2D3D
3mo ago
By that token we should be flooded with Indian gamers too, which we don't have. Even at its peak Mobile Legends shitheels were populated by salty filipinos and vietnamese and indonesians, with nary an indian rearing their head in the race wars. I have no idea where all the Indian gamers are. Surely on commutes people want to do SOMETHING to expend brain cells before the madness overcomes oneself.
2D3D
3mo ago
Lets head this off at the pass: is wokeness ruining western games, while chad east asians just remain shameless? My own answer is: Wokeness seems to magnify the problems in bad engagement loops, making the poor underpinnings of the material especially evident and creates a failure cascade.
I don't think we need to delve into what media passes the smell test for Wokeness. saltierthancrait and other refugees from normie fandoms all complain that they actually do like 'Diverse Media' like Andor, Arcane, Balduts Gate 3, but thats missing the point.
The point is that Diverse Media typically has poor core engagement loops, leaving its flaws especially glaring to see. Rings Of Power was a terrible concept to begin with and it failed to hook with girlboss galadriel, making the decent performance of beardless dwarf lady inconsequential within that sea of garbage. Suicide Squad Kill The Justice League is speedrunning fan disappointment with terrible skins and character expansions on top of a mediocre gameplay loop hanging on the scaffolding of a bad narrative thesis. The greatest contrast can probably be seen in the difference between Mass Effect 3 and Andromeda. There are criticisms about Peebee being shrekified and amazon lesbian reverse colonizer Karen, but those are secondary to a mediocre core gameplay loop on a once again thin narrative skeleton. Mass Effect 3 was already wearing out its welcome and had too many additional gay romances, but it at least limped Commander Shepards ending across the finish line. Andromeda shit itself right out the gate and just wheezed out in the open for all to see, forgotten and decaying.
So why are Asian games/media 'successful'? For one there is a shitload of it, since Asia is gigantic and the northeast trifecta churns out tonnes of garbage that does not meet the escape velocity to catch western attention. Secondly, they mechanize skinner box loops in a predatory manner that makes Blizzard blush. The dopamine optimization mechanics Asian game gacha unboxing are reinforcing rewards for the core gameplay loops of explore to kill enemy by test of will or see number go up by minmaxing your gacha rolls.
For skill based games, Asia hardly has a monopoly on it, but I do agree that the sauce has been diluted in the west. Doom is probably the only AAA kinetic skillfest that hits the same dopamine hit of Elden Ring or Stellar Blade or BM Wukong (though the bitching I've seen on weibo sees some players blame optimization failures on difficulty spikes). I don't think the open world action RPG Assassins Creed clones have the sauce anymore, with even good games like God Of War getting a bit bloated with sequelitis trash.
So where does wokeness fit into this? Fundamentally, if a game looks like it doesn't have the sauce, wokeness is the fastest exploitable gap to get more eyeballs to dissect the game and expose all its flaws Dragon Age Veilguard put the blandest most soyface qunari as its trailer thumbnail, on top of it actually being a bad trailer full of Quirky Character Introductions, so much so that Bioware scrambled to release a gameplay preview to shore up the damage... and that gets picked apart by butthurt fans looking for flaws. Without the wokeness, the gameplay trailer would not have attracted so much scrutiny. If anything, attacking Noticers of wokeness in media seems to be the indicative failure signal for public consumption: it means there is nothing redeeming to otherwise direct attention to.
Finally I will say that wokeness is all negative feedback loops, no upside. Girlfriend Reviews got fucking terrorized for daring to cover Harry Potter on her channel, Lindsay Ellis got hounded off the internet for an inoffensive video on Raya The Last Dragon, etc. Solid work can weather some crazies, like how Hbomberguy and Sarah Z have no issues with the Sherlock Fandom, and my queen Jenny Nicholson has torn down woke and unwoke media alike to great delight, but that skill ceiling is hard to achieve. By contrast, shamelessness is an easy path to attention in this starving market, and Stellar Blade, Nikke or other shameless games witb decent gameplay loops saw a bump when they catch the fleeting attention of shameless streamers.
Asians don't actually have the Sauce for excellent media (Korean grindfests and Japanese cash shop meta breakers are still notoriously bad tropes), but the lack of political presshre to force enshittification elements means smaller mistakes can escape notice.
2D3D
3mo ago
Defect is both active intent and incapability. There are a number of Indonesian and Malaysian financial scandals that all shit themselves because the parties involved were too stupid to execute the bare minimums of their plans. Failure was inevitable for things like the maminco tin scandal, but the fail point occurring earlier in the chain than expected happens because incompetent retards fuck up their end of the conspiracy without knowing they fucked up.
This could be inverse survivorship bias too. There likely are a number of successful corners and exploits conducted under the radar without common knowledge. What little I know of shadow banking is that avoiding the taxmans eye is the most successful way of 'exploiting' a market opportunity, and these small scale illicit money movements are simpler to aggregate into pools steered by bankers and accountants to magically clean cayman island accounts.
