DTulpa
15d ago
What a take, indeed. What exactly would NPR have to do to qualify as 'too left' in your book? Softly recommending guillotines for the rich in the coming socialist revolution? I bet even that wouldn't count!
Look, we get it. There's about a dozen principled leftists that are keeping laser-focused on 'real issues' who don't truck with facile wokeness. They never count for shit, and the ones who do show up are seemingly always Squad-type woke/socialist hybrids, but they have my sympathies. However, wokeness is a thing absolutely concentrated on the Left, and I don't think you get to cleave yourself from it so cleanly just because you too don't like their company.
Something that increasingly sticks in my craw is modern socprogs appealing to the "invisible hand of the market" whenever something like this happens - that is, when they're not accusing free markets of being corrupt, predatory, immoral, unsustainable, and demand more "ethical" dictats to be handed down from authorities.
If the accusations against Brand are made public, and his audience decides to give him 0 dollars the next morning, that is the invisible hand at work.
If a group of journalists, activists, and politicians bypass audience response and go straight to spooking management to cut him off, that is preempting feedback from the market. You are not letting the hand do its thing; you are calling God and demanding he intervene precisely because your faith in letting the market decide doesn't exist.
As if the decisions and personal preferences of Youtube, Rumble, Amazon, Steam constitute 'the market', and all the rabble like you and I don't count. As if those people (their CEOs or their beuraucratic layers that weigh in on these controversies) are what we are referring to when 'let the market decide' is invoked.
"Jeff Bezos doesnt like Confederate flags because racism, and now he has banned their merchandising on his storefront! See, you free-market right-wing capitalists? The market decided! You have literally nothing to complain about unless you're a hypocrite. Consumers are rejecting your racism."
That's been a decade-long refrain by now, and it has not gotten less idiotic or obfuscatory (by intention, I've come to believe). I'd wager that all these attempts to cut people off from their sources of income, to appeal directly to a storefront's management to have something taken off the shelf, to algorithmically suppress 'bad content' and 'bad people', are actually driven by fear. The fear that if you went hands-off and let the chips lie where they fell, progressives would have to face the truth that their shit is not as popular as they think it is, and oh gawd these peddlers of hate, sexism, racism, PUA-ism, COVID misinformation, election denialism might have more appeal than us! Or at least enough to make us sweat.
That must be psychically turbulent to experience, so best take steps to avoid that scenario. Just cut off some heads and say "Consumers were begging me to do it! Nothing unnatural occurred at all. Im just following the will of the people". And it really explains everything between the night of Trump's 2016 win and what we see today.
As problematic as the "groomer" smear is, I hope it's at least understood that it is also a product of many years of every nuanced, reasonable expression of concern over gender-affirming care being ignored, gaslit, and ostracized as bigotry while medical professionals and academics (plus all sorts of recruited activists from the normal world with no domain experience) ran full steam ahead with their fingers in their ears.
It is not my first preference to 'go there' with hyperbolic and catastrophizing language when discussing these issues, partly because I do have a worry about its spillover on regular LGB people who don't support giving puberty blockers to children. But since the smear seems to be the only thing that has drawn blood, forced my opposition to ocassionally pause or walk things back, and has produced a swelling of support from a subset of 'normal folk', I would be an idiot to urge for its retirement.
DTulpa
1yr ago
They willingly waded into the no-win scenario that I'm sure many people warned them of. Sympathy seems unnecessary.
So let me just try to clear the table a bit and assure you that I'm not too concerned about people marrying their dogs, daughters, or what have you. To the the extent I would draw a connection between gay marriage and our current tensions, it's more in the possibility space that was left in the wake of its victory. For a variety of reasons I find it to be extremely unlikely and just too plain viscerally disgusting for legalized pedophelia or beastiality to ever be digested by society at large. But whereas previously I would have reflexively scoffed at the suggestion, I've lately been reduced to a more meek-sounding "well, that just seems so unlikely" and that shift low-key disturbs me.
