FtttG
User ID: 1175
So, what are you playing?
Well over a decade ago I watched Yahtzee's review of Catherine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_(video_game), a weird puzzle-platformer from the people who made Persona. Although Yahtzee was iffy on the game, I thought it sounded like it might be my bag, but at the time they hadn't released a PC port. I picked it up in a Steam sale a few months ago and started playing it last night.
I'm really liking it so far. It's very funny and quirky, the core gameplay is deceptively simple and much more challenging than I expected, and it's oozing with style.
FtttG
11mo ago
Liara Kaylee Tsai, a Trans Woman With “Incredibly Powerful Energy,” Found Dead in Minnesota.
First things first: this is an unspeakable tragedy, I feel terrible for this person's friends and family, and anyone cracking jokes about "their pronouns were was/were" is disgusting and should be ashamed of themselves.
This article is remarkably forthright, refusing even to lie by omission:
An autopsy determined that Tsai died from multiple sharp-force injuries, though it’s unclear when she died. Lewis, an acquaintance of Tsai’s who was visiting her from Boston, has been taken into custody in Olmstead County and charged with a felony count of interfering with a dead body and second degree murder, according to local outlet KTTC. Olmstead County Sheriff Kevin Torgerson told MPR that there was no indication that the killing was motivated by anti-trans bias, as Lewis is also trans.
I predict that this will go one of two ways:
- It will immediately become widely known that Tsai was murdered by a fellow trans person, trans activists will figure it's not worth the trouble to use this to attempt to advance their agenda, and the story will vanish into the ether.
- Other news outlets reporting on the case will be much less forthright than this one and darkly hint towards the murder being motivated by transphobia without explicitly saying so ("at a time when Republican administrations across the country are rolling out legislation designed to limit trans people's access to restrooms and lifesaving medical treatment, Tsai's death is a timely reminder of..."). There will be a steady stream of politicised candlelight vigils across the US. If you think trans activists wouldn't stoop so low as to use one trans person being murdered by another to promote a narrative of widespread transphobia - tell that to Brianna Ghey (and Matthew Shephard, by extension).
FtttG
1yr ago
a society gaslighting women into thinking casual sex is empowering
Nice way to pass the buck there, blaming this on "society" rather than "feminist media".
The first example is spot on, and it's pretty much the same as the OnlyFans one (very attractive women stand to gain, others less so).
My opinion that unions are evil is largely based on the negative externalities they impose on society, the distortionary effects and inefficiencies they wreak on the economy and their strong and not-at-all-coincidental historical affiliation with organised crime. I don't really have a strong opinion on whether the modal worker stands to benefit by joining one or not.
FtttG
2yr ago
Seconded. I believe that gender dysphoria is a real medical condition, but also that some people may misidentify as transgender either out of honest confusion about their gender identity, or maliciously in bad faith.
A society in which self-ID is the legal standard has collapsed that distinction, and sees no difference between a trans person who has suffered gender dysphoria since childhood and who has been taking hormones for years vs. a person who gave no outward indication of suffering from gender dysphoria, only "realised" they were transgender immediately after being convicted of a crime, and who has no taken no steps to make themselves more closely resemble a member of the opposite sex.
Now you have to accept the bad actors as members of your own group. You made this bed, now you have to lie in it.
They don't seem to be trying to deceive anyone about just who and what they are; as you say, the leader is non-passing. Calling her a "her" isn't a lie, it doesn't obfuscate the facts; no one's walking away thinking she's got a uterus here.
