both sides are bad
Present them with a thought experiment: they can will a good side into existence right now, if they can only imagine it. What does it look like to them? The gamble here is that they will be unable to describe it, and a weak description should be challenged so they're pushed into a defensive posture.
why do you care
Typically, it is foolish to answer this question because it is rarely asked in good faith. If you were to answer it directly and honestly, you should expect to receive attacks against whatever you answered with (because your answer would be like a giant cartoon bullseye to them). Knowing this, it's not hard to understand that the person asking really does care and they're just a bad faith actor.
But this doesn't answer the question. How to deal with them? Well, I wouldn't bother on a platform like twitter that encourages poor communication habits. I'd probably give the troll-ish Umineko-inspired argument "without love you can't see it", which translates to "you can never understand a thing if you don't care about it". The way you present it can be done to infuriate them by suggesting they're inferior to you for not caring (it may well be true). Using the same logic, you could also just throw their question back because it's a fair gamble that they do not care about you or your motives enough to listen, but I think this is less effective.
I want to point out that this short question is a highly effective bad faith strategy. It is not an easy question for most people to answer, but you naturally try to answer it after reading it. Once the answer proves non-trivial to produce, you take a tiny amount of psychological damage/irritation, which causes you to hesitate in responding.
example
Of course it's a short-hand communication platform. Hmm, how about berating them for nihilism? The normal defense against an accusation of nihilism is to show that something matters to you, so you then get to take the role of bad actor and attack whatever they answer with (you must be prepared to attack holy cows like BLM).
I am largely ignorant of Tumblr, but I do agree - I've seen this dynamic unfold in many places online. I hold a mixture of pity and contempt for those involved. Some of the poor fucks may just need a little help, but they'll get dragged down by the ones that revel in spiritual squalor.
I hope that joke doesn't go over anyone's head.
It actually went over mine. I was too wrapped up in the trainwreck on display. It all seems like satire, but I know it is not. Some of the comment chains are too spot-on.
If you hate yourself, it's time to re-evaluate your life. Such as why the fuck are you a furry?
They typically are products of failed socialization. The normal process is for a person to correct their behaviors to enough of a degree to fit in, but a furry (also other classes of degenerate) will instead reject their peers. They do not understand the process of social give-and-take. Thanks to the communicative powers of the internet, these people can achieve their own support groups so all members can circumvent normal social support principles.
It is the furry community as a social support group that will discourage the normal re-evaluation of one's life. Other furries will not wish you well or congratulate personal growth, they may well attack you. This is because it challenges the foundation of the furry community - it is a place for the warped and maladapted, so any correction demands excommunication. Failing to demonize such a member gives an implicit signal to all members that it is not right to reject personal growth, which will trigger cognitive dissonance (and nobody likes feeling cognitive dissonance).
In a way, the furries that hate themselves are on the cusp of becoming normal again. On the other hand, self-loathing plus a refusal to change oneself creates a despicable person.
tl;dr: Furries generally cannot re-evaluate their lives and change themselves. It requires attributes that are already selected against for initial group inclusion.
But I wasn't using them in reference to my beliefs. It'd be more accurate to say "politicians that are actively working against the interests of people who use the terms rino and dino," which is a mouthful, so it's more efficient to just take the label and use it so those people understand it.
I would not use the terms if such a person had not popped up. My expectation for bystanders here is that they understand that our present political system is a farce, so I have little motivation to treat them like normies.
Contextually, I was trying to refer to the type of person you had responded to. Perhaps I was not direct enough to prevent this misunderstanding.
I want to disagree, but I don't think I can. I've given up on the representative republic. No matter how perfect a candidate you lift up for a position of power, there is only 1 way that they could represent all of your interests: that candidate would have to be you. Naturally, there are finite positions to fill, so there will be many citizens that fail to have their interests represented.
Eradicating Rinos and Dinos is a priority for someone who has not given up on our present political structure. They think it's perfectly fine to have a couple of political boxes and if large amounts of citizens become unhappy then it only means that it's time to change the stickers on the boxes.
I've only thought of two solutions. One is to go full democracy, zero representatives - every little beaurocratic motion requires X% of the population to vote or it goes in the trash, and then there must be some 60%+ of the votes in favor of the motion. This would require a serious overhaul of how voting is handled and the terms of citizenship that can grant voting rights.
