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@uni-daioh / uni-daioh.tumblr.com

The greatest of all sea urchins.

I want to make it clear, I'm not here to oppose the possibility of people being incarnated souls from other planets. However, if you identify yourself specifically as a starseed - IE, an allegedly advanced spiritual being come here to spread supposed enlightenment - I will have to oppose you on the grounds of you choosing to become a missionary to preach spiritual eugenics and promote cultural genocide. If you aren't a space missionary here to preach spiritual eugenics and promote cultural genocide, then please call yourself literally anything other than "starseed." (No, this term cannot be "reclaimed," as literal white supremacists proudly call themselves "starseeds" right now, and the starseed movement has always been tied in with various racist pseudoscientific crap like ancient alien theory and linear evolution.)

we will never run out of new discourse it's an infinite supply

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So, often a thing I randomly think about when I read posts like OP’s is “But is it true?” because it seems like that issue - the question of whether or not the claim at hand is literally and factually correct as opposed to having the correct social and political affiliations - is getting completely elided. It feels like whether or not someone is actually an advanced spiritual being incarnated here from another planet in order to spread enlightenment is kind of a big deal, and not just able to be handily dismissed by pattern-matching them to the closest moron with moronic Earth ideas?

Similarly, it feels like people don’t understand that (or at least argue as though they did not understand that) the reason ancient alien theory is “racist pseudoscientific crap” is that it’s not true, not that it would diminish the glory of the ancient Egyptians, Britons, Zimbabweans, or whatnot if it were true.

not a big fan of sorcerers, personally

As play experience? As more-or-less necessary part of world building? As DM experience? Are we even talking about D&D?

primarily 2 though my general dislike of mages also places them in 1 and 3 as well

At least wizards have to dedicate themselves to years of study and warlocks have to trade off part of their soul! “I’ve got magic blood” is Boring!

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#also if you've got magic genes you're obligated to have as many kids as you can #for equality what if you have bad magic genes (demon lord sealed in left eye) instead

Anonymous asked:

Main reason I'M hyped about artificial wombs is as a big stick to hit pro-choice people with. Hmm, it seems the universe has handed you another "choice" besides ritual infanticide. Care to try it?

I didn't mention this in my post, but yeah I did notice the pro-lifers in the bushes with baseball bats labeled "artificial womb technology."

I wouldn't push for that, personally, but can the pro-life side wring out enough support to impose it via a state legislature?

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what’s the pitch here

extract the fetus from the womb and throw it in the artificial womb so it can be... put up for adoption?

Yes, the pitch is the obvious reading: "Pro-choicers say that they fear the complications from pregnancy, or the loss of agency from pregnancy, or they can't emotionally bear carrying a child imposed on them by a sexual criminal, so we'll just chuck the baby in an artificial womb and put it up for adoption, which negates all their criticisms. Checkmate, abortionists."

My balance of obligations doesn't require me to impose this policy on others (though there are stricter moral bindings on what I, personally, am permitted to do with regard to abortion).

I'd say it would be interesting to see the pro-choice counter, but while the pro-choice counter may or may not be correct, it will not be interesting.

  1. nonny specifically is an uncharitable asshole towards both atheist pro-choicers and the people who have and will work to make the tech happen. 2. Go on then ya nob, fund artificial wombs to own the libs! The 1% of pro-lifers who actually care more about zygotes than bioconservative gender roles can be won over to "safe, legal, and rare". The 99% who hate abortion but also contraception, butt stuff, and oh yes artificial wombs, will blame us for any uptick in unwanted children but be glad for the good optics of taking them on as servants uhhhh valued children, which sucks but is an improvement on how they got their non-biological children historically. 3. You're taking a presumably consensual sexual act, mixing someone's genetic material with another person's and incubating it without physically imposing on them, and optionally chasing them down for social engagement or money. i.e. If you line up the reputation and money effects right, it's bringing women up to the situation of a man who consents to sex but not to impregnating his partner. Am I seriously the only one who sees the potential there! It's much, much better than forced fucking pregnancy, but it's not great. You don't go scorched earth on your idiot sibling having a kid, fucking up your bloodline, and being a smug asshole about it, but you are glad there are only a few people in the world capable of hitting you in the values like that.

