It’s not that they see the people they’re fighting as human

I’m saying that’s not a shield against it. Genocidaires dehumanize their victims and they still get fucked up by their own actions and what they’re taking part in. It’s not about morals or consciences or anything like that, it’s just people not handling that sort of violence and horror well at a fundamental level. That’s not to say “oh it makes them sad, it makes them unhappy, it makes them regretful” because it can just as easily make them worse and more violent and unstable, it’s just to say it’s something that actively attacks and corrodes their own humanity. They can psych themselves up and dehumanize their victims and beat their chest as loud as they want, as loud as they need to to push themselves to actually do it, but they’re still going to be broken by it in some way.

This isn’t something original to Israel, obviously, though that provides a very clear and visible example of a population trying to keep themselves whipped into a bloodthirsty frenzy and breaking at the seams because of it. I know it happened to the Nazis too, and that there’s research on that and how Nazi ideology tried to recuperate that self-destruction through violence by lionizing it and making it a pillar of their ideology. I’d assume it’s just a universal phenomenon, that such violence just kind of does that to people regardless of how they try to psych themselves up and cope with it.

The latter, probably. People fundamentally do not handle horror and atrocity well, no matter how eagerly they dive into it or how loudly they beat their chest and bay for blood. It’s something inherently corrosive and destructive that can’t just be warded off by being a bloodthirsty fascist genocidaire.

I struggle to articulate how absurd and evil it is, that they’re eagerly destroying themselves just to spill more blood, just to slaughter and spread terror and death and misery for the sake of monstrous fascist ideals. Self-interested evil is horrible enough, but they’re beyond even that, it’s just death and horror for the sake of death and horror and fascist supremacy. All they have to do is not fucking do that, it’s in their best interests to not fucking do that, but their twisted fascist ideology demands they sacrifice themselves for the sake of genocide.

Like I’ve always said: the property and licensing argument about AI training has always been a corporate psyop to set up and legitimize moves like this, where big property holders and content hosts get to reap the rewards by claiming dominion over everything they touch while everyone who works and creates gets fucked, and the proprietary slop generator they feed becomes “legitimate and ok, because it’s properly licensing its training data”. That’s why AI is a labor issue rather than a property issue: AI isn’t stealing extant art, it’s devaluing skilled labor and destroying creative jobs and setting up for further squeezing and extraction by Capital.

Yep. Fundamentally the same sentiment sits at a lot of reactionary thought, either in opposition to a status quo that isn’t permissive enough for the privileged classes or in defense of a status quo that gives them almost unlimited personal freedom to act upon others as they please. You’ve got slavers opining that abolition would be the real slavery because it would destroy the only true freedom that is being an idle slaver dandy who can do as he please and live in opulence on the backs of others. There’s that one take on Fascism that it was fundamentally selling itself as the liberation of the warrior class and the powerful who were then free to subjugate and act upon others as they pleased.

We can even tie this into the whole farcical framework of “individualism” vs “collectivism,” where “individualism” is the “good and free” state of things where the vast majority of all individuals are subjugated through violence both direct and indirect to serve the opulence and lusts of the more privileged classes, and “collectivism” is the “bad and unfree” state of things where all individuals have their needs met and there is a systemic goal of preventing a more privileged class from separating out and preying upon them or abolishing and reintegrating such a class if it already existed.

The secret is that if you swap out the word “theocrats” in that sentence for a context-appropriate antagonist it becomes an accurate description of a big chunk of basically any big counter culture in the US over the past century or so. Sometimes you don’t even have to swap it out, you just have to attribute it to a different time. Like it describes s being mad at geriatric old fuddy duds who hate fun one year and then redirecting that onto women the next year because Steve Bannon told them women were coming for their treats, it describes the hedonism of rock fandoms or the hippies, etc.

Smug treatbrain is so quintessential to American culture that it makes me want to do a bit about brainpans and treat lobes to mock explain it.

I think my framework of looking at American counter cultures as being heavily biased towards being fundamentally just as chauvinist as and a little more treat-centric and libertine than the mainstream culture works well here. Like Atheism as a movement in America has fundamentally been comfortable straight white men who think all the performative stuff and cultural signifiers they have to do to join with the Evangelical power framework are cringe and dumb barriers in between them and their preferred treats: in their worldview all the cruelty and hate and domination and violence that the theocrats carry out are secondary bullet points to tack onto a powerpoint presentation in support of their real grievances, which are that the theocrats are cringe little weirdos who think silly things that are cringe and what’s worse are standing between fun loving guys and yim yum tasty treats like drugs and porn and free access to women’s bodies.

Atheism itself is just disbelief, a rejection of mythology and magic as infeasible. It’s not a ward against chauvinism or libertine treat-lust, and toxic sorts of self-interest and an alignment with American hegemony can make anything and everything toxic by association.

First a blackpilled groyper who just wanted to be famous and also die, then a NAFO freak, now a sovereign citizen? It’s like he’s going for a niche reactionary white guy BINGO. What’s the next one gonna be? An extremely divorced guy whose personality is filming himself going on racist rants while driving around in his truck? An Evangelical wearing Chick Tracts like a Warhammer character wears scraps of scripture?

