rendakuenthusiast:

obiternihili:

ragemovement:

When liberals Constantly use ‘45’, ‘head cheeto’, ‘drumpf’ etc to refer to trump….I’m just like “you know it isn’t like beetlejuice, right”

it’s just the liberal obummer

It’s exactly as stupid as obummer was. Or for that matter however people made fun of Bush. Or for that matter writing “Micro$oft” with a dollar sign.

It’s such a disgraceful way to refer to our first Meme-American President!

They need to have some cultural respect instead of just dismissing him over his unusually-saturated skin color!

balioc:

rowantheexplorer:

earlgraytay:

yieldsfalsehoodwhenquined:

systlin:

rowantheexplorer:

We really ought to bring back the term “grognards” for misogynist throwback geek boys. I know it used to be applied to “old school” tabletop gamer bros who refused to grow as game systems and gaming culture changed, but I think it’s a good term that deserves to be applied more broadly.

French for “complainers”, the historic grognards were Napoleon’s Old Imperial Guard that he let get away with complaining about stuff that others might go to the guillotine for saying. They were not good for morale, and pretty much universally reviled by the rest of the French Army. Even Napoleon wasn’t all that fond of them, but he let them get away with it because seniority.

I second this motion. 

the last time we took an insult that mocked already-hateable people for something relatively unimportant and tried to turn it into a synonym for “misogynist” it did not end particularly well

I hate the word ‘neckbeard’ (to the point where I think it’s an anti-autistic slur), but I still think this is a good idea. The difference is that having a neckbeard does not inherently make you an asshole, but being a grognard in the geek sense has always meant you’re an asshole. 

A grognard isn’t just ‘someone who likes older game systems and is sad that newer ones don’t have the features he wants them to’, a grognard is someone who’s That Fucking Guy about it. A guy who says that anyone who isn’t playing their preferred edition of a game is a Fake Geek who Has It Too Easy and Doesn’t Understand What Makes The Hobby Great (sound familiar?). A guy who’s willing to get in big flame wars on the internet about how OH MY GOD 1ST EDITION WAS THE BEST AND ANYONE ELSE WHO SAYS OTHERWISE IS LYING. A guy who, in short, believes No Fun Allowed unless it’s his preferred kind of fun.

‘Grognard’ thus has two connotations built into it that ‘neckbeard’ does not: 

1. “You’re being That Fucking Guy, stop it.”

2. “It’s just a game, you should really just relax.” 

As long as we’re careful to specify that this doesn’t just mean someone who’s socially awkward or “creepy” - it specifically means someone who’s That Fucking Guy about women/minorities/LGBT+ people in Nerd Stuff- I think it works.

This was exactly where I was going with it. Thank you for finding better vocabulary than me. Because I also hate the term “neckbeard”, and I also don’t like that we stick related stereotypes to “basement dwellers” and “fedora wearers”. Those things are not the problem with the behavior. That’s bullying someone’s outward appearance or living situation, and that’s not fair or right. But “les grognards” - the complainers - describes what they do, and carries with it why it’s a problem.

I appreciate where you’re coming from, I appreciate the distinctions that you’re trying to draw, but…this is not a good plan, folks, you will not like the thing it ends up doing.

As long as we’re careful to specify that this doesn’t just mean someone who’s socially awkward or “creepy” 

That never ever works.  Once you create a discursive category, it will immediately start mutating to fit the needs of the people in the discourse.  Once you create a discursive category that is specifically crafted to be an insult, it will immediately start being used to insult whatever groups people actually want to insult, so long as they’re close enough to the blast radius that the semantic stretch can be made to work.  That is how categorical language works.  And if you try to push against it, to defend the rigorous boundaries of your terminology…well, we’ve all seen how well the phrase “well, actually” fares in the wild. 

“Grognard” sounds a whole lot like it means “filthy basement-dwelling subhuman autistic neckbeard.”  Therefore, if it gains any traction, it will be used to mean that thing by the many people who are invested in making such attacks.  The niceties of your usage choices won’t have any power to constrain. 

---

To be clear: I don’t mean to be policing your private vocabulary here, it sucks when you can’t talk as you please, use whatever terminology makes you happy (and live with the consequences if/when people misunderstand you or diverge from your intentions).  But it sounds like you’re saying that it would be good to make a public campaign of spreading this particular usage of “grognard,” so as a member of the public I’m pushing back.

