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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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Perusing Based Mods

I'm confused, is there some special browser I'm supposed to use to see this?


Silly thought: the based mods are using the wrong approach. You need to launder your political preferences through accepted victim groups.

To get the gay out, just call it a muslim friendly mod. Now the owners of Nexus have to choose to ban muslims, or keep banning the anti-gay stuff. For extra bonus points, try and make some of the anti-gay muslim nations aware of these games enough to ban them (and then the company will do the work for you and create the mod, like they did with spiderman).

To white wash the game, just call it a monument to the Ukrainian people. Put in some Ukraine flags, give everyone Ukrainian names, and make them all white. Then give options in the mod to switch out the flag, and to switch out the names.


More serious thought: this is all very tiresome. I always feel this way when I see politics intruding into hobby spaces. I very much blame the Woke for starting this fight within gaming specifically. I can't help but feel it was also their single largest strategic blunder (not that I think anyone is pushing a high level strategy for either side). It was probably the single greatest red-pilling of American youth. They created Trump's youth base. Or maybe this kind of fight was just destined to happen. If you believe the culture is rotten and you want to change it, then eventually you are going to find yourself in conflict with the people who enjoy the culture as it currently exists. I feel some sense of cosmic justice that in return for messing with the hobby I love they created their worst enemy.


My future goals:

I have slowly been volunteering to help out more organizations in my life. I've been a moderator on here for years. I'm on the board for a non-profit recreational sport in my area. I'm on the Parent-Teach-Association for my daughter's school. I do feel that the previous generation failed me. They neglected these side aspects of public and social life, and left them wide open to capture by leftists with an agenda.

I will generally be pushing a line of non-politics. As well as trying to be helpful. I do believe that most volunteer organizations will easily follow the incentive gradient. They will do whatever is easiest, and whatever their members are willing to do. I just intend to be a roadblock that makes the incentive gradient flow towards non-politics. If I was involved with Nexus mods, I would have advised them to take a non-politics approach. Let things happen on your platform, and only get involved in the legal stuff. If anyone makes a push for you to get involved, say "sorry, but we don't have the resources to deal with such and such, we are trying to make this a great platform"

The recreational sports league I'm in had a bit of drama recently. Some of you might have followed along in the Wednesday wellness threads. The situation has mostly resolved itself at this point. But one of the board members now wants to put in place a code of conduct agreement to our mailing list. I'll be fighting to change the "code of conduct" thing to basically be a waiver of liability for what our members say/do. And my simplest argument will be: none of you want to enforce a code of conduct.


Children's Culture:

My wife and I have a lot of discussions about what we'll expose our daughter to, and we've more or less decided the cut off is the 90's just to be safe. There were still normal shows, books or games that generally depicted normal cis hetero white families like ours positively. To subject her to modern media feels like child abuse. To the 90's it is.

I have two daughters myself. I do watch the content they consume. Most of it for toddlers has seemed to not have gay themes. Peppa pig is whimsical and nonsensical. Paw Patrol is full of action, and a bit of silliness. Daniel Tiger's neighborhood seems entirely composed of nuclear families. Bluey tends to stay away from politics, even though it is clearly made in mind with the parents watching alongside their kids. I might have missed things in any of these shows, but if I'm missing the things, I think my daughters are missing them too.

I've lately had my daughters singing along with me to a song that contains cuss words in it. Usually I feel weird when I hear cusswords in a song and I'll skip it rather than dealing with the discomfort. Looking back, that was probably unnecessary. There is a very clear "shit" in the song, and my oldest daughter just says the word "chick" instead, because "shit" is not in her vocabulary so she just latched onto the closest word she knew. The song is of course: Rich Men North of Richmond.

Peppa pig is whimsical and nonsensical.

Daddy pig is portrayed as a doofus sufficiently consistently that both my wife and I found Peppa Pig problematic. We can't stop our kids watching it, but we don't seek it out for them.