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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1283 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 5, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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According to English grammar and logic, if you say "There's not nothing," you are saying that there is something. According to Spanish grammar, if you say "no hay nada," you are asserting that there is nothing. But within Spanish logic, should "no hay nada" mean that there is nothing, or that there is something? I understand the level of "logic" of Spanish that dictates that the "no" must agree with the "nada" but in English the "not" cancels out the "nothing" and makes it something (even though most people who use double negatives- "ain't nothing" for example- are implying the Spanish "logic" of matching.)

In other words, if you have grown up speaking only Spanish your whole life, would you believe that the "no" SHOULD cancel out the "nada," in the way that English speakers often understand that "I could care less" is used to mean "I couldn't care less," or is it completely logical within the language of Spanish for the "no" to match the "nada"?

What are you buying during the Steam summer sale? I picked up Persona 4, Noita, Witcher 3, Halo 3 collection, and the Prey Mooncrash DLC.

It's ending in a couple days so I'm considering picking up another couple games on sale like God of War, Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon, or Into the Breach.

Tell me what you're buying, or try to convince me to buy one of the games on my list!

If you grabbed P4, I would strongly recommend Metaphor ReFantazio, if you don't already have it.

I finally got Valheim and enjoyed it for a while but lately have been drowning in so many bears that it's not fun any more. Literally about half my time is spent fighting bears, and as soon as one's gone another seems to take its place almost immediately. Can't go anywhere or do anything. Also, the bears don't drop anything I want, so it's pretty much purely a pain in the ass.

Let's be clear that it's not a skill issue; I can fight them just fine. It just takes too long and their spawn rate is insane.

My more experienced friends tell me I should probably just build a new house somewhere else. Apparently the problem I'm having may be a quirk of two small black forest biomes near my house. The game seems to want a bear in each of them at all times, whereas when I go and explore larger black forest biomes bears don't seem very common at all.

For several reasons I'm thinking I may just want to start fresh with a new character and world.

I admit it's been a long time since I cracked open Valheim, but can't you just make a new world and move your existing character over to it? I seem to recall doing that a number of times to help friends take down some of the bosses.

Definitely could, but I'd like the experience of starting from scratch again, this time knowing how things work.

I bought P5R (been feeling the itch for another playthrough and I don't really feel like using my PS4) and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Not much that piqued my interest, in all honesty.

With P4, just making sure you know there's a remake coming out in Feb. Jury is out on whether it'll be good, but it is probably worth holding off playing P4G until there is some consensus on how the remake compares.

I've always been a P fan but I don't like the look of the new screenshots from the P4 remake. They've messed up the art style.

Personally I'm holding out to see if they mess up the music (I saw a video with a version of Your Affection which was absolutely atrocious, they turned the breezy J-pop song into a techno track, and I'm hoping that is not going to be the summer town music cause I can't stand it). The P4 soundtrack is really good (the singer's ability to pronounce English aside), and if they screw that up it's probably gonna be a no from me. The other major concern I have is whether they rewrite story beats for culture war reasons (Kanji and Naoto are likely victims there), which I doubt they will do but is always a possibility in this day and age.

I think there is some rewriting for modern western cw reasons going on. That's the rumor. It's gonna suck.

The soundtracks have always been great. But I happen to think that turning the engrish into correct english would actually worsen the whole thing and homogenize it while taking some of the focus away from pure melody/vibe (which they (used to) excel at) and onto words. They made some completely new tracks for the P3 remake. They weren't bad at all, but they clearly broke with the old style.

When P5 came out, some American players were complaining about a lack of "localization". I think that if Atlus keeps adapting the series to the Western market, they'll ruin it. My suspicion is that we've already seen the best of the creative genius behind the series and it's downhill from here even though P6 (coming in a year or so) will probably make a lot of money for them.

With the new "darker theme" they supposedly have gone for with P6, and given how almost the same ground has been covered 3 times now, this would have been a good time to create a university age game.

Huh. I should purchase something. God knows I don't play any of the games I buy, but I can pass it on to the grandkids. A slight pain is the fact that I've still got an account based in India, because it occasionally pays off in terms of geographical arbitrage. But at other times, it makes a quick spur of the moment purchase difficult.

Right now, I'd recommend anyone into tactics give Menace a whirl. It's still a while away from feature-complete, but the recent updates and a few mods make me quite close to booting it back up again. Got my money's worth with about 20 hours of playtime already, and it has the potential to provide hundreds.

+1 for Menace rec. Very fun. Very unfinished too though, back when I played it, but the potential is there.

I'll wait for 1.0 before I go back to it.

God knows I don't play any of the games I buy, but I can pass it on to the grandkids

Well....

"Unfortunately, Steam accounts and games are non-transferable," the support rep explained. "Steam Support can't provide someone else with access to the account or merge its access to another account.

"I regret to inform you that your Steam account cannot be transferred via a will."

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/you-cant-take-it-with-you-but-you-cant-leave-it-behind-either-valve-says-you-arent-allowed-to-bequeath-a-steam-account-in-a-will/

There's the official EULA and there's handing the password away with a wink and a nod. I'll make sure to delete all the hentai games I do (not) own.

