#it's about ideological consistency

[captainjonnitkessler]

Actually wait, yeah, how are people reconciling their support for the Internet Archive with their hatred of AI? Authors were like "hey this website took all our work and is using it in ways we didn't agree to" and everyone lost their SHIT to the point of harassing authors over it. Now authors are like "hey this neural network took all our work and is using it in ways we didn't agree to" and people are tripping over themselves to support a lawsuit that could quite possibly set the precedent that makes fanfic illegal.

Obviously the real answer boils down to 'people think it's good for people to read books and bad for people to use AI', but fundamentally either authors have the right to determine where and how their work is used or they don't. Like if you don't think the Internet Archive distributing work for free does any active harm to an author, I'm not sure you can make the claim that a neural network scraping it among millions of other works IS doing active harm. Especially when it's not doing anything that fanfic authors aren't doing already.

[windcarvedlyre]

I've been following @druidposting's DR2 playthrough on discord and we just had a really good discussion about DR's Closing Arguments. Specifically the way the murderer is depicted as grey and featureless, which until now I found a bit annoying.

In Danganronpa it's repeatedly the case that we don't have the full picture until the talking actually stops- which always goes beyond the end of the trial. We generally vote first and come to understand what the murderer's actual motive was, sometimes filling in important pieces of the timeline in the process, afterwards.

But none of that matters for the killing game because characters' emotions aren't directly relevant to who was the 'blackened'- the only thing that matters to Monokuma- so it comes out afterwards and does nothing to change their execution. It doesn't matter how sympathetic they are (basically everyone) or whether other people share responsibility for the situation (eg. Hanamura, Pekoyama, Momota) or whether they intended to murder at all (Nanami). They objectively pulled the trigger and nothing else matters. Nothing about them as a person matters.

The Closing Argument mechanic might illustrate that problem- literally. They're a dramatic, conclusive summary of the entire case... constructed before the vote even happens, before we know if we're actually right, and they're missing something really important:

The actual perpetrator.

We quite literally don't even begin to see the real person behind the crime, any real exploration of their mental state, anything besides the cold, hard facts of the murder that are necessary to convict them, until the comic finishes and the protagonist makes their final accusation- replacing the grey figure with their real appearance in a shot that's often intensely emotional.

And these comics lack crucial parts of the case's timeline and sometimes important parts of the very scenes they depict that we only find out about afterwards. And those are what we know; characters may die with some pieces of the truth and prevent us from ever learning them. These aren't objective depictions of the murder, they're the protagonist's subjective attempt to connect the facts they have. A join-the-dots portrait of someone with missing dots and no colour.

Even characters' expressions may not match how they truly feel, with the grey placeholder potentially looking way more confident and sinister than they were in reality. Pasting Falter's commentary here since they put it well.

For obvious reasons this could especially be a problem for characters that die before the trial- the ones we never get a post-vote testimony from. DR1 chapter 4 really highlighted that in the way Asahina's huge misinterpretation of Oogami's feelings took up a lot of the post-trial discussion, only for Monokuma to reveal Oogami's real suicide note and recontextualise everything.

It might really be a problem for how Komaeda's depicted in DR2 chapter 5. While he isn't greyed out, we get panel after panel where he's either level-headed or maniacally evil, and even the depictions of his self-torture and death don't humanise him:

But we know that his real feelings were more complicated than that. We have his actual corpse to compare the last page to.

He died afraid.

If we approach the comic as Hinata's mental image of him instead of reality, he died without anyone truly understanding him. He was alarming, very hard to relate to, actively fought against people doing so, ensured even the killer didn't watch him die, and the survivors couldn't begin to understand his motive until a chapter later. The Closing Argument reflects that.

Early in DR1 Togami calls out the rest of his class for judging others by their own standards. However, he, too, is doing this, maybe more so than many other characters; his inability to view other people through anything but the cold, brutal logic of the killing game bites him in the ass in chapter 4. In DR2 chapter 2 voting without a good understanding of Pekoyama's motive or Kuzuryuu's involvement nearly got everyone killed. Komaeda's a walking embodiment of the problems with flattening people into caricatures and not empathising with them, suffered from people doing that back to him, and his case- the Closing Argument for which turned everyone else into grey placeholders- was impossible to solve with objective facts. It was only survivable because the survivors cooperated and one person tried to analyse things the way he would.

