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urquan


				

				

				
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User ID: 226

urquan


				
				
				

				
7 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 04 22:42:49 UTC

					

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User ID: 226

And for the most part I think what we're seeing with both Joey and Hubes is: they were being a good boyfriend, but they didn't pick you and that's upsetting because they were a good boyfriend. I got the feeling from the little we heard from these women that they would have been perfectly happy with Hubes if he had picked them.

This does definitely sound like the mirror image of the old nice guy meme about men who get mad when they're rejected.

As it turns out, it's pretty ego-busting to be rejected, especially by someone you really like, and think might be a great match for you. It hurts. A lot. I've been there. And it's very easy to turn immediately to the ego-defense mechanism of denial: "I never liked them in the first place." I'm sorry to say that long in my past, I was there too.

I wish we all could just get along, cooperate, be kind to one another, and derive gains from trade. But I'm disappointed in how sorrow so often leads to bitterness, and bitterness to hatred. I'm reminded of that surprisingly pithy Yoda quote: "fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering."

I'm going to disagree with you that Huberman did nothing wrong. I have a strong distaste for infidelity, especially at this scale. I suppose that comes from just good-faith disagreements we might have over relationship structure. And I don't think this is jealousy. Believe me or not, I'm not all that jealous of someone who chooses not to settle down -- ultimately I prefer monogamy and I see in it a lot of profound benefits that, especially as I've considered it in recent months, far outweigh whatever benefit comes from the alternative. And with the specifics of this case, to hide so much of his life from intimate partners just doesn't sound all that appealing to me -- but hey, I really like deep pillow talk!

Sometimes I worry discussions about dating ignore the diversity of considered preferences that exist out there in the world. I'm a man who, for the balance of my life, has preferred and pursued monogamy as a major life goal. There have certainly been moments where I've doubted that preference (as avid readers may recall), but I've always come back to my strong view that being interpersonally intimate with an exclusive partner is profoundly meaningful, one of the most meaningful things we have on this earth. For me, things like sexual market value and dating strategies are means to the end that is a loving relationship. I think this kind of true relationship becomes more than the sum of its parts, where sex and commitment bring forth not only children but the intimacy, companionship, and mutual fulfillment of a life spent thinking not of "me" but "us."

What strikes me about sex-and-dating discussions nowadays is the total poverty of romance. This is the lifeblood of the poets, the essence of many of our highest values! I don't recognize in them the sort of reckless abandon, or even passionate affection, that has characterized my dating goals since the day I first fell in love in my youth. Perhaps love is just rare. But in all these discussions about body counts and marketplace values and sexual relationship priorities, I see little emphasis on the possibility, however remote, that something profoundly great, sublime even, could ever emerge from an intimate connection with one's lover. It feels like a desacralized, mechanistic, optimized, even inhuman approach to life and love. Where is the lover about which the Bard wrote, who could "see Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt"?

Maybe that's just the internet in general -- happy people don't tend to post about their happiness, but bitter people post ceaselessly about their bitterness. And I see little value placed upon that most agreeable of words, "us," and all the value in the world placed upon the darkest and most tempting: "me me me me me me me." This happens not only in people's honest assessments of their current state, but even in their assesssments of what the ideal would look like. Has anyone ever heard of a dating thread where people talk about how passionate they are about romance and how much they want to spend their lives sacrificing and caring for another person? I presume the people who feel this way get eagerly snached up by the first person to realize it.

But nevertheless I continue to believe strongly in the significance of the Third Thing, the love that unites commitment to sex and alchemizes both into something greater and more enduring, about which cummings could write, "love is the every only god."

The current paradigm is "women's bodies are defective male bodies, men's brains are defective women's brains." That's not an explicit viewpoint or something that anyone intends directly, it's the outcome of the slow process of commoditizing human beings and molding them into good little workers and subjects who are obedient, pliant, and don't rock the boat. Anything that stops them from doing this is a flaw which the powers that be seek to destroy -- signal-boosting any ideology that seems likely to accomplish it. Once again, this isn't a conspiracy; it's a prospiracy, a side effect of powerful institutions doing what powerful institutions do, and of humans in powerful positions doing what humans do: endorsing ideologies that subconsciously go along with their pre-existing goals. This is the origin of "woke capital."

Women are more likely to uphold institutions and, as girls, to sit still for long periods of time (like you say), and are less likely to shout loudly about the emperor having no clothes. Men are less likely to do things that remove them from the workplace for a period of time (especially bear children), and more likely to slave away at work for hours on end while abandoning their families at home.

