November 24, 2022

The bottom-up war on Thanksgiving (libtard foot soldiers, not top-down war by academia / media)

Why do libtards go out of their way to ruin Thanksgiving? Second time within just 5 years.

Part of their greater moralistic crusade to destroy family bonds, destroy American traditions, and destroy holidays as a whole -- as something sacrosanct, protected from everyday bullshit.

I don't mean ideological crap that they post online about how the Pilgrims were problematic or whatever, I mean in their IRL face-to-face interactions with their own flesh and blood on a supposedly holy holiday here.

The former is top-down by the elites in academia, media, and entertainment. I'm talking about the bottom-up process by -- usually not elites, but aspiring elites, strivers, etc. And they may well be outside of academia / media / entertainment, but they take their marching orders from those sectors' elites, as foot soldiers in the crusade.

Well, they may end up destroying family bonds, but not in the way they think -- they're just going to get written off, excluded, and ostracized by those who do value family sanctity over petty moralistic bullshit.

Because contrary to their wish-casting, normal people don't actually have to tolerate them, host them, or even interact with them on these holidays anymore. No amount of pressure from Harvard, MSNBC, or Disney is going to enforce the foot soldiers being hosted by their families, at the grassroots level all over America. They only control what happens in their top-down world (what makes the news, what's taken as true history, etc.). Instead, the foot soldiers are weeding themselves out of the kin-pool.

Technically, it's zealots who fall under this description, since the non-zealous Democrats aren't weeding themselves out, and there are a handful of psycho Republicans who antagonize their families to the breaking point / ostracization. But right here, right now, zealots are way more libtard than conservatard, at least 80-20. Republicans, conservatives, Trump supporters, etc., are more jaded and cynical about politics, whereas Democrats, liberals, and Trump haters are driven by idealistic fervor.

Finally, in typical fashion, the ones trying to destroy the family bonds are always those who have received the most from the family and given the least, and go out of their way to signal their ingratitude. Normally this is tolerated because they're parasites who happen to share a high percentage of their genes with you -- but it's gotten so bad, that I don't see these types being tolerated any longer. Not in my case, that's for sure. They're not going to suck anything more out, while giving nothing back -- and waging war on the family at the same time!

My advice to those with a libtard crusader in your family (and there only needs to be one to ruin it for the whole group), get your anger out in the short-term, and then just write them off indefinitely. Tell them you aren't going to talk to them, host them, or give them anything (money, gifts, services / favors, literally anything).

I was hoping this would've died down after the psycho fever pitch of the late 2010s and 2020, but the fact that it's still going on in 2022 means these ones are probably not correctable by mundane means. Pray for them if you want, but you aren't going to change them -- they underwent a radicalization during the second half of the 2010s and 2020, and their transformation cannot be reversed.

If it was just an edgy middle-schooler posting a raised fist in the summer of 2020, I'd ignore that and wait and see what happens throughout this decade. But if they're a Millennial who imprinted on the war for wokeness, not as a youthful rebellion that may fade away, but as though it were a mature responsibility of theirs -- like a fiery 30-something preacher -- I don't see that wearing off. They weren't young, impulsive, and impressionistic -- they were in their late 20s and 30s!

To close on something more upbeat, please consider yourself lucky, and appreciate your situation, if you belong to the fortunate families that are primarily Silents, Gen X-ers, and Zoomers -- rather than Boomers and Millennials (and post-Zoomers, who are too young to be anything yet). You really don't know how good you have it, even if you were also subjected to the divorce epidemic or other family-destroying trends.

That was not unique to Silents and X-er children, but Boomers and X-er / Millennial children, too. But on top of that dysfunctional family force, the Boomer / Millennial families have a far higher concentration of zealots corroding the family for moral crusader reasons.

Sadly (to not close on something so upbeat after all), this is another huge blow to IRL and another huge boost to online / virtual interactions. You can micro-curate your social network online, excluding these persistent toxic influences that plague IRL spheres like the family. But it is what it is, you can only adapt -- by excluding the toxic ones from IRL family occasions, and depending more on normal people online (yes, they're out there, even if they put on an edgy persona).

83 comments:

  1. To clarify, I don't even mean that these libtards are blowing up the family over overtly current political events. Although that is always going to get wedged in there -- now their cause du jour is not Trump or Black Lives Matter, but cucking for Ukraine over Russia (which is still related to Russiagate from the late 2010s).

    BTW, if you drive around rich areas, those BLM, "In thise house, we believe ____" signs are all gone. It's straight up warmongering against Russia, with the Ukrainian flag colors. Same with their bumper-stickers. Pathetic. Get annexed, bitch.

    What I mean is how libtards turn a pro-family holiday -- when everyone gets to see each other, bond, etc., despite perhaps being far apart for much of the year -- into the Airing of Grievances, petty sniping, and other interactions that destroy the camaraderie and intensify hatred between family members.

    Not razzing, joshing, pot-shots, etc. I mean trying to humiliate someone, nursing grudges, pointless endless bickering, and so on -- always, ironically, from a position of owing more of a debt to the target of intended humiliation, while thinking themselves superior. So fucking delusional and full of hubris.

    And after watching what's supposed to be a family-bond-supporting movie like Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. Millennials have no trouble indulging in a little wholesome watchalong, and then taking a total hatchet to that movie's lessons with their IRL family members two minutes later. Sad, pathetic, but also to be coldly written off at this point.

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  2. Ah, the good ol' days of 2012, when all we had to complain about on Thanksgiving was Black Friday stealing the sacredness of Thanksgiving (since it started bleeding over into Thanksgiving proper, which became relegated to Black Friday's Eve).

    It's like that saying "rich people problems". But we weren't richer in 2012. We were just pre-collapse in our imperial lifespan. Nearing a crisis, teetering, or whatever after 2008, but not yet in free-fall.

    Nostalgia is real, and good. It reminds us of the truth, and not lie about how great the present is relative to the past. Anyone who's drowning would give anything to be merely treading water or gasping for air at the surface. They're not wearing rose-tinted glasses from 40 feet under the sea.

    Update needed for that "2002" song -- "two thousand and twelve". That's about the last year anyone could plausibly update it to, and trigger nostalgia -- no "2018", since that was well into the crisis / collapse phase. Maybe 2013 or '14, but that doesn't fit the prosody as well. The audience would know what was conveyed -- the early 2010s, before everything went to shit later in the decade, and in many ways is still going on (not so much the collective violence and rioting, though).

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  3. What makes these people think that such perpetual disrespect is going to be tolerated by their targets? It must be the libtard media inflating the watchers' sense of moral superiority, so that everyone who is inferior to them will have to do their bidding, get dragged along for their crusade no matter what, etc.

    Guess again -- we're just going to cut you loose, at best treating you like some random stranger, at worst like a toxic influence. No amount of bitching in the MSNBC twitter's mentions is going to enforce your crusade on your own family members who you're leveling such disrespect upon.

    And not just such disrespect in general, but saving it all up to explode on the most sacred of family-oriented holidays, like Thanksgiving. Not just that it's pro-family, but about giving thanks and expressing gratitude -- what better way to destroy that than nurse grudges (which they're invariably on the wrong side of, naturally), air grievances, and just spray disrespect all around like a school shooter.

    Worse, a school shooter who picked graduation or prom or something sacred to the school's unity, for the occasion of offing their fellow students.

    Non-zealous family members may have similar bones to pick with the target, but admit that they may be wrong, they're seeing it from a blinkered perspective, or maybe they just don't want to stir shit up during a family unity holiday, and save it for later, and in private. But their goal is not to destroy the family, holidays, or American traditions, so they would never act like the wrecker libtard crusader.

    (And no, this is not just "idle venting on the internet," I'm going to cut off this person for real. You hate to see it, but this person has made me, after repeated episodes with no change and no remorse and no mitigation of disrespect levels.)

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  4. ...And yes, this person literally did shoot at a packed, driving school bus from a hiding spot in the woods (using a bb-gun), around 5th grade. Luckily no one was harmed.

    This is not to air someone's dirty laundry, but to establish a general principle -- these wreckers tend to have deeply anti-social behavioral roots, which they only ever sand the rougher edges off of (while also learning to preen moralistically about trivial do-gooder crap).

    So please, don't be fooled by these types.

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  5. "No amount of pressure from Harvard, MSNBC, or Disney is going to enforce the foot soldiers being hosted by their families, at the grassroots level all over America. They only control what happens in their top-down world (what makes the news, what's taken as true history, etc.). Instead, the foot soldiers are weeding themselves out of the kin-pool."



    That be true. Except when they also seize State Power for themselves.

    And report their Kin to the Total State so that their Heretical Kin gets killed. They won't hesitate given the opportunity to put all the Kin they want dead to be shot and thrown into a mass grave.

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  6. The more time goes on, the more I think the Mayans were right about 2012. All sorts of really bizarre trends start that year.

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  7. Unfortunately for libtards, there's no such thing as the Total State that they can report us to and have it punish us for not being libtards.

    Our society and empire are in collapse, and that means a permanent breaking down of the scale of societal complexity. Meaning, there is no central empire that can boss around its colonies -- that already began with the Philipines breaking away in the late '40s, then Cuba in the late '50s.

    And back to the Russia / Ukraine war, a major NATO client has already told us to fuck off (Hungary, 2nd seat of power for the most recent empire in their land).

    South Korea since the Kim Dae-jung realignment of circa 2000 has been pursuing rapprochement with North Korea. That's only a matter of time.

    Within the core nation itself, the federal govt no longer has legitimacy among the people, and can therefore no longer enforce its will. Case in point was the mask and vax mandates -- everyone foolishly said these were the new "taking off your shoes / X-ray machines" in airports, because COVID was the new 9/11.

    I said bullshit, that was when we had a strong cohesive society (relative to now), so its policies had stayed. But today's measures would not because they were attempting to take root during a period of disintegration and polarization. And I was right. Not only the mask mandates, vax mandates, all of that COVID shit is gone forever, whine however much the libtards might.

    There was no governor of the 3rd-largest state defying all of the 9/11 measures in 2002. In 2021, DeSantis was doing just that to the COVID measures.

    The Total State belongs to the Midcentury, when American asabiya was at its peak. Now that we are in total free-fall, there is no such glue holding together institutions at that high a level of complexity and power.

    Feel free to rub this fact in, re: COVID measures failing to become the new 9/11 authoritarianism, when you're around your libtard wrecker relatives. Their wannabe genie can no longer grant the libtards' wishes.

    Also that whining on the internet hasn't prevented your big bad enemy Russia from annexing Crimea plus 4 new provinces so far. You're longing for the days of winning wars and territory? It's not the 1940s anymore, dinosaur -- get with the current year!

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  8. I can feel the hurt in this, it must be really difficult when it's family who starts to get all ideological on you rather than just friends or acquaintances. I hope it doesn't prevent you from seeing the rest of your family.

    A (former?) friend of mine acted the same with the vax mandates. I lost my job because I refused to take it, and when I told him about it he literally couldn't stop smiling. He never once expressed an ounce of sympathy for what happened to me (the members of my family who did take the vaccine agreed with me that the mandates were deeply wrong), and even acted smug about it. This is a guy I've known for most of my life and who was at one point my best friend. I'm not angry, since I've known he's been a heavy Reddit user for a while now, but I still can't believe just how far gone these people are. Sacrificing real friendships and relationships to show loyalty to the values of the State, like you said in your comment.

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  9. The 1940s was the peak of egalitarianism/cohesion because it saw the peak of the reach of Walter Scheidel's horsemen in the 20th Century.

    https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691183251/the-great-leveler

    https://nationalinterest.org/feature/violence-history%E2%80%99s-great-economic-leveler-188974

    https://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/economics-cant-answer-why-inequality-sometimes-declines/

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  10. I'm a conservative who loves stomping on my lefty relatives. My patience for the pompous shit they spew ended last year when they made unvaccinated family members eat outside for Thanksgiving. Like dogs. They're class and the supportive structure is evil from that fuck fink and the nyt reading douchebags on down. After their reaction to trump and the support of their death wish leadership, they deserve all the disrespect they've earned and will continue to earn until we finally stop with the charade of these bs holidays.

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  11. Well like I said, the worst part isn't the overtly political / ideological stuff that they find a way to wedge into holiday conversations.

    (Although not being a zealot does make it hard to conceal a smile when the zealot is impotently griping about how, now that the Republicans took back control of the House, there may no longer be infinite American wealth flushed down the toilet of the losing Ukrainian war. If only the Dems had maintained control, we could be wasting American wealth there forever, to get back at the Russiagate mastermind!)

    What I really mean is how they blow up the fundamental point of the holiday -- family togetherness, showing gratitude, especially for those things that got us through hard times (when the Pilgrims were underdogs that might've gotten wiped out like the Jamestown Colony, etc.). Instead, they sow division within the family, and shit all over the sacrifices that their fellow family members made to get them -- the zealot -- through hard times.

    They can't stand the idea that they are in those sacrificing members' debt, because that up-ends their self-inflating view that they themselves are superior, and the sacrificing ones inferior.

    It never occurs to them -- and they would actively deny it if it did -- that the reason they have higher wealth and status is because someone bailed them out in a crisis, and took one for the team. And in my case, it's not reciprocal, I've been the one to be the slack in the family system, since I am not as obsessed with individual career ambition or personal consumption.

