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papirouge · 2 years ago

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Papi I need to vent!!!

I was checking out the new street fighter and somehow I ended up in this website where people were criticising this new character whos an african american woman, saying how she was super ugly and just forced diversity. They swore that they were not racist, but the way they worded things obviously revealed that they were, talking about how she was an stereotype and how offended black people should be because of such an ugly black character. But i researched her a little and literally the development team got help and advice from actual black employers from Capcom to create this character (Kimberly).

And some other people were complaining about how censored the female characters were, how they fell for the feminist/sjw brainwash, and that they would not buy the game if it stayed like that. Mmh, some of these characters literally have their titties out, super exagerated hour glass figures and angles focusing on their asses and all, and super tight clothing, like what the fuck are they talking about??

I went to other threads and they were talking about the new little mermaid movie, and obviously were talking about how ugly the actress was, how wokism ruins everything, and how redheads needed representation too but were all being replaced by black actors. Also a lot of comments about how the progressives hate redheads the most because they represent the 'most special type of white' (aka theyre rare). Never heard that one before.

They also discussed the new peter pan movie, revealed to contain a black Tinkerbell, and obviously lots of racists comm3nts that i dont wish to repeat. Some even talked about the japanese trailer (some are obssesed with anime and j-videogames as they consider asian media clear of wokeism), and many jap fans hated it and a commenter even said how some people were calling her 'kuronbo-bell', which apparently is the japanese word for the n-word?

Many threads too about how unattractive some female characters were nowadays, and when some commenters responded that not every female character needed to make their pp hard, they went in rants about how they didnt need to make them ugly either to be inclusive, that theres nothing wrong with male sexuality, and that they were being censored. Some of these 'unattractive' characters they were talking about were tweens...

ugh, anyways this became too long. Sorry for vomiting all over your inbox papi :( i wanted to say more but this is enough.

damn girl... what type of tragic internet gutter are you wandering through?🫠

rule #1: the internet is NOT safe and for your own mental safety you'd better learn to simply ignore & avoid those spaces where this breed of demons like to vent their putrid opinions away - especially if you're a Black woman.

some other people were complaining about how censored the female characters were, how they fell for the feminist/sjw brainwash

That's the thing with coomers/gamebro: they think they pornfried expectations for women is the standards, and anyone remotely critical of this entitled of having female characters NOT sexualized is a woke/feminist/leftist agenda. But there totally isn't an agenda to sexualize women of course.... I remember an idiotic french youtuber who said he felt uncomfortable watching Nightmare on Elm Street 2 because the male main character because there was a whole homoerotic depiction around him (idk if the male producer of that movie was gay..) - which made sense, because as a straight male, you're not comfortable having to deal with a sexualized gaze on another male. The problem is just a few minutes late, when he was talking about Nightmare on Elm Street 3, he was rejoicing because "finally I can see BOOBS!!".....and I was like OKAY BUT WOULD IT OCCUR TO YOU WHY YOU FEEL ENTITLED TO SEE A SEXUALIZED WOMAN WHILE BEING UNCOMFORTABLE WATCHING A SEXUALIZED MAN???

and how redheads needed representation too but were all being replaced by black actors. Also a lot of comments about how the progressives hate redheads the most because they represent the 'most special type of white' (aka theyre rare).

this dude was typically the kind of youtubro to whine about w0kiSm and how female character are becoming too chaste and ugly...the truth is for these men, women feelings will never be valid - only theirs. A woman being uncomfortable seeing another woman naked & sexualized ? feminist/wokism/jealousy, etc etc A man uncomfortable watching another man naked and sexualized? valid & rational argument in a movie critic. These men are clowns.

They will gaslight everyone calling women emotional but watch them having no consistency in their opinions whatsoever, and hiding themselves behind a cringe contrarian/anti system posturing

Men -and especially- anti-feminist/pseudo anti system/contrarian male youtuber are the most emotionally driven (FYI the french youtuber ended up kicking me out of his channel discord group bc I embarrassed him after I said he was "overreacting" after he took personally something I said that wasn't specifically directed at him💀) and intellectually inconsistent people EVER. You should never take anything they have to say about female representation seriously.

LMAO the projection of it all. Aren't the WHITE THEMSELVES been clowning and discriminating for centuries redhead for being dirty, stinky and being witch? That's ain't the fault of no Black people. Same can be said about blond btw. Blacks NEVER went out of their way to create a whole narrative about blondes being dumb, bimbo, etc.... THE WHITES DID IT TO THEMSELVES. But somehow that's the Muh w0KiSt fault now? As I always said, "woke has become a hollow buzzword not meaning anything anymore.

They also discussed the new peter pan movie, revealed to contain a black Tinkerbell, and obviously lots of racists comments that i dont wish to repeat. Some even talked about the japanese trailer (some are obssesed with anime and j-videogames as they consider asian media clear of wokeism), and many jap fans hated it and a commenter even said how some people were calling her 'kuronbo-bell', which apparently is the japanese word for the n-word?

Funny how they didn't have the same energy to call for "sticking to the material" when the previous Peter Pan movie got Tiger Lily whitewashed (played by Rooney Mara) but as I said, those people are not consistent ¯_(ツ)_/¯

The white dudebros elevating Japan as a holy land deprived of wokism are up for a huge wake up call when they realize that there's a growing amount of celebrities openly gays/crossdresssing (Matsuko Deluxe, Peey, Kemio, Ryuchell, etc.) and even more so calling for gay marriage and overall improvement of gay rights lol When I was booking for my acomodation in Tokyo, I was also surprised to see how the city had entire hotels dedicated for Muslim tourists, which is according to those white dudebro would be unthinkable in a land free of wokism and muslim invaders... Tokyo is more "inclusive" & progressive than these White anti want to admit, but narrative.....

when some commenters responded that not every female character needed to make their pp hard, they went in rants about how they didnt need to make them ugly either to be inclusive, that theres nothing wrong with male sexuality

I'm absolutely not surprised by Japanese dudebro joining in to dunk on Black tinkerbell. Black people know that we don't have no allies - especially among unmelanated people. Never forget Japan sided with the Nazi. They have that demonic racial supremacist rot in them. There's no wonder many White nationalist LOVE larping behind Japanese imperialism - when real Japanese imperialist wouldn't spit on a White gaijin even if they were on fire... They are sooo delusional~ but I guess thei obsession to dunk on Black people with ANYONE is enough for them. The world is truly obsessed with is, that's quite insane.

I also remember an article saying how Japanese people, who are culturally wired to fit in, get extremely influenced whenever they get in touch with foreigners. That's why you'll see them catch up Conservative talking points & opinions whenever they mingle with them - and do THE MOST.

That being said, it's pretty ironic to see Japan being so cranky about seeing race swap favoring of Black people when they themselves cast their own domestic Japanese actors in foreigner role. The "Shingeki no Kyojin" movie was super cringe because you had those blonde aired German named characters (in the manga) you assumed all along would be bulky 7 foot good Aryans....being played by 5'7 Japanese twinks, I- They REALLY should sit that one out and be quiet. We all know if Ariel was played by a Japanese woman they would be honored. The world is just mad that Black women get POSITIVE representation, that's all.

lmao but no one says they are "ugly" beside them, so why making it everyone's problem and make a such a fuss over their fee fees being hurt? A non sexualize character isn't "inclusive" - it's just being normal. Do these scrote go outside and scream at women not wearing revealing outfits that they are trying so hard to be "inclusive"?? NOT BEING SEXUAL IS THE NORM - VIDEO GAMES/MOVIES DOING NON SEXUALIZED CHARACTER IS JUST A REFLECTION OF A STANDARD. SEXUALIZING CHARACTER IS ACTUALLY AN AGENDA PANDERING TO MALE SEXUALITY. Jeez, the cumbrain energy is HUGE on this one.

#answered #papi truths

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opinated-user · 2 years ago

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Lily is always saying people hate her because she's trans and always tone policing her, but I just realized that the reason people dislike her stuff so much is because she only punches down.

Like she just got an ask about the HBO thing, where they have scrubed all their shows from their service making them unwatchable now. And she didn't care. She pretty much defended HBO by saying that other companies own the shows to so it's fine what they did.

Meanwhile she calls random women fascist racists because they enjoy a ship she hates. She only shits on individuals. Disney isn't really at fault for how shit the star wars sequels were, no it was the women who like kylo Ren. It's not Disney's fault that their rep is bad, it's the show runners for not just doing it anyway ( as if that'd even work).

I don't mind mad reviewers--jim sterling is good. They do sometimes complain about certain video game fans but they spend way more time exploring how the ceos and companies are really the worst thing in the industry.

Meanwhile lily is saying some random bitch on Twitter is the reason shows don't have lgbt rep she likes. 🙄

the difference is that sterling is an actual leftist with a very clear notion of how corporations are inherently against the interest of the workers and the consumer for the maximun profit. they clearly know what they're talking about because they keep themselves updated on the latest news while still sticking to a very easy to grasp set of principles and a viewpoint. LO meanwhile just roleplays as leftist without any understanding of how systems or industries actually work because she always wants to make every problem about individuals that we just need to replace in order to have everything work perfectly just like a liberal would. she never does research and she hasn't keep herself updated on anything that isn't WOW, the only company she has ever bothered to denounce but still supports by promoting their products and playing their game since she doesn't have any real principle. anon refers to this ask

transcription:

Opinion on how discovery WB merger killed allmost all artoon network and HBO animated projects?

I think this is horrible...

LO response:

Cartoon Network’s lineup didn’t die, they were just removed from HBO Max. Other parent companies own Cartoon Network, not just Warner Discovery, all HBO Max had were the streaming rights.

Also, whatever. It’s HBO Max, does anyone actually have that?

this right here shows a severe and total lack of understanding what is the real problem people are upset over. the fact that other companies own CN just means that no one can agree on what to even do with their shows so they might as well dissapear. they can't legally ever touch it again.

