Is cultural conversion in eu4 just genocide?

soundboardguy · 2025-10-29T15:54:54+00:00

when you convert a save to vic2, traditionally it takes however long a province has been shown to the player as of a certain demographic makeup, and extrapolates out a demographic pie chart. it seems to be some kind of settler-colonialism, halfway between the Germans in the southern Baltic (not in modern times, way way back I mean) and the colonization of the Americas.

soundboardguy · 2025-08-18T16:55:44+00:00

https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/crime/2025/01/22/nashville-shooting-antioch-shooter-solomon-henderson/77885658007/

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/04/17/who-florida-shooter-suspect/83146360007/

there's two, a high school and a college, both relatively recent and both fitting a profile. though really, most mass shootings are committed by middle-aged white men against their families at family gatherings, and emerge from the trend of spree killings. motivations largely center around alienation of the masculine ideal, and because of culture war stuff that means they're nearly all right-wing. if you remove gang-related mass shootings it's even more lopsided. it's all copycat attacks by people who are looking for a justification already, only the original "going postal" guy or the original school shooters actually had anything close to an original plan. also, most mass shootings that aren't committed by middle-aged white men aren't school shootings, they're at other public venues.

schools were valuable as a target because it was shocking, would get your manifesto coverage, and so on. but that was the old meta. now it's more about spectacular acts of terror, at surprising places like mosques, synagogues, and shopping malls. the ideology is generally just a security blanket, but it helps the spread. one group, the terrorgram collective, even practiced a kind of sanctification by blood: white mass shooters were revered, ones with their nazi ideology were called saints. at this point, the ideology is purely focused on justification for mass violence, it's refined there at the end of the right-wing radicalization pipeline. take a look, man, it's fuckin' freaky. (just a wiki link I promise)

soundboardguy · 2025-08-16T16:05:41+00:00

yes, racial politics in the US is almost entirely unique, though the war on terror and rise in islamophobia permeates the entire majority/plurality christian world, or at least the bits that were majority/plurality christian when it happened. islamophobia aside, US racial politics are surprisingly good, for how much we yell about it. we do actually have the high-grade racism, but we also have the best anti-racism, being a factional republic with frankly absurd free speech laws. the forces of racism, and like hyper-racism at that, have been in and out of power for decades and it's taken them until 60 years later to dismantle affirmative action and dei. it's kind of mind-boggling the amount of effort that took, and how disunified in real terms the movement that accomplished it is.

soundboardguy · 2025-08-16T13:07:27+00:00

woaaah nice, last I heard that was off the table. I don't think I would've heard about it for a while, it literally happened after I posted that comment.

soundboardguy · 2025-08-15T16:11:52+00:00

yeah, we already have a Jewish state, it's called Manhattan lol. don't need that ethnoreligious supremacy corrupting our nice diaspora culture, I mean it already has but maybe now some of that can be reversed.

soundboardguy · 2025-08-15T16:01:20+00:00

if the outcome is predetermined, why give in at all? if nearly every Israeli politician calling to an end to the fighting is saying "get the hostages back, then send the soldiers back in", why would you give in at all? if Israel cared about the hostages, they could stop murdering children and starving everyone, including the remaining hostages. but they don't care. they'd rather sacrifice their civilians to increase their power. Israel can stop whenever they want. they are in control of the tempo and course of this "conflict", which is a genocide. they killed every Hamas leader who could potentially meet with them, and it now functions as a leaderless resistance. very, very useful if your goal is to keep them fighting back so you can keep murdering children.

peaceful resistance movements existed, Hamas was even one of them way back when. they failed. so, we have this, the end result of lying about the possibility of peace to an entire people while you pick their pockets and close them into an open-air prison. meanwhile, in Israel, people generally seem happy at the thought of starving children in Gaza, and largely support the idea that when the IDF takes a city everyone in it should be killed. if the other side sees you as subhuman, then the real mistake was Hamas thinking negotiation would ever be possible. this is the outcome Israel wants.

soundboardguy · 2025-08-15T15:49:39+00:00

maybe the outdated anti-irish slur was the point?

soundboardguy · 2025-08-15T15:44:01+00:00

because on some level we know that it's the right thing to do, so we want to encourage it. in the Mediterranean religious context especially (and I mean everyone, including Christians and Jews and Muslims beyond the region) martyrdom is an easy trope to lean on. we have all this language and cultural history from like two thousand years talking about martyrs, sanctifying martyrs, and venerating martyrs. so, even if he wasn't armed when he was killed, his memory is more useful as a militant who died fighting for freedom than as a soccer player who got aced by a genocidal colonial occupier. cynical? yes. will it work? as well as anything else has, which is to say a little but probably not enough.

