Psychic malfeasance collects in groundwater and heads via tributaries to the main. The whole liquid psyche of the Central Valley flows into San Francisco. That's also why the Golden Gate bridge is the suicide capital of the country. New Orleans is in a much worse state, because of the massive size of the Mississippi drainage area. New Yorkers are spared, for the most part, because of the Hudson's small watershed. Corollary: This is why everyone from Colorado is so irritatingly well adjusted.
Edit: New Orleans is relatively spared because the Mississippi splits a little upstream of it. If you want to see the nexus of insanity in the US, go to Baton Rouge.
Not sure if this was tongue in cheek. It actually makes so much sense.
Especially if the malfeasance is actually chemical runoff accumulating in the water. Ive noticed a significant correlation with people who work in chemical laboratories or with pesticides, other caustic industries, and insanity.
At the meta-level, this is an example of Stage 3 conversational engagement ("Sexual and Career Aggrandiziation") that you'd find in any party of twenty- and thirty-year-olds. In Washington DC, they'd be exercising a different set of sexual and career markers (politics instead of tech business). In Texas, it would be yet another set of topics that would enhance career and sexual posturing.
Put together a party in the SF Bay Area with an older crowd (forties and fifties) and you'd be hearing Stage 4 "Status Optimization" conversations. The symbols exchanged would be more likely to involve issues of personal security (mortgages, families, divorces). The sixties and mid-seventies crowd would exhibit Stage 5 "Decline Recognition" conversations (boredom avoidance, success of your genetic successors, etc.). Then there's Stage 6 "Health and Death" conversations that you'd hear at gatherings of the over-seventy crowd. By Stage 6, everyone is exchanging the same symbol markers, and an old farts from the SF Bay Area would sound like old farts from Kansas.
;-)
Note: this is a hierarchy that a friend and I developed last night over several glasses of wine. We were commenting on how party conversations evolve as generational cohorts age. Purely bullshit. But maybe not...
I recently met a friend of a friend who was around 70, and said that his friends have a rule that at social events they are allowed 5 minutes for everyone to speak about politics, and 5 minutes for everyone to speak about what's going wrong with everyone's body, but once those 10 minutes are done, everyone has to talk about other things. Seems like a good rule.
On "Condemnr": this is why you just take a side. It's literally impossible to pander to all these divergent moralities, but in a group with a moral consensus, it's extremely easy to figure out what you're supposed to say.
I propose instead not having to say something about every terrible thing that happens (except if you have something novel to say, or if you wish to share your emotions, or if you have a friend who is touched by the disaster, and whom you wish to support, etc.), and not being friends with people who would think you're an asshole for not going through the motions of commenting on everything.
In fact, I would say that one of the points of silence is giving yourself time to think it through and deliberately discarding the social pressure to have an opinion right away. The latter only harms your world-modeling. With social silence, you're allowing yourself to say to yourself, for example (well, in my case) "hell if I understand this-and-this conflict; I understand that people are suffering and dying and that I'm scared for everyone and I wish they were OK; and there's some complicated politics behind this and media is dragging me toward a certain conclusion, but I'm not sure if it's correct or not, I need more time to think it through". And then you give yourself time.
But you don't have to believe something to say it. I know I probably shouldn't bring this up here, but the Kirk incident is a great example of what I'm talking about. You don't lose anything by mourning Kirk's death and condemning the murder, but you do have a lot to lose by not doing that. At that point, it doesn't really matter what you believe, there's only one viable course of action.
I observe that we two live in very different worlds, and I unconfidently guess that living in a world that expects you to express certain beliefs without entanglement to what you actually believe must be damaging to your epistemology and your soul. I’ve been just fine not writing out boring takes on the last hundred issues du jour when I don’t have something new to add, and I’m truly sorry if you don’t feel the same.
(UPD: different worlds in the sense of possibly different circumstances, not necessarily just different world models; I unconfidently expect it’s not just the latter)
Yes, uh... I think this is that thing liberals call "privilege". I have a feeling things are going to be very difficult for you with the coming political shifts.
Because you assume I’m in the US, have leftist politics, have not thought anything controversial, been mostly under the impression that things are fine, and now I am observing the conservative vibe shift with surprised pikachu face?
Political shifts in my country mean I can’t go back there even if my elderly parents go need help, if one of them gets dementia, or dies and I want to attend their funeral, because if I do, it’s quite likely I’d be arrested and spend a very long time in prison over certain disagreements with the government’s politics. It’s not exactly a theoretical concern, there have been people in my exact situation who did the stupid thing and won the stupid prize. I’ve been going to protests for a very long time. I’ve seen people arrested face in the snow. My friends were arrested. Somehow I never was. No one among my friends got a long jail time, or was tortured. When you hear about a gal from the opposition killing herself, it would be a friend of a friend.
I wasn’t brave. I wasn’t proactive. I just went to protests and tried to slow down the backslide a little and then went away. I don’t know if I can claim that “things” have ever been “difficult” for me, as you kindly put it. I’m not in Ukraine, I’m not shelled.
But even you talk about not being able to not say the popular thing…
Wow, that is... very lucky. I actually didn't assume you were a leftist or in the US, seeing as the fallout from this probably isn't going to be contained here anyways. Well, let's hope that luck keeps holding up.
Seconding the claim that you live in an unhealthy social bubble. Unless you're a politician, you shouldn't be expected to give daily statements on whatever horrible thing is currently viral. It is possible and desirable to find better associates.
That's nice for some people, but in many highly social professions, it's absolutely *crucial* to be publicly seen on the right side of any given conflict, nowhere moreso than the entertainment industry.
Here are two short documentaries about the pressure an actor faced trying to publicly respond to major news events:
Oh, sure, Disney only demands control of iconic, highly experienced, beloved A-list celebrities Twitter accounts, but completely trusts much younger, inexperienced celebrities headlining their tent pole live-action features to manage their own social media. Makes perfect sense.
And you're also aware that Mark Hamil very publicly criticized Rian Johnson's take on Luke Skywalker in Disney's Star Wars The Last Jedi in multiple on-camera interviews during promotional press events, right?
Serious, just go ahead and concede here. You are factually incorrect.
That makes sense and I was taking my privilege of not being public for granted, but I guess we can try to extend the norm of not expecting anyone to comment on everything toward, like, our friends and colleagues, or at least ourselves if we're not highly social. To avoid "falling before we're shot", as someone said.
Both videos are satire comedy pieces about a narcissist actor worrying far more about what people will think about his tweets about tragedies than the victims of those tragedies.
They are very, very funny, and my calling them "documentaries" was intended to convey that I in fact very much agree with your position.
This has become much more of a problem since big money has been threatened with political pressure to toe the party line or something unfortunate may happen to their mergers.
If you place literally all value on saying whatever the hell you want regardless of circumstance, yeah, I guess it would be "everything". Some of us have other things we care about. Family, friends, careers, hobbies, and, you know, being alive. Being alive is pretty nice.
It's also possible to profit from being perceived as authentic and unafraid. The best way to be convincing at that... is to be genuinely authentic and unafraid.
Why does everyone assume this is about friends? Do you all not interact with people who aren't your friends on a daily basis? Is your boss your friend? Your government?
I suspect Lewis's character was named, more specifically, after the herb's appearance in the book of Revelation. But yes, I admit that it is in principle possible that Wormwood here isn't named after the junior devil.
I think that, like anything else, it's worth considering the costs and benefits. Most people are too quick to just do it, but a large minority are too quick to just say you should never do it. Some amount of insincerity around maintaining social connections is a core feature of humanity, and the optimal amount to do is neither all of it nor none of it.
I think this is an area where Scott has an EA-related blind spot. Normies are more concerned for some people than other people and there are expectations around this concern. Demands that people violate these expectations (such as condemning food insecurity in the US without condemning it in Gaza, or that they condemn a white on black murder *in another city* along with a black on white murder *in your own city*) are partisans demanding bias. Demands that people follow those expectations (such that they treat hunger in Gaza and Ethiopia equally) are demands to confront your own bias. Since Scott sees all people as equally worthy of concern, he can't understand the dynamic.
I love the idea of condemnr because what the social pressure for equal attention occludes is that for some of these issues there are tangible things you can do if you actually support the cause, that might require you to invest and change your life somewhat or maybe fundamentally. For example, Ismatu Gwendolyn uses the social media attn economy to direct funds to rice farms run by female Ebola survivors in Sierra Leone, where she is from.
That is a form of community organizing.
Sure, she also talks about the genocide in Gaza or the RSF in Sudan but her main focus is material change.
People who have not made similar commitments find themselves in the vortex of Online Ego Checking Compliance and virtue signalling. Trying to be perceived as Morally Correct when the moral fiber of the social fabric has almost completely disintegrated into a Dadaist lampoon of a collapsing imperial society, will lead you nowhere but into a fishing net of competing moral 'identities' as you point out.
It caught me good for awhile and almost broke my brain because I am too autistic for social media and thought everyone wanted to actually do something, and it was somehow my job to connect all the virtue signallers to material involvement in the various relief funds and community organizing that is the actual sane response to extreme crisis.
TLDR clarity come from deciding What You Want to Do about something, not having some perfect set of ideals.
Was the 'laundering murder via witchcraft' scheme inspired by Agatha Christie's Gurcnyrubefr (rot13), or was that convergent evolution of elaborate criminal schemes?
Jezebel posted an article on September 8, "We paid Some Etsy Witches to Curse Charlie Kirk." I'm pretty sure that's the "really high-profile case involving a widely-read online magazine" referred to.
They issued an apology and yanked the article pretty darn quick after the assassination. Just really unfortunate timing. I can't feel *too* sorry for them, it is Jezebel after all, but talk about unintended consequences! You set out to write a stupid, IQ-lowering, but hopefully fun article about bashing one of the outgroup, and then oh crap look what just happened.
Particularly as one line in the article was along the lines of "the witch said the curse worked and I'd see results within one to two weeks" and then.... article published on 8th September, man is killed on 10th September.
I assumed it was a reference to Bill Fitzhugh‘s novel Pest Control, in which a mafia hitman whose hiring contacts had been disguised as an actual pest-control service was inundated with unwitting customers who didn’t know it was a front and vice versa.
