07mk
7mo ago
Man, if I killed someone with a gun, I'd love to have you as my defense attorney. "My client didn't intend to kill someone, your honor, he just pulled a piece of metal/plastic on a product he owned while it was aimed at a person for two minutes straight!"
This is, to be frank, an insane comparison. Pointing a loaded gun at someone and pulling the trigger is the literal physical act of killing someone, or at least causing injury with the high likelihood of killing. This has no comparison to how changing some pixels - or anything else - for a virtual game relates to racism. There is no physical reality that connects the playing of a game with racism the same way physical reality connects shooting a gun at someone with murder. Many people believe that the contents of a modded game can exacerbate racism, but this is by no means a well-supported view, and is certainly a far less consensus view than "shooting someone with a gun has a high likelihood of kill them," and the leap from "I personally think this mod could exacerbate racism" to "therefore, this modder, even if possibly subconsciously, had racist motivations in creating this mod" is unjustified.
By this logic, I could download a mod that changed "white" to "cracker" or "cracker-colored" and no one should assume I'm being racist.
Absolutely. I would 100% not assume you were a racist and I would defend you as being a non-racist, at least on the basis of this one decision. This would remain just as strong even if, say, you modded Doom to change all demons to cis white men and the player character to an amalgamation of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. The only conclusion we could draw is that you wanted to make a Doom mod with these properties, and any sort of speculation about your personal beliefs about the politics surrounding people like Kendi, DiAngelo, and cis white men would be just that, speculation, and you would be responsible for exactly none of the speculation that many people could (and would likely) speculate about your principles and beliefs that motivated you to create such a mod.
And, needless to say, in neither your example nor mine, would you actually be being racist, since there's no one to actually be racist towards in a situation where you're just writing some code in a computer and offering other people the choice to download and use that code.
07mk
2mo ago
Well, I don't care about the state of sex ed in America in the most literal sense of the term - I have nothing in my life that would be affected positively or negatively based on what these sex ed policies are. If I had children of my own, I would care, and if I thought my own future would be affected meaningfully by the next generation of adults being taught the pleasure of sexual acts in explicit ways, I would care, but I don't see how it would.
I would certainly prefer it that kids today were taught sex in ways even more conservatively than I was taught, but that's just my own aesthetic preferences, along with some empathy I have towards those kids, who I feel sorry for to some extent due to the world we created for them. But it's not my responsibility to care about these kids, and their sexual well-being ultimately doesn't affect my life all that much.
07mk
4mo ago
Probably the most prominent example of this recently has been the phrase "from the river to the sea." Some people surely use it with a genocidal intent (there should be no Jews between the "river and the sea") while other use it as an expression of solidarity between the West Bank, Gaza, and non-Jews in Israel more generally.
I must admit I'm pretty ignorant about this phrase and why it's considered genocidal. Getting rid of Israel as a nation and even kicking out all of the Jews from there isn't genocidal, just ethnic cleansing, right? Is the issue that that was the Nazis' initial plan before they got to the Final one, and as such we can round one up to the other? That seems like the slippery slope fallacy (though I'll admit that there is indication that the people descending down the slope are doing so by pouring oil on it rather than by carefully inching down by building steps or something).
But I'd also say that, if it's the case that the phrase is genocidal in nature, then it doesn't really matter if the person saying the slogan is thinking to themselves, "I'm saying this because I really want those Jews murdered" or "I'm saying this because I want to show solidarity between XYZ and literally not an inch more;" the latter is still showing full-throated support for genocide, and their ignorance of what the phrase that they chant means just adds on to their ethical failure, and certainly doesn't mitigate it. I'm just not sure how the phrase could be genocidal in nature.
07mk
4mo ago
There are people right now calling for policies leftists don't like and/or consider racist (restricting immigration, cutting welfare, harsher crime punishment). Some of those people (Murray) have explicitly linked these things to their take on HBD.
Sure, but policies that we don't like or even consider racist is different from "bigotry, racial hatred, or dehumanizing," because we had to expand the definition of "racist" in order to categorize things like "restricting immigration, cutting welfare, harsher crime punishment" within it. So that's just a whole different category of things.
But, even without them, you can easily connect the dots because history didn't start yesterday and none of these arguments are now.
People keep saying this, but every time I see the dots actually connected, I notice that the threads held there by sheer force of will rather than any sort of actual underlying connection.
In terms of political intuitions people continue to hold without strong empirical backing...this doesn't seem that egregious.
