pigeonburger
11d ago
On April 10-11, 2024 they were arrested and sent to jail for 30 days for "contempt of court". The problem is that the Ag Department seems to have issued the arrest warrant on their own. The case has never been in court. They have not been before a judge.
So they are both in jail serving a 30 day sentence that didn't involve a judge and they haven't been allowed to see a judge.
This is what pisses me off so much in the relationship between government and citizens, is that government officials has free reign to do abuse their power pretty much however they want (short of personal enrichment, and even then) because the worse that happens to them is punishment to their office, not to them personally. You can be absolutely certain if those two guys had unlawfully sequestered an employee or official of the agricultural department for 30 days, they themselves would be sentenced to a lot more than 30 days in prison. But we all know that the worst that's gonna happen there is the office gets told they can't do this, maybe someone or two lose their jobs (and don't worry, they won't have any trouble finding another) and maybe Pennsylvania's taxpayers have to foot the bill on some damages (and don't worry here either, approximatively 0 democrat voters in Pennsylvania will change their vote just because their party's officials unlawfully throws people in jail).
pigeonburger
7d ago
In a sense, but homelessness has two crucial distinctions, it can be a temporary state for people who are very much "polite society material" but have hit a rough patch, and it also interacts a bit too much with said polite society, being a nuisance to its members and that chafing is encouraging them to be tougher on it. It's harder to feel compassionate towards the homeless if you have to endure their litteral excrement everywhere in your city.
pigeonburger
3d ago
I'm not sure it's so much complexity I'm avoiding now but games that don't respect my time.
I used to love JRPGs, it was my favorite genre. I can't really do it anymore. They seem like so much pointless busy work. Closest thing to one I've been able to play a bit of (and even then) is Triangle Strategy, and that's a tactical JRPG. I guess tactical RPGs I can still stomach a bit because fights feel like distinct chapters that I can do one and feel done with for the night while feeling I've actually moved forward.
On the opposite side, three genres I never imagined I would ever enjoy, have become my favorites: hard simulators (the harder and drier the game, the better), shmups and fighting games. All of which are so much more challenging and complex than JRPGs, which are usually only difficult if you're impatient and don't level up properly, but all of which feel so much more significant than raising arbitrary numbers because I need them to move forward.
pigeonburger
8d ago
There's all sorts of goals one could have. Often the goal is to make enough of a nuisance of yourselves so that you force the news to mention your cause, maybe sparking some conversations in the public. Sometimes, as you say, it's specifically to taunt the police so you can get some pictures of them hitting you in an attempt to take the moral high ground reserved for those oppressed by authority. Some protests are pure practice, every year here there a day of protest "against police brutality" and it's just a rallying cry for all the people who want to practice rioting (and for the police to practice their riot suppression) for when they'll have an actual cause they want to strategically riot for. If your protest is elite-supported, it can be to intimidate or to launder unpopular opinions for the elite by making them seem a lot more popular than they are.
I got to agree that the highest achievement for a game is to be able to carry its narrative in its gameplay. To do the opposite of the often mentionned ludo-narrative dissonance and achieve ludo-narrative convergence.
Another example that attempts to achieve both kinds of narrative crafting (both through writing and ludo-narrative convergence) I'd say is Death Stranding. It only achieves ones of them (ludo-narrative convergence), the writing being symptomatic of a man who has been told too much he is a genius and started believing it. But the way the gameplay is structured seems to be tailor made to reinforce the game's theme: cooperation is better than isolation. The game forces you to forge ahead in areas that are without any infrastructure, and that is where things are at their most risky. Once the region is connected, you can build infrastructure, but the costs are usually exorbitant, requiring unfun grinding to achieve. But the online system sometimes puts other people's constructions in your game, the more time you spend in a region helping the NPCs the more help you get from other players, and what was once difficult treks across inhospitable terrain becomes trivial milk runs due to all the roads and bridges you've made. And eventually you're spending hours building a zipline network in the most challenging region of the game not even for yourself since you don't have to stay there anymore, but for other players to enjoy. The game makes you altruistic. Not by forcing cooperation onto you or by heavily incentivising it, that would be meaningless, but by making you feel grateful for other people's help and by making you feel the gratitude of others (those almost meaningless likes you get when someone mashes a button on infrastructure you built).
