Nerf Discourse

Sideblog for video games. Overwatch and Fire Emblem discourse, mostly.

[kontextmaschine]

Oh for reference I've never been a rationalist, I came here by way of nydwracu.

[argumate]

nice, you neatly managed to triangulate an even more offensive origin story!

I've never been a rationalist either, but anyone who doesn't performatively hang shit on them frequently enough is dubbed one by proximity.

[shlevy]

I have never felt more validated than when @just-evo-now said something along the lines of “well you’re actually not and have never been a rationalist” at a party with rationalists in a discussion about the notion of rat-adjacency.

I think some of them are cool and appreciate their perspective on things but mine has a different label that you’ve already decided to hate!

[squareallworthy]

I was out there thinking that facts and rational inquiry and so on are good when Yudkowsky was in grade school. As I’ve said before, I’m not rat-adjacent, the  rats are me-adjacent.

[ghostpalmtechnique]

I am regularly reminded that this is not true whenever I get into an argument with someone who has not adopted rationalist/adjacent norms for discussion (i.e. almost everyone outside of perhaps some academic philosophy departments).

[squareallworthy]

I consider new discourse norms and vocabulary to be “not much of anything new,” especially given the tendency of rationalists to re-invent terminology all the time.

[ghostpalmtechnique]

I’m not talking about the terminology.  I am referring to treating discussion as truth-seeking rather than point-scoring, which is sadly extremely rare outside of rationalist/adjacent circles.

[the-dao-of-the-zerg]

We didn’t invent truth-seeking, and that’s nothing new. But I do feel that getting an entire community on the internet to embrace it is a genuinely impressive act. It’s one of the few remaining healthy “walled gardens” I know of online - most online walled gardens seem to have become unhealthy echo chambers and hug boxes.

Rationalists are also the most ideologically-tolerant group I know of. It’s rare to see the combination of a genuine walled garden with strong discourse norms, and the self-control not to weaponize those norms against people who have unorthodox views.

[nerfdiscourse]

the only ‘strong discourse norm’ i ever saw on SSC was that it was perfectly acceptable to call trans women ‘mentally ill men who think they’re women’ and you weren’t allowed to call the people who said that fucking idiots

[nerfdiscourse]

the ‘sharks have smooth skin’ thread, but it’s someone insisting “i’m consuming ethically under capitalism”

[headspace-hotel]

since I guess I’m talking about Star Wars now, calling the Empire in the Star Wars sequel trilogy “fascist” has always bothered me in a way that’s it’s very difficult to express, but has something to do with how...fucking abysmal the portrayal of the empire is in terms of like...being anything more than a vague, hollow aesthetic.

I mean yeah, “fascist-coded” might apply to them, but that term feels useless for anything except winning internet arguments. What they are is “bad guy coded.” There’s no substance. We largely don’t see the qualities that would make the Empire fascist. We get close, a little bit, with Finn’s backstory, but then that gets thrown out the window. “Speeches with lots of yelling” and “flag color schemes” aren’t what fascism is.

Like, here’s the obvious thing: if you are content to rely on how a regime is ~portrayed~ to decide if it’s fascist or not, you sure as hell are not going to notice fascism in real life because you’ll be waiting for your country to adopt a more evil-looking color scheme. I mean, if we’re going to take it seriously, this is not a good way to evaluate evilness.

“Kylo Ren is a bad character because he’s a fascist” is a take, but consider: “Kylo Ren is a bad character because he isn’t a fascist.” There is no substantial ideology or intent behind his actions, he’s just angry and likes power. The Empire doesn’t appear to have a culture, let alone an idea of their culture being superior. The fight against the Empire has nothing anti-fascist about it. As handled in the sequel trilogy, it’s just irritatingly shallow. It absolutely could have been better. The seeds absolutely were there! But Rise of Skywalker was too occupied no-homoing Finn and Poe to remember to complete their character arcs.

