A sort of extended comment section

Did you know that the Communist Manifesto is part of the curriculum of the United States armed forces? One of my copies is bound with a bunch of other original source documents for a US military class.

Cueta, Spain was a war-zone last night! Yesterday's Islamic horde invasion was day 1.

Today they've started looting every store in the city.

If this doesn't make you support re-migration, I don't know what will.

America, in November, we have two simple choices:

1 - Cast votes to allow this invasion back to America soil again like it happened under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

I largely play old fighting games that were released as set-in-stone editions, and are immutable. While the perception of characters and the knowledge of playing with and against them might change, their properties will stay exactly the way they are until the end of time. I don't think people appreciate how positive this is to the attitude of playing one of these games.

Testament is an absurdly strong character in Guilty Gear XX: Accent Core +R. They will continue to be strong forever. You basically never see people in the community bitching about Testament, or complaining about this. And why would they? That's the game. The game is like this forever. You can either adapt, learn the counterplay, analyze top sets to see how strong players deal with Testament's tools, maybe learn a stronger character with a stronger Testament matchup, or you can play a different game. That's just how it is. Nothing to be done but to adapt or leave.

I think, personally, that this is incredibly good for the experience of playing a game like this. There's nothing to bitch about, no hate to be given. This is how the game works. We're here to play the game. There's no point overselling a character's strengths or weaknesses online, like prayers to deities who might be listening, hoping for a nerf or buff. Sometimes a game might be unbalanced. Sometimes that's okay if the game is still fun to play. Zappa's incredibly strong, sure, but you'll get laughed out of the room if you get mad at someone for playing them. The Zappa we have is the Zappa we'll have forever. You can learn the matchup, practice and adapt, or you can find a different fighting game.

The flipside of this, is that if you play a character, whether that be a high tier, or a mid tier, or a low tier, that's the character you're getting forever. Your character will never receive a nerf that guts them, nor a buff that leaves you the most hated person in any tournament. There's a certain jovial atmosphere around players of bad characters, not one of prayers to the devs to change or fix them, but one of acceptance. This is the character we have. They're base properties aren't getting any better. Let's see if we can't make them work? On the flipside, if you pick a strong character, they're not going to be hit by a massive nerf leaving them unusable. Characters aren't going to have the properties of moves altered, making you relearn every combo. Your character is yours. All there is is to make the most of it.

And this isn't even touching on the fact that, in many cases, a game being unbalanced can be a good thing! Melee is an intoxicating spectator sport for a lot of reasons, but chief among them is that such a large percentage of the cast is just unusably bad, making any appearance of the bottom half of the cast exciting and novel. Who gives a shit about what Zain's doing, there's a Game & Watch in top 64, let's watch them! You also see this prominently in +R with Bridget, who's always an extremely exciting character to see in action. It's great! It gets the crowds going! It's not always a bad thing for characters to be bad, as long as you let the player base accept this and don't lead them on!

honestly I think there's a lot that e-sports could take from Melee. Love or hate the game, it is uniquely capable of hyping up crowds in no small part due to the pro wrestling style personas that the top players have always played up for the cameras and the focus on players as larger than life characters, on top of the game having very distinct character brackets that make any deviation thrilling and enrapturing to watch, and I think e-sports could benefit as a viewer experience by- I am dragged off stage by a hooked cain

I contrast, in my head, my experience of playing Luigi in Melee, a fun experience of trying to make this piece of shit work, having a pretty good time with it, with trying to play Testament in Strive, on paper a much better character relative to the cast. The anxiety of every balance patch coming out, seeing if this time Testament is going to be allowed to be good. Of getting moves reworked and having to relearn entire combo trees. Of getting nerfed, despite already being the worst in the game. I think about the way that every dispute over character balance is projected loudly, because there are often developers listening. Oftentimes it feels like the community response to a character being strong, or a matchup being uneven, isn't an opportunity to adapt, learn counterplay, maybe pick up a secondary, but to hope and pray for them to get less strong overnight. The cast gets homogenized in an attempt to make wide scale balance updates easier.

Look at the date.

HELLO you are asking questions that literature and poetry THROUGHOUT the middle ages has asked, and it is from this questioning that we derive things like the Codes of Chivalry (which is not "how to treat a noble lady really nice" but is actually "how to be an ethical person when you're rich and you own a horse" and includes such things as "don't run people over with your horse")

In fact I daresay you already know instinctively just from cultural osmosis what a good boss -- a good liege lord -- is and does based on the tropes that have survived to the current day and the kinds of things that get Hugely Praised in things like legends of King Arthur.

A good boss (liege lord) is:

Merciful. He is not having his peasants killed for things like poaching rabbits during a famine. In fact, he is working to mitigate famine. During times of individual hardship, he might negotiate with a peasant for a payment plan on their annual rent.

Patient. He is not impulsive, he does not lose his temper.

