2D3D
7d ago
Has there been an exhaustive deep dive on this board on why the fuck Aella has so much traction in 'rationalist' spaces? Its like nerd porn except it reduces actual sexual activity to shit even Sheldon Cooper would find autistic. That there exists a client base of horny nerds who can afford any dubai portapotty slattern but instead choose to go for a mid tier data analyst who feeds her cock counter into excel spreadsheets and orgasms to the graphs instead of the act.
2D3D
1yr ago
SEX AND THE BIG CITY
or
THE LAST UNINVADEABLE THIRD SPACE
In the digital age of escorts on demand and cheap flights to indulge in sex tourism, why would adult entertainment venues that offer sex-adjacent services persist, when one can get your rocks off for a much cheaper price? In observed practice within Asia, these venues exist not for booze and girls, but for establishing membership in the brotherhood: you are in our world now, and the initiation is sin.
This came about after I made a post about the adult entertainment scene in Singapore in a necro'ed thread when I saw @Pasha complain about the lack of visible seediness in one of Singapores premier red light districts. Details about the mechanics therein can be found here for context and to provide a primer for my below.
https://www.themotte.org/post/981/smallscale-question-sunday-for-april-28/211124?context=8#context
So what is this brotherhood mentioned up top? Basically it can be summed up as 'I need to know you will not fuck me over when push comes to shove'. This is perhaps foreign to professionalised pseudoacademics where people are best experienced as minimizeable windows on a zoom call, but in professions relating to physical goods and services, human trust is a shorthand for task success: better to get shit done with someone you know has your back than to waste tims searching for the MBA approved 'best fit'.
This is not limited to physical tradespeople like laborers and soldiers, but includes B2B sales professionals, commodity traders, shipbrokers, construction/civil engineering. In these environments, decision makers responsible for multi million dollar trades and projects care less about saving a rounding errors worth of marginal savings in favor of knowing who to yell at when shit goes tits up.
In the KTVs and Indian Dance Clubs and Thai Discos in Singapore, the patrons are often groups of men, usually professionals in the same cluster. Oil traders and refinery site managers, construction project managers and engineers with their lawyers and bankers, shipbrokers with agents. The booze and the women show up, the mens wallets open up, but more importantly their mouths open too. Industry gossip is adjacent to insider activity, and being part of these networks gives incredible insight into the movements and activities of not just the people in that group you are with but those groups they are part of as well. By joining or initiating these activities, an opportunity is presented to quickly establish a bond with the other men present, to immediately let it he known that you can be called upon when needed. There is incredible power to be had when you are one of the first names on the tips of powerful peoples fingers, and for many punters a successful night is not when your dick gets wet but when you get the phone number of a useful contact.
So why the sex revue? Well it is because of the steady decline of third spaces that have been invaded by credentialed professionals, especially women, who dislike legacy networks that are impenetrable. There are legit professional reasons for this, such as contravening of KYC protocols or tender processes, but for the most part the dislike of legacy networks stems from jealousy. There are plenty of women who have successfully entered halls of power, especially in Thailand and Hong Kong where female scions are groomed for succession by their fathers, but for the most part a lack of trust in these women to bother with handshake agreements leads to their exclusion from networks of power. Thus, the networks must be dismantled as much as possible, starting with removing the exclusivity of their assembly grounds. Male only social clubs have steadily been eroded to be female inclusive, from the Knights of Columbus to Freemasons, and other threads have highlighted youth organizations being the starting point of this rot, with the Boy Scouts being mixed gender while girl scouts remain female exclusive. Whatever organizational benefit there is to opening up the genders, it does mean there are less third spaces for men to discuss the ongoings of power.
Therefore, the last venue is the strip club, the sauna, the banya, the KTV. The men say they are going there to be sexual degenerates, and many often are purely socially retarded men seeking base human interactions, but the true sustenance of these places is being the third place that women have zero interest in demeaning themselves to enter. That alone will ensure their continued presence even as the world gets continually anonymized into the homogenous digital soup: the last bastions of human connections will concentrate under the pressure, hardening its borders to continual external forces till they are fully impenetrable.
2D3D
1yr ago
no real experience beyond consuming KDramas.
