You wear makeup because you are a spineless, mindless c**t: Cosmetics Tips from the MGTOW subreddit

We all know who the real make up queen is

I would argue that a blanket claim that not paying for copies of information is “being cheap” is classist, as it embeds the assumption that everyone can afford to. (And, further, embeds the assumption that every failure to pay takes money from “poor starving artists”! In practice, in most cases, it takes money from giant media conglomerates that already have more money than God and use a lot of their surplus to buy such things as a) your government, b) smaller independent media outlets thus narrowing the range of perspectives that get much airtime, and of course c) out and out propaganda ala Sinclair’s recent controversial actions. Perhaps the rule should be “pay if the top person at the producing end makes less than you do, and it hasn’t made a profit yet, or else if you feel it deserves a donation”?)

A blanket suggestion that one should always pay also has the problem of conflating multiple issues, because the torrent version and the paid-for version are commonly not 100% interchangeable. The paid-for version is typically format-limited, often region-locked, and may not have subtitles or a translation in your own language, or etc.; whereas, the torrent versions may include (or be augmentable with, via e.g. .srt files or alternate audio tracks) more language versions than officially released, and is likely a generic digital file with no DRM that will work on any sufficiently powerful machine to which e.g. VLC has been ported (in the case of software, any sufficiently powerful machine to which the software itself has been ported).

For example, let’s say person A collects all of the MCU films (thus far) legally, and B torrents them. Person B ends up with a few dozen gigabytes of data in a folder on a hard drive. B can easily back this up onto an external drive, or a keyring of thumbdrives even, and the latter can be carried around in a coat pocket and played back on a phone or netbook while on the go. B might also have a whole passel of translations and dubbed audio versions available, including RiffTrax/MST3Kings as well as language localizations. B’s files will work if B takes the portable drives on a trip to Upper Kumzala, Nowherestan or Webebeng, Utopikanda and goes to view with on locally borrowed hardware, such as a smart TV. By keeping backups, and any time a disk fails making a fresh copy from the surviving copy, B’s copies of the films can be preserved indefinitely, and the films can be preserved indefinitely (as long as we don’t fall planet-wide into a new Dark Age, at least, and if we do we have much much bigger problems).

A’s collection, meanwhile, consists of 18 (and counting) boxes any three of which are the same size as a single 8TB 3.5″ external hard disk drive, each of which contains a scratch-vulnerable BluRay disk or two or three. There’s no (legal, reliable) way to make backup copies, so if one of those gets scratched, A has to pay for that one again or do without, and if the film has gone out of print some day in the far future, it’s simply gone for good. If A goes to Utopikanda the disks won’t play in a BluRay player there, and if A brings his own BluRay player, we can add a briefcase-sized, several-hundred-dollar chunk of electronics to the 18 boxes in his luggage for the trip. Which he must then trust to the Utopikandan power grid, such as it is, not to mention it won’t work there at all without an adapter, another three-pound brick-sized gizmo that costs another twenty bucks. If the disks or player or adapter get broken or stolen, A has no recourse (B is just out the thumbdrive keychain backup copy of his collection back home, and can get blank replacements for $30 and copy the movies back onto these in hours at no additional charge.) If one of the films lacks a localization A wants, A is SOL. And eventually, none of A’s copies will survive, so if copies in either a stone-tablet-durable or else an exactly endlessly recopyable (and not copy-protected) format don’t exist (like B’s copies!), the films themselves will eventually be lost forever (as some films from early Hollywood, and some early Dr. Who episodes and other stuff, already have been). And of course lots of devices with the theoretical ability to play the films (and which could play B’s copies) will simply refuse to play A’s copy-protected disks for various reasons.

It is possible to compromise a bit between B’s and A’s positions. Person C could build up a collection like B’s, but also, say, watch each film in the cinema when it first comes out, and Marvel and the other involved parties will then get some of C’s money via the ticket sales.

