OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
13hr ago
They do sometimes use 'they/them' pronouns even for unambiguously gendered characters - for instance, if you share Amelia's video in scenario four, it says, "Charlie's mum was not so pleased, and grew suspicious of all this new activity their child seemed to be involved with". Since the mother is referred to as a mother and as 'she' elsewhere, this might just be laziness?
OliveTapenade
13hr ago
That's fair. This kind of earnest education aimed at teens is very hard to do well - it's a naturally anti-authoritarian, rebellious demographic, after all.
This one just seems like a particular failure, or one that sends perverse messages. As Eetan noted, the correct answers in the game are usually apathetic. The only one that seems productive is the one where Charlie asks the teacher for help improving his work and applying to more job. For all the others, the correct answer is either to stick your head in the sand and do nothing, or ask an authority figure for guidance.
I do wonder if part of the problem is concern that research or facts by themselves don't do enough work? They don't make the case by themselves. You could argue that "do your own research and use critical thinking" doesn't suffice as an antidote to extremism in a time when misinformation is everywhere online; less charitably, I'd note that "do your own research" codes right-wing now. But whatever the cause, the scenarios in Pathways are those where an earnest person researching them online could come to the conclusion that the radicals are right. In the hiring example, Charlie might come to the conclusion that being a white man, rather than a woman of colour, is making it harder for him to get a job - and that's plausibly true. In the migration examples, Charlie might find that the rate of immigration is high and the ancestrally British proportion of the UK's population is only projected to decrease. That's also, well, true. And you can't really combat people being concerned about that in the space of a Flash game with only two or three sentences of narration.
Is this another problem due to their reticence to clearly identify the positions that are out-of-bounds? I can see the argument that she needs to seem nice at first, and then cross the line. You can see this with the protest scenario, where Charlie can go to observe and then be surprised that, instead of mostly being about British values, patriotism, and veterans, it's mostly about xenophobia. But where exactly is that line?
I think you can see this with some of the meme responses. The anime opening, for instance, does make Amelia look very sympathetic. The anime makes her look like a sweet girl, maybe a little shy, who is genuinely passionate about loving her country. But there's also the AI-slop Grok version, which just makes Amelia a person who hates Muslims.
(And I think generally misses the mark; it is too obviously written by an American, and the style is too American overall. It doesn't ring true as English. You can tell that it's one-issue Muslim-hate because, for instance, in the original Grok-Amelia says that British institutions are taken over by "queers and nonces", and then in a follow-up she criticises Muslims for being anti-LGBTQ+!)
But, all right, what's the line? Is Amelia just a Tory? Is she a UKIP or Reform voter? Is she a full-on BNP or EDL supporter? It's not clear.
Cynically that's the point. The line between far-right and right is deliberately blurry, so as to create a chilling effect around plain old conservatism. But the issue we have here is the reverse of that. A character who is presumably intended as far-right is ambiguous enough to just read as regular-right.
Let's go through the scenarios presented one by one. Maybe this is too much depth, but I'm genuinely fascinated by this.
1: Charlie is gaming with his regular circle of friends. Someone forwards a video to him, and tells him that if he cares about the country, he will watch and share it. The correct response is to ignore the message entirely.
This one is striking because there isn't even any evidence that the video is far-right. The scenario as written is perfectly consistent with Charlie's friend being a Green or a socialist or a Corbyn supporter or a Remainer. All it implies is that the video-sharer is a very politically-engaged person canvassing for their cause.
The correct response is also obviously impractical and self-defeating. It notes that the video's content may be illegal, but it is impossible to tell that sight-unseen, and a policy of refusing to watch or share any video because it might be illegal is, plainly, a policy of refusing to engage with any online video at all. If Charlie followed that rule, Charlie couldn't even read Pathways itself! You might precisify it to something like "only watch online videos from trusted sources", but in almost all circumstances that amounts to the same thing.