Institutions, especially corporations, want their employees to be male in the ways that benefit them and female in the ways that benefit them. They don't want people, they want androgynous commoditized worker bees. They want cattle and not pets, human docker containers cloned and scaled at will from the amorphous "cloud" of the "workforce." The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings. You will own nothing and you will be happy, and your storage will be separated from your compute and kept in trust by Amazon.

My girlfriend has gotten explicit advice that she should never get pregnant, it will "hurt her career." She detests these people who have established a system that expects her to sacrifice her biological and spiritual drive to bear and raise beloved children in the name of economic productivity and ruthless inhuman competition. This system sees bearing and raising the next generation of human beings, the most fundamental purpose of society, as a distraction from the more worthy goal of creating wealth for Wall Street. It asks this of men too, but because of the unchangable realities of being a sexually-dimorphic mammalian species, this requirement hurts women more than men. The entrance of women into the workforce on the same terms as men is the true systemic oppression of women. The left used to know this, like when Elizabeth Warren wrote The Two Income Trap. But it has forgotten it as its funding has shifted to corporations "woke" to their own interests, who are more likely to fund the striking of a child in the womb than to pay for the care of that which is born. And the abortionist feminists celebrate them for their avarice like good little girls.

The goal isn't to turn men into women or women into men. That's an ideological side effect, like "Communism" in Stalinist Russia. The goal of Stalin was to empower himself. And so it is with woke capitalism. (Perhaps real woke has never been tried?)

The Yemeni sheikh's quote about everyone having guns ("no matter if you're rich or poor, you must have guns") reminds me of my favorite youtube edit of all time: "Fimif sas dad." "No matter what our beliefs are about guns, we need guns."

This thing sounds like something that could be written by a leftist, with just a few words changed. I mean, imagine something like this:

Compared to my early 20s self, I am a lot less prone to ingrouping with the kind of Liberal people who deliberately shut themselves off from the world by retreating to the ‘burbs—people who just want to be comfortable and don’t have a burning desire to change the world. I’ve also lost any protective instinct toward people who stay in a shitty poor area with no opportunities just because they have a sentimental attachment to their ghetto hometown. My experiences have taught me that these people want nothing to do with my vision for the world and aren’t my comrades in any meaningful sense.

Actually, this sounds more believable than the original text. It's certainly more likely to be somewhere in ChatGPT's training corpus.

It's no wonder this man hates the Midwest -- he's basically a progressive activist, just with one or two ideas swapped around! The actual conservatism (and the pragmatism and realism he labels as "smallmindedness") he found there is as alien to him as it is to the woke moralist, and he rejects them for the same reason. They, in turn, reject his utopian vision -- because they're stupid and reactionary and the world is going to leave them behind. They're not on the right side of history. Don't they realize how much work there's been in academia right-wing internet forums about the systemic racism against Black people White people deeply ingrained in American society? Just do another search-and-replace of "smallminded" and put in "prejudiced."

@FiveHourMarathon and I have gotten into arguments in the past about the nature of conservatism, but regardless of where one draws the line between conservative and reactionary, this guy is on the other side of it. This is not the writing of a conservative, desiring to hold on to the lasting traditions that have been gifted to him by his upbringing. This is an ideologue, a radical, someone animated by the same spirit of the age that motivates the Communist revolutionary or the social justice activist. And he has the same smug self-assurance that, if empowered, would drown his neighbors in a lake and call it baptism.

Everything this guy writes is just a massive argument for Hlynka's position -- the strong form, not the way-too-far version he started saying later on -- that white identitarians are schismatic progressives, not really conservatives. I know he made some very strong and silly claims that extrapolated too far from the connection he saw. But guys, this right here is exhibit A.

This is too bad, but I understand the decision.

I do wish we had more representation for the sort of old-school Reagan/Bush conservatism he embodied. In his advocacy for colorblindness and a sort of common-sense anti-wokeness (rather than a more complex philosophical anti-wokeness) he represented the mainstream strain of conservatism that retains a great deal of power within the West and especially in the US. Of all the posters here, he's the one whose words sounded the most like the conservatives I know in person. In an (admittedly distant) second place is hydroacetylene. Probably FarNearEverywhere is in there somewhere, despite not even being from the same country as me. On the other side of the aisle is resident liberal netstack.

