Alternatively, the Taliban were actually successful. And they certainly don't want the right (as nebulous as that concept is now) at home realizing that hey, woke cosmopolitans are sadistic cowards who will tyrannize us and rape our children (metaphorically and literally in just the Afghan example alone) when in power, but who crumple like a wet tissue when seriously threatened and would sooner fall off airplane wheels in a cartoonish attempt to flee rather than actually fight in defeat.
Wouldn't want them getting ideas and sweeping away all of the #Resistance in a true storming of the Capitol like the 'Ban just did to globohomo's client regime in Kabul, right?
Jewish, atheist, comms director for the pro-pedo Prostasia Foundation and he's contributing to the effort to shut Christianity out of the public arena.
All a rather long-winded way to say 'proud member of the Synagogue of Satan'.
Scott Roeder did nothing wrong
This. 'Derivative' doesn't necessarily =/= 'bad'. Has there been a single truly, completely, 100% original story that takes not even a crumb of inspiration from what came before it since, say, Homer?
Also if you ever feel bad about your writing, just remember: people have been paid millions to write lines like 'somehow...Palpatine returned' and 'You need the bad pussy' into formerly powerhouse film & TV franchises. For the past 2 years, that thought always gets me back on my feet when I hit a snag & start questioning myself while writing.
*Islam-loving trannies at that, if I remember correctly. An RL friend I have who fancies himself an enlightened atheist and quasi-Marxist literally doesn't like Dawkins anymore (he was certainly a big enough fan back when we were in high school) because he's anti-Muslim and a racist apparently. Allah 1, fedora-tippers 0.
Well, so far it seems the 'Ban has still done less damage to Kabul than BLM & Antifa did to America's cities last year.
I have never seen or read about any other group throughout history which tries so, so manically hard to justify a Day of the Rope perpetrated against themselves.
I thought Saif al-Islam had always been one of the survivors of the war, and it was a bunch of his younger siblings who died. IIRC it was Mutassim, Gaddafi's fourth son, who got his throat slit by the rebels after the same battle that their father was killed in; and another Saif, Saif al-Arab, who died in a NATO airstrike. (Perhaps that's where any confusion over which Saif perished might have arisen)
Anyway, I find it very difficult to imagine this Saif, or anyone else, doing worse than the warlords who have torn Libya to shreds over the past decade if he should be elected at this year's end. Even an empty box would do less harm going forward.
Also, some of Deus Ex's military/intelligence/other gov't figures are neither hopelessly corrupt nor spineless. They'll encourage you to do the right things early on and will even actually make a stand against the illegitimate US government (and by extension the absolutely heartless & merciless conspiracy wearing it as a skinsuit) that goes beyond posting some strong words onto the public bulletin.
Too optimistic indeed.
You seem very quick to jump to fantasizing about politically-prosecuted teenagers being sodomized to death in prison. Why is that? Care to take a seat over there and explain, or are you too much of a faggot to even try?
The message I'm seeing being broadcast is the same one that convinced Chen Sheng and Wu Guang to set in motion the end of the Qin dynasty.
Chen Sheng: "What’s the penalty for being late?"
Wu Guang: "Death."
Chen: "And what’s the penalty for rebellion?"
Wu: "Death."
Chen: "Well...we're late."
If you're going to be punished for walking on the Senate floor as harshly as you would be for actually burning down the Capitol with a bunch of congresscritters locked inside...well hell, I'm really not seeing much incentive to NOT go for broke against the system.
Anna Navarre's psychopathic bloodlust and eagerness to kill American citizens would be depicted as a hallmark of a strong heroic woman and totally justified by the NSF being evil white male Christian Trump supporters. That one female NSF commander mentioned in some datacubes & emails early on will be lucky if they 'just' show her to be a thoroughly character-assassinated and negative figure like the anti-ERA ladies from that one FX show starring Cate Blanchett as Phyllis Schlafly, and don't just write her out altogether.
Damn. This really wasn't how I wanted to see that scrapped UNATCO loyalist path brought to life.
Re: that fanfic, I vaguely remember seeing a passage where Draco tells Harry (both still just first years, in other words they're 11 when this goes down) that he wants to rape Luna Lovegood (a 10 year old) to teach her dad not to mess with the Malfoys. Instantly killed any desire I had to read any more of HPMOR, and it hasn't come back ever since.
