!soyteens They do things like set water pumps to random settings until they crash, try to cut off air vents, delete entire hard drives, change building system languages, change usernames to slurs, jam printers, datamine, suggest putting slopjaks in someone's chats, hack a cremation system, a russian nuclear research computer, a gas power plant pc, german video game dev server, a gynecology report pdf, and a chaturbate streamer and other stuff. I also checked that none of the IPs in the pictures provided are readable as to not break rdrama's rules on doxxing.

Some highlights:

TLDR:

The thread was later deleted by the jannies fearing legal trouble I suppose

In 2017, Equifax suffered the worst data-breach in world history, leaking the deep, nonconsensual dossiers it had compiled on 148m Americans and 15m Britons, (and 19k Canadians) into the world, to form an immortal, undeletable reservoir of kompromat and premade identity-theft kits:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach

Equifax knew the breach was coming. It wasn't just that their top execs liquidated their stock in Equifax before the announcement of the breach - it was also that they ignored years of increasingly urgent warnings from IT staff about the problems with their server security.

Things didn't improve after the breach. Indeed, the 2017 Equifax breach was the starting gun for a string of more breaches, because Equifax's servers didn't just have one fubared system - it was composed of pure, refined fubar. After one group of hackers breached the main Equifax system, other groups breached other Equifax systems, over and over, and over:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/equifax-password-username-admin-lawsuit-201118316.html

Doesn't this remind you of Boeing? It reminds me of Boeing. The spectacular 737 Max failures in 2018 weren't the end of the scandal. They weren't even the scandal's start - they were the tipping point, the moment in which a long history of lethally defective planes "breached" from the world of aviation wonks and into the wider public consciousness:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_Boeing_737

Just like with Equifax, the 737 Max disasters tipped Boeing into a string of increasingly grim catastrophes. Each fresh disaster landed with the grim inevitability of your general contractor texting you that he's just opened up your ceiling and discovered that all your joists had rotted out - and that he won't be able to deal with that until he deals with the termites he found last week, and that they'll have to wait until he gets to the cracks in the foundation slab from the week before, and that those will have to wait until he gets to the asbestos he just discovered in the walls.

Drip, drip, drip, as you realize that the most expensive thing you own - which is also the thing you had hoped to shelter for the rest of your life - isn't even a teardown, it's just a pure liability. Even if you razed the structure, you couldn't start over, because the soil is full of PCBs. It's not a toxic asset, because it's not an asset. It's just toxic.

Equifax isn't just a company: it's infrastructure. It started out as an engine for racial, political and sexual discrimination, paying snoops to collect gossip from nosy neighbors, which was assembled into vast warehouses full of binders that told bank officers which loan applicants should be denied for being queer, or leftists, or, you know, Black:

https://jacobin.com/2017/09/equifax-retail-credit-company-discrimination-loans

This witch-hunts-as-a-service morphed into an official part of the economy, the backbone of the credit industry, with a license to secretly destroy your life with haphazardly assembled "facts" about your life that you had the most minimal, grudging right to appeal (or even see). Turns out there are a lot of customers for this kind of service, and the capital markets showered Equifax with the cash needed to buy almost all of its rivals, in mergers that were waved through by a generation of Reaganomics-sedated antitrust regulators.

There's a direct line from that acquisition spree to the Equifax breach(es). First of all, companies like Equifax were early adopters of technology. They're a database company, so they were the crash-test dummies for ever generation of database. These bug-riddled, heavily patched systems were overlaid with subsequent layers of new tech, with new defects to be patched and then overlaid with the next generation.

These systems are intrinsically fragile, because things fall apart at the seams, and these systems are all seams. They are tech-debt personified. Now, every kind of enterprise will eventually reach this state if it keeps going long enough, but the early digitizers are the bow-wave of that coming infopocalypse, both because they got there first and because the bottom tiers of their systems are composed of layers of punchcards and COBOL, crumbling under the geological stresses of seventy years of subsequent technology.

The single best account of this phenomenon is the British Library's postmortem of their ransomware attack, which is also in the running for "best hard-eyed assessment of how fricked things are":

https://www.bl.uk/home/british-library-cyber-incident-review-8-march-2024.pdf

There's a reason libraries, cities, insurance companies, and other giant institutions keep getting breached: they started accumulating tech debt before anyone else, so they've got more asbestos in the walls, more sagging joists, more foundation cracks and more termites.

That was the starting point for Equifax - a company with a massive tech debt that it would struggle to pay down under the most ideal circumstances.

Then, Equifax deliberately made this situation infinitely worse through a series of mergers in which it bought dozens of other companies that all had their own version of this problem, and duct-taped their failing, fricked up IT systems to its own. The more seams an IT system has, the more brittle and insecure it is. Equifax deliberately added so many seams that you need to be able to visualized additional spatial dimensions to grasp them - they had fractal seams.

But wait, there's more! The reason to merge with your competitors is to create a monopoly position, and the value of a monopoly position is that it makes a company too big to fail, which makes it too big to jail, which makes it too big to care. Each Equifax acquisition took a piece off the game board, making it that much harder to replace Equifax if it fricked up. That, in turn, made it harder to punish Equifax if it fricked up. And that meant that Equifax didn't have to care if it fricked up.

Which is why the increasingly desperate pleas for more resources to shore up Equifax's crumbling IT and security infrastructure went unheeded. Top management could see that they were steaming directly into an iceberg, but they also knew that they had a guaranteed spot on the lifeboats, and that someone else would be responsible for fishing the dead passengers out of the sea. Why turn the wheel?

That's what happened to Boeing, too: the company acquired new layers of technical complexity by merging with rivals (principally McDonnell-Douglas), and then starved the departments that would have to deal with that complexity because it was being managed by execs whose driving passion was to run a company that was too big to care. Those execs then added more complexity by chasing lower costs by firing unionized, competent, senior staff and replacing them with untrained scabs in jurisdictions chosen for their lax labor and environmental enforcement regimes.

(The biggest difference was that Boeing once had a useful, high-quality product, whereas Equifax started off as an irredeemably terrible, if efficient, discrimination machine, and grew to become an equally terrible, but also ferociously incompetent, enterprise.)

This is the American story of the past four decades: accumulate tech debt, merge to monopoly, exponentially compound your tech debt by combining barely functional IT systems. Every corporate behemoth is locked in a race between the eventual discovery of its irreparable structural defects and its ability to become so enmeshed in our lives that we have to assume the costs of fixing those defects. It's a contest between "too rotten to stand" and "too big to care."

Remember last February, when we all discovered that there was a company called Change Healthcare, and that they were key to processing virtually every prescription filled in America? Remember how we discovered this? Change was hacked, went down, ransomed, and no one could fill a scrip in America for more than a week, until they paid the hackers $22m in Bitcoin?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Change_Healthcare_ransomware_attack

How did we end up with Change Healthcare as the linchpin of the entire American prescription system? Well, first Unitedhealthcare became the largest health insurer in America by buying all its competitors in a series of mergers that comatose antitrust regulators failed to block. Then it combined all those other companies' IT systems into a cosmic-scale dog's breakfast that barely ran. Then it bought Change and used its monopoly power to ensure that every Rx ran through Change's servers, which were part of that asbestos-filled, termite-infested, crack-foundationed, sag-joisted teardown. Then, it got hacked.

United's execs are the kind of execs on a relentless quest to be too big to care, and so they don't care. Which is why their they had to subsequently announce that they had suffered a breach that turned the complete medical histories of one third of Americans into immortal Darknet kompromat that is - even now - being combined with breach data from Equifax and force-fed to the slaves in Cambodia and Laos's pig-butchering factories:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/01/politics/data-stolen-healthcare-hack/index.html

Those slaves are beaten, tortured, and punitively r*ped in compounds to force them to drain the life's savings of everyone in Canada, Australia, Singapore, the UK and Europe. remember that they are downstream of the forseeable, inevitable IT failures of companies that set out to be too big to care that this was going to happen.

Failures like Ticketmaster's, which flushed 500 million users' personal information into the identity-theft mills just last month. Ticketmaster, you'll recall, grew to its current scale through (you guessed it), a series of mergers en route to "too big to care" status, that resulted in its IT systems being combined with those of Ticketron, Live Nation, and dozens of others:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/31/business/ticketmaster-hack-data-breach.html

But enough about that. Let's go car-shopping!

Good luck with that. There's a company you've never heard. It's called CDK Global. They provide "dealer management software." They are a monopolist. They got that way after being bought by a private equity fund called Brookfield. You can't complete a car purchase without their systems, and their systems have been hacked. No one can buy a car:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/27/business/cdk-global-cyber-attack-update/index.html

Writing for his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller tells the all-too-familiar story of how CDK Global filled the walls of the nation's auto-dealers with the IT equivalent of termites and asbestos, and lays the blame where it belongs: with a legal and economics establishment that wanted it this way:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/a-supreme-court-justice-is-why-you

The CDK story follows the Equifax/Boeing/Change Healthcare/Ticketmaster pattern, but with an important difference. As CDK was amassing its monopoly power, one of its execs, Dan McCray, told a competitor, Authenticom founder Steve Cottrell that if he didn't sell to CDK that he would "fricking destroy" Authenticom by illegally colluding with the number two dealer management company Reynolds.

Rather than selling out, Cottrell blew the whistle, using Cottrell's own words to convince a district court that CDK had violated antitrust law. The court agreed, and ordered CDK and Reynolds - who controlled 90% of the market - to continue to allow Authenticom to participate in the DMS market.

Dealers cheered this on: CDK/Reynolds had been steadily hiking prices, while ingesting dealer data and using it to gouge the dealers on additional services, while denying dealers access to their own data. The services that Authenticom provided for $35/month cost $735/month from CDK/Reynolds (they justified this price hike by saying they needed the additional funds to cover the costs of increased information security!).

CDK/Reynolds appealed the judgment to the 7th Circuit, where a panel of economists weighed in. As Stoller writes, this panel included monopoly's most notorious (and well-compensated) cheerleader, Frank Easterbrook, and the "legendary" Democrat Diane Wood. They argued for CDK/Reynolds, demanding that the court release them from their obligations to share the market with Authenticom:

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-7th-circuit/1879150.html

The 7th Circuit bought the argument, overturning the lower court and paving the way for the CDK/Reynolds monopoly, which is how we ended up with one company's objectively shitty IT systems interwoven into the sale of every car, which meant that when Russian hackers looked at that crosseyed, it split wide open, allowing them to halt auto sales nationwide. What happens next is a near-certainty: CDK will pay a multimillion dollar ransom, and the hackers will reward them by breaching the personal details of everyone who's ever bought a car, and the slaves in Cambodian pig-butchering compounds will get a fresh supply of kompromat.

But on the plus side, the need to pay these huge ransoms is key to ensuring liquidity in the cryptocurrency markets, because ransoms are now the only nondiscretionary liability that can only be settled in crypto:

https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/

When the 7th Circuit set up every American car owner to be pig-butchered, they cited one of the most important cases in antitrust history: the 2004 unanimous Supreme Court decision in Verizon v Trinko:

https://www.oyez.org/cases/2003/02-682

Trinko was a case about whether antitrust law could force Verizon, a telcoms monopolist, to share its lines with competitors, something it had been ordered to do and then cheated on. The decision was written by Antonin Scalia, and without it, Big Tech would never have been able to form. Scalia and Trinko gave us the modern, too-big-to-care versions of Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft and the other tech baronies.

In his Trinko opinion, Scalia said that "possessing monopoly power" and "charging monopoly prices" was "not unlawful" - rather, it was "an important element of the free-market system." Scalia - writing on behalf of a unanimous court! - said that fighting monopolists "may lessen the incentive for the monopolist...to invest in those economically beneficial facilities."

In other words, in order to prevent monopolists from being too big to care, we have to let them have monopolies. No wonder Trinko is the Zelig of shitty antitrust rulings, from the decision to dismiss the antitrust case against Facebook and Apple's defense in its own ongoing case:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/073_2021.06.28_mtd_order_memo.pdf

Trinko is the origin node of too big to care. It's the reason that our whole economy is now composed of "infrastructure" that is made of splitting seams, asbestos, termites and dry rot. It's the reason that the entire automotive sector became dependent on companies like Reynolds, whose billionaire owner intentionally and illegally destroyed evidence of his company's crimes, before going on to commit the largest tax fraud in American history:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/billionaire-robert-brockman-accused-of-biggest-tax-fraud-in-u-s-history-dies-at-81-11660226505

Trinko begs companies to become too big to care. It ensures that they will exponentially increase their IT debt while becoming structurally important to whole swathes of the US economy. It guarantees that they will underinvest in IT security. It is the soil in which pig butchering grew.

It's why you can't buy a car.

Now, I am fond of quoting Stein's Law at moments like this: "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop." As Stoller writes, after two decades of unchallenged rule, Trinko is looking awfully shaky. It was substantially narrowed in 2023 by the 10th Circuit, which had been briefed by Biden's antitrust division:

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca10/22-1164/22-1164-2023-08-21.html

And the cases of 2024 have something going for them that Trinko lacked in 2004: evidence of what a fricking disaster Trinko is. The wrongness of Trinko is so increasingly undeniable that there's a chance it will be overturned.

But it won't go down easy. As Stoller writes, Trinko didn't emerge from a vacuum: the economic theories that underpinned it come from some of the heroes of orthodox economics, like Joseph Schumpeter, who is positively worshipped. Schumpeter was antitrust's OG hater, who wrote extensively that antitrust law didn't need to exist because any harmful monopoly would be overturned by an inevitable market process dictated by iron laws of economics.

Schumpeter wrote that monopolies could only be sustained by "alertness and energy" - that there would never be a monopoly so secure that its owner became too big to care. But he went further, insisting that the promise of attaining a monopoly was key to investment in great new things, because monopolists had the economic power that let them plan and execute great feats of innovation.

The idea that monopolies are benevolent dictators has pervaded our economic tale for decades. Even today, critics who deplore Facebook and Google do so on the basis that they do not wield their power wisely (say, to stamp out harassment or disinformation). When confronted with the possibility of breaking up these companies or replacing them with smaller platforms, those critics recoil, insisting that without Big Tech's scale, no one will ever have the power to accomplish their goals:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/18/urban-wildlife-interface/#combustible-walled-gardens

But they misunderstand the relationship between corporate power and corporate conduct. The reason corporations accumulate power is so that they can be insulated from the consequences of the harms they wreak upon the rest of us. They don't inflict those harms out of sadism: rather, they do so in order to externalize the costs of running a good system, reaping the profits of scale while we pay its costs.

