MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
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User ID: 1783
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.
TBH for whatever reason evangelicals tend to have nearly blind support for Israel, and that’s long been the GOP base of support. I believe this is why Israel is seen as the one country to support here. It’s more pander than anything, and not too bad so long as it doesn’t have to many negative effects on security.
I think the whole idea is frankly pagan. I don’t think it’s very Christian to say that God has to do anything we decide he should, and the idea smacks of magical thinking.
I don’t think it’s quite the mainstream position in the right-leaning spaces. They might nod along with “evil” or “ideologically possessed” (which started with JBP, I think) but I don’t think, aside from mocking college students and wine moms that they call liberals stupid.
I mean, ideally all of this would happen organically. Subculture is how you get new ideas, new insights. But because of modern technology and our understanding of psychology we managed to basically take artificial control over the engines of culture. Music used to come from seedy dive bars where local artists would work on their sound before being discovered by labels. They’d sound unique because the isolation from the mainstream music scene allowed them to experiment and invent new and interesting sounds. New ideas tend to come from the fringes where an idea can be worked on and perfected away from mainstream culture.
The internet and especially social media have changed all of this. Those hidden pockets of creativity are now put online where the concepts are put online and co-opted or destroyed before they can be refined enough to stand on their own. Worse, the internet has created a situation in which everyone is almost constantly being bombarded with content (read:propaganda) all the time. You think like everyone around you unless you take special care to unplug. But especially in politics, this means it’s almost impossible to come up with something new, unless you’re pretty much a radical. Everyone else is reading the same script, the one that doesn’t work anymore because it’s not 1982 anymore. Most of the apparatus of politics runs on inertia a dead system that ran on Consensus, on very carefully crafted campaigns and old tired bromides and ideas about politics that were invented for your grandparents or great grandparents. We have AI and fentanyl, we’re possibly approaching WW3, and our traditional ways of thinking about politics was laid down when digital clocks were the height of modern technology, Spock was on TV, and kids hid under their desks because the commies were going to nuke us.
Give me the radicals, even if they’re wrong. It’s the only defense against total stagnation and irrelevance.
I’m not sure where the misreading of the Bible is here, because I’m not sure what the prophecy he’s going on actually says. It’s plausible he’s actually right about those verses.
But I think hyper fixating on “omg” he doesn’t know the population doesn’t mean much for very obvious reasons.
First of all, he’s not remotely involved in planning the war. The people who are absolutely have the relevant information and probably intelligence assets on the ground telling them where the targeting drones should go first. It’s like being shocked that the CEO at apple doesn’t know exactly how much RAM the new iPhone has — he’s not the one designing the phone, he’s the one who demanded the phone be designed at built. As with most high powered elites, he has people to handle the details and he has been told that the military can probably pull this off. That’s all he needs to know.
Second, the exact population is irrelevant compared to things like geography, technological levels, military strength and enlistment numbers, and so on. China has a billion people, but how many of them are in the military? How many are rapidly aging members of the generation before the one-child policy? How many are women? Deciding Cruz doesn’t have any idea about Iran because he didn’t know off by heart tge exact population of Iran is really silly.
I think it’s the narrative liberals tend to tell themselves in which the only reason someone disagrees with the liberal position is that they have a defect, either moral, intellectual, or in cases where they feel charitable, educational. You didn’t, according to this narrative, study the issues and come to a different conclusion. You came to that conclusion because you’re stupid or uneducated unless you just somehow get off on hurting people. So when white wine moms talk to you about why you came to the wrong conclusion, they assume that they’re talking to a lesser being not as evolved or educated as they are.
Conservatives don’t have quite the same narrative. They don’t assume that their liberal counterparts never studied the issue, they assume that they’re perhaps sheltered and get their information from biased sources. But that doesn’t make you stupid or uninformed.
I mean im not sure that works. I’m sure that you’re not going to literally disappear everyone who went to a protest where 50501 is present, however the data gleaned from such events would be extremely useful to bad actors if they wanted to make things interesting.
First, running the list and public profiles of attendees is a treasure trove of information that can be weaponized against them. For example, I can look for common elements in those profiles. Perhaps an interest in art, a type of music, favorite TV shows, etc. I can then use that data to find other people with that profile who are not yet protesting but might. I can perhaps check these names against other databases. Any unpaid parking tickets? Anyone looking for a job I can flag in a background check? I don’t need to go after all of them or even most of them. I can probably get better bang for the buck by targeting random people who are perhaps really well connected on social media. If I arrest 50, but they post about the experience online, and those posts, because of the number of followers goes fairly viral, I can probably discourage people from protesting without having to really waste time and energy trying to brute force the thing.
