KingOfTheBailey
No bio...
User ID: 1089
KingOfTheBailey
6d ago
Total immunity is a problem, but if the government had agreed to take on the risk for the pharma companies in this emergency situation instead of just waving it away (including paying out for vaccine injuries) that seems much more balanced. Operation Warp Speed was pretty much about "how fast can we get this done?" and that includes speeding up the safety trials. I don't know what the US actually did here.
KingOfTheBailey
13d ago
My current strategy for Gleba is to think about it later. I'm not yet sure if it's going to be fun or "fun", but I'm hoping for the former.
KingOfTheBailey
13d ago
It's Factorio but more, where each flavor of "more" is different in its own way. If the base game came out in the early 2000's, the DLC would be one of those really good expansions whose purchase would be thoroughly justified, like TA: Core Contingency or SC: Brood War.
I cobbled together a space platform and set forth. Thoroughly underestimated my fuel and ammo needs and got smashed to bits by asteroids while traveling. Now I'm stuck on a volcanic hellscape where none of the production chains make sense, I didn't bring enough stuff, my base back home isn't really set up for remote construction, and I'm having a great time.
KingOfTheBailey
14d ago
From the "... and giving my GPU a well-deserved rest", I take it to mean he's been having a lot of fun prompting local (and presumably less censored) image generation models.
KingOfTheBailey
19d ago
If you buy it on factorio.com (which goes through Humble) they let you generate a Steam key.
KingOfTheBailey
3mo ago
Personally, I would like to pass on my own terms before I lose the ability to consent, and do not want to see my elderly relatives tortured to life by the medical system.
Unfortunately, Canada has showed how easy it is for euthanasia to become a vehicle to shuttle out any medically inconvenient citizens. This has flipped me back from supporting euthanasia to opposing it.
KingOfTheBailey
3mo ago
And for those who weren't around back then, we know that Brianna Wu manufactured at least some of the "hate", because GG caught Wu forgetting to switch to a sockpuppet on the Steam forums.
KingOfTheBailey
3mo ago
I think you mean "effect".
KingOfTheBailey
3mo ago
I appreciate the link and the implicit "are you sure you want to go down this road?" it contains. A couple of years ago, it felt like unbreakable blue-tribe consensus forever, which I found horrifying. Now that things have cracked, and it only took a failed assassination attempt to do it, what is team red supposed to do otherwise? The rhetoric is still that Trump is the most dangerous Threat to Democracy who must be stopped, from the side that usually makes arguments about stochastic terrorism. I see two broad types of strategic response, both awful:
- Claim "principles". This feels like trying to co-operate with defectbot, and seems to bring things further away from balanced, healthy discussion.
- Seek vengeance. This feels really good but escalates the culture war, and seems to bring things further away from balanced, healthy discussion.
I really don't know what culture war disarmament looks like. There needs to be some cross-tribe elite consensus that we stop doing these sort of things, and I don't know how you get there without first putting the shoe on the other foot for a while. The pendulum needs to swing back a little bit, then it needs to be caught.
KingOfTheBailey
3mo ago
I love this place so much.
KingOfTheBailey
4mo ago
Consider this synthetic shitpost: https://x.com/EndWokeness/status/1815137702561689866#m
You can tell from the x.com username that this is obviously going to be a fake, and the word choices and speech pacing make it even more clear. But for someone without such an idiosyncratic speech rhythm and reputation for stumbling and mumbling? We're well past "you can fool some people some of the time" and probably even "you can fool most people some of the time". I'd say we're at "you can fool most people most of the time" now, and it will only get worse.
KingOfTheBailey
4mo ago
https://timecube.online/ is a false archive of the TRUTH, a trap to make people educated stupid. Accept no imitations. https://web.archive.org/web/20160112193916/http://timecube.com/
KingOfTheBailey
4mo ago
I guess that's where Rowling conjured up the Wizengamot from.
KingOfTheBailey
4mo ago
That's exactly what I understand POSIWID to mean, though.
imperfect humans will sometimes create a system that does something other than what they intended to begin with.
