mightygodking @mightygodking@mastodon.social

Notes on BRAVE, MAYHEM, MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS and THE LITTLE HOURS at my Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/mightygodking/

Steam recommendation: SUPERFLIGHT

it's like three bucks and I've been playing it for maybe an hour now

today, @gin and I made chunky tomato-chicken soup, and it is quite good and I recommend it generally

question: is it possible to boost a toot from a different instance so that people in my own instance see it

i don't know what that does but people told me to do it

awoo~

whenever I see an advert for another new MOBA-type game I just think "I am too old to learn a new type of vidyagame, why don't they make text adventures any more"

is Mastodon finally hitting critical mass or is this just Ello all over again

i appreciate the idea that one should maximize the facility of the 500-character limit but, at the same time, I think the expanded character limit is more valuable for "chaptering" thoughts within a thread than it is for minimizing post-count

also, feature wish: embedded toot-quotes, those are great on Twitter

17. anyway, first tootthread is masto-DONE

didja see what i did there

i did a pun, a play on words if you will

16. I realize this sounds more than a little Marxist (and I am not Marxist, I don't think) but Marx had a healthy appreciation of what we would consider realpolitik when you get down to brass tacks

15. (I'm not arguing against egalitarianism here, I'm just saying most people probably assume they're at the "completely egalitarian" end of the axis and they're probably more elitist than they think?)

in any event, though, the point I'm trying to make is that your opinion of who should have political power will generally shape a lot of your preferred policy outcomes as well, and that ideas about power drive politics more than anything else in our monkey brains

because we're pack animals

14. like, saying "everybody should get the same amount" is nice in theory but realistically it is incompatible with representative government; representatives in republic-style systems simply *DO* have more power than their constituents, in both the de facto and de jure senses

and some people might at this point advocate for technologically-assisted Athenian-style democracy but it's more or less a terrible idea most of the time

13. anyway, the sliding axis that really matters for your political determination is

"how much political power should each person possess"

it's a more complex question than you think it is

12. (because, as I said before: "conservative" isn't necessarily tied to any given policy preference, it's about protection of the status quo - an attempt to protect, say, an egalitarian political system from fascist change would be "conservative" in the same sense)

11. the answer to "which of the Trumpists or the Tea Partiers is "far right" now?" is "both of them, in different ways"

because politics isn't really a simple sliding axis in all respects and indeed in most cases it just isn't at all

there's really only one axis that actually matters, if you want to get reductionist about it, and calling it "liberal/conservative" is erroneous

10. but the Trumpist-nationalist and the Cruzist-Tea-Partier have different tactical solutions to this perceived problem

the Trumpist says "the problem is that the power of Real Americans has been diminished and we need to use the government to re-center power within Real Americans"

the Cruzist says "the problem is that those we consider undeserving of power have wielded government against us, thus it must be destroyed"