Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
"Behind our efforts, let there be found our efforts."
User ID: 83
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
5mo ago
Welcome to Culture War, where you can choose between fighting to the detriment of everyone and surrendering for the benefit of your enemies and the detriment of your own.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
2yr ago
Overregulate everything into stagnation either out of naive Staatsgläubigkeit or in order to create an entire ecosystem of grift in which economically illiterate leftists and amoral opportunists thrive, submerge it all in woke lingo until there's not a refugee you can turn back nor a woman you can say no to and not a single thing you can refuse to do for the climate, burn money and ruin economies with a vengeance because that far up and so many layers removed from the taxpayer what do you care. Look at the EU and see what the progressive left desires for America. Or, if you aren't American, what's wrong with that particular flavor of pan-Europism is that it's just plain not viable in the long term. It will make Europe poorer, reduce social trust, weaken important national and cultural institutions and slowly builds up a bureaucratic monstrosity that becomes ever more expensive to maintain while it provides next to no service of value but plenty of disservice.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
6mo ago
Is today's malaise just downstream of being unwilling to commit to things? The birthrate crisis, the military recruitment crisis- moderners just not wanting to burn their bridges and have no recourse but to see their commitment through?
Yes. Yes it is. I 100% believe this and have vaguely gestured at it before. It's what I observe IRL all the time, every day, in almost every interaction with young-ish urban-ish people. A complete inability to commit to a task, a schedule, a version of the truth, an agreement, a responsibility, a shared model of the world, or even eye contact.
No idea why though. What went wrong?
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1yr ago
I've spent many hours discussing this exact line of thought with several people, and no, they insist he's a "failson" who's just short of being literally retarded and his entire business model is a matter of burning daddy's money and causing unmitigated destruction in every field he's active in.
In other words, Musk Derangement Syndrome.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1yr ago
I've been obliged to watch a lot of corporate training videos lately, and so far there's been an unbroken string of white people and especially white men representing negative examples while their exotic associates and of course especially exotic women represent the correct way of doing things.
I think in all those hours of material I watched, the only white man presented without a negative angle was a presenter.
Anecdote, anecdote, feel free to ignore.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
2yr ago
The meme can't infect you if you identify it as cringe.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
2yr ago
In my opinion, as with most wars, the reason why it started becomes less important as the war continues and we should examine the reasons why it doesn't end. And of course I can provide that reason: Because the west can afford it. We are so damn wealthy and powerful that we can afford to let our birth rates plummet, to sacrifice our economies for vanity projects and to fight the stupidest culture wars among ourselves. Why is a war between the sexes? Because it was started, and there is no pressure to end it.
My point at this point, which I think is quite clear, is that ownership is essentially and definitionally the right to deprive others. That's it. I don't like that. In fact, I detest it with passion and rage. I hate it. So, I want an alternative.
This is ass-backwards.
The definition your chatbot put out may serve your position, but it's clearly not standard and obviously not how ownership normally works. Which is this: Ownership is the right to not be deprived. I.e., the opposite of what you posit.
Do I deprive you of my car? Does my mother-in-law deprive you of the vegetables she grows in her garden? Does my landlord deprive me of the apartment I rent? Do I deprive my employer of the wages I earn? Does a customer deprive a store of the products he buys? Does a hunter-gatherer in a jungle at the other end of the world deprive me of some berries and a squirrel? Do you deprive me of the device you use to post here?
You can argue that any of those statements are true, or come up with some other semantic acrobatics, but in the end it's transparently extremely motivated reasoning.
I normally advise any would-be revolutionary to first understand why the world works the way it does before they waste everyone's time by implementing some half-cocked utopia that's made of fairy dust and ignorance. But posts like this are the opposite of understanding. It's wilful nonsense.
There can be arguments for alternate economic systems, but positing a useless definition of ownership isn't making any of them.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
2yr ago
The "pandemic" was a period in which many societies and governments dropped the mask on pluralism, burned the hitherto observed social contract, and stopped just short of putting guns to people's heads to tell them "do as we say or else", purely to force people into obedience for no good reason and many bad ones. And they stopped not because they came to their senses, but because the war in the Ukraine distracted them.
Seeing what petty tyranny lurks behind the thinning facade of supposedly liberal society can have a sobering effect.
My prediction: Those rightwing governments will fail in many ways, like all governments do, but unlike others each mistake of theirs will be shouted from the rooftops and all their members will have their failings highlighted in minute detail by the media, until either these governments collapse under the stress or the voters learn to vote correctly next time.
