pigeonburger
11mo ago
It's a shame because Reddit largely killed the standalone forum for non-ossified communities. For the passively apolitical majority, those who are okay with simply ignoring the politics or are used to hearing it as background noise and don't think there's anything weird with it, it's a Schelling point for conversations on any topic.
pigeonburger
11mo ago
Recently my gaming obsession has been submarine warfare simulators. They are the best games to play to quickly grow a sense of what you're saying; submarine warfare is nothing but developing a sense of how confident you can be with limited and potentially unreliable information in an adversarial environment. Possibly the purest distillation of that insight.
pigeonburger
11mo ago
I'm sure the conservatives would all love to conquer the institutions, they're mostly wary that yet another "ally" savvy to the ways of the institutions will turn out to be an infiltrator who will betray them when the stakes get high enough. Many would rather bet on the boisterous man who makes himself an enemy of institutions at every turn. He might not be the best to convert institutions, but perhaps he will succeed at razing them or culling them (he hasn't so far, but there's also a much longer record of conservatives betraying their base).
pigeonburger
11mo 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
11mo ago
Sierra's Fast Attack is abandonware, has a decent tutorial and goes pretty far as far as cold war submarine simulations go. It should be easy to find a version packaged for Dosbox.
The current most complete cold war submarine (amongst other platforms) simulator is the opaque and aging "Dangerous Waters". It's very in-depth, and but it takes a long time to reach a point where you can have fun with it. And it's not free (though it's often cheap).
Two other popular cold war submarine games are the old Red Storm Rising and Cold Waters, though they wouldn't really be considered simulators, at least not hard simulators. They abstract away the information gathering game to a single number. They make submarine warfare to be more about dodging torpedoes like in the movies. The first one is abandonware and the second one is fairly recent (and often on sale).
WWII-era sims are possibly an easier way into submarine simulators. They are also about data gathering, but less intensely so. The Silent Hunter series is the main one; starting with 3 in particular they're worth looking at, though they're not abandonware. I hear good things about Aces of the Deep but haven't tried it yet. Not abandonware either.
pigeonburger
11mo ago
Outside of the obvious problems with it (Harrison Ford's age and following up on a train wreck of a movie that bifurcated the lore in a detrimental direction), Indiana Jones can't be remade or followed up on succesfully because Indiana Jones is a throwback to pulp adventure stories/comic books almost no one remembers now. I think the last thing to succesfully tap into nostagia for that that was The Mummy in... 1999. Now, Indiana Jones IS the reference. There's only so much you can achieve by referencing two/three beloved movies (opinions are mixed on #2).
This is a broader problem with remake/sequel culture, succesful pop culture franchises were built by drawing heavily from preceding pop culture but in a new way; a remix. Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back built a franchise through heavy inspiration from pulp sci-fi and samurai(/western) movies; mix them together, you get Star Wars. Return of the Jedi and more strongly the sequel trilogy's inspiration is... Star Wars. No significant additional inspiration was added to it, they just remixed a remix. Nothing new is created, they're just diluting the original signal. Of course, the fans would probably be disappointed if they did anything else; the prequel trilogy was mostly rejected because it was different. (Rejecting it because it wasn't very good is fine; rejecting it because it doesn't feel like Star Wars is a case of "careful what you wish for" that we can all appreciate in hindsight with the sequel trilogy).
So anyway, sorry for the meandering post to come to the shocking conclusion that remake and belated sequels are creatively bankrupt, but I just had to take the opportunity reflecting on the new Indiana Jones movie to work through why it is creatively bankrupt.
pigeonburger
11mo ago
When I last saw pictures of him promoting the movie he looked as if he regretted not managing to kill himself in his last plane accident.
pigeonburger
10mo ago
Yes, I think it's fairly obvious they do, but they don't want to do it with their money, they want to do it with the common pot. And they get pushback because there's people suffering close to the bottom who work hard, floating just above the line where a safety net would need to catch them, who really could use the money they're forced to put into the common pot, who wonder why they shouldn't keep their money instead especially when they see others not working as much as they do being entitled to equal or more of it.
And as a result, the elites feel annoyed because they believe (and I think they truly do) that if everyone just shut up and paid taxes and didn't try to resist their plans, everyone could have a strong safety net and if they have to enact policies that explicitely fuck over the red tribers they'll see the necessity of a strong safety net, and they'll stop resisting.
So in general, they believe they have to soften up people a bit to accept ideas like UBI.
pigeonburger
9mo ago
Gonna try to steelman the X rebranding here.
The one thing that everyone in the Musk-Twitter discourse seems to agree on is that Twitter has significant value in its brand. Now, it might not even have that. Who really wants to talk about "'X'-ing on X" when it's far more idiosyncratic to say "tweeting on Twitter", which people have done for the better part of the decade?
