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13d ago
I agree with you but it's not confined to the online right, at least in a different context than literature. Moralism has infected horror movies with fervor lately. All logic and/or narrative is thrown out the window in favor of making sure the point of the movie is stamped onto the screen in big bold letters.
Take "The Substance" there are massive leaps of logic and narrative flaws that abound but, because the movie has a message, it's acceptable and celebrated. It often reminds me of Yud's Universal Fire. "Who cares if it doesn't make sense this story has magic and monsters." Whether it's laziness or a lower bar horror has just become mostly this now. There was a horror movie that I quite liked a few years ago called Relic that essentially just gave up at the end and had a sequence that made no sense so they could spell out what the meaning of the movie was and it almost ruined the entire thing for me because the narrative itself completely collapsed at the very least so they could stamp the message of the movie on the screen for idiots.
I feel bad saying that this is kind of a sexes thing but it kind of is and I don't mean to say that women are bad at making horror movies, they usually make 2/3 of a great horror movie and then the last third is a muddled mess that could probably be saved but because people aren't willing to criticize them about this and the breadth and depth of horror movies sucking beyond this is unimaginable to people who don't follow the genre, then the movies keep spiraling into deeper and deeper into "no plot, only message" until we get something like the Substance where it's filmed and presented like a David Lynch movie except where every single metaphor/motivation/symbolic thing is cudgeled into your brain rather than being mysterious or even hiding the story.
I think it started in earnest with how well the Babadook was received and even though it's a woman writer/director I don't put it on that movie, the fact that the story can be a metaphor is one thing, the problem arises when it's literally the only thing it can be because every other possibility has been burned to the ground with sequences that make no sense. But it's an increasing trend that I hate because it ruins the narrative at least every single time because no one bothers to just weave it into the film they just give up near the end and say, "here's the moral" and then because it's horror most people just clap.
I remember listening to Joss Whedon's commentary on Serenity and through it he kept saying things about the plot to the effect of, "if this were a movie then this bad thing wouldn't happen but it's not a movie." Essentially, the world has to exist in shades of grey and darkness to reflect the reality of the situation, until there is a reflective point and things become black and white, the moral highground is taken and the good guys can win because it is now a "movie." Thinking of this it just made me think of Tarantino's take on how he must write a plot in a meme format compared to that take and him just saying something like, "The plot is this way because it's cool."
I know most people would consider them on par and plebian but the messaging, academics, morals of a piece of art becoming louder than the rest of it just serves to make it worse in my opinion but every time it's done its celebrated and used as a shield in the same way you can't complain about a plot of a fantasy novel because there's dragons, you can't complain about the plot of these movies because it's a metaphor or even a better refrain being that you just don't get it.
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16d ago
Maybe not intentionally going hot but it seems very culture war just going based off of reddit's reaction. The response is either shrug, "good", "more of this", or "I don't wish violence on anyone but..." and those are just the ones that aren't removed by the mods. But this is nothing new for reddit, there's a fair number of subs dedicated to anti-capitalism sentiment and they post often about killing rich people in the same way that pol would post about the day of the rope or whatever. I've seen many conversations on reddit that all boil down to:
Eat the rich.
Okay, but you don't mean kill them so how do we solve this problem?
I meant what I said.
Then it sort of just devolves into people agreeing with the sentiment that wealth inequality's only solution is violence. You can say this isn't culture but class but it seems to me the lines have already been drawn where being rich is always bad unless the person is sufficiently left. The CEO being despised for being in Healthcare seems like a fig leaf that just fits better than most for people from the outside looking in, but if this was an oil exec or a finance exec, the talking points would be different but the people celebrating would be just as fine with it.
I tend to avoid the anti-capitalist subreddits and whatever overflow they might have into the many left-wing subreddits. So, I imagine, there's more than I think. A decade ago there wasn't any specifically large anti-capitalist subreddits, then things like /r/antiwork and /r/workreform started, now there's stuff like /r/fluentinfinance and other hydra heads that are all the same thing, when they're not celebrating or justifying events like this they're just posting the same things that they must know are lies, whether they pretend that profit is revenue or that rich people's net worth represents the amount of currency they can spend at any moment. It seems clear that the celebration isn't coordinated by the left but the overlap between the tail and the head is pretty hard to figure at this point. There were memes in /r/adviceanimals about the killing and at some point it became a specifically left wing subreddit, but /r/pics, which also became a specifically left wing subreddit, doesn't have anything about it which leads me to believe the sentiment is organic, to the extent that its possible to be on Reddit anymore.
