In my early 20s, I figured dealing with shit-tests, general rudeness, and shallow interests of many modern women was just stupid. The ease life-ruining accusations is a bonus. I stay the hell away at a hint of crazy or lack of virtue/independent thought, and don't bother dating or sleeping with sane ones I can even stand having a conversation with.
This drives up to no end how so many Christians were taught the wrong version of this. If you were in a captive situation, you mock your captor by showing the ineffectiveness of his slap. Not that you let yourself become captive of an aggressor in the first place.
I still advocate mgtow with modern women. One uncouth shit test, one abhorrent impulse to fall in with societal consensus, etc.
https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=27792
The 20 or 50 part essay series clarifying this.
For about a decade, I've gone over to Nietzsche's "what is Evil? That which stems from weakness". At least as I interpret, this isn't any kind of aspiration to return to when Spartans enslaved the Helot population, at least based off birth instead of virtue and merit. Merely that you see evil men and women capable only through the masses of sheep to feed on. Preceding that, weakness and self-centeredness weakens the societal environment, and lesser beings thrive.
It's basic psychology, if you provide forgiveness, state-welfare, etc, the conscious or unconscious mind incentive structure adapts to abuse said charity for granted. A related term that's popularized in recent years is the banality of evil.
Look today at the UnitedHealth CEO murder. 100s of millions of Americans; sympathetic, apathetic, or antipathetic towards the man and his family; are just as guilty of the dismal state of American healthcare costs. We have a faddish zeitgeist, like we have to dozens of news events in the past, without the economic and sociological literacy to fix a damn thing. Don't look for the evil public enemies straight out Fahrenheit 451 to sacrifice, look at the bozos who thought they were sticking it to the man when they had policy encouraging employer provided healthcare.
Don't forget 4, which populations do the catcalling on the streets
Well fuck, now I know what the Budweiser drinkers felt during the Dylan nonsense. Guinness was my go to at random restaurant I'm at, but that's a luxury easily dropped.
I'll try the simplified version. Equipment pieces gives stats, usually 3-4 of them. Celestial is an attribute prefix that spreads the stat points among 7 stats, buffed to 9 stats a few years ago. First a player gets to the point of equipping top-level exotic/ascended gear; sadly enough gamers are utterly oblivious and run leveling gear. Often times they will be recommended a Celestial build, as it's boon, tank, power+condi damage, healing but master of none. This popularity lengthens the time of big-group open-world event chains (plus semi-afk leaches during some events), and leaves them utterly unprepared for instanced content (skill level and statwise). If one calls this out in that section of the game, you will be anti-gatekept HARD, as one must always let people enjoy things.
Content-creator mightyteapot, among others, tried to rectify this amongst the community, but there is so much inertia to sail upstream against. These open-worlders are the majority of ANET revenue.
Like the first game, competitive suffers from a decade of bloat. At the very least it's fast-paced and opaque. I finally started playing a mesmer in the past week to figure out how the hell they work, and would say their complexity rivals the GW1 mesmer's sheer oppressiveness.
It's hard for me to put this in a short response. Gaming as a hobby is more mainstream than it was 3 decades ago, and our general culture has gotten softer. There's always been the Eternal September effect, where pioneers in an area of life have said thing experience rapid growth of newcomers. Overwhelmed by sheer numbers, they aren't able to acculturate the masses with healthy norms that ensured the success of said thing or community in the first place. With games in particular, monetization shifted towards post-purchase micro transactions, so devs put more resources into retaining a lowest common denominator playerbase, oftentimes with whales. This coincides with the general cultural shift of expecting competency (or in-group compatibility) towards unqualified inclusivity, even when said inclusivity weakens a hobby or makes it dangerous (ex: skiing and snowboarding at a popular resort). This effects singleplayer and multiplayer games, like Total Warhammer removing what little campaign logistical depth there was.
Multiplayer games in particular shifted away from the high-skill, always alert Quake/Unreal. Battle Royales (disclaimer: I've play them for 40 hours at most) are the prime competitive example, where one can relax and mess around. But a player struggling to win can blame their teamates or random item spawns instead of their own lack of skill and coordination. MMORPGs forever changed with the massive success of WoW which, despite being skillful game, was a casualification of earlier MMOs; this got much worse past the 2nd expansion. I'll explain further down.
Just looking at the Guild Wars franchise alone, the first and second game are stark contrasts. GW1 is basically a party RPG with shared lobbies, and GW2 a regular themepark MMO. The first punishes you if you try to level without any thought put into your skill selection and traits, and required you to find other players to progress missions, or rely on AI henchmen. The game did change with expansions introducing heroes to make other players unneeded (this had to be done as content grew and playerbase shrunk), while certain infamous missions like Thunderhead Keep got nerfed.
The second game targeted the wider MMO audience and changed industry trends. Starting off, they neutered any leveling or open-world that they were afraid scared off enough casual gamers from other new MMOs. IIRC during the beta, there was a trio of Ettins guarding a hero point (needed to make character stronger before reaching level cap) that stunned players (each would telegraph their attack sequentially) that didn't dodge or block, leaving piles of player corpses. Stuff like that had to go to maintain a soft leveling experience. There's actual skill and creativity in the game mechanics and buildcrafting, but most the time it wasn't needed, leaving a large gap between launch content and intro endgame, in addition to an equivalent gap and good players doing the rare slices of challenging content.
