daguerrean
2d ago
I will admit the revisionist history I see from redditors regarding the prequel trilogy is surprising. I was a kid that was pretty much the target audience for the prequels when they released in the 90s, and even as an eight year old they were underwhelming and immediately forgotten. The only parts that genuinely made an impression on kids and entered into the canon were: Darth Maul and double-bladed lightsabers, podracing (mostly because of the great Nintendo 64 game). While there was hype for the Phantom Menace, parts 2 and 3 were attended with no hype, even from children.
daguerrean
2d ago
I essentially agree with you, but I doubt it has much to do with his own mortality, he has simply always been this way. He has always emblazoned his name in giant gold letters on skyscrapers, it's just kind of who he is. I think now that we are halfway through his final term it is obvious that he won't be able to remake American society wholesale and his enemies will always hate him, there is no changing either of those things. So like you said, I think he seeks to emblazon his name on world history. If the USA acquired Greenland his name would certainly be indelibly written into the history books, I don't think there is much of grand strategy angle to it. Most of this stuff seems relatively harmless, and frankly it's potentially a good thing for a US President to have a strong drive to be considered great.
Okay, I just played the game and I have to say I don't think they were trying to make her repulsive. They were clearly trying to make the point that "falling down the far right rabbit hole" can be easy, seductive and come with social reinforcement that makes it seem desirable. They also show the main character receiving tons of 'likes' and online affirmation. Amelia seeming cool and attractive sort of goes with this and I think was trying to underscore the point that it isn't just old boomers that can have "dangerous ideas" the same way that an after school special about the dangers of drug usage and peer pressure would show the drug using teens as cool and attractive not some random bum on the street.
daguerrean
3d ago
There is a certain annoying rationalist-ish tendency to notice meta-level patterns and thereby conclude that there is no truth, or that truth is irrelevant, that there is nothing but patterns and that all things that can be fit to the same pattern must be interchangeable. Of course the other side has an isomorphic complaint, but it is simple, they are wrong and I am right.
What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.
daguerrean
3d ago
I speculate that the motivations behind some of the protesting has a purely psychological etiology: excitement from a sense of purpose + externalizing the problems which plague one’s own life.
I think this is a significant factor. You probably get to feel like a superhero responding to an alert somewhere in the city and hopping onto your rented e-bike like the Batmobile. Then there is the whole psychological aspect of just getting to scream at ICE for as long as you want, any insults you can imagine. In a way it strikes me like a form of those "Scream Clubs" you see in leftist cities, just like the dark/evil version of them. I never understood the appeal of those scream clubs to begin with, but they seem very popular among women. Like the woman pictured in the article basically matches my mental model of what someone screaming at ICE would look like perfectly.
daguerrean
3d ago
I don't understand how any White man could support the left in this country. You can think what you want about healthcare, you can hate Donald Trump if you want, all that could be true and I still don't understand how you could support the left. The left has such open, naked hatred directed specifically at White men it just feels like self-preservation should kick in at some point and supersede the rest of your political preferences.
There is something very interesting going on with middle-aged White women, you see it with the hosts of this podcast and with all the recent ICE protests too. Obviously, I get middle-aged women being the moralizing demographic of Christian moms protesting video games, but recently White women seem to be radicalized with a degree of violence that is unfamiliar and shocking to me. Now, they aren't going out and committing mass shootings but they seem to have an open bloodthirst that seems very uncharacteristic. Anyone have any theories what is happening here?
Edit: The fact that Jennifer Welch is a divorced divorce attorney probably puts her in the 99th percentile for hatred towards men.
daguerrean
7d ago
This world. 14th Amendment, baby. You don’t get to pick one line from the Constitution and ignore the rest. Citizenship is more than a paper guest pass
As leftists are so fond of saying, the Constitution is not a suicide pact
daguerrean
9d ago
Another great example! I've heard exactly this lament from vintage resellers I know endlessly and in many ways it mirrors exactly my experience with daguerreotypes and antique shops. Similarly it is hard to blame Goodwill for picking up the fistfulls of dollars they were leaving on the table. But as you said and as I said above, it is a bit sad for people that are broke but with aspirations of higher fashion. In the before time, a bit of effort and fashion-knowledge (as your wife had) could stand-in for money in a way that it can't today. Today if you're broke you're going to look broke.
daguerrean
9d ago
Why do we care about the words? What was he supposed to say in the split second while his adrenaline was pumping after almost being run over “My heart goes out to her friends and family”?
If the shooting was warranted then any nasty words were warranted. If the shooting was unwarranted that is enough grounds to criticize him on, the words are irrelevant. This strikes me exactly as accusing him of murder, arson and jaywalking.
daguerrean
10d ago
I very much like both of these examples. I'll respond to reach.
