2D3D
1d ago
Ultimately the leaders as representation fails to accommodate their specific (a?)historical perculiarities, instead treating the leaders as avatars of national aspects.
In that vein, I still long for a true age of mythology style approach to a 4X game. Use regional gods and regional aspects as socionational representations, and go ham with it. I want Arminius channeling Wodans +10 Black Forest ambush rolls in his rebellion against Bismarck seizing the +6 cultural stability bonus of King Of Franks from Charlemange who needs that bonus in the campaign against Nelsons +4 global naval bonus. That'll be absolute tits and be much richer than the giggles of seeing Gandhi roflstomp Elizabeth.
2D3D
1d ago
As a game they should just do the ultrafictionalized portrayals of ahistorical figures. In Civ Alexander rubs shoulders with Cleopatra and Gilgamesh and whatever other big name just like its right out of Fate Grand Order. In the same vein Civ should not be beholden to true existence or even semirealistic representation. The Japanese turned King Arthur into 6 different versions of big titted blondes, Sid Meier can genderbend MLK into a beyonce lookalike.
2D3D
1d ago
Red states are disproportionately black, with blue cities in red states blacker than blue cities in blue states. Everytime liberals (so not specifically referring to you) smugly post that red states are stupider and more criminal than blue states they end up shooting themselves in the foot because it goes back to how large the black population is.
The ultimate test of this experiment will be the outcome of St George county in Louisiana after it split from Baton Rouge county. Richer whiter (but still having black residents) zone splits off from failing black county because the whites wanted better schools. With less whites around will the blacker Baton Rouge be free to prosper and flourish without the evils of racism tainting their progress? I posit no, but the anticipation of the upcoming crash is itself part of the journey.
2D3D
2d ago
Looks like Gatwick had no arrests made. I know several authorities globally have used Aeroscope to catch and fine violators for flying near aerodromes, and it is a common enough occurrence that it even showed up in the Aeroscope marketing briefly. Aeroscope was stupidly cheap at less than 10000 US dollars, and had better detection rates than all other much more expensive drone detection systems (typically 30-250000 per unit) that were in the market when Aeroscope was first introduced. That and its low setup cost meant that DJI sold thousands of units all over the world, and would have sold even more until the US DOD banned DJI drones from its inventory due to national security concerns, partially from the prospect that field units using DJI A3 controllers would be detected by aeroscopes obtained by hostile actors. DJI shut down aeroscope in 2023 and a successor is reportedly in the works, but in the meantime anyone flying a DJI drone is near certain to be detected by a system. How the system operators in turn respond to that information is another (very very very funny) problem.
2D3D
2d ago
Crime rates are geographically constrained in the USA rather than an everpresent reality. Much ink can be spilled about general observations, but the simple fact is that if you don't live near blacks, crime will be a much lower problem. The USA has enough space for crime-worried californians to flee to economic centers in texas or florida, while economic activity concentrated in only a few cities filled with racialized criminality limits the options for Europeans.
Racialized crime is a solvable problem; black people don't like crime either as clearly evinced by their disapproval of 'defund the police'. The problem is liberals who use disparate impact as a means to castigate their proximate political opponent instead. There is of course the grift of NGOs and the like to extract sympathy from do gooders, but that happens on both sides of the aisle and so its a wash.
2D3D
2d ago
Thus the simplest solution to fair-evasion/free-riders (a solution so obvious that only someone very educated or deep in the terminal stages of woke brain-rot could fail to see it) is don't let them get away with it
There is a slow convergent point in most criminal justice studies is that law enforcement works by true arrest rate, not necessarily severity. The problem in the USA and Europe is that the disproportionate arrest rates of minorities is attributed to societal failures that one of the competing dominant political arms can use to attack the other in order to further their own political interests. So long as heterogenous outcomes are treated as failures requiring intervention, the meta will incentivize redefining heterogeneity to maximize resource capture.
