gattsuru
5hr ago
Mostly got small or useful stuff, some art prints, some handheld tool batteries, a few gift cards. All appreciated, but not really interesting. The real toy one was Project Silverfish, kinda a S.T.A.L.K.E.R.-like with graphics by the way of The Witness (cw: furry scaly inheritors of humanity). It's astoundingly unforgiving and still in beta, but been pretty enjoyable if you don't mind the occasional getting domed by a patrol from a faction you didn't even realize was on the current map.
Gave the SO a new monitor - OLEDs really are amazing and have come down a lot in price - and seems to be serving okay, though only after purchasing it found that the 'adjustable stand' was really just five degrees and an absolutely zero vertical control.
Most of the other gifts to family or friends are pretty unexciting. I've got access to a sublimation printer and some weirder-shaped heat tools, so replacing damaged or badly-faded and no-longer-manufactured coffee mugs or other easy-to-find blanks is a fun parlor trick, especially now that post-processing tools (AI or otherwise) have gotten so good, but most of them won't have any meaning outside of the recipient.
Uh, helped a coworker get his daughter and son-in-law some desktops together, which was a lot more !!fun!! than expected given current RAM pricing. I was able to pull some tricks to get them 32 GB each without paying a kidney, but wow that entire thing was a mess.
gattsuru
2d ago
This is probably something that's just inaccessible to me, but would that really solve that many people's discomfort? If biological role means reproduction, I can give examples of people who'd be happier if they could knock someone else up by scissoring hard enough, but the latter is one of the rarest kinks I've ever seen. Guys who'd want female reproductive organs and get knocked up are more common... and still one of the central examples of kinks most straight guys are extremely uncomfortable with.
If it's something about muscles or hunter/gatherer breakdown, that seems less likely to directly squick, but more likely to just not have a lot of people care and a few people really care.
gattsuru
2d ago
The original essay is available online. I get that you're trying to reject its assumptions, but I don't think you're really succeeding at it so much as arguing over definitions.
If we replace the Ranma or Ozy's thought experiment instead with "how would you react if a mad-but-exceptionally-skilled plastic surgeon kidnapped you and gave you the exact outside appearance and vocal patterns of the opposite gender, without messing with your gonads, menses, yada yada; we'll call the population that had this done to them momen and sound like a bad scifi flick, they're tots not women-in-your-specific-sense", and one half of the subject population immediately slit their own throat, and the other half got slightly annoyed about having to replace their wardrobe and learn how bras work, it'd be compatible with your claim and Ozy's.
At least some of the sameness of AI writing reflects misuse or unfamiliarity with the tools, rather than a deeper problem with the technology itself. It's not hard to give different flavors to different characters. It actually takes some effort to avoid going too hard on it. Completely avoiding the dread em-dash requires a bit more effort, and keeping a world consistent requires a decent (set of) lore bibles, but it's definitely possible and a bit easier than building and keeping coherent a more serious effort by human writers. The more complete your lore bible, the more the LLM can give the appearance of talking about a consistent world.
It still needs human review -- I left in a prompt for the foxman merchant version that has a logical error with a pronoun, and did regen one response for the hedge mage that had a sentence structure error giving bear tails a claw -- but that's a lot faster than manual writing even for that.
gattsuru
3d ago
Silverhand is canonically a practicing bisexual, but it only comes up if you go into a gay bar to start with. Reeves has worked that sorta blue more overtly in the past, with My Own Private Idaho, but he's also played a lot of bi-or-gay-in-other-media characters that dropped the theme in translation, most notoriously with the in-name-only Constantine film.
gattsuru
3d ago
"Cis-by-default" is trying to motion toward the difference between the sort of straight guy who'd react to a Ranma'ing by poking his own breasts and giggling for three hours straight, and the sort who'd immediately douse their head in boiling water. (To turn back into a man, right?)
