xunzilla

[xunzilla]

GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: Doom is a user-extensible aesthetic vision of Hell, and one of the reasons it works so well at that is monster infighting - if one demon's attack hits another demon, the second demon will get mad at the first and retaliate. Hell is an endless cycle of violence where badass ripped monsters twelve feet tall with rocket launchers for arms kill each other until they die in Hell and are resurrected to fight again. As an irritable and short-tempered person who would very much like to be twelve feet tall with rocket launchers and tren, watching the hideous robotic spiders, musclegoats etc. slaughter each other in a 2.5D mosh abattoir totally succeeds at convincing me I should fear for the state of my immortal soul

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GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: it sucks that race science doesn't work

ZEPHANIAH EZEKIEL THUD: What do you mean by this.

GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: think about it. if race science worked everything would be so much easier. evaluating competence would be a simple matter of breeding, and all men would be born into their rightful station

HAMPHECIUS HUMBUG: The sons of the tillers of earth would till, and the sons of the rulers of earth would rule... maximally efficient, with no more strife than between the lion and the ant...

ZEPHANIAH EZEKIEL THUD: Doesn't it devalue human intelligence to reduce it to that of the ant?

HAMPHECIUS HUMBUG: bro are you asking me if i want to #disrupt received wisdom to secure the bag. what do you think america is about

GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: America is about the eugenic breeding of a transnational master race; look up what the founder of MIT said

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Here's one for the 'post-doomer literature' files. Don't worry about which literature :-)

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in 2024 the conservatives broke the civil rights era taboo on explicitly recognizing white identity in a major-party election. this passed without comment

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that's at best a side effect of the process of figuring out how to make reproductively viable life paths that are meaningfully distinct from dying at 25-35 in a manner that aligns the various stakeholders, a set which includes forces that would really like for people to die to the world outside the office at 25-35, and does not in a relevant manner include the owners and operators of the individual lives in question

We're in a global memetic race to develop a secular breeding imperative

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I'm not saying this doesn't go hard, I am listening to it on purpose, but that entire era of American culture where we got into music from Germany - where some of us learned German and went there - like, there's a cultural studies dissertation in that that I'll summarize (too flippantly) as "a response to Peak Rap for white people whose cultural inheritance included Enya"

Like how people looking for an alternative to rap got into German music when it was Kraftwerk and invented Detroit techno

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conservatives often see government entitlements as a form of property, which we parody as like "get your government hands off my medicare" but are they wrong? if property rights are created by the government – which they are: patents, IP law, etc. – why should medicare be any different?

hence "welfare queens", a class of aristocrats that the working class both resents and disdains. resents because they're aristocrats and we don't hold with nobility, disdains because the proper values come from submission to authority. like you don't see middle managers having feuds

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In which is regarded our Atlantic coast:

HANPHECIUS HUMBUG: Tegucigalpa-Saxon lawn farmers, Cadillac-fattened cyber-peddlers, seventh failsons of bloated baronets—

GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: do you know what they used to call senescent civilizations with fading, unearned wealth? societies of illiterate, lethargic, cart-pulling cud-chewers, ruled over by priests in strange robes who babble in dead tongues and wave idols over their primitive flocks? the sick men of the world system, the excreta of history?

HANPHECIUS HUMBUG: what

GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: the East

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It's fine. We're in an era where the polity is contracting. Conservatives want to contract it in certain ways, but they're wrong about where it is! More people have dyed hair, piercings, short hair as women or long hair as men, etc. than are monarchist weirdos like JD Vance who believe in repealing the 19th Amendment, banning contraception, and having a transnational absolute monarchy that believes everyone who doesn't support its king will be tortured forever in the afterlife. Catholic converts are creepy and weird! They're also very literally engaged in a conspiracy to subordinate America to Rome. They even have a creepy vizier! The creepy vizier, who the Trump administration appointed to the federal agency for managing the administrative state, says that politicians should replace the administrative state's staff with Catholics in order to make America a Catholic theocracy—and that it's fine to make it a Catholic theocracy since it's currently a Pelagian one. Pelagian? Very weird. These people are deeply out of touch. They've lost the plot. They don't get it. They're the kind of guy that joins an organization that, within living memory, had the biggest child-rape scandal in history—they're creeps.

Sometimes it's fine for the polity to contract. Sometimes it's fine to stop being tolerant of things that we used to be tolerant of. This country used to tolerate the Ku Klux Klan—used to think it wasn't weird to be a Klansman—is it bad that we stopped?

