WhiningCoil
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User ID: 269
WhiningCoil
23d ago
All the same, I'd be willing to bet if there was a massive social campaign to "normalize" people who want to amputate random limbs, it started being prominently featured in countless shows, and it began getting taught in kindergarten, the epidemiology behind the disorder would enormously change. We'd have countless teen girls experiencing "Rapid onset bodily integrity identity disorder", and often entire friend groups.
Then que all the midwits citing the old research under the old social conditions about how "Nobody chooses to do this flippantly, and research shows they are much, much happier after you perform the amputations." I wouldn't put it past the same liars we've been dealing with for the last 20 years, lying about how puberty blockers or cross sex hormones are "completely reversible" might pull some similar nonsense word games about the amputations being "reversible". Or doctors start scaring the fuck out of parents with "Would you rather have a disabled son or a dead son?"
It's more important than ever to say say "no" to this nonsense early, no matter how cruel it sounds. Turns out a lot of these old medical ethics to "do no harm" are load bearing, no matter how many sophist you throw at the word "harm".
WhiningCoil
5d ago
It is profoundly heart breaking watching people you otherwise respect and have affection for repeat nonsensical NPC talking points, as though they were their own original thoughts. It just completely breaks your perception of them. It reminds me when I was reading the Prince of Nothing series, and the main character is some genius hypnotist manipulator, and every other character he encounters goes from being an interesting individual contending for power in a Game of Thrones-esque power struggle to merely his puppet. By the end of the trilogy there are like, 3 actual characters left, and everyone else has become an NPC in thrall to him. I kind of hated it.
It's frightening above all else. It lowers my estimation of humanity on an absolute basis, versus merely impacting how I view that person. It changes how I view myself. It's like if your best friend tumbled over one day, cracked his skull wide open, and instead of flesh and blood and brains, there was just a hamsters on a wheel that quickly ran off, leaving your friend inert. And while your first thought might be "Was he always just a hamster on a wheel?" your next thought might be "Is there a hamster on a wheel in my head too?!"
It's the sort of thing that makes me wonder if LLMs aren't actually that smart, but that people are dumber than we thought. I can't think of a better analog to "Pattern matches language tokens based on a data set without any comprehension of their actual meaning" in people than just uncritically repeating NPC talking points, angrily, without considering for even a millisecond any of their broader implications. I've called it unidirectional knowledge before. You are spoon fed a list of data points, along with the only permissible conclusions you are allowed to draw from them. Do not draw outside the lines! Most people are happy not to.
Frankly I can't understand how we, as a species, made it through anything anymore. I don't understand how we progressed past city states. Maybe an elite, which really is better than us, and which really is necessary to keep us from all choking on our food because we forgot to chew (metaphorically) is real and required.
More importantly, if such an elite class of human is real, it's probably safe to assume you aren't among them. You have to face the very real possibility that you, like everyone else, just has a hamster on a wheel in their head.
WhiningCoil
21d ago
I mean, I'm not against this exactly. I just fully expect it to be another tool of anarcho-tyranny where charges like this are rarely if ever pursued against parents of a politically relevant skin tone because disparate impact, restorative justice, blah blah blah.
Maybe not. Maybe I'll be surprised. A case in my state did see a mother of a political salient identity actually get charged, convicted, and sentenced to two years. They are going after the assistant principal for criminal negligence too, and frankly, she deserves it.
I wish I knew more about the process these convictions go through. I know our Republican Governor and Republican DA have been going hard on our out of control schools, and the bureaucrats who've ruined them. Sad to say it'll all probably get undone lickity split as soon as power changes hands again.
WhiningCoil
21d ago
Ok, the "Big if true" takeaway from this review for me.
India: The Worst Country on Earth inflicts violence of a spiritual and metaphysical variety upon the westerner. If only Samara was crawling out of their TV to kill their physical body, they might die cursing a white girl and their salvation would be assured. Instead India: TWCoE attacks their very soul.
The Westerner MUST identity with the foreigner. MUST empathize. MUST psychically place themselves in the Indian’s shoes. MUST Imagine themselves one and the same.
