domain:acoup.blog
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
I'm not disagreeing with you in broad strokes, but 'protecting young women's sexual purity' is much more of a right wing value. Obviously Epstein is dead and the MAGA base doesn't think he's chilling in Cuba with Tupac, though.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
I mean, Vance's incentive is to get Trump to resign as soon after the midterms, but definitely after the midterms, as possible, for constitutional reasons.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
Yes, poverty in the native underclass and poverty among non-underclass is different because these people have different folkways.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
6hr ago
they instead refer to pro-life activists as 'anti-abortion activists'.
I'm ok with that -- obviously that's what they are!
There's even the movement to stop saying pro-choice (among pro-choicers) and instead say pro-abortion. I'm fine with this. Obviously whether abortion is acceptable and should be legal, and under what circumstances, is the core of the debate. I'm happy to use the euphemisms, because it's also true that pro-lifers believe they're defending life and pro-choicers believe they're defending the ability to choose whether to carry a child to term.
I get the "marriage equality" thing, but honestly I'm fine with that term too -- if you believe gay marriage is meaningfully different from straight marriage, obviously you think it's unequal, and should be so legally, in an important way! Of course, that's strategically dangerous, but I would rather people just bite the bullet of whatever it is they want to argue for and own it. But I'm also happy with the term "traditional marriage," though I'd prefer if advocates for that opposed "we just don't love each other anymore" divorces as well.
I guess I just take the "avoid semantic debates" thing pretty far -- for the most part, I'll use any term you want me to use, I'd prefer to think about the object level.
I did a fun excercise once, where I tried to exploit the euphemism treadmill for humor or for trolling (not that I commend trolling). I just found the most out-there, unknown, transgressive, new-style, politically-correct term for something, then used it to say something deeply offensive about that thing:
"People of color should go back to where they came from."
"Birthing people should be forced to have at least one child a year." (This phrase is just dumb, I see why radfems hated it so much.)
"BIPOC are a major threat to the social fabric of the United States."
"The LGBTQIA2S+ community is made up entirely of groomers."
"Trans women of color are the worst people on the planet."
(For the record, I don't believe any of this. These are merely examples.)
Doesn't have the same valence as using a slur, does it? And yet these phrases communicate a pretty harsh claim. But stripped of opposing-tribe markers, the actual object-level claim emerges like Neo from the uterine vat of the Matrix, and can be discussed.
So I guess that's why I cringe at euphemistic avoidance of opposing-tribe terms: I'd rather make a harsh claim in a way that might get mistaken for an opposing-tribe claim than signal my in-group in a way that burdens my claim with its smell. It's not about claiming territory for me, it's about exploring ideas.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
I think the difference comes down to shopping behavior- either that of men vs women, or that of women shopping for themselves vs their husbands. Anecdotally women want to buy their stuff in person, but feel comfortable just ordering stuff for their husbands online at the best price available.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
Did you miss the 'native underclass' descriptor? This is a predominately urban group defined by generational poverty.
There are a variety of people(eg grad students) who have very similar incomes to the generationally poor underclass, but are not underclass.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
Normal, working and middle class blacks shop at grocery stores and eat normal, burgers and spaghetti and pork chops, food. Most blacks are not the underclass(and the underclass is not entirely black, although it is disproportionately so). Underclass whites don't cook either.
FistfullOfCrows
6hr ago
Hale was a girl, that definitely changes things. When I hear, "keeps a diary" I imagine either some one older than boomers or a girl. Also, there's a world apart between a manifesto and "dear diary"
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
6hr ago
I once saw a TV segment (might have been with John Stossel) where they interviewed a dry cleaner who had significantly different prices for men's and women's shirts. The owner said that the reason for this is that they could put a men's shirt through the machine and everything would be fine, but if there was so much as a hint of a stain remaining on a woman's shirt, the woman would be back in complaining and demanding they fix it and/or provide a refund. So they actually cleaned the women's shirts better.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
I will agree that at the time of final arrest he was not going to be charged with any crimes serious enough to merit death- but he has committed some of those crimes in his life.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
That would be the normal way to leave but you could also double back through the store.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
Meat shoplifting is 100% a thing and way worse for the store's bottom line than stealing rice or tomatoes. Mostly not for personal consumption(although it does sometimes happen), but for resale- meat is expensive unless your cost to acquire rounds to 0.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
6hr ago
The only time I see The Apprentice referenced online is when the film version of Trump gives his sigma speech about tactics and Trump supporters go 'based!' see here for an example. They reappropriate the work of others: https://x.com/PierceKeaton/status/1865222291157598458
I mean, did they really think they were attacking Trump by making their fictional version of him spell out his strategy in a coherent way that makes it sound like he knows how to play the media for maximum effect?
