Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
No bio...
User ID: 214
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
2mo ago
I would have agreed with you only 5 years ago. I used to browse /tg/ a lot, but the quality on there has steeply declined. Very few stories are posted there any more, and all discussion threads are derailed by posters spamming NoGames or accusing other posters of being Bumpfag. I can't speak to the other boards, but that one used to pump out so much iconic content and has been reduced to a shell of itself.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
3mo ago
I was wondering if you were going to link to that Kulak piece as I read your comment. I haven’t been able to unsee that trope and ponder its meaning in each case I see it ever since reading it.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
Fantastic work, though the sections on how Gerard manipulates procedural outcomes on Wikipedia to turn supposedly neutral, fact-based articles into hit pieces fills me with dread. This same kind of malicious citogenesis was used in the Kiwi Farms deplatforming saga back in 2022/2023 to turn the Wikipedia narrative on them into a one-sided hit piece, with journalists citing conjecture and laundering it into a Reliable Source. I assume anything controversial on Wikipedia is written this way now, but I don't think the average person does.
You're on a roll with this niche you're carving out for yourself. I'm excited to read about the next bizarre rabbit hole you decide to post about in 4-6 months.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
10mo ago
I walk everywhere I can, and have gotten by without owning a car for the last several years. In the last four years, I've lived in both a spread-out suburb and a denser, quasi-urban area. In my experience as a dedicated pedestrian, the majority of motorists I encounter are very deferential and mindful, stopping when they don't need to or waiting much longer than is required at a stop sign when I am approaching a crossing in order to let me through. Almost every cyclist I encounter is the exact opposite, refusing to slow or turn for anyone. It's on you to get out of the way or have the cyclist shoot you a death glare for not showing them sufficient deference. They are a massive hazard and nuisance on the sidewalks. Part of that, I'm sure, is due to lack of dedicated biking lanes, but I think cyclists have a cultural problem that makes them extremely unlikable, and not just to motorists.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
8mo ago
Trump is on stage giving the speech now. AP has called Pennsylvania. Unless Alaska somehow doesn't turn out the electoral votes, it's over. What a ride this has been.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
8mo ago
I have so many thoughts. Dana White taking the mic and thanking Adin Ross, Theo Von, and Joe Rogan felt surreal. Trump scooped up a lot of young men's influencers into his camp this time, while the Harris campaign didn't even seem to consider the option. Barron Trump has been advising his father to go on the podcast circuit before the election, and it seems to have paid off. Those memes about Barron secretly masterminding Trump's win in 2016 seem to have come true, eight years later.
How much did Elon, Rogan, RFK, etc. getting into his camp swing this for him? I'm thinking those were critical endgame winds for Trump. Hell, how much of this was made possible by Elon buying Twitter?
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
This has set them up for the obvious counter from the Right: why are you so mad about a movie where a guy saves children? Child trafficking is bad... right?
The mainstream journalistic reaction to this movie is full of handwringing and non-arguments. But they're not doing it because they're secretly pedos or want to cover for them. Circling the wagons, even if purely on instinct, is natural when you sense that someone is attempting to build an ideological superweapon against you, which Scott described in Weak Men are Superweapons. The whole post is worth reading if you haven't; it's one of his best and quite brief. This passage is most relevant though:
I suggested imagining yourself in the shoes of a Jew in czarist Russia. The big news story is about a Jewish man who killed a Christian child. As far as you can tell the story is true. It’s just disappointing that everyone who tells it is describing it as “A Jew killed a Christian kid today”. You don’t want to make a big deal over this, because no one is saying anything objectionable like “And so all Jews are evil”. Besides you’d hate to inject identity politics into this obvious tragedy. It just sort of makes you uncomfortable.
The next day you hear that the local priest is giving a sermon on how the Jews killed Christ. This statement seems historically plausible, and it’s part of the Christian religion, and no one is implying it says anything about the Jews today. You’d hate to be the guy who barges in and tries to tell the Christians what Biblical facts they can and can’t include in their sermons just because they offend you. It would make you an annoying busybody. So again you just get uncomfortable.
The next day you hear people complain about the greedy Jewish bankers who are ruining the world economy. And really a disproportionate number of bankers are Jewish, and bankers really do seem to be the source of a lot of economic problems. It seems kind of pedantic to interrupt every conversation with “But also some bankers are Christian, or Muslim, and even though a disproportionate number of bankers are Jewish that doesn’t mean the Jewish bankers are disproportionately active in ruining the world economy compared to their numbers.” So again you stay uncomfortable.