Nony seems to be one of those drank the koolaid prolifers who's particularly stupid. People get abortions to not be pregnant, because they don't want or can't support a kid, and generally only specifically to kill the child in cases of known disabilities, drug and alcohol use by mom, sex selection abortions, incest, rape, or because fuck the babydaddy. The fetuses you'd get by substituting embryo transfer for abortion in cases where that might not be voluntarily chosen if everything else was equal, those are low quality, hard to adopt out, long term low productivity citizens.

While the true believer "every fetus is a person" ladies definitely exist, they don't seem to be the bulk of the pro-life movement.

And I really don't think that most prolifers prioritize saving (and funding) every fetus so much as specific gender roles and sexual norms. And whoo boy, but the impact of artificial wombs on gender roles and sexual norms... It's not going to be what they want.

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What do you think the impact of artificial wombs would be on gender roles and sexual norms?

I think there may be understandable cases like (1) giving meat to someone who has moral or religious objections to eating meat, or (2) giving a non-diet drink to someone who has diabetes or suchlike (I don’t know much about this but I think there are health hazards in this vicinity).

To be clear, I think the vast majority of yelling at servers is unjustified and often by wealthy assholes.

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I’ve only done this when politeness has failed me. The closest example was years ago, when I ordered a pasta dish I got routinely at a restaurant and the server asked me which of two sauces I wanted on it, and would not take “the much fancier sauce it specifically and normally comes with” for an answer to the point where I had to ask for the manager in order to get the perfectly normal version of a dish I had frequently gotten there previously.

Like there’s something for being polite but at some point if communication has broken down that badly you either have to say something less politely or get up and leave on the spot, which is also impolite.

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It’s so fucked up how tiktok culture has made clout-poisoned people turn the public into content, every day I see people minding their business have their entire faces put online for thousands of likes, a couple kissing on the train, a lady dancing across a cross walk, a guy nodding his head to the music at a club, a lady buying a banana at the store, ring camera footage of the neighbors kids being stupid. Just let people live jfc

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I think I may have made it seem like this is about wholesome content (which my sentiment towards that is the same) but most of the time when I see this stuff people are being ridiculed for being completely normal. And I didn’t make up any of these examples btw, I couldn’t find the dance one but only because there are too many videos of people being recorded at cross walks

(Faces censored and additional text added by me)

Im gonna add this to every post about this i see im never gonna shut up about it. This will get people killed. This will ruin lives. More people live in hiding than you think. So many people are one post away from having to abandon their whole lives. Dont ever post anything of anyone without their consent, stranger or not.

Don't even know what I'm supposed to find funny about the first one. Are they not allowed to like Ethiopian food? Are they not allowed to bond on a date over their shared love of a fairly unusual thing? Am I supposed to be so precious and delicate that I can't see people tamely kissing on a train? I don't get it and I don't want to.

Yes, it's currently considered inappropriate for a White person to like ethnic food, and especially to talk about liking ethnic food where it may be overheard.

It's also considering inappropriate to engage in Public Displays of Affection (PDAs) now.

When I was young, both of those positions were held by regressive conservatives mad about the Sexual Revolution and Equal Rights, but now these are positions are also held by young Dem/Left progressives, so tbh I would say it's fairly uncontroversial to see the behavior of the couple as inappropriate from both ends of the political spectrum at this point, and Centrist to see it as acceptable.

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Ethopian food is good and talking about how good it is in public ought to be perfectly acceptable regardless of your appearance.

Friendly reminder

friendly reminder that if your fantasy RPG has this graphic it's gonna crash and burn

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Not sure that’s true. I mean, this is less exciting than the version that the D&D 3.5 Player’s Manual had, but it basically did have it.

yeah but this wasn't about D&D it was about your rpg

the presence of a chart of polearms is considered by some to be the defining trait of the "fantasy heartbreaker," a new RPG system someone develops with their group after years of hard work and nobody pays any attention to it because it is just D&D and does nothing D&D doesn't.

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It’s not really 100% true that fantasy heartbreakers haven’t existed since the 90s, but it’s closer to true than not, and there are plenty of current fantasy RPGs that could have just been D&D and have not met with complete failure.

Though, I suppose in a sense there always were - it’s not like Rolemaster wasn’t around back in the day, either.

drakengard 3 is one of my favourite games. after years of adoring it, i streamed it for some friends, spent a collective 8 hours or so, over the course of several weeks, trying to beat the final boss, failed and gave up because i was not having fun anymore. the final boss theme continues to be one of my favourite videogame songs of all time

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how does yoko taro do this to people

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If you’re looking to complete the final boss of Drakengard 3, the way I did it was to sync the game to a video of the final boss which provides a step chart telling you when to hit buttons, and then hit buttons along with the video.

