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User ID: 613

plural


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 15:48:57 UTC

					

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User ID: 613

I don't want to multiquote because that's usually the failure mode of long discussions here that are contentious but there are a lot of questions here which I'll assume are not rhetorical. I want to make clear that I've mostly been talking about WhiningCoil and Steve just stems from that. This is a thing I've seen many times and it's probably why I've come to believe that the mods can never admit they're wrong and it's that someone new or unknown to me insults an active poster and they completely get away with, no warning, no ban nothing. The active poster insults them back and they get banned. And If I argue that this is unfair the mods will come out and tell me that I am wrong, and stupid. Both of which I accept and know but I also feel it's kind of a bad look to just break the rules in this way but I'm actually not in favor of banning anyone for anything except spammers and trolls who are specifically trying to disrupt conversations so I think it's just something I need to get used to or along with.

I don't know why you think I am your enemy or am acting as such but my disagreement does not represent that nor is my idea that you should admit that WhiningCoil's ban was made in haste and basically guilt by association with a post that shaped its meaning showing up after and appearing next to it related to owning the mods or anything like that. I think it's incredibly bad moderation to do something like this because it changes the rules to be more than they are stated. If you want the rules to be different there's a sidebar, I mean there's no explicit rule about calls to violence at all or "fedposting" if that's what rule Capital Room and WhiningCoil were banned for. But there's certainly no rule that says even if not explicitly stating a call for violence if it looks adjacent to it then you will also be banned. As I've said in another comment I believe that he was actually controlling his rage and bile when making that comment and if you wanted to ding it for being low-effort, sure, but somehow it's about breaking a rule that doesn't exist if you interpret what was written uncharitably. And if the end result was simply this single day ban I would not care because I generally don't care about bans that happen that aren't about users personally insulting other users. But I meant what I said that this ban will be used as reasoning for a longer ban in the future, so it absolutely does matter because long bans are one of the big reasons why people choose to never come back. The "never admitting wrong" is about this.

I get that you feel that Steve needs to be banned for breaking that command. But when a ban like this happens it's like something designed to get Steve banned. Like how apparently, I, because I don't post enough, am allowed to insult other people, but if someone insulted me back they'd get banned and I would not even get a warning. If what I'm doing right now would get me banned save for the fact that I mostly lurk then by all means ban me, I actually am extremely uncomfortable making posts in the first place and would prefer to be warned off or sever the possibility. I end up making comments like this because I am incensed and severely wish that I hadn't in the ensuing replies.

What are you supposed to do when people violate rules over and over? It depends on a lot of things. I think letting it go is the most optimal situation since I generally don't care if someone violates rules that do not impact the level of discourse here. At the end of a comment chain when people get jokey, no I don't think they should all be banned for low effort, but if they start conversations that way it needs to be curbed. Steve being mean to you guys may affect how other users respect you, sure, and you've gave him a specific rule about it. But to me the context actually matters. Just like you give lurkers or newbies leeway that you don't for regular users it might make sense to give leeway based on the context of the situation. You banned someone for a rule that doesn't exist which they may or may not have violated depending on how uncharitably you take their post. Steve breaks his rule. I get it you have to punish him because you've tied your hands but 30 days when I've seen nothing to suggest from any mod that WhiningCoil actually broke a rule except for the initial ban post that just seems to say "well, i feel like i should ban you too because this is a little too close to the other post that actually broke the rules," which again I'll point out that this annoys me but wouldn't get me out of scrolling if it didn't mean that it's another step toward that user being gone forever because in a year this will be part of an incompletely cited list of situations in which WhiningCoil has broken rules in a specific direction leading to a long ban. And that's why I think it's not a 1 day ban that doesn't matter. If this place operated differently then I would believe differently and not respond like this.

