[Old age abdication was common for Japanese Emperors, but they were never ruling monarchs]
Sort of? AFAIK it was considered a big thing when Emperor Akihito abdicated in 2019 (since the emperor is also anointed by God, or possibly is a god, I forget) and nobody had done it for 200 years. I'd be interested to hear more background on this.
Corvos
12d ago
Er, no, I was just making those up to point out that there are entirely different categories of scandals and people who do 'Forbidden Thing Category A' may have lots of patience for other 'A' enjoyers whilst advocating zero tolerance for 'Forbidden Thing Category B'.
Meanwhile, in the real world, MAGA won the popular vote (that is, the absolute majority of Americans) and some of its most fervent supporters are people who fled the third world and are appalled to see America sliding back into it.
It was like those stories about whaling ships landing on islands where giant sea turtles could be plucked off the beach and cooked, with no natural defenses from a lack of experience of predators.
And there was a time when it was super easy to lie on the internet. Most dating apps didn't connect to "real name" social media as a default until Tinder, and reverse image search was in its infancy, if you were in a different geographic location than where you lived or just in a sufficiently dense market there was no practical way to connect a profile under a fake name to your real life identity. Hell, for a few years girlfriends routinely fell for the "someone made a fake profile of me" line!
Right, but this is why people started demanding that everything be public and making awful apps like Tea. The time before banking regulations used to be great for speculators but it was terrible for everyone else, which is why we now have banking regulations. "You used to be able to get away with anything" is usually going to be said in the past sense because the majority of people do not see this as a positive. It's no different from the glory days of Soho, 1960s mixed-sex accommodation, or Sodom. These things don't last because they aren't good for the majority of people.
Dan Savage used to predict that we would reach a point where such a critical mass of people had engaged in sexting that the scandal would no longer attach, because everyone had done it, so we couldn't disqualify politicians for dick pics because everyone had one.
But most people haven't done it, and they think that the people sending dick pics are animals.
We seem to have reached that critical mass for everyone having some internet controversy, but rather than lightening the consequences we've harshened them.
Partly because it's not actually everyone, but also because they're different controversies. Mr. "I once shagged my dog" is not going to be any more approving of "I think Hitler made a lot of good points", and vice versa.
Corvos
12d ago
I thought it was Scott-run, and that he would want to know about attendees having difficulty attending. Talking to Lighthaven sounds like the right move.
A drink tomorrow afternoon sounds great! Same place as before, or different?
Corvos
12d ago
I’m sorry to hear it.
Maybe consider talking to Scott, if you haven’t already? It may be that they can request a temporary visa for you in some way, or at least go through some process to make clear that there is a genuine pull coming from the American end for you specifically, which I imagine might carry more weight with an American visa office.
Corvos
12d ago
I do like talking to Claude, at least for anything where I can double-check its work, both because it's capable of avoiding rude language like "slop" and "dogshit" and "shitty"
To go on a tangent, I find it sociologically interesting that one big group of people likes talking to AI partly because it’s always polite, kind and inoffensive, while another hates dealing with it for precisely the same reason.
Corvos
13d ago
Libertarianism with a small l is a much more powerful force in America than in other Anglo countries. You could credit the Kochs with some part in keeping it viable if you wanted to.
Corvos
13d ago
Be aware that this page shows organizer and co-organizer, so you are basically doxxing yourself here. You might be better off sending a DM.
putting them in the positions they deserve, and clearing out all those unqualified affirmative action hires who got inappropriately appointed to those positions instead of a deserving, meritorious applicant like themselves
Yes, but it really matters if they’re correct in that analysis! The Jews and Asians were correct: once historic discrimination was removed, they did considerably better. I think by now we can safely say that African-Americans were not correct about this: they were unable to compete after discrimination against them was removed, or even once a heavy finger was put on the scale in their favour.
Personally I grew up being told again and again that there are ‘too many white guys in X’, with special interest groups, mentorship, considerable government/media pressure and often quiet biasing of entry criteria all working hard to reduce the percentage of white men. In a friend’s line of work, jobs are specifically advertised as ‘for a person of BAME background’. It would be kind of weird if white people didn’t do better when these barriers are removed.
Put another way, isn’t there a pretty big difference between a movement that is campaigning to level the playing field for everyone, and once for reparations and affirmative action for their preferred group? MAGA doesn’t campaign for white men; Trump never said, “if you don’t vote for me, you ain’t white”.
You can call any political movement that broadly captures a specific group and advances their interest ‘identitarian’ but then I think you’re catching a lot of stuff in that net.
