domain:dualn-back.com
RegularlyExpressed
3m ago
How multi-lingual are these guys really? My impression was that they achieve very basic conversational aptitude in the languages they study i.e. enough to play the role of white guy who "stuns" native speaker of X by order noodles in X, rather than reaching genuine fluency.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4m ago
If I were Trump, I'd go with option 1.
Why? What successes have come from previous iterations of this option? Why do you believe it would deliver superior results versus prosecuting the culture war to the greatest extent possible?
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
7m ago
I'm for "Trump smash". Breaking the current environment that any tactic is OK for the left but none (including ordinary political rallies, which as you may recall the left liked to disrupt in 2016) for the right is necessary for the right.
But I suspect that a Trump in Sing Sing for putting an expense in the wrong ledger category(with the correct one determined retroactively, natch) will have trouble doing any of those. The boomercons will desert him as a criminal and he'll lose, and the left will be emboldened.
Of course if they put Trump in Sing Sing and he wins, he'll almost certainly at least TRY "Trump smash".
RegularlyExpressed
8m ago
I don't think even RFK supporters think he's going to win? He's interesting to discuss because of votes he'll take away from either of the other two candidates.
SteveKirk
22m ago
People really need to study the rise of the crits in academia. On the CRT wiki page it's of course described as a "right wing maga conspiracy theory", but if you go to Derrick Bell's bio it explains how his fringe group used threats and backstabbing to take over departments and get their allies hired, their enemies fired, and infinite money for their programs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derrick_Bell
Liberalism can't beat leninist vanguard party organizing. And Conservatism can't beat it without nuking the whole battlefield.
Tangentially related...
How much should Trump get even, if he is elected? Either choice he makes seems pretty fraught.
Option 1) Play the bigger man. Pardon himself, obviously, and a few limited other people. Beyond that do nothing. This will prevent a wider conflagration in the culture war. Downside: without a tit-for-tat, the left will be emboldened for much greater tats in the future.
Option 2) Do unto him as he hath done unto me. Pursue corruption investigations against his pursuers (many of whom quite deserve them). Go after voter fraud and ballot harvesting. Turn the executive branch against the left in the same ways it has been turned against the right thus far. Upside: When both sides are armed, the chance for peace is higher than when only one side is armed. Downside: The system will probably resist him, and it could provoke a bigger backlash.
If I were Trump, I'd go with option 1. In reality, I expect him to just do whatever he wakes up feeling like he should do that day with little follow through.
RegularlyExpressed
29m ago
I'm less cynical; I think it's likelier that the people who came up with the story are true believers in the progressive cause. Insofar as it's about optics I would imagine it's more about looking good to the professional media class than it is about pre-emptively shielding themselves from public criticism. I don't know how effective it would be against criticism anyway, mechanically it'll probably be fine, and things like micro-transactions are hated by the left as well so accusations of racism won't do much to defend them in their eyes.
hydroacetylene
30m ago
Look on the bright side- good chance he’ll get out of our hair and be replaced with Greg Abbott’s(who will at least give technocrats a hearing) chief of staff.
hydroacetylene
32m ago
Ken Paxton has a core staff of highly competent people that are loyal to him personally- they left the AG office to defend him during his impeachment- and the opportunity to recruit almost unlimitedly from red state governments, even ignoring project 2025 lists of potential conservative hires.
hanikrummihundursvin
33m ago
The west comes in and does whatever it wants. They're paying for everything after all.
faceh
36m ago
People do occasionally bitch about the leader selection, but I don't think there's ever been a point where a given leader was race or gender-swapped. Easy to avoid critiques from either side about 'inclusion' when the whole point is to represent the entire gamut of global civilizations and to faithfully represent each one as its own unique racial, social, and technological mix of traits.
Leaving aside the running gag about Ghandi being a nuclear-armed terror.
Some complaints about picking lesser-known leaders from a given nation's history in order to prevent a complete sausage-fest.
Hell, STALIN was a playable leader back in Civ 4 (also my favorite to play as incidentally), I dunno if they'd be able to get away with that today, even though he is probably the one leader most Americans could name from Russian history (okay, they COULD name Putin but lol that's not getting included) Note they also completely removed reference to "slavery" as a mechanic post Civ 4.
