Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being a reactionary post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal critical theorist Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man Fox News boomer. No one yet has guessed a scholar, or multiple people. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
Dean
Flairless
12d ago
I enjoyed the charming quaintness of the argument that expanding the House to 11,000 people would require fewer, not more, staffers to keep up with the magnitudes more institutional relationships such a reorganization would imply.
Holdo also had the sin of being a terrible leader in general. Going from assuming command to a mutiny in a matter of days, when the mutineers are experienced and committed believers in the cause, says far more about the commander than the mutineers.
Plus, it was frankly poorly thought out on a thematic level. 'Defer to people in positions of authority and do as you are told even if they appear incompetent' is not only contrary to the themes of much of Star Wars, but anathema to a lot of the cultural convictions of the more individualist/egalitarian West. In turn, it created tonal confusion for the major themes of the movies, while also flagrantly demonstrating the lack of concern for the verisimilitude of the broader IP.
Gundam? Pokemon? Dragonball Z? Half a dozen other major Japanese IPs?
Even if we limit to within the Anglosphere, I'm fairly sure that- various efforts to the contrary- franchises like D&D, Warhammer 40k, and most fighting/strategy genre video games are more popular among men than women. Each of these have had merchandising, novels, movies/TV series, comics, spinoffs and emulators, and so on.
Sure. Names will be withheld to protect the guilty innocent, but yes.
Why not 'neither is quality?'
The question of a reason is neither answered or addressed by pointing to a boo group. Even if we were to agree that the boo group is not [good quality], it does not imply that the alternative is thus [good quality]. They can both be [bad quality].
I also gave you the elaboration paragraph, which you did and still ignore.
Dean
Flairless
15d ago
Is there a reason to believe a cross-section of the society that has been causing the replication crisis for the professional careers of most of its members is 'quality?'
Dean
Flairless
15d ago
Do you have any reason to think that @magicalkittycat is not, in fact, just a principled liberal?
Sure. Principled liberals have battle scars from running into reality, and magicalkittycat is neither indicating or claiming any, while repeatedly rejecting other people's observations on sophistic grounds in ways that classical liberals aren't exactly known for, even as he denies or ignores historical dynamics that principled liberals were publicly conceding for decades.
MKC speaks as a leftist assuming the mantle of a liberal, which has been a standard dynamic for decades, not as a classical liberal.
Dean
Flairless
15d ago
You avoided the question, since you did not identify what free speech right is now being targeted by the government by the government not providing monetary grants.
The government was already- as in, for decades pre-Trump- using Title IX against universities for what individuals were doing. This has repeatedly withstood the scrutiny of courts, bipartisan elected official review, and even the approval of academics like Terence Tao. Your own citation concedes that 'Real discrimination deserves a real response,' it merely quibbles what [real discrimination] should be bounded at, while presenting a false dilemma that has already come to pass.
Which free speech rights do you believe are being targeted by the government now?
This overall topic is about who the democratically elected government chooses to spend money on. Even if you consider free speech dependent on federal subsidy, which would be wildly at odds with the premise of natural rights, there are always people not getting money. There have always been conditions for getting the money. These incudes the previous administration's insistence on DEI-support speech in applications and proposals, the reversal of which is the basis of the OP's quoted objection.
Do we condemn Kolmogorov?
Sure. Appeals not to generally devolve into special pleading that are categorically rejected in other contexts.
Kolmogorov complicity is still complicity, and it was specifically complicity with, for, and for prestige within one of the worst authoritarian/totalitarian states of the 20th century. Kolmogorov is not morally absolved by being a stellar mathematician who advanced the field. He has the same sort of moral onus of gifted scientists of other totalitarian regimes, who are routinely condemned.
Dean
Flairless
16d ago
Not literally everyone in academia is your enemy.
And?
I try to avoid enemy/friend distinctions for many reasons. I am not adopting or revealing any preference here. This is a specific point about the metaphor.
