What grabs you by the pussy?

"I don't need you anymore

I can't use you anymore"

 

Garbage - Deadwood

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"I love the enemy, my love is the enemy

They say they don't want fame but they get famous when we fuck"

 

Marilyn Manson - Slutgarden

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"I went to Mother and asked her, “What do they do in the boygroups?”
“Perform natural selection,” she said, not in my language but in hers, in a strained tone. I didn’t always understand Hainish any more and had no idea what she meant, but the tone of her voice upset me; and to my horror I saw she had begun to cry silently."

 

Ursula K. LeGuin - Solitude

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"Another 'sister'? This is a jail, not a harem, Captain Butler." 

Gone with the Wind

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Though Disco Elysium dutifully toed the "man bad, woman good" party line, it did insert a couple of easily ignored sotto voce counterpoints, like Measurehead's entourage.

Measurehead himself (the lummox on the extreme right*) is hired muscle for the mob, a pseudointellectual, devoted and all-consumed racist justifying his views (per the moniker) to a large extent by phrenology. It feels entirely natural for him to be supplied with an estrogen brigade puffing up his ego non-stop.

 

An article caught my attention a couple months ago, questioning the social impact of Russia's returning troops from its invasion of Ukraine, especially given its recruitment of prison inmates, illustrated by the case of a wife-murderer set loose by the authorities only to kill his new girlfriend after his glorious return from the front. But here's the thing: he had a wife. He had a girlfriend. Sadistic hired muscle has no trouble attracting mates. To me, such cases routinely recall that Andrea Dworkin, whose name may not be dropped much these days but whose bigoted demagoguery during the '80s and '90s became the mainstream, anti-sexual "all men are criminals" feminism of the past couple of decades (and became encoded into law via her co-conspirator MacKinnon) backed up her murderous screeching by the street cred of having been a battered wife herself in her youth. Except she wasn't some twelve-year-old child bride sold by her parents to a man she'd never met. Dworkin was an adult in her early twenties when she sought out and shacked up with a Dutch rebel as per female ape instinct to latch onto an overtly combative rising star who could challenge the system on her behalf and raise her through the social ranks by proxy. So the groupie act didn't work out for her. But that breed of violent, domineering male was her choice of mate and countless groupies breed ever more such males per their own choice, with every passing generation.

 

Of the many sound bites he's provided "grab 'em by the pussy" gets repeated by Trump's detractors more than most for the unquestioning shock value it elicits as "rapey" but it only takes two lines of context to realize the conversation was something slightly different.

 

Trump: "You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything."
Bush: "Whatever you want."
Trump: "Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything."

 

Yes, when you're a star they let you do anything. And much as I hate him, in that lowest-common-denominator assessment of human nature Trump was absolutely right. Was it supposed to be news to anyone that women throw themselves at high-ranking men? At dominant men? At men who fire others? At men who kill, abuse and enslave? At Measureheads? Moreover, why are we still treating as a shocking revelation the truism that dominance contests among men are enforced by women for their own sexual gratification?

 

I've gone over this before, but it's damn near impossible to think of any "romance" content aimed at women that does not hinge on displays of wealth and power and power-games, from softcore porn video series to romance novels to the more ridiculous Hammer Horror themed "romantasy" variety to stories written by and for heterosexual women about male characters dominating and raping each other. But even those who find themselves scandalized by such fads tend to treat them as... well, fads of the internet age, ignoring the underlying issue that only the explicitness of the sex is new. (edit: even the goofy romcom schlub who seems worthless next to the decoy love interest of higher rank must explicitly out-do his rival in some way by minute 80) It would be harder to find action/thrillers from past decades in which the hero is not required to gun down other men by the dozen before he is favored with a chaste little kiss of feminine approval ahead of the boss fight. The hallowed fields of folklore and myth and past centuries' literature were themselves replete with men butchering, dueling or buying and selling each other before the designated hero, at last victorious, is deemed worthy of the princess' attention. That they never porked was somewhat beside the point, as per female instinct watching men attack, abuse, demean and dismember each other IS sexual, being in fact the way animal females in general select their mates by relative fitness. At least now, after billions of reads on stories about Snape topping Harry or whatever, can you not admit that where there's that much smoke there might just be some underlying fire?

 

When women claim to want honest, decent men, they are flat-out lying. They want dictators. They want murderous thugs. They want avaricious robber barons, and the entire feminist movement has lied on their behalf for centuries by feigning innocence among the unfairer sex every time they're handed more and more political power yielding no decrease whatsoever in warmongering or social inequality, because the men overtly perpetrating such acts have themselves been women's obedient and carefully selected instruments from the dawn of time.