#lily orchard

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rotationalsymmetry · 3 years ago

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The other thing is…sure I’ll tag “the tumblr experience” but there isn’t one tumblr experience or one Twitter experience etc. your experience is largely about who you follow and how you engage, or not.

Like…I follow a mix of anarchist/leftist bloggers, people who post nothing but cute animal videos, atla fan blogs, people who complain about ableism, and general misc. If I started following significantly more political blogs, I’d have a different experience. If I flooded my blogs with ATLA fan art, I’d have a different experience. If I follow a ton of pastel hued positivity blogs I will have a different experience than if I follow people critical of the mental health system. That’s not tumblr. That’s a subset of tumblr.

Likewise on Twitter you can follow activists or you can follow science types or people who talk about gender but in a fun way or knitters sharing their projects, if you’re on Reddit you can find a fight or you can find a subreddit where you get kicked out at the first suggestion of conflict, if you’re on Facebook you can … there’s a lot of different potential experiences on each platform and there’s more commonalities cross platform between communities with similar interests/vibes than on the same platform between different clusters of people.

It doesn’t make sense to say Twitter steals your humanity or whatever. Depends what you do with it. Now yeah, there’s the river, there’s different algorithms, there’s tendencies different sites have. But a lot of what I’m seeing isn’t that.

#social media

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briek58454521 · 4 years ago

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Let’s rant about bigotry in media and fake allies.

.Look. I get it. You want to believe that your cartoons, media and celebs are completely perfect darlings that can do no wrong, but let me be frank. I don’t care how much you don’t want to talk about it. I care about the creators who keep inviting the discourse their way through their idiocy. Whenever a creator gets in trouble for doing shit like making jokes about slave hats on a live stream, or including a blackface caricature in an art book, or killing off their gays the very episode they come out or are introduced, there’s always a subset of people who say shit like, “it was a mistake, they didn’t mean it. It kinda gives us as a leftist community a bad name when we keep attacking each other like this”.

Let’s dismantle that. And let’s break this down in three basic points I’ll use throughout. 1. It is not your place to accept an apology that was not for you, especially when in regards to racism, sexism, anti-LGBTA+ bigotry, and anti-semitism. 2. We need to stop lumping in actual criticism with alt-right idiots being shitty about marginalized groups existing, because ultimately, infighting is not the end of the world, and disagreements are not inherently bad. They are a fact of life. 3. Most importantly of all, just because these people claim to be allies, that does not mean that they are. Because make no mistake. CARTOONS ARE NOT ANY LESS EFFECTED BY THE BIASES OF THE ENVIRONMENTS WHICH PRODUCED THEM THAN ANY OTHER WORK OF ART.

Now. Let’s break down that shit completely.

1. I used those examples as a jumping-off point, but in general, this shit always happens. A creator fucks up, they get criticism which was unquestionably earned, they get rightfully dragged, and the creator uses the backlash to garner sympathy from their audiences and paint their critics in a bad light and whine about Cancel Culture. NOW, I already talked about that in another post, but basically, it doesn’t exist, and is used as a weaponized shield from criticism.

Thing about all of that as well is when the creators keep bringing up how they didn’t mean it like that. Most people would answer this with, “doesn’t matter, what matters is what you did”, but there’s something else that people don’t talk about. This is usually a bunch of white people excusing this shit. Or otherwise, a bunch of people who weren’t actually affected by the latest controversy. And therein lies the rub. Allies, let me put it this way. WHEN THE SUBJECT OF THE CRITICISM IS ABOUT THE PORTRAYAL OF MINORITIES IN MEDIA, YOU ARE IN NO POSITION TO EXPECT SAID MINORITIES TO FORGIVE THOSE CREATORS WHEN YOU WERE NOT AFFECTED BY IT.

Remember the Lana Del Rey controversy, where her dumbass ended up getting shit for her statement filled with venom towards other artists? Could have been cleared up if she had just accepted that she messed up and didn’t word her statement correctly, but no. She lashed out at the people who told her it was kinda racist to lump a bunch of black female artists into a conglomerate of artists who just, “twerk, cheat, have sex, and get money”, and dismissing feminism as needing to accommodate women “like her, who were more delicate”, perpetuating inadvertently to the idea that black women are less delicate, white women are petite, demure, and need to have a place above the others. AND LOOK, it’s how she responded that sealed it. Accusing her critics of being the actual racists, who hate women, and conflating the criticism with.....ugh....a FUCKING RACE WAR. Do I EVEN need to explain the problem with that?

The point is that it was idiotic of her to assume that she didn’t deserve the criticism because she “technically didn’t mean it”, when ultimately, she wasn’t the victim, she wasn’t the one who ACTUALLY got hurt by all of this, and that most of the criticism WAS NOT ANYWHERE NEAR as vitriolic as Lana accused it of being. And people do this to minorities all the fucking time. Where the praise for the work is what matters, but then they’re just upset and looking to be upset about things when they....sorry, when WE have shit to say about the fuckups. Constantly, minorities are expected to praise bare minimum bullshit lest we have self proclaimed “””””allies””””” get pissy that we aren’t playing along. Well, sorry, but, I think it be time to stop with that shit. It doesn’t matter how pure you think that person is. If the people who are the actual part of the controversy have shit to say about it, MAYBE LISTEN TO THEM instead of trying to force people to accept the apology that wasn’t even yours to accept, nor was it for you to shove in our faces to shut us up. And if you dislike that I’m saying that, just know. That’s exactly what you’re doing when you pull that shit.

2. As simply as I can put it, complaining about how a trans person is portrayed badly is not the same as complaining ABOUT the presence of a trans person, and to lump that shit onto the other pile is dishonest and willfully ignorant. When we keep getting upset about the tone, or upset about, “WAAAH, they said a me-no-like”, and lump that in with the actual facists looking to erase us from the history books, we are doing half of their job for them, and normalizing shit like what I saw the other day, where on Twitter, some asshole complained, “Anime is supposed to be an escape from reality. Adding black people to it kinda ruins the point.”

I’m gonna talk about it in the next point, but for now, understand this. NO ONE says shit like that just out of the blue without having it come from somewhere, and that attitude is all too prevalent.

In cartoons especially, criticism of the NB lizard from She-Ra is not being bigoted towards non-binary people, because the use of a fucking lizard to portray them is the ACTUALLY bigoted thing. And to lump in criticism of that with the criticism of She-Ra not being conventionally attractive enough for men to masturbate to the fucking minor is only going to long-term HARM any discourse. Because having these conversations as well as discussing these issues and educating each other about them is how we AVOID THEM. Criticism is not just a vector for asshole conservatives to be pissy about your existence. It’s also a veritable TREASURE TROVE for how not to fuck your shit up. And when we all get it, we learn. I get it, you don’t want to do shit wrong, but when you do, as everyone will, the backlash will burn itself out, and once you’ve fixed it, people will be very forgiving. Because, and it’s gonna sound mean....THAT’S HOW AUDIENCES WORK. THEY WANT TO FORGIVE YOU FOR WHEN YOU DO SHIT WRONG. So just...fix it. And listen. Yeah, you’ll get called stupid, you’ll get called “moron”, but you will have saved yourself from getting that shit ten times worse later on down the line. BEAR IN MIND, THOUGH, any of you already typing about how that’s enabling cyberbullying under the guise of critique, IT’S NOT. There’s a wealth of difference between the two, and trying to distract from the point with that is just a red herring. So stop with that.

And now....for the biggest one of all.

3. See...here’s the thing. About that anime douche. That doesn’t happen in JUST anime. It’s been around for decades, and has been a thing to this day. The WoW community got upset about womz being in power for the past 15 years, and have gotten on their high horse about black people being in the game, stating that if they were around sooner, maybe it wouldn’t, “SEEM TOO POLITICAL”, with that Asmongold jackass trying to start a second wave of GamerGate because one of the people at Blizzard said, “Black Lives Matter”. Fantasy as a genre has been so rooted in racism, that the inclusion of goblins for the most part is synonymous with anti-semitism towards Jewish people. Captain Marvel was pilloried for the past two years because the mean lady said that shit needs to change and wasn’t too nice, and also, me don’t like her too much. Basically, tone policing over a personality that we still give Howard Stern a platform for. In cartoons, the inclusion of black people is seen as an inherently political opinion. The rumors of Gen 6 Apple Jack possibly having a black voice actress prompted comments such as:

“The thiing with AJ is clearly anti-white/conservatist as a response to Trump America. What is opposite of country redneck female? Of course, and urban black woman.”

“It’s the fact that she’s black that bothers me.”

“Killing a blonde freckled Southern character for some political agenda is the last thing I want to see.”

The news of Velma Dinkley being gay was immediately pounced upon with shit about a homosexual agenda, and constant bullshit about how it was so forced, or whatever. This shit always happens, and is gonna keep happening. You know why?

Because the entertainment industry is not ready to accept minorities. The games industry is not ready to accept minorities. Cartoons are still not ready to accept minorities. They accept them for a moment, until those minorities challenge someone’s ego. Fans embrace a character until they’re a woman, or a POC, or on the spectrum, or LGBTA+. The existence of us is denigrating to these idiots’ escape, not from reality, but from us. It’s bad enough that they have to put up with us in the real world, but even worse that they have to see us in fictional shows that aren’t real.’ Us merely BEING AROUND is a bad thing, and to ask for some improvements is met with bemoaning about agendas.

Supposed allies begin and end their support with how much money we put in their wallets and how much we stroke their egos about how woke they are, and actual allies are lumped in with actual offenders. If we get upset that a show they’ve posited as so enlightening is actually the utter pits and not in any way healthy, they get upset. Tell a Reylo they’re shipping something toxic and dangerous, they’ll get upset and yell racial slurs at John Boyega for sitting next to Daisy Ridley. Say, “Fuck Arthas”, people get upset jump down your throat about how you hate forgiveness. Tell people that the Grinch ought not to be forgiven, people get upset you’re strawmaned about how you hate forgiveness.

