Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
No bio...
User ID: 1864
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2hr ago
Yeah, I knew asking Jiro to be arsed to write more than two sentences was a pretty monumental ask. You shouldn't be so pessimistic though! Hope springs eternal and all that.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3hr ago
Happy to, conditional on:
- You bothering to write more than lazy, snarky, single sentence replies to minimize the asymmetry of effort between us.
- Define outgroup.
- Define good faith.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3hr ago
It's true, although if Asmongold hops on the stage at the RNC and says "The more pain and terror inflicted in the process, the greater the psychic wound sustained on the collective consciousness of these illegals and all others interested in following them, the better" to thunderous applause then is deplatforming really the answer to our problems?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3hr ago
So no I don't think that the other side of immigration is doing anything in good faith.
As evidence that your outgroup is acting in bad faith, you bring up legislation from 40 years ago. 2/3rds of those voters are probably dead, while the majority of voters today (myself included) weren't alive or were far too young to vote for your compromise. Your imagined voter who supported amnesty in the 80s knowing that we'd be in the situation we are today as part of some dastardly bad-faith plan to bring in more illegal immigrants is nonexistent.
"But Chris!" you say, scurrying back to your bailey, "I didn't mean voters today are acting in bad faith because of legislation from 40 years ago, I'm saying they push compromises in bad faith knowing that they're meaningless and we'll be back where we started 40 years from now! How could you not parse that from my two sentence effortpost that I worked on meticulously to avoid any ambiguity?"
To which I say, you aren't offering any evidence that these compromises are offered in bad faith, you're pretending to read the minds of your outgroup and ascribe the worst possible impulses to them. I believe that the majority of Americans support a middle path, flanked by people like the one I replied to and open borders folks. Biden, the media, and a majority of voters all knew the administration had a problem with immigration leading up to the election which is why they tried to craft a compromise to address it. You won't get a mea culpa, but it was pretty obvious throughout the summer that the status quo was unsustainable.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
7hr ago
The following is a nakedly partisan take, but that's because you asked for a poll of opinions. These are my sincerely held beliefs; there's no room for anyone to argue me out of them, but I'm not expecting anyone to share it, either: there is simply no good faith left at all in my heart. my political opponents, and they will never operate in good faith. There is no negotiation in existential conflict. There is only the will and the power to act.
'You see Charlie, these liberals are trying to assassinate my character. And I can't change their mind. I won't change my mind, because I don't have to. Because I'm an American. I won't change my mind on anything, regardless of the facts that are set out before me. I'm dug in. And I'll never change.' For your viewing pleasure - one of my favorite clips, and not even for that quote.
Every time I read one of these pathetic tough guy screeds, my first thought is to laugh at the absolute lack of self-awareness. 'Reee, my outgroup is full of animals who would never compromise or act in good faith! This justifies me never acting in good faith either. I can't wait for my fellow citizens to get mown down by the stasi for disagreeing with me!'
My second thought is to reply, 'Say it louder, and into the microphone, please.' Seriously. Go hop on Fox News and give an interview about how you want to shoot protestors and cruelty is the point and God praise Donald Trump. Write your angry, impotent screeds and spread them as widely as possible - under your real name if you can. There's really nothing better for democratic electoral odds than platforming people like you.
Or, and I hold little hope for a week-old-probably-troll account, you could dig yourself out of your sad little internet radicalization hole and stop holding so much hate in your heart. I guarantee your life would be better for it.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1d ago
'I hate it,' quoth the hater.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1d ago
I haven't seen you around for a bit and am happy you're still here.
I've been here the whole time. Lurking is just my natural state. This is the only forum I've participated in across thirty odd years on the internet.
What's your personal solution to this problem?
It's always been easy on a personal level. I have some innate affinity for and take pleasure from responsibility, returning the shopping cart, and working towards the flourishing of family/community/nation/humanity in that order. I appreciate that this is not a generalizable solution, although it's one I wish we could evangelize.
If one's moral framework is entirely built around one's own pleasure and benefit (or limbic gratification as you say), then sure, none of the above matter and anything I say will fall on deaf ears. There's no logical argument I can provide to convince you that I'm right. But frankly, not calling your parents or raising your children or treating your wife well or reading books or staying fit is, for lack of a better term, a bitch move, no? At the risk of typical-minding after already admitting I'm weird, I think nearly every man has this urge or understands what I mean when I say that.
