https://pastebin.com/5ENcTSw4

I have legit lost sleep over the first quote from “they thought they were free” listed here:

https://www.facinghistory.org/sites/default/files/2023-04/Reading_Do_You_Take_the_Oath.pdf

This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever read. It’s almost into not even wrong territory. I think you should contact a philosophy department and ask them why they haven’t considered this.

Eh, mostly I’m just pointing out how stupid this is to anyone with half a brain in their head.

We have animal rights legislation and morals for reasons, and nobody who like protests whaling gets criticised for not growing fake whale meat. You might disagree on where the line should be but it’s just outing yourself as someone with underdeveloped theory of mind if you don’t understand why people might feel strongly about it being further down the tree of life.

I consider myself a flexitarian, I adopt puppies, give them a good life till they’re about 2 years old, then humanely slaughter them and eat them. The stuff I don’t eat I backfeed to the next round of puppies.

I am so with this post, what I do is so much more sustainable and humane than anything that happens on a farm. Extremists harrassing me should fund lab grown meat instead. Really this is more ethical than eating beans because of crop deaths.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Everyone involved in this, anyone who followed these orders, needs to hang.

Hopefully people don’t need a college degree in literature to understand basic subtext.

I think it’s about learning that it’s worth doing more than anything else.

a plant based diet is completely healthy as long as you eat varied foods and don’t try something stupid like subsisting on apples and dandelions.

There are world renowned athletes who are plant based…

you get that this wouldn’t work as a critique if it was obvious you could make different choices right? Then it wouldn’t make the player complicit. If you’re not complicit it’s just a game saying “military shooters could be different” which is a nothing statement.

Like how games with a “get the information (evil)” and “get the information (good)” button aren’t offering real moral choices. Or how deus ex would lose all impact if the “here’s a gun, go kill these people” starting mission tempting you with a rocket launcher popped up a “you might change sides in the future” warning.

By involving you, leading you just like any other military shooter for a bit then cutting you loose is what creates the critique. You compare notes after playing and someone points out something and you go “huh, why didn’t I try that?”. It’s not condemning you for not trying that, it’s asking you if you’re happy with a genre which trains you to never to try it.

It’s weird. I credit my scientific education with waking me up to questioning stuff. Like when you learn about how we know stuff, the limits of proof (e.g. can’t prove empiricism is “true” it just works extremely well for certain things), how hard it is to wrangle stuff into scientific questions and so on the elephant in the room is how fucking impossible most questions are.

Then you get thinking about how untested most of society is, how many different ways there are to interpret things, how unknowable the “goodness” of your preferences is and so on.

Yet, in the same cohort as me there were a lot of people coming out extremely certain of their own worldview and blindly faithful in technocrats and the mystical power of throwing data at stuff to solve enormous problems. Like we are anywhere near being able to calculate out a human society.

So idk, I think it’s less stem vs not stem and education quality and kinds of people/where they’re at in life. You could probably go through a lit crit course and come out blinkered too, being able to do lit crit doesn’t guarantee you’d have good opinions.

Military shooter games glorify war and shallowly reward horrible behaviour. Spec ops does it differently.

Majority of people: do horrible thing

Some people: experimental and find heroic thing is rewarded.

Discussion possible, why did the majority do that? could we talk about horrible and uncreative design patterns in the genre of military shooters? How media portrayals of war train us not to look for peaceful solutions? Whether this feeds into how we view American imperial wars?

you: no spec ops bad video game because I didn’t do the good option.

I think you’re actually engaging with it a bit shallowly. You are the one who invented the rule and a different framing is exploring how, if games seem to put us in situations where we must do horrible things to advance even a couple of times, we take that as a rule instead of risking losing to find other ways.

Which is a fairly glaring indictment of the whole military shooter genre which is all about “hard men and hard choices” that completely dehumanise the factions you’re in opposition to.

I feel like the licensing in Australia is in generally pretty good (sometimes it’s bonkers reactionary in terms of what gets banned).

Rifles you can get levers and bolt action. They fire plenty fast enough for whatever you want to do with them recreationally.

Handguns are licenceable but it’s strict as fuck. Expensive club membership, regular training/competing events (community + keeping skills and culture good), 6 month probationary period with only supervised shooting, another 6 months before you can buy your own, have to have a rock solid safe bolted to the floor inspected initially and randomly (every few years realistically). Seems completely reasonable, handguns exist to put holes in paper and kill humans, plus they’re highly concealable and much harder to use.

Do you talk to people like this in real life?

Could you be a little less online about stuff. If you’re lile 15 and just coming out of indoctrination with limited support around I forgive you, otherwise Jesus christ mate get a grip.

Hi, I’m shit at brushing my teeth long enough/regularly enough. I am glad fluride is in the water.

Hi I’m someone who has concerns about animal testing and is sensitive to SLS causing mouth ulcers/generally ruining taste for a while, unfortunately hippy toothpaste often lacks fluride for insane reasons. I am glad fluride is in the water.

Hi I’m a kid with horrible parents that neglect my dental care. I am glad fluride is in the water.

“Just let people hurt themselves” is never that easy.

Keep in mind our categories are pretty arbitrary. We have stuff like semimetals and so on. All bonding has multiple characteristics outside of extremes, e.g. covalent bonds with dipole character.

Metals are just our name for the broad category of bonding between extremes at conditions we usually find on earth where we live. They are soft squashy bonds that are kinda slutty because they’re just sort of average.

Actually within the metals we see some pretty different characteristics, especially with D orbital chemistry stuff but because of inertia we just keep these things all in the same category of metals because shiny squishy was a lot more obvious than fucky wucky complexing when people named them.

From vicious giant insects who have once again come back

whimper was a dovecot and postfix machine. Email isn’t very fun

I don’t have many now, just minstrel (it plays music) but previously they’ve always just be sounds. Rawr, groan, whimper, bark, moan, growl etc.

Except minstrel (it plays music) :p