Bay 12 Games Forum

it's been, wow...almost exactly two years since I left Bay12. I don't know if anyone still remembers me, I mostly hung out in FG&RP. Bay12 was a pretty big part of my life until I left due to, well, mostly posts in this thread and ones like it. I was a sad, shitty reactionary in 2016-2017 after falling down a very dark hole very fast. Honestly, leaving Bay12 and disengaging from the people here probably slowed my recovery a lot. I'm better now. Still not good, but better. I don't think I can undo the things I laughed at and believed, but I'm trying.

I don't mean to clog up this thread or anything, but I mean, it's where I did most of my ick. I'm probably not coming back, but it just felt weird vanishing into thin air after so much...low-level suckiness and trolling. You're good people. I'm sorry.

Just want to say that it's wonderful when someone has the courage to make a post like this.

I think he was vacillating between "poor kids are just as bright as rich kids" and "black kids are just as bright as white kids" and his brain shifted gears mid-sentence. He's certainly as I'm-not-racist-I-have-minority-friends as you'd expect a wealthy white septuagenarian liberal to be, but I think this speaks more to his senility and the general state of mental decrepitude that he's long passed off as folksy idiocy.

This is pretty generous, IMO.  I don't know many specific details on this point, but I've seen lots of references to Biden defending segregation throughout his political career.  Like yeah, it was the type of brain mix-up anyone can have.  But it seems pretty likely to me that it was the type that reveals something about the way he was thinking about the subject while trying to construct a sentence from those thoughts, rather than a totally innocent collision of separate not-racist ideas.

Anybody ever notice the similarities between justifying keeping capitalism and justifying child abuse? "They're all like that, you're lucky you at least have me" is exactly the ethos behind the on paper argument.

I've been making this observation for years.  I have soooooo much to say about it.  Abusive household dynamics parallel so cleanly with so many aspects of society.  Not just capitalism, but most hierarchical macro group dynamics in general.  I'm at the point where I think understanding the mechanics of abuse is a critical pillar of understanding how to respond to the modern crisis of society in general.  The psychology of loneliness is another closely related issue that I've been starting to see aspects of in everything, and I don't think it's any coincidence that victims suffer chronic loneliness as long as they stay in an abusive situation.

Philosophy Tube put out a video recently on abuse.  So my comment on that video is conveniently available to throw in here as kind of relevant input on the subject.

I just want to add that experiencing self-hatred and denial aren't necessary for a relationship to be abusive.  My only criticism of this video is I feel like it may have given the impression that this is central to what it means to be abused.  With respect to Olly's experiences, I don't want anyone to believe this.

Abuse functions through conditioning the victim to constantly question whether it's worth risking a fight.  And by fight I mean a sleepless night, a public humiliation, a dangerous confrontation with authorities, broken possessions, prolonged campaigns of passive aggressiveness, a suicide attempt, etc.  Extreme stuff.  Stuff that makes the normal, healthy moments of day to day life seem petty by comparison.  As Olly said, an abuser will use your virtues against you, but also your responsibilities.  You have to function at work and school and so on.  No responsible person can be having such fights all the time.

So you suppress the parts of yourself that risk conflict.  There's a million petty things you go through in a day that could trigger a fight with an abuser, and they will make it known that if you disregard them your lives will grind to a halt even to the death of you both if that's what it takes.  Even if you know it's abuse and you don't blame yourself and you love yourself, it still remains that the only way to co-exist with an abuser while maintaining a functioning life wherein you can hold down jobs, stay out of trouble with authorities, etc is to bend your every thought and habit around minimizing the risk of conflict, and to suppress whatever parts of yourself get in the way of that.  This carries on long enough, you lose those parts of yourself.  They wither and die.  You lose your individual personhood.  You forget how to be anything but the caretaker of your abuser's temperament.  Your psychological being is devoured and subsumed into the abuser's. 

That is the essence of abuse, and no amount of savvy or strength of will prevents the end result.  The only thing that prevents it is leaving.

With some adjustment of details where appropriate, think about this in terms of class relations...

And I can't take credit for it.  It was a talk by Derrick Jensen called The Other Side of Darkness which I listened to about 11 years ago that set me on this thought-path.  You can look it up easily on youtube.  Derrick Jensen is a militant anarcho-primitivist.  Pretty extreme.  I definitely don't agree with everything he says, and he can be very cooky and meandering.  But he's also a very soulful individual and if you're willing to take 2.5 hours to give it a listen, there are some moments of intense insight worth listening to in there.  He grew up in an abusive environment and drawing comparisons to that is a foundation for much of his work.

Material conditions and incentives affect people's behavior, for sure. But if it was the impetus, we would stop once we had enough, or even an excess. We categorically do not. The people who manage to avoid this tendency are not the norm, and that's not because of our American culture or Capitalism. It's happened under every system and every creed, given enough time. Humans themselves are the common factor, not Capitalism itself.