Of course, one other thing should be noted: a lot of the times, the prices on things like these are pure unadulterated greed. For example, typically, a version of Windows that’s fairly new retails for a few hundred and a version of AutoCAD that’s fairly new for a few thousand. AutoCAD is probably the less complex and labor-intensive of the two products to develop. And the marginal cost of reproducing a single additional copy of either is measured in pennies. In the long run I think we need to come up with a better system to pay for the development of information objects than “force everyone to treat them as scarce items like cars and TVs, while charging whatever someone thinks the market will bear”. Perhaps for basic stuff (operating systems, anything where a gold standard has emerged as with Photoshop and MSOffice) nationalization makes sense (as there’s a natural monopoly in the latter cases, and OS monopolies are so easily abused), while for low-overhead stuff a mix of open source and Kickstarter-style funding models ought to suffice. That leaves higher-overhead stuff without a natural monopoly, like bigger game projects and blockbuster movies — most of them entertainment. Perhaps a copyright-like system but with a much shorter term, say two years? As a rule those types of products have made back their investment by then if they ever will, so every dollar of copyright-derived economic rents on a copyright over two years old is pure profit anyway. No less a pinko Marx-loving commie bastard than Adam Smith(!) espoused taxing away all economic rents, so certainly lowering the copyright term to two years can’t be too leftist right?

Nationalizing the natural-monopoly cases does however open its own cans of worms. At least two. First, which nation? If they all get to have their own forked version they’ll end up incompatible, and you’ve got a new version of gratuitous region-locking. And everyone will likely standardize on someone’s version anyway to avoid that pitfall, probably the United States’s, so “every nation gets its own” in practice will probably mean “the US controls the world’s software”. Enter the other can of worms: NSA back doors, spyware, surveillance, censorship, etc. … Photoshop already contains censorship of a sort, as it is programmed to refuse to work with images that contain enough of the patterns printed on certain currencies. And it’s privately controlled by privately-owned Adobe Inc., who could not implement such a feature and if the Secret Service complained that Photoshop could theoretically be used by counterfeiters could respond by citing Amendment I to the Constitution and appending “, so you can go fuck yourselves”. If this sort of thing happens already just from a three-letter agency leaning on a too-big-to-fail private company that (as establisged in Citizens United) has the same free-speech rights as a citizen, it’s sure to be a lot worse if the government controls the source code for widely used and standardized-on software directly!

My answer to this is that they would have to be open sourced, and the government role would be to have a Department of Software Improvement (or similarly) whose job it was to use its budget to hire smart programmers to submit patches to fix bugs and implement popular-in-the-polls new feature proposals. With many private, volunteer and corporate eyes on the code and the submitted patches (especially, the government-written ones) to catch any attempt to sneak anything nefarious into the software (NSA back doors, censorship of information the government considers inconvenient for citizens to play around with, etc.) … and the multinational problem’s solution is likewise simple then, which is, there’s one git repository to rule them all, but every country can choose to contribute via its own version of a Department of Software Improvement to widely used software (and then, every country’s spooks will be watching like hawks for every other country’s DSIs to be trying to sneak in surveillance backdoors and kill-switches and such, ensuring that no-one can without being quickly caught and the nefarious code excised again, with a fun bonus international incident to deal with in the diplomatic arena as the only lasting reward for their efforts).

The above could even be pilot-tested, with an initial few countries instituting DSIs that contribute to Linux, Apache, Mozilla, and some other widely used things that are already open source, and often whose security against backdoors and surveillance is already a matter of national security for every country due to the sheer magnitude of the economic fallout of a sufficiently serious and damaging incident with these products. Using eminent domain to force Windows, MacOS, and an assortment of widely standardized-upon proprietary software into open-sourcedom could come later.

FeministGuy has been getting funny looks since his very first post. The very name itself makes me suspicious. I feel like there is more too that one than he lets on.

Feminist guy please address our suspicions and tell us about yourself. I’d love to know why you chose that name and where you are coming from.

So far I’ve got that you are Iranian and are somehow involved with incel’s in some capacity.