The ROI of fare enforcement is the higher utilization rate of commuters when criminal vagrants are no longer an everpresent concern. The ROI of fare enforcement is the lower maintenance costs for repairs and cleanup when mentally ill homeless no longer defecate and trash the public space with the full expectation of someone else cleaning up their mess. The ROI of fare enforcement is the higher communal trust that the MTA will enjoy when it looks to be an organization that can steward its received resources with competence and clarity, instead of burying its head deeper in the sand about extant problems too inconvenient to address openly.
The Shopping Cart Theory is a great first-order test to determine prevalence of antisocial elements. Disproportionate amounts of resources are invested in cleaning up after noncooperatives, and even more are invested in resources to gently nudge them into being cooperative of their own recognizance or accommodating their preferences through rehabilitation and custodial services. Some people get off on being as difficult as possible because they fundamentally hate the people offering them help to begin with, and self-flagellating to absolve the noncooperative of their responsibility does not lead to greater resource utilization efficacy.
Just like how drug-testing welfare recipients does not meaningfully capture significant amounts of drug abusers or signalling immigration crackdowns does not actually catch many illegals, these programs are meant as signals to the noncompliant that mercy is no longer guaranteed. Less fare evaders will use the services on offer to begin with, and that is a perfectly acceptable outcome.
2D3D
3d ago
How far away have you actually seen the Mini 4 fly
The mini doesn't fly as far as the air or pro. My own tests in perfect environments get it about 2 miles easily, but RF interference degrades it significantly. Normally at around 0.5m
2.4ghz for the Mavic 3 gets you about 2 miles, 5.8ghz mode in a low-RF saturation environment can push up to 5, 10 with a patch antenna.
All of this ignores 4G/5G teleoperation kits that can be mounted onto even Mavic Pros now, which do exist and can be controlled via a sim card, or full autonomous drones. Range is definitely not the limiting factor for these drone sightings.
The boring answer for the drone sightings is likely mass hysteria and false attribution, since small aircraft are not noticed by people most of the time and when they are now being paid attention to they seem so different from the big liners that they cause confusion. Drone shutting down airports like what happened at Gatwick a few years ago started with dickheads flying a drone for that sweet shot, then general incompetence during the monitoring phase. A common problem is observation drones used by one agency without notifying other agencies, causing other agencies to scramble their own observation drones etc etc etc.
Most LEO have DJI aeroscopes in their inventories, which can track all DJI models up to 2022 that were in the air, and a fair few newer models using legacy firmware. By now someone would have figured if it was a rogue DJI drone in the air. If the flight lights can be seen its a low altitude drone. Its most likely some trolls fucking about and piling on for shits and giggles.
But its much better if its ayys looking for their dropped nuclear fuel. Lets hope the greys land and demand to see the manager here.
2D3D
5d ago
I'm normally supportive of the stance that capitalism+innovation converges to most efficient outcomes, but that is true only for local contexts. Bunker fuel is just burnt in international waters and the world collectively shrugs and says 'fuck the fish'. Economics is one thing but absolution of responsibility does exist. The only reason there isnt a floating migrant fleet of slave-labour factories is that efficient capital planning beats out deregulation.
2D3D
5d ago
The difference in priming language employed is that the right coopts the new terms created by the left, whereas the left redefines existing words with the necessary moral valence. The right calls things Woke, DEI, Affirmative Action etc as adjectives for leftist programs, the left calls things Genocide to force a false equivalency. Ireland asking the ICJ to redefine genocide just to make sure Israel is convicted of the charge is the clearest sign of terms being degraded and coopted for the existing moral value of the term instead of the acts meeting the standard. Mitt Romney was already fascist in 2012, and that card is already played. Chud is the preferred term of the left now, but literally no one thinks that term has negative connotations because no one actually watched that movie.
