Will the "new normal" ever truly end?

[Syaoran Li]

I'd more or less agree that Corbyn lost because he was a terrible party leader, borderline communist, and Brexit flip flopper rather than anything to do with culture war issues. This site puts way too much stress on those relative to the average voter, and I mean way too much.

Don't bring Japan into this, either. Abe had previously been prime minister in the 2000s and is the grandson of former LDP prime minister and extremely influential economist and war criminal Kishi Nobusuke. He's as establishment as can be. The establishment in Japan and South Korea is just very different to what it is in America.

A description of Kishi's career would derail this thread, but aside from his love of rape he ran Manchuria as a giant concentration camp for rapid industrialisation in the 1930s, and his corporatist economic planning went on to influence Pak Chung-hee and the South Korean economic miracle under the cold war military dictatorship. His post war prime ministership was brief and ended when he was ousted by student protests after he tried to force through a treaty with America over the objections of parliament before a planned visit by Eisenhower.

Before you jump my ass, I totally agree Abe is very much an establishment leader.

I'm bringing up Japan mainly because the Japanese establishment is very different from the establishment in the West. For corporatists in the West who are closely in bed with China, the Japanese establishment is seen as part of the problem. There's a LOT of animosity between China and Japan for obvious reasons

I honestly think a lot of the extreme autistic hateboner for anime, manga, and Japanese video games by the Woke Left is the result of corporate astroturfing and a very minor but very visible symptom of something else that's actually important.

Like, I get you're one of those "genre media is not valid" types who doesn't like anime but what I'm talking about goes beyond the normal (and completely understandable) disdain for weebs and into an autistic level of hatred for a lot of the Woke Twitter types, most of whom are no better than the weebs and are usually worse, except their fandom of choice happens to be stuff like Marvel/DC capeshit, Harry Potter (before Rowling offended the troons too many times) or woke Tumblr/"CalArts" cartoons like She-Ra and Steven Universe or things like punk culture and "cottagecore" or other Tumblr aesthetics.

I get that the anime fandom is a lot smaller in the UK than it is in the US though, and as always, I'm mainly going by an American perspective since that's what I know and observe here.

Companies like Disney don't want the unneeded competition whose establishment is entirely different and is not as affected to the conditions of the American establishment, and chances are that China's probably in with this as a small component of a wider push against Japan.

The anime and pop culture shit is unimportant in the grand scheme of things, but it's one symptom out of many that's really visible in the social media sphere so it's easy to cite. The corporate establishment in Japan is not conducive to the corporate establishment in America, Europe, and especially China.

We see a similar thing with a lot of the fearmongering over Russia, and the most visible symptom of that is a lot more important to the bigger picture, the "Russian collusion" narrative.

The Russian establishment is also not conducive to the EU or China and is a direct threat to both, plus there's a lot of neocons and neolibs here in the states who still have a Cold War mindset due to being literal Boomers (and some of the Early Gen X'ers like Obama) and view Russia as an enemy no matter what.

Granted, Putin is an authoritarian brute and a geopolitical wildcard but he's also one of the first nationalistic populist world leaders of the post-Cold War era to really gain a lot of prominence.

Really, I think a lot of the scorn over the establishments in Japan and Russia is rooted in the same disdain for popular nationalist movements in the West. It's global corporatists and their ChiCom allies not wanting any genuine threats or competition. They want to protect their own wealth and power and squash anyone who'd stand in the way of more wealth and influence.

Plus, with China there's the historic animosity the Chinese have with Japan and Russia.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Germany and Australia had big lockdowns. The province of Victoria basically became a police state with people not allowed to go some 30 kilometres outside their house. As well arrests for wrong think on social media.

Germany's lockdown wasn't as big as Australia's

Evil Doug Ford, brother of coke addict felon Rob Ford, is imposing reversions on the lockdown. Returning back to stage 2 when all Ontario was in the final stage of reopening.