Ozy originally had a poll from somewhere saying some sizable number of men in that situation claimed that they'd go full suicidal, but I can't find it or any real references to it, so I can't look back at how well-designed it was, and even the summary had a lot of questions unanswered about how performative that claim was. But from a revealed preferences sense, you do get a lot of similar outputs: most obvious in smut where some fraction of guys get really uncomfortable with (especially but not only VR) female protagonist games even in F/F-only contexts, but also more subtly the difference between guys that are bored by and those that are outraged by having to learn about woman-specific things like traditional makeup use.
That said, yeah, I agree quiet_NaN doesn't seem crypto-trans. I've clocked people wrong before, but at minimum I'd expect a crypto-trans person to either really like the gay romance option or at least mention the lesbian option for an alternate universe Witcher 1, even crypto-trans people that don't fit Blanchard's typology.
gattsuru
3d ago
The feds had supposedly been offering a plea bargain for a while, though the details haven't been made public. If the bargain was just felony-with-no-jail, she had a lot of reason to reject it even if a conviction was likely; if it was a misdemeanor, she was making a pretty high-stakes bet.
Part of her decision-making was probably resistance huffing, but there's also a lot of long-standing norm about treating various protections around judicial office-holders very expansively, both to avoid complex legal situations and with the tacit understanding that prosecutors that didn't would find judges suddenly less charitable to their position. That equilibrium became a lot less stable since Dugan's initial behavior.
gattsuru
3d ago
That's fair, and further I like to think keeping a "you have to actually read and rewrite the AI's output" principle is optimistically going to get a best-of-both-worlds situation where the human's writing benefits from the machine's access to information, and pessimistically at least reduces some of the spam potential. But I will caveat that you're vastly overestimating the ability of the casual reader to spot AI signatures without a very high false positive ratio.
gattsuru
3d ago
Getting a conviction is a little surprising, if only because of the extremes of jury nullification we've seen in other cases. The split verdict is weirder and might help the inevitable (and quixotic) appeal, but there's probably going to be more mileage in hammering on the edges of the sentencing guidelines to avoid a prison sentence and pulling the next Dem president for a pardon.
I'm not sure if it says anything too big. The behavior here was especially brazen, the immigrant unusually unsympathetic, the arguments about primacy of criminal cases particularly unbelievable, Dugan's unwillingness to testify on her own behalf technically can't be used against her but definitely didn't help, and the feds were able to get a relatively friendly (or at least not-actively-unfriendly) jury pool.
It's information when you're not surprised, but it's not that strong a signal.
There's also a bit of messiness about the actual judicial seat. She's been suspended since April, but still is technically a judge. The state has previously argued that a felon has to resign from office at the time of conviction, not sentencing, but there's not really a direct enforcement mechanism and if there were it'd be run by the largely-sympathetic-to-Dugan judicial office. She could be impeached, but it takes two-thirds of the state Senate to do it, and while Republicans are a majority, they're only a slight majority. Especially if Dugan pushes appeals, she could end up keeping her seat til 2027 or even 2028.
gattsuru
3d ago
There's a minor scandal in the tumblr video game sphere, because Studio Larian discussed the use of AI tools in the development pipeline. It's not clear exactly what they were using the tools for, but most critiques have interpreted it as only using AI-gen for concept art that won't even get a pixel in the final game, and they're still very unhappy with it.
((I've been trying to come together with a top-level post on the topic, but I dunno if it'll be interesting enough or if it'll be me going full Gelman Amnesia given that we have actual video game artist experts around.))
gattsuru
3d ago
That's a good argument about game media erring on the liberal side, but it's still weird how "woke" AAA games are, rather than borrowing from the broader liberal ethos. Not just in extremes, or some post-hoc sharpshooter's definition, but in what's being done specifically.
