Tollund_Man4
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User ID: 501
Tollund_Man4
10mo ago
Can you think of a better test to see if an actress is willing to do what the director asks her to?
How about something difficult that isn't immoral and which won't risk tanking your reputation and getting you into legal trouble?
Even if there's merit to the idea of giving actresses tests which are overkill relative to the actual demands of the job, for an executive to assert that this test must be sex is odd, clearly in danger of being motivated by sexual desire alone, and risky for business.
There are many Latin Americans (Brazilians in Portugal)
There are a lot of Brazilians in Ireland too. The 2016 census showed 15,000 or so and now it's at 40,000.
Like the Polish before them (and unlike asylum seekers) there really isn't that much anti-migrant sentiment against them, though they do suffer a lot at the hands of Dublin's feral youths.
Tollund_Man4
10mo ago
These can be the same people at different times. In this framework nerds who are drunk or on certain drugs are low value low inhibition.
Though I'd say the nerd bit is far less important than the drink and drugs which make all types more likely to do something stupid or violent.
the vast majority of totalitarian land empires are not as bad as either Nazi germany or the Stalinist USSR.
How many other totalitarian land empires are you counting as having existed (roughly)?
If there have been 50 other empires then sure these 2 are an outlier, but if China, the Central Powers (do they count as totalitarian?) and Tsarist Russia are the only other examples then it's at most a slim and in no way a vast majority.
Tollund_Man4
10mo ago
Yes definitely. I don't know much about Kant or Locke myself but since they are rarely discussed here I'd imagine more people than you might expect will come out of the woodwork to discuss.
Tollund_Man4
10mo ago
I try to engage in discussions based on what I've been reading and those solidify things in my memory. Maybe I won't remember the specific facts but I'll remember that I've talked about them and know where to look for a quick recap if they become relevant again.
Tollund_Man4
10mo ago
I'll start with the caveat that I know some very successful people (career, romantic, fitness etc) who are heavy gamers (and a caveat to that caveat that I know some very successful people with a cocaine habit) and the confession that I've found life just as difficult in the times I've chosen to abstain from gaming as the times I've gone overboard with it.
I hope it will be uncontroversial to say that the escapist and the addictive nature of gaming can seriously stifle the development of some people. A lot of people probably know someone like this, as for myself I've got friends approaching their 30s who have yet to form a romantic relationship or move out of their parents house and who aren't otherwise hampered by autism, ugliness, stupidity or anything else that would have made life hard regardless. They're intelligent and likeable enough that they could have already done a lot in life but gaming specifically seems to have been what stopped them. Like the dangers of a drug habit, this isn't a convincing argument as long as you conceive yourself as not being in that minority (hopefully it's a minority) who can't game with moderation.
The best argument I can think of for the moderates is in terms of opportunity cost, and this is one which has convinced me to make attempts to abstain in my personal life: "Tallying up the hours displayed on your (my) steam account what kind of person would you be if you had spent that on solving practical problems in your life or pursuing meaningful intellectual inquiries? Let's grant that it's implausible that you could have been doing something better for all of those hours since you only game when you're too tired for anything but escapism, what portion of those hours could have been put to real use? Are you being honest with yourself if you say that each of those 50 hours playthroughs were time that would have been wasted anyway? Are there not other forms of escapism that could satisfy your desire which don't have a tendency to eat into your productive hours and might have even brought some incidental benefits?"
This is an argument that convinced me. I doubt I'm half as productive as most of the people here so I'm not claiming a position of authority on how to live life well, though like my successful friends who drink too much or indulge in cocaine I do wonder how much more of an impressive person you could be if you chose something else.
How sturdy is the argument that “not everything has to be productive”?
'Not everything has to be productive' can be an argument against video games also. Instead of letting yourself be bored for a while you're choosing to simulate productivity in the times you're too lacking in motivation for real productivity. Boredom might be a negative stimulus that prompts motivation for more substantial actions which you're choosing to block out with something that makes you contented with your present state.