Probably also a reason that South Africa has never and will never be implemented in the base game.
RegularlyExpressed
39m ago
But but... one point someone made is that the playable protagonist of EVERY game before this has been a fictional character made up specifically for the series, with no historical parallel, which is perhaps in order to give the player the 'blank slate' avatar and avoid any major historical inaccuracies by having some well-known historical figure being an extremely dangerous assassin in their spare time.
I think you're right that they obviously want to make this all about Yasuke, and that wouldn't work unless he's the main character because you could always just ignore him otherwise. I also think part of it why previous historical figures weren't playable characters is that it's often more inspiring to imagine hanging out with and earning the respect of your heroes rather than literally being them. Taking the example of AC2, it was quite cool for a lot of people to have their character become friends with Leonardo Da Vinci, but I don't think a game where you play as Da Vinci would have generated quite as much excitement.
SkoomaDentist
42m ago
Well, the last-last one did just get banned...
SkoomaDentist
46m ago
SkoomaDentist
46m ago
SkoomaDentist
47m ago
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
52m ago
If they’d released AC2 in current year, the same people would be complaining that beating up the Pope was an attack on Western civilization.
The same people who are complaining about woke stories today, were alive and active on Internet forums back then, and did not, in fact, complain.
Anyway, can't wait for the new Black Panther game to come out.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
53m ago
I've seriously considered voting for him, should he be on the ballot in my state. (Is he going to be on all the ballots or just some of them?)
His voice is bizarre. And the brain worms thing is genuinely concerning. But I feel like we're at a point where the big two options in this election are so clearly and obviously not good for the job that I'm desperate for something I can do to signal my total displeasure at the direction of my country.
I'm a pretty conservative guy, and have become more conservative over the past few years. But I've also never voted for Trump. I have seriously, seriously considered it, not because I think Trump has magically become a better candidate, but because the ways in which lawfare has been invoked in an attempt to limit his influence is totally shameful, an insult to the democratic process, an obvious refusal to follow democratic norms on behalf of a party which continually claims its opposition has abandoned democratic norms.
It's the fact that this hasn't worked, and even backfired, that has made me back off from my initial intention to vote for Trump. Even him winning 45% -- which I think he's likely to do -- would be a solid and profound rebuke of the attempts to use weird lawsuits and criminal trials to bring down a major political candidate. But I am still much more incensed by the Democratic party's use of overblown criminal trials, especially the "hush money" one that seems like nonsense upon stilts, than I am by anything Trump has ever done. The Democratic party is the real threat to democracy in this country, as far as I'm concerned.
I'm also angry about the OSHA vaccine mandate, and Biden's general inability -- especially before the election year -- to actually assert control over the executive branch. He promised he wouldn't mandate the vaccine and he did it. People I know were forced to receive a medical procedure of limited benefit to them, on the basis of shoddy (or outright nonexistent) evidence, pursued by an authority that had no true right to make such a sweeping regulation, and required to continually present evidence of receiving this procedure, which has had utterly no value for at least the past couple of years, in order to maintain employment.
It's clear to me that Biden doesn't control his party, his party controls him. And I'm certain that has always been the case, even before he became senile. And however moderate Biden may have presented himself, his party is anything but moderate or restrained.
And what's worse is they're not even radical in the areas where the country desperately needs radical change. I agree with the tankies: the Democratic party is a party of woke capitalists. They'll talk every single day about "equity" and "diversity" and "racial justice" and "sexism," but when it comes to making real change in the real country, and doing things that help real people on the ground instead of boosting the status of various NGO officials -- they're a fucking joke. When's the last time you heard mainstream Democrats actually taking about real healthcare reform? Or making changes to employee benefits? Or consumer protection? Probably just a few times in the past few months, as the Biden administration has rushed to do a few things at the administrative level in an election year. But it's too little, too late. They burned their political capital on woke signalling and not actual policy, and the country has suffered for it.
