2D3D
2d ago
Someone could also hold that a Gaza run by racially tolerant pacifists is better than the Islamists. Forcing a binary proposition is working backwards, justifying the current cause celebre by any tenuous means necessary.
2D3D
3d ago
Most of us will react with the standard 'smile and change the subject' if we are not on board, because terminating near friendships has social consequences. This is the exact reason why democrats and the pro-palestinians see no reason to ever compromise and consider the validity of the necessity of a military or of Israel or of conservatives: there are zero, literally zero, social consequences to denigrating the out-group.
Of course this calculus can be assessed to be wrong, but it merely reflects the short-sightedness of the activist. There is a presumption that the military and police are mere dogs leashed and muzzled by whoever controls the government, and even if one does not control the government these stupid retards won't know how to start objecting to the superior intellect of the democrat urbanite. The social consequences for disrespecting violent men with guns tends to be far more immediate for residents of countries with less geographic dispersion than the USA, and until the protestors discover how hard the boot can actually clamp down, they will never be learn.
2D3D
3d ago
Not that it matters, but it wasn't me. For what its worth you're right, and the steam rules are, as others have noted, remarkably nebulous. I think there're incest-adjacent visual novels on Steam, and literal nazi dating sims, but those haven't attracted the eye of sauron. It is more likely Steam is reactive than proactive, and it only needs a moralizer to flag a game and put it under review. Look (not so) hard enough and almost all the adult games will have something objectionable.
2D3D
3d ago
I wish, but alas it doesn't seem to be true. Criminalizing debtors and vagrants and prostitutes to make up numbers for the mines is a reversal of what my posited state is. I think the early settlers were extremely happy to exile or execute criminals, so that really helped keep order. In our scenario of the middle ground the large body of criminals are actively violent types, not unfortunates rounded up.
2D3D
3d ago
I don't mean to disparage your statement, Kowloon in a US city is a losing proposition because rot spreads outwards. Kensington in Philly or South Side in Chicago or Tenderloin in SF are effectively nicer versions of your Kowloon model, and they have to be actively managed to stop the rot spreading.
2D3D
3d ago
Marxism is popular because its the only anti-state movement that managed to on the face of it capture a powerful state entity. Syndicalism, anarchism and other movements all failed to capture states, so there is no extant example to suck in all the intellectual energy. Marxism, by having ostensibly captured one major european population, points to a proximate success story to coalesce intellectual energy around. That marxism/stalinism/communism collapsed into failure is attributed to how It Wasn't Real Communism, and when there was Real Communism it was glorious.
2D3D
3d ago
Thats a function of geography and unwillingness to shoot invaders. Set up Libertopia as a totally inaccessible island, like a fully constituted Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and airdrop criminals there PUBG style, with regular drops of humanitarian ration packs and water filtration tablets. It'll be the ultimate relocation experiment, at minimal cost compared to maintaining vigilance over a perennial criminal underclass.
2D3D
3d ago
True, the racial discrimination in the mosques is ultimately a self segregating exercise instead of an actively ordained one. The mosque leaders being active community members volunteering to be part of the administration instead of job appointees does make the difference between racial vs religious based discrimination in the mosques difficult to parse.
One minor observation though is the schismatic fissures in Malaysian, and probably larger muslim world. While internally Islam is a race neutral religion in the whole, the cleaving of Islam into its various sects has mapped somewhat closely to differing ethnic groups as well. Shafi is the school of thought for the overwhelming majority of Southeast Asia, with explicit bans on Shia and Ahmadi in Malaysia.Yet there exist strong informal deobandi influence from Indian preachers, while I've seen discrimination against the bangladeshis justified as them being hanafi. Islam may be a racially neutral religion, but it still has been used as justification for racism.
2D3D
4d ago
Malaysian calls for racial tolerance in any form is fundamentally wrong from first principles: Malaysia explicitly is the only country that constitutionally enshrines special privileges for the muslim majority race and makes continual efforts to further grind other races into the political dirt.
Malaysian calls for racial muslim equality are founded in an intense Arab-worshipping complex in the country, where being increasingly Arabic is conflated with being a good muslim. Small things include the replacement of the word for headscarf from Malay (tudung) to Arabic (hijab). Other examples of linguistic shift include replacing other muslim-practice related terms with Arabic, like iftar instead of buka puasa.
For the most obvious example of Muslim racism, globally but especially visible in Malaysia, look at how they treat the imported Bangladeshi workers. Extreme racial discrimination and forced mosque segregation, with the charity organisations dedicated to foreign worker welfare being run by Chinese and white expatriate women. The ummah is united only as long as the other inferior muslims don't pollute my sacred soil with their backward ways.
