crushedoranges
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User ID: 111
crushedoranges
5d ago
'Performative' is the fig leaf that liberals use to distinguish good theory from bad praxis. In practice, however, it is a nuance without a difference, given that liberalism has no defense against bad actors from the left. We know this to be true because of spectacular tactical victories on part of activists and 'the groups' to impose their views on (charitably) good-meaning and agreeable people.
Let me give you my definition: wokeness is the barely-disguised will to power through the soft and feminine language of slave morality. It exults the weak and marginalized to the height of society, to right historical wrongs. That is the 'social justice' part. The 'woke' part comes from the conspiratorial assertions that the dominant racial group in the West (white, male people) have been systematically keeping the marginalized out of power and that it is fundamentally imbedded into every aspect of society.
This concept is called 'white supremacy.'
Therefore, every effort must be made to make society 'woke', to advantage minorities, ethnic and sexual, within the system to counteract the inherent bias of the institutions. Although this definition will be fiercely contested by its own proponents - they are self-aware enough that the programme is wildly unpopular - one defines things by its outcomes, by its real-world impacts. Definitional word games do not change the fundamental power-seeking, inquisitorial drive of the movement. Individually the elements that compose it may not be novel but it is the combination of these elements that make 'woke' what it is.
crushedoranges
7d ago
"The Left" seemingly can. Who's really in charge of the Biden administration? Whenever I bring up this point, a common rejoinder is that I'm electing his team as well as him. There's an endless train of whataboutisms: nothing is particularly heinous or egregious.
crushedoranges
10d ago
That may indeed be possible but I try and keep personal motivations out of analysis as much as I can. Not that he can't be morally disgusted (and indeed, most people should be) but since it is impossible to debate the personal beliefs of someone I do not personally know, I don't usually comment on it.
I am aware that assigning political motivations to things that public figures do can come off as conspiratorial and uncharitable at times. I didn't mean to imply that he was some sort of Machiavellian figure. I'm just attempting to analyze it through a realpolitik lens - which, indeed, diminishes the personal.
crushedoranges
11d ago
I immediately demand a referendum for unification with the fatherland: Canada is and always will be American. The anschluss of Canada will be to the benefit of both parties and amend the crime of the Treaty of Paris.
crushedoranges
11d ago
Elon is attempting to re-establish Right Wing bonafides and embarassing Starmer and the UK establishment is risk-free. Everyone knows Britain ultimately follows the American direction and Trump doesn't give a shit about UK-US relations: not after Labor sent staffers to campaign against him.
crushedoranges
18d ago
I get the feeling that a lot of H1Bs just want to make their bag and go home: Vivek is pissed that not only that he's being treated as new money (because, well, he is) that he's also not getting any respect for being an Indian. Sundar and Nadella may be CEOs of American tech companies but he might as well be a Level 1 IT call center man for all the difference it makes to the average American.
And that's the rub. He wants respect and status, but you can't get that by sneering at the natives. Complaining about the football quarterback that goes home to fuck the prom queen outs you as a particular kind of nerd.
crushedoranges
19d ago
And in the long run, we're all dead.
There's a prejudice by the Extremely Rationalist towards long time preference that goes way too far, and at its most unflattering can be said to be variants of 'how does this effect you personally?' It papers over the important questions - what is a nation, and its peoples?
You could say the same thing about anthropogenic global warming. But people aren't saying the issue isn't very important in the long run. In fact, they're overreacting. Meanwhile, mass migration by neoliberalism is creating a crisis of the social democracies that is very much going on as we speak, having immediate effects on the daily lives of everyone in the West.
In the end, there is no great list of Priority Issues of which must be tackled in order. A great deal of people care about this and it can't just be handwaved away to Providence. The fact that the economic and academic elite are downplaying it makes it all the more important that it be addressed. Issues with elite support don't need apologia on our part: they have plenty of support from the institutions themselves.
Fetuses can't be leftists, yes. This is why I love them.
(You can borrow this response, if you'd like. Chad face gif is optional.)
As a refrain to my own banning, I'd like to say that the sentiment I am rebutting is similarly devoid of value: intersectional bundling of leftist causes does not impress me. In short, it is essentially saying: "Why do you care so much about this, huh? How does this personally affect you, when the world bleeds so much?"
