Gen X veteran. New England redneck. Big Eva apologist. Posts are 40% tech, 40% religion, and 100% shitposting. Live Free or Die. Мне похуй.
The Not-So-Deep Northeast
Joined June 2009
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A friendly reminder to those offended by my posts. Especially my fellow evangelautists:
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As a connoisseur of racism, I have found no greater joy than discovering other language realms on X where they are truly light years ahead.
Behold the great meme war between the Turks 🇹🇷 and Chinese 🇨🇳 which has been brewing now for 3 days!
It began with a small Turkish account posting a meme of a cat wearing a straw hat + slitty eyes + wispy moustache. A Chinese user then replied with a meme of Patrick Star from SpongeBob parachuting next to the Turkish flag, with a caption along the lines of “I heard the Turkish flag was designed like this, is that true? Both were from small anonymous accounts but now has been viewed by several millions.
Turks took it as mockery of a national symbol and all hell breaks lose.
The broader historical and cultural pile-on on both sides were equally impressive in its deep knowledge of Ottoman / Chinese history, along with very creative vulgarity. I read one Chinese tweet calling Turkey the fleshlight of the entire world. Both sides insulted each other as “might as well be Indians.” Then it got super testy when it ventured into Turkestan/Xinjiang/Uyghur territory, and soon out came digs about the Turkish lira, China virus and other general nationalist trash talk.
The next stage was the free speech Olympics. Turks started posting images of Xi Jinping and daring Chinese users to criticize him to prove that China is “free.” Chinese replies often flipped it to “you criticize Xi but none of you dare criticize Muhammad.” When no Chinese account could criticize Xi, the Turks concluded they were all bots.
The latest stage has been the international expansion.
Japan + Taiwan + Azerbaijan + Spain lined up with Turks against China.
Japanese accounts were the most visible contingent. Taiwan joined the Turkish side for obvious reasons. Azerbaijan was in Turkic solidarity mode. South Korea and Spain too for reasons which are not clear to me.
Iran + Greece + India + Egypt joined up with the Chinese against Turkey.
I saw an Iranian account openly telling the Chinese to keep going and “discipline the Turks” because the Ottoman/Persian rivalry runs deep still. Greece obviously went against the Turks and as for India, who knows. Could’ve gone either way but they chose the Chinese.
The whole thing, while viscous and passionate at times, has strangely left me with the warm fuzzies. Imagine how much more boring life would’ve been without @X’s auto-translate feature
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They treated patching, asset management, and basic IT hygiene the same way manufacturing treated quality and durability: if it doesn’t print more money this quarter, it’s a cost to cut. That’s how you get technical debt, a permanent helpdesk backlog, and outsourced support.
It’s also how you end up with products that fail on schedule.
Leadership asking “how did this happen” is just the latest version of “who could have seen this coming.”
There are a lot of uncomfortable conversations going on in boardrooms across America and elsewhere this morning.
Leadership is asking questions which make them squirm like
"How come we didn't know we had all these vulnerable software packages in our environment?"
And they're being told, by technical people who are terrified of losing their jobs, facing uncertain futures with all this AI crap and misinformed leadership making increasingly poor decisions which only make things worse, that the reason this is all happening is because for years they were hamstrung and prevented from doing those jobs, BY THAT SAME LEADERSHIP.
Patching.
Updating software.
Documentation.
Asset Management. I wrote a book on it. Check it out.😉
How can you protect your assets if you don't know how many you have and what they are and where they are?
No, you can't have that money in your budget to do your work because we have to use it to spend it on stupid things like tokens.
No, you can't take down a production system in the middle of the day and we're not going to approve any overtime either so figure it out.
Except it wasn't figured out because in order to update it the system needs to be taken offline.
And the technical people need to be able to do those updates without having some megalomaniac breathing down their neck asking the dumbest questions like ETA? 🙄
ETA.
When it gets done, dumbass. That's when.
Is this harsh? Yes.
Once again this is a revealing incident showing that all these companies who love to brag how secure they are, really aren't in reality.
But that is not the fault of the technical staff.
That's the fault of the guys and gals in the top echelon who are supposedly managing all these businesses but doing a very poor job of it.
They never get called out though.
I think we need to change that.
