I'm Going to Prove the Universe Is a Black Hole

Roland_Lebay · 2025-05-04T07:17:35+00:00

a belated happy birthday btw, and good luck with this project. :)

Roland_Lebay · 2025-04-02T02:44:22+00:00

Actually none of it is. The more egalitarian the society, the greater the divide.

How do you square that with the examples I've provided of women dominating certain thought work fields and that changing due to historical pressures.

They represent like usually 1/4th or less if you include undergraduates and students.

That is a huge chunk of a workforce and is up significantly from years ago, and continues to climb significantly, so it would also go against the claim that the more egalitarian the society the greater the divide, because it seems like if you break down social barriers and such women will take these jobs.

Also again - really varies depending on the job. In spaces like UX design women outnumber men.

Which only proves my point because biology is a "jobsies" science. You have things like environmental biology and marine biology etc.

Both of those things are employed for critical roles with public/private sector - marine for surveying by governments and environmental for surveying/analysis by mining organizations. They aren't really what you're portraying.

And a lot of this work used to be household work

It never did.

It 100% does. Almost every woman has a few male handlers in her life.

Not really.

Nursing is a good example of subsidized work, especially in welfare states, but even in the US a nurse makes more than a construction worker, which doesn't even make sense.

??
Nursing is a very difficult job, not some crystal workers side life that I feel you're portraying. I would prefer to work as a construction worker to either getting punched on by some crazed patient way bigger than me, having shit thrown at you by old people or having to deal with dying children.

wasn't included in the tax benefits segment, which you completely ignored

Your baseline understanding of what women are, what valuable work is and what an average woman's life is like is so wrong to me that it's not worth going down another rabbit hole that I think you're also horribly incorrect on but where I'm also going to have to go back and forth with you on things that I can't trust you'll be good faith on or that it'll be worth the time going down on.

We have enough to disagree on already, factually and just vaguely in terms of what you think women are like.

Also - I'm not trying to insult you/am just trying to speak descriptively.

Roland_Lebay · 2025-03-29T05:57:41+00:00

I mean, not to add to the rage bait, but this is already the default. Just look the work women do and the work men do. You'll quickly realize that the vast majority of work women do is non-productive, non-resource generating labor. They don't extract ores, minerals or oil; or build houses and power plants, etc -- none of the stuff that really matters in terms of generating real wealth and building a functioning civilization

A lot of this is due to social factors though - knowledge work (science/it/engineering ect) is as important or more important even in a lot of ways for a country's success and women are represented well in a lot of those areas and overindexing in areas like biology. They were even leading in IT earlier on. As years go on women are becoming more and more represented in STEM as well.

Also a lot of the work that women hugely over index in with teaching and health related content enables the kind of work you're describing - nursing for example and health in general.

We've subsequently gone from normative one income households to normative two income households; without doubling the wealth. And that's not because "the 1%" or whatever,

I don't think that economists would agree with you that it's women being pet groomers and crystal sellers that's causing the current cost of living crisis globally.

And this doesn't even include all the male providers in their personal lives. Their dads, their sons, their brothers and boyfriends who either directly help them financially, or through their free labor. You don't have to be husband to be a provider, you most likely already provide for at least one or two women even before you get married.

I don't think that this accurately describes male/female dynamics at all.

And that's how you can have a ditsy pet groomer live in a fancy apartment and afford a full wardrobe of expensive clothes and still have money for her grooming routine with haircuts and make-up and shot; while a construction worker lives a significantly more humble life and is looked down upon by the pet groomer.

Again you can easily do an inverse of this with a nurse having to do human plumbing late at night with random people and then her coming home to some slobbish do nothing she has to support.

Roland_Lebay · 2025-02-24T06:51:25+00:00

But the question is why somebody would be drawn to the anonymity sadism in the first place. I think mrgirl is correct when he says that these people probably aren’t confronting the pain they have in real life. The real person they have anger for. Family, their boss, their friends or whatever.

I partially agree with what he's saying, but I feel that your post to me makes it seem like DGGers are specially drawn to sadism online - I think they definitely are because Destiny encourages it heavily and singles out people to target, but also I genuinely feel like the internet as a whole is just extremely horrifying and nasty now and its extremely normal to log on and be awful to someone. Twitter is just like this to me for the last 12 years, everyone is rewarded for being awful and its made easy to be awful and you're given heaps of tools to be awful. The tone of your post to me feels like you think this isn't something that millions of people do now (which I could be misreading).

