New Testingstan

idk

but i do know that the STEELERS SUCK

and so do the fucking YANKEES

fuck 'em

Stofsk wrote:Hahahaha, did DA actually say that?

I paraphrased, but it basically covers the whole of his argument. Can't provide a link at the moment because search isn't working over there right now, but he created the thread specifically to argue his accelerationist reasoning behind voting for McCain.

Count Chocula wrote:Umm, wouldn't "anti conservative" count as "liberal" in the US? 'Opposing right-wing ideals,' as you said, inherently implies advocacy of left-wing ideals. Anthropogenic global warming er climate change, gun control, higher taxes, deficit spending, 'the western world sucks,' and universal health care are all positions advocated on TEO and are mostly opposite to so-called conservative beliefs.

Speaking of belief, I believe (no not that deep, just think) that the average age on TEO is getting younger as the older members are banned or move on, which would explain the rise in super-deep discussions about video games and the reduced output of the several excellent graphics artists and fanfic authors on the site.

Phant mostly summed it up. They don't necessarily advocate left-wing ideals because they agree with them so much as they do because conservatives oppose them and they oppose conservatives.

Saying that anti-conservative is equal to liberal is like saying being opposed to China's occupation of Tibet means you support returning the Lamas to power.

adr wrote:but i do know that the STEELERS SUCK

and so do the fucking YANKEES

They do so for entirely different reasons, though.

The big market baseball teams suck because they suck any possible enjoyment out of the game by buying up the big name talent and monopolizing the market, making it next to impossible for any team that isn't as rich as them to compete. The Yankees suck more than the others simply because they are the most guilty of it (though the Red Sox come in a close second by trying to pretend they aren't guilty of it).

At least the Steelers just suck for tribalist reasons, since the NFL is a socialist organization.

adr wrote:i'd say it all depends on the details but a lot of this shit is more about personal attacks than the position

if w. mitt romney says something, ppl will attack it

but if b. hussein obama says the same thing ppl will defend it


i betcha if we took like a page from marx literally and attributed it to idk friedman or greenspan or something

people would say how totally fucking stupid it is even if they consider themselves on the left economically otherwise

the problem is mitt romney's a habitual liar

if he said the sky was blue i'd want independent fact verification

the sky is in fact... grey and white right now

Civil War Man wrote:But take any given conversation about him. When he does something bad, you'll obviously get conservatives crowing about how this proves he's evil, but you'll also inevitably get some "liberal" defending him even though their opinions would be reversed if the president had an R after his name.

When he does something good, conservatives will try to reword it until it's something bad (or, failing that, try to claim credit), while everyone else except his apologists complains about him not doing it earlier.

I'm saying that liberal doesn't really exist on the board. There are just the token conservative members, and the rest are anti-conservative. They aren't really motivated by leftist ideals so much as they are motivated by opposing right-wing ideals.

I kind of just chalk the double standard up to mindless tribalism. Look, he's on our side so we've got to support him, he's part of the in-group so he must have decent or understandable motives for doing stuff unlike those enemy guys who can be assumed to simply be evil etc.. Same psychology that explains when some prominent right wing priest gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar and cries about how he repents and regrets it right wingers believe him.

Thinking about your point, my impression is SDN's liberalism does have sort of a "First World problems" bent: stuff like gay marriage and universal healthcare is higher on their radar than concerns about stuff like reforming US foreign policy, and positions like "look Iran is obviously irrational so them getting a nuclear weapon would obv be a huge threat" are relatively acceptable, compared to their domestic policy rough equivalents like "look, being on welfare should be unpleasant because people need to be motivated to work". Similarly with shit like peak oil and global warming I get the impression the apocalyptic vision of choice is the West/industrial civilization as a whole being fucked, when really something like that is likely to fall hardest on the global poor, not the guys who live in rich countries which for a variety of reasons are likely to be much better able to absorb shit like that without everyone dying and eating cockroaches. But nobody writes smugfics about Africans starving because of peak oil and global warming while Americans and Europeans continue to drive to work, despite this being arguably more plausible than "Commies bombarding Mormons with nerve gas in postapocalyptic dystopian US" and more relevant as social commentary.

