ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
Leftist handling of 'Oppressed groups', in which the oppression is centered and what the group actually believes/practices just doesn't really come up despite the fact they're some combination of borderline theocratic, hardline conservative and run contrary to woke culture.
Ironically both Israel and the Provisional IRA are good examples of this. Both are basically bog-standard 19th century ethnic nationalist movements that spent decades getting glazed by the left wing because they bothered to give the bare minimum of socialist lip-service. The difference is, the Provos never won (not completely anyway), so unlike Israel they never got the chance to reveal that their left wing commitments were a paper thin cover for their real goals. Whereas Israel has the misfortune of being a leftist bette noire due to their socialist apostasy. This apostasy is also why most of the left hates modern Russia so much.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
I wonder if the current generation of secondary school teachers will go out of their way to "recontextualise" the Holocaust by listing off all of the more fashionable groups targeted for extermination by the Nazis: gays, disabled people...
That actually was the usual didactic approach to the Holocaust in America in the late 2000s and the first half of the 2010s. Portraying it as a more general crime against humanity. The number of deaths was often described as 10-12 million and it included Soviet POWs, homosexuals, religious and political dissidents like Jehovah’s Witnesses, other miscellaneous ethnic groups like the Romani people and Polish Slavs, Rhineland Germans of African ancestry, and the disabled. I don’t know exactly what the politics behind the shift was, but that approach fell out of favor in the last half of the 2010s and it started being described again as mainly a crime against European Jews.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
Given his difficult relationship with Ms. Swift I suspect that might be intentional.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
There is an idea of an @AvacadoPanic, something illusory. But there is no real him.
Fuentes, who I'm not sure if he was behind Ye's ideological evolution or was just there to cheer it on, seems to be recognizing the Right's strategy of relentlessly and exclusively appealing to low human capital is not gonna go anywhere good:
Special Agent Fuentes was more than happy to pal around with Kanye when his ridiculous cringe mental illness antics were making the far right look like a bunch of unserious clowns. Now when Kanye knuckles down and independently puts out an actually effective piece of viral far right propaganda, Nick is suddenly hammering the “uhhh actually guys we have to distance ourselves from this, it’s making us look low status”. Even though Nick’s own low human capital has been making the far-right look low status for over half a decade.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
80 percent of the Indian flag posters on 4Chan seemed to suddenly disappear so I think it was legit.
Sharp escalation in the India Pakistan conflict over the last hour. Ballistic missiles seem to have been fired, and confirmed reports of explosions in Islamabad and Rawalpindi.
UPDATE: Pakistan acknowledges that three military bases were attacked, preparing response
UDATE: the situation is deteriorating rapidly. I’m hearing absolutely wild rumors about the targets that are being hit. Supposedly a massive cyberattack has just taken out 70 percent of India’s power grid.
UPDATE: The Pakistani Prime Minister has convened a meeting of the National Command Authority. It’s probably just saber-rattling, but this is the group that would give authorization for the use of nuclear weapons.
Kek. Yeah everyone remembers Stalin’s cold command and rule by fear, but he never would have been able to do that if he hadn’t spent most of the twenties rules-lawyering the Communist Party bylaws.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
The Pakistani defense minister was also spouting off about how a “limited nuclear exchange” couldn’t be ruled out.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
To be fair, ignoring what the author thought they were saying, and overanalyzing what actually ended up on the page or screen is a big part of any kind of literary or film criticism.
I saw the characters less as any kind of generational warfare commentary and more as archetypes of the people who tend to play Minecraft. You have:
-(Steve) People who see Minecraft less as a game, and more as an open-ended artistic outlet. The types you see in the YouTube compilations of complicated sculptures, nifty machines and giant architectural projects.
-(Garret) Serious “hardcore” gamers who play Minecraft in addition to hundreds of other games.
-(Dawn) Normie casuals who mostly enjoy Minecraft for the cute aesthetics
-(Henry and Natalie) Children, and people who recently played Minecraft as children and are now entering young adulthood.
India has just attacked three Pakistani army bases near the Kashmir region with missiles. There are some indications that power infrastructure in a Pakistani town was targeted as well. Troops are also clashing along the line of contact. This is as far as I know the biggest escalation in the region since the Kargil war. If this were any other two nuclear powers the world would be on a state of panic now. What are the culture war implications of a full scale nuclear war in South Asia?
UPDATE Unconfirmed reports that Pakistan is carrying out a military response, including air strikes on Indian bases in Kashmir.
UPDATE Pakistani Prime Minister has confirmed ongoing Pakistani military response. Heavy gunfire, artillery and air strikes heard on live feeds along the line of control on Kashmir
UPDATE Multiple Pakistani news outlets claim that Pakistan has shot down two Indian Rafael fighter jets. Some Indian news agencies are now reporting that a jet was downed.
UPDATE: Second round of missile strikes in the early hours of May 8. Sources confirm that the aerial engagement yesterday that caused the loss of 2-5 aircraft had over 125 fighter jets from both sides involved.