Say whatever you will about him. But RFK seems to actually care about the direction of the country. I watched a speech he gave about our lack of direction, how medical debt and economic disparity has damaged our country. I heard him talk about how our young people lack direction and our society gives them no reason to have any. His message resonated with me. He's probably farther left than me, but I don't care -- he's passionate, he seems to my eyes to care about ordinary Americans regardless of their spot in the oppression olympics. He looks like the adult in the room to me, the guy who looks at the state of the country and cries out in the wilderness: something needs to change. I look at all the candidates, and the one who actually seems to care about Making America Great Again is RFK.
I think some of the extremes of his vaccine skepticism are kooky. But I admire the fact that he still seems to care about the crazy stuff we did during the pandemic. He hasn't allowed the mainstream to let him forget about all of our grave moral errors during COVID. I myself was infuriated that the red wave never materialized in 2022, after two years of injustice based on false facts. And I'm infuriated that our politics has devolved into culture warring, or whining on both sides about foreign wars, or paranoia about China, when it's clear to me that this country is facing a demographic implosion, a massive and unprecedented loss of meaning, and a rapid, unstoppable loss of national identity and values. We're re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic and pointing to explosions on far-off iceburgs, when the ship is sinking, taking on the water of anomie, while our young men and young women are sharpening their knives ready to maime each other. We need transformational leadership, and a positive identity.
And I'm not sure RFK will give us that. But I'm damn sure Trump or Biden won't.
theory
54m ago
It’s “why doesn’t social justice have a credible competitor?”
Unlike liberalism (in the Founding Fathers sense), SJ recognizes threats to it. A liberal institution will permit the rise within it of those who are hostile to it, one captured by wokeists will purge anyone not sufficiently loyal to their ideology, even if the neutrals are loyalty to the institution.
SJs pulled up the ladder which they climbed up upon. So in order for an alternative to form, wholly separate institutions need to be created anew.
SteveKirk
58m ago
The thought of Paxton prosecuting the Tides Foundation the same way this administration prosecuted the NRA is wonderful, but will he be able to get the staff and bureaucratic whips together to do it?
Tanista
58m ago
That's the 'women are wonderful' effect. Everybody loves women. Everybody of any race has some women they care about.
I highly doubt that this particular trope would play as well in traditionalists societies. I don't think you can pin this on the WAW phenomenon because it manifests in the exact opposite way in certain cultures: it'd be considered immoral to send women into combat if it wasn't laughable as a concept.
Seems to me that it's just a very Western trope. Cultures have their fictions, this is the West's. So it is with the race swap stuff, so it is with the gender stuff.
The problem these days is that Western content creators have a tendency to pair a 'realistic, gritty' aesthetic with feminist fantasies. So the male fantasy of a scantily-clad (it's magic armor ok) Amazonian goddess turns into a rough-looking, middle-aged, square-shouldered she-man.
Well, yes. They listened to the people who (rightly) said that those characters were meant to titillate men. I don't even think it was a confluence of two factors, it was straight up hostile to "objectification".
I guess nobody bothered to argue that attracting men in media men were likely to pay for was hardly a great sin, cause here we are.
RegularlyExpressed
59m ago
One angle I'm somewhat surprised hasn't been brought up much is that this set-up will almost certainly lead to the "problematic" optics of a non-Japanese person running around slaughtering a bunch of Japanese people.
It won't matter in any appreciable way. Some leftists might not like it, but the people who really drive the energies of the progressive movement will, in any conflict between protected groups, come down 100% on the side higher in the progressive stack. This was clear to see during the affirmative action debate, where suddenly children of Asian immigrants were white-adjacent/part of the privileged class.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
Back in the before times we had to wait for a new SO to introduce us to friends and family, but apparently now if a man doesn't at least have a sort of "pre-introductory portfolio" in that regard girls worry that they might get the "it puts the lotion on its skin" treatment.
That sure stirred up some thoughts. In rough chronological order order:
- Boy, am I glad to already be married...
and now if you start to type "dating las vegas" into Google then autocomplete will helpfully suggest "dating last chopper out of nam" instead.
Oh lol, I guess I'm not the only one.
-
We need a total and complete shutdown on America until we figure out what the hell is going on.
-
Butlerian Jihad when?
To confirm you aren't crazy: I get the bar too, although I don't mind it all that much.
More options
Context Copy link