Ex_Nihilo
10mo ago
Not sarcasm; I really do think your response was fantastic. I tend to overenthusiastically react to good points that I hadn't considered before.
That thought was not to say that cocaine is a viable, more productive alternative to gaming, but simply that, if even one of the most dangerously addictive substances on Earth has the potential to leave more of a positive impact on the progress of one's work, that's a pretty good indicator of where video games should sit on the hierarchy.
Ex_Nihilo
10mo ago
What a brilliant response. Your takedowns of the common "cop-outs" are of such an undeniable verity that, I think, you sufficiently lance any notion of video games as worthy of inclusion at all in a life not be wasted. Even cocaine seems to confer greater benefits - real productivity in the real world - albeit with much greater costs. Your hours-spent thesis is a fatal blow to simulated productivity, as even one minute of real productivity in those 50 hours is infinitely greater than the faux-accomplishments of a simulated world. Your last paragraph is a very clever retort to a common excuse that I'd neither heard nor considered before.
Is there any reason to not forgo video games completely? Are they in a category with gummy candy, smoking, and lottery tickets - no benefit of any kind beyond a dopamine release - or more like classic movies, dime novels, and social media - escapism with some degree of social and intellectual benefit?
I’ve enjoyed my two-week trial run of Lex Fridman’s maximally productive daily schedule but do find myself missing my offline career-based sports games. How sturdy is the argument that “not everything has to be productive”? Are books and television and film so far above video games in the usefulness ranking (after all, they can confer knowledge and social benefits, if not maximally condensed) that it’s a no-brainer to stop gaming completely? Or should sedentary leisure as a whole be relegated to “break in case of emergency” status, never part of a daily routine but “around” when more productive options are not available, or only to be used in the company of others?
I’ve wrestled with this for every day of these two weeks and still see benefits of escapism, while simultaneously seeing the futility of time spent achieving nothing in the real world - even if only for an hour or two.
EDIT: I coincidentally just discovered the "End Poem" of Minecraft; a poignant take on this discussion:
[teal] and the universe said I love you because you are love.
[green] And the game was over and the player woke up from the dream. And the player began a new dream. And the player dreamed again, dreamed better. And the player was the universe. And the player was love.
[teal] You are the player.
[green] Wake up.
Four Questions of the Culture War After the Campaign Announcement of Dr. Cornell West
1. How viable is Dr. West as a third-party candidate?
I was fortunate to meet Cornell West when he visited Penn State around 2016; having known nothing about him at the time, I was struck by how viscerally he resurrected the images of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, effectively combining the biblical fire-and-brimstone tonality of the former and the political fire-and-brimstone of the latter. Yes, the black people of America are a uniquely oppressed people-group, he asserted, but they are not the only such group, and the Democratic Party is as a "Good Master," happy to have blacks in their company, but always keeping minorities in their proper place.
If I, not a person of recent African descent by any measure, could be emotionally captured and intellectually moved by his lectures, how much more must they work on his target audience? And if his many soapbox sermons which are undoubtedly to come gain a viral following among both the subjugated races and those true believers of the Woke Ideology who didn't realize they weren't actually supposed to believe what they were told, I wonder if we might see a percentile impact beyond that of any similar candidate in recent memory, perhaps even chipping at that of Ross Perot. After all, Black Americans make up (as many a rightist could tell you) more than twelve percent of the populace; even a minority of that minority could shift the movement of greater tides.
2. Are viral speeches still the greatest arm in an Outsider Politician's arsenal?
Much - indeed, maybe all - of West's power in the 2024 presidential race rides on his ability to create viral bits of speechmaking; neither his fame nor his name are quite potent enough to make up for the steep paths he will have to traverse. Trump's impact in 2016 certainly had something to do with him simply being famous and not an established party member of either warring titan, but the viral bits of speechmaking really made the difference; even the gaffes were proof that he was getting under the enemy's skin. Perot, Sanders, and Nader had the speechmaking, but not the fame, name, or party acclaim (or, I suppose, the luck of going up against a detested old-timer). If speaking is still powerful in the future we're living in, then I suspect that West will fly high. I wonder, though, if his ideology might be a tad too grand to fit into TikTok bites and YouTube got-'em compilations, too academic for the vox populi, too rooted in the real history of the Civil Rights Movement to swim in heavily-chlorinated intellectual waters.
3. Will this campaign introduce trepidation in the academic veneration of Black Americans?
The 2024 presidential race will put the Ivy League in the uncomfortable position of having trained two detractors of their party-ideology; one who could be seen, easily enough, as a mistake of the distant past that has been corrected and overcorrected for in DeSantis, but another who, very inconveniently, took advantage of the scales balanced in his favor for the express purpose that he would strengthen their cause, then turned around and had the gall to openly disagree with them in West. Their mistakes in McWhorter and Sowell were repressed and erased to the best of their cultural ability, but West presents a new problem: he could actually, really kneecap their cause on the scope of national humiliation, with the enemy in 2024 being potentially far more potent than they were in 2016. One wonders if, with language undoubtedly lacquered in a thick veneer of "continued anti-racism and justice," the idea of sola pellis might be modified into something with a smaller, controllable aperture.
4. What new ideological platforms will be introduced to navigate the thorny task of denigrating a formerly sacred opponent?
While the Ivy League merely finds themselves in an uncomfortable corner, the Woke-Liberal-Progressive alliance will again be forced to test the unquestioned ideological "upgrade-ability" of their constituents with West in the race. While this has been deftly executed in the past, and the /r/politics clan sees no paradox in throwing West overboard, none of Cain/Powell/Rice/etc. had a substantial black following, certainly nothing that would have caused a ripple in the enemy camp. How, though, will the left respond to a candidate that can't be dismissed as "ain't black" or "white supremacist" due to the risk such a claim would run in alienating one of their prized demographics? The "single vote away from losing to fascism" rhetoric doesn't hold up as well as it used to, and I'm genuinely curious at the language that will be contorted, revised, or invented to solve this problem.
Ex_Nihilo
11mo ago
If it’s any comfort, most people pick up this tic simply by being immersed in leftist academic or professional environments, not necessarily by being a leftist themselves. Compared to some of the other answers in this thread, the rhetorical “right?” is a sort of “hidden indicator,” not necessarily a conscious change of vocabulary.
Ex_Nihilo
11mo ago
I have found one of the strongest subtle clues to indicate that someone is a leftist (or mired in leftist ideology) is their use of the rhetorical “right?” to end statements of dubious fact, or just statements which they know are unacceptable to refute, mostly things “we all know, right?”. It’s like a tic where they can’t stop doing it even if they tried.
Ex_Nihilo
11mo ago
I think that part of the reason so many of us have difficulty with self-controlled weight loss is the rarity of examples like your uncle; that's an incredible story that can serve as a powerful "carrot" for many who know him. 90% of adulthoods are descents into overfed and underactive lives, so I imagine many people lack the evidence that such a transformation is even possible.
Ex_Nihilo
11mo ago
Is eating 100 calories and walking two miles (supposing that, at my height and weight, one mile walked burns an additional 50 calories above TDEE) chemically the same thing as eating nothing and doing nothing? I'm in the middle of a weight loss campaign and love to walk, but am continually baffled at the futility of "exercising to lose weight."
I don't see the relation between your first assertion and the quoted text. The quotation is referring to activities which have demonstrable benefits, and the author takes issue not with the idea that they're forms of leisure, but that they're unproductive forms of leisure, which they assume "hobby" to insinuate. Video games are absolutely unproductive in any real-world sense; music and reading are real-world activities in the actual, non-simulated world. The question is whether activities in the simulated world have any worth in our real one.
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