Moving to X could be a very powerful move because specifically of it's weak branding. At this point in time, I think most americans and people who are deep into the american sphere either currently hate or have at some point hated Twitter. Right-wingers because it's been banning them hard under the previous management, mainstream progressivesbecause it stopped banning right wingers under current management. Nazis because it doesn't let them post aggressive slurs at people. Communists because it's a corporation owned by a billionaire. Libertarians because they respond to government requests. Greens because I don't know, computers use electricity. Centrists because everyone is yelling politically charged polarizing content at them on it.
Not only sunsetting the brand, but making the branding less salient can be a smart move. Seeing X branding when clicking on a link to a post somewhere doesn't remind me immediately "oh yeah, its twitter, fuck twitter!" like it used to. And in time, X being so generic might avoid having such strong emotions associated with it; it's more likely to be a liability for the company.
Is what I'm describing part of some ancient philosophy or religion?
Indeed, as others have pointed out, this mindset is at the heart of Stoïcism. It's also fairly close to Taoism.
What Stoïcism instructs is what to direct your will at: yourself. If you think that you have some influence over the DA, even just as a private citizen voting and writing letters to other people, then consider doing that. Or shape yourself into someone who would become a DA that would achieve the outcomes that you consider optimal. Make yourself into a better person and a better world will flow from that. The world is what it is; it can be improved if the people in it are improved, but the only one you can ultimately control is yourself. "But this DA is bad and is encouraging more bad people to do bad things!" Good is virtue, bad is vice. And virtue and vice can only be truly known from the inside. If the DA's actions are driven by greed and the desire to be popular, that would be vice. But most people would consider forgiveness to be virtuous, maybe that's what's driving this DA? And your view that these charges should be brought up against these criminals, it's important that you observe your own thinking to understand if that's truly driven by wisdom, a virtue, or by a vice (in that case I think most would see wrath as a vice). Broadly: worry about yourself. Your soul, your actions, your reasoning.
And couching things in emotional terms, is a sure way to lessen your power of reasoning, to lessen the quality of your very soul. You see it everywhere; the originally well-meaning extremists that believe that because they see what they consider an injustice, it gives them licence to cause similar injury to others. Or single issue political/social crusaders who become blind to unintended consequences because they see one thing as "bad".
I've had similar experiences to you, for me the difficulty has been piercing through the veil of expertise of the priesthood. If you sit them and debunk a specific thing, they'll still hold the belief because "If the truth was so plainly different surely all those elite journalists wouldn't believe a falsehood! There must be some more complexity to it that you don't know or understand..."
I feel like in a lot of cases, it's because people have an unconscious understanding that if they let one thing through to show them "yes, the news achors absolutely would tell you easily debunked falsehoods" (and note, this applies to the priesthoods of any political team) it'll all come crashing and they'll be cast out into the intellectual wilderness as we here mostly are; and sadly I have to admit it's a place many people are not equipped to face mentally and emotionally.
pigeonburger
9mo ago
Restaurants in East Asia, or restaurants of East Asian cuisine abroad?
Here in the west if a restaurant has a giant menu it's usually a bad sign because it means nothing's really good. But I think for East Asian cuisine restaurants abroad, they feel kind of forced to serve a few (often westernized to hell) "staples" of asian food else people complain. Like I see a lot of korean or vietnamese restaurants serving sushi because people just don't know or don't care. Thaï restaurants will be forced to serve general tso's chicken, all noodle restaurants will be forced to serve pad thai, etc...
pigeonburger
9mo ago
Well, that's specifically what I was talking about too!
If you're in a large city with a big East Asian population with some effort you can usually find the small places that exist to cater to that community instead of "the locals" and they will usually have smaller menus and much better food. But serving Chinese in particular is a tough one because China is big and its cuisine hasn't homogenized the way Japan's did for instance, and Canadians have no idea what Chinese people eat. It's probably simpler for the restaurants to just go with what their customers expect to see on the menu: every single variation of noodles/rice/dumpling/soup with chicken/pork/beef/shrimp, overly sweet sauces that is general tso's flavored, lemon flavored, peanut flavored, fish sauce flavored... rather than have to explain to confused Canadian who felt adventurous enough to go a chinese restaurant, but not THAT adventurous, that she might actually enjoy the braised tendon or the chicken feet.
pigeonburger
9mo ago
Yes. It's not a waste of energy to understand his actions in the sense that if you have to make a decision on his actions, like voting for or against him in an election, you need to act wisely and justly. But it doesn't really matter to YOU whether it was driven by vice or vertue, I was simply pointing out that you can't really tell whether something outside of yourself is good or bad; you can't know all outcomes, and you can't know other people's internal thoughts. All you can really know is your own.
