MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
7mo ago
This might just be my American ass talking, but I don’t see how these weird ethnic carve outs can possibly lead to more unity. My experience of Affirmative Action has been that it provokes resentment and negative assumptions that wouldn’t be there if everyone was given the same criteria for being hired or chosen. I would expect ethnic carve outs for parliament would have a similar effect especially when something unpopular passes that the Aborigines support.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
8mo ago
This is one of the things that I find utterly weird about our moment in history. We just have no concept of how much of what we have is a product of simply having abundance. We can afford to put people in jail being completely unproductive for years and even decades and still feed them for all that. We can afford to pay people who cannot (and often will not) do anything productive. We can afford to tolerate a great deal of deviant behavior and ideologies. And I’ve always strongly suspected that most of not all of our “enlightened ways” come down to us being wealthy enough to be enlightened.
And I think when the surplus goes away (either because of space colonization or collapse) we’ll have to go back to the unenlightened ways of our ancestors. When you not doing productive work means a lack of food, or your deviant behavior puts others at risk or consumes too many resources, other people aren’t going to put up with that for long. If your “transition” in whatever form it takes, costs too many medical resources and you live in a place where medical care isn’t easy to come by, that by itself harms people. The blood used for your top surgery means a shortage of blood for people having accidents or something, or maybe a shortage of antibiotics as well, people aren’t going along with that because they understand that it means they might not get medical care.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
9mo ago
I think a huge issue here is that there are so few who understand narratives and the ideas of metaphors and allegorical language well enough to get it. Most of the media critics I’ve read seem to take everything they see and read absolutely literally— orcs have dreadlocks and are therefore a stereotype of black people and therefore racist. If you don’t present your story literally and bop them over the head with it, they can’t see aliens as stand ins for earthbound culture topics. I got nearly banned from a subreddit defending a nazi planet trek episode that pretty much is anti Nazi in every conceivable way and taken down in short order (by two characters played by Jews no less). They couldn’t get that a story needs a beginning and an answer to the question of why the situation exists in the first place. In the case the alien Nazis were started by a rogue star fleet captain. The people I was talking to just couldn’t quite grasp that characters in a story can do things that the author doesn’t agree with. I don’t know how to create a story with deeper meanings for people who can’t grasp very basic ideas about fiction and storytelling.
So I don’t think it’s the toolkit, the issue is that at the moment there’s a good number of people who just aren’t literate enough to allow anything other than a literal version of the story they want to hear. And I suspect that this is why movies and tv are so bad. You cannot do anything but the literal without toddlers toss their toys out of their playpens in protest. So writers for mainstream content are stuck writing (to quote Critical Drinker) “wonderfully diverse female space Jesus” — a woman who can do nothing wrong and always saves the day. If that woman is ever shown weak, or needing to learn, or needing help, or some mere man saves the day, the literalists in the audience will call the writers sexist.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
9mo ago
I think Covid hawks were a creation of the hype machine. The searches don’t go up and down based on variants, but media coverage. The media basically dropped all COVID coverage around the time of the Russian invasion when the hype machine went from coverage of COVID related stories (new variant, mask/vaccine) to Plucky Ukraine with a guy who looks like Hawkeye. Instead of the signal being masks and telling everyone you never leave the house, it became Ukrainian flags and being obnoxious about the pronunciation of Kiev as Kyiv.
But to my mind, it was always a creation of media. Had the media not covered the story, it wasn’t much. It was, for the vast majority of people, a glorified flu virus. Had it not come with death-tickers and infection-tickers on the nightly news, breathless coverage of new variants, and endless advice about whether given activities were “safe” to do, people would never have cared in the first place. Had this happened in 1983, there wouldn’t have been nearly the hysteria— in large measure because we didn’t have the possibility of sending millions of office workers home, and didn’t have online shopping. The hype pushed billions into to coffers of Amazon, Walmart, Doordash, and instacart simply by virtue of making people afraid to leave the house.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
9mo ago
Stuff like this is why I come here. I don’t mind criticism of a movement provided it’s based in facts. And what bothers me about most of the criticisms of both them film and the organization is based more on “yuck” emotions than facts. The critics to my knowledge haven’t pointed to fabricated parts of the movie or even the financial statements of the organization itself.