As damning of political intuitions as this statement is, it's true. What gets me is that "not egregiously bad in a category of things known for being incredibly bad" is not the standard I want my side to live up to; in fact, I try to make it so that it's only because my side lives up to a higher standard than the other that I choose that side. One of those higher standards is one of epistemology; that the left is more correct than the right because we perceive the world more accurately than the right. Perceiving the world more accurately isn't a matter of believing more true things like "the Earth is closer to 4 billion years than 6,000 years old" but rather about the process by which we discriminate between what is true and what is false. And if we're willing to say that this bit of political intuition is a high enough bar to censor HBD, then that calls into question our epistemic standards in general, which calls into question my belief that ours is actually the better side.
07mk
7mo ago
What I reject is that idea that it doesn't say anything about you.
In the literal sense, nobody takes the other side of this, though. Trivially, if I make deliberate modding choices, then that tells the world that I made those deliberate modding choices. I think so few non-schizophrenic people would disagree with this as to be irrelevant. So claiming that it says something about me is meaningless: of course it does, because every choice I make trivially tells the world that I made that choice.
The point of contention is on the specific claims about what else these choices imply about me or any other generic choice-maker. E.g. if someone modded Stardew Valley to transform some brown pixels to beige ones, it's entirely possible that such a decision was motivated by the modder's deeply held philosophical/political/personal/etc. views which are bigoted, hateful, or whatever, but that can only be supported by additional external information. And merely knowing that this person made such a mod doesn't actually add any information or give us any data from which to construct the truth about that modder's motivations or beliefs or where their lines are. Again, with the exception of the trivial truth that it tells us a lot about the modder's desire to transform certain pixels.
07mk
7mo ago
It's one thing to say that, for example, watching MCU movies because they're "in" at the moment doesn't mean you endorse the idea of capitalism, it's quite another to say that your very deliberate modding choices don't at the very least say something about where your lines are.
Sure, those are two different things, but the important thing is that they're both true. Deliberate modding choices don't tell us anything about where your lines are, except strictly within the realm of deliberate modding choices. To extend any implications outward to something else, like one's political opinions or personal ethics or whatever, is something that needs actual external empirical support. One doesn't get to project one's own worldview onto others and then demand that they be held to that standard.
07mk
1mo ago
I couldn't make it thru one playthrough either, but not because of whatever ideologies it was trying to sell. It was just the uninteresting, unlikeable characters that gave me no investment in figuring out the murder. I found the setting very boring, too, so exploring the area and meeting its various inhabitants and witnesses was just a drag. I can only imagine how bad the writing must've gotten later on as the story developed and the characters had time to breathe, because the writing started off very stilted and unnatural and only seemed to get worse as I kept playing. Shame, since the RPG system for investigation/interrogation/other detective work seemed pretty neat.
07mk
3mo ago
I just think the idea of US citizens having access to uncensored LLMs at close to SOTA quality will be considered far more dangerous than weapons (short of nukes, though even then...), meth, and counterfeit money.
Then again, perhaps a cyber-based defense is more likely than nukes. Perhaps we'll get a Great Firewall of America to keep Americans from surreptitiously accessing the NK LLM. And equivalents in other nations too. But that has its own issues in implementing, of course.
07mk
4mo ago
I just don't understand why people continue to put so much effort into making the experience of drinking something more painful and more likely to cause bloating and gas. With beer, I see the carbonation as an acceptable consequence of the brewing process that also serves as a helpful way of enforcing a speed limit in taking in the alcohol. But with soft drinks, neither excuse exists.
07mk
6mo ago
How do stereotypical sexual fantasies involving tomboys start? She's been the only girl you know that didn't have cooties, wearing stereotypical boyish clothes, cutting her hair short and liking stereotypical boyish activities. Then one summer she suddenly matures into a woman and her friends can no longer play with her because they lose the trail of thought every time they see her new assets that are irresistible despite her lack of effort to promote them.
I've never heard of this stereotype. Or, tbh, any stereotype about sexual fantasies involving tomboys. I don't really know any other people who are into tomboys, but I am someone who's into tomboys, and that stereotype is the opposite of what I would consider a satisfying sexual fantasy about a tomboy; the reason I'm attracted to a tomboy is that she has those boyish features, like short hair, small breasts (this is a preference I hold for non-tomboys as well), perhaps slightly muscular build, along with engaging in more masculine activities with her, such as sports or video games. I'd find the notion of a girly girl "maturing" into a tomboy-ish woman (though obviously that asset growth only goes one way, so it'd be just a matter of minimal growth rather than reduction) far more sexually appealing than the other way around.
07mk
6mo ago
While moral culpability is certainly part of the question (I think the answer is easy enough to be uninteresting: you are right), my question is literally which parts were in the plan?