I don't know if I can think of any game in older generations that have achieved such a tight integration of narrative in its gameplay. It's the exact opposite of Spec Ops: The Line.
pigeonburger
8d ago
It's often negative in the short term, but there are a lot of small causes that the news just doesn't care about and wouldn't mention if it weren't that some people made themselves a nuisance. It's a long term play, to not let your cause be forgotten or ignored. It's better to make people angry about you than let them ignore you.
For those specific examples, climate protestors have full elite backing now, the strategy is different. It's intimidation, they're used by the elites to show what they are willing to destroy if people don't bow down.
I would love to be proven wrong and for the officials and the police officers who went along with this to be thrown in jail, but at worst the police officers might be sacrificed. And while they shouldn't have executed unlawful orders, I have a harder time blaming them as it seems likely their fault is mere carelessness and not checking that the order was legitimate (after all, the government probably almost never sends bogus warrants to them), while the Agricultural Department would have to be power tripping for things to have happened as they are alleged to have.
"Tax Fairness for Every Generation"
Proceeds to increase how much money they'll siphon off the upcoming intergenerational wealth transfer
I'm quite pissed at this. And to add to the annoyance, since this is a budget change, it is unlikely an incoming Conservative government can realistically reverse it, as the assumption of the income this represents for the government will baked in to expenses. Cutting any spending here ends up being a battle, so it reprends more energy and focus the incoming administration will have to expend, and if they just reverse the change without cuts the Liberals will smugly say "but I thought we needed to get the deficit under control?"
pigeonburger
19d ago
What your narrative doesn't explain is why the US is considering dropping charges now - assuming that they actually are considering that and it's not just another deception.
Leftists and young democrats voters have to be thrown a bone because they're threatening not to show up to vote for Biden over Israel. It's just that.
pigeonburger
11d ago
Americans can correct me if I'm wrong but from what I hear, their votes are worth the same. Seniority matters as to who decides who gets to write opinions. The most senior member of the majority (which is automatically the chief justice if he is in the majority) assigns redaction of the opinion to one of the members of the majority. Same happens for the dissenting opinion (most senior judge in the dissent, automatically the chief justice if he is dissenting with the majority, choses who writes the opinion).
So seniority is important, but not THAT important. What does matter though is that their opinion is taken into serious consideration by other judges. Ideally, a judge to the Supreme Court should never be a blindly partisan hack, but in practice it can (very charitably) said that they are at least preselected for an extreme adherence to one school of thought with regard to how flexible the Constitution should be. But a particularly eloquent opinion might be able to sway swing votes or even peel off a justice or two from the other bloc, so experience and quality as a justice matters.
Ultimately this is the reason why I consider Trump to be easily the best option americans have had in a long time. Of course a wise and devoted to the population's well-being president/king would be best, but at least a vanitous president is a lot easier to keep aligned with the population's wishes than the puppet of a PMC that believes they should be the one deciding what the population should desire. The former just has to be reminded that the population will love him if he does what they want. The only thing that seems to motivate the PMC to go along or pretend to go along with the population's wishes is the threat of losing to a populist who could undo their long term sociocultural engineering projects.
I think part is that the audience on Mac skewing older and more well-heeled, and that outside of multimedia, Macs were not very well equipped to play games for their era, especially for the price. If you wanted a computer for the kids to play games, there were usually cheaper and better suited alternatives. Cheap 8 bits micros were better for games than early monochrome Macs with only beeps, then Amigas were much better equipped with their dedicated sound and graphics chips, then with 486s and above and VGA and SVGA PCs were able to push more complex graphics.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
I'm 100% ready to believe this pessimism in the air comes from our inability to self-organize. We are locked in with people we do not like 24/7, reading their crappy opinions, we can't just splinter off and make a new community and so we live with a slight psychological chip on our shoulder but we're not sure why.