2D3D
5d ago
Political inefficacy by not having a sweeping unassailable majority is not the win condition, because that is impossible. Focusing on stymieing tactics employed by adversaries is missing the forest for the trees: public official elections are mass referenda of the dominant social mores salient to the population.
The 2016 Resistance insisted that the electoral college was invalid as a referenda because the popular vote was the true means of judging who was actually representing the culture of the nation, as was the 2020 election contestations that sought to delegitimize the results as first principles. In both cases the politicians elected were crippled by the normal morass of government functioning, yet the Culture War - the very title of this forum thread - pays scant attention to inconsequential details like tax policy. Instead, conflict points of salience are debated on moral/intellectual or numbers grounds. No one actually cares about womens sports to care about trans women shitting up the sport, people care about trans women being an exploitation point for bad actors to claim moral unassailability.
The presumption of eventual victory is why Trump 2016 inspired so much more resistance than 2024. Losing the popular vote as well as the electoral college and frankly almost all other down ballots of note is as total a repudiation as can be. Isolated defeats such as prosecutor recalls, no matter how common, can be attributed to tactical failures. There is no intellectual motte to retreat to in this comprehensive defeat, no comforting fact to point at to disclaim the strength of the repudiation. Hell, this election even showed the relief army of minorities turning their banners and joining the enemy enthusiastically.
The democrats basked too long in the glow of Californias massive population inflating the moral merit of their positions. Republicans are used to being told "everyone hates you!", deservedly or not. Democrats have no similar experience, and their fall into infighting to lay claim over the scraps of their coalition is already happening for all to jeer at.
2D3D
6d ago
Destiny seems to catch endless flak from Hasan and Vaush for (insert leftist infighting meme). I think its Palestine and Defund The Police that caused the biggest leftist rifts, so off the top of my head I would think that is what catches the ire of leftists.
There is much scorn to be levied at the entire streamer culture and the parasocial relationships engendered with especially pathetic hosts, but Destiny is really mid even by those standards. I love that Breadtube streamer types were convinced that getting Harris on their podcasts would have changed the electoral needle of young men, which is a hilarious lack of awareness of who even ends up listening to their pieces in the first place.
2D3D
6d ago
There is already a museum of memes, where a PWC manager is immortalized for all to see. More people have seen this disappointed pakistani man than any religious icon. By kb of digital space, that man is a god alongside dicaprio and harold.
2D3D
7d ago
The act of defying Trump publicly was itself a form of ring-kissing. Lips were firmly planted on the O-ring of the presumed actual power brokers, the professional intelligensia of media academia and moneyed professionals that propped up the DEI establishment (its a real thing, I saw the contract for DEI consulting services my company had to engage in order to qualify for ESG benchmarks required to be part of fund portfolios). Trumps capture of the presidency was viewed as an aberration, a confluence of sexism and gerrymandering that caught the true powers off guard. The dominant calculus communicated by media was that Trump was a fluke, and the Resistance was just waiting in the wings to resume its rightful place over Trumps accidental reign.
Honestly, the left had a series of surprisingly good accidental victories from 2018 to 2022, allowing midterm senate correction, covid and Roe overreach to be conflated with the presumption that Trump was a spent force. The end of ZIRP cuts much of the fat that could be showered onto the DEI establishment that propped up the power of The Resistance. With that gone, the shadow of power of DEI has been exposed. Now there is a new ring needing to be kissed, and I do suspect it is less disgraceful for the likes of Altman and Zuckerberg to kiss Trumps ring than subject themselves to Joy Reids screeds.
2D3D
7d ago
I really wish latinx was around when I was in college. Id have had so much fun introducing my latino friends as latinx at parties full of white kids. My friends would have to grin and be polite as I wax effusively about their journey to the hallowed shores of america where their latinx identity would be given the respect in this safe space of understanding. It'd be seeing a human pressure cooker in action.