Someones experienced the east asian dating sphere and knows the horror for himself. Virginal asian girls really live a cloistered life totally unknown to their foreign counterparts, even indian, and the girls who are put off by obnoxious yellow fevered men are unlikely to waste time dating asians either. For great fun see if these girls read webnovels, those things are hilariously smutty and gay.
2D3D
1yr ago
You have no idea. Good east asian girls are a totally unknown quantity to westerners because these girls generally didn't date at all and find even nebbish whites too aggressively forward. These girls also have their preference profiles shaped by the most asinine Kdrama shit, and their expectations for male behavior are simultaneously low and ridiculously high. While more leeway is given to whites in terms of cultural compliance, less leeway is given for emotional unintelligence. This is a huge warning sign because these girls have no experience in managing their own emotional states under duress and present a totally unknown variable even to themselves.
2D3D
1yr ago
Propaganda about female infidelity while men die in the trenches is as old as language has been invented. Even now there are constant jokes about Navy wives being Coastie girlfriends, and thats peacetime. This propaganda is more for internal consumption of the propaganda generator (look how stupid they are for continuing to fight us!) instead of the propaganda receiver.
I also think 'residents want to part of russia anyways' is pretty disingenuous. Slovyansk and Mariupol both told Russia to fuck off, not to mention Odessa and Kharkiv. Crimea, meaning Sevastapol only, is about the only case where arguing for Russian loyalty is possible, since Donestk and Luhansk needed Little Green Men to invade. Nevertheless, Donestk and aluhansk likely hold little love for Kyiv, so Novorissiya is still extant.
The simple fact is that Ukrainians aren't fighting for NATO, they're fighting to not he Russia. There is direct evidence of how Russia treated its holdings in Ukraine, with Mariupol being a wasteland and torture centers being set up in Kherson. One can readily calculate that while the west may be hypocrites, the Russians will not be kind masters as weirdly envisioned by anti-progressives.
2D3D
11mo ago
I confess to forgetting about muslims. If its a palestinian (black haired man, so not a small chance its an arab) with a social media history of pro-palestinian leanings I will fucking laugh. I think an attempt will be made to make the shooter right wing regardless of leaning, like how Europe defines muslim antisemitism as right wing because islamism is a right wing ideology according to the authorities. In this case if the shooter at any point expressed concerns about state overreach he will be cast as right wing, if the fact that he held a gun without bursting into flames isn't enough for that label to be thrown.
If its MUSLIM, fully expect it to be entirely memory holed and for endless pro-islam marches to be made. Pulse nightclub is now cast as a right wing incel attack, and the Fort Hood and DC sniper attacks are also forgotten. Fuck even 911 is forgotten by leftists who find it irritating that America dared to strike back against brown terrorists.
I honestly doubt its a right wing gun nut. Any gun enthusiast will know that a .22 is a joke round and will go for .223, 30-06 or .308 for an assassination. Someone using a .22 seems just bafflingly incompetent.
2D3D
11mo ago
Peace comes through cessation of conflict, and belligerents need to get smacked over the head enough to realize it isn't worth it to continue fighting someone who is able to ruin you effortlessly. Armenia stopped resisting when Azerbaijan overran Nagarno-Karabakh effortlessly, Gaddafi died ignobly following NATO airstrikes, Serbia got its shit pushed in. Peace IS achievable through war; you just have to hit hard enough. A different conversation on whether someone is actually capable of hitting hard enough against a sufficiently motivated target does exist, but it does remain that surgery is less effective than amputation for decisive deescalation.
An enduring mentality in a large number of liberal-minded circles is that everyone globally actually wants peace, and that all they need to embrace peace is to feel safe, for once there are no guns pointed at them they will put the guns down themselves. Jeremy Corbyn, Yanis Varoufakis and other ostensibly well-meaning socialists likely do sincerely believe that peace is hindered by warmongering westerners who have the agency to choose to war, and by choosing not to war all other parties can therefore be free to choose peace.
This is, quite obviously, untrue. Plenty of people choose to signal conflict against the West not because the West is bellicose, but precisely because the West is restrained and limited by its internal forces. Screaming 'DEATH TO AMERICA' on your flag wins plaudits from the american political establishment tripping over themselves to justify why the houthis might think that way, screaming 'DEATH TO RUSSIA' would see Lavrov threaten nukes and FSB contractors magically installing windows right in front of you to fall out of. The West is powerful but restrained, a perfect enemy to rail against to rally internal actors to ones own agenda. The Houthis signal opposition to USA and Israel not to actually hit back at them - that is a fanciful andd fevered objective - but to rally more of the internal population to their ranks against the true enemy, the Yemeni government in Aden.
