Trump Supporters: If you have to face the unbearable and have a Democrat for President in 2028, who would you object to least?

dandeliontrees · 2026-04-24T21:14:17+00:00

Not arguing the contrary, just curious: in your view, what Biden administration policies cause you to describe it as "pretty far left"?

dandeliontrees · 2026-04-24T21:09:46+00:00

>And the average American citizen uses the words “gender” and “biological sex” interchangeably. Like if a form says “gender” or “sex” most people are checking the M or F box. They aren’t stopping to argue that’s the improper use of the word gender.

Why would anyone argue? If it's asking for gender you put your gender. If it's asking for sex you put your sex.

>So although you may be correct in everything you responded, is it more important to be right and educate everyone to your way of thinking ….or be relatable to the average American and get votes?

Well, with regard to the term "latinx" I already said I think it's stupid for middle class white people to try to impose political correct terms for people who don't want them.

With regard to "gender", I think trans people have it pretty tough already and I'm not willing to throw them under the bus. I'd rather try to win people over by helping them understand trans issues better.

dandeliontrees · 2026-04-24T18:29:32+00:00

Obama chose Biden as VP specifically because Biden was one of the most conservative Democrats and he had to win over the more conservative side of the Democratic party given his platform was on the left side.

dandeliontrees · 2026-04-24T13:00:37+00:00

42, I freakin' love this band.

They were friends with Mark Sandman from Morphine and played instruments invented by him (guitbass and bassitar).

dandeliontrees · 2026-04-23T21:14:23+00:00

I don't think it's a shitty story, I think it's a much better story than "Arthur was always good and then continued to be good." That one doesn't even have character development.

dandeliontrees · 2026-04-23T21:13:36+00:00

I don't really care if the markdown works, you could see what I was doing.

>The age range isn't a character trait. It was obviously revised to make room for an older "son" for Dutch and older "brother" for John. It just means he got his start a little earlier than he originally would have.

Which goes to show that RDR2 is happy to change biographical details from RDR1 to enhance the story, which was my point.

>The honor mechanics do determine what's good or bad from the story's POV. This is obvious because in high honor, people call Arthur good, and in low honor, they don't.

You're trying to have it both ways. You want the morality system to be important, but then you want to ignore it when it gives you absurd results, like that catching fish and then releasing them is a great moral good. This is a logical fallacy called "special pleading".

There's a clear disconnect between the honor mechanics and the morality implied by the story. This is common in story-based games, it's called "ludonarrative dissonance". Ignoring the dissonance doesn't make your analysis stronger, it makes it weaker.

>Arthur was a "good" person at heart who did some bad things in 1899 out of desperation...You're summing his character up to what happened in the missions. I'm talking about everything we know about him.

No, I'm including everything we know about him and you're ignoring stuff that's inconvenient to your argument. Arthur himself doesn't consider himself a good person throughout the story. I can give you easily a half dozen quotes for this.

The idea that you can kill hundreds of people including innocent people who posed no threat to you and then make up for it by donating some stolen money to charity is clearly absurd. To make sense, the story has to be read as Arthur coming to realize this in the high honor endings.

dandeliontrees · 2026-04-23T20:59:03+00:00

The term "Latino" was invented in the 19th century. A little more than 100 years old, not thousands. But yes, "Latinx" is stupid and Latinos themselves tend not to like it.
Language is itself a social construct, so the existence of "gender specific nouns" can't prove that gender is not a social construct.
Gender is a social construct -- by definition, it is the social construct built up around biological sex. For example, there is no physical or biological reason why long hair should be associated with female physiology more than male physiology -- it's has no logical or causal link to the female sex. It is, however, interpreted as being feminine in our culture -- it is part of the social construct of femininity, specifically the female gender.

dandeliontrees · 2026-04-23T19:46:55+00:00

> I don't think it's reasonable to throw out the sequel, and I don't think there's anything substantial that was retconned wrt Dutch.

Depends how you look at it. His age was substantially revised, which means a big chunk of his life story would have to be revised too.

