People’s brains fall out of their heads on this one hey? Like wtf, you’re actually responsible for what you say seems pretty basic. Nobody is arguing for prosecuting anyone who expresses opinions, or what they earnestly believe to be true and communicate in good faith. Just, if you make shit up and people get hurt well then, you did that hey.

Hmmm lets examine this statement.

Isolated weird place, scary Russians, Russian stereotypes of intellectual game + tremendous violence.

Gee, it almost sounds like this is a too convenient racist lie. Any proof? The oldest reference just says ‘it totally happened’ and cites something I can’t access on Google books. It’s 20 years after the fact and not a primary source.

She makes a handful of digital toys free. Slurs hurt real people. Keep this in context

The… upper middle class…? An income of 400,000 euros? that’s 10x the median income.

What tf is rich then?

I’m not raging I’m Australian.

There’s no fucking antenna that pops out of people’s heads and overrides their thoughts when considered in abstract. That’s Murdoch rag level of boomer bullshit.

Idk what broken arse society you feel like you’re from but humans everywhere work towards the collective all the time. You try to come up with some derranged “actually we don’t support the vulnerable” because propaganda about costs is written about and yet even in the face of that people continue to not attack each other in the streets. Oh capitalism is cannabalism is it? fucking derranged take but even so you just conveniently ignore how that system is enforced by a tiny minority and billions of people struggle against it or try to tame it. Oh climate change inaction huh? yes sure if you judge us all by the fucked up leaders of states but what about all the protests? what about all the climate scientists? The journalists writing about? what about the fact that greenwashing is an effective marketing strategy?

Like I’m sorry that Shazza and Bazza on the street don’t know how to tackle massive structural issues but it is absolutely a lobotomised take to think that means they’re not decent creatures.

“The masses” are just individuals. You sound like a 20 year old who just discovered atheism and started reading the paper.

you need to spend less time online and more time talking to your neighbours.

neither are the people claiming humans are, as a herd, fairly dumb and incredibly selfish

wtf? by what standard?

Humans frequently band together during disaster, humans care for their young and old, humans don’t typically engage in cannibalism of the weak, humans rarely fight to the death or even serious injury, we live in cities of millions with astonishingly low rates of violence etc etc

where is this terrible selfish stupid behaviour? what standard are you comparing the species to? we’re more violent than orangutans but they’ve never set up water sanitation so I think we can call ourselves smart and we’re less violent than chimps or gorillas… are you comparing us to fictitious ideal beings or what?

Humans are wonderful. Not always good, not always reasonable, but wonderful.

We are rich, nuanced, vibrant beings. A small portion of us are defectors but by and large we are community focused and willing to give when we feel we are not being taken advantage of.

Unless you think all your friends, yourself, and your family are garbage it is inconsistent to assume a random sampling of humans would not display the same prosocial traits you find in them.

The one thing we are incapable of doing though is handling power.

Yeah. I am not a Buddhist but I’ve always found something rings true in the reflections on impermanence. When we bond with someone we accept the pain of loss, and when we feel it most people seem to describe relief once able to “let go” an accept it being over.

It seems to me that encouraging clinging and reminiscening stunts you a bit and only really provides temporary relief of the loss while drawing out the time it takes to process it.

Idk though, maybe I’ll have the misfortune to feel differently some day. It’s hard to judge someone hanging out with their spouse watching death creep closer each day. I have approximately zero idea what my opinions would be in the face of that.

My wife is fortunately still alive so maybe that colours my view. However when I’ve lost other people the blessed anaesthesia of forgetting has been essential in being able to function.

From the short quote it seems like she maybe has a healthy-ish attitude but idk… I feel like this would be a shallow simulacrum that prolongs grief.

Hopefully people don’t need a college degree in literature to understand basic subtext.

I think it’s about learning that it’s worth doing more than anything else.

you get that this wouldn’t work as a critique if it was obvious you could make different choices right? Then it wouldn’t make the player complicit. If you’re not complicit it’s just a game saying “military shooters could be different” which is a nothing statement.

Like how games with a “get the information (evil)” and “get the information (good)” button aren’t offering real moral choices. Or how deus ex would lose all impact if the “here’s a gun, go kill these people” starting mission tempting you with a rocket launcher popped up a “you might change sides in the future” warning.

By involving you, leading you just like any other military shooter for a bit then cutting you loose is what creates the critique. You compare notes after playing and someone points out something and you go “huh, why didn’t I try that?”. It’s not condemning you for not trying that, it’s asking you if you’re happy with a genre which trains you to never to try it.

It’s weird. I credit my scientific education with waking me up to questioning stuff. Like when you learn about how we know stuff, the limits of proof (e.g. can’t prove empiricism is “true” it just works extremely well for certain things), how hard it is to wrangle stuff into scientific questions and so on the elephant in the room is how fucking impossible most questions are.

Then you get thinking about how untested most of society is, how many different ways there are to interpret things, how unknowable the “goodness” of your preferences is and so on.

Yet, in the same cohort as me there were a lot of people coming out extremely certain of their own worldview and blindly faithful in technocrats and the mystical power of throwing data at stuff to solve enormous problems. Like we are anywhere near being able to calculate out a human society.

So idk, I think it’s less stem vs not stem and education quality and kinds of people/where they’re at in life. You could probably go through a lit crit course and come out blinkered too, being able to do lit crit doesn’t guarantee you’d have good opinions.

Military shooter games glorify war and shallowly reward horrible behaviour. Spec ops does it differently.

Majority of people: do horrible thing

Some people: experimental and find heroic thing is rewarded.

Discussion possible, why did the majority do that? could we talk about horrible and uncreative design patterns in the genre of military shooters? How media portrayals of war train us not to look for peaceful solutions? Whether this feeds into how we view American imperial wars?

you: no spec ops bad video game because I didn’t do the good option.

I think you’re actually engaging with it a bit shallowly. You are the one who invented the rule and a different framing is exploring how, if games seem to put us in situations where we must do horrible things to advance even a couple of times, we take that as a rule instead of risking losing to find other ways.

Which is a fairly glaring indictment of the whole military shooter genre which is all about “hard men and hard choices” that completely dehumanise the factions you’re in opposition to.

From vicious giant insects who have once again come back

People read this stuff, get mislead, and get fucked up for the crime of wanting to watch a film from 60 years ago.

Using a condom doesn’t require trusting a third party to keep you out of gaol, and has lots of regulatory industry around it guaranteeing quality.

VPN companies are not ideological projects, they are businesses bound by the laws in the countries they operate in optimising for profit. They will abuse your trust if it makes them money or frees them from criminal liability.