That is perhaps the greatest blind spot of liberals regarding all the various bellicose agents all over the world that strike against USA or Britain or Australia or whoever opportunistically - the moral cover they cite of grievance-originated warmongering is just the excuse which sticks in the actual local conflicts they are intent on prosecuting, with or without the involvement of externals. Plenty of people are willing to commit crimes against their neighbors without the shadow of the West, so the restraint of the West is not facilitating any peace.
2D3D
10mo ago
Thats what we have now! Capitalism produced Reagan, a square jaw movie hero turned president. Communism gave us Brezhnev, Castro, Mao and Kim Il Sung, all manner of fat ugly aesthetically and behaviorally discomforting golems. Even communist attempts at beautiful art were mediocre shitpiles, with Soviet Realism being a pastel pastiche of the colouring of Old Masters overlaid onto garish parodies of reality.
Communism is UGLY and gave us brutalism, plasticised film dolls ironically more unnatural than the west, and unaccountable leaders who didn't have any physical charisma at all. Che Guevera adorns all commie flags because he's the ONLY good looking commie. For every 10 Che simps there are 1000 posters of capitalists to simp over. But commies have ONLY Che to adorn.
2D3D
1yr ago
Don't forget questioning and queer as allowing weirdos with innocent fetishes to be considered members instead of allies.
Sapiosexuals and demisexuals and aromantics all consider themselves within the LGBT+ umbrella, so they get easy entry.
The lack of internal accountability means sexual abuses in the community that are happening face disincentives to report out of concerns that the community will be discredited means the abused just retreat instead of holding the abusers accountable.
The most obvious are trannies preying on children, especially girls. Most of the community is pretty ugly so perverts focus their attention on young girls seeking an identity, and since these girls don't speak up, the ++ continue unrestricted. I have unfortunately observed a steady supply of young boys eager to pimp themselves out for rich sugar daddies flush with money and drugs, and none of my male friends who were active on grindr as teens show any regrets in their adult life.
With the lack of whistleblowers and a nebulous definition of the community, the entire circus is likely to continue growing, even if public disapproval from rebellious teens grows.
2D3D
9mo ago
Is it gauche to refer to my own post https://www.themotte.org/post/1160/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/249419?context=8#context
Where I specifically said that there would be a race between 'HAH THEY ARE EATING CATS' and 'can we please stop talking about cats' conservatives?
JD Vance folded, said that he was making things up to get the conversation going. Trump hasn't mentioned it once more. Any unearthing of proximate evidence is burning sacrifices to a dead god. The point was fumbled, and memory holing is the best strategy. Repeatedly digging up this corpse to pretend it can still tapdance is not really helping advance the cause.
2D3D
10mo ago
Chinese pop culture is crippled by government diktats. There was a brief flourishing in late 2010s to early 2020s of Chinese xianxia martial arts stuff that started getting lots of traction, like Word Of Honor and The Untamed, which was initially pleasing to the Chinese authorities for their popular reception in other Asian countries and increased traction in the west.
Turns out, they were popular because they were adaptations of webnovels written by bored ladies chapter by chapter on long commutes. And these bored Chinese women, like bored western women, write thinly veiled smut.
So you have these xianxia novels with impeccably beautiful men having intense physical and emotional fights with each other as they struggle with their roiling emotions, while a virtuous woman laments at their conflict and tries to use her womanly charm to get them to stop their conflict and kiss and make up And continue kissing, and do more.
These adaptations, greenlit by producers desperate for content and 'blind' to the subtext, go balls out in following the vision of the author, complete with creative reinterpretations that somehow enhance the original vision, and when queried by censors the producers just shrug and say 'its the source material, and people like it'. It doesn't actually have gay kissing on screen, just two beautiful men staring intensely at each other in shiny flowing silk robes as a camera spins around them while dramatic music plays and they verbalize their emotional torments. Totally not gay sex. Oh and the 'disciple' of one of the men is the source of what is effectively a custody battle as both men try to be good role models for the 'disciple' and in the end the men make up and have their own academy with the boy as their head disciple and its totally straight and not a gay romance ending and wait wasn't there a female MC at one point?
