coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
You are not modeling the modal recruit accurately.
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The 13 known rape cases are not the minimum bound of rape cases, as the author notes.
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The chance of being captured is at least 2,350 out of 20,000, given figures on the number of Hamas militants.
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Humans respond to stories more than statistical probability. Humans will decide not to swim if they hear a story about shark attacks. The chance of a shark attack is much less than the chance of being placed in an Israeli rape dungeon, where there is the continual fear of being raped.
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You are not imagining being a human in a social ecosystem which values familial honor more than anything and where rape is shameful, such that some families would kill their own child if they were raped. You are not imagining being a 75-90iq Hamas recruit. We live in “mattress girl” country where being a rape victim gives you support and arguably honor. It is very hard for us to imagine the mindset of an Islamist in Gaza.
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All the rape stories are aversive. The dog rape is just extra subversive.
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I keep having to say this: they do not need to be riled up in a demoralizing way when they are already riled up in better ways. The starvation, the land grabs, the grandmothers killed, the aid workers killed are all better focuses. This is why nations in history have never used “they’re raping our POWs” as their propaganda of choice, even in non-honor cultures. When Caesar was sent off to another king, the rumor of his being raped stayed with him his entire lifetime, harming him. And Islamic culture is even more rape averse than Ancient Rome, by a lot.
coffee_enjoyer
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19hr ago
Israel has captured more than 2,350 Hamas affiliates, so it is a real outcome possibility for the militants.
coffee_enjoyer
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19hr ago
It’s not sufficient to say that the story vaguely increases anti-Israel sentiment in the West; it needs to be argued that the increase in anti-Israel sentiment is worth it for Hamas when it comes at the cost of enrollment and morale. Which it likely is not. The social norm against starving hundreds of thousands of children is stronger than bestiality rape in the West, anyway. They don’t have such an absence of atrocities which would warrant harming themselves to make up the story.
coffee_enjoyer
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19hr ago
Your entire position from the start has been to deflect and screed about these two points I made in my first comment:
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that Hamas is a Islamic honor culture where male rape is shameful and aversive, especially involving an unclean animal. To this, you claim I have no evidence. That is a wild response. You apparently didn’t read the original linked article where this was specifically noted, by someone who is a double Pulitzer Prize winner. (Let me guess: he hates the Jews).
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that Hamas already has enough atrocities to show to the West, which means adding a dog into the mix does not help them over and above how it hurts them.
That’s really it. Because if you had to admit that a story of being raped by dogs is bad the morale and enrollment of Hamas given all available information, which is an intuitive argument, then your screeds no longer make sense. This is why you are afraid to plug the query into an AI of your choosing, which I suggested to you (but the AIs are antisemitic?). This would literally be the easiest way to determine whose intuition is motivated. Ask it to read all the available sociological literature on Hamas or relevant Islamic militant groups. I’ll wait.
coffee_enjoyer
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21hr ago
It just reads to me that you have a deep-seated personal reason to defend Israel at all costs. This is why you’re resorting to a litany of ad hominems rather than just explaining your position and why you disagree. I can understand why “the IDF is using dogs to rape prisoners” would be a horrifying thought for someone who loves Israel and who is eager to call critics antisemitic. After all, if they’re doing that, it would mean that there could be something wrong with Israel, which would prove the critics directionally correct. But we should still think dispassionately about the accusation. If Hamas does not stand to gain from the accusation, then it is unlikely that the accusation is manufactured. If the accusation is not true, then it is likely manufactured from the top brass, because the journalist interviewed the family members and friends of all the alleged victims, confirming their reports, and the Palestinians would not randomly decide to lie at the same time about the same thing undirected. As such, you are insinuating a widespread Palestinian conspiracy theory orchestrated by Hamas. But Hamas does not stand to gain on the whole from the accusation: (1) it will decrease their enrollment and morale, (2) there are already an abundance of horrible things that Israel has done to Palestinians, like mass starvation and other rape cases, which thus makes it unlikely that they would sacrifice their enrollment and morale in order to negligibly increase their messaging abroad. You disagree, but you don’t really articulate your disagreement to these points, you just kind of name call. I still have no idea why you think that a story about Hamas militants being raped by a dog would not harm the enrollment of Hamas militants and their morale.
