WhiningCoil
No bio...
User ID: 269
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
A Map for the Regulation and Destruction of Free Software.
A buddy of mine shared an article about The White House warning people against programming in C or C++ and it teed me off about a conspiracy theory I've been harboring for going on 10 years now.
My baseline assumption is that whatever you choose to call this weird woke, centralized, authoritarian, elite/bureaucratic corporatist conglomerate, they want control. All of it. Over things that you would think have nothing to do with them. They want your wood ovens, your gas stoves, your gamer PCs, they really don't view anything as beyond their purview to "regulate" and make your life infinitely worse by slow degrees.
If you assume these are pathologically controlling busy bodies, which I think you are right to assume, the fact that anybody can program anything probably terrifies them. They barely understand technology to begin with. Just look at any time they haul a tech CEO before congress and attempt to get sound bites for their constituents. It's horrible. But the cat is more or less already out of the bag when it comes to open and free software. How would you put it back in?
By degrees the process is already underway, in the name of security. Most PC's sold today will only boot authorized operation systems, with an option in the BIOS (for now) to turn off that safety feature. Windows warns you every time you try to run an "unrecognized" executable, with the option (for now) of ignoring it's warning. People are far more habituated than ever to closed software ecosystems thanks to Apple and Google and the fact that most people spend more time on phones these days than computers. All it would take is to slowly shave away by degrees until the process of running free and open software is so frustrating that most people don't do it, and the powers that be can "deprecate the feature" under the rationale that it's not used anymore.
Maybe it starts with the big sellers of PCs like Dell, where they just don't have a BIOS that lets you boot unauthorized OSes. And for a while, that's fine, because what self respecting enthusiast buys a Dell? That's probably a perfectly fine security compromise for institutions that don't want to run the risk at all of some unauthorized code hijacking the boot process. Then maybe the feature gets cut from lower end motherboards. But that's fine, if it's still a feature that matters to you, you can always get a high end motherboard. Lots of features are only available on higher end motherboards. And then one day, with little fanfare at all, the feature vanishes.
So now you are stuck running increasingly enshittified versions of Windows and a few select Linux distros. So what?
Well, at the same time, imagine how Windows slowly chips away at the ability to run "unrecognized" code. Right now it's an annoying popup, same as it has been since Vista. Maybe one day the default behavior is switched to not letting you run it at all. But it's ok, there is a toggle to turn on the old behavior burried deep in the system settings somewhere. Maybe a security submenu. Then a while later they get rid of that, but if you know what you are doing, there is still a registry setting you can change. Then a while later they only support the feature on Windows Pro instead of Home. Then one day, it just vanishes.
So now you are stuck running enshittified versions of Windows that refuses to run "unrecognized" code. But it's cool, you can probably still do something to get your code "recognized" right?
Anyone who has had to do any web development probably knows about using self signed certs. Often good enough for local use, generally insufficient if you plan on letting anyone outside of your org attempt to use your system. You have to get a signed cert. And often pieces of software just expect a signed cert, and may not have any option at all to override it's refusal to work with a self signed one. I expect much the same will occur with "unrecognized" code.
All code will need to be signed. Maybe you can self sign code you've written on your local system, but nobody else will be able to run it. Unless they go through the added hoops of adding your key to some sort of key store for "recognized" code. But eventually the self signed qualities of the code will catch up to you, and Windows may just refuse to accept self signed code certs anymore. But no fear! Maybe Github or other organization will offer to sign your code for you. Assuming it meets their TOS, nobody on social media has cancelled you, and their AI hasn't rejected your project for hallucinated reasons. But eventually, however well relying on a 3rd party like Github to allow your code to run on your locked down operating system and your locked down hardware starts off, it will become a barely viable solution. And then free and open software is over.
I hope I'm just being overly pessimistic. But I honestly see this happening in my lifetime.
WhiningCoil
7mo ago
I want to talk about game mods.
I cut my teeth on Doom WADs back in the day. WADs that committed flagrant copyright infringment like Alien or Star Wars TC WADs. WADs that replaced all the pinkies with Barney the purple dinosaur so you could shoot him with your shotgun. I played wacky maps like border1 for Team Fortress. And lets not forget the nude hack for Drakan: Order of the Flame. Or the plethora of offensive or innapropriate character models modded into every Quake.
Back then, I don't remember there being any sort of centralized modding sites. The Doom wads I actually found at local computer shows, probably sold "illegally" on a handful of floppies. Many of the maps or models would just download automatically when you joined a private server in Quake 1/2/3. At least I think they did? Maybe not Quake 1. And it's utterly inconceivable to me that id Software would have issued any sort of statement about the offensive material being made for their game, counter cultural as they were. I sincerely doubt they would have put any thought to it what so ever. It was simply somebody else's business.
Perusing Based Mods, a collection of mods generally banned from everywhere else, paints a grim picture of the political landscape of modding. I hate that I even have to use the phrase "political landscape of modding". Doing whatever the fuck you want with something you own should not be a political act. Alas, here we are.
