ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
No bio...
User ID: 1012
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
21m ago
They already fancied themselves Jedi rebels and Dumbledore's Army before the ICE masks. I've seen the bumper stickers and reddit comments. ICE agents could wear rainbow tracksuits and helicopter beanies and they would still get called stormtroopers.
Making ICE scary definitely seems to be freaking out illegals judging by the empty Walmarts and Home Depots we saw earlier, so it seems like an effective way to encourage self-deportation. And if my brother or son were an ICE agent, I would definitely want his face covered and his name hidden while doing his job given the now-regular leftist violence against right-wingers. The extreme left is going to hate his guts regardless.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
28m ago
When this happens, they will be met with stone-faced negation from Red Tribe,
I can only hope. If it were to happen tomorrow, I don't think it would play out that way. There are still too many right wingers (mostly boomers, but also some enlightened center-rightists) who think we can rollback the clock to 1990 and will thus aid and abet the left by chiding and policing their own side.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
2d ago
Thanks, this is a good reality check. There seems to be a lot of romanticization of the trades happening these days, and I've always been a little skeptical. Sounds like hard but steady work that comes with its own set of tradeoffs. One of my sons is technically inclined but a bit ADHD/on the spectrum. I've been wondering if he would do better as a field tech of some sort rather than as a white collar desk jockey. Personally, my years as an IT dispatch tech were the most fun I ever had in my working years. Long hours and lots of BS, but a great crew, rewarding work (you can see the things you fix), and I loved getting paid to drive around and see different towns and the "backstage" side of many businesses. Sounds like working a trade has some similarities.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
3d ago
How has that worked out for you? I have been thinking about whether or not I should send my kids to college. My kids are smarter than average and we plan to homeschool, so I think we could set them up for success pretty well. At the same time, I'm concerned that not having the magic paper might hinder them early in their careers. Have you experienced that?
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
3d ago
I am in my mid-30s, so I imagine we were looking at colleges around the same time. To be fair, I do also remember being shown the shiny new cafeteria and student union, and hearing about the new football stadium they were building, but I didn't care at all as a 17 year old. My parents were there with me, though. In hindsight, perhaps these amenities were aimed at convincing the parents, since they would be the ones actually footing the bill. Kind of obvious now that I write it out.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
4d ago
Okay, that's fair. I suppose I might be typical minding. I think I am considerably less nerdy/autistic than many users here (no offense meant, I just mean that I'm a socially integrated normalfag) and even I based my choice of college mainly on (1) the fact that it had the field I was interested in, (2) that it wasn't located in an inner city shithole, and (3) that they gave me a fat scholarship.
I've often heard hat new stadiums/cafeterias/fancy dorms are built to "attract students" but I do not personally know anyone who compared universities in this way. Even the 100 IQ normies at my HS who you would expect might care about that stuff were much more interested in whether a particular school had a good "party school" rep, whether their bf/gf was going there, or whether it was the "correct" school for their family sports fan dynasty (I lived in the southeast). I do not recall once ever hearing about the quality of the dorms or gyms.
However! If I were an unscrupulous admin trying to expand my bureaucratic power, this seems like a really convenient argument to make. "We need 50 million dollars for a new gym to attract students to Foobar State! If we don't build it, students will choose University of Foobar instead! We can't fall behind!" And all the other admins have grifts of their own and know how to play the game, so I doubt anyone would stand in the way except to try to grab those funds for their own power expansion ("We don't need a gym, we need to expand and renovate student housing!")
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
4d ago
I didn't say international students were demanding shiny facilities and more administrators, I'm just saying that the money from international students most likely goes towards increasing bloat and add more irrelevant facilities. Does a university actually NEED a state of the art massive gym complex or sprawling student union center? These always seemed like make-work bureaucracy expansion projects to me. More facilities = more employees = more admin. At least football can be justified as pulling donations from alumni. Certainly none of the money goes to making education cheaper or better (cheaper books, higher prof salaries, more profs to decrease class sizes, etc).
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
4d ago
No? I don't think I said that? I'm sure the admins, like all useless bureaucrats, will cling to their gibs until the bitter end, even if it means completely hollowing out the educational mission of the university.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
4d ago
Tell me more about that, because when I was in college I didn't demand any of that. I wanted cheaper textbooks and affordable housing close to campus. I went to local restaurants or cooked at home. Our gym was a little old, but it was fine. I don't recall any student protests demanding fancies facilities. Maybe that's a common thing at other universities that I'm just not aware of?
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
4d ago
International students are subsidizing (superfluous) university services, wages and administrative bloat. I don't think native students see much benefit from the money at all.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
6d ago
I don't think they will meekly accept it, no. But under the bioleninist framework, they are only strong because they are organized and their opponent is not. If the normie right begins to organize, it will successfully oppress the left. Probably not only via peaceful means.
I'm not sure how to define the "most leftist" ideas I accept. Probably some economic policies. I have some sympathy for protectionism, labor unions, and reducing income inequality.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
8d ago
Anyone played around with voice cloning and generation? ElevenLabs came out of nowhere a while back and blew everyone's minds, but are there any serious competitors to their quality? Or are they still the best around? Is it possible to do it locally?
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
8d ago
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
8d ago
I don't want my enemies dead, but I do want them to think twice about expressing their ideas. Maybe I even want them to be afraid to express them. I want TPTB to run a propaganda campaign to associate people who express those opinions with foolishness, cowardliness, malice, perversion, and disloyalty. My enemies can go back into the closet and stop spreading their intellectual contagion. They will eventually dwindle in number and influence as they are no longer able to convert others.
