OK don't make fun of me. My last serious gaming was of the Quake Team Fortress and C&C Red Alert era. Did the original run Halo games with my little brothers. Dabbled in Warcraft 3. Sometimes would get really drunk and play Soul Caliber with my friends in like 2004. I gave up games to chase tail and haven't persojally owned anything for gaming, console or PC, since the first term of the W admin. I am completely ignorant and uninformed. My questions:
1. Are those cut screens actually in a video game? Because they look like South Park. I mean.. the voice...LMAO
2. Are you telling me they made a game in feudal Japan but your character is a black dude? Because that's also f-ing hilarious.
I don't know that it's liberalism exactly. It seems to me more that they've decided that the princess archetype, which inherently involves a plot around interpersonal/social (as opposed to violent) disputes, vulnerability, and a romantic heterosexual resolution is just too problematic to deliver. The result is they don't make them anymore or when they do it's reluctant, soaked in derision, and embedded in a constant pitch for something else.
Their problem is that people but in particular lots of little girls still love the princess archetype. Not all, nothing wrong with those that don't, or boys that do. But there are enough that love it to support a several hundred billion dollar a year business empire in an otherwise tough and fractured media market. Disney used to serve up the best princesses but now it's like going to a steakhouse where the ownership has gone vegan, the waiter won't stop asking if you're sure you don't want the sustainable fish paste instead of the ribeye, and when they finally bring you the meat its dressed up in a bunch of crappy sauces and bewildering sides that weren't what you came for. Maybe the best way to think about it is that while Disney invented the modern steak house they seem unable to understand that they did not invent the steak.
That is not how the issue is understood by the voting public and I think you know that too.
Obama was in a defensible place, constantly and prominently asking for security the GOP in Congress refused to fund while being careful to champion the cause of only the easiest, most sympathetic cases. Biden was a total disaster. As soon as he took office he ended remain in Mexico and reversed the other Trump EOs that were creating some breathing room. Then he sat for over 3 years while the asylum system was made into a total mockery. It's night and day.
I dunno. Omitting a national abortion ban from the platform for the first time in 40 years is a pretty big deal. Especially if you're looking to give cover to socially moderate women in swing states open to voting for you.
I think there are multiple angles to it. One is 'law and order.' One is the perception of government dysfunction. One is that we have more foreign born people as a proportion of the population than any other time in history, plus fertility decline of the native born citizenry, plus the larger 'late capitalism' malaise and disenfranchisement driving a bunch of cultural panic.
As you note there are lots of ways you can play it that might work but the one thing you probably can't do is occupy the middle of a ven diagram that says 'nothing is happening,' 'we don't care that this is happening' and 'you are a racist.'.
Heh in fairness to my wonderful professor the course was Medieval Europe. UMD's history department had plenty of courses on the Islamic world. My concentration was Europe and there were courses that got into those kinds of topics, including Scandinavian history and Germanic Mythology (for which I got credits both for my major and my German citation).
I don't want to do too much projecting of intelligence but it seems to me that the GOP's slight edge comes from apparent willingness to make trade offs and even take hard lines with their constituencies. The big business wing has gotten a big middle finger on immigration and tariffs. A quieter but still firm 'shut up' seems to have gone out to the pro-life movement. Which doesnt mean they aren't still very off-putting and alienating. There's a reason they're in charge only by a thin margin. We have yet to see the Democrats do anything quite like it, in the sense of picking some sides for the sake of getting/holding power.
My recollection of the survey is that we talked 'fall' of Rome as prologue, spent 5 minutes on Byzantium and Clovis, then Einhard acting as the center of gravity for basically everything else from that (sub) period. A lot of reason to to question whether this is really a distinct era but I'm also not sure there's an obvious alternative approach at the 100 level. Gotta go to the 200 and beyond for the rest.
There are official policies and de facto policies. Chances are way lower that Trump is president if from the beginning Biden had approached the border the way he did in the last 8ish months of the administration. It's also the common thread in every important European country from UKIP to National Rally to AfD to Brothers of Italy.
When I was getting my history BA the distinction they made was low medieval (approximately 410-1066 i.e. Alaric to William) versus high medieval (approximately 1066-1400). The low medieval period is characterized by breakdown of central authority in the early years followed by slow re-establishment of governments based around vassalage and the church. I don't see anything happening now as a parallel.
The occam's razor of conspiracy theories is not to attribute to intentional malfeasance emerging from smoke filled rooms that which is adequately explained by incompetence and a*s covering.
It's all about give and take. I've always been a proponent of broad tolerance of speech and being as hands off as possible. All I can go by is the news reports and I'm open to the possibility that a lot of this is greatly exaggerated. The algorithm rewards rage and controversy not perspective.