I'll accept that your trans friends are much happier now than they were before. The tension is if this has come at the expense of those not convinced of the efficacy of activist talking points applied broadly, those erroneously misdiagnosed at an early age, and social stability on the whole (deleterious as opposed to ruinous). There are always a small number of people that would have their lives radically improved if society rearranged towards their preferences. That still leaves everybody else. Prescribing puberty blockers (or any 'affirmation plan') to minors who show an inkling of gender dysphoria is quite unreasonable to me. Ditto for any reprimands or punishments meted out to people who misgender trans or NB people. Whatever merit the the current gender framework has, I would throw it all in the bin if those are baked-in unavoidable consequences of it. That's before we even get into scenarios like 'penised individuals' raping women in shelters, which - I am not really sure how to totally quantify as a loss on net. Feels like a pretty big loss of something to me! Like a reasonable expectation that nobody would allow such a scenario to be possible?
You say there's no path towards normalization of pedophilia or beastiality because there's a lack of basic impulse for it. While I agree on the general nature of man's sexual proclivites being at headwinds with such a development, I find it hard to reconcile this with the growing body of work that suggests people really can be influenced by their media (read: porn) consumptions, and the rabbit hole of extreme acts hardcore porn addicts find themselves watching, unable to cum to anything less. Clearly our minds are highly susceptible to suggestion, and we now live with a cornucopia of suggestions available at a whim. While I still don't think that's likely to breed a generation of 'pedos and furries' as some doomsayers get on about, I do think you can get some big swings on those margins, and that leaves the question of how we should regard them.
But even deeper than this - and the thing I'm struggling to communicate - is that the language games the Left has played on this terf has nuked a lot of patience, charity, and goodwill that can be generalized to anything else they say. If they are willing to demolish the classic and useful definitions of words like 'man' and 'woman', whilst replacing them with bloated concepts and jargon that are meaningless to the average person, then the sky is the limit. We can do the same thing with words like 'victim', or 'consent', or 'sexual desire', and I have noticed this is already in the water supply. If you want an extension of this principle, see the same dynamic play out with 'protest', 'riot', and 'insurrection'. I am worried that when my opponent says he wants 'peace' as I would understand it, and I reach out for a handshake, he may stab me because "Well, duh. Of course he meant 'peace at your expense' in his local parlance! You can't even say he lied!". When a trans activist or sympathetic ally makes me second-guess what it means to be a woman, it's natural to second-guess any other term they employ that's loaded with ambiguity you didn't realize was even possible a second ago.
It's been a slow trek here, and it's informed by personal experiences as well as the public/political sphere, but the last 15 years or so have gradually cemented for me that humans are a strange species, capable of a lot I had thought was unfathomable, at least in the west. There were a lot of metaphorical guardrails I had taken for granted that were totally banking on people being constrained by 'reasonable' but unspecified assumptions about the human condition. I think those boundaries have already been crossed several times in my mind, which then in turns leads me to believe those boundaries didn't actually exist outside of social conformity and enforcement. Rewind back to 2004 and I'm betting very low odds on people marrying pets by 2024. What odds would I have placed on gender transitioning for minors, had I even known that was going to end up on the table? Assurances that nobody's gonna fuck the dogs doesn't carry the same smackdown it used to.
I've ways had a suspicion that some of the induced hysteria at least in the US was - for some people, on some level - an attempt to hurt Trump.
After Trump got covid, took Remdesevir, ended up fine, and made a public statement to the effect of "Don't be afraid, dont let this take over your life", the unanimous response of 'responsible people' as typified by Andrew Cuomo was "You should be afraid! Covid could kill you!"
I still think about this occasionally; how pathetic it was and out of sync it was with the national character we apparently pretend to extoll. How smart, serious people promoted neurotic, debilitating worry, and the Clown Prince was the one being sensible and imploring some healthy perspective - and then chastised for it despite being ultimately vindicated over time judging by everybody's behavior over the following years after his loss.
I am reminded of Stormfront from The Boys. In a show that revels in trashy awfulness, and really wishes to impress on you the irredeemable bigotry of her character, its remarkable which areas the creators refuse to go. When we have the flashback to her horrific murder of an innocent black man, they can't even muster the bravery to have the N word (or anything similar) leave her mouth. Instead you get childlike utterances like "you black piece of shit" and whatnot. As if her lines were written by a teenager that really really wants an uber-racist villainess, but is mindful to not cross the line and get scolded by his teachers.
I suddenly realized that this show - despite all its outward appearances - does not have any balls.
DTulpa
1yr ago
When Bud Lite gives somebody a commemorative can to celebrate their personal milestone of fake womahood, I would say they've sailed past bland ol' marketing and are deliberately pandering. And while I have a degree of tolerance for pandering, I have grown incredibly tired of the relentless affirmation of falshehoods and poor understandings woven throughout the trans phenomenon.