I find the “yuck” emotion writing tends to discredit the opposition to the idea in question just because to my mind, if you had real reason to distrust the movie or the organization that’s what you’d talk about. Instead it’s been wall to wall “oh my god, can you believe this MAGA Qanon movie is actually being shown in theaters, and people are not only going to eww see it but actually shudder like it!” It’s a terrible way to get people to listen to your opposition to the film simply because it cannot articulate why it’s wrong or why OUR isn’t exactly on the up and up.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
I think there’s a danger in caving too early. If you accept the very first olive branch, then it’s pretty obvious that you weren’t serious and we’re going to cave as soon as possible. Boycotts are in essence demonstrations of consumer power, and if you’re accepting the first offer, you’re showing a lack of staying power. Once companies figure out that they can do whatever you want as long as they occasionally toss a few platitudes your way, they won’t be afraid to hit the accelerator on liberal/woke causes because they know that waving a few American flags around is enough for you. You’re cheap and easily bought off.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
It’s an outgroup term, and one Western media has spent decades creating as an outgroup term. “State sponsored media” is quite often used to describe government sponsored media in other countries with the implication being that they’re not independent like the media in the West. There are two problems with this: first, that it falsely implies that everything produced by the media outgroup is completely false, and second that our media isn’t at least partially controlled by other means.
I don’t think controlled state media lies all the time, and in fact unless the lie benefits the regime in question to lie, they probably don’t lie any more often than other media does. If there’s a fire in a factory in China, Xinhua will probably be reasonably accurate about the event, how many were injured or killed, etc. They’re likely to report accurately on things the government says. They probably get the weather report fairly accurate as well.
And our media is controlled, not explicitly, but if you want access, you have to play the game. If you’re too negative on political figures, you won’t get access to those tips and interviews. If you report on something that you aren’t supposed to, you aren’t going to be invited to happenings and lose market share as your rivals break news first and get those big interviews and behind the scenes looks at something. You might even lose advertising if you report something that is too out-there for major brands.
NPR/PBS runs on patronage. The corporation for public broadcasting gives grants and allows shows access to their radio and tv shows. The more your content matches with stuff the inside-beltway likes seeing, the more likely you are to get funding and airtime. So almost everything on there is biased towards those viewpoints. Ben Shapiro couldn’t get on NPR no matter what he does because he doesn’t appeal to the people making the grant and airtime decisions. Things like Hardcore History won’t make the cut either.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
I think a lot of this is people leaving the Democratic Party not so much because they agree with the GOP, but because the Democratic Party has abandoned the working class on almost every issue, and has become the party of the elites and sneering at the working class.
Hispanics are Catholics generally, and thus are pretty strong Christians (at least culturally), strongly pro family, and are thus pretty conservatives on most social issues. They also fled parts of the world run by criminal gangs and would thus be fairly strong on law and order stuff. Blacks are usually conservative Protestants and thus also pro family, and so on. They might also want the supposed left-leaning economic policies, but on social issues, they’re pretty conservative.
Which gives the democrats two major problems. First, they’re not only against these more conservative social policies, but they often sneer at anyone not fully on board with them. They aren’t just generally in favor of LGBT stuff, they insist on drag queen story hour, full on drag shows in elementary schools, and so on. Secondly, they are not even trying to deliver any of the kinds of policies that would help the working class. The last minimum wage increase was just after the financial crisis of 2008. Biden had both houses and all he really needed to do was ignore the parliamentarian— who he can outright fire — to put a minimum wage increase in a budget bill where it might have passed. He chose not to. Instead the big economic policies of the moment are environmentalist infrastructure and paying off student loans (and he was blocked on the loans).
