ApplesauceIrishCream
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User ID: 882
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
The @KulakRevolt vs. @2rafa high-adrenaline creative writing competition was not on my bingo card for today.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Different context, but I had exactly the same reaction to the girlboss approach that Rings of Power took to Middle Earth. If women warriors are everywhere, and nothing unique...what about Eowyn's entire character arc? Tolkien presented her as accomplishing something rare and difficult; that it was hard for her, but she pushed through and achieved greatness. If half--or even much less!--of the Riders of Rohan were female, then Eowyn just comes off as whiny, not heroic.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
They were appreciated even by people who'd never read Tolkien and didn't care about how faithful they were to the books.
This misses the point. Yes, the existing fanbase will care about faithfulness to canon in ways that potential new audiences won't, but what every audience member cares about is some level of verisimilitude--does the story with all its components hang together in a mutually-reinforcing way that captures the imagination? Tolkien is an excellent example of a storyteller who had a clear vision and a craftsman's attention to detail. As Jackson found, if you stick to his vision, all the little pieces fit together better, making the overall narrative and supporting structures more satisfying to the audience. You can make changes, and Jackson did as noted above, but they need to be in service to the story.
It was short-sighted, but I never claimed the money-men are actually good at predicting what will be profitable.
"You had one job!"
ApplesauceIrishCream
10d ago
"Proportionality" is in fact an important concept in international law contexts, but it's nearly always misrepresented by the legacy media, either due to ignorance or malice or both. Properly used, it refers to the scope of collateral damage that is permissible when seeking to eliminate a legitimate military target--the excess damage must be proportional to the military value of the intended target. It has literally nothing whatsoever to do with being "proportional" to the damage caused by the other side.
ApplesauceIrishCream
6mo ago
Underdog analysis can also be complicated by questions of scope--are we talking about Israel vs. Hamas, Israel vs. Hamas + the wider Islamic world that funds them, or Israel + its supporters in the US vs. Hamas + the wider Islamic world? The homeless guy vs. Mr. Rogers scenario doesn't quite capture the dynamic of group vs. group when each side has debateable membership.
That said, I don't favor underdog analysis as a particularly useful lens, though clearly others disagree.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
The historical claim to a "singular they" is a central example of a motte and bailey. There was the occasional usage of singular they to refer to a person of unknown or unspecified sex, where "he" would be more grammatically standard--this is the motte. Referring to a known and identified singular person as "they" was not a thing.
Did you think no one would actually click your link? Because Merriam-Webster lays out exactly what I said above, though with more sneering.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
That's not really the full picture, from the American pro-life perspective. As a grassroots movement, it was very far from fringe: solid majority position in the Republican party, and a minority position among Democrats--until the fallout from Obamacare hit, there was a small caucus of pro-life House Democrats, though it's gone now. Prior to Dobbs, the controlling precedent was Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, which functionally replaced RvW--of note, the "Casey" that PP was suing was the pro-life Democrat Governor of Pennsylvania.
When you're talking about the Supreme Court, it's got few enough members that you might as well refer to the individuals rather than aggregating trends. Roe/Casey would have been overturned decades ago, if not for a string of Republican appointees that refused to pull the trigger--Kennedy, O'Connor, Souter, and Roberts. At least publicly, their appointing presidents (Reagan, GHWB, GWB) made common cause with the pro-life movement, and promised to appoint originalist justices, except oops...oops...oops.... Even then, each of those presidents did appoint justices who either were part of the Dobbs majority, or would have been if they'd still been on the Court (Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas, Alito). Trump was unusual in that all of his appointees joined Dobbs, instead of just half.
So, yes, Dobbs was a "big surprise to everyone," but only in the sense that the pro-life movement had decades of experience supporting candidates that ultimately betrayed them, and expecting Trump's vetting to succeed where Reagan's, GHWB's, and GWB's did not looked like starry-eyed optimism at best.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
A variant is Becoming The Mask. Or more generally, the advice to "fake it 'til you make it."
Consider habits, and consciously choosing to develop one. It takes work to wear the rut into your unconscious, but the habit takes less effort to maintain over time, and may eventually integrate itself into your normal course of behavior. I'd say that rehearsing a role is just one example of this type of personality modification, that is intended to be broader in scope but only temporary for the purposes of the production.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Is there a reason that you find Politifact credible?
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
I'd say the majority of the alt-right isn't even Republican, but properly speaking, "Republican-leaning independent." In other words, "I've got reasons to dislike both parties, but if I have to choose a candidate that's got a shot of winning, I'm voting R."
