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icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


Fiend posted:

False dichotomy. Voter fraud in this case is presented as a red herring to shift the debate from election fraud perpetrated by corrupt officials and corporate interests to the poor and disenfranchised. So in this poll I can choose to deny it exists or agree with redundant layers of legislation harming the poor and working class. Keep an eye on this in case noted douche-nozzle Carlin Yoder gets his mitts on it :)

Yeah but the problem is that most people don't think of that, because most people don't give a poo poo about politics besides rooting for their favorite team.

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icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


I always interpreted the Dark Knight in the other way, that just like Batman upholds his no killing code even though it means everyone suffers and he has to live a double life, if we as a society want to uphold the rule of law and universal rights we have to suffer the occasional meaningless violence or terror attack. But maybe that's just my leftist bias showing through.

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


The Macaroni posted:

Technically a comment responding to an opinion piece on the disaster that is Rick Santorum, but so thickheaded I had to share. With special guest stars "the race card" and "The Civil Rights Movement wasn't a good thing!"

Wait a minute, did this just say that segregation was "a nearly universally accepted good"?

Or are they referring to getting rid of segregation as a nearly universally accepted good? Because the way things are going, I'm not sure which it is.

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


Pope Guilty posted:

There's also something which tends to piss me off, which is the conflation of liberalism with socialism, which is a radically different ideology calling for a radically different society. The idea that paying taxes and getting government services has anything to do with socialism or Marx is about as widely accepted as it is complete nonsense, and this conflation makes it difficult to discuss politics in a sane way.

I don't talk about politics with most people I know in real life, but when I do I try to avoid the word "liberal" and refer to myself instead as leftist, seeing as the word liberal is deeply tied to the American Democratic party, and the failure of the Democrats has been entirely in messaging and issue framing. At this point the right has total control over that word and its connotations, so there's no point in using it anymore.

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


SlipUp posted:

Domesticated animals absolutely are important in tandem for wheels for the purposes of transportation.

But no no you see it was actually alright that Europeans came and tortured, enslaved and murdered millions of people because they hadn't invented the wheel yet! Savages!

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


Hempel posted:

It was a ban on face covering in public places, not a ban on headscarfs. There are states in America that have similar laws eg. Washington D.C, Florida and New York.

Well there are also states in America that still have anti-miscegenation laws on the books, so it's not like if America has it it must be good. I don't think France is some kind of hellhole but the headscarf law (and yeah, it was a headscarf law) isn't really a great example of progress in the personal freedoms department.

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


trucutru posted:

Ahahaha, yeah, forcefully pushing a reform that most Mexicans hate is a good example of democracy in action.

Libertarians don't want democracy remember. The filthy masses can't be trusted not to enact socialism, so we'll just have benevolent overlords run things for them.

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


Josef bugman posted:

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2014/05/cyberbll.html

1) What the gently caress is this trying to say

2) Why the gently caress is it making me angry

3) What kind of writer essentially talks to themselves whilst imagining it is what their readers are thing.

From the looks of it it's a right winger being angry that a completely unremarkable, centrist news/politics magazine is too left wing, with all the usual whining about the mainstream media and the politically correct agenda

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


Women, minorities, liberals, same as it's always been, as long as the populist right existed. It's not like they're incorrect in viewing this as an ideological war. They've just finally figured out which side is best representing their views.

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


It's just indicative of nerds and nerd poo poo getting integrated into the mainstream. Looking at pretty much any internet forum all the way back to Usenet, it's obvious most nerds have always been borderline neonazis, this is just the first time that mainstream society has taken notice of a manchild poo poo slinging internet war

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 05:05 on Nov 9, 2014

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


Popular Thug Drink posted:

its not about games at all, games is a symbol for growing older and having to deal with people and people having opinions that you dont like

If you look at the GOP voting base you see lots of people refuse to deal with other people having opinions they don't like straight into the grave, voting Republican the whole way

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


PT6A posted:

Pretty much. The equivalent in other media doesn't really exist. No one would refer to themselves as a "TV-watcher" like it's some kind of identity, and generally people who get really into music or films or anything like that (to the point where it becomes a part of their identity) wants to see the medium explore new directions and experiment. It's only self-identified gamers who seem to want complete stasis in their medium of choice.

