BaronVSS
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User ID: 483
BaronVSS
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2yr 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.
BaronVSS
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2yr 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
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2yr 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
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2yr ago
Why then, would they mention it? Is the political persuasion of the killer's grandfather the most important topic here?
BaronVSS
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2yr ago
The title of this thread reads "culture war roungup"
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.
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
Boris hosted a party shortly after he left hospital, I doubt he was that shaken by it. I think most of his COVID policy was motivated by public opinion and the media response.
These are all my observations as a britbong.
When the UK voted to leave the EU, this caused a political stalemate in the UK's lower chamber that lasted 2 years. Theresa May, who became PM after Cameron resigned, did not have the numbers required to pass her deal and invoke Article 50, which was to agree to a settlement with the EU and terminate all other aspects of EU membership. This was unpopular with those parties to the left of the Tories, who wanted to remain part of the EU and those on the right of her own party, who wanted to leave the EU without any concessions offered. She quit in the spring of 2019, after a third failed attempt to push her deal through the House of Commons.
Boris wins the resulting leadership election. His plan, partially concocted by Dom Cummings was to force a GE and campaign on the basis that, if given a majority, he would end the deadlock and leave the EU under a repackaged version of May's deal. In December, he won an 380 seat majority, and passed A50 just before the new year.
In 2020, the coof hits. The original plan of the UK government, which is to encourage individual measures such as handwashing and voluntary distancing, is thrown out for the lockdownist policy that originated in China and was copied by countless other nations. Cummings is of the impression that, if we had done this earlier, we could have reduced the number of deaths. I disagree highly, the UK does not have the culture, geography, nor the dystopian panopticon required for the results seen in east asian countries and its primary hobbies consist of Greggs and Alcoholism, but that is another topic for another time. I also do not think it is the reason he was eventually knifed.
Dom Cummings is exiled from the government as he and Boris' wife Carrie took huge dislikings to each other, resulting in interfactional squabbles until Carrie's faction won. He is now on the outside looking in.
During the winter of 2020 while the country is in Lockdown and the common citizen is denied freedom of association, Boris and his colleagues host several parties at Number 10. This is leaked to the press a year later around the time a fourth lockdown is being proposed. After several months of political obstructionism, Boris is eventually fined, issues a weak apology and moves on.
In the Spring/Summer of this year, a story emerges about a sex pest in the Tory party having molested several people at an event. It is revealed that Boris ran interference and prevented action from being taken against this person. Tory MPs, sick and tired of having to defend the actions of the PM and his inner circle, propose a VoNC, which he passes with the worst numbers for a PM to date. His cabinent shortly resigns in quick succession, and he gives up the ghost and resigns.
After his own leadership election, Liz Truss wins. Liz Truss is, as was discussed on the subreddit, extremely stupid. She appoints longtime ally/adultery partner Kwasi Karteng as Chancellor (chief money guy), who unveils a budget with tax cuts and spending rises funded by borrowing. This is the event that caused the pound to crap itself and nearly killed off the pension industry. Truss eventually U-Turns and replaces Karteng with Jeremy Hunt, who immediately undoes the budget and replaces it with one reminiscient of the pro-Austerity Cameron government. Her position still awful, she elected to resign today.
Boris is being suggested primarily as a replacement for Truss by the membership, who are rural pensioners with opinions far to the right of even the populist public.
BaronVSS
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2yr ago
I see you are unfamiliar with Kulak's philosophy and worldview
BaronVSS
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2yr ago
All those seem to me like load-bearing walls for civilization, and we shouldn't dismantle them just to get an advantage in some other debate.
They are load bearing walls for this civilisation, which is a very unique take on human existence that has been around for few centuries at absolute most. The SocJus professional class, who are busy knocking said walls down, are doing so because it is highly unlikely that their enemies will ever sieze control of important institutions like payment providers or media platforms.
As for dead values, I miss how willing people were to read and write lengthy things. You can go and read old news articles on news outlets and they are significantly longer and more verbose than the stuff that is put out now. Any idea that cannot be condensed into a tweet struggles to spread, and I think this is one of many reasons politics is the way that it is now.
There's a challenge to the succession claims of her kids, but all of the arguments against their succession are like 'I just have a sense for these things. I just know they aren't her kids' or there will be a quiet and vague reference to the fact that her kids don't look like her husband. But no one is ever just like 'she has 5 kids and they are all white. She has blonde hair and her kids all have curly black hair. Obviously they are not her kids'.
