HalloweenSnarry
No bio...
User ID: 795
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
Was the life you had in Venezuela really that much worse than sitting on the frozen streets of a foreign country begging for money?
Genuinely, the answer is probably "yes."
HalloweenSnarry
2yr ago
I guess it's a mixture of "USSR sucked away some of the oxygen for anti-capitalism for decades" plus the Days of Rage "all the terrorists ended up getting good-paying academic jobs" thing.
Now that the USSR has been gone for long enough and anti-capitalism is gaining steam again, the current issue is that power structures and technology conspire to make anarchism extra-unworkable.
HalloweenSnarry
2yr ago
I suspect that, at the moment, the trans-rights warriors are spread too thin. The entire past four months has felt pretty non-stop on trans-related drama, so they genuinely might be too exhausted to muster the Extremely Online energy for this at the moment. There's apparently people still mad over VTubers WRT Hogwarts Legacy, and it's been nearly two months since that game came out. Add on smaller events like Keffals apparently deciding to flounce on politics, and bigger events like Nashville (side note, surprised the whole "Transgression" thing, where apparently people stormed a state capitol, went without note on this site), and I suspect the end result is that it's all too much for the modal online transperson or trans ally.
HalloweenSnarry
2yr ago
That's what I'm getting at: you're using euphemisms. If you want to argue that "the chilling effect of MeToo on sexual relations is not a bug, but a feature intended to drive population control as desired by The Shadowy They," you can just argue that plainly. It may be declasse, it will probably attract a hard counterargument, but you won't get the likes of me noticing their own confusion.
HalloweenSnarry
2yr ago
Many people mocked the trans lobby's attacks on anyone who played Hogwarts Legacy and declared them a failure. I'm not sure they were. As one commenter here said (I can't find the link unfortunately), they've made it so that if you're a public figure playing the game, you must first disavow Rowling and insist that playing the game does not mean supporting her, which assumes the premise that she did anything wrong in the first place.
The thing is, if the trans lobby was trying to hurt the sales of the game, they've utterly failed--they probably never even had a chance. If their goal was to attack people, who, much like Rowling, would probably be otherwise politically allied with them, then they have succeeded, but I don't think we need to re-tread the Toxoplasma of Rage (see this comment explaining a similar concept in relation to this topic).
The problem here, though, is that you'll just get people who will play the Wizard Game just to piss off activists even if they don't really care for HP (see: Pipkin Pippa).
HalloweenSnarry
2yr ago
I feel the need to defend Scott here a little and say that, yes, while media manipulation is nauseatingly endemic (insert that "It's Media" meme image here), he is still probably right that the media, by and large, does not invent Protocols of the Elders of Zion-level fabrications. I mean, for Chrissakes, here he is, sampling InfoWars. InfoWars! The website where people's general understanding of the brand is "that show where Alex Jones claims that Satanist Democrat Lizardpeople are coming to take your guns and harvest your children for their adrenochrome."
And here's Scott, saying that even Alex Jones's website is not, technically, guilty of Protocols-ing, of making every single detail up whole-cloth, in spite of the above. The reality of what InfoWars et al do is both more sinister and yet somehow more boring than that: taking things that are trivially true and factual, but blowing them up disproportionately to the exclusion of even things that would falsify whatever story the outlet wants to tell you. I think the sad truth is that, for the human mind, narratives form most solidly around the brightest parts of a story, so whatever the media chooses to highlight will indeed carry the founder's effect for the rest of the facts of the story.
Sure, there are whoppers of stories that mislead the populace, and not all of them are from places as uncomely as InfoWars, but perhaps the reason why the media seems so unassailable is because they rarely ever say things they have absolutely no proof of.
HalloweenSnarry
3mo ago
the UN judge getting convicted of slavery in the UK
The what
HalloweenSnarry
4mo ago
Isn't one potential argument here that Ukraine was wanting to take the same route as Poland, but didn't have time to really do that before 2014? I think even Kulak made that argument early in the war, that Ukraine saw what happened to Poland and were like "Orthodox Jesus, I've seen what you done for the Poles and I want that for myself."
If the invasion were put off by like 5 years, maybe we'd see some actual progress towards EU-ification.
HalloweenSnarry
5mo ago
I got my start in this sphere thanks to being exposed to Rat Tumblr and Scott Alexander in the 2010's, I for one have never even freaking heard of Ziz until now.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
I kinda don't miss the flame wars of old, personally, but I really wouldn't say that modern-age online beefs are any improvement.