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
You have no evidence that it is happening
If I have evidence that humans behave a certain way, then I have evidence that Palestinians will behave a certain way. You were just unwilling to consider the Fallujah Dog Rape Thought Experiment. I know saying “it’s common sense” won’t do anything here, but this is common sense that most guys who would die for their country, or even be torture, would be averse to serving their country if it brought the possibility of being raped by an animal. Because this reduces their honor when the whole reason to fight for your country is honor. Islamic martyr honor culture does not extend to being raped by a dog. This is all quite clear to me. But instead of your explaining your own intuitions, you ask for the impossible, as if I could present a written affidavit from LinkedIn Hamas CEO with a nice bar graph of their quarterly recruitment figures. The absence of evidence here just means that we use what evidence we do have to infer probabilities. Maybe you can ask your favorite AI to gauge the likelihood that an Islamic militant group would face reduced recruitment after a viral story that their militants are getting raped by a ritually unclean animal. I would think it would agree.
Confident, socially adept well put together men with good jobs and a vision for the future, as desired by the author, are not going to spend their time wallowing around an Orthodox commune filled with incels being bossed around by babushkas. It's just ridiculous to expect successful well adjusted people to saddle themselves with such things in the modern world. Same goes for well put together women that know how to attract men. The real world operates on a 9-5.
You’ve provided here the perfect argument for why the West needs Christian communities, even though they are difficult to get right. Humans do not naturally help anyone below them, because that’s instinctively ridiculous when they can maximize their own pleasure. But if Westerners continue acting this way, they will be replaced by an endless hoard of immigrants and also different Abrahamists (Amish, Haredim, maybe Salafists in Europe). Not only that, but everything is just kind of ugly and silly, so we’re not even going out in style. So the options are to ignore reality and die, or to try to understand the social technology that our ancestors left us, which worked in the past and works in certain variations today.
One of the ways that social technology worked was by reinforcing that “ridiculous” idea of someone “saddling themselves” with the sins of the deplorables beneath them. That could pass as a working formulation of Christianity. It’s very much about throwing maximum social reinforcement at the prospect of doing this, so that people do it. But this is also why a lot of churches fail IMO: they are very bad at reinforcing this. The ritualism and theology-nitpicking of Orthodoxy does not accurately shape human behavior to turn them into little Christs. It’s too distracted, not powerful enough. The stupid evangelical dance concerts that get tens of millions of views also do very little. You’d think it wouldn’t be this hard, in a culture that gives so much reinforcement to people for grades and haircuts and video games and fashion, to provide them reinforcement for the longterm prosocial things.
They also meet and make families living as radical left/liberal/progressives, for example.
Statistically not, though, which is part of the problem. Progressives have a low TFR and declining.
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
What fun thing are you doing with AI?
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
If the the criterion has predictive value then it’s a good reasoning tool. You appear to not want to provide an argument as to why it’s not predictive. There has been atrocity propaganda since time immemorial, yet never have men admitted to being put in such a humiliating position for that purpose. We actually find a trend of humiliating stories being hushed aside so that the nation and soldiers don’t lose morale. Why would the trend be bucked and broken today, just now, in 2026? Why should this be the first case in history of atrocity propaganda where the alleged victims — from a fierce honor culture nonetheless — stand to gain only immense social humiliation, losing all morale?
Do you have any evidence that fear of being raped by Israeli dogs is actually impacting their morale?
Because men all over the world fantasize about dying for their country. Men do not fantasize about being raped for their country. A Hamas militant who dies gains honor for their family. A Hamas militant raped gains dishonor for their family. Unless you think that Palestinians are the only people in the world who bypass basic human motivational thinking, they will be averse to signing up for Hamas if the outcome is rape as opposed to torture. Notice how in action movies, the protagonist may be tortured, but is usually not raped. Do you need a source on the stigma of rape in Palestine?
