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@badger
I don't see you guys having any other politician who isn't running on some lunatic Christian brand or who isn't an Obama clone.
AOC is on that trajectory. Watch videos of Pelosi when she was a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Congressional neophyte, and she sounds like a carbon-copy of AOC. Now she's a sclerotic, corrupt old crone. Same thing happened to Obama, the 'change' candidate. That's what Washington, especially the legislature, does to any reformer. It corrupts, and AOC is already too far gone imo.
Trump's popularity is in abusing the mentally unwell and broke Mexicans, somehow the new Jews of the American Nazi regime, except the Jews had fucking money. When does this translate into any actual good for anyone?
I think this is a very out-of-touch assessment as to the motives and beliefs of the average American voter. My aunt cleans houses for a living. She doesn't have any hate in her heart for Mexicans. But she has a mortgage to pay, and when they border is open and we have people streaming over half the rich people she works for switch to Mexicans who pack into a house like sardines and will work for half as much. School taxes go up because ESL instruction is expensive and in the US property owners pay for local schools. It's not hateful or meanspirited to want a decent life and a job that pays enough to have a roof over your head. The bottom line is that when you have people streaming into the country who are used to third world living standards and are willing to work for pennies on the dollar, your own poor and working classes can't compete unless they immiserate themselves to a similar level.
Then there are the local economic effects. The US is the largest source of remittances in the world. Billions upon billions flow out of this country every year from immigrant workers to their families back home. If you are small business owner in a small town with a factory that employs locals, those locals come to your store and have a certain portion of their paycheck to spend. Then you take the money you make and spend it at other places in town. This is the basic economics of how money gets moving in the local economy, and how a rising tide can lift all boats. What happens if the local union goes on strike, and the factory brings in illegals as scab labor and then keeps them on, paying them let's say 60% of what they were paying the union. Well, that's 40% less money being spent around your town to being with, and 40% more going into the factory owner, which these days is probably some constellation of investors in wealthy zipcodes scattered throughout the country. Then let's say the immigrants send 30% of their paycheck back to their country of origin. Well now you're down to 42%.
What does that do to the local economy? What happens to the mom and pop shops on main street? The restaurants? They get gutted, then the real estate gets bought dirt cheap by a mega-corporation that turns everything into the same bunch of corporate chains. When I was a kid and you went around to different towns sure there was a McDonalds at the big intersection, but the town itself was all small businesses owned by the people who lived there. Increasingly that's not the case - everything is corporate owned.
Foreigners often see this as a race thing for some reason but it's not. Trump has the highest support among ethnic minorities for a Republican in my lifetime, and it grows every year. The growth has been especially strong among Hispanic voters, with Trump coming within an inch of winning an outright majority of Hispanics in 2024, a record level of support. Black support is also growing, and these groups especially approve of Trump on immigration. This is a large part of why Democrats are losing voters - back when Bernie stood a chance and was wildly popular (also with Hispanics), he said that open borders were 'a Koch Brother's proposal'. Cesar Chavez, the famous Mexican-American civil rights activist and labor organizer, campaigned heavily against illegal immigration while he worked to unionize largely Mexican farm workers in the US, rightly seeing them as scab labor who would break strikes and suppress wages.
Our media loves to frame this as some sort of mean-spirited racial issue, but it just isn't, and their constant insistence on doing so is why pretty much only decrepit boomers watch corporate media anymore - their ratings are in the toilet, and what viewers they have live in a dementia-addled fog. But I feel like people outside the US don't have the reality in front of their face all the time, and so only have the news to go by and get an incredibly distorted picture of what the country is like and how people feel. Take this:
Trump's popularity is in abusing the mentally unwell
This mostly comes from a single instance back around 2016 about which the media shamelessly lied. Trump was talking about people dancing/cheering in New Jersey as the towers came down on 9/11. A reporter, Serge Kovaleski, criticized him for this. Trump mocked Kovaleski, as he had written an article about it himself, in the exact same way he's mocked other people that he's portrayed as incompetent in his little Borscht-belt act: by flailing his arms around with a vacant look on his face. He's done this same gesture for a general and for Ted Cruz when he waffled about waterboarding, it's one of his canned routines. The media clipped that moment and ran article after article about how Trump 'mocked a disabled reporter'. They cite it in just about every article they've written over the last ten years. The public walked away with the idea the Mr. Kovaleski was someone with Downs Syndrome or some sort disability which Trump was mimicking.
