And you don’t think violence is an appropriate response to fascist tyranny?? What the fuck is wrong with you? Are you just going to politely get in the gas chamber? Where’s the fucking line for you?

Not everyone needs to go out and shoot a Nazi but let’s be respectful of the people who actually put their life on the line to rid the world of evil.

I forgot they were even making this game. BL3 was kind of bad, the pre sequel was painful. The tiny Tina one was okay but weirdly had no ng+ and shitty dlc. Meh.

Never played the original, but I don’t feel a need for remakes.

Paradox of tolerance is resolved when you view tolerance as a treaty. If one side breaks it, they no longer benefit from it.

If two factions are fighting and call a truce, and then one side starts fighting again, it’s nonsense to tell the first side not to fight back because there’s a treaty. The treaty has been broken.

There’s a Sartre quote about that.

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7870768-never-believe-that-anti-semites-are-completely-unaware-of-the-absurdity

They argued that if the NPCs had been bandits they would just attack on sight.

Video game mindset is real.

I remember one of the first games I tried to run, when I was a young teenager. I described how there was a big rat in the first room of the ruins. The player was like “it’s just there? Looking at me? Ok i shoo it away and check the doors…”

I was like, oh. Right. Duh. Normal people don’t just kill every creature they see.

I think a root cause is conservative emotion driven decisions. Some people will look at facts and from them draw conclusions. Conservatives prefer feeling things and from them deciding what to do. Cities feel scary and alien to them so they must be full of crime and danger.

It’s probably not a coincidence that religion, the kind that prioritizes feelings and faith, is also popular among the right.

They’re shitty people by most reasonable metrics.

Management lives in a fantasy world of vibes and bullshit. They don’t care about the workers, the product, or the users. They are insulated from consequences.

The mega corporations need to be broken up, and replaced by smaller, worker-owned, organizations.

Thanks for the reasonable response.

In essence I’m contesting that strict language standards are necessary to be understood. I mean, of course some standards are still required, just not strict enough to be all uptight about it when people start to bend them.

We agree on this, I think. I’m mostly a linguistic descriptivist - that is, language is what people speak more than what’s written in a rulebook somewhere. I’m not a linguist but I have an undergraduate degree that required some courses on English language.

It can be annoying when there’s a word for something (eg: enshittification, gaslighting, woke) and people then over extend it to mean “things i don’t like”. There’s not much to stop that, other than as an individual trying to be more precise in language. I think it’s not good for one’s brain to only have a few catch-all words for stuff.

I think “slop” specifically is a very old word (1400ce, if etymology online is to be trusted). But like if there was a word for “low quality LLM content” (let’s say… slopplement), applying that to any low quality writing would kind of suck. it would almost certainly happen, though, because all of us humans are kind of lazy.

Anyway. We mostly agree. I would just recommend being mindful of one’s word choices, because a narrow vocabulary can be a drag on thinking and communication.

I have had players get confused when NPCs don’t want to drop everything and help them. Like, the NPC is just living life. They’re not going to risk their safety and livelihood because you asked nicely a few minutes after meeting them.

One player had her mind blown when she learned NPCs can lie. She’d sort of pissed off this one faction with mild misbehavior. She gets pissy with one guy and demands he tell her where the macguffin is. He lies. She says okay, goes to that place. Gets in some trouble, and has no macguffin. She’s looking at me like “where is it?”. After several increasingly overt hints I just tell her “maybe he lied to you, because you broke into his house, pissed off his friends, and demanded he help you. Maybe he just lied to you”.

“But… He said the thing is here”

I like to think if I shot a right wing extremist troll, my dad would help me lay low instead of turning me in. But my dad is an aging hippy, not a maga hat worm brain.

You say it’s foolish to enforce strict language standards, but the most important thing about language is that it is understood. You buried that point in the middle of your second paragraph.

Did you read 1984? It has a major thread though it about how collapsing language reduces the ability of people to think. One of the first and most prominent examples in the book is replacing the many words for “good” and “bad” (eg: great, amazing, excellent, terrible, atrocious, etc) with simply “good” and “ungood”. Similarly, the dispossed has some writing in it about how language shapes thought. For example, the prevalence or absence of possessive forms (eg: my house vs the house I stay in)

The reason I used “good” and “ungood” is because those are the preeminent examples in 1984. They’re not a judgement of your post.

I’m not sure why you’re dismissive of “high school reading lists”, but you are coming off as someone who might actually be a high schooler. Your last emoji didn’t render, so maybe that would’ve changed the meaning.

Switched to PopOS on my desktop and Mint on the ancient laptop my gf had laying around. No real complaints. Games run fine. Browser runs fine. I had some trouble getting mint installed on the old laptop, but the internet had a solution.

I think the install process is kind of daunting for many users, but once it’s going I think the average user won’t have any problems. Windows, by contrast, is kind of aggressive with its “GOING TO UPDATE NOW” and “don’t you want to use one drive???”

So long as you’re understood, it’s fine.

Burying the lede here.

But also like language shapes the way we think. If you just let all your words boil down into “good” and “ungood”, you’re reducing your tools for thinking. 1984 and The Dispossessed are great books, by the way.

Charlie Kirk was a piece of shit and the world is better without him. I will cheer for every unrepentant maga scumbag that dies.

Did the onion write a piece about how we should reflect on Unnamed Nazi #342 in Indiana Jones’s life and family yet? “Sure, Unnamed Nazi #342 willingly joined an organization focused on subjugation and mass murder of people, but it’s important to remember that he also had a family. They were looking forward to living in a house stolen from the people he helped murder, and living off the fruits of slave labor.”

They don’t care about what words mean. They will say anything, anything, to try to secure power. They are bad people. They are bad people.

This small community way of thinking you’re describing is kind of a bad system. It doesn’t scale well and is extremely vulnerable to injustice. It shouldn’t be held up as a gold standard or even an acceptable way to think. I thought most people accepted the law should apply equally to all, but that “small town” mode is going to produce “sure Jimmy stole the car and crashed into the deli, but he’s a good boy. Give him probation. But that [slur] parking in the fire lane? Throw the book at them!”

Two things can share one property without being the same in all ways.

Doctors cut people up and sometimes take organs out, but they aren’t the same as a serial killer doing the same.

Kirk doesn’t deserve a minute of silence. He was a scum bag. His ideas were trash. He got what he was due.

I vote that musk dies. Preferably alone. He seems like the kind of asshole who would try to take everyone else with him.

Fuck. He’s such a colossal idiot. He has so much money. He could have peace. Buy a house anywhere in the world and just kill out. Get off Twitter. Retire. People would stop talking about him in a couple years.

But he can’t do that. He’s broken inside. And also quite stupid.