Bee teachers explaining to their larva students, "no, despite the name, the human queen isn't mother of everyone in the nation." Bee Catholic Priests explaining that you shouldn't call her "Queen Teresa"
a character who thought they had crippling anxiety who can handle the "make-you-evil" artifact safely because it turns out they actually were super evil on the inside but they were just good at coping.
"shirt that lights you on fire when you put it on" appears in a old Arthurian legion. So classic D&D's diabolical cursed items aren't unprecedented.
many evil f2p mechanics can be made significantly better by just being incompetently made. A gatcha game where the gatcha was hidden away in a menu and a bit dull to pull wouldn't be that bad. The trouble is the endless optimization of user engagement/spending money/addiction rather than one mechanic exactly.
gatcha still isn't good tho.
sometimes treating atheism as a religion is useful since it fills the same slot. Being both atheistic and Christian is hard, just like being Christian and Buddhist is hard*. E.g. When you are collecting data about what religion people belong to, including an atheism option is reasonable. *though both of those do exist though are rare. Sometimes treating atheism as not a religion is useful since a barely religious christian behaves quite similarly to an atheist. Likewise for a barely religious Muslim. E.g. when you are collecting data about religiosity.
I have something of an objection to the first part - although “an atheist and a Christian” is contradictory, and “a Buddhist and a Christian” is rather hard (although it has been done), “a Daoist and a Buddhist” is a farily large religious category, and “a Hindu and a Muslim” was historically way more common than you would expect.
Christian Atheists do exist So apparently it isn't too contradictory for people to believe in. You can argue that Christian Atheists believe in non-sense, but you presumably believe that of every religion (or atheism) you don't believe in. It is true that some people follow multiple religions. The ability to treat religions as exclusive is because either they contract each other or have explicit rules against syncretism. (e.g. no idolatry). Some religions like ancient roman paganism had few concerns about syncretism or contradictions. And in a context dominated by such religions, treating religions as exclusive is misleading. To some extent, we can continue to treat religions as exclusive if we just label the mixtures as new religions. It is definitely more appropriate to model Baháʼí Faith as a new religion than to model it as people believing in a bunch of religions at the same time. Likewise classifying Christianity as form of Judaism on grounds that that Christianity believes in the Old Testament too, would be misleading. The exact lines between religions are a deeply fraught concept. "Who counts as christian?" will vary depending on who you ask. and will make people angry. Even in the west, we have beliefs about luck or fae or whatever, which are religious in shape, but are rarely considered to be exclusive with Christianity (though are definitely frowned upon by many christian leaders). Compressing all human belief into a single category will be super lossy, but "Saudi Arabia is 93.0% Islamic" communicates lots of useful information. Instead treating each religion as a separate toggle might communicate it more accurately but misses the point that they are still largely exclusive.
sometimes treating atheism as a religion is useful since it fills the same slot. Being both atheistic and Christian is hard, just like being Christian and Buddhist is hard*. E.g. When you are collecting data about what religion people belong to, including an atheism option is reasonable. *though both of those do exist though are rare. Sometimes treating atheism as not a religion is useful since a barely religious christian behaves quite similarly to an atheist. Likewise for a barely religious Muslim. E.g. when you are collecting data about religiosity.
mental burglars breaking into people's houses and stealing their psychological baggage. That's why people sometimes get over thing that were troubling them.
Ancient aliens hypothesis to explain why the salt crystals are little cubes. That such an unnatural shape.
"it is immoral to write a story which uses conspiracy theories as its lore" seems very analogous to Christians thinking D&D turned people into satanists. I suppose you could take the position that fundamentalist Christians were correct about that, but I wouldn't want to have to defend that position
a guy who doesn't believe in Christmas. Not that he doesn't celebrate it. He insists that no one ever does. It is a trick to make us spend money or a holiday that never arrives.
Corporations care about near-term profit. What counts as near-term profit is determined by accounting rules. e.g. technically, investing in a 100-year bond is a very long term investment (since you only get your money back in 100-years) but accounting rules don't count it as a expense to a 100-year bond, so companies don't under invest in them. In contrast, investing in say consumer goodwill will show as an expense. So a CEO looking to boost profits this quarter might sell a bad product (ruining consumer good will in exchange for some fast cash) even if that hurts the company in the long run. Thus, by reforming accounting rules, we can control corporate behaviour. For example, if "how much the public approves of your company" counted as an intangible asset, companies would be less willing to ruin their reputation in exchange for a dollar (because it would appear as a loss to investors) There are limits. Because investors ultimately want actual cash as dividends or stock buybacks, even if we say "a dollar given to the poor is worth two dollars in heaven", investors will still punish companies with such heavenly profits.
sugar is a psychoactive chemical that crosses the blood-brain barrier with effects like decreased starvation and "mmm tasty"
Community Label: Mature
idea: put cocaine into salad to make it easier to maintain health eating habits.
Community Label: Mature
Drug and alcohol addiction
"if doctors are supposed to police who deserves painkillers, then doctor appointments should be paid out of the police budget"
Referring to any corporation which makes more than 50% of its revenue selling to the government as a "government-funded corporation"
hypothesis: Left-leaning people say things like "Wokism is very powerful in society and politics" because they are personally afraid of being shamed for associating with the wrong things, or questioning seemingly nonsensical statements.
You might object that Wokism has few political victories, so must be weak, but it has power in people's hearts and daily lives. If someone never mentions their favourite show, because they fear it is problematic. Then Wokism has power in their life, potentially much stronger than most policy changes have.