lmao yeah DC is the leading city and New York City is just a sideshow among American cities

I didn’t say that. And DC is the number one city when it comes to civic religion if we’re talking about cultural exports for a domestic audience.

And I’m talking about New York being the leading city of the American Empire, not the world

Oh, so now we’re talking about leading city? We might as well just say it’s Washington DC. You know, the actual capital.

Exactly, just like I said globally diffuse and not city specific

Literally everything you said about NYC like music, fashion, food, publishing, tourism, and art is globally diffuse. You think the rest of the world just bang on rocks for music, wear rags for clothes, and eat mud for food?

YES! NYC has free childcare, LA does not, do you bother keeping up with recent developments

So what does that has to do with being the cultural heart of anything?

My point is Minneapolis isn’t the cultural or financial heart of America, New York City is

Which you did by throwing out some non sequitor about living costs. I might as well say New Orleans is the cultural heart of the US because they like eating gumbo.

That’s not what I said, I said Hollywood is failing because of enshittification and AI oversaturation after Covid devastated the theater industry

The same theater industry that you prided NYC for bringing to the world? How is this an argument for NYC being the cultural heart of anything?

Again we’re not talking about China

Right, I’m talking about the world.

videogames are apparently the only thing you consider cultural products which is a bizarre belief on its face

I listed at least 7.

(and like film are globally diffuseand not site specific)

The AAA videogame industry revolves around Japan, China, and the west coast. No cares about Slavjank made by Polish devs.

Evangelicals are culturally marginalized hence their constant crash outs

They are growing in Latin America and still have a cultural stranglehold in the US, especially the South.

New York City is the largest site of cultural production in the country

Now you’re just asserting this without bothering to say exactly what cultural exports they actually produce since no one cares about Broadway musicals.

Los Angeles is too expensive

More than NYC? There are definitely cheaper cities than NYC like Minneapolis. Not sure what your point here is.

and again Hollywood is failing

Uh huh.

Also if you seriously haven’t heard about the continuing enshittication of Hollywood and the hollowing out of its institutions by scandal and AI obsessed executives, then you’ve been living under a rock

No one is going to boycott films just because movie execs appeared on Epstein’s island.

toe of tac of tic

Hollywood is dying and its cultural impact was always globally diffuse

What the hell does that even mean? Hollywood films are the number one cultural export of the US. People in China watch trailers of capeshit slop translated into Chinese on Douyin. Absolutely nobody in China gives two shits about Broadway. And this isn’t even getting into Disney and Paramount consolidating hold over media. Are you gonna “uh aktually” me about those media corps just because they aren’t actually located in the particular city of Hollywood but a different southern Californian city that less than a few blocks away?

claiming video games are a West Coast phenomenon is delusional

The videogame industry in the US is all headquartered at the west coast. All the big name AAA studios like Activision-Blizzard and EA have HQs in California. Valve and Microsoft are based in Washington. NYC basically only has Take-Two. Globally, the US videogame industry competes with Japanese and Chinese studios.

threading on semantics doesn’t change the fact New York City is the leading metropole in cultural production; again, music, fashion, food, publishing, tourism, art, and yes theater did you forget how many wealthy libs exist in this country? Did you forget the effect bullshit like Hamilton had on liberal consciousness?

None of that shit matters compared with Hollywood films, AAA videogames, Evangelical Christianity, academic papers, traditional news media, social media, and for lack of a better word, NGO-ism. You know, actual US cultural exports that matter. Absolutely nobody in Brazil is consuming the slop that passes for food in the states or watching Wicked. But they sure are watching US films and playing US videogames and being exposed to a particular branch of Protestant Christianity and studying so they can have the chance at getting accepted to a US university.

How does NYC contribute to the pot? Hollywood films and AAA videogames are from the west coast. Evangelical Christianity is from the south. Social media is throughout the country. This leaves traditional news media, which is centered at NYC, and academia/NGOs, which NYC partially contributes through Columbia as an Ivy League.

The number one city in overall cultural production gets to be called the cultural heart and semantics doesn’t change that, when people think of Americana, New York City looms the largest in their minds

Maybe if you only talk to New Yorkers lmao. Absolutely nobody in the rest of the country thinks New York represents Americana. The center of Americana is the Midwest. Everybody knows that. Everybody except for New Yorkers apparently.

The fact the mayoral election became a national phenomenon that had even dumb southern hicks thinking they could vote in it proves New York is the leading city of the American Empire

That’s because traditional news media is centered at NYC. It’s like how Hollywood films always seem to portray LA and California in general in a positive light.

It’s almost like it’s a big ass country and despite New York being the cultural heart, there are other major poles like Los Angeles

It hasn’t been the cultural heart for a century. It lost out when the film industry moved from NYC to Hollywood. That was my point. Since then, it existed as a major pole alongside other cities. At best, you could say it was first among equals until the 2010s, when a combination of videogames being an established artform with a base in the West coast, professional sport viewership moving away from baseball to football and basketball, and social media eroding trust of traditional news media further diminished its cultural status as first among equals. The US doesn’t have a real cultural heart. NYC certainly isn’t the center of Americana and it has never been.

Like, are you really going to use theater as an example of cultural influence? People stopped giving a shit about theater when the first films dropped. Frank Sinatra’s generation already didn’t give a shit about theater.

New York is one the major poles of cultural production in this country; from music, theater, to food culture, and it’s political influence is enormous considering the financial powerhouses that squat downtown

So we went from “cultural heart” to “one of the major poles.” Good, progress has been made. Why do I have a feeling you don’t value the mayors of those other “major poles” as much as this particular major pole?