Then the next day you hear people complain about Israeli atrocities in Palestine (what, you thought this was past czarist Russia? This is future czarist Russia, after Putin finally gets the guts to crown himself). You understand that the Israelis really do commit some terrible acts. On the other hand, when people start talking about “Jewish atrocities” and “the need to protect Gentiles from Jewish rapacity” and “laws to stop all this horrible stuff the Jews are doing”, you just feel worried, even though you personally are not doing any horrible stuff and maybe they even have good reasons for phrasing it that way.
Then the next day you get in a business dispute with your neighbor. Maybe you loaned him some money and he doesn’t feel like paying you back. He tells you you’d better just give up, admit he is in the right, and apologize to him – because if the conflict escalated everyone would take his side because he is a Christian and you are a Jew. And everyone knows that Jews victimize Christians and are basically child-murdering Christ-killing economy-ruining atrocity-committing scum.
You have been boxed in by a serious of individually harmless but collectively dangerous statements. None of them individually referred to you – you weren’t murdering children or killing Christ or owning a bank. But they ended up getting you in the end anyway.
Depending on how likely you think this is, this kind of forces Jews together, makes them become strange bedfellows. You might not like what the Jews in Israel are doing in Palestine. But if you think someone’s trying to build a superweapon against you, and you don’t think you can differentiate yourself from the Israelis reliably, it’s in your best interest to defend them anyway.
The whole situation is a big culture war W for the right because it's a bad look to get so upset at a movie about a guy fighting child trafficking. But most journalists pushing back against this movie aren't thinking "I'm going to try to suppress this because I'm secretly a pedophile." They're more likely thinking of all the posts on Twitter and Facebook they've seen about the Satantic pedophilic elite, the ones that argue they control most of society and salivate over filling them full of lead.
While most journalists would agree that pedophilia and sex trafficking are bad things, they definitely don't buy into the idea that vast portions of society are controlled by pedos. But they do know that the person who believes this considers journalists as a class, at best, complicit, and at worst, in on it. So when they see a movie about hunting down child traffickers that the kind of person who posts about Satanic pedophilic elites seems to like... The incentives are all there for journalists to use their narrative-setting power to slander it however they can.
I remember there being a similar, but obviously less widespread and institutionalized, uncomfortable reaction on the right to the game Wolfenstein's "Punch a Nazi" ad campaign. This led to a similarly easy gotcha — what's the matter? You don't think Nazis are good, do you?
This kind of statement puts you on bad footing, which of course is entirely the point. But you don't have to be pro-Nazi to notice that the person fantasizing about violence seems to have a much broader definition of the term than you do, and that their definition includes you. Staying silent while they attempt to normalize extra-legal action against you might be ill-advised.
I'll say that I despise the seemingly complete capture of journalism as a field by activists who see it as their duty and right to use their platform to set a progressive agenda. I know a few people in real life in and adjacent to the industry, and they have a genuine antipathy for middle-America, whiteness, religion, etc. The widespread loss of trust in the industry is well-deserved, in my opinion. But I think the "they're all pedos/covering for pedos" line of thinking is either dishonest or misinformed, and may prove to be dangerous down the line.
Seeing TikToks with likes in the hundreds of thousands lamenting Chris' transition or gleefully noting MrBeast's obvious discomfort with his lifelong friend in their recent video is quite the vibe shift. I'm not sure what's more surprising to me — the reaction itself or it being allowed to exist on a big platform. The censorship of the last 5 years has become so normalized to me that I'm taken aback when I see genuine anti-trans posts break 100,000 impressions without being mopped.
As for the reaction, as others have noted, millions of zoomers have a strong parasocial relationship with this band of male friends. Chris' transition and the awkwardness it injects into their dynamic is palpable. These people may not be anti-trans, but they certainly don't like what transitioning has done to their favorite creator's content. For many people whose exposure to transgenderism has been filtered through sympathetic lenses — popular media or news about transgender oppression — this may be their first genuine glimpse at the uglier side of it.
Chris was a well-adjusted chad who had a wife and infant child, and broke it off to become this. Many 20-something men would literally kill to have half of what Chris had— looks, respect, wife, and child. If throwing those things away to start HRT and live as a woman is what makes Chris happy, then for many it may for the first time really call into question how far their preferences differ from the cultural values that produced this outcome.
I don't really buy into there being a corrective "pendulum" when it comes to most progressive positions, but with the trans stuff it really feels like people are getting sick of it. Recently it feels like every week there is some new story that comes off quite badly for transpeople. The shooter targeting Christian children highlighting the militant anger of many transpeople (no demo fedposts online harder than they do), Dylan Mulvaney going mainstream/being sponsored by an all-American beer brand, and now this.