"Safe horny", as much as it gets smudged with tumblr associations, isn't actually a good representation of the (even post-Yahoo) tumblr ethos. Hell, I'm not even sure the Type I/Type II body thing is more compatible with trans thought than "masculine"/"feminine": you'd know better than I, but both the clean and smut-focused indie works I follow with trans readerships (and a few cases authorships) don't take that tack. Or for a non-video game example, compare Dungeons and Dragons to Super Lesbian Animal Adventure. The latter is much more left-wing and probably more offensive to soccons, but the former's got a lot more wokisms.
gattsuru
3d ago
Yeah. It's hard to make out exactly how bad, given that there's even more of a closed-door culture than the US's terrible backroom deals, on top of the language barrier. But there's very clearly a lot of explicit and implicit pressure going around, and it's not just focused on Chinese domestic or quasi-domestic policies. A lot of it's weirdly arbitrary even to the Chinese.
gattsuru
3d ago
I’m sorry, but I can’t help but think this is over-optimistic nonsense.
I mean, I'm not proposing that the Red Triber partisans will win, get serious concessions, or even survive. Just that a lot of people will die. From my perspective, it's pessimism. I don't like the 'Blue Tribe rolls over the country with no serious resistance' situation, not least of all that the Blue Tribe is clearly incapable of maintaining vital infrastructure literally anywhere they've taken over. But my proposal involves mainstreaming political assassination, spree attacks and indirect warfare on civilians based on arbitrary and often-wrong signals, immediate direct attacks on that same infrastructure, and serious damage to large-scale logistics even faster and quite possibly in my lifetime.
“Plans” will happen, sure. Lots of stupid, counterproductive “plans” by idiotic “lone-wolf” actors — a large fraction probably egged on and guided by undercover Feds into the least effective courses possible... Not effective ones. This is an illusion created by the apparent effectiveness of left-wing supposed “lone-wolf” radicals. who are really just the visible end of a vast, less visible organized apparatus
There's a strong argument here, where so many of the various 'mysteriously unsolvable' televisions crimes, the bizarre willingness to let criminal or outright terrorist organizations coordinate publicly until they can overwhelm coincidentally-nonresponsive police, and the cratering homicide closure rates are really reflections of those industries being unwilling and uninterested in actually catching criminals, and I think you're absolutely right there. There's really strong nonpublic evidence for it! You can go full Yarvin and say that even the drug gangs are just politics by other means and no one in power wants to solve or prevent crimes if it'll make the , or you can stick with hradzka and notice that actually solving problems would get in the way of diverting tons of money toward (often toward supporting the violence these orgs claim to be fighting) while pretending to solve problems, whatever works.
Yes, when those orgs were faced with a Red Tribe political activist group committing crimes or 'crimes', they took out all the stops, and then a couple glimpses in a grainy camera and some parallel construction is enough to track someone down and toss them in jail for years.
But there's a separate argument, regardless of whether these orgs could solve crimes that they're ignoring now, whether they could catch attackers who are actually and seriously planning around them. So far, Red Tribe political activists have often signed their names on manifestos nailed to doors, and their actual dedicated attackers have had the sort of opsec normally held by Scooby Doo villains. The omnipresent surveillance state is kinda shit. Yes, we can't know it's full capabilities and we can't judge by the overt crimes it doesn't solve because it doesn't want to, but
And there's an even-more damning one about whether those orgs could prevent attackers. Because the US military had a real trouble there just in the specific context of green-on-blue attacks. You can't win that way if the opponent still has the will to fight, but you can do a lot of damage.
How many people do you think will really pick option 2?
Do I think one in a hundred will take the stupid option? Maybe.
But I think this question depends on implied other options. Both Option 1 and Option 2 look terrible if your alternative is staying home and doing nothing and everything just being boring. But Jake Gardner was literally minding his business.
This is unintelligible. Beyond the grammar errors — “when we it becomes”? — I have no idea what this means.
Sorry for the typos. Basically, I'm proposing near-complete jury nullification of several well-liked (and sometimes even well-intended!) federal civil rights act bits, and common knowledge that any such nullification will happen, with the only exceptions being aggressive enforcement against Blue Tribe orgs that are stuck exposing themselves to liability in Red States. Red Tribers might already see that as a plus, given the various CRA abuses. I'm less happy when it happens to a FACE Act case involving baseball bats, but I won't be able to argue against it.
I’m not clear on the scenario you’re vaguely gesturing toward here, but the answer to “what do you think happens?” is “nothing,” because nothing ever happens. Red tribes grumble, and mutter “somebody aught to…” and “next time, we’ll…” and then roll over and take it.
