It really is so wonderfully charming how devoted Texas Republicans are to ensuring poor and underclass women are forced into having more babies than they currently do. This certainly won’t lead to problems down the road, because impoverished single mothers famously raise the most well-adjusted sons who commit crime at well-below-average rates.
Hopefully SCOTUS eventually limits this specific form of depressing ridiculousness.
It’s clear that wokeness isn’t the cause of bad game writing. The very suggestion is ridiculous.
Firstly, game writing has always been terrible barring a number of exceptions that can literally be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Secondly, countries with less ‘wokeness’, like Japan, have even worse, more hackneyed and more cringe game writing than their western counterparts.
Thirdly, some of the rarest examples of good game writing, like Disco Elysium, are explicitly leftist, woke fiction (bordering on actual political propaganda) far to the left of the average ‘Sweet Baby Inc’ employee.
The vast majority of bad game writing since the invention of video games, and probably still today, can be lain squarely at the feet of straight white (and Japanese) men. This is not in any way to suggest that wamen or minorities are any better (just look at modern YA fiction to see they are not), but it’s clear that the dire state of game writing is not their fault.
But let's put aside speculation about technical issues and focus on what is SBI's department: writing. Well, thing are not looking so good there either
There are maybe 10 AAA games that have ever been released with passable writing, and probably two thirds of them are from two studios (Rockstar and CDPR). That’s passable, by the way, not good (which would lower the number to maybe one or two, though I’d rather not debate which exactly they are).
Game writing was dreck before these consultants and is so now, too. The reason for this is simple - almost all game writers are D&D geeks who almost exclusively read science fiction and fantasy garbage and have no understanding of classical literature or even film to broaden their ability. Everything is a Marvel movie to them because it’s all they know.
Kotaku has written an article about it, the article's author claims that you can't be racist against white people.
Gawker was famous for paying writers for clicks, she seems to be doing a very good job. Amusingly, the same practice on the same website (then under different ownership of course) led in substantial part to the original Gamergate moment.
Like for example many western AAA titles in recent years struggle with modeling female faces for some reason, and the in-game models look uncanny valley-ish and quite unlike the people they're modeled after, and the conspiracy-inclined are saying that the characters are deliberately made ugly to challenge the patriarchal standards, or something.
Japanese games always anime-ify all their characters’ faces, even in the rare cases in which they use facial capture. It’s extremely jarring when playing yet another Japanese game with ‘realistic’ (by which I mean not-cartoon or exaggerated in art style) environments and anime plastic skin triangle face NPCs, where everyone looks like the picture Koreans bring to the plastic surgeon. But that’s a personal preference, probably.
Western games tend to go for direct scans rather than yassification. I think there’s a general emphasis on ‘more real’ characters, but it’s pretty common across the board. British TV tends to avoid casting extremely beautiful actors in many roles (especially in comedy and ‘gritty’ drama) and it seems to have been that way for a while, and probably isn’t the result of feminism. And, for example, the women in ‘Suicide Squad’ by Rocksteady, which you note these consultants worked on, don’t seem to have been made particularly unattractive physically in the clip you link, judging by Harley Quinn and Wonder Woman at least.
Mass Effect Andromeda
This really brought me back. But really, the face model for Sara Ryder does seem to look a lot like the final character model, people just cherrypicked pictures in which the model was mewing/posing instead of smiling or moving her facial muscles and therefore showed her prominent jowls and squareish jaw.
I don’t agree with forcing expansive gun rights on liberal states whose electorates have clearly rejected them.
Complain legitimately about the way in which red states had progressive politics forced upon them (in some cases at gunpoint). And by all means advocate the federal government enforcing policy on the states when it comes to borders, immigration, foreign policy and (actual) interstate commerce, as conservatives rightly do in the first two cases.
But I see no reason why conservative gun owners must force the population of Hawaii to accept a law which both doesn’t affect the gun policy of conservative states and is transparently deeply unpopular there. Similarly, I’d find it wrong if and when a progressive Supreme Court limited gun ownership rights in a conservative state.
It doesn’t seem bad if Texas is the Wild West and Hawaii is East Asia when it comes to gun policy. Conservatives still have plenty of places to live. Regional differences in view on permissiveness around vices, weapon ownership, abortion and so on are part of the normal tapestry of life in countries with hundreds of millions of people.
2rafa
7mo ago
The sooner the public accepts that the future of the West’s leadership is a combination of Brahmins and PoC women who have nerdy white husbands, the more comfortable we will all be.