2D3D
3mo ago
Dollar generals are an interesting case, and they do indeed perform predatory pricing once local competition is snuffed out, but I don't think they are laughing their way to the bank once they kill the competition. Their price rises are only to whatever the local equilibria is for their provided service, and any presumed producer surplus the monopoly is expected to accrue is obviated by theft ("its only shrink" will be claimed by insistent progressives), low barrier alternatives (DG isn't the only dollar store after all, and delivery exists) or other intrinsic factors. DG does not have a cheat code that forcefields their stores against poverty induced crime paired with ineffective law enforcement.
The negative effect of DG isn't the subsequent price hiking as DG tries to stabilize its price needle after factoring in theft while outcompeting alternatives, it is the utility calculation of the goods on offer and the utility destruction stemming from misallocated capital. The legacy mom and pop stores are only in dead small towns or shit neighborhoods because they are the ones with a 'monopolistic' hold as the locale simply cannot justify additional investment for higher grade inventory, much less fitouts. The fresh produce on offer (I presume; I've never seen fresh produce at a black-heavy bodega, but spanish harlem always had peppers and onions) has a presumed higher utility per dollar for health outcomes, but for personal utility calculations that same dollar spent on ricearoni and DMD goes much further. These 'food deserts' exist because the local population simply was not having its personal utility preference exercised by expensive and effort heavy 'healthy' foods. The cheap consumer surplus phase of DG expansion is DG rolling the dice on where the stable marginal surplus needle lies, and DG bets on its competitive advantages to be the one that captures a greater marginal surplus. The consumer surplus returns to its stable point after the ZIRP-funded gambling ends. At no point is DG laughing its way to the bank.
2D3D
3mo ago
There has never been an incidence of 'cornering the market' as per the bogeyman definition of monopolistic price gouging. Technical abuses of mechanical inefficiencies arising from information arbitrage are not repeatable actions, and there is a different conversation to be had about the effect of frictionless cross national capital transfers.
The only successful way to perform market cornering to capture the producer surplus is by regulatory capture, not 'lose money until competitors all exit, then hike prices'. If your product was only bought because it was cheap, raising its price won't magically force the demand equilibrium to shift in line with your price manipulation. Open competition can certainly lead to value-destructive capability duplication and tragedy of the commons (public infrastructure is the most common example of this) but the stable equilibrium will never allow for a permanent marginal producer surplus. The only way that can happen is if the needle is jammed in place by a government exercising monopoly on force. In places where the government does not have a monopoly on force, parallel governments spring up to get their hands on the mechanisms of regulatory capture, even if we just call those governments 'citizen committees' or 'corporate towns'.
2D3D
3mo ago
Why not? The legal system of special privileges for a different social class already exists in the USA. 'Two-tier policing' in the UK is catching on as a catchphrase to encapsulate the phenomenon of high-frequency criminals being underprosecuted, and it frankly applies to the USA as well. This is somewhat countering the prevailing meta of 'its racist to prosecute minorities more often' because minorities are in fact committing crimes at a much higher frequency than even their incarceration rates confirm, but the prevailing meta is still 'black people are being arrested unfairly'.
The law is unevenly applied, but it hews to observable patterns: rich fucks abuse the tax code, repeat offenders abuse legal protections for minorities or the incarcerated.
2D3D
3mo ago
The Kafala system of the UAE is somewhat analogous to the Singapore migrant worker system, but if anything the UAE has increased worker rights to match Singapores (not really high) migrant worker protection standards, so the negative valence of a loaded term like Kafala is employed more for affect than accuracy.
The most obvious benefit of a restricted work permit system is the explicit avoidance of bringing in dependants. The work permit system applies primarily to labourers, domestic helpers and prostitutes. These categories of workers can have their work visas revoked effectively at will, their home countries are bound by formal diplomatic agreements to take back visa breakers, and they are not entitled to any family benefits at all. If a prostitute or domestic worker gets pregnant their visas are revoked and the children are not automatically entitled to Singaporean citizenship even if the father is Singaporean. There is no civil partnership type of legal category here, so citizenship is not granted to fathers for children out of wedlock. Finally, work pass holders need permission from the Ministry Of Manpower to marry locally, citizen or not. There are a few domestic helpers that married local men, but the stereotype of these women being domestic helpers has made them relatively unattractive prospects for much of society. Quite unfortunate, given how fucking hot some of these girls can be. The most common foreign marriages here are local men marrying vietbu/siambu, who often are here on student visas or short term visit passes and not prostitute or domestic worker passes. (I know one edge case where because of covid a short term visit pass girls was able to appeal for permission to create a cleaning business to sustain herself while stuck here, and she got a bunch of whores to sign up as cleaners. Many awkward moments for some men in condos where their favorite whore rotated to do COVID cleaning theater in their condos). Because they did not come in under a migrant worker visa, they faced less restrictions on marriage (formally they are not allowed to be employer, but my previous post on Singapore prostitution makes clear how these girls can pay their way)
Another fact to consider is the lack of overall social benefits which limits the attractiveness in gaming the system to force permanent entry into Singapore. No one is entitled to medical benefits in Singapore to begin with, as entitlements are a taboo word in the local polity, but standard workplace practices like workmans compensation and sector specific insurance's do cover enough of a workers expected health outcomes to optimize output. With minimally adequate protections and little additional protections or entitlements by gaming the (difficult) system, players are disincentivized to try too hard.
