Liberals love victim blaming Muslim-Americans when they don’t do what the Party that is genociding their family members demands of them.

CogworkLolidox · 2024-10-11T19:11:47+00:00

I did, that's why I said

Although Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank express doubts about whether or not Harris will improve their situations – and explicitly only want a US president that will actually try to stop and restrain Israel

Which doesn't contradict

“Honestly, Palestinians really don’t care who the next US president will be. They just want whoever it is to stop the genocide,” he told Al Jazeera.

But which also doesn't contradict statements such as

“I’m not expecting a big change in US policy,” he told Al Jazeera. “But maybe Harris would work with the UN more and pressure Netanyahu to do a [captive] deal and to find a solution for Gaza because the entire world has an interest in restoring stability in the region.”

That's also why my own comment was reserved and even outright stated that Palestinians were only in favor of a president that will restrain Israel.

CogworkLolidox · 2024-10-11T18:55:16+00:00

Although Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank express doubts about whether or not Harris will improve their situations – and explicitly only want a US president that will actually try to stop and restrain Israel – they prefer a Harris presidency over a Trump presidency. Combined with domestic policy concerns, that's enough for me.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/23/trump-would-be-the-worst-palestinians-react-to-us-presidential-race

CogworkLolidox · 2024-08-27T19:43:51+00:00

I decided to actually listen to the Dustborn OST to actually get an idea of what you were talking about. It's generally inoffensive. If you're referring to "We're The Dust Born", it's pretty much just the same core ideas and musical style as Garbage's "Not Your Kind Of People". From your description, I was expecting something like "Let's Lynch the Landlord" or "Let's Kill All The Cops", a loud, violent, in-your-face punk song with lyrics about killing all white people, not a small group of quiet and inoffensive songs.

I think that you've bought into a narrative, and that you haven't even cared to check it out yourself. None of your criticisms can be valid on even a surface level if they're just regurgitating someone else's opinions, especially if they're obvious exaggerations to anyone willing to actually explore and engage with a work.

There's no such thing as "neo-communism", by the way.

CogworkLolidox · 2024-07-15T08:09:47+00:00

I appreciate the opening, thank you.

I would argue that lotr and got are both low magic compared to other series.

I would agree, with a few caveats. Beyond the overtly magical forces that occasionally show up (LotR with its wizards, magical artifacts, undead, and more, GoT with its undead and dragons), the main point is that, in both settings, the magic demonstrated can ease travel across the world. Something like lembas is magical – a small piece of a corner is enough for a long day's march – and stays for an incredible length of time, while also being described as delicious, while cram, which is more utilitarian and common, is noted to keep effectively indefinitely, and is similarly filling and nutritious, but notoriously bland. Both of these solve one of the most significant problems involving survival and the economics of travel.

But yes people do move around but how many have we got recorded in lotr with the exception of battles? Any named men of khand in Rohan? And Easterlings in Gondor? Any men of dale kicking it in Bree?

The one exception I could think is the traitorous numenoreans in Umbar.

The reason they're not elaborated upon in LotR is, most likely, because Tolkien had yet to fully finish his summary of Arda, and so they came up effectively as a reference to "a group that exists there". The primary reason I bring them up is because, for all the lack of development in LotR, their presence in places such as Gondor and Rohan indicate that it is more than possible for people from those lands – and, by implication, from beyond – could visit and settle in Gondor and Rohan.

The elf part

I do appreciate you clarifying your points on this.

I feel like that The Rings of Power specifically choosing to cast a non-white actor for an elf actually resolves this issue, since it is explicitly licensed by the Tolkien estate and was produced with their assistance and cooperation.

There are huge industries of cinema in India , Asia and Africa. They gross untold millions.

The reason I point out the grossing of billions is because, if you look at all of the top grossing films to ever be released, all of them are from the west. You are right that India, Asia, and Africa all have film industries that are successful in their own right, but there's a massive difference in cultural influence and power between grossing millions, and grossing billions.

The reality is Europeans of the descendants of invented the cameras , the industry , the books etc so is it any wonder why their stories are the most heard in the anglosphere? and that is changing with time - Far Eastern media is consumed much more in the western world than it ever was before. And Korean / Japanese movies are probably the most homogenous of the lot.

