ZDL, 1 hour ago

Equilibrium was underrated. I liked it much better than The Matrix (which felt like some pretty shallow people trying to be deep while rehashing SF themes dating back to about the time I was born). I mean Equilibrium wasn’t especially original either (part Brave New World, part 1984, and part Fahrenheit 451) but it didn’t try to pretend to be deeper than it really was.

Drag Me To Hell was good fun.

Love Never Dies … I … it never grabbed me. Musically it was weak, IMO, which is fatal for, you know, a musical. (Same for that Rocky Horror Picture Show sequel Shock Therapy.)

Dog Soldiers was very good indeed; I should probably watch it again.

The rest are either things I’ve never heard of, or things I’ve heard of but am not interested in.

ZDL, 2 days ago

French people in general freak me out.

. . .

… Wait for it! …

. . .

I mean they eat pain for breakfast!

ZDL, 8 days ago

Do you believe this? If so, why?

Yes, I do. And I don’t view it as a “left” vs. “right” false bifurcation either. (The Americas need to grow up and realize there’s more than two directions!) There are policies that match however, the phrase and, although usually originating from the so-called “right” in the west are not universal to it and are the product of a very specific subset of that right. (And can be found in other cultures on what would be called the “left” by simplistic-minded western political thought.)

These policies cannot be meaningfully interpreted as attempting something and being cruel as a byproduct since it’s trivial to show they don’t actually accomplish their purported aims. You have to look elsewhere for the goal, and the one consistent thing across all of them is that they hurt an “out” group.

So you don’t believe this “the cruelty is the point” exists?

https://ttrpg.network/pictrs/image/f2120494-0819-455a-8554-6cd0901fdf7c.png

Tell me, then, what the point of this was if it wasn’t the cruelty? (And be glad I picked a mild example. There are some truly horrific photos of this horrifically cruel institution out there.) Lynching was a cultural backlash of people resentful of having lost mastery—of having lost power over a group they considered (and still do!) subhuman—lashing out to cause that group misery and to inculcate fear in that group.

I could find similar kinds of photographs (including far worse ones) from Nazis (“right”), Maoists (“left”), Islamists (left and right begins to break down here), criminal gangs (even more ridiculous to label with left or right), the Japanese in Nanjing (“right”… I guess?), etc. etc. etc. In all such cases the cruelty is, in fact, the very point of the action or policy

It’s terrorism, to put it into a single word, and in all terrorism the cruelty is, in fact, the very point.

And right now in the USA in particular there’s a single group prone to lashing out at perceived (and actual) loss of standing, power, and influence. A group prone to wearing red baseball caps. (Yes, I’m talking about MAGAts here.) A group that is noted for instituting policies simply to be cruel to an out group that they perceive as somehow “replacing” them. (Yes, I’m alluding to the Great Replacement bullshit that festers in MAGAt circles.)

So yes, indeed, the cruelty is very much the point.

Is it true / false in some or all scenarios?

The statement “it is true in some situations, not true in others” can be made about literally any philosophy, political slogan, or pithy expression.

Is it with certain groups or regarding certain things?

“The cruelty is the point”-style politics are likely older than civilization. You can see “the cruelty is the point” policies and actions in the very first things ever written down. So it is, yes, tied to a certain group: humanity.

As to what it typically applies to, well, that is also a sad fact of human nature: it is an exercise of power. To many people you don’t have power unless you are making other people feel misery. This isn’t universal across humans, but there is a large chunk of humanity that believes this. We call them “sociopaths” or “psychopaths” or other such terms, and they are alarmingly common in human society. Some estimates place them at about 1 in 20 people. And by their nature they crave positions of power and thus strive for them, leading them to be over-represented in the corridors of power. Hence policies that appeal to sociopaths and psychopaths being so common.

Do you feel that speech like this is conducive to fixing societal issues?

Yes.

If you believe that policies are enacted to accomplish goal X and set out to prove that it fails to accomplish goal X, the argument is ineffective if the real goal is goal Y. For any value of goals X and Y. Even if goal Y is “cause suffering”.

To combat something and effect change, you have to know what that something really is, not the polite lies told about what it is.

Is what is considered “kind” always the best course of action?

No. And yes.

To an individual sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind to society at large. For an extreme example, I’m sure that being tossed in the slammer with the key thrown away is unkind to the “kicks” murderer, but it is kind to society at large to stop more people from dying and more people from mourning their losses. For a less extreme example, sending that hedge fund guy who ran a Ponzi scheme that defrauded thousands of people of their life savings off to jail would be viewed as “unkind” to him. But it would be far less kind to society to let that kind of sociopath run free to do more fraud to more people.

ZDL, 8 days ago

During the Nanjing Massacre, two officers got into a contest to see who could kill more people with just their swords. They went on a rampage against captured civilians, executing them by sword in a bid to see who would reach a higher body count. This was reported upon in dispatches with all the glee of a sporting match.

What was the “real point” that this cruelty was the means to reaching?

I can find hundreds or thousands of things like this in reading history. Can you find the “real point” behind all of them? Really?