Now this is one of the parts where Stocism tends to lose some people, but Stoics, like most ancient virtue ethics philosophers, consider that ethics are simple and innate. When we're close to nature, we do not need to be taught that being rash, cowardly, mean and violent is bad, it "feels" innately bad. Likewise being wise, bold, nice, and calm feels good. The Crusader or the Jihadist who commit large scale murder are doing so because instead of focusing on themselves and their actions, they focus on the world, which they see as "evil". And trying to correct the world directly blinds you to your own actions. If instead of focussing on whether the world or other people are good or evil, he were to think "is my conduct virtuous?" as he's about to massacre an innocent, he would likely come to a different conclusion. You can commit an awful lot of evil when trying to improve the world, that you wouldn't be committing if you were trying to improve yourself.
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.
While we're on the subject of Star Trek Voyager episodes with interesting allegories for race, there's Living Witness (which was directed by Tim Russ, the actor for Tuvok, even!). There's two alien races living on the same planet and Voyager's passage caused a war after which one of the races subjugated the other. Centuries have passed and relations between the two races have improved, but a copy of the Doctor wakes up and finds out that this relatively peaceful state of affair is based on a rather false retelling of the events where the race that won the war was belligerent and had Voyager kill the leader of the other race for them, when the doctor knows the subjugated race actually attacked Voyager unprovoked. The Doctor is stuck between leaving things as is, even if it's based on a lie, or pursuing the truth, which threatens the peace as some of the subjugating race always felt bad about the way they were cast as the villains and the subjugated race wants to clings to a view of history where they were blameless. Eventually it's settled on the truth. The whole episode has a feel of exasperation towards grievance politics.
Voyager got maligned for having some of the worst episodes (and the worst multi episode arcs) in Star Trek, but it had some great one-offs too. And it's funny to me how a show like Star Trek that's meant to be progressive can be "left behind" by an ideology that by design keeps moving.
pigeonburger
9mo 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
9mo ago
Maybe it's just edgy kids using twitter as an unprecedentedly powerful megaphone and we're still at the same base rate of this sort of thinking. Or maybe it's just a manifestation of greater general polarization.
I have non-edgy barely online friends in their 30s who seem to think a local political party's throwaway idea of the government rationing car and plane travel is what we need. These friends do travel more than they would be allowed under that scheme and they do admit it, but they basically just say "it'd suck, but that's the kind of decisive action we would need" and excitedly talk up the idea to everyone.
pigeonburger
9mo ago
He simply asked Lance a couple of questions to tease out his position, and Lance admirably admitted something a lot on his side probably believe: "bodily autonomy" is the strongest legal argument for abortion but the point of abortion is to avoid this issue. If tomorrow a 5 week-old baby was viable that basic, pressing issue of work that helps the pro-choice movement would remain.
I mean it is the most clearly announced motte & bailey argument I've seen, and it frustrates me to no end when people refuse to admit it. The main organisation championing it in the US, Planned Parenthood, is named after the bailey. But if you come with arguments that if women are given the choice of parenthood men should be given a choice too (to legally and financially renounce fatherhood) then woah bro! We're just talking about a medical procedure and bodily autonomy!
pigeonburger
9mo 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.
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.
pigeonburger
9mo ago
It'd be easy to turn the good/evil framing around on them.
By signaling that you are the kind of person that would pick blue, you are pressuring everyone around you to risk their death or else they'll live with yours on their conscience. I love my family and my friends, I would prefer they NOT put themselves at such a serious unnecessary risk of death, especially not my sake.
The only truly selfless moral choice (assuming no one is reading this post or applying meta reasoning) is to signal that you're the kind of person who'd chose red and then secretly chose blue. It's also quite a stupid choice, I think.
pigeonburger
9mo ago
In the same spirit: pointing and shaming how wasteful north americans are for driving instead of using public transport, claiming that if almost all the money we put on road maintenance and car infrastructure instead went to public transport it would be fast, clean, cheap and wonderful and all the junkies and mentally ill people belligerently bothering people on it would disappear, despite it being the very same people who push for everyone using public transport that are also pushing for complete tolerance of every nuisance in public spaces in the name of compassion.
pigeonburger
8mo ago
OP is modelling the progressives as percieving and understanding the problem and its solutions the same way as he does, so is confused and left scrambling to find an explanation as to why they chose bad solutions, coming to the conclusion that bad solutions must be a deliberate part of a plan to force people to find good solutions. Progressives do the same thing when they claim that their ideological opponents must be evil or selfish for refusing to fix whatever social ill is their current project.
As you point out, most progressives likely see the issue differently, and their solutions don't seem bad to them.
Fishing. I haven't been in years, I desperately yearn for it.
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