(Tangent: this comes up in polling a fair bit, but there's a big difference between "Republican-leaning centrist" and "Republican-leaning independent." The first group could conceivably vote for a candidate of either party, but more often votes R; the second doesn't identify with either party, but is closer to R than D. The important distinction is that a large chunk of the second group considers Rs to be moderate squishes, and are even further right. The phenomenon is symmetric; there are "Democrat-leaning independents" who consider themselves further left than the D party. "X-leaning centrists" are a subset of "X-leaning independents," but far from the whole picture.)
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
I can empathize with large chunks of what you've written here from my own experiences--among other things, I'm looking at walking away from theater-adjacent hobbies because Republican is the New Gay and the closet fucking sucks when you're in an environment that sincerely hates the real you.
I'm also losing the last shreds of my patience with "my non-binary offspring is a they/them, and I expect you to use the right pronouns." This is not a hypothetical case. I've dodged the issue so far, but another person I know was swifty corrected when he referred to the teenage boy as "he." Apologies for misgendering ensued, and I've discovered this is a red line for me. I will not cater to the whims of a teenager in my word choices, and exerting social pressure on me to do so violates my expectations of friendly behavior.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
I think there are many facets to this particular issue. I agree that what you've identified is one of them, but there are others. (And different facets will apply to different degrees across many individual cases.)
One observation that's practically prehistoric is that men and women frequently have trouble understanding each other. There are real, experiential differences that even given time, energy, eloquence, and the best of good faith can be very hard to fully communicate. One common assumption that crops up all the time is "as a [man/woman], this thing I deal with all the time is rough; [women/men] don't have to deal with that; it's so much easier for them." And it's even true! ...But it's true in different senses both ways, and it's easier to see the ways you've got it rough than the ways you've got it easier.
An example--one distinction I've seen in the described experiences of being a man vs. being a woman might be summed up as "no one cares" vs. "everyone cares." The male side of that talks about disposability, never getting compliments, feeling alienated, etc. The female side of that talks about unwanted attention, constant judgment, feeling smothered, etc. So an unhappy man might desire the sense of being important and connected that comes so easily to women, and an unhappy woman might want to take a break from all the expectations and just be able to chill like men do.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
I view them as not noticeably different from neo-Nazis. Both are inclined to romanticize the worst ideological failures of the twentieth century, and while both can find grains of value and/or justification here and there, the Everests of skulls suggest to those wiser folk that the search for meaning will be more fruitful elsewhere.
(Also, both groups have their LARPing edgelords and their true believers. The mix is likely similar.)
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Come on, this is ridiculous. Are there books that meet that description? Unfortunately, yes. But there are many quality female authors, both classic and modern, who are perfectly capable of writing competent plots and characters with agency. I've read romances that defeat your description in detail. Random example--no exploration of the mystery genre is complete without hitting Agatha Christie.
I can't guarantee you'd like any book or author I'd recommend, but your tastes are extremely narrow if no female author would qualify.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Possibly because socialism is extremely common and extremely successful on the very small scale. As a general rule, this is how families work, and sometimes extremely tight-knit groups with very high in-group loyalty, like cults. The problem is that it doesn't scale up, and this is a massive problem when you're talking about organizing a society.
The insight of incentives, free markets, etc. is that you can have net-positive interactions without the reinforcement of high in-group loyalty to control defection. The "problem" is that this type of interaction doesn't scale down--it would be a bit ridiculous to run a family on a barter system: infants don't have anything of value to trade for food and diapers beyond weaponized cuteness. This is an illusory problem, though, when you're applying a system to the matching scale of its competence--socialism for family structures, markets for societies.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
It isn't clear to me that she had any sort of plan or agenda, she simply changed her mind when asked.
Yes, that was largely Meshkout's take as well. I believe it's a failure of theory of mind to chalk it up to randomness or whimsy, and it was obvious to me what her likely thinking entailed.
Meshkout's eleven words was an unusual request--as Dean says above, signaling through exceptional effort. The judge decided to take it seriously, as a test of Meshkout's credibility and judgment--that it wasn't a last-ditch effort at empty posturing on behalf of a client that didn't deserve it. The correct lesson to draw from the situation is to use that request--or similar--in cases where you are sincerely trying to prevent a miscarriage of justice and not use it in other cases. It's an opportunity to preserve the integrity of the signal.
In light of this, the essay's response of "it was so random, what can it mean" was intensely frustrating.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
While there are characters with anti-Catholic sentiment (and any number with a pretty fierce hatred of Catholics, as you should expect in the middle of the Thirty Years' War), the 'series' is definitely not anti-Catholic.