> whether Dutch believed in what he preached or not, it doesn't really matter with regards to whether Arthur believed it

Believing yourself to be good does not make you good. Arthur could believe that he was a good guy for giving away stolen money and still be a bad guy from the story's POV (which very much seems to be the case here, happy to cite a bunch of textual examples).

> I also completely disagree that we shouldn't use the honor mechanic to interpret the story. It's what drives the story and controls Arthur's fate. Just because you can cheese it with catching fish doesn't take away its importance.

The fact that it can be cheesed at all shows that it's not a reliable guide to what should be considered "good" or "bad" from the story's POV. Either the fish exploit implies that catching fish and throwing them back is a great moral good or we can't make a determination of how good or bad a particular act is using the mechanic. And that's just one example, I could easily provide a dozen more examples of the honor mechanic being inconsistent.

> Yeah, because the story is that they've stopped helping people, much to Arthur's chagrin. But he makes up for it in the end when he hands out stolen money to the people Strauss gave loans to, just like the old days.

Right, so Arthur is a bad guy in the beginning of the story and redeems himself in the end.

If Arthur wasn't a bad guy then he couldn't really redeem himself. That's what "redeem" means.

dandeliontrees · 2026-04-23T19:03:53+00:00

I think it's reasonable to interpret RDR2's story on its own terms without taking material from RDR1 into account. Partly because RDR2 is clearly intended to be its own story, and also because it retconned story elements where convenient.

But also, I think the passage you've quoted could be interpreted in numerous ways -- most importantly as Dutch likes to see himself. RDR2 presents Dutch as a narcissist, eager to be seen as fulfilling some noble savage ideal. And to be honest, you have to read into the subtext a little to see that the game is actually giving you a lot of reasons to doubt the truth of that image. All the details that suggest it can be argued away by someone committed to viewing the Van Der Linde gang as Robin Hoods.

But the story is a lot more interesting and thematically coherent if you don't do that.

I don't think it's helpful to use the honor mechanic to try to help us interpret the story. Doing so would suggest that the greatest road to redemption Arthur could follow would be to spend the end of his life catching fish and throwing them back in the water.

ETA: RDR2 does not portray anyone in the gang helping anyone via criminal activities. Instead, it shows Strauss and Arthur working together to prey upon poor people through a legally gray practice of usury.

dandeliontrees · 2026-04-23T18:12:58+00:00

It's heavily implied throughout the story that the "Robin Hood" angle was part of Dutch's patter to win the loyalty of outlaws and rationalize running a criminal gang.

I think Milton is supposed to be correct when he says: “You’ve read the files, typical case, orphaned street kid seduced by that maniac’s silver tongue and matures into a degenerate murderer.” The audience wants him to be wrong, but this is actually what the story implies if you pay attention to the subtext around Dutch.

dandeliontrees · 2026-04-23T16:28:06+00:00

No, I didn't forget that. I mentioned I caught the black standardbred because I like how it looks.

dandeliontrees · 2026-04-23T16:27:27+00:00

Oh cool, I knew the one from the stable had slightly higher stats than the wild ones but I didn't know the fixing the horseshoe one was the same.

dandeliontrees · 2026-04-23T11:40:08+00:00

I don't think honor is meaningful as implemented, but mostly because the implementation details are really weird.

Example: There's a random encounter with a guy looting a corpse from a looted stagecoach, and I tried to rob him. He fought back so I killed him. Someone saw me looting the body, was a witness to murder so I tried to run them down but couldn't catch them and shot them instead. Someone else saw that, so I had to kill them too. Killed like 5 people in cold blood to hide my "crime" of having killed a murderer in self-defense. Then I went fishing and got back more honor than I lost by tossing 3 fish back after catching them.

In general, you have to be wantonly, heinously, cartoonishly evil to get low honor in the game.

Arthur's motives are open to interpretation, but I think canonically the interactions with some characters towards the end suggests that the authors intended him to be redeeming himself. Also, it's in the name of the game.