You don't understand how retarded modern economists are. A lot of them actually believe that we have entered "a new era" where "depressions don't happen anymore so long as we use quantitative easing and take on massive debt 4ever." Many of them hold high positions of power.
The academia has fucked their minds and now they're coming to fuck our wallets

I don’t know a ton of advanced theory yet but I can confirm economists are retarded.

In particular, they’re so used to circlejerking about free trade that they become obsessed with it and start judging everything by how it impacts trade. Socialist who wants to raise taxes and regulate everything, or free market that has higher taxes on just foreign goods? They’ll pick the socialist. Free market for illegals to come in, or free market for domestic labor? They’ll pick the illegals. They are dumb as hell because they just parrot each other’s buzzwords.


mind you, think this through. I’m basing this off the heavily libertarian ones I’ve met. There’s an option here of heavily regulation one sector of the economy, or EVERY sector of the economy, and they knowingly choose to align with people who do the latter.

 

[Pointless Pedant]

Before you jump my ass, I totally agree Abe is very much an establishment leader.

I'm bringing up Japan mainly because the Japanese establishment is very different from the establishment in the West. For corporatists in the West who are closely in bed with China, the Japanese establishment is seen as part of the problem. There's a LOT of animosity between China and Japan for obvious reasons

I honestly think a lot of the extreme autistic hateboner for anime, manga, and Japanese video games by the Woke Left is the result of corporate astroturfing and a very minor but very visible symptom of something else that's actually important.

Like, I get you're one of those "genre media is not valid" types who doesn't like anime but what I'm talking about goes beyond the normal (and completely understandable) disdain for weebs and into an autistic level of hatred for a lot of the Woke Twitter types, most of whom are no better than the weebs and are usually worse, except their fandom of choice happens to be stuff like Marvel/DC capeshit, Harry Potter (before Rowling offended the troons too many times) or woke Tumblr/"CalArts" cartoons like She-Ra and Steven Universe or things like punk culture and "cottagecore" or other Tumblr aesthetics.

I get that the anime fandom is a lot smaller in the UK than it is in the US though, and as always, I'm mainly going by an American perspective since that's what I know and observe here.

Companies like Disney don't want the unneeded competition whose establishment is entirely different and is not as affected to the conditions of the American establishment, and chances are that China's probably in with this as a small component of a wider push against Japan.

The anime and pop culture shit is unimportant in the grand scheme of things, but it's one symptom out of many that's really visible in the social media sphere so it's easy to cite. The corporate establishment in Japan is not conducive to the corporate establishment in America, Europe, and especially China.

We see a similar thing with a lot of the fearmongering over Russia, and the most visible symptom of that is a lot more important to the bigger picture, the "Russian collusion" narrative.

The Russian establishment is also not conducive to the EU or China and is a direct threat to both, plus there's a lot of neocons and neolibs here in the states who still have a Cold War mindset due to being literal Boomers (and some of the Early Gen X'ers like Obama) and view Russia as an enemy no matter what.

Granted, Putin is an authoritarian brute and a geopolitical wildcard but he's also one of the first nationalistic populist world leaders of the post-Cold War era to really gain a lot of prominence.

Really, I think a lot of the scorn over the establishments in Japan and Russia is rooted in the same disdain for popular nationalist movements in the West. It's global corporatists and their ChiCom allies not wanting any genuine threats or competition. They want to protect their own wealth and power and squash anyone who'd stand in the way of more wealth and influence.

Plus, with China there's the historic animosity the Chinese have with Japan and Russia.

Anime fandom is definitely much smaller here, to the point where the idea it would ever affect anyone's view on politics in any way is laughable. I don't think it's true in America either but we'll have to agree to disagree on that one. I have had personal experience with video game and even historical communities being swamped with awful weebs, posting nonsense like cartoon girl versions of WW2 warships, and many of them were communists. They tend to gravtiate towards extremism in some way or another, but whether that was edgy fascism or tankyism varied, and some even flip-flopped between both (nazbols). At any rate they were irrelevant and annoying.

