Doom community happenings

optimus This "cloud" that is spreading through cultures is not benign: in truth it acts more like social contagion. A forced meme, if you will, and it is the worst fucking idea ever for a thousand different reasons beyond freedom of speech.

1) Authoritarian Language Policing.

"So that the speech being Irish, the heart must need be Irish; for out of the abundance of the heart, the tongue speaks."

This is a quote from Edmund Spenser, who wrote one of the very first genocidal tracts regarding the subjugation of Ireland by the English. Think of it as an Elizabethan "how-to" guide. And aside from scorching the earth and starving the barbarous natives (a dream which would later be realized), Spenser postulated that the Irish language needed to be utterly obliterated and replaced by English. His thinking went like this: an Irishman who speaks English first and foremost will only be able to think English thoughts. By indoctrinating children, you own the future.

The assault on the Scottish language was a similar state of affairs, and the routine thumpings only stopped about 25 years ago, if you can believe it. Multiple times in school - despite the alleged dissolution of corporal punishment - Scots children would be thumped round the back of the head by a clique of wandering geriatric fucks masquerading as school masters, simply for the crime of saying the Scots "aye" instead of English "yes". This I report as a true fact, because I was one of those kids.

It's colonialism, pure and simple.

My point is this: language is a vital part of cultural expression. By forcibly removing (nay, amputating) certain parts of a persons vocabulary you remove their ability to conceptualize "bad" thoughts. The amputee can no longer intellectualize nor articulate arguments against the ideology that is enforcing the language change.

As an example: imagine a language without the concept of tense. Imagine being unable to conceptualize time on an intellectual level. Such a language would lead to irrevocable stagnation because "tomorrow" - as a thing to be concerned about and plan for - is a vague, fuzzy concept that will probably occur but fuck it, let someone else sort it out. There were several African aborigine languages that never evolved tense (probably because every day is exactly the fucking same, so who the fuck cares what you are doing tomorrow) and that ended really fucking well for them.

As a brief aside, and coming back to the concept of "bad thoughts", think how often - as a child - you were castigated for "bad language." Now ask yourself how often this castigation was simply enforcing a method of control. Blasphemy laws, etc, all serve to enforce subservience to a religion and ideology. now ask yourself how often the enforcers of the fuck-police actually understood what they were perpetrating, instead acting out of instinct and indoctrination. Parents beat children for bad language because their parents beat them for bad language. This concept - passed generation to generation like a fucked chromosome - eventually finds expression in a fucked concept like Original Sin.

The sins of the father are the sins of the son. And that Old Testament bullshit has once again emerged as White Guilt, and once-a-fucking-gain, it's being used as a method of control by a posse of ideologically indoctrinated cunts.

40oz - this one is for you.

2) Cognitive Dissonance

The second reason why maliciously fucking with language is a bad idea.

There was a Pavlovian experiment carried out that went like this: you show a picture of an apple to the subject. The subject is punished when he says "Apple." The subject is rewarded when they say "Orange." Later, they moved on, and showed the word "blue" but it was coloured "orange", and repeated the same bullshit cake-or-death punishment and reward system. The end result was catastrophic cognitive dissonance. Anxiety attacks. Lawsuits. A cornucopia of pharmaceuticals to stop the subject explosively decompressing beneath the weight of their own induced neurosis.

Imagine doing this to children. Because we are.

The human brain is a fucking delicate, complex organ, and deliberately fucking with it via dissonance-inducing bullshit leads to extreme, near-psychotic results. And the media is one big cognitive dissonance machine. Everyday the media is telling you apples = oranges. It can be "peaceful protesters" burning shit down, it can be "alt-right nazis" hiding in your cereal box, it can be a tech company telling you "Black Lives Matter" whilst their Chinese serfs are hurling themselves from the tenth floor of their factory, trampolining off the suicide nets and doing a yeeting cartwheel into the car park to break their fucking skulls on the cheap asphalt.

It can be the leftist screeching "racism!" into the mouthpiece of the iPhone. Hypocrisy - when internalized - induces this cognitive dissonance, this attempt to hold two fundamentally opposing viewpoints at once. I keep hearing about the "exhaustion" of the faux-left, as if they are simply too fucking tired to debate and defend their ideas and ideals. And yes, it is exhausting, to keep sane when you can't keep your apples and oranges straight, that the two have merged into some hideous hybrid that is neither one nor the other, when you are having anxiety attacks and suffering from disassociated personality disorder because you fucked the established synaptic pathways of your brain in an attempt to make an ideology - one that has never worked in two hundred years because it is fundamentally fucked - a viable fucking alternative.

Aside number two: Utopian ideals do not and have never worked. Thomas fucking More wrote Utopia as a cynical satire. The only way you can create a perfect society is by removing the imperfect. Any society that includes the imperfect is by definition imperfect. Hitler postulated this. Desmoulins started his revolution by introducing the aristocracy to the lamppost. Stalin perpetrated removing the imperfect on an industrial scale. I don't know what Mao's gig was, but we can safely assume he was a retarded cunt. And the reason why all of these people and their take on socialist ideology killed billions in their failure is because they failed to understand that perfection is subjective.

In short, I do not trust the subjective opinions of left-wing demagogues. Because their brains are fucking cooked on rhetoric. Because intellectually believing in socialism - a system that has historically killed more people than it has saved - causes cognitive fucking dissonance.

Either that, or the demagogue has intellectualized the murder of millions and - this is the truly scary part - decided that it is A-OK.