Both sides of the aisle generally agree that the left fails to provide role models for men. Someone needs to wrest the banner of self-improvement, fitness, hygiene, stoicism, etc. from the Tates of the world and divorce it from the more toxic aspects of masculinity.
They just need a better physique and more charisma than I can muster.
Carrying on, one of my major frustrations in modern discourse is that there doesn't seem to be much individual reflection on what the point of life (or anything) even is, let alone widespread agreement. "Gratifying the human limbic system" seems to be what we're settling on and that puts us squarely in OP's dilemma.
The time is ripe for the birth of a new religion. Gather thy flocks, and adapt thy sermons to tiktok.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1d ago
You started your post with:
Why Should I Care? To provide some context, I've been in a bit of a malaise for the last few days, having had a rough week at work, and I get into a spiral of fantasizing about quitting my job when the thought hits me - why, exactly, do I even care about the job? Why do I actually care about contributing to society?
You followed up with 20 different ways society fails men, whom you depict as passive victims in your narrative. None of these actually answer the question you started with - okay, in the past men could be decidedly average and the church would still furnish them with a doe-eyed virgin and 20 acres of land on their 18th birthday. Even if you and all the NEETs lived in that world, what's the point of getting married? Of having children, raising them well, working to feed yourself? Why do you bother to call your elderly parents?
If your answers were orgasms, economic utility, economic utility, not starving and I don't talk to my parents on a regular basis then your problems run a lot deeper than dating market hard and my life is pointless because the state won't let me starve. If you don't want to do your job then don't, but quitting to pick pineapples isn't going to make you any happier until you find something larger than your own ego and physical pleasure to live for.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1d ago
Welcome back.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
5d ago
If what you're doing deserves to be treated with dignity and without antagonism, you should not be shamed! In fact, it will probably be very difficult to shame you if you actually know that you're conducting yourself in a dignified fashion and feel strongly that the people who suggest otherwise are in the wrong.
I doubt this very much. Someone immigrating from a country where women are expected to bare their breasts in public would be readily shamed walking around downtown NYC. Conversely, I've met women in the Peace Corps who ended up in countries where they were shamed for wearing shirts and went with the flow, despite their discomfort. A hedge fund manager would be shamed mercilessly were he transplanted to a trailer park in a suit with a briefcase full of whatever they put in their briefcases, and a trailer park bro would be shamed for driving his ATV around Martha's vineyard. Self-righteousness won't get you very far if you're literally being ostracized by every person you meet.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10d ago
I wasn't talking of Canadian perceptions. Are you playing for pity now with this ridiculous «nuh-uh»? Yes it was.
Your link is showing data from 2020. Your initial argument was:
How have the last 20 years been for them? Are they famed for their Deep State? I rest my case.
So, despite 15 years of supposed collapse it is still one of the most popular countries for people to emigrate to. Clearly, even taking your arguments at face value, they aren't coming here because the country is 'well-run,' or because the deep state is (in)competent. Your entire argument is internally incoherent.
But Canadians were endlessly preening about their moral superiority and greater civility and safety, too, much to the consternation of Americans.
None of which have anything to do with the government, or how well the state is run? The people believe that they are better than the stupid uncultured Americans, while the Canadian government widely (and correctly) recognized as an inefficient nightmare that completes everything massively overbudget and years behind schedule. This has been true for decades.
You want to prove me stupid and ignorant on every turn
Stupid no, ignorant in same cases, but a massively overblown ego always. Which makes you say stupid things, in a way that's fun to read.
If you think otherwise, make some concrete predictions for the next few years based on your grand narratives, and let's see what happens.
Now even first generation immigrants flee south for better opportunities
Brain drain to America has again been a problem for decades, and the trends are dead flat prior to the pandemic. Meanwhile, US emigration to Canada increased in the same timeframe you're discussing.
the government barely has popular mandate,
In the last 25 years there have been more minority governments than majority. Nothing has changed.
there's increasingly not-jokey talk about Alberta accepting American annexation.
Are you aware of two prior actual referendums for a province to separate from the dominion, the second of which failed to pass by a hair? A province that was much more valuable to the country at the time, and that still has a larger fraction of national GDP? The second of which was supposedly during your 'well-run' state period? Yet you talk about Albertan annexation by the US when 2/3rds of the province opposes independence, let alone US annexation. Do you just write this based on reddit vibes or something? Come on man, it's all nonsense. I'm out.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11d ago
Canada used to be seen as a “nicer America”, an uncontroversially well-running state.
