Absolutely. It’s probably not healthy for me to get invested in a video game and its individual imaginary characters, let alone ones from a game that is this abstracted and weird, but I get invested in individual dwarves sometimes, and for her I was definitely hoping for some kind of redemption arc to come along.

Another of the victims from the first military’s calamity, I was able to do that for - he survived but developed psychological problems and was a perennial issue in the fortress, but I managed to ship him off to be the administrator of a settlement, where he seemed to do okay. But yeah, I was bothered by the end of the hammer girl’s arc; I felt she deserved better. If I ever start playing again and revisit this fortress maybe I will try to have someone make a statue of her, yes.

I don’t usually abandon them because some issue has arisen. Dwarf Fortress fun is type 2 fun which is the best kind of fun, and the kind like this that is not deadly is actually in my experience a pretty high quality of it that can be had.

The only pure annoyance that I think ever caused me to abandon a fortress was when I gave all my soldiers backpacks, and they all put food in and all the food started rotting and emitting miasma while it was tucked away in their dorm rooms, and I couldn’t throw any of it away because it belonged to them. That one ruined the fortress, as far as I can tell, totally unfixably, and I don’t even know what is the thing you do to stop it from happening. Now I always just either ban backpacks completely and junk them on sight if one does manage to make its way into the fortress, or else configure all their carried food to 0. I don’t know what is the right way to have food in backpacks without causing miasmagheddon but if someone can tell me I would love to hear.

Basically, the OP article said that the main vehicles by which protest can drive social change are twofold:

• At a small scale, by galvanizing public opinion one way or another. A violent or disruptive protest can make the voters think the protestors are the “bad guys”, or a protest without clear cohesive demands can be too abstract to produce any real change, but a clear and cohesive protest can induce people to vote for the side they see advocated for, especially if there’s a violent police response to paint a clear picture of the protestors as the good guys and the establishment as the bad guys. That perception can swing elections.
• At a large scale, the awareness that there are millions of people ready to get in the streets for an issue can cause existing leaders to react differently on it, regardless of any voting in the equation.

The absolute best kind of propaganda is the type with a big grain of truth in the middle.

If I were Ukraine, I would most of the time say that we got information from enemy agents in the military, when I didn’t, and then when I actually did I would say nothing about it. Kind of take the legitimate level of it that is happening, and the legitimate fear and overreaction about it from the Russian commanders, and just toss a little more fuel on that already real fire every now and again.

All animals tend towards reinventing crab, all transport solutions tend towards reinventing train

I liked his video on Operation Praying Mantis and then I watched one about how awesome was the US bombing campaign in Vietnam and how we could have won without the politicians ruining everything, and that ruined my stomach to want to watch more of him 🙁

My theory is that these stories are purely to make the Russian military paranoid of its own troops

Merry Uristmas

I didn’t say everyone; I certainly don’t think that. When you’re backing Cornel West and saying you’re super concerned that the Democrats might lose the election and then making up false things about the Democrats and uninterested when you get called out on the false things and keep repeating them, though, I don’t think it takes some kind of crazy X-Files type of leap of logic to say hey everybody I think this guy’s not 100% on the level.

And pay your power bill, and brush your teeth even though you already did yesterday, and try to prevent a horrifying fascist dictatorship with a credible chance at taking over the US from succeeding. I know I know it is oppressive to have to do these things.

I mean honestly I’m not even saying you should do that third one, just that you should stop implying that the pro killing protestors and political opponents guy is basically the same thing as an identifiably old person who isn’t as on board with a good progressive agenda as I would want him to be. But yes, whichever version you want, all three of those things are among the things I would recommend to get in line with if you want a safe and happy life going forward for the next few years.

And yet… you’re the one in this thread who’s stumping for the boot coming down on all our necks. But sure. Keep talking.

Part of the point of the book was, every country is like that. You can’t just write some stuff in a book and expect it to do anything. People will follow them, or not, or they will as the current Court is doing find absurd reasons to argue why they are following the rules when they are not. At the end of the day it’s just a book.