In the most recent episode, one character points this out to the gathered court in no uncertain terms and is promptly beheaded for Noticing. His actor even straight up ignores the show pretensions and straight up says that "they're white". I'm amazed that was released via an official channel.
There is no actionable goal in that statement, particularly not if it's coming from a white person. Your friend was uttering the signals they did in order to remain part of and have high standing in their chosen group. The only useful thing you can take away from this is to know that this belies an inherent resentment to a group you (and he) are also part of.
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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2yr ago
I do not think "serious" narrative fragmentation will occur, given that:
Almost everyone I know is in the category of "did what they were told without much fuss" and they have already binned the events of the last 2 years almost entirely in distant weird times category.
Those who suffered little from the virus but much from the lockdowns and are aware of such facts have no one fighting their corner and are not large enough to demand serious restitution. Pro lockdown media has already prepared their inevitable rebuttals, expecting you to forget everything that was done to you in the name of public health. Those times have been brushed under the rug, and now all our woes are the fault of Big Vlad or whoever.
There will be no reckoning, no rapture, and that is a pill so black that light cannot escape its surface.
BaronVSS
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2yr ago
A relevant link to a highly memorable thread on this subject on the original motte.
Ignoring international blowback, the plan has a significant flaw. To establish a nation, and not a handful of disparate gangs battling for control over an area (which is what we have now), some social or cultural cohesion is required between the rulers and the ruled. It is highly likely that the hypothetical billionaire and his security force will be white, or at the very least Western, and thus appear to Haitians as the original french colonialists come again. The current gangs will proclaim themselves freedom fighters against this imperialist threat, and even if you overpower them in a conventional war they can go undercover in a decentralised war which the IRA and Taliban pulled off to great effect.
BaronVSS
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2yr ago
I think there were a few groups/people describing themselves as alt-right in the mid 10s before Donnie came along and the movement entered media prominence. The groups that constituted the alt-right, as perceived by news stories primarily referred to themselves as whichever group they were originally, be they White Nationalists or Seduction types and so on.
It is potentially a useful distinction from the sort of conservativism espoused by older people, which tends to focus on keeping the welfare state alive for the elderly while selecting random populist items, such as re-legalising imperial measurements and cyclist registrations as policy goals.
Currently the term refers to any ideology that places itself in opposition to the liberal mythos, and they are all lumped in together. Bi-weekly we see articles in news outlets that decry the dangers of the "alt-right" recruiting young men and boys to its nebulous banner. If you bother to read the article this is mostly anti-feminism with elements of white nationalism.
BaronVSS
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2yr ago
Kulak's post on humanity's ingrained love of violence and domination.
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/s0e1r7/comment/hsg1z8s/
If we are judged to be ranting buffoons by a third party, what does that matter?
I made a post I think last year on subreddit as to why the echo chamber is the ultimate destination for any kind of social group. Even on this place most people are in alignment on things like SocJus and transgenderism and such. When your style of communication is incompatible with another person's, let alone held values, how can you deal with them? People would rather hang out in places that are agreeable to them.
I remember a particular banpost that was made shortly after Roe V Wade was undone, and there were all these non-regulars you'd never seen before. There was one woman asking about a particular type of diet, and when questioned on aspects of that diet she devolved into ALLCAPS insults. This was a person simply not capable of engaging with the sort of deconstruction of ideas that occurs here. Most people I think are not: to them, ideas gives them grounding in this confusing, frightening world. Ideas are not things they defend with argumentation, they are things they defend with passion.
To you, the old lady was a ranting buffon. Perhaps in her eyes, you were just one of many sheeple.
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.
I wonder if there isn't a vault full of scripts somewhere entitled things like "High Fantasy Series #3" or "Sci-Fi Series #91" that are wheeled out whenever a big studio acquires the rights to a famous name, and the plot and characters of that script are retroactively wrangled to fit that script. It would explain whatever paramount did their rendition of Halo, in which the Arbiter is not an alien prophet but instead John Halo's human love interest and a heaping of necessary space politics so vast it puts the Phantom Menace to shame.
BaronVSS
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2yr ago
I found the railway wording funny, but that's just me.
I don't think it matters at this point what Scott names his communities, the NYT article established him the minds of everyone who matters as deplorable or deplorable adjacent.
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.
Yes it is, and I see not a single sign that this will improve. South Korea's gender politics and 0.78 birthrate beckon.
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