adderaline

listen. even if we disregard the fact that lots of legal experts, including the peers of the people who put this ruling in place, believe this is an existential threat to democracy, in practice, the ruling puts the authority for determining what is an official act into the hands of the judiciary. the supreme court is the ultimate authority in making these determinations. its a power grab, plain and simple, which grants the president immunity for “official acts”, and places the authority to determine what is and isn’t an “official act” in the hands of the same people who granted him that immunity.

the fact that Roberts is making vague gestures towards some kind of accountability means less than nothing. considering how Trump is behaving, what he and his crowd seem to believe about the breadth of this decision, we should not assume that a room full of people Trump put into power have any interest in ensuring Trump doesn’t “get away with everything”, and we shouldn’t assume that these people are even nominally interested in telling the truth about their intentions, considering just how much of their personal comfort is guaranteed by the institutions that Trump represents, and how resistant they are to accountability for their extremely well documented lies.

your personal confidence in Trump’s eventual, eternally forthcoming guilt relies on the trustworthiness of liars and the moral fiber of bigots. good luck with that.

I’m not understanding a word you are saying

that makes two of us, i guess? i don’t know what it is you’re trying to say i was saying. to be more clear, i’ve been seeing a lot of talk in this thread arguing against the “video games cause violence” claim, as if that was what the lawsuit was about. i don’t think the contents of the article present the families’ lawsuit as primarily concerning that particular claim. i then attempted to describe what i believe their actual claim to be.

i’ve emphasized the words i think are relevant here:

These new lawsuits, one filed in California and the other in Texas, turn attention to the marketing and sale of the rifle used by the shooter. The California suit claims that 2021’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare featured the weapon, a Daniel Defense M4 V7, on a splash screen, and that playing the game led the teenager to research and then later purchase the gun hours after his 18th birthday.

that Call of Duty’s simulation of recognizable guns makes Activision “the most prolific and effective marketer of assault weapons in the United States.”

the fact that Activision and Meta are framing this as an extension of the “video games cause violence” thing is certainly what they’ve decided to do, but it seems to be talking past what the complaint and lawsuit are about, which is the marketing of a Daniel Defense M4 V7 in 2021’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.

the reason i emphasized the gun model is that that seems, to me, to be the core feature of the case the families are trying to make. not that video games cause violence, but that Activision bears responsibility for the actions of the shooter because the shooter played their game, then proceeded to kill people with the specific model of gun that was being advertised in that game. the fact that the article takes the time to reference another case where the specific naming of a gun model lead to a sizable settlement, and says this

The notion that a game maker might be held liable for irresponsibly marketing a weapon, however, seems to be a new angle.

seems to support my reading. that isn’t the same thing as saying video games make you violent, which is the claim a bunch of people in this thread seem to be shadowboxing.

i dunno, maybe there’s some ambiguity there? are you arguing that the lawsuit is about rehashing the video games make you violent claim, or what? i genuinely don’t know what you’re trying to communicate to me. i hope this clarified my stance.

some of y’all definitely aren’t reading the article. this isn’t a “video games cause violence” thing. they are suing Activision and the gun manufacturer Daniel Defense for marketing a specific model of gun in Call of Duty, and maybe? that the Uvalde shooter used that same model of gun in the shooting. i dunno if there’s merit to the argument, but like, categorically, this isn’t the “video games cause violence” argument y’all seem to think it is. its about a gun manufacturer advertising their product in a video game.

plenty of people?

i’d like to see how you’d be measuring “performance” in this context, or what you consider to be worthy of merit, because those things are not the objective measures you seem to think they are.

people who are contributing to open source projects are not a perfect Gaussian distribution of best to worst “performance” you can just pluck the highest percentile contributors from. its a complex web of passionate humans who are more or less engaged with the project, having a range of overlapping skillsets, personalities, passions, and goals that all might affect their utility and opinions in a decision making context. projects aren’t equations you plug the “best people” into to achieve the optimal results, they’re collaborative efforts subject to complex limitations and the personal goals of each contributor, whose outcome relies heavily on the perspectives of the people running the project. the idea you can objectively sort, identify, and recruit the 50 “best people” to manage a project is a fantasy, and a naive one.

the point of mandating the inclusion of minority groups in decision making is to make it more likely your project and community will be inclusive to that group of people. the skillsets, passions, and goals that a diverse committee contains are more likely to create a project that is useful and welcoming to more kinds of people, and a committee that is not diverse is less likely to do so. stuff like this is how you improve diversity. in fact, its quite hard to do it any other way.

