News Stories Which Highlight the Structure of the System

[Fujikoma]

I guess you shouldn't flip random people the bird?

[Doktor Howl]

Ok, back when I was studying the Blue Cliff Record, there was a zen Koan I found especially disturbing, except I think it was about Huang-Po and every time his name comes up it's rather disturbing. Anyway, this Zen master has a young pupil, the master never says anything to anyone, when asked a question, he holds up one finger. That's, it.

One day, a traveller approaches the boy and asks, "What does your master teach?" and the boy doesn't say a word, just holds up a finger. The master gets pissed, REALLY pissed, and chops the boy's finger off.

This is why you can't trust Buddhists.

[Fujikoma]

Ok, back when I was studying the Blue Cliff Record, there was a zen Koan I found especially disturbing, except I think it was about Huang-Po and every time his name comes up it's rather disturbing. Anyway, this Zen master has a young pupil, the master never says anything to anyone, when asked a question, he holds up one finger. That's, it.

One day, a traveller approaches the boy and asks, "What does your master teach?" and the boy doesn't say a word, just holds up a finger. The master gets pissed, REALLY pissed, and chops the boy's finger off.

This is why you can't trust Buddhists.

Fuck, after reading it roughly four times, I chucked "The Blue Cliff Record" in the garbage, I figured the sixth patriarch would approve.

[Cramulus]

huh, it's almost the same story as Parable of the Gong

student says "how do I resist bureaucracy?"
master says "run a red light when nobody's around"
student runs red lights dogmatically
master gets creamed by student's car

[altered]

Other reasons you can't trust Buddhists:

The most well known form of Buddhism in the west is Vajrayana Buddhism (zen is a school within vajrayana), and the vast majority of its population is primarily very focused on the same shit that the evangelicals are (you go to hell for a few aeons if you are gay, you permanently divorce yourself from Buddha nature if you do drugs, and it is a curse to be born as a woman, so it is our god given duty to punish the fucking shit out of all these reprobates)

In Tibetan buddhism (a vajrayana school itself) it used to be ok to just straight up fucking murder members of other Tibetan religious orders on account of their spreading false teachings and slowing the work of enlightenment, it's thought that chod probably has some older precursors that were completely wiped out of the historical record by this shit

In most of India and Southeast Asia Buddhism has Hindu flavor and one of the demonic orders (they oppose the Buddha!) is a nondescript "subhuman" group (rakshasa, not considered to have the usual telltale traits by most Buddhists but to simply be evil beings pretending to be humans) which is conveniently used to push their favorite genocide agenda by damn near every "activist" group in western India (toward Pakistan) and almost every majority Buddhist country east of Bhutan and south of China

Bhutanese Buddhists take the bones and skin of criminals and make musical instruments out of them, this is not a joke, you can buy these online (damaru and kangling are the most obvious examples if you really want to look into it you sick bastard)

The Dalai Lama supported the killing of nyingma Tibetans and was only stopped by his exile and subsequent need to become media friendly in the west

Buddhism is no better than any other religion of its size and popularity, it's just been mysticized by stupid fucking westerners

[Fujikoma]

Yes, but watch me levitate and bend this spoon with my mind.

[Faust]

So the New Zealand shooter shouted "Subscribe to pewdiepie" on video during the rampage.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/28/18521547/pewdiepie-subscribe-new-zealand-shooting-hateful-tseries-meme
I'm not sure what to make of this other then how modern pop culture intertwines with horrifying real world events.
Some are claiming it is because Pewdiepie has become a a symbol for white supremacists (in part because of the media claiming pdp is a white supremeacist to manufacture outrage and traffic to their journalism).
Others are saying it is just a popular meme at the moment, and the incel entitled white boy star of his own narrative shooter would of course be consuming that media.

We have a broken media. We venerate an entitled Swedish dork. We make him a symbol for and against white supremacy, regardless of his feelings on it. We live stream shootings of places of worship. We share videos of shootings in places of worship.
This is who we are now.

[altered]

PewDiePie is legitimately a terrible dude. I doubt he had anything to do with this particular thing going on, but he's been called out a good twenty times or so for being basically indistinguishable from a legit Nazi.

The "Death to all Jews" sign thing, the sentence "Hitler did nothing wrong" on a sign held by Jesus in January of 2017, when pretty much everyone with a brain realized that shit was not funny, being buddy-buddy with people like Ben Shapiro and driving traffic to Sargon of Akkad, dropping slurs... oh and he says it's just humor guys, there's nothing antisemitic or racist about it, etc.

