popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
popocatepetl
1d ago
All bluesky is now alight in celebration of the murder
I doubt /all/ of them are.
It is very strange how I must be on the backfoot arguing that radical violence-enjoyer leftists exist, year after year, when they completely color every corner of the internet that isn't a total right wing bubble.
I was in the same position as Doubletree or 4bpp yesterday, reflexively ascribing this to a few left extremists nutpicked by the algorithm. But "he got what was coming to him, I have no empathy" really does seem to be the prevailing vibe on Reddit at least.
I've done well enough insulating myself from leftist online spaces after we left Reddit, I had somehow forgotten what it's like.
The left seems to believe the situation is sufficiently dire as to justify violence
The 50 million or whatever Leftists in America don’t feel that way. Like two people do. There’s this guy and then Luigi Mangione.
You mean that like two people were willing to pay the personal price. Do you really believe if we distributed Death Notes to the other 49,999,998, MAGA figures wouldn't start dropping dead?
History shows that people readily indulge in violence against the hated outgroup when they feel perfectly safe from blowback. Are leftists moreso? I would suspect a little, since right-left are self-sorting groups moreso than tribal conflicts of the past, and the hard left does not even have a fig leaf moral code against violence. We can't know if the 50 million Death Notes distributed in the other direction would stay any blanker. (My unproveable guess is, maybe 20-30% blanker.) But "only two leftists feel violence is justified" is ludicrous; if favorable circumstances opened up, millions would sign off on killing at least the leadership class of their enemy.
Serious question: at what point is political violence justified?
Look at the Catholic just war doctrine, kind of a checklist of criteria violent action must satisfy to be right in the eyes of God: is there a competent authority organizing the armed action? A realistic possibility of success? A just cause for which you're fighting? And is it your last resort?
The Catholic church has an explicit social teaching on this. From Catechism 2243:
Armed resistance to oppression by political authority is not legitimate, unless all the following conditions are met: 1) there is certain, grave, and prolonged violation of fundamental rights; 2) all other means of redress have been exhausted; 3) such resistance will not provoke worse disorders; 4) there is well-founded hope of success; and 5) it is impossible reasonably to foresee any better solution.
Traditional leftist revolutionary violence has run afoul of 3 and 4 at least. Likewise, so would any right reactionaries eyeing violence, even in a truly horrible situation like South Africa. I would say Francisco Franco was in the clear, probably.
You are right to bring up just war theory. The throughline of all Catholic teaching on "When am I allowed to harm?" is the double effect. You are not allowed to do anything that is intrinsically evil (which, contrary to mischaracterizations of Matthew 5:39, violence is not). You must not desire the evil outcomes (so no wanting to hurt enemies for the sake of hurting them). Evil outcomes must not directly cause the good desired end (so no terrorist killing of civilians, even if that helps lead to victory). And there must be a proportionate cause (so no rebelling over the government failing to fix that nasty pothole).
In some ways, this is a hard teaching for many people, but the Christian POV on violence is not as alien from intuitive morality as is often suggested.
Where the Christian POV is alien is that rebellion against an authority you're born under is truly the last resort. God put you under a prince, even an evil prince, as part of his active or at least permissive will. 'Consent of the governed' is nonsense. Does a child get to choose whether to obey his father? No. There may be extreme situations where a child must run away or even fight his father, but that requires extreme justification. David stays loyal to the evil king Saul, simply running when Saul tries to kill him. Jesus meekly submits himself to be executed by Pilate.
popocatepetl
2d ago
Is it really bad for malignant narcissists to target politicians rather than schools? At least politicians know what they're getting into. If school shootings were genuinely replaced with single assassination attempts on random political figures, I would see that as a big improvement.
This is a terrible idea. A random school shooting is senseless violence. It passes like a hurricane and perhaps leads to some heated gun control debates. But violence that looks intertribal leads to civil war.
popocatepetl
2d ago
Real America's Voice is now confirming he passed.
Kevin is sadly vindicated. He just jumped the gun I guess.
popocatepetl
2d ago
Bennett's Phylactery now says dead. DELETED
Kevin Dolan screwed the pooch with this one.
Rule of maintaining credibility: Don't tweet things like that unless you have a 100% clear insider scoop.
Whether a story is a "pounce" comes down to whether the story actually instantiates a larger problem. That's the rub, isn't it? The left and right don't agree which problems are a big deal, or even which ones are real.
I can't really remember any incident being reported with the opposite valence. That is, I don't think there are stories presented in the form, "This wouldn't really be news if it wasn't for the fact that the left is 'pouncing'."