They just don’t understand, or care about the essential fact about all of this. As I said earlier. The environments which produce the worst of offenders in these fields, and the problems we hate seeing so much are in no way less affected by the biases that they were cultivated by. And media has never been any more ready to accept minorities as people and as worthy of being portrayed as people than literally anywhere else right now. And speaking up about that is what gets these fake allies mad, especially when they LIKE the media. What makes these people so mad is not the troubling portrayal of POC, or women, or minorities. Not that we are routinely ostracized for existing in cartoons, not that this shit happens at all. They don’t give a flying fuck about any of that. It’s the thing that they have to put up with as a result of that that makes them the most upset.

Criticism. And they don’t like that.

And no matter whether or not these cartoons are made by bootlickers, or this movie was made by a TERF, or if this creator has a history of blackface, racism, or has made garbage statements about women, if you aren’t nice and considerate enough towards their feelings, you’ll make them, and us, the allies, feel uncomfortable. NO DWAMA, just not too divisive feedback that’s ultimately worthless as it was made purely to try to appease idiots and the people most affected by these issues at the same time, meaning it had to be watered down past the point of no return in order for us to factor it in with our jaded mindsets and worldviews that are the direct cause of the problems we complain about, yet keep exacerbating through our ignorance and unwillingness to change.

If you aren’t like that, and don’t believe you should be lumped in with that, don’t behave as if you are that sort of person. But, even then, if you aren’t...listen to the actual experts. Stop listening to some white guy’s idiotic hot takes about black rep, and actually listen to black people. Listen to trans people instead of some cis white chick with no understanding of trans issues. Stop platforming the worst of offenders within these communities as the bestest ever. And most importantly....

remember that horses don’t exist.

#media #racism #sexism #cartoons #world of warcraft #reylo shippers #fake allies #anti lgbt idiocy #horses don't exist

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layce2015 · 4 years ago

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My thoughts on The Last of Us pt. 2

Sooooooo.....the most controversial game and the sequel to a game that many consider a masterpiece. And it's one of my, if not my favorite game of all time. As you guys know, I was really hyped for this game.

Then those leaks happened and everyone turned against the game. I didn't read the leaks as I wanted to find out for myself when I got to play the game.

Now that I've played it and beat the game, y'all are probably wondering what my thoughts were. Well....I thought the game was okay.

Let me explain, there are parts I loved about this game and there are parts I really didn't like in this game (I'm sure one moment you guys know which one I really didn't like). I don't think it's a Masterpiece as those game reviewers gave it but I don't think it's total garbage either. I think it's kinda in the middle.

Sad thing is, I can see a good story in this but I think the execution was off and the pacing was off as well. I don't think the game should have been as long as it was, it should've been at least 15-18 hours long, like the 1st game.

And the ending to this game....honestly, I expected worse. And I will say as I was getting closer to the ending I had a feeling that that was gonna happen. It kinda reminded me of the All Out War in Walking Dead with Negan and Rick. So the ending didn't upset me as much as everyone else was.

So, all in all, I think the game is decent and I might go back to play parts of the game but it is not a Masterpiece like the 1st game was.

The combat and Gameplay, I will say I had a lot of fun with. I feel like that part was better than the first game. And the animation of Ellie working on her guns on the workbench was so cool to see. The bow and arrows were probably among my favorite weapons, which is funny as it was my least favorite in the first game.

This is kinda hard to say without spoiling the game, so here we go!

SPOILER ALERT

If you haven't played this game or watched your favorite YouTubers play it all the way to the end DO NOT READ BEYOND THIS POINT!!

Okay, we good? Good.

MY MAN JOEL DESERVED BETTER!!!

Sorry, I had to say that but Joel's death, I REALLY didn't like it. Not that he died, but the way he died and that he died so early in the game I really didn't like. I had some inkling that he would die in this game but just not that way or so soon.

It felt more like it was for shock value than to tell a good story.

And I hate Abby so much as a character. And I want to say Fuck you Neil for trying to get me to sympathize with her while playing the second half of the game as her. I don't care about her at all! And fuck you, Neil, for also having me play as Abby and beating Ellie up.

Also is it bad everytime I got Abby killed I was happy and kept saying That's for Joel?! I'm sorry if I'm happy about the character I'm playing as dying, something is wrong.

I think if we cut out all that stuff with playing as Abby and just mainly focused as Ellie and got a different ending, this would've been a better game maybe a Masterpiece like the 1st game.

Also the flashbacks with Joel were my favorite parts of the game. It was just heartbreaking on playing those and seeing Joel again.

As for the whole SJW crazy leftist thing people complained about, I don't think it was that bad or in your face. I mean, it wasn't like shoved in your face. It felt like it was said then not really brought up again.

As for the new characters, the only ones I really liked was Jesse, Dina and, to some extent, Owen. Jesse and Dina I thought were pretty likeable, I thought Dina and Ellie's relationship felt real and was pretty good. Jesse was also a decent character.

Also I want to shout out to Tommy for being a badass and going on that one man army fight to Seattle.

Owen was the only one of the bad guy group, I kinda liked as it felt that he was reluctant to help Abby with her revenge mission against Joel. And he was pretty likeable

Oh yeah, the reason Abby kills Joel is because her dad was the Doctor that was gonna work on Ellie to extract a cure from her. So yeah, Joel killed him and that's why she goes after him.

Also the infamous sex scene in this game, I don't think was that bad. I was thinking it was gonna be waaaay worse from what I've heard people saying how they thought it was awful. I think that was another scene to be used for shock value.

And now let's talk about the ending. So after going through all of this, killing all these people, getting leads on where Abby is, Ellie finally catches up to her and her and Abby have a fight. Ellie gets the upper hand and is about to drown Abby until she gets a small flashback of Joel then stops and let's Abby go.

I understand that people are very upset with this ending, but the reason I'm not as upset as everyone else is that, I kinda had a small feeling that that's the ending they were gonna go with. Also I was expecting a much worse ending, like Ellie does something stupid and Abby kills her and leaves or something else.

But like you guys I would've preferred a different ending, like her killing Abby. And then maybe have her realize that, this changed nothing that she feels nothing. She doesn't feel satisfied or whatever.

I also think they went with this ending cause they wanted to be controversial just like the ending of the 1st game was to alot of people.

But that's just my theory.

But like I said, there are parts I like about this game and other parts I didn't like and it's sad cause I can see the potential for this being an amazing game. And it's just an decent game. I don't regret getting the game and I'll probably go back and play it but probably not all the way through. Probably the first half and then that epilogue ending, just skip that whole Abby section.

All in all, that's my opinion. Let me know if you guys liked the game or not! And please let's be civilized about it! And if my opinion about the game makes you upset, then I'm sorry that's your problem not mine. This is MY opinion! If you didn't like the game, I understand. But me personally, I didn't love it but I also didn't hate it, I'm just in the middle of it.

And to be clear, I don't love it as much as the 1st game. The Last of Us will always be my favorite game.

As for my fan fic, I'm sure everyone is wondering if I'm gonna follow the game. I can assure you that I will NOT follow the game. There are some aspects I'll keep but not all of it, I'm gonna kinda rewrite the story and make it more satisfying, hopefully.

#the last of us #the last of us joel #the last of us pt 2 #my thoughts #spoiler warning #the last of us pt 2 spoilers #joel miller #ellie #ellie williams #review #video game #video games #tlou spoilers #tlou #tlou2 #tlou joel #tlou ellie #tlouedit

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arcanenrok · 4 years ago

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Many people have, quite frankly, funfairly, decried the weeb community as a den of the alt right. However, I saw something the other day that made me think.

I follow a couple of Japanese language learning pages on instagram, and one of them recently posted vocabulary (異性愛者- heterosexual, 同性愛者- homosexual, etc.) for pride month. However, there were a lot of negative comments, and it seemed many of them were coming from, after I did a quick look, from parts of the world that are generally conservative Islamic. One person in particular was complaining about how “American” politics was being put on display where he wanted to learn about “Japanese” culture.

I am also reminded of another incident where I saw people complaining about a Japanese artist on twitter doing a commission featuring Alice Margatroid holding the lesbian and trans flags. They were saying things about “decline of the west” and about the artist getting “corrupted” by western influences.

It’s seems this homophobia has a link to anti-western sentiments. In both cases, I’d reckon that it is in particular the “liberalist corruption of the west” that is what inspires ire to the western world. In the case of the conservative Islamic world, it comes from a pre-existing ideological disparity. For the guys complaining on twitter, they seem to have similar feelings towards the “liberalization” of the west, but perhaps with the added touch that they think it used to be great (given their use of deus veult memes). And nothing seems to symbolize “western liberal corruption” to both of them more than the pride flag.

Which brings me to the point I wanted to get to, which was why Japan seems to attract fans from conservative ideologies. The truth is is that Japan really is a socially conservative place. People who hold tradition as supreme would probably find Japan to be very respectable and appealing for it’s own sense of traditionalism. They probably see it as a bastion of sorts against the wave of “western liberalism”, and so when they see things relating to western liberalism come in contact with things that are Japanese, they cry ‘corruption’.

The people who are attracted to Japan for this reason end up coloring their participation in the weeb community with their ideological desires. As such, you get a bunch of people who proudly wave anime around as a beacon of social conservatism, and that probably is why amongst leftist circles that weebs have the reputation they do.

tl;dr, the idea of weebs being alt right probably comes from a lot of people admiring Japan for it’s social conservatism, and so they personally characterize anime proudly as a beacon of right-wing ideology, and that got picked up on by leftists, despite everyone else liking anime normally.

