Botond173
12hr ago
e.g. those "hands chopped off" pictures are something the natives did to each other and the Belgians actually tried to stop.
That part isn’t actually considered to be controversial at all. Leopold ordered a local armed force (gendarmerie) to be set up, commanded by European mercenaries and recruited from locals, with arms and ammunition being shipped in at great expense from Europe. As the officials were worried that the recruits would use the ammunition to poach local wildlife, they forbid hunting and ordered the hands of any killed rebel/saboteur/bandit/deserter etc. to be severed, collected and presented to command as evidence. Instead of suppressing poaching, this resulted in a black market where soldiers bought up severed hands from local tribesmen. It’s a simple case of perverse incentives. Everybody in power knew well that cutting of the hands to plantation workers for whatever reason is counterproductive and thus not to be condoned.
Botond173
13hr ago
Has anyone seen the recent miniseries M: Son of the Century streamed on Sky? As far as I can tell, it generated little attention outside Italy even though the director is an Englishman and there not being many other subjects that could conceivably generate more controversy than the conception and ascendance of fascism.
Botond173
13hr ago
I'm pretty sure it'd have been entirely possible to restrain and arrest her without resorting to lethal force. She was just an average White normie.
Botond173
13hr ago
There’s a recent German-Slovakian historical drama entitled Führer und Verführer (“Leader and Misleader”) about the life of the infamous Nazi propaganda minister Dr. Goebbels. I imagine it only had a rather limited release in the US and the UK (it surely has no Wikipedia page in English). I thought the movie is well-made altogether but nothing new really – also the cast pretty much looks generally scarcely like the figures they are supposed to portray – with the glaring exception that Hitler’s character not once behaves like a raging lunatic and does not even raise his voice at all. (I remember that the movie Valkyrie was the same in this regard, but it also only showed Hitler on screen for no more than a few minutes.) I never imagined that I’d ever see a German movie like that. Can definitely recommend.
Botond173
14hr ago
A jumped-up, corrupt demagogue fascist indeed, who pretty much only had a real chance of winning only because activist judges aligned with the EU/GAE Deep State barred another jumped-up, corrupt demagogue fascist from running.
Botond173
14hr ago
So nobody comments on the recent Romanian presidential elections? I'd say it's a twist that's interesting from a culture war perspective.
Botond173
4d ago
It also bears mentioning that Playboy used to release a multitude of (mostly) short erotic/softcore movies on VHS. Supposedly subscribers could receive them via mail-order for an additional fee or something, and cable channels also broadcast them. I think this was important in terms of brand recognition and building, especially in an age when distribution via VHS was still the norm. Before the age of cheaply available broadband internet it was much easier to control the distribution of such content and limit piracy/filesharing.
And it’s also unironically true that Playboy usually featured interesting articles as well.
Botond173
4d ago
I guess it’s just a simple case of scarcity. Women tend to either have well-shaped tits that are small, or big tits that are often misshapen and saggy, and of course get increasingly saggy with aging, which most women are terrified of already. Only a small minority of women have the sort of ideal breasts that earn you a Playboy photoshoot, so small that it’s impossible to fill all titty mags only with pictures of them. Hence the sad and pathetic proliferation of bolt-on tits.
Botond173
13d ago
I agree with hydroacetylene's reply. No offense meant, but your argument is the equivalent of the "I don't know anyone who voted for Nixon" meme.
Botond173
13d ago
The next day, one of this mom’s younger daughters said something that sums it all up: “I’m graduating, and I’ve never danced with a guy.” Contrast that with her older sister, who just seven or eight years ago came home from prom having danced with seven or eight different young men in one evening.
I'd say there's a high probability that the younger daughter is homely-looking and standoffish, comes across as sassy and somewhat insufferable, whereas her older sister was both pretty and demure or at least didn't come across as hostile/difficult, and therefore stood out. Regarding the seven-to-eight-year timeframe I guess it may seem too short but I think it makes sense. Cultural changes generally happen in cascades/waves I think, with more remote/isolated communities experiencing changes later, to a lesser degree or almost not at all. We can generally tell that there was a period in the US culture war when gender was absolutely at the forefront of it, but it's entirely possible that a community such as this was not yet reached by this back in 2017/18.
