2rafa
maybe it will all turn out fine
User ID: 841
2rafa
5hr ago
If you bought the cart for $70 and then played an emulated version on PC (whether or not you ripped your own copy) I would consider that much less morally objectionable, but I’m guessing you did not do that.
2rafa
5hr ago
That’s facetious, this is a complete remake that seems to have been made largely from scratch by hundreds of people. If someone spends $100m remaking a movie from 1950 that is free on YouTube I don’t see why that would justify not paying to see the new version.
2rafa
5hr ago
Isn’t the only reason these licenses exist because they provide the legal framework to challenge piracy in court? Otherwise, I could simply copy my “digital product” and sell it to fifty thousand people, right?
2rafa
23hr ago
It seems like this Zelda is a well made and reviewed game, I see no reason why the creators shouldn’t be compensated. Life involves thousands of decisions in which one can be pro or antisocial at little or no cost.
2rafa
1d ago
I think it’s vulgar to pirate games (I assume you’re not ripping it from the cart). Call it a matter of honor. If one must do it, it is best not to mention it.
2rafa
1d ago
Shapiro is far too Zionist, he’s openly Zionist, proposed in Jerusalem, tried to ban support for BDS etc, he’s never going anywhere now. Ossoff has moved around on Israel but has been somewhat critical. There is a nebbish energy around him though.
2rafa
1d ago
In general I think this kind of argument is weak from the right.
Some of these women wear the hijab but they mainly do it for cultural reasons, this is a second generation Indian American psychiatrist from an upper middle class family whose husband is overtly pro LGBT, gay marriage, etc.
Clearly he’s more religious than, say, Mamdani, who is basically atheist, but El Sayed is about as religious as Sadiq Khan, which is to say that he is hardly an Islamist.
2rafa
1d ago
Which is also why Sarah Jukaku almost certainly having been subjected to female genital mutilation is also not readily talked about.
Sarah Jukaku is an Indian Muslim. FGM is quite rare in that population, and she doesn’t belong to one of the groups of Indian Muslims (who are quite heterogenous) who practice it.
2rafa
1d ago
It was legally clear that Greece could crash out of the Eurozone in 2011. They chose not to. The legal analysis from the Troika more broadly, the ECB specifically and the European Commission all said they could - what rule prevented them from doing so?
2rafa
3d ago
Maybe. But DeSantis will look ugly and fat on stage next to slick Newsom. In the battle of the white guys, glistening California will beat sweaty Florida. It would be a campaign with almost zero policy, a lot of traded insults, some macho posturing on both sides, and then Newsom would win.
So in this scenario they quietly or overtly threaten him with impeachment (ie supporting an inevitable Dem impeachment vote) and he pardons himself for absolutely everything, then resigns to give them what they want.
He then spends the next two years talking about his betrayal. All the while, the Republicans are still in control of the presidency, his base is completely fractured with many more conspiratorial supporters thinking he was backstabbed by Epstein RINOs or something, and they lose in a landslide in 2028.
Vance cannot win a presidential election, or probably even a primary.
2rafa
3d ago
Part of the problem for Vance and any other Republicans who are performatively distancing themselves from Trump is that a substantial proportion of Republican primary voters still mostly like him and are unlikely to hate him before 2028.
Not only can Trump blame all problems between now and 2028 on a Democratic congressional majority preventing him from doing anything (and he will be persuasive to enough people in doing so) which will ensure he retains at least a core loyal base, but he will also (i) respond extremely poorly to criticism from inside the party and (ii) will be very public in endorsing a preferred candidate or candidates.
This means that even if a Trump-skeptical candidate wins the primary, which would be difficult, they are likely to be heavily bruised by a primary campaign in which he will feature as a looming presence. Trump, who remains a vindictive and capricious person with little loyalty to party, would then also likely criticize them throughout the actual presidential campaign period, reducing turnout in his core boomer base and making an actual victory almost impossible.
In the alternate scenario, if a Trump-endorsed candidate wins the primary, he will require Trump at rallies and in media more broadly to drive turnout among his base to win, which means that he will never be able to criticize him even slightly, and in turn that obviously means that he is unlikely to win swing voters.
2rafa
3d ago
In the next few months, there's going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I'm open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you.
Vance is widely hated and has to try to defend his future candidacy against Rubio (who despite being both more neoliberal than Vance and more in favor of the Iran War will be perversely less associated with it than Vance simply because Vance is uniquely ugly and unlikeable).
Neither are likely to win the 2028 nomination, which will be a bloodbath that will end in a compromise candidate rejected by Trump (who will endorse Rubio or someone even more venal), after an early primary defeat for Vance, lobbied against by the outgoing candidate, who will easily lose to Newsom or (god forbid) Ossoff.