It's different because games and comic books are pretty much as low as low art gets. People watching movies generally have some sort of desire for artistically worthwhile experiences, video game players and comic book readers just want to see titties a very large percentage of the time. This conflicts with the recent movement for indie and artsy poo poo, not that there's anything wrong with that, but I think it's a factor. Combine that with people's bigotry in general, and the particularly virulent strain of bigotry among nerds who feel wronged by anyone who isn't a white male nerd, and you get a whole lot of people really really mad their pornography is being criticized or taken away

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 10:17 on Nov 15, 2014

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


Getting back to "nerds are loving awful" it really can't be said enough. The 'persecution' in real life is almost 100% that they can't get a girlfriend because they're gross weirdos. However their own conception of what's happening is that other people hate them because they realize they're smarter and better in every way than those other people.

What's worse, in my opinion this attitude is baked into nerd culture/media to a fundamental level. The idea that "I'm smarter/better than normal people because I like X thing" is essentially the core belief that underpins the subculture. You can see it in nerd media pretty much wherever you look, take Ender's Game for instance. Ender's Game is about a borderline autistic supergenius who's bullied because he's better than everyone else and ends up killing multiple people and comitting genocide but it's not his fault, he was forced to do it by people who hate him because he's smarter than them. It's pretty much 100% reader stand in gratification, and Ender is portrayed as almoat a Messiah figure. This is one of the classics of scifi.

Basically nerd culture is 100% awful. There is almost nothing positive about it. It's a machine that churns out 4chan posters full of seething hatred towards anyone slightly different from themselves. It's not just the people here that are the problem, it's the culture and the corpus of media themselves

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 00:38 on Nov 16, 2014

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


Silver2195 posted:

The "NERDS!" attitude is silly. Pretty much everyone posting on SA qualifies as a nerd.

I invite you to go read the Hacker News thread in YOSPOS. I think you'll reconsider

This is actually thread relevant more or less, so here you go:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8601727

Eric S Raymond posted:

Nor is it any good thing that “youths” now behave as though they think they’re operating with a kind of immunity. We saw this in Ferguson, when Michael Brown apparently believed he could could beat up a Pakistani shopkeeper and then assault a cop without fearing consequences. (“What are you going to do, shoot me?” he sneered, just before he was shot) As he found out, eventually that poo poo’ll get you killed; it would have been much better for everybody if he hadn’t been encouraged to believe that his skin color gave him a free pass

It’s not clear to me that this kind of indulgence is any better – even for blacks themselves – than the old racist arrangement in which blacks “knew their place” and were systematically cowed into submission to the law. After all – if it needs pointing out again – the victims of black crime and trash culture are mainly other blacks. Press silence is empowering thugs.

That's one of the most influential and wealthy Open Source tech people in the industry

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond



Here's another choice quote from someone else

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8557958

quote:

thesz 17 hours ago | link [flagkilled]

I went to read to see the real benefit or waste of diversity and found nothing there.

I really do not care about feeling of some minority member. Heck, I am a minority member if you define it properly - being able to squat 20 times 120% of my own weight, being in top 2% in IQ scale, less than average height, more than average weight, have a child in my early forties, etc.

What I care of is the positive or negative things that minorities bring into teams. I've found nothing.

Completely unsubstantial article. Makes me think that the only thing minorities bring is the cause for conflict.

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 03:14 on Nov 16, 2014

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


Idran posted:

Wealthy sure, but is he really still influential? I honestly thought ESR faded into irrelevance years ago.

There's no meaningful difference between him and any of the new generation of captains of tech capitalism, except that the new generation might be worse. Point is these people are legitimately awful

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008



I'm the subtle homophobia

See, just loving awful. It's poo poo all the way down

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


goku im piss posted:

Or people just get tired of the party/group that they want to support throwing them under the bus whenever it's politically convenient.


One more vote that obviously wasn't needed or wanted, right?

Unironically agreed, but replace men and feminists with white people and black liberals, or upstanding Germans and Bolshevist Jews

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


To a bigot, denouncing bigotry as bad appears holier-than-thou, because bigots don't actually think bigotry is bad.

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


Jerry Manderbilt posted:

*They think that bigotry is bad, but they themselves are good people, therefore they themselves cannot possibly be bigoted and their bigoted views can't be bigoted either.

I think that's part of it, but I also think you're given lots of these people too much credit. Lots of people really are just loving awful deep down.

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


7c Nickel posted:

I'd just like to point out that of the 4 people he declared are "calling all gamers misogynistic hate-mongers and advocating for their death", 2 are game developers, 1 is a games journalist, and 1 is a geek celebrity. I kind of doubt they said anything like he's claiming with any seriousness.

And the KKK hated white liberals just as much if not more than black people themselves, because they were seen as traitors, and that is the one thing that is absolutely unacceptable

Same thing here. They betrayed their obligation to be faithful defenders of the bigoted, screaming manchildren, so they must be destroyed

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


Uroboros posted:

This I don't really agree with at all. Like any other medium they can be absolute poo poo, and are absolute poo poo a vast majority of the time, but calling them the lowest form of art is an insult to some very creative and talented individuals.

