Divergent Societal Evolution Must Happen

I have to ask - is censorship really that bad of a thing if it's done by the mutual consent of all, or at the least the heavy majority, of parties involved? The same could be said for isolationism and the usage of older technology. You see, there's a couple key differences between what I want and what north korea has - the most glaringly obvious difference is that in these hypothetical, insular, communities - we wouldn't be shooting dissidents or starving - the second is that cultural, societal, and yes even technological, progression would be allowed - it just has to be divergent from the path that the rest of society has taken.

I am offering up a solution to nearly two decades of squandered potential for those who can't stand it - simply wind back the clocks and try again on a much smaller scale.

by Seth; 1749311979; Report

sure if this specific generation of people wants to live in this society thats fine, but what happens when these people have kids? these kids are the forced to live in this society full of heavy censorship and dont get to learn about modern technology.

by dextros; 1749312256; Report

The way I see it, if two parents of a child could look out at the world and be concerned enough about the misuse of technology, the internet, etc. etc. etc. to take this drastic of a measure - because no bones about it, this is a drastic response - then I see that as indicative of them caring deeply for their child's safety, mental well being, etc.

Already, there is a decent chunk of the upcoming generations that jokingly swear they would never let their kids onto the internet, some put that into practice - this would just ensure that it was less and less possible.

But I'll humor you, the kid wants internet access - the kid turns 18 and can legally leave and do whatever somewhere else (because the rules of the community would bar any device that could access the internet) - he would be excommunicated from the intranet - plain and simple.

Whatever happens to him in real life is none of my concern, I want my walled garden and I don't want any retards with low time preference shitting it up.

If he made a website on the intranet - which would be difficult were he excommunicated I might add, it would be assumed that he had been tainted with the rot of the world wide web, and hopefully other websites adjacent to him would defederate from him.

This is the only sane option.

by Seth; 1749312834; Report

so you would disown your child for wanting to be in modern society? i mean, what else do i need to say? youre simply an idiot

by dextros; 1749313055; Report

Are you fucking retarded? Extrapolating a little much from "they wouldn't be allowed on the intranet, and any devices that could connect to the internet are barred". I never said anything about "disowning" - I would heavily disagree with it and realize that my kid wouldn't be allowed to communicate within the confines of the intranet anymore - that's it.

This is a perfect place for me to illustrate why the internet, as a whole, has been a bad thing - and I can do so in just two words, using your post as evidence.

READING COMPREHENSION.

by Seth; 1749313865; Report

the options youve given for a kid to use modern tech in this society are a: too bad, youll use this windows 95 and youll like it, or b: move out and never come back (disowned).

by dextros; 1749314099; Report

You're either like 12 or you've got holes in your brain or something dude.

You know we had other operating systems in 2007, right? I mean, me and my family were stuck on XP, we had this old Dell Dimension - I digress, we had good enough technology in 2007 that didn't inch into every part of our lives the way it does now.

We had MP3 players, or radios, or CDs, etc. - so we could listen to music when we wanted to, without the risk of our favorite albums getting pulled down or having to deal with ads interlacing the songs (except in the case of radio, but I digress).

We had DVDs, Tapes, we went to movie theaters or watched cable when we wanted to see movies or shows or what not - and we didn't have to deal with the internet spoiling shit, or streaming services, or any of that mess.

I could go on but if you don't get the point you never will - we had good tech, it is the forcing of the internet into everything that I have taken umbrage with. This started in 2007 with the proliferation of the iphone.

I specifically said that technology would be allowed to progress, but it would have to do so within the communities - forcing it to go down a path that diverts from the way things went with the rest of society.

I'm talking about lines that run away from each other here, you're talking about one line that kept running and a point that never moved - we are not talking about the same thing, you are too dense to understand that.

Read my fucking posts you troglodyte - I said they wouldn't be able to use the intranet.

The internal network.

The intranet isn't the fucking town - the community - the enclave(s).

by Seth; 1749314627; Report

ok so the entire point of this society is that theres none of *our* modern tech, but then its ok if people have this modern tech? what the fuck is the point then lmao? to me it sounds like you just want to talk to people online who are equally brainrotted by nostalgia. you dont need an entire society for that dumbass you can probably just join a group. and my windows 95 mention was hyperbole, i was being dramatic obviously i know about windows xp dumbass. most of current media is made by millennials so its quite literally impossible to not know what a fucking mp3 players is are u srs

by dextros; 1749315274; Report

Again, reading comprehension. You gotta be some kind of slow.

When I say "no modern tech" - I mean the smartphone and everything after it. The cutoff for technology is 2007.

And good luck trying to create 2025 technology when you only have 2007 technology and none of the expertise.

I don't want people "brainrotted by nostalgia" - I want people who are willing to just eat the sunken cost of two decades of decline and start over.

Begin again.

People who want to BUILD instead of living in a constant state of enshittification and destruction.

If you can't fathom it, if you can't see the vision - just how DIFFERENT the world could be, I don't think you ever will.

Which means that you'll rot. You'll sit online, on the international network - and you'll see every place that you trod enshittified. Everything will become less fun, and the people will become more lobotomized - less capable of thinking complex and serious thoughts - you'll live to see most if not all of them replaced with algorithms that simulate interaction, etc. etc. etc.

And you'll love it - you'll eat your slop with a smile on your face.

We won't though - I want off this wild ride and I'm taking anyone with me that I can, because that's the RIGHT thing to do in my mind.

You people make me sick.

by Seth; 1749315663; Report

ur getting lost. im saying ur society is stupid because it forces children to live in this outdated world. if a child in ur society wants to access modern technology ur claim is they have to make it themself? do they not have ANY access to the outside world? do they even know about the outside world? youve literally recreated north korea because you want to "go back to the golden days" or whatever.

by dextros; 1749316322; Report

Fucking morons, all of you - and by that I do mean the british.

I shouldn't expect you to get any of the references to The Amish - they exist in America and to my knowledge were the descendants of Germans - THEY VERY CLEARLY KNOW THAT THERE IS AN OUTSIDE WORLD YOU DENSE RETARD.

Do you really think that any community could sustain itself without, specifically, interacting financially with the outside world?

If you imagine money as energy, physics alone will tell you that that system isn't sustainable.

YES you fucking retard - they would know that there was an outside world.

YES you fucking retard - they would be able to interact outside in the real world.

YES you fucking retard - they would be interacting in the outside world but still would not be ONLINE on the fucking INTERNET

YES you unbelievably fucking retarded limey - TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS WOULD STILL HAPPEN, IT WOULD JUST DIVERGE FROM THE EXISTING PARADIGM, AND WOULD LIKELY BE MUCH SLOWER TO PROGRESS DUE TO LACK OF EXPERTISE, TECHNOLOGICAL LIMITATIONS, ETC.

It's like talking to a fucking brick wall with bad teeth, holy shit.

by Seth; 1749316956; Report

do you even read ur own replies?

"And good luck trying to create 2025 technology when you only have 2007 technology and none of the expertise."

a person in this society would have to make the tech themselves, implying they have no other way to get it, implying they cannot interact with the rest of the world. maybe that isnt what u meant tho? fair mistake, maybe youd make less mistakes if you focused on making one point at a time instead of going off in rambling paragraphs?

also i love how youve completely abandoned the pretentious bullshit language you had going on in your original post, u mad? :)

by dextros; 1749317375; Report

What are they putting in the water in the uk? Heavy metals, strange chemicals to retard the populace so that they don't revolt? Is the brain damage more by nurture - or it is just intrinsic nature at this point?

How many times do I have to fucking say it.

1. ALL TECHNOLOGY THAT WAS CREATED AFTER 2007 IS BANNED AT THE OUTSET
2. TECHNOLOGY THAT CAN CONNECT TO THE PRE-EXISTING INTERNET IS BANNED, THAT MEANS WIRELESS COMMUNICATION AS A WHOLE WILL LIKELY BE BANNED
3. TECHNOLOGY WITHIN THE COMMUNITY MAY BE PROGRESSED, CREATED, MODIFIED, ETC. - PROVIDED IT IS INLINE WITH THE AFOREMENTIONED LIMITATION
4. THIS WILL ENSURE THAT ANY AND ALL TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESSION FOLLOWS A PATH DIFFERENT THAN THE ONE THAT THE SOCIETY WE LIVE IN TOOK

There, if you can't understand that little sequence of events, you never will.