Once I got the synchronization right I did it on my second try.

Okay I know I said I was on a break from “D&D culture bad” posting but someone in a TTRPG facebook group I’m in got called a snob for merely suggesting to a “fellow” aspiring TTRPG *DESIGNER* to check out games other than Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition lmaoooooooooooooooooooooo literally Marvel fans but 10x worse

D&D’s ubiquity has transformed tabletop roleplaying into the only hobby where people will accuse you of gatekeeping for politely inviting them to dig deeper into it

Like homie we’re literally holding the gate open and begging you to come in.

This reminds me of that twitter thread that Cavegirl Games made a while ago about the problem with people falsely equating genre with setting. Genre often comes baked-in into the mechanics of a TTRPG, for example D&D’s mechanics exist to emulate a very particular kind of action-adventure power fantasy, but for people who have no experience outside of D&D and maybe Pathfinder (and thus have no frame of reference for the existence of other types of mechanics that exist to emulate other genres), it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you can play any genre in D&D by homebrewing surface-level trappings of that genre’s setting (such as six-guns for a western or spaceships, robots and laser guns for sci-fi), when actually you’re just playing D&D-style action-adventure but set in the wild west and D&D-style action-adventure but set in space.

Which is also why there’s a myriad “HOW TO RUN HORROR IN D&D” reddit posts and youtube videos out there, people unaware of the possibility space for actual horror mechanics will just emulate surface-level trappings of the horror genre in a system with mechanics that are notoriously bad at doing horror and then find themselves having to fight the system at every turn.

Right??? It’s funny how so many 5e fans paint 5e as a game that uniquely supports social roleplaying and noncombat solutions and older editions and other systems as mindless wargamey “kill monster take its stuff rinse repeat” affairs when 5e barely has any actual mechanical support for social roleplaying beyond “uuuuh charisma check I guess”. Even WITHIN the D&D lineage, older editions like the B/X D&D set tended to treat combat as more of a failure state, and had actual mechanics for nonlethal encounter resolution such as fleeing combat, parlaying and negotiating with monsters, and monsters fleeing or surrendering, which 5e sorely lacks. And that’s without mentioning any of the non-D&D systems that actually put combat and noncombat play on the same level of importance and mechanical weight.

Anyway here’s my favorite D&D brainrot quote:

“D&D is a role-playing game like no other– one wherein [thing that’s true of literally every single TTRPG in the world]”

that article doesn’t recommend either of the official 5E LOTR books

lmao

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To be fair, I also wouldn’t use Adventures in Middle Earth for much other than inspiration if I was going to run LotR in D&D, with some exceptions, on account of I don’t like it much. But also, what’s the other official 5e LotR book? (Full confession: I am a “I will simply run it in D&D” type of person but this is on account of it being the type of game I genuinely want to play, though usually I mean 3e or something OSR, not 5e. I have tried some other games and found most of them tragically not D&D and thus wanting, or very limiting in other ways.)

my b apparently “The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying,” which is the 5E adaptation of The One Ring isn’t out until Q1 next year.

I remember AiME’s Journey system being cool but I don’t remember much else. I’ve also never read/seen LotR, so

i have a deep and perverse love of books that twist and warp 5E into something it isn’t supposed to be. sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t in interesting ways.

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The journey system is fun, yeah. It’s just I’m not sure “Lord of the Rings is about taking very long walks across a world that is slowly falling apart year by year” exactly matches what I think of when I think of LotR, plus some balance/mechanics qualms. I mean, it’s not entirely wrong, but it’s also sort of not what the actual books were about.

I mean, the falling apart, mostly. Taking very long walks is dead on.

Okay I know I said I was on a break from “D&D culture bad” posting but someone in a TTRPG facebook group I’m in got called a snob for merely suggesting to a “fellow” aspiring TTRPG *DESIGNER* to check out games other than Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition lmaoooooooooooooooooooooo literally Marvel fans but 10x worse

D&D’s ubiquity has transformed tabletop roleplaying into the only hobby where people will accuse you of gatekeeping for politely inviting them to dig deeper into it

Like homie we’re literally holding the gate open and begging you to come in.