#sfw #text #arcane thoughts

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friedesgreatscythe · 7 years ago

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@alien-leftist wanted me to do running commentary on the PC showcase, so here you go. I know nothing about this stuff and I don't care about PC things *and* I'm in the middle of editing a fic today, so you've caught me in a very strange mood lol

I'm not complaining btw, I just find it funny bc I am not at all in the right headspace for this.

"You're doing 'woo,' that's excellent." This showcase is clearly early in the AM and the hype guy is acting as everyone's coffee.

"Intel explores the future of PC gaming" ................... k

XBox something

New look at Shadow of Mordor (which means nothing to me bc I'm not a Tolkien fan)

Player Unknown's Battlegrounds

and a premiere from tripwire or w/e?? god I know piss all about PC shit lmfao

All of this was narrated by, and I quote, Evil Ominipotent Voice from the Sky. That is the voice's name and how he is credited.

World Exclusive, something by 2k involving LOUD TELPORTATION that makes the Inception BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARP noise. It actually looks cool but it just makes me sad about Mass Effect. When will I stop being sad about Mass Effect? Never. This question is a joke.

PS THIS EXCLUSIVE IS XCOM 2: WAR OF THE CHOSEN. All I know about XCom is nothing so I'll take their word for it when they say it's very exciting.

"The goal is to make something massive." Uh oh. Or Uh yay?

Sonja, some chick I think she's a Youtuber or whatever, is introducing a cute lil PC game that is genuinely adorable. Ooblets, I think it's called? It's like Adventure Time meets Pokemon meets Animal Crossing, so it has elements and features of all three combined. Plus adorable outfits and nerdy dancing???????????????/ I'm sold and I can't even play it lmfao It's coming out in 2018 btw

BIG MECHS AND EXPLOSIONS

by the ppl who made Shadowrun (w/e that is)

Oh it's just Battletech. Okay. And two dudes are on stage to talk about it, so good on them, I hope they had coffee. I feel like I need coffee just looking at them. They look like history professors and I am tentatively trusting of them.

there's singleplayer in Battletech btw

Mount & Blade 2 trailer, idk what this is, but if you like armor and fighting and horsies I guess this is your game

i think we're on a new trailer but i forgot the name i was too busy worrying about the Outsider bc he's my Void bf and Daud is a salty frog man

THERE'S DRAGONS IN THIS GAME THOUGH WTF that's crazy

DRAGONS AND

DINOSAURS??

Okay it's Total War II: Warhammer wtf that looks ballin

Okay tech stuff about Intel, I don't understand this either I'm SORRY CORE i9 EXTREME EDITION?? OKAY?? i heard the words 'engine optimizing' and 'using all the cores' so i guess that sounds good

something about a contest sponsored by people with money so they can give more opportunities to pc indie game makers, ok cool, thanks for the gaming world's version of a scholarship

ONE MILLION DOLLAR BONUS if ur the grand slam winner

that's a lot of money back now..........

ok now they're talking about showcasing skills and VR and idk what the latter has to do with the former. ps this guy is saying the word challenge too much, please stop my dude

i've been lost for the past five minutes idk what they're talking about or why

I'm still worried about the Outsider, Jay I just love him so much 8(

oh it's for playerunknown nvm

a trailer about war combat something i think it involves north korea. trip wire??? idk i don't focus on war games, they kinda skeeve me

occulus horror game but vr is dumb and things look silly and lame I M H O but this horror game actually looks neat. it reminds me of nightmare house. the game is called killing floor 2 btw

The Last Night thing, but tbqh I couldn't care less about this after this dude showed his butt a few years ago as a Gamergate supporter lmao. I'M TIRED OF PPL APPROPRIATING THE AESTHETICS OF CYBERPUNK WITHOUT THE CORE, CRUCIAL ELEMENT OF ANTICAPITALISM/ANTICORPORATION, and so in conclusion, the Last Night is wasted in the hands of its creator, thank you

Apparently in this game, btw, all jobs have been taken over by AI, making humans obsolete, and it's about ~finding yourself~ and they said the world changes based on little choices you make so yeah we'll see buddy

ok i'm lost again, sorry they're showin smth that you can check out at ylands.com? it looks like a goofy minecraft. well. goofier. i think it's actually called ylands--like "eye" lands--

this host guy is creepy weird and he's desynched so i hear his voice before his mouth moves. Big Cryptid Mood

another game by duders who made 'don't starve'. it's a sci fi RPG called.... i don't know, i couldn't understand the woman who said it. it looks like a cartoon though, like specifically the venture brothers, and that's RAD as fuck. ok the game is called Griftlands. neato. late 2017/early 2018

blah blah blah VR again blah blah i believe the VR is our future, teach them well and watch them grow

they namedrop troy baker, as if my dude wasn't the worst part of uncharted 4

homedude on stage straight up saying bullshit. like he literally said the word bullshit, and apparently something about his game includes the butterfly effect

i haven't seen an actual piece of media with the butterfly effect SINCE the butterfly effect. and life is strange tried it.

idk what game he's talking about btw sorry!!! but he said "it's $29.99. NONE OF THAT 69.99 MULTIPLAYER ONLINE BULLSHIT" and i lol'd so he's really passionated about this game

someone also called this game "full frontal fuckery"

OH IT'S CALLED LAWBREAKERS ok, whatever. it looks like pvp only stuff tho so............................................... ?

ps too many ppl are using the word literally now, it's a pet peeve, oh no

ppl who made stardew valley and star valley have a new game. i have no idea what either of those things are but this game looks like a really really old school final fantasy, and that's cute for nostalgia points alone. it seems to have fire emblem-y combat. online and local multiplayer, for people with friends and the strange desire to make friends with gamers. game is called wargroove.

jfc this conference is long

THIS CONFERENCE IS STILL GOING ON

SHADOWS OF MORDOR SHIT NOW out oct 10th

ok now we're on to i THINK age of empires remaster? this game was so fun goddamn, it takes me back to the age of 13. it's basically ancient history sims.

oh god it's finally over, i can rest until ubisoft.

#e3 17 #long post

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siryouarebeingmocked · 8 years ago

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SJWs get salty about Seth MacFarlane and family guy.

Local SYABM discovers he’s on blocklist

> Mediocre White Man

How to make SYABM assume the rest of your post is wrong, in just three words.

> but because the motherfucker donated some money to LGBTQIA groups and stumped for Bernie, he’s hailed as a progressive.

Pay no attention to the obvious leftist leanings in the shows you’re complaining about, such as repeatedly skewering conservatives.

> Seth MacFarlane created shows that dealt heavily in anti-black racism, antisemitism, ableism, Ace Ventura-levels of transphobia,

Yes, the idea that straight men might be disgused by the idea they’ve been fantasizing and admiring a trans woman is “transphobic”.

Also, I don’t think the movie ever makes it clear whether Finkle was trans, or was just that desperate to escape the shame.

Oh, and spoilers for a 1993 movie.

> rampant and vicious misogyny,

Is it “misogyny” or “making fun of gender stereotypes for men AND women”?

>normalized rape culture,

It’s funny you should mention that, considering the show has downplayed F>M rape, which usually isn’t included in “rape culture”.

> pedophilia as a joke,

Also, Prom Night Dumpster Babies.

>and violent Islamophobia.

He’s an athiest who makes fun of Christians, but clearly Islam and Judaism should be exempt from mockery. He also makes jokes about violent Islam.

> He taught generations of young white guys

Let’s see...Season 1 aired in late Jan 1999, Jan, so I guess someone born on that date would be 18. So it is, technically, generations of men. Two generations.

>that this shit was okay to say and believe because it was “just a joke” – hell, I’ll bet there’s a good Venn diagram between Family Guy fans and Trump supporters –

One of the most popular animated sitcoms in America? Yes, I should think so. Also with Hillary supporters.

> and anyone who criticized him was just some boring, humorless PC police asshole.

Including the people who complained about his “shoehorned atheism”. Because we all know how much religious people tend to be PC.

Also, I love the hypocrisy here; you’re complaining that FG’s critics are stereotyped, while stereotyping the show’s fans.

The rest of the line is “Or get ‘er done.” A reference to Larry the Cable Guy, who has a lot more than just a catchphrase. Also;

Early on in the special, Birbiglia declares that all jokes are offensive to someone. It’s a sentiment that a lot of people (not just comics) share. He smartly critiques this notion of political correctness without actually getting too political.

Oh wow, it’s almost as if someone took these quotes out of context to support their argument!

#family guy #animation #stupid #hypocrite #oh snap #teamBlocked

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newstfionline · 8 years ago

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Has Political Correctness Gone off the Rails in America?

By Philipp Oehmke, Der Spiegel, Jan. 5, 2017

It’s a Friday afternoon in Oberlin, Ohio, around one month before the country heads to the polls to elect Donald Trump as its next president. The final classes and lectures of the week have just ended, and a young woman comes walking by in bare feet with a hula hoop gyrating around her waist while others are performing what seems to be a rhythmic dance to the African music that’s playing. Two black students are rapping.

It’s the kind of scene that could easily play out on a beach full of backpack tourists, but this is unfolding at one of the country’s most expensive universities.

Many female students here have dyed their hair green or blue, they have piercings and their fashion sense seems inspired by “Girls” creator and millennial star Lena Dunham, who, of course, also studied here.

In such a setting, it seems almost inconceivable that this country could go on to elect Donald Trump as its president only a few weeks later. Yet pro-Trump country is just a few miles away. Oberlin is located in Ohio, one of the swing states that made Trump’s election possible. Drive five miles down College Road toward town, and you start seeing blue “Trump Pence 2016” signs on people’s lawns.

Places like Oberlin are the breeding grounds of the leftist elite Trump’s people spoke so disparagingly of during the election campaign.

Only a few months earlier, a handful of students claimed they had been traumatized after someone used chalk to scrawl “Trump 2016” on the walls of buildings and on sidewalks at Oberlin and at other liberal universities. It triggered protests on some campuses, with students demanding “safe spaces” where they would be spared from hearing or seeing the name of this “fascist, racist candidate.”