Though maybe this is just me viewing the community through bile-colored glasses and I'm just imagining things.

you may be viewing it through bile-coloured glasses (lol you lot take that place waaay too seriously), but I think you are broadly correct

and man, the implied hatred & disdain of the working class I see in so much of what they write... well actually no, hatred is the wrong word: but a sort of patronising, disconnected smugness. It's a lol when it comes from guys like stas bush though

i really want to write some political fiction

it'd kick ass

but i suk 2 much

i can't wait until i retire so i have the time to do everything awesome

would aliens try to invade
but then everyone would peacefully resist & refuse to work in their salt mines
and this would shame the aliens into leaving us alone
?

evilsoup wrote:you may be viewing it through bile-coloured glasses (lol you lot take that place waaay too seriously), but I think you are broadly correct

and man, the implied hatred & disdain of the working class I see in so much of what they write... well actually no, hatred is the wrong word: but a sort of patronising, disconnected smugness. It's a lol when it comes from guys like stas bush though

Hatred might be too strong, but patronizing might be too mild. I'd put it more implied contempt of the working class, particularly those with manual labor jobs.

Like that whole weird antipathy DW has towards miners.

well i can't speak for wong, i've never interacted with him in any way
(when I stumbled across stardestroyer.net I remember lolling at his 'OMG star trek is COMMUNISM' essay, as if that wasn't actually explicitly stated in TNG)

but it's just... I guess it's part of that general smug superiority they have going on, it comes from the same place that makes them think that anyone who disagrees with them politically is either a dribbling idiot or outright evil

evilsoup wrote:would aliens try to invade
but then everyone would peacefully resist & refuse to work in their salt mines
and this would shame the aliens into leaving us alone
?

Heh, that reminds me of a vague idea I had for fiction:

I was reading Umberto Eco's 14 points of fascism and I got to this bit:

For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.

Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such "final solutions" implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.

And I looked at the last bit (bolded by me) and starting thinking about how those "Nazis conquer the world!" type stories would be exactly the kind of scenario where fascism is actually confronted with this inherent contradiction and running with this idea it would be interesting to see how it reacts.

Eventually collapses under this contradiction?
Reforms to become more "life focused" and conventional and hence less terrible as people stop giving a shit and just wanting to live their lives in the absence of an obvious threat?
Begins cannibalizing its own society in a desperate attempt to keep up the pressure by finding more enemies (there can always be more traitors!)?

I'm guessing some combination of 3 and either 1 or 2.

I don't have any real concrete ideas but it strikes me as interesting take on one of those "Nazis/vaguely Nazi-esque regime take over the world!" type dystopias.

evilsoup wrote:well i can't speak for wong, i've never interacted with him in any way
(when I stumbled across stardestroyer.net I remember lolling at his 'OMG star trek is COMMUNISM' essay, as if that wasn't actually explicitly stated in TNG)

but it's just... I guess it's part of that general smug superiority they have going on, it comes from the same place that makes them think that anyone who disagrees with them politically is either a dribbling idiot or outright evil

these are the same people that think batman is stupid for not killing the joker when he had the chance because apparently killing is easy under utilitarian ethics?

hmm
well I'd say the natural state of things is for people to get more liberal as their society gets wealthier, which would go towards 'reform'
but would something like the nazi state be powerful enough to contradict that? Imagine North Korea on a worldwide scale... well, they'd be able to find plenty of enemies for a long time, in the case of actual-factual nazis, from partisans and so on, especially if they went with their historical 'kill eastern europe' plan.

I don't know

Do you remember that thread about warrior-monk-professors in an armoured library in some post-apocalyptic wasteland, giving out education to local guys? I think thanas deleted it for being too interesting.

Well, I thought about that for a little while - there was some suggestion that maybe they could come up against a renegade guy of theirs who was using their knowledge for EVIL and building up an empire. I think it could be a pretty interesting story if, instead of fighting the invading army or whatever, they accept the invaders peacefully and even co-operate with them. But then they talk to the soldiers and educate them about history and philosophy, and teach them poems, and so on; and the army starts to suffer for ennui (we've got more than what we need, why bother continuing?), and the empire sort of... peters out.

