JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
Formerly "SandwichWarrior" and "The Upright Man", may or may not be feral, is most certainly quixotic.
User ID: 4009
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
6mo ago
I would be interested to hear why you think it's "funny".
Kind of off topic but in regards to Louisiana v. Callais and the redistricting wars; Is it just me or did the media drop the subjects once it started to look like Tennessee might actually gain a black congressmember as a result of thier redraw?
It was all over my feed for a week, Tennessee published their revised map, and then crickets.
If you would have a regime where Tyler Robinson is allowed to buy a gun and Clarence Thomas is not, than I do not believe that you are a "Conservative" in any meaningfully American sense of the word.
You stand in opposition to not just the United States Constitution but to the very principles and ideals upon which this nation was founded.
You are who conservatives are trying to conserve against.
Its not that "Christianity in the US is definitionally not left-wing" so much as the left in the US defines itself (at least in part) through its opposition to "Christian Moralism".
The sort of "The universalist egalitarian HBD denial" you describe has little to no influence on the US Left and is overwhelmingly associated with the religious right and so-called "Moral/Silent Majority".
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
6mo ago
I feel like you are projecting your map of local German politics onto the US in a way that doesn't really apply.
Support for both Racial-identity politics and racial discrimination are pretty much an exclusively left-wing/Democrat phenomenon in the US.
Freddie DeBeoer and Matthew Yglesias were two of the specific people i had in mind when i wrote this a month ago.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
6mo ago
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
6mo ago
The talk around the water cooler is that Daines is either considering a run himself or gunning for a VP or cabinet slot in 28.
Almes, the man he endorsed as his replacement is a Trump appointed US attorney whose main thing has been cracking down on NGO fraud so make of that what you will.
Not time travel, just perfect prediction
Corporate want's you to find the difference between these two pictures and they are the same picture. Either they KNOW the future or they don't, and the problem as typically presented gives us no reason to believe that they do.
I feel like you are conflating your assessment of an opinion being "mediocre, cringe, or bad" with that opinion being wrong in some objectively measurable way.
Just how confident are you that you know better than Elon Musk? How do you justify that confidence?
From where im standing the GoP seems to have a much more coherant idea of both what it believes and desired path forward than the Democrats do.
They're a center-right populist party with mercantilist tendencies.
Meanwhile the Democrats are currently stuck trying to square the circle of being the party of "anti-racism" and "punch a nazi" with also being the party of art school socialists who believe in the primacy of race and blame Jews/Isreal for all the worlds ills.
These are not mutually exclusive statements. People who's job is to "interact with reality" on a daily basis, IE cops, plumbers, meat-packers, bus-drivers, retail clerks, Et Al are also the people most impacted by the negative externalities of luxury beliefs like "decarceration" and "open borders".
As I said in my post on Cheney,
He could not claim that "Real Neoliberalism/Compassionate Conservativism has never been tried" or that he only got to implement half of his intended foreign policy because the "enlightened centrists" had been given everything they wanted. The plan was tried, and it failed.
We had a solid 20+ years of Democrats being the party of progressivism and Republicans being the party of progressivism-lite and it is the manifest failures of progressivism that lead to the rise of the Tea-Party and the eventual exile of the faction that men like Cheney and Gingrich represented from the party because the GoP actually has a functioning primary system.
The post 2020 GoP is essentially a center-right populist party with mercantilist tendencies, and is only remarkable insofar as our intellectual class has strayed so far out into the weeds that moderate center-right politics appear incomprehensible to them.
If anything MAGA can be understood in part as Republicans re-embracing their mid-century role as the big-tent party after spending much of the 90s and early 2000s/GWoT era in the wilderness.
The East-coast populists and Sothern Tea-party coalition allied to wrest control of the party from the old Rockefeller-style corporatists, the Evangelicals started out defending their long-time allies on the corporatist right but their support had been wavering due to perceived betrayals on abortion and LGBTQ issues. 2020 and the lockdowns killed that alliance for good leaving the corporatist isolated from the wider party and they simply didn't have the votes to maintain position on their own. Cheney died and his heirs (both intellectual and biological) found themselves getting primaried. Now the populists are setting the agenda, and while the Evangelicals might grumble about Trump's lack of couth, they appreciate having the populists' support on issues like abortion and school choice.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
6mo ago
One could argue that this is what already MAGA is, a coalition of the people who "interact with reality" on a daily basis rebelling against the laptop and email class and this is the driver of so many of complaints held by that class. The thing about interacting with reality is that you can just do things.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
6mo ago
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
6mo ago
If that's what he's doing, what's the problem?
Tolerating bad faith actors inevitably ends in an equilibrium where bad faith is the norm.
Counter point: as you yourself said...
A sane rational and moral person would have picked up on that and seen
The path of violence and self-destruction leading to violence and self-destruction? Who could've imagined?
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
6mo ago
I haven't played Dishonoured but from reading the description and other people's comments here I get the impression that this is not "Ludonarrative Dissonance" as much as it is simply the narrative.
Like i said in the op, Jason Brody didn't kill those people, YOU killed those people and if you're complaining that the game is punishing you for playing like a murder-hobo maybe that says more about you than it does the game.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
6mo ago
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Spec Ops: The Line but I also agree with much of @RobertLiguori's critique of it and that is why i would argue that Far Cry 3 is the superior execution.
Yes a sane, rational, moral person should see the "bad end" coming from a mile away but niether Jason nor the player are sane, rational, or moral.
That's the point that I think people who complain about the ending are missing.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
6mo ago
I see 4 as the Empire Strikes Back to 3's Star Wars, it is in many respects the superior Film/Game but much of its impact comes from having the core ideas and themes established beforehand.
The crab rangoon really is fantastic.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
6mo ago
Did God not make us to be servants?
No, God made made us in his own image.
Like I said the first was a glorified tech demo, the second had strong ludic elements but weak narrative, and the third is where everything "clicked". 3, 4, and 5 are all excellent IMO and kind of form a trilogy in their own right, exploring the themes of choice, consequence, and how "He who fights monsters must be careful lest he become one...", but the latter two are really just alternative takes on 3 which is why I hold up 3 as the one to play.
As for 6, as fun as it is to watch Gus Fring chew the scenery, Hocking and a bunch of the other developers who'd been involved in 2 - 5 had either retired or moved on to other projects and I feel like it shows in the quality of both the writing and the gameplay.
Note that I said "Christian Moralism" not "Christianity" the need/desire to move beyond Christian morals and replace them with something more "rational" "scientific" or "pure" has been a core theme of left-wing ideology for over a century. And for all this time it has been the "right" that pushes back.
Yes Nazis defined themselves in part through thier opposition to Communism but also through thier opposition to what we would describe today as "traditional western values" both Hitler in his own manifesto and his contemporary critics like Lewis wrote at length about his disdain for the "slave morality" that was/is Christianity.
Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian Art School Socialist of ambiguous sexuality who thought Jews and Billionaires were to blame for all of the world's ills and wrote positivity about the Islamic revolutionaries of his day. Fact is that if Hitler circa 1938 were to be Isekaied into the present day, he would be an immediate darling of the left-wing podcast circuit.
If the Nazis fighting Communists makes the Nazis a right wing movement, would you also describe Trotsky as "right wing" because he fought against Stalin and the Bolsheviks?
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