Socially conservative
How is the modern American red triber ‘socially conservative’? Do they refrain from sex before marriage? Do they go to church every Sunday? Do they sincerely believe blasphemy is a sin and avoid expressions like ‘damn’ or whatever? Social conservatism is dead in America outside of a few niche communities of Christians, Mormons and Jews. Your average red state conservative is as ‘socially conservative’ in their own daily life - if not less so - than a deep blue Democrat corporate lawyer who lives out in Connecticut and hosts fundraisers for Biden. Unless disliking Bud Light ads is the central defining factor in social conservatism, of course.
The US military doesn't protect America, Americans or the American way of life. It protects international trade, aka shutting down production in the rust belt and outsourcing production to cheap countries.
The American way of life is, in many cases, all about the acquisition of cheap consumer goods made in China and elsewhere.
Haringey is approximately 32% White British. My estimate is that among school-aged children, it’s more like 20%. Most of the white British will be wealthy Londoners who live in the affluent neighborhoods of Highgate and Muswell Hill, who will almost certainly send their children to private schools. (Quite a few of the rest will be Ultra-Orthodox Jews, who have their own schools too). The rest of the borough is “among the most deprived local authorities in England” according to Wikipedia.
My guess is that there are very, very few white english children at the schools sending students to these programs. So while white working class English boys are indeed one of the lowest performing demographics in UK schools (as many conservative opinion columnists have noted in response to this program) there are very, very few of those left in Haringey. (And many if not most of the working class white children in the borough will be the children of slavic immigrants, who seem to perform fine).
For what it’s worth, I think this stuff is pretty smart and pretty good. Whatever becomes of the immigration debate, encouraging a culture of achievement, responsibility, respect for education and conscientiousness in young black men (which this program seems to want to do) is surely a good thing. It would be a bad thing if the government shut it down.
It is utterly untrue that elites have no 'skin in the game'.
Where do elites live? The downtown core of major cities. If violent crime spikes in Manhattan or San Francisco, it's rich people who suffer more than the middle class. Middle class white picket fence Americans don't live in Manhattan, they don't live in downtown SF, they don't live in the Loop in Chicago. They live in safe suburbs that are themselves largely insulated from the effects of elite decisionmaking.
During the pandemic, my rich parents' neighborhood (Greenwich Village, Manhattan) which was and is one of the most expensive zip codes in the country, measurably got worse. They're tough on crime, but by and large, wealthy people in Manhattan voted for the most 'pro justice reform' mayoral candidates. They supported Alvin Bragg for DA. When garbage piles up and homeless people accost them in Washington Square Park, that's the direct impact of deinstitutionalization and 'justice reform'. When upper-middle class whites support affirmative action, they're directly making it harder for their kids to get into top colleges (yes, even with muh legacy admits factored in). I know tons of very wealthy people who truly believe and advocate for higher taxes on themselves. I know plenty who don't, of course. But many do. Rich parts of LA like Santa Monica are full of homeless encampments that directly make the lives of the wealthy people who live there worse. Again, much more skin in the game than in the average safe suburb of a midwestern city.
Sure, the absolute pinnacle of these movements are a little more insulated; I imagine that Alexander Soros has a bodyguard (although that's probably as much because of threats from schizo Qanon types as it is because of random dangers in the city). But in the merely moderately-wealthy segment of the PMC (say the 97th to 99.95th percentiles) there's a lot of skin in the game.
“No no, we’re not the real enemy, forget your crime stats, how about an illegal immigration story? No? A little cunning (((manipulation)))? Can’t I interest you into some slit communist bugmen?”
Deflection by racism is cringe when the Indians do it, it’s cringe when the Hispanics do it, it’s cringe when the Jews do it, and it’s cringe when black conservatives do it too. On the other hand, it’s again a hilarious reminder of just how diverse the dissident right is, it’s ethnics all the way down trying to convince each other they’re the real inheritors of huwhite civilization.
Candace can’t easily move left, so she’s just positioning herself for a minor update to the based black woman grift; it is a fundamental testatment to America’s inherent liberalism that it will always have an audience.
The reason it’s $11 for a dozen eggs certainly isn’t that the dollar has been ‘devalued’, it’s at near historic highs relative to most other developed world currencies. The reason eggs cost $11 in the US while they cost $4 or less in most of Western Europe is because of a combination of bird flu, price gouging (most farmers aren’t Democrats) and the fact that large, warehouse style US grocery stores cost much more to run in terms of electricity, and the US in general has far higher labor costs than the much more compact stores that exist in other countries and the workers they employ. Working class pay shot up across the board after Covid, many grocery store workers went from $9 an hour to $20 an hour, so food prices shot up because grocery stores are extremely low margin businesses in which any rise in costs is passed on to customers. If Tucker considers this a disaster, he should just come out and say it.