This reminds me of that twitter thread that Cavegirl Games made a while ago about the problem with people falsely equating genre with setting. Genre often comes baked-in into the mechanics of a TTRPG, for example D&D’s mechanics exist to emulate a very particular kind of action-adventure power fantasy, but for people who have no experience outside of D&D and maybe Pathfinder (and thus have no frame of reference for the existence of other types of mechanics that exist to emulate other genres), it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you can play any genre in D&D by homebrewing surface-level trappings of that genre’s setting (such as six-guns for a western or spaceships, robots and laser guns for sci-fi), when actually you’re just playing D&D-style action-adventure but set in the wild west and D&D-style action-adventure but set in space.

Which is also why there’s a myriad “HOW TO RUN HORROR IN D&D” reddit posts and youtube videos out there, people unaware of the possibility space for actual horror mechanics will just emulate surface-level trappings of the horror genre in a system with mechanics that are notoriously bad at doing horror and then find themselves having to fight the system at every turn.

Right??? It’s funny how so many 5e fans paint 5e as a game that uniquely supports social roleplaying and noncombat solutions and older editions and other systems as mindless wargamey “kill monster take its stuff rinse repeat” affairs when 5e barely has any actual mechanical support for social roleplaying beyond “uuuuh charisma check I guess”. Even WITHIN the D&D lineage, older editions like the B/X D&D set tended to treat combat as more of a failure state, and had actual mechanics for nonlethal encounter resolution such as fleeing combat, parlaying and negotiating with monsters, and monsters fleeing or surrendering, which 5e sorely lacks. And that’s without mentioning any of the non-D&D systems that actually put combat and noncombat play on the same level of importance and mechanical weight.

Anyway here’s my favorite D&D brainrot quote:

“D&D is a role-playing game like no other– one wherein [thing that’s true of literally every single TTRPG in the world]”

that article doesn’t recommend either of the official 5E LOTR books

lmao

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To be fair, I also wouldn’t use Adventures in Middle Earth for much other than inspiration if I was going to run LotR in D&D, with some exceptions, on account of I don’t like it much. But also, what’s the other official 5e LotR book? (Full confession: I am a “I will simply run it in D&D” type of person but this is on account of it being the type of game I genuinely want to play, though usually I mean 3e or something OSR, not 5e. I have tried some other games and found most of them tragically not D&D and thus wanting, or very limiting in other ways.)

@bambamramfan I cannot reblog your post directly because the OP of your post blocked me, but you wrote:

You’re honestly telling me that modern videogames, the best of the hundreds released every year, give you the same emotional intense you got from playing Super Mario Brothers 3? (Or whatever came out when you were 8.) They definitely don’t feel the same way to me. Or are you arguing that all these modern games, even all the indy 8-bit darlings, are technically worse than Super Mario Brothers 3?

Why not both? I feel like it's yes to both. (related post on being worse, not sure which sense you're using "technically" in.)

About once every other year, a great video game gives adult me the same emotional intensity that I recall from playing when I was 8-10 and the world was full of novelty and wonder. Some are PC releases like Avernum and Thea, some are semi-lost Flash games on Kongregate.

The rest, which is nearly all of them, are worse to me, even the indy 8-bit darlings. The 'best' of the videogame industry is still making a lot of bad decisions. As I regularly harp on at this blog, Master of Orion 1 is a game good enough for me to still play it, because it made a lot of good and clever design decisions, and later strategy games in its general genre just keep not making those decisions when MOO1 is right there to learn from.

Master of Orion, 1993: The controls for a planet fit in the sidepanel of a 320x200 resolution view.

Endless Space, 2012: there's a full-screen planets view packed with buttons buttons buttons buttons buttons buttons buttons BUTTONS

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Depressed mostly-RPG player, can confirm that they don’t give me the same “emotional intensity” but, like, see first word there? Kind of a no shit, Sherlock.

But, you know, it’s still really obvious that CRPG games got much, much worse after 2006 and did not really get better until after 2014. Likewise this isn’t just an emotional psychodrama thing, you can point to an actual decline in quality between Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and now Rings of Power, even as superhero movies went from being predictable as laughably bad to being the blockbuster film every year for over a decade. I’ve still been blown away by how cool games like 2011′s Terraria and 2020′s Satisfactory were, still really loved titles like 2008′s King’s Bounty: The Legend, 2013′s Hammerwatch, 2016′s Grim Dawn, 2017′s 20XX and Utawarerumono: Mask of Deception/Mask of Truth, 2019′s Fire Emblem: Three Houses, and probably more that are just not coming to mind.