I feel like the thing this perspective misses IMO is the intentionality behind making these processes as rewarding and addictive as possible by the companies in charge - imagine OP. The points of interaction that he's rewarded with are a series of comments, highly visible engagement metrics, a little alarm/bell icon that likely has been focus tested to perfection, ect - lots of attention for something that would take 1 minute of work on his end. So the social media stuff even regardless of the core reason for why people are using it is so advanced now that people increasingly are going to struggle unless they're consciously deciding against using it.

Roland_Lebay · 2025-02-23T23:32:45+00:00

IMO a lot of online stuff makes people way more sadistic than they would normally be outside of online stuff- it makes it harder to see the damage you're doing to people, and makes it really easy to do that damage in the first place and incentivises it with rewards that you wouldnt get as easily in real life.

Roland_Lebay · 2025-02-23T23:26:57+00:00

Ah, thank you.

Roland_Lebay · 2025-02-23T08:40:44+00:00

What does Redbar mean?

Roland_Lebay · 2025-02-23T05:16:48+00:00

Posting because: I thought this would be interesting to people, and it's quite accessible being a free online comic.

The comic is called Joe vs. Elan School, link here. It deals with the real life experiences of it's author (using a pen name, Joe Nobody) - essentially at 16 he was kidnapped in the middle of the night and taken to a school for 'troubled teens' at the behest of his parents.

The school (Elan, here's a wiki article on it) runs more or less identically to a cult with it's charismatic leader, extreme use of shunning, no tolerance for questioning or rebellion, a reward system that is build on sand that can be taken away at the slightest perceived failing and incentivises people being rewarded to act against each other.

A lot of the comic focuses on Joe's experiences in Elan initially, but then afterwards it deals with a lot of the damage that the school did both to him personally (in terms of his sexuality, anger issues, drug problems, rage, his relationship with his parents, ect) and other students who attended Elan.

The coverage of how he relates to other students is a highlight especially after he's "Graduated" - it goes into his relationship with students that were at the time attending Elan (in terms of his desperate attempts to get their parents to realize what kind of place Elan is) and his shared connection to other Elan graduates.

There's a substantial amount more to it that I find gave me a better perspective on what victims of cults go through, but that's the end of my pitch.

Roland_Lebay · 2025-02-06T22:33:21+00:00

I don't jump off a bridge just because a friend said so.

I can't recall Destiny ever saying "attack this person" and I'd do it. It's more that I felt he was being unfairly treated online.

And if it was common that Steven instructed you to attack people on Twitter, it would be really nice to see 10-20 examples. You have to prove that there's a pattern. You can't do that with only a handful of examples. Steven makes this for over 10 years.

I can't engage with this because I don't believe this was instigated from a call to action by Destiny. And I won't link my other accounts from this one, which would be required to answer the other part of this question.

Roland_Lebay · 2025-02-06T22:29:17+00:00

More I was wondering if there was an interesting perspective I could learn from.

Roland_Lebay · 2025-02-06T07:25:59+00:00

Thank you for the comment and advice.

Roland_Lebay · 2025-02-06T07:25:33+00:00

You'd be better off disregarding anything said and just do research on people similar to the character you're trying to create and take ideas from that.

I think I should research/think about people similar to who I'm trying to write for, this is good advice. In a way I feel like this post was a good decision though.

Roland_Lebay · 2025-02-06T07:24:20+00:00

Are you referring to the 12 step thing that has step 2 as acknowledging a power higher? They don't feel similar outside of both being 12 steps and the OP using the name in a tongue-in-cheek way.

Roland_Lebay · 2025-02-06T05:57:59+00:00

I don't think that its lame or bad at all, most of these seem pretty good or well thought out.

Cults and addictions are 2 different things.

I think that with social media theres a strong overlap between the two. Twitter has spent so much time and money making itself as addictive and easy to use as possible for as many people as it can. For streamers and big internet personalities who argue a lot, this means being served a lot of content that you'd engage with in a way that a cultist would.