Despite the ostensibly strict regulations on work pass holders being channeled into their specializations, I can attest that PLENTY of migrant workers are greymarket hustlers, and every bangla I meet gives me his QR code namecard so I can call him or whatever buddy he has for any manual work I need done - the big problem of this is that these shameless fucks them spin a sob story and ask to borrow money all the goddamn time, like all the prostitutes and hostesses who manage to snag your wechat.
The racialized differentiation also cleaves more starkly in the USA than in Singapore. The bangladeshis and indians are the migrant construction workers, yes, but their bosses and sponsors are local Singaporean Indians. White pit bosses commanding latino day laborers probably looks more uncomfortable to race sensitive americans as opposed to multiracial Singapore where everyone is openly lowkey racist to each other.
2D3D
3mo ago
I suspect the messaging will be interpreted differently by different people. Motivated reasoning causes progressives to automatically presume the quantifiable costs of illegal immigration is false, just like how conservatives will say the same about quantifiable benefits of immigration. As a political slogan, money spent by the government is too easily a figure fudged by creative definition assignment that everyone automatically slots stated figures into an existing worldview and the actual numbers are so far removed from our daily understanding that there is no way we can parse it - is one trillion really that much more affective than one billion?
The first problem of illegal immigration is that you can't easily return the illegal to their home country. Deporting someone needs their home country to accept them, and if a migrant burns their passport or claims their home country is unsafe they get to stay forever. Deportations at the border occur for the USA because you can definitively prove that they came from Mexico at that point. Once someone disappears into the US and burns their passport they are effectively permanent residents, unable to be shoved off anywhere to be someone elses problem.
I previously spoke about setting up anarchyisle as a nation with citizenship automatically granted to anyone in the world just so that western countries can deport literally anyone to Anarchyisle at will, allowing deportations to be conducted with sufficient political will.
The other solution is to have all illegal migrants exist in a lawless state, unprotected by any legal rights such as minimum wages, medical care, family reunification visas or police protection from vigilantes. Similarly, they should be free of tax obligations and diversity initiatives. I'm sure New Mexico can have a Free Zone where businessmen will put in sweatshops to manufacture cheap plastic garbage guarded by private security and staffed by grateful outlaws earning double the minimum wage of their home countries. If even that is economically unviable, then what the fuck are these migrants even doing in the USA to begin with.
2D3D
3mo ago
Oi you got a loicense for that Noticin' you did there, guvna?
Labour is effectively pot committed to the strategy of bringing in unlimited third world ineffectives. Labour first fucked up by letting EU migration flood the UK economy and distort the local labour supply and demand curves, then the Tories shit the bed with handling Brexit and failed to contain MENA immigration. Labour, being held hostage to its progressive and islamist wings under Corbyn did not even pretend at objecting to the floodgates and in fact covered up the negative consequences of Muslim crime even before Corbyn came into power, suggesting that Labour was aware of the negative effect of muslim flooding following Brexit.
This is the reason for two-tier policing coming to the forefront. The tories shit the bed as they are incompetent brainlets huffing copium about Singapore-On-The-Thames and other fanciful platitudes, but the UK is in a genuinely tough spot because of its internal incentive structures. All Labour can do not is play with statistics to dampen the flames and hope that a lucky roll with give a magic opportunity to change the social dynamics soon enough.
I would like to think even the most staunch Momentum progressive knows that it is better for migrants to adapt to British culture, no matter how loathsome they may find the Britisher, as opposed to British people changing to be more like the migrants, but I don't really have faith in that. Progressive brainrot generates plenty of thinkpieces about how the west has no culture and that the multiculturalism of pedophiliac welfare jihadists is a good thing for a country. If Starmer doesn't get ahead of this rot in the larty, his only chance for survival will be the continued cuckcaging of the Britisher, and I'm not sure how long it will take before the Britisher realizes the cage isn't actually locked.
2D3D
3mo ago
In any pay to win game, the whales are not the best players, they just stack abuse and ruin the game for anyone who isnt whaling as hard. This applies to immigration as well, because a skill ceiling is not the same as a funds ceiling. The difference between games and real life is that real life has plenty of other incentive structures that can be exploited beyond the confines of 'getting to the country', and it is these incentives which lead to the massive negative effects of immigration being inflicted on unwilling native populations.
