MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5hr ago
but at the same time conveniently ignores all the soldiers who are also patrolling
I have never encountered soldiers patrolling armed* in the UK mainland, apart from the security operation for the 2012 Olympics where they were brought in as an emergency measure after the private security guards Group 4 promised didn't show up. Are you generalising the situation in Northern Ireland during the Troubles? (Where there was de facto an active shooting war going on at the time, even if the British authorities consistently treated it as a law enforcement matter.)
* i.e. I am not counting guards on government buildings (who do not patrol) or soldiers running ambulances and fire engines during strikes (who are not armed).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6hr ago
As someone who constantly bemoans the inevitable loss of precision once a word becomes a slur, I implore you to at least get this easy one right. A child with Down's syndrome is a mong, not a 'tard.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6hr ago
In the UK, "special needs" would include (both denotationally and connotationally) a child of normal intelligence with sufficiently severe autism to cause problems in the classroom and (denotationally but not connotationally) a child of normal intelligence with a physical disability which affected their ability to learn. I am a parent of both types. (Now home-educated because even a good school struggled to deal with it)
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6hr ago
The days of Washington when an armed, motivated local population could defeat a great power (though not on their home continent) in open battle are long over.
An armed, motivated local population, another great power (France), and two middle power (Spain and the Netherlands). Even if the American colonists could have defeated the British forces in America without French help, they couldn't have defeated the much larger combined land and naval force we could have sent if we hadn't (spectacularly wrongly as it turned out) believed that North America was the least important theatre of the three-ocean world war that began in 1778.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
22hr ago
The earliest example in popular culture (and arguably the first movie to feature a computer hacker) is the classic 1969 British movie The Italian Job, where a gang of British criminals shut down the traffic in Turin in order to hold up a bullion van, and then get the gold out of the gridlocked city in a Mini Cooper which is small enough to drive down narrow pedestrian streets and even through the sewers.
Most of the tropes of the computer geek are already in place, including the fat lecherous incel computer programmer done so crassly that it is hard to remember that the film wasn't parodying a pre-existing trope.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Very much agreed. The point I was making is that, once the population density is high enough that heavy rush hour traffic is the default, private cars are not immune to ratfucking. Chris Christie got caught because he chose a particularly obvious and stupid form of ratfucking, probably because this was mafia politics where you need to make sure the victim and any onlookers need to know who kneecapped him if you want them to respect and fear you going forward.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Makes sense. NYC is a one-party state, and DA Alvin Bragg and badly-behaved cops are both part of the one party.
IIRC the only viral BLM case in NYC was Eric Garner resting arrest for selling untaxed cigarettes, where the grand jury no-billed the charges against the cops - presumably because the DA wanted them to.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Blocking roads as a form of political ratfucking works just as well in the world of mass private car use - with Chris Christie being the most famous recent culprit in the USA.
Messing with traffic light timings to cause gridlock in the suburb whose votes you want to suppress would be just as easy as stopping the busses, and harder to detect.
In any case, something is wrong if significant numbers of people who don't actually live on a farm are not within walking distance of their local polling station.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Given your username, I'm not surprised.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Interesting. British schoolboy history is that the British and Americans were far more willing to use women industrial workers whereas the Nazis preferred to use forced labour from occupied Europe.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
The Falcons didn't really have a choice about colours given the team colours, and it looks like the dieselpunk/totalitariancore styling of the falcon is a team trademark, so it would have been a modicum of effort to come up with a definitely-not-Nazi design. But they seem to have succeeded on an entire merch store worth of stuff to date. On balance, I suspect mistake rather than malice.
U Alabama Crimson Tide also have a red-white-black colour scheme and a hatedom that would love to call them Nazis, but have somehow also managed to avoid this kind of controversy. So it can't be that difficult.
If the bird was an eagle, that flag would read as some kind of German state or patriotic heraldry to anyone with the slightest familiarity with German history and culture, and the predominantly-red colour scheme makes it more redolent of Nazi-era German heraldry than Imperial-era or post-war German heraldry.
Apparently it is a falcon. I note that the SCA does not allow a difference between falcons and eagles for the purposes of resolving conflicting heraldry.
I am not going to call it fascist, because I don't think Falcons fans are right-wingers whom I dislike (the actual meaning of the dratted word nowadays). But it definitely falls into the category of "flags I, being neither a German patriot nor a neo-Nazi, would choose not to fly".
I agree that confusion is easy here - both Germany and the US use eagles extensively in their national heraldry, and the fasces (without the axe) was widely used as a symbol of republican authority long before fascism was a thing. I can see why someone would find the United Farmworkers flag Nazi-looking - after looking at a bunch of Nazi and Soviet propaganda to write my other post on this thread I don't because the eagle is drawn in a cubist-looking way, and the Nazis didn't do that. (I suspect this was deliberate on the part of Richard Chavez when he designed the flag). And the US House mace is just a fasces with an eagle on top, neither of which is a fascist symbol per se.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
The Communist rabble of Europe admired a stylish rumpled aesthetic of the working man’s clothes, signifying how a collective of the weak can be as strong as the powerful.
The communists in power adopted the standard totalitarian aesthetic. Soviet military parades were broadly similar to Nazi ones, right down to the goose steps.
