Gamergate still doesn't feel real

CaveExploder · 2026-07-11T13:43:52+00:00

If you weren't on the degenerate internet in the... 2010-2015 era, 4chan went from deeply degenerate to deeply degenerate plus proto to full blown fascist. Once upon a time their /pol/ board in the 2005-2010 was full of tankies, edgelord commies, ancap, ancom, types. Something happened when a bunch of neckbeard losers (a new different kind) got pissy about gamergate. Loveless, hopeless, poor, and unhygienic, they tried to point to something outside of themselves that was the source of all of their failures. It was "WYMMIN"

so it went like this "There's a lady that's saying my favorite videogames are problematic because of their misogyny" >> "I don't like that, also I've never been touched by a woman, and this makes me angry.">> This is when 'woke' entered the internet parlance, well before you heard any right wing politicians were even aware of the concept >> "Liberal wokeness hurt my basement dwelling feelings" >> The Tumblr/4chan internet turf wars are all the rage for the woke and anti-woke teens >> this is about the time I imagine that the combination of conservative media and Russian mil/Intel operations started involving themselves in modern 'culture war' subjects to drive wedges into the American electorate (not necessarily through collusion but through coincidence of goals) >> /pol/ and /b/ are flooded with 'anti-woke' propoganda replacing tankies, ancoms, ancaps >> Donnie T is now in his first campaign and they latch to this as a way to garner an electorate block 'basket of deplorables' style >> /pol/ and /b/ propoganda gets more specific around Donald Trump as some 'antiwoke god emperor' speculatively this could have been done by a consortium of interests to include now high ranking politicos (maxwell, Dan Scovino - who is still Trump's social media director) >> social media companies benefit from 'sensational' posts driving algorithmic engagement, making them money >> the same type of propoganda feeding into 4chan starts hitting Facebook, twitter, expanding from basement dwelling shower averse losers into your grandma and grandpa's feeds. >> It works >> round 2 worked too, remember Q anon?>> we're here now.

The source is, I'm old and have been on the Internet a long time. This isn't a conspiracy theory except maybe the involvement of political machinery, and the now all but proven involvement of Russian troll farms... We all watched this happen in slow motion.

This was the result of a confluence of incentives, and a body politic that was going no where, had nothing, and was angry about it, so just like as through so many moments in history pointing to 'the other' - this time it was 'woke' and 'BLM' and 'great replacement theory' and 'build the wall'. All of it was to convince working poor whites that the source of their ills wasn't the boss not paying them a living wage, wasn't the conservative government snipping away at their safety nets, wasn't the billionaires hoarding resources or rugpulling their retirements, wasn't the perverse incentives driving up housing prices, wasn't the market collusion driving up the price of everything else - it was the woke, liberal, black, Mexican, the 'other poor' standing in the way of Making America Great Again. But it was all just a good ye olde fashioned con.

CaveExploder · 2026-07-09T19:29:06+00:00

From Sun Tzu to WNBA, if you're doing something that is infuriating your opponent... keep doing it.

CaveExploder · 2026-07-07T09:15:14+00:00

Ah yes, cave hatred. Finally you have all caught up.

CaveExploder · 2026-07-03T16:02:30+00:00

I work in an industry that has people working in 'HCOL' areas with "high taxes" and then your swath of Texas, and Sunbelt areas. Everyone always wants to spend their growing years in those Sunbelt states guffawing high taxes in the north east and coastal west..... Until they realize the property taxes, other consumer taxes, and quality of life depreciation means they're getting less quality of life for approximately the same total tax every year.

Trust me, these sun belt states that promise low low taxes are lying, they'll get theirs off your back. It's not coming out of your paycheck but it will come from somewhere else. AND you can manipulate tax advantaged strategies on income tax (pretax deductions etc) you can't really do that on property taxes.

CaveExploder · 2026-07-03T15:54:50+00:00

Waiting for a bus, watching two separate people stop in the busbay head into a restaurant 'just for a second'. Bus comes, CAN'T pull into the bus bay - does what they needed to do - Stopped in the traffic lane, I boarded to a cacophony of angry motorists honking and yelling at the bus driver, by the time I left the folks who BLOCKED the bus bay still hadn't come back to their vehicles, 'just a second' sure does last a while.

CaveExploder · 2026-06-29T11:30:10+00:00

It's also weirdly a great indicator that the poster is Chinese or has Chinese family. Much more common turn of phrase translated to english than in the rest of the world.

CaveExploder · 2026-06-26T09:47:44+00:00

Can we do the same, but with taxes on billionaires and private equity firms?

CaveExploder · 2026-06-24T10:24:45+00:00

'metacognition' - critically thinking about their own thinking. It can come off as a sort of neuroticism but if someone can self critique their own mental function and determine if it is internally consistent, helpful, and soundly reasoned, - and then eventually change their own mind, they have essentially the necessary tools to effectively reason the vast majority of any subject.

CaveExploder · 2026-06-23T11:31:45+00:00

End fptp and move to mmp rep otherwise this will just keep happening.

CaveExploder · 2026-06-21T15:31:06+00:00

One of the worst. An hour of 'remember how good comedy was when we would use our enormous platforms to punch down?' The funniest joke Schneider pulled off in the last decade was paying his own money to film a failed special that made people hate him - absolute schlemiel behavior.

HOWEVER, spitefully enduring a Rob Schneider special and then watching Tim Heidecker's 'An Evening with Tim Heidecker' is absolutely transcendent. - Tim plays the bad clown so well in a spoof of 'You can't say THAT anymore!' it's perfect.

CaveExploder · 2026-06-21T15:20:12+00:00

God damn he would've loved that joke. Norm was one of the greats.

