FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
But in the tiny sliver of overlap where the culture war actually intersects with your personal life in a way where you finally could conceivably stand up and actually sacrifice something, you're all talk (and not even in person to your coworkers' faces)? Can you forgive an admirer of yours for seeing this as weak, disappointing, and hypocritical?
Certainly. Since you ask, though, allow me to provide additional context.
FC stands for Faceless Craven. I joined this community explicitly to better understand the threat posed by Social Justice ideology, and I did so from the start with a strong awareness that maintaining anonymity was extremely important. My introduction to Social Justice in its modern form was getting "cancelled" by a close friend for speaking the truth in good faith, and having experienced the process first-hand, I had zero intention of ever repeating the experience. Seven years later, that intention has not changed. I have made a serious effort to maintain anonymity, do not attend meetups, and consciously remove or obfuscate most personal details from my posts.
This specific topic has come up semi-regularly over the years, and my advice on the question every single time has been to prioritize protecting yourself, to keep your head down, and not to play stupid games for symbolic prizes. Progressives have built a massive, interlocking system of social control backed by the power of the state, specifically to abuse people who expose themselves in exactly this way. I do not think marching into a meatgrinder is brave, and I do not believe that those who do so are setting an example that will inspire a hundred others. they will be significantly harmed, those harming them will suffer zero perceptible consequences, and the harm they suffer will be used to intimidate the rest of society. I've made no secret of this view, or about the fact that I do not engage in any significant political speech in public under my own name, to the point of avoiding lawn signs and bumper stickers. I do not believe that I live in a tolerant, pluralistic society, and I see no point in making it easy for people who have openly declared their intention to abuse people like me.
Everyone does say that, which is why Blues keep winning. It's a classic collective action problem.
I mean, not everyone says that. Some people do in fact stand up bravely. Most of them get promptly crushed. Awareness of the nature of the collective action problem has greatly increased, and yet none of the people who periodically attempt to resist it actually succeed, even a little. Most normies are still oblivious to the problem's mere existence. Almost all normies have no comprehension of the sheer scale of the problem, how deeply entrenched it is into every significant social system.
There was a time, early on in the original forum, where the "we all just need to stand up at the same time" argument seemed, if not persuasive, at least colorable... And then Damore wrote his letter, and got promptly smashed. The other side is not looking for dialog. We are not participating in a good-faith conversation. The problem will not be solved "if only Stalin knew". Progressivism is not a common-knowledge problem that will go away if enough people just say "no", it is an intentionally-created and -maintained system of dominance, and dismantling it is going to involve a considerable amount of bitter conflict.
"Well, my small contribution wouldn't make a difference - they'd just fire me and hire someone who'd acquiesce", you might say.
I don't think the stuff I make provides any significant contribution to the general problem. I don't think I could persuade my boss that we shouldn't be making it. I don't think the stuff I'm making is evil enough to refuse to make it on moral grounds. There is a difference between compromising and being compromised, and it seems to me that this is the former. It is humiliating and infuriating when I have to deal with it, but humiliation and infuriation are part of life. I use the money to make a home for my wife and my children, and I put my effort into things that might actually make a difference.
I'm not trying to shame you. Well, okay, maybe a little.
That's fair enough. It's legitimately shameful.
But I am actually genuinely curious whether you conceive of a grander justification for your small participation in the Blues' battle. Are you biding your time? Are you under the impression that the solution is going to be political and thus our personal actions in non-political life aren't actually making things worse?
"Be nice until you can coordinate meanness". The important term there is coordination. Fighting a civilization-spanning system of control as an individual is a bad idea. In the long term, the goal is to find ways to coordinate large-scale resistance, or to develop capabilities that increase the effectiveness or lower the costs of that resistance.
On the coordination side, politics is a dandy coordination mechanism, but individuals have little impact on it. Integrating into healthy local-level communities and, if possible, hardening them against Blue infiltration and attack seems more immediately important. Building a family, having kids, and raising them properly seems like the most important thing of all.
On the capabilities side of things, my personal efforts are in the general spirit of Defense Distributed. The goal, as I see it, is to find and exploit significant vulnerabilities in the existing gun control regime, and to develop techniques that move us as close as possible to a state of weapons being, for all practical purposes, uncontrollable.
