TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
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User ID: 373
Two people are being forced to fight each other to the death. They are both equally inexperienced and of the same height and build. They are fighting in a flat open area.
One has a 6 inch hunting knife. The other has a 34 inch wooden baseball bat.
Who is likely to win?
There was a Twitter poll a few years ago here, but you should post your answer before you look.
I personally thought the answer was pretty blindingly obvious and this question wouldn't even be interesting since everyone would agree, but I've been taken aback at how I'm actually in the minority opinion.
Edit: You bat people are insane. They're both inexperienced fighters so the bat hits are going to be pretty bad and the knife hits are going to be pretty bad. But a bad knife hit still means someone is getting stabbed, which is way, way worse than a bad bat hit. The only way the bat user wins the fight is if they get lucky and get a very good hit in (like bashing the person full-force on the head). They only get maybe one chance, then the knife user can just close the distance by lunging.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
I'll add, though, in my personal experience was that the only people who ever called the game leftist were leftists praising the game for pushing forward leftist (not necessarily "woke" or progressive) messaging.
Interestingly, I've only ever experienced the opposite. I've only ever heard the game denigrated as leftist by right-wing forums complaining about the Communist bias. Although it should be mentioned that I don't browse a lot of leftist video game forums (are there even that many besides Resetera?).
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
the whole thing is this is not the authoritarian right
I wasn't saying this publication was from the auth-right, I was saying it has similar goals as the auth-right in banning porn, but its evidence is the opposite of what the auth-right normally claims. Both sides want to ban porn, but one side is saying it increases violence while the other side says it decreases violence. Both claims can't be true simultaneously. At an intuitive level, the claim that porn leads to violence simply doesn't make much sense to me, and leads me to believe this study is falling victim to selection effects, i.e. the old "correlation doesn't equal causation".
I think it's more like "people with problems like depression, anger issues, etc. engage in anti-social/coping behaviours like getting in fights, being aggressive, drinking, smoking, drugs, and porn use".
I agree with this, the behaviors correlate but aren't caused by each other. So a porn ban wouldn't have the desired effect and the study is effectively worthless.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Israel should be added to the list of hostile nations,
Israel isn't hostile in the same way that Russia or China are though. I'd argue they're highly overrated, but they're not trying to destroy the influence of the US as an end-goal, they're just getting way more out of the relationship than they're putting in.
The Jews want to censor criticism of Jews and Israel
That can be opposed in its own right
So force a TikTok divestiture for censoring anti-China views, then fight against pro-Israel censorship on other platforms.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
First, there shouldn't need to be a quid pro quo for initiatives that are just generally good for the country, which Ukraine aid is. We're providing assistance, building up our own withered defense-industrial base for a potential future hot conflict against China, and inflicting losses on an ally of China who has very explicitly stated anti-American and anti-Western views. FDR didn't need to give Republicans a bunch of concessions to fight WW2.
Second, Biden was willing to give concessions on immigration by signing the most conservative immigration bill in a generation, something Republicans were on board with until it looked like it could actually pass, then Trump sabotaged the agreement.
Russian propaganda isn't the only reason why Republicans dislike Ukraine aid, but it's certainly a part of it. I've debated the Ukraine issue a lot, and Russian arguments like "James Baker pinky-promised not to expand NATO eastward" have been prominent, even on this very forum.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Thirdly, some of the rarest examples of good game writing, like Disco Elysium, are explicitly leftist, woke fiction (bordering on actual political propaganda) far to the left of the average ‘Sweet Baby Inc’ employee.
It's a common complaint on 4chan that Disco Elysium is super leftist, but actual evidence for it is quite thin. You can espouse communist viewpoints but in the end the character admits it probably wouldn't work out if implemented. There's also the blatantly corrupt union boss which is not something you'd normally see in a leftist work.
Beyond communism, I haven't heard many complaints that DE is actually woke. There was the lower class racist near the hotel who's made out to be repugnant, but he's a fairly minor character. There's the strange pseudo-black nationalist on the wall if I remember correctly, but his weird political theories are meandering and incoherent.
