Ur boss.

Jesse, wake up!

it’s pretty easy for people to become lonely losers in an anonymous, world class city and it’s pretty easy to learn the names and relation to capital of most people in a tiny rural village within a few weeks and a few conversations.

the interface matters less than the person and their will to meet and connect with others.

I think that different localities can effect different people, differently. Granted this is mostly moot at an individual level, because we have very little control over the social contexts we end up living in; but like humans are kind of born instinctually wanting social connection with others. It's the inability to pursue or receive it, that leads to people learning to live without it; or hardening themselves against it.

you can be the most deadly tier 1 operator to ever live, trained in every martial art known to man, and a ball of pure muscle and freakish dense bones with crazy reach

…and still be dropped by a semi-coordinated group of willowy, gangly attackers (with a plan of attack) that combined might only barely hit your weight class

I would contest that this is entirely dependent on what the state of weapons & armaments technology of the day is. It's not as if Knightly Castes have never been an effective paradigm. But either way this dude was jumped by like 30 people, seemingly of both men & women. The personal qualities of whoever is being entrapped is not the most relevant factor in this situation.

(article was linked below, by the way)

Fair enough, I had not seen that it had been linked in the thread before I started responding to your post, and after having read the article I can now conclude that this is way more insane than what either of us seem to be arguing for.

Apparently this was a coordinated ambush by at least 30 campus students of mixed company (that is to say both men & women), and they were actually students at a private Roman Catholic college. So while I'll concede that this is probably not a consequence of "Age Gap Discourse", I also don't think you can credibly reduce it to "Angry Young Men Venting Misogyny". This is actually like some kind of insane Youth Q-Anon Brigade.

I know of a not-insignificant portion of young misogynistic guys who are angry at women their age for dating older guys instead of them. They were around even when I was the age of the guys in this article and that was a while ago. I always felt like that fed into a lot of guys buying into the Alpha Male discourse that come around later. Probably related to incels too, but not sure which came first.

I do not deny that there are lots of men who get mad about women dating other men, for lots of reasons. My issue here is with the unevidenced assertion (we don't have the original article here) that this assault specifically is being driven primarily by that specific specie of brainworms. People like to ascribe every bad thing that happens only to their opponents, and never to flaws in their own house.

You mean the conspiracy theory that

Yes, I'm aware of that. It's also an obviously unrelated form of brainworm to what's going on here.

I would figure maybe this was caused in part by conservative Catholic anti-sex brainworms and young guys feeling ownership of women their age and jealous that their classmates are dating older guys instead of being their Catholic trad wife. Hook up with a guy a few years older and we’ll lynch his ass? That’s the message.

I mean, c'mon here. The people who have been yelling about "age gaps" for the last 4+ years have not been Conservative Catholics & Incels. This is 100% a "cultural-left", radlib phenomenon.

TBF, Greenland was not in any way a relevant matter to the average American until like a week ago.

It's more, their own immediate revenue streams, that the insurers are prioritizing. Why they are legally allowed to do this, however, is certainly a quandary though.

Middle class is an arbitrary distinction we are all workers

It's not entirely arbitrary. The middle classes are what people are referring to when they talk about the Petit Bourgeoise & "Labor Aristocracy". Still, peppersky is perhaps taking things a bit too personally.

Both of them are pretty often annoyed about how their characters (and most of the others) were stuck on a writing treadmill to obey that absurd syndication demand of an eternal moment, such that new viewers can drop in without feeling like they’ve missed anything.

If there's anything about the modern streaming media format that's a genuine improvement over previous TV network programming, it's this. Writers are no longer forced to maintain a permanent "status quo" for a show, because anybody who wants to can always go back & rewatch old episodes, or just start at the beginning & catch up with the rest of the audience.

I prefer this explanation, tbh.

Up is North, because North is at the top of a compass, and is the direction a compass will always point towards.

Why is it upside down?

I mean I was already doing all of those things, so like, SoulsBorne games just feel like home for me.

Sorry, I edited my reply right before you answered.

By incompetence, I don’t mean “setting up a self-defeating empire that’s doomed to failure” but “shooting yourself in the face because you held the bolter the wrong way.”

Fair enough, I suppose. I'll grant you it's unusual for most factions to be portrayed as actively stupid on like, and individual level. If I were to go looking for examples, again I would look at the Ecclesiarchy & Imperial Nobility first though.

Part of this though is that I think it takes some amount of talent as a writer to be able to make a plausibly stupid villain, and most 40k media while IMO not completely terrible is generally at best like Airport Pulp in terms of the quality of writing.

A good example of what I'm talking about, that I'm reminded of because I've been rewatching Breaking Bad recently, was the bit where Walt & Jessie are trying to steal P2P from the chemical warehouse. They successfully pull off their scheme to use thermite to fry the locking system, but then they don't realize that a chemical warehouse isn't going to carry shit in easily transportable quantities for individual use, and don't think to steal a hand-truck, so they end up waddling around with a 50 gallon barrel of industrial chemicals between their legs.

What I'm getting at is that I don't think most writers would care that much about the logistics of this kind of thing, or make a point of writing it into the story.

grayscale

space marine 2

Wat?

Fascists are grossly incompetent, and that’s one of the things that’s missing in almost all “satirical” portrayal of fascists

It is present in 40k tho.

Space marines are what fascists think they are while orks are what fascists actually are. Hell, even calling them orks gives them too much credit because orks aren’t that cowardly.

TBH, not all Space Marines are sane, or competent. That's really just a handful chapters, and specifically usually the Ultramarines. Marines Malevolent function basically in the exact same way that IRL special forces do (gleefully sadistic, murderhorny, criminal psychos), and basically everyone hates working with them as a result of that. It's really only when viewed at an absolute surface level that any of the things that fascists supposedly "like" about 40k appear to be even remotely correct, and even then only if you're wearing blinders.

The instant you start looking under the hood at things like the Ecclesiarchy & the Imperial Nobility it becomes extremely obvious that the rot is terminal & inextricable from how the Imperium as a society is structured.

It can’t be a satire until there’s a real alternative shown to the empire, at least hypothetically. Not while there are things in the lore that actually ‘justify’ a fascist response. Not until every rebellion stops being chaos or genestealers.

You should play 40k Rogue Trader then, and just take the Iconoclast options all to their logical conclusions. I would rather not spoil the effect of it, but I can DM some good outcomes if you like.