gattsuru
1yr ago
For another variant of the problem, see the wildlife 'separate populations' discussion Kagan brought in Loper-Bright was about this case asking if the Washington State population of the squirrel subspecies sciurus griseus griseus was distinct enough from the Oregon and Californian populations of the same subspecies to 'count' as a species-as-legal-term for the Endangered Species Act. Or where local regulations effectively traded off unproved harms committed by politically disconnected actors against much-more-established risks by powerful ones.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Back in the long-ago of the 2007-2009 era, various electronic freedom groups established and encouraged a wide variety of individual users to establish limited VPNs and forwarding services, as a parallel-but-less-fraught alternative to the then-new Tor network. I'm... not so optimistic we'll see a recurrence of that.
gattsuru
1yr ago
That'd be a fun norm, but :
- It'd be nice to have some other actual way to find truth from trustworthy sources, unless you want the inevitable LBJisms to be indistinguishable from actual pigfuckers. And we don't have such sources.
- There demonstrably already are exceptions. At minimum, we have a Kari Lake exclusion, and more seriously a large portion of plausible threats that are so deadly not even complete morons risk them.
- Palin was not a politician in 2017: she resigned from the Alaskan governorship in 2009, and would not join another political race until 2022 (which she lost).
gattsuru
1yr ago
gattsuru
1yr ago
Maybe it's changed since mumblemumble years ago, but back in my day it wasn't like each meeting started off with everyone sitting in a circle and exchanging distaff American Pie jokes, or spin the bottle, or gay sex ed. When there's a new student you'd go around for introductions and have the option of disclosing your orientation, and then mostly a sit-around-and-bullshit social club. There were teenagers that were hooking up who'd met at the GSA, but even the people who'd brag about it weren't going to do that in front of as varied a crowd as you'd get at a club meeting proper (there were girls there!).
(uh, second-hand from my brother, band camp was closer to the actual gay relationship or 'relationship' space. I'd expect that was somewhat specific to the cliches at the school we went to, though.)
@SteveKirk's "oh boy relationship drama" is closer to my experience, though I tended to run into where it was most an annoyingly creepy teacher wanting a bunch of disposable and impressionable activists. Which is a problem, but a different sort.
(probably not universal, but pretty damned common).
EDIT: if you'd like a more recent and undisclaimered example, this was from 2021.
From what I understand, the law prohibits use of private photogs for campaign activities on the cemetary grounds.
Which would be fascinating, given the official Army response was not that the photographers were specifically the problem, but that regulations "clearly prohibit political activities on cemetery grounds". And no one at the Army is pointing to the specific rule either way directly.
Some other groups have pointed to CFR 32-553.32, but that doesn't care at all about photographers, and depends on a ludicrously vague definition of 'partisan political activity' (here, largely devolving into "but Trump"), and the regulation allows nothing more than the ANC's Executive Director to ban someone, which can't be delegated. Worse, the Trump campaign claims to have gotten explicit permission from Arlington beforehand, albeit. The closest I can find for an actual statutory, rather than regulatory, prohibition is one on demonstrations separate from ceremonies, which doesn't apply here. Others point to the Hatch Act, but that applies more to use of video and imagery taken during a political career -- the Hatch Act excludes the President and VP, but doesn't allow everyone working under their orders a Get Out of Hatch Jail Free Card.
((Uh, overlooking the bit where the Hatch Act is also basically unenforced.))
I wonder why Trump didn't just use the DoD footage from all the times he visited Arlington as president?
No small part of the point of this particular circus is to highlight the Abbey Gate families, and implicitly that the Biden-Harris administration has generally not met with or supported them. Since Abbey Gate happened in August 2021, that would be after Trump left the Presidency.
gattsuru
1yr ago
The plaintiffs in that case were a pair of middle schoolers and their parents. While the kids were old enough to ditch the sweatshirts and seemed like they were probably wanting to play along, it was still near-certainly the parents providing the sweatshirts and idea.
