Open Thread

Open Thread #141

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64 thoughts on “Open Thread #141

  1. Here’s an admission of a recent “oversight” in which a well-known German TV host was used as the face for a vaxxing campaign even though he did not get injected with whatever those mRNA vaxxes are:
    https://www.welt.de/vermischtes/live230889917/Corona-live-Wirbel-um-Tweet-der-Impf-Kampagne-zu-Guenther-Jauch.html
    At the same time, “experts” can’t explain why trust in mainstream media as well as the government (not that these two aren’t one and the same) is at an all-time low.

    1. Nobody can say that those young citizens are not enterprising. While you and me may just wait for the traffic jam to resolve, young Jamal and Tyrone are putting their creative problem-solving ability to good use and quickly as well as successfully identify money-making opportunities. They also demonstrate that they are on top in the field of politics, which is evinced by the fact that they exploit a loophole, i.e. defunding the police, that was provided by the current administration. We all whine about billionaires dodging taxes by exploiting legal loopholes, so let’s show that we are better than that and cheer on those young men for finding ways to find success in the current complicated legal environment by pouncing on an opportunity when it presents itself.

      I also like that those young men are ardent supporters of the second amendment. Let me tell you something, bigots: Democracy would be a lot better off if our young men would take a leaf out of the book of those exemplars of the human species one can witness in Chicago. Can you even imagine how paradisiacal society would be if the rest of us was just half or maybe even just 1/3 as good as Jamal and Tyrone are?

    2. @Pickernanny

      You’re back! How did your stint of partially abstaining from the internet go?

    3. @Aaron

      Haha, so many good points. I laughed pretty hard at this.

      “let’s show that we are better than that and cheer on those young men for finding ways to find success in the current complicated legal environment by pouncing on an opportunity when it presents itself.”

      Speaking of which, a group of BLM ‘activists’ in Minneapolis held a city council member hostage until they signed a statement saying all unfair peaceful protesters charges be dropped:

      https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/06/aggressive-blm-activists-block-minneapolis-city-council-members-car-force-sign-statement-saying-rioters-charges-will-dropped-video/

      I wonder if this makes the signed document valid? I have to admit, these individuals are good little golem. I’d have to commend their bravery and ability to get things done if it weren’t for the fact that (((they))) permit this, and that if this were no longer feasible for (((them))) this type of nonsense could be squashed immediately. I know white supremacy is our greatest threat here in the States, however I’m not aware of any whites trying to organize in the least since they gunned down Ashli Babbit. It isn’t hard to get people back in line if you really want to, at least not in this day and age when everyone is fed, fat and entertained.

    4. In the olden day, any contractual agreement due to force or intimidation was invalid, and the perpetrator had to face severe consequences. Yet, we seem to live in a different reality now.

    5. @Sleazy’s Wife

      Well, I did cut out a lot of content I was consuming and still have. I lurked on the blog here from time to time too. I figured I would try to live a good a life and be as happy as possible and stop worrying about the decline of things. I ended up trying some new things and kept pretty physically active. As far as my garden goes, I’ve had a lot of failures but quite a few successes so far as well.

    6. @NeutralRandomThoughts

      Sure!! What do you want to know about? Just in general or something specific. I didn’t til any earth with a machine, instead I used a digging shovel to cut out patches and then a pitch fork to pry sections of sod up which I then used to make dirt mounds in an area I use for composting. In those mounds I planted seed potatoes, some of which I had made from a bag of red potatoes and others that I had bought. Potatoes have done really well (I think) judging from the amount of green vegetation that sprouted which is now dying back. This is an indication that they are almost ready to harvest, so I’ll not know until then whether I got a bunch of fresh yummy taters for a bit longer. I can post pics of some of my harvest here and there as it comes.

      I have about a dozen tomato plants, some cucumbers, a row of corn, an onion/garlic patch, some squash and some jalapeno plants that are lagging behind. I tried to do everything by seed, however I’m not having a ton of luck with herbs. It may be the poor quality top soil and compost mixture I used, I’m not sure. I might go out in a day or two and just purchase a few herb plants. I’m thinking about installing a raised bed with a hinge door using greenhouse material. This way I can start some greens toward the end of Summer and grow them well into late Fall.

