Men are oppressed by cartoon women driving guys around in cars, incel insists

@KindaSortaHarmless

Some people watch Strike Witches for the history jokes. Others watch it for the dogfights. And still others watch it for the underage girls flying about in their undies carrying heavy weapons.

They might be shit fans, but they’re still fans

Their is also a fair number of fans of Strike Witches fans who earnestly enjoy the Characters and character interactions, others who are fascinated with the world building, and others who enjoy not only the historical nods but also the level of authenticity of the 1940’s setting even considering it’s fantastical elements.

Granted I won’t deny the series is fan service heavy, and it’s well known for the fan service; but it would be unfair to say that is all Strike Witches as a series is all about.

It’s also funny how quite a number of people mistakenly think that Karlsland is “just Nazi Germany because WW2”; but in reality Karlsland is culturally akin to WWI Imperial Germany/German Empire (heck the battle/navel flags of Karlsland are deadringers for WWI Germany’s battle and navel flags), they just have WWII Germany’s tech level and tactics.

It is also a rather light hearted, idealistic and hopeful series with a unique charm to it; which is one among many reasons why I love it so much. And also why I take umbridge with jerks infiltrating the fan-base and spreading bs.

Especially the Gary Stu Fanfic writers. *Blech* Naw dude: your rehashed self insert super soldier who violates cannon just by existing isn’t great writing and your not making the series better with that literary bile being added to the witches ranks. The cutie witches are the hero’s, get used to it; and take your Misogynistic garbage with you. The Witches are NOT your incompetent comfort battalion where anything the witches can do: “Gary Stu can do better”.

And yes: this is a VERY sore spot for me…

@Moon Custafer:

Bayou might still be safer than the Major — while driving, she’s probably also lurking in a VR chat-room as part of an ongoing investigation.

I hope you’re not suggesting that the Major would be bad at something!

My take is always the same…

…

YOU drive.

So, it’s good if a woman makes you a sandwich, but bad if she drives you someplace? Personally, I like it when someone (of any gender) does something nice for me, but it’s nothing I am entitled to. That’s was makes it nice.

@Moggie:

I hope you’re not suggesting that the Major would be bad at something!

Of course not—the Major is perfectly capable of driving a car, diving into the ‘Net AND probably piloting another body around someplace else at the same time— but it’s usually an awful shock to her passenger (poor Togusa!) when she casually admits she’s doing it.

@epronovost

The modern Japanese culture isn’t prudish when it comes to sexual themes, or at least not nearly as much as the North American and European culture…

I wouldn’t quite put it like that. There are ways in which the Japanese are even more prudish than Americans. Japanese porn, for instance, has to blur out all pubic hair. (Incidentally, lolicon emerged largely because this law left a big loophole: namely, children don’t have pubic hair.) Pop idols are governed by strict morality clauses worse than anything that the Disney Channel ever did to its teen stars, to the point where, a few years back, Minami Minegishi, a member of the girl group AKB48, shaved her head and filmed a tearful apology after being caught spending a night with her boyfriend. Otaku are widely viewed by mainstream Japanese society with derision and suspicion; in 1990, the “otaku killer” case, in which an otaku serial killer brutally murdered and defiled the corpses of four young girls, caused a moral panic against anime and manga that led to widespread censorship. Even some creators of anime and manga, including Hayao Miyazaki and Hideaki Anno, have voiced frustration with what they feel to be the dominance of the industry by otaku and their fixations.

I think the reason why Westerners think the Japanese are so much more libertine is because our chief exposure to their culture came through anime and video games, products of an otaku culture that exists outside the Japanese mainstream. It would be like if Japanese impressions of American culture came largely through ultraviolent, hypersexualized, grimdark ’90s comic books and animated adaptations of such.

@Naglfar

Frankly Lolicon as genre isn’t into and of itself porn or pornographic; it only becomes such when that particular genre tag is supplemented with the Hentai genre.

Mind you this isn’t a value judgement for or against the lolicon genre or loli’s in general; more just trying to inject some critical nuance in terms of genres and analysis thereof.

I mean in “Is the Order a Rabbit”; it’s a loli anime filled with lolis: yet it is completely bereft of any porn or pornographic imagery or subjects. Just because something is categorized as “lolicon” genre or has a loli in it: doesn’t make it synonymous with “child porn” and it’s both inaccurate and misleading to conflate the two as being mutual. I mean anime like Is the Order a Rabbit being labeled child porn “because loli is in it”; kind of feels like it’s a very big stretch and kind of turns the term “child porn” into a prolapsed adjective; which in my book is very dangerous and shaky ground to tread in the face of actual child pornography and child sex trafficking.

Plus, well tbh I feel it kind comes across as an arbitrary moral panic against a genre and art style that does nothing to actually help actual child victims of child predators, nor actually do anything to stop the proliferation of actual child pornographic paraphernalia where actual flesh and blood kids are being exploited and harmed by sex trafficking scum.

Or at least that is how I have come to understand the subject given the information I have seen and processed.

@Naglfar

It’s okay; admittedly in the west the genre term “lolicon” does admittedly carry some slightly sticky connotations, an arguable degree of culture shock and it’s definitely not a genre of character archetype for everyone; but it is too quick a leap being made to conflate “Lolicon”, as a genre and trope: as being, into and of itself, synonym to “Child Porn”.