2D3D
4d ago
Push comes to shove, most men in the suck accept their duty, if only because adrenaline and testosterone are a helluva drug. Instinctively all men who have done team sports or other forms of group bonding know this, and acculturated messaging about duty and honor go a long way to motivate what looks like irrationality.
What men don't like is dying for nothing, or worse dying for someone elses interest directly against our own. Hence the claims that Ukrainians are dying for NATO or USMC was dying for Haliburton - those claims, if believed, can crush morale. We saw Afghanistan fall when everyone felt that Kabul did not care for even the Pashtuns much less the Hazara or Tajiks, and we saw the Iraqi army all abandon Mosul because dying for Sunnis isn't on the cards for the Shia. Even now we see Palestinians, Lebanese and Houthis continuing to die for Islam/Anti-Israel, even though Iran has thoroughly asspuppeted them. So long as the men believe in the cause, it doesn't matter if someone else actually is asspuppeting them.
2D3D
4d ago
edited for punctuation
I wish to add that Ukrainian troop complaints about mobilization are more 'let me fight well' instead of 'I do not wish to fight'. Ukrainian soldiers in the brigades constantly bitch about not having enough ammo or artillery or mines to fight in the trenches, instead of bitching about why they are forced to fight. Motivation is a more germane concern among the muscovites, which is why their regeneration focuses on central asians and token impressed foreigners instead of the westernized slav elite.
This point in particular
Full-scale war to recapture all lands included in the 1991 borders
really substantiates the thesis that Ukrainians have given up on peaceful coexistence with Russia, and the only thing that would have polled higher is 'full scale war, with the west directly bombing every russian on our soil.'
There is no positive sentiment left in Ukraine for the Russians and the Ukrainians already view themselves in a full scale war. One of the only thing stopping further mass mobilization is limitation in materiel and training capability, rooted in competence and capacity issues. This obviously still doesn't mean Ukraine is going to or will actually win with mobilization, but the narrative internally is 'we want to kill Russians' instead of 1918 era 'our leaders send us to die for nothing and we shall rise against the capitol'.
2D3D
4d ago
Jap publishers have more esoteric content like loli and beast, which steam takes down immediately. Ironically I think guro is also taken down on steam, even though you can flip to the next screen and download gore simulator 20000.
2D3D
4d ago
'PORN MAKES YOU SOFT WHEN YOU NEED IT MOST' or some catchier tagline would at least make coonsumers pay attention to something. In this current iteration it's as useful as cigarette warning labels. 'SURGEON GENERALS WARNING' is more naggy schoolmarm than hypnotoad.
Re porn games I get the appeal; my Skyrim mod list is basically an archive of Loverslab over the years including now deleted works, and I briefly did product development for VR Mate integration with animated joiplay-generated visual novels. Combining parasocial AI relationships with immersive VR and haptic feedback (fleshlights) is basically a recipe for total motivation death. I honestly think that would be a fucking fantastic way to manage stupid violent impulsive young men.
2D3D
5d ago
Thankfully humans aren't frogs, and people can literally move away when things get too bad. Once excess wealth is no longer free for the taking, market forces force a rationalization either by failure or by reform. Plenty of housing projects and suburban neighbourhoods became failures once black people moved in and the property values collapsed due to the rise in crime, with no amount of cajoling or 'rejuvenation' actually moving the needle on the prices. Barring mandatory state-facilitated wealth transfers, which also presumes both full state capture and maintenance of state capability, I don't see these trends sustaining long term to reach a denouement for either the Equity or the Libertarian viewpoints.
2D3D
5d ago
Look at WW2. Past winners prepared for a trench war. Especially in wars, looking at what used to win is just weird
I don't mean what people used to win, I mean look at what past winners are doing now. I would trust the Iranians over the Iraqis over what sort of capability is the right trend to go for winning in the region, just as I would trust the Taliban over the ANA. Similarly, I would trust NATO over Warsaw Pact, or Israel over Egypt, on who is likely to have a clearer head on what is more likely to work. I would also point out that this calculus changes rapidly, and we do see that with NATO suddenly trying - and failing - to rediscover the love of 155mm artillery.
There's been no good environment to establish what actually works and what doesn't.