Yes, destroying an entire solar system is ABSOLUTELY genocide, but the film spent like, 40 seconds on this, because the role of Starkiller Base is to be another round thing in the sky to blow up while starfighters go pew pew pew. The annihilation of billions of people and untold amounts of culture is an afterthought. It’s also boiled down to a single person pressing a button instead of a massive project overseen and operated by countless people, and its impact seems totally forgotten about once the heroes blow the thing up.

I mean sure, this is true of the original Death Star, but Starkiller Base is “the same plot point, but worse.” The original Death Star took almost two decades to complete, for one thing. There was at least some recognition of how meaningful it was to create something with the purpose of annihilating planets. It was still shallow but it was something. In The Force Awakens there’s nothing, there is no weight to it at all. It’s not handled at all in terms of the destruction of cultures, of entire people groups, just as a Bigger Bad. Everything is just there to mirror the plot of the OT enough to make the fans happy (which is impossible, but I digress). That entire part of the story is executed in a way that just sucks unbelievable amounts of ass.

I guess my take is that if we’re arguing about whether Kylo Ren should be redeemed because he’s a “fascist,”—that is, if we want to take this stuff seriously at all—we should talk about how terrible a job these films did with portraying fascism. You can’t even say that Disney was *attempting* to portray fascism because let’s be real, I doubt Disney has an interest in meaningful social commentary with its cash cow franchise.

The argument we’re essentially having about the sequels is “If you imagine what these movies would be like if the villains had any meaningful, socially applicable ideology or motivation, they would probably be fascist because the people that gave them a vaguely “Nazi-like” aesthetic would, in this universe, have done that for a reason other than to tell us that these are supposed to be the bad guys.” At some point the execution of an idea in a story has to be so fucking bad that it’s overly flattering to the story to discuss it so much.

[morlock-holmes]

Okay, well, the sequel trilogy sucks because it's extruded corporate product and JJ Abrams is a bad writer.

That said...

Something that I find slightly bothersome is that numerous contemporary writers talked about how fundamentally hollow Nazi ideology was.

Jorge Luis Borges lived in Argentina, and during the war the population of that country was divided as to whether they supported the Axis or the Allies.

Borges fancied that, when his fascist acquaintances would talk about some Nazi victory, he would even hear a tinge of fear in their voice, because in his mind, Nazism was something you could fight for, die for, and kill for, but it was impossible to live in.

Like, there was a sense that the Nazis' barbaric destruction wasn't so much justified by Nazi ideology as much as that action was at the heart of it, and imagining what a Nazi country would look like during peace time was extraordinarily difficult.

(I'm paraphrasing material from Selected Non-Fictions published by Penguin books, I don't have it in front of me to quote)

Particularly, I think it would be very strange for the First Order to have a "culture" at least in a broader sense; they're the remnants of a cult of personality which sustained itself by destroying any rivals and any rival ideology, of course their internal culture would see the destruction of rebels/undesirables as the most important project they could embark on and the one most central to their "culture", with everything else that governing entails being understood only very, very vaguely and fuzzily, I think that actually is pretty characteristic of modern dictatorships and authoritarian political movements.

[largerobot-deactivated20211119]

Particularly, I think it would be very strange for the First Order to have a “culture” at least in a broader sense; they’re the remnants of a cult of personality which sustained itself by destroying any rivals and any rival ideology, of course their internal culture would see the destruction of rebels/undesirables as the most important project they could embark on and the one most central to their “culture”, with everything else that governing entails being understood only very, very vaguely and fuzzily, I think that actually is pretty characteristic of modern dictatorships and authoritarian political movements.

Ironically, that also describes the TFA and TLJ’s depiction of The Resistance just as much. That is, it’s primarily a cult of personality around Leia. “She'll always be a princess to me," and all that. It damn near disintegrates the moment she goes unconscious.

But, to tie that into the OP’s point, no one would describe the good guys as fascist. They’ve got the good guy color scheme!

[morlock-holmes]

With all due respect I don't agree; Abrams does lean into the cult of personality stuff, but The Last Jedi goes hard against that; Finn's arc in that movie is about him beginning to see what he's fighting for outside of simple survival, and Rose's entire contribution to that, which Jonson frames as essentially the moral of the movie, is that the Resistance has to actually stand for something, that their goal is not just to destroy the First Order but to protect and nurture what they love, and that this protective and nurturing impulse is fundamentally more important than any act of destruction.