    7. This sounds amazing. My grandmother grew her own potatoes, and more or less everything else as well. She even had chickens. I think my mother never bothered with potatoes because harvesting them is comparatively exhausting. In contrast, you can simply pluck tomatoes or cucumbers. Having your own garden has a lot of benefits, and I’m not only thinking of prepping for a doomsday scenario. The contrast between homegrown fruit and vegetables and what you get in stores is mind-boggling.

    8. Yes, I’m quite excited to start getting some yield finally! Having some chickens would be great, though I think it would be a zoning issue here. Looking forward to having a bit of land one day maybe. Something to strive for anyways. Maybe if BTC goes to $1 mil, haha. Ideally, I’d like to make any such purchase without having to go into (((debt))).

    1. This is most certainly completely unrelated. The key paragraph of the article is this one:

      “Pilots have an increased risk of blood clots. COVID-19 vaccine recipients have an increased risk of blood clots. Reuter’s and Fact Checkers cannot hide the fact that an increased risk on top of an increased risk is potentially a disaster, but neither has any regard for human life or the truth, as evidenced by the propaganda they’re currently creating by the minute.”

      As a reminder, 15 months ago I wrote about Covid being bullshit:
      https://www.aaronselias.com/2020/03/21/the-past-present-and-future-of-the-covid-19-psyops-operation/
      The main arguments still hold up, and my prediction about public liberties getting curtailed also came true. Now we’ll only have to see if my prediction of this being used as a prelude for war will come true as well. I no longer think so, however. Instead of a war, we got the mass vaxxing campaign, which seems to have all hallmarks of a genocide, with, based on statistical analysis, tends of thousands of people dying and more than one million suffering from severe side effects up to becoming disabled. There is no need to fight a war to reduce human population if you can brainwash them to get injected with an untested substance. (The mere idea is so ludicrous that I can’t even fathom how gullible someone must be to willingly sign up for this.)

      By the way, is it just me or have Bill Gates and his butt-boy Fauci really not gotten a lot of mainstream media news coverage recently? The elites are probably too busy searching for a suitable talking head for their “Cyber Polygon” operation, which is already in the ramp-up phase, with bogus hacker attacks.

    1. Aaron
      There is nothing wrong with hiring third-world labor, no matter if we are talking about engineers or manual work. They are clearly able to perform work at the same standard as a native:
      https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/panic-spreads-another-miami-beach-condo-deemed-unsafe
      Collapsing buildings are the first manifestation of your society falling apart, and it’s a very fitting one. Brace yourself.

      I don’t see anything in your link about them using third world labor? Did I miss something?

    2. I looked more into this. There is plenty of evidence that the construction company cut a lot of corners. Also, immigrants are heavily overrepresented in construction. Furthermore, Florida is an attractive destination for them. It does not take much to connect the dots here.

    3. You have to use angled brackets, i.e. “<" and ">“, not “[” and “]”. I just fixed it.

    1. I am not sure what you would mean by “hacking” your mRNA, but as far as I can understand it, all current covid vaccines are experimental and its long term effects uncertain.

      I had heard that they could actually screw up your immune response to covid, but did not know how much credence to lend it. Then I stumbled upon this interview by Brett Weinstein

      https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BNyAovuUxro

      I dont know much about virology or immunology, but I have some knowledge of general biology and how evolution works. The arguments this guy makes sound worryingly plausible.

    2. Herkerderker:
      Is it correct to say that every vax either works via the spike protein or hacking your mRNA?

      I believe at least the main ones do. IIRC there may be some spike proteins in the body for a few days until the body has cleared them up and developed antibodies to them. 🙂

      Yarara:
      as far as I can understand it, all current covid vaccines are experimental and its long term effects uncertain.

      Most of them are past the experimental phase. All the ones used for vaccination in the west are, at least. It’s been over a year since the first shots were given during trials, so we’ve got a pretty good knowledge of side effects in that timespan. What may happen in five years I don’t know, though.