I think all layoffs need to be in a moratorium status because it's clear to me that the very last thing you want to do is get rid of the individuals in your company who are going to help you clean up from all the vulnerabilities which need to be patched in the coming days weeks and months.
Yesterday was a precursor.
A taste of what is to come.
Now is not the time to be laying off those who have the technical skill to help you recover from the fallout.
Stop worrying about vibe coding idiotic projects that aren't going to make your company any money and start worrying about protecting the assets you have today.
Invest in the people whose work got you all that money you are spending on this AI shit and prioritize giving them the tools to make your organization even stronger.
AI models are not alive.
They do not have consciousness now and they're not going to.
Play books that they are running right now are based on human technical experts notes. They aren't inventing anything new.
They are reading what it is we have done in reality and mimicking that.
And they are going to be successful in hacking you because you haven't allowed your technical staff to do their jobs which you hired them to do.
Listen to your cybersecurity staff.
Listen to your information technology staff.
Instead of restructuring your human assets start shuffling around money and shoring up technical budgets so that they can do those jobs properly.
And stop with the bullshit excuses.
Do you want to get sued?
Because that's where this is going to end up if you don't start getting your technical houses in order.
That starts with everything I said above.
And the very first thing that you need to take offline is those stupid AI chatbots that you put on your websites.
Your customers hate them.
They loop.
They want to speak to a human.
And you should try it yourselves.
There's a number of them working for you.
That's how you get paid the ridiculous salaries you make.
How's about talking to them for a change, instead of at them? 🙄
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Jonathan Szeto retweeted
I've always gotten the unshakeable sense that in the end, it all evens out.
The guy with a six-figure salary in a nice neighborhood must deal with the boss -- but he gets a comfy life.
The broke guy in an isolated village may be poor -- but his pace of life is relaxing, he fishes a lot, is never in a rush, etc.
Basically add up any configuration of lifestyle stresses and benefits, total it up, and examine its inverse -- and the net amount of benefit and stress will wind up being the same in the end.
There's not really any "getting ahead" so much as there is "choosing whatever schema of problems and enjoyments you'd most enjoy."
Ever since this dawned on me it's really made life seem a little more playful. It's opened up the playing field mentally. Every choice I could make is just another, new configuration of stress and rewards, ultimately not better or worse than my own -- just different.
Since moving back to New Hampshire, I've encountered a lot of longtime residents who say they want to leave.
They haven't yet.
And having lived in different parts of the country, I'm pretty confident they would have hated where they would have moved to as well.
Drove out to North Jersey to sight see and do some thinking
I love the east coast in summer, green lush blue skies, just beautiful
I'm in a cheerful mood, I stop at a farm store along the road, I'm buying some local honey, eggs, a cold beverage
The woman ringing me up asks where I'm from
-Texas
"OH, why are you in New Jersey?"
Tell her I like to come to the East Coast during summer, I find it lovely, I think New Jersey is perfect during the summer
She looks at me with skepticism
"New Jersey is a black hole. I wish I could leave"
-oh...well it's nice during summer
"I grew up here. It suck's the life out of you. I bet Texas is better"
-there's got to be something you like about it?
"No. The town I grew up in is an armpit, but I'll always be from there (deep sigh)"
-I see...(tap my card fast as I can)
Well, good luck
--a nice reminder that Perspective can be the difference between heaven and purgatory.
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Jonathan Szeto retweeted
I have infinite respect for the trades, and I think most people who make the pro-trade argument do it from the right place. There is NOTHING shameful about being blue-collar..
But the reason it's "cope" as a standard career for economically displaced right-wingers is:
a) unless you are a business owner, it's not very lucrative (50-75k) & tends to wear down your body (compare this life to the largesse of the white collar, 100k+ remote laptop job)
b) it only furthers the displacement of right-wingers from the institutions and centers of power in the nation
This is why what @Bowtiedplayer is saying is salient - there's a risk of losing institutional power when you tell your kids to eschew elite colleges, as they've been traditional feeders for the ruling class. My counterpoint though is that the university's power is mostly based on prestige - which is a hollow, gatekeeping power - and can be broken by those with actual power abandoning them, so long as they offer alternatives that lead to more power for their kids than they would have had in university.