Bad actors, including violent people, have a vested interest in deceiving people that they are not bad actors. Male people are vastly more likely to be violent than female people. Hence, when a violent male person demands that everyone refers to them using female pronouns, people who don't know them personally will not unreasonably assume that they are female, and adjust their risk calculuses accordingly. Behaviours which would rise to the level of "red flag for violent or threatening behaviour" if committed by a male person will not result in a batted eyelid if committed by a female person. You can say "we've redrawn the category boundaries such that the word 'woman' now includes certain male people (with all the propensity for violence that that implies): adjust your expectations accordingly, and it's not our fault if you erroneously assumed that this person referred to as 'she' was female and didn't think she posed a threat as a result". But let's be real: 90% of people (99% of non-extremely online people) hear "she" and think "female person", and assume that said person is exactly as prone to committing an act of violence as any other female person (which is to say, not very). Even if the person is familiar with the tenets of gender ideology and knows that the category "woman" includes some tiny proportion of male people, they will assume that any person referred to as "she" is a female person unless they have good reason to believe otherwise. The fact that one tiny corner of human society has redrawn category boundaries in order to use the word "woman" in a nonstandard way doesn't change the expectations 90% of people have about people who are referred to using the pronoun "she", and no one is more aware of this than bad actors looking to get away with bad behaviour.
If an article about the Zizians includes a photo of LaSota, it will be obvious that LaSota is male, and people will update their expectations about LaSota's behaviour, threat level and risk calculus accordingly. But many articles about the Zizians do not include any photos of LaSota (I only found out what they looked like earlier this week). Likewise people talking about the story on the radio or on podcasts. So an article which says "LaSota says that she thinks so-and-so... she was last seen crossing the border into Mexico on [date]" will be interpreted by a significant proportion of its readerbase as an article about an uncontroversially female person who poses no more threat than any other uncontroversially female person. Even referring to LaSota as a "trans woman" doesn't get you out of this hole, as a significant proportion of the general public thinks the term "trans woman" refers to a female person who identifies as a man. (Never mind native Anglophones who are unfamiliar with the finer points of gender ideology; what about non-native English speakers to whom the term "trans woman" means nothing?) If "I'm using this common word using my nonstandard definition, I am fully cognizant of the fact that most people use it with its standard definition and know that most people will assume that I am using this word with its standard definition" isn't "obfuscating the facts" (or, less charitably, lying), then I don't know what is.
Bill Clinton may have been technically telling the truth when he said "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky" according to the stipulative definition of "sexual relations" which only refers to PiV intercourse. But I have zero qualms about saying he was lying when he said that: in common usage, sucking someone's dick or inserting a cigar into someone's pussy absolutely falls under "sexual relations", and Clinton knew this, and he knew (indeed, hoped) that people would interpret his statement as a denial of any kind of sexual interaction with Lewinsky at all even if he'd only technically denied having PiV sex with her. So when a significant proportion of the population is unfamiliar with gender ideology and assumes that anyone referred to with the pronoun "she" is female, if you refer to a person as "she" and neglect to specify that the person is male, you are obfuscating important facts about that person whether you like it or not. And if you retort "it's not my fault those people aren't woke enough to know that not every woman is female", I'll respond with about as much sympathy and understanding as if Clinton had said "it's not my fault people are so uneducated that they don't know the legal definition of the term 'sexual relations'." Truly honest communication necessitates taking your audience's level of education and ideological leaning into account.
FtttG
11mo ago
As noted by Freddie deBoer, woke people tend to endorse the concept of rehabilitative justice most enthusiastically, but have two weird carve-outs: any kind of alleged sexual misconduct, no matter how innocuous; and using or mentioning racial slurs in any context. Any white cisgender male who commits one of these infractions is assumed to be unclean forever and always, no matter how much punishment (legal or otherwise) they may have endured.
To be fair to woke people, this attitude is at least consonant with one of their other typical opinions: that gay people are "born this way", that sexuality and gender identity are congenital and hardwired. If this is true of gay people, why wouldn't it also be true of paedophiles (a group which I think it's totally reasonable to characterise this guy as a member of)? And frankly, I think almost everyone essentially shares this attitude. For all of you people wishing him well and crowing about woke hypocrisy, I have to ask - how comfortable would you feel about leaving him alone with your twelve-year-old daughter or niece?
Representing Ireland is a (sigh) non-binary singer-songwriter calling herself* (sigh) Bambie Thug. Her decision to participate was controversial, with many figures in Ireland's music scene likening her to a scab worker for not honouring the Eurovision boycott in protest of Israel's participation. She has given multiple interviews defending herself and insisting that she is acting in accordance with her values. I believe I read somewhere that she claimed she was originally planning to wear a dress with the word "ceasefire" or something to that effect emblazoned on it in ogham (am ancient Irish script) but the Eurovision people made her wear something else.
