MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
No bio...
User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
28d ago
I think a lot of modern writers directors and producers are simply unaware of why a given decision was made, so they end up copying the look and mannerisms without understanding why it worked or why it doesn’t work in their context.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
28d ago
I think Disney has long refused to let the stories and universes be themselves. They seem to have to rebrand everything to be Disney friendly, nothing too weird, masculine, violent. And while it works for cute kiddie shows or girl-friendly shows, but not really for the more action-adventure series like Marvel and Star Wars.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
29d ago
It’s also the things that even in a direct democracy you’d personally have very chance of actually having much input on the issue. It’s the perfect way to get credit for being “concerned about the community” while having no real requirements to understand anything. It doesn’t matter, and you won’t be held responsible for making a mess of things. So you get to argue about it, thus appearing knowledgeable and caring about “the issues”, while facing absolutely no consequences if you get your way and are wrong. Call it M’aiq’s Law. The more visibility the debate has and the less responsibility anyone has for getting it right, the more likely people are to debate it.
But as long as they get to vote, sure they argue about politics but, at least from my personal observation, the participation is mostly about feeling as if they participate, and very little about outcomes and certainly not about what happens after they vote. Like if they get little of what the6 say they want, sure they grouse, but it’s not like they’ll do much more than tantrum on social media and talk about lying politicians. So the median American “votes”, fails every time to get politicians to do what they actually want done … and are mostly perfectly okay with it. That’s not “caring about the vote” so much as “caring that they get to cast a ballot every couple of years.” Which is different, and furthermore doesn’t bode well for the predictions that people will get upset about their district being rendered non competitive. They still get the parts they care about: the process of casting a ballot, the ability to complain, the constant need to stay informed so “they know how they should vote.” The only part missing is the steering wheel being connected to the wheels. It’s like those little car-seat steering wheels kids have. The kid is perfectly content with turning the little wheel and couldn’t give a care that it doesn’t do anything to the car.
And really, for most human behavior, the truism holds that if a person really truly cares about something, they’ll find a way to do it. If they really cared about local politics, they’d find ways to participate, it’s not impossible. Yet nobody cares about that stuff. If people thought that politics was important, they’d at minimum know who sits on these various boards and committees, who’s mayor and which county ward they live in. They’d know the issues and vote accordingly. It doesn’t happen. Turnout for city races is somewhere near 25%, board meetings are not full of citizens concerned about the issues. Unless some sexy national issues come up, nobody attends school board meetings. Real politics is a ghost town, nobody knows or cares what happens there.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
29d ago
I’ll be honest with you that most normies just don’t really care about politics and thus don’t really care if their votes actually count. It’s not a question of getting people upset about losing their vote in whatever form it takes, people honestly don’t care about politics except as a means to amuse themselves on social media or feel important because they’re “informed.” Go to any school board or planning committee meeting — these are things that have a real and lasting impact on community life — and nobody shows up and you’d have a hard time to find anyone who knows one out of 5-6 members of that board. Politics for the rabble isn’t about making decisions and changing things, it’s about feeling powerful feeling like they’re the good ones for being informed, and yelling at opponents who are “obviously screwing everything up.” As long as those things remain intact and the country is more or less running smoothly, the normies will be too busy watching sports and yelling at people online to notice that the votes the cast don’t matter.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
30d ago
Which doesn’t matter at all because we basically never lived in a true democracy. I’m just kind of tired of the elite playing games as if they’re actually worried about the votes of the plebs.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
Doesn’t choosing to leave those things “out there” imply pretty strongly that we could economically get them? I’m not convinced that’s true. Getting to the asteroid belt is not energetically cheap, and the trip itself would take years and require that any crew taken along bring food water, and life support sufficient for a 2+ year journey. At current launch costs, you’d have to bring back a lot of minerals to break even.
O’Neil cylinders would enable space farming, but again, we have the difficulty of sourcing the materials to build the cylinder, the energy to launch it all to wherever you want to build it.