However what isn't lost on me is that I'm pretty sure the people out protesting are the same ones who refuse to tolerate mere discussion of contentious topics in classrooms or speakers with whom they disagree on whatever topic speaking to a group that wants to hear them in a lecture hall. And yet they would ask their audience to give them a benefit of the doubt we all know they would never in a million years extend to others. Hence why even the most fair minded people have become skeptical. The kinds of broader principles one might appeal to were purged from this type of activism long ago.
The thing is I doubt I'm all that far off from a policy perspective. I'd have stopped military aid and running diplomatic interference for the Israelis decades ago. However even extending maximim charity to the student and faculty activists I do not think it is fair or reasonable to ask regular tuition paying students to submit to being endlessly held hostage.
I think that might be another take that's becoming dated. There's always a conversation to be had about the ROI for the marginal student and/or the marginal school. That issue was a lot more acute with the glut of students during and in the years following the great recession. My understanding is that one upside of a full employment economy is that it was driving a correction. More jobs, even not great ones, meant fewer students of the kind most likely to fall through that sort of gap. Pity Trump seems hell bent on reversing it.
The more important questions I think revolve around whether colleges have no choice but to require the students that want to attend class to accommodate the never ending Palestine party, as it obstructs walkways and open spaces, or worse periodically paralyzes educational or administrative functions by occupying buildings or engaging in other disruptions. It can be added to long standing questions about whether it really is a good idea to have some Dean of student life equipped with the latest in feminist thinking investigate alleged felony sex crimes among the student body, run admissions departments as thinly veiled probably illegal racial balancing bureaucracies, and threaten the STEM departments with sanction if they refuse to lower their standards because someone somewhere might be upset about the demographics of the class and/or professoriate.
Sorry for being unclear, my gripe comes down to my belief that we're de facto funding the institutions. Most students could not get the kind of credit on the terms they do, if at all, but for the public backing. Without students able to get that money, the economics of even wealthy private institutions change considerably.
I would much rather live in a gray area on this topic or under the fiction that we're really funding the students.
Making that work requires a sense of propriety from the administrative leadership at these institutions that I do not detect. At a certain point if the public via elected officials decides they don't want to support schools that operate under bizarre and backwards theories of race or sex or whatever else that's way out of step with the values of the average tax payer I don't think they have to or that the students as an intermediary cures the issue. The result of that would be a 'get out of jail free' card the universities don't deserve and puts the taxpayer in the pickle of either funding nonsense (which is ironically highly self destructive to the universities themselves) or nothing at all.
I want to be persuaded by that argument but am struggling as to whether I actually am. Where (I think) we're aligned is that I do not want the government using the heavy hand. I think it is bad for all involved and society more generally.
If the institutions themselves hadn't been so hellbent on thumbing their nose at their benefactors and the wider public it would be a lot easier for me to say it's the students spending the money not the government. However followed to it's logical conclusion we end up in a place where in order to fund education and research the government has no choice but to also put its thumb on the scales for deeply antisocial and illiberal ideologies with no democratic mandate, with the only alternative being to take the tax payer money and go home. That's a terrible place to be and feels to me like a false choice.
Heh, I was at UMD followed later by the 'also ran' state law school when these sorts of debates were in their post PCU, Clintonesque nadir. There were some traces I recognize mostly in retrospect but it was not something that loomed particularly large.
My concern about giving an alternative approach a hoity toity title is that it may well concede premises about legitimacy of the criticisms that I'm not prepared to. Which isn't to say I disagree with your general philosophy.
However if I had to pick at it a little, it would be this question of whether there really is a hard line between private and public, at least to the extent the privates, SLACs, Ivies, whatever, receive public grants and most importantly the backdoor subsidy of federally backed student loans. That doesn't mean the government can just come in and shut things down for no reason other than speech it doesn't like but it does mean that all of the direct and indirect money has always been subject to the democratic process. In terms of what the Trump administration is doing it seems to fall under pulling strings everyone for reasons I will never comprehend forgot were, and always have been, attached.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/17/25”
OK don't make fun of me. My last serious gaming was of the Quake Team Fortress and C&C Red Alert era. Did the original run Halo games with my little brothers. Dabbled in Warcraft 3. Sometimes would get really drunk and play Soul Caliber with my friends in like 2004. I gave up games to chase tail and haven't persojally owned anything for gaming, console or PC, since the first term of the W admin. I am completely ignorant and uninformed. My questions:
1. Are those cut screens actually in a video game? Because they look like South Park. I mean.. the voice...LMAO
2. Are you telling me they made a game in feudal Japan but your character is a black dude? Because that's also f-ing hilarious.