In the months prior to the election, “safe spaces” had been one of the most widely discussed terms at Oberlin. The concept has its roots in feminism and describes a physically and intellectually sheltered space that protects one from potentially insulting, injurious or traumatizing ideas or comments--a place, in short, that protects one from the world. When conservative philosopher and feminism critic Christina Hoff Sommers was scheduled to give a speech at Oberlin last year, some students did not approve and claimed that Sommer’s views on feminism represented “microaggressions.”

When Sommers appeared anyway, leading some Oberlin students to create a “safe space” during the speech where, as one professor reported, “New Age music” was played to calm their nerves and ease their trauma. They could also “get massages and console themselves with stuffed animals.”

“Microaggressions” are the conceptual cousins of “safe spaces”--small remarks perceived by the victims to be objectionable. In addition, there are also “trigger warnings”--brief indicators placed before a text, image, film or work of art alerting the viewer or listener of the possibility that it could “trigger” memories of a traumatic experience or the recurrence of post-traumatic stress disorder. Such a warning surely makes sense for people who have experienced war, who have fled their home country or who have otherwise been exposed to cruelty and violence.

But at Oberlin, one student complained to the university administration and requested a trigger warning for Sophocles’ “Antigone.” The student argued that the suicide scene in the play had triggered strong emotions in him and that he, as someone who had himself long been on suicide watch, should have been warned. In an article he wrote for the Oberlin Review, the student, Cyrus Eosphoros, compared a trigger warning to the list of ingredients on food items. “People should have the right to know and consent to what they’re putting into their minds,” he wrote. Eosphoros has since dropped out of the school.

The call for safe spaces and trigger warnings in addition to complaints about microaggressions all fall under the term “political correctness” in the United States.

Few other expressions are as ideologically charged and contested as this one. It is most widely used as an invective: Coming from the mouths of the right-wing, including Donald Trump and his millions of followers, the term is used to describe self-censorship. They consider it an expression of a victim culture, within which the hypersensitive “leftist mainstream” (also used as an epithet) seeks to isolate itself from every deviation from its own worldview. Opponents of political correctness consider it to be an overwrought fixation on the needs of minorities and one’s individual identity, on skin color and gender.

Now, two months after the election, those looking for clues as to how Trump’s victory became possible quickly arrive at the refusal of many Trump detractors--including members of Hillary Clinton’s own campaign team--to confront the uncomfortable fact that there are legions of Trump fans all across the country. It’s almost as if, in the face of Trump, liberal America collectively retreated to a “safe space.” And when they finally resurfaced after the election, Trump had won.

There was a time when political correctness wasn’t yet synonymous with hypersensitivity, feel-good oases or censorship. Originally, it was associated with the counterculture, not as a project of the academic elite and the establishment as it is today. Initially, it was an attempt to free the public debate from prejudices based on race, gender and background--from the apparently casual yet hate-filled and disparaging comments that frequently caused suffering, particularly among minorities and the weaker members of society. It was intended as an effort to get the voices of these minorities heard in the first place.

One of the primary assumptions of political correctness is that thinking starts with language. Those who use disparaging language must think that way as well. Another assumption is that of constant progress. That people evolve over time, that discrimination and inequality diminish over the centuries, from the elimination of slavery to women’s suffrage to same-sex marriage and the growing acceptance of transgender people. Progress was seen as the integration of the formerly suppressed and of minorities. At least in theory.

In the last decade, however, the obsession with minorities and their victimhood may have gone overboard. In a much-discussed opinion piece for the New York Times last month, Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia University, argued that American liberalism in recent years has been seized by hysteria regarding race, gender and sexual identity. Lilla says it was a strategic error on the part of Hillary Clinton to focus her campaign so heavily on African-Americans, Latinos, the LGBT community and women. “The fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups,” he wrote.

Even as the white working class and lower class flocked to Trump in droves, students at Oberlin were busy organizing a protest against the food served at the Afrikan Heritage House. A few students had pointed out that the dishes there were at most Westernized interpretations of the original recipes, a state of affairs which showed a lack of respect toward African traditions. This offense, too, has a term: “cultural appropriation.”

Meanwhile, Asian students complained that the cafeteria served bánh mì using inauthentic ingredients, prompting accusations of cultural imperialism.

The college took the complaints seriously, as it does with all grievances lodged by students. It has a reputation to protect--and must also protect itself from the lawsuits that many of its students’ parents can easily afford.

The cafeteria had to issue a public apology. But it shouldn’t have been only the Vietnamese students who felt insulted--it should have been everyone. After all, another term often used at Oberlin is “allyship.” The theory basically goes like this: Someone who has spent his life as a heterosexual white male will never be able to understand how an incorrectly-made sandwich could trigger a trauma. Nor would he ever truly be able to comprehend the systemic microaggressions that a black woman might be exposed to. But he could make himself her “ally,” by taking her experiences seriously and accepting them at face value, whether or not he is able to comprehend them personally.

For some professors, it has gone too far. One of those is Roger Copeland. On a recent Friday afternoon, he made his way to the Slow Train Café, the only place at Oberlin where everybody meets up during the day--professors, students and activists. He has come to talk about everything he believes has destroyed his profession. He has recently accepted an early-retirement severance package and will be leaving the school in a few weeks. Professor Copeland has taught for over 40 years at Oberlin. He is a theater professor and he looks the part. He arrives wearing a Hawaiian shirt and speaks, even in normal discussion, as if he were reciting Shakespeare from the stage.

Copeland himself took to the streets in protest in the 1970s: against the Vietnam War, against Watergate--the big things. On two occasions, he was arrested.

Today, though, it’s personal pronouns that his students are squabbling over and Copeland has little understanding. He says students no longer want to be addressed as “he” or “she,” but as “X” or “they” or newly created personal pronouns. At Oberlin, terms like “Latina” or “Latino” for people with Central or South American backgrounds have been replaced with the gender-neutral “Latinx.”

Two years ago, Copeland asked a young student who was editing a video during rehearsals for a stage production if she would manage to finish editing the footage by the end of the week. He didn’t get the immediate response and things were hectic. “Yes or no?” he called out in his exalted way. “Yes or no?”

The student, who Copeland says is an Asian-American lesbian woman, stormed out of the rehearsal, not that uncommon of an occurrence in theater. Later, the dean ordered Copeland to his office and accused him of having berated a student and of creating a “hostile and unsafe learning environment.” There was that term again: “unsafe learning environment.” The dean handed him a document and asked him to sign it. Copeland refused and provided the names of others who had been present and who could attest that he hadn’t berated the student. The dean said it didn’t matter. What mattered was that the “student felt unsafe.”

The matter led to a formal Title IX investigation for sexual misconduct. Copeland hired a lawyer and the probe was dropped after a year. The whole thing cost Copeland thousands of dollars. Worse yet, he says, he lost his ideological compass.

What was going on? Where, if not here, did young men and women have the opportunity to mature into citizens, into people who could also confront unpleasant views?

Copeland self-identifies as a leftist. He’s a man who has fought for social justice, for the rights of the weak, for freedom and for free speech. Now students were dismissing him as some old, reactionary grandpa who knew nothing about the vulnerabilities created by identity, skin color and gender, whether it be male, female, gay, lesbian or transgender, the full spectrum of LGBTQ, as people call it today--or “cisgender.”

Cisgender is a relatively new word and Copeland only recently became aware of it. He also learned that it is often used as an insult. It describes pretty much to a “T” what he is: a white, heterosexual man who is certain that he doesn’t want to be a woman and isn’t even a little bit bi-sexual.

Copeland isn’t the only victim. Across the country, “social justice warriors,” as they are disparagingly called, are leaving a trail of destruction in their wake, attacking professors, artists, authors and even DJs along the way.

At a bar at the University of North Carolina, a student named Liz Hawryluk complained to the DJ on a Saturday night in 2014 when he played Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines.” The song was a major summer hit, played at nightclubs around the world, but Hawryluk demanded the DJ immediately stop playing it.

The song includes the line, “Good girl? I know you want it.” Allegedly words a rapist would speak.

When the DJ refused and the girl continued insisting, she was asked to leave the bar. She then wrote about her experience on Facebook, arguing that line in the song is a “trigger” for victims of sexual assault that can reawaken their trauma. After her post got shared a number of times, the bar publicly apologized and fired the DJ.

In 2015, feminist film researcher Laura Kipnis, a professor at Chicago’s Northwestern University, became the subject of an investigation after she published an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education about sexual paranoia in academia. The subject of the article had been a new ban on sex or relationships between students and professors at the university. Kipnis also criticized what she described as obsessive discussion among female students about traumas and sensitivity. She described it as a fallback to traditional behavioral patterns--the vulnerable woman, the helpless victim and the man as the perpetrator.

But the supposedly defenseless female students struck back--first on Facebook and later in the form of a protest. Two students then lodged a complaint against Kipnis for alleged sexual misconduct, arguing that Kipnis’ essay had a “chilling effect” on female students who wanted to file sexual harassment complaints. Kipnis had to hire a lawyer and the charges were dropped after a 72-day investigation. In a later article, she described the proceedings as an absurd drama reminiscent of a Kafka novel.

Roger Copeland spent a long time contemplating where these vulnerabilities and sensitivities might have come from. “The relationship my students have with the world is constantly mediated. They only have access to it through their iPhone screens and through the social networks they have joined. What we would call the virtual is the real for them.”

It’s only when they are in the lecture halls, when someone like Copeland is speaking to them, that this filtered reality is suddenly suspended. This suspension can evoke a defensive reaction in those who are only used to receiving select news from a politically correct world in which everything has been furnished with warning labels and freed of any microaggressions. Internet activist Eli Pariser calls the serving of information to users using algorithms that predict what they think the reader will want to see the “filter bubble.”