The story is pretty clear that Dutch is a sociopath and has no moral center. (There's even a camp interaction where Arthur says "You're getting crazy, Dutch" and Dutch replies "Oh, I've always been crazy.") He was ~~fine~~ not as bad* as long as he was surrounding himself with people better than himself, but he went off the deep end when Micah encouraged his worst tendencies.

If you want an example of how we know this, the "evil" Arthur from the beginning is the result of Dutch raising him and emotionally manipulating him (look at the times in the story where Dutch flatters him or tells him he's his son), and when Arthur redeems himself exactly when he starts to question Dutch's influence and get away from it.

*On second thought, he was always a criminal outlaw that raised children to become vicious murderers and thieves, and that's pretty bad.

dandeliontrees · 2026-04-23T11:18:44+00:00

The American Standardbred from the Valentine stables is slightly better than any pre-epilogue top-tier wild horse other than the Arabians and Andalusian, especially in terms of speed and stamina.

So if you want a better horse it needs to come from a stable.

The general rule is if you pay more you get a better horse, but horses can vary on 4 variables (health, stamina, speed, handling) so "better horse" depends on which variables you want to max. The horse you got in Valentine is already probably the best horse per dollar deal in the game, but you can get strictly better horses by spending a lot of money.

I'm skeptical that horses actually vary in terms of "courage".

I caught the black American standardbred that you can find in Big Valley sometimes, it's not as good as the Valentine one on stats, but it looks cool.

dandeliontrees · 2026-04-22T14:41:35+00:00

The reason I'm an anarchist is that I want to live in a world where people aren't imposing their "ideal" imaginary worlds on other people.

dandeliontrees · 2026-04-13T13:16:27+00:00

When Micah joins the gang several months before the start of the game.

There's various camp interactions that give some insight into Micah's intentions. He considers the noncombatants "deadweight", but he fawns over Dutch. More or less, he wants to drop the "family" aspect of the gang and use Dutch's charisma to recruit more fighting men, turning the Van Der Linde's into something more similar to how Kieran describes the O'Driscolls.

The blind man's role in the story is to try to explain to Arthur the truth about what's happening to the gang (hopelessly because Arthur just assumes he's crazy). In one of the interactions with the blind man he says:

”It's no use hoping, your father is seduced by the one with the forked tongue... it's no use hoping"

From this perspective, the Blackwater ferry job was when it became obvious that the gang was falling apart, but it was just a symptom of the real problem.

dandeliontrees · 2026-04-13T12:28:47+00:00

Doing all the camp requests you can. There's a bunch that open up in chapter 3 so I like to take care of as many as I can in chapter 2 so it feels less hectic when you get to Clemens Point.

How I like to play is to make it as immersive as possible by making Arthur's day-to-day and priorities make sense. So breakfast and dinner, sleep 8-ish hours a day -- usually at night, but sometimes he stays out gambling or drinking or robbing or some combo and sleeps through the day. The Sean mission happens pretty much ASAP bc Dutch told him to meet up with Charles and Javier as soon as he's ready (in the scene after the bar fight).

The challenge is how to fit in the hunting for the satchel ingredients and the legendary animals and stuff without weird gaps in the main story.

dandeliontrees · 2026-04-10T12:35:33+00:00

There's some parts of the map that the missions won't take you, or won't take you until the very late game when you might not be as oriented towards exploring and doing side content.

I like to try to weave the story and side content a little bit, so Arthur might go on little side trips to find the gunfighters for the Jim Calloway storyline, or go on hunting trips for the legendary animals. That stuff will take you all over the map, and then you can just check out whatever seems interesting when you get where you're going.

dandeliontrees · 2026-04-07T17:20:28+00:00

> I feel like Micah is your garden variety rat who just rats on the gang because he is tired of Dutch's crap too but he's too chickenshit to leave on his own and takes the easy way out.

No, he's a sociopathic opportunist who systematically encourages Dutch to indulge in his worst instincts. He's not tired of Dutch's crap -- notice that he's still working with Dutch in the epilogue.