Yeah that’s some good englishing there toebean. You could do a lot worse and still be better at it than most of the English.

Oh and englishing isn’t really a word. I just made it up.

@toebean

That lipstick you talk about…. Would you mind sharing the brand? I’m still looking for one that actually lasts. And yeah. I get the whole “it glitters! I need it! NOW!” as well…. XD

@Toebean
Just wanted to pop in and say you have the best username/avatar combo. >^..^<

…and as you can imagine, Scild proceeded to fillet his “argument” quite eloquently.

Ooohhh, brb, off to see this. I have missed the magnificent takedowns Scild is so good at ❤❤

@NicolaLuna, welcome back <3 I like your new avi! I mean, that's not a surprise, but still. Feministguy is not a feminist guy, and has been here… two weeks? Three? He basically refuses to acknowledge any criticism, just like a troll, and you're well right to do up a bit of a side-eye at him 'cause he let his incel flag flay a few threads back. Still refuses to acknowledge the fact.

Thanks ^_^ my Avi matches my hair. The guy I’ve been dating has nicknamed me dash (as in rainbow dash) and I’ve nicknamed him sharky.

I’m reminded of the way that conspiracy theorists are secretly comforted by their conspiracies, because it is more comforting to think that even an evil force is in charge than the truth, that it’s all chaos and no one is in charge.

By the same token, it’s comforting to think that women are wearing makeup as an evil conspiracy to control men than to face the truth, that women are just going about their lives and don’t care very much what you think of them.

While I can certainly concede the fact that Corporate America (and corporate everywhere, really, America isn’t the whole world, right?) are totally out to get us all, that’s not really pertinent to wether women (or people in general) should wear makeup.

It’s obviously best decided by non-makeup-wearing men who are very focused on explaining at great length and ad nauseam how much they don’t care about women, and why we should all spend inordinate amounts of our precious lives listening to their opinions on this.

As a straight white male, I’m certainly glad I dodged being subjected to other people’s lived experiences, and that I can rest comfortably in my willful ignorance, and even leave it to these luminaries to fight the good fight against feminism and its cultural-marxist-soy-boy-enablers, so I don’t actually have to reflect on my own part in my relations to other people.

Also, facepalm-to-head-desk-level: Over 9000!

Me: *came down here to ask what “the Wall” is*
Me: *sees the Feministguy kerfuffle*
Me: what

Some classic MRAL
https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2011/05/03/lara-logan-redux-more-victim-blaming-rape-denial-and-rape-apologetics-from-in-mala-fide/comment-page-1/#comment-15918

At the same time, I can understand his blind anger and pain that leads him to make such unfounded declarations. We live in a world in which any man below the alpha level is spit upon by entitled women who consider us to be second-class citizens, little more than indentured servants that provide them with money and status- and I don’t say that lightly. Fix our broken sexual system, and you will not have men lashing out at women like this- which, while wrong, is a natural and understandable response to such treatment.

Again, not to excuse what he wrote. But this is a textbook example of how the MRA philosophy can benefit women too.

You want to know what I hate most about worthless omega fat chicks? Why they get no sympathy from me? It’s because it’s so easy for them, for women, and they’ve still managed to somehow fail the simplest of tests- not fucking eating yourself to death. My face is fucked up from birth because I have a deformed eye. I had no choice, I am ugly and an omega no matter what, even if otherwise I looked like Taylor Lautner. But I still keep myself in relatively good shape, because I simply like to be healthy, and I don’t even have the incentive of getting laid like everyone else, because it’s not going to happen anyway. Thus, I have NO compassion for weak, disgusting, pathetic, worthless, fucking fat FUCKS who have been given every natural opportunity in the world, who could be normal and hot, who COULD be betas or alphas, but who are too fucking weak to stop stuffing their fucking fat fucking mouth with goddamn fucking cake and fat calories. FUCK them. Yes, I hate fat women. I hate them. Is that politically incorrect? Well fuck you too.

I mean.

@Weatherwax

“The only way to win is not to play.”