No, it didn't. Or if it was, it was by ignorant people living half a world away teaching your high school geography class. This is so far from Canadians' self-conception that at least on this point, I can confidently say that you have no idea what you're talking about.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11d ago
If either or both of them dedicate significant resources to striking at each other, then that will confirm that the breach is serious in nature, and that will bode extremely ill for my faction.
...why? I mean, firstly, 'significant resources' is load-bearing here in a way that's difficult to falsify. Secondly, I recoil at the use of 'my faction' (where's the guy who was trying to address the address the hate in his heart with his pastor, or something like that?) but I guess that ship has sailed. Thirdly, what does it matter to you whether Trump cancels Elon's contracts or Elon doesn't show up for republicans next election? Your coalition is the same, the people who vote for guns and the people who vote for abortion and the people who vote for whatever else will turn out in 2028.
Either way, I'll go way out on a limb and predict that the presidency goes D in 2028, without knowing who either candidate will be. In the grand scheme of things, Elon-Trump beef is irrelevant.
this would be evidence that our leadership is fundamentally dysfunctional, and I would expect that to manifest in other ways in relatively short order.
Again, why? Obviously your leadership is fundamentally dysfunctional - how can you read what Elon and Trump are tweeting at each other and conclude anything else? Would you ever behave that way, let alone behave that way if you were representing a nation? They're just dysfunctional in ways that you or your 'faction' approves of.
What updates beyond this would you recommend?
You should probably update on at least the stability of Elon. Whether the drug of choice is ketamine or culture war, something degraded significantly in the last couple years, and I say that as a papa Elon fanboy.
I'd say you should probably update on Trump as well, but I expect you already think he's bonkers and love him anyways or you'll never change your opinion, so that's probably not a worthwhile conversation.
thinly-veiled
Was this meant to link to a pop song? If so, the reference went over my head.
Where do you expect the thinly-veiled minecraft references to be directed?
From Trump supporters, towards Elon.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11d ago
It'll probably prompt Rightists to make thinly veiled comments, if it keeps going. About minecraft.
You often talk about worldview, predictions, updating, etc. Do you have an update to your worldview based on this thread?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
18d ago
It was after this paragraph that I decided to just stop reading.
Sad. You'll never get to experience my devastating counterargument. Best of luck to you - I'm eager to see how all the predictions shake out, although you haven't shared many here.
But my argument here was not that China Good: solely that allowing Chinese development in the first place, instead of pursuing a more negative-sum strategy, was not a blunder or a betrayal of American self-interest. America actually can benefit from global growth (eg by getting bailed out in a crisis, after having become a pillar of global economy). Chinese growth prior to this phase of conflict is, therefore, not evidence of American Deep State being incompetent.
I think you should expand this take into it's own post for discussion of the group. It's...an interesting one.
For the contrary example, look no further than the EU and Canada. They have comparable population quality, are at the same stage of development, and share many of your natural advantages. How have the last 20 years been for them? Are they famed for their Deep State? I rest my case.
This one too. Can't speak for the EU, but the argument that Canada would be as powerful as the US (or I imagine you'd retreat to a motte of achieve comparable GDP growth rates to the US given that you haven't actually specified any metric by which to compare them over the last 20 years) if they only had a more competent deep state is a hilarious take.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
19d ago
Does that count as impeding progress?
No, because you can just go down to the store and buy fish oil for 30$? Not to mention eating fish oil isn't progress, we've been doing it for I don't know how many years. Lovaza is different in that it is manufactured in a GMP facility, with GMP protocols and supported (I presume, I don't follow the fish oil literature) by expensive clinical trials. Maybe you don't care when it comes to fish oil, but you probably care that your hideously complex chemo drug is both 1) effective and 2) safe.
Would the libertarians paradise where drug manufacturing and prescription was completely unregulated, and savvy consumers learned which manufacturers were reputable and which drugs were efficacious by word of mouth be better than what we have now? No idea, although it's worth noting that we effectively had that paradise in the era of snake oil salesmen and sulfanilamide killing over 100 people. We had thalidomide, we had SV40 contaminated polio vaccines, and other incidents I can't remember off the top of my head. I think it's reasonable to question whether the FDA in it's current state is net positive and how it can be reformed, but I'd wager that the vast majority of the 'FDA delenda est' crowd have no idea why this fence was built in the first place.