The games have always been a critique of the justice system and Japanese society and push us to care about others as individuals, not reduce them to- and judge their right to exist by- something they've done or their net impact on society. There are always consequences when someone neglects to do that, and the above might be yet another way the games explore that theme.

[sapphire-theseainequator]

Mfw another funny harmless meme on tumblr is just transphobia + terfism

Love how the super progressive uwu let's be inclusive people gender is not real site would adopt memes that is just backward of their ideology

[rabbits-of-negative-euphoria]

recently heard someone describe the Barbie movie as a Rorschach test, and the more I think about it, I couldn't put it any better or more succinctly. Roger Ebert can retire now

[turian]

i love achievements as a feature on steam because it's so fun to be able to see what percentage of players of (for example) new vegas, did a thing. and then speculate on why. and compare to the percentage of players who did another ideologically dissimilar thing. and it also lets me know that not many people bothered with busking in bg3.

[paradoxius]

There needs to be a term for the kind of strawman-adjacent argument where, sure, there actually is a guy who believes that but I think he's a dumbass.

[teenagefeeling]

also. i'm actually really fucking sick of people trivializing social anxiety disorder as being socially awkward or shy and not being as bad as "real" neurodivergencies or disabilities. like how can you be constantly talking about trying to reduce mental health stigma while consistently throwing the most common mental disorder under the bus

[kitchensinksurrealism]

guess who won in my constituency!!!!! it was.................

*drum roll*

some tory guy again 😔

[aph-estonia]

you know what's crazy is at least where i live piv sex is legal at 16 but anal sex isn't. you have to legally be 18 to fuck in the butt. i know so many criminals. i might even be one

[fatalism-and-villainy]

Something I love about DS9’s framing of Jake Sisko is how he’s consistently positioned as someone worthy of protection, whose survival and flourishing and emotional well-being are of tantamount importance, and whose innocence and vulnerability are precious.

It’s present from all directions in The Visitor. Everybody protectively closes ranks around Jake upon Ben’s disappearance, with those little moments of Dax and Kira and Bashir giving him physical affection and reassurance and Quark going out of his way to be nice to him. Jake’s older self’s protective impulses towards his younger self, as well as his desire to save his father, are the basis for the timeline reset. And then after the spacetime continuum gets wrenched back in line purely to save Jake from the emotional trauma of losing his father, the episode ends with Ben, who’s borne witness to everything and is the only one who remembers it all, continuing that work of shielding Jake from that knowledge.

And then Nor the Battle to the Strong carries on the thread of protectiveness towards Jake, in that case as part of the episode’s deconstruction of military heroism. As he’s marinating in shame over bailing on the mission to retrieve the generator, Bashir apologizes to him and says he was wrong to put Jake in harm’s way in the first place. And then at the end, he wakes up after sealing the cave entranceway and both Bashir and his father are tenderly looking after him, with similar imagery to The Visitor in terms of him being symbolically cradled by the other cast members’ concern for him. He never needs to toughen up or grow out of that need to be rescued - in fact, his fear and panic and feelings of being out of his depth prove to be immensely valuable, as his last conversation with his father emphasizes, because he’s able to bear witness to the experience of the soldiers through his writing.

That comes through in a really interesting way in Valiant as well, with Jake’s emphatic concern for his own survival in the midst of all the culty militaristic weirdness of the Valiant crew:

Nog: You don’t understand, because you’ve never put on one of these uniforms. You don’t know anything about sacrifice, or honor, or duty, or any other things that make up a soldier’s life. I’m part of something larger than myself. All you care about is you.

Jake: That’s right. All I care about is Jake Sisko and whether or not he’s going to be killed by a bunch of delusional fanatics looking for martyrdom.

And I love that exchange not only because it’s a rare articulation of how I would actually feel in a situation like that in a franchise full of characters who are all prepared to sacrifice themselves in the line of duty, but also because in the context of the episode, Jake’s position is actually the heroic one! It’s his sense of self-preservation, and the fact that he hasn’t romanticized the notion of heroic sacrifice, that enables him to see through the dogmatic ideology of the Valiant cadets and recognize how dangerously out of their depth they are. And it’s just a nice articulation of his own worth.

(And of course the Defiant rescues them at the end, because Jake’s grown up now, but he hasn’t outgrown needing his father to save him. And that’s never a shameful thing, but a really beautiful thing, and necessary to the fabric of the show.)

