crushedoranges
No bio...
User ID: 111
crushedoranges
9mo ago
If the threat of their imminent approaching deaths isn't enough to establish even a modicum of self control they're not really human beings, but automata who have lost their will to live. But it doesn't matter, in any case: because although they claim to have no self autonomy, they are very good at wheedling out benefits and favors from the people around them. It all smacks of bullshit in the end.
The number of people who weigh more than 600lbs is a vanishingly small number. It's not like in the Jersey Shore, where fake tanned sluts and himbos compete to be the stupidest on camera. Being very fat is comorbid with something very wrong with you and it's a pathology that is rapidly spreading in the Western world. They don't need to pick out the crazies and the exhibitionists: they just need to turn on the cameras and watch them do their distorted routines.
crushedoranges
11mo ago
I could have, yes.
crushedoranges
2mo ago
I want to believe in God, in defiance of the absence of evidence of his existence. Because faith is an absurd notion: but it is like love and hope. It is a necessary balm in a cruel and uncaring world. In the Kierkengaardian sense, I believe in God as the manifest nature of love: eternally abiding, unconditional, perfect. Forgiving. Merciful, to the flawed creatures that are men. In my life, I feel so sad, so forlorn. I feel that only God could love such a creature as I.
It is probably the only love I will feel in this life.
Perhaps that makes me a strange Catholic, but I arrived here strangely, in any case. You could make a secular case of Christ's nonexistence, but that wouldn't change my faith in God, because my faith isn't based in scurrilous readings of the Bible or enscribed onto plates. I don't care to prove my faith or defend it against skeptical inquiry. I base it on love: that transcendent, ethereal quality that is beyond the ability of materialism to define beyond the inadequate language of hormones and socialization.
That is the most profound miracle of all, and beyond the reach of fedora'd Redditors.
crushedoranges
10mo ago
It doesn't work that way anymore because the very concept of a 'mainstream media' was shattered into a hundred thousand screaming fragments by the bale curse of social media. 'respectable' media like NYC and ABC may capture the lib normies but that audience is growing smaller by the year and more out of touch by the moment.
No one even remotely in our reality would think Kamala is a strong candidate.
crushedoranges
11mo ago
Ted Cruz and Chris Christie. (James Carville is Darkstalker Kaathe.)
crushedoranges
11mo ago
crushedoranges
11mo ago
In the balance of it, creating an technical class within North Korea that is not military in nature is important, I think. NK having its software devs being more civilian is important in the long term for creating a philowestern elite.
crushedoranges
17d ago
We are three generations into the liberal experiment of the emancipation of women and the resulting sexual revolution and birth rates are already in the terminal phase. If you want an example of societies that are collapsing because of it, you just have to look out of the window.
Societies do not have to be healthy by liberal standards to be self replicating: see, all of history.
You think the Somali Muslims and Amish that will replace us will share our egalitarian ideals?
crushedoranges
5mo ago
Well, it seems like people like me - or people who think like me - can name a number: zero. Consider the epistemic sin of easily preventable deaths on the heads of people who refuse to name a number.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
I know. I don't personally believe in that definition, which is why I steelmanned it.
But it's revealing that even this common deflection falls apart if you even spend a moment thinking about it. Adding allyship to this interaction includes those white knights.
Are you a Civ multiplayer person? I think that probably explains it. Civ multiplayer is just so different of a game from Civ single-player that it's impossible to talk about the subject without mentioning the elephant in the room.
I play GSG-type games as single-player experiences. (Mostly because my internet was dogshit for the longest time.) And, in my experience, the Civ AI has always been dogshit, unable to comprehend the multivariate functions of its own systems.
IT VERY WELL MAY BE TRUE that those elements are present in Civ 4. I never got to experience them properly. I concede the point that the Civ 4 combat is not as two-dimensional as my hot take would imply but the game itself does a bad job of demonstrating it for the player. EU4 also has very bad AI, but the cheating is in such a matter that it has the pretense of emulating skillful play, and not just modifiers given to the AI just because.
(Yes, I know the AI gets buffs in Paradox games. But the buffs in Civ are much, much larger comparatively, to compensate for a lack of historicity and other railroady mechanics.)
The base game of CIV is piss easy, even on Deity: the AI is too incompetent and cowardly for the job of containing the player without obviously ganging up against him. You don't need to know any of that to win single player civ (although it will make your game go faster.) But that's not even the worst part of it!
The inability of players falling behind to catch up means that in Civ games, there is an obvious winner very early on, deincentivizing participation in casual play and ensuring a negative experience for the majority of players. This is the real reason why Civ sucks. No matter how clever you are tactically and keeping all of those modifiers in mind, the bigger blob will always win. I'm not going to fight to the bitter end for days for a predestined conclusion: I'm just going to quit before the birth of Christ.
crushedoranges
9mo ago
I'm going to have to go through the 'keep off that weight' dietary and lifestyle change phase eventually. I won't lie, that will probably be even more difficult than the fasting phase I'm doing right now.
