anti_dan
1yr ago
MattY is a perfect example of a left of center person who interacts with important right wing arguments, but is unable to engage with them. He will acknowledge all the things that Salier says, but then doesn't adjust anything. I am not saying, he must necessarily change his preferences and goals, but he doesn't even adjust how he'd things things should be implemented to have more success. At most he will say something like, "be quiet we have to do this on the down low," regarding something like defunding police.
anti_dan
1yr ago
I read the article and it is a tour de force in using lots of words to say very little. I suppose it is a bit idealistic (albeit in an utopian way I don't think is plausible), but it is simultaneously lacking any substance. Suburbs with lots of trains and buses? Sure. How? A bus route that serves 3 people a day is a massive waste, and is what subsidized busing in the suburbs actually looks like. Diversity? I see people of races doing things of all sorts, how are you going to overcome fundamental differences? Is it going to be reparations forever? Then say that. Say what you mean, not nothing and lovingly allow your fellow travelers insert their utopian dreams into it.
anti_dan
1yr ago
I don't see why defending bland, generic car based urban sprawl at all makes sense for conservatives.
Because cities make people childless even more. Because the real vision of people attacking suburbs is a rich Manhattan with clean streets, while the rest of the riff raff has the right to enjoy unpoliced gang violence in their neighborhood because you aren't allowed to move away to the burbs.
anti_dan
1yr ago
Indeed, how does his vision deal with any of the maladies that modern suburbs were created to workaround?
anti_dan
1yr ago
Sure, but there is no good left of center reason to not support Zionism. "the apartheid state of Israel, and the occupation of Palestine." Is just a pair of easily debunked mottos.
Thus, it is reasonable to suspect different, real, motives.
anti_dan
1yr ago
I participate or participated in many online video game communities. What you are describing as niceness = left wing is probably as far from the truth as I can imagine. The only area where is could plausibly be true is commenting on weirdness or grossness. It seems that leftists typically embrace weirdness like over the top piercings and tattoos or fat-embracing etc more than those on the right, and so you do get left wing moderation by banning negative comments about people's appearance, delinquent drug use, cheating on partners, fathering/mothering multiple bastards, etc. Basically, if you ban criticism of weird or bad life choices, yes that results in a leftist shift. But that doesn't get you even 10% to where most of the forums end up drifting.
Where it inevitably ends up is with banning people for anodyne right of center opinions that leftists categorize as "attacks". Illustratively, I was once banned from a Warcraft III forum for "homophobia" aka saying orgies spread STDs. On city-related forum, there was a mass ban of "racists" which was people who had participated in a thread about getting their gaming systems and laptops stolen in home invasions. Not some targeted ban of slur-users, a ban for everyone who was not a mod that participated in the discussion. This is not "niceness" its hounding out dissent because open discussion refutes their worldview.
anti_dan
1yr ago
Repeat that for a few months and the only people left are the ones who wouldn’t use slurs to start.
But they consistently will go much further than that. TheMotte may or may not ban slurs, but even if it did it would not drift drastically leftward. To make the Motte into /r/politics you start banning ideas, facts, and questions.
anti_dan
1yr ago
Spotify Only
anti_dan
1yr ago
Its a podcast on a platform...
I'm fairly sure you can get it elsewhere as well, its just less easy than using spotify. Is The Lion King not a movie because you only get it from Disney?
anti_dan
1yr ago
there's more plausible deniability on the left's equivalents.
Meh, there's just more special pleading accepted by NYT.
anti_dan
1yr ago
The answer is no, they don't know it will make it "suck" because they don't care if someone who's read the Silmarillion doesn't like what they did to Tolkien's lore. Nobody else (sigma the tiny, tiny percentage of the audience who's read the Silmarillion) cares either. MCU movies aren't made for you, the middle-aged dude who has boxes of X-Men and Avengers comics from the 80s in your cave. They are made for the new viewers they want to attract.
