BaronVSS
Sort by controversial
No bio...
User ID: 483
I do not find the casting of the Velaryons to be much of a diversion from what you describe. Valyria, a region with a mediterranean climate, somehow managed to produce and maintain consistently an overwhelming percentage of white albinos mixed with the odd 100% black person. This makes the Strong Boys story point farcial, three children, all white as snow? In a way it's worse than RoP and Wheel of Time and the other shows that cast randomly until certain demographic percentages are met and pay the setting exactly no mind, House of the Dragon wants you to believe that Valyrians can be any race so long as they have white hair and then make a point of identifying Criston Cole as being dornish based on his skin tone.
Ultimately, I don't think the origin of the virus really matters.
There are two popular scenarios for the introduction of COVID into the world.
-
The commonly accepted scenario, where the virus emerged in bats consumed at a wet market in Wuhan.
-
The commonly disparaged scenario, where the virus was the product of activity occuring in lab near to the wet market in Wuhan.
If scenario 1 is true, China deliberately withheld information about the virus from the WHO in the first month of the pandemic. This was information that might have been of benefit to other world leaders in planning health strategies.
However, those world leaders spent the first few months encouraging behaviour that would directly contribute to the spread of the virus, before u-turning and banning not only intimate contact with strangers but also contact with those close to you for months at a time. If China had co-operated and released full information, would they have acted upon it?
If scenario 2 is true, then as you say a handful of the world's elite aided and abetted an extremely dangerous practise that produced a pandemic, then tried to mitigate it by one-upping each other in terms of damaging hygiene theatre. With the introduction of the vaccine (which I would like to point out that governments were doubly lucky in that it came out incredibly quickly and did not have terrible repurcussions when they decided to inject into literally everyone), WEIRD nations were offered an out and everything that was done to you should be forgotten.
I note with interest that only the US media has produced articles to the effect of requesting an amnesty for actions taken during the pandemic. This is mostly a product of the US having a significant anti-lockdown political movement in the form of the republicans. In most European nations measures had bi-partisan support questioning the measures is an extremely fast way to make yourself a pariah.
In both scenarios, the public demonstrated that they could be mostly cowed into submission with threats of mass death several orders of magnitude greater than observed reality and readily available bread and circuses, which very happily dived into. Some have taken to being a Nietzschean Last Man with incredible devotion. If I was someone like Biden or Johnson or Xi or whoever I would not be remotely afraid of the man in the street, or at the very least I would re-evaluate just what exactly would drive him to rise up and overthrow me, because everything I've done to him so far barely got a peep out of him. I might even release COVID-like viruses all the time for fun.
BaronVSS
Sort by controversial
1yr ago
The title of this thread reads "culture war roungup"
BaronVSS
Sort by controversial
1yr ago
Why then, would they mention it? Is the political persuasion of the killer's grandfather the most important topic here?
BaronVSS
Sort by controversial
1yr ago
The desparation of groups to see a mass-murderer wind up belonging to the other tribe inspired me to dream up a mobile app that you could use whenever such an event was occuring live. It would allow you to bet on the identity and motivation of the perpetrators of mass murder events while they are breaking news. The odds would be based on collating data from every media headline atrocity that has occurred in the past 20 years. Imagine the odds on this guy.
Some might call it crude, but I would argue that this is no worse than the wink nudging that occurs on reddit or twitter whenever such an attack occurs.
BaronVSS
Sort by controversial
1yr ago
Sneer clubs are inevitable. Moreover, sneer clubs are an evolutionary trait. You will notice that every single community that gathers around a particular topic in some way ultimately forms a consensus that ostracizes or expels nonbelievers. This is so in order to form tight, cohesive groups that remain together under stressful times. You cannot place your trust in someone who would abandon you or even side with someone that is threatening you. Non-rationalists respond positively to sneers, increasing or maintaining status in a group. This is pleasurable for the human being. Why would it ever stop?
As I have so often lamented after small talk laden parties, yes, it really is all just vibes.
BaronVSS
Sort by controversial
1yr ago
A pity. I really hoped China's eventual capitulation to some-COVID would have marked a conclusive end to this saga. Ultimately though I'm not as worried as once I might have been, in between shortages of vital resources and inflation central governments do not really have the political capital for hygiene theatre that they did last year.
Because there isn't a seperate 'women society' and a seperate 'men society' that are independent from each other where people from each society can voluntarily elect to interact just for a bit of fun.
Given the prevelance of single sex friendship groups and associations compared to evenly balanced friendship groups, there functionally are male societies and female societies. This state is further magnified when you leave co-ed environments: there are countless men in tech or women in nursing who have zero interaction with men that they were not already acquainted with before the transition.
This situation is incredibly dysfunctional to society and if it continues, it can quite easily become ruinous.
Yes it is, and I see not a single sign that this will improve. South Korea's gender politics and 0.78 birthrate beckon.
BaronVSS
Sort by controversial
1yr ago
Agnosticism is for the most part an attempt to plead neutrality and evade involvement in a culture war. It is functionally the same as atheism in terms of revealed preference (less likely to be involved in a community, less likely to be married/have children, etc), and would only be tolerated in a secular society.
BaronVSS
Sort by controversial
1yr ago
Were it not buried under a pile of technical debt and a lack of interest from Valve, we could be seeing "Team Fortress 2: 2"
BaronVSS
Sort by controversial
1yr ago
BaronVSS
Sort by controversial
1yr ago
Sometimes I see faded, expiring one way labels on the floor in shops. They'll remain there until they completely perish.
What a mess we made, when it all went wrong.