In all of these areas... Guns aren't valuable because you can use them to fight the Blues. Guns are primarily useful because they serve as a coordination mechanism, a banner to rally around. Politics isn't useful because winning an election means winning the culture war, they're useful because they are a coordination mechanism. What we need to be coordinating is a complete rejection of Blue Tribe, of Progressivism as a whole, root and branch. In order to do that we need to build common knowledge of what Progressivism actually is, what its actual history is, how it actually works, and what steps are necessary to actually dismantle it. Most of my participation here is focused on trying to gain an understanding of these questions for myself, such that it can be communicated persuasively to others, and especially to normies who don't spend all day Very Online.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
sorry, was mostly reacting to the contrast between my own perceptions going in, and my perceptions now that I've had direct experience...
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
I stay up pretty late by nature (generally to 2 or 3am), and my wife has done most of the nighttime wakeups when I wasn't already awake. Taking it in shifts, we mostly get by, but there have been a couple nights where at 4:30am, the baby's wide awake and cooing, and I want to cry... but holding them while they sleep is incredibly nice. My kiddo being especially wiggly and refusing to cuddle under most circumstances is probably also part of it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Hopefully you have more sense than to film yourself and call the police on yourself if anything needs to be handled.
I'm familiar with the incident, and I think my assessment differs pretty significantly from yours.
By contrast, Gardner and Zimmerman are actual examples of responsible self-defense against blacks being subsequently railroaded by the local, state and federal authorities. The best defense against this is to not live among Blues, and it is a strategy I pursue; it won't save you from the Feds if the Eye of Sauron falls on you, but it's a good option that I recommend to all Reds.
While TV ads may actually accurately represent the proportion of black Americans in your environment
They don't, at all. I've repeatedly agreed that TV ads (and shows, and movies, comics, print media, video games, pretty much all visual media) vastly and intentionally overrepresent blacks and intentionally frame them as positively as possible, to the point of complete absurdity. I've offered my own evidence that this is an intentional, conscious choice being made top-down by the media producers, backed by an engineered perception of consensus, itself maintained by bullshit social harassment tactics.
None of this means I need any of this blatant propaganda to see normal, productive, law-abiding black people, because there are literally tens of millions of them, many of them living in my immediate environment.
they still vastly overrepresent the proportion in mixed-race relationships, and most of these actors don't have a southern accent either.
Entirely true, and I'm fully aware of the stats on mixed-race divorce, elevated rates of spousal abuse, etc. Black people have a lot of problems. A fair number of black people are a problem, in the sense that they are committed to violence and lawlessness and there's nothing to be done about it but avoid or defend against them. And yet, there's many millions of black people who are not like that, and avoiding the one and coexisting with the other is more or less a solved problem in large swathes of the country. The obvious existence of absurdly-huge volumes of anti-white and pro-black propaganda doesn't change this fact. Blacks aren't even the source of the Propaganda; Blues are.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
My mom did in fact live in a lower-middle-class borderline shithole southern hood. She tried her hand at the real estate game, and ended up renting a house out to a black guy, who promptly got himself jailed. The renter's sister and her family promptly moved in and started squatting, had to be evicted, trashed the house in the process, and my mom ended up selling it at a loss.
I have no idea where the "controversy", "selling the house to a wealthy acquaintence", or "high-five-figures" parts are coming from.
I suspect this has a lot to do with it, yes. Also, I live in an area that takes the Second Amendment and self-defense generally pretty seriously, so if there is a genuine problem we can probably handle it, and are relatively unlikely to get screwed after the fact by the powers that be.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
waking up in the middle of the night to take care of them
This can be rough, but when you successfully soothe them and get them to sleep again, it feels really good. Compare the popularity of Dark Souls; there's something to be said for succeeding at a challenge.
changing their diapers
This is so little trouble it's barely worth the mention.
Then I'd see white people, Indians, Asians. There's only so many middle-class black people to go around, and they are not equally distributed across the country.
Black people of any class aren't equally distributed around the country. famously, 51% of suspensions from school given to black students as punishment were given in the 13 states of the former Confederacy... which is where 51% of black students live, because it's where 51% of black people live.
Police chiefs, judges and surgeons are not 'moderately successful' imo.
Pretty sure black police chiefs aren't exactly rare IRL. Judges I have no idea about, but I do enjoy Clarence Thomas. Surgeons I have no idea about, but would expect "Blacks less likely" to apply.
The average American knows that 'black' neighborhoods are not places you want to spend too much time in
Sure.
'black' schools are not places they want their kids to attend
Sure.
and unless they personally know Mr Smith down the street, a black face in their neighborhood is cause for some concern.
