Auspol 2024 Mark 2: You stupid white bastards

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Auspol 2024 Mark 2: You stupid white bastards

The Artificial Kid: Feb 22, 2002; Plibble

quote:

"I've only ever wanted to be a theatre person," says Badham.

"When I was very young, I wanted to be an actor. I think it's quite common for young people, who would like to be the star of their own movie, [but] I had always written and I felt a calling to write.

"When I was around 10, I thought, 'Yep, writing � this is what I do.'"

# ¿ Mar 8, 2024 11:20

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# ¿ May 17, 2024 19:03

The Artificial Kid: Feb 22, 2002; Plibble

I remember back around the turn of the millennium when people like John Pilger and and Noam Chomsky were part of a largely coherent worldview in which America and its western allies were far less benign than they liked to seem, and were tipping into monstrous evil in Iraq and Afghanistan. The receipts were there. I met government officials who confirmed that the aluminium tubes intelligence on Iraq was bogus (they were for rocket bodies, not uranium centrifuges). The US failed to confirm any of their claims despite gaining total control of the country, etc. Then Julian Assange came on the scene with a perfectly cogent reason for anonymously releasing records of government and military malfeasance and exposed an overt war crime.

And since then it�s spiralled off into this weird world where formerly incisive critics are interlinked with networks of Kremlin-puppeteer disinformation spruikers of varying degrees of purity.

It seems like there are several things all happening at once. I�m getting older, tireder and nore gullible. Putin has emerged as a new challenger against Dick Cheney for the drown of �worst ravager of the concepts of truth and order in international relations�. And it�s sort of one of those �everything happens twice, first as tragedy then as farce� things except it�s �then as farce + nuclear sabre rattling�. America has no doubt got better at propaganda, and I�ve got more tied into algorithmic propaganda networks for �my side�, and at the same time Russia has been exposed to be running massive disinformation efforts that were probably always there in weaker forms. Mainstream America also seems to have genuinely resiled from the worst excesses of the war on terror (which makes it all the more remarkable how much terrible poo poo they still get up to).

The thing that does my head in is trying to work out how much better America has actually become (relative to the rise of figures like Putin) vs how much the wool has just been pulled over my ageing eyes. 20 years ago I thought pine gap was an affront to our sovereignty, and it still is, but part of me also thinks that maybe in the third and fourth decades of the 21st century there might be worse things than belonging to an alliance that can see everything, everywhere.

The Artificial Kid fucked around with this message at 08:59 on Mar 9, 2024

# ¿ Mar 9, 2024 08:57

The Artificial Kid: Feb 22, 2002; Plibble

I would blow Dane Cook posted:

https://twitter.com/SatPaper/status/1766350856440398141

Nuclear is the real punk rock. We don�t want grandpa�s stuffy old solar panels.

# ¿ Mar 9, 2024 09:10

The Artificial Kid: Feb 22, 2002; Plibble

freebooter posted:

On the contrary to the wool being pulled over your ageing eyes, you have grown up and come to the correct understanding that the world is a more complex place than it appeared when you were in your late teens or early twenties and were taking your political lessons from tankies.

We didn't have proper tankies back in the early oughts, just fringe communists who manned hopeful booths at other people's protests trying to get a few more washed up weirdos to join their cliques.

To be clear: I don't think my views of that time were substantially wrong, although they were probably more youthfully exuberant and unchallenged. The most salient thing for me is that I used to have right wingers, racists and hawks calling me a liberal as a slur because I believed in peace, international order, healthcare free at the point of care and a generous social safety net. Now I have self-proclaimed leftists calling me a liberal, also as a slur, for essentially unchanged beliefs. What seems to have happened is a bunch of people went so nuts, between America's crimes and the Russian propaganda firehose, that they can no longer really deal with nuanced reality at all. But I can't help acknowledging the possibility that if I suddenly find America under Biden more palatable maybe the problem is I'm not seeing as clearly as I used to.

Solemn Sloth posted:

I�m not sure now is the time to talk about how thank god mainstream American politics has come back from the brink of the early 2000s

In many ways, no. But it's a cool zone, where evading the imminent peril of fascism can mean veering into the sunlit uplands of social democracy and benign hegemony.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2024 07:08

The Artificial Kid: Feb 22, 2002; Plibble

freebooter posted:

You named John Pilger, for example, who is my go-to example of a 21st century tankie as defined by e.g. what someone thinks about Russia's invasion of Ukraine or Assad using chemical weapons on his own people.

