FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
24d ago
It was just mentioned in passing on a phone call, not in a written exchange.
FtttG
24d ago
Earlier today, someone told me that Charlie Kirk once made derisive comments about Ryan Carson, a left-wing activist who was stabbed to death in New York two years ago. Googling "Charlie Kirk" "Ryan Carson" produces nothing promising. Can anyone confirm whether he really did say anything to this effect?
FtttG
24d ago
his usual anti-AI take that I think he doesn't even bother to update at this point
Exactly what I said last month:
Freddie deBoer has a new edition of the article he writes about AI. Not, you’ll note, a new article about AI: my use of the definite article was quite intentional. For years, Freddie has been writing exactly one article about AI, repeating the same points he always makes more or less verbatim, repeatedly assuring his readers that nothing ever happens and there’s nothing to see here.
Jesse Singal posted a note on Substack taking another journalist to task for flatly asserting that Kirk's killer was a Republican gun nut who was motivated to kill Kirk because Kirk was too moderate. deBoer showed up in the comments to lash out at Singal, accusing him of falling victim to audience capture, and characterising Singal's podcast co-host, Katie Herzog, as an "open reactionary".
I know being a new father is very taxing and deBoer probably isn't getting a lot of quality sleep, but the man seems really cranky and confrontational lately. I'm growing increasingly reluctant to listen to what he has to say, as the ratio of "good, insightful points":"childish temper tantrums and juvenile zingers" is just getting too high.
It seems to me that if Israel wanted to take over Gaza, they could have just - done so, at any point in the last twenty years. Israel doesn't want Gaza, and offered the territory back to Egypt on at least one occasion. Egypt doesn't want it either, of course, and constructed a massive wall along the Gazan border which extends several metres underground specifically to stop Gazans from tunneling under. If the blockade is an indictment of Israel, it's just as much an indictment of Egypt. And yet Hamas rarely, if ever, fires rockets at the other enforcers of this blockade.
And as for how awful it is that Israel places strict limitations on which products and goods go into Gaza - I will reiterate that Hamas is an entity which literally digs water pipes out of the ground in order to fashion crude rockets out of them. When Hamas officials say they hate Jews more than they love life, they are not being hyperbolic. People tut-tut about the invasive and humiliating procedures Gazans are subjected to when they want to travel into Israel for work, but seriously - if you were an Israeli official, and there was a group of people who hated you this much on your doorstep and who will resort to any underhanded tactic just for a chance to hurt one of you (up to and including employing women and children as suicide bombers), what would you do differently? Tear down the security checkpoints so Gazans can come and go as they please, immediately resulting in hundreds of Israeli civilians being killed in terror attacks? Allow the free flow of industrial products and fertilizer into Gaza, so that Hamas can use these to manufacture rockets and suicide vests? I genuinely want to know what you'd do differently if you were in their shoes.
FtttG
25d ago
You're absolutely right, I'd just woken up from a nap when I wrote that comment.
They fired off thousands of rockets at people they’re being occupied by.
Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005. Hamas persisted in firing rockets at them for the next two decades. And far from these rockets being aimed at military targets, there's no real guidance system to speak of, and the goal is solely to sow terror among Israeli civilians who themselves bear no more responsibility for this state of affairs than the civilians in Gaza do.
Israel gets to play by imposing the framework of discussion to make Hamas take blame for things they aren’t primarily at fault for.
Hamas isn't to blame for the thousands of rockets they fired at Israel over the last few decades? Hamas isn't to blame for the suicide bombers they sent into Israel, or the water pipes they dug out of the ground in Gaza to use to manufacture rockets?
Yes because Israel is the military occupier. You can’t be fair to an occupier. How can you?
To reiterate: Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005.
Halt any further military incursion tomorrow and rethink its plans for the region. There would be a good place to start.
How many military incursions did Israel make into Gaza between 2014 and October 7th, 2023? Your brilliant suggestion was Israeli policy for the better part of a decade. Hamas responded to this cessation of hostilities by committing the worst pogrom since the Holocaust. At this point "complete and total destruction of Hamas, root and branch" strikes me as an entirely reasonable goal for Israel to pursue.