Nope. There's too many middle-class black people where I live, way too far from the actual ghetto, for this to be a realistic concern. This isn't the 60s. Nice neighborhoods don't turn to shit overnight when blacks flood in from the ghetto. We've built an elaborate social system that pretty well precludes that particular mistake from being repeated, barring overwhelming and abrupt government action. The blacks moving in can afford the housing prices, which means they've more or less got their shit together.
The ones that ads usually portray are basically 'average middle-class white American but dark-skinned' and I really don't think that's that common.
And I'm telling you that "average middle class white american but dark-skinned" is what a notable portion of my neighbors look like. I'm lower-middle-class. I'm an artist, I don't make programmer money. My wife and I together are barely making it into six figures. We are not big shots, and neither are our neighbors, and yet a fair number of them are black.
Why would this be surprising? Given that Blacks are Less Likely, and given that most people are doing pretty okay, you should expect the bell curve on Black economic status to have a fat left tail and generally be shifted leftward, but otherwise to have roughly the same shape per-capita. So there's a lot more poor blacks and a lot less rich blacks relative to whites, but the middle portion of the graph is going to be fairly similar.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
If you want to see black people in respectable professions, all you have to do is go to where the people with respectable professions live. I'm not sure about "wonderful", but they're certainly reasonably relatable.
The diversity propaganda is absurd and oppressive and very obviously intentionally so, but that doesn't make the large percentage of reasonable, peaceable, moderately successful black people stop existing.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
We evolved to have children not to enjoy children.
I used to think that. I was very, very wrong.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
It appears that the only chance to see successful Blacks in respectable professions (not political/grievance activism but as judge, police chief, surgeon...) or as quiet, satisfied customers is when they are acting, directed by non-blacks.
Alternatively, I could take my dog for a walk.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
But why is that the option?
Because virtue signaling works.
From a manager's POV, they can either get staff to spend X hours working on getting progressive acceptance or X hours on making the actual customers want the game more.
Pretty sure my boss thinks the customers are all progressive as well, and he knows the middlemen between us and those customers are progressive. It's cheap advertising.
For example thinking of ways of making the game more fun or more mesmerizing, the story more compelling, etc.
Diminishing returns. We've already spent between hundreds and thousands of hours on those objectives; meanwhile, we'd spent zero hours shilling for this particular progressive cause.
Wouldn't a brainstorming session 'give me the most controversial idea that you think could create press / make more people interested in the game you can think of' be just as valuable if not more?
That's actually probably a pretty good idea, but it's clearly the sort of idea a bad person would come up with. You don't want to be a bad person, do you? People don't like bad people.
Perhaps having a character say dirty, sexist or racist jokes could make the game more interesting.
"Every day, there is a Main Character of twitter. Your goal is not to be this person." I mean, it's definately possible to succeed that way, but it's an extremely high-risk/medium-reward sort of strategy.
I can't imagine what kind of pressure the people working there are working under, being creative within extremely narrow guidelines.
It's generally not so bad, but it certainly has its moments. Diverse characters make pretty much everything harder, for approximately zero actual benefit. A lot of character design is exaggeration and cartooning; when you apply exaggeration and cartooning to a POC character, you enter a minefield, since anything resembling a stereotype has to be avoided. You can make a white character look dumb as a post, or criminal, or malicious, or lazy; doing these with a black character is capital-P Problematic. there's workarounds to the problem, which of course inflict their own forms of damage. Our game has male and female characters of various non-human races. The best way to make non-human female characters look female is with female signifiers, which are now understood to be sexist. and on, and on, and on. We go a couple months without having to deal with this horseshit, and then it pops up again, and you grit your teeth and do as your told until it goes away again. We had a no-shit full-bore SJW on the team injecting this stuff non-stop for a couple months, but they got let go when it turned out they didn't do any of the actual work they'd been hired to do, and then we got to crunch for a couple weeks straight to get done what they'd been supposedly working on for the last six months. After they were gone, I tentatively floated reversing some of the progressive bullshit changes to the art they'd demanded, and got immediately shot down. Haven't made that mistake since.
So it goes.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
Making a good game with innovative, fun gameplay, interesting visuals and story, compelling characters etc, would definitely make you (commercially) successful as well.
Sure. But while you're doing that, you also want to be a good person, and you want the extra boost of being seen to be a good person, and you definately do not want to be called out as being a bad person, because that could be disastrous.