Which parts they implicitly expected would happen, vs which parts were explicitly in the plan, vs what instructions were propagated to the men, vs what actually happened.
This is a factual question
I'm curious, because your initial post was just a link to a Tweet with one statement that basically paraphrased the Tweet without adding context, what is the significance of these factual questions in this context? For instance, "How many of the attackers wore matched socks, instead of mismatched?" is also a factual question with a factual answer that has some objectively true answer, but knowing this positive integer figure doesn't seem particularly important or even meaningful in this context. Your factual questions seem only marginally more relevant to the situation than my own made-up theoretical one. But as someone who's only been tangentially keeping track of this situation (I must admit that I grew bored of the whole Israel-Palestine saga two decades ago), I could be missing some context that illuminates the importance of the questions you asked.
07mk
8mo ago
The psychological cost of living as red picker vs. the cost of dying as a blue-picker.
It didn't occur to me until reading this, but also there's the possibility of the psychological cost of living as a blue-picker - which is the knowledge (at least with very high confidence) that I futilely risked my life for no gain. The odds that my vote was the decisive one that brought blue from 49.99% to 50.00% or whatever is minuscule, which means that, almost certainly, regardless of what I picked, all the blue pickers were going to live anyway. My picking blue meant nothing in terms of causing good, but I was able to manipulate my brain into convincing myself that it was worth it to pay the real cost of a real fear of real risk of dying, when removing that fear was as simple as picking a different color which, again, would have caused no negative consequences.
07mk
8mo ago
And believe me, if misclicking meant living or possibly dying, I'd be pushing that mouse around with the slowest movements possible.
I actually posit that the hypothetical, as presented, doesn't allow for the possibility of a misclick. Given the life-or-death stakes involved, if you made an accident in your click, then that's a consequence of your choice not to take precautions against a misclick by doing something like what you suggest. I'd personally zoom in/scroll to the page to the extent my non-preferred option is literally not on the screen before my mouse or finger is even over any of the options. And obviously there would have to be a decent time gap between press-down and pull-up of the finger on the mouse button or the touch screen, so that I can visually verify that the button I intended to click was indeed the one I clicked (usually you can cancel such clicks by dragging the mouse off the button before letting go).
Freak occurrences happen, I suppose, including a random bit of cosmic radiation flipping a bit on your PC to switch your choice to the other one. These seem like such unlikely and uncommon outliers that they can be effectively rounded down to zero. Otherwise, if someone misclicks, I would consider that just an active choice the person is making that they don't really care if they have to face the consequences of pressing the blue button or the red one.
07mk
1mo ago
t's kinda funny that 5 (or 5 Royal specifically I suppose) is the best Persona game mechanically (in my mind anyway), but that as I play backwards through the older games I feel like the PThieves are the least interesting characters. I feel like 3 and 4 have the group dynamics nailed down better. Plus Koromaru > Sparkly Bishie Teddie > Teddie >>>>>>>>> Morgana, you can't change my mind on the animal/mascot party member tier list. I am very grateful that they brought Baton Pass Shift over from 5, not having it in Golden was a bit of a learning curve.
Interesting, I've only played 3 & 4, and I'd compare 4 to 3 like how you compared 5 to 4/3 - mechanically, 4 Golden was basically the perfection of the 3/4 gameplay formula, but it was hampered by the fact that the characters just weren't as good as in 3. I also preferred the darker tone and themes of 3, though perhaps the story is mostly a wash, since 3 kinda dragged in the 2nd half while 4 had solid pacing with its murder mysteries throughout.
Kinda sad to hear that P3R suffered from being too close to the source material, according to a lot of people. It really would've been great if it had combined the best of the gameplay the series had to offer with the best of the characters and perhaps tightened up the story. But perhaps the exclusion of FeMC and the Answer portion from FES was a sign that this was more of a cash grab than an attempt to create the definitive version of the game (obviously any remake is a cash grab, but there's a spectrum).
07mk
3mo ago
I’ve abstained from masturbating for a few days before seeing her and it still happens—other times I’m fine but we can’t have sex for various reasons.
I masturbate every 2-3 days.
Hm, I'm no expert on this, but what's the longest you've abstained before attempting? My intuition is that 2-3 days just isn't all that long to build up... whatever it is that gets built up. I'd consider abstaining a minimum of a week, perhaps 2+, before the next attempt. If sexual times with her happens more often than that, then just stop masturbating altogether; you seem to have enough self control to quit porn for 2+ months, after all. And if you know that the only way you're getting off is with her, your body might find the motivation to step up at the opportunity.
