KingOfTheBailey
No bio...
User ID: 1089
KingOfTheBailey
5d ago
Fair point, that's unfortunately where the escalating cycle of "punch XYZs"/"everyone I disagree with in an XYZ" ends up.
KingOfTheBailey
5d ago
I disagree with the "Charlie was like your Republican Grandpa" argument. He may have had similar political positions, and he definitely should never have been shot, but Charlie was definitely in the political game in a way that gramps wasn't. He founded TPUSA, he organized events, he ran streams, debated people to change the public's mind, and judging by the heartfelt tributes that have come out he was an important node in the institutional right's network.
I think the following propositions are all true:
- Charlie should never have been shot
- Charlie was "in the game" in a way that normie (R)s weren't
- Dealing with potential political violence is a regrettable part of holding political office
- Assassination of people not holding office but in the game, with weapons that require at least some planning and skill to use, is a very worrying erosion of the norms around how the game is to be played
- There are enough people on the left made crazy by the memetic environment that normie (R)s are correct to worry when they see a relatively normal "in the game" guy get assassinated to plenty of cheers, excuses from MSNBC presenters, and milquetoast statements from many politicians. (Some thankfully bright anti-examples: Cenk, Newsom).
KingOfTheBailey
5d ago
For the right, this is one of those "my rules > your rules, fairly > your rules, unfairly" situations. As much as I fear that you're correct, I still hope that once we spend enough time at the "your rules, fairly" stop, there can be a discussion about how these rules suck.
KingOfTheBailey
5d ago
Do you have the URL or an archive link? Wondering if it's available on wayback or something.
KingOfTheBailey
7d ago
The fact that Chase Strangio told SCOTUS that "there is no evidence to support the idea that medical transition reduces adolescent suicide rates" during oral arguments as part of Skrmetti should mean that the "dead son or living daughter?" line gets finally put away forever. If there was good evidence that applying these interventions sooner rather than later really helped children, I would have expected Strangio to know about it and deploy it during Skrmetti.
KingOfTheBailey
8d ago
I reject pretty much every aspect of this post. I think you present your premises as a false consensus and a false binary choice as your conclusion. The actual policy discussion on the ground is not "we're only gonna do high-skill immigration. How much should we do?" but the beginnings of a "not any more, you're not" response to "we're just not going to bother enforcing immigration law against illegal migrants". Which means there's a lot of low-to-medium-skilled work being done by immigrants. There's no point in my mind to discussing the numbers of truly high-skilled immigrants a country should import when unskilled labor, fast food, taxi driving, food delivery, etc. are all done by immigrants with varying legal status, and chain migration rules allow the high-skilled migrant to bring a family who brings their family (who ...).
KingOfTheBailey
9d ago
Old Magic was fun, but I moved to other card games years ago. The newer card designs feel wordier, powercrept and just plain worse to me than what we had back in my day, and the endless tie-ins are ridiculous to me. Netrunner was fun until NISEI (the fan continuation of FFG's reboot of WotC's Netrunner) was skinsuited by the sort of people who run Discord servers and turned into a full-throated progressive organization.
KingOfTheBailey
9d ago
Use an interface that lets you fork the conversation, and explore several branches.
KingOfTheBailey
15d ago
The online battlefield has shifted though. Would Trump 2016 have happened without Reddit and 4chan? Those don't exist in as usable a form these days. Twitter was a huge coup, but that's still "two steps back, one-and-a-half steps forward".
KingOfTheBailey
15d ago
KingOfTheBailey
15d ago
There were enough people who still deny the results of the 2004 election that Politico ran a compare-and-contrast with the Trump 2020 deniers. Doubt in the integrity of the election has been around nearly as long as I've been politically aware.
KingOfTheBailey
16d ago
Let me spruik Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out in his memory, as well. Its broader thesis around establishing a right-counterculture is interesting, but the stuff about the idiot box was an absolute thunderbolt when I read it:
First, as the leftists used to say, “Kill Your Television”. I am not one who generally thinks that machines are inherently evil. Television is an exception. It is no more and no less than a hypnotic mind control device. Don’t believe me? Sit a hyperactive toddler in front of a television and watch what happens. They freeze, turn away from everything they were doing, and stare at the screen. Gavin McInnes once noted that the “on” switch of his television was an “off” switch for his kids, and so it is. Do you think this device does not place ideas in the minds of those who fall into a trance in its presence? And what ideas do you think the Hollywood/New York axis wishes to place there? I recall reading one account of a father who, tired of his two under-10 daughters’ bratty attitudes, limited their television viewing to a DVD box set of Little House on The Prairie. The change in his daughters’ behavior was dramatic – within a couple of weeks, they were referring to him and his wife as “Ma” and “Pa”, and offering to help with chores. The lesson is obvious: people (and especially children) learn their social norms from television, far more even than from the people around them.
