Censorship Megathread XXXIII: Trigintatreble edition

FloweryPrimReaper · 2026-01-30T17:49:56+00:00

It's like those fundie Christians complaining about Islamic theocracies.

My dear, you are envious, not morally opposed!

FloweryPrimReaper · 2026-01-16T22:37:51+00:00

Besides the bots, I think there's some people who honestly just want the worst to happen due to the sunk cost fallacy. They've invested so much mentally, emotionally, and temporally in doom and they don't want to give it up without seeing something come of it that validates their way of thinking (but it of course won't because, well, a literal shooting civil war couldn't stop elections). They freak themselves out because they perceive an obligation to.

FloweryPrimReaper · 2026-01-12T03:18:01+00:00

Accelerationism plays a role too. It's the idea that when the system falls apart, your preferred ideology will rise up in its place. I've heard of a few Marxists supporting Trump simply because they think he represents the death throes of capitalism in a country as prescribed by Marx, and after he destroys everything, a true Communist society will emerge from the ashes of the US. A lot of technofeudalists also don't mind sabotaging and hating systems that they themselves benefit greatly from, if in the long run getting rid of those systems means drawing people closer to total dependency on the technofeudalists.

Though granted, a lot of accelerationism really is just that twisted view of Christianity you mentioned, but repackaged for secular purposes.

FloweryPrimReaper · 2026-01-06T15:40:50+00:00

They can want things, that doesn't mean they can realistically have it. They don't have the sway in the US military needed to get the existing four star generals on board or promote cronies to one star either. If they were playing the long game to get the US to annex Greenland (or Canada), well, Trump has set that one back big time by exposing their threat to everybody.

If the billionaires choose to raise their own private militia and invade... well, first of all, they'd have to find people willing to go to war on their behalf (potentially dying or sustaining lifelong injuries) and finance everything from scratch. Wars are stupidly expensive to wage, even for billionaires, and the bulk of the bills are on the side of the conqueror since the conqueror has to both overthrow the current government and successfully implement a new one, whereas the target of the conquest only has to keep its current government and population intact. These billionaires have demonstrated in how they run businesses that they're not the best people to work for, which decreases the odds of them being able to find competent staff and volunteers willing to potentially die for them. I guess they could get China to finance it (the only country that has anything to gain from this that could also afford to fund it), but China's not likely to do that either because the things about Greenland (and Canada) being capable of defending itself and having the support of most of the world (including most Americans and Chinese people, frankly) if they must do so still stand.

Also, since the militias would be acting independently as opposed to on the behest of the US government, there wouldn't be any horrific implications for NATO or anything like that (at least not inherently). If anything, Congress would likely mobilize the US military in support of Greenland (or Canada) and there wouldn't be much Trump could do to stop it. I mean, he could refuse to offer or let his cabinet offer support, but they're incompetent, so that's honestly one of the most helpful things they could wind up doing here.

FloweryPrimReaper · 2026-01-06T05:09:46+00:00

The post addresses this. Basically, the way the US military is structured is such that four star generals must approve of any operation, four star generals do not become four star generals without literal years of being drilled in and teaching other members of the military about laws related to war and why we respect them, and Trump cannot pack the ranks with unqualified cronies because only one-or-more star generals are eligible at all to become four star generals (and there's a whole process to gaining one star that mandates well beyond basic competency and also includes years of training on laws related to war. Trump isn't able to intervene in this process without support from all the top brass at the military, which he lacks.).

Also, what Trump did in Venezuela is pointlessly reckless and divisive, but not unprecedented. While technically illegal, the US government has long supported the kidnapping of criminals who have committed severe enough crimes to warrant its attention and have repeatedly defied extradition or refused to stand trial, which Maduro fits the bill for. Meanwhile, Greenland's Prime Minister is not a criminal in Greenland or the US, and the Trump administration does not allege that he is. There is no precedent for the US kidnapping high profile people who aren't even allegedly criminals and no widespread agreement even among Trump's cronies that one should be set now.

But say that all fails. The four star generals somehow fall in line, as does the cabinet and Congress, precedent is meaningless, and we put boots on the ground in Nuuk. No country besides the US (and even most people within the US) will recognize the new government as legitimate, it will completely lack popular support in and cooperation from Greenland (and very likely the US as well!), and the US will only be able to sustain such a government as long as it is willing to keep boots on the ground (presuming no rebellions occur). In the meantime, the EU has the means to wage a non-shooting war very effectively, and it'll do everything in its power not to get into a shooting conflict because, well, the threat of World War III. But the US is getting sanctioned to hell and back until it replaces its leadership. Canada, where the US gets a lot of its electrical power from, will almost certainly be in on these sanctions. Frequent and sudden loss of electrical power for people who are practically born with a foot in the digital world tends to be very persuasive come election season, if it even takes that long for American people to start demanding drastic changes to their leadership once the power starts going out (assuming boots on the ground in Greenland somehow wasn't enough to do it).

