The state of Post-OSR content

The1True said:
Wait, we're still talking about students and gamers right? 😬
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Not at all. :)

In case you think I am a confidently smug in my mean-streets beliefs, I am myself shocked at my own core conservatism and growing sense of panic as I start to see Western society and its values on the ropes. I want my kids to have a bright future and I'm starting to panic about that...feeling a sense of guilt that I was negligent in safe-guarding the homefront while crooks and anti-Western forces were secretly (and now overtly) plundering and burning. I don't feel informed enough to know where to point the finger, but something has seriously gone wonky. The town guards are no longer at the gates and there seem to be no adults left to right the ship. Perhaps we (Gen X) are at that inevitable generational inflection point where we need to step up and take on the miserable and zero-fun job of running the world. The days of youth and youthful pastimes may be over for us. I just don't know.

And while charity and kindness are virtues, like the proverbial partying rock-star, its starting to feel like waking up one day and realizing at all your so-called new "friends" have just been robbing you blind and laughing about it. Tough decisions need to be made. Perhaps we (in the West) don't have the luxury of being "the nice guys to everyone and everything" anymore. If/when our generation steps up and tries it's best, we will inevitably be hated and labeled as villains by many. It's not going to be easy or pretty.

All the while, there is a fear of being manipulated by propaganda and the like....and a strong suspicion that today's "crucial turning point in history" and "most significant election ever" (etc) is actually the status-quo---meaning history shows, as Tolkien said, we are ALWAYS fighting that slow losing battle against evil. Every moment is a crisis, and the moment you realize how we are constantly close to losing everything we value (i.e. that which makes us relics from the 70s that are more alike than different) is also the moment lose your youth. Despite change being eternal, do we try to hold the line on anything?

Am I alone in feeling this way?

@Prince: Sorry.
 
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squeen said:
Am I alone in feeling this way?
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I tend to agree that this is a reversion to form. We have had an unprecedented period of peace, in my view, for a few reasons:

1. The construction of a system of international order.

2. Advances in technology that allowed rapid dissemination of relatively accurate information by institutions. Technology was advanced enough to make it easy to record events, but not so advanced that you could fake those recordings. And it was sufficiently expensive to disseminate information that doing so was largely the purview of institutions.

3. The technology of war was so destructive that it discouraged wars of aggression between major powers, because it destroyed the value of the territory you wanted to gain.

4. Individuals who had lived in the previous period, and took seriously concepts of public service, the preservation of international order, norms in politics, responsible journalism, and the avoidance of pyrrhic wars.

But, to bring us back to fantasy tropes for a moment, it is the doom of men that they forget. There are very few people with meaningful memories of WW2 who are alive and in a position to influence policy. Things have been really easy for a long time, and for the last 20 years or so it really didn't matter who was in power in democracies, because nobody really thought policy could have serious, existential impacts. Serious people stopped going into politics, because politics wasn't serious; and voters allowed this because they also don't take it seriously. So now political parties are populated with profoundly unserious people, and an unserious electorate elects them anyway.

As a result, the system of international order has eroded, because nobody has treated it seriously. We seem to be entering a period of interstate anarchy, which is a return to the earlier period.

News became profitable, rather than being a money-losing public service (thanks 60 Minutes :rolleyes:), which changed its focus. Technology advanced to a point where any idiot could fake information and disseminate it at will, with broad reach. Not being able to rely on information is also a return to the earlier period.

People have forgotten how mindlessly destructive conventional warfare is, having not waged one in almost 80 years; people actually seem to think that wars can be won relatively inexpensively. Moreover (and this is hypothesis on my part), I feel like the increased range of firepower encourages wars where a major power thinks it can wage war from a distance, without risking their own territory; this allows wars for domestic political purposes, because you don't really care how much destruction you are wreaking if you either (a) don't care to seize the territory of the nation you are bombing, or (b) don't really care what condition it is in when you get it. I also fear that our ability to construct things more quickly may make autocrats think it is no big deal to level cities they want to occupy. In any event, there is at least a perception among many that wars of aggression are worth the cost. This is also a return to the earlier period.

Unfortunately, our political institutions, and voter priorities, are still stuck in a period where democratic politics didn't really matter. And our governments have forgotten how to get anything done, because three years ago it didn't really matter. So we are ill equipped to manage the current situation. I don't know how people can look at the last three years and think that, for example, engaging in culture wars should be our top priority. But they do, and a lot of the electorate seems to agree. Why don't politicians do serious things and tell us hard truths? Because we punish them when they do.

So we are entering the FAFO phase of domestic and international politics. In democracies, either voters and politicians are going to figure out how to get serious, or they are going to cease to be functioning democracies; either by electing autocrats, or being forced by weakness to become clients of autocratic states.

Not being engaged in politics isn't an option anymore. To quote Trotsky, "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you."
 