As some other anecdata, if you like, until recently many Chinese people prized medicine (and other goods!) manufactured in the USA. Largely due to the regulation and processes you dislike.
It only took them nine years!
Difficult for me to comment as I'm about up to date on epipens as I am on fish oils, but the rejection seems pretty opaque. Are you confident that the entirety of the issue here is the FDA just sitting on their application/dragging their feet, or were there actual major problems with the design?
I think that the FDA impedes progress relative to a theoretical-within-punishing-the-elites pharmaceutical regulator
What does 'theoretical-within-punishing-the-elites pharmaceutical regulator' mean?
Regardless, at the end of the day you face tradeoffs between safety and cost. The ideal number of pharmaceutical recalls/killed patients isn't zero, but it's hard to say what the optimal number is.
If you're curious, the Chinese have significantly deregulated. They also use a lot more 'phase zero' clinical trials that allow smaller biotechs to get clinical data much more easily and, as a result, are on a trajectory to wreck the US biotech ecosystem in the next 5-10 years. That said, I'd bet they've had some nonzero number of patients in clinical trials develop serious adverse events that were kept hush-hush in a way that's impossible to do in the USA.
Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that I'm very curious how the Trump admin has been doing tackling regulation. There's a lot of things going on, and regulation seems to have lost the spotlight, but I'm very much hoping that we walk away from the next few years with dramatically reduced regulatory agencies.
Well, he appointed an HHS secretary (who oversees the FDA) who fucking hates the pharmaceutical industry. As far as I can tell, the twin north stars of RFK Jr. are 1) pharmaceutical companies are evil and 2) COVID was manufactured in a lab and facilitated by NIH money. I don't think he's a man who wants to maximize the number of drugs large pharma companies can get approved. They've also (as far as I can tell) entirely cut off government grant money to at least Harvard, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Northwestern and others which probably isn't optimal for progress. He's threatening to block government scientists from publishing in top medical journals and is instead promoting his personal weird one. Biotech in the US is probably dead in the water, and the future is Chinese.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
22d ago
Particularly given that many of those same people have likely ridiculed the purity spirals on the left.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Your complaints about GWOT are motivated reasoning, GWOT was quite successful for Israel at least.
Why is it motivated reasoning? My impression is that the GWOT is fairly widely regarded as...not the most successful foreign policy, no? Or are you trying to make the argument that the US state department is competent, but got played by even bigger-brained Israelis?
The US has been able to grow its economy extremely rapidly through Chinese industrialization, without that your, as marxists say, Internal Contradictions would have likely brought about a protracted recession already.
The confidence you have in stating these counterfactual alternate histories is just astounding to me, but I guess there's no stakes when nothing is falsifiable. I won't pretend to know what the world would look like had China failed to industrialize, but I'm also not buying your interpretation offered with the barest of rationales and no evidence. I could just as easily argue that a world where China failed to industrialize is one in which glorious America land still stands head and shoulders above the rest of the world with no real peers, and the only way to settle the argument would be the floridity of our prose and our imaginations.
Don't forget that in 2008, it was China that bailed you out.
Ah, that was very generous of them. I'm sure self-interest played no part in it, and it's not even clear what you mean by that - buying treasuries? If so, they bought treasuries throughout the early 2000s at a rate not that different from 2008 - was that also for altruistic reasons?
1970s-2023, I'd say. Your safe and prosperous world is a product of an overall competent policy. Just continuing and improving on Biden's program could have been enough. See the success of CHIPS act, for example.
Vietnam war and Afghanistan/Iraq were competent policy? What about the inflation of the 70s and early 80s? All the NIMBYist policies that birthed our housing crisis and inability to build anything, falling birth rate, crumbling infrastructure? Contrary to some of the blackpillers, I won't pretend that the last 50 years have unilaterally been failures, but all the available evidence points towards relatively normal people muddling along rather than a cabal of puppetmasters making the rest of the world dance. All the problems that put us on the path to being peers of and/or eclipsed by China were born during the golden age you're gesturing towards.
Like owning the biggest consumer market in the world
How do you propose to leverage this? Tariffs?
most of the world's most prized IP
Indeed - Thankfully, China also has a robust track record of respecting those IP rights.
having military presence in all corners of the world.
Maybe.
I'd say you left out immense natural resources (even more so if you include the 51st state), vast oceans on both flanks and (I laugh while writing this) the ability to appeal to talented immigrants from around the world, and integrate them into the social fabric.