[Ossoff would be the worst thing to ever happen to American Jews, so I can only cope by hoping he loses the primary race]
2rafa
3d ago
California is actually possibly better placed than a lot of other states; boomer greed has made a lot of socialist initiatives hard to implement, Mexicans are more centrist than FOB Guatemalans, Haitians and Hondurans, and the demographics of the three big cities are better than a lot of big East Coast cities. Local governments are powerful, even LA has cities like Beverly Hills and Irvine where they actually enforce the law.
They also have, like Illinois and Michigan, a Democratic machine that is so corrupt that it actually serves as a kind of bulwark against the DSA / socialist lobby.
2rafa
3d ago
It is completely legal for a Eurozone country to trigger article 50 and leave the European Union and therein the Euro. This can be triggered by any national government, just as it was in the UK, although obviously that didn’t involve the Euro in that specific case (nevertheless, the legal mechanism would not be different).
2rafa
3d ago
The ‘weapon’ in the case of opposing socialist policies is that international investors (governments, private asset managers, whatever) might voluntarily choose not to lend to you anymore. The ‘weapon’ in the case of opposing right wing policies is that they just…block you from doing them with no recourse by ruling them illegal.
As you note, they are not the same.
2rafa
3d ago
Sorry, you signed economic treaty #142495 with the international Fuck You Organization. That's actually illegal. There will be a fifteen-year court case in some international court run by countries that hate you, and in the meantime the bond market has decided you're actually a major lending risk. Look, I'm sure you'd love to manage your own country's economy, but the rest of us have decided that it's not really in our interests for you to do so, so please give control over to our team of experts so they can carve you up and take it all for themselves.
This isn’t actually true, though. Even in cases where, say, the EU and ECHR protect some private property rights (and therefore expropriation without compensation) it’s easy for there to be ways around it. For example, you simply issue a new currency and print money to pay property holders at a laughable official exchange rate, giving them cents on the dollar, then briefly switch to using euros or dollars, then issue a new currency. This would require crashing out of the Euro and possibly EU but this, again, is perfectly legal - Syriza strongly considered it, but decided against it because it meant a lot of economic hardship. You can even do it more easily than this by passing entirely legal laws that make some sectors non-viable commercially, destroying enterprise value, buying them from investors for nothing, then restoring their pricing power - for example - again fully legal under the ECHR as long as you have some kind of environmental or other reasoning. The same goes for defaulting on government debt, which any treasury can do by just…not paying the coupon for a relatively short period after which the markets consider it in default - this doesn’t require any special authority. Now, again, progressive governments might choose not to do it, because a lot of socialist economic policy is actually very very stupid and bad, but they could.
By contrast, stripping say 5 million people of citizenship at once and mass deporting them isn’t possible with a simple majority in most of Europe.
2rafa
3d ago
Two reasons:
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Even if the Republicans win a legislative / congressional landslide in 2028, it’s very unlikely they’d win back a majority, almost impossible.
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Trump will still be president until 2029, so will remain an unpopular incumbent and ‘in charge’ on Election Day for voters.
It’s already over. Next Democratic administration equipped with a majority will naturalize millions and open the doors to millions of ‘climate refugees’ from Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Refugee numbers are set by the President, he can literally make them five million in a year, ten million even. There is no mandatory cap.
I agree that Brazil is now the best case scenario.
2rafa
3d ago
Is your impression that the majority would have been retained if this war hadn’t happened?
2rafa
3d ago
Your Victories are Temporary, Theirs are Permanent
The most important thing lesson reified by recent political events is that while conservatives can win by democratic means, they cannot rule by them.
This is the single absolute lesson of the last fifteen years of democratic populist conservatism, from Meloni to Orban, from Bolsonaro to Trump. Progressive victories are eternal and irreversible, conservative victories are limited and ephemeral.
Understanding why requires only a cursory glance at the underlying constitutional mechanics of every major Western or Western-adjacent democracy (the same also applies in large part to many non-Western democracies, like India, although they have their own local differences).
The 20th century saw the construction of a number of constitutionally protected edifices that make conservative governance effectively impossible. These include, but are not limited to, the ECHR and European Union and the integration of the first or both into the constitutional structures of pretty much all European countries, the CRA in the United States, the emergence of supremely powerful progressive Supreme Courts in Canada, Italy and elsewhere, forms of devolution that strip precisely the powers from national governments required to implement conservative policies, and the emergence of a vast legal sector - particularly in the Anglo countries - designed to stymie policy implementation by using much of the above.