ZDL, 8 days ago

Oh, every epithet gets misapplied. “Misgendering is literally violence!” “<insert person mildly conservative> is a literal Nazi!” “<insert ever so slightly social policy> is literally communism!” It is not even slightly surprising to hear that people are misusing “the cruelty is the point”.

ZDL, 7 days ago (edited 7 days ago)

“Real point” sounds very … “no true Scotsman”-ish. It sounds like the kind of diversion you use which can be applied to literally every situation. It sounds, in fact, very similar to the COVID-19 deniers saying “they didn’t die of COVID-19, they died with COVID-19”. It’s intrinsically impossible to prove after the fact and is thus a perfect diversion.

When the “real point” from a body of people seems to always, with almost no exception, include cruelty to some target—doubly so when it’s always the same target!—that whole “real point” thing starts to wear thin. It sounds very much like a diversion of a particularly ugly sort: the kind of diversion that people with no skin in the game make while treating human lives as just a data point in an intellectual exercise.

Is my language strong here? Yes. Because I’m in several of the fucking target demographics of much of the “not the real point” cruelty: female, (half-)Asian, and bi. It’s not some hypothetical mental exercise for me when I see one policy after another whose “real point” seems to always be aimed “by coincidence” at me and mine. At women. At visible minorities (Asians—especially the perceived-Chinese—in my case). At the queer community. And I can’t help but be amazed at how these “real points” always seem to have one of a small set of sub-groups in the cross-hairs. But it’s all by coincidence, of course.

The cruelty isn’t the point. It’s just coincidentally always the outcome. Aimed at the same targets. Of course.

ZDL, 7 days ago

• Lynching.
• Jim Crow laws.
• Any “tough on crime” bills that seem to always wind up aimed mostly at black and Hispanic people. (Quite by “coincidence” I’m sure!)
• Any anti-terrorism laws that always seem to sweep up “terrorist speech” of minorities (esp. “Muslims”) yet somehow completely misses the terrorist speech of actual white terrorists who then proceed to do mass shootings (of minorities, natch!) or who blow up federal buildings.
• “War on Drugs” laws that seem to always go after the crack users, but hardly ever apply to the coke heads in Wall Street (or in fucking Congress for that matter!); laws that throw black and Hispanic people into jail (often for life after the “tough on crime” bills nail them for “three strikes”) while barely slapping the hand of middle-class suburban white dudes who are doing exactly the same thing: smoking a bit of weed.

Oh, and, naturally, of course:

• every single fucking time an old white dude decides to legislate a woman’s uterus.

“By their fruits shall ye know them,” as the Bible says. You can claim that every one of this (very small sample) list of policies and laws has a “real point” … yet that real point is almost always held to the throat of an out group. Women are too uppity for the modern conservative, so practical biological enslavement is introduced. Not to stop termination of unwanted pregnancies (sex education has been proven time and time and time again to be far more effective at this!, not to mention that the support for the life of the child ends the moment the baby pops out of the mother…), but to keep women where “they belong”: under the thumb of powerful white men. You can claim that all the crime and drug bills are aimed at reducing crime, but the numbers show that these are quite thoroughly debunked as a way of actually reducing crime, and they also show that they’re disproportionately aimed at minorities that, get this, conservative assholes hate, even if the laws’ wording is “neutral”. We’ve seen the “real point” of all these laws and many more, and it points not to “law and order” as the real goal, but rather the control of out-group people through terror. The cruelty is, in fact, the actual point.

It’s all very nice for a white dude to sit there, look at the wording, and treat this as an intellectual exercise. White brodudes hardly ever feel the consequences of these nice intellectual puzzles, after all. Their skin isn’t in the game. “The law’s wording doesn’t reference hatred of minorities or of women, so it must have another point.” But those of us who get that point shoved deep into our body politic while watching it completely bypass white folk and especially white men get the intended message: “fear us and don’t step out of line”.

The cruelty is the point.

ZDL, 6 days ago

Again, I say “by their fruits shall ye know them”.

There is always an excuse. There is always a reason. But it’s a staggering coincidence that these excuses and reasons are almost invariably pointed at and/or applied to subgroups who are not in favour: visible minorities, women, LGBTQ+, etc. Where are the policies that accidentally hurt, say, white men? Where are the policies that accidentally inconvenience wealthy people?

No, sorry, I don’t believe in that much coincidence. I know they don’t use the language of hurting visible minorities, women, the queer community, etc. but it completely beggars belief that they don’t a) know what the impact is, and b) want that very impact.

But again, what do I know? I’m just someone with skin in the game. I guess I should defer to the white dude who is my better because he has the clearer view from his purely theoretical stance.

ZDL, 6 days ago (edited 6 days ago)

It’s easy to remove race and sex from things when you’re not in the group that’s taking it in the neck.

The Tulsa Race Massacre wasn’t done by people performing “gross and abusive amassing of wealth”. It was done by ordinary white folk who didn’t like black folk enriching themselves in Greenwood (the so-called “Black Wall Street”). Again the cruelty was the point. It was specifically used to destroy hope for black folk. You can pontificate all day about the “real point” but at the end of the day all these “real points” are directed at specific people and cause cruel suffering to those specific people.

