netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
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User ID: 647
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
1d ago
She had lovely legs. I would say that for her. They were a couple of pretty smooth citizens, she and her father.
I can’t say why this one hit me so hard. It’s so stupid. I love it. Material for the Lyttle Lytton contest.
But the best scene so far has been the four-way confrontation in some jerk’s apartment.
I hit Agnes on the head with less delicacy than before, kicked her off my feet, and stood up. Brody flicked his eyes at me. I showed him the automatic. He stopped trying to get his hand into his pocket.
"Christ!" he whined. "Don't let her kill me!"
I began to laugh. I laughed like an idiot, without control. Blonde Agnes was sitting up on the floor with her hands flat on the carpet and her mouth wide open and a wick of metallic blond hair down over her right eye. Carmen was crawling on her hands and knees, still hissing. The metal of her little revolver glistened against the baseboard over in the corner. She crawled towards it relentlessly.
I waved my share of the guns at Brody and said: "Stay put. You're all right."
I stepped past the crawling girl and picked the gun up. She looked up at me and began to giggle. I put her gun in my pocket and patted her on the back. "Get up, angel. You look like a Pekinese."
I went over to Brody and put the automatic against his midriff and reached his Colt out of his side pocket. I now had all the guns that had been exposed to view. I stuffed them into my pockets and held my hand out to him.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
1d ago
Sir, the goalposts are back there.
quite wrong to lose the ability to control the destiny of your people
They have not lost it. They are choosing—of their own free will!—policies which might give it up. Why do you think that is?
More importantly, why do you think they need to “correct” it? If you’re trying to give them “control of their destiny,” maybe a military dictatorship is a complete nonstarter.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
1d ago
I, too, would be interested in a local perspective. Coverage of the CDU says they came out of 2025 federal elections alright. Now they’re falling out of individual states?
Maybe their economic stance is that unpopular. There’s some sort of landlord crisis in Berlin proper, so residents have started going full socialist.
But what’s up with M-V? It’s the least dense state in Germany. Is this an urban/rural split? Are there even any immigrants over that far?
Even if the AfD were to somehow convince every single ethnic German in the city to oust the Ausländer, ethnic Germans will soon be a minority in their own capital city.
I think this is pretty silly. AfD has decidedly not convinced everyone that it’s the last hope of the German race, so the 25/42/50% equivocation is beside the point. As discussed downthread, it’s also not obvious how many of those 25% actually get a vote.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
1d ago
I can think of a couple from Germany.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
1d ago
That’s nice, but they didn’t lose that ability.
Ethnic Germans still have majorities (almost?) everywhere. They are choosing not to vote as a bloc. I think this is a good thing; coalition governments are more accountable than one-party states. Note that naturalized citizens apparently aren’t voting as a bloc either. They’re just much less likely to go AfD.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
1d ago
I tried a couple Poirot short stories recently. Not super impressed. Sherlock Holmes if he only had 10 pages to work it out. Not that there aren’t some redeeming qualities, but it didn’t wow me at all.
My wife and I are continuing our tradition of reading aloud before bed. We started with Wodehouse but the current novel is Chandler’s The Big Sleep. My God, this is incredible. Marlowe just sort of stands around until people get uncomfortable and either leave the evidence or try to kill him. And there are so many hilarious phrases.
Least expected feature: Los Angeles. I always assumed noir was a New England thing.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
1d ago
I just read that one!
Not nearly as self-contained as M&C, but it’s fun and badass and absolutely hilarious.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
1d ago
Yes! It’s a beautiful, unique work. Not even imitated all that often.
Despite being killed off remarkably fast, Fëanor is one of the characters of all time.
My copy has this crazy painting of an exploding castle on the cover. I was able to trace it back to “The Fall of Numenor” from this calendar. No; I have no idea why that rated the cover. If you haven’t seen those, enjoy.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
1d ago
Do you have any reason to believe it’s not stereotypical midlife crises?
FWIW my dad doesn’t appear to have changed behavior at all. He’s gotten more interested in whiskey, I guess.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
1d ago
That is a more interesting one.
The Republican Reconstruction agenda which Johnson opposed mostly made it into law anyway. He stirred up a lot more resentment against it, but I can’t say if it would have been more or less enduring if he had rubber-stamped everything. I suspect that ship had sailed after his first year, by which point several Southern states had reconstituted their old governments and sent their war heroes to Congress.
Maybe you could preempt the Lost Cause by refusing amnesty to Confederate personnel? But then you’ve still got the remnants of the aristocracy trying to hold on to their plantations, putting up statues and moaning about the good ol’ days. Can you avoid that without going full damnatio memoriae?
Also, preventing ex-Confederates from getting into state or national government probably reduces support for black suffrage. That would give voting southerners license to, well, recreate their whole underclass again. That’s an injustice and probably still reinforces the aristocratic myths.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
1d ago
I’d use a test along the lines of “would believers in the original cause endorse my goals?” Or maybe “would I care about endorsement from the original cause?” So neo-Nazi groups might count even if they don’t have a specific opinion about Versailles. But they’d have to deploy that iconography in service of a Nazi-approved goal like, say, purging ethnic Russians from a region. Merely defending Ukraine’s territorial integrity wouldn’t count.
By this standard, there are definitely people who still identify with the Lost Cause. They’re not expecting to bring back plantation economics but they do still want to maintain a black underclass. Or they have strong opinions on federal authority: courts, banking, interstate commerce. It’s a different world but I think you can still show continuity, especially when it comes to civil rights.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
1d ago
A rump government which couldn’t secure the interests of slaveholders wouldn’t have stayed together long.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
1d ago
Other commenters have given good reasons why winning the war was more or less out of JD’s hands. You’re relying on foreign recognition and the addition of more border states to even force a stalemate.