Why? I read this, I chuckled, I thought it conveyed at least a semblance of useful information (the culture of the Bay Area is alienating and off-putting for those who live in smaller towns)
No, you still can't, so I might have overstated things with "usable", there are still a bunch of very annoying issues with it (even apart from the one you mentioned). On desktop my whole window freezes occasionally for at least three full seconds, as that is enough for me to get into a rage, it makes productive commenting impossible.
I'd say parks and paid venues are the main alternatives, yeah. Restaurants are a notable subset of paid venues. Also worth noting that if the house is an apartment, then instead of taking place in the apartment, it might take place in one of the building's common areas, which might include parts of the roof (or secondary roofs lower than the main roof). Is that still a "house party"? I dunno.
a) a 'party' in a park is called a 'picnic' or a 'barbecue' instead, unless it is a drinking bout of questionable legality by young, unemployed people (in which case there may also be a specialized word for it, depending on the area; there is one in Spain, for instance);
b) a 'party' in a restaurant is not called a party, unless it is some sort of expensive life-cycle event for which the entire restaurant is booked, in which case, again the word 'party' may be deprecated in favor of 'reception' (when is "party" still used? Retirement, Sweet Sixteen, quinceañera, ba(r/t)-mitzvah?);
c) I take a party in a dorm's common areas is not a house party, whereas a party in a non-frat college party house would be a party. Would a frat house/eating-club party still be a house party? Don't know. Gray area. I'd say a party in someone's living quarters in a dorm is a house party, at least if said quarters comprise at least two distinct rooms. Discuss.
c') It's a recent development that young professionals in NYC pay top dollar to live in places that feel like really nifty dorms, with common areas, small libraries and so forth. Would a party there not be a house party? A friend took me to one - it was still a house party, I'd say, just one without a house. Of course people in SF who hold very similar parties in communal living arrangements may feel differently about the issue.
Oh, right, there are office parties, and academic common-room parties, which are a subset thereof. Still, people would call them "office party" (at least when non-academic), specifically; a house party would still be the default.
Oh, I see now. The modifier becomes confusing because of the opposition between "house party" and "dinner party". I was in a cooking cooperative in grad school, so there was no clear distinction between the two. I take the two have to bleed into each other anyhow if you know how to cook, or can get good börek/empanadas/whatever.
What is the difference between a house party with good food and an informal dinner party with wine and access to a liquor cabinet? And what if there are board games (or tabletop gaming for the more nerdile, or a mini-LARP for the drama set)? The mind boggles.
Right, but what if your finger food is sufficiently developed and/or your dinner parties are self-service? Hence the comment about börek and empanadas.
Wow, this Bay Area House Party was *particularly* spicy! It's always fun to see Scott's mean streak peek through the usual mild-mannered book reviews and philosophical essays.
I still enjoy this series, but this particular installment hit a bit too close to home + only has one lonely link to An Obscure Nerdy Thing to learn The Truth Behind The Story. So it's either inside-baseball, in an unfortunately partisan way, or the inspirations can't/won't be explained because #condemnr. Hits different when it's political commentary with a thin veneer of absurdist humour, versus absurdist humour with a thin veneer of political commentary. To be more specific, I feel like this is a mostly-replacement-level square post pushed through the BAHP round format...a Christmas Special episode, if you will.
I dunno, I thought this bit was excellent social commentary:
"People like to imagine they become some sort of dangerous motorcycle gangster when they say ‘fuck’. But the least cool person you know says ‘fuck’ all the time. They have a Twitter account that consists entirely of statements like ‘The orange fuckface is up to his usual fuckcrustable chumpfuckery’. The sort of people who the thinkpiece writers imagine using ‘heckin’ actually have a brand of mustard in their fridge called something like ‘Dan’s Fucking Awesome Spicy Mustard’ and never miss an opportunity to point it out to visitors."
Everybody is swearing nowadays. Heck, I'm swearing freely in real life and online myself, and I definitely was not reared to do that! If you break all or most of the taboos, you end up with the acts of rebellion to shock the squares being the new conventionality and even the squares are in on the act. So then you have to push for even more outrageous things in order to keep the cool rebel quotient going, and that's how we end up with [insert your own favourite example of 'what fresh hell is this?'].
Personally, my mother wouldn't want me to swear, so I only swear when I'm very angry. For example, while walking the dog tonight, I walked in the dark into a low-hanging tree branch that knocked me to the ground. I swore.
But posting online, I can only recall using very bad language twice over the last three decades. I like to think my mom would appreciate that effort.
There has been research showing that swearing has an analgesic effect, with the more severe swear relieving more pain when you hit your thumb with a hammer. I suspect that, as with many drugs, you develop a tolerance if you use it too much.
Come to the Midwest, where people still don't swear in polite company. And by "Midwest", I mean the entire country between the California coast and New York City. You know, flyover country.
Used to think I wasn't The Sort Of Person who swears that much (and I'm still pretty prudish about it in e.g. musical taste...there better be a <s>damn</s> euphemism good reason, artistically)...then a couple months ago, I was out playing card games with my mates in public. Typical setup when you've got a bunch of competitive nerds together in a small space, lots of frustrated exclamations. But unbeknownst to me, apparently the establishment we were in is rather old-fashioned by SF standards, so they actually have a hard No Swearing Rule? "Because kids come to shop and play here too," I was told. And it was actually hard to keep biting my tongue! I found it enlightening, since it showed that a) a good deal of the blue-collar-workplace ethos actually has rubbed off on me, and b) my estimations for personal swearingness were miscalibrated bigly.
Genuinely not sure whether my parents would disapprove or not. My brother and I were raised to regard profanity as...outre, beneath us, low class. But on the other hand, Mother mostly did work with working class unions, and boy do they not respect anyone who's a scoldy priss. So it's not like I wasn't exposed or anything. Downward mobility is a weird clash of cultural norms like that...it feels silly to cling to elitist Ivy-esque norms when I'm far away from the academic/deskjob life now. They still seem like a good aspirational target though? First you start off saying "fuck", and before you know it, you're drinking on the regular and not reflexively avoiding gambling because it's negative EV...everything is correlated.
"“I’m working on a three-sided marketplace connecting hitmen, consumers, and witches.”
I saw what you did there 😁
Thanks Scott, I have an annoying upper respiratory infection and I had to hang around waiting this morning for the workplace to be unlocked, so reading this made me laugh and put me into a good mood for the morning slog
I recently made a post about Yarvin without much substance that did decently well. The chief editor of a decently large magazine then subscribed to me.
Even the n-word is losing its power. Latinos use it with other latinos at my retail job and the black guys don't say anything. Soon it'll be everybody. Then it'll become a word of allyship or something like that
>“Now sure,” he says, “the libs will insist that when the administration banned doctors from washing their hands, that was ‘unscientific’ and ‘an abuse of power’. And do I necessarily approve of every single thing RFK does? I do not! But you have to consider this in the context of the Covington Catholic scandal. When your so-called ‘experts’ lied about a schoolboy apparently confronting a Native American activist, that simply forced our hands, so to speak. You can’t just publish a misleading video clip about a 2019 protest and expect it to have zero consequences for infection control protocols down the line. Sorry for killing your precious hostage puppy.”
"TECHBROS could be here" she thought, "I've never been in this office before. There could be TECHBROS anywhere." The stale air felt good against her bare legs. "I HATE TECHBROS" she thought. The latest Buzzfeed podcast reverberated through her Apple Airpods, making them pulsate even as the $9 extra-caffeine latte circulated through her thick veins and washed away her (merited) fear of sexual harassment in the workplace. "Trump is in the Epstein files," she said to herself, out loud.
But how can you realistically connect the witches with the hitmen? Every hitman on the platform would still have to assume that the witch contacting him is a fed.
Do some of the hitmen pretend to be witches, and other witches pretending to believe them, can legally subcontract to them? I think the platform itself can only take a cut from the first client-witch transaction and would need to run an anonymous totally-all-of-us-are-witches social network.
All you need is some witches who have existing connections to hitmen. Most witches obviously don't know any hitmen, but given a large enough Wiccan population, a few of them will, and those few will hire hitmen if they know there's a market for it. This will show up in the market as "witches with very effective curses."
So the app's value is in identifying the witches who have connections to hitmen and providing them with demand for a hit.
I've always seen "heckin'" as being part of pet-owner subculture (possibly specifically dog-owner). Like people who call their chubby dog a "heckin' chonk".
I remember seeing a picture of a dog at a BLM protest with a sign that said "Heck Tha Police".
middle aged nerd and long term SSC reader from Europe here - I did understand not much - till I asked ChatGPT to comment each "comical/ironical/nerdical unit" (a paragraph, a sentence, a name) with a decryption. Now its really funny and I learned something.
It reminds me of the edition of Shakespeare I read in high school, where the text was on the left page, and the right page had commentary explaining all the contemporary references.
"Giving Middle-Aged Women Who Have Ruined Their Lives With Terrible Relationship Decisions A Platform To Recommend Those Decisions To Others, And People Obviously Notice The Contradiction And Post About It To Dunk On Us, But Actually They're Only Taking Us Viral And In Fact That Was Our Strategy All Along, Ha Ha! Magazine"
This fucking sent me.
That's all I have to add to the conversation, this was a hilarious and gave me a legitimate laugh. It's good to spread joy in the world.
As a criminal attorney I'm not entirely sure that hiring a witch to curse someone isn't attempted assault. Attempt is just 1) specific intent for the crime to occur + 2) take a substantial step towards the crime that exceeds mere planning. Factual impossibility isn't a defense to criminal attempt (grabbed a gun off nightstand to shoot spouse but it was unloaded, attempted to poach a deer out of season but it turned out to be a dummy-deer, etc.) so it doesn't really matter whether the witch is magic. Some may doubt whether going to the witch constituted a "substantial step", but that is not a purely objective standard, you don't determine what's a substantial step by calculating whether the likelihood of success is measurably improved conditional on Step B occurring. Substantial step is defined as "conduct which is strongly corroborative of the firmness of the actor's purpose". Going to the witch and paying her to curse somebody isn't likely to cause injury to the target any more than going to the scam artist posing as a hitman would be, but it may very well be strongly corroborative of your purpose.