I think a computer ethics class being mandatory as part of a compsci degree is a great idea (as is compulsory bioethics class for life sciences degree) to the extent that they don’t have an industry-prescribed list of what is ethical and what isn’t. Obviously the instructor will have their own opinion, but even if they try full throttle to indoctrinate their students, I think that they by and large would be very unsuccessful at it. (1. Have you successfully been indoctrinated by a university class on anything? 2. Have some faith in comp sci majors for fuck’s sake.) Whereas actually thinking through what the ethics of your profession should be is an incredibly useful exercise that people actually should engage in, and I think a lot of people don’t just simply for the reason that it never comes up. And a class like this is good in ensuring that it does come up.

A compulsory set of ethics practices that you get tested on, as is the case in finance, is an incredibly bad idea on the other hand (although the fact that it led to a scandal where Ericson employees were caught in an ethics test cheating ring is hilarious enough that maybe it was worth it)

There was an optional computer ethics class taught when I studied computer science, that I did not have sufficient time or interest to consider taking. I have the feeling that if I were forced to take that sort of class today, I would have pre-existing principles of ethical computing that directly conflict with what that sort of class would be obliged to each; and I would resent having to take it; and might feel somewhat more motivation than I already feel to deliberately compute things in ways the class taught was unethical.

Computer science people are already shouting “Stallman Was Right, I told you so in 2006” off the top of their lungs, and humanities people are saying “But I can’t delete my twitter and whatsapp, that’s where the people are”. I don’t know what more ethics would help.

tired: ethics courses for compsci students

wired: ethics courses for business students

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I took a mandatory computer ethics class while in college and it was the worst thing and caused the word “ethics” to leave a bad taste in my mouth for most of a decade.

Highlights include “ethics have nothing to do with morality” and an overall thesis of “ethics are what benefits the largest company involved in the situation and the more it benefits that company the more ethical it is.” (Seriously, over half of the content was “don’t copy that floppy” / “Nullsoft is the most unethical tech company in the history of the world and Justin Frankel should be hanged”)

idk what people who say stuff like this think they're accomplishing. good luck with that i guess

legitimately sorry your field just took a financial hit due to technological progress, but this has happened thousands of times throughout human history, and sticking your head in the sand and telling everyone to fuck off has a low success rate

Part of my feelings about this are from being a lifelong fan of Spiderweb Software, which is really just one guy who has been writing video games since the 90s. Indie games with bad graphics are not, you know, a hugely profitable market, and I feel lucky that he's been able to support himself full-time on this. And one of his biggest expenses is art. He has to hire people to draw little swords and goblins and shit for him. And since it's all mismatched stuff from different artists, he deliberately makes it as generic as possible, his games don't have a distinctive look, he gets a lot of generic fantasy art so that he can mix it all together. Which is exactly the kind of thing that the machine learning models are good at, they're bad at creating a consistent distinctive look, but if you just want "sword graphic from a fantasy video game" it will give you something that sure looks like some sword from some fantasy game. And like, I don't buy his games to support illustrators? I do want to support him, and of course I'm fine with how my money will go to illustrators because that's one of his expenses. But like, what if he had been a bit less popular? What if his games had stopped making money and he went to work programming for a bank or something? Would I have been okay with that because it's ultimately a consequence of illustrators getting paid well? No, I'm going to think, it would've been better if he didn't have that expense, if there had just been some magic box that could create the little sword graphics. Like what the fuck loyalty am I supposed to have to illustrators as a class? If the people who actually use illustrations can be saved that expense, that's a real benefit to the world. The difference between some indie game being made vs not, maybe, one day, when there's real products based on these generative image ML systems, not just cool demos.

This illustrates my problem with this whole thread and the thinking around this even more starkly.

For crying out loud, take the thought one step further man!

Suppose, rather than relying on Spiderweb Software to make games that are kind of what you are looking for, end users instead had a cheaper, or even free, little box which they could ask for "A game like the ones Spiderweb Software makes, but also-" and get a really good rendition of a Spiderweb Software game out of it.

Wouldn't it be better if end users didn't have to pay some programmer for video games, and if game designers didn't have to waste a bunch of time learning to program? If instead of paying middlemen like Spiderweb Software, they could just get what they specifically want without the added cost of paying this programmer that you happen to like?

The entire premise of this post is that you're glad an artist can make a living as an artist rather than being forced to do it as a hobby during free time from a real job!