In general, the intellectual right have gone all in on accelerationism. They want ‘something’ to happen. It doesn’t really matter what that is, it just has to shake up ‘the system’. Unfortunately they fail to realize that ‘something’ in these cases is usually worse than the present. I’ll vote for Trump next November, but only because I personally dislike a lot of influential progressives and will enjoy the crying and wailing on social media if he wins (and perhaps in the faintest, 5% chance he might do something about immigration). He’s still almost certainly a criminal, a scumbag and will accomplish very little of what his supporters hope for if that happens.
And that is the point. Trump is the only proven vessel for any conservative faction to enter the White House since 2004. Everybody in the movement knows this. Whatever their ideological or political aims, they all depend on Trump. Whether you’re an energy lobbyist or an evangelical or a dissident rightist or a Wall Street business con, Trump is your only hope for your guys getting into the executive. A smart American elite would ensure Trump wasn’t sentenced before the election. But they too have to fight their ideological battles.
Like they protect Epstein until they have to murder him in his cell.
And Epstein probably did kill himself. He was a billionaire pervert whose main (other) hobbies were hanging out with influential people and travelling the world, and who was about to spend the rest of his life in solitary in a federal jail, without sex and without money. Many kill themselves in far less dire circumstances.
Epstein having his lawyers or associates bribe some prison staff to look the other way is vastly more likely than an assassination; if the ‘powers that be’ wanted to kill him, they would have done so discreetly long before he was arrested, especially given he was obviously under investigation for many years. There was no need to attempt an absurdly high risk hit in a high security jail in the middle of Manhattan when they could have arranged an entirely plausible accident any time over the preceding few years.
The motive is also lacking. Why would Epstein have talked? Was the US government going to give him a sweetheart deal and let him out in 2 years if he gave up Clinton and Trump? Clearly not, it’s a ridiculous suggestion (he wouldn’t have been able to provide proof the prosecutors didn’t otherwise have, so would have been accused of lying) and even if he had nothing to lose, he had nothing to gain either.
There’s a kind of incoherence to ‘stolen election’ claims that I dislike, in that they’re almost always made by people who assume that the permanent bureaucracy / deep state / powers that be / white supremacist patriarchy / Russia / etc means that Our Guy can win but still lose anyway.
If the deep state can have its way even when /ourguy/ wins, then why does it also need to rig elections? Either elections don’t matter because the President has no power, or they do matter because the President actually has a lot of power, but Trump just failed to do anything with it.
I’m convinced the stolen election narrative was profoundly damaging to the Trumpist right and GOP more generally in the US. What is more demoralizing than suggesting that ‘they’ will win even if you come out to vote? Or even, if you take the theory further, that they ‘allowed’ Trump to win in 2016 knowing, presumably, that they could control him or prevent him from doing anything they didn’t want him to?
The stolen election narrative was strategically moronic. It exists solely to assuage Trump-the-man’s ego, and spread because the modern US right is in large part a Trump personality cult, so various operatives, media figures etc wanted to do their best to remain on his good side. A single shout out or mockery from the oracle of Mar a Lago can make or break a career, so playing to his ego was so important they forgot strategy to claim that Donald actually did win for real.
(I think all US elections involve some low-level corruption, rigging and machine politics, but that broadly the most popular candidate in the majority of the country - pursuant to minor discrepancies in popular vote subject to the unique dynamics of the EC system obviously - wins).
Well it’s relevant becuase in the Canadian bureaucracy (as in most bureaucracies) most things are recorded in writing, including offers of this kind of assistance apparently. Almost nothing in a Western bureaucracy when it comes to interaction between some government body and the citizen would ever happen ‘verbally’, even minor stuff requires 7 forms and a bushel of letters sent to the citizen about everything that relates to anything to do with an issue.
So while the government may have conveniently lost its copy, it’s much more suspicious that the veteran did, especially when she went directly to the press to complain about it.
2rafa
10mo ago
You can’t tell me that anti-affirmative action advocates aren’t firmly aware that they’re in practice advocating for a huge reduction in black representation in top colleges, businesses, civil service employment, state contracts and so on.