2D3D
7d ago
Its the same as Islamic fundamentalism - apostates must be killed because to have read the quran and yet reject it is proof of the foundational incompatibility of the heretic with logical existence.
The difference of course is that I can unironically find at least five jihadis in my 1st order peer group who will take a few weeks break off their comfortable lives to go on a beheading spree throughout the holy land if airfare was covered and their legal immunity upon return was covered. Despite decades studying and working in the educated professional world I cannot think of a SINGLE progressive/leftist who would actually even pull the trigger themselves. The leftists want Someone Else to do the dirty work of executing their intellectual will. The jihadis at least bother to justify within their doctrine why the apostate must be killed. There is nothing in the leftist philosophies that mandate gulags, much less executions.
2D3D
9d ago
They're already doing that to themselves. Turns out that debasing oneself to attract girlbossses doesn't actually make one more likely to secure mates. Thankfully the Ivy graduates have defined social success to include non-reproductive bonding structures, making the act of finding a friend a sufficient hurdle to have surmounted to achieve social grace. Yet even that barrier seems to be increasingly out of reach thanks to the new social status meta of mental-trauma induced insufferability.
2D3D
9d ago
From the linked article:
All the while, the heteronormative centre chugs on. XF challenges this centrifugal referent, knowing full well that sex and gender are exemplary of the fulcrum between norm and fact, between freedom and compulsion
This reads like fanfic by pseudointellectual transhumanist autogynephliacs (cough dresden codak). The centrality of sexual identity to modern transhumanistic language is honestly kind of weird, and it crops up in weird places quite often. The Transformers forum was filled with weird transsexual fetishists for awhile and they had to ban all the Megatron/Starscream fics because it was getting too weird. And if you've been on the TF wiki, weirdness is kind of their baseline state of being.
2D3D
9d ago
Ruy Texiera, who has been mentioned here a few times, is one of the most eminent names back in the late 2000s and early 2010s that crowed about the emerging democratic majority that would render the republican party permanently on the backfoot. He wrote the book 'The Emerging Democratic Majority', crowing about the electorates changing demographics rendering the traditional republican base of angry old white guys a diminishing minority. Its not like he was the only one presuming as such, Lindsay Graham himself said that there weren't enough Angry White Guys for the republicans to rely on forever.
Yet, if anyone has followed Ruys work since about 2014 onwards, it would almost seem that Ruy is a hardcore conservative. While the argument tracks that the republicans may have moderated their rhetoric about migrants and social conservatism, the much more attributable fact is that the left went fucking crazy after Obamas 2012 victory, and thought that they had free license to go full progressive. Following Michael Browns shooting in 2014, the cultural left which was in the ascendancy in the USA went in the direction of intersectionality, merging disparate disparate outcomes into a semicohesive web that castigated all achievement as unfair exploitation by a legacy white male establishment. The leftward sprint was so fast (I blame Elevatorgate, frankly) that people who were actually succeeding on what they (mostly rightly) perceived to be their own merits started questioning the reality that was being presented by the left, and simply by questioning they were cast out as uncle toms. These unmoored agents were now receptive to the siren calls of normalcy. As Ruy keeps saying in his interviews (like in The Bulwark where the comments all call him a delusional ultraconservative), he didn't leave the left, the left left him. His language now has some cope that he never claimed the emerging democratic majority was inevitable and that he maintained that it required the democrats to continue representing the white working class fairly, and while I think this is a bit of an ass-covering exercise, it still somewhat tracks.
One of the most amusing aspects of media post-election 2024 cope is that the normie voters were tricked into believing a lie from a right wing media ecosystem that had been totally unknown and impenetrable to the left, and if only the democrats had just reached out even harder to spread their message to the unwashed masses they would have been converted to their point of view and have agreed that Trump was so manifestly unfit that there was no real choice but to vote for the democratic platform. Till now I have not actually seen any lefties consider that maybe the unwashed normie masses had actually listened to what the left had been saying nonstop since 2016, and that the message was rejected on its own merits. The left likes to pretend that the election started from July 2024 when Harris was appointed the knight to slay the dragon trump, ignoring that reality existed before 2024 and all the language spread nonstop by democrats and democrat activists was on public record for all to see. The greatest enemy Harris had in 2024 was not Donald Trump, it was Harris 2019.