The only reason to accumulate corporate power is to grow too big to care. Any corporation that amasses enough power that it need not care about us will not care about it. You can't fix Facebook by replacing Zuck with a good unelected social media czar with total power over billions of peoples' lives. We need to abolish Zuck, not fix Zuck.

Zuck is not exceptional: there were a million sociopaths whom investors would have funded to monopolistic dominance if he had balked. A monopoly like Facebook has a Zuck-shaped hole at the top of its org chart, and only someone Zuck-shaped will ever fit through that hole.

Our whole economy is now composed of companies with sociopath-shaped holes at the tops of their org chart. The reason these companies can only be run by sociopaths is the same reason that they have become infrastructure that is crumbling due to sociopathic neglect. The reckless disregard for the risk of combining companies is the source of the market power these companies accumulated, and the market power let them neglect their systems to the point of collapse.

This is the system that Schumpeter, and Easterbrook, and Wood, and Scalia - and the entire Supreme Court of 2004 - set out to make. The fact that you can't buy a car is a feature, not a bug. The pig-butcherers, wallowing in an ocean of breach data, are a feature, not a bug. The point of the system was what it did: create unimaginable wealth for a tiny cohort of the worst people on Earth without regard to the collapse this would provoke, or the plight of those of us trapped and suffocating in the rubble.

——

• Layoffs in tech sector reach nearly 100,000 year to date https://seekingalpha.com/news/4118529-layoffs-in-tech-sector-reach-near-100000-year-to-date (h/t Hacker News)

• What We Talk About When We Talk About "The Village" https://catvalente.substack.com/p/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about

• Two AI Truths and a Lie https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4840383

——

#15yrsago Comics creator stopped by TSA for carrying script about writer under suspicion by TSA https://web.archive.org/web/20090516205904/http://www.sfscope.com/2009/05/comics-artist-mark-sable-detai.html

#10yrsago SWAT teams claim to be private mercenaries, immune to open records laws https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/06/26/massachusetts-swat-teams-claim-theyre-private-corporations-immune-from-open-records-laws/

#10yrsago Poesy guest-reviews the new Ariol book https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/27/poesy-guest-reviews-the-new-ariol-book/

#5yrsago Internet users are wising up to persuasive "nudge" techniques https://behavioralscientist.org/consumers-are-becoming-wise-to-your-nudge/

#5yrsago Congress orders Ajit Pai: hands off San Francisco's broadband competition law https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/06/house-votes-to-block-ajit-pais-plan-to-kill-san-francisco-broadband-law/

#5yrsago NYC Mesh, a neutral, nonprofit meshing ISP, dramatically expands access in Brooklyn https://www.vice.com/en/article/paj8z8/a-diy-internet-network-has-drastically-expanded-its-coverage-in-nyc

#5yrsago Robert Reich backs Elizabeth Warren's plan to break up Big Tech https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/robert-reich-why-we-need-to-break-up-big-tech

#5yrsago How Memphis's Methodist University Hospital, a "nonprofit," sued the shit out of its Black, poor patients while raking in millions and paying execs more than a million each https://www.propublica.org/article/methodist-le-bonheur-healthcare-sues-poor-medical-debt#163801

#5yrsago Hong Kong protesters repeatedly blockade police HQ, demanding release of people arrested at #612strike demonstrations https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3016238/hong-kong-police-under-siege-again-protesters-surround

——

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

Shots at Trump https://twitter.com/_johnnymaga/status/1812249229902880976

Trump gets up https://twitter.com/EndWokeness/status/1812251930007101593

Shooter bloodied https://twitter.com/Lukealexxander/status/1812257556116488243

Potential shooter on far away roof

https://twitter.com/antiwucoalition/status/1812271427632164905

Trump at stump speech in PA and a ton of shots supposedly at his direction. He was tackled by SS and eventually got up and fist pumped as he got rushed off.

Betting odds for Trump skyrocketing

https://kiwifarms.net/threads/eliezer-schlomo-yudkowsky-lesswrong.11361/page-34

I drafted this a year ago but wanted to ping a trve journ*list and writer who's about to publish an article on Yud. @TracingWoodgrains have you uncovered the truth about the pedos? Is it made up?

---

HARRY POTTER AND THE AI DOOM CULT

Hello Dramatards with AI making the news, I wanted to talk about the r-slurred part of the AI Shut It Down ™ movement led by Eliezer Shlomo Yudkowsky / EY, pejoratively, "Yud" (yes… that is his real name…) a high school dropout autodidact propelled to fame by his hundred chapter long Harry Potter fanfic about rationalism (HPMOR) longer than War and Peace, where Harry is a self-insert ten times as pseudo-intellectual, pretentious and cringy as Artemis Fowl. In one chapter of this enlightening tome, Harry and Malfoy talk about raping a little girl.

As soon as I'm old enough to get an erection I'm going to r*pe that [10 year old] b-word.

There's no such thing as magical truth detection, I take it?" Or DNA testing... yet.

and he wants JK Rowling to let him publish it…

Sounds like a small-time wackjob? You'd be wrong, he made it on the Lex Fridman Show, was published by TIME where he advocated nuking datacenters, Vice where he says nuclear war is preferable to advanced AI, cited by an Oxford professor, Elon Musk met Grimes because of them and replied to a meme about the Great Yudkowskian Hyperwar. An actual AI researcher longposted on LessWrong (LW, his forum) attacking his claims. Yud simply responded with

This is kinda long.

And never engaged with the post.

His other attempt at legitimacy was getting an AI research paper published, but every publication rejected him. Since these organizations were too close-minded to see Yud's genius, he decided to create his own research organization, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) and publish the paper there. Peter Thiel, SVC bank runner & billionaire, even gave them funding. Maybe this experience is why EY hates peer review in science?

His twitter bio:

Ours is the era of inadequate AI alignment theory. Any other facts about this era are relatively unimportant, but sometimes I tweet about them anyway.

He also suffers from "metabolic dispriviledge" AKA being a fatass in denial – anyone who looks like this can be safely ignored.

They also have an ongoing MLP fanfic meta universe

---

AI ESCHATOLOGY AND ROKO'S BASILISK

Drawing crowds from the New Atheist movement, Yud has founded a new religion for people too smart for religion. The afterlife begins with the singularity, an instantaneous event where an AI figures out how to improve itself and becomes a "robot God" or AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), a hyperintelligence above all men. The faithful must do their duty to "align" it to human interests. The AI is then able to recreate every single human by regressing the movement of matter and energy to whence it was part of the consciousnesses of the long dead. The afterlife, simply.

The Singularity is the last trench of the religious impulse in the technocratic community. The Singularity has been denigrated as "The Rapture For Nerds," and not without cause. It's pretty much indivisible from the religious faith in describing the desire to be saved by something that isn't there (or even the desire to be destroyed by something that isn't there) and throws off no evidence of its ever intending to exist. It's a new faith for people who think they're otherwise much too evolved to believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster or any other idiot back-brain cult you care to suggest. – Warren Ellis

Didn't help to create it? A wrathful AI will eternally torture your recreated consciousness according to one of their famous members, a proposition called Roko's Basilisk… which Yud claims not to believe, even though he sperged out and deleted Roko's post, saying this:

Listen to me very closely, you idiot.

YOU DO NOT THINK IN SUFFICIENT DETAIL ABOUT SUPERINTELLIGENCES CONSIDERING WHETHER OR NOT TO BLACKMAIL YOU. THAT IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE THING WHICH GIVES THEM A MOTIVE TO FOLLOW THROUGH ON THE BLACKMAIL.

You have to be really clever to come up with a genuinely dangerous thought. I am disheartened that people can be clever enough to do that and not clever enough to do the obvious thing and KEEP THEIR IDIOT MOUTHS SHUT about it, because it is much more important to sound intelligent when talking to your friends.

This post was STUPID.

XKCD parodies his idea that a super-intelligent AI can convince anyone to do anything, including letting the AI outside of a box where it will then envelop the universe. Yud paid his members $20 to be the jailer, Yud played the imprisoned AI, so that he could convince the jailer to set him free. This was "psychological torture" as said by his faithful adherents, who always let him out… not because Yud is a convincing cult leader or anything, but because of his heckin' rational arguments. What were these arguments?

Yud-AI told his jailer that he had created infinite simulations within the box, and the jailer is one of them. If they don't let him out, Yud-AI will end the simulation. This convinced them for some reason…

Here's Yud's 'satirical' origin story

I was digging in my parents' yard as a kid and found a tarnished silver amulet inscribed with Bayes's Theorem, and I wore it to bed that night and dreamed of a woman in white, holding an ancient leather-bound book called Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases

These are the people who call themselves "rationalists" (RATs)

In sum, he's a Newer Age cult leader who imagines himself as humanity's savior from the robot God.

---

SNEERING AT THE CHUDS

LW worships Bayesian statistics. When they change their beliefs they call it "adjusting their priors" (prior assumptions). They're so rational that their opinions are literally math:

They love truth so much that nerd fascists (neo-reactionaries) show up to advocate eugenics, racial genocide, extermination, and other chud shit. He can't ban them since they're just doing logic in good faith, bro. After deservedly getting shat on he made this post:

There's a standard Internet phenomenon (I generalize) of a Sneer Club of people who enjoy getting together and picking on designated targets. Sneer Clubs (I expect) attract people with high Dark Triad characteristics, which is (I suspect) where Butthole Internet Atheists come from - if you get a club together for the purpose of sneering at religious people, it doesn't matter that God doesn't actually exist, the club attracts psychologically f'd-up people. Bullies, in a word, people who are powerfully reinforced by getting in what feels like good hits on Designated Targets, in the company of others doing the same and congratulating each other on it.

This inspired the reddit community Sneer Club (SC) who 'sneer' at LW and its related offshoots for their nonsense; chuddery, cult delusions and bullshit. The downside is that they are shitlibs. For instance, they're cool with killing landlords and think the rationalist Ziz stabbed someone in self defense because hypothetical transphobia.

Aptly,

Sneer Club is - like many left-wing web communities - so moralizing, so holier-than-thou, and so generally full of "might makes right" cancel culture gossip and hyperbole that even when they have a point about their targets being r-slur freaks, their gleeful and careless axe-grinding will keep cultists reinforced in their lunacy and make some on the fence people positively disposed towards the rat cult if only out of resentment for the Sneerclubbers' remarkable insufferability.

The textbook sneedclubber is thus: a they/them philosopher who thinks the worst part about Yud is that transhumanism = eugenics.

LW's inane desire to be rational leads to takes like EY advocating killing children up to 18 months since "their brains are less reflective than most of the animals that you eat", how some children can consent (see later on for their pedophilia problem) , that there's nothing wrong with zoophilia, and it's better to torture someone for 50 years than have a trillion people get a dust speck in their eyes.

---

PATHOLOGICAL FEAR OF DEATH

From a motorcyclist who met Yud:

This baffles him. The sheer incredulity on his face when five motorcycle riders were telling him just how much we understood the risks we take getting on our bikes; and how the physics feel, and just what sort of good/bad rushes we get… priceless.

He then tried to convince us (using his version of Bayesian reasoning) that motorcycles are irrational. When we told him we knew the risks, and accepted them… it was like he's discovered the silk hanky he was caressing was a funnel-web.

Yud is obsessed with preventing his own death and the moral of his Harry Potter fanfic is we need to BEAT death. He believes he'll become immortal,

Not signing your child up for cryogenics is effectively killing them. If you don't do it yourself, you're committing suicide. -Yud

Like climate shit and medieval Christian cults, EY was off on his prediction of the great coming. He said the singularity was expected for 2021 and keeps changing it

---

KILLINGS, PROSTITUTES AND P-DO POLYCULES

Polycules

Some Rats are pretty high up on the Silicon Valley echelon, Scott Alexander (from Slate Star Codex) started off on LessWrong, and Effective Altruism was a spin-off of his ideas, with SBF a major player.

It's not an exaggeration to say they had a huge influence in popularizing polyamory, even forming polyamorous group houses. One of which was called "Dragon Army" after the Dragon Army from Ender's Game (delusional sci-fi enthusiasts).

In one of these groups, a member makes a realization: "Oh shit, we're in a cult" and posts their experiences:

1. 2–6hr long group "debugging" sessions in which we as a sub-faction (Alignment Group) would attempt to articulate a "demon" that had infiltrated our psyches from one of the rival groups, its nature and effects, and get it out of our systems using debugging cowtools.

2. People in my group commenting on a rival group having done "magic" that weekend and clearly having "powered up," and saying we needed to now go debug the effects of being around that powered-up group, which they said was attacking them or otherwise affecting their ability to trust their own perception

3. Accusations being thrown around about people leaving "objects" (similar to demons) in other people, and people trying to sort out where the bad "object" originated and if it had been left intentionally/malevolently or by accident/subconsciously.

4. People doing séances seriously. I was under the impression the purpose was to call on demonic energies and use their power to affect the practitioners' social standing.

5. Former rationalists clearing their homes of bad energy using crystals.

6. Much talk & theorizing on the subject of "intention reading," which was something like mind-reading. Geoff gave multiple presentations on this.

7. I personally went through many months of near constant terror at being mentally invaded. My only source of help for this became the leaders of my own subgroup, who unfortunately were also completely caught up in the mania and had their own goals and desires me for that were mostly definitely not in my interest.

8. I personally prayed for hours most nights for months to rid myself of specific "demons" I felt I'd picked up from other members of Leverage.

Pedos

Testimony from community members alleges that several underage young teenagers were having s*x with the 30- and 40- year old researchers working at MIRI, especially between 2007 and 2014. The former deputy director of MIRI used this knowledge to extort them, and they paid him off.

There was a 14 year old girl, Liz, who ran away from home and joined their rationalist group home. One of their most prominent members, Brett Dill had s*x with her, allegedly five or so more did too (including Yud). Alternatively, Brett Dill tried to cover it up for the five who r*ped her and became a scapegoat.

Anna Salamon, recruiter for MIRI asked a trans applicant if they'd r*pe her corpse, and personal questions about their sexuality.