You guys do not understand that for the average person "freak" is already an inherently terrible thing to be, and "weird" only recently became acceptable when its meaning was softened and palatable "weirdness" became marketable alongside "nerd culture". In everyday usage a "weird guy" is still someone you want to avoid, it's a common euphemism for "probable sex offender", and to call someone a freak is about equivalent to calling them a slur. Being visibly mentally ill or visibly homeless is enough for a good portion of the population to believe you don't deserve human rights (although they wouldn't phrase it that way), and having visibly autistic mannerism is enough for people to think you shouldn't be let around kids. LGBT acceptance was won by arguing that gay and trans people are "normal, just like you and me", that they aren't weird, that they aren't freaky sex perverts they just want to love and be who they are. There has never been any kind of broader acceptance towards weirdness qua weirdness or freaks qua freaks, even on the left. It doesn't exist. For the average person, to be weird and gross is to be inhuman, unworthy of life. There is no distinction made between the subjectively disgusting and the morally condemnable; if you are freaky you are bad and that's that.

People calling J. D. Vance a weirdo is not going to come back around to harm LGBT people in some sort of indirect way, because mainstream acceptance of LGBT people is already predicated on the assumption that they are not weird. That's what the last 15 years have been about, convincing mainstream society that LGBT people are "normal", because normalcy is a deeply ingrained prerequisite for acceptance. Obviously I think this is ridiculous and stupid, but I think it's pretty silly to look at Dems calling J. D. Vance "weird" and "freaky" and be like "that's what's doing it". No, it's like attacking a politician by insinuating that they're gay in the 70s or whatever. It sucks that that's something that can be used as an insult but it's the water we're fucking swimming in, it's gonna be years before anyone looks back on it with shame. And a lot of supposedly progressive people are gonna realize they were on the wrong side of history, but that's par for the course.

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Given that many Americans are extremely sensitive about the perception of Satanism - see the public responses to Dungeons and Dragons, Harry Potter, Lady Gaga, etc. - S&P seems less like people making things up than like sensitivity readers, whose job it is to ensure that mass-market cartoons don't cause cultural offense, even to people who Alex Hirsch has never met and thinks are unreasonable. I mean, we live in a country where people believe in Real Raw News - and some of those people have children, and determine what products their children consume, and are part of Disney's market.

But, like... should they be?

Should our cultural output be sanitized to avoid offending the sensibilities of the uneducated and terminally simple? Or are some people's views so retrograde that they aren't worth taking seriously?

More importantly for Disney, a publicly traded corporation: would it be good for business to write our social inferiors out of the public square?

I don't know - would you have invested in Charlie Hebdo?

That video of Alex Hirsch reading S&P notes for Gravity Falls conveys a few things to me:

1) the U.S. entertainment industry (especially animation) is run by older conservative types who make up offensive terms and get really mad about them.

2) the people who run Disney would be the first to fall in line with a fascist regime.

3) most of the media we consume is tailor-made and watered-down to appeal to the tastes of older, deeply religious conservative audiences.

4) conservatism, not the left, is and always has been the biggest voice of censorship in American culture.

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The first paragraph of her Wikipedia:

Anna Dalia Ayala (born December 22, 1965) is an American fraudster and convicted felon. She is most known for bringing a fraudulent tort lawsuit against a Wendy's restaurant in San Jose, California in 2005. Ayala’s claims cost the chain more than US $21 million in lost revenue.[1][2] This led to a felony charge of attempted grand larceny against her, to which Ayala pleaded guilty in September 2005.[3] She was sentenced to nine years in prison on January 18, 2006 and served four years.[4] In 2013, she received another prison sentence for an unrelated incident regarding filing a false police report and felony firearm possession

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David French, the National Review writer and former president of FIRE turned rhetorical foil for a Catholic convert from Trotskyism (from Nietzscheanism from atheism from Islam) in a Twitter post about the event planning choices of a library in Sacramento (which were globally available and distributed on the internet) that blew up into "the French-Ahmari debate", about whether the mission of conservatism should be to advocate for the rights of a Christian minority under a liberal framework or to make the government Catholic?

Yeah, that tracks

Trump/MAGA incite political violence and never condemn it. Maybe Trump will understand that weak men with guns are not a good thing.

Live by the sword, die by the sword.

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Speaking of 2014, who else remembers the slate of media articles about celebrities coming out as conservatives? Phrased in that idiom, taking alignment with an invisible minority 'out of the closet' and into public to advocate for its normalization. David Mamet was one, which is why I've heard of David Mamet

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It's surprising seeing Popehat quoted by Liberals Are Cool Dot Tumblr since I remember him as a conservative blog run off in the realignment ca. 2014, but that might be spillover from Clarkhat, his co-blogger who went Moldbug until, to the disappointment of part of his audience, he didn't get to be a co-blogger anymore

Trump/MAGA incite political violence and never condemn it. Maybe Trump will understand that weak men with guns are not a good thing.

Live by the sword, die by the sword.

[xunzilla]

Having resolved to investigate the dubs vs. subs question, the DYEWSPH2TER SOCIETY watches the new Dungeon Meshi.

IZUTSUMI (DUB): The name of your race is pretty strange. I heard it came from your kind getting one of their legs chopped off for committing too much thievery!

GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: She would not say that.

ZEPHANIAH EZEKIEL THUD: Why not?

GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: "Committing too much thievery"? She's a slave bought from a freak show and she speaks fluent Ciasslcal English?

