Do you think The Boys is an accurate representation if real people had superpowers?
Most of that is entirely absurd and not worth getting into. I'm sure a pedantic historian can nitpick it if that's the way everybody wants to go.
However, let me revisit your accusation of "contradicting my point". At no stage here have I conflated unarmed protest with peaceful protest. All along I've been frustrated by the US mindrot tendency of accepting no nuance between some My Little Pony version of political action and outright armed confrontation. The worldwide protests that show how bonkers the US perception of the issue is were not peaceful, but neither were they an armed confrontation where protestors attempted to use their armed might to deter police forces. They were... you know, political action. Civil unrest. "Civil" being the key word.
The way you and US leftists in general tend to parse stuff like this is nonsense. The fact that mass protests can escalate to the point they went in Nepal, Madagascar or any of the countries in the general "Gen Z spring" movement and prior protest waves disproves the US perspective because a) it has nothing to do with the level of access to weapons, and b) it shows sufficiently commited public action doesn't have to be either fully nonviolent or an armed insurrection.
Americans look at this as some form ot guarantee their success by either intimidating the other into submission or hoping that the other side will fold immediately. That's not how this goes. "The cops may charge at us, we should bring guns" is some weird overlap of thinking protestors are entitled to painless victory and that there is no possible pressure beyond violent pressure. It makes no sense to me. And yet, here we are, a bunch of posts down the line.
See, and there it is. Zero to a hundred. It's either popcorn or civil war, no gradient.
I mean, for one thing Nazi Germany also wasn't defeated by military cosplayers flashing their gun collection at them, and clearly neither was MAGA America. The first one was defeated by a borderline apocalyptic global war, so... in the grand scheme both the military cosplay and the sternly worded letters are pretty much about just as effective there. We're still waiting and seeing on the MAGA America part.
But for another, plenty of nonviolent and/or unarmed protest has achieved its goals, historically. From Europe to India to South Africa to the actual United States. The "sternly worded letter" derision is pure action movie fantasy. This month alone the governments of Madagascar and Nepal came down after mass protests. Not a single set of camo pants in sight, just... you know, students organizing on social media and One Piece flags for some reason because this is a weird timeline.
They weren't even fully nonviolent, either. There were clashes, there was enforcement violence and dozens of people, mostly protestors, were killed in both countries. And still two governments came down and the situations continue to evolve and push for full regime change.
Meanwhile the example I'm being given is some American fascists standing on a street while cops that agree with them wait for them to get sleepy at their military cosplay convention and go home.
I don't get Americans. I don't think the way they see the world as a culture makes sense, and I am terrified at how much they export it successfully through places like this. Nepal just held a full-on election over Discord and I still understand how that went down better than middle class America's political views.
Yeah, no, that's the point. You look at a barbaric demonstration of a completely broken down society and see something that works. That's horrifying.
You effectively saw some guy walk into a subway holding his erect, exposed penis in one hand and a machete in the other and went "hey, that guy found an empty seat right away, I think we can all learn a lesson here".
That's nuts. It's weird that you don't see how nuts that is.
Somehow still accurate.
Well that went places.
I didn't say it looks like a flash game, I said it looks like the logo for a flash game portal.
That is fucking terrifying and so is anybody who doesn't think so.
Twitter has an aggressive character limit, a focus on a streaming feed and historically it's been built on fast, trending content updated in real time via reposts and this sort of atomized discussion using unthreaded quotes.
Tumblr has changed a bunch trying to stay relevant in a MySpacey kinda way, but it's ultimately more of a blog platform where the main post is expected to be bulkier and more readable while the threaded responses are framed as more of a comments section you don't even get to see in full by default, so it more or less splits the difference between Twitter and Reddit, or between Masto and here.
"A different CSS" can impact how you interact with things a bunch, along with how you present trends and follows. Which I guess was my original point.
It's less the design itself and more that it makes the entire proposition seem like a flash game portal circa 2006, so it just screams "stay away" at unsafe volumes. It's not even a bad drawing, it's just branding the wrong thing at the wrong time.
It's all just little text packets, this place included.
But hey, that's all social media. The slight differences in threading, text limits, media embeds and share mechanics do matter.