[vamptastic]

kantian ethics are very fun even though i disagree with nearly all of them however. GOD he is hard to fucking read.

[psychotrenny]

It reveals very deep flaws in your ideological framework if you consistently take the position that "Pedojacketing harassment campaigns against trans women are good if happen to be actual Pedos", especially when your definition of "actual Pedo" is "watches the bad sort of Japanese Cartoons". Like from a coherent materialist point of view, these sorts of campaigns aren't bad because they happen to get wrongly weaponised against innocent transfems. They're bad because this sort of interpersonal harassment is completely useless for both dismantling the systems that make child abuse possible and meaningfully rectifying specific cases of abuse on an individual scale, even in the relatively rare* cases where the target does legitimately support or even engage in this abuse.

This ineffectiveness is especially egregious when the criteria for involvement in abuse isn't based off any actual social relations but merely public engagement with sufficiently reactionary media; determining threat through a usually tenuous and always idealist association. And it's even more egregious when the media being cited isn't "reactionary" by any standard beyond the ignorant homogenisation of an entire nation's media supported by various incorrect assumptions about its general social and legal conditions. The fact that an ostensible "Marxist-Leninist" can hold a position even remotely favourable to these tactics simply demonstrates how detached knowledge of Dialectical Materialism does not automatically translate into an ability to apply it.

*by the nature of these campaigns being most common and effective against those who are least able to defend themselves i.e. those who are most structurally disadvantaged by the very systems that create this abuse in the first place. One a structural level these tactics are oriented towards hurting the vulnerable by rhetorically exploiting the spectre of abuse, not at protecting the vulnerable from actual abuse

[snovyda]

[...] A major international media outlet asked me recently to join its educational platform. I had to record a video message in English and talk about my experience of serving in the armed forces of Ukraine, so children around the world could learn English from these videos and accompanying materials. I recorded it and did everything according to their instructions.

I got a cheerful message the other day from the editorial office, saying: “We’ve launched!” I opened the presentation and had a panic attack. The lesson was structured around eight speakers, each talking about their war experience: four Ukrainians (including me) and four Russians. A Russian journalist and armed forces “deserter”. A Russian teacher. A Russian medical director. Another Russian journalist. The lesson ended with a slide. The Russian flag was at the top. The Ukrainian flag at the bottom. The question proposed for discussion: “What similarities and differences did you notice when listening to the experiences of people from Russia and Ukraine?”

The emotional negligence of this makes me want to scream. [...] I am sickened by how my story has become an ideological tool to equalise the experience of the defender and the attacker. [...]

I’ve been living with the acute feeling that the world is tired of restraining its unquenchable love of Russia. The west wants to believe in the Cinderella story, that one day the dictatorship will fall and a wonderful democratic world will emerge.

Instead of imposing further sanctions and restrictions on Russia, the west is ready to crown the film Anora with all the awards, despite the fact that the Russian actor Yura Borisov, who appears in the film, also starred in a biopic of Mikhail Kalashnikov, the inventor of the AK-47, which was partly filmed in Crimea after its annexation.

The world is ready to listen to Russia again: a UK television channel last year released the film Ukraine’s War: The Other Side by Sean Langan. The film doesn’t just give the other side a voice; it gives a human dimension to the stories of the occupiers and repeats the narratives of Russian propaganda. This is as consistent with journalistic standards as asking an executioner, how are you feeling as you do this, and do you miss your family who are waiting for you at home?[...]

[...] If during the first term of Trump’s presidency we talked of the post-truth era, now we find ourselves in a world in which the truth is taken out, tortured and shot. This means that there will be no justice. This means that anything goes.[...]

[...] The world is looking at the body of truth that is dying and bleeding before our eyes. I beg you, if you can’t stop the bleeding, at least don’t turn away from the sight of blood.[...]

[communist-ojou-sama]

Like, this may come as a shock to people like Tumblr liberals who are totally stuck in the Western anglophone neoliberal ideology echo-chamber but like, outside of the west, out there where the majority of the worlds people live, Kwame Nkrumah's thought is taken more seriously than Milton Friedman's. So why will left liberals engage with Friedman's thought, even if only to debunk it, but not engage at all with Nkrumah's writings on neocolonialism, and just write it off?

There's a common charge leveled by supposedly "open-minded" liberals toward anti-imperialists, that we just 'blindly' support any force that's contravailing US the US on a regional or global scale, but how am I supposed to take this seriously as anything but projection?