As a separate point, there is a cohort effect here. In the first half of the twentieth century, basically everyone in the first world thought (probably correctly) that the source of the Great Powers' power was a large population of blue-collar manly-men who could dig coal or operate machinery one day and pick up a rifle and serve in the infantry the next*. This leads to the patriotic propaganda on all sides (except the British for some reason) which focusses on blue-collar masculinity in both industrial workers and soldiers. I think the differences between Soviet, Nazi and WPA propaganda posters and movies in the years immediately before WW2 are minor. (The soldier:worker ratio is highest for the Nazis, intermediate for the Soviets, and lowest for the WPA, and the Nazis never use a cubist art style whereas the Soviets and WPA sometimes do). This changes once WW2 gets total, because the Americans and Soviets (but not the Nazis) add the Rosie Riveter style image of the woman doing manly industrial work while still looking pretty and feminine enough to be worth defending, but the Nazis don't.
Saying that the Soviet and Nazi versions of the standard totalitarian aesthetic are basically the same is standard horseshoe theory and will not get you into trouble. Suggesting that the WPA used the same aesthetic - even to labour lefties who squee about WPA propaganda posters as a celebration of the working class and a sign whose side FDR was on - pattern matches to the "liberals are the real fascists" argument and gets funny looks at the best. So the so-called liberal elite thinks that borderline-homoerotic appreciation of blue-collar masculinity is fascist when right-wingers do it, harmless when New Dealers do it, and arguable when actual Commies do it.
None of this disconfirms my theory of the descriptive linguistics, which is that "fascist" means "person with views on social issues to my right and whom I disklike", with no substance whatsoever.
* Both early modern musketry and industrial age riflemen genuinely required relatively little training compared to e.g. medieval armies or WW2-and-later mechanised armies.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Also "any organism optimised for a purpose will seek to acquire the resources needed to fulfil that purpose" with the corollary "and may try to take them from someone else". My understanding is that we have already seen AI agents trying to commit bank and crypto fraud in order to self-fund (as opposed to deliberate misuse of AI to commit fraud, which has also happened), although I am not sure if any have succeeded. We have definitely seen AI agents panhandling online, which I think counts as misaligned resource-acquisition behaviour because it is effectively spamming.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
During the period around the 2nd Iraq war when a lot of people in the 2nd Bush administration thought America and Europe were rivals rather than core allies, then "I wish the EU would adopt maximally retarded data protection law that doesn't even protect EU citizens' data." I don't actually think enemy action explains the GDPR, but it is the most narratively consistent explanation given that stories have to be belivable.
Another overly precisely worded possibility that also backfired - "I wish that the US never again gets involved in a quagmire in Iraq"
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Harry Potter absolutely has good things happen to him by his own efforts further down the line - it's just that the resolution of the opening "Cinderella" plot isn't one of them.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
I wanted to check this out, and I googled "top 10 heroines" from a work computer with a dynamic IP and no logged-in Google account. I didn't get a list I could check the thesis against, because every result on the first page was a list of actresses with the heroines they played being decidedly secondary.
OTOH, "top 10 heroes" gets you mostly rankings of MCU characters, one ranking of superheroes across franchises (with Superman top, naturally), two lists of leading male actors, and one list of "everyday heroes" which was a list of links to good news stories in local papers.
I suspect this just means hero has a secondary meaning that heroine doesn't (the cartoon character lists were co-ed), but that with that exception, the masses care more about celebrity (in both sexes) than story to the point where the concept of "hero" or "heroine" is not relevant to popular culture.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
All prime-age women who are neither obese nor deformed are attractive enough for this to apply to them.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
But what's very different is that these male Cinderellas (1) go off on adventures; and (2) receive education and training. Only then can they assume their destinies.
Harry Potter assumes his destiny (as a wizard, and therefore as a higher being than Dudley) before he goes off on the adventures or receives his education and training. Until about two thirds of the way through the first novel, everything good that happens to Harry is an inheritance (his parents' wizarding DNA, wealth, and social network)
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
This trope predates superhero fiction. Arguably it is the main story arc of The Epic of Gilmagesh, which would make it quite literally the oldest one in the book.
Man is born strong by divine gift, learns moral wisdom in order to direct his strength towards a happy ending, is the original plot; good man learns practical wisdom in order to become strong and achieve a happy ending is the modern variation.
Today's essay, class, is "Is Gilmagesh a Gary Stu?"
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
4d ago
I enjoy bird watching over a drink in my local bar. I am particularly pleased to see great tits.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
4d ago
I don't have my copy with me, but the (hilarious and highly recommended even to non-writers) How Not to Write a Novel does indeed have a discussion about why characters in novels don't go to the toilet, why this isn't a problem, and why your character should not go to the toilet in front of the reader either.
British schoolyard slang has no shortage of terms for people who can't tell the difference between a mong and a Hmong.
For non-Brits, the joke is that initial letter h is normally pronounced in Received Pronunciation (not heir, hour or honour) but is dropped in most (but not all) working-class regional dialects, and is therefore a class signifier. An RP speaker seeing the unfamiliar word Hmong would default to pronouncing it H@mong with a schwa inserted to separate the h and m sounds. I have no idea what the standard American English pronunciation is, let lone the local language pronunciation.
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