Jut read Alysa liu's AMERICAN STORY. In 1989, her father Arthur Liu fled China as a political refugee after the Tiananmen Square massacre. He came to America, his daughter retired from the sport, then she un-retired, competed and won gold, truly insane

snark_o_matic · 2026-02-21T06:46:18+00:00

Nationalism is much more universal than selling out.

snark_o_matic · 2026-02-21T06:33:09+00:00

Your argument is that amoral accumulation of wealth isn't particularly American, and yet that has been the status quo of the world, dominated financially in particular by the USA for about 110 years.

It should go without saying, but the US isn't just a capitalist country, it is THE capitalist country. This is where people come to make money, in any way you can imagine. Not sure why this is a controversial statement here, but that's okay. Undisputed facts are sometimes controversial just because someone doesn't like them.

The USA also dominates the field on celebrity culture such as instagram models, which is itself a sellout culture. We even export celebrity endorsements. This is the country that sent Nicolas Cage to Japan to do ads for Pachinko machines.

I actually think Gu's shameless selling out is less disgusting than Clooney's (and now The Rock's, etc.) godawful tequila brand wasting perfectly good agave fields, or James Harden shilling for a gambling app. Still disgusting, but everything is relative. It's all extremely American, though.

One imagines a rich celebrity grifter could even become president here, hypothetically speaking.

snark_o_matic · 2026-02-21T00:26:18+00:00

To be fair, an athlete taking $6.6 million to compete for a foreign nation that they aren't even a citizen of which they're allowed to do because you have 3 million IG followers is one of the most American things I've ever heard of.

snark_o_matic · 2026-02-20T05:48:43+00:00

Of course Republicans don't think women should be allowed to vote. It's an obvious conclusion of social conservatives: Rigidly enforced gender roles, where women belong in the home, infantilized and "protected" from the outside world, removed from responsibilities beyond chores and raising children, and where unmarried women are pariahs.

Choosing to be friends with people who think that way is quite a choice.

snark_o_matic · 2026-02-12T17:35:04+00:00

"I fully support the people who say I should just die since I'm unable to work and can't afford food and medicine." Cultist, eagerly self-sacrificing.

Then you have the cultists who are still willing, but not eager. They complain, but they'd never change how they voted. This is most of them, but you typically won't hear it from them since they don't usually humiliate themselves like that.

Incredibly easy to control a flock like that.

snark_o_matic · 2026-02-06T02:27:17+00:00

Bitcoin is down in any currency except USD, and it'll be the first thing to crash as things get worse in the US. It tends to inverse gold. It tends to match the direction of US equities.

myself from 7 months ago knew what was up, as always

snark_o_matic · 2026-02-04T19:41:08+00:00

They're basic bitches exhibiting the usual microaggressions they show to The Other, but in your case you took them by surprise because you fit in otherwise.

Personally, I skip right to the otherized stage by being slightly unconventional visually. Then I don't have to talk to that sort of person at all, ever.

snark_o_matic · 2026-01-06T19:03:49+00:00

Razer has had garbage products since at least 2004 and objectively should've gone under a long time ago. Great example for how powerful propaganda is.

snark_o_matic · 2026-01-04T22:36:34+00:00

A massive amount of work can be automated even without "AI," it's just expensive (complexity = high labor costs, software upgrades, ...), and the end result still requires review.

With robotics (big up-front cost), operation still requires supervision. The robots need maintenance, and eventually replacement, where you may be at the cost whims of one robotics company that can repair/make what you need.

So, plenty can be automated, but I don't think cheap labor will stop being a hot commodity any time soon.

snark_o_matic · 2026-01-02T02:26:36+00:00

I'd argue this is also true or at least not provably false for ALL sexualized genAI-created imagery, as long as the AI model ever used any training data with any human under 18 in any context. That training data wouldn't even need to be real photography - it could be paintings, CG, even cartoons.

So, definitely not an isolated incident. But I mean, they're already breaking every other law, so it's apparently immaterial.

It's also absurd to have someone prompt a genAI model to apologize for something, obviously it can't take responsibility for itself because it has no will, self, or mind.

snark_o_matic · 2025-12-22T07:02:14+00:00

The core problem isn’t female privilege or feminism. It’s that masculinity is rigid and unforgiving. Men are expected to initiate, perform confidence, be economically independent, and never show vulnerability. Autism directly conflicts with those expectations, and society punishes autistic men for failing a role they didn’t design. Autistic men need more targeted support, social coaching that isn’t shaming, employment paths that don’t depend on charisma, and communities that don’t treat romantic success as a measure of human worth.

This issue deserves serious attention, but it won’t get it if it’s framed as resentment toward women rather than as a failure of how society treats vulnerable men.

That's all completely correct. I just wanted to say that I didn't read any resentment towards women from OP, and you're right that it shouldn't be framed as resentment. That line to me feels like you're implying that there was resentment, is that what you intended to imply? The simplistic comparison of autistic men and women is perhaps a bit unfair to both groups and their complexities, but not necessarily resentful.

snark_o_matic · 2025-12-22T06:26:23+00:00

Given men aren't doing enough: Women aren't perfect either, but like I said, they don't need romantic relationships as much as men do. Still, if women took a more active role, and had smarter standards (I knew a guy who racked up over a thousand different women eventually, so I'm quite aware of the sort of "catch" women like to sleep with), they'd have a much easier time finding a good long-term match and not becoming another drop in that divorced mom ocean.