    One primary example of a sticking point -- having to take up an unpaid 40-hour per week babysitting job during the summer of 2014, because this ingrate zealot was going to lose either his job or custody of his kid, since his psycho striver ex was nowhere to be found, and he didn't have enough money to pay for childcare. I was already going through my own career crisis, so that was another nail in the coffin at the time, but I didn't care -- family comes first.

    Or at least it did back then. I've never been repaid, I don't just mean charging some dollars-per-hour rate and getting cash, I mean in any way whatsoever. No favors, no services, no anything. And I never will be. On top of all that, whenever this comes up -- or anything related to it, like the irrevocable hit I took -- this person will downplay or even outright deny what I did, and what I gave up, to bail his sorry ass out.

    But this person saves it up until Thanksgiving to straight up shit all over it, make fun of it, ridicule it, etc. It's far worse than the base level of ingratitude and lack of reciprocity -- descending into sacrilege.

    This person is no longer my family member, as far as I'm concerned. I've already accepted I'll never be bailed out by him in any time of need I've had or will have, since 2014, even though he now makes decently more than I ever will -- because I was the one to jump on the grenade that summer, rather than let it blow up him and his kid.

    I'm just not going to sink anything else into that dead end, don't want to hear from this person again, see this person again, or even know what's going on with this person.

    Some of these tendencies had always been there -- like I said, the school bus bb-gun shooting -- but it wasn't until the woke war of the 2010s (especially toward the end) that this person got possessed by libtard demons. I can't exorcise them either, none of us can.

    If they could simply respect Thanksgiving, it wouldn't have come to this, really. I would've grumbled about never getting anything back for having taken such a hit on this person's behalf, but never would've needed to cut them off, if this person hadn't totally torched Thanksgiving over these matters, TWO TIMES in five years.

    They can't just live and let live, they have to invade everyone else's relatively normal lives and try to blow them up, melt them down, and wipe them away. Sorry, sucker, not any longer. This person is simply not going to be allowed into my life anymore.

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  12. BTW that's why these discussions aren't airing dirty laundry that should stay within the family or whatever -- this person is no longer family, has gone out of their way to destroy it and shit all over the sacrifices made by family to maintain family.

    So they're no longer entitled to its privileges, like not having your ingrate zealot history posted about to support a (sadly) far more general principle about who these people are and what they've done -- and what should be done with them.

    Too many cucks on the right-wing side seem to believe that "sanctity of the family" means letting this minority of wreckers destroy the family from within, violate its norms, and still enjoy the benefits of family membership.

    Other way around -- the duty of any family steward is to remove those who are actively damaging the family, up to the point of exile like those two libtard Millennials are getting from King Charles!

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  13. To get away from personal stories and back onto general cultural patterns, it's hilarious to see modern / urbanite right-wingers try to square the circle on such matters.

    Like, what happens in societies that are intensely kin-based, family-centric, etc.? Indulging those kin members who are damaging the broader kin group? Ha!

    Person X's behavior has brought material damages or reputational dishonor onto the broader family in a way that cannot be cleaned away? Then they will be ostracized, exiled, or straight up killed in order to prevent further damage to the family (materially and/or intangibly). Yes, even though they are a member of the family.

    "Um, wow, big yikes from the so-called 'family values' societies -- I thought you were all about family, and yet you're killing one of your own blood relations?"

    If their actions are damaging the whole rest of the family -- YES.

    Honor killings are only the extreme case of this phenomenon, it goes on in far more mild ways as well.

    Modern-urban right-wingers are just looking for a way to rationalize libtard helicopter parenting and overly indulgent protection of their pwecious kiddos, even if they're harming the broader group.

    RETVRN to tradition, and ostracize the wreckers from within the family.

    BTW, I don't think these problems arise among Noble Savages (hunter-gatherers, lucky ones). It's only when there are higher material stakes, when society gets at least as complex and "rich" (relative to H-G's) as pastoralism and tropical horticulture, let alone sedentary agriculture.

    If everyone's pretty materially poor, like in the H-G society, what overpowering incentive is there to wreck the family from within, be a back-stabber, fink on your own family, etc.? Good ol' Noble Savages...

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  14. In the hunter-gatherer society, the ceiling is very low on material wealth, so there's no point in pursuing individual "career" ambitions.

    That's what I mean about pastoralism, tropical horticulture, and sedentary agriculture -- those who wreck the family aren't necessarily selling the family out to an outside group of hostage-takers.

    I just mean distancing your individual self from the broader kin group, to pursue your own ambitions -- maybe amassing lots of wealth for yourself in an urban job (instead of being a farmhand on the family farm), getting rich quick through looting as a soldier, or if you're a girl, throwing yourself at some rich guy and hoping to get some of his wealth, or land yourself the hottest guy in the land even though you aren't yet engaged, etc.

    These are all pride-driven individual ambitions, and they threaten the broader kin group. "Unless the ambitious one sends a good deal of their newfound wealth back to their tolerant family" -- but then, an ambitious person is generally selfish, and will send very little back to their family. They want the gold and glory for themselves -- that's what motivated them to cut the family loose and focus so much on their own pursuit of wealth and status.

    Whether the ambitious one does or does not send stuff back to the family that they have distanced themselves from during their ambitions, the point is that it's a very destabilizing thing to the family. One member gains a shitload, while the others not only do not share in it, but could well be damaged by the absence of a critical family member who's away pursuing their ambitions.

    The high degree of risk in allowing that, from the family's view, is why they generally frown on this behavior, try to rein it in, and punish it where possible (honor killings).

    Because let's get real, most people with overweening ambition don't end up amounting to much, status and wealth-wise -- there isn't much room at the top, and there are tons of strivers aspiring to top status. So usually ambition just means a loss for both the striver and their family -- because all that disconnection from the family still didn't get the striver their big pile of gold, in the high-stakes competition.

    "I've got to send my kid to a GOOD SCHOOL, so that they can live in a GOOD CITY, the only place where they can find a GOOD JOB."

    Most of those strivers wind up with absolutely nothing to show for their ambitions, on top of becoming genetic dead-ends like city-dwellers have been since the dawn of civilization, only replenished by ambitious country folk / suburbanites (sadge).

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  15. So much right-wing nutjobbery is based upon their audience being yuppie parents who want to incubate the ideal yuppie spawn, or to continue being ideal yuppies themselves if they don't have kids.

    It has nothing to do with conserving traditions, the nation, the family, etc. -- individual ambitions are the most fundamental threat to collective welfare, including the kin group.

    Actually conservative parents (the Greatest Generation, the Amish, etc.) would never want their kids to fuck off to some random college, then some random city, then some random job in some other city, on and on until they finally got bored and accepted their not-so-dreamy wealth and status level (and genetic dead-endedness). The family is over within a single generation.

    These massive destabilizing episodes only happen under harsher pressures, and/or a baby boom that gives the kids an edge over their parents at the bargaining table. Plus, too many kids means the family farm gets split up into smaller pieces per kid, perhaps unsustainably.

    But this is exactly what right-wing media audiences want -- they're strivers, too, just within a right-wing sector of the economy (e.g., the military or labor-intensive small business, not the media or info-tech). They treat their kids as extensions of themselves, and since the parents are driven by overweening ambition and conspicuous consumption, they want their kids to max those stats as well -- and to hell with the consequences for tHe FaMiLy.

    Glad I found some way to blame right-wingers as well as left-wingers for fucking up this collapsing society, albeit in their own different ways.

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  16. A nice bit of horseshoe theory at work here, BTW. Unlike strivers, the scions of generationally rich families, like Tucker Carlson, would absolutely amplify what I said about individual ambition vs. family cohesion.

    On some level it's about the coherence of the beliefs, facts, arguments, historical precedents, etc. He's a real family values guy, ideologically.

    But on a material level, he wants all these damned graspers and strivers to stay put in their third-tier towns and suburbs, so that his urban generationally wealthy family doesn't have so much competition!

    I will always support the little guy and big guy teaming up against the selfish middle guy. No one is more hated than strivers, not only for their individual traits, but for the damage they do to their families, communities, and nations, due to their overweening ambition (which usually doesn't even pay off anyway!).

    That was the ruling coalition during our nation's heyday of the Midcentury -- Big Business (owners) and Big Labor teaming up to keep Big Management's head in a vice. The Reagan Revolution, AKA the Yuppie / Boomer Revolution, heralded the end of that order, and managerialism has been running rampant ever since, driving this society right into the ditch.

    RETVRN to the New Deal tradition, a la Studio 54's carnivalesque clientele -- the party-hearty idle rich, and total nobodies who could be a somebody for a night. Insecure strivers go elsewhere.

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  17. Historical religious right-wingers are well aware that Loyalty to God outweighs loyalty to family.

    Didn't Jesus say kin will betray kin because of the loyalty of those kin to enemy values?

    How many purported Right-Wingers read the writings of the Ante-Nicene Church Fathers like Tertullian and St John Chrystostom?

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  18. Jesus was an apocalypticist, believing that the unironic End of the World As We Know It was going to happen in his own lifetime. That is the only way to motivate ignoring your kin in favor of the higher cause -- because time was so short, you could either bring your family on board the latter-day Noah's Ark, or they could refuse and get drowned in the apocalypse. No time to argue fine points, be subtle, interact over multiple rounds, and reconcile.

    The sky is about to open right up -- are you going with us, or staying with them?

    That apocalyptic streak has always remained in Christianity, but it's not as central as it was back in Jesus' own time. Because the end of the world did not happen.

    However, today's woketard crusaders feel motivated by the same sense of an imminent apocalypse (white supremacy, fascism, chuds, Russia, whatever), so they are just as willing to throw their families by the wayside if they can't get with the rescue mission immediately and unconditionally.

    Unlike the early Jesus movement, though, these crusaders aren't offering anything material or intangible, so mostly these warnings just fall on deaf ears. No, we're not going to ruin our collective lives just to appease some insane religious fervor that you were demonically possessed by in 2017.

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  19. Wreckers are also inverting the norms about razzing, joshing, and other good-natured humbling behavior within a group.

    The point of those behaviors has always been to check someone's ambition, pride, etc. "Oh yeah, you think you're so much better than everyone else? Well why do you have buck teeth then?" Nick-naming such a person Bucky, or a fat person Fats or Tubbs, and so on.

    These are minor flaws that are beyond a person's control. Pointing them out is to prove that the person is a mere mortal who is not beyond the reach of fortune / fate / chance / etc. If they were a superhuman, genetically or by engineering, they wouldn't have such minor flaws. But they do have them, so they aren't superhuman -- they're mere mortals like everyone else. And they'd better not get too big for their britches.

    All part of enforcing egalitarianism, rather than encouraging ambition and inequality and destabilization (because there's generally little benefits, and they go to a select few, while most strivers fail to get anything at all from their striving).

    Similarly, cutting down the tallest poppy, the Scandinavian Law of Jante, and so on. Including hunter-gatherers, part of our Noble Savage past. Checking, rather than encouraging, individual ambition.

    What the libtard wreckers are doing by sabotaging Thanksgiving norms about razzing, etc., is elevating rather than condemning ambition, and ridiculing the checking of one's own ambition for greater collective welfare.

    "Oh you sacrificed some ambition in order to 'take one for the family team?' What a sucker, and I'm sooo sure it was such a deep sacrifice, like anyone else couldn't have done it, do you want a trophy?" etc.

    And the traits or behaviors they target are not those beyond someone's control, they're more up to free will and choice. Therefore, they could be altered -- and the wrecker is trying to lean hard on the target to change their behavior, like the reforming model of prison. "Act less altruistic, and I won't target you so much."

    For example, checking your ambition, voting for Trump, working in this vs. that industry, etc. It's not about reminding them that fortune is more powerful than them, and they can't escape chance flaws. It's straight-up trying to manipulate their behavior -- but in the striver direction, not in the anti-striver direction!

    Now, typically these wreckers have zero leverage, so what they're driving things toward is their own ostracization by their intended targets. Overweening ambition usually means they're not giving stuff to their family, so what is lost by cutting off the ambitious one? Nothing. If anything they're sowing division within the family, so they have negative leverage -- the others have only something to gain by freezing them out.

    And to add to the richness of the portrait of these types, yes, completely unsolicited, this person in my family went on about how they want to live to be 100 years old, to be in great shape for 100, etc etc etc. Hubris, pride, overweening ambition, you name it, this person's got it.

    Traditional razzing, joshing, etc., is designed to enforce egalitarianism, stability, harmony, etc. against those who would disrupt it by standing out too much -- whether as cultural weirdos, sexual deviants, or very rich / high-status careerists ("too big for their britches").

    It's no accident that the nouveau riche and strivers generally have adopted the cause of cultural deviance -- both destroy egalitarianism, and give a middle finger to attempts to rein in the group-destroying threats of individual pride and ambition.

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  20. Wannabe troll asking for the content of what was said, what topics sparked the explosion, etc., didn't read what's already written, which is clear.

    As for other people's reactions, the driver of the car (not me or the person, and no closer related to me than the person, generally closer to the person, in fact) pulled over into a parking lot and threatened to kick the offender out unless he shut his idiot ingrate face.

    It must suck to always be wrong and have to do confession through projection like you, but when I'm this set on ostracism, I'm right.

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  21. Good view into the libtard wrecker mindset, though: wannabe troll equated "roasting" with "ridiculing sacrifices made for the ridiculer". I know that it sucks to be in a family with a wrecker like you, and if your family has any balls, they'll freeze you out, too (you've probably abandoned them long ago anyway, though, and I assure you they don't mind by now).

