siryouarebeingmocked

[siryouarebeingmocked]

I wonder if the rich-haters pivoted to hating billionaires, specifically, because that level of skrilla is rare, and people who have it often seem like fundamentally different people from The Rest of US.

Or because they were easier targets.

I can look past all the race stuff because, hey, I guess you just think race realism is true and that's a difference of opinion, man. I don't love it but it is what it is, it's a bullet I have to bite if I want to hold the view that people can have different opinions on the science and that's reasonable.

But "people who hate the rich are the correct enemies to have?"

I don't hate the rich, because I make a policy of not hating anyone. But if I was gonna hate anyone, it would be the rich. There's some deep and fundamental moral incompatibility here. I think I can only view you as an enemy and not a reasonable interlocutor, on this account. I mean I still wish you the best, and so on, as I wish everyone. But it would seem you are irreconcilably my Opponent.

Look forward to fighting you if the class war comes or whatever. Actually I'm a reformist I don't really want a revolution. Look forward to battling you for support of our respective favored policies in the arena of public opinion. Today and all days in the future.

Hi anon! I think you're scraping for nuance in a one-liner that got bumped recently, so lemme elaborate:

In my experience, people who hate "the rich" frequently don't know, or don't care, who has very much wealth or income. See for example this post that comes to mind.

There's a prescriptivist reading which says hate-the-rich posters are deeply ignorant and say false things about "the rich". This reading seems to me frequently unproductive to the point of being practically wrong, trying to issue corrections on numbers is ineffective.

There's a descriptivist reading that "the rich" in this context should be viewed as a semipolitical category independent of wealth - this is approximately what Soviets Communists did with "kulaks", watering down the word to mean any landowning farmer with a farm big enough to employ a farmhand. Kulaks were "rich" because they had more land than one individual could farm. Cynically, "the rich" means roughly "people whose stuff I want to take", notably not including Bernie Owns-Three-Houses Sanders because these people usually don't want to take his house. He feels like a teammate to them.

But supposing we focus on wealth for a strict definition of "rich": still the wrong class to hate. A lot of (gestures vaguely) lefties have an intuition that everyone was, is, or should be equal in wealth, and that the rich have "cheated" by taking someone else's share through exploitation or theft or the like. Back when Rowling was popular with lefties, it was easier to use Rowling as a counterexample who got rich selling Harry Potter books in a way which very much seems to have been non-exploitive.

There are exploiters who got rich by exploitation, but most of those are deeply political, sitting in Congress or running NGOs, because exploitation works better with a power base. Money without a power base has a tendency to get taxed and exploited away.

[siryouarebeingmocked]

Even as someone who loves to reference 1984, I'm still a bit stunned by how fast and totally the Left went We Have Always Been At War With Eastasia™, vote Kamala.

Still wonder if it was partially motivated by avoiding admitting the Right was right about Biden's issues.

I read your posts about the Democratic Party's image problem and "malevolent progressives speak for you" problem. I think another recent point is also relevant: the Biden Presidency turning out to be a puppet. Biden did not speak for the Biden Presidency. The Democratic Party lied about Biden's senility. The Democratic Party lied about who was speaking for the Biden Presidency. The Democratic Party lied about who was in charge and making decisions. Private newspapers lied in coordination with the Democratic Party.

This shows the Democratic Party to be corporally untrustworthy about Morlock's defense that the image problem is from private actors and not from the Democratic Party official leadership. The Democratic Party lies about who its leaders are. The Democratic Party coordinates its lies with private actors. These private actors are in theory not part of the Democratic Party, but in practice are doing Democratic Party work.

Do you agree?

mostly

I think it is probably less agentic and willful than you present it as. it's not really coordinated, as it requires little if any communication in secret to decide on a strategy. the democratic party isn't really that good at the "decide on and then execute a strategy involving publicly visible actors, like not in the movie sense the people who take action sense" part. the things that benefit them are mostly because of all those outside actors holding the same biases and trying to adjust the scales in the same direction.

but they lie when they claim that's not happening, they lie when they claim those people are associated with them or that they never act to support or cover those people, they lie when they say those people aren't the party's driving force. the democrats serve the malevolent racist progressives because there's nobody else to serve, nobody else providing an ideological basis and motivating force.

the malevolent racist progressives are not "puppetmasters" in that they created the Democrats to serve their needs, as much as they found an inert puppet on the ground and went "hey, free puppet!"