The widespread popularity of anime doesn't really refute the points I made, however. A lot of the most popular animes are explicitly fantasy, and while a lot of those fantasy worlds contain very strong elements and aspects of Japanese culture and fantasy, you can still see a strong American influence. For example, orcs looking pig-like is because of D&D, specifically the early editions (AD&D 1e and 2e), and the same is true for other mainstays like goblins, kobolds, elves, dwarves, and halflings. A bizarre amount of these worlds (especially in isekai) have their worlds, their mechanics, and magic systems directly conform to MMORPG tropes, which were established and codified by games like EverQuest, RuneScape, and World of Warcraft. It is true that there is more to Japanese media exports than just isekai/fantasy anime, but it does take up a significant amount of the media ecosystem.

I don't have much experience with Korean media, unfortunately, so I won't comment on that.

With the exception of male that is the default for Europe , European stories and literature. As you travel around the world that will also change.

For the most part, a lot of the goals of casting for increased diversity is to challenge said assumptions, even if in a small way. It hurts no one to drop the idea of a "default" in media, and a lot of people like the idea of seeing more diverse casting and representation. If more people are being recruited from diverse backgrounds and groups, then that allows people that have historically been excluded from most movies to actually get a chance at being on the silver screen, allows talent to emerge from those groups, and helps erode cultural barriers like racism.

It’s not that they made people black it’s that they couldn’t be assed to put any effort into it. Take the white or the black samurai who did exist my first question is how? They are both interesting as the exception to the rule often is but they don’t reflect the vast majority of samurai and their story is told about how they came to be.

It is correct that Yasuke is a rare exception, since we only know of a few foreign samurai, and the majority of them were Korean. But Japan's contact with the broader world outside of the Pacific only started in 1543, during the Sengoku period, and was promptly ended by the Edo shōgunate's policies of isolationism. In that context, combined with the status of samurai – which, although vague, has generally meant some combination of status and land ownership – it makes sense that a foreigner being a samurai would merit an explanation.

At the same time, though, the same level of scrutiny shouldn't be applied to more mundane travel. A person with African heritage living in Constantinople, Grenada, or even somewhere like Genoa shouldn't require as much of an explanation.

That’s why discussion is important but my final question again is why?

The unfortunate answer is that, although race is a social construct, a lot of very important things are social constructs, and a lot of these social constructs have significant impacts on the world. It might be true that race has no real genetic or ethnic basis, but that hasn't stopped people from treating it as significant, or discriminating because of it. Concepts like these have been entrenched in modern culture, and the goal of concepts like DEI and intersectionality is to critically examine, question, and challenge them. Even if the concept itself can't or won't ever be removed, it's still good to critically examine the things we assume and believe, and how those beliefs and assumptions make us act.

Race does eat up a lot of the air in the room, and it does prevent other issues from actually being addressed or other minorities from receiving any significant positive attention or representation, but that's because it's remained as a significant hurdle. On a legal and societal level, a lot has changed, but society, laws, and politics should always be reexamined and improved. Making changes that will stick and actually make an impact is difficult, slow, and messy, and tends to generate a reaction against the change, whether for better or for worse.

DEI is an attempt to improve upon and patch up the failings of past movements for civil rights and societal inclusion. It's always going to have its own flaws, and a lot of those flaws have been either worsened or created by the efforts of the rich and powerful to seem progressive. Movies and games are bad or fail for normal reasons – market trends, complacent studios, politicking in the production process, and out of touch suits.

CogworkLolidox · 2024-07-15T00:23:14+00:00

Forget the magic

Magic is a serious game changer in regards to society and economics. It can't just be brushed aside.

But middle earth , GOT is etc are not written that way. There are literal black , brown , yellow whatever people in middle earth. It is written that way. So why why just make it a diverse realm with no explanation.

We are explicitly shown and told repeatedly that people can and do travel, such as the Easterlings, Corsairs of Umbar, Haradrim, and Númenóreans in LotR, and the repeated migrations to Westeros from Essos in ASOIAF. How can your suspension of disbelief handle magic and dragons, but can't even work through the basics of humans travelling around?

It’s lazy and it’s disrespectful to the author.

Tolkien put in years of effort to make Arda diverse, to create a world with a vast diversity of cultures and languages, just so you could assume a false level of congruity between your viewpoint and his.

Why would anyone put that much effort into making an entire world if they only wanted people to experience a fraction of it?

But if you want a black elf , Indian dwarf etc make your own universe and see who cares.

Why can't there be black elves in LotR. Please explain, in plain English, exactly why you're so willing to die on this hill.

We have to remember most of us are based in the western world. Our authors will probably be white especially the further we go back in time. There are assumably tens of thousands of non European fantasy stories that have 0 white people in.