Now if you oppose the woke stuff, and don’t like being lectured to about it, that’s a strike on the democratic side. They aren’t upholding your beliefs and values. In fact the6 often mock you for holding them. They’re teaching things in your kids schools you don’t like, and often at the expense of very necessary skills that your kids need for their future.
And there’s nothing gained by holding your nose for them. They’re not working on making working class lives better. They sold out the train engineers. They aren’t raising the minimum wage at all, they’re not paying for trade schools or on the job training. They’re not teaching your kids to read. They’re not even doing anything about drugs and crime. They care about Ukraine, they care that the upper class failsons are unable to pay back their loans. They care about the cultural interests of the laptop class.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
I’ve said this a thousand times and I really believe it. The concept of human rights is really only possible in a stable society. Rule of law is the best outcome possible, but if you’re living in a place where gangs disappear hundreds of people every year, because eventually everyone either flees or takes the law into their own hands. And I’d say really, this is probably the best thing, long term for the people of El Salvador— a stable peaceful society in which a real liberal society and real democracy and real human rights can happen.
Most government functions are tools anyway. Human rights are a great carrot, a thing government can grant when there’s a generally stable society in which one can generally expect to live without having to worry about crime. Liberalism is another fruit of a stable civilization, as it requires such a thing to exist before the society can get away with deviance from the norm. Even democratic institutions are dependent on a stable peaceful system where you can reasonably expect that the losers will accept their losses and— actually exit stage right.
Most of us, unless we read a lot of history have a mistaken notion that human rights and liberalism and democracy are the cause of our prosperity. History says otherwise. Most of human history is real raw power struggles between elites, brutal regimes that tortured people and would barely give the pretense of a trial. The reason the American revolution happened when it did was that the West had enough law and order built up that something other than an autocratic king could run things. The colonies were filled with law abiding, church going, hard working English people. You could walk down the streets at night without fear of being mugged. Of course a civilization filled with law abiding citizens who worked hard and believed in morality could form a stable republic — the stability allowed the social trust that made it possible to believe that George Washington would actually step aside if he lost. Of course such a people could conduct trials and worry about a guilty man being sent up the river by mistake. Crime wasn’t all that common.
Of course civilization thus far has had a 100% failure rate. Every great civilization has eventually failed and either dissolved in chaos for a time or got conquered by somebody stronger.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
6mo ago
I think at least for me, the question is “what exactly are the Jews supposed to do here?” People love to criticize, but I don’t think any other groups would have as measured a response as Israel has to a group of people living within a stone’s throw of their major cities having a stated aim to kill them and wipe them off the map, and who regularly target civilians with rockets and bombs and terrorist attacks. If the native tribes of North America were regularly launching missiles from their reservations, we’d probably have a very similar response. If they do all the things Palestinians regularly do from Gaza, there’d be a wall, guards, and everything else.
We’re not thinking that way because for most of us, warfare, especially warfare of this type hasn’t happened in our countries for almost a century. It’s pretty easy to sit back and arm chair quarterback when war is something you only know from movies and that being too restrained is free for me in the USA who doesn’t have do worry about anyone you know suffering the consequences. When it’s your city, your people, and so on, anyone would tend to err on the side of protecting their own.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
10mo ago
I think a lot of the reasons come from the elites no longer having significant skin in the game and little connection to the real meat potatoes and dirt road.
If you see the world through a laptop full of spreadsheets and as long as the spreadsheet makes graphs that make them look good, they don’t see a problem. Problems will only show up after I’m gone. And thus why not make pretty graphics that make the boss happy? You get paid, it feels good, and you don’t have to deal with the aftermath.