Now obviously that would need a lot of work to be any more than naive wishful thinking, and really I can't be bothered with it right now, but it could be interesting. A change from mad max fallout 3 war war death kill stuff, anyway.

well in the specific case of batman and joker, they have a point
but the real world isn't black and white like that, there aren't actually any people who just want to watch the world burn, batman can't be trusted to turn off the PATRIOT phone hacking system
so the fact that they have a point there just shows how shitty batman comics are

evilsoup wrote:would aliens try to invade

maybe but that's been done

i'd do shit like THE TRIAL OF BIN LADEN or the less plausible OBAMA: IMPEACHED which would center on attorneys, diplomats, and detectives trying to find truth and justice

if i did an alien invasion it'd prolly be titled WE SENT DOCTORS in which the aliens would set a positive example for arrogant empires by helping the world's poorest achieve moderate prosperity and independence through things like health maintenance education and sustainable infrastructure development

evilsoup wrote:well in the specific case of batman and joker, they have a point
but the real world isn't black and white like that, there aren't actually any people who just want to watch the world burn, batman can't be trusted to turn off the PATRIOT phone hacking system
so the fact that they have a point there just shows how shitty batman comics are

it's easy to see the dilemma that they were trying to present but the movies didn't execute it very well

but the idea that someone can just turn off the moral center that makes them think "no, killing is bad even if i think this guy deserves it" is kind of a bad joke

evilsoup wrote:but then everyone would peacefully resist & refuse to work in their salt mines

btw this would probably work


but if i was doing like a mmore traditional alien invasion i'd make it some sort of misunderstanding resulting from some hjard sci fi shit


ok imagine the aliens are coming from another star in sleeper ships and something went wrong

the technology limitations means they can't expect help from their own ppl. they have no way to just leave. and they are colonists rather than conquerers so they don't have access to ALIEN BATTLECRUISER and NANOTUBE POWER AROMR

they are just improvising with what they have trying to make their way

and it didn't start otu violent but there's all kinds of fear of the unknown and the supply problem puts a time limit in place raising the stakes of failure


between the fear, the ticking clock, and difficulty of communication with a totally alien culture on both sides things go down hill

man I doubt many of them would actually kill the joker if they were in that situation
words on the internet are cheap

really, I think batman comics are a pretty bad test of peoples' morality or empathy or whatever, since they're so shittily written and the joker doesn't really register as a human (due to the shitty writing)

adr that sounds like it could work, you could have like talking heads interspersed saying shit like 'we should have killed him, this trial is a farce'
but then your self-insert guy can go
'NO! That is not the american way, we need justice & truth & transparancy; the law must be applied to everyone, even those we consider to be enemies'

And oh yeah, I generally prefer benevolant aliens (have you read any of the Culture books?), I think it's kind of ridiculous that all aliens everywhere are apparantly uniform expansionist empires

and that kind of peaceful resistance, or at least trying to reach an accomadation with other guys in a difficult situation, would be more interesting than any military scifi ever.

evilsoup wrote:but would something like the nazi state be powerful enough to contradict that? Imagine North Korea on a worldwide scale...

But doesn't North Korea "work" in part because they've got a hostile outside world they can point to in order to justify how shit things are?

It's been a while since I read (some of) B.R. Meyers's take on it, but I remember something about how basically North Korea is deliberately provocative to the rest of the world because of internal politics - they need a hostile world to give themselves legitimacy.

I find this an interesting idea to play with - peace is corrosive to ideologies like fascism because so much of it is bound up in the percieved need for aggression and unity vs. a hostile world, and it's an ugly ideology on its own merits so you need fear to make it look attractive.

Not saying you're wrong, mind you, I'm just thinking.

Do you remember that thread about warrior-monk-professors in an armoured library in some post-apocalyptic wasteland, giving out education to local guys? I think thanas deleted it for being too interesting.

Well, I thought about that for a little while - there was some suggestion that maybe they could come up against a renegade guy of theirs who was using their knowledge for EVIL and building up an empire. I think it could be a pretty interesting story if, instead of fighting the invading army or whatever, they accept the invaders peacefully and even co-operate with them. But then they talk to the soldiers and educate them about history and philosophy, and teach them poems, and so on; and the army starts to suffer for ennui (we've got more than what we need, why bother continuing?), and the empire sort of... peters out.

That sounds cool.

I like that, at first reading, it sounds like a standard terrible stabbed in the back type myth about how all that learning and art and shit is emasculating and drained the vigor of our heroic soldiers, making them limp-dicked and effeminate and unwilling to sacrifice their comfort and lives and stab people in the face in the service of their country like real men. Then you think about it a moment and realize what really happened is they were woken up to the fact that their leader and his militaristic vision was A) ugly B) unnecessary.

adr wrote:idk

but i do know that the STEELERS SUCK

and so do the fucking YANKEES

fuck 'em

Oh how you would hate two rooms of my home. You just named my favorite football and baseball teams respectively.