Botond173
18d ago
Fair enough. But this raises a couple of issues.
Green space and sidewalks would swiftly get taken over by fentanyl junkies, mentally ill homeless and other bums. What would you prefer to be done about it then?
Should the new bike lanes/paths be designated as bikes-only? If yes, should bike use be restricted on other roads correspondingly? This is a rather thorny question.
Botond173
18d ago
I think the issue is rather that the people usually targeted by armed and/or violent criminals are the ones using public transport who get attacked after getting off the vehicle and walking, because they make convenient targets.
Botond173
18d ago
What would you prefer to use all that precious public space for instead? Build public housing? Grow crops? Build public parks? Bike-only paths?
I also wonder just what % of lethal car accidents occur within city limits.
I don't disagree with what you wrote but I think it'd be much more simple to just say that this is pretty much something only the working class and the underclass engages in anymore.
Botond173
1mo ago
Can anyone explain the Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid reference? I just don't get it even though I've seen S1.
Botond173
1mo ago
we saw signs of harm that the war on drugs was causing
Is this specifically meant to be a reference to the incarceration rate of black men?
Botond173
1mo ago
Also being a city with no hinterland, in which virtually every citizen travels abroad regularly.
How does any of that matter in this respect?
Botond173
1mo ago
The Blue Tribe's Long March succeeded because the Red Tribe was either entirely unaware of it happening or assumed that it's politically irrelevant. It's never going to happen the other way around.
At this point in time all this makes scant difference. French society is in terminal decline, ideologically captured and on an irreversible path of racial replacement. In this it's not different from other Western European societies, of course, but one aspect that does set it apart is its proven ability to regenerate and transform itself by itself through upheaval and bloodbath. After all, it's no coincidence that the current French republic is the fifth such in history. This is something the Germans or the British will never be capable of doing.
Ignoring all that, it's a great write-up indeed.
Botond173
1mo ago
I find it rather telling that the one regime this tribe constantly holds up as the bright shining light of model liberal democracy is the FRG i.e. former West Germany. It makes sense, as it’s an otherwise nonsensical polity that was artificially created by first merging America’s local zone of military occupation with those of Britain and France i.e. states that economically and militarily depended on the American empire for their very existence after 1945, and then absorbing another fake state, the GDR into it in 1990 and then lying that this constituted the “reunification” of two sovereign states. It’s clear as day that this whole power structure exists under the tutelage of the US Deep State (also under the strict understanding that it continues to economically aid Israel) and that there’s not a single citizen of the FRG that may assume any high-level position of local authority of any sort before being vetted for years by NGOs, foundations, universities and other tools of said Deep State. This in itself explains why this whole political organism is heading straight towards voluntary self-abolition and annihilation.
///
Just to nitpick in a friendly manner: I suggest that instead of linking to two dozen or so comments, you post the first comments of comment chains / discussions where you participated.
Botond173
1mo ago
Once it became clear that the term had outlived it's usefulness
I'd add that the Manosphere was clearly able to exist as long as it did due to a very peculiar cultural milieu where Blue Tribe feminists were ramping up the culture war, but the Trump phenomenon, the alt-right, the meme wars, Gamergate etc. did not yet exist.
Botond173
1mo ago
Andrew Tate was able to make a name for himself precisely because he obviously took detailed arguments that were posted on Manosphere sites that have been defunct for many years, repackaged them and dumbed them down, and presented as his own in short videos and whatnot. His followers believe him because they don't know any better, because again, those sites are no longer accessible. He's exploiting the death of the Manosphere.