And even when the aftermath comes, you’ll be pretty insulated from it. If the economy tanks, you have money, international investments, and a passport. You probably don’t even know anyone affected by it. All of your friends live like you do, visiting Europe and the Caribbean and wherever else. You have people to handle the cooking, shopping, cleaning, you have security to keep people from bothering you.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
I’ll agree to a point. I think these are absolutely crimes, however, I don’t believe that anyone else of his social status would have been prosecuted on them. And I think a lot of it is that he doesn’t really fit the culture of the Washington Elites. He’s a Clampett, more or less. He’s the guy who talks in braggadocio, eats steak with ketchup, and does political theater in burlesque. He’s a White Trash President. He’s supposed to be understated, nuanced, culturally sophisticated, prefer Professional Managerial Class food, clothes, music, and entertainment. He’s not supposed to mock political opponents on Twitter like a 4chan troll, he’s not supposed to openly kill our enemies with drone strikes (although a plausibly deniable death carried out by the CIA that nobody knows about is fine, there are rules to kanly).
Had Trump had the demeanor of Desantis, I don’t think they’d have lost their minds, they’d have opposed him, but it would not have been as much of an open scorched earth warfare as it is with Trump. Desantis would have to deal with more quiet opposition, more subtle, and more fitting of another PMC cultured politician. He wouldn’t be investigated with a breathless “is this long nightmare finally over?”
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1mo ago
I think a lot of the problems stem from the professional inbreeding of writing and filmmaking. You are certainly correct about people having less lived experience. I would argue that in a lot of ways it goes much much further. In order to make it in Hollywood, you have to go to film school, and by the nature of college and student loans, you have to come from a certain stock to have the ability to study film, creative writing, or acting in school, As in at least upper middle class with a mommy and daddy able and willing to not only foot the college bill but support this budding Hollywood star for years while they worked on getting in. So we’re talking about at least 50 years removed from the time when their ancestors did ordinary manual labor in a factory, repair shop, store, or building site. They exist both in their families and among their peers in a world where nobody takes religion seriously. They also are not the kinds of people who watch boxing or MMA on TV and certainly have never been in a fight themselves. They don’t know anyone who’s been in the military. All of this means that not only does our author know nothing, but he’s surrounded by know nothings. And he’s likewise been taught by no nothings.
There’s not much of a chance that a person who’s never seen a real fight and never took so much as a karate lesson is ever going to understand fighting. And someone who doesn’t know anyone who’s ever been a cop or soldier can’t possibly understand the mentality of those professions.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
4mo ago
I think in the eyes of a lot of the public there’s no plausible charitable reading of “they removed a major candidate (who pretty much has the nomination at this point) from the ballot in absence of a conviction for a crime.” This is a red line for any country that wants to claim the mantle of “real democracy” — that candidates even the ones the elite disagree with — have the right to run in a free and fair election. I don’t see how anyone who planned to vote GOP in any form is going to be okay with losing the election where their nominee Isn’t on the ballot.
So what’s being created here is a scenario in which the only result that the public can be sure that there was no interference in is “Trump wins.” If Trump loses, the GOP and MAGAs are not going to simply say “maybe next time,” because the reason they think the6 lost is the denial of their right to a fair and free election. It’s going to make the aftermath of 2020 look very tame. At least in 2020 we were holding a fair election where everyone who was running was on the ballot, the laws were mostly followed, and while there’s plausible theories of fraud, it wasn’t overt. I expect that there might well be attacks on state governments and election officials, possibly riots or other forms of violence because that’s generally what happens when people belief that their government has betrayed democracy.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
4mo ago
So Meta the parent company of Facebook and instagram is now allowing users and advertisers to post claims about election fraud in the last election but not the soon to be held 2024 elections. I’ll lay my cards out here and say I’m personally a skeptic of the claims that the 2020 elections were stolen. I don’t see why that should prevent other people from making such arguments.
But my question for you guys is whether these claims are going to really erode trust in future elections. To me the issue that erodes that trust is that the official government structures never bothered to look into the claims that such fraud might have happened and instead opted for the COVID style full court press of “nobody should bother to take it seriously, and if you do it’s clear that you’re falling for misinformation.” To me nothing erodes trust faster than an official response of “nothing to see here.”
