Mantergeistmann
No bio...
User ID: 323
Mantergeistmann
11mo ago
My understanding is that men are still allowed to attend such things. However, i have no doubts that an equivalent event advertising itself specifically for men (but still allowing women) would either draw the wrath of Title IX, or else be overwhelmed with women showing up in protest.
edit: What Voxel said below.
Mantergeistmann
6mo ago
Underdog analysis can also be complicated by questions of scope--are we talking about Israel vs. Hamas, Israel vs. Hamas + the wider Islamic world that funds them, or Israel + its supporters in the US vs. Hamas + the wider Islamic world?
That's one of the interesting things about power... local power can be a massively different beast than total power, or even future local power.
"My garden may be smaller than your Rome, but my pilum is harder than your sternum", and all that.
Mantergeistmann
4mo ago
I'm reminded of Shamus Young's old post about Twitter:
Twitter is like owning a television that only shows me scandals by the Yellows, and acts of virtue by Purple. I no longer have to go to the trouble of fooling myself. We’ve invented software to automate and industrialize the process, and then added a scoring system so that the masses will constantly bring it fresh fuel. It’s a system of rules with the emergent property of creating a continuous flow of crowd-sourced propaganda. We’ve gameified tribal bigotry.
Mantergeistmann
10mo ago
I have a bit of a weird stance on vigilantism. I think it's morally justified... as long as the vigilante immediately turns themselves in, pleads guilty, and accepts the punishment meted out by the court. That allows for redress of extreme injustice by someone with sufficient conviction to accept the result of their actions, but prevents an endless cycle of retaliatory extrajudicial violence.
In theory, at least. I'm sure it's a terrible idea in real life.
Mantergeistmann
11mo ago
The most popular women's sport by far is tennis, but even there, a quick perusal of the world rankings reveals no household names.
I mean, isn't that more that the very well known Williams sisters didn't really have any obvious successors for the public eye?
Mantergeistmann
1mo ago
The "I can't be trusted alone in a room with a woman that isn't my wife" mike pence?
Wasn't that about avoiding spurious accusations?
Mantergeistmann
5mo ago
You mean like the work permit program that was going on and growing prior to the attack?
Mantergeistmann
9mo ago
Wasn't Macedonia's change a result of international politics rather than internal? I.e. Greece took issue with it?
Mantergeistmann
6mo ago
TF2. 24/7 Insta-Respawn 2Fort only.
Mantergeistmann
8mo ago
Money and muscle, that’s what I want; to be able to do any damned thing I want and get away with it. Money won’t do that altogether, because if a man is a weakling, all the money in the world won’t enable him to soak an enemy himself; on the other hand, unless he has money he may not be able to get away with it.
- Robert E. Howard
Mantergeistmann
1mo ago
The underlying assumption by Pro-Israeli voices is that it is impossible for Pro-Israeli content to simply be unpopular. It is impossible that the Israelis are simply bad at memes. There is no actual evidence of bias produced, no evidence of suppression of Israeli creators or boosting of Hamas hashtags, the assumption is that this bias must exist in order for consumers to make the choices they made.
I suppose the evidence would be that we have strong evidence that TikTok is willing to censor/promote/bury certain topics, as that's far more plausible than TikTokkers just not caring about Hong Kong compared to other platforms and causes. We also know that TikTokkers are more antisemitic than other platforms. Correlation does not equal causation (it's possible that anti-semites just prefer TikTok over Instagram for other reasons), hence why I said weak evidence.
To quote Nate Silver,
TikTok’s users are young, and young people are comparatively more sympathetic to Palestine than older ones — but not by the roughly 80:1 ratio that you see in the hashtag distribution. I would not treat this data as dispositive — expression on social media can be contagious and overstate the degree of consensus. But this matches a pattern in other TikTok content that is sensitive to China, such as tags critiquing its policy toward Hong Kong.
Mantergeistmann
10mo ago
Didn't something recently happen with the mods of /r/Battletech being replaced, and people rejoicing over there because it was The Wrong Sort of people getting kicked out?
Mantergeistmann
24d ago
The problem is that we can not build them in the USA. Out of the last 4 units we tried, two of them ran up construction costs approaching $30 billion before they threw in the towel and got canceled. The other two at least got built, but again, with a cost of some $30 billion. It’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 3-5x as expensive as wind or solar.
