MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
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User ID: 1783
Tbf, I think in both parties, filter bubbles are removing the natural flow towards the center that used to exist in politics. Politics in the 21st century has more of a hold on a person than religion would. No one cares what you think about reformed Christianity. They do care if you have the right opinion on immigration, taxation, woke, etc. and furthermore, people are often choosing interests and hobbies and lifestyles based on their political views. If you’re on the right, you collect guns and drink beer and watch football or hockey. If you’re on the left you’ll be interested in art and vegan or organic foods, drink tea, and meditation.
I think there’s a bit of LARP to anyone claiming an identity they are not born with. I’m not even convinced that one could reliably describe the feeling of being oneself. What does being M’aiq feel like to M’aiq? If I were asked to describe myself, I wouldn’t be able to describe myself by internal feelings of M’aiq-ness because there’s nothing so unique to my internal states that I could point to and say “if you feel like this, that’s what it feels like to be me.” I could talk about interests and behaviors, beliefs, favorite movies or TV shows. I could talk about my memory of some event. But all in all, my experience of being me is pretty much a normal human being experience. And everyone has male and female coded interests. I like HEMA and art and hiking and watching baseball and Masked Singer. I think I could find several people both male and female who like those things.
I think on some level the truth is almost always “both”, which has made things like “is X biological” a bit harder to come to a solid conclusion on. You can have predisposition to just about anything you can think of, but often the truth is that it’s biology meeting just the right environment. People are much taller than they were in 1700, as anyone who’s been in a historical home can tell you, as the furniture is designed for people much shorter than we are. Humans didn’t suddenly evolve to be taller, it’s just that we have more food and better quality food and therefore grow taller.
I suspect some of the increase in gay/trans is down to environmental factors. Some of it is the endocrine disrupting chemicals in the environment, some of it is cultural influences that not only don’t discourage them but often celebrate them. But biology still has some part. It makes some people much more susceptible to those influences.
What difference does it make if the fathers were opposed? This is human psychology and human nature does what human nature does. I think there’s something to the theory as unitary monarchs are probably the single most universal form of government in every culture that has ever existed. Other forms exist, but if you threw a dart at a chart of world governments, you’d very likely find some sort of unitary monarch in power. Most of Asian and European history is the history of monarchy and empire. We’re used to democratic societies, but historically speaking, they’re pretty rare.
Even the “love letters” are fairly normal across time. Welcome to the historical norm of most of human history in which your country’s fate is determined by whether or not they can appease the guy with the most powerful military.
Honestly I expect the “resistance” to Peter out pretty quickly once the gloves actually come off. I just don’t see anything that makes me believe that these people understand power, strategy, or even real desire. It’s like they’ve almost decided that Trump is going to get away with it anyway so other than making noises so that people don’t mistake them for supporting Trump. But there’s no real drive there.
Chuck Schumer writes “strongly worded letters” that do nothing and mean nothing. He had not, however used the filibuster to block any of Trump’s legislation or nominees. He didn’t refuse to raise the debt ceiling when that came up. Corey Booker sat on the steps of the Capitol for a day, telling everyone how much he wanted to save Medicaid. He also voted for Trump’s nominees even when it wasn’t required. No Democratic legislators have introduced impeachment or contempt of Congress charges, they’ve held no hearings to investigate the supposed crimes. Even Newsome is pretty much rolling along. He could have easily as governor ordered the National Guard to stand down. He didn’t try it. This isn’t a group of dissidents willing to do whatever they can to stop something they see as an evil regime marching towards authoritarianism. This is a group mostly miming opposition while doing nothing.
