HalloweenSnarry
No bio...
User ID: 795
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
Yeah, this is the sort of thing I'm referencing, there's going to be a few political seats up for grabs in the near future.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
There's like a few Senate(?) seats potentially available for grabs due to some runoff elections or something, I think. Again, I didn't memorize the details that well and I've already wiped the texts, and I don't even live in the East Coast where this would be more relevant.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
If you have a big bankroll, you can keep going with that for a while, but eventually, that money runs out. I think 2024 was a big year for when many of these decision makers finally recognized that they were able to see the bottom of the barrel of money they've been feeding their projects. In video games, we might see an actual closure of Ubisoft this year, depending on how their next Assassin's Creed game - one that had direct inspiration from the BLM riots of 2020 according to a developer, IIRC - does, after the mediocre reception of their Star Wars game last year.
This has pretty much been because of the zero-interest-rate regime, which was recently-ish brought to a close with help from the pandemic (which itself served as one last turbocharge of money and growth for entertainment and tech). Now the growth has slowed down, and wokeness is not safe from the chopping block, even if the blade has not yet fallen.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
I am starting to suspect the OP may be fishing for comments like yours to show how bad we are, or something like that. It's odd behavior if they aren't being underhanded, but are instead being sincere.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
(even homeowners aren't onboard with price rises at this point)
Since I haven't seen Grendel-Khan around in a while, would you care to go into detail? I'm curious.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
Tangential anecdata: I've been getting a whole lot of political-ad texts over the past several weeks alerting me to Democratic campaigns (didn't bother to read them in detail, though, I just sent an unsubscribe response and deleted ASAP). It seems that some Dems are finding the willpower for #Resistance, despite this being the kind of time where few might blame them for keeping their heads down and muddling through.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
Having read that article, I'm beginning to think that the political thrust coming from Trump, Vance, Musk, and others is more about morals, values, and aesthetics rather than advancing some more coherent goal. The Vance quote seems to illustrate it, especially taken in light of his comments overseas during that security conference: this is about establishing and enforcing the superiority of a specific set of values, not just within America, but also among the West as well.
Which, sure, duh, "MAGA" has been Trump's slogan, but I think now the strategies, such as they are, make a lot more sense when not viewed at from a game theory perspective.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
I have to wonder if it only started running out of battery in that clip.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
This is a very fair point to raise, I'm just wanting to point out that the "what about the Ukrainians?" line of argument ignores all the ways that Russia can keep reducing the Ukrainian population even in the event of capitulation and surrender.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
Also my resume is mostly a bunch of crappy audio games that are not on Github.
Are they on Itch, at least?
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
...Ah.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
Worth also remembering that Zelensky became a Presidential candidate in the first place because he was caught on camera ranting about corrupt politicians, IIRC. His fashion choices are indeed most likely motivated by him wanting to distance himself from the politicians of yore.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
Was the rent truly so high that it cut into other necessities? He probably wasn't entirely wrong, and from the sound of it, he probably has other motivations for quitting drinking.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
I am one of those people against the treatment Matt Taylor was given in 2014, and even so, I don't think "reduce obnoxious wokeishness in science" is worth a lazily-indiscriminate defunding campaign.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
Yeah, and said monopoly was eventually broken (sort-of?) by the government itself. Maybe Nybbler could have used the example of the RCA labs (who did do a bunch of interesting fundamental science), but then again, the Labs division were often at loggerheads with management in the back half of the 20th Century, and this infighting led to RCA's demise.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo 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 want Manifest Destiny, not overseas entanglements.
Literally our own history showed that we did the Manifest Destiny as far as we could (even going so far as to conquer Hawai'i, which is over a sea), and then like a couple decades after that, we decided to help push the Spanish Empire into the dustbin of history. If anything, Manifest Destiny probably led to the Spanish-American War, and I could 50-Stalins you and claim that the American Empire should not have gone west of Oklahoma or Texas.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
"Option D: Apologise profusely to Russia and provide them with any support necessary to completely subjugate and annex Ukraine, in return for a promise that they will cooperate in containing China"
Why on earth does anyone think that a Russia hopped-up on revanchism is going to do a 180 and go "okay, bro, no problem, let's do this together" instead of being like "ha, fat chance, as if, Western imbeciles" if this were to come to pass? I don't care how synchronized the people are to the will of Putin or for whatever theory of Kremlinology you subscribe to, this sounds plain retarded spoken aloud, even putting aside how outside the Overton Window it is.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
Eh, I think irony and detachment was the thing that took over around 2010, though that too may be passing.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
I'd argue that Japan is already in a pretty good place in most respects. Trapped in a local maximum, perhaps, but it's not the worst local maximum to be in.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
If Haiti were French, is that terrible?
But Haiti was French, and Haiti being French is arguably the reason that Haiti is Haiti nowadays. If Haiti were never French (or Spanish either), then Haiti today might not be the Haiti we know. I imagine it's not like France just sheepishly gave up their colony for reasons of un-based-ness or whatever, there was a literal slave revolt. Perhaps the French thought they were slavedriving for the best interests of themselves and their slaves, but the Haitians/Taino clearly didn't see it that way.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
Yes, and while I don't want to bring them into these arguments because it might be seen as lazy, we have the Holodomor and Chernobyl to look at as prior examples of how Russian control ended up working out for Ukraine. Starving populations and irradiated no-go zones are probably pretty bad for GDP, you have to admit!
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
Thing is, the problem with this view is that "trans women are not women" is not a universally-accepted truth--if anything, it is a matter of fundamental values conflict. To you, it is truth, but to trans women, it is the opposite. The only thing that points to objective reality is a trans person's birth identity--but the entire point of being transgender is to leave said identity behind as thoroughly and quickly as possible. You're not going to be able to do more than keep referring to The Artist Formerly Known As Prince as just "Prince."
I understand there'd be some friction between English and Boer, but you'd think that by 1965-ish and on, both whites and blacks in South Africa would draw much less of a distinction between the two.
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