Your hypothetical "What if you could save your comrades by being raped by a dog?" is ridiculous and, of course, dishonest. No one asked a Palestinian to get raped by a dog for Hamas.
How would you have felt today if you didn’t have breakfast? The Fallujah Dog Rape Hypothetical informs us how humiliating rape is for men, that it is maximally aversive, and thus necessarily reduces morale and recruitment, especially so in an honor culture. The known outcomes of an activity influence the willingness of people to engage in an activity.
If you really want to pose analogies, the equivalent would not be "Volunteer to be raped by a dog" but "Volunteer to claim you were raped by a dog," or if you believe the dog-rape really happened, "Volunteer to fight an evil enemy who might rape you with dogs if you are captured."
Well no, the story is now publicized widely, so Palestinian would-be militants will learn about the story. Hamas telling them they won’t be raped by a dog will not be very convincing, and as they are not yet recruited, they have no reason to believe Hamas once that story has sunk in.
It explains their motive if you think "reducing their morale" is an Israeli objective
Yes? Of course that’s their objective. How could you think that’s not their objective?
if you think they have failed to achieve their objective
I thought this was common knowledge. Hamas is still out there, and they haven’t been able to exile the native Gazans.
You are, as usual, just imagining an fantastical "Evil Israelis who do Evil Things because Evil (Jews)”
Is it your opinion that Israelis have not previously committed evil acts?
It's pure made-up atrocity porn
If they already raped Palestinian prisoners, and the chief lawyer of the IDF had to leak the video to try to bring the soldiers to justice, and then they dropped the charges, then I’m not sure why you’d think it is beyond the Israelis to rape prisoners with dogs. Because the last thing is already 80% evil, and adding a dog is only 20% more evil. Unless you think that this didn’t happen, or would prefer not to think it would happen. Do you think they killed aid workers and hid their corpses? Do you think they destroyed statues of Jesus with a sledgehammer in Lebanon? Did you know there’s a holiday where some Israelis throw puppies on a bonfire?
it's like claiming Abu Ghraib was part of a systematic plan by US forces to demoralize Iraqis and make them stop resisting. Maybe you believe this was the case, but then you have to believe that from the top on down, the entire US chain of command was not just sadistically evil but extraordinarily stupid.
But I pretty much believe this, except for the demoralization part. Abu Ghraib was extremely evil. People were tortured with dogs and there are accounts of rape by guards. This is actually a good argument toward my view I hadn’t even realized: unfathomably evil torture facilities have existed in recent memory.
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
If they are attempting to persuade a Western audience, why would it matter that the dog is contaminated? We don’t have the social norm. And if this is the most horrifying event they can imagine, why would they want every young Palestinian learning that this could be their fate?
This only helps Hamas in a two-dimensional reading. Hamas is not in need of fabulous tales of torture when there are already real tales of torture. Yet Israel stands to gain an aversive threat that could actually make young Palestinians wary of signing up for Hamas. Americans are concerned about children starved and bombed, aid workers killed, land taken in Lebanon. Arabs might care about the dog part, but this was published in the NYTimes for a Progressive readership which already learned that Israel dropped the charges on that rapist a few months ago. It is not clear that this story is in Hamas’ favor, it requires a dozen men to destroy their family reputation forever, and it is actually more useful for Israel to have this story out than Hamas. If you’re Israel, you realize that you you can’t get to Hamas in any past attempt, so why not use psychological horror?
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
It has very limited usefulness elsewhere
For this to be the case, there would need to be a lot of cases in history where someone lied about something which would lead to overwhelming personal and familial shame. Do you think that’s true?
It is extremely unlikely to decrease morale or enrollment of new recruits--what, they're not afraid of being imprisoned or bombed or run over by tanks, but the rape-dogs will terrify them?