If you're a normal person growing up in America your default social position is likely live and let live. The tales you grew up reading and watching promote understanding, tolerance, and not jumping to conclusions with regards to unfamiliar cultures or lifestyles. The villains in your childhood tales are the intolerant, traditional, and quick to judge. Many are inclined to apply this rule to transgender people, and it is easy to say at a distance. It's someone else's life, let them live it how they want since it doesn't' affect me.
This isn't a bad rule to live by compared to many others. But it doesn't always play out as well as in the stories and many are beginning to realize that. Many who are fine in theory with transgenderism don't want to see it pushed in their media, for example. Pushing it to children is a bridge too far for many. It wouldn't be so bad if it just meant that your daughter cut her hair like a boy and grew out of it in a few years, but that practice may lead her to being pushed towards a suite of medical interventions that you can't take back. If tolerance means letting activists evangelize irreversible chemical treatment to minors, to your kids, over platforms like discord that you may not fully understand?
At that point, you might be fine becoming the villain. As Huck Finn said:
"It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:"All right, then, I'll go to hell"- and tore it up."
...
That feels like where the post should end, but I said that I was surprised that the "MrBeast 6000" TikToks were allowed to stay up this long. I want to talk more about the platforms, but it feels like it belongs to a different post. Musk buying Twitter feels like a big narrative break. It's the wild west on there once again with accounts being restored and allowed to say things that would have been an instant ban anytime in the last 5 years. The Twitter Files show that much of the online consensus of the last five years was enforced from the top down by federal agents working closely with private institutions.
It makes me wonder what the cultural landscape would look like if not for the top-down smothering of right-wing content. What would Adult Swim look like had they not followed external pressure to cancel MDE's World Peace and Sam Hyde had been given access to that audience for years? Hell, what would Reddit look like if it hadn't nuked the growing far-right subreddit dedicated to the same show, or pulled out all the stops to block /r/theDonald's expansion?
If you look at the Twitch debate scene, it's almost all between varying shades of liberalism and leftism. This isn't necessarily due to these views being more popular, but by who has been allowed to grow their platform without interference. Hasan Piker is allowed to have sponsorships and remain on Twitch despite his views being as radical as Sam Hyde's. The smothering of right-leaning content is artificial and enforced by pulling levers from the top down. But there is a genuine market for it and the people who can articulate conservative thoughts in an interesting way, and it's been suppressed for years. If one side has corporate approval and the other side gets blocked from payment processors, of course there is going to be a disparity in whose ideas are currently more popular. There are many ideas that would sweep through the mainstream if they weren't constantly pulled out by the root.
Activists know this which is why the knives have been out for Musk since the purchase went through. Substack seems to be in the crosshairs as well now. I can't blame the activists for doing this; they understand how power works and are willing to use it to prevent competing power structures from taking hold. Who knows who will come out on top in the end? Smart money may be on Musk being forced to fold, but he seems quite sick of being told what to do by them and may stick to his ideals. If so, I wonder what things will look like 10 years from now.
I worked as a writing consultant in college, a position my college hired English-proficient students for. The job was to be there for appointments other students would schedule to have their essays looked at and the like. This required me to take a semester-long course as training, and the doctrines I was taught there were both extremely bizarre and line up neatly with the CW elements of phonics I've been reading here.
There was a guiding principle for the people who taught this class and who wrote our books that it was wrong to teach a student the "correct" way to speak English. By correct we could instead say hegemonic; the way that educated, well-off people tend to speak and write English in America. Who are you as a (white) educator to tell a (nonwhite) child that the way he learned to speak at home is wrong? It was extremely upsetting for me to learn this was a popular position in the field of English education. But...
It's obviously been a while, but my experience with phonics as a young lad were that they were essentially drills. You have sound-letter association drilled into your brain through constant repetition and reinforcement. It's perhaps not a very Western way to learn on the face of it, as we pride ourselves on being creative learners who don’t rely on rote repetition. But there's a time and place for more rote learning. Like in art, you can't really express yourself in English if don't have the fundamentals down first.
You have to understand that for the type of person who usually gets into English Education, sitting there and beating the sounds of letters into the malleable skull of an underprivileged minority child feels like a form of violence. Your way of speaking is wrong, here is the correct way to talk and write. It is reminiscent of British boarding schools forcing students to copy lines into their books over and over, or of colonial efforts to educate the savages. This may sound like a weakman, but that really is how they seemed to view it.
This conflicts with a more practical understanding of language and the job of an educator. Yes, there is a way that educated people tend to speak. Yes, people go to school so they can fit in with those people and make money. Yes, it is your job as an educator to teach them how to do that. No, it is not your place to decide that this hegemony is unjust and must be overthrown. And finally, how dare you use young students as your pawns in this game to do so.