Women went fucking feral for this shit, and Chinese cultural products started getting consumed voraciously. Then the CCP figured women were having unrealistic standards for men and mandated no prettyboys in TV, and uptake has slowed accordingly.
The Koreans dramas have a much higher international reception even in English media because the Koreans stay shamelessly pretty, and have the extensive plastic surgery to keep it up. I hate kdramas for their tropiness and generally poor acting, but the koreans have leaned in to their strengths and keep their output at max shamelessness. I don't like Jdramas because their dudes all have some weird fucking hairstyle that makes them look like unkempt hairballs and I watch too much JAV to take japanese live action women seriously.
2D3D
1yr ago
In his famous 201 lecture Mearshimer predicted that it would be too stupid for Russia to invade Ukraine because it would look bad for Russia. Mearshimer did not consider Russia to be militarily capable of accomolishing a fait accompli, and thus ruled out Russian hostility as a given. In fact if you look up Mearshimers work prior to the 2022 war, Mearshimer keeps banging on that the USA should focus against China and that securing Russia as an ally was - and still is - of paramount importance. I view his hostility to Ukraine as part of his larger crusade against perceived misplaced priorities of the state department combined with an extremely ruthless calculus of relative power focus: it is inefficient to support weak corrupt states in Russias proximate orbit and it is better to husband resources if not spending it to bribe/secure Russias allegiance.
Mearshimers military analysis is, unfortunately, severely lacking. In his rush to get the west (really just USA) to refocus against China, he emphasizes that Russia is winning and in the face of such inevitability the west should stop wasting time. His sources for Russian inevitable victory are ridiculous retards like Scott Ritter, ArmchairW, BigSerge and fucking moonofalabama. It is an echo chamber of 'russia stronk!' vatniks that stand in contrast to the nafo chuds, and unfortunately for Mearshimer the inevitable victory of Russia is neither evident nor imminent. The longer Russia stumbles over its slow grind in Ukraines east, the more time is wasted on debating artillery shells instead of nuking Chinas island chain airbases.
2D3D
8mo ago
Progressives do not want criminals to turn into the law enforcement mechanism because progressives do not believe crime is real in the first place. Or at least progressives have convinced themselves that crime isnt real, hence the logical next step of abolishing law enforcement.
Self actualization for progressives is contingent on having an oppressive force to actively resist, because their set worldview is already perfect and does not require convincing externals. Said oppressive force must be manifestly engaging in oppression, and so law enforcement against criminal minorities is coopted by progressives to be proof of their worldviews conception. People being criminal assholes isn't because they are shitheads, its because they are systematically oppressed by the big bad state.
In the progressive conception there is never any need for law enforcement labor, and it is impossible for minorities to commit crime when there is no oppressive force incentivizing them to do so. Manifest failures like Christiania, CHAZ, East Hastings, Kensington, etc etc are simply proof of how oppression is so systemic that criminal minorities absorb the culture of white oppressors to oppress themselves.
The labor of law enforcement is false labor for the progressive. It was never needed, and so should never be compensated. Ironically, law enforcement is required for the progressive worldview to continue existing. Without law enforcement, progressives have no manifestation of the oppressive structure and no external force blameable for progressive failures. The progressive worldview requires law enforcement to exist more than it wants it to be abolished, because if law enforcement is gone the progressive ideas have to stand on their own, and deep down all progressives know their pet minorities will find it easier to scalp defenseless dangerhairs than armed magasuburbs.
2D3D
9mo ago
But I don't think accusing people of eating wildlife and/or pets is dehumanizing them
Ironically I think this defense of potential pet eating is a deflection. Migrants ARE different from locals and from each other, and not always for the better. By emphasizing that Noticing the pet eating is itself a 'dehumanizing' act, all Noticing is thus reflective of the Noticers dehumanizing intent and thus can be categorically dismissed.
This is why the pet thing is so damn stupid. Migrants ARE committing crimes at elevated rates relative to their demographic, violent crimes at that. All the statistics about migrants being good for the economy and good for safety are due to large numbers of women inflating the denominator of crime/migrant ratios. Thanks to this stupid pet thing, the haitian who drove illegally or migrants robbing in NYC or the other instances of actual crimes are dismissed by the polity. Harris absolutely fumbled the border during her time as border czar, and the only reason people don't care right now is because the ones suffering are deep blue sanctuary cities that normies don't particularly like anyways.