Habits are strong, shared values are strong, codes and norms and laws and traditions are strong. But they’re not invulnerable. Fire up people’s loyalty and sense of justice and tell them that the leader is the law and that’s now the most important thing, and watch all the laws in the world crumble and tear like wet tissues. It doesn’t matter if it’s just in people’s heads or it’s written in stone on every street corner. It doesn’t make a difference.

Note to all the concern trolls: This is what an argument looks like that is focused on Biden’s age as a problem and what might be done about it, out of actual concern for achieving a good result for our politics and democracy, without carrying a massive implicit or explicit message “and that’s why we should all be voting for Cornel West instead” and then whining about how everyone is in denial and trying to silence your innocently helpful message when you get a hostile reaction.

So I am basing this on a book “How Democracies Die” that describes a series of case studies of nations that were threatened by a fascist movement, and those that succumbed, and those that defeated it, and what were the differences and tactics involved.

It’s fairly depressing, because a lot of times once it reaches a certain point there aren’t a lot of good options, but it is based on real outcomes and I think it’s instructive.

The Democrats’ “taking the high road” that they like to do is different. Assassinating the justices would be responding in kind. Growing the court would be a dangerous escalation. Making a crash priority out of impeaching them, like equal in priority with taking your fucking vacation for July 4th or passing a resolution honoring National Snails Day or whatever useless thing that are doing instead, would be a proper response (to me). Holding a hand-wringing press conference and then doing more or less nothing other than crossing fingers and hoping that this November doesn’t bring the end of the Republic - I.e. taking the high road, i.e. apparently what they’ve decided to do - seems like a pretty sure road to calamity. That, I’m 100% not advocating as the right course of action, although I can see how it might have sounded like I was.

This is the fascism trap. It’s tempting to fight back “in kind” once the rules start going out the window, and obviously by the letter of their decision it would be perfectly legal for him to just assassinate them as an official act and then nominate all new justices. But this is a trap. The further we all abandon the unspoken rules that keep things on the rails, the worse it gets. You have to fight back on the tilted table without yourself breaking any rules you can avoid breaking.

It’s a shitty situation but that is the strategy, as far as I understand it.

(And I know, or I assume, that you weren’t serious - but still it applies, even to more minor things like solving the problem by nominating 10 new justices or things like that.)

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.

If you’ve spent any amount of time among people who went to / are in college in their early 20s, and people who were working in their late teens and early twenties, it becomes clear that college arranges for the students to have a managed-for-them life to a degree that I actually think is severely harmful to them. It’s basically a big day care. Education is fuckin fantastic, I’m not saying it’s not, but the nature of the way your life is organized within it to me I think is very bad for people.

Like yes you know integrals, very good, but e.g. I spoke to a guy who had not paid his phone bill for months, who somehow still had phone service but was genuinely very confused about how the bills he was getting now could have gotten as high as they were. No matter how many times I tried to explain to him, I couldn’t get it across. I finally just gave up the endeavor.

Honestly, I think that impeaching all 6 justices is the right thing to do.

Just explain it to people in congress. You WILL lose your power when the whip comes down. You MAY be imprisoned or killed if you don’t get in line, and even if not, any power you had in congress will be stripped and discarded. There is no safety, even for the most extreme of the true believers. This is your chance. If you don’t try to stop it, then I think it’s better odds than 50/50 than within a couple of years you’ll be saying you’d do ANYTHING to be able to go back to today and do it, and have your old life just hanging out in Washington and doing legalized insider trading and collecting bricampaign contributions and not having to worry about what will happen to you or your family or your home, again.

I don’t know if the people will believe if it is explained to them. Groupthink and complacency are powerful things. But that is absolutely what’s at stake.

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.

Seriously. Surely making certificates is one of the absolute apexes of the ratio of how much money you can make versus how much actual work you have to do; in what world did they manage to be sufficiently massive cockheads as to screw that ticket up?