HalloweenSnarry
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User ID: 795
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
Alas, we are a long ways away from the days of Postal Service Badassery.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
Are these actual categories of football equipment, or is this a metaphor? The usage here reminds me particularly of competitive shooting, or perhaps also auto racing.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
Carini's reason for giving up does remind me of certain forms of competition, but it reminds me specifically of competitive gaming, particularly speedrunning and e-sports. In speedrunning, resetting the moment you make one fairly significant mistake is normal (never mind that it could mean starting a whole run over if you aren't doing segments), and in e-sports-oriented games (like MOBAs or FPS games), the idea of ditching a ranked game when things go south early is common enough that many games have their matchmaking systems designed to punish early-leavers.
Perhaps to point out that we don't actually have that much logistical distance from the 15th Century? Our technology and our logistics support each other in an interlocking balance, and certain things cannot be sustained without other things.
ETA: That being said, if you put a gun to my head and asked me to answer where I think we'd end up in the event of a global collapse, I think our tech level might be dropped down to possibly 18th-century levels, assuming that electricity somehow becomes unreliable or scarce alongside fossil fuel.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
I think this is a bit orthogonal to the topic, though. "Decapitating enemy leadership" has arguably always been a "legitimate" (insofar as such things can be "legitimate" when you go down to the level of primitive, tribal tit-for-tat) strategy in warfare. The rebel army seeks to overthrow the Emperor, killing him if necessary; the Emperor is in his right to demand the rebel leader's head on a pike; rival kingdoms are perfectly fine with the enemy bloodline being extirpated, and so on. Consider the Ferguson, the 18-Century rifle that could have been used to assassinate George Washington.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
A machete isn't terribly concealable either, though, I'd imagine.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
Not to get deeply entangled in this discussion, but I suppose the steelman to IGI is that the material improvements that we live under are far from permanent, and could well disappear before we realize it, and suddenly we find ourselves back to the brutal state of affairs known to the past.
Consider Mad Max, a media franchise that remains fairly popular today despite the original film being more obviously inspired by the Oil Crisis (a temporary shock that helped spur us into changing our ways), and the sequel defining the post-apocalypse tropes that made it so influential, despite it coming out at a time when the Oil Crisis was likely abating, if not already ended.
The Curse of Plenty, the thing that gives rise to the narrative of "good times create weak men," is a trope we see in fiction and in real life. We go from rags to riches and back again, just as ancient religions had ways of saying that we come from nothing and eventually return to nothing.
I do personally feel that we had a peak of "goodness" in recent decades that may well have been an anomaly, and that the "dreamtime"/whalefall (to borrow from Scott) is well coming to an end. We can only hope that things don't snap and break apart once all the slack is gone.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
How so? Is out-of-wedlock childbirth super-haram in Islam?
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
Maybe they're afraid that the real thing would be too seductive? There are people who think Sam Hyde is a legit funny guy (and I will admit that the meme of "Sam Hyde identified as perpetrator behind [terrorist incident]" is actually kind of amusing).
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
Do those still exist?
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
The shonen manga conception of winning, perhaps. I think, more generally, "winning" is just simply conquering some barrier or challenge, and hopefully leaving said barrier/challenge behind.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
To add onto what Tophattingson said, the logic there is very much of the same vein that the joke "the law forbids the rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges" is skewering.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
But you'd think that, if the game won on politics over quality or popularity, then he wouldn't have gotten booted--presuming, of course, that Greens tend to lean towards Palestine over Israel.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
Yet, there are those who wish to cross the Rubicon, to feed the flames and let the last cinders burn, until nothing remains.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
If only someone could have bombed that moment with a drone carrying the Stop Killing Games URL on a banner.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
It's worth noting that Japan nearly chose to fight to the death. I don't know what motivated the Emperor specifically to surrender, but just the act of deciding on surrender caused him to nearly be couped by his ultranationalist military, as I understand it. Hell, the Japanese were preparing for the Americans to land on their shores, and were nearly ready to make a desperate last stand.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
I think what Tinted meant is that, like me and others, they grew up with online fandom (think forums and early social media), steeped in the tits-n'-beer-liberalism milieu, and then watched with horror as GamerGate transpired and revealed just how many people operated on Conflict Theory.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
Am slightly disappointed it wasn't the "I'm smoking on Bhutanese Shadow Garden Dark Evil Pack" meme.
HalloweenSnarry
4mo ago
I think it'd be ironic, darkly-humorous, for the Democrats to turn to a man they once made their #1 adversary as their savior. As you say, it could actually work, but I think that's why they won't do it.
HalloweenSnarry
4mo ago
I dunno, Obama got pretty close with his hair. Still not bald, of course, but...
HalloweenSnarry
5mo ago
If we're on this topic, then let me link the relevant SSC post.
HalloweenSnarry
5mo ago
AIUI, the Civil War comics came out years before the current zeitgeist was born. Bizarre that they chose to adapt the story for the MCU, given that I was always under the impression that Civil War was one of the weakest storylines to come out of 21st-century Marvel.
HalloweenSnarry
5mo ago
I have to wonder how much of this is confusion between the hard leftists who wanted Bernie and the center-left who much preferred to have Biden leading the fight.
Hedging bets, perhaps, or maybe wanting a repeat of the hostage crisis that got Reagan elected?
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