PropagandaOfTheDude
No bio...
User ID: 726
PropagandaOfTheDude
9mo ago
Frankly, I think it is all fundamentally about resentment of the have nots against the haves, and this is essentially a parallel development.
The Frankfurt school brings a memeplex that the solution is obvious, and those in-the-know just have to keep reiterating why the problem is bad until people come around.
But it's also postmodern and Gnostic. The one unifying agreement is that everything is white cis-hetero patriarchal capitalist—our modern Yaldabaoth. That Everyday Feminism comic is reminding you that even if you think that you have gained knowledge and escaped, you probably haven't. There's always more work to do.
PropagandaOfTheDude
2yr ago
Six years ago, Sarah A. Hoyt coined "roll hard left and die".
Years ago, watching science fiction magazines and newspapers of various sorts come and go, I identified a process I called “roll hard left and die.”
When a magazine or a newspaper or any news or entertainment media was in real trouble, they went hard, hard left, then died.
It took me a little while to realize this was a sane strategy. In a field completely controlled by the left, when you knew that your job was in peril be it through missmanagement or whatever, your last hope was to go incredibly hard left, so you could blame the failure on ideology. And instead of not being able to find a job, you found yourself lionized by all the “right” (left) “thinking people.” New jobs were assured.
In his December 15th newsletter, Josh Barro wrote the following about Elon Musk:
Some people are spinning out baroque theories of what the underlying business strategy is, but my strong feeling is that there isn’t one. I think what’s happened is that Musk has greatly overpaid for this company, he’s not running it in a way that’s likely to produce financial returns that come close to justifying the price he paid, and leaning into the idea that he is serving a great social mission (vanquishing the proprietors of the “woke mind virus” who were trying to destroy our society) helps him feel better about the unpleasant business position he’s gotten himself into.
If you’re going to lose money, it’s best to feel like you’re losing it for a cause [...]
The difference here is that I can't see Musk's root motivation as "not being able to find a job" when all is said and done.
And if that's the case, it makes me reconsider how much of "roll hard left and die" really does boil down to Hoyt's lifeboat theory, and how much is "losing money for a cause".
PropagandaOfTheDude
10mo ago
I'm also reminded of that one woman who committed suicide a few years ago IIRC, who had written a book about her experience dressing up as a man (no transition, just roleplaying for the book), where she seemed to come to some revelations about the difficulties of men's lives that were completely invisible to her before the experience.
The Motte automatically converts Twitter/X links into Nitter links, right?
Nitter is dead, and its replicas will die in less than 30 days.
Nitter currently relies on the mass generation of guest accounts, a weird anonymous form of account that was only supported by old versions of the Twitter app. Creation of them was totally disabled today, so every nitter instance will be dead in under 30 days (when they expire). Scrapers apparently also relied on this, as every public nitter instance was being hammered by scrapers earlier. Instances will probably shut down quite soon unless someone finds another way to create tens of thousands of accounts in an automated fashion for free.
(Note: This is a per-account setting, in the "Content" section.)
PropagandaOfTheDude
9mo ago
From the old country, worth linking to.
Occasionally, I find myself listing out all the different things that people use the words "capitalism" or "capitalist" to mean. I think I need to add a couple.
That website is using the "state of alienation, strife, and scarcity; considered as a moral and natural evil" meaning.
PropagandaOfTheDude
1yr ago
We have 2 dogs and 10 cats in my condo right now. This isn't normal right? She also teaches kids math as a data scientist so she is obsessed with helping people. But I feel like there is a certain point where it's insane. Should I crack down and tell her how crazy it is with how many animals live in our condo, or should I just let it go.
You've heard of or read those news stories that pop up, about people who have lots animals, in filthy conditions?
One of the paths that leads to this is that the person or family can foster four pets. Then eight pets. Then twelve, sixteen. It works, for a while.
Eventually some other crisis happens. The household can't take care of them all. But having a dozen or more pets is normalized. Stress accumulates. Quality of care drops, and drops.
Right now I don't think you folks are in a position to cope with a life downturn.