I get your feeling, and I think the main culprit, the biggest reason the insular internet mostly collapsed is Reddit (and recently Discord). The technical superiority of Reddit when it came out, its ability to spin up new subreddits on any topic and its originally relaxed moderation turned it into a natural Schelling point for any community. Previously if I wanted to find an active community talking about topic_x, I'd google "topic_x forum" and look at some of the results and join a PHPbb (or similar) forum that seemed to have a vibe I liked. Now the first place I, or pretty much everyone, will think about is /r/topic_x. It will be bigger and more active than almost any other community about topic_x.
The only exceptions are going to be existing communities that don't want to be Schelling points that passively attract newcomers (like this place) or people who have an axe to grind against Reddit. And while I do myself have an axe to grind against Reddit, I have to admit I'm in the company of a lot of witches who really just want a place they can spam the n-word, and the communities created by that second group are likely going to suck.
All true, but I'd point out that these are the reasons why the US is currently on top. For the most part, it's where the US is coming from, not necessarily where it's headed. For many of those, the US is headed away from them. Like for (2), selective scrutiny of business dealings and of regulatory observance for being on the wrong side of politics is increasingly visible in the US; I don't know if it's more or less the case than before, but it's certainly more high profile. Musk might not be facing jail right now, but there's a large group of people, in some states a majority, who would electorally reward public officials for finding any reason to go after him. There's a large (and growing) group of people who believe Musk (or anyone) should not have been able to make that much money in the first place and that such wealth can only have come from some illegitimate or immoral acts, and while these people are not in power right now (because the elites don't believe it, they just use it for electoral purposes), it could only take one populist rising at the wrong time to ruin the idea that the US is a safe place to do business in.
What strategies do Mottizens follow for a good social life?
Creating and following a tradition. For over 12 years my friends and I made a weekly habit of meeting at a specific neighborhood bar every tuesday evening. Not everyone is there every week, sometimes life gets in the way, but being there is the expected default, and we can assume we're busy those evenings and try not to schedule anything else then.
Sure, once a week is nothing compared to the socializing people used to do, but most people I mention this tradition to seem to envy it.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Is there a way to tell which of these is true?
I don't think so, but let's dive into each one.
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It's true that most users probably don't notice the sculpting, but then again, they do notice that for some reason, somehow, Google has gotten worse. I don't know if the sculpting is the issue with search, I don't think anyone outside Google (and maybe inside Google too) knows the exact reason why Google Search sucks now, but since for Gemini's image generation it seems exceedingly likely sculpting was the reason for images not matching the expectations of the prompter, then I think we should assign a fairly high probability to it being at least part of the cause for the degradation of service for search too. And as dominant as Google is now, changing search engines is very easy, low friction, so once a competitor gets enough traction it might turn out to have been very counterproductive.
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I think people at the very top could dial back if they wanted to, as long as it's not framed to be dialing back on the commitment to ideology, but as a technical matter; they don't have to give any rationale except degradation of the service. Companies have been laying off DEI employees/departments with little pushback, because companies still officially run on the rules that put finances above ideology (for now). As long as it's because the company needs to trim some of the less "core" employees, and not framed as "our customers and employees hate everything the DEI department has been doing". So while businesses are not allowed to explicitely retreat from the ideological battleground, they still have the latitude to excuse themselves for technical reasons.
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This one seems pretty unfalsifiable and conspiracy minded. I don't think most people outside of extremist political operatives think along those terms. And demoralization is easily countered by reminding oneself that if it was truly hopeless, they wouldn't need the propaganda, whether it's opinion shaping or demoralizing.