For pete's sake!

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I mean I get where you’re coming from in a lot of ways but the world would overall be a better place if a lot of these things happened. Yeah there’s essentially always someone one step directly up the ladder who benefits the most, but that’s just how technological progress has always worked.

Like... your 3rd and 4th paragraphs are pretty close to one of those utopia-with-flying-cars images to me? The proper way, imo, to fix “sorry about your entire industry, learn to code or starve lol” isn’t making technological progress impossible, it’s building a strong social safety net and encouraging progress.

Am I really naive or is iron Dome purely defensive?

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Yeah, though any defensive thing is always offensive in a way since it means you can attack without fear of retribution, because you are well-defended.

saw a ttrpg product advertise that their writing team is “70% diverse”

what does that

what does that mean

When they use the word “diverse” in this way, what they really mean is “deviant”. They see the “old heterosexual Christian white man” as the “center” and their Marxist Critical Theory casts every other demographic as a deviation from that center, with all “deviants” of any kind having a shared interest in overthrowing and replacing that center.

not the kind of response I expected from a RWBY blog, but thanks for your deranged input.

Obviously it means that 30% of their writing team is a uniform quantity of pure argon gas.

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I wish I could be a uniform quantity of pure argon gas capable of writing tabletop RPGs.

"Ron Hubbard had become a well-known writer of pulp fiction stories in the 1930s before he joined the United States Navy in 1941, a few months before the US entered World War II.[2] His military career was not a success; he was removed from both of the vessels that he commanded after disagreements with his superiors and an incident in which he inadvertently shelled neutral Mexico."

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looking at art just so you can decide if its Evil and Problematic is the death of media analysis

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when will we be free of people who only give a shit about art when they can use it for their Ideology

No time soon; before we had The Problematic Inquisition we had a the Evangelical equivalent standing in judgement on every new Disney release and starting their own guaranteed pure film studios.

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For a while it looked like we were free of them (I mean, they stood in judgment and started their own studios, but you weren’t necessarily obligated to care) and the Problematic Inquisition had, to the degree it had started, not become something you were obligated to care about either.

So it’s not *impossible*, as this basically summarizes most of the 90s and 2000s. When or if it will ever happen again... well, who knows.

In his recent links post, Scott Alexander linked to this very powerful and disturbing essay by Richard Hanania (content warning for devastating honesty but honesty about some potentially upsetting and arguably quite intolerant attitudes). I actually had run across it a few weeks ago and had it in mind when responding in a recent back-and-forth discussion about what stigma is, and forgot to bring it up and link to it (perhaps for the best; my responses were getting more and more unwieldy already). But here is a guy who has an "ugh, eww, I don't really want to be around that, I also have a vague idea that people like that are less trustworthy but can't entirely pinpoint why except eww" reaction to certain types of people. That seems to represent an instance of stigma at its purest. Maybe that still isn't a 100% pure "disvaluing" type of stigma attitude, and maybe that virtually doesn't exist, but it's pretty far along the spectrum in that direction.

That article will probably have a pretty lasting effect on the way I think about anti-woke-type-progressive people actually: I've always tended towards the assumption that SJ-type activists are too keen to imagine their opponents as coming from a place of irrational disgust, and SJ activists probably still are overestimating this, but it's very possible that more of the opposition is rooted in pure gut-level disgust than I have been recognizing.

Man I found that article irritating. First of all, everything in there is going to be coming out of the mouth of Ron DeSantis the next time he gives a speech so it's not really non-conformist anymore and I'd like people to actually notice that please.

Second, I have this feeling of, like, the feeling I get whenever French bigots pass another law against clothing they don't like.

Like, when I hear a story about women being forced to wear burqas or head scarves or whatever, my reaction is always, "Each woman should dress however the fuck she wants and it's nobody else's fucking business"

And apparently there's a large contingent of French people who are like, "It's too bad that the wrong people are forcing women to dress a certain way. We need to make sure that the right people are in charge of forcing women to dress a certain way."

From when I started blogging from a much more panicked place I thought about "cancel culture" (And to a large extent related shit like wokeness) as an essentially politically neutral process.

Basically, I would think of it like, you say something that you don't believe to be controversial, and it sets off a firestorm of controversy, with mobs of people sending you hate mail, calling your job and demanding you be fired.