Pay to win immigration in its current form - investment immigration or high-skill work visa sponsorship - does not necessarily attract the best people in skills or morals. The only thing it controls for is absolute numbers of the migrants and their web of newly eligible dependants, which can reduce the frequency of assholes within this diminished population interacting with the wider world and mitigate negative externalities.
For low value immigration right now the value capture of fund availability to immigrate to the west is by the smugglers, but the negative externality is still wholly borne by the west and the smuggler costs are miniscule compared to the long term economic damage of illegals. Andrew Tate is a loathsome gremlin spewing garbage from his food hole, but as far as the romanians are concerned its just a few women that end up suffering his predations, a calculus far less objectionable than one refugee bringing 8 relatives and spawning 6 kids on permanent welfare.
As it stands the negative consequences of immigration are largely from illegal immigration and asylum claimants, whether those negative consequences are a suppression of lower end wages or active criminal behavior, and the compounding effect of parallel existing policies is what amplifies these negative effects.
Society is an open-ended multiparty cooperative game with imperfect information. Whatever stable equilibria we enjoy in our current societies is due to a common understanding of payoffs for cooperation and defection with other players in the game. Some societies now have an exploitable meta of 'self declared victimization' which blocks consequences for defection, and society breaks in areas with those rulesets.
New entrants unfamiliar with the meta will inevitably choose defect eben by accident, and reveal that the game was lost to begin with. Unless the payoff matrices are formalized and commonly understood, it will not matter whether immigrants pay 100k to ICE or 10k to a coyote. Someone somewhere somewhen will end up defecting, and the game meta will continue breaking.
2D3D
3mo ago
oh, yeah reductress is pure satire. as far as ridiculous advice columns go I am not sure if you can thread the needle of 'sincere advice' and 'funny writing'. if anything some of the reductress goblins give better advice for women than the screeds of salon, but admittedly salon is the lowest bar possible.
2D3D
3mo ago
Oh I don't mean just the chinese women still in KL. Shitloads of them have escaped to Australia, UK and US, with larger numbers here in Singapore. Of my familial circles about 30% of them have married white men, and among my peers about 20% married white. There is an overwhelming bias towards overseas education in my particular social circle, so that in hindsight skews the balance. I could be overestimating based on the number of my female peers from university and work who married white and are especially irritating on social media, with an equally irritating coterie of sycophants desperately declaring their preference for a white boyfriend ("I don't see race!"), but I see plenty of my peers who studied local (NUS) and managed to lure white men to this tropical hellscape (in terms of weather). I don't claim that KL is aberrantly monoethnic in its marriage composition, but you can see much higher multiracial marriages in Singapore and Hong Kong where you would have a higher population of white single men, compared with reluctant assignees posted to KL. White women normally are followers of their husbands, with endless bitching from single white girls that the white guys are all stolen by locals.
As for the segregation in Malaysia, yea theres a shitload going on that is both obvious and hilarious. KLCC is one of the only successful malay-focused malls, and its only successful because it is the catchment for all the KLCC malays. KLCC food actually sucks balls, and the chinese malls in the area like Pavillion blow it out of the water in terms of store quality and restaurant quality. Major malay malls are the Mara chain, which have been hilarious failures due to government enforced monopsonies crippling all the vendors, and the Chinese malls like Low Yat and Midvalley have easily double or triple the foot traffic of the Mara malls or shitholes like the Times Square Berjaya. The particular flavors of Malaysian corruption as evinced in the racial mall wars are really fucking funny to delve deep into, but are tangential to this point about outmarriage rates.
Tldr you don't see the chinese girls shacking up with white men in KL because those girls play the white passport card asap. I see them more in Singapore and HK because Singapore and HK are not necessarily worse than white countries for life outcomes, hence the delaying or even refusal to play the white passport card, and this observation is even without statistically breaking down my own social groupings.
2D3D
3mo ago
Honestly you might have seen plenty of Chinese women who were married to Malay men, but they dress identically to upper class Malay women (HEAVY makeup, overly embroidered tudungs, and double layered flowy full body dressses that swish aggressively to show off the expensive underlayer or shoes) and thus are indistinguishable. Similarly, upper class Malay men can look extremely Chinese, so the racial differences may not be so obvious if they are dressed the same. Malay and Chinese men can look very similar, especially when heavily weathered by the sun. For air conditioned professionals, grooming can make all the difference. Remove Hishamuddins pornstache, put him in a suit and he will look like any number of Chinese contractors.
Specific to marriage rates, Chinese women marry out at far higher rates than Chinese men, but usually to White or Indian men. Chinese women rarely marry malay men due to extreme familial resistance stemming from the religious intransigence of Islam, and for the most part girls who marry malays become fully acculturated, hence my above on the presentation.