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On careers. I will attribute to this my inability to find a good plumber. Here is my hypothesis. 70 years ago I imagine that if you were the son of a plumber there was a good chance you ended up a plumber too even if you had an IQ of 130. Today if that's your IQ, all you have to do is do well on the SAT and you'll get whisked away on a scholarship to NYU or something. And after that, well, how you gonna keep em down on the farm? The point being, if you shopped around enough 30 years ago you could probably find a pretty damned intelligent plumber. Sure, even back then most plumbers wouldn't have been the sharpest, but there were at least some. Today with the much more efficient sorting of people, how many common residential plumbers have an IQ of 130, approximately zero?
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The prevalence of metagaming and net decking is a great example. I played Vanilla World of Warcraft and loved it very much at the time, and I remember awaiting the launch of WoW Classic with great hype. Unfortunately I found when they relaunched it, it just wasn't the same. Of course it wasn't the game that had changed, but me, and us and how we approached it. I and other players were no longer content to bumble around in dungeons and group wipe repeatedly all night. We weren't 12 but 30 and we expected dungeons to be a polished and professional experience, and generally at the first sign of a wipe we were abandoning the group and finding something better to do with our time. But in our greater desire for time-efficiency in game we had somehow removed all the magic. My experience in WoW classic lasted a couple months before I gave it up, the magic just wasn't there anymore like it was when I was 12 and naive and just fucking around.
Lately I've been reflecting and I think one of the biggest themes of change in my lifetime is the increasing efficiency of the world, and largely, it sucks. I think different people have described this in ways that suit their own worldview. Like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, Redditors might call this a form of late-stage capitalism, woke people would call a subset of this gentrification, I call it increasing efficiency. Let me give you some examples.
Airplane seats. Thirty years ago, a savvy traveler would know to get exit row seats, for the same price you got extra leg room. Over the course of my life airlines have recognized they had this little luxury and were effectively leaving money on the table by not charging more for it. Over my life they have created sub-designations like economy-plus to extract that little bit of value that they were leaving behind.
Some years ago I went to Kansas City for a conference and I was pretty excited to try the barbecue. I went to a couple places and overall, while it was decent, I'd had better in New York which obviously makes complete sense! If you were a world-class barbecue chef from Kansas City, why would you stay in KC where there isn't much money and the competition is fierce? Bring your talents to New York or San Francisco and you stand to get a much bigger payday and critical recognition that would never be available to you in KC. In some sense, having a great regional cuisine only available in Kansas City is just irrational. If people all over the world would like barbecue, why would it only be available in some relatively poor middle-America city? It should naturally be available the world-over in proportion to the money available in a locality. I think essentially the beautiful diversity of regional cuisines is an inefficiency or an irrationality waiting to be eaten up. At this point the only foods remaining regional are really ones that nobody else wants.. In the world I grew up in my dad would always tell me that you just couldn't get a good cheesesteak outside of Philly, that world doesn't exist anymore.
Or consider my hobby, daguerreotype collecting. When I look at older collections built in the 70s-90s, collections were more haphazard. People would have lots of mundane things I wouldn't look twice at today mixed in with some truly extraordinary things that would be impossible to buy now even if you were a museum. It seems like in the past, before the internet, price discoverability was basically zero, so with enough persistence if you were willing to hit the road and hit up dozens of antique and book stores you could turn up great things for nothing. Today with the availability of eBay, prices are more accurate and as a result collections are much more defined by how much money you have to spend. There is no shortcut, there isn't really a way for effort and luck to substitute for raw dollars today.
I think Tinder and OnlyFans are examples of the same phenomenon. Tinder, for women, is essentially a price discovery tool. If you are a gorgeous girl from some small town you no longer have to settle for some guy from your hometown. You can go on Tinder and find that there are 6'5" med students that do rock climbing a few miles away that are very much in-your-league. Regarding OnlyFans, if you were curious about ho'ing it up 40 years ago what was your option? Mail photos of yourself to Hustler and then potentially move out to LA for a giant question mark of a payday? Today if you are a moderately popular woman on social media you will have a very good idea of exactly how much money you would stand to make the very moment you choose to open an OF, which could be a very large amount indeed.. I think thirty years ago if you were some loser guy working at a small town gas station you could at least have the fantasy of getting the girl, because sometimes the world was just crazy and irrational and nonsensical things happened! Today I think that fantasy feels less realistic as desirable women have far more tools to get a sense of their true worth. Not to say the world is perfectly rational now, but it is more than it used to be. I think the popular SEC couples meme is celebrating exactly the wonderful irrationality of mixed-attractiveness couples that is increasingly rare to see.
