So… your source to back up your point is an excerpt from a fictional book written by someone who’s expertise is in writing fiction?

Personally, I try not to take the word of someone who is not an expert, or at least versed in that particular area. Just because Pratchett was very a progressive writer doesn’t mean his opinions on gun control should be taken for anything more than his own personal position.

And if we’re just going to cite his fiction as his opinion, we have to assume he was also pro-police violence. I don’t know how much Discworld you’ve red, but even as Vimes progressed as a character and got better in a lot of ways, he always ended up resolving the issue by skirting the actual law and bending the rules to fit his purpose. Often he would espouse how much easier his job and the city would be if he wasn’t restricted by the law. Not everyone else, they still need to follow the law, but Sam Vimes knows better. There were even times when Pratchett would start to push back on that idea like he was going to have Vimes actually understand that police aren’t special and should be as answerable to the law as anyone… then the conflict would always be resolved by Vimes going outside the law and taking it into his own hands. He never learned that lesson. Quite the opposite actually.

So for those unfamiliar, Pratchett was so conservative, he was writing about rogue cops taking the law into their own hands before you kids ever heard those words put together.

But they gave their honest pov as a representation of white people in general.

Yeah, but until relatively recently, white folk didn’t think that way. At all.

Edit: Also, to be clear, what we currently call the “confederate flag” wasn’t associated with the entire rebellion. It was the battle flag of a specific army, the Army of Northern Virginia. It was mostly moved to irrelevance by everyone other than confederate apologists until the civil rights era when old-school racists started to put a bunch of confederate statues up everywhere and promoting the flag as a symbol in an attempt to frighten Black people fighting for their rights.

Even before World War II, cracks were evident in the foundation of the flag’s status as a symbol of heritage. Occasional northern and African-American voices questioned the wisdom of displaying a flag they associated with disunity or treason. And young white southerners began using the flag in distinctly non-memorial ways as a symbol of regional identity.

The growing battle over the post-Reconstruction South’s established racial order of Jim Crow segregation resurrected the Confederate flag’s use as a political symbol.

Supporters of the States Right Party (aka the Dixiecrats) in 1948 embraced the flag as a symbol of support for segregation. Although the Dixiecrats emphasized Constitutional principal, “states rights” in the 1940s and 1950s translated, as it had in the 1860s, into the purposeful denial of fundamental human and civil rights for African Americans.

The explicit use of the Confederate flag as a symbol of segregation became more widespread and more violent after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision. Southern states resisting federally-mandated integration incorporated the flag into their official symbolism.

link

Not the same person but I googled “causes for secession” and clicked the first link.

First link.

What? If there’s someone walking around punching a bunch of people in the face and I’m very anti-face-punching, 100% I’m going to go against my principles of not punching the one time to punch that person in the face. They should then, hopefully, understand what their actions were doing to those around them and develop a sense of empathy.

I believe at least 1 or 2 of them said specifically their goal was to take all his money to remove his ability to create further harmful content.

Also sure, Mamoa is a big guy and fit, but he’s an actor, right? Not a fighter?

It’s kind of like how Nick Offerman said in an interview once. Everyone sees him as this manly man because of the roles he plays and because he wood-works. But he’s from a real “country” family. A rural farming community where everyone was self-sufficient and real “manly” men type. He’s the one who wanted to be an actor who never has to work with his hands again.

What I’m saying is those men have jobs where they protect people from physical violence with physical violence. Jason Mamoa pretends to hit people on camera.

How is that tracked?

What were you saying then? What was your point of saying “not always the case.”?

So we’re protecting the system against the outliers? So we’re blocking naturally muscular or otherwise more athletic cis girls from playing? Really tall basketball players? Runners who are just naturally faster? How do you judge they fall too far outside the median range?

Or have you given this no thought and you just think boy things are for boys and girl things for girls and you stopped learning at age 3?

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I don’t know that you need a semicolon but you could definitely use one, and that would probably be the best way. Semicolons are for when two complete sentences are related. But they can still be formatted as two sentences, or even the same sentence with a comma. Many sentences contain parts that could be standalone sentences. But reading back over the original sentence again I would probably say it can just be rewritten to be more straightforward.

“Another aspect to this video is that Somerset, when actually trying to write some of the material himself, produced complete garbage.”

Mostly I’ve just been reading a lot of philosophy recently which tends to run on a long and complex sentence structure that’s unnecessary and could be a lot simpler, so this kind of thing has been at the front of my mind lately. That’s probably the only reason I even noticed in the first place.

I have no issue with the content provided, but I wanted to give a little constructive criticism on the structure of your writing. Real small. When you say,

There was another aspect to this video, which was that when Somerset actually…

When you say there is a thing, the reader is going to assume the next thing you write to be that thing. So you don’t need the “which is that.” You can just launch right into what you’re going to say, you already set it up. You basically said “I have a thing to say. The thing I have to say is this:”

Everything else is informative and well presented. No other notes.

It could also be the fact that a Mon-Fri 9-5 job just isn’t the norm and often isn’t enough for one to live for a majority of Americans, so they have less time to learn, then make those repairs. In addition, prices for tools and materials have obviously gone up, making those repairs more expensive than “back in the day.”

