brazenautomaton

[brazenautomaton]

"goblins are inherently antisemitic" is a take because people need to recognize antisemitism based on surface-level shit only, so they don't have to think about what they do themselves. people praising Hamas were still saying that Hogwarts Legacy was an antisemitic game because goblins had big noses and something to do with money.

wokeness and problematic content has to be a checklist of superficial qualities. an expansive checklist allows them to judge as many creative works as possible as failing, and doesn't require them to think about their own beliefs or prejudices.

I am mere centimeters away from writing a full on essay about how the “goblins are inherently antisemitic” myth spawned by this website propagates misinformation, displays a huge misunderstanding of what folklore is and does, and contributes to an environment that distracts people from how antisemitism actually operates and the ways in which it’s dangerously on the rise in our current climate–something which, surprise surprise, has almost nothing to do with little green fairy men

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Executives don't have to sign off on the creative content of the game! That's an absolutely batshit assertion! And without that, the argument is "Okay, the writers were very bad, but the executives hired the writers, and that means the executives are at fault and the writers are not at fault."

Judging by the dev process of Anthem, I wouldn't be confident EA's executives had any hand in this. BioWare had a lot of leeway on what they did and when EA checked it in it was not in depth or in detail. And BioWare, internally, does not have evil soulless greedy "execs" who only care about money. BioWare is run by and driven by people who absolutely believe in their creative vision, and don't recognize they're very bad at implementing it.

"Executives" are not evil fucking spirits that haunt the concept of money and make everything bad. They're people who exist in material reality and can be observed! You can't just say "Something bad happened, so it was the fault of the executives and not the fault of the people who did it." That is frequently true, but it's also frequently not true. When the "bad thing" is extremely bad writing it's usually not true, because the writers very rarely say "I wish we had time to do this better but we were too rushed and couldn't go it right," and very often say "Our writing was very good and fiercely spoke to Our Political Moment and everyone who didn't like it is a racist subhuman!"

And when the BioWare layoff news came out, many people had no sympathy because they believed the writers were at fault for Veilguard’s failure, not the execs at the studio or at EA. Now that the EA CEO came out and used stupid corpo buzzwords to basically say, the game failed because it wasn’t a live service game, can these people see, who the fuck is more likely at fault? The writers who helped develop the good games in the franchise, or this sort of fucking money hungry clueless narcissistic business people?

[brazenautomaton]

You know, for a so-called "Ice Fairy Enthusiast", you don't seem to post a lot of Cirno stuff.

you're right

I haven't changed that in forever

I have let down the Strongest

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Astrology doesn't seem to work.

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Someone needs to stop all these liberal Nazis, I'm seeing them everywhere

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her mom literally just gave her one

I may have fallen away from paying attention to MTG lore for several years but I can say for certain that Chandra would NOT have a fucking driver's license

[brazenautomaton]

The John Shift Incident

The year is 2042.

Billionaire pop idol Taylor Swift retired to an orbital space station in 2034, with quarterly deliveries of supplies and the occasional celebrity visitor.

John Shift, a paparazzo, is hired by The Daily Scald, an Internet tabloid (their premier product uses AI to dunk on celebrities to make their clients feel better about themselves). John's boss, Robert Montresor, provides John with a meager budget and orders him to go into space to get photographic footage of Taylor Swift. (The footage has to be on physical film.) John purchases a second-hand rocket from a rocket dealer in Mumbai that he knows is shady, but decides not to ask tough questions because he can't afford better. The dealer is illegally reselling a rocket which has aged out of service in the Indian space launch industry, but has applied makeshift repairs. The dealer represents the rocket as in good working condition.

After launching into space, the life support system on John's rocket fails, and he dies in orbit. After a period of seven days in space, the rocket's automated systems put it onto a return trajectory. It then lands on the roof of an elementary school in Alabama, and the incident becomes a national scandal. (No additional people are injured or killed by the rocket's return.)

Who is at fault for John Shift's death?

