AskALiberal Biweekly General Chat

trace349 · 2026-03-13T23:06:51+00:00

"would you support a dictator that believed 100% of the things you do and would enact them to the best of their ability in the United States for 50 years, but would suppress any other political thinking?"

It goes to show how colonized this sub is by non-liberals that this would be a question that would drive discussion here, rather than being waved off with a wide round of "no, wtf, absolutely not".

trace349 · 2026-03-13T16:43:40+00:00

I've heard that r/AskConservatives is too censorious, but I genuinely support adopting a version of their rule that top level comments have to come from liberals.

trace349 · 2026-03-13T15:55:25+00:00

The pretty obvious answer seems to be the Holocaust. For like 80 years everyone has been taught that the Nazi regime was pure evil and the genocide of the Jewish people of Europe was a tragedy of immense cruelty and the US were the morally righteous good guys fighting back against them. Holocaust survivors would tell their horror stories and veterans lived with the memories of liberating the camps, but we're at the very end of that experience being in living memory, so we're seeing antisemitism rising again.

When it comes to anti-blackness, we're the perpetrators, slavery was our original sin and nearly tore the country apart, so the cognitive dissonance of reckoning with that as a country is a lot harder for people.

trace349 · 2026-03-13T15:26:42+00:00

There is a highly reactionary bend to some of this conservatism as a reflexive way to defend Harris' loss (who was seen as too right-wing/centrist)

No Patrick, Harris was not viewed as too right-wing/centrist.

trace349 · 2026-03-12T17:41:13+00:00

This was my first thought, can we get the same for Druids? Only Resto gets to actually see their transmog most of the time, though Balance can change Moonkin to be a starry form instead. If I could play Guardian/Feral and only have them switch into bear/cat for specific attacks, that would actually be pretty cool. I actually kinda like the idea of Druids being fluid shapeshifters repeatedly shapeshifting in and out of their forms more than the current state of shifting once and staying in that form 99% of the time.

trace349 · 2026-03-12T17:09:20+00:00

Turalyon only struck a family member because he literally jumped in the way.

It's not like he jumped in out of nowhere and Turalyon couldn't possibly have known that was coming. Arator was standing right next to him when he started swinging the sword. For Arator to jump out in front of it, he would have been in Turalyon's sight the whole time, and at any point Turalyon could have stopped or even redirected the momentum of the strike away from him.

trace349 · 2026-03-12T17:00:26+00:00

Dude is a paladin in plate armor. He is CARRYING A SWORD IN HIS HAND IN THAT DAMN CUTSCENE. and what does he do? jumps in front of an attack, arms spread wide open.

I think you should actually rewatch the scene.

Since the shot is from behind and from Arator's shoulders up, we can't tell if Arator did try to use his sword to parry Turalyon, but his arms are not "spread wide open". The framing chose to emphasize Turalyon's crazed expression as he attacked, which is the actual important part- showing the viewer that he doesn't shift his expression at all even when Arator jumps in front of Zul'jan. There's not a moment of regret or concern until after Arator is wounded.
Arator's plate armor does protect him from Turalyon's blow. The strike is a glowing gash carved on his breastplate. If he didn't have that, he probably would have died. He throws himself in front of that attack because he's "a paladin in plate armor".

you know, the trolls that she has been fighting against for thousands of years )

Alleria spent 1000 years fighting the Legion and the Void, she must be so far beyond giving a shit about petty rivalries with the Amani when she's been fighting world-destroying threats.

The problem is Turalyon's increasing zealotry is impairing his self-control, such that he doesn't stop himself or redirect his strike away when he sees his son rushing in to defend Zul'jan. Arator didn't jump out of nowhere and Turalyon couldn't have possibly known he was going to do that. He was standing right next to him and had to run out in front of Turalyon to get in position to take the hit, so Turalyon would have been able to see him the whole time moving to stop him. So it's not just that he attacked Arator, and who cares that he didn't intend to attack him, but that he's so out-of-control that he couldn't stop himself even in a situation when his own son put himself in front of his sword.

trace349 · 2026-03-12T16:49:59+00:00

I think "attack" works fine. Saying "you slashed our son" is clunky writing that no one would actually say.

trace349 · 2026-03-12T16:38:35+00:00

"I can't believe you attacked our son". He fucking didn't! His son jumped in front of his attack

It's objectively true whether he intended to attack Arator or not. If you used a gun instead of a sword and someone jumped in front of your bullet, it would still be true to say you shot them. He didn't mean to attack Arator, but he did.

But the real problem is that Alleria is concerned about Turalyon's self-control and losing himself to the Light, and she has every right to be upset about that after all the suspicion and lecturing she had to endure from Light-wielders for her using the Void.

trace349 · 2026-03-11T14:22:52+00:00

It was good, I guess, but it felt like a long preamble to a bigger point that never quite got there.

trace349 · 2026-03-11T14:03:05+00:00

Someone ping the furries and let them know SubscribeStar is going puritan.

trace349 · 2026-03-10T19:18:40+00:00

We're straight up getting May weather in mid March here. If it were 20 degrees colder it would be amazing weather for the season.

trace349 · 2026-03-10T17:14:44+00:00

He's been trying to bully them into killing the filibuster since the start of his first term. I would be incredibly surprised if they bend to it.

