I Don't Like MOBAs; Independently, They're Dumb

 There's five players per side. It's supposed to be a team game.

 Most of the game is single player. With three lanes and one jungle, you're not likely to see your teammates at all unless you're collapsing for a team fight - a negligible portion of the game. 

 You do need to be a team player in the team fights. If you like team fights, most of a MOBA match is pointless and tedious to you.

 If you like the essentially 1v1 or even PVE-like nature of doing a lane, you won't be much interested in the critical team fights. You'll just be mad at whoever is 1v1ing worse than you are. 

 MOBA conventions are deliberately designed backwards, for maximum distress. 

 Apparently a one-lane mode is highly popular. Well, no shit. Admittedly, it's mainly because players are stupid and it simplifies things. Secondly it's because you actually see your teammates in this alleged team game. Play together instead of the toddler-mode parallel play.

Is Self-Hatred the Anti-Dao?

 I should perhaps say any form of self-refuting behaviour, of which self-hate is the emotional incarnation. 

 If you hate yourself, then you hate your self-hatred; you want to destroy your self-hatred because you believe it is wrong. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ If the self-hatred doesn't encompass itself, then we contradict the premise that it's [self] hatred.

 All demons and devils are characterized by self-hatred. In my usual schema, demons can theoretically be fixed while a devil's self-hatred is inherent. 

 Note that beliefs and feelings are types of behaviour. Believing is something you do. Feel is a verb. This doesn't go without saying because English is a corrupt trash fire instead of a language. 

 

 Existence is the Dao. It makes sense that self-destruction, existence which tries to end its own existence, would be the anti-Dao. 

 Self-hatred makes you incompetent. Symbolically, turning away from existence makes it difficult to affect existence. From another angle, any competent self-destroyers have already destroyed themselves by the time you get a chance to observe them; selection. 

 Self-hatred is inherently inglorious. There is nothing you can only gain through self-hatred except self-destruction. Things that don't exist can't have properties, such as glory. This aside, anything you can gain through self-hatred you can more easily gain by not hating yourself.

 Thus we find Existence valorizes selfishness. Psychological egoism wins again.
 The basic virtue is self-perpetuation, for suitably sophisticated values of [self], and a [perpetuation] that implies glorification and growth as stagnation => decline and annihilation.
 The basic vice is spreading ideas of self-destruction.
 The basic perversion is deliberately picking a self-perpetuation that inherently requires the destruction of other selves.

Latest Warfare Analysts Less Knowledgeable than Star Trek Writers

 Which I find sufficiently amusing.

 I see this as spiritual degeneration (Empire, Sophism, Christianity) leading to physical intellectual degeneration. They asked to be stupid, and this prayer has been answered.

 Emphasis mine:

 Someone recently said this truism, paraphrasing: modern war will be all about offense, as defensive systems have not caught up in development to offensive ones.
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/the-dragonbear-hug-signals-unprecedented

 It can't catch up. This is a problem with molecular bonds. Short of psionic-style Star Trek shields, offence will always overmatch defence. You're lucky if stopping a munition only costs 20x the damage it can do, because munitions can deliver more energy than molecular bonds can withstand. 

 Fighting the last war: in this case, everyone is still trying to field a knight, with nigh-impenetrable armour. This is no longer possible and there is no reason to think it will ever again be possible. Ironically, this makes warfare a lot like chess, where every piece can take every other piece. You get defence not by stopping attacks but by threatening to counter-attack. Tit for tat. "If you move into range of me, sure I can't stop you, but I'm also in range of you." 

 

 Star Trek writers already knew about this. They had a [structural integrity] field. In other words science magic that held their molecular compounds together more strongly than their inherent bonds. Without this, there's no phasers, no shields, no photon torpedoes, and you certainly don't fight a couple hundred miles apart from each other. As soon as an enemy spaceship is distinguishable from an asteroid field, it gets blitzed by mass drivers.