I'm considering getting the Skitarii DLC for Darktide, but I think I'll be able to restrain myself by focusing on completing some challenges with the vanilla characters instead.

My brother strongly recommended Elden Ring, but it's damn expensive. Doesn't look like it'll be any cheaper anytime soon, but here my strategy will be to instead focus on completing Dark Souls 1 instead. I have the Prepare To Die Edition, which I need to mod with DSFix to make it playable with KBM, and even then it'll be a rough ride, but the easier-to-play Remastered edition is, again, damn expensive.

And then I got Lords of the Fallen (2023), which only cost around 9€. I don't get to play much, so I suppose it'll last me long enough for me to not need to torture myself with Dark Souls after all.

I'd honestly hold off on Skitarii until it goes on sale. It doesn't feel like it fills any truly unique niche.

Good recommendation. I ended up getting it for myself and a buddy, pretty much on a lark, and...yeah, you're right. It feels like one big pile of conditional buffs that don't really amount to anything in particular.

ER is good, but it's functionally DS4. If you haven't played DS2-3, you can get those first instead.

I got Empire of the Fading Suns. I played the demo in the 90s and couldn't find it until recently.

Keeps crashing for me.

If it's on launch, the Dev suggests:

1 - Go to the game folder, then in there go inside the "DAT" folder.

2 - Once inside open the EFS.ini file as a text.

3 - Change the line "video_on=1" to "video_on=0" and save.

There's probably some codec issue loading a 30 year old video file.

Pedantry warning.

Sometimes game developers will release a full game, then a few months later release a few additional missions or scenarios sold separately from the base game. For decades, the standard term for such content was "expansion pack" or "mission pack". If the expansion pack can be played without having previously bought the base game, it would be referred to as a "standalone expansion/mission pack".

At some point in the 2010s (?), around the time that physical media began being phased out in favour of digital releases, "expansion/mission pack" was deprecated in favour of the new term "downloadable content (DLC)".

This term is stupid.

Any PC game purchased via Steam or similar digital storefronts will be downloaded to the user's PC: it is entirely accurate to describe any base game as "downloadable content" by virtue of it being content which one can download. Likewise games purchased via the PlayStation Store. Even if you buy a game in a DVD case from a brick-and-mortar shop, it often just contains a slip of paper with a download key.

"DLC" is an idiotic term to replace a perfectly descriptive and useful one. The only kind of video game content which can't be accurately described as "downloadable content" is video games released via physical media (discs, cartridges etc.). Bring back "expansion packs".

You are absolutely correct.

Please contact Gabe Newell and inform him.

I agree. Unlike most idealistic proposals (like ENIAC keyboards), I assume most people know what "expansion pack" means, so we can use it in real conversation.

Small "DLC" like cosmetics aren't expansion packs, but we have a word for those too, with a more accurate connotation: "microtransactions".

Even if you buy a PS5 game in a DVD case from a brick-and-mortar shop, it just contains a slip of paper with a download key.

Not always: it was recently a big news headline that Sony plans to end physical disk production in 2028. Personally, I don't think it matters, because the underlying problem that everyone (rightly) points out does matter, not owning your games, is separate (you can buy a physical disk and lose access to the game, and you can freeze and hack a digital game to keep access; it may be symbolic, but symbolism is vastly overrated).

Not always: it was recently a big news headline that Sony plans to end physical disk production in 2028.

Are we disagreeing? In the OP I said that even if you buy a game that comes in a DVD case, it usually contains no disc and just a slip of paper with a download key on it.

Since they plan to end in 2028, they must be producing some physical disks today.

Oh, I see what you mean. Using PS5 games was a bad example, I'll amend.

“DLC” took off in the Xbox Live era, once consoles all had Internet connections. It was suddenly much more practical to sell things for prices which would never merit a physical printing. The term was perfectly reasonable until digital distribution of entire games became common.

You're not wrong, but like all renamings and reformattings it was done to evade accumulated expectations about what an "expansion pack" should be. Like when Starbucks used "tall" instead of "large" for their coffees, or the shift to Nespresso pods.

Like when Starbucks used "tall" instead of "large" for their coffees

Doesn't it go "tall – grande – venti" for "small – medium – large"?

"DLC" and "expansion pack" are not synonyms. Rather, "DLC" encompasses all optional add-ons, while "expansion pack" is reserved specifically for major optional add-ons.

Victoria 2 and Victoria 3 are good examples.

  • Victoria 2's DLCs are easily divided into two categories. The two expansions, A House Divided and Heart of Darkness, were major, linear upgrades to the game—you can play V2, V2 + AHD, or V2 + AHD + HoD. Additionally, there were several cosmetic, non-expansion-pack DLCs, mostly "sprite packs"—e. g., American Civil War Sprite Pack—plus a music pack.

  • Victoria 3 currently has a smorgasbord of DLCs. They are marketed with several different names, from "music packs" and "art packs" at the minor, purely cosmetic end to "immersion packs", "mechanics packs", and "expansions" at the high end.