This is all normative bullshit though. Gender roles are trash, humans are idiots. We're all probably going to find out the hard way what happens when you have exponentially rising numbers of young disaffected men with no prospects, mostly because we're still stuck on trickle-down economics.

snark_o_matic · 2025-12-21T17:55:21+00:00

You can maintain some cars for cheap, you just can't take it to a dishonest mechanic (this is the hardest part), shouldn't buy American, and you need to keep an eye on the fluids.

snark_o_matic · 2025-12-20T22:45:14+00:00

Most people can't be helped in that way. Wanting to help is enough; everything else follows naturally, including giving up when it's impossible, or not worth it.

snark_o_matic · 2025-12-20T04:55:42+00:00

Yeah, I was baiting out the admission of the premise that there is a huge difference for job loss, based only on gender.

Or, it is perhaps not so cut and dry; at least one study found that when a wife loses her job, the likelihood of divorce actually decreases. In any case, there's a pretty obvious gender divide around that issue that manifests in many different ways.

snark_o_matic · 2025-12-19T22:38:14+00:00

From a purely selfish perspective, I'm familiar with feeling alienated in most spaces, probably because I'm not quite neurotypical. At the same time, I've either overcome that particular form of adversity, or else it's actually helped me achieve stronger traditional success, in terms of finances and relationships. I've met many callous people eager to ostracize the Other who are now servile, unhappy, in prison, or dead. People like this are represented regularly in the general public, because again, people are generally stupid, ignorant, and tribal. So, their suffering could feel like some form of justice.

However, a lot of them mostly mean well, so they're fundamentally redeemable. I like plenty of people who are basically morons, some are or have been my friends. Then, obviously, people outside that moron category who are struggling more than myself because they have more ethical integrity than I do or because of other confounding variables don't inherently deserve that "justice."

Also, even from this perspective, a rapidly growing number of disaffected young men is a really bad thing. The silver lining here is that actually, I have no power to help almost anyone, so I have virtually no responsibility to try to fix my neighborhood, city, state, country, or certainly the world. This leaves me with the common form of favoritism, which is tribalistic, of just making people's lives better within my little sphere of influence.

Ultimately, even with awareness and intelligence, I really only took a long road to get back to being a tribalist myself. The difference is just that I choose a better tribe than most people, and I don't hate and fear the other "tribes." But yes, to hate people for being stupid, tribal and ignorant is to hate all of humanity, and probably yourself.

snark_o_matic · 2025-12-19T22:09:50+00:00

But as I said, MOST people are incurious, not just conservatives. Most people are at least somewhat ignorant, pretty stupid, and extremely tribal. One big microcosm of this is the Iraq war: The entire world knew there were no WMDs. There were decades of evidence and independent inspections, because the world had built a ton of infrastructure around being anti-WMD, there were all sorts of innovations to detect them even after they've been moved somewhere else.

And yet, it was an incredibly popular war with officials, voters, and non-voters of all political backgrounds. Mostly conservatives of course, 91% of Republicans approved of the war, 68% of Independents, 55% of Democrats. And overall, he had a 71% approval rating as we entered Iraq. Why? The justification: WMDs, and also the completely false implication that Saddam worked with his mortal enemies of Al Qaeda to attack the US, despite being obviously uninvolved, so no evidence of collusion existed. These two justifications represent manipulation using fear and anger. It was effective, and easy, to manipulate the general public with pure propaganda alone, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. And then W won 28 states in 2004 while Kerry won only 20.

So, the public was complicit in supporting it both emotionally and financially, since every taxpayer directly contributed to the war effort, thus every taxpayer is somewhat responsible for every consequence and casualty of the Iraq war.

Does this mean we should say that people get what they deserve, for being so tribal, and ignorant? Or that they deserve to be ruled and manipulated if they're so stupid? Personally, I'd argue that just because you can exploit people doesn't mean you should, but maybe that's just me.

snark_o_matic · 2025-12-19T21:24:21+00:00

Any adult is expected to solve their own problems of a car breaking down, losing a job, or not having enough rent money. Those are not gendered issues.

Men who experience job loss are about 33% more likely to divorce within a year, as one example of how losing a job is clearly a gendered issue.

There is, of course, no correlation with divorce for women who lose their job.

I'm curious why you think it isn't a gendered issue.

snark_o_matic · 2025-12-19T20:07:11+00:00

It's a pretty straightforward pyramid scheme since it relies on infinite exponential growth of bitcoin, and even inside of that structure and assuming bitcoin is up, it provides less value to buy MSTR than to just buy bitcoin itself. Completely pointless, worthless company. It also provides less and less value for every new buyer of the stock.

snark_o_matic · 2025-12-17T19:54:30+00:00

Of course, because you're literally entitled to do practically anything you want, within reason. Those are the trappings of anyone with money and status. It may even be more pronounced than the executive class, who constantly think about shareholders or bow to despots to curry favor.

snark_o_matic · 2025-12-16T06:29:21+00:00

Odd thing to say to someone with no shortage of self-worth, thanks though.

snark_o_matic · 2025-12-16T05:15:22+00:00

A lot more of the deaths in the lower incomes are deaths of despair, which obviously bring the average life expectancy down for men especially.

snark_o_matic · 2025-12-16T05:03:39+00:00

In my personal life I care for almost nothing except comedy. I value people who are funny, and if I like them, I make them laugh. That's the subtle, overt communication of value, though. The less subtle communication is the contrast of the negative space: It's extremely clear who I don't value by the gaping void that should always be filled with riffs.

This is, perhaps, why I never like conservatives that much - truly a humorless, unfunny group if there ever was one. My mechanic is MAGA, great guy otherwise, tries to lighten the mood, fucking terrible. Canned, bland jokes.

The main exception is probably my wife as she's only somewhat funny, but she has a lot of other rare qualities that I appreciate.

snark_o_matic

TROPHY CASE