“Insignificant” meanwhile he’s mayor of the most important city of the American empire

Mayor isn’t a significant political office in the US. Mayors of Beijing and Shanghai sit in the Central Committee and even they get outranked by party secretaries of the Beijing and Shanghai Municipal Committee respectively.

And you don’t think New York fuckin City doesn’t meet that criteria? Mayor of the financial and cultural heart of the country isn’t prestigious enough?

Mayors do not become president. Governors and senators do. The last mayor who became president was Coolidge over a century ago.

And let’s be real, NYC hasn’t been the cultural heart of the US for a century at this point. Tin Pan Alley tunes and Yiddish vaudeville stopped being the forefront of Burgerlander pop culture more than half a century ago.

In the crowds that I hang out with, paying for something when you can get it for free makes you a sucker.

Me playing romhacks which are just the original roms except with a single pixel changed in the title screen so I won’t be called a pirate

Coolest part is you get a skill that lets you mind control a demon, and if the demon spawns minions, it now spawns minions that are also on your side. This is how you get around the 3 summons cap for the warlock.

Damn, there really is a royal asswiper.

We should have had a moratorium months ago. People obsessing over an insignificant mayor, which almost all mayors are in the grand scheme of things, is ridiculous. The only mayors who are not insignificant are mayors in countries where being a mayor of particular cities, usually the capitol, is a political stepping stone for more prestigious offices. In the US, being a governor or a senator is a stepping stone for being the president. It’s how Clinton only became senator of NY to pad her resume before failing twice to become president.

Gamergate is what made me quit games.

Games have long since peaked. The days of the 90s are long gone. Good games in 2026 are restoration mods or rom hacks of games from the 90s. People who were around from 1985-2005 had it good.

Gamergate, like most reactionary movements involving dipshit g*mers, try to pin the decline of gaming on the wokes and women. The real reason is the same reason why almost everything sucks relative to before. It’s due to enshittification wrought by capitalism.

Gaming once wasn’t a masculine hobby at all until the combination of the game crash of 1983, which wiped out a branch of gaming that didn’t try to appeal to just dudes (read up on the development history of Ms Pac-Man) and Nintendo aggressively marketing games as “toys for boys” so consumers would buy (Nintendo) games because it didn’t have the stigma of being videogames. The infamous horse armor DLC dropped in 2006, and everything got much worse since then.

Arcades, which were a third space for gaming, started to be usurped by consoles and PCs during the late 90s until it’s mostly dead. Matchmaking destroyed player-run servers, which had actual communities with mores and communal understanding on how people should act like all communities. I genuinely do not think Gamergate would a thing if arcade third spaces were still a thing.

Arcades declined in the same exact way malls and other third spaces have declined, crushed under the weight of neoliberalism which seeks to turn every person into an atomized consumer with no sense of community. Games themselves turn into SaaS in the same exact way other software have pivoted towards Saas.

And the thing is it’s not like game devs back then were somehow purer or anti-capitalist (The original design doc of Diablo 1 had the game devs envision selling game items through real life booster packs like Magic). What happened is that the finance bros eventually figured out how to milk people dry, figured out how to get people addicted through dark patterns (euphemistically described as “maintaining player retention”). There is a big difference between people being addicted to Diablo and people being addicted to some bullshit gacha even if the success of Diablo did pave the way towards the gacha bullshit we see today. Diablo was addictive because it’s a Skinner box, and while the original devs might not have intentionally set out to make an addictive game (but note their original design doc as mentioned above), subsequent developers would very intentionally use dark patterns as part of their game mechanics.

It started with Roswell. They were obviously testing classified aircraft, but because a bunch of people thought aliens were involved, they ran with it so every conspiratorial plot has two narratives: the official narrative where there’s nothing suspicious (it was a weather balloon) and the official crank narrative (it was an alien spacecraft) while the most plausible explanation (it was classified research) gets pushed off the stage by the first two narratives.

You see this with 9/11. There’s the official narrative (al-Qaeda hates the US because the US has freedom) and the official crank narrative (the US blew up the towers with a controlled demolition) when there’s far more explanations than “the CIA didn’t know about al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda didn’t know that the CIA didn’t know about al-Qaeda” and “the CIA rigged three buildings with explosives.”

Hell, they’re even trying to do this with Epstein. The official narrative is that Epstein killed himself. The official crank narrative they’re trying to push is that uh aktually Epstein didn’t die and is still alive. Both narratives take up space for what actually happened, which is that US intelligence liquidated an asset when the asset outlived their usefulness and became a liability.

Almost every single two-term president has lower approval ratings in their second term than their first term. This was true for Obama, Bush Jr, Clinton, Reagan, Truman, and Nixon. I think the only modern exception was Ike?

I just wanted to better understand dialectics lmao

You’re better off reading Daoist works like the Dao De Jing and the Zhuangzi with the understanding that they were written in China during the Warring States period. That or reading the Vietnamese textbooks translated by Luna Oi.. In practice, Hegel is only understandable once you have a decent grasp of dialectical materialism through Marxism. You read Hegel after understanding Marx to deepen your understanding of Marx that you already have. Hegel is not good for pedagogy.

He legit probably doesn’t give a single iota of a fuck about anything outside of basketball and making money. Not that this excuses his behavior of course. It’s not a whole lot different from some engineer who tunnelvisions over solving whatever engineering problem is on their mind but the company they’re working for builds drones that blow up Palestinian children.

The CIA basically overthrew him because writing Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism was the last straw for the CIA.

Just lie and say you live in California where the Democratic candidate would win anyways. They really don’t have an answer for that.