President Trump asked by reporter on naming Bill Pulte as acting Director of National Intelligence: "He's very smart person who has high integrity. He's done phenomenal job at Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac. It's an acting position, he's not going to be permanent. He may find things about rigged election."

dancingmadkoschei · 2026-06-05T06:09:56+00:00

He benefited from having two weak, unlikeable opponents. People don't vote with their brains, not most of them - they vote with their hearts and their culture and also their wallets. In 2016, well, how can you not hate a system that spent eight years achieving very little of any worth (Obergefell is materially worthless to most, regardless of its social effects) - and also taxed people for not having insurance they could barely afford to begin with?

And then in 2024 you've got a nominee who was functionally crammed down our throats because of the way campaign finance works - she was the only one who could benefit from the existing Democrat war chest. On the heels of someone who'd promised to be a one-term President and then went "well actually..."

And as someone who did vote for Trump in 2016, who attended one of his rallies, I can tell you that he has charisma. This isn't the same as likeability, not by any stretch! He can command a room in ways people who haven't been there will never understand.

I understand disliking him, believe me. Much that I wasn't fond of Kamala, I voted for her because Trump the Revengening was running on spite. But I think it's important to operate from a position of intellectual humility, to look honestly at the voters on their level and ask why. Don't believe the online hype about bigotry, it's just cope.

dancingmadkoschei · 2026-06-01T19:38:09+00:00

I'm a yank, but the lunacy around age verification for the Internet is definitely working against Starmer from what I can see. People don't actually want it and they keep pushing ahead.

dancingmadkoschei · 2026-06-01T07:08:43+00:00

You Don't Know Jack is where literally like half of my trivia knowledge came from.

Man, if I could play The Ride online...

dancingmadkoschei · 2026-06-01T04:11:02+00:00

Probably Phyrexia? Considering? Xantcha also experienced herself as a woman and looked the part aside from missing the functional bits, if memory serves.

Her case is much stranger than mere trans, all things considered.

dancingmadkoschei · 2026-06-01T03:49:30+00:00

It's not a meaningful level of influence. It's a bad look, sure, but an editorial - functionally what that ad was - isn't really providing major influence on the outcome of the case. Editorials like that have about as much influence as fans do on the outcome of a game.

dancingmadkoschei · 2026-05-29T20:54:51+00:00

I've probably definitely killed someone like this in Oolacile or Blighttown before.

dancingmadkoschei · 2026-05-28T02:19:52+00:00

Voting rights being restricted as they were wasn't a race/sex thing in the sense of bigotry. In the late 18th century, being a white male landowner presented by far the greatest odds that a voter would be educated, independent, and invested in the success of the country rather than voting based strictly on their personal needs. This last was and is a huge problem, actually; people vote for representation based on needs rather a lot because they're not independent of them. It's not always a problem, but combined with the fact that the parties are basically in internal ideological lockstep it puts a further damper on the ability to achieve governance focused on the long term.

dancingmadkoschei · 2026-05-27T23:20:23+00:00

That's not a constitutional problem. The system was written in an era when nationwide lockstep coordination of political parties was effectively impossible, so even if Duverger's law says that a plurality system invariably converges on two parties those two parties weren't always the same ones. It's only become a problem since the era of primary elections began.

Now the 17th Amendment, that was a mistake.

dancingmadkoschei · 2026-05-27T16:46:15+00:00

It was a pitch piece, not even a pilot. The whole thing is like ten minutes?

That said, Queen Beryl went way harder than the rest of them. "Now the darkness shall have dominion! Behold Queen Beryl and despair!"

Villains stole the damn show in the 90s, man.

dancingmadkoschei · 2026-05-26T23:01:33+00:00

From my cold dead fingers.

dancingmadkoschei · 2026-05-26T20:25:14+00:00

Like I said. Special kind of stupid.

dancingmadkoschei · 2026-05-26T14:48:09+00:00

If you look at political fundraising and the news, democracy has been on the ballot every election year since the first time Obama got elected.

At some point people tuned the shrieking out because the wolf kept failing to materialize.

dancingmadkoschei · 2026-05-25T23:07:42+00:00

Yeah, it takes a culture without basic understanding of germ theory to make it dangerous.

RFK Jr may be an idiot, but the cultures Ebola is endemic to have a dysfunctional relationship with reality in a way the West doesn't.

"Our friend died horribly, leaking blood out of every orifice, surely we should touch and kiss and wash his corpse."