I've said it before but I don't get why everyone hated the casino planet subplot, it's easily the best and most important part of both those movies.

[nerfdiscourse]

i dislike the casino subplot because the good guys achieve nothing and pat themselves on the back about it. it’s still better than a fair amount of the stuff going on across all three sequel movies, but that’s because the bar is so low it’s buried in the floor.

TLJ overall is a bunch of clinton supporters convinced that they lost because of evil space wizard magic, which is doubly ironic because the prequels are about a bunch of clinton supporters losing to an evil space wizard who didn’t need to use his evil space magic to beat them

[morlock-holmes]

Didn't they liberate a bunch of space horses or something?

[kitty-cat-enjoyer]

Space horses that just caused destruction that the still present slave population will have to fix, before the slaves are forced to go out and recapture the space horses, yeah.

Ultimately the only "victory" of the film and it's largely meaningless

[morlock-holmes]

If you assume that the villains undo everything the heroes accomplish as soon as they are off screen then you end up with the sequel trilogy, which is plenty of evidence that it's usually a bad idea.

[nerfdiscourse]

i’m 99% sure the part where the horses get recaptured happens on screen.

[headspace-hotel]

since I guess I’m talking about Star Wars now, calling the Empire in the Star Wars sequel trilogy “fascist” has always bothered me in a way that’s it’s very difficult to express, but has something to do with how...fucking abysmal the portrayal of the empire is in terms of like...being anything more than a vague, hollow aesthetic.

I mean yeah, “fascist-coded” might apply to them, but that term feels useless for anything except winning internet arguments. What they are is “bad guy coded.” There’s no substance. We largely don’t see the qualities that would make the Empire fascist. We get close, a little bit, with Finn’s backstory, but then that gets thrown out the window. “Speeches with lots of yelling” and “flag color schemes” aren’t what fascism is.

Like, here’s the obvious thing: if you are content to rely on how a regime is ~portrayed~ to decide if it’s fascist or not, you sure as hell are not going to notice fascism in real life because you’ll be waiting for your country to adopt a more evil-looking color scheme. I mean, if we’re going to take it seriously, this is not a good way to evaluate evilness.

“Kylo Ren is a bad character because he’s a fascist” is a take, but consider: “Kylo Ren is a bad character because he isn’t a fascist.” There is no substantial ideology or intent behind his actions, he’s just angry and likes power. The Empire doesn’t appear to have a culture, let alone an idea of their culture being superior. The fight against the Empire has nothing anti-fascist about it. As handled in the sequel trilogy, it’s just irritatingly shallow. It absolutely could have been better. The seeds absolutely were there! But Rise of Skywalker was too occupied no-homoing Finn and Poe to remember to complete their character arcs.

Yes, destroying an entire solar system is ABSOLUTELY genocide, but the film spent like, 40 seconds on this, because the role of Starkiller Base is to be another round thing in the sky to blow up while starfighters go pew pew pew. The annihilation of billions of people and untold amounts of culture is an afterthought. It’s also boiled down to a single person pressing a button instead of a massive project overseen and operated by countless people, and its impact seems totally forgotten about once the heroes blow the thing up.

I mean sure, this is true of the original Death Star, but Starkiller Base is “the same plot point, but worse.” The original Death Star took almost two decades to complete, for one thing. There was at least some recognition of how meaningful it was to create something with the purpose of annihilating planets. It was still shallow but it was something. In The Force Awakens there’s nothing, there is no weight to it at all. It’s not handled at all in terms of the destruction of cultures, of entire people groups, just as a Bigger Bad. Everything is just there to mirror the plot of the OT enough to make the fans happy (which is impossible, but I digress). That entire part of the story is executed in a way that just sucks unbelievable amounts of ass.

I guess my take is that if we’re arguing about whether Kylo Ren should be redeemed because he’s a “fascist,”—that is, if we want to take this stuff seriously at all—we should talk about how terrible a job these films did with portraying fascism. You can’t even say that Disney was *attempting* to portray fascism because let’s be real, I doubt Disney has an interest in meaningful social commentary with its cash cow franchise.