Hatred is lifeblood in the culture war and if the rhetoric is constantly "nothing will change unless poor people decide to rise up and kill their oppressors" and something like this happens where it's no big deal to kill a CEO, comments are talking about how they'd get off with jury nullification, "it's literally the same thing as killing a nazi," or venerating Shinzo Abe's assassin because he deserved to die for being conservative in a thread about this killing, then it's definitely going to either give the culture war fuel or become another overt part of it even if it turns out that the culprit was a hired assassin by a rival company.
It reminds of Trump's assassination attempt and how, whether or right or wrong, it was claimed that it wasn't political. Just because something is done absent a culture war motive doesn't mean that there isn't a culture war angle.
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1mo ago
I'm not sure if you're objecting to the claim that the media is saying Trump is being normalized or that people are complaining that media has been normalizing Trump. Both have happened a lot.
Fallon: I Didn't Mean to 'Normalize' Trump
The Case for Normalizing Trump
Don't Normalize Trump's Vision for America
Normalizing Trump: An Incredibly Brief Explainer
We are Normalizing Trump. Again.
Protesters Outside of New York Times demand newspaper "Stop Normalizing" Trump
This has been going on since 2016. I mean the media obviously aren't normalizing him, in my opinion and experience, but people are certainly claiming that it's happening.
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1mo ago
I'm not crazy, am I?
If you were trying to convince others that you're not crazy I wouldn't let them read this post.
What you're describing, that level of deviancy from the norm can only be, to me, explained as mental illness. They're clearly not "fine" even if they're fine with the rape.
But say they're not, then maybe they don't consider it rape at all and this crisis of being abnormal wouldn't occur to them.
So it wouldn't indicate reducing criminal or social penalties for rapists. And I don't think it would indicate reducing support or funding for rape victims, a majority of which are still traumatized in the normal way that everyone thinks they are. But maybe it would suggest something along the lines of... giving people the benefit of the doubt?
It probably already does this. People who consider what happened to them not that bad are probably not reporting it as a rape and if it happened out that it was reported they're probably not testifying, not getting a rape kit, not taking pictures, and even assuming all this is done just happenstance of them enjoying the experience, their descriptions, testimony, and demeanor would probably end up maybe allaying some amount of criminal penalty.
But even considering all that, you break a law, you get punished by the law, some things are mitigating, but someone enjoying a thing because they have a mental illness doesn't make it okay.
The rape your requiring in this hypothetical means the person being raped can't be aware that it is going to happen. Even if they enjoy the act their agency is still being taken without their permission. Even doing something I like, I wouldn't be thrilled to have this forced on me and my time taken.
This kind of thinking is like "it's okay to steal from rich people because they won't miss it." or "it's okay to attack that guy because pain don't hurt and he loves to fight." Maybe you could use that as mitigating factor in sentencing, but no, there's no benefit of the doubt. In fact, what is the doubt here? That we should give people a pass if they encounter a .01% individual who is not bothered by their victimization?
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1mo ago
I mean, I'd also laugh at the idea of it being a blitz as well. Something can't really be a blitz if it never slowed or stopped from its starting pace.
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1mo ago
Or at the very least gatekeeping. Ostracizing posers or not granting them entry/status would make it much less socially enticing to take on any "trait" that you want. Bring back shame. Everyone knows that a large portion of people claiming statuses conferred by being trans or gay or nonbinary are clearly doing it for status. Not being able to turn people away from a group means that the incentives of the group change to fit the people that don't belong.
I feel like a lot of the people getting their status out of things like: nonbinary, genderfluid, aromantic, pansexual, pronouns, or getting status out of things like unverifiable or self-diagnosed illnesses, or even things like homosexuality and bisexualty are getting that status because of the power that has been given to trans ideology. If you take away the idea that you can just claim an illnesses or trait and become a protected, unique, and celebrated person then, in an ideal world, the words become just words again.
I hear a lot of younger people call themselves many things but I find it very hard to believe them, even to the point that I don't really believe some people when they say they're gay because when they do they're 90% of the time obviously doing it so that people will treat them differently/better and I base this on it being brought up apropos of nothing and having yet to see said person give off any other tell that they might be gay, like ever having a boyfriend/girlfriend or even exhibiting other traits that I'd associate with being homosexual. Might be just a normal response of a person who is actually gay trying to fit into society these days but if that's the case it's a sad state of affairs.
