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Friday, January 20, 2017

Utawarerumono 3 Will be Translated and Released this Fall:

Hallelujah!  We just keep winning.  Utawarerumono's anime ended in a cliffhanger, covering only up to game 2 of the trilogy.  Well, in come the heroic game companies.  Atlus has agreed to translate games 2 and 3 (we have the anime for 2 so that's unnecessary, but game 3!) and release them both this year.  Now people outside of Japan can experience the conclusion of this thrilling, decades long journey just like the people of Japan got to years ago.

The PS4 has been severely lacking in worthwhile games, so Utawarerumono 3 will also justify my PS4 purchase I made long ago.

Da Capo III has been fantastic so far.  It's amazing how familiar everything is.  The scenery, the music, the costumes, everything is drowning in nostalgia.  But make no mistake, the five new heroines are all splendid in their own right.  Admittedly, this is the smallest Da Capo roster of romantic interests ever, but they make up for the lack of numbers with individual excellence.

I liked Trump's speech, but it's not very persuasive.  There's no logical reason why you should care about people simply because they're inside your own borders instead of outside.  We have more in common with people outside our borders than many people inside our borders.  There's no reason to be universalist up until an arbitrary line is drawn on the map.  Why not just be a humanitarian and care about all people?  Why all Americans?  It's just total nonsense.  Caring about other members of your race is grounded in reality, like caring about members of your family, you have a shared genetic interest in cooperating.  In addition, people who are related to each other share a rapport of personality, beliefs and values, that goes down to their central essence.  They can get along naturally.  To the point that even friends and wives are more attractive the more genetically closely related they are, this is a well-known well studied fact.  If everyone in your country is your cousin, the country will naturally love itself.  But America is just a flophouse for the world's workers.  There is no community here.  We don't even all speak the same language.

I find citizenism, patriotism, civic nationalism, or however you want to call it, completely logically incoherent, and a complete non-starter between the actual principled and sensible positions of racists and humanitarians.  Like Ayn Rand said, if one side is principled and the other is unprincipled, the principled side will always prevail in the end.  Trump's principles make no sense, it's a foundation of sand, it's like trying to become a unitary body simply by wishing it so.  It will inevitably fold against the more logical and coherent position of the liberal opposition, that doesn't see why an arbitrary line on a satellite map should determine the value of other human beings and what we are willing to sacrifice for them.

But Trump doesn't have to be a good philosopher to do good work as president.  Just by repealing all the crippling business regulations, letting our police crack down on thugs again, appointing a new Supreme Court that actually follows the Constitution, staying out of war with Russia, and so on, he's going to make the country an immeasurably better place to live.  Going from Obama to Trump is like emerging from a gulag.  Every day Trump is going to do some new thing that makes me happy.  Contrast that with Bush, Clinton, or Obama, who every day just did something that made this country worse, which is the entire experience of my lifetime, and it's hard to even crystallize just how wonderful it was to see Trump sworn into office.

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