I'm not "implying" anything, I've stated outright the fucking OPPOSITE - I have said NUMEROUS TIMES that they would be able to interact with the outside world - just not through the INTERNET.

The INTERNET IS THE BIG FUCKING PROBLEM.

And yes, I'm mad - I'm fucking fuming at how retarded you are, and the realization that there's an entire INTERNET's worth of retards just like you. DENSE, INCAPABLE OF BASIC READING SKILLS - EVEN WHEN I TRY TO DUMB THIS SHIT DOWN YOU CAN'T FUCKING READ.

It seems to me that the best part of you ran down the crack of your mom's ass and wound up as a brown stain on the mattress - I think you've been cheated.

Fucking boneheads, all of you.

by Seth; 1749318038; Report

ok so we're getting somewhere, thanks for clarifying. earlier on you implied that a person with access to outsider tech would just be restricted from the intranet with no real life consequences:
"Whatever happens to him in real life is none of my concern, I want my walled garden and I don't want any retards with low time preference shitting it up.", but i guess you changed your mind?

so, if a kid born into this society is unhappy with it and would rather access modern technology they would be forced to leave, which is definitely disowning. so basically, ur a terrible person? i dont know what else to say tbh

by dextros; 1749318837; Report

You can't read, you're illiterate - there's no other explanation.

Other than that you're just acting retarded - which you best not be, it's not a good look I assure you.

I've been nothing but consistent - and I didn't even say anything about what you quoted in my last message.

Do you know the "walled garden" is? It's the intranet - it's another word for the INTERNAL NETWORK. A walled off network where the internet can't get in - where people in these enclaves can enjoy communicating with each other without the burden of the various rots of the modern day internet (international network).

They wouldn't be allowed to access the INTERNAL NETWORK.

They wouldn't be allowed to use technology that can connect to the INTERNET within the enclaves.

If they were really willing to choose a fucking iphone over living in one of these enclaves, they would be told to GO SOMEWHERE ELSE.

That's not "disowning" - that's putting your foot down and saying "Not in my house".

If I get away from the internet, and the rotten society that has spawned from it - and I start a different society that also wants away from it, why would we ever want to live next to someone trying to spread it?

I swear, it's retards like you that muddy the waters on literally every topic with their inability to read and their pre-conceived notions.

"Oh, we can't ban drugs, because what if someone wants drugs, are you gonna disown your kid because they like drugs?"

No, I'm gonna tell him to quit shooting up on the fucking couch and go to rehab!

Go fuck yourself - the queen of england is burning in hell and your king has ass cancer.

by Seth; 1749319582; Report

notice how half your argument is focused on me as a person and not the actual topic? hrmmm maybe thats because your argument is stupid? plus im not patriotic at all so ur insults are just kinda funny

anyway so the definition of "disown" is to refuse to acknowledge or maintain any connection with. so by kicking your child out of ur house and also exiling them from ur society, u are definitely disowning them for... wanting an iphone.

its hilarious that u keep going on and on and onnnnn about my apparent lack of reading comprehension (ur rlly obsessed with that for some reason) yet you cant even reread ur own message and see how ridiculous you sound

by dextros; 1749320208; Report

"Get out of my house, we're still family, we can still talk and you can still come over from time to time but I refuse to have your vice under my roof" is not "disowning" you fucking retard - disowning is refusing to acknowledge them, cutting them out of the will, lying and saying that you don't even have a kid, etc. - you're moving the goalpost because you've dedicated yourself to a position brought about by your own hyperbole and inability to admit that you don't know what being "disowned" is.

Let me put it like this - rules are rules.

Rules are a good thing, I believe that.

Our enclaves would likely - I would hope - have some kind of rule barring anyone who was a convicted sex offender, or at risk of becoming one (that means anyone who was a "non offending" pedophile or whatever they call themselves these days.)

This would be an agreed upon rule, no doubt - who's gonna vote against disallowing pedophiles into the town?

Now imagine if you will that some retard, some absolute fucking buffoon, I mean pants shitting, chest slapping, window licking retarded - imagine some retard caught wind of this and started saying some shit like "but there's always been pedophiles, people in the olden days used to fuck 11 year olds, are you really gonna disown someone because they're 29 and pop a chubby when they walk by the playground?"

THE COMMUNITY WOULD BE INTENTIONALLY FORMED WITH THE INTENT OF KEEPING CERTAIN THINGS OUT. AMONG THOSE THINGS WOULD BE THE INTERNET AND THE ROT THAT IS DOWNSTREAM OF INTERNET EXPOSURE.

I don't know why I'm even explaining, and re-explaining, and then further re-explaining this shit to you - you're 18 according to your profile (but you type like a retarded fourth grader) - you can't even fathom a world that's anything similar to what I'm talking about. You weren't even remotely cognizant until like 2012, you didn't have your own thoughts until a few years after that - and likely now you subsist on a diet of algo-slop like the rest of your peers.

If there's any functioning brain cells left in that big, hollow, head of yours (I doubt there are), I bet there will come a day when you see that everything's gone wrong - and that perhaps technology has evolved to our detriment - and you're gonna wish that for just 15 minutes you could experience the world without it, but you won't be able to.

And I'm gonna be in my bunker laughing my ass off about some other shit - because I'm not gonna be thinking about anything outside of Bunkerville.

by Seth; 1749320993; Report

so firstly, dude ur not even 10 years older than me from what i can tell so you can stop playing the seniority card. its not working and makes you seem dense and ignorant. younger people deserve the right to voice their opinion.

also, i thought this town or whatever didnt allow anyone with modern technology? how would someone visit if it was against the law? tbh if i was going to visit my family thats completely estranged from society and also kicked me out for, i repeat, wanting an iphone or whatever, i definitely wouldnt want to be without a way to contact someone. also why would you let the child visit anyway? from what i can tell people who use modern technology "sicken" you and you liken them to drug addicts and... pedophiles? am i reading that wrong? so yeah why would this child even be allowed to visit if theyre a "slave minded cretin"? (wow, harsh way to describe ur theoretical child)

by dextros; 1749322761; Report

I'll play the seniority card all I want, seven years makes a lot of difference - especially in the era of micro-generations. I work with people your age, they don't understand half the shit I talk about. Just completely different worlds we grew up in - I intend to write more about this at some point, maybe later today when I get back from my afternoon errands. I digress.

It's called a fucking LANDLINE - it's how HOME PHONES WORK.

Don't have a landline? It's called the fucking MAIL. The fucking SNAIL MAIL. The UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE.

You wanna visit? Park outside of town and leave your fucking phone in the car - simple as.

Are you incapable of comprehending the idea of unconditional love - what it means, and all that mess? I hate the shit that my mom has done - she's made nothing but bad choices throughout her life, and we (my siblings and I) have had to deal with the long standing implications of it all. Regardless, that's my mom, and I love her. She can visit - she has to leave her poor decisions at the fucking door though.

What is so hard to comprehend about this?

And yes, I will compare them to pedophiles and drug addicts - because pedophiles, drug addicts, and those so rotted with internet addiction that they would choose an iphone over their family, friends, etc. all have one thing in common.

OUTSTANDINGLY POOR IMPULSE CONTROL.

by Seth; 1749323194; Report

landline? mail? is that like... landline.com? idk what ur talking abt

but anyway we both know that a mobile phone is way more capable at fast communication, and i was talking about the visitor needing communication because theres no way in god im going to my radical, extremist parents house without some way of contacting someone outside in case something bad happens. a landline is owned by the parents so thats obviously not a safe form of communication, and wtf is mail gonna do? so yeah your point is moot

and ur point abt conditional love? what are we talking abt rn. these are the laws of ur made up regressive society, you cant have these filthy outsiders visiting with their technology and rotted minds!!! u literally have laws against that

by dextros; 1749323917; Report

You'll have to excuse my two hour delay in this reply, I had errands to run.