And to me that process, and the lack of defenses people have against it are the problem. It's an equally frightening process whether the mob is screaming at you for the time you said "All lives matter" or whether they're screaming at you because you said "black lives matter".

And as the reactionaries gain power I've come to the disturbing conclusion that a ton of rat-adjacent people are actually totally fine with the process as long as we give it back to the christians, fascists and homophobes who ought to be in charge of it and start using it against the woke people who definitely deserve to never work again because they use racist words like "equality" and "diversity" and "stakeholder".

I don't like it but a lot of people have said, pretty much explicitly, that cancel culture is bad because it's left-wing and that, say, homophobic or transphobic versions of cancel culture are somehow less dangerous or concerning.

Yeah, I’m a pretty similar spot these days. I (to a limited extent, certainly nothing like Hanania) threw my chips in with the anti-woke crowd from about 2018 to  early ‘21 because I thought they meant it when they said ‘why can’t we all just get along?’ They clearly didn’t mean it, or else it ended up not mattering, and I’m mad at myself for not seeing the heel turn coming.

Now, don’t get me wrong here, there’s a lot about the woke left that I still hate, that I think is absolutely inimical to the world I want to live in. A lot of its biggest celebrities are deeply horrible people. And I think cranks of all kinds are part of a healthy informational ecosystem, both in that their presence implies the lack of easy-target censorship and that the smarter ones are able to make critiques that others refuse to.

I think a steelmanned version of Hanania’s argument is something like “Left-wingers who talk way too much about diversity and injustice and such, in a way that seems unobjectionable, are often hiding some truly vile shit in the background, and getting you to accept the unobjectionable stuff is part of the game itself, so I’m going to just pass on it entirely.” And I think there’s some truth to that too. There’s plenty of stuff I read during those years that made a very compelling case for the woke left becoming a hegemonic, authoritarian force that clothed itself in fake-niceness and goodness, and I think there’s some truth there as well. Dismissing truth because the person saying it is less-than-perfect doesn’t get anyone anywhere.

But if you’re going to talk about unelected ideologues enforcing their ideological fetishes on the world, about random groups of thugs busting up peaceful public gatherings because they can’t tolerate different ideas being spread, it behooves you to not do exactly that when you get an ounce of power to burn. Hell, even the Depp-Heard trial went down in the exact way the new-right people told me could never happen, namely the woman emerging with a tattered reputation and persona non grata status instead of the man. In that respect, maybe the mask-off right deserves a mask-off standard bearer like Hanania.

The tongue-in-cheek ‘liberal’ take on white separatists was, well, WSs don’t want to live near black people, and black people don’t want WSs to live near them, so what’s the issue again? I’m increasingly thinking that some form of separatism is the only lasting answer to deal with people like Hanania and his many left-wing equivalents, who actively, proudly refuse to even tolerate people who are different than them.

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Hell, even the Depp-Heard trial went down in the exact way the new-right people told me could never happen, namely the woman emerging with a tattered reputation and persona non grata status instead of the man.

She lost the trial, which legitimately surprised me as someone who wasn’t following it and dismissed it as a SLAPP just designed to waste her time and money, but I’m not sure how the reputational thing is shaking out, honestly. Have any notable people come down on Depp’s side? Only thing I heard was a few actors liked a Facebook post and were being called out for it, that’s about it.

Anonymous asked:

That substance is either a supersaturated solution of something (sodium acetate? sugar?), or a supercooled liquid (water?). If the screaming isn't feigned, it's because that's either really hot or really cold.

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It’s almost certainly sodium acetate, which heats up when it crystallizes. Not sure how feigned the screaming is - it’s supposed to get rather hot, but it usually only gets to around 105-110 degrees Fahrenheit, which is usually not enough for screaming.

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when i was 15, i felt like… really deeply DEEPLY uncomfortable with the fact that there were cameras everywhere at my highschool. the sensation of not being able to walk to class without being monitored somehow really fucked with me for some reason.

this only worsened after seeing this segment on the school news that featured various stupid stuff caught on the hallway cameras, like people falling down or readjusting their underwear when they thought the hallways were empty. 

but they werent. there was someone watching, and they forgot to police their behavior and ended up getting embarrassed for it. everyone laughed at this segment. i remember the classroom being filled with snickers as someone fell flat on their face. i wasn’t a “superwoke” kid or anything, but i didnt think this was funny. i thought it was scary. what if that was me? what if i got caught fixing a wedgie on camera without even knowing it? 