Lincoln, on the other hand, has a few opportunities to avoid Union disasters. Several of them involve McClellan.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
1d ago
Cold Days turned out way better than I expected.
Freedom’s Forge is a WW2 biopic about setting up military-scale production. There’s something aaqc-worthy there about the change in expectations over 80 years, but I’m not sure that I’m the right person to write it.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
3d ago
I understand that dealing with Shakes is frustrating. Don’t stoop to personal attacks. Seriously, block him if you have to; we don’t enjoy banning good contributors.
Take a week off.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
5d ago
Precisely. If you had Roman levels of communications and records, we’d have much less material on Smith. Self-proclaimed prophet flees across country, murdered by a mob. Followers remain dedicated enough build a city in the desert.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
5d ago
Dude, this is one of the most unhinged things I’ve seen you say. I’m not even sure I parsed it correctly.
The Clancy case isn’t an ideological touchstone, and it’s certainly not analogous to urban warfare. I have no idea how or why women “handing back the wheel” would fix the Middle East, if that’s even what you have in mind.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
5d ago
The informed, truthful, people, would say something like 80-99%.
First: I’m not sure this passes the sniff test. Think about your nearest urban center. Then think about how it would look if 80% of spaces in it contained at least one valid target. A weapons cache in every mailbox. Each store clerk a combatant. Multiply this over the ~100 km2 controlled by Hamas. Would it look like the pictures?
Second: I don’t think this is actually the sticking point for most people. The question of acceptable casualties is deontological, not utilitarian.
Basically everyone would answer 99%-100%.
See, that 1% makes a big difference. Americans have the privilege of being choosy about our involvement. Support for Palestine is almost entirely predicted on whether one thinks the collateral damage is avoidable.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
5d ago
How far does the association go?
Hamas is obviously antisemitic. Some of their defenders doubtless fall in that category. But I have to believe it’s possible to defend a group without endorsing all its positions, let alone its motivations.
Consider a single-issue antifeminist. He holds no opinions about Jews but wishes that sharia law applied to women everywhere. As such, he approves of Hamas’ actions. Is he an antisemite?
Consider a Westerner conservative influencer. He says things like “Islam is right about women” in an attempt to put progressives between a rock and a hard place. Is he an antisemite?
Or consider a Western zoomer. He repeats edgy proposals he hears from people like the first two. He’s not sure if he’s being ironic, post-ironic, or serious…but is he antisemitic?
I don’t think you can draw a line from Hamas to CUAD to Macklemore and keep the ideology intact.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
6d ago
Yeah, I take option 3. What I struggle to understand is why you go for 1. It feels to me like the worst of the options, but obviously that’s not the case for you.
Which option would you say applies to Catholics?
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
6d ago
Not that high of a bar. It’d cover half the charismatic Christian spinoffs which ran afoul of the law. That’s just in America; go back before the Reformation and I bet you could find all sorts of martyrs.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
6d ago
I’m not sure how many of those failsons or tax-evaders are out there, but it’s almost certainly fewer than you think.
Get a bunch of Eastern Europeans to show up to a meeting and center that…
This is a stupid plan with several obvious failure points. Where are you getting these Slavs? How are you training them to promote your party line? Do you pay them? Why should you expect the target organizations to listen to a bunch of obvious plants?
what is literal Naziism if not turbo-woke except centering blond-haired, blue-eyed Germans as the primary victims
Oh, come on. I can think of half a dozen load-bearing differences, and I bet you can too. How about “revanchism” or “self-abasement” or “overthrowing a fucking government”?
Your models are cartoonish.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
6d ago
Why is that a big denial?
I think Clavicle was making a lazy, shorthand version of the argument. He doesn’t have numbers for the TX Indian population (it’s less than the Lizardman Constant). He didn’t show an example of failed assimilation. He just pointed at brown faces and said, hey, look how spooky this is! I’m sure he has his reasons, but this is awfully sloppy, and I can criticize it even if I agree with the model of human behavior.
In my experience, the presence of Indians and Hispanics has not in fact destroyed Texas culture. We’ve remained quite firmly American. Republican, even. I don’t know where our clavicular lives, but it sure looks like he’s formed an opinion based off one Twitter photo.
Now, I do think we disagree on the possibility of assimilation. Your link doesn’t appear to say anything about interbreeding, only that certain European populations performed and still perform better than others. Would you say that all those groups have failed to assimilate to American culture?
It also suggests that such groups can’t have assimilated because they don’t vote “like the rest of White America does.” This is obviously inane. I almost suspect that the author isn’t actually American; he’s ignoring the massive regional splits which have existed (and shifted) since the founding of the country. When the absolute whitest states in the country go solid blue, something else is obviously at play.
So yes, I think that cultural assimilation absolutely happens before genetic assimilation. It’s happened before and it is happening with Asian and Indian and Hispanic populations. I don’t see how this contradicts anything about “evolution.” People are more than their genes.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
7d ago
Well, first you’ve got to consider the possibility. Our computer-literate, sci-fi-reading crowd probably has an easier time with that than the average Boomer.
Then you have to distrust all your senses, something which has been a sticking point since at least Descartes.
And you’ve also got to accept that you aren’t special.
Not that any of these make it impossible, but Christianity starts to look like an easier sell.
Fuck.
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