The beauty of AI in this case is that I can use big data to control people in ways that are pretty invisible until they punish rule breakers. If I can make it hard to get an apartment, or a job, or for you or you kids to get into a good college, I don’t need to body slam you and throw you in jail, I can just reward the good ones with prestige and easier life while punishing the bad by withholding privileges. If protesting means that the only jobs you can get are at Wendy’s, I don’t even need to make it illegal. People won’t do it because they don’t want to get stuck working at Wendy’s and living with cockroaches in a squatter apartment with 6 roommates.
The democrats suck as a party. They just don’t seem to understand how anything works in actual politics.
1). They have insanely high standards especially as the minority party. Like Al Franken was reasonably popular. But Alas, he had a picture taken in the early 1990s of him pretending to touch a sleeping woman’s boobs not even actually touching, just hands near the boobs, and it was an obvious joke by a professional comedian. But that’s the end of him because even though the picture was 15 years old when it came to light, it was just too much. And I’m sure this has happened many other times as well.
2). They publicly in-fight and publicly refuse to accept party discipline and therefore cannot get a real coalition going. Kamala lost, in part because she was not pro-Gaza enough for that wing of her party. To the degree that GOP members and voters disagree, they are extremely disciplined in voting. Disagree with your GOP membership’s position, you do so in the primary elections, but in the general, every GOP candidate gets the support of the party and the voters. There’s not even public disagreement. The party wants your support, and you are expected to shut up (at least in public) and vote with the party.
3). They lack media platforms in major markets. If you want to hear conservative news, you have a very large network to choose from. You have podcasts, YouTubers, tv news networks, radio, websites, substacks, etc. and they are generally agreed on what they support, or at least who they support. They have a mutual respect and understanding that you don’t attack other conservatives unless they’re going too far to the left. The Left has individuals with TV, radio, or podcasts, but they really don’t support each other. Raechel Maddow doesn’t tell the same story as Ezra Klein who doesn’t tell the same story as Thom Hartmann.
- they seem to lack any sort of clear, coherent vision of what life in a Democratic Party run America would look like. And because they can’t articulate a clear vision, it’s really hard to get people to buy into it. If they had a vision for America as Denmark, but multicultural, or something, sure they could probably get some buy in. If they said “competent leadership” again, I think people would go for it. When your best come-on is “ those other guys are nuts and want to have a white Christian nationalist fascist dictatorship with blackjack and hookers,” it’s hard to get past the question of “okay, but what are YOU going to do for me? Because he promised to make Americans strong and prosperous again, and all you got is he’s lying and a fascist”.
5). They mistake procedure for power. Democrats famously asked the permission of the parliamentarian to add “increase the minimum wage” to a budget bill. This parliamentarian has no power, and can be fired at the whim of Congress. But when the parliamentarian said no, they basically threw up their hands and gave up. When a Supreme Court seat came open during and election, republicans suspecting they’d win, refused to confirm any Obama appointed nominee and thus took a lifetime seat on the SCOTUS for their side. One group chooses procedures as a proxy for power, the other simply uses their power to get power. And the party that chooses power wins, unsurprisingly.
I’m convinced that most younger Americans have generally gone to the GOP if they want power. Theres just no way that a party who couldn’t tell an octogenarian with obvious dementia that he couldn’t run for a second presidential term is going to weird much power. It’s a very weird thing. The democrats want the trappings of power — the fundraisers, the ceremonies, the interviews on legacy media that pretend they’re important. But for anyone who wants actual power, the GOP is the lace to be.
Honestly, if they weren’t doing that, I don’t think you’d see the blowback. It’s easy to hate things that look and sound like stuff that happens in the movies. If you slam-tackle people in public, throw flashbangs into diners during dinner rush, and so on, you get blowback.
