HalloweenSnarry
No bio...
User ID: 795
HalloweenSnarry
1mo ago
If we were to go with your framing, perhaps Romney and his fellow old-style Republicans did presume the Deep State would work for them and not Obama, because they had good heuristic reasons to believe so at that time.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
See, I am a China Hawk, and I think it is absolutely braindead not to siphon off every bit of human capital from them we can.
The question is, do they stay siphoned? They may not necessarily have loyalty to the state, but they have a sort of loyalty to the land and the people that said state controls, and they also may have family that can be leveraged to achieve whatever goals the state dreams up.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
There is a thorny tension in that, yes, there are challenges that seem difficult to solve without massive coordination--and suborning lots of polities to a higher power is a decent way to sidestep the usual difficulties of coordination problems (Sidenote: also available here!). However, some of these same challenges are the ones that are so high-stakes and consequential that getting it wrong can be really bad, and worse, "getting it wrong" can also scale too well. I think the "experiment" mindset is the right way to go about tackling these issues, when it comes down to it.
HalloweenSnarry
4mo ago
"If it don't make dollars it don't make sense" is an absolutely terrible heuristic for government spending.
This is pretty much the same argument made against things like trying to reform USPS. Yes, it loses money, but guess what? Life itself is inherently a money-losing enterprise. I think of Bostrom's phrase "a Disneyland with no children," and I feel like the spending-reform types are unconsciously drawn to trying to instantiate it.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
I think there is a sort of religious-revival component to Trump 2. Now, that sounds lazy and snide, I admit, but I don't mean for that to be the case. I've stated before that the new direction from the administration, the current motivation, seems to be from the values-aesthetics angle. The package offered by MAGA does indeed seem to be "America has grown soft and complacent, we must make it great again by reaffirming our values and rejecting the soft-power view of American greatness."
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
But I would say that the first canary in the coal mine was Warcraft 3.
If we're gonna be citing RTS games as the warning signs of change, why WC3 and not C&C: Tiberian Sun? That game infamously launched in quite the state, and contra WhiningCoil's above post about auteur studio leads, I doubt that TibSun was supposed to be a magnum opus kind of game. It was an ambitious title, sure, but it was otherwise a bigger-and-better sequel that, as far as the popular narrative goes, was unfairly rushed out the door by EA and never really fixed into what it should have been.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
As TequilaMockingbird pointed out, "degrowth" refers less to market statistics and more to the literal expansion of the "physical economy:" less power generation, less manufacturing, less consumption, etc., stemming from a belief popular among eco-minded progressives that syncretizes socialism and envrionmentalism into a desire to return to the state of nature where Man is theoretically more fulfilled and healthier, and in doing so, heal the Earth from the damage caused to it by civilization.
Now, of course, you can still be cheeky and say that Trump will accomplish the same things anyway, which I can't bring myself to dispute, but I would also like to register, per my recent posting history, that I truly do suspect that the setbacks to global capitalism will not spell the end of civilization.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
Off-topic, but: I wonder if the problem with the Jones Act wasn't exactly the restriction itself, but the failure to enforce export discipline. In another timeline, the Jones Act is probably still around, and is much more unassailable because the US went South Korean with shipmakers.
HalloweenSnarry
5mo ago
I got my start in this sphere thanks to being exposed to Rat Tumblr and Scott Alexander in the 2010's, I for one have never even freaking heard of Ziz until now.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
For comparison, see, for example from 19th century, war of 1870. War ended with great victory for Germans, great humiliation for French. France lost two provinces, lots of cash and honor.
What happened afterwards? Peace. Bad feelings remained, but diplomatic relations were restored, French could travel to Germany and vice versa, no walls and barbed wire on the borders. Not thinkable today.
It was precisely this war, however, that deepened Franco-German resentment, which contributed to both World Wars, as both empires sought to see the other ground under their heel in the name of their blood feud.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
I believe LibreOffice/OpenOffice's Word equivalent can do em-dashes, too, if you type -- and another word right after it.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
Fuck, I love using those, too. I hate that AI's co-opted it.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
Destroying the prosperity rather than reinforcing those values is madness.
The dissidents already believe that half of the political spectrum has effectively forbade the American public from ever reinforcing those values, what is your solution to that?
HalloweenSnarry
7mo ago
I remember, back in the GamerGate days, that there was actually a statistic claiming that (slightly) over half of gamers were women--however, that statistic rows against the belief you described. The under-publicized explanation for that statistic was "women prefer simple, low-time-investment mobile games like Candy Crush and aren't playing COD or AssCreed,*" and I think failing to understand that is why bigger companies and gaming-related insititutions have spent the past decade flailing and floundering about with progressivism--the classic "things vs. people" gender divide.
*Not that there aren't women who are into traditional "hardcore" games at all, mind you.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
I'd rather we just didn't.
I think the problem is that we honestly just can't not. I think destructive nonsense like this has become an inevitability in some way, and it's going to keep happening until enough destruction has passed.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
Not for lack of trying, arguably.
Probably I'm biased by the fact that I want to keep the neoliberal machine going... but do conservatives really not see the danger in giving leftists a chance to transform it into a vanguard-communist machine instead?
As per the recent discussions about the sad, sorry state of liberalism as of late, the perception among some is that the Neoliberal Machine has already unwittingly fed the strength of the Communist Vanguard, and the radical actions of Trump et. al. are a potential alternative to letting the Progressive Chestburster hatch from what's left of the incumbent neoliberal order.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
Was RFK not on the side of the "vaccines cause autism"/homeopathy memeplex? I thought he was on that wagon even before COVID.
This source I found on China's options for retaliation only mentions banning the import of Hollywood films. Now, that will create a gap in their market, but they likely do have enough of their own industry to fill the void and won't need to resort to industrial-scale infringement to get their fix.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
but I swear to god if I see one more twitter account with a greek statue profile picture complaining about how degenerate the modern world is, with its homos and pedophiles, I'm going to have an aneurysm.
Worth remembering that some or all of those kinds of posters are secretly women (allegedly).
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
I wouldn't say this is a problem with liberalism eating its own, if that's what you're saying. I'd say it's more that the pro-Palestine memeplex has metastasized in the liberal body politic.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
Isn't there a "defense tech bro" scene in some other part of California, though? I think there has been a culture shift occurring, though somewhat slowly and silently.
HalloweenSnarry
5mo ago
I think the perspective of many on this forum is that the bureaus are themselves staffed with wolves, so this is of no help, in their eyes.
HalloweenSnarry
6mo ago
More concerning to me is how a former Green Beret can't even rig an improvised explosive device correctly.
"We trained him wrong on purpose...as a joke."
I would think the disparity in reaction here is because the upper class are expected to behave better than that, to rise above vice, and they often try to avoid disabusing the public about such a notion.
Consider the meme of pedophile Catholic priests: these are the people who are supposed to be your spiritual leaders, and while all humans are fallible under Christian doctine, molesting boys is a level of sin that one could otherwise not believe a holy man would stoop to.
Maybe it's some sort of hardwired primal instinct. If we gravitate towards hierarchy, we also gravitate towards expecting more out of our social betters.
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