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AlexanderRM

@alexanderrm

btw, the realization that you can just not say shit about topics you’re not qualified to talk about is both very liberating and one I think alot of you need to make.

like fr, being online doesn’t mean you’re obligated to comment on every little thing, you can just shut the fuck up if you don’t know what you’re talking about

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having cash is like having secret money. like whos gonna find out i’m buying tacos with this crisp $20 bill??? not my bank account, that’s for sure

That’s literally why the government wants to stop it

I think there are aspects where being a person just sort of sucks and is degrading for pretty much everyone. If you're an unattractive woman people treat you as hardly even a person, if you're an attractive woman people go fucking insane and try to coerce and threaten and harass their way into accessing your body. If you tell them you aren't interested in allowing them to access your body they lose their minds.

It seems like the equivalent for men is that they're hardly even people unless they have abilities and resources and they often are expected to attain this with little to no social or emotional support.

The thing that bothers me is that I have my little bubble now where everyone is pretty secure because they've made themselves into walking products rather than humans and when I exit my little bubble it just seems like stuff is insane out there. Weird shit happens when I exit my bubble that I don't understand and don't seem to be able to adequately protect myself against. I'm told that the problem is that I'm too accepting of weird people and this makes me blind to warning signs. At least when you're a product or an asset people treat you with some degree of dignity. No one wants to damage the product.

None of the bubbles I’m in feel quite like places where “everyone has made themselves into walking products rather than humans” (except to the extent people sell 40+ hours of their time to corporations or other entities except for money) including bubbles full of weird people plus also one bubble full of relatively normal but unusually nice people (my fiancee’s childhood friends). Sadly I don’t know enough about your situation to be able to put into words what the difference is or give advice for finding such bubbles but it is totally possible!

OTOH I don’t know enough about your situation to tell if maybe you’re just seeing different sides of similar groups of people that I’m not seeing.

And I get a little bit Genghis Kahnghis I don’t want you to get it onghis Nobody else but me (ooooh) With nobody else but MeeeeMe
I get a little bit Danghis Dahn Don’t want you to Genghis on with Nobody else but Mingus Nobody else but Mingus Kingus

So just to clear things up, I view "based" as meaning a kind of high-agency behavior that is indifferent to left-wing moral norms. I don't consider this inherently a good thing. ("Based" would also tend to imply some level of effectiveness, and not being overwhelmed by emotions.)

A mayor ordering the cops to remove the active drug users from the subways so that normal people can use them, over the screaming of the opposition, is "based." A man forming a paramilitary organization and successfully carrying out a program of extrajudicially executing drug dealers is also "based."

But we can't trust that the vigilantes in the second scenario will only kill guilty people (such as dealers who have killed people, either directly or through overdoses), or that they won't form a gang themselves, so this second scenario isn't actually a good thing.

If we keep moving in the "based" direction, we're talking about Mad Max scenarios, Ghenghis Khan, etc. Not really something to aspire to. And as I understand it, the term itself is derived from slang for being high on cocaine.

This is all part of why I don't use the term that often.

"Based" to mean "good" may have spread too widely now. May have to give up on this one.

yeah, your usage of based always struck me as bizarre and offensive. 

I think I captured the usage of the term by the online right quite well.

"High-agency and indifferent to left-wing moral norms" ("based") vs. "illiberal left-identitarianism" (or "post-liberal progressivism") ("woke") also cuts the central conflict of the 2017-2022 ideological vanguards well, implies what the failure modes of their respective approaches are, and differentiates them from the previous round of disputes (2000-2012).

But with energy dissipating from the online right scene from 2022 onwards, now seems a likely time for "based" to go more mainstream, and with a more general meaning that keeps the positive connotations of exercising agency and pushing past restrictive rules, which seems to be how it's being used by others now.

I use “based” to mean “Pushing past societal norms but in a good way”, which is also how the online right uses it (they think think “in a good way”= being right-wing), that seems to work well enough.

Dismemberment of Czechoslovakia after the Munich Agreement

The USSR, UK and France get a lot of very well-deserved flak for appeasement but it’s incredibly wild to me that the Polish military government decided it was more important to seize a handful of villages than to support Czechoslovakia against someone who was revanchist over the same war where Poland gained independence.

Source: reddit.com
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Have definitely said this before (I am a longstanding hater of hyperbole for rhetorical effect) but the way some of you describe utterly replacement-rate generic cultural ephemera does kind of make me wonder if you've left yourself any words to distinguish between it and, like, actually consciously ideologically racist/antisemitic/homophobic/transphobic propaganda.

Not to take this too far beyond the intended point, but I can help but understand this as part of the way the content/attention economy works.

