I thought modern Chinese were supposed to be getting these benefits for their parents and grandparents making this sacrifice.

However, it’s important to emphasise that social science has so far failed to provide definitive answers.

Yeah thats traditionally not the job of the social sciences or science in general.

Thank you for educating me, I absolutely did get the sappy propaganda version of that story. I do WISH we could convince people not to use the symbol but I admit that’s something I only wish was possible because it would give us a prescriptive answer to emerging hate symbols.

On a long enough timescale maybe people can recoup the symbol back to its/their original forms; but we live now, and I find it unlikely. And the danger we face now from symbols with plausibly deniable hate built into them is considerable.

Did you notice we were talking about an emergant cartoon frog hate symbol and now we’re having a one hundred year old debate about the last great hate symbol? If we don’t draw lines, what is the protocol of protecting ourselves from fully unironic uses of would be hate symbols? I am not saying CENSOR PICTOGRAMS I DON’T LIKE. I am saying there isn’t a way to stop people from abusing our reticence towards censorship and tolerance of the gray without intense scrutiny and educating people about the symbols. That does kinda mean telling Buddhists that their sign of peace is our sign of death. First the culture shock, then the bitter arguments and singed pride. What should come next then?

Its a complicated thing for sure. I think its worth considering that the Native Americans whose version of the symbol was most directly copied elected to give it up, and that was in 1920. How could we ask Buddhists to give up their symbol of peace? If it isn’t fair to Buddhists, why did the Navajo, Hopi, Apache, and Tohono O’odham feel like they HAD to?

And that was a decade before the mass killings of the Holocaust. A decade before America intervened.

I fear the answer is there is no right answer. Sometimes groups make incredible leaps of empathy like that, but like hell was it fair to them.

The Swastika interestingly is four right angles, so the symbol occurs all over human society hundreds and even thousands of years before Nazism found it.

People thought any symbol so common throughout history had to be a quasi-good thing. They used it as a general sign of good luck. About the only thing that even comes close to the swastikas ubiquity and thrust of sentiment post-war is the “smiley face” symbol.

The Nazis saw all this and sent scam archeologists around the world to unearth and then piece together a narrative that their Aryan supermen ancestors had been the rightful masters of the earth. From the moment they made that decision, it’s had the stink of human ashes wafting off it ever since. Fire, wind, fortune, ‘North’, Kali’s creative destruction, and dozens more meanings all wiped away. So many cultures and groups robbed of a symbol or perhaps a phoneme even with their own contexts.

Draw the right angles. It is the wheel that crushes now. It means hate. We have a conditioned response as a society to it and each one of us personally has our own gutteral secret feelings about it. But the old meanings are all dead.

One of fascism’s best features is simply bald faced stealing. They stole that symbol from thousands or millions of people who used it every day. Pepe at least carries his own eternal chagrinn with him in protest of being used as a dogwhistle, but thats about it. His expressions are your expressions.

Pepe is damaged goods though. He endures well past his relevance and utility as an internet comic character when very similar concepts (rage faces, Polandball) have had their time and slowly lost ubiquity. But Pepe endures not JUST as a Nazi dogwhistle but as a symbol that even if someone is not right wing they still would like to convey a certain unsociable edginess, like a colorful threat display on a jungle animal. The disposessed middle class, the failure to launch kids, the kissless sensitive souls, all find commonality with the frowning frog. And these are the people they target. People use Pepe as a flare to suggest they’re in pain and only feel safe talking about it to other anonynous people on the same boat. Aka the most vulnerable to radicalization. Clinging to Pepe is advertising that you are looking for something that you don’t even know what it is, but normies can’t or won’t give it to you. Pepe is a green light to radicalization.

And like the various versions of the swastikas before they became THE Swastika, Pepe did nothing to deserve this. Just like everyone else under Nazi occupation.