Palin v. The New York Times... still
The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals holds:
Palin’s claim was subsequently tried before a jury but, while the jury was deliberating, the district court dismissed the case again—this time under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 50. We conclude that the district court’s Rule 50 ruling improperly intruded on the province of the jury by making credibility determinations, weighing evidence, and ignoring facts or inferences that a reasonable juror could plausibly have found to support Palin’s case.
Despite the district court’s Rule 50 dismissal, the jury was allowed to reach a verdict, and it found the Times and Bennet “not liable.” Unfortunately, several major issues at trial—specifically, the erroneous exclusion of evidence, an inaccurate jury instruction, a legally erroneous response to a mid-deliberation jury question, and jurors learning during deliberations of the district court’s Rule 50 dismissal ruling—impugn the reliability of that verdict.
For those unfamiliar with the background, in reaction to the 2011 Tucson Shooting of Representative Giffords and several others, the New York Times, among many other media, tried to tie then-relevant once-Vice-Presidential candidate to the shooter. Like all those other media, the proposed connections the Times gave were entirely imagined: the shooter was a paranoid schizophrenic that had become obsessed with Giffords by August 2007, before Palin had been offered the Republican Vice Presidential candidacy, and before any of the proposed 'incitement', and there was never any evidence that the shooter had even seen any of Palin's supposed 'incitement'.
However, the Times slipped particularly aggressively: it revisited the claim years after it was obviously false in the piece America's Lethal Politics in 2017, arguing that the link to Palin's political incitement was extremely clear, unlike the then-current Congressional Baseball shooting. Not only would anyone remotely familiar with the case know that was false, claims in the piece America's Lethal Politics were in direct contradiction with the link used to support those claims, and/or with other claims in the same paper, or other sites under the Times umbrella. While these were corrected eventually in the most dismissive manner possible, the organization never actually apologized to Palin or made clear that the statements about Palin specifically were false: even the current piece just sputters off a correction that never mentions her name and a main piece that now merely points and winks when it says "... in that case no connection to the shooting was ever established".
In 2017, Palin brought a lawsuit for defamation. This Did Not Go Well. The district court first held that Palin would have to prove impossible claims and dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice. After an appeals court overturned that dismissal, New York State 'refined' its law so that defamation lawsuits became harder and more financially risky to bring; the trial court held this applied retroactively. The same district court then had an actual trial, where the same judge refused to allow a wide variety of relevant information in as evidence, required again that Palin prove a novel and impossible standard -- that the Times' editor not only knew the claim was false, but that it was defamatory -- and eventually dismissed the case while the jury were deliberating. Some number of the jurors received phone notifications of that dismissal while they were deliberating.
As a result, the appeals court has ordered Mrs. Palin a new trial.
It's... not clear how much this is gonna matter, though. Yes, Palin can demonstrate that the New York Times knew or should have known that the claims were false, and that being accused of inciting a assassin-turned-child-murderer is defamatory, while the defense is stuck with "owo, we fowgot". And yes, that's the traditional understanding of what it takes to defame even a public figure. But that's not what actually wins a court case, and when it comes to the things that do:
... while the voir dire proceeding in this case was atypically limited, it was not “so demonstrably brief” that it prevented counsel from “draw[ing] any conclusions about a potential juror[].” The district court questioned prospective jurors about what they and their partners did for a living and what county or borough they lived in. Although minimal to the point of being borderline insufficient, these questions provided at least some context for counsel to draw upon. While the additional voir dire questions that Palin proposed “might have been helpful to [her] in deciding how to exercise [her] peremptory challenges, we conclude that [their] absence did not render [the] trial ‘fundamentally unfair.’”...
The district court was initially misled on this point by defendants’ counsel, who insisted that “[t]he Daily Dish was a separate website,” such that Bennet’s statement in his deposition that he “consum[ed]” The Atlantic’s website would not support a conclusion that Bennet encountered any Daily Dish articles.