I was a big user for a couple of years here, after we got full legalization. Saying it kills motivation is right; I wouldn't say it does it directly, but indirectly by making you boring and okay with being bored. I've mostly stopped not because I made a choice to stop, but because my wife is now living with me, she doesn't use it and I don't think it would be fair for me to be so boring to be around when she's there. When she's not there, I usually have other things I want to do that would bore her but entertain me so I don't really need to make myself okay with boredom.
seek and destroy
It's more remind and dissuade.
With one very notable exception, public violence in the US and Canada tends to be criminal rather than terroristic, and when it's terroristic, it's usually a lone wolf. At least for now (until cartel or jihadist violence significantly rises), criminals and criminal organisations there are not exactly geared for high level violence. And for those organisations, public violence is not a smart solution anyway, it attracts too much attention and it's bad for business. Cops with pistols are plenty enough to intimidate them into avoiding public violence. And while lone wolves can buy fancy weapons and equipment in the US, they're by the nature of being "lone" wolves, immediately outnumbered as soon as two cops or armed civilians show up. Europe has more of a problem with jihadist groups with international funding and sometimes high end equipment, a disregard for their own lives and a mission that makes public violence a goal in itself rather than an unfortunate detour to another end. A group of 5-10 of them can outgun and outnumber the police on the scene for enough time to do a lot of damage. These people are not intimidated by a cop with a holstered pistol, they need to be reminded that the country they're thinking of attacking has a military, and that this military is close enough to respond quickly.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Besides, the original Gamergaters were utterly vanquished. Gaming is one of the wokest industries now, unlike back then when there was a sense that it wasn't too late to claw it back from the brink.
Would not say utterly vanquished, it was a pyrrhic victory for the press and wokies at best. Gaming journalists barely exist anymore, sure some of that can be blamed on existing trends towards independent video bloggers and streamers and the threat of AI, but you know what would have surely helped them weather these conditions better? Not having alienated the very core fandom of the topic they're covering, those that would have kept consuming high quality written content about their favorite topic, if that had been what was on offer. As for the game industry itself, it's not doing so hot, especially on the western AAA side. Again, alienating the core fans lost them the support they would have needed in these tougher economic times. Meanwhile, it's not like gamers could really lose to begin with; they're the one with the money and who drive the transactions. If the western AAA market refuses to make games they want, well, if there's demand there's gonna be some clever indies or 2nd tier devs snapping up the opportunity. And there's always Japan. And the past can't be taken away from them, there's an essentially infinite back catalog to explore.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Following posting this comment ( https://www.themotte.org/post/900/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/193633?context=8#context ) regarding a law that I believe should only apply to those who would want to impose it on the population, I have been playing in my head with the idea of a "Higher Standards" bill for politicians. The idea would be that all laws apply maximally to elected officials; in situations where prosecutors or judges find themselves with any discretion in their ability to prosecute or punish crime committed by an elected official, even in their personal life, they should forced to start their process from the point of the harshest possible position. They would be forced to prosecute jaywalking, the slightest driving infraction, etc... and start the mental accounting for sentencing / fining with the longest sentences or highest fines before any mitigating circumstances can apply. Details as to whether it would apply to actions before the enactment of the bill, or to accession to public office could be negociated either way. A grace period could be left open to allow rewriting laws before it applied.
I see a lot of positives coming out of such a bill. The main one is to urge restraint in writing laws. Legislators pass laws knowing that it is unlikely that they would ever be used against them and care very little that these laws are held over the population like the sword of Damocles that could at any moment be applied by a prosecutor looking to make an example or please a private sponsor. If you want to vote for a law criminalizing piracy, you should yourself be able to account for every single piece of digital content you have. If you want to curtail "hate speech" you better be damn certain that whatever comments you make today on either side of the Israel/Palestine conflict will not be considered "hate speech" by the standards of tomorrow, etc... While I don't believe it would stop all of it, I think it would force legislators to reconsider some laws that achieve little but make technical criminals of very average people for widespread actions.