2D3D
10d ago
Third world bribery is hilariously different from first world bribery. A policeman shaking you down for a random traffic pit stop is unheard of in the developed world, whereas the networked corruption of opaque contracts and awards buried within bureaucratic legalese are a misty shadowland for third world.
2D3D
12d ago
Blame Disney. Making Gypsies hot exotic innocents who deserve pity made all criticism of domestic underclasses impossible to maintain without cries of 'racism', a charge that magnified its weight from the 1960s till now. Guy Ritchie making Travellers hot probably didn't help either.
On a more serious note, the Europeans successfully kicking Irish Travellers and Gypsies out of cultural capitals and into third rate cities (Marseille always had a reputation and right now Malmo is its own meme) probably had a great deal to do with the acceptability of a postracial European polity. Out of sight, out of mind. Some places being perennial shitholes regardless of foreigner presence probably contributed greatly to the presumption that shitheads are race-agnostic, blinding polite society to the racialized nature of shitheads till it became too late.
2D3D
12d ago
If natural resource wealth were the primary determinant of economic success, South America would blow the USA out of the water with its relative geographic safety and immense wealth. Yet their people all seek to emigrate to the USA.
Speak to third world migrants and they all have a distorted but extant view of USA as the shining city on the hill where their labors will not be seized by a politico or a noble. For all the complaints about the oppressive foot of the US government on the necks of its people that commentators both left and right love to decry, nothing compares to the petty corruptions that smother daily life in third world countries. Hell, the US governmental oppressiveness does not compare to the bureaucratic machine steamrolling across people and businesses in relatively competent western european institutions.
The gilded cities of gold promised to migrants by their kin that landed in the USA through their own sweat and toil is real for them, when compared to the shittiness of their home countries. The USA is not Europe where the promises of riches and success are so dependent on navigating local bureaucratic contexts that the promises of wealth are afforded better by criminality and fraud.
USA is not perfect, and there are many migrants who have found the US wanting compared to their homes. But it is telling that there are so many more who wish to drape themselves in the stars and stripes and disclaim loyalty to their home countries. Grifters do exist, and the USA under the democrats refused to acknowledge that bad actors could possibly exist, but Europe provides both a compliant state and weak people to leech off on. Barring the Canadian collapse, the USA will be able to stave off the camp of the saints for a good while more.
2D3D
14d ago
I've come to realize that A Song of Ice and Fire is poorly written historical fan-fiction
Agreed, Martins writing style was good for the tone of the subject matter covered in GRRM, which ultimately is the mundanity of perceived evil. Evil acts are just acts that happen in the normal grind of a shit world with shitty actors.
The problem is that after he got tied up rewriting Dance Of Dragons and Feast Of Crows for years, he just lost interest in plotting a path to the end. Autistic commitment to the mundanity of terrible things happening to good people means an autistic commitment to timelines, and GRRM got sidetracked in his main plot, introducing new characters primarily as a plot progression point - Quentyn to bring Dany out of Mereen, or Aegon II to get Tyrion out of Braavos - and the concepts he could write into that character to show how shit life is for heroes became more interesting to write than Dany fucking about as a shitty administrator, and it just became a sprawling web of concepts vaguely anchored to a main plot GRRM lost interest in literally last century.
