domain:npr.org
gattsuru
2m ago
They will absolutely wreck you in Vintage Story, to the point where they're more feared than most of the not!zombie enemies. Only the Bells, as mob-summoners, are really worse; even the T3 and T4 drifters can do comparable damage, but they're much slower, where your best hope when being chased by a brown bear before getting iron or steel armor involves trying to pit trap or outswim them.
Thems Fighting Herds has Huggles, who acts as the final boss for each arcade mode run, and is frankly unfairly hard. There's a bonus mode version you can play as that's even more overpowered, though it's intended for the rest of a multiplayer fight to team up against whoever gets to play the bear.
The Elder Scrolls have pretty consistently had bears as some of the most dangerous enemies, to the point where they could out-match some lesser dragons in Skyrim.
I've had Tribal runs in Rimworld wrecked by an early-game bear manhunter, though I dunno if that was vanilla or a mod. The Long Dark has some dangerous bears, though once you've got a good rifle setup and prep they're kinda loot pinatas.
I guess maybe Five Nights at Freddies, for a loose enough definition?
But yeah, they're definitely often treated as far less threatening or dangerous than they should be, even in some survival-themed games.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
10m ago
Federal authority is a norm, not an immutable law of the universe, and norms can go away over time.
Except it's a norm backed by a lot of guns.
Here, defiance by Red Tribe provides the other half of the back-and-forth wrenching that will tear this norm out of its cultural foundations.
And what is left after the norm of Federal authority is "torn out," if not the raw "obey or die" assertion of power through raw force?
If Abbott and DeSantis continue on their current trajectory, then we'll see more Broad spectrum resistance from Reds as well.
Only until Abbott, DeSantis, and their supporters end up in prison or dead.
Keep that up, and it's entirely possible that Federal authority loses all credibility
They don't need credibility, they just need to send armed FBI agents to do pre-dawn no-knock raids on enough of those who oppose them to deter the rest.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
14m ago
Why do you think using it to coordinate Red Tribe defiance is a bad idea?
Presumably, because "Red Tribe defiance" is itself a bad idea? Either because one is Blue Tribe, or because one sees "Red Tribe defiance" as leading only to Blue power cracking down even harder?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
16m ago
the so-called captains of industry, who tend to lean right,
[Citation needed], as they say. Because from what I've read, these days "industry" leans ever-leftward — see DEI, ESG, etc.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
17m ago
Does it specify which species of bear? Black bears are common in the lower 48, and I've run into them before: I've even heard of people aggressively chasing them off. Not cuddly, but some of them aren't that much bigger than a large adult human. Grizzly and polar bears are much larger and dangerous.
I think the distributions of danger here are relevant: a 99th percentile dangerous human might well be much more dangerous than the equivalent black bear, even if the median black bear doesn't even get seen because it avoids humans. The median human is, I would guess, a net help in a survival situation, or at least tries to do so. In my experience, people evaluate risks like that very differently.
Somewhere in here is a decent joke about cougars in the woods: mountain lions are quite dangerous if they decide to kill you, but so are divorces.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
17m ago
From a Red Tribe perspective, there is no rational reason beyond naked fear to respect or maintain federal authority.
Why isn't that fear enough?
Blues look at this as a fiat accompli, but why respect a system that doesn't respect you?
What matters is not respect, but obedience. Blues don't need or want Reds' respect, only their submission.
Given that reality, why continue to support and maintain those institutions?
Because you will be punished if you don't?
The correct move is to withdraw the consent of the governed, and make them fight for every step.
So, poking the (metaphorical, Federal) bear?
Deny them freedom of action at every possible point.
This implies we have any meaningful ability to do so.
Never concede their legitimacy
Legitimacy is overrated. Don Corleone doesn't need "legitimacy" to get people to pay him for "protection," does he?
never grant them authority
What does this look like, and how does it end in anything other than getting arrested, shot, etc.?
never cooperate.
Try that with the IRS, or the FBI, and see what happens.
When they push back, escalate, and when they push back on that, escalate again.
What makes you think this can possibly end well? How does this not end in the Feds and Blues crushing Red utterly. What does getting you (yes, you) and your entire family gunned down by SWAT accomplish, exactly?
Attack their institutions and organizations.
Attack with what, exactly? As the old meme goes, you and what army?
Engage in economic and legislative warfare.
Same question as above. They have most the big corporations and economic weight on their side, and only their legislation has "teeth," not ours.
All this has been done to us; tit-for-tat is the correct strategy given the state of play.
Except we lack the means to do unto them as they have done unto us. It's like telling a man taking cover from gunfire to "just shoot back; tit-for-tat," when he's unarmed.
It does not appear to have unlimited state capacity to spare.
It doesn't need literally "unlimited" state capacity, merely enough to crush us. And as I see it, it has that in spades. What evidence do you have to the contrary?
It is entirely possible that we can grind them down to the point that the social structures they're leaning on simply collapse,
Wrong, wrong, WRONG! It is not, in fact, "entirely possible" for us to do this. They are too powerful, and we are but ants beneath their boots.