"
I don't know that it's liberalism exactly. It seems to me more that they've decided that the princess archetype, which inherently involves a plot around interpersonal/social (as opposed to violent) disputes, vulnerability, and a romantic heterosexual resolution is just too problematic to deliver. The result is they don't make them anymore or when they do it's reluctant, soaked in derision, and embedded in a constant pitch for something else.
Their problem is that people but in particular lots of little girls still love the princess archetype. Not all, nothing wrong with those that don't, or boys that do. But there are enough that love it to support a several hundred billion dollar a year business empire in an otherwise tough and fractured media market. Disney used to serve up the best princesses but now it's like going to a steakhouse where the ownership has gone vegan, the waiter won't stop asking if you're sure you don't want the sustainable fish paste instead of the ribeye, and when they finally bring you the meat its dressed up in a bunch of crappy sauces and bewildering sides that weren't what you came for. Maybe the best way to think about it is that while Disney invented the modern steak house they seem unable to understand that they did not invent the steak.
"
I am completely unfamiliar with this controversy.
"
One has to be amazed at just how intentionally Disney has gone about sabotaging its ownership of the market they themselves created.
On “A Dark Age”
Oh for sure. Even with my degree I would classify myself as having not mere holes but gaping chasms.
"
That is not how the issue is understood by the voting public and I think you know that too.
Obama was in a defensible place, constantly and prominently asking for security the GOP in Congress refused to fund while being careful to champion the cause of only the easiest, most sympathetic cases. Biden was a total disaster. As soon as he took office he ended remain in Mexico and reversed the other Trump EOs that were creating some breathing room. Then he sat for over 3 years while the asylum system was made into a total mockery. It's night and day.
"
I dunno. Omitting a national abortion ban from the platform for the first time in 40 years is a pretty big deal. Especially if you're looking to give cover to socially moderate women in swing states open to voting for you.
"
I think there are multiple angles to it. One is 'law and order.' One is the perception of government dysfunction. One is that we have more foreign born people as a proportion of the population than any other time in history, plus fertility decline of the native born citizenry, plus the larger 'late capitalism' malaise and disenfranchisement driving a bunch of cultural panic.
As you note there are lots of ways you can play it that might work but the one thing you probably can't do is occupy the middle of a ven diagram that says 'nothing is happening,' 'we don't care that this is happening' and 'you are a racist.'.
"
Heh in fairness to my wonderful professor the course was Medieval Europe. UMD's history department had plenty of courses on the Islamic world. My concentration was Europe and there were courses that got into those kinds of topics, including Scandinavian history and Germanic Mythology (for which I got credits both for my major and my German citation).
"
I don't want to do too much projecting of intelligence but it seems to me that the GOP's slight edge comes from apparent willingness to make trade offs and even take hard lines with their constituencies. The big business wing has gotten a big middle finger on immigration and tariffs. A quieter but still firm 'shut up' seems to have gone out to the pro-life movement. Which doesnt mean they aren't still very off-putting and alienating. There's a reason they're in charge only by a thin margin. We have yet to see the Democrats do anything quite like it, in the sense of picking some sides for the sake of getting/holding power.
"
My recollection of the survey is that we talked 'fall' of Rome as prologue, spent 5 minutes on Byzantium and Clovis, then Einhard acting as the center of gravity for basically everything else from that (sub) period. A lot of reason to to question whether this is really a distinct era but I'm also not sure there's an obvious alternative approach at the 100 level. Gotta go to the 200 and beyond for the rest.
"
There are official policies and de facto policies. Chances are way lower that Trump is president if from the beginning Biden had approached the border the way he did in the last 8ish months of the administration. It's also the common thread in every important European country from UKIP to National Rally to AfD to Brothers of Italy.
"
When I was getting my history BA the distinction they made was low medieval (approximately 410-1066 i.e. Alaric to William) versus high medieval (approximately 1066-1400). The low medieval period is characterized by breakdown of central authority in the early years followed by slow re-establishment of governments based around vassalage and the church. I don't see anything happening now as a parallel.
On “The JFK Files Drop Today (Supposedly)”
The occam's razor of conspiracy theories is not to attribute to intentional malfeasance emerging from smoke filled rooms that which is adequately explained by incompetence and a*s covering.
On “On Jethro Tull”
Isn't there a meme about this?
In my teens: The radio is playing my jams!
In my twenties: The bar is playing my jams!
In my thirties*: The grocery store is playing my jams!
*Or after, as the case my be.
On “The JFK Files Drop Today (Supposedly)”
Obviously it was Roger McDowell.
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/17/25”
Got it now I understand.