 

 The general principle is that defence is worthless unless it is impenetrable, due to the fact lines are longer than points. Attacks can always be focused on one point, whereas defence has to cover all the points - either a line or an area. Consequently defence is always dramatically more expensive than offence. Unless the defence is so strong that no attack can defeat it, it will not cost-effective. (Or almost no attack.) 

 Tanks are supposed to be knights. They're not, so they're obsolete. AA is supposed to be aerial plate armour. It's not, so it's obsolete. 

 Look at the sequence: drones can be shot down, so you get AA to deny drones. The enemy therefore uses not-drones to shoot your AA, which cost dramatically less than the AA. Then gets to use its drones anyway. You can't afford as many drones because you spent so much money on AA.

 I would put AA in for police actions. You do want to defend against half-hearted or civilian-level drone attacks. AA is not a military technology, unless you enjoy wasting money. 

 

 It gets funnier: you can play ye olde SNES game Metal Marines, which has AA missiles. If you get enough of them, you can make yourself immune to enemy attack. Problem: it is far easier to explode their ability to attack you. Dramatically cheaper to spam attack missiles and kill them before they have time to blow up all your bases. 

 Just like real life. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 What grade level would you say 16-bit videogames are? Fifth grade, maybe? The latest military analysts aren't educated up to that grade. Fourth-grader soldiers. (What grade level to Star Trek writers count as?)

 Not educated enough to be familiar with chess either. Only a few thousand years behind state of the art, lel.

 

 Remembering, securing yourself against the government means you have to outsmart technicians who can't outsmart daytime TV writers. Again, the Amish are not exactly shining peaks of intellectual might, and they can manage to outmanouvre the government. 

 In chess there's no option but to attack. If you don't attack, the game just ends. In real life, you would see that any attack is going to cost far more than you would gain and decline to move, especially as real life is real-time and you can move simultaneously. Your pawns both take each other. Agree on a demilitarized line, then place your horsemen so that anyone moving beyond that line immediately gets blown up. They do the same, and stability is achieved. As long as the Malthusian limit is far and there's enough food for everyone, peace is the Nash Equilibrium. 

 P.S. Black governments are terrified of allowing a white government to arise. White governments, not being Satanic, can hire logicians and epistemologists for use in warfare, granting them a ludicrous level of asymmetric advantage.

Very Explicitly Why Diogenes Can't Wank

 Look. I don't wanna see that. Neither does anyone else. 

 If Diogenes doesn't care about what I want to see, why would I care about what he wants? E.g, to go on living? I can 100% ensure he never does it again. 

 Have to cooperate to be a cooperator. Deviate and be neutralized.

 

 The problem with Athens was that they claimed to be rational yet couldn't explain why Diogenes can't coom in the Forum. All they had was fee-fees, and well, Diogenes had fee-fees too, yanno?

 P.S. Remember, yes, we need a Pope to determine who isn't and isn't lying. Diogenes can claim public wanks are incredibly important to him and I'm lying about not wanting to see it; that would mean, to use lolbertardian terms, I'm the one "initiating aggression." I would be trying to find an excuse to hurt him and get away with it. Except, of course, he's the one lying. He can just wank in private. The only thing he can possibly gain out of public wanks is precisely the discomfort it causes. Defection.
 There is no machine or algorithm* that can determine who is lying, because [GIGO]. The liar just lies to the machine too, corrupting the output. Hence, must have an adjudicator. Someone has to decide what is garbage and doesn't go in the machine, and given that, they might as well be the machine and decide directly, because [quis custodiet]. If I don't like the Pope's adjudication, the only solution is to leave the Pope's church and get a new Pope. If Diogenes doesn't leave the church (Athens in this case) then we have to assume he broadly accepts the Pope's judgment. Even if there's a mistake, he has to accept it, so as to also accept all the times he's right.

*(Machine made of techniques instead of technology.)

Anti-Censorship as a Game of Tower Defence

 Bloons, or maybe [they are billions]. The idea is to never attack the root cause, because then you can't keep playing the game. 

 P.S. When I was a tiny idiot I played Warcraft like a TD: defend as efficiently as possible until the enemy ran out of gold and I could attack without retaliation. Absolute risk minimization. An extremely boring and time-consuming way to play, but there it is. 