And if we are not so fortunate as to get the happy end, all the efforts put into this strategy pay dividends at the subsequent levels of escalation.
How can you possibly believe that "the subsequent levels of escalation" are anything other than Red Tribe getting crushed harder and harder, until we're eventually eradicated?
oats_son
23m ago
I don't have much to say about the rest of your post, but Xiaomannyc is one of those Internet Polyglots that purports to have super language abilities and regularly makes videos "shocking" natives with his knowledge of their little-known language. It's safe to say these types don't really bring anything useful to the table. Learning languages is a game of dedication, not speeding through things in 24 hours and impressing everyone. At least his Chinese sounds like it's good, though.
mildly_benis
24m ago
Bear pickers would get what they deserve. At least you can expect a man, if he's forced to eat you, to kill you before he begins.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
44m ago
they are not motivated by what wins votes.
Well, why should they be? Per the past post of mine that @magic9mushroom linked, have you considered that maybe the reason they appear to care so little about elections is because they know elections don't matter? That they'll remain in power no matter how the masses vote?
I mean, I don't see how anyone, having seen both the Trump and Biden presidencies, can believe POTUS is anything more than a figurehead position, as much in charge of the Executive branch of DC as King Charles III is in charge of the UK. Nor how they can have lived through government "shutdowns" where nothing that mattered actually shut down and trillions of dollars continued to be (unconstitutionally) spent, and still think that the House of Representative's "power of the purse" still exists.
The reason the administration enforces extremist doctrines "no liberal would have endorsed until a few months ago" is because they know they won't suffer any meaningful consequences, because they have all the power, and there's nothing and nobody that can stop them.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
57m ago
The only realistic move is to organize into a tight religious in-group, because: religion is the best way to train the young’s’ spiritual/mental immune system against political propaganda, religion is the best way to transmit cultural/philosophical concerns, and (most of all) America offers strong religious protections which would allow you to live sequestered away from normal life in America.
First, how does this accomplish political goals?
Second, you vastly overstate said religious protections. AIUI, getting religious tax exemptions is actually incredibly difficult, particularly for a "new" religion.
Third, isn't this just "instrumentalizing religion"? How is your conservative "new religion" anything but a LARP, with added tax evasion scheme?
Frankly, I'm getting tired of people proposing the (ridiculous) idea that the best way to achieve material political goals is to start a [expletive deleted] cult.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
59m ago
Please no "ai girlfriend startups"
Personal distaste or perceived unprofitability? Genuinely curious.
I wear my flair on my sleeve and continue to think that the first service to figure out how to milk coomers NEETs and not instantly evaporate under the Eye of Sauron's withering gaze will immediately go viral and make wild bank until the fad blows over. This applies to non-coomers as well but AI/LLM-based things invariably cut both ways anyway so the distinction has no practical difference.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1hr ago
I think a lot of WEIRD people are stunted. And I don’t think men would do much better in a similarly worded “would you rather” scenario aimed at them. The issue is that the way we raise kids and the way we’re taught (or more properly mis-taught to judge risks, rewards, and dangers) tends to create an entire culture of infantile adults who can’t understand let alone handle the real world. And we do it to ourselves.
The first issue is extreme safetyism. We’ve gone from being a frontier people who were used to handling our own lives and the risks that came with it, to a people that are suffering from anxiety and depression in probably the safest environment humanity has ever known: a country that hasn’t had a war on her own soil in almost 200 years, where the biggest health risks are diseases of gluttony or old age, where most people face the workplace dangers of paper cuts, and where we commute strapped into cars that are designed to withstand collisions going much faster than they normally go. And I think a lot of it is down to safetyist lifestyles that not only don’t teach people to reasonably handle a risk, but create a mindset in which you’re taught to ruminate on the idea of injury death, insult and loss.
The second thing we’ve been taught is to put our own feelings on the level of facts. I’m not suggest that your feelings don’t matter at all, but I do think that we’ve put them much too far forward in our thinking process, which leads to all kinds of problems. First of all, feelings about a subject are not always true. You might be afraid of spiders, but if they aren’t actually dangerous to you, that fear is only going to harm you by diminishing your own life and your ability to live it. Second, focusing on feelings especially negative feelings just makes you feel worse. Focusing on positive emotions isn’t all that great either if you get so attached to the good feelings that the loss of them is catastrophic to you, or leads to unrealistic expectations of what life is like. Negative emotions are normal, and losses are common. You will experience both often. And if you’re focused on feelings, you’ll be miserable.
The third thing is that we aren’t taught to look to facts. Nobody is asking whether a thing they believe is actually true. They aren’t taught statistics, probability or logic in school, so they have no real toolsets to use to decide what is real or not or whether a thing they read or see is true. What are the actual facts on the ground in Ukraine or Gaza? Would this not change how we think about what to do in those situations? What is the actual cause of inflation? Would knowledge of the cause change what we do to solve it?