Heck, even his bugbears about all his enemies being the same people sounds a lot like the conservatives I know in person, who would probably be keen to make claims about Democrats being secret HBD-pushing racists. So there's a weird way that, even in his failures, he represented a constituency in our political sphere.

I'll miss his crotchety conservatism. I think the elder realism of posters like him is necessary at times to counteract the philosophical idealism and youthful exuberance that permeate this space. We need more dad energy. And Hlynka had it in spades.

It would be ludicrously unlikely that the Matthew principle weren't true on Twitter, since it's true everywhere else. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Today I asked my local mistral model "What are some alternatives to Hashicorp Terraform?" and received the best answer ever:

TempleOS: TempleOS is an alternative cloud platform that emphasizes simplicity. It focuses on providing a single, easy-to-understand interface for managing infrastructure. This makes it a good alternative for small projects where you don't need the complexity of Terraform or other tools. However, it has a smaller community and limited integrations with external services compared to more popular IaC tools.

This may be the funniest hallucination I've ever seen, lol.

Then it got better. I asked it to tell me more about TempleOS:

TempleOS, also known as the "One OS," is an alternative cloud platform developed by Terry Davis between 1985 and 2013. It was designed to be a single, unified operating system that simplifies the process of managing infrastructure and applications in the cloud.

And as Aaron spoke to the whole congregation of the people of Israel, they looked toward the wilderness, and behold, the glory of the Lord appeared in the cloud.

Edit: Okay, I kept going, this just keeps getting better:

Terry Davis indeed named TempleOS as a tribute to his belief that he was building an operating system for an Abrahamic temple. This unique perspective differentiates TempleOS from other cloud platforms and adds an interesting aspect to its history.

I'm just imagining a marketing comparison sheet with "Temple for God: Yes" under the TempleOS column and Ubuntu with "Not a Divine Temple." Move over Mark Shuttleworth.

This keeps generating gems:

TempleOS was not designed primarily as a cloud platform but rather as an operating system inspired by religious beliefs to manage various aspects of a divine temple, including infrastructure resources like virtual machines and applications. Its design and features were not focused on simplicity and ease of use for cloud management per se but rather on managing the temple's operations in a unified way.

The web-based interface was just one aspect of TempleOS, which aimed to provide easy access to its functionalities from any device connected to the internet. However, TempleOS did not gain significant attention or releases until 2013 when Terry Davis started sharing it with the public as a cloud management solution due to the growing interest in cloud computing and the potential applications of its design.

I've heard of pivoting your product, but going from "temple for the God of Abraham" to "cloud management solution" is quite the change.

Most of the conservative Christians who like Jews that much are dual-covenanters, they believe Jews also go to heaven because of the covenant with Abraham.

This is like the uno reverse card of that male feminist meme where you name a male feminist and it turns out they have accusations of sexual impropriety in the closet. Apparently "name a successful male role model with a happy home life" nets you either conservatives or, occasionally, actors who just follow the Holywood culture.

Maybe we should talk about woke executives? Is Bob Iger happily married?

People complaining that it is hard not to say things in an online forum where they don't need to even participate is a bit mind-boggling to me.

I don’t know that this describes Hlynka. But neuroticism is a hell of a drug. I work to keep myself under control, but there’s definitely an undercurrent of subconscious screaming and threat detection that can get activated by online forums.

When young lefties talk about hate speech being violence and trying to purge the commons of hated speakers, I get it. I don’t like it, I don’t agree with it, I think it’s wrong, but I understand on a deep level the underlying psychological impulses that motivate it.

I think following that logic makes the problem worse, and forms a catastrophization cycle that reinforces and strengthens their distress. But I can totally see how “these terrible ideas cause me so much pain, we need to get rid of them” is a train of thought people go through.

And there is pain. I know, when I see ideas that particularly get my gourd, ideas that threaten, if taken seriously, to damage values I hold dear — I know those things can easily make me freak out, become despondent, vindictive, to lash out like a cornered tiger.

This isn’t something I can easily describe to someone not familiar with serious anxiety, not because it’s some secret knowledge or something I’m “special” for feeling, but just because the feelings are so profoundly out of place that I think many people would find it shocking anyone could react in such a way.

I think this describes some of the “I can’t help but post on this forum I hate” phenomenon. People love hate-reading and hate-posting. It’s not helpful, it’s not healthy, but it is gut-level rewarding because of the great salience of threatening ideas.