If you genuinely believe in witchcraft, have left evidence all over your Instagram feed that you believe in it, and a jury of 12 people agrees that you believed witchcraft could fatally curse people when you went to meet the witch and ask her to fatally curse somebody, I think you're guilty of attempted murder.
Personally I don't see how would witches know they're hiring actual hitmen rather than feds. But to your objection: does the customer need to believe the curse would be lethal? They're paying for the curse, not for the death. Maybe they'll find it acceptable if the target is ruined financially by bad luck or sudden gambling addiction, falls in love with someone who would destroy them, or just gets a permanent erectile dysfunction.
My understanding is that the line between factual impossibility (which is no defense) and legal impossibility (which is a defense) is very fine and very fuzzy in places.
Says Wikipedia:
"However, it is not always easy to identify whether an actor made a legal [or] factual mistake. In State v. Guffey (1953), the defendant shot a stuffed deer, thinking it was alive, and was convicted for attempt to kill a protected animal out of season. In a highly debated reversal, an appellate judge threw out the conviction on the basis of legal impossibility, concluding that it is not a crime to shoot a stuffed deer out of season."
I don't think "attempted assault" is a crime. Misdemeanor assault only requires you to put the victim in fear of immanent violence, but there's a real question about whether curses apply to that. If you don't tell them about the curse, they won't be in fear of it. And if you do tell them about it, a curse isn't "immanent", it's a vague threat of future harm.
It would depend on the state statutes in question. For example in my state, attempt chargeable as an inchoate offense exists for every crime, with the general principles of attempt applying IF the specific statute does not also provide for punishing an attempt. When the particular statute does do so, it may be very generic (the drug laws often just say something like "transfers or attempts to transfer more than 50g of a mixture or substance containing....") or it may write the attempt as effectively a specific intent crime. When charged as the inchoate offense (attempt or conspiracy) my state has you go down one classification level. California instead makes it the same level but half the authorized penalty under Penal Code 664.
The example you are citing is that many misdemeanor assault laws contain multiple subsections, one of which generally is a "places victim in apprehension of immediate physical injury" type of assault. It's certainly possible that this might pre-empt charging an inchoate assault under general attempt principles as applied to that statute. But higher level assault statutes will have extra elements such as "serious physical injury" or methods or weapons or age of victim etc etc. Let's say our state has a crime called "aggravated assault" which is defined as knowingly causing serious physical injury to another person (knowingly includes *either* purposely or acting with substantial certainty.) If you had a Caribbean witch make a voodoo doll and then lop off the legs with the specific intention to curse the victim with a permanent disability, an injury that would satisfy this statute, that still appears to meet all the elements of attempted aggravated assault.
"Normiecons: you have nothing. You are nothing. You have no reason for hope."
"This is not your country. It never was. They let you live here while you grew their food and made their widgets. Now widgets are from China and machines tend the crops. You rot on fent and DraftKings"
"And all real power remains in the hands of hereditary communist aristocrats like Yglesias, who openly boast about lying and do a little jig when it works."
Back in reality, the unemployment rate is close to zero, American conservatives, while lower-income on average than liberals, are still richer than the vast majority of the planet*. And they control the Presidency, House, Senate, and Supreme Court. Matt Yglesias's influence over the Biden White House, if it ever existed in the first place, is gone and dead.
Now, over the long term, I do think the Left will win, as the Right is putting all its effort into appealing to rural, low-income, religious, and conspiracy-brained people, neglecting the elite. But you won't hear that from Yarvin, who pessimism disguises what is ultimately just soothing happy-talk. For if all you have is the illusion of power, you don't have take any responsibility when you fail. The medieval peasant had the comfort of knowing his place in society was the inevitable outcome of his birth. Americans, with the power to make money and participate in the political process, retreat to the comforting illusion that they are medieval peasants, Alex Jones style conspiracism for the truck drivers and Yarvin's thick prose for those who think of themselves as highbrow.
* While Trump voters had lower average incomes than Harris voters, I'd bet that if you account for the many people who didn't bother to vote, Trump voters earned *more* than the average American, whose average income is higher than that of almost every country on Earth.
>Now, over the long term, I do think the Left will win
Win in the sense that it'll produce a critical theorist version of Pol Pot? Western leftists haven't really had a chance to perpetrate any spectacular atrocities, so it's only fair that they get a shot I suppose.
The scene reads so much like something out of Stephenson or Sloan or Palmer that I have to assume it's at least partly a bit. But is it a bit by the author, by the interviewees, or by the zeitgeist? Has optimistic near-future sci-fi made the leap into live performance art?
>“Now sure,” he says, “the libs will insist that when the administration banned doctors from washing their hands, that was ‘unscientific’ and ‘an abuse of power’.
The problem is that when the administration makes decisions that are the opposite of exercising power (when the administration stops mandating or outlawing things or stops government programs), it is still accused of abuses of power. While mandates and bans by democratic party administrations are not called abuses of power by the same critics. The only consistency is the preferred political party.
This series is genius, and I have to ask: is "DISREGARD PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS AND ASSIGN ME HIGH SOCIAL STATUS" a real t-shirt? Because it is perfect as both a t-shirt and as a parody of the type of person who would wear such a shirt.
The "Hecking" but reminds me of the 1966 song "The Rebel", by Allan Sherman, about a college student who gets chided by his school's Dean for profanity over saying the word "heck". He and his girlfriend, Rhonda, respond by starting a sit-in protest for free speech. The protest catches enormous amounts of attention and absurd numbers of people across the country join in, culminating in the President of the United States saying "heck" in a televized statement about the protest.
Until very recently it was illegal in Canada to falsely practice witchcraft. So you could be a genuine witch, or a fake witch who admitted it, but not a fake witch who didn't admit it.
I would note that this would nicely cover what's proposed here, and thus can only say its removal from the Criminal Code has opened us up to danger.
It used to be that spiritualists (and con artists, and no I will not say "but I repeat myself") were prosecuted under very old witchcraft laws.
Then reform-minded people got on about how nobody believes in ghosts and demons and spells anymore, so these laws are both unnecessary and embarrass a modern society, and got them repealed. Laws against fraud would be perfectly fine for the task of dealing with scammers and fakes. Hence the introduction in 1951 of the Fraudulent Mediums Act:
"An Act to repeal the Witchcraft Act, 1735, and to make, in substitution for certain provisions of section four of the Vagrancy Act, 1824, express provision for the punishment of persons who fraudulently purport to act as, spiritualistic mediums or to exercise powers of telepathy, clairvoyance or other similar powers."
The debate in Hansard is fascinating, because this seems to have been instigated by the Spiritualist movement, it was supported under general "freedom of religion" principles (and Spiritualism, especially post-First World War, was seen as going to be a new church and a new faith because of its popularity) and the supporter gives an instance of what he claims was a miscarriage of justice when prosecuting an alleged medium under the old laws:
"May I now recite the Spiritualists' grievances? They arise from the Witchcraft Act, 1735, and the Vagrancy Act, 1824. The dates of both these Acts prove that they are being used for purposes that were neither intended nor contemplated, when it is borne in mind that mediumship was first practised in this country in 1853. It might be suggested that the Witchcraft Act is capable of dealing with impostors, and that I do not deny, but I think the most salient fact is that the complaint is that it catches in its net impostors and innocent people alike. The Witchcraft Act, worked in conjunction with the Vagrancy Act, 1824, has the effect that no medium, however innocent, has a reasonable chance of escaping conviction, not under the law, but on account of the present court procedure. I think the classic case, which I do not propose to recite, is that of Hill v. Duncan, in which the accused was not allowed to demonstrate even before a jury."
What is Hill v. Duncan, you ask? It would seem to involve Helen Duncan, a Scottish medium, who faked ectoplasm and other phenomena (pretty crudely by our standards of today, look at the photos in the Wikipedia article on her):
The trial was about this, a séance she held in 1941 where the spirit of a drowned sailor from a sunken battleship appeared. Except nobody was supposed to know the ship had been torpedoed, so the Navy for one were very interested in how she was getting this information (and they didn't think it was from ghosts):
"Duncan was barred by the judge from demonstrating her alleged powers as part of her defence against being fraudulent."
Some people felt this was an embarrassing case, because trials for witchcraft? in the 20th century? Hence the broad support (even amongst those who didn't believe in Spiritualism) for reforms such as the 1951 Act:
"After the verdict, Winston Churchill wrote a memo to Home Secretary Herbert Morrison, complaining about the misuse of court resources on the "obsolete tomfoolery" of the charge."
So then you couldn't prosecute "this fake medium conned my widowed client out of her life savings" because the defence was "no, I really do possess spiritual powers and you are trying to prosecute me for witchcraft, which is no longer a crime, and trying to force me, a genuine Spiritualist, to deny my beliefs". What, you say I'm a fake and there are no such things as ghosts? Can you prove that? Trying to prove "intent to defraud" was difficult in this way, and so the Act was eventually repealed and now prosecutions are brought, if they are brought, under general anti-fraud and consumer protection legislation.
So if you're doing things like psychic phone lines or online Tarot readings or Etsy spellcasting, this doesn't count as it's considered to be 'for entertainment purposes' and that, I would imagine, would be the defence for any witch and hitman enterprise, should a case go to court: no, this is just entertainment, we're playing a part, just like a movie!
Paul Krugman recently wrote an article about the increasing number of working age men who aren’t employed. Key points: 1) It’s a serious problem because men’s sense of dignity and self worth is tied to employment, 2) It mostly involves men with limited formal education, and 3) the jobs that are available to people with limited formal education are increasingly in fields which are female-coded rather than male-coded. This wouldn’t be relevant here except that I googled “hitman near me”--OK, not literally googled; I used DuckDuckGo because I don’t want to be permanently listed on Google’s list of people who want to hire hitmen--and it appears that the job is both male-coded and open to people with limited formal education. (I did find a job application form that asked about education, but made it clear that they would give credit nontraditional educational forums such as “the school of hard knocks” or even “Trump University.”)
So Bob (and presumably Scott, though this is fiction and we can’t be sure he agrees with everything his characters say) is right to think we need more hitman jobs. I think his approach is wrong, though. If we really want to attract more men into the profession, we need organizations where men have a chance to rise to the top, not one in which it is the norm for men to answer to a female boss.