And the protests are much the same. These are not spontaneous protests brought on by genuine outrage. These are planned protests, short in duration, carefully crafted such that they are short, easy to get to, and coordinate with most people’s schedules. Holding a planned demonstration from 11-2 on Saturday is pretty weak sauce. Holding a protest like that without making any concrete demands is a joke. We are here, clear, and only doing this so long as it doesn’t interfere with work, chores, or Billy’s little league game. What’s the point? How does this demonstrate power? Resolve? Anything? But 3.5% showed up on a sunny weekend day in June so according to them the Revolution will succeed. Again, I very strongly suspect that this movement is less about Trump or anything Trump is doing and more about having learned in school that they’re “supposed to oppose this” lest history judge you complicit. It’s not about Trump, or ICE, or anything else. It’s the nagging fear that their grandchildren in their horror scenarios will ask them why they didn’t do anything. So they’re making a public show of opposition they don’t actually care about. Because how will anyone know they’re the good ones if they don’t hold up a “honk if you don’t like fascism” sign.
But since nobody is serious about anything they’re saying, it will absolutely fade under real opposition. A few sidewalk protesters thrown into prison, the arrest of a political figure who defies Trump, cutting funding for a pet project for their district, whatever. They won’t continue fighting when it has a real cost. As such Trump can do pretty much anything he wants to.
And you often do the same in war. Sun Tzu says that exactly— where you are weak you want to look strong and where you are strong, you want to look weak such that your enemy attacks where you are strong and not where you are weak.
But the biggest part of poker is the fact that it’s one of the few games where the entire point is that you have incomplete knowledge. And therefore a lot of the strategy is about using the odds and psychological power to make the most of the cards you have. This is how both war and politics work. You don’t know what the other guy has or is going to do, so you act to maximize your odds based on tge cards you have. Trump seems to be pushing hard on the “I have really good cards here, you better agree to this ceasefire or im going to take it all.” It’s not a check, it’s a raise. Agree or get more of what I just did to you.
It didn’t help them in previous wars. No matter what Israel did to avoid casualties, it either wasn’t enough, or it was considered evil. I think this is why they’ve been so gloves off this time. The gloves are pointless, as any sort of fighting back is demonized as apartheid or genocide. So, rather than risk their soldiers to prevent such war crimes, just go for it.
Mine brother, we shalt party like it’s 1699!
I feel the same way, I don’t think online gambling (which in my mind includes buying loot boxes for regular games as well( should be legal simply because it removes all friction from the process and allows for much easier age check bypassing. By requiring a gambler to get into a car, drive to a casino and put a physical credit card into a physical machine, you force enough friction that a person would have a harder time gambling when they weren’t thinking about it. It’s also much harder for a child to fool an employee of the casino if they must be physically in the same building.
From my point of view, it seems to represent blue-collar working-man masculinity for most people who have them. The point is to signal that you’re a hard working man’s man. Most of the drivers are actually urban professionals of one type or another, at least where I am, most actual contractors use minivans.
I think a lot of the bias in the pro-Muslim direction is a lack of lived experience with this stuff. If you’re a zoomer, you were a baby when 9-11 happened, and you didn’t actually see what the intifada did, or any of the ISIS beheadings or suicide bombings and IEDs in Iraq/Afghanistan. So the impression you’d get from the media is something Like “Muslims were sitting in Palestine, minding their own business when those colonialist Jews showed up and for no reason at all decided to require all kinds of security measures and put up walls.” No, every one of the security checkpoints was because of various jihad and intifada attacks against civilians.
I don’t think Israel is perfect here. The settler movement is making everything worse. Bombing hospitals is not a good thing to do. The list honestly goes beyond this as well.
If bombing Iran buys us five or ten years, it’s probably worth it. I don’t think they can restart a program we just blew up and have a bomb in two years.
Yes, but it was also quite the psychological and even philosophical blow. Before 2001, we just sort of assumed that the world order was USA and Western Europe on top, everyone wanting to be us. We basically ended up not only resting on our laurels, but often tearing up the things that lead to our success.