Putin's rise to power wasn't really anything to do with the current wave of right wing populism, since it came at the end of the 1990s. Russia was in an awful recession throughout that decade and was suffering from rampant corruption and crime. By reining in the worst of the lawlessness (assigning casinos to only operate in remote areas like Vladivostok made Moscow safer, for example), Putin built up popular support and then consolidated his rule into a dictatorship. Few really objected to this because the Russian "democracy" had been a pathetic farce under Yeltsin anyway. Culture war issues didn't really register at all until Putin started courting the Orthodox support with his "homosexual propaganda" bans in the 2010s, by which time he was dictator already.

The Russia hoax happened in the context of the aftermath of the 2014 Russian attack on Ukraine and seizure of Crimea by "little green men". The conquest, the first time anyone had annexed territory by force in Europe since WW2, resulted in sanctions being placed on Russia by various countries, including Japan (relations between the countries are poor, I'm not sure why you're putting them together). After Brexit and Trump Russia was therefore the obvious scapegoat, even though they weren't actually responsible for either.

 

[Syaoran Li]

Anime fandom is definitely much smaller here, to the point where the idea it would ever affect anyone's view on politics in any way is laughable. I don't think it's true in America either but we'll have to agree to disagree on that one. I have had personal experience with video game and even historical communities being swamped with awful weebs, posting nonsense like cartoon girl versions of WW2 warships, and many of them were communists. They tend to gravtiate towards extremism in some way or another, but whether that was edgy fascism or tankyism varied, and some even flip-flopped between both (nazbols). At any rate they were irrelevant and annoying.

Putin's rise to power wasn't really anything to do with the current wave of right wing populism, since it came at the end of the 1990s. Russia was in an awful recession throughout that decade and was suffering from rampant corruption and crime. By reining in the worst of the lawlessness (assigning casinos to only operate in remote areas like Vladivostok made Moscow safer, for example), Putin built up popular support and then consolidated his rule into a dictatorship. Few really objected to this because the Russian "democracy" had been a pathetic farce under Yeltsin anyway. Culture war issues didn't really register at all until Putin started courting the Orthodox support with his "homosexual propaganda" bans in the 2010s, by which time he was dictator already.

The Russia hoax happened in the context of the aftermath of the 2014 Russian attack on Ukraine and seizure of Crimea by "little green men". The conquest, the first time anyone had annexed territory by force in Europe since WW2, resulted in sanctions being placed on Russia by various countries, including Japan (relations between the countries are poor, I'm not sure why you're putting them together). After Brexit and Trump Russia was therefore the obvious scapegoat, even though they weren't actually responsible for either.

1. Anime fandom is more of a thing in the United States, particularly among the younger generations (Core and Late Millennials plus Generation Z) and specific series tend to be a lot more popular in certain ethnic or economic sections of those generations (blacks who love DBZ and Naruto or hillbillies who love those two series plus InuYasha) but a lot of them trend apolitical overall while the "historical political weeb" autists you mention are a fringe within a fringe, especially over here where they are outnumbered by the apolitical weebs and casual anime fan.

I'm not sure if the UK ever aired anime regularly on Saturday morning network blocks or basic cable in the late 90's and 2000's, but they definitely did in America, which is probably why anime fandom is more of a thing in America and American weebs are just slightly less cringe-inducing than British ones. Slightly.

But to clarify, I'm not saying anyone's politics would be informed by the anime fandom. Rather, I'm saying it is targeted by the Woke Left and the corporate establishment in America as a small part of a wider push in the "Culture Wars" and nobody's politics are being informed by these views aside from the autists who play historical games, and here we've got a lot more of them outside of anime.

You do have the turbo weebs who flock to fringe politics here, but they're outnumbered by all the other turbo-autists from other fandoms into fringe politiccs. There's all the "traditionalist Deus Vult" types inspired by Crusader Kings II, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and YouTubers like The Distributist, plus all the unironic "queer punk" Anarcho-Communists and "democrat socialist" crypto-tankies who try to shoehorn their beliefs into stuff like the furry community, superheroes, goth and punk culture, and Tumblr cartoons like She-Ra.