SIMPLICIO J. RHETORICUS: Is the language of the island diglossic?

GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: They're ruled by the elves. But let's not get into translatology. (A horrid, ill-formed word: two parts Latin, one part Greek.) The manga renders Senshi's dialogue in an atrocious fantasy accent, but it makes clear a nuance of the original: he's a weird foreigner who lives alone in a cave and his only friends are orcs.

SIMPLICIO J. RHETORICUS: Does Izutsumi's country have a different language?

GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: Izutsumi's country is fantasy Japan. Look at their names. "Shuro" is a mispronunciation of a name Laios is unfamiliar with.

SIMPLICIO J. RHETORICUS: The dwarves' names also fit Japanese phonology. Senshi, Namari...

DICTIONARY: 鉛 なま̅り̅ nàmárí, lead (chemical element). Perhaps related to Goguryeo 乃勿 *namur; cf. Korean nap, OC (Zhengzhang) ra:b.

TYPESETTER: U+0305 COMBINING OVERLINE should render above the characters ま and り, but on some systems may display as spacing characters following them. We apologize for our inability to reliably display simple linguistic text without platform-dependent markup in 2024. 😔👎💩

ENCYCLOPEDIA: Vowel length in Zhengzhang Shangfang's reconstruction of Old Chinese represents Type A syllables.

GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: Izganda?

SIMPLICIO J. RHETORICUS: Is that an official name? The scan thought Laios and Falin Touden were Laius and Farlyn Thorden.

ENCYCLOPEDIA: Lajos is a Hungarian masculine given name, cognate to English Louis. People named Lajos include Lajos Kossuth, who in 1849 presented the Hungarian Declaration of Independence. A bust of Lajos Kossuth was added to the Small House Rotunda of the United States Capitol Building in 1987.

ZEPHANIAH EZEKIEL THUD: 1987?

ENCYCLOPEDIA: "A Gift to the People of the United States from the American Hungarian Federation"

GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: Did you think he was more important? At any rate, he was a nobleman.

ZEPHANIAH EZEKIEL THUD: It sounds Greek to me.

HANPHECIUS HUMBUG: Hungarians don't have saunas.

ZEPHANIAH EZEKIEL THUD: Didn't you think he was Faroese? It's a fantasy west.

GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: Why would Japan care about Hungarian names? But this is a stupid diversion. Where were we?

SIMPLICIO J. RHETORICUS: Dubs vs. subs.

GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: Of course! A critical matter. A noble pursuit. In this fallen world, in which the noblest by nature are forced to toil in drudgery while petty-minded merchants build generational fortunes that their mediocre heirs piss away, many are unfortunately unable to read Japanese. So we debate dubs vs. subs.

SIMPLICIO J. RHETORICUS: I grew up on 4Kids. I can't stand the English VA voice. The Japanese one is bearable.

GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: Thank you for your valuable contribution.

VRISKA: why do you all have the same voice

ZEPHANIAH EZEKIEL THUD: We live in a bourgeois republic.

SIMPLICIO J. RHETORICUS: Let's grant that Izutsumi's country speaks a different language. "Committing too much thievery" is a clumsy phrase. "Thievery" sounds silly compared to "theft". And it's a vague Latinate verb that lets the noun carry the meaning - very indirect! We don't live in the kingdom of nouns.

ZEPHANIAH EZEKIEL THUD: Why couldn't Asebi, Toshiro's retainer, have been taught to speak like that? Toshiro went to the island for training. But would they pay real islanders to teach them the nuances of the language?

SIMPLICIO J. RHETORICUS: She was bought at the age of six; even if the circus had the same language as the island, that's well within at least the tallman critical period.

ZEPHANIAH EZEKIEL THUD: She would've been taught out of dictionaries, which don't say anything about connotation.

VRISKA: okay not to be rude but can i say something about some of the papers i've read

GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: I didn't pay that much attention to "thievery". It's simpler, more regular. For all I know "theft" might be too hard a word to put in a mass-market translation. "Committing too much theft" would still sound too classical. It seems like the wrong intent.

ZEPHANIAH EZEKIEL THUD: Why couldn't a slave learn the acrolect?

GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: How broad-minded. Would your escaped slave also write her own sermons?

VRISKA: oh my god shut up

VRISKA: what does the sub say

IZUTSUMI (SUB): That odd name for your race. I heard it's because lots of you got a foot lopped off for stealing.

VRISKA: the manga?

IZUTSUMI (MANGA): I hear that the reason your race got that name is because a bunch of halflings got punished for theft by having one of their feet cut off! Guess they had to deal with having half as many, huh?

VRISKA: yea the dub is bad

ZEPHANIAH EZEKIEL THUD: It could be a deliberate choice. I personally think that "thievery" is awkward, but it's a possibility to keep in mind. We'll see if what follows bears it out.

VRISKA: marcille sounds like a college republican horse girl

VRISKA: #notwrong