4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
2mo ago
I think there may well be a thought process along the lines of "This person is known to unapologetically violate some societal taboos of the highest order. How do I know he won't violate the taboo against suddenly punching his interlocutor in the face? You claim there is a big difference and he for sure won't violate that one, but is it my duty to understand the details of the principles of people with insane evil morality?". There is such a thing as being afraid of something you can't predict - imagine being trapped with a bear (and the claim that this bear is strictly vegetarian at this time of the year) or a member of one of those uncontacted tribes that sometimes shoot outsiders on sight (but sometimes are happy to trade in shells and trinkets).
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
2mo ago
My impression was that alcohol is much less reliable in inducing that soma-like state of sedation and contentedness that people take weed for, and the margin between when alcohol makes you a happy zombie and when it makes you feel violently sick it quite narrow in comparison. This puts weed closer to the wireheading attractor (sacrifice qualities that give humans moral value in their own eyes to maximise feeling of pleasure).
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
2mo ago
Nothing in the author's writing implies that they are in the group of people thinking of what is being aborted as a "baby". Both sides regularly fail theory of mind over this - blues can't imagine someone actually thinking that an abortion is anything like killing a human (and therefore conclude that pro-life must be mental gymnastics for wanting to punish women who have sex for fun), and reds can't imagine someone not thinking that fetuses are human (and therefore think pro-choice is mental gymnastics for cynical murderism).
If there's any implied argument, it's just something like "you can't commit to ruining the life of some dumbasses just to make concessions to the outgroup" - like most people, the author has sympathy and there-but-for-the-grace attitude for way more dumbasses than outgroup members. Forced motherhood = ruined life incidentally is yet another blue outlook that reds often don't believe is real.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
2mo ago
Surely it's not a sacrifice if it's fun, any more than "giving up doing the chores for Lent" would be an act of devotion.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
2mo ago
I understand your frustration here, but it seems manifestly true (from my perspective as an academic, albeit not in the humanities) that the academic priesthood of the SJ establishment has appropriated Marxist vocabulary as well as a fair amount of concepts (whether they use them correctly or not) and generally sees itself as the rightful inheritor to labels including "Marxist", "leftist", "socialist" et cetera, and they only disavow them as part of a slippery routine when their opposition tries to put a name on them (see relevant Freddie DeBoer post). At some point it just seems impractical to not go along with the self-identification of the overwhelming victors - almost as if you insisted that no major modern branch of Christianity were actually Christian, though of course it's not a perfect analogy since we are not in a setting where Christians protest whenever members of other religions pejoratively call them Christian, even as they happily identify with the label among themselves.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
2mo ago
And yet people still willingly sign up for the military, which is far more dangerous than policing ever could become. Do you know any people who did? I reckon that there are actually many for whom the idea of being authorised to engage in violence has enough of a draw that they would be willing to take considerable risks and encumbrances for it, but they might be underrepresented in the sort of circles rat-adjacent debate addicts like us are overrepresented in.
I've been in Europe for the past three years or so, where US-style police brutality is not really an issue, but otherwise I'd almost accept these terms except "you don't get to move out of a small jurisdiction" would be a huge imposition completely orthogonally to any sociopolitical experiments performed there. Do I get to have the rule follow me to whatever small jurisdiction I move to instead?