I don't think that you should ban people forever because you hate their opinions but luckily, I'm not Steve so I don't have to pretend that this should reflect on what I think. And I should make clear again as well because of the implications in your post you're not my enemy. My opinions are not really that aligned with Steve or WhiningCoil or the people that think you mainly target right wing posters and are trying to get them off the site. I think that it's more reflective of the fact that Steve and WhiningCoil (or from the other side who just got banned token_progressive) are very emotional about their beliefs and for some reason being emotional about beliefs gets you banned. I hate to use Dase again but if he unemotionally calls a poster an idiot or despicable, or Trump a retard, it barely registers amongst the other AI content because he genuinely seems to not care about whether he's insulted you or broken any other rules. But if you care and say the same things, god help you. How do you deal with it? Just moderate with the same charity and context you're apparently giving me because I don't post often enough. Or with the same leniency and blind eye given if someone isn't that invested in the rule they've broken. I can't ask you to be anything more than fair and I don't want you to be harsher and I'm not going to change the system or rules so that's where we are.

Or simply do what you're going to do anyway, my incensed reaction is completely impotent. It's easy to comment from the sideline, I know, but that's the only view I have and like your tough shit comment about me not seeing the sausage getting made for a myriad of reasons, I think it goes the other way as well, if you're reversing bans or removing things from people's record and not telling people then you can't expect them to take that into account when judging the situation.

The charity I was referring to was to WhiningCoil. But I can see, as usual, you guys can never, ever admit you were wrong or made any kind of mistake in moderation. It's not a small ban that is basically nothing because it's the reason why Steve was just banned. Every modhat is one step closer to a permaban unless you are a mod or someone like Dase who gets to show up like TrannyPorno every month and insult a bunch of people and get a warning for one of the five insults and the others are ignored and each one of those ignored posts and the warning would be a ban for someone like Steve or WhiningCoil because even if you guys can't see it it's pretty obvious to me there is a bias against a certain type of poster that comes down to not liking how they post and never the actual content because I've seen "fedposting" like WhiningCoils about once a week here without any even warning. But the point is Steve just got banned for thirty days for an accumulation, if this ban means nothing about WhiningCoil then it surely wouldn't be used against him in the future for a 30 day ban, right? I've never seen that to be true.

And I'm not advocating for banning Dase (I don't even think TrannyPorno should have been banned) but I do think direct insults toward other users is actually the worst thing to allow to slide in a forum. But even moreso than not giving charity to WhiningCoil, that maybe he didn't actually fedpost because you have to assume things to make that true, but that absence of charity becomes even more absent when this will get used as a accumulation of infractions that gets him further banned for an increasing amount of time. I've said it before but if you want people to not actually post something then actually make the consequences matter because saying "this doesn't really matter but don't do it, 1 day ban" is always going to lead a permaban and at this point that pretty much feels like its the point because I've been pointing this out for years and years.

I'd say what whiningcoil said was carefully worded if his intent was something similar to capital room's. I think you meant to say you've never seen a carefully worded long piece get modded around here. And it's true, just write two paragraphs and your week ban will end up just being a day or write seven paragraphs and you'll just get a warning, despite the content being exactly distilled down to the single sentence it could have been. Words, words, words, should literally be written in to the rules.

This is a terrible ban and using his comment about the obvious troll poster troll posting and getting away with it because charity is endless to new posters who pretend not to know anything is ridiculous.

But the reason this is a terrible ban is because WhiningCoil's ban was a joke on several levels of both being bad and lazy and sets an assuming the worst kind of rule to the forum as a whole that I'm sure will go well.

But the bad moderating here seems to be here to stay if you can't just admit that you made a mistake and should actually be as charitable to the people you mod as they are supposed to be to you.

Well, then I'm not sure what your response is supposed to mean. FC didn't call for violence, neither did WhiningCoil. How do you get around this unwritten rule that means if you post something short you will be interpreted as uncharitably as possible? I guess words, words, words works in the way it always does for every rule here but WhiningCoil didn't break the rule, at least not the one they're blaming him for. And your suggestion seems more like a "how do you get away with writing bullshit on your homework? just write nonsense for a few pages they never actually read it." than a real suggestion of how someone should conduct themselves.