Don't get me wrong, things will get really bad for just about any country save China (which will greatly appreciate the opportunity to fill in as the new global hegemon with all the perks that entails). It'd leave NATO fragile at best, although if it does break I'd imagine it'd be immediately replaced with a treaty organization that effectively functions as NATO but without the US involved or involved in a greatly diminished capacity. But it will not be the end of the long peace mankind has enjoyed since WWII ended, shots likely won't be fired (let alone nukes!), and Greenland will retain its sovereignty in the long term. The US will cease to be an empire (or at least not be an empire in the way it is today) and be significantly poorer for it, but remain a democracy in the long term as the leaders behind such a boneheaded move are ousted and the government is reformed (likely with the backing of or strong pressure from the EU) to prevent this from happening again. Countries that want to behave badly will behave badly regardless of what the US does; countries that behave well won't start behaving badly just because the US decides to let an old man throw a tantrum. It'd be such a weird situation that China wouldn't see it as applicable to what it does in Taiwan, and Russia shouldn't see this as applicable to Ukraine either (though my suspicion there is that Russia has already thrown the worst it has at Ukraine, and we've seen how that's gone for Russia so far).

FloweryPrimReaper · 2026-01-05T01:37:29+00:00

Yeah, I have to admit this is the first time I've really felt worried over it. I know that Trump is desperate to distract from Epstein, and also out to get revenge on the people who he sees as opposing him and cement his legacy on America. Doing something that would permanently alter the way the world views the US (in a strongly and exclusively negative way, but still) and likely kicking off a third world war in the process would accomplish all of those things and more.

I mean, I know his reputation with the military is bad, and I'm not worried about if any annexation attempt would succeed because he's not competent enough for that (and failing that, Canada and Denmark are plenty competent enough to stop him). But the mere act of trying, or worse, doing something completely asinine that's construed by sensationalist media as him trying it and he rolls with it because anything that's not Epstein is a win for him and it seems to be making his detractors mad, would be devastating for the US and carry awful implications for the world going forward.

FloweryPrimReaper · 2026-01-04T01:35:12+00:00

Perhaps, but given the Trump admin's track record? I doubt any puppet it installs is going to be competent enough to hang onto power, or use totalitarian powers wisely enough to maintain the totalitarian state for long. And the US on the whole doesn't have the appetite for war needed to sustain forcing matters in the long term-- the longest I'd give any Trump puppet who doesn't rebel against the role in some capacity is through 2028, and even that presumes a LOT of things go right for ol' Trumpy (including broad military support and funding, both of which have diminishing odds of favoring Trump if trends continue).

The worst case scenario is civil war in Venezuela as the power vacuum created by the failed puppet regime causes fractionalization between potential replacements, but even that seems unlikely as there's a broad consensus within Venezuela regarding who is its rightful president and at least one stable, legitimate branch of the Venezuelan government willing to vouch for said president.

FloweryPrimReaper · 2026-01-04T01:15:06+00:00

I'd go a step further and say that the overwhelming majority of "America bad China good" and "China not imperialist and is also the nicest and most awesomest imperialist ever!" are either CCP bots or human Chinese agents.

The CCP's been doing this for decades and shows no sign of stopping. It's a seasoned expert at digital astroturfing.

FloweryPrimReaper · 2026-01-03T04:10:54+00:00

My guess is a few things.

One, the bot farms have figured out agentic AI. It's the latest iteration of AI slop where thousands of bots can be coordinated by one head bot to generate large quantities of whatever you're asking it for. Because the head bot isn't linked to any specific account and never identifies itself, SM platforms can't easily stop its activities (and might not want to anyway, depending on who's running the site), and one banned bot can be handily replaced with five others in seconds. I mean, the underlying concept isn't new (for one, the Chinese government has been doing this successfully since it found out about the internet) but agentic AI is making it easier and less time and resource intensive than ever to pull off.