---

The best results are likely to come from not creating weaponizable categories.  Say the thing you mean, don’t chunk ideas together.  You want to say that someone is complaining about other people having Bad Wrong Fun?  Say “he’s complaining about people having Bad Wrong Fun, and he should stop.”  It’s more words than “grognard,” but the costs are much lower.

Yes, being redeployed against autistics or fat people or the unfashionable is the almost certain outcome of such an endeavor. You can’t euphemism treadmill your way out of being low status. Just ask the “retarded” - or was it “developmentally challenged” now? The establishment keeps trying, at any rate, but it will never work.

mutant-aesthetic:

buublack:

Is there a name for the genre of tumblr blog that posts interesting and detailed essays about (equally) interesting things but literally every other post is insufferable garbage?

the rationalists?

@argumate

@collapsedsquid

Then how do you think the Gen-Z Tumblr teens who are growing up now will turn out?  They’re forming their political worldview during the Trump years, I believe that they were somewhat continuing the trend of the younger Millennials but that’s the sort of thing that seems likely to change.

I’m not sure.  The Obama Administration continued with the droning, and bombing, and disrupted Libya, but its outward presentation, aided by the Media, was pretty chill, and as such it didn’t generate quite the same sort of backlash.  Who will grow up, look at Obama, and celebrate voting for the other party at the first opportunity because they feel like they missed the chance to oppose him the first/second time around?

Like, on one level, they should obviously react to Trump negatively and become Dem voters, right?  

So like, that’s what should happen, but…

Last I heard, trust in the Media is lower than trust in President Trump.  We’ve elected a living internet meme as President, and somehow this has happened.

(I admit, the reaction to the Trump Admin has made me more, rather than less, sympathetic towards it.  Perhaps I’m just evil that way.)

Likewise, the Dems have tied themselves up in idpol knots, and that stuff is toxic.  And aside from that they have other problems.

And the whole gamer thing?  That was supposed to have way less memeforce than it did, but the political awakening of thousands of young people was the Media lying about them over exploded Internet drama.

And the lid’s blown on some of the stuff going on in Europe.  You can choose whether to believe it or not, or whether it’s important or not, but it’s no longer a supremacy of the Liberal narrative that multiculturalism has no downsides whatsoever and is completely safe.

I think, probably, Trump is actually going to generate less generational backlash than Bush did.  That’s what my intuition says.  By being such a meme, he’s turned hatred against himself into a performance, and that has weakened its conversion effectiveness.

It mostly depends on whether we get in another war.

collapsedsquid:

mitigatedchaos:

@collapsedsquid On the other hand, given proportional manpower required relative to population size (small, due to force multipliers), and the wave of response to 9/11, would a draft have prevented the Iraq War from getting launched?

I’m not so sure.  And that’s an enormous political cost to pay if it may not even work for that goal.

While the article called it a draft and I sort of continued that, in truth what I think it’s suggesting is some sort of mandatory national service program. “Requiring everyone to serve“ is the phrase used in the article.

And I wasn’t suggesting it as policy, I was discussing it as something to react to.

Right, I just mean the general case of “well America would be less likely to randomly go to war if it had a draft,” since that did come up.  I do think we should be looking for ways to prevent the next Iraq War, I just don’t think that would work for that.  (Though I’m not quite opposed national service in principle.)

As for left-leaning youngsters learning to fight, while the older Millennials are more strongly Democrat, apparently the younger ones are only weakly so, and the dividing line happens to correspond to how old people were during the Bush Administration.

(I don’t think the Bush Administration realized just how much damage they were doing to the cause of Conservatism itself in America.)

mutant-aesthetic:

moontouched-moogle:

w-r-o-u-g-h-t:

the fact hillary clinton has a children’s book is super creepy honestly

that’s political propaganda

it’s for children

how have i not seen anyone else freaking out about this

Probably because everyone’s too busy laughing and memeing about how awful and blatant it is

Don’t all political leaders in the US get children’s books? Like, I thought that shit was normal. Hillary’s is only noteworthy because it’s fucking awful.

I’ll be publishing my first children’s book soon.  It’s mostly about Singapore.

imp:

that whole radical vulnerability thing was just performative softness it wasnt actual vulnerability because it would be a lot darker otherwise lol

Ask meme!