That is, all Palin must do is prove to twelve jurors the contents of a New York Times editors brain the better part of a decade ago, in a jurisdiction where the state has already retroactively changed statutes to make this trial harder, in front of a judge that has repeatedly made errors going on direction, while the defendant openly misleads the court, with the bare minimum opportunity to reduce bias on the part of jurors selected from part of the country heavily opposed to Palin. That trial -- maybe happening in mid-2025 -- in the exceptionally unlikely chance Palin and her legal team do win, will still do nearly bupkiss in actually making anyone whole or seriously discouraging the Times from making shit up; given reporting on the earlier 'victory' for the Times, it probably won't even persuade anyone not already certain of it that the Times was making shit up.
There's a lot of fun comparisons, of better and worse validity, to other recent defamation lawsuits, but I think they're a bit of a distraction. I tell that story so I can tell this one:
Trump v. Hostages
The former president allegedly made the call on August 14, according to Axios, and repeated in Reuters, which cited two unnamed "U.S. sources who were briefed on the call."
Big, if true! There's long been rumors about Reagan delaying recuse of hostages from Iran or Nixon sinking Vietnam-era peace talks, although they tend to end up just shy of conspiracy theory only because Dem cranks don't count. Someone like Trump doing it, in the middle of a war with tens of thousands of casualties and over a hundred corpses hostages, some American? With people willing to give first-hand knowledge of it?
And then the other shoe drops:
But Woodruff said in a post on X on Wednesday that she had not seen later reporting that the story had been denied by the Trump campaign and Israel.
That post reads, in full:
There's a bit of a missing note, here: the problem isn't just that the Trump or Netanhayhu offices denied it -- they would, after all -- it's that she made it up, herself. Neither the original Axios or Reuters articles even imply that Trump has encouraged Netanyahu or other Israeli politicians to delay any deals of any kind. Indeed the Axios story managed to say the exact opposite:
Woodruff will, of course, suffer absolutely zero for making up a fat fib in the middle of a major media discussion on national news. But don't worry, we have really strong true-finding tools, right? Oh, no, they just need people to prove a negative or 'unproven' is all we get. Hope that won't be a problem!
Attempted Assassins v. FBI
Which is kinda fascinating, given that the FBI sent out a wide variety of Emergency Disclosure Requests for accounts supposedly tied to the shooter, including a Gab account tied to the man was filled with progressive-aligned trolling, which the FBI lumped into the "the general absence of other information to date from social media". It'd be fascinating to know if that means that the FBI believes this Gab account wasn't the shooter's at all, or if anyone else with other accounts tied to him got EDR'd.
Too bad! And we're not gonna find out.
The FBI also released some photos of the shooter's gear; those that remember early testimony by the FBI about a 'collapsible' stock making it hard to notice while the shooter was walking on the ground can now know (again) that FBI Directory Wray is a moron.
Trump v. Arlington National Cemetery
On Monday, Donald Trump visited the Arlington National Cemetery with a number of 'Gold Star' families, close relatives of those who died in service to the United States military, in this case the Abbey Gate bombing during the Afghanistan withdrawal. To borrow from Douglas Adams, this has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
The US Army issued a stark rebuke of former President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign over the incident on Monday at Arlington National Cemetery, saying in a statement on Thursday that participants in the ceremony “were made aware of federal laws” regarding political activity at the cemetery, and “abruptly pushed aside” an employee of the cemetery.
“Participants in the August 26th ceremony and the subsequent Section 60 visit were made aware of federal laws, Army regulations and DoD policies, which clearly prohibit political activities on cemetery grounds. An ANC employee who attempted to ensure adherence to these rules was abruptly pushed aside,” the Army spokesperson said in the statement on Thursday. Section 60 is an area in the cemetery largely reserved for the graves of those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“This incident was unfortunate, and it is also unfortunate that the ANC employee and her professionalism has been unfairly attacked. ANC is a national shrine to the honored dead of the Armed Forces, and its dedicated staff will continue to ensure public ceremonies are conducted with the dignity and respect the nation’s fallen deserve,” the statement said.
The Army spokesperson said while the incident was reported to the police department at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall, the employee in question “decided not to press charges” so the Army “considers this matter closed.”
