Which strikes me as akin to a colonel saying "I did absolutely everything right when I ordered my men to rush that hill; those damn enemy combatants with their machine guns in bunkers are the ones at fault here."
You're not seeing it from a consequentalist standpoint, which is probably the one the people complaining that their movement was failed are taking. I think there's an important distinction because technically the people they accuse of holding them back aren't seen as enemy combatants in the context of making the world better. They might be adversaries in the context of getting a policy implemented internally, like that colonel might be a big fan of human wave style tactics while another colonel is arguing in favor of softening the enemy up with artillery, both arguing and trying to convince the brass of approving their preferred tactic, bickering and going as far as doing some political manuvering to try and edge out the other, but still fighting on the same side of the war. So their accusation is not that their tactic would have worked but for the enemy, but that they are being machine-gunned in the back by the other colonel who would be putting winning his small argument about tactics (disapproval of sexual liberty) over the overarching goal of winning the war (of making life better for everyone).
Whether the argument is accurate or not is different, but the accusation is of sabotage, not of facing resistance from the enemy.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
I don't know, if I were Hamas I would probably wouldn't want my support to appear too high in polls, because their best weapon is the innocents they hide behind. If it turns out that the innocents are pretty much in full support of Hamas, they stop being so innocent and Hamas lose their best shield, both literally in battle and figuratively. Though there's also a lower bound of apparent support that Hamas also has to avoid, at which the Palestinian civilians might decide they have a good enough chance if they start a civil war to stop/disarm Hamas.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
Yeah, the US military is not very good anymore at winning hearts and minds of a population through occupation, but they are still unmatched at fucking up specific military and political targets. Think of all the efforts Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden went through to try to avoid that (insert Saddam Hussein tunnel meme here), only to still end up getting ganked. And the US was essentially unopposed in taking Bagdad, there was never a question of whether they would manage it, always of how fast they will. Iran has its irregulars sure, but they're mostly a country filled with infrastructure, government offices, military bases, which would be fucked hard in an instant in a military conflict.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
Nuclear weapons have been mystified completely out of proportion
Indeed, people forget that not all nuclear weapons are strategic in scope; tactical nukes exist, and only simplify the kind of destruction that conventional weapons achieve. And anyway it's not like large campaigns of conventional bombings can't achieve the kind of destruction we associate with strategic nuclear weapons too, as Dresden and Tokyo can attest. But I guess it's good that we still kept that genie in the bottle, there's no reason to make large scale destruction easier, it's already too easy.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
A lot of the "blueness" of it is due to Canada's baseline level of anti-americanism. By that I mean that there's one thing Canadians have in common from one coast to the next, is that feeling of inferiority with regards to americans, the idea that they are so close but not quite living in a Country That Actually Matters, that drive them to protectively act like they wouldn't want to be americans anyway, Canada is so much smarter you guys. Especially with regards to politics; if a move is seen as being uniquely american, the Canadian population will virtue-signal that they want their politicians to do the opposite. (Whether politicians actually will is not necessarily guaranteed since "opposite whatever the americans do, whaterver it is" is not a smart thoughtful heuristic for politics).
If that barrier is overcome and Alberta was an american state already, opinions would probably quite different.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
Unless telework affects your availability for some of your tasks (which is to say that some of your work has to be done in person and thus telework complicates scheduling), I wouldn't consider it to be a concession from the employer and thus not worth any amount of pay.
pigeonburger
2yr ago
What would likely pop to my mind is that they're doing a study to see how many people would take the offer.
pigeonburger
2yr ago
Exactly, if the war ceases right now at the current lines, Russia's ability to rearm stays constant or improves (as sanctions loosen or their enforcement becomes more lax). Ukraine's drops precipitously off a cliff as Western support evaporates. Ukraine needs Russia to see the invasion as being routed and done, not merely paused, because Russia will find itself in a more advantageous position in the future, and Ukraine needs the mental barrier of "starting a war of aggression on a neighbor" to be back in place, preferably with a little extra bracing from that neighbor having kicked their asses, to hope it doesn't get restarted again.
pigeonburger
2yr ago
Globalist liberalism is in complete control of popular expressions leftist ideology. The last gasps of resistance were the early 2000s anti-globalisation demonstrations/riots and Occupy Wall Street. Since then, all the popular left wing causes happen, coincidentally I'm sure!, to further the goals of (and as such get support from) globalist liberalism.
This is an interesting way of seeing it. I can think of a lot of regulated activities that can simply be broken down into a series of unregulated activities. Does this ever win in court, or do judges always slap it down with something like "don't try to be cute; the greater picture is obviously that you ran an unregulated taxi"?
