Tophattingson
No bio...
User ID: 1078
Tophattingson
3mo ago
GW still does smaller box games that are sold through Target, but you are right that they're no longer aiming for a younger audience with those. But if we take the strongest possible interpretation of this, then contrary to the comment I was responding to, GW has actually narrowed the demographic it sells to, not broadened it.
Tophattingson
3mo ago
De facto criminalizing all sexualities also means criminalizing homosexuality. Equal treatment cannot be the basis for LGBT rights, because it offers the opportunity to equally give everyone no rights. The demand of LGBT rights when it comes to homosexuality being legal is that what two consenting adults get up to in the bedroom is none of the state's business. I believe that principle should hold even when a spicy cold exists. Anything less, and we risk specific criminalization of homosexuality in response to a future pandemic.
To be more specific about the restrictions that were actually imposed, they criminalized having sex with people who are not from your household because they criminalized meeting other households indoors, regardless of heterosexual or homosexual. There are reasons this might disproportionately impact LGBT people.
Yes, the actual problem with the Confederacy was that they didn't enslave enough whites, and the actual problem with Nazis is that they didn't gas enough Germans. If only they did that, they'd have been goodies. Hurrah equality!
Rights can't work from a basis of equality. Was the solution to gay marriage was actually to prohibit all marriage, and sodomy to instead criminalise all sex? No. To be even more flippant, gay people were already legally allowed to have straight marriage, and straight people were already prohibited from gay marriage.
You do realise that I am a LGBT person who was pissed off at the government de facto recriminalizing homosexuality with lockdowns? The bracketed hello might have been too subtle... Leftists are okay with certain forms of bans on homosexuality, but that's because the aesthetics of LGBT rights takes priority over actually giving us any rights, because it turns out that they in fact do want the government to care about what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own bedroom. Hence it's okay to violate our rights as long as it "doesn't stem from decrying them", whatever that's supposed to mean (though really it still is decrying us because it's about reducing humans to disease vectors on a spreadsheet in general).
And to get out from the weeds and back to the point: It's trivially incorrect that nerdy political purges are based around some sort of propensity to make the lives of their friends worse, or damage the relevant hobby. The target prioritization is totally wrong for that to be the motive. Lockdowns actively criminalized in-person Boardgaming, Dungeons and Dragons, Magic the Gathering (last I checked, lockdowns killed paper Standard), Wargaming, Conventions, and all other nerdy face-to-face activities. And politically, those were supported more by the left than the right. Therefore, if you're going to use attacking friends and their ability to participate in any particular nerdy activity to justify nerdy political purges, there's your actual target. Anything else would be ad-hoc excuses to disguise an ulterior motive for purges.
I'd be way more comfortable playing with a social conservative than a mask addict, even if because of demographics this is very unlikely to actually happen. At least I could trust they'd still be interested in playing when ligma 28 rolls around, and they wouldn't be motivated to call the police on me for suggesting it.
Tophattingson
3mo ago
For reddit, I'm pretty confident it is something akin to an astroturf campaign. Just done by a few unpaid, obsessive to the point of would probably get diagnosed with something power users, rather than people being paid to do it. It's surprisingly easy to manipulate something to the top of reddit by ensuring it gets a few early upvotes because of how the algorithm works. The way in which reddit was taken over by the Katie Johnson/Jane Doe case, immediately after the debate, followed by a lot of users being confused at why it was news on Reddit and not elsewhere (the answer is because the case is from 2016 and was almost certainly nonsense), looked suspiciously like someone firing up a specific campaign though.
On the other hand in 2024, the left-leaning person is far more likely to have non-white people, LGBT, or other groups that are effected by conservative policies, so it's not a shock that now they have a closer relationship with those folks, they're less likely to be seen as just arguments.
Like, why do I want to be personally friendly with people who want to make the lives of my other friends worse?