And I should note that FC was warned for that post, just not banned. So, even your acceptable version of how to express oneself in that situation is not a pure example of the right way to post.

You were a part of the discussion that happened two months ago that pointed out that the post cited in TW's Schism reasoning post which did not call for violence. And even the spicier FC post cited by others doesn't seem to be calling for violence either unless you interpret people saying that they hate and want others to die as being actual calls to violence which is not how I understand the term/phrase. I'm guessing you disagree or maybe didn't see the posts Nybbler made.

For me, saying you think that the only solution is killing people and saying that you hate these people and if they tried to destroy your home/city that you'd kill them is a far cry from the same thing. But no amount of words, words, words is going to make it acceptable for FC to have said that the right should just start shooting leftists because they are evil and not because they should defend their lives and property with violence and that they're indifferent to their own destruction because they believe they are evil.

I just want to make it clear that I really don't think calls of violence are allowed or tolerated,even if worded eloquently or verbosely. In fact, for the most part tiny posts like capital's or whining's are let slide far more often and mostly because it's assumed that we give charity to other posts. Capital's is pretty impossible to afford charity to but Whining's post is pretty easy to do so.

I'm nearly certain it was 20th Century Fox but I can understand the confusion as by the time show actually ended 20th Century Fox didn't exist anymore and became 20th Century Television when Disney bought them which also happens to own ABC so really the show ended in the hands of ABC anyway in a roundabout way.

Your point would be better taken if they didn't continue to make the show (Roseanne) except under a different name (The Conners) and just say that her character died.

For the most part ratings don't matter anymore because they're all too low. And anything that just says "ratings" is likely bullshit because the amount of people that watch it also doesn't matter or hasn't in the past, it was all the demo, 18-34 year olds who watched. Years before what your talking about Harry's Law was I think also the second highest rated show on NBC but it got abysmal demo ratings so they cancelled it despite it being owned by the network.

Last Man Standing was not owned by ABC it just happened to air there and at that point they're only making money on commercials so while ratings might matter there, the fact that FOX actually owned the show makes more sense why they'd pick it up if it was cancelled elsewhere.

More and more shows have very little value if they're not owned or anomalistically high in ratings (speaking for terrestrial television). Funnily enough, both of those things were true for ABC and the Roseanne revival. Though the Conners didn't drop much in the ratings so they probably saved an enormous amount of money, but it remains to be seen how much value they lost in the brand, because selling The Conners to a streamer probably loses you money if you instead had seven more seasons of Roseanne.

If you're going to be installing like three or more (modern AAA) games at once then I'd recommend getting a secondary SSD (nvme or otherwise) on top of whatever you get. The install sizes are insane nowadays and unless you want to uninstall and reinstall games all the time then you probably want at least an extra 500GB SSD (which would be lucky to get you five modern AAA games). Most new games will be at least 100GB if not 150 and they're only getting bigger. I haven't noticed that much difference with an NVME drive compared to a regular SSD but NVME is a bit of future proofing if they finally start doing stuff with direct storage. The best part about NVME is the form factor, it just feels so much better to install than a big clunky box with wires.

If your wi-fi connection drops sometimes I'd recommend getting a powerline adapter. It should be about equal to wi-fi if your wiring is good/new but more importantly it will be stable and won't drop connection if you're going to play games online. If your wi-fi is rock solid it doesn't matter though.

Without pre-installed windows make sure you at least have a usb thumb drive available so you can put an installer on it.