PropagandaOfTheDude
1yr ago
Some hard-core of people exist who, for whatever reason, will always want to transition to living as the opposite sex and will be happier if they do so; but there also exist today people who transition for reasons of social contagion or to take advantage of policies, who would be happier living as their birth-sex.
I found this Tumblr screencap a while back, it stuck in my head, and then it turned up again recently:
i went to go pick up my HORMONES from the chemist today and the guy was quite sweet and very well intentioned but clearly way out of his element... when i was leaving i did the standard "thanks have a nice night" and he responded with "you too enjoy your... (very very quietly obviously realising what he was saying was highly insane) gender..." and tbh i haven't stopped thinking abt being a gender enjoyer since
For me, that's a useful way to view matters. Is a given person a gender enjoyer? Or someone who isn't enjoying anything?
PropagandaOfTheDude
2yr ago
One example that I recall was that the classical liberal "You don't like gay marriage? Don't get gay married!" has turned into punitive attacks on cake decorators.
PropagandaOfTheDude
9mo ago
Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music discusses various ways that music genres grab ideas from other music genres. Or enthusiasts take a particular element from one genre and put it front-and-center into new tracks, making it distinctive enough to be its own genre. Calling this process "direct and coherent" would overstate things.
Same process here.
(I suppose that "Cultural Marxism" is roughly equivalent to the hearing "Oh, you listen to disco?", back in the day.)
PropagandaOfTheDude
1yr ago
Inclusion into strangely discriminatory female spaces
Something like this?
"Having been both a student and teacher at MIT, my personal explanation for men going into science is the following: 1. young men strive to achieve high status among their peer group; 2. men tend to lack perspective and are unable to step back and ask the question 'is this peer group worth impressing?'"
PropagandaOfTheDude
2yr ago
Hlynka confusing extroversion with intelligence once again.
The extroverts are the people that you'll interact with when you go to east Africa, so there's some selection bias.
PropagandaOfTheDude
2yr ago
I'm not sure that the movie is supposed to be set in 1996: the jury selection in particular only really makes sense either before Batson or in an alternate universe where it never happened.
Per the novel's Wikipedia page, the events are set in 1984, two years before Batson.
...and I see that you sort of mention that with "plausible for 1984".
Maybe?
I recall playing the original Deus Ex with a stealth assassin. The game took care to provide killphrases for two of the minibosses. And then—whoops!—I had a devil of a time trying to deal with Walton Simons(?) at Area 51 armed just with a sniper rifle. Apparently if I had just spent a moment to knock him unconscious in the previous mission he never would have appeared...
I think the key frustrations for DE:HR boss fights boil down to a couple of things.
- You have to carry along weaponry on mission after mission so it'll be available during the four boss fights. For most of the game, that meant a fully tricked-out revolver, based on wiki advice. Then I added a grenade launcher. They take up room, especially when added to a tranq rifle and a stun gun.
- You'll find the usual game designer trope where your weapons don't really do much until you've dealt with some precondition.
- Pretty much every time I save spammed and retried and then looked on the wiki for hints and then won, I explored the area after the fight. Lots of weapon/ammo caches, and other rooms and corridors besides the main "arena". So maybe they did design them to support hiding and sniping. (Your non-lethals won't work.) But when the cut scene ends and the mini-boss is in front of you, there's a very strong tendency to just start unloading.
There's a DLC The Missing Link where the final boss is just a guy, and sneaking over and doing a takedown works just fine. That was nice.
PropagandaOfTheDude
2yr ago
I'll link to the Status 451 book review that everyone always links to:
What if fanatics made a serious and nearly successful attempt on the life of the President of the United States?
What if those fanatics got into the Capitol building and committed a mass shooting on Congress while it was in session?
What if those fanatics conducted bombing sprees, for years, in multiple American cities?
And what if people really did do every one of those things, and you’d never heard of them? That’s the story of Puerto Rican separatists.
PropagandaOfTheDude
2yr ago
"Screed".
