The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
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User ID: 174
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
8d ago
Well, also, it's a _rom_com. If you make the character ugly, that's going to spoil that part. If you make them unpleasant, it's a different genre (e.g. The Taming of The Shrew). You need the flaw to be something the male character will find endearing or at least tolerable. The clumsiness also makes it easy to set up the meet-cute.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
8d ago
So are boobies.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
8d ago
Characters in novels do sometimes make reference to going to the bathroom, but the scene isn't typically described. And characters mentioning shitting their pants after some terrifying event happens too. The Orc thing you mention would be comic relief, so might fit in somewhere.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
8d ago
Gregory House is obviously a bag of flaws. We start out seeing that he's an asshole. He's also crippled, but that's the least of his flaws. We quickly learn he's also a drug addict. Ethics rules aren't so much guidelines as a checklist of things to violate. He deliberately pretends to be a racist to get one of his subordinate's goat, and deliberately pretends to be more sexist than he is to do the same to his boss, a subordinate, patients, relatives, etc. He's lazy about seeing 'boring' patients (who he insults all the time) and doing his paperwork. He's utterly reckless -- it's typical of him to nearly kill a patient in the process of diagnosing them. How does he keep his job? He's the best in the world... and, as he obnoxiously asserts constantly and is eventually proven right, his boss is attracted to him.
Little of this, however, is actually the cost of his skills. Except maybe the recklessness and ethics violations. You could have a show about a less-flawed House, but it wouldn't be as good.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
8d ago
I think Jiro has the right of it here, and further, the academics often specifically pick terms that would obviously be "misinterpreted" in the pejorative way ("toxic masculinity" perhaps being the worst offender, or "symbolic racism").
Further, I don't find the "male gaze" of the camera to be all that interesting, because when the directors or cinematographers specified that the camera moved up from the walking woman's legs, lingered on her ass, and only then continued slowly up to her face as she turned (revealing her prominent breasts)... they always knew damned well what they were doing. And so did most of the audience. The feminist critic just put a name on the practice so it could be denigrated (and equivocated upon).
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
8d ago
When feminists brought up these concepts, I never interpreted them as meaning that a book that fails the Bechdel test is automatically bad, nor that a book in which a female character exists only to get murdered to motivate the male protagonist is automatically bad.
You should. They will claim otherwise, but that's in-between paragraphs applying those tests in exactly that way (and often enough, wrongly).
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
9d ago
Of Star Trek protagonists, Kirk perhaps pays the least, but he does pay over and over again. (Despite his reputation, he hardly every gets the girl, and he loses them all the time)
Holmes is canonically kind of a miserable guy who, when he doesn't have crimes or writing of monographs to keep him occupied, gets strung out on cocaine. He's asexual by nature and appears to enjoy none of the other pleasures of life except smoking. Watson is actually quite successful, married (though eventually widowed, and without issue), and often happy, but he's the chronicler, not the protagonist.
Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe is another Holmesian character; he has one pleasure besides solving mysteries, which is eating himself to obesity. His Watsonian sidekick is Archie Goodwin, who gets beat up and arrested a lot. Unlike Watson, Goodwin never marries.
Mike Hammer is the archetype of the noir detective; if you think they don't pay, you don't know the genre (not GETTING paid, now, that happens on the regular)
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
10d ago
I'd vote for Cujo over Vivek. Even if Cujo was eating my face at the time.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
11d ago
but going back as far as Kinsey we know that the number of men who have had sex with another man is higher than the number of men who self-identify as gay or bi. There is a reason why early AIDS researchers used the term "men who have sex with men" and not "gay or bi men".
How much of this is just among ethnic groups who refuse to admit to being gay, though?
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
11d ago
Not just the medical process but the psychological process -- that is, getting the kids to believe they are trans and want all this stuff in the first place in the first place. And the social process (new name, pronouns, dress, makeup, etc)
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
11d ago
If Kamala manages to get the nomination, it'll be a second Tim Walz type. She can't stand anyone who could obviously upstage her.
I don't think the Democrats are dumb enough to give her the nod, considering every Republican possibly in play except Vivek could beat her with their eyes closed (OK, Nikki Haley might need to keep one eye open), but if she does, it'll be another Democratic disaster.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
11d ago
LVT has a lot of problems, but the most basic one is property tax is generally supposed to pay for municipal expenses. And (Strongtown's claims notwithstanding) municipal expenses scale almost not at all with land value, and a bit more with property value (not so much among classes of property, but between them, because what they scale best with is population.)
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
11d ago
If property prices go up uniformly in a taxing district then your property taxes do not go up. This is true basically everywhere.