The reason why something as unimportant as anime is being targeted by the neoliberals in this "Culture War" is actually explained by a fairly obvious and realistic reason: Profit.

The attempt to politicize fandoms by corporate astroturfing and pandering to Twitter SJW's is just merely a method to do that. If it was the 1980's and we had social media back then, they'd probably try and pander to religious conservatives or yuppies instead to sell their merch and crush the competition. It's backfired a lot in America (Get Woke, Go Broke) but these companies are hyper-consolidated and could take the hit plus the Chinese market was more lucrative prior to COVID-19

A lot of these media companies don't want extra competition from foreign works and attacking the pop culture exports of Japan in particular probably helps endear these corporate bigwigs further to the extremely lucrative Chinese markets. It's all about the money and making sure that not only the gravy trains keep rolling in but that nothing comes up to delay or derail them.

2. Agreed on Russia, since Putin was able to rise to power thanks to the economic nightmares of Russia in the 90's. The "Culture War" issues and the Western establishment attacking Putin and Russia are all related to Russia being a wildcard in the region and a direct threat to China and the EU thanks to geography.

The crisis in Crimea and Russian interference in Syria were the things that really kicked shit into high gear and made Russia a major target of all this. The anti-homosexual laws were merely a convenient way to tie it into the burgeoning culture war BS back home and get normie citizens in the US to actually give a shit.

I'm not lumping Russia and Japan in the same group in the way you think, because Russian and Japanese relations are very poor. China doesn't like either of them and neither do the EU or the corporate neoliberal establishment in the United States.

I'll clarify a little further: The nationalist and populist movements in the West, the Japanese establishment, and the Russian establishment are all entirely separate things and are at odds with each other most of the time. But they are all opposed by China and the corporatist establishments in America and Europe for a variety of different reasons.

It isn't that these three groups are part of some alliance or are closely related (they're obviously not) but that a different set of groups who are closely tied to each other view each one of these unrelated entities as either enemies or obstacles for a slew of different reasons and are content to attack all of them at once but in different ways befitting of the situation.

 

[Pointless Pedant]

Mainland China is actually a huge import market for Japanese cartoons, albeit censored to be politically correct. I don't think there's some kind of conspiracy against them because they're not even that stigmatised in hostile countries. Anime fans are almost kind of mainstream in China, which they certainly aren't anywhere in Europe except for maybe France at a stretch.

Video games, especially mobile games, are much, much bigger, though.

 

[Syaoran Li]

Mainland China is actually a huge import market for Japanese cartoons, albeit censored to be politically correct. I don't think there's some kind of conspiracy against them because they're not even that stigmatised in hostile countries. Anime fans are almost kind of mainstream in China, which they certainly aren't anywhere in Europe except for maybe France at a stretch.

Video games, especially mobile games, are much, much bigger, though.

I know mainland China is a massive market for anime (where it's censored for the Chinese releases) but the "hostile conspiracy against anime" (as you're describing it) isn't a Chinese thing. It's entirely from the American megacorps for the American market. The anime fandom and market in the United States is a lot bigger than Europe and the UK but is smaller than China or Southeast Asia.

It's a marketing ploy mostly pushed by American corporations for the American market. I should've been more clear on that. The hyper-consolidation of American media has led to massive stagnation and shit like the capeshit fad, woke culture being forced into everything, and extensive corporate astroturfing to keep things afloat in the American market specifically.

The Chinese animosity against Japan is almost entirely geopolitical and has nothing to do with pop culture or financial gain. Now if these geopolitical tensions somehow got even worse and American corporate bigwigs were forced to chose sides, most of them would back China over Japan since China's obviously the more profitable market.

 

[Deftones]

I'm honestly not sure. I hope this "new normal" DOES end eventually but I don't like thinking about what the future will bring. 2020's full of unexpected surprises.

 

[DamageJoy]

Some schools also made you read brave new world and it's a good example of how a free seeming and benevolent seeming governance can be equally terrifying.

