Brickmuppet Blog 2.0

November 07, 2012

So What Now?

So...what's the backup plan?

Well, to begin with, we must deal with what is in front of us, and it is not pleasant.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 06:04 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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1 Well said.

The big problem with the Democratic government over the past four years has been that they haven't owned or even properly addressed any of the serious underlying problems they've been facing. Everything has been laid at the door of the previous administration, with the tacit assumption that now that the Republicans were out of power, the problems would be solved by fiat.

How to approach this over the next four years (as a conservative or libertarian) is tricky. Getting liberals to admit that they have a problem and need to find a solution (really, many problems, and many solutions) is essential, but when people are invested in something, it becomes very difficult to get them to admit they made a mistake. They will often back up their mistake with increasingly irrational responses rather than admit that the original decision was wrong.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wed Nov 7 06:38:37 2012 (PiXy!)

2 Bricky, you make some very good points, but you're too optomistic. I and a number of people said the same thing regarding the social conservatives four years ago -- they were poison to our cause. We tried to make a (third-party) go of it then, but failed due to lack of money, leadership, focus, and everything else needed to succeed. Oh, and the minor matter of a schism -- by the social conservatives. We never recovered, and I can tell you -- the liberals can't tell the them from the Tea Parties, and nobody can tell either from the "false flag" operations mounted by the GOP.

In four years, it won't be "difficult"; it will be impossible. The EU will fall into chaos by then, and I expect Europe to start falling under the sway of fascists in fact if not name, with war to follow. Greece is already heading there. We'll be suffering from a broken economy, China will be in a succession crises and looking for a diversion, and Mexico is a mess.

What to do now? We can't "close the deal" when half the country thinks the "deal" is being taken care of the other half's productivity. The voters will (continue to) flock to whomever promises them food and security.

I'm too old and decrepit to tilt at windmills any more. My plan is to hunker down in a ringside seat with a drink and try to survive watching the fall of Western Civilization. The end is beer.

This assumes I'm not in the equivalent of a re-education camp somewhere for wrongspeak.

Oh wait, been there, done that. It was called "diversity training."

Posted by: ubu at Wed Nov 7 13:29:26 2012 (SlLGE)

3 Ubu: I'm most assuredly not optimistic.
I'm a history buff. The road we are on is well traveled, but only in one direction.

Still, despair is a sin, and we simply must turn this around, because civilization is precious and there is nowhere to run.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Wed Nov 7 15:20:44 2012 (e9h6K)

4 1. The NEA has raised a couple generations of American students to expect the government to give them what they want, and that there is no need to actually go out and earn it themselves. Most of the young voters I have talked to have never been exposed an alternative political argument, and in fact have been conditioned to tune out any opposing viewpoints because they are, by definition, racist/sexist/Fascist/etc.

2. The majority of the members of the supposed Fourth Estate were educated as "journalists", which means they feel their purpose is to advance a social agenda, and not report facts . In other words, they are political propagandists. Even as a growing number of voters turn away from traditional sources such as newspapers, magazines, and TV/radio news programs, most are still being spoon-fed one political viewpoint disguised as "news".

3. The majority of the entertainment industry is also committed to pushing leftist agendas, just so long as they are exempted with special tax breaks, etc.

Right now, I just don't see any prospects to turning things around in my lifetime...

Posted by: Siergen at Wed Nov 7 19:23:21 2012 (Ao4Kw)

5 Eh... not all the glories of Rome were in the era of the Republic.

The one bright ray of sunshine, if you can call it that, is that though we are beset by problems, it's worse almost everywhere else. Things are exceedingly unlikely to go wrong here first, and the worse off it is elsewhere, the more we benefit in terms of relative competitiveness. Already it's one of the prime enablers of our spending spree - the treasury bonds keep coming in because if the US goes under, there's no other safe harbor for the money anyway.

And if things go bad everywhere? Well, not to put it too bluntly, but in a savage world of tooth and claw, nobody has fangs to match ours. In point of fact, nobody is even in the same class, excepting the broad class of "countries who have nuclear weapons", and of those none other have anything even remotely like our ability to project power abroad. You could even go so far to say that the current system of international trade and commerce exists entirely at the whim of the US - were we determined to stop it, not a single tanker would reach port, nor a single pipeline continue to pump gas. It's not good to make too big a deal of it, and obviously it would be PREFERABLE not to have to go down that road, but if the shit hits the fan...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Wed Nov 7 22:56:07 2012 (pWQz4)

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November 06, 2012

The Wait

more...

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 05:06 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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2012 First Election Results

Dixville Notch, a town in New Hampshire traditionally opens the polls at 12:01 on election day. As the town has less than 20 people they certify their vote early. They've been an accurate predictor in the past every single year since...um...2000.

Anyway they're the first polling location to have certified results as of a few minutes ago and the result was...A TIE!

I think we can all reach a bipartisan consensus that as omens go, this is a bad one.

UPDATE: Oh yeah...a prediction.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 03:25 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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"How Can You Possibly Believe That?"

I hear that from time to time. As some of you know I'm in college. So on those occasions I allow myself, either be accident or design to by "outed" as to my political leanings I frequently get words to that effect.

^{"Oh you have got to be squidding me! He's carping about pollacktics again. Thank Cod this election season is fin-ally over"}

more...

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 02:18 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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1 Cutting loose the dead weight would seem to be the number one skill needed by an incoming president these days. Cautiously optimistic here on the far side of the world (as a small-l libertarian myself, inoculated early on by Robert Heinlein).

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tue Nov 6 09:15:03 2012 (PiXy!)