[brazenautomaton]

if the violent revolution larpers just accept that collateral damage is inevitable but unfortunate, that's one thing and is certainly true.

but that does not seem to be happening, it seems to be accepted and encouraged. "hey uh maybe killing your enemies almost always leads to innocents being hurt" "so? france got over it eventually."

any innocents who get killed were kulaks

[brazenautomaton]

it is never too late to simplé take a nap for 18 hours

[brazenautomaton]

You shouldn't be making arguments that hinge on specific factual statements being true or not true when you have a case of Cannot Be Specific Disorder this bad.

Me: The intentional under-paying of people in social welfare jobs based on the premise that people who "don't need the money" make better, more virtuous, more altruistic (feminine-coded) workers is rooted in gendered classism.

The goddamn centrists in my notes: But have you considered that the rich are the truly marginalized?

Jesus Godforsaken Christ, I'd rather go back to arguing with the people calling me a pedophile.

[brazenautomaton]

"On purpose" means "this consequence was why this action was undertaken." If it didn't, it would mean "these actions were not the result of random muscle tremors" and not be worth mentioning. You said that not paying politicians very much and preventing non-rich people from being politicians was "on purpose." Since it would be meaningless to say "these policies were not created by random muscle tremors," a reasonable person would interpret this claim as "The pay rates of politicians were intentionally chosen to prevent poor people from being politicians." This is an agentic action in order to orchestrate an overall outcome beyond one single event: a plot. It is also obviously not what happened.

I don't have to show you cops busting up country clubs because you didn't make a claim about reality that would only be disproved by cops busting up country clubs. You made a claim about reality that said in our culture people think of the rich as being morally superior and righteous, and this is obviously not true.

Cops also don't roust politicians for being politicians, but if you were to try and use that to claim our general cultural attitudes toward politicians are that they are respected and seen as morally superior, then you'd be so astonishingly dishonest I don't even know if it would count as using language any more. The trivially observable facts are that politicians are not legally persecuted, and that our culture despises "politicians" as a category. There is no wiggle room on that. Once you have observed that trivially observable thing it is impossible for an honest person to deny, I just point out it works exactly the same in every capacity for "the rich" as a category.

This is a semi spinoff of this post, but really its own thought.

When a job pays less than a living wage, it generally attracts one of two types of employees:

Desperate people (usually poor and/or otherwise marginalized or with barriers to employment), who will take any job, no matter how bad, because they need the money, or

Independently wealthy people (usually well-off retirees, students being supported by their families, or women with well-off husbands*), who don't care about the pay scale because they don't need the money anyway.**

And sometimes, organizations will intentionally keep a job low-paying or non-paying with the deliberate intent of narrowing their pool to that second category.

People sometimes bring this up when discussing the salaries of elected officials -- yes, most politicians are paid more than most "regular people," but they're not paid enough to sustain the expensive lifestyle politicians have to maintain, and that's on purpose. It's not an oversight, and it's not primarily about cost-cutting. It's a deliberate barrier to ensure that only rich people can run for office.

The same is true, albeit to less severe effect, of unpaid internships -- the benefit of "hiring" an unpaid intern isn't (just) that you don't have to pay them; it's also that you can ensure that all your workers are rich, or at least middle-class.

When nonprofits brag about how little of their budget goes to "overhead" and "salaries", as if those terms were synonymous with "waste," what they're really saying is "All our employees are financially comfortable enough that they don't worry about being underpaid. Our staff has no socioeconomic diversity, and probably very little ethnic or cultural diversity." ***

This isn't a secret. I'm not blowing anything wide open here. People very openly admit that they think underpaid workers are better, because they're "not in it for the money." This is frequently cited as a reason, for example, that private school teachers are "better" than public school teachers -- they're paid less, so they're not "in it for the money," so they must be working out of the goodness of their hearts. I keep seeing these cursed ads for a pet-sitting service where the petsitters aren't paid, which is a selling point, because they're "not in it for the money."

"In it for the money" is the worst thing a worker could be, of course. Heaven forbid they be so greedy and entitled and selfish as to expect their full-time labor to enable them to pay for basic living expenses. I get this all the time as a public library worker, when I point out how underfunded and underpaid we are. "But... you're not doing it for the money, right?" And I'm supposed to laugh and say "No, no, I'd do it for free, of course!"