My issue with the iphone / smart phones is actually everything that it does that isn't phone calls. "Everything devices" have created a world where the overwhelming majority are trapped in a technological slavery - I seek to combat this.

An easy way around this would be for someone to have a "dumb phone" - a portable phone that can make calls and text, nothing else. No data - no browser, nothing but calls and text. This, by the way, I've never properly come out against - because I'm not against it, my issue is with the internet pervading and perverting everything - as well as the misuse, monopolization, and enshittification of the internet by retards and corporations.

You type like a fag and your shit's all retarded.

by Seth; 1749330523; Report

ok and? ur allowed to not like the internet idgaf abt that, but ur weird authoritarian society is stupid and could easily just be a private forum or something where you and your non existent society can have a circle jerk and moan abt how good the internet was back when it took 20 minutes to download an mp3.

and yuh, i type like a fag, have you read my profile?

by dextros; 1749396079; Report

I don't know if my first reply got through or not, the site crashed momentarily when I posted it, prompting this one.

Dude, there are like three or four rules - and the federation and defederation of these intranet webrings would be done purely by the mutual consent of those involved. That's about as far from "authoritarian" as it could possibly get. I'm not looking to be some digital dictator here, that's retarded. No, I just want to find the people who want out, permanently, and offer them a way out - and a way forward.

As for the private forum bit - you very clearly don't know how the internet has functioned for the last 15 - 20 years. Search engines killed forums, imageboards, etc. by redirecting all traffic to 3 or 4 major websites. To get an audience you have to have virality and novelty (which is why this place gets flooded with tiktok kids every three months) - but most of the time that just gets hits and not lasting members, or you need to siphon a pre-existing audience from somewhere else, effectively turning your website into a different website (like when tumblr banned porn and the great migration happened to twitter, turning twitter into tumblr 2.0 for several years - or when /qa/ had an exodus to the sharty).

I want to build and facilitate the building of intentional communities built around a few central ideas, one of which is that technology should be reined in for the sake of our collective attention spans, enjoyment, mental health, etc.

And now that you bring it up, no, I haven't read your profile - because it doesn't load properly on my CRT. Every element is out of whack, it's all mishmashed, text is over other text - I don't know if you made this yourself or just copied and pasted somebody else's work (no shame in that, it's what I did) but it was done improperly. I'm actually glad you brought this up, I didn't know how to tell you in any of my previous comments.

by Seth; 1749401348; Report

my profile is made for 16:9 aspect ratio, tbh im too lazy to make it work for other resolutions because thats a lot of complicated css work (plus by making my page unusable i do filter out the mobile users who seem to be less interested in using the site properly, so in a way i can understand your frustrations with these kinds of users) but also my ui could definitely use some work

the reason i say its authoritarian is because the children born into this community havent agreed to these rules and could disagree with them, but i imagine many of them would feel trapped because who would want to leave their family, yknow?

also, you could make a forum and manually chose who can come in through some sort of verification system. i assume your idea for a society would have strict moderation for who can and cannot enter, so you could try and employ those guidelines in this forum, that way you can filter out the crowd who dont share your ideals. of course people could lie or maybe incorrectly think they qualify, but that could happen irl too. besides, the people who arent meant to be there would probably reveal themselves through their actions so you could just ip ban them lol

i was trolling a bit (a lot) earlier because i didnt see any of us changing our minds, but i do think the forum idea has some value, maybe? got bored of being a dick

by dextros; 1749421352; Report

You know what? Fair point on the page related stuff, I can understand that - we can find common ground on that one.

No child agrees with the rules of his upbringing, his upbringing is innate - it's the parents job to make decisions for the kid, teach them right from wrong, and then hope that when they get old enough to properly rebel that they won't fuck up and ruin their lives in the process. When I was a kid, I got no say in what school I went to, what I watched on the television, whether or not I could watch R-rated movies or play M-rated games, etc. - but regardless there was always some sort of reasoning for it. Mom chose the school we went to - even when we lived a county over - because it was smaller, and less violent than the other schools in our area. We weren't allowed to watch certain shows on TV, or certain movies, or play certain games - because we were young and Mom didn't want us cursing in public or imitating the violence in them. So on and so forth.

In the modern day, restricting internet access to kids is a necessity - we live in the era of widespread pornographic proliferation - even youtube has softcore porno videos on the front page from time to time, not to mention tiktok's algorithm pushing e-whores to up the watchtime and retention for advertisers - this mixed with how easy it is for pedophiles to find, interact with, and groom minors is a recipe for disaster.

We live in an era where it is an anomaly if you don't have a run-in with a pedophile online before you're 12.

With the way that the internet has sunk it's tendrils into day to day life, into all the technology that we use, into our entertainment, into our work, into our education system, into every sing facet of our day to day lives - to properly defend against it's misuse and ill-effects on the youth, getting free from it entirely is the only reasonable step.

Admittedly, it's a big big big step - but that big step will lead to much more incremental, smaller, easier steps in the right direction.

I would also like to add that, again, these communities would be community driven - the entire community would be formed with the mutual consent and governance of it's people - specifically with the goal of staying away from the internet in mind. That is quite literally as far from authoritarian as I could possible imagine, rule by citizens committee - direct democracy - an intentional community, all of these are staples of Anarchism (which I will admit, is not a philosophy I adhere to, but a broken clock can still be right twice a day).

I don't care much for what people do behind closed doors - unless it has an area of effect which encroaches upon me. The internet infects culture wherever it spreads. Culture is a shared history amongst peoples. Therefore, my neighbor using the internet in this intentional community would affect me, as well as the other neighbors.

You see, the issue there is that it would still be on the internet, meaning that the rest of the internet would be regularly accessed - even in passing - by the inhabitants of the forum. This means that there would be bleedover of modern internet culture into the forum - see the previous paragraph.

Also, I have never ran a forum - but I know someone who has. It's not very fun, and if you don't dot every "i" and cross every "t", bad things tend to happen. I won't go into specifics, the forum sat idle for a while - russians found it - the website had to be nuked for a very specific, very bad reason.

Strong digital borders to protect the userbase from the rotten and all consuming culture of the modern internet - that would be a shared ideal of the userbase of the intranet.

Yeah, I sort of figured - but I'm very serious about this, this is - I believe - a noble ambition, necessary to maintaining what I believe could be the last bastion of the internet as it was - in the efforts to create a new network that can just tank the sunken cost of the last 18 years and keep rolling like nothing happened. A community capable of "picking up where we all left off", as it were.

For the record, I don't intend to be as abrasive as I am - it just sort of happens, especially when I get a few more than a few beers deep and start typing.

by Seth; 1749439959; Report

being forced to actually review my thinking rn </3

okay so where im coming from is that whilst i DO think children's access to the internet should be monitored, i do also think that system is easily exploitable. i think i have a bit of a unique experience with the internet, being a gay man, because as a kid the only support i had was online resources. so, i do think the internet can have value to a child; without that support i got to help me figure out that i am not an inherently bad person for my preferences, i might've ended up way worse off. while i do want children to be protected from all the bad things on the internet, i also worry that children could be restricted from getting actually helpful support, under the guise of protecting them. the child is completely at the mercy of their parents morality, which works most of the time, but obviously there are bad parents that exist.

obviously queer people arent the only ones who can get support online: abused children might turn to the internet for advice or affirmation, which the abusive parents would obviously dislike, so they could easily decide to move to this internet free zone where now the child cant even go to a public library to access the internet for help. this perfect society where children are completely safe from danger online is also a perfect prison for children being abused in real life (banger line that i did not recycle from overwatch)

so, i guess in a way your idea for society wouldnt be any worse than our current one, youre just trading one issue for another. depending on what you value, your society IS better.

by dextros; 1749487893; Report

You know, I've been typing and retyping this paragraph over and over and I don't think I've got a good way of saying this, so I just have to be as blunt as humanly possible.