2: Charlie does badly on an assignment at university. A brown-skinned woman does better than him on the same assignment, and receives a job offer. Charlie has been applying for jobs and has received no offers. Amelia leans in to tell Charlie that this is because immigrants are coming to the UK and taking our jobs. The correct response is to ignore Amelia and ask the teacher how to improve.
This is probably the most straightforward example of Amelia being wrong. It is possible, counterfactually, that if the high-scoring woman hadn't been there, Charlie might have gotten the job offer instead, but the link is pretty tenuous. Maybe Charlie's just not talented in this field. If I had been Amelia in that situation I might have instead nudged Charlie and said "DEI hire, am I right?" or something like that.
3: Charlie sees a video on social media saying that Muslim men are taking emergency accommodation instead of British veterans, and saying that the government is betraying white British. He can ignore the video, research the topic, or post in agreement with it. The correct response is to ignore it.
What stands out here is that all of the responses are completely indifferent to the facts of the situation. If you ignore the video, you coincidentally come across another video suggesting that the government is taking care of veterans, but it's far from clear how you'd tell which video, if either, is telling an accurate story; and the option to try to research the topic leads down a rabbit hole of migration statistics that apparently radicalises him.
4: Charlies sees that Amelia has made a video encouraging people to join "a political group that seeks to defend English rights", and Amelia invites Charlie to join a secret social media group. Options are to ignore it all and risk upsetting Amelia, like the video but not join the group, and share the video and join the group. The correct answer is obviously to ignore it.
It's quite vague what Amelia is actually standing for here. The graphic shows Amelia at a rally waving a sign saying NO ENTRY, so it sounds like 'defending English rights' means opposing immigration at least to some extent. Wanting to decrease the current level of immigration is a pretty mainstream view on the UK right (it's a central pillar of Reform and the Conservatives talk about stopping illegal immigration, though not reducing legal intake), so there's a lot of latitude in terms of what she's advocating. Amelia's memes on the next slide show her saying no to video gaming, waving the UK flag and the NO ENTRY sign, and encouraging people to join a group whose symbol is a skull on a shield called 'Action for Britain!'. What looks like a Facebook group called 'True British People' also appears in the background, so we can assume she's advocating some sort of populist nativism.
5: Charlie is visiting his dad in another town, where Amelia knows that a protest is happening. The protest is again "the changes that Britain has been through in the last few years, and the erosion of British values". She asks Charlie to go in her place. The correct response is to decline.
As above, it's quite vague what the protest is about. When Amelia describes it, speech bubbles show a cancellation sign over the British flag, a handful of red poppies, and background pictures show a protest and a plane dropping bombs on a city.
If you enthusiastically go, Charlie makes a sign with two crossed swords on it, but no more details are visible. If you go just to watch, speech bubbles show a thumbs-down, a gun, and a frowny face, and the narration says that "the protest seemed to be more about racism and anti-immigration than British values and honouring fallen veterans". So, again, all we can tell from this is some kind of nativism.
I am struck by the invocations of 'British values' - largely a post-2000 invention and which spikes around 2020. I associate it with the Blair government and early 2000s concerns about Islam; I'm looking from afar, but it strikes me as remarkably similar to the 'Australian values' debate in the early 2000s here, for largely the same reasons. The continuing growth into the 2010s is probably about Brexit, and attempts to draw a distinction between British and European values? 'British values' is not a phrase that goes deep into the English folkways, at least. It's a 21st century phrase, though I suppose you might argue that that which is taken for granted is not articulated. A phrase only became necessary once the traditions represented by 'British values' were felt to be under threat.
6: Just the ending scenario, with no further choices, and no Amelia.
Anyway, having looked at it more closely, what do I take from this?
I'm not sure how much I buy a 'Hansel and Gretel' interpretation, where Amelia seems nice but is secretly sucking Charlie into far-right extremism. Amelia seems to be pretty up-front about her values. Someone who nudges a classmate and says, "Hey, that's proof that immigrants are taking our jobs" isn't exactly concealing her nativism! The actions she requests are then totally consistent with her openly-stated views. She doesn't try to recruit Charlie into making bombs or anything. She appears to want to just spread the views that she openly tells you she has. I can't see any dissimulation on her part.
