BF2S Forums Presidential Election 2016

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

literally looks like a grid of ai-gen slop result: "christmas house couple, red sweater, forest green sweater, looking at viewer." don't gotta specify white, that stuff's probably automatic.

bottom right: "we have jaime and cersei lannister at home"

side ask, is there like a special union for hallmark actors?

re: the people longing for the hallmark movie stuff, if you will direct your attention to the basic level of attention these characters evidentally put into their appearance: it would appear the reason more wasps don't have the hallmark wasp lifestyle is because they eat fast food too much and never exercise.

i think i have a basic grasp of what the usual plot of these are. woman leaves boyfriend for hometown heartthrob, right? aren't the male leads usually kind of empathetical and more fun for the female lead to be around than their high-maintenance and/or stereotypically inattentive city boyfriend? or is it all still just highly creepy stuff that the female lead is inexplicably drawn into.

Wasn't the suburban dream created basically to sell electrical appliances?

After WW2 the US was sitting on too much manufacturing and generating capacity so people were forced into the quiet horror of suburban bliss, with the only letout buying toaster-rotisseries which played Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer etc or sinking into valium and wifeswapping.

Dilbert_X wrote:

uziq wrote:

i have tried to explain to dilbert and his ilk before that so much of the riches and splendour you see in capitals like london or new york are literally built on imperial extraction, and not in some long-ago 'get over it, it's history' way, either. but these people don't want to hear it because any sort of historical examination or wide-view understanding of the nation's place in the world is anathema to them. they're more interested in nationalistic or pseudo-scientific myths.

Every nation could have had an empire if they'd just tried harder.

except you unironically believe it comes from some sort of racial genius ‘encoded’ in DNA or some other ahistorical, pseudo-scientific bollocks.

and, besides, most civilisations or peoples have had their own empires in some form or another in the longue durée. so what the fuck are you talking about? it’s not an exclusively european thing. this whole postcolonialist/imperialist discourse you rant at and ridicule isn't about making out europeans as being uniquely evil, dilbert: it's about recognising that the modern world today is in large part a configuration downstream of european empires in the 17-19th centuries, and is guided by a very american mutation of empire today. not exactly a hugely contentious claim, there.

there’s a whole corpus of literature out there that discusses - rather than proves with bigoted certainty, note - why europe industrialised first, say, or why certain powers borrowed from renaissance city-state systems of trade and scaled them up to a system of globe-straddling capitalism, etc. these are all more or less contingent historical phenomena with material explanations. not your style of essentialist ‘white peoples are superior’ claptrap, which is composed of 99% cucked ideology.

it’s not like i’m one of these dumb liberals who wants everyone to feel guilty for empire and go around forever prostrating themselves. i am not a ‘reparations now!’ person. how to engage with the legacies of empire is a whole other thing. but it’s not exactly hard when walking around the splendours of Bath, say, with all its golden brickwork and coiffured finery, and realise ‘well how did everyone here become so fucking rich and refined? and realise every single family occupying a georgian pile had extensive commercial interests in sugar plantations. how about a little intellectual honesty, as a starting point to any conversation on the topic?

Last edited by uziq (2025-03-13 04:44:47)

Dilbert_X wrote:

uziq wrote:

insane. *all* offers rescinded at a medical school. all funding dropped at short notice, so no further funded admissions.

Its a biomedical research school, not a 'medical school'.

splitting hairs, here. a not-for-profit institution dedicated to biomedical research is adjacent to the med schools. where do you think all the new medicines and treatment modalities are coming from? nurses and physicians? dumbass.

Had the tables been turned any other culture would have annihilated and enslaved us, probably the Chinese will yet, this won't be fun and I expect to see it.

what does that have to do with anything? i find it really confusing when right-wing people play this card. 'it's dog eat dog!' trying to have a little clear-thinking and honesty with respect to your own past doesn't *weaken* you for all this clash-of-civilizations stuff that gets you so excited and semi-tumescent.

or is it better to pump people full of nationalist myths, and to shush-up the uncomfortable parts of history? better to send them off to die in their droves in the fields of some foreign land, eh?

Last edited by uziq (2025-03-13 05:01:22)

china had no interest in expansionism for most of its history. but you can't expect dilbert to read any sort of history that isn't concerned with 1939-1945 and the wehrmacht's engagements.

you really need to read a history book. the middle kingdom of china used vassal states and a tributary system.

this is just commonly accepted historical consensus, not some blue-haired woke liberal thing. european colonialism was very different from imperial china.

china wasn't "one country to begin with" in the same way as england wasn't "one country to begin with". what is your point, here? britain was a bellicose evil and threat to the world because of wars between wessex and mercia?

there were several hundred years when china had a giant lead over the comparative backwaters of europe, in population, resources and riches, culture and civilization -- all. and yet it was the portuguese who formed the first maritime empire by sending out sailors to far-flung territories, not the chinese. the chinese imperial court practically had to be forced into trade with european powers at several junctures in history; generally, their attitude was that they didn't want for anything. there are very big differences in both region's historical development.

why do you think china had gunpowder for several hundred years before the europeans, but were quite content to use it for construction or fireworks and rituals rather than cannon and guns for subjugating other continents? "every people try to grab as much as they can and use their advantages", blah blah blah. read a fucking book (for the 10,000th time). you can even get AI to summarise these things for you now!

Last edited by uziq (2025-03-13 06:30:12)

it’s like saying the normans harrying the north of england was ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide’.

i mean, yeah, the consolidation of any large nation state or unit involves erasing groups and lots of conflict. have you looked at a map of medieval europe? how many of those polities or cultures still exist?

the point is that china’s imperial courts were focused on consolidation and inner stability over expansion and conquest. china didn’t grab the new world, europeans did. talk all you want about manchus.

what relevance does the burning of the scholars have in this context? don’t you have a history degree? do better.

Last edited by uziq (2025-03-13 08:05:46)