BaronVSS
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User ID: 483
I disagree. All coverage I see of it, excluding The Telegraph, is framed with the assumption that 200K people died and this is an utterly horrific failure of the government and not an inevitability of a nation state becoming fat and old. I look at all the headline images that journalists choose to run and I Cannot Help But Notice that most of those wearing placards or holding up pictures of the deceased are old people lamenting even older people.
I fear the response to the pandemic has been normalised: when something like this happens again, we will shut down schools and places of free association, we will usher everyone inside their homes to look at screens all day, and we will demonise anyone pointing out the utter disaster of this policy. The operating policy of the country is determined by what is best for the all powerful owner occupier class and the national religion.
BaronVSS
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11mo ago
I don't think neckbeard shaming ever really left. The terms just changed to something that could not be used to directly attack a person's appearance. Low status men were still free game.
For me, it was probably Crusader Kings II.
This happened around halfway into the game's lifetime, with the Way of Life and Monks and Mystics expansions marking the transformation from a grounded feudal politics simulator into a wacky reddit screenshot generator, with a slew of event spam I had to download mods to turn off. This was further followed by expansions that expanded the map to include cultures and regions that weren't at all comparable to the european feudal system and in addition slowed the game down to a crawl.
I have barely looked at CKIII. Beyond the fact they've got to recreate and overhaul all of 2's features to make it worth my while, the game seems to be designed for people who loved horse popes and/or want to play Medieval Bridgerton. Everything else that bothered me about CK2 is still there: limited diplomacy, can't intervene between two vassals fighting especially when one of your vassals is directly related to you and countless other things.
This has happened in a few other games but CKII is where I saw it happening in real time.
BaronVSS
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1yr ago
After witnessing the events of 2020-2022, take my rightful place at the head of the queue.
The only person in life who will consistently look out for you, is you.
BaronVSS
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1yr ago
Not all measures were removed in all countries at the same time. In the UK, the restrictions were 99% gone by February, but many places in the anglosphere or adjacent continued until the late year.
Personally, I think the following things contributed to society's funny amnesia moment:
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The length of the pandemic. It had gone on for nearly 2 years, and as time went on the average person gradually stopped being as afraid.
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Non-terrible vaccines had been administered into a majority of 50+ individuals in WEIRD anglospheric nations, which are the only countries that matter. At this point, much of the functional threat of the virus has been eliminated.
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The increasing number of leaks that lawmakers, particularly those at the very top, were throwing racous lockdown parties while everyone else was being denied freedom of association. In the UK, partygate rendered any further restrictions politically difficult for the government to implement.
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The timing of the Ukraine war. Socially, it immediately supplanted COVID as the Big Thing Everyone Cares about and governments were no longer rewarded for spending vast amounts of state resource on it. Politically, governments had to rapidly change their priorities to account for the war and its knock on effects.
BaronVSS
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2yr ago
In their defence, the official app (and new reddit) is utterly horrific and using anything else is a requirement to browse the site.
A friend and I were talking about the changing attitude about the way games are made, marketed and sold to consumers by corpos. A very interesting question was asked that I'd like to repost here:
When was the first time you saw something that made you realise "I am no longer the target audience" for something you used to love? This needn't apply to games, it can be anything you took part in and enjoyed doing but no longer do due to the thing being changed beyond your power.
BaronVSS
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2yr ago
I don't know what else there is to talk about. The outcome of the war, whatever that may be, has been decided by now by people with significantly larger dicks than ours and novelty of combat between two near-peer nations has worn off. I assume that, when the news is reporting the war, the Ukranians are making progress, and when the news goes dead silent on the war then the Russians are making progress.
I care primarily about the personal impact: that I get to suffer inflation and energy scares due to my government's (or indeed, every western government's) complete and total aversion to energy security. As for morals, the ultimate moral of life, learnt most bitterly in the years before, is that the strong do whatever the fuck they want to the weak, and the weak suffer and invent slave moralities in order to pretend that they are not suffering.