This is Serge Kovaleski: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSU2KBQnXOAL_puTbvdFcRHNAif101VO4VQBg&s
He has a completely normal face and mannerisms. He suffers from arthrogryposis, a condition which causes stiff joints and limited mobility. He's a normal, intelligent guy with a hand which is stuck in an awkward position. Someone who wanted to mock his disability would do the precise opposite of wildly gesticulating and waving his hands around his head. In some of the most breathtakingly dishonest articles, the outlets would take a freeze frame of Trump's wild flailing at a point where his hand was in a position that most approximated that of Kovaleski's. In reality, Trump was mocking either incompetent factchecking or outright journalistic malfeasance. The 'mocking a disability' angle was a welcome opportunity to distract people from their own shoddy reporting, which was at the time on full display.
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@AdaptableRatman
I am not a corporatist.For me, the state and God come before any corporate interest.Like in my eyes the Musks and Gates should drop their ego and greed for the good of the nation(s) they are citizens and residents of (ideally both) without hesitation.
I feel like you are operating under the common misconception that corporatism as practiced in Portugal had anything to do with modern business corporations. Both words come from the same Latin root (corp=body) but have nothing to do with each other. Corporations derive from that root because they are fictional bodies created and empowered by a legal system to shield their owners from liability.
When used in corporatism, the root refers to corporate groups in another sense (unions, agricultural estates, professional organizations, guilds, universities, military) which engage in cooperation which is mediated by the state, with each of these 'bodies' sending representatives to present their various interests when there is a dispute about resource allocation. It is an integral part of Catholic social teaching which emphasizes class cooperation, as opposed to zero-sum competition or class conflict. Nothing to do with modern corporations at all.
He even banned women leaving the cou try without fathers allowing it. He banned nurses marrying
I really don't see this as severe at all considering the modern paradigm under which we operate, in which women have an extremely difficult time raising children, something most of them want to do but can't because a two-income household is now the norm. If anything, Salazar offered an eminently sensible alternative - either work in your profession or become a mother - but he took the hard stance that the expectation that a women should raise children and work is not something that should ever be allowed to be normalized. Being an economist, he likely foresaw the inevitable results of that: cratering wages in respect to cost of living, the disruption of family formation, and an essential doubling of working class exploitation and the class conflict/hatreds that this would engender. Not to mention all the intangible value that would be wiped out - women serve a vital social function in any society and are often the glue that ties a community together. If they need to work fulltime to survive, those communities often suffer from alienation and dysfunction.
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@AdaptableRatman
Hasan is a shallow shill as far as I have seen.
All three are, but Hasan at least appears to be aware of it.
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Destiny was retarded enough to insert himself into a debate between two actual scholars on opposite sides of an issue and make a complete ass of himself. He seems like your best bet. Vaush and Hasan seem smart enough to realize that they would not thrive in a formal debate setting with a prepared opponent.
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@Mikal
Just played the Suikoden I & II remaster. Great games that really stand the test of time, and overall faithful remasters. Was very nostalgic.
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@Swagnarok
The problem with what you wrote, I guess, is that (a). it sounds like more simping for authoritarian strongmen with unchecked power that's screwed half the world over already;
Strongmen (monarchs, essentially) can cause good or evil. They are often backed by historical forces which they ride to prominence and must navigate them. Julius Caesar is a great historical example of this. People often say he destroyed the Republic, but the Republic had already destroyed itself by that point. Caesar was just driven by the spirit of the time, and dealt the deathblow to a sclerotic, dysfunctional political order before it brought down his entire civilization.
To understand what it means to check power, I highly recommend Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy, his true Magnum Opus which was a critical influence on America's own Constitution. It's difficult to sum up in a forum post, but what he argues is essentially that there are a few critical moments during which a republic can be 'recalibrated', and then they tick along like clocks, driven by historical forces which will inevitably wipe out any balance that you manage to create. These 'unbalancing' moments are always dangerous times for republics, where your system is vulnerable to being subsumed by a foreign invader, sinking into despotism, or falling apart altogether if an opportunity to recalibrate fails to appear or if it is recalibrated incorrectly.
(b). it sounds like a completely passive and fatalistic way of thinking that would have you do nothing to improve the world until this purported messianic figure showed up.
Everything we do in life is constrained by conditions and currents far beyond our control. You can call it fate if you want. For most of us, the fullest way to resist is martyrdom, but few have the will to follow through. So what appears inexorable often becomes inexorable, in most cases.
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@badger
Ok but how was Bernie Sanders not a no-brainer? Man is talking about tax the rich and 4 day workweek. Instead you guys elect an ignorant reality tv star.