2D3D
1yr ago
I have acted as the Indian Aunty to matchmake/gatekeep for my desi brother (UK born, Indian, Doctor, absolutely shit useless with women), so let me (not) assure you: the Indian aunties in the UK are recommending socially reclused mummys girls whose lives are intertwined with their mothers at the hip, or these girls have run through their address book and are finally willing to accept their parents request for a Nice Indian Boy.
These arent necessarily bad things, the girls tend to not be psychotic, but I will say that the passivity of all the girls is infuriating even for socially functional desi men. Something about the NRI cultural experience demands that the men take the active lead in all aspects, with little feedback mechanism for what constitutes a successful interaction. As the Matchmaker, I have received endless complaints from the mothers about the lack of Interaction from my brother, so if you decide to pursue those paths, do note the pitfall.
On the other hand, their passivity and your relative bargaining power (articulate Good Indian Boy with medical degree) means you can set the tone entirely. Depending on your shamelessness you can use these girls as your mandatory partner in exploring the London gastronomic scene or as sounding boards for your gushing at the wonders of the Bovington tank museum.
Finally, buxom blondes tend to come with uncertain mass distribution curves. Be prepared for disappointment should you make footfall in the West.
2D3D
8mo ago
Bare minimum competent execution without real threats: Norway, Sweden, Czechia
Decent execution to counter real threats: France (special case: bites off more than they should chew) Poland, Finland, Turkey
Competent execution to counter real threat: Japan, Korea, Israel
Criteria for procurement success generally falls into the following categories:
- successful delivery (on time, on budget) of contractual requirements and subsequent phases including turnkey development
- suitability of requirements to mission objective
- compliance with governance restrictions, if any (re corruption)
- support local capability development, if any
When broken down in this manner, competing incentive mechanisms become immediately obvious, but also indirectly exploitable. Excepting definitional abuses of the above conditions, procurement failures for even basic systems are the statistical norm. Supporting indigenous capability development is the usual means governments and defense service sellers drain the public purse for no benefit, but ego stoking by censuring or advancing defense adjacent causes is also a common cause for mission failures.
It must be noted that a fundamental cause for procurement failures is economic incapability. Even if procurement practices are perfect, some states just have a shitty threat environment and cannot actually react to any practical threat which manifests. For the most part, the post Cold War peace dividend has resulted in objective 2 flailing about, letting defense budgets wither and focus shifting to counterterrorism and intelligence capabilities. In this anemic budget environment, inventories and capabilities have withered, with institutional knowledge rotting away and unable to redevelop even at a glacial pace.
The main defense many countries have is the incapability of their proximate threats. Nations are rolling the dice and hoping their neighbours are both too weak to actually do something and too smart to want to do something to begin with A military action is ruinous to both aggressor and defender regardless of kinetic success, and for many procurement agencies their mandates service internal political requirements when no external threat is manifest.
2D3D
11mo ago
Lets talk grilling.
My old grill finally crapped out on me. It is 30 years old, rusted all over ajd frankly it likely poisoned me every time I cooked on it because of extensive rust and chemical scouring to clean it, but I abused it till the legs finally rusted over and broke.
So, having abused a fully depreciated asset till death, I am looking for new steak scouring options. And in this fresh market I find the Weber egg to be the premier product recommended by social osmosis.
Thing is... I don't find the end quality to be necessarily better than my existing alternative of reverse sear into broiler.
Grill marks are undesirable byproducts, further charring is controllably obtained by blowtorch, smoke is infusable at source in a brine or introduced in a sauce. With broilers I can capture the drippings onto a bed of potatoes or in a pan I can glaze the fond for a pan sauce.
So, what am I missing? What is the weber fulfilling that I can't mechanically obtain with pans and grills?
2D3D
1yr ago
good people have learned to no consider the frameworks that are explanatory
Disparate impact is the metastasized final form of the academic postmodernism/marxism cancer that festered after the students of the 70s survived to be the administrators of today. The powers have a set view and anyone that goes against the Message is to be shut down, see the unpersoning of Roland Fryer for the best example.of this.