Many of the mods follow a theme. Removing LGBT flags or pronoun selection from games. A few go further and remove homosexuality as content from games. Some remove anachronistic or nonsensicle diversity from games. Some just make all the people white because fuck it why not? A few are more accurate localizations versus whatever Americanized nonsense activist put out stateside. Like restoring the submissive personality to characters which localizers decided had to be more girl bossy.
The latest one I've seen which hasn't been banned everywhere, but which none the less appears to be walking a thin line, is the Better Aesthetics mod for Baldur's Gate 3. I'll let it speak for itself.
Baldur's Better Aesthetics is an attempt to make Baldur's Gate 3 look more like Faerûn as we know it. More Dwarves will have beards, more Duergar will be bald (including the women!), and fewer Githyanki will be sporting big ol' whiskers. You will also notice fewer people from Chult, but more from Calimshan, and there will no longer be ANY Half-Orcs with pink hair. Please note, these changes aren't universal. A couple of Dwarves have assimilated and gone clean-shaven, and a few lore-accurate descendants of Chultan foreigners remain (like the legendary Duke Ulder Ravengard). But you will certainly notice a difference!
I actually found this thread discussing the changes it made, and the lore reasons for them, interesting. In fact, it turned Baldur's Gate 3 into the Sword Coast I more or less recognize from Baldur's Gate 1 and 2! None the less, at an object level it makes Baldur's Gate 3 less "diverse", and thus it's problematic. I can't say for certain, but I find it suspicious there is zero mention of it on the Baldur's Gate 3 subreddit. The single mention of it on the Steam forums is locked. Zero mention on the GOG forum for the game. I can't say for certain the existence of this mod is being broadly censored from the usual captured spaces. But I can't rule it out either.
It's just all so tiring. I go back and play old games, and I'm reminded just how different and natural they are. They don't have weird diversity polemics oozing out of every nook and cranny. Or the crypto-racism of having every evil or stupid character look like me, and every cool, heroic and most importantly moral character look like a Gen Z Nonbinary Zirboss. You aren't constantly confronted with the equivilent of a pride parade every time you meet a new cast of characters. And all the gaslighting about how it's not a big deal, why are we so annoyed by it immediately becomes a huge fucking shut down the internet deal whenever someone takes it back out.
My wife and I have a lot of discussions about what we'll expose our daughter to, and we've more or less decided the cut off is the 90's just to be safe. There were still normal shows, books or games that generally depicted normal cis hetero white families like ours positively. To subject her to modern media feels like child abuse. To the 90's it is. Everything after that is just too damned gay for children.
WhiningCoil
5mo ago
So, I watched Escaping Twin Flames this week. It's basically a documentary about a cult, with a fun twist at the end. The short version is it's a cult/mlm that promises true love to everyone paying in. The leader of the cult claimed he could channel who the soul mate, or "twin flame" to use cult speak, of the members was. Twin flames were often just random ass people in the cult members life. No matter what members were encouraged to stalk, harass and profess their love to their "twin flame". That approach wasn't going so great however. There was a manifest lack of success in the group, with vanishingly few members successfully entering a relationship with their "twin flame". Sensing things weren't going so great, the leader changed the rules so that everyone's twin flame was actually already in the cult. Only problem was, 80% of the members of the cult were women, and there weren't enough men to go around. But the cult leader had a fantastic idea. If you just convince half the women that they are actually "divine masculine", and get them to transition, everyone can pair off as "divine masculine" and "divine feminine". It's genius!
Why can't two ladies just be in a relationship? I donno, shut up. Cult leader says so.
So anyways, the final episode is about the cult forcing members to get "gender affirming care". Cross sex hormones, top surgery, you know the deal. And this is enforced through all the classic cult conditioning you've seen if you've ever watched a documentary about cults. The cult recruits from lonely, vulnerable, often young and impressionable people. You are encouraged to cut off everyone outside of the cult. All dissenters are exiled from the cult, creating a status quo where you must do whatever the cult leader says or lose your entire social support network. A lot of people even derived their income from the cult, making the control even more complete. Lots of struggle sessions breaking down the identities of cult members. Like I said, if you've seen a cult documentary before, none of this will be new to you.
What made this special to me is the many, frequent caveats the documentary included that you are not, under any circumstances, to apply any of the horrific trans brainwashing depicted in this documentary to anything else. This is unidirectional knowledge. You are only allowed to consider it in the context of this specific cult being bad. Now here is random trans expert we've hired to reinforce the point that these trans people have been abused into being trans, and not any other trans people you may have had in your life. Ignore your lying eyes. Especially insulting is that all the moms they interview about how their children were stolen away by the cult still use the new preferred pronouns and names of their abused and brainwashed children. Had me yelling at the screen "Have the fucking strength of your convictions you coward!"
Frankly, the nominal stories a lot of parents tell about their children deciding they are transgender doesn't differ that much from the cult experience. Their child is totally normal, not a hint of gender dysphoria, until a person the kid looks up to or wants to impress, often someone the parents can specifically identify, starts pushing it on their kid. Kid does it to fit in with their friend group, maybe a completely different friend group than they had before, maybe a friend group that only exists online. Then kid is encouraged to completely cut off anyone not 100% on board with their new identity. Most horrifying of all is how often the state involves itself in this, with schools serving as a vector to suggest to children, and glamorize, queer identities, facilitate their secret transitions, and CPS stepping in to take custody from parents who don't "affirm".