[siryouarebeingmocked]

Remember, your goal as a game master isn't to ensure everyone has fun, it's to educate your players about morality

[siryouarebeingmocked]

Back to stanning Elon

[siryouarebeingmocked]

Sadly, Masayoshi Son pulled the funding for the FunkoPop ice cream project after it was found that the flash-freezing 3D printer with robotic arms to add the gumball eyes afterwards would cost $45,000 each - too expensive after paying for the Hollywood intellectual property licenses.

I still dream of that lost world where every FunkoPop is destroyed almost immediately after being created.

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Do Trump and Musk understand how hypocritical and, frankly, racist they sound being so moved by the plight of white South Africans while gleefully telling pretty much every other asylum seeker in our country to get the fuck out?

[siryouarebeingmocked]

Since some of them insist that II is a misdemeanour, and not a crime, legally speaking, I'm thinking about sardonically using "misdemeanour immigrant". Also, something, something 1984, something Newspeak.

I like to use the phrase "illegal alien", rather than "undocumented migrant"/"undocumented person".

The "undocumented" framing cleverly makes the thing that people who want to say "illegal alien" inexpressible. When people want to talk about a foreign national who has entered a country against the law, or at least currently remains there in spite of being required to leave, then euphemistically referring to that person as "undocumented" is confusing. Trying to enforce a certain terminology on somebody else makes that person unable to make a point about illegal aliens, or foreigners who are, interestingly enough, often heavily documented.

[siryouarebeingmocked]

I think about Azula shooters often and their common refrain of "if Azula hadn't had a mental breakdown, she would've won" and I'm here to tell you that no, she wouldn't have.

There is no universe in which Azula was winning that fight with Zuko (or Katara, for that matter).

Azula spent so much of Book 2 being built up as this deadly terrifying force against whom the heroes are badly outmatched that it can be difficult to catch exactly how quickly Zuko is advancing.

Back up a bit to Book One. For the fearsome exiled crown prince of the Fire Nation, Zuko's not that impressive a firebender. He's not bad by any stretch, and he's able to lay the untrained Sokka and Katara flat pretty easily. Then he gets in the ring with Aang, who is an airbending master, and the difference between a regular bender and a master becomes apparent when Aang literally puts his ass to bed:

People have attributed this to the fact that no one's fought an airbender in 100 years, but I think it's also worth noting that Aang (a 12 year old from a pacifist nation) has probably never fought anyone before. Like, ever. And yet the second Aang thinks "okay, I'll attack back", the fight's over.

Zuko's got the same genetic predisposition for firebending talent that Azula does, yet it never seems to manifest because of his mental blocks. At the beginning of the series, he's already so beat down that all he really has is conviction, pride, and anger, so even with training from Iroh (the firebending master, thank you very much), he struggles. Yet throughout Book 2, when he has no time to train because he's on the run, he actually seems to advance faster. The fact that his bending is literally tied to his character arc (as his morals become tangled and he has to fight off aforementioned mental blocks) is pretty brilliant. Like, by the time of the Crossroads of Destiny, Zuko getting his ass handed to him by Aang is a pretty consistent feature of the show--he just can't match wits with him.

Hell, at the beginning of the series, he and Iroh (again: the actual firebending master) launch a combined power surface-to-air attack...which Aang casually swats away into a nearby ice wall. Come the Crossroads of Destiny, however, and Zuko by himself launches this bigass fireball that blows through Aang's defenses.

Zuko advances so quickly that it's scary. That prodigious talent is in him even if it doesn't come through as cleanly as with Azula. Who, by the way, was busy about to get flattened by Katara some few dozen feet away, until Zuko took over and then effectively stalemated her himself.