But encountering a threat, however overblown, makes anyone want to eliminate it. And thus we get censorship, and long screeds whose text rhymes with “fuck you.”

The difference between me and the cancellers, I guess, is I know my emotional response to these things isn’t helpful, and it isn’t anybody else’s problem. It’s mine. And it’s my responsibility to deal with it, and to respond to the world in an intelligent manner. To be slow to speak and quick to listen.

I know I’m an unusual case. Sometimes I like to talk like I’m typical of the zoomers because of my experience of mental illness. But if I’m truthful, I’m not. My neuroticism is way higher than the average even for my generation.

I also… and this contradicts everything I’m saying here, but I don’t think of my struggles as an identity. But I talk to some people who seem like they view themselves as a Certified Generalized Anxiety Disorder Experiencer (TM) and not a person who struggles with anxiety. I’m not a person-first language advocate (I think language games are silly) but I do think there’s a mindset difference there.

I do think we’re doing things that lower the sanity waterline, lowering all boats. And social media is ground zero of this as far as I’m concerned. I’m not sure that exposure to random strangers’ ideas is actually helpful for people who struggle with calibrating their threat detector. I also believe that facing difficult situations is the only good way to calibrate. I just think there’s a balance to be struck between engaging in things that are scary but useful and being a masochist who tries to argue with people you believe deeply in your heart are wrong, and evil.

All I’m saying is, maybe Hlynka was higher in neuroticism than he let on. At the very least, some fraction of “involuntary” posters is explained by what I described.

I truly do not understand how such a person navigates their day to day life.

If we’re talking about the neurotic ones, often not very well.

This is an interesting analysis of the dissident right, but keep in mind that this poll wasn't created by or for the dissident right -- the authors of it have never heard of them and would hate them if they had.

There's the mainstream right, that wants low taxes, libertarian policy, and military might. That's the "GOP Establishment," or as their enemies call them, "RINOs." There's the nationalist right, that wants more manufacturing and less foreign wars. That's the "Trumpist" right, or as their enemies call them, "MAGA Republicans." Then, and only then, there's the dissident right, that wants actual racism. That's the extremely-online version that doesn't exist among conservatives in person. Maybe at those weird right-wing parties in New York, but if you think "people at New York parties" are representative of the right, I'm prepared to offer you a sweetheart deal for the Brooklyn Bridge. I disagree with him on how far he takes it, but I agree with @HlynkaCG totally that the identitarian right in this sense is more of a sect of dissident blue tribers than anything truly red tribe. And I say this as a born and raised red triber from Jesusland (and, if I'm being honest, a pretty hardcore nationalist rightist despite my misgivings about Trump personally).

This poll was created by the mainstream right, with occasional nods to concerns of the nationalist right. The dissident right isn't even on their radar.

We exist on an offshoot of an offshoot of the comments section of a psychiatry blogger who has openly practiced polyamory, and frequently discuss people like Aella, who promote sexual relations with multiple partners as an enlightened and superior alternative to monogamy. These discussions have been had here as recently as a few days ago.

Polyamory is also, as far as I can tell from my experience in it, rapidly becoming normalized in what's left of the atheist movement and the broader "nerdy woke people" subculture. Heck, my mom is an HR director in my conservative hometown, and lately had a job applicant who spoke openly about their poly lifestyle (they didn't get the job, mostly because they seemed legitimately crazy). This stuff is widespread, and I think it's more common in queer dating than straight dating. This is a slippery slope coming from the same people: gay people and nerdy woke people.

Maybe the slippery slope isn't leading to polygamy right now, exactly. But it has been, and is, pretty clearly leading to the normalization of polyamory. I think polyamory is more difficult to translate into the existing legal framework around marriage than gay marriage was. But if it weren't, I would be under no pretensions that Scott, and Aella, and Ozy (was he dating them at the same time?), and all the rest of the crew wouldn't be arguing their hearts out that recognizing plural marriages is a human rights issue (TM). As far as I'm concerned, it's just a matter of time.

I didn't love FarNearEverywhere's comment at first, but after reading through it, I think she's right. The elements that cause the dating market to be so asymmetric are legion, and not reducible to "women are less horny." If you wanted to somehow genetically engineer things so straight relationships look more like gay ones, you would have to alter the biology of women so throughly that the human species would be unrecognizable.

