SnapSlav

Totally missed the point I was getting at, but whatever... I'll just accept and enjoy the irony at this point, as little as I can. I should think it's pretty obvious why they think this: because that's what they've been told. Do people spontaneously come to the conclusion that the planet is warming dangerously because of human activity? No, they think that because that's what they've been told. Do people out of nowhere arrive to the same conclusion on a massive scale that there is society-wide racial injustice occurring where they can't possibly know about it? No, they think that because that's what they've been told.

One is a description of a character archetype (e.g. "the well-meaning, but uninformed, who is capable of being convinced"), the other is an admission of personal fallibility (e.g. "they are or they aren't that type of person, I don't know yet"). Words underlined represent those distinct uses of the words "can" and "maybe can" that you are referring to. These are two separate statements, not contradictory statements. Personal fallibility doesn't mean the person can't be reasoned with, it just means the observer doesn't KNOW (yet) that they can or cannot be reasoned with, but as I explained in the topic introduction, my interactions with these particular individuals is that they appear to be of the persuadable variety, with the proper approach/method/information. Ergo, the topic, asking, "What are these approaches/methods/knowledge-bombs that I may use?" I mean, for fuck's sake, what bigger cue do you need that someone IS of the variety that CAN be convinced, than them being a leading member of their school's debate team, and going into college to major in Philosophy? I'm not saying it's 100% shut and closed, without any possibility of being otherwise, but that's closer to 100 than 0, that's for damn sure... Right, that's the whole POINT of the topic: Methods to use to separate those who can be saved from those who cannot... I'm not interested in assertions that a group is a monolith... until it's not. On top of being nonsensical, it's irrelevant to the topic at hand. I didn't ask, "Are there people who can be convinced that this is not true?" I stated, "I don't think this is true," and also asked, "What can I present to convince these people (of whom I believe to be persuadable) that it is not true?" Obviously some people are just "meant" to be part of those psychopathic hive-mind groups... whether their upbringing "broke" them in just the right way that that's where they "belonged", or whether they were just born that special kind of evil... I don't think "why" matters. They cannot be saved. I've indicated several times that I don't give a damn about these people. If it is your assertion that they're ALL of this variety, then would that not preclude you from having any input in this topic, since the topic was about the kinds of people you're asserting that they are not?

Like I said, we're talking about "in the moment". We all know what things are good qualities in people. Some people simply choose not to act on that knowledge. There's no special "lesson" to give our daughters/sisters/cousins/etc that will prevent them from picking bad boys. They either have the capacity to see past instinctual urges and think about the long-term impact of their decisions- what Stef refers to as "deferral of gratification" -or they don't. Find me a women who when asked whether they'd date a man who was honest or who never told them the truth they'd pick the latter, because I'm positive they'd all say they want the honest man. But that doesn't mean they will actually pick a man with integrity over a serial liar, when presented the choice. Again, we're talking about instincts, here. Rational thinking (sadly) does not apply. After all, the question you posed was not "how can we change them" but "why do they do this?"

At the risk of feeding a possible troll... The difference is one is spiteful and the other is empathetic. Both believe the same lie, but they react to it completely differently. One can be reasoned with, the other cannot. Obviously we reserve the snarky comebacks for the ones who cannot be reasoned with, because why waste our time trying to explain a reasoned argument to them if they're just going to reject it, when you could just be a jerk to them, accomplish just as much, but at least elicit some slight enjoyment out of the exchange? By contrast, the other is responding to the lie with thought-out plans to try to help however they can. Clearly they mean well, aren't getting in anyone's face being belligerent, and maybe- just maybe- can be reasoned with. It's like pointing out the difference between a Communist who believes it because they're broken in all the right ways that they will reject any efforts to persuade them, and a Communist who believes it because they've been propagandized their whole lives, but would embrace the truth if it were ever presented to them. One can be saved, the other we call Antifa. A wonderful list of examples of what I was getting at. If it isn't a problem with fertilizer, it's new methods of accessing more fossil fuels. If it's not fossil fuels, it's nuclear power. Etc etc. The list of possible technologies to provide for the future keeps infinitely expanding, and I just don't see us "exhausting" our resources anytime soon. Like Boss said at the top (and I agree), it's an economic issue. We'll never reach "overcapacity", because if we ever near "capacity", we'll correct for that, so long as there are market incentives (common sense) to do so. I look at all technology from the perspective of, "how did the average citizen perceive 'fuel' when they were heavily reliant on whale oil?" To me, the answer is, "they had no idea what could be invented in the future", which means we have no idea what will be created in the future, either. So all the doom-and-gloom naysayers insisting that we're going to run out of X are implying that technology is and will always be what they can currently expect/understand, when it's more likely a matter of "people will find a way, we just don't know what that way is yet".

Oh, I wouldn't be THAT charitable. That might take out a sizable chunk of the world's problems, but I'm sure there are PLENTY more woes in the world to solve that would give Stefan ample content to work with... unfortunately. Sexual selection doesn't really target the qualities that make "good men", such as virtue, honesty, integrity, for the same reason as explained above in the 4 vs 200 point. These were not "valuable" traits in the hunter gatherer sense of survival needs. They seek assertiveness and aggressiveness in male partners because that's what safeguards and provides in that primitive environment, and both alphas and bad boys exhibit those qualities. So on an instinctual level they can't distinguish between the two. They want alphas, but they don't have filters for the important characteristics that differentiate an alpha from a bad boy, so they go for both indiscriminately. And for the women who are smart enough to KNOW the difference, good luck winning the argument between her frontal lobe and her lizard brain. In the moment, we all follow our instincts. On an aggregate level, some women will get lucky and nab an alpha by following their instincts, while most will just get caught up dealing with the bad guys they ought to steer clear of. "Serene" and "kind" are just not traits that women select for, unfortunately.

Again, we're talking about 4 having less of an impact than 100-200. Even if we included ALL of human history post-agriculture, we're only talking about 11, which is still nothing compared to 100-200. A couple thousand years aren't enough to change our genes so drastically. Considering 4 thousand years "a long time" genetically is just a mistake, because that's just a flash in the pan that is our genetic history. Additionally- again -it's not that "bad boy" genes are advantageous (to the males who have them), it's that female behavior to submit to "bad boys" is what's advantageous (to the women who have that). Think of it as guy A running a successful business versus guy B owning of a subsidized "business". Guy A doesn't understand how guy B could stay in business, because he has poor business practices, wastes money, has little diligence or hard-work ethics, so HOW could he still be running a business? It's not that he's running a successful business at all, he's just being kept "in business" because tax-funded subsidies are keeping him afloat. This is what female selection versus male exception is all about. If women choose poorly, you get more of the bad genes, and if you've paid ANY amount of attention to the "single mother" series of videos of Stefan's, you might notice that there are many women who make very bad choices. Some men spread their genes by being exceptional, some men spread their genes simply because women chose them. Maybe the way you can look at it is that all those "efforts" to make better sexual selection is really only giving us better people. But that's still just select individuals, which you have to seek out and identify with great care over a long period of time. It's not the species as a whole.

No, you misunderstand. The evolutionary advantage is in the women submitting to "bad boys", not the men being bad boys. So the bad boys get to spread their genes, but only because the women accepted them, and the women accepted them because it was either submit or die. Men didn't have that choice, it was either kill or be killed, and bigger, badder male usually got to live another day by killing the less big, less bad rival male. Also, we're not talking about the last few thousand years, we're talking about primitive times where there were no such thing as "armies". Remember, most of human history was over a hundred thousand years of hunter gatherer small and primitive tribal society, and only relatively recently have we had civilization. Our species is adapted to that huge period of primitive living, where rival tribes would kill everything that wasn't them, not armies following orders. So, to recap, for most of human existence, there were tiny tribes of primitive hunters and gatherers. They featured stoic men who would hunt to provide for the tribe, and rarely express their "emotions" (disappointment, fears, worries, etc) because it was evolutionarily disadvantageous to air your grievances/failures if you came back to the camp from an unsuccessful hunt without any food because it would only spread panic that could destabilize and endanger the tribe. Then there were the physically weaker, open and supportive gatherer women women who needed those communal bonds and openness instincts to nurture the children and aid each other in their daily tasks (being physically weaker and requiring teamwork) to keep the tribe alive. In that environment, when a rival tribe decides that it's easier to eliminate their rivals than to relocate and find better hunting grounds, the men have no option but to kill their enemies, or they die. The women have a different choice: submit to their invaders, and they can survive. This is the origin of the preference for "bad boys". It's not that the men have ANY kind of genetic advantage for possessing this trait. It's that women are bred to select this trait, because doing so guaranteed their own survival. Make more sense when it's explained that way?

