Culture

Pill Bugs

Chill Culture, Evil

Probably is the smartphone/social media combo. That’s a cognitive poison pill we’re wholly unsuited to deal with.

PS2

Chill Culture

I do not like this post. Not at all.

Videogames are something I never really got into and I never owned a PS2. But I do remember that release day as it was all over the news.

Veil

Chill Culture

What pre-internet experience do you miss the most?

I miss the lack of surveillance. Not that there was none, but it had a cost; if someone or some entity wanted to keep tabs on you it was an active effort. These days if you have a mobile phone or a car made since ~2015 nearly anyone can buy your data and find out a huge amount of info. The government of course can also track your every move effortlessly. And don’t even try to convince me that smartphones do not “listen” to our convos. Unless you’ve gone full clown, it’s obvious that they do.

We’re all in the panopticon now, with no way out.

Status and Judgment

Chill Culture

Dating requirements.

This isn’t entirely wrong, but it also isn’t fair to women.

It ignores that being attractive isn’t actually that easy. We live in an obesogenic environment that requires a lot of self-control. And to be what most men consider attractive1 involves quite a lot of work from women: “natural” makeup, shaving legs and armpits, dressing decently and flatteringly and other skin care and body care routines that most men are not even aware of.

But it’s right in that men are more judged on things they have no control over, especially in the US2.

As a first approximation, women are valued for merely existing; men are valued for status and achievements. Those men who have neither are considered disposable by both men and women.

  1. If you don’t just naturally have it like my partner.
  2. Women in other countries aren not so incredibly, unhealthily obsessed with height as American women are. Don’t know why.

Pithy Pity

Chill Clowns, Culture

I probably made fun of the Fat Acceptance/Healthy at Every Size movements more than I should have. It’s not that it was punching down. The reality is that those groups had vast cultural power and it was easy to get canceled for standing against them.

What was more morally suspect is that both movements were populated by pitiful people who believed they had no agency. It’s not a good idea in general to make sport of the pathetic even if they do have some power. It’s just poor form.

Still, they deserved resistance because their movements spouted antiscientific nonsense and perpetuated great harm, especially against kids. That needed some form of smackdown.

Anne of Denmark

Chill Culture, WTF

Tattoos do not look good on either gender, but they are the worst thing to happen to women aesthetically speaking since this popular fashion during the early 17th Century:

The scoop neck is ok, but everything else there is terrible. Just like tattoos. What a sad blight. And combine that with near-ubiquitous obesity and…yeah. It’s bad.

Apropos

Chill Art, Culture

The quest to offend no one leads to art that elevates and inspires no one.

Appropriate everything, says what’s true, look into the darkness, cast aspersions and dent your helmet bashing through to the truth. One should not aim to offend, but excising anything with power and beauty is what the goal of removing all possibility of the offensive ineluctably leads toward.

All good art is offensive in the original Latin sense: it hits you, it moves you, it strikes against you. Otherwise, it’s worthless.

M Pause

Chill Culture

Gen Z Woman Just Discovered ‘Millennial Pause.’

This pause is real, but is not due to just the former quirks of various social media apps. Not at all. It’s because analog recording tech such as audio cassettes and VHS tapes usually had a 1-3 second period where they had to spool up and actually start recording when you hit the button.

A lot of millennials (and all of Gen X) remember those times, while Gen Z has no clue; all of that was gone by the time they came around.

And that is where the pause comes from.

Turn Trump

Chill Clowns, Culture

The return of Trump was also made nearly-inevitable with fourth wave pseudo-feminism declaring all men inherently evil “Schrödinger’s rapists” while claiming all women are angelic by nature because they are naught but tiny little blameless children, even up to their 40s.

That just ain’t how people are, and men are tired of hearing about it. Even I am extremely over it, and I didn’t vote for Trump.

Pealegal

Chill Clowns, Culture

True, but there’s more to it than that. And the “more” paints progressives in an even worse light, unfortunately. I remember the tail end of the pay toilet battles during the early and mid-1980s. The progressives got them banned because “no one should have to pay to do a basic bodily function” and because their position was that there should be free and plentiful public restrooms1. But then they never bothered to build any political power to achieve this goal.

Like much of progressivism, the pay toilet battle highlighted a tendency which has metastasized to be even worse now — they take something away, even if imperfect, and replace it with nothing at all.

And that’s never a winning strategy, weirdo degrowther fantasies aside.

  1. Which I agree with.