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2mo ago
I use the CSS provided from this post from John_Doe_Fletcher:
https://www.themotte.org/post/1076/smallscale-question-sunday-for-july-14/231158?context=8#context
.active.arrow-up::before {
color: #bd2130;
}
.active.arrow-down::before {
color: #0062cc;
}
Do you watch tennis? I'll admit I haven't watched in years, but Hawk-Eye/Shot Spot was unchallengeable and considered the final and correct call. Tennis has been much better ever since it was introduced. It's extremely fast, replaying shot location in less than a minute (sometimes even less than thirty seconds) of the challenge and showing it to the player. It quelled people stewing over something they thought might be a bad call and kept the game moving. I'd thought for years that if they introduced a system like this for baseball then it would speed up play considerably and mollify people's questioning of whether an umpire's call was correct. I'm sure it'd need to be more fiddly because of changing strike zones but I suspect they really don't want to introduce something that would speed up play in baseball anyway.
The only problem I see with this is that letting a player ask to see where the ball was probably helped ease tensions a lot during matches and the challenge, even if just confirming what the computer already saw should probably still be included as a request if it's just using a similar system to Hawk-Eye/Shot Spot.
This is exactly the kind of stupid-easy thing that AI should be used for. Did something pass this plane, yes/no? There's a world of difference between that and deciding something like a complex criminal court case.
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3mo ago
I mean they're clearly wrong. The yellow smiley face came way before The Simpsons and was the basis for emoticons/smileys before they became emojis.
It would also have avoided the endless Trump lawsuits or at least most of them.
But I think it would strictly make things better because it gets Trump out of the game. The culture war is probably an endlessly rising tide but for some reason Trump makes it rise much faster whether he's winning or losing as long as he's playing people are losing their minds and justifying literally any culture war item they support or reject on the back of his uncouth facebook-level news regurgitation.
It's also worth saying that it completely evades Kamala being the candidate which, in my mind, would lessen the culture war. It would have possibly stymied the idea that "my enemies are fascist and going to disenfranchise or even destroy any minority they encounter" not because it's true or not, but because it didn't work.
Trump, for all his faults, did not decide to try to arrest Hilary. The complete disregard for law or procedure maybe came earlier but to me it seems like it was fully ignited because of January 6 and dems implicitly saying that this "insurrection" not only defines any of our enemies but also empowers us to treat them as enemies in what should be neutral situations. Trump has some classified things or not whatever but a law that nobody respected or expected would be used in this situation is somehow exceedingly important because it can be used to attack Trump.
I am becoming more and more blackpilled about this but I do think the difference between waiting for Trump to finish and vanish and just lying, throwing away decorum and meeting him far below his level because you can get away with it doesn't happen if he's elected. It would have probably ended up this way regardless but Trump makes decorum decay at warp speed.
(maybe his level is that low, I don't know, but one thing's for certain in my mind, he would be ineffectual because he mostly has been.)
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3mo ago
Emoticons perfected the usefulness of small image addendums to communication and emojis enshitified them over and over and over until we have have the dumbass garbage we have now where it wants you to put an emoji of groceries after you just wrote groceries. Though there's probably still an argument to be made that emoticons/smilies were not necessary either. There's a part of me that finds anything beyond simple ASCII smiles or winks obnoxious now. I think that stupid clapping shit with emojis between each word pushed me over the edge into hating what they've done to communication.
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3mo ago
My neighbors had a netless trampoline growing up and the kids there and a lot of the neighbors jumped on it for hours a day and I don't recall any injuries from it, but most of the falls and near injuries were from hitting the part with the covered springs.
On looking it up there are a bunch of different types of trampoline nets, some that are outside the spring portion and some that are inside the spring portion and of varying heights as well. I imagine if the net were arranged within the springs rather than outside the whole of the trampoline it'd fair much better at preventing injuries than ones that are completely outside of the trampoline because you can still fall onto the covered spring portion which was about 95% of how people fell while using the trampoline either hitting the spring portion and falling off or just hitting the springs and twisting their ankle on them.
The most common factor to people--that I can remember--getting hurt but not really injured, on the trampoline, was multiple people using it at once, though.
I don't know this all sounds like a specific bubble. Here's my personal bubble.