 All political issues work by assiduously failing to attack the root cause, ensuring the problem will re-occur. You might perhaps forgive them as the root cause is that taxation is a crime, hardly an easy dragon* to slay, but Reality runs on strict liability. That is: you might forgive them, but Existence will not. Profanity is profanity. Sin is sin.

*(Dragons are of course good, not bad, but it amuses me to use the set phrase anyway.) 

 They can't solve the problems because they were never seriously trying to solve them in the first place. The ineffectiveness is intentional; they refuse to give up ineffectiveness, because it would violate their core value. The core value being to continue the game. They want to play tower defence, trying to ward off the hordes, which means they need a horde-generator. Looks to me like they're trying to impress daddy. Want him to praise how hard they worked. At best.

 Unlike tiny idiot me, they don't want the enemy to run out of gold. Like Israel vs. Hamas, if the opponent runs low on money they will hand it to them under the table. Not to mention USG vs. Mexican drug cartels. They work very hard to look like they want to play the game like I do, but literally never take the opportunity to do so when it arises.

 I think they regularly pull their punches and avoid putting up towers that are too strong. Can't discourage the enemy too much, nor cost them too much money. They could just be amazingly incompetent, I suppose, but then the pro-black-government forces would lose occasionally, when they were having an especially off day. You only get consistent battle and contest if the opponent is matching the handicap. Similar to that one kind of spar.

 Really we find over and over that Republicants are masochists. They're trying to lose. They desperately snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
 You might forgive them for wanting to attack the root issue and failing to find a path, but they're not trying. They not only don't want to attack the root issue, they want to defend the root issue. 

 We find over and over that Americans are supplied tyranny because they demand tyranny.

 

 

 

 P.P.S. When I was a tiny idiot asshole, instead of some asshole on the internet, I did enjoy constructing a phalanx formation in Warcraft. It solved the control group issue since the idea was nobody would move. Also solved: can select only 4 units. The enemy would simply suicide into my formation until they could Canadian Healthcare themselves no more, requiring only that I reset the phalanx after they were dead and maybe heal a few frontliners.

 One of the things I learned was the extreme power of range overmatch. The only thing which caused any gold loss to my phalanx formation was when they used the same max-range (9) units as I was using: catapults. Couldn't kill them before they attack.

 I should have also noticed the power of burst damage, but I didn't. Average DPS doesn't matter if you use cooldown rather than windup, because you can cool down before the battle starts. 

 IRL the strategy is a lot better. Defensive war is stronger than offensive war. You can let the enemy exhaust themselves, then walk over and stop them from doing it again. 

 P.P.P.S. Come to think that's probably why Blizzard went down the APM rathole. The correct way to play Warcraft 1 and 2 is through huge APM, because there's no control groups and minimal automation, and when they could afford to make the units not-stupid they, uh, just didn't. Moron units and jank control were traditional - rather than fixing these issues, they doubled down. 

Is There Any Chance the Lotto isn't Rigged?

 Maybe real people win the lottery, but they get disappeared by CIA agents, the winnings collected with asset forfeiture, and anyone who complains about this obvious problem is, you know, also disappeared. Intimidating an American is very easy to do.

 

 Maybe nobody real wins the lottery. Maybe it's all crisis actors and rigged tickets. 

 Maybe it's a money-laundering scheme for certain Mafia factions with the right convenience store connection. 

 

 Maybe it's just the roll that's fake. They find whoever they like and program the machine to spit out their number - doing things in reverse. 

 How would you know? How would you check? Opportunities are everywhere, and the motive is obvious. Mens rea can be assumed until proven otherwise...and it flagrantly isn't. 

 Admittedly the Mafia one is somewhat unlikely as the lotto obviously an extra tax levied on being poor and stupid, while adding money laundering would make it too complicated and make government agents too obviously criminal. No plausible deniability, and no staff that can pull it off either.