Except California, which is where a lot of the discourse centers. And it seems a lot of people -- even non-CA property owners -- don't realize that California is weird in that respect, and was before proposition 13 (among other things there's a constitutionally provided 1% property tax). And you'll note the people who insist that prop 13 must be repealed NEVER talk about going to a conventional property tax system at the same time.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
11d ago
An upside down flag was originally an emergency symbol; hanging it is basically ye olde equivalent of dialing 911. From that it acquired meaning as a protest symbol, meaning that the country is in dire distress.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
11d ago
Who is going to see a real image circulating around, then call the real image a deepfake, then provide their own deepfake as the supposed "real" image as "proof"? It's so farfetched that I'm surprised anyone would think this harebrained plot would work.
I am certainly cynical enough to believe someone would do this. I understand that most people aren't, but any serious journalist should be.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
11d ago
Yeah, I'm pretty sure my white liberal NJ neighbors are all for gender fluidity and trans.... for other people's kids, not their own.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
12d ago
But for the grace of god I go
No. If you were in the position of the person you are pitying with that phrase, either the world would be in a such a terrible state that there would be no one to save you, or the people you are imagining would be in your current position would not spare a thought to save you. That is one of the blackpills of the culture war; that mercy is taken advantage of, and restraint is treated as weakness and met with ruthlessness. Your well-treatment of your enemy will likely merely contribute to your own destruction.
CL is not "Stable" it is metastable.
There isn't really a bright-line difference between "metastable" and "unstable". Either one, a small perturbation pushes you out of the stable region. What held us there was reciprocity -- the threat of retaliation for bad behavior, and the promise of co-operation for good. It has failed. Bad behavior was justified and retaliation declared illegitimate, and co-operation was not offered. We're out of the stable state and I see no way to get us back in.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
12d ago
The replacement of classical liberalism with “woke” is exactly why classical liberalism did and does need to adapt.
Classical liberalism is dead. What is left of its mantle has been taken over by a few libertarians who can't understand how their preferred policies leave them open to being consumed whole by their illiberal enemies. It turns out there is no stable free equilibrium; for a time, we maintained an unstable free-ish equilibrium based on reciprocity, but that's gone and it's not coming back.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
12d ago
Rose Belmont looks rather androgynous, but the game's rated Teen, how horny could they make it?
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
12d ago
This is the YIMBY/New Urbanist/Pod People story. But it isn't true. The Case-Shiller index, adjusted for inflation shows large drops in real housing prices. In fact, housing has been flat (though at a very high level) in real terms for a couple of years.
Generational wealth, in terms of inheritance, isn't much of an issue in America. We live too long. If your parents die in their 70s, you probably get your inheritance in your 50s. Whoopty-doo; by that time either you're already well-established (and your kids, if any, probably are too) or it's too damned late. So housing wealth is either borrowed to provide a cushier retirement, or borrowed to burn in the furnace of the health care/nursing care system.
This series tells the real story, I think. Single-family housing completions crashed after the bubble. The reason for the crash is obvious, but they never recovered. Why not? Well, this gets into more speculation, but my read is that the New Urbanist anti-sprawl pod people were able to use the crash to seize control of housing policy. And they preferred multifamily. However, most actual buyers don't, which limited that; you will notice that when people post about how expensive housing is over on the birdsite, they nearly always use a single-family detached home as a benchmark. Population, in terms of households, of course, kept growing. More demand, less supply... what do you expect? And COVID made things worse by making multifamily even LESS desirable.
Good news is there's a medium-term solution. All those empty-nester boomers are going to be leaving their homes, one way or another. And Z and Alpha are smaller generations. I don't know if the (mostly Millennial) anti-sprawl people will ever lose their grip on new housing policy, but I expect there will be a lot of renovation to provide single-family housing for Z and Alpha and the following generations.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
13d ago
FIT takes up a block between 7th and 8th avenue in Midtown Manhattan. It's not some sort of enclave, the only "security" is 27th street is closed to through traffic.
(incidentally, MOST college campuses in the US are open. You can stroll right through Harvard, for instance)
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
13d ago
Come to think of it, I've consumed a lot of media about this topic, and for some reason I think this is the first time I've seen John Henry brought up. Even though it's kind of the obvious parable...?
Perhaps because those of us who have thought of it prefer not to bring it up.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
13d ago
During the Cold War there was something of a rules-based world order. But the rules were always more like guidelines, and the purpose of the rules was pretty much to prevent nuclear war. All sorts of pissing around that didn't risk that was fine.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
14d ago
Nope, they invaded Afghanistan under Carter, they were embargoed, but Reagan lifted the grain embargo and sold them subsidized wheat before they left Afghanistan.
The Cabin in the Woods works, but it cheats as it's a pastiche.
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