I think all of this points to the problem I have with over-romanticizing space exploration. We sort of have an unfounded assumption (probably because of poor analogy to sea-exploration) that you can sort of just find or get the resources on the way. That works on the ocean. Out of food? Go fishing. Out of water? Get some on the next island you pass. You won’t run out of air because obviously you never left Earth and you can breathe the atmosphere on the boat. In space, you have to bring it with you. All of it. And worse, you have to launch it or the tools and materials to make it from Earth. The free lunches that sailors got simply don’t happen in space. If you’re in space, water either has to be brought along, recycled, or chemically manufactured. Food either must be brought along, or you must bring the seeds and everything required to grow, harvest, and preserve them. The fuel is the same situation, either you bring it, or you manufacture it. The free lunches don’t happen. In fact space is probably one of the most dangerous places to be. You can’t breathe in space, it’s too cold for survival. There’s no food or water. That’s before considering the radiation that would be dangerous to humans, or the asteroids that can smash tge ships protecting astronauts from exposure to space.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I mean there’s a pretty big opportunity cost to things like mars colonies. I’d give a conservative estimate that it would probably cost several trillion dollars a year to build human colonies on Mars. Keeping in mind that it’s going to cost that per year as everything they need is probably coming from earth. Now if we’re spending $10 trillion a year just think of some of the other much more useful projects you could fund for that amount of money. The NHS costs about £3000 per person which is roughly $4050 per person. At ten trillion dollars, you can give everyone on planet Earth access to first world health care. Or we could give every human on earth clean water and electricity. Or work on carbon scrubbing technology to mitigate global warming. Send every child on earth to not just through K-12 but through university.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
Tge sleeper has awakened.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I mean it depends. If I’m a government official, I would do my best to downplay or dismiss or classify the story. The reason being that the only real data we have on how humans would react to something like this is the War of the Worlds broadcast in the 1930s, which resulted in a fair bit of panic. A real-deal alien civilization sending a real spaceship to earth is likely to cause more panic. That helps no one. As far as who meets tge aliens, I’d look for a level headed diplomat if anything.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
To be fair, if you’re the minority party, you need every vote and supporter you can get. That’s how elections work— get the numbers, or take a seat while the other side does whatever they want. If MAGA wasn’t in power, they would not worry about Fuentes unless he was driving away potential red voters.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I’m expecting that most of the internet will be abandoned by humans by 2050 as bots, fake images and videos and so on continue to spread. Eventually “I read it online” will have the same effect on future generations as it did in 1995 — a sign of something that’s unverified and therefore suspect. The number of outright hoaxes is high enough now that I think most people have had tge experience of being fooled by a fake-news story, picture, or video, or reading or listening to someone who has. It’s crazy enough now, but give it 25 years and I think it will be so difficult to spot a fake that people will be forced by necessity to return to the equivalent of old school news sources, people they actually know or have good reason to trust.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I’d be curious to know what type of businesses that 5% were used at. It might be good for things like writing boilerplate news and bad at ad copy. It might be good at picking up trends in engineering and business to business stuff and not so good at picking the new fashion trends.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
The problem being that except for a fairly small number of jobs, there’s no way to prevent this person from having contact with children. Warehouses might be about the only low-skill job available where you could guarantee that at no time is he in contact with a child. As far as professionals, most of them are public contact jobs, so again he’ll be able to contact children.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I mostly watch Chinese period dramas, and frankly I like the “everyone is an asshole” thing, mostly because it’s not out of step with an actual medieval society. Read about War of the Roses, read about any medieval period. They acted that way because they were basically very polite warlords and understood that everything they did would either expose them as weak or show them strong.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
Probably not. Most modern fantasy authors have good imagination except that they never really deep dive into other cultures or time periods and I think it’s a huge blind spot. Someone living in 16th century France would find just about everything about the modern European mindset weird. We’d find them strange as well. And honestly im not even sure that people as recent as the Victorian Era might not walk around modern London and wondering why people there are acting so strangely.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I mean in most circumstances sure, but I think the thing gets a bit complicated when you know your kid will be horrifically abused raped etc. every day he remains with the custodial parent, you don’t have the months to years a court process can take. A kid getting pimped out nightly to men so mom can afford drugs doesn’t have years. The environment is much too dangerous, and leaving them there while they languish is unsafe for the child.
First rule is the health and welfare of the child. The second rule is follow the law if possible.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I don’t value that personally because it’s not authentic to the period or setting. It’s like having a character in 1500s France Google something. To me it’s jarring because people living in premodern times absolutely do not see the world like modern Californians.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
Present-mindedness. It’s annoying. It’s like we cannot wrap our heads around the idea that people exist or even could exist that think in ways that we disagree with. I like the Mist Crown series by Sarah Maas, but its so annoying to read a medieval peasant acting like a modern, feminist, atheistic modern American as though the author literally couldn’t conceive of a premodern woman in a premodern world.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I mean exactly. It’s not a serious thing, at least not in the sense that they literally believe in theNeo-Hitler theory. If they did, and they wanted to stop it, they’d be doing that. I find it rather fascinating just from the psychological aspect as it almost seems like a rape fetish, but political. They want to be brutally repressed. They want the camps. They want the mass arrests. It’s exciting to them. That’s why they’re always speculating about canceling elections, martial law, and camps. Not because they believe it’s going to happen (in fact Trump would be stupid to cancel elections or declare martial law because it would create a huge backlash from the general public), but because they want to play out their vision of themselves as plucky rebels defying their Hitler. But because it’s a fantasy and they at least unconsciously understand that, they aren’t willing to accept loses of their lifestyle. They aren’t willing to be arrested, risk their job, make their kid miss practice, break the law, etc. they want to appear to have resisted without the messy stuff.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I’m not demanding they form a militias or something to be taken seriously. But the complete lack of any action beyond standing outside with signs doesn’t really do much to convince me that these guys are serious. It’s like someone screaming that tge house is on fire from the bedroom while queuing up a Netflix movie. The actions don’t match including the actions including by people who have power and should know what to do and could do things to either slow it down or impeach or launch investigations or hold hearings. Yet… they don’t.