The specifics of the scenario don't really matter: the core just requires undeniable evidence of sexual assault of a young minor, the minor fleeing to/being kidnapped by the minor's biological father, and federal officials kidnapping the minor again to return them to the same location they were molested, likely to the same person that molested them. The trans custody stuff with a possibly-desisted FTM just seem particularly easy for each tribe to form its own media fragments, since no bigwig Red Triber is going to believe the defenses of each step, and no bigwig Blue Triber is going to admit that there's a problem in what's happening.
Remember the Comet Pizza guy? Because as touched in the head as he was, charging in with a rifle to stop a pedophilic conspiracy that didn't exist, he was limited by two factors: he thought he was being a hero, and he thought revealing 'the conspiracy' would get everyone on his side. Maybe in a world where the entire left wing had spent the previous two years joking about how it was better to be a sex slave than go to Catholic school, he wouldn't have done anything at all, or maybe just have tried the same 'reveal to everyone' approach.
But there's another option.
I’ve watched my parents, my friends, my neighbors do exactly this my entire life.
Sure. And a wide majority of people will probably keep that, even in my nightmares. Most people didn't even know about Ruby Ridge.
gattsuru
3d ago
There's a small faction that just dislikes the mere possibility, even in good games, often to completely inconsistent ends. It's funny that they end up the dark mirror to Saarkesian complaining about Bayonetta's lollypops without recognizing how much that parodied a Devil May Cry protagonist, but they still real. But they're also a small, if vocal, minority-of-a-minority.
A decent game buys a lot of patience. Hell, even games that are bad, but at least have some signs of passion going into them, get a lot of forbearance (example gratia: rayon spelled out that Palworld does Type 1 / Type 2 bodies, and no one cared).
gattsuru
6d ago
Hell, there's a !!fun!! question if it isn't an Experience Machine. What happens when everything but the 'people' are real? If you had immortality, I can think of worse ways to spend thirty years than a Primitive Technology meets Minecolonies run to really build an monument in the same sense that Sagan joked about making an apple pie from scratch.
gattsuru
6d ago
The state supreme court finds that (1) the federal supreme court's decision does require Nevada to retroactively recognize the 2008 California marriage, but (2) Nevada's courts are not authorized to create out of thin air a 1992 common-law marriage for these same-sex romantic partners when Nevada's legislature has explicitly refused to recognize common-law marriages even for opposite-sex romantic partners since 1943.
That seems a reasonable enough conclusion for these specific facts, but good heavens do I get twitchy about these sort of retroactive judicial decisions being decided this late in the game. Here, it's 'just' one guy's 401(k) and some stocks, and while that probably sucks for his ex-husband's finances, there's a lot of other stuff that's downstream of this sorta divorce evaluation, and it's been five years since this pair filed for divorce, and a decade since Obergefell. It's just been up in the air that whole time?
There's not really a good solution, I recognize that. Party presentation exists for a reason, Mootness and ripeness same, and past attempts to set up blanket rules for this stuff have been an absolute mess. But it's like the first line to an Aristocrats joke that ends with the shout "a Justice System".
gattsuru
6d ago
Very likely to get appealed, especially with the split verdict despite heavily overlapping underlying components. The sentencing guidelines put this at 15-21 months, though there's enough possible mediating and aggravating factors that I could see it getting turned into six months home detention or probation situation at one end, or 21-27 months at the higher end.
gattsuru
7d ago
While semiautomatics have existed and been common in sporter and military environments before WWII, police and criminal violence overwhelmingly favored the revolver into the 1970s. When they moved away from it, they moved from .38/.357 (and heavily favoring the bigger-but-weaker-.380) as a common round to 9mm and eventually 0.45 ACP, further helped by longer effective barrels (as well as more rounds and faster reloads, at least for anyone not named Miculek).
See here for a breakdown of how vast that difference was.