Socio-cultural advancement has become something of a fetish for many students--and many have lost sight of everything else in the process.

Professor Marc Blecher, who teaches political science at Oberlin and enjoys lecturing on Marxism, had warned at a meeting one month prior to the election, likewise at the Slow Train Café, that the millennial students of today’s generation may talk a lot about social transformation, but they have lost sight of one truly decisive issue: class.

With their focus on skin color, gender and sexual orientation and the microaggressions associated with them, he argued, students were overlooking what Trump was able to recognize: Most people in the United States aren’t unhappy or angry because of their gender, their personal pronoun or the lack of a trigger warning in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” (due to misogyny). They’re angry because they aren’t able to pay their rents, and they have the feeling that nobody cares--that the liberal-progressive public is more concerned about whether the bathrooms used by transsexuals should be those of their biological or perceived gender. Shouldn’t the discussion be about the fight for wealth redistribution rather than definitions and identities?

Sidestepping such issues often underscores just how helpless many of these students have become, Blecher says. Still, he doesn’t want to create any misunderstandings. “They are not spoiled sons and daughters. Oberlin’s brand is social progressivism. The school wants to admit students from financially weaker families, students from Hispanic or African-American families, some are kids from the streets. Some have spent the last five years trying to get in and then their guidance counselor at high school gets them into a place like Oberlin. They were the most promising students we could find. And you know what? They arrive here and it is hell for them!”

Academic expectations are high, which he says makes the students feel like they don’t belong here--and, in a way, they don’t. “At its core, Oberlin is a highly exclusive place that wants to be inclusive. It’s an unavoidable contradiction. So some lash out.” And how do they do that? They look for a discourse, for a language. What they find is language like “microaggressions,” “safe space” and “intersectionality,” meaning the traits that some minorities have in common. “Their frustration keeps growing to the point that they start attacking the food in the cafeteria!”

The interesting thing, says Blecher, is that the students’ feelings of outrage are correct--they are just misplaced. “What’s really keeping them down are class dynamics and racial segregation. But we don’t talk about that.”

In places where microaggressions lurk and trigger warnings become necessary, certain things can simply no longer be discussed. The children of the 1968 student protest generation took for granted the freedoms that their parents fought to obtain, holding them to be self-evident. The grandchildren of the 1968 generation now want to retract some of those freedoms. Free speech--once the highest achievement the leftist student generation had fought for--is now largely and paradoxically being invoked by populists and the right-wing.

When Donald Trump calls Mexicans who cross the borders rapists, when he cracks jokes about women, and when, at gatherings in his honor, people lift their arms in Hitler greetings and fans of his top adviser Steve Bannon tweet “Sieg Heil”--that all falls under “freedom of speech.”

The roles have been completely reversed. Whereas today’s leftist student movement is willing to sacrifice the freedom of speech--fought for by their political predecessors--on the altar of trigger warnings and “safe spaces,” this right is now being defended by the very same right-wing whose political antecedents sought to prevent it back in the day.

This new right can be seen every day on Fox News. The cable network interprets freedom of speech to mean the right to insult. And that freedom of expression also provides a license to spread untruths. That’s also a problem with Trump’s new America: One part of the population is growing increasingly sensitive and no longer wants to read “Antigone,” while the other is growing increasingly brazen, calling Mexicans rapists and seeing all Muslims as terrorists. In Donald Trump, they will soon have a president who emboldens them.

Their narrative holds that they would love to say what is actually on their minds, but the “social justice warriors,” the guardians of political correctness, led by the “liberal media,” won’t let them. They too feel they are victims--at least they act like it, complaining that you can’t say anything in this country anymore. Indeed, they feel much as the leftist students did in the early 1960s. The only difference being that there really were things that you couldn’t say back then.

On the day after the vote, Oberlin College held a symposium called, “Making Sense of the 2016 Election.” A few days later, 2,400 students, staff and former employees called for Oberlin to be made a “Sanctuary Campus,” a kind of “safe space” for the illegal immigrants that the incoming Trump administration has said it wants to deport.

A few days after that, news of the vote breakdown in Oberlin came in: 4,575 votes for Hillary Clinton against 412 for Donald Trump. They now want to find those Trump voters. And confront them.

#political correctness #Oberlin College #microagression #Democratic politics #2016 presidential campaign #liberals #conservatives #US politics

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horrible-monstrosity · 6 years ago

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post from like five weeks ago that i just got around to finishing now woot

oh man, I thought I had run out of salt to mine aside from heromaca, but just look at this fucking shit it's fuckig beautiful--

wait no actual first off, I want to complain about the fucking otter motif- we get it Ukuhara you made two pseudo-successful series with animal motifs, now you're being self-referential. fucking stop. There's nothing to the otter motif that can possibly actually add anything to the show- "uhh sometimes they hold hands ???" doesn't work because it's nowhere near the desperate clinginess implied in the trailers, and if that's how it's supposed to be it's an incredibly shallow motif, and it can't be the gay man thing because that's about hairy guys, not anime twinks. But becusae Penguindrum had a penguins and Yuribears had a bears and becueas meaningless callbacks are meaningful to retarded people, we have to have something so working backwards it's otters. My conficence in this production is though the roof

first off, there's the weird wait for it DOUBLE STANDARD with how people describe what they expect from this show versus how they describe Utena et al- with Utena it's about the porblems stemming from the magic evil society monster from forever ago, the good old patterwacky, how we're not saying the mens are responsible for all evil but we're saying hurr mens, how we're not saying women are the only victims that matter but every mention of male victims goes into some bizarre circular language avoiding ever actually assigning agency to any sort of a human cause while every mention of le female victims goe striaght to belbllbelbleblelbblbllbr but with these male characters it's suddenly, oh, it's about the expectations placed on men (reasonable enough), expectations to live up to muh toxic masculinity (no)... sentence ends. The expectations don't come from somewhere, they just... sentence ends. Not even society half the time. Because men can't be the victims of anything let alone a social anything, I guess. Definitely not from women. and of course there's some fucknaut beating off about "HRUUUUU BE AGNAISNTNT DUBE BRO CUTLURE ???" because why the fuck would a japanese director who writes deap n meeningful tresh care about your fucking misandric american derangement complex you fat unwed dangerhair rre-- Especially amazing how this *subtle/subconcious sort of leftist cancer is coming out of 4chan, but I guess you really can't expect people to be very reverse woke outside of, like, /pol/ (where they may be just a little bit too woke). fuck idk Reminds me of like 7-8 mins into this video where some shlubnut declares proposal expectations or some shit sexist... but does not say against whom. Because then they'd have to admit it's possible for things to be sexist against men, or a bad time for men because of their gender, and possibly because of the actions and expectations of a woman. Can't have that. So it's either sexist against women or it's just sexist against the air and nothing, I guess.

There's something about Iku being a communist edgelord and in some kind of commie cult, and about Penguindrum being a refutation of that... uh, somehow. I guess because it had something to do with a cult? Somehow?

There's something about Ikuhara and Hideaki Anno going on a gay spa trip, I don't fucking know- but interestingly, one anon's interpretation of the preview materials sounds entirely like the "hedgehog's dilemma" shit from Eva. And they did both work on that new Godzilla thing. Hmmmmm

And of course there's the convergence shit like "if it deals with The Stereotypes then it is a feminism even if it has ideological components that have nothing to do with anything feminism ever does or addresses". Can't have anything outside of the thing, obviously using the show's existence as validation for their own twisted and retarded viewpoints and so having to insist that is conforms entirely to said viewpoints while simultaneously not having the more odious elements of said viewpoints because we totally don't hate teh mens guys, we just like an anime that's about ~~sticking it to the virgin-whore complex~~ that totally exists while sucking off the male knight-beast complex most of the damn time except the knights are evil too and the one guy who's actually nice is a spineless wimp who's sexually assaulted by his sister all the damn time and should totally be happy about it FUC (srsly, there's an Utena fan site or forum thread or something I found once that talks about the virgin-whore thing in Utena with googly eyes and gooey lips but then suddenly mentions the show flipping it onto males and just... says it's "interesting" and leaves it at that... some fucking shit like that meh)

oh yeah, there's this guy

For a long damn while I've thought to myself that Ikuhara's works, while touted as feminist and certainly dealing with those feminist sorts of issues, aren't quite... so. They're certainly some kind of gynocentric, but with just a little bit more... sympathy for the male characters, responsibility placed on the females, and generally some sort of actual nuance. Maybe. Just a bit. Certainly more than basically every breakdown I've ever seen of his works has put forth up until this mofo. I guess the best thing I can say is his works seem to exist in some kind of limbo between the two... Utena seems like it's deconstructing the idea that the "roles" are some unique oppression to women or even fucking matter, including a backstory for Akio where his role as prince breaks him so badly (thanks to greedy peasants who, if I remember, are a mixed-gender crowd... where do they lie in the prince-princess-witch equation?) he basically fucking invents an evil role for himself where none apparently existed before. But then it ends like it was... not doing that, or something. In Yurikuma, I mostly saw people say shit like "this is what society makes lesbians do by being so mean to them!!" (lol remember when lesbeans got stoned and thrown off of roofs lollololol so oppress clearly the victims of anything etc etc), but there is just... no fucking society in that show outside of the cannibalistic sex offender bear lesbians and the Higurashi-tier paranoia-cult schoolgirl lesbians. The latter victimize themselves by coming up with ridiculous social mores to defend against the threat of the bears in their midst (entirely reasonable, but they sure found the most retarded possible way of doing it), while the former are cannibalistic sex offenders. NO ONE WAS THERE TO MAKE THEM THIS WAY. Hell, with the humans being called "yuri" and the bears being... well, bears, which is a gay guy thing, and the plot being about segregating two compatible but different halves of society where the more violent half can go "undercover" and "pass" within the less violent half in order to hunt them... it comes off more like the females are trying to political feminist themselves and build a wall to keep the males out. Which comes with the implication that men are cannibalistic sex offenders, but since the grils are being characterized to an absurd height of feminine toxicity as well and the show is about both sides learning to cool their tits it kind of works. Kind of. fuck idk The entire plotline with the teacher who let herself be waited on hand and foot by some guy (nice fucking meaningless reuse of the coffin motif from Utena, by the way- shit like this is why even if this was the most reverse woke anime ever it would still just be shit) and then when he simply got bored of her and politely moved on she lost her shit and immediately killed him, then remained bitter about it for the rest of her life and went on to assault teenage girls... that has got to be taking the piss. It's just gotta. If not Iku has his head up his ass to heights previously unimagined.

and then there's those converging lefttards in that thread going "he is wrong with his subjective interpretations of a vague show though!! he is wrong!!! reeeee" Uhhhh, there's like a bazillion types of feministsms so the show can't possibly be about critiquing it!! It can't just, like, pick a type, or pick out some commonalities (there sure are plenty for something so supposedly nebulous), and mull over that, it's unposstible!!

