The fascists own all the media organizations. The population has been taught systematically since birth to have unyielding blind faith in the institutions of the state and capital. Many won’t understand that anything unusual is happening until they’re hungry and cold, burying empty caskets for their drafted children sent to die in fascist wars of conquest.

It’s because they’re used to male perspective being the default focal lense for all media they consume. Male gaze is more about perspective than it is about aesthetics, something that has seemingly failed to translate into current online discourse.

In essence, all media in a genre they deem belongs to them must see them as their primary audience and must reinforce the perspective they feel is theirs. It’s a kind of patriarchal social egocentrism. Women can exist in those pieces of media, but they have to be defined in relation to a male perspective. This can be a male character within the same work, or it can even be the audience itself by presuming the audience is male.

It’s been so pervasive throughout media over the years that they think of this as being “just how media is”. When media deviates in really any way that media becomes the aberration of the norm. It can be as simple as one of the female characters having a side plot about her that doesn’t involve any of the men, or a female character who isn’t sexually appealing to what the current male psyche desires. The media in question becomes inherently an act of political activism. A transgression.

It’s notable that media from genres deemed not “belonging to the male perspective” is not judged the same way. Men do not become outraged at chick flicks or romcoms or romance novels. They don’t become outraged at drama TV shows made for women about women. Because those things are socially permitted to exist outside of men’s perspectives. It’s usually seen as unique when a man enjoys media that has a female perspective. It’s assumed that he won’t. This essentially means that female perspectives in genres they do see as belonging to them comes across as an explicit attack on them. They avoid the female perspective as much as possible, they denigrate it and demean/belittle it constantly. They do not want to be forced to see the female perspective and will actively resist it.

There’s lots of examples that go beyond this. Lots of media over the past hundred years has broken the rules and been lauded instead of denigrated. But we live in a time where an organized effort exists specifically to promote patriarchal thinking among men and those efforts mean that more scrutiny is being applied to this than ever before. There are entire content engines driving constantly to produce as much patriarchal outrage content as possible, all the time. And it works.

These problems existed long, long before the modern far-right movement started. It’s partly why it works so well. This male egotism in media existed before, and less resistance to it also used to exist. That change in social atmosphere means that men can be manipulated into further and further misogynistic beliefs. All it takes is dogwhistles and a loud, angry, entitled male gamer, and you can radicalize thousands of people into misogyny. And they will repeat that cycle with more or less any boy or man they know.

To make a long story short, anxiety about their perspective not being the default in their favorite genres of media presents a great opportunity to turn young men into fascists. The far right has capitalized on this, and that’s why you see so much outrage about it online. It’s also likely that algorithms have picked up on you being male and will probably show you more of this exact type of outrage content.

I started on Mint, then went to Arch Linux with Gnome. Now, I spend hours a day every day editing the dozens of config files for my Arch + Hyprland setup. I discovered NVIM plugins and decided to figure that out on my own instead of using one of the pre-made plugin packs. Now 90% of the software I use is cli. You can do anything from a terminal, and once you start it’s hard to justify using bloated GUI applications instead. Especially once you make your TE and prompt pretty.

Liberalism is a conservative ideology, yes. It’s the ideology of capitalism and western imperialism.

Leftism is the political realm of anti-capitalists. In a political dichotomy, liberalism stands on the right with other capitalist ideologies. Leftists stand opposed to them both. Liberalism is the ideology of billionaires, of strike breaking, of economic prosperity for the wealthy being the measuring stick of how successful a society is.

I support him in so far as he is leagues more socialist than the vast majority of his peers in the democratic party. But ultimately, yeah, he’s not likely to support a total overthrow of the capitalist institution in America. I think he’d rather America more closely resemble the Scandinavian countries politically. Honestly, I think opposing him in achieving that is kind of foolish. It would objectively improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people. It would be a path forward, and in many ways, it is a foreseeable path, one that I don’t think is impossible.

I’d also support a general strike and an outright revolutionary uprising, though. Capitalism is and has always been the problem. Doing away with it in its entirety is the right thing to do. Human life shouldn’t be for profit. The fruits of production should be shared fairly among all. The progress achieved by science and engineering should be a collective boon for all of humanity.

It’s basically like. Someone drawing a picture. Then watching the buttons you’re pressing on a controller. And then drawing a new picture. And based on the game that they think you’re playing in their head trying to guess what the next picture ought to look like. With no error correction and no conceptualization other than what the next picture should look like.