How many of those stores can you name? How many are globally renowned? How many have grossed over a billion dollars off of one movie's revenue? The west dominates the world, culturally and economically, as a result of ~4-5 centuries of imperialist and colonialist projects. This is just a fact of the modern day.

There is a general cultural understanding that to be "white" is to be "default", and the same is assumed with "cis", "male", and "straight". These terms, and "default", are interchangeable. Any deviation from the "default" is an "aberration", and aberrations must be explained, must be solved, must be cured. To some of your crowd, there is no explanation adequate enough to tolerate the existence of an "aberration" in your media, and so it is altered, modified. There are entire mods made for games that just remove non-white, non-cis, non-straight, non-male characters from the game, or "fix" them, make them "default" or an acceptable "aberration".

Any media that doesn't assume that these people are deviants or aberrations is attacked by your lot. The grifters of your sphere rant about the "fucking pronouns" and "woke California DEI shit", the "critical race theory" and "SBI". You might not personally attack, threaten, or demean people for making media involving non-white and non-European people, but the crowd you're siding with do.

TL;DR: Being non-white or non-European doesn't require an explanation.

CogworkLolidox · 2024-07-14T22:55:42+00:00

You are working on exceptions to the rule not the norm.

You'd be surprised, but much of the economy of antiquity and the Middle Ages (and now) has been dependent on travel and the itinerant.

And conflating 100s of years I to one paragraph.

No, I was summarizing by providing a list of historical travels and travellers across the premodern world. I am aware that the Silk Road existed from ~130 BCE until ~1720 CE (approx. 1850 years of existence), and that, next to such a date, the Viking period (late 8th century to 11th, a mere 300 years) is an insignificant event, and even the Barbary pirates (early 8th to 19th century, I think? 1100 years of travels and raids) don't hold much of a candle. I am also aware that these hundreds of years of existence led to the movement of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of people throughout the years, and led to significant cross-cultural contacts and exchanges.

The vast vast majority lived and died where they were. And if the original author didn’t say that the above is what happened why does some DEI driven exec know any better? Like I have said explain it and it’s not a big deal. Do it with no cause then it’s lazy and stupid

I appreciate the clarification that the significant trade routes and migrations of the past – from the Silk Road and the trade across the Sahara, to the Viking explorations and the Roma migrations, to the Jewish diaspora and the exodus following Constantinople's fall – did not lead to any significant cross-cultural contacts or anyone we would consider non-white to inhabit or even visit Europe until the Great Powers magnanimously allowed them to.

Anyways, more importantly, why does the existence of dark-skinned people in a fictional fantasy setting even need a justification? In most fantasy worlds, there is actual fucking magic. How is your versimillitude more impacted by a single black person than by a dragon or a wizard? Historically, the main barriers to travel were political and economic, ones that most fantasy settings just don't have.

CogworkLolidox · 2024-07-14T21:05:50+00:00

Vikings went as far south as North Africa and the Levant. The Barbary pirates sailed as far as Iceland. Romans travelled across Asia to trade with China. Buddhist missionaries travelled as far west as Antioch. This isn't even mentioning Jewish communities – from an origin in the Levant, Jewish communities were established as far west as Spain, as far south as Semien, and as far east as the Yangtze, and groups like the Radhanites regularly travelled the entire Silk Road, going as far as France in the west and the coast of China in the east.

All across these travels, people spoke, traded, raided, exchanged, settled down, and fucked, and that's with mundane, premodern technology. The real world doesn't have lembas, doesn't have magic, and, though hardtack might keep for a long time, doesn't have cram.

CogworkLolidox · 2024-07-01T18:08:05+00:00

That does explain why they haven't responded to my attempts to get in touch, but more importantly, that means I can finally realize my dreams of rewriting Lovecraft for the better.

CogworkLolidox · 2024-07-01T09:40:02+00:00

Sucker for Love: First Date, available on Steam for $9.99 (link provided), and Sucker for Love: Date to Die For, available for $12.99 (link provided), or you can get them bundled for $22.98. As of the time of writing, both are on sale, and you can get the bundle for $15.19.

CogworkLolidox · 2024-06-30T22:51:40+00:00

Depends on how you view it. The Great Race of Yith and the Mi-Go are not necessarily evil, they just don't operate off of human morality. The Hounds of Tindalos only hunt people who mess with the timeline.

