Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
All alliterations are accidental.
User ID: 83
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
4mo 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
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
5mo 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
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1yr ago
The meme can't infect you if you identify it as cringe.
Southkraut
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1yr 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.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
9mo 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
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
4mo 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
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1yr ago
I'm sure that abortion is largely illegal for both sexes in Poland.
Southkraut
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1yr 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
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1yr 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
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
2d 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
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
11mo 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
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1yr 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.
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
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3mo ago
Thanks, I'll let my daughter know that we had to accelerate the degradation of her homeland in order to prove a point.
I "have" to feel that the great sin of Germany was what it did to the Jews, Cripples and Gypsies. I do feel that the greatest sin of Germany back then was what it did to Germany and the Germans.
As for those WWI vets, you can validly suggest that they weren't all unhinged gangsters, but I will insist that more than enough of them in positions of great power were, and this includes big names like Himmler, Göring, the non-veteran Göbbles and Hitler himself, and a thousand lesser party barons who managed to escape post-war condemnation only because they lorded it over the Germans instead of bullying foreigners or minorities. Some more unhinged, some more gangster, some perhaps neither but alas the the party was top-heavy with unhinged gangsters and the top had the last word on acceptable behavior.
I'm fine with denouncing the common depiction of the Nazis as fundamentally evil, fine with admitting that they did some good, fine with any claim of there being worse things in the world than Nazis, fine with theories that posit that Fascism may have good points, but not fine with attempts to whitewash those particular Nazis as saviors of the Germany they destroyed in their mania and incompetence.
Look at their mismanagement, the purges, the wealth accumulated by party functionaries, and the ground-level stories of German peasants and tradespeople being bossed around and told to shut up and get with the program or else, and look at the total and utter catastrophe that was WW2. It takes a lot of revisionism to clear them of the blame for that. You can, if you like, completely ignore the horror stories of concentration camps and death squads or any principled objection to authoritarianism - there's still more than enough left to condemn the Nazis in general both for what they attempted and for what they ended up achieving.
And I honestly don't know enough about JFK to answer your question.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
11mo ago
The last paragraph invalidates whatever else you may have written. By associating yourself with environmentalism and animal welfare, you break the illusion of your post being purely an objective evaluation of a diet - it instead comes to appear that any seeming facts you deliver are likely cherry-picked to support your moral politics.
And maybe this is untrue, maybe it really is purely about practical health concerns, but then why that last paragraph? It smells too strongly of missionary zeal.
What I'm trying to get at is this - it's disappointing to give a text the benefit of the doubt only for it to ruin its credibility in its last lines.
As for my own excuse: Eating meat is normal, the vegans I know tend to be crazy, better stick to my guns.
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.
I recall one genuinely intelligent friend who told me in late 2020 that "once the vaccines come everyone just needs to get jabbed and this will all be over" and in early 2022 "you should have gotten vaccinated because that's a fixed viral load whereas the virus in the wild might give you any sort of load and then you don't actually know what happened to you."
My impression from this and similar interactions: Arguments are soldiers and covid vaccinations are primarily a tribal signal.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1yr ago
What is that conference and why does it matter?
Southkraut
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1mo ago
Tangentially related.
I recently received a gift copy of Pacific Drive (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1458140/Pacific_Drive/). Ostensibly a game about driving, scavenging, tinkering with the car, and uncovering the mysteries of its setting.
Well, at some point fairly early on, you unlock the ability to decorate your car...and the available decorations are a large assortment of "pride" flags, plus "black lives matter".
I searched and discovered a mod that removed all those, installed it, it worked, and so as to facilitate the same procedure for others I posted a guide on steam on how to remove those flags. Hardly a day later, the guide was banned. I asked Steam Support why this was, and they told me that it had violated the community guidelines. I asked which one exactly and how, and received a non-reply that simply gestured at the guidelines again, but also told me that I should not have included an obscured link the guide. I offered to remove the link and asked whether that would make the guide pass muster, and if not, what other rule remained broken. They finished up by telling me that the issue was resolved, and closed my ticket.
I wonder a little how people can stomach doing customer support in such a way.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
3mo ago
AFAIK the usual story is either "women grossly overestimate their market value" or "women underestimate how destructive a signal divorce initiation is, initiate to create pressure on the husband, and the outraged men escalate by actually going through with it".