Beoric said:
I also fear that our ability to construct things more quickly may make autocrats think it is no big deal to level cities they want to occupy.
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The Space Needle in Seattle was originally built in about a year (1962). Nowadays they can't even seem to upgrade a storm drain without taking several lanes of the street offline for a year. A new Space Needle today would probably take at least five years, and a new nuclear reactor takes decades of waiting now.

Is this good news that would make autocrats less warlike? I dunno, but it's a real trend.
 
Hemlock said:
The Space Needle in Seattle was originally built in about a year (1962). Nowadays they can't even seem to upgrade a storm drain without taking several lanes of the street offline for a year. A new Space Needle today would probably take at least five years, and a new nuclear reactor takes decades of waiting now.

Is this good news that would make autocrats less warlike? I dunno, but it's a real trend.
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Lack of state capacity hasn't hit everywhere. For instance, China can built military vessels at 20x the rate of the US.
 
Someone I don't know from Adam eloquently expressing my growing anxiety...
https://twitter.com/x/status/1720885631574769700
..or perhaps I am falling for just another flavor of propaganda. Pick your poison? (Hey, you like drama?...well, we've got a media feed for you.)

Or is this what it might feel like in a a prison, before the riot? Or a country on the eve of war?

Is it even conceivable that someone (something!) might be pulling these strings? Ratching up global tension? To what purpose? Why now?

It's all very surreal since geopolitically, little has changed in the past 10 years. 20? 30? We haven't suddenly run out of resource. Did COVID break something?

I ramble.
 
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squeen said:
Is it even conceivable that someone (something!) might be pulling these strings? Ratching up global tension? To what purpose? Why now?
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Um, yes, there are state actors that have been doing this for years, and it is yielding fruit. Russia, China and Iran among them. They run troll farms that are intended to pit democratic factions against each other by boosting misinformation with artificial engagement (using a bunch of fake accounts to repost and like each other's posts). They targeting every political camp and special interest group by "confirming" their worst suspicions about each other until nobody trust each other. They use the same technique to undermine trust in journalism (any mistake a journalist makes will get amplified) and in democratic institutions. I don't think this is controversial.

They don't even have to make this stuff up, they just have to boost stuff people are already saying. Someone comes up with a conspiracy theory using open source information and an argument that superficially makes sense to the uninitiated; or a politician states a false statistic or says something controversial; or a journalist gets something wrong in a way that is inflammatory; and they just boost those messages to everyone who is susceptible. Which is almost everyone.

And once buzz is generated, some dishonest or lazy opinion columnist or politician picks it up to be offended by it, and then it looks like a real story (because nobody can tell the difference between an opinion columnist and an actual journalist) and the trolls boost that. And people one one side of that issue get upset. And then responsible journalists and columnists debunk the story, and then the trolls boost that to the people on the other side of the issue, and then they get upset. And each side doesn't trust the other, because each believes their source for news and thinks the other side is lying or stupid. If we are lucky, one side has correct information; often, neither side has entirely correct information.

Right now, if you want to be able to have accurate information, you need to actively curate your sources. Which is a lot of work. Or you need to find sources that have done a good job of curating their own sources. Even that is a certain amount of work, because a lot of journalists, opinion writers and even whole newsrooms are actually pretty shit at navigating the current information environment.

EDIT: And you can't even hedge your bets by going to different mainstream media sources, because a lot of the time they are just recycling material from a wire service like AP or Reuters. Because nobody has functional newsrooms that do their own reporting any more. So if the wire service makes a mistake, it is repeated by dozens of outlets.
 
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I thought the other day; wouldn't it be great if some monolithic AI could do real time fact checking and shut bullshit down or pause it before it spreads. But, I guess even if they could build such a thing and it didn't turn into some dystopian censorbot, crapped up with the biases and predispositions of its creators (like the new Chinese ChatGPT), I guess rogue states would just build their own AI to create and hurl lies at the web at a rate that inevitably overwhelms it anyway.

Seriously though. I've lost good friends to the culture wars and I miss them. They were. They ARE good guys. They love their families. They respect the rule of law. They take care of the people around them. But then they go and say shit online that makes me want them erased from the face of the Earth. It's a sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach. I hate it. I hate whatever made me feel this way. It's no wonder that more and more moderate people see the sense in some vast and horrible reset. I remember the peace and serenity of that first, big, total shut down of the pandemic. Like whatever happens, happens. Suddenly, it seemed like there were a lot fewer people in the world and it was great! I know I wasn't alone in that, and that should be bloody terrifying.

We've lost the ability to talk to each other, and we're way to willing to 'other' people and wish them gone. That's why I love this place and keep coming back, even when it's quiet for months. I know this conversation is inviting the ire of our absentee
 
Peter Zeihan (one of Bryce's favorite geo-analyist) thinks China is heading for a massive collapse in the next 5-10 years for two reasons: population demographics and Cult of Personality at the top that prevents accurate information from flowing to the bottleneck of decision making.
 
It's sad...honestly.