The argument we’re essentially having about the sequels is “If you imagine what these movies would be like if the villains had any meaningful, socially applicable ideology or motivation, they would probably be fascist because the people that gave them a vaguely “Nazi-like” aesthetic would, in this universe, have done that for a reason other than to tell us that these are supposed to be the bad guys.” At some point the execution of an idea in a story has to be so fucking bad that it’s overly flattering to the story to discuss it so much.

[morlock-holmes]

Okay, well, the sequel trilogy sucks because it's extruded corporate product and JJ Abrams is a bad writer.

That said...

Something that I find slightly bothersome is that numerous contemporary writers talked about how fundamentally hollow Nazi ideology was.

Jorge Luis Borges lived in Argentina, and during the war the population of that country was divided as to whether they supported the Axis or the Allies.

Borges fancied that, when his fascist acquaintances would talk about some Nazi victory, he would even hear a tinge of fear in their voice, because in his mind, Nazism was something you could fight for, die for, and kill for, but it was impossible to live in.

Like, there was a sense that the Nazis' barbaric destruction wasn't so much justified by Nazi ideology as much as that action was at the heart of it, and imagining what a Nazi country would look like during peace time was extraordinarily difficult.

(I'm paraphrasing material from Selected Non-Fictions published by Penguin books, I don't have it in front of me to quote)

Particularly, I think it would be very strange for the First Order to have a "culture" at least in a broader sense; they're the remnants of a cult of personality which sustained itself by destroying any rivals and any rival ideology, of course their internal culture would see the destruction of rebels/undesirables as the most important project they could embark on and the one most central to their "culture", with everything else that governing entails being understood only very, very vaguely and fuzzily, I think that actually is pretty characteristic of modern dictatorships and authoritarian political movements.

[largerobot-deactivated20211119]

Particularly, I think it would be very strange for the First Order to have a “culture” at least in a broader sense; they’re the remnants of a cult of personality which sustained itself by destroying any rivals and any rival ideology, of course their internal culture would see the destruction of rebels/undesirables as the most important project they could embark on and the one most central to their “culture”, with everything else that governing entails being understood only very, very vaguely and fuzzily, I think that actually is pretty characteristic of modern dictatorships and authoritarian political movements.

Ironically, that also describes the TFA and TLJ’s depiction of The Resistance just as much. That is, it’s primarily a cult of personality around Leia. “She'll always be a princess to me," and all that. It damn near disintegrates the moment she goes unconscious.

But, to tie that into the OP’s point, no one would describe the good guys as fascist. They’ve got the good guy color scheme!

[morlock-holmes]

With all due respect I don't agree; Abrams does lean into the cult of personality stuff, but The Last Jedi goes hard against that; Finn's arc in that movie is about him beginning to see what he's fighting for outside of simple survival, and Rose's entire contribution to that, which Jonson frames as essentially the moral of the movie, is that the Resistance has to actually stand for something, that their goal is not just to destroy the First Order but to protect and nurture what they love, and that this protective and nurturing impulse is fundamentally more important than any act of destruction.

I've said it before but I don't get why everyone hated the casino planet subplot, it's easily the best and most important part of both those movies.

[nerfdiscourse]

i dislike the casino subplot because the good guys achieve nothing and pat themselves on the back about it. it’s still better than a fair amount of the stuff going on across all three sequel movies, but that’s because the bar is so low it’s buried in the floor.

TLJ overall is a bunch of clinton supporters convinced that they lost because of evil space wizard magic, which is doubly ironic because the prequels are about a bunch of clinton supporters losing to an evil space wizard who didn’t need to use his evil space magic to beat them

[lumsel]

That “obama reading marx to get girls and failing” excerpt is indeed funny, but obama pretty clearly flags that he himself thinks that behavior was cringe and embarrassing in the text. he outright calls his past self a pseudo-intellectual. “obama was a cringe incel” isn’t really an effective dunk on the man if it’s the exact same dunk he was deploying on himself.