We can’t talk about nuclear without acknowledging that the USA, as a country, can’t build nuclear anymore. Anyone who who even tries goes bankrupt. I don’t mean there is a lack of political will, though there is that. I mean we don’t have the manufacturers, contractors, designers, or financial sponsors that know how to do it. It’s really sad.
If I recall, the MIT study on the matter even straight up said that it's not the cost of the nuclear portion that drives up the price, it's the general construction and horrible project management of the rest of the site.
Mantergeistmann
9mo ago
There's been something weird about writing in media (and gaming) for a while now, and i wonder how much of it has to do with graphics and effects. As they become more and more of a budget, and the writer therefore becomes a smaller percentage, people start thinking that the writing doesn't matter (rather than seeing it as a high return place to spend your money, since doubling the salary and getting a better writer would be a small percentage of the overall cost).
Mantergeistmann
11mo ago
I mean, if they really wanted to go with the women and early beer angle, they'd have a Mesopotamian-dressed queen drinking from a golden straw.
I still wouldn't buy Miller Lite, but props for effort would be in order.
Mantergeistmann
1mo ago
Saying 'From the river to the sea' doesn't neccessarily require violence
In the same way that "blood and soil" could just be a call to recognize the efforts of hard-working small farmers. But if its used by protestors in the immediate aftermath of a horrible attack by a group of white supremacists who are known to have used it as their own slogan... at that point, I feel like using it and claiming innocence is ignorance at best.
Mantergeistmann
9mo ago
And they need to be of similar type, to get Nth of a kind benefits. As one person once put it, the problem with the US nuclear industry is that "In France, they have hundreds of types of cheese, but only two types of reactors. In America, this is reversed."
Mantergeistmann
10mo ago
What makes my blood boil is when all the same people who came up with concept of appropriation and wrote articles like the above turn around and carefully, deliberately do exactly the same thing. And now it’s okay because it’s the right people being erased.
For instance, suppose they made a set of Marvel tie-in MtG cards, and Nick Fury (notably played by Samuel L Jackson) was white. I have a hunch there'd be a ton of outrage... despite my understanding being that there's precedent for Nick Fury to be white.
Mantergeistmann
11mo ago
I wonder who the market is for these long-form New Yorker and Atlantic articles? You know the ones that start with long rambling sequences like: "Susan Hernandez was enjoying her coffee sitting at the Whistlestop Diner as was her habit on Tuesday."
That sort of writing is how you win a pulitzer/other awards. "Writing for Story" (unintentionally) discusses that sort of shift, from news/facts to long-form journalism. The idea is that giving it that human element draws the reader in.
Mantergeistmann
11mo ago
Every now and then you see people arguing that Taiwan should follow Hong Kong's example. I will admit that I find it difficult to come up with a charitable explanation beyond uninformed, dangerously optimistic, or shill. Maybe that "It'll happen eventually anyway, might as well take the best terms possible even if the agreement likely to be broken"?
Mantergeistmann
6mo ago
I'm pretty sure it will just be interpreted as "here's yet more proof that Israel is a colonialist/apartheid state, they don't even allow the Palestinians to control their own basic human needs like food and water!"
Mantergeistmann
7mo ago
The reporting there is fascinating. I appreciate how long it takes for them to actually name the hand gesture in question. Uncharitably, because they know their readers would take it less seriously if they used the phrase "OK sign".
Mantergeistmann
7mo ago
There was something something pressure and corruption and scandals and such, or possible two such incidents that I'm conflating (Burisma, Hunter Biden, corrupt prosecutors, military aid being blocked?), such that the left was generally "Ukraine establishment good" and the right was generally "Ukraine establishment corrupt". That and the fact that once Biden was Pro- arming them, the Right had to swing against him, and then the Left had to get in line.
Mantergeistmann
8mo ago
I'm reminded of my favorite counter-factual: suppose that the BLM-adjacent riot at the White House that one night in summer (which resulted in dozens of injuries to the Secret Service) had succeeded in breaking down the doors. Would that have been an insurrection? I feel like the current battle lines would, for the most part, swap entirely.
This is exactly the sort of thing I'd hate when it was used by the Left against the Right, and turns out... I still hate it. A pox on whoever first decided that "dogwhistles" were a thing. You might as well say she's pro-corporate-monopolies.
More options
Context Copy link