Yes, this is their attitude, and it is objectively wrong. Wide appeal never works without hardcore buy in. The hardcores are the tastemakers of virtually every IP, perhaps rom-coms excepted, I don't know much about that area. "But League of Legends" you will exclaim. Well, first DOTA2 is still incredibly successful despite being punishingly hardcore, and second, its weird you aren't touting the overwhelming success of the super casual Heroes of the Storm, which even had the benefit of tons of loved characters! Fact is, it was way too casual, it couldn't succeed even with you being able to make Jim Raynor fight Diablo and Arthas fight Kerrigan. LOL is the example of what you want to do, balance hardcore appeal and skill expression with the ability to be a bit casual. This is actually what early MCU did. Hardcores enjoyed Iron Man and Captain America. Hardcores don't enjoy She Hulk, and its tanked.
anti_dan
1yr ago
I actually think it does make or break AAA games and movies on a regular basis. What is the last major game that was both popular and lasted long without appealing to the nerdy core? Fortnite was quickly supplanted by PubG on this basis.
anti_dan
1yr ago
It didn't fail because it was "too woke," it failed because the wokeness appears to substitute for actual dialog and characterization.
Inconveniently for your argument, these are the things hardcores enjoy and complain about the lack of when absent.
anti_dan
1yr ago
I'm saying hardcores are the most turned off by lack of quality. And among non-hardcores there are a much higher % that don't care about quality.
anti_dan
1yr ago
That would be a decent excuse if they were doing anything right, like getting themes right, character personalities right, or anything of the sort. That they have butchered the timeline is only sin #587 in the show.
anti_dan
1yr ago
A poor definition of hardcore if I've ever seen it. Hardcore fans are pioneers who discern what is the value early on and then police the ip into quality. Hardcore fans kept super smash bros melee relevant long after all its successor games faded from memory because it is simply better.
anti_dan
1yr ago
HOTS does have some depth, but I think you are seriously underrating the skill expression of DOTA or even LOL laning and what that brings to a hardcore fan that well, listening in on comms cannot. Shotcalling and cooperation is certainly a skill, but it isn't one that gamers have really cared about, so its still a point of not understanding the audience if you build a game around it.
And lets not confuse ourselves here. HOTS might have depth, but that is wholly accidental on Blizzard's part, just like wavedashing was wholly accidental on Nintendo's part in SSBM. They set out to make the most casual of casual mobas possible to try and suck in fans of their existing IPs into a FTP lootbox gambler.
anti_dan
1yr ago
This is a bad idea, and I will explain why its a bad idea even if you think marijuana should be legal:
None of these people are actually in prison because they had weed on them. They are hardened criminals, who also happened to have weed on them and that was the easiest thing to prove, so that is what the AG who wanted to preserve his 100% conviction rate went with.
anti_dan
1yr ago
Well that sure points towards deeper problems with the system that still doesn't justify keeping marijuana illegal just to act as a crutch for overly cautious prosecutors.
If you think public servants being lazy and covering their asses points towards deeper problems with the system you're never gonna like any system.
"it appears that few inmates could be in prison or jail solely for possession of small amounts of marijuana. Indeed the number is likely so small that it would have little or no impact on overcrowding "
Of all drug defendants only 2.3 percent—186 people—received sentences for simple possession, and of the 174 for whom sentencing information is known, just 63 actually served time behind bars.
https://www.ussc.gov/guidelines/2021-guidelines-manual-annotated
Those are the sentencing guidelines.
Here are some illustrative examples you can use the guidelines to doublecheck:
Simple possession of marijuana (say you are caught with a big ole bag of weed) is, at most, a level 4 offense, carrying a sentence of 0-6 months for first time offenders and up to a year for those with a criminal history. Acceptance of responsibility (aka plea deal) would reduce the offense to a level 2. At level 2 anyone without a Class VI criminal history has a recommendation of 0-6 months, and a VI would be 1-7 months.
The next level of possession would be if you had 2-4 kilograms of marijuana. That is a Lvl 10 offense. So 6-12 months for a first time offender, 24-30 for a Class VI criminal. LVL 10s are allowed to be pled down to lvl 8, which would make it 0-6 months for a first time offender. With 8 pounds of weed! That's enough for Havard's whole student body to get high for the weekend!
Some split between deterrence and punishment is likely. You can see rhetorically, there is often heavy emphasis on punishment.
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