[nerfdiscourse]

surely the pertinent dunk is ‘obama only thought about leftism because he was horny and stopped caring about it when it didn’t ‘work’’ and nothing to do with him being cringe and/or an incel

[nerfdiscourse]

headcanon: cho chang’s name is her parents’ last names, because her first name is the asian equivalent of ‘nymphadora’ except worse because it sounds even sillier in chinese mandarin than it does in korean or cantonese. nobody at hogwarts notices

[dog-with-a-pen]

[nerfdiscourse]

[amiya voice] arkunightsu

[markrosewater]

The phrase "Activate this ability only any time you could cast a sorcery" is really pretty clunky. Would you change it if you could?

If a had a cleaner, more intuitive template, sure.

[nerfdiscourse]

‘Activate this ability at sorcery speed’ works if you are willing to have ‘instant speed’ and ‘sorcery speed’ become game terms, but it’s not a lot better.

[commentsense888]

[the-grey-tribe]

That will select for recruiters who played Pokemon, not for recruiters who know about your job skills.

[nerfdiscourse]

hey, he spelt onix wrong!

[transhumanesque-deactivated2020]

never really thought of the pokemon universe as cyberpunk but I guess they have a whole working system of transhuman uploading and virtualization, but only for animals. that’s pretty cyberpunk!

maybe with the whole chill pastoral vibe they’re more like the “miyazaki patchwork” future or whatever from that alignment chart. gotta find that thing. still some room for cyberpunkery in there

[nerfdiscourse]

remember that guy at the start of every game who says “technology is incredible! [new thing this game lets you do]”? i do. technology is cool and good in Pokemon, and not inherently in opposition with nature like it is in so many other settings. the central conceit of the game is using cool new technology to explore the natural world and learn about it without seeking to exploit it for personal gain, and doing so is possible. not very cyberpunk imo.

politically and economically, the pokemon games are pretty much a socdem utopia. everything you need is free, nobody seems to be meaningfully impoverished, and nothing is expensive enough that a child can’t buy it with a bit of work, but also a guy can charge you ten bucks to look at his mansion as your child friend comments “this is how the rich get richer!”

but really the better example of what i mean is gen 5, which is the first and only time the series has ever considered systematic critique of itself, and the conclusion was ‘actually this system is fine and everyone involved loves it’, because any other position would require changing how the series works. it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of pokemon training.

[nerfdiscourse]

gushing wildly about ‘a fistful of blasting powder’

[the-grey-tribe]

Unpopular opinion that I suspect is actually widely held but rarely voiced: If you’re a lactose-intolerant vegetarian with a mushroom allergy, then you don’t get to be a picky eater to the same degree as an omnivore. I know it’s not your fault to be allergic to mushrooms, but you are using up pieces of your accommodation budget with essential accommodations. If I try to cook for all of us and you tell me that you also don’t particularly like potatoes and onions, well, tough titties!

If you are doing a weird fad diet, I feel no obligation to cater for that, you should just eat a smaller portion.

Similarly if you keep kosher or are not eating meat on a Friday: I don’t particularly feel the need to accommodate different people with different dietary restrictions differently and specifically if they are all able to eat the same vegan, gluten-free curry alternative.

I suspect most people act more or less like this: If you already spent all of your food accommodation budget on your allergies and religious commandments, you can’t afford to be a picky eater. If it’s easy to accommodate you, for example by just not putting sausage on the pizza, there is no reason not to accommodate somebody, but if you’re already gluten-free, it’s unreasonable to demand gluten-free pizza. If it’s a small gathering, having pizza might be weird in the first place if two out of five people can’t eat gluten. But if the cook ensures that the big shared family pizza pie is gluten-free for your sake, you shouldn’t make a fuss because there are some onions touching your slice of the pizza.

Basically, you get all your accommodations necessary to live and to keep all your taboos. No taboo tradeoffs, no expecting people to choose between being hungry and getting sick. But beyond that, picky-eater accommodations will only go up to a point. That’s based on the amount of extra effort it takes to accommodate you, not the amount of rules or things you have you don’t eat. It’s possible to go way over the accommodation budget with your (non-negotiable) allergies already. If somebody says “just cook white rice and I’ll be fine“, then that person is easy to accommodate. If somebody demands white rice when there are already perfectly edible potatoes, that’s unreasonable.

