Didgeridont

2016 US Election: Day Zero

<Snipped quote by The Spectre>

Eh, I looked that up too, but who cares. It's a sick and wrong position to hold.

and I'm a glutton for punishment.

Discourse me daddy

@Ace of Hearts

>sick

>wrong

Uhhh, how?

2016 US Election: Day Zero

<Snipped quote by Didgeridont>

Wow, were you waiting all day to bust out that one, Edgy McCuck?

@Ace of Hearts

What? It's just my opinion. What's the problem?

2016 US Election: Day Zero

>wake up
>"damn, really sucks how our VP thinks you can electrocute gay people until they're straight"
>see if Roleplayer Guild is still a rank shit hole
>see this thread
>"damn, maybe electrocuting gay people is okay as long as we democratically choose to do so."

@Ace of Hearts

Well, you have to punish degeneracy in some way. I think it's obvious that Trump disagrees with this stance and not much will be done regarding the GLBTs, but we all have dreams.

B!tchfest: a healthy release for our non-roleplay annoyances.

<Snipped quote by j8cob>

I am aware that he isn't simply his public persona, but the reality is that he was primarily known as his public persona. The "Guy from the Apprentice" narrative wasn't sewn from whole cloth in the last fifteen months by the media to smear a guy who had previously been seen as an Alan Greenspan type figure.

You go back six years ago when we didn't consider him a mostly political figure and you'd find people looking at him as that guy who builds flashy casinos with his name on it and yells at Gary Busey on television. Imma assume that most people haven't exactly read his book, for instance.

<Snipped quote by Didgeridont>

Well, first and foremost I think your reading of the situation between races isn't quite true. There are still racial divides in this country this is true, but it doesn't tell the whole story. I live in a pretty mixed working class area and, everyone here being part of the same regional class culture, we get along pretty damned naturally despite race. If I drive downtown into the ghetto, or conversely if a black neighbor or co-worker went to a small town in the hills, then yeh, there is problems. But speaking of the part of the city I live in, I have more in common with a black neighbor than I do with a white man from Beverly Hills.

And I agree, cultures should be allowed to change naturally. That's kind of what I am saying actually. What I have just described is my natural cultural condition, but your theory seems to assume it is invalid and that I and my neighbors need to be artificially segregated so that I experience my culture more in line with your idea with what it should be than what it actually is. Which is to say simply that I find your concept too bizarre and rigid to ever allow me or those around me to experience culture naturally. There would have to be a culture Gestapo around telling me what Didgeridont requires my culture to be. Historically some regimes have tried it, and historically it doesn't work. The Soviets tried to enforce a culture and the people rejected it a few generations later. Franco attempted the same thing in Spain and the people rejected it only a couple of generations later. Culture is a moving thing, and if you put it behind a dam it only cracks the dam and floods outward on it's own.

And the Roman Empire doesn't work as an example. In the Mediterranean, particularly the eastern half, they absorbed cultures that were decidedly unroman and allowed them to practice their culture, and even their religion, so long as they followed civic law and refrained from converting people to cults. These places Romanticized slowly through a natural process of cultural drift. They had divisive citizenship laws this is true, but as time went on citizenship laws, for your average person, mostly just affected where you sat on the tax base. It's in the decadence of the post-Severan collapse that they begin to hold Germanic tribes introduced into their borders at arms length instead of integrating them, dividing the Empire into increasingly competitive power bases in the last century until those power bases basically tear the thing apart. They couldn't have kept those barbarians out because... well, they tried, they simply couldn't afford to. But by holding them at arms length instead of integrating them, they created the conditions for the empire to fracture as those Germanic power bases became independent.

@Vilageidiotx

Perhaps you may indeed share some traits in your lifestyle with the people who live near you. I would rather chalk this up to the culturally chimeric nature of the West rather than any meaningful connection of true culture. You share little history with these people. You don't share a background in the food you like or the beliefs you hold. You wouldn't raise children in the same way as them and you weren't taught the same values as them. There may be some overlap in your social characteristics, but on the whole, you are unable to connect with these people in the same way you would connect with someone who looks and acts almost exactly like you. The common ground you find with them is not as ideal as the common ground you might find with a person of the same ethnic and cultural background as you. That is the root of human conflict - difference. Races are different, cultures are different, genders are different, individuals are different. As long as there is difference between us, there will be conflict, in some form, no matter how minute. A successful nation is built upon people who can find the most common ground between each other. Culture is spawned from that, and is meant to preserve the unity be encoding the ideological similarities of the people into a state where it becomes easy to absorb by people of that culture. You may share values with someone who looks and acts completely different to yourself, but the cultural connection between you is weak and will continue to be weak, mainly because you are too different.

Maybe the Roman Empire was too weak of an example. Perhaps a more modern example of the strife and discord that come from a drastic change in culture would be the rise of the Ayatollah in Iran. Granted, there was a political reason for the Iranian Revolution, with the overthrow of the Shah and all, but the strongest part of the movement was its focus on religious fundamentalism. Iran was becoming more and more Westernized as a result of the Shah and the influence of the U.S./Britain, and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism was a driving force in trying to destroy this Western influence. The culture within Iran was becoming too detached with the identity of many Iranian people. Naturally, they rebelled, and tried to reform their culture and society based on what they believed was more congruent with their national identity. We could argue about the degree of success this had, especially when you consider Iran today, however the one point you cannot argue is that the connection between a people and their defined culture is integral to social harmony.