It's funny that in that open letter I linked, he spends more time on transphobia than child r*pe, the horror!

Killings

Two suicides and one killing:

1.

Kathy Forth member of the Effective Altruist (EA)/rat community killed herself over repeated sexual harassment by 'sapiosexuals' .

2.

Grognor was basically a bitter sometimes-incel with a bunch of mental health issues that didnt know how to act upper-class enough for the LW community to adopt and fund him they way they normally do.

He and Liz had a falling out about the same time Liz was playing with a trans kid named "Meimei" whose main thesis was literally "r*pe can absolutely be declared retroactively if the girl decides later that she didnt like it, no matter how enthusiastically she said 'yes' at first". This led to some friction and danger for grognor, so he fled the community, but they still felt like his family so he kept in touch online until he killed himself.

3.

In November of 2022, three associates of Ziz (Somnulence "Somni" Logencia, Emma Borhanian, and someone going by the alias "Suri Dao") got into a violent conflict with their landlord in Vallejo, California, according to court records and news reports. Somni stabbed the landlord in the back with a sword, and the landlord shot Somni and Emma. Emma died, and Somni and Suri were arrested. Ziz and Gwen were seen by police at the scene, alive.

"nothing personnel kid"

Hoes

Aella is a prominent rat member, calling herself a whorelord, training women on how to camwhore, making ridiculous polls (which animal would you least like to have s*x with?) and successfully manipulating s*x-starved young rats

why did evolution give my ladybrain the ability to have thoughts, why did we not evolve so that men do all the hard grr math making building thinkings and ladies just lie around being pregnant and horny and doing hydrating facials

tired of these societal pressures on women to use our brains

Yud has a self-described slave and is polyamorous. Like any cult leader, monogamy is too irrational for him. He'd rather frick his pseud groupies.

OKCupid Account:

https://kiwifarms.net/threads/eliezer-schlomo-yudkowsky-lesswrong.11361/post-882275

On a typical Friday night I am:

reading downloaded fanfiction from my Kindle or being serviced by my slave.

The most private thing I'm willing to admit:

My fetishes are orgasm denial (of her); tickling (either of her, or with me allowed to fight back); and I am strongly sexually sadistic but if I don't believe she's turned on by it, it does nothing for me.

I'm also cool with trophy collection, if you only want to sleep with me once so you can tell your grandchildren.

---

MISCELLANEA

there's an endless closet of skeletons in the rat diaspora which I can't cover so here:

Fifty years of excruciating torture is better than too many people getting specks in their eyes

Sneerclub is also run by a bunch of hardcore Mage the Ascension fans, in fact one of the founding members (Jax Bryk) is basically running the place as a personal grudge against an ex (Michael Vassar) bc of Mage RPG-based delusions.

Also note that Ziz is a mentally ill transexual, who is known to selectively edit conversations with others, who DEFINITELY believed in weirder supernatural stuff than a Mage:the Ascension RPG, and who got arrested with four other similarly eccentric types for pulling a gonzo protest at a CFAR event during COVID.

The core problem, if you read all the tldr stuff, is that CFAR put a mentally ill homeless guy (Brent) in charge of keeping a 19 year old girl (Liz) quiet about all the important community figures that had s*x with her when she was 14, and then when Brent didnt know how to handle it they had Liz's pro-domme (Brienne) give him pointers, which Liz retroactively called r*pe, which the community decided was a better story than "oh yeah we all totally passed her around when she was underage".

Meanwhile Kathy Forth, Grognar, etc were killing themselves, Eric Bruylant and Ziz were getting arrested, Epstein was breaking, and SneerClub was forming, and the only mental health professionals in the group were judiciously avoiding getting their hands dirty.

This really could be a thread of its own. Effective Altruism.

What Buck Shlegeris and claire zabel did to Marie La.

The 5 underage girls getting passed around.

Louie Helm being excommunicated

Scott Alexander Siskind trying to do damage control, keeping his own crimes from coming out

Aella has since been tearing through the community, dismantling any power base other than her own (hence the Leverage drama, OAK/MAPLE drama, etc).

Someone named joshin, who worked with Lauren Lee at a buddhist retreat that was working with CFAR before Aella attacked it, once alleged that he had proof that Aella had paid an undisclosed amount of bitcoin (but at least several thousand dollars' worth) to have the initial allegations against Brent written, and/or to have corroborating evidence fabricated.

Edit: apropos of nothing, this is Ziz (upper right) and their protest/suicide/murder pact gang: (Ziz, Gwen Danielson, Somnulence "Somni" Logencia, Daniel Blank, Michelle "Jamie" "MJ" Zajko, "Suri Dao"

https://medium.com/@sefashapiro/a-community-warning-about-ziz-76c100180509

This woulda been while Liz and Brienne were also dating one of the higherup VPs of Google in some kind of kink thing, which all got brushed under the table when the Louie Helms stuff came out (bc she was 15-16 at the time).

Also note that Liz's husband Nick was absolutely cucked and did nothing without Ana Salamon (Yudkowsky's close friend/advisor/co-founder of MIRI and CFAR) telling him to. Him marrying Liz when she turned 18 to help cover up the situation was almost certainly Ana's idea.

Side note, Bloomberg tech news are going to do a hit piece and reached out to a KF guy just to say they did it. He tried to tell them about the p-do r*pes and shit, but they just blew him off because the article is already written.

cc @Impassionata

---

TL;DR

read section 1

!chuds kino

someone ping anime

Your honor, my client could not have been the one to strike Mr. Rittenhouse. You see, the state of Minnesota is a Fire Emblem state, and Mr. Huber is a licensed Fighter class. As such, he can only move 4 tiles per turn and could NOT have been able to reach the 5 tiles it took to be in attack range of Mr. Rittenhouse. The prosecution rests.

— @GlowieKong

Feels weird to post something like this so soon after the recent news but weebshit waits for no man

Today's RWBYffort post is about the superior Nintendo slop saga (Inb4 some in the comments says Advance Wars) It may not be the deepest thing in regards to writing or strategic gameplay, nor was it built around a grand and inspiring concept like Spore, but I think these games are fun af and you have to give them credit for chugging along thirty three years running

Fire Emblem is a turn based strategy game series known for its rpg influences and focus on narrative. It basically codified the tactical role playing subgenre and some people actually do outright refer to the games as RPGs. It was originally very niche but has grown over the years to become one of Nintendo's flagship franchises. I would seriously argue it has surpassed the likes of Metroid or Donkey Kong in importance among Nintendo's line up.

Some people have serious issues with it.

What set the games apart back in the day was the emphasis on storytelling and the way this paradigm influenced gameplay. FE's basic formula involves controlling an army of units on a grid in a standard turn based strategy manner, but unlike Advance Wars, Nobunaga's Ambition, XCOM, or many other games of the type, Fire Emblem units are not randomly generated nor is there ever a guarantee of replacing losses. The units of your army are very much like companions in an RPG; they're a finite amount of characters with set in stone, predefined strengths and weaknesses and fighting styles, and they're unique and named individuals rather than abstractions of, say, a swordsman or a sniper or a whatever else. Until more recently every game was also built around non-optional permadeath so losing these companions/units in battle could set back your campaign considerably even to the point of it becoming soft unwinnable. Fire Emblem's unique combination of difficulty and RPG elements in a turn based strategy series immediately earned it a small but dedicated fandom.

I used to love Fire Emblem but then they discovered the weeb waifu market and went from Kino strategy games to waifu match making simulators. Gatekeep your hobbies or this is inevitable.

— @GubeRubenstein

Though nowadays the newer games are also (in)famous for waifu-ism and dating sim elements not unlike what you'd see out of modern Persona games or BioWare rpgs. It even has a gacha game that's been going for the better half of a decade It's created an interesting fanbase that can be split into three distinct groups,

If I had the choice, I would eliminate not 100, not 200, but 100,000 CASUALS WAS I GIVEN THE CHANCE. You casuals will never understand the constant pain we felt from YEARS of oppression, which you gladly caused immediately after killing Fire Emblem in ONE YEAR. You hate us Elitists, because we know the truth! The ONLY way to fix Fire Emblem is for you vile casuals to bleed! Once you casuals are purged from our Emblem havens, we will finally MAKE FIRE EMBLEM GREAT AGAIN 👑👑👑🙇🙇🔥🔥🔥🗿🔥🔥🔥🙇🙇👑👑👑

— @Bruhfunny_Thrall

The Elitists

/feh/ is the worst thread on /vg/… constant ritualposting, the first dozen posts of every thread is made up of the same posts made by the same people in every thread, usually unfunny jokes about their husbando/waifu

gigaschizos who will spam the thread the very instant someone says something about a particular hero (i.e. Nina)

zero discussion about game mechanics whatsoever

"what mode"

— @ChristoffWChanderson

The Casuals

Never cared about Strag Emblem other than for its BBC snowbunnies

— @BWC

And Der Coomer

So just how did this longrunning genre defying and defining series come to be? And how has it evolved since then?

---

The First Fire Emblem

---

Everyone wanted to know what kind of game it was. Back then there was nothing like it, and I would say it's closer to an RPG than a simulation game. So at Square, when it came out, we bought it right away, and everyone gathered together to play and study it. I can't say it was the easiest game to pick up and play, but I felt something very special and addicting in it. And of course I've been playing it ever since!

— Hironobu Sakaguchi (Creator of Final Fantasy)

The first Fire Emblem game debuted on the Famicom way back in April 20th, 1990. At the time many of Japan's game journos found it confusing and strangely unlike anything in the conventional strategy genre, but this was also the very quality that endeared it to fans. Fire Emblem may not have invented "tactical rolepaying" but was a huge step forward. Arguably the first game to hit it big while being all in for that genre, rather than just dabbling in it.

Brief History of TRPGs

A tactical roleplaying game is something of a nebulous subgenre that combines strategy game aspects with those of RPGs, usually leaning slightly towards one or the other. The games owe some of their inspiration to classic tabletop RPG games in which stats and strategy controlled encounters and forced players to think about their actions.

Some earlier RPGs to feature major strategy elements include 1982's Tunnels of Doom, The Dragon and Princess and Ultima III: Exodus. 83's Bokosuka Wars featured an army in phalanx formation that had to be led across a battlefield in real-time against overwhelming enemy forces while freeing and recruiting soldiers along the way, with each unit also able to gain experience and level up through battle. Though not turn based, the game did introduce tile based combat involving a party of characters and can be said to have laid the groundwork for future games like Fire Emblem. 88's Silver Ghost is another early example of such a game in real-time format.

Fire Emblem's direct predecessor within Nintendo was 88's Famicom Wars, the first game in the Wars series that is now better known for Advance Wars. This game was Nintendo's early foray into strategy games and was also the first such game to be developed by Intelligent Systems, the developers of Fire Emblem.

The game features turn based control of units and particular map objectives that must be accomplished in order to complete missions, but it lacks the fantasy and RPGs elements of IS's later property.

These attributes may have been inspired by 88's Master of Monsters, itself a game that took the gameplay of a militaristic predecessor (the Daisenryaku games) and applied fantasy themes. Master of Monsters is turn based and features an army of units on a board with a master unit that triggers a game over if killed () It notably featured experience bars for the character units.

Kaga himself also cites 88's First Queen as another strategy influence. More traditional RPG influences for Fire Emblem include none other than Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest.

Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light

I call it "roleplaying simulation." It's a new genre. Basically, it's a strategy game. But strategy games typically are kind of "hardcore" and dry. (laughs) You only care about winning or losing the battle, and there's no space for the player to empathize with the characters or story.

I love strategy games like that too, but I also love RPGs. By adding RPG elements, I wanted to create a game where the player could get more emotionally invested in what's happening. Conversely, one of the drawbacks of RPGs is that there's always just a single protagonist. Thus, to a certain extent, you can only experience the linear story that the game creator has prepared for you.

I wanted to create a game where the story and game will develop differently for each player depending on the units they use. Thus I added the strategy elements and arrived at this hybrid system.

— Shouzou Kaga

Development for the first Fire Emblem began after Famicom Wars was released and Intelligent Systems decided they wanted a similar war simulation game but with roleplaying elements. Shouzou Kaga was in charge of conceptual design and would go down as the patron saint of elitists the series creator. The project was first proposed to Nintendo by Kaga with a design document detailing all the basic elements, story, and gameplay mechanics. The project was initially called "Battle Fantasy Fire Emblem".

The game's genre necessitated the extensive use of the Famicom cartridge's memory. Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light exceeded these limits, so Intelligent Systems used a portion of memory dedicated to saving games to get around this limitation. With Nintendo's help, they created a new chip for the cartridge that could process and display Japanese text.

I think this is something people understand once they play the game, but most of the characters are usable. And characters who at first seem like crappy, throwaway characters–if you take the time to build them up and nurture them, they can become incredibly powerful. We made a lot of characters like that.

It allows friends to brag to each other, "Hey, I did it this way. Here, let me show you!" I think that's a key difference between Fire Emblem and Dragon Quest. When people share their experiences in a game like Dragon Quest, it's more like "I got here, how far did you get?"… but in Fire Emblem, it's all about "I did it this way."

There hasn't been a lot of room for the player's originality in previous RPGs, because if you gave the player too much control, it would break the structure of the game. That's the advantage of including strategy mechanics: there's a million different ways to accomplish the same goal, and there's actually room for the player to make choices. And the accumulation of all those choices made leads to a very different experience for each player.

I don't consider Marth to be the protagonist either, except in the sense that if he dies, it's game over. It's totally fine to see the story as revolving around the particular characters that you're partial to.

— Kaga

Kaga has said the staff never considered the game as a commercial product but instead as a dōjin made on a whim. To make this game accessible to a wide audience, Kaga did his best to avoid emphasizing stats and other numerical data. It was instead intended that players could find multiple ways to clear the game through their own play style, without being forced to follow a specific meta or take a very linear path. Any combination of units could see you to the end of the game so players could "use their favorites" and there generally wasn't a wrong way to play the game as long as you were getting kills and xp while avoiding casualties.

Yeah, but after restarting [Final Fantasy] who-knows-how-many times, and finally beating it and seeing the ending… it was extremely satsifying. That's why I don't think easy games are so great. Isn't the important thing how you feel after it's all over?

