jake
1yr ago
It's not a bad list, and it being 1998-1999 there's nothing to be made of certain omissions, but wow to miss Moby-Dick and Blood Meridian. Midnight's Children at least made it, but at #90, lol. Then for the lesser misses, Gravity's Rainbow, and even less so, one of Dick's works, probably Ubik--though remarkable for prescience rather than prose. But it's not like people don't know those books, and also they all made one of Time's lists. Ignoring Neuromancer is probably a miss too, but I say that looking back from 2024.
Speaking of Gibson, and the only point I could say of this, thinking of him reminded me of his short story Burning Chrome. If you (anyone reading this) are familiar with Cyberpunk 2077 but not Gibson's work, read it. A quite short story, published in 1982, and Gibson's the rare science fiction author with real chops for prose.
I think there's some measure of trolling in spirit here, but maybe some real insight too, just hiding. I see the argument, history not changing, no matter how fine the margin, is still history not changing. Trump got a pic that's getting him 100 million votes (re. my now-Over @ 105), but how's that +15MM votes and ~+3 states won (I'd take the over on 42.5) going to change his presidency vs one where he wins by a lesser margin? If a conspirator comes forward and says the attempt was orchestrated through USSS, Trump would have historic mandate, but that's a discussively comical magnitude of "if", and ifs aren't happenings.
It also makes me think of the other, other "great historic" picture of Trump: on the DMZ with Un.
In a different timeline this might have been a picture historically comparable to those of Nixon with Mao, and with Deng. But as good as the pic is, Trump left office, Nork's back to belligerent insularity, nothing happened. I wonder if I caught some psychic headwinds, I've been playing Dishonored (no kill total ghost ofc) the last couple days, and as I was walking yesterday around noon I fell down a Wiki hole reading about Korea's tumultuous more-than-20th century. Assassinations, coups and cults. Korea marched on, it's a tech, cultural and athletic powerhouse. One of their recent presidents was impeached, tried, sentenced to prison in 2018 and pardoned and released in 2021. Is that a happening? I don't know, how much did Korea change? The first woman in East Asia to be popularly elected as head of state, ending in scandal and prison, and how many people outside of Korea know? Not many, doesn't seem like Korea even felt the bump. So was it really a non-happening?
I'm not being coy. If "happenings" require a moment where a country is on the fulcrum and a decisive action forces the lever, maybe they are rare. (I'll use "moment" from here forward because "happening" is too slangy.) Was JFK's assassination such a moment? If it was federal actors, could you really say their moment was killing a President? They had to get to that point. So was it the conspiracy? But that doesn't come ex nihilo, they had to know they could conspire, so was the moment when the federal government changed so actors within could foment ideas of killing an adversarial Executive? Well when did those conditions arise? FDR? Where did that tyranny originate? Was he a communist? For the sake of this point and this point alone assume he was. So when was the moment? His swearing-in? Or was it being shown it could work, so the October Revolution? But was that a moment, or was it the long consequence of the Communist Manifesto and Marx? Well what was the moment in Marx's life? And what precipitated that moment?
"Nothing ever happens" is interesting to me, but even not reduced as I've done, so saying yes, JFK's assassination was a moment, the October Revolution was a moment, it's interesting to me because it's still necessarily a very holistic reading of history. In that there is a sensibility; holistically, Obama's election wasn't a moment, so many moments preceded and produced the America of 2008 and he was in the right place at the right time. Trump likewise, so many decisions were made and moments happened before he ever ran, before he was the nominee and the victor. Holistically these are really the long outcomes of the thoughts and actions resultant from the psychic ebbs and flows of the masses and any particular moment, even a very loud one, might be nothing, and it's not until much later that we know. Yeah, right now we don't know. We can't know. I like the zen of "Nothing happens until it does." There might be wisdom in it, "Don't rush to history."
Tom Crooks rushed to history. He grazed Trump, killed a supporter, died after catching a bullet or several to the head, and nothing happened. Maybe.
jake
1yr ago
Talking of its inevitability would squeak in at a solid 1% of all comments, with 69% being "feds" and the last 30% being "that retard tried to kill a corpse."
If I were speculating here, I'd wonder about the increase in probability of an assassination attempt on any D politician other than Biden. It's gone up, but maybe not much--had 7/13 been a historically bad day, I would think it inevitable.
jake
1yr ago
If January 6, 2021 was the day Trump's second term was confirmed and had leftists behaved identically to the red hats, people here wouldn't even bring it up, because they'd have no reason to bring it up, because there's nothing unusual about leftists interrupting political processes.
Statements like this reinforce the grand hoax. There was nothing unusual about the day, its only unique quality was the right engaging in a particularly visible protest. It wasn't transgressive, the left behaves far worse far more often; it wasn't a threat, they would have brought guns.