Finally I find this interesting... while his previous works had some kind of strange innocence about them despite the sexual shit, the first male-centric work he does outright has "lust is life!" as a tagline and the word "desire" worked into the title. I'm... not even implying anything with this, I just find it really kind of interesting. The title itself actually inspires more confidence than his last two works- the "zanmai" could mean "lust" or "desire" and is likely referring to the same thing as said tagline, and the "sara" could mean "dish" (as in "this place's signature dish", not a literal plate or something); lusting after food is often metaphorically used to mean lusting after someone sexually (gobble someone's cock, etc), so already it looks like there's something vaguely resembling a coherent symbolic framework rather than the random-words-based titles and plots of Yuribears and Penguindrum.

Honestly however this show turns out it's going to be a fucking disgusting beautiful delicious shitshow and I cannot fucking wait.

#anime bitching #deep thunks

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96thdayofrage · 7 years ago

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Ever since I began investigating the extremist groups lining up behind Trump last spring, several of their leaders have made big claims to me about an alt-right following in Silicon Valley and across the broader tech industry. “The average alt-right-ist is probably a 28-year-old tech-savvy guy working in IT,” white nationalist Richard Spencer insisted when I interviewed him a few weeks before the election. “I have seen so many people like that.” Andrew Anglin, the publisher of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer, told me he gets donations from Silicon Valley, and that Santa Clara County, home to Apple and Intel, is his site’s largest traffic source. Chuck Johnson, the publisher of the conspiracy-mongering site Got News, said he gets lots of page views from the San Francisco Bay Area.

“If you even try to posit that racism and sexism aren’t why women and minorities aren’t making it, that it’s some combination of talent and values, people’s heads just explode.”

After Peinovich was outed, he also insisted to me that many techies secretly identify with the alt-right, which he attributed to a backlash against the “corporate feminist and diversity agenda” of tech companies. “The fact that speaking up about this virtually guarantees career and social suicide, as in my case, shows why so many white males in tech would be attracted to the alt-right.”

None of these alt-right figures would provide any data to support their claims. As I’ve reported, some alt-right sites have wildly overstated their reach. Moreover, the tech industry is renowned for its globalist outlook: Public-opinion surveys conducted by a Stanford political economist have found that rank-and-file workers in Silicon Valley exhibit less racial resentment and more favorable views toward most forms of immigration than average Americans.

Nonetheless, “alt-techies,” as Spencer and others call them, do appear to play a role in a movement that first incubated in the backwaters of the internet and eventually spread online with the rise of Trump. Some heroes of the far right are associated with tech: They include former Breitbart News “tech editor” Milo Yiannopoulos; the infamous neo-Nazi hacker Andrew Auernheimer (a.k.a. Weev); and the video gaming vlogger Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, whose “Pewdiepie” YouTube channel featuring Nazi-themed jokes has 54 million subscribers. (Last month Kjellberg apologized for the jokes and said he is not a Nazi.)

There are also successful figures in the tech industry who appeal to and have commingled with the alt-right: The DeploraBall, a gathering of far-right activists and conspiracy theorists during Trump’s inauguration, was co-organized by software investor Jeff Giesea and attended by tech billionaire and Trump backer Peter Thiel.San Francisco-based tech entrepreneur Curtis Yarvin is known for launching the pro-authoritarian “neoreactionary” movement and reportedly has been in contact with Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon. (Yarvin denies this.) Giesea and Yarvin, both of whom I interviewed, reject the “alt-right” label for its associations with white nationalism, yet they share the movement’s disdain for the race and gender politics of the left. (Thiel’s media representative did not respond to a request for comment from him.)

To further gauge the influence of the alt-right in tech, I interviewed seven people in the industry who embrace aspects of the movement. They included current or former employees of Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and Twitter, some of whom responded to me after I reached out to them through their Facebook pages. They asked that I not publish their names, citing concerns about their jobs. I also interviewed two techies associated with the Daily Stormer; one declined to disclose his identity to me but has a posting history on the site indicative of working in tech in the Bay Area.

Three of the alt-techies I interviewed said explicitly that they were white nationalists. The others did not identify that way, but they emphasized their belief in racial or gender differences in IQ or social behavior, and strongly rejected identity politics, affirmative action, and what they see as toxic political correctness. Their views shed light on how the alt-right has found a receptive audience on the margins, at least, of the tech world.

A former product manager for a top tech company who now consults for Twitter told me that white and Asian male domination in the tech sector has more to do with innate abilities and culture than discrimination. “If you even try to posit that racism and sexism aren’t why women and minorities aren’t making it, that it’s some combination of talent and values, people’s heads just explode,” he says. “They just refuse to even float the idea.”

“I’m not necessarily saying any one race is bad,” says “Mark,” a former software developer for Yahoo and Facebook. “But we should at least agree that statistically, race and sex genes do make us differ enough on average to make things uneven in certain areas.”

“The history of nearly every field of science and engineering was driven by white Europeans,” declares a 45-year-old computer chip designer who says he lives in Berkeley, California, and who posts under the name “White Morpheus” on the Daily Stormer. “Nobody will say their real feelings [about the alt-right] because a mob of fat blue-hair complainers will drive you away from your career forever. Peter Thiel coming out [for Trump] was a joy to us all, because he could show his support for the Trump train where we could not.”

In 1990, Ku Klux Klan “Grand Dragon” Don Black created Stormfront as a dial-up computer bulletin board for former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke’s campaign for Louisiana governor. By 1995 it had evolved into the first major public website dedicated to promoting white supremacy, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups. But online hate speech mostly remained confined to its traditional base of neo-Nazis and Klansmen until the launch in 2003 of 4chan. Originally conceived as an anonymous message board for discussing Japanese anime and manga, 4chan attracted a cult following among techies at around the same time that its political discussion board, now known as /pol/ (short for “politically incorrect”), became a hotbed for racist jokes and ironically intended Hitler memes.

The political glue binding the predominately young, male 4chan community is essentially anti-leftist: a disdain for identity politics and so-called “social justice warriors.” This attitude thrives amid a culture of anonymity, in which status ostensibly comes from page views rather than one’s gender, ethnic, or social background. “Larry,” a software engineer for Google and an alt-right fan, points to the infamous 4chan post, “There Are No Girls on the Internet,” where one 4channer profanely lectures another about how online life is a meritocracy in which gender should play no role.

Yet, hostility toward women and people of color thrives on 4chan and on Reddit, the social sharing site whose political and gaming forums /r/the_donald and /r/kotakuinaction are popular with the alt-right. In 2014, 4chan and Reddit users launched an elaborate campaign of rape and death threats against female video game developers that became known as Gamergate. They found champions in Yiannopoulos, who argued that the true victims were the men whose gaming culture was being destroyed by “feminist bullies” and the “achingly politically correct” tech press, and in Mike Cernovich, a blogger who has trumpeted the neuroticism and other alleged weaknesses of women as well as what he claims to be the criminal proclivities of certain ethnic groups. When former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao last year banned five “harassing subreddits,” including one called ShitNiggersSay, the move unleashed weeks of bigoted trolling (a.k.a. “shitposting”) and digital vandalism on the site—and a migration to a Reddit copycat site, Voat. (More recently, similar migrations took place after Reddit banned /r/altright and discussion of the fake-news scandal #PizzaGate.)

The anonymity of 4chan and Reddit makes it impossible to tell the extent to which they are dominated by tech workers, though an abiding interest from the tech presssuggests considerable overlap. “It’s definitely geek culture,” says McGill University cultural anthropologist Gabriella Coleman, who has studied how 4chan gave rise to the hactivist group Anonymous. “Clint,” a Valley cybersecurity startup founder and longtime visitor to the site, told me that the majority of active users on 4chan/pol/ are in tech, though typically in lower-level system administrator and tech support jobs that come with a lot of downtime during the workday. Dale Beran, who recently wrote about the political history of 4chan, argues that techies have become less dominant as 4chan and similar sites have expanded, though they still play a role: “We can define [4chan users] by their retreat into the computer, which means a lot of them have computer skills—whether that’s networking or coding or whatever—but to some it may have simply been World of Warcraft.”

“Most contributions that built the internet came from white people,” declares one notorious hacker.

Before Gamergate, Larry, the Google software engineer, was “a standard Democrat straight-voting person,” as he puts it. But reading about the movement in the tech press and on pro-Gamergate websites “did highlight some of the inconsistencies and hypocrisies with positions on the left,” he says. A comment in a Gamergate thread led Larry to the Unz Review, a website run by Palo Alto tech entrepreneur and former GOP gubernatorial candidate Ron Unz. There, Larry says he was exposed to treatises on “human biological diversity” expounding on the supposed cognitive differences between intellectually superior and inferior races.

