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I haven't played any of these games, but "explains otherwise" seems to be a misrepresentation given that the commenter you linked is saying himself that Blow's

I haven't played any of these games, but "explains otherwise" seems to be a misrepresentation given that the commenter you linked is saying himself that Blow's game combines ideas and rulesets from several other previous games. Elsewhere in the arstechnica comments you linked > But, uh... this isn't a "Linus Torvalds is a jerk" sort of situation. "Controversial" undersells just how outlandish and inappropriate Blow's views are. Blow is a full-bore fascist sympathizer who also doesn't seem to think that women have any role to play in his profession. What's going on on these platforms? Is there any serious evidence to the strong claims?

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pendenthistory 10mo ago
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- mariusor 10mo ago
  When you support political leaders that push fascist discourse where regular people that happen to have more empathy for their fellow man are presented as the enemy - in Hegseth's book the call to arms against them is literally in the first paragraph - I think it stops being about not far enough left, but about being way too far right.
  - pendenthistory 10mo ago
    Yeah, when you call half the US fascist and nazi there is not much we can talk about.
    - mariusor 10mo ago
      I said nothing about "half the US", and nazi is just your projection I think. But I'd like to know, are you disagreeing with me that the "us vs. them", where them is minorities, women, liberals is *not* in fact one of the upmost fascist tenets?
      - pendenthistory 10mo ago
        You are calling the majority of the US "far right". You're calling people fascist for voting republican. You are the extremist.
        mariusor 10mo ago
        With the risk of being a pedant, I think that even at the time that Trump got elected, the validity of saying he was supported by a majority of Americans would have been questionable. Today, I'm positive that it's wrong. But please, answer my question: do you disagree that the discourse of Trump's administration, where immigrants and minorities are "the enemy" and every measure is allowed against them, is not fascism? To quote one of their golden boys Pete Hegseth's book *first* chapter: > The other side—the Left—is not our friend. We are not “esteemed colleagues,” nor mere political opponents. We are foes. Either we win, or they win—we agree on nothing else. > The United States has the top economy and military in the world, but our cultural and educational institutions—America’s soul—have succumbed to leftist rot.
        pendenthistory 10mo ago
        > our cultural and educational institutions—America’s soul—have succumbed to leftist rot Sure, let's examine this. Do you disagree that most organisations are extremely dominated by the left? Something like 90% of people in academia, media, schools, (until recently) corporate leadership, various government institutions etc vote democrat. Do you disagree that in the past 20 years or so, the right has been heavily censored online and in the work place by the left? These are all facts, he is not wrong here. When one side has spent 20 years pushing out the other, taking over institutions, censoring them and calling them fascist/nazi, don't be surprised when they are viewed as the enemy. I also know exactly what you're thinking, the reasoning you use to justify this: 1. It's not censorship, it's preventing disinformation and "hate". This argument doesn't hold when "disinformation" is political opinions of roughly 50% of the country 2. Academia and institutions lean left because Republicans are simply less intelligent than Democrats. "Truth has a liberal bias". You think kind of arrogance from the left is conductive to a good dialogue and friendly relations?
  - eudamoniac 10mo ago
    Even if Trump were quite literally a Nazi, he is the elected President. Democracy is important. I don't know how one can simultaneously believe in democracy and believe that everyone who voted for the winning candidate is objectively incorrect. If most voters want to gas the Jews, that is just the will of the people, and that's terrible, but you need to pick in that scenario between a democracy and some other form of government that surpresses the will of the people. I am of the opinion that Trump is nowhere near bad enough to choose the latter option; we should preserve democracy I think and allow that the majority of voters are not wrong or "too far" right. Yet a whole lot of people seem to be of the opposite opinion.
    - meheleventyone 10mo ago