*EDIT: I guess this is probably why legal systems rely so much on subjective human judgement rather than applying purely mechanistic rules, as the latter would be tricked by breaking down a regulated activity into a series of unregulated ones, but humans would probably just see what happened for what it is.
pigeonburger
2yr ago
Game sense, it's usually called, and yes, once a base threshold of athleticism is achieved it's the biggest factor for success in most sports. With some exceptions, as american football and baseball do have players whose job is mostly maxing unidimensional athleticism, but not all of them. Game sense is still the top skill of an american football quarterback.
To an untrained eye, watching sports you see a very chaotic situation and don't understand why some players are so revered, they just seem to be lucky to find themselves in a position to score a goal and other players in that position would have had similar success rates. But then over time, you figure out how most of sports is about putting yourself in that favorable position.
pigeonburger
2yr ago
Indeed, but the man was also talking about his wife's experience. It could be accurate but a married man myself, I can assure you he was heavily disincentivized to compare it to anything less heroic.
It's because feminists have framed the question of rape as something "men" as a group do to "women". Not a highly contemptible subset men, but men in general.
If you could have a societal debate about how to stop bike theft WITH bike thieves and their solution was "lock your bike better", you would rightly answer them "no, if we're all on the same page about stopping bike theft here, then the solution is that you JUST STOP STEALING BIKES!". But of course, bike thieves are not interested in these societal debates, they don't show up to them. So it's okay to assume they will keep stealing and it's appropriate to suggest solutions that work around that.
But as I've mentionned feminists have framed the question of rape as being something "men" perpetrate, so when men show up to societal debates and helpfully suggest mitigation strategies they get the same treatment as our hypothetical bike thief who shows up at a how to avoid bike theft debate. And the contemptible subset of men who commit those rapes are not interested in the debate and obviously don't show up.
*EDIT: And I think it's important to note here that feminists aren't necessarily completely wrong here. Think of the prevalence through history of armies "raping and pillaging" after conquest. Of how recently it was that it became unacceptable for husbands to force themselves on their wives. There's a lot of men throughout history who we probably would think of as normal for their time, not a particular small subset of them, who would consider doing what you want with a conquered people's women or forcing a wife to "her duty" as normal behavior.
pigeonburger
2yr ago
I believe voters would punish a defection on a very simple unambigious sworn promise like that. Ok, maybe many/most people wouldn't but with elections being decided by razor's edge margins it wouldn't take a lot of them to effectively put victory out of reach.
pigeonburger
2yr ago
That doesn’t really explain his covid reaction or LGBT reaction. He took positions deeply at odds with prevailing PMC attitudes. Also Florida was a purple state he turned red.
What I'm saying is that he turned Florida red by picking those fights with the PMC. He isn't picking those fights against the PMC at a cost to his career, it's all benefit. Floridians love to see it. That makes it impossible to rule out that he will only pick those fights so long as it helps him politically, and once he's got the highest office he'll take the path of least resistance and will not pick those fights to avoid the same fate as Trump.
pigeonburger
2yr ago
I don't think he would himself change so much as I believe him to be more cynical than idealist, and a strategy pandering to a reddish-purple Florida would become obsolete once president. And I believe the PMC reaction to him ("Worse Than Trump!") is strategy from the PMC understanding that appearing to play ball with the establishment right now is poison to any Republican's primary campaign.
pigeonburger
2yr ago
I guess it comes down to whether the regime is all in on teaching kids to be trans in public schools. And if they actually care about black people as saints or would mostly be fine with treating them the same as white people. Those are useful tools to bash maga but I don’t know how many in the PMC actually believe that stuff.
There's also the possibility that Desantis himself personally doesn't care that much about these things and that as he got into power, he would pivot his priorities into ones that get bipartisan approval (read: the priorities of the PMC/cathedral) so he can line up some quick wins and would only make weak ineffectual gestures at placating his base on these topics.
pigeonburger
2yr ago
He can swear it publically and drop out of the race before the pardon. As for running in 2028, he's gonna be 5 years older, obviously and unambiguously breaking a sworn oath by running, facing a more established candidate (an incumbent Republican president, quite possibly), that's probably enough to guarantee him a loss. If Trump believes he's gonna win 2024 he might not go for such a deal, but his stated position is that the last election was rigged; does he believe he can win, enough to risk jail? Enough to refuse an offer to make it a draw and walk away with dignity?
pigeonburger
2yr ago
So far the Biden v Trump II is far from in the bag for either side. There's also some hidden information Biden and his inner circle know that we don't: they know how deep and how damaging the corruption story goes. If it's not much worse than what we have now they might decide to take their chances with the election, but if that rabbit hole keeps going and going, they might want to stop inquiries before they get too far.
