urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
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User ID: 226
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
12hr ago
Instead, Cortez proved himself a diplomat of no small skill, and put together a coalition of the Aztec's subject peoples which ultimately strangled Tenochtitlan, and then entered into negotiated political relationships with the Spanish crown.
When I took a class on Spanish colonization in the Americas, this was repeatedly emphasized. It was an astoundingly fascinating class, taught by a really passionate professor. And the core message was that it wasn't the Spanish that swooped in and single-handedly took down the Aztecs, it was the resentment of those subject groups that took them down. Which, as @2D3D notes, is incredibly inconvenient both for people who want to say white people are uniquely evil and, I strongly suspect, for indigenous activist groups in Latin America who want to whitewash (pun intended) the cruelty of the indigenous empires of the Americas.
There are many, many bad things you can say about European activity in Latin America. The other thing emphasized in my class was how terrible the encomienda system was. But what was also emphasized about that was how many members of the clergy were intensely opposed to what was happening in New Spain, including this fire and brimstone sermon against slavery from a Dominican friar:
It is to make these sins known to you that I have ascended this pulpit, I who am Christ’s voice in the wilderness of this island; and it behooves you, therefore, to hear this voice, not with commonplace attention, but with all your heart and with all your senses—this voice which will be unlike any you ever heard, a voice more harsh and severe, more frightful and devastating, than you ever thought to hear.
This voice declares that all of you are in mortal sin, living and dying in it, because of the cruelty and tyranny you practice toward these innocent people. Tell me, by what right or justice do you hold these Indians in such cruel and horrible slavery? By what right do you wage such detestable wars on these people who lived mildly and peacefully in their own lands, where you have consumed infinite numbers of them with unheard of murders and desolations? Why do you so greatly oppress and fatigue them, not giving them enough to eat or caring for them when they fall ill from excessive labors, so that they die or rather are slain by you, so that you may extract and acquire gold every day? And what care do you take that they receive religious instruction and come to know their God and creator, or that they be baptized, hear mass, or observe holidays and Sundays? Are they not men? Do they not have rational souls? Are you not bound to love them as you love yourselves? How can you lie in such profound and lethargic slumber? Be sure that in your present state you can no more be saved than the Moors or Turks who do not have and do not want the faith of Jesus Christ.
People like to point to Christianity as some evil thing that made European colonization worse, but amen amen I say to you, it was the only thing that kept it from being even worse than it was. Fire and brimstone, baby.
It also allows them to continue harboring their intense classism and hatred of people like white appalachians and poor southerners. I agree there are some criticisms you can make of those groups -- some of those very hard-hitting -- but the criticisms made by elites are often far more gutteral and contemptuous than grounded and sympathetic. I would not be surprised to hear some references to "scum of the universe".
The real thing that distinguishes this to me, though, is how it contrasts powerfully with the attitude towards other poor groups; I can't tell you how many middle class+ white people I know will talk endlessly and with great care about being respectful towards AAVE speakers, and then in the next breath make fun of backcountry white dialects that are similar in many respects. It's not the kindness or politeness that grates me, but how selective it is. I dislike the sort of smorgasbord contempt you get from some of our more... elitist posters, but I can at least respect the consistency.
Poor white people are the only people you get to be prejudiced against nowadays, and people are eager to use them to fulfill their innate desire to look down on and insult people they see as lower than them. Compare the valence of the phrases "white trash" and "black trash."
I also get the sense, like ThisIsSin, that overall standards have gone up a lot too, while people's actual value has gone down, with greater obesity, sedentary lifestyles, and mental health challenges among both men and women.
But I also can't help feeling that people have just lost interest in romantic relationships in general. They don't believe in eros any more. They don't have faith in love being valuable. This especially seems pronounced among women, who, after all, are the biggest traditional market for such high valuation of love.
There just seems to be a cohort of women that's not interested in dating any man who comes their way. And I'm not saying they won't date any man who comes their way (that seems eminently reasonable), but that they won't date any of the many men who come their way (some of those men, I know, were generally very popular among women). I know, and have had, lots of female friends and acquantances who have never been in major relationships and show no interest in starting one. We talk about "men going their own way" -- but "women going their own way" seems to be an even bigger group, at least from my zoomer perspective. Love seems transactional, not interpersonal, to them; if I recall correctly, some back in school would joke about marrying a rich man for the money, but actually loving a man never seemed to occur to them.
I haven't noticed as much of a similar cohort of men, though there are some. And there are definitely men who 'desire' a relationship but aren't very active in looking for one.
Contrary to popular belief, this cohort actually seems just as pronounced among women of a conservative background, to my eyes because of the intense values against casual dating in that cohort. They are, just as much as any highly-selective women, waiting for Mr. Right to fall out of the sky. And it has to be Mr. Divinely-Ordained-Right, because the marriage is in three months and they will immediately have children.