…on the other hand, aren’t I kind of riding the line between fictional and real already?

osberend:

shieldfoss:

slatestarscratchpad:

kontextmaschine:

Mike Cernovich acquired a copy of that “Shitty Men in Media” list (he was offering $10,000) and is using it to run hit pieces

says he’s going to give the accused a chance to reply, I suspect that’s an excuse to sequence them strung out for maximum news impact, in priority as culture war enemies

What a moron.

These people are going to get away with it, because the accusations will forever be associated with the alt-right. If he’d waited a week or two, someone else would have taken the bait, published, and the media would have eaten it up.

But now the whole issue has been coded “of interest to racists” and everyone else will be careful not to touch it. The people involved will defend with “You’re accusing me of sexual harassment? Aha, I see you’re a fan of Mike Cernovich” and it’ll never go anywhere.

here you are assuming Cernovich intends to bring abusers to justice in an effort to help women

which

i mean

Nah, the analysis still applies if he wants to take down Biddle et al. for being sociopolitical enemies. Where it falls apart, of course, is if he really just wants to gather money and love from guess existing base for “boldly standing up to the hypocritical liberal media establishment,” etc. In that case, he’s actually better if the left drops it as a result of his support, because it gives him more “lone voice crying the wilderness” cred.

Beyond just him, does it not empower the hard right in general if this wagon circling happens?

One of the things that’s been really empowering for the hard right (in my opinion) are conditions in Europe, including sex crimes.  Because of just who was committing those crimes, they were able to gain a temporary monopoly on “justice” as a platform for that particular issue.  

Do people realize how bad that is for Liberals?

They’re building a narrative that the Left and the Liberals are thick with pedophiles, molesters, and sex traffickers, and that when they aren’t committing those crimes themselves, the Left and Liberals are willing to overlook them depending on ethnicity.

Circling the wagons isn’t what the Liberals should do.  The way to prevent the hard right from gaining ground in Rotherham was to be better than they were, by actually enforcing the laws, like they are supposed to and, ostensibly, which is in line with their principles.

We’ve seen that at least some of the hard right are willing to fabricate a narrative if they have to, but a non-fabricated narrative has a lot more solidity to it.  

So maybe they circle the wagons, and this outsider can’t actually take these guys down.  But what if the point isn’t to take them down?  What if the point is recruitment?  Long-term recruitment, shifting the margins of power, which, when you only need a majority, matters.

Their faction is relatively small right now, but it has room to grow in proportion to how badly their rivals fuck up and/or are disconnected from reality.

thathopeyetlives:

mitigatedchaos:

Been hanging onto my 3yo phone for environmental reasons and because I like having a removable battery.

Now I’m worrying if I won’t be able to get an upper-ish-tier Android phone with a removable battery if I wait too long, just like I wasn’t able to get one with a keyboard…

Any battery is removable if you try hard enough. What’s the motivation for that?

What, having a removable battery?

Aside from that I’m considering ordering a replacement battery for only like $10 + shipping, which would probably double my phone’s battery life again,

and environmental concerns, including opposition to planned obsolescence on these things that we’re paying so much for and spending so many resources on, which are not easy to recycle,

I like having the ability to turn turn a phone COMPLETELY OFF if it starts screaming and fucking up, or if I just want it to be completely and totally off, and my experience has been that the hardware switches to force this are apparently not hardwarey enough or something.

If the phone is not responding and has locked up while I am stranded somewhere, or I get into a social situation where the phone must be off now, I can literally physically remove the battery and force the issue whether the phone wants to turn off or not.  No waiting 12 hours for the battery to die.

rustingbridges: oh are they getting rid of removable batteries, why, why is that good

Supposedly, to make phones thinner or more waterproof.  In actuality, to limit phone effective lifespan.  I’d consider putting a luxury goods tax on it, and on all methods of planned obsolescence if I were in charge of things.

its-okae-carly-rae:

mitigatedchaos:

cultureulterior:

mitigatedchaos:

Anyhow, we’ll set the rest of that discussion aside for now, since I want to clarify how I differ from some of the others.

I don’t believe in the purely mind-pattern definition of self.

I don’t see uploads, if possible, as being identical people to the originals.  You might be able to Ship-of-Theseus something to cross that causal barrier, but then you have to actually Ship-of-Theseus it to get the appropriate causal entangling.

If I get shot, and you re-instance a brain backup into the blank nervous system of some sort of empty clone doll, I don’t wake up - the clone does.

My suspicion has only grown greater on this with the whole quantum stuff.