Except, see, I have these pesky little human needs, like food. And I can't get a cart full of groceries and explain to the cashier that I don't have any money, but I have just so much job satisfaction!

And it's gendered, of course it's gendered. The subtext of "But you're not doing it for the money, of course" is "But how much pin money do you really need, little lady? Doesn't your husband give you a proper allowance?"

Conceptually, it's just an extension of the upper-class cultural norm that "polite" (rich) people "don't talk about money" (because if you have to think about how much money you have or how much you need, you're insufficiently rich).

*Gendered language very much intentional.

**Disabled people are more likely to be in the first category (most disabled people are poor, and being disabled is expensive), but are usually talked about as if they're in the second category. We're told that disabled people sorting clothing for $1.03 an hour are "So happy to be here" and "Just want to be included," and it's not like they need the money, since, as we all know, disability benefits are ample and generous [heavy sarcasm].

***Unless, of course, they're a nonprofit whose "mission" involves "job placement," in which case what they're saying is "We exploit the poor and desperate people we're purporting to help." Either way, "We pay our employees like crap" is nothing to brag about.

[brazenautomaton]

America has its own foreign intelligence agency, the CIA

which is why they have to rely on another country's intelligence agency, there is no option worse than relying on the CIA

[brazenautomaton]

imagine if every time someone talked about the weather you had to endure a screed about global warming

imagine if every time someone talked about a school assignment you had to hear the speech about how awful the school system is

like you can agree with and think those things are valuable subjects and you would just be begging these people to shut the fuck up

Yeah what you said about how communists are so popular because most people hate the rich and money on a visceral level really struck me

I mentally replaced “communism” with “monarchy” and you are so right about how they’d be kicked out of any group for being so annoying

yup, imagine if every bit of fantasy media that had kings or queens or princes or princesses had a bunch of people who would not shut up about how historically awful monarchy was every time you tried to talk about it

[brazenautomaton]

Yeah what you said about how communists are so popular because most people hate the rich and money on a visceral level really struck me

I mentally replaced “communism” with “monarchy” and you are so right about how they’d be kicked out of any group for being so annoying

yup, imagine if every bit of fantasy media that had kings or queens or princes or princesses had a bunch of people who would not shut up about how historically awful monarchy was every time you tried to talk about it

[brazenautomaton]

[brazenautomaton]

The part where you said "That's on purpose" is the part where I got you claiming this was on purpose. It's right upthread, we can see it.

Of course most people hate the rich. Look at any media we produce. Rich people are fat and evil thieves. Every company is evil and the CEOs are the most evil of all. Every company is infinitely agentic and gets away with limitless evil because their evil money allows them to get away with everything. Nearly every movie that has wealth in it is a movie about how wealth is inherently evil; it's not universal and there are outliers where wealthy people are good like Megalopolis (and man that movie was batshit), but the overwhelming majority of the time that wealth is good it's because it just drops in the cool sets and props that the heroes can use and then gets the fuck out of the camera's vision. The three popular characters that are both wealthy and heroic I can recall are Tony Stark, Batman, and Scrooge McDuck; the former two are constantly made to apologize for being rich, Stark is actually shown in the text that the way he got all that money was evil and destructive and he has to make up for it, and Batman isn't shown that way in his own comics and films but it sure as hell is the most common argument against him in and outside the fiction. Scrooge is Scrooge, though, he gets to be fun.

Both political parties claim to represent the average Joe working class and both accuse their opponents of being captive to Big Business. The rank-and-file of both political sides blame all of their ills on a nebulous class of evil rich people and carve out special exceptions for the couple of rich guys they like, most obviously either Soros or Trump. Millionaire actors log on to Twitter and talk about how the rich are responsible for poverty and millionaire rappers rap about the rich keeping them down. Antisemitic conspiracy theories keep sneaking into mainstream discourse because their core is about "The Jews, who are all rich, use their richness and wealth and money and banks to cause all of the bad things to happen" and people keep going "Wow, I do agree that rich people use their richness and wealth and money and banks to cause all of the bad things to happen, this seems on the up and up!"

