Vollerei
6d ago
These proposals do not come from a place of genuine concern or worry. This is damage control and limitation for their ideology. They don't give a fuck about Arday beyond being able to leverage his final gift to them in order to prevent further ideological damage.
The left was caught diversity hiring to one of the most prestigious organisations in the land, deliberately and wilfully overlooking obvious lies and inability in order to do so. Their devotees blindly defended him without even looking at the claims, because he was a black man. All of this concern about Arday's decision to die rather than face scrutiny is simply an attempt to limit or prevent anyone exposing more of their diversity hires. And there will be more. There will be a lot more.
Exposing frauds is in the public interest and exposing Arday is one of the few good things the media has done in recent times. I would be in favour of a guideline that future Ardays be placed into protective custody until the landscape settles, if indeed anything must be done about such things.
Vollerei
12d ago
The single most tragic thing about this entire conflict is that anyone in the civilised world has any sort of opinion about it whatsoever.
This should be completely unknown to us, off our radar. This does not concern us. Desert shithole ethnoreligious land conflicts are nothing to do with us. And yet there are people shitting up my town centre every weekend about this. I have to endure conversations with people who inexplicably make this core to their identity.
So I'm in favour of whatever route out of this puts a stop to that as swiftly and decisively as possible while costing my country as little as possible. If that is Palestine becoming a radioactive glass crater, so be it. This is my sole concern about this matter.
Vollerei
13d ago
Hmmm.
The thing that made Woke different, in my opinion, was social media. To criticise oneself is noble and self-effacing, and a desire to appear such, as well as morally superior, is what I think drives much of wokeness. Essentially white leftists are pick-mes for minorities, they sell out their own race or nationality to be considered "one of the good ones". Some cynically think they are helping minorities upend the entrenched order (to install socialism, or whatever) and that they will be rewarded with a higher position than they currently have in the new hierarchy, or indeed something other than a shallow grave, once their fantasy revolution is complete.
Vollerei
13d ago
A lot of the cultures they like to portray as having a concept of "trans" or "third gender" didn't, and they're just reinterpreting them through their values.
As far as I've been able to tell, the vast majority of them are simply "failed male, useless for the normal purpose of men". Spartans would have yeeted these off a cliff. These other cultures allowed them to live, and found something marginally useful for them to do.
Vollerei
13d ago
We should focus less on being normal and more on being kind.
No, we should be normal. We tried being kind, and then the definition of what kind is shifted from "refraining from outright laughing in their faces" to "wholeheartedly playing along with their delusion at all times". Now, "being kind" just means outright lying because a person prefers lies to truth.
Vollerei
13d ago
What she's calling Woke 1.0 was actually already Woke 2.0. Woke 1.0 existed on tumblr, it was Atheism+ and the invention of a billion insane genders.
Turning DEI and Critical Race Theory into curse words and ending affirmative action were huge
These are non-achievements. Wokeism is still the law of the land. Policy is still based on it. Until you can get fired from university positions for being accused of being a communist, it isn't done. Until 13/52 is openly stated and policy is based on it being true and self evident, it isn't done. Until BLM is viewed the same as Kony2012, it isn't done. Until stating your pronouns gets you laughed out of a room, it isn't done. As long as people are willing to openly call themselves socialists, antifa, anti-racists and the like, it isn't done. Until Ibram Kendi, Kehinde Andrews, Priya Gopal and all such people are destitute, derided, and working in McDonalds cleaning toddler vomit from the ballpit, it isn't done.
Vollerei
14d ago
This is a dog bites man/man bites dog distinction, surely?
Black guys stealing cars happens basically every single day. Anyone at all stealing a plane is a much rarer event. And for it to all proceed so... almost peacefully? That's what captures people about it.
Strangely, I have much more sympathy for Sky King's sadness on a human level than I would if his stunt was in the service of, say, environmentalism. It's extremely... human, in a way. If Tyrone broke into a racetrack to run a few laps before self-deleting while expressing such sadness (with a reasonable level of articulation), I'd consider it noteworthy too.
Vollerei
20d ago
I think you vastly overestimate the number of people who are willing to risk injury to defend the honour and corporate profits of Aldi for minimum wage.
Vollerei
21d ago
No minimum wage cashier is tackling a tweaking drug addict shoplifter, I guarantee you.
Vollerei
21d ago
If there's no profit motive, none of the employees or managers have any reason to care about shoplifting
None of the employees in any normal store have any reason to care about it, either, other than the threat of losing their jobs for not tackling it, which is unchanged here. Their wages aren't based on profits the store makes.
