xchen

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Posts posted by xchen

  3. Posted

    On 12/1/2016 at 8:58 PM, Mangela Lansbury said:

     

    We grew up in the same area, roughly! Though the county I grew up in went blue in 76 for Carter.

     

    I'll address some of this in bullet points too, mostly with follow-up questions.

    • Outsider status has some understandable draw when our system of governance is so fundamentally broken, but I believe that some experience is necessary. I also believe that Trump's experience is largely a net negative, especially in matters of foreign policy. Having operated in a purely self-interested way for so long, Trump is accustomed to transactional relationships. You give someone this service or object, and you receive something you perceive as being greater or equal in value in return. I think this transactional basis for relationships with foreign governments is dangerous. For instance, we're training Afghani soldiers in an effort to bring stability to the region. We get very little from this effort -- in part because of our methods, and in part because that's just the nature of the relationship. It's not terribly transactional. We naturally don't get much out of it. We just do it. How do you believe that Trump's disruptive, outsider status-based transactional foreign relationship paradigm will benefit the nation? Put more broadly, how do you believe his business experience has prepared him for public service?
    • Trump is poised to destroy labor unions, both through judicial appointments and through administrative and legislative means. The Rust Belt labor forces that he whipped into a torpor with rhetoric about NAFTA (justifiably, since that was when Democrats ceased to be the party that represented them) were in the best shape because of labor unions. How do you believe his anti-union stance will help workers? To further the calamity his economic plans have, we have his tax plans and his seeming willingness to default on American debt. His tax plans won't provide meaningful immediate benefit to most of America, instead favoring large tax cuts on the highest earners. How do you believe his tax plan will benefit the common worker in a way that past similar efforts at trickle-down economics have failed? Alternatively, how do you believe his tax plan is meaningfully different from trickle-down economics? How do you believe that a default on American debt, which would be the natural end to Trump's stated intentions of not paying back certain debtors under certain conditions, would be beneficial?
    • Why is America the greatest country on Earth?
    • What is the material benefit of disbelieving Trump's rhetoric?
    • Georgia's economy relies on undocumented immigrants. In the early 2010s, Georgia adopted HB87, which created a hostile environment for undocumented immigrants resulting in an economic loss for the state of upwards of $100M (if I'm remembering right). In this way and through similar stories nationwide, undocumented immigrants have been shown to be vital to the operation of many industries and the continued functioning of essential infrastructure. Why do you consider undocumented immigration to be such a calamitous problem that must be addressed? Put another way, what net harm do you believe there is that outweighs the benefits of undocumented immigrants?
    • What radical ideas do you fear spreading to Western society, and in what way do you expect those ideas to impact your life?

    This is perhaps a little probing, but I've tried to be thorough and precise in my questions so that I could potentially have something to follow up on in further discussion and better understand your point of view.

     

    Hey - thanks for such a thorough post, as soon as I get a minute I plan to follow up!

     

    Thanks to the rest of you too, I realize we don't see eye to eye but civility goes a long way and is a welcome change after such a long and brutal campaign cycle. 

  4. Posted

    On 11/23/2016 at 4:07 PM, unimural said:

     

    I have a few questions, and I'll probably have some follow-ups if you're still interested. And thank you for offering your point of view, whether you answer or not.

     

    • What were your main reasons for voting Trump?
    • What are your thoughts and feelings with regards to Trump's campaign rhetoric?
    • Which of his campaign promises do you think are the most important ones?
    • Do you expect Trump to follow through on his campaign promises? By the follow through I mean a reasonable attempt at getting the thing done.

    If you don't want to answer publicly, I'm happy with a PM as well. I am simply curious to hear your view.

     

    I'm going to keep with your bullet format! I want to give a bit of my background too as it might make the context of my replies even weirded! I'm in the metro Atlanta area in a county that wen't blue for the first time, and many friends and co-workers would openly tell me they couldn't believe anyone would vote for Trump and that they were openly voting for Hillary with varying degrees of support ranging from enthusiastic to lukewarm or minimal. I was raised in a Republican household but in my formative years became much more libertarian and socially liberal while remaining pretty fiscally conservative. After 2012 I completely left the Republican party as I felt the party no longer represented me and career politicians on all sides were ruining the country. I was supportive of some of the primary candidates, and completely unsupportive of others this cycle, and was pretty turned off by the long primary campaign.