You want to put a rainbow flag over a six-pack? I think that's cringe, but I'm fine with it because I understand that symbol to be vague and open enough for people to read what they want from it. You want to personally celebrate a weirdo with their farcical, unconvincing transition into womanhood? Well... why? Could you imagine Bud giving commemorative cans to Dolezal for her inspiring journey into 'blackness'? And what would the reaction from the hoi polloi be? Sure, it wouldn't affect me personally. But it would be such an opportunity loss to not criticize it as abjectly stupid, or to question what the hell Bud was even thinking when they greenlit this stunt, and to also point out this pattern in marketing is increasingly ubiquitous from all major brands.
No, this doesn't affect the taste or quality of the product. But the cultural assumptions and messaging being baked into media and ads - now coming from your 'classic degenerate US beer company' - are absolutely obnoxious and demanding a pushback. What specificially is Bud celebrating here? What values are they displaying when they treat Dylan's transition as some legitimate thing that isn't to be questioned? Does the average employee even believe it? Or are they just going to continue ramrodding this shit, and once cornered default to "Hey guys! We just want to be nice and inclusive, no big deal! Choo choo", as if there isn't
a festering sociopolitical rat's nest of unexamined assumptions and contradictions roiling underneath?
"I just consume what I like and pay no attention to the marketing" is very much where I'd like to be, and probably where I still would be if this was the era of non-political Budweiser Frogs. Unfortunately, I have learned that I 'live in a society', and wokeness is intent on appropriating and weaponizing everything it can get its hands on; 'forcing' consensus through pop culture while skipping over every serious deliberation that could undercut it.
The Mulvaney cans are one of the biggest flexes I've seen, in many ways because of Bud Lite's preexisting image of a low-class red tribe beer. As if to say "even this territory can be conquered and made fabulous and gay, and boy aren't you the dysfunctional non-nice weirdo if disagree with any of this". One wonders why this whole performance - separate from the beer itself - might piss people off.
It took decades for Left Inc to finally 'police its own' and issue denunciations when some of them unapologetically stated they had no issue with the externination of Jews - despite this strain of antisemitism being loud and obvious to anybody paying attention and who wasn't wrapped up in the coalition. And this just so happens to coincide with wealthy donors shutting their purses. Sure.
Ditto for the insistence that elite higher education was essentually unassailable, had no duty to accountability or obligation to explain itself to the plebs, and only caved when the extent of Ms Gay's fraudulence became too much to ignore - after bravely standing to her defense with a super-serious official Harvard letter and several weeks of articles accusing her critics of being anti-black.
Compared to the reflexive denunciation ritual every Republican or conservative has to partake in when somebody points to a Nazi and accusingly asks "DO YOU HAVE A COMMENT ON THIS?". Nope. You don't get to casually claim superiority on that front. Perhaps you are saddened that you see less of those denunciations 'over the last 8 years' than before, but it's obvious to me that this fruit doesn't have much juice left to squeeze, and that is entirely your fault.
EDIT: I don't know how I could have written that bit on Claudine Gay and completely whiff on the most odious part of her case: that her fraudulence went uninvestigated, unpunished, and was generally rewarded due to political interests in an institution that is supposed to value academic excellence (ha ha, I know, at least 'on paper'). Gay isnt a bad actor operating all on her own. She gets to her position with the aid of a corrupt system that will crow about their prestige and integrity every day of the year, right before they pivot to "actually, this is pretty normal, and uhh... we don't really need that kind of pedigree for something as boring and unserious as college president". And you consider her an 'extremist'? She's very normal to me, and my only surprise (which isn't, really) is that some Dems are belatedly unhappy with or embarrassed by a creature that is their own making.
Do you have a right-wing closet Nazi analogue you'd like me to condemn? Somebody who isn't a Substack writer, or a third-rate grifter on a platform thats probably throttled to hell and back if it hasn't been outright banned from the Play/Apple store?
DTulpa
6mo ago
The entire fervor for removing Confederate statues, flags, and other icons is one that has been revived within the last decade. And no, linking to some historical griping about it at any point in the last century prior to the 2010s doesn't mean anything. Their removal wasn't some natural conclusion long in the making after distance from the Civil War. It was an opportunity seized during a time when the country was already tilted sideways with Trump and BLM - a time when emotions were constantly overriding everybody's mental buffers. The Confederacy and its legacy were retrofit as the cause and explanation for modern day racial ills, and made a convenient target to destroy in a flex of political power.