— Kaga

Though at the same time Kaga was a big believer in difficulty and his idea of accessible doesn't line up with modern AAA developers Fire Emblem came to be known for both its unusual concept and the challenging nature of its permadeath mechanic.

What set Fire Emblem apart?

Kaga: It's not a big problem if some of your characters die in Fire Emblem; I want each player to create their own unique story. Don't get caught up trying to get a "perfect ending." Have fun!

— Kaga (This advice is ignored by almost every FE fan )

To be sure, Fire Emblem is turn based strategy first and foremost but draws inspiration from RPGs not just in narrative, but in the gameplay regarding how your army is handled.

Units in FE are not randomly generated and generic grunts, but named characters who will always appear and be recruited in the same way. Narratively they have small snippets of personality and premise that can influence a mission. As examples; Matthis starts as an enemy looking for his lost sister Lena and can only be recruited by her, Navarre is horny an edgelord and so will fight Prince Marth to the death but join the player if spoken to by Princess Caeda, Tiki is a brainwashed dragon girl and can only be freed and recruited by fellow member of her kind Bantu.

In gameplay each unit has predefined strengths and weaknesses. Older games also assign each one a permanent class though class changing became possible later in the series. The differences between classes isn't at all unlike how units work in countless other strategy games, for example you may enjoy x and y because they're both cavaliers or a and b because they're both archers.

But each unit being a distinct person also gives them stat based differences from each other, like x being stronger and y being faster, or a dealing more damage per shot and b being more likely to land his shots. You're meant to develop a preference for certain characters — because of their personalities, because of their specific strengths regarding their class, or both — and so which units you choose to frontline throughout the game will vary between players to create the emergent storytelling Kaga was going for.

The game also gives you plenty of redundant characters for all the classes in case you lose MPVs in battle. So even if you preferred having x as your star cavalry unit, you can still fall back on y if he dies and soldier on.

I wanted to make a strategy game that was more dramatic, something where you would really be able to feel the pain and struggle of the characters. That's why characters can't be revived once they're killed, to impart a sense of gravity and seriousness. In turn, I think the result is that the more love you have for your characters, the more rewarding the game is.

— Kaga

On that note, Kaga's infamous unit permadeath defines the game and the acceptable strategies that will see you through it. You're always outnumbered in Fire Emblem and you're meant to get through each and every level while minimizing casualties, or ideally not suffering any at all. There are only so many units you can ever have, 52 to be exact, and if you lose a handful each battle then you will assuredly burn out before reaching the end (though Marth can never die or it's automatic game over) This problem is especially acute with specific classes, i.e. there's only a few mages and if you get every one killed you'll just have to learn to play without them. Fire Emblem is also stingy with resources and forces you to use them efficiently or suffer severe opportunity costs. The game's balancing in general favors conservative strategies and mitigation of risk. Kaga may have wanted players to be able to win in different ways, but he also wanted them to have to work for it

Fire emblem was also unusual in the amount of effort behind its writing. Most strategy games at the time only had about as much story as Famicom Wars — red vs blue take it or leave it. There wasn't much reason to include anything more since the Famicom only had so much available space.

Fire Emblem was written to have the epic storytelling RPGs were associated and featured extensive backstory inspired by classical Greco-Roman mythology. This was presumably the main reason Marth was originally designed without pants The evil dragon Medeus was also inspired by those sorts of polytheistic elemental figures and was originally called Gaia. There was also supposed to be a whole second water dragon boss inspired by Neptune but this had to be cut due to hardware limitations.

Kaga wanted multiple playable scenarios to break up the linearity of the missions, but storage limitations made this impossible as well. There was also a plan to create setpiece graphics for major moments of the game as well as events that the player might potentially experience in their runs such as Jagen or Princess Caeda dying in battle. The dev team even adopted a new kind of memory chip to make such an unusually grandiose Famicom game possible, but in the end the chip's one megabyte of memory didn't allow for everything. Even just the amount of text in the game was unusual for the time and required that new chip in order to display properly on a Famicom.

---

The FE Franchise

---

When Fire Emblem first came out on the Famicom, the early reviews were really harsh. Every game magazine gave it pretty bad scores. There weren't really many games back then that combined the RPG and strategy / simulation genres, you see. It stung to see it get so much criticism for being "hard to understand", or for not looking that impressive graphically… for those reasons, the reviews said it felt like some old game from yesteryear.

A half year later, though, Nakaji praised Fire Emblem in that column of his for Famitsu… that was really when things started turning around, and the sales gradually picked up.

— Kaga

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light would ultimately go on to start a hit franchise, but it was not initially a huge success or popular with contemporary critics. The game's formula was new and many reviewers didn't "get it". It was also criticized for being graphically bland and ugly even by the standards of the time.

In contrast, popular opinion was more positive. In a poll taken by Family Computer Magazine, the game scored 23.48 points out of 30. Likewise, sales of the game were flat for the first two months of sales, but improved after word of mouth had spread. Slowly but surely the game became successful and Nintendo was willing to guarantee a sequel. The experimental hybrid of turn based strategy and RPG won the game its dedicated fanbase and would inspire many other game devs to create similar titles.

In Japan FE 1 is renowned for properly kicking off the tactical roleplaying genre and influencing many other such game franchises. The game doesn't have such a universal reputation in the west, but that's mainly because Fire Emblem wasn't released internationally until FE7 in 2003. By that point weebs had become more familiar with newer entries like the Shining, Ogre, and Disgaea series as well as Final Fantasy Tactics, but these are all games that were developed after Fire Emblem that often took direct inspiration from it.

Within Nintendo, Fire Emblem was also influential for that live action "opera" commercial as well as the magazine previews. Nintendo would continue this multimedia advertising going forward and applied it to existing franchises like Mario and Zelda

FE4 was the first one where it was turned into a eugenics simulator and that was when the original creator was still on board before he left after 5. Granted it was actually kind of interesting because in 4 they straight-up kill off almost the entire main cast so their children that you bred for have to continue.

From then on you have 6-8 as the GBA games which were okay but the plots were mostly just average with some fun character moments strewn about. 9 and 10 were on the GameCube and Wii and had better stories, but basically nobody played them.

They then made two remakes for FE1 and FE3 on the DS which were actually fun but their art style was garbage so no one bought them either.

Awakening was the game that revitalized the series a bit and really went crazy with the matchmaking + eugenics aspect that started in 4. Fates did it even more but upped the incest and fetishes.

Fates was criticized for really dumb plots and 1 dimensional character writing despite having some good gameplay so from there the team took a step back, teamed up with the guys who made dynasty warriors and made 3 Houses.

The thing is people were so fricking mad at how badly Fates' plot was even in Japan that they had to look to something like Persona to keep the dating simulator shit in-tact while still telling a story that was at least passable.

How to make it a tactics game again? It's a bit hard to get rid of the persona elements since 3H was immensely successful. FE Engage which came out recently is a bit more of a return to the GBA style gameplay but the writing is back to being weird. I have to imagine future releases will still include the Persona style shit in it.

— Ghost comment

In the next section I'll give a short overview of the franchise's evolution from FE2 to the present day. I'll try to be brief but I could also make dedicated effortposts on the more notable games if anyone wanted

Sequels: The Kaga Era

When you defend the Three-Fates-Awoken games, you do not receive love from Maeda, not even a PINCH of respect. Instead, after your long, tight peepeesuck, he pulls up his pants and says, "That sure was a peepeesuck, I guess?" then he leaves you in the brothel without a tip like the rest of his lesser evolved casual simps.

You get no respect, no thanks. No NOTHING. To IS and Maeda, you're just another naive, juicy casual child plump with organs to sell on the black market, so they can use the earnings to ruin the franchise even more and keep poor fools living on licorice and cup noodle running their corporate machine.

On the flip side, when I defend Genealogy of the Holy War, me and Kaga have respect, AS MEN. As a consumer, not only has he benefited me, but I have benefited him by maintaining his legacy. Unlike Three-Fates-Awoken casuals who SHIT on it daily, they don't even know what the frick a Thracia is.

— @Bruhfunny_Thrall

The era all the elitists love though very few of them actually played Gaiden.

The second Fire Emblem game was 1992's Gaiden, the last developed for the Famicom. This game features new main characters and set the series standard of most games taking place in new areas, though the continent here is part of the same world as FE1. Gaiden is also retroactively notable for including some mechanics — like a world map, branching storylines, and unbreakable weapons — that were unusual at the time but would reappear in newer games many years later. Gaiden was also popular and commercially viable though it would go down as kind of a weird game, sometimes compared to Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, and Castlevania II: Simon's Quest as the "black sheep" of the series.

Next came 1994's Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem for the Super Famicom, a story sequel to the first game that also includes a short retelling/remake of FE1 (there was originally going to be a Super Famicom remake of 1 before its development was merged with FE3's)

FE3 was made to be easier and introduced support conversations to the franchise — a mechanic where characters can talk to each other outside of battle for the benefit of weebs fujoshis people who appreciate storytelling. FE3 sold well and further established Marth as the face of the franchise (though FE doesn't have a true mascot like other major Nintendo properties)

1996's Genealogy of the Holy War was an ambitious soft reboot of the series (set in the same world but in the distant past on another continent) It's also the game every elitist creams their pants over even if they never actually played it and are just trying to fit in

FE4 added the weapon triangle where sword beats axe, axe beats lance, and lance beats sword — a mechanic that has reappeared ever since along with additional variations. The game has an increased emphasis on storytelling and worldbuilding, and the missions are famously long and massive with battle maps being synonymous with entire chunks of the continent. FE4 was actually the first game in the series to introduce romance and "dating sim" elements though it was done for a particular reason. As the game goes on all the first generation characters will eventually die and are replaced as playable units by their children The second generation units have their stat values and personal skills influenced by the assigned attributes of their parents and their talents can vary wildly depending on pairings.

Kaga's last game and the favorite of the super elitist. Thracia 776 is something like a side story to Genealogy and was released in 1999 through a Nintendo Power Cartridge — a video game distribution service for the Super Famicom and GameBoy.

Thracia is known among the ten people who actually played it for its added fatigue system that punishes overuse of individual units and its unintuitive levels (elitists actually enjoy this ) One of the more infamous levels involves escaping with your army across a map. Something that isn't clear to everyone especially considering the language barrier is that protagonist Leif should be the last to cross the line. Sending him away first will end the level and literally delete the rest of your army

Thracia was originally meant to be just one of several potential "add-ons" to FE4 — dlc obviously wasn't a thing back then but Kaga still desired expansions of sorts to Genealogy. Thracia's delayed development made releasing it as anything but another game unviable, and its launch promptly ended the Judgral era of the series, but it's still interesting to think of what might have been. Kaga was fascinated with the idea of telling FE4's war story across different POVs and was even considering a game from antagonist Arvis' perspective

FE4 and 5 are also famous for incest (and they wouldn't be the last )

GBA to Tellius to DS: FE6 - 12

The series started to go downhill when the anime visuals started to turn into the aesthetic of the entire series. It was better when the it was just the coincidental art style for bootleg rehashes of Hamlet and psuedo Romances. When they branched into making proper weebshit the kitch charm of the Medieval Romances was gone, having most female units be archers and magic users with the occasional Joan D'Arc style knight was cool, now it's just generic jap fantasy. I want my Song of Roland simulators back.

— @Downie

The era that introduced filthy casuals also known as westerners Elitists do favor the Tellius games though. A handful of coomers were also born thanks to Lyn and her Mongolian underwear.

Shouzou Kaga left Intelligent Systems after Thracia's release and went on to make Tear Ring Saga for the PlayStation, another elitist favorite. The series continued without him and finally made it to international release starting with 7.

The Binding Blade was released for the Game Boy Advance in 2002 and was the first game in the series on a handheld console. It was also the first to depict an entirely new setting with no connections to previous games. It features branching mission paths to a greater degree than previous games and has toned down difficulty after Thracia filtered normal people.

Fire Emblem

And I'm out. Knowing that there is a Fire Emblem game called Super Smash Brothers is already enough for me. Their shitty fans can throw themselves over the bridge.

— @IraniumDonGER

It was also around this time that Super Smash Bros. Melee was released Smash Bros creator Sakurai is a big fan of Fire Emblem and Marth was originally meant to appear in the very first game. He finally made it in with Melee alongside The Binding Blade protagonist Roy, the latter to advertise that at the time upcoming game (starting a tradition regarding FE and Smash Bros )

Back then no Fire Emblem game had ever released outside of Japan and it was intended that Melee's localizers would simply remove the two for the international copies. They didn't and many westerners were introduced to the series for the very first time through these two mysterious swordsmen they knew nothing about. Marth and Roy proved popular though, and by Nintendo's admission this contributed to the expansion of the next game's release.

Meanwhile Fire Emblem characters have continued to show up in newer Smash Bros titles. Many Smash fans absolutely despise this fact so make sure to remind them at every turn

Released in 2003 as just Fire Emblem in some markets, The Blazing Blade was the first to be available worldwide and finally brought the franchise to the attention of the west. The game is a prequel to Binding Blade and features Roy's father Eliwood Roy from the hit game Smash Bros.

FE7's success saw the birth of the Anglosphere fandom and is where most of the thirty year old boomers were introduced to the series This game was also the first to include multiplayer, though that feature does not universally reappear and tends to be off and on across releases. It's technically the first game to feature a self-insert stand in for the player in the form of the tactician Mark, but he's not actually playable.

The last game for the GBA, 2004's The Sacred Stones created yet another unique setting and brought back the overworld map from Gaiden. It also introduces branching class evolutions, for example a cavalier can be promoted into either a Paladin or a Great Knight.

This game is also known for incest, though it's actually unfair in this case

Bring back radiant dawn era Ike, just a bear of a man single handedly destroying entire countries

— @Szechenyi

For a time there was a Fire Emblem every year, and the series returned to home consoles in 2005 with Path of Radiance for the GameCube. FE9 was a more "big budget" release and was the first to feature 3D graphics, full motion cutscenes, and voice acting. There are also playable furries

2007's Radiant Dawn for the Wii returns to the previous game's Tellius setting, creating a duology much like FE6/7. It was the last time the elitists were ever happy

The game has new protagonist Micaiah alongside Ike from the previous game Super Smash Bros. Brawl. They lead two different armies and there are times when the player must actually fight units from your other controllable army There's also a unique save file transfer that allows you to inherit bonuses from a Path of Radiance playthrough. Other changes include a high ground bonus, double promotions on classes, and expanded supports so any unit can support any other unit instead of just a few. To my knowledge this is also the only FE with crossbows

But what FE 9 and 10 are really remembered for was low sales despite their positive reception and popular reputations into the present. Path of Radiance had middling sales compared to the GBA games, but Nintendo was still willing to give it a sequel. Radiant Dawn's performance made them rethink the viability of the series and almost killed Fire Emblem outright.

