HalloweenSnarry
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User ID: 795
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
I'm genuinely getting worried (even if in a concern-trolly way) that the ADL is sending itself down the PETA path with stuff like this. I'm not Jewish, but I imagine many Jews really don't need an organization like the ADL succumbing to the toxoplasma incentive gradient. I guess to some people, though, it might be too late and they're already well down that slope.
I mean, come on, over Fortnite of all things?
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
I'll just say it: hypocrisy is not a weakness in the Culture War. You can't put a social justice-believer in their place by attacking their epistemology, what makes you think you can do it to The Chief Twit himself? Applying Ctrl-H to rhetoric does not win you the argument, let alone the Culture War. Maybe highlighting someone as a hypocrite worked back in the old Internet Atheism days (and that's a big maybe), but now? Your opponent is likely to just ignore it, able to perfectly compartmentalize the reasons as to why they're right and you're wrong.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
I sort of alluded to it with this comment, but I think the problem with Noah's idea is that...well, it's still not enough. Shiny, cozy cities sure do sound nice and all, but it's just not Promethean enough, IMO. Where's all the mega-arcologies powered by underground fusion reactors? Where's the space elevators guarded by semi-autonomous rocket-plane-mechs? Where's the space colonies?
If you're going to propose a radical vision for the future that doesn't end in the options of AI Panopticon, Radical Environmentalist Degrowth, or Planet Riyadh, you need to go bigger than those--bigger than the planet, arguably.
Dispatches from the War on Horny/Payment Processors: the other shoe has dropped for Pixiv.
A year and a half ago, Pixiv made signs that they'd be clamping down on content on some of their services to appease Visa and MasterCard. Today, Pixiv announces that US and UK users will face restrictions on content they can upload. (Specific details here.)
Currently remains to be seen how much this affects the Western artists who are on Pixiv, but it doesn't bode well. Some think this portends a coming era of digital pillarization, and while I won't rule out the possibility that things will get so walled off that VPNs become a necessity, it's hard to say how likely that actually is.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
Yassine Meshkout even wrote a post about how he saved a client with just eleven words.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
I have some thoughts on these passages (bolding mine):
In their “transformative-justice” workshop, my students learned to name “harms.” This language, and the framework it expresses, come out of the prison-abolition movement. Instead of matching crimes with punishments, abolitionists encourage us to think about harms and how they can be made right, often through inviting a broader community to discern the impact of harms, the reasons they came about, and paths forward. In the language of the anti-racism workshop, a harm becomes anything that makes you feel not quite right. For a 17-year-old at a highly selective, all-expenses-paid summer program, newly empowered with the language of harm, there are relatively few sites at which to use this framework. My seminar became the site at which to try out—and weaponize—this language.
[...]
Keisha is uniquely talented at performing her role, but she isn’t the author of the play. Pushing anti-racism to its limits, what we reach isn’t just hollow doctrine, but abuse: Pathological relationships that cut us off from the world, from the give-and-take of reasons and feelings unfolding over time that makes up life in the world. We see this crystal clear in the paradoxes that I encountered: The experience was supposed to be organized around a “transformative justice,” rather than a punitive model, yet the community managed to expel two of its members. Students continually voiced their desire to find practical actions to help change the world, but after four weeks, they had learned to say that anti-blackness is so foundational, the world could never change. The students wanted freedom, for themselves and for all, but they started to say that the only route to freedom is indoctrination: having me tell them what to think.
This and the ending bit about "believers in democracy, fugitives from democracy" got me thinking: for all the benefits of democracy, it must have safeguards and limits. Imprisonment and policing are bad, but the only remaining alternative to punishing social transgression is mob rule, and I imagine that even a purely-black community that does not police or imprison its members will eventually turn to lynching or exile. Maybe this is how it will be in the world that modern anti-racists want to bring forth--maybe this is how it should be, to put on the Neoreactionary hat for a bit. But this can't possibly make for anywhere nice to live.
WRT Trump, pro wrestling (as Trump once cameo'd in WWE, and Linda McMahon was on his Cabinet, IIRC) is often the comparison made, that Trump is a master of "kayfabe" and being able to sell the audience the image they want to see. Pro wrestling is arguably a right-inflected form of theatre in itself, and probably descended from carnival shows (in fact, much of wrestling terminology is descended from carny-speak), so that thread is definitely there and you aren't just seeing Jesus in toaster marks.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
It's not just the voting itself, it's also the slate, no? Back during the Sad Puppies days, the slates were a major point of contention.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
They had principles. And that makes modelling and predicting their behavior by other power brokers effectively impossible, which is anathema to the aforementioned alphabet soup of the world.