Prudent. He makes choices that are thoughtful, considered, conservative (in the sense of not needlessly risky--he's not investing his entire fortune in having everyone plant an unproven crop). He is making sure local infrastructure like roads and public buildings are maintained and kept in good nick.

Gentle. He doesn't haul off and slap a servant or a tenant for breaking a dish or making a mistake. He doesn't abuse animals, his wife or children, or his employees. He doesn't rape the servants.

Generous (both in money and in spirit). He is not extorting the peasants for an amount of rent that is beyond their means, he is not raising taxes every year to cover his own lavish lifestyle. He is paying his servants a living wage (or, if wages are low, he's giving them room/board/clothing to make up the difference). If someone in a tenant's family dies, the lord is sending a gift of condolence, or helping to pay for the funeral, or possibly even ATTENDING the funeral and speaking a few kind words about the deceased, ESPECIALLY if they were a really upstanding and important member of the community. If one of his tenants is gravely sick, the lord is sending a basket of food or paying for a doctor. He is giving charitably (generally this will be, like, a bequest to the church so that they can run a hospital or an orphanage or a school for the local village children).

Pious. This classically means "goes to church, submits with humility to God" but to me this quality is subtextually standing in for "maintaining an ongoing sense of Perspective that HE'S not god, that there are higher powers he is Accountable to, that he too can be Judged, etc, so that he doesn't end up going on a weird fucked up power trip"

Humble. One of the most admiring things you hear about a lord doing in literature and epic poetry is, "He ate off of wooden plates while his followers ate off of gold and silver." Humility isn't about being meek, it's just about not thinking so much of yourself that you turn your nose up and sneer at what "lesser" people do. In other words: Don't be a fucking diva. If your carriage gets stuck in the mud, climb out and help everybody else push, you're not gonna die from getting mud on your shoes.

Condescending. This word has changed wildly in meaning/tone over the last couple centuries -- it's now a rude thing to do (because we've done away with legal social hierarchies, so someone acting like they're lowering themselves to your level IS insulting), but in older times, a high-ranking person "condescending" to a servant was worthy of praise and admiration: it means they were setting aside rank and privilege to speak to them with the easygoing, friendly respect and compassion they'd give a peer. This is things like... Treats those beneath him with courtesy and respect (ie: listens soberly and attentively when one of his servants or tenants comes to complain about a problem). Having a sense of humor and kindness about it when the lord and a servant both come around a corner at the same time and run into each other and the servant gets knocked to the ground and starts babbling apologies--the condescending (positive) lord helps them to their feet with his own hands and cracks a joke to show them that it's ok (as opposed to just walking off without a word or insulting/scolding them). This is also things like trusting a farmer, woodcutter, or artisan to speak with expertise about their own livelihood and taking their advice into consideration if they tell the lord that one of his ideas won't work.

Good boundaries. The ethical liege lord knows that it's normal for the staff to probably be softly bitching about him in private (even with a really good boss, we all grumble from time to time). He's not eavesdropping on them, he's not going into the staff areas where they should reasonably expect to have a degree of privacy, etc.

Righteous and protective of "the weak". The "weak" here doesn't necessarily mean physically weak, this is often used in the sense of someone politically or socially weak, aka The Marginalized -- the poor, the disabled, women, children, the elderly, etc. If a lord sees someone like this being mistreated or abused, he's supposed to step in and put a stop to that.

Committed to reciprocity. In a highly hierarchical system like feudalism, every person (from the lowest peasant all the way up to the crown prince) legally OWES their liege lord certain things (taxes, labor, service, loyalty, etc). A good liege remembers and takes very seriously the idea that this should be a balanced and reciprocal relationship -- in other words, he owes something BACK. Feudalism is modeled very strongly on the family system: If children owe their parents obedience and service, then parents owe their children care and protection. This still applies when the "child" is a farmer and the "parent" is a local baron. Or when the "child" is a duke and the "parent" is the king.

Basically, we get so caught up in the aesthetics of nobility that we forget that it literally is a managerial position that comes with responsibilities that were... very similar back in the day to the same ones we have now. Humans have not changed all that much. At the end of the day, a really good boss in the 1400s versus in one from the 2020s displays most of the same qualities of personality, even if the details of execution are different.

The next question is, of course, "well, but this theoretical liege lord is HIGHLY idealized -- how often did that actually HAPPEN? Wasn't it more likely that everyone was exploited all the time?" and to that I say: Well, maybe. But again, I don't think humans have changed all that much. Just like the bosses of today, there's a SPECTRUM: A really really good boss is rare and precious and one that you tell stories about for years after you've left that job, but a truly, genuinely, homicidally nightmarish boss is also pretty rare. Most bosses are sort of meh -- they have their good moments, they have their shitty moments, but they're tolerable and you can get along with them well enough to do your job, and then you roll your eyes at them behind their back. Generally, humans don't take outright exploitation lying down. Being a bad boss in the historical period is how you get peasant uprisings and revolts, and you know that to be true because your parents raised you with that knowledge, so unless you are very stupid or inbred or an egomaniac, there is literal personal incentive to at minimum be a Tolerable liege lord. And that means hitting at least SOME of the above bullet points.