You may have intended to build a system that does X but actually it does Y. It's now time to be clear-eyed about that fact, and working from the assumption that you have a system built to do Y, decide what to do next. But saying "no, it's meant to do X" is not an option if you're trying to actually achieve X.
KingOfTheBailey
4mo ago
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ashley-biden-diary-claims/
Snopes rates the following claim as "true":
A diary authored by U.S. President Joe Biden's daughter, Ashley Biden, describes showers taken with her father when she was a child as "probably not appropriate."
https://www.msn.com/en-US/news/us/joe-bidens-daughter-ashley-admits-her-diary-entries-are-real-in-court-letter-showers-with-dad/ar-BB1mWabj links to Twitter posts that have screenshots of the relevant page (including claims that she was hypersexualized at a young age), along with Ashley's submission to the court.
KingOfTheBailey
4mo ago
Yes, Republicans have been calling Biden senile for years. But even as early as his inauguration ceremony he was repeating instructions from an earpiece ("salute the marines") instead of following them. I don't object to the earpiece itself here: it's fair enough that for a big event like inauguration you might have someone giving you cues, but he's been wobbly since the start and only gone downhill. There were also a few instances where he appeared very confused about what documents he was signing and when he should sign them, but I can't find the good clips of that online any more.
KingOfTheBailey
4mo ago
I'm guessing current_year+8 refers to 2016, where the election of Trump broke the brains of the American left. But I thought the eternal current_year began in 2014, when the culture war really started to take off in its current iteration.
KingOfTheBailey
4mo ago
In both cases, the decline is underway. The difference, I think, is in the reason for the shift. In your model, it's chasing an audience that will never be receptive in a misguided hope to pull in new blood. In Hoyt's, the roll is caused by people signaling loyalty to their class or industry peers.
KingOfTheBailey
4mo ago
My understanding of "roll left and die", at least according to Hoyt, was different. I read it as the members of a failing institution going full mask-off because they no longer had anything to lose, and signalling allegiance to the left bought them status.
I don't know if "dilute/abandon your message in the hopes of not turning away potential members, and alienate your base" has a pithier name. It's not quite the same as "get woke, go broke".
KingOfTheBailey
4mo ago
Funny, I just asked a similar thing. I think there is a vibe shift in progress but I hadn't considered the Twitter angle. I think you're right, it's important. There seems to be three main factors: it's (maybe) a Too Big To Fail platform, so a lot of people stayed on there due to network effects, Community Notes make it easy for dissenters to counter The Narrative right where normies can see it, and even pre-Elon there was a subculture of poasters who enjoyed messing with the establishment. So I can totally buy that it was highly effective for Elon to take and that it might have started a preference cascade, and I suspect that's why there's much news trying to make him look bad.
KingOfTheBailey
4mo ago
Is there a youth backlash brewing against LGBT?
I came up out of the subway the other day, and nearly my entire field of view was filled by a massive glowing screen full of flapping pride flags, wall-to-wall and six feet tall. It was a project by some charity or other claiming that "hate crimes" (or victimization, or incidents, or whatever they measure) jump by 60% during pride month. I've been so burned out by the sight of that flag everywhere that the only reaction I can muster is "maybe stop being so obnoxious about it then?" From the POSIWID perspective, one could consider the purpose of pride month to be to spike hostility against LGBT people, so why do it?
A long tweet from sci-fi author Devon Eriksen claims that pride month is downstream of the "toaster fucker" problem, in reference to an ancient greentext. Condensed: the internet brings together people with bizarre niche interests (what he calls "toaster fuckers" — he claims it's meant to be a general term but he's clearly writing about the LGBT theater of the CW). A supportive online community stops these people from leaving the toaster in the kitchen and adjusting to the normal world around them, and instead these online groups metastasize, eventually spilling over into the wider world: intra-group status competitions start with "who can fuck the most toasters", lead to "'toaster-fucker pride' bumper stickers" and then "bragging about how they sneak into other people's kitchens and fuck their toasters, too" and "swapping tips for how to introduce kids to the joys of toaster-fucking."