Now if this were 1935 Berlin, and these people believed that the crazy Austrian was about to destroy democracy, the actions don’t remotely fit. They can’t be made to fit unless they don’t actually believe what they’re saying, or they’re actually okay with it, but playing tge part. Psychologically, I think the LARP angle makes a lot of sense. It explains the sort of slacktivist protests, the lack of fear of saying something that the reactionaries don’t like (a good way to get arrested in actual authoritarian regimes), the lack of action by anyone in congress, and on it goes. Now there’s always been a certain romanticism of “plucky resistance movements.” The genre of resisters bringing down or stymies an authoritarian regime is a staple in Hollywood. Star Wars, Red Dawn, Lawrence of Arabia, pretty much every WWII movie ever made, Handmaid’s Tale, Hunger Games. It’s a trope buried pretty deep in American mythology. And so people who are disappointed in losing the culture war might well project that movie trope onto American politics, especially because it allows them to cast themselves as the heroes of the psychodrama. It’s easy to cover up a life you aren’t happy with by pretending to be on some kind of great crusade for Justice. It’s also great for a party that barely has a real agenda because if you are fighting Palpatine, it doesn’t matter that your big idea is shovel-ready projects or something — you’re fighting evil.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I don’t see it that way simply because none of the actions they take are consistent with the idea that “reactionary enemies” are about to end civilization as they have known it. The same people refer to ICE as the Gestapo and to Alligator Auswitz and Palentir reading their social media posts also are mostly bitching on the Internet, and occasionally attending a weekend protest that doesn’t interfere with normal life at all. I think most of the “reactionary Nazi” stuff reads more like a psychological need for significance in their own times than the thought that these are actually threats to civilization. Even in Congress, the minority leader is Jewish and he’s not doing anything more than sending angry letters around. If they really believed in Trump’s Nazi party, it seems like you’d be doing a bit more than leaving tge equivalent of 1-star reviews on the internet.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
Now, I have little idea if this is a left/progressive thing; I've just observed it in that group because I am part of that group and have spent most of my life surrounded by people in that group. I suspect that conservatives, by their nature of preferring tradition - such as the tradition of keeping civilization going for the next generation - have a greater tendency to want to keep humanity and human civilization going than progressives, who tend to be skeptical of tradition. But either way, I'm quite sure this attitude of "why care about humanity's survival when we have my favorite principles to worry about" is extremely common among progressives. Usually, it's not explicitly spoken or even thought, it gets laundered in, as alluded to above, by motivating oneself to believe that the evidence indicates that one's principles don't actually conflict with other goals such as survival of humanity/human civilization (in fact, I see such motivated reasoning often leading people to believe that their principles are actually synergistic to good goal, such as game devs genuinely believing that putting in characters that conform with their ideology would also lead to more sales due to expanding the market).
I tend to perceive progressive strains of liberalism as making the assumption that civilization as they know it is tge default state of humanity and you can’t really destroy it. It’s not “sacrifice survival for thriving” it’s “survival is a given, so let’s thrive.” On tge conservative side it’s understood that civilization is not the default state, decorum, high trust, low crime, safe environments etc. do not just happen, nor will they just continue without some efforts put toward maintaining those things or preventing their destruction. Now I think you can have thriving as well as civilization if you bother to do so correctly. If you make sure that the support structures aren’t destroyed or that public morality, health, and welfare are preserved, then you can do things to allow people to thrive. It’s not a zero sum game.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
The problem with the end of civilization is that the alternatives suck.
Furthermore, I think we have a serious problem in humanity civilization or not if basic biological necessities like perpetuating the species or not eating ourselves to death, or those kinds of things. I’m hypothesizing that we’re creating a very hyper stimulating environment that hijacks our normal biological systems in ways that are more stimulating than the normal activities that our hyper stimulating environment creates. I’m looking into a minimalistic sort of entertainment tech detox that im suspecting will prove this out. But if people are hyper stimulated by media, technology and so on to the point that they don’t end up socializing as much as they should, or if porn (which I don’t do) is hyper stimulating to the point that real life humans and dating them cannot compete, I think we may be engineering our own species out of existence much like we created beer bottles for Australian beetles to prefer to hump over real female beetles. If this is the case, it needs to be dealt with unless the royal we are perfectly okay with killing off the most intelligent species we know of in the entire universe to make the money printer go brrrrr.
I always imagined the Great Filter might be something exciting like a war or a plague. Turns out that it might be us creating systems that stimulate our brains too much.
Phones.
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