    3. There are speculations that the Chinese vaccination is a placebo, but I am not sure how credible they are. In any case, it is not clear what the goal of those vaxxes really is. My current working hypothesis is that the goal is a mass culling of the herd via both a breakdown of your immune system and, in the case of women, infertility. Note that there is a massive push for vaxxing children, which are not at risk. I think there is a double attack on collapsing the birth rate: vaxxing fertile women (ages 2 to 40; intermediate future up to a few decades in the future), and locking down society, in addition to media fear-mongering, to make people not want to have children (present to intermediate future).

      Note that this is speculative. However, we already know that birth rates are dropping precipitously as a consequence of lockdowns. Yes, I know, this is most certainly a total coincidence that has nothing to do with Covid at all.

    4. @Yarara, I meant RNA, not mRNA. And I don’t really understand this stuff very well. But I know human cells have RNA, so the vax somehow messes with it, or so I thought.

    5. Depends on how you define experimental. I may not be using a technical definition, but until the long term effects are better known, they are still unreliable to me. There are already suggestions that, in addition to the blood clotting risks, they may mess up your natural immune response.

      Also, they dont stay in the injection site like they were apparently supposed to do, but wander around your body accumulating in several organs, most worryingly in bone marrow and ovaries.

      Long term side efects of that might be zero, but could also be a replay of the thalidomide fiasco on a massive scale. We simply dont know yet. Most peoples immune system can deal with covid perfectly fine, and with proven and safe medications like ivermectin greatly improving patient outcomes, why risk it?

      @Aaron the “depopulation plan” trope is older than both of us, I have heard it over and over again in relation to many different vaccines or other medical treatments, or even non medical events at all. It resurfaces with enough regularity that i find it hard to take it serious. Like Kissingers natsec memorandum 200, which was very real, but people read too much into it conspiracywise. He was hardly the only, or even the first one to argue that overpopulation was a problem public policy should do something about. He was also wrong, in retrospect.

      What is much more real, and much better documented, is the revolving door and lobbying of big pharma around national and international scientific bodies and government regulators.

      In public policy analysis we know this under various names, to my mind policy capture and regulatory capture describe it more accurately. The phenomenon itself is not really new, neither especially mysterious, if you know what to look for. Its more some details, like the massive scale of this one, that look unprecedented to me.

      The military-industrial complex and the national security bureaucracy offer good templates for comparison, and have been much better studied.

    6. @Yarara, thanks for the comment. I really like reading your inputs.

      On a totally unrelated note, are you still in South America? If so, can we catch up per email?

    7. @Neutral

      I am still in Argentina, yes. My usual posting email is an obvious fake, but I am signing this post with an actual email address I check. Aaron can email me yours there, or transmit it further to you, if he could be so kind?

  2. Apparently, GTA VI will be released in 2025:
    https://www.gamespot.com/articles/gta-6-will-reportedly-only-be-out-in-2025-will-include-fortnite-like-evolving-map/1100-6493368/
    Thus, you may skip getting a PS5 and just preorder a PS6. For reference, GTA V came out in 2013. GTA V Online was a big success and allegedly the main reason for the long wait for GTA VI, but this does not seem plausible to me because I do not think that Rockstar has put significant resources on GTA V:O. Also, the profitability of GTA V:O is often mentioned as a reason for GTA VI coming out so late, but does this really make sense? Maintaining an existing game takes less money and people than creating a new one. Also, why would Rockstar leave a few billions on the table, which they would arguably have made by putting out a new game sooner. I would not be surprised if there are big internal problems at the company, due to an influx of woke activists. The same happened at CDPR, and we have all seen what a mess Cyberpunk 2077 has turned into. Thus, my expectations for GTA VI are quite low. It could well turn out to be a huge disappointment.

    1. I would have to assume that almost definitely will GTA VI be disappointing in some way. Not that I care, the last one I played was III for the PS2, but I imagine it will be full of all kinds of woke bullshit even though it might poke fun at it some. Though maybe they’ll have some more ‘whitey is dumb and evil’ stuff tucked in there like when a KKK member in RDR2 sets himself ablaze accidentally trying to light a cross at a rally.