I feel like the realization of some grand abnormality in one's sexual development is an all too common problem in the modern age, one which didn't even exist properly two decades ago - it has only become worse with the proliferation of the internet.

That is to say, the internet has been churning out sexual deviants with access to strange and abnormal pornographic materials - as well as support structures and communities who encourage that behavior.

(Insert toaster fucker image here)|

Now I don't know the specifics of your story, but I know the specifics of mine. You see, back in my day - I had a frighteningly encyclopedic knowledge of furry porn - like I said, no beating around the bush - which I still retain a great deal of, there's no putting that genie back in that bottle - once you have that rot in your head, even when you suppress it, you're still stuck with it.

Now if I were to examine specifically where that originated - it was because I had a great vulnerability about me when I was 11 - broken home, abusive parent, bullied at school by teachers and peers alike, autistic (didn't know it though) - so when I clicked a wrong link one day and was presented with something new to me, that got the adrenaline flowing in a frightening but interesting way every time I looked at it, perhaps that misattribution of arousal rewired my brain chemistry.

It was then the kik groups, 4chan threads, 8chan threads, and so on which reinforced it.

In other words, I have taken the long way around here to say that - especially in the digital age - sexuality is more a byproduct of nurture as opposed to nature, and there would most likely not be cause for concern that some 13 year old having gay thoughts would feel shunted by the rest of this hypothetical society, because he probably wouldn't be having gay thoughts to begin with. If he was, it would probably be a good indicator that his parents had nurtured that sort of thinking - which would mean that they were sexualizing, or imposing sexualization to some degree, on their son, and they should be investigated.

As for abused kids, I do not know if you have "mandatory reporters" over there - but here in the US we do. Pretty much, if you see or suspect something as anyone doing a certain job, that joblist is basically everyone who works with kids, and then some, and you do not say something - specifically pertaining to child abuse, child sexual abuse, etc. - it brings about some level of culpability in it, legally. They will prosecute mandatory reporters if they do not report what they are mandated to report.

This is why I'm hammering home that we need to be as diligent as possible with the founding stock. Good people will have good marriages, where they won't beat or molest their kids, those kids will grow up fairly normal and well adjusted compared to society at large, and hopefully this newfound, positive, cycle will continue.

by Seth; 1749489587; Report

Pardon the intrusion, been reading through this riveting conversation - I'd like to know your definition on what a normal child is? How would you define a good marriage? What, to you, is a well adjusted person - what is "normal"?

by Hazel; 1749838646; Report

You got links to external social media sites on your SpaceHey profile, that means I can disregard any opinions you offer.

by Seth; 1748666629; Report

HELP ME BRO U CANT BE REAL

by 「𝐀𝐍𝐓𝐖𝐊𝐄」; 1748705086; Report

Antwke, I pity you - and all those like you. So rotted by the online climate of the current age that you can't perceive who is and isn't legitimate. I bet you crave "context tags", and long for interactions where every comment is followed by a "/srs" or a "/j". Every word I speak is true and honest, every interaction is legitimate, I am more real than you could ever comprehend. Take everything that I say at face value because I'm not trying to hide, subvert, or obscure anything.

by Seth; 1748710054; Report

yeesh take it to a publisher ✌✌✌✌

by 「𝐀𝐍𝐓𝐖𝐊𝐄」; 1748719312; Report

I can see, plain as day, that behind that faux aloofness - that cynicism and irony poisoning - lies a human being, kicking and screaming to get out. I hope it's chains are broken some day. I hope someday that it may breath free.

by Seth; 1748719954; Report

It's no surprise to me that the euro-adjacent australian mind cannot comprehend or even fathom the idea of communities maintaining their own sovereignty and control over their own borders - even if those borders are digital. Let me spell it out as succinctly as I can - the internet has only gone up in terms of active users, posters, etc. since it's inception - and since it's inception it's been a running theme that more users = a less fun experience. The earliest example of this is that, in the early 90's, every September there would be an influx of teens and children all across the internet because their school just got a new computer lab and that acted as a gateway drug. This kicked into high gear in 1993 and resulted in the "Eternal September", when the influx of new people overtook the original oldfags. Demographics shifted immeasurably, the old guard were pissed and likely disenfranchised from many of their old stomping grounds. I have seen this very phenomena occurring on a widespread basis - and by that I mean an international one - over the course of my entire life. The more people post in one specific spot the larger the noise to signal ratio becomes - a hard pill you're gonna need to swallow is that there's absolutely nothing that a korean, or an indian, or a pakistani, or a bangladeshi, has ever done that the overwhelming majority of Americans would ever care about - so, why are these foreigners competing on the same digital fronts for the eyes and attention of Americans? Money. Plain and simple. The intranet works purely on the concept of gathering like minded individuals from across the nation - that is to say MY nation, America - and to create a network where there is no financial incentive, and where there can be an easily enforceable moral code - I'm not asking for the world here, I just want a browsing experience unmolested by the goonerized society I'm forced to live in, where cool things are made by people out of the love for their respective medium, and where - if one enclave opens the flood gates - we can just defederate from them and never speak their names again. This is possible. It CAN happen and it MUST happen - this is an existential problem in my eyes for those who remember the internet as it was - and dream of it as it COULD BE. The Amish maintain insular communities across the US but still contact other AMISH communities here and there - they maintain their numbers through both recruitment and just raising families - insular communities of people specifically opposed to "smart" technology or the "internet of things" is way more doable than some Kaczynski level, stone age, bullshit.

by Seth; 1748616763; Report

haha, okay. leaning towards trolling, but if so, props for the dedication.

the australian mind can't fathom border control...? australia, the nation known globally for its draconian treatment of asylum seekers? the nation that was a white ethnostate until the 70s?

by the time "eternal september" came around there had already been multiple waves of people bemoaning computing reaching a wider, non-academic audience. you yourself are several levels deep in a very long chain of computing & internet geeks accussing the new blood of poserdom; at our age, we're like 5th generation posers.

you need to get some info from offline sources, dude

by gaz ☆; 1748645038; Report

also, hate to use it as a gotcha, but there's a lot of child abuse among the amish for a reason

by gaz ☆; 1748645214; Report

aaaand re: the koreans, indians, pakistanis, bangladeshis comment... racism aside, what an impressively uncurious comment. i would assume that any politically engaged american would be interested in what indians and pakistanis are doing right now at the very least

i guess americans really are as parochial as they say :P

by gaz ☆; 1748645929; Report

‘Merican here. Buddy just needs to step out of his bunker for a bit, hop over to a major city and face his shadow. All this brewing disdain for the world…this ideology only comes from a life trapped underground, fighting forever.
America is fueled by the blood of the world. To say that nobody in the US cares about foreigners is just plain wrong… progress isn’t made in an echo chamber.
I’ve read through this guys blog posts - man, you’ve got the brains, just wish your heart had a lot more room. Unfortunate.

by Hazel; 1748650731; Report

You'll have to excuse my lack of a timely reply - I had a shift at work to attend.

I assure you I'm not "trolling" - I detest the idea of being purposefully inflammatory just for engagement if you can believe it. I'll probably make a post about it at some point, but in short I value sincerity a great deal, and much of my gripes with the "way things are now" is the lack of sincerity and how it's just "par for the course" these days. I will say though, here because it helps my case that there needs to be a strong disconnect between society at large and the internet / hypothetical "intranet" - the internet has been made more insincere by the influx of everyone's peers and neighbors. In as basic terms as I can muster - peer pressure from the real world has muscled it's way into every inch of the digital world and this has destroyed creativity and enjoyability.

And yes, the australian mind can't fathom having borders because your country, much like every other country in the Anglosphere over the last fifty some-odd years - has been duped into accepting absurd amounts of immigration - replacing and displacing native born citizens and countrymen. It doesn't matter what your country was like in the 1970's - there's enough kebab shops in the cities ran by "mahkmoud" and his cabal of child brides and cousin-brothers that every australian I've ever spoken to has brought them up - and it's illegal for your people to say anything negative about them. Dead to rights, your country throws people in jail over "hate speech". I could create a twitter account tomorrow, tag the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and say "I hate non-whites and believe that the holocaust (which did not happen) should happen again." and nothing would come of it - you couldn't do the same.

