PierreMenard
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User ID: 2675
PierreMenard
2hr ago
Well, I was referring to all people in general. Even for white Westerners, I wager that the effect you describe is driven by a significantly different demographic than the average gamer. I'd be surprised if this was not also a factor in the rising popularity of Japanese/Korean animated media over Hollywood's muddied productions.
PierreMenard
3hr ago
The trans wedge has been a good development for anti-feminists.
Abortion is not a woman's choice and it is not an issue that men cannot talk about. Similarly, as the trans tidal wave keeps crashing over the ruins of society, wamen may find out that liberal men offering their physical and legal protection was a mere accident of history, and perhaps going out with a chaperone is a good idea, once there is literally no space free from the towering presence of a trans stasi agent.
PierreMenard
3hr ago
I'd wager it'd just be a pragmatic decision. The majority, wealthiest portion of consumers is 40+ years old, age groups where you can't seriously compete in most sports. People who are both wealthy enough to spend money on competitive sports equipment and in an age range where competition even makes sense are a very small fraction of the population.
I wouldn't be surprised if these brands' marketing started looking more like drug ads 'after my hip-replacement surgery I wasn't sure I would still be able to run, but the new Nike SwiftMax give me just the right amount of support to keep going...'
PierreMenard
8hr ago
That's the 'women are wonderful' effect. Everybody loves women. Everybody of any race has some women they care about.
On the other hand, aside from some with exotic racial preferences, people usually want to see people that look like them in the media they consoom. Moreover, adding characters that look blatantly out of place from a historical, common sense point-of-view, takes away from the immersion.
For a lot of (male) gamers, adding attractive women in skimpy clothing is just a bonus. It does take away from the realism, still. The problem these days is that Western content creators have a tendency to pair a 'realistic, gritty' aesthetic with feminist fantasies. So the male fantasy of a scantily-clad (it's magic armor ok) Amazonian goddess turns into a rough-looking, middle-aged, square-shouldered she-man.
PierreMenard
9hr ago
Plenty of gamers loved playing CJ, an African-American character, in his GTA San Andreas adventures, fighting for his street gang and taking part in various criminal activities per the GTA formula. It's a great game because it mixes good gameplay (guns, cars, open-world which was somewhat new then), and an interesting story with characters that are both colorful, memorable, and also somewhat realistic, with the usual humorous exaggeration of the series.
The player, who is most likely not a would-be criminal from an impoverished inner-city black neighborhood, gets to experience a fascinating (exaggerated, fictionalized) facet of contemporary American life, with hundreds of references to TV shows and movies, music, sports, etc.
And of course, plenty of opportunities to drop the gamer-word while playing.
In this case, what does a black samurai bring to the experience of the game? Do we get some special scenes of the main character experiencing racial discrimination and having to take revenge? Does not sound like a lot of fun to me.
In the best case scenario, they'd bring some flashbacks of the main character's past life in Africa, with some neat well-researched African culture on display. Somehow I'm skeptical, unless they can somehow place the character in a part of Africa that wasn't having a ton of enslaving, public executions and human sacrifices going on all the time.
PierreMenard
1d ago
The problem with a lot of material targeted at kids is how sanitized it all is. Whether it's superheroes or robot-animals or what not, the solution is always some magic or techno-magic, never an actual practical skill that kid-behaving-like-adults would develop.
You'll never learn how to gut a fish or dress a deer by reading an 'adventure in the woods' type of book. You'll never learn how to make bombs or makeshift weapons or how to bribe an official. You can watch 1000s of hours of pirate cartoons and barely learn any strategy or tactics.
PierreMenard
1d ago
Well this is an English-language website on a European-created internet, populated with educated people familiar with the Western mindset. Antisemitism was historically very common among that group.
If we were sitting in a circle in Papua New Guinea then the pros and cons of cannibalism may be more common.
You'll have to forgive me if there's something a little counter-intuitive in the idea that the best way to decrease the number of rants about the Jews is to have more rants about the Jews.
No, there are other ways to decrease the absolute number of rants about the Jews, obviously, but we're talking specifically about the Motte. If you're sick of reading this content, there's still plenty of space on the wider English-language internet that is more or less curated of Jews-rants (for now). It's too bad for you that people that have interesting things to write about also seem to have a strange obsession for Jews-rants.
Perhaps we could have a separate Culture War Roundup Thread where talking about Jews would be allowed. We could have all the Ukraine, Gaza, NYC, Biden admin, Trump lawfare discussion in that thread, and for everything else, keep it in the Jew-rant-free thread, with the occasional link to a comment on the other thread if an user somehow thought that a discussion would be improved by adding an appropriate Jew-rant.