BaronVSS
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10mo ago
For reference, we have had only one incident that could be tied to incel ideology in the past few years. The incident itself was notable for a reason not often discussed, namely that it could have been prevented if a public servant had done their job correctly.
I think it's apparent that the existence of incels scares the shit out of centre-left/left aligned women, particularly those in the public sector. Potential threats of violence aside, the incel memeplex provides powerful competition to the worldview put forward by the predominantly liberal society, which encourages meekness, reassigns social failings concerning men to individual ones and denies their lived reality. Shutting down this memeplex and ensuring the young man conforms to the expected view (even if the young man in question refuses to deny the evidence of their eyes and ears) is of paramount importance, as the young man is only in school for about 6 hours a day but is exposed to online and offline belief systems for the rest of his time.
This suggested policy is stupid. We already have Prevent, which by itself does nothing and is a glorified list of potential terrormen that is written to but apparent never read, given that every news article I read about a lone wolf attacker he is almost always "known to authorities." I have written on this subject before, and in that time I see that absolutely nothing has changed. Educators, politicians and journalists will continue to misdiagnose the problem and suggest nonsensical solutions.
AUTISTS: THE LAST OPPRESSED CLASS
(For the purposes of this post, I am defining an autistic person as someone who has been diagnosed with an autism spectrum condition, or could qualify for an autism spectrum condition diagnosis should they given access to the correct services. The disaster spiral trainwreck that is the self diagnosis movement and the widening of the definition of autism to be completely meaningless, I might write about at another time.)
The modern anglospheric society operates off the belief that there are oppressed groups and oppressor groups. It is stated that oppressor groups have high rates of economic and social success, while the reverse is true for oppressed groups. This is often referred to as the progressive stack, with some oppressed groups being more oppressed than others. To alleviate this disparity, oppressed groups are allowed to seek reparations from their oppressor and demean their oppressor in public spheres, while the reverse is not tolerated. There are many examples of these groups: Women are oppressed by Men, Non-white People are oppressed by White People, Gay people are oppressed by Straight people, Non-english speakers are oppressed by English speakers, and so on. However, there is one group to whom this opressed definition might apply, but receive no recognition, appreciation or restitution from society bottom text.
Autistic people have utterly awful life outcomes. They have very poor employment rates, with many being unemployed or undermployed, even if they are level 1 autists in possession of college degrees. The suicide rate is abysmal, with rates being 9 times in excess of neurotypicals and over half of autistic people having considered suicide throughout their lives. Autistic people also experience heightened rates of social and even sexual abuse.
Despite this very strong case for a place on the progressive stack autists have no place whatsoever on it, or indeed recognition that they even exist in wider society. I do not recall the last time there was a front page article on my country's news outlet about anyone with my condition. I do not recall there being any support or preferential treatment for autists in regards to accquiring economic and social capital during the time when I was seeking employment, in comparison to programs that fast track and support women and ethnic minorities, for example. Support for autistic people is very limited, and only meaningfully exists in the early stages of childhood. This support is not provided to allow the child to feel comfortable in their skin, but to minimise friction both with neurotypicals and with the school and work systems. Even behaviours that are not directly harmful to the autistic person themselves or to neurotypicals, such as stimming, are heavily discouraged.
For most opressed groups, the responsibility for the easing the disparity is put upon the oppressor group. For example, men are expected to validate the fear that women feel due to the difference in physical strength in situations such as being in an elevator, or walking alone at night, and adjust their behaviour accordingly. It may depress an individual man to feel that he is and can only ever be a threat, but this feeling is not validated and he is told to Get Over It. In comparison, the autist is expected to adapt to social norms and behaviours that they do not innately pick up and instead learn manually, in the same way that Sideshow Bob learned that there was a rake there by walking into it except this time the rakes are invisible. It is the autist that has to mask, the autist that has to conceal their interests, the autist that has to pretend to be someone other than who they are.