For a mechanical keyboard Gateron switches for mechanical keyboards are usually cheaper and better than cherry switches in most people's experience because they're smoother. They usually try to sell you red, brown, or blue switches. Red is light, smooth, almost mushy in comparison to others. Brown gives you feedback but no clacks. Blue gives you feedback and clacks, like a typewriter. I prefer blues the most but they will be annoying if you hate clicky-clacks or share a space with someone who is annoyed by that (or also play games online with people over an open mic). I'm not that much help on this because mechanical keyboard people seem a lot like audiophiles or wine snobs where I feel like most people will not notice things aside from the major descriptors. For example, red switches feel very much like membrane keyboards to me and I know that's sacrilege.

Another bit of sacrilege, I would recommend getting a controller. Not simply because some of them play better with that (classic example being dark souls but anything with analog movement) but because kb&m tends to hurt my hands after extended play whereas controller usually just wears out the tip of my thumb at most, and more important to me is the lean-back experience is so much nicer than lean forward when it comes to playing games and relaxing. Your mileage my vary and I certainly am not saying it's better in any way but comfort but pretty much all first person shooters/third person action games I default to controller. I know if it's pvp you're getting murdered but as someone that doesn't play pvp games that doesn't matter to me. They are quite expensive though and buying a nice one is important. Also, this depends heavily on the type of game you're playing if you aren't into old emulated games/platformers/third person action games it doesn't really matter (i still play any strategy/rpg/sim with a kb&m). I'd recommend an 8bitdo pro 2 but some people really like asymmetrical sticks.

Sorry, I realize I'm talking as if you don't know how to do anything or what anything is and I assume you know most of this stuff but I thought I'd chime in.

If you've seen backpack battles (the link is a demo), it's very similar. Basically, it's an autobattler where you buy/obtain items between asynchronous PVP battles (the battles are fought based on other players' setup but you're not playing against them in real time) and the items will synergise with each other in more and more complex ways. So, say you get a bunch of fruit and each fruit does a specific buff between attacks and you also have something like a fruit bag which gives a buff for each fruit you have.

To me, nothing about the bazaar looks better or more interesting than backpack battles, in fact it looks dumbed down and mobile-gamed by comparison, but it seems like people like it a lot better but I've heard people say they preferred its less complicated take. Though I prefer Super Auto Pets to Backpack Battles but maybe that's just beause it's perfectly playable on mobile (maybe the Bazaar will be but it's still in beta and PC only for now, I think). Funnily enough both of these other games were inspired by the Bazaar which has been in development for the better part of a decade.

Though I'm maybe too biased since the genre isn't for me since I don't like PVP games as they turn into perfect play or lose simulators after a few months.

There was a conversation someone repeated recently to me that they overheard from teenagers that basically ended like this: "It's so weird that you only talk to your girlfriend IRL. Like you're not even friends on instagram, it's kinda cringe."

I saw this post near the top of /r/all on reddit a few days ago. And I'll see something similar a few weeks from now. I don't think most people are capable of understanding scale beyond thousands. I know most people don't understand net worth. But a lot of this seems like willful ignorance because it conforms to what they want to believe.

Even then it's only apples to apples for certain countries. I remember someone arguing that China had a better infant mortality rate than the US and I looked it up. From what I could find China's IMR is measured at over 28 weeks gestation or greater than 1000g but you'll still find people that will claim the US has worse IMR than China because arguments are soldiers and their fingers are in their ears.

From what I remember looking up about this if you adjust for pre-term births the US's IMR ranking doesn't quite get to comparable countries but rises dramatically and the IMR rate of black, native american, and pacific islander was double that of white, asian, and hispanic. I'm sure those factors are going to make the US numbers look bad comparatively as long as higher portions of its population have those demographics.

I agree with you but it's not confined to the online right, at least in a different context than literature. Moralism has infected horror movies with fervor lately. All logic and/or narrative is thrown out the window in favor of making sure the point of the movie is stamped onto the screen in big bold letters.