But if you are going to adopt/concede an 'enemy institution' paradigm in the first place, there's no particular relevance of 'not literally everyone is your enemy' beyond the utility of those not-enemies to help target the enemies. If they aren't, or can't, then even if they better qualify as collateral rather than collaborators, neither category is enough to merit any principle against targeting the enemy institution. If their presence is used to claim the institution cannot be targeted because of the damage to the non-enemies, this is merely the use of human shields. Human shields are not protection of legitimate military targets. This is especially true if they are willing human shields, voluntary or paid or otherwise.
Dean
Flairless
16d ago
The sepoys enabled British control over east Africa, and fought the empire’s wars broadly. They weren’t just a local skirmisher force.
But sepoys for controlling east Africa weren't the reason for invading India either, which is the rather more important distinction for Britain's motives for going into India.
We've enough of the historical record recorded to have pretty unambiguous rationales for the East India Company's conquest of India, and 'to get forces to control east Africa' wasn't one of them. The British Empire might have cared about capturing markets for the sake of captive markets, and it absolutely engaged in slavery/don't-call-it-slavery in the process, but it just as definitively did not approach its empire building with the mindset of a Paradox strategy gamer prioritizing pop accumulation. No particular part of the empire was set up for maximizing population value from a government-utility advantage, which is one of the kinder things to say of the British Empire.
As with most imperialist states, hefty cultural chauvenism on the part of the conqueror broadly squandered potential population contributions from subjugated people, as opposed to any real policy of cultivating and extracting, well, high-value human capital.
Dean
Flairless
17d ago
And the flip side of that is that the piece of paper does not drive a man/woman to choose their own ethnic group for favoritism. Which is to say, many people keep old passports out of convenience or utility, not ethnic identitarianism.
I've a similar feeling when the word 'must' appears in journalism.
In other fields, 'must' is an obligation, or a consequence of a previously established condition. An apple must fall when subject to the law of gravity. A spouse must maintain a certain level of relations lest they be divorced into an ex-spouse. A racer must move faster than the competition to win. A legal contract must be fulfilled to avoid the penalties of breaking the contract.
In journo-speak, 'must' is much more likely to mean 'something the writer wants the subject to do, but they don't actually have to do.' The politician must take a certain position. The government must take a certain policy. In such cases, though, the consequences of not abiding the 'must' are, well, that they clearly did not have to do what they must have done.
To me it's a red flag of advocacy journalism, outside of specifically technical/consequential framings of the earlier sense.
Dean
Flairless
22d ago
Of course, being aware of being in a dream is itself lucid dreaming. Which is fine, but when you start then trying to use that awareness to deliberately twist the dream in your preferred direction, it reaches the metaphor's awkward transition of dreaming being an individual person's thing to, well, something other people have a stake in.
Socially controversial social engineering that tries to leverage lucid-dreaming-like 'I know this is a dream, but others must still behave like a dream while I change their dream around them*' has some of the same experiences/connotations/implications of being stuck in a dream you don't control, but when then keeps changing for the worse. I.E., a nightmare of feeling impotent and trapped.
Dean
Flairless
25d ago
Ruinous! Posting functions should trend towards forgiving so as to encourage contribution from would-be or marginal posters. Locking people into mistakes that demand more clarifications might be tedious.
Or locking people into bad temper posting which runs afoul the rules, but which they might think better of after seeing it posted.
Quoting this because this was what was present and being responded to before your edit.
No. In order for the mission to be fucking accomplished, you have to accomplish the fucking mission, which is to reform sufficiently to go unnoticed.
Heavens no. The Mission fucking Accomplished paradigm was established precisely to defend not banning recognized ban evaders who were noticed, but weren't breaking the rules on decorum to the degree to warrant another ban on those grounds. It was the returnees compliance with the decorum, not their ability to not be detected, which was the accomplishment. Were it the later, the defense of non-moderation wouldn't have had to be made in the first place.
And it's also worth noting that you did not ban TequilaMockingbird for past posts, or even any rule breaking aspect of this post.
It's fine if we have abandoned the 'Mission fucking Accomplished' paradigm on this site, as long as we're clear of the change of paradigm.
