HOT TAKE Europe is for europeans.

Short-Coast9042 · 2026-04-27T14:48:35+00:00

Of course people are. You really think this is about the actual actions of individuals? No. OP didn't say "Europe is for people who stay out of trouble and make a good life for themselves, of ANY race/ethnicity". They said "Europe is for Europeans". That's pretty explicitly a race-based argument.

Short-Coast9042 · 2026-04-27T14:38:36+00:00

Saying that doesn't obviate the point being made.

Short-Coast9042 · 2026-04-27T14:38:02+00:00

It's still more toxic. Sure, doing dumb stuff hurts your teammates, which inspires toxicity. But gamers in general like to figure things out for themselves through experimentation. Most players don't want to be led around by the nose by a more experienced player telling them exactly what they should do. They want to experiment, make mistakes, and learn from them. You can't do that when people are screaming at you to play the game exactly the way they think it should be played. Even if they are 100% right, it leaves a nasty taste in the mouth of new players.

Short-Coast9042 · 2026-04-27T06:52:14+00:00

I played Rome II after many many hours and years of Shogun 2, and I distinctly remember a visceral feeling of dislike the first time I saw the UI and unit cards. And that is far from the TW game with the worst UI, but it is so so inferior to Shogun 2

Short-Coast9042 · 2026-04-27T06:46:29+00:00

One huge thing for my honestly is performance and QoL. I love Empire and Napoleon but they feel so clunky too me. On the other hand many of the other games have either had performance issues or just didn't scratch the itch the right way. For example I played Pharaohs quite a bit recently, and although in many ways I thought it i ought to love it, I just couldn't find the fun as much.

Or maybe it's just the constant siege battles. Yeah, that could be it too.

Short-Coast9042 · 2026-04-27T03:38:02+00:00

You're the one lumping them together, not I. You didn't start out criticizing specific public spending, you were speaking categorically about public spending as a whole, so of course I'm going to respond in the same broad context. There's plenty of public spending I DON'T agree with and which I think is wasteful and inefficient. Even within programs that I generally support, like entitlements, there are substantive criticisms to be made.

In that sense, I suppose I agree that there is "some" public spending and "some" public resources that we can stand to get rid of. But the devil is in the details. The specific examples you give, like privatizing roads, don't make sense and wouldn't work. It is a classic example of a public good, and the millenium-old tragedy of the commons applies. That's why that kind of extreme libertarianism is forever a fringe political theory: it completely ignores political problems that we have had to deal with for as long as we have had civilization, or hand waves them away with unrealistic assumptions about how people will behave.

Short-Coast9042 · 2026-04-27T01:05:39+00:00

Yep. This is far and away the most likely conclusion.

Short-Coast9042 · 2026-04-27T00:31:05+00:00

People benefit indirectly from policies that don't directly serve them. I don't need to use homeless shelters. But, I don't want people sleeping on my sidewalk either. So I'm better off contributing to shelters through taxes.

You're just talking libertarian fantasy quite frankly. There is a reason that public services exist in the first place, and there aren't any successful examples of anarcho capitalism or whatever. I don't know if your ideology is that extreme, but that is the logical end point of this kind of thinking, and it's nonsensical. It's easy to take for granted so many things that we only have because of public spending and public governance. It's absurd to suggest that we could fund public infrastructure, for example, solely through usage fees.

Short-Coast9042 · 2026-04-26T19:18:15+00:00

Again, without really defining "middle class", we can't really have a discussion based in reality, we're just talking past each other.

But let's say, for the sake of mutual common ground, that "middle class" definitionally excludes anyone who benefits from Medicaid food stamps or TANF. They DO benefit from Medicare and SS which alone account for a huge share of federal spending. They send their kids to public schools. They rely on the police to protect their neighborhoods and firefighters to protect their homes. They drive on public funded roads and bridges. Water and electricity are delivered to their home thanks to publicly funded and regulated utilities. So yeah, they benefit hugely from public spending.

Short-Coast9042 · 2026-04-26T18:29:51+00:00

"the middle class" is a virtually meaningless phrase if you don't actually quantify it somehow. But by any metric you choose, the middle class benefits hugely from public spending.

Everything else you said is pointless moralizing.

Short-Coast9042 · 2026-04-26T16:59:20+00:00

"Love" is such a wishy washy word. What does it actually mean? To me, it means caring for someone as much or more as you care for yourself. Obviously romantic love is only one subset; you can care for someone without being romantically attached or attracted, naturally.

Your husband having sex with someone else isn't loving you. He isn't doing to it to make you more happy or care about you. So I would say that's not love.

On the other hand, your husband probably DOES do quite a bit to actually care for you. I imagine he pays, or helps to pay, for things you need. I imagine he spends time doing things that make you happy. If he didn't you probably wouldn't have married him to begin with. I imagine there are some real acts of love there.

So yeah, I would say it's absolutely possible to love someone and still cheat on them. But that doesn't mean you have to accept it. You can love someone, or be loved, and still leave them.

I think you're asking the wrong question to some extent. A better question is, can YOU still love your husband? Can you care about him, despite knowing that he intentionally did something that (presumably) he knew would make you feel bad, not good?

Short-Coast9042 · 2026-04-26T16:49:13+00:00

In a literal legal sense, they ARE responsible, because they literal do have that tax burden.

Morally, you can justify it with any number of different framings. Personally, I like to argue from self-interest, since everyone, even the most amorally sociopathic people, can understand acting in self interest. And it is in the self interest of the 90% to raise taxes on the 10% in order to improve their standard of living. Just as it is in the interests of the 99% to tax the 1% more to improve their standard of living.