The solution to dating asymmetry is, and has always been, and indeed was, monogamy as an enforced social ideal, and norms and values that cultivate satisficing and not perfectionism when it comes to settling down. That doesn't mean pushing people to settle with an abusive alcoholic, but it does mean encouraging people to settle down with a homely, but kind and nurturing partner instead of chasing after hotness or status. It also means holding people to their vows, and leading people to see re-investment in their relationship rather than divorce as the solution to cooling off romance or non-abusive problems in a relationship. These are the conditions under which actual love can flourish, and furthermore I think they make both men and women much happier than the current situation, on net. The women get commitment and the men get regular sex.

That goes for men as well as women. Find your 5/10 sweetheart and marry them, damn it.

Dextromethorphan as an antidepressant, I had not encountered that before. Buproprion seems like it would be a good medication for a person dealing with anhedonia -- though my experience, as someone whose depressive episodes are secondary to anxiety, was it just made me more anxious than I'd ever been before. Like "have a crisis of faith because of brand-new worries"-level anxious.

Anhedonia sucks. Scott wrote once about how his patients with anxiety+depression often said that the anxiety was more disabling than the depression, and if they could just get a handle on the anxiety they could handle the rest. That's true to my experience. But anhedonia is the one thing that's worse: there is genuinely nothing as confusing and soul-destroying as not just feeling a lack of pleasure but a lack of any ability to understand what would give you pleasure.

Interesting that you haven't experienced any brain zaps. But it might actually be too early -- I only get brain zaps after about a week cold turkey off similar medications. It's possible that the brain chemistry changes that cause a lot of the (let's call it what it is) withdrawal syndrome are slow to manifest. So you may yet encounter the symptoms.

I suspect there are two concepts that are being conflated here -- sensitivity in terms of what you feel, and sensitivity in terms of what you detect.

One is being a highly sensitive person. While I think this is a useful construct, when you break it down I suspect it's a combination of neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness to experience in the Big Five model of personality. I don't think this is the sort of "sensitivity" that is conducive to "sensing" other people's hidden intentions, though maybe it allows you to be creative in particular ways that people with other personality dimensions would find difficult. I don't think it's a superpower. (Maybe if you want to write angsty poetry, of which I wrote much when I was a teenager.)

The other is what is often called "emotional intelligence." I don't like the term. I would prefer "cognitive empathy." This type of "sensitivity" makes it easier for someone to "read" other people's emotions and intentions because it allows you to mentally understand their perspective, modeling their behavior in your head. It has nothing to do with poor functioning, and in fact has everything to do with good functioning! It's the closest thing to a "superpower" in terms of what you're talking about.

My evidence for these being separate is that psychopaths, who are definitionally not highly sensitive in the first definition, are capable of being highly sensitive in the second definition -- that's where the ideas about psychopaths manipulating people by reading and mirroring their emotions comes from. In fact, to function at all as a psychopath, you probably have to develop a great degree of cognitive (system 2) empathy, because the more automatic emotional empathy that gives most people a head start in understanding other people's emotions is absent for you.

I suspect that the random youtube videos and quora posts are a bit of copium, combined with it being high-status and rewarded nowadays to praise sensitivity and emotionality to the high heavens.

As far as I can tell, Captain Marvel only made money because it was sandwiched in between the Infinity War movies. People were hungry for Marvel at that point, the last film ended on a cliffhanger and the excitement was palpable. This was clearly the high point of Marvel's energy in pop culture.

I'm of the opinion that they knew Captain Marvel wasn't going to be very good and sandwiched it where they did to boost the numbers.

national Origen mythology

Alright, if the public schools are teaching the pre-existence of souls, I want a voucher right here and now.

The KotakuInAction people are all over Japan. I'm very much just not a weeb, so I don't really relate to that -- and it doesn't help that the big issue for a lot of KIA people is that they want scantily-clad women, and this is the one horseshoe-theory area of agreement between me and the woke. I don't like the weird uncanny valley female face thing, but maybe a little less cleavage and a little more practical armor for female characters is a good thing. I still don't know WTF BioWare was smoking when they created the outfits for female characters in Dragon Age Origins.

I don't buy too many AAA games, but I also didn't buy too many AAA games before wokeness. Actually, I probably buy more now, because my gaming tastes are broader. though the ones I buy are more selective, and usually older anyway. I recently bought BioShock -- never played it before. And I'm going to admit, despite my hatred of the cyberpunk genre's aesthetic, philosophy, and morality, I have enjoyed Cyberpunk 2077. (It helps that I had essentially no context before buying it, and so wasn't offended by the shift from RPG to action adventure.) For the most part, it's genuinely difficult to find a game in my library that released after 2017, indie or otherwise. I play games basically on a 15-year delay, and I only play games that come highly recommended.