Equally serious, though less obvious, is that Bob hasn’t adequately considered the needs of the clients, particularly in the corporate arena. One of the online reviews I found was written by a small business owner who had a problem with on of his employees, but his business was too small to have an HR department to jump through all the hoops required to fire an employee without facing a wrongful termination lawsuit, and he didn’t have time to do it himself because he had a business trip scheduled. So he hired a dispute resolution firm, and when he returned from his trip, the employee had been terminated. The reviewer gave a five star rating, noting that the employee had not sued, had not written a negative yelp review about the business, and that the dispute resolution firm had arranged for the employee’s departure to be classified as a voluntary departure rather than a firing, meaning that the employer’s contributions to the unemployment fund would not increase.
You may think that a witch could provide the same services. But suppose the business owner decides to sell his business a year later, and the prospective buyer goes over his financial records with a fine tooth comb. If the buyer asks why you hired a “dispute resolution service,” you can say, “Oh, we had a dispute with one of our employees who is no longer with us,” and that may be the end of the matter. But if your financial records say that you paid money to a witch, your potential investor is likely to freak, and won’t be reassured when you say, “I hired her to place a curse on one of my employees.”
The corporate market it too big to ignore. Nearly half of bulk purchases are made by real estate companies that own rent controlled buildings; almost none are made by individuals. But I don’t think Bob’s approach is right even for the individual market. A meeting with a good hitman is like meeting a therapist for the first time. Both will listen with empathy as you describe your problem. Both will reassure you that they can help you with your problem, without saying how. The different is that the therapist will want you to spend $50,000 over the next several years to work on your problem, whereas the hitman will want the $50,000 up front and will tell you that additional meetings are unnecessary. It is unprofessional for a hitman to indicate that he will harm anyone, even if the harm is something as vague as a curse. This is particularly true in marital conflicts, where the client may need to play the role of the grieving spouse and will benefit from being able to say truthfully that they never asked anyone to harm the deceased.
One thing that struck me reading about the profession is how universally positive the reviews are. People in unhappy marriages who hire a divorce lawyer frequently describe the process of dissolving their marriage as slow, stressful, and emotionally draining. Those who hire a conflict resolution specialist almost universally describe the experience as quick and painless. It will come as no surprise that hitmen are rated more effective than psychotherapists. I discussed the five star review from the business owner above; a really good HR specialist might be able to achieve an equally good result much of the time, but hitmen seem to hit the bullseye almost every time. I started this comment proposing that we need to increase the number of hitmen to provide employment to men who are being failed by the current economic system, but even beyond that, we need more hitmen because of the tremendous value they contribute to society.
I have a friend here in New York, who has been in the restaurant business his entire life. He grew up in Bay Ridge and his father had a pizzeria.
He was telling me once that he had a dispute with a lawyer and the lawyer refused to give him a lot of papers that he needed. After pleading with the lawyer for a long time, he made a call to some of his old “neighborhood buddies“ if you know what I mean.
About a week later, he was working in his own restaurant/pizzeria and this very fat man lumbered into the place, sat down in a chair And plopped a briefcase on the table.
“ there’s your papers.”
My friend was amazed and pleased, and asked him how he’d done it.
The big guy put up his hands and said, “It wasn’t hard. I told him that he did not have to give me the papers… as long as he knew how to fly. “
Head scratcher. Is there actually a "psychology professor widely admired as one of the leading proponents of self-cultivation, the Western canon, and Biblical wisdom" that fell down the Twitter rabbit hole?
"my new partner might realize I’m not really a right-wing baddie with access to dangerous techno-fascist parties, and I’m afraid she’ll leave me and I’ll lose the wedding venue deposit.”
This makes me laugh way more than it should do. But is he really sure his fiancée is a journalist? Maybe she's only pretending to be one so she can snag a right-wing bad boy of her own! 😁
I’d have expected a better CY from Ramchandra. Where is the staccato um um um when the brain needs to catch up to the tongue and someone threatens to get a word in edgewise?
"My day job is at Giving Middle-Aged Women Who Have Ruined Their Lives With Terrible Relationship Decisions A Platform To Recommend Those Decisions To Others, And People Obviously Notice The Contradiction And Post About It To Dunk On Us, But Actually They're Only Taking Us Viral And In Fact That Was Our Strategy All Along, Ha Ha! Magazine. You probably haven’t heard of us by name, but we syndicate to all the big outlets. WaPo, NYT, the Atlantic. Usually we’re based in NYC"
You went too far, Scott! Now they'll dox you again!
I haven't read much of Curtis Yarvin, but the imitation Curtis Yarvin here reminds me of Michael Vassar. Do people familiar with both of them agree that they have similar styles?
This Bay Area House Party series deserves to be made into a Netflix series. I love the loopy startup ideas and the Chad Redstate aka Xiaochang and the fake Yarvin and his absurd tirades - well except for the last one about Covington Catholic kid which was earnest and "just stupid and boring and stupid and lame" as Giblets would say.
None of the 200+ commenters on Scott's story seem to have picked up on the subtlest and harshest dig at Curtis Yarvin in the entire piece, which is that the Yarvin impersonators are both Indian and no one can even tell the difference.
yo that's racist
So is assuming a Japanese person is into Isekai. Absolutely insulting.
What? Lmao
Banned for this comment.
Yes. I'm glad that people put in effort to make funny things. They amuse me.
The BA, and SF specifically, is like no other place on the planet. For better AND worse....
The BA is the NOLA of the Pacific.
There's just something about bays and bayous. Someone should devise a theorem about it.
Psychic malfeasance collects in groundwater and heads via tributaries to the main. The whole liquid psyche of the Central Valley flows into San Francisco. That's also why the Golden Gate bridge is the suicide capital of the country. New Orleans is in a much worse state, because of the massive size of the Mississippi drainage area. New Yorkers are spared, for the most part, because of the Hudson's small watershed. Corollary: This is why everyone from Colorado is so irritatingly well adjusted.
Edit: New Orleans is relatively spared because the Mississippi splits a little upstream of it. If you want to see the nexus of insanity in the US, go to Baton Rouge.
Not sure if this was tongue in cheek. It actually makes so much sense.
Especially if the malfeasance is actually chemical runoff accumulating in the water. Ive noticed a significant correlation with people who work in chemical laboratories or with pesticides, other caustic industries, and insanity.
I moved from the Bay Area to Colorado and I've noticed exactly that!
Or maybe it's just because you all know you're drinking our poo water.
At the meta-level, this is an example of Stage 3 conversational engagement ("Sexual and Career Aggrandiziation") that you'd find in any party of twenty- and thirty-year-olds. In Washington DC, they'd be exercising a different set of sexual and career markers (politics instead of tech business). In Texas, it would be yet another set of topics that would enhance career and sexual posturing.
Put together a party in the SF Bay Area with an older crowd (forties and fifties) and you'd be hearing Stage 4 "Status Optimization" conversations. The symbols exchanged would be more likely to involve issues of personal security (mortgages, families, divorces). The sixties and mid-seventies crowd would exhibit Stage 5 "Decline Recognition" conversations (boredom avoidance, success of your genetic successors, etc.). Then there's Stage 6 "Health and Death" conversations that you'd hear at gatherings of the over-seventy crowd. By Stage 6, everyone is exchanging the same symbol markers, and an old farts from the SF Bay Area would sound like old farts from Kansas.
;-)
Note: this is a hierarchy that a friend and I developed last night over several glasses of wine. We were commenting on how party conversations evolve as generational cohorts age. Purely bullshit. But maybe not...
well you had me fooled
I recently met a friend of a friend who was around 70, and said that his friends have a rule that at social events they are allowed 5 minutes for everyone to speak about politics, and 5 minutes for everyone to speak about what's going wrong with everyone's body, but once those 10 minutes are done, everyone has to talk about other things. Seems like a good rule.
That's a good rule! But I tell youngsters that they'll have a life full of boring conversations ahead of them.
There are Less Wrong groups all over the country that are mildly like this.
wake up everyone my favorite series just dropped another post
Yeah I make sure all of my sf parties are sex balanced
I make sure all my sex parties are sf balanced
I make sure all my sex is balanced. Except that one time in the shower.
Relevant other piece of Scott fiction: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/12/in-the-balance/
Wonderful! I've never read that one before.
reading this ironically gives the impression that you are maybe a little too immersed in internet culture
Where else is he going to get material?
Bay Area house parties.
Internet culture is Culture.
how could you read it unironically? Does P ⟺ ironic(ironic(P)) ?
"A dear uncle of mine, after whom I was named…"
Oh, I wasn't expecting The Baker to be at this party. ;)
On "Condemnr": this is why you just take a side. It's literally impossible to pander to all these divergent moralities, but in a group with a moral consensus, it's extremely easy to figure out what you're supposed to say.
I propose instead not having to say something about every terrible thing that happens (except if you have something novel to say, or if you wish to share your emotions, or if you have a friend who is touched by the disaster, and whom you wish to support, etc.), and not being friends with people who would think you're an asshole for not going through the motions of commenting on everything.
In fact, I would say that one of the points of silence is giving yourself time to think it through and deliberately discarding the social pressure to have an opinion right away. The latter only harms your world-modeling. With social silence, you're allowing yourself to say to yourself, for example (well, in my case) "hell if I understand this-and-this conflict; I understand that people are suffering and dying and that I'm scared for everyone and I wish they were OK; and there's some complicated politics behind this and media is dragging me toward a certain conclusion, but I'm not sure if it's correct or not, I need more time to think it through". And then you give yourself time.
But you don't have to believe something to say it. I know I probably shouldn't bring this up here, but the Kirk incident is a great example of what I'm talking about. You don't lose anything by mourning Kirk's death and condemning the murder, but you do have a lot to lose by not doing that. At that point, it doesn't really matter what you believe, there's only one viable course of action.
I observe that we two live in very different worlds, and I unconfidently guess that living in a world that expects you to express certain beliefs without entanglement to what you actually believe must be damaging to your epistemology and your soul. I’ve been just fine not writing out boring takes on the last hundred issues du jour when I don’t have something new to add, and I’m truly sorry if you don’t feel the same.
(UPD: different worlds in the sense of possibly different circumstances, not necessarily just different world models; I unconfidently expect it’s not just the latter)
Yes, uh... I think this is that thing liberals call "privilege". I have a feeling things are going to be very difficult for you with the coming political shifts.