Likewise, for The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, the infamous Horse Armor Pack was merely a minor DLC, while Shivering Isles was an actual expansion.

Also, you didn't ask a question.

I wish they'd used a more descriptive term like "additional content" or "extra content". "Downloadable content" is just stupid.

It's also just an awkward fit. There's been several cases where the 'downloadable content' was just an unlock code for part of the game that was physically on the disc but not available to players, with the Protean character from Mass Effect 3 being an early and high-profile example. And these days you run into the problem the other direction: ARK has been dumping a ton of downloadable content that's free-as-in-beer, but charging for parts of the gameplay instead. If you want to get your ass eaten by a pyromane, the free Ragnarok map has that coming as a default. If you want to actually tame the pyromane, though, you gotta shell out five bucks, and you won't get the notice until the tame fails, either.

I'm not that opposed to paid cosmetics, and from a pure gameplay perspective the current balance is roughly better for the consumer in general. Ragnarok is easily a 100+ hours play if you like ARK at all (admittedly, a big caveat), while the Pyromane is kinda a gimmick tame that's more annoying than useful. I think the drakelings are worse, but they're still not that bad compared to the rest of the balance mess that is ARK. But it still feels like a really bad equilibrium that we fell into, rather than a good result we're happy with. At minimum, even the best-case situations like FFXIV have had friction between the paid cosmetic sphere and the modding community, and most cases drift from that promise pretty fast.

Expansion packs also used to have a substantial amount of additional content for that price, whereas modern stuff is shamelessly drip-fed out at an astonishing unit price.

Does anyone else ever watch/listen to Glenn Diesen's "The Greater Eurasia Podcast"? The tone of the show is rather dry and boring but many of his guests seem to talk about Europe getting nuked like it is as inevitable as the weather forecast.

I am no geopolitical expert by any means so my first reaction was that this was just a tactic to kick Europe/NATO into action to better defend itself against Russia, but one of the main guests proposing the nukes is Stanislav Krapivnik, (who sometimes seems slightly drunk in my opinion,) and apparently is on Russia's side in the Ukraine conflict. Since that's the case I suppose he might be exaggerating Russia's power boastfully or trying to instill fear into the West but he is not the only guest who seems to treat nuclear action as an inevitability. And it is not that Russia would nuke Ukraine, but rather they mention targets like Germany or Finland or other NATO nations.

Can I get a sanity check on this? Does anyone on this board share the view that Russia is going to use nuclear weapons on Europe in the next year or two?

I think it’s always been a lot more likely than people think. Nixon, Golda Meir, Kruschev and DeGaul all got close to using them at one time or another. Someone will eventually unless God keeps stopping it.

Now with respect to this current conflict I don’t think it’s likely. I think your best bet at seeing mushroom clouds was in summer of 2022, when for a minute in looked like an entire 60,000 man Russian army group was going to be encircled and destroyed. Other than that one which is already past, I think there are two potential scenarios.

The second is that Putin uses nukes offensively to win the war quicker. I don’t think that’s very likely because Putin is already winning the war, if slowly. Even if the Russian economy really was about to shit itself and die, and extreme measures had to be taken, I think there are probably several alternate extreme measures he could take instead. Like a full wartime mobilization and draft. Or conventional strikes on Polish rail terminals. Or loudly declaring victory on Twitter and going home.

The third option is that I chug an entire Mountain Dew Baja Blast and we switch over into the Call of Duty Modern Warfare II timeline, and it turns out Ukraine was just a prolog to a full scale Russian invasion of Europe. Obviously that could lead to a nuclear war but there would be many, many intervening steps that would have to happen and it would probably take years.

No, I don’t know this guy.

I don’t think nukes are likely, either. This is more likely a strong filter bubble.

Never heard of that podcast either.

I try to make an effort to understand Russia's point of view enough to get an idea of why they think it's necessary to fight this war, and why they have shown such dogged persistence in it despite disappointing results of their opening moves and staggering casualty counts. I still can't see how they would think it's a good idea to start throwing nukes around now, especially at the other European powers. It seems to me like it would read to a lot of people as an admission that they are unable to achieve a result they consider favorable on the battlefield with conventional weapons, which isn't going to be much of a plus for their standing in the region. I also find it unlikely that there are any good targets in Europe for "tactical" nuclear weapons right now. It seems highly likely to me that any use of nuclear weapons against formally uninvolved NATO nations at this point would escalate to strategic use exactly as fast as pretty much everyone has always expected. I suppose there's no way to know what might change in the next year, but it's hard to imagine what could happen that would change that.

So yeah, I think it's just Russia supporters being all butthurt that they haven't been doing all that hot.

I don’t think your picturing it right. It wouldn’t be nuclear strikes on NATO. It would be tactical strikes on various hard points in Ukraine, with the aim of collapsing the Ukrainian army in a matter of days, not weeks. Then the Russians would wait and observe to see what kind of response there is, which could range from “nothing” to “limited nuclear strikes on Russian soil”. That said I don’t think it’s likely, I will explain above.