Say your AC stops working at the height of summer. You go online and download the manual from the manufacturer, follow the directions to diagnose the issue. Awesome! You know what’s wrong, you just need to make a special trip to the hardware store (maybe where you live isn’t close to one since brick-and-mortar is more and more rare) and you can’t afford to wait for it to be delivered. So you buy the part and tools required at whatever price they’re selling for there because you can’t shop around. You don’t have another day off until next week, so you try to work a little bit every day on it, but you’re tired from your two jobs and only have a few hours free every day really. You’re having to stop and start constantly so you never get any momentum going on the work and it’s taking forever and the whole time you don’t have air conditioning so it’s hot as fuck. You don’t really know what you’re doing so it’s slow going. You’re losing sleep because it’s so hot and at least one of your jobs is physical and tires you out before you spend an hour tinkering with it every night. The little time that you normally get to spend with your kids is taken by this repair, and it takes almost a full week, and you have to hope you didn’t make a small mistake, because again, you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re just going from the manual, like “back in the day.” Or you could just dip into the savings and hire a guy to come out and fix it in an afternoon.

But you’re right, it’ probably just kids these days.

How can a crime vary by ideology? Criminal implies legalities. How can your ideological point of view change whether or not a law was broken?

I mean, I would say that it’s far more ethical than most billionaires. She didn’t exploit workers, she performed and the populace gave her the money willingly. It’s as ethical as one can get in the modern day where no person can participate in society without benefiting from exploitation. And as far as I can tell from some half-assed searching, her investments are in property, but not in the landlord sense. She owns rich people property. Mansions and jets and shit.

I my personal opinion, musicians seem like the most ethical rich people in terms of how they got their money. They get exploited by the music industry early on, but money primarily comes from ticket and merch sales, which people choose to spend their money on in support of the artist. People hate capitalism, but forget what it is they hate about it and just start hating the money, forgetting why it’s bad- the exploitation.

The way I remember that Affect is active. You affect things. Effect is passive, and is the result of something. Affect is a verb (and I think sometimes can be a descriptor). Effect is always a noun. So you can have the resulting effect of an experiment, but if you mess with some variables, you have affected the effect.

Though, in this case, you're turning the noun into a verb, so you could make the case for either use I think. If you hyphenate it though you can leave it as is without thought. "Streisand-effecting.

Years ago I had a CEO of the company I worked at make a similar comment; "affect/effect. No one really knows which one to use." So my contrarian, anti-authority ass just looked it up right then and decided to always know.

I don't know that many people say that because of the story though. It created many of the cinematography methods we still use today. Before it, movies were generally just recreating stage plays in front of a camera. Every scene a stationary shot framing the whole room. No real transitions. For Citizen Kane they tore apart the roof and floor to allow for a camera to get moving shots zooming into a scene and angles not often used before. It changed the way people thought of movies and what they could be. People do love watching the slow decline of the powerful, but that movie is considered one of the best movies for other reasons.

To use your alcoholic analogy. Imagine you were a terrible alcoholic and you decide to get better. Great! But you can't STOP drinking. Not completely. You have to stop drinking too much while also NEEDING to have 2-3 single drinks a day to survive. So every day. Every. Single. Day. Multiple times a day you have to face that temptation. Your brain and body are craving you down a fifth of vodka when you wake up, but you're only supposed to drink a watered down Bloody Mary instead. You have to taste that vodka and get a tiny bit of that dopamine hit from it, but you just have to stop. Your kitchen is full of liquor bottles, but you have to just wait until lunch to have your next drink with that craving eating away at you.

And then you hit the breakroom at lunch to sip on your small shot of whiskey you brought from home, but the breakroom is a cocktail bar and everyone around you is downing a couple pints of lager or a Long Island Ice Tea. There's an open bar right there! Plenty of drinks easily available and your mind is begging you to just go get some. But you're not abstaining completely. You just have to sit there and sip on your tiny bit of alcohol and that'll just be enough.

For your nightly drink, you always take it at home. You can't go to a restaurant with anyone, or even by yourself. You can't order in. The smallest drinks they serve is a full pint. And still, while you down that Manhattan as quickly as you can every night so as not to think about it too much, you have to go to your kitchen to prepare it with the shelves full of liquor. And just have that one drink. Everyone else gets to have a few drinks a day and move on with their life, but for you every meal is a fight to not go off the deep end while dipping your toes just a little into the pool.

And then tomorrow you have to wake up and do it again.

And every day for the rest of your life.

And that's just me trying to appeal to your empathy, assuming you have any. There's science that shows that the dopamine (or maybe serotonin, I always get them confused) that food addicts get is just as addictive as a hard drug habit. It's literally the same thing. That's why drugs feel good. It's not just the altered state that's addictive. The chemicals your brain release when it gets these things make you crave more. Some people's brains light up from eating some foods. It's the same thing as a drug habit, but you can't quit. Ever. There's science to back up how wrong you are. You just don't have to deal with it and you can't imagine how anyone could have different experiences than you.