Healthy societies perpetuate certain norms and behaviours for different social roles. Mother, father, man, woman, boy, girl, etc. This is because, as we are in the painful process of rediscovering in the West, if you leave people to their own devices with no direction, they will lose their minds. Either they drift aimlessly, or they latch on with a vice-like grip to the first thing that promises direction and purpose to their life.
You really don't have to cater for the exceptions, boundary-pushers or border-straddlers, because anyone who is serious about defying society's expectations for them (female blacksmiths, male nurses, etc.) will push through with sheer force of will and achieve what they want. If they aren't willing to persevere against social pressure, they obviously aren't serious about whatever it is they claim they want to do that defies the norms. A healthy society can tolerate a certain number of eccentrics and deviants.
For everyone else, they NEED these social norms. It gives us all a shared language by which we can navigate social situations. It provides safety nets and guard rails for the different roles in society. Most people are not capable of putting rational checks on their own behaviour. They have no use for absolute freedom. If you give it to them, they will squander it, or it will consume their potential in hedonism and aimlessness.
I guess the US is going to have to have a heavily militarised southern AND northern border if it can overcome its own internal problems.
Whenever I see videos like this I always come back to the same thought. Britain has always had its share of shitholes, like any country--the squalor of medieval cities, the tenements at the end of the 19th century/early 20th century--but at least they were OUR shitholes. When you're dealing with your own people, you always have a chance at improving the situation, because ultimately it's a material problem.
What we have now is a spiritual problem, and the people occupying these places have no connection to us whatsoever. Why should they care that the grand Victorian buildings in the town centre are derelict? Their ancestors didn't build them. They don't know any different.
Perhaps I'm a coward for leaving the UK rather than staying and fighting the decline. The way I see it, things will not change until people are forced to confront this decline through some kind of economic crisis or civil unrest; something on their doorstep that they can no longer ignore. At the moment, the vast majority of British people are still too comfortable to acknowledge that there is a problem.
Amen. Christ is King.
I have to be honest, this one kind of baffles me. I don't know why they would produce something like this right now. It's obviously playing off of what is in the public consciousness, but why? They surely know how tense things are in America at the moment, with two rapidly crystallising factions battling for its destiny. What is the point of provoking this very volatile situation with a piece of media like this?
Is it just a case of art imitating life? I've been robbed of the notion that any media get produced without the say so of the powers that be. If so, why would they tempt fate like this? It reminds me of 2016 when people memed Donald Trump's presidency into being. Are they trying to meme a civil war into being?
To be fair, if you just 'save money' nowadays, it will be 25% gone within 5 years, if you're lucky. Much better idea to invest it.
Does anyone remember that really mediocre mid 2000s shooter Haze? Dreadful as the story was, the one thing I really liked about it was the concept of the corpo soldiers having implants that would show them a curated version of reality, erasing their downed comrades from their view to prevent loss of morale, for example.
There isn't a shadow of a doubt it my mind that Google or Microsoft would show you their curated version of reality if they could get away with it.
I'm currently in the laborious and expensive process of applying for a US visa. My wife's family has frequently joked that we should just fly to Mexico and hop the border. If that plan didn't involve me rubbing shoulders with dirty central American migrants for days on end, I might just consider it.
I mostly just lurk on this board, but I do see you post quite frequently. From what I have gathered of your life, the best advice I can offer is to pick a path and stick with it, regardless of the difficulties that crop up.
That's what I had to do to get out of the dark place I found myself in. I realised part of the reason I hadn't made any progress in life is because I felt overwhelmed by choice. I had a tiny bit of experience being an intern for an IT company, so I basically said 'Right, this is what I'm going to do come hell or high water, because it's definitely going to be better than wallowing in self-pity.' That gave me the motivation to pick myself up and go to university, and really take it seriously, not just to piss around as I would have done if I was 18.
Did I know if I would really enjoy working in IT? No, not really. It's scary making those kind of decisions because you cut yourself off from all the other possibilities of what you could do in life. At some point you have to take a leap of faith, though. In most cases you will find that success in one area tends to lead to success in other, unexpected areas of life.
I have personally found that one's perception of pain is closely tied to one's mental state. In my early 20s when I was in the depths of depression, I felt constant aches and pains all over my body, and every little niggle or physical inconvenience would manifest itself as physical pain, to the point where I thought there was something seriously physiologically wrong with me.
Now that I am married, exercise regularly, and am successful in my career, my overall daily experience of pain is greatly reduced. Things which I used to have to take pills for I can shrug off without issue. I presume this is because the body produces more natural pain killers when you are in a better mental state. That might go someway to explain how different people's pain threshold changes not just with their experience of pain, but their life circumstances.
Some people were permanently messed up by the COVID experience. Mentally, I mean. I don't think they will ever fully recover. Occasionally I see people still wearing masks when out and about and I think 'Man, if only you could understand what was done to you.'
She doesn't have any kids to raise. You tend to accumulate a decent amount of money if you remain without a family into your middle age (especially if you are an unscrupulous scam artist).
Fuck. Off.
I'm not necessarily against the concept of unions, as I do think it is necessary for all kinds of groups to organise in their own defence against greater powers, but in practice they become corrupt like any man made organisation.
The fact that every single union isn't devoting 100% of its time, funding and energy towards campaigning against immigration is a damning indictment of all of them.
I guess it proves that even modern day NPCs are capable of nationalism in the abstract. If we had the levers of power, I have no doubt we could mould public opinion in the right direction.
Just like the filthy mags in MGS!
You know, in order to end a war you do actually have to talk to the other side, even if you think they are big evil meanies. But who am I kidding, they have no interest in ending this war.
Yeah I never really cared about the handheld games or Revolution. They were TOO anime and tropey. Literally the only ones I enjoyed were 1 and 4, both of which I think played to the strengths of the setting AND the fairly unique gameplay.
Bear in mind that the series was already basically dead after the handheld titles until Sega decided on a whim to release a PC port of the original and it became wildly popular, which basically spurred the production of 4.
I wouldn't entirely write it off for that reason alone. I suspect the only chance for a revival at this point though is if Sega dies and the IP gets picked up by a more competent publisher.
Yeah, I always had this idea in the back of my head where they could move the timeline forwards and do like a cold war period style story, maybe with playable teams on both sides of the conflict to highlight the tragedy of war. That's what I would do if I was in charge of the IP anyway.
The only Sega IP I care about is Valkyria Chronicles, and I seriously doubt they'll make another one of those (although 4 coming out did surprise me, so who knows). Otherwise I really wouldn't miss them at all.
There isn't enough unity left in Britain to even entertain this idea.
I used to do that all the time back when I was a teenager hijacking my neighbour's wifi signal. One of the things I miss most about early youtube.
A lot of our social faux pas have been ctrl-c ctrl-v'd whole cloth from the USA, without consideration for context or history. I've even heard people parrot the line that 'we are a nation of immigrants', which makes even less sense in Europe than it does in America (where it doesn't make that much sense either). I think it's just a consequence of the USA being the de facto leader of the Western world. A lot of the cultural context in Europe is full of American hang-ups, even when it doesn't hold up to even cursory scrutiny.
It's also very difficult to convince conservatives to organise. We are disagreeable and individualistic by nature. That's why there's always so much back biting.