It is and it isn't. Anyone who tries to suggest to a MAGA blue-collar worker that he should get affirmative action for being white will likely get a punch in the face. Rightly or wrongly, most MAGA supporters see themselves as rolling back unfair discrimination against them, rather than advocating for their own racial interests. Though tbf even as I type this I'm reminded that a lot of the progressive left launders its demands the same way, but the spirit still seems kind of different... they are often explicitly racial in a way that MAGA just doesn't seem to be. There's no Ibram Kendi in power saying, 'any disparity between white people and others is racist', there's no public statements 'blackness is an original sin', no 'grit and resiliance is a hallmark of black supremacy'.
I think it boils down to the fact that America is, still, a largely white country and a largely white-run country, where almost everyone was raised with the 'I have a dream' speech. White progressives are comfortable flagellating (other) whites, and raising up other races; despite many accusation, white MAGA aren't comfortable denigrating other races or exerting white supremacy, and those few who are don't feel able to say so publicly.
Sure. My statement was a recognition that I think @Amadan's predicted answer is correct: both on the ineffectualness of decorum-conservatives and that these sentiments have been coming from the Left for my entire adult life if not before (the Left in Britain played 'Ding, dong, the Witch is Dead' to mark the death of Britain's first female PM, and I was getting death threats from Leftists IRL in 2015). The left will recognise the importance of decorum only once it becomes clear how indecorum has worked out for them.
I doubt very much that the American Left will be crushing anyone for the next ten years even with the bullet box in play as it already indisputably is - they are wedded to incredibly unpopular positions, a terrible record, and they openly loathe 50% of Americans on the basis of their gender and >50% on the basis of their race. They may be able to retrench under a different banner but that will take time.
The British Conservative party, by way of contrast, has pursued the cunning strategy of being so utterly ineffectual, self-sabotaging and spineless that a left-wing PM has been forced to become a conservative and try to show them how it's done, though he will inevitably fail. Personally, I see Trumpism as having considerably better return on investment.
Corvos
14d ago
Sorry, I expressed myself poorly. You are factually correct that the Path of Pain and Absolute Radiance are optional.
I agree with the previous poster in the sense that you have to fight some pretty bullet-hellish bosses and do some pretty gnarly platforming to get the chance to fight ordinary Radiance, and that I noped out on hearing this.
Corvos
14d ago
He fights, he makes libs cry, and traditional, "respectable" conservatives are now seen as cucks who conserved nothing and are committed only to losing politely. MAGA cares absolutely nothing about propriety or decorum, because that's a chump's game, and any discussion that veers in the direction of "What happens when the other side does this?" will get a hundred stories about how the other side is worse anyway, the other side has been defecting forever, and only after we crush them and make them lick the soles of our boots might they learn to behave and restore a kind of equilibrium.
Yes, I think that roughly describes my feelings on the matter.
No, I agree with @popocatepetl. AFAIK getting the good ending requires doing a bunch of ‘optional’ bosses to power up the dream nail, then going through super-meat-boy style platforming in the White Palace to get the Void Heart, then fighting two difficult bosses in a row.
I beat the ‘final’ boss, felt kind of good about it, looked the game up online and got told about all the other bullshit I was meant to do and gave up.
I liked HW for the metroidvania exploration, but Team Cherry seems far more invested in super-hard bosses and platforming.
But it seems Team Cherry wanted to make a sequel to the part of their game I actually didn't like. Shame.
Agree completely. I don’t think they realised that this wasn’t what appealed to many players.
Corvos
16d ago
Personally I just want some fast, decent boilerplate refactoring of a simplistic codebase at the moment, and I don’t know what’s available.
Corvos
16d ago
GitHub submissions always have an element of flexing and self-actualisation (the "become the best stamp collector in Sheffield" type of male hierarchy climbing pursuit). The best female programmers I know disproportionately do not put their hobby projects on Github, and are often unenthused by the idea even if urged to (it draws attention, might attract the bad kind of attention, looks like cringy showing off which they just axiomatically don't like, etc.).
Right, but the former is good! Computing runs on this kind of person. It’s very important if female programmes don’t like to draw attention or be the best at something, and especially if they become the majority of a profession and start discouraging it in men. That’s a big part of Andrews’ point.
Corvos
17d ago
Correct but it’s not really feminine, men use it all the time. Maybe women use it a bit more.
The -wa suffix, which is feminine, seems to be becoming more common amongst young men at least in fiction. I think this is just because young men watch a lot of anime babes and then subconsciously repeat what they hear.
I would respect the King for doing this, though as a general principle I think you need to wait long enough for them to be a reasonably known quantity. Certainly not younger than maybe 35. If the throne had been passed to Prince Harry ten years ago, you could have had the entire monarchy being led around by the nose to please a Californian socialite with a grudge.
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