To the credit of my instructors: they acknowledged that this is, on some level, why people want to get an education. For reasons of practicality, English teachers have to teach English. They made it clear that we should push back against this where we could, and that it was a long-term goal to overthrow this paradigm. To bring it back to the "whole language" model... based on my experience with educators, I know that of the two methods, they would very much like this one to be the one that works. I can see them convincing themselves that it does, especially since it lacks the blunt objectivity of phonics. It makes sense that it took this long before people start raising the alarm on this.
I have some more things to say about English education, but that might be better for another post. I also don't want to lump all teachers into this bucket. I know many of them who just want to educate children and keep their mouths shut about this stuff for the same reason you don't openly push back against your workplace's DEI policies. It is a shame, because mass literacy is a cornerstone of success for a culture, and it seems standards are constantly falling.
I'm not a blank slatist and don't believe that we can equalize outcomes through education. But if we're forcing children to go to school, we should get some form of literacy as a result, and not have the time and money sabotaged by what to me looks like institutionalized white guilt. We could do a lot better by people if we just stopped digging the hole deeper.
A funny aside. As consultants, we weren't supposed to fix the grammar in a student's essay, even if that's what they came in with the intention to do. Just help them with ideas and maybe teach them writing rules they didn't understand. This was... perhaps overselling the importance of the place. Maybe it was to comply with a looser definition of plagiarism the university had (I'm doubtful). However, this was what about half the American students in my appointments wanted me to do, and what almost all of the Chinese students wanted me to do.
This is understandable, especially for the Chinese kids. It seems logical that a writing center for students would be at least in part about an English native fixing your paper so it isn't riddled with basic grammatical and usage errors. English is a difficult language and has a lot of weird rules that make it trivial for a non-native speaker to out themselves as such. After a while I just started doing grammar checks in my consultations, and my consultees tended to be much happier for it.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
Seeing as so much of the AI Safety field turned out to be, in practice, simply ensuring the AI Overlord agrees with progressive dogma, I'd prefer to just let it rip at this point. I'll throw in with the /acc types and take my chances with Clippy over having these ideas be enshrined in the AI that will mold the thoughts and lives of future generations.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
The movie is primarily aimed at nostalgic millennials, not the young girls the toys are made for. It markets to people who grew up with the toys, but is more interested in using the toy brand to sell a film, not the other way around. Movies made to sell toys look like the ones on this list this list. They are animated, have child-friendly ratings, feature the toys center stage, and have a point of view that is neither critical nor deconstructive of the product featured, unlike the 2023 film.
To say the themes of the movie are only there due to the director just making the motions downplays the intent and artistry of the director, Greta Gerwig. Gerwig is known as a feminist director and earned a fair amount of buzz for Ladybird back in 2017. Regardless of how you feel about her work, looking at the three major films that she wrote and directed shows she has a point of view. The themes of her movies are not incidental or accidental, regardless of whether or not they're attached to a Mattel product.
Barbie is especially interesting due to the casting of Ryan Gosling, a masculine icon of problematic young men, as Ken. This has led to the film having a crossover appeal to both women and the incel and sigma subcultures of young men, who are attempting (successfully IMO) to co-opt the film's themes into their own thing with all the Ken memes. There's a lot to see here, and dismissing the movie as a Mattel commercial is reductive. People are not wrong or misguided to analyze a cultural product like this.
Almost everything put out by Hollywood and the big streaming services from the last 5 years is like this to varying degrees, IMO. This (the current, race/gender/sexuality-focused incarnation) began around 2013 but was easy to ignore, ramped up around 2016 when Trump's election broke the minds of many in our creative class, and has become institutionalized (1), (2) in the past few years. I don't expect it to get better, only worse. The average consumer of media has no understanding of semiotics and doesn't pick up on things like racial coding, so they will accept pretty much anything as long as the product is good and the dial is moved slowly enough. Which, fair. Most people understandably just want to experience a good story. But I think most viewers can't really recognize racial animus unless a brown Velma looks directly at the screen and says "I hate white people."
There's a line I've seen here and everywhere in oppositional nerd circles since racial and gender politics started getting injected into things they like. It usually goes something like, "the problem isn't the representation, it's that they focused on it instead of the story." This has always felt like a cope to me. Many progressives are good storytellers. A show can be well-written, compelling, and entertaining AND depict a false history/reality, or cast your demographic group/ideology as all the villains.
People mediate and understand the world through the stories they consume. How many misconceptions about guns or defibrillators does a layman have due to how they are represented in movies? How many people's mental models of who commits violent crimes, what the people of medieval Europe looked like, or what percentage of people are LGBT are primarily derived from what they see in shows and commercials?