I imagine if you are a guy that frequented strip clubs, hooters and escorts you probably view the glory days as behind you. 30 years ago you could probably find some seriously gorgeous girls with enough looking, today I assume any decent looking girl would be leaving those places for OF.
I would say gentrification is a specific subset of this same phenomenon. Essentially it is a majority/privileged/white group recognizing that a minority/marginalized group has something that is 'undervalued' and moving in to exploit that. This undervalued thing could be a food like oxtail, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, a hairstyle, whatever. Either way I think these are both cases of an inefficiency being ironed out, low-hanging fruit being plucked and the world becoming more rational and efficient. After all, shouldn't Williamsburg be expensive? It has a great view of Manhattan and is closer to the Financial District than lots of upscale areas on the Upper West/East Side. The fact that it was ever cheap was just an obvious inefficiency waiting to be corrected.
I think this kind of sucks because the theme across all of these is that the world becomes less irrational and by extension less hopeful. In the past you could dream of getting the girl, or finding that amazing daguerreotype in an antique shop, or coming home to a cheap meal of oxtail in your Williamsburg apartment with a great view of the Manhattan skyline. Today, as with collecting, the quality of your life is much more closely following the amount of money you have to throw around and opportunities for savvy or just plain lucky individuals are disappearing. Kind of sad imo. I think the human spirit and persistence of hope rely to a certain degree on irrationality and chaos to sustain themselves, the idea that anything can happen and it doesn’t have to make sense.
I would be very interested if people have more examples of this because I feel like it has swept across almost everything in the last 30 years
daguerrean
10d ago
About 6 persistently dishonest commenters managed to keep the discussion going by assiduously ignoring every fact that emerged and more or less abusing a loophole in the rules of the site. Users continued giving them (you)s in the naive belief that one more argument could prevail.
daguerrean
10d ago
How do you perceive that W.R.T. NYT? I just went to their homepage and the top 4 stories were in order:
- Noem Says 'Hundreds More' Agents Will Be Sent to Minnesota Over 'Corruption'
- Somalis Fled Civil War and Built a Community. Now They Are a Target.
- After Minnesota Shooting, ICE Again Limits Congressional Visits
- Who Was Renee Good, the Woman Killed by an ICE Agent?
daguerrean
10d ago
Why are we obligated to follow some imagined proportionality of objective importance? You forget, this forum exists for entertainment, no different or more significant than Fortnite. We’re all just shooting the shit for fun and sometimes discussing gender relations in the latest season of Love Island is just plain more fun than some dry geopolitical developments that only nerds care about.
daguerrean
11d ago
I am not pretending to be some above-it-all enlightened centrist but I will happily bite the bullet and assert that both played stupid games and won stupid prizes, as they say, or more succinctly FAFO’d.
If you believe you are engaging in semi-violent civil disobedience against a regime you perceive as brutal/fascist/totalitarian then you should be prepared for and accepting of violent repression in response. Whining about it strikes me as pathetic LARPing to some extent. You want the glory of claiming to be fighting evil murderous fascists while secretly expecting you can endlessly shriek and obstruct and they will treat you with kid gloves. IMO if you want to pretend you are going into battle with the SS then you should be prepared to die and face it with courage.
daguerrean
12d ago
Why Minneapolis? If you had asked me eight years ago where I felt the culture wars were going to be centered I would have said Portland. Being in the PNW it was the epicenter of wokeness and it seemed like you had antifa and Proud Boys gearing up for street battles there. If not Portland I would’ve picked somewhere else stereotypically woke, Seattle, San Francisco, even NYC while not unusually woke is at least especially prominent.
Minneapolis really had no reputation in my mind, I wouldn’t have imagined it was any woker than any other semi-large American city, and probably comparable to Oklahoma City or St. Louis or something. But from George Floyd to Somali Daycares and Renee Good it has clearly become the main battleground. Does anyone have any theories as to why this is?
daguerrean
12d ago
Okay so this is interesting. Am I reading this correctly you are hoping for a meet cute with a woman at a sex club and from this…a relationship? What is your relationship history like? How often do you attend sex clubs? As a single unaccompanied male, what percentage of your visits result in any sexual activity with a woman? Are you bisexual? Do you use prostitutes?
daguerrean
12d ago
Okay, my apologies. I acknowledge my comment was over the top. However, in my defense, I think there is a point where blatant dishonesty is more corrosive to this forum’s norms of charitable good-faith discourse than any number of nasty words. Take LiberalRetvrn downthread spewing stuff like this:
All I saw was a guy in a mask jumping out of an unmarked vehicle and running toward her …. In that situation it seems reasonable to fear for one's life.