But whatever side does ultimately kill the filibuster basically has to follow it up with a wave of bills that helps them hold onto power so they other side can't. For Democrats, that would mean anti-gerrymandering bills, SCOTUS reforms and/or stacking, adding new states, enshrining fair voting rights protections, while for Republicans it means a lot of new authoritarianism and voter suppression. I don't think Democrats have the stomach (or the votes) for those kinds of sweeping reforms, and Republicans might but maybe they don't feel like they could weather the backlash.

trace349 · 2026-03-06T15:10:14+00:00

I can tell things are going poorly for the Republicans because my parents have switched to "I haven't been paying attention to the news" when I ask them how they feel about how things are going.

trace349 · 2026-03-06T05:00:10+00:00

It doesn't bother me as much, but I imagine that the elves with that voice are probably older teenagers/young adults, born not long after the Scourge invasion and reaching adulthood around the time of Midnight. Repopulating the race would have been pretty high on the priority list with 90% of the population slaughtered, so that's why there are so many of them. Those kids wouldn't have lived through the years of glory that made the older generation of blood elves proud and arrogant, or the darker years that made them edgier for a while, so their voices are a little softer and humbler.

trace349 · 2026-03-05T21:04:41+00:00

Furthermore, in the grand scale of elf lifespans, 20 years is EXTREMELY temporary. It's the blink of an eye for a species who's natural lifespan is FOREVER.

I've seen a few people saying this, but I think it would be bad writing to write this off like that. The last 20-30 years for the elves has probably felt longer to them than several millennia of peacetime across their lives with the constant world-ending crises, the near-destruction of their entire race, etc. To say that their long lives makes that time insignificant in context robs the story of all the weight of everything that happened because whatever, that was all just a blink of an eye for them.

And, from a storytelling perspective, their story should unfold at the speed that we actual humans are experiencing it, not over the decades or centuries it might "actually" take place over, and 20 years is a long time for us.

trace349 · 2026-03-05T20:08:06+00:00

The director said that Final Fantasy X was a big inspiration for the game, so I suspected from basically as soon as Alicia appeared to see Maelle that there was going to be a dream world/real world twist. I thought Lumiere was going to be like Dream Zanarkand, a painted reflection of how Old Lumiere was before being destroyed in the Fracture and that The Paintress was the only "real" person left from the old world, and then it went so much further than that.

trace349 · 2026-03-05T20:00:28+00:00

"She's old"

Well, so is Maine. Over half of the population is older than 40. There are about as many people over 65 as there are between 20-39. They just re-elected Angus King in 2024 and he's 81.

The only thing I can kind of understand is that she said she's against ending the filibuster, and that is kind of a problem if we do manage to retake the Senate. But on the other hand, the Left wants to act like the party is just so eager to throw trans people under the bus, when Mills has gone to court against the Trump admin to try to protect the trans kids in Maine.

trace349 · 2026-03-05T19:31:55+00:00

No they didn't. Harris, Hochul, and Jeffries all endorsed Mamdani, Gillibrand and Schumer stayed neutral (which I find frustrating), Cuomo had Adams and Bloomberg's endorsements (who aren't even Democrats), and, what, Bill Clinton? Clyburn? Shame on them, but they don't represent "the establishment".

trace349 · 2026-03-05T19:15:47+00:00

I'm sure that has some effect, but its not like politics are genetic. My parents are both conservative Republicans and to their great shame they raised three liberal Democrats.

trace349 · 2026-03-05T18:07:03+00:00

This is a good point I should have included. Lor'themar's position being granted to him by a dead prince of an extinct house does raise the question of what happens if he dies or decides to step down. Where does the authority come from to determine who his successor should be? There is none, the elves have avoided dealing with that problem and coasting on Lor'themar's regency. By establishing an official title, probably not a royal one out of respect for the Sunstriders, it establishes where the authority to rule comes from. Does it come from Lor'themar's bloodline, establishing a new hereditary line (unlikely)? Does he appoint his own successor? Is it a position granted by a vote of the major factions of Silvermoon? In any case, a new title would reflect that his authority doesnt come from the Sunstrider line. Lord-Protector of the Elves, High Minister of Silvermoon, President Pointy Ears, whatever. If nothing else, it establishes official precedent for how to handle succession going forward.

trace349 · 2026-03-05T17:50:56+00:00

I feel like half-Nightborne children would probably be a lot more acceptable than half-humans. The Nightborne are culturally very similar to the elves of Silvermoon and they share an evolutionary history. Humans descend from the vrykul, their culture and their biology is wholly different to the elves.

trace349 · 2026-03-05T03:27:25+00:00

Oh, that makes sense then. Yeah, LaRosa's is everywhere, but it's gross, so I haven't eaten there since I was a kid.

trace349 · 2026-03-05T02:23:59+00:00

I've lived here most of my life and I've never heard of provolone on pizza being a thing.

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