I think you're right about North Korea actually, and that model couldn't really be expanded to the whole world. Fascism probably would break down if the fascists ever did conquer the world, but I don't think it would go quietly. There would be progress, but it would be much slower, because actual fascists would be much more willing to just shoot hippies (not that there would be hippies exactly in a fascist world-state, but you know what I mean).

adr wrote:i'd do shit like THE TRIAL OF BIN LADEN or the less plausible OBAMA: IMPEACHED which would center on attorneys, diplomats, and detectives trying to find truth and justice

That reminds me of another idea I had, inspired by that WWII discussion on SDN adr was in.

I was thinking to myself yeah, at some point violent resistance to the Axis was probably the least bad option - but I bet if you were actually fighting WWII with the goal of "stop these guys from killing lots of people, while inflicting the minimum of death and suffering while doing it" the strategy would look very different from the OTL Allied strategies which were heavily influenced by all kinds of less noble motivations.

So I got thinking hey, there might be a neat bit of philosophical military SF, a WWII-expy where the Allies think more like adr does in terms of "self-defense is justified (with war being an organized form of self defense) but not going beyond that."

I'm thinking prolly works best to just make it another planet or something, so you can have a weirdo culture to stand in place of the Allies, the Axis analog would be more like their selves in our world.

I even thought up a bit of local cultural color for the "good guys".

They don't celebrate victories. No parades or anything like that. Instead after a battle they do a ritual of apology, basically a kind of somber mass-funeral type thing, where they ask forgiveness from the spirits of those who died, and especially those they have killed.

So like, say, after coming back to base from a bombing mission a pilot would do a little ritual of apology to the anonymous guys who got killed by his bombs. Instead of a military parade to mark a victory you'd have a public mass ritual of apology by all the surviving members of the combatant units. Etc.

evilsoup wrote:Fascism probably would break down if the fascists ever did conquer the world, but I don't think it would go quietly. There would be progress, but it would be much slower, because actual fascists would be much more willing to just shoot hippies (not that there would be hippies exactly in a fascist world-state, but you know what I mean).

Yeah, this isn't too different from my take on it.

evilsoup wrote:And oh yeah, I generally prefer benevolant aliens (have you read any of the Culture books?), I think it's kind of ridiculous that all aliens everywhere are apparantly uniform expansionist empires

i have not read thtem but heard good things

and that kind of peaceful resistance, or at least trying to reach an accomadation with other guys in a difficult situation, would be more interesting than any military scifi ever.

imo in most cases, when you start the shooting, the interesting part of the story is over


part of this might be a personal thing of mine; i hate waiting. when i know something is going to happen and it hasn't yet i feel trapped and anxious and shit

but as soon as it starts to happen, i go right back to normal relaxation and it isn't a big deal



so when i imagine myself in the place of, you know like captain picard facing down a romulan warbird, my heart pounds

not just even out of fear of the romulan's disruptors but just out of anticipation of what happens next

(and of course the fear contributes a lot too)



whereas after the battle begins, it is kinda rote. bring us about, fire phasers, whatever, all by the numbers.




you know i think it is entirely a feeling of helplessness


while waiting there's nothing i can do. i'm trapped in that i can't leave and trapped in that i can't do anything about the process.

i don't know what is going to happen

i don't know when it is going to happen

and there's not a damned thing i can do about it



but after the shooting starts, i'd be in some kind of control again. by barking those tactical orders i feel in charge again, and the plain simple outcome of phasers and photon torpedoes is a lot more predictable than waiting and words


so eh not so bad


at least that's how i imagine it






thus the sci fi scenes i find most compelling are the ones where i can feel helpless the same way

picard's stand offs with the romulans are always fun


and another good one is the ANH death star. despite the shooting having started, princess leia, and to a lesser extent, governor tarkin are in that very same helpless kind of situation where all they can do is listen and wait.

between that, the humanization of the rebel pilots, and the presentation of the radio chatter i like that sequence a lot. i find it a lot more effective than the much fancier action in ROTJ, or the really boring prequels


edit: from "the best of both worlds" captain picard: "turn the page"