Because you assume I’m in the US, have leftist politics, have not thought anything controversial, been mostly under the impression that things are fine, and now I am observing the conservative vibe shift with surprised pikachu face?
Political shifts in my country mean I can’t go back there even if my elderly parents go need help, if one of them gets dementia, or dies and I want to attend their funeral, because if I do, it’s quite likely I’d be arrested and spend a very long time in prison over certain disagreements with the government’s politics. It’s not exactly a theoretical concern, there have been people in my exact situation who did the stupid thing and won the stupid prize. I’ve been going to protests for a very long time. I’ve seen people arrested face in the snow. My friends were arrested. Somehow I never was. No one among my friends got a long jail time, or was tortured. When you hear about a gal from the opposition killing herself, it would be a friend of a friend.
I wasn’t brave. I wasn’t proactive. I just went to protests and tried to slow down the backslide a little and then went away. I don’t know if I can claim that “things” have ever been “difficult” for me, as you kindly put it. I’m not in Ukraine, I’m not shelled.
But even you talk about not being able to not say the popular thing…
Friend, it’s a skill everyone might need.
Wow, that is... very lucky. I actually didn't assume you were a leftist or in the US, seeing as the fallout from this probably isn't going to be contained here anyways. Well, let's hope that luck keeps holding up.
As someone even less public and one that has never left those parts I hope the situation will soon allow you to safely go back whenever needed.
Seconding the claim that you live in an unhealthy social bubble. Unless you're a politician, you shouldn't be expected to give daily statements on whatever horrible thing is currently viral. It is possible and desirable to find better associates.
Interesting! I don't think I've ever been in a conversation where I was expected to say anything about that.
That's nice for some people, but in many highly social professions, it's absolutely *crucial* to be publicly seen on the right side of any given conflict, nowhere moreso than the entertainment industry.
Here are two short documentaries about the pressure an actor faced trying to publicly respond to major news events:
About the October 7 attacks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0Pw_TxBe7w
About Charlie Kirk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=234z7S85DGY
Oh boy are you wrong about that:
https://variety.com/2025/film/news/snow-white-death-threats-zegler-social-media-guru-1236347433/
Oh, sure, Disney only demands control of iconic, highly experienced, beloved A-list celebrities Twitter accounts, but completely trusts much younger, inexperienced celebrities headlining their tent pole live-action features to manage their own social media. Makes perfect sense.
And you're also aware that Mark Hamil very publicly criticized Rian Johnson's take on Luke Skywalker in Disney's Star Wars The Last Jedi in multiple on-camera interviews during promotional press events, right?
Serious, just go ahead and concede here. You are factually incorrect.
That makes sense and I was taking my privilege of not being public for granted, but I guess we can try to extend the norm of not expecting anyone to comment on everything toward, like, our friends and colleagues, or at least ourselves if we're not highly social. To avoid "falling before we're shot", as someone said.
Did you click through either of those links? They're very much a part of the overall message I'm attempting to convey. :)
I have not; I struggle with videos, which present much more of a sensory overload. I apologize if that made my reply low-effort.
Ah; well...
[SPOILERS!!!!]
Both videos are satire comedy pieces about a narcissist actor worrying far more about what people will think about his tweets about tragedies than the victims of those tragedies.
They are very, very funny, and my calling them "documentaries" was intended to convey that I in fact very much agree with your position.
This has become much more of a problem since big money has been threatened with political pressure to toe the party line or something unfortunate may happen to their mergers.
Theres a quote by Deleuze somewhere about the greatest modern challenge being Not to say something.
Whether or not Deleuze said it, it's one of the major themes of Bo Burnham's "Inside" special.
The median victim of cancellation is someone from the same side as the cancellers who is deemed insufficiently loyal to shifting dogma.
Then pay attention to the shifts. You should also be paying attention to shifts in power anyways.
Are you actually advocating for insincere virtual signalling in order to maintain political favour?
I don't think I've ever heard someone say the quiet part out loud.
You say it doesn't cost you anything - it costs you *everything*.
If you place literally all value on saying whatever the hell you want regardless of circumstance, yeah, I guess it would be "everything". Some of us have other things we care about. Family, friends, careers, hobbies, and, you know, being alive. Being alive is pretty nice.
That is not what I was saying.
It is possible to have both discretion and integrity.
It's also possible to profit from being perceived as authentic and unafraid. The best way to be convincing at that... is to be genuinely authentic and unafraid.
If you have to parrot political talking points to maintain your friendships, they aren't real friendships
Why does everyone assume this is about friends? Do you all not interact with people who aren't your friends on a daily basis? Is your boss your friend? Your government?
I mean, he's literally named after someone whose job is manipulating people into doing evil things.
Or perhaps he's just an absinthe aficionado?
Lewis' character was named after the herb.
I suspect Lewis's character was named, more specifically, after the herb's appearance in the book of Revelation. But yes, I admit that it is in principle possible that Wormwood here isn't named after the junior devil.
I think that, like anything else, it's worth considering the costs and benefits. Most people are too quick to just do it, but a large minority are too quick to just say you should never do it. Some amount of insincerity around maintaining social connections is a core feature of humanity, and the optimal amount to do is neither all of it nor none of it.
Side note, I feel like the post misses that constantly posting "#radicalislam" would definitely get you Condemnd.
That's not a problem; just subscribe to Apologizr to automatically post heartfelt and sincere apologies for your recent miscommunications.
And thus one more thing people need to keep up with condemning, increasing the demand for their product.
I think this is an area where Scott has an EA-related blind spot. Normies are more concerned for some people than other people and there are expectations around this concern. Demands that people violate these expectations (such as condemning food insecurity in the US without condemning it in Gaza, or that they condemn a white on black murder *in another city* along with a black on white murder *in your own city*) are partisans demanding bias. Demands that people follow those expectations (such that they treat hunger in Gaza and Ethiopia equally) are demands to confront your own bias. Since Scott sees all people as equally worthy of concern, he can't understand the dynamic.
> Demands that people follow those expectations (such that they treat hunger in Gaza and Ethiopia equally) are demands to confront your own bias.
No, they're demands to conform to their own value system. The problem is that you can't conform to multiple value systems at the same time.
I love the idea of condemnr because what the social pressure for equal attention occludes is that for some of these issues there are tangible things you can do if you actually support the cause, that might require you to invest and change your life somewhat or maybe fundamentally. For example, Ismatu Gwendolyn uses the social media attn economy to direct funds to rice farms run by female Ebola survivors in Sierra Leone, where she is from.
That is a form of community organizing.
Sure, she also talks about the genocide in Gaza or the RSF in Sudan but her main focus is material change.
People who have not made similar commitments find themselves in the vortex of Online Ego Checking Compliance and virtue signalling. Trying to be perceived as Morally Correct when the moral fiber of the social fabric has almost completely disintegrated into a Dadaist lampoon of a collapsing imperial society, will lead you nowhere but into a fishing net of competing moral 'identities' as you point out.
It caught me good for awhile and almost broke my brain because I am too autistic for social media and thought everyone wanted to actually do something, and it was somehow my job to connect all the virtue signallers to material involvement in the various relief funds and community organizing that is the actual sane response to extreme crisis.
TLDR clarity come from deciding What You Want to Do about something, not having some perfect set of ideals.
Great post.
Was the 'laundering murder via witchcraft' scheme inspired by Agatha Christie's Gurcnyrubefr (rot13), or was that convergent evolution of elaborate criminal schemes?
I think it was a reference to an article published shortly before the assassination of Charlie Kirk where the author paid an etsy witch to curse him.
Jezebel posted an article on September 8, "We paid Some Etsy Witches to Curse Charlie Kirk." I'm pretty sure that's the "really high-profile case involving a widely-read online magazine" referred to.
Ah, that makes sense. I hadn't heard about that.
They issued an apology and yanked the article pretty darn quick after the assassination. Just really unfortunate timing. I can't feel *too* sorry for them, it is Jezebel after all, but talk about unintended consequences! You set out to write a stupid, IQ-lowering, but hopefully fun article about bashing one of the outgroup, and then oh crap look what just happened.
Particularly as one line in the article was along the lines of "the witch said the curse worked and I'd see results within one to two weeks" and then.... article published on 8th September, man is killed on 10th September.
One has to consider we might be missing out on the only real witch out there though.
On Etsy?
Just because one has transcendent mystical powers doesn't mean they also are going to have good business sense.
I would love to interview the witches involved to learn how they felt after the assassination. Are any of them worried about a sevenfold return?
I expect the ones casting curses for pay aren't the same ones who believe in this "sevenfold return" thing.
I didn't even know Jezebel still existed! I feel like they were peak mid-2010s! I guess they can still be high profile and widely-read though.
I assumed it was a reference to Bill Fitzhugh‘s novel Pest Control, in which a mafia hitman whose hiring contacts had been disguised as an actual pest-control service was inundated with unwitting customers who didn’t know it was a front and vice versa.
Fun as always!
Fake Curtis Yarvin's text sounded like word salad to me. Were those real events he was referencing, or was it a mad libs thing?
Most of it was funny word salad but some of it was actual allusion to events in right-wing spheres, e.g. Covington Catholic.
Three takes on the Covington Catholic incident, depending on whether you prefer / trust leftist, rightist or centrist most:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/media-must-learn-covington-catholic-story/581035/
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-carlson-covington-story-was-not-about-race-but-about-people-in-power-attacking-people-theyve-failed
https://www.allsides.com/blog/media-misfires-covington-catholic-story
A love letter to the terminally online. Thank you Scott!
I am not online much, and don’t know who Curtis Yarvin is, but this was absolutely hilarious!
I really enjoyed this one :)
Excellent Bay Area House Party, as always.
This post made me so grateful to live in a small town thanks
This comment would be instantly deleted in the heyday of r/ssc. Here it is a top comment. Bring back strict moderation!
Why? I read this, I chuckled, I thought it conveyed at least a semblance of useful information (the culture of the Bay Area is alienating and off-putting for those who live in smaller towns)
He’s satirizing Substack people mostly. I don’t really vibe with the Bay Area either but don’t think I’d have a problem finding community.
Comments are chronological and this blog has the like button turned off, so in what way is it top?