Oh, I do this all the time. My reaction to every police anti-black brutality story of the last decade has been to think of those perfidious Chinese cardiologists. To wit, okay, maybe the cop went too far in this or that story. Maybe. But the problem you (progressive journalist) are implying to be pervasive is actually a freak event. Yes you can supply a lot of anecdotes, but that's only because we're a massive country. And your talking about that freak event is causing riots and lax policing leading to preventable deaths, so actually, your complaining is the problem here.
I suppose this is also what Blueskyers mean when they mock Republicans for being afraid of riding buses or what not. "The problem you (NY Post journalist) are implying to be pervasive is actually a freak event." And they think Republicans talking about this freak event is leading to racism, which is a Real Problem.
teh country
Rare spotting of a critically endangered typo. Autocorrect has driven this once common forum friend to the brink of extinction.
I expect the right to be every bit as cautious and measured with their racial moment as the left has been with all of theirs. And who can blame them?
There's no racial moment. No doubt, the last few years saw a right-wing victory in that rightist views can get platformed again. But it wasn't a platform that made Fergusson or Floyd electrifying. It was a full spectrum propaganda apparatus that amplified these useful signals every hour, every day, from every glowing screen. And I'm not just talking about CNN or NYT. Turn on the Disney channel in 2020, and you'd see preteens raising their fist in solidarity with Black victims. Moreover, the left had sympathetic bureaucrats and NGOs waiting in the wings to cash political capital when it got generated.
The right has none of this. Yes, they're mad. Peasants can be mad as much as they like.
I'm underselling this a bit. With Trump in office, the right can parlay this into some useful currency. But there will be no "moment" for the anti-BLM right just because we have a horrifying video.
So this place is kinda dead now eh? What happened? There’s a ton of stuff happening in the culture war and the main thread is wildly boring with posts not at all topical
"Willing to comment, not willing to effortpost" syndrome.
I have no doubt that if someone made a toppost about the train stabbing of Iryna Zarutska, it would generate hundreds of comments in response. But that requires someone to do the work of writing a summary and well-posed take, first.
popocatepetl
4d ago
This development does not surprise me in the least, given how the tail end of my playtime in Hollow Knight was mostly just a continuous escalation of challenge for the sake of challenge. I liked the game for what it was up to a point, especially for the exploration, but the exclusive focus on high-end skill checks in the boss rush or extreme platforming sequences at the end had me check out.
I had the same experience of HK. The game was all roses until I maxed out my knight. Then, suddenly, to reach the ending I apparently had play a masocore platformer and a bullet hell game? Why? I checked out and watched the ending cutscene online.
Honestly, I didn't hold this against Hollow Knight. But it seems Team Cherry wanted to make a sequel to the part of their game I actually didn't like. Shame.
Update on Silksong.
The conversation around this game is getting on my nerves. Camps have divided over whether Silksong is too hard (double damage, runbacks) or just right (get good). Ultimately difficulty is up to preference. No one is going to convince anyone here, although people denying Silksong is harder are pretty annoying. But no one is talking about Silksong being a different genre than Hollow Knight. That seems important. Am I taking crazy pills?
The core conceit of Metroidvanias is exploration yields power. You have a freeform world and can explore many different areas. As you find collectibles and beat bosses, your avatar strength increases. You unlock new areas, which open up new bosses and powerups, which in turn open up new areas, etc. Not so in Silksong.
First off, the area progression is almost entirely linear. You have one or two optional areas like Hunter's March. But really, you're advancing down the critical path like a regular action platformer.
Second, your avatar strength is barely increasing, and not at all due to exploration or boss-beating. If you comb every area for hidden walls, you can maybe find enough masks to increase your health from 5 pips to 6 pips by Act Two. But since most enemies and environmental hazards do two damage, that isn't an upgrade. As for your damage output, you are gifted a small sword upgrade at a set point in the story about 10 hours in. But since all the enemies from that linear point on get twice as tanky, that's not an upgrade. And there's no incentive to backtrack, so...?
All crests or tools you get are sidegrades. They unlock other gameplay styles according to your preference. I've mostly ignored them.
Weirdly you do get a few things that feel like Metroidvania "door-opening" moves (See: the Drifter's Cloak or Silk Spear). But they end up only being used to advance from the area you find them in. Want to backtrack? The door-opening moves don't open anything in old zones. And later levels forget about them. (Why didn't Team Cherry put steam updrafts in later levels at least? That was fun!)