Common knowledge has the aftermath of 1986 Miami Shootout as the turning point for the law enforcement side of the equation, and that is genuinely where federal officers started moving toward more, bigger, and more powerful ammo. State police varies a lot more. And criminal use is hard to measure... but that ojp.gov report puts Philadelphia deaths as going from rarely (3%) to often (21%) 9mm pistol between 1985 and 1990, and pistols as a category were still less common than the .38/357 revolvers alone.
gattsuru
7d ago
But we have more than vibes. We've had some of the largest and most expensive natural experiments ever created.
Rov_Scam has kindly tried to provide a steelman of prosecutions for BLM protestors for doing 'real damage'. I think it got an AAQC? Fascinating story. But I'll point that the majority of its arsons fall under the supposed five year minimum terrorism enhancement that overcame a plea bargain's limits as mandatory in a case with far less connection to terrorism. The few that don't either revolve around multiple arsons or direct assaults on other people, even in cases where Rov_Scam's summary coincidentally doesn't mention it. We can throw the Molotov Lawyers in for free, but they also got well under. There might be a hundred felony convictions in that area, but there were tens if not hundreds of thousands of felonies.
Fun, and all, but it's also a tiny fraction of what happened during the BLM protests. Even for the specific matter of statute vandalism, a lot of statute vandals just got off free, if they were even seriously chased to begin with. Baltimore didn't even record the Columbus statute one as a crime. Indeed, the first actual punishment I could find was a laughable slap on the wrist. When rioting protestors shoved a statute over onto a man nearly killing him, while a politician told nearby police not to interfere, the only person that actually got in trouble was the one who tried to prosecute it.
And then when you look at political violence, Dolloff didn't even go to trial, less than half of the CHOP/CHAZ murders were prosecuted, and the poster here that claimed to take comfort from reason prevailing in the Gardner case never mentioned him again when the prosecution restarted and drove him to suicide.
We never found out whether Grosskreutz's CCW was merely 'expired' when he tried to shoot Rittenhouse, or if he'd had it revoked, and he was never charged over it or any of the downstream matters that the second option would require. None of the people that tampered with scenes of homicides - on video, unmasked - got in trouble, either.
People have made these arguments several times, in depth. I have enough of an ouvre writing them that I have to watch my words so I don't unintentionally blast Amadan with sarcastic quips about four-year posts.
But, hey, that's not immunity.
(Modulo Dolloff.)
Rov_Scam's defense is that the J6s, and the Bundies, and any other remotely comparable matters all involved "morons". Just a total coincidence that the left-wing cities can never find people who give long interviews to friendly press, or 'cover their face' with a mask that makes Superman's glasses look like serious protection, or are "morons" in the exact same bad opsec way, or got caught literally red-handed but then police or prosecutors just coincidentally made a oopsy-doodle, too.
Let's suppose that's true, and not an artifact of willful rejection of various powerful modern tools, or refusal to use preventative policing to catch people before or during the act, in this one case.
They're still not in jail. They're still doing it. They're still getting vast and long-lasting political benefit from it.
And then I notice that only one person in this thread used the word 'immunity', or any word near it.
gattsuru
7d ago
And it's nice in a lot of situations, but like the "auto" keyword in C++, I think people abuse it far too much. Types should be explicitly written out in code!
Good lord, this, and it's become endemic in C# and Java, too, where it makes some of the absolute least sense.
gattsuru
8d ago
I don't think your confidence is shared by the mainstream left, let alone any radicals. They're terrified that Trump is going to black-bag them in the middle of the night!
Do people believe that, or do they just say that?.
"The Republican Party is Doomed" is still written by a man that conflates certification with education with job security with meaningful skills, and who today has yet to confront or recognize a very simple flaw downstream of what that means:
There is not some deep physical law that educated young professionals are the source of administrative or executive power in this world. They have been favored for the last seventy years because (outside of academic-enforced Curleyism) they were competent, not just in systems that they created, but in their ability to manage and adapt to the world.