Major motivations can be attributed to Europeans, in general, seeing through the filter of ethnicity. Borders are a matter of race, historically, not ideas or alliance, or who-won-what-battle. Scotts don't want their own country because they think they have anything to gain from being a separate country up in the North without much chance of having any halfway decent economy. They want their own country because they're not English. The Russians in the Crimean peninsula didn't want to secede from Ukraine and join Russia because they didn't like they politics, they did it because they were racially Russian, and not Ukrainian. Catalans are also very ethnic-distinction-minded and by and large make the distinction whenever possible. They may benefit from having more localized control with a smaller local government. They may benefit from having a better economy that isn't shackled to a "sinking ship". But really, all that doesn't matter nearly so much to them as "we're not Spaniards" does.

So I'm seeing the topic as two main questions. As for the question of, "Is there an explanation as to why women keep falling into the same trap," I think this is way too much overthinking of a relatively simpler issue. The attraction to "bad boys" is simple evolutionary psychology. If women are the more communal, cooperative, and openness-centric of the two sexes because our evolution as a species necessitated that it be so, then women going along with their invaders and accepting the biggest and the baddest of the stronger and often-more-violent men worked to their advantage, because by that point their defenders had all been killed. Biologically, evolutionarily, psychologically, it just makes sense that they go for that, because it ensures the propagation of their genes. So women are built to be that way. That's the reason. Really the only reason. The other question, the matter of the assessment of the "bad boy" himself, and your own psychology, personal history, etc... I'll leave that for someone else far more qualified to comment on such matters. Sieg did a damn fine job thus far, so I'll defer to him on the matter. =]

Lot of good stuff here. Basically there is no connection between the two, as they are practically polar opposites in the gradation scale of pursuit of women versus avoidance of women. PUAs pursue them, MGTOWs avoid them. The reasons why don't really matter. Some PUAs do it because they want sex but DON'T want to get into a relationship, while other PUAs do it specifically because they want to find their OTP (one true pairing). Either way, they're pursuing women. However they don't do like like it's some kind of game; it is a game, and they play it, and practice it, and aim to get better at it CONSTANTLY. On the MGTOW side, it's the same story with "the reasons don't really matter". Either they're losers who just call themselves MGTOW as a convenient excuse, or they're cynics who don't see the point/value in companionship or procreation, so they ward off all interaction with the fairer sex all to maintain their independence. Does the distinction make a lick of difference? No, they're avoiding relationships with women, regardless of their reasons. So they don't share any commonalities, really. About the one thing they "share" in common is that they're both men, but that's like saying liberals and conservatives are "alike" in that they're both human. That's just bad categorization if you can find an excuse to call polar opposites "similar" through some form of bullshitting. The "middle" would be someone like a PUA who does it for a partner, or someone who just wings it and tries their best to get a happy living without any kind of community to "teach" them how to do it, or any study to research what many have done before them to know what works. Basically, your average Joe Blow is the middle. "Purple Pill" is just nonsense. There's no such thing. There are only 2 pills. You either escape the matrix, or you submit to the matrix; there is no third choice, no "middle" option. What some people call "Purple Pill" is people who haven't faced the crossroads that defines the alternatives. They haven't been "woke" but neither have they decided to reject enlightenment, either. They're "in the matrix". They may choose to take the red pill or the blue pill if the choice presents itself, but it hasn't. Thus, the "middle" is said Joe Blow making the best that he can. One side uses methodology to achieve its goals. The other side just... is. They don't have special secrets/skills/wisdom/techniques to impart onto others in order to be what they are. They just subsist. Frankly, I'd choose PUA any day of the week, given the choice. It just makes more sense. If you're an analytical person, it's a lifestyle that takes the dynamics of the interactions between the sexes and it analyses the ever-loving-shit out of it, systematizes it, and weaponizes it! You can choose to study just out of curiosity and never pull the trigger, or you can use the weapon for the purpose it was designed for. The choice is up to you...

Again, wrong audience. There are the kinds of people who will bemoan "there are too many people", and then there are people who will explain away their decisions because "overpopulation". We're dealing with the latter, not the former. I frankly don't even engage with the former, if I can help it. But the latter are people who CAN (possibly) be "saved". Thus the question of how to convince them.

I largely agree. So again, the question becomes "how do I convince them of this"? As I recall, I tried to touch on the subject of racial differences in one of the conversations, and the guy got very defensive when we got there. Obviously he didn't want to get anywhere near race realism. For reference, this is a guy who, when I wasn't even trying to convince him of it, after a few words, he looked mind-blown at me and asked, "Wait a minute, are you telling me Climate Change isn't real?" Basically, he's a very indoctrinated person, and in some areas it looks like he just hasn't taken a pill yet, and in other areas it looks like he's taken the blue pill. So with someone like this, it's very tough to give them enlightening information if they're unwilling to accept it. By contrast, a different conversation with a different person was with this 18-19 year old girl when asked about her plans for the future, she happily gushed that she was going to get a law degree, then maybe have 1 kid and adopt 1 kid, "because overpopulation". Earlier she had made it clear that philosophy was of interest to her, and she'd been part of debate teams in high school. So already we're seeing that contestant #2 looks MUCH more promising than contestant #1, in that their pushback wasn't as severe, and their openness to talking about difficult subjects was much greater. One thing I think is clear is that these need to be 1-on-1 discussions, less influence from a group who may chime in and distract from what you're saying, or deviate from the topic. I also think I'd need to do a little probing of their thoughts so that I have a better understanding of what their formed opinions are, so that I can explore where there are good openings to work with, any "chink in the armor" to exploit, as it were, to being with discussion. I can't just go in guns blazing with, "You're wrong about overpopulation." At least, I don't think that would be remotely as effective... XD Dude, apples and oranges. I'm not talking about the "Earth First" psychos protesting outside of shopping centers with signs talking about there being "too many people", and whose sole comments is that there are "too many people". I'm talking about the naive people who will cite "overpopulation" as their reason for doing or not doing something. In this instance, it's adoption versus procreation. They're kids, barely adults, and they're saying with GLEE that they will adopt because "overpopulation". To them, there's no need to have their own children when they can adopt, because adoption means taking children from families that could not provide for those children, and that the only different between children they raise of their own and children they raise of another's is simply that they will not look like them, because otherwise they're the same. Clearly there's a lot of room to work with, here... provided they're willing the listen. For one thing, they're following the assumption that we're all blank slates, entirely subjects of our environment, and there are no racial differences, so adopting an African child would be exactly the same as raising their own biological Asian children, which is absolutely false. But how do we argue that point to them? Secondly, there's the matter that they're overlooking incentives when they're "removing burdens" from families that don't have the resources to sustain their numbers. They're assuming that solves the problem, rather than those families feeling like they've just been given a free ticket to create MORE "burdens". It's back to basic r versus K again, where these (ostensibly) K people are assuming everyone else is K, when in fact they are r, and they will go back to pumping out babies they cannot feed the moment you take them off their hands. Believe me, if these were just those assholes who say "there needs to be fewer people in the world", I would be the first to snarkily ask them when they can do "their part" to lower the population size. But these are different people, different subject, completely different motivations. That phrase just does not apply to this scenario. Not really. To sustain a population of the current size, you need cheap fossil fuels and fertilizers. One important ingredit to fertilizer, Phosphorus, is very limited, we may run out of it in about 20 years. Other fertilizer is based on the availability of cheap fossil fuel. You say "not really", but your comment just suggests to me that it is indeed a matter of technology and its advancement. If Phosphorus is essential, chemistry as a study was designed to take molecules and break them apart or combine them together, as needed. Break apart water to get pure hydrogen and pure oxygen, combine sodium and chlorine to get salt, etc. Beyond just simple chemistry, we have conquered the splitting of the atom, and it's been the next goal to achieve the combination of atoms, so in theory technology could "create" more Phosphorus. Besides that, your statement of "we may run out of [Phosphorus] in about 20 years" reminds me heavily of the "peak oil" argument, which was pure nonsense. Speaking of which, the second half was "cheap fossil fuel", which as it so happens we ARE acquiring as our technology gets better and better! So it sounds like gathering the necessary resources to create more food is a matter of technology, even though you opined that it's not.