At hour thirteen, I don't feel my hornet is meaningfully stronger or more capable than at hour two. Instead, the last eleven hours have been a sequence of challenge levels.
Conclusion: Silksong is in practice closer in genre to something like Super Meat Boy or I Wanna Be the Guy than Hollow Knight. The trappings of a Metroidvania are here, but the substance isn't. I feel like this change is more important that just 'second game harder', no?
Thanks for the detailed explanation!
Now please explain how DS3 fits into that narrative framework.
It doesn't. Dark Souls meant and intended one thing at release. Then they had to make another game, so they brainstormed a sequel, which retroactively changed the meaning of the original. And then they made another sequel, which retroactively changed the meaning of the last two games, again. And so on and so on.
This is why "canon" arguments when it comes to stories that were not planned in advance are stupid. Obviously, in Star Wars: A New Hope as of 1977, Darth Vader is a low level mook and the republic collapsed in distant history. Now, when I watch it again in 2025, should I view it through the hermeneutic that Darth Vader is actually Vice-President of the Empire and the Republic fell 19 years ago? Of course not. Those retcons were made for the artistic convenience of later films.
It's generally valuable to analyze movies or games on their own, in light of what preceded them at the time of release.
"[X] is persecuted because it's bad" should be the default assumption, despite what a lifetime of cultural conditioning tells me.
Cults are marginalized, criminals are jailed, and pedophiles are excluded from some jobs. Unproductive workers are fired (or at least not promoted), unpleasant people don't get invited to parties, and flaky people don't get trusted with responsibilities. I'm guessing I would agree with the consensus 90% of the time, but that last 10% is very important.
Yeah. I gotta say, mainstream conservatives seem drawn like salmon to their native pool of the worst argument to support directionally correct positions. Throughout the 2016-2024 window, "cancel culture" was the rallying cry of conservatives against the left. But that was always the worst tack to take.
- Bad things should get you cancelled. Even if not, it's a universal feature of human societies. Every society has the sacred and taboos, whether right or not, and violating them has always resulted in punishment or shunning. The left is more likely to eliminate inequality of outcomes than you are to eliminate cancellation.
- When you whine about cancellation, you're pre-emptively sabotaging yourself for when you take the cultural catbird seat back. If you've spent eight years complaining about viewpoint discrimination, you can't easily conduct a purge of the people who did the last purge, the people who kicked you out to begin with. They can then shiv in your back and seize back power at the first opportune moment.
See also: The "snowflake" insult conservatives used around 2012 for woke people complaining about representation of blacks or gays in movies. Well guess what. Now Hollywood is woke, and conservatives are holding the bag of being "snowflakes" for complaining about the representation of blacks or gays in movies. Funny how that works.
popocatepetl
6d ago
People don't like being lectured by hectoring feminist church ladies any more than christian ones.
I mean it seems like the basic difference here is that a much larger percentage of the population thinks the latter has some sort of moral authority to make lectures
Not any more. What percentage of people goes to church compared to college or works in a corporate environment with HR lectures?
That's a playing field so slanted it may as well be a mountain cliff. Everyone in church getting lectured by hectoring church ladies is there voluntarily, while college and HR talks are mandatory for anyone who doesn't want to be prole.
The average person in the west still sees pastors and priests as having some residual moral authority, which is why leftist activists still try to infiltrate churches. Respect for woke equivalents is mostly (thought not entirely! The piety of towards George Floyd, etc. is heartfelt) a reflexive and instinctive accommodation to power.
popocatepetl
6d ago
Happy birthday to the Motte! If nothing else, it is a good time to remind myself that I am bad at predictions and should never play the prediction markets, because I didn't think we'd last this long. But here were are today, entering year four!
Any takes on what made our lifeboat more successful than other Reddit pilgrim colonies throughout the internet? The lifecycle of every other I've seen is:
- One month of elevated activity, with everyone criticizing Reddit and celebrating their new home
- A purity spiral towards the far right starts
- Ghost town
I'm certain a few departed/banned left-leaning posters will accuse us of going through #2. But it's nothing like what happened to Ruqqus, for example, and #3 never arrived. We've been stable at 1000-2000 comments/week for years now. Subjectively I'd say quality is down, but eh.
Perhaps mottizens are just built different™?
nifty meta-narrative like DS2 did, or at least not with such gravitas or panache.
Please elaborate.
