It’s important to remember that the most iconic dystopian fiction is not a vision of the future or an insight into the darkest tendencies of human nature.
The most iconic dystopian fictions are specifically insights into the nature of the British. Orwell was not painting a vision of the future, he was opening a window into the minds and hearts of the British. Perhaps not all British people are this way, but enough of them are and enough of them have clawed their way onto the fulcrums of institution that they stomp upon the face of their kinsmen until they can all down in misery together.
Terry Gilliam’s Brazil is one of the most enlightening pieces of media and arguably the greatest depiction of proper dystopia through the lens of actual relevant sourcing: British culture and governance. In Brazil you very clearly see a society that instills a tyranny of convolution upon its populace. Everyone drowns in tubes and wires. Bureaucracy stretches out onto an exponential infinite dimension of torturous agony. The film culminates in the highest ideal a British person strives for in life, which is to torture a friend viciously for the sin of having transgressed an absurd law.
It was always laughable that high school teachers and armchair midwit philosophers would dangle the likes of 1984 in front of us as some cautionary warning against something that could ever happen to us. The truth is that while a police surveillance state or oppressive dictatorship is always a very real possibility, the excessive horror of that existence is not really something that’s universally applicable. It is nightmare that the British distinctly occupy. A cruelty that excessively morose is exclusive to certain specific societies, one in which drab misery was always present. The Russians are a good example as well, their Bolshevik communist hellscape could only have been facilitated by a people already used to trampling upon each others existence through a history of harsh cruelty. Most dystopias have generous pockets of humanity to give reprieve from the cruelties of the state, which are mostly done logistically without excessive need to crush humanity
The UK is unique in this tendency. Their cold shitty damp swamp origins fostered a brutish people who have developed an attraction to suffering, a hunger for it, a need to crush their fellow man in order to feel any sense of fulfillment. The most autonomous and independent of their ranks left for the new world or some other colony. Britain’s best always choose to leave that damp shithole, despising the ravenous maw of chattering busybodies and chastising hags who will scurry away from stab happy Africans to hone in on random natives and harass them for the sake of existing.
This is why they were so prodigious an empire. They wanted to be anywhere else but home. It’s why the mutiny on the HMS Bounty occurred, the prospect of returning to London was a promise of entering hell itself. The fascinating combination of ignorance mixed with fictional-factual toned smugness makes the English nanny drones particularly tantalizing for hate. They are so specifically programmed for crushing their fellow man that it’s not enough to simply gawk at them and dismiss them. You want to actually go to England and beat them thoroughly with large iron rods. You want to reprogram their brains via a gun pressed into their mouth as tears stream down their face. Theirs a worldview so abhorrent to all natural principles of existence that they deserve to be corrected inside of a soundproofed shipping container.
Their laws jail you for purchasing dull cookware knives while daily rape gets completely dismissed. They are so specifically rabid in their crusade to suffocate life that they reach out to other countries to prosecute people for transgressing against hate speech laws. Their country swirls into the toilet and their final dying act is to pull down and drown their fellow kinsmen when they try to escape.
@doctorsex@sickburnbro I think LFJ would be the only person Josh would make an exception for, out of sheer self-preservation. But he hasn't, yet.
In any case the blocklist drama caught multiple threads by surprise, and nobody on splinter sites, copycats, or gay ops boards is taking credit. So I'm pretty sure this is just troons being troons at each other organically. It's getting pretty funny, which is the whole payoff of watching and archiving for us.
Liz Fong Jones, the tranny that did the technical part of DropKiwiFarms, started up a new non-profit called End Networked Harassment, specifically go to after KF again. He joined BSky and posted a blocklist for "anyone who is affiiliated with Kiwi Farms or using their shibboleths in connection with harassment (eg "Sneed", "lolcow")".
But trannies being trannies, they infight with other trannies, who wound up on the KF list for the crime of criticizing other trannies. This pissed off even more trannies, so one of them made a copycat blocklist with the same name that added some of Elliot's allies.
@petra@sickburnbro@deprecated_ii It's a large corporation, no one accomplishes anything great there. Those places are cruise control for steady profits, which is how they can afford to tolerate the DEI junk in the first place.
The men who work there are happy enough to scoop up a good paycheck, then fuck off and do the important or interesting stuff outside of work.
@sickburnbro@petra@deprecated_ii The problem is we've promised all the dirty jobs people that their kids can go to college. That became "the American Dream" and you aren't going to propagandize Millennials and younger gens out of their white collar fantasies.
Plus we automated a lot of the factory jobs away since the 70s. When Obama did his Green Revolution bit, opening a bunch of expensive factories with government money, they only created 50-75 jobs each. That's nice in a small town, but not nearly enough raw numbers for a working population of 150 million.
@sickburnbro "take land away from families who tended it for generations, give it to new imports (who side with us politically)"
I know the accusation is overused, but this is literally every Communist implementation of the last 130 years. From Russia, to China, to Cambodia, to Cuba, etc.
@phnt@RustyCrab@deprecated_ii@sun Kind of. Active Desktop was a way to hack web pages into the background image, but it was still the core Explorer program underneath. WinXP had what you said but you could turn it off and go back to regular windows rendering. I give MS some slack on those because everyone was experimenting with the Web back then, and you could easily toggle it off.
But Windows has been on a long slide into retardation for decades now. I didn't realize they completed the journey with 11, figured it would take one more version.
@deprecated_ii@RustyCrab This is ancient lore, but MS has been repeatedly asked to "upgrade" notepad and refused. The reason was they needed a 100% reliable text editor option, and they reused it as a component in other areas of Windows. Notepad is (was?) critical infrastructure.
Adding anything like AI means the latest generation of MS devs don't know wtf they're messing with.
@sickburnbro Funny how everyone else is allowed to get exorbitant punitive damages to really stick it to the bad guys (tobacco companies, Alex Jones, etc). But we aren't allowed to harshly punish anyone involved with the vax.
@sickburnbro She's a bureaucrat drone, rubber stamping contracts. This tells me the immigration importation and distribution complex has become so large and ingrained, it's boring and routine. It's not covert ops by political operatives and NGOs.
@sickburnbro@HonkHonkBoom@Nesano Yeah, but 40K lore was explicit about female space marines being a biological impossibility. They've been trying to shoehorn them in for 2 decades now.
If "female Frontline combatants" are referencing some other faction, that's fine, there's a bunch of those. If they're excusing an actual female space marine, then the fans lost the war. (I would have expected to hear something explosive if that were the case, so it probably isn't)
@sickburnbro If I understand the law correctly, the President can just revoke their special status on his own. Or maybe refuse to renew it after it expires every few months.