domain:moultano.wordpress.com
anti_dan
12hr ago
Somehow this post feels nearly maximally uncharitable to both parties and young men. Have Democrats become too conformist to be cool? I suppose. Are Republicans a party with an excess of unconstrained young male energy? I suppose. Do young men need an outlet for their energy? Yes.
But its not like the Democrats stumbled into being "lame" (your word). It was part of a calculated electoral strategy that prioritized other things, and necessarily excluded male interests, particularly those of noncriminal working males. That left the GOP with an opening that they seized on and since libertarianism has always been unpopular with voters since the franchise was expanded beyond a few landowning men in New England, discarding that in favor of a little paternalism that sounds more masculine was a winning message.
Rov_Scam
12hr ago
Alright, which specific people would you arrest. I'm serious. The crucial mistake of the J6 protestors is that they were all incredibly stupid. The BLM rioters at least had the sense to operate primarily at night, conceal their identities, and choose locations that weren't guaranteed to be under God-level surveillance. Not that it mattered since they took videos of themselves and posted them to social media. The reason there weren't as many arrests during 2020 as you think there should have been is because Priority #1 is ending the riot, not investigating and making arrests for individual crimes. The same priorities prevailed on January 6, with very few people being arrested at the scene and the vast majority being identified and arrested later. Unless the evidence exists that allows you to identify criminals, you can't arrest them. You act as though there are tens of thousands of people out there who the police know committed crimes but who aren't being arrested for political reasons.
I will grant that a lot of people who were arrested for more minor crimes like failure to disperse had the charges dropped without incident. However, you have to consider the context of what was going on in 2020: The courts were operating under severe restrictions due to COVID. The normal criminal dockets were backed up; it wasn't feasible to prosecute hundreds of people on charges that would result in small fines when they were already having trouble moving felonies through. But the people who caused damage and were caught generally were prosecuted.
TwiceHuman
12hr ago
I don't think anyone would do more for a stranger than a close friend. But these people might have beliefs like "I generally don't like humans, animals are much better" or "If only we could all become cyborgs so that we could get rid of our human imperfections" or "Humans are a plague on the planet, I'm ashamed for being human myself".
Thoughts like this correlate with the dislike of nationalism, because of the belief that egoism is bad at any scale (speaking positively about the self, or ones own group is perceived as being immoral because it implies that other groups are inferior). These people also feel inferior, which is why they feel great pity for other groups that they perceive as inferior. These people want an ideal world, and think that if we aren't living in one, it must be because somebody is mean (and not because life is hard), so another trait in leftism is naivety (the exact same kind which is found in communism!).
Of course, prioritizing friends over non-friends is the same sort of bias as nationalism, and even considering leftism superior to right-wing beliefs is not different from thinking that one culture or race is superior to another. Leftists always speak about how bad white people are, even white leftists, but somehow they feel superior for noticing that they're not superior. This feels similar to when people compete in who can be the most humble, and other virtue signaling. It feels illogical, but that's likely because the goal isn't logic consistency, but things like:
1: Calming ones conscience. 2: Feeling good about oneself. 3: Defending against criticism from other people. 4: It allows for people of mediocre and uneventful lives to feel like they're fighting for something important.
Leftism can also be compared to some aspects of Christianity, especially the strongly feminine parts. Even more interestingly, the subversion of Christianity can be compared with the subversive nature of leftism, as described by Yuri Bezmenov.
DiscourseMagnus
12hr ago
Isn't the reporting that he said it in a phone call, and not by text?
KMC
13hr ago
I'll grant you that. The vulgarity and norm breaking were appealing not in themselves but because they were demonstrations of commitment. Commitment to what? Well, something I'm interested in, let's leave it at that.
I like my politicians to bite bullets. It's the only way to actually demonstrate conviction.
KMC
13hr ago
The commentators are the result of consuming the kinds of content that the admins and moderators allow.
DiscourseMagnus
13hr ago
It was that unequivocally condemning a white supremacist who committed murder should be the easiest thing a president does.
I mean, I'm not a Charlottesville expert, but isn't this a completely fabricated narrative that the courts made stick to signal that they hate white supremacists? My recollection is that the fatality there was only slightly less justifiable than the incident with Rittenhouse; a bunch of counterprotesters surrounded a white supremacist's car and threatened him to signal the strength of their political convictions, and eventually he panicked, tried to drive away, and struck and killed one of them. This seems less like a case of going out to murder one's political opponents and more like a demonstration of why blocking cars is not a nonviolent form of protest.
Rov_Scam
13hr ago
How much research did you do? On Saturday he makes his famous "many sides" comment. On Monday he releases the prepared statement you linked to. On Tuesday he doubles down on what he said Saturday:
What about the alt-left that came charging at, as you say, at the alt-right? Do they have any semblance of guilt?
You had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists; the press has treated them absolutely unfairly.