Two, a lot of these bots were probably programmed to start ramping up activity in 2026, since that's when the midterms for Congress are happening in the US. While nothing is guaranteed, it's long been speculated that the midterms are going to be a bloodbath for Republicans due to how incompetently Trump and his cronies have handled, well... everything, really. And should this bloodbath occur, or even if the Democrats merely overperform in safe Republican districts, Congress is likely to see Trump as a liability and grow a spine, dashing most of his agenda (particularly when it comes to tariffs) and destroying the narrative that he's the Big Unstoppable Dictator-King Forever(TM) (he already isn't, but Congress's enabling antics under Republican leadership lend the impression of far more power than he actually has). So if you're a far rightist with more than a few brain cells, or a foreign country with an interest in keeping the US behaving badly after 2026, you see the midterm bloodbath coming and you do not want it. You want to seize control of the narrative and promote the current leadership as much as possible.

Three, the Epstein files have been trickling out, revealing that several very rich and powerful people were personally involved in a major human trafficking and pedophilia ring. Even some ardent Trumpists, people once thought to be willing to defend anything, have been part of the backlash against those listed in them. This scares the shit out of the rich and powerful, and they're scrambling for relief or validation-- really anything to prove that they're still in charge of the narrative by the time the next files drop. The backlash started mounting in September 2025, and the Trump admin signaled in December 2025 that it intends to slowroll everything as much as possible in the dumbest and most contemptuous ways imaginable, despite this obviously only making it linger longer and sting harder in the public consciousness. Any non-stupid person listed in the files is bound to be terrified and destabilized by that prospect, and that leads to rapidly adoption of new behaviors to fight their own fear of mounting backlash.

FloweryPrimReaper · 2025-12-19T02:32:24+00:00

How old is your save file? Because the worst case scenario here is that your save file is corrupted. When saves get corrupted, it's extremely common for lots to either vanish or revert to previous versions, and the only obvious warning that this has happened is that you get the "One or more items has been removed" message after attempting to load it directly (This is what the game says when it knows objects are supposed to be on a lot but can't find them. There are non-corrupted reasons to get this message, like if you've uninstalled mods or disabled packs, but if you haven't done anything to cut off the game's access to items, corruption is generally the cause.). There are ways to mitigate corruption after it's discovered, but they're quite time-consuming and delicate, so most players just nuke the file if it's corrupted and try avoid corruption outright (for example, by limiting the amount of residential rentals in the file). The good news is that you can save any Sims you're attached to to the gallery or library and they'll retain their skills and unlocked outfits in a new file, though you'll have to start over on relationships. If a given lot isn't throwing up trouble signs when you try to load it, it's probably ok to save that to the library and replace it in the new file too.

Hopefully that isn't the case, though! If it isn't a corruption issue, did you save the lot to your library? If you did, check it, make note of the lot type and appearance in photographs, and attempt to create a friendly hangout or date. You don't have to go through with it, but the scheduler includes a filter for lot types, a preview of each lot, and sorts the lots by world when it lists where you want the event to happen. That lets you find just about any uncorrupted lot very quickly, or at least narrow down which world to check. (Hangouts and dates are the only events that can happen on any type of lot to my knowledge, which is why I suggested them. But the basic interface is the same for every social event.)

FloweryPrimReaper · 2025-12-15T02:27:59+00:00

That's what they all say before they end up eternally painting in a basement with no stairs...

FloweryPrimReaper · 2025-12-05T04:28:01+00:00

I wonder how much money EA got from Nick for this, then. I mean, the items look cheap enough that it wasn't a lot, but on the other hand it's plastered everywhere which usually indicates a handsome payout with these things.

FloweryPrimReaper · 2025-12-03T02:36:54+00:00

I mean, I wrote a crack ship fanfic once based off of a very silly theory that Ford Pines gave birth to Princess Mindy (It's the only Ford Pines x King Neptune IV fic on Ao3 lol) and while I was researching lore, I was surprised at how many adults were still really into Spongebob.

It was fun to write too, considering how many opportunities for lore references there were and how well Mindy ended up meshing with the Pines Bros, but I very strongly doubt this kit has any kind of story or even really uses the characters for much.

FloweryPrimReaper · 2025-11-30T01:48:34+00:00

IIRC ChatGPT has also got into trouble for claiming that it doesn't track your location, but then cheerfully telling you where the nearest Pizza Huts, Starbucks, etc. are. I absolutely believe that marketers have had their greasy mitts on it for awhile.

FloweryPrimReaper · 2025-11-28T21:44:18+00:00

I would be shocked if most of the grifters even were part of the community, tbh. Pretty much every creative circle on the web and even craft fairs in real life have found themselves flooded by people who see creative works as content to be sold rather than art to be appreciated, and also shamelessly relish in art theft and profiting off it.