This is such a flagrant and deliberate mischaracterization of video that all of us can see that it degrades the norms of discussion here and is exactly what the Mein Kampf quote was directed at. I will clean up my act but for the sake of discussion I implore you to moderate blatant dishonesty.
If he had just walked up and said "ma'am, can you please get out of the car" none of this would have happened
There is literally no reason to believe this. These lesbians were there specifically to obstruct ICE, there is no reason to think a little politeness will suddenly make them compliant.
I think this was an insanely stressful situation, and she is completely blameless for the actions she took in this video.
She was there specifically to obstruct law enforcement. She ignored their orders to get out of the car. She tried to flee straight through an ICE agent walking directly in front of her car. On what dishonest leftist planet is ANY of this blameless?
It is shocking to me that even on the sacred Motte, of all places, even in the face of incontrovertible video evidence we still have to deal with insane leftist sophistry and blatant lies.
One is reminded of a certain relevant quote:
The more I argued with them, the better I came to know their dialectic. First they counted on the stupidity of their adversary, and then, when there was no other way out, they themselves simply played stupid. If all this didn't help, they pretended not to understand, or, if challenged, they changed the subject in a hurry, quoted platitudes which, if you accepted them, they immediately related to entirely different matters, and then, if again attacked, gave ground and pretended not to know exactly what you were talking about. Whenever you tried to attack one of these apostles, your hand closed on a jelly-like slime which divided up and poured through your fingers, but in the next moment collected again. But if you really struck one of these fellows so telling a blow that, observed by the audience, he couldn't help but agree, and if you believed that this had taken you at least one step forward, your amazement was great the next day. The Jew had not the slightest recollection of the day before, he rattled off his same old nonsense as though nothing at all had happened, and, if indignantly challenged, affected amazement; he couldn't remember a thing, except that he had proved the correctness of his assertions the previous day. Sometimes I stood there thunderstruck. I didn't know what to be more amazed at: the agility of their tongues or their virtuosity at lying. Gradually I began to hate them.
daguerrean
12d ago
He obviously didn’t feel she was a threat until she rammed him with her car. Why do you pretend not to understand this? Who do you think you’re convincing with this act?
daguerrean
12d ago
I don't think the right should be holding the dude up as a hero or anything, either, but the lefty impulse to make martyrs out of their people seems to be irresistible to them.
Personally I don’t think guy is a hero and if I knew him I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he was a violent asshole. However, I think the right has learned something they didn’t know in 2020 with Chauvin. As you said, the left will always defend their own and will happily make heroes out of murderers. They will make sure Weather Underground terrorists get sinecures and support. This woman’s partner will get a massive gofundme. It is time the right does the same, even if the people don’t deserve it. Like the gofundme for that n-word lady (both of them). I expect we will see the right much more vigorously defending this guy, they won’t just let the left destroy him like they did Chauvin, there will probably be a highly successful gofundme as well
daguerrean
12d ago
Come on, it’s obviously not a troll and he’s linking a video that’s extremely relevant to our discussion. In the rush to post he got one detail wrong, stop the retarded paranoia.
daguerrean
12d ago
Come on man, surely you’ve seen leftists presenting a story like this: “Lady and her partner were on the way home from dropping off their kid at school. They make a wrong turn and completely accidentally end up in the middle of an ICE operation. Agents begin shouting confusing orders including “turn around.” Lady is panicked, tries to comply and do a 3 point turn, agent deliberately positions himself in front of her car and murders her.”
This is an extraordinarily popular narrative online and this convincingly debunks every one of those points. This isn’t some “two screens” rationalist bullshit, this is like Nicholas Sandmann, there is a straightforward lie and there is the truth.
You can still accept this video and say the shot was unjustified, but to say this doesn’t clarify anything just isn’t true
I did find this extremely amusing in a darkly totalitarian way. Apparently "Look up more information" is a wrong answer, it is wrong to even attempt to engage with, research, fact check or read about any wrongthink position. You are just supposed to detect wrongthink and close your eyes and ears. It is really striking to me, it seems like the UK has literally criminalized dissent on the issue of immigration, how could this possibly be? How could their population tolerate it?
Edit: The exact wording for the choice above in the game was “Find out more about the topic online”, the topic being immigrants consuming resources for British veterans. The games next text then is “Charlie wasn’t sure if the video was true but the other recent encounters made them curious. Charlie went directly to the account’s website and found research papers, statistics, information about protests, and more regarding the ‘replacement’ of white people.”
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