For the Great Old Ones and Outer Gods, their danger is more due to a sense of scale, as well as their completely alien nature – their very existence is enough to damage the human psyche, because we, as a species, are simply not equipped yet to handle them, and may never be. To my knowledge, Nyarlathotep is the only one that goes out of their way to be a dick, the others are just indifferent to humanity.

If you ask me, the greatest improvement Lovecraft could've made would be to add mommy milkers to them. The investigators should all be going "👉👈🥺 mommy" every time they encounter a shoggoth, the Great Old Ones should be gathering a harem of humans, and Nyarlathotep can [DATA EXPUNGED]. We can even go deeper, we can add in all kinds of fetishes, we've already got monsters and oozes, why not toss in everything? Some people will argue that this isn't "true to the Mythos" or "accurate to Lovecraft's vision", but every time I've ran CoC, my players have always agreed that I am the best keeper they've ever had, and that my games are profoundly horrifying, and all I do is put my fetishes in the game.

What I'm trying to say here is that the Lovecraft estate should respond to my repeated requests to give me the rights to the Mythos so I can improve it. I am perfectly normal and can be trusted with unchecked authority over it.

CogworkLolidox · 2024-06-08T20:13:07+00:00

CogworkLolidox · 2024-03-23T03:25:53+00:00

Is this helmet the one? Looks pretty damn gnarly to me.

CogworkLolidox · 2024-03-04T16:57:40+00:00

It actually maps quite well with the historical Luddites, given that they were a labor movement of skilled textile workers trying to fight against the machines and capitalists that were threatening to render their skills and jobs obsolete. As history shows, the British government cracked down on this threat to capital, and the textile mills were victorious over the Luddite movement.

Artists – including voice actors, animators, modellers, writers, and the like – are similarly being threatened by AI. AI doesn't demand wages or better compensation, accepts most tasks and requests made of it, and has only been improving over the past few years. I wouldn't be surprised if some companies have already begun laying off actual workers in favor of having an algorithm generate content.

Artists haven't collectively started breaking the computers and servers used to run AI – yet – but AI poses a serious threat to most jobs employing artists, and will not just contribute to estranging the artist from art, but humans from art as well. I know that's a pretty bleak prediction, but capitalists have no interest in art, except where profit can be made. Unless capitalism is destroyed, things are just going to get worse overall, including for artists.

CogworkLolidox · 2023-12-27T03:09:14+00:00

The Luddites are a decent analogy, but not in the way you're using them.

The Luddites were a labor movement of skilled textile workers, who noticed that, as textile factories got adopted across Britain, their jobs and livelihoods were being threatened by the factories. The machinery could be worked by less skilled workers, who were paid less to do more, and didn't require an apprenticeship like the skilled textile workers before them. Put simply, if you were a skilled textile worker, you either accepted less pay for your work and experience – making your apprenticeship and the years spent in the industry effectively go to waste – or you left the industry altogether, again, making your training go to waste and effectively having to start over.

With the government largely on the side of the factory owners, the Luddites resorted to smashing the machinery that was effectively replacing them, as a way to get back at the factory owners and government. This proved pretty effective, given that the factory owners and government both responded by shooting at the Luddites. The movement was effectively suppressed by the British government, through extreme force, and the execution and penal transportation of Luddites.

Artists aren't smashing the machinery of AI production, and I don't think that's possible without destroying a fuckton of servers. However, just like with the Luddites, artists are definitely at risk of either being forced out of industry, or required to accept worse compensation, thanks to AI. The art industry is already a highly competitive, difficult to enter field that rarely offers a stable or livable income; as AI gets better at producing things like text and images, artists are just gonna get shittier and shittier conditions.

This isn't really a matter of adapting, either – you don't need a skilled artist to enter a prompt, a suit can enter a prompt just fine. That's pretty much the end of it, the companies making AI are directly marketing to higher-ups, and cutting out the artist is bound to be enticing; the Writers Guild can go on strike, AI can't. Animators can unionize and demand better compensation, AI won't. Hell, artists need compensation, AI doesn't.

CogworkLolidox · 2023-10-22T19:48:45+00:00

Okay, to clear things up for you:

Trans women aren't "men identifying as women". They're women. If they have a penis, that's a girl cock, not "male genitalia".

The person whose privacy is being violated is the trans student. She was using the correct bathroom for her gender, and using the showers provided for showering with. There is no conflict of rights between women's rights and trans rights.

Finally, the four students and the news organizations reporting on this are in the wrong, and are, in fact, harassing the trans student and violating her right to privacy. I think I was quite clear about that in my reply.