My crackpot theory is also that this has something to do with women's relationships with their fathers (and men's relationships to their mothers); most of the women I've gotten on well with romantically have had at least decent relationships with their fathers. I have a weird suspicion that the rise in divorce and single parenthood has led to a lot of women who don't have major male influences in their lives, so they don't form the understanding and appreciation of men's personality traits that women who grow up around them do -- leading them either to idolize or reject something they don't really understand. Growing up with a caring father gives you a good example of the positive influence of men in your life, and a key example of the value men can provide to you and your children. Plus, it means you love at least one man, and that predisposes you to feel positively about them in general. My girlfriend groans at my dad jokes, but her own father's are even more groan-worthy, so she's had a lot of practice tolerating them (and I think secretly enjoys them, don't we all?).
I guess it just makes me sad, I'm a big believer in the value that an intimate relationship, above and beyond the sexual or transactional benefits, brings to people's lives, more than most men -- and I know this, because when I bring up my beliefs on the issue other men mostly don't seem to understand me and talk about it in confused ways, the same way my asexual friends IRL have talked about sexuality in ways that are incredulous and confused. I have this strong value, I've seen its profound impact on my life, and I see it profaned and cast off everywhere -- "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, Moloch the loveless."
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1d ago
After reading this a couple times last night, sleeping, and then reading it again today, I finally realized what the quotation means and why people are reacting the way they are: the message is addressed to people who were trying to use the bridge and were impeded by the protesters, not the protesters themselves.
I thought the message was addressed to the protesters, who the DA was claiming were falsely imprisoned by the police. There are probably lots of reasons for my misinterpretation -- "imprisonment" being more closely connected to jail (and booking) than to being impeded by a protest, "detained" being a word associated with the police, and of course my schema of the world in which San Francisco prosecutors are more concerned about police misconduct than public disorder. I am fascinated by my misinterpretation.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
3d ago
Ukraine is an especially poorly partitioned country where you have entire regions that are mostly Russian speaking, then others that are Ukrainian speaking, and still more that are heavily Hungarian.
This sounds like a "Comrade Stalin threw a dart on a map and put the border where it landed" problem. And I agree it causes tremendous issues of national identity and integrity post-breakup. For the Bolskeviks, obviously that was the point: divide the minority ethnicities, put them in SSRs with people they hate, destroy nationalist ambitions, profit collectively owned return on collective investment.
And then there's Moldova, which just is North Romania, but was divided from the motherland because of dumb Soviet border disputes.
Who wore it better: UK or USSR?
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
4d ago
I guess my problem with these examples would be, I never looked at any of these as paragons of game writing, even in their heyday. In my youth, Halo was a multiplayer game, people didn't care about the campaign. I've never heard Destiny praised particularly for its writing, I associate it with multiplayer as well. Call of Duty is the Marvel movie of videogames, they've had stories but I've also mostly associated them with multiplayer rather than their campaigns. I don't do horror in any medium, so I can't speak to Dead Space.
But overall, your list leaves me wondering whether you're just looking for good stories in all the wrong places.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
4d ago
ME1 is my favorite game of all time, but I agree with the criticisms of the trilogy as a whole. I feel it went immediately and, ahem, massively downhill from there.
The reason I like ME1 isn't even because of the power fantasy, which I don't care about very much, I desperately want games where the main character isn't all that powerful. I'm actually annoyed we don't see more of those. Let me be a damn shopkeeper with a girlfriend, damn it.
What I liked about ME1 was the character work and the worldbuilding, which I think was pretty good. People praise ME2's character work, but my problem is I think they stretched themselves out too much, and had too many characters to focus on the important ones. I also agree the characters of Miranda and Jack were bad. The only acceptable female romance options in Mass Effect are Liara, Tali -- and I'll go to bat for this one -- Ashley "religious tomboy" Williams. I hear the chicks really dig Garrus. And I mean really dig Garrus.
There is insufficient storytelling about male characters having compelling romantic relationships with women in all mediums. I dare everyone to try to find actually-sensitive storytelling about male-female relationships, from a male perspective, that isn't 1. pornography 2. completely hamfisted or 3. downplayed. Apparently there's "not a market for it" and "why do you love women that much, that's gay" but, uh, this is my thing, my question with each and every story I engage with is "how high quality is the love interest subplot."
The stuff I get is generally not great, but I have to take the crumbs I can get from the master's table. The best stuff might literally be fanfiction. Somehow teenagers on the internet are doing a better job with a whole genre than the entire media apparatus.
Trump can't win in 2028, he can only serve two terms. I also have doubts he could successfully appoint a successor, his political success is too married to him personally.
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