Off the top of my head I would say the ratio of Chinese women marriages in Malaysia is 85% chinese, 7% white, 6% indian and 2% others (black, malay, hispanic). Among PMC it would be 60% chinese, 25% white, 10% indian and 5% others. This factors in the overseas education rate of Chinese PMC, where it is almost guaranteed they will marry a foreigner.
Indian and malay with have lower outmarriage rates because of lower baseline attractiveness relative to chinese women. Pale skin and low bodyfat% is still valued, and unfortunately indian and malay girls simply don't have the same genetics or cultural influences incentivizing outmarriage optimisations. Indian and Malay families refuse to let Their women be despoiled by outsiders, but Chinese either devalue daughters (more a historical than current practice) or the Chinese PMC is cucked by western liberal values into pretending all races are equal and perpetuate the kayfabe. The last point is more a westernised Asian phenomenon but such liberal pieties have found traction in the PMC here.
Refinery29 is where you would go for deranged women advice columns. Its still pretty decent, but it used to be alot more amusing when trashy hot messes celebrated semiconsensual sex acts instead of modern situationship bemoaning.
edit: sorry not refinery29, which is basic bitch white girl stuff. reductress is the unhinged goblin woman site, which is about babylonbee level funny. that may be insulting the bee, but i find their top tier hits dont quite make up for their normal trash.
2D3D
3mo ago
Perhaps not? Malaysia certainly isn't great, and Singapore uses forced integration as a cheat code, but I've never felt under active threat and treated like a foreigner in Indian plantation worker encampments or in Malay kampungs the way I was treated when I crashed at my friends place in Prospect Park (the precursor to the aforementioned loot goblin episode). I honestly think the difference between Black (ghetto) and Latino America is greater than the difference between Malay and Chinese Malaysia, much less Black vs White America. I've lived in both, and the cultural contrast/conflict between ghetto america vs gentrified condos is extreme, much less suburbia. When malays reach class escape velocity and become middle or upper class, they upgrade the trappings of their existing culture and maintain existing cultural practices. Blacks who reach class escape velocity either turn full white (Obama Harris) or live white while acting black (rap and sport stars). There is no maintenance of the actual good practices of hood life: community time sharing for elder or childcare, church attendance, I'm struggling here so I'm tapping out.
I could just be especially negative towards 'the black experience', since I am not actually black and my black friends were codeswitchers who had intact middle class families and spoke ebonics just to get entry into Orange street clubs.
2D3D
3mo ago
Slight disagree on race not being a visible indicator. Its all about your immediate environ, and I can't tell whether someone was raised fatherless, but I can tell when someone doesn't belong, and race is the fastest and most statistically significant shorthand I had. A shit neighborhood with crime infesting it often is blacker, true, but in public desegregated spaces I found laying attention to isolated or 4+ groups of blacks to be optimal for barm minimization. It is precisely because black criminals are outside their local geographic bound that the racial element comes to the fore I will never go anywhere near Crown Heights of my own volition, so the black criminals there are a distant problem. Seeing a group of 4 black kids strut into the C train at Chambers is anomalous enough to immediately set off spidey senses. If they had a boombox it was Showtime, who were irritating for other reasons.
Crime stands out precisely because it is anomalous: MonkeyWithAMachinegun treats the miasma of everpresent crime as background noise to the city, and living in Bed-Dtuy made me think incidental misery was just par for the course. An extended period of crashing at a friends place in fucking Alphabet City made me realize that crime was NOT an everpresent feature, it is localized to lazy thugs who can't be bothered to stray out of their neighbourhoods and thats what makes their anomalous presence such a visible precursor to crime.
In the end I ended up getting into trouble with white criminals more often, but I treat that as statistical provenance: I curated my social environment to be as white/asian as possible, so obviously any stupid shit I encountered will be due to them. The statistical frequency for which my encountering black people lead to negative experiences for me was a much higher rate than with whites, even controlling for geographic accidents. I may nkt have been Die Hard 4 John McClane, but wearing a nice suit and shoes at the bad side of Prospect Park might as well have put a quest icon screaming 'LOOT GOBLIN' to the neighbourhood.
2D3D
3mo ago
Hairstyle, mannerism and catchphrases were enough to convince me that Vivids seminal (hehe) work Who's Bangin' Palin captured the physical essence of Sarah Palin perfectly in Lisa Anns headlining portrayal of a senior american politicians engaging in aggressive diplomacy with russian emissaries.
No, I'm serious. Just the hair and glasses and a 'you betcha!' were enough to spike the immersion. The other actresses just couldn't cut it, but Lisa Ann did.
For mere physical similarities to other visible public figures its alot more difficult. Perhaps only Anissa Kate can pull off pretending to be Gal Gadot, but thats because both of them are terrible actresses with worse accents.
(I imagine some more degenerate posters here would go 'ah I see you are a man of culture too').
