kky
3mo ago
a country that had just lost a war
This is the excuse that the defeatists gave in the moment, but in fact they had not lost the war, and de Gaulle went on to win it. Had he the advantage of the French fleet and a loyal army evacuated to North Africa (which the Germans could not touch, in accordance with what their generals were writing at the time and in retrospect), one can only imagine the process being smoother. The armistice question was also up in the air for longer than you suggest.
George Lucas was probably thinking of a combination of Caesar, Napoleon, and Hitler.
None of these were known as kindly old men in whom the country could trust in trying times and who was willing and eagerly voted excessive powers by a legislative body feeling lost and ineffective, which is Lucas’ text here. The first (whichever you choose) won a civil war and set terms. The second leveraged a generalcy into a coup. The third used a popular movement of angry young men to quell opposition and gain legitimacy. None were voted in by a deceived parliament thinking it was a jolly good thing too. On the other hand, Petain is actually a good parallel to the literal text. I suggest the Wikipedia analysis, insofar as it ignores the words, is misguided.
kky
3mo ago
Yeah, I think it’s mostly about what makes for better TV. A riot from people who you can allege are trying to hang the Speaker is immediate, visceral, you don’t need to know much to enjoy it. A plan to file paperwork wrong, deliberately, is comparatively lame. Could paperwork be that important?
It reminds me of that scene from the old Star Wars movie where everyone is voting away their rights in favor of an emperor. Or, if you prefer, the actual event I think it was based on, which was really two events: the selection of Marshal Petain as the head of an interim French government to negotiate capitulation with Hitler, and the subsequent vote to give him unlimited constitutional powers. The first was rather popular, as everyone thought well of Petain, and the second was forced through with the assistance of ruffians shouting down from the galleries and thuggish ministers physically blocking a floor debate. George Lucas preferred the first scene over the second, for some reason. Really makes you think, huh.
kky
3mo ago
The riot on Jan 6 was a distraction, a representation of the real danger, which was the Eastman plan to attempt to present an alternate slate of electors and undo the results of the election.
This was way more dangerous than you’re letting on. If it had succeeded, then essentially any amount of violence from the left would have been justified, because the formal process of the election was undermined.
The rioters, sure, they were not as damaging. But seriously wargame the next moves in America if that plan worked. It’s not pretty.
kky
3mo ago
There is a bright line which I hope the backlash does not cross. The bright line is the support for political violence and terrorist acts. The American left has been extraordinarily undisciplined about advocating these things. (The right has been modestly better mostly by virtue of getting kicked off most sites but 4chan, where you can go find advocacy for political violence and terrorist acts if you so desire.)
If the effect of this winds up being that advocating for violence on social media becomes extremely unpopular, that would be an excellent thing for America. It would be a real cooling of the overall temperature. If, instead, it becomes an excuse for the lunatic right to breach containment, it would be quite bad.
The cancel culture part is honestly much less important than this. Part of how things went south in France in the early 20th was people coordinating with one another to one-up on crazy demands to destroy the Other on their niche media (newspapers). The temperature kept going up and it made it impossible for people to cooperate on anything, even keeping the Germans from conquering them. Free speech is highly important, but the standard criticism is that speech acts are real and form a weakness to a blanket policy thereof. Advocating popular and political violence is one such act.
kky
3mo ago
I’m going to highlight what I think is interesting and valuable about this comment, which I see being totally lost in the outrage in other replies. Forgive me if this isn’t original, OP.
Mangione’s motive - and potentially this other shooter’s motive, too - was not the strategic implementation of political principle. It was extremely personal, and the personal elements are what actually drove the murder. This is similar to past assassinations, like the schizo in Minnesota who believed he was personally carrying out Walz’s will on Earth.
But the murder, which was to the killer personal, became public. And when it became public, the public used it for their own purposes. The personal element was consumed by the strategic implementation of other people’s political principles. Kirk’s death may (let’s accept OP’s premise) have been just the expression of a personal idea, intent, purpose, but that’s gone now. All that remains is politics.
Or, in the words of someone far wiser than I:
But none of these templates are true, in the sense that there's no causality. They are merely post hoc descriptive. And since dead men tell no tales, you can pretty much describe one any way you want, for your own purposes.