I’m not sure what the end goal actually is here. Is he going to go full president Joker? Very Smart People on the left say so. But then again, if that’s true, those same people are behaving very strangely. They’re attending rallies they pre-register for by giving their full name (50501 does this), filming the entire thing, posting symbols on social media, etc. they also show up in full cosplay — Gilead Girls, Leia, various anime characters. I just, if they’re thinking that Trump is going to mass arrest opposition, they’re not only doing everything possible to make sure they’re on the list, but fighting back in ways that simply don’t make any sense. You think Trump wants to arrest the opposition, so you register in advance, apply with the local police (which likely means giving contact information). When you get there, you stand on sidewalks with signs, dressed as children’s TV and movie characters? I can’t imagine anyone would have thought any of it in other states with the threat of authoritarian takeover. I’m sure the people who protested the Nazis did so for a couple of hours on weekends while dressed as characters from Wizard of Oz or Popeye. So either it’s true that Trump is going Joker and we just happen to have an opposition composed entirely of people who stopped maturing at like 8 years old (in which case, we’re going that way), or the whole thing is a combination of Oppression Fetishized, and being used to drum up support and donations.
As I said I don’t have any special insight into this sort of thing. If the end is to take over and disappear Americans, I don’t know what would look different. On the other hand if that’s not the end goal, it would look the same. I would say it’s maybe 30-40% it escalates.
I just don’t understand why the journalist community is just incapable of self-correction here. The reason right-leaning news is growing is that it at least tries to get the facts right, and is open and honest about what it believes in. People like FOX and Joe Rogan because they’re trying to get things right and when they don’t get it exactly right, you at least know where they’re coming from. CNN pretends to be neutral but skews left and everyone is fairly aware of that.
I mostly go with AP and BBC when I’m trying to assess whether or not something is factual. Rogan is at least trying and has the virtue (increasingly rare in traditional news media) of letting the guests actually speak without interruption even when he clearly disagrees with them. And because of that, listeners at least get a full understanding of what that guest is trying to say. I find the practice of constantly interrupting the guests on a show to be annoying. If a conservative goes on CNN, he rarely gets to speak a complete sentence before getting cut off to make the counterpoint.
I think we coddle everyone too much. Schools are literally afraid to flunk kids, parents don’t make them do chores, and so unless they play competitive sports, Theres just no push toward “you need to actually do stuff to be successful. Add in the push toward hedonism and consumer culture, and people have absurdly low work ethics and high expectations.
I personally “bother” more as a way to test my hypothetical understanding of an issue against interested and sometimes hostile perspectives. I do so understanding that no idea is off limits, which makes it much more interesting. My perspectives are probably somewhat eccentric, which again makes things more fun. The point is to learn, to listen. I don’t honestly care if I change your mind. I care that I’m learning.
I mean yes, I totally agree. But I notice that really the first bump of hyper-partisan politics seems to have started with the rise of cable news and the 24-hour news cycle. Before that, being a political junkie was hard work. You got an hour a day (local half hour and National half hour) of television news, a newspaper in the morning, and that was about it. Political talk radio was in its infancy, as was internet news. So if you wanted to closely follow politics, you’d have to buy in-depth news magazines and that had a time and money cost to it. Which made becoming too radical on either side of the equation a lot of work. You just couldn’t marinate in the stuff going on in Congress or what this or that political figure said.
I find, for myself, the more news I consume, the more political opinions mattered to me. Up to a point, awareness is good, and to the degree that an issue is actually important, you should be aware of it. But when news consumes you, you end up being pushed into radical thinking and anger and all the rest of it. It’s not a healthy way to live life. And I think slowing down and just doing much less thinking about politics is good for not just individuals but society in general. Most of the stuff people get mad about wouldn’t have made the news at all in 1982. What would you have heard about No Kings had it happened in 1982? You’d see a three minute story, maybe some random person saying something about “Trump isn’t a King”. You’d see another story about the military parades, maybe a couple of short “it’s good for the soldiers” statements by the brass, a brief clip of Trump clapping along to music or something. That would be it, on to other things. Maybe Iran and Israel get two minutes, as does Ukraine, and the shootings and manhunt in Minnesota. Weather and Sports. Not enough to feed on or radicalize on.
I mean, the reason that deterrence works on Putin is that he’s at least semi-rational. He doesn’t want to have millions of dead Russians as a result. The concepts of Jihad and martyrdom of killing and dying in the name of Islam giving you a ticket to paradise— these negate the deterrent effect of “don’t try it, you and 3/4ths of your people will die.” Add in that there are statements in the Hadith that claim the end of days is marked by a great slaughter of Jews, and it’s not hard to imagine that they’d be willing to use it.