This surge of rightwing election successes is a backlash to recent issues of immigration, covid hysteria and the usual culture war topics getting more attention - it will wane as the rightwing governments are discredited, but the aforementioned issues will continue unabated.
The EU will win this one thanks to having most media on their side.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
5mo ago
@SkookumTree succeeding at the Hock, obviously.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1yr ago
I think you touched upon one valid point, which is the size of projects, and that the man in charge is rarely the one with a comprehensive creative vision, and even if, has too much on his hands to see it through.
But as for generalized conclusions about the decline of culture at large - probably true, but on a longer time scale, and not the immediate cause of the sharp decline in video game writing quality.
I offer a different hypothesis: The game makers of old made games from first principles, the game makers of today make games that imitate the games they know. They have played games for decades now, since they were old enough, have consumed endlessly, and whatever unique creative ideas they might have had have since been sandblasted to dust by a thousand consumer products having gone throgh their brains. They think in terms of what they have experienced hitherto, which is games based on games based on games, and their writing likewise.
Nobody needs to explain or justify why games have hitpoints, third-person reticules, experience points and levels, ultimate abilities, hero classes, zombies, magic that produces differently colored fireballs, scientific anomalies that manifest as colorful particle systems, star lanes, energy shields...all of this is assumed away as the baseline stuff of our consumer experience, and it goes without saying that when something "new" is made, it is made out of all the old that constitutes the entirety of our experiences. And that old used to be from different media, and so had to be adapted to fit a creative vision that sprang form outside of the gaming world. But now the old is just well-trodden ground, trod again, and again, and again. I don't need to explain to you why you are the chosen one with quasi-magical powers who can slaughter hundreds of meaningless enemies - it's what you came here for. Whatever plot I provide to justify it is just background noise.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1yr ago
Oh, that's rich. The problem isn't culture or absolute poverty but wealth inequality? Let them in, they're harmless...but then they become criminals because the natives are wealthier than them?
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
24d ago
No.
To some extent, when dealing with the topic of whoring, we must embrace the monstrous, one way or another. Here are our options:
- Tell the kids that whores are disrespectable they will ruin their lives if they whore themselves out, be it for money or attention, because they will be considered at least damaged goods if not somewhat subhuman by most people anywhere and ever. Also tell men with low sexual market value to shut up and stop complaining, they're not getting any and that's final. The shaming is ubiquitous and relentless.
- Tell the kids that whores may fulfill an important function, that their work is valuable and necessary to keep low-status men satisfied, but god damn if you become one you'll be disinherited and booted out of the house because whoring is still disrespectable and it's the lesser humanoids who should do it, not real people! The shaming is somewhat more limited, but still strictly in effect.
- Tell the kids that everything is permitted, you can do no wrong, fuck anything that moves, there are no consequences. They subsequently ruin their lives and cannot comprehend how this cruel world does not support them in their brave life choices. You don't shame, but others will do it for you, because not everyone lives in the anti-shame bubble.
- Tell the kids to do their whoring in style and with discretion, pragmatically and as befits mid- to high-status people. Do it by disguising it as serial monogamy, or "dating", or just do it in private and make sure none of it ever becomes public knowledge. Or just do it in the classic form of medium- to long-term monogamy, they wouldn't be the first trophy wives. You don't shame for the behavior itself, but for a lack of adroitness in engaging in it.
- You somehow brainwash / reeducate / social engineer all of humanity so they buy into the sexual liberation meme and fuck without a care. Abolish all categories of infames. Restructure the world so that nobody can ever do shamefully wrong because everything is right. Shame on you if you actually believe this to be viable.
- Abolish the deeply-ingrained, natural and timeless practice of shaming people and instead skip right ahead to capital punishment and damnatio memoriae, for whore as well as client. Nuke the entire institution from orbit. There is no shame when the would-be shamed party ceases to exist.
- Do it like most western societies do it at present, by mostly just looking the other way and pretending not to see anything. There is no shame when...hey, wait, why are you plastering your whoring all over social media!?
I'm sorry. I can't take the topic entirely seriously when it leads with one of the the least deserving examples possible. Aella, an ostensibly intelligent woman who decided to build her entire name and reputation on doing things that humanity at large considers shameful is surprised when large parts of humanity would rather shame her than praise her.
I feel...differently about Germany.
