Charles Gordon

Cluster B awareness

[Charles Gordon @FatherProgress]

@edelnougat @memeticsisyphus It would be worth your time to read dominion by Tom holland.

[Charles Gordon @FatherProgress]

@Devon_Eriksen_ Isn’t the problem with ME3 not specifically the ending but the lack of endings?

[Charles Gordon @FatherProgress]

@lauracainndy @BigBoris_2 The same way people stop and watch the scene of a car accident lol

[Charles Gordon @FatherProgress]

@Horry_HB @Hypermelony7 I definitely see that. Someone compared ME2 to the Canterbury tales, which I think is an apt description.

With AI anything is possible these days. Who wants to fix Mass Effect? lol

[Charles Gordon @FatherProgress]

@santinolee5 @DeathKi76976489 @Mangalawyer Do they work on 11?

[Charles Gordon @FatherProgress]

@RazorFist Nothing has prepared me for the ME2 slander I’ve seen today.

[Charles Gordon @FatherProgress]

This underscores a core issue with gaming and story telling in general.

Few if any writers are actually reading great works of literature, or studying what makes stories compelling. Gaming’s demise is built into thinking great literature is just “heteronormative white cis oppression.”

[Charles Gordon @FatherProgress]

@BlotterMonkey Sin

[Charles Gordon @FatherProgress]

@DocStrangelove2 Those strollers are getting sprayed with lead dust.

RIP baby’s ears if these retards ever did this

[Shawn T. Smith @ironshrink]

“Couples counseling is where marriages go to die.”

I’ve seen that phrase banging around here lately, and it’s a strange sentiment. It’s true in some cases, but not for reasons you might assume. I’ll come back to that. While I generally disagree with the notion, I think I understand where it comes from.

For starters, people generally distrust psychologists, and I don’t blame them. The loudest voices in my profession have not shown themselves to be trustworthy.

Current example: there’s a real possibility @APA could lose accrediting authority because the organization is a Marxist, gender-ideology dumpster fire. They act as if their first responsibility is to advance their political ideology, and psychology is simply the vehicle for doing so. The public sees this.

(I’d like to point out that I was calling @APA a bunch of ideological hacks long before it was cool to call them ideological hacks.)

A second reason the sentiment sounds reasonable is closely related to the first. My profession is absolutely dominated by women, and most of those women are of a strong leftist/feminist bent. That doesn’t make them bad therapists. I know plenty of leftist female psychologists who I trust implicitly because they keep their politics out of the clinic.

It’s the ones who can’t keep their politics in their pants that, again, make the rest of us look bad. “Our marriage counselor was a feminist harpy who just sat there and told my ex-wife she was right.” These horror stories aren’t particularly rare (though some of them are exercises in ego-protection). True or not, the stories spread fast… and many of them are true.

But what about good therapy? How come you never hear those stories?

It’s simple. When therapy is conducted by a skilled professional, and it goes well, you *shouldn’t* hear about it. What’s said in therapy stays in therapy. That is as it’s meant to be, but it’s an inherent marketing problem for the profession.

Under those conditions, saying “couples counseling is where marriages go to die” is like saying “the stock market is where people go to lose all their money.” Yeah, sometimes it’s true. Sometimes it isn’t. Overgeneralizing is how you deprive yourself of a tool that might otherwise be useful. And that’s all that couples counseling is: a tool.

I’ve worked with a lot of couples. Sometimes, the marriage is simply DOA. Sometimes — and this is a well-known phenomenon — one or both sides of the couple seek therapy as a means to end the marriage because they didn’t know another way to start that conversation. In those cases, marriage counseling truly is where the marriage goes to die.

However, other couples use therapy for what it is: one tool among many to keep things running smoothly. The worst therapist in the world couldn’t destroy these marriages because these couples don’t view their relationships as a product of external forces.

Instead, they possess what used to be called an internal locus of control… a term that unfortunately seems to have fallen out of favor. No one with an internal locus of control would ever say, “couple therapy is where MY marriage came to die.”

[Charles Gordon @FatherProgress]

@slob924 @Cyael She’s grotesque.

[Patrick Lockwood @AlobhaPatrick]

Kid therapy should always be voluntary.

Most kid issues, however, can be solved with parent coaching or therapy

[Christian Heiens 🏛 @ChristianHeiens]

If these people had their way, nothing beautiful would ever be built again and all of society's resources would be poured into babysitting barbarians from the Third World forever.

We are held hostage by the bottom rung of society who weaponize our own morality against us in order to continue leeching off us like the human parasites they are.

[Charles Gordon @FatherProgress]

@FreddyLA7 Visit Baylor while you’re there!