The average college graduate today struggles to use a screwdriver, and increasing numbers struggle to write or comprehend an essay; a far broader group have actively rejected even the ideals of meaningful understanding of reality. Teacher's unions have begged and striked to require increasing levels of education that you and I know does absolutely shit for their actual capability, and they're unusual for anyone studying it, rather than it being a problem. If you throw the mandate of heaven in the trash, it ends up in the trash.
That's not necessarily a good thing! Obviously there's the big grifter problem, where once you realize that the TV-show grifter and the PhD are equally unknowledgable about 1800s history, you have the problem of distinguishing what randos do have anything. There's a lot of infrastructure and cash that's hard to replicate outside of academic or industrial settings, and the resulting processes not getting done because those settings are so hostile to you they'd rather burn cash and credibility, and just no one trying, doesn't change much.
More broadly, there are still places that have keep some undercurrent of adherence to actual skill or knowledge that's hard to develop elsewhere, with some interest in actual capability, whether or not they've been skinsuited by politics. There's a far broader scope where the things they teach aren't deep knowledge or skills, but they're the teacher's passwords necessary to get anywhere today. FCFromSSC-style "iterated harm-seeking" is going to be very interesting in the !!bad!! sort of ways, when applied here.
I don't think you can avoid plans happening, as people get radicalized, as someone who has even an inkling of what that could looks like, and very many good reasons to wish it wouldn't happen.
More seriously, there's a lot of options radicals have, many of which do not require vast planning or coordination, only common knowledge.
Some of those options aren't bad. If, as a completely random example, the left will be murdering political enemies with impunity or the police and prosecutors will just look the other way when someone on the right gets his or her face punched in... well, I was on team Pink Pistols when gay guys getting bashed was a non-zero risk. I'm not abandoning that because some people insist it'd be better if I were beaten than their brownshits shot, and if they've never said the name "Paul Kessler", I'm not going to even care. There's a functional moral and legal principle, here.
But the majority of options are bad, and they're still going to happen. There's some subtle stuff, like what happens when we it becomes common knowledge the Civil Rights Act doesn't and hasn't realled since its inception, and every jury the least competent lawyer in a red or purple state can manage will nullo your prosecutions, and any lawyer slightly above that Platkins out any attempt to Uno Reverso by getting jurisdiction in a blue state first.
And then there's an actual horror stories.
Remember Malheur? Two years ago, if it happened again, common knowledge had already become that people committing actual terrorist arson against federal police didn't get a 'mandatory' terrorism enhancement. Today, there is basically nothing the nuBundies could say that would cost them political support, and until and unless they literally shot -- not shot at -- federal officers, they'd still have behaved better than anti-ICE groups. That includes literally dropping heavy rocks onto the front windshields of fast-moving cars and people, or running for a national office with a nazi tattoo.
But don't worry, without a college diploma, Red Tribers won't drop rocks. That's a fancy-boy edujumacated physics problem. Electricians, machinists, plumbers, gun nuts, maintenance employees, firefights, construction workers, no possible relevant domain expertise. or at least none I'm willing to discuss publicly
Remember when FEMA decided that they weren't going to provide support to houses with Trump political signs? Ah, without the proper cred-en-tialis there's no way some Red Triber would end up walking door to door or considering neighborhoods dangerous based on matters tangentially related to politics. They'll just be a ton of people doing work requiring hands-on expertise, to serve people they hate and know hate them, with ready and long awareness of normal and subtle failure modes. No way they might be in evacuated neighborhoods before most residents return, with easy arguments to defend any place they could be at all.
Remember some of the California trans sanctuary laws? What do you think happens when the mainstream news reports a father just now kidnapping his son, the federal marshals heroically rip a long-pregnant early teenager from their parent's arms the next week, and no one can talk about what the kid's current gender presentation or who assaulted him to start with? Do you think there's anyone who can argue Loudon County a success case for gradual stepwise moderation? Do you think people need a medical doctorate to notice the difference between a week and twenty-one weeks? A historian's degree find every single person with their name on public record for those orders?
These don't require a plan. Many of them don't even require explicit coordination beyond listening to the news, sometimes even only listening to news reporters biased against them. They're not even indicia I think are particularly likely -- since I don't want this to happen, I'm not going to meme my way into disaster.
