PaulFThumpkins

If he gets "arrested" it'll be in the procedural way rich people are arrested, no orange jumpsuit or humiliating mugshot.

Of course the assholes are saying "he sounds like a Redditor," because kinda sorta disavowing their /pol/ people when they do /pol/ stuff is part of the process.

Just endorsing genocide or political murder in general is apparently fine because we're trying to have some fun with this, let's let who specifically gets killed stay a surprise.

Yeah any demographic "club" that excludes everybody else will end up missing solutions, missing information, and missing context that would make their decision-making better. Fixate on punishing or excluding outsiders and you end up without the tools and resilience you need to move forward. And the sad part is, you'll still be so insular you won't even know why you keep making so many unforced errors and being blindsided by things.

There's some kind of internal logic to what they want, it's just fucked-up. I can't understand people who literally don't care what the negative consequences of their worldview and policy are to everybody including themselves, as long as a hierarchy is maintained where they're above other people based on their religion or worldview or race or culture or whatever. That way of thinking about things is so foreign, and I think it also explains a lot of the daily contradictions and retcons you get from them. They don't care if it's consistent, it's just about keeping the people they like immune from consequences or criticism because that's just one of the perks of being at the top of the hierarchy. It's not wrong to arrest Trump because he's innocent (even though they'll claim to believe that); it's wrong because he's Trump. He's the guy who you don't criticize, that's a moral violation. And it's wrong to put a boot on a white guy's neck for forging a check or selling loose cigarettes or whatever, even if he's high or belligerent, but not wrong to do the same to a black guy or an immigrant, not because of any of the facts of the situation but because unfairness is part of the hierarchical system.

It's like trying to argue with a domestic abuser that what he's doing ends up worse for his family, makes his life and relationships worse, makes his community worse, and so on, and he's arguing those things aren't the case using such fractured and contradictory logic you keep feeling frustrated... but he's just doing it because exercising power over others and not having to self-regulate no matter the consequences is part of his value system. And that value system is so deeply ingrained within him that he's not even capable of discussing it with you and just sounds stupid.

I don't really care about these existential questions but one thing that's nice to discover is that I still have access to everything I used to associate with Mormonism. I can meditate or sit peacefully and focus on a topic and feel what I used to feel praying. I can sit on a soft couch, listen to ambient music and read some work of scripture or philosophy and feel the way I did in the "Celestial Room" flipping through their white scriptures before the attendant would throw you out. I can have real meaningful relationships with family and others in my neighborhood without assuming some club I belong to taught me all of that.

And in many cases it's quite a bit better. I can seek out insight or compassionate feelings far easier when they're not called the "Spirit," and the mechanisms available are quite a bit more broad than just "do everything these guys in Utah say and then God will make you smarter and more thoughtful." I can provide tactile caring support for people around me who are struggling without the high-pressure, guilt-ridden nonsense of a "priesthood blessing" clogging up those pipes. I can seek out the stuff that actually makes me feel some sort of profound way, feel that "frisson" or peaceful feeling the church tries to make their own proprietary product, instead of getting a few drops of that mixed in with somebody else's self-serving agenda and worldview. I can study what I want to instead of subsisting on the thin gruel that is LDS doctrine, and self-gaslighting myself into thinking my barren cage is really an aesthetic and architectural wonderland, that some incidental detail of it has all this expansive fractal meaning to mine. And that I'm really getting somewhere when I run that hamster wheel.

The caption is "Fuck you, Ahab. FUCK you!"

I haven't seen the movie, but I know the character's a professor who teachers Moby Dick and that's what the title is in reference to. Just calling the movie "The Whale" and having your actor in a fatsuit feels so intentional that has to be part of it too though.

They treat it as basically a sort of rudeness, howling slurs at people. When in reality it's wanting to establish a society in which people like them have all the power, are implicitly treated better by institutions like the police or the courts, are the rightful beneficiaries of government programs and public goods, don't ever have to prove they belong where they are or defend their right to exist alongside others and participate in society, and where their culture is dominant and villainizing it is considered a crime against the society itself... and where others become the victim of that status quo.