They must imagine the devoured cow feces in their own mouth, imagine themselves copulating with stray diseased dogs, imagine themselves bathing in manure piles and destroying their environment by choosing to litter on a scale unimaginable, imagine themselves open defecating in the midst of busy cities. They must imagine themselves devouring unhygienic meals seasoned with animal droppings and most revolting products of the human body…
They MUST empathize, and their gag reflexes must activate and they must feel their skin crawl as if beset by parasites and sexual diseases welcomed in through a million disgusting wallowing practices.
They cannot do what Hundreds of millions of high caste indians and upper class third worlders do every day: Stop Empathizing.
Stop looking on them as your fellow man, and instead look upon them as revolting stupid bottom feeding animals, akin to diseased racoons or possums…or various mamilians who wallow in their own filth, or seek their missing nutrition in the droppings of more noble creatures such as the bovine.
For to stop empathizing, so the western thinks, to stop believing “there is only one race the human race” or “that all men are created equal” would be to abandon all that is good and true and transcendent in this world.
Except for the what is obvious to plainly see: it is neither good, nor true, nor transcendent.
It is a lie. A lie overwhelmingly obvious upon mere observation of any of the billions of members of other species and subspecies of human.
So, that's my question. Does the 1/3 or less of India that is not sub 85 IQ, per the stats quoted in this review, regard the rest as subhuman diseased animals? I'm not really predisposed to believe, or not believe it. Though scrounging through my long term memory for supporting evidence, I recall that Google's Indian CEO allowed nearly every anti-white, anti-American agitprop seminar imaginable, but shut down one that was going to talk about India's caste system.
WhiningCoil
5d ago
Maybe. But Thiel is not the only model for how to execute a "conspiracy". I often think about the Cult of Scientology, especially when their "Fair game" doctrine was in effect. I wish I still had the article, but one journalist in the 70's and 80's covering them was harassed by them night and day. But probably the most insidious part was that scientologist also covertly insinuated themselves as her "friends".
I think the article I remember might have been about Paulette Cooper? I mean, look at some of these details!
In February 1973, anonymous flyers appeared all over Cooper's new apartment building accusing her of various sexual perversions, including pedophilia.
While she awaited trial, Cooper depended heavily on several close friends, two of whom turned out to be agents of the Church of Scientology. "Jerry" often stayed in her apartment and would eventually move in for several months, during which time he reported regularly to the GO. In one GO memo, he noted that if Cooper became depressed enough to commit suicide, "Wouldn't this be a great thing for Scientology?" On several occasions, he tried to coax Cooper to stand with him on the dangerous ledge of her 33rd-floor apartment.
The GO's harassment of Cooper continued into 1974. Her father's office received copies of pages from the diary she had kept as a teenager—and still had in her possession. In early 1975, GO agents broke into the office of Cooper's college psychiatrist and stole her records.
In 1976, Hubbard and his operatives in the GO, frustrated by their failure to silence Cooper, developed an ambitious new campaign to discredit her. Dubbed Operation Freakout, its goal was to have Cooper "incarcerated in a mental institution or jail or at least to hit her so hard that she drops her attacks." The plan included staging multiple tightly coordinated incidents involving imposters, false reports, and planted items.
In many ways, elements of the cult conspiracy against a reporter hostile to them are easier today than ever. You don't need to anonymously spread fliers when you can have the algorithm spread information for you. You don't need to break into their physical offices when you own more data on them through their internet usage than was even imaginable to Scientologist in the 70's. You don't need to find any actual people to be their friends when catfishing with fake profiles is so easy!
I'd argue, executing a Scientologist style Operation Dynamite or Operation Freakout is easier than ever, and could largely be automated through the use of algorithms.
WhiningCoil
5d ago
...the Stasi often used a method which was really diabolic. It was called Zersetzung, and it's described in another guideline. The word is difficult to translate because it means originally "biodegradation." But actually, it's a quite accurate description. The goal was to destroy secretly the self-confidence of people, for example by damaging their reputation, by organizing failures in their work, and by destroying their personal relationships. Considering this, East Germany was a very modern dictatorship. The Stasi didn't try to arrest every dissident. It preferred to paralyze them, and it could do so because it had access to so much personal information and to so many institutions.