"
Is there a typo or some nuance about polls versus people who showed up to actually vote I am not getting?
I am struggling to understand how voters under 30 could have 'supported Biden by large margins' but 'Trump probably narrowly won 18-29 year-olds.'
On “From The New York Times Editorial Board: The Authoritarian Endgame on Higher Education”
It's all about give and take. I've always been a proponent of broad tolerance of speech and being as hands off as possible. All I can go by is the news reports and I'm open to the possibility that a lot of this is greatly exaggerated. The algorithm rewards rage and controversy not perspective.
However what isn't lost on me is that I'm pretty sure the people out protesting are the same ones who refuse to tolerate mere discussion of contentious topics in classrooms or speakers with whom they disagree on whatever topic speaking to a group that wants to hear them in a lecture hall. And yet they would ask their audience to give them a benefit of the doubt we all know they would never in a million years extend to others. Hence why even the most fair minded people have become skeptical. The kinds of broader principles one might appeal to were purged from this type of activism long ago.
"
The thing is I doubt I'm all that far off from a policy perspective. I'd have stopped military aid and running diplomatic interference for the Israelis decades ago. However even extending maximim charity to the student and faculty activists I do not think it is fair or reasonable to ask regular tuition paying students to submit to being endlessly held hostage.
"
I think that might be another take that's becoming dated. There's always a conversation to be had about the ROI for the marginal student and/or the marginal school. That issue was a lot more acute with the glut of students during and in the years following the great recession. My understanding is that one upside of a full employment economy is that it was driving a correction. More jobs, even not great ones, meant fewer students of the kind most likely to fall through that sort of gap. Pity Trump seems hell bent on reversing it.
The more important questions I think revolve around whether colleges have no choice but to require the students that want to attend class to accommodate the never ending Palestine party, as it obstructs walkways and open spaces, or worse periodically paralyzes educational or administrative functions by occupying buildings or engaging in other disruptions. It can be added to long standing questions about whether it really is a good idea to have some Dean of student life equipped with the latest in feminist thinking investigate alleged felony sex crimes among the student body, run admissions departments as thinly veiled probably illegal racial balancing bureaucracies, and threaten the STEM departments with sanction if they refuse to lower their standards because someone somewhere might be upset about the demographics of the class and/or professoriate.
"
Sorry for being unclear, my gripe comes down to my belief that we're de facto funding the institutions. Most students could not get the kind of credit on the terms they do, if at all, but for the public backing. Without students able to get that money, the economics of even wealthy private institutions change considerably.
I would much rather live in a gray area on this topic or under the fiction that we're really funding the students.
Making that work requires a sense of propriety from the administrative leadership at these institutions that I do not detect. At a certain point if the public via elected officials decides they don't want to support schools that operate under bizarre and backwards theories of race or sex or whatever else that's way out of step with the values of the average tax payer I don't think they have to or that the students as an intermediary cures the issue. The result of that would be a 'get out of jail free' card the universities don't deserve and puts the taxpayer in the pickle of either funding nonsense (which is ironically highly self destructive to the universities themselves) or nothing at all.
Hopefully that clarifies.
"
You think it's bizarre to discuss the article that is the subject of the post?
"
I want to be persuaded by that argument but am struggling as to whether I actually am. Where (I think) we're aligned is that I do not want the government using the heavy hand. I think it is bad for all involved and society more generally.
If the institutions themselves hadn't been so hellbent on thumbing their nose at their benefactors and the wider public it would be a lot easier for me to say it's the students spending the money not the government. However followed to it's logical conclusion we end up in a place where in order to fund education and research the government has no choice but to also put its thumb on the scales for deeply antisocial and illiberal ideologies with no democratic mandate, with the only alternative being to take the tax payer money and go home. That's a terrible place to be and feels to me like a false choice.
"
Heh, I was at UMD followed later by the 'also ran' state law school when these sorts of debates were in their post PCU, Clintonesque nadir. There were some traces I recognize mostly in retrospect but it was not something that loomed particularly large.
My concern about giving an alternative approach a hoity toity title is that it may well concede premises about legitimacy of the criticisms that I'm not prepared to. Which isn't to say I disagree with your general philosophy.
However if I had to pick at it a little, it would be this question of whether there really is a hard line between private and public, at least to the extent the privates, SLACs, Ivies, whatever, receive public grants and most importantly the backdoor subsidy of federally backed student loans. That doesn't mean the government can just come in and shut things down for no reason other than speech it doesn't like but it does mean that all of the direct and indirect money has always been subject to the democratic process. In terms of what the Trump administration is doing it seems to fall under pulling strings everyone for reasons I will never comprehend forgot were, and always have been, attached.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.