The fear of failure is considerable. The desire to do anything possible to increase the chances of success is likewise considerable. And that's why I burned a couple days some time ago making art for a progressive fundraising campaign that I absolutely despise and that had zero to do with our product, but that my boss thought might get the company some good press. You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
I don't need to ask why. I've sat through a couple impromptu diversity lectures over the years. Both the indy space and Triple-A are completely dominated by progressive voices. The entire gaming press ecosystem is rabidly progressive. Influencers are more balanced, but everyone the boss knows and everyone the boss respects, cares about, and wants to impress are all on one side. You want to show your game at PAX, you want buzz, you want people cheering you on and giving you good press, well, there's a set of beliefs and behaviors that get you that, and there's another set of beliefs and behaviors that definately will not.
I could give more examples, but I'll leave it there for OPSEC purposes.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
Every time we made a piece of art that didn't have POC/gender balance in it, our boss told us it wasn't diverse enough and we had to remake it to be more diverse. This complaint never was made for anything involving villains. It took a dozen iterations before we started internally discussing where to put the diversity in a given image during the planning stage, and we still frequently are told that the images aren't diverse enough and we need to add more. Any time we do an early mockup with stock images that aren't themselves diverse, we're reminded that the finished version has to be diverse. I'm indy; the boss tells us directly.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
I work in video games, you may recall. I've recently been making art for the in-game stories, and for promotional material. It has been communicated to the art team that representing diversity is a requirement in every image by default, with rare exceptions. Diversity means non-white and/or female, preferably both. Exceptions are images depicting individual characters (some of whom are still allowed to be white, but of course are balanced by the requirement that other characters be non-white) or bad guys, who are of course not subject to diversity requirements. Assuming you aren't depicting a villain, white characters are required to be balanced by diverse characters. Diverse characters are themselves, of course, balanced already and need no corresponding balancing.
I'm a little amused that we're still debating whether this sort of thing is happening. It's absolutely happening.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
So was the sexual revolution a failure?
Short answer: categorically, yes.
Long answer: What's your understanding of "the sexual revolution"?
school administrator told me to my face that, with regards to state education law and their ongoing violation of it in my case, "The law doesn't matter. The law can say whatever it wants," but what matters is what you can get a court to enforce "and I know your parents can't afford a lawyer."
This is the sort of thing you really ought to get on tape.
And I don't see the basis for your confidence.
Most people don't. That seems like a good thing, on balance.
At some point, one has to admit that war is lost. If the Red Tribe has not yet clearly passed this point, then where is that point?
When our will to fight is broken. At the moment, we're still ramping up toward conflict, and it's still possible that conflict can be precluded through more-or-less peaceful resolutions of the existing points of contention. Once conflict actually starts, it will be too late for talking about it. To the extent that the risks of such a conflict are not generally appreciated, it seems to me that no benefit to Reds is derived by elaborating them. If the only reason Blues might not oppress Reds is that they're not sure they'd be able to do so without mortal consequences, fighting is probably preferable than perpetuating the existing "peace". In which case, overconfidence and obliviousness on the part of Blues is a strategic asset worth preserving.
Your position, it seems to me, could come from one of a couple premises. Either you think Reds lack the awareness, the will, or the capability to successfully prosecute a fight with Blues. I think the Culture War demonstrates sufficient Awareness. Will and capability are intertwined: the greater the capability, the less will is required, and vice versa. You are assuming that people wait in their homes for the SWAT teams to come for them, which it is not clear they will do. Further, you are assuming that the capability is limited to our ubiquitous autoloading cartridge-firing weapons, and that assumption is most certainly not valid. The value of personally-owned firearms is primarily political, not strategic; the political fights over gun control are useful to coordinate within Red Tribe over the question "is it time to fight?". Once the question is answered to the affirmative, it seems to me that autoloading cartridge smallarms largely go to the sidelines.
As for what defeat looks like, if blues can successfully confiscate personal firearms, inflict serious social and legal consequences on non-woke Christianity, and maintain something approaching the current economic and socio-political conditions, that would pretty clearly be a victory for them in my book. I think it very unlikely that such an outcome is achievable, but you are free to think otherwise if you wish. Time will tell.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
The last several years are best modelled as a massively distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. You are betting that the methods this search has discovered so far are more or less the best methods available. Having examined the question at some length and with a particular frame of mind, I am confident that your assessment is wrong.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
It's cliche to say that "education should be about teaching you how to think, not what to think," but I think that's actually a pretty decent goal.