2D3D
3mo ago
Honestly I see alot of handwringing about the potential for AI and how we are crippling AIs true end state because of woke/chud moral tainting of these computer models, but you can go to pixiv to see the absolute tsunami of unrestrained AI generated there, and the Chinese are even more degenerate. Unrestrained AI exists, its just too useless at this moment to do anything other than churn out degenerate pornography.
2D3D
3mo ago
Once the rot is passed down it is metastasized. Here in southeast asia there is a popular pastime among Malaysian Malay kids called basikal lajak. Take a normal bike, shorten the height by shaving the handlebar and the seat down, take off the brakes and reflective pads, then go to the highest point on your nearest highway and speed downhill. The kids go prone on the bike to minimize drag, and they also do not wear any protective gear of any sprt because protection is for pussies.
Wipeouts are common, but this practice came into focus because a group of malay kids lajak at 3am (because of the heat) and they went down the wrong direction of a highway, smashing into a car driven by a chinese woman. The malays cried that this woman murdered the eight kids, and the courts were subject to racialised pressure from malays until finally the high courts made clear that the driver, who was on the correct side of the road and following all rules, was not responsible for the kids all killing themselves.
So, why would the kids do something so incredibly stupid and dangerous and still think they were in the right? Its because their authority figures are themselves lajak (the grown up version are called rempits, who waste their food delivery paychecks on constantly destroyed motorbikes because they do drag racing at night too). These figures are the ones feted in the community, seen as cool and brave for irritating the authority figures enslaved to the rich yet too impotent to clamp down on rempits.
What of the parents? The parents either are rempits themselves, or simply do not give a shit. The mothers of the kids killed by the driver said that they had no responsibility for the conduct of their kids because 'kids do what they want, the government should build things for kids to do'. Its 3am and your kids are riding downhill! They did that when their road outside the village was a 200m dirt track and cars were nonexistent, but thats not the case anymore.
Because of this incident, the parents have doubled down. Rempits regularly arrange for convoys to travel the interstate highways to prove that THEY own the roads, not the authorities and certainly not normies. Any attempt at shutting them down is met with cries of racial discrimination, and politicians promise to fight for the right of rempits to practice their unique culture regardless of the cost to normies. It does not matter that the police and normies are themselves malays who simply want to lead a normal life, what matters is that the thugs are playing at being a protected class, and their rotten behavior flows down to their offspring.
It is difficult enough to enforce behavior when it is technically in-community policing. It will be Impossible in racial-culturally segregated societies like the USA.
2D3D
3mo ago
I don't dislike feminists and feminism as much as many people here, but Amanda Marcotte really comes pretty close to the caricatured archetype of a narcissistic self-regarding man-hating harpy for whom "feminism" means "Everything I do should be celebrated and anything that makes me unhappy should be banned."
I remember reading Salon back in the early 2010s when it was Dan Savage talking about whatever degenerate sex act he wanted to do, and Marcottes style was at odds with the prevailing writing style: angry, hypocritical, and honestly just plain stupid. The columns were bitch sessions about why everything bad that happened to them was the fault of a direct male actor, or something vague that ultimately traced back to an ever-expanding-yet-contradictory definition of 'patriarchy'. More men being bosses of company was the patriarchy, while ISIS was something exotic to be pitied. I just checked and her column on ISIS brides had 7 mentions of 'christian', with a total of 3 for 'muslim' and 'islam' combined.
Sadly, Salon, just like Slate and Vice, ended up ditching edgelord degeneracy in favor of boring self-congratulatory emotional indulgences. Everything is the fault of White Man Patriarchy, and in response to the shittiness of White Man Patriarchy I shall document my self-loathing as I try out a Fitness Bootcamp/wilderness scream session, where I am upset the first friend I made in 10 years (a gay activist) tried to hit on me.
She and Valenti (thats the 'I am no longer hot', and 'I drink male tears' lady) are probably the worst examples of hypocritical, boring and frankly stupid feminists who don't even have the grace to be readable or amusing in their staid rants. I also find that their self-portraits are so far removed from how they look in reality that the hypocrisy is something more to level at them, but there is ample reason to despise them without having to launch snide remarks on their presentation.
2D3D
3mo ago
Hmm. Strictly speaking even Shanghai served a real purpose: the defense, however hopeless, of a major population center. Highlighting its value for foreign audiences would be opportunistic, since foreigners were actually there. I don't doubt the Chinese, like literally every military, would have yelled for every eyeball possible to be on their plight when they are under attack.
If we are talking about attacks launched specifically for foreign support against militarily dubious targets, arguably the Oct 7 Hamas-Palestine attack counts. The now-purged Arab telegrams and social media were publishing footage of the attacks on Israelis far and wide, with calls for the rest of the Arab world or at the very least West Bank and Hezhollah to strike the visibly weak Israelis that were blown away by the Hamas onslaught. Similarly the Six Day War had the Egyptians claim they had successfully bombed the Israeli Air Force into oblivion in order to get the Syrians to attack as well. This may be a case of an attack failing to materialize that nonetheless was constructed for foreign optics, so it may hold to your example.
