pigeonburger
7mo 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
7mo 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.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
The people who are blaming hip-hop for cultural decay would have blamed jazz for the same 70 years ago, and now jazz is probably the second most "respectable" high brow musical genre after classical.
pigeonburger
7mo ago
Yup.
Despite having gone through the very heart of the cathedral in my formative years I consider myself more resistant to the indoctrination than my parents are/were, than most of my peers are and than any part of my education. Whatever mutation of genes and memes created me, I believe it has to be nurtured, alerting the system to my presence will only cause an overwhelming immune response that is all but guaranteed to wipe me out. So I will attempt to nurture and grow this mutation, by genes or memes.
Going out in a blaze of glory is a winning scenario for the state. Your family line will be either eradicated or severely diminished. Your manifesto (or as they will call it "your hateful screed") will not be spread. The movies they will write about you will depict you as a desperate, ignorant loser.
pigeonburger
7mo 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
1mo ago
The falsehoods are easily dismissed, because if the company is healthy and making more money than they let on, then why isn't the advice to the public to just buy shares (at least, of those that are public)? After all, they're just being greedy, so why aren't they encouraging everyone to put themselves on the other side of that equation? And if they're voting shares they also get a say in C-suite remuneration! Wouldn't that be exactly what people who complain about greed be doing? After all, they seem to know so much about running a business and how pricing should work, I'm sure they'd do a great job as investors! /s
And in the realm of sexual sociopolitics, I'm rather skeptical that the progressives considered the conservatives to be people mostly on the same page and with similar ideas about what "victory" looked like, just with different ways to get there.
If you zoom out far enough, sons and daughters living happy fulfilling lives is what everyone is after. At least, for people who invest themselves into social policy making with impacts on that kind of timescale. There isn't really any personal gain to be made, the people who pushed the changes that led to the current environment are by now too old to personally benefit from it.
My point is not that the colonel who cannot ever manage to implement his strategy is worthy, but that it's a fair complaint if another person ostensibly working for the same objective is actively making things worse for no other reason than to not see him succeed. If the other colonel really was shooting his country's troops in the back, pointing it out to the brass is not pitiful whining, it should be investigated and that colonel arrested and tried for treason. If, in progressives' mind, conservatives are making everyone live miserable lives for generations for no other reason than to spite progressives, they should make that case to the population as best they can so that the population rightly shuns conservatism. It's not argument I can see them making convincingly, but they absolutely should try it if they truly believe that conservatives are that nasty and petty.
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
7mo 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
14d ago
Without the urgency of the current war encouraging the West to transfer arms to Ukraine, and especially if the West loosen economic sanctions on Russia following peace, Russia will replenish its arms stocks for the sequel war way faster than Ukraine can.
pigeonburger
8mo ago
That is still meritocratic with one extra step; they're meritorious because they've been appointed to the job by God, who's the supreme judge of merit.
pigeonburger
7mo ago
Or the crypto-racism of having every evil or stupid character look like me, and every cool, heroic and most importantly moral character look like a Gen Z Nonbinary Zirboss.
Being a bit of a devil's advocate here, but I can't help but see this as validating the other side's concerns about representation. One of the main defenses against culture being remade was that the old one was serving everyone just fine; that black kids were identifying just fine with a white Little Mermaid. Of course, there's an obvious over-representation of diversity now, but after how many decades of under-representation? The thinking here, which I can't agree with, is that dragging our faces in it for a while is necessary for straight cis whites to learn not to do this again. But your reaction seems to be exactly what they're going for and is likely to embolden them; your unease is the mirror of the one they claim every non straight cis white has felt for decades before they established institutional and cultural dominance.
pigeonburger
7mo 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
6mo 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
1mo ago
Agreed on it being currently shitty to be a politician, but then again part of the issue is that on top of relatively bad benefits and pay (bad relative to what the same person could get working somewhere else with the same skills and workload) it also has very low respectability. What that law would do hopefully on the long term is restore respectability to that profession. And if it takes a significant pay increase to justify, I wouldn't be against it, as the benefits of a better breed of legislator would quickly outweigh their cost by orders of magnitude.
pigeonburger
3mo ago
You can do similar things with crypto through smart contracts.
pigeonburger
5mo ago
It really is not that hard to make babies. Why would artificial wombs be needed?
