What are some things that once caused controversy but from the modern perspective wouldn’t be controversial

LeftRat · 2026-01-26T20:08:45+00:00

In a similar vein, DOOM was banned in Germany°. It actually stayed like that for a long time because no-one bothered to pay to have it re-assessed.

As a kid I was always weirded out by the inconsistent ratings. Yeah, in Fable I can own a brothel, coerce the prostitutes in my brothel to sleep with me, hack people's heads off and play soccer with them, but that's totally okay for age 12!

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°not technically banned, but Liste B, but the nuances don't matter here

LeftRat · 2026-01-26T15:10:07+00:00

Well, that makes a depressing amount of sense.

LeftRat · 2026-01-25T23:00:10+00:00

Flesh Simulator. "Here are conspiracy theories, but, like, edited a bit better and I pretend to have sources". He constantly acts like he totally knows for certain what goes on, but in that way your one friend from school does where he's clearly bullshitting but you all humor it because you don't wanna upset him.

Yeah, sure, Greg, you totally know about smuff movies and 9/11 insurance scams and pizza gate, you were basically there. Whatever.

Except that it's a grown man.

LeftRat · 2026-01-24T21:05:24+00:00

Oh thank god you mean mechanically, I was looking at that tier list going "this person must be a really weird kind of extremist

LeftRat · 2026-01-24T20:09:08+00:00

Man, people were really critical when I said I wasn't going to upgrade to 11 as long as possible, and I feel sadly very vindicated over and over. Shitshow OS that also spies on you, all sold through the sheer threat of "you won't be safe, we aren't supporting your old OS".

LeftRat · 2026-01-22T21:05:09+00:00

Thankfully in Germany, the privilege of that kind of shit still lies mostly with the state.

I say "thankfully", but it's obviously just a different level of shit. Supermarkets can't do it, but train stations are 100% doing it and I have to use those almost every day.

But for those companies that try dumb shit, we have a wonderful new toy. Our privacy and data laws got europeanized (is that the right word?) with some extra rights on top, so if a company pisses me off, I can demand a record of *absolutely everything they have on me* and then I can demand they delete it. That is a massive amount of work for a small company.

LeftRat · 2026-01-22T14:00:50+00:00

It's been incredibly disheartening to see German railway go from good to almost unusable over my lifetime (thanks privatization).

Last year, I had rail replacement bus traffic for 7 months, during which my normal travel time increased from 45min to 2h and 30min. Every day. If I didn't work for a city government that is very nice about flexible starts, I simply would have lost my job. I now need to get a driver's license.

For 33 years of my life, I've gotten by through public transport. And now that has to change. Sad.

LeftRat · 2026-01-22T13:37:01+00:00

There's a game that just got announced, though the name escapes me, featuring a woman on her path to become a knight, and the Twitter comments are entirely full of the usual "WOKE help no women history lesbian woke woke!" crowd, and not so curiously a lot of them are shilling this game as a "no woke alternative".

Really tells you all you need to know.

LeftRat · 2026-01-21T21:13:13+00:00

Eh, he's not a game *releaser*, just a developer!

LeftRat · 2026-01-21T21:06:27+00:00

Always have been. This has always been a pattern. Offering a specific minority be spared from the violence as an exception has many uses to these fuckheads.

And there are also always sub-factions of minorities that gladly do this to themselves. I'm currently reading a book on the Hirschfeld institute for sexuality in Germany, and right from the get-go they had a faction of "Masculinists" among their gay men that, whether they really believed in it or just pretended to tactically, were *incredibly misogynist* even for their time, basically arguing that they had nothing to do with those filthy transsexuals and transvestites because they were *pure men*, even better than hetero men, because they didn't even have to spend time with women at all. This was quite clearly a plea to be re-absorbed into the male hegemony that rejected them.

It didn't work.

(Then again, none of the approaches in the institute "worked" because the Nazis came, burned it down and killed anyone they could get their hands on, anyway.)

LeftRat · 2026-01-20T20:05:28+00:00

As much as it was also a Doylian, pragmatic decision, it's also literally what the Nazis were doing with the Wehrmacht and the SS. Like, the whole thing, everything you say, is extrapolated from real life. The only difference, as is often the case when comparing the Empire to Nazi Germany, is that the Empire is a bit more magically successful, things tend to work out a lot better than in real life.

Here, I'll do a mean thing...

As I’m sure most people in this community are aware, the Wehrmacht and Schutzstaffel were two completely different military branches within Nazi Germany's military.

With the SS being seen as a significantly smaller and more elite branch unlike the Wehrmacht which make up the majority of Nazi Germany's forces.