No, I won't approve of them killing their own children in the womb. No matter how much things may suck in the real world. Things will always suck. There will always be injustice for them to point at, to try and shame me into not caring. A giant meteor could be coming to wipe us out like the dinosaurs and I'll still keep caring about the issue in exactly the same way.
The pastor may see it as 'throwing it under the bus', but I prefer to see it as a 'sincerely held belief'.
Are you a Civ multiplayer person? I think that probably explains it. Civ multiplayer is just so different of a game from Civ single-player that it's impossible to talk about the subject without mentioning the elephant in the room.
I play GSG-type games as single-player experiences. (Mostly because my internet was dogshit for the longest time.) And, in my experience, the Civ AI has always been dogshit, unable to comprehend the multivariate functions of its own systems.
IT VERY WELL MAY BE TRUE that those elements are present in Civ 4. I never got to experience them properly. I concede the point that the Civ 4 combat is not as two-dimensional as my hot take would imply but the game itself does a bad job of demonstrating it for the player. EU4 also has very bad AI, but the cheating is in such a matter that it has the pretense of emulating skillful play, and not just modifiers given to the AI just because.
(Yes, I know the AI gets buffs in Paradox games. But the buffs in Civ are much, much larger comparatively, to compensate for a lack of historicity and other railroady mechanics.)
The base game of CIV is piss easy, even on Deity: the AI is too incompetent and cowardly for the job of containing the player without obviously ganging up against him. You don't need to know any of that to win single player civ (although it will make your game go faster.) But that's not even the worst part of it!
The inability of players falling behind to catch up means that in Civ games, there is an obvious winner very early on, deincentivizing participation in casual play and ensuring a negative experience for the majority of players. This is the real reason why Civ sucks. No matter how clever you are tactically and keeping all of those modifiers in mind, the bigger blob will always win. I'm not going to fight to the bitter end for days for a predestined conclusion: I'm just going to quit before the birth of Christ.
crushedoranges
29d ago
Death stacking is a derogatory term for a common theme in GSGs and RTSes that the best strategy to beat the AI is just to have a huge blob of units that overruns one's enemy like a horde of ants eating a hot dog. The idea is that games should heavily discourage this beginner strategy. It reduces the complexity of systems to whoever has more units will win.
Although there's a lot of merit in what you say, microing dozens, if not hundreds of units in the late game - in a turn-based strategy game like CIV - is a huge pain in the ass. It's not fun. It may be more 'realistic', but games like EU4 and HOI4 do it better. CIV's combat usually amounts to out-producing one's enemy rather than elaborate strategic maneuvers, which is fine, but let's not pretend the IV combat system was deep or anything. It wasn't. It was the garnish on top of a city manager.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
Scargill and the like had toppled a labour government: humiliating the PM at the time and dragging the country into a standstill. I would focus on Thatcher's predecessors (Callaghan, Wilson) as she was largely a reaction to their failed policy. If unions will sabotage the pro-Labor party, there's no point in government negotiating with them. By the time Thatcher came to be the public wanted the government to destroy the power of the unions and once that was accomplished they dispensed of her for more amiable neoliberal money-men: she was just the hatchet-man.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
American healthcare is also insidious in that A) emergency care is mandated to to administered, regardless of circumstances and B) if the patient can't pay for their emergency care, then the provider eats the costs.
For SOME reason, Americans can't do the math and realize that this means that paying customers are charged more, and that's why their ER rooms are over-capacity from being used as a universal health service.
To fix healthcare costs, either emergency care is paid for by the state - or emergency care is not administered to those who can't pay.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
Before I address the essential thrust of your argument, I would like to state that although many people say that Martin's work is morally complex, I believe that it is not true. To say that 'war is bad' is a rhetorical tool is comic over-exaggeration. In truth, I believe that his work is not even strong enough to state such a thing definitively. That is the nihilism of which people speak. There is no message. Things happen. There is no meaning in the cruelty and goodness of these characters: it might as well not have been written. Their deeds don't effect the world. At times, they hardly effect themselves.