Right, so Hamas fires literally thousands of rockets at Israel for no discernible end for decades, stages October 7th as a last-ditch effort to get the world to pay attention to them (fully cognizant of the fact that the Arab world is growing increasingly tired of the Palestinian cause), Israel responds by waging war on Hamas to reclaim the Israeli hostages, Hamas fights back, using various repugnant strategies designed to maximise Palestinian civilian casualties, and persists in firing rockets at Israel throughout (along with the occasional indiscriminate terror attack inside Israel's borders while they're at it)-
And your gloss of this is that Israel bears more responsibility for escalation of hostilities than Hamas?
The obvious next question is - if the fashion Israel responded to October 7th was excessive or inappropriate or whatever, what, in your estimation, ought they to have done instead?
FtttG
25d ago
to me there’s no doubt Israel is pouring more gasoline on it at the moment than Palestinians are.
What are you basing that opinion on?
As they have explicit win-states, I consider immersive sims a genre of video games, whereas sandboxes like Minecraft are more akin to software toys, per Will Wright's distinction.
I'd also dispute whether a game whose environment is wholly procedurally generated can be classed as an immersive sim, as the genre typically involves the simulation of a specific space rather than the simulation of a kind of space. System Shock 2 takes place on the Von Braun and the Rickenbacker, not on a generic spaceship whose constituent spaces can be arranged in any arbitrary order.
Five years ago I tried playing Deadlight, a side-scrolling puzzle-platformer set during a zombie apocalypse, originally released for the XBox 360 in 2012. The PC port was hopelessly broken and routinely freezed and crashed, so I abandoned it after half an hour.
I was curious if the devs had finally got around to patching it in the interim, so I reinstalled last night and was pleasantly surprised to find not only that they'd done so, but it's surprisingly absorbing and fun, to the point that I played about two-thirds of it in one sitting. At times the graphics are so stylised and the camera zoomed out so far that it can be difficult to discern exactly what you're looking at, resulting in unforeseeable deaths and trial-and-error gameplay, but the checkpoints are distributed so generously I didn't really mind so much. The player character is vulnerable and can easily become overwhelmed if there are more than two or three zombies, leading to moments of panic when you're trying to leg it and hoping your stamina metre will hold out long enough for you to scale a fence to safety. Cracking stuff.
What really lets it down is the writing. I've never really cared for zombie movies as a genre, and even the ostensible pinnacles of the genre rarely seem to transcend their fate as a collection of the same handful of tropes rearranged in subtly different patterns (I recently rewatched 28 Days Later and found that it has major pacing and tonal problems, with a flabby, aimless second act bookended by an iconic opening and strong conclusion; the only reason Train to Busan received the acclaim it did is because of people who want to claim they watch "foreign films" without actually venturing outside of their generic comfort zones; I will grant that Night of the Living Dead is a legitimate classic of indie cinema). But even given this remedial standard, Deadlight falls short, by virtue of being set in the US in the 1980s and yet very clearly having been written by a non-native English speaker who never bothered to ask an American-born person to spot-check his dialogue for idiomatic incongruencies. There's a bit where a character called the Rat Man asks the player character to rescue his son, in exchange for which the Rat Man will help the player character information track down his missing friends, to which the player character replies "an eye for an eye, huh". For fuck's sake — "an eye for an eye" does not mean "quid pro quo".
Update: having now finished it, it was serendipitous that I mentioned 28 Days Later.
Immersive sims simulate a virtual environment with a high degree of systems-oriented internal consistency, and unlike most games which do this (e.g. SimCity) they attempt to immerse the player in this simulated world by having them control a specific individual therein (typically from a first-person perspective), as opposed to having them observe the virtual environment from a God's-eye-view.
In general I vastly prefer genre tags which offer some kind of description of the game's mechanics: genre tags of the form "games that are like X" are useless because they presume familiarity with X, which is an intrinsically more insular naming convention than just describing how the game plays. Does anyone seriously think "Doom clone" is preferable to "first-person shooter", particularly when most FPSs have so little in common with the original Doom? I'd love if someone could come up with a better name than "roguelike" — I'd hazard a guess that the majority of people who use the term are unaware the term is a reference to a specific game, never mind having played it.