 

Yes, Ursula, those brutish men out there, tossed into the wild beyond the protective circle of women's community "perform natural selection" - for your damn benefit. So you don't have to, and so you can mate with a winner. And if you have any doubt about that, imagine how easily the reverse could be true: that if women decided today they prefer to fuck losers, by tomorrow men would be terrified of winning!

 

 

 

 

 

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* Ugh, and I just realized the anarchist graffiti artist and the proponent of neoliberal economics are situated at the extreme "left" of the same playable area, opposite Measurehead and the strikebreaker. Maybe that's accidental, but I wouldn't put it past them to have arranged the political wings on purpose.

Making you work for it

Bloodlines 2.03 - Power up your ass

I've felt monumentally unmotivated to continue my Bloodlines 2 run, but luckily I tend to jump back into games I hate all the faster just to satisfy myself that I've gotten my money's worth and chuck them into the Bozo bin. So after cleansing my palate with a strategy campaign (that'll be faction #24 if anyone's keeping track) I waded back into the bloody morass and ground my way through the next few in-game nights. Which mostly consisted of grinding blood points.

Mmmm. Scaaaarf. D'oh!

The new resource system is... odd, and not particularly satisfying. Instead of a blood pool, each individual skill has to be charged with blood, and most can be charged at the same time in 1-3 feedings,* including bleeding your stunned enemies dry in the middle of combat. (Technically not diablerie if they're ghouls? Except you also drain vamp bosses? Not sure.) As feeding also heals you, you'll polish off your last victims each time by draining them. As a result, you rarely or never actually need to replenish your blood mini-pools outside of combat. Instead, feeding is crammed back into the system by MMO-inspired farming of melancholic/choleric/sanguine blood (yes, I heard it too; quit that spinning, Galen) as currencies to buy spells from your trainers, which you can then enable with XP. 

I have a lot of problems with this whole crap'n'kaboodle.

1) The idiotic pinball scoring for your humors, seen on the left-hand side. It seems impossible to get less than ten points per tick of sucking, or spend less than ten, but they just had to inflate the numbers to impress... whom, exactly? Second-grade dropouts that can't divide by ten?

2) Each flavor of human comes with its own minigame, with the goal being to get them out of sight into some dark alley where you can bleed them undisturbed, by chasing them, making them chase you angrily or having them follow your sexy ass. Decent bit of fun in itself, but it comes with zero skill application or dialogue. Hit the talk button and the chase triggers. So after a lot of repetitions (each skill requires ~5-15 humans, depending on cost and how completely you can drain them without a Masquerade violation) it still becomes a chore.

3) Randomized spawns. They just pop up on your map as HUD markers. There's hints of a more interesting dialogue-based system where you'd sniff out incipient victims and somehow encourage their humors to unbalance... or something(?)

- but currently it does nothing and appears to have been replaced with the ready-made HUD spawns halfway through development.

4) Homogenized demands. Talk of the four humors sounds like a prime opportunity for roleplaying, expressing your own character's personality via your favored flavors, but you'll just be asked for preset quantities by various NPCs. While each skill has different requirements, they even out to irrelevance overall. A flaw largely inflicted by:

5) Worst of all, what I mistakenly took for a Lasombra skill tree in my first post turns out to be the skill tree. For everyone. Your clan merely makes various skills cross-class in XP cost. Except cross-class availability only works when other aspects like spells or weapons remain wholly separate to lend each class some personality. Otherwise, in what sense is this still a clan system? Even if you work it into the plot "I'm so special that I don't even need a personality!" is a terrible, terrible self-insert fanfiction idea for a protagonist, subverting the setting all for snowflake narcissism.

6) As a bonus, even within a relatively limited and homogenized skill selection, several seem redundant as implemented into the slap-happy combat. You're got a couple of super-punches, that Earthshock stun plays out as a Greater Magic Missile counterpart to my Arms of Ahriman knockback/root, and I'd guess the Toreador/Ventrue's many brainwashing abilities don't play out very differently either. At least BL1 was honest about "upgrading" powers. And given you don't need any general stats or support skills, by the fourth(?) night I've already hit max power.

7) Zero noncombat skill integration. (At least for your actual protagonist; your Malkavian alter-ego is all noncombat.) And to think I specifically cited the original Bloodlines as ahead of its time among cRPGs in this regard.