07mk
7mo ago
Why did someone make or install this mod? It clearly didn't come into existence because particles randomly happened to generate the mod. If the reason was one we would call racist, then yes, we can reasonably infer that someone at the very least made something racist that may indicate their own racial prejudice. Sure, we can't prove racism totally. But I think it is entirely reasonable to be at least somewhat more convinced that the creator is racist.
You jump from "why" to "it's entirely reasonable to be at least somewhat more convinced [of a conclusion]." I disagree with this. I think the entirely reasonable thing is to say "We don't know," and being convinced, somewhat or otherwise, of the creator's racism or other beliefs sans external independent evidence, is unreasonable. Yes, if the reason the creator made the mod were one that we would call racist, then it's entirely reasonable to say that the creator is a racist racist who racistly created a racist mod in order to spread his racism. That's a big if, one that can't really be checked by observers only from looking at the mod.
You either believe in an overly strict chain of causality and inference, or you are trying to establish a principled stance that you don't actually uphold in real life.
??? I don't see what's overly strict about this chain of causality, and I don't see on what basis you get to claim that I don't uphold this in real life. To me, it appears like you're doing here to me the same thing that I'm accusing you of doing with this mod theoretical to the modder, which is projecting your own biases onto the situation and asserting that someone else must be (somewhat more likely to be) acting in a certain way because of how your projected biases relate to their observed behavior. To me, it feels like an overly restrictive and closed view of the diversity and idiosyncracies of humanity to believe that one can just simply conclude from "He changed all the black heroes to white heroes" or "He changed all the demonic enemies to cis white people, to be murdered by the POC champion protagonist" that "He did this out of his sociopolitical beliefs that are in accordance with the direct, straight-up pattern-matching against this mod (i.e. that if I modify a work of fiction to more glorify white/black characters at the expense of black/white characters, that implies I hold some sort of belief or bias in favor white/black people and against black/white people IRL)."
07mk
8mo ago
Given that time I had my purse robbed by some little bitch of a thief in a shopping centre, leaving me literally penniless with no way home, I am quite happy to spend more on enforcing zero X theft than just 'allowing' a few harmless 'victimless' thefts.
Are you engaging with what "zero X theft" actually means, though? That's not "vanishingly small number of X thefts," which could possibly be accomplished by scaling up the current enforcement mechanisms by a few factors or a few orders of magnitude. That's zero theft of X, which for purses or bikes would likely mean something like having full coverage surveillance of all public areas (and most private areas) at all times, and furthermore those policemen or security guards would also need full surveillance to prevent corruption, bribery, etc. Of course those people also need surveillance to prevent corruption as well and so on and so forth. On top of all the regular training needed. We'd probably need to commit a substantial majority of our population just to law enforcement. Even after all that, I'm not sure that zero X theft for something like purses or bikes is a likely outcome. It's really difficult to build a truly perfect system with literally zero failures in anything but the most trivial circumstances, and society-wide theft is very far from trivial.
If we call for anything short of that (and possibly even if we do call for all that I described above), that means we are fully admitting that we are completely okay with and accepting of some nonzero level of X theft in our society, even if each and every individual occurrence of such theft is an injustice that we seek to prevent.
07mk
2mo ago
This was a private school, located in (what I as an adult now recognize as) a quite wealthy neighborhood in Cambridge, MA. FWIW, I do recall we were specifically encourage to masturbate for health reasons (specifically no STD & no pregnancy - any other benefits such as pleasure or whatever weren't mentioned IIRC), but I don't think any actual explicit instructions were provided, either orally or visually.
Your line does seem reasonable, but it also does seem like one that's hard to maintain from the current hegemonic belief that pregnancy and bonding with a partner are merely a couple of optional consequences one can freely choose to get or not from sex. That mostly just leaves the pleasure portion, and not covering that, along with the many now-mainstream techniques for accomplishing those, would leave a big gaping hole in the education that the internet can rush to fill (less of an issue in the 90s).
07mk
6mo ago
Yes Israel has an obligation not to commit war crimes on a mountainous scale.
This was in response to the question:
Does Israel have an obligation to send water or electricity to Gaza?
This seems to imply that Israel not sending water or electricity to Gaza is the committing of war crimes on a mountainous scale. Could you clarify what the connection is here? I'm not that familiar with actual war crimes (i.e. in the sense of actual treaties and laws around what nations are allowed to do to each other's combatants and such), so I'm guessing there must be some international treaty that gives Israel that obligation to send water or electricity to Gaza, and I'm wondering what that is.
07mk
7mo ago
The OP is clearly saying you cannot infer anything about their beliefs or worldview on the basis of the mods they play. That is what I don't agree with. Those are not trivial things.
