BaronVSS
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User ID: 483
BaronVSS
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2yr ago
I do not think "serious" narrative fragmentation will occur, given that:
Almost everyone I know is in the category of "did what they were told without much fuss" and they have already binned the events of the last 2 years almost entirely in distant weird times category.
Those who suffered little from the virus but much from the lockdowns and are aware of such facts have no one fighting their corner and are not large enough to demand serious restitution. Pro lockdown media has already prepared their inevitable rebuttals, expecting you to forget everything that was done to you in the name of public health. Those times have been brushed under the rug, and now all our woes are the fault of Big Vlad or whoever.
There will be no reckoning, no rapture, and that is a pill so black that light cannot escape its surface.
BaronVSS
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2yr ago
A relevant link to a highly memorable thread on this subject on the original motte.
Ignoring international blowback, the plan has a significant flaw. To establish a nation, and not a handful of disparate gangs battling for control over an area (which is what we have now), some social or cultural cohesion is required between the rulers and the ruled. It is highly likely that the hypothetical billionaire and his security force will be white, or at the very least Western, and thus appear to Haitians as the original french colonialists come again. The current gangs will proclaim themselves freedom fighters against this imperialist threat, and even if you overpower them in a conventional war they can go undercover in a decentralised war which the IRA and Taliban pulled off to great effect.
BaronVSS
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2yr ago
I think there were a few groups/people describing themselves as alt-right in the mid 10s before Donnie came along and the movement entered media prominence. The groups that constituted the alt-right, as perceived by news stories primarily referred to themselves as whichever group they were originally, be they White Nationalists or Seduction types and so on.
It is potentially a useful distinction from the sort of conservativism espoused by older people, which tends to focus on keeping the welfare state alive for the elderly while selecting random populist items, such as re-legalising imperial measurements and cyclist registrations as policy goals.
Currently the term refers to any ideology that places itself in opposition to the liberal mythos, and they are all lumped in together. Bi-weekly we see articles in news outlets that decry the dangers of the "alt-right" recruiting young men and boys to its nebulous banner. If you bother to read the article this is mostly anti-feminism with elements of white nationalism.
BaronVSS
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2yr ago
Kulak's post on humanity's ingrained love of violence and domination.
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/s0e1r7/comment/hsg1z8s/
If we are judged to be ranting buffoons by a third party, what does that matter?
I made a post I think last year on subreddit as to why the echo chamber is the ultimate destination for any kind of social group. Even on this place most people are in alignment on things like SocJus and transgenderism and such. When your style of communication is incompatible with another person's, let alone held values, how can you deal with them? People would rather hang out in places that are agreeable to them.
I remember a particular banpost that was made shortly after Roe V Wade was undone, and there were all these non-regulars you'd never seen before. There was one woman asking about a particular type of diet, and when questioned on aspects of that diet she devolved into ALLCAPS insults. This was a person simply not capable of engaging with the sort of deconstruction of ideas that occurs here. Most people I think are not: to them, ideas gives them grounding in this confusing, frightening world. Ideas are not things they defend with argumentation, they are things they defend with passion.
To you, the old lady was a ranting buffon. Perhaps in her eyes, you were just one of many sheeple.
BaronVSS
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2yr ago
FWIW the larger subreddits are all controlled by a relatively small cabal of uberjannies who use automated banlists. For posting a nonzero number of times on LockdownSkepticism and CoronavirusCirclejerk I got banned silently from posting in places I'd never even been on or heard of.
I wonder if there isn't a vault full of scripts somewhere entitled things like "High Fantasy Series #3" or "Sci-Fi Series #91" that are wheeled out whenever a big studio acquires the rights to a famous name, and the plot and characters of that script are retroactively wrangled to fit that script. It would explain whatever paramount did their rendition of Halo, in which the Arbiter is not an alien prophet but instead John Halo's human love interest and a heaping of necessary space politics so vast it puts the Phantom Menace to shame.
BaronVSS
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2yr ago
I found the railway wording funny, but that's just me.
I don't think it matters at this point what Scott names his communities, the NYT article established him the minds of everyone who matters as deplorable or deplorable adjacent.
BaronVSS
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2yr ago
slatestarcodex
Scott's attempts to clean his name were entirely for nothing.
BaronVSS
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2yr ago
The Church of England is dying and irrelevant as a cultural force. Attendance numbers have been declining steadily since the 90s:
https://faithsurvey.co.uk/uk-christianity.html*
http://www.brin.ac.uk/figures/church-attendance-in-britain-1980-2015/
in particular, the takeup among the young is shockingly low, and those people are your future worshippers.
Whatever cultural steps it tries to make are one or two years behind the current liberal consesus. OP brings up the rejection of women bishops: more recently, the Church said that they could not define precisely what a woman was: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11000401/Church-England-woman-decide.html, which rather raises the question of not quite knowing what something is, but whatever it is it can't gain rank in the organisation. I would put money on it not existing in half a century from now.
*Interestingly, those demoninations that are growing in number are those that actively reject established churches such as the CoFE and the Catholic Church. These churches tend to believe in some whacky things, and in some things that are incompatible with western thought. As these people are one of the few groups having children and forming any sense of cohesive community, they may be powerful players in the politics of the future.
If someone can tell me how tf you do links as you could on old reddit, that would be highly appreciated.