I disagree strongly with this.  I believe this perception is a product of confirmation bias that isn't anyone's fault, but it's a natural product of social awareness within the system itself.  Because the people who do stop when they have enough aren't highly visible people.  It's mostly people who are "successful" in the form of amassing large amounts of wealth and power who attain visibility to the culture at large.  And of all the people who do not attain large amounts of wealth and power, how many of them are visible to you or the culture at large?  How can you possibly know how many people are out there who do consciously reach a point of being content that they have enough, and deliberately cease amassing wealth and power?  Or is it just a common assumption that we take for granted so much we don't even realize we're making an assumption that everyone who isn't wealthy and powerful just failed to get there?

I'm also tired of seeing this mythologization of the USA's past.

The specific observation is that large chunks of the population have lost the willpower, grit, or whatever to solve their own problems. 

Back when the US started, people came over here and by sheer force of will made their way in the world.

Back when the USA started... it was genocide and rape of lands.  Full stop.  "Came over here and by sheer force of will made their way in the world" literally means "Came over here, slaughtered lots of natives, and enjoyed rapid expansion over their territories full of unexploited resources."

You associate FDR's policies with the decline of this grit culture.  But let me point out a different association.  In 1912, contact was made in California with who is considered to be the last Native American to have grown up without any interaction with the western world.  That's a pretty solid landmark for expansion in the New World.  The New Deal was only about 20 years later.  I'm much more inclined to believe that hitting the limits of expansion into native territories has more to do with the decline of settler grit than FDR's policies did.

Today's situation is not at all comparable.  Human population has roughly quadrupled since 1912.  There are no more frontiers.  There is nowhere to expand for access to resources that are not already claimed.  There are wild places left, but they are protected for good reason.  The environment is collapsing in a dire way.  A third of all wildlife is in danger of extinction.  Insects as a global biomass have declined by 80% in the past 30 years, and the remainder is disappearing at a rate of 2.5% per year.  What's left must be carefully managed by collaborative agreement for collective interest.  If that's not the realm of government, then I don't know what is.

I also don't think the idea that everyone should just run their own businesses instead of complaining about wages is very practical.  I honestly don't understand the kind of world you envision by that logic.  There are too many goods/services that are better provided for by a large organization than a small one, or are beyond the reach of a small business completely.  And unless you imagine most of the working population running one man operations, the problem of wages is still there.  Just more of a nightmare, because there's many times more employers who need their asses kicked to pay their people.  Wages are a problem that has to be addressed no matter what, and they're only addressable by means associated almost exclusively with leftist politics -- unionization, strikes, government intervention, etc

Not likely.  Most republicans will do a better job of getting media attention away from it, but keep it going as it is.  Most democrats will improve the humanity of conditions on a surface level, but only as much as necessary to make a for-profit industry based on racism, political persecution, and ruination of families seem more palatable to those not directly effected by it.

That is glorious.  The quality of the art piece is top tier on its own.  Getting the president to stand in front of it and give a speech is legendary.

I realize I'm a little late here, but....

Quote from: EnigmaticHat on July 24, 2019, 09:34:24 pm

The basic issue right now is that people will go to college regardless of what college costs.

In the US, this also applies to health care, cars, housing... for some reason in the US we have this underlying culture of "I'm going to do it anyway, I don't care what it costs, because I want it."

In the US, this also applies to health care... for some reason in the US we have this underlying culture of "I'm going to do it anyway, I don't care what it costs, because I want it."

Talk about a cultural problem.  When people are seen as entitled for not just dying when survival is expensive.  Makes it kinda hard to take you seriously on the rest of the stuff you say.  Like if you'd just said cars and housing... those are necessities, too (yeah cars definitely are in many places in order to hold down a job), but I could interpret generously and assume you mean that people buy more expensive cars and houses than they need to.  Ok.  But then you throw healthcare in with those.  And I think.... maybe that's not what you meant.

Saw Stabbing Westward in concert tonight.  The most forgotten, underrated gem of a band from the 90's.  To this day some of the rawest, darkest, hardest hitting, most emotional music I've ever heard.  Definitely the angstiest. And they never put out a song that they didn't put their all into.  They're the only band that has never put out a single song I didn't like.  They broke up in 2001, and I never thought I'd get to see them live.

But totally unexpected... they hold a 20 year anniversary concert for their 3rd album just 10 minutes down the street from my house.

Only a few dozen people showed up.  And I think there were only a couple people there under 30.  It was sad to see how forgotten they are.  And the venue kinda sucked.

But they still totally killed the show.  The singer is 54 now, and still looked like he could be 20 years younger.  Can still hit all those vocals with the same intensity that he could in the studio 30 years ago.  They're also super nice and met with the *entire audience* after the show.

Still one of the heaviest songs I've ever heard
I love how the last line of the song completes the whole thing
I probably listened to this one hundreds of times in my late teens
This was my favorite song to play on my walkman as I walked through the halls my last couple years of high school