This was one of pieces of writing that really made me interested in selecting better media for the relatives around me, because so much childrens' media is agenda-pushing slop these days. Cheap 3D animation that an N64 dev would be embarrassed to ship, all sorts of horrid behavior, and studiously compliant with current-yearism (how exactly did your token wheelchair-bound character make it into the rocky field?).
I hope someone pulls out a ruler and measures the length of your beard.
I did not have direct experience with Katrina, but Bayou Renaissance Man's Katrina Postmortem is a document I've gone back and referred to a few times as part of my natural disaster prep. Lots of great information about social considerations instead of just physical prep, after-action "shell shock", etc.
To me it seems obvious that subjecting kids to religious values is a bad idea.
Until approx. 5 years ago I would have agreed with you, and maybe 8 years ago I would have strongly agreed with you. But it has not escaped my notice that most "normal Christians" I see just seem to have their lives together so much more: they're happier, kinder, started families sooner (or at all), haven't had to rediscover from first principles a reason to get out of bed and do anything, ...
I say this as an atheist who has gone to more masses in the past couple of years than the rest of my life combined, but has not and probably doesn't expect to find faith.
KingOfTheBailey
20d ago
Unfortunately the only things I can find arguing that story are still at the "screenshots of chats" level of evidence.
KingOfTheBailey
21d ago
It does seem more likely to me that this is underclass behavior than a self-defense video from a rapey migrant. However:
no evidence
It is written in the scriptures that:
Law of No Evidence: Any claim that there is “no evidence” of something is evidence of bullshit.
No evidence should be fully up there with “government denial” or “I didn’t do it, no one saw me do it, there’s no way they can prove anything.” If there was indeed no evidence, there’d be no need to claim there was no evidence, and this is usually a move to categorize the evidence as illegitimate and irrelevant because it doesn’t fit today’s preferred form of scientism.
Now we're not talking about the scientific establishment this time, but a part of the United Kingdom. While this incident is not from Rotherham or Yorkshire, the state and its justice system from have a history of covering up child abuse by immigrants in the name of "community relations", as well as coming down disproportionately heavily on people who object. While you might say there are proportionately fewer migrants in Scotland, external online observers are going to be aware of Scotland's woke politics. There was the Adam Graham Isla Bryson case, where a rapist adopted a transgender identity during the court process, and was sent to a woman's prison. A sibling comment already mentioned the railroading of Count Dankula. There was also the £7bn superinjunction covering up the importing of 18000–19000 Afghans. It is very easy to say "we found no evidence" if "we" choose not to look very hard, and very easy for an external online observer to believe that the police and other systems in Scotland would do just that, given that we know from West Yorkshire that local police have been part of cover-ups in the past.
So I think it is perfectly rational to have suspicious priors if one is familiar with Rotherham and the extent of similar coverups in the UK, only saw a still from the video, and/or only read suspiciously carefully worded articles from mainstream sources. But the perspective of the camera in the video makes it harder to believe. Screaming "pedophile!" is a weapon underclass kids know how to wield; so is the reflexive "phone camera on, start recording" move. If there was a migrant behaving inappropriately I would expect to see him in the shot, as well as the armed girl.
KingOfTheBailey
24d ago
@self_made_human's recent posts about the pretty-but-dim model from this week's thread are a sad counterexample. You might get no shortage of men wanting to sleep with you, but it was the social technology of enforced monogamy that made them commit. Identifying who will stick is a prerequisite to choosing a suitor, and seems like a much harder question.
KingOfTheBailey
24d ago
The show bible for My Little Pony is on archive.org, and it has some interesting things to say about how they positioned the world. It's also from 2009 so it predates the woke spillover:
What does it take to make someone fall in love with a brand? What makes a series of stories you heard in your childhood memorable for you entire life, so much so that you want to share them with your children once you become an adult? Think of The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter. These brands settle into the hearts and memories of their audience and remain there. Why? These brands are worlds. The possibilities within these worlds are vast, yet there is a defined logic and structure to these alternate realities, making them highly believable. Moving more inwardly, these worlds have limitless lands where limitless types of beings and characters can live in them. You see, it is not just the world that the audience loves, but mostly the characters that live within them and the different, yet somehow similar trials they must face in their lives.