Women see pregnancy as hitting pause (and in some high-powered careers, halt or rewind) on their carreer progression for a couple of years. Unless they are in a very secure position with their mate, it is a scary prospect. An artificial womb would shorten that pause to the time spent taking care of the newborn before it can be sent to daycare, time which could be more equitably split with the father than the time being pregnant could.
pigeonburger
7mo 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
8mo ago
I think the best way to describe this in military terms would that it's baiting the enemy army to fight you in the bailey.
pigeonburger
9mo ago
Of course these duties are much less grand than making the perfect society. You just have to be a good whatever it is you are. Neighbor, husband, mother, worker, student, businessman, beggar; it doesn't really matter what or who you are, but you have to play the cards you have as well as you can. Only because to not do it is a waste.
That is quite important, yes. If you're in actor in the middle of a play and you think that the play sucks, you're not going to make it better if you start stealing lines from another actor because you think you can say them better than he can. That will only ruin the play even more. The only thing you can do to improve the play, is to play your own role as best you can.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Couple of weeks ago I moved my MiSTer FPGA from the living room to the bedroom and turned it into more of a retro-computer like setup. But on it, I've been mostly playing MGS for the PSX for now. I've played through and enjoyed Twin Snakes on the Gamecube back in the day, but never the original.
I've also been trying to get into but been unable to really plunge into old school first person dungeon crawlers turn based RPGs. Stuff like Wizardry, Might & Magic and their descendants. I always loved the aesthetic of that genre and I keep thinking that once it clicks I'll love them, but whenever I try to play them I just... mostly don't have fun. They're mean games; they rarely forgive mistakes, they require remembering a lot of stuff to have a chance. Yet I have no problem with challenging games like From Soft games, shmups, fighting games, etc... or with games that require acquiring knowledge (I love straight up oldschool roguelikes like Nethack). But dungeon crawlers... I don't know why it won't click. The only ones I could stomach a bit (and only a bit, I still dropped them fairly quickly) is the Etrian Odyssey games and some MegaTen games (the remake of the original Megami Tensei on the SNES, Strange Journey, SMT IV).
pigeonburger
10mo ago
we exist to get beat
Would correct that to "we exist to get bought".
There's the stigma that Canadian companies cannot compete in a mature international industry so if one happens to be an early innovator, it'll take a foreign company buying them up to allow them to reach their proper potential. It also doesn't help that Canada, outside of Quebec, is pretty much the perfect example of an anti-nationalist country. An anti-nationalist country doesn't nurture its companies in the local market until they're able to fend off for themselves on the international market to make us proud. We'll either send them off to get slaughtered too early, or keep them on as a little protected local pet until the international market comes knocking.
pigeonburger
3mo ago
We know a lot of people are not confused about this because "help your own, avoid freeloaders or impersonal systems that can create or incentivize freeloaders" is basic conservative ideology in America. Let's not even speak globally.
Jonathan Haidt identified the group who bucks this trend as WEIRD (Western Educated Industrial Rich and Democratic). It can feel like these people's values are dominant in the population if you live in a WEIRD enclave but as you mention, globally and even just in more conservative areas they really aren't, even if they are still able to hold an outsized amount of influence due to the concentration of mediatic, economic and political power in WEIRD enclaves. Haidt identified that WEIRD people tended to compress all moral judgement to the harm/care and cheating/fairness moral dimentions, wheras conservatives (and non WEIRDs) had a more multi-dimensional moral judgement.
You also seem to have some personal beef with "vaping heterosexual white men with Asian wives". I'd suggest dropping it. This is not the kind of discussion forum for your personal grievances.
I didn't read him as having any beef with them. To summarize what I believe is position is: libertarians usually are people whose personal issues with "square" conservative society are minor and not substantive, and they could easily just negociate for acceptance of them (acceptance of minor risk taking with regards to personal health, acceptance of interracial relationships with ethnic groups that seem mostly compatible) rather than agitate for the destruction of functional societies.
The vaping heterosexual white men with Asian wives line just points out how for the most part they're still heterosexual and white. That they don't consider gender/sexual anarchy to be optimal solutions since they don't for the most part use themselves the freedom it gives them, and that they are the kind of white people who move out of neighborhoods at the first signs of diversity-fueled racial unrest. But most of them are very smart, so they often write the best most convincing arguments against conservative norms, which are then picked up by people who do want gender/sexual anarchy and believe homogenous societies are inherently deficient.
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.
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