domain:city-journal.org
sun_the_second
10m ago
What do you have against basic human decency? What it looks like is exactly the same as wokes getting triggered by a nonmixed heterosexual family because it's a dogwhistle for fascist racism or something.
SteveKirk
24m ago
This is just the "what does it matter to you that we support Basic Human Decency, seems like you're the problem" trick. It's manipulative and vile.
sun_the_second
25m ago
I'll be frank, this does look like deliberately seeking to be offended by woke, given that phrasing "male/female" as "body type" is about one of the least intrusive things ever. Are you "exhausted", or are you hypersensitive?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
26m ago
Have you already read A Wild Sheep Chase? The two books are mildly connected.
2rafa
29m ago
See I care less than I did a few years ago. My politics haven’t changed, but I think I’m probably less afraid of these people than I was, so I’m more willing to accept it in the “weird quirks of a foreign culture” way.
jkf
30m ago
We over-regulated general aviation and so froze it in time.
I was amused to discover that the only source of new parts for caveman-carburetor attached to the 500lb cast steel straight-six lump powering some farm equipment I was working on over the summer is FAA-approved general aviation parts suppliers -- this stuff is still in production even though it was considered inefficient at powering tractors circa 1965, because many of the approved engine designs for commercial light planes date back to the 1950s.
The bad news is that a new carb from these suppliers would be in the same price range as a whole tractor, due to government enforced certification monopolies stringent manufacturing tolerences; the good news is that it's a fucking caveman carb without even any jets to clean, so I scraped the goo out of it as best I could and made a new gasket from a Cheerios box; now it runs just fine.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
33m ago
Yes, though you also can't see a person's latest tweets from their profile page. So mostly you have to be linked to a tweet to see it.
WhiningCoil
37m ago
Well, like I said, depends what your threshold for bullshit is. I'm so fucking exhausted by it, I nope out the moment I see "Body Type" instead of male or female, or if a game lets you pick your pronouns. Is that petty? Perhaps. Am I missing out on otherwise good games? Once again, perhaps. I just fucking can't anymore. I'm tired. And yet those are increasingly standard features across AAA and indie games. Even a lot of those Switch games being held up as standout titles in a world of AAA slop are getting that nonsense.
doglatine
44m ago
My intuition is that films and TV have dropped off a lot more in the last 8 years than videogames, with some incredibly vivid and memorable successes very recently. While the Sweetbaby stuff has definitely tainted a lot of AAA games, the kind of games most affected are those that were mass-market slop anyway. I can’t think of many titles where it’s true to say “this would be great were it not for the DEI nonsense”.
WhiningCoil
51m ago
I generally agree with BurdensomeCount, but I don't think he's trying to say there is literally nothing made after 2012 or 2016 that is worth your time. It's just that so much of it isn't, that the juice isn't worth the squeeze attempting to sift through it. Especially when you can just pick virtually anything that was considered "good" prior to 2012 and not find it offensively ideological. Compared to today where even the "good" games are often full of marxist or gender ideological talking points in degrees from "I can roll my eyes at this and get on with my day" to "My Disappointment Is Immeasurable And My Day Is Ruined".
Rosencrantz2
1hr ago
So the second one sounds like an example of a conspiracy theory – it's not just an exaggeration but implies a shadowy cabal who's really in control. Unless the speaker just means Trump is a 'Russian asset' in the minimal sense that his existence is of value to Russia (rather than in the spycraft sense).
The others seem a bit more like rash overclaims than complete fantasies to me though it really depends on how the speaker elaborates on what they mean when questioned. Russia did interfere with the 2016 election, for example, but it does not appear at all likely it made a significant difference to the outcome.
daguerrean
1hr ago
When I read the first sentence I thought you were going an entirely different direction with that. Either way it’s based
Stellula
1hr ago
My experience is of course the opposite.
I see way more discussion about "real" topics like engineering. Twitter used to be mostly pop culture and culture war nonsense. Not it seems a lot more like real human beings having actual, real discussions (well...not really discussions. I still think that twitter/X are the wrong format for conversation).
doglatine
1hr ago
At the risk of sounding like a pervert, I associate that peach fuzz with some pretty good memories. In particular, a couple of my more innocent exes had some light fuzz, but because they were relative ingenues they hadn’t absorbed the cultural messaging around hair removal. So I associate it with a certain kind of wholesome unaffected young womanhood.
Rosencrantz2
1hr ago
What is the patriarchy or whiteness except the ultimate in shadowy central planning?