That really is the key behind my fears of SV. They have so much information at their fingertips. It's already known that even 10 years ago they were experimenting on directly influencing how we feel. I'm supposed to believe there is anything stopping them, any moral or legal barrier, from developing systems that act just like this? The deleterious effects of social media algorithms on mental health are already well understood, but they craft them because it's good for their bottom line. Why would they not lean into the explicitly harmful effects, and unleash it on their enemies? What we already know they do, and have done, is proof of malice enough.
WhiningCoil
16d ago
With Metzen... man, I just don't know. I never followed whatever the fuck happened with World of Warcraft past the vanilla experience. The cracks were showing in WarCraft III, at least for me, and StarCraft II was heart breaking in how profoundly stupid and masturbatory the story was. Do a thing, undo a thing, redo the thing. I hated it.
I just don't think Metzen's ability to story craft grew with his ambition to be "epic". He was perfectly able to do some rudimentary world building and a pulp fantasy storyline, largely following Carmack's old formulation that story in games was like story in a porno. When he tried to make the story good for it's own sake he fell flat on his fucking face. Maybe he got lucky with StarCraft, probably the singularly good story he did.
I think this is just part of the broader signs that our culture is dying. Nobody tries to tell a tried and true story with any sincerity anymore. Everything is endless subversion. Heal turns, face turns, pointless soap opera drama. I've come to loath all that deeply. It feels like we can't even create stories anymore, much less anything more substantial.
WhiningCoil
16d ago
Still beats becoming a vassal state of Russia.
Does it? Does it really? I'm not sure I'd choose being extirpated from the land of my birth and replaced wholesale by a hostile and alien culture, over being conquered and turned into a vassal state by a co-ethnic I share a thousand years of history with.
I mean, it's like asking me, a 90% British American with roots back to the founding of the the country, if I would rather America be flooded by Africans to the point where white people have been virtually extinguished, or a resurgent British Empire reconquer the USA.
I'd pick this baffling to imagine resurgent British Empire 101 times out of 100. Offers more hope for my descendants than genocide.
A shame that's not a choice actually offered me...
WhiningCoil
5d ago
The psychologist will presumably recover, once she stops screwing her ex.
Take it from an older, more experienced man. If you meet them in the midst of mind numbingly retarded self inflicted consequences, they never stop. Sure, she might stop fucking her ex, but then maybe she'll fuck her boss. Or her friend's husband. Or cut of all her hair and join a cult. Or decide she's trans. And on and on and on. Stupid doesn't just go away.
WhiningCoil
15d ago
This I can get behind, and says better what I was trying to say below about game writing being load bearing. Game writing is, or was, engineering, just like making the rest of the game was. Both on the level of "How much room do we have on the screen/in memory to fit words" and also "What is the greatest economy of language we can use to maximally support the world being built?" Many times a lot of this writing was only found in the manual.
I'm going to riff off Diablo for a minute. Grabbing my ancient manual off the shelf, it has so many casual hints of a greater world. Like King Leoric sending the warriors off in a war against a northern kingdom of Westmarch. The rogue is from a mysterious order, who's purpose is never disclosed. The sorcerer is just one of many mage clans from the far east. And then of course the bestiary and the history, written from the perspective of an in universe character, vastly flesh out the world.
And what is the actual game? 16 levels of a dungeon in a singled ravage town. Unknown "black riders" recently came through devastating it. Lazarus had just lead a party into the dungeon to be trapped and killed by the Butcher. Now go. 95% of the lore in the manual doesn't directly come into play. It just builds a world hinted at. A world, IMHO, Diablo 3 largely ruins. Never bothered with 4. 2 did alright I guess.
It actually reminds me that a lot of my favorite fantasy novels or CRPGs emerge from home brewed table top RPG settings that the creator steeped in with his friends for years before he put pen to paper for the first time. I believe that's how Malazan Book of the Fallen got it's start. I think Record of Lodoss War as well?
WhiningCoil
5d ago
Getting bogged down in the details of what Scientology, as an organization, is capable of today is totally beside the point that they prove a conspiracy of the type I outline is possible, and easier than ever. Maybe not for them, as they aren't what they used to be. But for someone sufficiently motivated.