That’s exactly how it is. “What, as a teenager you fantasized about dying a heroic death to save your family or nation, but not being sodomized by a dog?” You can easily socially reinforce males to die in war through patriotism. That comes out of instinct. You cannot make them eager to be sodomized by dogs. There is nothing in Palestinian culture which would allow such a thing. (Imagine you’re the USM commander of the battalion ready to begin the Battle of Fallujah. More than 100 Americans are expected to die. You’re preparing your troops. But wait! Due to unforeseen circumstances, we can actually win the battle if just one soldier is sodomized by a dog and talks about it publicly. Who is the heroic soldier willing to save 100 lives by being raped by a dog? I think every few would raise their hand, maybe your intuition says differently. But now imagine they were all Muslim fundamentalists from a culture where women will not find husbands if their brother was raped and who find dogs ritually contaminated. And this explains the Israeli motive, given that destroying all of their dwellings and starving their children did not significantly curtail their morale. It makes sense why Israel would use dogs for rape because nothing else has reduced Palestinian morale.)
There is a very obvious benefit to Hamas lying about Israelis raping Palestinian prisoners with dogs
How much more important is the “dog” element compared to the previous, evidenced cases of rape in Israeli prisons? Does the “dog” element move the needle?
Atrocity propaganda almost always serves to increase morale and recruitment by representing the enemy as unspeakable monsters
This is 100% true, but you will not find a case of atrocity propaganda in history where a man writes publicly “yes, it was I who was raped by the German Hun when they took Belgium! It was my backside which suffered!”
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
In historical analysis, there’s a useful concept called the criterion of embarrassment. If a claim is highly embarrassing to the claimant, then it’s more likely to be true, as normally people are unwilling to lie when they stand to gain only shame, humiliation, and loss of status. For instance, while every holocaust writer talks about the Jews who acted as informers and helpers to the camp guards, no author ever claims that they themselves informed or collaborated, because to be an informant (or moser) against another Jew is the most shameful sin in Judaism. Hence, such a narrative does not exist, as the author would be delivering himself only social approbation. “Raped by a dog” is like this. It is a claim that is maximally shameful to a Palestinian claimant given their unique cultural values. It’s a claim that would arguably harm the Hamas cause by decreasing morale and the enrollment of new recruits. And it’s an unnecessary claim, given that the IDF’s top lawyer already resigned in order to publish a video of the Israeli soldiers raping a prisoner.
Lying about this would not serve an essential function, and according to the criterion of embarrassment, I think it’s likely these prisoners are telling the truth about what they think happened. (Phrasing it this way because they may have been made to think the rape involved a dog, as part of a psychological terror campaign).
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
No 19th century Brit, no matter how much he had pride in his social class, would have preferred a Mohammedan Pakistani or a Heathen Indian (as they would have called them) to take the place of their own race in their own universities en masse. This would have been unthinkable to them. Read about how Kipling didn’t want White blood wasted trying to civilize them. Or look at Mulready’s paintings which were specifically designed to make his viewers care about their own poor instead of foreign aid. Dickens literally wrote about his desire to exterminate the Indian race while he was writing those empathy-laden stories to inculcate love for the White poor in his novels
Dickensians, understandably, speak of his humanity, of his generosity of spirit; and yet, this humane author advocated mass-slaughter of the Indian people. In the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny, Dickens – not once, but several times – made his feelings quite explicit, writing in a letter at one point that were he Commander-in-Chief in India, he “would do [his] utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of late cruelties rested … with all convenient dispatch and merciful swiftness of execution, to blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the Earth…”
It’s not atypical of cultures which practice in-group preference to also have a class system. Everything is relative.
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
That’s a post-1960s change. It shouldn’t be difficult to find the opinion that the British had on other races in the 1800s. “Seeing the story hundreds of times just confirms the obvious moral and intellectual superiority” is not how stories of victimhood work. They induce feelings of compassion, care, and gradually in-group preference. This was behind BLM and even Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
Yes, that’s why you have to present them with these stories hundreds or thousands of times.
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
Solid and fact-based post.