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
8mo ago
It depends. The mainstream media isn’t reporting this, so it’s unlikely that the average NPC or low information voter will know about the issue at all, and among those who do, most as dismissive of the Hunter Biden stuff. So it’s unlikely that most of the people will feel strongly enough to not vote for Biden.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
8mo ago
I think honestly the things that I see in the culture now that weren’t when I was a kid (for reference I graduated high school in 1996) is a couple of really big “zeitgeist” changes. First, was the idea that everything was awful in some way, and that no amount of effort was actually going to help matters. People made fun of the Hope and Change Obama campaign poster. If you believed in a better world, you were a naive person. It was all cynicism all the time. Everyone knew problems were unsolvable, the climate was fucked and we were at peak oil and nobody cared.
At the same or similar time, therapeutic culture (probably through over diagnosis of mental disorders) entered the mainstream of discourse. I believe this kind of ideology is ultimately disastrous because it gives answers that are meant for a population already severely broken and who need to be treated gently and pushed this same bubble-wrapped feelings first idea onto normal people. This created two affects: it gave cultural scolds the language and legitimacy to curtail speech, and it created a culture full of wimps who can do little for themselves and thus break much more easily than their ancestors. Cultural scolds have always been around, but until therapeutic culture entered the mainstream, the idea that people suffered harm from reading things they disagreed with didn’t have much traction. Once everyone started feeling trauma, and their body started keeping score and so on, it became the job of everyone to protect the weakest from trauma and the resulting mental illness. Which means that if you say something wrong in public, you’ve committed violence and inflicted trauma. And thus venues that allow that are now participating in creating trauma. The second is that people themselves are much weaker simply for being taught to be that way. They can’t handle loss or defeat, they can’t handle not getting what they want, and are unwilling to put forth effort into getting those things.
If you put those things together, you create a sort of grim dark world. Everything is awful, you’re weak and will be harmed by mere words. When you live in grim dark, you don’t see much to look forward to. Why work hard when you aren’t going to get anything much for it and the world will boil to death? Why have kids? Why make art with heart and soul? Why challenge people to do great things when it doesn’t matter?
I think this is the problem for a lot of bastardized media franchises as well. Woke (the cultural scolds) are definitely a part of it, but I think the unstated part of it is that we no longer believe in heroes or heroism. It’s impossible to make a serious hero movie in a culture that no longer believes in that sort of thing. Or at least impossible to play it straight without it feeling naive to the deconstructionist writers and producers who find those stories to be kid stuff. The Jedi cannot be a force for good, because in 2023 everyone knows that everyone with power is oppressive. You cannot have a government that isn’t secretly evil or broken by infighting because everyone knows that doesn’t happen. If you for some reason try it, you have to play it for laughs, either by frenetic action or absolute farce, because hope, change, and belief in a better future are silly.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
I don’t think that’s the issue. And if I might rant against your rant, the problem I see is that we take literally nothing seriously when discussing politics, technology or culture. I get that sometimes it’s helpful to make references to popular culture and media. But what I’ve seen, and Ukraine vs Russia is the exemplar of the moment is a complete lack of seriousness in the discourse around it. We’re pussyfooting around a situation where two nuclear powers are escalating tensions over a territory of questionable value in either direction. And we’re doing so on the basis of memes.
I can make the case for just about any possible position in response to the Russian invasion. Every one of them has serious pros and cons because war is a serious matter. A negotiation of a new border brings a hopefully stable peace, but would encourage Putin in further expansion. A proxy war with the goal of driving Russia to the 2014 borders risks a hot war between nuclear powers, but would send a strong message that we will not stand for invasion of sovereign nations. There’s a lot of history that should be a part of the discussion as well. We can’t, or won’t talk about this very very serious topic in a serious manner. Instead, Russians are uniquely evil “orcs”, and we’re talking about a potential world war in terms of movies while insisting on a new spelling for Kiev and chastising companies who still call their chicken dish “chicken Kiev” instead of “chicken Kyiv” as though Putin or anyone else gives a flying shit what we call the dish.