In 2020 I would have voted for Biden if my vote mattered but I live in California so I've always voted third party. I thought Biden would tone down the culture war and stop petty political bullshit. Didn't appear to happen at all. Kamala's campaign seems to be built on saying she's great, ridiculing and slandering anyone at all who disagrees, and both of those things coming back to "this is true because I said it's true." And to be fair it works, a bunch of idiots wandering into a building and breaking a few things is now an insurrection. And that's been so common that I've become enured to it. But the petty mean girl shit they've been doing has actively made me think I might never support the democratic party again. Coupling together the "Kamala can't possible lose and is polling ahead of Trump on all demographics" and "Yeah, but also fuck him, fuck his family, this JD Vance guy fuck him, too, fuck his family, they're all dirt and should die. Kick 'em while they're down and don't stop 'til they're dead." They're justifying this shit by saying it's Trump's weakness. Yeah, well, now you're just like Trump and you can't pretend to be the party of good vibes and higher moral character anymore except for people who don't pay attention or have no compassion for anyone who thinks differently. Being underhanded, playing dirty politics is one thing to do behind the scenes or allowing to happen hands off but this explicit endorsement of being without decorum or decency has vibed me into my vibe-shifted vibe that I can't hold onto any hope or promise because it's all tainted with being scummy.
(Note that I look at Reddit too much. This may be strongly responsible for my vibe-bubble or vibubble for the vibe enthusiasts out there. Also note, I'm not making fun of you specifically for saying vibe, but it's become almost a meme to me at this point where people just say vibe about everything, now.)
There's a scene in Good Will Hunting where Will is telling his therapist how his dad used to present him with a belt, a stick, and a wrench and make him choose with which to get beaten. He chooses the wrench because fuck him. I'm almost that bitter because of how they decided it was a good idea to sink to Trump's level of being a petty insulter. Really, below Trump imo because Trump is a liar and a blowhard and I certainly don't take his insults as the dead serious "I would murder you and it would be completely fair and right" attitude that people have about Trump.
My vote doesn't matter but I might just vote for Trump. Trump deadlocking the world because no one will ever agree with him even if he said the sky was blue sounds like a better option than having another president and cabinet that get to do insanely retarded bullshit like trying rioters as insurrectionists because they feel differently about their politics and not any of the actual intentions behind the riot itself. Trump might try to do that but the justice department will protest, sit on their hands, and nothing will happen. So, how is he not the better option, here?
I just saw a snippet of this on reddit. It's unbelievable that there wasn't anyone in Australia better. Though one of the reddit comments makes a good point that most people who are good wouldn't pass the Olympics drug test.
EDIT: here's a news story with more context and videos (though all of the videos are also on twitter they're not down right now)
Okay, the whole cast were not losers. It was an extremely unlikely kaleidoscope of friends that were and I can't believe I actually seemed to remember this offhand: band geek, jock, freak/stoner/beat?, and dudebro. But none of them were the lowest totem pole of their respective tribes and the audience was routinely shown characters more desperate, more sexually obsessed, and pathetic. You were supposed to laugh at Jim when he fucked the pie, but it all came back to understanding the power and desperation of puberty and sexual conquest. That most notable scene is followed by Eugene Levy talking to his son about like he's a human being that's done something that shouldn't be done but not something that he himself doesn't understand the desire to do especially at that age.
In the same vein as every other time I've heard of people making macguyver'd sex toys and, yes, other time's I've heard people talk about fucking couches, it's ridiculous and desperate and they know they're being laughed at by sharing it but at no point have I heard someone say it isn't true to the human experience. It's intrinsic weirdness relies on relating to others about your masturbation habits.
Look at it this way, is a foot fetish weird? I expect everyone has a fetish of some sort but having that isn't the weird part. Telling other people about it notably weird. Making said fetish your only avenue for sexual gratification is weird. Someone being super excited by feet and like licking them or whatever before sex is kinda like "Ah, okay, I see you, now. I know what you like." And not, oh my god this person is a pervert beyond the pale. Whereas if that same person goes onto some onlyfans model's insta feed and posts "show feet." that's really weird, even in the sphere of already being fallen into sexual deviance because of how it reflects other issues that are far weirder than the foot fetish and that is a lack of shame, and a lack of boundaries or to a lesser extent compartmentalization.
In the context of an autobiographical book fucking a couch is on the same level as discussing masturbation candidly but the abstraction of it being "for" something matters. Context always matters and affects what makes something weird or not. Almost all the stories I heard about men fucking inanimate objects were from people who had moved past that stage in their life and were relating how utterly impactful and intractable their libidos were as young men. If they were talking about it while they were still doing it that's an entirely different ball of wax but again I think context matters. In the context of an autobiographical book that I assume includes the pain and awkwardness of growing up it seems perfectly in keeping of something I'd expect of a teenager in the 1990s-2000s based on what I've heard from other people about the same thing.
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4mo ago
I've heard this from the radio, comedy specials, podcasts, youtube videos, and men posting about it on forums. I used to listen to Loveline every night and it seems to me it's as common or less common than a woman using a vegetable as a makeshift dildo, certainly not beyond the pale.
