isaacsapphire

[isaacsapphire]

Uh, do you have any examples or references of this shift away from Identity to Class? What year did this occur? Do you have anything that would demonstrate that it is a widespread sea change rather than a couple local activists shifting strategies?

decades of oppression-based identity politics on the left seem to be reaching its apex, by which I mean a collapse/snapback is inevitable

It's inherently unstable, creating a coalition of people whose only connection is a sense they've been wronged...and who base their value on the degree of wronged that they've been subjected to.

It also creates a permanent slave class who will actively resist bettering themselves. Because first off, that implies something's wrong with them and they are beautiful and perfect in their brokenness thank you very much. Second, they risk losing their place in the oppression pyramid...they may even become the oppressor if they get too better! Third, as any officially oppressed(tm) person here will tell you at length, they have a dozen or more reasons why they simply can never be better and why they need the world to instead cater to them forever.

It's a fucked up crab bucket situation and the best part is there's no walking it back. Well, the "best" part. Because signs of the inevitable blowback are already showing and I fear just how far things will go. As a certified not-normal guy I doubt things are going to be great.

[isaacsapphire]

Who’s actually doing this “Newthink” then? Is this something that colleges and HR departments just invented whole-cloth over the last decade or so and has no relationship at all to the dear Democratic Party?

I keep running into people who insist this ideology has absolutely nothing to do with their darling Democratic Party, and yet people keep thinking it’s associated with the Democratic Party. Wtf is going on? Certainly Fox News and its imitators like to amplify the excesses of the “Newthink” and associate it with the Democrats, but if it’s all a lie, why don’t the Democrats rein it in?

Political Think Tank: You are unelectable because you're alienating a ton of people, even those who used to be part of your base

The Democratic Core: If those fucking nazi yokels don't like our newthink we'll slit their throats and use their blood to lube our bike chains. btw why do those evil fascists keep winning?

[isaacsapphire]

Jeeze, what events happened between the 1800s and World War Two?

Yearning for the days of… the Austro Hungarian, Ottoman, etc Empires. So silly to aspire to a nation state, to aspire to the protection of borders, to aspire to self-rule. What kind of crazy person would reject the benevolent rule of some far off monarch?

You’re being disingenuous Island Owl, the answers are in the basic textbooks.

one of the great problems with the world since the 1800s has been its division into ethnic nation states, which accelerated in the conflagration of WWII and continues to the present day as we fight over borders, forcing some people out of their homes and preventing others from leaving in a bloody and fruitless attempt to divide humanity; countries suck, fuck your country!

it's interesting to consider whether this ruinous ethnic division could have been achieved without violence and bloodshed, perhaps by a system of incentives for people to move or stay; personally I highly doubt it, but granting the hypothetical of a world perfectly segregated by language and race and religion and every ethnic boundary both real and imaginary it would remain a fact that people still want to move around! whether for work or study or love or simple curiosity, and even when people don't move their ideas do, there is no way to paint the world by numbers without inflicting horrors on the people who live in it -- and why do you even want to do it in the first place??

if you love "a people" without loving a person then you don't love anyone at all.

[isaacsapphire]

There’s more people, and hence per capita fewer Disney Park “slots”. It’s a luxury experience for children of the wealthy now, and the people of Walmart are second class visitors if they make it to the parks at all.

Das economics babbey.

I have long since accepted that most people just enjoy things more than me but whenever I'm confronted with just how much money Disney bleeds out of you to spend a day at an overcrowded amusement park I'm literally taken aback wondering how anyone could possibly think it's worth it.

[isaacsapphire]

The teachers are government workers, the politicians are their employers. Other government worker unions do similarly. And of course non government employee unions are impacted by politics so they also have to encourage politicians to favor their constituents interests, and the interests of unions in general.

Like, I am not a big fan of unions in general or government worker unions in particular, and even less a fan of teachers unions in particular, but this is normal behavior, that, insofar as it is objectionable, is no more objectionable than the behavior of eg. Police unions.