I think I agree with some of that description but not all of it, and may write it up in another thread if I get time, but it's not so important for this post. I need it as context for the bit that I think is more accurate: the normies getting fed up with all the toaster-fucking, the backlash, and the response (lightly edited to concatenate multiple small tweets, but no words changed):
Pretty soon normal people, who ten years before would shrugged and said "that's weird", are now sick of toaster-fucker flags everywhere and their kids being told to fuck toasters by sickos, and now they're going to burn every toaster-fucker flag they see, and Florida just passed a law requiring you to be 21 years old with proof of ID to buy a toaster. And Utah has banned toasters altogether and the Mormons have stopped even eating toast, bagels, waffles, or any other heated bread product.
But it doesn't stop there, either. Because a few toaster-fuckers get beaten with fence posts by people sick of hearing about toaster-fucking, and other people, who didn't see or hear the toaster-fuckers' prior behavior, say "holy shit, toaster fuckers really are oppressed". And they decide to become "toaster-fucker allies", despite the fact that they haven't the slightest real interest in fucking any toasters themselves.
I think this explains the split in normie opinion pretty well: red states have had more than enough and that's led into the various legal battles that Devon alludes to, school choice advocacy, campaigns to replace progressive school boards, etc. I don't think I've seen "beaten with fenceposts"-level backlash (I figure it would pop up here if it was an issue), but even the memory of such events in the semi-recent past could explain normie "I want to be a good person so I'll call myself an ally"-ism. Compare the number of "racist hate crime" hoaxes over the past few years, to the point where "the demand for racism exceeds its supply" has become a dark joke among cynical online commentators. I don't think I've seen LGBT activists fabricate incidents (certainly none as badly as Jussie Smollett did), but it seems useful for a group to have opposition to keep its supporters energized ("our work is not yet done!") and I could definitely see obnoxious pride month displays as accidentally serving this function.
Onto youth. A recent tweet by a newish Twitter account, America_2100, claims a drop in support for LGBT over the past few years (2022–2023: US-wide: -7 points; Republicans: -15 points, to a 10-year low of 41%; Democrats: -6 points; "young people": -8 points). In particular, they claim Gen Z's support for gay marriage dropped by 11 points between 2021 and 2023, which is double the time span of the other stats but could indicate an ongoing decline in support. Unfortunately the tweet doesn't source the surveys it refers to beyond saying that it came from PRRI and I don't have hard data beyond a couple of anecdotes. Lime, a scooter rental company, made a pride-flag crosswalk in Washington a 'walk-the-scooter' zone after several teenagers were arrested for leaving skid marks on it. I saw a recent comment on a gaming subreddit (sorry, I can't find it), in response to yet another pride-month-themed mod, saying something like "don't be discouraged! 50% upvotes for a pride mod is pretty good these days". But when I interact with university students, the discourse is still very pro-LGBT: they talking about being excited for pride events, etc.
So, questions for the floor:
- Do you see a "vibe shift" around attitudes towards LGBT, and if so, is it generational?
- Have you seen any discussion on the progressive side around changing strategy?
KingOfTheBailey
5mo ago
The theory is that undesirables don't enjoy listening to it, so it's a cheap way to "move them on" without having security or police actually have to interact with them and risk a confrontation.
KingOfTheBailey
5mo ago
It might be stronger in recent years, where pushing "the message" became much more of a thing in entertainment, but the anti-mutant Senator Kelly was created in 1980 and appeared in the 1990s X-Men animated series. (Because you've listed X-Men alongside BvS, Marvel, etc., I'm guessing you're thinking more of the 2000s Fox movies, or possibly the recent X-Men '97.)
KingOfTheBailey
5mo ago
Why is Cap on the side of the libertarians? Because you'd expect Cap to be on the "trust the government" side so we have to invert that to make it more "interesting". It's just expectation subversion, Rian-style, with no thought about whether it's consistent for the characters.
So the Doge of Venice wasn't part of the pun?
More options
Context Copy link