Vollerei
29d ago
I can't be the only one who dislikes the accusatory structure of Privilege to begin with?
No. But that is its function.
It kind of leads to the concrete argument inherently. Privilege is applied to the group that, by definition, lacks the disadvantage. Wouldn't a more productive conversation be around how to fix the disadvantages of others?
You are assuming that the stated goals and justifications of its advocates are the actual goals and justifications. You can simply look at how it is used to determine whether or not this is true, the purpose of a thing being what it does and all.
If I say someone has Male Privilege, what is that meant to do?
To shut them down, to denigrate their opinions, and to devalue their achievements. It is meant to serve as an I-win trump card over opponents who have the appropriate characteristics. It is Smite Evil for social justice types, that is to say, it functions as "Smite Male" or "Smite White". A superweapon that only harms the specified targets. How glorious!
Vollerei
1mo ago
It mostly becomes a formality by the end. If you're at all competent at exploring and building characters you amass a pile of scrolls and potions so massive that you can crush any encounter under the weight of them.
Early game combat on the harder difficulty was my only time having to really scrape and strategise in the entire game.
Vollerei
1mo ago
D'oh. I was away from my PC while typing so I was going off memory. Thanks!
Going to list my favourite lesser-knowns, all puzzle games;
Blue Prince, Chants of Senaar, Case/Rise of the Golden Idol, Strange Horiculture/Antiquities, Seance at Blake Manor, Return of the Obra Dinn.
Vollerei
1mo ago
The issue is not that the gay relationships I see are not genuine enough (with the solution being to consume even more genuine LGBT media)
The solution is that we shame and mock people who write bad, shoehorned in romances. None of us should have to read bad content.
Possibly it’s just a relatability thing, but I imagine this is why representation is such an important point for activists - most people want to see themselves in their stories.
I never really understood this. I don't need my heroes to be proxies for me. I appreciate good characters for their own sake.
Most of the examples I gave came at the explicit cost of a hetero ship that the story had previously pushed, sunk after years of fans aggressively pushing for the gay alternative until it became canon.
I don't like instances of fandoms pressing things on authors, no matter the direction. Every author should just ignore their fandom and do what they were going to in the first place. Any time I detect that a decision was made in response to fan pressure, I hate it. Romance or no.
Vollerei
1mo ago
but as a straight person I don’t get any enjoyment out of reading about such relationships
Weird. I enjoy reading straight relationships just fine. Just not when they're bad and shoehorned in and superfluous to the plot, like a lot of Hollywood movie romance subplots.
What you might be seeing is that a lot of gay relationships in fiction are quite low effort, because they're being written cynically as representation slop, or because they're written by people who aren't gay (I would be fucking shit at writing straight romance, I don't know the internal experience of the courtship at all) or because they're being written as a wish fulfilment by the kind of gay authors who didn't have a social life.
Vollerei
1mo ago
She is positioning her real self as the "artwork" being "fixed" by filters, meaning she identifies her real self with the ugly drawings.
Vollerei
1mo ago
I think you're almost exactly wrong.
https://old.reddit.com/r/uknews/comments/1uxxd2g/family_of_18_from_gaza_wins_human_rights/
This news is being widely celebrated by the Free Palpatine lot. It's about being anti-West and more specifically anti-Right Wing, not any greater principle. Right Wingers don't want the Gazans in their countries, that's all the justification the far left need to import as many of them as possible, by any means, by hook or by crook.
Vollerei
1mo ago
Yes, "the broader leftist intellectual sphere is intolerant", sure, but there are a lot of people who are left-aligned but still tolerant who would happily be part of a community with active disagreements.
...So long as the prevailing powers that be in the space are ultimately on their side. They're content to be there when they still have the Global Rules they can get you sitebanned by the sympathetic admins under. They're content to be there when they know mama's watchful hand is poised to strike the mod team if they ever allow anything they consider truly contentious. Reddit Motte was not free; that's why it isn't on reddit anymore.
Vollerei
1mo ago
I sort of feel like you're just reverse engineering the old Invision PowerBoards days of the internet, when every website would have its own cheaply hosted forum made on the same software with varying levels of CSS editing. And I'd like that, because that was a genuinely better state of the internet.
Subreddits aren't a million miles from this concept, save for the huge catch of all being governed by reddit's rancid piece of shit admin team and their global rules. Which is a lot of the problem with reddit, honestly. Most of the rest of it being the type of moderators who will thrive within those global rules. Getting rid of the name thing will help, because it removes the prestige of having the "official" subreddit for something, and therefore discourages such mods who are only out for control. Having control of the names might invite accusations of bias as to who you rename and who you don't; you could maybe just maintain control of a front-page directory of sorts, a dewey decimal system of forums, and de-list ones which drift too far from their stated purpose.