I recall I did predict a long grinding war after like a week of it.
I'll take your word for it. Would you agree that the vast majority of people have gotten it wrong, over and over again? Including (I'd guess we can infer) the US and Russian state departments?
What did you say at the time?
I kept my mouth shut because I at least have the self-awareness to know that I know fuck all about Ukraine and Russia.
Sorry, this sounds very much like Russian “we haven't even started yet” narrative to me.
Hardly. It's an argument that we were undeniably the most powerful country in the world and, while we caused plenty of misery, our reign was fairly benign.
I'm under no illusions that America in 2025 is the superpower it was in 2000, or that China is a nation of rapacious peasants riding the coattails of the Master Race to success. There's a fair chance that China destroys my industry the same way they destroyed western manufacturing, with your prized Tsinghua graduates grinding 996 for poverty wages to fuck me in the ass.
But you have a susceptibility to grand, romantic narratives where small numbers of people can leverage their brilliance into enormous influence on the course of history rather than human matters largely being emergent phenomena. If you think I'm wrong, make some concrete predictions about how China will bring about America's ruin in the next three years - should be plenty of time for a couple of Tsinghua galaxy-brains forged in the fires of the gaokao to run circles around some retarded Orange Man sycophants, no?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
overestimated the US mainly because I did not account for the immense capacity for self-sabotage.
I'll wager that if we're still here in 3-5 years, you'll be saying the same thing about underestimating the Chinese capacity for self-sabotage. The United States isn't going to collapse in the next 5-10 year timeframe, and if we lose to China, it will be a long and drawn-out process. Not some knockout punch engineered by whatever the CCP department of foreign affairs is called.
I think they have enough talented people to do this, it's just those people have lost in internal politics.
Did those talented people lose in the 2000s during the GWOT era? Or in the 90s when we let American companies migrate to China en masse? When have these Mycroftian prodigies ever won in internal politics, what decisions did they make with said influence and where's the golden era in American foreign and domestic policy mediated by these people?
Manipulating the world is made much easier when you own major causal factors of that world. It doesn't take 200 IQ, though intelligence helps not to manipulate yourself into the ditch. All of great power politics is such manipulation. Suppressing competitors, strengthening allies, capturing international institutions
Like what, the financial system that proved utterly incapable of regime change in Iran or hindering Russia's ability to wage war? Toothless institutions like the UN, WHO or WTO?
networks of high-agency people, not by vague sentiment of the electorate. Sorry, that's just what we can observe happening.
Sure, the electorate isn't writing policy, nor should they.
That being said, the ability of anyone to influence systems this complex is limited, and related to how well we actually understand them. We designed computers from the ground up, and you can drill all the way down to machine code and circuit diagrams if you like. Mastery over the system makes you a 10x software engineer, or whatever the 10x hardware engineer is called. Diagnosing and fixing problems in a car or aircraft is eminently doable because we designed and understand all the parts ourselves.
On the other hand, reading all the economics textbooks in the world won't give you mastery over the stock market any more than learning fluid dynamics will help you understand the weather well enough to predict it perfectly. Biology PhDs can't even make basic predictions about how the system they've studied their entire career will behave in response to a given perturbation. And this is only partially due to the fact that they aren't very bright or talented in general, but more due to how complex and inscrutable biology is - at least to humans as we are now.
You bring up Russia and Ukraine - in March 2022, was there anyone (including what we can guess the US state department thought at the time!) who confidently predicted the outcome would be >= 3 year grinding war with little movement on the front, dominated by drone warfare? I saw plenty of takes that Russia was about to curbstomp Ukraine, then after the initial offensive failed, plenty of takes that Russia was about to collapse due to American sanctions, all of which turned out to be bullshit. If you can't predict that, I don't believe you when you say that Russia was capable of winning the war if they had just done it rationally, or that you or anyone could have figured out what to do differently in the leadup to reach a significantly different outcome. The outcome hinged on decisions made by thousands, if not millions of people - their morale, equipment, education, talent, weather, luck. If some South African entrepreneur had listened to all the people telling him not to build a rocket company, and the Ukrainian military never had access to starlink, would we be looking at a vastly different map? If Obama had pushed NATO to seriously stockpile arms and could provide Ukraine the materiel (shells, tanks, drones, whatever) to prosecute the war properly, ditto?