      Tell me what happened to democracy when Hitler took power? And how democratic was the overall process? So was the decision to commit mass murder of millions of people really the democratic will of the people? It’s like people haven’t even touched a history book sometimes. You can also look at the parallels to Trump and his continued assault on the democratic norms in the US government. For example assuming powers that are those of Congress, trying to control what states can do via executive order, a thankfully rebuffed attempt at gerrymandering even the Republicans shied away from and so on. If one believes democracy is important one must also believe that we need checks and balances within government such that democracy is maintained in the face of bad actors. Trump is not the only elected person in government after all and democracy requires free and fair elections to continue when his presidency ends. Also nothing about a democratic result means that any side needs to be happy about it or that anyone is or should be protected from criticism.
      - eudamoniac 10mo ago
        > Tell me what happened to democracy when Hitler took power? And how democratic was the overall process? So was the decision to commit mass murder of millions of people really the democratic will of the people? It wasn't, but as I said, if the majority of voters do wish to commit mass murder, that is actually not trivially ignorable. > You can also look at the parallels to Trump and his continued assault on the democratic norms in the US government. For example assuming powers that are those of Congress, trying to control what states can do via executive order, a thankfully rebuffed attempt at gerrymandering even the Republicans shied away from and so on. Congress is our representatives. They are philosophically us. The majority of them do not want to impeach Trump for these things. Also the majority of voters reelected Trump knowing how he is. The way things are going is how the people want it (if you believe in democracy and the philosophy of representatives). > If one believes democracy is important one must also believe that we need checks and balances within government such that democracy is maintained in the face of bad actors. Trump is not the only elected person in government after all and democracy requires free and fair elections to continue when his presidency ends. There has been absolutely nothing to suggest that democracy, as in the literal sense of voting to determine representation, is at risk from inside the political apparatus. I don't consider Jan6 anything of that sort btw. > Also nothing about a democratic result means that any side needs to be happy about it or that anyone is or should be protected from criticism Sure, but the crux of the issue is that the left is going beyond criticism. The vocal left continuously claims that the elected government, and crucially those people who voted for it, are in some outgroup (nazis, fascists, bigots et al) that does not deserve to have democratic power in the country by their very nature. They weild the 'paradox of tolerance' as a bludgeon to disenfranchise half the country. It's unhealthy for democracy, both in itself and because when a group feels under (politically) existential attack they will do heinous things to survive.
swiftcoder 10mo ago
They have a nice collation of his greatest hits over on Reddit[1] [1]: https://www.redditmedia.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1jh275b/over_the_course_of_an_entire_year_rthewitness/ https://www.redditmedia.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1jh275...
- wongarsu 10mo ago
  Ok, I can see the "fascist sympathizer" (though the fascist is Trump, not Mussolini or Hitler, so it's presumably not such a minority opinion in the US overall). But "doesn't seem to think that women have any role to play in his profession" doesn't seem substantiated from those links, unless I'm missing something here? Women being less interested in programming according to him is completely orthogonal to whether he thinks they should play a role
  - latexr 10mo ago
    > though the fascist is Trump, not Mussolini or Hitler, so it's presumably not such a minority opinion in the US overall Does that make a difference? You could levy the exact same argument about the other two in their respective countries in their respective times. Doesn’t make it OK.
    - incrudible 10mo ago
      It is OK in the sense that these are not fringe opinions, they are part of the mainstream political discourse that, as a serious person, you can not effectively dismiss by throwing around certain bad words like fascist.
      - latexr 10mo ago
        > these are not fringe opinions Neither was slavery. Was that OK too? And to clarify (though it’s worrying this point needs to be made), I mean morally. > throwing around certain bad words like fascist Fascism has a very clear definition. It describes a particular set of behaviours and actions, all of which you can compare to reality and determine if it’s happening or not. It’s an objective word. If anyone is trying to “dismiss” anything, it’s the people pretending it’s subjective because they support its outcome.
