pigeonburger
1yr ago
I haven't seen a qualitative change in recent times, I've seen footage of unfocussness similar to the debate for the last 4 years, but I think they were rare episodes 4 years ago, and since the beginning of the year it's more like the baseline with rare instances of focus.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
Obama might be worried because if Biden has a chance at all to win, it would be by a slim margin, and if Biden won't step aside, disunity might cost the dems that margin, and Obama would be one of the obvious ones to blame for it.
And ultimately I'm in the camp that the debate is probably not going to move the needle much, unless it causes Biden to be replaced, because of the same reason. People know what they have in front of them. The only thing it will change is independents who already knew they would like to vote Trump but needed an excuse to voice it now have it.
I don't think anyone doubted since 2020 that Biden was not reaaaally going to be in charge. The guy was always entirely a vote in favor of letting the PMC/The Deep State/the Cathedral/the Swamp/The Adults In the Room/whatever you want to call it reassert control of the government, and they on-purpose pushed a candidate with little ability to assert himself to represent that choice. Biden's cognitive state never mattered, except that now they think they have an excuse to saddle him with the blame for all the failures of the last 4 years and replace him with someone who's going to come into this looking like a fresh start.
We all know that the promises politicians make are not enforceable. They are riddled with lies. They were rehearsed in a backroom focus test to sound good. They were designed to manipulate us. So why are we discussing them seriously?
Ultimately that's what bugs me so much about the whole "Trump lies" schtick I hear from the media and the PMC.
It's tone deaf and insulting to the public, because the public knows very well what they have in front of them. They know politicians are salesmen, pitching a product. Usually, pitching that product will involve some sort of lie if we take that word in an narrow sense. The car salesman who tells you the deal he's offering you is the best in the industry, is that a lie? I mean, maybe technically, but only a very socially stunted person would get offended by it, stand up and point at the car salesman and yell "LIAR! THIS ISN'T THE BEST DEAL, AT HONDA THEY MADE ME A BETTER DEAL!" The dude's trying to sell a car, you know that coming into the dealership.
And Trump as a salesman is a lot like a car salesman, Obama is more like a startup founder pitching to angel investors. But both are selling something, trying to make their product look as good as they can, and yes, technically lying. Or omitting important truths. But the public already knows this, they've interacted with salesman, they know that not everything you hear from a salesman is to be taken at face value. But the media thinks that since Trump talks like a blue collar worker and Obama like a university professor they can make you "realize" that Trump is lying but since he uses big words maybe they can fool you into thinking Obama is not. Which is insulting because the public knows they're both just as much salesmen one as the other for a long time, it's all been priced in already.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
Sadly, I'm sure most will reach for a relief valve against cognitive dissonance; they'll claim it's a recent development. If anything, they might end up blaming conservatives because their unprincipled claims for years that Biden was unfit made them ignore his actual decline when it happened.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
Trump really seems to care about stopping immigration
I would reframe that. Trump really seemed to have picked up that a majority of voters seem to care about immigration.
I doubt he personally cares. But a leader who's at least able to identify and echo the wishes of the voters is still way ahead of one that cannot or will not.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
I would be surprised if he was, he's notoriously "straight edge" due to his brother's struggles with alcoolism, and that's one of the things I can believe is a deeply-held personal conviction of his.
Think of the nazguls as leaders and special ops. They're good one on one fighters, and can serve as force multipliers when leading troops (through inspiration or terror), but in the north, they're in enemy territory.
Our gamer minds have been infected by RPGs into seeing power scaling by orders of magnitude, your hero starting as a level 1 with tens of hitpoints and finishing at level 99 with tens of thousands of hitpoints and no reasonable numbers of lvl 1 characters could even come close to representing a serious threat to it. But Tolkien probably had something more like Dark Souls scaling in mind, where super powerful characters are a couple of times more powerful than starting characters, but even beginning trash mobs in the right situation and in the right numbers can still be a credible threat. Aragorn is a powerful fighter and would be almost guaranteed to win a 1 on 1 fight against any other characters weaker than the Lich King or an ancient elf. But I don't think Tolkien had in mind that if, say, 10 average gondorian guardsmen surprise attacked Aragorn their swords would essentially bounce off of him because they're too weak and he's too powerful. Or that he could solo the entire Shire in an open fight. Or think of Boromir's fate; he was supposed to be one of the most powerful human warriors out there, and I think it's probably fair to assume he would have been at least a match for one nazgul that isn't the Lich King, as that was the point of opposing 9 members of the Fellowship to the 9 riders. He was killed not in a fight against another "unique" named enemy, but just tens of orcs/uruk hai.
So your nazguls, if they didn't act covertly, would risk facing a couple of hundred strong hobbit militia, and that's just wasteful use of elite special forces or officers.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
There shouldn't be a strategy. Just make sure that doctors are liable when their willingness to go along with a patient's wishes crosses the line into malpractice, but other than that, it's worth the tradeoffs. The Covid response should have made that clear, especially around alternative treatment protocols (HCQ, ivermectin). Even if these were clearly not killing anyone (when prescribed and not taken by idiots who can't figure out dosage), and could conceivably have benefits, western government went above and beyond to stop people from taking them, or discredit doctors who prescribed them, not because of medical harm but because they needed to assert narrative control and that narrative was "No reasonable doctor believes in those treatments, don't even argue about it, shut up, stay at home and follow orders". If I recall they also in some places pressured pharmacists to not fulfill prescriptions for them. Governments will use and abuse any ability to insert themselves in the relationship between doctors and patients to the fullest, even if for political purposes and not medical purposes.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
I don't think there is necessarily a link between "trans being real" (which I assume means some people having hormonal or brain imbalances that mean they will never feel comfortable being identified as their birth sex) and being reliably able to identify it in young malleable children.