I think the best things to teach kids are sensible risk taking, stoicism and not getting attached to luxury, and good sound thinking and truth-seeking. These things can be taught, and to be honest we used to teach them. In STEM and philosophy we still do. It’s just that we’ve removed most of this from the curriculum of people who don’t need to use them for work and then wonder why our systems don’t work and problems don’t get solved.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1hr ago
At the end of the day, one has to support candidates in the primaries who are sane and support his/her favored policies
What about when there isn't a candidate supporting your policies? For example, where's the "end no-fault divorce" candidate?
TowardsPanna
1hr ago
I had a possibly very naive thought about this. Now that the last halving of reward has happened, and nearly all the btc have been mined... is it possible that people will just sorta lose some interest in the whole thing? Move on to a newer crypto as standard? Or do you think btc will remain the gold standard of crypto and just become more and more valuable per btc as more people want to get into crypto (is this even a given, or could products from central banks or Visa/MC become most popular instead?)?
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
1hr ago
I'm almost ambivalent. The primary issue I have with a gay son is that I want genetically related grandkids, and while that's by no means insurmountable even today, I expect it to be even more of a non-issue by the time a hypothetical child is sexually mature.
My response to a gay son or thot daughter being thrust on me, fully grown, would be a huh??? rather than anything more considered.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1hr ago
Easier said than done, particularly given that the other side is a lot more experienced at it.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1hr ago
If I was a white gentile I’d probably become a tradcath.
First, how does this answer my question? What does this do, politically, for the right?
And second, isn't this instrumentalizing religion, joining a denomination for reasons other than genuine belief?
haroldbkny
1hr ago
That's interesting, I was thinking of this slightly differently. Everyone talks about the hippie protests of the 60s as this big purposeful, meaningful thing that changed American culture for the better and were protesting a meaningless war, etc. This whole Columbia thing has gotten me to reconsider how much the hippie protests actually had a point from the get-go. Did they also start out, and maybe even stay, as a bunch of petulant teens complaining without having much of an agenda, or list of demands, or purpose? Did we ascribe the meaning and purpose to these protests after the fact, at least in some cases?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1hr ago
Huh, no one really has answered your questions.
Yeah, it's frustrating.
Have a coup, or otherwise radically alter the governance structure.
Again, monarchist awaiting our Augustus, so I'm right here on that.
Hunker down and wait a generation until the left birth-rates itself into nothing.
Did you read the link? It'll take more than just a generation, which requires a way to maintain cohesion across generations — which is where I suppose all the other replies going on about religious groups (the sort of instrumentalization of religion that, back on SSC, Mai la Dreapta used to denounce and Well… would brag about) come in.
Import voters with similar values (MAGA, famously enthusiastic supporters of immigration).
From where, exactly?
Win in the national public discourse, in ways that are sufficient to convince people.
Between so much of the left being "cognitive heroin" (to borrow from Scott), and their control of the media megaphone, that's just not happening.
It's looking like we'll get something of a reprieve in the near term by the fact that black and hispanic voters are increasing their republican support.
Again, if you read the link, that phenomenon is vastly overstated.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
1hr ago
but I didn't know how to phrase any of it in a way that would be "leaving the rest of the internet at the door".
Look dawg, I'm an admin and even I have no idea how to enforce that rule without ruling out about 95% of everything that gets posted here. I presume it mostly exists to avoid petty drama and forum flamewars from leaking through.
Until someone tells me what the hell it's supposed to mean, I'm just going to slink away whistling. I don't recall seeing anything ever reported as a violation of said rule, and that should tell you something, given how certain users here consider themselves the effort police and report with a zeal worthy of the Stasi.
haroldbkny
1hr ago
I'm glad you posted this, because I wanted to rant about this, since it's the most irritating feminist trend I've seen since 2017ish, but I didn't know how to phrase any of it in a way that would be "leaving the rest of the internet at the door".
I do think that, like other commenters have called out, the trend is childish and virtue signaling, and no one is being sincere. I think takes like this:
If a bear attacks you, people will believe you, if a man attacks you, people will not believe you.
do more to show exactly what feminists think about men, as opposed to how women are actually victimized by men in society.
What is the difference between a bear and a man? Maybe that men are people and bears are not? Men have other people who love them, and trust them, and care about them. Is that perhaps the reason why people may give men the benefit of the doubt in the case of an ambiguous he-said-she-said situation, but not give such benefit to a bear? Do men not deserve such a benefit over bears, because, you know, they're actual people and bears are not?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1hr ago
It's interesting how "thou shalt not take too much dick" is a universal prohibition for both genders. There's something of an asymmetry here.
Straight men having a lot of sex is praiseworthy, and society seems to have less of an intrinsic disgust reaction to lesbians than to gay men.
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
1hr ago
How do I capitalize on the fact that the social fabric is fraying at breakneck speed?
Please no "ai girlfriend startups" and defense contractors. I really think GenZ onwards is fucked beyond repair, and I have accepted outcome personally and intellectually. That doesn't mean I can't make riches from it though. Let's get creative here.
It's funny to me how both sides of the battle of the sexes will endorse the Mike Pence rule, while also mocking the other side for adopting it.
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