We anti-imperialists often make specific, verifiable claims about happenings in global geopol, such as that the so-called "Free Syrian Army" consisted mostly of salafi jihadists allowed into Syria through their northern border with Turkey, and that it doesn't make sense that a civil war could simply Materialize in a country like Syria which right before the war started had one of the lowest ratios of guns to people in the world, or that the Maidan coup regime that swept into power in Kiev in 2014 was heavily infiltrated with fascists, and would not have been able to consolidate power without the instrumentalisation of fascist gangs and paramilitary organizations.

The liberal response to these specific claims, then, is to point to reports from corporate media with every incentive to lie, themselves doing no independent investigation but instead parroting verbatim the word of the State Department as fact, and dismissing all independent media investigations out of hand with no further thought.

In a situation such as this, can that response really be considered "open-minded"? It seems that time and time again intellectual rigor is reserved for discussions of technocratic tinkering within the west's iron curtain, and not the lives of people outside of it.

There's plenty of brain-juice to be expended on justifying why the US economy is actually in good shape and the people saying they're struggling more than before are just stupid, but when it comes to considering why African heads of state choose the China Development Bank over the IMF as an economic partner or Russia over the NATO states as security partners, these leaders of millions are dismissively written off as histrionically anti-Western, paranoid, and too mentally weak to see through Russian and Chinese propaganda. Is it this really a 'rational' way to look at the world?

Personally, I think not.

[heavenlymorals]

Details that I've noticed about Arthur Morgan-

-He, for the most part, despises male touch, especially if it's overly affectionate. He gets tense anytime a man hugs him and wants it to be over as quick as possible (Jamie, Mickey) and he looks visibly offended when Professor Bell touches him. He even sometimes gets annoyed when Dutch touches him on his shoulder, someone who he considers a father figure.

-On the flip side, he does not mind female touch at all. He even initiates it sometimes (Tilly, the girl at Beaver Hollow). Now one could argue that they were high stress situations, but if Tilly was a dude, he would've just set her free, make a snide remark, give her a gun, and then he'd expect her to help him with the fighting. He is completely cool with the nun giving him a hug and doesn't get offended when Mary Beth touches his hand in their therapy session.

- He seems to be pretty well read. He knows Shakespeare, with Romeo and Juliet, and Icarus. He makes other literary references. This is probably due to Dutch. Dutch is clearly very well read and cultured. However, Arthur seems more interested in practical works like guides then philosophy and stories, given that the only book he has on his tent desk is a plant guide.

- He's great at remembering faces and less so on remembering names.

- He does have an amazing propensity to remember physical features, like how he is able to create amazing portraits of the people he meets without consistent reference. It's incredible and works back to the whole great at remembering faces thing. Same goes for animals.

- He is very curious. He is always touching things, looking at things, critiquing things, and trying to understand how they work.

- He generally refuses to be emotionally open with men and does it only with women- this could be due to the idea of the Cult of Domesticity. I've made a post about it before. Compare him speaking with the nun to Reverend Swanson. Compare him speaking to John about Dutch leaving him to him speaking to Sadie about Dutch leaving him.

- He is very connected or is fond of artistic people. He and Mary Beth talk about their journals. He is fond of Albert Mason's photography and helps him out. He is interested in Charles Chataney's artistic work, even if he doesn't like it or connect with it.

- Since a lot of camp members respond to Arthur's antagonizations with something like "not again" or "I knew I'd be next", it's safe to assume Arthur will go off on people from time to time, regardless if you play high or low honor.

- Does not have a fixed temperament. In some missions, he is more energetic and in others, he is more downtrodden. Very realistic and I fucking love it.

- Has direct eye content at all times- will look anyone in the eye and does not give a fuck. NPCs will look away from him if he stares at them.

- Gets mad when men don't behave like men, especially when it concerns women. He gets pissed at John for not stepping up and being a man to his family. He gets annoyed and even pissed off when asking why Beau couldn't have helped Penelope Braithwaite as she is his woman.

- Given how the camp falls to shit whenever Arthur isn't donating, we can safely conclude that Arthur is the most valuable member of that camp, bar maybe Hosea and Dutch.

- He is very reminiscent of the Dark Romantic, which is really interesting as a lot of times, it can be looked at as the middle ground between Romantacism and Realism, two ideologies that were very popular in the 19th century. I will make a full analysis regarding this later.