I think it's fair to say video games have a higher ratio of low to high art than other mediums. That's partly just because it's a more popular medium than books or movies, but it's still true

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


VideoTapir posted:

I wonder what would happen if the anime industry were confronted this way in Japan.

The problem with anime in my experience is just Japan itself. Even the stuff that has some artistic merit and that an adult might not be ashamed to watch has the occasional bout of hilarious sexism. I think Miyazaki is just a gross anomaly unfortunately

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


I remember there was like a Kotaku article interviewing Kojima, and during lunch with the journalist he was smoking a cigar and sexually harassing the waitresses like there was nothing at all unusual about it

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


PT6A posted:

What makes online gaming so attractive? Is it the legions of utter morons you can encounter? The thrill of being called a "friend of the family human being jew" by someone whose voice hasn't dropped yet? I deal with enough morons in my day-to-day life, I want my recreational activities to be as free from them as possible.

Well it's a video game, and it's online, but other than that yes. If you're a (male, well off) teenager with unlimited free time there's definitely an appeal to loving around on the anonymous internet. I guess it's similar to lazing around and being a worthless poo poo IRL, except less well adjusted and involving less human interaction. It's entertaining to gently caress with people online when you're 15 years old, see the griefing thread in Games, Ventrilo Harassment, etc. It's the same mentality that drives 4chan. Naming your character "I love cock" so people yell it when they get mad, that kind of thing. Most of the people involved are not that bright and not that mature

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 23:25 on Nov 24, 2014

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


At least in some online games, the mechanics are complicated/well put together enough that abusing them in clever ways can make people really, really really mad. I remember I saw a guy with a youtube series of him playing Leauge of Legends and purposefully not following the popularly recognized strategy even though he knew what he was doing and won the games in clever ways, and he got his own teammates breaking down and screaming at him over the microphone, threatening to kill his family, etc, because they thought he was throwing the games and didn't know what he was doing

here it is

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bylPTYle4W4

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 00:21 on Nov 25, 2014

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


VideoTapir posted:

Can anyone explain to me what the alleged lack of ethics in games journalism was; or is that now and was it always just a meaningless slogan? Because I've not yet come across an explanation of it that wasn't complete gibberish.

On the surface it's just the accusation of game journalists trading good reviews for sexual favors

The subtext though, is that the angry bigoted nerds want reviews to be a sort of consumer reports style quality stamp assuring them that they're getting all the tits and violence out of a game that they've come to expect, rather than a review of the game as a work of art. There's a prevailing anti-intellectual/artistic sentiment that 'art games' aren't real games, and reviewers giving art games good scores are therefore bad reviewers / 'unethical'. The sex-for-scores stuff is nominally the reason for the argument, but I'd argue that subtext is very important in terms of why they care so much about it

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 14:03 on Nov 30, 2014

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


CharlestheHammer posted:

It should also be mentioned that the initial claim turned out to be not true.

It also was posted by a bitter ex.

Yeah I know, that's why I said 'the accusation of'

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


Ultimately I don't think video games will ever become high art in the strictest sense, but I do think they're normalizing with other popular media like film in terms of artistic merit

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


Jack Gladney posted:

He's also disgusted by the idea of a white person dating a black person:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Stacy_McCain#Controversy


For some reason, the original article has been taken down.

All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, into our schools, our churches and our places of recreation and amusement.

but it's NOT RACISM

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


Jack of Hearts posted:

That it was overrun with reactionary idiots isn't really in question. But games media is poo poo, and there were reasonable amounts of non-white non-male gamers who decided to be publicly outraged for reasons which approximate plausibility. (Not that the outrage was justified, but that it wasn't artificial.)

:laffo:

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


I think he's trying to say that video games and their players are exempt from normal political or sociological analysis, somehow

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


Hasters posted:

What is it with Minnesota and funny conservatives?

Well, at least they're better at keeping them out of power than Wisconsin is

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


CharlestheHammer posted:

That is true but that doesn't make your snide comment make any more sense. So congrats?

let me introduce you to forums poster computer parts, AKA the Texan fishmech

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


from Roger Cohen at the NYT:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/27/opinion/world-war-iii.html

maybe it's just me but I don't think it's physically possible to get any more insufferable and condescending than this. like literally using the framing of a parent talking down to a small child. holy poo poo gently caress you roger cohen. also with the Serious People beltway consensus that the US is in decline and has to dole out concessions to Russia, China, Iran, etc, RIGHT NOW or bad things will happen. what those things are doesn't matter just do it, quickly, no time to think

quote:

World War III
Roger Cohen

“Mommy, please tell me again, how did World War I begin?”

