WhiningCoil
No bio...
User ID: 269
WhiningCoil
8d ago
I haven't, but I can probably ad it to my reading list. Making my way through Crime & Punishment lately, when I'm not working on a bunch of cabinet doors.
WhiningCoil
19d ago
South African demographics are simply not in the cards
I don't see why not. The neoliberal solution to 3rd world poverty seems to be to import literally the entire 3rd world. 10 years ago it was only crazy right wingers that thought, or at least spoke the hate-fact, that America would be minority white in our lifetime. The respectable anti-racist who set the narrative claimed that was a "conspiracy theory". A mere decade later I'm supposed to believe "South African demographics are simply not in the cards." after all the lying and gaslighting I've already been subjected to?
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
This reminds me of the trend I saw of "Men would rather X than goto therapy". Although trying to dig it up now only shows people mocking it, by inserting the stories of great men throughout history and fiction into the format. But I thought I recollected women making earnest posts complaining about the men in their lives deciding to record a shitty album, or taking up intense study of trivial subjects, instead of going to therapy.
Presuming it was ever an earnest meme, and I wasn't just missing the joke...I was utterly agog that these people who never, ever, graduate from therapy would mock men for self actualizing. I can personally attest that whenever I feel any sort of transient depression creeping in, giving myself any sort of self actualizing goal and getting busy is the best and most immediate cure.
I'm actually reminded of the time I posted this funny bit by Denis Leary about therapy to a discord, and some crazy lady in therapy took it so personally they thought I was literally telling them to kill themselves.
WhiningCoil
19d ago
The Ukrainian news outlet Ukrayinska Pravda reported Thursday that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson used his surprise visit to Kyiv last month to pressure President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to cut off peace negotiations with Russia, even after the two sides appeared to have made tenuous progress toward a settlement to end the war.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/diplomacy-watch-did-boris-johnson-help-stop-peace-deal-ukraine/5792502
“Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement,” wrote Fiona Hill and Angela Stent. “Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.”
The news highlights the impact of former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s efforts to stop negotiations, as journalist Branko Marcetic noted on Twitter. The decision to scuttle the deal coincided with Johnson’s April visit to Kyiv, during which he reportedly urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to break off talks with Russia for two key reasons: Putin cannot be negotiated with, and the West isn’t ready for the war to end.
https://dailysceptic.org/2022/09/01/did-boris-scuttle-talks-between-ukraine-and-russia/
Yet according to Ukrainska Pravda (a pro-Western newspaper in Ukraine) pledging support wasn’t the only reason for Johnson’s visit. “Sources close to Zelenskyy” told the newspaper that Johnson was an “obstacle” to peace talks because he’d brought “two simple messages”.
The first is that Putin is a war criminal, he should be pressured, not negotiated with. And the second is that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not. Johnson’s position was that the collective West … now felt that Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined, and that here was a chance to “press him.”
Fast forward to August, and an article in Foreign Affairs by the self-described Russia hawk Fiona Hill claims that April’s talks did yield a “tentative” agreement:
According to multiple former senior U.S. officials we spoke with, in April 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement: Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.
In the end, of course, no such agreement was reached. But the timing suggests it was Johnson’s visit that scuppered the talks.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Sound like the direction my wife was taking with out daughter, before I put my foot down and said we must discipline her. We don't have to let her act the way she's acting. She'll probably freak out and throw a giant tantrum. It probably won't work, effectively, at least at first. But calmly doling out consequences for actions will work. I wasn't even proposing anything bonkers. Just sending our daughter to her room when she talked back and refused more gentle corrections to cease.
My wife pushed back claiming that sounded "abusive". She claimed nearly all corrective measures were "abusive". She'd swallowed some bonkers gentle parenting bullshit. The problem was, our kid would walk all over her until she blew up at the kid about what a shitty brat she was acting like. This seemed far worse, to me, than just calmly sending our daughter to her room.