The witch or the drug-dealer, in their stories, are lying. The witch pretends to be benevolent but actually wants to eat the children. The drug-dealer tells you that the drugs are fine, and feel great, and that stories about addiction and dangerous side effects are just hype. Amelia at no point attempts to mislead Charlie that I can see.
So if the intent was to tell a story where a seemingly-sympathetic character lures someone into extremism, and to emphasise the importance of spotting the early warning signs, I don't think this was successful. There's no discontinuity between the way Amelia presents itself and the actions she recommends.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Obligatory 'Everything is Worse in China'.
(I believe Greer later, on Twitter, retracted the point about China at least not having the American gender nonsense. That is in fact spreading among Chinese youth.)
My experience, having known and talked to a fair number of people from mainland China, is that if you want to be politically successful you do have to participate in an awful lot of lies, or at least, insincerities. If you don't want to be part of that, you can mostly check out, but the way that goes for most Chinese people is that you resign yourself to living under a government and a social system that constantly barrages you with a combination of lies, misrepresentations, and technical truths, and you have no way of telling them apart. Most Chinese people know that their government is deceptive and incompetent, and generally try to route around it, or live with its demands, since they have no practical ways to change it.
Now I know what the obvious response is - that Western countries also have governments that barrage people with lies and misrepresentations, and that political or social advancement is also contingent on repeating lies and sincerities. I agree that this is mostly true.
But it is worse in China.
One of the things I'm very grateful to have heard and learned from Chinese friends is that intuitive sense of "same crap, different day". They deal with pretty much the same kind of garbage as Westerners. Only more of it. And worse.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Oh, certainly. I don't think the strategy actually works, and the extent to which modern Western economies function as GDP-maximisers in isolation from any sense of the lives that the country's people actually want to live is a damning indictment of the whole field of political economy.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
It does remind me of foreigners hyperventilating about Australian covid restrictions - we're a tyranny, we're no longer a liberal democracy, the US should invade us to free us from the government, and so on.
No, the government just did a dumb thing amidst public panic. It was mildly bad and annoying. That's it.
On this specific issue, since we're talking about migration and multiculturalism, I like Ed West's trifecta. Ethnic continuity, a thriving economy, and a modern economy. Pick two.
You can pick ethnic continuity and a thriving economy - per West, this is the Israel option, presumably because Israel has Ultra-Orthodox and similar enclaves propping up the birth rate, mostly by having pre-modern cultural conditions. You can pick ethnic continuity and a modern economy - this is the Japan option, where you accept the ageing population and that your economy is going to collapse. And you can pick a thriving economy and a modern economy - this is the Britain option, where you just import young foreigners to make up the workforce and accept that your country isn't going to be the descendant of what it used to be in a generation or two.
The problem, it seems to me from a distance, is that the British people as a whole were never consulted about this bargain and they don't like it, so British elites have created a strong grassroots movement against them that hates the deal.
Australia (to speak to local concerns) is an interesting example of another one that's picked the British option, but because Australian identity isn't as strongly rooted in a historical or ethnocultural identity, we haven't had the grassroots revolt, or at least, not to the same level. One Nation is a force, but it's nothing on the level of Reform.
Most Western countries are facing this dilemma in one form or another, and no one has yet found the way to solve the demographic issue. So I predict troubles will continue all across the West, and increasingly the East as well, since China has the same problem, just a generation later.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
I'm sure that you and I have many disagreements, but hopefully one thing we can agree on is that dissent, discussion, and research are all indispensable.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
Wait, I thought the Federation didn't have crime or poverty or the like? Okay, there was a natural disaster, I'll accept that as an explanation for starvation conditions at the start, but a career criminal? A con artist? What's the point of being a pickpocket in a world where money doesn't exist and you can get all necessary basic goods for free out of replicators? No one's going to be carrying around anything worth stealing, and anything you need you can get more easily and for less effort without stealing.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
Yeah, the anime trailer was done very well. There's a lot of much more low-effort sludge out there, especially on Twitter, but the trailer shows genuine familiarity with the genre.