Ten years prior you would see the flag on the car in the Dukes of Hazzard remake, and the film even has the playful cognizance to joke about what that means today. Since then, we have awoken to its evil power and must take drastic steps to not just hide it away in a dark vault, but destroy it behind people's backs? I don't believe it, and I would need a lot more than "it makes black people feel bad" (a point of merit) to be at ease with this given I don't trust or agree with any of their other newfound heuristics or behaviors.
His belief in creationism would have gotten me hot and bothered in the 2000s. In the time since, I have watched his 'betters' - people with no attachment to millenia-old superstitions and fueled only by the love of science and compassion for others - quite possibly exceed him in the strangeness of their beliefs and the ruination in their consequences.
I'm an unrepetant atheist who has nonetheless softened towards religion, if only because the notion I once held that "less religion = more good ideas can flourish" has been badly beaten (pending status on survival) and because I have been shown being non-religious isn't an antidote to stupid thinking. And no Young Earth Creationist of status is going to give me any lip about my white privilege or grease the wheels for a child's gender transition.*
I reckon it's a two-way street, but I feel like there's this endemic failure for some people to model the minds of people who are totally unphased by this, especially those of the 'smarty pants' variety typically seen here. 'Man walked with dinosaurs' is ridiculous to me, and it has practically nothing to do with any given culture war item today. And even if I may personally scoff at his beliefs, I'm betting he may be a more reliable ally against things I also oppose, even if our reasoning may diverge at times.
*Some indicators the speaker may not be 100% reliable on that front. But as to the question why his creationism isn't a deal-breaker or remotely a topic of my concern, the above still stands.
DTulpa
8mo ago
I believe the Holocaust occurred and I've seen no reason to doubt the quantity of reported fatalities. Like you, I am suspicious of SS' motives and wary of their presence here. I frankly skip 90% of their posts.
However, the Kamloops controversy has been discussed numerous times both here and at the old place. It is completely reasonable for somebody of any political inclination to be irritated with what appears to be another runaway moral panic that was sanctified by government representatives and MSN narrative crafting.
If there's an indictment I wish to make, it is against this absurd situation where "truth bombing" on subjects like this may have to come from SS-types occasionally. Because in an ideal world with an honest media, there is no need for hand-wringing about SS' ulterior motives. He doesn't even come up, because the consensus on "Kamloops mass graves" would be that this was overblown and hysterical, as informed by the CBC (and CNN, NBC, etc).
I didn't even notice who made the post until I got to the comments. Learning that SS was the OP on a topic that has been of interest to me certainly doesn't make me happy. But I am more annoyed that going against the grain on the Kamloops narrative may be increasingly pattern-matched to genocide denial in general. That's certainly not SS' fault. Or my fault. It is certainly somebody else's.
DTulpa
1yr ago
Too many syllables, and I can't tell who its supposed to resonate with.
Is there a large contingent of Rs that would nod in agreement with the 'sanctimonious' label? Sanctimonious about what, exactly? The things that they already broadly align with him on?
It would be more understandable if Trump was appealing to Democrats with that jab. But it's still nowhere near catchy enough. Disappointed.
I sympathize with your vexation here. I'm not sure how productive these discussions can be if we have to regularly pause for interjections of "you haven't assigned enough (or any) blame to my outgroup". I think he could have made a better post than that.
At the same time, I also think we would be remiss to completely talk around a very obvious link between female promiscuity and popular progressive feminist messaging. A certain subset of men may benefit the most from modern dating/hook-up college, but this culture has never been broadly or enthusiastically condoned by men, at least out loud. A man may be happy that prostitutes exist if only to satisfy his base urges, but he's not exactly proud of it. And since humans aren't consistent, principled thinkers - while he may be happy that some women sleep around if only for the opportunity for him to get laid, he's probably not thrilled to find out his wife/girlfriend had dozens of partners prior to the current relationship. "X in the streets, Y in the sheets" kinda sums up the attempted propriety.