*Don't care.
FtttG
1yr ago
Was it his physical appearance that was the problem?
No, it was his social awkwardness, introversion, lack of people skills and narcissistic entitlement - his physical appearance had essentially nothing to do with his loneliness. I very much doubt going to Alaska for however long would have helped him with any of the above.
It's like how "2024 AD" means "two thousand and twenty four years after Jesus died"; you're making a fairly simple error if you think our calendar system relies on the existence of an actual biological Jesus.
This seems like a fundamentally flawed analogy. The choice of the year 1 as the starting point of the Gregorian calendar was arbitrary, meaningless and didn't refer to any actual historical event (even most historians no longer believe Jesus Christ was born in that specific year), but changing calendars is an enormous hassle, so we're stuck with this one even if it's based on something which is ultimately arbitrary and irrelevant. With you so far.
But the "clusters" that are based around the words "male" and "female" are not meaningless and arbitrary. In fact, the concepts associated with these words have more predictive power than almost anything in the biological (never mind social) sciences. For instance: 100% of human babies born via natural birth or C-section were gestated in the womb of a person whose body produced large gametes i.e. a female person. Conversely, 100% of the human people who impregnated another human person were people whose bodies produced small gametes i.e. male people.
Of course there's loads of ancillary, arbitrary and irrelevant nonsense associated with these two categories of human being (there's no reason that people whose bodies produce small gametes shouldn't wear pink clothes or dresses). But pointing out that there's loads of ancillary irrelevant nonsense associated with a given category of entity doesn't mean that the category itself is meaningless, or that the category doesn't "cleave reality at the joints" in a manner demonstrative of underlying physical laws. Boats still float on the water even if they are given a male name and no one gets around to smashing a bottle of champagne against the hull. "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
FtttG
2yr ago
Last year I was dating a girl who worked for this public policy research organisation. She was telling me about a study she was writing, which argued that private secondary schools use different methods for teaching students than public schools do, which explained why private students do better academically and professionally than public students.
I found her optimism touching, even heartbreaking, and immediately started reciting all of my best talking points from Freddie deBoer: it's all genetics, the children whose parents can afford to send them to private school tend to be smarter than the children whose parents can't; "school quality" and "teacher quality" have pretty much zero bearing on educational outcomes and are almost pure signalling; if you sent all of the private school kids to a public school and vice versa, you would see essentially zero change in educational outcomes in either cohort; and so on and so on.
I dunno. I feel like to work in this space you're essentially required to have drunk the blank slate Kool-Aid. Hearing her talk about how, if public school teachers just adopted this One Neat Trick then we'd end up with a generation of working-class astrophysicists - I dunno, it's a similar feeling to when an otherwise intelligent person wants to read your horoscope.
Before you are three closed, identical boxes. The first box contains two silver coins and nothing else. The second box contains two gold coins and nothing else. The third box contains two coins (one gold and one silver) and nothing else. You have no idea which box is which, you cannot see inside the boxes, and they are mounted to the wall so you cannot lift them to estimate their weight.
You reach your hand into one of the boxes and withdraw a gold coin. If you reach into the same box to withdraw the second coin, what is the probability that that coin is also gold?
FtttG
1d ago
So much of modern leftism has Gnostic parallels, it's unsettling once you know what to look for.
FtttG
2yr ago
If Western Europe had America's demographics , crime there would go through the roof.
And if my grandmother had wheels she'd be a bicycle. What does this even mean? "If the UK was more like America, it would be more like America." Like - yeah?
FtttG
9mo ago
Also the manga section keeps growing. I'm not surprised that American comics seem less popular than ever, but I am a little surprised at the manga growth.
If the staff are very woke, this doesn't surprise me. How can you be pro-trans without also being pro-anime?