IMO the error of the Charlottesville protest was all optics. As the White undergrad admissions rate at UVa decreases by 7.5 points per decade, there are only 60 years until there are 0 White undergrads at UVa, or at least a South Africa style pittance alloted to the dispossessed kin of Jefferson. A protest against replacement is a no-brainer if your interest is to increase the wellbeing of your group. (Were you a Tibetan, a wigger Uyghur, or a Kurd, this activity would be amply funded by USAID). If you want to signal strength, ie with a torchlit march, you need control of every single camera in the vicinity. You should have hand-selected thirty people and gone somewhere private and just made it seem like it was a big march. The point of this, I suppose, would be to recruit members. Of course the media would be there and find the ugliest person saying the dumbest thing and link that to your movement. This is 101 stuff. And you didn’t actually want to signal strength anyway, you wanted to signal victimhood. You needed to show a White Virginian having to work at a slaughterhouse surrounded by Hondurans who don’t speak English, and then show a random Muslim from Pakistan getting a scholarship to UVa with a clear look of superiority on his face. Then you had to send those flyers to wealthy Virginians, and do such things hundreds or thousands of times, and then do like fifty other things, and then you get to do a public torchlit march. The ancient victory triumph is the last of the things you do, not the first thing you do.
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
I think the question could be delegated to the intelligence-gathering of the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK. They would make sure that the rumors of your nail-polishing habits aren’t being disseminated by a company that produces clip-on nails.
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
I think you can get to it in months from 3% if you have the capabilities of Iran, but this is a double moot point: DNI + five eyes says no desire to build one (no whistleblower has said otherwise), DNI says destroyed in Operation MC Hammer (sub-operation can’t touch this). Maybe even a triple moot point because of the fatwah, a quadruple moot point because it would be an irrational decision for them to ever aggressively launch a nuke, and a quintiple moot point because Israel is an aggressive power (increasingly religiously extremist at that) in the Middle East with nuclear weapons that aren’t inspected.
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
Yeah, they went out of their way to signal their goodwill by keeping enrichment levels below 3.67% during the Iran Deal.
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
Succinctly: wealthy and disloyal pro-Israel Americans lobbied Trump to get rid of the Iran deal, because spending the blood and treasure of Americans for the safety of Israel is desirable to them, motivated by a mix of nationalism, racism, and religion. And you can hardly fault them! If I could pressure loads of Israelis to die and waste trillions of their own dollars to expand American hegemony, I would do the same. (Of course, they would respond to this by ensuring I have no influence.)
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
But Iran had a promising nuclear medicine program that required enrichment. It exported radiopharmaceuticals to neighboring states. They need Mo-99/Tc-99m for cancer imagining. It is a top 3 producer of Tc-99m. They need to produce 90% of their domestic medicine because sanctions. They’ve been shouting about this since 2019 and the answer “sorry, all those kids with cancer have to die without treatment” is obviously not satisfactory.
coffee_enjoyer
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7d ago
I don’t think you want an actively hostile environment like American suburbia in a game. But as an example, if Elywnn Forest had too much beautiful red foliage and flowers and apples galore, then it’s not as nice to receive a small red cloak, as you’ve seen red everywhere. If the starting castle wasn’t so small, it wouldn’t be nice to get to Stormwind. Or if it already contained different kinds of grasses, then there’s no novelty reinforcement from entering Westfall. In a theoretical gamified North Korea, maybe they’d want to reinforce the loyal citizen of Pyongyang by introducing a new color or color scheme every 5-15min walking pace, like with WoW zones.
coffee_enjoyer
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7d ago
I’ve been thinking about why Vanilla WoW was so good apart from nostalgia:
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Unwanted reinforcer satiation was reduced as much as possible. If you want the player to feel awesome upon obtaining a colorful cloak or a new spell, then you don’t want everything in the world vivid and dazzling, because the novelty and pleasure of these things reduces the power of those reinforcers. If the mobs are colorful and the characters around you are all wearing awesome things, then picking up some basic “red cloak” is no longer as pleasant, and thus no longer reinforced. Pleasure from stimuli are competitive to each other. (In a boring classroom, even a black and white VHS is a good reinforcer; not so in a mall).