You also had some very fine people on both sides
Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. This week, it is Robert E. Lee. And I notice that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you have to ask yourself, where does it stop?
As @Rosencrantz2 points out, you can cherry pick a few sentences out of each incident to make it sound like he's offering nothing but condemnation, but I specifically said that he can't help using these events as opportunities to dunk on his opponents. His Tuesday remarks made it sound like the white supremacists and neo-Nazis were a small minority of people who just happened to be at the protest and not the organizing force behind it. He says the left is just as bad, if not worse. And then he goes on to put Confederate generals in the same league as the founding fathers, just so you know whose side he's really on.
MathWizard
Good things are good
13hr ago
I generally share your assessment, though I don't think I hated its flaws quite as much as you and stuck it out slightly longer, getting halfway through Act 2 before dropping it.
The permanent gear does get a tiny bit more creative in Act 2 with occasionally having an affix, or having a different boost (a belt that increases the duration of your status effects instead of boosting your max damage), so there are tradeoffs. But with no storage for it you kind of have to commit to a build long-term since swapping can only be done when you find a new piece, which is stupid and makes the game more repetitive (which it already was). They should have stuck to the main skill tree for straight stat upgrades and used the Relics as gear.
BurdensomeCount
Unable to escape TheMotte's cycle of Samsara...
13hr ago
My apologies, I was going to make a joke about confusing it with Penn State but they have a 50%+ admit rate so nowhere near the same league. An easy enough mistake to make. The names of US universities are very weird and eclectic and hard to remember, you can replace UPenn with Rice and the point would still stand.
The worst offender for an American university name has to be Colgate, to me Colgate is what I brush my teeth with...
Totalitarianit
13hr ago
Yes, of course. Condemnation in the "strongest possible terms" is no match for the "nothing but" barrier. I'm finding no evidence, video or otherwise, of Trump performing seppuku either. I stand corrected.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
13hr ago
If somebody doesn't like your party or its platform, then the problem can't be that your platform is lacking - it can only be that the person is unaware of how fantastic your platform really is.
Or, alternately, that the person is an evil Fascist bigot who hates all good things because they're so evil and hateful.
Pongalh
13hr ago
The more important point to me is the privacy part. How many of us would really come out unscathed if all our private convos were unearthed? (In general too many people want to chalk up to extra horrible malice what is better explained by the new information environment.)
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
13hr ago
You do know that UPenn is also Ivy League, right?
Pongalh
13hr ago
That Brooklyn lefty campaigner guy who was killed on CCTV with his girlfriend nearby, conservatives were very much "welp, hoisted by his own..." as in this is the result of his own views on crime. A smug schadenfreude was palpable, but I didn't see overt celebration myself.
striker
13hr ago
Democrats lose because they are lame.
This – perceived lameness – is pervasive across the west. The sad thing (for democrats in the US, or progressives or liberals or lefties or whatever they’re called elsewhere) is that in general they are compassionate people, with empathy towards others, especially those who have fallen through the cracks, and they’re interested more in civic society than in individual gain, but online media has no proven way of effectively showing the OTHERS whom they have compassion for. Which makes them look lame. Whether they are or not is largely irrelevant because perception creates reality.
In contrast, online media does a great job of showcasing and promoting individual gain, thereby attracting all those who are primarily driven by it.
But even more importantly, because all humans are a jigsaw of mismatching parts, and nobody is either 100% compassionate or 100% individualistic, this means you get the strange phenomenon that even people who are 25% individualistic, say, are exposed to a lot more content (and a lot more compelling content) that is individualist in nature, and so the prevailing wind is that those people gravitate slowly from “left” (compassionate) to “right” (individualistic) by dint of the air they’re breathing in online settings much more than carefully thought out worldviews and philosophies.
TLDR - liberals look lame online, therefore they are lame, therefore most people gravitate towards conservatives over time.
Rosencrantz2
13hr ago
nothing but
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
13hr ago
They also appear not to have considered that if they want young men to vote for them (especially young white and Asian men), they should probably offer them something other than scorn. Which, as far as the culture war goes, they do not. Even when the Republicans express their disgust for young men watching porn, that's better than being disgusted with young men for being men.
This is posting rather than lurking and on top of that these true brexit geezers used their personal email addresses.
Among the donors were several associated with email addresses traceable to police and other public officials.
If you're donating to the Rittenhouse Foundation under, essentially, your real name, you are wasting money on that VPN subscription.
TheFooder
13hr ago
You want a jihad but you don't want it to be stupid? Methinks you demand too much good sir!
TK-421
13hr ago
-
Because the trio of a criminal, violent illegal alien, and teenaged religious extremist murdered me and used me as a skinsuit.
-
Yeah, this was the real shocker. No jokes, no exaggeration, this is where the rhetoric has led. As best as I can tell, this is the very edge of the verbal Overton window in deep blue spaces. I have zero concern that she has actually begun to do so, could or would in the near future, and I'd definitely be aware before things got to that point. This is the very front line in the shit testing AOR.