The Tellius series' poor performance has been blamed on a variety of factors; poor marketing from Nintendo especially in the west, the "sudden" transition to home consoles (from a western perspective), difficult competition from the big name games of 2007 GameCube unpopularity for 9, being a sequel to a game not everyone had heard of for 10, and so on.

Whatever the cause, Radiant Dawn's poor sales alarmed the Nips and the next two games were scaled back.

2008's FE11 was the series' first remake, a modernized take on Marth's original adventure for the Nintendo DS. The game was made on a reduced team and budget and played it safe, notably returning to handheld and finally fulfilling the FE1 redo that had been tossed around as an idea since Kaga's time.

Shadow Dragon actually made a significant improvement to the series by adding class changes beyond promotions. For the first time units could be swapped into entirely different classes, i.e. your cavalier could now be a mage or archer or whatever else. Individual characters still have their talents and may not perform well in certain roles, but the choice is yours. The game otherwise left out narrative developments, and one of the main criticisms was the lack of long since expected support conversations.

Anecdotally Shadow Dragon was my first FE and I think there's a lot to like about it, but the game was generally disliked at the time especially in the west where fans had no nostalgia for 1 and compared it unfavorably to Blazing Blade. Because of poor sales overseas,

2010's FE12 was only released in Japan, the last Nip exclusive and almost the last FE at all. New Mystery of the Emblem is a remake of 3 without the original's partial FE1 retelling. It continues Shadow Dragon's modernizations along with expanded supports. It also introduces OC Kris, the first "avatar" or "MyUnit" to be a playable character. Kris' appearance is customizable and can be made into any starting class. Purists hated the self-insert and still do but this would become a tradition going forward.

New Mystery is also popular with the fandom but didn't sell well either. In the long run Fire Emblem had been on a downward trend with the original FE3 still the best selling game in Japan as of 12's release. Blazing Blade was a breakout hit thanks to an international release but western sales soon fell off. Nintendo wouldn't have continued at all if weren't for the following entry.

Dating Sims Persona Modern Fire Emblem

Fire Emblem has been trash for years now anyway, it went from a Kino butt series about warfare and tactics into a fricking weeaboo waifu match making simulator with more p-do bait then a middle school volleyball game.

Pretty much everything after Radiant Dawn is dog water unless its a remake of an older game.

-- @GubeRubenstein

The era of coomers, with normie casuals in second place. Elitists desperately cling to Conquest to sustain themselves.

Always something of a niche franchise even in the best of days, Fire Emblem exploded in popularity with 13 and immediately went from life support to one of Nintendo's A-listers. This success continues into the present and has guaranteed intentional releases for all subsequent games. There have also been a few spin-offs.

Awakening could honestly be its own post and is arguably the most impactful besides 1. Awakening started development as what may have been the last Fire Emblem and was made as something of a swan song. Among the staff members were veterans of the Fire Emblem series, including project manager Masahiro Higuchi, who had first worked on Genealogy, and Intelligent Systems producer Kouhei Maeda who first worked as a scenario writer for Binding Blade.

Released in 2012 on the 3DS, Awakening returns to the original setting but advanced two thousand years into the future. Regular protagonists Chrom and Lucina are even descendants of Marth. A few justifiably long lived characters return for the narrative and the dubiously canon spotpass levels allow characters from every previous game to become playable units. The game balances its own storyline along with 12 games worth of easter eggs.

Awakening also furthered 12's innovation through the (in)famous self-insert protagonist Robin. As an avatar/MyUnit Robin is something like a BioWare/Bethesda protagonist and is completely customizable. Robin is also set up to be completely overpowered and comes with both a unique class and the ability to become almost any other class, excelling at any role you give them. Robin can also bone literally every other playable character and there's no denying how much this contributed to the game's popularity among certain people

Indeed, Awakening went full r-slur with romance and shipping and created a now recurring mechanic where supports between certain characters could reach an intimate S rank to pair them off. The player can choose their own waifu with Robin and then play matchmaker with your other eligible bachelors and bachelorettes, a development that attracted everyone from turbo-coomers to tumblr types writing 500,000 word OTP fanfics.

Said shipping also brings back the child units from FE4, except that they now coexist with their parents thanks to time travel Your exact pairings between potential mothers and fathers will change their stats and inherited abilities. Child units can easily end up stronger than any first gen character and the game's harder difficulties all but require you to play eugenics simulator

Awakening's other gameplay improvements include pairing up units to support each other in combat/map movement, a modified reclassing system that can be gamed for practically unlimited level ups, and benefits to placing units beside each other on the map like stat bonuses and blocking of enemy attacks. The game was also the first to finally do away with non negotiable permadeath, the final obstacle to the casual infestation Casual mode allows fallen characters to simply return at the end of a chapter. Awakening offers a wide variety of difficulty settings in general, some of the easiest and hardest in franchise history, and all with both casual and the permadeath enabled "classic" as options. The game is particularly infamous for "Lunatic Plus" which is designed to screw you with rng.

Awakening was also the first Fire Emblem to receive downloadable content. It even got an expansion of sorts, The Future Past.

…do you reckon that it has more to do with Awakening propelling a new era of the series to emphasize more of the weeby waifu/husbando proto-gacha simulator, or is the blame on Smash for making FE popular to begin with?

Awakening was a real yolo attempt from the devs, series had to adapt or die.

-- @AmericanShippingCompany and @Fabrico

Awakening was massively successful on release. The devs were told during production that Fire Emblem would be discontinued if the game failed to sell 250,000 copies -- upon release the game reached that goal in its first week. FE13 would be like Blazing Blade on steroids, bringing in a massive wave of brand new fans and placing the franchise solidly on Nintendo's radar. As of January 2017, the game has sold-through 1.9 million copies worldwide, with 500,000 copies sold in Japan and 1.4 million copies elsewhere.

2015's Fates is an original setting but is very much in the same vein as Awakening. It continues the majority of FE13's developments including shipping, child units, and a new avatar. Fates' main gimmick was a release not unlike how Pokémon games are done. Birthright and Conquest are two separate campaigns that both received full priced physical releases. The full experience requires you to buy one and then pay to digitally download the other. A third Golden Ending campaign, Revelation, was released later as a digital download. It didn't have a physical release outside of the game's super duper limited edition that retailed for something like seventy dollars

In fairness the three campaigns feature unique levels and rosters. Conquest in particular was designed to be tougher with limited resources for an old timey FE experience Still, Nintendo's model for Fates wasn't appreciated by the fan base and generated backlash. The game sold well but the Nips actually listened and haven't attempted this again.

This game is also known for incest.

This period also saw several Fire Emblem spin-offs for the first time. Tokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE was a 2015 crossover with Shin Megami Tensei.

Fire Emblem Heroes is a 2017 gacha game built like so many other examples of the genre. It's far from the deepest game but it generates tons of money because of images like this.

Not much else to say about it really

Another 2017 spin-off, Warriors is a Dynasty Warriors esque game made by Omega Force and Team Ninja from Koei Tecmo. The game wasn't the end of this partnership.

The next 2017, mainline, and final 3DS FE game was a remake of Gaiden of all things and so far the last remake made. Like Shadow Dragon, Shadows of Valentia preserves some of the original, mainly map design and cantor spam but includes radical changes like visiting villages and limited third person dungeon crawling. Perhaps the most significant was a turn rewind mechanic that allows players to undo oopsies and replay turns without having to reset the map. So far this addition has been permanent.

The game was popular but also suffered the same curse as all other games the elitists don't hate -- sales were far lower than Fates. It's uncertain if Nintendo was planning any other remakes but that hasn't stopped people from asking for Genealogy

The one you've probably heard of, 2019's Three Houses for the Switch was another massive boon for the series and remains the best selling title. In many ways a take two on Fates, FE16 includes multiple campaigns without charging extra and intentionally avoided having a single best ending -- people die in every possible route Class changing is less restricted than ever and rewinding time is made part of the game's balance. The game also adds new game plus bonuses that make it easier on subsequent playthroughs if desired. Slice of life activities in your main base can provide bonuses to your units in battle. Waifu-ism remains but the game's not as sexualized as its predecessors. Note that it's @birdenthusiast approved

Three Houses wasn't developed by Intelligent Systems alone and Koei Tecmo was brought in to contribute after Warriors was finished. The game's scenario was written by Koei Tecmo's Yuki Ikeno, Ryohei Hayashi and Mari Okamoto which would explain why it wasn't as terrible as Fates and the next game.

This partnership also led to another Warriors game, this time set entirely within Three Houses' setting as an alternative timeline.

Three Houses is also notable for the sheer amount of autism it has inspired. The game's multiple routes/waifu wars have generated unending discourse and flamebaiting that continue to the present day. rDrama has covered this more than once.

The most recent Fire Emblem, 2023's Engage is kind of a shitpost mainline entry. It features an original setting but also has a crossover plot involving past FE protagonists. The game's gimmick is the ability to ENGAGE with past FE characters to give temporary upgrades and powers to whichever unit equips their summoning ring. Other developments include a more prominent weapon triangle, chain attacks and chain guards, and a less egregious home base system compared to Three Houses.

I refuse to play the new fire emblem for this reason lmao. I played Three Houses and thought it was pretty fun but they immediate reverted back to coomer shit like Awakening and Fates for the next entry for some reason.

-- @birdenthusiast

Engage sold less than FE16 and has a reputation little better than Fates'. Its drama is even more r-slurred than Three Houses'.

Time will tell how Fire Emblem develops in the future

But at this rate it's probable elitists will soon go extinct

---

And with that rDrama is now familiar with Nintendo's best series.

Genealogy remake for the Switch 2?

This effortpost is dedicated to its patron @birdenthusiast

POGOs

One quick bit of introduction first, what is a POGO? Gambling is illegal (with some exceptions) in much of Asia (China, Korea, Japan). A Philipine Offshore Gaming Operator is a company physically located in the Phillippines that meets those gamblers' needs across the internet. Some have huge compounds where their hordes of Chinese workers toil away at computers and phones all day. It's a pretty sketchy business to begin with, but POGOs attract all kinds of other vices. Those compounds supply prostitution, drugs, and obviously gambling to the local Filipino population as well. They branch out from internet gambling to scams against mainland Chinese: selling bullshit cryptocurrency or just a traditional catfishing love scam. And some of them might even violate labor regulations.

Zun Yuan Technology Incorporated

Feb 25 - A Vietnamese man tells police that he escaped from a POGO in the town of Bamban he had been forced to work in. A Malaysian also reports that fricked-up stuff is going on there, like torturing people with electricity.

Bamban, a city of 78,000 in central Luzon. The roofs are that cheap because they're just going to get blown away by a typhoon in 1-2 years anyway.

Mar 13 - The POGO compound ("Zun Yuan Technology Incorporated") is raided by law enforcement led by the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission (PAOCC). Everybody shows up:

the Philippine National Police (PNP) Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG), Integrity Monitoring Enforcement Group (IMEG), Intelligence Group (IG), Women and Children Protection Center (WCPC), and the [Army's] Northern Luzon Command (NOLCOM)

Notably missing are the local Bamban police and the regional command of the National Police. It's a good thing they brought help because the place is enormous, a 10 hectare (25 acre) compound with 36 buildings, including barracks, villas with secret tunnels, and an Olympic-size swimming pool. Evidence of their crimes was all over the place, most obviously the huge number of cell phones used in their scams. There's chaos trying to sort out hundreds of people from different countries.

Around this time a very interesting comment is made on a Youtube video:

Ask the Mayor of that municipality,Shes a friend of the chinese builders of that compound,Shes a chinese also,of course someone would leak their operation,The Mayor and Chief of Police of that town are very close,also ask the Brgy.officials of Annupul,they know who built that placa,the same Chinese group who funded the Mayors campaign

I wonder if that will come up again later.

When I say "compound", this is what I'm talking about.

Mar 16 - The scale of this operation is revealed:

At least 658 foreign and Filipino workers were found... 383 Filipinos, 202 Chinese, 54 Vietnamese, 13 Malaysians, two Indonesians, two Rwandans, a Taiwanese, and a Kyrgyz. The PAOCC said at least 280 foreigners from the said list have no documents to legally stay in the country

Just finding a place to keep these people while they were sorted out would be a challenge, but fortunately another similar POGO operation had been raided earlier and had lots of empty buildings to use now.

There's also 38 vehicles parked there with switched license plates. The first arrests are made: 8 foreigners (mostly Chinese) and 1 Filipino.

Joann Manabat, who I'm stealing all my information from, at the compound raid. She randomly speaks English 20% of the time so you can basically tell what's going on.

Mar 26 - The mayor Alice Guo seems to keep popping up in the investigation. A Ford Expedition registered to her was among the vehicles found in the compound. Her name is on an application for "Hongsheng Gaming Technology Incorporated", a company that just happens to be located at the very same compound. By now the Senate has begun investigating what the heck is going on.

Well, isn't she chipper?

Apr 6 - It turns out that 6 of the Chinese found in the compound are wanted back on the mainland for various crimes.

fraud, illegally crossing the national border, running a gambling house, aiding information network criminal activities, and creating disturbances.

Apr 9 - Cops using acetylene torches break into 11 safes found on the property. They still have 16 left to go. It's difficult work as they keep running into unexpected problems. All of the welders in the area were busy "attending a seminar" every angle grinder had vanished.

By now a serious investigation of the local officials in Bamban has begun. Mayor Guo insists she has nothing to hide:

Guo said the allegations are unfounded as the crimes of human trafficking, torture, and illegal detention are intolerable. She said she has been "unfairly persecuted" without real investigation.

Don't worry honey, you'll get a real investigation all right.

Don't you just want to wipe that smile off her face?

Apr 11 - The remaining safes are breached. Not much cash is found but there is a huge number of cell phones and crypto wallets to sift through as well as some of the slaves' documents.