mariusor 10mo ago
I've been watching Blow work on his compiler and game for many years. He has gone the deep end in his sympathies for Trump and Trump adjacents, but misogyny I've never witnessed from him. I think he is the latest victim of the Notch-Rowling slide into rightism. It happens when a relatively benign conservatives have opinions that get the internet mob riled up, bullies them, cancels them and thus makes them dig deeper into their righitst believes and moving more and more into hating said mob, extending that hate to the people the mob pretends to represent, etc. It's a bit sad really. I hope he'll come out of it some day, but in my experience he doesn't have the humility of accepting when he's wrong.
- jstimpfle 10mo ago
  I think your general idea is right, it sounds reasonable that the insane cancelation mania can bring some conservatives to dig into deeper holes. It is probably what enabled the recent right shift in politics. As to Blow specifically, I've watched his streams quite a bit. I've always had sympathy for him and have been able to relate to his opinions a lot (about software in particular). But I can see how some other people could take offense from the way he's presented his stances. I say that as someone who once made him angry myself when I live-commented in one of his streams because I had a rare disagreement. I was maybe not in shock but at least startled by his reaction. I had presented my disagreement relatively casually. Now, my impression is that he's tuned down his considerably and developed a more well meaning stance on things over the years. Recently I've found him more on the side of "here's how most people are doing this, I don't like this, maybe I don't think it's sustainable or how you get good results, but anyway here's what I like to do instead, make of it what you want".
  - mariusor 10mo ago
    I'm not talking about his words on technical stuff, I'm talking about him being so pleased with the state of US today. Somehow in Blow's mind what Trump and his handlers do to the country is the best thing ever. I'm not a US citizen, but being enthusiastic about other people losing their freedom and freedoms is obscene.
latexr 10mo ago
> What's going on on these platforms? Is there any serious evidence to the strong claims? The second paragraph in the submitted article has a link to the women claim. I hadn’t seen it before. I have also never personally seen any overt fascist sympathising but then again I don’t follow Blow closely. From what I’ve seen from him, though, doesn’t seem hard to believe. He has very strong opinions on a lot of things he knows little about (and belittles those who disagree with his uninformed opinion), is enamoured with Elon Musk, and is always going on (dismissively, divisively, and dehumanisingly) about “The Left”. He also has very poor and obvious fallacious arguments filled with bad faith assumptions. He believes in God and (if I recall correctly) his justification was (paraphrasing) “a lot of smart people are not atheists” (weasel words, appeal to authority) then went on to rant about “Reddit atheism” (ad hominem) or whatever. That was on his own stream, by the way, so no chance it was taken out of context when I saw it.
- wongarsu 10mo ago
  This claim about women [1]? Calling that "doesn't seem to think that women have any role to play in his profession" seems like a wild misquote bordering on slander. His statement is essentially "women might have the same ability but are for biological reasons on average less interested in programming". Which is a statement I don't agree with at all, but also a statement that doesn't make any claims about the role women should play or could play, and he repeatedly states that he is talking about statistics and averages, not all women. 1: https://www.resetera.com/threads/jonathan-blow-the-witness-braid-thinks-women-are-biologically-less-interested-in-tech-than-men.11742/ https://www.resetera.com/threads/jonathan-blow-the-witness-b...
  - jstimpfle 10mo ago
    That's the same thing as happened to James Damore, who is, in my view, a harmless guy (even nice) and whoever cancelled him or is unable to acknowledge he had a point is much closer to fascism. I don't like throwing that term but just to return it. It _boggles_ my mind that someone might find it controversial that there are on average differences between the sexes in terms of behaviour and interests. And to throw extremely strong accusations like "fascist" for a totally reasonable assumption or observation like that, I don't have words for that, I think those people have been smoking too much pot.

