domain:asteriskmag.com
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6hr ago
I'd bet a decent chunk are idiots with cheap DJI or equivalent drones not following the rules. But probably not all of them.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
6hr ago
ICE arrests superintendent of Iowa's largest public school district
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency arrested Ian Andre Roberts, who is the superintendent of the Des Moines (IA) public school district. If you've been following along with this aspect of the culture war, you probably figure he was arrested for abetting or protecting a student or faculty or staff member from them. But no; the guy is, according to ICE here illegally and was given a final order of removal in May 2024. ICE is strongly implying he never had any work authorization beyond a long-since-expired student visa. It seems to me pretty bold for someone here without work authorization to be in such a high-profile position. Even more surprising for him to be hired; the district claims to have done a background check on him; you would think this would result in them finding out he was not authorized to work and not being hired. Someone screwed up there.
Other aspects are that he had a weapons possession charge in Pennsylvania from 2021, but this was a pissant ("5th degree summary offense") thing about having his deer rifle on his seat still loaded. More serious is that he fled the ICE agents when stopped; his car was found with a loaded handgun, a hunting knife, and $3000 in cash. I don't much care about the illegal-alien-in-possession aspect; making a whole range of normal activities super-illegal based on a status offense is a tyrant's trick. But fleeing certainly seems to indicate a guilty mind rather than some sort of error or misunderstanding on ICEs part.
At first I thought they might have the wrong guy; there's an Ian Andre Roberts from Guyana who competed in the Olympics. But no, that's actually the same guy.
On reddit, /r/desmoines is up in arms... about the arrest, of course, not about the school district hiring a guy with no work authorization.
quiet_NaN
6hr ago
In that context, the optimal gun is nearly identical to Grandpa's full power hunting rifle, which nobody has the political power and will to ban.
I think that this depends on the killer's goal. For a targeted assassination of an unsuspecting victim from distance, hunting rifles seem obvious. But not every sick fuck is a sick fuck bent just on murdering one specific person, some want to kill as many as possible. These seem to be the ones who mostly go for semi- or full-auto weapons, if they can get their hands on them.
Semi-mandatory is a dangerous line to ride.
I consider semi-mandatory as preferable to an amendment. The US is at least relatively accommodating for conscientious objectors, although that's more a necessity determines grace deal. The cost to living in a powerful nation that likes to wage war is sometimes you're a slave for dumb and unnecessary reasons. That's a fair enough thing to object to.
Lean into sports and competition.
The US still has a relatively healthy recreational sports industry that still can create fads and innovate. Disc golf or pickleball as two examples that come to mind. Underwater hockey might yet take off for you. I'd prefer to subsidize getting the youth outside, but if video games are a reality (I like video games too) then competition e-sports are of higher value. Team based games at least provide a way to develop teamwork, communication, and leadership ability. Might even be able to route around the Hitler Youth comparisons by promoting e-sports in addition to real ones.
Tractatus
6hr ago
If you think the consequences only showed up in the last 10-15 years, you are necessarily insisting that the sky-high divorce rates of the 60s-80s, the latchkey kids of the 80s-90s, raised on "the electric babysitter" and Nintendo (who emphatically did not turn out "ok"), the rise of hookup culture and dating apps, and so on, were actually Good Things. I don't know what to tell you, other than that you're being incredibly myopic. Great evidence for Chesterton's quip about the whole world being nothing but Progressives who go about ruining the world, and Conservatives who insist you cannot undo what the Progressives have done, because they have already adopted those changes as "tradition," as being Gospel truth.
The modern buzzword du joure "Parasocial Relationship" was coined not in 2020, but in 1955; much different than the modern use (which is just describing a dysfunctional form of propinquity; if I didn't know any better, I'd suspect the definitional drift was deliberate), it described disconnected housewives who legitimately behaved as though the fictional characters on the soap operas were really their friends. The standard description was "newlywed leaves her family ties, moves out to the suburbs, doesn't really gel with the neighbors, and, with entirely too much time on her hands due to kids and school, along with modern conveniences making housework take up much less of her day, vegs out in front of the boob tube and goes haywire." This was not treated seriously because this extreme was so rare, and the solution was to get the women involved in the community; after all, it was the 1950's, everyone was having 2.5 kids and making good money, so it could not possibly be the case that cookouts with the HOA, bowling leagues, Avon parties, et al, were actually not viable long-term replacements for blood-and-soil family ties. In fact, other than Christopher Lasch, I don't know anyone that even thought to connect the dots.