You deride me as a poser simply because I was born after the old, old, days. You neglect to realize that I'm advocating for a return to those days because I know it would be more beneficial for both the users of that new, hypothetical, "intranet" - and for society at large. It's the digital equivalent of looking back through history, seeing that the peasantry in the 1800's still owned land, didn't pay income or property taxes, weren't watched day and night by the government, and weren't constantly made into paranoid maniacs by a little glowing square that fits in their pocket - and saying "perhaps we went wrong in a few places".

Make no mistake, I am saying that a different network for those who wish to be completely separate from the rotten, hollowed out, soulless, husk that we operate within the confines of today SHOULD BE PURSUED AT ALL COSTS - a way out, and a way forward, where a new culture can arise from the shared efforts of those willing to build it. One where you don't spend most of your day off "doom scrolling", one where video sharing websites don't bombard you with ads and push thinly veiled pornography to children via an algorithm, one where there aren't just three or four fucking sites ran by monopolies. I AM ADVOCATING FOR AN INTRANET THAT CAN NEVER BE CONTROLLED BY VESTED FINANCIAL OR POLITICAL INTERESTS, WHERE CONNECTION IS DONE BY THE COLLECTIVE WILL AND CHOICES OF THE USERS OF ANY TWO OR MORE PARTICULAR WEBSITES. I AM ADVOCATING FOR FEDERATED WEB RINGS.

I'm quite literally advocating to just go back to technologically what we were in 2006, before the proliferation of the smart phone - and then just start over. Technology can be experimented with and adapted, but specifically - there are a few technologies that I do not wish to see proliferated. Anything that can connect to wifi or bluetooth - into the trash it goes. I don't think "child abuse" will be an issue because I'm not building fucking Little St. James Island here - if a kid shows up to the school house with bruises the teacher is still a mandated reporter. Use your fucking head for once, holy moly dude.

Again, the euro-adjacent mind can't see things from the American perspective. No one here gives a rats ass about the rest of the world, and we haven't for years. There are holdouts of boomers and retarded college aged activists - and bot accounts on twitter used to manufacture consensus. That's it. I am 100% certain that another fucking plane could hit another fucking tower - not even, THE NEW TOWER, the new World Trade Center and everyone would say "That sucks, I still don't want another twenty years of fucking around in the sand countries." The shift has been noticeable, everywhere. The American People want out. I wrote to both of my state's Senators and my districts Representative, personally, and told them that I didn't want any indian or pakistani "refugees" resettled in my state, and that I didn't want any involvement in their dumb and gay border conflict - if I had that idea and followed through on it, think about how many people did the same thing and just didn't talk about it online.

I will now switch to addressing "Hazel".

I wish I had the bunker right now, I really do - but I'm just up against the down payment on the land presently. Within the next year I should be able to begin laying the foundations (big concrete slab) for the bunker. I would also like to state that The Bunker isn't for some kind of "end of days" situation or any of that mess, nothing like that's gonna happen, certain of it. I'm just terrified of tornadoes. I got PTSD (diagnosed) from one four years ago, and that night has encompassed much of my life since then. I tell you this not to gain your sympathy or for ass pats - I'm saying this because, the way I read your comment, it seemed that you were implying that my fear was of cities as a whole.

Make no mistake, I don't fear cities - I am disgusted by them though, heavily. They stink, the air is hard to breathe, every committee tasked with laying out the roads can't make up their damned minds - and the noise. The noise has to be the worst part, but I digress.

America is fueled by the blood of Americans. Old Stock, Heritage, Americans. It was my ancestors who came over from the Old World before the Stripes had Stars to wave with. It was my ancestors who set the nation free in The Revolution. My ancestors pushed West and conquered untamed lands from savages and mother nature herself. It was my ancestors who nearly tore everything down the middle fighting each other in The Civil War (on both sides), and were then man enough to let bygones be bygones when the gunsmoke had cleared. I could continue, but I think you get the point. This country was almost exclusively WASPs, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, for it's entire existence, and it only started to get infested with a different european diaspora, Roman popery, and other blights during the 1900's. In the Cold War, the government (namely Lyndon B. Johnson, that rat bastard, may he rot in hell eternally) decided that we needed cheap, low cost, unskilled labor to combat the Soviet Unions cheap, low cost, slave labor - so he signed the "Hart-Cellar Act" in 1965, effectively opening the floodgates at the Southern Border - as well as opening America's borders to eastern european detritus and East-asians (I will admit, I don't have a funny word to act as an insult here. "Dog eaters" or "Bug munchers" would have sufficed but I felt like it was too obvious, I hope you'll forgive me for this misstep on my part.).

This was the moment that the battle lines that we have had to fucking deal with for the last 60 years were drawn.

"Progress can't be made in an echo chamber" - you've clearly never worked with a group of people who were all on the same page, we got that shit done post haste.

I have hardened my heart out of necessity, and it won't loosen up until I never have to hear about whatever dumb shit the monopolized normal-net is jerking off over at any given moment. The moment I get a viable, long term, alternative to the internet - with like minded people who are just as fed up as I am with the way things are - is the moment you'll see me loosen up and just switch to talking about movies, cartoons, games, how I spent my Saturday, etc.

This issue is of the utmost importance to me, and I believe others need to see the importance in it as well.

by Seth; 1748669279; Report

again, i can't overstate how wrong it is to say australians "can't fathom" borders. i was going to cite my lifetime living in this country and my degree in australian history to lend some credibility to this point, but the thing is you really don't need either of those things to know that. anyone who has paid even the slightest attention to this country in recent decades would be aware that australian elections have been fought and won on the issue of border control in extremely recent history. australia has been having a resurgence in popular anti-immigrant politics since before you and i were born.

white nationalism and border paranoia are baked into the fabric of this nation; the idea that 50 years of contentious, qualified immigration reform nullifies that is supremely naive. and let me remind you that 50 years is not a long time - that's our grandparents' generation, a generation which still has direct cultural and political influence on this country. you've gestured to this reality yourself by suggesting that "every australian" has an issue with muslims, so which is it?

i know you won't hear it from me - which is fair enough, considering i'm a stranger - but racism is rotting your ability to think critically. racial hierarchy isn't real and shaping your worldview around it will only leave you with a cartoonish simulcrum of reality.

i've heard the standard of education in US universities is pretty poor, but i sincerely encourage you to seek out more information from scholarly sources. having grown up with a prominent immigration scholar in the family and studied a bit of immigration history myself, the actual primary sources paint a much more complex and interesting picture than political propaganda from either side, and they're a lot more intellectually rewarding to engage with than shitposts on /pol/ and other such things.

academia has its flaws too, to be clear - i'm not saying it should be exempt from what appears to be our mutual skepticism of insitutions - but at least it is an institution that encourages high standards, disagreement, and debate. you obviously have a strong drive to think for yourself and question the narratives that are presented to you; don't waste it by feeding your brain slop.

in regards to the rest of your comment...

a) 2006 strikes me as something of a late cut off point for someone trying to return to a less profit-oriented internet. that's post dot com bubble and everything - why then?

b) my intention isn't to deride you, but to point out that there are a hundred internet cultures that predate the ones we ourselves are nostalgic for. people snarked at the internet users of 2006 just like you're snarking at the internet users of today; if you went back further, you'd get people rolling their eyes at you for using a GUI, or accessing the internet via your personal computer instead of a timeshare.

c) the point i was trying to make about the amish is that isolated, ideologically-motivated communities provide ideal conditions for exploitation and corruption. i'm not accusing you of child abuse, i'm saying the insularity of the amish is not something to admire. and while we're on the topic, it's bizarre to romanticise the amish in one breath and criticise supposed muslim "child brides" in the next. let me be more clear this time: amish communities enable child sexual abuse.

d) you may not care about the rest of the world as an individual, but the united states is certainly invested in maintaining its global power. your country's international pull is what enables you to sequester yourself this way, not vice versa.

e) your ancestors imported unsuitable land management practices from another continent and fucked your nation's ecology beyond repair. the excesses of the city are as much their legacy as anything else.

your profile says you don't read books, so this may be a pointless exercise, but if you want some easy entry points for slightly more scholarly work on these topics i can recommend the modem world by kevin driscoll and you are not expected to understand this from princeton university press (both computing/internet history) and william cronon's famous essay, a place for stories: nature, history, and narrative (for historiography; you will probably find the discussion of the american dust bowl interesting). how to do nothing by jenny odell has some good stuff about decentralised networks in the last chapter too. if you read one, go with the cronon. but please, dude, read something.

by gaz ☆; 1748927103; Report

oh, and on a personal note... when did you become racist? did you grow up in a conservative family? genuine questions.

by gaz ☆; 1748927122; Report

I will try to be as succinct as possible with this reply, for fear that we'll both be submitting novellas back and forth if I don't.