      I remember a video being pulled from youtube because a gamer uploaded a clip where he hogtied a feminist, drug her by horse and dropped her down into a cave. I don’t think the creators had that in mind initially. I also vaguely recall it coming out that many of the staff working on RDR2 were treated poorly and overworked, which led to them rebelling in little ways like programming little hidden messages for the gamer to eventually find here and there, like in a catalogue, for example. At least the company was able to deliver a massive open world game that worked on schedule. We’ll see. All we really need to predict what will happen somewhat accurately is a recent staff photo.

    2. I recall another abhorrent RDR2 video where the hogtied feminist NPC was hogtied, thrown on a horse, and dropped in a swap, serving as a snack for the local crocodile population. It was genuinely sickening. I absolutely did not laugh out loud when I watched that, both times.

    3. When was the last time you played GTA5 ? I recently played it again, now on a RTX2060 and to be honest: how should GTA VI be? You need to keep in mind, GTA3, Vice City, Liberty City Stories, San Andreas, and so on…where all Limited by hardware. GTA5 is the first game, that can be updated on hardware for performance or graphics.

      By playing GTA 5, I had two points on my mind:
      – Graphics are so well made and realistic, what else should I expect from GTA VI? Would it still be a GTA then?
      – The Story with Franklin, Michael and Trevor, the stuff that’s going on, the radio stations and advertising…GTA has always been a game, where they had some really dark humor.
      If we think about the one scene in Red dead Redemption 2 where Arthur punches a Feminist in the face and feminist all over the Media where provoked by that. Could there still be another GTA, and no one feels hurt? Not even any minorities?

    4. I played GTA on PS3 back in the day and when I recently bought a used PS3, I also got a copy of this game. I think it still looks pretty good. PC is of course a different ball park. Sure, on PC you can add a few mods to get better textures or lighting, but you won’t get better geometry of NPCs or character models. There have been significant advances in computer graphics, so GTA VI should look a lot better. Note that when GTA IV came out, people were also wondering if there will ever be an open-world game with better graphics. Similarly, when I played Red Dead Redemption, I thought that graphics won’t get much better anytime soon, but compare it to RDR II and marvel at the incredible difference in graphical fidelity!

      I think the trademark humor of GTA will have to go out of the window for GTA VI because of how oppressive mainstream culture has become. I recall a credible leaker writing that GTA VI will have a much more serious tone. It supposedly will have two characters this time, a woman who is the mastermind of everything, and a man who is a walking punchline for jokes. Let’s see if this will turn out to be true. I would not be surprised if this will indeed be the narrative angle of the game.

    5. I started playing MGR:R again. It took me a while to remember the mechanics. I assume this is in the same class of genre of Devil May Cry and God of War? I really like this one because of the high speed pacing and Raiden’s aesthetic is just badass. It makes me kind of interested in Bayonetta. Btw, this game takes place in 2020 and I’m at the point where Raiden has gone rogue and is killing cops in Colorado.

    6. I’d say MGR:R is in the same genre as Devil May Cry and the old God of War games. Sometimes it’s referred to as “character action game” but calling them “3D beat em up” would probably be more fitting. The new God of War, which is sometimes mocked as “Dad of War”, is more of the typical Sony brand of narrative-heavy single-player games. The mechanics in it are a lot simpler as the game has completely removed verticality, i.e. the character can no longer jump. Visibility is also quite poor, compared to the zoomed out view of the old GoW games.

      I don’t remember that Raiden is killing cops. There is probably a political statement here somewhere but I can’t quite put my finger on it.

      I did not like Bayonetta that much. You can get the first one for PS3 cheaply. I got it myself as part of a haul but don’t like it very much. I remember that I owned it for the Xbox 360 years ago and dropped it quickly. The sequel I played through on the Wii U. I thought it was OK but it did not leave a lasting impression on me.