So the topic of "the world is overpopulated" has come up a number of times around the office in the last few months. I dunno if it's just a coincidence, but every time I can remember, it was Asians (Orientals, as per Stef's recent comment that he wants to bring that word back, which I'd be happy to oblige and contribute, but must admit I prefer to say "Asian" out of habit) who brought up the statement, and everyone else just affirmed them. Whether it was preference cascade causing more skeptical people to hide their less-than-convinced stand, or whether I was the only person in the room who thought (on the inside), "No, the world' isn't overpopulated, that's just a line of bullshit you've bought into", no one else so much as attempted to refute that claim. I tried, but both because I haven't refined my in-person argumentation skills in a long time, and because I held back so as not to place myself in an awkward position at work, I didn't convince anybody. So I'm wondering, what are the arguments in support and opposition of the claim that the planet is overpopulated? Obviously, the claim is about humans, not ants nor deer, and the issue isn't necessarily that the number of bodies itself is too high, but that the sustainability of providing for any single human life is impossible at the scale of how many total lives we are at now. Whether it's a matter solely about food scarcity, or living space, or waste disposal space (or others I haven't noted), or a combination, this is usually what people are talking about when they mention "overpopulation". They're not talking about Jews or Armenians being densely packed into close quarters during their respective genocides. My observations are... I'd argue that living space is definitely not a problem, because technology has brought us multi-level buildings, so the same square footage of land has had its capacity for living space multiplied many times fold over the recent centuries. The industrial and post-industrial eras, in particular, have brought about the advent of skyscrapers, which may be used as either office spaces, or as hotels and apartment complexes. So "packing" human beings into enough room isn't the issue, although I suppose someone like Paul Joseph Watson would argue that people want to living in homes, not apartments, and they don't want to live in plain, glass towers like skyscrapers, but the issue is not pleasing humans, but providing for humans, so I'm going to ignore that argument for this topic's sake for the time being. So, as I've presented the matter of technology allowing for multiplication of the use of land area by occupying increasing levels of building stories, "living space" is not in immediately short supply, so that leg of the overpopulation stool is gone. Likewise, I'd pose that food provision is also a matter of technological advancement. With the advent of GM crops, botanists have developed drought-resistant, disease resistant, higher-yield crops. Combined with better methods of cultivation, like crop rotation, green houses, and many other utilities designed to enhance our ability to produce food that I'm not even aware of, coupled with a production-centric economic model like Capitalism that creates abundance of resources, is "not enough food" really a problem at all? Isn't it just that some places have too many people and not enough food provision, while other places have a far greater capacity for food production relative to their populations? So the issue isn't the ability to produce enough food, it's something else that's preventing some places from doing so, isn't it? For example, foreign aid acting as a disincentive for productivity and an incentive to reproduce. Either way, would it not follow that the "not enough food" leg of the overpopulation stool has also been knocked off? So lastly there's waste disposal. Here I don't really have any arguments about the issue, so much as I'm going to fall back on the expertise of someone else. In this case, Angela Logomasini of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, demonstrated in the "Recycling" episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! with a visual aid that a tiny portion of land (relative to the rest of the country) could account for 1000 years of landfill space, were there all disposal to be 100% landfill and 0% recycling. So if that's accurate, then all hopes of standing on the overpopulation stool have all but flown out the window, as the last leg it has to stand on (that I know of) is not well and truly gone. But beyond that, there's the argument that much, MUCH older civilizations, far less advanced than where we are at right now- namely, medieval Europeans -effectively lived in their own filth, and they built their cities on top of their older cities, and "filling the land" (in this case, with entire cities) hasn't proven to be any issue over the last several centuries. And yet again, as with the previous 2 matters, technological advancement is a present matter. So would it not follow that techniques to use the most of space have made efficient use of space where waste is concerned a moot point, too? I'm sure there's plenty of other arguments, so tell me what I've missed, or where I may be completely mistaken! If I'm not wrong, how can I effectively communicate that overpopulation is either not a pressing issue, or possibly even a lie, to these people who so confidently express that it's real and there's nothing they can do about it besides affirm its reality, and that they should adopt rather than procreate? Because I'm tired of seeing relatively intelligent people nice themselves into extinction, as well as I'm tired of hearing leftist platitudes everywhere I go, but I don't want to go on some spontaneous tirade when I could present a compelling case to persuade someone instead.

I'm also none-too-keen to be using Facebook, but I'm equally interested in the prospect of meeting up with any others from this community/board in the Orange County area of So Cal. What about other resources, like meetup.com for instance? Basically anything BUT Facebook (or Twitter, or the usual suspects)...

Well I'm not necessarily looking to read it to have my mind blown. That's already well into the past. You can't red pill when you've already been red pilled, unless it's because you discover that your previous "awakening" was a deceit and you were in fact being brainwashed. But I quite doubt that these days. Figuratively speaking, I always notice the zippers and the seams and see a costume; I never see the monsters everyone else perceives. And THIS was the abridged version! I had to cut out details in multiple edits to get it down to THAT small, and even then, it just isn't small enough. Suffice it to say, Ulysses is quite possibly my favorite character out of the entire series, for obvious reasons. Although Elijah makes for a damn respectable second. He's not as sympathetic of a villain, but he has amazingly complex layers to him. It takes a very confident writer to allow a character to lie to the audience without telling the audience that they're being lied to, and leave it to the audience to figure out the character's true motives and flesh them out. Whereas Ulysses just brushes off mentions of his past and wishes to forget, Elijah straight up belittles every attempt you make at outsmarting him, and you might not even realize that he's a massive hypocrite and much more vulnerable than meets the eye, if you don't pay very, VERY close attention to the little things. No no, the Enclave didn't nuke Hopeville. The detonator was just an "Enclave" device. Either that or Pre-War American, but if that's the case, then it makes an already-mysterious device even more of an enigma. Regardless, New Vegas makes it clear that after the destruction of the Oil Rig, what little was left of the Enclave's infrastructure was largely acting on auto-pilot. There was no organization anymore. It's even entirely possible that ED-E's journey is all a lie, because Navarro doesn't exist anymore. (It makes "saving" ED-E in the end of the DLC even more of a hollow victory when you know this. But that's also part of his character: the joy is not the destination, it's in the journey.) The likelier explanation is not that the Enclave had anything to do with the Divide, but that NCR prospectors scavenging the ruins of Navarro found the detonator, and from there it was delivered to Hopeville. It could all have been a great, big, tragic accident, if they had no idea what it was for, and they just assumed it was useful "military electronics" and sent it to the NCR's major supply line into New Vegas, which was Hopeville. Whatever the case, the cause of the delivery of the detonator is a mystery. Without a doubt, I'm much more dubious of its claims nowadays than I was when I heard about it roughly 5 years ago. I love the idea of it, but recent history has shown that attempts at making man-made ocean platforms have pissed off almost everyone. Lefties get ornery that their precious "environment" isn't remaining perfectly "natural". Neocons get fired up because they think any action by foreign groups in (what they consider) international waters amount to acts of war. But really I'm more concerned with how fixated they are on the "save the planet" ideas they exhibit, rather than "save civilization". Following tried-and-true models of successful societies to create a better society sounds promising. But advocating unproven and utopian idealism of a super society that can provide for the rest of the world sounds like a burden nobody asked for, that will never succeed, and will only amount to another massive tragedy.