Beyond those I can't think of anything else.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
From the study, about half of the negative effect of porn is just gay men watching more porn and being more depressed in general (model 3 on page 50). Also, the study suspiciously says porn usage imparts a massive uptick in violence, which leads me to believe there's just other factors not being controlled for. One of the authoritarian right's attacks on porn is that masturbation leads to men essentially "leaking their manna" and becoming passive and less likely to pursue their goals, which is the opposite of what this study finds.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
I'm cognizant of the fact that the Jewish lobby has a tremendous amount of power in the US, and that it's generally not a good thing considering the US-Israel alliance is pretty lopsided and parasitic, where the US gives lots of aid and spends huge amounts of diplomatic capital for dubious returns.
That said, I don't think an argument that's essentially "the jews want you to do this, therefore you shouldn't do it" is particularly persuasive. The reasons I listed in the first comment are still valid. We shouldn't allow a corporation from an enemy country that's beholden to said country's government to have unrestricted access to the domestic information sphere, especially after they've proven multiple times that they're willing to abuse it.
X could be next
This is just a slippery slope unless you're willing to go into a lot more detail on how force-divesting a Chinese company for things specifically related to Chinese manipulation in the context of wider geopolitical competition with them, could directly lead to the government using that power randomly on anyone and everyone. The bill specifically mentions control by a hostile foreign power (currently limited to just 4 nations), so the brightline is pretty clear.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
I could do a response here but:
As a thinking adult
This is especially tedious on your part
This is childish thinking
you waltzed into some lazy narrative
etc.
Being maximally antagonistic while still staying just within rules to not get modded is still annoying, and my past experience on this site has proven time and again that these discussions are almost always unproductive. For the record, I probably shouldn't have done the "right back at you" or the "you're being obtuse" parts above. I probably should have just not responded at all when you led with "choked with lazy cliches", although to be fair the rest of your first comment was fine and it's only down here in the replies that you have obnoxious stuff in almost every paragraph.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
besides the dissident right
It mostly is the dissident right as you say, but you shouldn't just handwave them away. They altered the outcome. They prevented Ukraine aid from being passed. It might eventually pass, but it will come delayed and probably quite a bit less than was originally intended.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
That the West is the villain in Ukraine, despite Russia being the aggressor. Russian propaganda flows freely through Western societies, while the reverse is not true. Russia is scoring more and more wins because of this fact.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
I reject the notion that the US is an "empire", at least since the winding down of the Iraq war. US allies are free to end their associations with the US (like NATO) without fear of getting invaded by the US. The same was not true of conventional empires.
I would suggest to make America good again in home, worth supporting for conservatives and moderates
I broadly support this, but the best way to do this is by winning the battle for public opinion on things like rejecting blank-slatism, postmodernism, and the corrupt implementation of the Civil Rights Acts. Instead, US conservatives have gone from the party of endless occupations in the Middle East ~20 years ago to rejecting democracy (or at least the results of democratic elections) and allying with America's enemies today.
Last thing the world needs is going closer to world war situation because certain extremist imperialists can't deal with the fact that countries like Russia and China are going to be influential too
The issue isn't that Russia and China are going to be influential. That's bad given their repugnant authoritarianism, but it's nothing that would merit more than a Cold War 2 style competition. The main issue is that both have made clear they want to conquer their neighbors by force. That principle has been one of the best things to come out of Pax Americana barring the mistake of the '03 Iraq invasion. Reverting the world to the pre 1945 days where strong nations annexed weaker ones would be terrible for lots of reasons.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Is there not a lot to criticize? Only in a very binary thinking is criticizing the US some nefarious act and proof of bad will.