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4mo ago
Believe? I guess. I've heard from many men talking about experiences like this that it seems very normal to do from like 12-16 but not normal to talk about. I suppose it becomes less normal the older you get but I don't know how old Vance is supposed to have been in the fake excerpt. And I suppose it is "incel energy" but I don't think that that is altogether weird. Most men when they're younger are incels. It's really only weird to be an incel if you're like mid 20s and above. I can't really speak to how "neckbeardy" American Pie is but I really think that's a reach, unless we're just calling anything that's lowbrow neckbeardy, now.
(Or maybe I'm misunderstanding what neckbeardy means but to me that codes as autistic and much more concerned with fantasy/sci-fi and in-universe lore being consistent with source material. Though, like incel, neckbeard has never been clear as an insult for anything other than this person believes differently than me and this makes them bad human beings. incel being you are like this but can't have sex and neckbeard basically being you are like this but also ugly and being ugly is a bridge too far. Similar to cuck in that it feels like more of an insult that's trying to make friends with other insulters rather than actually make an accurate insult. Which, I guess, weird falls into now.)
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4mo ago
I can see that. I keep thinking about undecideds and middle America I completely forgot that most people simply don't vote and democrats have a bigger base.
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4mo ago
But I'm not sure whose vote your getting with the attack though. Is the game making republicans mad so they lash out? In my mind the undecideds are more likely to be offended by the trend than to internalize that republicans are weird and thus not worth voting for because I don't think weird works as an insult for the outsider looking in. It's just too tepid.
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4mo ago
It's odd to me because it seems like such a bad attack. The idea of a young man fucking anything and everything inanimate is not weird. I've heard many comedians or just "funny guys" on podcasts/standup talk about this all the time and they always get laughs. Hell, American Pie's main character fucked a pie and it was simply a joke and I don't recall any big hubub about Jim's character being too weird because he fucked a pie. Though that was a long time ago, I don't remember American Pie showing up as one of those movies that you "forgot" was bad because it fell outside the overton window now. When I saw that Walz used it as an insult I honestly just felt secondhand embarrassment.
The whole "weird" angle of attack seems really bad in general because it doesn't say what they want it to say. If they want to tar Vance for something made up just say he molested someone. If they want to tar republicans for being gross then call them gross, as an insult for anything against the left-leaning the word is already used that way anyway. Weird just doesn't work in my opinion. Comes out somewhere along the lines of calling an old man lame. Yeah, maybe the old man is lame, so what? The word is not insulting enough. Most people probably identify as weird in some way when they're probably not weird at all but since it's not really a pejorative and was in fact celebratory in most cases before this sudden shift. Hell, most of these people probably worship Weird Al and their favorite Radiohead song is Creep, hey there's another better word than weird.
But I feel like the way that the astroturfing is turned up to 11 right now there's a feedback loop going on where it's nearly impossible to tell if a strategy is working or if everyone's just nodding and agreeing with the strategy because, to me, the crux of it all working is getting the majority of people to say that it's working.
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4mo ago
All the extensions that I saw that said they did this are defunct now. There's a program for doing it but it sounds like more of a hassle than it's worth if this is happening all the time.
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4mo ago
Yeah, I said it was like over half the reports in the janitor queue. We disagreed on how often the reports were "super downvotes" for being too left or too right.
I understand them well enough, now. You can just call me stupid and not be passive aggressive about it, I'm an adult.
I would have no problem with him being banned if the person that instigated the events were even just warned but they weren't in this case or in the others. The rules are different for each poster. Wildcard rule, whatever. I disagree that this is a good way to do things but I stand by the fact that it's simply unfair for seemingly no reason other than accumulation. In most situations the instigator is held to a higher standard than the responder. But not here. It's fair and right that there should be consequences and even if you had given steve a permanent ban but had given the original instigation a warning I would have thought it was a better response than just ignoring someone basically calling anyone who makes a certain argument a pedophile and not even getting an informal warning.
Even then it's only apples to apples for certain countries. I remember someone arguing that China had a better infant mortality rate than the US and I looked it up. From what I could find China's IMR is measured at over 28 weeks gestation or greater than 1000g but you'll still find people that will claim the US has worse IMR than China because arguments are soldiers and their fingers are in their ears.
From what I remember looking up about this if you adjust for pre-term births the US's IMR ranking doesn't quite get to comparable countries but rises dramatically and the IMR rate of black, native american, and pacific islander was double that of white, asian, and hispanic. I'm sure those factors are going to make the US numbers look bad comparatively as long as higher portions of its population have those demographics.
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