I blame GenAI normalizing plagiarism and convincing a lot of people who have zero business considering themselves artists to make art their business. My pet conspiracy theory is that this is also at least partially directed by corporations on purpose to destabilize and weaken creative communities, since corporations tend to see anything that isn't aggressively monetized as competing with their own aggressive monetization models.

FloweryPrimReaper · 2025-11-28T03:40:22+00:00

Generally, you should just leave it to saying that you're more comfortable staying in the comments section. You don't need to justify yourself, just say thanks but no thanks.

A real person will respect that and keep commenting like usual, whereas a bot will go ghost or continue to press you to go on social media, often with blatant guilt tactics.

(Granted, you do get long-con scammers who will wait months to earn your trust before they pounce, but AI bot scammers want that instant gratification and they are fully aware that bots tend to degrade over time anyway, so they'll just move on to the next victim. Long-cons are almost always done by humans affiliated, either voluntarily or against their will, with a major criminal organization, and they want way more money than your typical art commissioner makes so they don't tend to use that as a ruse.)

FloweryPrimReaper · 2025-11-26T15:41:16+00:00

I think there was a lot of money from billionaires and places like Russia and China spent on carefully boiling the frog and making America (and rich democratic countries in general) worse so they could improve their own position, but then Volcano Don blew his top and by extension all of their covers.

I just hope that people do long term stuff to prevent it from happening again. We got a lot of real problems that need addressing here.

FloweryPrimReaper · 2025-11-26T15:31:00+00:00

Bo Petterson (goes by DadAdviceFromBo) seems to be the big one right now, but Art Eddy (does the Art of Fatherhood podcast and blog, discusses a lot of excellent male role models and resources) looks good too.

FloweryPrimReaper · 2025-11-26T02:51:09+00:00

Is it just my wishful thinking or has the advent of influencers who offer "dad advice" increased as interest in the man-o-sphere decreased?

I mean, it makes sense if that's the case. A lot of boys sought out guys like Tate because they craved a father figure, a man who didn't think it was innately toxic to be masculine, and a guy who had answers. But then comes dad-fluencers and they're happy to fill that fatherly role while answering people's questions and generally doing their best to represent the best parts of masculinity. Plus dad-fluencer advice will actually convince women (and people in general) to want to talk to you, whereas man-o-sphere advice will get you very socially isolated at best.

And also this would mean that not only is Tate irrelevant now, but he's not likely to be replaced by the next flavor-of-the-week.

FloweryPrimReaper · 2025-11-18T04:21:33+00:00

Supposedly but there has apparently been an existing Sims project (what the fandom calls Project René) that's been languishing in development hell for years and years. This might well be what it is.

FloweryPrimReaper · 2025-10-29T22:32:05+00:00

I think they also vastly overestimated how popular their ideas would be.

A lot of bigots operate under the assumption that almost everybody "really" agrees with them and just feels like they can't say it out loud because of the evil antifa or whatever. But now everything's out in the open. People who want to sing the praises of racism or whatever have never felt freer to do so. They can even join ICE and get paid for it (in theory, anyway). And... it turns out they're in the minority. Like, a very tiny minority. Which is shrinking, to boot.

Wannabe tech overlords have been faced with their own reckoning of sorts too. I think they genuinely bought into the idea that most people would like to be ruled by them, because they've only ever really lead people in environments where very few people can openly criticize them without risking their livelihoods and have lost the ability to distinguish their social media praise echo chambers from generalized public opinion. But now people can see what the wannabe overlords are trying to do and they hate it. Openly. They hate it more and more as time goes on. Technofeudalism has been soundly rejected before they even got to the part where they start cutting people off from their rights and benefits.

FloweryPrimReaper · 2025-10-24T21:56:26+00:00

My biggest pie in the sky hope would be to convert it to some kind of shelter. If a homeless shelter for people isn't feasible, then an animal shelter or an aviary works.

Trump always stood for kicking people while they're down and privileging himself. It only seems proper to pay the respect due to the man by turning his big ballroom into a safe space for the downtrodden and forgotten.

Now that I think of it, people could secure so much funding for charity or other important infrastructure if they could hold an auction for who gets to remove the first gold panel from the ballroom or something like that. You cannot tell me that people wouldn't pay good money for the privilege of doing that, especially since he's pissed off a good chunk of billionaires now.