If Joe Stack had reflected on that, he would never have hit the ignition.
kky
3mo ago
What do you mean? Nutjobs are definitionally the most likely people to commit senseless violence, since they’ve taken leave of theirs. They’re also very likely to have spotty political records because their political beliefs are concretely a stand-in for their own unstable emotions. This is largely dog bites man news.
The issue is that the overall environment is heated enough that madmen take assassination as their preferred form of acting out, instead of stripping naked in public and announcing the end times.
kky
3mo ago
The comparison is made much, much worse by the obvious fact that THIS black man WAS sitting in the back…
kky
3mo ago
The missing part of all of these stories, IMO, is: where does the shared money go? If all the men in the family work and all the women are married and raising children, then communalizing wealth to handle the elderly, a widow and orphans, and hard-to-finance large one-off expenses seems like a fairly unobjectionable practice. In larger society we leave that to the government, or at least a local church, at significantly higher graft than my hypothetical, and someone trying to “make it on his own” is an obvious tax evader.
But I expect this isn’t the whole story, and the reality is an excess of men who don’t work or women who aren’t married or an unusual quantity of drink for the amount of money earned. That’s what’s really wrong: the family exerts authority to tax, but not authority to force good behavior. That is, this isn’t a criticism of the “demand sharing” family, it’s a criticism of an undemanding welfare state that lets he who does not work to eat.
But I’d be interested in the specifics. The above is largely prejudice.
kky
3mo ago
nowhere I went was it possible to get half-decent Moroccan or Iranian food, nor is there anything that even beats the rock bottom tier of German bread in Germany
Interesting - I live near a little Persian exclave. There’s a few Persian restaurants down the way. Guess they’re hard to find, though.
For bread, there’s a half-decent place I know of, but for anything good I’d recommend Wisconsin. It’s technically coastal.
kky
3mo ago
Self-sacrifice, I think, is born in part of the realization that nothing important is sacrificed.
If people believe the “self” is paramount, they will sacrifice everything at that altar. That’s a pretty tidy modus ponens. Reality is that the self is nothing but a heat haze. It comes, and it passes. There are other things more enduring. Duty, for instance. Then it’s easy to do things that are hard.
The other day, my father said to me: “I don’t really feel pain as deeply as other people. I think it’s because, in my youth, I had a few times when I was in really intense pain, and couldn’t do anything about it. So, I suppose, my body learned it wasn’t anything life-threatening. So it doesn’t bother me any more.” So too threats to the “self.” One lives through them. But enforcing it, I think, may just make it worse. Simply support them. Show the fruits of another life, and they may be persuaded.
kky
3mo ago
Here’s my take from a few bosses and couple upgrades in.
Overall, the game’s pretty fun and meaningfully more difficult than the first. I feel pretty confident saying this. I 100%ed (112%) the first game deathless, and it wasn’t that hard. I’ve gone back to it a couple of times and it’s been very easy to pick back up. On my first play through I even got several bosses on my first try. Silksong is not giving me trouble on the level of, say, Sekiro, but it’s not nearly so easy.
I think there are two elements driving this. First, the enemies all have truly obnoxious amounts of health. It feels like every fight takes about 1.5 to 2x what it would in the original. IMO this is a hard miss. The original had a challenge mode for forcing boss completion with perfect or near-perfect mechanics. Extending the time to complete a boss will force perfect mechanics but honestly gets quite boring. I’ve so far found it pretty straightforward to learn mechanics and perform for a few minutes, but it’s not the best experience.
The second part is that the movement in the game is way messier than the first. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The first game had exceptionally clean movement, which made it a tactile delight to play. Silksong’s movement is comparatively weird. My hands are well practiced in Hollow Knight movement, and I have a hard time adjusting to the different down attack movement. This is one change of many. So some of this challenge is just a learning curve. Back to Sekiro, I had to eat dirt at the first actual boss for something like an hour to get the main mechanics under control. That’s table stakes. I also suspect that using the non-basic attack options (“tools”) is much more important than in most games in the genre, but a serious miss here is that the degree of their importance is not obvious from menus… This means that the player is not quite encouraged to experiment. For all of these I expect that the game will shake out over time, and I do like the systems even if they do not come naturally.
