Botond173
11hr ago
Progressive stranglehold on video game culture or video games themselves?
Botond173
11hr ago
Who is the wife?
In this case, nobody. I didn't claim that the game wholly represents the typical male fantasy in the eyes of Blue Tribers, only that it feeds into it. In other words, it goes into the same mental bucket.
Botond173
11hr ago
How confident are you that this extends beyond the Extremely Online?
Not at all. Then again, Gamergate wasn't that different in that regard, was it? I view this as a small and delayed aftershock of Gamergate.
Botond173
12hr ago
According to the results of a search right now, there has been no discussion here of the Pragmata controversy so far.
(There is no Wikipedia article on it, at least not yet.)
I’d put forth the following arguments:
It seems the Blue Tribe generally views Gamergate as a propaganda defeat because they see it as a long-term contributor to the MAGA/alt-right phenomenon but at the same time I don’t think they concluded that they themselves are even partially to blame. Therefore they are looking for opportunities to fight back, and are now including the pedophilia accusation in their attacks on evil gamers. As far as I can say, this was generally not yet the case back in 2014.
I’m also noticing something that eluded me so far, namely that the probable reason why both the original Gamergate (the Zoe Quinn controversy) and the current controversy proved to be effective ragebait to the Blue Tribe is that they are fueling two of their grievances at once.
One: they generally believe that toxic loser men are aiming to police women's sex lives out of resentment and hatred. I don’t think they have anything specific in mind. (I once asked here what this stuff is even supposed to be. I only received one answer: ‘compelling or aggressively encouraging women to not be floozies.’) It’s just a general vibe that makes them feel the ick. It’s why they think Quinn was unjustly attacked.
Regarding Pragmata I think their train of thought is the following: this sleazy game feeds into the typical male fantasy of being the protector and patriarch of a nuclear family where he is supposedly owed sex, affection, food, services etc. His subjugated wife is the idealized woman who is virtuous and yet hot, basically a personal slut. And it’s not like these dudebros are making any effort to be the supportive, emotionally intelligent, suave etc. male ally that is worthy of a relationship, instead they want to realize their fantasies by curbing women’s freedoms. It’s just terribly gross.
Their other usual grievance, of course, is that toxic males want to appropriate hobbies and cordon them off for women, turning them into their own toxic ghettoized playgrounds.
Botond173
13hr ago
It seems there were two separate things going on. One: these regimes generated more internal dissent than non-communist dictatorships. Two: they reacted to existing dissent in more extreme ways than non-communist dictatorships normally did to the same sorts of dissent.
Botond173
13hr ago
In East Berlin pretty young women were known to throw themselves at any travelling West German or Western foreign men at hotel bars, just to have a small hope of escape.
This was exactly the same in Hungary as well.
It's not like the situation in the Baltics was that much better though. If we correct for the negative effects of the Yugoslavian war, that is.
Botond173
13hr ago
The population of USSR and Warsaw pact was roughly 500 million
I checked Google and it seems I was indeed mistaken. I’d add, however, that 2rafa’s argument is still basically correct: the collapse of the ‘90s did not affect all former Soviet satellite states to an equal degree, and the same applies to former Soviet republics.
Botond173
16hr ago
Half a billion seems to be a massive overstatement. Otherwise I mostly agree.
There were also related changes of the same nature. A massive drop in fertility, the rise of suicide rates, a massive rise in alcoholism and drug addiction rates, the reappearance of contagious diseases that were considered to be already eliminated etc. The latter was the result of the utter collapse of an already shoddy and underfunded healthcare system, as was the decrease that you mentioned.
Botond173
16hr ago
I wouldn’t be certain about the former. The state response to Bolshevik terrorism and agitation in the late years of Czarism was, when compared to similar policies of Western nations, actually mild on average. The sheer difference between that regime and the Bolsheviks in terms of the number of people who were sentenced to forced labor or internal exile is also rather telling.
I'll probably regret asking, but how is the robot daughter in the game 'loli-coded'?
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