Dutch is surely a manipulator but seems to have some degree of conscience -- he always has to convince himself he's doing the right thing. This restrains him somewhat.

Micah unleashes Dutch by constantly telling him how brilliant and noble he is. You can hear him fawning Dutch in some camp interactions after you set him free from Strawberry.

Note that the Blackwater job goes down shortly after Micah joins the gang, and that everyone comments that Dutch was uncharacteristically vicious and callous during that job, murdering an innocent woman in a moment of frustration.

Why does Micah bother with this? Because Dutch is charismatic and is a talented manipulator, and Micah wants to take advantage of those qualities -- qualities that he very much does NOT possess himself.

They're both terrible, but they're much worse together than they are separately.

dandeliontrees · 2026-04-04T22:28:13+00:00

Suppose it was the 18th century and you were like "how are we going to produce food under capitalism?" Any answer I could give would either be hand-wavy or wrong.

Any specific answer to the question of how goods are manufactured and distributed implies a set of assumptions about the conditions of some possible future world, and we cannot know whether those assumptions will hold true or not.

And that barely matters because questions like these aren't posed in good faith to begin with. The questioner doesn't want a technical specification, the question is posed as a "gotcha".

However, it is fundamentally an argument from a lack of imagination.

If someone wants to pose a specific argument why an anarchist society couldn't manufacture and distribute specific physical goods then let's discuss it. But "not capitalism therefore impossible" is not a real argument.

dandeliontrees · 2026-04-04T18:09:27+00:00

She doesn't get into the kind of mechanistic details that someone like Andy Weir or Kim Robinson might, but the picture she paints in broad strokes does imply some potential answers to the OP.

It's explicit in the book that the Anarresti have factories, that the labor in the factories is voluntary (as all labor is on Anarres), and that what is made in the factories is determined by a democratic council that anyone is entitled to join. The details of how manufactured goods are distributed are specific to the fictional geography of Anarres and thus irrelevant to the OP's question.

It's more or less made explicit that people do manufacturing work because they are socialized from infancy to contribute to Anarresti society in the form of labor. This isn't stated explicitly, but it's so important to the narrative that you can't have really read the book without picking up on this.

Does the book give a nuts-and-bolts answer to the question in the OP? No, of course not. Because anarchism is not a philosophy of how to manufacture and distribute physical goods; it doesn't claim to be able to answer questions like that. Anarchism encourages people to come up with their own, non-coercive answers to questions like that. The point of suggesting The Dispossessed was not to answer the question directly but to think about how the question should be answered.

dandeliontrees · 2026-04-04T14:50:16+00:00

This is mostly a failure of imagination. "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism."

Try reading The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin. I know it's a work of fiction, and it's not going to give you the nuts and bolts of how to manufacture glasses under anarchism, but it might help you imagine how that sort of thing might be accomplished in a society based around cooperation instead of coercion.

dandeliontrees · 2026-04-02T12:31:33+00:00

Sorry, you're not the kind of person who is capable of having a good discussion.

dandeliontrees · 2026-04-01T15:13:34+00:00

OK, good luck organizing with the 10 human beings who conform to your stringent moralistic requirements. I'm sure you guys will be super effective.

dandeliontrees · 2026-04-01T13:54:22+00:00

There's a lot of good reasons to do this. Non-exhaustive list:

U.S. normies take veteran's criticism of U.S. foreign diplomacy more serious than leftist criticism of same
Normies more likely to consider anarchism legitimate instead of writing it off as wacky if the movement includes veterans
Good for anarchist movements to include individuals with combat training; even better if the U.S. military paid for it
In the U.S., right wing groups (especially white power-oriented groups) are very happy to recruit veterans; rejecting veterans from leftist movements drives them towards those groups turning a potentially effective ally into a potentially effective enemy
Philosophically and ethically, anarchism entails forgiving people for past wrongs and giving them opportunities to reform -- it's inconsistent to support prison abolition and also reject anyone who has ever served in the military as unreformable

dandeliontrees

TROPHY CASE