Hating the government isn't the same as hating the location. But to answer your question, perhaps mostly because I'm sentimental. I'm a So Cal native. I was born here, grew up (mostly) here, and despite all the traveling I've done, I quite like it here. Money is part of the issue, but it's certainly not all of it. In a sense, Southern California right now is what New York used to be a century ago, in that "if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere!" It makes more sense to be successful out here, and then move somewhere else (if it really gets so bad that I feel like I have to) than moving right now, and having a harder time in the long-run. Also, the longer I stay, the more of a chance I have to leave a lasting impact. I'm not going to get dragged down into the swamp, but I'm not going to jump shit just yet, that's for sure... It was bigger then than it is now. Serbia used to include Kosovo, Montenegro, and more. Even some portions got taken by Bosnia after the war. Don't get me wrong, I couldn't be more pleased to be wrong if the slavs did work together and saved Western civilization. I just know that every slav I've ever met has been an island, not a welcoming port, with the few exceptions being ethnic slavs born over here like me. I wonder if I should feel honored, or disturbed... XD Speaking of 1984, I really should get around to reading it. I never have, only Animal Farm (and found it fucking amazing). But right now my list of reading material is long enough... it'll have to take a seat in line! Well most of what you learn that transpired between the Courier and Ulysses is revealed in the same DLC, Lonesome Road. The other DLCs largely hint at their shared history, but give very little concrete information to go off of until the finale when they confront each other in the Divide. Thematically, the 3 "main" DLCs all act as components of a larger, cohesive story. No surprise, then, that they're all directed by the same person, meanwhile Honest Hearts was handled by a different director, which easily explains the drastically different tone, theme, and disjointed feeling that it had with the rest of the game. Which order you play them in really only impacts the order that you learn different pieces of information. Though going by the overarching narrative, as well as the ending slides of the DLCs, Lonesome Road is truly intended as the finale of the story, the other DLCs serving as a primer, supporting the final confrontation to come. The abridged version of Ulysses and the Courier's backstory is that both were Couriers, and their paths crossed several times, but it probably left more of an impression on Ulysses than his counterpart. When Ulysses discovered the Dam for the Legion, the Courier discovered Hopeville, which started a new settlement that eked out a living in the harsh area. Ulysses tracked the Courier to Hopeville, and having lost his home to the legion's conquests, he felt like he found a new home in Hopeville. This was destroyed (along with the entire settlement) when the Courier delivered the Enclave package containing a detonator that triggered all of the nuclear missiles in the underground silos of Hopeville, creating apocalyptic earthquakes that shattered the whole area, killing almost everyone there. Ulysses took this destruction of his "second home" very hard, and held a personal vendetta against the Courier for their role in its destruction, even if it was unknowingly. More importantly, Ulysses felt like a cog in a greater machine that he had no chance in influencing by observing both the NCR and Legion grow into unstoppable powers that were going to clash, but now the events of the Divide gave him warped inspiration on "how to kill a nation". So when he learned that the Courier survived the ambush in Goodsprings, he sent them a message that it was time to settle the score in the Divide, intending to use the Courier to "deliver" one more package: the very same detonator. So Ulysses could arm the remaining missiles and use them against the Courier's "home" (which varies, per playthough, depending on the actions of the player and which side they choose allegiance), both ending these powers that he felt had grown into engines of destruction, but also so he could exact his revenge against the courier by destroying their "home", and the nail in the coffin would be that were it not for the Courier's unnecessary interference, none of this would have even been possible. They would have made this second nuclear armageddon a reality, just as they had launched a missile earlier in the DLC, simply because they wanted to progress forward, and that meant doing whatever it takes. Ulysses would prove his point, get his revenge, and stop a war, all in one fell swoop. As far as antagonist motivations writing goes, that's solid gold. He doesn't want some silly or cartoonishly evil scheme. It's not overly-and-unnecessarily complex. He's very direct about what he wants and why he wants it, and when you learn the deeper backstory behind it, it fleshes out his character more so you may even relate to him in some ways. Yes he's largely motivated by revenge, but he's also pursuing a goal to stop what he sees as a greater evil, not so different from how your character is working towards a greater goal in "resolving" the situation in the Mojave Wasteland. I'm reminded of what I heard about the Seasteading Institute. I hope it gets off the ground, and provides a good opportunity to found (experimental) freer societies, though I imagine it will probably cost an arm and a leg to be given the chance to participate. You'd get to live out a fantasy of existing in a not-mutant-ravaged Rapture like in Bioshock- albeit one floating on the ocean surface, rather than sitting on the ocean floor -and potentially escape from a Leftist Apocalypse on land in a freer society, in one relocation! Then again, I first learned about this back when I was much more left-leaning, from a source that's increasingly obviously left-leaning, so for all I know, it's already been contaminated with all their bad ideas. I know a simple cursory look at their website right now that they spend an awful lot of attention to environmental concerns, and alarmingly little attention to social frameworks. Either they really plan on winging it with their floating societies and see what different permutations of anarchic structures can lead to, or I just misinterpreted their aims entirely...

Actually, I live in "the most conservative" area of Southern California. Granted, that really only means the lowest percentage of leftists to everyone else is 30% (and it's usually 60%, instead of bay area 80% and above). But in my particular field, there's also a rather large number of conservatives, which I attribute to the job being very competitive. So the nature of our work weeds out most (but not all) of the leeches, and my office is on the boarder of this area that's "the most conservative" of So Cal. So I don't have to hide that much amongst my peers. Clients is another story... The real problem is the leftist government. My little corner of the state may be more reasonable as a whole, but we're still being legislated into the ground by our dear Governor Moonbeam... I really, really doubt it. Hate to be a stick in the mud, but even if this optimistic vision of yours does happen, it'll be generations and centuries beyond me. I'll only ever live to see the divide continued. The transformation of Russia serves as a very encouraging spectacle of what might be possible, but for reasons I cannot understand, the other slavs just don't share the same values. They're much more inclined to go with the multi-cult vision of the world, because they want to join the EU's new world order. Somehow being repeatedly invaded is a memory only the Russians have about the world around them. In spite of having been enslaved by the invading Muslims for centuries, the other slavs are totally cool with joining the very power that's welcoming in their historical enemies. Very few pockets are putting their feet down and demanding anything of the waves of migrants, and Serbia is one of those few pockets. No surprise at all, then, that when they're asked to work and make themselves useful, the migrants just walk right through the country. It's pathetic how transparent this situation is, and yet how clouded every looking at it wishes it to be. On the contrary, I believe I took it precisely the right degree of far enough. Most of what I said was simply an explanation of my own nature as it pertains to that philosophy of looking after your own legacy to protect what is right in the world. When I say I look to identify "threats" or "lost causes", it's precisely because they're the kinds of people who do NOT exhibit a sort of curiosity or humility. They don't show a potential to realize that they were wrong all along, they exclusively project delusion and hypocrisy. For example, there are people in my family I've deemed "lost causes", and as such have cut all ties to them whatsoever. It's the decision to cut ties with family that others might consider monstrous, but to me it's just what needed to be done. We're talking people who threaten to call the police because they get themselves so worked up that "I'm" the one threatening them. And of the few times they actually try to "debate" me, their crowning argument is "no, you're wrong". There's no room for growth in people like this. They don't show any signs of integrity, or an inclination for curiosity. They're dead-set in their ways, and their ways are "everyone else is wrong". All those internet stereotypes of SJWs who decry "racist, sexist, xenophobic' toward all their enemies? Yeah, these people literally say exactly that. So am I taking things too far when I look at people like this and my assessment is "this is a genetic dead end, AND they can never offer me anything of value in my life, so drop them like a hot plate and never look back"? I'd say no, it's an appropriate reaction, given the circumstances. When it comes to strangers, I'm just more closed-off, out of caution. Again, my surroundings being so rife with liberals, it's a behavior that's largely born out of necessity. Chances are simply much too high that if I were to be open and honest with everyone I ever met, I'd be on the receiving end of an Antifa-styled mob beating. But when two of us who share enough in common both approach each other (equally cautiously), and we both pick up enough cues from one another that we kinda guess we may believe some of the same things, we usually both timidly toss out a few comments to see how the other reacts. I've met a couple really cool people by taking such chances after getting a certain vibe from them over the course of conversation. It's quite likely, in fact. Not more likely than otherwise, but 10% is nothing to dismiss. So getting shot in the head, you have a 1 in 10 chance of surviving. Clearly, the Courier was one such fluke. As for the Courier's actions that led to Ulysses' response, he made his point by the end of the lonesome road that it WAS entirely your fault, regardless of whether you knew what you were doing or not. Just as you had the choice to turn back and not face the consequences of your actions, you didn't have to take this job or that. You didn't have to do many of the great (or terrible) deeds, but you chose to. It's certainly a good choice, for the time being. While the rest of the world welcomes in their own demise, Russia is one of the few places that seems to be trying to stay alive in any of the ways that matter.