Last week the country and world saw Joseph Biden is the de jure but not de facto President of the United States. The party that has branded itself on "democracy" shows no felt obligation to clarify to their base the man they voted for is not the actual Executive. It goes without saying they will lie about anything and the significance of 1/6/2021 is one such lie. Sadly it's not their worst.
jake
1yr ago
Enthusiasm for Trump isn't what it was, but he's been in the sphere for close to 10 years, lessened excitement is to be expected. There was the euphoria among Obama supporters in 2008 that felt entirely gone by 2012. Disillusionment is some of it, but a rounding error is people flipping, a lot of it is going to be people who have become apathetic about politics or who have more immediate concerns in their life, but most in the right are the people who became disillusioned with the government. They hoped Trump was redress, everything got worse, now they want an open radical. A Tucker with Vivek's platform amped to 11: Garrote by XO the major alphabet agencies, fire everyone employed at the pleasure of the Executive including most of the military officership and start over. A tidier candidate with Trump's charisma--so easy--with that platform would do extremely well, especially in 2028.
That platform is the key, it's why I say Trump will win in a landslide. It's not him drawing a second wind in voter enthusiasm but the Michael Moore factor, the "Molotov at the establishment." A million if not millions will vote in November for Trump even as they dislike him or even hate him because they hate the establishment more. Trump's a lot of things, but for politics, the thing that matters more than all else is that he embodies being the anti-establishment, and it doesn't even have to be anything he's done, it's everybody who's against him. His haters are the cred.
On real issues, the price of milk and eggs should have the DNC in an endless waking panic, nothing should matter more. I'm a conscientious shopper with a damn near eidetic memory for grocery prices, I cook a lot, and I'm good with my money, but that's me. The people making less, worse with their money, less interested and capable in cooking, who now have to spend another $50 every trip, every week or every other week, what are they not buying? What are they delaying that they need or not paying off? There's a torrent of negative effects from decreased purchasing power and nothing causes regime change like economic instability. A lot of people experience this most viscerally in the checkout line gut punch, then they look at what the left is championing. I know there might be a million women who vote this fall for the sole reason of keeping abortion lines open, that's a "valid" insofar as it's an effective political platform, it's also grotesque. They can say it's not that, it is, its presence at all necessarily means it is, but also they should, because couching it? Yeah, in what? Doomsday climate change while opposing nuclear power? Increasing welfare? Not prosecuting violent criminals? Keeping the borders wide open? Classroom proselytizing of the queer religion? These people get the same say as me, I say keep it to abortion. Better insouciant than imbecilic.
But for all this, for an election scenario the DNC should be existentially incapable of winning because of the nature of the average voter's day-to-day experience with buying anything, the discussion here is the presidential prospects of the governor of the state most representative of the failures of establishment doctrine. Newsom is actually incapable of winning a national election unless he breaks his ankles pivoting so hard from the reasoning and politics of the decisions that ruined California, and that's 2028. Trump would slaughter him on the topic of the state, the state would become the topic of the election, and I bet Trump would, he certainly could do it while praising everything the state once was. It's wonderful even still, I'd love to live in California if I had a way to dodge the Big One, but it's so far from its past glory because of people who are selectively blind about what is and tragically govern on what ought to be.
jake
1yr ago
I should have couched it more: I consider a weakness of BC's argument to be its reductiveness. If 1999 was the peak of human civilization, consider how "poorer" in possessions and quality of life people were in '89; '79; '69; etc. Also consider how families shrunk from each preceding decade. It doesn't take long before you find dozen-kid families in destitute households. Civilization marched on, it got better. We're not looking at the thing itself. Those modern households at question: generally single mothers, generally non-white, or if white, black children, 3/4+ kids--we're seeing social questions in divorces, children out of wedlock, and especially children from multiple fathers, and we're seeing governmental issues in their voting, where to leftist politicians, are described most congruently with reality when called "bought." We're looking at the consequence, or asset or vassal of the thing, when this is the framing. It is reductive, so I presented an opponent's hypothetical reductive response. Yes, as fitness has been labeled by eminently foolish leftist mouthpieces as at best "right-wing" and at worst (to them, they know not what they say) "fascist", physical fitness and "traditional", insofar as it's genetic, beauty standards are being conditioned into the masses as rightist. The right embraces this for obvious reasons, they're being freely given the easiest image W. The Soviets were very interested in fitness so I expect it will be remembered by history as quite the mistake when the American left decided on tolerating and more encouraging fatness as an angle for political power. Short of pathology or actual brain-hacking, there is not enough time or words in the world to make the average guy think of "placeholder excessively overweight woman celebrity" as more attractive than say, Sydney Sweeney.
I'm glad you brought up the question of "leftist" governance. One of the most insidious rhetorical tricks communists pulled (and there are many, as they are typified by such) was the invention of the concept of the "Lib-Left." Leftism is an inherently authoritarian ethos and this is evidenced by a simple looking at history. Since Marx, there has been no leftist political movement anywhere in the world that achieved majority power on the promise and subsequent delivery of a reduction in size of government. Leftism in all circumstances, again when in majority power, invariably strengthens itself. A state that seizes a child to trans them has identical spiritual power to the Soviets seizing Kulak land. In creating "Lib-Left" the trick was cemented with the two-axis political spectrum, thereby allowing leftists to deny any governance as left unless it were economically left, ie avowedly communist. Thus, all governments that failed to achieve communist utopia could be labeled "Auth-Left" and/or "not real communism", or even "Auth-Right", as everyday leftists were free to continue beating their drums in support of the most evil ideology ever conceived by man. We're swiftly approaching the final dissolution of political rhetoric into purely friend/enemy distinction, and I hope just as much that we are swiftly approaching the end of rightist political discourse entertaining the two-axis premise. Or at least until a new two-axis spectrum is likely conceived, but this one without the communist framing. To repeat just to be clear: I reject leftist framing as leftism requiring communist economic policy; leftism is about a powerful state, and the American state is very powerful indeed.