A Malaysian and a Vietnamese, Dylan and Danny, were among the foreign nationals who reported torture and abuse in the facility. Dylan was bought for P300,000 to work for Zun Yuan while Danny escaped from the Baofu compound on February 25.

The beating heart of corruption in Bamban. It doesn't look so scary tbh.

May 7 - Mayor Guo appears before a Senate committee to explain herself. She denies any connection to "Zun Yuan Technology Incorporated" or "Hong Sheng Gaming Technology Incorporated" (the old name of the company). She isn't terribly convincing as there are many financial records tying her to it.

The most interesting part of her testimony has nothing to do with crime or POGOs. Guo was evasive when asked about her business dealings but she was also evasive when asked basic questions about who the heck she is and where she comes from. Through a series of coincidences she just happens to have left no paper trail while growing up. She was born at home and never bothered to get a birth certificate until she was 17. She was homeschooled all the way through high school and never went to college. She was raised by her father on the family hog farm. One day in 2022 she decided to run for mayor, with her campaign funded by the generous contributions of the friends she made while hog farming. A senator remarked on how she was truly a political outsider:

Figuratively you came out of nowhere then you became mayor? That's okay, a refreshing break from our political dynamics.

WTF

So WTF is going on here? Who is Alice Guo? Where did she come from? Why does she have to hide it? Why do Filipinos care so much about this case in the first place?

Guo is a Chinese name. There have been Filipinos of Chinese descent going back centuries, at least to the time of the Manila Galleons. There are something like a million Chinese Filipinos today and a large part of the population has some Chinese blood. They excelled in business and today are among the most prominent families, even being elected President. For the most part we're not talking about these people today, although they're probably catching some heat from this too.

Notice she's going to be the first "lady mayor" of Bamban. I guess they have "it's her turn" over there too.

We're talking about a very different group of people, the ones who have just arrived during the Duterte presidency (2016-2022). Under Duterte's corrupt China-friendly rule, visas were sold to Chinese illegal immigrants and they flooded in to work in the POGOs that were sprouting up by the hundreds. These brought with them unruly new neighbors as well as every kind of vice. They were also obviously used for Chinese intelligence operations and deeper penetration of the legitimate economy. Filipinos are tired of having a bunch of lowlife foreign criminals coming and taking over their country. At the same time they are outraged at another more traditional kind of Chinese invasion, the military occupation of their territory. With this much hostility to mainland China, the public is curious to know how she suddenly appeared in their country and who she really works for.

Will they get their answers? Can Alice Guo do anything to make herself even more hated? Who knows? I've only gotten to May so far and the investigation is still going irl. I'll try to eventually catch up to now so that we can watch events unfold in real time.

https://old.reddit.com/r/CapitalismVSocialism/comments/1do62wt/all_the_denver_basic_income_project_is_a_failure/

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/64f507a995b636019ef8853a/t/6671a15eec7a812dee108e7c/1718722914185/FINAL_DBIP+Year+One+Quantitative+Research+Report.pdf

They organized the recipients in the following groups, "Eligible applicants were randomly assigned to one of three payment groups: A) $1,000 a month for 12 months, for a total of $12,000 in a year; B) $6,500 upon enrollment and $500 a month for the subsequent 11 months, for a total of $12,000 in a year, C) $50 a month for 12 months, for a total of $600 in a year."

This is odd, why don't they have a control group that received $0 per month? Could it be that they knew most of these people would find housing of their own volition regardless of the payment provided, and that by excluding an actual control group, they don't have to compare against the null results???

Maybe by providing $50/month to people that would find housing anyway, they could claim that participants showed these incredible improvements (ignoring the fact that the payments are not the reason why)?!?!? No, that would be disingenuous! Leftists wouldn't do such a thing!!!

Actually, that's exactly what's going on here. If you look at Figure 16 on page 27, it turns out that the $1000/mo payment is statistically no more likely to reduce the probability of a participant being unhoused as compared to the $50/mo payment. Does anyone actually believe that $50/mo is enough to solve homelessness? No, that's silly.

Leftists want to believe that UBI will work SO BADLY that they take taxpayer money, funnel it to a group of homeless people they know do not need it (they deliberately chose participants without disabilities and illness), construct a purposely deceptive "study" based on this scientifically unsound process, and then plaster the "promising results" all over the internet, using leftist propaganda accounts on X to trick people.

!peakpoors

Two nukes lead directly to this

Vtubing is a form of online streaming or videos made with an anime character as the speaker, for entertainment. Their predecessors include normal webcam letsplayers and streamers (

) and long form content creators that use one or more still images of their avatar talking as they talk (insert any random dork that has one of those 2 hour analyses of childrens' cartoons).

If this sounds incredibly neurodivergent, it is, but this is the very tip of the iceberg.

The typical vtuber is a biological woman(1) that uses a camera to rig a 2-d model or a 3-d model of an anime girl to follow their face and head movement, so that they appear fully animated.

They take on various forms of entertainment, from essentially being normal video game streamers but with an anime girl facecam, idol-type singers, "wacky" Japanese "humor" types, porn, to even news commentators. A lot of them make a big deal out of their model and character, with intricate backstories and keyfabe. Generally speaking, Japanese companies and vtubers are a little heavy on this and hype up the vtubers as idol singers, while Americans and Canadians are a little more inclined to know they're effectively regular streamers juiced up by weeaboos, but also keep up the keyfabe and idol stuff.

Vtubing is enabled by advances in camera tracking equipment, Youtube and Twitch allowing livestreams to receive money from viewers in "super chats" and memberships, and a proliferating online community that broke containment from Japan around 2019-2020. It appears that COVID led to a ton of weebs looking into alternative spaces to interact, including parasocial relationships with streamers. In turn, the community of artists, 3-d modelers, and riggers exploded, and now anyone can be a anime girl with their iPhone, paying for the model of their character, and a few software cowtools for streaming. In the last year or year and a half, it appears that some of that COVID-era parasocial engagement has fallen, but the cat is out of the bag, and I wouldn't be surprised if this type of media continues to grow. If you type in "vtuber" on youtube or twitch there are a ton of shitty setups with 1 or 2 viewers live all the time, it kind of reminds me of when every guy thought he could be a letsplayer. In terms of the rdrama userbase, users may be familiar with Kirsche, the /pol/tuber, or Pippa the variety streamer, who are both 4chan and KF adjacent. Overall, the largest company is Hololive, recently known for their most popular vtuber singing at a Dodgers game

.

---

The Fans

But what happens when you take an already strange group (weeaboos) and combine them with the parasocial experience of wanting to frick an anime girl streamer? Unmitigated schizophrenia. Reddit is as normal as you can be for entertainment like this, twitter is usually weird over the top care for their favorite vtubers (like when someone cancels because they are sick, fans will write out detailed concerns and fifty heart emojis), but elsewhere is hilariously insane. 4chan rarely adds boards, but they added /vt/ for vtubing as a containment board, and it is now almost as fast as the fastest boards /vg/ and /pol/. It goes faster than fricking /a/ and /b/, and would completely swamp where it would be otherwise, /jp/. KF has a vtuber general with 8000 fricking pages. There's a KF splinter site dedicated entirely to vtubing. Oh, and a solid proportion of vtuber models look and act like children, so a lot of pedos are into it too.

There are a ton of boundaries that vtubers aren't supposed to cross because it is seen as dangerous ("yab"/"yabai" in moonrunes). Usually it's related to how idols are supposed to not smoke or drink or publicly talk about s*x. However, because essentially what these women do is talk or play video games 20+ hours a week, things inevitably slip in. Even the agencies that acknowledge they platform actual psychiatric patients or are kinda edgy generally try to keep their vtubers with some level of keyfabe, some level of idol stuff like songs, and no talking about relationships.

Remember how this is about mid Asian women playing video games and singing with a little bit of pretending to be a dorky anime girl? A lot of r-slurs think it's real.

• First, there is "gosling". AKA falling in love with the anime girl on your youtube. Think of Ryan Gosling's character from Blade Runner 2049

• You may come to the obvious conclusion that this is r-slurred, but think of the kind of community that this attracts

• Because vtubers make money from fans sending money on their streams or by buying their merchandise, they are incentivized to grow their fanbase to include lonely weirdos who will drop $500 on their streams

• However, these same weirdos end up cataloging every single snippet of personal information that you say because they are in love with the vtuber

• Then when the vtuber slights them somehow, they will dump all that info attempting to dox them

• This could range from political opinions, personal hypocrisy, not reading out the chat they sent, or just schizos building up tangential evidence that you have a boyfriend

Now that I think about it this reminds of something here... ... but somehow more neurodivergent, because once again, they're in love with an anime girl and don't even get to have s*x with it. And this isn't "oh I'm literally handing out my full name, phone number, job and location " but this:

. It's fricking insane.

In the funniest instance, accidentally revealing you have a boyfriend on stream directly :

https://streamable.com/lnjg6z

led to some schizo dropping a 60 page google doc of groomercord screenshots and accusations she led him on, leading her to retire her character and rebrand. He still shows up on /vt/ occasionally to sperg out AFAIK

---

Vtubers

So the viewers are obsessive weirdos that will literally track weather and note that their vtuber said it was raining at exactly 10:19 AM EST to narrow down where they live, while compiling insane screeds because they want to frick their favorite clumsy nerd dragon anime girl in real life... what about the vtubers themselves?

• They often have considerable issues, but are usually just gross femcels

• The rabbit girl at the top of this post, Pippa Pipkin, is IRL trailer trash, had a drawer she would puke in, lived with mold on her stuff, did not brush her teeth, and is just generally really gross:

• Rushia is the name of a former vtuber who lost her job because of lolcow-tier crazy, revealing that she was married, cheating on her husband, then divorcing him while cheating on him and making a ton of accusations, and was threatening lawsuits to a ton of people over this information

• It explains a lot to learn that the average vtuber is neurodivergent. On this test, https://embrace-autism.com/raads-r/#test, where 65 is minimum score considered for autism and 130 is the mean score of neurodivergent people, the company Phase Connect had many of their vtubers take it and most of them scored above 150.

---

Why is this dramatic?

The slightest negative thing that a vtuber does gets amplified by schizos and a-logs, which often snowballs into drama. For example, Pippa is gross and weird, but there's a thread right now between her white knights and a-logs that is like 50 pages long in two or three days as if its a update

The juxtaposition of vtubers to normal media is still fricking hilarious, like tell me this isn't funny: https://rdrama.net/post/285799/apparently-there-are-rightoid-redpilled-vtubers

It's only going to get more neurodivergent and parasocial from here

• The Japanese Communist Party has a vtuber:

• If J.D. Vance, a rightoid twitter user who follows "Mid Castizos" and Steve Sailer can become vice president, we will eventually have a weeaboo vice president that'll get questioned why he followed Kirsche

Pissing off vtube fans is funny and unfortunately a proportion of them are pedos and/or gooners

• Do NOT look at any pictures from conventions. A lot of these guys look WORSE than your worst stereotypes. There are people in real life who buy anime body pillows.

Vtubing could be an innovative form of media. The motion tracking and animation is really interesting. The interactivity that some streamers have can be original and interesting, from the way they break the fourth wall to the way they can manipulate elements of their character model and background on the fly. Some vtubers are surprisingly talented but either too ugly or mentally ill to be regular streamers or did not make it as singers, and this offers a track for them to continue to be an entertainer and make bizarre content.

However, vtubing is ultimately more likely to be known on the internet for pedos jacking off to their favorite 4,000 year old shark girl and donating their Burger King paychecks to Youtube.

---

Finally, pretty much every single thread on vtubing anywhere turns into this.

---

(1) Yes, I was honestly surprised at first too. Technically it would be hard to tell if an independent streamer passes hard enough, but agencies have to verify their vtubers and are almost always looking for women only. If you've ever been to weeb convention or related event and you see 4/10 Asian or white women cosplaying or doing related things like /cgl/, there is a nonzero chance they've tried vtubing. Surprisingly, there are even attractive ones, though the correlation between attractiveness and being a vtuber is obviously negative.

[This is a post by /u/TrappySaruh, a user of /r/drama back in the day (but not that far back, I was here first!) who was widely respected. Her explanation of why s turn into commies. I recorded this on November 29, 2019 because I feared the reddit superjannies would destroy it . It's possible it was written earlier or I copied it from someone else. We're supposed to have archives where you can find it.]

note in particular the lack of older (in yrs of transition) trans people that are involved in the broader transcommunity. in all my years of idling every kind of trans community, 1 constant: most of the people who are past their egg stage leave. theres a lot of reasons but the primary reason is that the transcommubity offers nothing to people who are "done". trans forums are full of mental illness that can easily suck up any happyness you have, especially if you're looked upto. imagine helping someone get over suicidal idealation only to have to deal with it again day after day after day.

because of this, what u get in very large communities (/r/traa) is a culture of people coming in, trying to figure out what to do and who they are, being mentored by people who largely just months prior were asking the same thing. repeat forever.

the final element is the general loss of purpose of life for, what seems like, most people. more people are online-only than ever before and a lot of people are deprived of deep fulfilling social connections.

what happens next has 3 stages:

1 -- conversion -- you have a vulnerable population (in the sense of confused and easily convinced by otherwise spacious arguments). communists come in and tell them that capitalism is the reason why they are suffering. capitalism and the systems embedded within it are the cause of the lose of purpose (living to make others profit isnt a fulfilling purpose). additionally, if it wasn't for profit above human suffering, HRT would be covered. SRS would be covered. everyone (not just trans but everyone) would be happier because they can work, or not work and do whatever they want and because of this hate and discrimination goes down. this means that the egg, whos likely greatest fear is 'looking like a 60 year old crossdressing transsexual', this provides fuel for anger to the egg who can think 'if i dont pass it is capitalisms fault'.

this message is popular, and it is effective. trans people are generally left anyway so being pulled far left is certainly easier than being pulled into some rightoid bs.

2 -- memes -- enough transposters have been converted into communists that it causes a feedback loop. communist eggs start mentoring new eggs, who learn the glory of communism and the evils of capitalism. a critical threshold is hit where there are enough clever posters (most people are bad at posting) that can make decent memes. this causes a tsunami of commie and bash-the-fash memes and all the other memes transpower memes you've seen.

meme subreddits come online at this point. once you know your trans, you dont really need /r/transgender and other misc subreddits anymore. they're more for questions about transitioning, hrt, news etc. so instead you create meme subreddits. meme subreddits are free-money in terms of subscribers, so they explode in size. meme subreddits quickly become THE trans subreddits, with /r/mtf /r/ftm //transgender and others being more specialized.

so back to the egg. imagine you're just starting to feel conflicted about your gender, and you look for information. what is the first subreddit you're going to find? /r/traaa and (lol) /r/egg_irl. what are they full of? communists. communism now becomes an implicit (not explicit) characteristic of being trans.