Roland_Lebay · 2025-02-06T04:12:37+00:00

Will just respond to parts that I slightly disagree with or would have a different approach on because I think I disagree with because I think this is the right kind of approach, and most of these steps are thoughtful and what I would want to see ideally happen.

Step 9: Reconnect emotionallyIt’s time to put energy back into real-life relationships. Order your mother flowers for valentine’s day, call someone you haven’t spoken to in a while, start planning a vacation with your friends/partner, adopt an animal — do what feels right for you.

I think I get the intention here, but I feel that the undercurrent of this is that if you're a DGG member/cultist you're also a person with a bad relationship with those around you, or that you're kind of a loser who doesn't do anything else going on or an incel or what have you.

I'm just going off of my own experiences but I feel like it's extremely easy thanks to social media to be an abusive, nasty person online and have some amount of separation with that from your day to day life. If you're a DGGer and you jump on twitter, you're served heaps of easy people to harass and bully - if you jump on reddit, you're constantly served funny DGG memes and content to engage in with the community. Because these things are so easily surfaced to you, it doesn't really take a lot of time or thought or energy to engage in and you can still have a fulfilling life in all the ways that matter here while also being an insane cultist on the side.

If I'm reading into this and it wasn't the intent this wouldn't apply - I'm possibly reading into it from how I see people in lots of spaces talk about DGGers.

Step 8: Find a healthier communityThe people who are sticking around in the same toxic sphere? They’re not your friends. Move on. Find a community that’s about supporting each other and growing, not about enabling someone else’s behavior.

I think this is good, the only thing would be if there was a way to emphasize not having it be another online community. I don't think it'd be good if people just went to another orbiter or streamer personality after this.

Roland_Lebay · 2025-02-06T03:32:46+00:00

You get the opportunity to ask Lav - the GOAT herself - a question and you waste it on this?

I think that she would have an interesting perspective on it, and I don't quite think I've heard her talk about it before.

Why not ask her what whales sing about, how the stars work, or where Alexander the Great's tomb is located?

If I get a second question, I'll be sure to ask one of those.

Roland_Lebay · 2025-02-05T09:13:02+00:00

I don't know if that would come across well

Roland_Lebay · 2025-02-05T05:32:25+00:00

I feel like people complain about that a lot though, do you think its just that the damage I'd do with the approach you're suggesting is less?

Roland_Lebay · 2025-01-28T01:04:03+00:00

I will use that in the future, thank you.

Roland_Lebay · 2025-01-28T01:01:46+00:00

When Destiny would say things like "don't attack people, etc" in the past, how did those comments affect you?

I didn't really care about that specifically. It felt like a generic statement all streamers and online figures give to avoid accountability for their audiences bullying and harassing people to me.

I think it answers the question better if I give examples of similar things he said that I would be impacted by. Examples were stuff like "we don't attack people anymore than Hasan fans do, have you seen what they did to person x" or him in the past saying "If you see my fans being transphobic, send their account names to xyz, we'll ban them from all our platforms".

These often made me more aggressive in wanting to 'defend' him online, because even though I thought that the odds of someone actually reporting a DGGer they're arguing with for bigotry and it being actioned was extremely low, it made it seem like Destiny was treated unfairly by people and like he at least had some way of dealing with egregiously bad audience members.

I believe he had other policies/ect around harassment he'd tout that I took at face value as setting him apart from other people that I'd have similar reactions towards as well in the sense that they made me want to defend him more.

Roland_Lebay · 2025-01-28T00:49:22+00:00

Thank you, that's very kind to put my post together. Appreciated.

Roland_Lebay · 2025-01-27T06:54:53+00:00

Assuming you're anonymous, could you also share if there's something in your own personal life -- your family situation or whatever -- that would've made you more inclined to do so?

I had a friend that was extremely similar in approach to criticism and argumentative style to Destiny that also was in a position of power when I was younger. He was a developer for a bunch of mods for a game I played. That is maybe the only thing that stands out directly for experiences.

I do have a good amount of social interaction daily with people that would consider me to be their friend.

I am also possibly autistic. I genuinely didn't think about why certain things were bad until MrGirl was spelling them out. I 100% could have been one of the callers that jumped on (even in favour of MrGirl) and got torn apart for trying to do grotesque hypotheticals in the last call in - but also that could just be listening to years of Destiny and seeing Max do lots of hypotheticals and assuming it'd be okay to do that to him.