He was an option for a time. Then Trump won the Republican primary because he went scorched earth against the establishment, skewering the Bush family in South Carolina and inflaming the entire Republican establishment against him. At the same time, Bernie refused to go for the jugular against Hillary. Instead of criticizing her blatant corruption, he said that he was 'tired of hearing about her e-mails'. Meanwhile, Trump more or less got on stage and said 'Bush lied, millions died', and people declared his political career over, only for him to triumph in the end.
Once it was clear that Trumpism had swept the Republican part, The Powers That Be poured all their energy into the Democrats. Even if Bernie decided to grow a spine at this point, I don't know if he would have been able to make any headway against the full brunt of all that raw power. What followed was an exercise in humiliation. In two elections, Bernie was trotted out to chide the more radical base of the Democrats to vote for two blatantly corrupt establishment ghouls. Two shivs in the back are a bit much for anyone to take. Bernie repeatedly put the Democratic Party that he himself had criticized as corrupt and ineffectual over his increasingly pissed-off base. This more or less transformed him from a potential reformer to a neutered sheepdog for the Democratic Party. There's a theory that I think may have some truth to it that his wife had been up to some sort of not-quite-legal financial shenanigans which were held over his head to get him to behave, but what's done is done. Bernie missed his moment and it will never come again.
AOC is a joke. Her group (Justice Democrats) ran on a fundamental issue - healthcare. They pledged to force a floor vote on Medicare for All (single-payer), so that all representatives would be on the record and could be held accountable for voting no. After talking a big game, AOC was soon calling Nancy Pelosi 'Mama Bear' and when the golden opportunity actually came to force that vote (the margin was so thin that the Squad could have withheld their votes in return for said vote) they demured. They then lied and said that if they had done this then the Republicans would have won, which is flat-out untrue. Votes would have continued to be held until a majority for one candidate was reached. She had been handed a couple of juicy committee seats and didn't want to give up that taste of power.
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2. In a subversion of conventional wisdom, the hypocrite is a myth rather than a true villain.It is always easier to give advice than to follow it yourself, and it's easier to be motivated to take hard action by someone else's compulsion than it is to motivate yourself. Rather than obstinately braying "HYPOCRITE! HYPOCRITE!" when someone tries to help you accomplish something that they haven't, the smart person would see this as a psychology hack which can be exploited. Instead of the masses listening passively to the instruction of a guru who has to pretend he's perfect (until some investigative journalists prove he isn't and the entire thing crumbles like a house of cards), two unmotivated people can "teach" one another to rise to the level of competency that they themselves would like to attain. The accountability group structure is where the most potential for improvement lies, and everyone in society ought to be plugged into such.
Before I give feedback, I'd just like to point out that this is a common misconception of what a hypocrite is. A hypocrite is not someone who 'doesn't practice what they preach', a hypocrite is someone who 'preaches what they don't believe' - hence why they are usually viewed with undiluted scorn. Sometimes their actions can clue you in to this, but someone who fails to live up to a lofty ideal while nonetheless sincerely striving for it is not a hypocrite.
I think the issue with the program would overall be that it's not pragmatic. This sounds like an attempt to basically give CPR to long-atrophied social institutions which once supported and sustained this country and each community's constituent members. One of the troubling things that I've discovered is that societies that reach a certain point tend to collapse rather than reform because as things break down an inertia also sets in. This inertia makes reform at once more urgent to attempt and more difficult to pull off. It's like a plant in which the potting media and roots have begun to rot and acidify - the very breakdown that has made the quick recovery of the plant so crucial has also weakened the plant, sapping its ability to reestablish roots and opening it up to attack by other pests and diseases. This sort of program would require the direction of the sort of great men who are the flower of a healthy civilization, but whether a dying civilization can create those figures is often down to a coin toss, historically. Our society is so far along the liquidation process that we are in the 'invaded by mercenary, opportunist hordes' stage of late Roman decay. At this point I don't see much hope of a turnaround before we hit the 'hard times' part of the cycle.
As a historical tangent, Mao did something similar to resolve the opium addiction crisis in China and it was very effective. But also, very bloody - a lot of drug traffickers were branded subversive enemies of the state and summarily executed. The CCP, however, showed mercy and offered your sort of hard rehab to the addicts, who at that point made up a significant majority of the population. I think that this sort of thing also can't be carried out in a rosy way. Can't fix a nation without cracking a few heads, something like that.
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@badger
Skep I think you might be the only American with a brain. Please do dig up more of my posts. I went at it on wealth inequality a while back and got nothing out of these lot. Maybe the issue needs your poetry.
