Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
All alliterations are accidental.
User ID: 83
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
6mo 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
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
10mo 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.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
15d 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.
5mo 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?
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
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
4mo 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.
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.
6mo 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?
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
4mo ago
Hate to pile on, but as others have said - if this is overwhelming evidence, then you simply longed to be overwhelmed.
If this violates the leave-the-internet-at-the-door rule, please say so and I'll happily delete. I'm posting in spite of it because it seems relevant, but it's n=1 so no sweat if the rule comes first.
So I just got banned from my favorite Battletech discord server for very politely disagreeing (in fact, for saying no more than that I respectfully disagreed) with very severe new anti-anti-lgbt rules that even made having anything joke-like in your global pronoun field a bannable offense. Following this I was told that it was not acceptable to call for the annihilation of groups of people and that I shouldn't be a shithead, but that it was of course permissible to politely state one's opinion. I invoked that principle and stated that the language involved in the matter seemed excessively dramatic and directed at strawmen besides. I was called a troll and banned within seconds.
I'm getting similar vibes here that I got when I politely declined vaccination and suddenly half my family turned on me as if I were planning murder. People I presumed to be reasonable overtuning their reactions to benign disagreement. Other places just don't play by Motte rules.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
11mo ago
His post may have been shitty, but the literary critique of Hlynka taking too long to make a simple point is not entirely off the mark.
Southkraut
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1mo ago
While some of what you say may be correct, I feel the need to temper your enthusiasm.
German society had numerous problems in the 1920s. It was shaken up by the effects of industrialization, urbanization, unification and democracy, and even more badly so the first world war and the following economic crises. The country was very troubled and not at all self-sufficient. What the national socialists turned the country into in the 30s and 40s wasn't much better. Some problems were solved, yes, and maybe it even was the nazis' doing, but what they made of Germany wasn't a lasting high-trust society but a totalitarian shithole that steadily degraded its social capital - by replacing Germany's formerly durable culture with the artificial crackpot pseudo-culture invented by party ideologues, by pouring ever-more resources and manpower into military endeavors (one can make the case that this was justified, given the Bolschewist threat, but frankly I think a large degree of doubt is merited here), and finally by ruining what was left of the country's international standing and plunging it into the war that almost destroyed it at the time by the after-effects of which are slowly destroying it now.
For all that I know many at the time may have fought for the country proper, or against bolshevism, but on the whole the fight was corrupted in means and in goals and led to the worst possible outcome short of an actual Nazi victory, because let us recall for a moment that the people in power at the time weren't sagacious guardians of Germany's heritage and future but a bunch of unhinged gangsters high on their own supplies of ideology and drugs and intent on transforming Germany from a real country with a real society populated by real human beings into some nightmare caricature. They might have coasted for some time on the industry of the people and the military heritage of Prussia, but Nazi administrative competence was, frankly, not much to boast of. I have no doubts that whatever social and economic capital Germany had at the time, the political leadership would not have failed to destroy it in due time.
So, yes, I guess they wouldn't have suffered the cultural decay that comes with Stalinism or Capitalism...but instead we would've seen a third flavor of cultural self-destruction.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
7mo ago
So you think TX should be forced to host immigrants that it does not desire, whereas CA should not be forced to do the same even though it desires immigrants?
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
10mo ago
A male friend recently gave me the dating advice that what's important in a partner is that they are "naturally happy", which struck me as a hilariously insufficient and condescending criterion, better suited to choosing a puppy.
That is excellent advice and well-worth blasting from the rooftops with megaphones. Could've saved me decades of trouble if I were amenable to advice.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
11mo ago
I must echo what @functor wrote below.
We are officially in a "technical recession". I don't know what that means, but I guess it's not good.
From my perspective the crisis is proceeding pretty much exactly as predicted. I earn more than the median or average salary in Germany, I live in the supposedly cheap countryside, I gave up all expensive hobbies and so did my wife, and yet I struggle to feed a family of three. Absolutely everything is expensive. Wages are barely creeping up, while inflation eats all that and more.
I invite you to look at the graph in https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Arbeit/Verdienste/Realloehne-Nettoverdienste/_inhalt.html .
Look at how the good red line rarely goes over the bad black line. Then look at the vast gulf that opened between them in the last few years. That's wages versus prices.
Looking at energy prices, I can't find a neat graph in what little time my patience gives me, but those are going up, too. Meanwhile politics announced plans to fix energy prices for various industries - now is that just lobbyism at work, or is that actually a somehow necessary act? And if the latter, is that because there is no energy crisis and everything's fine and renewables are doing a good enough job?
If there is no crisis, then fine, I guess everything just continues to look like one from the ground but we Germans are known to be unjustified doomsayers. Damn my lying eyes.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
6mo ago
Please excuse the following rambling.
The way I see it this goes back to the cold war, when Israel was a proxy for the West and the muslim countries were getting cozy with the soviets. Now, regardless of whether it was actual soviet manipulation or just an organic development, somehow Western youths and students ended up getting on board the anti-imperialist, socialist and pro-soviet train, and backing palestine over israel is just part and parcel of that. And while elements of the far-left, especially in Germany, have been pro-israel probably as an outgrowth of being anti-nazi and thus anti-antisemitic, the majority still gets their geopolitics from ye olde colde warre thinking. Add to that the timeless but boosted-in-modernity fixation on promoting the interests of the weak and oppressed, and the degraded cultural immune system of the West that's no longer able to defend itself against leftist narratives which leads to increasingly drastic purity spirals in leftism as well as the marginalization of other lines of thinking that leave this kind of leftism in control of most discourse and media, and there you go, the youth and the students and many of those who have some sort of platform to speak from are now pro-palestinian by default, and even if they'd like to denounce what hamas are doing they can't without betraying their side in the culture war.
Now, the German left very quickly shut up and toed the line to support Israel, since you cannot be anti-zionist in this country without putting yourself dangerously close to the nazi area, but America doesn't have quite the same mechanisms in place, so your youth and students can fully enjoy their ideology.
Southkraut
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10mo ago
You don't have children, do you?
Southkraut
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10mo ago
I'm om vacation and too busy to read newspapers, so I can't add anything at present, but I greatly enjoy these windows into regions I normally ignore entirely.
Top-level comment or post, whichever it is, please keep it up!
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1mo ago
No. I've spent several days in a state of unabating rage about her having strangled everyrhing positive out of our lives. I'm escalating. Today I dumped her, myself and our daughter at her parents' house and we'll live here for the indefinite future. If retvrn to the multigenerational family model doesn't help, then my next step will be to be a very bad parent and ask my daughter to choose either mom or dad.
Does she have any interest in changing?
Only if it happens without any effort on her part, or by her doing more of what she's been doing so far.
Hello The Motte, thanks for hosting my vent.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1mo ago
That certainly fits my anecdotal experience. First-hand. Lots of it. My wife's an overtherapied wreck who spends every waking hour re-heating her anxieties. Only ever gets worse.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
5mo ago
He killed what was left of the HRE and accelerated Germany's slide into Prussian hegemony, so he's in my bad book.
Amazing General, though. The anti-meritocrats tell me that it's entirely down to luck, but given the long string of battles that he should've lost by the numbers but somehow turned into victories, I strongly suspect that skill has something to do with it.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
5mo ago
IIRC, he believes that his expedition will change him to such a degree that his newly-acquired badassness will shine through without needing explicit introduction.
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.
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