But going even deeper, where the fuck is the medical establishment? When the Heaven's Gate cult had members castrated themselves, I sincerely doubt they just waltzed into a Planned Parenthood and had it done no questions asked. How are the diagnostic criteria so wide open that a cult leader can have his members electively mutilate themselves at walk in clinics, no problem?
Most ironic of all, is there is a part of the documentary where they describe an incident where the cult leader had his top leadership watch a documentary about another cult. Then he instructed them to write essays about how he was definitely not a cult leader. This was the moment one of the interviewee's in the documentary realized she was in a cult and left. All the other cult members performed that feat of cognitive mutilation however. Meanwhile, on a meta level, the documentary is pulling the same fucking thing on us, the audience, with it's gaslighting about the explosion of trans youth. We just weren't assigned the further task of completing homework about how nothing we saw in the documentary about a trans cult applies to the other trans cult we see sitting right in front of us.
WhiningCoil
5mo ago
I was watching some random youtube recommendation, and they were talking about Britain not meeting recruiting targets either. And one of them quipped "Nobody wants to fight and die for an economic zone."
I may not have gotten the words precisely the way they said them.
All the same, it hit the mark for me. You fight and die for a nation. A nation that performs some combination of representing and defending your values, family, and prosperity. These days the governments of our open borders economic zones actively undermine our values, attack our families, and pillage our future.
WhiningCoil
10mo ago
I’ll summarize the link but you really should read it for yourself, it’s astounding how bad Disney gets the Star Wars franchise: for instance, the books need to be (in addition to all the old touchstones of diversity etc) ANTI WAR. And then there’s the characters, who are somehow all androgynous.
You know, the idiocy of Disney's "The Force is Female" push doesn't take a genius to figure out. I was talking to my wife about it, and I just asked:
"When we were kids, how many little boys did you know who liked Star Wars?"
"Tons."
"Did you know a single girl who liked Star Wars?"
"No."
It's the absolute height of fart huffing retardation to literally jettison your entire built in audience for an IP, and try to replace it with an audience that never cared about it one iota. Like I get the typical neoliberal line of "They're just trying to expand their market". Except now the experiment has been run, and they've wound up appealing to less people than before.
It was literally inconceivable to me, if you'd asked me 10 years ago, that I could stop loving Star Wars. I dragged my poor not-yet-wife to a midnight screen of The Force Awakens, well past her bed time. And she went with me because she knew how much it meant to me, god bless her.
And yet here I am. I fucking hate Star Wars now.
The ways they've seemingly purposely spit in the eye of every fan of the original Trilogy and EU is insane. Between turning all the legacy characters into beaten down pieces of shit, killing them off ignominiously and denying fans the reunions they desperately wanted. Putting aside all the glaring technical issues with the craftsmanship of the films, like poor writing, poor characterization, completely nonsensical plot contortions, etc. I forget where I heard it, but someone joked that all new Lucas Films are made for an audience of one, Kathleen Kennedy. Every film has to be about a stand in for how Kathleen Kennedy views herself, replacing a character that is a stand in for how Kathleen Kennedy views George Lucas. Once I heard that, suddenly it all made sense.
God I hope Disney sells it all back to Lucas at half the price.
WhiningCoil
7mo ago
It's amazing that seemingly overnight, a norm was kayfabed into existence that people accused of sex pestery should be deplatformed/demonetized off all social media. Like this has always been the case, and has been applied in a politically neutral way. Despite, to my knowledge, this is literally the first time it's ever happened.
The political motivations for this are naked as can be. Even in the initial reporting, it was included in the article that none of the women chose to come forward, they were sought out by reporters. At least that's what I heard reported at The Hill, still can't read the initial article due to paywall and archive links not working for me for some reason.
WhiningCoil
8mo ago
Tucker Carlson is the maddest of lads.
Among the speculation about why Tucker Carlson was fired, so suddenly, and without any actual reason, was this interview. He had one version of it taped for Fox News, and they still own that tape. So he had the Chief of the Capital Police come in again and tape the interview again.
This makes things notable in a few ways. I'm still digesting this interview, mind you. But for starters, there is the surface level that the Chief of the Capital Police feels like he was set up to fail. Tucker takes this further, and heavily implies or leads that the whole damned Jan 6th was a setup. Then on a deeper level, there is the fact that this is the second time they've done this song and dance, so the Chief of the Capital Police knows this is Tucker's angle, beyond a shadow of any doubt, and he's still doing the interview again.
But here is Zerohedge's takeaway from the interview.
It Was Pelosi: Former Capitol Police Chief Reveals 'Set Up' Behind January 6
Perhaps most damning is Sund's claim that then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) refused to authorize the deployment of the National Guard at the Capitol despite Sund's pleas, and that federal agencies withheld information and warning signs of potential dangers prior to the riot.
"This sounds like a set up to me," Carlson said, adding "I'm sorry, it does."