Yes. It's a stupid trade war and it's highly likely that no Tsinghua graduate will be so stupid. That aside, China has an official policy of not pursuing global hegemony. This certainly has no teeth, but Americans don't even have an equivalent toothless commitment.
I hope we don't see the future that proves you wrong. If Americans were truly hegemonic and held that as their goal, the world would look very different.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
The question now is whether migrants are like benzos or, say, antihistamines.
But antihistamines don't work...oh! I see what you did there.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
I expect you'll dismiss what I say as just another smug American chauvinist...but watching you express with great confidence that the geniuses at the US state department were about to crush the Chinese upstarts a few years ago, to joining the ranks of the resident Chinamaxxers should be enough to give anyone whiplash. If anything, it should make readers update their priors about trusting anyone with grand geopolitical narratives.
The US State department isn't staffed by geniuses who can shape the world to their liking. Nor is the CCP. And even if you took US IMO team and forced them to study geopolitics rather than theoretical physicists finance, their ability to influence the world would be minimal. The NWO-deep state-Masonic brotherhood conspiracy theorists believe manipulate world events to their benefit doesn't exist, simply because the world is too hideously complex a system for someone of any intellect or means to meaningfully manipulate. I don't seriously believe that anyone can predict what will happen or who the paper tiger is.
Is China an unstoppable manufacturing behemoth about to steamroll the US navy on their way to Taiwan, or an aging and shrinking nation who imploded their property sector with loads of debt? Is America the global hegemon with the best military, largest concentration of talent and strongest economy in the world, or a sclerotic, internally-divided shitshow? Probably...all of the above? Who can say whether China's population bomb represents a hard cap to their ascension, or whether they can dominate every STEM and manufacturing field to a degree that dwarfs the rest of the world before they lose their dynamism? Or whether China does a Pearl Harbor next October and Americans of all stripes rally around the flag, erasing the problem of partisanship?
The uncertainty is part of the fun, I suppose. But I'm fairly confident that nobody can make meaningful predictions about what will happen consistently. And I'm certain that whatever happens, some asshole on TheMotte will write a novella about how fucking stupid Trump/Xi Jinping were for doing X when any retard could see that Y was the obvious course of action. Hindsight bias is a helluva drug.
It seems Americans simply cannot conceive of having a serious or superior enemy...They feel like Main Characters of history, who are destined to win for narrative reasons and therefore can afford arbitrary foolishness in the midgame – at it will amount to is a few extra lines in the moral takeaway in the epilogue. Karl Rove's famous quote is quite apt.
All of these criticisms can be leveled at the Chinese as well - you've never heard them rant about 5,000 years of civilization? The century of humiliation making them temporarily embarrassed hegemons, from which they will inevitably recover? And you think that a world where China is hegemon won't see shit like Trump's exploitative trade war on the regular? Look at how they act in the SCS, or fish the hell out of South American countries EEZ. Look at where the Thomas and Sabina shoals are on a map and tell me what business they have ramming Filipino ships. Look at the wolf warrior diplomacy bullshit they pulled before realizing how ugly pulling back the veil made them look. Now scale that up to hegemon-level.
Not to mention I'm fairly confident I've seen you mock Americans hyping the 'Chinese threat' and making them out to be more competent than they actually are as a motivation for more defense spending.
Were you living in reality, you'd feel more incensed at nonsensical, low-IQ-racist boomer copes that keep undermining your side's negotiating position.
I've burned plenty of incense. It hasn't gotten me anywhere, and I've seen how miserable the people are who walk far enough down that path. Boomers gonna boom boom boom my friend.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Once upon a time, this is what I got out of Wheel of Time. It didn’t matter if the prose was florid or the plotting glacial. The sprawl was the point. I wasn’t reading it to find out what happened in each finale, but to watch the setting evolve, further selling the illusion of another world.
That's curious; I'd find myself skipping Perrin, Egwene, Elayne, Nynaeve POV chapters out of boredom to get to the climax with Rand. Almost all the moments from the series that stick with me a decade or so later are with Rand: Picking up Callandor (and trying to revive the dead child), Rhuidean, cleansing saidin, using the True power against Semirhage for the first time, his epiphany on dragonmount.
I suppose as a teen I was even more of an uncultured swine than I am now.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Proposal: Everyone else writes their own versions of your viewpoint, complete with what they think you do for a living, asl, etc.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
I thought he was the same guy as Julius Branson?
Indeed. I can forgive you for this one instance, though.
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