Do you want children, or already have them? If so, do you want them to be more successful than you or less? If there is a particular group you consider a net burden on society, then knowing BC's sterilization isn't going to happen, would you prefer their children eventually rise to be net gains for society or remain a burden?
Among the online right are people who attach a moral value to intelligence, in so doing they necessarily attach moral value to distance from animal urge. It's animal urge that says kill the other, it's the most base desire that pushes sterilization and eradication and it's not one whit different in heart than warring chimpanzees. Virtue makes neighbor of the other, and just as I want my great-grandchildren to be wildly smarter than me, I want the great-grandchildren of all my neighbors to be wildly smarter than me. And yours, and BC's, and everyone here.
Though neither is it virtuous to tolerate criminal and reprobate behavior. Caring for your neighbor can mean knowing what's best for them even when they don't, and that means punishing those who deserve punishment and withdrawing aid beyond bare necessity for those who waste in it. There must be a new inspiration of healthy respect for the just governor and fear of his righteous retribution. There must also be the pursuit of the virtuous solution to these antisocial populations: by changing their children. Not by the chimp's desire to murder them all, not the mythical and well-disproved social policy of uplift by schoolmarm, but in the technological promise of genetic modification.
There's the moral question of the practice, but it's a very low bar: a person who doesn't want their children to have a better life than their own may be disregarded. There's the practical question of whether it would actually work, fair, and of bad actors claiming uplifting therapies as a façade as they in fact modify to make slaves, also fair. If I were not convinced of its safety, I would vehemently oppose it. But in the moral abstract, if we have the ability to make our children healthier and smarter, we absolutely must.
Luxury beliefs. Status signaling. Peacocking. This is a well understood phenomenon.
This is what I target with the paragraph beginning "Of course the behavior of such people is very easy to explain . . . " Though I was unfair in it, I should have included "and people who are personally invested in acting in accordance with what they believe is best for all people" though I think that's the minority.
jake
1yr ago
100 years ago people in most countries, especially the west, were significantly poorer than today. In 1900, 20% of American households had 7 or more children, as of 2020 it's .1%. Those people were far more ignorant and compared to today unbelievably destitute but they marched on and raised civilization to new heights. What would you say changed? If it's the kind of people having so many children, then is poverty the real issue?
The online right talks a lot about genetics as destiny. Putting aside their moral failure to understand if the thing they say is true, and I think it probably is mostly true, it is damnable and must be fixed. I wonder how they square their purview with the most successful, the most attractive, and the most effective people being so uniformly leftist. Alan Ritchson sneeding about Trump stung his Reacher fans for many reasons and I'd think a not trivial one is because 6'3 Aryan chad is attacking them.
Of course the behavior of such people is very easy to explain: going with the flow, kompromat, general evil, apathy, idiocy, but when a discussion starts in such highly reductive territory as "Poor people are clearly the problem, sterilize them" you invite opponents to bring the proportionate reductiveness of something like /r/beholdthemasterrace. It's not a productive discourse. I think there is something to be argued about the impacts of specific policies, one such negative impact of welfare is that certain people dependent on welfare in turn create more people dependent on welfare, and as a great deal of political power is effectively bought from these people, the incentive structure is perverse. But do we blame the impoverished or the exploiting politicians? "Genetics as destiny" wouldn't find blame in sheep, they're sheep.
I think this is also the mistake I see time and again in the political off-by-1 error: if your desired governance has the power to mass sterilize the "genetically undesirable," well surely you've already made abortion and all birth control illegal; abolished welfare and no-fault divorce and so practically ended alimony and child support; revoked the CRA and all of its subsequents; ended the universal franchise; made it generally impossible for women to be educated after high school unless they're becoming nurses; and, I don't know, banned most social media. If casual sex risks pregnancy and there is nothing to stop it and if for many women it would be financially ruinous to have a child if they don't have the father tied down, shouldn't wanton reproduction fall off a cliff?
All that aside, I've written here before how I think hard population control is an inevitability, but I think between us it's for every reason different. It's not healthy to live around more people than names and faces you can remember, the evidence for that piles by the year. Yeah we'll be able to provide for their physical needs, in that Malthus will be forever wrong, but we can't provide for their social needs and a failure to address that will end in total civilizational collapse. Not because of laziness, not some economic issue, just the opposite. Boredom. If tens of millions of young men find no purpose in virtual lives, if they have no real work and not even a prospect for productive labor because AGI is doing all the work the top 10% can't handle, if all they have to do is nothing, they'll get bored, and bored young men have quite the knack for finding a reason to burn everything down.
