Botond173
1hr ago
A computer game featuring a nuclear family as characters, so a human adult woman as the wife and one or more human biological children (not androids), one where the player has to fulfill the role of the protector patriarch and husband, would obviously be much more effective ragebait to Blue Tribe online feminists, because in their view this is basically the full manifestation of the typical toxic male fantasy.
You’re right; in Pragmata there is no wife, and the child is an android and not a biological human. However, the player is still supposed to be the protector patriarch to this android, and is thus, according to the reasoning of Blue Tribers, designed to pander to the toxic fantasies of angry loser males who are otherwise mostly unfit to attract flesh-and-blood women and form families in the real world.
Botond173
2hr ago
In other words, they do fear backlash from their own employees, and that is part of it.
Botond173
3hr ago
doing a bunch of things that nobody in the western games industry wants to do
Out of fear of backlash, you mean? Or out of simple profit considerations? Or something else?
Botond173
18hr ago
I'll probably regret asking, but how is the robot daughter in the game 'loli-coded'?
Botond173
18hr ago
Progressive stranglehold on video game culture or video games themselves?
Botond173
18hr ago
Who is the wife?
In this case, nobody. I didn't claim that the game wholly represents the typical male fantasy in the eyes of Blue Tribers, only that it feeds into it. In other words, it goes into the same mental bucket.
Botond173
19hr ago
How confident are you that this extends beyond the Extremely Online?
Not at all. Then again, Gamergate wasn't that different in that regard, was it? I view this as a small and delayed aftershock of Gamergate.
Botond173
19hr ago
According to the results of a search right now, there has been no discussion here of the Pragmata controversy so far.
(There is no Wikipedia article on it, at least not yet.)
I’d put forth the following arguments:
It seems the Blue Tribe generally views Gamergate as a propaganda defeat because they see it as a long-term contributor to the MAGA/alt-right phenomenon but at the same time I don’t think they concluded that they themselves are even partially to blame. Therefore they are looking for opportunities to fight back, and are now including the pedophilia accusation in their attacks on evil gamers. As far as I can say, this was generally not yet the case back in 2014.
I’m also noticing something that eluded me so far, namely that the probable reason why both the original Gamergate (the Zoe Quinn controversy) and the current controversy proved to be effective ragebait to the Blue Tribe is that they are fueling two of their grievances at once.
One: they generally believe that toxic loser men are aiming to police women's sex lives out of resentment and hatred. I don’t think they have anything specific in mind. (I once asked here what this stuff is even supposed to be. I only received one answer: ‘compelling or aggressively encouraging women to not be floozies.’) It’s just a general vibe that makes them feel the ick. It’s why they think Quinn was unjustly attacked.
Regarding Pragmata I think their train of thought is the following: this sleazy game feeds into the typical male fantasy of being the protector and patriarch of a nuclear family where he is supposedly owed sex, affection, food, services etc. His subjugated wife is the idealized woman who is virtuous and yet hot, basically a personal slut. And it’s not like these dudebros are making any effort to be the supportive, emotionally intelligent, suave etc. male ally that is worthy of a relationship, instead they want to realize their fantasies by curbing women’s freedoms. It’s just terribly gross.
Their other usual grievance, of course, is that toxic males want to appropriate hobbies and cordon them off for women, turning them into their own toxic ghettoized playgrounds.
Botond173
20hr ago
It seems there were two separate things going on. One: these regimes generated more internal dissent than non-communist dictatorships. Two: they reacted to existing dissent in more extreme ways than non-communist dictatorships normally did to the same sorts of dissent.
Botond173
20hr ago
In East Berlin pretty young women were known to throw themselves at any travelling West German or Western foreign men at hotel bars, just to have a small hope of escape.
This was exactly the same in Hungary as well.
It's not like the situation in the Baltics was that much better though. If we correct for the negative effects of the Yugoslavian war, that is.
Botond173
21hr ago
The population of USSR and Warsaw pact was roughly 500 million
I checked Google and it seems I was indeed mistaken. I’d add, however, that 2rafa’s argument is still basically correct: the collapse of the ‘90s did not affect all former Soviet satellite states to an equal degree, and the same applies to former Soviet republics.
Botond173
1d ago
Half a billion seems to be a massive overstatement. Otherwise I mostly agree.
There were also related changes of the same nature. A massive drop in fertility, the rise of suicide rates, a massive rise in alcoholism and drug addiction rates, the reappearance of contagious diseases that were considered to be already eliminated etc. The latter was the result of the utter collapse of an already shoddy and underfunded healthcare system, as was the decrease that you mentioned.
Botond173
1d ago
I wouldn’t be certain about the former. The state response to Bolshevik terrorism and agitation in the late years of Czarism was, when compared to similar policies of Western nations, actually mild on average. The sheer difference between that regime and the Bolsheviks in terms of the number of people who were sentenced to forced labor or internal exile is also rather telling.
Botond173
1d ago
I’d go further. Let’s suppose the trans son of an average white bread family is offed and there is reasonable ground to conclude that it was his transness that provoked the killer. I’d argue that in the post-2012 or so world, his family trying to conceal this fact would in fact invite more potential outrage, ostracism, censure, cancelling and mobbing than them doing the opposite.
Botond173
4d ago
I think it's legit a good joke. Sometimes the absurdity of the world reaches such levels that humor is the only valid response.
Botond173
6d ago
I was referring to the social norms before the Sexual Revolution, not the era of the early Church.
Botond173
6d ago
s to why you can't discuss looks productively with women, it's because attractiveness is core to female self image and requires immense kayfabe to avoid the crushing reality.
I think it should be pointed out that this is a relatively new development. Back when early marriage and Christian monogamy were the norm, women's lives were basically similar, regardless of their looks.
I’ll raise the issue of paternity testing as potential culture war fuel.
As far as I know, the law in US federal states and Western European countries is usually that a husband may not have a paternity test done on the child or children unless the wife agrees to it in writing and the family court permits it (in case of a divorce). I’m not a lawyer and I don’t know the specifics. But anyway, the practical reality is that a husband having such a test done on the kids without consulting anyone else is illegal. Basically there is never any permission given to do such tests.
On one of the now-defunct Manosphere sites, namely Dalrock’s blog, a regular commenter who went under the online name Novaseeker made a prediction about 10 or more years ago: not only will there not be any new legislation making paternity tests easier, as usually demanded online by angry men’s rights activists, but the opposite will happen. Namely: a growing number of men, usually in case of facing an initiated divorce, will start tinkering with these laws, covertly getting paternity tests done, basically on the black market, and this in turn will result on corresponding legislation becoming even more punitive and restrictive. There’ll be heavy fines, maybe even prison sentences etc.
Again, this was written more than 10 years ago. I wonder if anything of this has materialized or not.
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