8) XP grinding. You get ten (or multiples-of) points for every feeding or killing, and need them by the thousand for each ability point. (Pinball numbers again.) Quest completion does award far more, but once again, I've explicitly cited the original Bloodlines' positive example in downplaying the grind. Here though, the lack of inventory, crafting, resource pools, base customization or other ways to reward adventuring between quests forced them to re-institute it.

 

It's a bit telling of the skill system's superficiality that the second and third boss fights... don't require it. They revolve around one-two-pimp-slapping endless chains of weak adds, either not requiring or outright turning off your vampiric abilities. Out in the city, things spice up slightly once anarchs start spawning randomly on various rooftops (and finally start getting better guns) and again when Sabbat ghouls join them for rooftop firefights, but this is still a paltry amount of mob/combat diversity. And given they leash pretty close to their spawn points, you can cheese most fights by running away and returning to "stealth" kill freshly unaware mooks, Skyrim-style. But that's an old routine. Hell, despite unlocking half a dozen spells, my most entertaining moment came when I realized I could stand a street away and just lasso mooks to their deaths off ledges using my infinite free-cast telekinesis.

telekillnesis

Luckily "it's raining ghouls" doesn't count as a masquerade violation. (Man, Seattle's got some issues.)

Behold my wondrously deadly vampiric power! - of... magnets...

*sigh* I guess making more use of physics is at least one marked improvement over a title from twenty years ago.

AoW4 Factions, 3

AoW4 has managed the odd feat, unequaled since City of Heroes, of inspiring me to not just write up a character bio but constantly create new factions and give them all more or less whimsical flavor text. So here they are, one by one:

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My next couple of factions were heavily defensive tactically, with this one working best as trench warfare with healers shuffling behind it. Weirdly, strategically it's one of the more aggressive since order/materium lacks many of the others' freebies, thus needing to establish itself, and benefits from a wide vassal pool for rallying. It's not easy for me to get into the Lawful mindset, or at least to treat it as anything but evil, but I like the affirmation here, and the call-and-response dynamic rapidly establishes a leader at the podium.

It Can't Happen Here

"The conspicuous fault of the Jeffersonian Party, like the personal fault of Senator Trowbridge, was that it represented integrity and reason, in a year when the electorate hungered for frisky emotions, for the peppery sensations associated, usually, not with monetary systems and taxation rates but with baptism by immersion in the creek, young love under the elms, straight whisky, angelic orchestras heard soaring down from the full moon, fear of death when an automobile teeters above a canyon, thirst in a desert and quenching it with spring water--all the primitive sensations which they thought they found in the screaming of Buzz Windrip." 

 

 

There's a book I've been quote-mining recently, and you can expect me to keep doing so for a while longer. That's not due to its trenchant futurology or its lyrical virtuousity. Not that it's terribly written, but Sinclair Lewis' style is decidedly prosaic and strained a bit too hard to interweave It Can't Happen Here with both the middlebrow diction and jargon of 1935 and real-world references or analogies which have somewhat dropped out of public consciousness in the intervening ninety years and counting. Purely as a dystopian vision, it measures poorly against the field's defining works like 1984, Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World. It lacks the same grandiose sweep, the same universal insights. But, weirdly, all of the above can also be seen as its strong point.

 

I can't remember how I ran across the book, but its central villain's rise to power has tracked eerrily in every description and plot point that more modern phenomenon of Trumpism, from a lack of even casual acquaintance with the truth to blatantly insane campaign promises to fickle political alliances, to the blatant idiocy deliberately ignored by his supporters, to even the artificial folksiness and crass, casual dudebro mannerisms which should rightly shame any public figure out of the public eye. But don't.

 

Described from the viewpoint of a small-town New England newspaper editor, instead of dropping you in medias res into a dictatorship already established, this alternate America's rapid crash into fascism lays out the venal or delusional psychological tricks by which commoners allow or collude with their own descent into helpless subjects of a despot, during each step of heightening restrictions, privations and terror. As such the story falls into that rarer subgenre of an apocalyptic procedural, outlining day by month the personal impact of social decline, every social nicety you lose, every right you never knew you'd miss, every tiny vanishing luxury, every fresh insult piled upon injury.