The second solution is to just go full retard and boost the number of political representative positions by 10 times or more. Make every representative be a single issue representative so each voter has no need to make a compromise on their values. This would require all political power roles to be voted for, which would make some powerful people very upset. It would also be a large burden on voters, as there would no longer be general roles like "mayor" or "president", and they'd be replaced by large numbers of hyper-specialized politicians.
I noticed this shift. Can you speculate as to the cause? I did not go there often enough to know if the users changed personally or if the nice ones all left.
Perhaps pre-approval of users for the priviledge by moderator? Now that antonio isn't in the mod team (here), I can't count on the mods to make a meta thread when it's needed. We haven't actually needed one in a while, so I do agree that we shouldn't be seeing the meta threads that have been popping up - most of the time it's one user getting called out or some dumb argument getting blown up. I wouldn't want to ban such threads because it's one of the few recourses if a mod starts being a problem.
Meta threads are also the acceptable channel for challenging the rules in the sidebar, since an open discussion promotes understanding for everyone.
What is the official narrative on where all those children are being taken? Random orphanages? New special housing for children that are very "safe"?
If you seriously want to try to figure out his payrate, you'd probably need to analyze his post history. What days of the week and hours of the day he typically posts during would give you a timezone approximation. Some careful reading would help narrow down the group paying him by determining narrative vectors.
I recall seeing a payrate guide for shilling on 4/pol/ (which is a terrible read now) recently, I think it was specifically for the ADL or JIDF. Point being, it shouldn't be impossible for the payrates of other organizations to be floating around out there.
Don't discount the value of ideological pawns, though; some shills really do it for free - which should technically make them trolls.
Suggested new rule: each user is allowed to make only 1 meta thread per week.
I think they have a misunderstanding of cause and effect there that makes them as tragic as they are. I've encountered several that wanted things like adoration, love, respect, but they didn't have a clue how to realistically achieve their desires. I think back and wonder if they even truly understood their own desires.
It makes the whole fursona thing more ironic/tragic, because they've developed this practice that makes hugbox functionality highly efficient by giving direct clues as to what they desire, but then everyone acts blind to what they see unless it suits their own desires.
Edit: To be clear, I'm saying that desires such as "be beautiful and attractive" are not true desires, and that there's typically a deeper desire pushing such ideas to the surface of the mind as the consciousness struggles to translate the subconscious.
encouraging and incentivizing people to become furries
Here's my major point. Politically, we do have some incentives given to degenerates. While I think we can agree that it has not reached an alarming level demanding revolution, I do think it's worth being troubled over.
Of course, the topic was specifically furries, but I think it's okay to spread it out to all fringe degenerates. I can tolerate homo pride parades (since I never see them), but a parade for furry, zoo, cannabilism, etc would be quite alarming. It's kind of a stretch, but I could blame part of the whole tranny thing on the political priviledges enjoyed by females (even a little is too much). The government likely didn't intend that result, at least. Positive reinforcement is effective, so I don't like seeing it generated by policy so easily - it's bad enough we have to deal with problems at a cultural level, we don't need help making it worse.
I thought about it a little more and am now speculating that grifters (all exploitable communities get grifters occasionally) from these fringe "communities" are the primary drivers of getting the fringe to become normalized. If I were a guy scamming furries, I might have an enjoyable amount of power/money, but if furry suddenly became mainstream then my power would increase. Luckily, most of these fringe grifters don't have the smarts or connections to pull this off; they're probably grifting in the fringe because they couldn't cut it elsewhere. However, all it really takes is a couple of high-power retards to agree with the grifter and give birth to new political incentives.
I do disagree with some of the minor points in your argument, as I have had some really positive experiences with furries, but I won't actually argue any of it because it's in my best interest for furries to be undesirable. If they weren't so openly ridiculous, I'd have to see more grifters messing with them, and I don't want that even though the majority of them deserve it (they even contain a disturbing amount of middle managers and other do-nothing-for-big-bucks vocations). I want to mention it at least, because I think it's psychologically fascinating for a person to fabricate a persona based on what they wish they were like. The ones that choose bright colors and other attention-grabbing details are plainly desiring attention, which can lead to an unpleasant personality, so I can validate you there, at least.