Unfortunately, libertarians are overrepresented among Americans who talk about politics online, and many of them are congenitally incapable of parsing even the slightest bit of nuance. It's often a very autistic, beep-boop way of seeing the world. Couple that with the arrogance that comes with thinking that you've discovered a simple set of rules/principles that explain everything, and you've got a complete inability to see past your own nose. I know, I suffered from the same condition once upon a time. The people who are basically either Fox or MSNBC drones are even worse - I've become convinced that at least half of those are bots, and the other half might as well be.
Most Americans aren't retarded. They see this shit for what it is. There's just no political outlet for that kind of thinking - the closest thing in my lifetime was Trump, who was more of, as Michael Moore put it, a Molotov cocktail thrown at the establishment. Something is definitely coalescing around him though, it will be interesting to watch whether it is subsumed by the beltway status quo or not.
A large chunk of people didn't care about January 6th because we knew that the vast majority of the assholes (Rs and Ds) cowering in that chamber sold their constituents down the river a long time ago. Only boomers who still watch corporate media were massaged into any sort of outrage. To the rest of us, it was just a criminally lame party thrown in the world's most expensive whorehouse.
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@badger
It's an irrelevant point. We're better off than we were in ancient Greece too. Humans figure shit out, it makes our lives better. The cost of living is still way out of whack like OP says. Housing prices are way higher than they should be owing to some people having way more money than they deserve. Something is broken. The average person's life is stress and debt like it never was before.
That's only half the problem. Investment firms and rental companies buying homes is a huge problem in the US because they focus on smaller single-family homes and starter homes. So instead of a new family starting to build equity on their first home purchase to eventually spring for a larger house later on, they are being bled dry by rent. Some of these regional rental companies have been absorbed by giant investment firms like Blackstone, a company which was sweeping in with cash 10-30% over market price to snap up homes a few years back. During Covid the amount of such homes purchased by investors instead of as domiciles shot up by around 80% iirc, fed by low interest rates and huge cash injections into Wall Street. Now over a quarter of the market is held by investors, and as I mentioned these investments disproportionally consist of less expensive homes.
Personally, I think that the executives and boards of these companies should be executed in very creative ways. Maybe make a gameshow out of it. Then ban property ownership for all corporations and non-citizens, and make owning more than, say, four homes cost prohibitive via the tax structure for individuals. Foreign investment and immigration also put a huge amount of pressure on the housing market, and can lead to significant property destruction.
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@MayCaesar
Sad what happened to Bioware. Origins and Jade Empire were both great. Kotor 2 and DA2 were fun but criminally rushed through development. Peak Qunari. Then Inquisition was so obviously a repurposed MMO with storytelling that was starting to slip, and I won't even talk about the last one. Never got into ME.
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@AdaptableRatman
Good to hear. Easter Vigil is a very beautiful, moving experience.
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@thett3
There’s only one way for this beef to be resolved:Rap battle
He should have a rap battle with LeShawnda. Trial by combat.
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@LucyStarfire
Its what he wrote on Twitter, and I see plenty of people agree with him thinking it will make them all billionaires.
You know what they say, a sucker is born every minute. Elon's fanbase is full of them. I mean, who else would worship a dude who flat-out told them that they were all too stupid and needed to be replaced by foreigners? Only morons. Or foreigners.
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@Sidewalker
Definitely my favorite poet, and I've grown to appreciate his Four Quartets more and more upon each rereading. Lots of gems in there.
'Humankind cannot bear very much reality.'
'The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That quesions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.'
'I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.'
'You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,
That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.'
'Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart's heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul's sap quivers.'
'Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort.
First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and soul begin to fall asunder.
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others' harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
Then fools' approval stings, and honour stains.
From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.'
'There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life'
'We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.'
'We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.'
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Musk treats his employees like absolute dirt and is a deeply misanthropic figure, so I'm not at all surprised he would implore them to 'make themselves useful.'
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@AdaptableRatman
Ted Cruz is a far more devout Christian than Tucker Carlson and Trump both. Let's be honest.So I am not sure why anyone is siding with shill Carlson.
Ted Cruz misquoted a bible verse to support his political position (Israel was a name given to Jacob, not Abraham), then didn't even know what book of the Bible it came from. I don't see how any Christian who read the Bible could think that Genesis 12:3 could apply to the modern state of Israel, or even Jews in particular. The whole thing is theologically nonsensical.
