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617
Play With Your Buddies / Re: Minecraft: Dwarven Stronghold - Add yourself to the new spreadsheet!
« on: April 04, 2015, 01:17:08 pm »Found a temple at 556661-218980, 4k from base camp. Another one at 556592, -217970
We should create a monorail station this weekend. Nobody wants to trek that distance, but we can certainly take a minecart there. (And to the ocean.)
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General Discussion / Re: Things that made you sad today thread.
« on: April 04, 2015, 12:14:50 pm »
Yeah...I don't really think you can argue that boycotts are legitimate but anti-boycotts aren't. If people want to bail out the pizzeria, let them. It's not taxpayer money, so who cares?
619
General Discussion / Re: [*Honk*] Atagos soft fuel tanks return (Also featuring chen) (Happy thread!!!)
« on: April 04, 2015, 10:41:58 am »
Bean soup for breakfast! Leftover from last night. There really is such a thing as tasty cheap college-student food, folks. I haven't microwaved a thing since I got my own apartment.
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General Discussion / Re: Bay12 2016 Election Megathread- It Is Terrifying
« on: April 04, 2015, 09:27:11 am »
The rise of China and the loss of secure blue-collar work is a problem, too. Again, it's one that I don't think the modern American liberal coalition is well-poised to handle...socially liberal upper-middle-class people call the shots in the modern Democratic party, and their disdain for the working class (especially working-class social conservatism, which drives them up the wall) is well-known, even if they pretend to hide it.
(Do I have disdain for the America working class? To an extent, yeah. But I'm an old-school Northeastern elitist, and paternalism is not a dirty word for what's left of us.)
@Reelya: Absolutely, but modern progressive rhetoric isn't necessarily helping. Nineteenth-century America wasn't exactly economically secure, either- the panic of 1837, the panic of 1857, the Long Depression from the 1870s to the 1890s (nobody remembers any of those, but that's par for the course for 19th-century American history, except for the Civil War.)
(Second edit: Although, as you point out, industralization is also relevant. I'll have to chew on that for a while, I hadn't thought about it.)
(Do I have disdain for the America working class? To an extent, yeah. But I'm an old-school Northeastern elitist, and paternalism is not a dirty word for what's left of us.)
@Reelya: Absolutely, but modern progressive rhetoric isn't necessarily helping. Nineteenth-century America wasn't exactly economically secure, either- the panic of 1837, the panic of 1857, the Long Depression from the 1870s to the 1890s (nobody remembers any of those, but that's par for the course for 19th-century American history, except for the Civil War.)
(Second edit: Although, as you point out, industralization is also relevant. I'll have to chew on that for a while, I hadn't thought about it.)
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General Discussion / Re: Bay12 2016 Election Megathread- It Is Terrifying
« on: April 04, 2015, 09:02:00 am »
I don't know. I'm merely pointing out the problem; I don't know what you'd do about it. As I've stated, I distrust modern liberalism to do much more than make the decline slower and more comfortable; but I don't see much of a way out.
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General Discussion / Re: Bay12 2016 Election Megathread- It Is Terrifying
« on: April 04, 2015, 08:46:21 am »
Well, I do think it's true that the cut-off point for America's Silver Age, if you want to call it that, was the rise of Reagan- an initial rebirth ("Morning in America") which proved hollow and has led, thirty years later, to the modern political landscape.
I think people have become increasingly atomized, which is why I don't trust modern liberals to reverse the decline. People have become individualized to the point of isolation- there's no sense of collective operation anymore. Extended (and nuclear) families, trade unions, community organizations, pretty much every sort of social organization except the corporation- weaker than they were 50 years ago. (I think the New Leftist focus on identity politics means the modern liberal coalition doesn't know how or why this should be reversed.) The GOP distrusts collectives except those grounded in evangelical Christianity, for obvious reasons.
This sort of atomization is something new. America's had other ages of huge social and economic turmoil, but the isolation we're seeing today wasn't there. I've heard people talk about a new Gilded Age, and we do live in a new Gilded Age, of a sort...but the Gilded age birthed all sorts of social movements; people were engaged with society (the record for voter turnout was in 1876, at 82%). Again, I don't think modern liberal ideology can see this very well...when your main focus is on people's individual identities it becomes difficult to talk about collective sacrifice.
I think people have become increasingly atomized, which is why I don't trust modern liberals to reverse the decline. People have become individualized to the point of isolation- there's no sense of collective operation anymore. Extended (and nuclear) families, trade unions, community organizations, pretty much every sort of social organization except the corporation- weaker than they were 50 years ago. (I think the New Leftist focus on identity politics means the modern liberal coalition doesn't know how or why this should be reversed.) The GOP distrusts collectives except those grounded in evangelical Christianity, for obvious reasons.
This sort of atomization is something new. America's had other ages of huge social and economic turmoil, but the isolation we're seeing today wasn't there. I've heard people talk about a new Gilded Age, and we do live in a new Gilded Age, of a sort...but the Gilded age birthed all sorts of social movements; people were engaged with society (the record for voter turnout was in 1876, at 82%). Again, I don't think modern liberal ideology can see this very well...when your main focus is on people's individual identities it becomes difficult to talk about collective sacrifice.
