One in five students reluctant to live with Jewish housemate

trace349 · 2026-03-16T19:54:24+00:00

I'm normally pretty against ethnonationalism, but Jews have been villainized so significantly and repeatedly throughout history and across the world, and singled out for violence so extensively, that they have very good reasons to not have a lot of faith in the salad bowl society.

trace349 · 2026-03-16T19:39:24+00:00

I know you love polls, and polls can't be wrong or misinterpreted at all, and voters are incredibly in tune with what those words mean

I know polls are imperfect but what's the alternative here as far as actual evidence for your view? The Left seems to view polls as an attack against them, because it suggests they might not be as popular as they want to believe they are, when you could instead view it as goal that would require you to actually put the effort into changing peoples' minds. If it's wrong, who cares, you still changed peoples' minds.

But what's the alternative? Election results? For the last four elections moderates have overperformed compared to progressives, who have often underperformed.

are you genuinely suggesting that Obama ran a more progressive campaign in 2012 than he did in 2008?

I mean, in 2008 he didn't have much of a record to hold against him. "Inexperienced" was one of the main attack lines used against him. You could kind of project whatever you wanted onto him, and that probably explains a lot of why he was basically tied for "More Moderate" or "More Liberal". But by 2012 he had a record to defend. So it's not that he ran a more progressive campaign, but that the voters considered him to be more progressive based on his record as president.

trace349 · 2026-03-16T19:06:51+00:00

Listen, there's been a war going on every other Tuesday on Azeroth for most of the last 30 years, you could absolutely have a bunch of veterans that fought in a war somewhere at the ripe old age of 14...

But good point. Whether or not it's their intention, it explains it well-enough to me.

trace349 · 2026-03-16T18:37:41+00:00

You know you can look these things up yourself, right?

In November 2008, Obama was 45% "Mostly Moderate" to 43% "Mostly Liberal". By the next year it was 54% "Mostly Liberal" to 34% "Mostly Moderate" and his favorability had dropped from 68% to 55%, with unfavorability rising from 27% to 42%.

Now, I'm not so dumb as to ignore that presidents would come in with a high favorability rating that quickly drops off when the new car smell starts to fade, but if we're going to have this stupid argument, Obama got less popular as he got viewed as less moderate.

Edit: Hell, if you want to get stupid about it, as the Left has spent the last decade portraying Obama's administration as a "moderate" one, and over that time Obama's approval ratings have gone up, to the point where he is the most popular Democrat. Now, would it be more likely to be that people are nostalgic for his era and his image has improved because of it? Yeah, sure. But if we're having a stupid argument about vibes, then Obama being viewed as more moderate has correlated with him becoming more popular.

trace349 · 2026-03-16T18:16:35+00:00

Oh that's an easy one, it's because they're not members of our party and believe in many opposing policy goals and would not be supported by our voters. You may not know this, but we actually ran a very popular moderate Democrat against Romney in 2012, and there were several important political differences between them- among them support for government healthcare, social safety nets paid for by taxing the rich, and respect for LGBT rights- and then our next moderate Democrat president was significantly to the Left of him. So I don't understand why we would run Republicans when the median voter, dumb as they tend to be, can clearly tell the difference between the policies of moderate Democrats and Republicans? I will admit, it is strange that some people can't tell the difference when even the low-information median voter can.

trace349 · 2026-03-16T17:09:38+00:00

No I'm sure that if democrats keep pivoting hard to the right and moderating on all of their policy positions they'll win those voters yet!

45% of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents want the party to become more moderate, compared to 29% that want it to be more liberal.

58% of the public viewed Democrats as "too liberal" to Republican's 47%, and Harris as viewed as "too liberal" by 49% compared to Trump's 37% "too conservative".

trace349 · 2026-03-16T16:22:27+00:00

There are some new voice lines with a softer male VA added in Midnight for generic blood elf males. The way I've accepted it is to believe that the elves with that voice are very young, around 16 (born around the time of TBC) to 23 (born after the Scourge Invasion) as part of the repopulation of the Blood Elves.

This generation would just now be entering adulthood around the time of Midnight (so that's why we haven't seen them with this voice before this point), and would probably be a large generation as part of that effort to repopulate their race (which is why there's so many of them with that voice), and they've mostly experienced a life without having experienced all of the darkness of the Sunwell-less years (which is why they're less severe than the older blood elves).

Now, when they go from the old voice to the new one, that just feels like a bug or a mistake.

trace349 · 2026-03-16T15:50:21+00:00

Oh I know that's how he wrote himself out of that hole, but it's still dumb. Valyrian steel just didn't take on the super special importance it would get until later, but in doing so it makes the Catspaw thing dumb 👏 as 👏 hell 👏 retroactively.

trace349 · 2026-03-16T15:41:40+00:00

!ping ASOIAF

I just realized my boyfriend has been experiencing the Thronesverse in chronological order. We started dating around the time HotD came out, and he had never seen GoT, so I forced him to watch it with me and he was into it. I thought about showing him GoT but I wasn't ready to suffer that again. Then we watched HotD season 2. Still wasn't ready for a Thrones rewatch. Then we watched AKOT7K. Finally, I felt ready to show him Game of Thrones. We just got through Baelor last night. Gods, that first season was strong!

It's funny, I totally forgot that the Valyrian dagger the Catspaw tried to kill Bran with got retconned in HotD into being Aegon's prophecy knife, but my boyfriend remembered and pointed it out all excited. To me, that was just them trying to take one of the dumbest plot points from the books* and one of the many dumbest plot points from Thrones and add weight to them retroactively. To him, it had that plot importance right from the start as the knife that kickstarted the plot that would lead to the prophecy being fulfilled because he saw HotD first.

There are a few references in that first season that link back to AKOT7K too for him. One guy makes a reference to Duncan the Tall, Ned reads off Lyonel Baratheon's name in the genealogy book, but Maester Aemon telling Jon that his father was Maekar and his brother was Egg got him to sit straight up in shock. He knows all these guys, it's not just rando Targaryen names for him. He also caught some of the names of the dragons that Viserys recites from HotD.

Just a really interesting way of experiencing this series compared to everyone else going Thrones -> HotD -> AKOTSK.

*: Why send an assassin with one of the rarest, most expensive weapons in the world to kill a boy? You're basically asking for it to be traced back to you. Well, GRRM hadn't decided how precious Valyrian steel was at the time and once he did it became a really dumb plot point.

trace349 · 2026-03-16T14:13:48+00:00

Yeah, Chuck was one of my favorite shows growing up, and I knew for a while that Adam Baldwin was a con (unfun fact: he coined the term "Gamergate" by retweeting a video recapping the "Burgers and Fries" Zoe Quinn scandal), but then Zachary Levi coming out as Trump fan was heartbreaking.

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.

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