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  22. Another general point about libtards wrecking Thanksgiving is the "turkey trot" phenomenon, which is only the tip of the iceberg of similar activities that they strive to do instead of spend time at home with family on Thanksgiving day.

    Not being a yuppie libtard, I had little idea of what this was -- I was only aware of the Black Friday shopping chaos as the primary sign of how desecrated the holiday had become, particularly when it crossed the line back onto Thanksgiving proper, not even the Friday after.

    As a national trend, the turkey trot -- running a mini-marathon on public city streets, in a group competition -- began around 2010, and was a core piece of the woke 2010s. Before then, only Buffalo had a public run on Thanksgiving. A few cities here or there added onto it starting in the mid-'90s, but it only took off after the 2008 depression, around 2010 or '11.

    The main running orgs in America only kept track of it starting in 2011, because there was nothing to track nationally before then.

    And sure enough, this person had brought up having done a turkey trot sometime during the mid or late 2010s, perhaps wanting to do one when this person was visiting with the rest of the family, idk.

    Since Thanksgiving is about family and home, the wreckers have to take any activities out of the home, ideally into no home at all (like the home of some relative or friend). Well, can't get any less home-y than the outdoor public streets of a big city.

    And while they may drag a few nuclear family members along (to post on Instagram, naturally), the extended family is nowhere to be seen, as is required of a super-duper family holiday like Thanksgiving. And 99% of the attendees are not family at all. There are no closer bonds among them than there are among the mob members on Black Friday.

    What would yuppie strivers be without turning everything into a competition? It's not just a gathering, but a literal race to a finish line -- individually, no teams -- even if it's not as high-stakes as the Olympics or whatever. They can't stand mellowing out, being cooperative, and shutting off their anti-social competitiveness for five seconds.

    It's actually a worse desecration of Thanksgiving than Black Friday was, although we only ever heard about the latter. Mainly that's due to class -- yuppies are desecrating with the turkey trots, so it's NBD, if anything a blessed new tradition. The mob on Black Friday are more working-class, so they're just a scum-sucking mob ruining everything, according to the media / entertainment.

    I certainly focused on the Black Friday desecration, but if I'd known what the yuppie strivers had been up to on Thanksgiving day itself, I would've focused even harder on that.

    When this person mentioned the turkey trot thing in the late 2010s, I had no idea it was so widespread until reading about it now, with 20/20 hindsight. Something like a million strivers taking part by the late 2010s.

    And like I said, that's only one particular way they do this on Thanksgiving -- anything else involving leaving the home (indeed, anyone's home) to be around non-family members, for a decent chunk of time, is an offense, too.

    They treat Thanksgiving like a vacation to be packed with time spent outside anyone's home, with family members making up the smallest percent possible of the group assembled there.

    There was nothing like that back in the '80s, '90s, or even 2000s.

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  23. The other category of traditions that the strivers destroyed was the other one they kept harping on in the puff pieces about the turkey trot during the 2010s -- aside from the Black Friday shopping mob, there were that damned mass of bodies slumped over on the couch, watching sports on TV.

    "Ackshually, unlike those couch potatoes, we're going to get out and get some exercise of our own -- and preemptively burn a bunch of turkey day calories!"

    I've never watched sports on my own, but that's exactly the kind of tradition I remember from the before-times. If it wasn't sports, at least watching the Macy's Thanksgiving parade, or watching movies on VHS / DVD, maybe while the kids were playing with toys in a group (or later, video games). Or even turning off the TV set altogether, and people just conversing with each other in a festive mood.

    At any rate, the setting was not allowed to leave the home, and the extended family was there, with no random strangers intruding.

    I know there are still a minority of homes with Boomers in them where the "assembly around the TV for football" tradition is still alive, but after they die off, that one is over. Gen X-ers and Millennials may continue gathering around the TV to watch movies, although that's harder to pull off since you need to watch 3 or 4 movies to fill up the same time slot as the entire Thanksgiving football TV viewing (pre, post, and everything in between). I think marathoning 3 or 4 movies in the middle of the day might be too much for most people.

    Board and card games could fill that time, although I've noticed a decline of those activities in my own family over the past several years. We didn't play any this year, usually there's at least a game or two of Uno.

    I actually bought a full, vintage Monopoly set just for these occasions, but they never go for it. I've accepted that family board games that can go on for hours will never come back. It has to be some trendy libtard game like Secret Hitler where you get to use libtard buzzwords like Hitler, fascist, etc. to jerk yourself off.

    The rationalization is that "Monopoly takes too long to finish" -- I don't remember that, but even if so, who cares? The fun is in playing the game, not taking it deadly seriously like some yuppie libtard striver and wanting to get a literal monopoly over all properties and utilities. It's just a fun, wholesome game that takes as little or as long as you want, has enough twists and turns, rises and reversals of fortune, as you could want.

    You don't want everything to be a competition, but Monopoly is pretty harmless (if the players aren't strivers). Maybe Millennials and Zoomers can turn it into playing Mario Kart in local multiplayer, instead of with random nerds online. As long as the setting never leaves the home, and only family members are involved.

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  24. Stuffing yourselves on left-overs all weekend is another one that the strivers have all but eliminated.

    Jesus, this year we went out to eat on the day before Thanksgiving, and again tonight, despite having made tons of food for Thanksgiving proper. It has nothing to do with "Oops, we made so little for turkey day itself, guess we'll have to go out". Strivers are so obsessed with their conspicuous leisure and consumption, that they don't know how not to go out to eat (or even worse, order it delivered by slaves through an app).

    You're supposed to be holed up in the home, getting ready for winter hibernation, being taken care of by one another (food-wise, generally by the women). You're not supposed to leave home and rely on random strangers making your meal.

    I don't recall doing this before either. Maybe stopping by McDonald's on the trip to my grandparents' home, but once we were there? No way would our grandmother allow us to go out for a meal!

    I could maybe imagine going to a local old-school cafeteria once the whole weekend, though everything there would be Thanksgiving-themed, so as to not disturb the mood. But when you go to any random fast-food or sit-down restaurant, it isn't Thanksgiving-themed at all -- just whatever they normally serve. It prevents the Thanksgiving atmosphere from really taking hold over the weekend.

    Returning to the activity of TV-watching, I don't recall going out to the movie theater at all during the whole weekend. There may have been a year once in awhile where it happened, idk, but it's not something that sticks out. It was certainly not a common thing.

    It's not as offensive as the turkey trot, since watching the same movie is not a competition, and your extended family would be more willing to go see a movie as a huge group, vs. going to jog a mini-marathon as a huge group.

    But it's still outside the home, and with most of the group there being non-family. It just goes too much against the bonding together vibe!

    Sometime tonight I'll look through which movies were released Thanksgiving weekend over the years, and see if any jog my memory of having seen them that exact weekend. But I don't think so.

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  25. Scratch that idea, we could've seen a movie that had already been out for a week or so, on Thanksgiving weekend. That's a lot more movies to check, than just those released that weekend. So I won't bother checking after all. Point being, I don't remember it at all, and I have a pretty perfect memory.

    Hold on... looks like I saw Spectre with my family during Thanksgiving weekend in 2015. (I wrote up a brief impression of it, so I know the date).

    Looks like it would've been the Sunday conclusion of the weekend, but still one of those activities that you just have to get out of the home and be around random strangers on what is supposed to be family / home time.

    They do the same thing with Christmas, of course, but that's for another time. Rarely desecrating the day itself (thank God), but the days surrounding it -- look out, strivers are going to try dragging everyone outside the home to be around non-family.

    And no, that was never common! Not even for Christmas-themed movies like Home Alone. We had all winter to see that, we didn't have to go see it the very day after Christmas, when we're supposed to still be holed up in the home together.

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  26. The only type of activity I remember where a chunk of people left the home for awhile around Thanksgiving, during the before-times, was the older men going out hunting -- not very seriously, as I recall, just to get on their hunting clothes, take some guns and other gear, and get out to socialize together. Low-key, no pressure, not a real serious hunting outing.

    But unlike what the strivers would have you do, there were no non-family members around them, and they did not go to a public attraction where such non-family members would be gathered, especially on a holiday weekend -- e.g., hiking on a public trail or strolling around a public park. Hell no. Venturing out into the woods to shoot the bull while half-pretending to be on the lookout for a deer, with not another soul in sight? Sure.

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  27. By far the favorite Maoist struggle session for these wreckers to stage during a family holiday (of the non-overtly political kind) is over diet and exercise. That ties directly into their turkey trot bullshit, and sabotaging of the "veg out on the couch watching sports" activities.

    Maoist struggle session, or managerialist "annual performance metrics evalution", same deal. As though the wrecker is in some position of authority over the target! Sorry, but the wrecker contributes the least to the family, so they have nothing to withhold, like a manager does with a paycheck or working conditions. So it's even more clueless and offensive. Just part of the striver's wish-fulfillment to be the ultimate manager of everyone else's daily minutiae.

    What occasion could be less fruitful to try and stage an intervention, struggle session, etc., over diet and exercise? THANKSGIVING. I've never been out of shape, obviously these ones are never directed at me, but another family member(s) who do tend toward obesity as of age 35-40.

    If it's friendly joshing about "looks like you're planning to put on a little more insulation for winter hibernation!" then BFD. But when it's a serious, concern-trolling lecture that comes up again and again, it's an attempt to launch a struggle session -- when everyone is expected to be eating shitloads of food, and lounging around instead of exercising.

    But they know this, and pick the opposite time to lecture than what might actually get results. And they don't bother staging interventions any other time of the year, so the concern-trolling is transparent bullshit -- they save up their lectures for the entire year, until they will be maximally useless and humiliating (i.e., by trying to deprive the fat family member of the boatloads of food and couch-potato-ing that everyone else is indulging in during Thanksgiving weekend).

    And there's always the individualist responsibilizing of the target, that we expect from neolib yuppie psychos. It's all your fault that your diet and exercise is garbage, and if you don't steer your ship in a different direction, you're not only going to harm yourself, but those around you by dying early or being incapacitated.

    If you're so concerned, then why don't you move nearby to the target and make their meals for them? And drag them out for regular exercise with someone they're connected to, rather than go for a walk alone? Because wreckers insist on refusing duties and obligations to others, especially family members, so they will never be close enough to play an active role in helping the fat family member get healthier. They're too busy indulging their own wants wherever they please. Just the occasional lecture from a distance during most of the year, and the pointless struggle session during Thanksgiving.

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  28. This leads to a general point: strivers find the things that are least able to be helped by others, for their struggle sessions. In other words, things that are most up to the individual. Like diet and exercise -- it's hard for others to directly intervene on a long-term basis, or on a short-term basis that would have long-lasting effects.

    Why don't they point to something else that could actually be helped by the concern troll and the rest of the family? Because then the possibility exists that the wrecker will have to actually contribute something to help the family! "You want me to do it for you????" Slap on some neolib bullshit rationalization like "teaching a man to fish" vs. "giving a man a fish" or "equality of opportunity vs. outcomes".

    As one example among many others, my brother and I visited the fat family member's home for July 4th in 2015. Pointless trying to alter their diet on a major feasting day like that, right? So why bother. But, I did see their garage was turning into a "hoarders nightmare" mess. So on the spot, I said me and my brother should clean it all up, and organize what was left. And put a dent into the mess in the shed out back.

    Took several hours, but it was after we'd already eaten, lounged around, and still had daylight to spare in summer before heading out. Aaaand, it didn't require leaving the home -- it was an attached garage! No non-family members involved either. And that's something where a few hours can have long-term benefits -- it took several years for it to start getting out of control again.

    It didn't matter that we weren't going to be repaid immediately for that labor -- if it's a big deal, then just do it yourself and take one for the team. And in this case, we were being hosted and fed by the garage-owner, so it wasn't such a one-way street anyway.

    Strivers avoid all of these things where they can intervene for a few minutes up to a few hours, or a few visits, and where they might have to be taking one for the team, doing the dirty work for someone else. Yeah, well, if they're family, sometimes you have to suck it up and do it for them. Provided they're grateful, of course, and try to make it up to you in some other way (like hosting you).

    Or if you can't do the work yourself, just plunk down however-many dollars and hire someone to fix the problem on behalf of your family member. Especially if you've got decent money, and it would otherwise be spent indulging yourself on conspicuous leisure / consumption. (Assuming the recipient would be grateful and try to reciprocate somehow else, of course.)

    The striver wrecker in the family has literally never done anything like this for the rest of us. Probably the last time they did was back as a teenager, having to mow the lawn for chore money.

    That's really the only exception for taking one for the team -- don't ever take one for the wrecker. You won't find out who the wrecker is until you do, and they never reciprocate and ridicule your sacrifice after the fact, though. But once you do figure it out, cut them off from any labor, service, favors, etc. That would only be feeding the further disintegration of the family.

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  29. As an example of the superficial do-gooder-ism that wreckers often employ to mask their shirking of duties and obligations to the family, another family member who lives near the wrecker says that the wrecker frequently bakes sweets and treats -- only to give out 90% of it to neighbors and co-workers, leaving their own nearby family member with hardly anything. The member who gets little keeps bringing this up, but the libtard insists on leaving the family with 5% and strangers with 95% (people he does not have deep roots or close bonds with either, it's just an empty display for brownie points).

    This is the opposite of what my Greatest Gen grandmother did -- bake tons of stuff for the family first, and then whatever else she could bake on top of that, that we in the family could not eat or take back home ourselves, would go to the broader community. And she was a very prolific cook and housewife, so she did always have something going out to someone outside the home, but only after everyone in the family was taken care of.