A major protagonist of one of the branching sub-series is Father Larry Mazzare, Grantville's local Catholic priest. Turns out, it's kind of a big deal when Urban VIII gets a written summary of Vatican II. What follows includes a fair amount of swashbuckling drama--because that's part of the genre--but also an in-depth exploration of faith, obedience, and consequences, both by Father Mazzare and Urban VIII. Urban is not a villain, and neither (despite the visual cues) is his black-robed vizier, Mutio Vitelleschi, sixth Father General of the Society of Jesus. The Spanish, on the other hand....
The 163x collection of books ('series' is a bit inapt, as many of the later books occur in parallel, though in different areas) has several very solid entries, particularly near the beginning. IMO, 1633 is better than 1632, for instance. But the quality of the various branches varies pretty widely; the Catholic/Southern European branch that follows Larry Mazzare and starts with 1634: The Galileo Affair is one of the better ones, but I'd avoid the ones involving Virginia DeMarce.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
I expect the central answer to your question is limiting liability for management and/or the organization itself, in the context of bad publicity (and they can at least make the argument in harassment/hostile workplace environment suits, even if the workshops have no formal shielding effect). Management can point to the workshops as offsetting institutional responsibility, and throw whatever individual involved under the bus as needed.
Also, this shield against liability can be proactive in cases of blackmail. Jesse Jackson/Rainbow PUSH is a very early example of explicit blackmail, but just keeping an eye on implicit incentives can be good enough. If the activists running the workshops see you as a source of funding, they are less likely to go looking for problems in your backyard. (At least, for the grifters. The true believers might still go after you.)
Sometimes the corporation even goes looking for the activists--Coca-Cola hired the NAACP to denounce regulatory attacks on its product as "racist," for example.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
I think the "grimdark" label is often misapplied; remember, the setting that gave the trope its name is Warhammer 40K. It's not just a general "do bad things happen onscreen" measure; it's an evaluation of specific story elements.
"Grim" is a measure of the characters, in terms of moral motivations. The protagonist is an anti-hero, and the conflicts are gray vs. grey or gray vs. black. There are no classic altruistic heroes here; a grim story is cynical about people and how they work.
"Dark" is a measure of the moral center of the setting itself. No good deed goes unpunished; virtue is for fools. If there's a higher power, he's at best completely disinterested in justice, but he might just be Tzeentch straight up. Dark stories are cynical about ultimate justice and whether good deeds have meaning.
Sanderson is a good example of an author who is not grimdark, and he explicitly rejects the concept. Yes, the Elantris and Mistborn settings are deeply broken, but the protagonists are trying to fix things, and their efforts are rewarded. The brokenness of the settings isn't a grimdark immutable constant; it's the result of previous bad choices and calamities that can be addressed.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
It's pretending a black guy could be nobility in a white majority place and nobody would even bat an eye, let alone raise objections.
Amusingly, I can think of a major space opera that does exactly this (ok, black girl as queen) and the author is 100% not woke or blank-slatist. The difference is that it's explained in plot and supports larger themes in the story. It's the opposite of "this village hasn't seen an outsider in generations, but might as well be a United Colors of Benetton ad."
Similarly, waif-fu occasionally works--Buffy the Vampire Slayer and River Tam, IMO--but Whedon did the work to explain his special cases. I think this points out one of the central problems with woke in a creative context--all too often, it's intellectually lazy. The blank slate means you don't have to justify casting choices in terms of logic, genetics, population dynamics, etc. So for an audience with even an instinctual grasp of all that--"people who are related to each other tend to look more like each other!"--you lose verisimilitude and immersion in the story.
ApplesauceIrishCream
15d ago
The other responses you've got are mostly correct, but I'll elaborate on a few points. I've written a bit about the process before here.
@VoxelVexillologist is correct to point out Roberts' automatic seniority as Chief and its consequences, but the case is complicated by the fact that the right-ish portion of the Court has six Justices, not five. Roberts is certainly inclined to write more moderately than Alito, but if he writes too moderately, Thomas/Alito/Gorsuch/Kavanaugh/Barrett can form a majority without him. Dobbs is an exceptionally high-profile example of exactly that.
Recusal is more of an issue for a new Justice, but still pretty rare unless the new Justice was a very recent Solicitor General (or other high-ranking member of the Justice Department, including the AG). The Solicitor General is the number two guy at Justice and has the special responsibility of representing the US in court--he usually does so personally before the Supreme Court, and delegates to staff in lesser cases--so he'll often be involved in litigation strategy of multiple cases that later appear before the Supreme Court.