As @jeroboam states, blank slatism is prevalent and the mirror to blank slatism means that all outcomes for all peoples must be equal with the same inputs. The end effect is that anything that has a race or class component show up anywhere must automatically presume the unequal outcome is because of SOMETHING LARGER that maps back to greater discrimination of some sort.
This is super funny because obvious answers become deliberately ignored. Urban communities in the USA could not keep blacks out, and as the blacks came in so did crime and therefore diminishing property values + white flight. Urban communities in Argentina and other capital cities with high crime have private police to kick out criminals, criminals who have no champions at the top to force society to accept them. That the criminals are black/mestizo is irrelevant: no one gives a shit about racial sensitivities and so the criminals have no free pass.
2D3D
5mo ago
Wokeness flourished when it was viewed as the inevitable stymied by a fraud, the will of the changing demographic majority-minority populace frustrated by the last gasp of white rage. That framing allowed white progressives to lead black progressive (women) by the nose, trotting out blacks as shields to block criticism of wokeness. The minority support of trump upends this entire argument, making it clear that wokeness was not supporting the preferences of the inevitable majority.
There are plenty of other reasons, in particular ZIRP ending and the fact that DEI policies neither improved bottom line nor stopped activist screeching. Nevertheless the vanguardist progressives have lost their colors. They have no leg to stand on, and barring a cogent minority voice emerging from a massive race scandal, wokeism has lost its merit.
2D3D
6mo ago
Crime rates are geographically constrained in the USA rather than an everpresent reality. Much ink can be spilled about general observations, but the simple fact is that if you don't live near blacks, crime will be a much lower problem. The USA has enough space for crime-worried californians to flee to economic centers in texas or florida, while economic activity concentrated in only a few cities filled with racialized criminality limits the options for Europeans.
Racialized crime is a solvable problem; black people don't like crime either as clearly evinced by their disapproval of 'defund the police'. The problem is liberals who use disparate impact as a means to castigate their proximate political opponent instead. There is of course the grift of NGOs and the like to extract sympathy from do gooders, but that happens on both sides of the aisle and so its a wash.
2D3D
6mo ago
Thus the simplest solution to fair-evasion/free-riders (a solution so obvious that only someone very educated or deep in the terminal stages of woke brain-rot could fail to see it) is don't let them get away with it
There is a slow convergent point in most criminal justice studies is that law enforcement works by true arrest rate, not necessarily severity. The problem in the USA and Europe is that the disproportionate arrest rates of minorities is attributed to societal failures that one of the competing dominant political arms can use to attack the other in order to further their own political interests. So long as heterogenous outcomes are treated as failures requiring intervention, the meta will incentivize redefining heterogeneity to maximize resource capture.
The ROI of fare enforcement is the higher utilization rate of commuters when criminal vagrants are no longer an everpresent concern. The ROI of fare enforcement is the lower maintenance costs for repairs and cleanup when mentally ill homeless no longer defecate and trash the public space with the full expectation of someone else cleaning up their mess. The ROI of fare enforcement is the higher communal trust that the MTA will enjoy when it looks to be an organization that can steward its received resources with competence and clarity, instead of burying its head deeper in the sand about extant problems too inconvenient to address openly.
The Shopping Cart Theory is a great first-order test to determine prevalence of antisocial elements. Disproportionate amounts of resources are invested in cleaning up after noncooperatives, and even more are invested in resources to gently nudge them into being cooperative of their own recognizance or accommodating their preferences through rehabilitation and custodial services. Some people get off on being as difficult as possible because they fundamentally hate the people offering them help to begin with, and self-flagellating to absolve the noncooperative of their responsibility does not lead to greater resource utilization efficacy.
Just like how drug-testing welfare recipients does not meaningfully capture significant amounts of drug abusers or signalling immigration crackdowns does not actually catch many illegals, these programs are meant as signals to the noncompliant that mercy is no longer guaranteed. Less fare evaders will use the services on offer to begin with, and that is a perfectly acceptable outcome.
2D3D
9mo ago
This sort of naked self serving intellectual autofellatio is reminiscent of all the 'liberals are smarter than conservatives' drivel that gets repeatedly updooted on reddit and shared breathlessly by irritatingly smug college kids on facebook from 2004 to likely forever.