    That earned her a high reputation not only within our family, but the broader community, where everyone knew her as one of the best cooks in the area. Rural Appalachia, BTW, didn't go to college, never worked as a wagie. You don't need infinite money-printing from the central bank to fund these sorts of activities.

    In fact, by choosing not to transplant themselves to some yuppie big city to be status-strivers, they lived a much more affordable life, and had plenty left to lavish on everyone else in the family (that's a topic for another post, though).

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  30. And in case it needs to be said, the libtard is not giving out 95% of his baked goods to the poor, needy, homeless, etc. It's to other people in the area who he knows -- comfortable middle-class strivers like himself.

    Sorry to burst the delusional bubble prevalent among left-wing retards that if wealth is being funneled away from the donor's family and out into "the community," that means that it's egalitarian redistribution and breaking up familial wealth, etc.

    Guess again, dumbasses -- it's going to other fairly well-off strivers, or their superiors who they want to butter up. It never gets redistributed downwards.

    And that point generalizes to all such "wealth directed outside the family" -- just because someone's Boomer parents sell off their house in order to fund their pre-death indulgences, rather than give it to their X-er / Millennial offspring (as the Greatest Gen gave their houses to their Boomer offspring), that doesn't mean that the poor or needy are going to get an affordable house, as though it's a blind lottery to determine who gets it.

    Nope -- the highest bidder, preferably paying all cash. Meaning -- not you, you dumb shit. It's going to a multi-billion hedge fund like Blackrock, or a single billionaire like Bill Gates, or whoever, to become neo-slumlords. Not your sad striver ass.

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  31. Brief intermission to reiterate a central point: none of this was articulated as a battle plan, urged on, or otherwise handed down the top-down chain of command in the media or academia. The entire mass of libtard strivers and wreckers figured this stuff out on their own, independently. Then they learned that their fellow strivers felt similarly, and they began coordinating their lives to reflect these common goals. All entirely bottom-up, as zealous foot soldiers for the neolib woketard system.

    Naturally once academia and the media learned about these bottom-up phenomena, they were only too happy to cheer them on, rationalize them, tell them what they want to hear to keep them going. But as Taleb says, this is only "lecturing birds how to fly". Or Aesop's fable about the fly on the wheel axel, saying "What a dust do I raise!" as the cart is traveling along the ground.

    The puff pieces on turkey trots in the NYT and Vox.com came *after* they were already surging among the striver base. Puff pieces there on "how to survive Thanksgiving with your Republican relatives" came *after* libtards turned a family / home holiday into an anti-family / anywhere-but-home struggle session. The media cater to a demand, they do not create demand out of nothing.

    Sad news for all the left-wing and right-wing posters, talking heads, reacting avis, podcasters, etc. You're only impotent commentators, not the prime movers of history.

    As a long-time resident of the now abandoned Gothic ruins of the blogosphere, I have no such delusions about my writing, else I would've decamped to Twitter or Substack years ago.

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  32. When hardly anyone wanted to accompany the striver on the far-away-from-home / few family members present trek on a hiking trail, he griped about how "at least the people who like going outdoors" went along. AKA himself and one other person, while the rest of the family was with each other in an actual home or temp home (hotel room), lounging around.

    Same story as the last time this person ruined Thanksgiving over the exact same issues (2017 or '18). It was also paired with the all-important push to go hiking hours away from home, probably in the presence of strangers since it's a popular weekend to have off. Few / none of the family went then either, and naturally it was a horrible experience. (I stayed home both times, and this time most of the family learned their lesson from last time.)

    Just another way for neolibs to blame others for perceived BS moral failures -- being couch potatoes who are going to die early, rather than logging off from sportsball TV and touching grass, to ensure they remain on the path toward immortality ("I want to live to be 100, *and* be in top shape then as well").

    The irony is that the striver only goes out into the wilderness as a tourist, treating it like a great big playground or jungle gym. Doesn't hunt for trophies or food, doesn't maintain or improve the space as a conservation effort, doesn't do much productive labor at all -- pure leisure.

    I like that kind of leisure, too, but not when everyone's supposed to be home with family.

    And as a further irony, I've spent way more time and effort out in the wilderness doing productive labor (all unpaid, natch, but it's for the greater good). When I visited home in the mid-2010s, I saw that one of the trail networks behind my old high school had gotten totally overgrown -- not only the old stuff growing back, but new invasive species strangling the edges to death (Oriental bittersweet vines). Huge trees fallen right across a wide walking path, cutting it off, while resting 6 feet high so you couldn't even just walk over them. Leaves clogging the drains. And so on and so forth.

    Clearing out the brush so that the old entry points were accessible again, eliminating as much of the Oriental bittersweet as possible, raking leaves out of the drain and slope above it, sawing through 500+ pound tree trunks, limbing them, bucking them into smaller sections, and skidding them off to the side of the path, wielding 15 to 20-foot branches to knock down large branches dangerously dangling up near the canopy, felling the odd medium-sized tree that had already been struck by lightning, etc etc etc.

    And adding a few new things like planting a couple stepping stones into the creek bed where it's too wide to jump over, and too deep to wade through without freezing your feet off in winter.

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  33. All of that took several months of going out there for a few hours a day, purely as a hobby (no pay, only amateur hand tools, no crew, just moi). There's so much terrain to cover in any of these Eastern Woodlands trails, even if it's in a highly developed suburb. And after 10 years of total neglect -- it didn't look like that at all when I was there in the '90s -- it gets completely shut down, and keeps building up to the point where no one from the park service etc wants to tackle it.

    And this was all during fall and winter, when you're working in the freezing cold trying not to bend your fingers too much while holding tools, since they get frozen faster that way (bent fingers are like a kink in a hose, slowing circulation). And getting the proper clothing, as much wool as you can get on you, wool liners for leather work gloves, etc.

    That's one of the project I'm most proud to have taken on and completed, since at least for another 5-10 years that network will be open to the public again. And it's a trail system I spent plenty of time with growing up, so the sentimental value alone was enough.

    BTW, you will get shredded doing this kind of labor. Look at what lumberjacks used to look like pre-power tools -- wiry, lean, shredded type, not the bulky beer-belly type of today. That was just a pleasant side-effect, though, I was not doing this in order to sculpt some ideal trad physique or whatever.

    The striver, the so-called outdoorsy one, looked down on this part-time job of mine, belittled it, chuckled at the idea it counted as a part-time job or project or hobby since I was not getting paid a wage by a boss to do it. Typical neolib yuppie dehumanizing view of productive work, that it only counts as honorable and esteemable depending on how much money you got doing it. Pathetic.

    Deep down, though, it's because he realized he was just a little kid in a playground when he's hiking trails like that, whereas it takes a mature man to beat back overgrown wild nature (and invasive species to boot), restoring and conserving a huge system for future generations. Not like I did that on a national scale, but in my own little possible way, doing the most I could (more than anyone else had done for that place ever).

    I think he also ridiculed the effort because I didn't use it to farm clicks, likes, subscriptions, or viral status on the gayass internet. I posted about it here and there at the time, but there's no vlog, daily journal, pictorial essay, etc. about it. I don't need validation from the internet like strivers do when posting pics of themselves hiking to Instagram or Facebook.

    That's too feminine of a trait. If a 20-something girl does it, it's totally fine. But a man in his 30s or 40s? Gay. And striver-y.

    Hard manual labor that's thankless, and that will get noticed and appreciated but not attaching to your identity specifically (just "whoever did this, thank you!"), is grown man's work (remunerated or not).

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  34. Stuff like this must've been totally ordinary back in the New Deal era, since nothing was decaying and overgrown. After the neolib / yuppie / Boomer revolution of the Reagan '80s, though, these spaces became only playgrounds for striver contests, not something to be maintained and conserved through thankless hard manual labor (perhaps unpaid).

    The whole REI crowd is full of total phonies, sorry to break it to you if you didn't know. They don't have the know-how, tools, clothing / gear, and practice to do a simple task like clearing brush away from an opening into the woods, let alone the heavier projects I mentioned.

    You need wool pants to protect from jaggers, goatskin gloves to protect best against abrasion (with wool liners if it's cold), wool jacket for protection and warmth -- and a nice long machete like my uncle gifted to us, made in USA by Ontario Knife and sharpened by him. And whatever supplementary tools, but basic stuff like that. Can't get most of that -- especially the tools -- from REI or Patagonia, although they've got more carabiners than you can shake a stick at. Sadge.

    You have to go to hardware stores for most of that stuff -- and if it isn't sharp enough at retail, you'll have to find one of the few ragged Boomer dudes who still has a creepy dimly lit workshop where he'll sharpen it for $10.

    "Um, yikes, seriously? Patronizing the business of a probable Trump voter, in 2022, literally? I can't even..."

    Nothing worse than an REI type who "runs" (i.e. jogs) as a hobby.

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  35. BTW, most of that stuff could've been found cheap in thrift stores during the 2010s (though only rarely today, since people like me have scooped most of it up by now -- you'll have to wait until we die for it to re-enter circulation at thrift stores).

    Only thing I never could score at the time was a pair of logger boots. This year or last, I finally found a pair of vintage Chippewa's (made in USA, of course), but they were slightly too big, and I don't have any trail restoration projects on the horizon anymore. Something like $15, too, it was crazy, like the Golden Age of thrifting in the 2010s.

    But I'm sure whoever got them (they were gone a few days later) is putting them to similar unpaid productive hobby use, for future generations' benefit, not just taking a selfie in them and posting it to Instagram like a fag. (As always, this is totally fine and cute if you're a young girl doing it.)

    And at any rate, I scored some never-worn East German officer boots for cheap about 5 years ago at a thrift store, and they don't have laces or other closures that present an opportunity for water to enter, and the top goes nearly up to the knee, so they protect against lower brush perfectly (better than just wool pants, in fact).

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  36. To get further off-topic, I think that's why some guys are such girl-haters -- they are forced to spend too much time around the grating girlboss type (a minority of women, and who are invariably girl-haters themselves).

    They look to entertainment as an escape from that toxic kind of femininity, so they track down cute girls to try to "thot patrol" online (never succeeding, of course, always getting ignored). Or consuming Western movies or whatever, as a LARP.

    Again, I enjoy the good Westerns, '80s action classics, etc., just as much as anyone else (more so, in fact, when I get in the right mood).

    But more often I'm looking for an escape from male-brained and male-bodied activities, when it comes time to consume entertainment. That's where the cute girls posting selfies in vintage clothing comes in, or vtuber princesses hosting their cute little virtual house parties, sharky chanteuses seranading us with cabaret karaoke, and sending back the eye-contact coming my way from ripe teenage babes (and MILFies) while out in IRL places.

    This was not such a huge schism during the 2010s heyday of "lumbersexual" males, i.e. non-rural guys dressing up like lumberjacks, reading the Art of Manliness blog, and so on.

    But maybe during the late 2010s with #MeToo or the broader Trump phenomenon and the libtard hysterical reaction against it, it fractured into a girl-hating and a girl-liking camp. Seems like the ones who have spent more time in female-dominated spaces and activities IRL, went in the girl-hating camp, revealing themselves to have been posers (they weren't doing unpaid trail maintenance, they just wanted a rugged look at their fake QE-funded office job, which was overstaffed by harpie HR Karens, who were never to be seen out in the woods).

    But that still leaves the guys who were doing really guy work, and guy thought, during that time, to join the girl-liking camp by now.

    I could never imagine hating girls, but then I haven't been controlled by HR Karens day-in and day-out for my whole adult life like other guys have. Sadge.

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  37. The beard! That's the giveaway of the poser type of lumbersexual. As I've said before, more facial hair only happens when status-striving is going through the roof, and in egalitarian times, guys are clean-shaven.

    But even in striver times, it's those who are aspiring to higher status who grow out their beard.

    I image-searched lumberjacks from the 1800s, and they rarely had full beards, at most a moustache, and often clean-shaven or only stubble. The proliferation of facial hair during the Victorian era / Gilded Age was mainly among strivers and high-status people.

    They lost what little facial hair they had by the egalitarian Midcentury (image search lumberjacks 1950s).

    Anyone who committed to a beard during the 2010s is a yuppie striving to compete in for status with other strivers. Meaning, probably not the actual outdoorsy / rugged type, just interested in the persona construction of that type. Or they are that type, but styled to appeal to a yuppie audience (like the Barnwood Builders crew).

    Naturally, the striver wrecker in the family committed the most to a beard during the 2010s and since. I grew mine out for a few months every once in awhile. But rarely kept it.

    It's easier to not shave than to slave out in the freezing wilderness with hand tools to tame wild nature.

    Only person I would ever LARP as is my Greatest Gen grandfather during the Midcentury. And if you're doing what he did, it's not a leisurely LARP, it's just continuing a productive tradition. I don't think he ever grew out his beard his whole life.

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  38. writing wistful songs about gooba

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  39. Also a wistful-yet-horny song about Gooba. ("Little blue sharkette...")

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  40. Hey, did you join that gc
    With the most uwu-ful girl in the world?
    And if you did, was she vibing, vibing?

    Hey, if you join that gc
    With the most uwu-ful girl, that unplugged her streams
    Tell her "Please, shorky"
    Tell her I need my fave-y
    Oh, won't you tell her, I re-sub'd her?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLbGeZSUrhg

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  41. The ongoing realignment of Democrats with capital continues as the zombie Reagan Republicans lose support everywhere. Joe Biden just sided with the railroad bosses against its workers, indicating that the Democrats no longer care about the working class anymore.

    https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/11/28/statement-from-president-joe-biden-on-averting-a-rail-shutdown/

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  42. Both parties since Reagan have cut out the working class as a whole class. Now it's more about which sectors' workers will a party treat somewhat better, based on which sectors make up the party.