Last thought. The areas of the game so far have been lackluster. Hollow Knight made it very clear how the pieces tied together into a unified whole. The starting area is literally a crossroads suggesting what was once present in that land. In Silksong you start in an iron foundry that is apparently still active. I don’t know what to make of that except that the devs wanted both a lava level and red ants, which I believe got cut from Hollow Knight. If this game is eight years in the making for cutting-room floor scraps from the original it leaves much to be desired. But I’ll wait on that judgment.
kky
3mo ago
This is roughly correct. For the debt reform to work without a moral hazard, the part(ies) who profited most from the debt must be heavily punished.
One way to accomplish this would be to, instead of debt forgiveness, to allow former students to settle their debt with the proceeds of a lawsuit against their alma mater at the cost of their degree. Think your degree wasn’t worth the cost? Just return the defective goods…
kky
3mo ago
With respect, and since I generally enjoy reading what you have to say, I don’t think this is a very good take. In fact, it seems more accurately to be a description of how a government will always act with private organizations: it will, in one way or another, become influenced by them or try to tell them what to do. Only in rare circumstances can they be persuaded to leave one another alone.
This is because the government in question is not totalitarian; that is, society is ordered in some manner by organizations that are outside of the government. Nominally their spheres of influence do not overlap, but practically, they almost always do. This problem gets worse the more powerful the private organizations get, and the more they disconnect from either the implicit organization of the government or the roots of its power. In cases where the government and organizations see eye to eye with one another and with the power base, disagreements can be managed with a simple request or negotiation. When they cannot, the government will try to coerce the organizations, and the organizations will try to subvert the government. These are nothing more than the straight-line solutions to the inevitable conflicts which arise, much in the same vein as war.
Of course, it is possible to define areas of responsibility and depend on the good character of leaders on both sides of the divide, which results in a better society. But I won’t beat on the drum of culture this very second.
So what characterizes an authoritarian government, or organization? Simply that people low on the totem pole have few avenues for independent action or redress. This has a very limited relationship to collusion between private and public parties; correlation, not identity. (The army has always been authoritarian, even in very free societies.)
Now, what I think is really wrong with your post is that it sparks a comparison with the Obama presidency, like an allergic reaction. So instead of talking about Trump, now this forum is back to relitigating how awful Hillary was. That’s a bad thing. We shouldn’t be stuck in a cycle of petty chuddery over past resentments. I don’t think this was intentional, but it’s a pretty bad outcome regardless.
Moreover, on the logical front, it’s temporally fraught. This is responding to Trump 2, but TDS began before Trump was even inaugurated, before he was even elected. And - I’m not sure about everyone else, but TDS feels a lot calmer this time around, people talk about the guy less. So this doesn’t work as an explanation.
If we’re just talking TDS, the most charitable explanation has to include the fact that it is clearly deranged, that its worst predictions have not come true. The basic claims, back from 2016, are that Trump would set himself up as dictator (didn’t happen, made a half-baked attempt that actually set much of the country firmly against him, and he’s looking too old for a second shot now), and that he was a pawn of Russia (in reality he’s just a little naive about Putin, like some other right-wingers are, but hasn’t conceded anything major). The evidence then was weak, but the certainty was absolute. I believe it to have been a simple translation of the underlying sentiment of shock when Trump won. It meant that victory in elections was not assured, when all their information had told them it was. The support for Trump had come from somewhere totally illegible, which is why they could not foresee it. These emotions should rightly have been translated into a new awareness, a new zeitgeist, in which the challenges of America under globalization took the forefront, where previously the meaning-making institutions of left and right had made their existence impossible (to understand). But this was too much for almost anyone to handle. Instead, the emotions got repressed into insane but still easier to manage forms: it’s not Americans, it’s Russians; also this elected official is undemocratic and authoritarian. Now it’s safe. The move on the right, FWIW, was more cynical: “oh, these are the new wacky Christians, just say the right things and they won’t pay attention to the more complicated parts of policy, like tax breaks.” And, from what I can tell, they were totally right, so one point to them.