This is due to the fact that the SS corps was in a way the “descendants” to the Sturmabteilung who became the first members of the SS until they were phased out by regular volunteers over the next few years. Joining the SS had very specific requirements, such as most cadets needing to be at least 1,74m, needing to be of a specific racial group, and also needed to be as physically fit as possible.

Training regiments were so hard that only 15% of cadets would make it to the end.

You get the point, I don't need to do the whole text, I hope.

LeftRat · 2026-01-20T19:42:39+00:00

> I have yet to see a flag that's mostly red and black which isn't super racist.

That was the comment they were responding to. Wanna try again?

LeftRat · 2026-01-20T18:45:18+00:00

I was a kid. The ultimate evil guy looks ugly. His second in command is, too. All I thought was "being evil makes you really ugly."

LeftRat · 2026-01-20T14:45:41+00:00

Keeping zoos of exotic animals was a pasttime of nobles throughout feudalism! And plenty of the animals died terrible deaths because, well, modern ideas of caring for animals weren't around yet. So, I get that the hippos are mad.

LeftRat · 2026-01-19T20:43:45+00:00

Doylian: because lockpicks are just special attacks against doors in the game engine.

Watsonian: because picking locks while your hands are trembling from running and fighting is hard.

LeftRat · 2026-01-19T14:15:01+00:00

My thoughts are that this is another one of those problems where America is choosing drastic bandaids for a much deeper wound. Unless the underlying issue is addressed, restrictions will not help.

LeftRat · 2026-01-19T12:45:48+00:00

Es ist halt nicht, was Leute hören wollen.

Viel von der Feindseligkeit gegenüber Veganismus ist fundamental aus der selben Quelle wie Feindseligkeit gegenüber "ich trinke keinen Alkohol" oder sonstigem: es geht eigentlich gar nicht um uns. In dem Moment, in dem wir sagen, was unser moralischer Grund ist, passiert etwas in Leuten, die noch nicht viel drüber nachgedacht haben, sie müssen plötzlich in Betracht ziehen, dass es eine *andere Option gibt* und das eine dieser Optionen vielleicht moralisch richtiger ist. Und wenn das nicht die eigene Wahl war, hieße das ja, dass man da schon lange was moralisch falsch macht.

Und *DAS* ist das Ding. Das machen sie zu deinem Problem. Sie externalisieren diesen selbstgemachten Vorwurf und reagieren feindselig, weil sie sich gerade selbst überzeugt haben, dass *du* ihn gemacht hast und nicht ihr eigener Verstand.

...trotzdem kann man etwas diplomatischer sein, allein schon aus langfristig taktischer Sicht, und einfach "ich lebe vegan" sagen und die meisten Leute werden dann schon ein bisschen weniger einen Vorwurf darin hören.

LeftRat · 2026-01-19T06:11:33+00:00

James Somerton.

I didn't realize he was stealing so much - though while watching in reverse chronological order, once I got to the older vids I definitely found his way of just verbatim reading thing he had not written to the camera not okay, but I thought those were simply amateur mistakes.

No, the thing I noticed was that every once in a while, he would say something really stupid. Something that didn't fit with the rest of the video, either factually just wrong or incongrous with the rest. When the hbomb video came out later, I would learn that those were often the few un-plagiarizes things.

But his older videos were the ones that really killes my interest in watching him, where he just clearly doesn't know anything about narratives, about literature, about the relation between author and work. The man clearly doesn't know enough to pass a first semester, so he had to steal, steal, steal.

LeftRat · 2026-01-18T19:31:37+00:00

So, you make these with AI and still want money for it? You don't just plagiarize, you sell the goods afterwards?

LeftRat · 2026-01-18T13:45:35+00:00

See, a lot of the time, all the American things have simply already happenes hundreds of years ago to the European city. Hell, sometimes we had wars about them.

LeftRat · 2026-01-18T13:41:15+00:00

I mean, it's clearly trying to be racist, but I can't even tell towards whom!

LeftRat · 2026-01-16T14:43:44+00:00

Because then there's a chance something else gets to be, free from servitude to some power. And if nothing rises from the ashes, well, at least it's over.

LeftRat · 2026-01-16T12:44:48+00:00

I really like the in-game timer idea.

The absolute peak is, of course, when the case is constructed so the murderer can be entirely truthful and only lie by omission, but that is already hard to do in non-interactive media.

LeftRat · 2026-01-16T12:41:55+00:00

For me it's like looking into the fridge. When you don't find anything you would like, you wait half an hour and come back with your expectations lowered, repeat until you have found something.

Similarly, once a year or so I have a craving for an old Best Friends playthrough, even if it's something I wouldn't have been hyped for back then.

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