Our culture hates "the rich" as an abstract concept, and our collective neuroses about money very often stem from people's need to redefine themselves as not rich and their enemies as rich because they hate the rich.

And Communists get away with things nobody else gets away with, in a social context (which is what I was talking about, but fair cop if you are not familiar with that subject from me and you took it as "getting elected to offices"). If fascists actually were as commonly as accepted as communists, you would be planting bombs by the side of the road. If any other extremist ideology talked as much about their personally hobby-horse as much as Communists did they'd be a cause for nationwide concern; if any completely middle of the road political ideology talked about their personal hobby-horse as much as Communists did they would be banned from fora and servers because oh my God shut the fuck up.

This is a semi spinoff of this post, but really its own thought.

When a job pays less than a living wage, it generally attracts one of two types of employees:

Desperate people (usually poor and/or otherwise marginalized or with barriers to employment), who will take any job, no matter how bad, because they need the money, or

Independently wealthy people (usually well-off retirees, students being supported by their families, or women with well-off husbands*), who don't care about the pay scale because they don't need the money anyway.**

And sometimes, organizations will intentionally keep a job low-paying or non-paying with the deliberate intent of narrowing their pool to that second category.

People sometimes bring this up when discussing the salaries of elected officials -- yes, most politicians are paid more than most "regular people," but they're not paid enough to sustain the expensive lifestyle politicians have to maintain, and that's on purpose. It's not an oversight, and it's not primarily about cost-cutting. It's a deliberate barrier to ensure that only rich people can run for office.

The same is true, albeit to less severe effect, of unpaid internships -- the benefit of "hiring" an unpaid intern isn't (just) that you don't have to pay them; it's also that you can ensure that all your workers are rich, or at least middle-class.

When nonprofits brag about how little of their budget goes to "overhead" and "salaries", as if those terms were synonymous with "waste," what they're really saying is "All our employees are financially comfortable enough that they don't worry about being underpaid. Our staff has no socioeconomic diversity, and probably very little ethnic or cultural diversity." ***

This isn't a secret. I'm not blowing anything wide open here. People very openly admit that they think underpaid workers are better, because they're "not in it for the money." This is frequently cited as a reason, for example, that private school teachers are "better" than public school teachers -- they're paid less, so they're not "in it for the money," so they must be working out of the goodness of their hearts. I keep seeing these cursed ads for a pet-sitting service where the petsitters aren't paid, which is a selling point, because they're "not in it for the money."

"In it for the money" is the worst thing a worker could be, of course. Heaven forbid they be so greedy and entitled and selfish as to expect their full-time labor to enable them to pay for basic living expenses. I get this all the time as a public library worker, when I point out how underfunded and underpaid we are. "But... you're not doing it for the money, right?" And I'm supposed to laugh and say "No, no, I'd do it for free, of course!"

Except, see, I have these pesky little human needs, like food. And I can't get a cart full of groceries and explain to the cashier that I don't have any money, but I have just so much job satisfaction!

And it's gendered, of course it's gendered. The subtext of "But you're not doing it for the money, of course" is "But how much pin money do you really need, little lady? Doesn't your husband give you a proper allowance?"

Conceptually, it's just an extension of the upper-class cultural norm that "polite" (rich) people "don't talk about money" (because if you have to think about how much money you have or how much you need, you're insufficiently rich).

*Gendered language very much intentional.

**Disabled people are more likely to be in the first category (most disabled people are poor, and being disabled is expensive), but are usually talked about as if they're in the second category. We're told that disabled people sorting clothing for $1.03 an hour are "So happy to be here" and "Just want to be included," and it's not like they need the money, since, as we all know, disability benefits are ample and generous [heavy sarcasm].

***Unless, of course, they're a nonprofit whose "mission" involves "job placement," in which case what they're saying is "We exploit the poor and desperate people we're purporting to help." Either way, "We pay our employees like crap" is nothing to brag about.