HalloweenSnarry
2yr ago
The anti-doomer's flowchart, courtesy of Ross Scott.
You may remember that, a while back, Ross Scott (of Civil Protection, Freeman's Mind, and Ross's Game Dungeon fame) hosted a discussion with Big Yud himself over AI risk. I couldn't finish the video, but I gathered that Ross was not impressed by Yud's arguments from the premise of AI gaining consciousness and thus wasn't really grasping what Yud saw as the problem. For the many of you who are averse to long videos, the above image lays out Ross's positions on AI risk, with reasons for why.
I suppose I'll have to point to this piece if I'm ever called to answer why I nostalgia-cize about a time I was barely aware enough to enjoy.
That being said, I acknowledge that the Internet and smartphones are two genies that can't quite be put back in the bottle, and there's also a lot of stuff I'm not sure I'd want to give up to go back to the 90's.
ETA:
Another thing that was great about the 90's, something that Freddie probably didn't talk about out of lack of experience, was the world of computers and computer games. Back then, we didn't fear technological progress quite so much (if you did, you probably were an actual honest-to-God literal Baby Boomer who probably imagined a Skynet-like AI forming from the digital ether of computers, much as how people thought flies spontaneously formed on meat pre-Pasteur), and getting new games and hardware was exciting.
The 90's saw computers go from spreadsheet machines that were mostly only good for card games and endless clones of that one Star Trek simulator to multimedia powerhouses that could run Quake. If you were a console gamer instead of a computer gamer, that was still a super exciting time, because you also had games go from 2D to 3D and improve just as rapidly.
Going to a store like CompUSA or Fry's Electronics was special, because you could shop for a new graphics card or check out the new PC games.
HalloweenSnarry
2yr ago
I think I've already heard this argument on Tumblr in more direct wording; that you really could just leave out the "TE" in "TERF," since trans-exclusion is pretty much just a logical conclusion of honest-to-God man-hating radical feminism. Now, I don't think Rowling herself is an honest-to-God man-hater, but hardcore feminism demands the expurgation of everything male, and there is generally no exemption for "was male once" under the radical wing's ideology. So, you are right in that it is technically just sexism, but flipped.
I suppose I should also use this post to reply to Folamh below and say that, while I'm not sure that normies really do use "sex" and "gender" interchangeably, I think the real reason this argument won't work is more due to the perception that you can't actually discriminate unfairly against men--normies don't necessarily grok anything beyond the simplified narrative of feminism. Granted, I suppose the mainstream is at least weakly trans-sympathetic and thus will also fail to grok what Rowling's actual beef is.
HalloweenSnarry
2yr ago
I wonder if a suit could be brought over this.
HalloweenSnarry
2yr ago
I don't think it's a good thing to try and argue this from a culture war perspective; parents of school shooting victims are perhaps simply always destined to go campaigning against guns. As someone who is pro-gun, I don't need Alex Jones on my side, I can simply try and argue from other angles why I think the Brady Campaign and so on are wrong without trying to undermine the tragedy they suffered. If anything, we are served better by people like Open Source Defense, Karl Kasarda, and so on than we are by Alex Jones. "Arguments as soldiers" is one thing, but Alex Jones's problem was taking that a bit too literally.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
I hate to dogpile this, but to echo the other replies with a twist, I would say that your statement would be true if this was still the 90's/early-to-mid 2000's. 90's civics with their colorblind idealism, however, are dead and rotting.
Eh, I'm under the perception that Blue Tribe is pretty damn split on alternative medicine and pseudoscience. On the one hand, large swathes of Blue Tribe go all in on it, but on the other, the rest are kind of horrified at the harm it can cause. The Blues are lucky that the political polarization over COVID shook out the way it did, because now they can jettison anti-vax from their memeplex (where previously it was an alt-medicine mainstay that was causing Measles to resurge).
Similarly for the Red Tribe/conservatives, I have to wonder if anyone even pushes Intelligent Design anymore; am I wrong for saying that it always seemed like a way to smuggle God into the secular realm? But now that Christianity has been on the backfoot for so long, conservatives and the like don't really care for whitewashing their beliefs like that.
HalloweenSnarry
2yr ago
It's not the will of the LEOs, it's the will of the confiscators giving them orders. There will be enough LEOs who won't push back on their orders.
I don't really put much stock into this in a post-Floyd world. I imagine that, in your hypothetical scenario, by Week 3 of the Great Gun Confiscation, officers will start conveniently calling in sick.