I'm not a particular fan of using gravestones as political props, in a lot of the same ways that I'm not a huge fan of parents dressing their kids up as political props, and because Trump, this manages to be DARE-level incompetence at doing it, too. On the other hand, I'm also stuck in this world, where politicians taking media from military cemeteries for political ads has both long been tolerated and long been ugly and partisan, without it becoming a national news story or involving physical confrontations that get reported to police. Trying to track down the actual authority or past enforcement for the rule ends up finding 'something something Hatch act', which is just shy of Logan Act for a red flag for incoming inconsistent application.
Now, I don't particularly trust DailyCaller reporting.
But it'd be real nice to have a way to tell. Too bad!
gattsuru
1yr ago
That's fair, though I think it applies there, too.
I get how the small-ask-big-ask theory works, but I think there's a useful to notice that's not really how things have been going. In many cases, the big asks come first, in no small part because they're (perceived as: trying to get actual numbers on how many people are effected by these policies is like pulling teeth) much more important.
gattsuru
1yr ago
After all, if an app for women cannot keep an AMAB out, how can all the other controversial spaces like sports, prisons, waxing salons, etc.?
I'm curious why you'd expect the latter to come later. There's already a whole circuit of the United States where the ADA requires transwomen be treated as women in every single one of those spaces, despite explicit text in the ADA disclaiming such. It's been two years. SCOTUS shrugged. It's done; just a matter of how long until the rest of the courts join in.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I've been working a bit on a "Intro To Circuit Design" sorta class, working to the point where high school students can build a small keyboard, starting from a KICAD schematic, deciding parts and constraints, going to the full process of ordering both circuit boards and parts, hot plate soldering, and loading in a basic firmware. Technically the software and main processor selection is based on this project, though I've stripped out most of the mini OLED screens in favor of just having a handful of handful of WS2812s a la this (partly to keep the part count down, partly for costs, and partly because finding a display module available in quantity <1000 from a vendor that will stay around more than a month is a fool's errand).
I've run it once before and it worked okay, but the nature of the keyboard (especially w/ n-key rollover) made it prone to crossing from repetitive enough to drill in concepts well over from into repetitive enough to bore younger students, especially given KICAD's everything. Made some tweaks, we'll see how it works.
gattsuru
1yr ago
pedophile adjacent clubs for kids
This is a really bad mental model of what GSA clubs look like.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Sharpshooting is a pretty serious skill, both in terms of developing and maintaining direct shooting ability, and also in terms of developing a broader set of situational awareness, learning to see things rather than patterns, and developing stamina.
More generally, counter-snipers are set up in what they've selected as an ideal position, generally shooting from prone position, and often are working with spotter assistance. The Butler SWAT individual had to sprint from a location with obscured view due to foliage, get a sight picture, and was almost certainly firing from a standing position (albeit possibly with support/cover).
It's 100 yards, which isn't some amazing world-defying feat, but it's one that I would normally expect a counter-sniper team to excel at in ways that most police officers (and most SWAT) don't really prioritize. ((Though obv this guy may well have been an outlier.))
gattsuru
1yr ago
The current Official Story of the shooting is that:
- A total of ten shots were fired.
- "8 shots were fired by [the shooter] from his firing (and dying) position on the AGR rooftop."
- "The 9th shot fired on J13 was from a Butler SWAT operator from the ground about 100 yards away from the AGR building... He stopped [the shooter] and importantly, I believe the shot damaged the buffer tube... This means that if his AR buffer tube was damaged, [the shooter]’ rifle wouldn’t fire after his 8th shot."
- "The 10th (and, I believe, final) shot was fired from the southern counter-sniper team... entered somewhere around the left mouth area and exited the right ear area. Instant over. This entry-exit aligns with USSS southern counter-sniper team position."
That is, a rando on the ground managed faster and more accurate counter-sniper operations, possibly even disabling the shooter, than the actual federal counter-sniper team.
gattsuru
1yr ago
The shooter was dead, and we didn't learn anything interesting about him other than that he lived a few blocks from where my grandparents lived (which was only of interest to people from the area).