(I also think by discriminating against white people these past 15-20 years they've basically sealed their fate as irrelevant political incubators in this country, and don't want to bail them out. Does anyone really think Barron Trump needs to go to NYU to have a future in commerce or politics?)
The trades don't offer this alternative path to power. It's maybe smart personally, but if done collectively it's game over for the right as they will have no influence over national policy.
@Pat_Stedman, can you explain to me why the advice getting into the trades is boomer cope? You would agree that there is an increasingly growing need for those skill sets? Why is that cope? That seems wise to me.
One thing I'd add, is that an elite degree loses a lot of its luster the further away from the coasts you get. There's a running joke in the South that when people ask you which school you graduated from, they don't mean college, they mean which high school.
Sure, an Ivy degree turns heads, but the thing is you lose out on the local networks which will make or break your career. And in STEM, nobody cares which university you went to until you get a post-graduate degree.
This is going to be even more true as the money flows out of high-expense blue states like California or New York, and into places like Texas, Tennessee, or Florida. Everybody worries about expats importing their progressive policies, but the reality is that a lot of woke policies like transgender bathrooms and CRT haven't held ground in flyover country and in fact have seen significant pushback.
The situation right now is like the Southern campaign in the late stages of the Revolution. Like the British, the globalist elites have grossly overestimated the amount of support they can get from blue loyalists in flyover country. They're just one or two strategic blunders away from losing everything.
This is a worthy counterpoint, but it honestly still doesn't pass muster to me.
My ivy league degree got me precisely zero career opportunities when you included my politics in the equation. The only job I got through degree was because my boss assumed I was a shitlib like him. You need to at least pay lip service to the club or hide your views to fit in. Everyone, and I mean everyone is on the left or at least globalist. And I graduated in 2010. It's substantially worse now.
Is that a good environment to put your child in? At best you teach them to suppress their opinions to survive socially. At worst you cause them to change teams. And what results exactly are you accepting for these costs - indeed what results are you paying hundreds of dollars for?
If you're rich and well established you already have a network - your kid doesn't need the one they offer you, which again is an insular network anyway. Every non-STEM career path they offer you funnels you directly or indirectly into the system's managerial class, with promotion tied less to competence than allegiance. If that's what you're striving towards, then it makes sense. But if it's not, I struggle to see the ROI. My kids could use their $300k tuition in much better ways.
Tech founders have already shown us whats more important to success is results not pedigree. It's the entrepreneurial attitude that gets you ahead not the credential. Credibility with the in-group is what matters increasingly, not generalized status signals, and I think as we enter the 2030s this mantra will be written into stone for all of society.
Some of course may nevertheless feel called to "infiltrate" the institutions, and I respect that. We need some to do it. But those are people of a certain mindset who know what they're getting into. Aside from these and the hard math/science types however (for whom IVY+ remains required, as they have the best labs and incubators), I see a lot more ROI in leveraging existing networks to create independent, parallel sources of power on the outside. The argument for our kids is not to "get into the trades" (which I agree is right wing boomer cope) but to get into INDUSTRY. Like what @AJA_Cortes is doing with Athenor. We should be supporting the children of like-minded people in our communities, so they have opportunities. Giving them internships and apprenticeships - practical business skills - teaching them how to make money and run companies.
The more well off and connected you are, of course, the more this is in your reach. For the average middle class kid without an existing high-net worth network, no this isn't feasible yet. I get that. If you get a scholarship to an ivy take it. But the only way these parallel networks get created for the middle class kid in the future is through elites like Sean Duffy deciding to start starving the old institutions of talent. Eventually it hits a critical point, and the ivy brand fades, or they undergo their own restructuring to survive, without your child getting brainwashed in the process.
The bottom line is if you have hit millions in assets and have a high powered network you shouldn't feel compelled in ANY way to reach towards the ivies for scraps anymore. You don't need them. Work with your peers to help each others' kids. The end result will be a self-sustaining economic ecosystem that is wealthy and influential in its own right, and not only resilient, but through sheer competence will begin to exfiltrate and degrade the rotting carcass of what exists today.
This is what the 2030s will be about. No use in trying to cling to a sinking ship. Build your own life rafts, or drown.
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This is not a tweet about the weather.