A lot can change in 50 years, a lot can change in 10 years. It was Vladimir Lenin who said that "There are decades when nothing happens, and weeks when decades happen" - or something like that, I'm paraphrasing.

Much in the same vein, Rome wasn't built in a day - it took hundreds of years to reach it's apex - but it took less time for it to fall.

I maintain that the euro-adjacent mind cannot fathom proper border control because they're the most prone to experimentation by NGOs and other vested interests when it comes to immigration - airdropping any number of strange foreigners into an area in large numbers to see what happens.

In the big cities in America, as well as the small towns - we have been victims of this as well, but we have had significantly more pushback than the euros and euro adjacents - primarily because we have a right to free speech, granted by God and ensured by the state.

I am allowed to speak out against migrants being dropped into small town, USA - as loudly as I wish - but Australia as well as other European and European Adjacent countries outlaw this talk, or at the least, make their laws against speech as vague as possible to fit the current agenda of whoever's in office.

As for American Academia - it has been devalued in ways you would never imagine were you to not see it with your own eyes. The "Educational Industrial Complex" as I often refer to it - does little to teach, really it's just a big funding scheme to get money in the pockets of the owners - and to churn out useless diplomas.

Even the doctorates here are often seen as worthless, you'll find a diamond in the rough - but most of the time the doctors just rush through shit, prescribe as many pills as possible (they get paid the more that they do by the way), and there has now arisen an epidemic of medical professionals using ChatGPT to diagnose people (many such cases).

I am using this as one example, but what I'm trying to illustrate is that true wisdom and knowledge - at least in America - isn't gained in a classroom, our literature is often just as devoid of any useful information - we have entered an age where you have to learn to recognize patterns, to develop a gut instinct, and to chase down every tidbit of usable information that pertains to it yourself - with no handholding.

I don't read much anymore - key word there is "anymore", back in my younger days I was an avid reader. Comprehension nationwide has taken a bit of a dip, I can attest to that - but I like to think mine hasn't been tarnished too much - I wouldn't be having back and forths of this length if it was.

Would you believe me if I said that I haven't been active on /pol/, or for that matter any 4chan boards, since about 7 years ago? I emigrated to 8chan before the Tarrant Shooting in New Zealand, when 8chan went down (sustained bot attack from the previous owner in the wake of the shooting) I just hobbled from forum to forum, site to site, etc. etc. for years. Now I'm here.

There was even a period right after that that I just gave up on the internet, cut it off, watched basic cable (three channels on an antenna), listened to the radio.

I say this because, yes, while I was a lurker on /pol/ in my younger days - I'm not anymore. It's nothing but glow-ops, schizophrenics, and ironically enough - the long term example of unchecked immigration from the worst places online.

You see, /pol/ used to be for /pol/acks - skinheads. Then, in the wake of the election - and the banning of several subreddits - there was influx of redditors. I don't think I need to explain why I and many others saw that as a bad thing. Immediately, the demographics shifted - politically everything moved closer and closer to the center-right - then you got the hit pieces in the media, and then you got an influx of normals, people's grandparents, reds trying to raid, 12 year olds looking for a secret club, and feds. By gum, there were so many feds.

All the "real /pol/acks" left - they went to a dozen different splinter-chans, discord, rocket, telegram servers, some just went to twitter and dealt with getting banned weekly, etc.

And /pol/ is now unrecognizable to the untrained eye.

Same thing happened with my other stomping grounds - /r9k/. It was the only place that I felt at home - around the rest of the dead-ends and blackpillers - at least in my teenage years.

In short - a reddit for "incels" (different from the robots of my day, I assure you) got banned so they flooded in, more flooded in after media pundits picked up on Alek Menassian's shitty frog posting on facebook leading up to his van attack, women poured in, those women were chased by influx from /soc/ trying to get laid, and now it's all just unrecognizable bile.

Someone told me once that "There are no real robots left, they all either logged off forever or killed themselves."

So all in all, this sort of answers part of a later question of yours - I became whatever the website-based equivalent of "racist" was - against users of other websites who flooded into my stomping grounds and then proceeding to turn my stomping grounds into a crude facsimile of what it used to be. They took our names, our symbols, our history - and they derided it. They made it worthless.

That easily carried over to the rest of the web when I realized that it was happening on a much larger scale, on every website - especially the one's that everyone used.

Especially as the big three or four websites swallowed up more and more of the internet at large.

I digress.

2006-2007 is the cutoff for me as I see it as the apex of it all, the last great "good old days" before it all started going downhill. It was also the last time that the internet wasn't plagued by mobile posters - as the iphone (the first smartphone / everything device) didn't exist yet.

The iphone, to me, represents the opening of the flood gates - the gates that held back a torrent of the unwashed, filthy, lice-ridden, masses. Masses who don't "get it" - will never "get it", and whose very presence has done irreparable damage to the culture of every website.

There were no doubt elitists for the times before me, and no doubt there are elitists for the times after me - I am elitist for the times that I remembered the most fondly, not through rose tinted glasses but just through the sheer examination of how good those times truly were. It was the right balance of form, function, and execution - everything was in perfect harmony in those days. Now, everything is desynchronized - out of whack, as it were.

I think you're ignoring just what the "ideology" I'm trying to build a community around is. It's the shunning of technology, post-2007, as well as the culture after that time - because it does nothing but create misery. I am of the belief that the creation of an intranet, one where information from the outside world is limited, one where culture is cultivated in real time by those contributing to it - an entirely separate history than the one we're all forced to participate in here and now online - I believe that is a noble goal. Part of that goal involves the complete and total eradication of pornography on the intranet - banning it entirely, defederating from sites that post it or enable it's posting. I say this because - as society has become more sexually depraved, as pornography has proliferated - I believe that it's plain to see that pedophilia has spiked up, as has child exploitation and all things related.

So in other words, I believe that creating a network that cannot be used to proliferate pornography - as well as communities which do not communicate with the outside world in such a way that they could transmit pornography into their homes - would actually lower any instances of specifically child sexual abuse.

There's also a grand need to rigorously filter out any of the "founding members" of these enclaves - as pedophiles beget more pedophiles. I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but those who were abused as kids (sexually), tend to repeat what was done to them. Can't have that - this whole intranet idea and the erecting of digital boundaries and borders hinges on ensuring that the founding members are of good standing, and won't fuck up a good thing by doing something as stupid as diddling a kid.

I have lived just one town over from the Amish all my life, and I have worked with them many times. Never once have I heard of Amish Child Sexual Abuse - because the Amish punish their own, and rather severely so I've heard.

It's not just me who doesn't care for the rest of the world's squabbles, it my peers, family, friends, everyone in my area - and for the most part, half or over half of the country. I am firm and serious in my belief that another plane could hit the new World Trade Center - and no one would want to enlist to "fight the good fight" - because we're all so tired of it all that it isn't funny. We have "intervention fatigue" - and no one's buying the old lines anymore. Most soldiers don't enlist for "glory" or any of that mess anymore, they enlist for money. Plain and simple. They're mercenaries, and they know it. Most people aren't even in proper compliance with their draft registration - I would assume.

