• 0 Posts
  • 15 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle
  • Intro thoughts, feel free to skip to next paragraph: What you’re basically suggesting (based off edit) is the massive and unrelenting attack on our more base urges. My boyfriend says this is “peripheral route persuasion”, and it includes sex appeal and also things like happy people drinking Coke. Indeed advertising almost exclusively uses these tactics to get you to buy something (or at least remember) within 30 seconds or less.

    But I think you’re getting at the main core of human interaction, where the natural order of people is to act based off of emotion and not really think about it. Alternately, you can put your mind into big-brain thinking mode and make a salient choice to not drink brown spiced lemon fizzy sugar water.

    The Elaboration Likelihood Model essentially assumes that “As motivation and/or ability to process arguments is decreased, peripheral cues become relatively more important determinants of persuasion. Conversely, as argument scrutiny is increased, peripheral cues become relatively less important determinants of persuasion.” These peripheral cues can be hormone based, for example. Therefore, it suggests a central route of information processing (think hard about it), and a peripheral route of information processing (gut feeling).

    This is any information, not just persuasion. You see hot girl on street, you consider your car looks cool, you try to pick her up by using your*(edit) car as evidence to hop in.

    Btw, in the Wikipedia article they literally spell out the consequences of this theory in Politics, Advertising and Media (all of it).





  • I was in highschool suffering from multiple mental health disorders and social isolation. I was smart sure, but as I later learned you can’t outsmart your own brain. What it took was finding a girl, as studious and hard working as me, but even more stressed and destroyed by home life and a destructive boyfriend that preyed on their undiagnosed autism and major depression. It started when I simply told them that their emotions mattered, that they mattered as a person. Suddenly I was confronted with a person in their most stressful senior year, previously a danger to their own self, offloading their sorrows to me in need of anything resembling emotional support.

    I had to learn (the hard way sometimes) how to listen, and listen with intent. I felt this urge, this duty to help, no matter how little I could do with how I was faring. I felt like if I didn’t do this, I would regret it for the rest of my life. It eventually lead to friendship into a relationship on fundamental compatibility, but I didn’t have any of those feelings at the beginning. I just accepted their texts, their calls, the first ones I had ever made to someone outside of school. It was the first time I ever felt I had a purpose. It was the first time I felt like I could do what was right, rather than what was expected.

    Our relationship is rekindling as we both near college graduation. We’re far more stable now, but we crave our scant few hours shared on weekends. I can feel my life trajectory flying wildly out of prediction as the day they move in with me nears. However, I know that if it was anything like the last time, I can afford to be bold and to be true to myself. It’s one thing for your life trajectory to change, but it’s another to be committed to making it as good as possible.


  • Always glad to brush up on my acts of mass terrorism/righteous defenses of sovereignty*.

    *Note: This is barely a funny, I legitimately have nowhere near enough knowledge on the topic, not even superficially. 14,000 words of Wikipedia article spanning 4 centuries? Just the Wikipedia article? Damn…


  • I’ve got a Linux work server because VHDL simulations are hella expensive. I have to say that if your team isn’t willing to RTF-Man pages, you end up with a lot of cargo cult CLI processes. No crystalized knowledge or training, it’s hard to start up in it. It’s enough that requiring explicit Linux experience for new hires is preferable. Windows sadly has the familiarity benefit. And don’t get me started on the wacky custom solutions the IT set up circa 2002…





  • Don’t let schadenfreude and tribalism blind you for the reasons for disliking this person. You don’t win in politics if your opponent dies from old age, you win by shifting the forces that decide elections. Cheering on the… lets see here… inescapable march of time on a human’s body invites much the same onto yourself in the future. That is, don’t laugh at old people deteriorating if you don’t want younguns in the future to laugh at you or your grandma. It’s a journey that we all take, and I feel like it should have some dignity in it.

    I wish he and his family good health, and that the political structure around him fades into history.


  • The layers on this one is astounding. Someone with legitimate artistic talent had to make 6-layered fandom/furry content. Then someone (named yuri, no less) used it as a nuclear level reply to a PragerU bait tweet. I want to deconstruct it, to fully describe why it works so well, but I won’t out of pure respect.




  • America will always fight wars because their interests in resources, political alliances, and ideological stability. It’s for the money. It’s always the money at the end.

    America is the cultural and military hegemon due to the proliferation of free trade enforced through an unmatched navy. America becomes more powerful by maintaining this status quo. It’s why dangers to the oil supply have driven 3 out of the 4 examples you rightfully point out. Sadly the Middle East is the oilbasket of the world with the worst borders ever designed. If you want energy, you spread influence there.

    However, there is one instance where the interests of the USA align with the general interest of the average Westerner.

    People don’t like democracies getting invaded. And potential democratic trade partners getting invaded is bad for business. You can have both at the same time. I will not defend the Gulf War under this banner, but the faster that we can prove that land grabs are nonnegotiable in this Pax Americana, the better.

    And also, you don’t have to convince me that war is inefficient. I’ve read Catch-22. But you do have to convince me that the destabilization of the breadbasket of Europe (and the world) is less important than the opportunity cost of a couple million lost to a few hundred corrupt officials.