JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
Formerly "SandwichWarrior" and "The Upright Man", may or may not be feral, is most certainly quixotic.
User ID: 4009
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
6mo ago
Consider the opening sample in this song.
That specific instance (from Apollo 17) was later determined to be the spent 3rd stage of their own Saturn Rocket
In my post on Halo from last month I mentioned that Clint Hocking's work on the Far Cry franchise probably deserved its own essay. In the process of researching that essay I discovered that another YouTuber had already beaten me to the scoop, covering much of the same ground that I had planned to.
I'm going to link his video below, but I still want to get this out because I find the franchise's central theme of choice, consequence, and the role that we as individuals often play in our own destruction/salvation, are highly relevant to conversations that have been happening elsewhere on this forum.
For the uninitiated Far Cry is a series of single player first person shooters produced by Ubisoft. The series follows an anthology format with each new game introducing a new setting and set of characters.
The first Far Cry game released in 2004 was essentially a glorified tech demo for Cervat Yerli's scalable dynamic rendering engine which he had developed in partnership with Nvidia and would later market under the CryEngine name. This technology enabled highly detailed and expansive exterior scenes with functionally infinite draw distances to be rendered on the hardware of the day without the need to rely on pre-baked lighting/shaders and forced perspective tricks the way contemporary 3D games like Half-Life 2 did.
If the first Far Cry was essentially a tech demo, Far Cry 2 released in 2008 was a gameplay demo. What narrative there is, is paper thin, but what Far Cry 2 did was codify the genre of the "3D open-world action game with crafting and collectibles". Blazing the trail that games like Skyrim, the Assassin's Creed series, Batman Arkham City, Ghosts of Tsushima, and Cyberpunk 2077, would all follow. It may be one of the most low-key influential video games of the last two decades.
The third game is where everything clicked. Far Cry 3 released in 2012 was the first Far Cry to have a proper narrative with fully realized characters who were more than stock archetypes like "Generic Action Hero Guy", "Mad Scientist", and "Femme Fatale". A lot of effort went into facial animation and voice acting to the point that it still holds up surprisingly well for a game that is over a decade old. Which brings us to the thesis of this essay.
If the measure of a piece of "literature" or "art" is the ability to tackle a complex or challenging ideas and make them accessible to the masses, Far Cry 3 deserve to be regarded as high art for how deftly it uses its own medium to convey and amplify the themes of the story it is trying to tell. Or as DJ Peach Cobbler puts it Far Cry 3 tells a story that only a video game could tell
You play as Jason Brody, a pampered rich douche-bro on vacation in Ersatz-Indonesia who, along with his friends, is kidnapped and held for ransom by pirates after they stray too far from the relative safety of their beachfront resort. Jason, with the assistance of his older brother Grant, manages free himself and escape into the jungle but Grant gets shot and killed during the escape, leaving Jason to face the Jungle alone and unprepared.
This is our first hint that the game might be operating on a deeper level than your conventional shoot-em-up. Grant is presented to us as the quintessential hero protagonist, handsome, charismatic, capable, brave, and he dies an ugly gurgling death bleeding out in the mud while his little brother panics. This all happens in the first 10 minutes of the game and the message is clear. You, the limp wristed trust-fund kid, are going to have to level up if you are to have any hope of surviving the jungle much less freeing your friends from captivity. And with that the game releases you into its world.
As you progress through the game, discovering landmarks, hunting animals, crafting equipment, and completing quests, you unlock new abilities, new weapons, better stats. You become more and more capable, and more and more of a killer till by the end John Rambo 'aint got nothing on Jason Brody.
This where things get interesting because without getting into spoilers it is made abundantly clear throughout the narrative that all this killing and "leveling up" is taking a toll on Jason's mind, that it is damaging his relationships with his friends, his family, society, morality, and ultimately reality. At the same time Jason isn't the one doing the killing, we are. YOU, the player, not Jason, are the one positioning the crosshairs and pulling the trigger. You, the player, are the one who made the decision to complete that extra side-quest so that you could unlock that sweet triple knife take-down, and having unlocked it, by God we're going to use it, because dopamine's a hell of a drug. By playing the game we have been manipulated into being willing and enthusiastic participants in Jason's descent into violence and madness. The daemon on his shoulder whispering "Yah, we got this" as we pursue our own destruction.
...and this is why I believe that that the infamous "bad ending" is the canonically correct ending for Jason's story, and that the people who complain about how the game "punishes the player" for making the thematic choice by wanting to keep playing are missing the forest for the trees. The fact that game gives you one last chance to reject the path of violence is what makes the ending so impactful.