623
General Discussion / Re: Bay12 2016 Election Megathread- It Is Terrifying
« on: April 04, 2015, 08:17:37 am »Conservative ideas can make sense. "Let's not go changing things willy-nilly, it could end up even worse." Just that it ends up being "Don't damn well change a thing!" And then you get things like basic human rights and climate change which need change and soon, and it's obvious to nearly everyone that it needs change.Point being that modern "conservatives" are in fact reactionaries. They're not trying to preserve status quo, they're looking to undo decades of progress as quickly and haphazardly as possible.
There was another point I wanted to make but I've forgotten. Oh well.
Those who actually are conservatives are called "moderates" and seen by the new GOP as Quislings, as worse than Democrats.
I think- do hear me out here- I think the Tea Party does see something that nobody else sees, even if it's through smoke and mirrors.
America's in an age of decline. We can't get anything done. Our growth is hollow, our upper class is useless as an aristocracy, the middle class is shrinking and the lower class is stuck in the mud. Our infrastructure is decaying and everybody is disillusioned. There have been some victories in the last few years, but they've mostly affected small segments of society who weren't all that different to begin with (gay marriage especially), so the bar for required political and cultural will is lower. Could the space race happen today? Or the Eisenhower interstate system?
That's an age of decline! The Tea Party feels this, but they're totally wrong as to why (it's not because we need to put the Bible back in schools or some such twaddle) and even more wrong as to what to do about it- cutting taxes on the rich and removing the social safety net isn't going to reverse America's decline and it certainly isn't going to turn the clock back to the childhood you thought you had (I'll just invite the interested to google postwar tax rates).
Sure, we live longer, a few more sectors of society have been brought into the mainstream fold, and we're a bit richer, if more unequal. But is America, the society, as vibrant as it was in, say, 1965? Does it have as much potential? I'm not so sure. There's a case for liberal reactionism to be made here. The Tea Party is bad, really bad, but all that right-wing rage didn't come from a vacuum.
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General Discussion / Re: Things that made you sad today thread.
« on: April 03, 2015, 09:22:29 pm »
Good Friday again; I should have gone to church but didn't. Last year I went on Good Friday but not on Easter; I suppose I believe in sin but not in salvation...
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General Discussion / Re: Things that made you sad today thread.
« on: April 01, 2015, 07:55:52 pm »Yes. Chafed, sore nipples, all over your eyes.chafed nipplesno
The goggles, they do nothing!...because they're actually a brassiere.
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General Discussion / Re: Speaking Irish
« on: April 01, 2015, 07:30:09 pm »Dia dhuit!
My Irish is a little rough and I'm still learning. (I probably forgot an accent in that greeting). But I think it's a beautiful language and I want to learn, but it's hard to learn when I'm an American and it's a minority language even it its homeland. Has anyone else been interested in learning to speak it, or does speak it? It'd be great to have someone to talk with or get pointers from.
Are you using Duolingo? That's sort of the Irish course par excellence at the moment.
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Play With Your Buddies / Re: Minecraft: Dwarven Stronghold - Add yourself to the new spreadsheet!
« on: April 01, 2015, 01:05:36 pm »I got teleported to the town (I assume it's New Treeland) and will probably get a house set up at some point either tonight or tomorrow. Are we still looking for an ocean to colonize?
There's bound to be one somewhere- we can just run a rail line to it.
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General Discussion / Re: Bay12 2016 Election Megathread- It Is Terrifying
« on: April 01, 2015, 08:57:37 am »629
General Discussion / Re: Things that made you sad today thread.
« on: April 01, 2015, 08:53:15 am »
I'm going to get a B this semester. The class in question is my Homer class. Now, I love my Homer prof to bits, we get along very well (it's a small classics department, bordering on incestuous), but jesus he's a hard grader. Pretty much everyone in the class nearly flunked the second test- I got a mid C and it was the second-highest grade- and he has a policy that you can drop a test by writing a B-quality essay about something relating to Homer. Problem is, it was due a week from the second test...during a very busy week...and I had a crap thesis that sounded easy to write about but that I just couldn't pull together. I eventually biked home from the library last night, in a thunderstorm, went to sleep and decided "you know, a B in one class will not be the end of the world."
And you know what? It won't be. I'll work my ass off the rest of the semester- only three more weeks of real class following this- and make my peace with it. And then it'll be summer and I'll have a hundred glorious days of deciding what productive means for me, and then I'll go to Russia. And then Portugal. And it will be glorious.
And you know what? It won't be. I'll work my ass off the rest of the semester- only three more weeks of real class following this- and make my peace with it. And then it'll be summer and I'll have a hundred glorious days of deciding what productive means for me, and then I'll go to Russia. And then Portugal. And it will be glorious.
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General Discussion / Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« on: April 01, 2015, 12:37:11 am »Why not just toast all the bread and have a triple the toast toast sandwich?Now you're thinking with toasters.
A toast sandwich...with untoasted bread in the middle.