One might equally say that fabrication is about making sure the right atoms are in the right places. And equally, that would be a decent goal, but just as equally, we don't have the tools to do it.
You can absolutely teach people how to think, to at least some degree. The degree you can achieve this goal, in a general population sense, using the existing tools of the educational establishment, is so extremely limited that no value is gained from trying. The system evidently works for ideological indoctrination, and it conceivably could function to teach basic skills, were it reformed. There is no evidence supporting the idea that it can actually mass-produce "well-rounded individuals", or "teach people how to think" in any meaningful sense.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
I don't want to build society on a bedrock of delusions.
Neither do I, yet I note that much that replaced Christianity as social bedrock has been quite explicitly delusional. Secular Materialism talked a good game, and then when people actually committed to it, they went utterly mad. Meanwhile, us Christians continue to chug along, succeeding by the Materialists' standards as well as our own.
What I (probably obviously) meant with 'uniformly' is that humans are very varied and it's entirely implausible that a nation wouldn't have over 1 in 20 people who, by your standards, it'd be obviously an unforgivable and titanic evil to murder for their 'wickedness'.
Humans are quite varied in the forms of evils they choose. They do not vary much in whether or not they choose evil. They do. They don't even vary that much in the amount of evil they choose: they generally choose quite a bit. Nor is evil divided into "minor" and "serious" grades. It's divided into the kind whose harmful effects are obvious and the kind whose harmful effects are subtle, but both kinds lead to misery and death, just as both kinds are endlessly justified by the individual engaging in them.
It seems to me that you are looking at people, and assuming the average person is "good" and only the obvious outliers are "bad", somewhat similar to how we handle terrestrial justice, where we mostly leave each other alone against there's an immediate, obvious, grievous offense. Therefore, you're saying that the murderers and the thieves and the rapists are legitimately bad, but most people are okay, and even if we assume most people aren't okay, at least five percent have to be okay. But that's not an understanding I share. The quiet boy who takes the abuse and does nothing in return can still hate the abusers in his heart, and probably does, if my own experience is anything to go by. Likewise for the street beggars and the elders and the men who do their jobs and "don't bother anyone". There are a lot of ways to embrace evil that don't show up in crime statistics.
Further, there have been societies within the last hundred years that were massively more complicit in evil than our own, where either direct participation or at the least complicity in really obvious, immediately harmful evil was more or less society-wide. Revolutionary Russia, Cambodia, and China come immediately to mind. Maybe you are right, and the society we are in has one in twenty who aren't evil. Maybe that's why we survive. Or maybe doom is around the corner, and we'll wake up tomorrow to a few megatons of instant sunshine.
Again, consider the example of China nuking one of their provinces because it was 'wicked'.
I have no expectation that anything China does is done for reasons of virtue or justice, because the Chinese government, like our own, seems quite wicked. On the other hand, we firebombed Japanese and German cities, incinerating hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, because they were citizens of empires that spread slaughter and atrocity across the globe. I don't think the fact that this was done to them was unjust. Do you?
This just ... highlights ... the absurdity. Okay, God, right now, glasses America. Is this good?
It's not hard to think of reasons why we'd richly deserve it. A couple centuries of slavery, sixty million abortions, endless lawlessness, routine acceptance of evil and injustice... The list of potential reasons is long. We are not a righteous nation. I am certainly not a righteous person, nor are most of those I know, even those who, like myself, put some effort into actively trying to be more righteous than we've been in the past. I believe the peaceful, happy life I enjoy is an example of divine mercy, not something that I deserve for my goodness. This has served to calm me considerably through the culture war, a reminder that as furious as I grow with those on the other side, I am in no way better than they are, and so have no right to hate them. What they do is fundamentally no different from what I have done, and will doubtless do again.
You're just giving a billion times as much deference to things in the Bible as you would anything else.
A billion times seems like an exaggeration. I give it a fair bit more deference than I give to other things, because it provides the best axioms I've found. Or to put it a bit closer to the local parlance, it pays considerably more rent than any other worldviews I've been able to test.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
Again, it is obviously untrue that the whole world was uniformly wicked and deserved to die, or that an entire city was uniformly wicked and deserved to die.
They don't have to be uniformly wicked. It's enough for them to all be some level of wicked, which the Bible asserts they are, for reasons that I think, based on my own introspection and observation, they probably are. We all have it coming.
...oh. that makes a great deal more sense.
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