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
The children of Asian and Hispanic immigrants seem to integrate just fine. Like sure there's activist exceptions but by and large second and third gen Hispanics and Orientals are just... Americans.
jkf
6hr ago
Wouldn't the next step be to actually do this? We've "made fusion power" quite some time ago, it's just not significantly energy positive, so not super-useful as a generating station.
There's no such requirement if it's a method of making gold -- it doesn't even need to be net-positive in terms of gold value for it to be an interesting thing to try in the lab.
So I'm a bit suspicious that it's not actually that easy to do -- although maybe they are kicking off Project Rumplestiltskin at Livermore Labs as we speak, who knows.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6hr ago
I really appreciate this comment, because it reveals that I have put too much trust in commentators who are either extrapolating from incomplete information, or simply grasping at straws. I should have used more humility before speaking confidently regarding a topic about which I lacked sufficient direct knowledge!
Lazuli
6hr ago
The biggest driver was just being able to sneak in games while work was slow.
Play Balatro instead. It's the perfect mobile game.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
I see he's banned now lol.
For two weeks. He'll be back and probably get another chance before a permaban.
But now that I'm here, I'm curious to know if your perspective is the prevailing opinion here.
For this specific problem? Almost certainly graft by left-wing NGO's is the culprit in the eyes of most posters.
OliveTapenade
6hr ago
Imagine if the enemy said "doing the hokey pokey is an endorsement of our cause." Or alternatively "doing the hokey pokey is pledging loyalty our cause." Well I would find it a pretty compelling reason to stop doing the hokey pokey.
Well, sure, but who on earth says that saying the name 'George Floyd' or that saying the phrase 'Black Lives Matter' (in reference to a movement and organisation called Black Lives Matter) constitutes endorsing anything? I don't see the concern here.
I can understand not wanting to use certain phrases because they frame an issue in a way you disagree with. For instance, I avoid saying the phrase 'marriage equality' because I think it is a gross mischaracterisation of the issue, and if I used it I think I would be accepting a strawman. Likewise there's a tic among some activists where they refuse to use the phrase 'pro-life' in any circumstances; they instead refer to pro-life activists as 'anti-abortion activists'.
But 'George Floyd' is just a name, and saying it implies nothing about whether one supports or opposes any political issue related to him. Likewise BLM is the name of an organisation. I don't think that saying it in that context constitutes a kind of endorsement.
Tolkien’s Middle Earth stories are intended as an ersatz mythos for the historical peoples of the British Isles; the various peoples and factions of the world are rough stand-ins or symbolic idealizations of the various ethnic groups and their myths which have coalesced into the modern (white) peoples of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. (And, by extension, the Celtic and North Germanic peoples of Continental Europe.) Gondor as a rough analogue for Roman-Celtic Britain, Rohan as the horse-obsessed Anglo-Saxons, Elves as the remnants of the pre-Aryan Neolithic peoples, etc.
This is expressly incorrect.
If you open up your copy of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien writes in the appendices that the Rohirrim do not resemble the Anglo-Saxons:
This linguistic procedure does not imply that the Rohirrim closely resembled the ancient English otherwise, in culture or art, in weapons or modes of warfare, except in a general way due to their circumstances: a simpler and more primitive people living in contact with a higher and more venerable culture, and occupying lands that had once been part of its domain.
He represents the language of Rohan as old English in order to express its linguistic relationship to the common speech spoken by the hobbits, which he represents as modern English, but he says clearly that the folk of Rohan do not especially resemble the ancient English otherwise.
Likewise for Gondor, note Tolkien's Letter #294, where he is responding to and criticising the draft of an interview of him for the Daily Telegraph:
[Journalist:] Middle-earth .... corresponds spiritually to Nordic Europe.