In 2022's Batman, there is a scene where a gang of white men attacks an Asian man and tries to pressure a new member into beating him up. The recruit is a young black man, the only nonwhite person in the group, who clearly does not want to do this and resists the temptation of these bad men. This is not an outlier for the movie, as every villain is very deliberately cast as a white man. This scene is especially egregious though because it is deliberately set up to reference to the stories of violence against Asian people in New York and other American cities. If you recall, this violence was also blamed on white supremacy despite the demographics of the majority of the perpetrators.
You, a commenter on an offshoot of an offshoot of an offshoot of a forum dedicated to the noncensorious discussion of idea, may simply roll your eyes at this and file it away as a silly morality play. But what percentage of people are actually aware that it isn't white people randomly attacking Asians on the street? How many people had the opposite impression created by the media and reinforced by the movie? If you look at the comments of the video I linked, they're all talking about how cool the scene was and how much they like Batman. And fair enough, because despite all of this it was still a good movie, because these racial politics are not mutually exclusive with good filmmaking (or the good filmmaking is a vessel for this kind of political message*).
Borges' "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" depicts a fictional (within the narrative of the story) country encroaching on and reshaping the real world after a group of people spends generations creating it from whole cloth and presenting it as factually true in encyclopedias and other sources of information. You might understand that the Asian Hate narrative is grossly misleading, but do you think the average person is on the same page as you? When the story is printed as a footnote in the textbooks of future schoolchildren, whose version of reality will it support? One of the United States' biggest exports is its media. What kinds of ideas and narratives are we exporting to the world? Are you comfortable with them?
If you're someone who doesn't really care about this or who can stomach these themes, that's a fair enough position to have. These issues aside, in many ways we're in a golden age of content creation. However, if seeing your identity, ideology, or religion constantly attacked and depicted as evil/ignorant in media does bother you, that's not going to change unless something forces it to. There are many excellent shows saturated in progressive politics, and as long as people are willing to ignore the less savory aspects, they will continue to be made.
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.
You may or may not agree with the idea that representation in media matters and can significantly influence people's perceptions. I'd argue it does, and that the moderating influence of reality will only wane as information is increasingly filtered through algorithms and generative AI. I think it's fair to assume that the showrunners of TLOU agree with the position and find it important to represent different groups responsibly, given the show's politics. With this in mind, I'd argue that the things Rowling has said about trans people aren't half as egregious as the racial politics of TLOU, its creators, or shows like it. The question then becomes if you're willing to not give these creators your money, attention, and support.
*The posts in this thread from @DaseindustriesLtd are worth reading and were a partial inspiration to start writing this.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
10mo ago
Your friends' scenario is probably my single biggest fear in life. My cousin is disabled in the same way, and it destroyed my aunt's marriage. She'll spend the rest of her life taking care of her, and then her oldest daughter will inherit the job once she dies. She is in her thirties and has the mental capacity of a third grader, has a host of health issues, and will never be independent. The whole situation is a nightmarish black hole that there is no escape from. It's hitting especially close to home as I'm nearing my late twenties and have been talking children with the woman I'll be marrying. If it were fully up to me, I would terminate a pregnancy if our child were to have some kind of developmental disability out the gate, but she has a Catholic upbringing and obviously does not feel the same way, so I'll just have to roll the dice when we have ours.
I do want to push back on the part about social opportunities, though. I recently went on a trip with with my parents, girlfriend, two of my friends, one of their girlfriends, and their parents. Our families are close, and we met by me becoming friends with one of the sons in middle school. As we became friends and hung out after school, my parents met his, and befriended them. Now, years and years later, my parents know dozens of people in the area purely through that initial connection. I think, if you live in the suburbs, one of the only ways to build a functioning social network in your middle years is by having kids and connecting with their peers' parents. Obviously this can only really happen once they get a bit older though. I know you're more of an urbanite, so I'm not sure how much this would apply to you or your brother.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
I largely agree, but he is currently facing a wrongful death lawsuit by Anthony Huber's father. I imagine he's going to be hounded by very well-funded civil suits for a long time as revenge for getting off. Still, this is a far shot from state prosecution or murder.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
3mo ago
Stranded in Fantasy is one of my comfort reads. It's a quasi-gametale written on /tg/ about a group of ordinary humans who get portaled into a fantasy world. It's not a power fantasy like most isekai-type stories; the characters have nothing to start out with and must struggle to survive. It's extremely comfy and the characters, while flat, are fun and care about eachother.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
11mo ago
Nintendo is overrated in the way Disney is overrated — brand power and nostalgia do a lot to sell and market their games. That said, look at the AAA gaming scene over the last 5 and what developers are left that haven't devolved into slop mills pushing out incomplete, buggy, soulless games? Nintendo, From Soft, maybe CD Projekt depending on how charitable you want to be towards Cyberpunk. Nintendo holding onto their reputation for this long speaks to something beyond nostalgia.
