I just wanted to confirm from our meeting just now, did you want me to (some crazy shit that could cause problems)?
Haha glad you enjoyed; I have many more. I thought of Dwarf Fortress games like explaining your dreams or your DND sessions, in that they’re only interesting to the person who went through them, but if it’s not that way I may start making a habit of posting them in a DF sub somewhere.
Nothing to do with anything, I just feel like some levity is needed:
So: I had a little guy in my Dwarf Fortress game who was a master at combat. All his physical stats were extraordinary, and he loved war. He was in the military and excelled at it; my military saw a lot of action and he became legendary in several fighting abilities. Then there was a great disaster which led to the decimation of my military, and a period of several years hiding in the fortress with all the doors locked until the goblin army got bored and went away on its own. He survived the disaster, but he was badly wounded. Like real messed up.
The fortress survived, and gradually things came back to life, but this dude was crippled. He had to walk with a crutch, and had nerve damage. He became a cook, at which he also excelled, and his excellent meals became another key fixture of the fortress. I would sometimes sell barrels and barrels of them to trade caravans when I was short of other stuff, at huge prices. But. He always had unhappiness because of wanting to be able to get back to fighting. It was clearly a non starter of an idea, but it bothered me somewhat that the guy had been through so much and now had any kind of sadness in his daily life.
Finally, during a period of needing some additional troops, I finally said fuck it and put him back in the military. I gave him a battleaxe to go with his crutch, honestly not really sure how it would work out. His physical stats were excellent but the fuckin dude’s got a useless leg. I don’t think this is going to work. But it’s what he wants to do, and who am I to tell him no?
I watched him close during his first encounter in combat. He wasn’t good for much, to be honest. It was clear that his physical ability was impaired. He kept falling down. Until, somehow, he lost control of his axe, and then he picked up his wooden crutch and BEAT THE FUCK out of his adversary with the crutch. Like absolutely took him the fuck apart.
I don’t understand the combat engine well enough to say exactly how it works, but it seemed clear that the answer was to give the guy a steel crutch and have that be his weapon. He kept breaking wooden crutches across enemies’ faces and falling down, which is an issue in combat obviously, so I didn’t feel like it was safe to continue to let that happen and have him maybe come to harm. I made a bunch of steel crutches, and tried to manipulate things so he would pick one up and start using it, but I never quite got it to happen. I think I gave up the whole endeavor and put him back in the kitchen. But if someone can tell me how to assign a particular crutch to a particular wounded dwarf, I’d love to give him a brand new indestructible crutch and let him hobble his way into battle and go the fuck to town and finally come into his own.
Rail lives in that weird category like rural mail or power service (or, for that matter, highways) – you need to provide it if you want your country to be a civilized place, but it’s real real hard to make it available at a reasonable price and still turn a profit.
Turns out the answer was government, all along…
Saying that it’s okay if one group of people that someone tried to wipe out, does whatever they want, because of course they’re the victims after all, is exactly how we got to this situation where Israel is creating on Earth a for-real biblical apocalypse and people are trying to defend their right to do so.
Two things can both be concerning
When one side is being violent and racist against innocent people and then some other people start being violent and racist against innocent people on the “other side” to counterbalance, that’s not a calm or welcoming development for anyone concerned
Throw some Costco Ghirardelli brownie mix in a mug
Add a little milk and stir
Microwave for roughly 45 seconds, until it starts bubbling, then quickly stop
Throw some vanilla ice cream on top
Eat it up with a glass of milk on the side
Fuckin delightful man
Apparently the only way the candidates will agree to do it is if the format is so stilted that there’s no chance of anyone learning anything or seeing the candidates get challenged on anything. It’s basically just a taking-in-turns version of a campaign commercial.
What, indeed, is the point. Like a lot of American politics, the whole “debate” survives as a pointless vestige of a thing (now long forgotten) that was useful and productive in its original form, but now is mutated to a useless and unrecognizable monstrosity, which you have to pretend is super serious and important if you want to be able to be on TV.
Yeah. I mean it’s hard to blame them–
You know what, fuck that, let’s blame them. They have a responsibility. This is like all the German businesses that played along with the Nazis because it was easier and then had to change the subject when their grandkids asked them about the war years. Like yeah grandad ran a, uh, a pots and pans factory. Yeah. Just pots and pans. Now go play outside.
In ordinary times I think it would be fair to say well you know a bunch of them didn’t focus on the bottom line and went out of business and everyone had to get new jobs, so hard to blame the ones still around. But this is kind of all hands on deck time. It’s one thing if you don’t want to write articles about the IRA and all good stuff about Biden. It’s a whole different fuckin story if you want to write stories feeding into getting the guy elected who is going to fuck up your home and city and business and economy and the safety of you and your families, too, and then (I am sure) stand around like “we’re all looking for the guy that did this” if it winds up coming true.