Even granting the premise of your whole post, I have to make this one tiny quibble: shouldn't principles make someone predictable rather than unpredictable? If you have a devout Catholic, then you'll have a good idea of how much fish he consumes. If you have a devout Mormon, then you know not to serve soda at any party he'll be at. If you have a devout Communist, you'll have a good idea of what'll get him quoting from Marx. If you have a Wokist, then you can obviously predict their arguments in advance so long as you're familiar with the egregoric memeplex.
If anything, while Trump was unpredictable, I feel he was also rather unprincipled. The man switched political parties multiple times before he ran as President, and his sustained turn to the right almost feels like an aberration of the pattern. The only principled, predictable thing about the man in office was "if Obama did it, he was gonna try to reverse it." Trump was, and probably still is, a wild card soaked in chlorine trifluoride and gilded with a razor's edge of gold.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
This is...interesting, given the recent context of not one, but two different 4Channers getting busted by a Florida sheriff over Fedposting.
Also, I do suppose that sanity is a resource we are running out of on the national level. Hard to say what'll happen when enough nutty people get into Capitol Hill.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
I've been watching Outlaw Star recently, and much like with the later, more well-known Sunrise series Cowboy Bebop, it leans heavily on Chinese-style imagery, probably Hong Kong more specifically. Luxurious restaurants, Taoist themes, Tiger Balm Garden-style opulence, it's all there. China generally factors heavily into the lore of the series, with the warp-drive Phlebotinum landing in a Chinese desert, Chinese space pirates being the ones to use Grappler Ships for combat, and the main antagonist force using Tao-based superpowers.
It seems that people at least really liked the aesthetics of Hong Kong. Mainland China seems to be a harder sell unless it's pre-revolutionary (as in pre-ROC) China where the aesthetics are concerned.
It's hard to say if China can be a cultural juggernaut outside of being a potential model of government, as Georgioz noted. In speaking of Hong Kong, the CCP has arguably strangled that golden goose culturally and politically--"liberate Hong Kong" is a meme that has historically proven to inspire the same amount of cultural allergic reaction among Chinese people as a VTuber mentioning Taiwan. (We talk about "woke excesses" here on The Motte, but it seems like China also has a problem with Terminally Online people setting the tone for discourse, and it's just as bad as in America.) It remains to be seen if the mainland can really make an impact outside of, say, mobile gacha games.
HalloweenSnarry
11mo ago
I'd have thought that the more poignant counter would be "imagine if the British did something similar pre-independence."
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
incandescent bulbs vs. fluorescent
I guess we ended up side-stepping that, since LEDs took over.
HalloweenSnarry
5mo ago
We've seen both sides break out some fucking old hardware (Maxim guns with Holosuns!), you really think a WWII-era vehicle that isn't a tank or a troop carrier is getting into Fantasyland territory?
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
I'm kind of surprised at people who think Bud Light is some sort of exclusively Republican domain. It's Bud Light, not the NRA.
I think you're failing to recognize Bud Light as a class marker, which is part of the discussion here. You may want to re-read Scott's writings about the Red Tribe and the Blue Tribe.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
Pwnia
Pwnia, land of the Gamers and Haxors, est. 1337.
HalloweenSnarry
9d ago
To summarize: guy makes a popular window manager for what will be the new standard for Linux desktop window display software, the community around it is composed of half "programmer socks" trans people and half toxic 4Chan shitposters, the toxic parts of his community prompt a Linux dev with more privilege to get him declared persona non grata from working within the "mainstream" of this tech.
HalloweenSnarry
4mo 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
8mo 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.
Dispatches from the War on Horny: Has the popular Japanese website Pixiv been colonized by the Western Social-Financial-Complex?
Today (well, yesterday as I write this), Pixiv announced that, in cooperation with Visa and MasterCard's policies (well, okay, they say "Brand Protections of Card Networks," but you probably know what that really means and which card networks they're referring to), they will be forbidding certain content from their Booth, Fanbox, and Request services--of note is "sexual exploitation of a minor." If you aren't already, sit down and get (un)comfortable, this is going to take some explaining.
Now, because of the recent Twitter shenanigans, you may have come across these blog posts by Matthew Skala and Ethan Zuckerman about Pawoo, Pixiv's Mastodon instance, and both its sheer popularity as well as how comfortable its userbase is with lolicon content (and how that makes other Mastodon instances chafe). Well, loli content is once again the source of conflict over at Pixiv, and the East-vs.-West dimension seems like it's also at play here.