The… many limitations of this is the inability of image generators to rationalize 3 dimensional space. It can only approximate it based on what it thinks should appear on the screen. It lacks any ability to keep track of variable information. It really is more like a Doom-style hallucination than anything else. Some of the videos on that article are truly bizarre looking. I’d imagine after a few minutes every single one of them would devolve into an endless loop of being trapped in non-sensical geometry or killing the same enemy over and over again as the AI has no way of remembering the enemy existed to begin with, let alone that you killed it.

I’ll be honest I don’t think there is much use in this at all. It suffers from the same limits as any other model AI. Believability at a glance is not believability under scrutiny and if it’s only believable at a glance then there’s not much practical use in it. The advance in computational power and model sophistication required to stand up under scrutiny is massive.

The Nazi’s created rocketry as we know it today and made many innovations in medicine and manufacturing.

Are we going to argue the pros and cons of the Nazi party?

This conversation wasn’t even about the Mongol empire it was about Genghis Khan

“…not at all clear other kings would have done any different…”

Is that the standard now? Comparison? He is still unbelievably evil even by comparison to other evil people.

Him and the dynasty he created were one of the most destructive forces in human history and resulted in the horrific deaths of millions of people. By many metrics, they practiced genocide and ethnic cleansing on conquered populations. They destroyed the books of captured people’s and places of worship. They’re also well known for having destroyed farmland and aqueducts to starve out massive numbers of people. They were butchers. Mass murderers on a skill the world had never seen at that time. He erased entire civilizations from history, ones that we still barely know anything about.

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I don’t see how UBI would materially worsen the lives of the chronically ill and those who cannot sell their labor. It’s essentially universal welfare that allows anyone to survive whether they sell their labor or not. That gives you the ability to leave a job that is exploiting you. Without UBI losing your job means potentially becoming homeless.

I’d say that it isn’t far enough, sure. I’d also say that food and shelter should be considered universal human rights that everyone has to by law have access to regardless of their circumstances. Which would itself provide many of the same benefits as UBI.

As an anarchist and a socialist I’d change almost everything about the way the current world functions. But as a direct thing that would improve the lives of almost everyone, I am very much in favor of UBI.

Yeah I can definitely see how the argument about “original semites” is coming very close to outright hatred and antisemitism. We have to be more conscious of the language we use than that. We shouldn’t be making arguments in this vein but instead focusing on anti-colonial arguments. When discussing the colonialism of relocating European Jewish communities to Palestine there’s no reason to be using this kind of “race politics” language.

The relationship between Ashkenazi jews and the communities that were already present in Palestine is not something I understand very well, and more broadly the history of Ashkenazi jews as a whole is something I’m only familiar with as it relates to early 20th century European politics. It’s something I’d like to do my own research on from reliable sources to better understand how these kinds of arguments feed into genuine hatred of Jewish people.

I’m not as educated on the broader nature of antisemitic arguments as I should be. I appreciate you adding context to why some Jewish students feel unsafe with the discourse going on at the moment. Anti-Zionist action has an obligation to protect Jewish people as much as it has an obligation to protect Muslim people and ethnic Palestinians. Our goals ought to be to separate ourselves from race hierarchy and protect human rights for all. It’s critically important that in advocating against the Israeli government and the IDF that we do not tolerate anti-semitism in any form and that we reject the support of ant-semitic people wherever it appears.

It is here. We did the math, and a mortgage on a brand new house was literally half our rent at 20k down. The barrier to entry is the down payment. Those “good terms” entirely have to do with how much income you make and how much debt you have.

I pay for maintenance on my apartment. This is essentially universal where I live. Also, maintenance costs do not come anywhere near the gap between mortgage and rent payments. Mortgage is literally less than half on a very, very shitty apartment. We didn’t even have proper heating when we first moved in to our last apartment. We both work full-time jobs. The building was very close to being condemned. It was the cheapest in our town of less than 100k. Mortgage on homes less than 10 years old was legitimately half our rent. Including HOA, including insurance, including taxes and utilities, it was literally half the cost.

But 20k we do not have. And we have not been able to save even a quarter of that, as our cost of living has doubled in the last 4 years. Entirely due to profiteering by corporations and landlords.

Long and gist of it, no, unless it’s a government run property rent is literally 0 out of 10 times going to be cheaper. Do you not understand the fundamental purpose of being a landlord? Are you under some kind of delusional belief that any measurable amount of landlords are in the business of renting properties out of the kindness of their hearts? No, being a landlord is just like being a company that sells water. You’re going to charge absolutely as much as you can possibly get away with, because literally the entire purpose of being a landlord is to make money while doing as little time investment as possible. Our last landlord did literally nothing for over a year while the house fell apart around us. We gave him over 20 thousand dollars in rent. The land tax there was peanuts. He pocketed at least 10k for doing literally nothing.