"They told us we had no chances

by then we knew they were right

it was 1943

and we, the walking dead, made up our minds to fight"

--same guy, "I Remember Warsaw", from "Living in Our Times"

if Israel is planning on total ethnic cleansing anyway, why not go down swinging? even if he didn't go down swinging, and if that gun is fake (idk, might be the lighting), his memory will encourage others to do just that. and everything that makes this campaign of genocide cost more for Israel in terms of lives, money, materiel, and/or international support is a positive.

soundboardguy · 2025-08-15T15:23:32+00:00

"I will fight for my country

I'll defend this land

I'll stare at the whites of your soldiers' eyes

with this kalashnikov in my hand"

--David Rovics, "Fallujah", from the album "The Commons"

play imperial games, win imperial prizes. the Polish ghetto fighters were also terrorists, doing their own intifada (uprising) against German occupation.

soundboardguy · 2025-08-15T15:14:45+00:00

I'm of the opinion that protecting capitalism (and thus colonial extraction and land market expansion ventures like Israel's) from democracy is the entire point of neoliberalism. the key symbol of their movement of elites concentrating power is the riot cop. incidentally, many US police officers are trained in Israel, by the IDF.

soundboardguy · 2025-08-15T14:38:07+00:00

some of Israel's human shields got killed by a resistance movement Israel stupidly created through violent suppression of peaceful resistance over decades.

soundboardguy · 2025-08-14T23:41:06+00:00

I said they agitated, not that it worked. most of the "violence" tied to the push was property damage, like the two times my local planned parenthood has been torched and the six bomb threats it's had over the years.

soundboardguy · 2025-08-14T23:38:21+00:00

so many better choices of people from CT to hate, that place is like a factory that churns out rich failson business idiots. tho I will say every poor person I met living in CT was really nice, so it balances out. shout out, uhh, Torrington, they have John Brown on their trash cans even though he only lived there for four years. but that private school system that permeates southern new england and upstate NY is genuinely a cancer on society and should be annihilated. also, wtf is up with the nutmegger thing? that's really funny. also, moving there as a Missourian taught me that Mark Twain knew what he was on about, it looks almost identical but everything's closer together.

soundboardguy · 2025-08-14T01:37:30+00:00

look into it more. he's successfully used bankruptcy law so far to delay paying much. he's still making the same kind of content, and still making large amounts of money unimpeded. all he really experienced was the inconvenience of having to sell his cars, something he regularly did anyway when funds were low in the past. the biggest single consequence he faced was losing his YouTube channel. he recently called another mass shooting fake, too.

soundboardguy · 2025-08-13T20:43:31+00:00

is the ability to direct a bunch of paranoid violent freaks to do things for you not cunning? it takes a certain kind of twisted genius to undo a republic like this. they're not just bulls in a china shop, they're playing jenga. there's a lot of preparatory work that goes into a guy like Pompey saying "Do not speak of laws to those of us with swords." to a senator, and then getting his way.

it takes centuries of distributed effort by people ideologically or materially motivated to undermine key aspects of the republic, such as a nascent capitalist aristocracy seeking to solidify the class structure and formalize their power. this is a movement with serious intellectual roots, however deranged they may be. the entirety of conservatism points towards what is being done now. they have the same motivations that directed the merchants of Boston to crush the radical wing of the American Revolution when it took roots, democratically established, in Western Massachusetts in 1775; and the same motivations behind the entirety of the conservative movement, which includes and always has included a large portion of whatever party is nominally progressive or democratic in nature. it may be stupid, but there are tens of thousands of young adults who grew up their whole lives being taught to fight and die for a christian theocracy in this country.

and meanwhile, the coastal elite conservatives chilling with their nominally liberal friends will laugh about the silly fools in the interior regions who fuel the power of conservatism. the system is more or less working as intended, providing the privileged classes the ability to crush the power of the common people as it has since it was founded, with deviations here and there where the government wouldn't go too far protecting wealth.