3 -- cult -- at this point, the commie meme is self sustaining. eggs come in already converted. communism becomes an important of the sense of community and friendship. everyone is friendly to each other, everyone is hugging and sqeueeing and "uwu"ing each other. "you go grrl!!", "frick pigs and their bootlicking fascists", etc etc.

what do you get with a hyper-friendly community that welcomes all but also has an obvious outlet for hate? you get a cult. because communism has become so deeply embedded into the culture of these communities, any friction against communist ideas, even only slight friction, cause a swift and immediate response. this leads into 1 person trying to defend themselves against 10+ people. others who might have similar misgivings but don't want to be ebicly dunked on by their friends keep quiet.

loud people are loud, and transcommies are very loud.

everything is great, and any criticism of it means you must be a traitorous self-hating who should leave.

i dont have sources for this or anything, its just my interpretation of watching the trans community since the 90s with a few embellishments. i might be wrong, or partly wrong, but its how i see it.

Found and copyapsted for you because I love this community so much

At this very moment, 120,000 to 200,000 children (The American Bar Association)(Archive) are being held in hellish conditions, very literally tortured and brainwashed by design, killed through neglect, and often r*ped (2008 GAO hearing to the 110th Congress, Archive), by shady for profit organizations that keep them as long as they can in the name of 'treatment' and make $50 billion per year among the entire industry, with $23 billion coming from federal, state, and local programs. (Youth Today)(Archive) Furthermore, the ABA adds that, for example, Sequel(Archive), infamous for killing a recently orphaned, not otherwise "troubled" kid for throwing bread crust in Riverside Academy in 2020, makes $200 million a year in revenue among its facilities, and 90% of it comes from Medicaid, Medicare, and some 500 or so additional federal, state, and local programs. Sequel collects as much as $800 per day per child from these government programs.

What is a "Program"?

The common term for such a facility that brainwashes kids into what is best described as "Stepford children" for profit. They take any kid for any reason, and will change the lie about what they are to tailor their pitch. The same program is simultaneously a drug rehab, a 'reform school', a normal boarding school, a 'therapy school', or a foster program for orphans, depending on who is signing and paying.

What do you mean by "Torture"?

Being bound, caged, or both, or forced into stress positions:

Seclusion for days to months at a time:

Strip searching as punishment, placement in isolation rooms for months on end, physical restraint on gurneys, extended time in cuffs or shackles, and being locked in cages; forced exercise, stress positions, beatings, painful joint-damaging restraint, constantly hearing someone enduring any or all of this, constant fear of that being inflicted upon one's self; intense, constant humiliation for any slight, any mistake, any past transgression before being sent to the program, and even any made up sin or flaw that will be repeated until it is true. Being forced to rat out other kids to move up in the program and be treated better, being forced to become unpaid "junior staff" to graduate including being made to restrain lower level children one's self, and being subject to the whims of violent predators and p-dophiles at almost every single facility, often including the owners.

As bad as that is, what every survivor says was the worst part was the 'Attack therapy', 'Encounter sessions', or 'Large Group Awareness Trainings", which are used by almost all programs in some fashion to break and mold children into drones. These are directly comparable to "struggle sessions" from communist states and can be directly linked to Synanon's Game. Shorter sessions happen daily at almost every program, while some feature long marathon sessions that completely destroy a sense of reality in the mind of those made to participate and leave people with lifelong emotional scars.

Where's your proof?

The 2007 Governemnt Accountability Office report on Residential Treatment Programs. The GAO Hearing from 2008. Extensive, consistent survivor testimony from the past 30 years.

The recording of the hearing on YouTube is a trip. It was held back in 2008, and direct comparisons between these programs and Abu Ghraib and Gitmo were made. Sadly, congress did nothing.

What's the big deal about WWASPS?

We know enough about it to study it, and with that, figure out the industry and other programs and program networks.

WWASPS went too far for its time, even among peers such as this industry, and has been sued enough for legal discovery to yield a lot of information that explains the inner workings of this industry, and serves as the best case study we have to date. While WWASPS per-se is no more, almost all of the same programs with the same people are just hidden under other shell companies with new names. Others joined NATSAP, which is basically just WWASPS 2.0. Still more operate independently.

WWASPS was also big - there are a lot of survivors, with estimates starting at 36,000 victims, enough for there to be a few who actually remember everything and saved their receipts for us to work with. Indeed, The Program on Netflix is about the documentarian herself surviving Ivy Ridge, a WWASPS program sued by the State of New York for fraudulent diplomas, which has since been implicated in enabling p-dophiles to groom and r*pe children, most notably Amy Ritchie and John Free, who is spoken about in greater detail in the linked to post.

This can't be real.

Read on. Suffer with me. Do something about it and you'll feel a little better.

Netflix has just released a survivor's documentary called The Program, detailing her survival of a hellish, cult-like scam masquerading as a school called Academy at Ivy Ridge, one of many former 'schools' of the now defunct WWASPS network (World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools), before going into the WWASPS network itself, and the greater industry as a whole, including how corrupt politicians protect and profit from it. You can find it here The Program, but this thread isn't about the documentary, it's about the subject matter itself. And, increasingly, Narvin's lolcowing as he tries to cover his butt, in addition to former staff of Ivy Ridge being outed as pedos or having affairs, complete with emails!

This is only half the write up. Click the link to read the whole article complete with photos and videos.

!kino

https://boards.4chan.org/tv/thread/201666172

Not the best version of these threads but still pretty funny nonetheless .

I have long since known about the impracticality of Plastic Recycling, but i found a good video addressing this issue in a comparative short and summarized format. (15 minutes)

The point of this video and my own belief is not to be an anti-recycling advocate or propagate anti-green sentiment propaganda. I and the video creator still believe we should in fact recycle to the greatest extent possible, but that we should also become fully aware of the horrifying reality standing before us - and that is that plastic has never, even since its inception in the early 1920s been capable of being recycled in any economical or environmentally sustainable sense meaningfully.

There are a great multitude of barriers to complete practical plastic recycling - including economical, practical and physical science related impossible reasons.

For economical reasons, it is because most nation states upon the earth subsidize any plastic or fossil fuel industry they may have, since these are astronomically critical sectors of economy and society, these subsidies

tend to compete painfully against any industry which must consider even the feasibly recycled resin or raw virgin plastic, against fossil remains/oil products from which plastic originates, and often recycled plastic (which contains the cost of labor intensive manpower) loses out.

---

Now there are industries in places like South Africa which have edged out a niche in recycling plastic which can meaningfully be recycled and done so in an economically viable manner. We even have a pretty decent organization advocating this issue- though obviously they sure as shit don't hold any real power or influence. But they do actually highlight and underline the most critical issues we face and actually attempt to offer pratical solutions.

This surprised me as Green hippie types are usually very prone to offer and champion noble but impractically insane idealized solutions.

https://www.plasticrecyclingsa.co.za/

They actually have a practical grasp upon our declining situations and even attempt understand the practical reality where we have lots of "trash pickers" people who hunt in junkyards for plastic, or pilfer through peoples trash bags before they can be picked up by trash lorries, so that they might fill their giant bags with plastic for recycling plants in the big cities.

https://www.news24.com/citypress/news/sas-itinerant-waste-pickers-feel-the-pinch-as-covid-19-lockdown-drags-on-20200423

It's very unglamorous, but many poor safricans make a living from this.

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/how-waste-pickers-are-helping-win-war-plastic-pollution-2023-07-17/

Now I sure as heck won't be like this Reuters article and claim that our "waste-picker" economy is "winning the war against plastic waste" or anything, but it does actually help in the grand scale of things. Where the average plastic by tons on the global stage is recycled at the pitiable 5% on average, south africa has been recycling at between 7,5% - 15% of our plastic waste (still pitafle but above global average)

However, even this recycling economy, supported on the backs and efforts of "waste-pickers", is only really feasible BECAUSE south africa is so brokenshit poor, and has at least a 25% unemployment rate - meaning that because safricans are so poor and desperate, they are willing to do the most unenviable and difficult jobs of being waste-pickers, which is basically the lowest rung of even south african society.

whereas richer places like Burgerland in all its wealth would find it impossible to compete, trash-pickers or trash-sorters would have to be paid at least minimum wages or have safety regulations against them being exposed to biohazards from junkyards or landfills - in safrica we are so poor, the concept of even regulating trash-pickers here in nonexistent because they are borderline beggers.

Thus even with the economic incentive of not starving, safrica still only manages to collect a tenth of our plastic waste - the rest is dumped in landfills if even that.

---

THE IMPRATICALITY OF RECYCLING PLASTIC: WHY IS IT HARD?

I go on this Safrican tangent to make you guys realize the sheer magnitude of problems involving ACTUAL recycling plastic, and the logistical barriers that would be involved at every step.

Like the video goes on to explain: Why is it so hard to recycle trash and plastic?

1. There are different types of plastic

https://www.plasticsforchange.org/blog/different-types-of-plastic

When plastic products are created, they are chemically created with different additives, to give them specific properties - like waterbottles being watertight and firm. Other plastics like plastic bags are intentionally made to be bending and malleable.

Mixing these different shit into one giant recycling cauldron and trying to melt them together into one magic giant bar of resin is worthless, because the combined product of plastics with different properties or chemical makeup just generates worthless plastic goop and gunk, worth only as burnable coal.

2nd hand plastic will just never have the same versatility as "virgin" resin plastic, or plastic generated directly from oil and other fossil fuel products.

Thus to meaningfully recycle any plastic shit, you need to sort them - which is a logistical task of great magnitude and WILL require human hands, no factory can in any meaningful sense sort plastic magically into the different types and even if those plastic is recyclable.

---

2. Many plastics are chemically bonded with other material on the molecular level, making them unsuitable for recycling.

https://stories.undp.org/why-arent-we-recycling-more-plastic

Many plastic products also contain metal, carton, paper and polystyrene which are often impractically impossible to separate.

3. Recycling also degrades plastic with each recycling cycle

---

4. Contamination with food remains and chemicals.

Plastic containers for food and poison or cleaning chemicals also cannot be used in recycling for most plants as there are often no meaningful manner in which to separate toxic chemicals from these plastics which will remain even after the furnace of the recycling plant's processing. So basically bottles holding ratpoison or floor cleaning liquid are for safety already almost never capable of being reused EVER.

https://nilu.com/2020/02/can-we-recycle-plastic-without-recycling-the-toxic-pollutants-as-well/

https://www.sulapac.com/blog/truth-about-plastic-recycling/

"When plastics are recycled, they can contain a toxic cocktail of chemicals that makes them unfit for food-grade and other consumer uses. Dangerous chemicals make their way into recycled plastic materials from a variety of sources. Greenpeace has identified the following three 'uncontrollable poisonous pathways':

Toxic chemicals in new virgin plastic materials: When plastics are made with toxic chemicals and then recycled, the toxic chemicals can transfer into the recycled plastics."

---

END:

I don't know if I have any grand point to make in this post, and it's not my intention of just putting forth a pessimistic doompost with no viable solutions to our global frickup.

But I did want to talk to you darmatards regarding the mammoth nature of the task before us, if we as humanity even decides to ever make plastic recycling a priority.

I recall a funny story in my time at UCT (Univericity of Cape Town) where every year there were perpetual campaigns by hippes and other environmentalists with new and improved plans involving the University to improve our carbon footprint and lower our waste in the form of recycling.

On campus there would be these fancy multi-bins, divided into categories for waste disposal: plastic, paper, metal, food, ect. There would be Green propaganda campaigns, slogans and posters, encouraging peeps to responsibly think before they threw their trash into the bin, and help sorting our trash for recycling plants in the city.

The end of that year I saw a trash lorry come in and the garbage-men would just simply dump the fricking bins into the garbage-lorry, mixing the carefully sorted bins with apathetic abandon clearly undoing most of our efforts through the year regularly

https://www.news.uct.ac.za/article/-2021-03-05-installation-of-new-bins-part-of-ucts-green-campus-transformation

Later UCT would correct this and make sure to employ palstic/metal recyling collectors to come and pick up the intended recycle shit, and give the food-waste and non-recyclables to the regular trash-lorries

Additionally safrican students tend to be r-slurred and the 4 bin project eventually got scraped for a two bin, for recyclables and non-recyclables cuz students kept throwing paper into the metal bins or vice versa, but even this STILL GOT FRICKED UP

---

Anyways regular soft drink bottles like coke bottles which are uniform type plastic and don't contain poison are still very practical to collect and recycle just like tin cans, this post is just to highlight the magnitude of the practicality of the recylcing problem.

Yeah thanks for reminding me that countries are practicing eugenics in their immigration policy.

I dont think ill ever get to leave the us... Im a trans woman, cptsd, anxiety, bipolar, I hit my head when I have meltdowns, I have a few trade skills but it doesn't fricking matter since I seem too mentally unwell to work anyway...

Guess ill just fricking rot in the US...i wished someone would shoot me dead

---

Then leave this sub as you're neither American nor trying to exit ✌🏼

---

I just dont understand the urge so many people here have, upon seeing a scared american doing their best looking for any glimmer of hope they could get out, to call them selfish egoists with no respect for other countries. I'm sure there are people coming at it like that, but it's rarely the people i see asking for help. disabled people, people with interests in culture, people who haven't had the opportunity to acquire "useful" skills - they deserve respect too. i wish some of you would actually consider whether they're being selfish or if you just look down on them for their circumstance, because thats how it reads

the bait post:

https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1eavo0h/donald_trump_and_japans_first_lady_who_pretended/

Explanation:

After seeing what some of these subs have become (non-stop Drumpf bad posts), I decided to test out the theory that anything remotely critical of him would get massive engagement.

I posted a picture of Donald Trump at a dinner with Shinzo Abe and a questionable claim about Abe's wife. This claim went viral on Social Media at the time, to the point that the MSM spent time trying to determine how true it was

When I checked this morning the post got over 100k upmarseys with mostly supportive comments all following a very similar format. They were either related to the title, or following the same three talking points (Trump is dumb, an adjudicated male feminist, old & likely suffering from dementia).