My ancestors voted for the man who made our national parks, ensuring that half the country wouldn't lose it's woodlands, rivers, streams, mountains, etc. to the rapid industrialization of the early 1900's - that's Teddy Roosevelt for you, God Rest His Soul. Meanwhile, take a look at the "old world" - in europe it's all cities and people crammed into apartments like sardines - at least in the more "civilized" parts of the continent. Farther East you go, and the colder it gets - there you've got suitable land for whatever you please, but you have to dodge the bullets and artillery shells to get to it. I jest - but I find America's landscape to be far better and more suited to my liking than that of europe's - or australia's for that matter.

I would also like to state that - America has been making great efforts to conserve our country's national beauty for a lot longer than, and a lot more enthusiastically than - everywhere in the world that is contributing to fucking the world's ozone layer and oceans up. That's the entire continent of Africa, The Middle East, India, China, Indochina, etc.

I will chop out this portion because it legitimately steams me to think about how these continents and countries are destroying God's creation with such enthusiasm - it makes me think that the merciful option would involve an unspeakable amount of nuclear bombs. The long lasting fallout from that arsenal's usage would still have less of an impact on the Earth's natural beauty than letting the people who inhabit these areas continue to pollute our oceans and skies.

But again, I digress.

To sum this all up, if you can believe it - politics were the least of my families worries growing up. Both of my parents voted for Obama twice, and then both voted for Trump twice - I never discuss politics with either of them though because they're old and quite frankly I don't think they've thought any of their positions out. Boomers in America are incapable of seeing the end result of most of their short sighted decisions.

No, I became "racist" when I watched for 100 days straight, via several livestreams - as an angry mob of reds and blacks burned down every major city in America with impunity, with the blessing of every major corporation - all in the name of a dead junkie who provably died of a fentanyl overdose.

And there are thousands, hundreds of thousands, likely millions of Americans who are in the same boat as I am - they're just a little quieter.

I don't believe my original goal of making this as short and sweet as I could has panned out. That sucks - oh well. Shit happens.

by Seth; 1748931952; Report

What an exhausting mindset to have. Your worldview is heavily shrouded in the dust of your past - such a heavy attachment to what was, and constantly running away from what IS.
You are a puzzling collection of ideologies that, frankly, I couldn’t begin to understand. From the sound of it, you’ve already built your bunker in that small town of yours, mentally asphyxiating yourself to conjure these… absurd hallucinations of the future.
What you perceive is what the world turns into. All your eyes see is flames and ashes… why do you put so much hatred to your fellow brothers and sisters? We are all trying to survive, same as you.
There is a lot more kindness waiting for you, if you could just listen. I mean, truly listen.
I wish you healing.

by Hazel; 1748959911; Report

I don't see "flames and ashes", I see patterns.

I'm old enough to remember being taught proper infosec in computer class - never tell anyone your name, your location, never post pictures of yourself online, etc.

I'm also old enough to remember all of that going out the window a few years later - when my classmates were adding our teachers on facebook and posting in excess to chase a dopamine hit.

I've seen the long goal of the way the internet will eventually be - it disgusts me.

Imagine everyone, separately, screaming into a void - forever - and the only echoes they get back are the fake accounts created to give the illusion of activity, foreigners trying to farm interactions for a paycheck, and advertisements.

No, I'll have my bunker someday - and then, by hook or by crook, The Bunkerville will come to fruition.

Until then I will continue to broadcast from the belly of the beast.

Also, if you can believe it - I'm willing to ignore a great deal of the failings of society around me as long as I have my bread and circuses, I feel I'm more honest than most in this regard.

If I got my intranet, and others like me were there - you and everyone else would never have to lay eyes on my posts, even tangentially, ever again.

Food for thought.

by Seth; 1748967761; Report

i agree that a lot can change in 50 years, and those are fine sayings to capture that sentiment. but you can't subtitute proverbs or maxims for evidence.

the simple fact is that your ideas about immigration do not map onto australia. they do not describe what has happened or is happening in this country.

i agree that knowledge need not be gained in a classroom; plenty of classrooms are garbage. the best thing an education can do is empower you to learn independently. at the same time, criticising the education system need not snowball into full-on anti-intellectualism. there is no failure of the system that can negate the fundamental importance of critical thinking and research skills.

i also agree that prior knowledge and overarching theories - what you call gut instinct and recognising patterns - have their place. truth is an assembled thing, as they say. but ultimately these are tools to aid in your analysis of evidence.

you have just encountered direct proof that these methods alone are inadequate to understand the world. in this case, relying on gut instinct and pattern recognition in lieu of evidence has led you to make basic errors. there's a phrase to describe this approach: it's called talking out of your ass. you can do better.

as far as i'm concerned, to behave this way is to reduce yourself to the level of chatgpt: hallucinating "facts" based on a vague impression of the general gist of things.

i won't directly address your point about hate speech laws in australia as i don't have the expertise. that said, i don't think you appreciate how normalised anti-immigrant rhetoric is here. i'm actually finding it somewhat challenging to explain this to you, because from my perspective, it is almost so obvious as to defy explanation. it's quite daunting to attempt to capture the overall impression of a country that one accrues over a lifetime of living there and multiple years of study.

i had originally typed out a short list of examples, but i think this one might be illustrative enough for now: milo yiannapolous, of all people, had an incredibly successful tour here in 2017, and even addressed our parliament. i'm quite confident i can prove this point beyond argument, but i hope the fact that somebody like that had broad appeal here gets the point across.

i think it's a shame to blame poor countries for the state of the world. i don't have the time to go into it in depth now, but this one is truly an issue of wealth, not country. pollution and all other forms of environmental destruction are driven by the upper and middle classes, who contribute the majority of humanity's overall emissions.

this report is slightly out of date, but a good place to start: https://wid.world/www-site/uploads/2023/01/CBV2023-ClimateInequalityReport-2.pdf

and here's a summary of a more recent study:
https://iiasa.ac.at/news/may-2025/worlds-wealthiest-10-caused-two-thirds-of-global-warming-since-1990

i don't expect to convince you on this anytime soon, but the amish protecting pedophilies from the american justice system is not a good thing. the catholic church has also pursued a policy of dealing with child sex abuse in-house, with tragic consequences.

anyhow, you've inadvertantly given me a new documentary on the topic to watch out for. looks like there's a miniseries recently out too. judging by the descriptions, it seems like there are a fair few people who have been failed by the amish policy on child abuse.

i have to start organising dinner with my girlfriend now, so that's all from me for the time being.

why did you stop reading?

by gaz ☆; 1749019295; Report

Firstly, I'd like to apologize for the delay in this comment - you see when these back and forths normally happen it's past midnight my time, and I was exhausted enough from work last night that I came in, drank one beer, and was out like a light.

All I can really say with the first part is that we're gonna just be going back and forth on this if it isn't snubbed - all I can say is that, from pattern recognition, it's the euros and the euro-adjacents that can't understand why borders are a good thing. I've had conversations, you've had conversations, we both have anecdotal evidence. I think at this point we should just agree to disagree on this point, because if we don't it'll never end anywhere.

As for "education" - I would truthfully hope it's different in australia, here in the United States, even the most fundamental and simple forms of education - the ones mandated by law and forced on every child - are effectivelty worthless. My disdain for "intellectualism" does not stem from specifically my disdain for the education system though - my disdain for "intellectuals" is predicated more on my respect and admiration of action. I seek to applaud and sing the praises of people who "do" - not just those who talk about things. The easiest topic I can give an example of here is art - in all walks. The creators create, they are the "do"ers. Meanwhile, the commentators comment on the creation, either deriding it and mocking it or praising it and examining it - either way, these so-called "intellectuals" deconstruct that which has been created as opposed to simply enjoying it. They've created nothing but a bunch of empty essays explaining what was obvious to anyone with a set of working eyeballs.