You've often compared the Hock to fighting in a war, Navy SEAL training or other physically taxing tests of endurance and determination. Your theory assumes that anyone who undergoes a Hock-esque ordeal would never commit a mass shooting (as Rodger did), but I don't even have to go back earlier than this week to find an example of a military veteran doing exactly that. Can't wait to hear your rationalisation for how it doesn't count because he only went through boot camp.
I reiterate: if you want to do your camping trip, go for it, but don't delude yourself into thinking it'll fix all of your problems in one fell swoop, or that it's the underlying secret to human civilization or a male rite of passage or similar. I'm not telling you this out of spite or meanness: I'm urging you to manage your expectations and be realistic. You say "the Hock provideth" so often it's starting to sound like a religious incantation, which is not a healthy approach to adopt in the pursuit of self-improvement.
FtttG
2yr ago
I've done the most clichéd thing ever and bought a gym membership in the first week of the new year, and I'm looking for suggestions for exercises and routines to follow.
My main motivations for working out are to improve my mood, and vanity. I'm not interested in getting "huge" or "shredded", but I would really like to get rid of my beer belly and look generally leaner and more toned. I'm also planning on running a marathon at the end of this year, so any exercises which would assist with that are also welcome.
I don't really know anything about strength training, so currently my only goal is to be able to deadlift my body weight (~83 kg) in a few months' time.
FtttG
1yr ago
digging back to the ancient year of 2009, Climategate
Am I the only one who finds Moldbug's writing style completely incomprehensible? He rambles on for paragraph after paragraph, smugly self-assured, and at the end of it I come away with literally no idea what he's trying to say. The only thing I'm confident of is that, whatever it is he believes (which is something I am wholly unable to glean from the actual content of what he's written), he thinks it's so self-evident that you'd have to be an utter cretin not to already believe it.
It's an experience not unlike reading TLP/Edward Teach, but at least in that case the incomprehensibility does seem to be deliberate (for whatever reason).
FtttG
10mo ago
I suspect that a lot of these benefits in practice are only afforded to biological females and to males who make enough effort to signal that they are serious about their gender identity.
According to Spiked:
In the tiny Spanish enclave of Ceuta on the Moroccan coast, almost 50 people have legally changed their gender since 2023. The vast majority of them work in the military or police – and 39 of them have changed from male to female. Only four of them have even bothered to change their names.
...
Aside from growing his hair slightly longer and wearing earrings, Perdigones has apparently made no effort to present as a woman. He hasn’t even bothered to shave his beard.
I think it's reasonable to assume that a male who's unwilling even to change his name to signal his commitment to his newly discovered gender identity is unwilling to remove his testicles or undergo hormone therapy.
I don't know what on earth makes you think you are disgusting and hypocritical for wanting a relationship now. There are plenty of people who post on this site who are in relationships (myself included) or even in marriages - are they disgusting hypocrites for getting into said relationships without toiling in the Arctic circle for months? Why, of all things, is that the rule-in criterion for who is entitled to be in a relationship (or even entitled to want to be in a relationship)? Should the human race go extinct because most people can't afford to travel to the Arctic circle for months at a time?
I know you're going to give me some self-pitying/self-deprecating spiel about how all those people in relationships have actually made something of themselves, which means they're entitled to want a romantic partner - unlike you, who's so uniquely loathsome and contemptible that he ought to be euthanized unless he can Prove his Worth by etc.. To which all I can say is - bullshit. I haven't made much of myself (overweight, temporarily living with my parents, failed writer, failed musician, boring email job) and have had more than my fair share of attacks of self-loathing over the years - but the last time I actually thought there was something suspect about my desire to be in a relationship, I was a literal teenager. Wanting to be in a romantic relationship is the most normal and healthy desire a human being can have, regardless of life circumstances. I literally cannot envision any person, no matter how pathetic or loathsome, for whom knowing that they would like to be in a romantic relationship would lower my estimation of them - if I met a literal convicted murderer who killed children without remorse, and he said "I'd like to have a girlfriend", that wouldn't cause me to think any less of him. I cannot even fathom how you arrived at the conclusion that the desire to be in a romantic relationship is only legitimate conditional on having achieved XYZ, and is otherwise disgusting or hypocritical. For that matter, I can't, offhand, think of any desire meeting that description. A paedophile's desire to rape children does not become any less disgusting because he is a war hero; wanting to be rich is a perfectly legitimate desire to have, even if you are a lazy bum.