I don’t know why people discount the fact that Trump isn’t coming to “they stole the election from me” from some kind of neutral position. Trump is a historically, notoriously thin skinned man who lashes out at a lot of criticism and almost compulsively responds to it (eg tweeting @ minor columnists, celebrities or TV hosts who criticized him). The default assumption should be that he’s never going to accept that he lost fair and square, and will claim fraud. A lot of Trump supporters who believe the election was stolen believe it because he said so. Expecting this to be some kind of intellectual debate is ridiculous. Biden stole the election because Trump lost, and because Trump can’t lose and can’t believe he could lose. The evidence must then be obtained, as a secondary process.
This is why ‘stolen’ can mean many things, from hacking electronic voting machines and stuffing ballot boxes to planning protests (ie the ‘fortify the election’ meme) and engaging in the same dirty tactics that have been the norm in American politics for almost 250 years.
People who believe the election was probably stolen based on intuition: will you rescind your claim if Trump wins this year?
2rafa
3mo ago
More seriously, I think it is true that one of the worst aspects of the American era of Western hegemony is the informal and indirect nature of empire. It is much cheaper than the French, British or (arguably) Spanish approaches, but it’s much more destabilized and mostly much worse for the ruled populations. Yes, Bukele aside, McKinsey under contract from the State Department could do a better job of running most of Latin America than the locals. BCG and 20,000 American mercenaries in charge of Haiti would save countless lives. It would be both humane and reasonable for America to assume control over its colonies. Hand the treasury and tax collection of every country that was a Western colony in 1950 to Citigroup + enforcers and they would do a better job than the average corps of corrupt third-world officials. America has the right to rule Israel, just as it has the right to rule the EU. It is a shame that, in practice, it rules neither (it took over a decade, a war and a little sabotage to convince the Germans to drop their pipeline, after all).
And there’s an aesthetic aspect, too. The Union flag once flew in Vancouver, in Belize, in Accra, in Cape Town, in Cairo, in Delhi, in Hong Kong, in Auckland, in New York for that matter. The American flag does not fly in Seoul, not in Tokyo, not in Riyadh, nor in Bogota or Mexico City, not even in London. It’s sad. Painting the world blue, forcing the other nations to sing your song, bow to your flag, put pictures of your leader in their public buildings, isn’t that what it’s all about? McDonald’s and Starbucks in Jakarta and Nairobi can never fully replace that.
2rafa
3mo ago
Moving on from rhetoric, Israel is genocidal in action, blowing up an enormous amount of Gaza without regard for civilian casualties.
If our ‘benchmark’ for genocide is the Holocaust, in which the vast majority of Jews under Nazi geopolitical control were murdered, then it’s hard to see how Israel’s action in Gaza is genocide. Even assuming that the vast majority of the Hamas-reported casualty figures are civilians, something like 1% of the population have been killed, which is not unreasonably high in comparison to historic invasions of dense urban environments. Whatever the threshold for genocide, 20,000 casualties out of a population of 2,000,000 surely isn’t it.
We are literally paying so the Israelis don't have to come to any reasonable accord with the Palestinians or other Arabs
The Israelis have proposed multiple reasonable accords with the Arabs, who have rejected all of them, and who indeed rejected even the UN’s 1947 accord, brokered by many global powers. More generally, I don’t think that either Israel or Hamas are ‘genocidal’; they would commit genocide if they could, but so would many tribes and peoples throughout history, what matters is whether they can (both geopolitically/diplomatically and practically), and in this case neither can by those conditions.
Even this proposed moral trade
To be clear, that wasn’t my intent. My intention was to argue that the expulsion of descendants of German Gastarbeiter would not be ethically equivalent to the Holocaust by any means. I added the last line about Israel because I knew that, otherwise, it would be all anyone would discuss in the replies. I don’t think the fate of the Palestinians and the fate of Muslims in Western Europe are linked, certainly not in so direct a way.
2rafa
10mo ago
For men, there’s also the meta-horror that women consider this a great love story. Five minutes of Alpha >> lifetime of Beta.
Isn’t this, to some extent, just a way to rationalize your own ephemeral relationships with women as meaning something and to justify your own aversion to settling down, though? It seems a little self serving.
2rafa
3mo ago
Birthrates only matter because of mass immigration. If you don't have mass immigration they're irrelevant, especially with the pace at which automation via LLM (including in the material world with PaLM-E and other multimodal models for robotics) is advancing.
It doesn't really matter if South Korea's population falls from 50m to 10m provided two things are true:
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Firstly, that total productivity can be maintained (this seems likely with LLMs able to take over a large percentage of white collar labor over the next few years, and robotics + multimodal LLMs likely to take over a large percentage of blue collar labor over the next decade or two). In this case, no economic collapse is likely, and while fiscal policy might need to adjust to redistribute generated wealth, that's not an existential issue.