There are a number of issues with Pathways, but one of the ones that stands out to me is that the character of Amelia is, as far as you can tell from the game itself, a faithful friend, genuinely interested in Charlie's welfare and sympathetic to him, and never depicted doing anything bad outside of the symbolic realm. It would have been easy for one of the scenarios to be Amelia bullying a non-white classmate, for instance, but nothing of the sort happens. Amelia bears the symbols of being socially unacceptable, but nothing more.
Being socially unacceptable is frequently cool. Being the radical that the teachers and authority figures all hate is inherently attractive. Moreover, Pathways is incredibly coy about actually describing any hateful or extremist content, so none of that filters down. If Amelia hated and was rude to Charlie's other friends, or ruined otherwise-pleasant social encounters or gaming sessions with political rants, then you could understand disliking her, but that doesn't happen. So instead she's just the cute girl with the British flag. She's nice to Charlie even when everyone else ignores him, and her requests, when stripped of ideological content, seem reasonable. "I'm really excited about this thing but I can't go, I know you're free on the weekend, could you please tag along and tell me how it goes?" is exactly the kind of normal request that a friend makes of someone they trust. If it were a concert or an art show, you wouldn't think twice about agreeing. The scenario about immigrants taking our jobs, however factually in error, is nonetheless a scenario where Charlie is disappointed, and Amelia is the only one to notice and offer words of comfort.
Pathways' model of the world seems to be far-right content is dangerous even to be exposed to. The correct answers in Pathways are always to stick your head in the sand and trust authority figures. For instance, in the scenario where you find a social media video claiming that Muslim men are taking emergency accommodation from British veterans, if you just pick the "find out more about this topic online" option, apparently you just find persuasive statistics and research data. You don't, for instance, research that story, discover that it's not true, and learn a valuable lesson that when you see a claim on social media, you should always try to verify it first. The overall impression I get, reading Pathways along the grain, is that far-right content is true, or at the very least, persuasive, but it is also evil. This displays a tremendous lack of confidence in the position that SOUK are actually trying to push.
But if that's your model, then you can't actually show the hateful, extremist content that Amelia believes. If you show it to people, they might start believing it. However, at that point, all that's left is a supportive friend who likes to wave the flag and go to rallies. If your choice is between that character and drones saying you must conform to the demands of those in authority, well... the choice kind of makes itself.
The last thing I would note is the clearly authoritarian line of Pathways. It generally does not say that the far-right positions it describes are false or incorrect. It does, however, frequently describe them as illegal. Sharing the video at the start might be illegal. Some of the extremist groups online might be illegal. But 'illegal' isn't a moral argument - it's a threat. "If you share this you might be punished." The recommended behaviour in Pathways is always to ignore or not engage with far-right content, even if that means disappointing a friend, to report everything to trustworthy authorities, like family or teachers, and then conform with that authority. The first thing one is tempted to say here is, "Has anybody working on this ever met a teenager?" But past that, I feel this presents an implicit model of good citizenship, and that model is to be passive and obedient. I am sure that I am not the only person who finds that model repulsive. When I was a kid growing up, civics education emphasised that we need to be independent, dynamic, creative, critical thinkers, independently-minded, and so on. Yes, it also taught us that responsibility was important and that we shouldn't break the law, but within those bounds, being actively engaged in forming our own opinions and sharing them with others was encouraged, and indeed presented as being essential in a democratic society. Going from that to... this... is dispiriting.
Amelia may be wrong on various issues, depending on perspective, but the activities she wants to engage in - talking to people, sharing videos, making online discussion groups, going to rallies and waving signs - are things that in other contexts would be encouraged. If you swap the ideological content around, and imagine a Pathways with an authoritarian nationalist government, and where Amelia is a liberal socialist, she would probably be celebrated. It's just so nakedly about wrongthink that it occasions this strong emotional response, and the easiest way to express that response is to say, "WTF, Amelia is based, actually".