This new paradigm, that you must leave behind your family, you must "find someone that's right for you" (no-one ever seems to notice the narcissism inherent in such a statement), that the friends you choose are more important than the family you had no say in, these all moulded the Baby Boomers; it should be no shock to us when the Boomers had half the kids their parents did; that they slapped bumper stickers on their overpriced RVs, proudly proclaiming how they weren't going to leave a dime to their kids, spending it all on themselves, and eagerly consumed media praising them for this choice ("It will teach them to earn it on their own, like I did!" >conveniently forgets all the bailouts his parents and/or grandparents gave the Boomer after every fuck-up); nor should it be any shock to us that they would ultimately decide that "find someone that's right for you" necessirly implies "and if this person no longer feels right for you, or if you meet someone new who feels "more right" for you, well, it's time to blow up the marriage. It'll be hard on the kids, sure, but if they loved you, they would want you to be happy."
No, inceldom is not some wholely new phenomenon that can only be attributed to technological changes, it is just the next stop on the slippery slope of the radical change to the family that has been ongoing such Industrialization. It isn't even new; mass societies destroying families is so common across history that Spengler includes it - in the form of his comparison of the City versus the Country - in The Decline of the West and that was published in 1917, long before Tiktok, Youtube brainrot, and AI slop was even a twinkle in anyone's eye
LazyLongposter
6hr ago
Much like masturbation, I'd be much happier if philosophers kept it to themselves.
Have you ever been in any "philosophy" circle? It quickly becomes unreadable because every single person will come up with their own definition for already defined words to match one of their theories, and then will use them in concert to try to make their thesis a mathematical proof. You end up with sentences that look like plain English, but are completely unintelligible. This is the antithesis of good communication and discussion.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6hr ago
Stupidpol is not a mainstream left-wing forum, it's a forum of left-wing rejects that are routinely called fascist, who were preparing for offsite emigration themselves at one point. I used to post there myself.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
7hr ago
Hephaestus is disabled in the lore, though.
Hephaestus is described in mythological sources as "lame" (chōlos) and "halting" (ēpedanos). He was depicted with curved feet, an impairment he had either from birth or as a result of his fall from Olympus. In vase paintings, Hephaestus is sometimes shown bent over his anvil, hard at work on a metal creation, and sometimes his feet are curved back-to-front: Hephaistos amphigyēeis. He walked with the aid of a stick. The Argonaut Palaimonius, "son of Hephaestus" (i.e. a bronze-smith), also had a mobility impairment. Other "sons of Hephaestus" were the Cabeiri on the island of Samothrace, who were identified with the crab (karkinos) by the lexicographer Hesychius. The adjective karkinopous ("crab-footed") signified "lame", according to Detienne and Vernant. The Cabeiri were also physically disabled.
In some myths, Hephaestus built himself a "wheeled chair" or chariot with which to move around, thus helping support his mobility while demonstrating his skill to the other gods. In the Iliad 18.371, it is stated that Hephaestus built twenty bronze-wheeled tripods to assist him in moving around.
Where was I “blaming that for a rash of violence dating back to July, if not last year”? Please re-read what I wrote.
The wording was sloppy, because I had two clauses, but the entire American Eagle “Good Jeans” incident showed the left that cancel culture techniques just weren’t working any more, and it was around that time the left started to become really violent.
Another example of right wing cancel culture from earlier this year is how 4chan hacked that Tea app then mocked the pictures of women using that app.
faceh
7hr ago
Edit: I believe the “good stuff” is still being made, but its audience and distribution network is not part of the great algorithm fork. It’s elsewhere, it’s curated, and it’s often offline. Interested in the new avant garde. I suspect it’s here, it’s just not where 50-98% of people spend their time.
Yep. You have to be willing to dive beneath the surface, long enough to find the pockets of original and specifically high quality work that the indie scene is putting out.
faceh
7hr ago
Writing long-form fiction to even a high-human standard.
I like this one. The ability to create a fictional world that has 'infinite' branching plotlines and arcs to follow, or to produce the exact sort of one-shot novel you've been craving.