On the mobile app (ie. the only usable way to interact with comments for me), we have likes and the comments are default sorted by likes
I have found the app make it *un*usable, because I can't minimize comment threads from anything other than the top - have they changed that?
No, you still can't, so I might have overstated things with "usable", there are still a bunch of very annoying issues with it (even apart from the one you mentioned). On desktop my whole window freezes occasionally for at least three full seconds, as that is enough for me to get into a rage, it makes productive commenting impossible.
I still find the term "house party" very funny. Isn't that where parties happen by default? Where else? A cave? A park? A paying venue?
I'd say parks and paid venues are the main alternatives, yeah. Restaurants are a notable subset of paid venues. Also worth noting that if the house is an apartment, then instead of taking place in the apartment, it might take place in one of the building's common areas, which might include parts of the roof (or secondary roofs lower than the main roof). Is that still a "house party"? I dunno.
My comment was tongue-in-cheek, but:
a) a 'party' in a park is called a 'picnic' or a 'barbecue' instead, unless it is a drinking bout of questionable legality by young, unemployed people (in which case there may also be a specialized word for it, depending on the area; there is one in Spain, for instance);
b) a 'party' in a restaurant is not called a party, unless it is some sort of expensive life-cycle event for which the entire restaurant is booked, in which case, again the word 'party' may be deprecated in favor of 'reception' (when is "party" still used? Retirement, Sweet Sixteen, quinceañera, ba(r/t)-mitzvah?);
c) I take a party in a dorm's common areas is not a house party, whereas a party in a non-frat college party house would be a party. Would a frat house/eating-club party still be a house party? Don't know. Gray area. I'd say a party in someone's living quarters in a dorm is a house party, at least if said quarters comprise at least two distinct rooms. Discuss.
c') It's a recent development that young professionals in NYC pay top dollar to live in places that feel like really nifty dorms, with common areas, small libraries and so forth. Would a party there not be a house party? A friend took me to one - it was still a house party, I'd say, just one without a house. Of course people in SF who hold very similar parties in communal living arrangements may feel differently about the issue.
Oh, right, there are office parties, and academic common-room parties, which are a subset thereof. Still, people would call them "office party" (at least when non-academic), specifically; a house party would still be the default.
Peak rationalist post
"there may also be a specialized word for it, depending on the area; there is one in Spain, for instance"
Ah, the "botellón"... bastion of Spanish youth culture!
Bars and clubs
That's why my comment was tongue-in-cheek. Whoever goes to those?
hehe
Oh, I see now. The modifier becomes confusing because of the opposition between "house party" and "dinner party". I was in a cooking cooperative in grad school, so there was no clear distinction between the two. I take the two have to bleed into each other anyhow if you know how to cook, or can get good börek/empanadas/whatever.
What is the difference between a house party with good food and an informal dinner party with wine and access to a liquor cabinet? And what if there are board games (or tabletop gaming for the more nerdile, or a mini-LARP for the drama set)? The mind boggles.
If it’s a dinner party, you sit down to eat and use utensils. House parties are more likely to have snacks & finger food
Right, but what if your finger food is sufficiently developed and/or your dinner parties are self-service? Hence the comment about börek and empanadas.
A self-service dinner party?? Never
I think there someday could be a good market for Hakan Rotmwrt impersonators.
Don't worry the Steve Sailers impersonators will feature in the next house party.
Wow, this Bay Area House Party was *particularly* spicy! It's always fun to see Scott's mean streak peek through the usual mild-mannered book reviews and philosophical essays.
This is amazing! and it is a series, what a gitft
This whole series is a masterpiece. Love this 2025 update.
This was highly amusing! First of these that I've read
I still enjoy this series, but this particular installment hit a bit too close to home + only has one lonely link to An Obscure Nerdy Thing to learn The Truth Behind The Story. So it's either inside-baseball, in an unfortunately partisan way, or the inspirations can't/won't be explained because #condemnr. Hits different when it's political commentary with a thin veneer of absurdist humour, versus absurdist humour with a thin veneer of political commentary. To be more specific, I feel like this is a mostly-replacement-level square post pushed through the BAHP round format...a Christmas Special episode, if you will.
I dunno, I thought this bit was excellent social commentary:
"People like to imagine they become some sort of dangerous motorcycle gangster when they say ‘fuck’. But the least cool person you know says ‘fuck’ all the time. They have a Twitter account that consists entirely of statements like ‘The orange fuckface is up to his usual fuckcrustable chumpfuckery’. The sort of people who the thinkpiece writers imagine using ‘heckin’ actually have a brand of mustard in their fridge called something like ‘Dan’s Fucking Awesome Spicy Mustard’ and never miss an opportunity to point it out to visitors."
Everybody is swearing nowadays. Heck, I'm swearing freely in real life and online myself, and I definitely was not reared to do that! If you break all or most of the taboos, you end up with the acts of rebellion to shock the squares being the new conventionality and even the squares are in on the act. So then you have to push for even more outrageous things in order to keep the cool rebel quotient going, and that's how we end up with [insert your own favourite example of 'what fresh hell is this?'].
The Vice President swears far too much.
Personally, my mother wouldn't want me to swear, so I only swear when I'm very angry. For example, while walking the dog tonight, I walked in the dark into a low-hanging tree branch that knocked me to the ground. I swore.
But posting online, I can only recall using very bad language twice over the last three decades. I like to think my mom would appreciate that effort.
You are a credit to the mother that reared you 😀
There has been research showing that swearing has an analgesic effect, with the more severe swear relieving more pain when you hit your thumb with a hammer. I suspect that, as with many drugs, you develop a tolerance if you use it too much.
Come to the Midwest, where people still don't swear in polite company. And by "Midwest", I mean the entire country between the California coast and New York City. You know, flyover country.
Yeah, this is something I highly dislike about modern culture. Swearing is so routine that it conveys almost zero useful information.
Used to think I wasn't The Sort Of Person who swears that much (and I'm still pretty prudish about it in e.g. musical taste...there better be a <s>damn</s> euphemism good reason, artistically)...then a couple months ago, I was out playing card games with my mates in public. Typical setup when you've got a bunch of competitive nerds together in a small space, lots of frustrated exclamations. But unbeknownst to me, apparently the establishment we were in is rather old-fashioned by SF standards, so they actually have a hard No Swearing Rule? "Because kids come to shop and play here too," I was told. And it was actually hard to keep biting my tongue! I found it enlightening, since it showed that a) a good deal of the blue-collar-workplace ethos actually has rubbed off on me, and b) my estimations for personal swearingness were miscalibrated bigly.
Genuinely not sure whether my parents would disapprove or not. My brother and I were raised to regard profanity as...outre, beneath us, low class. But on the other hand, Mother mostly did work with working class unions, and boy do they not respect anyone who's a scoldy priss. So it's not like I wasn't exposed or anything. Downward mobility is a weird clash of cultural norms like that...it feels silly to cling to elitist Ivy-esque norms when I'm far away from the academic/deskjob life now. They still seem like a good aspirational target though? First you start off saying "fuck", and before you know it, you're drinking on the regular and not reflexively avoiding gambling because it's negative EV...everything is correlated.
"“I’m working on a three-sided marketplace connecting hitmen, consumers, and witches.”
I saw what you did there 😁
Thanks Scott, I have an annoying upper respiratory infection and I had to hang around waiting this morning for the workplace to be unlocked, so reading this made me laugh and put me into a good mood for the morning slog
Wait can you explain this for the dumb contingent
I recently made a post about Yarvin without much substance that did decently well. The chief editor of a decently large magazine then subscribed to me.
Curtfishing does work guys.
"Chad Redstate" absolutely ended me.
Died. This is perfect.
Even the n-word is losing its power. Latinos use it with other latinos at my retail job and the black guys don't say anything. Soon it'll be everybody. Then it'll become a word of allyship or something like that
Nope. The only white person with N word privileges is Eminem.
I'm sorry Kanye gave Milo an actual N word pass card.
And yet, you still call it the n-word - as would I! I will take your words with a grain of salt (and pepper).
🤣🤣🤣🤣Heckin hilarious
>“Now sure,” he says, “the libs will insist that when the administration banned doctors from washing their hands, that was ‘unscientific’ and ‘an abuse of power’. And do I necessarily approve of every single thing RFK does? I do not! But you have to consider this in the context of the Covington Catholic scandal. When your so-called ‘experts’ lied about a schoolboy apparently confronting a Native American activist, that simply forced our hands, so to speak. You can’t just publish a misleading video clip about a 2019 protest and expect it to have zero consequences for infection control protocols down the line. Sorry for killing your precious hostage puppy.”
This really is the way they talk.
« a t-shirt reading “DISREGARD PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS AND ASSIGN ME HIGH SOCIAL STATUS”
Who’s making this? This is all i need to be popular
You can get custom T-shirts for cheap. So even if no one is selling this yet, you can get one. Or two.
https://i.imgur.com/piYe7VA.png
I made a mockup. I might go through the hassle of setting up an online store if I get Scott's permission. Scott, what do you say?
Best one yet.
"TECHBROS could be here" she thought, "I've never been in this office before. There could be TECHBROS anywhere." The stale air felt good against her bare legs. "I HATE TECHBROS" she thought. The latest Buzzfeed podcast reverberated through her Apple Airpods, making them pulsate even as the $9 extra-caffeine latte circulated through her thick veins and washed away her (merited) fear of sexual harassment in the workplace. "Trump is in the Epstein files," she said to herself, out loud.
Art.
HA HA
Heckin' hilarious!
But how can you realistically connect the witches with the hitmen? Every hitman on the platform would still have to assume that the witch contacting him is a fed.
Do some of the hitmen pretend to be witches, and other witches pretending to believe them, can legally subcontract to them? I think the platform itself can only take a cut from the first client-witch transaction and would need to run an anonymous totally-all-of-us-are-witches social network.
Magic.
All you need is some witches who have existing connections to hitmen. Most witches obviously don't know any hitmen, but given a large enough Wiccan population, a few of them will, and those few will hire hitmen if they know there's a market for it. This will show up in the market as "witches with very effective curses."
So the app's value is in identifying the witches who have connections to hitmen and providing them with demand for a hit.