To use an example with some emotional distance, I kept up with the feminist blogosphere in the early to mid 2000s. It was visible in real time the way people moved into that 'overstatement of harm' and 'hyperbolic denouncement' form of expression. It goes like this: you need to post frequently to attract regular readers and earn ad revenue and/or clout. The content needs to suit the topic of your blog, be timely, and be of interest to your readers. Let's face it, it's not every day that someone publishes the literal Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And since historical analysis is less interesting than current events, you need to find things being published now. There are horrible, bigoted screeds being published, but often in specialised places. Even if it's on mainstream platforms, it's not in the places you hang out for fun, so you need to go seek it out. And it's genuinely awful to dive deep into right wing communities or ideologies; the stuff they write is upsetting and genuinely traumatising to read day in and day out.

So the blogger decides not to expose themselves to that stuff, but to find what they can in communities closer to home. Sure, it's not as extreme, but if you look at it through a particular lens and with an uncharitable read, it's still gesturing at the awful content you know is out there. Eventually (quite rapidly) all the things you are denouncing on your blog are edge cases and fuck ups from people within your own community. But since you know the genuinely beyond the pale shit is out there, and you need to keep people interested, you're denouncing it with the same level of vitriol you started out with.

Another issue is that actual right wing hate content is, often, frankly really weird. It often contains referents to ideas or cultural products that are well known within those communities but completely opaque to people outside. Right wing screeds can rarely be accused of brevity or coherence. You need to do a lot of legwork to unpack what it's actually saying to your audience. Plus, since it's often so culturally alien, it's kind of less interesting to your readers? They find it easier to grasp why something is important when it comes from people they see as part of their own community and is written in a language they understand. It's easier to handwave away right wing hate groups as niche and insignificant, because it's not like the people you interact with regularly actually believe any of those things (never mind that the people making legislation actually do, and are culturally closer to the screeds).

I see the hyperbolic focus on fanfiction, fanart, and milquetoast corporate products as the current expression of the same process. I'm also not really sure what can be done about it? Especially as, in the current moment, the niche right wing ideologies have broken containment and ramped up attacks in the mainstream. So people have a lot of understandable fear and vitriol. I also don't think flattening the scales of awfulness and bigotry helps much, but several decades in I'm at a bit of a loss.

Sound designing a vampire being hit in the face with a shovel is... challenging. Who would've guessed.

[Audio transcript: Ben Galpin voicing Jonathan Harker from Dracula by Bram Stoker. He says, "There was no lethal weapon at hand, but I seized a shovel which the workmen had been using to fill the cases, and lifting it high, struck, with the edge downward, at the hateful face," followed by a cartoon "bonk" and the Wilhelm scream. End transcript]

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Problem is, because of my way that I am I can only work productively after 2pm, and I can only work really productively after 8pm. I am at my absolute best at 3 in the morning. But despite the fact that I would have been a killer night watchman in caveman times, our present society is organized around a tyranny of the early-risers, so I am forced to wake up at 8am and spend the whole day in a stupor.

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The upshot of this is that I am often either late for things or don't have work done. I solved this problem in college by simply getting less sleep, but as I have gotten older this has become increasingly infeasible.

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I'm making this post mostly because it is relevant to my immediate circumstance (I am suffering!), but also because it does actually illustrate my broader values. Like, there are I'm sure major efficiency gains to be had by forcing everyone onto the same daily schedule regardless of the degree to which this is suitable for them. I get why we do it this way, and I know there's a cost to not doing it this way. But especially now, during a period of ever greater potential for automation, I think we can afford to spend our wealth as a society on the costly endeavor of enabling pluralism. And I think we should! I think we must!

OP I don’t know what industry you’re in but night shift jobs exist in many industries, I work at a post office sorting plant and did that for the first few years before an evening shift opening came up, there’s loads in manufacturing as well. Literal night watchman is also a job that still exists!

joe biden has many strange moments but my favorite will forever be when a reporter is asking him questions about something and he goes, completely unprompted "YEAH WELL YOU KNOW REPUBLICANS THINK WE DRINK THE BLOOD OF BABIES????" and then walks away without elaborating at all

First sigma male president

Hol up that’s actually a perfectly cromulent response to the question he was asked, I’m astonished.

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the spotify algorithm analyzing my music habits and deciding “this is a girl who would enjoy a punk rock cover of milkshake” makes me want to delete my account

hi yeah i found out recently that the popular caramelldansen (you know. the one you know.) is actually a fucking nightcore remix and this is the original

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forbidden knowledge

Caramelldansen is the ultimate relic of the past because it wasn’t just a meme song it was a Nightcore remix meme song that got even more popular than the original.

Even darker secret knowledge the original dance also isn’t that version either. Most can see the original dance in the background of a scene in Fast&Furious: Tokyo Drift.

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It’s not Nightcore, it predates Nightcore. The term you are looking for is Speedycake. After the late* DJ Speedycake.