Oh boy. The following are all spoilers. Although the Dark Souls series never makes these things explicit, discovering them is the marrow of DS1 and DS2. I recommend these games in part for their story, but I'm not going to turn a Motte comment into a CIA document. Read at your own risk.
Dark Souls is set in a kingdom named Lordran, and Dark Souls II in one named Drangleic. They're far away: "if the first game was set in the North Pole, the second would be in the South Pole". Both kingdoms are in a Cormac McCarthy The Road state of social collapse and imminent human extinction. All characters are slowly going mad as they lose hope. The vast majority are already mad ('hollow') and form the bulk of enemies you fight. The games hint, if you pay attention to their death sounds and what makes them respawn, that hollows are 'player characters', so to speak, who unplugged the controller, abandoned the game, and turned into mobs. And ALL player characters of Dark Souls do eventually turn into mobs. The games diegetically loop back to New Game+, so no one ever "beats" Dark Souls, strictly speaking. Whenever you stop, you stop. The "Age of Fire" ends, and the "Age of Dark" begins, though the in-game lore never explains what these terms mean.
All this is an analogy for nihilism in our garden-variety IRL life. Dark Souls games pose the question: Is fighting entropy worth it?
Do you remember when I said DS1 and DS2 are set in different places? I lied. Or Director Tomohiro Shibuya lied in that interview anyway. Once you actually play Dark Souls II, you'll find heaps of evidence that Drangleic is actually Lordran, except tens of thousands or even millions of years later. Most locations of the first game are all accessible, but buried underground, and so worn with age it's hard to tell what you're looking at. First game items can be found as artifacts: the Holy Grail equivalent of DS1, the Lordvessel, is in a trash heap in the basement of the starter village. Characters frequently remark on "countless kingdoms rising and falling on this very spot".
(Side tangent: 2014 was the first time I encountered NPCs in the real world, though I didn't have the vocabulary for them at the time. Debates raged online for the first year after DS2 on Drangleic vs Lordran. One side said "Here is a mountain of evidence Lordran is Drangleic", the other side said "An authority figure said Drangleic is not Lordran, and Trust The Experts, case closed". Fun times.)
Everything in DS2, even the story, is a cheap knockoff of DS1, being repeated over and over and over again. There is an Age of Fire running out, yielding to an Age of Dark. In one sense, DS2 is making another analogy about nihilism and entropy. In another sense, DS2 is talking about video game sequels.
Dark Souls 1 was a smash hit. What's more, beyond commercial success, it became perhaps the Most Admired Game Of All Time. What Ocarina of Time was in 2010, Dark Souls became in 2011. What's more, the premise and ending of DS1 made even the idea of a sequel artistic sacrilege. That hopeless, but nevertheless beautiful descent in the Heat Death of the Universe — and I won't even spoil the way DS1 punctuates that at the ending — did not brook a direct sequel. But because video game franchises, FromSoft did indeed have to make a sequel to a game about the End of the Universe.
This crass act is a bit like taking mom out of her coffin, mummifying her, and using her body as a carnival prop.
Bearer of the curse.
Long have I awaited one such as you, one who might shatter the shackles of fate.
One who can set me free. Bearer of the curse, it was my own manifestation that led you here.
Dark Souls II a game about being forced to go through the motions of something degrading that you hate. Like making a cynical sequel to a story that conclusively finished. Over the course of the game, you forget why you're even doing what you're doing, just like the ugly crone in the opening cinematic promised. Of course, it's not "just" about video game sequels, but that's part of it.
popocatepetl
6d ago
Could you go from person to non-person?
This is a pretty annoying leftist framing of "rights". Are children not people? Are foreigners living within another country not people? Are the mentally disabled and elderly not people?
Would you be able to live a happy life having had rights and then having them taken away from you?
Of course. Here, the example of expats above is helpful. And indeed, in practice I did experience losing freedom of speech when I was a teenager, having learned things and come to opinions that are de facto illegal in my country. The Boomers lost freedom of association in the 1960s and they managed well enough. And voting? Please. Voting is a joke. The right to vote is the right to be ruled by whoever controls the media.
I just posted a comment recommending Cradle. Good job me. Since you've already read Cradle, I agree with FC that Beware of Chicken is extremely funny.
As for another... I enjoyed listening to an AI audiobook of Release That Witch, despite an embarrassing pseudo-harem element. It's an isekai where a chemist bootstraps an industrial revolution in a magical setting; the "progression" is more Civilization than Amazing Cultivation Simulator though.
Very interesting how Communist theory seeped into the Chinese author's depiction of a state planned economy.
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