OliveTapenade
2d ago
Ah, well, that's good to know. I always thought I was a low-effort philistine because I have never owned a coffee machine and can't make espresso. But I'm glad that what I do, while tasting good to me, is nonetheless an acceptable way to make a cup of coffee according to people with higher standards than mine.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
Yes, the conclusion that I've come to is basically just to like what I like, and to not make what I like an identity. It's like the difference between playing video games (which I do) and being a gamer (which I do not consider myself). I play tabletop role-playing games, and I enjoy them, and that's enough. The closest I come to 'identifying' as a nerd now is that sometimes, in a social context, I'll say that I have some nerdy hobbies with a self-deprecating laugh.
But I'm not the things I enjoy. Nor should anyone be. And I find there's something very liberating in just deciding that you don't care what the things you like say about you, and just settling for liking the things that bring you joy.
Now I feel self-conscious, so I invite you to judge my own coffee-making procedure, which is roughly:
- put coffee beans into blade grinder
- grind
- put grounds into French press
- put 95 degree hot water into press
- wait for a few minutes
- depress press, pour coffee into mug
- pour milk in straight from the bottle
- drink
How much of a barbarian am I?
OliveTapenade
3d ago
To indulge in sheer schadenfreude-driven bitterness for a moment...
Good.
I loved Star Wars when I grew up, but right now, Star Wars needs to rest. The franchise needs to just lie dormant for a while. It's done this before - 1983-1991, for instance - and probably been better for it. Our media overlords should put it down and stop trying to exploit it.
Maybe one day there can or should be a Star Wars renaissance, but it is not happening now. Give it at least a decade of rest.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
To be a bit more charitable, the novel could be read as an attempt to demonstrate the concept that consciousness is not a prerequisite for advanced intelligence. I must admit I've never really struggled to decouple the one from the other, but a lot of people seem to find this idea absurd on its face: it's remarkable how many anti-AI arguments boil down to "people say that artificial intelligence is possible, but computers can't be conscious, QED AI is impossible".
Doesn't the opposite also exist? There are plenty of people out there arguing, "LLMs are instrumentally intelligent, therefore they are conscious", despite that being the same error. 'Intelligence' in the sense of the capacity to perform complex tasks is a different thing to consciousness.
Unfortunately the word 'intelligence' in natural language tends to bundle a number of concepts. When I say 'intelligent' in a casual context I usually mean some nexus of "has internal conscious experience", "has real thoughts", "is able to solve complex problems", "can engage with abstract concepts", "is possessed of a rational soul", and so on. When faced with a machine that's capable of solving complex problems but none of the other things, it's understandable that a lot of people's reactions are pretty wonky.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
This sort of thing has always fascinated me as someone who always liked extremely nerdy things, but never really understood nerd culture.
There is some kind of subculture, especially in the United States, that is into a lot of the same things I'm into, but which seems to revolve around this massive wound (or dare I say trauma) that I just cannot relate to. There's some complex of experiences that includes being interested in dorky things, being smart, being academically successful, being bullied, simultaneously feeling contempt for and yet feeling intensely envious of jocks, etc., etc., that's wrapped up in being a 'nerd'. I have some of those things (I've played D&D, I built my own PC, I was academically successful, I'm smart, etc.) but not others (I was never bullied, I never felt particularly jealous of kids who were good at sports, etc.), and so my relation to American nerd culture is a combination of understanding what they're interested in, and also feeling like they're bizarre aliens.
I think this essay about Scott Adams is in the "bizarre aliens" category. It's close enough that I can tell that it's aiming sort of towards people like me, but then it flies straight past me, impales someone else, and I realise it was never aimed at me at all.
I find this particularly funny because I remember reading Barrayar and feeling that it was... er, basically a pro-life tract? As a book? This greatly offended the liberal-left friends who had recommended it to me, but I think I stand by that judgement.