I share a lot of your criticisms of Breath of the Wild though. They spent so much time on the (admittedly amazing) world design and physics engine that dungeons, loot, enemy variety are all undercooked. Something I've noticed about it is that the non-gamers I know absolutely adore the game. They love the freedom and playing around with the cool physics system to see what you can do. More traditional gamers I know get tired of the copy-paste content after trying to play the game like a traditional Zelda and wind up much more negative on the game.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
They often hamstring a good sucker punch twist by foreshadowing what's going to happen before you start the story. If they come packaged with a tagging system like on Archive of Our Own though, where you can search by the most granular of details to find the story you want, I can get behind that.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
2yr ago
More digital ink should be spilled on the effect of the show Critical Role on the overall hobby. For those who don't know, Critical Role is a show run by voice actor Matt Mercer about him running D&D with a group of players who are all themselves actors. It is wildly popular, with each 4-hour episode pulling in an average of a million views, and has brought countless people into D&D. It is one of the big contributors to the game becoming as mainstream as it is.
The politics of the creators and its fanbase are easily identifiable. At risk of sounding low-effort, Matt Mercer's twitter bio contains both his preferred pronouns and a BLM hashtag. I say this because those things are symbols of commitment to specific ideas, and this is generally reflected by the show's fans. To see a very quick and simple example: look at this article, where the writer expresses her disappointment that a group of white players would publicly play in a fantasy setting based off of nonwhite cultures for their upcoming adventure. This line emphasizes both the lengths the creator goes to be racially sensitive, and the feelings of his audience.
Regardless of Mercer’s assurances that he and his team would be working with “professional cultural & sensitivity consultants” throughout the campaign, and that he would attempt to present certain aspects of languages and cultures “without appropriating them”, many were still concerned that it would still come across as a group of people engaging with cultural touchstones that they aren’t a part of.
This is not to say that Matt Mercer isn't liked by his audience, far from it. I'm simply trying to illustrate the general social and political leaning of him and his audience. If you want more examples, I can produce them.
I mentioned how the show has brought droves of fans to play D&D and join its comunity. To put it simply, you can't bring in such a huge number of people without it vastly changing the culture of the hobby. Like it or not, people who think like the writer make up a substantial amount of the playerbase for Dungeons and Dragons now, possibly the majority. This culture is endorsed and amplified by the creators of the game, Wizards of the Coast, who have the same politics. The racial controversy you bring up is a very natural and obvious result of this cultural shift coming into tension with the old culture of the game. If you're feeling like the hobby isn't as much for you anymore, that's because it probably isn't.
Many players are fleeing to stuff like OSR, where the gameplay tries to emulate an older era and the culture is resistant to changes like this. I still play D&D, but I use my own setting, add my own homebrew, use my own races, and most importantly run my own game. I use D&D for its rules, but since 5E is basically a combat simulator, so you have to do a lot of work to make the exploration and interaction robust.
But that's the fun of D&D and tabletop. You can do your own thing with your own people. It doesn't affect me what WOTC does with their races and published adventures, since I don't use those. If you don't know people or don't DM, the outlook is less rosy.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
2yr ago
There are a lot of barriers to free competition that people aren't aware about. One of them is that payment networks, which are required to participate in the modern economy, are in the business of blacklisting people and businesses for opaque and often unappealable reasons. This article, Section 230 isn't the problem, Payment Networks are goes into some detail on this. If your ability to process credit card transactions can be taken away for not playing nice, this is a significant deterrent to sticking your neck out against the prevailing culture.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
2yr ago
I'm worried about this one. It has bipartisan support between (to my understanding) the pro-censorship wing of the left and the China hawk wing of the right. Both groups hold a lot of power in Washington. The powers the RESTRICT act grants are broad and vague and would extend far past simply banning TikTok were it to be passed.
There are four points generally put forward by proponents of banning the app. I'll try to address these as best as I can. If I'm missing or misrepresenting one, let me know. These points are:
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TikTok is should be banned because it harms the attention spans of young people and acts as a bad influence purely as a social media platform, independent of any Chinese interference.
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TikTok has the potential as Chinese social media to let the CCP use algorithms to promote harmful viewpoints among American users.
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TikTok gives the CCP unprecedented ability to spy on us and collect blackmail on future leaders through user data.