I feel like you're being deliberately obtuse here. Of course you can criticize the US or the way that things are done here. But you don't have to go to an adversary country to do that, nor hold them up as an example of where it's supposedly done better. Tucker's examples were bad for other reasons, e.g. cherrypicking and just being wrong about basic facts like Russian inflation being less than the US's. But beyond that, Tucker has had a pro-Russian bent for a long time, so it's a motte-and-bailey to say there was nothing else going on there. He could have taken examples from friendly countries like Japan or Europe, but he didn't. He also could have added caveats explaining how he didn't think the US should be like Russia in most ways but that clean subways were an exception, but he didn't. His entire trip was done to delegitimize the West and hold up Russia as a better alternative. It's why he went and asked softball questions to Putin, giving the leader of an enemy country a high-profile platform to say whatever he wanted to Western audiences.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
What's wrong with that? All four of those countries are pretty anti-USA.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
would legitimize China's stance against facebook and google years ago
These were already legitimized when China became the only country (barring maybe Japan) that has a tech sector that could plausibly broadly compete with that of the US. If the US doesn't do this, it's just unilateral disarmament. Democracies are losing the propaganda war badly since they're unwilling or unable to use similar tactics that dictatorships like Russia have been using.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
I think your thinking is choked with lazy cliches that prevent me from respecting it seriously.
Right back at you.
This is in fact what forcing a TikTok sale is, a meaningless culture war distraction
It'd be a pretty consequential action in the US-China rivalry given how important tech companies are these days. There's a reason CCP propaganda mouthpieces are trying so hard to stop it: because having an easy way to reach US voters is a tremendous asset in sabotaging an adversary, or otherwise getting them to do what you want.
Saying nice things about Russia isn't "proving the superiority of the Russian political system" to anybody. This is a low-effort bad-faith slur to avoid having to think about anything Tucker says.
That's absolutely what Tucker is doing. Going around trying to prove how great Russia is, often with disparaging remarks towards the state of the US. The obvious implicit follow-up is that we should be more like them, i.e. we should emulate their acidic form of conservatism and likely their authoritarianism as well.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Again, this isn't a TikTok ban, it's divestiture.
And this isn't quite like US cultural clout in the 80s. This is like if the Soviet Union owned CBS and used it to influence the news Americans received.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Trump opposes TikTok divestiture
We may be seeing the GOP becoming pro-China in real time.
Recently there’s been a bill advancing through Congress that would force a divestiture of TikTok from its Chinese parent to some sort of Western company. Many are abbreviating this as a “TikTok ban”, but that’s not accurate. It’s more of a forced severing of the app from ByteDance in particular, although the precise details following the bills passage remain to be seen.
The TikTok Question
You could list all the typical issues that social media creates and they’d almost certainly be true for TikTok like they are for Facebook or X. But in addition to this, TikTok has two unique issues from being beholden to the CCP.
The first, less pressing issue is data security. China has a law that allows their government to require any Chinese company to give them any personal information they request. ByteDance has been caught a number of times doing bad things with American users’ data. They spied on journalists who criticized the company. The American arm forwarded data to the Chinese arm, which forwarded it to the Chinese government.
The second, bigger issue is of propaganda. Nearly a third of Americans age 18-29 regularly get news from TikTok. This news is subtly and invisibly controlled by a foreign adversary government. Noah Smith summarizes the broader implications:
There’s a concern that through subtle manipulation of the algorithm, TikTok can steer Americans away from topics of discussion that are sensitive to the CCP, and toward CCP-approved points of view.
A new study by the Network Contagion Research Institute confirms that this is already happening, in a very substantial way. By comparing the hashtags of short videos on Instagram and TikTok, they can get an idea of which topics the TikTok algorithm is encouraging or suppressing.
The results are highly unsurprising for anyone who’s familiar with CCP information suppression. Hashtags dealing with general political topics (BLM, Trump, abortion, etc.) are about 38% as popular on TikTok as on Instagram. But hashtags on topics sensitive to the CCP — the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Hong Kong protests and crackdown, etc. — are only 1% as prevalent on Tiktok as on Instagram.