“Sweetheart, I already told you, that was long ago. A century is a very long time.”

“But, Mommy, please.”

“Well, it’s complicated. Do you really, really want to know?”

“Yes, Mom.”

“It’s a sad story. The world was organized in one way, and that way collapsed, and in the process millions of people were killed.”

“Wow. How was it organized before?”

“There were things called empires. They controlled vast territories full of different peoples, and some of these peoples wanted to rule themselves rather than be governed by a faraway emperor.”

“O.K.”

“The Austro-Hungarian Empire was one of them. It had lots of grand palaces in its capital, Vienna, where people danced at fancy balls. It governed parts of a poor corner of Europe called the Balkans where its rule was disliked. One day in 1914, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and his wife were assassinated in a Balkan city called Sarajevo by a young man, a Bosnian Serb, who wanted the freedom of the south Slavs from imperial rule.”
Continue reading the main story
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“That’s sad, Mommy. Guess the music stopped. But so what?”

“The empire got really angry. It told Serbia to do a bunch of things or face war. The ruler in Vienna was confident because he had a close friend, a rising power called Germany. Serbia also had a good buddy, a country called Russia, which is big. Anyway, Serbia kind of dithered around, like you with homework, so Austria-Hungary went to war against it.”

“And then?”

“Then Germany declared war on Russia, whose friend was France, which didn’t like Germany for various reasons. Soon Germany attacked France through Belgium. That made Britain cross. It went to war against Germany. Another empire — a sickly one — called the Ottoman Empire, eventually joined the German and Austro-Hungarian side. Later the United States, a rising power, came in on the British and French team. After a few years, more than 16 million people were dead. The Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, German and Russian empires had collapsed.”

“All because a couple was killed? Mom, that’s weird.”

“Sometimes little things get bigger, people lose patience and perspective, there’s a spark and you get a big mess.”

“Mom, it couldn’t happen again, right?’

“Nope.”

“Are there any empires left today?”

“Some people call America an empire even if it doesn’t have an emperor. It is the most powerful country on earth, with soldiers all around the world and different peoples that rely on it for direction and protection. But America’s getting weaker.”

“So, Mommy, is it kind of like what you said about the world being organized one way, and then being organized in another way, and lots of people dying in the process?”

“Not exactly, sweetheart. Dying where?”

“In Syria. Mom, what’s Syria?”

“It’s a small country with different peoples and religions that came into being when the Ottoman Empire got so sickly it collapsed.”

“Why are people fighting there?”

“It’s complicated. Do you really, really want to know?”

“Yes, Mommy.”

“Well, there was this brutal, remote tyrant behaving like an emperor and some of the peoples in Syria rose up against him. The tyrant started shooting them. America and Britain and France, among other countries, didn’t like that, and they said they’d kind of support the rebels, but didn’t really.”

“Why?”

“Because, like I said, America is sickly. It’s getting weaker.”

“Okay. Then what?”

“The tyrant had a big friend called Russia. He had another quite big friend called Iran. They both really did support him.”

“So he won?”

“Not quite. Many of the people who wanted to get rid of the tyrant were Sunni Muslims. They had the backing of Saudi Arabia, which is Sunni Central and hates Iran and has supported Sunni fanatics. Turkey, which was the successor to the Ottoman Empire and hates the Syrian tyrant, also got on the rebel team. But Turkey hates another people in Syria called the Kurds even more than the tyrant — so much it’s been ready in a sneaky way to help one group of Sunni crazies who slit throats, kill Kurds and shoot people in Western cities.”

“Mom, I’m confused.”

“Syria has broken up, like the Ottoman Empire. Russia is bombing some enemies of the Syrian tyrant. America is bombing the throat-slitters. So is France. Turkey shot down a Russian plane. Russia is angry. The Kurds want the state they didn’t get 100 years ago. Saudi Arabia is fighting a region-wide war against Iran. That war is most intense in Syria, where hundreds of thousands are dead.”

“All because some folks wanted to get rid of a bully?”

“Sometimes little things get bigger, there’s a spark and it’s a big mess.”

“Mom, what would World War III be like?”

“Don’t worry, darling, everything is different now.”

“Totally?”

“Totally. We have life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Happy Thanksgiving, my love.”

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 01:43 on Nov 27, 2015

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008



Why haven't we guillotined these people yet?

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


british MP is not a meaningful position of power. see Brexit for example

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icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


Who needs facts when you can just snort a huge loving line of masturbatory Whig triumphalism and spray words on a page?

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