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pendenthistory 10mo ago

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mariusor 10mo ago
When you support political leaders that push fascist discourse where regular people that happen to have more empathy for their fellow man are presented as the enemy - in Hegseth's book the call to arms against them is literally in the first paragraph - I think it stops being about not far enough left, but about being way too far right.
- pendenthistory 10mo ago
  Yeah, when you call half the US fascist and nazi there is not much we can talk about.
  - mariusor 10mo ago
    I said nothing about "half the US", and nazi is just your projection I think. But I'd like to know, are you disagreeing with me that the "us vs. them", where them is minorities, women, liberals is *not* in fact one of the upmost fascist tenets?
    - pendenthistory 10mo ago
      You are calling the majority of the US "far right". You're calling people fascist for voting republican. You are the extremist.
      - mariusor 10mo ago
        With the risk of being a pedant, I think that even at the time that Trump got elected, the validity of saying he was supported by a majority of Americans would have been questionable. Today, I'm positive that it's wrong. But please, answer my question: do you disagree that the discourse of Trump's administration, where immigrants and minorities are "the enemy" and every measure is allowed against them, is not fascism? To quote one of their golden boys Pete Hegseth's book *first* chapter: > The other side—the Left—is not our friend. We are not “esteemed colleagues,” nor mere political opponents. We are foes. Either we win, or they win—we agree on nothing else. > The United States has the top economy and military in the world, but our cultural and educational institutions—America’s soul—have succumbed to leftist rot.
        pendenthistory 10mo ago
        > our cultural and educational institutions—America’s soul—have succumbed to leftist rot Sure, let's examine this. Do you disagree that most organisations are extremely dominated by the left? Something like 90% of people in academia, media, schools, (until recently) corporate leadership, various government institutions etc vote democrat. Do you disagree that in the past 20 years or so, the right has been heavily censored online and in the work place by the left? These are all facts, he is not wrong here. When one side has spent 20 years pushing out the other, taking over institutions, censoring them and calling them fascist/nazi, don't be surprised when they are viewed as the enemy. I also know exactly what you're thinking, the reasoning you use to justify this: 1. It's not censorship, it's preventing disinformation and "hate". This argument doesn't hold when "disinformation" is political opinions of roughly 50% of the country 2. Academia and institutions lean left because Republicans are simply less intelligent than Democrats. "Truth has a liberal bias". You think kind of arrogance from the left is conductive to a good dialogue and friendly relations?
- eudamoniac 10mo ago
  Even if Trump were quite literally a Nazi, he is the elected President. Democracy is important. I don't know how one can simultaneously believe in democracy and believe that everyone who voted for the winning candidate is objectively incorrect. If most voters want to gas the Jews, that is just the will of the people, and that's terrible, but you need to pick in that scenario between a democracy and some other form of government that surpresses the will of the people. I am of the opinion that Trump is nowhere near bad enough to choose the latter option; we should preserve democracy I think and allow that the majority of voters are not wrong or "too far" right. Yet a whole lot of people seem to be of the opposite opinion.
  - meheleventyone 10mo ago
    Tell me what happened to democracy when Hitler took power? And how democratic was the overall process? So was the decision to commit mass murder of millions of people really the democratic will of the people? It’s like people haven’t even touched a history book sometimes. You can also look at the parallels to Trump and his continued assault on the democratic norms in the US government. For example assuming powers that are those of Congress, trying to control what states can do via executive order, a thankfully rebuffed attempt at gerrymandering even the Republicans shied away from and so on. If one believes democracy is important one must also believe that we need checks and balances within government such that democracy is maintained in the face of bad actors. Trump is not the only elected person in government after all and democracy requires free and fair elections to continue when his presidency ends. Also nothing about a democratic result means that any side needs to be happy about it or that anyone is or should be protected from criticism.
    - eudamoniac 10mo ago
      > Tell me what happened to democracy when Hitler took power? And how democratic was the overall process? So was the decision to commit mass murder of millions of people really the democratic will of the people? It wasn't, but as I said, if the majority of voters do wish to commit mass murder, that is actually not trivially ignorable. > You can also look at the parallels to Trump and his continued assault on the democratic norms in the US government. For example assuming powers that are those of Congress, trying to control what states can do via executive order, a thankfully rebuffed attempt at gerrymandering even the Republicans shied away from and so on. Congress is our representatives. They are philosophically us. The majority of them do not want to impeach Trump for these things. Also the majority of voters reelected Trump knowing how he is. The way things are going is how the people want it (if you believe in democracy and the philosophy of representatives). > If one believes democracy is important one must also believe that we need checks and balances within government such that democracy is maintained in the face of bad actors. Trump is not the only elected person in government after all and democracy requires free and fair elections to continue when his presidency ends. There has been absolutely nothing to suggest that democracy, as in the literal sense of voting to determine representation, is at risk from inside the political apparatus. I don't consider Jan6 anything of that sort btw. > Also nothing about a democratic result means that any side needs to be happy about it or that anyone is or should be protected from criticism Sure, but the crux of the issue is that the left is going beyond criticism. The vocal left continuously claims that the elected government, and crucially those people who voted for it, are in some outgroup (nazis, fascists, bigots et al) that does not deserve to have democratic power in the country by their very nature. They weild the 'paradox of tolerance' as a bludgeon to disenfranchise half the country. It's unhealthy for democracy, both in itself and because when a group feels under (politically) existential attack they will do heinous things to survive.

swiftcoder 10mo ago

They have a nice collation of his greatest hits over on Reddit[1] [1]: https://www.redditmedia.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1jh275b/over_the_course_of_an_entire_year_rthewitness/ https://www.redditmedia.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1jh275...