For some of these topics, differences in the user bases of the two apps might account for these differences — for example, TikTok is banned in India, meaning the topic of Kashmir is unlikely to be discussed on the app. But overall, the pattern is unmistakable — every single topic that the CCP doesn’t want people to talk about is getting suppressed on TikTok.
Even if you’re skeptical of circumstantial evidence like this, there are leaked documents that prove the company has done exactly the kind of censoring that the study found:
TikTok, the popular Chinese-owned social network, instructs its moderators to censor videos that mention Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, or the banned religious group Falun Gong, according to leaked documents detailing the site’s moderation guidelines.
So why does this matter? Suppressing Americans’ access to videos about Tiananmen Square might or might not sound like that big of a deal, but consider what TikTok would be able to do in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The U.S. would have to make a very rapid, highly consequential decision about whether to come to Taiwan’s aid. Imagine anti-Taiwan videos flooding TikTok, threatening to send the President’s poll numbers plunging. Imagine the U.S. government hesitating in the face of that concerted flood of manipulated public opinion, and thus losing a critical confrontation with its most powerful foreign adversary.
Trump Opposes Divestiture
As a result of the above issues, forcing ByteDance to sell the app to a Western company is one of the few issues that has broad bipartisan support. Well, it did have bipartisan support until Trump did a 180 and suddenly opposed the bill. This was after Trump met a wealthy TikTok investor who promised to support his campaign.
Now, a politician changing his views wouldn’t normally be that much of big deal. After all, voters generally choose people whose views align with theirs, so for a normal issue Trump would usually either be forced back to his initial position or risk a fall in the polls. We recently saw this with his Social Security reform proposals. However, foreign policy is unique in that the public largely takes its cues from trusted partisan elites. This is a broadly replicated finding that basically translates to “the people are sheep”. Most individuals know that foreign policy is really important, but it doesn’t affect their lives that much, so it’s harder for them to get an intuitive understanding of how things are going compared to something like, say, the economy. Thus, they look to people they trust to get their views, and then say they formed their views by “looking at the evidence”.
An example of this is Russia. There has been a pro-Russian undercurrent in the GOP for the past decade or so, but it was mostly limited to a few fringe individuals. It started becoming more mainstream when Trump feted Putin during his presidency, and then it became even more pronounced in 2023 when Trump used Ukraine aid as a cudgel against Biden. Republicans were quite hawkish towards Russia as recently as the 2012 election when Obama told Romney that “the 80’s called, they want their foreign policy back”. Now here we are a decade later, with Tucker Carlson sniffing chocolate cake in a Moscow parking lot to prove the superiority of the Russian political system and how it’s a “bastion of conservative values”. Russian propaganda about the villainy of NATO is repeated as mainstream conservative talking points, and the Republican base largely goes along with it.
Could the same happen vis-à-vis China? I don’t see why not. Granted, it wouldn’t happen all at once, but I believe a gradual shift in that direction is certainly possible. China is an orderly society with a strongman leader. It doesn’t recognize same-sex unions. As an opponent of America, it could be presented as an opponent of vaguely defined “globohomo”. Simply ctrl+c, ctrl+v the standard talking points used for Russia, as most of them fit just as well if not better for China.
Trump has been hot or cold on China just like he was on Russia. He criticized both countries if he thought the democratic president was doing something that “made us look weak”. But then he quickly changed his tune after having a few inconsequential meetings with Putin/Xi. Eventually, the forces of negative partisanship pushed him to become clearly pro-Russia, and presumably it could happen with China as well. Trump’s clout means much of the Republican elites are following him:
• Tucker Carlson has long been against anything that would hurt TikTok, and could very well be where Trump is getting his views.
• Marjorie Taylor Greene is against the bill.
• Elon Musk is against the bill.
• Kim Dotcom is against the bill, and repeats much of the “America is bad” rhetoric previously seen in pro-Russian arguments.