By contrast, it is feminism that has railed against "slut-shaming", argued that women who sleep around are unfairly judged compared to Chads, whitewashed sexual exhibitionism as personal exploration, and so much more since at least I was in Jr High. I'm not even interested in blaming anybody for our current state of affairs - just an admission that there is an obvious (if not clear) relationship between the dashed expectations of young women and this ubiquitous ideological memeplex. I don't think you can assign more culpability to men for herding women towards the Sex Party - gently pushing against their backsides and reassuing them to not worry, this will all be so fun - versus an industry of Grl Power media that is assumedly produced mostly by women.
As such, I am not interested in curbing or punishing legions of cheating/insistent men that potentially threaten the structural integrity of our society. Not until we dial the lens out far enough to indict a few other groups. Zero interest in "getting men to play by the rules again" when both sexes have defected from them (with women running the full sprint, one could argue), and when the fairer one routinely acts like it never has any agency in these affairs whatsoever - which is unacceptable when you've spent decades trumpeting how you know what you want, you are self-empowered, you don't need anybody to hold your hand or 'mansplain' things to you, and being chaste is just an insecure demand from the patriarchy.
Short of actual rape, there's a lot I'd give amnesty to until this conversation space starts looking halfway reasonable. But I'm not optimistic, and it is for that reason I reluctantly agree that this wound may not heal. All the "stitching up" has to happen on the men's side, and women act like they're just oblivious passengers that never saw the dozen road signs warning "POTENTIAL LANDSLIDES AHEAD".
DTulpa
11mo ago
A single individual writing an email about how they "don't need anymore useless black men" would trigger a virulent autoimmune response from everybody within reach of it. So much so that even if the writer truly felt those words, they would self-censor them knowing full well that their livelihood would be terminated as a consequence. The individual who writes such a statement in professional context with their full name attached to it doesn't exist, given the aforementioned. And even if they did, excusing a lack of reproach from their surrounding peers because "it's just one person" would not be sufficient in the eyes of most people. Correctly or incorrectly, we expected full-throated condemnation and ostracization to signal to everybody else they're on the good pages and do not tolerate bigotry.
If we have reached the point where describing whites in this fashion is just some modern-day faux pas that oblivious people can just innocently and accidentally stumble into - without any forerunning mental checks that would usually trigger the "Wait, does this sound racist?" moments of introspection people have had cultivated over the last half century, then that is quite telling. The negative space around people who write emails like those in the OP is instructional precisely because it doesn't trigger all the same fiery noise and ra-ra that would never fucking end if skin tones were inverted.
Irritating, but may be for the best, at least in my use case.
I copped a permaban several months ago and the Twitter app was basically rendered useless, removing all my follows and forcing me to seek out individual pages to see their updates. And since I didn't care enough to deploy workarounds to create a new account, apps like Fritter at least allowed me to save and organize my follows, even if I couldn't post. Now that's dead as well, and it's easier to walk away from the whole thing.
I've also noticed that the old trick of Googling your query with 'reddit' appended has become less useful, with many subs having gone private or requesting age verification. Most of these platforms disgust me at this point, but it was hard to drop the compulsion of 'checking in' after years of usage. If they want to assist me with kicking the habit, I'll accept.
DTulpa
1yr ago
I have no nostalgia for the original film, mainstream action blockbusters aren't really my thing, and a 'nostalgia sequel' several decades since is usually an instant write-off. I'm also very cynical of the modern Hollywood landscape and its output.
So I did raise my eyebrow at all the positive word of mouth for Maverick. I figured I'd sign myself up for an experiment and see what all the fuss was about, expecting to be pleasantly surprised by the movie being fine, but that's about it. So I can't overstate the level of shock I experienced when I left the theatre liking it. Like, really liking it to the point where it was my film of the year; painfully but decisively edging out Northman and Everything Everywhere (both films I loved and am more likely to rewatch). Those are certainly more 'interesting' films with stuff to chew on. But the sheer triumph of Maverick's execution felt anomalous and worthy of attention.
The plot was predictable, and I could see all the the filmmaker tricks for setting up drama, humor, and romance getting telegraphed in realtime... but by god, it worked on me. And I'm not sure I can tell you exactly why it worked on me, despite all my intellectual defenses manning the barricades. I'll admit that time and place probably have something to do with it. Maverick wouldn't have been notable to me ten years ago, whereas my experience at the cinema last year felt like an oasis in a desert of films compromising themselves one way or another for 'modern audiences' or tinsel town sensibilities.