    7. Ah, that’s a shame to hear about Bayonetta. It would seem Platinum Games has quite a few duds under their belt.

      “I don’t remember that Raiden is killing cops. There is probably a political statement here somewhere but I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

      Also, if you remember the prologue of the game, a group of white terrorists and their private military kidnap the prime minister of some African country and chop him in half. Their motive is as simple as they enjoy war and all these private militaries have ushered in peace and prosperity in the third world. After playing all the Metal Gear games again you pick up on all kinds of subtleties. After all, Kojima was desperate to be in the big Hollywood club, or something along those lines. I’ve heard Death Stranding is utter garbage. I think everyone was expecting a horror masterpiece and instead got a sci-fi B movie for a game.

      I really liked GoW2, I considered it to be near perfect for that style of game. I watched me ex-girlfriend play the newest one and I thought it looked good, the fight that takes place at Krato’s residence is pretty epic. I didn’t realize it was streamlined compared to the older entries. Personally, by the time I had finished GoW3 I was tired of the formula. I tried playing ascension after that and didn’t get far. I wonder if they’ll be able to keep from going woke with the newest development.

    8. I bought a used PS2 just to play GoW 2 shortly after it came out, and played GoW as well at that tome. While I thought that GoW was pretty good, GoW 2 was absolutely fantastic. I don’t think there was anything about the game I did not like. It’s a fantastic action romp from start to finish. A few weeks ago I bought the GoW Collection for PS3, wanting to see if the game holds up. I played it for maybe half an hour and realized that the magic is still there. The game still has one of the best opening sequences of the genre, and I had to force myself to put the controller down, which isn’t a feeling I get often.

    9. I just realized after reading your reply that there is the Saga collection, is that the one you’re referring to? It has the PSP entry on it as well. Also, I made and error in my other reply, it was Chains of Olympus that I had briefly played. Considering how cheap this collection is on ebay I’ll have to pick it up at some point.

    10. I came across the GoW Saga Collection when I was looking for the GoW 2 remake (EDIT: it’s probably more of a “remaster”). I would recommend that you do not buy it as it contains some of the games only as DLC and even if you got a new copy, the codes can most certainly no longer be used. The game collections I got are called “God of War Collection” and “God of War Collection II”. The former contains GoW 1 and 2, the latter the two PSP games, of which Chains of Olympus is one. I’d have to look up what the other one is called.

    11. Ah, thanks for the recommendation. Didn’t the PS3 store go down recently? I would imagine the codes not working. I had a code for MGS1 that did in fact work, but that was a few months or so before the store shutdown.

    12. I think the PS3 store got shut down, but even if not: the DLC codes in PS games are single-use only and they are time-limited. First-print bonuses are often valid only for a few months, bigger DLC sometimes just for one or two years.

    1. I can think of two plausible ones, related to the ancestral environment:

      1) Back then, most men did not procreate, only Chads did. Whenever Stone Age Chad came around, it was more beneficial for the tribe if all women were fertile at the same time. Chad could simply bang one Stacy after another, leaving them pregnant, before heading out on the next hunt.

      2) It is an evolutionary advantage for women to be cooperative (hard to imagine nowadays). In other words, a woman who was hard to deal with while PMSing may simply have been abandoned by her tribe. Yet, if all women are PMSing at the same time, the tribe would not kick out all women. Thus, synchronous ovulation is a protection mechanism.

      Needless to say, all of this is purely speculative.

    2. Robert Sapolsky has pointed out that the alignment is seemingly not random, all females in the group will synchronize to the dominant female.

      The immediate mechanism seems to be olfactory, IIRC. Makes sense, intuitively. Also, I think (logically) that birth control messes up that sync.

      Aarons first evolutionary explanation is one that I heard elsewhere, and it makes a lot of sense. Also, keep in mind synchronized copulation would later on correlate with synchronized births in a short time span, so it is concievable that this might also exert some sort of selection pressure, but it is not immediately clear or evident to me why.

      I know in many species the copulation and reproduction season/interval are timed to coincide to an optimal seasonality for raising the offspring in their first stages.

      Eg: “spring has started, you should copulate right now, so by the time your offspring is born, it will be summer and there will be plenty of ripe fruit for them to feed.” It would make zero sense to give birth to your offspring in wintertime in this case.

      Not sure how this would apply to humans, as we do not have a strongly defined reproductive season, ie we fuck around all year long.