The rot goes deeper, and it was also quite common in discussions of COVID and the response. It wasn’t a cool rational debate about the merits of various types and levels of lockdowns. There was little discussion of the relevant risks of different activities and the risks at different ages and risk factors. We simply screamed at anyone who wanted to leave the house.
My thinking is that we are, as the Chinese observed at one point, and unserious people. We aren’t having rational debates and choosing reasonable alternatives. We aren’t discussing the facts on the ground. We’ve become the people defending Ukraine from orcs, Jewish space lasers, and freedom fries. And this is not a sign of a healthy civilization. This is a society clearly shrinking back into a deman-haunted world in which the entirety of thinking about very serious issues must be reduced to children’s movie references or image macros to be digestible by the public.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
25d ago
I’ll agree that parents are responsible for their kids, and I’ll agree that in this case (as they bought the weapon and took him out target-shooting with it) they are responsible for enabling the shooting.
But I think as a blanket thing, I’m less convinced simply because preventing your kids, especially if they have ongoing mental health issues, from doing anything wrong is an impossible task. Once a kid has access to money and a vehicle, your ability to control them is pretty small. It would take an extreme level of helicopter parenting to prevent a teenager from doing this. He goes and steals a gun from somebody else, and you don’t know. He builds bombs out of household materials, and you don’t know. You’d have to track him to be sure, and watch his internet to be sure.
Worse, I fear that the looming threat of liability might make parents less likely to seek help. If you have your kid diagnosed with something like bipolar or borderline personality disorder or something that makes them more likely to be violent, you’ve now created a situation where you’re admitting possible guilt — you know your kid has issues, and if they act out, well, you knew about it. The best defense is that the child isn’t diagnosed with anything.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
6mo ago
Except that the advice given to women is in you example is pretty exaggerated. The places women are asked to avoid are generally places that are dangerous to men as well. General safety means not going to seedy bars, not walking in dark alleys and not getting blackout drunk. Other than “wear clothes that fully cover your reproductive organs and breasts” I’m not seeing anything that would seriously curtail normal life for most people. Nobody is telling women to stay home and wear a burka except in their imagination.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
10mo ago
I think a lot of elites simply aren’t very religious themselves and thus are sort of befuddled by religious objections and thus tend to assume it’s about the other people. Like the state leadership of Colorado seems to be assuming that his religious objections are a rhetorical device and a way to say “gay people are yucky”. I think they just honestly don’t understand religion as a belief. To a religious person it’s about obeying God, and thus violating this is out of the question. I tend to find most people in those elite positions tend to be heavily utilitarian and consequentialist — they don’t really start with axioms that you can’t violate, they start with who is affected and how. They’re seeing only the effects — gay couple not getting a website. And that must have been the intention by the religious person, because they chose the actions that denied gays the website.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
I’m answering the first part for myself but I think unless/until the streets are safe and you don’t have to worry about being mugged or stores being looted or other forms of street crime, I don’t see any way you’ll convince people to give up guns. And so I think you’ll either going to need to rearm the police and get serious about “broken windows” policing, or deal with people wanting arms for self defense.
Most reformats I’ve seen are more like “disarm, then we’ll eventually circle back and deal with your concerns.” Which is frankly a bad deal and everybody knows it. If I said something like “give me your ring and then I’ll give you something for it later,” or worse “just give me your ring, and I’ll stop calling you a greedy ass,” nobody thinks this is a good deal. Nobody thinks it’s a reasonable idea. And no concerns are actually discussed. Like for people who want a gun because of break-ins or something, they’re not going to accept keeping the gun in a locker off-site. They’re not going to accept limits on bullets. Especially if they’ve had to deal with the cops and had a prowler and had to wait 15 minutes for the cops to show up, write a few notes and drive away. As self defense guys say “when seconds count, help is only minutes away.”