When I was a kid living on the St. John River, every August we slowly stopped swimming. The dog days had arrived. The water warmed, the rocks turned slimy, and the levels dropped. Some years the brave (or stupid) kids would still cross, swimming the narrow (but extremely swift) channel that remained. Inevitably some old-timer would shake his head at Mother Nature for robbing the St. John Valley of a full river.
Had they forgotten it happened every year since the beginning of time?
When I see a post that says we “need” rain, the poster is doing the same thing. They’re forgetting that by the time August rolls around, Maine dries up. It’s been that way for as long as I can remember. Drought maps, news reports, coffee shop talk—it’s all just people trying to explain away a reality that doesn’t need explaining.
Weather amnesia. Was it dry last year? Wet three years ago? Did we have a snowy winter?
Saying we “need” rain implies someone has control, and that your memory insists it used to be wetter. Let me clue you in: it wasn’t.
The maps and the headlines will keep coming. They always do. The river will keep dropping in August the way it always has. The only thing that changes is how loudly people insist it is different this time.
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Jonathan Szeto retweeted
I like @CatholicPods a lot, so I want to frame my criticism respectfully.
In the Christian tradition, East and West, there are two streams of thought on the spiritual life.
The first, and probably the dominant one in the Latin tradition, is that spiritual progress is measured by going from basic to more advanced prayer. So, for example, perhaps as a child, your prayer life was a Morning Offering and an Our Father, Hail Mary, and Glory Be in the evening before bed.
But as an adult, it’s expected that you dedicate a certain amount of time, learn mental prayer, practice Lectio Divina, pray the Rosary, undertake penances/mortifications, etc. For those who are “too busy” to pray for 30 minutes, some Roman Catholic saints quip, “Then you need to pray for an hour!” More isn’t always better, but it oftentimes is, and so Christian perfection comes as you learn how to “develop” your prayer life into mature, advanced form.
The second stream of thought, and something more common in the East (though certainly not exclusive to it, see St. Thérèse of Lisieux for example) is to do little things well, with great love. There’s the apocryphal story of the ultra-zealous convert who goes to Mount Athos—the S tier of Eastern Christian monasticism —and is scandalized when the monks tell him to sleep in the bed, and not on the floor; to eat meat and not fast; and to read Charles Dickens (!) When the neophyte confronts the old monks, he’s told that if he wants to learn how to be truly ascetic and great, he needs to learn humility and be open to things like balance and moderation.
I suspect that the idea of Vance “only” praying 2 decades of the Rosary is scandalous only to those who quantify the spiritual life, adopting the first model, and think that the only thing preventing a collapse into sin and vice is by mortifying our bodies with hair shirts and praying in large amounts. But in the East, many renowned ascetics argue that the simple Jesus Prayer— “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner”—said intentionally and sincerely, is a more authentic prayer rule than 150 prostrations and fasts done with spiritual pride.
As a general rule, I think we should be careful when publicly speaking about prayer rules. We can speak objectively about kinds of prayer and methods, but we need to be VERY cautious when trying to apply them subjectively to people we do not personally know and do not have spiritual authority over. Just like fasting, it’s always better to assume that a practicing Christian’s practice is consistent with what they have been counseled to do. Perhaps Vance started out praying the full Rosary every day and novenas, and a confessor suggested he scale it back and do less with more love.
A person’s prayer life is the most intimate part of his soul, and therefore, we should always have a sense of caution before making assumptions about the life of grace in another person’s soul. And as a school principal, I’ll end it with this: our school janitor models Christian humility and prayerfulness in a way that constantly makes me realize how much farther I need to go to be the kind of person God desires me to be. Holiness is the vocation of all, but the means to attaining that holiness for each individual is between God, their confessor, and the saint-to-be.
This quoted post is unavailable.
This probably explains why many of my Catholic friends from high school are now ex-Catholics.
This quoted post is unavailable.
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Jonathan Szeto retweeted
To the highly intelligent man, logic even more than money is his God. He will worship it vigorously, dismissing anything that does not obey it, believing it contains the answers to all things even as he perverts and corrupts it to suit his biases.
He will cling to reason desperately. He will not relegate it until it fails him in the most catastrophic of ways, and he becomes intimately aware of its acute limitations. Then and only then will he gain an appreciation for chaos, death, paradox and spirituality. Then and only then will he realise logic does not have the answers to all things. Only then will he realise how prideful and ignorant he has been.