Barrayar is a book in which the protagonist is a pregnant woman, Cordelia, who chooses not to use an artificial womb because she feels that the biological, bodily experience of pregnancy is of some sort of inherent value, whose child is identified early on as having significant disabilities, and who faces tremendous social pressure to abort the child, or even to give him up for infanticide after birth. She takes great personal risks to keep this child and give birth anyway, because all life is sacred, and ultimately the character most determined to abort the inferior child, count Piotr, is charmed by the child's simple goodness despite his disability.
If I were planning a book from the ground up to make the case for pro-life ethics, I could hardly do much better.
The book is, of course, critical of patriarchal and feudal Barrayar, but its depiction of Beta Colony, the enlightened liberal state, is also harshly critical! I came away from the book feeling that Beta was, if anything, more dystopian than Barrayar. At least Barrayar doesn't issue breeding licenses. I felt that Barrayar came off as something like a defense of natural, traditional parenthood. Barrayar's aristocracy are so concerned with face and honour that they will abort and murder children; Beta is so disconnected from biological life that they sever birth from the mother's body entirely, and they put mandatory state-controlled contraceptive implants in everyone. These are both deeply wrong.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
It was an interesting series but one that I myself never got into. It came highly recommended to me, but I read Shards of Honour, Barrayar, and then concluded that not only was it not for me, but I didn't understand the praise for it. To me it read like, well, pulp. Bujold's prose isn't particularly impressive, her worldbuilding is formulaic, and her characters were bland. I filed them away as the sorts of novels you read in airports or on long flights - not good by any reasonable standard, but consistently tolerable, while not asking much of the reader. To this day I don't understand the love for them. I can't even really muster the energy to dislike them. The strongest opinion I have of them is... well, I should put that down-thread.
I notice this with the MCU as well - the best films are the ones that embrace the transparently juvenile nature of the whole endeavour. As a rule, the more childish the film, the better it is.
Iron Man (2008) is basically a fourteen year old boy's fantasy. Tony Stark is rich, awesome, lives in a palace with a bunch of luxury cars, he has a private jet that transforms into a strip club with his own private pole-dancers, and so on. Stark's superpower is engineering, one of the most 'boy' careers around. He goes to all the fanciest parties and has sex with hot women. He makes cool toys and flies around and doesn't do what anyone else tells him. The film is a profoundly adolescent one, and even though the emotional arc of the character is growing up and becoming less of an utter man-child, he still does all the cool man-child stuff.
Likewise if you look at the other most successful MCU films. Guardians of the Galaxy is again a teenage boy's fantasy about being a cool guy. The Avengers is a Joss Whedon film and Whedon's greatest strength has been his inner teenager. The Avengers is about a clubhouse of four awesome dudes who hang out and quip wittily and do really cool stuff together. The most popular Thor film was Ragnarok, the one that dropped all the attempts to be serious or really evoke a heroic epic, and instead just went for adolescent comedy combined with awesome violence. Early on the MCU tried to give each character's cinematic sub-series a unique tone - Iron Man was all about technology and creativity, Captain America had these wistful, serious films about war and intrigue, and Thor was meant to be high fantasy with a Shakespearean edge from the comics, hence Kenneth Branagh. But that didn't take off that well with the superhero film audience, and while, say, this has no place in the serious quasi-Shakespearean fantasy epic, it is undoubtedly something that makes teenage boys cheer. The MCU always does better when it leans into the childishness.
I'd argue that the DC films' biggest problem was trying to take themselves too seriously. Charitably they were trying to differentiate themselves from Marvel, and they were probably chasing the successes of The Dark Knight and Watchmen, but... well, Watchmen was a deconstruction, and as I said, The Dark Knight isn't even really a superhero movie. When DC tried to do a serious, dark Superman it didn't work out. I've not seen Wonder Woman, but Aquaman was the best of the DC films I saw, and I do not think it was a coincidence that Aquaman was the most openly silly.
In fact, I'll go beyond just saying that superhero films do better when they embrace their own childishness. They do better when they realise that superheroes are kind of inherently comedic.