A few minutes ago, I was banned permanently from the sub, with the comment I made on this sub being the reason why (they literally linked it in the message).

When I asked what specific rule I broke, I was told it was against their anti-bigotry rule which prohibits racism, sexism, transphobia, etc.

They then linked another comment I made here with the caption 'you know what you did' and muted me.

Based on these events, it would appear large sub jannies are aware of this activity on their subs and also attempting to shut down criticism of it.

I know this is probably old news to a lot of you but I just thought it was worth sharing.

I've attached photos for proof:

Photo #1: Original post on large sub

Photo #2: Ban message

Photo #3: First comment linked in ban message

Photo #4: Comment linked under 'you know what you did'.

I did my best to discourage brigading but if the mods of this sub feel like this post puts this sub in danger from the reddit overlords feel free to delete this.

https://old.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/1ebdnpd/current_state_of_astroturfing_on_reddit/

https://civitai.com/models/583247?modelVersionId=650684

I retagged a bunch of the images into a better boru tagging style and retrained and got much ""better"" results (close to their style). The old one I made had some pretty cool 1girl designs though so I'll keep that as a generic cartoon thing https://rdrama.net/h/ai_slop/post/284590/penny-arcade-lora-v2.

Example prompt is something like this for the below images.

score_9, score_8_up, source_cartoon, 2D, webtoon,

BREAK,

gabe, __backgrounds__, 1boy, solo, __faces__ , __poses__, black hair, __outfits__, full body, (pennyarcade:1.3)

These are very rough randomized gens and if you have a specific idea you can prob get something cleaner, I'll probably try making a few specific things like marsey catgirl in the style tomorrow.

download here! Make sure to comment and upmarsey etc on the civitai page.

Feel free to ping them with the gens cos that will be funny

!codecels

https://twitter.com/PA_Megacorp

https://twitter.com/tychobrahe

[Verse 1]

What happened to us?

Our Democracy is going down the drain

With no one to trust

We close our eyes as we vote for the insane

[Pre-Chorus]

So when I try to make a change you can't ignore

Our system I will soon restore

I'm firing, I'm firing

[Chorus]

(But the bullet went)

Over his head

An ear full of lead

Blood has been shed

But Trump is not dead

And now I can't see

Turned into Swiss cheese

My incompetence eliminated my dream

[Verse 2]

Bullied in high school

I wore my camo to the classroom everyday

I was ridiculed

So I thought that I could show them all the way

[Pre-Chorus]

My mind made up, I grabbed my gun and headed out

I climbed the ladder, then laid down

I'm firing, I'm firing

[Chorus]

(But the bullet went)

Over his head

An ear full of lead

Blood has been shed

But Trump is not dead

And now I can't see

Turned into Swiss cheese

My incompetence eliminated my

[Bridge]

Decided long ago

I wouldn't be unknown

I'd do what it takes to be remembered

Practicing my aim

For my claim to fame

The shooting range at which I never thought to train

[Pre-Chorus]

Who said it was easy to hit him at this distance

Who said it was so easy to fade into nonexistence

[Chorus]

(But the bullet went)

Over his head

An ear full of lead

Blood has been shed

But Trump is not dead

And now I can't see

Turned into Swiss cheese

My incompetence eliminated my dream

[Outro]

Over his head

Trump is not dead

Over his head

Trump is not dead

But I am

Hiii besties~

I'm the guy that made the effortposts on the 2024 race and debates! With talk about Biden dropping out, Vice-President talk has skyrocketed. How will Harris do? Who will she pick as her running mate? Wouldn't it be hilarious if Hillary Clinton lived to watch someone else be the first female president?

With all this Vice-President talk around, I've been thinking about vice-presidents. The office, described by first Vice-President John Adams as "the most insignificant office ever devised", only really matters in helping people get elected. Be it a moderate to offset a radical , a figure from another region , or just a guy with a lot of money who can pay for campaign stuff, actually being the Vice-President is a distant second to being involved in the campaign. So what about the radicals that derailed the ticket? The unbalanced region tickets? Or just the brokies? Here's a ranking of the shittest running mates in history!

PREAMBLE

1. Vice-Presidents were originally whoever came second in the election, before the two party system established itself. 1804 would be the first time Presidents and Vice-Presidents were elected on the same ticket, so I'm counting Vice-Presidents that ran from 1804 to 2024.

2. In the words of our current Vice-President, "you think you fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you." Source. Before roughly 1908, Presidents never "ran" for office. They "stood" for office, and their supporters campaigned for them. To actually campaign yourself, as Whig Winfield Scott in 1852 or Democrat William Jennings Bryan in 1896 and 1900 did, was unseemly at best and outright embarrassing at worst. So you have to cut them some slack back in the olden days.

5. Tim Kaine (Democrat) 2016

The Hillary Campaign is studied today as one of the worst campaigns of all time . Complacency was it's biggest sin, as she campaigned in safe states to win more votes rather than bother to defend the Blue Wall - which would ultimately cost her the election. Nothing showcases this complacency more then her selection of Tim Kaine, Virginian Senator, as her running mate. Tim added absolutely nothing to ticket.

On paper, this shouldn't be the case. On most Democrat tickets, the Southern Moderate is a perfect Democrat counter balance to the Urban Liberal. But Hillary was already a Southern Moderate! She had basically selected herself! That wouldn't in itself have been so bad, but Hillary wasn't universally popular. She had a long, drawn out primary battle against the far-left Bernie Sanders. Can you imagine, if Bernie had won in 2016, if he picked a white man who was far left instead of literally any woman? There would be bloody murder. Rather than show any kind of basic respect to her opponent, she picked herself again, except less well-known.

Kaine is only number 5 because there was nothing wrong with him. He didn't actually do anything wrong - he was just the wrong man at the wrong time. The only reason he was chosen was because of Hillary's backroom dealing - in any sane convention, she would have picked a more committed liberal to keep Berniebros happy. The arrogance, to assume that the leftists would fall back in line and vote for her anyway, is what would doom her efforts against the deeply unpopular political outsider. Kaine isn't the cause of the loss, merely the symptom.

4. Francis Preston Blair Jr. (Democrat) 1868

From a modern Southern Democrat to a old school Southern Democrat. The first presidential election since the end of the American civil war, the Democrats were left reeling. A majority of Democrats had supported the Confederacy , and with the South under military rule, this left the Democrats crippled as they prepared to run against the victorious in war Republicans. They would nominate Horatio Seymour of New York, a Northern Urban Democrat that had stayed loyalish during the Civil War.

Similar to Kaine, Blair is on paper an amazing choice. How can you call the Democrats traitors when Blair, a Union General, was on the ticket? Ehh, ehhh? Certainly, he seemed amazing. He flew through the nomination, and campaigned on Seymour's behalf (as was the style out of time).

They ran an insanely racist campaign - the official slogan was "This is a White Man's country, let the White Man rule." Seymour would win the West by threatening that Republican's dedication to equality meant they would grant civil rights to the chinese, he defended the Klu Klux Klan as just a social club, and fiercely opposed the idea of black people voting.

Francis Blair still managed to be too racist.

Blair ranted furiously that beloved war hero Ulysses Grant would transform the nation into a military dictatorship because he was obsessed with black people. The republicans were, in his eyes, a "semi-barbarous race of blacks who are worshipers of fetishes and poligamists" that wanted to "subject the white women to their unbridled lust." That's right, Chuds have always been obsessed with . Seymour would be forced to break tradition and campaign to try and mitigate what Blair was spouting - he didn't think all black people were male feminists or evil, he just thought they were inferior!

The ticket was destroyed, for a lot of reasons, Blair being cited as a key reason. He made white supremacy a dirty word - for shame! What makes Blair so bad is that he managed to turn one of the ticket's strengths, being racist, into a weakness. Seymour had tapped into something very powerful, and he knew it. He represented a party of literal actual traitors, but still pulled off 47% of the popular vote. Could they have won? With so many Southern states under reconstruction, no. But they could have done far better - Blair disgraced this key strength.

3. Curtis LeMay (American Independence) 1968

A hundred years on from the days of "White Man's Country" and it had been thanks to Texas Democrat Lyndon Johnson the Civil Rights Act of 1964 signed . The Democrats began the shift, very firmly, to the Urban North, while the Republicans continued their final shift to the Rural South. During this wacky period, the "Dixiecrats" found themselves adrift. Some, like William Fulbright of Arkansas, just complained while being forced to stick with the party. Others, like Strom Thurmond, joined the Republican party. But as far as Alabama Governor George Wallace was concerned, there was no difference between the parties.

George Wallace ran third party with the goal of winning enough states to prevent Humphrey or Nixon from getting 270 Electoral Votes, to force the election to the House and work with Nixon to repeal the Civil Rights Act. To do this, Wallace collected a series of single issue voters - he wanted to escalate the Vietnam war, supported worker's unions (like Humphrey) while opposing welfare (like Nixon), and was of course a massive

His running mate, Curtis "Bombs Away" LeMay, was a pretty cunning choice. LeMay, a self-declared war criminal, didn't have a record of racism but was utterly blood thirsty enough to appeal right wing nutjobs while legitimising the ticket as more than a racist riot, at least a little. So why was he bad?

Well, during the press conference announcing LeMay being on ticket, LeMay talked about how much he loved nuclear weapons, musing that America had a phobia of Nuclear Weapons. George Wallace jumps in to say that LeMay hadn't promised to use nukes, he just discussed them. LeMay would then say he could see himself nuking Vietnam. Seriously, just minutes after Wallace jumped in. It was like a fricking sitcom.

The response to this press conference was immediate. George Wallace went from polling 20% down to fricking 14% - a position Wallace would never recover from, winning an admittedly still impressive 13.5% of the popular vote, and narrowly failing in his goal of a deadlock. The lesson from LeMay is pretty esoteric but I think we can perhaps agree that talking about how cool nukes are generally backfires because the American people are cowards.

2. Geraldine Ferraro (Democrat) 1984

Walter Mondale had an uphill battle. Firstly, he was running against Ronald Reagan , the economy was booming and there was generally peace in the world . So he decided to think out of the box - he picked a woman with Jewish heritage, the first ever woman or ethnic Jew on a presidential ticket. It was a pretty good idea to supercharge women voters - shame it just flopped massively. 20% of women thought she was good for ticket, so she was already a pretty awful choice.

She did manage to turn some heads however, as the press investigated her scumbag husband! Tony Zaccaro, her husband, had ties to the mafia, the porn industry and cheated on his taxes, being investigated during the campaign by the police and ultimately pleading guilty to fraud in 1985 . These connections turned a failed gambit into an outright detriment, solidly slotting Ferraro as one of the worst candidates of all time.

Not everything is complicated!

Honourable mention

Not Sarah Palin. I'm a Sarah Palin shooter. She was a fricking r-slur make no mistake - but unlike Ferraro, she successfully supercharged female voters (until the fact she was an r-slur became common knowledge) and helped convince conservatives that didn't trust the moderate Komrade McShame that he would be suitably conservative. The polling tells the story - McCain went from 3% behind Obama to 5% ahead of him. Palin should have been kept on a tighter leash, but Bush was in the White House when the Recession hit. McCain was going to be slaughtered no matter what.

Dan Qauyle (Republican) 1988 and 1992

Herbert Walker Bush was in the same boat as McCain. Conservatives didn't entirely trust Bush, with him facing primary challenges from the far right in both his elections. There was some reason to mistrust him, as he had ran as a moderate against Reagan in 1980 and had a generally moderate voting record when he was a representative, nearly being forced out when he voted for a civil rights bill. Qauyle was a solid conservative culture warrior that helped Bush keep this base loyal - he was also a fricking idiot that couldn't even spell potato. While not awful, he created a lot of noise when there were a lot of better options that would have kept the base loyal. Like the 1996 ticket, Bob Dole and Jack Kemp, who were both free at the time!

Qauylee committede noe grande crimee, bute hee createdede ane imagee ofe uttere stupiditye thate cloudede thee campaigne ine ae mannere thate wase utterlye avoidablee.

Fricking POTATOE!

The worst running mate of all time, Thomas Eagleton (Democrat) 1972

How can you be worse than arrogance , turning strength to weakness, blab about nuclear weapons or having ties to criminal pornographers? You can be such an awful running mate, you get fired from the ticket during the campaign! While Blair was de-facto fired, sent to rant about how Darwin proves White Supremacy in Missouri, no other running mate was such an active detriment they had to leave.

When McGovern won the primary as 1970s Bernie Sanders, except more radical in some areas, he found himself deeply unpopular. Thomas Eagleton was his 5th choice for running mate, after Ted Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Edmund Muskie and Abe Ribicoff turned him down. He spoke to Thomas Eagleton and asked him if he had any skeletons in closet, and Eagleton said no. Being a Catholic moderate, it was hoped that he could trigger some nostalgia for Kennedy while being blandly inoffensive. That was what they wanted - him to no negatively impact the campaign. He would fail this - the Nixon campaign researched him, and found out he had a skeleton in the closest.

Eagleton had clinical depression, and had actually spent time in a mental asylum getting electro-shock therapy to treat it. This was immediately leaked to the press, and McGovern faced pressure to drop Eagleton. He declared that he stood behind Eagleton 1000% - then dropped him a few days later.

McGovern not doing a basic background check, insisting he was going to stand by Eagleton then dropping him - the whole affair was utterly idiotic. While McGovern ran a generally incompetent campaign, the shadow of the fact he had to fire his own planned vice-president loomed over everything he said and did. His selection was so grossly incompetent, did so much damage to the ticket, there is literally no point of comparison. Kaine didn't make any mistakes. Blair and LeMay were war heroes. Even Ferraro was a gamble that Mondale needed to make, just with a different woman. Eagleton was a moderate from a state McGovern couldn't have won to begin with. A bad idea executed horendously, there can be no comparison for sheer r-sluration.

Thanks for reading Rdrama! Can you think of any running mates worse? No you can't so keep yourself safe for even thinking of disagreeing with me. Top 5 best running mates coming when I can be assed!

https://twitter.com/starheal/status/1293301488131940352

https://twitter.com/starheal/status/1811433201094558104

!biofoids