Not Nordic, please! A word I personally dislike; it is associated, though of French origin, with racialist theories. Geographically Northern is usually better. But examination will show that even this is inapplicable (geographically or spiritually) to 'Middle-earth'. This is an old word, not invented by me, as reference to a dictionary such as the Shorter Oxford will show. It meant the habitable lands of our world, set amid the surrounding Ocean. The action of the story takes place in the North-west of 'Middle-earth', equivalent in latitude to the coastlands of Europe and the north shores of the Mediterranean. But this is not a purely 'Nordic' area in any sense. If Hobbiton and Rivendell are taken (as intended) to be at about the latitude of Oxford, then Minas Tirith, 600 miles south, is at about the latitude of Florence. The Mouths of Anduin and the ancient city of Pelargir are at about the latitude of ancient Troy.
Auden has asserted that for me 'the North is a sacred direction'. That is not true. The North-west of Europe, where I (and most of my ancestors) have lived, has my affection, as a man's home should. I love its atmosphere, and know more of its histories and languages than I do of other parts; but it is not 'sacred', nor does it exhaust my affections. I have, for instance, a particular love for the Latin language, and among its descendants for Spanish. That it is untrue for my story, a mere reading of the synopses should show. The North was the seat of the fortresses of the Devil. The progress of the tale ends in what is far more like the re-establishment of an effective Holy Roman Empire with its seat in Rome than anything that would be devised by a 'Nordic'.
Tolkien analogises the return of the king to Gondor to the re-establishment of the Holy Roman Empire, with its capital in Rome. It seems to me that this would make Gondor or Minas Tirith the proper analogue to Rome itself, or Italy more generally. This seems supported by his intention that Gondor is, in terms of latitude, somewhere roughly between northern Italy and Greece or western Turkey.
I agree that The Rings of Power is garbage and that, in general, actors should be cast who plausibly resemble the characters they are intended to portray, but I want to nitpick that your claim about Tolkien's intentions here is just false.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6hr ago
+1. "Better graphics", undoubtedly, but that doesn't make a better video game.
FoundViaTwitter
6hr ago
We do have much better video games now, though.
Very debatable, especially if you include the early 2000s.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7hr ago
The parallel comments already said about as much, but Iranian media does not represent the standard of communication that I would wish for this community to aspire to.
You may consider your rationale as being analogous to "my outgroup shoots at me, so I would be stupid to unilaterally disarm and not shoot at them", but perhaps it is more akin to "my outgroup has bad hygiene, so I would be stupid to unilaterally disarm and take a shower".
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
7hr ago
Y'know, your comment helped me clarify a thought I've had. It seems that there are several different beliefs that often get confused for one another because they are only subtly different.
- Liberalism: reject tribalism, embrace equality and "color-blindness," let's put aside our differences to get rich and live and in peace (classical /old-school liberals)
- Identitarianism: embrace tribalism, take from others and give to your own, by hook or by crook (e.g. ethnocentric immigrants, Black nationalists):
- Anti-White Identitarianism: Same as above, except your tribe prioritizes taking from whites first (mostly because it's easy pickin's, but also something something oppression). There's the Progressive variant that adds the rest of the intersectional totem pole under whites
so far, do familiar. But then
- Pro-Republic Liberal Identitariansm (there has to be a better name): embrace tribalism, (but reluctantly and only as a means to RETVRN to limited liberalism, not as an end in itself) because liberalism can only function as s fine-tuning knob on a cohesive society, not as a combat arena for rival incompatible cultures to duke it out for supremacy.
Did I miss any?
And even then, the only real improvement has been in photorealistic 3D graphics. 2D graphics had already peaked by the late 90s; there's not much further you can go after you can already make gorgeous games like Marvel vs. Capcom. Stylized 3D graphics took a little longer, but by the early 2000s we already had beauties like Wind Waker.
I'm a big believer that the whole quest for MOAR POLYGONS is a mistake, and that we would have all been better off if we had just stuck with the PS2 and Game Cube instead of upgrading our hardware every five years to ever more expensive consoles with ever more expensive games, all in the name of making photorealistic 3D titles look slightly better with every iteration.
Which is why I'm a PC gamer now; I just buy old games for the cheap on Steam.
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