HalloweenSnarry
No bio...
User ID: 795
HalloweenSnarry
5mo ago
For some, the easy retort here is "what's the difference?"
I guess I'll echo the chorus and say that at least it's not Intelligent Design. I almost respect the foolish honesty of Young-Earth Creationism.
EDIT: 2rafa put it better: this isn't 2005, this isn't a sound-the-alarms moment the way it would have been once upon a time.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
As amusing as I find this, I believe that things that happened 100-140 years ago are still fairly relevant to us today, much more so than in medieval times. I think I've said as much before here, and I'd like to point to a comment made earlier this week about how we arguably haven't had enough time for the effects of the end of Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Act et. al to fully cash out.
100 years ago is not terribly long ago on the generational scale.
HalloweenSnarry
11mo ago
When you phrase it that way, it sounds like a slam-dunk, but I think there's probably enough wiggle room between what we did get and the unrealized plan. A larger campaign might be comparatively more sanitized for the American public.
HalloweenSnarry
11mo ago
I suppose I'm not entirely sure, so I'll leave it as an open challenge/prompt. The sustained dissonance between audience and critic ratings on RottenTomatoes might not exactly tell you if wokeness is eroding the final product, I suspect, but I'm open to someone arguing for a semi-reliable heuristic based on some logical factors. Maybe asking for proof that a vibe shift really is taking place is too hard an ask for anyone, but I'd still like to make sure that "latest thing bombed, Hollywood is doomed" is something more than social media amplifying whispers into thunderclaps.
HalloweenSnarry
18d ago
But Tarn still raises a good point: the current ruling coalition of India is a political party and a strongman head-of-state who is considerably right-wing compared to the previous ruling coalition. Will Modi reverse every last element of socialism stemming from India's independence? Probably not, but I'm under the impression that much has already been done in that direction. And given the uncertainty about the old Congress ever managing to wrest their seat of power back from the BJP, it's hard to thus conclude that India will accelerate leftwards.
HalloweenSnarry
11mo ago
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.
HalloweenSnarry
11mo ago
Are any of those corporations the companies that actually matter, though? Certainly not any Fortune 500 biz, I bet.
HalloweenSnarry
6d ago
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).
HalloweenSnarry
10d ago
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?
HalloweenSnarry
1mo ago
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.
HalloweenSnarry
1mo ago
Is that Jaibot? Did they move away from their own blog and onto Substack?
HalloweenSnarry
1mo ago
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.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
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.
HalloweenSnarry
8mo ago
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?
HalloweenSnarry
11mo ago
What's the proof for this? I can maybe accept "cringe peddling" as the Hollywood Machine keeps churning out Generic Extruded Cinematic Product, but I think you need to bring evidence that the "woke monoculture" is succumbing to an intellectual banana blight.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
There's a lot that Susan gets flack for, chief among them being the CEO of YouTube during its TV-ification.
HalloweenSnarry
1mo ago
"law makers trying to make it legal for you to sell your grandpa's private collection when he dies probably weren't trying to make it legal to buy and sell 150 guns, with no extenuating circumstances, in two years".
And yet, we are going to have more cases like this in time, I imagine, if they're not already happening, purely because the former will be indistinguishable from the latter, given the habits of gun owners (to speak more plainly: older people probably buy a lot of guns, thus, it is quite conceivable that a family that needs to ditch paw-paw's little arsenal might run afoul of the ATF through no genuine fault of their own).
HalloweenSnarry
11mo ago
Given Russia's performance in Ukraine, it wouldn't even be a stretch to depict them as a massive, terrifying force comprised of incompetent jobbers and cannon fodder, much like Nazis in popular fiction.
HalloweenSnarry
11mo ago
I was noting with that article, "of course the Chinese started shit over a fucking island," as it reminded me of the more recent strife over the Ryukyu Islands.
HalloweenSnarry
11mo ago
Yeah, I suppose it's hard to say if Mulvaney would really have just been more of a one-off thing or the prototype for a new marketing campaign.
HalloweenSnarry
6d ago
The conflict can be brought to a close with the snap of the fingers of Gazan leadership,
Even this is charitable, because this assumes that the Gazans will actually listen and not just keep on jihadin' on their own. Maybe most will, of course, but "most" is probably not enough for Israel at the moment.
HalloweenSnarry
1mo ago
I think 3 is the most likely candidate, helped along by 2. We've become sexually liberated in many senses, and yet, we've somehow also shied away from it in a way that may have also impacted on-screen romances.
There's an argument that this divestiture/ban/whatever is bad because we should focus on strong universal data privacy and the like, something that targets all social media and doesn't single out TikTok. I agree with that, but nonetheless, I think I'm on Noah's side with this, that we are in another Cold War and smacking an arm of the CCP on their little pizza hands is worth the questionable struggle presented by the bill.
Edit to add: This all being said, I suppose this will be the first real test of the right-wing theory about the power of the Cathedral. Will Yass's billions and Trump's bluster be able to make the Deep State blink, or will Yass find himself regretting getting on the Trump Train? Will Team Blue get what it wants regarding China, or is the American public too wedded to their social media to take this sitting down?
ETA2: I'm also not unsympathetic to a common thread in the replies here and to Noah: that it seems hypocritical and pointless of us to be so concerned about Chinese surveillance and control, about illiberalism from abroad, when we still have to deal with the same things at home. But I'd argue that it is precisely why we must take a stand against this. If we cannot stand up for ourselves against an outside enemy, we will never be able to stand up for ourselves against an inside enemy. "My brother and I against the clan, my clan and I against the world" and all that.
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