With the advent of political correctness, cultural Marxism, and similar coincides with the above to have a multiplayer and MMO scene to replace the declining past-time of watching network television. Whether it's Bob who instead of plopping down on the couch to watch Jerry Springer, picks up the latest game to not talk to anybody or learn mechanics, if the game has them. Or it's Jeff, who instead of watching the latest sportsball game with his buddies heads to a multiplayer game to bad unskilled while downing a few beers and having a grand ol' time with other online folk. This creates a giant vacuum to be filled activists, hall-monitors, or opportunistic devs can be 'anti-gatekeeping' gatekeepers, who then cultivate what I call a gaming underclass to steadily build-up and be exploited. The hidden costs of this dysfunctional social structure accumulate until playerbases of games result in swathes of shit, whether it's the mishandled toxic players, a lopsided skill distrubition, and an over-representation of what Javier Milei deems shit-leftists. It wasn't nearly this bad in 2005.
I barely played wvw till last year, but mounts really changed the under-5 roaming play, and more specs have high mobility.
Story has been saturday-morning cartoon garbage since first game, and pioneered superwoke since at least 2nd expansion. I only play it for the almost-bloated gameplay.
Spears are fine gameplay, but everything from SOTO and Janthir points to them winding down the game. Recycled assets, 1 old mount revamped per expansion, spears being an existing underwater weapon, unfinished launches and seasonal releases. Don't forget bugs existing since at least first expansion, and powercreep contrasting with the game direction at launch. This leaves pvp, small-scale wvw, and newest CM content having any sort of challenge; open-world I just avoid because its piss-easy or the players are new-gen gamers running low-damage gear/builds; some of the most egregious anti-gatekeepers in all PC gaming since 2017.
Compared to last year, I find most of these fragile, humorless true-believers will be encountered less by sticking to the end-game modes. 3/4 of these modes' (pvp, fractals/raids/strikes, wvw) playerbase is still shit, and plenty of good players still subscribe to NPR and Jacobian. Still haven't encountered the mythical 90s/00s ethos pro-gun, pro-attractive fictional characters guild, but at least I see these master baiters rounding the barrel fish shitlibs with usual exaggerated dialogue linked above.
Chris Pratt's statement was respectable, even if I disagreed with it.
Any right-wing or independent politician, pundit, activist that emphasizes compromised unity have an understanding of civilizational problems so off target, they'd somehow pilot a Europe bound airplane to to Oceania (lazy metaphor, sue me). Shit won't get fixed until we have a qualified, real-stakes franchise and decentralized governance (this implies controlled borders) closer to what the articles of confederation proposed; not withholding what we've learned in 2 centuries.
Maybe it varies from state to state, but if one can't even be assed to vote for propositions/amendments and parody/protest candidates, they're part of the problem. Exceptions to those who attempted more active resistance. For the most recent 3 elections, any objections to Trump are outweighed by what is permitted when he loses; the status quo that has persisted since the progressive era. Another Trump win increases the possibility that your preferred social structure is achieved in your lifetime, or your great grandkids'. After a Trump victory, we might have the opportunity to tell the McCain/Romney voting base to suck a long one.
From what I can tell, LAC is a follower of Nick Fuentes. That doesn't discount his coverage of historical analysis, but they're (groypers and other personality centric groups) are driven by drama and related herd social noise, then drawing their conclusions to satisfy in-group approval. For LAC's emphasis of being outside the mainstream, he comes off as a single-issue citizen. Maybe he has real hot takes in videos I haven't seen.
Positive right means compelling others, under threat of prison, to provide to the unfortunate, while putting a halo on his own head for voting "compassionately". I would take services offered by government or charity, but never campaign or vote for said government services.
A lot of that nonsense falls under positive rights and the personality types that uphold non-consensual burdens. Negative rights means that charity can take care of many homeless, or that legal immigration is predicated on if individuals are a net gain to the general welfare of existing citizens.
The arguments against many forms of democracy apply when populism devolves to tyrannical mob rule. If it's a bunch of people being NPCs who vote emotionally or tribalistically when their state ballot comes in, all sorts of nasty unintended consequences result from feel good laws. If it's local government, at least some negotiation is going on, and the voting party will revoke such superstitious law if and when resource providers choose more profitable communities, or neighbors leave when they can't access said resource.
My prior argument takes for granted that a functional, somewhat decentralized society will have contracts in place or otherwise be indoctrinated with the importance of vigilantly upholding property rights (within reason, we're talking a person owning a single gas station, not an entire city) and freedom of association. That takes precedence over the regular person's proclivity to economic and sociological illiteracy. The rational person realizes that 5 of them need to stick their necks out to dissuade the mob of 50 idiots, that didnt ration or negogiate in advance, from repercussions if they go ahead with pitchforks. If there are no repercussions, then that means the cyclical theory of civilizational collapse is gradually underway.
Local government, maybe. State government or even county, hell no
Then gas price rises off the chart, because no more is being extracted and produced. If it's only localized breakdown, then wider society should seek feasible punishment or ostracize. Many societal evils stem from deciding homeless, disabled, etc have a positive right to live. Rational people are more incentivized to protect or avenge the shopkeeper if they fear utter isolation of their community from prodctive society.
This is a libertarian position, not a lolbert one. If a community wants guaranteed access to an affordable resource, they should negotiate that in advance. Lolbert is believing in open borders or free speech for those who actively suppress it.
He did mention preferring other platforms a few times, but to have a literal spergout on the way out is indeed weak. Delete your account or keep it, but burn the right bridges in life.
Wanted to see Lethn's comment on this slow cooked situation. Looks like he left and deleted account.
Wonder what the context was back then that would have the NYT publish a conservative article (paid ad?) criticizing it.
If one is worried about targeted state-level surveillance, he will double anonymous VPN or stick to TOR, in addition to paranoid opsec. Mullvad has resisted/nutered legal orders before, if one is doing garden variety piracy.