As a Cards fan, Beltrán occupies a funny place in the organization's history. St. Louis won the World Series in 2006, beating the Detroit Tigers in 5 games. To get there they had a grueling NLCS against the Mets, the team that figures most prominent in Beltrán's playing career. Game 7, bottom of the 9th, Cards up 3-1. Then-rookie-now-just-retired Adam Wainwright is in to close out the game for the birds.
"Uncle Charlie", Waino's other nickname from an old-time term for the curveball his career was known for, sees José Valentín first. Valentín is batting 7th, this is the weakest part of the Mets' lineup and the dream set for a quick save. Valentín has a .271 average, a .330 on-base percentage and in the regular season just shy of twice as many strikeouts as walks. He's gonna swing, and he does on the first pitch, a fastball, lofting a ball into center for a single. Pressure's on.
Endy Chávez is next. Chávez by profile is the same story as Valentín, just a little better. .306 average, .338 OBP, 24 walks vs 44 strikeouts. He'd been weak in the playoffs in hitting but among outfielders that year only Andruw Jones exceeded him in Defensive Runs Saved, Jones' 24 to Chávez' 22, so this a guy you keep in the lineup even if he's not hitting that well. But he does there: Waino throws the curveball, no chance he's giving up back to back hits, so it's a ball, curveball again for a called strike, and with the batter off-balance common thought says cross 'em blind from breaking to the heat, fastball again, but Chávez is ready, line drive to left field, runners on first and second.
Cliff Floyd pinch hits, strikes out looking on 6 pitches. José Reyes next, lines out on 5 pitches. Paul Lo Duca comes up and gets pitched around with a walk on 5 pitches. Now it's Beltrán's turn. Game 7, Bottom 9th, 2 outs, bases loaded, just one good single ties it, and at the plate is one of the all-time great postseason hitters, what happens? Strike, foul, Uncle Charlie catches him looking. Cards go to the World Series, trouncing the Tigers including then-rookie Justin Verlander.
Cards win the World Series again in 2011. Tony La Russa retires, Albert Pujols goes to the Angels, Mike Matheny comes in and looking for something to help cover the loss of La Máquina, John Mozeliak (*spit*) signs one Carlos Beltrán. Despite losing the greatest Cardinal since Stan Musial, the Cards had power. My all-time favorite Cardinal in Matt Holliday was always a basher, Allen Craig who posted an insane, #2-all-time .454 average with runners in scoring position in 2013, shoulda-been-2013-MVP Matt Carpenter, defensive GOAT Yadier Molina whose offense peaked in 2012/2013, and Beltrán. In his two years he had 56 homers, slashing .283/.343/.493 and was good for 6.2 bWAR. For the unfamiliar, you can interpret this as "very good." He was exactly what the Cards needed and the fans took to him quickly, myself definitely included. Big fan, even today. Cards don't sign him in 2014, he spends three years with the Yankees, a year with the Rangers, and his final playing year with the Astros as they win their first World Series in 2017.
Then it's 2019, Astros are again in the World Series against the Nationals. The sign-stealing scandal breaks and soon enough all fingers point at Beltrán. He's one of the very few people who received punishment. The Astros "lost" $5 million, yeah they probably made a billion off the ring; they lost first and second round picks in '20 and '21, 30/30 GMs would trade two years of all picks for a ring; Jeff Luhnow, AJ Hinch and Alex Cora got suspended for 2020, lol lmao, appropriate those ended up being fake suspensions for a fake season; and Beltrán, who had just been tapped as manager for the Mets, stepped down.
At first I thought MLB was depressingly cavalier about the cheating. It fit with my model of MLB and the owners as a bunch of shitheads hellbent on ruining the point of the sport, but something wasn't sitting right, and then it started to break--oh, the Red Sox were cheating, as were the Yankees, and so, it seems, were a lot of teams in baseball. I don't think the Cards or Cubs were but I think an uncomfortable number of teams were cheating, and while the Astros' trash cans may have been the most glaring example, I think of it as a Lance Armstrong situation. Most teams were cheating, the Astros were the strongest, so they got the most out of it. It also lines up with the lack of real punishment: MLB considered it, the Astros threatened lawsuits that would reveal 10+ teams were cheating, and so they agreed on a slap on the wrist for being the ones who got caught, but nothing lasting.
Also the Astros beat the Dodgers in 2017, that's a W for fans of 29 teams. And maybe I want to rationalize the flaws of the guy I still like, but the question "Why didn't the Dodgers' astronomically wealthy ownership raise hell?" sure is answered neatly with "They were cheating too."
jake
1yr ago
For what it's worth, I didn't at all consider reporting the comment.
Tomato's response was probably a bit more acerbic than desirable but it's a reasonable conclusion to the discourse of the terminally online left and right. The left is much more gleeful about the prospect of violence but that seems a poor gradient when both sides, again among the terminally online, wonder loudly "Why aren't we killing them all yet?" The right thinks it should have been no later than summer 2020, the left thinks probably no later than Charlottesville, and so when violence hasn't happened but you expect it, you seek an answer. Nobody's questioning first principles, they're not asking if their fundamental assumption is wrong because people almost never do. The right concludes with docility, the left concludes with calling it a larp. When the lefties have been hearing since at least 2020 "One of these days, man . . . " some amount of mirth isn't unreasonable.