MathWizard
Good things are good
7hr ago
I think a major issue is that they've replaced many of the major roles with women for the sequel and they don't think it's ok to make jokes at the expense of women so what we get is a whole load of anodyne nothing.
2015+ in a nutshell.
HereAndGone
7hr ago
Several pundits and outlets liked making little lists of "possible VP picks".
Politico's list included a gay woman (if we're talking about why Kamala felt she couldn't pick Pete), so I do think picking Kamala was due to some internal politics in the party. For example, again from Politico's list:
Bass, 66, has said it is “very important” that Biden pick a woman of color for the VP spot. She was the first Black woman in the country to lead a state legislature after being chosen as speaker of the California state Assembly in 2008, after serving as an assemblywoman for three and a half years. Before entering public life, Bass was an emergency room physician assistant at the outset of the AIDS crisis and a civil rights activist.
Hmm, that wouldn't be you throwing your hat in the ring as "I will serve my country if selected", now would it, Karen?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
7hr ago
the fact that there was far more intense pressure to assimilate in centuries past than in the current historical moment
I don't think that's actually true. The central group of contemporary concern, Hispanics/Latinos, are assimilating extremely quickly. The major difference I perceive between 1900 and 2025 is the acceptability of explicitly racism - everybody is still more than a little bit racist, but almost everyone agrees, on paper, that racism is bad and feels the need to launder racist claims through other paradigms.
analyzed voting patterns and political affiliation among different demographic groups and found distinct differences in political alignment among the present-day descendants of these 19th-century immigrants.
Assuming this is substantively correct, it doesn't meant much on its own. Different immigrant groups were not uniformly distributed around the country. Germans were heavily concentrated in the Midwest, Italians on the East coast, etc... These places have their own regional politics that will confound efforts to trace an ideological lineage through immigrant populations.
I’ll ask you: in the absence of assimilationist pressure
I think this hypothetical is nonsense. It's not far off asking, "in the absence of air, would you be happy taking a plane from NYC to London?"
The pressure to assimilate doesn't come from having people lecture you about the importance of assimilating. It comes from being immersed in the host society, from unavoidably picking up the norms and values of that society, from the countless petty conveniences of conforming to that society's expectations, from having your children grow up in that society. To a large degree it comes from being allowed to assimilate.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
7hr ago
became normal accountable government officials who behave kindly and civilly
Behaving kindly and civilly would be counter to their purposes. Looking at how the Trump admin presents its conduct and how Trump supporters react, it is quite clear the jackboot theater and terror tactics are the point.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
7hr ago
The "which way, Western man?" memes really do write themselves. On the topic of shameless box-checking representation, disabled Hephaestus was a pretty good one too.
HereAndGone
7hr ago
Yeah, but that's "have a guy suck my dick or get nothing at all" sort of situations. If the guy gets out of jail and still prefers having a guy suck his dick rather than a girl do it, you can revise your estimates of "really gay" upwards.
wemptronics
7hr ago
I am behind reinventing accountability for officials, functionaries, and politicians. Bring back competence while you're at it. The likelihood we bring back competence or accountability depends on what you mean by fighting back. If you mean random, indiscriminate killings of various public figures that increases in frequency over time I don't think this will end up constructive or constitutional. If you have some Washington-Cincinnatus figure in your back pocket to lead the cleansing fire of rebellion, then I say bring him forth let's just vote him in 3 or 4 times. It'll be easier.
HereAndGone
7hr ago
Yeah, but it didn't seem to generate that much stress. That's the part I would have liked more development on: so, which of the squabbling AI got to make the decision as to the fate of the tug? Did it really matter? Was the tug doing something naughty, or was it an accident?
Your guy Dan freaks out not because "oh my gosh, if this isn't sorted, my sister will be - " (what? delayed? her ferry won't be allowed sail? it will be the declaration of World War Fourteen and Three-Fifths and any vessels will be burninated and she will be on that vessel and ARGH ARGH ARGH?) but because "Foxglass? what the hell is that?" So far as we can see, nothing happens the tug, the ferry, the sister. Life goes on, the world turns, Dan is back drinking bad coffee.
You need to make it a bigger deal that HIS SISTER is on THAT PARTICULAR FERRY and not tomorrow but RIGHT NOW oh the stress my nerves what do I do what do I do and then FOxGLASS pops up and starts demanding access codes he doesn't have and then he makes a stupid mistake decision and then we need the dual manual over-ride turn the keys at the same time.