[Charles Gordon @FatherProgress]

@GenePark There to take care of the girl bosses no doubt

[Charles Gordon @FatherProgress]

@nathano235 If you interact with enough poor people you come to understand rather quickly it is a character issue.

[Charles Gordon @FatherProgress]

@ajaybolt0 You came across like a woke hall monitor. Doesn’t usually go over well.

Is there really a question why stuff like this exists?

[Charles Gordon @FatherProgress]

@hellokillian She’s embraced the Chuds. The chuds have followed suit

[nic carter @nic_carter]

The WSJ starting to admit the obvious: Western democracy when combined with fiscally negative immigration and a generous welfare state, inexorably creates a solvency crisis. (they didn't mention the immigration part but it's an essential ingredient in the toxic mix)

their words are unusually stark:

> It’s also a litmus test of a pressing question facing the West: Is it possible for political leaders to rein in spending on ever expanding welfare states? So far, the answer seems to be no, increasing the chances that countries like Britain are inching toward a financial reckoning.

the welfare state + open borders model is a clear democracy failure mode and there's no obvious way out. no western European nation will reform pensions or entitlements. they are actually fundamentally incapable of doing what must be done. (the immigration aspect is virtual corollary to democracy because it creates incentives for the left to import reliable voters, so at least part of the time immigration is virtually unfettered.)

the UK, with maximum, unending immigration, an aging and shrinking workforce, a tiny and overexploited base of taxpayer paypigs, highly financialized service / financial industry, a legacy of welfare as political payoffs to disenfranchised groups, an inability to cut pensions, and a stagnant, is the poster child for this disease and the worst affected but by no means the only nation in this predicament.

the UK's grim fiscal state is the future of every western nation, unless something changes dramatically.

aging population + increasingly discouraged working-age adults + highly mobile capital & elites that simply leave under onerous tax regimes + mass and unending fiscally negative immigration + expensive decarbonization and deindustralization + a left wing that is totally committed to immigration, over all else + a total inability to cut entitlements = fiscal crisis and eventual default

in the end, the wealthy and the entrepreneur class that actually power growth will simply leave to escape the tightening tax noose. the government will become increasingly reliant on the middle/upper middle professional classes who lack the ability to leave, completely eliminating any motive to be entrepreneurial or take risks. the economy will become increasingly torpid as dynamism vanishes. the left will continue to gain power due to slow electoral build of immigration and will continue to honor their side of the deal, which is neverending handouts to fiscally useless electoral client groups.

case studies like south africa, venezuela and lebanon show us that life can get worse, and worse, and worse, and worse and worse. things getting extremely bad are not a guarantee that they won't continue to get worse. don't be fooled by anticipating a sudden realization among political elites that they have employed the wrong formula. things can just get steadily worse for decades and decades with no escaping the slide.

if I had to guess, I would venture that if no MAJOR (and I'm talking _major_) political reform occurs in western Europe, the continent will enter a sovereign debt crisis in the coming decade, standards of living will collapse, life expectancy will collapse, entitlements will be ravaged. I anticipate something akin to the effect that the collapse of the Soviet Union had on the local population, or worse. politics will be polarized between the ultraright and far left, each with their own radical solution to the problem (extirpating immigrants, versus actual socialism). I don't know which of the two will prevail. neither the right nor the left is willing to reform entitlements, which is the biggest problem, and so the market will do it for them. the US may escape their fate, but I am not particularly optimistic it will. our demographics and willingness to do hard things (on immigration, eg) are marginally better, but our spending and fraud-based entitlement economy is almost just as bad. no major party will even contemplate uttering that boomer luxury communism must end eventually. it's not even a topic in the midterms nor will it be in '28.

the productivity boost from AI might grant European nations a slight reprieve in the medium term, but it wont salvage their bleak fiscal situation in the end. this is because almost no European nation controls the industrial inputs to AI (beyond ASML), so their gain is limited to the productivity uplift from deployment of the technology, while they remain vassals to the nations which actually control the deeper stack. moreover, a GDP and tax revenue boost from AI can easily be outspent. these nations have a spending problem, not a revenue problem. they can always dream up utterly farcical new handout schemes, like the UK's "motability". additionally, while AI creates a legion of highly productive entrepreneurs, they will all tax optimize and the benefits of new firms will largely not be captured by their respective governments. capital and startups are more portable than they have ever been. AI simply accelerates the pareto-ization of the economy whereby a shrinking minority of founders produces more value whilst more and more are idle and depend on handouts from the productive few. however, capital and human capital mobility destroys this fragile arrangement and strips the idle many of their benefactors. AI buys Western Europe at most a few years of delay to the inevitable crisis.