I don't actually think GRRM is smart enough a writer to really walk the talk of criticizing the lack of 'Tolkeins tax policy' or whatever smugfuck Gritty Real World concept must be elaborated on to refute the narratives of high fantasy. The construction of his world is shoddy enough to begin with, but how a world is constructed is never the point of a story. A world is simply the skeleton on which the flesh of a characters interactions are draped onto, and GRRM was pretty good at having character moments. The problem is that his characters needing to mechanically interact in consistent manners meant he had to work more on that skeleton, and the failings became increasingly untenable to work together. A particular irritant I have is his concept that economic prosperity of Westeros was founded on Lannister gold and later the largesse of loans taken from the Iron Bank. Like, what the fuck bro, your main setting literally is about multiyear winters, fucking spend more than 10 lines talking about agriculture if you're so committed to subverting the handwaving of Tolkeins economics-free world. At least Tolkein talked about the sacking of the Shire and the terribleness of replacing pastoral idyll with industrialization, whereas GRRM spends way too much time tracing incestuous bloodlines instead of making his world not revert to 'eternal refrigeration'.
2D3D
14d ago
I literally eat raw onion slices with grilled meat skewers. Satay needs the acrid sharpness of unprocessed alllium to contrast caramelized sugar and soy sauce marinated meat.
Also onions on burgers are super common! The Animal Style of In'n'Out has grilled onions, Five Guys has onions 3 ways as toppings, White Castle has shaved onions, an Oklahoma style burger has a literal mountain of onions, every fancy burger place puts onion rings or fried onions as a topping addon in addition to grilled raw or caramelized options. The whopper and big mac both have onions! I HAVE to know which burger product in the USA is heavily patronized which does NOT use onions, except for baconator and shack stack.
2D3D
14d ago
The difference is that the PRC only really cares about the KMTs dispute of continuity of government from the 1911 Xinhai revolution, which is the theoretical successor to the Imperial China polity and its associated territorial claims. Cultural successors to different time/regions of China include the San Francisco and Flushing Chinatowns which practice the Cantonese ways of the 1800s, the Thai Chinese who practice a syncretic Thai-Teochew pattern of especially gaudy taoism (other southeast Asians are migrants who hold little affection for the mainland), and even the Joseon who at one point proclaimed they were the successors/avengers of Ming China following the Manchu conquest of the Han. Yet all of these are unimportant to the PRC because no one else claims legitimacy over the mainland.
The KMT are in fact colonizers in the truest sense, being a foreign people (KMT nationalist government, soldiers and displaced Nanjing intellectuals) that displaced the local power structures and cultures (Ainu/Japanese colonial subjects+local bureaucrats) while acting as a disputed successor to a foreign regime that had not ruled over Taiwanese for half a century. These putonghua speaking nobles ran roughshod over the minnanyu speaking islanders who cared not for the squabbles of the mainland. That the KMT was entertaining thoughts of reclaiming mainland China through an Operation Revival style invasion of the Inner Sphere was the maim reason for the continual dispute between the PRC and ROC.
Fast forward about 60 years and a LOT of cultural upheavals roiling the world, and the PRC obsession with the ROC seems less like actual intra-Chinese dynastic succession politics that basically characterized the vast majority of Chinese imperial history and more a consequence of a heavily interconnected world with a force of first resort actually able to project power to its vassals. The eastern roman themes draped the livery of Constantinople on their standards, but no levy of Aleppo trained with a Hellenic muster. By contrast the Taiwanese Armed Forces practically beg to be placed under the command and responsibility of their US friends, for force competency and blame absolution purposes. Whether this assessment is accurate or even shared by the PRC is unknown, but it certainly seems that Taiwans irredentist claims to the Qing holdings would not be maintained if Taiwan did not have the US 7th fleet nearby.
I will not tolerate this slander against the sacred numbers. The grand repository of interpersonal relationships curated by the loyal stewarts of pixiv and nhentai have assured me that Arthur and Modred and (insert saberface variation n) all are glorious vanguards with terminal weaknesses against phalli of any sort, especially goblin or orcs or black men (which is its own pathology to be unpacked at another thread). Work that into the Civ 6 leader bonus table, Firaxis.
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