ABigGuy4U
19hr ago
The Pakistani defense minister was also spouting off about how a “limited nuclear exchange” couldn’t be ruled out.
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
To be fair, ignoring what the author thought they were saying, and overanalyzing what actually ended up on the page or screen is a big part of any kind of literary or film criticism.
I saw the characters less as any kind of generational warfare commentary and more as archetypes of the people who tend to play Minecraft. You have:
-(Steve) People who see Minecraft less as a game, and more as an open-ended artistic outlet. The types you see in the YouTube compilations of complicated sculptures, nifty machines and giant architectural projects.
-(Garret) Serious “hardcore” gamers who play Minecraft in addition to hundreds of other games.
-(Dawn) Normie casuals who mostly enjoy Minecraft for the cute aesthetics
-(Henry and Natalie) Children, and people who recently played Minecraft as children and are now entering young adulthood.
India has just attacked three Pakistani army bases near the Kashmir region with missiles. There are some indications that power infrastructure in a Pakistani town was targeted as well. Troops are also clashing along the line of contact. This is as far as I know the biggest escalation in the region since the Kargil war. If this were any other two nuclear powers the world would be on a state of panic now. What are the culture war implications of a full scale nuclear war in South Asia?
UPDATE Unconfirmed reports that Pakistan is carrying out a military response, including air strikes on Indian bases in Kashmir.
UPDATE Pakistani Prime Minister has confirmed ongoing Pakistani military response. Heavy gunfire, artillery and air strikes heard on live feeds along the line of control on Kashmir
UPDATE Multiple Pakistani news outlets claim that Pakistan has shot down two Indian Rafael fighter jets. Some Indian news agencies are now reporting that a jet was downed.
UPDATE: Second round of missile strikes in the early hours of May 8. Sources confirm that the aerial engagement yesterday that caused the loss of 2-5 aircraft had over 125 fighter jets from both sides involved.
I think you and @RenOS are using a much finer-grained and overly academic definition of “larp” than what most people are using when they accuse someone of being a “trad-larper”. When they say that they mean the accused larper is more interested in making a fashion statement and isn’t really that committed to the ideology in question. For example, nobody is looking at ISIS and saying “well technically those guys are all just larping because the original chain of tradition between themselves and 7th century Islam was broken by 400 years of Ottoman rule and nobody decided to RETVRN to Sunni traditionalist interpretations until the Wahabbists in the late 18th century”
ABigGuy4U
4d ago
Well the joke with Johnny Bravo is that for most of his life he was a scrawny unattractive nerd, and though he finally hit his growth spurt and got big and handsome he still internally struggles with a lack of confidence and doesn’t really know how to behave around women. Which actually has a lot of relevance to the self-improver type OP talks about in his post.
ABigGuy4U
5d ago
That’s already a thing on YouTube to try and get views. Various politically charged incidents supposedly occurring in various classrooms across America, then someone on 4chan happened to notice that they all seemed to be occurring in the exact same classroom, and only the participants changed.
ABigGuy4U
6d ago
European NATO doesn't have more of everything except nukes.
They definitely don’t have more of those. Europe without America has about 500 nuclear warheads. Russia has 4500. Even keeping back a lot to point at the US they could easily double the EU’s.
ABigGuy4U
6d ago
Also just prosaic stuff like small arms, bullets, vehicle replacement parts, tires and gasoline. A big part of the reason for the complete collapse of the German Army in 1945 was that you had entire surviving units going combat ineffective because they couldn’t operate their vehicles and had no guns or bullets to shoot them with.
The three major restrictions America is placing on Ukrainian rules of engagement are:
(1) Attempting to kill Putin or very high level Russian government officials using American weaponry. This is the type of thing that could provoke in-kind retaliation against US government officials or other drastic retaliation measures. It is rumored that the US government was informed by the FSB of an attempted assassination of Putin just a few days before it was to be carried out and had to scramble to tell Ukraine to stop it. This was actually reported on in mainstream news media six months or a year ago.
(2) Actions designed to threaten or disable Russia’s strategic nuclear capabilities. Again, this actually happened, the Ukrainians used a NATO supplied missile to destroy a Russian ICBM early warning radar installation, a strike that has no inherent strategic value to Ukraine.
(3) Actions that would hurt Russia and are strategically valuable to Ukraine but would collaterally cause the collapse of the European or global economy. This is why the strikes on oil infrastructure got throttled back, Europe is still using a lot of Russian oil and gas and they can’t just go cold turkey on it.
ABigGuy4U
7d ago
So again the AI put totally false words into somebody's mouth and you apologists are defending it.
It’s not our fault that AI generated slop-Walz is just as serviceably mediocre as the real thing.
ABigGuy4U
7d ago
Especially given that digging into the Lockerbie bombing shows a lot of weird stuff as to the provenance of the attack.
ABigGuy4U
7d ago
That election is reason both parties are so afraid of contested conventions. The Democrats came out of that with George McGovern, who got absolutely wiped out in one of the biggest electoral landslides in American history. After that, both parties quietly decided that candidate selection was too important to be left to the voters.
That's how I see that going. Someone sanity-check me.
I think you are mostly right, but I think the structure of the machine you’re describing is a bit different. It’s not a linear chain coming down from the White House, and the White House isn’t the one controlling it. For foreign policy, the locus of control is the State Department and CIA (but I repeat myself) and then other entities emanate out from that locus like spokes on a wheel.