…not that having a near-identical clone go on without me isn’t at least somewhat comforting as an idea, but then, so is a nice grave compared to naught at all.

What about sleep?

It’s the same physical hardware, and I think that makes a difference.

Does that apply to your hypothetical digital copies as well, do they have to go through elaborate protocols of continuous operation to transfer from one datacentre to another without dying, or is it just the flesh-to-silicon transition that has this problem?

do they have to go through elaborate protocols of continuous operation to transfer from one datacentre to another without dying,

I would think so, but I am less likely to believe that consciousness is purely classical these days.

rendakuenthusiast:

thathopeyetlives:

In past ages, communists, socialists, and anarchists were usually reacting to a world in which resources were scarce in general as well as in specific and in which the situation of the poor in general was one of miserable deprivation. Meanwhile, the future potential of automation and robotics – machines which might not merely reduce the amount of work that needed to be done, but largely eliminate it – was not really visible. 

Today things are… different. 

It’s pretty common that I see far leftists more-or-less promising the following after a Revolution: 

1. That it will no longer be neccessary for everybody to work, and moreover that people will be permitted not to work, and yet to have enough to live on, without needing to justify not working to anybody. 

2. That industry will change to vastly decrease damage to the enviroment

3. That material quality of life and industrial capacity will not catastrophically plummet, especially not in things like medical technology

I think that this is… very optimistic. The kind of optimistic that no wise person would ever bet on. 

Some far leftists claim that communism is more efficient and will do better than capitalism. This is unlikely. The Soviet Union did great things – industrializing rapidly after everyone else had a head start and after having the Nazis burn half their country – but they were just catching up to others, and they were oppressive, enviromentally destructive, and didn’t let people not work by any means. It didn’t last. 

(However, in the post-Stalin soviet union, there were some labor rights that would make Americans drool.)

If you combine this with confiscationism and the intersectionality thing where anybody’s position in the grand hierarchy of justified people can be questioned, you have a nightmare: a society that continually eats itself, finding new classes of “bourgeoise” and kulaks and “counter-revolutionaries” to force into slave labor or just murder and loot, so that the Beautiful People can have their gleaming solarpunk utopia and their communism of leisure. 

I do not wish to suggest that I intend to be the enemy of hope; our current system is unjust and needs to be reformed. We can reform it in a way that will turn automation from a curse into a blessing, and which will improve peoples’ lives now and in the future. But this will not be revolution but counter-revolution, and will have no place for bloodstained red flags. 

Endorsed.

discoursedrome:

mitigatedchaos:

Anyhow, we’ll set the rest of that discussion aside for now, since I want to clarify how I differ from some of the others.

I don’t believe in the purely mind-pattern definition of self.

I don’t see uploads, if possible, as being identical people to the originals.  You might be able to Ship-of-Theseus something to cross that causal barrier, but then you have to actually Ship-of-Theseus it to get the appropriate causal entangling.

If I get shot, and you re-instance a brain backup into the blank nervous system of some sort of empty clone doll, I don’t wake up - the clone does.

My suspicion has only grown greater on this with the whole quantum stuff.

…not that having a near-identical clone go on without me isn’t at least somewhat comforting as an idea, but then, so is a nice grave compared to naught at all.

Now I’m very much in the Stop Picking On Death camp and we’ve had it out on that subject before, but, as you say, setting that aside: something that people who aspire to immortality tech need to grapple with, I think, is that any technology that pushes the boundaries of human survivability is going to change our concept of what “death” is. This has already happened to a limited extent: concepts of what death is and when it occurs have been pushed back by medical advances, while those same advances have also pushed back our concept of what life is, in cases like brain death. Insofar as radical life-extending/life-expanding technology is possible, our present notions of life, death and identity will have completely broken down long before those technologies are perfected, simply because they’ll be obsolete. In a sense this is comforting and in a sense it’s not, since this also means the end of our present notions of what a person is and what it means to say that a thing exists, because those notions are not designed for the kind of pressures that immortality tech would place upon them. You can already see hints of this in the extreme, unbridgeable disagreements over partial-continuity thought experiments.

It seems to me that insofar as there’s a generalized intuition of death, it’s that death is when something changes irreversibly in such a way that you can no longer recognize it as having the same “identity”. This isn’t just a function of the degree of change, though, it also has something to do with smoothness – when you get into situations where the end result is still clearly a living person rather than a pile of topsoil, people’s intuition about “is this death” seems to be almost entirely based on whether they sense an abrupt discontinuity in something they consider central to identity.