It is an exhausting and alienating element of which detracts from the work as a whole.
And that is the fly in the ointment. You can get away with things happen (that's what slice of life is all about, after all.) If the characters are compelling and interesting enough, you can get away with it. But he has slaughtered his best characters and introduced new ones which also meander around, and in an even less interesting fashion. The Dornish characters, Quentyn and Arriane, exemplify the issue the best. Brienne of Tarth wanders around in a futile quest looking for a girl who we know isn't there... Sansa cools her heels observing intrigues that strain the memory to remember.
Perhaps this is more realistic. But he has gone too far. He has deconstructed not just his predecessors, but his own story, and he is unable to put together his magnum opus. If the true quality of stories is the human heart in conflict with itself. then why does his later books make me feel nothing? Why do I feel bored? Why should I give a damn about his silly characters if they do things that change nothing?
Martin's characters are hypoagentic: the plot (read: his notional outline that grows increasingly distorted as characters spin their wheels, waiting for their cue) drives them where they need to go. They have no volition of their own, they are constantly driven by circumstances beyond their control. Neither heroes or villains, just people... perhaps a poignant philosophical point, but terrible for a coherent narrative. He looks into the abyss and sees in it reflected his own helplessness and lack of meaning.
There is nothing romantic about that.
This is a good essay, albeit, one that I disagree with vehemently, so I will attempt to rebut concisely and with the most gentle of rebukes.
If the sum of his contribution to the fantasy genre is that 'it's more complicated then that' and shades of grey, I'd reply: 'no shit'. He muddles... in a very liberal kind of way. In a way that does not add clarity, but obfuscates. In the way Samwell Tarly (his favorite character and probable authorial stand-in) is. Feast for Crows is him saying 'war is bad'. No shit! Don Quixote tilting at windmills. You mean to tell me that this author who desires to add nuance to the fantasy genre, comes up with the moral... war is bad'. Is his target audience literally children? Are they morons? Are they liberals?
He doesn't have to tell us that the world is full of piss and shit and cum and tax returns, we know that. There is a genre of Japanese novel, of which is called pillow books, which can be best summed up as... things happen. Things happen, in his underedited, over-bloated work, but nothing much of consequence actually occurs. (This is mostly talking about 4 and 5, rather than 1-3.) Contrast it to his own work - the Dunk and Egg novels, which are superior, which reiterate the core themes of ASOIAF - because they are short stories, and they are not allowed to meander into irrelevancy where things just Happen. They have plots.
To sum it all up (and to not be hypocritical about brevity being the soul of wit) if you're going to write a fantasy epic that is very long, write the transcendental and heroic. If you're going to be an indulgent ride where bad people do horrible things to worse individuals (Black Company is very fun) admit it. There's nothing wrong with that kind of writing. It's unpretentious. Don't be a fat fraud, a stammering pussy, and write about sex and gore and baby-smashing and then waggle your finger at the reader with liberal platitudes.
If Martin was honest about his anti-war and feminist beliefs, he would have written Vinland Saga, but he didn't. He chose to write this. And yes - we can judge him for it. He certainly doesn't hold back with his political opinions. He should extend his audience the same courtesy. But he doesn't. I think that sums it up very nicely.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
I don't care what others think, I like Kaladin and I will fight you to the death in defence of his wholesome bridgemen.
But I will agree in part that Sanderson does not know how to write a convincing heterosexual relationship. I suppose it would be too much to ask a Mormon to write erotica. But then again, Meyers of Twilight fame can do it, why can't he?
crushedoranges
1mo ago
I am not sure what he is specifically speaking of, but the French are in debt to the tune of 130% of GDP and are constrained by EU regulations which forbid the country from deficit spending. (They can't devalue the Euro and they can't increase the ratio any further.) Hence, budget cuts... which are despised on both the far left and the far right.
If France - one of the core members of the EU - is in trouble, then normally it would be Germany who would shoulder the burden. But in this case, Germany is in trouble too. So there's no help from them. France is more likely to have a revolution than dismantling its own welfare state... if the EU bureaucrats attempt to enforce a decision made by the troika (EC, ECB, IMF) then the French people will burn down the country. Three-way civil war.