At this point I think it's probably closest to:

  • war started because Russia thought they could blitz it
  • after not, in fact, blitzing it, backing down is very politically unpopular among the slice of the population that expects something for all the sacrifice
  • economical interests of some factions contribute to the incompetency and boondoggling around, such as pushing for retarded measures in the IT sphere

The only ones interested in nuclear escalation in this picture are the armchair warriors (mostly ignorant/uncaring about consequences and just wanting to feel good about the Russian bear going apeshit, not unlike some who think USA should just glass Middle East until goals are achieved) and the rank and file soldiers (who'd rather Ukraine get nuked than have to lay down their lives for it any further). Consequentially they are getting very angry at Putin who pursues the image of "denazificator" (as opposed to "stone them into the bomb age") and the other power centers who pursue money handouts for building nationalized social media apps and the like.

I agree about the armchair warriors bit. I do think their motivation for the war is much deeper and more fundamental and not really like Putin thought he could grab Ukraine all quick and easy and is now in over his head. Instead, I think the entire Russian power structure is existentially petrified of invasion from the West. It's all long memories about how horrifying Operation Barbarossa was to be on the receiving end of - this also fits in with how they talk about "denazifying" Ukraine. This is why they're willing to make incredible sacrifices to ensure that Ukraine remains in their sphere of influence. That also explains how there doesn't seem to be all that much discontent in Russia about how this war is going. I'm not super confident in my ability to determine exactly how much unrest there really is in Russia, but I would have expected to see more signs of it with how much of a grind this war seems to be for them.

On the IT side, I also discovered the Ukrainian scam call center thing - big article about it in Russian, Google Translate works pretty well. Apparently there's a ton of these call centers actively working to scam random Russians out of money and blackmail them into committing various petty, and maybe sometimes not so petty, crimes. Thinking from the Ukrainian side, it's understandable that they'd lean into that sort of thing and attempt to integrate it with their formal intelligence agencies to gain an asymmetric advantage when so many things are stacked against them. But then from the Russian side, that is a much more reasonable explanation for why they're cracking down so hard on the communication and messaging systems.

There is plenty of discontent in Russia about how the war is going, included among the opinion makers. It does not rise to unrest because unrest is outlawed and the law is enforced.

(The discontent among the opinion makers is, admittedly, primarily of the "we should be having this war but the leadership are thieves, morons and cowards" kind rather than "we shouldn't be having this war" kind because expressing discontent of the latter kind as a public person is extra no bueno.)

I do not believe Putin has memories of Operation Barbarossa, he wasn't there. Invocations of WW2 sentiments just sound extremely fake and contrived to me.

  1. Never listened to this podcast.
  2. Don't have a strong opinion as to what will happen in the next year or two. Widening the conflict they haven't been able to win yet would certainly be a move for Russia, and so there are strong reasons to think it is doubtful, but I'm not sure it's impossible.
  3. I assume the nuclear weapons being discussed are tactical, as part of an "escalate to deescalate" doctrine, with the idea being that Russia would use "small" nuclear weapons, probably after an initial military action, to say "back off" - with the idea being that NATO would be unwilling to retaliate with nuclear weapons of their own, lest the conflict crawl up the escalation cycle to "real" nuclear weapons.

IF Russia finds itself in a shooting war with NATO (regardless of who initiates it), I consider an "escalate to deescalate" scenario plausible. Russia has (by some estimates) a 10:1 advantage over NATO in substrategic nuclear weapons in the European theater. Many of these weapons are very small, deployed from artillery pieces or even air-to-air missiles.

I would stress that tactical nuclear weapons are very, very different from strategic nuclear weapons, and during the Cold War both sides would likely have used nuclear weapons "routinely" as substrategic weapons (for instance nuclear depth charges were intended to destroy an enemy submarine, not necessarily the entire Russian Baltic Fleet, or what have you). Generally speaking, the effects of these weapons would be along the lines of "destroy an airbase" not "obliterate Berlin." However, the current gap in NATO/Russian tactical nuclear capabilities is important because it limits the ability to play tit-for-tat if Russia uses tactical nuclear weapons, either as part of an escalate-to-deescalate gambit or simply because they are effective. If you've got 10 tactical nuclear weapons for every 1 of theirs, they are going to run out of tactical nuclear weapons long before you do. So once you've both nuked each other a few times and they run out, they have two options: accept you nuking them routinely (which greatly enhances the effectiveness of your weapons systems) or escalate to strategic nuclear weapons, with the larger stakes and (literal) fallout that entails.

Now, modern nuclear weapons are smaller and often have "dial a yield" capabilities that makes the lines a bit blurrier than that, but hopefully that gives you a good idea of why people might believe Russia would resort to nuclear weapons: militarily, nuclear weapons are very effective, even if they are "small." Politically, if you have the upper hand and the deeper stockpiles, you have good reason to believe that you can extract concessions from a foe who will be unwilling to race you up the escalation ladder to tossing ICBMs at each other.