There were repeated and conflicting reports about the shooter's social media (including the possibility that [the deputy FBI director in charge of the investigation mislead Congress on the matter), the shooter's body was cremated before the autopsy was released, we have no information about how the Secret Service fucked up so badly that they couldn't pick up a radio but the steady trickle of how badly they managed to fuck that up, that particular event was apparently the first(!?) post-Presidency Trump event with any countersniper presence from the Secret Service, and a whistleblower has come out claiming that the Secret Service headquarters "encouraged agents in charge of the trip not to request any additional security assets in its formal manpower request".
Oh, and I still like the 'bicameral, bipartisan' process that the Rowe claims to have, in an organization that doesn't have a 'cameral' to start with.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I'm not sure it's new, so much as it's a new target. Prop8 Discourse was very broad and very ugly. I agree it's emboldened, though; it used to be lawn signs or bumper stickers, with a lot fewer calls to go out and apply them to other people's stuff before 2016.
((And that's not limited to the left; the right's fascination with sticker graffitti is just following the leader, but it wasn't something I'd have expected in 2016.))
gattsuru
1yr ago
The pessimistic answer's that they don't care, either because modern audiences will buy it anyway, or because the costs of writing well exceed the return. But I'm not convinced.
((For example, take Deadpool 3:
The people who wrote the first confrontation weren't facing different pressures than the second -- it's not like Michael Bay helicoptered in, made a bad joke, and then dived out a window.
The less cynical possibility is more that the modern nature of digital editing and massively parallel work means that by the time even a mid-range movie comes out, it's hard for anyone to have a good view of the final product and only the final product. The people making decisions are living, breathing, and sleeping every part not just the scenes that are shot or napkins that are scrawled on, but even some that only existed in their heads. The people touching up individual scenes are looking under a microscope at details we might not even be able to see, without the big picture.
Sometimes that's for the better: a lot of what gets dropped is better implied, or better not done at all. But things slip through the cracks.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I was hoping to get some example of progressive moderation by people who are still supporting Biden/Harris, but at this point I'm hard-pressed to present the question over at The Schism in a way that wouldn't come across as trolling, and most places I can meaningfully ask aren't going to give a useful answer, but instead just Not Fifty Stalins Yet me.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Yeah, that seems correct. I don't think you'll be disappointed with the rest of how Tural goes. There's definitely still warts-and-all for every one of the cultures you encounter; the Pelupelu, Moblins, and X'braal, just come across as a little minimized compared to others.
((And given how much Gridania's warts get minimized, even including the WHM class quests, that's saying something.))
gattsuru
1yr ago
I will caveat that this defense doesn't seem particularly workable, here. As JamesClaims points out, "the problems with the original DECREASE study were reasonably straightforward to detect." Some of the testimony in the final report_also_ points to errors that would have been hard to spot without access to the underlying data (though "The principal investigator checked the work of the PhD candidate at random and never noticed anything unusual." seems... pretty clearly just a lie?), but this summary is a lot more to the heart of things.
These are results that, just from the final papers themselves, range from wildly implausible statistics to GRIM errors to confusing entirely different drugs. This is the sort of thing that should have resulted in deeper scrutiny.
I'm not quite willing to sign onto JamesClaims' "strict liability" approach yet, but I don't think you need to in order to look at this one and suspect either wilful blindness at best by the principal authors.
New and genuine (or genuine-appearing) deeds are fairly uncommon. Full-blown title fraud happens -- this article estimates around 11k cases in 2022 -- but it's pretty rare (<0.0001% risk per year?), and generally more harmful in the sense that it's a ton of lawfare to clean up and out, rather than getting people evicted from their own homes.
((The latter bit is part of why I think anti-title insurance arguments focused on the low loss ratio are misguided. The goal of title insurance isn't to give you the cash value of a house or fence line if someone fucked up paperwork somewhere; it's to handle stuff so you keep your house or fence line unless there's no other less-costly option. That said, a lot of 'title lock' companies are just outright scams.))
That said, the risks are very far from evenly distributed, especially where localities have particularly exploitable practices or taking advantage of national borders and emphasizing areas of quick growth near vacant land.
Weird fuckery and outright mistakes are more common, and obsensibly more of what title insurance is focused around.