 

But others surely have done all that better. The novel's true strength lies in the flip-side to its lacking universality, because it is indeed a vision of how it can happen (and is currently happening) here, in Anytown, U.S.A. Lewis captured facets of small-town yankee psychology which the more ambitious or flamboyant dystopias miss. The distinction is a white-collar vs. blue-collar one drawn elsewhere between, say, the Addams Family with their old-world manners and obscure tastes and The Munsters with their more limited appeal to the "meat&potatoes" 'Murican baseline, but also one of shallower social structures. I've said before that it's damned hard to find the traditional European gemeinschaft represented anywhere in American life, or, as a result, in their artistic output, except in stories about backwater dregs like Winter's Bone. Thus, while for example a previously discussed description of social decline in Il gattopardo might center on customs whose origins lay forgotten in the mists of time, ancestral homesteads, generational debts, restrained manners and privilege and art and millennial institutions like The Church, the cast of It Can't Happen Here inhabit a looser milieu of social clubs and college sports teams and puritanical frigidity.

 

Lewis manages to drive home the point that Americans' more confused loyalties in no way insulate them against a fascist takeover. Sure, the demographic friction might be a few centuries shorter in the making, but "niggers" 'n "kikes" nonetheless made acceptable targets of opportunity for profit-minded yankee rabblerousing. Instead of a few gigantic levers of traditional grievance which a European dictator might pull, a fascist takeover in the States must press a myriad tiny buttons, but these are still open enough for the pressing and less protected by a self-respecting bourgeois intelligentsia available overseas. All it takes is a few slogans, a few marching songs, a bit of folksy babbling about the good old days (whatever those might be) and the ever-useful harnessing of envy against one's neighbours, and up spring the gulags in Vermont as surely as they do in Siberia.

 

In may not be the most artfully penned world classic, but it's one everyone on this side of the pond probably should have read fifteen years ago.

Smeagol shot first.

The Surrender of Social Capital

"a well-run tyranny is almost as scarce as an efficient democracy"

Robert A. Heinlein - Friday 

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"What makes me sick about Hearst and the D.A.R. is that if THEY are against Communism, I have to be for it, and I don't want to be!"

Sinclair Lewis - It Can't Happen Here, 1935

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"The property of [France] is absolutely concentered in a very few hands, having revenues of from half a million of guineas a year downwards. These employ the flower of the country as servants, some of them having as many as 200 domestics, not labouring. They employ also a great number of manufacturers, & tradesmen, & lastly the class of labouring husbandmen. But after all these comes the most numerous of all the classes, that is, the poor who cannot find work. I asked myself what could be the reason that so many should be permitted to beg who are willing to work, in a country where there is a very considerable proportion of uncultivated lands? [...] Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, & to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right."

 

Thomas Jefferson - letter to James Madison, 1785

(note he was writing this shortly before Malthus provided the counter-argument to simply letting the rabble stake infinite claims for their infinite progeny) 

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Lookin' to get my culture on (as one does) I tried watching Das Lehrerzimmer, which turned out to be one of those movies every professional critic feels obligated to praise because if it's 'tackling issues' in a rudderless and stilted manner, it must somehow contain deep truths. While I'd normally welcome more criticism of modern interpersonal bureaucracy, that won't be found in a work which can itself manage no more than a tepid "careful now" as it merely confirms the existence of topics. Worse though, in order to advance such a plot without anyone playing the villain, all characters are forced to instead play the fool, making deliberately moronic choices at every step which fit neither into a realistic portrayal nor into the more consciously exaggerated old absurdist theater mold. It's hard to empathize, much less sympathize, with a bunch of clowns derping around worse than even your stupidest coworkers while the visuals and audio push you to feel invested and even anxious about their plight. I don't. I feel firing-squady about their plight.

 

One could, however, credit the flick with at least one brilliant impression on later reflection: that through that entire hour and a half of discriminatory implications and polite hand-wringing, nobody in the zimmer actually gets lehrered a single damn thing. Whatever's happening in that school, it ain't math, science and reading comprehension. And, as anyone who's met a GenZer can attest, that's all too realistic a depiction of past decades' cultural downshift.

 

On a completely unrelated topic, Bill Maher continued his descent from "tell it like it is" comedian to political mouthpiece recently with a New Rule attacking New York's newly elected mayor Zohran Mamdani and the rest of America's few Democratic Socialist politicians. Now, granted, the U.S. only acquired a semi-official socialist movement in the past ~15yrs and much of what you hear from them resembles less a valid political platform than the same idiotic virtue signaling and moral purity tests which have already sapped the (supposed) left wing's credibility. It is also true that Mamdani will either prove a Trumpish charlatan with no intention of fulfilling his ludicrous campaign promises or an imbecile whose effort will crash and burn spectacularly in a year or two, as the changes he's promised cannot be effected at a metropolitan level, either because New York is too big or too small. Taxing companies and parasitic billionaires might work for a large, powerful country leaving them less room to run with the loot, but not when they can simply move their office half a mile outside city limits. Rent control requires a shitload of ancillary subsidies and regulation to ensure apartments are actually livable. As for fully free public transit? I don't know what the hell that is, because we didn't even have it under a literal communist regime! It works well for small towns with light and predictable demand, but for a metropolitan clusterfuck? For just one problem, how many extra cops do you plan to pay to kick all the hobos out of their now free dormitory cars?