The more you tell me about your worldview, the more baffling and incoherent it seems to me, and I wish you would actually try to seriously consider the well-meaning criticisms or questions people have raised about your beliefs here, rather than just dismissing them with "no, you guys have it all wrong, it's Hock or bust." You've clearly been thinking about this stuff for so long that you've become trapped in a groove, a web of cached thoughts that you can't snap yourself out of. For someone who claims to be uniquely loathsome and awful, you seem to be suspiciously confident that your diagnosis of yours and society's ills is 100% accurate, and your proposed remedy 100% guaranteed to work. It's very easy to circle all the way around from self-loathing and end up at arrogant condescending solipsism (God knows I've done it myself), and there's something uniquely unbecoming about this cocktail of victimisation complex, self-pity and egotism.
So, do me a courtesy. Without any evasions, cop-outs, goofy stylistic flourishes ("provideth", "ambulances", "-maxx") or romantic fatalism (and without invoking the [extremely statistically rare] anecdote about the acquaintance of yours who was stabbed by his partner) - please tell me, in plain language, why you think the fact that you want to be in a romantic relationship makes you a disgusting hypocrite.
A lot of Marxist false consciousness and its derivatives seems very reminiscent of certain ideas about the demiurge.
The Matrix is obviously a big Gnostic metaphor (the machines have pulled the wool over our eyes and trapped us inside a false reality, we must see the truth and escape into the real world; machines = Demiurge). The Wachowskis later claimed that they'd always intended the film as a metaphor for coming out as trans, which inspired a lot of eyerolls and accusations of revisionism. But I don't think that's the case at all, I really do think that's what they intended at the time of writing:
the reason this interpretation doesn't jump out at most people is because they're approaching gender ideology from the perspective of "most people are cis, but some people are trans and that's okay and they deserve respect and compassion" as opposed to the perspective of "everyone is trans, but most have been brainwashed into believing they're cis - freethinkers whose eggs have hatched see the truth". Cypher is a detransitioner and also a cowardly traitorous villain: not a coincidence.
Everything about trans activism, really, has Gnostic undertones: the very concept of a "gender identity" which is wholly distinct from one's sex is obviously sneaking dualism in by the backdoor, but the way so many trans people talk about being trapped inside these nauseating flesh prisons and their transhumanistic desire to mould, slice and sculpt their bodies to better achieve their embodiment goals carries a big whiff of it too. This is part of a broader trend since the emergence of the internet towards Gibson's "relaxed contempt for the flesh": the tendency to see your body not as "you" but as a tool or vehicle you are controlling. Sometimes this can end up in weird science-denial places: fat acceptance activists who deny that the laws of physics apply to human beings just as much as anything else, that the only thing that can cause disease is mean words and fat shaming. It almost seems to come off like a denial of the existence of an objective external world: instead, we are all just souls trapped inside flesh prisons, and the only way one soul can be harmed is if another soul inflicts harm upon it.
At the extremes, you get into whatever the Zizians were doing, with their outré decision theory ideas about doing whatever it would be optimal for every one of your paraselves to do elsewhere in the multiverse - but they're a noncentral idea of the trend I'm describing.
It's possible you may have heard of the Irish hip-hop trio Kneecap (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kneecap_(band)), most of whose lyrics are rapped in the Irish language. They're best-known in Ireland and the UK, but recently they've begun to establish themselves in the US as well, to the point of performing in Coachella and selling out their US tour dates.
Their lyrics are often political, and they've been unabashed in their support for the Provisional IRA, their opposition to the British monarchy and government, their support for the Palestinian cause, and their concomitant opposition to Zionism. Their political lyrics have landed them in hot water with the British establishment on occasion (as they're from Northern Ireland, they're UK citizens even if they "identify as" Irish), with current Tory leader Kemi Badenoch once denying them an arts grant on their basis that the band "oppose[s] the United Kingdom itself" (a decision they successfully appealed).