Godot is WOKE and queerdo indie devs are using it to make WOKE games because they are UNCREATIVE HACKS who can’t into game engine thats why WE FORKED GODOT AND CHANGED ONE LETTER

Oh so its now completely impossible to stop a brigade by shuttering a subreddit for a day or two without begging some pea brain Reddit stooge. That won’t lead to anything putrid happening to small and medium subreddits on a regular basis I hope.

Interesting, thank you for the reply. I am not a hacker nor a gnostic but I have a slight fascination with the latter. But on hacking: while there’s merit to your position that hacker culture is reactionary I have to ask what do you think of hacker collectives like the one that leaked Project 2025 or other noble computer nerd activities? It seems to me like a hacker is exercizing another avenue of power over her world like jumping or singing. Thinking the online world is seperate and intangible from our non-online experience seems to be making the mistake of dualism in upholding one sphere of reality over the other/s.

hacker culture is intrinsically gnostic and reactionary

Do you nind elaborating a bit?

If AI bros were serious about existential risk and problems of alignment instead of attempting to form a cult of technobabble to make themselves superior and scrounge for venture capital… They’d pull the plug.

Altman is selling what he alledges he dreads more than anything: AI that would lie to you without a second (or even first) literal thought.

If you formed this chat clique you have to lead it and not be coy about it. If I were you I would talk privately with Ann and tell her not to spew the negativity. She could possibly have a blog type “quarantine room” for venting. But you should put your best foot forward and present a friendly space. Stick to your guns about that and people who don’t want that will self select out. When Ann is ranting you’ll look chill in comparison and maybe you can talk to her about who you both want to flirt with. You made a colleague chat, you have to, err, chat with your colleagues.

But for Deus Ex, we’ve got… I don’t know, Cyberpunk 2077, maybe? But the whole open world thing doesn’t really fit in with the usual gameplay loop of Deus Ex. There are a fair amount of great cyberpunk games, but none seem to really scratch that immersive sim itch. I guess Prey is pretty close as well (in addition to its System Shock influences), if you consider some of the body/power upgrades, but it’s not all that similar thematically.

Check out Cruelty Squad by Ville Kallio on Steam. Aesthetically and spiritually it scrys into the future on the same level Deus Ex did and delivers an even more dire prophecy that feels as disturbingly prescient. It takes the open ended levels of DX and adds insane verticality and mind bending traversal. It plays more tactically than Deus Ex but the augment system is really rewarding and enables the player to munchkin their way to their target.

You may notice it looks artistically like a 13th century Christian piece with a Jackson Pollock splotch of New Years Eve stomach soup all over the canvas. I retort that so did DX1 most of the time. The CS playerbase refers to our ability to parse and navigate this style of level design and eclectic color composition as the ‘CEO mindset.’

But seriously I am a big Deus Ex enjoyer and other than Thief nothing has come as close to the full breadth of experience that world evokes in me. It is both terrible and beautiful to behold.

By the same token gait recognition.

Counterpoint: My sibling had their goddamn desktop ransomewared by this thing when they dared to uninstall it. It isn’t privacy nerd sensabilities, Windows now behaves like malware under certain opaque conditions and at unpredictable intervals. This was four years ago on Win 10. How great do you think non savvy people are about clicking things they don’t understand anyway and essentially springing a trap?

If what’s happening is broad incompetence, it is genocidal in its disregard for human life, and the IDF should be turned inside out at the Hague.

This is quite obviously a bot. I derive no pleasure in the fact it’s propaganda slogans hit at core truths, I merely urge my bruhs: consider the motive behind an account that thinks you’re stupid enough to miss its complete inability to come off as human.

This kind of silly shit is on brand for Pagliarulo.

Sorry, it’s just you know how this has to go. “But komrade, surely you know many Unix and GNULinux operating systems are free”? and there’s probably although not guaranteed to be a distro that suits your needs and has analogs for Windows apps. If you’re opinionated about it, that’s fine, but on first blush, it’s confusing. Bring your own hardware and it’s free, right?