Culturally, we tore up quite a lot of the social technologies that made success possible. We decided on some level that self-control, decency in a very broad sense, family and the centrality of protecting children from physical and emotional and psychological trauma, excellence as a virtue. Those things became sort of passé. Only old people and boring people still thought that one man, one woman for life with the woman as primary caregivers, or worried about too much sex, drugs, and violence in movies. Who cares, we are the top civilization heading for victory, and everyone wants to be like us.
Educational standards did not keep up, and in fact they are pretty low by this point. We decided that having an educated population was less important than the uncomfortable need to make kids learn things. But again, we were dominant, and believed we would always be dominant.
So what happens when we were rudely awakened by 19 guys with box cutters taking down major landmarks in America. And Americans had no idea how or why it happened or what we should start doing to fix it. We thought we permanently were going to be the utopian future. What now.
My contention is that our stories, especially popular stories are how people deal with the stories. Battlestar Galactics was an attempt to deal with 9/11. We thought everything was fine. Then the Cylons blew up the colonies. You never knew who was or wasn’t a cylon which is kinda like the jihadists who might or might not have been integrated into American society. The story explored all kinds of the different facets of the situation.
I think our current mania for medieval fantasy and romantasy is a longing for things that exist in those archetypes — strong, wise leadership, nobility, tradition, and heroism. And so how would a knight deal with some of the problems we face right now? Or a wise King?
No, if Iran with a nuke is dangerous, letting them have it because you don’t want to lose a midterm is short sighted. A nuke detonated anywhere on earth would kill millions. That would certainly be worse than losing a midterm. Especially if that nuke hits an American or allied city, an American military base, or some high value target in the Middle East.
Israel is Israel and they’re frankly not part of my analysis here. If Israel didn’t exist, I think the history of Islamic radicalism would make an Islamic nuke a danger to world stability. A religion that says those who kill for God with a weapon that can obliterate a city is not something that would improve my insomnia.
I’m rather impressed because of the political capital used. This isn’t the kind of decision one should make with an eye to what the people will think about it. If you need to prevent an enemy from getting too powerful to deal with, you need to act even if it is unpopular. An Islamist state with a history of supporting terrorism is not a state that should be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. It’s beyond crazy to me that everyone is worried about poll numbers here when the issue was Iran with access to a weapon that could kill millions.
I mean the objection is that no one could remain a public figure after suggesting I want to “end” any group other than whites. If he’d been talking about “ending Jewishness” or “ending blackness” or “ending femininity” he’d have been fired rather publicly. In fact, reading his statement he doesn’t say “I object to Jewishness, like other forms of bigotry.” He said “I object to antisemitism, like all forms of bigotry.”
If he’d worked with a group that suggested that treason to blackness is service to humanity, he would never be in a position to have anything else he said taken seriously. He’d probably be banned even on Twitter.
It’s a Jewish specific thing in this context because Jewish laws forbid that anything that touches something unclean must be destroyed. Christianity has no similar rules. If I hold a race in a church, it might be offensive, but it doesn’t render the building “unchristian” to the point that it must be destroyed. The closest I can think of is hala in Islam or no beef in Hinduism. Reserving the holy things of religion against things that break those rules isn’t special treatment is the condition doesn’t exist for other religions.
I’m just looking at his particular interest in Africa, and food insecurity in Africa and tge Congo. None of this sounds like a guy with right-leaning tendencies. He does have a grandiose agenda and vision for how and what he’s going to do in DRC, but the choice of “American hunger to control black people in Africa” has no right-coded hooks, but does have left-coded hooks (international food security, American Empire, etc). This just doesn’t read like even a center left idea. This sounds pretty progressive in its choice of location and race-hierarchy and America-booing. I don’t think anyone remotely MAGA, NRx, or dissident right is going to glom onto “people in Congo need my help because America is using food to control black people in Africa.” They won’t because this isn’t on the list of concerns right leaning people would have. Right spaces tend toward nationalism, religion, masculinity, and similar issues. He doesn’t care about any right-coded ideology at all.