The new guidelines seem tailor-made to ban loli and guro (AKA gore) content (which, as a reminder, is fictional art), with the former being, well, just plainly popular for what is likely a whole bunch of cultural reasons I can't get into here. While these guidelines focus on payment-based services that Pixiv provides (Booth is a storefront akin to Gumroad or Storenvy or Etsy, Fanbox is a subscription service akin to Patreon, and I presume Request is Pixiv's equivalent to Skeb, a website for commissioning artists), it's not inconceivable to think that this will sooner or later also apply to the regular art-sharing side of Pixiv, the main site itself.
While I can't really link to them (or at least the Sankaku article collating them), there's already some reactions from Japanese users suggesting that Pixiv will have a Tumblr Porn Ban situation on their hands, as users pre-emptively flee the site before they get kicked off and leave for competitors like Nijie (another art-sharing site) and Fantia (another subscription platform).
One other reaction has been to ask "why not avoid this conflict?", as Pixiv could either just not use Visa/MasterCard (like what competing site DMM did), or, more feasibly, implement workarounds like using points purchased with credit cards (like what DLSite and deviantArt do), or even adopt crypto payments. However, it's also likely that Pixiv is completely fine with this, and here's where things get spicy:
Oddly enough, a few months ago, Pixiv instituted DEI-type policies and sensitivity training, which I presume is quite the rare thing to see from a Japanese company. Now, without going way "beyond the wire" epistemically, it does seem like Pixiv has somehow picked up the Western memes of DEI and incorporated them. This likely made them more open to playing by the rules of Visa and MasterCard, not just on paper, but also spiritually. But, again, I don't want to get too into the weeds of cultural colonialism from the West--it could just be that Pixiv really wants the money that flows through the Visa/MC networks and aren't too willing to rock the boat on this matter. I don't think this is the newest form of imposed American hegemony on the Japanese way of life, like Commodore Perry or the post-WWII occupation and reforms (which arguably built the environment that allowed hentai and lolicon to emerge in the first place), but it kinda does feel like it. (Though see also)
There is certainly no shortage of culture-war red meat when it comes to the modern culture clash between America and Japan WRT general social justice issues, from how Japanese Twitter's trending tab was populated by politics and similar current events until Musk took over, to the aforementioned Mastodon/Pawoo conflict where both sides were of completely different mindsets, and the various controversies over censorship and localization with Crunchyroll's anime distribution and Sony's treatment of Japanese games.
And of course, I don't think I need to re-link articles about Visa vs. PornHub or Patreon restricting adult content or so on. You might already be familiar with how PayPal and the credit card companies basically ban porn and other adult content (citing its high risk of chargebacks), whether outright or through sheer inconvenience (there was a comment I saw recently about how a medium-tier/size payment processor for a porn site had to keep re-routing around damage in the form of network bans, plus also the little things like not being able to use PayPal for some sites and services). Financial deplatforming comes in second or third place to regular social media deplatforming in terms of how often it gets discussed, but it's not very far behind.
Just from the practical/ethical standpoint, PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard are so huge and dominant that they probably should just be common carriers, especially considering the non-NSFW areas where they have influence (namely speech and such; dissident shitposters and Russians are probably well-aware of this reality). PayPal can freeze your account and hold onto your money for no good reason (and you especially better hope they don't catch wind of you doing sex work or selling NSFW art commissions), and your only option is to enter arbitrage, if you can.
But there's also the poltical dimension of this: these three companies are part of the massive American/global financial hegemon, able to kick off actors and users at-will, whether they be lowly prostitutes or even entire countries. Having one large actor dominate much of the world's wealth is very likely bad on its own, but the pay-to-play ESG corporatism being used to draw the lines of social acceptability is extra-worrying. The anti-porn policies of 1st-world payment processing may be rooted in social conservatism, but they play nicely with the liberal-progressive strong-arming many worry about. For any country more worried about losing access to international money because they crossed some cultural or social red-line of the West, there are only three options: embrace crypto (and subject yourself to the non-stop boom-and-bust cycles it suffers from), voluntarily disconnect from the global finance system (with all the hard work that entails), or admit that we all live in America.
EDIT: Since this kicked off a whole sub-thread in response to Hlynka, I would just like to state for the record that while I don't really care for Lolicon at all, I am fully aware that it will likely not stop there, and even an otherwise vanilla-but-still-NSFW image might eventually not be allowed. Slippery slopes, Murder-Ghandis, "the line must be drawn here," "first they came for..." etc.
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