BaronVSS
Sort by controversial
1yr ago
There will be no appraisals. It behooves nobody in the journalist/politician alliance to examine whatever the fuck it was that they had a hand in making. We will be seeing countless knock on effects for years. The only silver lining is that in our (UK) official inquiry there will be some investigation into the effects the pandemic has had on the young. I feel desperately sad for them - their early years are so vitally important and the government did everything it possibly could to disrupt them.
BaronVSS
Sort by controversial
1yr ago
The worst part of all this is unlike any other disaster, say loss of immediate family or assault, I have absolutely no one in real life I can talk to, completely uncensored, about how I felt about it or how I feel now. At best all I have ever had are online friends and anonymous spaces like this one, baduk and LockdownSkepticism. Everywhere else just dogpiled you.
BaronVSS
Sort by controversial
1yr ago
often find themselves in crime
Do you have any examples of this? I'd genuinely never heard of that before.
BaronVSS
Sort by controversial
1yr ago
One of my all time favourite writeups and one of the most blackpilling things I have ever read. K-Pop is, and could only have been, the product of a country with 0.78 birthrate. Its worldwide popularity is illuminating as to the sort of future the developed world might inherit.
SK has utterly awful gender relations, with pro/anti-women groups demonstrating against each other in streets in the same way that many western interest groups do. In part this is due to the presence of the draft, which kneecaps young men at the very start of their careers and thus allows young women to eat their piece of their economic pie. SK an already very cuthroat society, and so this has generated a very strong resentment and a counteracting backlash.
If you hate men in reality, but are wired to want them thanks to one of many of God's boundless gifts upon you, surgically enhanced korean boys seem very appealing.
BaronVSS
Sort by controversial
11mo ago
Your English Vocabulary Size is:
22542
Top 5.76%
Your vocabulary is at the level of professional white-collars in the US!
Alas, I am but a tiny brainlet. My cranium is smooth and without ridges.
I remember beating all my colleagues at this though, so that's good.
BaronVSS
Sort by controversial
11mo ago
Example: everything that was done in the years 2020-2022, ostensibly to protect public health
BaronVSS
Sort by controversial
11mo ago
When I was 16, I and every other boy in my RS class was made to stand up and recieve chastisement by our then RS teacher, who proclaimed that the world was made for us, by people like us (my school was 99% white working class), that we had it the easiest out of any group of people and that we had a duty to right this imbalance. This is not my lived experience (though I attribute that to my undiagnosed and untreated autism), and it is broadly not the lived experience of young men, who have worse outcomes than their fathers and are expected their bear the dwindling of their piece of the socioeconomic pie and the societal narrative that this is not so with a smile on their face.
And frankly, given the events of the pandemic, I am not so convinced that there is a large divide between the British and Chinese states.
I would say that the British State currently has little room to commit any of the atrocities you describe. We have no heavy industry, as most of it was shipped offshore to East Asia and other places around the world and thus no Lithium Miners to abuse for the benefit of the global market. The worst crime that can be attributed on this basis is that the government leaves people who cannot adapt to the information economy to rot.
Morever, outside of the post WW2 waves of migrants, the UK has no immediate different ethnic group to victimise - white welshmen and scotsmen have more in common genetically with englishmen than they otherwise wish to pretend. If there was perhaps a group of Zorostrians who lived in Cornwall/Devon at the turn of the 20th century we may very well have had recent state oppression on british soil.
BaronVSS
Sort by controversial
11mo ago
Ireland is not really considered "British" soil in the popular conciousness, NI is seen by everyone barring loyalists as this colonial venture we didn't really clear up. Much of what happens in the UK news cycle doesn't consider NI and May's coalition government was the first time many people actually learned about the separate but equal part of their state. In addition, most of the oppression was done by the loyalist ulster government, who are neither truly Irish nor mainland British, rather than the westminster government.
BaronVSS
Sort by controversial
11mo ago
In their defence, the official app (and new reddit) is utterly horrific and using anything else is a requirement to browse the site.
My brain is broken as a result of the past few years, and I feel not the slightest inclination to fix it.
To surmise a very long story, I was an r9k tier NEET sadsack up until a few years ago when I began the uphill struggle to rebuild my life. By 2019 I had managed to get a job I would normally have required a degree for and normal friends I went to the pub with, both of which are things I thought I could never obtain. At the start of 2020 I was looking for a place of my own, which is exactly when the (UK) lockdowns hit.
I ended up losing the place I was going to move into, all of my hard earned friends moved away. I was able to hold onto my job, which for around seven months consisted of me travelling to and from an empty, freezing office and spoke to no one real and constitutes possibly the worst time of my entire life. Government actions rapidly deflated the value of my savings and put a fire under the already burning housing market. There are more parking spaces for rent than there are 1bed or studio flats in the city where I work. I cannot afford anything within 20 miles of where I live. It wasn't fucking like this pre-pandemic. Even if I engaged with the spook of "mental health", what would be the point? My life is materially worse in every conceivable way. My prospects are permanently damaged as a result of government action, cheered on by both strangers the system purports to be my "countrymen" and people close to me that I once respected, but now no longer.
Despite all of that, it is the cognitive dissonance that bothers me most. How can a person proclaim that a virus is deadly enough to ban recreational outdoor activity, but tolerate certain outdoor political protest? Why are tampons and clothes considered "inessential goods"? Why does going sledding outdoors in a country where snows once every 2 years make you a granny killer? I go back and read my old posts sometimes, and there was shit I got angry about then that I had apparently forgotten now. The most blackpilling thing about all of this is that indeed, just forgetting what was done to you and changing what you Care About in the way you change your clothes is most successful way to approach life. It amazes me that humanity has developed any capacity for individualist, introspective thought at all.
It probably does not help that I elected to read Nietzsche and Stirner at the same time during my aformentioned 7 months alone in that building. My "Good Morning, I hate _" could fill a book of its own.
More options
Context Copy link