Human biological diversity has also gained currency in the Valley through computer scientist Curtis Yarvin, who writes under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. Starting in 2007, in series of blog posts often cited by alt-right followers, Yarvin laid out a political philosophy known as neoreaction or the “Dark Enlightenment.” Combining a technocratic sensibility with reactionary political thought, neoreaction rejects Enlightenment concepts—such as democracy and equality of the races and sexes—and instead advocates something much closer to authoritarianism. Yarvin believes government would work much better if run like a tech company and helmed by an all-powerful CEO president. He spoke admiringly of Napoleon, whom he considers to be “kind of the Steve Jobs of France.”

Yarvin’s blog combines dorky programmer lingo with dense references to obscure, proto-fascist political texts. “When I started blogging 10 years ago, the availability of completely unorthodox written content [online] was mostly confined to the pre-1923 corpus, which Google did such a nice job scanning,” Yarvin told me in an email. He believes that software programmers are attracted to his writings because they “are always looking for something to do with their restless, fidgety brains. Especially if it’s weird and doesn’t involve dealing with physical humans.”

Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who reportedly gave Trump more than $1 million during the campaign and was an adviser on Trump’s transition team, has circled neoreactionary ideas. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wrote on the Cato Institute’s blog in 2009, adding that women and “welfare beneficiaries” have through their voting habits “rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron” (He clarified two weeks later that he supports women’s suffrage and redirected blame for the supposed demise of democracy on “unelected technocratic agencies.”)

Thiel is reportedly an investor in Yarvin’s cloud computing company, though Yarvin told me that he and Thiel have never discussed neoreaction. Michael Anissimov, another well-known neoreactionary blogger, was formerly the media director of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which has received funding from the Thiel Foundation.

While a student at Stanford University in 1987, Thiel founded the conservative Stanford Review to inspire campus debate by “presenting alternative viewpoints.” In the 1995 book The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus, Thiel and former Stanford Review editor-in-chief David O. Sacks argued that multiculturalism at colleges was hurting education. In one bizarre passage, they speculated that some college date-rape cases were actually “seductions that are later regretted”—a comment for which Thiel apologized last October, telling Forbes, “Rape in all forms is a crime. I regret writing passages that have been taken to suggest otherwise.”

DeploraBall co-sponsor Jeff Giesea, also a former Stanford Review editor, worked for Thiel Capital Management in the late 1990s. Last year, Giesea partnered with far-right blogger Mike Cernovich on MAGA3X, a digital operation dedicated to waging meme warfare on behalf of Trump’s campaign. Enlisting a network of pro-Trump Twitter influencers such as former BuzzFeed employee Anthime Gionet (a.k.a. Baked Alaska) and right-wing troll Jack Posobiec, the group spread Breitbart News contentand memes based on conspiracy theories such as #SpiritCooking and #Pizzagate. The DeploraBall stirred controversy among the alt-right when Giesea and Cernovich decided to remove Gionet from their “featured guests” list after he posted several anti-Semitic tweets. But Giesea told me that he generally agrees with the views of alt-right fellow travelers such as Yiannopoulous. In January, he told BuzzFeed, “I see Trumpism as the only practical and moral path to save Western civilization from itself.”

In 2014, Jesse Jackson began pushing Silicon Valley tech companies to disclose statistics about the racial and gender composition of their workforces. By the following summer, he had pressured Google, Facebook, Apple, and many other major tech companies to reveal their paucity of black, Hispanic, and female employees and commit to making improvements. But when he appeared on Reddit that summer to answer questions about diversity in tech, he faced a virulent backlash. By far the most up-voted question began, “You are an immoral, hate-filled race baiter that has figured out how to manipulate the political system for your own gain.”

The comment came from an anonymous account that was later deleted; few people in Silicon Valley are willing to question the value of diversity out in the open. “If there was [opposition to diversity policy], it’s probably something someone says to themselves in the car on the way home or on the bus on the way back to San Francisco,” says Reed Galen, a GOP consultant who advises tech companies and has been trolled online by the alt-right over his criticism of Trump.

Chuck Johnson, who runs the pro-Trump site Got News from his home in Fresno, California, and claims to have received funding offers from wealthy tech investors, points to an obvious outlet for closeted alt-techies: “A lot of these people see a sort of ostracism takes place [after they question the value of diversity], and they either rebel against it internally or they go online and they have a different identity and they shitpost on Reddit.”

Several alt-techies I interviewed said they were fans of A Troublesome Inheritance, a national bestseller published in 2014 by former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade that makes a case for the existence of differences in average IQ and behavior between races. The book and others like it have been widely criticized by geneticists as misleading, overly speculative, and not based on scientific consensus, but the alt-techies claim such critiques are just political correctness. “Nobody wants to touch it or admit it for fear of being branded alt-right,” Mark, the Facebook engineer, told me.

“Tomorrow, being a Hispanic, Black, Muslim or woman in the USA is going to be very scary,” the Latino founder of a Silicon Valley startup wrote on Facebook on election night.

White supremacists see the historical dominance of Silicon Valley by white males as a reflection of the world’s natural order. “The reality is that for the vast majority of all human civilization, the majority of makers have been white,” insists Andrew Auernheimer, a.k.a. Weev, a notorious troll and hacker who says he does tech support for the Daily Stormer and The Right Stuff. “Most contributions that built the internet came from white people,” he says, but now “our contributions are essentially being stolen from us.”

Alt-techies are scornful of South Asians working in Silicon Valley under H-1B visas. White Morpheus, the Daily Stormer reader, told me that he became a white supremacist after working with “unqualified subcontinentals who were brought in by visa fraud to drive down American engineering wages” and who “produce subpar work product.” (Before I contacted him, White Morpheus had posted on Daily Stormer about forming a neo-Nazi meetup group in Silicon Valley and using programming tools to create more video games “like Angry Goy.”)

The H-1B visa program, which Trump has vowed to reform, is unpopular among many tech workers due to concerns about its effect on wages and job security. Studies have shown that the largest recipients of H-1B visas are outsourcing firms, and that H-1B workers get paid less money than their American counterparts for the same work. But hardcore racists see an opening to turn the H-1B debate into a recruitment tool in the Valley. “A bill is being introduced in the House of Representatives that will neutralize the economic advantages these anti-American companies get from gaming the H1-b visa system,” a contributor to the Daily Stormer wrote recently. “If the cucks in Congress don’t block it, the not-so-humanitarian motives of big business in browning and third-worldizing America will be revealed.”

“Tomorrow, being a Hispanic, Black, Muslim or woman in the USA is going to be very scary,” the Latino founder of a Silicon Valley startup wrote on Facebook on election night. The post elicited an outpouring of solidarity from many Bay Area techies—but not from Andrew Torba, an alum of the Y-Combinator tech incubator, who tweeted a screenshot of the post with the line “Build the wall.”

When other Y-Combinator graduates began criticizing Torba on Facebook, he waded into the fray: “All of you: Fuck off,” he wrote. “Take your morally superior, elitist, virtue signaling bullshit and shove it.” Using an alt-right term meant to demean mainstream conservatives, he added, “I call it like I see it, and I helped meme a president into office, cucks.”

Y-Combinator soon banned Torba from its alumni network for “speaking in a threatening, harassing way towards other YC founders,” in violation of its ethics policy. Torba denied threatening or harassing YC founders and called the ban “a quintessential example of Silicon Valley censorship in action.” He later turned down my request to speak with him about the incident by posting parts of my email to him on social media with the comment “We don’t interview with fake news sites.”

Picking fights online may have helped Torba’s startup Gab, a social-media network that quickly positioned itself as a haven for alt-right-ers banned from Twitter. Gab’s frog logo is reminiscent of the alt-right mascot Pepe the Frog, and Torba has posted on Gab what could be construed as riffs on the Pepe hand signal and the alt-right’s red-pill meme. (A Gab spokesman said Torba does not identify as part of the alt-right.) Trump’s victory seemed to encourage other alt-techies to speak up, albeit pseudonymously.

“What if some cultures are better?” a commenter wrote a few days later on Y-Combinator’s popular social forum, Hacker News. “Why should we respect foreign cultures if they don’t respect our own? Why should you lose your job if you make a joke in public that some people deem offensive? Why is racism against whites and sexism against men acceptable?”

Another commenter on the thread chimed in: “Based on the tone of the comments around here lately, I’m getting a sense that HN has been populated by closeted alt-right for a while now.” (A few weeks later, Hacker News announced a “political detox week” in which political stories and threads were banned.)

A similar controversy has played out in recent months on Reddit—another young, male techie-dominated site—as r/The_Donald has risen to become one of the site’s most active subreddits. Its participants are notorious for trolling other Reddit communities and attacking people based on their religion, race, gender, and sexual identity, as Gizmodo‘s Bryan Menegus has documented. Citing two former Trump campaign officials, Politico‘s Ben Schreckinger recently reported that Trump’s campaign team privately communicated last fall with r/The_Donald’s most active users to seed new trends and feed catchy memes from the site back to Trump social-media director Dan Scavino.

The gaming vlogger Pewdiepie, whose YouTube channel is the world’s largest, made rape jokes early in his career and sometimes uses the word “slut” as an insult. Since August, he has made nine videos featuring Nazi imagery or anti-Semitic humor, according to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal. (He later apologized but also said the Journal took the remarks out of context.) In a vlog posted in January that has been viewed more than 7 million times, he jokes about getting banned from Fiverr, a website where freelancers offer their services for $5, after hiring people to make a video of themselves holding a sign that said, “DEATH TO ALL JEWS”—drawing kudos from neo-Nazis. In February, Disney’s Maker Studios said it would no longer run PewDiePie’s network and YouTube canceled the release of the second season of his reality show, Scare PewDiePie.

The alt-techies I spoke with remain aware of the risks of emerging further from the shadows. “If I posted publicly about what I told you, I’d get fired,” says Larry, the Google software engineer. “Even with Trump, there is huge cultural inertia.”

#tech

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