rolfmoo
1yr ago
Those with power do as they will, and those without complain about violations of rights and freedoms
This is not the trajectory of world history over recent centuries. You do in fact have more rights and freedoms as an average modern American than as an average citizen of almost any premodern civilisation. All of this apparently gritty cynicism about how it's all about power and rights don't real is just historical denialism.
rolfmoo
3mo ago
Bicarbonate of soda (baking soda in American, possibly?), not baking powder.
rolfmoo
8mo ago
I think there is a hopeless/nihilistic/no-heroes streak in some parts of contemporary culture, but mostly surrounding climate activism. (It's a narrative that flatters my prejudices to suggest that it's a cautionary tale about distorting the truth for rhetorical power "for the greater good": the exaggerated claims that global warming will end the world, rather than just be very bad, didn't galvanise people to action but created a kind of numbing despair.) "Only we are the heroes" might be a better phrasing of the problem.
I've always thought that a sequel trilogy should be about Luke starting his own Jedi order that is less oppressive than the original one, but running into the same problems that those harsh rules were created to solve. (Kids missing their families, questioning the Jedi ways, potentially creating new Anakins.)
For what it's worth, the old Expanded Universe novels were exactly this. Luke's New Jedi Order is founded on a much healthier basis and succeeds in bringing together a new Republic and creating some of the greatest Jedi in history... and also runs into some spectacular disasters, because solving problems is hard actually.
rolfmoo
1yr ago
NB: I apologise if this reply seems harsh - I've tried to avoid that but see above on why I don't think straight about this.
I think this exemplifies my problem, really: it's all talked about in vague terms that can make the frighteningly insane sound perfectly reasonable.
Never mind "temporary suspension of civil liberties to save lives", which covers almost anything: how long and how bad for how many? If saving those 500000 people costs two weeks of no nightclubs, OK, I'm listening; if it costs a decade of China-style welded-indoors lockdown, no deal, molon labe etc.
But this was just never discussed. It wasn't a matter of "we'll consider these restrictions if they're projected to save at least this many lives", it was "your fundamental civil liberties are gone, you want to know what our cost-benefit analysis is, it's fuck you that's what it is".
And there's certainly no admission of failure now. If as it turns out they were crazy all along, that's critical evidence against them for the future, and I at least reserve the right to say "I told you so, clearly nobody involved in this fiasco should work in their field ever again". But it's just quietly dropped for the next Current Thing like the world didn't go insane for a few years!
rolfmoo
7mo ago
Just download songs and put them on your phone? How hard is that?
I used to do this, and then I got a trial Spotify subscription and never went back - what they really sell is convenience. The value to me of my time and attention is greater than their fee.
rolfmoo
9mo ago
I'm not clear on how this differs from "I could be happy in Heaven despite knowing there are people in Hell because my mind would be rewritten to consider this justice". A divine entity reshaping you like that could make you think of anything as justice. How would you tell the difference between this, and the Hypothetical Reverse God who condemns all Christians making you think you perfectly deserve misery?
...Also, I can't help but notice that this whole "without these specific rituals and beliefs, you suffer forever" business feels a lot more like an idea maximising pressure to spread it than the kind of thing you'd expect from the Almighty. It seems very petty, very suspiciously human, for an entity with the majesty and sheer greatness of God to hold that kind of a grudge.
Who am I to teach God mercy? Well, I don't have a torture-dimension for my enemies, so I have that going for me. I sort of feel like the Almighty should be able to outdo me here, rather than the opposite.
rolfmoo
1yr ago
Literally exactly zero isn't necessary - it just has to be a rounding error, like "it happened because the CCTV camera just happened to explode while all the guards were sneezing" or whatever, as opposed to the current rate of "who cares".
rolfmoo
8mo ago
It concerns me that "believe" and "pretend to believe" aren't very obviously flagrantly different things.
rolfmoo
8mo ago
I don't know when the common understanding became that TTRPG rules are supposed to represent the in-world laws of physics, but that is not what they do and isn't in Pathfinder and never has been, going right back to OD&D. TTRPG rules are there to assist the DM in running the game, that's all. The rules for diseases are not necessarily reflective of what disease is actually like in the world and certainly don't exclude the possibility of things like acquired immunity.
Is germ theory true in Golarion? That's for the DM to decide if it ever comes up, not something to be gleaned from the rules.
Also, more importantly, the setting here is lintamande's fanfic Golarion, which differs in a few ways from the RPG setting.
Iomedae comes from a world where mass immigration and the state capacity to control it don't exist - of course she finds modern mores on it strange and horrible, it would be weird if she didn't.
rolfmoo
8mo ago
Convincing yourself that God exists - or convincing yourself that you have convinced yourself - won't make there be a God. There just is one or there isn't. All you'd be doing is lying to yourself.