B!tchfest: a healthy release for our non-roleplay annoyances.

<Snipped quote by Didgeridont>

We've always done that though. You could take this argument and transpose it into the world of 1850's politics and, honestly, it would fit perfectly. Swap the Irish for the Mexicans and Papacy for moral degeneracy and wham bam, you've traveled into the past 150 years.

And we didn't smash ourselves together. You make it sound like the United States was some weird international particle collider experiment done from the very beginning as a purposeful attempt at multiculturalism, when reality is way more chaotic. Some people immigrated here on their own volition, others came here as refugees. Others didn't have a choice; they where either assimilated by conquest, or in the case of the black man, stolen from their rightful home. And this is history. This is how it has always worked in the entire world in every nation for all time. People move, borders shift, cultures change. You can't really draw a line around a group of people and say "This is a culture" because as soon as you do, it makes connections outside of the line, or it changes from within. To attempt to freeze a culture is absolutely futile.

@Vilageidiotx

What I meant regarding the collision of cultures was that people allowed for too much interconnection between races/ethnicities which resulted in a society where none of the participants can be truly happy.

While it may be true that culture itself changes, it should change naturally in an attempt to serve it's people. Culture is a representation of a certain racial/ethnic identity. As soon as the identity outpaces the culture or vice versa, there begins a stagnation and decline in society. You see this with the Roman Empire, where it eventually became flooded with individuals who were decidedly not Roman and did not conform to the practices of the Romans to such an extent where it preserved peace.

To say that a people and their values can be so malleable that they should not be preserved is a dangerous path to tread.

B!tchfest: a healthy release for our non-roleplay annoyances.

<Snipped quote by Didgeridont>

And these things shift. The cultural values and morals of two or three generations ago are as foreign to me as the cultural values of many other nations.

The things you are talking about are way too fluid. I can tell pretty easily that I don't have your common goals, or your ideas about what is proper morality or laws. You'd have to use force to keep me, and many many other Americans, in line with your concepts of how things are supposed to be. At that point can you say your method is any more natural or cohesive than another other method? It seems to me if you have to use increased force to keep your "cohesion" then your "cohesion" is rather brittle.

@Vilageidiotx

It is clear that the civilization we are a part of is currently in a state of cultural decline. We are too eager to cast away the values that we once had in favor of newfangled ways of seeing the world. This is exacerbated by the fact that, due to the inundation of America with unsavory characters, we are a nation that is at odds with itself in terms of demographics. The white man has different values than the black man, and the red man, and the yellow man, and the pink man, etc. Instead of trying to understand our differences and promote diverse connections between each other, we have smashed ourselves together and tried to work with the aftermath of the collision.

B!tchfest: a healthy release for our non-roleplay annoyances.

<Snipped quote by Didgeridont>

The so-called "greatness" you want isn't that though. Your "greatness" focuses entirely around your oddly-constructed system of what you believe to be "great" and what you believe to be "degeneracy". In reality, neither should be supported or fought above all else. Class is the primary conflict that we need to focus on, not those damn ess-jay-doubleyews with their ( ( ( F E M I N I S M ) ) ).

@Keyguyperson

Class is an imperfect way to categorize people. As soon as whatever "bourgeois" are properly "class-struggled" against, new boundaries will be set to separate people. The most perfect way of creating cohesive social order is via independent, homogeneous ethnicities and social orders. Borders, language, and culture are all indicative of a nation that is not only united via common goals/ideas but is also controlled by proper moral boundaries and laws.

B!tchfest: a healthy release for our non-roleplay annoyances.

<Snipped quote by Didgeridont>

I'm denying that your "greatness" even matters.

@Keyguyperson

Why wouldn't it matter? The propagation of the human race is augmented by the success of the groups they are a part of. Civilization has been a tool used to secure the next generation of humanity. I don't really get how greatness wouldn't matter, as it would help determine the success of civilization.

B!tchfest: a healthy release for our non-roleplay annoyances.

@Didgeridont
>muh redpill
Oh wow. Truly, you are the philosopher-kings of this generation. I tremble in fear of your superior IQ and pure nordic bloodline. Enlighten me, glorious ubermensch! Enlighten me with your artifact-riddled jpegs! You and your kind are truly the only independent and strong peoples remaining on this planet, what with your desire to be ruled by an eternal god-emperor and fixation on cuckold porn!

>We will preserve the things that made each nation in the world a great nation: borders, language, culture.
Spooky shit.

@Keyguyperson

ayo where the counter-argument at? Are you denying that these factors made empires and civilizations great?

B!tchfest: a healthy release for our non-roleplay annoyances.

@Didgeridont
You wanna step away from the keyboard for a while m8.

@Spud

nah mang, bring on the libs.