Seconded, however I don't think it will be available for the public to view.
I enjoyed it for about 15 hours. Thought the combat would evolve somehow, but it did not.
I don't think they'll get infested with socjus crap. They might be fringe degenerates (cub snuff, kemono shota, etc), but somehow it seems like they're the kind that repels wokeness. I can't quite explain how - maybe just the ability for children to die at all in their story.
Supposedly they were being held back a lot by their prior publisher employers, so I think they could be a group to keep an eye on after they take some profits here to get started. I'm a big fan of worldbuilding, and it looks like they've got a fleshed out setting, so as soon as I see them make something with gameplay that can satisfy me, I'll probably buy in.
Receiving a box of noticeably used porno mags around age 8. So I got my fill of porn even without having any internet before college. Perhaps it was intended to replace "the talk". At least there were some really cool pulp magazines in there (about 20 issues of Eerie and Creepy).
vorephiles have entered the chat
I can see it. The whole LGB+ thing is skirting dangerously close, isn't it? I think "two spirits" is accepted in it already, so all it really needs is zoophilia to combine into furry. Or would you maintain that the label and specific group itself must be acknowledged?
I believe this was the same devs/designers that made Solatorobo. Like that game, this one seems to be intended to look okay while having mind-numbing gameplay. Not that I've seen a gameplay video, but reading about it, that's the way it's sounding.
I was leaning a bit away from venture capitalists. As you say, they expect a return on their investment. Any person making a similar investment without expecting a financial return is either pulling some investment trickery or is engaging deliberate sabotage - both of which can be considered a form of financial return, I suppose.
This is a bit more of a stretch, but what if it's a foreign government? There's plenty of governments that bleed money freely. This becomes a lot more plausible if it's not concerning consumer media, like if someone were to influence our nation's military leadership into making terrible policy decisions for the purpose of weakening our strength. That's an easy write-off to a foreign nation's military budget.
Explaining such a thing for vidya or movies is more difficult, as I can barely grasp the required belief systems. I know people exist that believe you can force cultural change by manipulating media (because they think culture is a product of media when media is actually a product of culture). I do not know how this belief develops, so I can't guess as to what countries might be stuck with it in their leadership.
From there, it'd be a matter of how much of a threat a nation (or western society as a whole) is to some global power player, and them trying to put a price to the destabilization of their enemy. It certainly sounds laughable like this, though, because it's so weak and petty.
Regardless, I do agree that it cannot be done forever. If it's done for the purpose of sabotage, it won't need forever. I just find it troubling because not many seem to be prepared for actions that betray expectations.
There's a loophole in "get woke go broke": it assumes that a producer of goods is dependent upon its consumers to make a profit.
Say you're an executive at some big company like Ubisoft. You sell games, got a new one in the works. The number crunchers give you a report of expected sales totalling X. Now a foreign entity approaches you with a deal under the table: force this small list of changes in your new game and receive 2X dollars. This foreign entity is now your customer base and can outvote thousands of wallets.
No proof, of course. Legitimate business deals get covered in NDAs, so of course an illegitimate business deal isn't gonna be reported. Not really the point, though, the point is that an incentive structure exists and so it shouldn't be considered impossible.
There are many variations of this. One of my favorites is when that 2X dollar payment is made in the form of product purchases, so the executive can now factually report that they doubled expected sales. Even better if the product is digital because then foreign entity doesn't have to waste a trip to the dump.
That cycle is popular because it can be interpreted in multiple ways. I don't think praying for a messiah is one of the correct interpretations unless you strictly desire an avatar of vengeance. Or maybe similar would be praying for a leader to unite the allies to your cause. But a Jesus figure, no, I don't think that's a real interpretation.
I expect to see a new thread on the matter once it's finalized.
Kind of exciting for a political move like this to happen. I'm personally interested in the general validity of the draft being discussed by public officials. I won't deny you your style of victory, but I would prefer to have men not getting drafted at all.
Huh? This actually passed? I can't believe this. Is there another step before it's finalized?
Yep. Even if some of the miserable ones are given a miracle to correct their woes, there's a good chance that they'll just find something else to be miserable about. This knowledge is not hidden from them, so it's a sort of self-preservation to stall it from coming to fruition - lucky for them that such science/magic is nowhere near available.