This flows both ways. Politics was interested in me personally in 2020 in a way that it wasn't before, and also in a way that disproportionately affected nerdy activities like board gaming. Why would I want to be friends with people who want to make the lives of myself and my other friends worse by supporting lockdowns, which were far more egregious than the average social conservative's demands not least because it also involves partially criminalizing homosexuality anyway? Well, it turns out that I don't really have a choice, because 90% of the people around me want to make my life worse, and the option to join a gaming community with a consensus that opposes lockdowns doesn't exist.
Am I'm banging my usual drum again? Yes. But there's a point: You've given no reason why board games should have gone left to protect LGBT friends who suffered from conservative policies, instead of going right to protect the LGBT friends (hello) who suffered from progressive policies. To go even further, the entire nerdy ecosystem depends on capitalism, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly to function. It also has a bit of an obsession with everything military. All things that have (for one reason or another) clustered into Conservatism. If nerdiness is going to have a political slant, why is that slant not for it's natural ally? If anyone's going to get politically purged, then why not the Communists whose political ambitions are mostly incompatible with the continued existence of these nerdy activities?
Tophattingson
3mo ago
I think I was a bit unclear. In this case I was asking about computer games, not board games. Though I'll definitely look at some of these anyway.
Tophattingson
3mo ago
Go back far enough and the screens of concern would have indeed meant TV. But by the 'awokening', phone and computer screen time would be the concern. Either way, pg-13 was already a Warhammer thing long before 2014.
Tophattingson
3mo ago
CrowdStrike going from nothing to having such a large influence in a decade, and the background of it's founders, is enough of a weird smell that it makes me suspect regulatory capture rather than merely regulation. But I don't have anything concrete to base that hunch on.
The vaccine mandates weren't meant to do anything about covid. They were meant to punish political dissidents.
Tophattingson
3mo ago
Although I'm a dirty hex-and-counter wargamer
I've recently played some hex and counter wargames, albeit computer ones. Unity of Command 2, to be specific. But I am looking for something a little less like an elaborate chess puzzle, and not weirdly AAA-game expensive. Do you have anything you'd recommend?
Maybe it's different in the UK where GW is based and Warhammer stores themselves have a notable retail presence alongside independent stores that sell it, but I'm pretty sure Warhammer has always been PG-13, if not marketed even younger. Sure, it's stuck in a weird place where it has to combine an ultra-violent and occasionally horny setting with that, but the sales pitch to parents has always been something like: Here's a hobby that appeals to boys which is indoors, quiet, creative, doesn't involve screens, and requires some mathematics. Loiter in one of their stores for long enough and you will hear something like that pitch being given to some parents by the staff. Maybe even "like cooler airfix" (though that's so old a reference that it might only work for grandparents now). More formally, there's also this.
As an aside, I think their failure to offer brush-on primer even though it would be worse than spray primer is a mistake in this context. Sales of aerosol paints are age-restricted here. Sure, their parents can buy it, but I think some fraction of them will refuse because of the association with graffiti and hooliganism.
Tophattingson
4mo ago
I read it as adding sugar-free snacks and drinks on top her usual diet, rather than substituting for it.
Tophattingson
5mo ago
I think there's a soft plateau, where progress slows dramatically but doesn't hit zero. There are diminishing returns where putting in more processing power extracts increasingly small gains in neural network performance. For about a decade, processing power has been scaled up by both exponentially improving hardware, and exponentially chucking more resources at the problem. We can't do that forever. The latter has ran out first, as AI investment has been dropping (inevitably, it would have had to stop, it was growing faster than GDP was). Hardware will continue to get better, but now lacking the second exponent, gains will be slower. Rock's law will later slow hardware gains to a crawl for basically the same reason.
Tophattingson
5mo ago
what are you all using AI for?