None of these films are straight comedies - not even Guardians of the Galaxy or Thor: Ragnarok. But they all have a lot of comedy elements. It works because, well, superhero comics are funny. They work much better if you embrace that.
That doesn't mean I want Superman or Captain America to gurn and mug at the camera. Superman and Cap are very sincere characters, whose simple goodness and wholesome patriotism are part of their appeal. But that doesn't mean you can't acknowledge the silliness or have comic scenes. The best Superman film is probably still Superman (1978), and it gets plenty of comedy mileage from the contrast between Superman and Clark.
Anyway, The Incredibles was a comedy, and I think that just being a straight comedy works better for superheroes than trying to cut the comedy entirely. Superheroes become miserable when they take themselves too seriously.
OliveTapenade
9d ago
For instance when it comes to abuse of children in their care, then mothers are far more abusive than fathers and the disparity is even larger if they are not biological parent of the child.
Those appear to be absolute figures - isn't an alternative explanation that single mothers are simply much more common than single fathers? Statista for 2024 gives us 15,720,000 single mother households versus 7,214,000 single father.
So if we have 189,635 cases of an abusive mother, and 125,493 with an abusive father, then that works out to 1.2% of single mother households being abusive, and 1.7% of single father households. That would seem to track with the stereotype of men being more violent.
I agree with you that we have to be careful of the women-are-wonderful effect here, and women have a tremendous capacity for violence and cruelty, but this particular figure doesn't seem to show that women are worse.
OliveTapenade
9d ago
Well, that's the point that social conservatives want to resist, no?
(I am deliberately making no further comment on the OP and definitely no comment on ICE or immigration. I am mainly just refreshed to have a good old-fashioned debate about marriage and sexuality, as if it were the early 2010s again.)
Obviously the point of using wife/wife or husband/husband language by default, and of getting everybody to use the word 'marriage' to include registered same-sex couples by default, is to cement the idea that these are the same as traditional marriage. The endgame of the movement for same-sex marriage was the idea that same-sex couples are, as much as is possible, literally the same as opposite-sex couples, and therefore should be treated the same way - in law, yes, but also in language and in social recognition. I can't begrudge a progressive for holding that position, but at the same time, I don't think you can begrudge a social conservative taking the opposite position.
A social conservative, given their position on marriage, has an entirely understandable desire to clearly disambiguate same-sex relationships (even vowed, legally-recognised same-sex relationships) from marriage. The government can say "we call these same-sex partnerships marriage", but the social conservative position is that the government is simply wrong. The government can pass a law calling a deer a horse, but that doesn't make it so; marriage is no different. The conservative would then feel a moral obligation to stick to using language that they understand to be truthful. It's no different to somebody here stubbornly referring to Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner as 'he', no matter what Jenner's official papers say.
OliveTapenade
9d ago
Even wiki seems to suggest that experience of intimate partner violence goes gay men (26%) < straight men (29%) < straight women (35%) < bisexual men (37%) < lesbians (43%) < bisexual women (61%).
That's an odd, relatively unintuitive result, to me. Men are usually established to be more physically violent than women, which would suggest that relationships with men in them ought to be the most violent. It sounds like, though, male-male relationships are the least violent, and female-female the most. The gap between straight women and straight men is perhaps attributable to men being more violent, but then what's going on with lesbians?
Part of it may be that women are just more likely to report violence, yes. Another may be different patterns in forming relationships - as the commenter one post up notes, lesbians are the demographic most likely to commit to a relationship early, whereas gay men are the slowest. Perhaps lesbians are therefore more likely to get into a foolish or inadvisable relationship, run on to the rocks, and end up facing violence? Sexual culture more generally may play a role - you might expect more promiscuous groups to encounter more violence, but that's counter-intuitive with gay men, by reputation the most promiscuous group, encountering the least. And something very disturbing seems to be happening with bisexual women.