Obviously, this is terrible. How then, are autists to get onto the progressive stack and get the sweet government funding necessary to improve these awful outcomes? The first task is to create an original sin for neurotypicals that devalues their accomplishments whilst providing avenues to redistribute their social and economic capital to autistic people. White privilege, male privilege and so on are all forms of this and it would not be difficult to create a similar privilege checklist for neurotypicals, but to get into a position to enforce this belief on the rest of society would be far more difficult. Autists, estimated, make up roughly only 2% of the global population against a neurotypical 98%, compared to the 13% of African Americans vs White Americans and the roughly 50%/50% sex split among men and women. Moreover, autists are not naturally grouped or forcibly segregated into one place in a way that men, women and ethnic groups are, so they cannot easily band together and overcome oppression they face.
If we were able to overcome both of these issues, there is another large problem: NTs innately do not like autists, finding them to be offputting and thus wishing to interact with them less based on thin slice judgements. You can argue that there are similar innate dislikes against other oppressed groups, however these groups usually have something that endears them to their perceived oppressor in some form, whether these are biological urges or moral spooks about kindness and human unity, or contributions to society in the form of food or entertainment and so on. There are no moral spooks that encourage being nice to the weird asshole in the corner, even if they haven't done you any real harm. Obligations to do the neurotypical social dance run much deeper than any other aspect a human being is othered by.
Lastly, autism is still seen as a male coded thing, and oppressor/oppressed heirarchy is the strongest where it relates to men and women. There are some autistic people who are able to hyperfocus on useful things, and thus can channel their abilities into a lucrative career. However, these careers are usually in something like software developement, research or other high value STEM careers due to their innate rigidity, which are currently the target for cooption by various diversity movements due to their high status and outsized influence on the world we live in. These positions are likely the only place that a neurotypical will not only encounter an autistic person, but an autistic person in their element who may not be masking (and I suspect this lack of masking is one of the reasons that autists in these roles are being targeted.)
Meanwhile, female autists are more heavily socialised into following neurotypical norms and thus present in a neurotypical manner, so they do not register as being autistic. Hence autists are either invisible or irritating to the oppressed/oppressor sensibility and general notions of social status, and must be removed. Where NTs have not met neurotypicals, their perception of the condition is usually influenced by piece of shit media like Rain Main or the Big Bang Theory, where most depictions in the vein of "Guy who punches himself in the head" or Sheldon Cooper."
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.
BaronVSS
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2yr ago
I used to hate them, now I admire them for their consistency. The Tankie doesn't hate on pharmaceutical companies one year and get Pfizer tattoos the next. The Tankie doesn't overlay the flag of whichever country experienced an atrocity over his avatar on twitter every month. The Tankie just hates. If you have values that are in contradiction with his, he will openly advocate for your harm, but then at least you know where you stand with them. Other internet users? Who knows.
BaronVSS
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7mo ago
Kitboga has done immense damage to India's reputation
Thanks to him, I cannot think about the word "redeem" without automatically associating it with India.
I wonder if the yelling scammer guy is aware of his own popularity.
BaronVSS
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11mo ago
I think BC is a real person and I think his disdain of us and the values we possess is genuine, as his desire to reinstate a antiquity era moral phantasm over what we have now.
BaronVSS
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1yr ago
He was banned for only ever posting about the Hock. His reddit account is still active, so clearly he hasn't gone into the woods to his death.
BaronVSS
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2yr ago
FWIW the larger subreddits are all controlled by a relatively small cabal of uberjannies who use automated banlists. For posting a nonzero number of times on LockdownSkepticism and CoronavirusCirclejerk I got banned silently from posting in places I'd never even been on or heard of.
They believe it captures the lived experience of young men who enter the alt-right/manosphere/incel pipeline for whatever reason and thus provides the antitode to that way of thinking. It doesn't for a whole host of reasons, the primary one being that the main character is 13 years old and most fears young men have about their social status and manhood kick in from around 15-16 onward after maturity has hit.
BaronVSS
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1yr ago
I voted SDP. Though they are the literally who party, and the various minor joke parties all came ahead of them where I live, it was the only time where I've ever voted and experienced zero hesitation when putting an "x" on the ballot.