I have no idea whether there's any truth to either of those.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
5mo ago
My take is that your mind is stuck in some kind of bizarre loop and I'm not sure what might help you get out of it. Touch grass? Get blackout drunk to reset your brain? Start boxing?
I don't currently have the wit to write up anything worth reading, so here's my research-free quick take for the purpose of just adding one more German perspective, based on having known some people from that and adjacent subcultures, and having lurked in some of their channels. No claim of factual correctness, but here's how I see it:
Eins (1.). No, they're all LARPing. How far they'd take it in the end is hard to tell, but these kinds of subversives are all either delusional, dumb or putting on a performance for their ego's sake. I won't even attempt any armchair psychology of the types involved, but the ones I knew were all very eager to be special, to be seen as special, and to embrace beliefs that enhanced their special status even if only in their own minds. The german conspiratorial milieu is also full of Bauernfänger (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Bauernf%C3%A4nger) peddling anything from crystal therapies to unlock the power of your mind to novel covid cures. I mean to say they're a credulous bunch.
As for chances of success: Though they overtly deny it, they must know on some level that the people do not have their backs, and wouldn't even if they were to conquer berlin and every state capital on top of it. Old Germans hate change, and young and new germans hate wrongthink in general and right-wing think even more so. An armed revolution in favor of everything most of the population despises, which all institutions are sworn to oppose and that only a tiny conspiratorial segment of a small and politically marginalized part of the people actually desires? Even delusions can only carry you so far. Most of them, I suppose, revel in the aesthetics of being a serious revolutionary, but would never have gone through with it.
Zwei (2.). They're there, at least this subculture is strongly pro-russian, anti-american, anti-NATO and so on. But whether this is purely a grassroots artifact of cold-war era pacifist activism or at least partially an astroturf by Putin himself, I cannot say. Money flows from Russia to certain German organizations, as others have noted, so it wouldn't be entirely surprising.
Drei (3.). Firstly refer back to 1. for one large cause. It's just the kind of people who want to be special.
Secondly, again refer back to 1. again, most of them must have known that they could never succeed, and this lack of ideological prospects extends to parliamentary politics as well - the German right will not get much further than it already has; not within our lifetimes. Going into politics for the right means fighting not just an uphill battle, but committing to a sisyphean struggle just to keep the overton window from snapping left so hard that it leaves even the last conservative out in the cold. That's a bleak thing to dedicate yourself to, and it seems to me that some people require a more colorful political vision, no matter how unlikely its implementation.
As for institutional capture, I must repeat: Most Germans reflexively and thoroughly hate anything smelling of right-wing wrongthink, in a way that even American wokes have not yet come close to. Yeah, you guys over the pond have the crazier issues with your trans and your blackbodies, but post-war Germany has mastered the science of mental inoculation against political deviancy. There is no chance whatsoever of capturing any institution that matter, nevermind of reversing the long-accomplished capture by the left of all institutions that do. This isn't even an unequal fight; it's a non-fight.
Exit is not an option. They want to either be special, to see themselves as heroes who overthrow the oppressive regime that's selling out Germany while keeping the people in ideological lockstep, or they actually believe this and want to save Germany. Creating a new society isn't on their agenda.
And, let's assume that it were on their agenda: As with all ideological crusaders, they don't want to move out into the cold to put theories they themselves believe in in so far as psychologically necessary, which they cannot implement without substantial manpower and material, the failure of which would not only embarrass their ideology but also them personally. Let me rephrase this: they don't want to move out of what is one of the comfiest, cushiest countries in the world to try their hand at building a nation out of thin air, ego and delusions. No matter how serious they are about their beliefs, there must be at least some small part of themselves screaming at the madness of giving up material paradise for what is barely even a pipe dream. But as prefaced, I don't think this is even an option for them.
Eh, my coffee is drained and I still don't think I've been able to say anything of value. I keep trying to find something of value in the German right, something more to stop the leftward slide of the country than inertia and a little friction with reality, but so far I've been mostly disappointed. Hardly surprising given Germany's history and the last 75 years of everything that can be done to weaken the right having been done, and mostly successfully so. These kinds of failed nonstarter revolutionaries are, IMO, not to be taken seriously. They receive outsized media attention because anything that mobilizes people against the right and anything that discredits the right always receive outsized media attention in Germany. Don't read too much into the particulars of this case; it's not that significant.
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.
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