Bay 12 Games Forum

Probably FG&RP?

If your entire population votes for a candidate and they don't win, the takeaway is that you don't get a say in the election system anymore, which, if you think the other populations dislike you, means you're fucked.

... there's more than one election cycle, mate. And more to the government than POTUS. If your takeaway from losing one presidential election is you've lost your say in the system forevermore, you may have some misunderstandings about how our election system works. Somewhat farcically massive ones. Same for being disliked by chunks of the country meaning you're just perpetually fucked, really.

Not going to put that possibility completely off the table considering the state of education (north and south) during the period, but... yeeaah.

And if you're able to become president without needing a certain portion of the constituency...

... you're roughly every president in the history of the nation? Like. Having voted in the last few election cycles. This whole line about foo's demographic not giving representative bar any votes being acceptable contributory grounds for violent rebellion is just... have we forgotten how our election system works at some point during this discussion, or is some kind of point trying to be made here I'm missing?

... isn't that a FS/N fic, not a ZnT one? Pretty sure it doesn't cross over, either.

Unless that was the reference being made, I guess. Read like it hadn't changed targets.

Though nah, ZnT had some nice world building and just good enough characterization to act as a hook, but the rest was kinda' sub-par, at best. Shows its LN roots a bit too much, ha.

... look, when you're as short as the bat dudes sometimes what looks like dagger to bigger jerks is what your people call a spear.

I'll say this: If nothing else, the southern/conservative efforts to revise history vis a vis the civil war are pretty tenacious. Almost be admirable if what it was trying to downplay wasn't so odious. Probably be fine if it was just trying to point out there were other (smaller) reasons, but as we've seen in the last handful of posts that ain't exactly what's trying to be done.

... is it really so surprising the south doesn't have the most amazing reputation regarding history, though? We've kinda' been the usual final bastion of jackass for the last couple hundred years, and that's above and beyond the whole civil war thing. Sure, there's parts of the other regions of the country that've indulged, but it's tended towards a lot less "part" down here. Got some good shit going out, too, but... yeah.

Culture wise, yeah, there's a negative slant. And again, it's one of those "no shit, sherlock" things. If you've paid attention to it for the last few decades it's not exactly surprising -- most of the positive boils down to resourcefulness and hard work, an appreciation of natural stuff, and to a degree a veneer of politeness and helpfulness... maybe a bit of patriotism, too, vis a vis military enlistment (and not much else). And only that first pair comes without caveats -- that appreciation is alongside a powerful dislike for anything else, and I use the word veneer for a bloody reason. That politeness is used as much as a social weapon as anything, that helpfulness is tainted with a vicious xenophobia that shits on a lot of people, sometimes just folks from the next town over. Then the patriotism leans towards bloodthirsty as goddamn as its kind of starting point of nastiness. We do a pretty good job of trying to piss on whatever good general good points we got

And I guess the food. We know it largely kills the fuck out you, these days, but it's pretty tasty.

Then there's the rest of it. Beer (and not in a good sense or a celebration of alcohol culture), a monofocus on hunting/fishing, mechanical stuff, and (a specific handful of) sports, the anti-intellectualism (that shits on most common cultural exports, like writing, art, music*, etc., among the rest of the problems it causes), all the mess involved with the sexism, racism, xenophobia, and so on, the notable veneration of violence (even relative to the rest of the country)... it just kinda' keeps on going.

Southern culture's got a bad rep because southern culture has given itself a bad rep. A lot of the shit it promotes is just kinda' detestable, and holds on more due to inertia and stubbornness than anything related to merit. Throw in the association with poverty to top it all off, and there's nothing surprising about the regularly negative evaluation of southern culture. Folks ain't shitting on it just because of where it's coming from. Sodding live this stuff, and the general low opinion isn't exactly inexplicable. Even the internal support is half driven more by dislike of the metaphorical foreigner than anything else. We'll be the most odious bastards in the world if some damn <insert xenophobic slur> tells us to not be.

*We actually do okay, here, but the rub is a lot of the neat stuff we've done or are doing is drowned the bloody hell out by pop country and shitty gospel. There's still bastions of mountain music and zydeco and blues and bluegrass and whatnot lingering around but they can be hard to find a lot of the time.

Country music is Southern now?
Here I thought it was Western, and Bluegrass was Southern. That also seems more like a meme than anything else, but that might be because I live in a semi-rural part of my state.

Nah, country is primarily a southern thing, now, or at least the modern pop country (which is what has the heinous reputation, to the extent that there is one) is. Bluegrass is basically approaching dying down here, and hasn't really been a substantial thing for... longer than I've been alive, really. You can find country or gospel (sometimes rap or rock!) playing on just about every street corner, but if you want to find anything else (outside of more built up areas, anyway, and even for them you're generally talking more stuff that's not local; classical, touring bands, etc.) you're going to be hunting. That's almost especially true for the stuff that used to be more or less specialties.

Heh, yes, I am excluding "extinction of all macroscopic life on earth", there.
But to me, that sounds like something that would be excessively difficult for a human to pull off.
I mean, the universe could collapse tomorrow, but that doesn't have much to do with us, does it?

A human, sure, but in general we're already courting stuff like atmospheric methane poisoning and acidified oceans deep sixing the biosphere, among who knows what else. It's not easy to wreck our capability as a species to progress and/or rebuild vis a vis our technological base, but it's easier than anyone would like. The march of technology is far from inevitable, unfortunately. There's plenty of Bad Ends littering the path