Hate to say this but this has more relevance than when it is usually used, but UK poster here.
It feels quite eerie. The Queen is (was now, I suppose) a part of the country in a way that will be felt. You could at any time in any place put on a voice of an old woman speaking in an extra refined RP accent and people could immediately tell who you were referring to. Moreover, she lived through several decades of incredible, breakneck change. Several PMs have said of her weekly meetings that they were the most valuable time in their week, to be able to talk to someone who was as close as you could get to impartial advice and had such experience.
She was also the only thing the country could have theoretically united around as a single cultural marker. Before the Jubilee you could go outside and see union jacks and banners depicting the queen's face on almost every house, then on the day everything shut down and neighbours roped off streets to get large open spaces so that they could celebrate the event. That is gone now. Charles does not have the benefit of being a still point in a moving world and comes with several bizzare views about coffee enemas, and it is likely he will be King for the rest of this decade. We may very well see the end of the Monarchy as a cultural touchpoint and the transformation of this country into a complete satellite state of the US will be done.
There was rain and thunderstorms here all throughout the afternoon, which if you believe in portents is not a good sign.
BaronVSS
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2yr ago
I agreed with your sentiment, and then out of force of habbit gave you an internet point.
That says a lot about society.
BaronVSS
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2yr ago
Recently, I have been attempting to learn Dominions 5: Warriors of the Faith.
Dominions is a turn based fantasy strategy game. It can be best summised as a bizarre mix of Heroes of Might and Magic and Risk, with a DF-esque combat system that models limb damage and such. In it, you play as one of many Pretender Gods worshipped solely by a single nation, trying to banish the other Pretender Gods and occupy the place of the Pantokrator, the God of All Gods, the creator of the Universe, whose empty celestial seat and the resulting power vacuum is the trigger of the conflict. To do this, you must either kill off the other nations through traditional violence or capture a number of red chairs called "Thrones of Ascension" scattered throughout the map. Alternatively, you may spread your religion so hard that your opponents fade out existence through not being worshipped any longer, as this universe shares Warhammer logic where a God is only as powerful as the number of people that believe in them.
Dominions has a reputation for being incredibly complicated with a near vertical learning curve. Having played it for a dozen or so hours now, I would not say that the core game is complicated. What makes Dominions complicated is the sheer amount of content in it and the way it intersects with each other. You have three different time periods to chose from, each with their own nations and theme and each period holds roughly two dozen nations. On top of that, you must design a pretender god, which again has countless designs to choose from (you can be anything from a simple wizard seeking Godhood to a Dragon to a Zeus-like figure or a giant tree, or possibly even this thing) and stat them out like they're a D&D character. Then you have battles - battles in this game are not real-time, nor are they turn based. Instead, you setup your commanders and groups of soldiers with specific, ordered commands and the battle plays out based upon those commands. This is not Endless Space: giving your units the correct orders is the difference between having your mage rout the enemy army with a cloud of poisonous gas and having him kill your units instead.
My current nation of choice is Abysia. They are lava-men with incredibly tanky units and a range of mage-priests skilled in Fire, Blood and Astral (a mixture of astronomic and lovecraftian horror) magic. With these powers combined, you can expand very quickly at the start of the game, rolling over the weak and pathetic independent provinces while taking very few or no losses. Unfortunately, they are hard countered by the existence of rain, and I'll probably need to branch out if I ever go online.
If we are not: why is that? Other voluntary organizations come under pressure to diversify, all the time - see "knitting too white," "hiking too white," etc. Would our church not qualify because it's too small? Because it isn't a business? Because we do not have any status to award? Because we have no social media presence?
The purpose of that attack is not to ensure that the recipient changes their ways and transforms their community to be a pluralistic collection of races. The purpose of the attack is to chastise and lower the status of the recipient in that moment by implying that they have a stank of Racism that can never be quite cleaned. Had you perhaps say a dozen or half a dozen non-white members, the attack line would then become the traditional jab that some of your best friends are black.
Ask these people for solutions to this and you will not get any immediately actionable goals. At best you would hear abstract targets like "tackling structural racism" or social rituals like "having uncomfortable conversations" with no real explanation as to how to get to these goal or what the result of an uncomfortable conversation is supposed to be. I do not recall who said it now, but the best line I have ever heard on this is that there would be no real difference in material outcome between someone reading out a Land Acknowledgement and someone reading out John Wayne quotes on a stage.
Who knows, maybe enough subs follow in our wake that single topic discussion forums become a thing again.
Shame they're all modelled on reddit, that format incites poor quality conversation.
BaronVSS
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2yr ago
TheMotte was one of three forums that tied me to that place. The day where two and three go as well are not far off.
Reddit is dying. New reddit is infinite scrolling hell, its rulership hates any remotely provocative conversation and lets not talk about the delightful people we had to share a website with.
I don't know what the future holds for us here. Hopefully enough people come over and Zorba fixes enough of the problems he's inherited.
I used to hate them, now I admire them for their consistency. The Tankie doesn't hate on pharmaceutical companies one year and get Pfizer tattoos the next. The Tankie doesn't overlay the flag of whichever country experienced an atrocity over his avatar on twitter every month. The Tankie just hates. If you have values that are in contradiction with his, he will openly advocate for your harm, but then at least you know where you stand with them. Other internet users? Who knows.
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