Thinking about it, I recall tankies at one point claiming that Indonesia attacked East Timor to curry favor with the USA, or Columbia warring against Cartels and FARC for the same reason, claiming that these peopld would not have acted without US demanding it so. Though this may fall kore as 'proxy war' instead of 'notice me senpai'.
2D3D
3mo ago
Throwing resources to hold a symbolic target is more a Ukrainian thing, with the massive overcommitment at Severodonetsk causing Lysychansk to fall in short order. Overcommitting in Avdiika and Bakhmut should have cause rapid collapses of Chasiv Yar and (pokrovsk?) but the Russians barely stormed 2km out the gate before settling down for a long grind (to nowhere in Bakhmut and now encroaching Pokrovsk near Avdiika. Ukraine overcommitted to stupid defenses in those locations, and Russia arguably overcommitted in throwing bodies there too. A question could of course be 'where should Russia choose to attack', but I am uninterested in expending brain cells in even theoretical advancement of Russian goals.
If we want historical analogies of 'overcommitting offensive resources to a militarily ineffective onjective' it would probably be Stalingrad historically or even Kursk itself, where Germany pushed troops it did not have to secure a target it did not need. Hindsight showed that German commitment to those campaigns was ineffective. We may yet make such a similar assessment of Ukraines own Kursk adventure in future, but right now it is very much Ukraines ball to play.
2D3D
3mo ago
Trump is a showman who won against a bureaucrat in 2016 and lost against a way-past-his-prime politician. Harris has inherited a political machine and hasn't said anything as stupid as 'deplorable' or 'pokemon go to the polls' which actively made Hilary look stupid. Trump only has Laughin Harris, which is so far inferior to Cacklin Kamala that his failure to deploy that just shows his current impotence. Harris definitely needs to give SOMETHING to the blue wall, but even there the enthusiasm for Trump has waned in general compared to 2016 and even 2020. Trump just doesn't have the sauce right now, and without Biden as a punching bag Trump just seems gassed out.
2D3D
3mo ago
You fight wars with the army you have, not the army you want. In this case there are two distinct Ukrainian armies: the trench army fighting grinding attritional static line battles dominated by artillery, and a much smaller maneuver army trained on donated western equipment. The latter army cannot function in a battlefield dominated by minefields and artillery + loitering munitions. The meta to hard counter minefields is combat engineering, and to counter artillery + loitering is air supremacy. Air supremacy means unrestricted air operations, which is incredibly difficult and which has a distorted public profile because the US doctrine has made it seem way too easy to achieve.
As such, the Ukrainian assault into Kursk is an economy of force effort, using an available resource in its optimized capability. Russia only has opportunistic air dominance, with the default assumption for any air operation being contested. As such the only overmatch Russia has available to deploy against the Ukrainian rapid advance forces is occasional longer range strikes, which while effective are insufficient compared to the current Ukraine-air-war meta of loitering munition, KA-52 attack helo and SU25 reactive strikes on advancing assets (pitch-up Mi8 rocket pods are only more useful against fixed emplacements). Russia has minimal drone assets in Kursk, and quick response close air support seems countered by air defense assets brought up by the Ukrainians, with the unknown threat scale posed by Ukrainian assets serving as an effective anti-air umbrella - the Russians do not definitively know that the Ukrainains do not have the capability to take out integrated fix-track-target platforms (basically see aim shoot, which must be a very fast decision cycle that does not work if the attacks are popup). With no minefields in place to funnel advances into specific directions and wide open traversable plains, the Russian defense is difficult and anemic.
As it stands, the Ukrainians seem to be running roughshod over local resistance, with an air defense umbrella of unknown size limiting the intensity of Russian best response. Furthermore, Russian ISR has been dominated by its drone assets, which are extensively deployed in Ukraine and not locally. I know for a fact that the Russians have extremely few COTS drones in any domestic defense units, with pretty much every fundraised COTS drone going to units on the frontlines. I would venture that a similar situation exists with organic ISR assets, with Orlans deployed where they are presumed to actually be useful (at the front) and not at home. Russian manned fixed wing aerial recon assets are anemic, and the anti air artillery brought up to Kursk seems to be impeding surveillance missions (though the Russian doctrine has to my observation never prioritized full spectrum battlespace awareness, likely due to incapability). It must be noted that ISR is actually somewhat difficult, and territory is really large. Even an incursion only 20km deep is really hard to find unconcentrated forces, and EW + AA prevent most detailed ISR assets. The most striking incident of this Ukrainian attack was the destruction of 1-2 companies worth of Russian reinforcements, with burnt out trucks visibly full of dead Russians after a Ukrainian artillery strike on the vehicles. The Ukrainians only found such a juicy target because the Russians uploaded videos of themselves travelling to Kursk to raise morale.... onto Telegram.