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The CCP is our (the USG's) enemy and we should block any gains in cultural, political, or material power they are making and with any means at our disposal.
To the first point. There's no accusation of poisoning our youth, ruining our attention spans, or breaking our minds you can level at TikTok that doesn't also apply to Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, etc. All of them promote political extremism and use algorithms of varying complexity to feed users personalized content. TikTok is much better at creating a curated feed, but that's not for lack of trying on the part of its competitors.
An argument to ban TikTok for this reason is an argument to ban all of them. There are plenty of people who would YesChad at this, which is a fair position. I'm not on board with banning these sites for freedom of expression reasons, but they've caused a lot of genuine harm and are likely a net-negative on happiness overall. However, I don't think this is on the table regardless. The 1st Amendment will (rightfully) prevent the government from banning social media apps over this, and the RESTRICT act will only lead to a more regime-controlled version of them. Our lawmakers want to put social media more under government control, not ban it.
Also, if your politics are outside the American overton window, how exactly will you get your message out without social media? Would you believe the things you currently hold to be true if not for the narrative control the Internet has wrested from the government and legacy media? In the 20th century, there were only a few, tightly-controlled media companies that had any messaging power. Your worldview was constrained to what they, and the people around you, found acceptable.
Point two is the psyop potential we are giving the CCP. I'm not sure they have the competency to actually do anything meaningful to us, but it is a fair concern for the future. But what can they do to us that we haven't done to ourselves in the past 8 years, exactly? I believe this point is pushed disingenuously by censorious legislators to pass a law that will give them greater narrative control against their real enemy — domestic opposition, but I will go more into that further down.
Point three is that TikTok gives the CCP huge amounts of user data on Americans. This is a valid concern, and I can see the blackmail potential they would have on future leaders through leaking DMs, nudes, embarrassing old videos, etc. At the very least, I understand why we would want to block TikTok on the phones of anyone who works in the military or in a sensitive government position.
If your position is that no one should get to harvest our personal data, I support you and would like to see that privacy enshrined in law. If your position is that only China shouldn't get to do that… You may disagree with me on this, but as an entity, the CCP's ability to ruin my life seems much more... distant than the USG's. The current regime seems very interested in pointing the state at right-wingers. The linked press release describes the Biden administration's plans for dealing with domestic terrorism, with the outlined targets being white identity extremists and militia people. You may trust the Biden admin to fairly interpret the phrase "domestic terrorist," or trust our 3-letter agencies to not abuse their power or fabricate evidence, but the last few years have destroyed any trust I have in them.
Simply put, if I had to choose one state to get my data, I'd choose the CCP, simply because I'm a world away from them and have no power to break down my door should they desire to. They are not as much of a threat to my freedom or safety as the American government that views many of its citizens as domestic terror threats. I've no illusions about which country I'd actually want to live under, and the USG is not even in the same ballpark of political repression as the CCP, but that doesn't mean I trust my government with our data.
Point 4 is the China Hawk position many Republicans hold. The reasons for this are a combination of China's threat to U.S. hegemony, its desire to spread its politics and influence to client states, the desire to have a "common enemy" to reunite Americans on shared ground, and military-industrial complex-driven greed/warmongering.
This may be the position that gets the most pushback, but I just don't care about China. I don't want to spend more American money and lives on foreign conflicts when there is so much to work on domestically. I don't like the ideology and policies we are exporting to the rest of the world and don't want it to spread completely unopposed. I don't want to die in some "unifying" conflict across the world for a government that pushes domestic policies designed to economically and politically disenfranchise people who look like me. The USG has lost the Mandate of Heaven and it should focus on getting that back, rather than picking more fights abroad.
This is all before we get into what the RESTRICT act gives the government the power to do, which is a lot. It empowers the Secretary of Commerce and the President with the "authority to take any... action as necessary" against information and communications technology products and services that are deemed to be owned or controlled by foreign adversaries and present a national security act.
As I understand it, this would be a process that would require approval by committee, not congress, and lets the President or Secretary bypass 1st Amendment protections to move against any tech or social media company that they deemed to be foreign influenced. This would apply to social media, tech, crypto, etc., and gives these two individuals the power to go after any company they like at will after some procedural outcomes.
I've seen how freely the Russian Interference accusation is baselessly thrown around. It was used by our intelligence agencies to justify shutting down the Hunter Biden story in election time without any supporting evidence. I have no illusions about how this is going to be used, if the act is passed. It will give our government the power to do what it's wanted to for a long time: go after cryptocurrencies and enforce regime control on any platform it wants, free of the pesky constitutional freedoms that prevent it from doing so. It seems like a modern Patriot Act, or an updated Sedition Act of 1918.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
2yr ago
Criminal justice reform can be somewhat of a snarl phrase because it’s generally used by people who seem to not believe in prison as a concept, or more charitably, are blank statists enough that they believe almost everyone can and should be rehabilitated with enough time and effort.
