Bingbong
1d ago
- Alabama might beat Jacksonville if Alabama was in mid season form versus Jacksonville playing essentially their first preseason game (a month of training camp).
Even absolutely legendary CFB teams will be lucky to have half their roster have meaningful NFL careers. Like I'm sure there's been times in the history of both sports where the absolutely hottest, best CFB roster might have been competitive with a particularly injury-depleted demoralized single game roster running out the QB5 and the backupbackupbackup OL but the gap between the worst healthy NFL team and the best healthy CFB team is still pretty gigantic.
Bingbong
1d ago
If all you saw was photos of the most passionate Browns and Jets supporters and you didn't live in the same country you'd probably have a skewed view of how much their ultras liked the team, though.
Bingbong
2d ago
I think the first face reveal bit she looks underaged, the third-person model looks generic young-but-legal anime and the other cinematics look a tad young but nothing crazy.
Bingbong
3d ago
I think you can argue all day about where the line should be, but in the established metagame that is 2026 Western society there are better uses of your time and generally if you're arguing passionately about this it's not really for productive reasons.
If I moved into another neighboring society and the line was anywhere between like 16 and 20 I can't imagine it having too big an impact on my day-to-day life or being something I consider a grave injustice eitherway.
Bingbong
4d ago
Whilst I'd agree with the sentiment that Charlie Kirk's anti-trans stuff was most likely the thing that motivated his assassination, the polarization around him and him being treated like the antichrist by people on the left side of the Aisle was more a gestalt of his entire collection of opinions IMO
Bingbong
4d ago
Yeah I mean I know enough relatives who grew up in effectively these conditions (My dad's in his 80s now, has a large number of female siblings most of whom married before 20 to get out of the house/after getting pregnant) and I don't think the average quality of match is some massive departure from what the same women would be doing circa 2025. It's all pulling from the same fundamental social networks for the most part, and 'I'm going to select for somebody who is a somewhat stable wage-earner' as a motivation produces different results to 'I'm going to select for whoever gives me the strongest emotional pull'.
I also feel similar about arranged marriage as a whole. I'm not supporting knifepoint 12 year olds marrying 80 year olds, but I've got Indian friends and that 'strong introduction to somebody of about the same SES as you' pathway seems to work pretty fine on the aggregate? Maybe I have insufficient faith in the ability of people trying to self-source 'love matches'
Bingbong
5d ago
Yeah but the same person who is 'we need him for the football team' with Mtumbo Mtumbo likely doesn't have the same sentiment for Dale Daleson III who used a no-no word once and wore a red hat. I'm big into the MMA fandom and it's kinda hysterical how often fanbases take issues with 'US citizen fighter is a Republican' whilst getting behind overseas fighters who realistically have social views far to the right of Republicans. I get on fine with Dagestanis I've met and trained with, but like the social views of a Khabib Nurmagomedov are likely going to be miles outside of the current overton window of Western discourse. They're generally polite and good guys in a training room, but I've had conversations with some where they've prettymuch said, without qualms, that homosexuals should be killed and I think very few MAGAs are at that point on the continuum,
Bingbong
5d ago
Exactly. Debooonkers of this number are also likely ones who didn't have any issue with the '1/3 males in college will rape somebody' study that has been cited for a decade+ now or other insane flourishes of the #metoo era.
Bingbong
5d ago
The number is probably overblown but the thing that annoys me is that people trying to erode the number are being enthusiastically platformed whilst completely absurdities like Ro Khanna claiming that DOGE has killed 4.5 million children (up from 500k a few months ago) get essentially no critical pushback despite being even more insane and frivolous. I've had enough random stuff that could be debunked (or atleast determined to be hugely exaggerated) with about 30 seconds of thinking shoved down my throat in recent years that it's kinda funny to see all these people suddenly own calculators and rational thinking hats.
Bingbong
5d ago
I feel like Mottizens are probably more likely than most to have run into MtFs in their day-to-day life as a result of affluence, education, industries of choice etcetera. Admittedly mostly the 'Speedrunning-American' class of such.
Bingbong
9d ago
Yeah but Finance is largely allocating to SAAS bullshit due to margins at this point. There's benefits of liquidity, but most of the truly transformational stuff we've seen in recent years (Like SpaceX) has had a lot more to do with Elon Musk's personal ballast and raising money for a space project now would generally be incredibly difficult since Finance beancounters say no.
Bingbong
9d ago
I think there's a bit of a self-perpetuating loop where the outside world making such a deal of it means that there's more desire to quash it, plus having violent crackdown happening in the absolute center of the country in a way that the powers that be almost instantaneously regretted means less willingness to go over it. China also seems quite happy to crack down on navel-gazing/revisionist history stuff to stop it gaining steam, and better to absolutely prohibit topics. A lot of Chinese senior leadership is very scarred by the Cultural Revolution (since they were the 20-30 year old children of higher-ups who got sent to the countryside) and thus try their utmost to stop popular movements gaining steam.