I've never heard of Stanislav Krapivnik. Posturing that Russia should nuke "the ones behind Ukraine" is a common pastime of some of the pro-Russian media people and is not serious IMO.

To the extent that it exists, where is the best place to get an intellectual/highbrow MAGA perspective that isn't merely anti-anti-Trump? The American Affairs publication, N.S. Lyons' substack, as well as Scott Greer and gummibear737's Twitter account, look to be good places to start. Michael Pettis is a name I frequently hear from people engaging in trade war apologetics. Any other person/publication worth checking out?

I consider myself a moderate country-club Republican sympathetic to Doug Burgum and Jeb Bush who wants the war on fracking to cease, though more of a reliable "hold my nose for Trump" type at that than a Lincoln Project/Bulwarker that isn't meaningfully conservative and is gung-ho on reflexively swallowing progressive tropes and validating the most extreme elements of the other side of the aisle. Being temporarily based in a blue-collar European town and seeing people cursorily reading the headlines of state-owned media while being unable to criticize Trump on his merits has made me inadvertently more sympathetic to him, with me making post-hoc rationalizations of untenable policies as they keep gish-galloping and I don't want to give them credit where it happens to stick.

I have seen MAGA defined by putting Trump over the party; if that’s accurate, you’ll have a hard time finding Trump-agnostic MAGA Republicans. I think that definition is probably a little uncharitable, and there is some constituency who have picked up the slogan without any strong feelings about the man.

The principled MAGA perspective derives from national self-interest. Defense, trade, foreign aid: Americans as a people are selling ourselves too cheap, and should act as a people to get a better deal.

For obvious reasons, this will not be very appealing to random Europeans.

Mystery Grove's substack, IM-1776, Shakes' post history.

Hmm, my impression of the former two is that they latched on to the MAGA/America First brand while superimposing their esoteric philosophical framework that Trump himself and most of MAGA have no appetite for. @Shakes do you happen to have any recommendations to add?

Claremont Review of Books

Eh, their caliber has decayed since 2016. Haven't been too impressed with many of their recent essays that have leaned heavily on strawmen and woke-right sophistry.

https://noyb.eu/en/us-supreme-court-just-blew-eu-us-data-transfers

On Monday, the US Supreme Court decided in Trump v. Slaughter that the US Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) may not be independent anymore. Since 2000, the EU has relied on the “independent” FTC as the enforcer of EU-US deals on personal data. According to EU treaty law, such oversight must be independent. In the current EU-US deal, the European Commission relies on the independent FTC 259 (!) times. Max Schrems: “Given that there are no independent authorities in the US anymore, we call on the European Commission to orderly withdraw the adequacy decision on the US.”

Is this a legitimate concern? I'm not a lawyer, but as I understand it, something must be independent from a specific thing. Both of the citations for an "EU requirement for an independent DPA" just state that "Compliance with these rules shall be subject to control by an independent authority," which does not state explicitly what the independence should be from.

That's probably for Europeans to decide. How much do they want the access to US technology? Lately, they are big on "digital sovereignty", just as the Russians are, so maybe eventually they'd decide to wall themselves off, like Russians (and Chinese before) are doing. I guess it may be concerning for those US companies who want to sell services to Europe. For others, I don't see a reason to care.

So, what are you reading?

I'm adding Taylor's A Secular Age to the list. Going through the backlog slowly.

Mick Herron's Slough House series. I keep falling back into comfort reads (Trollope) but I started this for some reason and I feel almost normal reading it. The combination of plot, character development, and occasionally just lovely writing is engrossing.

Shadow of the Torturer, Gene Wolfe. Excellent atmosphere. Remarkably likable characters, all things considered, and constantly reminds you that things are going to get weirder.

Moving on to Banks’ Inversions before I have to take it back to the library. I feel like I can see the greater structure he’s going for, but I’m not quite sure how it comes together. I think I’m benefiting from reading it right after another novel of sci-fantasy torture politics.

1/3rd of the way through Infinite Jest. Finally reaching the stage where it starts to be enjoyable rather than a slog.

Finished reading Andy Weir's Hail Mary, and I watched the movie too. I still think both were great overall, though the movie traded off leaving out some of the less important details and hamming things up a little for some amazing visuals. Not to spoiler things too much, but I think the ending does show Weir trying to get a little more into character development side of things, though it's probably still not his strongest point. The Sci-Fi is a little hand-wavy on the details of a few things, but probably no more than needed for future tech, and mostly does a good job of sticking to its own rules.

Almost done with The Worm Ouroboros. I think it is quite good overall despite its shortcomings. It's an interesting counterpoint to Tolkien's world - there's no guarantee that good will ultimately triumph and it's up to the characters to actually change the course of events, although there's a light smattering of prophecy.

