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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • I’m a strong atheist, but you’re kinda pick and choosing the facts. Skepticism isn’t about replacing one dogma with another.

    China had a whole thing with persecuting those with religious beliefs. It’s certainly the minority, but state enforced atheism has created great horrors. Anything can be warped and disfigured into a horrific belief system used to justify anything.

    Those who are religious should be held to the same level of scientific scrutiny as everyone else. There’s no evidence to show that Andrew Wakefield was Christian, and look at the shit show that caused


  • I’m just saying that accepting your definition of anxiety being tied to apprehension, anxiety about the climate is still valid.

    I would say your definition is correct, but your application is extremely limited. The anxiety is about things getting worse, it’s a vague nebulous feeling that can apply 1ms in the future or several decades. Or even about finding out past information in the future (the unknown). Or just not knowing what the future holds.

    So yes, being super pedantic, you can’t really be anxious about the literal state of the literal climate literally right now, but it’s instead about the possible future outcomes and events. But it’s very commonly understood that when someone says they’re anxious about climate change, they don’t mean it in the super pedantic literal way




  • Sorry man, but that’s a relatively milk toast YouTube video with 81k views. Definitely very right leaning, but outright fascist is a bit much. She clearly has no media literacy or is deliberately misleading people.

    Her latest video got only 11k views, and most of her titles look like some right wing grifter shit like “Ben Shapiro SILENCES Candace Owens, CANCELS Debate?”.

    And I’m sure that right wing grifters will use this for content, that’s what they do.

    I wouldn’t say that shows anything more than a loud minority. Honestly 81k views is lower than I expected and more proves my point


  • Please could you provide some examples? I’ve legitimately never seen someone upset at the devs for not literally being fascists.

    If I have to go out of my way to find this, I’m assuming it falls under the “loud” minority group. I’m sure these people exist, but it’d surprise me if they made up a significant amount of the over 12 million players.

    Edit: Had a further look, there seems to be more people complaining about people taking it literally than people actually taking it literally. I did find like 3 Reddit posts, but all had 0 upvotes and like 30 comments telling them they’re wrong and stupid



  • It’s more that when the writing is bad something is perceived as “political”, as the insert of whatever political messaging is being used comes out of nowhere and smacks the player like a cudgel. That’s what most gamers have a problem with, obviously there’s a loud minority that rage about stupid shit like Jesse Faden being too masculine. But that’s not what most people are talking about.

    Games need to tackle these issues head on and fully integrate them into the world, not just tack on preachy dialog that doesn’t make sense within the wider game world.

    FF16 is blatantly about slavery and no one really complained, it’s not exactly peak fiction, but they at least had everything contained within the world. FF7 is the same but with fossil fuels and much better writing.

    New Vegas is the best example, it’s simply written well and gives the player agency.

    Death Stranding did a great job of both integrating it’s themes directly into the world, and also tackling them head on without any remorse.

    Helldivers is so ludicrously full on and absolutely dripping with it’s pro fascist ideology that everyone knows what they’re getting into from the intro video, and then the game starts adding texture and “are we the baddies” energy straight away.

    Fucking Disco Elysium is near universally praised by the wider gaming audience, and I don’t even think I need to explain how that one is political.

    It’s the same reason why most ideologically driven media is cringe as fuck. Christian media being a prime example, it’s contrived slop that doesn’t make sense within its own story. Like God’s Not Dead and it’s illogical legal system built on feels and Shapiro logic.

    Who remembers the weird pro-life Doctor Who episode? That was bizarre and out of place. The characters stopped acting like themselves for the sake of whatever message it wanted to get across. It just felt really out of place.

    The Last of Us Part 2, to label the most controversial example, had periods of good and bad writing, but focusing in on the “violence bad” part of it’s messaging, it completely missed the mark. Giving the characters names that they shout was just hilarious, and having Ellie repeatedly kill dogs whilst Abbie pets them was just so hamfisted. Then making the gameplay violent and fun which just divorced it further.

    TLDR: Gamers People love politics in video games media, they hate hamfisted preaching in video games media. Especially when it doesn’t make sense in the crafted world



  • This is however, a practice that results from the government being effectively corporate controlled. Which is the end result of allowing your free markets to run wild and allowing corporations to acquire that much power, money, and influence.

    A pure capitalist system actively selects for this kind of bullshit. The most ruthless and unethical companies end up winning in the end. And those same companies are buying our politicians.

    People blame capitalism when the system clearly favours the rich over the poor to such a dystopian extent that a man is allowed to be held hostage by a corporation





  • I don’t think classifying cisgender as a slur is defendable, especially on its own.

    Not saying it is a slur, but I’ve seen it used like a slur before, mostly coupled with “white” and “men”/“women”. But I’m fairly sure Elon himself is against censoring language for that reason (when it comes to things that don’t personally offend him). It just seems dumb and hypocritical to me




  • No papers that are actually concrete. Most of it is just speculation.

    I’m not a scientist, and for me personally it’s enough to make me spend a bit longer thinking before immediately dismissing all insects as mindless automatons. Most probably are simple biological machines. Jumping spiders are however massive outliers in terms of insect intelligence, and a cursory Google search will provide a wealth of evidence for it.

    I personally would also go as far as believing that they dream. I just don’t believe there’s a reasonable explanation for the REM like state other than some form of dreaming, even if rudimentary.

    I’m not going to state that jumping spiders are fully conscious as 100% fact, there’s not enough proof for that. But they do have a proven ability to learn, and an ability to make somewhat complex plans. And all I’m trying to say is that we need more research before dismissing them so certainly.



  • Thank you, it’s very valuable to correct that misinformation.

    It seems like an easy mistake to make as the original post being replied to is framing it explicitly in terms of economics.

    It’s just a bit of shitshow of weird communication. How hard would a tweet like “A problem with solar panels is that they produce too much electricity during the middle of the day, putting strain on the grid and requiring increased power consumption”.

    That’s not as sensationalist but I’m also not a headline writer. It just seems like this shitty piece of journalistic malpractice was made to stir up outrage