From my view, the annoying part is that a good writer -- and while I don't think you need to be Zahn-level good, coincidentally Zahn did offer his services free of charge -- could have pretty easily pulled it off in a way that made it much more impactful. Even if you don't care about the broader universe or milSF concepts, we never get an idea of why this was heroic and the other suicidal efforts weren't, why it happened now and not earlier or later, and some hints that it was even possible beforehand so people could want it.
Those breadcrumbs don't have to be as explicit in film contexts as in written works, but they still matter there. Instead :
- With the opening bombing run, have it seem more like an unabashed victory at first. You can still have Rose's sister do her heroic charge, here, but most of the non-bombers survive. Instead, after all they've taken out the dreadnaught, Hux warps in with his megaship right on top of them, just as they're about to leave. They give a panicked order to retreat through hyperspace, but the ship is too close; most of the fighters either ping off Imperial shields like bugs against a windshield, or slap against the hull, and barely mar the paint in the process. The only survivors are those that 'miss' the Imperial ship that was right on top of them, because hyperspace is so twisted, and even that was as much luck as anything else -- really rub in the survivor's guilt. Establish, early, that hyperspace impacts can happen, but that it isn't a useful trick in most cases. ((This also more clearly separate the failure bit here; it makes Holdo's complaints a lot more reasonable if the lives lost weren't necessary to take down that dreadnaught. And if you make it a surprise to the heroes that Hux's megaship can even do that, it explains why the rest of the Rebels can't flee.))
- If you're going to keep the fuel plot, talk up how small ships can use hyperspace easily, but it takes massively more energy for a bigger ship to enter or exit hyperspace. Establish that the power (and thus energy) for a big ship isn't just a little more, or even 'just' a few orders of magnitude more, but astronomically greater.
- On the Canto Bight trip, make some point where the heroes are trying to get into a space under a shield generator. Have one of them propose a repeat of the 'warp under the shield' from The Force Awakens, and spell out that it wouldn't work: they don't have a ship fast enough, or the shield's frequency, so they'd just bounce off, they'd have to start the hyperspace jump inside the planet's atmosphere to actually hit the facility, and it wouldn't even damage the facility they're trying to break into. Again, repeat that trying to blast through shields with a hyperdrive is a lost cause.
- ((Maybe switch the Canto Bight field trip from searching for a slicer to mumble mumble something, instead they're trying to destroy a hyperspace tracker on Canto Bight. The whole DJ arc can have him be a Plan C, where rather than the team blowing up the tracker, he claims to throw a bug into the system that gives random wrong answers and will damage the whole system.))
- Have a ship (maybe the medical ship during the chase deal?) try to make a hyperspace jump after already being damaged, as a last-ditch attempt to distract some Imperials or to escape, and have it not work. The hyperdrive motivator's down, the hyperspace engine's too damaged, whatever, and instead of getting away or blowing someone else up, it just spreads itself into a sorry streak of interstellar debris, less impressive than just self-destructing or ramming. Establish that hyperdrives, especially big ones, are fragile, so you can't just rely on trying to get close to a target without shielding and armoring yourself, and even that might not be enough.
- Each time someone goes onto the Imperial megaship, have a scene where their ship or shuttle just rumbles. The first time, have someone (DJ?) explain that it's because they're passing through such incredibly oversized shields, so that even when 'down' to allow something to pass in, they still have tremendous power available. Establish that the Rebels can't hope to break through them from the outside with simple force.
Now, you've established that hyperspace kill vehicles only work when a) targeting someone without shields in the way, b) that you're incredibly close to c) with a big expensive ship with a ton of power, d) targeting a big ship so you can even try to hit it, e) while that big enemy hasn't blown up some vital part of the hyperdrive while disabling the rest of your weapons and engine systems, f) you got really lucky on top of all that to actually hit. What kind of tactical or strategic moron would even risk the slightest possibility of that risk?