Dean
Flairless
26d ago
It was, however, permanently shamed, and to a degree that if Darwin ever tried to reuse the GuessWho account, they'd be constantly challenged to pick up the topic they flopped out on. It'd be like if Tracing came back and wanted to pretend that their flounce and denunciation of the Motte never happened- they'd regularly be hounded for it.
Dean
Flairless
26d ago
I don't recall his sense of humor ever being to refer to himself as a "Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker" either, but that's what the TequuilaMockingbird profile says.
I mean, if anything that's more my joke.
Dean
Flairless
26d ago
Too late- Amadan banned him on suspicion of being Hlynka and thus ban evasion. Not this post, just ban evasion.
Male audiences might not want modern Hollywood female lead character because Hollywood writers often insinuate the woman of the show doesn't want them in her life.
I firmly believe there is a good number of strong female characters that western/American male audiences have been fans of. Even in the action-centric genres, Ahsoka from the the Star Wars Clone Wars tv show, Katara from Avatar, and Vi from Arcane, Gwen Stacey from the newer Spiderman are all examples of very well received female characters. These aren't solely male fantasy waifu audiences either, and had strong female fandom components as well. They run a gauntlet from girly-feminine to tomboy, unabashedly straight to gay, supporting characters to show leads, and so on.
But they all also have very clearly dear personal relationships with men in their life- and not even necessarily romance fantasy waifu stuff either. Ahsoka is the apprentice for (secretly married) Anakin Skywalker, and it's a mentor-mentee relationship with no sort of romantic tension between them. Katara was the center of one of the larger (fan-insisted) love triangles of its time on television, but she's also a sister who simultaneously gives sass and cares for her brother and is almost defined by her consistently demonstrates compassion for strangers female and male alike. Vi is punk-butch aesthetic and unambiguous lesbian, but one of her closest relationships- and deepest regrets- is regarding her surrogate father-figure Vander, and her regret at getting him and her adopted brothers killed. Gwen may be in a tragic/doomed romance trope with Spiderman-Morales, but the emotional crescendo of character conflict/character arc in the second movie is her reconciliation with her father.
None of these characters are defined by their romantic relationship with the main man of their narrative. However, they also all have close and personal relationships with the men in their lives, the sort of thing that they worry/anger/fear over and would fight for. They wouldn't fight beside / for the men in their life merely because 'it is the right thing to do,' but because it's personal and they care and if someone threatened to take the men they cared about away from them, it would be visceral.
By contrast, what sort of personal male relationship does Brie Larson's Captain Marvel treasure enough to fight for? In the Star Wars sequel trilogy, what is Rey's emotional connection with Finn, her co-lead and the series larger self-projection male role? In Rings of Power, who is Galadriel's male emotional connection... besides the awkward love interest of the Dark Lord himself?
These aren't characters who show any particular desire / want / interest with an emotional relationship, romantic or otherewise, with the men in the setting who might serve as an audience proxy. Captain Marvel is stoic and most personal relationship is an abusive one she destroys the moment she girlbosses harder. Rey is... hard to place, since she's somewhere between oblivious / stuck in a fated romance / the trilogy was a thematic mess. Galadriel's indifference towards her own subordinates spawned sociopathic comparisons in her first episodes.
But note that all three of these characters have romantic love interests! It's forced / non-central / etc., but the nominal titulation is there if that was all that it took to get male investment. Captain Marvel got ship-teased with War Machine. Rey and Kylo Ren are having sexy abb scenes in the second movie. Galadriel and Sauron are the bad boy trash.
But I doubt much of the male audience could see themselves having a warm or interesting conversation over dinner, let alone something more. Polite discussion at best, maybe, if not barely restrained impatience / apathy. Oh, sure, they'd Do the Right Thing and save you if you were in danger, but only with the same emotional intensity as stranger #XYZ.
Compare that to a character who might not be a lover, but who might love you as a brother, or a mentor, or a friend... how many Strong Female Characters would extend even that?
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