To which Sund replied:
"It gets better. So I beg and beg and he goes ‘well, I’m gonna walk down the hall and we’ll talk to the Secretary of Defense or whoever he’s gonna talk to. Right then I get a notification, oh, I’m still on the call, we have the shooting of Ashli Babbitt. And I said we have shots firing, I still remember yelling over the phone. We have shots firing on the U.S. Capitol, is that urgent enough for you now?"
According to Sund, the National Guard didn't show up until 6 p.m., hours after the fatal shooting of Babbitt. He also claimed that the Pentagon deployed resources to the homes of generals, but not the Capitol.
WhiningCoil
6mo ago
Shrug
Not my fault the NPCs didn't realize the box was being built around them until they were already in it. I see people rallying around Beri Weiss, like she's some sort of reformed progressive because she keeps calling out anti-Semitism from the left. But she was perfectly happy to push anti-white demoralization propaganda at the NYT. Most of the people aghast now at how the left is treating them regularly promoted blood libel against my people, and promoted policies that have rendered the country of my birth virtually unrecognizable to me, to say nothing of the open institutionally hostility towards me. Go watch the shameless progressive talking points Beri Weiss shills when she goes on Joe Rogan 3 or 4 years ago.
What's especially galling is that all the rhetoric about "whiteness", statistically, was always more true of Jews than it ever was about whites. The wealth inequality, the disproportionate positions of power, the over representation in narrative crafting organizations. Every story ever told about how white supremacy works, if you believed their facile reasoning, was always more true of Jews than of white people. Shit, I remember a BLM meme that went around about how many white people control media organizations, that someone else went back over pointing out all the ones that were Jewish. Naturally, the latter was hate speech and the former wasn't. Because reasons.
Overwhelmingly, the Beri Weiss's of the world got the country they inflicted on the rest of us. Zero sympathy what so ever.
WhiningCoil
7mo ago
I guess it's sex crimes week on The Motte. Here is one I've been puzzling about.
How on Earth was Danny Masterson actually convicted?
This has been a slow boil for me. I'd seen headlines here and there about the slow rolling case against him. I totally missed when the first trial went to a hung jury. Then suddenly I see he was convicted on 2 out of 3 rape charges and sentenced to 30 years. Even saw some headlines about Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis getting dragged for writing a character witness letter for his sentencing. But something jumped out at me.
He was being prosecuted for crimes 17-19 years old at the time the prosecution started. Red flag number one, I don't know the specific law in CA, but surely that's pushing the statute of limitations, right? Indeed it is! Statute of Limitations for rape is 10 years. So how did they still prosecute him?
Well there are a few exceptions.. Namely
- Kidnapping the victim
- Drugging the victim
- Using a firearm
- Having been previously convicted of a sex crime (or maybe just being accused of multiple sex crimes?)
What appears to have sunk Masterson's SOL is that there are multiple accusers. Now reading the law myself, the reading seems clear to me. The exception requires a seperate conviction. But I'm no lawyer or judge, obviously.
(d)(1) The defendant has been previously convicted of an offense specified in subdivision (c), including an offense committed in another jurisdiction that includes all of the elements of an offense specified in subdivision (c).
Or
(e)(4) The defendant has been convicted in the present case or cases of committing an offense specified in subdivision (c) against more than one victim.
And I believe this is the part pertaining to SOL
(g) Notwithstanding Section 1385 or any other law, the court shall not strike any allegation, admission, or finding of any of the circumstances specified in subdivision (d) or (e) for any person who is subject to punishment under this section.
So I donno, maybe it's not as clear cut as I think. I repeat, not a lawyer.
Moving past the SOL concerns I have, what was the evidence against Masterson? Near as I can tell none. There were 3 victim testimonies, some expert testimony, and that was it. Zero evidence corroborating the witnesses, zero physical evidence, zero circumstantial evidence. And this is why SOL is so important. It's not a get out of jail free card. It exists so the defense can practically gather some evidence to exonerate their client. After 20 years, most physical evidence will be gone, alibis will be impossible, witnesses will be difficult to find and their testimony will be even more unreliable than already notoriously unreliable witness testimony. All we're left with is he said/she said, and the biases of the jury pool.
This was an idle, principled frustration for me. I honestly could give a shit about Danny Masterson. However, now that figures more politically salient, like Russell Brand, are in the crosshairs, the precedent set by Masterson's chilling conviction are all the more frightening.
WhiningCoil
5mo ago
Among normies who are aware of the problem, I think most suffer from Jessie Singal syndrome. Jessie Singal has been covering the trans-insanity beat for a long, long time from the left. He has correctly identified much that is ethically horrifying about the current trans movement. He has correctly identified institutional problems that need to be stopped. But he's so locked into "Republicans bad, Democrats good", that when Republicans literally stop the things he has written extensively about, he is horrified that Republicans are "making the problem worse". He's convinced that if Republicans would just lay off, now, after 10 years of his side ignoring him and actively promoting all the problems he complains about, he could convince them to reverse course. But those darned evil, bigoted Republicans just won't stop making his side crazy.