In the words of Huxley "a time when people would be satisfied, but in a way that perhaps they ought not be satisfied".

I think the biggest trick is that they point that bad things can happen elsewhere or in fiction, creating a contrast that reinforce the ruling narrative.
We can't be a dystopia, we teach kids about dystopias! (In a industrial scale mandatory education system, of course.) Banning these books is the biggest mistake one can make, if they can float around all the bad stuff in them are just fiction to the average joe. Like "they rewrite history to be in line with current values/politics, how silly".

A big problem with the mandatory literature stuff is people are not made to reflect and engage on the meanings and context of the book properly. Reading between and behind the lines should be considered a virtue for a citizen of a republic.

I'm honestly not sure. I hope this "new normal" DOES end eventually but I don't like thinking about what the future will bring. 2020's full of unexpected surprises.

Worst year of the decade so far. Things will somewhat get better anyway, just the systematic changes are what I am concerned about sticking around.

 

[Lemmingwise]

Banning these books is the biggest mistake one can make, if they can float around all the bad stuff in them are just fiction to the average joe. L

Again Huxley has my back.

"A world not in which books are banned, but where people care not to pick up a book."

 

[Samson Pumpkin Jr.]

A big problem with the mandatory literature stuff is people are not made to reflect and engage on the meanings and context of the book properly. Reading between and behind the lines should be considered a virtue for a citizen of a republic.

Oh boy, I can't wait for the day when the average joe will think critically about the media he consumes. It is a ridiculous idea that you can ever compel somebody to think critically by teaching them to. They either think critically or they don't, and that's it.

 

[Drunk and Pour]

The elite have see what we are willing to put up with in the name of safety. Luckily, Trump doesn't seem concerned with controlling how people live (how fascist of him), but the Left won't forget, so even if they lose this time, they will gain power again at some point.

 

[UntimelyDhelmise]

The elite have see what we are willing to put up with in the name of safety. Luckily, Trump doesn't seem concerned with controlling how people live (how fascist of him), but the Left won't forget, so even if they lose this time, they will gain power again at some point.

That's the scariest thing. The governments around the world have finally proven once and for all just how pathetically compliant and unquestioning the masses on a global scale truly are. So even though there have been uprisings and blowback, all the elites really have to do is bide their time and quietly put plans in place that will quash such people and permanently lock the rest into slavery (via microchips, social credit, cashless infrastructure, take your goddamn pick).

They've already got popular public opinion fully on their side where anyone who's sick of the lockdowns and masks is deemed a social pariah who must be punished for their "selfishness" and have kept this going strong for nearly a year now. The next steps are only a matter of time.

 

[DamageJoy]

Oh boy, I can't wait for the day when the average joe will think critically about the media he consumes. It is a ridiculous idea that you can ever compel somebody to think critically by teaching them to. They either think critically or they don't, and that's it.

I wouldn't hold my breath, but in theory ideals are supposed to be a thing to strive for. Instead of just people accepting everything sucks, thus making no attempt to at least hinder negative events from becoming worse. Personally I am absolutely "black pilled" when it comes to people, society etc. See how humanity will trade away it's hard earned rights, privacy etc. for a little convenience.

 

[The Skeptical Tomato X5]

Having looked at what's been going on the past couple months I've come to the conclusion that the US election may actually be critical in deciding the direction that things move forward.

For some context, I live in Australia and what I've noticed here is that federal government has been hedging their bets recently with regards to this. At the start of this whole ordeal much like the USA the government here decided to take a hands off approach to dealing with the pandemic and left it up to the states. What this has resulted in is each Premier (governor equivalent) going mad with power and each having different constantly changing restrictions as well as crazy border closures which would take ages to properly explain. In short, what they've done has caused irreparable damage to national unity and the federal govt. have obviously noticed this. Now the people in charge currently here aren't complete zealots devoted to the cause of the global prison planet, they'll just follow the way the wind is blowing. Recent statements coming from the Prime Minister as well as different state Premiers have worded in a cryptic way that implies that such restrictions implemented will never be reinstated. They never did this the first time round and I believe they're doing this and wording it in a way that gives them plausible deniability. In the result of a Blumpf victory they can go out and say "Look, we got rid of all this shit, covid is over. We promised you we would" and get away with it. On the other hand if Biden wins they can follow in the footsteps of the US and keep on trucking to destination Global Hellworld. With relations with China having become quite poor recently the government is going to look to it's other greatest ally the USA for protection and guidance. These people are cowards who will follow what they're told by their masters to do, so whoever wins is gonna dictate what goes for many other places.