I think you and @RenOS are using a much finer-grained and overly academic definition of “larp” than what most people are using when they accuse someone of being a “trad-larper”. When they say that they mean the accused larper is more interested in making a fashion statement and isn’t really that committed to the ideology in question. For example, nobody is looking at ISIS and saying “well technically those guys are all just larping because the original chain of tradition between themselves and 7th century Islam was broken by 400 years of Ottoman rule and nobody decided to RETVRN to Sunni traditionalist interpretations until the Wahabbists in the late 18th century”
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
Well the joke with Johnny Bravo is that for most of his life he was a scrawny unattractive nerd, and though he finally hit his growth spurt and got big and handsome he still internally struggles with a lack of confidence and doesn’t really know how to behave around women. Which actually has a lot of relevance to the self-improver type OP talks about in his post.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
That’s already a thing on YouTube to try and get views. Various politically charged incidents supposedly occurring in various classrooms across America, then someone on 4chan happened to notice that they all seemed to be occurring in the exact same classroom, and only the participants changed.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
European NATO doesn't have more of everything except nukes.
They definitely don’t have more of those. Europe without America has about 500 nuclear warheads. Russia has 4500. Even keeping back a lot to point at the US they could easily double the EU’s.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
Also just prosaic stuff like small arms, bullets, vehicle replacement parts, tires and gasoline. A big part of the reason for the complete collapse of the German Army in 1945 was that you had entire surviving units going combat ineffective because they couldn’t operate their vehicles and had no guns or bullets to shoot them with.
The three major restrictions America is placing on Ukrainian rules of engagement are:
(1) Attempting to kill Putin or very high level Russian government officials using American weaponry. This is the type of thing that could provoke in-kind retaliation against US government officials or other drastic retaliation measures. It is rumored that the US government was informed by the FSB of an attempted assassination of Putin just a few days before it was to be carried out and had to scramble to tell Ukraine to stop it. This was actually reported on in mainstream news media six months or a year ago.
(2) Actions designed to threaten or disable Russia’s strategic nuclear capabilities. Again, this actually happened, the Ukrainians used a NATO supplied missile to destroy a Russian ICBM early warning radar installation, a strike that has no inherent strategic value to Ukraine.
(3) Actions that would hurt Russia and are strategically valuable to Ukraine but would collaterally cause the collapse of the European or global economy. This is why the strikes on oil infrastructure got throttled back, Europe is still using a lot of Russian oil and gas and they can’t just go cold turkey on it.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
So again the AI put totally false words into somebody's mouth and you apologists are defending it.
It’s not our fault that AI generated slop-Walz is just as serviceably mediocre as the real thing.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
Especially given that digging into the Lockerbie bombing shows a lot of weird stuff as to the provenance of the attack.
That election is the reason both parties are so afraid of contested conventions. The Democrats came out of that with George McGovern, who got absolutely wiped out in one of the biggest electoral landslides in American history. After that, both parties quietly decided that candidate selection was too important to be left to the voters.
That's how I see that going. Someone sanity-check me.
I think you are mostly right, but I think the structure of the machine you’re describing is a bit different. It’s not a linear chain coming down from the White House, and the White House isn’t the one controlling it. For foreign policy, the locus of control is the State Department and CIA (but I repeat myself) and then other entities emanate out from that locus like spokes on a wheel.
So in your hypothetical, some group deep within the State Department looks at the numbers and maps and decides that conquering Ecuador is vital to America’s geopolitical interests. Suddenly, the President starts getting alarming security briefings about Ecuadorian weapons of mass destruction and imminent Ecuadorian aggression. The media gets their marching orders and starts running two articles a day about how the Ecuadorian President might actually be Satan. The NPCs take the lead from the both the White House and media and pretty soon you have people burning Ecuadorian flags on the street and demanding war.
The second thing is that the October 7 attack and the subsequent invasion of Gaza is the first major hiccup in the machine, where the gears seized up and the NPCs in the colleges and on the streets didn’t perfectly spin along with their state department orders. That might just be a one off thing. Israel-Palestine had been a culture war issue for over half a century, and people had much more baked-in preexisting opinions about it than they ever did about Ukraine or Iraq. So it was significantly harder to just beam their NPC programming right into their heads and send them off. But it could also be a sign that the control machine is just generally breaking down. I have a theory that the fervor over the Ukraine War was supposed to be a whole-of-society thing in America, not just a center left neoliberal cause celebre. It’s just that the programming ended up being rejected by large sections of the American populace. I see evidence of that and I keep meaning to make a post about it.
Chris Langan is a college dropout turned nightclub bouncer and part-time rancher. He received some negative media attention due to his negative opinions toward interracial marriage and his endorsement of some loopy and questionably antisemitic conspiracy theories. He is also possibly the smartest man currently living on the planet with a (disputed) measured IQ of 174.
One could argue that both the Enlightenment and the later Progressive moment falsely took credit for quality of living improvements that were actually just the result of the Industrial Revolution and the uncorking of more and more energetically concentrated fossil fuels. When the quality of the gas stopped getting better and better all the supposedly related social improvements suspiciously stopped.
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