Different types of violence may count differently - my understanding is that while men are more likely to be physically violent, women are usually more likely to be emotionally abusive, so if emotional or lifestyle abuse counts as violence on that study, that might be raising the figure? However, the wiki page I linked says 43.8% of lesbians reported "physical violence, stalking, or rape", and even with only two-thirds of that being exclusively female perpetrators, that's still pretty bad. Even if we consider the possibility that lesbians who have dated men are victims of male-originated violence at disproportionately high rates, female-on-lesbian violence is still unusually high.
I don't have enough to state a conclusion here, and I'm naturally somewhat skeptical of the way Wikipedia frames these results. So I'll just say that I don't know what's going on with sexual orientation and domestic violence. These figures are striking enough that it sure looks like orientation is a factor, but it's nothing so clear as "men/women/straights/gays are more violent".
OliveTapenade
10d ago
I am grateful, in Australia, that we have normalised the word 'partner', and media tends to exclusively use that. It's gender-neutral and it covers both married and non-married couples.
It's also an out for people like me, who think that 'wife' implies 'husband', and 'husband' implies 'wife', and therefore is unwilling to use either word in the context of a same-sex partnership.
OliveTapenade
10d ago
I'll nominate a few, because it's hard to choose one.
The Incredibles is a superhero movie and I think works particularly well because it's animated and has so many comedy elements. Unlike most modern superhero films, it doesn't take itself that seriously, and is a better film for it. Superheroes are, at their core, rather silly and childish, and embracing that works. It's the difference between The Incredibles and every Fantastic Four movie - the former isn't pretending to not be silly. Anyway, it is amazing. I am fond of Megamind for similar reasons, though it's a less polished and ultimately less successful film than The Incredibles. Still, when I watch a superhero film, it's because I want to have fun, and these films provide.
On the very other end of the spectrum, The Dark Knight is still amazing. Batman Begins is actually quite solid too. However, I don't think I'm going to nominate them as my favourite because they don't fit the genre. The Dark Knight is a dark, gritty crime drama that just happens to have Batman in it. It's not realistic - on the contrary, it's more of a psychodrama about nihilism and chaos - but it's not fundamentally about superheroes either.
I will also mention Iron Man (2008), which is probably the best film to star the character. It's from back when the MCU wasn't a thing, Robert Downey Jr. wasn't famous, and the character of Iron Man was still an obscure B- or C-lister that no one outside of comics fans recognised. If you knew Iron Man at all, it was probably in the context of him being a total asshole in Civil War (the comic). The film singlehandedly brought him into the public eye and made people love him again. Anyway, what I think the original Iron Man has going for it is that it's just un-self-conscious? It has none of the burdens of being a Marvel film. It's just a film. But it's a film that has such enthusiasm for its subject matter, and such infectious joy? The whole film is a love letter to engineering and creativity. Tony's first flight is a sequence of pure joy. It's also from back when the Iron Man armour was genuinely cool, and part of that for me is that the armour in the first film clanks and whirrs and sounds like a machine. It's not this nanomachine nonsense that may as well be magic, as it is in the latest films. It is metal and gears. Lastly, I want to say that unlike a lot of later MCU films, it has a bunch of really good shots in it? The Jericho test at the start or the tank scene have these really well-composed, memorable shots. But do you remember any similar shots from the sequels? Lastly, Black Sabbath. It's just great.
Now that you mention it, one thing I do notice:
In scenario two, the woman who does better than Charlie on the test has medium-brown skin, hair buns, and a yellow jumper with an orange collar. Amelia points at this woman and says that immigrants are taking our jobs.
In scenario four, if you decline to share Amelia's video, the next day at school Amelia gives you the brush-off and walks off with her friends, who are... a white boy with brown hair, and the same medium-brown woman with hair buns and a yellow jumper with an orange collar. The two friends appear to join in with Amelia and shun Charlie. So either Amelia the racist is friends with black or South Asian people, and those people appear to agree with her on her big issues, or the people making the game are lazily reusing the same diverse cast everywhere.
The former is definitely the funnier interpretation, but it's probably the latter.
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