For example, adding a new citizen requires only that a single administration (which probably didn’t win the support of an absolute majority of voters even once, depending on where we’re talking about) admit and naturalize - via work or family visa, refugee status, legalizing illegal migrants, whatever - a single individual. Stripping someone of citizenship almost always requires constitutional change, in some cases unambiguously (eg second gen birthright citizenship in the US) but in many other cases (many EU countries) practically, because appeals to the ECHR, constitutionally enshrined, will almost always be won by appealing parties except in - and sometimes even in - the most egregious cases. This is occasionally possible for actual terrorists but certainly not for large migrant groups. This inherent imbalance - progressives can easily add a million citizens, conservatives can never remove a million citizens - cannot be addressed by democratic means, because national-level extreme supermajorities are very unusual in democracies. It is coup-complete not because reactionaries can never get into power, but because they cannot exercise the power that their democratic majority should rightfully give them.
Even where legislation was passed by the regular process rather than constitutional amendment, the entire construct above allowed for the insertion (as in the CRA) of vast amounts of new and powerful law into the existing constitutional framework in a way that became impossible to reverse. Additionally, longstanding small-c conservative norms like the US senate filibuster, an unwillingness to repeal previous passed laws, the existence of ‘economic conservatives’ who don’t care about culture, crime or safety and so on, prevented the reversal in any case of radical laws passed during times of bizarre, panicked or propagandized national sentiment. Squeamish quasi-conservative politicians winnowed majorities into minorities on any possibly radical piece of legislation that even sought to temporarily or partially reverse anything.
This is the situation Western conservatives find themselves in now. The center-left have established a system where - because of the constitutional, legal and social systems and customs that they created or exploited in the 20th century - any conservative government or administration can play only in a small sandbox, limited in power and with the knowledge that anything they do can be washed away at the next election. Even lightly chipping away at one of the sandbox’s walls requires the legislative energy of an entire term, and all the while they can accomplish nothing else, must contend with moderates in their own faction, and any wider economic, geopolitical etc issues that any government has to manage, and then usually fail at repealing anything anyway.
Sometimes, in countries with systems in which the left has alienated a huge traditional voting bloc for religious-cultural reasons (Turkey and India) an ambitious leader can somewhat accomplish some things democratically, or quasi-democratically by preserving an absolute legislative majority for 10+ years, which is enough to finally hack away at the aforementioned. But the Anglo countries are not Turkey or India (yet anyway), populations are too fickle, they have longer democratic traditions, and the center and left are more powerful.
Future conservative movements must therefore consider very carefully what they can and must do, after winning power legitimately by democratic means, to ensure the neutering of non-compliant institutions and the ability to rapidly consolidate extraconstitutional power to effect significant change, by whatever means.
No Western country (no, certainly not even Denmark) has ever reversed mass immigration in modernity. Why? Because it’s boiling the frog. People get animated about it for a couple of years, then get bored. They start caring more about other things. It doesn’t even matter what those other things are, they could be anything. But they always find something else to care about. At that time, the pro migration side always comes back to power, even if a very faintly anti-immigration side (and it is never more than that) happens to be in power for a brief period.
It is important to understand and accept this. Nothing about the political situation is ever, ever, ever going to get better for conservatives in any Anglo country. At best, you carve out a brief catharsis against history, maybe very slightly and temporarily slow the tide (but deport nobody), accomplish nothing else, then lose. Maybe you get to laugh at a few crying progressives making sad YouTube videos, I guess. The happiest day for any conservative is an election victory, it is downhill from there. It doesn’t matter if Le Pen or the AfD or Farage or One Nation or anybody else wins, you will lose because they will do nothing to reverse the decline.
It is fate that the US midterms happen the day after the British government hands out citizenship to 800,000 poor Boriswave migrants from India, Pakistan and Nigeria, hired on wages of as little as $30,000 a year (many will move onto welfare as soon as they can, and even those who don’t will be net burdens on the state every year of their life), and who can now bring over millions more dependants. You can only lose. They will always win.
One propagandized video of a few border control cops being vaguely mean to a well-meaning liberal or a sympathetic migrant is enough to reverse even a neutered deportation initiative. A dead Kurd on a Mediterranean beach means you have to accept two million more young Afghan and Syrian men, sorry. A Hurricane in Haiti? Well, infinite migration from there can continue indefinitely because of course nobody can go home. Try and deport anybody? Well, you might get a few thousand, but the rest just have to lay low for a while until the opposition came back to power.
All one can hope is that the decline is slow and that the outcome is a society in which civilized people, come what may, can still live in some form of civilization for a time, gated behind walls that keep the tide at bay.
I thought the difference was that book republishing is subject to centuries of established law specifically about reprinting printed works, whereas digital copyright law is very recent and incomplete, so the ‘perpetual license’ served as a blanket assertion that resale (or copying and distribution for free) was prohibited.
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