The institutional sterilization and mutilation of children is a crime against humanity, the scale of which is difficult for the average normie to honestly contemplate. And especially the average normie Democrat. My extremely normie MSNBC consuming in laws just straight up disbelieve it. There side only does good things, and the way we describe it sounds like a bad thing, therefore it's not happening. It's right wing misinformation. We must have heard it from Fox News, always the boogie man, despite the fact that we don't even have cable. When we describe the things happening in our own state, they just mutter "Well I never heard about that." It doesn't help that the whole debate is shrouded in euphemisms like "trans healthcare", and lies about it being "fully reversible".
Among the true believers, charitably you have trans activist who mistakenly view every child through the lens of their own experiences growing up. Uncharitably, they've been horribly mutilated with no way back, and the only way to justify what was done to them is to perpetuate it. Otherwise they'd have to face the stark reality that their entire miserable existence was based on a lie. It's no wonder so many kill themselves.
And then you have the child castration fetishist in the medical community who write the standards of care.
WhiningCoil
5mo ago
You know, as an adult who grew up in the 90's, a lot of the demoralization propaganda just makes me roll my eyes. When I got to the 3rd season of Disenchantment and they made the main character gay, I roll my eyes and say to my wife watching next to me "because of course she is." Usually happens 3 or 4 times every single show we watch. More or less every episode of The Fall of the House of Usher had an absurdly on the nose progressive propaganda moment.
As an adult, it's eye roll worthy. Sometimes you can see past the politically motivated characters or plot points. Sometimes you can't.
Considering the media we'll expose our children to however, it gets scary. If a person uncritically consumed current popular culture, you get the Nashville school shooter mentioned below. Brain turned to mush, on a path to mutilation and sterilization, hating everything and everyone. There was nothing I saw in that manifesto that isn't constantly beating me over the head in modern pop culture.
I'm reminded of some joke about the difference between a cult and a religion. A cult is all made up by people. In a religion, all those people are dead. We're coming up on generations that have only known demoralization propaganda, and who's parents have only known demoralization propaganda. Whatever kayfabe social signaling hating cis white males, normal women, or wholesome white families used to mean, the people uncritically consuming it and signal boosting it now don't understand it's only supposed to be insincere virtue signaling. They're ready to start pogroms now.
WhiningCoil
7mo ago
Personally, I think both options are death. The fact of the matter is, as you correctly observe, Street Rods are an artifact from a very specific time and place, with conditions that are long since gone. And were they to choose "diversity", it would just lead to them getting chased out of their own hobby even sooner. Probably nearly instantly. Better to let them keep it to themselves until the last member dies, than have them suffer the heartbreak of having their hobby stolen from them, and themselves alienate from it, and then they die. Possibly sooner than they would have as a result of their devastating loss of community.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
I wonder about Disney. I have no idea how many people are like me, but all they've done is motivate me to stop watching TV and movies, period. They've motivated me to not let my kid watch TV, period. If they own all the media, I stop consuming all the media.
Instead I've been woodworking. My wife has been gardening. My daughter has been getting super creative with art supplies, crafts, playing pretend and running around outside. We're probably all better off with less consoomer media, regardless of the fact that Disney has been pushing an odious agenda. If anything I should thank Disney for becoming so awful it finally got me to touch grass more.
WhiningCoil
2mo ago
I'm not even Christian, but all that ad said to me is "Ha ha, we stole your religion!"
It came off exactly like the smarmy atheist who claims that Jesus really would have been an open borders communist. Not because he's studied the bible and the context of primitive Christians, but because it's a meme he chooses to believe and it pisses off equally ignorant Christians who can't argue against it any more than he can argue for it.
And so the ad spends it's time ritually humiliating Christians, showing them debasing themselves, subservient to people who hate them. All while making a facile claim that it's actually the true expression of their religion.
Trying to google who sponsored the ad, apparently the left maligned family behind Hobby Lobby did it? Which doesn't exactly mesh with my immediate reaction to it. But then again, plenty of religious organizations are acting as suicidal hollowed out zombies of late, so who knows.
WhiningCoil
10mo ago
The Gays Destroyed The "No Politics" Rule
Pride month began, and the moderators of /r/Battletech enforced their "no politics" rule as they have through elections, wars, referedums, economic crisis, etc. A long standing rule fastidiously kept by most Battletech groups I frequent. It's preserved Battletech as one of my escapes for long years as every other hobby I had got overrun with far left politics. Alas, no longer.
In response, Catalyst games launched /r/OfficialBattletech, specifically calling out the "bigotry" of /r/Battletech, and announcing Battletech is a "safe space". They parachuted in a community leader with experience moderating "safe spaces". People began making the sorts of spurious claims against the mods of /r/Battletech you are used to seeing, calling them being fascist at best, literally "Heil Hitler" nazi's at worst on the most spurious of circumstantial evidence. The originator of /r/Battletech came out of nowhere and completely removed the mods of /r/Battletech to make damned sure /r/Battletech participates in Pride Month.
Because it's not political. It's just being a decent person.
So I guess Battletech is explicitly left wing now. You are no allowed to opt out of their politics.