Also, do you actually expect some negative consequences for people other than members of the police from such a policy (which ones?), or is your presumable opposition just based on its consequences for police themselves? To be clear, I'm not actually in favour of anything that looks like police abolition - on the contrary, I am pretty sympathetic towards sending them to round up petty thieves and ethnic gangs, disparate impact be damned. I just think that policing is in the class of necessary occupations engaging in which invariably induces moral corruption and decay, and whose practitioners therefore should be shunned and restricted in their rights vis-a-vis regular people, rather like medieval executioners or burakumin (but without heredity or compulsion because we are past such medieval injustices). I don't think the European middle ages suffered from a shortage of executioners, at any rate.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
2mo ago
Well, nobody is forced to be a police officer and interact with "highly emotionally activated individuals" on a daily basis. I'm still in favour of giving police at most the right to violent self-defence that the normal person gets (except perhaps no duty to retreat), and perhaps even less on account of having special privileges and hence responsibility. If any existing police are unhappy with these terms, they should be fired and replaced with new hires who are; in the event that there is then actually some difficulty filling police positions (which would surprise me) we could discuss next steps.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
2mo ago
Isn't Ukraine, symmetrically, still demanding Russia's withdrawal from the territories it has successfully captured as a precondition? The problem with this war is that neither side is actually even close to being exhausted, so they don't see a point in taking about negotiations except as an opportunity for games and posturing.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
2mo ago
I learned driving at age 19 and felt the same about it for the longest time. It took moving to the US and being broken in by a few ill-advised road trips where I had the choice between driving for 9 hours straight after over a day awake and putting up with a logistical nightmare of missed appointments and late returns, as the other would-be drivers refused to do their part; after doing that I acquired the ability to drive on autopilot/do the "where did the past 2 hours go" thing that car commuters are known for.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
2mo ago
I find it hard to give Kamala much credit here beyond being able to thread the needle between acting like a harmless ingenue and projecting enough professional demeanor that there is no actual feeling of wrongness when imagining her as a president. Rather, I'm left impressed with the perfectly choreographed campaign that started with a big and somewhat crass push to caricature Trump and Vance as creepy (that TV ad someone here linked a while back). This was followed by an almost complete denial of media air to Trump, except to prominently describe them as "weird" and thereby subtly keep the memory of the initial blitz alive.
The media discipline in following this script was basically flawless and extended even to cultural vassals like DE, and seems to have been calibrated to tickle the same social receptors that enable people to rapidly catch on when a member of their peer group fucked up one time too many and there is an unspoken consensus to quietly cut them off. It must have taken a great amount of internal whipping to stop any and all outlets from defecting and farming TDS engagement by reporting on his shenanigans, but short of dying, killing someone, withdrawing or going to jail, he will probably not get rent-free headlines again.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
2mo ago
The problem with any proposal to punish large-scale indirect and negligent harms that arise from engaging in some otherwise permitted activity carelessly is that people only get excited about the prospect of doing it to people and professions in their outgroup. It's easy to believe that academics or COVID policymakers should be forced work under the looming threat of punishment for any consequences that can be traced to their research or policy when the personal suffering of scientists and COVID policymakers leaves you cold and you suspect that either activity has no or negative value anyway. However, if you are not willing to accept that the same principle apply to people and professions in your coalition, you will never be able to gather the requisite support from the other side. Would you be happy to bite the bullet and also develop ways to target and severely punish company executives for the same thing - say, holding everyone near the top of the tobacco industry responsible for lung cancer cases, or oil executives for deaths that were statistically traced to global warming? What about holding every media personality who signal-boosted dubious COVID treatments ranging from Ivermectin to antibiotics accountable for projected delta-deaths that resulted from people following their advice? If not, the other side of the culture war will rightly suspect that you actually just want to make life hard for their champions while ensuring that yours can continue operating unencumbered.
...to which the edgy response always has been that the government and MPAA should just set up a fully legal Megaupload for CP, thus destroying anyone's ability to get paid for producing it. Surely what's bad for the goose is bad for the gander.
In less edgy terms, making CP uncopyrightable and criminalizing buying or selling would have much of the same effect and presumably negate the advantages without needing any creature of the light to get their hands dirty. At that point you could at most argue that kudos/internet points for freely providing CP would also encourage production beyond what there would be otherwise, which seems like a bit of a stretch. Add a well-funded bounty programme to reward CP consumers if they help with tracking down producers and it's hard to imagine that the net effect would be more child exploitation. Some *chan NEETs could make an honest living beating their meat and using their autism powers to ID wallpaper patterns during the refractory period.
I figure the two are not so obviously different in terms of raising appetite for the act depicted (though I don't have a strong opinion as to whether either of them does and to what extent), but a big difference is that in a modern context, violence is much more easily contained than sexuality. Slippery slopes from friendly interactions to flirtation to superficial physical acts to sexual intercourse abound, and while there are instances of the endpoint of the slippery slope that society wants to ban (age difference, intoxication, force), it is rarely practical to ban everything all the way up to the starting point or far enough that society would be around to intervene. We can't stop friendly interactions and can't even really police the flirtation step, but by the time that step is reached the interaction has usually been taken "offline". On the other hand, slippery slopes from unfriendly interactions to fighting words to violent altercation to murder are much more rare and rarely taken offline (who gets a room with someone they get along unusually badly with?). Murder has other differences that make it unlikely to burgeon due to a small difference in murderous ideation, such as invariably yielding hard-to-hide observable effects (a person is gone); circumstances where all the beheading videos you binged bubble up in your head and you think "we both want it and I can get away without consequences" seem unlikely.