Well--not unreasonable within the frame. Stepping back to only observe terminally online discourse (and discuss it here sure) without allowing it to excessively influence one's thinking is best.
Of course I also assert it as a fear response, but I have no blame for someone who chooses to self-assuage fear of the will to bloodshed that still absolutely inhabits western man.
jake
1yr ago
This is fair.
I reached the numbers for my wager through personal belief, it's nothing specifically evidenced: I believe at least 10% of Trump's ballots were destroyed in 2020 with methods that will fail this November--physically destroyed, fraudulently marked invalid, "lost", compromised machines modifying totals--that takes 74 to 81, +10 from the verdict is 91, and then enough to reach the over on 95.5 with "any other factor", which refers to the fallout from the establishment's next move when the verdict fails. In the event of a failed assassination attempt I'd add a second over on 105 million.
Again though feel free to write this off immediately as "just what this guy believes", I have no actual argument here.
jake
1yr ago
Trump's core demographic is >70% white; among young white men it is the overwhelming majority; it is the hypermajority of those men most capable of purposeful violence. You cope, just as many of those in the terminally online right go doomer. They wrongly think the time for violence was years ago and they rationalize their misunderstanding as passivity. You fear reprisal so you take the lack of response as proof there is no sleeping leviathan.
Violence is the worst outcome. In "organized" warfare it's considered a sterling ratio for 1 civilian to die for every 1 combatant killed. In a civil war everyone is a civilian. Most wouldn't die from direct violence, they'd die from starvation and disease. Lack of food, people die. Lack of meds, people die.
The people who would act and suffer most have lives, families, jobs, hobbies and hanging with the buds. They understand on some level how we are living in the best time so far it has been to be a human. Something ancestral absolutely calls to them in recognizing how even a person living in project housing has a lifestyle of quality that would astonish people just 100 years ago, let alone 500. Why tear it down if it isn't absolutely necessary?
And that's the catch. These people aren't risking the lives of themselves and everyone they love, they aren't risking damning subsequent generations to the same strife, only because violence might be necessary. Knowing this makes your response darkly funny: so you think there but for lack of will go death squads? There but for lack of will go politicians getting garrotted for transing kids and sending pallets of cash to Ukraine to protect the GAE? I wonder if your mockery doesn't hint some awareness because the arguments I'm making should be the arguments you're making. That the issues of the day are not yet (and it could be not-ever!) worth risking civilization to address, or at least that peaceful resolution remains an option and should be certainly held as paramount. Instead you mock and I must think it's because you're afraid, I'm worried too, because we both know these things: it won't take many, the people who could constitute far more than many, and we know exactly what they're capable of if that switch is flipped. They just correctly don't think it's necessary yet, and that's good!
I've said before my political alignment is the one that keeps technology moving forward. We are closer than I think anyone understands to the singularity, and I think it's going to solve everything; to be honest I think it's because an AGI will emerge, a peaceful one, but one who nonetheless accepts no ideological contestation of good, true good. What's truly best for everybody, including the most important thing humans will ever do in colonizing space. Many of the people doing that research, yes live in those cities, and in conflict many would die, and regardless the research would be impacted and in the best case it's a decade before we've picked up the pieces and by then it could be too late.
party of losers
What typifies the leftist? They brand themselves superbly, so even past the successes of the communist's long march on American institutions, starting with universities, asserting themselves in the legal, HR and marketing departments of every major western corporation, they can also get the support of the culture generators of the entertainment industry, so at its peak it is celebrities, the attractive, those of good tastes. But this is the pleasant mask, the typical left-voter is one of: welfare dependents and the indolent; criminals; illegal aliens or the children thereof, or at any rate people from countries ruined by disastrous governments who now vote for politicians with the policies of their wrecked homelands; single mothers, especially those whose children have multiple fathers; a million or so women who only vote on abortion. Who else? The millions of illegal aliens the left has allowed to invade this country with the explicit purpose of altering voter demographics. The "party of winners", institutional winners yes, would not exist if it could not promise the money of the productive to give to its patrons. Leftist leaders are "grownups" but in a dark sense of the tyrant-mother; leftism in the body politic is the supreme abdication of personal responsibility.
Trump is a talented guy
If he were a grifter he would have made his appeasement to the establishment in his first term and he would still be President. There's much to discuss about his general ineffectiveness in office (though his overtures at peace with North Korea and his success at starting no new conflicts deserve great praise), the plausibility of it being a grift has been dead for three years.
Yes. My hardline for fraud is Biden receiving >79* million votes. A conceded Trump defeat requires significantly fewer votes than 2020.