Hobbies/Fandoms I'm allowed in
-
Video Games -
Board Games -
Science Fiction -
Star Wars -
Star Trek -
Battletech -
Woodworking
And I log into youtube to watch Stumpy Nubs tell me how to sharpen a chisel every day in fear some flashpoint will have occurred. That the Eye of Sauron finally noticed that woodworking is too white and must be destroyed. And suddenly every content creator I watch will be posting these mewling apology videos for not doing enough to foster diversity and inclusiveness in this important hobby. And the rest of the month ends up being pride themed woodworking content. Making your own buttplugs on a lathe or whatever. How to add glitter to a poly finish.
WhiningCoil
3mo ago
There are a lot of half arguments here.
Like, you scoff at impenetrable end to end encryption. But the realities of the internet are that any back-door or security flaw that allows end to end encryption to be penetrated exposes literally everything to literally everyone. There is no limiting principle as is the case of say, a door to a kiddy porn dungeon. Presumably there would be a warrant. Or maybe in the case of your valuables being in the sort of safe The Lockpicking Lawyer could open in under 1 second with a toothpick, some hopefully limited number of criminals will ever actually get a crack at it. Not so with anything on the internet. Either it's impenetrable, even to legitimate law enforcement (but especially illegitimate law enforcement), or virtually every criminal on Earth already has access to it. There is very little in between.
Then you decide to stan for cloud computers. Because a friend of yours is an idiot and didn't fix his NAS when it had a problem. But the fact of the matter is, the cloud is still only someone else's computer. And they can revoke access to your data just as capriciously as a RAID array might fail.
And then to smear everyone concerned as QAnon, as though fears of data collection and spying haven't been validated time and time and time again. Did Snowden happen before you were born? Has it been that long?
WhiningCoil
5mo ago
Let me illustrate my expectations by going over some historical pogroms.
The 1821 Odessa pogroms are sometimes considered the first pogroms. After the execution of the Greek Orthodox patriarch, Gregory V, in Constantinople, 14 Jews were killed in response.[1] The initiators of the 1821 pogroms were the local Greeks, who used to have a substantial diaspora in the port cities of what was known as Novorossiya.[2]
So just 14 Jews killed, but the message of "Your kind isn't welcome here" is clear. Moving onto 1881
The event which triggered the pogroms was the assassination of Tsar Alexander II on 13 March [1 March, Old Style], 1881, for which some blamed "agents of foreign influence," implying that Jews committed it.[9][10] One of the conspirators was of Jewish origins, and the importance of her role in the assassination was greatly exaggerated during the pogroms that followed. Another conspirator was baselessly rumored to be Jewish.[11] The extent to which the Russian press was responsible for encouraging perceptions of the assassination as a Jewish act has been disputed.[12]
So that's the trigger. Here are some of the excuses made during that time.
For decades after the 1881 pogroms, many government officials held the antisemitic belief that Jews in villages were more dangerous than Jews who lived in towns. The Minister of the Interior Nikolay Pavlovich Ignatyev rejected the theory that pogroms were caused by revolutionary socialists, and instead he adopted the idea that they were a protest by the rural population against Jewish exploitation. With this idea in mind, he promulgated the notion that pogroms had spread from villages to towns. Historians today recognize that although rural peasantry did largely participate in the pogrom violence, pogroms began in the towns and spread to the villages.[17]
Man, the more things change, the more they stay the same, huh?
At least 40 Jews were killed during pogroms between April and December 1881.[18] An additional 225 Jewish women reported being raped; Of these, 17 were reportedly killed while being raped.[citation needed]
Only 40 casualties. And the results...
The pogroms of the 1880s caused a worldwide outcry and, along with harsh laws, propelled mass Jewish emigration from Russia.
I'd say historically, pogroms weren't about murdering even a significant proportion of the population. That's why it's not called genocide. Instead, they are about instilling fear through the much beloved stochastic terrorism, so that they leave. Historical pogroms also aren't a single event, but a steady roil of targeted racial violence with peaks of mob violence, and occasionally lethality. The role of the state seems to alternate between inflaming tensions with racial rhetoric, and being incredibly passive aggressive towards defending the rights of the unwanted citizens.
Frankly it's a state of affairs most Democrat run cities are already in, in their racial anti-white libelous rhetoric, and their slaps on the wrist, if any enforcement at all, for racially motivated anti-white hate crimes.
Most people totally immersed in the mores of the sexual revolution will never be able to entertain the notion that those mores harmed them. They may look around them, at their peers, and see the damage. But their own decisions will always be above reproach, because SLAY QUEEN!!
It gets particularly bad when the consequences are just manifestly obvious to everyone except them. Among the moms at my daughter's school, it's a fucking train wreck. Even only getting their side of the stories, it's a horror show. One woman can't hold down a job, can't hold down an address, and was in some sort of situationship with the guy she was staying with. All she had to do was not also fuck the felon ex partner/father of her daughter while she fucked the guy she was living with, and she couldn't do it. Cause nobody can tell her what to do. So then she was homeless again. Cause it's not like felon baby daddy had a place she could stay.