    3. I would argue that in the ancestral environment we were much more exposed to the seasons so the same reasoning for seasonal mating would have applied. This simply became unnecessary after we figured out how to properly shelter ourselves.

  3. Aaron,
    In a previous post you stated, “there is a time when you will be too old to bang hot twenty-year old chicks…. This assumes that you are healthy and in good shape”

    Is the reason for this due to a cap on age? Do women prefer hook ups within a certain age range like men who are 5-8 years older and anything above that is a no-go-zone. Of course, escorts and sex workers are an exception.

    1. We’ve discussed this before. My personal feeling is that society places an artificial cap on the age range. In other words, 20 y/o Stacy would fuck 50 y/o Chad if society granted it.

    2. Of course money plays a factor. It makes a difference if 50 y/o Chad is rich. Yet it’s still frowned upon, just to a lesser degree considering the added variable. Nevertheless I’ve seen huge age gaps in sexual relationships with money not being a huge issue.

    3. Society (traditionally, at least) placed a cap to try to restrict the market choice of the most succesful mates, both male and female. Not by conscious design Id say, but societies that over histoy did so (heterosexual, monogamous, arranged marriages) outcompeted societies that did not.

      In your example, the primary interested party here would be less desirable women who are not as attractive or young. Coincidentally, Quillette recetly published an interesting article on this topic:

      https://quillette.com/2021/06/28/mate-selection-for-modernity/

      Not much new here for those who follow evolutionary biology and evo-psychology debates and seduction, although the projected numbers paint a bleak future for many US women.

      Incidentally, I have in recent times experienced this censure from close female acquaintances (who are closer to my age), when I told them I am now dating a girl 14 years younger than me. Previous ones were 13 and 12 years my junior . (Its not that I am choosing younger ones, its just that as I get older, my girls stay the same age. 🙂 )

    4. While there was nothing genuinely new for me in the article you linked, there are a few passages that made me chuckle, such as this one:

      Furthermore, researchers from the University of Aberdeen found that males could move themselves two points higher on a bespoke attractiveness scale by increasing their salary tenfold. For females to achieve a similar two-point effect, their salary would need to increase by 10,000 times. The socioeconomic status of a man is a major determinant of his attractiveness to a woman, but the opposite is not true.

    5. Not by conscious design Id say, but societies that over histoy did so (heterosexual, monogamous, arranged marriages) outcompeted societies that did not.

      Most developed countries today are monogamous, or at least they were before the rise of out-of-wedlock sex. There are some exceptions, most notably the Ottoman Empire which was for a certain amount of time superior to other European countries despite being polygamous society in which top men could have several wives.

      It is actually quite surprising that monogamy is advantageous to society considering that from an evolutionary point of view polygamy allows higher status men to produce more offspring relative to high status men in monogamous societies. One could say that is an eugenic advantage.

    6. It could well be that it boiled down to quantity over quality, i.e. in a polygamous society you had fewer offspring as the few Chads could not impregnate all women whereas in a monogamous society, more women were pregnant, leading to more offspring. I would have to think more about this, but this thought does not strike me as immediately implausible.

    7. TL;DR: it’s a good strategy for the chads individually, but a losing strategy for society (and the human species) at large.

      Long explanation:

      To me , the most plausible working hypothesis is that socially and/or legally enforced monogamy creates more stable societies. If a certain small % of high status males claim a disproportionate share of available females for themselves, there would be plenty of single males with little prospect to reproduce resorting to more violent mating strategies (running higher risks for the reward).

      IIRC, Martin Daly & Margo Wilson argue along these lines in at least one chapter of their classic “Homicide”. Young males in urban ghettoes with little prospects of progress and therefore of successful reproduction are driven to high risk-high reward strategies ie criminality.

      Even is this is only a minority of men, the resulting violence might be enough to wreak havoc on the stability of a society (imagine how traffic would turn to utter chaos if everyday a bare 2% of drivers decided to drive on the lanes opposite of where they are supposed to).

      This is observed in animals as well – in species where females are extremely choosy, like Orangutans, the non-alpha male must often resort to deception and rape to be able to reproduce.