In short, I hate "intellectuals" because they're snobs, full of themselves - they get high off of huffing their own farts and they like to think that they know shit when they really don't know shit. They may be able to cite some specific passage from some book written by some dude three hundred years ago - but they lack common sense, gut instincts, etc. All the things that are necessary in day to day life.

I see intellectuals as a strain of the rest of society, and as more people have tried to become "intellectuals", this has become a much larger problem.

Another way of illustrating my admiration for one group and a disdain for another would be specifically my admiration for the applied sciences, as well as my admiration for the experimental sciences - as opposed to my disdain for the purely theoretical.

The former two actively try to create what they seek to create, while the other just writes essays.

I'm not talking out of my ass, I'm right on this and I'll die on this hill.

The opinions of the masses matter little in the face of the opinions of the ruling classes. This is why there's a strong, grassroots, opposition to immigration (legal and illegal) in every country where we feel it's ill effects, yet still it happens.

Milo's not a good example, center right, token gay guy, has AIDS - he was always a grifter and it was plain to see for a great, long, while. Even Fox News anchors hated the guy early on.

Those "poor countries" burn tires like they're going out of style, have no equivalent to the Environmental Protection Agency, no conservation laws, fuck like rabbits, fill "sacred rivers" with unspeakable amounts of garbage (that flows straight into the sea) - and one of them has a fleet of fishing boats the size of a city that is dedicated to "cornering the fishing market" (read here as stripping the sea of all natural life as efficiently as possible, destroying the ecosystem in the process). It doesn't matter who's doing it in those countries though - because it's still happening.

You want to save Earth? Something's gotta give, and "essays" and "studies" on the matter ain't gonna solve anything.

An unspeakable assortment of nuclear weapons lobbed at the houses of those responsible? That would do a lot to stop it though.

Damming the ganges river? That would stop a lot of it.

Destroying the three gorges dam. bringing the collective might of three rivers crashing down on a path where 109 or so nuclear reactors lie? That would stop a lot of it.

You know, in America, you're more likely - and I mean 1000% (this is a real number, the Department of Education itself published it) more likely to be molested as a child in a public school than in a Catholic Church? Let's not even bring up mosques and synagogues, those numbers are crazy in their own right. I digress.

I'm not Amish. When I compare the idea of these insular communities to the Amish I am doing so in regards to the intentional limiting of technology - and the rotten culture that has spawned downstream of modern technology. Sexual depravity is deeply interwoven with that aforementioned rotten culture - and routing it out will greatly, greatly, reduce the chance that some kid will be traumatized at any point in the future within the enclave(s).

As for why I stopped reading - who has the time these days? I work a full time job, years of hard labor jobs have made me tired and creaky. On the insistence of a friend of mine roughly a year ago, I knuckled down and read "Blood Meridian" - that's about it as of late though. I like passive entertainment a lot more these days - beer and VHS Tapes.

by Seth; 1749058562; Report

forgive the delay in my reply too. life happens; you know the drill.

i'm afraid that i can't agree to disagree with you on this point. that australians care deeply about (and consistently vote in favour of) border control is not a matter of anecdotal evidence, it is historical and political fact.

i've been trying to avoid overwhelming you with specific examples, but perhaps it's necessary to mention some to get the point across. what kind of evidence would you need to see to prove that there is broad concern and support for border control in australia?

we have a successful far right anti-immigration party that doubled its representation in this year's election. we had anti-immigrant race riots so significant that they made international news in 2005. all of our political parties support "turning back the boats," which was one of the biggest issues in the elections of the 2000s and 2010s.

this video is a brief primer on how that happened:

https://youtu.be/_SoghjAo8eg

and you can also take a look at these 2010s australian government ad campaigns on the topic:

https://i.postimg.cc/BQWGdvqh/hhftaf952pk71.jpg
https://i.postimg.cc/sDPbq9HX/d8b62e3b356cf87e51353acdae439b9f.jpg

recent polls (this year and last year) have shown that the majority of australians believe immigration is too high. only a few weeks ago there was a spate of attacks on chinese international students, following on the heels of recent attempts to legislate an international student cap.

is there a reason you don't want to believe australians care about borders? i promise i'm not trying to trick you or feed you an ideological line about it. to be blunt, a smarter anti-immigrationist would take this information and incorporate it into their own argument, not deny it altogether.

you've been alluding to that argument yourself with claims like "there's a strong, grassroots, opposition to immigration (legal and illegal) in every country," so i don't see why you're contradicting yourself by insisting "euro-adjacents can't understand why borders are a good thing". it's one or the other, mate.

moving on, i'm curious as to why you see artists as do-ers, but not intellectuals. when you sit down and write a blog post, do you not feel like you're creating something?

i suppose i'm about as much of an artist as i am an intellectual, and to me both processes are creative; there is certainly a lot of creative labour involved in synthesising a dozen disparate sources into a coherent, readable narrative. most of the artists i know have undergraduate or postgraduate degrees, either in fine arts or another field, so it's a bit of an alien distinction to me in that sense too. they're all fairly critical of academia themselves (as are many "intellectuals", you'll find) but they'd also all hold that their educations were a path to self-actualisation.

i can't really comment on art criticism, but i'll agree that there does exist plenty of bad, pretentious criticism overall. i'm not sure if there's a meaningful difference between a bad painting and a bad essay about painting, though; to me they're simply two different crafts, equally able to produce good or bad results. there may be certain cultural and institutional trends that encourage disagreeable results in one craft over another, but i don't think that is reason enough to reject any given approach wholesale.

the closest thing i have come to engaging with art criticism is literary criticism, and i can definitely say that the essays i read in that field were neither empty nor obvious. they added to my enjoyment and understanding of what i was reading - even the ones i didn't necessarily like. i still think about the papers i read in my class on modernist literature all the time.

this may be a goofy comparison, but i think your claim that intellectuals "deconstruct" things gets to the heart of a fandom argument i keep running into. most recently, i saw it pop up in a reddit post from a doctor who fan who was extremely angry that other fans didn't like the new episode.

it seems there are two types of people: people who view critique of a thing as destructive to that thing, and people who view critique as producing a new, additional thing. i'm certainly in the latter camp, and for me, critiquing things i like is part of the fun. but for a lot of people in the first camp, critique is perceived to "ruin" the original thing, as an actual tangible attack on the person and the artwork. cue hurt feelings, bullying other people for not sharing your tastes, etc.

if i was going to address your perspective succinctly, though, i'd probably just go back to saying... every criticism you're making of academics and academia can be made without needing to apply it universally. many "intellectuals" are snobs and bullshit artists, for sure. there are also plenty of smart, self-aware people producing worthwhile stuff. it doesn't have to be black and white.

there's a bit of an irony here in that you are critiquing critique. you also have a blog full of essays of social critique. always worth asking... who does it benefit for you to believe that intellectual enquiry is the sole domain of snobs? knowledge is power.

i hope that in a few years you can look back on your claim that lauching nuclear weapons and damming rivers would be good for our ecosystems and see how entirely batshit it is. not gonna touch that one.

also... i'd argue milo is a great example specifically *because* he's a token gay grifter. his popularity proved that there exists a significant mainstream audience for his various bullshit here. doesn't really matter why he's saying it - people showed up to listen.

i won't give you shit for being time poor. a marxist might say that's the point though; if you spend all your time making somebody else rich, you won't have any time left over to figure out what's going on. either way, i think it's worth getting back into the habit. i don't have the time or the attention span i had as a kid either, but the reading i do get around to is one of the most fulfilling parts of my life.

doesn't need to be books; that's part of why academic writing can be so good. short-form but packed with good information, and a ready list of citations (and sometimes rebuttals) if you want to follow the rabbithole somewhere else. longform (https://longform.org/) is a good website that collates longer non-academic nonfiction articles as well. YMMV.

here's the cronon article too. meditations on us environmental history. i think you've got the reading comprehension for it. https://www.williamcronon.net/writing/cronon_place_for_stories_1991.pdf

by gaz ☆; 1749521531; Report