It's also incredibly blasphemous for a Christian to take the verse 'the world will be blessed through you' and apply it to a genocidal state founded in the 20th century and not Jesus Christ, whom the verse was actually portending. Ted seems, to me, to be much more of a 'whited sepulcher' than Carlson.
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@Castin
The part where blackface trolls are gonna help us save lost souls is monkey shit.
More abject racism. Comparing a strong black woman to a monkey and a troll... what has the world come to?
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I've always found Molinism to be the most interesting and plausible attempt to resolve the supposed free will/destiny contradiction. It's essentially a framing of the issue where every possible choice that you could take, and the natural consequences of those courses of action, are seen by God as part of His omniscience, compounding upon one another over and over in a kind of incomprehensible counterfactual fractal that encompasses all of creation. God intervenes in butterfly effect ways to nudge the world towards these events by pushing people towards or away from certain paths. God can also see areas where human actions play off each other and funnel into certain 'bottleneck' events, allowing for prediction and prophecies. The theologians who eventually came up with the idea called it 'God's middle knowledge' - a knowledge not only of what is and was but also everything that might be.
It also fits in with the Catholic theological belief that the devil is the prince of this world. The natural human tendency towards despotism, cruelty, and sin pervades all societies. This is why Christ compares the actions of divine grace to leaven - it's a living thing which works within the inert, lifeless dough, does its work in secret and silence, and is only evident in the result. He compared it to a small seed growing into a tree. Divine intervention will be a subtle thing which effects large changes through inscrutable causality. It's the most poetic and interesting framing of the issue that I've come across.
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I went to a bougie shooting range with a friend and the difference between that and the rural gun culture I grew up with was shocking. Guns were like an expensive fashion accessory, and the whole 'rebel Amurikan' aesthetic was turned into a fashion brand for people who live in McMansions. I feel like I understood how black people feel about minstrel shows. People shot guns in my area because they wanted to shoot squirrels, or muskrats, or ducks, or deer, or their neighbors. The gun was just a tool, not a cutesy lifestyle.
Also, the guns had a dampening effect mostly on assaults. I still remember when some 80 year old vet feigned frailty before pistol whipping some 'city youth' who had come up into the sticks looking for a soft target to carjack. Similar thing happened with this nondescript old timer who used to train with Joe Frazier back in the day - beat the shit out of a couple of city kids who were fucking with him. Did people still shit talk each other? Sure. But there were lines you didn't cross, and it cut down hugely on physical violence.
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@Castin
By all means, let's permit all manner of stereotypical niggamassabitch inflammatory garbage on the 0.6% chance we might deradicalize the next Columbine shooter.
The next time there's a mass shooting, nobody else will understand why. But we will.
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It was basically American Olde English for 'wow, we really fucked up with those Articles of Confederation, huh? Lets try and do better this time.'
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@Swagnarok
While I haven't played Path of Radiance or Radiant Dawn (I did watch most of a playthrough of the former), I'm not sure if they're a "return to the series' roots", if by that you mean the Kaga era games. Sure, PoR has a linear story unlike Blazing Blade and lacks a Gaiden-style overworld unlike Sacred Stones, but all this really tells me is that it's mechnically and narratively simple, something that not all Kaga era games were.
It's the fact that there was no way to farm experience. You started out, you moved on to the next chapter, you had access to shops then you didn't. It felt very much like the first one I played and apparently the ones that were released prior to that in Japan. I wouldn't even call it simple - it made gameplay itself more complicated. If you wanted to level up a weaker character like Astrid you needed to do it within the process of the story and had limited opportunities to do so. This required more creative gameplay and clever use of terrain to bring them up to speed before the enemies got too strong. If you wanted a weapon from a shop, you needed to have saved up enough to grab it when you had access, or to make hard decisions about selling items to scrape together enough money and buy it.
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@Swagnarok
I just remember minmaxing the best kids by pairing up parents to get better attributes in the children - traits maybe, or stats? I can't remember, it's been a while. I felt like a child rancher managing a herd of human livestock instead of a general commanding troops, lol.
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@Swagnarok
Fire Emblem
Been playing it since the one with Lyn and Hector - forget the name it was so long ago. I really liked Three Houses - was getting tired of the shipping and 'breeding' mechanics of the newer ones up to that point, which was starting to get a bit creepy. My favorites though were probably Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn. Amazing story, a return to the series' roots while introducing interesting new mechanics.
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I really like Civ. Probably Civ 5 was my favorite, but I never played 4 which was apparently great. Also played 3 and 6, which I enjoyed. 7 is apparently a shitshow.