In Praise of Feminism

 [Question everything] often cashes out to mean [condemn everyone]. Can we condemn anti-feminists? With effort, I believe we can. Yes, even these ones are doing it wrong.

 Feminism is about stripping women of all responsibility. The steelman: what if, indeed, that's the point? 

 Wouldn't that be nice as an option? To be entirely free of self-discipline? Simply follow your impulses during every waking moment. Certainly we can't have this utopia for everyone, but that aside it's not in fact infeasible. It is possible for it to be an option for women. 

 Ironically, anti-feminists are typically Communists. It's about Envy. They envy the idea of a woman who never needs to control herself. She never needs to fear the outside because men will protect her, and she never needs to fear the inside because men will force her; make her unable to follow her self-destructive impulses.

 Universal basic womancome. Provided for unconditionally, with the proviso that discipline is also provided. 

 You can see the peacocking potential. "Yes, my wife is completely useless. I can afford it." Compete to apply as little discipline to the woman as possible.

 If the goal is this truly Democratic utopia, to give this absolute childhood to as many as society can afford to give it to, then feminism is indeed the way. It has gone too far in a few places, here and there. Feminists think in utopia men can even afford abuse, and this is not true. There are certain responsibilities that cannot be dispensed with, and one is to cooperate with cooperators. To give women this utopia, where they don't have to reign in their own impulses, men must be allowed to physically force them not to be abusive. The marriage contact can't have no responsibilities at all; men must demand the utopia just as women do, which means they have to be paid for this supply in some currency they find valuable. 

 Feminists and anti-feminists don't have to fight. They fight because they choose to. Their utopia is a world of eternal war, and probably death.
 It must be intentional, because they're not changing strategies. It is very stable, so it must be working for them. I just wish I didn't have to live anywhere near these demons.

Excessive Starcraft Posting

 I solved the late game, and it has applications to real warfare.

 By the late game, you've already lost and the game finished minutes ago, or your armies are more or less evenly matched. Also even pros can't reasonably command 200/200 armies, so they just kind of stupidly slam into each other and die, making engagement very risky. Since everyone is playing very fast to get through the agonizing first 3-5 minutes, by the time you notice you're engaging at a bad angle - if you can even tell in advance which angles are bad and which aren't - half your army is already dead.

 Solution: bait. Supply as many opportunities as possible for the enemy general to make a mistake, while, as much as possible, preventing him from baiting you into mistakes. 

 Present your army as bad, then - surprise! you have good units just out of sight range. Or use colossus to bait him into building infinity vikings, then suicide your colossus so they have nothing to shoot at while you wipe out the rest of his forces. Funnel him into a counterattack at a predictable location. Leave an expansion open; either he naked expands to it, essentially gifting you an expansion, or he guards the new building....meaning your full army can smash into his bases on the other side of the map. 

 Find every opportunity for the other side to fuck up, and present it to them as temptingly as possible, as long as you can do so without exposing yourself to a symmetric risk of mistake. 

 Shockingly it's, like, genuine gameplay. Has little to do with build orders or unit counters, and has a lot to do with your enemy's psychology, meaning it generalizes far beyond Starcraft in particular. 

 If you can't bait him into making a mistake I guess you default into the coinflip. Either build a-move units and hit every forward expansion at once (while also dropping in the main, because why not?), or simply slam your army into his army until you find out who runs out of cash first. 

 P.S. SC players should be thinking a lot more about manoeuvre and chess. Place your army such that their army is forced to either take a bad engagement or go stand in an unfavourable location, then relocate your army so they face the same choices until they're entirely boxed in and have to take a bad fight. Then you win. If you can't see how to do that, figure out how to zone his army into a place where you can do that. (With e.g. disruptors.) 

 Sadly this doesn't require hand speed, so players that can, like, actually warfare don't end up as SC pros in the first place. "Why would I do all that thinking when I can just macro." "Because you're already at 200/200, genius...." 

 Though I suppose that's how Serral always places his infestors in the right spot. If he isn't forcing their army into range of his infestors, he disengages. It's easy to place the infestors right when you choose where to engage.