Smite of Disrespect,
what I was trying to bring up is the (potentially entirely different phenomenon, or the same - unsure) I observed on a forum culture NOT related to politics (that is, the example I had was not on politics):
1. created as a forum where differing views are tolerated, often because some other forum did not tolerate differing views
2. over time, some users come in and raise to the position of power or popularity. These people are extremely capable of winning over arguments, and manage to feel those who lose the arguments ostracized or feel ashamed and so cease involvement, while either not breaking the forum rules or because the administration is friends with these people
3. soon, there is one forum clique with coherent views dominating all debates. New users that do not agree with these views dare not join, or even if they do, they soon give up
4. administration installs views of the victorious group as official forum policy and debating it is banned

Then let's say there is a certain culture - a multitude of forums which concern themselves with subject X. So when a new forum is created, it goes from 1->4 like described above, as the result of that once again a new forum is created, it goes from 1->4 like described above, and so on

I am not sure if this is the same thing as "left wing cannot exist without moderation, no moderation forum become right wing". And I tried to see if "left wing" and "right wing" could be or were meant to be taken non-literary and then wondering if it is the same thing. Apparently I dragged in something else entirely and the terms were meant to be literal.

Thus in regard of "toxicity", "being hardcore" I meant what happens on stages 2 and 3. When users are allowed to dominate others in arguments (despite those with differing or less popular views not barred from participating), the contest for domination is all that remains, civil discussion no longer possible, until the strongest win and then there is no more debating (or actually, sometimes there is, but they are quickly shut down, dissenters being banned shortly after their arrival, in addition to being defeated in arguments and humiliated).

The relation between what I meant and what you meant in the past posts remains uncertain.

Oh, don't get me wrong. Capitalism is also fucked, as we are about to find out. We're going to enter a period of history worse than that of the Great Depression, the only difference being that bankers no longer have the common human decency to commit honourable seppuku off a very tall building. Which means that we are going to have to take a leaf from Desmoulins' book and do it for them - not because it will shorten the recession - but because it's good for morale.

I've ranted about late-stage capitalism before, and I'm struggling to reconcile the fact that I think both systems are fucked beyond all hope of repair in my lifetime. I'm trying to codify these thoughts onto the political compass, and the only thing I can come up with is that I think I must be some sort of bizarre left-wing accelerationist. The sooner the apocalypse comes, the less long-term damage will be done (I'm thinking centuries, rather than millennia). A man with the plan of Kwisatz Haderach and the morals of a Judas Goat, or perhaps the clown who leads retarded children down into the gas chamber.

Interesting. I wonder who Tormentor copy/pasted it from.

40oz not my intention at all. But you're often a man with his feet planted on either side of the great divide, trying to act as conciliator. I just think there is a danger of burning yourself out by trying to juggle thirteen separate definitions of not apples.

dn thanks my dude. Appreciate you looking out for me. It means a lot.

I'm sure I must sound silly when im talking about a peaceful utopia, but rather than an end goal, I see it as a principle that must be upheld and will always need refining along the way. It requires free speech, but it also hinges on a population where the general attitude is to always be teachable. In the united states, there's a conservative right wing phenomenon that asserts that ignorance is strength and stagnation is civility, and this is antithetical to science. Our definitions of things change in light of new information. Our social norms are always changing and the laws must keep up with it.

This bleeds over into the Doom community, which is what I am primarily invested in, and so I must voice my opposition to it when I see it. In that case, I agree with what doomworld says their morals are -- that the community includes many different people and its important that these people do not feel ostracized. Yes, 100%. But the manner in which they do it says otherwise. I can't see these actions to be that of those who really is an ally to progressive politics OR to the survival of Doom. The way they actively seek out problematic people, mobilize to bully them to embarrassment, manufacture drama, seek out bad "patterns" of behavior on a per individual basis while minimizing the vast amount of good content they provide for the Doom community, and acting as the moral authority in which to behave in a sphere that is fundamentally about Doom -- a morally flawed game.

Do you really love dogs if you smother it with affection until it has severe abandonment issues, keep it safe from the outside world by denying it exercise, and swap out a nutritious diet by sharing your chocolate bars with it until its heart stops?

It doesn't matter how "inclusive" you are if you're spending all of your energy in the community plucking people out of it to the point where people don't enjoy being here. Is the best way to become a prominent member in this community to be a fuckin bootlicker to the people who are ready to kick you to the curb the moment you start acting out of line? Fuck out of here. A diverse art scene cannot be nurtured in an authoritarian space. People need to be free to express themselves in the way that they want.

I understand this comes with consequences and sometimes people are going to get hurt. I feel for those people, and I will fight for you. But like it or not, we are here for Doom, and the survival of this community requires a collective support of one another. The community was never in a state where I felt it was thriving enough that moderators could just axe my friends out of it at will, but it's much weaker now in the aftermath of Doom Eternal.

The health of the doom community is in content. More maps. More graphics. More music. More projects. More videos. More discussion. More posts. Progressive values helps but its not the lifeblood of the community, and it sure as fuck isn't in an authority that enforces it.

You can't seriously believe this.

One could imagine if only DW resolved this issue in private from the beginning. Not suggesting they must, but hey, how much could have been avoided. Cause I really can't concentrate on anything in my own real life because of all that was caused by past iteration. And I am partly responsible for it too, since I participated in it.

Think about it as "responsible disclosure" - major security vulnerabilities are usually discussed behind closed doors. Once again, it is not mandatory but it is a tried practice that exists for a reason.

AUDIBLE SIGH...

I wouldn't rely on Cacowards as an authoritative list of elite wads. The better way to find good wads is to randomly find an /idgames entry (via Doomworld's frontend) and check that its ratings are good.

Also it seems to be solely your interpretation that being a runner-up is a humiliating pat on the had. I just see it as "runners-up". Being there on the page gives you more attention than not being at all.