It is for these reasons he has love: to show him the foolishness of his ways - that his reason is not a God that governs all, but a tool of understanding that can explain many things, but not all things, that can help him master many things, but not everything.
There exists a reality beyond the limitations of his logic, and it will batter down his doors in his smug, self-protective hubris until he is humbled. He is a zealot, and he will come kicking and screaming. For a man’s rationality to fail him then is a type of initiation - it is for this reason he must come to know heartbreak.
Jonathan Szeto retweeted
Don't argue nuance with someone who just wants to be right. They believe they're correct, because what they think is the limit of their capacity to understand a thing, their bias, or their preference. They are not interested in the truth. Only in feeling cleverer than you.
This isn’t just about male-female relationships.
It’s also about the relationship a man forms with the organizations he’s affiliated with. If things aren’t going great, men will silently check out. And then the organization will wonder where all the good men went.
(I’m looking at you, American churches.)
Every woman who wants a successful relationship needs to understand male nature.
Men and women are not equal.
Men will:
• Stay silent when hurt.
• Think deeply but show less.
• Test loyalty through actions.
• Observe more than they speak.
• Lose interest when unappreciated.
• Avoid vulnerability as it’s high-risk.
• Stop explaining when misunderstood.
• Value peace of mind over attention.
• Distance themselves when disrespected.
Accept men as they are, not as you wish them to be ladies.
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Jonathan Szeto retweeted
Look, Peter.
I know you are trying. I appreciate that.
My family fought in the Revolutionary War. The recent ones are buried in Arlington.
I am here to tell you there is no such thing as 50 percent American.
You either are, or you ain’t.
You are. Balaji ain’t.
Tibor Rubin was not born in America. He won the Medal of Honor. Lord Haw-Haw was born British. He broadcast for the Nazis. Soil decides nothing. Direction decides everything.
Being American does not mean you never stumble. Americans do un-American things the way mortals sin. We are human. We fall for propaganda. We swallow media lies. We make mistakes. Sometimes, in the worst moments, we secretly dream of escaping somewhere quieter.
This is a Christian nation, and the standard for being American is the same as the standard for being Christian. Are you walking toward the light, or into the darkness?
Nobody is asking you to turn your back on your culture. Nobody is asking you to change the fundamentals of who you are.
There are sins I fall into repeatedly. Sins I cannot seem to shake no matter how hard I try.
Does that make me less Christian? No.
What would make me less Christian is refusing to name the sin. Petitioning others to leave the church. Promoting the sin. Sneering at the people who walk the straight path while I stumble.
The bar for being American is lower than the bar for being Christian. But a bar exists.
Do you acknowledge your differences? Are you walking toward a better America, or away from it? Do you take time to honor the people who died for American ideals?
Are you here to squeeze out money or fame or power for yourself? Our are you hear to contribute to all?
What makes Balaji un-American is not even his commie utopian propaganda. That is a symptom.
His real sin was posting that anti-American horseshit ON MEMORIAL DAY.
That’s the closest thing to a litmus test we have.
If you stopped and said a quiet prayer on Monday. You’re probably American.
If you do not have the decency to keep your mouth shut about fleeing the country on the most reverent day of the American year, while Gold Star families are weeping over folded flags, you ain’t. You are a tourist with a passport.
Welcome to America Peter.
Probably you already know it, but I am a first-generation immigrant. I don’t talk about these things publicly because I believe I do not have the right to. However, what I can say is I came to the US with the full intention of assimilating. No flag flies in my house other than the American flag. I am actively studying American history, practicing American traditions, and making my home as American as possible. I immigrated, in part, because I was culturally more aligned with Americans than with any of my former countrymen.
People like Balaji (I know a bunch of immigrants like him) don’t want to be American. They just want the money. That creates a balkanized country, and we all know how that ends. Worst of all, they don’t care about American traditions and culture and see them as disposable. Moreover, as I found out lately, American culture is its people. I can participate but will never fully be part of it. So what’s the point of trying to “become” American even though I will never be one completely? I do it for my children and grandchildren. If I manage to be 50% American, maybe they’ll be 80%, and those after them will be 100%. That’s why I do it.