Of course this could just be pure but I believe at this point in time Trump and Biden have come to represent two sides of a global elite. One who wants an impoverished prison planet slave class and another who wants people to just go about living their lives as consoomers to sell their product to while still amassing vast amounts of wealth and power. I dunno about you but I'd much rather pick the lesser of two evils.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

I hope coronapanic ends. But thanks to scumbags in positions of power and influence, we're stuck in a dystopian nightmare of mandatory muzzles, "social distancing", "Zoom meetings", and "temporary" closures.

I miss 2019 as if it was this exotic and better ancient time.

And 2019 sucked.

 

[Lemmingwise]

I hope coronapanic ends. But thanks to scumbags in positions of power and influence, we're stuck in a dystopian nightmare of mandatory muzzles, "social distancing", "Zoom meetings", and "temporary" closures.

I miss 2019 as if it was this exotic and better ancient time.

And 2019 sucked.

From the documents, the novel pandemic was planned to take 5 years.

 

[DeadFish]

The world is shifting into a new era. So no. Things are going break down this decade and in a savage fashion

 

[Someone Awful]

I thought about this question a lot. Now that it's obvious what the 2020 election outcome is, here are my thoughts,

If the DNC coup succeeds like it looks like it will, all hope for American government appears lost on a national scale. It would delegitimize our republic, weaken our country, and allow no possibility for a challenger to rise up like Trump did. We would become a kakistocracy, ruled by the worst possible men and women for the job that wokeism has made possible. The kakistocracy will be embolden to do whatever they want, no matter how disastrous the consequences might be, thus why they are pushing for the Great Reset.

Going forward, people who want to be free have to decide for themselves that they are free individuals regardless of what trends, culture, societal pressure, and the government says. They have to do so knowing the enormous risk involved in saying things that are politically incorrect up to and including cancellation and death. We have relied on government for too long to tell us that we are free, now they want to tell us that we are peasants that are no longer entitled to autonomy in any circumstances. If we want to decide our destinies, we have to decide to be our own masters.

As for whenever or not the new normal can be stopped, a government does not last forever. A government can only last as long as the ones handling it are competent enough to handle it. Once enough people see through the illusion, they lose their mandate and a new, saner world order can ensue. But it only happens when people are willing to sacrifice everything to put to end to the hellish nightmare they are going through. In the interim, dissidents against the new world order will find ways to circumvent or even reject the establishment's ways. It will involve making hard choices, but the passion and hope of the people will continue even in the darkest era.

I can't answer if that will happen within our lifetime or not nor do I have all the solutions to it. But the fight for a better culture and a better society than we have is always worth the battle, even if you think that fight is impossible. Even if you lose hope in the government and the current culture, don't reside yourself to just going through the motion. That is a life worse than death itself.

Personally, I am going to put up a good fight for what I want to see while I am still alive. I am not going to let swamp demoralize me into thinking I am worthless or have me put aside my goals in life no matter how many insane rules and regulations they put out. The fight itself for something better is an honorable one and if it impacts even one man to change things for the better, then it was worth it even when I am forgotten by all. This is not the end of history, but rather the beginning of a new, uncertain era that will test our resolves and character.

The short answer is, yes. How long is the question but it is worth fighting against when the opportunity come up.

 

[Irritable Bowel Syndrome]

New normal will eventually end but it's probably going to take some sort of catastrophic event. Sorry decades of complacency can't be undone that easily.

 

[Verxis]

It's over.