Bay 12 Games Forum

Bit back, but just catching up so whatever.

Look, I want to believe that Republicans have a coherent, rational agenda. But right now, it looks like their entire political standpoint is "fuck liberals!" Does anything else explain calls to repeal the EPA? Does anything else support insulting our allies? Is there any other explanation at all for throwing out the Iran nuclear deal?

Sure. The other explanation is their coherent and rational (in a sense, not getting into whether the ideological basis behind it is anything desirable), but by and despicable (in practice, if not necessarily intent) and damaging to the country, agenda, that they have pretty blatantly been pursuing for decades. Their goal is not fuck liberals, it's fuck government. Look at their actions through a lens of someone trying to reduce governmental power and voter confidence in the possibility of capable and beneficial government, and a lot of things start making a lot more sense.

Fair few years back, one of 'em put it pretty succinctly: To paraphrase it, the republican party is seeking to create a federal* government small enough to drown in a bathtub.

And to do that you have to make it weak and unwanted. The goal of the GOP is to undermine the functioning and concept of government to the point it can be done away with, in practice if not name. They believe (to varying degrees and extent of explicitness) that sort of thing is a net negative for this country. Most everything else they do is either secondary, or based around personal enrichment rather than political ideology.

* And eventually state, but right now all the ways they're fucking those is mostly collateral from the overarching plan to make a non-functioning government in order to ruin voter confidence in US governmental organizations.

I feel if rural areas are to be won over to productivity, they have to been done so on the ground floor. Not from someone postulating from the top, but as someone whose been to these regions and has actively fought to improve conditions in rural areas. Once their lives have stabilized, that's when they can start considering new ideas and real progress can be made.

You can search back in the thread (and/or the previous ameripol one) for rural, industrial/industry, or density/population density for some of my previous comments on this. It's come up more than once and it's actually one of the relatively few things I've encountered in politics over the last few years that approaches viscerally pissing me off. The short form is that there is no amount of ground floor work that can be done that is going to work. About as close to period as you can get. Any and every attempt over the last several decades, which have been persistent, pervasive, and, while not magically successful, able on many fronts to bring whatever degree of succor possible to the regions in question, have been ignored. Just as persistently, just as pervasively, and with significantly more success. Similarly, all the (myriad, also pervasive, etc.) ways in which republican efforts in rural areas have fucked any and every one in these areas, are generally downplayed at best, also ignored most commonly, or at the worst occasionally through some goddamn voodoo miracle managed to increase their support in said areas.

Said it previously. You cannot talk to someone that will not listen. There is no persuading someone that is going to persistently ignore any and every thing you say or do. Internal/cultural changes can alter how that works, but there is functionally nothing a liberal can do on the ground that has meaningful electoral effect. Or if there is, I haven't seen it over the past few decades, and I still haven't seen anyone make an attempt to figure one out, much less succeed at it.

Also, stabilization might actually change that, sure. Problem is you cannot stabilize most of these areas. Period, this one isn't "as close as it gets to", it's period. It's not physically possible, especially in any way resembling what supported them before the inevitable happened. You can offer (re)training/education (if you can get funding and support, good luck when the GOP exists), you can offer welfare and similar support to give them means to better accumulate funds and build themselves a better life there or elsewhere (see previous paren), you can bring in new industries that can function in rural conditions (see previous paren again, also it's not going to support the same amount of people and they're often going to have to be doing very different things), but fundamentally what many of the folks in question want -- what their parents had, what their community was built around, a surety in regards to past and future, and on, and on -- is either gone or going, and there's both nothing that's going to stop it and nothing that's going to bring it back, at the absolute least to the same extent it was previously. And, again. Just about everything that could be making that process hurt less, or slow it down, or even arrest or revert it to whatever degree, is either rejected or ignored. So far as democratic/liberal efforts to sway these areas electorally go, the efforts might as well not exist and (at least so far as electoral influence goes) spending resources and effort on it might as well be pissing those resources and effort down a dry well.

Eeyy. Thanks, ehehe.

... hopefully I'll remember to still grab a copy when/if the next dollar drop comes around. Maybe run a mini giveaway or somethin' if my memory's not borked a reminder by that point, heh.

E: Oh hey, new stuff comes quick. Redrock had a fungal grove!

... that includes something called a water weep, that has *checks calculator* about 72,000 drams of water in the squares surrounding it. No typo, that's five digits, ahahaha. 5x5 of 3k deep pools, with the center occupied by the shroom itself. Is... is this some kind of nefarious fungus plot, or did I just instantly trip over the means to buy out most of the merchants in the game?