Take "The Substance" there are massive leaps of logic and narrative flaws that abound but, because the movie has a message, it's acceptable and celebrated. It often reminds me of Yud's Universal Fire. "Who cares if it doesn't make sense this story has magic and monsters." Whether it's laziness or a lower bar horror has just become mostly this now. There was a horror movie that I quite liked a few years ago called Relic that essentially just gave up at the end and had a sequence that made no sense so they could spell out what the meaning of the movie was and it almost ruined the entire thing for me because the narrative itself completely collapsed at the very least so they could stamp the message of the movie on the screen for idiots.

I feel bad saying that this is kind of a sexes thing but it kind of is and I don't mean to say that women are bad at making horror movies, they usually make 2/3 of a great horror movie and then the last third is a muddled mess that could probably be saved but because people aren't willing to criticize them about this and the breadth and depth of horror movies sucking beyond this is unimaginable to people who don't follow the genre, then the movies keep spiraling into deeper and deeper into "no plot, only message" until we get something like the Substance where it's filmed and presented like a David Lynch movie except where every single metaphor/motivation/symbolic thing is cudgeled into your brain rather than being mysterious or even hiding the story.

I think it started in earnest with how well the Babadook was received and even though it's a woman writer/director I don't put it on that movie, the fact that the story can be a metaphor is one thing, the problem arises when it's literally the only thing it can be because every other possibility has been burned to the ground with sequences that make no sense. But it's an increasing trend that I hate because it ruins the narrative at least every single time because no one bothers to just weave it into the film they just give up near the end and say, "here's the moral" and then because it's horror most people just clap.

I remember listening to Joss Whedon's commentary on Serenity and through it he kept saying things about the plot to the effect of, "if this were a movie then this bad thing wouldn't happen but it's not a movie." Essentially, the world has to exist in shades of grey and darkness to reflect the reality of the situation, until there is a reflective point and things become black and white, the moral highground is taken and the good guys can win because it is now a "movie." Thinking of this it just made me think of Tarantino's take on how he must write a plot in a meme format compared to that take and him just saying something like, "The plot is this way because it's cool."

I know most people would consider them on par and plebian but the messaging, academics, morals of a piece of art becoming louder than the rest of it just serves to make it worse in my opinion but every time it's done its celebrated and used as a shield in the same way you can't complain about a plot of a fantasy novel because there's dragons, you can't complain about the plot of these movies because it's a metaphor or even a better refrain being that you just don't get it.

Maybe not intentionally going hot but it seems very culture war just going based off of reddit's reaction. The response is either shrug, "good", "more of this", or "I don't wish violence on anyone but..." and those are just the ones that aren't removed by the mods. But this is nothing new for reddit, there's a fair number of subs dedicated to anti-capitalism sentiment and they post often about killing rich people in the same way that pol would post about the day of the rope or whatever. I've seen many conversations on reddit that all boil down to:

Eat the rich.

Okay, but you don't mean kill them so how do we solve this problem?

I meant what I said.

Then it sort of just devolves into people agreeing with the sentiment that wealth inequality's only solution is violence. You can say this isn't culture but class but it seems to me the lines have already been drawn where being rich is always bad unless the person is sufficiently left. The CEO being despised for being in Healthcare seems like a fig leaf that just fits better than most for people from the outside looking in, but if this was an oil exec or a finance exec, the talking points would be different but the people celebrating would be just as fine with it.

I tend to avoid the anti-capitalist subreddits and whatever overflow they might have into the many left-wing subreddits. So, I imagine, there's more than I think. A decade ago there wasn't any specifically large anti-capitalist subreddits, then things like /r/antiwork and /r/workreform started, now there's stuff like /r/fluentinfinance and other hydra heads that are all the same thing, when they're not celebrating or justifying events like this they're just posting the same things that they must know are lies, whether they pretend that profit is revenue or that rich people's net worth represents the amount of currency they can spend at any moment. It seems clear that the celebration isn't coordinated by the left but the overlap between the tail and the head is pretty hard to figure at this point. There were memes in /r/adviceanimals about the killing and at some point it became a specifically left wing subreddit, but /r/pics, which also became a specifically left wing subreddit, doesn't have anything about it which leads me to believe the sentiment is organic, to the extent that its possible to be on Reddit anymore.