With regards to aerial operations, this statement simply is not true. Since Vietnam, we have not seen a single instance of air supremacy being countered by GBAD, with Mole Cricket 19 and Gulf War 1 showing how a full spectrum multi layer GBAD network can be curbstomped by the threat they are supposed to be the hard counter towards, and thats against Phantoms and F15s that have the RCS of a bus. Meritorious arguments about whether those were 'anomalies', such as what Kenneth Pollack does in 'Armies of sand' when he cites specific cultural into organizational into C&C failures of Arabs as specific reasons why those systems failed have been made, so it is up to us to decide whether 'near peers' like the Chinese or Russians are necessarily up to scratch - current Ukraine would point to that not being the case, with most casualties for the UAF being the caused by the excellent Mig-31 mounted R37 air launched missile. I would also point out that many countries in the NATO sphere have their own Air Defense Artillery - specifically Patriot and their own ADA testing, even in adverse conditions, has lead them to conclude that buying into the F35 is still a good decision. I would like to imagine comically large sacks of money changing hands as a smug lockmart exec combs his hair to the WSB dicaprio slickback, but that still means their internal papers have concluded it is better to purchase F35 even though other companies are knocking at the door with their own comically large kickbacks - the last major western aerial purchase scandal was Dassault in the 90s to my recollection, but there has been plenty of investigations launched with no firm conclusion since then.
Russia is not firing them at Israeli war planes. Don't know what the etiquette is at locking targeting radars on IAF, but I imagine it's also not done there for obvious reasons (in a war zone, the logical thing is for someone to fire an anti-radiation missile the other way) so Israelis in F-35s wouldn't know if they're being acquired.
So your thesis is both 'S400 is so good that it can detect the Israelis without them noticing' and 'Russia is polite so they won't try to acquire the S400 because otherwise its a shooting match'. This literally is the opposite of how routine flight operations are conducted - terrestrial radar - even normal airport tower - stations ALWAYS paint aircraft in neighbouring countries without issue so long as the airspace integrity isn't violated (see Turkey shooting down Russian jets the moment they crossed the border back in 2015 - the Russians were tracked long before they actually physically crossed). My point is that the Russians own presence in Syria allow the capabilities of the S400 in establishing a track on the F35 can be done without needing Turkey to act as the backdoor to upend the Secrets Of Stealth. There are plenty of other reasons for the S400 vs F35 spat that don't hinge on LockMart being nervous that F35 will be exposed for the failure it is.
Ultimately, I feel it is instructive to see the direction of where countries are focusing their efforts on in countering a modern aerial threat environment. More SHORAD solutions against drones, more natively integrated AESA inside stealthy aerial platforms, less dedicated ADA ground stations. Even India has demurred against exercising the option for purchasing the last remaining S400 units, and the Indians are the only major air force with a positive operational history that have not bet big on stealth as their air dominance capability. S400 certainly has its advantages, but it has not been assessed to be the stealth killer by the people actually making the decision to buy the damn things.
2D3D
5d ago
Freedom of association is impossible in an 'equity' focused social order. What you're describing is exactly what Redlining was, and the modern incarnation of crime map overlays on Zillow was axed precisely because it was 'disequitable'.
2D3D
5d ago
Those warning labels are so vague as to be insultingly trite. Impaired brain development/functionality can just be post coital sleepiness, heightened demand for sexual services can just be normal sex stuff... this is almost insulting.
2D3D
5d ago
It is quite commonly seen that onlyfans/livejasmin is more a parasocial relationship than a sexual gratification one, fulfilling an emotional need that the dopamine hit of an orgasm cannot satisfy Similarly, the concept of ownership and personal control over porn consumed materials fulfils an emotional need that jerking it doesn't quite cut. Creating your own porn by filming with/out consent actually falls in the same psychological space as commissioning, paying for stuff other people produce and thus having the transaction... these actions are rightly viewed as deviant and violating of social norms, but they do happen and so long as people exist there will be strange niches beyond our comprehension that will be filled.
2D3D
6d ago
You want me to give you the kind of data that'd get you into ADX Florence or whatever its Chinese equivalent is
Of course not. This is a nerd forum, not warthunder. If you have secret info so damning to stealth, then so be it, rest easy that when the balloon floats you'll be vindicated, unlike literally every nation scrambling over themselves to buy F35s or develop the Su57 or J31 or Qahar. I prefer to err on the side of the wisdom of crowds and see 'past winners' continuing to buy 'winning' tech. Lazy and reductive, but its not like the history disfavors it. There is one exception to this historical trend though, and its super fun!
I think people are just full of shit. And when there's billions at stake, the incentive to deny and lie and hope it somehow works out gets irresistible.