TL;DR: In the words of Honore de Balzac, "Everything I have just told you can be summarized by an old word: noblesse oblige!"

‘Don’t be a fool! What have you heard, and why did you listen?’ Gandalf’s eyes flashed and his brows stuck out like bristles. ‘Mr. Frodo, sir!’ cried Sam quaking. ‘Don’t let him hurt me, sir! Don’t let him turn me into anything unnatural! My old dad would take on so. I meant no harm, on my honour, sir!’

Some of this erodes as the hobbits go through the book's many troublesome events, bringing them closer. But in the early parts set in the Shire, there's more class distinction where Sam works with his hands in the dirt and the other three hobbits are nobles.

Believing something not only without evidence, but that actively contradicts the evidence, creates patterns of thought that make you completely incapable of what is necessary in academia. Occasionally you'll find someone who is able to compartmentalize enough that they can succeed in academia and hold a completely different set of ideas in their personal life, but those people are rare.

Now, there ARE plenty of people who I would consider to hold conservative ideas and values in academia, but they're the kind of people who the MAGA movement has spent the last decade pushing out of the Republican Party, people like Ben Sasse or Jeff Flake, and they're not the kind of people Mr. Sachs and those like him consider "conservative" when they bemoan the lack of conservatives in academia.

I don't know who Sachs is, I remember a fair amount of back and forth on Twitter regarding this which didn't seem to center on people being really radical. My view of it being a straw man particularly focuses on the implication that truth seeking is at odds with "conservative politics" more generally.

"This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand, and God." "This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God."

But:

Like a lot of things in this genre it kinda points out differences between ideals expressed in science fiction (or cases when something dystopian has been produced), generates negative affect from them, and smears that negative affect all over a bunch of stuff with (in my view) little rational justification.

Also MASSIVE gell-mann amnesia regarding EAs and longtermism IMO, and "what do you care if the bridge falls down? The most important thing is that it centers minority voices" mentality.

I think some of these problems are common in an essay that jumps between many different topics.

It says we shouldn't care about a supposedly theoretical, far off human extinction by evil robots and then talks about Sam Altman perceiving that the potentially evil/dangerous robots are forming right now in his own hands.

One: Why does the top say "stories of a better future"? That's not what science fiction is. That's not even what the article body is about. The article later says "Gibson’s vision was explicitly dystopian".

Two:

Star Trek depicts a post-scarcity, post-capitalist society where money has been abolished and humanity works toward collective betterment.

Star Trek is wrong or incoherent on this point. "Post-scarcity" is a buzzword that collapses under scrutiny. The strict interpretation is physically impossible because Chateau Picard is scarce; there aren't enough French chateaus to go around. The loose interpretation is already accomplished. Roddenberry didn't understand why money is.

-Patrick McKenzie, Bits About Money.

From that report:

Sometimes investigators would only provide video surveillance, which was not enough to prove intent to defraud in some cases. It was enough for probable cause but not enough for the higher level of proof of beyond a reasonable doubt to convict.

To answer prev's tags: Saying that Shirley "uncovered" it should have an asterisk: several people have arguably uncovered and re-discovered it over time and been unable to prove it because the bar for a conviction is very, very high. Even with video evidence of the wrong number of kids, intent is hard to prove on an incorrect billing number. (This is why some fraud laws use a "knew or should have known" standard instead. Miscounting one child is reasonable error. Miscounting the children by half-again is fraud.) Here's one of the convictions described in the 2019 report's appendix on previous Minnesota childcare fraud prosecutions:

In December 2013, law enforcement began conducting surveillance of Salama. According to court records, on 57 days, Salama billed for more children than were actually present by an average of 57 percent. Between December 2013 and May 2015, Salama received a total amount of about $2.55 million. Based on an average daily fraud rate of 57 percent, prosecutors extrapolated the fraud to $1.449 million. Ali pleaded guilty to theft of public money in exchange for dropping the wire fraud counts. On January 23, 2018, United States District Judge Joan Erickson sentenced Ali to two years in prison, two years supervised release, and restitution of $1,449,105.67.

Palworld tried injecting new content but got a different kind of slop: SurvivoCraft BaseBuilder slop where "Wooden Club" is a craft item that requires unlocking to be allowed to make, and the technology levels are a senseless point sink of filler and level grinding.

"Wooden Board" on the same level as "Mill" but 13 levels over "Wooden Chest", while an energy shield can be made from sticks and stones and unobtainium crystals at level 4.