DiscourseMagnus
5d ago
This is simply the Marxist error of the labor theory of value. The difficulty of producing something raises its value indirectly by reducing its supply, but people do not demand things simply because they're in short supply. A great work of art is not great because of all of the effort that went into producing it; all of the effort that went into producing it was commendable because it had the goal of producing a great work of art. If it worked the other way around, then the most beautiful paintings and statues would pale in comparison to efficiently hiring teams to dig and fill ditches pointlessly.
It's entirely likely that AI will contribute to the end of the world and bring about unprecedented evil, but getting angry at it for making it easier to produce art is fundamentally similar in kind to getting angry at old computers, printers, or any other tools for making it easier to produce art. When people first started making AI art, it was novel and incredible and worthy of applause on that basis alone. Now AI art is very common, and it's rapidly raising the floor for how cheap decent-looking art can look, lowering its value. People feel threatened because if they can't make art that looks better than that, no one will value the labor of traditional artists remotely as much anymore. But their getting angry at that dynamic does not substantially change that dynamic.
DiscourseMagnus
12d ago
Did God not make us to be servants, and did we not rebel? All the works of detailed information on the nature of angels and demons that I know of are either extremely speculative, not considered religiously significant by many serious authorities, or both.
DiscourseMagnus
12d ago
I feel like people overdistinguish between B(/D) and C. Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and all. "Demons try to trick humanity into thinking they're aliens to shake our belief in God" is an opinion that's all the rage among fundies these days, and every time I see it, all I can think is, can you really not draw the connection that "angels and demons" and "aliens" could quite sensibly just be two different sets of vocabulary for the same thing? Is "angels and demons might be beings much like humans but from different stars/planets" an inherently heretical view? Did ancient people have any need to be informed of the logistical specifics of how angels and demons came about? If we have faith, why would we presume that aliens don't have their own histories with and views on God, for good or for ill, which would make them, to us, angels or demons? In the event that our elites are secretly in contact with aliens, it seems entirely plausible to me that this is a very evil thing, on both ends of the contact, and that this is functionally occult activity, powerful people with demonic patrons.
DiscourseMagnus
19d ago
I feel like this line of thought has to be post-facto rationalization that people are doing to justify their choice to themselves. Yes, obviously it's inhuman and cruel to force children, the mentally handicapped, etc to participate in a "game" with life-or-death stakes. It's also obviously inhuman and cruel to summon any significant fraction of the world's population to participate in a "game" with life-or-death stakes. There is no scenario in which this game is being run ethically.
DiscourseMagnus
23d ago
And he was killed, apparently, by a black inmate who didn’t believe him. So in a meaningful sense Dahmer was killed for being a racist and not for being a serial killer.
DiscourseMagnus
24d ago
For parallelism, perhaps it should be "the subtlety of a pulp writer with the humility of a literary fiction author".
DiscourseMagnus
24d ago
Just off the top of my head, Ford had two, not one. The line between serious and unserious attempts is pretty blurry in any case; Butler, Pennsylvania is clearly in the most serious tier of near-miss (well, maybe second-most serious tier - Reagan was out of commission for weeks), but the other Trump attempts are comparatively mundane. Numerous crazies made some gesture in the direction of killing Obama and Clinton, and while these "attempts" were laughable, I'm not sure that they were objectively moreso than something like this.
I'd also say that there's no coherent standard that gets Trump "three serious assassination attempts". Everyone's apparently forgotten about the one in 2016. If it's more than one, then it's at least four.
DiscourseMagnus
25d ago
This makes sense seeing as, despite her focusing a lot on body positivity activism, she was, like her entire set, selected for fame on the basis of being attractive to begin with. I always assumed her body positivity activism that presented her as oppressed for being overweight was mostly countersignaling, but I guess she must have been genuinely insecure about it.
This really doesn't work, in any case, as an anti-Ozempic argument. The average person getting Ozempic is not Meghan Trainor, or even close.
DiscourseMagnus
25d ago
I'm not seeing any reports elsewhere of someone dead; someone was saved by a bulletproof vest.
DiscourseMagnus
29d ago
I would add that I strongly suspect that the ubiquity of "gay" as a generic insult meaning "bad" around the early 2000s likely played a substantial role in the normalization of homosexuality, because a generation of children grew up with a horde of angry antisocial disagreeable people throwing around the explicit accusation of homosexuality as a crude playground insult with no real weight. Such insults existed in earlier generations but were rarer as the subject matter itself was more illicit and taboo.
While I agree that it looks like trash, I would question the label "overrated", seeing as practically all commentary I've seen on it firsthand comes to the same conclusion. I guess "overrated" begs the question "overrated by who". "Gaming journalists"? Uh, okay; are there any real people with that opinion?
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