Hatred is lifeblood in the culture war and if the rhetoric is constantly "nothing will change unless poor people decide to rise up and kill their oppressors" and something like this happens where it's no big deal to kill a CEO, comments are talking about how they'd get off with jury nullification, "it's literally the same thing as killing a nazi," or venerating Shinzo Abe's assassin because he deserved to die for being conservative in a thread about this killing, then it's definitely going to either give the culture war fuel or become another overt part of it even if it turns out that the culprit was a hired assassin by a rival company.

It reminds of Trump's assassination attempt and how, whether or right or wrong, it was claimed that it wasn't political. Just because something is done absent a culture war motive doesn't mean that there isn't a culture war angle.

I'm not sure if you're objecting to the claim that the media is saying Trump is being normalized or that people are complaining that media has been normalizing Trump. Both have happened a lot.

How Not To Normalize Trump

Fallon: I Didn't Mean to 'Normalize' Trump

The Case for Normalizing Trump

Don't Normalize Trump's Vision for America

Normalizing Trump: An Incredibly Brief Explainer

How We Normalized Trump

We are Normalizing Trump. Again.

Protesters Outside of New York Times demand newspaper "Stop Normalizing" Trump

This has been going on since 2016. I mean the media obviously aren't normalizing him, in my opinion and experience, but people are certainly claiming that it's happening.

I'm not crazy, am I?

If you were trying to convince others that you're not crazy I wouldn't let them read this post.

What you're describing, that level of deviancy from the norm can only be, to me, explained as mental illness. They're clearly not "fine" even if they're fine with the rape.

But say they're not, then maybe they don't consider it rape at all and this crisis of being abnormal wouldn't occur to them.

So it wouldn't indicate reducing criminal or social penalties for rapists. And I don't think it would indicate reducing support or funding for rape victims, a majority of which are still traumatized in the normal way that everyone thinks they are. But maybe it would suggest something along the lines of... giving people the benefit of the doubt?

It probably already does this. People who consider what happened to them not that bad are probably not reporting it as a rape and if it happened out that it was reported they're probably not testifying, not getting a rape kit, not taking pictures, and even assuming all this is done just happenstance of them enjoying the experience, their descriptions, testimony, and demeanor would probably end up maybe allaying some amount of criminal penalty.

But even considering all that, you break a law, you get punished by the law, some things are mitigating, but someone enjoying a thing because they have a mental illness doesn't make it okay.

The rape your requiring in this hypothetical means the person being raped can't be aware that it is going to happen. Even if they enjoy the act their agency is still being taken without their permission. Even doing something I like, I wouldn't be thrilled to have this forced on me and my time taken.

This kind of thinking is like "it's okay to steal from rich people because they won't miss it." or "it's okay to attack that guy because pain don't hurt and he loves to fight." Maybe you could use that as mitigating factor in sentencing, but no, there's no benefit of the doubt. In fact, what is the doubt here? That we should give people a pass if they encounter a .01% individual who is not bothered by their victimization?

I mean, I'd also laugh at the idea of it being a blitz as well. Something can't really be a blitz if it never slowed or stopped from its starting pace.

Or at the very least gatekeeping. Ostracizing posers or not granting them entry/status would make it much less socially enticing to take on any "trait" that you want. Bring back shame. Everyone knows that a large portion of people claiming statuses conferred by being trans or gay or nonbinary are clearly doing it for status. Not being able to turn people away from a group means that the incentives of the group change to fit the people that don't belong.

I feel like a lot of the people getting their status out of things like: nonbinary, genderfluid, aromantic, pansexual, pronouns, or getting status out of things like unverifiable or self-diagnosed illnesses, or even things like homosexuality and bisexualty are getting that status because of the power that has been given to trans ideology. If you take away the idea that you can just claim an illnesses or trait and become a protected, unique, and celebrated person then, in an ideal world, the words become just words again.