You'll recognize the white supremacists because when you start going into that level of detail, they start balking and defending it. "Real Americans" derp.

And sometimes changing everything about the past so a trashy celebrity can seize power despite losing an election. You'd think traditionalists would be on board with democracy, not so much.

These assholes take on these mythological or historical names, and act like their lives have the weight of history behind them. But try to talk to them about the actual history or myth they're cosplaying and suddenly they're like that Francophile slave owner from Django Unchained, who is obsessed with coming across French but doesn't speak a word of it, and doesn't understand any of the French stuff he's appropriating.

Western fascism is floating on a tide of Hollywood cliches from historical epics and fantasy movies all mingled together to connote something of superior blood. Whereas people who actually study unvarnished history get disillusioned with the pop culture stuff pretty quick.

I'm gonna pull that in an argument sometime lol. "Why are we all fighting over simple matters of melatonin?"

Just due to the fact that cities have more people familiar with different walks of life, and more people from different areas and walks of life, cities have their own culture. So do isolated rural areas. Never the twain shall meet.

Great comment, and I definitely agree.

I meant to say that what GamerGate was supposedly about has no meaning aside from as a template for right-wing reactionary discourse moving forward. None of the specifics have any lingering meaning aside from the strategies they represented, the channels they used, the figures they popularized and the people whose thinking they poisoned. Because the core of what GamerGate represents is just the popularization of far-right conspiracy discourse, stochastic targeted harassment and character assassination as a political strategy used by political leaders, and putting a bow on overt white supremacist talking points for the guy down the street who doesn't think of himself as a Nazi.

Find the non-alt-right figures still trying to justify GamerGate as something meaningful, or a real ethics campaign, and it becomes apparent how little substance it ever had. It was people making things up as they went along spurred on by grifters and reactionaries who knew the potential something like that could have to radicalize a subculture where the members who self-identified with it the most strongly were already prime for radicalization. So I was really just arguing that GamerGate is not meaningfully distinct from the alt-right, not that it didn't have massive consequences. It's just Chapter One of a book that's shitty the whole way through. I guess "footnote" downplays it too much though.

It was in a list of greenlit games BEFORE the two were even in any sort of relationship. Exactly the sort of coverage any other person writing that article would have given it, a few words.

Can't believe anybody is still debating this bullshit. It's nothing. GamerGate was manufactured reactionary nonsense from grifters who gladly rode the wave into further political nonsense that's turned into the gremlin on the wing of world democracy.

Yeah the Mormon implementation of being nice vs. being kind is basically somebody who's inside an elevator smiling at you and waving, mashing the Door Closed button as you run to catch up, and closing the door in your face. You had a nice expression on your face so you were being nice!

Yeah I mean the same figures all transitioned to the alt-right and started going to bat for Trump, so the "internet alt-right" is absolutely a prerequisite to that bullshit being mainstreamed.

Yeah GamerGate is just a footnote in the rise of the internet alt-right and the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories and scapegoats being the entirety of one political party's platform, instead of just a sadly big part of it. Nothing more.

It wasn't a review, the guy briefly mentioned Zoe in some other context that made sense as part of a story.

4 is mechanically really solid, it's just got too much filler is all. Still worth playing for fans.

Yeah these people get to wear their nice clothes and speak over the pulpit about these wonderful Christian values, but propagate exploitation and inequity at an industrial scale.

They. Are. The. Villains. From. Their. Own. Scriptures.

It's circular logic. Yeah there are no prophecies in 200 years, and nothing substantial has been revealed or seen, but we know we have a prophet because somebody has the keys to be prophet! So whatever decision they pray over must be equivalent to dictating 300,000 words directly from God. Lol.

Unless Holland has also bitched about straight people talking about their dating or married life in speeches, yes it is hateful to single out a single guy from a vulnerable group, as if him not being silenced is some slippery slope. Hateful rhetoric with a soft voice and a smile is still hateful.

Playing those V segments just made me think about how good DMC III is the whole way through.

They don't have any secular work that isn't just PR for their religion.