One consequence of seeing Maverick is that I am now more askance towards films attempting to be 'clever', 'heady', 'subversive', or 'topical'. These are not bad things to aspire to be, but I lately feel like so much of the conventional wisdom for making good characters, tone-appropriate humor, and satisfying narratives has been sacrificed for those things. Like a film or show isn't really legit or worthy of one's attention outside of a lazy weekend afternoon unless it's busting tropes, sending up conventions, or lampshading itself with a too-proud self-awareness.
Then Maverick comes along and reminds me that films are experiences, not masturbatory intellectual exercises. And if the experience worked for you, questioning how it works is like questioning a magic spell. As Mr Plinkett said, 'you may not have noticed, but your brain did'. Maverick felt scientifically designed to positively engage my senses with such satisfaction that my cynical brain was effectively being told to STFU, and that can really only happen to me if it's doing its job well.
(Additionally, all my friends who saw it have had similarly glowing reactions. I took my grandfather to see it as well, and the level of enoyment he had would seemingly indicate this man hard been starved of films he likes for decades.)
DTulpa
1mo ago
Some people have a political commitment to toe the party line on GG, regardless of the thin air it turned out to be.
I remember when the stock line was "Gamergate is driving women to suicide online". I don't recall any body counts materializing, or any posted receipts, but everybody moved on as if they hadn't proclaimed an utterly vacant falsehood. They memory holed that particular spike of hysteria, casually downgrading back to the ambiguous but exploitable terrain of 'harassment campaigns'.
If there is a single death I can even tangentially connect to the GG saga, it would have been the suicide of Zoe's ex-boyfriend after she marked him for a feeding frenzy. That there was a concerted effort to suppress the criminal, dead-fucking-obvious irony of this among journos and fellow indie developers showed me how strong the woke meme game is when it matters.
DTulpa
2mo ago
I don't undertsand why the 'tiny minority' argument still gets play on here of all places.
The issue is not Lizardman's Constant. The issue is society needlessly and uncomfortably contorting itself to accommodate Lizardmen. I've said it elsewhere here, but trans activism has reached into my world on several fronts over the last decade, twisting up everything from hobby groups, to corporate politics, to the software I install prompting for pronouns. This is all possible even without even so much as sharing room air with trans person.
I may be a simpleton, but - there is something infuriating about the follow-up 'What consequences are you so worried about?'. And I'm really not sure in the specifics! Call it a hunch, but I think the officiated dissolution of the man/woman binary will manifest in a thousand indirect and different ways down to the level of how one socializes with other people. And the amount of confusion and irritation it produces will never abate. They're building a house without a ground floor, because they think floor boards are just ugh trivial.
Inseparable from the issue of medical care for trans children is the entire 'gender ideology' that some worry threatens to permeate every aspect of public life in a way school shootings don't, by definition. Obesity probably inches closer to that, what with the fat acceptance movement and the glamorization of unhealthy celebrities. But it's hard for anybody to take the fat man seriously for complaining he's being charged two tickets for filling two seats on a flight. Gender affirming care and the ideological umbrella it operates under is one of the few things where criticising or doubting it from any angle, in any context, to any degree can risk severe professional and often personal disadvantage in a way other political or social topics don't despite their polarization. The only other subject matter I can think of that prompts this 'zero-tolerance' treatment is race. By contrast, I don't think my employer really cares that much about how I feel about climate change, even if it annoys them. I'm not risking a lawsuit if I think the science is 'fake and gay'.
Given that, I don't think it's too surprising that trans issues will get more fuel because it's something we've found will raise its head anywhere and everywhere in due course. I haven't been to a high school or been a teenager for decades. Meanwhile, 'gender crap' is something I have to endure on multiple fronts both public, personal, and professional. And it can be this way even if a trans person only physically enters my orbit once a year.
DTulpa
6mo ago
Because those aren't what's being teabagged. It's modern day 'racist southerners', similar deplorables, and fellow travelers that are the true target, and the banishment (now celebrated destruction) of Confederate iconography is a good proxy for that. It is a flex not just over southern pride, regional history, and heretofore popular mythology, but also over anyone that doesn't like to see current progressives' thoughtless pursuit of cleansing art and media rewarded.
I have no ties to or love for anything Confederate. It's not in my family tree and I was bred Blue tribe enough to reflexively mock the whole modern shtick of it. Do you think I object to the statues' removal because Lee is a super cool dude and slavery was no big deal, or what?