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The above applies even to the aural components of the game. The ambient environmental “background sounds” in original WoW are low stimuli, in between music and sound effects. This means that the aural cues for looting, leveling up, fulfilling quest are more reinforced than if the game has a default high level of aural pleasure (a soundtrack too dazzling).
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The greatest reinforcers are reserved for compelled immersion. By the time you’re bored with your spells, you travel to buy a new spell in a specific familiar environment. All of this immersion is secondarily-reinforced by the more primary reinforcer of Fun Ability + Novel Animation + Growth-Feeling. You have to spend money, which heightens and potentiates this experience. To get a new spell, you might have to travel for 10 minutes, remembering the things you did in the environment. Other great reinforcers are the discovery of a new area where the environmental cues (novelty) change abruptly, which only take on so much reinforcing power because the previous environment was not filled to the brim with novelty.
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Summarizing some of these above points: you want to reduce the novelty and fun of every single part of the game which is not earned after immersion. This is a balancing act, because obviously it can’t be so boring that you don’t want to play at all. But you actually want the player to be as bored as possible while still playing, so that all of the great reinforcement occurs when he is compelled to feel immersed in the character and world.
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I think Vanilla devs were like wizards of psychology, at least in practice, because they arranged boredom in an intelligent way. The WoW player is actually bored, and even in a state of annoyance and displeasure, when he has collected 8 leather scraps and needs 2 more to go. But he keeps playing, because of the Ovsiankina Effect (w wish to continue what we started). There is even a “biological preparedness” factor at play, because when we are frustrated we don’t mind bashing some enemies. So the WoW player is put into a carefully-managed negative and bored state for an amount of time, which he might associate with a particular set of mobs (rather than the game entirely), and by the time he has collected 10/10, he is now biased toward collecting the reward for the quest rather than quitting. The period of boredom is forgotten. There is now something else to do. And it’s also forgotten because the “frustrated / boredom state” occurs at a mnemonically-weak point in the game. Finding a new mob is fun and memorable; returning home for a reward is fun and memorable; but the weaponized boredom happens at a moment that is naturally unforgettable, lacking serial-position bias or novelty bias.
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The reason why immersion is essential is not because it’s just one pleasant feeling among many. It’s an essential condition for continued engagement with the product, because if the fun you’re having in the game can be found elsewhere, then you may decide to simply have that fun elsewhere. If “exploring” is the fun, you might decide to explore a new game. If “fighting”, you might play a better fighting game. But you can’t find Azeroth or ChunkNorris the dwarf warrior anywhere else, and you’ve become addicted to that as it exists as a collection of cues which govern all the greatest rewards (reinforcers) of WoW.
There are then some other things worth exploring, but I’ve already written too much: the zone soundtracks often contain an odd sound you would never hear anywhere else, increasing the power of its associative memory potential because of uniqueness; there is a “biological preparedness” factor of increasing status and strength as a grunt character (versus already being a hero).
coffee_enjoyer
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8d ago
But Nietzsche is the one who provides the subjectively-created value schema here. His advice is to create your own values and be autonomously self-governed, and to feel the most “power” which he defines circularly as successfully overcoming a subjectively-defined “resistance”. At no point does one actually have to measure against some objective standard. If someone is simply placing an arbitrary resistance in their week, so that they can feel the pleasure of dominance or “power” over their own devised lifestyle, then there is no self-overcoming. At least in Christianity, there are objective standards to measure against, and actual fears and fixations which require a man overcome himself, plus the external role model to enable this activity.
Christianity had already completed its own self-overcoming
If Christianity were already the most adaptive system for a man to overcome himself, then why would we depart from the system that works and trust Frederich Nietzsche to guide us on our journey? Where is the proof in the form of successful Nietzschean households and organizations? I can at least drive to a monastery and witness a boomer living in a cell owning nothing, and without complaint (a miracle unto itself).
This is a lot of text to say that you are unwilling to have the focal question in dispute judged by some third party AI. At the end of the day, one of us is willing to put their skin in the game, and one of us is not. The focal question — whether the story is likely to harm Hamas recruitment and morale — is something you were extremely confident about in your last replies. To quote:
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