PierreMenard
1d ago
What is that meant to show? The fact that there exists an ideology more hated than Zionism does not mean that Zionism isn't hated.
My point was included already:
Well, then that's why you see more white nationalism-adjacent discourse on the Motte than zionist content.
If you want to see less talk of Jews-bad on theMotte, then make Jews-bad talk more mainstream. If SecureSignals could publish his opinions in the NYT, why would it be interesting to post it here?
The infamous 'Nazi punch' was one guy
There was also the whole Charlottesville event when a blue city decided to completely pull police forces from a legally registered protest and let counter-protesters take over and harass the lawfully-protesting right-wingers. The infamous car accident even happened because a driver got confused trying to leave the city, got threatened by a gun-carrying antifa, and then took a wrong turn in a street crowded by illegally-assembled counter-protesters.
Note how nobody at that time dared to publish a headline such as 'Is it OK to run over antifa protesters?' and nobody yet is writing headlines such as 'Is it OK to punch a zionist?', but that may change.
PierreMenard
2d ago
There are absolutely places where being a Zionist will get you punched.
When was the last time these billionaire Zionists got punched? Anybody doxxing them like Supreme Court justices?
No, it's not as radioactive as white nationalism, but so what?
Well, then that's why you see more white nationalism-adjacent discourse on the Motte than zionist content.
People who want to defend Israel's right to ethnic cleansing can just do so on TV panels, government offices, billionaire whatsapp groups, Fox News ads, SuperBowl ads, etc...
Meanwhile Tom Cotton has the audacity to suggest that perhaps the violence in American cities should be contained and everybody freaks out.
A few days later, The New York Times published an opinion piece by Cotton titled "Send in the Troops", arguing for the deployment of federal troops to counter looting and rioting in major American cities. Dozens of Times staff members sharply criticized the decision to publish Cotton's article, calling its rhetoric dangerous.[89][90] Following the negative response from staffers, the Times responded by saying the piece went through a "rushed editorial process" that would be reexamined.[91] Editorial page editor James Bennet resigned days later.
PierreMenard
2d ago
The mods were just following orders. Is it really anybody's fault that no one but Nazis can seem to follow pretty simple rules?
PierreMenard
2d ago
A strange backwards situation in which the feeble try to tell the mighty what is allowed.
Interestingly, when one considers the relationship between the US and Israel, a straightforward interpretation is that the mighty would be the US.
Yet who is telling who what is allowed? Whose billionaires are broadcasting Superbowl ads and emptying their government's coffers to fight whose wars?
Was mid-century Germany justified in telling the feebler Eastern-European countries how to treat their civilians?
PierreMenard
2d ago
And plenty of contexts where it's no problem at all or even a given. Not quite the same thing as being a White nationalist. Is it OK to punch a Zionist yet?
PierreMenard
2d ago
Mainly at the level where I think, boy, it'd be really nice to read the Motte without the same two or three people every time yelling about the Jews.
I agree with you! I can't wait for anti-sionism to be so mainstream that Jews are afraid to publish their pro-Israel opinions and have to get together on obscure pseudonymous message boards to dare express that 'perhaps Jews have a right to self-determination'.
From my experience, you can apply in person to entry-level, wagie jobs, and they may want you to work there, but if it's not a small business, you will still have to painstakingly submit an application online anyway. Some kind of humiliation ritual, perhaps.
The best part is that the people in charge of hiring you will also struggle with the process, as the devices they have in their grocery store have awkward hardware, the 3rd-party app (successfactor) is complicated or constantly changing, and they don't actually perform that process very often.
The technology was supposed to make hiring easier, more convenient, practical, but it is questionable whether that was actually achieved. I'm sure some metrics were improved, corporations have better awareness of who was hired and when, and they can do more background checks, penny-pinch wages and target workers for layoffs more accurately, they can optimize diversity scores to manage unionization risks...
On the other hand perhaps 'old-school hiring' wasn't so bad. Perhaps somebody can still be a good employee despite having used the n-word in 2008 or being an ex-con in some other state.
I think there's a significant possibility of disagreement on that point. Wasn't Athena the goddess of war?
I'm sure there are many other examples, from the common witch to the royalty/divinity, where female characters gained the might to defeat men through supernatural means.
Another aspect of it is that having out-of-context female characters opens up different modes of storytelling such as romance, motherhood, which randomly making one of the character browner does not really do.
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