I think about this a lot too; for those of us who were in our late teens and early twenties and therefore became politically aware in the 2000s atmosphere of unquestioned American hegemony and GWOT overreach it is, even on a long timescale, a bit whiplash-inducing to adjust to a world where Russia and China are serious authoritarian powers in a multipolar world, and also the right-wing of American politics is cruising into nascent fascism.

I guess for me it happened so gradually that I never doubted I was still seeing clearly; it was more of a realisation that the Pilgers of the world, or the red triangle watermelon set on Twitter, or the people who post in this particular thread, are in fact fringe viewpoints; which does not necessarily make them always wrong but did make me evaluate their claims more critically. Just because people are saying something contrary to what the Herald Sun is saying doesn't automatically make them right, in the same way that the United States doing bad things does not mean Russia is actually good.

I don�t know when the term tankie was coined but I never heard it back then. I think we�re basically on the same page. The absolute wrong of the war on terror made a bunch of stopped clocks right. But it also seems like a lot of unanswered questions about the west, its socioeconomics and its geopolitics are being bulldozed into a trench by the tech revolution.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2024 11:21

The Artificial Kid: Feb 22, 2002; Plibble

thatbastardken posted:

thought it was from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_Spring

hmm no this is earlier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_Revolution_of_1956

Sorry, I should have said I know where the word comes from but I don't know when it started being used for segments of the online left/horsehoe tips. It wasn't common twenty years ago. I first noticed it when I came back here after a long hiatus around pandemic time.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2024 11:56

The Artificial Kid: Feb 22, 2002; Plibble

Lid posted:

It's counterpart on the right is western war hawks and mega racists, though I honestly think tankies are right wing as they are very pro-fascism when it's their people.

Absolutely they're authoritarian to the bone. The kind of people who are just waiting for someone to hand them an AK so they can line up the normies. Seeing tankies in action is how I've finally come to understand the hippies-turned-neocons who were such a puzzle in 2002. I realise now that the missing link was that narcissistic, authoritarian cunts who secretly despise and think themselves superior to everyone else flock together.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2024 12:13

The Artificial Kid: Feb 22, 2002; Plibble

Finally someone is calling out the tyranny of the male gays.

# ¿ Mar 12, 2024 10:54

The Artificial Kid: Feb 22, 2002; Plibble

Bucky Fullminster posted:

I regret to report it's time to take the Holly Valance posters down from the walls of our childhood bedrooms.

https://x.com/WillKingston/status/1768816213520507105?s=20

Obligatory reminder that this is a product of the toxic disinformation machine.

�Why would you bother going to your music lesson if we�re all going to be dead in five years. No I don�t want to address the question of whether or not there�s a real crisis so bad that it might depress children. I just want people to shut up about it�

# ¿ Mar 16, 2024 05:42

The Artificial Kid: Feb 22, 2002; Plibble

CAT INTERCEPTOR posted:

While I completely agree LLM's / Generative Computation is a bubble that badly needs to burst and gently caress off, unlike Crypto it does has some use, so the tech companies like Microsoft - ESP Microsoft - are going to leverage the small amount of use cases to keep forcing it everywhere and it's going to stay like a smelly poo poo dumped in the middle of the room no one wants to clean up. Crypto can gently caress off tomorrow and no one but the bag holders will notice or care, cant say the same for LLM's or Generative Computing now.

Microsoft is profiting heavily from it all because Azure is the backbone of so loving much of it, a lot more than I think most even in tech realise.

This is wrong and fortunalty I dont need to point out that it's dribble from the Crypto bros, thanks to those who already debunked.

Plus lets say it's .5%. 0.5% of thw ALL the worlds energy going towards doing exactly nothing of worth when all that power could be used to do real poo poo that can reduce carbon. ANY power used by crypto poo poo is wasted.

The big problem now tho is as crypto goes out the window, LLM's are taking the power instead, we are just so loving dumb as a species.

Because LLMs interface linguistically with human users they can probably be hot swapped for something new and better more easily than almost any previous technology in history.

# ¿ May 2, 2024 13:42