      A related argument is that enforcing pair-bonding between one man and one woman makes sure that the males invest their energies in cooperative upbringing of the offspring (rather than dengerously competing with other males), as is assures them (supposedly) of their paternity. You invest more in your offspring the more certain you are that you are helping your genes to pass forward.

      In the not-so-distant past, an alpha male (chad) could theoretically impregnate a zillion women like Genghis Khan supposedly did, but since humans take so long to reach maturity, without male parental investment in their upbringing, a large majority of those offspring will never reach reproductive age.

      And as another downside for society more generally, such a mating strategy may also misallocate, degrade, or even destroy the reproductive potential of the women in the process if she suffers malnutrition, health issues or death as a consequence of trying to raise a child alone.

      Pretty much like male lions killing other males offspring when they take over a new pride, it is advantageous for the alpha male individually, in order to increase the chances of passing on his genes, but not an advantage for the females or for the species.

      You can see support for this in the fact that most supposedly polygamous societies are de facto monogamous for most people, because even if you are allowed more than one wife, you are also expected to be able to sustain them, and any children you father with them.

      I have not specifically looked up the Ottoman Empire on this specific matter, but I would be very surprised if it was any different (and given the amount of history I study related to this subject area, my guess is such an anomaly would have crossed my path by now).

    8. There was a paragraph in the article that made me roar out laughing. This was the paragraph:

      The notion that most women are callous resource extractors is inaccurate. They are not necessarily after resources, but rather the primary predictors of resource acquisition. Namely, intelligence and hard work.

      Cringe

    9. If a certain small % of high status males claim a disproportionate share of available females for themselves, there would be plenty of single males with little prospect to reproduce resorting to more violent mating strategies (running higher risks for the reward).

      Indeed. This could explain why polygamy was more adaptive in our warlike ancestral environment. Violence created by swathes of young men not getting laid could simply be exported to your neighbor via raiding and conquest. Today things are different.

      However, I was talking about bio-evolutionary point of view. If you give rich chads more mating opportunities which produce legitimate children then I would expect that such societies would over time accumulate higher percentage of physically and psychologically superior specimens. Yet it is almost as if reverse is the case.

    10. I understand why societies have these healthy norms. What I don’t get is why so many other healthy norms for longevity of a society are routinely ignored. Example: promoting female promiscuity. We live in sick times.

    11. Not just sick, but internally inconsistent and incoherent on so many levels.

    12. @ Alek, I’ve heard a hot wannabe celebebrity phrase it as that “women don’t like money, they like confidence. Confident men make money.”

      That’s some mental gymnastics right there.

  4. Hey all developers,

    I am thinking about moving from Java to Scala 3. Have any one of you used Scala and think it’s a big upgrade from Java?
    I’ve read lately a bit on reddit about Scala and there is a huge discrepancies in what devs think about it.
    I really don’t like that it allows to write object-oriented code and the learning curve is probably one of the biggest in comparison to other languages. But it’s probably the only functional language widely used at the moment that has a static typing. Also more Haskell jobs are emerging, which I would like to be my final destination and it would be certainly easier to move from Scala to Haskell than from Java to Haskell.

    1. On the other hand Java is adding more and more functional features to its language, so is the move worth it? I don’t know.

    2. In my opinion, Scala is a really crappy language. It is needlessly complicated. Actually, it’s supposedly most important feature, the combination of OOP and FP, is its biggest problem. People tend to keep writing their shitty OOP code, with a bit of FP here and there. It furthermore does not help that your average Scala developer used to be a mediocre Java developer. It’s not a proper FP language. If you want to learn Haskell, then just do so. I don’t see how exposure to horrible real-world Scala code would anybody help with Scala further down the line. It may give you some extra motivation, though, but that would be an unintended side effect, pun intended. (For the non-geeks: pure functional programming languages do not have side effect.)

    3. That comment made me curious to research functional programming (and side-effects). The description/explanation of the paradigm totally makes sense to me. Maybe I’m too new to this stuff to have a preference, but these explanations about avoiding side-effects totally “jive” with me.

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