Anyway, people have had a lot more time to digest, and developments under Biden have made the anti-globalist complaints way more legible, so there’s less TDS this time. And the current complaints are about what he IS DOING (usually: playing really fast and loose with the law; ignoring second-order consequences), and while these are sometimes factually a little shaky, they’re not nearly as crazy as hypothesizing wildly about what he MIGHT DO. So I’m not sure I’d describe it as a major force in America any longer, if that means anything.
kky
3mo ago
Adding to this, (some of) the people who react this way are also ones who feel upset and betrayed when their side has power and doesn’t achieve every possible goal, often against predictable and legible opposition from the other party, the centrists, and the other branches of government. Is it possible that some of our civic dysfunction rests on the back of sheer misconceptions about how a republic is intended to operate…?
kky
3mo ago
In my opinion, the interesting part of this isn’t the cell coverage. That’s an obvious scapegoat. You mean every time a train goes through a tunnel, everyone aboard starts hallucinating rapes? Before the cell phone every gathering of more than 10,000 caused an imaginary murder crisis? No, the cell coverage is funnily enough a metaphor, used concretely and not in a literary sense, for societal breakdown. Cell coverage goes down, and people interpret that as society going down, and that means the things they register as primal, pre-social, appear before them like fear in the dark. And when the lights come back on, they report that (to them) the things they thought they saw were caused by the dark, when anyone outside can see it was the fear…
Not sure what else to draw from that, but it’s an interesting vignette. Thanks for bringing it.
kky
4mo ago
In the current cultural moment, progressivism is mostly associated with shoddy, preachy art. I could name names, but I think everyone has at least one example that comes to mind. So: is there an example, today, of good progressive art? I’d say yes, and point to Toby Fox’s DELTARUNE.
DELTARUNE is a pseudo-sequel to the extraordinary success of Undertale, with most of the same characters but almost none of the same plot points. Both games are fairly linear 2D turn-based RPGs with some puzzle and real-time elements.
First, in what way is it progressive?
- The game is absolutely saturated in gender non-conformance. The fighter of the party is a tough girl. The healer is a sensitive boy in a dress. The main character is deliberately androgynous, and is referred to as “they.” The main romance that features is lesbian.
- Ditto pluralism. Most of the characters are “monsters,” which are generally anthropomorphized but come in all varieties. The main character is the one human. They all live happily together.
- To expand on this, the “enemies” in the game are not really enemies. Persuade them a little, and they will lay down arms. Mistake theory predominates.
So, what makes the game good?
- On the aesthetic front, the obvious standout is the music. Toby Fox is a competent and creative composer with a real flair for making catchy tunes.
- Equally, the game oozes creative vision and whimsy. It’s full of interesting ideas - like a computer-themed level replete with viruses, ads, and a “Tasque Manager” - which it executes on splendidly.
- In that vein, Toby Fox also is superb at tying everything in the game together like an auteur. The sound matches the gameplay matches the story matches the graphics. It is very hard to find anything seriously out of place. (I do not call him an auteur simply because that implies that all ideas for the game source from him, when there are very obviously sections that match someone else’s vision. What he does is seamlessly mesh those sections into the overall experience.)
- The gameplay is also quite expansive. It includes elements of bullet hells, rhythm games, etc, all as they make sense. The game is never shy to add something new if it might be fresh or interesting. This especially livens up the combat.
But what I think makes this a good PROGRESSIVE game is something a little different:
- The game is not slavishly progressive. It is set in a small town, where everyone knows one another and goes to church on Sundays. This is portrayed as a little stifling but also kind of sweet. There are plenty of straight and gender-conforming characters (though it’s pretty low on typical machismo). It does not follow line item requirements on any topics du jour, and indeed there is a section lampooning a polyamorous “throuple” (Toby’s words, not mine) run by a deeply obnoxious busybody pushing around two hapless and unhappy orbiters.
- Real-world politics are totally absent. There is no sexism. There is no analogue to any real racial group. There are rich and poor people, and differences between them, but there’s no hatred for one or the other.
- The characters themselves are compelling. I’m not going to go so far as to say they’re particularly deep, but Toby is great at showing rather than telling, and overall they ring true. Small example: at the start of the game, you wake up in a room with two beds. One has a shelf full of trophies and awards and all kinds of cool games, music discs, and so on. The one you wake up in is barren and gray. It very quickly becomes apparent that your older brother is off at college. This paints a picture that does not need extensive textual elaboration. You get a sense of who your character is from the world you inhabit and how people talk to you. This pattern is repeated over, and over, and over, and it’s quite refreshing.