wongarsu 10mo ago
Ok, I can see the "fascist sympathizer" (though the fascist is Trump, not Mussolini or Hitler, so it's presumably not such a minority opinion in the US overall). But "doesn't seem to think that women have any role to play in his profession" doesn't seem substantiated from those links, unless I'm missing something here? Women being less interested in programming according to him is completely orthogonal to whether he thinks they should play a role
- latexr 10mo ago
  > though the fascist is Trump, not Mussolini or Hitler, so it's presumably not such a minority opinion in the US overall Does that make a difference? You could levy the exact same argument about the other two in their respective countries in their respective times. Doesn’t make it OK.
  - incrudible 10mo ago
    It is OK in the sense that these are not fringe opinions, they are part of the mainstream political discourse that, as a serious person, you can not effectively dismiss by throwing around certain bad words like fascist.
    - latexr 10mo ago
      > these are not fringe opinions Neither was slavery. Was that OK too? And to clarify (though it’s worrying this point needs to be made), I mean morally. > throwing around certain bad words like fascist Fascism has a very clear definition. It describes a particular set of behaviours and actions, all of which you can compare to reality and determine if it’s happening or not. It’s an objective word. If anyone is trying to “dismiss” anything, it’s the people pretending it’s subjective because they support its outcome.

mariusor 10mo ago

I've been watching Blow work on his compiler and game for many years. He has gone the deep end in his sympathies for Trump and Trump adjacents, but misogyny I've never witnessed from him. I think he is the latest victim of the Notch-Rowling slide into rightism. It happens when a relatively benign conservatives have opinions that get the internet mob riled up, bullies them, cancels them and thus makes them dig deeper into their righitst believes and moving more and more into hating said mob, extending that hate to the people the mob pretends to represent, etc. It's a bit sad really. I hope he'll come out of it some day, but in my experience he doesn't have the humility of accepting when he's wrong.

jstimpfle 10mo ago
I think your general idea is right, it sounds reasonable that the insane cancelation mania can bring some conservatives to dig into deeper holes. It is probably what enabled the recent right shift in politics. As to Blow specifically, I've watched his streams quite a bit. I've always had sympathy for him and have been able to relate to his opinions a lot (about software in particular). But I can see how some other people could take offense from the way he's presented his stances. I say that as someone who once made him angry myself when I live-commented in one of his streams because I had a rare disagreement. I was maybe not in shock but at least startled by his reaction. I had presented my disagreement relatively casually. Now, my impression is that he's tuned down his considerably and developed a more well meaning stance on things over the years. Recently I've found him more on the side of "here's how most people are doing this, I don't like this, maybe I don't think it's sustainable or how you get good results, but anyway here's what I like to do instead, make of it what you want".
- mariusor 10mo ago
  I'm not talking about his words on technical stuff, I'm talking about him being so pleased with the state of US today. Somehow in Blow's mind what Trump and his handlers do to the country is the best thing ever. I'm not a US citizen, but being enthusiastic about other people losing their freedom and freedoms is obscene.

latexr 10mo ago

> What's going on on these platforms? Is there any serious evidence to the strong claims? The second paragraph in the submitted article has a link to the women claim. I hadn’t seen it before. I have also never personally seen any overt fascist sympathising but then again I don’t follow Blow closely. From what I’ve seen from him, though, doesn’t seem hard to believe. He has very strong opinions on a lot of things he knows little about (and belittles those who disagree with his uninformed opinion), is enamoured with Elon Musk, and is always going on (dismissively, divisively, and dehumanisingly) about “The Left”. He also has very poor and obvious fallacious arguments filled with bad faith assumptions. He believes in God and (if I recall correctly) his justification was (paraphrasing) “a lot of smart people are not atheists” (weasel words, appeal to authority) then went on to rant about “Reddit atheism” (ad hominem) or whatever. That was on his own stream, by the way, so no chance it was taken out of context when I saw it.

wongarsu 10mo ago
This claim about women [1]? Calling that "doesn't seem to think that women have any role to play in his profession" seems like a wild misquote bordering on slander. His statement is essentially "women might have the same ability but are for biological reasons on average less interested in programming". Which is a statement I don't agree with at all, but also a statement that doesn't make any claims about the role women should play or could play, and he repeatedly states that he is talking about statistics and averages, not all women. 1: https://www.resetera.com/threads/jonathan-blow-the-witness-braid-thinks-women-are-biologically-less-interested-in-tech-than-men.11742/ https://www.resetera.com/threads/jonathan-blow-the-witness-b...
- jstimpfle 10mo ago
  That's the same thing as happened to James Damore, who is, in my view, a harmless guy (even nice) and whoever cancelled him or is unable to acknowledge he had a point is much closer to fascism. I don't like throwing that term but just to return it. It _boggles_ my mind that someone might find it controversial that there are on average differences between the sexes in terms of behaviour and interests. And to throw extremely strong accusations like "fascist" for a totally reasonable assumption or observation like that, I don't have words for that, I think those people have been smoking too much pot.