I must apologize for the long (loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong) delay. The truth is that I've been very busy with work, but that still doesn't excuse the fact that I've kept you hanging all this time. Furthermore, I'm STILL quite busy with work, so I can't really devote myself to the same lengthy diatribes I would adore to write, so I have to be pretty brief right now. But I'll try to touch on all the important stuff, even if it means lumping different comments together because "they're referring to the same thing, I think" and responding to them in one short go. Yes, the person was female, but it wasn't "that" type of relationship. She was an elderly mother of someone I'd been conversing with, and when I heard her speak I noticed her (familiar) accent, so I asked about it, and when I felt that brief "kinship" of being fellow slavs- and she didn't -I remembered how we damned Serbs see brotherhood in our fellow slavs where they themselves see none... or even worse, grudges. (Just look at what happened to LONG time friends Vlade Devac and Drazen Petrovic, or the documentary "Once Brothers" that covers their falling out, all because of a flag.) On that note... It's a lovely idea that we could see our bonds and unite over them rather than fixate on the divisions and remain divided. But I just don't see it happening. Too much pride and too much resentment. Even I, after all my eagerness to see fellowship in other slavs, have been jilted enough times that I've grown more cynical towards the prospects of any form of unity. There's just too much bad blood and grudges. It's not going to happen. =/ You're pretty close as far as the name goes. I always learned it as "Land of the Southern Slavs", but the difference is basically just syntax. They're otherwise identical, so you're fairly spot on! As for the war itself... I was a child growing up in the states when it happened, so I never got to experience it firsthand. I just learned about it from my mother. My most poignant memory about it was asking my mother when we'd get to go visit family in Yugoslavia again (having already been there before the war when I was 5) and seeing a sadness overcome her face when she told me, "We can't, it's too dangerous there right now." Of course she tried to explain why and that there was a war going on, but I couldn't understand what that meant. I was 6, for crying out loud. I hadn't fully understood what death was, yet, so like hell I was going to grasp the significance of hundreds of thousands of people killing each other in a civil war that basically amounted to land-grabs. Sadly, that's all it really was. Just people claiming territory. First the Slovenians saying "We're independent now, this is ours, it's not yours anymore", and then decades of disputes over which mountain range belonged to whom followed. Like Milo says time and time again, the American experiment really is unique, because it wasn't formed on the basis of who came from which stretch of what land; it was ideological-based. Well it WAS a matter of who came from which stretch of what land in Europe, and you'll hear complaining about it ALL the time from all the ethnic groups who insist that they're separate from the rest of their countrymen. No I'm not Italian, I'm Sicilian. No I'm not Spanish, I'm Catalan. No I'm not English, I'm Scottish, for God's sake! And so on it goes... Just imagine trying to tell these people, who staked their claims on ancestral homeland and lineage, that their claim wasn't as important as this utopian dream. As Stef pointed out in a fairly recent video, every time multi-ethnic nation states have been attempted, they always devolved into the same squabbling and fragmentation. The term "Balkanization" specifically refers to this phenomenon of a nation splintering because of what happened to Yugoslavia, and what happened to Yugoslavia is just so typical of these types of attempts at forcing people to band together who wouldn't come to that decision on their own. Yeah, the CIA was involved, and yeah, trying to take over land because you wanted valuable resource deposits was involved, but ultimately these efforts to sow dissent would never have taken root if the soil of fragmentation weren't so fertile. No, the Greeks are not considered Slavic. Though we do share a kinship with each other, strangely enough. Go figure, a Czech feeling less camaraderie towards a Serb than a Greek does to the same... Being able to look at people and assessing them as "worth saving" or "dead weight" is a goal I often aim for. However cold and dismissive it may appear, I'm always trying to identify "threats" or "lost causes", and I'm very detached and pragmatic when it comes to the matter of severing ties. Not even blood relation gets in the way of determining whether you're worth keeping in my company or better off persona non grata. The problem is that I still hold that delusion of fellowship, at times, when I should instead be identifying "threats" or "lost causes". It's a bad habit I've been trying to rid myself. I realize how monstrous it appears to some people, but that's just the way it is. I don't hold any "monstrous" intentions. Hell, no matter how much I wish to disregard someone, I still don't wish them ill. I don't spite them when they're sick, I don't mock them, I just desire to stay away from them, and them me. I probably could do MORE to isolate myself from certain people. I suppose it doesn't help that "being social" and "NOT burning bridges at all costs" is integral to my line of work... Oh the irony. I'd be so much better suited to callously assessing people as "already dead" or not by my nature, which is inherently detached and pragmatic. Yet I go out of my way to fight that nature, because work. Still, the nature is there, so maybe should I ever get successful enough that I become "so fuck-you rich", I'll find it quite EASY to fall back on very cold analytical assessments of people's worth. XD Never change! =D I know I had a "different" upbringing than most around me. One half of the family was assimilated American "mutt", and the other was culturally-intact immigrant. So I grew up hearing stories of the American dream and swallowing the creeping-Socialism blue pill in schools, as well as stories of what it was like "in Europe". Many of the things I'd hear regarded demographic strife of the day; the Muslims this, the English that, etc. So that rubbed off on me in unintended ways, but even then I was so obsessively-specific that when I reported to my parents that "some Mexican kids" were bullying me, I was just being accurate. I didn't think they were ganging up on me because of our racial differences, I'm pretty sure it was because they were a group of 4-5, and I was a loner. I just recognized the differences in people, and never shied away from pointing them out. Still, my parents felt like they had to sit me down and tell me not to be racist. So I saw the fear of "don't be racist" at a VERY young age, and grew inoculated against it early on. In time, when the problem of political correctness grew rampant, I'd already learned why it was bullshit well before the brainwashing was too far gone. The same could not be said of... well, never mind. I'm sure it's all still there. It's just behind layers of culture and media that refuse to acknowledge it. Like Jeff Foxworthy's tame "You Might Be a Redneck" bits, there's back-and-forth stereotypes we still have of each other. Germans having rigid and strict work ethics even appeared in The Simpsons back in the 90s, so despite several decades of brainwashing, it's still there. You just gotta know where to look, like any kind of truth. If all you do is behold the gatekeepers, it's not that the smugglers don't exist, it's that you're choosing not to see them. Beneath the veil of PC is a very eager populace dying to tell some racy jokes at the slightest provocation! Speaking of direct impacts and whether or not the next big leader is a benefactor or a dictator, I'm reminded of a major part of my family history that I only recently (this March, in fact) became aware of. The short version is one man had a miserable life because he stuck to his principles in a situation where principles weren't popular, and another person deliberately abandoned those principles to NOT have a miserable life, but had the opportunity and authority to save the former's life. AND he's STILL alive, and his mind is still sharp! It's my most immediate goal to be able to close some deals right away so I can finance a trip back to Europe to speak to him about his life and his choices. It's been nagging me ever since I learned what he did. I can neither condemn nor commend him, and that moral grey has been bothering me. Ideally, we don't find ourselves in a situation in which caving our principles can be considered laudable under ANY context. But that's what separates us from socialists: we don't confuse idealism with reality. We have to make peace with what actually is, not with what we wish it to be. As a consumer who bought the Game of the Year Edition, I'd argue it is a good as it could ever have been. Now mind you I'd have liked it if we could see more and bigger families, as well as in depth meta-historical libraries and meet close friends and family of the major leaders, but who can say for certain that'd make a better game world. I enjoyed most of the DLCs, though I'd say I prefer them as DLCs than main stuff since (Lonesome Road in particular) they're harder to role-play (or more precisely, mentally imagine to fill the voids, i.e. emergent story telling) and give the player a more defined role whereas the main game was as sandbox-y as can be expected for a semi-modern open world game. I'd argue the "holes" here and there make for an ironic boon because we can imagine what the answers are and make up stories to explain XY or Z, and that I think makes for effective marketing and popularizing since if, for example, the maker was a Leftist we'd find his rational as to why things are the way they are flawed if not downright wrong, and vice versa. That and I enjoy not having everything answered since it gives me creative freedom. I'd say I felt the gravitas of the game as well. When I first played, I fell for both Mr. House and Caesar. I knew I'd replay the game later to do the other, but it being my first play through I couldn't just flip a coin and stick with. Eventually I decided to join the Legion (this was long before I found FDR and became an AnCap/NatCap by the way, I think I was still a Communist or perhaps growing out of that and becoming a blank-slate Nationalist) and was very happy to keep the Caesar alive and make myself his heir. I considered the NCR doomed to collapse under its own weight, both as a Republic and as a people, whereas the Legion (or really Neo Roma) had something going for it that I knew could become a new nation-state. However from a more recent perspective, I realize they're all attractive in their own way, but I'd argue the Independent route is the most player-creative-friendly since I can easily imagine setting up my own nation based in New Vegas and being the NatCap King of Nevada, as well as being the ruler-less state-less vacuum for AnCap to move in. Having spent literal YEARS discussing the merits of the game on another board ostensibly catered to the series... A bunch of us came to the conclusion that had the "original" (or something like it) plan for the game's ending been maintained, had Bethesda given Obsidian a decent chunk of time to work with, instead of an unreasonable and rushed development, we might've seen a game like the original Dark Souils in which the creators saw no NEED for DLCs, and where subsequent DLCs would truly add to the narrative without feeling tacked on. Sadly, what we got was a (still great) game with an ending that felt second to the greater character story that can only be completed if you finish the DLCs in a particular order, and that regardless of how you play them, they'll always feel tacked on, because they were. Not because they were afterthoughts; they certainly weren't. But they were added later, because they couldn't be added in to begin with. The real story really is the conflict between the two couriers. Benny serves as an ingenious sleight-of-hand as a faux antagonist and his failed assassination attempt on the player character and the greater geopolitical strife of New Vegas are merely the catalysts that get the journey started. But it was your character's history with Ulysses that got him to set the events of the game in motion, and his setting of the events in motion that begat the confrontation at the hellscape ends of the world that would determined whether civilization would survive or whether a new apocalypse would be ushered in. Even something as sentimental as a robotic companion that won't truly "die" because it's just a copy of the real thing you befriended serves as a powerful emotional anchor for the final conflict, where you have to choose the attachment of something inorganic over the lives of millions of people, and yet the decision is a hard one to make. Really, the final boss of the game wasn't Lanius, it was Ulysses. He followed in the great Fallout tradition of well-meaning but flawed individuals whose goals threatened the entire world, and putting him down or stopping him some other way was the REAL endgame. Who holds Hoover Dam just doesn't compare to saving the whole fucking world. Plus, there's plenty of game files that hint that the game wasn't really meant to end after the battle for the dam. Some of us disagreed about exactly how it could've played out, but essentially you either heard all about the enigmatic "original Courier Six" just like the vanilla game, or as the creators initially intended, you had the chance to MEET said character, then spend the rest of the game realizing they were this figure who almost got you killed, and after the major conflict with the Legion was settled, they'd send you their ultimatum to face you to decide the fate of the wastes, and he'd make his same grand point when you confront him, that none of this really needed to happen at all- it happened because you just had to keep going. It was a great commentary about your characters, as well as a clever jab at how players typically approach video games, in a way that wouldn't be seen until Chara's monologue to the player in Undertale. Yeah you just helped save an entire city, maybe helped them build a new country, but you also ushered in certain doom because you couldn't just leave this character's past alone, and he just had to make his point clear. To a lesser (but still very poignant) extent, the other DLC antagonists also serve as a much more profound confrontation than the vanilla game's final act. Between a madman you chase all across the desert with ambitions of "wiping the slate clean" and absolutely deranged and morally-vacuous scientists hell-bent on escaping their prison and using the world as "test subjects" for their demented experiments, and of course Ulysses and his poetic aspirations about "waking the sleeping giants of the Old World", each represents a far greater catastrophic threat than an army attacking a strategic position, and the squabbles between different groups in the setting where that attack will take place. It's like looking at the first few mission in Tactics and insisting that defeating the raiders was the real victory, when it was in fact the menacing Calculator that had to be defeated at all costs which served as the true adversary for the whole game. Naturally, the squabbles and your character's role in either pacifying or exacerbating them make for a more complete and "real" world, and these are where the lovable charm of the games has always been found. But it's in those greater conflicts (that cannot be avoided by simply idling away the days) that ground the stories, and lead to a more epic conclusion that makes your choices feel all the more satisfying. Whether or not you made The Den a better place matters because you stopped a second global holocaust. Whether or not New Vegas gets claimed or remains independent only matters because the rest of the world was spared from a life-ending catastrophe. How New Vegas should be governed is certainly the more thought-provoking ending to the game. It gives all sorts of opportunities for very different players to decide what their "perfect world" would look like, given the same opportunities to shape it as the Courier does. I know I was more of an Anarchist when I initially played the game, so I absolutely strove to achieve the Independent ending back in 2010, and was kinda disappointed that it was realistic. There's certainly much less philosophy to talk about where antagonists whose motivations are purely genocidal are concerned. Still, those antagonists, and just how hard it is to shake them from their genocidal purposes can be, is so much more personally interesting to me. I know many a Fallout fan absolutely adores the Master because of his doomed Unity plans, precisely because of how damned certain he is that they will work, and just how crestfallen and hopeless he becomes should you demonstrate to him that they cannot succeed. His (possible) parting line of "Go now. Leave while there is still hope" is just so haunting... I think that's enough for now, right? =)