In either case, the invasion period is exhibit A for getting nukes. We talked them into giving up nukes in the 1990s. We promised protection. They got invaded. And North Korea isn’t being invaded because of those nukes. I mean, if I’m on the outs with a superpower, my best hope of avoiding “liberation” is nuclear weapons. So no matter what happens between Israel and Iran, they aren’t going to stop trying.
Part of, sure. But im pretty sure they weren’t choosing fashions or foods or other products because they were associated with abolition. Modern politics isn’t politics as they would have understood it. It’s more of a lifestyle brand in our culture. And in a lot of ways I think I would compare our way of thinking about our political party affiliation much like someone pre-enlightenment might have thought about religious denominations. Today nobody really gives a fuck what denomination of Christianity you follow. And outside of highly religious regions of the country, nobody’s even that upset by the idea that you’re not Christian at all. Most people believe or don’t but it’s not the thing that drives their thinking. Go back to the reformation, and it mattered quite a bit both to you and everyone around you what type of Christianity you practiced. Be a Catholic in John Calvin’s part of France isn’t good for your lifespan. Be Protestant in a Catholic region and it’s likewise not a good thing. And most people were not only willing to die rather than renounce their version of Christianity, but likewise willing to see others punished for not being the right kind of Christian. Minus the killing (at least thus far) this is how most people approach politics. Our system is the only good and true, and the reason you aren’t a good red/blue is that you are evil or deluded. And each part of the political spectrum has its preferred lifestyle. MAGA types like to style themselves after working class interests. Blue tribes tend to like more arty things. But why should this go along with politics?
I mean you still have no border control at the state border. If I live in California it’s not like there’s a border checkpoint at Texas. So whatever the most liberal policy is would end up being tge reality for everyone. One million immigrants in California don’t have to state there.
I mean I don’t know that such a situation will continue forever, and I think our social trust is rapidly eroding. In part because we are fractured as a society into groups that have less desire to cooperate, and even less to trust that the others won’t defect first. A low social trust society cannot remain nonviolent for long.
I think that the attention span thing is real, and quite troubling. I find it very rare that anyone can even articulate what they believe and why they believe it, let alone provide evidence that backs up their positions. Most people, when pressed to explain where they get their information, it generally reduces to social media, YouTube, or podcasts. In short, for the vast majority, their view of reality is based on the AI running their social media feeds. In this sense we are very far behind the people of 1824 or even 1724 who generally got their news from newspapers that came out once a day and contained long-form articles about the news. This means that they at least understood the bare facts of the issues. And that puts them far above us in being able to understand the world, and take positions based on the facts and their own thoughts about those issues. We run on vibes.
The bigger difference between their era and ours is that we’re much more narcissistic and see political opinions as parts of our identity. In 1824, you wouldn’t have made an identity of your policy positions. A person’s lifestyle and hobbies were not affected by their politics. People might have interests, but being in favor of the fugitive slave law had nothing to do with how you saw yourself as a person. You didn’t pick up or drop interests because they were coded “other team”. Nobody stopped drinking tea because it was marketed to the Southern people. We dropped Bud Light because it was marketed to trans people.
I mean I think the silence is rather telling here. If he were a GOP/MAGA type, they likely wouldn’t be silent on motive. There’s a lot of people on the left who want MAGA to go stochastic terrorist on them. They fantasized about “MAGA instigators” infiltrating the No Kings protests, much as they fantasize about Trump declaring martial law and using the military against them. Is the political equivalent of a bored housewife with a Rape Fetish. She’s so bored an feels so unwanted that rape is an improvement.
I think the red states are growing faster than blue the blue states, which given how close elections have been and how often the results follow the EC over the popular vote, that could be huge.
I mean that’s how power works. If you read ancient history really up until the late 19th century, violence was very much a part of the politics of the era. I don’t see why our era is different other than a fairly stable system in which power could and did change hands often enough to make all voices feel heard more or less. If that changes, or the elites leading the major factions believe that they will be disempowered for a long period of time, I think you’ll see a return to older and less civilized versions of politics in which shooting a political enemy is a viable way to force your way to a seat at the table.
Power games between the elite are how power is distributed in any society. If they can’t get there by peace, we’ll have wars.
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.
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