All of this in retrospect makes it abundantly clear why Zuko's firebending seemed to skyrocket so much when he learned true firebending from the Sun Warriors: it was really the only thing left. He's hard a hard road learning how to fight waterbenders, earthbenders, and airbenders, and even if unconsciously, he's applying the philosophy Iroh taught him about augmenting his bending style with aspects of other styles (see also, the waterbending-like fire whips he uses in the above gif). Once he actually understands fire and how it works, he's got it mastered. Hence why any gap between him and Azula effectively disappears as soon as their next fight--before her friends have betrayed her and her stability goes out the window. There's no real sense of urgency to their fight at the Boiling Rock prison. True, Sokka's presence with the sword helps, but Zuko doesn't look remotely worried and he counters Azula's every attack perfectly.

All her life, Azula only ever learned fire. She was taught by the best people the fire nation can employ, so she knows all the cool tricks, but she's still poisoned by the corrupted firebending practiced in the modern ATLA timeline. Unlike Zuko, who managed to get the basics if nothing else from Iroh (fire comes from the breath, and can be used to survive as much as to kill), Azula has always used fire as a weapon and a means to hurt others. She has no true knowledge of the craft, meaning she's got the same weaknesses as Zhao, she's just better disciplined to the point she can make up for it.

Zuko's victory was a given considering Azula's complete loss of control by the time of Sozin's comet, but even had she been in a perfect mental state, she'd have lost, because in many ways Zuko is simply the better firebender.

And that's the truth of it.

[siryouarebeingmocked]

I've seen some works where it worked out, like Batman 2022. But it still bugged me on a low level.

Well, the casting of the main trio for HBO's Harry Potter isn't as bad as it could have been. Harry and Ron are spot on. Not surprised that Hermione isn't a pale white British girl, but it could have been worse. (Obvious disclaimer no hate towards the child actors.) Definitely won't watch on HBO but may pirate it eventually out of curiosity.

Black Snape kills it for me. Sorry, I don't care if the actual show is more book accurate like they claim it will be, blackwashing gets a skip from me every time.

[siryouarebeingmocked]

I like how Breadpanes put "resisting arrest" at the end.

And had to make up a bunch of stuff to make it seem silly by association.

And implies "don't act like a violent idiot around cops" isn't advice given to everyone, and acting poorly has never gotten a white person killed.

I chuckled at the second one, and I'm black, from a black-majority country, with lots of single moms.

[siryouarebeingmocked]

>Fuck a man who wants to tell you that it's not basic girlhood 101 that female children are taught to yell fire instead of help.

Which no evidence has ever been found to support, and I don't think it would even be possible to reliably test that and control for all confounding factors.

It's also hilarious that people are still saying this in a post-MeToo world, when many powerful men's lives were ruined on unproven accusations of abuse and misconduct from women.

Some of those accusations were later disproven.

The "fire" myth is possibly based on the Kitty Genovese case, where she called for help and was ignored. Thing is, even that interpretation is now disputed.

"a NYT journalist covering the attack called attention to the purported “bystander effect” and suggested shouting “fire” could be more effective. The claim is in no way supported by any scientific or scholarly data."

Another interpretation is that people tune out most yelling in a city, not just "rape".

since men couldn't tolerate the man vs bear discourse so now they're replacing it with woman vs tree. fucking dickheads how do they manage to snitch on themselves each time???? like "the tree would never say no" ong are they bfr 😭

[siryouarebeingmocked]

[siryouarebeingmocked]

mark my words any baby born of a woman who died & got turned into an incubator is going to have insane mental health issues as they grow up... you were not meant to gestate inside of what is for all intents and purposes a corpse i cannot image that there aren’t going to be consequences of having such a fucked up experience in utero. i also believe this about artificial wombs btw

[siryouarebeingmocked]

Everyone is always saying "ohhh torture doesn;t work" and I'd just like to say fuck you fuck you fuck you. you have such a reductive idea of "working" it's sickening, maybe i want unreliable and forced testimony huh??????

[siryouarebeingmocked]

though I still love Chronicles of Narnia the older I get and the more I learn the clearer it becomes to me why it would have driven Tolkien completely insane

[siryouarebeingmocked]

[siryouarebeingmocked]

Who is stopping you from buying the lavender or vanilla stuff?

Quit bitching and go smell pretty.