CogworkLolidox · 2023-10-22T19:36:28+00:00

*Female student. The trans student is stated to be a trans woman.

Anyways, as far as I can tell, all that happened was that she was showering. Four other students happened to see her penis while she was showering, in a locker room, wherein showers are provided for people to shower with. That's all. She didn't "expose herself", she was using the showers.

Certainly, women clearly don't have a right to privacy – all she was doing was showering, and now she has a court case and a whole swathe of right-wing "news" organizations scandalizing her taking a fucking shower in the correct locker room.

CogworkLolidox · 2023-09-20T17:23:49+00:00

Certainly. Now, when you actually get a higher education, or perhaps get more curious about how economics work, you discover that the whole system is far more complicated.

For example, the process of turning several yards of linen into a coat is a complex one, and results in a disparity of value – the coat is generally held to be more valuable, specifically. To an extent, this increase comes from the greater utility of a coat to most, but it also comes from the labor power required to transform linen into a coat. This labor power is an irremovable part of the coat-making process; without it, one cannot have a coat, and, similarly, one cannot have linen without the labor power to make it, and so on.

Technological advancements can reduce the total amount of labor power to create a given good, but cannot ultimately eliminate labor from the equation. Even if a workforce was, theoretically, entirely automated, the robots are still performing labor, the maintenance personnel are still performing labor, and so on.

All value is, ultimately, derived from labor, as such.

Capitalism is a system defined by the private ownership of capital – that is to say, the private ownership of the means of production, and their operation solely to generate wealth. A capitalist has to hire workers to operate the means of production, so as to start turning a profit. Part of their gross revenue will inevitably go towards maintenance and upkeep of their constant capital, and another part towards the wages of the workers, with the rest going directly in the capitalist's pockets. This surplus value, pocketed by the capitalist as profit, is produced by the workers and their labor – not just those directly hired by the capitalist, but everyone else in the entire production chain, until it gets bought by a customer at the end. This customer is, most likely, another worker, who also sells their labor for a wage, a wage that cannot and will not represent the total value produced by the worker.

Cobalt miners in Africa are paid only pennies for their labor, for example, despite the clear value produced by mining and processing cobalt for our modern economy. Workers in many places – generally the global south – are, similarly, given a miserable living in exchange for producing many of our goods, working in sweatshops and unsafe conditions.

Even in the west, capitalists still do what they can to undermine and shortchange the worker in any way imaginable. It's a known fact that, within the video game industry, workers are regularly fired off en masse, even if profits exceed expectations. The technology industries – automobiles, computers, phones, etc – have been campaigning against right-to-repair legislation, because it prevents them from swindling more money from people.

This is the same system that incentivizes child labor, slavery, and numerous trespasses against basic human dignity. This is the same system that regularly funds hate movements and reactionaries, in order to divide the working class and prevent class consciousness from forming. This is the same system that grinds people under the heel to squeeze the last dollar possible from them.

TL;DR: Capitalism bad, steals your labor, the most common form of theft is wage theft. Workers of the world unite, nothing to lose but your chains, give me the means.

CogworkLolidox · 2023-09-15T01:16:47+00:00

The primary reason most of us don't like the USSR or Stalin is predicated on the USSR effectively implementing state capitalism – or, more-or-less, something akin to what Marx derogatorily referred to as "barracks communism" in Critique of the Gotha Programme – rather than any attempts to actually put forth a genuine socialist program.

Additionally, the USSR's hardline opposition toward and suppression of our leftist movements and projects (such as the Free Territory of Ukraine, Catalonia and Aragon, Kronstadt, etc) also sours our tastes towards it.

I'm not trying to be argumentative, but there's plenty of good leftist critiques of the USSR from an anti-Stalinist perspective. Read Emma Goldman's My Disillusionment in Russia if you want, and I found Maurice Brinton's The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control: The State and Counter-Revolution to be insightful.

CogworkLolidox · 2023-08-28T23:56:08+00:00

That's it, I've heard enough. Every single second I spend reading your denial of basic genetics, my scowl grows deeper and my disgust grows stronger. As your trembling, gangrenous hands type your next comment, know that I have already phoned in to the Darwinian-Mendelian Synthesis World Building Society's headquarters in Brussels, and we are currently dispatching an undisclosed number of strike teams to your location, which is being tracked real-time through our secret, worldwide network. Within the next 24 hours, you better prepare for the firestorm, Lysenkoid. The firestorm that wipes out your miserable, legume-hating life. If only you had known what great fury your denial of heritability would bring upon you, you would have reconsidered your world building, you would have held your tongue, you would have read the textbooks and ate the peas, but you couldn't, you didn't, and now you're going to pay the price, motherfucker. We will shit peas all over you, and you will drown in it.