I understand your point, of course. I don't think he's consciously a white supremacist, but he's been confronted many times about his bullshit, even lost Disney's sponsorship over the Jews thing, and he has apologized publicly in that wishy washy half-assed fashion where he did nothing wrong but didn't mean to hurt anyone anyway, then gone back to palling around with far right figures. Multiple times.

He's been given the opportunity to learn and he dwells in ignorance. He doesn't deserve anyone's defense, IMO.

[Fujikoma]

The end result of hateful rhetoric and irresponsible edginess.

EDIT: I suppose that needs some clarification, when I first visited these boards I was astounded by the kind of boiling shit that was poured down onto self-proclaimed "Discordians", I didn't mind getting shit on so much, but when it happened to some other people, it seemed, from my end, to be a kneejerk reaction. It took several years to parse WHY it was a kneejerk reaction, me being an idiot and all didn't help much. Some people are highly irresponsible when they attempt to dislodge others from their sense of "reality", as they don't really consider the long-term implications.

An easily picked out instance of this, in, of all things, a hollywood movie (shudders and repents profusely to God for referencing a movie in an attempt to illustrate truth) is Farva, in "Super Troopers". There's nothing particularly witty or thought provoking about his antics. He doesn't like being the butt of a joke, even though it's clearly an attempt by his coworkers to fit him into their social structure somewhere. The "meow" joke is funny, running up to someone's car window and screaming "Chicken fucker!!!", is a lot less funny, if at all, and offers no real angle of consideration. There's humor, and then there's pure shock humor.

Not to say it all boils down to humor, but a lot of these edgy weirdos egging eachother on must think they're sharing an inside joke, a running gag, and unfortunately, there's a group that took them seriously, when, obviously, there's no way it SHOULD be taken seriously, I mean, just look at incels, ffs... but people, honestly decent folk trying to go about their lives and get home to their loved ones, planning for the future and just trying to live in mutual harmony, have been brutally murdered due to the level of derangement that can build up from a toxic peer-supported environment. At this point, there's nothing, at all, funny about it, and solutions that aren't a scorched-earth policy are looking more far-fetched as things continue to be taken too far.

I can't consider a world where at least half these people aren't joking. If it turns out more than half were/are serious, then we're so screwed the threads are stripped, for eternity.

[altered]

You've got it all backwards. The far-right playbook for years now has been kidding on the square.

Nazi salute to a picture of Andrew Jackson. "It's just a joke, stop being so sensitive you wimp," while they plan out how to one-up their idols.

The minority are those who are just joking. I think PewDiePie is actually stupid enough to be one of them, he genuinely seems to have no idea what the implications of his actions are. When he gets confronted, he acts bewildered. But he's, in the BEST case, one innocent moron in a sea of degenerate po-buckers. Pay attention to this now: in the worst case, he is playing by the far-right rulebook to a T and getting away with it.

And if you think "playbook"/"rulebook" is a figure of speech, you are an innocent child and I must inform you that I delight in throwing cold hard facts down on children.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/daily-stormer-nazi-style-guide_n_5a2ece19e4b0ce3b344492f2

[Faust]

PewDiePie is legitimately a terrible dude. I doubt he had anything to do with this particular thing going on, but he's been called out a good twenty times or so for being basically indistinguishable from a legit Nazi.

The "Death to all Jews" sign thing, the sentence "Hitler did nothing wrong" on a sign held by Jesus in January of 2017, when pretty much everyone with a brain realized that shit was not funny, being buddy-buddy with people like Ben Shapiro and driving traffic to Sargon of Akkad, dropping slurs... oh and he says it's just humor guys, there's nothing antisemitic or racist about it, etc.

I understand your point, of course. I don't think he's consciously a white supremacist, but he's been confronted many times about his bullshit, even lost Disney's sponsorship over the Jews thing, and he has apologized publicly in that wishy washy half-assed fashion where he did nothing wrong but didn't mean to hurt anyone anyway, then gone back to palling around with far right figures. Multiple times.

He's been given the opportunity to learn and he dwells in ignorance. He doesn't deserve anyone's defense, IMO.

Going to disagree with you there, partly.  I think we can both agree he is a moron, and has squandered second chances repeatedly. I doubt that he is consciously or unconsciously a white supremacist, but he has racial bias, the same ones I've seen throughout the gaming community.
He has been called out twice, and vox and wsj have gone out of their way to pin the labels of WS and racist on him.

Theres nothing that original about his personality, he very much represents that old toxic sense of humour that grew up on 4chan and SA, where rape jokes and the n word were considered funny. He also attracts that mentality of follower, and the more controversy about that, the more he attracts the far right type.