Recently, the British government discovered footage of the band performing some time ago, during which the performers could be heard yelling "Up Hamas", "Up Hezbollah" and instructing the audience to assassinate their local MPs (it's unclear to me if all of these statements were made during a single gig, or individually during separate gigs). As a result of this, the band are being investigated by British police, because public expression of support for terrorist organisations is a crime in the UK (insert your own "loicense" jokes here). Their fans and many of their fellow musicians have come rushing to their defense. The band now claim that they have never supported Hamas or Hezbollah (doubt.jpeg) and their message has always been one of "love, inclusion and hope".
First things first: as a freedom-of-speech diehard, the idea of arresting and/or indicting Kneecap for yelling "up Hamas" is unconscionable to me. The fact that this "investigation" is happening at all is yet another canary in the coalmine (along with the numerous people investigated or convicted for gender-critical opinions, or the recent fellow arrested for burning a Quran) that freedom of expression no longer really exists in the UK. Probably no one will benefit from this probe more than Kneecap themselves, who made a name for themselves by cosplaying as radicals and going out of their way to be edgy and controversial. Glorifying a pogrom (albeit under the unpersuasive euphemism of "Solidarity with the Palestinian struggle" while grinning ear-to-ear) is revolting, but shouldn't be a criminal offense.
But, as noted by Brendan O'Neill, the double standard among the woke left is shocking. Because of his anti-Semitism and professed admiration for Hitler, Kanye West is now considered persona non grata among the woke left, or elsewhere. (It need hardly be said that probably the only reason he's expressing admiration for Hitler is because of his unmedicated bipolar disorder - but Mental Illness Doesn't Do That, so never mind.) Meanwhile, Kneecap (individuals, to the best of my knowledge, of sound mind untroubled by psychosis) expressed support for an organisation whose founding charter clearly and unambiguously states that its ultimate goal is the extermination of all Jews from the face of the earth - and the woke left eagerly support Kneecap, attending their gigs, joining in their juvenile football chants ("Ooh! Ah! Hezbollah!"), buying their merch, and rallying to their defense at every opportunity. The rules seem so arbitrary to me: you can't express support for Hitler, but you can express support for an organisation which shares most of Hitler's defining, animating opinions (hatred of Jews and desire to exterminate them, homophobia, misogyny etc.). You can't say that the Holocaust was a good thing - but if you want to cheer on the worst antisemitic pogrom since the Holocaust, go right ahead. It seems like some sort of perverse Sorites paradox, or Goldilocks effect: saying that the slaughter of 6 million Jews was a good thing will get you cancelled, saying that the slaughter of 1,200 Jews was a good thing won't get you cancelled. "Experts now believe it may be possible to express support for the murder of as many as two million Jews without suffering any reputational damage, but other sources differ."
I don't understand it one iota. I'm increasingly starting to think that the Holocaust has become completely de-Jewified (for want of a better word) and drained of its specificity, understood primarily as a grave crime because it was a mass slaughter, rather than specifically a mass slaughter primarily of Jews. I wonder if the current generation of secondary school teachers will go out of their way to "recontextualise" the Holocaust by listing off all of the more fashionable groups targeted for extermination by the Nazis: gays, disabled people, trans people (a myth; one of several, like "people have been acquitted for murdering trans people by using the 'trans panic' defense", that trans activists essentially dreamed up from whole cloth and which is now widely believed in woke circles), and then mentioning Jews at the end, as an afterthought. I wonder if the next generation, when asked why Hitler was so evil, will say that he was bad because he hated black people, he hated gay people, he started a war in Europe, and he killed lots of people - all true statements, and yet all statements which rather miss the point of why he was so evil. All of this "recontextualisation" of the Holocaust has the unnerving feeling of salami-slicing to me.