    Dems are the non-labor-intensive sectors, Republicans are the labor-intensive ones.

    Railway workers fall under the labor-intensive side of the economy, so Dems will shit on them more than Republicans will. They transport finished goods, raw materials, food, etc. -- all GOP sectors.

    They're not involved in media / entertainment, info-tech, finance, or govt services (staffing the DMV, public schools, etc.), which are the Dem sectors.

    If industrial production, transportation, etc. get shut down, it doesn't put a dent in the wallets of the Dem sectors -- it hurts GOP sectors like manufacturing, agriculture, energy (transporting coal), etc.

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  43. Dems are not trying to avoid a rail strike b/c their sectors would be hurt by the strike, that would be the GOP sectors. But while supporting a strike would harm the owners' wallets of non-Democrat sectors, it would probably also result in better pay / conditions for the workers in non-Democrat sectors.

    I.e., it would empower the chuds, who don't get their paycheck from Democrats, and owe nothing to them. Unions are mostly long-gone in labor-intensive private sectors, only still present in labor-intensive govt sectors like public schools, public bus drivers, etc.

    Back in the New Deal era, Dems controlled the ubiquitous labor unions, and the railway chuds would've owed something to Dems for getting them better pay / conditions via the unions controlled by Democrats, while the higher pay hit the wallets of non-Democrat elites in say manufacturing.

    Dem patrons want to ensure that only their clients get any degree of goodies, and that excludes railway workers (though it would include other workers in "transportation" if they were driving a public bus or train around a city, since those are govt workers).

    GOP patrons may not be giving railway workers *extra* goodies like even higher pay / better conditions, but they are the ones hiring these workers and letting them earn a living. It's better than not having that job at all, in the minds of these workers. So they're still primarily loyal clients of the GOP, whose labor-intensive sectors they rely on for work.

    Threatening a strike doesn't mean they're about to defect to Dems, who neither control these labor-intensive sectors in order to give them their base pay, nor control any unions that could win them extra goodies on top of that base. It's a worker vs. elite struggle within the GOP side of society.

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  44. I'll emphasize that Republicans do not represent the working class, that Democrats do not represent the elites, etc. That's not the nature of any realignment going on -- and really, Biden is just another Reaganite Democrat like Clinton and Obama. He's not a realigner, because "he" (his party) stole the last election from the disjunctive president of the dominant party (the GOP, as of Reagan in 1980).

    Trump was trying to realign things, but as a late member of the dominant party, he couldn't get much done. Like Carter trying to un-do or re-jigger the New Deal. Couldn't do it, it took the Reagan realignment to destroy the New Deal. Ditto for Hoover trying to make concessions with proto-New Deal farm bureaus and the like, but he was the end of the line for his dominant party (Progressive Era GOP). It took a realigner from the other party to do something new (New Deal Democrats).

    Realignment will only happen when some non-Reaganite Dem wins an election. Biden was Reaganite, campaigned on being Reaganite, and that's why he lost with voters. He couldn't compete with the attempted-yet-thwarted realignment of Trump, regarding industrial policy / de-industrialization, cheap labor immigration, and scaling down our collapsing military outside the core nation (including Japan, South Korea, and all NATO countries, in Trump's own words!).

    Bernie looked like he might've gone there, but backed down, and let the Reaganite steal the nomination during his party's primary, then played along with his party's steal of the general. I don't mean "Bernie would've won" the primary -- but Biden was guaranteed to lose, until the party shut down the voting by eliminating all the high-scoring candidates, leaving only unwanted Biden (and then shitting on Dem voters again by forcing Harris into the running mate / VP spot, whereas she earned 0 delegates with voters, who had thoroughly rejected her and she had to drop out early).

    That was a huge reason why Dems had to resort to stealing the general -- they rejected the will of their own primary voters by forcing Biden and Harris on them, eliminating Buttgag, Bloomberg, and the rest (and sabotaging Bernie by letting Warren stay to bleed the prog vote). Minimal enthusiasm from Dem voters meant hardly any turned out, and they'd alienated those outside the party with their summer of BLM / Antifa riots.

    Only difference for Biden, vs. Clinton or Obama, is his admin's illegitimacy, owing to the stolen nature of his election, whereas Clinton and Obama won easily with voters. So he can't force anything through -- half the country or more tuned him out as an authority once they witnessed the Great Ballot Count Stoppage of November 2020.

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  45. Getting back to the class angle of partisan politics, remember that 99% of what you read on the takemeister sites (like Twitter) is just kneejerk shilling of their own party, and kneejerk demonization of the other party.

    Especially after Trump's courting of some elements of the working class -- those in manufacturing, who his own party had been screwing for decades by off-shoring the factories they owned and operated. (Democrats have never been the party of manufacturing, it has always belonged to the Republican - Whig - Federalist lineage).

    So now the GOP takemeisters have tried to re-brand (without substance to back it up) the GOP as the working-class party, or at least the one that will lift up workers as well as yuppie strivers and bosses. Meanwhile they paint the Dems as the party of professionals and stock-owners -- the out-of-touch, overfattened, soft-handed elites.

    Democrat takemeisters repeat the same retarded re-branding, because both sides of the takemeister battle have to agree on certain rules and boundaries, if they want to argue finer points. They brand themselves as the party of enlightened, information-age professionals and savvy investors, while the Republicans are populist demogogues pandering to mouth-breathing working-class stiffs and beat cops.

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  46. But as I labored to explain back when I started exploring these dynamics around 2017 -- click on the "Dems vs. GOP" category tag in the sidebar for all in this series -- class divisions are not what splits up the parties. It's different sectors of society, and each sector brings along with it both the elites and commoners within that sector.

    So, both private / for-profit railways owners, managers, and workers are going to lean Republican today in America, because the GOP is the vehicle for labor-intensive private industries.

    Democrats will attract professionals in non-labor-intensive sectors (which tend not to have legions of working-class workers, since little labor is required), such as finance, IT, media / entertainment. But it also attracts working-class people in sectors that are publicly owned / operated, like public schools, public health / hospitals, public schools, most low-level bureaucrats (who are pretty working-class when it gets down to the "DMV form processor / picture-taker).

    However, "for-profit labor-intensive elites and workers" does not make for an emotionally turbo-charged jerk-off session about how noble your own party is, and how undeserving and parasitic your rival party is.

    Instead, frame it as a class war between the honorable working class vs. the decadent elites (conservatard framing), or with the opposite emotional tone but same empirical claims, as the evil chuds vs. the righteous elites (libtard framing). Now you've got your clicks, subscriptions, by-lines, etc.

    If you want to see what is actually going on, you have to rely on someone like me -- and a handful of others -- who primarily reside in the abandoned ruins of the blogosphere. Not like a mystic oracle who lives in wild nature -- those are the posers on Twitter, podcast-land, etc. But rather as one of the few people left with a functional brain not warped by partisan poison, who can give you an accurate diagnosis (although probably can't solve the problem, which is too big and far-gone).

    In reality, there is no "vertical" class angle to partisan politics. It's entire horizontal sectors vs. other sectors of society, like the military vs. finance, and all of the vertical dimension within a sector plays as a team against all of the vertical dimension of the rival teams. To a high degree of precision.

    So, "labor-intensive vs. non-labor-intensive" does most of the work, but you also have to throw in "public vs. private / for-profit" to capture the fact that Dems have shitloads of labor-intensive workers as their clients, just in the publicly operated sectors.

    Therefore, the partisan retardation in the takemeister battles ("the discourse") is not merely an error or inaccuracy -- it's the biased polar opposite of what's really going on in the real world. They claim an intense influence of class to the partisan split, when it's very weak. You get more clueless by binging that kind of info-tainment. You'd have stayed smarter by not being aware of it at all (like most normies).

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  47. The illusion of a class dimension to the partisan split reduces to the different nature of the sectors themselves, like whether they're labor-intensive or not. If they are, they will employ lots of workers; if not, they won't employ many.

    These two types of sectors fight over the laws of society because some fundamental things affect them in different ways -- like the unit cost of labor, e.g. as regulated by a minimum wage.

    That makes a HUGE impact on the wealth of labor-intensive elites, like agriculture, for whom their payroll costs are a major component of their "costs vs. revenues" balancing act.

    But if they are not labor-intensive, like finance, it's irrelevant to their bottom line, which is more determined by interest rates, since that's how they make profit -- lending / investing money at a higher interest rate than what they borrowed that money at from their higher-ups in the finance pyramid, ultimately stopping at the central bank nowadays.

    They don't have to employ more workers / pay for more man-hours in order to find a higher differential between those interest rates, it's about trying to borrow the cheapest from the central bank, and being savvy about which investment targets would yield a higher return rate.

    Farm-owners *do* have to hire more workers / pay for more man-hours in order to generate more revenue, because their revenue comes from selling their crops at a certain price per weight. More revenues means either hoping for higher commodities prices, and/or selling a greater total weight of their stuff -- and all that extra stuff ain't gonna pick itself.

    Here we see a further layer of retarded branding on the GOP shill side -- there are lots of working-class people involved in agriculture, which is a solid GOP sector. However, most of them are slaves ("immigrants / guest workers / etc."), not American citizens, not having roots going back generations in this country, not chuds. Likewise for all the working-class people employed by the GOP sector of manufacturing -- they are also slaves, just living and working outside our nation, in sweatshop colonies where the factories have been off-shored to.

    Where is all that working-class support for the GOP supposed to come from electorally, if most of their workers aren't even Americans? It doesn't matter to them, they mostly want the cheap labor, which pushes them to hire cheap foreigners (at home or abroad), and if that removes zillions of potential GOP voters, it doesn't matter -- as long as the other party leaves in place these cheap-labor policies designed by the GOP (like NAFTA, created by Bush Sr., and rejected more by Dems than Republicans in Congress).

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  48. The rump of Americans who remain employed in ag or mfg will be loyal Republicans, of course. But what happens with the huge chunk of them who lost their livelihoods (if formerly working there), or who have never been and never will be hired in these industries, due to Republican elites conspiring for cheap foreign labor over expensive domestic labor?

    That's what Trump's whole campaign was built around, promising to bring back mfg plants that his own party sent out of the country through the '80s and after. He not only wanted it to be "made in USA" -- but by American workers, not cheap immigrants. Our food is largely still grown and picked in USA -- but by foreign slaves, so agriculture is not a way to put food on the table, so to speak, for Americans anymore.

    Same would be true if we brought back plants, but they were managed and staffed by foreigners. That was actually how that Foxconn boondoggle in Wisconsin was going to go -- Chinese immigrants for the managerial and skilled technicians, illegals from wherever to clean the place up, as with the other existing Foxconn factories operating in America.

    Naturally that bruised Trump's ego, so he had to lie about it being pro-American and on-shoring -- when it was just a way to bring Chinese workers and professionals over here, not to re-employ struggling Americans in a profitable sector like mfg.

    Most of that Trump 2016 energy has dissipated by now on the right, whether mainstream or dissident. It's not about forcing GOP elites to pay higher wages by hiring Americans instead of foreign slaves, and it's not about forcing GOP elites to lose shitloads of money by pulling out of the Middle East and Afghanistan and Japan and South Korea and all of Europe.

    That was the attempt at a new magnanimous elite on the GOP side -- they would sacrifice some of their wealth, status, and power, in order to share with those AMERICANS below them, in order to patch up our fragmenting society and promote harmony.

    But they've gone right back to their typical bullshit about helping strivers get rich, as long as it's within the GOP sectors, and let the Devil take the hindmost in the de-industrialized Rust Belt.

    Now it's just about who will fuck up your daily life less, e.g. by COVID hysteria or woke school curricula. But the Dems have largely knocked off the worst parts of that -- because everyone ignored them, as Biden's admin is illegitimate. Or because their rioters spent their violent energy as of 2021 and '22 (zero riots or even marches over the striking down of Roe v. Wade lol).

    That's why there was only a red trickle in the House races -- putting aside that state-wide races may have been stolen in battleground states. It should've been a slam dunk to build on the Trump phenomenon and at least take back the House like crazy, a la the Tea Party's 2010 victory during Obama's first mid-term election.

    Either re-build those factories by the shitloads, and hire American citizens by the zillions -- and withdraw 50% of forces per year from the Middle East, Japan, South Korea, and all of Europe -- or fuck off already. Put a roof over my head, and a meal on my table, before I put a ballot in your box.

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  49. As I was reading these recent comments I had the thought "this level of analysis is not available anywhere but this random blog by this guy who does half his posts about chicks playing videogames on camera. In the comments section no less. The world is backwards". Only to have you pause your comment to basically say that, you must have impressed even yourself today.

    Excellent stuff

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  50. Vladimir Berkov11/30/22, 2:27 AM

    Yes this is indeed great stuff. I tried to explain this blog to my friends once and gave up. Even they admitted your gay men and dogs/cats hypothesis had something to it though.

    Question - if both parties have working class and elites, why is it that the Dems have such a longstanding edge in class and prestige. Part has got to be that being in the informational, tech, marketing, edu, media side they get to play tastemaker and crown themselves the kings. But why do they hold those sectors to begin with? Is the mass media sector naturally left elite?

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  51. They're not just any ol' chicks, they're princesses. And I've only been writing about / to them this year, I normally don't cover online content at all. But there's just something special about them.