If this is the actual argument, it is unlikely that people would say it out loud, since it implicitly centers an image of an act with at least superficial consent (Epstein, groupies and Discord casanovas rather than the dragged-into-white-van-at-playground scenario) which invites a whole tangle of thoughtcrime (ranging from revisiting '70s NAMBLA-style activist rhetoric to something like "I hear all the rich and powerful of the world get to engage in this. It must be really enjoyable if they jump through hoops to do it despite the risks. Why do they get to do that and I don't?"). So instead, they would resort to fielding the arguments that you list, which are socially unimpeachable but do not actually reflect the true target or expected mechanism of action of any anti-CP policy. As evidence, I don't recall "rape is actually about power" insight porn ever moving the needle on how much people want to ban CP.
How much did those experiments actually pay them? I would expect the pay to be a drop in the bucket compared to how much the cost of successfully raising children who "make it" has increased in the last 20 years, because otherwise we could have UBI (top-tier US college tuition fees can easily pay for three adults to have a comfortable life!). There's also the matter of inflation in attention and supervision children are expected to be given, which can't be made up for by just pouring in money. This is most obvious in the US near-prohibition on leaving even 12 year olds unattended, but even an Austrian family friend (young academic mother of two) reports malicious gossip from parents of classmates about her never picking up the kids after primary school because she has to work. What I gather from her stories is that mothers helicopter-parenting their children has become a status thing (it's naturally a luxury, since it means foregoing one income), even as legally it continues to be okay for children to be classic European levels of unattended.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
2mo ago
Why would all these arguments not equally predict that our current situation of equal franchise for poor and isolated and rich and well-connected is unsustainable? Unless you believe that any political conflict gone violent would be resolved by an individual contest of BRUTE STRENGTH, wouldn't the decision by landowners to enfranchise paycheck-to-paycheck workers be equally in jeopardy after one YIMBY bill too many?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
2mo ago
You have produced a roughly even mixture of true statements, statements of personal taste (and/or the taste of people with taste similar to yours, cf. "critical success"), falsehoods and blind dismissals ("Freemium games, gambling simulators" seems to simply rule out what is the best monetization model for their market, "perfect recreations of Mozart" is a quip that is utterly divorced from the reality of Chinese music).
USSR faced the same issue
Huh? Most people who lived there believe USSR literature was great (just consider the scifi output), and the movie industry did about as well as you could expect in a place where US-style movie making capital can not be raised. If anything, Russia turned into a creative desert after the fall of communism.
That beings us to Wukong, the one exception. It's right there in the name. Sun Wukong draws entirely from 'Journey to the West', a Buddhist epic. It is book with religious significance. It almost feels on the nose, but Wukong is one of India's only enduring cultural influences on China, and it shows.
...written in China, by Chinese, and presumably utterly foreign to any putative Indian readers. This is as fair as if you said that Star Wars (the highest-grossing Western live action media franchise) is to be credited to Japan and China, because the Jedi are a pastiche of East Asian warrior-monk orders.
Part of me is offended by this question. America makes amazing entertainment, year over year.
...and yet the only American entertainment that I have consumed for the past few years is the culture war. Admittedly, that particular alternate reality game does continue being the unchallenged greatest show on earth. I've tried watching American movies, playing American games and listening to American music, and stopped because they were simply inferior to the better works of entertainment that I can get from East Asia for free (financed by freemium models and gambling elements that extract money from people with more loose cash and lower executive function).
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
2mo ago
As the parallel post already pointed out, Stardew Valley is just a straight remake of the Japanese-made Harvest Moon - if it were made in China, it would no doubt be subjected to the same nonstop stream of "Chinese can only copy" slander that Genshin Impact suffered for its heavily-inspired-by-Zelda release region (which still was much less similar to the open world Zeldas than Stardew Valley is to Harvest Moon). Slay the Spire, which I was unfamiliar with, appears to be a deck-builder game, which Wikipedia tells me were also invented in Japan (and certainly most of the most prominent franchises are from there). I'll grant Portal and Terraria, though they both failed to create what I would call a genre since neither spawned any game that I would consider like the original and not inferior to it.
Granted, there is Nintendo and Japanese games in general, which I don't have a lot of exposure to because I play on PCs only and don't like super-hard games.