This approach has been utilized for countless intellectual properties, including Transformers and G.I. Joe, with much success, but has fallen short when attempted with girl properties. Perhaps this is because the softer gentler nature of girl properties felt limiting to those who would try. And all too often the worlds created for girl properties are left vague, ambiguous and generic. But I do not think this has to be so. A girl world can be set up the in the same manner, it is the intentions that must be different.
Rather than set the stage for epic, dramatic adventure stories like the examples above, a girl world should set the stage for friendship, heart and laughter as well as adventure--- adventure that is more fun and exciting than dramatic and epic, but adventure nonetheless. With only that alternate intention, the same strong history, mythology, back story and even the alternate logic and physics of an alternate world will serve the same purpose to endear you to the characters and make the stories memorable.
This sounds right to me, though the contrast between the corpospeak and the graphic design is certainly pretty jarring. I never watched it (not even when it was big), but there's a richness to the detail of the world and characters. Contrary to modern female character design, every character page has a "bad points" section as long as her "good points" section, and this is probably one of the reasons it had such a strong following in its heyday. Characters' bad points cause conflicts or avoidable problems, creating room for the ponies' good points to shine and resolve them.
The target audience was very carefully designed, and they knew they were targeting boys too (given the bronies of the 2010s, perhaps it worked a little too well). Some cut-down quotes from p65, if you want to read it in detail:
- Girls (6–11): My Little Pony offers 2 elements that are very important and popular to girls: relationships and fantasy. (Snipped much more from this point.)
- Preschool (3–6): The ponies are cute. Preschoolers own ponies. The stories and morals within are nice enough for parents. Little kids want to watch big kid stuff. They'll watch.
- Boys (believe it or not): They won't admit it, but they'll watch. When their sister’s watching it, they'll balk and act like it’s dumb, then they'll sit down and watch it. For the same reason Moms will find My Little Pony interesting enough to happily share with their daughters, the compelling conflicts, the strong characterizations, the silly humor and (most importantly for boys) the ADVENTURE, the boys will watch, too. Really
- Moms: We've got a few good points going for us when it comes to Moms. First, the original buyers of My Little Ponies are in their late twenties to mid-thirties and are likely to have daughters within the target age range, 3-11. Bringing back elements of the original ponies from the 80's ... will nurture a sense of nostalgia, something that is not difficult to do with Gen-Xers. Second, compelling storylines (ie: truly engaging conflicts, both external adventure and internal relationships,) characters with depth and complexity, clever and silly humor that doesn’t talk down to kids and even a few jokes that might go over the kids’ heads will all engage Mom enough that watching My Little Pony will become a fun thing for Mom to do with her daughter. Not only will Mom be sharing her favorite childhood toy with her little girl, but she may actually enjoy watching, too!
While MLP was a breakout exception, it's an existence proof that the suits used to know how to make girl shows that that boys could watch. But all we have now are the corpses of old franchises going to resyk to be turned into slop. Why haven't we seen other major media cater to girls-but-also-boys in this way, instead of the torrent of flawless mean-spirited girlbosses that we did get?
KingOfTheBailey
27d ago
metal-listeners would generally turn out to be more successful for reasons that I had a whole teenage pop psychology theory for that these margins are too small to contain
Don't tease us like that. I, for one, would love to have my musical tastes flattered when you have the time.
KingOfTheBailey
30d ago
I'd like to get as irritated as you (rather, I'd like to get things right and not irritate my readers), but my English education was terrible. Where can I learn the real rules?
KingOfTheBailey
1mo ago
You don't need to do this. You just need to ban pedophiles when people report them. Which Roblox seems to be refusing to do.
This is the bit that baffles me. I remember the whole Ashton Challenor situation on Reddit and how much pressure it took for Reddit to crack. AIUI, the people doing this on Roblox aren't even employees or mods or anything.
KingOfTheBailey
1mo ago
But can you help me understand the "encyclopedia" and "web surfing replacement" use-cases, when we have actual encyclopedias and a web to surf?
When looking for answers to programming questions, lots punctuation gets stripped out of search queries, and many language keywords are stopwords that don't get included in a search. But to an LLM, they're more tokens.
Another thing I've found useful is to get one to surface general issues in first-pass troubleshooting and then go look for actual forum threads documenting those issues. This helps you find where the experts are and cross-check the output against a real discussion.
KingOfTheBailey
1mo ago
I've previously speculated that normalizing polyamory (and sexual liberation more generally) would have this effect, and it sucks to see those predictions borne out in the gay dating world. I'm really sorry for your friends.
https://x.com/ChefGruel/status/1966595667637248388
It seems that the "car chase" was a news broadcast that then had breaking news of Kirk's assassination talking over the top.
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