When does the pattern click for you?

ZDL, 5 days ago

Again you utterly fail to address the point I’ve repeated at least four times now.

Please come back when you’re willing to address the elephant in the room I keep pointing to. Until then I’m not going to bother responding because you are not listening.

I’m so absolutely and thoroughly weary of the detached attitude of those who are in no way meaningfully impacted by the policies in question and who can thus treat it as an intellectual exercise where it’s mere symbol manipulation.

ZDL, 5 days ago

There’s a key word: invariably. It’s a staggering coincidence that EVERY FUCKING TIME the policies hit visible minorities, women, and the LGBTQ+ community.

EVERY FUCKING TIME.

If I picked up a gun and pretended to fire randomly and happened to hit a bullseye each time you’d likely suspect I’m aiming for the bullseye. Yet for some reason when the bullet hits visible minorities, women, and the LGBTQ+ community EVERY FUCKING TIME you think it’s firing randomly.

That’s my point.

This is not an accident. After literally hundreds of times the bullet hitting the bullseye you still think the aim wasn’t to hit that bullseye. Because you aren’t the target. You can afford to pretend it’s all happenstance and a side effect of some other factor, treating this as a harmless little intellectual exercise. But those of us with that bullseye painted on us? We can’t afford that shit. Because the bullets keep ripping into us left, right, and centre while, mysteriously, the white, middle class left in particular pretends there’s nothing to see here. (And the right just continues being the blind man shooting at the world … and somehow having the bullets repeatedly strike the body politic of visible minorities, women, and the LGBQT+ community.)

The cruelty is very much the point. The cruelty is how they intend to control those they don’t approve of. You just can’t see it because you’re not the target of it.

And I’m out of this conversation. I’m oh-so-fucking-weary of talking to the dispassionate observers tut-tutting from the sideline.

ZDL, 3 days ago

And again you missed entirely the elephant in the room that I’ve pointed out five times.

I’m out of here. Don’t bring this fucking white boy “well akschually!” catnip topic into my mentions again, please.

ZDL, 10 days ago

Por que no los dos🙃?🙃

ZDL, 11 days ago

Get a sled dog. All of the above advantages plus they like to pull heavy loads for you.

ZDL, 11 days ago

I landed a new client at work who will likely keep the company’s bills paid just by itself for the foreseeable future, giving us breathing space to do interesting things that entail some risk.

ZDL, 11 days ago

I can get pretty fancy brass, bronze, aluminum, etc. plaques made pretty cheaply.

…

Now I’m getting the urge to make something like this and put it on my apartment door.

ZDL, 11 days ago

Instigator! 🤣

ZDL, 14 days ago

🤣

ZDL, 13 days ago

👏

ZDL, 13 days ago

The Model 3 is an overpriced, shoddily-assembled car. The only reason it’s the “affordable” one is because of the huge amount of tax incentives E-vehicles get. If you had to pay the actual cost of a Model 3 you would not be calling it a “fantastic car”.

I know it’s hard for the Tesla cultists to accept, rather like the Apple cultists before them, but Tesla products are not good products for the price.

ZDL, 13 days ago

Literally 15 seconds to find.

I’m pretty sure the other states have similar incentives.

Fifteen. Seconds.

ZDL, 13 days ago

We agree here. Violence is mostly uncalled for, but sometimes it is, in fact, truly called for. Though again it needs to be laser-focused and well-communicated what the targets are and why they’re the targets. And it is absolutely essential that the violence not strike the uninvolved or your protest will fuel the opposition, not you.

ZDL, 13 days ago

Colour me a little bit suspicious here, but when someone says “all I did was disagree with X” I start wondering at what the “disagreement” looked like.

Since I only have one side of the story, I’m going to reserve judgment beyond, you know, pointing out I haven’t been banned anywhere that I know of and I quite often disagree with people.

ZDL, 7 days ago

I quit my job (working marketing for a tech firm) and then-career in very late 1999 without any parachute or soft landing zone. I just couldn’t pedal lies for a living any longer and had to get out. I then spent a year burning through my (stock-option inflated) savings as I thought about what I could do instead.

In early 2001 I made my choice. I would sell almost everything I owned, I would burn all my career bridges behind me, and I would go to China to teach “for a year or two” and get in touch with half of my family roots. EVERYBODY thought I was crazy making that choice, and my mother in particular was frantic because she’d spent her youth trying to escape China.

I’m now in my 23rd year of my stay “for a year or two”, 16 of which I spent teaching before stepping back into marketing for a firm run by a guy I love working for. (Officially on paper I’m his PA, but in reality I’m the de facto head of market research for our little consulting firm.)

That’s two major career changes, one at age 36, and one at age 52, that I’ve made in my life after leaving school. And in that first one I not only left without a safety net, I’d also very carefully burned all my career options behind me just to make sure that I didn’t get tempted to go back to working in Hell.

So congratulations! You did what I did, only with even MORE guts involved. Kudos!