The dance used in the vast number of 2d anime-esque caramelldansen vids has nothing to do with Caramell; it came from a gif on 4chan referred to as “Popotan dance” that started as fanart of an adult visual novel because of course it did. Speedycake was making his remixes at the same time as people were making popotan dance gifs of everything, and the memes converged into a compound supermeme that swept the internet.

The video above is yet another fan-made video, using 12 characters from the iDOLM@STER series. (Hint: the band that created the song is Swedish, so anything obviously Japanese did not come from them).

The first official video released by Caramell was this version, six years after the song was first released and two years after it started to spread as a meme:

fucking terrifying how deep this rabbit hole goes

DJ SPEEDYCAKE IS FUCKING DEAD?!

According to his Twitter he’s just as surprised to learn he’s dead as we are

cant lie this is hilarious to me

I would honestly listen to a three minute long song about pints with the lads

I am glad that the people of Ireland are united in the belief that Hozier is, as lovely as he may be, absolutely shite craic. Himself included. Sound lad, deLIGHTed to see him doing well and all but I would not have him round for cans, on my life.

so called feminists: "actually women are naturally inferior at everything, including quiz game shows, beauty pageants, chess, and video games. we need a society that is segregated so that anyone who would ever have to potential to win against a woman is eliminated. this is actually far better than organizing sports into weight classes or different athletic/skill level based categories that ignore sex, like what wrestling and video/board game tournaments already do. I cannot accept the reality that men and women are the same species. this is actually how we truly protect women. by calling them weak pathetic losers who could never win against even the worst opponent, and preventing them from even playing at all."

actually conversion I had with one of these nerds:

me: "so you think men are better at literally everything, even things that do not require any physical ability whatsoever?"

terf: "yes! those should still be segregated by sex! males should not be playing against women ever. it's an unfair advantage"

me: "so my brother has an unfair advantage over me when playing fucking monopoly?"

terf: "yes. males are statistically better and managing finances, while women are irresponsible and lenient with spending money."

hey guys. I think the people who are literally unironicly saying "women are bad at money. this means they suck at board games" aren't actually feminists

No joke, that was the rethoric the Francoist regime in Spain used to justify women being legally underage regardless of age and unable to open bank accounts without their husbands or fathers permission. That law was effective until 1975.

finally some justice for the celto-ligurians

we're running out of things to be annoying about

There should be a way to make fun of this the way reddit or whomever ran with "when did this become hotter than this" all those years ago.

Just an arms race to get older and older, yaknow? Authenticity of indigeneity claims is apparently a more important currency than I realized, or everyone's desperate to be american college students because the guilt kink is infectious or adaptive (apparently). Whatever.

Oh wait a minute.

Dont the French have more in common with raiders or warlords who accumulated power during the fall of Rome, than with Rome? Shouldn't they have land-acknowledged the roman empire???

see that's the problem with doing this stuff pretty much anywhere in Europe, it's conquests all the way down. Turks acknowledging the Greeks/Romans acknowledging the Latins acknowledging the Romans again acknowledging the kingdom of fucking Pontus acknowledging the Greeks acknowledging the Persians acknowledging the Greeks again. and I think the Gauls are in there somewhere too. my Anatolian history is pretty fuzzy going that far back but that's kind of the point

not that the Americas weren't like this too, but all the other conquests are kinda overshadowed by the big European one.

Lmao @ a Turkish government doing a land acknowledgement but unironically this is very cool, more people in Europe, Asia and Africa should do these.

Y'all ever get so excited about a scientific paper you're reading that you get chills???

So I thought to myself

Huh, a lot of our invasive species come from China and Japan

And then I thought, huh, I should look up what Kudzu is like in its natural habitat

And I found this article by a team of scientists investigating the history of Kudzu in China

And ohhhhh my goddddd. I'm vibrating with excitement over how cool this is.

The first bombshell that turned my brain inside out:

KUDZU IS NOT WILD. IT IS SEMI-DOMESTICATED.

In China, Kudzu has been a fundamentally important plant for food and textiles throughout history. We have Kudzu cloth that is 6,000 years old!

THIS PLANT CLOTHED AND FED ONE OF THE MOST POPULOUS AND MOST ENDURING HUMAN CULTURES ON EARTH

and in turn

HUMANS SHAPED AND SELECTED FOR ITS TRAITS

*AND*

in its natural range, humans are the main "predator" of kudzu

"Harvest by humans appears to be the major control mechanism in its native areas."

Kudzu is like that because it co-evolved with humans.

WHAT

YALL

This means

That Kudzu is so highly invasive because—just like most plants evolved to be grazed by herbivores and/or eaten by caterpillars, keeping them in balance with everything else—Kudzu basically evolved to be harvested by humans

The other half of the ecological partnership that keeps Kudzu in balance with everything else isn't a caterpillar or a hoofed beast. It's us.

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Yeah it's a usable resource, edible fucking food, that America just lets smother whole areas or try to destroy by flooding the ecosystem with poison 🥲🥲🥲