But think for five minutes, hard, about what thirty unrelated bad actors might individually want to do, just repeating the greatest hits of the last five years.
Then consider how much post-Civil Rights Act civility may have depended on how difficult it was to ensure an attack would hit the 'guilty' and not hit the 'innocent' -- as the charcoal briquettes rant highlighted, the Oklahoma City Bomber very specifically choose to burn children to death among others -- and what signal hearing "Kirk deserved it" jokes and 'jokes' from their neighbors have sent.
I would like it to not be this way. I don't see many people actually arguing it isn't. Only that it shouldn't be.
gattsuru
9d ago
Answer: no.
MINUTES for proceedings held before Judge Robert R Summerhays: TELEPHONE CONFERENCE held on 12/16/2025. A discussion was held regarding the language of a final judgment. The parties are to submit a new proposed judgment (or separate proposed judgments if they cannot agree as to the wording) in conformity with today's discussion on or before January 23, 2026. If necessary, the parties may submit supplemental briefs along with the proposed judgment(s). (crt,Craig, C)
But hey, if it doesn't take him more than four days to read two short papers, Summerhays may manage to actually bring a higher court's mandate to final judgement just under a year!
Not likely, at this point, though.
I'll start off with my condolences to anyone of any gender that had to listen to nRXs for this to happen at the end of it.
... I have a thought. That's not fair, I recognize... though I'd like some counterexample showing I'm just cherrypicking.
Talking about anything in a sensible way is not the point of the story; talking about why no one can group can talk about anything in a sensible way isn't part of the story. Laurenson isn't writing for Red Tribers, obviously, nor writing to Red Tribers, or even explaining Red Tribers to Blue Tribers. The point is to explain where Laurenson's coming from to Blue Tribers, and that's fine.
But from a Red Triber perspective -- and I fully recognize I'm far from hydroacetelene's level of 'real' Red Triber -- it's kinda the last part of this story where there's anything interesting. The Now What section is the biggest frustration, since it starts with 'here's the Blue Tribe principle insulting me and here's the Red Tribe random asshats insulting me, tots similar in scope and regularity' and then leads to a trio of revelations that practically come with the punchline 'do you think we don't know that?' But does anyone think there's a literate Red Triber on the planet, and I'm defining 'literate' here by Chicago definitions, that does not already know that a news media environment with any mix, no matter how lopsided, of Red and Blue Tribers devolves into squabbles?
I can make the argument that deradicalization matters, I can and regularly do make the argument that liberalism is dying at this rate, I can and have made the argument that it's really really dangerous. I'd like to solve that! I've been doing the (sometimes literal) Touch Grass thing, and some STEM-focused community outreach, and a half-dozen other programs trying to bring people together without bringing politics to the forefront.
Online, I'm overtly the bi furry gun owner for a reason, knowing how offputting the constant gay or gunnie references are to so many people: areas I'd like to go and philosophies I'd like to let live become 'target rich environments' if the only ones who wear it on their sleeves are the Everything Leftism Coneheads and straight-from-central-casting . I'd hope that there'd be some impact from showing people are people, and that Red and Blue can join together to achieve goals more important than wars of all-against-all over microns of worthless territory, and that at least some goals of those politics are more than hate or rage or malice.
... but I don't know if that will work, either, and ultimately, the Litany of Tarski wins. The STEM outreach program's had a small and subtle cold war over rainbow pins in the local community, the modded Minecraft server I helped with software problems had its owner proudly promote the time he beat the shit out of Brendan Eich, there's many Blue and Red tribe spheres I can't wear anything on my sleeve. Worse, so many high-profile people pretending to straddle political aisles are very clearly not that there's less than zero trust, here.
Everything else is a distraction. Yes, people are hallucinating their own consensus realities, but (as Laurenson points out!) it's not like the normies are doing any better. If we can't even talk about anything in a sensible way, if we can't talk about why we can't talk about anything in a sensible way, trying increasingly complicated and roundabout messaging won't solve it.
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