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Secondly, that those very same advances mean that military preparedness isn't damaged by falling number of young men, which again, advances in drone warfare suggest is likely. Plus, North Korea's birthrate is also collapsing (see Kim's recent comments) and it has half SK's population, so any disadvantage is unlikely to be large.
The main reason to be worried about birthrates is demographic competition as in Lebanon, in Israel, in India and so on. If a minority group has much higher birthrates than the native population, the long-term balance of power in a nation is almost guaranteed to shift.
The relative wages shown between England and low end US labor seems appalling.
The same is true for almost all Western Europe, it’s not a UK-specific problem.
And from the article you link:
This assumes that AI does not turn out to be a steam engine- or electricity-level invention.
Clearly this is not a smart man, as AI is vastly more significant than even either of the above.
2rafa
10mo ago
It seems unlikely that lesbians, in particular, would molest enough girls to create the next generation of lesbians for the ‘far-right’ / conspiratorial theory to be true. Even for males, the evidence for the “gays reproduce by molesting kids” canard seems quite limited.
The mechanism by which this is suggested to happen, in particular, is usually some framing of highly discredited Freudian psychology that, perhaps ironically, proponents of this theory would rail against in any other form.
2rafa
10mo ago
"Diversity is code for anti-white" is based on the logic that since efforts to diversify organizations/companies/government/etc. typically involve reducing the relative proportion of whites and increasing the proportion of non-whites, diversity is anti-white.
"Anti-woke is code for anti-black" is based on the logic that since 'anti-woke' efforts include as a central pillar the elimination of affirmative action (in education, employment, federal contracting and so on), thereby certainly reducing the relative proportion of black people in those organizations, anti-woke is anti-black.
You can take a principled libertarian stance that 'diversity' is manipulating the ratios and 'anti-woke' merely restoring the natural order of things, but from a consequentialist perspective one linearly reduces the proportion of whites in major organizations and one linearly reduces the proportion of blacks. A white person advocating the latter and a black person the former are both displaying ethnic self-interest.
2rafa
1mo ago
It’s a shame he was simply unable to follow the rules. He made some very good posts, but then would have occasional outbursts at random people. Who can forget the time he was randomly racist to @self_made_human and accused him of not being able to understand English because he was Indian or something?
2rafa
2mo ago
Knives Out
The ‘hero’ in the movie is Daniel Craig playing a white Southern gentleman. And the maid - Ana de Armas - is surely white unless you really take the ‘Africa begins at the Pyrenees’ definition. Her grandparents immigrated to Cuba from the north of Spain and her parents were part of the white upper class in the Cuban caste system (which persists, of course, even under communism).
2rafa
2mo ago
The point I'm trying to make here and the point that yourself the OP, @2rafa, @SwordOfOccam don't seem to be grasping is that onus of proof is not on the losers to provide evidence of illegitimacy, the onus is on election officials to convince the losing party that they lost fair and square.
And my point is that Donald Trump is a sore loser who was never going to accept that he lost “fair and square”. What do you think it would take to convince Trump he lost fair and square? This is the pivotal question in this debate, since most of Trump’s supporters will take his opinion on the matter.
Trump represents a pent up peasant and heartland burgher rage in a way that no other GOP politician can.
Yes, they want to “own the libs”, but that’s misses out the most important part. They want Donald Trump to own the libs. Owning the libs is important but not essential. Donald Trump is essential. Better Trump is in power and fails than DeSantis is in power and actually succeeds. This is, in effect, the decision that is being made.
But in a wider sense, American conservatives aren’t serious people. They consider forcing impoverished black single mothers to give birth to more children higher priority than ending mass immigration. That considered ending the tiny amount of GDP sent to Ukraine (tying up a longstanding geopolitical foe for years at the cost of zero American lives) more important than ending affirmative action - which only happened because of a 30-year effort by some autistic Jewish guy who couldn’t let it go. These are people who genuinely abhor the pittance spent on America’s empire when it has been the mission of every great Western civilization to conquer, to expand and to rule other lands and peoples.
They live in an imaginary mid century fantasy that is itself a product of Hollywood. They do not aspire to greatness, personally or collectively. Kevin Williamson was right about Trump, and about his supporters. The libs - if he wins again - will be “owned” well and truly for 4 years, and then simply pick up where they left off. Trump doesn’t understand institutions, but his supporters don’t care. The ‘deep state’ will let him spend 4 years in the AG’s office fighting spurious legal cases against his onetime political foes, and all the while the rest of Washington will tick along as usual.
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