This is a weird pattern in that presumably mass abandonment of the em dashes due to the memes around it looking like AI content would quickly lead to newer LLMs based on newer data sets also abandoning em dashes when it tries to seem modern and hip and just punt the ball down the road to the next set of AI markers. I assume as long as book and press editors keep stikcing to their guns that would go pretty slow, but it'd eventually get there. And that's assuming AI companies don't add instructions about this to their system prompts at any point. It's just going to be an endless arms race.
Which is expected. I'm on record very early on saying that "not looking like AI art" was going to be a quality marker for art and the metagame will be to keep chasing that moving target around for the foreseeable future and I'm here to brag about it.
Holy shit, are they? Because from the outside looking in I assume the presumption that a gun may be present is why US police is essentially a military organization willing to shoot anybody at the slightest provocation, so I would assume if you are faced with a crowd of armed people your first instinct to stop that is to shoot first.
I mean, my common sense assumption is that bringing a gun of any kind to a protest is a fantastic way to start a massacre of your own people, but I've lost the ability to parse how Americans understand both political action and violence ages ago.
This is a great example of modern Internet "either one thing or what I randomly decide is its opposite is correct".
Absolutely modern copyright is broken and unfit for purpose, absolutely the ability to correctly assign authorship is useful, absolutely there is value to exclusive monetization rights for authors, certainly the ability to assign those to corporations is overexploited in the current model.
All of those things are true at once and I'm pretty sure the unavoidable overhaul of a trillion dollar conglomerate of industrial and cultural dependencies worldwide is not going to end up fitting in a meme.
Cool.
So this presumes the rightmost party never wins.
Instead you should have one line somewhere in there where they don't vote for the lesser evil well enough and the right side skyrockets five memes down the road, except the lesser evil next time is the same amount to the left of THAT mark now.
I mean, you're living it, I'm not sure why I have to explain it.
Could have saved us both some time if you hadn't decided the disingenuous out of context response was worth going around the loop.
I mean... not really? This presumes the right never wins.
Instead you should have one line somewhere in there where they don't vote for the lesser evil well enough and the right side skyrockets five memes down the road, except the lesser evil next time is the same amount to the left of THAT mark now.
I mean, you're living it, I'm not sure why I have to explain it.
No, I'm getting what you're saying.
I'm saying what you're saying is wrong because it demands you consider only the statements they are explicitly making and disregard any statements they are not enumerating but that need to be included for it to follow some semblance of logic.
You are arguing that "I believe" has the capacity to contain all the false premises and justify them as long as every action that isn't belief-based remains internally consistent.
I am saying that... well, no, you need to assess the premises included in that belief to evaluate the entire statement.
"I want to drain the swamp so I vote for Trump because I believe he'll drain the swamp" or "I want to protect children from pedophiles and I believe Trump will do that" are just as valid of a statement, regardless of whether Trump is a convicted criminal or a sex offender.
As long as you are willing to collapse all incorrect arguments into "belief", you can justify the logic of any premise at all by just assuming the speaker is incorrect somewhere else that you're not evaluating. It's entirely tautological at that point. All human action follows some perceived set of incentives. Not all human action makes sense.
You're also presuming that the incorrect statements that make sense to you are fixable, which they absolutely are not. None of these people are working down that logic chain that you're stating. Let me be clear, you won't convince an antivaxer by changing their factual basis. Their factual basis is built to reach the conclusion they want to reach.
It's also important to point out that even if that was possible, "we have a population crisis so we need to close the borders" is a contradiction, and it's exactly what these guys are saying. They aren't saying "we prefer the effects of the population crisis to the changes to our culture immigration brings". That's not the statement in the first place.
The statement is fundamentally incongruous because it's incomplete and backwards. The real train of thought here is as follows:
"I hate foreigners" "Our population is shrinking" "I miss when women worked for me having babies and cleaning after me" "Foreigners are coming here because our population shrinking creates demand for them" "If women worked for me again having babies and cleaning after me we would be able to grow our population without creating demand for foreigners I hate"
The statement being provided is strategic. They won't say what they want, they will act to reach it. That includes misrepresenting their argument.
I mean, all due respect, to the guy, but this doesn't go down until 2027. At least give them a minute to get in the position where they could feasibly fuck up before you berate them for it.