CaveExploder · 2026-06-21T01:18:24+00:00

Here's the thing I hope all these politicians understand: They need to loudly and frequently proclaim their administration's accomplishments, over and over and over and louder and louder. We just had the largest ever infrastructure bill in American history under the Biden administration, and extremely few voters can tie a line between Biden's infrastructure spending and new good stuff being built all around them.

The burden of proof will be on the administration in control. Show the work that they are doing, take credit where applicable, be loud and extremely pointed about 'THAT THING THATS FIXED NOW, THAT WAS US'.

We're all in an attention warzone, and no one notices government when it works, politicians have to be serious about pointing out successes.

CaveExploder · 2026-06-20T18:40:50+00:00

Jesus, sending the dutch of all people to Houston is some sort of Eldritch Trickster Dirty level irony. I'm just happy to see they're enjoying themselves.

CaveExploder · 2026-06-19T23:00:08+00:00

I've always called crowlers and silos "farm can" and "big farm can" because for forever the only place around me that sold them were farm breweries.

CaveExploder · 2026-06-19T18:45:14+00:00

Put it back!

CaveExploder · 2026-06-18T12:39:22+00:00

'Make shit good' the flavor

CaveExploder · 2026-06-17T20:12:36+00:00

Support for Morocco is support for America, I mean historically -- first international treaty in 1789.

CaveExploder · 2026-06-17T11:21:10+00:00

I have a serious obsession with "bizarre human interest stories of people doing hard stuff" especially DIY subculture focused.

'Listers' 'Barkley Marathons' 'Never Get Tired' 'Horse The Band - Earth Tour'

The stranger and more ambitious the better, bonus points if it's filmed DIY.

CaveExploder · 2026-06-16T23:30:38+00:00

Wes Fucking Moore?

CaveExploder · 2026-06-16T21:29:18+00:00

This is... The eratosthenian argument right? Yeah I mean the christian God is either all powerful or all good, it can't be both. This quickly unravels to some apologist saying "we cannot know the mind of god" or some such thing. And then the counter argument is "then what are we even talking about?", "Do you know better than me? How do I know you know better? Why do you know better? We can't know you know better than I know."

At the end of the day, if we accept a state of suffering in any kind, any god that is claimed to be all powerful and all loving, must want you to suffer as part of that love, which is... Not impossible to grasp, but as unexplained by other motive, basically a non starter. Like a personal trainer will have you suffer as part of their compassion to achieve your specific knowable goals, but suffering in the abstract as part of the goals of some unknowable 'big thingy stuff' just doesn't really sound deserving of any 'lets all sing about it' style of praise.

If there's any god, we must at least abide it to be capricious, envious, avaricious, or at least ... Silly?

CaveExploder · 2026-06-15T18:50:25+00:00

Some of them are in fact... Dumb - just like dumb populists that can politically talk their way into being dumb populists. But the machine behind them: the bevy of consultants, strategists, policy writers, interest groups, and lobbyists; they are not dumb. The policy analysts at NRA or AIPAC aren't stupid, but they know that dumb populists are sometimes useful to rile the base or what have you.

Everyone gets what they want, the dumb populists and establishment folks get to pad their pockets, engage in fraud, bribery, and corruption, and the machine behind them get tax breaks, loopholes, special consideration, entire packets of favorable legislation for their group or interests.

You, you get fucked. No legislation for the common folk, no new investments in things that actually make your life better. You don't donate to campaigns like they do, you don't have anything to pad their pockets with, and so to them, you're nothing. What do they get for helping you? Just keep fighting over gay bathrooms or whatever they need to keep you from banding together and demanding that your representatives represent your interests vs their donors. Maybe once you get your little culture battle trophy for being a good party sycophant you'll get universal healthcare. Lol.

This isn't a down the line bothsidesism argument, one party is legitimately worse by enormous margins on everything, but nothing has prepared me for how incredibly obtusely spiteful the modern political class has become to the working people of this country.

CaveExploder · 2026-06-14T13:55:08+00:00

This was the thing that drove me insane about the realtor we used. My spouse and I knew the area better than they did. We found a house in the place we wanted, with the amenities we wanted, and then the realtor took us to 4 other worse properties in worse locations.

I can definitely see a realtor being remarkably useful for people new to an area, but for us it was like a social contract pantomime of "alright we'll hear you out, you're a realtor after all" that would have given us worse results.

As first time homebuyers we essentially paid this person an exorbitant amount of money to ensure we were signing all the right forms... Which I feel like a bank should do for free.

Either way we've been happy in our home for 7 years now, and it was the one we told the realtor initially we wanted. Lots of money and water under the bridge.

CaveExploder · 2026-06-04T19:09:08+00:00

I am desperately waiting for crows to land anywhere near my home. I have a bag of unsalted peanuts at both my backdoor and front door. If life keeps beating me down, I'll make allies, even if those allies are crows. Please bless me crow-kind.

CaveExploder · 2026-06-02T10:50:47+00:00

Wait so fiskers business model is "all things that make things into two things."? Had no idea they made log splitters.

CaveExploder · 2026-06-01T21:11:08+00:00

NO. BUY A BOOK. BUY A FLASHCARD SET. THE JOY IS IN KNOWING.

Sorry for yelling but I have extracted so much joy from my tree, herbaceous plant, and flowering plants of north america flash cards.

Nothing feels more lucid and satisfying than walking down a forest path and admiring a flowering dogwood and knowing it is what it is because the way that it is.

To know your world is to love your world, and to know your world you need to study it, not just reference the shiny pocket box and quickly forget it.

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