- Introverted, but not shy at all. In fact, he's very charismatic and is just as good as dealing with people as Dutch and Hosea (The Riverboat Mission) This 'dumb, mumbling' cowboy thing he's dumbed down to in the fandom is an insult to his character.

- He probably acted like a father figure to Jamie Gillis when he was still with Mary, given the fact that he taught him how to ride a horse. Will probably also make a full post about this later.

- Some people say that Arthur is around 5'10-11. Others say He's 6'0-3. Whatever his height actually is, he's still way taller than the average man during this time period, who was around 5'6. Now imagine that with muscles and armed to the teeth- fucking terrifying.

- Very sentimental. He keeps a photo of his supposedly no good Pa and wears his hat. He keeps a photo of his mother who he doesn't really remember at all. He keeps a photo of his dog, a horseshoe that probably belonged to a dead and beloved horse. He keeps a flower from his mother. Keeps a photo of Mary as well. If he had a photo of Isaac, he'd probably keep that too.

-Arthur died at 36 years old from Tuberculosis if you play high honor. The real gunslinger and outlaw Doc Holliday died at the same exact age and the same exact way.

- Genuinely doesn't give a fuck about movements, social issues, and cultural issues, but does care about individual people.

- I love him

- So fucking much

- 😃

[starlit1daydream]

several consecutive rent-lowering gunshots since we are in a dire dire fucking state right now

Damara Megido did nothing wrong, and is a direct victim of a misogynistic cowardly cheater and an abuser who manipulated her position of privilege to make Damara's life hell for no coherent reason; everything she did was justified and directed solely at the architects of her own mental ruination.

Rufioh Nitram is a misogynistic cowardly cheater and a spineless bastard whose problems are consistently all his fucking fault. He repeatedly slings shit in the direction of the girlfriend whose life he ruined, and then proceeds to try and prey upon her younger descendant because he objectifies her in his mind.

Mituna Captor is a grown-ass adult man, he is fully capable of giving consent and very proudly has sex, very often and is in a genuinely happy and supportive relationship. He is not a child, his disability does not make him a child, and Cronus is textually his sexual and emotional abuser.

Kankri Vantas is a pathetic, ideologically incomprehensible bootlicker with no genuine principles beyond fellating the upper caste and supporting his own inflated ego; he is also a textual misogynist and Latula's stalker, and explicitly ableist when he tag teams with Cronus to bully Mituna.

Meulin Leijon is not upset about her deafness. To take a character with genuine pride in her disability and a love for her way of interacting with the world and turn it into a tragedy is outright ableism. She is also textually being emotionally manipulated by Kurloz.

Porrim Maryam is more than her sex life, she outright says that she is more than her sex life and boiling her whole characterisation down to her being a slut is literally just misogyny and goes against everything she stands for. She is 19, she is not your hentai MILF, for fuck's sake.

Latula Pyrope is not a gnarly coolkid and you have fallen for her facade if you think so. She is textually struggling with a lot of self-worth issues, mental health problems she can't confront and puts on a mask purely to cover up these things. She is more than the stereotype she claims to be. Fucking Knight of Mind, people!

Aranea Serket did not turn into a conniving villainess overnight, her desperate quest for relevance was the result of milennia of being ignored and overlooked by the people she was meant to call her friends, compounded with sweeps of isolation pushing her to a mental nadir.

Horuss Zahhak is textually, actually, genuinely real-world racist and belittles Damara to her face by calling her Japanese a pathetic peasant tongue and barely even humanises her in their interactions. He is also deliberately ignoring Rufioh's pleas to end their relationship - he is no saint in this arrangement.

Kurloz Makara is not your soft boy for your wholesome yaois and his relationships with everyone have an inherent power imbalance. Kurloz is a noted manipulator, and is literally attempting to bring about the fucking apocalypse by conspiring with the main antagonist. He is not a good partner.

Cronus Ampora is a horrible, horrible man who is written on purpose to be a horrible man and has no redeeming qualities by intention of the text. To have this misogynistic, abusive, eugenicist pedophile even glance in the direction of redemption is to defy the character his purpose.

Meenah Peixes is not hypermasculine, and she is not butch. Meenah is incredibly girly, and proud of it, and the masculinisation of her character by the fanbase is a direct byproduct of the racism they display when confronted with a black-coded character who displays even the slightest hint of aggression. Let her be her hyperfeminine self.