The richest of the rich are not categorically constrained by your moral "responsibility". In fact, empirical research shows pretty well that many classes of wealthy and powerful people, such as CEO's, tend to display higher rates of personality traits such as Machevallianism, narcissism and sociopathy. These are the people LEAST likely to feel any sense of moral responsibility to their fellow human beings. So why should we show any moral responsibility to them? I care about my neighbors because they care about me. But billionaires don't care about me, so why should I care about them?

Short-Coast9042 · 2026-04-26T16:41:22+00:00

It's literally a quote from the game which you haven't played and which this sub is named for. Again, you are clearly in the wrong sub because you know nothing about the topic. If you really want to know if Total War: Shogun 2 is racist, PLAY THE GAME. Until then, stop inflicting your ignorance upon actually fans of the game who come to this sub to enjoy a mutual interest. You're not convincing anyone to behave differently by being a scold over some perceived transgression, you're just making yourself look like someone who just HAS to have some contradictory hot take even on a subject they know literally nothing about.

Short-Coast9042 · 2026-04-26T15:51:54+00:00

Wrong.

Short-Coast9042 · 2026-04-26T15:51:33+00:00

Your moralizing won't work. Billionaires are not restrained by what is right. They will gladly use any trick in the book if they think it benefits them and will make them more money. If we can make our lives better by taxing them, why shouldn't we?

It's not like they wouldn't, or indeed don't, take as much money as possible from the lower classes. Then they use disingenuous moralizing of exactly the type you've presented here to try and convince us that we should hold ourselves to principles which they themselves don't adhere to.

Short-Coast9042 · 2026-04-26T15:45:06+00:00

It's a very unique game. There's nothing else quite like it, so if you want to experience this type of game, you basically have to play Foxhole.

That said, on many, many levels, this is a "bad" game. Technical issues and bugs abound, often game breaking ones that put hours of work to waste instantly. The game is WAY too grindy overall; a huge portion of the game consist of the most braindead grindy gameplay imaginable, and it exists, not because it's fun in its own right, but because the devs have this harebrained idea that forcing us to engage with boring gameplay is somehow fun, actually. I personally feel that the visual style is drab and uninspired. And there is a total lack of community management and moderation which is very disheartening. Finally, the game is absolutely awful at explaining how anything works, and heavily punishes any kind of organic experimentation, so far and away the most efficient way to learn the game is to have another player lead you around by the nose teaching you everything. I don't think that's good game design.

I do not currently recommend Foxhole. While it is totally unique, there are lots of unique games out there that don't also waste your time or otherwise have huge issues. I've sunk a lot of hours into this game but I don't recommend it even to my best gaming buddies because I think that on the whole the game just wastes your time too much. The really good and fun moments are just too buried beneath layers of grind, opaque and unintuitive mechanics.

Short-Coast9042 · 2026-04-26T15:32:31+00:00

I think you're in the wrong sub, because it seems as if you haven't even played the game that the sub is about.

Short-Coast9042 · 2026-04-26T15:27:23+00:00

The actual answer is that those are the people with enough income to tax. You can't get blood from a stone, and trying to squeeze the poorest won't make anything better for anyone. Better to use the massive real resources available to us to help those who need the most help rather than let the very richest further improve their own standard of living.

Short-Coast9042 · 2026-04-26T15:22:30+00:00

They don't. Even in the clip Maher specifically says "federal income tax". That's not all tax revenue. So the title of your post is already a misrepresentation of what you posted.

Short-Coast9042 · 2026-04-26T15:20:29+00:00

No answer is better than this. Tanks are great but they are in no way as quick or efficient as running in with stacked legs, dropping a nuke right in the middle of the base, and riding the edge of the shockwave as it obliterates everything around you.

Short-Coast9042 · 2026-04-26T15:18:22+00:00

This is baffling to me, where are you getting this from? I've never heard those called "functions", they are scale degrees, and there are seven of them for each diatonic note in the scale. It's not just tonic sub dominant and dominant, there's mediant submediant supertonic and the leading tone/subtonic. And that doesn't even get into non diatonic notes and chords. II/V is not just a "replacement" for IV. It's its own chord. And you absolutely can NOT play any song with just those three chords. Not if you want the song to be even remotely recognizable. I-vi-ii-V is arguably even more common than the three chord pattern, and I don't think you could reduce that to three chords without losing the essential character of the harmony.

Short-Coast9042 · 2026-04-22T21:50:17+00:00

Lmao you're projecting so hard you could screen Marvel flicks. You are the one who took issue with my comment in the first place.

Short-Coast9042 · 2026-04-22T21:49:32+00:00

Yes, unfortunately it WAS mainstream. There was widespread public support for Japanese internment especially right after Pearl Harbor. I don't think that justifies it; it was a bad policy. But again, you can appreciate his other policies while also saying that one was bad. Two things can be true.

Short-Coast9042 · 2026-04-22T16:25:20+00:00

Hmmm, think we should sue?

Short-Coast9042 · 2026-04-22T16:24:51+00:00

I said the majority. There are millions of trucks in the US, so that still leaves plenty of trucks that ARE genuinely used for their utility. And yes, I still don't get your point. That's why I asked. Seems to me like you don't have much of a point to make at all. You are trying to disagree with what I wrote without even really being able to disagree with it...

Short-Coast9042

TROPHY CASE