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HalloweenSnarry


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 06 02:37:25 UTC
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User ID: 795

HalloweenSnarry


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 06 02:37:25 UTC

					

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User ID: 795

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Why does the "myth of America" matter anyways, though? I can understand the contours of the post-WWII "creation myth" of the US perfectly fine, but I can also sense that that narrative is probably going to be outmoded soon enough, if it wasn't already. The newer generations don't buy into the "America the righteous" story, and if anything, are ripe for a new narrative to be moulded.

I'm with Amadan and ResoluteRaven on this, that this all seems like pointless tilting at windmills. We're only in a culture war because there are no "real" wars to fight at the moment. The moment China or Russia move directly against us, though, I expect even the most radical of progressive American Jews to start frothing at the mouth and wrapping themselves in the Stars and Stripes, baying for blood.

It's the illusion of mastery over human nature when you're really just cultivating the worst parts of it.

I'm reminded of someone in this sphere once describing Francisco Franco versus typical fascist leaders in this (paraphrased) way: "Fascist leaders often saw themselves as the architect of the soul. Franco was just a cop."

I think all authoritarianism and elitism pretty much comes down to this core, that one can, with sufficient will-to-power and unquestionable primacy, have power over what is in a man's heart itself. By contrast, liberalism and progressivism fundamentally surrender that what others do or are is out of one's control, and the differences come down to how to handle that.

To add onto Ec's reply, I think the argument they were trying to make is that the Olympics and all other televised major sports sell a subtly/deceptively-unrealistic image of human capabilities. Frankly, I think a lot of sports-related marketing also does that (athletes on the Wheaties boxes!), and if, instead, we were honest while still trying to make sports a thing for everyone, we'd probably have to become bio-realist to some degree.

Are any of those corporations the companies that actually matter, though? Certainly not any Fortune 500 biz, I bet.

I'll echo Pongalh here and say that I think there at least used to be a pretense of relying on hard evidence. For example, the first wave of environmentalism in the 1970's wasn't merely about vibes, there were things people could point to as proof that we had enshittified America The Beautiful and needed to start cleaning up after ourselves.

I suspect the cynical explanation is that the British government doesn't have the same motive for putting its thumb on the scale like the American government would. They don't need to sell their people on any narrative in particular, because they don't really get themselves into wars (and pretty much most of the ones the UK has been in after WWII have been divisive at best) and they aren't tied up in global affairs like the US is.

So, I would say, yes, the BBC will probably be tilted in favor of the establishment, but there's no real pressure to be against said establishment.

"We're going to throw you in jail, not because you broke any law but because fuck you." "Yea, you broke a bunch of laws other people are in jail for, but we aren't gonna punish you because we like you." Very just!

Are there not countries around the world that work somewhat like this, where the de facto law is much more informal than it would seem? I think there's some value in having a "Rule Zero"/"Because I Said So" clause in law, where a situation is sufficiently outside a system's reference class and it also demands swift and decisive action.

I suppose the solution is merely to not be scandalous--but this would be quite a high bar for many politicians to clear.

What the heck does "policy starvation" mean? I've seen it a few times here and I can only sort-of guess at what it means.

Also, from my point of view, I suspect that any breakdown of Enlightenment power will only lead to a return to massive, bloody war, and less so any re-discovery of God. The conditions under which the Enlightenment was born were, if I'm not mistaken, near-constant sectarian conflict.

I asked this because that's the vibe I've gotten from this position, that The Statue Must Stand Lest The Odessans Suffer Rootlessness or something. It was perhaps too jocular of me to phrase it the way I did, but I feel like Botond has blown his own concerns out of proportion. If that is indeed not what he's getting at, then I fail to see what the concern is. What will happen once the statue is gone? They jettison a part of their founding myth that they want nothing to do with because of its ties to a people who are interfering with their ability to have a city in the first place?

I mean, didn't Dilbert get yoinked from newspapers because Adams started injecting his politics into the strip? I'm amazed it took this long for it to happen, but nonetheless, it seems like a fairly strong repudiation of Adams' legacy.

Question then is how the hell he got to QAnon from Green Party.

I am not a qualified expert on the topic of "trade as a force for peace," but I will say that it sure has seemed like China has always wanted to take Taiwan by hook or by crook, completely orthogonally to their entanglement in global trade. If anything, global trade has seemingly helped China conclude that taking Taiwan is in the possibility space thanks to the benefits they have reaped from it, and now that they are in a position of strength, they can happily abandon the power of trade in the name of taking Taiwan if they need to.

I get to use my taxes to (indirectly) pay for the gun the Camden gangbanger uses, a gun I'm not permitted to have.

What, exactly, is the mechanism by which this happens? I'm genuinely curious as to how this "also my tax dollars somehow" thing works, as you allege.

Huh.

Are you referring to the post-WWII expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia?

Also, while it's just one isolated post, I did find this on Bluesky today.

I think "character/person hypnotized into sex" is more prevalent in illustrated form rather than in live-action. More live-action stuff is probably the preserve of seriously niche and weird fetishes like sissy hypno (one of the genres where, as Aqouta and Prima mention, the viewer is the one that's supposed to be getting mind-controlled).

Besides, they're patient and rich enough to not genocide people as you can tell by what's going on in Xinyang.

...Is this sarcasm?

Yeah, those sandwiches you can get at 7-11 or Lawson probably are just literally built different compared to how it'd be done here in the US.

Is that Jaibot? Did they move away from their own blog and onto Substack?

I think that's a mixture of inertia, popularity among non-Western audiences (CS is probably second only to soccer among European and LatAm pastimes, and the Russian playerbase of Dota 2 is infamous), and the sort of "purity" of those games as contests of skill. Girls are probably more likely to play Overwatch, Valorant, or League.

Presumably, Apartheid could have been maintained if South Africa's white leaders chose to become a North Korea-style shithole. At least for a time, it was a good thing that they chose another path, it's simply a shame that those under the ANC's flag were so corrupt that SA is probably going to become a NK-tier basketcase anyways.

Reagan Democrat

...These are a thing?

I suppose the synthesis here is "extremists tend to make history by subjecting themselves to a high attrition rate and building their legacies on piles of corpses--whether theirs or their enemies'."

EDIT: As to the overall discussion of moderate change vs. extremist drives, I think we rarely do see modest goals being strived for and accomplished, whether that's because they're so modest as to be virtually-inconsequential (like, say, de-bloating some middleware for a specific IT solution or spending a few hundred thousand on a beautifying project for a city square), we just fail to notice them when they do happen (e.g. important bills for digital speech and copyright getting passed without much media outcry), or because some "modest" goals are actually not-so-modest and require outsized amounts of effort to achieve (like, say, housing reform). And if you have to shoot for the stars just to land on the Moon, why not pledge to reach the edge of the Universe while you're taking off the limiters?