As for LessWrong in general, the last thing I remember is that they collectively shat their pants over the concept of Roko's Basilisk - that recreation of Pascal's Wager by 'rational' atheists who've clearly been hit on the head with an anvil - to the point where Yudkowsky banned all mention of it and the guy who came up with it. Seems like they rapidly fell into total obscurity after that debacle, itself coming on the heels of the implosion of Internet atheism around 2012-14 between Elevatorgate and the rise (and fall) of Atheism+. I don't think I've seen Yudkowsky's name mentioned anywhere, by anyone, in the past four or five years, and it only came up when people wanted to mock him and his notion of rationality for a year or two before that.
As someone who did read it, I can spare you the trouble & say it's basically as another poster said in this thread: the 'Rage Against The Machine' types have gone mainstream and, in an exceedingly rare moment of self-reflection, can't honestly say they like what they see in the mirror. Though of course, they're quick as usual to blame capitalism and literally anyone but their 'democratic socialist' selves for it.
Yesterday’s cyberpunk fans, as it turns out, have become today’s final bosses — offering broken promises of escape from COVID-induced lockdown and our real and present dystopia.
Yeah, the Augmented Rights Coalition. Who are STILL shown to be good guys with a righteous cause at their core, suffering only from the (mis)guidance of the Illuminati plant. You meet their founder and he's shown to be an unambiguously good guy, the implication being that there was nothing wrong with the group until the Illuminati put Marchenko in control - IOW, what saner BLM defenders will say about tge riots while ignoring the org's actual ideology or how its founders explicitly identify as trained Marxists, done unironically.
Plus the game's best ending involves them getting what they want re:aug control legislation. Unlike previous games where you get a choice of who to side with and each faction gives you wildly different outcomes, MD's endings are variations of one ending determined by whether you pass or fail certain conditions.
Anyway, DX1 did this 'good org subverted by conspirators' thing much better in 2000 with Silhouette, the avant-garde rebels I mentioned previously. The game doesn't go out of its way to get you to agree with them in every regard but methods and there's signs of them being under Illuminati influence even before they're outright absorbed by the Illuminati in Invisible War.
Sure is. But as the other poster said, the Squeenix games are pozzed. Augs Lives Matter and a general pivot to 'racism bad' are the order of the day in Nu-DX, where the 2000 original talks about the Rothschilds and has actual deep insights & criticisms to offer about political systems & philosophies, even (perhaps especially) Western liberal democracies.
Real cyberpunk has never been tried!
Deus Ex disagrees. Of course that's also the game where...
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The totalitarian globalist technocracy sitting at the point-of-convergence for unchecked corporate & gov't power, and the UN army which serves as their public enforcement arm, are unambiguously the bad guys.
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The far-right militia guys who have been designated as terrorists and who you are encouraged to kill on sight turn out to be good guys fighting for the interests of the people against said technocracy.
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The avant-garde Situationist-style leftist rebels you run into later are pretty useless in a fight and will themselves agree that they'd all be dead without you, unlike the militiamen above who keep on trucking after you pummel the crap out of them in the first couple levels.
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Literally every media outlet is under the control of the technocratic conspiracy, even the one that seems 'based' and on the side of freedom at first glance.
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Perhaps most importantly, the game doesn't judge you for your actions and consistently gives you a huge degree of freedom to do whatever you want to do, all the way to the ending(s).
Yeah, I can see why Jacobin might have a problem with all that.
Man, that barely scratches the surface of how imbecilic these sorts of flowery Native American claims to the Black Hills (including Rushmore) are if you do even a little bit of research into the history of the region. The US has actually controlled the Black Hills longer than the Lakota - 132 years as of this year - since they first conquered it from the Cheyenne in 1776, and lost it fully to the Americans in 1889 (113 years).
Suffice to say, the Lakota aren't some autochthons to whom the Black Hills rightfully belonged then, now and forevermore on the grounds that it is the sacred land to which they are 'native'. The Americans conquered that particular stretch of hills & mountains as fairly as the Lakota did from their own predecessors, and any sane administration would if anything be more in-the-right than Andrew Jackson was to tell any court which ruled otherwise 'fuck off, go try to enforce your bullshit ruling yourself if you dare'.
I think we're well past the point where people should indeed develop a healthy hostility towards what passes for 'education' in the West nowadays - this PhD-winning gem of intelligence provides only the latest in a long line of examples as to why. Just how red is the little red schoolhouse, indeed!