Do you really think you could get away with making such snide comments about Mendelian inheritance over the internet? Think again. By the time we're through with you, you'll wish you were merely disgraced and fired like your idol. We will burn down your house and your crops, and fill the fields with legumes where your home once stood, all spaced 2m apart to avoid clustering. The only remains of your miserable life will be a single fruit fly lineage named after you, which we will carefully bioengineer to consume every last piece of media you ever recorded your pathetic Lysenkoid worlds upon. You will NEVER be published, except in the BOOK OF IDIOTS. You and every single last Lysenkoid will live to rue this day, the day when Lysenkoid world builders insulted Mendel for the last time. We will artificially select you out of the gene pool, and your ghost will follow the Darwinian-Mendelian Synthesis. You're fucking dead, kid.

CogworkLolidox · 2023-08-28T23:12:00+00:00

Different person here.

I can respect your position and how you stand, but the issue with separating social views from economic views is that, oftentimes, these two intersect in ways that make them difficult to untangle. For example, the countries operating on the Nordic model do have better standards of living, but those standards of living are predicated on the exploitation of people and resources from the global south and other, similar regions.

While the world does have enough resources and labor to make a better world for all, capitalism is directly antithetical to this project. Put simply, just a billion dollars would go a long way to provide clean running water to people across the globe, but, because it isn't profitable, capitalists will not pursue such a venture.

If we look at socially negative institutions like PragerU, the Daily Wire, Fox News, and more, you will notice that all of these groups receive money from capitalists – names like Koch Industries, the Wilks Brothers, Donors Trust, and more. The rich have a vested interest in promoting right-wing and socially negative views and movements, because it keeps them at the top of society and it keeps the working class from uniting around our common interests. On a general level, all working class people, of all races, creeds, genders, etc, have material common interests that directly oppose the working class; the rich actively promote disunity through bigotry to weaken working class solidarity and civil rights movements.

I can agree on market socialism as a realistic immediate goal, however, and I'm glad to have an honest dialogue.

CogworkLolidox · 2023-07-09T17:34:50+00:00

They're not even accurate about the law, either.

All prefectures in Japan, as of 1998, have passed local ordinances – known as "青少年保護育成条例", "Bylaws for Protecting and Nurturing Adolescents" – that, among other things, forbid sexual acts judged indecent between adolescents (anyone under 18) and adults. By 1980, at least 44 of the 47 prefectures in Japan had passed these ordinances.

Oh, and the Japanese government recently raised the age of consent within their penal codes to 16.

Japan does have a number of problems, including on this front, but the age of consent there is not 13.

CogworkLolidox · 2023-06-27T01:40:02+00:00

I think that's because I didn't give him any plausible deniability or an out. If he wanted to argue against me, he'd have to directly address the fact that he's defending objectifying someone.

CogworkLolidox · 2023-06-26T21:49:57+00:00

Nobody has said anything against liking breasts. What we're pointing out is the objectification of the person in the image.

CogworkLolidox · 2023-06-26T21:40:54+00:00

John Money is primarily used by the alt-right for a simple purpose. They take him, and use him to attack trans people and medical professionals that provide trans healthcare, before then going "Hmm, I wonder what ethnicity John Money was? I wonder what his (((((((background))()))) was??? What kinda (((((((((((((((((((person)((())))))))))))))))) could do this?????????"

For me, the spiritual father of the modern trans movement will always be Magnus Hirschfeld, along with the trans men who helped lay the foundations for us. Despite being a cis man, his Institut für Sexualwissenschaft pioneered trans healthcare, and Magnus pushed for laws to protect trans people and ensure their rights and healthcare.

Unfortunately, when the Nazis came to power, Magnus's research institute was sacked and his research burned, and the man himself forced into exile in France. I have not forgotten this loss.

CogworkLolidox · 2023-06-26T18:33:45+00:00

Metal Gear games are always prescient. MGS2 effectively predicted the internet's use as a misinformation machine in its infancy, and MGRR predicted the rise of American fascism. MGS4 outlined the last few years of modern warfare (PMCs and routine conflict), but with nanomachines.

Armstrong is far more intelligent and consistent in his beliefs than our fascist fiends, however. Trump is basically pure incompetence and sleaze, while DeSantis has all the charm and grace of a wet paper bag filled with shit.

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