domain:mattlakeman.org
2D3D
29d ago
Rufo is a talking head in the right leaning intellectual spheres, not exactly the ground most mid2010s-style refugees would find themselves inhabiting. Most forays into the 'other' side would lead to the usual shitposters on 4chan or Bodybuilding or the spiciest being Kiwifarms. No one actually goes to the Front or the spicier discords/telegrams/forums (not shared due to foulness). The reality also is that the intellectual CW right often has its successes claimed or attributed to boosters like Musk or Rogan simply for name visibility. Few people seem to know or care about Rufo or Loury or even Mcworther Sowell and Fryer. Which is a tragedy, but also totally expected since most of us have lives and aren't terminally online outrage bait biting retards.
OliveTapenade
29d ago
Yes, that makes sense to me - there's an audience of people who like the idea of D&D more than they like D&D itself, and by 'idea of D&D' what I mean is a bunch of colourful zany characters quipping and having lighthearted adventures in a fantasy world.
One of the things I find most striking about D&D fans today is the level of, well, historical amnesia many of them seem to have? In theory one of the selling points of D&D 5e was the idea of legacy. The thing that makes D&D different and special, compared to competitor fantasy RPGs, is its history. D&D has been going since the 70s and it has a tremendous history to draw on. 5e core was definitely trying to evoke a lot of that history.
But if I look at talk around D&D today, I am regularly shocked by ignorance of that history. I don't even mean things like the way that Gygax-era D&D was closer to a wargame, had very little characterisation, and would have four GMs and twenty players around the same table all playing in real time, but even quite broad things in living memory. I recently watched Noah Gervais' take on Diablo and something that shocked me, in the section on the first game, is the way he blandly asserts, "Today the focus of something like D&D is much more about the imaginative aspects, the performative aspects. 90s D&D, AD&D, hewed closer to its name - dungeon-crawling, monster-hunting, complicated rules to facilitate each."
And that's not only incorrect, it's the exact opposite of correct. AD&D2e is the edition that games like Baldur's Gate were trying to evoke. It was the era when story was absolute king, when the game was played via these extremely story-heavy railroaded modules, where every campaign setting under the sun was getting incredibly detailed write-ups, and recurring characters were at their most popular. It's the era of the Drizzt craze, when approximately a million Dragonlance novels were published (based on published adventure modules from the 80s!), and every player had their own good-hearted rebel drow or half-elf archer with a troubled past. The story and setting and continuity got so elaborate that when 3rd edition came around in the early 2000s, it was marketed as a back-to-basics game, dropping all the increasingly-inaccessible storytelling in favour of a return to just kicking down doors and killing monsters. Late 80s and 90s AD&D is the most story-obsessed D&D has ever been.
But this is something that you only know, it seems, if you were around and played D&D in the 90s. I feel like now we have a crop of players who believe that story only started with 5e or with those streamed gameplay sessions, and who mentally write off everything before it as a dark age of decontextualised dungeon-crawling.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
29d ago
I'll spoil the surprise: they can't. Too little, too late - and Ukraine cannot support or defend the infrastructure required to maintain them in the current state of the war.
2D3D
29d ago
The left does not want working class involvement, they want working class buy-in. The presence of the working class as adherents serves to launder the appeal of DEI paeans, hence the lumping of 'class economics' as a reason to support DEI on the surface. NPR like NYT serves as a sanity washing machine, packaging untenable ideas with somewhat reasonable or appealing ones and textdrowning readers in softly persuasive language to slowly edge the overton window one article at a time.
SSCReader
29d ago
Hence "just build nuclear plants; if you thought it was such a problem you would already have accepted the added risk".
Unless you also feel nuclear catastophe has a similar cost. Remember we've already established the risks are not being evaluated rationally. So you can't then use the fact they are not evaluating the comparative nuclear risk rationally as evidence of anything other than irrationality, thats what I mean by double dipping.