Then there is the woman who shameless adopts every upper class luxury belief she can, which coincidentally enables her to adopt an uninvolved wine mom poly lifestyle. She wonders why the other moms don't like her, when she casually drops lines like "It's really hard for me to not fuck my kid's friend's dads". And it's not like her kids are thriving either. All her children have some pretty significant developmental delays which signal neglect IMHO.
Oh, and local to me, an actual, no joke, camwhore ran for a state legislature seat. When it came out that she was having sex on a camwhore site for money, she started threatening to sue people for distributing revenge porn. Keep in mind, this was content, free content publicly available, that she produced and distributed herself. Naturally all the liberal local news outlets took her claims about it being revenge porn at face value, and hid in the middle of the article in a throw away line that she had, in fact, been a camwhore. The rest of all the articles implies by omission and the constant use of "revenge porn" that these were private videos illegally obtained and distributed.
The flip landscape for men couldn't be more stark. Men cut in half by divorce, parental alienation, jail if they can't afford the blood from a stone the court mandates for them. And the response is always "Well, if you didn't want to have kids, you shouldn't have had sex." Consequences for men are the one thing conservatives and liberals seem able to agree on.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
No, I literally cannot imagine a scenario where a pregnant woman successfully forces a teenaged male off a bike he doesn't want to be removed from, and takes his place. Especially not without everyone falling over in a tangled mess and getting scrapes and cuts all over their hands, elbows and knees. Probably some decent bruising as well. I especially cannot imagine such a thing happening with not just 1 teenage male present, but 5. Its not just a physical impossibility, it boggles the mind the consider the psychology of the person who thinks thats a thing they could pull off.
WhiningCoil
7mo ago
For the same reason it's "valid" to judge anyone's media consumption habits when you become aware of them.
This crystalized something for me I didn't really vocalize.
Nobody needed to be aware of how I modded Doom in 1994. There was no social media. There were no centralized modding repositories making executive decisions about what mods to allow or not. There were people at computer shows slinging floppies, random personal pages, sometimes CD-ROM compilations of just dumps of WADs scraped from god knows where.
I never needed to complain that the Kill Barney mod got taken down. There was never a pro shooting Barney and an anti shooting Barney faction arguing about it who you had to cast you lot in with. Nobody needed to set up a dissident host for Barney shooting mods. It was just... in the aether. It was out there. You knew some people liked it, and maybe some people didn't, but it was unquantifiable and frictionless, and totally nobody else's business.
It's this spirit of "nobody else's business" that has been lost. Because now it seems broadly accepted that media can be harmful, and so it's in everybody's interest to police all the media everyone else is consuming to make sure they aren't a harmful person. Shit, it's gotten to me too. My above screeds absolutely betray that I to believe the media you consume can be harmful. My bugbear is demoralization propaganda. I want it out of my house, away from my children. I refuse to patronize peddlers of it. I despair at how prevalent it is in our culture. I die a little inside when old friends I haven't seen in a while, who've been getting all the NPC updates, make casual disparaging remarks about how terrible white people are apropo of nothing. There is a sense of "Shit, they got to you too?"
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
Witness to Jordan Neely chokehold death calls Daniel Penny a 'hero'
Whoops, wrong link, not sure how that happened. Lets try again.
Witness to Jordan Neely chokehold death calls Daniel Penny a 'hero'
"He’s a hero," said the passenger, who has lived in New York City more than 50 years.
The witness, who described herself as a woman of color, said it was wrong for Bragg to charge Penny with second-degree manslaughter.
"I’m sitting on a train reading my book, and, all of a sudden, I hear someone spewing this rhetoric. He said, ‘I don’t care if I have to kill an F, I will. I’ll go to jail, I’ll take a bullet,’" recalled the woman, who is in her 60s.
"I’m looking at where we are in the tube, in the sardine can, and I’m like, ‘OK, we’re in between stations. There’s nowhere we can go,’" she said. "The people on that train, we were scared. We were scared for our lives."
Penny stepped in when Neely started using the word "kill" and "bullet."
"Why in the world would you take a bullet? Why? You don’t take a bullet because you’ve snatched something from somebody’s hand. You take a bullet for violence," she added.
Freelance journalist Alberto Vazquez began recording the confrontation after Neely was already in a chokehold and offered a second account of the homeless man’s conduct.
"He started screaming in an aggressive manner," Vazquez told the New York Post. "He said he had no food, he had no drink, that he was tired and doesn’t care if he goes to jail. He started screaming all these things, took off his jacket, a black jacket that he had, and threw it on the ground."
I do wonder if words can do justice with how threatening Neely was being on that train. I'm reminded of the Always Sunny bit about "the implication".
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
The only future I see any longer is 1984. We may shift to a multipolar world, but every pole will utilize the same, no exaggeration, Orwellian systems of social control. Extreme control of information. Elections that are more or less completely rigged. If not the actual vote, then having the intelligence community shaping the information environment to such a degree that nobody of a previous era would have ever considered it a fair election. The shift to a defacto one party state, where participation with the infrastructure of civilization is dependent on being a party member in good standing. It may not look exactly like China's social credit score, but it won't be far off, and will be identical in intent.