After experimenting with using it to generate various forms of game content, like encounters for D&D, character backgrounds, placeholder art, all of which ended up being kinda trash... I've settled into using it as a sounding board for decision-making, because occasionally it throws out ideas that are worth investigating. This doesn't end up being much better than just asking random people, but it also means I don't have to annoy anyone by asking random people about whatever dumb idea pops into my head.
Tophattingson
5mo ago
There's about 8 years between the initial invasion and the escalation. The Winter Olympics would only be a factor for a small proportion of that period. And the main country responsible for disrupting them was China itself, with it's continued use of covid restrictions.
Tophattingson
5mo ago
I think there are parts of the war in Ukraine that are attributable to the US but they are far more near-term than the expansion of NATO. Russia was already de facto at war with Ukraine. That needs to be considered in any question, because Russia didn't start a new war in 2022, just massively escalate an existing one. Why did Russia choose that moment, instead of any other, to escalate? The most probable explanation to justify the timing is the spike in oil prices. It has since been weirdly memory-holed that the oil and gas price spike predates the escalation of the war in favour of the claim that the war triggered the spike. The cause for the spike was a long-term consequence of low investment in fossil fuel extraction due to environmental policies, and the medium-term consequence of the oil and gas glut that happened in 2020, which reduced production, slamming into the rise in consumption as economies got un-shuttered. The US, in part, is responsible for shuttering global economies in 2020. High oil and gas prices motivate Russia to make a move in two ways. First, by making sanctions more expensive to implement. Second, by providing the government a big budget surplus that might be put to use. However, judging by the initial invasion strategy (Russia basically trying to win in 3 days) that this was less intended to outright fund a war of attrition, and more intended to soothe over the costs of integrating captured territory into a victorious Russia while deterring sanctions long enough to make Russia's victory a fait accompli.
Tophattingson
5mo ago
I wonder if this series will eventually cover the Tiflis bank robbery under "thuggery", because the number of people the Bolsheviks managed to kill in a single bank robbery is quite astonishing.
Tophattingson
5mo ago
He wasn’t featured in any media or historical documentaries or video games or anything else prior to 2020.
Yasuke appears in Nioh, a 2017 game developed in Japan, as a boss. But the context to this is...
I find this impossible to take seriously. If he were that famous in Japan, surely he’d have shown up before the current mania for making visible minorities star in every piece of media made.
Yasuke is a factoid about the Sengoku period. Nioh's plot is framed around a long string of factoids about the Sengoku period. Quite similar to how Assassins Creed plots work, except with Youkai instead of Assassins and Templars. You even play as William Adams, who is another Sengoku factoid. Koei Tecmo practically specializes in games about random Sengoku factoids in general, so even having relatively obscure ones show up is not particularly notable.
Tophattingson
5mo ago
Seems like a variant on merited impossibility. Perhaps merited possibility.
"It isn't happening and if it is, it's a good thing"
"It did happen, and if it didn't, why do you care?"
Tophattingson
5mo ago
It seems to me that every single one of your arguments again places a convenient cutoff point on history.
I quite deliberately mentioned that you can keep finding earlier original wrongs. "repeat this process for pre-1948 wrongs". The point is that the origin mentioned by OP is definitely incorrect because these earlier wrongs exist.
The 1948 war was preceded by massive Jewish immigration into Palestinian lands
Massive immigration fits most of Europe and Europeans are generally not considered to be entitled to commit random acts of violence.
terrorism by armed groups representing it,
Same.
and them leveraging their ties to the international community to secure support for plans that already amounted to mass expropriations of Palestinians
The housing crisis in many major cities in Europe has this same de facto outcome.
The particular reason why Palestinians are more entitled to engage in unrestrained terror tactics than these groups is that they have been subjected to unrestrained terror tactics first and continuously.
And this would also apply to Israelis, who also believe that they were subjected to unrestrained terror tactics first and continuously. So once again we end up with no special reason why Palestinians are uniquely entitled to do this.
Tophattingson
5mo ago
Feigned ignorance of Islamist motives is approximately the official position of law enforcement in Britain so it shouldn't be too surprising for it to be widely espoused.