So in your hypothetical, some group deep within the State Department looks at the numbers and maps and decides that conquering Ecuador is vital to America’s geopolitical interests. Suddenly, the President starts getting alarming security briefings about Ecuadorian weapons of mass destruction and imminent Ecuadorian aggression. The media gets their marching orders and starts running two articles a day about how the Ecuadorian President might actually be Satan. The NPCs take the lead from the both the White House and media and pretty soon you have people burning Ecuadorian flags on the street and demanding war.
The second thing is that the October 7 attack and the subsequent invasion of Gaza is the first major hiccup in the machine, where the gears seized up and the NPCs in the colleges and on the streets didn’t perfectly spin along with their state department orders. That might just be a one off thing. Israel-Palestine had been a culture war issue for over half a century, and people had much more baked-in preexisting opinions about it than they ever did about Ukraine or Iraq. So it was significantly harder to just beam their NPC programming right into their heads and send them off. But it could also be a sign that the control machine is just generally breaking down. I have a theory that the fervor over the Ukraine War was supposed to be a whole-of-society thing in America, not just a center left neoliberal cause celebre. It’s just that the programming ended up being rejected by large sections of the American populace. I see evidence of that and I keep meaning to make a post about it.
Chris Langan is a college dropout turned nightclub bouncer and part-time rancher. He received some negative media attention due to his negative opinions toward interracial marriage and his endorsement of some loopy and questionably antisemitic conspiracy theories. He is also possibly the smartest man currently living on the planet with a (disputed) measured IQ of 174.
ABigGuy4U
9d ago
Taiwan is a democracy full of Han Chinese
Taiwan is undergoing its own ethnic speciation event. Increasingly, if you were to call a Taiwanese person “ethnically Han Chinese” they would bristle in the same way a Ukrainian would if you called them Russian. That’s part of what’s leading to some of the friction between the KMT and some of the other parties.
I wouldn’t necessarily say that their assessment of Pakistan was wrong. They knew Pakistan was unstable and unreliable, but it was a much better option to keep Pakistan a nominal ally and de facto neutral, then to let them tip over into being an adversary.
ABigGuy4U
9d ago
I think it can be difficult for Americans to understand, because in the immortal words of a great hero, “you have big ocean”. Unlike Russia or China, America has basically never faced an existential foreign threat since the Revolution. It’s only existential crisis since then was a civil war, and barring a nuclear conflict its only potential future existential crisis is a civil war. Even the Revolution was a form of civil conflict. Because of that, Americans don’t really have that deep gnawing insecure feeling of “I need to keep my borders secure lest the Mongels/French/Nazis/Japanese rape and pillage my homeland.”
This is a bit tangential to your actual question, but it’s a point I’ve never had the opportunity to bring up here. People forget the extreme degree to which Detective Mark Furhman wrecked the prosecution’s case. It’s often remembered and reported that he took the Fifth Amendment when he was cross-examined, but no one talks about the fact that he took the Fifth when asked if he planted evidence in that specific case. That’s huge. It’s a giant red flag to the jury when the lead murder detective won’t answer whether he literally framed the defendant. Now I suspect OJ actually did do it, and that Furhman was just paranoid about his already looming perjury charges and was just Fifth Amendment-ing everything. Or maybe he engaged in some fairly standard (at the time) touching up of the scene to strengthen the case, like moving the glove to a more incriminating location in the alley, or daubing some of the victim’s blood onto OJ’s Bronco. But if I was a juror, the fact that the lead detective can’t say whether he planted evidence is pretty much already enough reasonable doubt for me to acquit. And when you keep that in mind, a lot of Cochran’s loopier theories about preservatives in the blood samples and the glove not fitting suddenly start to sound a lot more plausible and carry a lot more weight. Please keep that in mind before thinking of the jury as a bunch of dumbasses.
Also I highly recommend Season 3 about the Monica Lewinsky scandal, I thought it was very underrated. Clive Owen should have won an Emmy for playing Bill Clinton, that’s a role that’s very difficult to play without turning it into a Saturday Night Live sketch. And Beany Feldstien might initially seem like poor casting for Lewinsky but she does an amazing job.
ABigGuy4U
9d ago
Take Noble House by James Clavell as an example.
It’s funny you mention that, I just recently watched the miniseries adaptation with Pierce Brosnan. The TV version is pure 80s soap opera cheese, but also a very interesting look at a time and place that no longer exist.
ABigGuy4U
10d ago
So skeptical, in fact, that I tend to think there's an ulterior motive
It’s the same “legalize another 20 million illegal immigrants and then we’ll stop illegal immigration, we promise :^)” song and dance that Democrats have been doing since the era of Ronald Reagan. The first part always happens and then second never seems to materialize. That in turn incentivizes millions more illegal immigrants because they figure that if they can hang on long enough they will eventually get citizenship.
And even the most-ironclad, loophole free law you can write is useless if the administration isn’t going to enforce it.
ABigGuy4U
10d ago
Nerve agents are technically a WMD, and cyberattacks technically aren’t. But crippling an entire nation for weeks, causing billions of dollars in economic damage and probably hundreds of connected follow-on deaths is a lot closer in effect to a WMD than poisoning one guy in a restaurant.
ABigGuy4U
10d ago
Also it allows you to demonstrate that you can hit NATO generally, while demonstrating that on a rather timid non-central NATO member, and not one that would blow their top and massively escalate hostilities in response. Like France or the United Kingdom. @MadMonzer
Kek. Yeah everyone remembers Stalin’s cold command and rule by fear, but he would have never been able to do that if he hadn’t spent most of the twenties rules-lawyering the Communist Party bylaws.
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