Labour's victory was invetiable, given the electorate's love of the colours red and blue. For their performance over the past 2 years, the tories won far too many seats. This is probably to be expected, given the demographic makeup of the country and the top heavy age pyramid. More worryingly is the rise of the green party and a number of Members for Gaza, who are functionally a proxy for political islamism in Britain that neither of the big two have really got a handle on.
I do not expect things to improve in meaningfully in any way, given that Labour is 99% the pensions ponzi scheme party that the tories are. I at least take solace in that Farage won his seat and that the SNP have been utterly blown out, all over their chosen star buying an illegal camper van and her replacement shitting the bed at every possible opportunity.
BaronVSS
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1yr ago
Society already does not care about low value men. The only reason it pays any attention at to incels et al is out of a misguided fear that they pose or will pose meaningful physical harm to ordinary members of society. Given the continuined re-occurrence of things like the Bear-Man-Woods conversation and its complete disregard of statistics and reality, this trend will continue. I suppose the alternative is worse, in that loser men just get stepped on/around/over in the same way that homeless people do.
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.
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The commonly accepted scenario, where the virus emerged in bats consumed at a wet market in Wuhan.
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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.
Due to wider economic changes, Homer Simpson's lifestyle and achievements are no longer feasible for the rate of effort that he puts in. One thing I didn't point out in the above post is that men now face vastly increased competition for all the signifiers of male success from not only women in their labour pool but also globalisation. Had he been born 20 years later, Homer would have turned into Lenny or Barney.
The Tories are "right wing" in the sense that some of their prominent members make statements countering the current humanist consensus. Any policy that is remotely right wing, such as the Rwanda programme, is either neutered on implementation by the Civil Service or withdrawn beforehand by government members on the left of the party, fearing negative comments in the press. Speech is valued by the public far above action: Boris put the UK under three separate lockdowns and was about to do a fourth, stopping only due to innate weakness and a rebellious backbench. However, this is not remembered: what is remembered are his flippant comments about letting the bodies pile high. This is how the perception of a supposedly right wing government comes to be.
Amusingly, the newly returned Cameron is entirely to blame for having actual Conservatives in his Conservative party, rather than Lib Dems wearing blue coloured ties. He made a point of freshing up his party's image during his premiership so it was no longer perceived to be "Pale, Stale and Male." He was in such a rush to do this that he failed to vet many of his new entries to ensure they were Blairites and so you end up the party of today where ethnic minority women, such as Badenoch, Patel and Braverman have the strongest opinions.
If we are not: why is that? Other voluntary organizations come under pressure to diversify, all the time - see "knitting too white," "hiking too white," etc. Would our church not qualify because it's too small? Because it isn't a business? Because we do not have any status to award? Because we have no social media presence?
The purpose of that attack is not to ensure that the recipient changes their ways and transforms their community to be a pluralistic collection of races. The purpose of the attack is to chastise and lower the status of the recipient in that moment by implying that they have a stank of Racism that can never be quite cleaned. Had you perhaps say a dozen or half a dozen non-white members, the attack line would then become the traditional jab that some of your best friends are black.
Ask these people for solutions to this and you will not get any immediately actionable goals. At best you would hear abstract targets like "tackling structural racism" or social rituals like "having uncomfortable conversations" with no real explanation as to how to get to these goal or what the result of an uncomfortable conversation is supposed to be. I do not recall who said it now, but the best line I have ever heard on this is that there would be no real difference in material outcome between someone reading out a Land Acknowledgement and someone reading out John Wayne quotes on a stage.
The film is overly hyped imo, though that might be because I have had all morally spooked notions like fairness and equality beaten out of me by the mere act of observing how the world works. The lines about white people just bounced off me. I no longer expect to be seen as anything other than an oppressor at this point.
The worst thing about this film is that it's a romcom (and therefore an automatic 0/10) wearing the skin of something far more interesting. If black people have magic and thus are able to do anything they want, why do they devote substantial amounts of time to keeping white people happy when they could instead
establish a concealed, seperate society like the wizards have done in Harry Potter, or
BTFO the white muggles with magic and create their own nation?
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