Obviously, you get radically different results depending on how you define change, identity, smoothness, and so on, which is why once you start talking about hypothetical futuretech, concepts of death diverge into unrecognizeability. It’s also why the question of whether you’re dead or not depends on who you ask. It’s a fortuitous coincidence that the normal way of dying where your body stops working and disintegrates and isn’t replaced by anything with a close resemblance happens to satisfy nearly everyone’s death formula. In a real sense I think it’s fair to say that, just like selfhood, death is a social construct, and you need to account for that element of it when envisioning a “world without death”.

@discoursedrome here preparing for the discourse takes of 2507

cultureulterior:

mitigatedchaos:

Anyhow, we’ll set the rest of that discussion aside for now, since I want to clarify how I differ from some of the others.

I don’t believe in the purely mind-pattern definition of self.

I don’t see uploads, if possible, as being identical people to the originals.  You might be able to Ship-of-Theseus something to cross that causal barrier, but then you have to actually Ship-of-Theseus it to get the appropriate causal entangling.

If I get shot, and you re-instance a brain backup into the blank nervous system of some sort of empty clone doll, I don’t wake up - the clone does.

My suspicion has only grown greater on this with the whole quantum stuff.

…not that having a near-identical clone go on without me isn’t at least somewhat comforting as an idea, but then, so is a nice grave compared to naught at all.

What about sleep?

It’s the same physical hardware, and I think that makes a difference.

mitigatedextras:

kissingerandpals:

That stupid argument came about over a misunderstanding and people who have no idea about the context of it are giving their takes on it, and this is why I cannot stand Tumblr discourse

Sorry bro.

I just noticed the discourse expanding outwards now, like waves in a pond.

mitigatedchaos:

tanadrin:

This pisses me off so, so much. Warning: what follows is not very calm. Probably not very charitable either. I write “fuck” a lot.

Keep reading

< caring about opinions being actually good vs being seen to be good >

 Well, there’s your answer right there, isn’t it?

Scott may be the Rightful Caliph (or a contender for the position) within Rationalism and its Adjacency, but outside of our sphere, he has all sorts of markers that are low-status, or are tribal low-status, and he poses a danger to a lot of people that are farming status through toxic takes.

I mean, imagine if Rationalism became the new normal.  Sure, this would probably crash a lot of metaphorical trains and the results would be observable in the global GDP, but one of the trains that got crashed would be most of the established Commentariat, their pundits, the outrage-farming, clickbaiting and so on.

New ones would likely develop in the aftermath, because Rationalism doesn’t actually remove all sorts of base human emotions.  However, the new ones would be different people.  

Scott’s social status is zero sum with these people.  His gain is their loss.  They’re going to attack, attack, attack.  They may not even fully know why they’re doing it.

@more-whales offers this take:

I’m also sick of snark passing for wisdom about important things but my evaluation is probably closer to Maciej’s and I do think you are off the mark wrt where this snark in particular is coming from. He goes on to tweet here he doesn’t think Scott is evil and he’ll try to articulate it more clearly, so we’ll see

carry-on-my-wayward-wesley:

roachpatrol:

nakedmallrat:

adventures-in-asexuality:

nakedmallrat:

cant believe a bunch of english kids go through a fuckin cupboard and find a magical kingdom full of wonder and they go “yeah we’re the royal family now”

typical english behaviour

I think what’s more creepily imperialistic is the reaction of everyone in Narnia to the Pevensies.

Like, the Pevensies end up the royal family in large part because everyone’s like ‘it has been prophesied that you will come and rule us and everything will be great!’ and, well, in-universe I can’t really fault them on that; if I were a young teen or pre-teen in a completely foreign country, I too would probably just go along with whatever seem to make people friendly to me.

But the reaction of the Narnians, in almost ubiquitously welcoming these foreigners as obviously destined to rule them even though they know nothing of the country and the culture… now that is some creepily imperialist writing.

This is the only good reblog of this post in it’s entire 3 year hellscape existence

if four foreign kids popped out of a magic box and deposed trump by the express wishes of god’s fursona, i’d crown ‘em. this winter already fuckin feels like it’s lasted 100 years. 

I’M CACKLING

You’ll regret this, @roachpatrol, when it turns out those four foreign children from beyond our time and space were written by me.