Bay 12 Games Forum

A short victorious war

I love how waging a short victorious wars to solve underlying domestic issues is a solution that have been killing empires since Napoleon the third. Also big up to Putin "I'll deal with the US swiftly" after having his ass handed to him by Kiev's TDF.
Ukraine is currently bracing for a big push in the east next week, and free cities are currently shelled by russian artillery.

Also I don't know if the live map has been posted, but it's a good information source.

I see your point. Although I disagree on your conclusion, I respect your point of view.
Thank you for humoring me.

You are idealistic, Cathar. I appreciate that. But the kids and merely misguided people are a minority within Nazis. Those can, sure, be turned. But the vast majority of Nazis are so embroiled in their own propaganda that nobody, especially a "leftist SJW" who they will not listen to on principle, can change.

Not in my assessment. I've met a few people who cannot be turned, and that I really want out of my sight. One of them is the matron in my extended family, who is a bigot in pretty much every way you can imagine. She can die for all I care. The problem is she has the ears of people who I care about, cousins and nephews that may actually die as the result of her actions.

Leaving people you disagree with to their own devices is fine until the day you receive a phone call and learn that your uncle and two of his son are in reanimation because his wife insisted he would not wear a mask nor get a vaccine. Not confronting bad ideas allow them to fester.

Another I know is mostly attracted to far right ideas because misguided ecologic policies are destroying game in the forests he is hunting in, and because the locale governance-party townhall does not take the step to protect small business in the town, leading to general unemployment and reduction in the quality of life. None of them care strongly about race and gender, but those issues are trusted upon them by proximity with actual fascists.

You may be fine with that, and I'm not arguing that you have to listen to them. I'm fine with people not liking them.
I'm arguing that, in my point of view, discussing wth is a worthy endeavour, as it may 1°) turn them and 2°) lead to solutions of actual problems that did not appear at first.

Also : I do not believe for a second that 44% of french people are fascists. Not for half a second. It is not normal that far right parties do that high of a score here. This has to be adressed and censorship does not adress that at all.

But changing hearts on twitter ? 4chan ? please be serious ...

I've been on 4chan for a long, long time. And yes, I'm perfectly serious. You can't turn everyone, you have to pick your battles, but ground can be gained and people can be lead to think. Also I think you are generalizing peoples in the chans, I met some nice people there.

But here is my counterpoints :

• Every inch of ground you give up is taken by the enemy.
• Understanding where the enemy stands in a recquirement for victory
• The public debate is an ongoing and sustained effort
• Subjecting yourself to different points of views helps you grow as a person

As for turning people with hatred in their heart : I think you underestimate people, by a large margin. Maybe because you haven't been in contact with a lot of extremists, or maybe the extremists you've been in contact have been more extreme than mine. But I've seen people change for the better. Some are just kids, some are misconstruing the nature of their problems, some are just holding the beliefs of their locale community. All of them cannot be turned. Some are actually bags of hate, but they are in the absolute minority.

Allowing you to question your prejudices and your a-priori is one of the functions of free speech, actually.

Edit :

Okay, practical exemple. During the Brexit debate, the question of EU standards was put forth by the brexiteer camp, as an authoritarian top-down, costly and redudant measure by the European Union. That claim was largely uncontested (I think John Oliver made a snarky remark on it at the time, and that was it).

All of it was false, they are actually a democratic process used by the industry to upgrade the quality of their product and to speak the same language across europe, and consumer unions are part of the process of creating standards. Even today, I'm fairly sure the records haven't been set straight in the public opinion.

Now if the proposition is to just systematically abandon the ground and just let everyone live in their own reality, this will happen again and again. We need to confront the bullshit.

Sooooo, because you were there for the art community, and then the porn disappeared, and then the art community poofed, you're wishing loneliness and policing upon someone else who still enjoys the community for being there for the queer community?

We're back to 'the porn is gone' and the rest is sour grapes.

I think you misread me, with or without purpouse. As for the sour grapes, really no. People I followed on tumblr are still on other social medias. If you are happy with that dead social media, all the power to you, I'm very glad it worked for you !

Typical facist, so eager to ban anything that even mildly inconveniences them.

I won't call them fascists, but they are counterproductive. Robust political debate is absolutely necessary, especially now.
Where I am, I don't have the luxury of being able to "ban" the actual fascists outside of my house. If we don't win the political debate on the public square, if we don't turn to reason people who can be turned, France becomes a fascist state in five years.

People who want to stamp out political discussion in the public square are extremely misguided, even if their intentions are good. Bay12 may not be the place to have that discussion, but Twitter defintively is. I'm waiting to see what happens, because I don't trust Musk as long as I can throw him and his position changes according to the phases of the moon.

Taking any decision now is very premature.

lol. lmao.

Tumblr is a deep abyss policed only by robots, where every inhabitant simply shouts into the blue abyss like a deep water fish with a little light on its head. The robot that identifies illicit materials often misidentifies it. Tumblr is a tidepond that occasionally gets blasted with a UV burst.

The loneliness bit is spot on though.

I don't know. I remember Tumblr was known for its art community, its porn and its sjws. Then something happened, the company was bought, the porn was blasted off and litterally everyone went to twitter in protest.

At the time, Tumblr was already a redundant image storage device for me (dA does the same job but better), and since it now randomly blasts off pictures and have no public anymore, it has lost all function (at least for me).

Now waiting to see if we'll witness the same Hidenburg-style crash for Twitter but I don't think. Billionaire techbro posting doge memes may be annoying, but it's not comparable to denying people their share of tiddies pics.

Franckly I'm pretty good in an evironment where people harbour disgusting ideas in general, and the general attitude of trying to censor bigotry instead of confronting it is precisely what allows it to fester, in my humble assessment.

Problem with Elon Musk is not its self assessed "free speech fanaticism", it is is variable geometry. Musk is alright with the N-word, but he'll sack you if you criticise Tesla.

There is no good alternative if policed speech is what you want. Facebook maybe ? The other alternative go further in the unrestricted speech side of the spectrum.

Oh and : Elon Musk is a meme lord. It's a funny weed joke to him because 420 is a funny number, if I understand correctly. It wouldn't be the first time he wastes his fortune on idiotic ideas because his mental age is going through puberty. Dude propped up doge coin not so long ago.

Patrick Boyle made an explicative video on the topic.

Le Pen father was something else. I don't remember the pretext that was used to close his mouth, I think he said something racist to a far right newspaper. It didn't really matter what, dude had the profile of a minority party while his daughter had parlementarian ambitions.

Outside of him funding the OAS (again, a terrorist organization which assassinated elected official as primo modus operandi) he also had ties with the fascist skinhead movement. Oh also he conducted "interrogations" during the Algerian independance war, so theres that. But I think belonging to an organization whose stated goal included killing De Gaulle pretty much disqualified him forever.

Before he left the presidency of his party, he took care to cast out every single one of his direct subalterns so his daughter would inherit the party. When I was a teenager, I saw a constellation of far right new political parties created once or twice a year by a dude he would eliminate. Having him being cast out from the party by his daughter is very amusing.
Those guys are snakes through and through.

I think Gollnish (who still denies the holocaust) is still in the party - as a house clown I suppose. Nobody take holocaust deniers seriously here... But then again most Le Pen voters I talked to were also antimaskers and antivaxers so I guess there might be a public for that kind of rhetoric after all.