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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28357 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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[EDIT: At 24 hrs after my initial post I'll collect all the responses and decide what I want to do with them]

This is a poll question. The idea is to get and understand the people reading this, their takes.

In the optimal scenario, answers wouldn't contaminate the others' responses or reference others' definitions and understanding.

The question: In sociopolitical contexts, what is your personal, off-the-cuff definition or interpretation of the term NPC? Again, I'm not looking for any other thinker's or pundit's definitions of the term, but you, the commenter who responds to me. I already know the concept has already been discussed and mentioned, at length, elsewhere.

If you've never heard the term before, give me a guess of what you would think the term means and what information you pull from. Ideally, answers would be spoilered using the double-pipe notation, IE wrapping the answer with a pair of: || around their responses, without referring to anyone else's response.

To avoid contamination, I'll post my own definition as a response to this comment later.

NPC: An npc is an extreme conformist. An evolution of the sheep brought about by today's rapidly changing information space. Whereas a sheep may blindly follow a specific ideology an npc's beliefs can be updated, or patched, on the fly as new information is released. This gives them an incoherence that their ancestors such as the religious sheep lack, "Hey Wei remember how Dave went off on you last week for buying up those N95 masks and then tried to give you a hug despite covid spreading? I saw him at the grocery store today, he was double masking and had a disinfecting wipes holster on his belt. What an NPC."

Someone doing that today wouldn't be a conformist, certainly. Even at the height of Covid, double-masking, carrying disinfectant wipes etc. was not something I remember actually seeing anyone doing and would have marked the person doing it as not conforming to the social mores, which would have perhaps meant wearing one of those flimsy blue or white masks for a time and then dropping it when everyone else dropped it. Current zero covidians - whom I disagree with and have argued with repeatedly - are anything but conformist in the sense of conforming to current actual social norms, but I still keep seeing those gray NPC wojak memes about them implicating that they're what is meant by NPC.

I seem to recall you are in Finland? Is that right?

In the NY area, it was very common to see people double masking, masking by themselves in a car, masking and have a face shield, etc.

Sure, it might have been different in the blue areas in United States (probably the genuine epicenter of this sort of a reaction anywhere), but even then the point is that the clear majority of people, even in those areas, is not doing those things now. People who continue doing those things aren't doing it to be conformist, quite the contrary.

Current zero covidians are not NPCs, the NPC's have had their beliefs patched since 2022 and now don't mask.

A broken NPC in a town who regurgitates antiquated lines because they didn't accept their new Current Thing update is still an NPC who adopted their previous positions because they at least were an NPC.

Their understanding of the issues or the evidence didn't get better since; they're just stuck like a broken record.

That's true, they seem to specifically conform to authority figure narratives. It seems like more of a very online American thing, maybe they're still functionally conformists in the 'good neighbor', or religious sheep sense, but due to America's decaying social fabric lack any sort of social group to conform to and so tend to adhere mostly to w/e the prevalent authority narratives are.

The prevalent authority narrative has not told them to do this at least quite for some time, either.

I thought the hug an asian part made the time period of the quote pretty clear. There weren't many other time periods where we went from hugging Chinese people (Trumps china travel ban), to shaming people for buying up PPE (even trained professional don't always wear it properly!), to shaming people for not following strict PPE guidelines.

But they so loved that time they want to bring it back.

But, again, that's not NPC behavior by the common definition within the spoilered answers. Wanting to bring some specific era specifically clashes with the idea of just unthinkingly going with the flow and always adopting the currently fashionable views (indeed, by that definition most everyone on the right side of the political spectrum would be a NPC...)

I just intended it as a "use the word in a sentence example" way. Not saying it's specific to covid. I do think there are changes to the way information is disseminated in current times that make NPC different from earlier flavors of conformists. It's mostly the mindlessly following beliefs that rapidly change and are often contradictory though.

That was mostly the True Believer Zero Covidians, not the NPCs. Back in 2021 most Zero Covidians were NPCs, now the NPCs have moved on so you just have the true believers left. As such you'd expect the average behaviour of the group to change.

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