I'd certainly describe myself as a patriot. A nationalist even. But it's the culture, the language, the actual physical country, the people and their ways, and the everyday architecture that I love. Not the institutions, the state, the monuments and symbols. But that may have an obvious historical explanations. For the Americans, those things were always theirs - a democracy from the get-go, by the people and for the people. Tacky as their symbols might be, they are theirs. But for us Germans, the state was never truly a democracy; the most we ever managed was to be handed whatever form of democracy our betters thought suitable for us, by the state and against the people. We accepted it, of course, having always been a people of loyal subjects. We are now loyal subjects of our democratic constitutional order, but it's by social convention and pragmatism, and not in our hearts. As a people, we remain subjects, and our relationship to the state is little different to that our ancestors had to the Reich, or to their local princes. Those on high decide, and we obey. So what does that make the monuments, the symbols and the institutions? Those are the emanations of the ruling class, or the ruling gestalt entity anyways. They aren't truly ours. The local church, alright, that at least is or was relevant to people's lives. The ruins of a castle, picturesque and one can picnic there. But the statue of some Prussian Junker or King? Some neoclassicist monument to the Kaiserreich? A memorial to holocaust victims? The halls of government? None of that is of us and for us, but is of the state and against us. We are to obey in actions, but our hearts are irrelevant. Our constitution, our institutions, our relationship to the military, all that are artificial post-war creations installed to dictate specific behaviors to us. It's not from us. It's not for us. It's to make us behave.
At the most one could say that our tricolor flag, the black-red-and-gold, is by and for us. But in truth it was by a small subset of the population, ideologically charged and by no means organic. It's still our flag, we rally around it for identification and for sports, so I suppose we have taken to it.
Still, it's my country and my people and my language and my culture and my land, and all those are the best in the world. Obviously.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
2yr ago
Oh and apparently kids are more likely to laugh off a scraped knee if you don't make a big fuss over it. Worth a try.
In my experience this does work, but only if done as a combination of emotional support and distraction. First take the child in to console them, then immediately transition to directing their attention to something interesting. I.e., don't tell them to suck it up, don't teach them that you don't care about their pain, but do show them that daddy cares and that there are better things to do than dwell on pain.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
2yr ago
I'm sure that abortion is largely illegal for both sexes in Poland.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
2yr ago
But with nine, I cannot imagine enough coordination to pull off this hard of a troll.
The coordination to find a picture of nine white people?
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
2yr ago
It's an anglophone community the largest nationality of which is American. It's hardly surprising that in aggregate it has less to say on and less interest in stories from the Old World.
Which isn't to say that I wouldn't appreciate seeing more of them. Hell, I'd post them if I currently had the stomach to consume much news.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
4mo ago
Whenever I hear an argument along the lines of "We have to engage in leftist policy X, or else terrible thing Y that right-wingers fear will happen!", I reach for my tired disappointment.
Be honest with me now: you don't want to provide aid to the people of the Global South to prevent radical cultists; you want to provide aid to the people of the Global South because you think it's the right thing to do, and Osama 2.0 is a convenient argument you came up with.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
2yr ago
Where did you meet those people? I used to be among far-leftists and I used to be among academics (STEM though) and I never encountered even one far leftist who so much as knew what his opposition's arguments actually are beyond a forest of strawmen. At least I cannot recall any.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1yr ago
Thanks, I'll let my daughter know that we had to accelerate the degradation of her homeland in order to prove a point.
At first I just saw it as very unnecessary, since I had already had covid in the summer of 2020 and it had been harmless. By the winter of that year the vaccines were out but I was still feeling safe without one. Then everyone went crazy as described above, plus the creepy politics and media campaigns, and from there on you might call it principle or just spite.
The whole thing caught me off guard; I never saw the social pressure and the social ruin coming until was already too late. I had mistakenly assumed that people around me were running on mistake theory and that my reasons might matter to them. Silly me, it was conflict theory all along and I had strayed into the enemy camp.
But had I seen it coming, I would have done the same anyways. Only with more firing back right away.
Vaccine safety didn't factor into it for me.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
18d ago
Is there an actual justification for this anywhere or is this just "women can do no wrong" crystallizing into law?
I don't think so. Rather the opposite really - true believer leftists are very secure in their belief of the correctness of their ideas, to the point where experiments are in fact immoral, since people will end up suffering from the wrong solutions, and unnecessary because the good leftists already know the correct solutions.
Does this sound boo-outgroup? I'm serious, as an ex-leftist who spent decades in a leftist bubble and still lives next door to it. Experimentation may seem like a golden compromise to someone with enough epistemic humility, but epistemic humility is completely absent from the water the left swims in. They know. They know what the problems and the solutions are, and experimentation can only be worse than doing the obviously correct thing.
There's also a practical, political reason not to allow this - they have long-marched through most institutions; why ever give up now?
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