From this, we’re starting to see the base’s opinions change. For instance, a UCLA Republicans group posted a picture of Trump, Xi, and Putin together, praising them as “three conservative patriots”. Something like this being posted unironically would have been a fever dream 10 years ago. The ironic force would have been so strong that it would have reanimated Reagan as a zombie, given him strength to hunt down whoever made it and punch them in the face.
Perhaps the way I wrote my earlier comment lacked nuance, so I'll add it here. There more fanservicey female is basically extinct from western AAA games these days. At best, large Western studios are going for what could colloquially be described as "safe horny". Your example of Tomb Raider exemplifies this, as the original protagonist was pretty openly sexualized, while the later incarnation is perhaps conventionally attractive, but almost always fully clothed. A few games like WoW actively removed some of their sexualized elements, while I think basically anyone who plays games will notice they've generally become a lot less common than they once were. Some men don't like this type of titillation, while others (like me) enjoy it in doses, and some actively seek it out. No matter your opinion though, it's undeniable that there's a market for it, a market that is now almost exclusively served by non-Western studios with games like Xenoblade 2, Nier Automata, and others. "fanservicey female characters" is basically Stellar Blade's only claim to fame, yet it's looking like it's going to be a huge hit no matter the gameplay simply because of this. Of course the woke side of gaming threw a giant fit about it.
So Western games still have a fair share of non-sexualized but conventionally attractive females. But even on that side there are problems, as going for "realistic" women means subpar implementations end up looking like gremlins in ways unique to Western implementations. One example of a game where no women were attractive was Mass Effect Andromeda, as even though the female protagonist was based off a pretty good looking woman, the end result looked like she had crippling autism since they didn't get the animations right. Another example is basically any game involving Debra Wilson. She seems like a perfectly nice individual, but she's pretty plain to start with, and she ends up looking like a total gremlin in the games she does mocap work for.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Market forces will kill any initiative like this. There is no demand for role models that don't teach young men what they want to learn (at least from the young men themselves).
The same thing happened with injecting progressive politics hamfistedly into tv, movies and video games. The market will just flow around and find what it demands elsewhere.
Market forces are not all-powerful. For example, video games are an utterly male-dominated hobby, and most men would prefer to look at beautiful women ceteris paribus, yet large western studios have done everything in their power to eradicate attractive women in AAA releases to appease their loud contingents of leftist female employees. It's not a total ban, indies and Japanese games still have attractive women albeit with large pushback from woke forums like Resetera, but the difference overall is still quite notable.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
What a goofy post that seems like it's straight out of 4chan. But given that this account just started posting 12 days ago, I presume it's a ban-evader who will just make a new account.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
There's a massive gulf between a one sentence line in Wikipedia saying the US put "some" quid pro quo political pressure on Germany to accept some Turks in the 1960s, and the claims of European right-wingers who imply all nonwhite migration to Europe is a diktat enforced top-down by a brutal US occupation of the continent.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Mass migration started happening in the USA earlier, to be sure, but it was generally seen as a problem. It wasn't until the 2010s that people started pushing for open borders in practice if not in name, and this got transplanted to Europe to cause the chaotic migrations of 2014-2016.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Very good point! Yes, Korea and Japan arguably make the point even more clearly and succinctly than my examples.
I'm back to Factorio with some of my friends. We're trying to get a Space Exploration run off the ground. Been trying to use LTN and a city block layout to simplify trains but they've been hesitant.
Beyond All Reason has been fun, as it's like a modern incarnation of Supreme Commander which is one of the best RTS games ever made. It was the only one to really grasp that RTS's should be about base-building and broad strategic moves, not heavy micromanagement like AoE2 or SC2.
I've been trying to play Steins;Gate solo since people have kept recommending it to me, although I just can't seem to get into anime that much
Rimworld is coming out with a new DLC soon. I'm looking forward to losing another hundred hours, although I'm not looking forward to the mod conflicts that will inevitably arise.
Europa Universalis 5 was basically just announced. I haven't played EU4 in a year or so, but it's one of my favorite games of all time so hopefully that is good.
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