I mean, for most things medical, electrical, or legal, there’s no good reason for anyone without the training to attempt to DIY. For food and food additive advice, I’d look for someone who’s a Registered Dietitian, because they have trained in the material and would know the information you need.
I don’t think that the meaning is self evidently the same as originalism. There are other ways to derive intent that don’t come directly from the written text of the constitution or case law or any other written all.
The first amendment says “Congress will make no law establishing a religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The plain meaning is “no state church, and congress (NB: only one branch of government is mentioned in the text). So what does religion mean, in this context? What does free exercise mean in this context? What happens if Trump issues an executive order enjoining the entire country to the Orthodox Church in America? The text actually doesn’t say anything about executive orders. So you’d have to look to other things: what kinds of things were the people debating the bill saying about the bill, what were they trying to prevent from happening? What did they say when trying to sell the Bill of Rights to the People? What did early case law say about things like various states having official churches? What did they think religion means? These things are not plain reading of the meaning of the text. (Which, going only by the text, only prevents Congress from passing a law to make a National Religion or to forbid a religion from being practiced. That’s what the meaning of the words on the paper say.”
I don’t really think that “food insecurity” which is how im understanding his bizarre ideas about controlling colored people with food, is a neutral or red idea. I’ve really only heard it in blue leaning areas. As is his concern about said colored people as a group separate from poverty issues. Reds don’t tend to do that, they tend to talk about poverty as a problem and solve for poverty, with a pretty strong allergy to bringing up race in most contexts. It’s almost a useful heuristic at this point. A person who brings up minorities unbidden when talking about an unrelated subject is likely a blue.
TBH I think the big problem, which I’ve talked about before is that really most shouldn’t be following politics and probably shouldn’t be voting. Voter apathy isn’t a flaw in the system, it’s a feature. If people who don’t understand politics are heavily politically active, it’s honestly a problem to be solved because those people generally make terrible decisions. Even if they were somehow given “good” news sources, most of them don’t understand the issues well to make good decisions. Take away the “good, true’ news, and you have a situation in which people who don’t know what is going on and wouldn’t understand what is going on even if they got the truth are voting based on who looks most truthful and leader-like while lying to them on TV or TikTok. When people like that decide elections, it’s more likely to damage the country than do go.
I think the trope exists because most fantasy is based on D&D over anything to do with medieval times. It gets particularly irritating when the characters in the story act like modern people with modern concerns and attitudes rather than anything that someone living in the actual Middle Ages would have believed.
Some things I think were beneficial and should be brought back. Communitarianism, connection to friends and neighbors, belief in God. In a lot of ways I think that lifestyle is much more appealing as it gave everyone a place and a purpose with mutual support and respect.
See for me neither the combat nor the gambits really grabbed me. The fact that you spend most of the game without having to make decisions about fighting just sort of removes the fun. You cruise through most of the game that way — once you figure out the correct balance of auto commands to get the AI to not be stupid, you could put down the controller and grab a sandwich while the game fought itself. Which then turned the gameplay into moving around the game zones and solving puzzles.which aren’t bad, but are really pretty simple and don’t add much replay to the game. I felt like the entire experience was on rails to some degree. X was extremely linear, but at least you had to play the game yourself.

I think it’s just maturing. Randomness and luck and “it won’t happen to me” thinking work until reality bites you on the nose. When you’re 16 and you don’t study for the test because you’re convinced that the results are influenced by randomness “some people get A’s without even reading the book,” it’s pretty low stakes and you likely don’t have much experience of the consequences of making that poor decision. Once you’re a senior in college, you have stakes (you have to pay to retake the class you failed, lose scholarships, lose internships) and so saying “it’s all luck, I don’t have to study” loses appeal. At the same time, once you have things to lose, the sort of childish attitude of “just randomly try things” loses appeal. Having a bad dating experience at 15 is cute. When you’re 30, you often have responsibilities and therefore need to find someone who fits into the life you already have built for yourself. You aren’t just going to randomly find someone like that in a bar or night club.
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