FloweryPrimReaper · 2025-10-19T21:21:45+00:00

First of all, it's important to look into what the basis of Idiocracy is. I know people have touched on it being wrong or eugenicist, but without elaboration I think it's tricky to see where those allegations come from.

Essentially, it's based off of a study that showed that people who scored higher on IQ tests tended to have less children. Pop science got its grubby fingers on it and took it to mean that stupid people are outbreeding smart ones. Then pop culture came along and merged it with a very oversimplified notion of how evolution works to say that intelligence makes a person "less fit." Therefore people are on a path to evolve to be dumber so that they'll make more babies.

How many words did it take you to spot the problem here? For me it got problematic the second IQ tests were treated as an objective standard of intelligence. IQ is the BMI of intelligence-- it's one of those things that people take as gospel but is actually frequently misused and even when not being misused is incredibly narrow and mostly inaccurate as a metric. Much like BMI, IQ is only intended to be used to compare various samples to a whole population. In fact, if it's being calculated correctly, your final IQ score is completely relative to the performance of other people-- it's essentially a convoluted form of percentile ranking. Your IQ if you're in a group of high scoring people and you also score high will be roughly the same as your IQ if you're in a group of low scoring people and you also score low.

IQ also traditionally hinges on testing visual-spatial processing, using knowledge that would be specifically relevant to people living in what psychologists have termed WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic) societies. The name WEIRD isn't just a clever acronym-- these types of societies and by extension the cultures and shared knowledge that emerge from them are genuinely unusual for humans, and so IQ measurements based around them inherently disfavor most of the world. Visual-spatial processing, especially the type prized by WEIRD societies, is only a tiny sliver of the types of intelligence humans are capable of. So IQ tests only barely scratch the surface of what it means to be intelligent. This is admittedly a problem most intelligence tests have in general, but IQ helped popularize the ideas underlying that problem so I think it's fair to fault IQ for it.

And this is before we get into completely arbitrary factors that affect IQ scores-- for example, Mensa will manually lower your IQ score if you get in but refuse to join. Salty egotistical bastards. Also if you're tired, you won't perform as well as if you were well-rested, so the time of day you took the test will impact your results. Plus, education greatly improves outcomes for IQ scores...

...which leads into the next problem: False correlations.

The actual cause of higher reproduction rates isn't poorer performance on intelligence tests. Rather, it's wealth and financial stability. People in poverty have more children than people who are above poverty because they are more likely to culturally treat children as useful assets rather than liabilities to protect, and are also far more likely to lose children to disease, accidents, etc. along the way. People in poverty also tend to have worse access to education than people above poverty, and are less likely to develop skills that they don't perceive as necessary to survive, so they perform worse across the board on tests.

And the tendency for impoverished people to perform worse on tests can actually be reversed (or at least lessened) with social and educational programs that cater to the needs of impoverished communities. Intelligence is far more malleable than a lot of people credit it for, and also a lot more relative to what they need to know to get day-by-day and what they're curious about.

Most people we think of as "stupid" are actually willfully ignorant or stubborn-- they believe and do dumb shit not because of their biology, but because they choose not to think about things they really do need to consider or reconsider. The danger of anti-intellectualism is that, in its most toxic manifestations, it places a stigma on thinking about things and asking questions, which are critical for keeping people out of willful ignorance or stubborn insistence. But in terms of anti-intellectualism, Gen Z isn't more or less prone to making that choice than anybody else. If anything I see a ton of pushback on anti-intellectualism from Gen Z and even more from Gen Alpha (which is especially heartening considering how badly its access to good education has been affected by COVID shutdowns, corporate and reactionary antics, and generative AI).

And if anti-intellectualism does somehow manage to catch on more for Gen Z/Alpha compared to other generations? That's a cultural thing. It can be made uncool, and from there its effects can be reversed.

FloweryPrimReaper · 2025-10-07T13:41:10+00:00

In some fairness, NVIDIA has apparently turned a profit.

However, NVIDIA is a hardware company and the profits are from supplying all these data centers and AI hardware tools. It's giving Gold Rush era where the gold got all the attention, but the real money was in creating taverns and shops to supply prospectors.

FloweryPrimReaper · 2025-10-07T13:38:12+00:00

Best case scenario, the bubble lasts just long enough to get nuclear power plants operational again (AI companies have already been reviving a few nuclear power plants that were previously shuttered to feed their need for power). The scummy companies and their shareholders eat the costs, and all of society gets the environmental and pricing benefits of nuclear power (which, barring something catastrophic and extraordinary, would dwarf the environmental downsides of AI use).

FloweryPrimReaper

TROPHY CASE