Of course this cuts both ways: S400 and Pantsir sellers also have every incentive to tout their stealth killing capability, which kind of is odd if stealth is so useless that 'multilateral' stations and a ring of IRST can easily counter this non-threat. Do note that the multirole/air superiority sales sector does not advertise their offerings as 'better than F35' but instead 'we can fulfill your order books faster and meanie LockMart doesn't want to sell F35 to you' for expensive multiroles (F15EX, Gripen, Typhoon, Rafale) or 'you are poor and we are cheap' (TA-50, Tejas, JF17). Whether this thesis is rooted in smart purchasing decisions avoiding a politically loaded white elephant or a reflection of limited political/financial bargaining power is an exercise in relative value assignment.
Finally, re Turkey... I respect your hypothesis that S400 tested against F35 would show the folly of stealth against superior GBAD and the USA is being spiteful bitches for Turkey going behind NATOs back, but do consider that Turkey has always been an ally of last resort in the geopolitical chessboard which is the Near East. Erdogan has made no secret of his disdain for the West, and with that comes an adjusted calculus on whether that asset owner will respect the interests of the manufacturer - a very different and significantly more interesting discussion could be had on whether F35 unified maintenance system and capabilities are the REAL octopus of the US DoD ensnaring lesser states in its wake, but again that may require a seperate effortpost.
In any case S400 has been directly used by Russia in Syria already, which is right next to Israel which has had F35s in the air since 201?, so the live data aspect should already be known to them (and, for our sake as internet shitposters, not us).
2D3D
6d ago
Your assessment largely tracks with what I read, with a single point I'll raise about Raz Simone turning warlord at phase 3 being the major trigger for a violence spiral, instead of armed lefties suddenly finding their christiania.
Calling it a schelling point really reminds me of OWS, just where people WENT if they had nothing better to do. I was at Zucotti and there was this bartender from Georgia who quit his job to live a crust-punk existence with the other OWS. This was like 2 days before the crazies started using the park as their bully pulpit and the progressive stack became implemented to manage the crazies, only for that to morph into its own retarded beast.
2D3D
6d ago
Follows a fairly typical suburban normie pattern, honestly. Get the gnarly business of keeping the suicidal little monsters out of harms way till they can manage one trip to the ER without automatically dying along the way, then focus on loving oneself. Get a bit more fitspo, a bit less powerboss. I wouldn't be surprised if the Zucks, like most married couples, preach luxury beliefs of trans acceptance and racial equality but privately subscribe to gender and racial realism: proof will lie in where he sends his kids.
2D3D
6d ago
Ego satiation doesn't put food on the table. Once there material wealth was present for the taking, the infighting crippled the movement. The BLM formal organization milked the feel-good donations dry before collapsing, immediately calling the general public racist for not continuing to support Buy Large Mansions. While the grifter and the do-gooder may be seperate bodies, neither side manages to get their preferred outcome.
2D3D
6d ago
Bayarea is a notably young subreddit, as that whole website is. If anything this is a new crop of normies emerging, having seen the consequences of the soft touch and unwilling to continue blindly down this evidently rocky path to the progressive future. There is usually an interesting splitting of subreddits in regionals, with sanfrancisco and bayareahating each other just as seattle and seattlewa or publicfreakout and actualpublicfreakouts or unitedkingdom and ukpolitics all hate each other for being pussies and racists respectively. The split has been getting worse over time, likely because of the increasingly visible failures of progressives. Should be fun to see these spirals continue and see which side the banhammer falls on. Gendercritical got axed, but so did chapotraphouse
2D3D
6d ago
I would gently posit that your level of conscientious organization is slightly higher effort than these flash mobs. Occupy Wall Street and Chaz exhibit hallmarks of being coalescing of disparate bedfellows rather than a coordinated mobilization effort. Coordinated efforts if anything exhibit geographical dispersion to maximize visibility, like deliberate disruptions of uninvolved parties and events by the pro-pal protestors. Staying in a single region to protest dance is just a magnet attracting the crazies, and those tend to dissolve the moment a power struggle arises.
I find the bigger problem is that our friends tend to be more fickle than we calculated. True friendships are a tribe unto themselved, sufficiently bonded to ignore external cultural variations. Either your friends aren't so close that they are willing to censure you over inconsequential opinions, or they're weaklings who can't stand up against Current Thing. Both lead to the same conclusion of 'get better friends'. Difficult, but just like a good romantic relationship, worth it
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