I won that argument, one of the few I have won, and after sending our daughter to her room for a week when she back talks, it stopped. For whatever reason my wife, after that resounding success, said she didn't think it worked. I was utterly baffled, and asked why she thought that, our daughter has almost completely stopped back talking. She said she didn't know, she just felt like it didn't work.
Can't win em all I guess.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
I think this is just the most surface level manifestation of a deeper core truth. Liberals exist in a world without cause and effect, and conservatives do. Maybe this breaks down or gets fuzzy at higher and higher levels, like debates over man made climate change. But on personal, practical levels, or levels near them, I think conservatives have liberals absolutely licked when it comes to understanding and acting on practical cause and effect.
Because literally every profession, hobby or past time that exposes people to cause and effect gets accused of "radicalizing" people into "far right conservativism." Video games, exercise, sport, engineering. Programming used to, but these days so much of "programming" is so far removed from actually talking computer, the effect is lessened a great deal. Seems the "tech-bro", that odious, middle class, quixotically conservative in the sense that they believed they earned their success, has been more or less vanquished under the weight of silicon valley's expansive DEI departments. That or the more autistic among them got trans'ed.
WhiningCoil
19d ago
we would still be as white as South Africa ever was- not as it is today
I'm astounded you wrote that so unaware of the consequences you accidentally baked into your own "refutation".
WhiningCoil
25d ago
One can do that.
I believed that lie once. I won't believe it again. Especially not in the midst of the medical establishment trying as hard as they can do not do it, under any circumstances, and calling anyone begging them to a bigot, with the full backing of the government's monopoly on violence being used to take their kids away.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
My question is: Have you noticed this too? Maybe my circle's blowing this out of proportion, but maybe not.
Hello! I think you are talking about me. I mean, we didn't buy a whole ass farm. But we bought 4 acres, got some backyard chickens that give us all the eggs we need, and a nice garden. We still buy food. Even most of our food. We aren't completely off grid by a wide margin. Although we have stocked up on a growing supply of 25 year shelf life emergency food as well...
There were dozens of reasons we made the decision to do this. The increasing social dysfunction of the Democrat controlled semi-urban core we lived in, as well as the utter fecklessness of Democrats to even acknowledge it exists. All the institutions there-in insisting we mask our then two year old daughter, while turning a complete blind eye towards the "mostly peaceful" protest that caused all the businesses to board up their windows whenever they appeared. The rise in crime, like the guy who got shot in my condo parking lot, that nobody seemed to give a fuck about. The people were wound up so damned tight, taking our newborn daughter for a walk, on our best following all the covid guidelines behavior, people would literally dive into the bushes in a mad panic off the sidewalk to maintain that 6 foot distancing.
After we left, we looked back in horror as the school district double, then tripled down on secretly transitioning children against parents wishes, and keeping pornographic "diverse" books in middle school libraries. Or when we have business there, and we still see people masked, alone in their cars on the highway.
There were affirmative reasons we moved too, as opposed to just fleeing Democrats. I wanted my daughter to have a yard, and woods, and a creek to play in. I wanted to feel safe leaving her relatively unsupervised outside. It was way more affordable.
Sometimes I miss living somewhere walkable. But those thoughts are fleeting compared to all we gained in a deep red county.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
I am truly beside myself, like you, these days. And every smarmy "You just need to touch grass" remark sends me further over the edge. Because the insinuation is that I'm only this fucking destitute because I'm extremely online. When the reality could not more manifestly be the opposite.
I'm trying to raise a daughter in a world that already hates her. I have a school system that wants to tell her she's evil (I'm sorry, privileged, not like there is much meaningful difference). It wants to promulgate "queer theory" at the earliest age they can get away with. I live in a state where the school system will secretly transition children, no matter who is elected. The increasingly blue state legislature keeps creeping closer and closer to just defacto taking custody of children who's parent's won't "affirm" their identity. Which isn't to say they don't do it anyways already. The paranoia I have whenever I'm forced to expose my child to these systems is off the charts. You cannot tell me it's not justified.