I think its weakest point is the poor characterization of the good guys. Juss, Spitfire, Brandoch Daha, Goldry Bluzsco - I can't really tell you anything that distinguishes one from the other. The illustrations in the book give them all the same face, like tetrarchs (is this the point?). Maybe one is a little more impatient and another a little less. The bad guys are actually quite well characterized:

  • Corinius, the swaggering womanizer who backs down from a duel
  • Corsus, the drunk, somewhat over the hump, who sends his daughter Sriva (wily, coquettish, scheming) to seduce the king to advance his career
  • Corund, the honorable (to a fault) man who raised honorable sons (I admit I keep confusing him with Corsus due to their names)
  • Prezmyra, Corund's wife, torn between her brother who sympathizes with the Demons and her husband who will never go against the king
  • Gro, perhaps the most interesting character, also Tolkein's favorite, who constantly shifts allegiances and suggests killing the enemy through treachery at every turn, yet always manages to find a home

I guess it's a common trope that bad guys are harder to write than the good guys, but I think Tolkien managed this pretty well.

“But because day at her dawning hours hath so bewitched me, must I yet love her when glutted with triumph she settles to garish noon? Rather turn as now I turn to Demonland, in the sad sunset of her pride. And who dares call me turncoat, who do but follow now as I have followed this rare wisdom all my days: to love the sunrise and the sundown and the morning and the evening star? since there only abideth the soul of nobility, true love, and wonder, and the glory of hope and fear.”

[...]

It was now high noon. The horse and his rider were come to a little dell of green grass with a beck winding in the midst with cool water flowing over a bed of shingle. About the dell grew many trees both tall and straight. Above the trees high mountain crags a-bake in the sun showed ethereal through the shimmering heat. A murmur of waters, a hum of tiny wings flitting from flower to flower, the sound of the horse grazing on the lush pasture: there was nought else to hear. Not a leaf moved, not a bird. The hush of the summer noon-day, breathless, burnt through with the sun, more awful than any shape of night, paused above that lonely dell.

"Representation" should be defined for this comment thread as people of diverse backgrounds being seen as protagonists, deuteragonists, and antagonists in fiction, being elected representatives, and being hired for visible jobs at management/executive levels.

Is Representation a primary goal of the progressive project? Or is it a secondary goal, a virtue signal for societal diversity, since it can be seen as a sign that oppression has ceased, a sign that diverse people should be expected walking around in public, using services, present in labor jobs, and other signs of diverse social integration?

I would make a distinction between representation in media versus around media.

Within media, I think it’s close to the second. I would not call it a “virtue” signal, implying insincerity; if writing a plot that flatters one’s beliefs is insincere, we might as well throw out most of the canon.

Authorship or creative control of media is more complicated.

Consider the historical “well-rounded” education, which often involved reading a bunch of classics in the original Greek or Latin. Experiencing unfamiliar literature is expected to have inherent value. Tapping into an entire world’s worth of traditions, rather than the most visible ones, should work at least as well. I personally find this argument very persuasive.

Now extend it to familiar traditions, but unfamiliar situations. Reading a memoir about an event 80 years ago. Reading a retrospective of somebody’s niche interest. Reading a reaction to recent events from someone who grew up in your country, went through all the same schools, but is of the opposite sex. All of these are giving you something that you can’t access on your own. Diverse authorship offers diverse experiences offers the modern well-rounded education.

Now apply Goodhart’s Law, accounting for all the people who would like to claim their work is unique and enriching, and Sturgeon’s law, accounting for all those who really, really aren’t. There we have it: the modern commodification of diversity. It’s a shame, but it’s not at all unique to this particular subject. Anything that signals novelty will get picked up as a signal, because novelty is the most important thing in (monetizing) art.

Unsurprisingly, the replies you've gotten are not particularly charitable to the progressive project.

The progressive project is anti-hierarchy and believes in equality of all humans, that no person or demographic should have power over another. The other replies are mostly some variety of assuming that that's a lie and obviously it must be about instituting some replacement hierarchy to the one currently in place.

In that view, Representation is not the primary goal but serves multiple purposes. The primary purpose is merely a proxy for the success of that project: if all demographics are truly equal then their visible Representation should be equal. Although also if you're talking about elected representatives, the power part is pretty direct, not just about visibility. There's also a secondary purpose of visible Representation being a role model / propaganda for showing that better world is possible (or, as Bombadil points out, accurately depicting the existing world).

if all demographics are truly equal then their visible Representation should be equal

Proportional, no?

That would give power to demographics in proportion to their population, no? My understanding is the intent is equality, not proportional power.

Thank you, Actual Progressive. I intuit, then, that unrepresentative depictions/hiring/election results are taken as evidence (not proof) that oppression or bullying has kept the depiction from being representative?

not a prog but yes, my understanding is that its an equality of outcome type phenomenon. If people were truly equal then the outcomes would also be equal and the fact that they are not is representation of some hidden inequality that we just can't see yet.

assuming that that's a lie and obviously it must be about instituting some replacement hierarchy to the one currently in place.

Point of order: regardless of what is intended, it observably does institute a replacement hierarchy.

Is Representation a primary goal of the progressive project?