Indeed, and I agree with the OP and disagree with you. "Anything about their beliefs or worldview" is different from "anything [at all]." The deliberate choices one makes when modding falls into the latter category but not in the former category. E.g. if someone decided to make a mod that changed some pixels from brown to beige, it tells us that that person decided to make a mod that changed some pixels from brown to beige, which falls into the latter, but not the former. I doubt the OP would disagree with the notion that a modder deciding to change some pixels from brown to beige tells us that the modder decided to change those pixels from brown to beige, but he can speak for himself, I suppose.
Not every possible explanation is equally possible. I don't think people are missing the fact that the mod they were downloading, in the SV example, was explicitly about making a black character white. That context matters. Is it by itself enough to say a person is racist? Maybe not. But it does make it more likely.
Does it? It's possible that it does, but I dispute that you can believe with any meaningful level of confidence that it does make it more likely. This is the kind of nice-sounding narrative that intuitively makes sense and sounds plausible, and as such, if we believe it without doing the hard empirical work to check that it's true, then we should be highly suspicious that our belief in it is due to how plausible it sounds and how much it is in concordance with our intuitions, rather than how true it is. Again, in that SV example, it is, by itself, absolutely not enough to say the person is racist. Is it enough to imply that that modder is more likely to be racist than the typical SV modder or player? It might be, and it might not be, and we haven't done the hard empirical work to figure out which.
07mk
10mo ago
Now I may be a simple country hyperchicken, but it seems to me that Spider-Verse also featured a black main character. Seems like an odd comparison to make, given their narrative.
Spider-Verse's black protagonist is a character who has always been black starting with his original incarnation, AFAIK. Ariel in the original adaptation in 1989 was a ginger, and in the remake is black. So possibly Chinese audiences are rejecting the race-swapping of existing non-black characters to be black, rather than rejecting black characters in themselves. This rejection of such race-swapping is considered anti-black racism just as much as rejection of black characters in themselves by the "woke" ideology.
07mk
11mo ago
There's no such thing as "just" telling people to not drink Bud Light, the context of doing so is common knowledge.
I don't think that means there isn't "just" telling people not to drink Bud Light or shop at Target or whatever. It just means that when you "just" tell people to do that, you also necessarily include the context of the common knowledge. That doesn't make a message to Christians to boycott Bud Light not "just" telling people not to drink Bud Light; that's still literally "just" what it is.
07mk
11mo ago
Similarly, in societal terms, if I’m a recruiter trying to hire for a white-collar job, and I have to make a decision based on limited information, I would have to be a complete moron - or a liberal ideologue - not to utilize my understanding of probabilities gained from observation of previous outcomes.
I don't think there's a magic bullet solution, but this is why I think legally mandated moronicism - so that everyone is equally a complete moron in this respect - accompanied with increased legibility into individual competence is the right approach. There should never be a case where someone's name or race is the only information given to you as a recruiter/hirer, and it should be punishable if you make some meaningful consequential decision in the case that somehow that were the only information given to you.
07mk
1mo ago
The ginger genocide (aside: this phenomenon + the anagram is probably the strongest evidence for the simulation hypothesis I've encountered) is a fair point, but my perception of this is that even the very phenomenon is little known outside of fairly niche circles of people who pay attention to this kind of thing, and even those who know don't often realize that this is endemic in the industry, with Zendaya's MJ being just one example. It's not nothing, but I don't recall it rising to even the level of Tilda Swinton's Ancient One in Doctor Strange (aside: any sort of race/sex swapping is justified if it's to get Tilda Swinton to play the character), much less, say, Ariel from The Little Mermaid (another example of the ginger genocide! And generally talked about on its own instead of part of the larger trend). Maybe MJ's case is due to the complete victory by one side, but honestly I thought it was more like Nick Fury where people just didn't care much since it's a supporting character whose race isn't much of a factor in the story.
I've only seen Zendaya in the Spiderman movies and Dune, so I can't speak to her acting chops, but I can't disagree more on the idea that people are pretending that she's attractive. IMHO she's easily the most attractive prominent Hollywood actress right now. Maybe Rebecca Ferguson and Gal Gadot might come close? In any case, purely based on looks and ignoring any acting skills, her apparent popularity seems entirely justified to me.
I can't even think of there being any particular hubbub about her race in casting decisions. Even in the super hero movies she was in - a genre notorious for filmmakers accusing fans of bigotry in recent years - her casting as the character-equivalent to the traditionally red-headed white woman Mary-Jane was basically a non-issue, similar to Sam Jackson being Nick Fury.
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