i remember these cameras being used for everything – spotting dress code violations, catching students skipping class, etc. you can argue that they shouldnt have broken the rules, sure, but that doesnt excuse the concept of Being Constantly Watched. 

and what about the times when they weren’t doing something wrong? like when they were walking back from the bathroom or tripping over their own feet? did that warrant embarrassment and shame from their watchful spectators? does existing in a school hallway warrant surveillance? 

this brings me to the concept of anti-shooter architecture. there is a rising interest in school layouts that prepare for the possibility of a shooter roaming the halls. these improvements include bulletproof glass, concrete cover, and…. something scary. 

many of these highschool floor plans include some type of circular or central “watch tower” feature, and the designers actively boast about it being a panopticon. a panopticon. the same thing they use in prisons to enforce the idea that the prisoners are always being watched, though they can never really know when. 

what kind of effect will “anti-shooter architecture” have on kid’s minds? the constant threat of violence is already taking its toll on teenagers who have undergone active shooter drills, and this concept of air-tight security (clear backpacks, metal detectors, camera surveillance, constantly locked doors, etc) is not really an environment you would want to raise a child in, so why are we sticking kids in schools like that for 7-8 hours a day?

which leads into the next thing. many people’s solution to this is more guns, which equates to police presence in schools. ive already seen videos coming out of school cops beating black kids and ordering muslim girls to take off their hijabs. but beyond the racism and xenophobia, it’s another (now living) reminder of the unsafe environment these kids find themselves in. another reminder that theyre being watched and their behavior is being judged according to the law, or whatever the cop or teachers find inappropriate. that standing up for themselves or arguing can be taken as hostile and warrant physical intervention. 

police presence on campus grounds is DIRECTLY used to suppress student activism. you know that.i know that. we know that. you remember that photo of the cop spraying a line of peaceful protesters? you remember that cop that tackled a student for holding a sign? you remember the fucking car fuls of kids that were arrested for protesting? 

police are our enemy, but they can be found in plenty of highschools and colleges now. even in elementary schools, where young children are being taught to obey and trust cops. the conditioning is being started young, and if you don’t conform to it, you become a watched enemy on your own campus. 

what kind of affect will this militarization and surveillance in schools and campuses have on future generations? it’s impossible to deny that environment has an effect on development, so what kind of behavior are we encouraging when we educate children & young adults in schools that not only prepare them for violence, but instill them with the idea that they are constantly being watched, monitored, and judged? that they could be victims of gun violence at any time, or that protests are an excuse for police brutality? 

“You are so likely to get shot here that we have to build the place like a fortress but we also will force you to be here instead of going to a place where you are less likely to get shot” isn’t psychologically good for people either, I’d think.

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I’m just going to say that my experience of police at school sure gave me a lesson about “obeying and trusting cops” but it’s not the one OP is thinking of. Granted, I’m old enough that I was in high school when a lot of the security theater started, and “mass shooting drills” were never a thing, but all I learned was that the only reason to obey police is they can hurt you with impunity and that you ought to trust them to be violent thugs who get their jollies from beating teenagers.

But also like... nobody where I lived actually got hurt in any of the events that made the security stuff ramp up. I feel like it’s almost impossible to not be cynical about shit like “well some assholes flew a plane into a building in New York City so now we’re locking down most entrances, installing metal detectors, and ramping up our policy of randomly searching students’ belongings for headache medicine.”

And I mean, for all that? The metal detectors didn’t even catch the one kid who actually brought a “weapon” to school and got arrested. I mean, it was a BB gun, and he’d stolen it and was trying to pawn it off, so he was a dumbass, not some sort of violent terrorist, but yeah.

Oh, and to tie it all back together? That kid became a cop later in life, until he went to prison for domestic violence. See? School taught me a lot about trusting cops.

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So like, GPT-2 and it’s successors are going to kill the Internet, right? As soon as AI can make spam text indistinguishable from a real person approximately everything on the internet will be irrevocably spammed.

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Depends on the definition of “indistinguishable” generally, as stricter ones are basically identical to “AI apocalypse” premises and yeah those would change the internet - and indeed the world - a lot.

If you just mean “difficult enough to distinguish without close inspection” yeah it’d probably kill a lot of the open internet but more closed groups would still likely be fine. At worst there you’ll get a pretty understandable push to have everyone need to identify themselves with RL paperwork in order to use any internet service, but closed groups already have some form of that or “know someone in the group” checking for membership.