Remember these are not utilitarians. Just like the answer as to why groups who feel like abortion is a Holocaust happening every year aren't concentrating solely on that. That is just how people are. Virtually nobody who claims to believe that X is the worst thing in the world are willing to trade off other bad things against it in a rational manner. It is just not how we operate by and large. We are not rational. They are not rational. Rationalists are not actually rational (although they try).
So people who try to use that against a group (whether that is claiming Christians don't really believe abortion is murder or that climate worriers don't really believe in climate change), are just missing the point. They do believe it. And yet they will not act as if they do. Because they also believe in many other things and are not evaluating the trade offs in a utilitarian way. So that isn't evidence of anything except that they are humanly flawed (or gifted, if you think utilitarianism is evil).
Maybe it is true that every anti-abortion advocate should quit their job and advocate full time for a federal ban given as they believe that hundreds of thousands of innocent children are being murdered annually. Maybe everyone who believes climate change is an existential threat should be crowd funding atomic reactors. But that just is not how most people work.
2D3D
29d ago
I do note that Economist and Atlantic have more authors pushing back against DEI slop, usually couching their counterarguments in some hard numbers before going 'this is not how we help (insert chosen minority)'. Still ostensibly on Team DEI, but less wedded to the distasteful tactics normally employed.
ArmedTooHeavily
29d ago
The woke are more correct than the mainstream in asserting that the sum of micro-aggressions is outright aggression- it's just that the only people who really care to micro-aggress are the woke
Ah yes, only your outgroup performs a basic-but-ubiquitous behavior like minor acts of aggression.
2D3D
29d ago
Its easy to put your kid in a terrible school, its difficult to keep them there if you have the choice. Mommy forums back in 2020 were filled with anxieties about Covid affecting school choices and whether their precious darlings were going to be stuck in 'bad' schools. Liberal truisms about 'all kids are equal' tend to wither in the face of discipline realities in 'urban' schools.
Tomato
29d ago
Unless the ideology is merely that ugliness is desirable.
This has been a conspiracy theory on the right for a while. “They” are trying to demoralize you by insisting that ugly things (architecture, art, music, people) are beautiful. Very common /pol/ thread topic. Also comes up whenever female video game protagonists are mid. I don’t quite understand the objective or mechanism here but this is a very mainstream claim among that crowd.
2D3D
29d ago
VoA is high quality precisely because it is bound by mandate to not broadcast to Americans. Its a bit anodyne and obviously fully asspuppeted by the State Department, but it is honestly refreshing to read articles about international issues and how it relates to US interests without the stink of culture war blanketing the presentation.
2D3D
29d ago
Russia has much more to lose than Ukraine. Sure, Ukraine loses more as a percentage of its original reputation/territory/resources/material, but by absolute quantity Russian pyrrhic victory has lost more, and nothing can rebuild the Russian arms export market.
Jiro
29d ago
People who are not weird Internet guys think action and inaction have different moral valences.
2D3D
29d ago
'We are hated and (((they))) are destroying things we like'.
That is the basic aggrievement of the polack. Many modern culture war aspects map fairly neatly into the antipolack position, and polacks are largely losers who lack escape mechanisms from the assaults on their favourite escapes. A redneck in his cabin can still go out and drive his coal roller, an Indian can turn to the pro-India internet to get his ego reinflated, a Chinese can continue ignoring the incomprehensible west, but the polack can only suffer within the communication environment he is wholly nestled within and which he has little alternatives to enjoy.
Twitter.com/Artiah669/status/1778933764984320157
It's been a real thing for years. The call is "NORMALIZE X", where X is a deformity, mental illness, obesity, etc. it's the natural result of "representation matters.".
You can see it in all the comments: "Damn apparently every character needs to follow strict societal beauty standards rooted in white supremacy" etc. etc.
Once again it's only a conspiracy theory when outsiders notice what the insiders celebrate.