    • What were your main reasons for voting Trump?
      • Because he's not a career politician (and I would argue not really even a Republican)
      • Because I think he'll be better on economic issues affecting me, my friends and family, and you!
      • Because I think he truly thinks America is the greatest country on Earth and wants it to succeed again where it's been stagnant for many years
    • What are your thoughts and feelings with regards to Trump's campaign rhetoric?
      • I thought it was largely a tool used to great effect as proven by the outcome. I don't think he actually holds many of the positions he claimed to, which is fine by me as I don't hold them either. In many ways I think quiet Trump supporters like myself - in a way it's like a silent understanding between him and the voter where you realize he's making a ludicrous claim just to have the left get outraged and distracted, and in the end he ends up softening the position considerably. In the previous post I replied to there were lots of questions about Trumps comments with regards to Muslims and how we could be OK with someone threatening to create a Muslim registry. The answer is I'm not OK with that, but I also don't think there's any way that happens. If you want to continue on with this conversation, PM me.
    • Which of his campaign promises do you think are the most important ones?
      • Economic issues
      • Doing something about undocumented immigration (but not necessarily the Great Wall of America(tm))
      • Combatting the spread of ISIS and radical ideas to Western society
    • Do you expect Trump to follow through on his campaign promises? By the follow through I mean a reasonable attempt at getting the thing done.
      • I'm not sure, as I have never really considered this something we can reasonably expect - I'm pretty used to feeling screwed over by politicians. Is this a thing for the left, and if not, why? Obama had a ton of unfulfilled promises. Do you feel the last 8 years have been successful, and did you see Hillary as four more years, the natural selection, or a way to make right on things Obama left undone?

  5. Posted

    On 11/23/2016 at 0:20 PM, Twig said:

    All right, I'll bite.


    How do you justify voting for a man who willingly embraces racists to win an election, and then claims ignorance post-election? How do you justify voting for a man whole openly talks about requiring Muslims to register with the government? How do you justify voting for a man who brags about holding the power to nuke people and wants to continue torturing people?

     

    And that's not to mention the many other issues with Trump, most of which are rooted in what osmo's post is about. How can anyone trust a man whose words and claims literally change on a day to day basis, to whatever suits him best? The man is a pathological liar! But because Hillary is the establishment, I guess she's more evil than a man who embraces the alt-right movement? I honestly can't even begin to empathize with this, as much as I personally dislike Hillary (and, in fact, "the establishment").

     

    I'm fully aware that not everyone who voted for Trump hates Muslims (or any other group), but every single one is complicit to this behavior and this attitude. It's unavoidable. You can't vote for a hateful platform and claim innocence.

     

    So, yeah, why would you do something like this?

     

    Sorry, I just can't agree with this. By this logic everyone who votes for anyone would be complicit in all of the candidates past behaviors. Hillary's done tons of gross stuff. Are you complicit in all of that because you voted for her? You said yourself you dislike Hillary, I'm curious if you turned out to vote for her or stayed home like so many others.

     

    I think this type of attitude toward people of differing opinions is why they election turned out the way it did. I don't support everything Trump said, not by a long shot, and I don't think he even supports all of it. I'm going to address some of this more in follow up replies which I will be getting to ASAP. In my reply to you I mostly wanted to comment on the failed tactic of Hillary's campaign to choose to attack the Trump voter, which I think you echoed here. If you broadly put massive amounts of people into a "basket of deplorables" or say they're complicit in a bunch of gross stuff they don't agree with or feel complicit in, they're just going to tune you out. I could go on about what I think Trump's tactics were, why I'm OK with some of them, and why they were successful if you want to continue the conversation.

  7. Posted

    I'm willing to offer my perspective as a straight white Trump voter living in the south if anyone wants to ask a specific question on my outlook or why I voted the way I did in a polite an open minded way.

     

    I also was NOT that surprised by the outcome, but remained cautiously optimistic during the campaign while largely remaining silent in political conversations with anyone not outwardly supporting Trump.

  8. Posted

    If you think Clinton ran a solid campaign you should probably widen your sources of news consumption. There were weekly scandals and slip ups constantly and I think trying to write them all off  as "sensational" and mainstream media not doing their job is failing to see what went wrong here. Hillary Clinton is obsessed with power and fought the most dirty campaign fraught with corruption. They colluded with the DNC to fuck over a sweetheart like Bernie (who would have won). The upper echelon of the DNC is all out, and the interim chair had to resign from CNN after being caught floating multiple questions to the campaign  (major conflict of interest and a huge failure by the media this cycle). Hillary and the people around her have been so cavalier with their emails and it showed in the Wikileaks dumps.

     

    This election was a referendum on Hillary and corruption and if all want to keep denying that then I'm not surprised you were all so shocked to see the obvious happen on Tuesday. 

  10. Posted

    Conspiracy theories about her health? You're aware there's a video of a bunch of aides tossing her limp body in a van, right?

     

    If she hadn't been covering this up all this time we might have been able to have a viable candidate right now. Hopefully Bernie can get back in.

  14. Posted

    I played the first hour to get a hang of the mechanics then deleted my save and restarted. My 2nd starting planet was an ice planet and mining was now truly a matter of survival.

    Also when I left the first planet the surrounding space was desolate whereas planet 2 was surrounded by other planets. I find it interesting that everyone starts with the luck of the draw and some people are obviously going to be unlucky.

  22. Posted

    You're right about the difficulty. I lowered it mid game to have my play through be as cinematic as possible. When demoing the game for people I put it even lower to the point you don't even really have to aim.

    This is one of the best games I've ever played, going to play through it again immediately.

  23. Posted

    Did your Thinkpad have an SSD? That really makes most of the difference these days. I've been using my wife's old MacBook Pro after putting 8gb or ram and an SSD, and it's pretty fast. It's the 2009 model btw, with a Core 2 Duo if you remember those, lol.