I have set before you life and death, blessing and curses. Therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live.
- Deuteronomy 30:19
These themes of player agency and choice would be explored and expanded upon in Far Cry 4 and 5 (4's "Secret Ending" being a notable example of this) but if you are going to play just one of the Far Cry games please play Far Cry 3. It is worth your time.
The scenarios as I see them in order of likelihood.
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A: Someone testing the latest generation of classified tech fucked up and got caught, (think opening scene of Top Gun: Maverick)
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B: A Stargate type situation where the US government or possibly multiple governments have either developed or discovered something truly Sci-Fi and are trying to keep the metaphorical genie in the bottle.
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C: Angels, daemons, and egregores, are real.
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D: Predator and Predator 2, are real.
To be clear, I am reasonably certain that the A: is the true explanation and D: is unlikely in the extreme, but I threw it in there because I rewatched those movies recently, and I feel like the idea of the solution to the Fermi paradox being that Earth is essentially a national park/game preserve for Rastafarian Super-Klingons has potential for some really meaty sci-fi from both the human "prey" perspective, and from the perspective of the hunters who discover that the Antelope have invented crossbows and IEDs, since the last time they went on safari.
Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky all wrote at length about how "bonds of blood and affection" presented an obstacle to the revolution and would need to be at weakened if not eliminated in the name of social progress. They may have never literally uttered the precise words "abolish the family" but what they were advocating for was functionally indistinguishable from it. The bit in 1984 about schools teaching kids to rat on their parents and siblings was based on real world policies enacted by both the Third Reich and Soviet Union.
Furthermore, the position that children ultimately belong to the state and that parents are merely temporary custodians seems to remain a reasonably mainstream position amongst progressives to this day, and I would argue that this fundamental disagreement about who children belong to, their parents or the state, is the source of much of the vehemence and vitriol behind issues like school choice and whether schools should be allowed to keep secrets from parents.
Ironically, the presence of the scouring in Tolkien's work is a large part of why I roll my eye's at @OliveTapenade's claim that Jackson's adaptation is "too martial".
In the beginning of the story there is a suggestion that the people of the Shire may be able to bypass the question of good and evil by simply going along with whom or whatever, and I interpreted the scouring at the end of the story as a repudiation of this suggestion. The point that I understood Tolkien to be making with the scouring is that you can't escape evil by ignoring it or dismissing it as someone else's problem. Kolmogorov Complicity is still complicity.
The Ents, upon being made aware of the threat that evil posed, took up arms. The Hobbits (minus our protagonists) chose to go along to get a long and that is why they end up oppressed and in need of rescue.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
6mo ago
I genuinely can't tell whether you are being sarcastic or not.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
6mo ago
It's not unique to communism so much as a natural outcome of both the left's and the dissident right's embrace of collectivism. If you shift the focus of judgment from individual responsibility to the collective, the only practicable solution to the free-rider problem will be totalitarianism.
I agree that the absence of both Tom Bombadil and the Scouring of the Shire makes Tolkien's commentary on the nature of good and evil much less explicit than it is in the books, and but I have to disagree with the allegations of miscasting or that they didnt capture the core themes of Tolkien's work.
My issue with the Hobbit trilogy is that it is abundantly clear that the studio wanted more LotR movies but the Hobbit is a very different work from Lord of the Rings in both tone and content.
I disagree that the films take out most of the moral worldview. I will grant that it is less obvious than it is in the books, but one of the reasons I think both the books and Jackson's adaptation was so successful was that they successfully capture the essence (or "vibe") of Tolkien's very traditional Catholic worldview and why it might appeal to someone without being "preachy" or in your face about it. Gandalf's conversations with Pippin, Théoden's speech at Helm's Deep, Aragorn at the Black Gates, and the entire character of Samwise Gamgee, are all faithfully represented and carry what I understood to be Tolkien's thesis well.
By rights we shouldn't even be here, but we are... Is a good speech in it's own right but hits even harder in context of having been written by a veteran of the Somme who was looking down the barrel of WWII.
The frustrating thing from my perspective as a history nerd is that, to me there seem to be clear and obvious reasons why the Nazis were evil/went down the path they did but we don't talk about those reasons because there are a lot would-be revolutionary socialists in Academia who would find themselves having to answer some difficult questions if we did.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
6mo ago
Jenson is truly the best of all of us.