It gave some sound bites for people to hold up as examples of why Biden is old which I’m sure we will be seeing on certain news networks from now until forever going forward
And gave a bunch of “objective” news outlets a good excuse to write a bunch of “DEMS IN PANIC AFTER BIDEN’S UNFORGIVABLE SHIT SHOW” articles they are for some reason eager to write
Other than that significant amount of fodder, I think nothing of value occurred
Why would you hurt me this way
You’re going to think I am joking but I am not. Multiple people have sworn to me that this works for a common failure mode of HDD drives and I’ve literally never heard someone say they tried it and it failed. I’ve never tried it. Buyer beware. Don’t blame me if you fuck up your drive / your computer it’s connected to / anything else even worse by doing this:
I classify most of those people as shills. The people who want to talk about communism or anarchism or pro-China/Russia-ism, and lack of any interest or hope for US electoral politics as kind of an outgrowth of that but US electoral politics is not the main thing they are interested in focusing on, I classify as probably authentic tankies.
Like I say, of course, I have no idea. That’s just how I write it down in my head.
So, Gary Brechner wrote an article about this, like 20 years ago: Basically, that the combination of expense to build, and vulnerability to specific asymmetric threats, that huge ocean-floating warships represent, means that in the long term they are doomed as a serious military platform. They should go on the shelf alongside that thing the Nazis did with trying to build small-building-sized tanks, as something that just doesn’t make sense when all factors are considered.
It might seem that the submarinization of the Black Sea fleet proves him out, but as it happens, I coincidentally got to talk recently to an actual military strategy expert on the topic and this was his take:
I think, as some other people have said, that most of it is bad strategy and tactics by the Russians, of putting their big naval assets within range of the weapons that can fuck them up and for some reason not reacting (until very recently) when as a result they started sinking like pebbles in a pond.
There are places in the world with no government. Africa has lots of them; that’s probably the best place to travel to if you want a much more immediate and easy and possible-in-the-first-place path to get there than the total non starter idea of destroying the US government. Central and South America have some too, in selected places, but it’s less complete or widespread than it is in Africa. You could literally be living your dream in like a few weeks from now.
Actually I think there are also some crypto based attempts at doing something like that (like floating ships or islands or something), and they’d carry a lot of benefit in terms of the people speaking English and being supportive of your worldview and all, but they have worked even worse than the land-based places with no government, if you can believe it.
If you just meant you want the nice things about the US and its government, without either the destructive things that it does alongside or the obligations that have to happen in order for it to exist and do those nice things, me too! It’d be great. Maybe when you go to Africa you can get to work on making that system. Let me know when you get done and in the meantime I’ll be here with my clean water and highways and taxes garbage collection and anti-bear-attraction regulations and military and all.
Sure. My question is, why such a concerted effort to look for bad things about such a clear win?
Like would it work the other way? If the IRS was making life more difficult and expensive for everyone making W2 income under $79k, would you be out here saying well I guess an L is an L, but let’s remember it only applies to W2 earners and only some of them and anyway it’ll probably get overturned later on and I want to highlight the program’s important limitations and etc etc, instead of just saying “that’s a bad thing” like a normal person?
So you think it’s a good thing, just doesn’t go far enough / needs to be extended further in the same direction in the future?
The truth is, I have no idea and I don’t think it’s all that productive in most cases to try to sort it out or talk about it. I didn’t actually say anything at all about what the person was; I simply highlighted flaws in their argument and linked to one of their other comments and let the reader draw their own conclusions. In this case I think they were so self explanatory that I didn’t really need to indicate any of what my conclusions were.
But… to deal explicitly with my conclusions, I’ll say that in almost every case where there’s some kind of weird nonsense-logic, and then poking through the person’s history instantly yields some “let’s not vote for Biden” advocacy, I do personally tend to draw the conclusion that they’re a political shill. If I saw a bunch of geopolitical stuff or extended arguments about Marxism then that would tilt the scales in favor of tankie (although like I say, this is only my private logic about it, not like anything I would present as conclusive, because it’s basically impossible to tell.) Going into mainstream political forums and getting real vocal about how people involved with mainstream US politics are supposed to engage with it doesn’t strike me as real common tankie behavior.
I looked back in my history as an exercise in self criticism, and I found many many recent instances of me arguing with people I’m pretty sure are shills without bringing that accusation into it in any capacity, because usually, it’s not relevant and I think just dealing with their arguments at face value is more productive. And then, I found a comment from a few days ago where I called the Biden administration “fuckin assholes” about their support for Israel.
I won’t say that back further ago than that, you won’t be able to find me accusing someone of being a shill, because you will. I will say something about it in cases like this where it’s (a) hilariously obvious and (b) relevant to the conversation on a level that makes bringing it up productive, in addition to dealing factually with what they’re saying. But I actually don’t say it nearly as often as I think it. I won’t speak for how anyone else likes to do their internet arguments, but just as far as my conduct is concerned I’m pretty sure you’re just making up a convenient reality that doesn’t exist. Both of your main accusations here have nothing to do with the actual reality that exists in the real world.
I’m not sure why you’re committed to saying something “rebuttal-like” here, instead of just “yeah that guy’s full of shit” without any “but” attached afterwards, athough I have a theory.
(Also, this conversational pattern – where one person who is pretty clearly a shill expresses a statement, and someone does a rebuttal, and then the first person disappears completely and someone different instantly jumps in and starts conducting the conversation or attacking the rebutter – happens often enough and is slightly-unusual enough that I think that pattern is worth pointing out, also.)
Merry Uristmas