Gugabe
2yr ago
Yes but the political events are sufficiently spaced & he's now got sufficient capture of the audience that there's no real advantage to him in putting his status to any real test.
Gugabe
2yr ago
Yeah but question becomes exactly what the associated cultural rituals were.
It's one thing if the person opted into it of their own freewill/preference, but there's sufficient quasi-Eunuch 'trans' traditions that I wouldn't really consider to be anything like modern conceptions of free sexual identification
Gugabe
2yr ago
Still by virtue of it being a very small number, you'd imagine it'd have changed hands a bunch unless he's literally only the 7th person to hold the post since the secret service debuted.
Gugabe
2yr ago
Amusingly there were some critical articles released around the last season claiming that the show was ‘whitewashing’ the British Empire. I suppose it kind of does, in that if you were a random western teenager with little knowledge of history the Empire portrayed and suggested at on the show seems like a much more modern, tolerant and DEI-affirming multicultural polity (at least from the perspective of the metropole) than it actually was.
I mean how can they simultaneously diversity-cast historically-set media whilst not whitewashing the lack of diversity?
Gugabe
2yr ago
Honestly I'm confused why a bolt gun or some sort of pneumatic guillotine isn't used. Latter is literally impossible to fuck up if you put enough PSI behind a heavy enough blade.
Gugabe
2yr ago
covid was a very minor plague in comparison
As an actual disease, sure. In terms of economic, lifestyle and cultural consequences I'd argue it got inflated into one of the biggest ever
Gugabe
2yr ago
I'm prettymuch in agreement about the karaoke period. Then again it raises the question of the amount of medication and care going into sustaining said karaoke period.
Gugabe
2yr ago
Then again, we don't have anything like the Villages, so perhaps there is a much shorter distance to fall.
Arguably parts of Spain & Portugal were essentially the Villages pre-Brexit
Gugabe
2yr ago
The issue is more the healthcare system than retirement itself. Spending obscene amounts of money to tack on an extra year or two of life at the end, generally with awful quality, is what's really contributing to unsustainability.
Gugabe
2yr ago
In Australia, the first pensions were introduced in 1900 for 65 year olds. It seems weird that the cutoff's only drifted by 2 years in the time since.
Gugabe
2yr ago
I mean it's hard to phrase it palatably, especially when the majority of democracies have huge, strong voting blocs of the elderly... but modern conceptions of state-funded retirement just don't really mesh with any economic or societal sensibility.
Retiring at 60 from a life of hard labor when you had a life expectancy of 70ish and end-of-life care was more palliative and less 'here is 98% of your lifetime healthcare spending in order to eke out another 6 months of nil life quality' combine it with the majority of jobs becoming increasingly vague laptop sinecures with little-to-no coherent output and the whole 'I earned my retirement on the public purse' thing is also getting odd.
Gugabe
2yr ago
Different optics on the justice system just failing to do its job initially versus actively pardoning people, IMO.
Gugabe
2yr ago
you're so right wing that you can't possibly stay in the closet about it, it would be too obvious, which regardless of your politics isn't a good look, and quite likely maps onto something like "superfascist" anyway.
Agreed the more I think about it. Having enough social awareness to just tick 'Left' on the politics box and 'hide your power level' is a key stumbling block, and also confirms that you're less likely to be a complete pastiche of a raving QAnon-type or whatever overtly, regardless of what your true beliefs are.
In my dating apps experience, putting anything other than 'left' in politics was putting the difficulty on Very Hard.
Which is funny since like 99% of the time in actually matching/talking/meeting girls their own political beliefs were like 60th percentile Left or it just didn't come up.
I feel like on dating apps there's a certain Strawmanization of political spectrum where 'Right = Super fascist' and 'Moderate/Apolitical/whatever = Hiding Super Fascist'. Like how hard is it to just avoid talking about politics for a couple dates until there's enough of a rapport to actually countenance a conversation.
Gugabe
2yr ago
But on the other hand, if even a few percent of 6,300 nuclear weapons work, that's still a lot of nuclear strikes. So let's not be too brave about denouncing their arsenal.
I mean that's really the core point, especially since there's a difference in failure between 'Their nukes are good to a 100KM radius not a 10KM radius' or other stuff that's gonna not really change the core calculus
Gugabe
2yr ago
It generally makes it difficult lines to tread. I'm in a management position, and feel like I can be a lot more hands-on and mentoring with my male graduates/juniors than I can with females. Not that there's anything wrong with the latter, but even a small % chance of it being a career/financial/reputational landmine means I've gotta be cautious.
Gugabe
2yr ago
The teacher example's got a lot to do with the proximity to the age of consent, though?
Then again I'd feel differently about like 3 different hypothetical situations of
50-something CEO sleeping with fresh, 20 year old Intern in first real job
30-something middle manager sleeping with mid-twenties graduate who is their direct report
40-something senior middle manager sleeping with middler middle manager who's also in their 40s.
Gugabe
2yr ago
Anything resembling lockdowns, mask-wearing during any sort of physical activity or absurd location like a restaurant.
Gugabe
2yr ago
Yeah. I mean worse players have managed to ride the pine for a couple seasons, but a combination of him being super-specialized and outspoken meant that he probably lost out on that kind of role.
Gugabe
2yr ago
My take on this has always been that there'll be some skewering movie that comes out in 5-10 years about this period, and it'll mark the quiet transition of intelligentsia opinion into a 'Iraq WMDs' kind of an issue in which everybody pretends they secretly didn't believe all along.
Gugabe
2yr ago
Oh I'm gonna take the RAT test as a respect to their cultural beliefs but the fact that it's even a conversation is amazing to me.
Gugabe
2yr ago
Honestly it's shocking how sticky some of this stuff is, even if the vast majority of people have just moved on with their lives.
Got asked to take a RAT test to attend a 29th birthday celebration in which nobody is immunocompromised or over 30. Some people just seem to want to live in COVID zero mode forever.
Israeli identity a bit weird since the nature of their citizenship means that it's relatively easy to flip between being Israeli foremost & being a citizen of another state foremost depending on your advantage.
Also large population of ultra-orthodox who don't really do anything productive economically.
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