Each Justice has exactly one vote. The way any given Justice may punch above or below his weight is based entirely on his personal relationships with the other Justices (this is much more likely to be a negative factor; you don't get to the Supreme Court with a weak ego) and the persuasiveness of his arguments, most often in writing. My personal guess is that Thomas, Kavanaugh, and Barrett are very slightly more advantageously placed than average, and Roberts and Jackson are slightly less than average.
@pigeonburger is right about how the majority opinion of the Court is initially assigned, but not the dissents. All dissents and concurrences are not assigned; they are written by any Justice who chooses to do extra writing. There was a recent case where Kagan registered her dissenting vote on the outcome, but neither wrote a dissent herself nor joined another opinion, so her exact reasoning is unknown. This is perfectly valid; it's just much more common that Justices are inclined to explain themselves, both to their colleagues and to posterity.
One point often missed is that in a given Term--and indeed, in each month--every Justice writes as close as possible to exactly the same number of majority opinions. This may seem unintuitive, but remember that the most common voting outcome in any given case has always been 9-0, and still is. Naturally, the more conservative Justices will be more likely to write for the majority in controversial decisions today, but that just means that Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson are more likely to be assigned the 8-1 or 9-0 cases. This practise is intended to make sure that each chambers is carrying its weight in terms of the essential work of the Court. As I said above, though, dissents and concurrences do not factor into load-balancing--those opinions are entirely discretionary on a Justice-by-Justice basis, and are purely extra work.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Was there ever a less convincing* religious panderer than Trump?
I think this is true but inaccurate. Yes, Trump trying to sell the line "Hello, fellow Christians" would be ludicrous, for all the obvious reasons, but that wasn't what he was selling, or what the Christian base of the Republican Party was buying. He was selling "I will represent your interests," and the much-publicized examples of Trump's sometimes-awkward association with Christian ideas and symbology are better understood as costly signaling. Both Trump and his Christian supporters are aware that the Left hates them; Trump signaling support for Christianity makes it less likely that he'd be politically able to mend fences with the Left and betray his Christian supporters on the Right.
This isn't the usual dynamic. Most of the time, politicians actually are selling the argument "I won't betray our shared interests, because I am one of you, and your interests are my interests." Sometimes this argument is even honest! But most of the time, it's got some level of pandering to it. I'm saying that Trump didn't realisticly have this option at all, recognized the fact, made a different pitch to his Christian Republican audience, and was successful in doing so.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
In Defense of Wrath and Forgiveness
Anger and the rest of its conceptual cluster (wrath, outrage, hatred, etc.) are not in themselves wrong. They are the appropriate, healthy emotional response to a violation of justice. The virtue of anger is that it provides drive, energy, and motivation to correct or avenge a wrong. A passionless man is not moved by injustice, but instead becomes the proverbial "good man" that does nothing, leading to the triumph of evil. The common error in their manifestation is that of anger unchecked (or insufficiently checked) by reason and temperance, which frequently leads to further acts of injustice. Anger is a good servant in its proper context, but a bad master.
Forgiveness is a setting aside, or letting go, of anger that has outlasted its usefulness. It has nothing to do with whether the target of that anger no longer "deserves" condemnation; even the noble act of killing Hitler was insufficient to balance the scales of the tremendous evil he inflicted on the world during his lifetime, and he is no longer available on this earth to pay down that debt. The Holocaust was an event of great and terrible evil, an injustice that beggars the imagination, and for that, anger is the proper emotional response. But what corrective good can that anger serve, most of a century later? With perhaps one or two very minor exceptions, the perpetrators of that evil are long gone.
Anger at historical injustices, where there is no just outlet for that drive, is purely corrosive and--best case--harms only the bearer. "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." Forgiveness is therefore necessary to purge the poison of pointless anger, and turn instead to more productive pursuits. Forgiveness is not about denying the evil of past injustice, or forgetting the lessons that may be learned. To the extent that past evils may be educational, they should be heeded to avoid future pitfalls. But if they cannot be corrected or justly avenged, then angry fervor should be set aside.
Forgiveness is also conceptually separate from mercy--the denial or reduction of punishment justly earned. One may forgive and still punish; in fact, forgiveness is often necessary to avoid over-punishing beyond the demands of justice. This is no contradiction--once you are in a position to punish, the zealous drive of anger has most likely accomplished the good uses it can serve. Forgiveness is also healthy at any point in the process--it is a setting aside of anger, not responsibility. Using forgiveness as an excuse to avoid correcting injustice is still wrong.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
I believe the proper reference is to the Lightworker, also known as former President Obama, thanks to an exceedingly effusive article written by Mark Morford in SFGate several years back.
Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.
(Emphasis in the original text.)
Probably not a Lucifer comparison.
Nominative determinism is my favorite type of determinism.
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