[nerfdiscourse]

There’s a Peter Singer article that covers this more expansively. 

One of the more interesting arguments he makes is [paraphrased] “Muslims and Jews who refuse to eat meat that isn’t halal or kosher should simply not eat meat, because the slaughtering process required by their religion is a violation of those animals’ dignity and their right to the least painful death possible. I am not asking anything of them I would not do myself - I have been a vegan for 40 years. There is nothing in their scripture that requires them to eat meat.”

Then, in classic Peter Singer style, he takes this to its logical conclusion and argues that religious hospitals should be sold off to the public if the religious people in charge don’t want to provide health care that violates their principles. Love him, the absolute madman.

[nerfdiscourse]

‘hey some progressives are alright, like jesse singal!’ - ssc open thread

[nerfdiscourse]

‘magic: the gathering, and other CCGs, are only 96% male as a competitive game compared to the 99% male that most competitive video games are. i wonder why? it’s not like magic has a less miserably sexist community than other esports. is there a biological factor? if there is, it’d be drowned out by the enormous sociological factors, but maybe.’

‘this statement is proof that you are a biological determinist who hates women.’

[nerfdiscourse]

you: [writes a lot of incorrect words]

me: ok boomer

[gets banned]

really makes you think

[new-clemency]

I think a lot of the male positivity on this site falls flat because it fetishizes/otherizes male-related stuff instead of normalizing it. This isn’t the most thought out opinion I have but, “friendly reminder that it’s okay to be masc!!! Boys are pretty!! It’s okay to be a feminine boy too!!!” don’t really do much to normalize those things, even if they’re well intentioned. It’s like hearing “it’s okay to stick out” when really that’s not the message that’s helpful. Fawning over boys in skirts is again, well intentioned but my understanding (as a boy who likes skirts) is that it would be wayyyy more comfortable to just like, have boys in skirts exist?? And have it be normal and not a big deal in either direction? Like the way you normalize something is by including it as a normal thing in your life, not by drawing a ton of attention to it and making a big deal about how it should be normalized

[new-clemency]

The male sexual (and social) experience isn’t really talked about a lot either, in conservative OR progressive spaces, unless it’s being blamed for something. People talk a lot about positive masculinity but in a way that almost makes it harder to perform

[new-clemency]

A lot of men who want to be accepting of themselves and others read male positive posts and are kinda left feeling isolated by them, I think, because they aren’t written in a archetypically male tone, and are kinda overly energized and excited to a point that feels frenetic and self-doubting and femininely-voiced, which all combined make the message land really flatly

[new-clemency]

I’m mostly talking out my ass here and just freewriting but I do think there’s something distinctly non-optimal about positive male messaging

[nerfdiscourse]

imo the root of the problem is that ‘positive masculinity’ involves identifying things that men have that women don’t that are good, in much the same way that ‘positive femininity’ is the other way around - motherhood gets a lot more praise than fatherhood, for an obvious example of the latter

and it’s already been decided that the things that men have, women can also have - even if it’s the most basic, rudimentary stuff like ‘ripley, in aliens, is a woman who can shoot good and lift weights’.

and so the only things left that are uniquely masculine are bad, because women have not declared that they can also have them. ‘toxic masculinity’ exists because all the positive traits men have are no longer masculinity - they are neutral traits that men happen to have independent of being men, because otherwise women couldn’t have them. and this is good on the whole, because women should be allowed to have things, but it’s not good in the specific

[yieldsfalsehoodwhenquined]

pokemon hot take

changing your name, and to a lesser extent your pronouns, is extremely common in the pokemon universe.  traditionally, you choose one for yourself for the first time at age 10, and people often pick new names at significant turning points in their lives.  not only is this why you get asked your name and whether you’re a boy or a girl at the beginning of every pokemon game, it’s also why so many nurses are named joy, and why all the professors are named after different types of wood.