[Monumental formatting mistake, and couldn't figure out how to fix it in the edit. Had to re-post to make the fixes. PLEASE DELETE THIS!]

I'll touch on the rest later, but for now I just wanted to address this: The white race as a whole really reminds me of the Serbs' attitudes for much of the 20th Century towards the other slavs. It was the Serbs who wanted to unify all the slavs. It was the Serbs who saw the Russians and the Croats and every other slav as their "brothers". It was the Serbs who saw the nationalistic spark of revolution and frowned, trying to encourage "brotherhood". The Slovenes may have triggered the civil war, but it was the Serbs' suicidal inability to recognize that NO ONE ELSE shared their sentiment of "slavic kinship" that led to the conflict being a conflict, rather than a peaceful secession. The Serbs weren't at fault, they were just critically naive. Likewise, all this "let's stop being racist" bullshit and "diversity is our strength" being peddled and happily swallowed by the whites is just going to lead to a conflict that they will never see coming, because they'll have their blinders on. Why else are they surprised when someone attacks them, and they don't understand why when they were trying to "be more loving" towards their enemies? They don't even understand that these people are their enemies. They're naively thinking we're all a beautiful, multi-culti brotherhood, and nobody actually hates us without cause. It's a delusional mindset, and it's the one thing I truly regret about my lineage. I even still have it, to this day. I met a Russian and I immediately felt like we had a bond... well they didn't. Old habits die hard, it seems. ~_~

Well there's dealing with all the absurdity, and then there's being a fish out of water, like when you're rational and everyone else around you is liberal. In that sense I part ways with Dave Rubin's insistence that "the left abandoned liberalism", because as I see it, they're as crazy as they are precisely because of their liberalism. But I do agree that the divide is worrying. Even the conservatives where I work, an environment that rewards competitive and conscientious personalities and thus invites conservatives to congregate, keep their politics to themselves, and are wary of expressing their ideologies. As Steven Crowder argues when he points out that liberals can't accept compromise, it's either 100% progressive or you're a demon, that there is absolutely no possibility of the two meeting in the middle. Escalation is the only alternative, it seems.

