We shouldn’t conflate the Jewish people and the Israeli state/Zionists. That benefits Israel

I had heard about the online discourse in this area, but I’m glad to hear that something has come of that movement.

Fucking hell, that must have been terrifying

It took me a while, but I ended up really enjoying Death Stranding. One of the things that made it click for me was that I watched a video essay on a different game that used the playwright Bertholt Brecht’s V-effect as an analytical frame.

My rough understanding of it is that Brecht wanted to break the fourth wall and prevent audiences from identifying too heavily with characters, enabling them to better engage with the themes of the play; for example, if audiences end up identifying with a character who is a relatable asshole, then they might be less inclined to critically understand this character and the systems that facilitate their assholery.

Death Stranding invokes this with its absurd characters and setting. I never stopped finding it jarring when you have such silly character names and plots. This meant that for my first few hours of playing, I felt like I didn’t “get it”, and it seems like this is a fairly common reaction. However, this sense of “I don’t get it” is interesting because of how it primes you to search for something to get — some larger point that Kojima is trying to make with the game. If nothing else, I appreciate games and other media that have something to say, even if I struggle to grasp that message.

If I had to distill things down, I think the most prominent theme I understood was “Play is an essential component of human wellness, and it has tremendous capacity to facilitate building human connection”. I enjoyed how this was explored narratively through Sam’s interactions with various characters, but also through ludic means via the player interacting with other player build structures (I really enjoyed getting so many thumbs up for all the roads I built). Death Stranding sometimes feels pretentious, but I remember thinking “what’s more pretentious: the game that’s trying (and possibly failing, depending on perspective) hard to say something larger, or the player who regards the game with disdain”. Ultimately, I feel that the potential pretentiousness is neutralised by how earnest it is. Yes, it’s a very silly game, but that’s sort of the point.

Regarding Rings of Power, I absolutely hated the show, which sounds like a stronger opinion than what you hold. However, I completely agree that the discourse around the show is a trash fire of bad faith criticism that makes it impossible to express legitimate dislike of the show that’s based in honesty.

My current computer is the one that I helped my late best friend build, and I’m so glad that we ended up going for an AMD GPU. I wasn’t using Linux back then (and neither was he), so it was just a lucky fluke. My switch to running Linux as my main operating system would’ve been far more stressful with a Nvidia GPU, it seems.

I bought a pint for an acquaintance at my philosophy discussion group because he was moving away and this was his last session. I’m pretty poor at the moment, so even a small purchase like this was a lot. It was definitely worth it though, because it convinced him to stay for a while longer than he would have (the group session is held upstairs in a pub, but afterwards there’s usually informal discussions that continue downstairs in the main pub).

It felt very much like I was performing human socialisation in a deliberate, but nice way. I already told the dude that I would miss his presence at the group, but buying a farewell drink for him was a way of reiterating that sentiment.

I recently used Jekyll (https://jekyllrb.com/) as a static site generator. I found it easy to use. I personally used Gitlab pages, because I didn’t feel confident hosting on my home internet (didn’t want to inadvertently cause issues for my housemates when I’m still learning this stuff).

The nice thing about static sites is that it’s pretty easy to find free or extremely cheap hosting for them.

Shall I list off the crimes and systemic injustices perpetrated by atheists, or secular systems? Because the capacity to do great evil is not a trait exclusive to the religious.

I don’t deny that religious systems often facilitate the grave injustices that you list, but to lay equal blame across all religions and religious people is foolish because it fails to get at the true problem. People abusing their power would be a problem even if there were no religious people in the world at all.

I keep trying to convert my friends to using Firefox mobile for this reason. I generally try not to evangelise too much, but I have so many friends who keep complaining about ads when browsing the internet on mobile, and this would literally solve their problem. One friend complained about ads so frequently that they ended up getting irked at me telling them the problem was solvable. Our unhappy compromise was that I would stop telling them to use Firefox and uBO if they stopped complaining about this so much in front of me.

I respect their choices, but by God, I’m baffled by them. I get that inertia makes it hard to make switches like this, but when you’re spending so much time complaining about how much effort it takes to use the internet on your mobile, why would you not just solve the problem?