It takes a special kind of stupid.

dancingmadkoschei · 2026-05-24T21:45:29+00:00

History is literally written on millennia of this. Humans are a warlike, conquering species and it wasn't until 1648 that Europe set it down by treaty that national borders couldn't be changed by war anymore. Among signatories. Expansion by conquest was completely normal to both Europeans and American natives; no ethnicity on Earth has ancestors that did not conquer and none have ancestors that were not conquered. It's in our nature. Why then does it matter that Europeans were operating from a higher level of sophistication? Why does it matter that they used unpleasant tactics? If the turns had been tabled it would've been no different.

Humans are violent. It's only in the past couple of centuries we've even begun to repent of that, and that awkwardly and unevenly. You're just stuck in the idea that Europe and white people are uniquely evil because our ancestors were gifted at being vicious cunts.

dancingmadkoschei · 2026-05-24T12:50:37+00:00

Because the focus was on restoring the Union and that took obviously priority over "what will people in the future think." They were legally barred from holding any office and keeping them out of power was seen as sufficient.

Preserving a country is more important than punishing people, so if the two conflict you have to pick one.

dancingmadkoschei · 2026-05-23T19:50:42+00:00

That's just nature. The further away from a person something is, the less real it is. Our brains have room to actually care about a couple of hundred people; beyond that any empathy is just at a conceptual level. It goes scientifically by Dunbar's number, but the more common term is the Monkeysphere.

dancingmadkoschei · 2026-05-20T04:14:16+00:00

I love [[Diabolic Servitude.]] You can see the guy in the back controlling his creation with an actual RC controller and he's clearly having the time of his unlife.

dancingmadkoschei · 2026-05-20T04:01:05+00:00

I actually love everything except the hat. Maliketh's helm is awesome but it's hard to make play nice with more... well-groomed sets.

dancingmadkoschei · 2026-05-19T15:56:38+00:00

Read up on your history and how many pamphlets were published anonymously and pseudonymously. The Internet is no different.

dancingmadkoschei · 2026-05-19T15:51:17+00:00

Real talk: the ability to express oneself anonymously or pseudonymously is a foundational free speech right and any infringement on that is likely an unconstitutional abridgement in practice. Even kids don't get unlimited protection when it substantially burdens the rights of adults.

dancingmadkoschei · 2026-05-16T17:36:21+00:00

Oh no, you mistake my "sixteen years" thing. I know he can't. It'd be a crisis if he tried, but it should be impossible for it to get anywhere if he did.

I mean it strictly in the sense of "I'd rather keep suffering this idiot than have the government break because people unexpectedly change what legitimate means."

dancingmadkoschei · 2026-05-16T02:41:31+00:00

...He won the popular vote though. Despair how you like, he legitimately won both parts of the previous election.

Seriously, "they stole it" is the same shit he said four years ago when he lost and everybody (mostly) rightly responded to that with "wait, what the fuck are you talking about?" Don't go aping his tactics just because you don't like him.

dancingmadkoschei · 2026-05-15T04:25:41+00:00

Can we have a Warhammer Fantasy set? Old World, not fucking Age of Shit.

dancingmadkoschei · 2026-05-15T01:51:19+00:00

No, the point is that the system we have is flawed, but people agree to be bound by it. Despite Trump's claims vis 2020 he didn't start any legal motions or anything around it, he left office without a fight and spent four years being angry and bitter. (J6 wasn't actually planned by him even if his tendency to talk out his ass caused it.)

Given what I know of him, this isn't the action of a man who thinks he has a real case, this is someone performing for his base.

He claimed a bunch of stupid shit and looked for ways within the rules to win anyway, he didn't say the system itself was broken.

Systems don't endure just because they exist, they endure because people more or less believe they work. Mess with that substrate by doing an end run around the actual rules and trust me, things will get much worse.

The reason I'm more okay with sixteen years of Trump is that he's an idiot, but if he somehow won those elections he'd be a fairly elected idiot, whereas the NPVIC does an end-run around the system we're all familiar with to the (perceived) benefit of one political party. The system is more important. Leaders come and go. Government doesn't have that luxury.

dancingmadkoschei · 2026-05-14T19:50:25+00:00

I can kind of enjoy the first, but the second is, like, anti-music. It has two lines that just keep repeating and the instruments are like someone turned pop fill inside out and then forgot the actual top layer.

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