No, it's the means to an end. The goal is power, by means of eroding and destroying the current structure of society and replacing it with one that has them (who are "them" is debatable, though each individual participant naturally sees oneself as part of "them", nobody goes to a gulag voluntarily) on top. For the more cynical, this is the ultimate goal. For the more romantically minded, this is an intermediate goal, in the quest to establish a more just, more moral and more optimal (by whatever criteria) society - which is, obviously, impossible when the wrong people have the levers of power in the wrongly structured society.

By itself, more diverse workforce is not bad. Sometimes it is good, sometimes it is neutral. But the progressive project has nothing to do with it - DEI, which they promote as a vehicle to achieve representation, is not aimed at that, it's aimed at capturing power and rerouting it to progressive goals. If you want evidence for that, count how much the progressives celebrate minority representatives that do not subscribe to progressive views. Does US left love Clarence Thomas? Did they support Vivek Ramaswamy? Is Tim Scott their darling? Do they see Rubio, Cruz, DeSantis, Raul Labrador and others like them as role models and trailblazers? Do we see any pattern here going all across backgrounds and jobs?

One could even flatly say having Representation in the Republican party and the conservative movement would be, to their eyes, a bad thing.

It's not only the GOP as such. Any person who would be lauded as "representing" if he toed the party line, instantly loses the shine if they veer off the message. The Representation is only good when it serves the real goal - which is increasing the power of the Party. Be it political power, cultural power, financial power or any other power - but never diminishing any of it.

If you are an artist, then putting minorities in your work is something you can do. But, ending legislation that contributes to systemic oppression is something you can't do. So the progressive sees representation as a casual force, not merely a signal. Probably the social status caused by representation (or lack thereof) is a contributing factor for what is meant by "oppression." I'm not sure if this answers what you mean by "primary" or "secondary." It's more about levels of abstraction: oppression is fought by ways of representation (among other ways).

Personally, I want to see more diverse representation, not in the "DEI" sense, but the "unique and unconventional" sense. Maybe it started like this and became corrupted.

Progressives like seeing black and brown minorities and don't like seeing whites (or yellows), especially in high status roles, so their fictional depictions, political elections, and corporate hiring practices reflect such a preference.

Plus, the more whites are accustomed to seeing blacks and browns in fictional and high status roles, the less (negatively) surprised whites will be to see black and brown bodies as they go about their lives, and the less likely they'll Notice and object to being Replaced. It's like exposure therapy so the frog accepts itself getting boiled.

I’ll count that as primary: a form of psychological conditioning.

Neither -- it's a demoralization tactic against the stale pale straight majority.

English people literally think that there has been significant black Representation in their population since Roman times -- this is a direct result of decades of work by progressives at the BBC.

The impact is that the native English population will put up with (seemingly) literally anything -- very helpful for the progressive project!

Similar tactics are at work in the USA -- the exact group being 'represented' is not that important; LGBTetc works just as well as racial minorities. So long as the majority is underrepresented/delegitimatized, the intended purpose is served.

I’ll count that as both: dewhitening the leadership as primary, and secondarily as a form of psychological conditioning.

It's not a goal at all though -- it's a tool in service of their (other) goals.

In a sense, increased representation is a primary goal. Having minorities be acknowledged and normalized through representation is pretty high up there in terms of importance on the progressive agenda. You can't fight for trans rights if most people don't even know the trans exist.

In practice, I would say it depends on the author. Some write specifically for, say, an LGBT audience and have positive representation as one of the main reasons for why the story exists in the first place. Others do it for the sake of realism. A New York with no black people just doesn't really make sense. Any modern story exploring urban environments, especially if you delve in to the soft, slightly hidden underbelly, is by necessity going to include some level of representation of minority groups as they make up a sizeable part of most large western cities.

It is not usually a sign that oppression has ceased. If you lean more activist as a writer, the point of forcing diversity is exactly the opposite: Opression is still there, but through your writing you give a voice to the marginalized. If there was truly no opression, no one would bat an eye at a trans woman because she would just be another person to the rest of society. The fact that this identity matters enough to write about, and that doing so can garner pushback, is itself proof that there is still a lot of work to be done.

With respect to the odd levels of tolerance that liberals and institutions show toward various degrees of, shall we say, "illiberal and unwoke" behavior from Muslims: does anyone actually believe that a "white" Western convert to Islam would be shown even a portion of this tolerance extended "brown" Muslims, should he do anything that would get a Christian "trad" in trouble with the likes of CFS? Because I once again came across someone glibly making that claim, and I still find it utterly implausible. (I'm reminded of Fred Thompson's first episode on Law & Order.)

I assume you mean Child Protective Services?

I don’t get the impression that Muslims are getting extra slack when raising children, but it’s really hard to tell. Search results are fixated on England. What exactly do you have in mind?

I know one white guy who converted to Islam to marry his former grad student. No idea if they have kids.

It's called different things in different states. Here it's CYFD (Children Youth and Families Department).

It depends on who the trad families are interacting with. I had thought there were scandals about Muslim communes at a similar rate by population to the extremist Christian ones, but haven't looked at the numbers.