Otherwise, why the need to bump this all the way up to Elaine "my beauty régime comes first" Ford? Technical hitch, yeah it's rare but it can happen, put another page in the training manual.
daguerrean
7hr ago
Stupidpol is neither mainstream nor left
You were born condemned, to a Sisyphean quest to seek paradise but be denied access
One of the major thematic turn-offs of Hades 2 for me is that, back in Hades 1, getting to the surface distinctly felt like a proper goal given everything you have to overcome on the way. The ...events that transpire once you finally get to the surface (to avoid spoilers) only add to the payoff; Zagreus is cursed, his kin was not meant for the surface world, and even with all his willpower he cannot manage more than a few minutes to try and come to terms with what he has found, and attempt to salvage it, before he is inevitably dragged back to the underworld and has to throw himself at the challenge again and again. There is no escape, as it were. Despite only getting a small sliver of dialogue every time you beat a run, the story still visibly progresses and you can't help but get invested in it. I think Hades 1 is easily Undertale-tier meta storytelling and one of the best in-story explanations ever for the bog standard "you must do X successful runs to get the ending", it is so immaculately arranged that you barely notice the seams, especially with the little twist of
Compare this to Hades 2, where gaining access to the surface stages is... literally just a cheap early meta unlock for Melinoe; it is complete and total immunity, and the matter is never brought up again afterwards.
I understand this was largely gameplay-story segregation since they wanted to make the surface stages actually playable, but I still feel there should have been a better way to go about it. It solidly soured the initial impression of all the overpowered witchy bullshit for me, and so far it doesn't really get better - there does not so far seem to be a problem the protag's Quirky Cast of Strong Women doesn't immediately think of a meta unlock solution for.
sodiummuffin
7hr ago
I will note that the artstyle and characters seem a little bit.... woker?
Most obvious with Hestia, who they drew as a fat black woman with vitiligo. That one attracted enough notice at the time that it has a KnowYourMeme page. The vitiligo representation thing always feels a bit surreal when I encounter it outside of Tumblr art. It's the sort of thing I didn't predict penetrating the mainstream corporate world, but apparently there's no actual limit and SJW Tumblr art fads will show up at Target years later.
jkf
7hr ago
I have yet to see any pictures of the gun itself.
In the gory picture of the (self)shooter that is probably still floating around twitter, he's gripping what looks like a full-wood military Mauser of some kind -- K98k is my strong impression, so 8mm is a good guess, although there are other possibilities. (Notably .308, in case it's an, ahem, Israeli mauser)
Interesting possibilities in the ill-informed CW space, in that there's a strong chance that the rifle is stamped with either or both of swastikas and stars of David!
HereAndGone
7hr ago
The moral of the story seems to be "Ambitious broad is too happy with her comfortable lifestyle and illusion of power where she gets to boss people around to be a whistleblower even though (apparently) she is the only one who recognises the real threat, because her job is the only thing she's got going in her life" and the AI/AIs/whatever Sinister System in the mode of Colossus this is and the system knows that about her:
Elaine is 50, but the anti-aging treatment she throws thousands of your taxpayer dollars at every year makes her look 30, maybe 26, in the right lighting conditions. She likes how it tricks people. They look at her face and decide she couldn’t possibly have the authority to cancel their program with the click of a button. That’s one of the reasons why she loves her job enough to let DoD mess with her brain.
Gosh durn them agin' wimmen, this is why a Man should have been in charge from the start! (No, I'm not serious, though I did have to roll my eyes over '50 year old woman will toast the world on a stick over the bonfire of civilisation so as to retain her reeeeellly expensive anti-wrinkle creams that are a job perk').
Okay, went ahead and put a selection of them in a playlist.
https://suno.com/playlist/d8348313-aa62-4474-b272-75d4dbabf641
Note these took me <20 minutes to generate, counting time setting up prompts (I used ChatGPT to fill out the prompt descriptions a bit).
And less than $2 worth of credits, I'd guess.
I don't have an ear for music but these pass as the sort of classical songs I listened to on CD growing up.
The playlist has an "inspire" button that would let one use these songs as the basis for future generations.
Lest I pretend it does it perfectly every time, it did ALSO produce THIS monstrosity on the same prompts:
https://suno.com/s/5Gc5DUCoji1hG2kN
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