It's very realistic to me that it could be a real phenomenon but the malleability of young minds means it cannot be reliably diagnosed before a certain sexual/cognitive threshold.
I would take a significant pay cut if I could be assured of having this, maybe half. The hobbies I have that make me truly happy are pretty cheap. But I'd need guarantees that my children and their descendants would have the same deal. Because it's important to note that with less money for myself, there would also be a lot less for me to leave to my children, which means that if that community collapses or regresses, they won't necessarily have the egg nest to make a pleasant life for themselves elsewhere.
BUT I don't think it's a realistic prospect, short of fully automated luxury gay space communism (post-scarcity society). I think this is the deal of capitalism, you can't really modulate it to specific levels. We might get the impression it isn't so because this can take a couple of generations for the problems of "social democracy" to be obvious. Life is pleasant and orderly because other people work to make it so for others in society. They work because they are rewarded. If you reduce the reward, they won't strive as hard, making quality of life drop. And with the workforce mobility we currently have, the highly motivated, quality individuals will easily be convinced to move to a pleasant gated community where they will be surrounded by other highly motivated individual AND also get more money, and your community is going to be slowly only populated by the least ambitious and driven individuals, which will erode the very qualities that you thought you were compromising for.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
Of course, but with the housing market being what it is, being able to afford living somewhere where I get all this is what I need more money for.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
I think what you identify as "feeling like games from the 90s" is the lack of shame of letting you feel the designer's hand. Western designers seem obsessed with making games that feel like systems piled on top of systems. Levels that feel like they they were designed by following rules rather than just "being how they are" because a designer wanted it so. To create difficulty, a western developper create a class of boss or miniboss enemy with tweaked numbers to make it more difficult. To create difficulty, a From Software level designer puts a normal trash mob like a dog around a corner so you don't see him and he blindsides you, then makes another dog fall from above on you because haha funny! Western games barely ever do this anymore, they don't want you to think about (curse) the level designer.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
Imagine someone who makes their life's work opining on video games but they never actually played one, everything they know is based on second-hand knowledge and their own speculation.
I am reminded of Anita Sarkeesian's initial Feminist Frequency videos where she claimed to have been playing games all her life then proceeded to make factually incorrect assertions about some games (Hitman, IIRC) rewarding misogynist behavior (murdering women) when those games instead disincentivized it.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
This is the exact opposite of the rhetoric I remember from 4 years ago. Everyone was rallying around the ideas that "we need to stop fascism (read: Trump)" and "it's okay to choose the lesser of two evils, as long as we depose Trump" and "a vote for a third party is akin to voting for Trump". Make no mistake, the people saying they're not voting for Biden in 2024 were the exact same people I saw making these "lesser of two evils" statements last time around.
There is a good case to be made that this is deliberate tactic to drag the democrats as far to the left as they can. Just make the democrats panic so that they think they need to align their policies with them, hoping they'll throw them some candy like student debt forgiveness, and then closer to the election switch to the "choose the lesser of two evils" narrative regardless of how may of their asks were covered because ultimately that still drags the country closer to their preferences than voting R, third-party or not voting.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
just bear with it
pigeonburger
1yr ago
It comes down to whether they want the attention; I would be surprised if a smart one could not reliably get visibility by putting culture war bait for the media.
If a killer left a note or sent letters to the media saying he was doing it "for President Trump", do you really think the media would be able to contain themselves from making it a national issue? And the right's reaction when there's hints of a killer being trans or an illegal gives little doubt that they'd be just as impossible to contain if they were in a position of power in the media.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
I can't tell about the rest of Canada, but Quebec's cuisine is mostly a mix of french, british/irish and italian, with some new world innovations added to it (some unique to us, others we share with the rest of north eastern america).
pigeonburger
1yr ago
For example, it doesn’t explain libertarians, who tend to be Republican but are fiercely anti-police.
I think it can; libertarians are pro hierarchies, but natural hierarchies. They consider police to be an intrusion on natural hierarchies of force. Those who are stronger or better armed, or can afford the loyalty of stronger or better armed people to defend them deserve the better protection/law enforcement. To them, the police is like a communist state trying to make the protection/law enforcement market egalitarian.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
The main risk is food supply chain collapse leading to starvation and more instability, but if you live near farmland it's probably not going to be that much of a risk for you.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
The US Navy
More importantly, they might be building a lot of frigates and are starting to build aircraft carriers, but the PLAN has basically no institutional experience. They have negligible ASW and submarine capacity, any surprise invasion plan has to contend with an unknown: how many US SSNs and SSGNs are in or in range of the South China Sea right now?
The only way the Chinese can succeed is if there is enough political hesitation to intervene from the US.
Montreal is getting fucked slower than the other major cities, but it is still getting fucked.
The effect is slower because Montreal attracts poorer immigrants (as french speakers are prioritized), so the immigrants that arrive here are more competing at the bottom for rents than for houses and condos, but the effect at term is the same, as high rents push more renters to consider ownership.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
They tend to have milder weather too
pigeonburger
1yr ago
I think you should remember that no one will invest as much time and effort in judging you as you do. Most people have better things to do than obsess over your mistakes.
Honestly, the whole series is fun, and since you're already past the biggest obstacle (the nautical jargon) you should check it out
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