As to the strategic objective, who the hell knows. The optimal outcome is a rushed collapse of Russian lines within Ukraine as a disorganized command structure pulls units out haphazardly. That is unlikely to occur, and the 2022 Kharkiv offensive shows what happened when a rapid advance succeeded against Russian (held) territory: the local front collapses, and inertia prevents other forces from mobilizing in time, with the Ukrainian advance halting due to logistical limits as opposed to hardened resistance - building up minefields and fortifications is fast, but not 2-day fast. The limits of Ukrainian logistics to push through stiffening resistance will be tested fairly soon in my estimation.
The concrete strategic outcomes are, as commentators noted below, likely outsize PR outcomes. Ukraine is now seeking forgiveness rather than begging for permission to use its western assets, and videos of Ukrainians frolicking in Kursks is highly embarrassing for Russia. The messaging within domestic information environment in Russia is, to my read, the larger PR win. Russia has two contradictory narratives at play: the Russian army is the inevitable beast that is the envy of the whole world which keeps NATO afraid of taking Russia, and NATO is an incompetent meatgrinder which is throwing thousands of mercenaries and special forces to their death in Ukraine against qualitatively superior Russian tactics and equipment because the West is decadent and wasteful. The tension in the two narratives is: if NATO is so incompetent, why do we Russians need such a large army to protect ourselves from such stupid weaklings.
In this information environment, the worst case scenario is 'my large scary army is getting destroyed in the exact scenario they are supposed to be trained for'. NATO (Ukraine is basically just a NATO puppet after all) has invaded us, and we cannot defend against them. Russia can claim thousands of dead NATO soldiers and fire up DCS to show fields of burning tanks, but it can't stop its own citizens fleeing their villages and complaining extremely loudly as they run. Crimeans are not true Russians, but Kursk slavs are real Russians - blonde blue eyed white skinned orthodox Christians, true Russian blood speaking proper Russian, not Dagestani or Buryat subhumans, or dirt-eating khokhol yokels. These citizens are loud, complaining and asking difficult questions - 'what is our aviation doing' is a common complaint I've seen in Russian telegrams. Slow incremental advances past Avdiika which fell fucking 6 months ago are simply not sexy enough to drown out concerns about Real Russian Territory being tainted by Ukrainian homogays.
Low caste Dagestani and Buryati volunteers taking money to be blown up in faraway Ukraine is an ignorable outcome for the Russian state. It is not relevant to their daily lives, let alone existential. Actual Russian territory, fought on a land Muscovites can actually recognize, being overrun by NATO? Something has gone wrong, and given the shakeups in the Russian political scene - Dyumin is now the leader of Kursk defenses, which suggests Putin thinks the problem of Kursk is 'not enough political will' as opposed to 'boss we literally don't have the 4th Guards Tank Army anymore'
Chinese pop culture is crippled by government diktats. There was a brief flourishing in late 2010s to early 2020s of Chinese xianxia martial arts stuff that started getting lots of traction, like Word Of Honor and The Untamed, which was initially pleasing to the Chinese authorities for their popular reception in other Asian countries and increased traction in the west.
Turns out, they were popular because they were adaptations of webnovels written by bored ladies chapter by chapter on long commutes. And these bored Chinese women, like bored western women, write thinly veiled smut.
So you have these xianxia novels with impeccably beautiful men having intense physical and emotional fights with each other as they struggle with their roiling emotions, while a virtuous woman laments at their conflict and tries to use her womanly charm to get them to stop their conflict and kiss and make up And continue kissing, and do more.
These adaptations, greenlit by producers desperate for content and 'blind' to the subtext, go balls out in following the vision of the author, complete with creative reinterpretations that somehow enhance the original vision, and when queried by censors the producers just shrug and say 'its the source material, and people like it'. It doesn't actually have gay kissing on screen, just two beautiful men staring intensely at each other in shiny flowing silk robes as a camera spins around them while dramatic music plays and they verbalize their emotional torments. Totally not gay sex. Oh and the 'disciple' of one of the men is the source of what is effectively a custody battle as both men try to be good role models for the 'disciple' and in the end the men make up and have their own academy with the boy as their head disciple and its totally straight and not a gay romance ending and wait wasn't there a female MC at one point?
Women went fucking feral for this shit, and Chinese cultural products started getting consumed voraciously. Then the CCP figured women were having unrealistic standards for men and mandated no prettyboys in TV, and uptake has slowed accordingly.
The Koreans dramas have a much higher international reception even in English media because the Koreans stay shamelessly pretty, and have the extensive plastic surgery to keep it up. I hate kdramas for their tropiness and generally poor acting, but the koreans have leaned in to their strengths and keep their output at max shamelessness. I don't like Jdramas because their dudes all have some weird fucking hairstyle that makes them look like unkempt hairballs and I watch too much JAV to take japanese live action women seriously.
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