It's probably the same with my film watching nowadays, I just recently watched Goodfellas for the first time. My recommendation to everyone for everything is: don't engage in stuff just to engage with it, find good stuff and enjoy that. Life's too short for bad games, bad books, and bad movies. And there's too much good stuff not to just enjoy that.

If you sold state secrets to them, they'd presumably be positively inclined towards you and unlikely to turn the police state against you.

I actually suspect the opposite. "If he'll spy for you, he'll spy on you."

One of the eeriest things for me was reading about how the gender ratio at colleges alters people's dating experiences in profound ways, and realizing that huge amounts of people's dating behaviors really were influenced by market dynamics.

This isn't because of any particular failing on the part of the writers or critics involved, but is instead a simple corollary of the fact that the majority of works in any domain will tend towards mediocrity.

It's the Matthew principle all over again! The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

I think it's probably best to see "literary fiction" as a genre, not a quality marker (TM). It's a style and set of focuses that people, even today, choose deliberately to write in -- and some don't. And, within the modern literary fiction works, few are very good, and even fewer than that will ever be remembered.

Our view of the past is colored, always, by what has survived. Sometimes things survive because they just truly are brilliant and inescapably good, and people can't help talking about them. Sometimes, however, they survive because of being in the right place at the right time. The Great Gatsby is pretty good, I enjoyed reading it. But no one today would ever have heard of it had it not had it's post-war resurgence due to soldiers reading it during the war. It was, like you said, a historical accident.

I do think there's an assumption that the Blue Ocean audiences being looked for are of a higher socioeconomic class. And I think there's a belief that they tend to be more monogamers, I.E. people more focused on a title or two rather than something much more broad. (My understanding/experience is the people who are upset about the double standards/hypocrisy in Progressive journalism tend to be more Polygamers, people who play a wide variety of gaming experiences...but that means that we don't spend as much on individual titles...although I'd argue there's a higher level of value sensitivity there as well) But more than that, I think they're fishing for the so-called whales. The people who will drop absurd amounts of money on a single game.

This is a really interesting argument, and I can see what you're getting at if I squint, but I'd love for you to flesh out your position here. Is your view that gaming companies believe progressivism appeals to a higher-class subset of the gaming population that is simultaneously more likely to be interested in putting big money into microtransactions? Could you spell out how that works, because I don't necessarily see the straight logic there -- my guess is that progressivism is orthogonal to monogamers/polygamers.

It seems likely to me that polygamers are more concerned about journalism and progressivism in video games because their gaming interests are so broad that they need to follow news and pay attention to new titles in order to learn what they want to play next.

With monogamers, they're just focused on their particular title so whatever new thing is going on in the new story game doesn't matter so much to them. They're more likely to be incensed by a mechanical change to balance in their obsession than the woke story beats in the new blockbuster. The number of people who care about specific balance tweaks in League of Legends are a distinct subset of the population. But the number of people who can quickly scan a character roster for skin color or can develop an opinion about the sexual orientation of NPC romance options is much higher. It might just be bike-shedding.

Someone on an earlier thread about this controversy suggested that the narrative-based games which trigger both the progressive story beats and the backlash have an outsized place in discussion relative to the number of gamers who actually play them. I actually think it's the opposite: the big story games trigger such major discussion because they're the ones played by the largest plurality of the gaming populace. Maybe not a majority, though that wouldn't surprise me, but the largest and most mainstream chunk of committed gamers.

The hell? I’m in that bracket and there’s no way Trump has 50% support among young people. How could that even come about?

My recollection was that someone unbanned him at the request of someone who wanted to know how he was doing. But I may just be misremembering, or perhaps that decision was reversed.

I suspect, yeah, that's it. He was popular and charismatic and beloved and totally destroyed the left in his elections and thus he's loathed by his enemies.

He also pushed a lot of deregulatory policies that upset the left. But I think the hatred for Reagan on the left outpaces the actual impacts of his policies.

I think it's similar to Obama, who was and remains pretty loathed by the right, but whose policies haven't really made much of an impact -- the big one was the ACA, which has been mostly defanged. It's the fact Obama was popular and charismatic and defeated the right's challengers, some of the most qualified Presidential candidates in recent memory, easily (and, admittedly, with often dirty rhetoric).