I had that error a couple of times, and it inexplicably resolved itself. Try having the person join again (which may require a new invite). I think only 1 out of 4 members of my family were able to join without that initial error message. This was back when Steam had just switched how they handled family sharing, so I assumed it was just an implementation bug of some sort. One of my friends took three attempts before they could join, but it worked ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Though I will note that steam family sharing no longer works if the person is located in another country for the purposes of Steam billing region (so my Norwegian friend could not join my UK family)

I think they use the same thing that web crawlers use. If Google’s crawler couldn’t access the content of the page (or could only access a limited amount of content), it would likely rank far lower in search results

Hedgehogs are far less common than they used to be, unfortunately. I haven’t seen one for years. A friend who lives in a more suburban area has one living under their shed, and she (the hedgehog) is such a creature of routine that my friend’s family will often gather near the window to watch her potter around on her nightly walk

Compost the rich

He’s the philosopher of choice for people like Peter Thiel and JD Vance. He advocates for moving to a neofeudalist system, arguing that democracy is a failed project. Beyond this, he holds some truly repugnant views that are woven throughout his ideology

I second the sentiment. You and other frequent posters of delightful posts help this place to feel more like a community. It’s also nice because you make me reflect on my own online presence in a manner that provides a positive pressure to be the kind of person I value in my community; I see usernames like yours crop up again and again, and when I find myself noticing that organically, it makes me wonder what kinds of patterns people notice across my own comments — it’s introspective, but in a good way

Whilst I understand the sentiment, I gotta respect someone who is unashamedly embracing their id and chasing that dopamine rush

I might try that. I’ve not heard about sugar waxing before

The ladder that starts at Chipotle is not one that leads to work in the field you studied for. College graduates who are struggling to find jobs would relish the opportunity to work up the ladder in their field, but there are insufficient entry level jobs.

I don’t know how I would decide where to go in China, given it’s such a huge place. Part of it is straightforward, in that if you’re learning Mandarin, it wouldn’t make sense to visit a place where Cantonese is primarily spoken, but that doesn’t narrow it down much

My view is that genocide is not just the eradication of a culture — for instance, one of the widely accepted definitions of genocide includes the forced removal of people from an area, which isn’t necessarily the eradication of a culture. You raise an interesting question though, about why genocide is bad. Honestly, I can’t answer that question because much of my view here is based in the deep sense of moral wrongness I feel when I think about the blanket eradication of a people.

I suspect that the “blanket” part of things is what I most object to. There’s always going to be people who fall through the gaps, the question is who we’d rather fall through the gaps: would we rather have war criminals escape justice, or murder people who don’t deserve it. We get to decide which side of caution to err on, but the problem is that it’s not a 1:1 ratio.

To use an example from a completely different domain, in my country, there is a lot of harmful rhetoric around people who receive social security benefits, especially disability benefits. Even though benefit fraud is extremely rare, this rhetoric (and the policies that result from it) lead to extreme levels of bureaucracy to ensure that a handful of “benefit scroungers” who are not entitled don’t receive money, at the cost of huge numbers of vulnerable people who are entitled falling through the gaps. People have died because of this, and the number of people harmed is far higher than the reduction in benefit fraud (given that levels of that were already so low).

I get that when we’re talking about such egregiously awful acts that are happening today, it’s a completely different situation, but the blanket killing of people in the way you describe feels to me like an overly retributive approach that will not lead to lasting peace.

I understand what you are saying by highlighting past times where justice was not done, and I see how those past failures have continued to cause strife right through to the present day. I don’t know what would have been a more appropriate approach, but I agree that more needed to be done.

That being said, I can’t ever feel okay with the extreme approach you describe. I realise that this may well be a naive view, because I know that a big part of why I feel this way is because I need to believe that people can be redeemed. I’m not saying that everyone can be redeemed — “true justice” may well involve the execution of people who are responsible for these atrocities. However, for the large number of Zionists who merely hold reprehensible views because it has been taught to them from a young age, I need to believe that people like this can change — I cannot bear thinking about what that would mean if such change weren’t possible. Whether we call it genocide or not, I don’t want to live in a world where mass murder is okay.

To cap off this comment, I want to say that I really appreciate your comment. We disagree profoundly, and I suspect that neither of us will have changed our mind by the end of this. However, part of why I wrote this comment at all is because I felt like your comment was made in good faith and was earnestly engaging with my points. Even if we don’t see eye to eye on this topic, I appreciate that we’ve been able to have this discussion