domain:shapesinthefog.substack.com
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
Look, this is worth nothing, and I am no therapist, but I feel like a cry for help should get some kind of answer. I don't know you or your life situation. I don't doubt it's shitty for you to feel like this. But "defective subhuman" sounds pretty dramatic and very unlikely, and as for "decades of pointless misery," there are some things that are outside your control and some things that are not, and very people are truly fated to "decades of pointless misery" for reasons entirely outside their control.
I won't go further since I am not diagnosing you or trying to probe more into your "problems." If you just wanted someone to hear you, I hear you. If you want solutions, they exist.
Flak can shoot them down and acoustic or optical targeting is sufficient.
It flies at 3.500 meters. Flak at 35mm barely gets up there. Horizontal range to engage Gerans at cruise altitude with 35mm is maybe 1 km.
They're planning out routes all across Ukraine. It's much faster than a car. There's no way to realistically counter them from the ground unless you have massive amounts of accurate flak. Germany theoretically has 400 Gepard flak vehicles. Yeah, had they started upgrading them with modern electronics (I think it was 1970s equipment) back in '22, around now Ukraine would be able to create a 'barrier' 500 km long against Gerans. Or maybe 800, if we assume 2 kilometers horizontal range. They didn't - the 400 of so obsolete Gepards are sitting somewhere, waiting to be scrapped.
You can defend point targets if you put multiple flak systems on them. (and nobody tries something funny like having 20 dive at once etc.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1d ago
Who is this booted "you", who's "us" in that quote? Needs more context.
But to answer the question: No. Fortunately. The radicals I know have been radicalized as much by the IRL water they swim in as by online propaganda. This means that the radicalization is both somewhat attenuated by the need to be IRL-compatible and sadly precludes a return to normal because radical is the normal, as said, water they swim it. It's socially acceptable to spew wild theories about Russian or American or Chinese intelligence agencies doing god-knows-what, about the Rich planning to eat us all, about foreigners wanting to skin us alive, about elites not being happy until we live in the pod and eat the bug, about how the planet is doomed and we're all going to die by tomorrow, about how the vaccines / the environmental toxins / the microplastics / the heavily processed food is giving us cancer / making us infertile / turning the frogs gay. Just pick the right flavor for a given audience and you're off to the races.
And some of those theories may well be right, but epistemic humility is thoroughly out of fashion. I do see people go off and and get worked up until they call for race war now gas the kikes / revolution now eat the rich shoot the nazi politicans / deindustrialize now voluntary human extinction save the planet before it's too late. I don't see people talk each other down with anything that even directionally resembles "Wait, that's hyperbole. Have we considered the counterargument?".
SSCReader
1d ago
The Khmer Rogue can get back to disarming traps, we're paying him to get us into the Zhentarim vault, not for his opinions on child rearing.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I get what you are saying, but I think that a not-insignificant part of the MAGA base is into the QAnon stuff.
In literature (in the widest sense), making a character a rapist or child molester is often done to drive home that they are a baddie. It is a bit crude, but it works. So when create a myth of a smoke-filled room where sinister figures decide the fate of the world, to exclude the possibility of someone saying "but what if this is actually a good thing?", you add "and after business was concluded, they relaxed by injecting adrenochrome harvested from children and also raping a few kids".
Epstein is the closest real-life thing to that trope. Sure, it does not match the trope perfectly, nobody is alleging that the fate of the world was decided on his island, and calling it "pedophile island" seems a bit of a misnomer when most of the victims (from what I heard) were female minors who had already hit puberty, but polite society is really big into age of consent (and for good reasons), so it still generates sufficient moral outrage (and for good reasons, again). I think the underage aspect was probably meant to celebrate that the participants were rich and powerful and beyond the morals and legal restrictions of ordinary people (and also, blackmail obviously, but Epstein could hardly tell his guests that).
Pretty much nobody ever believed that Donald "grab them by the pussy" Trump was into consent very much. I do not think he is into violent rape, but groping someone he has power over (e.g. some beauty pageant contestant) in a way which would upset the HR ladies seems very in character for him.
I can not imagine that his reaction to Epstein was "hanging out with (supposedly) powerful, rich people and illicit, transactional sex with Problematic consent are my two least favorite favorite things in the world, I will pass". I do not think he was really that much into the underage aspect of it (I think that few people really are -- but of course any sexual taboo is a also a kink, if the Aborigine had pornhub I think "Kumbo on Kapota" would be in the top ten categories).
In a way, I think one thing the QAnon crowd is disappointed about is that they saw Trump as an outsider who would clean up the corrupt and immoral DC elites. Who cares how many models he fucked, at least he is not part of the supposed sex and power shadow council which rules DC and the world. Except that they now find that to the very limited degree that their fever dreams were something real, he was in the fucking middle of it, much more than Biden or 'crooked' Hillary ever were.