Even that dev who was recently making excuses about how face modeling is hard snuck in an "and actually it's good to challenge cis hetero beauty standards and we're doing it deliberately" towards the end.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
29d ago
Hmm, so their parents have to sell their home, and then... Buy another, or rent, reducing or eliminating the gains? Move in with the kids? Or take out a HELOC get right back in debt again (why not just buy a house at that point)? Big banks are advertising rates of nearly 10% for helocs. This all sounds pretty shit, I can't blame Canadians for being upset.
Yes, if you have siblings, your parents have an above average number of children and you are probably not coming out ahead in this system, but the average Canadian does.
The average Canadian is not benefitting from boomers' property values going to the moon because the only way they benefit from their parents' property ownership is:
- Parents die and you have no siblings and you're young enough to benefit from the windfall
- Parents get into debt and possibly destroy their equity to tap into the house (at which point you are no better off than the Indians stepping off the plane)
- Parents sell, at which point you can't afford an equivalent house anyway because they need somewhere to live too
Only option 1 results in a young Canadian family having a house comparable to their parents when they were a young family. If your parents had you young or multiple children, tough luck.
stuckinbathroom
29d ago
Breaking news: Uri Berliner has since resigned. I have to assume that "resigned" here is the usual thing where bigshots are allowed to resign to save face and avoid the public spectacle of being fired that any normal employee would face.
I sincerely hope this leads to a wave of resignations within NPR, with everyone saying “Ich bin ein Berliner” as their parting words.
2D3D
29d ago
Nothing stops the multiculturalism from existing outside the school walls though. Let the parents complain as they wish, which they have. See if the tradeoff is deemed worth it in the moment and in the result. The lack of protests from other parents about this forced secularisation and success in tamping down this islamic contingent would, ironically, likely lead to greater minority enrolment.
2D3D
29d ago
Normalize healthy BMI and smooth skin! Wait why am I being dragged to the ludovico theatre? Oh no its the Tess Holliday swimsuit special!
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
29d ago
Bezos isn't stealing crusts of bread out of peoples' mouths, but there are a few direct problems like the rich usually being pro-immigrant for starters, as it lowers the cost of wages to make them even more money.
Then there's a lot of indirect problems, like the existence of the ultrawealthy causing a general sense of unease and unfairness. It's a lot like having a ton of unassimilated immigrants. There are some direct problems, but the bigger issue is the backlash it causes.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
29d ago
That just kicks the can down the road a bit. They eventually sell if they want to get access to the money to do other stuff with it.
Yeah, it looks more like it in the sense of shape, but it's actually quite important that Russia doesn't control large parts of the annexed regions. I think it is not likely that they will succefuly take control of them before the war end.
anti_dan
29d ago
Uhh? Biden's whole Mid East policy is based on pandering to that wing. They have a lot of cachet.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
29d ago
It means I'm reading "A Thousand Plateaus" by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and now I'm going through the classic 'throwing its concepts at everything' phase of eating a new intuition pump.
Really, I don't think the concepts they bring up require the coining of a whole new set of words over it. And yet... I do find the jargon appealing. Deterritorialization is the process of moving away from the old context of something, and then Reterritorialization is the process of giving that thing new meaning. These steps can be nearly one in the same, in the context of continuous change and evolution, or they can be more discreet.
Examples:
- Moving away from traditional notions of human limitation (deterritorialization) and redefining what it means to be human in a context integrated with technology (reterritorialization).
- Removing a toilet from it's normal context in a bathroom (deterritorialization) and putting it in an art museum (reterritorialization).
- In a Thousand Plateaus, one of the first examples is that of the orchid and the wasp. In the relationship between the orchid and the wasp, both are taken out of their original roles, the orchid having the role of a flower, and the wasp having the role of a wasp, and they are placed in this new productive context, where the orchid takes on aspects of the role of a female wasp, producing her scent, whereas the wasp is reterritorialized as a reproductive organ of the orchid.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
29d ago
We already are fucking with it, so does nature, volcanoes etc.. at least this would be on purpose and controlled.
Well... thats very different from the US! We would pay nothing up to 13 million, or 26 million for a married couple, and only a max of 40% after that. Theres various other exceptions too.
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