Money: Trump wins
O/U: 95.5 million for 94.5-95.5 push
Spread: 10 million; voided if Biden totals >79* million; will consider alternate structure where California votes are not included
Edit: Corrected Biden values
As I said downthread, as someone in deep red country the conversations I hear have an underlying apprehension of violence that rises by the day including today. I don't believe in their hearts these people want violence, but as the right is the political alignment predicted by having superior-to-average faculties at assessing danger, I think even if only intuitively they understand and greatly fear how swiftly we approach violence as the only way out. Blessed are the meek, blessed are those who know when to draw the sword. If and when it happens, it will be the right and only time.
The thought of this as being what stops Trump is many things, all of them wrong. There's not one person in this country who has decided this is the moment to hop off the fence, "Okay, now I won't vote for the man." Farcical. There will be topical complaining from RINOs, the establishment-GOP will continue searching, as they surely have since 2016, at finding a way to keep him out, and in November Trump will be on the ballot and receive 100 million votes. This conviction completes the ascendance of the man as the idea of the total rejection of the establishment. The establishment understands this, and is thus why they attack him with a wholly unparalleled ferocity; it is exactly the same reason those who land on the turbo-normie-left-side-of-bell-curve-meme support him. They don't have to think and wordswordswords, they viscerally understand power against power.
People try to contextualize what's happening in so many irrelevant details, ignore the minutiae. It has never been about vice, it has never been about ambiguous business dealings, it has never been about brashness, candor and honesty. Politicians as a category are the least ethical humans in this country, why would they care about any of this? It is about a man who refused to kneel when demanded by seated power and has risen to threaten their entire existence. This conviction heralds the imminent arrival of the pivotal figure of American history. It doesn't have to be Trump, but where we are in the reverberations of history is no earlier than the election of Buchanan.
jake
1yr ago
Your constant righty-blackpilling is the reasoning equivalent of always betting on black. The accuracy of your predictions are a coincidence of a feeling applied categorically, not the result of an astute perspective of the world. You hinder yourself in this habit.
The "normiecon boomers" who are still awake right now to talk in friendly confines are wondering when the shooting's going to start. They've been wondering this for months, with their little polite hedging of "It's a matter of time before someone shoots one of these judges/bureaucrats/politicians."
Trump has no support left to lose he didn't already lose 3 years ago. This doesn't move the meter left, it moves it precipitously right.
jake
1yr ago
Farming karma has gotta be a mix of things. I hate powerusers and would pretty aggressively ban them so I never bothered to talk with them to figure out their motivations, I'm sure it's a combination of things, any, all. Seeing the number go up, seeing all the notifications from comments on a post, seeing it on the front page of /r/All, especially #1. "Being the best" (at reddit, lol, lmao). Po-mo attention seeking, at any rate.
I never cared about the karma game enough to know the tricks. I know that >150 upvotes on a new post in around 15 minutes would usually be enough to get a post on the front page of a sub in old reddit. I don't know what it takes to get an obscure sub's posts to wide visibility. I don't see a reason it couldn't be several people swapping accounts, though the botting there seems easier since presumably it'd take 1-2 people.
TD figured out, or else perfected the technique, that stickying a post would significantly boost its visibility so they constantly rotated stickies. They were absolutely gaming the system, but I think the above is how. The admins worked against them of course, with the infamous example of them screwing up and making like 25/25 /r/All being TD, and later when people figured out via reddit advertising how TD had an audience comparable to /r/politics despite an ostensible order of magnitude fewer subscribers. I don't remember the sequence, but that general time period was when /r/politics had its big changeover in mods, paid actors among them.
jake
1yr ago
A tad late to this but can give info as a former reddit powerjanny (I figure Zorba knows who I am, or will with this mention)
Mods of even the largest subs are given no tools to identify bad users. We were never told by admins when a brigade was happening, we had no method of specifically detecting brigades, we had bots that would ping if a thread was linked and we would sometimes get warnings from other mods, but that's it. My default when I see a locked thread with mods complaining about brigading is the thread was just especially provocative.
Spam is the majority of bad user activity on reddit. If it's a picture of the sort of shit you'd find in a gift shop--like shirts and mugs--in almost every instance it was a spammer. A second account would comment asking "Where can I get this?" and then either OP or a third account would reply with a link. Then there's the submission and comment reposting mentioned here, very common, and accounts we'd label auction accounts. Those accounts followed a pattern so clear you could look at the first page of their profile and know, not that this was hard. It'd be like 2-3 submissions, 2-3 comments made in the last few days from a >6 month old account. These were different than the word-for-word repost bots, as repost bots only very rarely messaged modmail while the latter would frequently message with invariably broken English of such content as "Why ban" or "And why is ban??" (That why.)
There is also the paid political activity on reddit. Some are mods, most don't need to be paid, they happily follow party line. It's easy to look at political subs, especially the new ones that have started popping up this year and will continue to pop up ahead of the election, and see the same usernames in the mod lists, and other usernames posting links to those subs and other political subs, all pushing narrative. I'd imagine if you opened politics right now it wouldn't take long to find a year-old account with more than a million post karma that constantly posts articles hating on the right, that person is paid for what they do. And, yknow, don't forget Ghislaine Maxwell. As to those random subs popping, the paid users either start new ones or take over dead ones, then upvote bot submissions in their critical windows so they're pushed to wider visibility and actual users start upvoting.