    And it does tie into extensive series on Manic Pixie Dream Girls, and the restless phase of the 15-year cultural excitement cycle. I had no idea the live-streamer format would be the place they'd all show up in, but since movies and TV and music are dead, they were bound to emerge somewhere else.

    It's not only the vtubers either, Pokimane is one too.

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  52. The ghost of Aimee Terese was smiling on me tonight -- scored some old school Ugg boots at the thrift store, back when they were Australian made (not in China, Vietnam, etc.). Based on the trademark, could be from the late 2000s, before they blew up and defined the look of winter during the 2010s.

    Nice chocolate-y brown, and very dark brown inside, pretty furry. Mid-calf height. Been looking for a pair forever.

    I'm having a nice chuckle at the thought of Aimee's tiny feetsies in men-sized Ugg boots, kind of like when they wear a men-sized shirt and it fits them like a whole dress.

    Now that Elon is issuing amnesties to suspended Twitter accounts, is she going to come back from the dead yet again?! :)

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  53. Thanks for the support, passing on the word to others it the best way right now. Might add a Patreon, and/or more content in new-to-me formats... we'll see. No, I'm not going to debut as a male vtuber -- that role is for princesses only. :)

    I know word-of-mouth still happens, because there's still interest in this blog, but it's all opaque nowadays because no one will leave a link anywhere. It's all screenshots uploaded to a private discord, or a text message, or whatever. There's no way to track who's coming, and from where, anymore.

    The whole internet is collapsing in on itself, and there are only these tiny insular cocoons / echo chambers / gatekept fandoms. And they will NOT say ANYTHING in public, where the out-group ("normies") might hear them.

    If you're not a long-term reader, you can go through the archives and never get bored. I've covered all sorts of topics that no one else has, or who didn't see much at the mind-blowing level.

    Not to toot my own horn, but I'm the most interesting *single* person on the part of the internet that was about academia and media. And I've been at it long enough that I should re-visit some older topics, with new things to add.

    I've been thinking about the mini-series on primitive / hunter-gatherer sexuality from 2012 or '13, and looking at how we can tell who among present-day modern people have the most primitive DNA in that part of their genome, without having to do a DNA test, looking at their phenotype differences. "Some people do this, other people do that; one is primitive and natural, the other is modern and warped".

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  54. Also, "Guy" may be a new reader, but this is far from some random blog that you stumble upon. I used to blog at GNXP.com back in the old days, and Steve Sailer's blogroll still links here over a decade later ("Quant-Dusk in Autumn," my old name that's the English translation of the Japanese "aki no kure").

    But it's not just people on the right, Anna Khachiyan linked here a time or two, back before she joined the Twitter cartel (they will only name and/or link you if you have a Twitter residence, for co-branding synergies within their platform, and I will never join Twitter, sorry Anna).

    Nassim Taleb quote-tweeted someone else notifying him of a post I wrote on his warming up to Trump in late 2015 / early '16, based on Trump's desire to get out of the Middle East (part of the unusual Trump supporters). It included a link, so that's an indirect link from him. "Brilliant analysis" in his words. Felt good. But he deletes a lot of old tweets, and it's not up anymore (although the URL is still up at the relevant post of mine he was reacting to).

    And Aimee Terese being my imaginary gf for awhile, she's not a right-winger.

    Even big parts of the woke left read here back in the late 2010s, probably not anymore though.

    I think the last person with any visibility to link here, or respond to a tweet with a screenshot of this blog with the URL visible, was Jack Mason / Perfume Nationalist.

    ...And as good as all that feels from the takemeister crowd, nothing blew me away more than tuning into Gura's streams and thinking, "Wait a second, where'd you come up with that topic? Are you lurking here???!?!" One of the highlights of my entire posting career is her taking my request for "What Makes You Beautiful" during her own birthday karaoke live-stream. :)

    I don't know, it feels like a snub (not that I care) when I'm lurked by media / takemeister people with no naming or linking. Not because I want fame, but because if I wrote it up, I think it's important, so why not have it seen as widely as possible. But I'm not an attention whore, so I'm not gonna spam it everywhere. Still, if you're already lurking, reading, and opaquely referring to it -- just say my damn name or website already, jeez. It has to be this esoteric reference that all the media-ites have with each other, but none of their readers know about.

    Plus, maybe the mediaite interpreter is misinterpreting what I said, whereas if they just named me or cited where they were reading something, the audience could check it out for themselves to see what's meant.

    Anyway, it doesn't feel like a snub when this happens with pure entertainers like the Hololive girls or Pokimane. They're not in the business of giving attribution, credit, citations, etc., like academia / media is supposed to do. It's just show-biz! I don't mind when entertainers secretly know about me and discuss me out of earshot of their fandoms (plus their fandoms are orders of magnitude larger than media audiences, so they're potentially risking more to refer to me, even obliquely).

    And we're in different industries anyway, how can I expect a plug from an entertainer? They're going to plug other entertainers, like their colleagues.

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  55. Gura must've gotten away with absolute murder growing up, as long as she buttered up her dad instead of her mom. The cuteness overload, a classic in the daddy's girl arsenal. And you can tell she's honed her skills to perfection by now.

    She even made a meta- comment sometime, about how "You can't get mad at me... I'm cute! Tee hee."

    She can only be so brazen about it because it's true, sigh.

    Then again, maybe we're only feigning being upset so that she'll feel the pressure to disarm us with a cuteness overload. Oh nyo, pwease, anything but *that*...

    BTW, "Good Riddance" came out at the very end of '97, but was still a staple at high school graduations years later (like mine, class of '99). Given how many chatters chimed in to say the same thing, I'm guessing anyone who graduated in the 2000s heard it at graduation too.

    BTW part 2, Gura may playfully tease the 105 year-olds who heard that song at graduation, but she herself was born in the last century. The last *millennium*, even. Such youthful energy for someone who's basically a thousand years old. Hehe.

    Thanks for the Ugg boots and boy band references, too, shows you still value my charmingly offbeat thoughts to keep lurking here. In a world where hot guys are only treated as mere sex objects, it's nice to find someone who appreciates me for my bwain. ^_^

    All I want for Christmas -- is Goooooob

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  56. And there's a civil war in the Democratic faction now. On twitter the Jews are accusing the blacks of being anti-semitic, and the blacks are accusing Jews of being anti-black.

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  57. Sharky, ah, cunny cunny
    You are my anime girl
    And you got me hunting you

    Cunny, ah, sharky sharky
    You are my anime girl
    And you got me hunting you

    I just can't believe
    The subtlety of subbing you
    I just can't believe, uwu
    I just can't believe
    The fun-ness of this meme-ing, too
    I just can't believe, uwu

    Sharky, ah, cunny cunny
    You are my anime girl
    And you got me hunting you

    Cunny, ah, sharky sharky
    You are my anime girl
    And you got me hunting you

    When I clicked you, girl
    I knew how much a click could mean
    (I know how much a click can mean)
    Like the springtime showers
    Stream your cuteness through my screen
    (Stream your cuteness through my screen)

    Sharky
    Stream a little shark juice on it, cunny
    Stream a little shark juice on it, oshi

    "I'm gonna cute-ify your feed"

    Yeah yeah yeah
    Stream some shark juice on it, oh yeah

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7T4aQMxTTM

    Maybe a little to yabai for a standalone post, but inspiration struck after watching Gooba ponder whether "Mike Honey" fit into the same saucy name pattern as "Huge Jazz" etc. during the FIFA stream last night.

    More tribute songs -- less yabai -- forthcoming! ^_^

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  58. Take some content, spice it up
    Flick the filter, flick it off

    Stream some shark juice on me
    In the name of chum
    Stream some shark juice on me
    C'mon jar me up
    Stream some shark juice on me
    So cute and fun

    I'm sopped, dripping beads
    When her cuteness floods my feed

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UIB9Y4OFPs

    (OK, back to the work on the not-so-yabai ones, for real!)

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  59. "Livin' in the Flood Zone of Love, and I Ain't Got No Insurance" -- from my forthcoming country crossover album.

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  60. Imagine not loving holographic girls (real girls wearing holo costumes to an online masquerade ball, where they graciously host us every night)...

    Too many wholesome and cursed-but-cute moments to mention tonight with the Goobinator (after the official game was done, during the even longer socializing-with-fans-and-colleagues portion).

    It reminds me so much of playing bideo gamebz back in the '80s and '90s, when it was still entirely IRL -- "You wanna come over after school and play some Street Fighter?" It was just a pretext for hanging out and socializing with friends. Play the game for an hour, then do whatever else for a few more hours, with no concrete plans.

    I'm not sure if Millennials had that experience when they were in their entirely-online phase of video games, like in the Wii / PS3 / Xbox 360 era. Did they play online for an hour, and then drop the game, but continue shooting the shit for another hour or longer over their gamer headsets? From the memories I've heard, their time was mostly devoted to the game itself.

    LAN parties were over by that point, too. Maybe Millennials could've experienced the "video games as a pretext for hanging out" atmosphere in the '90s or early 2000s, but I doubt their helicopter parents allowed them to do so very often. For the tail end of Gen X, our parents had no input -- one kid invited the other kid, and the parents respected their kids' separate social lives, allowing them to invite friends over (within reason), without having to get special permission from the parents.

    Now it's like one girl shows up in another girl's chat, asks to play a game later, and most of what they do is socialize rather than get sweaty and tryhard with the game itself. Or if they do focus on the game hardcore, it's only for an hour, then there's 3 hours of unstructured spontaneous fun afterward. Hehe.

    Seems like the period of 2005 to 2019 was the hardcore / angry / ranting / sweaty gamer era, whereas the '90s / y2k and now the 2020s are more low-key / mellow / casual-friendly video game cultures.

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  61. FWIW, I think Mumei has dancing talent, but that it's lying latent and untapped.

    She's a visual rather than verbal learner, she has always made drawing a hobby, and she can sing really well (technically, and performatively before a crowd / not getting stage-fright, etc.). These all point to her leaning toward the corporeal side of the "cerebral vs. corporeal" spectrum.

    Only thing I'm unclear on is if she's a butt girl or boob girl -- and no, that's not a sly request for such information. Just saying that's one part of this analysis that has a "do not know" value in the data. (All dancers, gymnasts, athletes, etc. are butt people.)

    In any case, she's mentioned that growing up, her environment steered her away from singing and musical theater. The same environment would've kept her from testing her talent at dancing, too (Puritanical). So, just because she doesn't currently enjoy cutting a little rug when the right tune is playing, doesn't mean she can't.

    It could just be a mental obstacle -- overcoming her upbringing, finding confidence, trusting the audience, and so on. But she has managed to accomplish that for singing, so I don't see why she couldn't do that as well for dancing.

    Singing and dancing are found so often in the same person, especially if they're inclined to musical theater. There's just no way she does multi-hour karaoke sessions from musicals, but also has two left feet. I don't believe it for a second.

    My advice to people in that situation: have one shot of liquid courage to loosen your inhibitions, stay home with no one else around, and put on some very danceable music (for me, it was 2nd wave ska, Franz Ferdinand's first album, and other intersections of dance and rock -- for Mumei, it might be ABBA and disco, '90s techno / Eurodance, idk).

    Don't look in any mirrors, just let the music take over your body like it's working your puppet strings. Since dancing is a natural activity, you'll do certain motions and carry out certain sequences instinctively (to maintain balance, to provide a little variety by alternating, to get more attention by stretching an arm or leg further away from your torso, etc.). You don't need lessons to get into the basics.

    In fact, don't bother learning any established step dances, routines, or choreography. Just get your body into the activity first, and when you're comfortable enough in your body while dancing, then you can learn ballroom dances, choreography, etc. (I never did, always stayed in my own gymnastic / club leader style, but anyone who asked assumed I had some kind of dance training).

    Like any kinesthetic skill, you have to practice to develop it, and keep at it in order to maintain it. But it never really goes away, just gets rusty at worst.

    It blows my mind that such a voice was kept silent for so long -- I'd hate to think there's a dancer in there that's been caged up as well.

    I believe in Moom. I only got into it when I was 23, roughly the same age as her. You don't have to have trained since kindergarten, if you just want to go dancing rather than join a pro ballet corps. It'll take practice and mental obstacle overcoming -- and maybe a little help from a shot glass. But if she achieved that for singing, she can for dancing too!

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  62. And how could I forget some motivation?! The first is the go-to inspiration for dancing, and the second plays into Mumei's persona as a tee-hee girl-next-door who erupts into psycho-mode when the time is right. Both from the same movie, naturally -- Flashdance (which I reviewed as the darkest-lit mainstream movie ever, in an old post linked below).

    And yes, I did just dance all around the room after 2am, while looking up these YouTube vids. They're classics of "just let the spirit possess you" (speaking of Mumei's loss of sanity in the Phasmophobia stream, hehe).

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miax0Jpe5mA

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evyKPVS_M7E

    https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2015/03/flashdance-darkest-lit-mainstream-movie.html

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  63. The Phoenician of Unleashin' is back from the dead on Twitter! Free speech haters on suicide watch, hehe. Welcome back!

    She's a derangiac, derangiac on the board
    And she's bantzin' like she was never banned before
    She's a derangiac, derangiac -- her encore
    And she's bantzin' like she was never banned before

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  64. Thanks to Gura for normalizing the word "panties," which has been the target of Puritanical policing for what seems like 20 years by now. I just searched Twitter for "panties" and "word", and they're still at it -- how awful it is, gives them the ick, only used by creepy guys, etc.