Take the sign thing, he  thought it was hilarious to put the most offensive thing he can on a system open (advertise anything for 5 dollars) to abuse that way, it's infantile, not racist. I think if he had put up something more blatantly offensive, there wouldn't have been any controversy, it would have been clear that he is fucking with a stupid system.

The second example was he said the N-word on teamspeak, this is racist and scummy and embodies the worst aspects of online gaming and should be judged on that accordingly. It's not white supremacy though. However, in the resulting media frenzy, a platform was given to white supremacists to defend him over the controversy, people he didn't want defending him.

He is the epitome of the worst parts of gamer cultures, and there is a huge part of his fan base that appeals to, intertwined with gamergate and fueled by those two media blow ups  I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of his followers are the same ones who harassed the female games journalists after that whole mess.

Saying he is pally with the far right though is exactly what I am describing about hanging labels this off him to suit a narrative. He has never spoken about Sargon other then to reference a video about starship troopers. Though Sargon repeatedly comments on him in defense against SJW's (something pwp has never said), he is the perfect cow for Sargon to Milk to spin a story of white men being disenfranchised and attacked by the media.

Shapiro contacted him through twitter, anyone who wants can see the exchange and fed into that same stupid sense of humor doing that meme review thing.
This behavior generates a cycle: People call him a racist, say he associates with racists, then racists come out in defense of him saying he is telling it like it, are empowered by it, are able to push the underdog narrative and end up shooting up temples.

Attack him, but attack him for the right reasons, or attack his putrid fanbase, but as along as that feeding of the far right goes on, its going to get worse not better.
If I ever see evidence to the contrary from him that these claims are true I would take all this back, but at the moment, it's just not there, I dont see it.

The reason I'm saying this is, and it's what worries me, is this is why trump won, and will win again. Giving the right icons by turning a whimpy apolitical bobbleheaded moron gamer who said the N word into a white supremacist racist is empowering the alt-right not dismantling them.

[Faust]

The minority are those who are just joking. I think PewDiePie is actually stupid enough to be one of them, he genuinely seems to have no idea what the implications of his actions are. When he gets confronted, he acts bewildered. But he's, in the BEST case, one innocent moron in a sea of degenerate po-buckers. Pay attention to this now: in the worst case, he is playing by the far-right rulebook to a T and getting away with it.

You posted this while I was typing, yes I would agree with this. I wouldn't say he is entirely innocent either, I think he loves the media attention.But I dont think he is playing the far right playbook, he's just a useful tool.

The worst part is I have written multiple paragraphs about "The political significance of pewdiepie", and as soon as I realised that I wanted to go throw the laptop in a lake and go live in a cave

[altered]

Stupidity isn't a defense is all I would add. He may just be that idiotic and ignorant. Most likely is, in fact. But it makes him effectively impossible to tell apart from the actually genuinely horrible individuals out there. I mean, let's be honest here: would either of us be surprised, well and truly surprised, if he came out as an actual Nazi? I'd assume no, it would be "oh, guess I gave him more credit than he was due."

Given that, I have a hard time blaming anyone for putting these labels on him possibly undeservedly. Because you /cannot tell/ if he deserves them or not.

ETA:

More to the point, it was designed to be impossible to tell by actually terrible people and 90% of white humans west of Denmark and north of Morocco that you'll meet who act that way are rabid assholes under the thin veneer of stupid.* I can't back that number up with hard evidence, but in the best case I'd estimate it's 75%, in the worst I'd say 95%.

* I have suspicions that people, white or otherwise, who act like that in Indonesia and the Philippines are similarly likely to be terrible, but I don't have any first hand experience with the shitty people from that region of the world. Suspicions based on murmurings from nice people who live there.

[Faust]

To be honest, I do think I would be genuinely surprised, I've been watching him since the early days and in a lot of ways his ignorance almost gives him a sincerity that I think has been his biggest appeal.
I would be sorely disappointed, because there are very few people I would choose to defend on something so serious.

[The Johnny]

"Suscribe to Pewdiepie" is a phrase product of an ongoing suscriber war for being the channel with most suscribers.

Hes competing against an Indian channel called "T-Series".

In one sense its a competition between legitimate suscribers (Pewdiepie) with illegitimate "T-Series" suscribers, because a lot of electronic devices such as tablets and phones ive heard have the suscription done automatically and by default to "T-Series".

But theres other competition which im sure you can all infer... a suscriber race war: indians versus the global gamer collective.

So to me, in most cases like that, "suscribe to pewdiepie" is racist coded language, not just random nonsense.