I often reflect how I could possibly explain to my child all the freedom we used to have. How easy air travel used to be. Or how fun it was to wait in the terminal to greet family as they stepped off the plane. How there didn't used to be security guards and metal detectors at theatres. How there weren't transients destroying every public work constantly. And literally nobody was murdered more often than not, under any circumstances, in the town I grew up in. I went back and checked the old FBI statistics, because I had one of those "Did I just not notice as a kid, or what?" moments, and it turns out, wouldn't you know, there was actually infinitesimal amounts of murder back then after all. That I had free reign to bike 10 miles to town, maybe 12 years old, along a busy parkway with zero reason to believe anything could possibly happen to me. And I find myself especially at a loss to explain what happened to all that.
No, touching grass is not the answer. Unless it's in a prone position at a shooting range.
WhiningCoil
18d ago
entirely unaware that he was the leader of the UK and not the US
Yeah, that's clearly the most obvious read there. That I'm completely retarded and can't tell the US from the UK. Not an assumption that Boris was acting on US policy goals despite being a UK politician, with the key quote being that he insisted "The West isn't ready for the war to be over yet". When the US is funding 90% of the war, it's a safe assumption to make that Boris was writing a check the US was going to cash, with their tacit approval.
I didn't bother responding to you then because you taking such obvious liberties with my actual claims, but if you are going to sit back and crow about it like it's some sort of victory, fine, you've gotten my attention.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
The problem is, you are dealing with, I believe, clinical narcissist. Twitter addicted, attention seeking game journos/activists. It's a raw, bleeding, narcissistic wound that there is anything that "cool kids" like which they can't participate in. That there might be any experience other people enjoy which is inaccessible to them. Begging them to leave something alone, lest they ruin it, simply means nothing to them. If they don't get to join the club, the club shouldn't be allowed to exist, and damn all the people who derive enjoyment or community from the shared experience of overcoming a challenge. There is literally nobody, no organic groundswell what so ever, clamoring for "accessible" FromSoft games.
I'm simply amazed that conversations like this even occur. If a game is too hard, I just don't play it. I don't need every game to be for me. Probably the majority of popular games I don't play. I attempted to play Demon's Soul once upon a time, and got my poop pushed in so hard a few bosses in I gave up. Never tried another FromSoft game, I don't care. There are literally tens of thousands of games out there. Play any one of those and get over yourself.
WhiningCoil
29d ago
What I do know is that when Trump was elected, I declined to invest my money in the stock market because I believed mainstream predictions that his election was clearly going to tank the economy, and then distinctly recall watching in some frustration as the stock market boomed and continued to boom.
Honestly, you have nobody to blame but yourself for this. I trusted my gut, that cutting corporate taxes would be great for corporate profits, and went all in on the Trump stock market. To say nothing of the deregulation and protectionist trade policies. Any expert claiming otherwise was a naked liar, and I cannot possibly conceive of how anyone could have believed that hokum if they thought critically about it for even a millisecond.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
I can't speak for everyone, and I can't speak for all games. But I played a lot of video games as a kid. You learn a lot more than just how to press buttons in a pattern.
It taught me how not to get ruffled by failure, a skill that came in quite handy during my amateur martial arts career at tournaments. To say nothing of less intense situations like debugging frustrating code, or dealing with a cut in woodworking going wonky.
It taught me to be methodical, as a lot of success in difficult games comes from thinking about the problem you are stuck at, and working backwards. If you constantly die in a certain corner, don't get stuck in that corner. If you can only beat a boss with a certain item, make sure you've collected that item going in. And once again, this methodical approach to problem solving has paid dividends in my professional life, and my hobbies.