I hear a lot of younger people call themselves many things but I find it very hard to believe them, even to the point that I don't really believe some people when they say they're gay because when they do they're 90% of the time obviously doing it so that people will treat them differently/better and I base this on it being brought up apropos of nothing and having yet to see said person give off any other tell that they might be gay, like ever having a boyfriend/girlfriend or even exhibiting other traits that I'd associate with being homosexual. Might be just a normal response of a person who is actually gay trying to fit into society these days but if that's the case it's a sad state of affairs.

It calls to mind this post I saw on reddit a while ago.

I use the CSS provided from this post from John_Doe_Fletcher:

https://www.themotte.org/post/1076/smallscale-question-sunday-for-july-14/231158?context=8#context

.active.arrow-up::before {
    color: #bd2130;
}

.active.arrow-down::before {
    color: #0062cc;
}

Do you watch tennis? I'll admit I haven't watched in years, but Hawk-Eye/Shot Spot was unchallengeable and considered the final and correct call. Tennis has been much better ever since it was introduced. It's extremely fast, replaying shot location in less than a minute (sometimes even less than thirty seconds) of the challenge and showing it to the player. It quelled people stewing over something they thought might be a bad call and kept the game moving. I'd thought for years that if they introduced a system like this for baseball then it would speed up play considerably and mollify people's questioning of whether an umpire's call was correct. I'm sure it'd need to be more fiddly because of changing strike zones but I suspect they really don't want to introduce something that would speed up play in baseball anyway.

The only problem I see with this is that letting a player ask to see where the ball was probably helped ease tensions a lot during matches and the challenge, even if just confirming what the computer already saw should probably still be included as a request if it's just using a similar system to Hawk-Eye/Shot Spot.

This is exactly the kind of stupid-easy thing that AI should be used for. Did something pass this plane, yes/no? There's a world of difference between that and deciding something like a complex criminal court case.

I mean they're clearly wrong. The yellow smiley face came way before The Simpsons and was the basis for emoticons/smileys before they became emojis.

It would also have avoided the endless Trump lawsuits or at least most of them.

But I think it would strictly make things better because it gets Trump out of the game. The culture war is probably an endlessly rising tide but for some reason Trump makes it rise much faster whether he's winning or losing as long as he's playing people are losing their minds and justifying literally any culture war item they support or reject on the back of his uncouth facebook-level news regurgitation.

It's also worth saying that it completely evades Kamala being the candidate which, in my mind, would lessen the culture war. It would have possibly stymied the idea that "my enemies are fascist and going to disenfranchise or even destroy any minority they encounter" not because it's true or not, but because it didn't work.

Trump, for all his faults, did not decide to try to arrest Hilary. The complete disregard for law or procedure maybe came earlier but to me it seems like it was fully ignited because of January 6 and dems implicitly saying that this "insurrection" not only defines any of our enemies but also empowers us to treat them as enemies in what should be neutral situations. Trump has some classified things or not whatever but a law that nobody respected or expected would be used in this situation is somehow exceedingly important because it can be used to attack Trump.

I am becoming more and more blackpilled about this but I do think the difference between waiting for Trump to finish and vanish and just lying, throwing away decorum and meeting him far below his level because you can get away with it doesn't happen if he's elected. It would have probably ended up this way regardless but Trump makes decorum decay at warp speed.

(maybe his level is that low, I don't know, but one thing's for certain in my mind, he would be ineffectual because he mostly has been.)

Emoticons perfected the usefulness of small image addendums to communication and emojis enshitified them over and over and over until we have have the dumbass garbage we have now where it wants you to put an emoji of groceries after you just wrote groceries. Though there's probably still an argument to be made that emoticons/smilies were not necessary either. There's a part of me that finds anything beyond simple ASCII smiles or winks obnoxious now. I think that stupid clapping shit with emojis between each word pushed me over the edge into hating what they've done to communication.