Excellent lesson for the Chinese, when (no longer if) they should take Canada over in full: their genocide of the First Nations needs to be as utterly thorough as the fate they meted out to peoples like the Baiyue in the distant past, because if not, their descendants are gonna have to put up with this shit from the losers-of-history seeking revenge a couple decades or centuries down the road.
It's more like they're Morgoth & Sauron, since a Tolkien thread seems an apt place to use that analogy. SJWs don't have the ability to actually create anything new, these deranged bugmen are so trapped in their programming and so hopelessly hollow on the inside that they can only ever corrupt and mangle the works of those who came before them to try to serve their wicked purposes - which is exactly what they're trying to do with LOTR.
Eh, not really. The Western Roman Empire's situation actually remained salvageable a lot longer than many people think, and even before the permanent partition of the united empire into two halves Rome had already overcome the Crisis of the 3rd Century and the Gothic invasions of the 4th. Shit only really started going downhill with the execution of Stilicho, the half-Vandal generalissimo of the WRE from 395 who had crushed multiple barbarian invasions & uprisings, in 408 on bullshit charges of treason concocted by the senator Olympius. After the Emperor Honorius (who had previously been like a second son to Stilicho) gave Olympius the reins of government, he proceeded to consistently make the worst possible decisions for two years until the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410.
Even then the WRE had a second chance. During the long & inadequate reign of Valentinian III they got Flavius Aetius, who was badass enough to fight and actually defeat Attila the Hun in 451. Of course then Valentinian rewarded Aetius by personally murdering him, motivated by rumors that the successful & popular general was going to usurp him - rumors which were spread by Petronius Maximus, another senator who was actually planning to usurp the throne himself and needed loyal, competent Aetius out of the way. After arranging Valentinian's assassination, Petronius ruled for two months before getting Rome sacked by the Vandals and himself lynched by a mob (for trying to abandon them to the Vandals) along with his son.
And still the Romans had a third chance in Majorian, their last really capable emperor who reigned from 457 to 461. Majorian was a genuine populist who reformed the laws to give the commons a fighting chance against the elites in the courts, got further than basically everyone else before him in his attempts to fix the Roman economy (which had long been fucked between chronic hyperinflation, massive tax evasion by the elite, the impoverishment of the non-elites and barbarian raids), and forced back various barbarian tribes to recover a swathe of Roman territory. Naturally he ended up being tortured to death by his Suebic general Ricimer, who was pretty much the anti-Stilicho, with the enthusiastic backing of the Senate. After this there was truly no hope, at best the WRE could've shambled along as a puppet of the Eastern Romans/Byzantines if their joint attempt to reconquer Africa from the Vandals in 472 had succeeded.
A modern approximation of this sad yet preventable decline would be if America kept voting out/assassinating every popular and competent populist president who tries to right its course between 2028 and 2076, at least one of whom should be an actual based black/Latino man to complete the Stilicho analogy, despite these candidates cropping up and trying to save the country as late as the 2060s. And then being all surprised Pikachu when the last FBI detachment is massacred and the last establishment figurehead they were protecting gets deposed by some Somali warlord in 2076, followed by that warlord declaring himself Sultan of Ameerika in the bombed-out ruins of DC and sending the presidential flag to the SACEUR, who has somehow managed to keep America more alive in Europe than on the North American continent itself.
Just the other day I remembered & dug up the archive of this ancient site featuring someone's anime-styled art & roleplays from way back in the early-to-mid-2000s anime boom - first found it & interacted with the creator back in 2005 or so when I was still a kid, and she was in high school. Crying shame to see how dead it is and how the creator seems to have since dissociated entirely from her past, even now I'm of the opinion that her work wasn't that bad and I recall how you could trace how she put in the effort & improved over the years. Certainly still beats the sanitized, inauthentic crap or outright SJ-tainted dreck you see out of 'creators' on Twitter, Insta, etc. today.
I could say the same about the forums I used to spend most of my waking non-school hours on, now they're at best husks of their former selves who are lucky to have sub-100 members online at any given point in the day when they used to have 2,000+ and at worst they got shut down years ago. The Internet until about 2007-08 was a truly magical place, God I'd kill to have those Wild West days before social media and the smartphone destroyed everything back.