PropagandaOfTheDude
1yr ago
Twitter shut down the "disposable account" mechanism that Nitter instances used. Thirty days afterwards, the last Nitter account stopped working.
PropagandaOfTheDude
1yr ago
There's a good chunk of library science that has to do with figuring out precise meanings, and precise classifications of "things" based on those meanings. Getting that nailed down helps the data crunching process.
PropagandaOfTheDude
1yr ago
My read at the time was that Mutual Friend was attempting to arrange for Other Girl to "go to the prom", and was trying to find someone to fill a critical slot in the plan. I've had no reason to re-evaluate that.
If it had been Mutual Friend asking for herself, I might have said yes. We had known each other for years at school, and hours upon hours in the same school bus by that point. But any theoretical indulgence for our shared history did not extend to Other Girl.
PropagandaOfTheDude
1yr ago
Not much to elaborate. Clueless, nervous, uncommunicative. Unable to initiate conversation,monosyllabic in response, zero cross gender social skills.
Now I'm getting flashbacks to a Korean classmate in high school, a lonnng time ago.
A mutual female friend (Taiwanese, but raised locally) asked me senior year whether I would be up for taking said classmate to the prom.
I said "Thank you, but I wasn't planning on going." I can only imagine what the ensuing vast, hours-long conversational chasm would have been like. I couldn't even say for certain whether the two of us actually ever talked to each other in school.
PropagandaOfTheDude
2yr ago
That is: adults were banned from taking vaccines until the FDA had satisfactorily hemmed and hawed over the trials
Entities were banned from testing people for COVID-19 while the CDC spent weeks coming up with and distributing their own, broken test mechanisms.
PropagandaOfTheDude
1yr ago
With the right cybernetic chair and daily sacrifices he'll be fine.
PropagandaOfTheDude
1yr ago
Only downside is that I went in with a particular playstyle that I enjoy from shooters, and its sometimes been hard to get the cyberpunk leveling to play well with my preferred playstyle.
How well does it handle stealth? I have been a first-person sneaker fiend since Thief.
I recently finished Deus Ex: Human Revolution as...a stealthy hacker.
PropagandaOfTheDude
2yr ago
Don't just ask her in a way that suggests that you are excited. Be excited. Pick something that you want to do.
"Hey, I'm going to <EVENT> on <DATE>. If you'd like to come with me, I'd enjoy your company. Let me know by <OTHERDATE>."
Then do it and have fun. Even if she says no, even if she says yes and flakes.
"Are you asking me on a date?"
"If you're there with me, sure."
PropagandaOfTheDude
2yr ago
Set up some location where you can put your awake, active child down, and safely not pay attention to your child for a while. Maybe that's one of those plastic fence things in the middle of the room. Maybe it's a dedicated room. (Move all grabbable items out of reach. That may even mean moving electrical outlets up to your eye height.) You have some time before this becomes important, but now's the time to plan.
The upthread discussion about male role models reminded me of a web essay that I can no longer find (damn it). The author was a male English professor for undergrads. His course satisfied a general requirement, so his male student population broadly represented the student body. In the essay, the author observed that when his male students were given an opportunity to select a text or topic to study, the most popular subject was always power.
I don’t recall the author proposing any reason for that preference. We can come up with a couple.
Broke: They know that power is the ultimate aphrodesiac.
Woke: They are already toxically masculine. The professor should focus exclusively on books by queer women of color, who hate power.
Bespoke: They are thinking about the Roman Empire.
I’ll have to expand on that last one.
Ages ago, I came across someone asking why 19th Century Britain seemed to be so obsessed with Rome. One responder said “Britain found itself with an empire unexpectedly. The 19th Century British culture was looking to ancient Rome to give it context. How should they act? What is it like to have an empire? What can they learn?”
That sprang to mind as I was reading the essay. Those teenage boys knew that they were on the cusp of having power, over themselves at least. They should, at least. What does that mean? How should they behave?
My question, then, is: What would you recommend for those boys, to help them understand the power that they will eventually wield?
More options
Context Copy link