If you look at the Internet they are apparently definitely dismantling the company to sell the pieces but also definitely continuing to make what they make but with MAGA politics but also as a muslim theocracy and trimming down and speeding up but also doubling down on live service at the same time somehow.
And man, one or multiple of those may happen, but almost certainly not all of them and none have happened yet. Given how much of a public-ass public company chasing short term gains they've been historically I can't help but think there's a fair amount of projection going on.
Here's my stance: I have no idea what this means and I have no idea what they're going to do. This is all weird and I have zero frame of reference for how the new owners are going to gel with that organization or what their new objectives are going to be when compared to the old "make more money this quarter than last quarter" thing.
That's... not how that works when you make statements about the world. Your unicorn example is all well and good in a universe where there are only hypothetical animals, but you're eliding big chunks of that chain. "Unicorns are pink" is a valid statement in the abstract, but if you're arguing about animals in the real world that's not where the chain starts. The chain goes: unicorns exist, unicorns are pink, all pink animals eat clouds.
And of course in this situation you need to evaluate each statement. Unicorns exist is going to be a big fat FALSE, which means you can't claim all unicorns eat clouds and argue it's a logical statement. It's a meaningless statement by itself because it depends on a false assumption.
Which is my exact point. You are claiming the argument is logical because you're assuming the only requirement is that it is internally consistent when all their premises are accepted. But the premises are false, so it's not. I appreciate that you're getting stuck when the chain of statements they cherry pick changes over time (see the free speech example), but they're not meaningfully different. If you let them cherry pick the clauses they need to verify and ignore everything else they can make a consistent argument in the moment about anything, including vaccines and flat planets and jewish space lasers.
I mean, no they can't because they suck at this. But still, they can make something close enough to one that if they speak fast and loudly enough on the Internet they can get more morons to follow their channels than to block them, so... here we are, I suppose.
Sure, but that's taking the concept of what's "logical" to absurd extremes. Any sort of paranoid delusion is logical if you accept all of its premises.
Is being antivax logical? Not at all. It requires amazing mental gymnastics to ignore centuries of scientific research. Things that are "logical if you believe them" is a great way to describe things that aren't logical. Vaccines do not, in fact, by all available measures, cause more dangerous issues than the diseases they prevent. If your "logic" requires a rejection of the entire epistemological framework upon which shared scientific kknowledge is established it's not "logic", kind of by definition.
This is the same thing. Its internal consistency isn't "logic". It can be shown to not be logical. If you suspend yourself from that conversation, deny the parameters of anybody who disagrees with you and cherry pick your values to specifically support your instinctively desired conclusion, then it doesn't matter how well you can through your train of thought, it's still indefensible.
I think that's why the MAGA thing stumps you a bit. Their train of thought isn't any better or worse than this. It's, in fact, identical. Information that supports it gets magnified, information that disrupts it is ignored. They are fun about it in that they add this cool temporal dimension, where that selection is applied regardless of how it was applied before, so they're all for free speech when people tell them to shut up, all for limiting speech when people criticise them. But that's not different to the fundamental contradiction of being concerned about a population crisis when you are trying to turn women into walking incubators but concerned about the massive influx of people when you're trying to be racist.
It's a lot of things, but it's not logic.
No, it's much more interesting than that.
It's an accurate representation of Garth Ennis being mad about having to work with superheroes despite not liking that at all and being a bit of a petty bitch with a bit of a dudebro sense of humor that, frankly, we all overrated at the time because when you were a teenager in the 90s you thought Preacher was hilarious and much smarter than it is, and it got to his head a bit.
And then it's an accurate representation of Eric Kripke who was very much the right age to have gone through that, taking the material and going "well, that Trump guy sure was a thing, huh?" and "aren't you kind of over all those MCU movies, also?" because superheroes in film were at the same point in 2019 than they were in comic books in 2006.
Don't be the teenager we all were in the 90s and assume that "edgy and mean and over the top" is the same as "smart and realistic". It's not.
I'll say that the show is at least less callous than the original material and it's at least trying to be political, which makes it slightly more plausible and internally consistent than Ennis' HR complaint of a comic book. Hollywood has a history of taking this edgelord crap (see also: every single Mark Millar adaptation) and making it palatable by applying the same mainstreaming and dumbing down that kills every Alan Moore adaptation. Turns out if the original material isn't that smart to begin with that's actually a good thing to do.