 

But none of that explains why Maher felt a need to lie in conflating socialism with totalitarian communism (especially as he himself spent decades' worth of shows outlining the differences for idiots) and pull an argumentum ad North Koream, except to virtue signal as anti-socialist to all the redneck imbeciles still obsessing over the Red Scare.

 

Funny thing: when phrase searching that Jefferson quote above, for the second hit down I got "was Jefferson a socialist?" which, given he was writing three or four generations before it even became an issue, I'm gonna call a bullshit question. How about: he was smart enough to note the absurdity of infinite wealth accumulation and the needless cruelty of enforced poverty and six and a half years later the French Revolution more than proved his point. But the only question relevant to the average moron is that of tribal affiliation: was Jefferson an "us" or a "them" either a dirty godless commie or a filthy decadent capitalist pig and should we mindlessly attack or mindlessly defend him while never bothering to understand what he said?

 

It's easy to forget that communism did originally address quite real imbalances of power like the 19th-century robber barons, sadistic fucks like the Carnegies that kept their workers under a slaver regime and could order a bought-and-paid-for private or state military to violently crush any dissent. So what will you do to prevent sadistic fucks like Bezos and Musk from starving the population to death on a whim? And what name will you append to such worker/consumer protection and individual rights measures other than socialism? Because there is none more fitting.

 

Now, of course once socialist protection measures advanced to communist state ownership - of everything - those states themselves even more thoroughly crushed the populace, because ANY human element, once allowed to reign unchallenged, will be a tsar, will be a khan, will be a Nero and Caligula and Torquemada, will gleefully bathe in the blood of innocents, will rehash every flavor of sadistic oppression soon leading to collapse. When it comes to the real-world game of civilization, if anyone wins, everyone loses.

 

But then we may simply be under an illusion that these sociopolitical transitions ever represented a discursive trade-off between publicly accessible ideologies, and that brings us back to schooling. The past couple centuries' industrialization created a demand for skilled labor and middle-class invention which forced rich investors to tolerate the lower classes' education in the interest of... interest. But they've always strained to restrict education solely to the skills needed to operate their machinery and the information age makes tighter control possible again, promises unlimited surveillance and forced consumer spending. The rise of copy-pasting artificial "intelligence" offers the rich an alternative. No longer must an educated middle class be tolerated to lead, entertain and indoctrinate so long as such functions can be automated by 1984's "versificator" and no longer need competent scientists be recruited if massive processors promise to brute-force technological solutions.

 

Thus public education must die a living death, so that the world can once again return to the perennial ape-friendly pattern of masters and slaves, and nothing in between. Kill phonics, kill multiplication tables, kill universities most of all, devote more hours to football, inculcate identity politics instead of reasoned social awareness, argue about capitalism vs. socialism while the rich get richer off corporate socialism, pick an ideology to make yourself feel big by participation and champion it to take over all of society. Crush any who would oppose your shibboleth. Much as in The Teacher's Lounge, this idiotic plot would never hold together if all the actors weren't bending over backwards to lobotomize themselves toward their primordial utility:

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"The Party claimed, of course, to have liberated the proles from bondage. Before the Revolution they had been hideously oppressed by the capitalists, they had been starved and flogged, women had been forced to work in the coal mines (women still did work in the coal mines, as a matter of fact), children had been sold into the factories at the age of six. But simultaneously, true to the Principles of doublethink, the Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules. In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much. So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming-period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult. A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them, spreading false rumours and marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate them with the ideology of the Party. It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working-hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice. The great majority of proles did not even have telescreens in their homes. Even the civil police interfered with them very little. There was a vast amount of criminality in London, a whole world-within-a-world of thieves, bandits, prostitutes, drug-peddlers, and racketeers of every description; but since it all happened among the proles themselves, it was of no importance. In all questions of morals they were allowed to follow their ancestral code. The sexual puritanism of the Party was not imposed upon them. Promiscuity went unpunished, divorce was permitted. For that matter, even religious worship would have been permitted if the proles had shown any sign of needing or wanting it. They were beneath suspicion. As the Party slogan put it: 'Proles and animals are free.'"

 

George Orwell - 1984