This last one, I donno. I want to say intense gaming sessions taught me to focus. But there is a fine line between compulsion and focus. I wouldn't say anyone is "focused" at the slot machine for 3 hours. But I'm willing to bet the kid who beat tetris was focuses as fuck.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Maybe once upon a time "it's hard to get a cert" was a valid complaint but today there exist fully automated services like Let's Encrypt. Their root certificate even comes default as trusted on my new windows installation. They even issue certificates to websites that may be phishing or malware. There is not really any excuse for your site to be lacking some kind of cert for auth and signing in 2024.
It also used to be easy to get domains, or hosting. Fully automated services exist!
Except, oh wait, turns out those easy automated services occasionally go all "We're not an impartial service you can rely on, we're a private company and we can do whatever the fuck we want."
WhiningCoil
29d ago
So some friends of mine finally talked me into playing Helldivers 2, all my skepticism about Games as a Service aside.
I enjoyed it for 3 days, and then wouldn't you know the networking completely fucking broke for no fucking reason, and I can't play with anybody anymore. Can't refund, can't play with my friends, nothing.
Got fucking GaaS-lit again. God damnit.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
I'm pointing out that the Eye of Sauron has seen us. And what starts off as advice rarely stays just advice. After the era of covid over reach, I can never go back to viewing "advice" as just such ever again.
WhiningCoil
27d ago
I wish I could still ask my parents this question. Because they bought a home in 1984, a year after I was born, for $124,000. Guessing off data, their mortgage would have been 13-14%. When I adjusted for inflation, their mortgage was nearly double mine in 2023 dollars. I bought a house for about $500,000 at a <3% interest. And that explains a lot of the hardship my family of 5 had growing up. Constant fights about money. Second mortgages to pay for necessary repairs. Praying the well pump or the water heater would make another season. It wasn't until the 90's that they finally refinanced, and then my teenage years felt like we were on easy street. Went from eating terrible, gristly cuts of steak strictly twice a year, to going out to eat at steak restaurants twice a month.
I'm not sure what delayed refinancing so long. I don't know if my parents simply never thought about it. I don't know if all the debt they had gotten themselves into kept them from qualifying. It's a total mystery to me, and I have no way to ask them.
Regardless, the "bad mortgage" was a boomer trope for ages. It reared it's ugly head in many 90's sitcoms. The Simpsons, Married with Children and Roseanne are all implied to be trapped in "bad mortgages" or otherwise house poor. And I remember in The Simpsons with the Flanders and Married with Children with the Darcys, they wind up with neighbors who bought later than them right next door and seem to be far better off, presumably with lower interest rates.
For years and years, the "bad mortgage" seemed like a bit of forgotten history. I knew a single poor schlub with an ARM or something who's mortgage doubled on him sometime around 2015 or so? Feels like he walked into that one. Only recently with 7-8% rates and prices virtually unchanged am I seeing people really groan under the weight of mortgages that eat up 50% of their income again. And if my childhood was any indicator, all this has happened before, and all this will happen again.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Can we please have a moratorium on word policing? Especially if it's literally all you have to say? There is nothing more obnoxious, low effort, and uncharitable that picking a single word out of a 10,000 word essay and harping on it for a lazy paragraph.
WhiningCoil
17d ago
You are reminding me of a childhood where I toted around Blizzard game manuals in my school backpack so I could read them on the tram and show them off to friends.
Are you me? I got yelled at so much in my middle school geometry class for reading the WarCraft II manual instead of paying attention. There were some absolute gems among manuals back then. Blizzard had some of the best, but Interplay and Westwood tried too. I got this Encyclopedia Frobozzica with Return to Zork, had me howling with laughter despite not having played any of the games before. The diary that came with Zork Nemesis that may have been from a version of your character that time travelled into the past and got killed seeded the plot well too.
Game writing was dreck before these consultants and is so now, too. The reason for this is simple - almost all game writers are D&D geeks who almost exclusively read science fiction and fantasy garbage and have no understanding of classical literature or even film to broaden their ability. Everything is a Marvel movie to them because it’s all they know.