Wanting to believe things is a type error. Beliefs aren't about what you want, they're about what you think is true.
rolfmoo
8mo ago
It's very different. The fact that sometimes you have to take into account that people are wrong about things doesn't change a damn thing about whether or not those things are, in fact, true. You shouldn't try to argue theology with a schizophrenic who thinks they're Jesus, but they still aren't.
rolfmoo
1yr ago
I have a novel hypothesis / wildly unfounded cloud-yell on this: we are seeing a shift away from stories and towards content.
Let's take your Star Wars example. Original Star Wars was supposed to be a childlike fairy tale, and there's nothing wrong with that (see C.S. Lewis). But it had some kind of coherent sense and consistency. It had the Hero's Journey. Its creators imagined a world and told a story of what happened within it.
Contrast Modern Star Wars. What is it supposed to be? It's certainly not a fairy tale, and it's not even really much of a story: there's no internal consistency. Characters don't really do things for reasons: Luke Skywalker almost murders a child not because there's any way that makes sense, but just because the Mentor needs a Dark Secret. Rey wants to redeem Kylo Ren not because she has any personal motive to do so, but because we need a Redeemable Villain. The world doesn't exist as a fictional setting: stuff just happens, the First Order appears out of nowhere, the Republic vanishes, now the Final Order exists, now it doesn't.
What it is is Star Wars content. There are people on a screen with lightsabers and blasters and spaceships - are you not entertained?
Just so with current-Phase Marvel. Does anything about Thor: Love and Thunder make a lick of sense? Does it have a solid plot? No - but look, Thor is here! And Valkyrie!
It's not really about it being for children. There are plenty of good stories for children: some of the best stories are age-agnostic. Great literature is not necessarily particularly highbrow or intelligent: Shakespeare and Homer were optimising for making good stories, not for showing off how clever and grown-up they were.
But it is really reminiscent of the rise of streaming as a phenomenon: when you watch a stream, there's no narrative, no coherent set of ideas coming together, just stuff happening. It's easy to procrastinate with it and to have it on in the background because it's not a story, it's just stuff. And so with a lot of modern cinema. No stories, at best a couple of Big Moments (that you can React to and talk about on Twitter!) strung together with content.
rolfmoo
8mo ago
It might not even be dementia. Elderly people have less physical stamina and "slack in the system" in general. A bad night's sleep (not uncommon for politicians), mild food poisoning, a dizzy spell, whatever - they're all going to hit an 80-year-old harder than a 40-year-old.
People do vary a lot, so I don't find it inconceivable that there might be some octogenarians who are perfectly fit to be senior politicians. What's eerie is the increase in politicians now being so elderly. Whether or not they're fit for the role strikes me as secondary to working out the reasons for the change. And simply banning them seems very unlikely to solve the actual core problem that's producing this phenomenon.
rolfmoo
9mo ago
The UK has an ongoing COVID inquiry. It's probably not going to come to much, but the general consensus I sense now was that the lockdowns and the general pandemic strategy were a bit foolish, yet another error of the Tory government.
It's no longer verboten to criticise the lockdowns, as it was for years. I still haven't heard a remotely sane answer for why vaccines had to be agonisingly slowly tested while the bodies piled up, because mumble mumble bioethics consent, but the whole population could be placed under house arrest on a whim, but there you go.
Realistically, there's not going to be a huge revelation. It's just going to quietly fade away, at best they'll be generally seen as a mildly bad response, and we'll forget all about it.
+1 for my general belief that the lockdowns were motivated more by panic, and monkey-see-monkey-do-ing China, than any actually coherent policy.
rolfmoo
1yr ago
What gets you fiercely activated, beyond what you can rationally justify?
Covid lockdowns. Vaccines? Very sensible. Vaccine mandates? Extreme, but I can imagine taking that position on the balance. But the idea of total loss of the most fundamental freedom - in my country, needing an excuse just to leave my house? I find it very hard to have any more sophisticated response than "fuck you and fuck your excuses", and on some deep emotional level that I can't shake it feels like everyone went completely insane at once on just this one issue.
It's especially weird because I'm pretty woke on most things. But in this case the mainstream feels totally insane and its viewpoint feels totally opaque to me, and inspires that kind of rage-and-panic reaction (which is not a pleasant thing to nearly constantly feel for more than a year).
rolfmoo
1yr ago
They might be hoping to reframe the whole issue. Nobody blames Photoshop when people make fake naked pictures of celebrities: maybe by making it a tool like Word and Excel, they're hoping that people will see it as neutral in whatever it's used for. I doubt this will work (if Photoshop were released today, would naughty pictures be blamed on Adobe?) but they might be willing to take the risk, gambling on Office's existing image as a neutral suite of tools.
Is there anything more to your point here than "AI currently exists and may have military applications, therefore there will never be a dangerous superhuman AI", which is an obvious non sequitur?
Are you trying to vaguely imply that reality is only allowed to have appropriately gritty and cynically-themed things in it like War And Commerce, as shown by this development, and therefore superintelligence is impossible because it would be inappropriate for the genre? Because weird implausible flight-of-fancy sci-fi stuff actually happens all the time and then rapidly becomes normal. You're currently on the global pocket supercomputer network, for example.
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