    The only way it's still used by those libtards / woketards is in the longer phrase "get your panties in a bunch / twist / etc." For the item of clothing, it has to be "underwear" or in typical Millennial kiddie-fication fashion, "undies".

    I searched YouTube for the word and the names of other Hololive girls, and several of them use it freely, too. Gura, Irys, Sana, and Kiara quite a bit. Fauna, Mumei, Kronii, and Bae as an echo of someone else (like Sana) saying it first. Ina, Calli, and Ame not very much or at all.

    Looks like the pot-stirrers are most likely to use it, and once they get the ball rolling, most of the others will join in as well.

    Maybe it's a generational thing? Boomers had no problem saying it. Somewhere during Gen X, maybe those who imprinted on 3rd wave feminazism, they started insisting on not being addressed as "ladies", and on never ever uttering the word "panties". They acted so hysterically, like merely uttering the word is going to rape all women because of how pervy they thought it sounded (earlier gens didn't find it pervy). So insane.

    Most Millennials are that way, too. But the Hololive girls are the very end of the Millennials, and start of the Zoomers. So they wouldn't have imprinted on that '90s era of feminazism and its aftermath in the 2000s.

    There was that whole exhibitionist mania of the early 2010s -- the No Pants Subway Ride, Free the Nipple, going topless around NYC, not wearing a bra, etc. That's the style of feminism that the girls born in the second half of the '90s / 2000s imprinted on.

    So not only do they not have any hysterical hang-ups about the word "panties," they don't have this taboo attitude toward any word referring to intimate clothing.

    How refreshing! And coming from cute young girls, too, not as the hysteria says only creepy old men.

    They don't constantly use the words, go out of their way to use them, pander to coomers, etc., as though it were a provocation. It's not a fetish or obsession. It's just the normal way to think and feel and talk about something that's totally natural and not shameful! Nothing to make a big deal out of, in any direction.

    ...Also the generation to FINALLY start bringing back the bush. Not as a fetish, but as part of living au naturel, back to nature, RETVRN to tradition, etc.

    I keep beating readers over the head with these observations because if you aren't watching these girls, you really have no idea how much attitudes and behaviors are changing already -- for the better! You won't hear it among podcasters, because they're all Millennials or maybe X-ers.

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  65. Also Gura, please start taking some zinc! It's the best single thing you can to boost your immune system. Either preventing sickness, or winding it down fast if you do get sick. Every supermarket has it. Best to take it with food.

    It may be too late to nip this one in the bud, but it should help wrap it up sooner than later. And please, take it every day from now on, no matter what, to lessen the chances of getting anything.

    Do you keep aspirin around? That will help with the fever / aches. If not, please keep some of that handy too, just in case.

    I don't mean to GONCERN so hard, but we all want our princess to be in the best shape possible. Maybe your parents already told you these things, but more voices will convince and motivate you better. :)

    Get well soon, sharky!

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  66. Kiara demonstrating how caked up she is, relative to her 3D model, is example 34869704 of dancers being butt people rather than boob people.

    It's not about the glute muscles per se -- it's about the sense of rhythm, which doesn't have to involve your glutes at all.

    There is simply a whole big bundle of traits that go along with being a butt person, and their opposite traits that go along with being a boob person.

    That's why I suspect Mumei, Irys, and Kronii are butt girls -- without asking them to demonstrate or confirm, or in any yabai sense at all. Just as a scholarly prediction about which traits are correlated with which other traits. They're all good singers, along with Gura, who already is loud-and-proud about being a person-of-buns rather than a person-of-breasts.

    Irys and Kronii also seem to be more into the fitness / sports games that involve IRL body motion.

    Mumei not as much on the sports side -- she may be balanced between the two.

    I actually believe Fauna about being a boob girl, it's not just egging on her "mommy milkies" fans. More cerebral than corporeal, like being a bit clumsy / fumble-fingers, while preferring to write scripts and narratives (for ASMR, Halloween shorts, etc.). And rarely includes dance standards in her karaoke setlist.

    BTW, I don't mean this as a size contest -- there are butt girls without badonkadonks, and boob girls who don't have mommy milkies. It's a ratio -- more in one region than the other, drawing attention more to one region than the other.

    This is an irony in a sub-culture that tends to cater to boob people -- most stereotypical "anime girls" meant to be sexualized have huge boobs, not huge asses. And yet on the talent side, behind the virtual avatars, there's plenty of butt girls represented. Not merely "boob girls who have C cups instead of the GGG cups of their avatars," but belonging to the whole other category, where they have more around back than up front.

    That is even more pronounced in the Hololive type of streamers because part of their appeal is singing and dancing, inherited from the idol phenomenon in Japan. Well, once you start selecting based on singing and dancing, way more butt girls are going to make it to the big leagues than if the appeal were only about verbal skills and chatting.

    Boob people are more exclusively found in media (like podcasting) than entertainment, because media doesn't involve singing, dancing, or anything else physical.

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  67. The daddy's girl phenomenon, continued. What is it about this kind of performance that weakens the defenses of most dads, but not so much of the moms?

    Moms might find it cute in a different context, but I mean where the parents are trying to get the daughter to start her homework, wash the dishes, clean up her room, etc. The daddy's girl isn't just about being cute, it's about the dad giving the daughter a pass on some responsibility because she launched a cuteness attack on him and won.

    Imagine trying to keep the pressure up on your daughter to wash the dishes or whatever, when she breaks out into singing the Willy Wonka soundtrack:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OTBmAHbC_4

    She knows she's aiming this at a male audience to weaken their defenses! Somehow it's different than trying to showcase her talents for her mom... maybe in the latter case, it'd be more about the technical skills. But then the mom would only respond, "Yes, dear, now you've improved your technique very well -- but what does your vibrato skill have to do with washing dishes? Get to work, young lady."

    The technical skills are still on display in the daddy's girl performance, but it's more about the attitude or emotional delivery -- "look how cute I can be, how could you *possibly* ask me to get my hands dirty washing dishes?!?!?!!?!! :)))))"

    The dad can't respond as the mom did, about how singing skills have nothing to do with washing dishes. He's being asked to evaluate her cuteness, not her singing skill (primarily). Did she not overwhelm your cuteness detector? And you can't ask something so cute to get so sludged up scrubbing dirty dishes, picking up her room, etc., can you?

    At least, you can't ask her to do those things right here and now, when she's in full cuteness mode. When she winds down and isn't doing her literal song-and-dance routine, then you can press her to do her chores. She won't be feeling super-cute by that time, and she can't argue that "I'm too cute to do manual labor" anymore.

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  68. And of course not all daddy's girls have to be singers, but they'll be putting on some kind of cuteness performance. As simple as opening their eyes wide, smiling wide, using a singsong voice, drawing out syllables ("Pleeeease daddyyyyy....."), giving an exaggerated overly excited hug, jumping up and down while clapping, and so on.

    Seems like the common factor is giving off signs of being a childlike, baby-ish even, rather than a subtle and composed grown-up. You wouldn't hurt a widdle kid, would you?

    In some other context, she may not need to get out of some chore, so she doesn't have to crank up the childlike traits. But when she finds herself in a bind about chores and work -- crank that cuteness up! You don't assign chores to wiw bahbies, you assign them to older children and adolescents. If she puts on a goo-goo ga-ga act, and it's convincing, then there goes her chore duties for the time being! Hehe.

    Still, why does this work so well against the dad, and less so against the mom? It's not because the mom knows it's only an act, because she may have pulled that act herself as a young girl. In that case, cluing the dad into it being an act to weaken his resolve would toughen him up to her assault. However, the dad can be fully aware of the fact that she's launching a deliberate attack on him, that she's not really a small helpless widdle child, but still succumb to her attack!

    Something about that performance tugs more at the male than female heartstrings. It's related to dads being more sad about their daughter growing up, and having an idealistic wish that they would not, while moms look at it matter-of-factly. Acting childlike and cute toward daddy indulges the dad's wish for her to not leave his watch and turn on her feminine charms in a more adult way, and for some stranger outside of the family.

    Moms know and accept that will happen at some point, they just want to manage that process to get her the best outcome possible.

    So it's about women being more practical and down-to-earth, while men are more idealistic dreamers and wish-casters? There's no burning wish from the mom that the daughter can indulge, whereas at some point she senses that the dad has an bottomless wish for her to stay daddy's little girl forever -- so if she strings him along with that fantasy by turning up the childlike cuteness overload, she can get something from him, but not her mom.

    Like I said, we can be fully cognizant of these dynamics, but that doesn't allow us to change the laws of nature. We're too vulnerable to the childlike charm act -- and wouldn't want it any other way, sigh.

    Imagine wanting to join the ranks of heartless wicked stepmothers for whom everything with the daughter is a cold utilitarian matter, nose to the grindstone, suck it up and deal with life not being fair, and so on.

    Yeah, they have to feel that and learn that at some point -- but they need to be protected, exuberant princesses, too!

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  69. So that ties into the "father as protector" role. Treating her like a Dickensian child laborer, exposing her to the harsh realities of life, etc., would be abdicating that role. He's the protector! Let her have her afternoon of singing Willy Wonka -- the cold hard logic of "the dishes are only getting dirtier" has to be kept at bay for another few hours, according to daddy's protective bubble role, otherwise it'll crush her singing hobby.

    I guarantee dads are more supportive of their daughters pursuing a not-so-profitable "career" or line of work, hobby, pasttime, etc. In the dad-mind, daughters need protecting from the ubiquitous dehumanizing forces of the market, or else they can't cultivate their singing, dancing, and other things that will never get them much money.

    If the moms do support their daughters in such endeavors, they play the psycho "dance mom" or "cheer mom" role, where they want to thrust their daughters into the cold dehumanizing commodifying market, and are trying to steel their daughters' nerves for being treated like a faceless and fungible cog in the great big impersonal system of, e.g., trying out for a prestigious ballet corps.

    So if the girl does have an overweening ambition about becoming a top ballet dancer, she'll have to rely on her mom, female instructors, and maybe a gay guy, none of whom will be vulnerable to her cuteness overload attack. They'll crack the whip, make her the best she can be, at the expense of turning her into a market commodity. Their role is quality control, to make the product the best it can be before it's brought to market / given its initial public offering.

    But most girls don't get into gymnastics, cheer, ballet, singing, acting, etc., in order to claw their way to the top of the status pyramid. They just want a safe space to become a princess for a little while, in between waking up early to get ready for school, washing dishes, and the rest of the mundane grind.

    And for this vast majority of girls, they need to rely on the good ol' protective dad to keep the market forces, naysayers, and whip-crackers at bay (most of them women, principally the mom).

    One of the major ironies of feminism -- "letting girls dream big" is always something their dads are going to indulge, more than their moms. It's not even close!

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  70. Remember the lyrics to "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" -- both parents are getting on her case to grow up and settle down. But her response to her mother is more blunt, "We're not the fortunate ones", i.e. what's the utilitarian point you're trying to make? None of us is going to make it big anyway, so why slave so hard trying?

    To her father, she reassures him, "Oh daddy dear, you know you're still number one". She's not engaging him in a utilitarian argument, because he's not making one to begin with (being the dad, not the mom). He's worried about who she's going to marry and have kids with, but she's disarming him by saying she's not ready for that yet, and so she's still daddy's little girl, so forgive her for living a wild and crazy lifestyle.

    I thought Cyndi Lauper would've been a gemini like Gura, but she barely missed it -- June 22 (cancer). No clue whether Cyndi Lauper fits the profile for cancer, because the only one I looked into was gemini, because that's what my oshi is. Who cares about the other signs? ^_^

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  71. To temper the view somewhat, and steer away from daddy's girls, you see a similar mirror-image thing with sons. Namely, the father is the cold hard utilitarian one, preparing him for entry into the dehumanizing market. "Football dads" a la "dance moms".

    The mother is the warm-hearted one who just wants to let him have his fun in a hobby or career, playing a more protective role against the array of market forces.

    In mirror-image fashion, this produces mama's boys, preferring the parent who gave them a protective bubble from the cold harsh market outside the family sphere.

    Rather than cuteness per se, the mama's boy deploys a boy-like sense of adventure and wonder and excitement, risk-taking in a childlike sense (not going for a big promotion at work, but taking on the bad guys, becoming king of the woods, or something fanciful and playful like that).

    The dad dismisses it as an act that will get him nowhere in the real-world job market, the mom enjoys having her wish indulged that he remain a rambunctious adventuresome boy with stars in his eyes, however impractical they may be.

    Daddy's girls and mama's boys seem to attract each other, whereas mama's girls and daddy's boys attract each other.

    Within each pair, the male feels differently about either parent than the female does. The mama's boy prefers the mom, whereas his daddy's girl gf prefers her dad. The mama's girl prefers her mom, and her daddy's boy bf prefers his dad. So they're not the same at that level.

    BUT, they *are* the same at a higher level, namely are they impractical dreamers who wander nonchalantly through life, or are they cold hard utilitarians who don't have time for that nonsense?

    Sure, when they're teenagers, maybe dating the opposite type can introduce some variety as the spice of life.

    But if you're going to be serious, settle down, start a family, etc., you can't have opposing worldviews like that. Dreamers find dreamers to establish a dreamer household, toilers find toilers to establish a toiler household. It's not a case where opposites form a complementary whole where each one tempers each other, and improves the whole. They would be too much at odds with each other to pursue a common goal as a family / household.