Right, these two restrictions together seem like they are designed to reach the conclusion that you want. A Chinese or SEA player (mobile-only) or Japanese (console) player willing to treat PC games as non-existent might come to the conclusion that the collective West has been a footnote in gaming (what did they make? Coin Master? Donkey Kong (a Mario ripoff with prerendered graphics)? Secret of Evermore (basically a reskin of Secret of Mana)?), and a Japanese PC player uninterested in casual difficulty would easily conclude that all Western games of note are late copycats of Japanese formulae. It's all too often forgotten that the narrative-driven 3D adventure shooter genre, which is basically the default for Western AAA games nowadays, is itself originally Japanese (Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Metal Gear Solid...).
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
2mo ago
I don't know, I heard the same narrative about commercial air travel but the actual numbers are such that passenger deaths are basically flat even as passenger numbers continue increasing superlinearly. Given any particular case report, it's easy to stare into the abyss for too long and convince yourself that it represents a totally new excess of dysfunction and malfeasance, but as someone who has binge-read multiple writeups of almost every major plane crash in history my sense is that chains of absurd mistakes, coverups and ass-covering are the default and have been since we started keeping records.
On top of this, the American military, in particular, has been subjected to its own peculiar shift since the 90s (or even earlier) as its incentives drifted away from winning a peer war towards being a jobs programme and peacock tail for the American state. Your platforms don't need to be cheap for their supply chains to form a highly liquid way of allocating pork as part of political negotiations, and they don't need to be particularly safe and effective as long as they look cool and you can cover up any persuasive data that they might actually not do well in a war. Internally, there will never be a shortage of schmucks to show-fly Ospreys around Japan, no matter how often they crash or how unfairly the schmucks are blamed for the crashes (people do far more risky things for glory and thrills!). Therefore, the military has no reason to run a complex system that deploys safe airplanes, but this does not have to indicate that other parts of American society are incapable of doing that, or have gotten worse at building other complex systems.
Proposing a flat correlation between willingness&ability to pay and human capital might seem attractive from the worldview of a right-wing American, but is it true? Anecdotally a part of the high-HC people who migrate to the US are far less desperate than your median Mexican - grad students who are willing to try it because it's the slightly more attractive option, businesspeople who are willing to give it a shot because they are frustrated with taxes and regulatory burden at home, et cetera. At 100k, you for sure would have priced out me and approximately everyone in my PhD cohort (most of us got offers in other countries too!), while if Mexicans can actually cough up 10k to pay a coyote (I would've already tipped towards the UK at that price point) then probably the difference to 100k can be made up by many by precommitting to do some crimes stateside.
(edited-in afterthought) Trying to get better-quality immigrants by imposing more on all immigrants is similar to those guys/girls who think that they can get high-quality partners by treating all their suitors terribly ("if you can't handle me at my worst..."). It might work to some extent if you can coordinate meanness with all your competitors (though even then it will breed resentment), but if you can't you will just attract the sort of people who can't do better or don't see anything wrong.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
3mo ago
Infiltrated? At least in China the tropes and community are very much homegrown (with at most some memetic seed capital from Japan). That it would start leaking into Russia is only natural considering how the geopolitical proximity of the two is increasingly translating into cultural exchange.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
3mo ago
Was 4 your first game in the series? No Civ out of 4, 5 and 6 recreated the magic of 2 and its clones and spinoffs (ToT, Freeciv, c-evo) for me, with the obvious theory being imprinting on whatever I experienced first.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
3mo ago
Even ignoring the circumstance that GDP (especially per capita) tells you almost nothing about real poverty, productivity or really anything and this might as well be Catholics wondering why the number of people with perfect pitch is not correlated with Gross Holy Water Consumption, I thought it's fairly well accepted that what matters for the poverty -> antisocial behaviour is not absolute wealth but perceived relative wealth. Italians in Italy are not surrounded by a society that is conspicuously more affluent than they are.
I don't mean to argue that the attitude I impute to those people is healthy for themselves or society at large - just that it does not have to be dishonest, nor even made from stuff that is unusual for humans. The less colourful example of a similar sentiment from your ingroup is plain xenophobia (in the traditional, literal sense), like how a British gentleman in the 1850s may have felt queasy about living in a street full of Orientals. This is not to defend being so estranged from internal political opposition that it becomes an unfathomable other to you, but that jug of milk has already been spilt.
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