It's possible I've been unclear in some post but that doesn't mean I condone these statements or the general atmosphere of acceptability of wishing for harm, I'm merely a traveler reporting my experiences. Data mines are different from other types of mines because you have to fill them up first, all I've got are a couple pebbles.
Having tired of Hades 2 for the moment and stirred by mentions of Synthetik and Ruiner downthread, I tried Hell Clock to get my ARPG/top-down action fix. The premise seemed solid enough, and the Curse of the Dead Gods-esque artstyle feels fresh.
About 6 hours in I must surmise it is... not good, i my humble o. In brief, Hell Clock feels distinctly like a game made by someone who really likes ARPGs generally and PoE specifically (with a touch of Hades, ironically), with zero actual understanding of what makes these games work.
Un-briefly:
+ I found the artstyle quite nice, although the levels themselves are fairly barren and the style makes projectile spam really blur together as a side effect.
+ The character controls well and movement is responsive, Hades-tier is the highest praise I can give it. WASD really oughta become the new standard for ARPGs going forward.
+ Voice acting sounds good, although a language I do not understand.
- Its most glaring con is that many game systems were evidently made by someone who does not understand how roguelites/ARPGs and metafaggotry optimization works. Examples galore:
- The levels are static, never changing throughout runs. It actually took me a few runs to nootice because that's like, the most basic expectation for a roguelike, but once I noticed my enjoyment fell off a cliff; I have no idea how you sustain interest in such a game without at least a token effort at procedural generation. This alone is a black mark on the game in general.
- The starting skill variety is far too limited, and more skills only open after beating Act 1 (which took me most of the ~6 hours), at which point your interest may or may not be gone. Mine certainly was.
- Gear is permanent and you do not lose it between runs, but the only things it gives (as of Act 1-2) is flat stat bonuses - HP for body armor, base damage for weapons, movement speed on boots etc. There is no variety, every slot is literally one stat, and the only upgrade is number go up. For an ARPG this is a fatal shortcoming; they even know how to do it, Sanctum relics (your other kind of equipment) are properly random and roll affixes! Maybe this gets better later, but with no actual stash for gear (how?!) I highly doubt it.
- The skill tree contains passives that increase dismantling yield and make upgrading relics/gear cheaper - forever dooming your autism to respec every time you upgrade your shit or clear out your stash if you want to make the most of it. For extra aggravation, the only respec option is to reset your tree entirely instead of deallocating points one by one.
- [cw: autistic rage] Mechanics are extremely hit or miss, due to the limited skill variety you are more or less corralled into a few working builds early on. Bleeding specifically is an outright scam: the mechanic is lifted straight out of Last Epoch so I quickly figured out how to work it, but I noticed I am not doing nearly as much single-target damage as I expected to. Bleeds just didn't seem to stick to bosses despite gazillion small hits per second, and at the Act 1 boss (and after a bit of googling) I finally realized why: bleed damage is unrelated to the hit that applies it, but bleed chance somehow still directly depends on it - bleed chance is greatly reduced the less damage you deal relative to total HP! My only damaging mechanic is directly countered by an affix-less wall of HP, the kind that bleeds are supposed to be good at killing in the first place! Spending literally 15 minutes to plink the boss to death due to my main damage source ceasing to work was the final straw, I alt-f4'd out of the game shortly after.
This actually gave me painful flashbacks so if any mottizen ever makes an ARPG, carve this insight into your psyche: any damage mechanic that can plausibly be played as main DPS must never be entirely negated by things outside the player's control! Leave damage immunities in 2000 where they belong! None of that "500% bleed resistance for undead" muh realism bullshit! Even Chris fucking Wilson Jonathan fucking Rogers, the king of player-hostile game design, figured out this part immediately following PoE2's release!
- The admittedly novel setting of 19th-century Brazilian badlands appears to mostly cash out into incessant glazing of the Canudos, victims of the eponymous massacre. I suppose alt-history is a perfectly cromulent narrative device, but by the time I encountered... checks notes Head-Cutter (in actual, literal hell!) I completely checked out of the narrative, it is impossible to take seriously. This kind of hamfisted political narrative never fails to give me the ick regardless of subject matter; I know nothing about the Canudos but I will be entirely unsurprised if they were actually some sort of horrible militant sect with plenty of chips on their shoulders that required direct gov't intervention to root out.
((Out of curiosity, does somebody know of a game extolling the virtues of jingoistic imperialism and brutal colonisation? Off the top my head I only recall Broforce and New Vegas: Sneering Imperialist edition.))
In short, I did not entirely hate Hell Clock but it wore out its welcome remarkably quickly and I am glad I picked up the uh, extended demo version from the high seas instead of buying it. Just play Tiny Rogues or something instead.
No, we cannot officially throw out the principle of charity.
More options
Context Copy link