DTulpa
1yr ago
I've had a similar beef with mod hosting sites like Nexusmods and Moddb regarding their recent removals.
Mods in the past could be downloaded from multiple different hosts and mirrors, but usually required you to have the awareness to seek out the dev's website. Sites like NM gave a lot of convenience of a central location for downloading, managing, and discovering content, with community tools for ranking and feedback. These days it's common for NM to be the only host for many mods, and removals were typically reserved for the truly heinous and illegal. While not perfect, it felt like a spirit of community collaboration mostly divorced from politics (more the norm 10 years ago than now) was working fine.
And now we see mods removed for petty political reasons, with the platform owners basically saying "Tough shit. You're paranoid. Don't like it? Delete your account." And boy would I (I even donated to you guys in the past!), likely while still begrudgingly downloading their hosted content without logging in. But now it seems many mods require a NM accoint, and so my options are to eat shit or just not play the mod. And if you were a modder who wanted to pull your own mods from the site in protest? Too bad, NM has made it so all mods are archived to preserve compatibility with other modlists.
It's such a blatant flex - "We dare you bigots to cut yourself off from the primary platform for modding" - and one they can only afford because of their position. I should not be feeling nostalgic about Filefront and Fileplanet.
I don't think so. If Coil is anything like me, he's had some experience fighting the Christian Right in his heyday before The Turning. We have a rough familiarity with what the average US Christian tends to value and believe because we spent years sparring with it. As outsiders, our understanding may have been necessarily imperfect, and our arguments motivated. But we could detect the general shape of the thing, and it did not include 'love poor migrants', 'the kids are totally fine', and 'kiss black people's feet'.
That may be a generalization (it is), and I may not be a Christian (I'm not), but it's not impossible for me compare where Christian status and power stood in my youth versus today. I can't NOT notice how that ad panders to so many modern lefty sensibilities, meanwhile actual churchgoers I know are decidedly on the Right, regardless of what their religious leadership decrees towards the purpose of modernizing the faith. Is there any cultural bone they could have thrown to social conservatives (y'know, the foremost representative group in US Christianity), or would that have been too icky?
Like... don't show me an ad full of lefty tokens with every group that's been earning side-eye getting their feet smooched and pretend my criticism is some sort of gatekeeping. It's disrespectful to my old foe, and I just feel bad for them.
Nobody was advertising Doom or rap to children, or if they did it was with the faintest of plausible deniabiltiy. Whenever there was some media firestorm over kids consuming 'inappropriate' content, the creators would perfunctorily gesture towards the ESRB rating system or parental advisory labels. The culture of days old was hidden from your parents, not championed as good medicine by media and its authority figures (official or otherwise). You hid the M-rated game from your Mom, and you didn't pop Eminem into your parents' car stereo on the way home from your school. If the opposite was the case, other families thought it was strange if they found out. There was - for lack of a better word - shame, feigned or otherwise, around letting your kids wildly consume subject matter above their intended age range.
I'm not sure what youth culture is into these days, partly because times do change, partly because it's hard to separate a clear signal from all the 'modern audience' astroturfing. But I find it hard to believe that the current environment - laid on thick by a PMC class of 30-somethings and older, still steeped in yesteryear's cultural battles - is a genuine, undistorted expression of the real thing. You had to overcome some barriers to reach the naturally-alluring experience of shotgunning demons to bloody ribbons in your favorite heavy metal album cover. Who today has to seek out or hide away woke content, as opposed to having it dumptrucked into their mouth by Disney or similar?
Is there anything more singularly obnoxious than a Reddit thread of smug shots at Elon Musk? According to them, apparently he doesn't know electricity and servers cost money. And firing most of the worthless staff at Twitter was the worst self-inflicted wound anybody could have ever made!
You ask why this causes bafflement, but do you really think these idiots know something he doesn't? That they have a better grasp of tech and its funding than the man who has a history with payment processors, cybercars, rockets, and now social media - and Elon is just bumblefucking his way to success? I'll grant that he is human and more error-prone than his godly 4d troll image would have some believe. But give any one of his businesses to a chump in that thread (or a group of them) and watch it go belly-up or taken away from them under their noses.
Maybe Musks's single qualification over these people is that he doesn't post on Reddit. A lot of Musk criticism clearly comes from a type who thinks they could do the same job he does even better if only the world had been more fair and gave them the opportunity to do so. It's laughable and contemptible in equal measure.
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