Again, this should come as a surprise to nobody, Trump was already part of the elite the moment he was born, and his defection from the DC swamp was always kayfabe at least till J6. But it does surprise the QAnon voters.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
IIRC, you looked pretty smexy when you posted a photograph of yourself (with face censored) with two soon-to-die-by-methanol tourist women. How many dozens of hawt gurlz have you fucked in your 25 years, you tiger? Lord it over this forum of incel chuds.
Slightly more (but still not very) seriously: When are you going to improve your goddamned English punctuation skills?
AvocadoPanic
1d ago
The Republicans are propped up by Adelson money and now Yass, while the Democrats get lots of money from Soros and some of the other liberal Jewish donors.
There's a frequently expressed desire by the public to 'get money out of politics', might this money be a good place to start?
SkoomaDentist
1d ago
How would I change the button colors?
I can never see if I’ve pressed the downvote button for a comment but have no such issue with the upvote button. I assume it’s because someone assigned stupid color to it.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
What is someone supposed to even say to that? There is no idea to respond to, only a person, but we are not allowed to make personal attacks. It’s frustrating to hear the only response to @shoeonfoot — “just debate the hot takes” — completely miss the point.
What do you want? A rule that if someone expresses a disagreeable sentiment, you are allowed to say "Wow, you're a racist, fuck off"?
naraburns
nihil supernum
1d ago
This is far too much heat, not enough light. And I'm a little perplexed because you and the user you're talking to both have a history of AAQCs and no warnings, and even your other posts in this thread are basically effortful with minimal (albeit admittedly not zero) antagonism. To the point that I was tempted to let it go entirely but even with maximal "benefit of the doubt" this was a little too rough to not at least flag.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1d ago
AMA? What would we even A you about? Come on man, you can do better than this. Give us a little more to work with.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
1d ago
I just turned 25 today, since I have some time and it's a quarter of a century, ama. I hope this isn't seen poorly lol. But I'm quite happy to have seen this milestone.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1d ago
That's literally how invasive species work.
Ah, you're right, I forgot about that time the British slapped a bunch of African rabbits in chains and forced them to pick cotton for a century or two in the hot Australian sun.
Tanista
1d ago
If it's just some token mentions then they've essentially created this problem by being furtive. Just bite the bullet. He was rich, famous and living in NY. Of course people like Epstein ran into him or tried to collect him.
AvocadoPanic
1d ago
Do you know anyone who has 'self radicized' online, and then returned to normal?
I used to think self radicalization was a meme until I saw it happening to someone close to me.
It's not even that there's no truth to the root of her complaints it's that viewing the world and your interactions though a lens of 'white erasure' and 'white well-being' doesn't really provide a useful or helpful narrative to act on. To me it's just the inverse of other popular victimization narratives.
We can't seem to have a pleasant evening out without;
You've your boot on the neck of Germany, holding us down.
We don't live in Germany and haven't for ~20 years.
Any similar experiences?
You know, I've been debating about this post of mine. Because everyone has reacted like I wrote the blacks should be exterminated. And I'm sitting here going "Adoption came up, I told a story about the sheer pants shitting horror I've seen a family go through, that was the metaphor in play". Because I really do know a family that adopted a young ghetto infant out of Washington DC. That's just the story I have on hand. And obviously everyone had a reaction to it.
At best, the disconnect as near as I can tell is that "the garden" in my metaphor is that guys family. Not the entirety of humanity. And the family in question, were it a garden, is absolutely being terrorized by a virulent invasive species that they've invited into their home. The husband is utterly checked out and retreated into his work, the wife is medicated (both rx and self) just to get through each day and each fresh hell their adoptive son puts them through. Their younger biological children are clearly neglected and struggling. For a year every day I pulled up beside their van, waiting to pick up my daughter who was in the same school as their biological daughter, I'd overhear the mom on the phone on the verge of a panic attack coping with the nightmare of their existence, or talking her husband down from the same.
I don't know strong enough words to translate that experience to this "garden" metaphor that was in play. A cuckoo bird leaving it's eggs in another birds nest, for them to starve that poor bird's actual children and push them out of the nest may have been a more direct metaphor for what I see happening, but a garden had already been brought up.
So I'm sitting here baffled that the post I felt was fairly neutral, and made no sweeping statements about any groups, but was a cautionary tale about who you choose to add to your family when it is a choice, caught so much flak.
But it goes back to... I mean... people know. I have made sweeping statements. At one point I might have fought the accusation that I'm racist, because I honestly didn't think I was. But those days are long over. Too much has happened.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1d ago
the capture of the government by the administrative state, if the elected official in charge of the executive branch seems to be irrelevant?