I’m not even sure I can find the extremist Christian scandals. There was YFZ ranch back in 2008/2014, but that was a weird branch Mormon cult compound. Also, it was raided by Texas; I can’t imagine they’d be any more lenient towards a comparable Islamic cult.

The YFZ raid was a dud on the claim of physical abuse of children, but most of the elders did get convicted for statutory- and polygamous muslims marrying teenagers would almost certainly get in just as much trouble. Mohammedans get a weird double standard in the progressive press but it's unclear that they actually get treated better by CPS.

I've mostly heard drama around the kind of homeschool families and communities who don't want to have to prove they did in fact educate their children in basic ways, but the accusation was educational neglect more than religious practices.

There was a Muslim cult in New Mexico that got in trouble for physically neglecting its children, after one of them died of preventable causes.

While I think states sometimes go too far in scaring parents about what constitutes "neglect," both cases seem basically reasonable, not of the "kids playing alone in the park" variety.

Perhaps the deciding factor here isn't the progressive's interpretation of the white Muslim convert's racial status directly, but rather whether the progressive perceives that the broader Muslim community has accepted them as part of the in-group.

White converts to Islam exist- as well as Mohammedans who naturally have white skin(even many Arabs appear physically indistinguishable from Italic or Iberian peoples; to say nothing of Anatolian turks or Dagestanis or Tatars). I suggest you ask them; I continue to believe that Mohammedanism being an ally of convenience to the left, and leftists being afraid of Mussulmen, explains more than skin colour(blacks get in trouble with CPS all the time) in how much the rules apply to them.

You omitted the ultimate bosses: Bosnians.

OP is incoherent, but contrary to his only direct claim: converting to Islam as a Westerners gets you enormous recognition and respect pretty much instantly. I remember endlessly hearing about Cat Stevens and Muhammed Ali from religious people when I was small.

In general it is flawed to try to compare the social lives of people who converts to a whole new religion as adults (often a very peculiar group) with people who live with the worldviews of their family and general environment.

Bosnians in my experience are only nominally followers of mohammed; they drink vodka, eat bacon, gamble, listen to pop music, dress their daughters in skinny jeans, never go to mosque, etc- actually less religious than serbs or croats. Not the kind of mussulmen who would particularly desire extra grace from CPS.

Has anybody ever joined the peace corps or a similar organization? I'm in my mid 20s realizing that I probably need to stretch myself in ways that would both improve my character and make me a more viable candidate for a good grad school. Not to mention that I'm interested in the US foreign service, and that peace corps is a fairly common pipeline to that. My main concern, beyond getting some weird disease or dying in a war zone, is that the experience will be a waste, and that I'll have to follow dumb rules about where I can and can't travel. Also, I wouldn't be making a lot of money and there are few ways to get around that without being discovered.

TIL US Peace Corps has nothing to do with what the rest of the world thinks when they hear such term.

Yes.

I had no intention of joining the US foreign service, and don't know anything about that part.

The experience itself was mixed. I enjoyed Teach and Learn with Georgia, a locally run Peace Corps shaped knock off, a lot more, but I think things vary a lot by location and gender. My main issue was that we weren't given enough work, in the hopes that we would exhibit agency to do other things that make America look good. But, also, many cultures the Peace Corps operates in expect, and indeed enforce, low female agency. So I was paired up with someone I didn't really work well with, with no other visible options for useful ways to contribute, and then had to leave early. In retrospect, I was acting pretty depressed, and my skills were mostly going unused. I was especially surprised that my English and teaching skills were largely unused in an English teaching position, despite being an actual career teacher, and the I couldn't figure out how to remedy that.

My male colleges seemed to have, in general, a better experience.

I'll have to follow dumb rules about where I can and can't travel.

Yes, more than other volunteer abroad situations.

I was in the Peace Corps, yes. This was the very early 90s though, and the world --and the experience of the Peace Corps-- has changed considerably. It was, for me personally, a great experience that stretched me beyond what could have been possible had I stayed in the US. Mind you the Peace Corps has all kinds of members, motivated for all kinds of reasons.

The reference to being "barred from foreign service for five years" below was only true for intelligence services (eg the CIA or military intelligence), to my understanding.

Bear in mind that if you join the Peace Corps, you will be legally barred from “US foreign service” ;) :^) for at least five years. So if that’s your intent you probably shouldn’t join. Also you shouldn’t be broadcasting your career aspirations toward that on a Mongolian ceremonial woodworking forum.

I couldn't get medical clearance for the Peace corps, but I still keep in touch with people who did. From my personal experience, two kinds of people really thrive in the program:

  1. People who don't have the slightest fucking clue about what to do with their lives.
  2. Mercenary strivers who have set their eye on government and will ruthlessly optimize for success in that field.

It doesn't sound like you're in the first group, since you mentioned the foreign service.

Are you in the second group? Would you drive four hundred miles to be in a united way photoshoot for a chance to serve as John Thune's personal assistant? Would you claim that a coworker you barely know has a cocaine habit if it meant you were 15% more likely to get a promotion? If so, the peace corps might be great for you.

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