It is therefore unsurprising that the meta of Intelligence has been both denigrated and conspiratized by the dissident right who may have been unwillingly grouped into the stupid meanie conservative doodoohead category by an unaware shifting of the overton window (hi guys! thats us here!). Calling oneself Intelligent is for buzzfeed quiz taking morons or mentally damaged pseudointellectuals whining on /r/gifted that they're actually super smart and therefore should be rewarded without cause, not us actually smart people who use our brains for Good!
As a result, one incoherent strain within right wing thinking now is a desire to use Facts and Logic without being Intelligent. Being a polysyllabic sophisticate swirling wine and commenting on the fragrant notes of burnt rubber and bleach to signify rotten grape discernment is the revue of ivory tower intellectuals, which we Real People are not. We are meat eating beer drinking car workshopmen doing Real People stuff, while actually in our deepest of souls we pontificate and circlejerk amongst our intellectual kin as much as possible.
A consequence of this, possibly relatable to some on this board, is an aggressive hiding of ones power level within 'polite' company and a simultaneous revulsion at the baseness (as in lowness, in the originally uncouth way as opposed to chadian basedness) of DR intellectualism. Though one may be comfortable enough to speak openly in forums or even within friend groups, it is unbecoming to actually read or watch DR podcasters. I've alttabbed to degenerate tentacle hentai rather than let my wife notice I'm watching Tucker Carlson.
2D3D
10mo ago
To be honest the sense I get is that the Democrats have settled their major internal fights since 2022/2023, and Bidens age was a distraction. Three progressive democrat sacred cows were executed in 2022: racial hyperfragmentation, defund the police, open borders. Latinx as a neologism being thoroughly disparaged by the entire polity in 2022 put paid to the split-and-lift approach democrats had of highlighting racial subidentities and holding them in high esteem in order to oppose white men and drive turnout. Defund the police and restorative justice as a whole died with the COVID crime rises and Chesa Boudin being ousted put other prosecutors like Krasner, Price, Bragg and Gascon on watch for being overly progressive, with less public celebration of defending criminals. Finally, the migrant invasion into democratic cities has muted active open border proponents.
The democrats still are vulnerable on these issues, but the muting of the progressive wings gives normies hope that democrats aren't actively trying to end run the retard ball into an open goal. Yes the progressives are loud and extremely irritating still, but they aren't being actively supported by politicians anymore. Without the progressive bogeyman, much of the past 8 months has been focused on Bidens incapability, and with Harris wisely shutting up about specifics there is little attack material that is holding against her.
Culture war now is a wash for republicans, because abortion is remarkably salient, while Trumps centrality to the Republican establishment means his rambly whining and halfhearted autofellatio is taking up valuable discussion focus away from economy and border.
Hyperfocused overthinkers are wont to laser in on individual policies or vague connected webs to posit the end of civilization based on the extrapolated outcome, but most people don't care for that. Talking about democracy ending with Trump was not a vote winner, and talking about the woke mind virus isn't either. Democrats have pivoted to a surprisingly blank slate bollard of a candidate, Trump is still trying to gas up his hot air balloon while flinging shit at Harris. The election is still Trumps to win, but he's gotta get the cook going now.
2D3D
1yr ago
Is there any great work that would be improved by the addition of choice, by the addition of alternate possibilities
Choice sucks. Most players in Bethesda or freeform character created open world games go for troll runs because the available choices end up sucking pretty hard and are inconsequential or inconsistent. Railroaded games don't offer choice beyond letting players play the game in different styles, and that has always lead to tighter narratives with greater emotional depth. The denouement of achievement is better savored when the outcome is amenable to the player.
LLM generated missions are unlikely to be any better than the standard algorithmically generated quests and maps of Roguelikes or Bethesda style radiant quests. By their very nature within a game a quest cannot significantly affect the world, otherwise other aspects of the game get broken. Unless the world is fully dynamically generated each playthrough and allows full destruction of not just the environment but the very engine itself, any LLM game quest will just be a high quality filler anime episode, inconsequential and distracting from the core experience players are actually intending to invest their time and effort in.
Post updated it to say 'white male'. Disappointing that we won't kick off 2025 with a declaration of war against China 'for trying to get at me'.
The only question now is leftist, psycho or deep state. My money is 50/40/10. I put no money on foreign assassin, but it'll be fucking wild if it is.
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