All the same, I will gladly take the ending paragraph after beating Quake, pictured below, to the utterly preposterous current year demoralization nonsense crammed into every nook and cranny of a modern AAA game. Bizarre out of context quips shitting on capitalism, men, white people, etc. There is something totally orthogonal to the quality of the writing going on here. There is a naked contempt, a visceral unmasked casual hatred, that oozes out of every pore of modern AAA game writing, totally independent of it's quality. The only thing the quality achieves is putting a thin veneer of artistic acceptability on it, where as the worst examples are just unhinged.
Edit: Tried to attach the screenshot of Quake's victory screen, threw an error, you can look it up. Sorry.
WhiningCoil
2mo ago
I used to think this was possible. However in a local argument with a normie democrat arguing about those evil Republicans trying to ban books, I showed them images of Gender Queer, and the page where the kid is giving another kid a blowjob, and asked them point black if they honestly thought that belonged in middle schools.
They doubled down. Didn't shake them one iota.
I think you under estimate the DNC's ability to lead their voters where ever they want them to go.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Probably because when China catches a spy, it makes them look under attack, and unfairly victimized.
When the US catches a spy, it makes us look fucking retarded. Look up any of the Chinese spies which had infiltrated the staffs of assorted DNC party members for decades. It's nothing but an embarrassment. So of course it's not talked about, because it makes our rulers look even dumber and more incompetent than they already do. It makes a mockery of our entire social order where we think it's virtuous to inviting foreign nationals of global rivals into the rooms where the levers of power are adjusted.
WhiningCoil
2mo ago
From my position as a moderately liberal griller this sounds like exactly what the right did after Trump lost: whining about stolen elections, utterly and embarrassingly paralyzing Congress, leading half the country into a fact-free conspiracy fantasy land, and so on.
I really don't think this is comparable. Mostly just the status quo at least since Nixon. An embarrassingly paralyzed Congress has been a feature of American government since I became remotely cognizant of it in the 90's, regardless of who the president is. That's the whole reason the first 100 days of a presidency has been fetishized for as long as I've been alive.
What was truly novel about the era of libs throwing a tantrum was suddenly, DEI, explicitly anti-Republican training sessions became mandatory. Schools integrated explicitly anti-Republican lessons geared towards children. Fundamental web based utilities began instituting explicitly anti-Republican TOS to boot them off platforms vital to engaging in the modern economy. Where I used to live, the town center got boarded up and businesses closed from time to time over "mostly peaceful" tantrums that threatened life and property. One morning at a farmer's market, in front of our families and newborn babies, I said I didn't like the new Star Trek and another liberal father there started yelling at me at the top of his lungs in public about the importance of punching fascist.
I moved to a red area shortly after Trump lost. You meet a person who can't help but grumble about a stolen election or bamboo ballots or whatever. But no business ever had to close for fear of their wrath. Nobody has been subjected to specialized anti-Democrat workplace seminars. The schools haven't changed the curriculums to focus on the long history of fishy elections, wink wink nudge nudge. I've never been subject to being publicly screamed at, or witnessed it the new local farmers market when someone wears a BLM slogan.
I think this comes down to the neoliberal obsession with GDP. It completely obfuscates strategic importance and control. It's the sort of myopic focus that allowed us to outsource critical infrastructure to China, and then we got bent over when COVID hit. Because to the neoliberal, if number goes up, who cares who controls a thing? Money is power, not actual physical possession of a strategic resource... right?
Ukraine is the breadbasket of Europe. It's coast are Russia's only warm water port. It's an important strategic buffer between Russia and keeping their enemies less than 2 hours away from their capital. How "poor" Ukraine is, however shitty their stock market is doing, however bad their GDP is changes none of those fundamentals.
Russia itself was mocked as being a third world country with a gas station. That hasn't exactly aged well.
More options
Context Copy link