These points are where most progressive art falters. It slavishly follows a set of predefined norms, instead of the artist’s opinions; it drowns itself in politics and analogy; its characters exist purely to push one or another point, which must be driven home explicitly, and wind up flat because of it. This creates something pretty drab and uninteresting, no matter the political stance which generates it.
I’ll leave off there. I don’t want to point too much attention to the line-items of progressive ideology in the game, which are better suited to the CW thread, but draw out how art is able to include ideology without being consumed by it, which I consider fun enough for Friday.
Opinions on DELTARUNE or other ideological but non-terrible art welcome.
kky
4mo ago
I think this is the hidden factor behind all the insane numbers. There are these insanely rich young men - through no special virtue of their own - in a culture that valorizes and prohibits sex to a massive degree, such that it’s basically unavailable to them under ordinary circumstances. So they have one thing they really want and nigh unlimited resources to throw at it. Cut this out and I’m guessing the numbers plummet.
kky
4mo ago
I think the core problem is that nobody really likes the Girlboss, here defined as a synonym of Mary Sue rather than anything else, but a rather large group of people feel obligated on political grounds to include her in stories. It’s sort of like a certain genre of Christian allegorical protagonist, who is always good and opposes the many faces of evil, which of course are all atheism, and receives infinite blessings which are immediately apparent for their good behavior. There’s nothing particularly interesting or appealing about this character, and indeed the most narratively compelling part of Christianity (going back to the life of Christ) is the struggle with oneself and inevitable temporal consequences of choosing what is right over what is advantageous. But, from what it appears, the key motive of the storytellers is to encourage virtue and avoid vice as a sort of line item thing. Check them off: never take the Lord’s name in vain, tithe or donate appropriately, wear the right amount of coverage… and so on. So they think it’s necessary to make the stories very simple and to keep them laser-focused on the right things, because it’s unconscionable to even come close to permitting the bad things.
So instead of a story, you get something like a spiritual safety manual. “John always wears his hard hat. But Bob didn’t, and got seriously hurt.” Great - safety manuals are supposed to be blunt and no-nonsense. You don’t want to encourage deep intellectual exploration of the morals of lock-out-tag-out. You just want the fuckers to do it. But these aren’t stories, in the end. Stories are meant to entertain, and at their highest purpose to encourage a kind of internal and emotional development which I think is the true nature of virtue, over and above the box-ticking. That means seeing otherwise good and impressive people make mistakes, human mistakes, and wrestle with the imperfect clay of humanity as they are and not how one wishes they would be. It means that Christ must curse the fig tree and spend a lot of time talking to prostitutes, and in the end, bear his cross.
This is roughly what is wrong with the Girlboss. There’s a lot of instruction on Dismantling the Patriarchy, as a series of required checkboxes, but nothing really interesting to the character. So the people who write her feel obliged to, but never really feel interested in her. If the numbers are correct, they prefer romantasy. And this gap between ill-considered moralism and pure hedonism would be filled by works of real virtue, except that all the air’s been sucked out and there’s nothing left but a void.
Goes without saying that none of this really helps girls learn how to grow into women with power over their own lives and communities, which I thought was the point but apparently wasn’t.
kky
4mo ago
Mexico is AFAIK basically a narcostate. Opposition “disappears” and then reappears in several different garbage bags.
Hungary - not familiar on the details, what gibs do they give to whom?
SA is a bit of a special case. To be a majoritarian gibs-based political party, on practical terms you need an exceptionally productive minority to tax for the sake of the voterbase. This doesn’t happen in most places. SA, with a wealthy white minority, is able to do it. I’d call it an exception that proves the rule.
kky
4mo ago
Hmm… I’m not sure how true either of those is of the examples I gave. Japan’s main “gibs” are highly focused domestic policies around food and agriculture, and I think they’re better categorized as strategic subsidies. Singapore mostly gives to its minorities, but the ruling party depends on the (non-gibs-receiving) Chinese majority for most of its support. I do know that Singapore actively represses other parties, but Japan does not, and the main party actually lost an election recently (and are now trying desperately to reform internally to weed out corruption).