The knowledge that it's not something you can fix but that you have to look forward to generations in the future is the hardest part to accept. I already have a hard enough time distancing myself from "trying" to argue with people who couldn't tell you the difference between a strawman and an ad hominem- except than one's Latin and the other goes in a corn field -that pulling myself away from what I refer to by shorthand as "lost causes" is hard enough already. My time is increasingly precious, so I can't just waste it spending a few hours "arguing" with someone only to realize they don't even know HOW to argue, that they're just a trained puppet more than anything else. Yet I have to be able to wait not just one conversation, but GENERATIONS? Ugh, it's a brutal revelation. Heaven forbid you should EVER tell people around you (again, liberal-central around me) that you've got to look forward towards generations of grooming good people, cause then they'll whip out the old "eugenics" accusations... There's no winning, except not to play. And I wanna play. T_T Well I grew up around the increasingly-agnostic modern West, yet with an immigrant parental background, so I got to see both worlds collide at the same time. I saw the "fair-weather Christians" as you put it, experience them, witness their legacy get passed along to all my education and neighborhood friends and permeate the world around me, and then be taken to a church far away because it was one of the very few of its kind in the States anywhere near my family, and they were different worlds to live in side by side. I didn't understand the gap in cultures or traditions or values as a child, but I started to realize how differently these two worlds saw the same things by the time I was first going to college. But by the time I was an adult with some world knowledge, I had taken experiences from both of these worlds and made them into a joke: "In the West, common etiquette dictates that it's improper to discuss sex, religion, or politics at the dinner table; but to Serbs, no dinner is complete without bringing up religion and politics!" Church growing up has been where the best philosophical and political discussions were always found. Even just attending one Easter celebration this year, I got to chat with total strangers about topics I'd been exposed to through FDR, and they were receptive and inquisitive, even if they disagreed about a few things here and there. It was lively discussion, and I cherished it. I only wish I could take it home with me, and have that same openness to debate wherever I go... That's a square I've been struggling to circle. I had the same difficulty during the election (again, I'm surrounded by liberals, so the world around me is always bleak, hopeless, and full of morons) where I'd watch a presentation by Stefan or Cernovich or Bill Mitchell about the numbers, and their presentations would tell me that the numbers are good for reasonable people, but I'd go home to the same insanity, and I just couldn't imagine that it was real. I know people are moving away from the legacy media, and yet I still feel that sentiment, "If they're not advertising this, then people will not see it." It comes back to a clash I refer to as "knowing, but not understanding." I KNOW the Streisand Effect is resulting in people going out of their way to see The Red Pill in Australia because of how hard their news tried to discredit it. But I don't fundamentally understand "in my bones" that just because Last Week Tonight with John Oliver isn't telling people to see these interviews, that doesn't mean people aren't going out of their way to see it. I generally have a policy of "do not hope; hope is doubt", but I do hope that it gets around. Reading quickly is a skill I find that you develop like any muscle you strengthen. It takes time, but it builds reliably, as long as you keep at it. You just get better and better at reading subtitles that you're not distracted while you're playing. Of course, it also really depends how the work is being subtitled. If they split up larger sentences isn't several groups of 2-lines of text, or if they shrink the text so they can fit entire paragraphs onto the screen at once, some are harder to read while you're distracted than others. For me though, it's not really a matter of "quality". Everyone says that Cowboy Bebop is better in English, but most are just saying that because that's what they heard first, it's what they're comfortable with, and their Spike Spiegel sounds like Steven Blum, so anything else just "feels wrong" to their brain. But by contrast, many were introduced to DragonBall Z through the Ocean dubs, and those were GOOD dubs in terms of quality... but they actively edited and omitted and altered so much material, that it serves my point about listening to the originals. It's not always a matter of quality. At least the Bebop dubs tried to remain authentic. But still, nothing's more authentic than the original. Some jokes/references are lost on those who don't appreciate language barriers, but no amount of dubbing can fix that. If someone's never heard of the phrase "When in Rome, do as the Romans" then a short explanation won't fix their obliviousness. Likewise with all sorts of phrases a Russian might utter that an American has never, ever heard. Funny story about that... There's a bit of contention between the various "slavs" regarding who is and who isn't slavic. Some would contend that Romanians are not slavs, and others would insist they are. Others will tell you that Russians aren't slavs, and so on and so on. As for Serbs, there is that bit of history (better part of a millennium, really) where they were dominated by the various changing faces of more or less the same people. Whether it was the Turks or the Persians or the Ottomans or the Austro-Hungarians, basically a continuing lineage of control, just different lines in the sand and changing names. Either way, Serbs were enslaved for that entire period, and one of the (enforced) "traditions" was that when a Serb man married, the ruling Persian nobles had "first pick" of his new wife. So many "Serbs" were conceived over the generations that were "not true slavs", but rather bastards of their rulers. But how could you even tell the difference? Persians are a very white-looking ethnic group, and there was no paternity testing until very recently. So because many Serbs have Iranian or even Turkish decent, there are other "slavs" who would insist that Serbs are not true slavs. Well... our ancestors descended from those same Romanian mountains as the rest of the slavic people, and no matter how many of us have "mixed blood", we all carry that same lineage. But on top of that, what amuses me the most is the inter-slavic insults we have for each other. I can't speak to what the Czechs may say about the Slovenians or the Polish may say about the Russians, but Serbs have a couple insults for "Bosna" (not a race, but it's become an identity since the Balkan civil war) and for Montenegrin people. There's a hilarious joke about a Bosnian who goes into an interview, and his German would-be boss is concerned about him that he will not fit their company because he hears that Bosnians are lazy, to which the man laughs and tells him with confidence, "No, you misunderstood, that's Montenegrins; we're stupid!" But, as the punchline suggests, the stereotype for Montenegrin people is that they are lazy (and Bosnians are morons). "Why does a Montenegrin have a chair next to his bed? So he can sit down when he wakes up." Etc etc... Well, whether he's a bushy tabby or he's actually a Siberian breed, I lovingly call my cat "my little Montenegrin", because he's just so damn lazy, like the stereotype. He gets up, just so he can find a new spot to lay down, just like the joke. He's even too lazy to bother with killing things cats normally hunt. He'd much rather sleep than do ANYTHING else. He always finds a way to make me laugh. That adorable, slothful ball of fur. XD The hard part is IDENTIFYING those smart people, however... As this last election's proven, people are much more keen to keep their ideas to themselves when they know there's a far greater likelihood of negative social consequences (if not violent ones) than that of having a friendly discussion with like-minded individuals. So how do you suss out like-minded people when they're actively keeping their heads down? Now that I've got my feet wet in business, I've got to isolate my own views from my public face, for fear of similar consequences. Even after joining NA Mensa (and having a blast attending several gatherings), it's slim pickings, because they just don't have as many gatherings as they used to... Any tips you use to sift through the weeds, or have you just kept a close, watchful eye on your social circles to make sure your garden was tended, as it were? Ah, gaming talk with people who enjoy a great work that I do as well. Also mild waxing of theoretical social structure for stable futures, to boot! Good times... I also prefer the House endings over the rest, but on some levels I feel that the game suffers from a few writing faux pas here and there. There's just not enough fleshing out the "real" face of the Legion, and to top if off the game was heavily rushed, so many of their greater ideas were forcibly scrapped, or at best, converted into DLCs which didn't quite fit the greater whole. I would have LOVED it had the "real ending" been the clash between Courier Six and Ulysses, which would have illustrated much more profoundly the consequences of your actions as a player and as a citizen of New Vegas and the greater wasteland, with the climatic Second Battle for Hoover Dam serving as little more than an impressive primer for the true coup de grace. But alas, the horrors of the Big Empty and the ghost stories of the Sierra Madre and the truth behind the rumors of the Burned Man and the final confrontation at the end of the Lonesome Road all had to be shoehorned into DLCs, segregated from the greater story as a whole, and forced to feel disjointed from the greater work. If only Obsidian could've been permitted to make the game they wanted, and not forced to generate a cash cow on an unforgiving schedule... But I digress. For all his flaws, I adore Mr. House. The game tries really hard to make you feel bad about something, regardless of which choice you make, but in the end I believe in House's vision. Philosophically I might be more aligned with Yes Man's Independent route, but pragmatically I just don't see it panning out like a unified Mojave under a dictatorial benefactor with an uncompromising will, a shrewd pragmatist's personal "moral" code, and unmatched brilliance. No matter my doubt, House always said the right thing to wash away my worries. I agree that Caesar's vision is far more realistic, and with the intervention of the Courier, the flaws in the Legion's structure could be corrected to set it on a better, longevital course. But the fundamental flaw that the system relies heavily on that powerful leader remains. The Independent route suffers from having no visionary to guide the wastes, the NCR route suffers from the burden of the bloating republic stagnating on its own overly-ambitious and unruly size and lack of consistent direction, and yet ideologically I'd favor them over the other options, if it were a real choice I was forced to make. Anyway, back to the original topic... I see too many trends to feel free of worry, however. It's not even a matter of having faith in intelligent populations leading themselves out of bad decisions, as clearly the highly intelligent Koreans still followed the bloody path to socialism. It really seems like that powerful leader is key to everything. Whether the powerful leader is Pinochet or Kim Jong, that seems to make the most difference. Were it not for Prince Alexander's foolhardy and misplaced sense of kinship with his "fellow" slavs, the Balkans could have had a completely different future, spared from the corruption of socialism, infighting, and eventual conquest by violent Muslim migrants. Had it not been for the ambitious Lenin, the world as we know it would have been completely different. But the latter example does pose a question regarding perpetuity of nations, vis-a-vis to your examples. Lenin clearly didn't groom Stalin to be his successor, yet Stalin took over all the same. Stalin never groomed his own successor, instead withdrawing into his own paranoid seclusion in his later years (not unlike Al Capone... sans syphilitic insanity). Yet the Soviet Union continued on its same course, in spite of the lack of unifying vision from a great leader passing on to a groomed successor. Does it not then follow that these societies continue on their course, when the foundation has been laid before them, to continue living underneath that structure... up until the eventual collapse, because they don't know how to build their own structure, and no one taught them how to? In that sense, Putin coming along was much more a fluke than anything else, much like Trump (except Trump has quite an intact bureaucratic machine to contend with, whereas Putin had a much more malleable canvas). I suppose I just want to look forward to a better world without banking on "good luck" like another Putin or Trump. I guess it's just harder for me to visualize that world, because it's something that may bear fruit generations after I plant the seeds. I don't want to be a cynic, I just see more cause to fret than to celebrate.