Tollund_Man4
10mo ago
Back in my teenage years I did use alcohol as a crutch for social skills and it worked pretty well. Of course you don't learn as much as you would if you just did the difficult thing and interacted with lots and lots of people while sober and in that sense you can become dependent on it.
I'd say if your goal is to relax and have fun you need to be around friends who know you well and accept your quirks (even if they might criticise them in good faith). There have been periods of my life where I abstained from alcohol for a few months and still went to bars with friends and it was still very fun despite me not being drunk.
Tollund_Man4
10mo ago
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. If so I'll have to be more careful not to sound sanctimonious (a hard thing when expressing strong opinions on how one should live), if not then thanks for the praise.
Even cocaine seems to confer greater benefits - real productivity in the real world - albeit with much greater costs.
Hah well I wasn't thinking about replacing gaming with cocaine when I wondered about better forms of escapism. I know a few friends who have wasted years gaming and a few friends of friends who have died from the other thing.
Tollund_Man4
10mo ago
Oh then thanks for the praise.
I still want to stress that cocaine is lower on the heirachy of the best uses of one's time and my argument would risk falling into absurdity if I said otherwise. The similarities I wanted to highlight were just that people can be very successful despite their vices and that the excuses made for something obviously bad can be seen regarding the thing I wanted to argue was bad.
Tollund_Man4
10mo ago
Other hobbies like engaging in politics, watching the news, or watching sports do not have any specific design for positive sum human enjoyment. They are much closer to zero sum games, where one person's happiness is offset by another person's disappointment.
This seems like a fairly pessimistic view on politics. Do you not think that political problems can be ameliorated? I'd say the difference between war and peace lies in that realm.
Tollund_Man4
10mo ago
I don't know what options prisoners have but it seems what they have in common with kids is a genuine lack of options and both may lack enough of an introduction to books to make them seem interesting (which I see wasn't true in your case). As an adult I can't really count all the other things I could be doing with my time, exploring the woods nearby will take a bit of effort but will probably be something I look back on as more rewarding than the same time spent gaming.
I think back to the endless boredoms of my childhood, my brother occupying our shared Game Boy Advance, my books finished, nothing on TV, sitting in a hotel room on vacation bored out of my mind. What did I do? Fucking nothing lmao
Hotels can be very boring places for kids to be fair, you're pretty dependent on your parents' schedule to leave and do something.
I had similar experiences arguing with my brother about who got to play the Xbox this time. Even having a strong stimulus like a Game Boy nearby can be disruptive as instead of finding something new to do you can just wait or argue for your turn, your sibling isn't going to put his mind to the same problem because he's occupied. Things were much more relaxed when we visited my grandparents' house and there was genuinely nothing to do but go out in the garden and look at bugs.
Tollund_Man4
10mo ago
The problem of politics seems unavoidable. People want to have more resources than their rivals. Their rivals want the same in turn. The winning move for humanity is not to play zero sum games.
People want more resources than their rivals sure, rivalries can also be dissolved or transferred into healthier forms of competition.
Tollund_Man4
10mo ago
I don’t see why in the slightest that I should center my life on “productivity”. The greatest benefit of being someone in a rich Western country with an easy-ish email job is that one’s material needs are extremely easily met,
Productivity construed in material terms is indeed shallow. I don't think the same is true for recognising that becoming a better person in a virtue ethics sense is going to take a lot of time that you really shouldn't be wasting.
Tollund_Man4
10mo ago
What I'm trying to get at here is that real meaning is ill-defined and most philosophers do include some form of pleasure and hedonism as an intrinsic value.
Your examples at least don't show that it's ill defined. I think most people would say those pursuits are meaningless or even harmful without hesitation.
Perhaps you can't objectively determine the meaningful ahead of time but it becomes quite clear when things are compared.
in which even one's greatest accomplishments will always carry the tinge of having occurred on artificially fixed terms.