Is it true of, say, Russia? Yeah, because Putin doesn’t depend on votes. But I’m not sure it’s true of countries with permanent or near-permanent elected parties. If there’s information you have to the contrary I’m all ears.
kky
4mo ago
No, it could certainly be vote manipulation of some sort (I think Singapore did it effectively by importing a lot of Chinese), but it’s not gerrymandering. That term is fairly precisely about redistricting.
kky
4mo ago
My argument is effectively that trying to secure power in a democracy through anything other than pleasing the majority of constituents is eventually opposed to its own goal. If you can get away with pleasing your constituents less by virtue of a gerrymander, then they will come to distrust you. If they distrust you, your voterbase will erode out from under the gerrymander, and when the dam bursts you will be in real trouble. The one-party democratic systems, like in Singapore and Japan, are obsessed with pleasing the majority of constituents and use the opposition parties as ways to find areas where they are falling behind public opinion. That’s the heart of it.
kky
4mo ago
I’m not personally sold on the correlation myself. Plenty of dumb harpies out there. Meanwhile, the smart women I know (NOT identical to academics) are generally pretty nice, including to me, a man.
Now, what I do see a correlation on is deference. A smart woman is more likely to challenge you on things and assert her own opinion, and less likely to take what you say at face value, holding kindness constant. This is simply because they’re more capable of going toe to toe on the details on account of their intelligence. So if you say something stupid, a smart woman will call you out, possibly nicely, but certainly accurately. And she’ll bring receipts. So for a man who likes to impress his woman (all men), this can be a bit of a challenge. Does she still like me and look up to me? Chances are yes, but it’s something a little galling. It’s like a man doing better with a child or animal - a sort of personalized, gendered insult.
So maybe that’s where it comes from. For me, dumb is such a dealbreaker that I can’t really look past it. But attraction is one of those things where people can never really see eye to eye, and I guess that’s a good thing in itself.
Sure.
Jan 6, a group of protesters gathers around the Capitol, some breaking in. They are under the impression they are demanding a recount and an investigation into fraud. Inside, a group of Trump loyalists inform the frightened Congressmen that they are demanding a corrected record, and there is no telling what they might do. A set of unfamiliar people, claiming to be electors, arrive and announce an alternative slate for Trump. Dissent is quashed by law enforcement, which says the situation is “dangerous” and that loud debate may draw attention. Pence walks in, and announces that in accordance with the text of the Constitution, he can verify electors. He verifies the new one. The people present do not know what to do, and do not oppose this move. Pence declares Trump as the continuing President.
Jan 7. News of this event comes out. America is immediately divided. Trump claims that he is President. Biden claims he won the election, and is now the president. Congressional Democrats move to invalidate the Jan 6 decision. Trump loyalists in Congress oppose the move strongly. Most Republicans aren’t sure what to do, and try to delay. A few days later, the first protests are organized and start. After nightfall they quickly descend into riots. MAGA counterprotests immediately follow. Mayors attempt to control the worst of it with riot police, but they increasingly struggle to control the crowds and opt to let the two sides have it out. News channels blast opposing viewpoints, and one-up each other in extreme language. Despite all this, things are eerily silent, and nothing really changes leading up to inauguration.
Jan 20. Trump arranges an inauguration in Washington DC. He deploys the National Guard around it. Biden, citing concerns for safety, withdraws to NYC and holds his inauguration there. Congressional Democrats go with him.
Jan 21. Biden, as President, orders the National Guard to defend him as he moves into the White House and displaces the pretender. Trump countermands that order. Both demand that the other be arrested. Some Guardsmen agree to support each side, and the civil war begins. What happens next depends on chance and individual conscience and is beyond predicting.
I hope I’ve made my point. The natural result of the plot was two people declaring their formal status as President at the same time. The moment one of them tries to exercise his executive authority you have a civil war. This is not particularly imaginative; this is what happens in history, over and over again, whenever you have a succession crisis that isn’t nipped in the bud. In reality, Trump backed down and the crisis ended. That was lucky. We were not guaranteed luck.
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