You don’t shit where you eat.

Yeah, and it’s not because it’s diversity but because it’s more about the message than about the art – you remember ever watching one of those horrible Christian movies? Very few were even watchable because they were so busy literally sermonizing. That’s fine, but it makes for crappy movies.

And on the other side of that, there’s lots of works out there that integrate Christianity as a theme that are first and foremost about making something good, and often they’re awesome.

San Francisco California (2024, colorized)

It’s been busy but going well. Glad springtime is finally here.

The nature of power is such that it isn’t self-sustaining. Many people see something that has been powerful for a long time and particularly neo-marxists think power is the lens through which everything is viewed, but such a lens ignores where power comes from.

When I say “neo-marxist”, I’m referring to the ideology that all there is must be power and we must view everything through that lens. Marxism split the world into the working class and the owners, neo-marxism split the world instead into the powerful and the powerless. Neither viewpoint is accurate enough to be a useful model of reality, even if both do touch on truth. By basing your actions on these models then, you’re going to be acting wrong because your models predict things incorrectly.

You can get power through raw force, but it never lasts. Examples exist all throughout history. The first imperial dynasty of china was extremely legalistic, the punishment for most crimes was death. The dynasty ended when one of the generals was late for a meeting, and when faced with death anyway chose to take his men and rebel. The Assyrians used brutal repression to become a powerful player in their region, but as a result every other player in the region banded together to take them out because they were too dangerous to be left. The same for the National Socialist Germans – they used a lot of force, and as a direct result everyone else ganged up on them and tore them to pieces.

Lasting power comes from mutual service. Even dictators who last end up having to live by this playbook. Dictators who last end up building coalitions of people within the nation because to do otherwise will just mean the next person will use slightly more force and become the next one. China as an example was a dictatorship, but the people tolerate it because many people felt the dictatorship was working in the interest of the people (more or less), and did supervise the greatest increase in the middle class in china ever.

All of this applies to the movie industry because people think the movie industry has power solely because it has power, when in reality it had power because it was producing films and TV shows people wanted to see and were willing to pay for. As the neo-marxists have come in and changed the industry into the left-wing equivalent of making those hokey Christian movies nobody likes it has lost much of its power because a screen nobody is watching is meaningless and powerless. Meanwhile, Japan as an example has lots of great media coming out of it because they’re making stuff people like first and foremost and then if they have other goals they come with that (and they’re great capitalists, using media to sell all kinds of stuff)

People think the problem is diversity, but the real problem is that diversity has become the centerpiece of the western media landscape, when it’s a boring centerpiece. Just being a different race or sex or sexuality isn’t interesting by itself, and all these new priorities come at the price of making unwatchable tripe.

To give further examples, there was a lot more popular media from black people in the 1990s, and A-list actors like Wil Smith came from those backgrounds. It worked because those black people were telling stories that involved them and were about them, helping audiences learn a bit more about the world around them while being entertained. By contrast, today we have black snow white, black little mermaid, and girlboss Aladdin. It’s a meaningless display of token diversity that is disrespectful to the source material as well as to the talent who could be doing something more relevant.

“But who will build the roads?”

The west can’t make movies anymore, but it just goes to show the destruction of western infrastructure. Increasingly, people are looking to asia (japan, korea, and india in particular) and I’m sure they’re going to keep growing until the west remembers that it’s the viewers that allow the film industry to exist.

The internet is a mirror, it reflects back what you put into it.

Of course, some people want to inject politics into every single thing that we do, and some people want to inject bad lessons into everything we do, but you can use it to learn math, science, crafts, skilled trades, you can learn about literature, history, philosophy.

On the other hand, the one thing that I think that you’re absolutely correct about is that you should eventually step away from the screen, and go do some of those things that you learn about online. My beloved Soviet canuckistan is presently an Arctic hellscape, but when we end up getting our 37 minutes of summer, I intend to go out and play with a new kiln I bought for firing pottery and melting different metals.

Earlier today I made a post on fbxl social about the concept that the state owns you as opposed to you owning yourself. If you own yourself, and I think that most people should want to, it ends up becoming contingent upon yourself to come up with plans. The world is an adventure, there is so much out there, and so many things you can do without a penny, but just as you said, you need to get out of the house in order to actually participate, and you need to put in the effort to find those exciting things because no one else is going to do it for you.

In Plato’s allegory of the cave, is the understanding of the forms which releases you from your bonds and sends you into the wilderness, but I think in postmodern society it is actually embracing your personal autonomy. For many people, if they see you doing something that they don’t like, if they hear you saying something that they don’t like, if they think that you think something that they don’t like, and they get all of their opinions and actions from someone else so they don’t need to and don’t get to choose their opinions or their actions on their own, and they see someone else thinking for themselves and acting for themselves, and of course it enrages them because they know what they’ve lost even if they don’t understand it.

I think I’d tell him to stop being so needy.

The modern world thought that material wealth and goods were the key to happiness. The postmodern world has no answers for how to be happy and even questions if happiness exists.

To me, it seems like we’ve lost the plot. What matters is intangible – living a good life isn’t about having the most stuff, it’s about doing fulfilling things including creating things, building things, forming relationships, leaving a legacy you build over a lifetime. Taking on meaningful responsibility and making the world better in the process. Man, nothing has been making me happier than raising my son, watching him grow and change and knowing my actions have a material impact and that it does matter a lot what I choose to do.

That’s what they said!

Honestly, I think you cash out while you can. reddit is what it’s going to be. It peaked a long, long time ago and now is a niche website for a certain type of user, so all they can do is try to squeeze more money out of the people left.

He’s not my type.

Though I’m sure it would be a wonderfully scripted and shot production. Instant classic. But still no.

Calculating mean, median, and mode.

Because they’re Italian family. Cheap af

I tend to agree with you on this point.

As free speech has become more limited, it seems that relations between different groups has gotten markedly worse. In spite of legal protection against so-called “hate speech”, it seems that hate has increased. I think it’s in part because hate is ugly and so bringing it out into the open is how you show how ugly it is, while hiding it hides how ugly it really is.

One of the death knells of the KKK was a reporter going in and explaining it in detail, which immediately showed that it looked like the scribblings in a notebook of some 14 year old boy with no sense of irony. The group ended up not needing to be banned because it was self-refuting once people understood what they were looking at in its entirety.

Especially on a subreddit whose raison d’etre is ostensibly to criticize the banning of books.

Canadians hate their big brother, and have had damn near everything America has because we’re quite similar in a variety of ways.

I recommend against it. I might not look it, but I have buns of steel and if you aren’t careful you’ll break your hand.

Because we live in a broken society that lacks the virility to do so.