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
I think the unpopularity is right. Unless we solve the issues that are making college unaffordable, simply wiping the debts (or a portion of the debts) simply makes the problem worse. The issue is that for skilled, non-labor jobs, college has become not so much a “nice to have” thing, but a requirement, in fact, it’s basically like high school was in the 1960s. If you want a good job and don’t want to be in construction, repair, or a chef or some other skilled labor— you have to go to college.
This creates a huge demand and thus makes the price inelastic. No one really looks at the costs or the interest rates beyond the choice between schools. You go, and if it costs 100K so what? You need the degree to even apply. And as long as college is the ticket to a middle class lifestyle, people will go, regardless of the cost. And of course as college becomes obligatory, and everyone gets a degree, the value falls. College in 1970 was a “wow, he must be a real go-getter. He must be smart,” thing. This was because they were relatively rare. Once college became the default, it’s not longer useful to signal intelligence or hard work (unless it’s a super hard degree), it’s too diluted to do that.
Making loans forgivable even if it requires a specific act of government to do so simply makes the problem worse. The forgiveness will be priced in. Why wouldn’t a school charge as much as they can get away with? If the dumbass students can’t pay, the government will. And on the student side, there’s no reason to economize here. If the debt gets bad enough, there will be a bailout. The employer side gets harder as well. Everyone other than the truly stupid have a diploma. So college is no longer enough. Maybe it will be internships, maybe we move up the credential treadmill, but college itself won’t be a ticket to those coveted middle class jobs. They’ll be a ticket to the line to buy a ticket to the middle class. And such a thing can stretch out quite a while because obviously people are willing to do everything possible to not be poor.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1mo ago
Morally speaking, yes it is defamatory. It’s obvious to anyone familiar with the subway incident that the story is in fact a direct reference to that event and that the audience is meant to assume that the background is at least somewhat accurate as well. And as to other stories, I think the same holds true. If I’m very obviously writing a story about George Floyd and then veer off into making my fictional Floyd into a drug dealing, gang-banging pimp, it’s very clear that I intended those accusations to filter down into the real person that my fictional character is a representation of.
And again just from a moral perspective, I think if you’re going to use a “ripped from the headlines” story, you need to change the story and the character enough that it’s not intuitively obvious that I’m talking about this specific person who did this specific thing. A fictional version of the story where the event happened somewhere other than a subway, and perhaps the guy getting choked had a weapon or whatever is probably a big enough change that the average viewer isn’t pointing to the screen with Daniel Perrry’s name on their lips. Then you have a fictional character that you can do whatever you want to do especially in making them hated in some way.
Or son Scott Card had advice about world building that amounted to “don’t use warp drive, everybody knows it’s Star Trek.” And I think in any fictional story, the general advice is good. If I’m creating my own fictional story, it’s bad practice to make it obvious where I’m getting my world building, characters, and events from simply because it tends to pull people out of the experience and in the case of using real events, transfer the fiction onto the real world.
The biggest attack on Christmas happens because of capitalism not any particular group. It’s really strange to think about but Christmas wasn’t destroyed by people saying happy holidays, as it was already moribund before that. It was killed by having Santa and reindeer and presents, thus as the marketing took over, any aspect of the holiday that doesn’t revolve around parties (which means buying fancy food) and decorating (buying stuff that matches the season) and media (wherein they sell ads) and of course presents (do I even need to say it) was stripped out and replaced with saccrine sweet smalls about peace, love, joy, and wonder — with no reason for those emotions. The reason is that for big companies, obviously don’t want people to see the holidays as primarily religious, as about Jesus, because going to church interferes with the buying of crap.
I have less hate of the phrase happy holidays because Christmas is already secular, and there are other holidays like Hanukkah and New Year’s Day. And at this point, the horse is twenty miles up the road. Closing the barn door now doesn’t matter. I think for those who want a religious Christmas, the best you could do is pick another date (orthodox Christmas is January 6) and ignore the marketeers.
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