Bingbong
9d ago
I agree that Beijing food is a bit nonspicy/plain compared to other Chinese varietals but I wouldn't call it bad perse. There are countries where the baseline is a lot worse.
Also I'd agree on the cultural stuff as a white person living in a Malaysian Chinese family in Malaysia. I do feel that the average Malaysian Chinese adherence to cultural stuff is higher than the average Mainlanders, but also the sheer scope, regional focuses and population of China means that if you travel you'll see a lot more random showings of cultural practices that you wouldn't otherwise expect. A lot of the old temples have been overrun by XHS photo-takers, but sometimes you'll see people doing things the old ways. I accidentally walked into a closed temple (Somebody left a door open and I think the person watching it wasn't confident enough in their English to warn me from going through) on top of Taishan last time I was there and there was a lot more monks and elaborate offerings than I expected.
Bingbong
9d ago
'DOGE instantly killed 30 Million people via cutting funding' and whatnot
Bingbong
9d ago
Yeah. China's fine these days, maybe a bit of issues with sameyness in their urban renewal but it's also absurdly cheap and comfortable in the vast majority of places I've been in the country. Most of the places in the world I've been to and felt like I'm unsafe/witnessing urban decay have been in the West such as New Orleans and Belfast (Yes, I'm sure I could go find worse places in Asia but like no real desire to do that).
What's wrong with Beijing food? It's not my favorite regional cuisine but I've had some great meals there.
Bingbong
9d ago
Tbh Americans probably have the lowest incentive to do it of most countries since the IRS is gonna come for your ass regardless and the basic passport is sufficiently strong.
Bingbong
9d ago
In what sense?
Why'd they crack down so hard? Why is it still held up as a pivotal moment in Chinese history or why is it censored perse?
Bingbong
9d ago
Kind of. Most of the Chinese senior officials were at formative ages during the Cultural Revolution, so they're very hesitant to allow anything approaching an ideological purity cycle to take place since they know how bad it can be for them. If Kent State happened in literally the middle of Times Square it'd have reached another level of exposure within the culture, though.
I do think you're overstating how ideologically unified the current Chinese populace is, but they've also seen massive improvements in living standards within living memory and tend to be anti-woke due to seeing a lot of the media that hits about Europe being flooded with refugees and whatnot.
Bingbong
9d ago
Yeah this is also my read of the situation. High profile defectors from the Soccer team happened at the start of the year and the US isn't being totally unreasonable in filtering some of the more politically-exposed people from the Iranian Team's posse from entering the country.
Also a spot where the USA can't really directly contradict the narrative without opening up further vectors for attack in the press. I'm sure there's some effort from the USA to fuck with the team, but realistically the players defecting is like the only potential scenario of consequence that could happen here.
Bingbong
9d ago
Yeah the Iranian Womens team had a bunch of defectors in Australia at the start of this year. I don't get why the US would benefit from fucking around the players so much whilst the Iranian government has a far clearer motive to stop potential defections and/or make the US look unreasonable.
Bingbong
9d ago
Is the Iranian thing solely due to US officials? The womens' team had like half of the team trying to defect in Australia during the outbreak of the war which surely has to be some part of the calculus here.
Bingbong
9d ago
I feel like the racial dynamic of European Soccer is a bit different to US sports. Locals have been replaced by random Africans within the last couple decades, and did so at a far quicker rate than the diversification of the general population. The USA's always had more of a mixed population and US sports have had huge African admixtures for far longer. Also the Draft means that there's way less of an expectation/idea that say the Green Bay Packers as an organization represents any sort of a local population directly. Soccer academies (prior to big business and international scouting atleast) meant that Football clubs would frequently be a lot more hyperlocal.
Hurling racial slurs at the only Black Person you're going to see day-to-day in a second-tier Italian city when he's ostensibly 'taken the job' of a local player is a lot easier than when you might offend somebody else in the stands.
Bingbong
9d ago
I'd argue most conservative factchecker types tended to be more motivated by autistic desires for accuracy rather than necessarily choosing to go along with their side's narrative on other things.
Bingbong
9d ago
Also funny that people who were extraordinarily credulous for claims like the Canadian Indigenous Reservation School genocide or acting like Black Deaths in Custody were about 100x higher than they actually are can suddenly do basic mathematics and modeling to contradict this particular issue.
Yeah can't think of a Soulslike barring Sekiro (and even then you can cheese a lot of stuff) that doesn't have the difficulty fall off a ton once you get more options.
More options
Context Copy link