[isaacsapphire]

@i-rate-horse-games there’s a horse game in there.

i think the near-extinction of people making fun, deep and/or unique interactive text-based browser games, projects and stories is catastrophic to the internet. i'm talking pre-itch.io era, nothing against it.

there are a lot of fun ones listed here and here but for the most part, they were made years ago and are now a dying breed. i get why. there's no money in it. factoring in the cost of web hosting and servers, it probably costs money. it's just sad that it's a dying art form.

anyway, here's some of my favorite browser-based interactive projects and games, if you're into that kind of thing. 90% of them are on the lists that i linked above.

A Better World - create an alternate history timeline

Alter Ego - abandonware birth-to-death life simulator game

Seedship - text-based game about colonizing a new planet

Sandboxels or ThisIsSand - free-falling sand physics games

Little Alchemy 2 - combine various elements to make new ones

Infinite Craft - kind of the same as Little Alchemy

ZenGM - simulate sports

Tamajoji - browser-based tamagotchi

IFDB - interactive fiction database (text adventure games)

Written Realms - more text adventure games with a user interface

The Cafe & Diner - mystery game

The New Campaign Trail - US presidential campaign game

Money Simulator - simulate financial decisions

Genesis - text-based adventure/fantasy game

Level 13 - text-based science fiction adventure game

Miniconomy - player driven economy game

Checkbox Olympics - games involving clicking checkboxes

BrantSteele.net - game show and Hunger Games simulators

Murder Games - fight to the death simulator by Orteil

Cookie Clicker - different but felt weird not including it. by Orteil.

if you're ever thinking about making a niche project that only a select number of individuals will be nerdy enough to enjoy, keep in mind i've been playing some of these games off and on for 20~ years (Alter Ego, for example). quite literally a lifetime of replayability.

[isaacsapphire]

@roger-maylor-brian-tay between these and all the “this is Gil and Tarvek in Girl Genius” responses, I think this was a fairly popular trope in a certain era.

meet cute: it's raining and I see your battered bleeding body lying in the mud and I kick it slightly to see if you're dead

[isaacsapphire]

Political Think Tank: You are unelectable because you're alienating a ton of people, even those who used to be part of your base

The Democratic Core: If those fucking nazi yokels don't like our newthink we'll slit their throats and use their blood to lube our bike chains. btw why do those evil fascists keep winning?

[isaacsapphire]

Homeownership is unattainable now too, so it’s literally impossible to buy into the system if you want to. Whatever will happen next? Perhaps we will live to find out.

I suppose its easy to feel like you're the vanguard of some great and powerful revolution when you're in your 20s, where it feels like all you newly minted adults are really going to change everything, without realizing the wall was coming

For the majority of the young revolutionaries that fire will go out pretty fast once they get a career and a kid. I can't speak for everyone I suppose but it seems like most would rather have a family and a career than to live in squalor and die for the cause(tm), and they figure that out fairly fast.

Having said all that, if that were true it would make the growing population of childless young men who feel they have no prospects--career or family--seem slightly alarming, wouldn't it?

A society that has lost the carrot(s) used to lead the bulk of young idiots away from their perpetual desire to tear things down runs the risk of someone managing to harness that desire for their own means.

[isaacsapphire]

Yup. And it’s not going to be pretty for anyone.

decades of oppression-based identity politics on the left seem to be reaching its apex, by which I mean a collapse/snapback is inevitable

It's inherently unstable, creating a coalition of people whose only connection is a sense they've been wronged...and who base their value on the degree of wronged that they've been subjected to.

It also creates a permanent slave class who will actively resist bettering themselves. Because first off, that implies something's wrong with them and they are beautiful and perfect in their brokenness thank you very much. Second, they risk losing their place in the oppression pyramid...they may even become the oppressor if they get too better! Third, as any officially oppressed(tm) person here will tell you at length, they have a dozen or more reasons why they simply can never be better and why they need the world to instead cater to them forever.