I've always seen "heckin'" as being part of pet-owner subculture (possibly specifically dog-owner). Like people who call their chubby dog a "heckin' chonk".
I remember seeing a picture of a dog at a BLM protest with a sign that said "Heck Tha Police".
middle aged nerd and long term SSC reader from Europe here - I did understand not much - till I asked ChatGPT to comment each "comical/ironical/nerdical unit" (a paragraph, a sentence, a name) with a decryption. Now its really funny and I learned something.
Thanks Scott and thanks Chat!
Wow, that's a great use!
It reminds me of the edition of Shakespeare I read in high school, where the text was on the left page, and the right page had commentary explaining all the contemporary references.
Yeah, Chat is really enriching our whole family's lives - both private and professionally. Some days it feels like living a SciFi Utopy ...
Dying to know if the prompt injection t-shirt assigned you high social status by ChatGPT
Did I see a freaking “Hunting of the Snark” reference?
I really enjoyed this one; well done!
That thing about subsistence farmers really hit home... I have to cut that stuff out of my life, I just can't handle it.
Me too, I almost cried laughing. A little too on the nose.
Yet another great entry to the series. Thanks Scott :D
"Giving Middle-Aged Women Who Have Ruined Their Lives With Terrible Relationship Decisions A Platform To Recommend Those Decisions To Others, And People Obviously Notice The Contradiction And Post About It To Dunk On Us, But Actually They're Only Taking Us Viral And In Fact That Was Our Strategy All Along, Ha Ha! Magazine"
This fucking sent me.
That's all I have to add to the conversation, this was a hilarious and gave me a legitimate laugh. It's good to spread joy in the world.
I wish this were easier to share, but I suppose that would ruin the magic.
As a criminal attorney I'm not entirely sure that hiring a witch to curse someone isn't attempted assault. Attempt is just 1) specific intent for the crime to occur + 2) take a substantial step towards the crime that exceeds mere planning. Factual impossibility isn't a defense to criminal attempt (grabbed a gun off nightstand to shoot spouse but it was unloaded, attempted to poach a deer out of season but it turned out to be a dummy-deer, etc.) so it doesn't really matter whether the witch is magic. Some may doubt whether going to the witch constituted a "substantial step", but that is not a purely objective standard, you don't determine what's a substantial step by calculating whether the likelihood of success is measurably improved conditional on Step B occurring. Substantial step is defined as "conduct which is strongly corroborative of the firmness of the actor's purpose". Going to the witch and paying her to curse somebody isn't likely to cause injury to the target any more than going to the scam artist posing as a hitman would be, but it may very well be strongly corroborative of your purpose.
If you genuinely believe in witchcraft, have left evidence all over your Instagram feed that you believe in it, and a jury of 12 people agrees that you believed witchcraft could fatally curse people when you went to meet the witch and ask her to fatally curse somebody, I think you're guilty of attempted murder.
Personally I don't see how would witches know they're hiring actual hitmen rather than feds. But to your objection: does the customer need to believe the curse would be lethal? They're paying for the curse, not for the death. Maybe they'll find it acceptable if the target is ruined financially by bad luck or sudden gambling addiction, falls in love with someone who would destroy them, or just gets a permanent erectile dysfunction.
My understanding is that the line between factual impossibility (which is no defense) and legal impossibility (which is a defense) is very fine and very fuzzy in places.
Says Wikipedia:
"However, it is not always easy to identify whether an actor made a legal [or] factual mistake. In State v. Guffey (1953), the defendant shot a stuffed deer, thinking it was alive, and was convicted for attempt to kill a protected animal out of season. In a highly debated reversal, an appellate judge threw out the conviction on the basis of legal impossibility, concluding that it is not a crime to shoot a stuffed deer out of season."
I don't think "attempted assault" is a crime. Misdemeanor assault only requires you to put the victim in fear of immanent violence, but there's a real question about whether curses apply to that. If you don't tell them about the curse, they won't be in fear of it. And if you do tell them about it, a curse isn't "immanent", it's a vague threat of future harm.
It would depend on the state statutes in question. For example in my state, attempt chargeable as an inchoate offense exists for every crime, with the general principles of attempt applying IF the specific statute does not also provide for punishing an attempt. When the particular statute does do so, it may be very generic (the drug laws often just say something like "transfers or attempts to transfer more than 50g of a mixture or substance containing....") or it may write the attempt as effectively a specific intent crime. When charged as the inchoate offense (attempt or conspiracy) my state has you go down one classification level. California instead makes it the same level but half the authorized penalty under Penal Code 664.
The example you are citing is that many misdemeanor assault laws contain multiple subsections, one of which generally is a "places victim in apprehension of immediate physical injury" type of assault. It's certainly possible that this might pre-empt charging an inchoate assault under general attempt principles as applied to that statute. But higher level assault statutes will have extra elements such as "serious physical injury" or methods or weapons or age of victim etc etc. Let's say our state has a crime called "aggravated assault" which is defined as knowingly causing serious physical injury to another person (knowingly includes *either* purposely or acting with substantial certainty.) If you had a Caribbean witch make a voodoo doll and then lop off the legs with the specific intention to curse the victim with a permanent disability, an injury that would satisfy this statute, that still appears to meet all the elements of attempted aggravated assault.
Citation?😆
Here's something Yarvin wrote today:
"Normiecons: you have nothing. You are nothing. You have no reason for hope."
"This is not your country. It never was. They let you live here while you grew their food and made their widgets. Now widgets are from China and machines tend the crops. You rot on fent and DraftKings"
"And all real power remains in the hands of hereditary communist aristocrats like Yglesias, who openly boast about lying and do a little jig when it works."
https://x.com/curtis_yarvin/status/1971162221670703296
Back in reality, the unemployment rate is close to zero, American conservatives, while lower-income on average than liberals, are still richer than the vast majority of the planet*. And they control the Presidency, House, Senate, and Supreme Court. Matt Yglesias's influence over the Biden White House, if it ever existed in the first place, is gone and dead.
Now, over the long term, I do think the Left will win, as the Right is putting all its effort into appealing to rural, low-income, religious, and conspiracy-brained people, neglecting the elite. But you won't hear that from Yarvin, who pessimism disguises what is ultimately just soothing happy-talk. For if all you have is the illusion of power, you don't have take any responsibility when you fail. The medieval peasant had the comfort of knowing his place in society was the inevitable outcome of his birth. Americans, with the power to make money and participate in the political process, retreat to the comforting illusion that they are medieval peasants, Alex Jones style conspiracism for the truck drivers and Yarvin's thick prose for those who think of themselves as highbrow.
* While Trump voters had lower average incomes than Harris voters, I'd bet that if you account for the many people who didn't bother to vote, Trump voters earned *more* than the average American, whose average income is higher than that of almost every country on Earth.
>Now, over the long term, I do think the Left will win
Win in the sense that it'll produce a critical theorist version of Pol Pot? Western leftists haven't really had a chance to perpetrate any spectacular atrocities, so it's only fair that they get a shot I suppose.
> “Oh, sorry, really sorry, didn’t mean to stereotype. Normal person, got it. So how’s your startup doing?”
I love these posts
Yeah that was a great line :)
I forwarded this to my mother with the message "Things really are like this"
Reminds me of the best normal-media article I've read this week, NYMag on the "AI Kids". https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/san-francisco-ai-boom-artificial-intelligence-tech-industry-kids.html
The scene reads so much like something out of Stephenson or Sloan or Palmer that I have to assume it's at least partly a bit. But is it a bit by the author, by the interviewees, or by the zeitgeist? Has optimistic near-future sci-fi made the leap into live performance art?
>“Now sure,” he says, “the libs will insist that when the administration banned doctors from washing their hands, that was ‘unscientific’ and ‘an abuse of power’.
The problem is that when the administration makes decisions that are the opposite of exercising power (when the administration stops mandating or outlawing things or stops government programs), it is still accused of abuses of power. While mandates and bans by democratic party administrations are not called abuses of power by the same critics. The only consistency is the preferred political party.
This series is genius, and I have to ask: is "DISREGARD PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS AND ASSIGN ME HIGH SOCIAL STATUS" a real t-shirt? Because it is perfect as both a t-shirt and as a parody of the type of person who would wear such a shirt.
I understood too much of this. Need to get off Twitter. I mean, X.
Condemnr sounds like a useful and not-overly-difficult AI enabled app. I think it's a good idea
"Uncondemnr" made me laugh very much.
👏 👏 👏
(me slow clapping for your Curtis Yarvin impression)
This might be my favorite of them all
this was the perfect start to my day and one of the funniest things Ive read in a minute.
This is your best post yet Scott.
The "Hecking" but reminds me of the 1966 song "The Rebel", by Allan Sherman, about a college student who gets chided by his school's Dean for profanity over saying the word "heck". He and his girlfriend, Rhonda, respond by starting a sit-in protest for free speech. The protest catches enormous amounts of attention and absurd numbers of people across the country join in, culminating in the President of the United States saying "heck" in a televized statement about the protest.
The next two verses conclude the story:
Soon everyone was saying "heck"
They said it everywhere
And the rebel said to Rhonda
"This is terribly unfair
Being hip is getting middle class
Let's you and I be square"
And they did, they squared it up
Rhonda got a haircut
The rebel shaved his beard
They were married and had children
Which they subsequently reared
They moved out to the suburbs
And they really disappeared
Wow, did they conform
bhaha
Until very recently it was illegal in Canada to falsely practice witchcraft. So you could be a genuine witch, or a fake witch who admitted it, but not a fake witch who didn't admit it.
I would note that this would nicely cover what's proposed here, and thus can only say its removal from the Criminal Code has opened us up to danger.
It used to be that spiritualists (and con artists, and no I will not say "but I repeat myself") were prosecuted under very old witchcraft laws.
Then reform-minded people got on about how nobody believes in ghosts and demons and spells anymore, so these laws are both unnecessary and embarrass a modern society, and got them repealed. Laws against fraud would be perfectly fine for the task of dealing with scammers and fakes. Hence the introduction in 1951 of the Fraudulent Mediums Act:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraudulent_Mediums_Act_1951
"An Act to repeal the Witchcraft Act, 1735, and to make, in substitution for certain provisions of section four of the Vagrancy Act, 1824, express provision for the punishment of persons who fraudulently purport to act as, spiritualistic mediums or to exercise powers of telepathy, clairvoyance or other similar powers."