Who knows, maybe in 20 years people will be leaving the Current Year cult, spilling the secrets of the things they were "forced" to do at the time.
And once again, forget, for a moment, the notion of a "conspiracy". Going back to Scientology, sure, elements of their attacks were conspiratorial. They had a whole office of dirty tricks. But there was also a prospiracy side to it. They declared a person "fair game", and all their member's knew what that meant. They didn't need to be told to do anything in specifics.
People like Crowder have been declared "fair game" by the successor ideology. Imagine some "rogue employee" at Facebook deciding "LOL, I'm going to manually add Crowder and Mrs Crowder's accounts to the 'hate algorithm' list." Same as how some "rogue employee" (at least when caught) always seems to be adding them to shadowban, suppression, and other soft or hard blacklist. Next thing we know, Crowder and Mrs Crowder are just angry all the time for reasons beyond their ken, and are fighting constantly. Per my last link, the tools already exist! Facebook as algorithms that can manipulate your emotional state, and they can place users on them.
WhiningCoil
5d ago
I'm less interested in litigating what to call the social factors of divorce, than establishing as a data point that people can be influenced to divorce, so I can move onto other data points that assume that. It sounds like we agree on that.
WhiningCoil
5d ago
So, uh, I feel like this post straddles the line between Friday Fun Thread, because I'm only like, 49% serious about it, but it's definitely culture war worthy, so, you know. Please remember I'm only partially serious. I'm not going to die on this hill, and gun to my head, I don't really think this happened. But... I think it could have.
Could Steven Crowder's Marriage Have Been Targeted by Silicon Valley?
Steven Crowder has gone the route of many youtubers into, IMHO, algorithm triggered insanity. Youtube content creators have been having mental health struggles for almost as long as it's been a job. I saw one youtuber describe it as having a robot boss that refuses to tell you what they want. And you keep throwing effort into their implacable gaping maw, and wait to see if the algorithm rewards you with income. If it does or doesn't, you have no idea either way what you did to please it. But you know you must.
This may have hit it's high water mark when a mentally ill Youtuber went to shoot up Youtube's offices.
So I see lots of content creators lose their damned mind. Something in the algorithm changes, they can't pay their bills anymore, they can't contact any actual human at Youtube about what to do, and gradually or suddenly they begin acting erratically out of desperation and anxiety. Steven Crowder was no different. His deteriorating mental health, paranoia, and controlling behavior are as plain to see as the sun in the sky.
What was different about Crowder was we know that he was specifically targeted by social media companies.
The former curator was so troubled by the omissions that they kept a running log of them at the time; this individual provided the notes to Gizmodo. Among the deep-sixed or suppressed topics on the list: former IRS official Lois Lerner, who was accused by Republicans of inappropriately scrutinizing conservative groups; Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker; popular conservative news aggregator the Drudge Report; Chris Kyle, the former Navy SEAL who was murdered in 2013; and former Fox News contributor Steven Crowder. “I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news,” the former curator said.
So, if we take as a given that algorithm chasing drives people insane, and that furthermore Steven Crowder was specifically targeted by Silicon Valley, what does that have to do with his marriage?
Well, on a human level, divorce is a social contagion of sorts. Backtracking and caveats aside, the raw numbers go like this
These researchers determined that that when close friends break-up, the odds of a marital split increase by 75%. They also found that people who have divorced friends in their larger social circles are 147% more likely to get a divorce than people who have friends still married. People with divorced siblings are 22% more likely to divorce. The study even revealed the contagion of divorce among co-workers could be as much as 55% in small companies.
And when you are talking about social media's influence on divorce
Firstly, it facilitates reconnecting with past romantic partners, which can lead to emotional affairs and infidelity.
Secondly, excessive time spent on social media can lead to neglect of one’s spouse and relationship, causing feelings of dissatisfaction and disconnection.
Moreover, social media platforms often portray idealized versions of others’ lives, creating unrealistic expectations and comparisons within relationships. This can increase feelings of unhappiness and resentment.
But this is all the background radiation from the no-fault divorce atom bomb going off 50 years ago.