Other benefits I see is that it would encourage legislators to pay attention to the technical minutia of the laws they're passing, outside of the pork they're able to fit in it and how it will play with interest groups. It would also discourage criminals from running for office.
I struggle to see negatives; technically it could discourage effective would-be politicians from running for office if they believe that this is going to be weaponized against them. And I guess it would be a struggle to pass as politicians obviously would hate it, but without any arguments to bring forward I think they would find it hard to convince their constituents that voting against it is anything but voting against their interest. And it would take only a few fairly clean politicians to make some noise in favor of such a bill, willing to trade the benefits of future criminality in exchange for the large boost such a clear pro-plebeian move would give them.
I guess it could also be argued it's a very legalistic, low-trust society move, which I would concede, but that's the point I believe we are at in much of the west. That when the system is seen as benevolent it is fine to leave cops with the discretion to decide, for instance, when it's in the public's interest to disperse disruptive people for vague reasons like "loitering" or to punish antisocial speech as "hate speech", but when I do not trust the system, until that trust is restored I would rather know exactly what the rules of the game are, and so I want lawmakers to be highly interested in making sure that rules are crystal clear too.
So are there any negatives I'm not seeing? Has any similar law been enacted elsewhere and what has it led to? I see lots of references in the anglosphere to proposed bills claiming to hold elected officials to a higher standard, but for the most part it seems like it's either object-level transparency laws (which of course, we need too, but won't encourage restraint in lawmaking), too vague or obviously meant to be solely weaponized against the proposer's rival (laws against "lying", or against "contesting election results" or whatever else of that kind).
pigeonburger
1mo ago
A lot of the knife answers seem to assume maximum stupidity from the bat fighter and maximum cunning from the knife fighter. That the only strike someone could do with a baseball bat is a big homerun swing. I'm pretty sure most people would figure out that's not all they can do with a bat within seconds of thinking of it as a weapon, and of how to avoid ending up being knifed. Most importantly, a quick overhead bonk (think kendo strikes) leaves you a lot less vulnerable if you miss than a swing, and if the opponent tries to catch it or to block it they will open up the entirety of their body to kicks. While that is not going to kill or even knock out in one shot, just one overhead bonk connecting is likely more than enough to end the fight; the amount of force in it would be enough to have the opponent reeling for long enough to line up another one, and another one, ect... And as for knife fighters, winning with one requires knowing something that is not really commonly known: you will not incapacitate someone with a knife. The targets that can incapacitate are small and an untrained person is not going to hit them on a resisting target. An expert probably wouldn't even bother either. The way to win with a knife is that you tie them down another way (say, by tackling them to the ground), and THEN you do damage with the knife, repeatedly. But the knife is essentially useless to win if you are not able to tie down the other guy, and with no distractions he has a big heavy piece of wood he's highly interested in keeping between you and him.
Nothing special really, my friends and I were mostly living in or around the same neighborhood, the bar in question was opened by a friend of ours and was the only pleasant place in the neighborhood, so it made for an obvious meeting place. Tuesday evenings were convenient for everyone the first few weeks, and after that we were just explicit in calling it our weekly tuesdays hangout. I think what helped is being explicit about it, and doing it on an "opt-out" rather than "opt-in" basis. There's also an open invitation to any friends, SO of the regulars. Anyone who wants to be there is welcome, but from the start we were already a stable core group of relatively mature and easygoing men, so there was little risk of personality clashes or drama spoiling it.
pigeonburger
21d ago
And without that motivation, your experiment starts functioning far worse than capitalism.
Exactly, because capitalism is unique in not only assuming humans are greedy but counting on it.
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.
I don't think Metal Gear Solid would have been nearly as iconic if it didn't successfully replicate the look, sound and feel of an action movie. Sure, by today's standards it's not "hyper realism", but by the standards of the day it was.
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