But I both want and need to do it. And I hope I get through it.
crushedoranges
9mo ago
Clumsily. (Like krogans.)
crushedoranges
9mo ago
I really don't want to get into definitional arguments, because they don't get anywhere.
I am using their terminology. You can argue it as much as you want that it is vague and nebulous, but it doesn't matter, because it describes a real subset of people that do exist that push policy and active goals. I don't have to go back to the Kievan Rus to explain it. What am I, Putin?
Don't dive into generalities. I am addressing a very specific movement (the woke, the intersectionalists, the crt) who can be described as cultural marxists. I am intentionally limiting the scope of the discussion here because there is where an argument can actually be had.
But if you want to continue down this path, please, provide your definitions of these things.
crushedoranges
9mo ago
Well, of course it is.
But your non-participation only entitles and empowers a potential Caesar, who similarly believes that the systems and institutions are a corrupt sham and shell. And when you go to hide behind said institutions, suddenly made aware of its values, it will collapse upon itself. You will be left naked and trembling before a new, populist God.
Unless, of course, that is your desired end goal.
crushedoranges
9mo ago
You don't need to believe in democracy, only give sacrifice to the civic gods. The Roman analogy is apt. I'm not asking you to sacrifice a fatted calf or a firstborn child: I'm asking you to stand in a line for two hours in some public place. It doesn't matter what you believe or what you think is true, only that the proper forms are observed.
crushedoranges
9mo ago
Let me make an analogy.
One prays to God, not out of a naive desire for divine intervention to manifest one's wishes, but as an affirmative call to one's own virtuous goals. Whether or not it comes to good or ill is divided into two parts: the mortal - which is in our control - and in the divine - which is ineffable.
Which is to say, go vote, because it is good for the soul, and then do the necessary things in your community anyway.
crushedoranges
11mo ago
Get away from me, Kaathe!
The age of dark is not yet here!
crushedoranges
27d ago
The American economy is not dependent on imports from China, and neither does it rely on exports to it. All it needs to do to blockade China is block the straits of Malacca and Tiran.
crushedoranges
6mo ago
That may indeed be possible but I try and keep personal motivations out of analysis as much as I can. Not that he can't be morally disgusted (and indeed, most people should be) but since it is impossible to debate the personal beliefs of someone I do not personally know, I don't usually comment on it.
I am aware that assigning political motivations to things that public figures do can come off as conspiratorial and uncharitable at times. I didn't mean to imply that he was some sort of Machiavellian figure. I'm just attempting to analyze it through a realpolitik lens - which, indeed, diminishes the personal.
crushedoranges
7mo ago
I would attribute that to the population getting older in general. City life, and its progressive paeans, are more attractive to the young who seek opportunity and change. They are willing to tolerate things like noisy neighbors and the homeless because they are willing to bear that burden, even if it annoys them privately. The old and those with families wish for the reverse and move away to where they can get away from that within their financial means.
It very well may be that the blues diminish because their societal bedrocks self-select and become redder in the bargain.
crushedoranges
8mo ago
A child, when introduced to the concept of probability, gives equal weight to the possible outcomes. Two choices means 50/50 (a coin flip.) A pollster that isn't better than a coin flip is useless. You might as well ask a child. (I believe the children's election - 52/48 in favor of Harris - being +2 D, while being wrong, was more accurate than any of the left-leaning pollsters could muster.)
crushedoranges
9mo ago
And for most people, that borderline is a wake-up call, yes.
I personally suffer from depression. Being fat didn't help with that. But for some people they look in a mirror and they think to themselves "I'm already fat, I might as well let myself go all the way" and that leads to all the pathologies of personality I just mentioned.
Right now, I'm going through a water fast, and it's difficult and uncomfortable. Losing weight is, in general, difficult and uncomfortable. The avoidance of discomfort and the pursuit of pleasure is the Western zeitgeist and I'd be damned if I let down my ubermenschian will to power by obeying the fickle whims of a decadent body.
crushedoranges
11mo ago
Then what, exactly, is all of this western aid paying for?
What is the length of commitment necessary from the West for Ukraine to win the war?
I think the average American is happy to support Ukraine, less happy, if it proves to be a Afghanistan-level commitment. Open-ended conflicts with no clear objective is the kind of foreign entanglement I do not like.
Fetuses can't be leftists, yes. This is why I love them.
(You can borrow this response, if you'd like. Chad face gif is optional.)
As a refrain to my own banning, I'd like to say that the sentiment I am rebutting is similarly devoid of value: intersectional bundling of leftist causes does not impress me. In short, it is essentially saying: "Why do you care so much about this, huh? How does this personally affect you, when the world bleeds so much?"
No, I won't approve of them killing their own children in the womb. No matter how much things may suck in the real world. Things will always suck. There will always be injustice for them to point at, to try and shame me into not caring. A giant meteor could be coming to wipe us out like the dinosaurs and I'll still keep caring about the issue in exactly the same way.
The pastor may see it as 'throwing it under the bus', but I prefer to see it as a 'sincerely held belief'.
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