Depends on how it's cashed out and elaborated on. I believe it to be patently obvious we live in a patriarchy that has been making slow-motion improvements, but that this fact is just a reflection on millions of people's net behaviours over time rather than something anyone has ever nefariously discussed in a group.
doglatine
1hr ago
Also true of music, but arguably not true of videogames. While most AAA games continue to be disappointing, dumbed-down, DEI-addled trash, there have been some spectacular successes in the last few years. BG3, Factorio, Disco Elysium, RDR2, Rimworld, Sekiro, Stellaris, Crusader Kings 2 & 3, Doom 2016 and Eternal, etc.. Nintendo also producing some of their best work on the Switch (Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom, Mario Odyssey).
DirtyWaterHotDog
1hr ago
Oh yeah, the hiring bar for twitter was still the same as other FANG companies. So, the employees (at least non-DEI programmers) were definitely competent. But it had insane redtape. My friend complained about the amount of redtape at twitter after leaving a team working on highly-sensitive data at Microsoft. So that's saying something.
Products like what?
They never saw the light of day. Most products created at big-tech die before they get too far. Google is infamous for this. But, it's an issue at other FAANGs too.
SteveKirk
1hr ago
If he was paying her for sex he wasn't breaking any promises. The skeevy guys are the ones going "yeah baby I'm totally gonna leave my wife for you but now's not the right time so please you've gotta get another abortion come on baby just one more time then we'll be together forever"
A guy who is either dating with the expectation of marriage or paying her pocket money with no strings attached is morally in the clear by my standards.
Twitter at its first user peak (around 2015) had 3500 employees. In 2022, It had 7500 without any additional user acquisition. In 2024, it has 2800.
In 2010, Google had just over 20,000 employees. Its major products were Search and AdSense, with YouTube, Chrome, GMail/Docs and Android following distantly behind.
Today, Google has almost 200,000 employees. Its major products are still Search and AdSense, which are barely better than they were in 2008, and they’re still distantly followed by YouTube, Chrome, GSuite and Android, with a modest cloud business added to the list.
Unlike Twitter, Google makes a lot of money. But it is still extraordinarily inefficient, and its headcount is likely at least 4x where it could be under competent administration. Every big tech business experiences extreme bloat because of a combination of the iron law of bureaucracy and more general fiefdom internal politics.
SlowBoy
1hr ago
They should have different standards. They owe the voter their judgement, not their obedience.
You are very obtusely missing the point. Voters elected Trump. Republicans elected Trump. Collins, Murkowski et al. can either work with Trump or not. They choose to defect, over and over again. They don't do this with Democrats -- they voted to confirm Merrick Garland who immediately went about trying to put Trump in jail. Which goes back to my original point: in victory, Trump has not retaliated against his enemies. He didn't try to lock anybody up in his first term. He rewarded regular mainstream Republicans with appointed positions. (He gave McConnell's wife a cabinet position in his first term.) And these same Republicans over and over again continue to defect, voting against Trump, criticizing him in public, undermining his administration. They always come back to this same defense: they're just doing their jobs, their judgment, they don't owe the voters anything. Ok! That is why voters are rejecting them.
It might be true that, for Collins specifically, her interests lie in being a centrist moderate vote. Ok, that's fine as far as that goes, politics is a realistic game. But she also wants to call herself a Republican! She wants seniority so she can chair committees and exercise political power and direct money back to her state. These politicians aren't actually independent, they need alliances and seniority and the Republican Party to have any power at all. And then they try to have the best of both worlds: they'll take the Senate committee chairs they won because Trump won, but they won't vote to give Trump anything he wants! This is exactly what I wrote to begin with: Trump continues to act as if in victory people will come together to enjoy the spoils. It's loser establishment Republicans who continue to defect!
Which gets to the other point: Trump clearly has a vision in how he is making cabinet appointments. He is selecting for smart competent people who are loyal to him, have specific axes to grind in administrating their bureaucracies, and who represent the various parts of his coalition. This is extremely obvious, even liberal outfits like MSNBC and NPR are talking about it. But for some reason on this forum a few posters like OP want to deny this, out of some sort of TDS anti-explanation. They don't like Trump, or don't want to understand him, or don't want to admit that they have been wrong about anything. So very explicable political processes somehow become totally inexplicable: Trump is just making picks at random, haphazardly, the guy who staged the greatest political comeback in American history just isn't all that smart. (People who are smart: posters on The Motte who propose that events are fundamentally random and no explanations can be deduced for anything Trump does.)
You ever have the same argument with a family member over and over again for decades? To the point where the moment they slip in an oblique reference to your deep seated differences in world view, all those negative feelings come rushing back in. Especially because they give you a look when they do it that says they know exactly what they are doing? And yeah, the people who don't know might look at your (possibly restrained) anger towards what you know is a direct provocation like you are being over sensitive. But your antagonist knows exactly what they are doing.
It's like that.
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