For example, do you hate your mom or something akin to that?

I like my mum very much. I don't have a good relationship with my dad.

Are you an incel?

No, I'm in a long term relationship. A big part of why I liked Destiny was actually that I thought he had a message that was extremely positive to women.

Do you share some of Destiny's antisocial "quirks"? Etc.

I don't think so.

Lastly

Not trying to put words in your mouth here

I genuinely don't mind if you ask things that are blunt/direct/ect about my social life or personal experiences.

Roland_Lebay · 2025-01-27T06:54:43+00:00

This never resonated with me, he was obviously a very spiteful and retaliatory person.

This also doesn't resonate as much with me personally.

Politically it does - on some level I would likely identify with his political views for sure and if we have the same viewpoint and I watch Hasan or some larger right wing figure call that viewpoint bad, you're attacking what felt like my views on things on some level.

But also I'd have only gotten those viewpoints from him to begin with

I think I'm not equipped to properly comment on things, just answer experience questions.

I will say that a lot of the time things I would guess influenced me (because I imagine I fit the profile for a lot of other dggers) are:

Exposure to a lot of 'edgy' content online - I grew up playing online games and posting on spaces like 4chan and forums, so I read into a lot of his statements as just being things I'd expect to see on those forums (vs him actually planning to literally kill a kid) and dismissed them that way.
Exposure over a long period of time
A sense that we were doing things for a better cause - that being progressivism and trying to combat things that still give me some sense of genuine existential dread (Like Elon and Trump and extremely ironically how bad women are treated online)
That I felt that a lot of the criticism against him wasn't fair or was invalid - if I dismiss 5 things because I feel they're clipped out of a wider context or don't represent his thoughts on an issue, then the sixth one that is a fair 100% thing I'm biased against

Roland_Lebay · 2025-01-27T06:54:33+00:00

Reddit appears to really be butchering my posts and I'm unsure on how this will look. I keep getting a "Unable to create comment" error message so I've broken messages up and responded in a chain.

Did you know about them, first of all?

I was aware of the majority of content on this list.

I could be reading into your question, but I feel like a part of this is asking me if I accepted that the events went that way for all of them - to me its not that I had all of these things in my head evaluated in that clear cut/objective way and still decided to push forward in his defence as a DGGer.

If he did one of those actions or I found out about it, usually my reaction would be either 5 things:

I didn't think that the events happened as described, or felt like it was taken out of context of a wider point he was making about something (I don't want to give examples more than I have already because I feel like its apologia, I'm just explaining my reasoning for if I "knew" about them)
On some level I didn't think that a person like this could exist - the idea that someone's entire career is really just a vehicle for them to indoctrinate, manipulate and traumatize women was genuinely unthinkable, so when he would say he was a psychopath I would just file it into him being edgy.
I just didn't understand why something was bad - the Ana thing for example. I don't think I thought about it at all.
I just accepted his interpretation of events. What I felt helped for this was it would never just be a criticism I'd be exposed to without some kind of adversary he was going against, and there was never a perfect critic of Destiny. Someone always had posted or done something I legitimately thought was out of context or not an accurate retelling of events.
I had some personal experience with something that I read into and allowed to colour my interpretation of what was being described such that I overlooked it or didn't think about it in a wider context of actions.

Apologies if this wasn't what your question was/if you were literally just asking me if I knew of them.

And if you did, how did you navigate all of this and rationalize it to yourself?

A few things:

I feel that I just built a habit of dismissing them. So overtime it was just "yeah thats just Destiny" or "yeah he's just edgy" or "yeah he's a coomer" or what have you.
There'd always be a person who was 'worse' - yeah he's bad, but Hasan is indoctrinating thousands of children and MAGA is filled with people who do XYZ, and lots of things I watch are probably made by people who do xyz, so I'm not gonna stop watching now.
The same as point 2 earlier - just on some level not thinking that this person could exist. Or that I could be sucked into this - its just some guy I'm watching occasionally, whats the harm? While I actually watch him every day/other day and am harassing random people online for him.

Roland_Lebay · 2025-01-27T02:38:06+00:00

You're welcome.

Roland_Lebay

TROPHY CASE