I’ve seen it once. It may be a random test selection or limited to queries it arbitrarily decides that it has a good (always 100% wrong) answer for.

I could not get through the embarrassing story of the DLC where you literally save the president and join the FBI.

The thin act of humanity Myers and the FIA agents put on in the beginning steadily drops away, with your actual client (Songbird) even all but saying “Myers is actually ontologically evil” in part of the opening sequence, just in much more guarded words than that.

I also liked how they made the president this tough lady who can fight for herself when the 2 most recent presidents have been bumbling geriatrics.

It’s a setting where wealth buys superpowers and nearly eternal youth, and Myers is basically Adam Smasher with a human mask.

It tastes like carbonated cheerios with some light metallic notes. It’s not awful compared to something like Budweisser that comes pre-skunked for some reason, but like any pilsner it can never rise above the upper limit of “well, there are in fact worse pilsners.”

From what I remember it was the abolish ICE movement getting immediately brutally crushed by Democrats that seems to have been the clearest catalyst. Up until that moment he was buddy buddy with the establishment and apparently fervently believed that they were essentially good, and their open pivot to “no, actually we like the ethnic cleansing machine stop saying it should be dissolved” cracked that and the way they turned on him for opposing them on it did the rest.

Uh oh, looks like someone needs to not let the barely acceptable absolute minimum standard possible be the enemy of the pure ontological evil that may or may not be part of a degree lesser than its frenemies in the official Bad Guy party whom it constantly makes common cause with!

All of their models have consistently done pretty good on any sort of standard test, and then performed horribly in real use. Which makes sense, because if they can train it specifically to make something that looks like the answers to that test it will probably be good at making the answers to that, but it’s still fundamentally just a language parser and predictor without knowledge or any sort of internal modeling.

Their entire approach is just so fundamentally lazy and grifty, burning massive amounts of energy on what is fundamentally a dumbshit approach to building AI. It’s like trying to make a brain by just making the speech processing lobe bigger and bigger and expecting it’ll eventually get so good at talking that the things it says will be intrinsically right instead of only looking like text.

It’s probably at least partly because at least some high schools literally teach students that income tax brackets mean all income gets taxed at that rate as part of their “civics” curriculum. Education, especially related to economics, is fully captured by far right cranks pushing propaganda through control over textbooks and program funding.

I even remember some dumbshit “educational” video from high school “civics and economics” that had some poor farmer having to not grow his herd because progressive taxation meant he’d be making less money if he made more. That class and the American History class I took the next year both stand out as just constantly getting basic material facts wrong. Like the English classes did a better job of covering history than the actual history classes did.

It’s funny, I can only remember the names of two teachers I’ve ever had and I can barely remember anything of highschool, but I can remember these clear flashes of how completely dogshit most of the classes were, even two decades later.

major gaming mags were seemingly afraid to mark down major games from major studios because they didn’t want to be denied review codes in the future

Wasn’t it more/also they were worried about ongoing advertising deals? Like it wasn’t even necessarily the review staff themselves being in on it so much as the execs leaning on them to not threaten the revenue stream.

IIRC for GTA5 it was all satire aimed at mid 2000s Fox, both the trashy reality TV side of it and Fox News. I’m not gonna say it doesn’t revel too much in the spectacle of just taking something that’s already awful and dialing it up a bit, but it’s more in the style of the Onion where most of the bits are taking the mask off an institution or trend and having it honestly portray itself as what it is (like the Fox News expy literally having the tagline “confirming your prejudices” or an American Idol expy literally just being assholes reveling in cruelty) than South Park style nihilism - it has a point to make and that’s that American culture is reactionary and repulsively self-centered and consumerist, even as it is itself reveling in being trashy slop.

You’ve got to remember, everything after GTA3 was written in the context of the Bush era and none of it was written after gamergate: it has the sort of incoherent dirtbag quasi-left contemporary counter culture stance of recognizing the US as bloodthirsty, pointlessly cruel, and deeply unserious but also not having any sort of framework for understanding or addressing that and being entirely too libertine and chauvinist on top of that. It’s kind of alien to anything we have now, because that whole counter culture basically got wiped out by gamergate crystalizing the chauvinist libertines into open fascists baying for blood and forcing everyone else to stop tacitly tolerating them.

Perhaps they’re just airbrushed artwork on top of the armor. It seems like the sort of sardonic thing that character would do.

Matt Ward is such an awful writer that exposure to his prose is an actual psychic damage hazard.

I think it’s something from an old Rogue Trader article? So it may be more a metacommentary from an old writer sort of thing, that Gothic would have been descended from Mandarin with a bunch of English vocabulary mixed in, albeit all unrecognizable after tens of thousands of years of sound changes.

Also the Emperor is from somewhere in what is now Turkey and canonically the most common language the humans speak (“Gothic”) is descended from Mandarin and is just artistically portrayed as being Latin based because “High Gothic” is supposed to scan as archaic in the way that inserting incorrect Latin into English does.