Botond173
1mo ago
A long time ago @Lewis2 made the following accurate (I think) sociological assessment:
Long afternoon naps and constantly falling asleep in front of the TV (or at least, constantly watching TV) are traits I would associate with lower and lower-middle class suburbanites and urbanites. Most of the older men I know are (semi-) retired farmers, small shop owners, professors, or blue- and white-collar workers who saved enough to be solidly middle class. These old men still help with the farm, cut firewood, paint the siding, clean the gutters, mow the yard, garden, hang out with their friends, golf, do a bit of carpentry or mechanical work, and so forth. Even in their old age, they’re typically still quite a bit stronger than their wives, which enables them to continue doing the more moderately physically-demanding tasks for longer.
It caught my attention back then because the first sentence is a perfect description of my father, even though he technically counts as a more or less solidly middle class suburbanite. It made me think about the everyday lives of the plebs and the various ways this life trajectory is markedly different from that of the classes above them in the social hierarchy. I’ll offer some arguments about this here, as I don’t think this would be valid content in the culture war thread.
One sociological observation I’ve read on dissident blogs is that the plebs and their rulers have radically different notions of retirement and leisure. Middle-class and upper-class youths are conditioned from early on to have low time preference, so they generally have at least a vague idea that a proper life goal for themselves should be a comfortable retirement spent travelling and doing other fun stuff after a long and fancy career. This, on the other hand, entails that their youth is to be focused on studying, busting your ass, networking, building connections, learning marketable skills, keeping up appearances. It’s obviously no fun, but it’s still necessary.
For the pleb, such considerations don’t appear, one obvious reason being that high time preference is the norm for him. The argument that he should plan ahead for a long and happy life would seem laughable to him and doesn’t even occur to him. The lives of plebs are uncertain and messy. As far as they’re concerned, the time to have fun, feel unburdened and do what you want is in your youth, because you cannot be sure about what comes later. In other words, their lives are generally front-loaded.
If you also consider that the only jobs available to the plebs are the shitty menial jobs, whether they entail physical labor or not, this means that the plebs doubly exploit themselves: they perform shitty jobs that heavily tax either the body or (in the case of shitty office/cubicle desk jobs and the like) the mind while at the same time routinely endangering their health: eating crappy processed/fast food all the time, binge-drinking, using all sorts of shitty illegal drugs, abusing prescription drugs, smoking, staying up late and not having enough sleep in general, partying, developing addictions etc. The combined effect of all of this is that the pleb turns into an overall wreck by the age of 50. What does this mean exactly? Your knees and back give out, and your liver and heart are all fucked up. Just moving your arms around can be painful in itself. In general, you’re in constant pain, and can call yourself lucky if you don’t get addicted to painkillers. Even if you have a nice garden/backyard, you can no longer cut firewood, paint the siding, clean the gutters, mow the yard, garden, do carpentry etc.
You never had much intellectual or spiritual curiosity to begin with, and the goyslop/prolefeed you’ve been watching all your life on the TV or your phone has rotted your brain as well. And when you stop working and retire, you lose the one source of daily stimulation and sense of direction and purpose you still had. This is the thing that explains “long afternoon naps and constantly falling asleep in front of the TV”. Never in your life did you read literature or had any interest in history, culture, arts etc. and it’s not like you’ll start to do this when you’re old already.
You become bitter and irritated, staring into the void of the abyss as Nietzsche described it. Most of the friends you used to have are now dead, crippled or sick and require regular care. Once you retire and your children reach the age when they no longer need to be looked after and it’s no longer necessary to organize events where they can play and hang out with other kids, you no longer have much of a reason to interact with your acquaintances of the same age, and your social circle erodes and eventually disappears. This is why elderly male social alienation/isolation is a big issue.
Again, all of this experience markedly differs from that of the middle and upper classes. I assume many of the regulars here belong to these classes and yet not have a general awareness of this, which is why I posted it here. (I don't think it belongs to the culture war thread.)
The mainstreamed Atlanticist narrative is that the Soviet famine of 1932-33 was a genocidal policy of mongolized Russian imperialists masquerading as Communists specifically intended to exterminate the proud and ancient Ukrainian nation. It should be pointed out that questioning any part of this claim openly will earn you condemnation for being a Russian agent.
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