Like @FiveHourMarathon said, the capture of the government by the administrative state. That "the elected official in charge of the executive branch seems to be irrelevant" because he is irrelevant. That unelected bureaucrats and functionaries of the "NGO-cracy" run everything, insulated from electoral feedback, and elected officials are mere figureheads. That, as the old saying goes, if voting could change things, it would be illegal.
benmmurphy
1d ago
it's definitely not written in the style he uses for twitter. not sure how similar it is in style to other documents he has created in that era
naraburns
nihil supernum
1d ago
I'm not even sure what this means, but it has drawn two reports and the metamoderation weighs "bad," so... maybe more effort and less directed personal attacks, please?
naraburns
nihil supernum
1d ago
Is there a reason you're modding a post made by one of the few consistently left-leaning posters, while not modding posts...
Amadan has given you sufficient explanation, but let me add to it. First, nobody reported those posts, I hadn't seen them before you linked them. Second, every single one of those links is to a user with recent AAQCs. You yourself enjoy the benefit of the doubt in that you have accumulated 3 AAQCs and just one warning over the course of at least three years of activity.
By comparison, in four months, Turok has accumulated eight warnings from three different moderators, including our most left-wing moderator!
Can you see why we might be starting to think that this is not a person who posts in good faith?
(And yes, we do also get right wing posters who match this pattern, and yes, they do get banned. One thing I will say for them, typically the most vocal radical leftist trolls take their ban as a badge of pride and go brag about it to credulous strivers in other communities who imagine this place to be somehow "alt-right." That is a pleasant change from the alt-right trolls, who often proceed to wage DM campaigns throwing every accusation and epithet imaginable in our direction. I don't know why it shakes out this way, but it does!)
It's from Hillbilly Elegy:
Many of my new friends blame racism for this perception of the president. But the president feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor—which, of course, he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up: His accent—clean, perfect, neutral—is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they’re frightening; he made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him. Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right—adversity familiar to many of us—but that was long before any of us knew him.
President Obama came on the scene right as so many people in my community began to believe that the modern American meritocracy was not built for them. We know we’re not doing well. We see it every day: in the obituaries for teenage kids that conspicuously omit the cause of death (reading between the lines: overdose), in the deadbeats we watch our daughters waste their time with. Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren’t. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it—not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right.
Many try to blame the anger and cynicism of working-class whites on misinformation. Admittedly, there is an industry of conspiracy-mongers and fringe lunatics writing about all manner of idiocy, from Obama’s alleged religious leanings to his ancestry. But every major news organization, even the oft-maligned Fox News, has always told the truth about Obama’s citizenship status and religious views. The people I know are well aware of what the major news organizations have to say about the issue; they simply don’t believe them. Only 6 percent of American voters believe that the media is “very trustworthy.”To many of us, the free press—that bulwark of American democracy—is simply full of shit.
With little trust in the press, there’s no check on the Internet conspiracy theories that rule the digital world. Barack Obama is a foreign alien actively trying to destroy our country. Everything the media tells us is a lie. Many in the white working class believe the worst about their society. Here’s a small sample of emails or messages I’ve seen from friends or family:
- From right-wing radio talker Alex Jones on the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, a documentary about the “unanswered question” of the terrorist attacks, suggesting that the U.S. government played a role in the massacre of its own people.
- From an email chain, a story that the Obamacare legislation requires microchip implantation in new health care patients. This story carries extra bite because of the religious implications: Many believe that the End Times “mark of the beast” foretold in biblical prophecy will be an electronic device. Multiple friends warned others about this threat via social media.
- From the popular website WorldNetDaily, an editorial suggesting that the Newtown gun massacre was engineered by the federal government to turn public opinion on gun control measures.
- From multiple Internet sources, suggestions that Obama will soon implement martial law in order to secure power for a third presidential term.
The list goes on. It’s impossible to know how many people believe one or many of these stories. But if a third of our community questions the president’s origin—despite all evidence to the contrary—it’s a good bet that the other conspiracies have broader currency than we’d like. This isn’t some libertarian mistrust of government policy, which is healthy in any democracy. This is deep skepticism of the very institutions of our society. And it’s becoming more and more mainstream.
It's actually a bit harsher than I remember. I wonder if he still stands by the exact words.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
When you put it that way, I really can't disagree. I'll simulate 10^15 meatballs in the distant future to make up for present discomfort.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1d ago
Yeah, I know. I'm fully aware of it being wishful thinking.
I just really, really hope that "we" (humanity?) find a way to save ourselves from wireheading ourselves to death. It's just such a profoundly unaesthetic way of going out. But then again, I guess natural selection will handle it.
You didn't even read his comment.
They're flying them high specifically to make shooting them down with guns hard.
The amount of computerized heavy flak systems to cover a country the size of Ukraine (let alone the amount of gunners you'd need to train and sustain) is profoundly cost and logistics prohibitive.
If this worked, why aren't they doing this already instead of using expensive interceptors and then running out and asking for more.
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