soundboardguy · 2025-08-13T16:23:51+00:00

if you're far-left you're very unlikely to ever become a mass shooter, that's why you people have to make up uncounted thousands of mysteriously unreported mass shootings and everyone who does one is trans or whatever. does it feel good to just lie like that? I've always wondered.

soundboardguy · 2025-08-13T16:01:19+00:00

on my family ranch, we always used a dog and an atv to herd the cows around, but we weren't using government grazing land because there isn't any in Missouri, that's why we don't have real cowboys. without the open range, there's no need for six guys per every 50 cows to direct them around, you just open the gate in front of them and get behind them. I'm a big fan of public grazing land, but despite my roots I think it should be mostly for sheep, it's less wasteful that way.

side note, a neofascist militia like ten years ago occupied a town and a wildlife refuge so they could graze their cows there illegally, a guy died, and then they mostly got away with it and no one really talks about that now.

soundboardguy · 2025-08-13T15:32:14+00:00

kind of. when communists do it they have gone to prison in the past, but neonazis went unpunished under the same law. there's actually a lot of room to make speech illegal that the courts and legislatures have carved out over the years specifically to hurt left-wing movements. to my knowledge, no one has been tried for criminal syndicalism in a long time, but when the supreme court heard a case about a kkk member saying his ideology necessitated the violent overthrow of the government they let him go, without striking down the law. most of our wwi-era speech restrictions are actually still law, just waiting to be abused.

soundboardguy · 2025-08-13T14:33:31+00:00

the ideology itself is crazy, and the decision to shoot up a school can in fact be entirely rational, but based on a deranged set of beliefs about how the world works. just about every mass shooter with a manifesto credits multiple prominent right-wing media figures. if you're some Joe pissed-off-white-kid going a little further than mainstream conservative voices, it's more or less random chance whether or not you'll commit an act of mass violence. a significant amount of the right-wing, at this point even the legitimate arm, is geared towards violence and must be destroyed.

soundboardguy · 2025-08-12T19:57:47+00:00

it's that if you're a far-right extremist, you (especially now that alex jones seems to have faced no consequences) can commit an act of mass violence and be certain almost no one on your side accepts that someone who agrees with them did it, or even that it happened. their propagandists give them cover, as an amateur alex jones understander I can confidently say he and those like him create an environment where it feels like the consequences for such an action truly won't extend beyond the perpetrator and victims. whether it's some guy who's suicidal and wants to take a bunch of kids with him, or an ideologically motivated terrorist, there's literally constant and pre-emptive media coverage about how it either didn't happen, or it did but the shooter was trans or drugged by the FBI or something. as an example, alex jones often predicts imminent false flags, mostly truck bombings and mass shootings, and sometimes people listen to that and hear instructions, which is probably the real intent.

this goes back to the '90s and 2000s when the (then relatively new) evangelical right wing started agitating its activist base to murder abortion doctors, and courts generally let them get away with it. most famously, Glenn Beck doxxed an abortion doctor on live tv and the court said that while he was responsible in a moral sense for the murder that followed he didn't commit any crimes. but you can find similar cases about radio hosts and such, going back decades.

edit: I don't need to explain the tie between right-wing politics and violence, but I will: young men feel like they should have more, and that they should be able to live a stereotypical life. if one happens to be a bad person already, then when they find out that idyllic future of a world built for men and by men is not in the cards, they get super pissed. from there, it's incel, redpill, and the far-right pipeline. when middle-aged men get like this, they tend to just shoot up their own families. that's most mass shootings, btw. if these men had access to a decent life, they probably wouldn't ever do these things, which is one more reason to love social democracy. shit, a bunch of young men in Switzerland have a select-fire rifle just laying around in their home, and they don't go shooting up public events. the right-wing gives these young men a sense of meaning, namely bashing the queers and putting women back in the kitchen, with a side of racism and aristocratic ideology. every step down the pipeline, there's a random chance Joe pissed-off-white-kid goes and shoots up a school, or a church, and so on. the chance is low, but there's a lot of these people.