And there's also the Cathedral element to consider; a lot of people high up in both parties care more about the system and the broad global neoliberal consensus than they care about their party winning, and to these people, Trump being sucessfully prosecuted and Biden winning 2024 is still in large part a loss. The US ends up looking increasingly like a one party banana republic where political opposition is jailed, Biden's public gaffes are only going to get worse with time and the system in general looks a lot less legitimate than it would if, say, DeSantis won.
pigeonburger
2yr ago
I think they might offer an exchange: Biden for Trump. The cathedral wants to gain back respectability. Biden is increasingly a drain on respectability, Trump was in itself a drain on respectability, and the actions they're taking to prevent Trump from getting power again (indictments and at the least in the eyes of about half of the US election shenanigans) are the biggest drain of respectability of all. But they can't stop because they've made Trump very very motivated to embark on Stalinian purges if he gets back in power; they won't be able to keep him busy and sheperded in a second term.
I can imagine the system being very keen for this exchange: both Biden and Trump publically renounce politics (Trump immediately and Biden as soon as his term ends) and drop from the 2024 race. In exchange, Biden pardons Trump of federal crimes, leans on state prosecutors to drop charges for Trump, Biden pardons himself and Republicans drop the inquiries. Everyone walks away, Biden stumbles through a speech about how it was necessary to put behind divisiveness and the strain on the democratic process that prosecutions and impeachments etc... the opposing side was causing. The cathedral gets back at least the veneer of respectability. Republicans lose Trump, but having the stronger candidate field below Trump they probably win 2024. The cathedral can let that happen because they don't really care about Republicans or Democrats, just Not Trump. It would help rebuild some of the credibility the electoral system lost. Democrats lose Biden, who was never a powerful candidate and was increasingly embarassing to keep around (too old, unfocussed, dwindling coherency, increasingly appearing corrupt). They had to sacrifice everyone else to prop Biden up and now they have no credible contender under him, but without the extreme imperative to win against Trump they can send Kamala get slaughtered against DeSantis or Ramaswamy and rebuild their field for 2028. I don't know if Trump would go for it, but if he believes himself he probably should. He has 3 ways out of the indictments: legal victory, electoral victory or PR victory. But his stated opinion is that the judges are unfair, elections are rigged and the media are against him. What exactly are his paths out of this mess then?
pigeonburger
2yr ago
It is quite powerful yes. And it gets worse when the algo gets involved. TikTok know what videos you lingered more on, so it knows what to serve you more of, even without giving it any explicit sign that you like it, and it hones in on superstimuli that tickles YOU specifically very quickly.
pigeonburger
2yr ago
I think there's a big distinction between the actual culture of today's youth and the one being pushed by over-correcting revanchist millenials. The super woke media is not the DOOM or rap music of this era, it's its complete opposite. It's what today's kids' parents would prefer they like instead of what they actually like. I'm not fully understanding what the majority of kids actually like these days, they're quite secretive and tend to share around in small groups online instead of in the public square, but sometimes I get glimpses of it and it's very much not what the OP is complaining about. They don't like it either.
pigeonburger
2yr ago
I agree. I think the 80s, 90s and early 2000s had struck a good balance of representation though colorblindness. But that's what I'm not seeing in OP's post: commitment to the colorblind (or gay/trans-blindness? we need a better term) principle.
To show that this over-representation is unnecessary you need to commit to judging cultural products on the merit of their content and not the color of the skin or the sexuality of people in it. It doesn't mean you HAVE to watch race-swapping remakes: most of them ARE bad on their merit because the point was the race-swapping/race-baiting, not creating a lasting cultural artefact. But if you pre-commit to reject them out of hand you are telling them that representation is a battleground, a zero-sum game and that you intent to fight them for it; that's not likely to produce a truce in the culture war.
One of the starkest examples of distinction between these two types of fictional world I can think of is the difference between Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II. DA:O built an interesting and complex fantasy world. In DA2 it seemed to be reduced to a stage on which the player character plays with moral puzzles. But I guess the existance of those Inserters is why DA2 was still well received by the gaming press and on gaming forums, reddit, etc... They just didn't feel or cared about how much poorer the worldbuilding felt.
From the writers' perspective, I would expect professionals who write genre fiction (even if it's "just" writing for videogames) to be mostly in the Immersers camp. Almost all great enduring literary classics in fantasy and sci-fi are more works of worldbuilding than character studies. I don't know if the current state of affairs in videogames is deliberately pandering to Inserters over Immersers or the result of a misunderstanding of what made a hit game. Maybe it's game director/designer interference? Make a world interesting and give the player some ability to influence it and some tough decisions along the way. Then player feedback is that people particularly remembered the hard moral decisions, and so the next installements are nothing but hard moral decisions. It's like a director that has one or two popular "twist" movies and then veers into doing just that.
Now that I think about it, it seems like it's a thing Bioware pretty much always ends up doing with their franchises if given enough time.
To support your point from an IT perspective, at a previous job, the server monitoring system malfunctioning is what tipped me off to a ransomware attack being triggered. Of course, as with anything this has to be calibrated so there aren't so many false positives that alerts or downtime is ignored, but an otherwise robust system going down for seemingly no reason should arouse suspicion.
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