Are you endorsing @RandomRanger's claim that "There is no truth, only competing agendas" and that "There are no objective standards by which we can judge one culture better than another"?
If so, are you trying to argue that the position of absolute moral relativism seemingly being advocated here is "pro" rather than "anti" western? and If you do believe that, do you believe that CS Lewis, Adam Smith, St Augustine, and Marcus Aurelius would all share your belief?
My interpretation @dr_analog's comment that they want a "Costal Elite" but would be willing to settle for a good-looking guy with an honest job.
The "problem" is that selecting for men with honest jobs means selecting against men who hold luxury beliefs. They may as well be asking "why can't i find a handsome dark-triad bad-boy who wants to settle down with me?
The answer is that these are contradictory desires. Dark-triad bad-boys aren't interested in settling down. And well-adjusted men with honest jobs who are interested in settling down are not going to share their politics.
I would bet on either a blue-state governor like Shapiro or Newsom, or a young chud like Piker or Mamdani being the 2028 DNC nominee over Harris, but I think the broad strokes of your analysis are sound.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
6mo ago
Are you trying to imply that this sort of attitude is somehow unique to the black underclass? In my experience it is endemic.
Ah so giving them extra vote power is just a deal so they don't shoot up the democracy.
This is essentially the core thesis of the The Federalist Papers.
You believe in gaining the consent of the governed don't you?
And again, I feel like this is where absence of those luminaries is most sorely felt, because they were smarter and more articulate than I am, and would have a more clever and artful way of making this argument.
It's not about second order effects, or even third, or fourth order effects. It's about Nth order effects. And there is no realistic way for anyone to calculate Nth order effects unless they choose to go down the David Benatar route.
I feel like you are starting from a conclusion and looking for supporting evidence, rather than sincerely seeking the answer to a question.
Yes there is an alignment, but I do not think it is as strong or as uniform as you seem to be treating it. Per the 2020 census there are 94 majority Black counties in the United States. Of those 94, Trump won 11 in the 2024 election, and was seems to have been competitive in maybe 20 others. That's not a lot, but it's not nothing either, and when you look at those majority black counties where Trump won or came close to winning, the common thread seems to be a lack of proximity to major urban centers.
My working theory is that rural and working class blacks largely mirror rural and working class whites in that they tend to be more socially conservative and anti-immigration than their urban counterparts. And that while the power of the various "political machines" that run cities like Chicago, Atlanta, New Orleans, Et Al may be famous, the power of those machines does not project into "the boondocks".
My understanding is that it is more a Urban vs Rural issue than a race issue, with the current status quo being that the urban populations of cities like Atlanta and Charlotte are distributed across congressional districts in such a way that it allows the Democrats to be competitive across multiple seats. Where as in an alternate map where the urban core was one district and the surrounding suburbs to the east and west were two others, the Democrats would essentially gain a "safe" seat at the expense of no longer being competitive in the others.
See this proposed map that has been making the rounds on X.
https://x.com/NewsWire_US/status/1978495533229428823/photo/1
In my experience the companies that will hire illegals tend to be less than scrupulous when it comes to things like counting hours and I have yet to receive a satisfactory explanation for why the law of supply and demand supposedly does not apply when it comes to the supply of labor.
It seems worth noting that conservative Christians are not the ones who've spent the last 50 years driving their communities and their TFR into the ground, so who exactly do you think is getting their credibility "shredded" here?
Yes, it is in the bible. It is kind of the whole point of the parable of the Good Samaritan. The question of who is your "nieghbor" or your "brother", is not a matter of proximity or blood but of comportment.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
6mo ago
Do you genuinely believe that the money is being shoveled into "uplifting children from historically disadvantaged groups" and not just "into the hands of liberal social workers"?
It's not "fake egalitarianism", it's a genuine egalitarianism that a lot of our "elites" and "elite aspirants" think is fake and this discontinuity is a major driver of tensions in the culture war.
When affluent liberals talk about how we need illegal immigrants because they do the jobs Americans wont. What they are saying in effect is that they don't think that people who pack meat or clean toilets should earn American level wages. To put it another way, they don't think they should have to pay "the help". They are saying that what they want is not employees but rather an underclass who they can exploit. And because there is a genuine norm of egalitarianism in the US this desire for an underclass is interpreted by many as a deliberate act of disrespect towards not just the class of people who pack meat and clean toilets, but towards the entire American experiment.
I enjoyed Spec Ops: The Line and have not played Dishonored
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