E2: Also, anyone happen to know if I can like... take this thing with me? Wear it as a hat? Breed it and start farms a few tiles away from every restocking trader I can find? The location's pretty silly convenient but it could be sillier convenient

E3: Oh wow. I'm not exactly sure what's happening, but apparently when you take water from the thing's water pool, the individual pool tiles gain fresh water. Looks like somewhere between half and a third what you shove in your water containers. Stepped into a fresh 3k pool, got ~600 drams worth of water, look at the pool and it's up 300 and a bit.

considering one of the talking points surrounding him was that he is a "real great businessman because of how much more money I made from the cash my dad gave me," that's a straight-up insane thing. cuz, iirc, if he'd just stuck it in an indexed fund, he'd have made much more than he did by trying to actually invest and build and manage on his own...

Yeah, pretty much. Perhaps the best(?) part of that latter bit is that he's actually spent time badmouthing those sorts of investors before, if my memory's working at the mo'. I mean, that's probably not saying that much, because there doesn't seem to be much that he hasn't, but *shrugs*

I guess to an extent you can't entirely blame people that bought that line, though. Most of the US electorate probably has a fair bit of trouble wrapping their heads around what a 40-100 million starting fund (and business connections gratis, and more than one bailout, and...) and several decades to grow exactly means, so far as dosh generation goes. Or even just a vague idea, for that matter (which is about where I'm at, tbh). Or had paid much/any attention (at least of a financial nature) to people working from similar (or worse off) starting points that (significantly) outperformed the guy. When you've got basically zero background to contextualize a conman, it becomes a lot easier for 'em to get away with an appropriately related lie, and largely harder to really fault the person buying it for falling for it. Eh.

E: Though, all that said, if someone of voting age hasn't realized that someone saying they're a great businessman is probably lying, they may have some problems of one sort or another. Just... throwin' that out there.

Quote from: Sergarr on February 04, 2017, 11:12:21 am

Haha, just saw Trump getting called "an elephant in a china shop" on Russian TV.

Heh, that is apparently an expression in a lot of countries. Over here we have nearly the same expression 'als een olifant in the porseleinkast' = 'like an elephant in a porcelain cupboard'

Amusingly enough, it's not actually an american expression, exactly. The one we do use is "bull in a china shop". What the rus did there was replace bull with the republican animal symbol... thing. Whatever it's actually called. Which is an elephant. Surprisingly on the ball if it was intentional, heh.

Were Stalin and Mao worse than hitler?

Depends on your metric. In some ways, sure. In others, maybe not. On the net... eh.  I'unno. Probably put the net rank as something like Mao>=Stalin>Hitler, but with fairly marginal differences so far as metaphorical score goes. Certainly if you made some kind of horrifying mutant Maolin the combined theoretical damnation earned would notably surpass a single Hitler.

Or to put it differently, after a point there's only so much point in ranking relative malignancy. They're all well past any threshold sanity would set for ethical behavior. Whether one wins out, to the extent anything can be "won", here, doesn't really make a functional difference.

Quote from: Frumple on February 03, 2017, 07:42:38 pm

... his what? Is... is someone actually using the words non-ban ban?

I'm using those words. Referring to his ban on people coming from certain countries, which he insists is not a ban, but in reality is by every definition definitely a ban.

Ah. Though checking, trump's actually started insisting it's not a ban now, too? Google seems to think he's still calling it a ban, but the Wozzname of Incompetent Pronunciation was trying to babble something contradicting that, heh. Probably just didn't set the time filters right, ah well.

Harassment and discrimination laws already cover what's necessary; protecting someone from hurt feelings is not the government's concern, and certainly does not warrant risking the near-sacrosanct nature of free speech protections.

Oddly enough, the harassment and discrimination laws in the US do not, in fact, cover what's necessary. We still have plenty of persistent discrimination and harassment plaguing the country in general and specific demographics in particular, particularly ones that don't receive federal protections and only receive sporadic state level ones, that is not able to be addressed under the purview of current law for many of the people being screwed by it.

Which is why stuff like the NY stuff show up, and why legal rulings continue to be attempted to be brought forward as precedent or to overturn old ones. If the current legislation and enforcement wasn't failing, there wouldn't be nearly enough pressure to get such efforts into effect. But it is, particularly for groups such as that the NY bit addressed.