(Still learning this site's formatting, this probably won't look quite how I want it to.) Well for me, these were people that did not have the "muh Russia" narrative as an argument, because this was pre-election days, when that story didn't even exist. Maybe they've changed and now they've added that to their repertoire, but that only means they've gotten worse. The point is, all they ever had was insults, not arguments. Bring up the name "Putin" and the argument ends a few words later, and those few words are always some kind of dismissal of Putin as something he's not... like a Communist, or a baby-killer, or whatever they'd absorbed from The Daily Show like everyone else. What's worse, is these were the GOOD people. They were the BEST of what's to be found here in Southern California. I can remember that one argument in particular, they kept moving their goal post whenever I'd disprove something negative they had to say about Trump. He didn't build his business empire, he inherited it all from Daddy Trump. So I explain how his inheritence was split between him and his siblings, and even then it was a tiny fraction of his net worth, decades after he's already built his business empire. Well he's never succeeded at anything, really, all he has to his name are failures. I bring up the wild number of his business holdings compared to the tiny fraction of bankruptcies he's used. Well he's a bafoon anyway. So what difference does it make whether you like his personality or not, that's not a qualifier for the position. Well he has no one in the international sphere who support him. What are you talking about, Putin praises him! THE COMMUNIST? He starts laughing, then says he's gotta go, we can't keep talking. I mean, I guess that's a good thing, cause were it not for the Putin button, that "conversation" might've just kept going in circles of them saying something false, then just saying something else false when corrected, rather than admit that maybe- just maybe -they're wrong. If I go to church (where the best political discussions are to be found... no joke), you might find some people who don't love Putin, but I haven't heard anyone make baseless assertions like what I'm used to from everywhere else. I'm just so tired of hearing the empty accusations of "Russian interference" with the greatest of convictions, without ANY substance or backing, that seeing these interviews was a breath of fresh air. Naturally that means they'll never be publicized... Hmm, I guess I was under the impression that it'd function much like HBO's service HBO Go, in that I'd need to have Showtime and then sign up to their online site and then this and then that, and it's stuff like this being SO much less convenient than simply firing up the ol' tubes and looking up what I want to see that's led me to stop watching TV as a whole (with few exceptions). But I'll give that a looking into for sure! =D I can remember first getting into anime, and I was of course introduced to the various shows by their English dubs. Back then if you wanted to watch something when it wasn't airing, your only option was VHS, and that meant whatever version was on the tape was what you watched, no configuring or changing language or subtitle settings, so it took me a while of hearing "dubbing's bad, originals are better" but once I saw a couple clips on the internet in Japanese, I HAD to get the subtitled versions on VHS. Then once DVDs came into style, I was already acclimated to watching in the original audio and reading subtitles. Fast forward a couple years later when I could half-speak Japanese, and I made a habit of translating my own viewing, correcting the translators for what I felt was a sloppy job. All these years later, I just find subtitling something in a foreign language to be the better representation, whether for accuracy's sake like with these interviews, or for art's sake like replacing the immortal Keith David's amazing voice with something... eminently inferior. Either way, it's gotta be subtitles. The original is the original, it's how it was meant to be experienced, and when it come's to accuracy, you can't beat original interpretation. What little Russian I could understand (because Serbian and Russian share some words, but it's like translating Portuguese using Spanish as your base... it's workable, but it's not an accurate translation by any means) left me the impression that the audible translator in the background and the (mostly) matching subtitles were accurate. I WISH such topics were the norm of your average news hour, and thus the average thought passing through your average American mind when the subject of Russia or Putin comes up. It would make for a much more stimulating conversation. I think there's an abundance of minutia to get lost in when debating the ethics of siding with this country or that country against this threat or that threat, without having to resort to the bullshit narratives like "Russian intervention in our election". Debating whether or not Iran should be allowed to pursue nuclear technology so they can create nuclear reactors to power their industry and move their society into the future is all by itself a massive debate to be had, cause there's the question of that technology falling into the wrong hands, whether their intentions are even to use it like they promise or if they'd really rather make good on their threats to Israel than anything else, etc etc etc, and that's just ONE debate on ONE topic. But asking your average individual to not go with the flow and not resort to the personal attacks and instead hold fast to the ideals of integrity as they hash out differences in healthy debate is a heavy labor of questionable value. You might just had better luck demolishing a brick wall with your fists. I find that to be a bit of a double-edged sword, however. To fall back on a gaming anecdote, Fallout: New Vegas is a remarkable work of art, which I was reminded of regarding the idea of a reliable strongman such as Putin. In FONV, you're faced with choosing sides in a coming war, and none of your 4 options seems like the best choice, but most people would see the faction of Caesar's Legion as the obvious "these are bad guys, so no thank you" bad ending choice. Except... when you meet Caesar, he's an AMAZING orator, you feel the pressure of his presence but at the same time honored to be speaking to him, and for a while, you forget all the evil you've seen committed in his name. You begin to think "You know, I think the Legion might just be the right choice!" It took another wise character (who's lived through many wars and seen it all) to crack the spell when he explained to me that, while Caesar has his line of succession all selected already, everybody's just following Caesar's orders, not Caesar's vision itself, and once he dies, his vision dies with him. Sure enough, one of the many endings for the game sees a split in the Legion after Caesar's death, and it breaks apart into disputing groups vying for power; it never continues the grander legacy that Caesar himself intended. Unlike the fictional Caesar's Legion, modern-day Russia isn't committing extremes of evil like going around enslaving their neighbors and absorbing them into their growing mass. But the greater view of their leader is just as bleak, like the aforementioned allegations of killing reporters. Regardless of how much or how little blood may or may not be on Putin's hands, Russia is being held together by Putin's commanding leadership. But that strength and vision comes at a terrible cost of vanishing once he's gone. Who will take up the reigns to pick up after he either finally retires or sheds his Earthly coil? Grooming a successor hasn't gone so well in the past. I worry that Russia will fall on very hard times when Putin's gone. With any luck, that will not be the case, but...

I felt a shred of kinship from your description of having to keep your politics to yourself because of your surroundings. For me it's Southern California, but the end result is the same: finding non-liberals is like searching for a needle in a haystack, if the hay attacked you every time you touched it to search around it... and tried to get your fired just because you're not hay like the rest of them... and blamed you for being bigoted for pointing out that they're hay... So yeah, I could sympathize with that kind of situation. =]

Well I can't say that I offer a perspective from NON-fans of Putin, as I too thoroughly enjoy the man. That being said, I have spoken to people who DIDN'T like him, and none of them were terribly rational about it. When I brought up the name with someone who considered himself a "rational Democrat", he shot back with "What, the COMMUNIST? Bah!" and as far as he was concerned the conversation was over. So yeah, everybody I've spoken to who wasn't a fan of the man could only consider him from the angle that an ad hominem was immediately to follow, and then the subject was to be dropped on command. I haven't been able to watch it all, as I prefer to get a good night's sleep, and it's been airing rather late, so I was kinda surprised that I could catch the majority of a single episode. It was VERY well done. Putin is translated for the viewer with subtitles and no dubbing so they can hear his words for themselves so any accusations of "that's not what he actually said" can be handled on the spot, and I've only spotted what looked to be a single instance of a cut that may have edited out dead air (as people are want to pause and collect their thoughts while speaking when you ask them many, many questions). So the presentation has been very good, by my standards. Stone asks a couple "tough" questions (from an American perspective) that he knows many Americans would be hard on Putin for (regarding homosexuality, for instance), and Putin's responses have always been quite well thought out and I haven't found a single thing (that was aired) objectionable. So clearly Stone doesn't adore the man, but neither is he smothering him, yet he's being perfectly respectful and keeping any manipulation to a minimum. That's what I like about Stone, as a director; even if some of his philosophies border on the absurd, his approach is very honest. It's all straight shots from him, no curve balls. Haven't found time to watch the other episodes, but having seen most of the 2nd episode, I liked what I saw. I saw a relatable leader (excluding his SUPERHUMAN tendencies for regularly engaging in MANY demanding activities... just because... which is kinda hard to relate to, but still admirable) and an interviewer asking varying degrees of tough-and-soft, but fair questions. I would recommend it if anyone (or someone they know) has Showtime.