BaronVSS
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User ID: 483
Hate to say this but this has more relevance than when it is usually used, but UK poster here.
It feels quite eerie. The Queen is (was now, I suppose) a part of the country in a way that will be felt. You could at any time in any place put on a voice of an old woman speaking in an extra refined RP accent and people could immediately tell who you were referring to. Moreover, she lived through several decades of incredible, breakneck change. Several PMs have said of her weekly meetings that they were the most valuable time in their week, to be able to talk to someone who was as close as you could get to impartial advice and had such experience.
She was also the only thing the country could have theoretically united around as a single cultural marker. Before the Jubilee you could go outside and see union jacks and banners depicting the queen's face on almost every house, then on the day everything shut down and neighbours roped off streets to get large open spaces so that they could celebrate the event. That is gone now. Charles does not have the benefit of being a still point in a moving world and comes with several bizzare views about coffee enemas, and it is likely he will be King for the rest of this decade. We may very well see the end of the Monarchy as a cultural touchpoint and the transformation of this country into a complete satellite state of the US will be done.
There was rain and thunderstorms here all throughout the afternoon, which if you believe in portents is not a good sign.
BaronVSS
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2yr ago
I agreed with your sentiment, and then out of force of habbit gave you an internet point.
That says a lot about society.
BaronVSS
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2yr ago
Recently, I have been attempting to learn Dominions 5: Warriors of the Faith.
Dominions is a turn based fantasy strategy game. It can be best summised as a bizarre mix of Heroes of Might and Magic and Risk, with a DF-esque combat system that models limb damage and such. In it, you play as one of many Pretender Gods worshipped solely by a single nation, trying to banish the other Pretender Gods and occupy the place of the Pantokrator, the God of All Gods, the creator of the Universe, whose empty celestial seat and the resulting power vacuum is the trigger of the conflict. To do this, you must either kill off the other nations through traditional violence or capture a number of red chairs called "Thrones of Ascension" scattered throughout the map. Alternatively, you may spread your religion so hard that your opponents fade out existence through not being worshipped any longer, as this universe shares Warhammer logic where a God is only as powerful as the number of people that believe in them.
Dominions has a reputation for being incredibly complicated with a near vertical learning curve. Having played it for a dozen or so hours now, I would not say that the core game is complicated. What makes Dominions complicated is the sheer amount of content in it and the way it intersects with each other. You have three different time periods to chose from, each with their own nations and theme and each period holds roughly two dozen nations. On top of that, you must design a pretender god, which again has countless designs to choose from (you can be anything from a simple wizard seeking Godhood to a Dragon to a Zeus-like figure or a giant tree, or possibly even this thing) and stat them out like they're a D&D character. Then you have battles - battles in this game are not real-time, nor are they turn based. Instead, you setup your commanders and groups of soldiers with specific, ordered commands and the battle plays out based upon those commands. This is not Endless Space: giving your units the correct orders is the difference between having your mage rout the enemy army with a cloud of poisonous gas and having him kill your units instead.
My current nation of choice is Abysia. They are lava-men with incredibly tanky units and a range of mage-priests skilled in Fire, Blood and Astral (a mixture of astronomic and lovecraftian horror) magic. With these powers combined, you can expand very quickly at the start of the game, rolling over the weak and pathetic independent provinces while taking very few or no losses. Unfortunately, they are hard countered by the existence of rain, and I'll probably need to branch out if I ever go online.
If we are not: why is that? Other voluntary organizations come under pressure to diversify, all the time - see "knitting too white," "hiking too white," etc. Would our church not qualify because it's too small? Because it isn't a business? Because we do not have any status to award? Because we have no social media presence?
The purpose of that attack is not to ensure that the recipient changes their ways and transforms their community to be a pluralistic collection of races. The purpose of the attack is to chastise and lower the status of the recipient in that moment by implying that they have a stank of Racism that can never be quite cleaned. Had you perhaps say a dozen or half a dozen non-white members, the attack line would then become the traditional jab that some of your best friends are black.
Ask these people for solutions to this and you will not get any immediately actionable goals. At best you would hear abstract targets like "tackling structural racism" or social rituals like "having uncomfortable conversations" with no real explanation as to how to get to these goal or what the result of an uncomfortable conversation is supposed to be. I do not recall who said it now, but the best line I have ever heard on this is that there would be no real difference in material outcome between someone reading out a Land Acknowledgement and someone reading out John Wayne quotes on a stage.
Who knows, maybe enough subs follow in our wake that single topic discussion forums become a thing again.
Shame they're all modelled on reddit, that format incites poor quality conversation.
BaronVSS
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2yr ago
TheMotte was one of three forums that tied me to that place. The day where two and three go as well are not far off.
Reddit is dying. New reddit is infinite scrolling hell, its rulership hates any remotely provocative conversation and lets not talk about the delightful people we had to share a website with.
I don't know what the future holds for us here. Hopefully enough people come over and Zorba fixes enough of the problems he's inherited.
The Church of England is dying and irrelevant as a cultural force. Attendance numbers have been declining steadily since the 90s:
https://faithsurvey.co.uk/uk-christianity.html*
http://www.brin.ac.uk/figures/church-attendance-in-britain-1980-2015/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/07/church-in-crisis-as-only-2-of-young-adults-identify-as-c-of-e
in particular, the takeup among the young is shockingly low, and those people are your future worshippers.
Whatever cultural steps it tries to make are one or two years behind the current liberal consesus. OP brings up the rejection of women bishops: more recently, the Church said that they could not define precisely what a woman was: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11000401/Church-England-woman-decide.html, which rather raises the question of not quite knowing what something is, but whatever it is it can't gain rank in the organisation. I would put money on it not existing in half a century from now.
*Interestingly, those demoninations that are growing in number are those that actively reject established churches such as the CoFE and the Catholic Church. These churches tend to believe in some whacky things, and in some things that are incompatible with western thought. As these people are one of the few groups having children and forming any sense of cohesive community, they may be powerful players in the politics of the future.
If someone can tell me how tf you do links as you could on old reddit, that would be highly appreciated.
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