    Entertainers don't marry their accountants, they marry other entertainers. And accountants don't want to get mixed up with an entertainer -- they want another accountant, doctor, lawyer, etc.

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  72. The match between daddy's girls and mama's boys can be seen between the generations as well. So, when a daddy's girl has a son, he'll become a mama's boy -- and her own father was probably a mama's boy.

    When a mama's boy has a daughter, she'll become a daddy's girl -- and his own mother was probably a daddy's girl.

    When a mama's girl has a son, he'll become a daddy's boy -- and her own father was probably a daddy's boy.

    When a daddy's boy has a daughter, she'll become a mama's girl -- and his own mother was probably a mama's girl.

    The transmission mechanism (genes or culture) doesn't matter, the point is that they're adapted to each other.

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  73. Coming from a long line of daddy's girls and mama's boys, I have no great insight into how the other type of family works.

    But my impression is that the same-sex parent doesn't try to throw that child into the cold harsh market vortex outside of the home. The dad teaches his son useful guy stuff, pushes him to get a job, etc., but doesn't go psycho "football dad" mode -- or "distant father" mode, let alone "deadbeat dad" mode, which is equally throwing his son into the market vortex outside the home, rather than playing a protector role.

    The only difference between the football dad and the deadbeat dad is the former is trying to prepare his son for when he gets abandoned to the harsh market vortex, while the latter says "you're on your own" in the vortex. But neither is trying to keep that vortex at bay, creating a protective bubble against it within the family household.

    Likewise, the mom teaches her daughter useful girl stuff, pushes her to get a girl-appropriate job, get married, etc., but doesn't go "dance mom" mode -- or "distant / absent mother" mode, let alone "wicked stepmother" mode, all of which are casting the daughter into the market vortex outside the home, rather than shield her within the family.

    The families with mama's girls and daddy's boys are more stable, while the ones with daddy's girls and mama's boys are more dysfunctional. But the latter don't mind it *that* much -- it takes all types to make the world go round, whaddaya gonna do about it?

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  74. To wrap up, what about that dysfunctional dynamic creates daddy's girls and mama's boys? Well, when the same-sex parent is saying you, a child, are headed toward the impersonal harsh vortex of the market, and I, your would-be same-sex protector, ain't gonna do anything to protect you from it when that day comes -- it makes the child want to seek extra reassurance and protection and shielding-for-their-dreams from the other, opposite-sex parent.

    Typically it should be like an apprenticeship, where the father mentors the son, and the mother mentors the daughter. But this isn't supposed to be any old apprenticeship -- it's family, therefore sacrosanct against outisde forces that would destroy familial bonds, like the market.

    In the stable household, the same-sex parent does not tell the child they're going to be on their own once the brief apprenticeship is over. They play the role of mentor, but also let them know that they can always rely on the same-sex parent's support materially and morally once they're confronting the market.

    That does not induce the apocalyptic fear of being inevitably thrown into the market's vortex, so they don't seek the extra reassurance and shielding from their opposite-sex parent. There's no sense of urgency, chaos, and discontinuity, but harmony, predictability, and stability.

    Oh, one last thing! Do daddy's girls and mama's boys prefer cats, while mama's girls and daddy's boys prefer dogs? On average, it seems like it. Because the former are more anxious in their attachment style, and want a very cuddly social affectionate pet, like a cat, and unlike the dog that will never sit on their lap, give them a massage, purr, and meow like a helpless widdle baby kitten.

    The latter, more stable in their attachment style, want a pet that is around and reliable but not cuddly or cute or clingy, that keeps a certain level of distance. And that's dogs, on average.

    There could be a finer-grained thing, where the former want clingy pets regardless of them being a cat or dog, whereas the latter want pets that are more aloof or independent regardless of their species. I'm just saying, since cats are more cuddly and affectionate than dogs, this probably shows up at which species is preferred, too.

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    1. Dogs are also much more toil than cats, fitting for toiling families. Dogs give easy affection and don’t care all that much how you treat them compared to cats but require a LOT of effort put into them. Walks, grooming, picking up poop, dog parks, kennels and crates, toys, feeding routines, etc.

      Cats require little in terms of physical needs or hard toil put into them but have a lot of emotional needs. Cats not properly socialized as a kitten never will truly trust humans no matter how much toil is put into it. You can obedience train a cat either. Cats can be entertained by or appreciate humans though who are on their wavelength and figure out how to treat them well and then they reward you with affection.

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  75. Dog people really have no idea how affectionate cats are with their owners. While taking a nap on the couch today, my tiger-bear jumped up when I'd barely pulled the afghan over me. Climbed on my stomach, gave me a massage for a little bit, purring loudly the whole time, then laid belly-down on me, looking me in the eyes. Afterwards, rolling onto his side, laying his chin down on me, stretching out his front paws to hug me while he drifts away to slumberland.

    When I wake up before him, I eventually have to move around some so my limbs don't get tired. He senses that and immediately turns back onto his stomach, sprawling out to try to pin me down -- so his bed can't move away from underneath him. Dammit. It takes a bit of rocking to one side, inclining him at a decent angle, for him to relent and jump off at last -- not before giving me a pitiful look right in the eyes, and trying to re-position himself as if I'm just going to keep laying there forever.

    He has more personality, respect, gratitude, reciprocity, and affection than a lot of people in our status-striving collapsing empire. The main reason why people are so into their pets these days -- they're unaware of, and don't participate in, these tiresome enervating status contests, polarization trends, and all the other things that are going to hell in a handbasket in our society.

    It's getting to the point where I love him more than anyone or anything else. Not a sign of a healthy, normal society -- but that reflects badly on society's elites, not on me personally. I'm very grateful to share our lives together, to the extent possible across species.

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  76. "Are You More Affectionate Than a Housecat?" -- the new reality dating show coming to screens everywhere next summer.

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  77. Anyone under 40 reading that, thinking "Gee, hope things are better when I'm that age," you'd better prepare for an even worse situation.

    I never would've thought, felt, or acted like my pet was the greatest living thing in my world, during my 20s or even 30s. And the tiger-bear found his way into my life 7 years ago, so I had plenty of opportunity to make him the highest creature in my life for half of the 2010s. But did not, although we've always had a close bond.

    It was the total disintegration of social bonds during the hell year of 2020, that marked the end of anything human. Covie may be ovie, but that was only a pretext to begin with -- the permanent destruction of my family is only cementing itself in late '22 and '23, when we should be healing and strengthening and seeing more of each other, if it had been about the coof and its restrictions.

    This has nothing to do with the stages of an individual's lifespan, like there's some certain age where you only have your pet, and people younger than that age think, "Man, I hope I don't ever get to be that age!" 40 year-olds in 1980, '90, and 2000 were born on third base, and have been and will always be the wealthiest generations in world history. They had families at this age.

    Once it gets to the 2008 depression, the crisis erupts right away. Someone turning 40 in 2010 had to really give it their all to overcome the obstacles to marriage, family, etc. But imagine turning 40 during the year that ended our society, 2020.

    You would've needed the strongest buffers imaginable to protect yourself from family destruction -- to come from a rich and/or high-status family, or to marry into a right / high-status family. Part of that is the material provisions per se that wealthy families enjoy, but it's more about the stability that wealthy families prioritize in order to ensure inter-generational wealth transfer / stewardship.

    If the family has been rich for generations, then simply staying together as a family *is* the family business. Succumbing to familial disintegration trends would mean not just the end of their kinship bonds, but the end of their material subsistence.

    Obviously I don't come from such a family, and did not marry into one (never married, no kids). Maybe if the central bank was your sugar daddy during the QE program of the 2010s and 2020, that could've made you feel comfortable enough to marry and have kids, although I doubt it. But at any rate, interest rates are going through the roof, and the central bank is withdrawing those trillions of QE dollars from circulation, so there goes your sugar daddy -- and your marriage and children, if you only got to that stage as a nouveau riche beneficiary of QE. Generationally wealthy families can withstand the central bank unwinding QE, since that wasn't the source of their long-term wealth.

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  78. There was a fair amount of illusory social and kinship stability during the 2010s and 2020, due to the central bank being a sugar daddy to the top 10-20% of society. Certainly for the bottom 80-90%, they never even got to enjoy this illusory stability during the post-2008 depression. But now even that nouveau riche group is coming apart after 2020.

    Just think of what 10 years of this climate is going to do, and then those born around 1990 can imagine what it'll be like as a 40 year-old in 2030, as far as marrying, having a family, a stable social / family life, etc. You're going to be even worse off than my cohort is now.

    And those born closer to 2000, turning 40 around 2040, fucking forget about it. Only the super-wealthy will be hanging on by that point, as far as social and kinship ties are concerned. Everyone else is going to be relying on their pets, online relationships, or outright AI / simulations for their connections to things outside themselves.

    And in that totally fragmented and alienated world -- like Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? -- the fact that I actually had a really-living cat to share my life with, and not just a robotic replicant in the shape of a cat, will make me feel pretty damn high-status after all.

    Also the fact that the destination of my online feelings was a real person, not AI, and actually noticed me, and to some degree reciprocated the good vibes (without having to pay her, as though it were a market transaction either).

    If you thought today's 40-somethings were in an unenviable, just wait through 10 to 20 further years into this dystopia, and you'll be seething with envy at the 40 year-olds of the early 2020s, who still had really-living pets and online interactions with really-living people.

    Start preparing now, or you'll get caught off-guard. And unless your family is generationally wealthy, don't plan for there being a central bank sugar daddy by then either. That was mainly to prop up the Boomers' living standards. They'll be gone in 10-20 years, and the central bank isn't about to start propping up X-ers, Millennials, or Zoomers indefinitely to the tune of trillions printed per year.

    In the meantime, you don't have to be such a doomer about these revelations. It can make you appreciate, be grateful for, and show love to the things you have now that you -- or your counterparts -- will not have after 10-20 years of societal disintegration.

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  79. Do Zoomers get nostalgic for tamagotchis, since they were a real tangible object they could hold in their hand, keep on their person, sleep next to in bed, etc., if they were so inclined?

    Nowadays, and getting worse going forward, simulated pets are stored in some server who-knows-where, accessed through some online account -- and not using hardware that is dedicated to this function. Just their all-purpose smartphone, PC, or laptop.

    It was bad enough that they had to rely on having feelings for, and taking care of, a simulated pet instead of a really-living pet. (Of course they probably had the real deal in their homes as well, but before long, that might be out of the question.)

    Pretty soon, they'll have only a simulated pet -- but with no distinctive physical "body" for its "soul" to inhabit and feel at least plausibly real.

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  80. Just feeling a little wistful-yet-hopeful after Bae sang "Think of Me" during karaoke tonight (musical theater / movies only). Gooba sang that during karaoke in October, too.

    It's what we'll all be thinking of, as it were, when online only consists of interacting with AI / simulations, or a Holodeck in meatspace.

    Holo girls aren't bots, AI, or mere avatars -- they're real people, who just happen to be wearing a costume for their masquerade ball, which they graciously host us at throughout the week.

    The only circumstances that could separate us are the further social disintegration, which could spread online and not just IRL, where we're only interacting with bots of various kinds. In that case...

    Think of me, think of me faking
    Convos with AIs
    Imagine me always on guard
    To hide your old replies
    Reload that save
    Go through those folder piles
    Think of the memes we'll never view
    I will never host a page
    Where I don't think of Goob

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  81. Irys sang that one, and "Phantom of the Opera" as well, about a year ago! Then Gooba sang both in October, and most recently. Now Bae as well. I don't know if Mumei sang them during her recent "musicals only" karaoke cuz that was for members, and nobody reuploaded clips. But if she's into musical theater and has an emo background, seems like a natural fit!

    Hololive karaoke is the new opera. Online opera. Zoomer opera. Whatever-we're-in opera. More of an anthology performance, but that's standard for "the pops" -- playing the faves.

    Broadway has been dead for at least a decade, maybe longer. The Disney renaissance was the last organic, large-scale musical "theater" culture from the American empire (and of course those standards are all part of the Hololive karaoke scene). There were a handful of Hollywood movies that employed the musical format in the 2010s (including Hologirl karaoke favorite La La Land), but they didn't catch on like '90s Disney, or '80s Broadway / West End (let alone earlier).

    True, there's little original music for today's online virtual musical theater, but that's due to our entire culture being past its peak for creativity (crashing asabiya, or collective cohesion -- no one can cooperate at huge levels, as is required for new musicals, operas, movies, TV series, or even video games).

    So it's only natural that it takes the form of today's high opera -- which is performing classics from composers who created their works over 100 years ago, when the European empires were still at their peak, before they all collapsed during WWI.

    It's also bringing these songs to an audience that, on average, has probably never had an interest in them, or even been aware of their existence. But then they watch Gura sing "Think of Me," and think, "Man, that one really tugs at the heartstrings -- I wonder where it's from?" and watch the movie, a taped performance, or listen to the soundtrack, or somehow or other engage with it.

    And they're not a tiny niche group performing for a self-styled elite -- they're the most popular group of Vtubers out there. Which also makes them some of the most-viewed streamers of any kind, virtual-avatar-sporting or face-revealing.

    It's one of the few mainstream outlets that's bringing respectable culture to mass audiences -- last time we saw that was the Midcentury Warner Bros cartoons bringing 19th C. classical / opera music to a TV-dinner audience. Now it's bringing Broadway to the cheeto-dusted keyboard audience. xD

    Luv u gurlz 4vr...

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  82. Great insights here, grateful, thanks.

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