This is to say the least; an inaccurate assumption.

Lolicon as a genre, however, typically applies to any female character with a child-like appearance and aesthetic; and ironically is not limited to characters who are actually aged as children but includes characters with youthful aesthetics, in particular ones that emphasize youthful cuteness and yet are either at least; teenagers, or even adults with underdeveloped or “youthfully cute body aesthetics”; as there are levels and tiers of the various kinds of loli character archetypes.

That being said; part of the possible reason for the initial, knee jerk assumptions against the genre admittedly is not helped by subsets of Hentai that feature lolicon and loli’s, as well as, on a possible, tangential degree, the novel “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov in 1955; which has likely been responsible for coloring the perspective a causal western audience, that in turn resulted in Lolicon as a genre and word in itself as being conflated with child porn and the misplaced connotation of “lolicon/loli” as being “child porn”.

The realty is a lot more nuanced and complicated however. The Lolicon genre is itself not pornographic; but it would be accurate to say it does end up inadvertently associated with it due to some complicated contextual circumstances.

@Katamount:

Meh, city driving is far too obnoxious. Especially in winter. Toronto wasn’t built for winter.

One wonders why they built it that far north, then.

Miscellaneous interesting articles I’ve found recently:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/past-six-days/2019-10-12/news/kidney-patients-face-waving-goodbye-to-eu-travel-after-brexit-whzxzbnn7

🙁

https://www.citylab.com/perspective/2019/02/broken-windows-theory-policing-urban-violence-crime-data/583030/

Left out of that one: that broken windows policing isn’t actually about crime prevention, it’s about domination and putting the colored people in their place. However, debunking the crime prevention claims might make it harder for the white supremacist core supporters to recruit dupes to support such policies.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/if-trumps-rage-brings-civil-war-where-will-the-military-stand

Troubling. If the military will have divided loyalties, then both sides will have substantial armed forces and it could drag on quite a while (or all end quickly with a very large bang…), though “the Neoconfederacy will have all the guns and trained soldiers” would have been a worse scenario still, handing the enemy victory on a silver platter. Let’s hope it either doesn’t come down to a shooting war or the portion of the armed forces on the Neounion side is sufficient (and nobody starts chucking nukes).

https://economicsfromthetopdown.wordpress.com/2019/10/01/has-wealth-gone-digital/

The buried lede here is that (most) property rights enforce power relations, especially in the absence of legitimate scarcity or a legitimate “tragedy of the commons” situation. This sort of thing makes me wonder if “pro-union pro-worker-owned-firms socialist” might be insufficiently far to the left.

Not all rights to exclude necessarily make the owner powerful at the expense of others, though, I think. My ownership of a modest collection of objects none of which are rare, for example, more assures I can, say, save a file I’m working on and be reasonably certain nobody’s deleted it (or carted off my computer entirely) the next morning. Having control over a limited amount of personal stuff seems to be a necessity. I can see a possible future where even that can be dispensed with, but it involves a lot of “cloud” infrastructure and there’s still one piece of personally owned property required, a physical key with thumbdrive storage on it that contains a person’s digital master key, used to authenticate themselves. And even then, being the sole person allowed to modify certain files online causes a form of ownership there. Perhaps versioning instead? Copy-on-write? With enough storage space…

There’s also things like the classic example of a lake threatened by overfishing. But rather than private property rights, that seems best addressed by public government empowered to impose quotas and require licensing for certain activities, in order to prevent overuse.

Private property would never be an easy idea to get rid of. It’s even baked right into our languages as a fundamental grammatical feature (possessive nouns), so it must have existed for a pretty long time, perhaps far longer than the 6000 or so years confirmed by archaeological evidence.

https://aeon.co/essays/blaming-individuals-for-obesity-may-be-altogether-wrong

If I had to bet money right now, it would be on BPAs in microplastics, since the latter in turn seem to get into everything. How controlled are the “controlled” environments used to raise lab animals? The food is precisely formulated, but is the water filtered? The air? Can dust get to them from the wide world beyond the lab buildings?

Dear David, for some bizarre reason Google recommended this article to me and I clicked on the bizarre headline to see what it was all about. I stumbled onto your website/blog and read through a few of your articles, your FAQ, and About pages. I find myself feeling truly sad for you David. I want to slap you across the face and tell you to snap out of it. You’re a talented and clearly hardworking guy, go apply yourself to something better than this. Spending your days pouring through the backwater of the internet, desperately searching for nuggets of shit to write about is a waste of your time. I implore you, get off social media and go explore new subjects that inspire you, and bring attention to them. Help bridge gaps and bring mutual understanding to nuanced issues. It’s a dark enough world already, instead of crawling through the darkness help bring light. I sincerely hope you wake up my brother.

@TacticalProgressive

Please fuck the fuck off and keep fucking off forever, thanks. Your apologism for content that normalizes child abuse is incredibly not okay. Like seriously what even the fuck.

If you’re concerned about David, James, I’m sure he would appreciate a quick PayPal donation. I bet that will do him almost as much good as your unsolicited life advice.