It's a fucked up crab bucket situation and the best part is there's no walking it back. Well, the "best" part. Because signs of the inevitable blowback are already showing and I fear just how far things will go. As a certified not-normal guy I doubt things are going to be great.

[isaacsapphire]

Like to charge, reblog to cast lols.

I have seen dozens and dozens of advertisements pop up in the last week pushing "0% down home purchasing assistance" programs "regardless of credit"

Housing market is SO about to crash

[isaacsapphire]

Yuuup, I was deeply tempted to do various imperialists past and present saying the above as a response.

Alternatively, hey OP how do you feel about colonialism and decolonization, lols.

borders between countries aren't real btw we just made them up. there's no such thing as an "immigrant" we're all just people moving around on the same planet that we've always moved around on

[isaacsapphire]

Isn’t it normal union behavior to engage in political advocacy for their constituents? Like, donations to PACs and political bribery campaigns to advance their interests are literally what the union exists to do.

[isaacsapphire]

Setting up for this pretty obviously imo

[isaacsapphire]

@entanglingbriars position above is pretty accurate to my observations… except for the “White American Protestantism” part. Have you never met Black American Protestants?! They make American Protestants in a few more colors too, but Black American Protestants have multiple entire denominations. Stop pretending this is a specifically White belief system, because it’s not.

Why do american atheists get so mad when it's pointed out that they are culturally christian?

Here's what I've seen among the ones who do this:

1: They think "culturally Christian" is an inherently negative accusation, and incorrectly imagine it as something that's supposed to work like original sin - essentially, a bad thing you're tainted with.

(This is of course incorrect; "culturally Christian" is a neutral descriptor, simply used to point out that things are Christian in origin and therefore not religiously neutral. For example, the Gregorian calendar is culturally Christian. This doesn't make it inherently worse than any other calendar, it just means that it's a calendar created by Christians that centers Jesus - even if you change the BC and AD to BCE and CE.)

2: They think being called "culturally Christian" is the same as being told they're still believers in Jesus Christ deep down inside.

(This is also incorrect because being culturally Christian or participating in cultural Christianity doesn't have anything to do with your beliefs. If you participate in Christmas or Easter as a nonbeliever, you are participating in Christian culture. If you try and claim your holiday celebrations are religiously neutral - well, you're just straight-up wrong. If you try and claim they're religiously neutral in order to pressure, say, Jews into joining your celebrations, you are pushing religion on them even if you consider yourself non-religious.)

3: They are emotionally motivated to feel as distant from Christianity as possible. They've become atheists fairly recently, and have a lot of unhealed trauma.

(Taking your trauma out on people and trying to police what they say and do to make you feel more comfortable is not a healthy coping strategy. You need to focus on healing yourself, not try and police how religious minorities bring attention to and talk about Christian hegemony.)

4: They haven't learned how to think about and analyze things in nuanced ways yet.

(Not uncommon among younger people in general, and also to be expected from people who've left a Christian group that actively hindered critical thinking. Fortunately it's a skill that can be worked on.)

So yeah, that's what I've seen so far. It's a dash of ignorance plus a dash of emotional reaction.

[isaacsapphire]

“A book ban, Wells said, happens when a book is removed from a public or school library shelf because someone, for example, deems it harmful or morally offensive.”

Anybody got a goose meme for this? Like, this is profoundly disingenuous to the point of being a baldfaced lie. The honest version is, “… because someone other than a librarian deems it harmful or morally offensive.”

Alberta premier mad that the schools are doing what her government asked of them

[isaacsapphire]

Ditto. Cars aren’t what makes motorcycles death machines in slippery conditions, like common weather in most of the world such as “below freezing temperatures” and “rain”, it’s physics.

Perhaps golf carts are a reasonable comparison as four wheeled electric vehicles.

People Who Hate Cars / defend motorcycles are claiming that motorcycle dangerousness is largely due to cars.

I am... Skeptical.