Coleman Hughes puts the case for the Israel beautifully in this 2 minute video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZloHekt7WLo
This is missing something important that can strengthen the case, because this is not an ad-hoc argument used exclusively for Israel-Palestine, but instead has precedent. One much stronger than analogy. Consider child soldiers. Killing children in war is wrong. Willfully killing children is a war crime. Along comes some military genius who decides that because you're not allowed to kill children, he should recruit them into the military, and use the power of their anti-child-killing war-crime-fields to make them invincible. They can shoot you. You are not allowed to shoot back. Genius.
The typical policy on this, however, is that child soldiers are offered no special protections, and that the use of child soldiers, rather than their killing, is the war crime. This is because to allow for special protections for child soldiers would act as a perverse incentive for their use, beyond the morale effects that fighting against child soldiers already has. The ideal world is one in which child soldiers get gunned down with complete indifference, just as any other soldier would be, to deter their use.
Similar must apply to a state that treats the lives of it's own civilians not just with total disregard, but as a currency that could be spent for generating sympathy. It's a perverse incentive. There's just no more direct parallel because not even some of the worst regimes in history have attempted this (and even if they tried, getting e.g. Japanese civilians blown up even more would have generated very little sympathy).
The problem with positing an "original wrong" is that the 1948 war was started by the Palestinians and their Arab allies, and subsequently they lost. So the search for an original wrong already has a wrong that came before that origin. Yes, you can arguably repeat this process for pre-1948 wrongs, but the "original wrong" you suggest is definitely not correct.
Another counterargument seems to rest on something like statute of limitations (like, the Palestinians and Israelis alive nowadays are not the ones who got robbed and their robbers), which would be more persuasive if Israeli settlements were not still expanding, and there weren't still Palestinians who are quite directly being made to suffer at the hands of the Israeli men with guns for no other reason than that they do not accept the "become Bill Gates's domestic servant" deal.
Stopping the settlers would fall far short of Palestinian aims. It has repeatedly failed to be a sufficient concession in prior peace talks. And even when tried unilaterally by Israel, made things worse, not better.
If you are continuously denied justice in an existential matter, though, I don't think it's at all an alien viewpoint that you are morally entitled to do whatever you find appropriate to seize justice for yourself, including ineffectual and vile acts of revenge such as murdering the women and children of those who wronged you. To claim otherwise, to me, seems to amount to claiming that you can be absolved for arbitrary wrongs if you just amass enough power to make effective resistance impossible, and I don't like that even before we start taking into the account that the targets of Hamas terror were intended and more often than not happy beneficiaries of the original wrongs committed.
Do you apply this principle evenly? Does it apply to Germans expelled from Eastern Europe in the aftermath of WWII, for instance? Are they entitled to carry out unrestrained acts of revenge in Western Poland in response to being expelled? And since this applies to any arbitrary wrong, as you have written it, to beat my usual drum, are victims of vaccine mandates and lockdowns entitled to carry out unrestrained non-hypothetical fedposting? Are Trump supporters wronged by being under the wrong government, as Palestinians living under Israeli rule would be, and thus entitled to fedposting? And, of course, does this apply to Israelis who are wronged by Palestinian attacks and, therefore, entitled to seize justice by committing their own revenge?
Maybe you do think this. In which case, this position is just more might makes right (despite you objecting to might makes right), using arbitrary violence instead of precise violence to try to maximize the might they can exert from the weaker position.
More likely, you do not think this. But if so, you are missing any particular reason why Palestinians are uniquely entitled to engage in unrestrained terror tactics, and I'm yet to hear a good one. If it's the degree of political repression, then the majority of the world's countries including many western countries are on the fedpost list for some form of repression or another. If it's being ruled over by the wrong ethnic group, then it's ethnostate for thee but not for me, because I am also ruled over by a Prime Minister of a different ethnicity, and I'm not entitled to kick out all the foreigners. If it's that Arabs were turfed out by Jews after they legally purchased the land from absentee Ottoman landlords, consider the ethnic makeup of London and the financial impossibility of living in London for many natives. For every justification I've heard, there's been a parallel elsewhere where any resistance was considered unthinkable, let alone random acts of terror.