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I'm suspicious of the idea the privatizing education will make it better. A think that a lot of the ugliest elements of modern American 'education' have been driven by privatization - particularly lowering standards. From a business perspective, it just doesn't make sense to have incredibly exacting standards. You just have to be a little higher than the alternatives, and you are seen as more prestigious and can command higher tuitions. And so, as the bottom rung colleges drop standards into the gutter to fill seats, all the levels above them drop to be just a little bit higher, and the public high schools breathe a sigh of relieve because they don't even have to teach the kids how to read to get them into college. Everyone drifts down.
Education works when it is an institution unto itself. When it's driven by the goal of educating. This means being run by faculty. Administrative bloat in colleges has ended with midwits who have joke MBAs dictating to engineering doctorates how everything should run, who should pass, who should fail, what the standard should be. Look at our biggest competitor, China. Their education system is brutal. The top of the system is just cold meritocracy, and it's left to the kids and the schools to hone themselves in a way which allows them to reach their highest level. This is how education used to be here. Just look at that Harvard entrance exam from the 1800s. I doubt anyone graduating from our glorified adult daycares today could pass it.
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@AdaptableRatman
Oh youre a tankie?
To be serious, my political/historical views are kind of an odd fusion of Carlyle and Spengler at the moment. Great men tied up in cyclical history, able to emerge only in certain places and times, but constrained by multigenerational trends and overbearing historical force. I don't believe really in political ideology as a force that moves people and the world, the ideologies are epiphenomenal to deeper trends and the characteristics of their host civilizations.
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@AdaptableRatman
How can you be both a fascist and a liberal
Don't forget communist!
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@AdaptableRatman
Then we have members like you, too unimaginative and capable to contribute for many years that act above us all.
I've got better things to do than have the same milquetoast arguments ad nauseum with the same people for five years. Here's to hoping that state of affairs changes soon.
A great liberation is at hand. Airmax rises triumphant.
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@Sidewalker
Bullshit attracts bullshit, stupidity attracts stupidity, but Leshwanda is going to elevate the site LOL.
This is true, but it makes the common mistake of conflating bourgeois gentility with intelligence. This forum is chock full of perfectly dull, uninspiring conversations between appropriately cordial people. These posters are engaging in the exact same cookie-cutter debates, regurgitating talking points from Fox or MSNBC at one another, that they were half a decade ago. Many of them hold the exact same views. This sort of behavior isn't a marker of great intelligence. I've had far more engaging and challenging conversations with people who sounded more like Leshawnda irl. It's the kind of interlocution that could be easily replicated by chatbots.
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@Mikal
Skep you coming back around for live mafia with Thett3 as well?
I'll try to make at least one. I'm much more busy now, but I should be able to come once in a blue moon.
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@ultramaximus2
I think what happens is the sites generally are influenced by their advertising customers who don't want to have their brands associated with user generated hate speech. There aren't any ads here, though I'd imagine that owners would want to grow the site and eventually monetize it with ad money.
Some sites get around this by making a 'looser rules' subforum that is hidden to non-members so people can let off steam there, but which won't come up on search results.
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@badger
Give us a good G.K Chesterton quote for old times Skep.
"The general proposition, not always easy to define exhaustively, that the reign of the capitalist will be the reign of the cad--that is, of the unlicked type that is neither the citizen nor the gentleman--can be excellently studied in its attitude towards holidays. The special emblematic Employer of to-day, especially the Model Employer (who is the worst sort) has in his starved and evil heart a sincere hatred of holidays. I do not mean that he necessarily wants all his workmen to work until they drop; that only occurs when he happens to be stupid as well as wicked. I do not mean to say that he is necessarily unwilling to grant what he would call "decent hours of labour." He may treat men like dirt; but if you want to make money, even out of dirt, you must let it lie fallow by some rotation of rest. He may treat men as dogs, but unless he is a lunatic he will for certain periods let sleeping dogs lie.
But humane and reasonable hours for labour have nothing whatever to do with the idea of holidays. It is not even a question of ten hour days and eight-hours a day; it is not a question of cutting down leisure to the space necessary for food, sleep and exercise. If the modern employer came to the conclusion, for some reason or other, that he could get most out of his men by working them hard for only two hours a day, his whole mental attitude would still be foreign and hostile to holidays. For his whole mental attitude is that the passive time and the active time are alike useful for him and his business. All is, indeed, grist that comes to his mill, including the millers. His slaves still serve him in unconsciousness, as dogs still hunt in slumber. His grist is ground not only by the sounding wheels of iron, but by the soundless wheel of blood and brain. His sacks are still filling silently when the doors are shut on the streets and the sound of the grinding is low."
