fired: Look at all these crosses, this anime must be rich with spiritual meaning!
tired: The Christian symbolism is meaningless. The director said he put them there because he thought they looked cool.
wired: The Christian symbolism has meaning because we each give religious symbols a different emotional loading, which we read into the work.
inspired: The Christian symbolism has meaning because God inspired various Japanese anime directors to put it there.
Considering that most of the time that my posts gets more than a few notes, it is because @argumate reblogged them, I wonder if my niche in the Tumblr ecosystem is “argumate feeder blog“.
wisdom is knowing that all of Tumblr is argumate feeder blogs
Is your centrality due to joining Tumblr especially early, or to monopolizing the US nighttime posting, or some other reason?
merely because of the anthropic principle, by which I assume that any blog I don’t personally follow can’t actually exist.
It’s true - if you check the followers on any given Tumblr blog, you’ll find that Argumate is the first. This is because the blog did not exist until Argumate visited it.
Proof:
This image was taken from a blog titled @strawberryrationalistgirl just moments ago, which is also the first time it has appeared on the Internet. It hasn’t even been indexed by Google yet.
you’re too orthogonal to me to be my political opposition
I follow you for weird ms paint comics and the futurist pseudo-history. moar of both pls
Also if I’m being honest, I’m pretty sure the latter ask is what the AnCaps are following for.
I for one like the ms-paint comics.
The year is 2042. Following the election of Elon Musk to the office of Hyperpresident, the Mitigated Chaos blog drops text-primary political content entirely and becomes a slice-of-life webcomic about the relationship of two married lesbian cops and their robotic AI dog, Sgt. Sparkums.
Tumblr wanderers sometimes stumble into the distant archives from a time before they were alive, posting callout posts against the ultra-reactionary politics of the year 2018.
@theunitofcaring: it does not have anything to do with ‘nations don’t real’ and is mostly used by people who think that they are (and that immigration restrictions are good, just shouldn’t apply to sympathetic people who’ve lived here for twenty years without trouble working hard)
It’s a tough question, because I don’t want to let the Democrats subvert the immigration system, and through it, democracy and de facto ownership of the state/country.
And I don’t think immigration is the solution to global poverty.
So if it were up to me, I’d probably pick some combination of all four of the alternative policies WRT to immigration at the bottom of this ask, simultaneously.
OK this is a bit of a tangent, forgive me:
One thing I find bothersome about the “Democrats importing people to win elections” narrative – setting aside the fact that immigrants primarily settle in Democratic strongholds as it is – is that it sort of assumes that being against whatever new people show up is a terminal value of the Republicans, which is silly. The American right does pretty well with people who emigrated from the Communist bloc, for instance, but it’s not that those people are inherently more “right-wing” in an objective sense, it’s that the American right has defined itself in a way that offers them more. It could easily do the same for later waves of immigrants, if only it could wrestle down the xenophobic portion of its base. They fucked it up about as hard as possible, but that GOP postmortem that determined they needed to win over Hispanic voters and were in a position to do so was correct – ICE can’t kick down enough doors to reverse that demographic trend.
There’s a common reactionary concern that the influx will fundamentally reshape the culture of America, but I’m pretty skeptical. America has had comparable waves of immigration in the past, and they did have some effect, but that effect is generally considered positive or neutral now, and none of them did nearly as much to change the nature of the country as WW2. Over the kind of timeframe where demographic shifts become an issue, most of the current batch of migrants will assimilate and shift rightward, and if the world hasn’t blown up by then, in a hundred years people will be pointing to them as examples of the “good” kind of immigrant to contrast with the hordes of unamerican degenerates pouring in from, I dunno, let’s say Aragon.
The uniting factor that makes immigrants more likely to vote Democrat is that the Democrats have less of an active interest in screwing them, and the Republicans are only interested in screwing them because they’re them, so it’s really a self-inflicted wound. Even the much-feared Radical Islamists are closest ideologically and politically to hard-line localist fundamentalist types who are die-hard Republican voters.
I don’t know enough about the history to say whether the Democrats actually were the ones who made xenophobia vs. xenophilia into a party-lines issue, but it’s definitely the Republicans who kept it there, and that tactic had at least as much effect on the resulting consequences as the original immigration reforms and the civil rights movement.
It’s actually related to the selectiveness of immigration, the rate of immigration, and so on.
The Republicans need less immigration because they need time for that rightward shift to occur.
Most of the immigrant groups, especially ones coming in in numbers, are apparently more in favor of government intervention than the mean US voter. If you’re a Republican, this is bad. If you’re a Republican, catering to that means becoming a not-Republican.
Could that be due solely due to Republican opposition? Possibly, but if you’re a Republican and your outreach has failed (perhaps in part because of racially-correlated wealth inequality - which again, dealing with is at odds with your whole Republican thing), is that a chance you want to take?
(Edit: Also, the list of proposals by Trump, offhand, sounded like it was designed to pull more of the Anti-Communist, Republican-voting immigrants in. Naturally it was rejected as being evil, but of course it would be as a political tactic, GOP are known to do similar.)
When Obi-Wan Kenobi wants to disable the tractor beam, he goes to find the tractor beam settings, which are a physical part of the Death Star (conveniently located above an abyss with no hand-rail) not a panel in some dialog box.
When Jyn has to realign the antenna to transmit the plans, the controls for doing so are a physical part of the tower (conveniently located on a windswept gantry jutting out into space) and are specific to that task alone.
Star Trek may have its tricorders and iPads, but Star Wars doesn’t even have text messages! If you want to send a message, you record a hologram of yourself and give it to a droid to deliver to the recipient.
Humanity has a hundred thousand years experience with carefully constructed special purpose tools, while general purpose software has only become a thing in our lifetimes; we still don’t know how to integrate it with our mythmaking, and perhaps we never will.
Using the manual override is what you do if you don’t have legitimate access credentials.
And if you have some piece of big, heavy equipment like a starship, then you want a manual override, right?
you’re too orthogonal to me to be my political opposition
I follow you for weird ms paint comics and the futurist pseudo-history. moar of both pls
Also if I’m being honest, I’m pretty sure the latter ask is what the AnCaps are following for.
If I’m being honest, I suspect some % of my followers follow me only to keep tabs on their political opposition.
Anonymous asked:
It’s a controversial term, it’s just controversial in the opposite direction.
Of course, it would be far less controversial among most of the ratposters than it is to me, specifically.
mitigatedchaos
And by the way? World government is what shouldn’t exist. Nations are the real alternative to that, and it takes more than being a difference in paperwork to fuel it enough for that. Things like communes aren’t a real alternative.
I don’t know if you saw my opinions on what to do about border disputes. But I also said I wanted that principle used to create a number of interlocking EU-like-but-less-bad-monetary-policy superstates. No world government, no real need for nationalism.
I don’t think that has the necessary power level to prevent world government.
There are two outcomes if you let a situation like the EU go on for too long. Either Europe will itself become a nation, as cultural borders dissolve under the force of internal migration, and power will centralize; or, they’ll forget who they are and, lacking the will to resist, there will slowly be the formation of a world government under people who ask why there should be such antiquated things as borders around the EUs.
Right now, Europe seems to be shearing itself apart over the friction of not being a true Federation.
Memes as ritual
Memes as spells
No!
They already did that!
It’s not a good idea!
THYL discusses the terrifying truth behind America’s first Meme-American President.