Tophattingson
6mo ago
Context: Australian media and govt have been panicking about male-on-female violence for a few weeks now. We recently had a mass stabbing by a mentally ill man, who targeted mostly women. Accordingly, male on female violence has increased statistically and the government has thrown a lot of money at various NGOs.
They are going to use the tragedy to push through vaguely linked changes that they wanted to do anyway. The UK saw the same pattern happen when the government used the murder of David Amess by an Islamist to push laws seeking to censor social media even though this is completely unrelated to the circumstances of the murder.
The majority of murder victims in Australia (and most if not all other countries) are male. But men are treated as disposable, so that doesn't matter.
Tophattingson
6mo ago
The argument was incomplete. It's not the use of unrapeable in isolation that's making the threat. It's the contrast between that section and the other sections. If you made a tier list of food, put dog-kidney pie in "inedible" and all the other dog meats in the other not-inedible sections, it would imply you consider other preparations of dog meat acceptable to eat.
To draw up a situation where the courts would find someone at fault for doing like this, consider a Mafia boss writing a list containing categories like "deal with soon" and "not to be killed" and handing it to a made man. Then, a few weeks later, some of the people under "deal with soon" are dead. This would be evidence connecting the boss to the crime, even though the literal interpretation of the list is that it never listed anyone to be killed, only those to not be killed.
but treating a group of posh high school boys as if they were seriously contemplating violent rape
The reason it should fail is because the threat is non-credible, and being done in private, couldn't have been used to coerce anyone.
Further context on this is that criticism of Two-Tier policing began with the difference in how anti-Lockdown protesters were treated by the police compared to BLM protesters in 2020. To summarise, the handful of arrests at BLM protests were for sporadic violence. Other left-wing omnicause protests went unchallenged. Meanwhile, the smaller and less violent anti-Lockdown protests faced blanket arrests for violating lockdowns, which de jure criminalized all protest but de facto criminalized only anti-Lockdown protests.
There have been a number of smaller incidents over the next few years which further enflamed this criticism. The light-touch treatment of JSO, XR, and other environmentalist protesters who sought to commit vandalism, often getting justified in the mainstream on the basis that "climate emergency" justifies unrestrained criminality, was compared to how government media and politicians treated anti-ULEZ protesters. Another was buffer zones around abortion centres outlawing forms of protest as mild as silently praying.
Then then escalated in 2023, where the Israel-Gaza conflict meant that there were constant protests that, in theory, violated the UK's extremely broad anti-terrorism laws, but were met with milquetoast police response. When a counter-protest to these was organised in November 2023, and met by a violent police response, the charge of two-tier policing escalated to the point where a minister was sacked for criticising the police over it. Further incidents, like police going after a Jewish man for being "Visibly Jewish" near protesters, only made it worse.
Edit: And this all takes place in a context that the police have increasingly failed to police crime in general..
The "moderate" explanation for why these events keep happening is that the police are trying to placate a violent mob over permitting peaceful protesters because their goal is to keep the peace, and keeping the peace takes precedent over fairness even when it means arresting innocent bystanders instead of violent mobs. The lesson some people will take from this is that the most violent group wins. Therefore, they should become more violent so that they become the mob that the police have to placate instead. Unfortunately, this lesson is wrong, because the actual explanation for these events is that being left-wing puts you above the law and being right-wing puts you beneath it.
Today, the counter-protesters and the police will argue that they are standing against racism. They are wrong. For the last 9 months, they have either participated in, or been complicit in, their own forms of racism. Forms that the current British government finds more acceptable to it's tastes
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