Lists of "worst video games ever" are quite a bit different from equivalent lists of books, movies etc., because before you can even begin to analyse whether a game is good or bad from an aesthetic perspective, it has to meet a certain floor of being functional from a technical, mechanical perspective. Hence, these lists often tend to boil down to a list of games which are hideously broken from a technical perspective (Big Rigs, E.T. for the Atari 2600), as opposed to games which are "so bad it's good/horrible" in the sense of aesthetics, tone, quality of acting, poor writing etc.. Of course a game which is so badly designed as to be functionally unplayable is very embarrassing for the studio that designed it, but it doesn't induce the same sensation of discomfort and cringe that a so-bad-it's-good film does. Broken video games, to my mind, are only interesting if you're a game designer or software developer who wants to learn what not to do; to everyone else it's just "they tried to make a game which was mechanically sound, and they failed". These games aren't interesting to discuss the way bad films can be. Probably the closest analogue is in film, in which bad films are often criticised in part for being technically incompetent. But The Room didn't become a classic of the so-bad-it's-good genre because of its primitive green screen, amateurish post-production dubbing and slapdash continuity: those elements were just the icing on the cake of its nonsensical plot, illogical characters, bizarre dialogue and its creator's misogynistic, narcissistic worldview. Even a version of The Room directed by a halfway competent production team (but using the same screenplay and actors) would probably still have been an embarrassment. (And conversely, a film with a passable screenplay and decent actors, but with clumsy post-production dubbing, would never become a classic of so-bad-it's-good cinema on the level of The Room.)
With all of that preamble out of the way, I'm curious what you consider the worst video games ever from an aesthetic perspective. In particular, I'm interested in video games which are technically functional and not completely broken, but which make so many bad aesthetic choices that playing them induces a feeling of vicarious embarrassment comparable to what one might experience watching an Ed Wood or Neil Breen film.
(I'm sure someone's going to mention Deadly Premonition but I'm not sure if it really counts: looking at the cutscenes I get the distinct impression that the developers were in on the joke and deliberately aiming for a cheesy kind of B-movie humour.)
Years ago I had a sort of harebrained thought, that one's support for authoritarian policies might be inversely correlated with one's self-perceived ability to protect oneself from harm. That is to say, if you believe that you are well-positioned to protect yourself from harm, you will tend to view protecting oneself and one's family as a personal responsibility (e.g. "we don't call 911, we call the coroner"), and will hence tend to skew libertarian on the political compass. Conversely, if you believe that you are not well-positioned to protect yourself from harm, you will tend to view protecting oneself as a responsibility for the government, and hence tend to skew authoritarian.
I think it's fair to say that the current dominant iteration of Western left-liberal politics has a visible authoritarian streak, with their support for lockdowns and vaccine mandates, their hostility towards unfettered free speech, their concomitant support for online censorship etc. you've all heard this before. Conversely, the dominant iteration of Western rightist politics is more libertarian - most visibly seen in the hands-off approach to Covid taken by Republican states in the USA, but more broadly in their support for unfettered free speech.
Hence, my theory would predict that people with a low self-perceived ability to protect themselves from harm will tend to lean left (because the current dominant iteration of left-liberal politics is authoritarian-leaning), whereas people with a high self-perceived ability to protect themselves will tend to lean right (because the current dominant iteration of right politics is libertarian-leaning). Note that this is entirely contingent and downstream of which way the wind is currently blowing: if the dominant strain of left-liberal politics was libertarian, it would attract people with a high self-perceived ability to protect themselves from harm, and vice versa.
Who tends to think that they are well-posed to protect themselves from harm? Gun owners, martial artists, bodybuilders - in other words, young strong men. Who tends to think that they are not well-posed to protect themselves from harm? Old people, people with physical disabilities (the former two groups among the most vocal supporters of lockdowns, for understandable if misguided reasons), physically weak men, and women.
What's the mechanism? Certainly testosterone is linked to a greater propensity for risky behaviour, so it's plausible that individuals with a higher concentration of testosterone in their bloodstreams would tend to have a higher self-perceived ability to protect themselves from harm. One data point: administering testosterone to Democrat men allegedly causes a rightward shift.
This is very much a half-baked theory that I'm keen to develop further, and I'd be eager to see data backing it up or contradicting it.
Note that this is only self-perceived ability to protect oneself from harm, which can obviously be radically skew of one's actual ability.
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