HalloweenSnarry
2yr ago
Perhaps, to some, murder is implied by "physical removal;" even if you defend the term as referring to deportation, not every single targeted person may give up their home without a fight. Exile and deportation are inherently forms of violence, IMO: it's said that liberals look at force/violence as a continuum or "dial," where severity can be turned up or down as needed, whereas conservatives view it as a binary or "switch," where it's either basically no response or maximum force. I think it's potentially actually both: violence will start at a low setting, but the high setting is always available in prompt order. Think of how libertarians frame many laws as being enforced at gunpoint, because many laws in America and elsewhere are set and enforced with "men with guns ordered by the government to shoot you" as the ultimate backstop to resistance of laws.
This is to say that I think killing is always implicitly encapsulated in the idea of removal, however bloodlessly you might otherwise envision it. After all, if a far-right party wanted to kick out some Jews with a deportation, but those specific Jews replied with a particularly Laconic "no," then what are the far-righters gonna do? Shrug their shoulders and leave them alone?
(Side thought: I don't know where to look for it right now, but in a thread about what to do about public-transit-abusers (which has become a semi-common topic here), I think I made the elaboration that some of our disagreements about law and order come down to how much violence is permissible to do to serial defectors, and by whom (libertarians/ancaps may favor the ability to just shoot drug users who bug you without repercussion, progressives would rather just accomodate around the issue, far-righters would want state-backed executions, regular conservatives would just want to lock them up in prisons), and what I wrote above reminds me of that.)
HalloweenSnarry
2yr ago
That quote, to me, reminds me of all those stories of industrial disasters and the like, the kind that are fodder to a certain genre of YouTuber, and a depressingly-common thread is that the management knew about the problem/risk that led to the loss of lives, physical and monetary damage, and criminal charges, and yet they forged ahead anyways for one or more of the following reasons: too cheap to be safer; can't lose profits; we need the results; it's not that big a problem; etc.
HalloweenSnarry
2yr ago
True, but this is not the complaint at hand--it's what is done with rapists that is at the heart of the dispute.
God, I also wanted to talk about this, but I figured it was too "rest of the Internet" for the Motte and I also figured I wouldn't have anything of substance to say.
The incredible levels of cope and blame avoidance had my mind wandering back to the discussions around the book Sadly, Porn, it's author The Last Psychiatrist, and his general fight against narcissism. Trans, cis, or whatever, there sure seem to be a lot of people in desperate need of admitting fault. The fact that people thought Silvervale's* "Twitter freaks" comment was a dogwhistle aimed at trans people and Jews was very much an "if you're reading it, it's for you"-type of thing, and if anything, I think it's only made the term "Twitter freaks" into more of a shibboleth.
The accusations of right-wing "gayops" smack so heavily of "big if true." I can believe that it may be possible, but if so, then trans activism has a bigger problem than a stupid wizard game if they can be reliably punked by 4Channers in such a way.
This and other events related to the general online trans community (and real-life stuff like Montana's recent bill) definitely seem like a string of PR hits for them, but it's hard to say if it'll actually move the needle on public opinion or just settle back down to the status quo.
*Silver is not the VTuber who is quitting streaming, for those unaware. That would be Pikamee, who was already planning on "graduating," but speculation says that the harassment may well have accelerated the plan.
HalloweenSnarry
2yr ago
As someone who was a Theatre Kid, albeit not an example of the stereotype nor quite exactly surrounded by examples thereof, the general archetype/stereotype of the Theatre Kid generally is: quirky, high-energy, might act out, enthusiastic, hungry for success, reverently addicted to pop culture, probably has a Tumblr, stuff like that.
HalloweenSnarry
2yr ago
In mild fairness:
-Kanye put his weight behind Tidal, which promised a more competitive cut for artists (or at least a whole-ass stake), and exclusively released The Life of Pablo through it.
-There was that time he went a rant on Twitter about the record industry, and posted an entire PDF (of his record conract, I think) as a long thread of images (yes, seriously, but I don't think I can find it now...).
-Kanye also backed the Stem Player (a device and streaming service(?) whose whole shtick was being able to isolate instrument and vocal stems/tracks from songs, allowing you to customize your listening experience, though it works best with albums that are already broken-up into stems), releasing Donda 2 exclusively for it (which was such an album, alongside the original Donda which released around the same time as the Stem Player).
It's possible that Kanye started out being frustrated at the music industry, but Kanye being Kanye, his...unique mind probably led to him escalating his frustrations into conspiracy territory.
I am starting to suspect the OP may be fishing for comments like yours to show how bad we are, or something like that. It's odd behavior if they aren't being underhanded, but are instead being sincere.
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