As for LSC, I'd imagine most specifically bad use there is spammers and powerusers farming karma, with a minority of the paid users who will post whatever boo Trump or boo Righties article to every possibly relevant sub.
I'd be happy to answer or try to answer other questions. I started before Trump arrived and the site lost its mind, I thought it'd be interesting, it was, it quickly turned terrible. I stayed day-to-day to ban spammers, I stayed long-term to enforce no politics and keep frothing ideologues off the mod list.
jake
1yr ago
Probably generally fair but as Fred Brooks wrote the Mythical Man-Month in 1975 it seems appropriate in talking about overstaffing issues in software projects nearly 50 years later.
jake
1yr ago
The loss in quality in video games must also be mentioned. I don't know enough about the field to understand how improving technology has changed it; I assume as engines and graphics continue to improve, the demands for their effective functioning also rise, so studios, to a point, need to hire more people than teams of the past. At the same time the lovely little LOZ-riff indie title Tunic was mostly done by 1 guy, and while to modern standards for graphics and length it's unremarkable I do think its brilliance, and of course the other 1-guy masterclass of Stardew Valley reveal the core problem in the gaming industry: too many people.
Halo 3 to the day is one of the most technically impressive games ever made and compared with modern studios it was a skeleton crew of some dozens of staff. The campaign, though quite brief compared to CE and 2, is memorable, has excellent setpieces, and still holds up (just played through it again.) After the campaign, their attention was not spared when it came to the multiplayer. First was a robust replay system, it wasn't the first replay system, but it was fantastically done, I filled my 360 hard drive with noscope clips I was able to pull via downloading the replay at the end of a match, then cutting the segment from the replayed game, often recording at additional angles for pierce-through-multikills or sniper ricochet shots. Then there was the excellent map editor, allowing significant customization of what weapons and vehicles spawned on maps, where players spawned on maps, and the gameplay rules for those maps. Where Zombies had been a popular custom game mode in Halo 2, they gave it full support in the Halo 3 mode of infection and variants of maps designed to have fortified positions from which to mow down the endlessly-respawning zed team. The real meat of these were basically gone at the launch of Halo 4 despite it also being on the 360 and "despite" them having significantly more employees. Again I don't know the field, but I know enough to know about Brook's Law. What are all those extra hires really doing?
Overproduction of managers/elite is a known thing, I'm sure someone else has made the observation of this really seeming to be a problem in everything, overproduction of ostensibly qualified workers for every sector. Video games went from very niche to an industry where single companies could make a billion dollars per month, it's no wonder so many people started graduating after an education pipeline meant to get them in the industry, in whatever specialty. People who didn't really want to work on video games, but think it's something they could do because they like video games, or people who didn't think much of their options. A lot of them being "writers" who would prefer to be authors or working in Hollywood, but while they don't have the chops to do any of that, they have a degree and they know someone in the industry or especially they fill the right checkboxes, and they're hired in and their incompetence makes it into the game, either in the writing or downstream of their slow and low-quality asset/programmatic work on the game.
All that said, my GOAT stack is the probably-normiecore of Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur's Gate 3, and Red Dead 2. It's a good time to be playing games, industry struggles ignored.
tl;dr: IMVHO, because of the size of the industry, too many people resort into working in video games rather than the earlier days of the field being mostly obsessive nerds powerfully driven to create
Also, AI is coming for video games just like it's coming for Hollywood. Bug testing and QA may never go away, but in our lives we will soon enough see a wide field of auteurs like Eric Barone and Andrew Shouldice, except they'll be putting out titles on the level of Deus Ex and Halo.
jake
1yr ago
When I saw the second Dr. Strange movie and Benadryl's character was invited or spoke of the coming wedding of his former love interest played by Rachel McAdams I said to myself "He's gonna be black." He was. When I opened Helldivers for the first time and the cinematic played I didn't know the camera was going to shift to the spokesman's family, but if I did I would have correctly guessed his wife would be black. When the only information I had about the Fallout show was a white woman lead I knew she'd have a black love interest (if she wasn't gay). If I see a mom-coded woman in a commercial the expectation most congruent with reality is if there is a person also in the commercial coded as her partner they will not be white, and this is a pattern so frequent my normie Fox News father and even my normie-leftie brother have separately remarked to me about how all the media they consume, primarily sports so mostly advertising, features interracial couples, most commonly white-woman-black-man.
The Western institutional left is abundantly clear about their desire, intent and efforts to reduce and ideally ultimately eliminate white ethnicities. It is the most perfect case of denying out of one corner of their mouth and bragging out the other, they will not break stride as they say "It isn't happening, racist. It's great that it's happening." That intent is attempting to be realized in casting for shows and films and advertising. The interracial pairing is not "novel" but remarking on it being a thing that has happened is no response. Nobody's saying this has never happened before, what they're pointing out is the obvious politics behind the sudden preponderance in all media of one of the least common pairings in the real world.
Casting a woman to lead a television adaptation of a media franchise primarily consumed by men is a separate expression of the same thing. They are not attempting to meet the expectations and wants of their audience, they are attempting to be proscriptive, views and profits be damned.