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@ultramaximus2
Unwarranted systemic vulgarity and invectives, which may include off topic personal attacks and/or hate speech, are subject to disciplinary actions.The account violates this part of the CoC. Ban is within the scope of CoC.
Yeah this is the kind of shit that should be purged from the CoC. Personally, I wouldn't invest any time into a website that had 'hate speech' anywhere in its CoC in this day and age, seeing as how broadly it can, and has been, interpreted. CoC should ban repeated targeted harassment in a precise way. And even that could be eliminated by making a block feature that actually works (all user's posts are hidden by default, maybe can unhide them by clicking on them. No @ing both ways).
Personal attacks are also part of debate. The founding fathers were calling one another hermaphrodites. Didn't Douglas call Lincoln like a hatchet-faced nutmeg peddler or something like that? They should be embraced as part of a long and noble tradition.
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@Swagnarok
@badger
@WyIted
You weren't Skep by any chance, were you?
No chance anyone remembers how to spell Skep's full DDO name. Don't think I ever bothered to know how to pronounce it, which is the issue.
Skeptsiyama or some shit
Skepsikyma. And that's why I changed it lol. Was contemplating making a new account with just 'Skeps' when I couldn't remember what e-mail I used for this site when I decided to log back on, but then it came to me.
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@Skipper_Sr
What places online do you recommend for expressing opinions and being around others who are articulate in a debate?
Twitter, soj.ooo, & Kiwifarms, are the '90-100% free' ones that I know of. Kiwifarms is the most 'rough-and-tumble'. Twitter is the most popular. Chans suck nowadays.
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@Mikal
I applied for Mod and if I get it will advocate for free speech. To be fair David is actually motivated and I think wants to drive the site forward and has good ideas. But I fully stand by free speech should be allowed. Direct racism is harder but I concur, DDO style moderation is what made the site so good but I have faith David will make some good changes.
Good to hear.
As an example, during the H1-B Christmas issue, on many sites I saw an incredibly intense and lively debate. People were asking stuff like - if 70% of the visas are Indians, are we getting the best and the brightest? Are that many of the best and brightest from India? If that's the case, why did they score so horribly on the PISAs that they dropped out of taking them? Why are so many of their tech grads, when tested objectively, unable to write code that compiles? If these are critical personnel, why are they being trained by the Americans that they are replacing? If those Americans can do the job and the Indian can't when they arrive, what is the justification? People were also talking about some of the horrific hygiene and sexual crime issues that are endemic in India and comparing them to countries like China.
People were talking about these issues even on Reddit. I look up this site using a Yandex site: search for H1Bs and... maybe I missed it, but I don't see anything. It seems like the perception is such that even touching these third rails will get your account banned, and so people don't want to risk it and a sort of tense silence reigned here for the duration of the scandal. Are any of those points 'racist'? Maybe by some definitions. But someone who could be talking about 50 non-racist things during the rest of the year isn't going to put up with being afraid to talk about one hot 'racist' political subject here when he feels freer to speak on Reddit, of all places. And so, he'll leave, and you'll lose engagement and activity. I think that racism is precisely the thing that needs to be blown open as far as moderation goes, in a way that sends the message: you will not be censored here. There is no gray area. Jimtimmy or whatever his name was from DDO needs to feel comfortable doing his schtick here. Will you get a Jimtimmy? Maybe. But you'll also get a lot of normal people who hold maybe one or two slightly 'racist' views but otherwise engage normally.
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@Castin
New mods are silent. New mods watch from the citadel. New mods are wise.
Eh, I think this is kind of why the site is dead. I was looking over people I remembered from the past who had colorful, strongly held opinions and many of them have been banned or just stopped posting. Sure, as a mod you can ignore feedback from site users, and it causes less trouble in the short term. But there's a reason that there's been a drive to loosen up moderation rules by the actual users. This forum is just boring. Mafia is the only thing it has going for it and is really the only reason I came back. There are dozens of places I could go to discuss issues that offer more diverse spreads of opinions and users who are articulate enough to defend them well. In my opinion, the site has been slowly smothered in its cradle by enforcing an Overton window and level of decorum that's like a timewarp to 2015. Nobody on the internet wants that anymore, and there're so many better-populated places to find what people do want. For the people who want a hugbox, there are places that are much stricter. For people who want to speak and explore freely, there's an ever-increasing number of sites that offer complete freedom. The zeitgeist has moved on.