Weird Malthusian degrowth policies will rule the day. Every year our quality of life will be worse than the last for some nebulous greater good. Despite this, I see no end to the forever wars either. Forever wars pair too well with degrowth anyways.
Governments will cull their electorate more openly, encouraging suicide and sterilization as "ethical" choices to meet degrowth goals. This messaging will begin as early as Kindergarten.
People who advocate for actual human flourishing will be considered terrorist.
And I'm just gonna stop there because I'm already depressing myself too much to go on. Should probably go touch grass or something...
WhiningCoil
5mo ago
Life imitates art. The less whites are represented in art and culture, even something as incidental as ads, the more ire gets directed at them for being mistakenly "over represented" in the real world. It filters into college admissions, hiring, governance, more art, etc, etc. It just creates an overall zeitgeist that white people aren't supposed to be here. It's demoralization, plain and simple.
Don't give money to people who hate you.
WhiningCoil
5mo ago
Lifelong medicalisation happens anyway no matter when you transition, but if you do it as an adult, it's much worse. You have to pay huge sums of money (tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars) for very painful, potentially risky surgery - for MtFs, facial feminisation surgery - which is literally slicing your face open, shaving your bones with a saw, and stitching it back up - tracheal shave, voice feminisation surgery, hairline reduction, and some more. All of this you do if you want to pass as a normal member of the opposite sex instead of a freak that's the butt of jokes.
My understanding, is that the state of the art research on the topic, before the mania, was that the vast majority of gender dysphoric individuals ceased being dysphoric with the completion of puberty. Upwards of 90%. Part of the diagnostic criteria in fact demanded you wait, to make sure the dysphoria persisted, before you began throwing medical interventions at it. Because "do no harm" still reigned.
The current state of the art is that the 90% that would have had their dysphoria resolved, and required no medicalization, must now be medicalized before puberty to make the transition of the 10% who's dysphoria wouldn't have resolve easier.
In other words, 90% of kids with transient gender dysphoria are being irreparably harmed for the benefit of the 10% with permanent dysphoria.
I get that if you have permanent dysphoria, this sucks. It might seem unfair. I don't care. I value the 9 other kids that would have grown up to be gender nonconforming and/or gay adults with intact bodies over you.
Even so, if that was as far as it went, I wouldn't be half as hopping mad as I am. What has me incandescently furious are the local school districts around me pushing pornography on children, and fighting tooth and nail to transition children in secret. And I'm especially livid at gender ideology being pushed as early as Kindergarten. This article, framing it as if it's a good thing:
In his kindergarten classroom, one teacher in western Massachusetts using “Rights, Respect, Responsibility” introduces the idea of gender as part of an exploration of identity. He explains that people use all sorts of pronouns: he, she, they, ze. He introduces the terms transgender and gender queer but doesn’t fully define them because that is too much for kindergartners, said the teacher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because his district did not authorize him to speak publicly.
He talks to students about anatomy but declines to classify various body parts as male or female. “We don’t say a penis belongs to a man,” he said. It belongs to a human, he explains.
All I see is institutions, starting as soon as kids are verbal, amplifying neurosis around puberty, nurturing them relentlessly, and then medicalizing the children that they've brainwashed behind their parents back. As such, we're not letting our kid anywhere near those institutions.
You left out 4) Men aren't allowed to have anything to themselves anymore, ever.
When I was a young man, I went to LAN parties with a bunch of other young men, and we formed intense bonds over deathmatches screaming every racially charged obscenity we could imagine. We tooled out our rigs, lots of us began learning to program or mod games, etc. This all happened in the safety of a basement, largely without internet except in the few houses that had big fancy broadband, and nobody was ever hurt.
Sure, it's not the most traditional of male bonding/rights of passage, but I think it worked, after a fashion, for us.
All this is now verboten. All games have some random fucking girlboss lecturing you about your privilege. There are no more offline servers. All behavior is closely monitored and you get suspended. Mods get you banned. It's the worst fucking dystopia I could have ever imagined being a 90's PC gamer.
I moved over to boardgames in the mid 00's, to continue to bond and compete as a slightly older adult male with my other adult male friends. Sometimes things got heated with our elevated testosterone and trying to find our place in the world. One time I almost came to blows with a guy after he got insanely drunk and made a bunch of outlandish accusations. A few years later I was best man at his wedding.
All this is now verboten. Less controllable, granted. But the last time I was in my old FLGS they almost kicked a guy out of the store for saying, in character, that he'd kill another player in a tabletop war game. Came down on him like a brick of shit, shouting "IF I EVER HEAR THAT LANGUAGE AGAIN YOU WILL BE PERMANENTLY BANNED FROM THE STORE!" Both players were absolutely shocked. They thought it was just banter.
Over the years, for some reason, that store went from staffing men approaching middle age who'd been gaming from before puberty, to a bunch of blue haired high school girls who routinely sneered at my purchases of GMT Games. I cannot comprehend the shift. I stopped going there.
And so it goes with literally every single thing too many men enjoy and bond over. It must be made terminally inclusive, so that women can participate and not have their feelings hurt. Which completely ruins it as a male bonding space. And so there will never be one again ever. At least not in the "free" world.
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