You're going to get accused of being a witch-lover, and hard. Since the main communities who would make use of this at first are going to be those who cannot exist on reddit without falling foul of the global rules and the tranny jannies. You will be accused of providing a place for nazis to collaborate on terrorism.
But assuming you have factored that in, what you probably want to do is come up with a customisable experience to fit the needs and whims of the communities who might use it. I'm just going to throw a couple of completely not thought out at all things that might make such a system stand out and offer something people might actually take a look at for being different;
-
Ability to change between forums-style strict chronological comment ordering with quotes, and reddit-style cascading comments section. God I fucking hate reddit comments sections. Wading through all the cruft I already read is tedious. Though I can envision this causing issues as people try to crosstalk between different preferred layouts and miss responses... but with ping replies I don't see it being a big issue.
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Topic tags, sort of like flairs on subreddits, except that one topic could have multiple tags, and you can maybe separate them into sections, a curated list of admin-defined ones for easy after the fact searching, and then user defined ones like the way steam game tags work, with topic creator given the chance to add theirs on topic creation.
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The ability to replace or remove up/downvotes. I actually like the kiwifarms thing where they have a ton of reacts for a comment. Helpful, funny, and so on. Functionally up and downvotes basically equate to likes and dislikes. This is just adding more options. Here in particular I can see potential for people to rate things as "dislike" but also "informative". Further to this, you can let people set their own filters to auto-collapse or highlight comments that get more than X reactions of a particular type, search the topic for the comment with the most reacts of a certain type ("helpful" when dealing with tech issues...) or what have you.
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Public moderation logs. Which mod removed which comment? Which mod changed which tag? which mod banned which user? Well, now you know. If someone is abusing their power, it will be there in black and white. Ideally this would be enforced, data collected by your forum software and sent to your servers, and the mod logs for any forum should be available by plugging the ID into some page you maintain. Mods should not be able to hide this. Maybe you can let them buy you out if you want. You can have the software and none of the oversight... for a fee.
Vollerei
1mo ago
As someone who has massively struggled with how I look in a non-trans way;
On the other hand when your desires clash with who you actually are in reality and you for instance end up with body dysphoria, we are told that if you think people should be themselves, you are a horrible reactionary bigot and paradoxically get accused of not letting people be themselves.
This could not be less true for me and my experiences. If you have problems with yourself aesthetically, you are roundly shamed for trying to get help in fixing them. Vanity is bad! And vanity operations and cosmetic surgery are superfluous! And shameful! You need to go to therapy to have some boring middle aged woman who could not be more removed from current culture talk at you until you agree there's nothing wrong with you just to make her shut up!
Becoming okay with being your ugly self is the ONLY option presented to you if you have non-trans related dysmorphia. Anything else and you're being shallow, you're being vain. And nobody cares what you look like! (This is the biggest lie of all time, I get treated MUCH MUCH better by randos ever since I fixed myself up and became beautiful.)
I dislike trans healthcare because if I had claimed to be trans, I would have been immediately shuttled off down a route of all the surgery and other interventions I wanted. But because I don't want to grow fried-egg man-tits and cut my dick off, I got nothing but being told to make peace with an ugly body I despised.
Vollerei
1mo ago
Most things are a negotiation between you, reality, and the rest of society.
You can have limitless belief in the fact that you're smart. You can truly believe it in the deepest recesses of your soul. You can proclaim yourself a genius and fully believe you aren't lying. But if you have an IQ of 85... are you a genius?
Or for a more subjective example, you can truly believe that you're the most gorgeous creature on planet Earth. You can be completely in love with yourself, and carry yourself with limitless confidence. But if nobody else is actually attracted to you... are you actually attractive? (This works in reverse, too, you can believe you're hideous, but if everyone wants to fuck you, nobody is going to believe you saying you're ugly.)
You can't give yourself a nickname, you can't decide that you're cool. Some things have to be bestowed by others. Most things require tacit agreements from others.
Trans activists actually do recognise this, which is why they push so hard on enforcing your validation of their beliefs. A trans activist that truly believed that internal ID was all that mattered would not care what pronouns others used.
I would have loved for this to happen.
London would, of course, have had to pay for a hard border and enforcement as part of its EU joining process. This would have then made the encirclement, blockading and sieging of London very easy. We could then charge London absolutely exorbitant rates for water, power, food and access, and thereby regain some of its hoarded wealth at least.
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