If they don't, and do the pragmatic thing and give France an exemption, then the entire EU will ask for exemptions as well. Either way: doom.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
It's always acceptable to bully intellectuals. If there was a French chad in the 1970s who called Foucault a fag and exposed him as a homosexual pederast, then the modern world would be much more tolerable.
If Carl wasn't called the soyfather by some internet frog, he probably would have written a well-received, New York Times best selling 'How It's Based To Marry Single Moms and Raise Another Man's Child." Intellectualism is not an end of itself: you get off once you reach the desired destination.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
I would attribute that to the population getting older in general. City life, and its progressive paeans, are more attractive to the young who seek opportunity and change. They are willing to tolerate things like noisy neighbors and the homeless because they are willing to bear that burden, even if it annoys them privately. The old and those with families wish for the reverse and move away to where they can get away from that within their financial means.
It very well may be that the blues diminish because their societal bedrocks self-select and become redder in the bargain.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
No.
But only because my answer to all calls for empathy, unbidden and spontaneous, is no. I'm not going to participate in the hyperreal fixations of others. Nor am I going to be coerced into accepting the implicit axioms such worldviews come with.
Others may support you. I will not.
crushedoranges
2mo ago
They tried this when Musk first bought Twitter with Facebook-backed Threads. It didn't work out, mostly because the people just weren't there. Network effects are very powerful. I haven't heard anything from it since.
Truth Social, Gab, Mastodon and the like are also-rans. I suspect Blue Sky will be the same.
crushedoranges
2mo ago
I think the big benefit of autonomous cars is that they are both a taxi and a valet service in one. Your car drives you to your desired place of work (for simplicity we assume the hypothetical person works in the downtown core.) It then shuttles itself off into a place where space is cheap, to charge itself. Perhaps in an old industrial zone. When its owner gets off work, it dutifully begins to make its way ahead of time, travelling in packs of five or ten.
Because there is no need for a steering column, the interior of a autonomous vehicle can be structured in a radically different fashion. The interior can be made much more luxurious, especially if it is for a single occupant! Since it's going to have an internet connection anyway, there's no reason not to do it up like a office, or put in a bed if desired. And when it drops off its occupant, it goes to another warehouse to charge. The convenience factor of not having to negotiate two permanent parking spots in a major metropolitan area is extremely high.
The increase in commute time could be greatly mitigated by the comfort factor, in my opinion.
crushedoranges
2mo ago
I apologize, I wasn't making an argument of 'the most effective thing to do.' I agree, making a martyr of him would be grossly unproductive for the people on the left. But you can't peacefully transfer power to Hitler. You can't peacefully protest a Hitler. Leftist rhetoric is begging for armed resistance that can never happen. They made such a big deal out of it. Now they look like so very weak and shrill.
Their self-perceived Hitler arose, and they are unable to stop him. What a pathetic display.
crushedoranges
2mo ago
Well, certainly not the liberals.
There's a popular conservative cliche: the ballot box or the bullet box. It's chest-puffy masculine bravado, but something completely lacking in their enemies.
Right now, the political left is awakening to the fact that their leaders are not only gaslighting liars, but spineless collaborators to a man they see as Hitler. There are no riots in the cities, no drama or fervor. Exhaustion.
At least the January 6th people showed up. I doubt this time around the left will muster any sort of response. There's no stomach to oppose him anymore. It ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper.
I'm not going to play the whataboutism game.
Did some people call Biden Hitler? (given reducto ad Hitlerlum, probably.) But Trump didn't call Biden Hitler. He didn't tell his followers that they were going to be put into camps and there was going to be a genocide. That's crossing-the-rubicon rhetoric.
You could say that 'stolen election' is that kind of rhetoric, too... but unlike so many, I have memories of the year two thousand of our lord when the Democrats thought Bush stole the election. Nothing happened to the American Republic. Life continued as normal.
If he is actually Hitler - and a minority of people seem to believe this with all their heart - then peacefully transferring power to him is what a cuck would do. Either that, or they never really meant it. That's all what I mean.
In my future utopia the age of consent for women will be 36 and the age of consent for men will be 12. Future generations of men will thank me for hagmaxxing.
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