Will this work? For a while at least, yes. I know because it worked on my side. But I think it will be more effective when we do it, because aristocracy is more stable and intuitive than bioleninism, and we have all the strong gods on our side (blood and soil, ancestral religion, family, unvarnished truth).
Then we can be friends and grill together in peace. No killing required.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
8d ago
It's been a while since I studied this, but IIRC the occupation of Taiwan was much less draconian than the occupation of Korea or the wartime occupations of the mainland. The Japanese built a lot of infrastructure there and developed the island somewhat. They also engaged in cultural repression, but again, I think it was less strictly enforced than in Korea.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
8d ago
Fair enough, sounds like he has more nuanced opinions than the average zealous nationalist. Good on him.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
8d ago
My gut says he's probably a PRC nationalist, though I say so with low confidence. Taiwanese have a generally warm view of Japan despite having been colonized by the Japanese for decades, so not all Chinese see the Japanese as a nemesis. The idea that "Japan was the ultimate enemy" is probably the strongest most unambiguous message in PRC propaganda, closely followed by "we must never forget the Century of Humiliation at the hands of Western powers" and "the CCP deserves undying gratitude for creating the 新中国 which awakened Chinese racial class consciousness and helped unify 中国人 enough to end their exploitation by evil foreigners." Given that, and given that the "Chinese=Han=Standard Mandarin" as an idea is pushed to promote national unity (no criticism here, every European country did it in the 19th and 20th century), I would take his linguistic theories with a grain of salt. Of course, I don't know the guy, so I'm speculating about his beliefs a lot here.
I'd be curious to hear what he actually believes if you feel you can broach this rather sensitive topic with him.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
8d ago
That's a tricky one. IMHO there's probably nobody on this board who is really qualified to disentangle the nuances there, since AFAIK we do not have any regular born-and-raised-in-the-PRC posters (and even if we did the fact that they post here would make them highly unusual). But my understanding is that zhonghua 中华人 /zhonghuaminzu 中华民族 is used to mean "ethnically Chinese people," and I have heard it used (often as "huaren"华人) in conversations where the speaker was simply a non-PRC Chinese (e.g. from Taiwan) but also by PRC Chinese appealing to the loyalty owed by huaren (or huaqiao 华侨) to the mother country (PRC).
Re disliking Chiang Kai-shek... that's a tough one since AIUI he wasn't a very sympathetic character. I think there are plenty of PRC haters who have little love for Chiang.
I confess to not knowing enough folks from southern China to really grasp their views on Chineseness and compare them with those of northern Chinese (with whom I had much more contact).
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
9d ago
Does your coworker speak Mandarin as his first language? Is he from the northern PRC? Is he a nationalist? Those are important factors to consider when evaluating his opinion. I agree with others that including Korean is highly suspect. It suggests a level of ignorant northern Han chauvinism, the kind that still sees China as the "middle kingdom" (IMO better translated as the "central kingdom") and all other so-called cultures surrounding it as uppity monkeys who were enlightened by the hoary and superior Han Chinese.
To your question, no, they are not the same language at all. A lazy analogy (in that you could nitpick it to death and probably find a more exact example) is that they are like English and, say, Romanian. Both are Indo European, both use the Roman alphabet. They probably have some words in common that could be identified by a linguist. But day to day, they are mutually unintelligible, and the Romanians do things to the Roman alphabet that make English speaker say "wtf," such as "ă" and "ș". They are only part of the same "Chinese" language in that all Romance languages are part of "Romance," and even that is too generous IMO.
I'm not sure that both sides' actions are comparable. The left cancelled people for relatively mundane political opinions and for making edgy jokes. Normies felt like you had to walk on eggshells under ascendant leftism. The right is cancelling people who say really tasteless things about someone who just got murdered in front a large crowd that included his wife and kids. They are also bashing trans people, but I think the vast majority of normies have mixed feelings about trans at best. The right is not going to cancel you if you make an edgy joke about women or blacks or if you express support for Gavin Newsom or whatever. I don't think most normies feel threatened by the right in the same way.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
10d ago
The Gellar device emits a wave called a Gellar field, essentially creating a bubble of real space around the ship.
Scrolling your phone with one hand in the grass.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
10d ago
This is true, but I think the online world has made it much easier and more rewarding to put on that new identity, and it is home to much more powerful and persuasive entities than the IRL world. Before the internet, your new persona might impress your skater or goth friend circle, and they and perhaps the cool kids at school would try to exert pressure on you. You might see an ad on a billboard or a TV commercial. It's much more insidious now.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
10d ago
Oh damn, I just realized they're different guys.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
10d ago
I get where you're coming from, but there is no way to turn down the temperature. The brainwormed extremist 5% on each side have control of the thermostat and are only interested in turning it up. The moderate left and right want the other side's extremists to stop raising the temperature, but they are unwilling to police their own extremists (or if they are, they are denounced as traitors and are sidelined). Neither side is willing to unilaterally disarm for fear of what the other side will do to them (though to be fair, I think the right is more justified in this fear based on the last 10 years). So the temperature will ratchet up until some event releases all the pressure.
When I have seen this on the right among normies, it's usually in response to the left's own Manichaean worldview, not because they view the left fundamentally as enemies who cannot be reasoned with.
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