I think back to the war movies like Saving Private Ryan or some of the other goodies. We got trained fighters out there, on a beach, in complete chaos and destruction. Trying to survive and fighting or even just wandering around aimlessly trying to deal and process through all the horrible actions. Tough bastards. Yet, they all--Boomers? Is that the correct term? are all disrespected and instead of tough bastards fighting to survive and win a war and eventually coming back to society with a measure of success....now we got people who get their feelings hurt over the smallest matters. Or who don't like working.

That scares and disappoints me quite a bit.

And can you imagine if there was a lot of destruction done in the US? I guess they would just rebuild Targets and Applebees because that's all they know how to build these days? Driving across the country...it's the same stuff over and over and over again.

Im awaiting the rude awakening...on my mountain. This Gen X is not going to step up for society. Sorry. I refuse to be villainized while trying to help--I've experienced that enough in my 30+ years of my career choice.

You are all welcome on my mountain. Just give me a heads up you are coming so I can disarm the booby traps.
 
The1True said:
I thought the other day; wouldn't it be great if some monolithic AI could do real time fact checking and shut bullshit down or pause it before it spreads. But, I guess even if they could build such a thing and it didn't turn into some dystopian censorbot, crapped up with the biases and predispositions of its creators (like the new Chinese ChatGPT), I guess rogue states would just build their own AI to create and hurl lies at the web at a rate that inevitably overwhelms it anyway.
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Of course, the current state of AI is profoundly bad at knowing, or caring, what is true.
 
Malrex said:
I think back to the war movies like Saving Private Ryan or some of the other goodies. We got trained fighters out there, on a beach, in complete chaos and destruction. Trying to survive and fighting or even just wandering around aimlessly trying to deal and process through all the horrible actions. Tough bastards. Yet, they all--Boomers? Is that the correct term? are all disrespected and instead of tough bastards fighting to survive and win a war and eventually coming back to society with a measure of success....now we got people who get their feelings hurt over the smallest matters. Or who don't like working.
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The Boomers are their kids; less Saving Private Ryan and more The Big Chill and Wall Street. They and their parents played card games, chess, lame board games and maybe wargames.

Malrex said:
Im awaiting the rude awakening...on my mountain. This Gen X is not going to step up for society. Sorry. I refuse to be villainized while trying to help--I've experienced that enough in my 30+ years of my career choice.

You are all welcome on my mountain. Just give me a heads up you are coming so I can disarm the booby traps.
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Gen X were born circa 1965-1980, and are more 16 Candles, Clerks, and, well, Generation X. Thesee guys probably started out playing OD&D, Basic or AD&D.

Not sure if you mean Millennials, which is circa 1980-1995. Mean Girls and The Social Network. Probably started out playing 3e.

I share your prepper instincts.
 
The Boomers were the spoiled generation that benefited from their parents (the GI "Greatest" Gen) saving the world in WWII. When asked to go to Viet Nam they protested. They also were over-stuffed full of rules by the GI's and as a result rebelled against any and all restrictions on their behavior, eternally chasing abstract "freedom". Birth control (the Pill) hit around the same time, so there was a lot of sex and early feminism. They also complained about getting a job and instead degenerated Western Civ and everything about it as hippies---appropriating Black and Native American Culture (e.g. civil rights, rock 'n roll, and naturalism). They started the Culture War and made it "normal" to be atheists. They also brought swearing into mainstream movies and polite company. Generally deadbeats and narcissists that fueled the decadent/stagflation 70's until, in the 80's, they later became super materialistic Yuppies when they finally had some money. The media used to call them the "Me Generation", but they eventually took over everywhere and squashed that, rebranding themselves as great revolutionarys despite overwhleming evidence to the contrairy. They hated Nixon more than Trump and will were by-and-large democrats. Their kids are the Millennials who were fed, whole-hog, a warped liberalism/marxism and (self)hatred of the West and whom started flexing their generational muscle via social media. Now they've reached the yuppie-phase and need houses. These are sweeping and unfair generalizations, of course.

Both Boomers and Millennials were population bulges. The Silent Gen and their kids (Gen X) are the tiny waists in between the tits and the asses.

No. I'm not bitter. It's just how I remember it. My Dad also told me about how the Boomers harassed him and called him names when he flew home on a commercial flight in his uniform---returning from his (draft) tour in Viet Nam. Jerks.
 
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Beoric said:
Squeen outing himself as Gen X...
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F-NhdtxXIAATxmn


No hate, though. Really.
 
I quite like millennials. I don' t find them to be any whinier than anyone else. If anything, I find that my own generation (X) spends more time whining about boomers and millennials, than millennials spend whining about all topics combined. Except maybe housing affordability.
 
Beoric said:
I quite like millennials. I don' t find them to be any whinier than anyone else. If anything, I find that my own generation (X) spends more time whining about boomers and millennials, than millennials spend whining about all topics combined. Except maybe housing affordability.
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You and Squeen got me curious enough to Google "gen X" to find out whether I'm a member of it.
 
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