I’m not really in that camp and think we can and should lock people up for as long as we need if they’re violent menaces to others. That said, prison conditions in the US are appalling and I get extremely uncomfortable when people righteously gloat about how a criminal will be violently raped in prison as retribution for his crimes.
Someone who goes to prison for a minor or nonviolent offense often finds himself joining up with a prison gang just to have protection. Once you’re out, your criminal record hurts your employment chances, but it’s okay because you just networked with a group of hardened criminals… it’s like we designed the system to both maximize suffering and crime.
I’ve seen a few suggestions for reform on here that I really like. One was from a rather controversial user who used to post here named Penpractice, who suggested public corporal punishment instead of jail time for minor offenses. Basically, humiliate and let the criminal resume his life, rather then send him to prison to meet worse criminals.
I like this idea, but since I don’t believe the optics of this could survive for a minute in the US, a better solution came from 2cimirafa, who basically said “keep violent offenders in prison until they’re 60 and give them fast food and video games to keep them humanely fat and sedated.” If that could survive the inevitable Republican swipe of “Democrats want to buy Playstations for every felon in prison” it seems to be a good idea. Keeping violent offenders comfortable and sedated and off the streets should cut down on violence for prison guards, less hardened prisoners they would prey on, and of course the average person.
Obviously, both ideas would take a lot of work from concept to execution, but they seem a lot better than the current system.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
2yr ago
Their content moderation team in the U.S. market is based in California and will promote and censor things in accordance with Californian values. I've followed conservative accounts on there that kept getting banned whenever they hit a certain follower threshold. On the other hand, their site recently highlighted several trans creators to celebrate Transgender Day of Visibility.
From the second link:
Working with me and my team throughout this process will be an outstanding group from the global law firm K&L Gates LLP, including former Congressmen Bart Gordon and Jeff Denham, who bring excellent expertise in the technology sector. The external team that we've brought on for this project will collaborate with our internal US management team to work on several key initiatives:
-Create a committee of outside experts to advise on and review content moderation policies covering a wide range of topics, including child safety, hate speech, misinformation, bullying, and other potential issues.
In its domestic market China has a much tighter leash on what TikTok can show its users, of course, but in America TikTok's social positions are the standard progressivism you will see promoted by any other major American company. If China is putting its thumb on the scale for the U.S. moderation team to engineer American social discord, it's a drop in the bucket compared to the chaos created by Musk simply halting most censorship on Twitter.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
Try running Stable Diffusion. It's open source and you can find a specifically-trained model for whatever you want. If you can't run it locally, you can find a million services online that can do it for you. You don't need to deal with content restrictions or it adding diversity to all of your prompts. I use a site called NovelAI, which runs its own version of SD trained off of an anime booru. They recently put out a new version of the image gen and it's really good. The progress made since just the last year is astounding.
We could have easily been in the timeline where the big three image diffusion models (Dall E, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney) all kept it locked down, but since one of them broke ranks and made it open source, it's opened up a world of potential for everyone to use image generation how they want.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
2yr ago
The framing of abortion as an issue of men controlling women always struck me as odd. In my own circles at least, the strongest pro-choice and pro-life people I know are all women. Most men I know have opinions on it, but they are rarely as firm or hardline as the women in my life. When discussing abortion with another man, there is room for nuance and whatever our opinions on the subject are, we can agree that the issue is uncommonly complex and difficult to find common ground on. I think both sides are correct in their own way so trying to untangle the mess that is the abortion debate is maddening.
I tread lightly if it comes up with women because it's always personal and it's always touchy. There isn't much room for disagreement, so I avoid saying too much if that's the case. Even if we agree on policy, any attempts by me to add nuance or explain the feelings of the other side don't go over well. I don't say this to condemn women or say men are better, but the energy in the debate reads to me as one driven by women. That being said, this is my personal experience, so I'd like to hear if this is the case for others here.
They were hacked by a Soyteen from Soyjack.party, as @Eupraxia said, not a state actor. The hacker restored the /qa/ board, which is where their site culture originated from and whose deletion caused them to move. This KF thread has a good overview on what their site culture is about. It is... weird, so be warned, but very funny if you enjoy schizo humor. They're well-known for raids of other imageboards, so this type of hack is only unusual for its scope.
This rDrama thread has more information on the hack and here's showing the hacker posting about how they did it.
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