I picked up Dragon Age Origins again lately to break in my new rig and it has been a breath of fresh air. It's really the last time Bioware was in proper form as far as I'm concerned and it's a grand send off. The whole siege at Ostagar just has this classic feel of an epic to it, from the rain to the drums to that one guy who falters and the guy behind him steadying him as they prepare to face the oncoming horde. I can't say that it's a game devoid of the mind virus of the current age, but it's nice to see a high fantasy setting that's just overbearingly white in essence and in depiction. Hell even the characterization of Ferelden as a country that adores its dogs is just quintessentially European. It's a quirk that's uniquely pronounced in white people and I don't think they even realized they were leaning into that. Then we've got Sten, who has long been a favorite of mine. He is resolute and unabashedly opposed to the very concept of women being warriors to the point where he will chide your companions and even the player for trying to be men. His dead pan delivery of it all is just the icing on the cake. He knows what is true and does not hesitate to state it plainly.

It's just been nice to go back and remember what a AAA game can be when it isn't completely overflowing with poison.

The last few weeks have seen an influx of low effort propaganda style image posts and I suspect it's only going to ramp up as we get closer to the election. It's an easy way to dilute the discourse and clog up the forum with noise and there's going to be a non-zero number of malicious actors using it in exactly that fashion over the coming months.

Brave is currently shitting the bed on me in what I fear is not an April Fool's joke, so I'm soliciting opinions. What browsers are you all using? What do you trust to not spy on you? Which browsers aren't thoroughly infected with ideological rot?

Obviously Google Chrome is a poisoned well, but are there any out there that pass muster?

The other week someone posted a bunch of links breaking down all the bullshit over the last two years surrounding the corona virus. Does anyone have the link to that thread or just a similar set of links handy?

I got some skeptical normies that need to get up to speed and I realize I haven't been meticulously cataloging all the info I absorb. It's difficult to link stuff that gets encountered piecemeal across a bunch of different sources, especially when the tech behemoths are actively waging a campaign to purge that information.

We need messaging to counter what the left has inundated our society with for generations.

I've been mulling this over for a little while and I think I've got something that could work. Campaigns like "It's Ok to be White" and "Islam is right about women" were extremely effective because of their simplicity and directness. They grabbed the attention of both sides and caused the media to go into a small panic. We're not equipped to make a long multi-generational march through the institutions and even if we were we don't have the luxury of time. To that end we need to continue adopting simple and effective messaging. I think if we boil everything down to what it is we need to instill in society to combat the poison we are currently afflicted with, then we arrive at this simple message:

Become strong.

I think a great many people have never even had this simple bit of advice leveled at them, and for a large enough section of the population it could be enough to push them onto a better life path. The left and its allure comes from a place of being weak and envious, how better to combat that than to create strong and healthy people? Honestly I think a good application of sticker/flyer vandalism with this messaging across the whole of western society could do a world of good. You'd see all the power brokers and their henchmen hemming and hawing about how it's some evil group perpetrating some sort of hate. It'd cause some people to second guess their programming and even the ones who weren't submerged will get that positive messaging directing them toward a better life, which strengthens our position by denying the left potential converts.

It also serves to put people into a mindset of perseverance rather than the abject fear gripping the world at the moment.

While I don't think it's actually targeted demoralization propaganda, the idea that things must get worse before they can get better has come to serve the same purpose as demoralization propaganda. It lays out the notion that there's nothing we can do right now to fix things, that we must continue to endure these hardships until some undefined point in the future where some backlash will magically manifest. I reject this premise and posit that we have already reached and passed the point where the populace at large should have provided some sort of extreme rejection of the abuse it is being subjected to. If we continue to parrot the idea that "things must get worse", then things will only continue to get worse. It will continue for years, decades, generations, until the people enduring the abuse are those who never knew what came before and how much better things could be. The Soviet Union was a shitshow for decades; Is that the timeframe we want to entertain for how much worse things must get before they can get better?

It's all just an abdication of the responsibility to correct the situation ourselves.