Could Silicon Valley, not unlike how they targeted Crowder's business through the algorithm, having also targeted his marriage? Could they have crafted an Iago algorithm and had it target Crowder and his wife: to sow distrust, resentment, and a belief that there are better options out there? Ten years ago Facebook was caught experimenting on user's emotions by adjusting the algorithm they were exposed to.. It's not like they don't have the technology.
WhiningCoil
26d 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
22d 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
26d 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
16d ago
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.
WhiningCoil
16d ago
Between this, and the comment below pointing out how most women of child bearing age have fled Ukraine, the outcome seems obvious. We pressured Ukraine into committing suicide. There won't be a Ukraine in 50 years. It will be an economic zone virtually devoid of native Ukrainians. If the world is lucky, it will be relatively well managed by Russian interest (minus the obligatory corruption, not like that is anything new in Ukraine), and mostly function as the bread basket of Europe same as it used to. If the world is unlucky, it will get flooded with sub room temperature IQ migrants by neoliberal NGOs and utterly cease to function in any recognizable fashion.
But the Ukrainians are over. The only question in 50 years will be, who was morally culpable for the genocide? Russia for starting the war, or the US for not letting Ukraine negotiate a peace back when their demographics would merely decline slowly, as opposed to fall off a cliff? If NATO had been hands off and Russia had won the war, there'd probably be more Ukrainians in 50 years than there will be now. I doubt there will be a million in 100 years.
WhiningCoil
24d 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
5d ago
Or at least 80% of the female population on said apps needs a therapist more than a boyfriend.
Ryan Long - Women are Psychos Too
Ryan Long - Stop saying 'All Women are Crazy', it's only 41 million
And I'll leave it there, cause it's Friday Fun Thread, and Ryan Long is fun.
WhiningCoil
12d ago
Notepad++ does this, but it makes it clear when you reopen the application that these are unsaved changes you are viewing. You can press CTRL-R to reload from the file and throw away your changes, among other pathways.
It'd be pretty thrown off if one day Notepad started doing that too without the robust UI changes Notepad++ has around the feature.
WhiningCoil
16d 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
26d ago
water alternatives
Why not drink water?
Never change SouthKraut, never change.
WhiningCoil
8d ago
On September 7, 2021, the Bitcoin Law came into effect and bitcoin became legal tender in El Salvador, making it the first country in the world to do so.[24] As part of this adoption, the government began requiring all businesses to accept it.[25] Under the law, transactions in bitcoin are not subject to capital gains tax, and foreign bitcoin investors who invest over ₿3 in the country are eligible for permanent residence.[26]
Two things.
It's not just video game writing. Writing across the board has utterly fallen apart. Characters lack any sort or purpose or core motivation, and mostly just get shuffled to the next artificial point of conflict/drama. Plots make almost no sense, even on their own terms, with characters acting in wildly unbelievable ways to force it along. Or the plot just regularly breaks the rules or themes of the work because it doesn't know what else to do. And that's not even touching on the fact that literally the only themes worked into anything these days is weird demoralization propaganda focused entirely on privilege/oppression dynamics, often in strictly black and white moralistic terms. Zero awareness of the human condition.
In so far as video game writing was "good", it was good in the sense that it was load bearing. The dialog could be awkward, the prose could be stilted, but if it supported the world that was being built and created the illusion that the game was a more lived in, real place than was possible to actually create or depict given technical, financial or design constraints, people generally say it was "good". I rarely find this to be the case anymore, as weird current year political bullshit immediately collapses the writing under the load a fictional world places upon it.
I do sometimes try to entertain the arguments of people who claim nothing has changed. That video games always had out of place "current year" pop culture references. Or that they were already political. And I know examples abound. I recall reading about one particular Infocom game that was written out of pure spite for Reagan winning a second term.
All the same, what felt like rare exceptions has become the norm, to the point where it crowds everything else out. It hasn't quite reached the level in games that it has on Netflix, where probably half the dialog is weird current year political references and marxist bullshit, and 3/4 of the characters are nonsensically and almost impossibly diverse for the setting. Which is to say, sometimes you encounter a purely ludic game with almost no writing what so ever. But among any game I've seen that has any appreciable amount of writing to speak of, if it's western, or even if activist got ahead of the translating duties, it's all sorts of shit up with current year nonsense.
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