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Corporatism, followed by Salazar's government in Portugal. Salazar called Himmler's racial beliefs 'deranged,' if I recall correctly, and was a mild-mannered economist not a cult-of-personality type leader. His system stabilized a chaotic, dysfunctional Portugal by uniting workers, the remnants of the aristocracy, and the bourgeoise into a system which found compromises between the interests of all three when there were disagreements. He increased literacy dramatically, and adopted a racial position known as 'Lusotropicalism'. This was informed by the flight of the Portuguese royal family to Brazil during the Napoleonic invasion of Iberia, and was the idea that Portugal was a global, multi-ethnic empire centered around trade, and not a European-based entity focused on extraction. The offshore holdings of the Empire were of equal importance to the Imperial core, judging by how readily and relatively seamlessly Portugal itself was once abandoned and then reabsorbed. His reforms are part of why the Portuguese empire outlasted even the British, only collapsing when the colonies were turned into battlegrounds between Soviet- and American-backed militias during the Cold War. The cost of trying to maintain order in the far-flung empire during these heavily funded guerilla conflicts put too much financial strain on it, and after Salazar's death a weakened Estado Novo was overthrown by a Soviet-backed coup.
Salazar was also probably more responsible than any one man for the defeat of Hitler. Franco was chomping at the bit to ally with Nazi Germany, but Salazar forced him into neutrality and used his control over critical tungsten mines to keep both Portugal and Spain neutral until the very end of the war. This left the Strait of Gibraltar open, allowing the allies to strike at Northern Africa and, later, at Italy, the 'soft underbelly of Europe'.
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@Greyparrot
It's absolutely not racist, it's TRIBAL, which is why people of all dna and skin shades say it, to be in the nigger tribe.Self depreciating? YupOffensive? YupEmpowering when used to signal belonging to the tribe? YupRacist? No No NoMaybe before Corporate Media glorified the nigger tribe with the nigger lyrics to sell billions of records was it specifically racially offensive, but that's many generations removed now. Most of my 16 year old students don't have a clue what a race or race-hate is. But they have no problems saying nigger all day long....Black people adopted the n-word from the white rednecksAs Sowell wrote extensively, that is not all they adopted, but we don't ban the tribal gang violence that also came from Redneck culture.......honor violence, flashy displays of wealth, and confrontational language, rejection of formal education... (heavens to betsy!)We don’t ban the violence. We don’t ban the dysfunctional tribalism. We don't ban the culture. But we lose our minds over a WORD that, ironically, was inherited just like everything else.
Please sir, if you insist on using that word so prolifically you really ought to post a picture of your hands. If they're white, it's alright, but if not... oh Lordy, those mods will be on you like bloodhounds on a crippled, darkly-complected fox.
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@thett3
We ought to be mindful of our white privilege. Mods around here will drag a poor African-American woman behind the woodshed with a loaded shotgun for a little bit of light-hearted banter. By Jove, I know I've been saved by such a fate by my lily-white complexion and 100% certified European-Aryan ancestry. But that's what it's like living in Trump's America. Golly, whatever happened to basic decency? What the heck? Can't we all just get along?
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@thett3
Jeepers, so good to see you on this website again my friend. Gee whizz! It sure has been a while since I saw that username! When I saw you posted I said “well, I’ll be” to myself
Mighty fine of you to say so sir. Gee willikers, best to be white as the driven snow on here. Never know when those cheeky mods are checking in on us for that 'vernacular'. I'm reading my Goofus and Gallant cartoons and shaking my head in horror at that Goofus's antics at the moment. How about you, old pal?
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@Mikal
You guys doing these July 4th or 5th? Kinda busy nowadays but I could make those if they're around 7. (Skep)
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Damn she was right all those years ago.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
And I think that anyone that finds an animal attractive has something seriously wrong with themWhat is that thing?
They lack the tender ministrations of a judicial apparatus willing to punch an 8mm hole in their skull.
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@badger
I'm really not terrible picky. I liked Dune. I just feel like Hollywood is completely out of ideas and is just making remakes or rehashing the same tired superhero movies. Most of the remakes are trash that just insult the original work; Dune was one of the few that I liked. I think a lot of it is due to people letting ideology bleed into creative works in a really hamfisted way.
I think a good example of a new series that was fun and creative was the whole Pirates of the Caribbean thing. They milked it to death and ruined it by the end of the series, but it was a fresh idea. Other than that, so many of the big hits have been book adaptions, remakes, comic book adaptations, or (absolutely dreadful) anime adaptions. It doesn't help that streaming services are eating up more market share, and they seem to exclusively hire hacks to direct their adaptations.
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