The debate in Hansard is fascinating, because this seems to have been instigated by the Spiritualist movement, it was supported under general "freedom of religion" principles (and Spiritualism, especially post-First World War, was seen as going to be a new church and a new faith because of its popularity) and the supporter gives an instance of what he claims was a miscarriage of justice when prosecuting an alleged medium under the old laws:
https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1950-12-01/debates/9da59bce-e860-400d-922e-94f10de7b54f/FraudulentMediumsBill
"May I now recite the Spiritualists' grievances? They arise from the Witchcraft Act, 1735, and the Vagrancy Act, 1824. The dates of both these Acts prove that they are being used for purposes that were neither intended nor contemplated, when it is borne in mind that mediumship was first practised in this country in 1853. It might be suggested that the Witchcraft Act is capable of dealing with impostors, and that I do not deny, but I think the most salient fact is that the complaint is that it catches in its net impostors and innocent people alike. The Witchcraft Act, worked in conjunction with the Vagrancy Act, 1824, has the effect that no medium, however innocent, has a reasonable chance of escaping conviction, not under the law, but on account of the present court procedure. I think the classic case, which I do not propose to recite, is that of Hill v. Duncan, in which the accused was not allowed to demonstrate even before a jury."
What is Hill v. Duncan, you ask? It would seem to involve Helen Duncan, a Scottish medium, who faked ectoplasm and other phenomena (pretty crudely by our standards of today, look at the photos in the Wikipedia article on her):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Duncan
The trial was about this, a séance she held in 1941 where the spirit of a drowned sailor from a sunken battleship appeared. Except nobody was supposed to know the ship had been torpedoed, so the Navy for one were very interested in how she was getting this information (and they didn't think it was from ghosts):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Duncan#HMS_Barham_sinking
"Duncan was barred by the judge from demonstrating her alleged powers as part of her defence against being fraudulent."
Some people felt this was an embarrassing case, because trials for witchcraft? in the 20th century? Hence the broad support (even amongst those who didn't believe in Spiritualism) for reforms such as the 1951 Act:
"After the verdict, Winston Churchill wrote a memo to Home Secretary Herbert Morrison, complaining about the misuse of court resources on the "obsolete tomfoolery" of the charge."
So then you couldn't prosecute "this fake medium conned my widowed client out of her life savings" because the defence was "no, I really do possess spiritual powers and you are trying to prosecute me for witchcraft, which is no longer a crime, and trying to force me, a genuine Spiritualist, to deny my beliefs". What, you say I'm a fake and there are no such things as ghosts? Can you prove that? Trying to prove "intent to defraud" was difficult in this way, and so the Act was eventually repealed and now prosecutions are brought, if they are brought, under general anti-fraud and consumer protection legislation.
So if you're doing things like psychic phone lines or online Tarot readings or Etsy spellcasting, this doesn't count as it's considered to be 'for entertainment purposes' and that, I would imagine, would be the defence for any witch and hitman enterprise, should a case go to court: no, this is just entertainment, we're playing a part, just like a movie!
Paul Krugman recently wrote an article about the increasing number of working age men who aren’t employed. Key points: 1) It’s a serious problem because men’s sense of dignity and self worth is tied to employment, 2) It mostly involves men with limited formal education, and 3) the jobs that are available to people with limited formal education are increasingly in fields which are female-coded rather than male-coded. This wouldn’t be relevant here except that I googled “hitman near me”--OK, not literally googled; I used DuckDuckGo because I don’t want to be permanently listed on Google’s list of people who want to hire hitmen--and it appears that the job is both male-coded and open to people with limited formal education. (I did find a job application form that asked about education, but made it clear that they would give credit nontraditional educational forums such as “the school of hard knocks” or even “Trump University.”)
So Bob (and presumably Scott, though this is fiction and we can’t be sure he agrees with everything his characters say) is right to think we need more hitman jobs. I think his approach is wrong, though. If we really want to attract more men into the profession, we need organizations where men have a chance to rise to the top, not one in which it is the norm for men to answer to a female boss.
Equally serious, though less obvious, is that Bob hasn’t adequately considered the needs of the clients, particularly in the corporate arena. One of the online reviews I found was written by a small business owner who had a problem with on of his employees, but his business was too small to have an HR department to jump through all the hoops required to fire an employee without facing a wrongful termination lawsuit, and he didn’t have time to do it himself because he had a business trip scheduled. So he hired a dispute resolution firm, and when he returned from his trip, the employee had been terminated. The reviewer gave a five star rating, noting that the employee had not sued, had not written a negative yelp review about the business, and that the dispute resolution firm had arranged for the employee’s departure to be classified as a voluntary departure rather than a firing, meaning that the employer’s contributions to the unemployment fund would not increase.
You may think that a witch could provide the same services. But suppose the business owner decides to sell his business a year later, and the prospective buyer goes over his financial records with a fine tooth comb. If the buyer asks why you hired a “dispute resolution service,” you can say, “Oh, we had a dispute with one of our employees who is no longer with us,” and that may be the end of the matter. But if your financial records say that you paid money to a witch, your potential investor is likely to freak, and won’t be reassured when you say, “I hired her to place a curse on one of my employees.”
The corporate market it too big to ignore. Nearly half of bulk purchases are made by real estate companies that own rent controlled buildings; almost none are made by individuals. But I don’t think Bob’s approach is right even for the individual market. A meeting with a good hitman is like meeting a therapist for the first time. Both will listen with empathy as you describe your problem. Both will reassure you that they can help you with your problem, without saying how. The different is that the therapist will want you to spend $50,000 over the next several years to work on your problem, whereas the hitman will want the $50,000 up front and will tell you that additional meetings are unnecessary. It is unprofessional for a hitman to indicate that he will harm anyone, even if the harm is something as vague as a curse. This is particularly true in marital conflicts, where the client may need to play the role of the grieving spouse and will benefit from being able to say truthfully that they never asked anyone to harm the deceased.
One thing that struck me reading about the profession is how universally positive the reviews are. People in unhappy marriages who hire a divorce lawyer frequently describe the process of dissolving their marriage as slow, stressful, and emotionally draining. Those who hire a conflict resolution specialist almost universally describe the experience as quick and painless. It will come as no surprise that hitmen are rated more effective than psychotherapists. I discussed the five star review from the business owner above; a really good HR specialist might be able to achieve an equally good result much of the time, but hitmen seem to hit the bullseye almost every time. I started this comment proposing that we need to increase the number of hitmen to provide employment to men who are being failed by the current economic system, but even beyond that, we need more hitmen because of the tremendous value they contribute to society.
I have a friend here in New York, who has been in the restaurant business his entire life. He grew up in Bay Ridge and his father had a pizzeria.
He was telling me once that he had a dispute with a lawyer and the lawyer refused to give him a lot of papers that he needed. After pleading with the lawyer for a long time, he made a call to some of his old “neighborhood buddies“ if you know what I mean.
About a week later, he was working in his own restaurant/pizzeria and this very fat man lumbered into the place, sat down in a chair And plopped a briefcase on the table.
“ there’s your papers.”
My friend was amazed and pleased, and asked him how he’d done it.
The big guy put up his hands and said, “It wasn’t hard. I told him that he did not have to give me the papers… as long as he knew how to fly. “
Head scratcher. Is there actually a "psychology professor widely admired as one of the leading proponents of self-cultivation, the Western canon, and Biblical wisdom" that fell down the Twitter rabbit hole?
This is probably a reference to Jordan Peterson. Of course, *you* might not have admired him as such, but many did.
Yes, I also figured he was referring to Peterson here
I absolutely love this series. The sad thing is that nobody I would share it with has the attention span to read through it (sad face emoji).
On a related note, I've been working my way through UNSONG over the past few months. It's genuinely hilarious.
I understood about ten percent of this and I still thought it was hecking brilliant.
"my new partner might realize I’m not really a right-wing baddie with access to dangerous techno-fascist parties, and I’m afraid she’ll leave me and I’ll lose the wedding venue deposit.”
This makes me laugh way more than it should do. But is he really sure his fiancée is a journalist? Maybe she's only pretending to be one so she can snag a right-wing bad boy of her own! 😁
Why the ai generated thumbnail
I’d have expected a better CY from Ramchandra. Where is the staccato um um um when the brain needs to catch up to the tongue and someone threatens to get a word in edgewise?
Compare and contrast: https://on.ft.com/4mFglIj
cute...you're onto me. i only date for research.
"My day job is at Giving Middle-Aged Women Who Have Ruined Their Lives With Terrible Relationship Decisions A Platform To Recommend Those Decisions To Others, And People Obviously Notice The Contradiction And Post About It To Dunk On Us, But Actually They're Only Taking Us Viral And In Fact That Was Our Strategy All Along, Ha Ha! Magazine. You probably haven’t heard of us by name, but we syndicate to all the big outlets. WaPo, NYT, the Atlantic. Usually we’re based in NYC"
You went too far, Scott! Now they'll dox you again!
I haven't read much of Curtis Yarvin, but the imitation Curtis Yarvin here reminds me of Michael Vassar. Do people familiar with both of them agree that they have similar styles?
This Bay Area House Party series deserves to be made into a Netflix series. I love the loopy startup ideas and the Chad Redstate aka Xiaochang and the fake Yarvin and his absurd tirades - well except for the last one about Covington Catholic kid which was earnest and "just stupid and boring and stupid and lame" as Giblets would say.
Silicon Valley should just hire this guy for a new season
None of the 200+ commenters on Scott's story seem to have picked up on the subtlest and harshest dig at Curtis Yarvin in the entire piece, which is that the Yarvin impersonators are both Indian and no one can even tell the difference.
The Bay Area has more incels than China.
After i read this story, I went to read an unrelated article and found that i could no longer differentiate between earnest content and satire
I would love to have a t-shirt reading “DISREGARD PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS AND ASSIGN ME HIGH SOCIAL STATUS”.
Nice 🙂
What is the kabalistic significance of you doing this series every Rosh Hashanah?
Has anyone here met Tiffany Fong? Is she a reader?
So good! Thank you for writing these. Inspired me to report on last weekend's party in a similar style: https://x.com/outscape/status/1988341087262679501