In the case of Prey, however, I'll grant that, based on the two or three hours I spent playing it, "shocklike" is a perfectly accurate description.
FtttG
26d ago
Meta: feature request
Is there a quick and easy way to type an em-dash here? If there isn't, might I suggest implementing Google Docs' solution, wherein two consecutive hyphens will produce an em-dash?
FtttG
26d ago
About to start Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, having previously enjoyed adored his novel Never Let Me Go.
In between reading full-length books I've been reading some of the Father Brown stories. So far I've read "The Blue Cross", "The Secret Garden" and "The Queer Feet". They're okay.
Sounds like my cup of tea, wishlisted.
Last night I gave Prey from 2017 a try, playing it for a few hours. It wasn't bad, but I agree with some people who argued it's so beholden to its immediate influences (System Shock 2 and BioShock) that it maybe doesn't really have much of an identity of its own. I like immersive sims, but the very fact of their relative open-endedness sometimes makes me feel a bit overwhelmed: I feel anxious that I'm playing them "wrong" unless I meticulously search every single drawer and container.
Just to emphasise that school shootings were very much a "thing" prior to Columbine and not limited to the US:
- Dunblane massacre (Scotland, 1996; 18 killed incl. perpetrator)
- Aarhus University shooting (Denmark, 1994; 3 killed incl. perpetrator)
- Eppstein (Germany, 1983; 6 killed incl. perpetrator)
- Dormers Wells (England, 1987; 3 killed)
- Sofia University (Bulgaria, 1974; 8 killed)
There were plenty I omitted because of low body counts, and the majority in that article took place post-Columbine (it's plausible that some, but far from all, were copycat massacres directly inspired by Columbine itself). I found your claim that "nobody" commits school shootings outside of the US particularly galling in light of the Dunblane massacre, easily one of the most notorious British crimes of the twentieth century (ranking up there with Rosemary & Fred West, Ian Brady & Myra Hindley, and the Yorkshire Ripper) and which was the direct impetus for sweeping gun legislation.
No one disputes that the Columbine massacre is the most infamous school shooting since the concept came into existence (in spite of its paltry body count, less than half of the Virginia Tech shooting), that it inspired numerous copycat crimes, or that it created a "script" for such massacres that many copycats have been following (consciously or unconsciously) to this day. But the concept of a school shooting did exist prior to Columbine. As to the question of their relative frequency within the US vs. without, they're so rare in absolute terms that the difference between the US and other industrialised regions is nowhere near as dramatic as the availability heuristic would have you believe. For example, there have only been two school shootings in the US so far this year, from a population of 330m, which gives us a per capita rate of 0.00061/100k. The total population of Europe is more than double the population of the US at 751 million. With exactly the same rate of school shootings in the US as in Europe, we would expect 5 school shootings to take place in Europe this year. Instead, there have been two school shootings with a combined body count of 21, along with a third in which one person was wounded but no one killed (and a fourth which Wikipedia classifies as a school shooting but really looks more like a political assassination which incidentally happened to take place at a school). Only counting the first two incidents, Europe's school shooting rate this year is 0.000266/100k; including the third, 0.000399/100k. Ergo, the US's school shooting rate is anywhere from 1.5 to 2.3 times more frequent than Europe's: a significant difference, but the idea that school shootings are some crazy phenomenon completely unique to the US and unheard of elsewhere is not borne out by the evidence.
I think there is a meaningful distinction between "certain specific ideologies drive people to commit acts of violence who would not otherwise have done so" and "our society produces a great deal of aimless, feckless young men who commit wanton acts of violence out of boredom or despair or to punctuate the dreariness, which they rationalise as having been inspired by this or that political ideology - but the specific ideology is almost beside the point, and if it hadn't been this one, another one would have done just as well". I don't know which category Robinson falls into, but I think the distinction is valid.
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