I think this is a far more important point than that of 'shared experiences'. In one sense I would define 'being in contact with the world' as being exposed to the possibility of genuine novelty and discovery - a war game has a meta that teenagers can figure out - real war will regularly surprise even the best minds.
We do our best to pierce the real world and bring it into the realm of intelligibility. Learning what others have made intelligible before us is an important part of that, but you have to venture into the difficult and unintelligible to make real conquests.
The virtual world isn't necessarily distinct from the real world on this definition, and solitary pursuits can still produce genuine insight - but in a standard game as in a grammar textbook you're never going to learn more than the author has set out for you to learn.
I'm surprised nobody is talking about the riots in France given how dramatic the imagery is. You've got rioters throwing grenades, brandishing shotguns, trying to rob a bank and setting police stations on fire.
The triggering incident was the fatal shooting of a black teenager who tried to drive off after the police pulled him over for driving dangerously. Riots are mostly located in Paris but have spread to other cities like Lyon, Marseille and Toulouse, with other incidents in smaller cities. Marseille has also banned public protests and stopped public transport. Iirc the military was called in to prevent a prison break in Paris.
at what point migrant camps / ghettos / unassimilated population centers / banlieues / HLMs become colonies in the colonial sense.
When the government lacks the power to do anything about them even if it wanted to. As long as European countries have the theoretical state capacity to eject the migrants then it's a matter of domestic policy rather than one of necessity imposed from overseas. It may be very bad domestic policy, but African countries aren't threatening to impoverish or take military action against France if it stops taking in their overflow.
The only groups who can externally constrain Western countries this way are the US and supranational organisations like the EU, and you do sometimes see the rhetoric of colonisation used by their opponents.
How do these compare to the retirement riots from a few months ago?
They're far more immediately violent and disorganized from what I've seen.
My French is terrible and I've only talked to English speakers (still mostly French people with good English) here but anecdotally everyone had a strong opinion on Macron, whereas this time around people aren't discussing policy and are just hoping the violence doesn't get worse.
Tollund_Man4
10mo ago
In Ireland's case the legal mechanism is there and plenty of deportation orders are given out. Very few of them are ever enforced.
Tollund_Man4
10mo ago
Although it's striking to me that even with Ukraine, the acceptance rates dropped from 85% in 2015 to 59% in 2022.
Apparently most Ukrainians are not even applying for asylum: "as of 25 March 28 000 people have arrived from Ukraine and registered in Denmark. 2 000 of these have applied for asylum and are now accommodated in asylum centres". It seems like this is the result of a special law which grants them work, schooling and welfare rights without the need to gain citizenship through the asylum process.
Tollund_Man4
10mo ago
Meanwhile, the west is busy deconstructing the same "racist, patriarchal, oppressive social structures" that we are bewildered that the migrants don't adopt.
This doesn't look right to me. The people deconstructing "racist, patriarchal, oppressive social structures" aren't bewildered at the fact that migrants aren't becoming devoted Christians, but the fact that they aren't becoming secular feminist progressives.
Tollund_Man4
10mo ago
I haven't verified the authenticity of this (I found it off some nobody on Twitter, and they were a left-leaning pro-capitulation to these ethnics)
It's on the UNSA Twitter (with a follow-up post saying that the 'we are at war' phrase was a reference to Macron saying the same about COVID.)
If you just start shooting them, even just with rubber bullets (but lots), or even better with paintballs that smell horrible when they break, they will stop rioting.
As far as Irish culture is from Islam, both have tended to make good use of martyrs. If we can learn from the wealth of experience the former has with rubber bullets the inevitable deaths that will result from large scale use will cause the more radical types to gain support amongst their own.
The Irish also made use of sympathetic Americans, but my guess is that present-day Americans have about as much or more sympathy for brown people being oppressed by police these days.
Thinking practically this seems hard to believe. Was it really easier in the past to start a subscription magazine that reached 100 readers than it is now for a Substack blogger to hit 100 paid members?
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