2 It gets worse.

A lot of people's private retirement accounts are tied up in the stock markets, due to an overwhelming advantage in taxation. The government has been encouraging people to put money in 401(k)-type plans for ages.

This has resulted in a great deal of money being allocated into stocks that otherwise wouldn't necessarily be in that market. (Granted that some of it has also gone into bonds.) And, lo and behold, as we've seen retirement plans switch from traditional pensions to individual stock accounts, the index value of the stock market has multiplied several times...

Unfortunately for us, we have a well-known demographic bubble ahead. What happens when all of those boomers stop putting money into the stock market for retirement, and start taking it out in order to actually retire? The answer is going to be a general decline in stock prices across the board, the same way as we've seen a general increase, right?

So what's going to happen when a bunch of baby boomers who are on the cusp of retirement suddenly see their stock holdings start to lose value? Those who can get out of the market will do so... sparking further reductions in prices, spooking more boomers. It's at least the seed of a full-blown stock panic...

Leaving that aside, the US faces a different set of problems than, say, Weimar or Zimbabwe.

Those two countries were effectively powerless. The US... well, it ain't. Anyone who believes that the US economy would enter a death spiral and not decide to export some of its problems is being delusional...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Tue Nov 6 15:28:50 2012 (GJQTS)

3 I'll agree with you on everything but education. Depending on the government for education is like handing politicians a blank check and saying "please use whatever you need to propagandize our children."

Posted by: RHJunior at Wed Nov 7 11:12:23 2012 (hZlxe)

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November 04, 2012

Regaining Their Stride

^{"You're back quick!" "Yeah...darnedest thing...my sister had left me a sammich."}

The last two episodes of Sword Art Online seemed a bit muddled and occasionally forced but they did advance the story.

This episode did not actually move the merry band of travelers along very much but it DID regain the shows earlier pace and character oriented feel.

It also established a few things:

*The racial divisions in the Fairy Game; They had mentioned this in passing previously, but it does seem to be a plot element. I'm not sure how much of this is the Japanese cultural "In/Out group" dynamics and how much of this is supposed to feel wrong to the audience, but it certainly seems like an unhealthy dynamic that is hardwired into the game setup. Somewhat related, there is a very strong prejudice against players not in guilds and teams from different races.

*This is further complicated by the fact that one really needs to be in a town or other designated safe place in order to log out (or ones avatar will get looted/killed and one will take the hit in a loss of XPs and items.)

*The guilds and adventure parties in the game are 'seruius bidness'. "Leaf" tells her guild leader that she won't be gaming with them for a few days and he freaks to the point that the guild are no longer contacts, they are enemies. This dovetails into the unhealthy "culture" of the games world.

*Our party is being stalked.

*Meanwhile, Asuna is in an impossible and demoralizing situation, but while she may be the 'princess trapped in the tower', (of both the game and the plot) she still has kept her wits about her and she manages to remain an impressive and interesting character.

^{"Oh, I'm just reflecting on my next move."}

*****

This leads to an interesting dichotomy. On the one hand, our hero probably* won't die if killed in the game, ( he'll take an XP hit and probably loose his kit) but he does have two major time critical issues (one he doesn't know about yet).

This means that the stakes are actually much higher than they were in the first half of the series.

All in all the show seems to be well and truly back on track.

*_{I say "probably" because due to poverty and lack of time he's using the nerve gear headset from the original game. It's possible (albeit unlikely) that, while he can log out now, "dying" might still trip the brain-fryer.}

_{UPDATE: That last paragraph was previously an incoherent word salad that has now been fixed.}

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 05:20 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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1 "XP hit and probably loose his kit" = lose

The idea that the device can Manchurianize the players without them noticing is a FAR more interesting plot than killing/comafying/trapping them.

Man, I'm really on a neologification trip today.

Posted by: Mauser at Mon Nov 5 02:22:08 2012 (cZPoz)

"XP hit and probably loose his kit" = lose

Yes. Indeed. It seems on the surface the stakes are less serious but any nontrivial delay and everything goes to hell. And yeah, the specter of Manchurianizational mischief being performed in the game itself is certainly there. If not now, very soon.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Mon Nov 5 04:37:31 2012 (e9h6K)

3 The forced competition between all 7 races is the five-bladed razor of realm-vs-realm PvP; in real MMOs, it's mostly just an excuse to be a dick to the opposing faction, but apparently in VR, players actually (gasp) roleplay it. But if one race wins the ultimate prize, the gameworld will implode. (of course, that, along with what a race has to do to win, reflects the character of its creator...)

It looks like Asuna will get some much-needed screen time next episode. While I'd like to see her hit Our Villain over the head with a chair and shove him out a window, perhaps that will have to wait until she wakes up. :-)

On a side note, the in-game fanservice makes perfect sense, since ALO doesn't force you to look like your avatar the way SAO did, but Suguha is perhaps even more impressive in the real world. If that's what she looks like in junior high, she may have to give up kendo when she reaches high school. Or switch to a different anime genre!

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Mon Nov 5 13:13:25 2012 (2XtN5)

4 I've been following your SAO posts for a while, and Monday night I finally pulled the trigger, watching eps 1-6 in a single sitting. Last night I stayed up till about 3am (not like I would have been able to sleep anyhow..) and caught up to episode 18. I can't remember the last time I mainlined a series like that. Good stuff! Of course, I'm now regretting that I didn't wait until is was complete....
It is nice to see that Asuna, even in the forced role of caged princess, is struggling against despair and thinking her way through the problem. Next ep should be a good one!

Posted by: David at Wed Nov 7 17:44:53 2012 (+C5m6)

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Dude...