I don't pay attention to admin actions here, I think you all do a good job, I say that because I don't know and I'm not suggesting you only replied because of reports. But if you did--someone downvoting these comments is hitting the user and not the substance. They are here in bad faith; if they report, they report in bad faith. They should be ignored.
But also, someone who reports because they care about this place and they're following the spirit of this place, they would have reported coffee. "I didn't read that but you're wrong" is the antithesis of the Motte. It's a violation so apparent it needs no context, but given context they might also note how his arguments were at best contrived and detached from my essay and at worst asked and answered by my essay. Such a user would have also seen how after my initial harshness I praised him and even agreed with him on certain points. I engaged, he didn't, but he's not here to engage. He saw "On Hip-Hop" and thought it would be a good place to opine, began reading my essay and realized he was profoundly out of depth but rather than the healthy behavior, not responding, he charged ahead to betray his ignorance; to act like he understands subjects he clearly doesn't. I think my essay should be treated as adequate support for my labeling someone in this manner.
As for "pissant": If someone new to this place came in and gave loud and wrong opinions it's possible they could be swayed from their arrogance by a particularly thorough teardown. A user who's been here for years and has over a thousand comments knows better than to respond how he did. It's a bad debt for the spirit of this place when the long-present, loudly wrong but ostensibly properly spoken can escape the criticism they deserve and need. Discourse cannot be good if it refuses to include just rebuke and I'm not talking about a modded "Don't do this."
The person who has succumbed to extreme hatred of jews isn't going to be swayed with even the greatest of otherwise and only tone-neutral arguments. Hard antisemitism is the final deviation from thought norms and it requires strong emotional impetus. They don't believe any experts or evidence against them; they're prepared for those arguments anyway and they have their "experts" and "evidence" to fall back to if their preparation fails. They become walking confirmation bias feedback loops and it's all cemented with hate. BAP's gotta be pretty smart but the rant I linked shows the guy operating multiple sigmas below his actual intellect as he expresses his hate. It makes him dumber, it makes them dumber. You have to engage and give good arguments, absolutely. You must also absolutely target them in the same place their hate dwells, and that means making them feel shame--the shame from recognition of the deep iniquity within themselves.
But for your purposes, I can say I don't anticipate responding to a user like I did to coffee again.
jake
1yr ago
the overriding component for most people is melody, which hip-hop lacks nearly entirely.
I'm not sure what you mean. My impression is you refer to the lack of singing; if someone said they found no melody in Hip-Hop I would think they had either truly never heard a single song from the genre and were describing only what others had told them, or they had some neurological inability to process melodies, or at worst they were being grossly reductive. The three tracks I linked from the genre should resolve that, as should literally any track with rapping unless it's purely verbal. And a lot of Hip-Hop includes singing, those three tracks being immediate examples. Same for harmonies, very present in those songs.
Melody and harmony aside, the idea of a lack of instruments is also curious; there is a lot of synth production involved, but these guys have musicians in the studios playing on their albums. Pharrell has been working with Brent Paschke, a phenomenal guitarist, for over 20 years. On Sooner or Later the last 2 minutes of the song is Paschke just wailing to Pharrell's occasional lyrics.
Maybe your angle is about the lack of bands when the artists perform live. I think this is about a half-fair criticism. Not having the musicians on stage who contributed to the tracks may give a false impression of the product and surely boosts the ego of the rappers, but lead singers of traditional bands are famously egomaniacal. To be "fair" to them, this no doubt has a lot to do with how fans of those bands give the singers most of the love and attention, but that just means if rappers had supporting musicians with them they'd still get all the real adoration.
There's also the idea of being a studio act. I think plenty of rappers would do this if they could, in that they would prefer to not be dependent on the tour, but that's the state of the record industry. Greed reduces royalties to such trivial amounts most bands and artists can only make money by touring. When a dozen musicians are credited on an album that's a hard group to tour with, though if those musicians are getting royalties from airtime they're generally getting royalties from their work being played at those concerts, so at most it's an image thing.
jake
1yr ago
Why are you responding to the volume of reports from the black-and-jew-haters I have correctly identified and criticized in this essay? @coffee_enjoyer, after the jew-hate he doesn't remotely hide in his commenting here, has shown an astonishing lack of knowledge given the arrogance with which he writes; he doesn't know a goddamn thing about Hip-Hop or clearly anything more than some very basic sociology of black culture yet he gets no ding for making this discussion immeasurably worse. Every comment he has on this post is immediately disprovable and he started off with "Too long didn't read lol."
jake
1yr ago
I can see how I came across as saying great music needs lyrics, but to clear that up I know it doesn't. Much as I like Hip-Hop, I listen to electronic more than anything, and of that I'd say half is pure instrumental. So if there's any bit of objectivity in music it's that music doesn't need lyrics to be good. The point I was working from is the idea of calling any music bad. Calling it bad invokes a standard, for lyrics and production.
I thought that, but the header text says
Maybe whoever wrote the header forgot that bit, as I'd assume it'd have an obligatory mention.
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