Flashfoward to Hux going full 'retreat, at our moment of victory?' He's exactly the sort of moron that would leave a disabled ship in his grasp just to make its commander suffer while he swats down unarmed and unshielded transport vessels. ((That this means DJ's betrayal inadvertently gives Holdo a chance at the cost of countless lives helps.)) Hell, he might try to capture them alive, just to torture them for the fun of it give Snoke a Rebel leader's brain to sift through. Have Holdo spell out, while she's desperately trying to come up with some way to distract the Imperials, to save just one life, that every possible system is down -- weapons, engines, shields, scanners, escape pods, life support -- while the Imperial megaship is taking up more and more of the view from the viewscreens. Have the Imperials give a sensor readout: the Rebel flagship is completely dead in the water, with a scattering of life signs.
Except the hyperdrive system. And then we hear the distinct heavy rumble of Holdo's ship being scooped in through the megaship's shields, and the viewscreens are no longer a sign of dread; they're a target. It's still a hopeless cause: Holdo doesn't have maneuvering thrusters to aim, or time to calculate a good hyperspace solution, no time to even guess that their damaged ship is big enough to damage the Imperial megacruiser, and they're leaking enough fuel that they might not even be able to enter hyperspace once.
Then the scene.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I just do not care who becomes Dawnservant.
Yeah. And the weird bit is that I don't think we're supposed to: Galool Ja Ja takes you aside around level 83 to specifically say that it doesn't matter who wins the whole keystone deal; regardless of the contest, he'll never approve a claimant that would be a clearly bad Dawnservant, specifically drawing out the two Mamook as failing to grow. The second half of the story kinda recovers by making a more interesting matter show up, but it does so by making clear that a lot of the threats in the first half never could have worked, even if Galool Ja Ja had made a bad mistake.
It's not awful -- when you're done, there's a pretty decent read of everything as a kind of slow-moving tragedy -- but it doesn't have that sorta drive To Find Out that the Dragonsong War, The First, or Elpis had, until nearly level 97.
Anyway, I asked because I wondered if there was a 'culture war' angle?
I've seen a theoretical anti-woke force opposed to Bryer proposed as the cause behind some of the recent DDoS, given the lack of anyone claiming responsibility, but I'm pretty skeptical; both at the sense of such a group existing and caring enough, and in a right-leaning group like that being able to shut up about it.
There's some story motions that could be read about more generic culture war stuff, especially since everything north of the Bridge from Yok Tural is very specifically Fantasy North America, and there's ways you could kinda draw the whole thing as a 'Best and Worst of America', given how closely the spoiler faction looks like a dark mirror to the Turali. There's been some attempts to draw the spoiler faction as a metaphor for AI, or a parable about American Imperialism, or Capitalism, though these are... either strained or generic. The Whalaqee have been fantasy!NativeAmericans being chased by a combination of accidental disease transmission and overt manifest destiny for fantasy!oil since BLU was first added, and while they're backgrounded, the fantasy!oil pumps are not. Maybe the Shalooni msq bit as anti-police corruption in a modern sense? I think you have to read pretty aggressively into it for everything but the Whalaqee.
I think the steelman would be more about the negative space. It is relevant that the Turali are explicitly Central American, and that there's not really much critique of their society. There's a different portrayal of the same story where Galool Ja Ja is a reasonable but less perfect ruler that would still have worked and hit the same story notes -- he has his vices, like his capriciousness and taste for combat, they just are never flaws -- or where Tural is a seen as a hegemonizing force rather than Sharlayan via Koana, or where conflicts between various Turali factions were a lot less reasonable.
But that's still extremely limited compared to Western game politics.
More charitably... there's one coherent position where the complaint isn't about compliance with complainer's principles, but that X-era Twitter is claiming a set of principles and not following it. You don't have to believe in free speech yourself to notice if someone wearing a Free Speech T-Shirt is also ignoring it. And in Musk's case, the economic incentives to drop principles when China or the Saudis ask are pretty overt.
((Though in practice, it's based on a strawman. For better or worse, Musk has never been a free speech absolutist so much as a formalist, and much of the high profile bad behaviors by X-era Twitter have reflected jurisdictions with weak or no formal right of free speech. And the 'higher' compliance-with-takedown numbers are Goodhart'd to hell and back: we know that the Official Requests have always been swamped by the unofficial ones.))
Less charitably, "who whom".
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