The point of being a landlord is having enough net money at the start to literally not work. To literally do no labor for which they are beholden to someone. To collect tax from the serfs that occupy their land. They are part of a separate economic and social class. And profiteering is the entire reason anyone chooses to do it. There’s literally no other measurable reason. There may be one or 2 mythical landlords who are running themselves into debt cause they love their tenants or whatever the fuck, but they’re not even a thousandth of a percentile. Literally statistically irrelevant.

So morality of crime is defined by the success of the victim?

Close, the morality of a crime is defined by the impact that committing the crime has on the lives and rights of others. Killing someone is a vile crime. You’ve taken away someone’s inaliable right to life. Stealing from the poor is a vile crime. You have taken the means of survival from someone who struggles to survive. Stalking is a vile crime. You’ve interceded on someone’s inaliable right to privacy and safety.

How does downloading a cracked video game or a TV show impact others? Who is being victimized, and how are they being victimized? Say, for instance, that today I download a game for free. What tangible impact does this have on others?

So if our ‘victim’ is a multi billion dollar corporation that is one of the fastest growing game companies in the world and is quickly approaching income levels rivaling some small nations, the tangible impact that me downloading their game for free has is literally none. There is no impact. They will never even know that I did it, and I do not consider the “right to commerce” as a fundamental human right. I do not think that me taking potential profits from billionaire investors is in any way interceding on their human rights and also do not believe that the action causes any harm to them.

So if you become incredibly successful for what you created there becomes a point where it’s moral for you to lose all rights and control over your art?

Corporations are not people. The designers artists and programmers at Nintendo do not direcy profit from game sales. They are paid a salary by their company. Again, it’s relative. There is no such thing as a moral absolute, we have to consider the context in which actions happen and the effects those actions cause. Stealing from the poor is vile. Stealing from Walmart isn’t.

So then the moral of the lesson is that art is worthless and creating new things serves no useful purpose?

I do not consider the primary purpose of art to be profit for shareholders, if that’s what you consider “useful purpose”. Art is useful in that it communicates human emotions and experiences. It’s useful in that it delights us, it inspires us, and we take great enjoyment in it. Even if all art was free, this would still be true. Free games are fun. Free books are worth reading. Free music is worth listening to. Paintings don’t lose value because I can see them without paying. Your view of art and your view of capital are so intertwined that you are ignorant of the reality that art is not capital.

Almost like the game companies learned that same lesson from people like you and just started making shittier games to accomodate their shittier fans.

Every single corporation on Earth will cut as many corners as possible to generate the maximum possible revenue for the minimal possible cost. Shitty games still sell exceedingly well. They have a profit incentive to invest as little money into their games as possible. Games as products are less enjoyable than games as art. We love games whose creators felt passion in creating them. We love games whose designers believed in what they were making, and felt connected to their product. Faceless corporations lose this entirely. Games are how Nintendo makes money. Therefore, even if no one wants to make this game, it must be made. For Nintendo must turn profit. This is part of the reason some games are amazing experiences and others are clear, transparent cash grabs.

I’m anti capitalist and explicitly anti commerce, especially with regards to large corporations, so. Whether it’s for piracy or not doesn’t matter. When I buy a game, I should have a legal right to do whatever I want with the data comprising that game. Including creating software to play it on other devices. It, therefore, should absolutely be legal to create and use emulators. Whether a particular end user is using it on legitimately purchased copies is beyond the scope of control of the creator of the emulator. This was already settled in courts in the 90s.

Piracy is also moral. It’s always moral to pirate content created and/or distributed my international corporations with income in the billions.

The very beginning. The emulator scene has existed since the 80s. The emulator scene has fought against Nintendo since literally the NES. And they have frequently won.

Painting nails different colors has always been a thing lol

I do think it’s important that people know what it is they’re celebrating, but yeah like my local Chinese community always does a lunar new year celebration that is open to everyone. I think a lot of Chinese people (and other communities that celebrate the lunar new year, like Okinawan Korean Vietnamese and many others) see open celebration as creating more appreciation for and understanding of their culture.

That’s become a whole rallying call for queerphobia lately. They also have beef with the words diversity, equity, and inclusion? I don’t even fucking know they can’t make their thoughts coherent and they don’t even bother trying.

Have you ever pirated something? If so, have you ever been sent to jail for it?

I’m not talking about hosting companies. Yes, I am aware that prosecution exists for them and has been a thing a long time. I’m saying they’re going to start pushing for end users to face jail time as well. It’s the only real recourse they have.