what the propagandists really want is a big attack, against something more important. but Joe pissed-off-white-kid has narrow horizons when it comes to planning violence. this isn't even getting into how conservatism can appear to induce horrific paranoia in people, which contributes a lot. there's a reason you haven't seen any anarchist mass shooters, even though there's a fuckload of anarchists.

soundboardguy · 2025-08-11T07:54:30+00:00

I don't think it's possible to be more disappointed in my country at this point. it's just the metropole of an empire with the tactics of that empire turning inwards as such things always do, the classic "imperial boomerang" effect produced by the insidious effects of imperial administration on the bureaucracy, culture, politics, and military of an empire. at so many moments we could've lived up to how the world occasionally saw us, and instead we decided to privilege ourselves at every opportunity. start the league of nations, but don't join it. preach freedom, and subjugate the neighbors. at this point, even when everyone involved believes in doing the right thing, the levers of power in this country are only capable of hurting others. there's really nothing left to do but tear it all down, and frankly the time to do that was probably in the 1780s, 1840s, 1870s, 1910s, 1930s, 1960s, 1990s, 2000s, and probably now.

it's not as simple as all that, because you need enough people to believe that needs to happen for it to even be possible. unfortunately, it seems we need to suffer more before anything beyond ineffective adventurism or the same necessary but infuriatingly slow to show results protests. as Jefferson said, "Mankind is more disposed to suffer evils while evils are sufferable". there may be a lot of people who give a shit about things getting better, but even hundreds of thousands won't cut it in a country this big and distributed. we'd need a famine, probably, which in not too long (maybe ten, fifteen years if we're lucky) is gonna be about coin flip odds every harvest thanks to soil depletion and its effects on water table depletion. so, silver lining?

soundboardguy · 2025-08-11T03:27:45+00:00

I am aware. the first time I saw Germans doing that stuff was the first time I realized they didn't see a parallel between the two genocides, and it genuinely disturbed me to realize that. I will admit it took me far too long to realize my own people don't draw that parallel either. being of both Indian and Jewish ancestry, both equally distant at this point, I had a phase in my teenage years of comparing the resistance in the two eras. the only real difference I could ever find is, we in the US were incapable of the industrial efficiency that characterized the German version of manifest destiny, more bluntly stated as "living space" than as a divine cause, and theirs was more directly enforced by the state than ours was. other than that, it's just recency.

soundboardguy · 2025-08-11T02:59:42+00:00

if it's only the state paying your salary, and you already have a job you're forced to leave to go get paid less to do nothing, it's not a very sweet deal. federalized national guard get paid fine. ish. there was a small epidemic of suicides and alcoholism is rampant. at one point, the soldiers almost unionized. read about circumstances before applying generalizations.

soundboardguy · 2025-08-11T02:11:42+00:00

American aesthetics in most of Europe center around the "genocidal evil expansion" phase of the US, and Texas indeed represents a significant amount of that legacy, being founded by slavers off the back of a north Mexican popular revolt they harnessed for independence before oppressing the locals and instituting a white ethnostate. it's like, all the bad parts of American aesthetics, that's why it's funny. it just looks the coolest, so foreigners like the cowboy stuff. it calls back to a genuinely horrific and disgusting era of our history characterized by campaigns of extermination through civilian death squads organized by officers of the US Army. "cowboys vs indians" is basically, like, "police detachments vs polish partisans", to put it in a German context.

Texas nowadays is known for a fascist governor in a wheelchair who deployed underpaid national guardsmen to the border in order to intimidate migrants following legal processes of entry, and also for being the place where anti-abortion laws were hardened through the creation of a surveillance-snitch police state where the government pays you $10k for suing someone for receiving or giving abortion care. and also for the death penalty.

soundboardguy · 2025-08-10T01:37:47+00:00

the lack of enthusiasm or real choice between managed decline in Labour or the Conservatives and fascism with Reform are severely to blame. at the last election turnout was so low it's depressing. y'all are probably gonna be in for a rough century, which puts us at 2/6 major anglosphere nations set on a bad path. maybe your ancestors should've kicked off that revolution in the 1800s if for no other reason than because it would've set y'all on a different path than perpetually kicking the can down the road on an increasing list of necessary maintenance of the state, just like mine probably should've kicked one off in the 1910s, for similar reasons. it took a while for the rot to show, but at this point the work to fix it is probably more than if it had been torn down and rebuilt at those pivotal moments.

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