If the IDF was bombing indiscriminately, then why are they using only expensive guided ammunition in dense urban areas? Wouldn’t it be far cheaper to just lob unguided bombs randomly instead of announcing where they strike through telephone calls, messages, flyers, hacked TV stations and, most recently, an online service? How does your claim of indiscriminate bombing mesh with this extensive warning system they developed?

if they aren’t bombing indiscriminately, the death toll is even more condemnable. if they are precise in their bombing, they have used that precision to butcher thousands of innocent people. in any case, saying “watch out people who have no place to go, we’re about to bomb the hospital you’re in!” is not the humanitarian victory you seem to think it is.

they didn’t die “because of the October 7 attack”. they died because the IDF has been indiscriminately bombing civilians after the attack. nothing about the actions of Israel are an inevitable consequence of October 7. they are the deliberate actions of a far-right government. i am not ill informed, i know the facts of the situation, i have family in israel, i am a jew. your failure to recognize forced migration and mass killing of palestinian civilians as fundamentally the same as what the jewish people were subjected to is appalling. never again for anyone.

or maybe not all jewish people think ethnic cleansing is acceptable? thousands of children have died.

ugh. you’ve pressed enough of my buttons to warrant a response.

We’ve come a long way from cave drawings and hieroglyphics

the idea that hieroglyphs are in some way inferior to modern writing systems in an objective way is flawed. hieroglyphs were a diverse writing system comprised of phonograms, logograms, and ideograms, and they could be used contextually to record a rich and complex language as fully featured as our own. the ancient Egyptians wrote their dreams, legends, and histories in this text for over 4000 years. the idea that our modern languages are somehow “better” than ancient languages is to misunderstand what language is.

And yet there is a whole new wave of people unable to use those languages correctly or even rudimentarily who drag civilization backwards by returning to hieroglyphics

the idea that there is a “”“correct”“” way to use language is flawed. the field of linguistics recognizes a vast diversity of languages, dialects, sociolects, and even idiolects that vary from each other in many interesting ways. collapsing that diversity into a single “correct” way to use language is nonsense, and has historically served to exclude those whose dialect is not supported by powerful institutions. just because people aren’t speaking like you are doesn’t mean they’re speaking wrong, or “rudimentarily”.

instead of catastrophizing about how new ways of communicating might end the world, as people have done literally since we started to write down things, linguists have studied how and why emojis exist, and, unsurprisingly, its not because people are getting stupider or something like that. its because they’re useful for conveying non-linguistic social information in informal written communication. without the non-verbal queues, vocal tone, and other contextual information that exists in spoken language, emojis are one of many ways to add context that can’t be represented through text alone. tone indicators and emoticons serve similar roles.

And things like emojis are leading the charge.

this is cringe. small changes in the structure of our informal written communication are never going to be the big, important thing you seem to think they are. if you’re this passionate about language that you think it can be ruined by funny little pictures, learn some linguistics. nobody who knows anything substantive about language shares your concerns, because they’re too busy studying the interesting new cultural phenomenon and what it might mean for our understanding of human communication.

i mean, at the state level blue states are both not trying to get queer people killed, and are expanding access to resources. blue senators aren’t voting with the anti-queer positions on the federal level. they aren’t safe, but complacency and support are not the same thing, and the outcomes for actual people are materially worse in places where republicans have control.

that isn’t what the linked article says lol.

you know, i’ve felt a similar way before. i thought that i had discovered some terrible truth, that everything is meaningless and its not worth it to try pursuing something that’s ultimately without purpose. then i got treatment for depression, and i can scarcely imagine living that way now. i still fundamentally believe that its basically all meaningless, but it turned out that my lack of drive and passion for life was far more related to the concentration of neurotransmitters in my brain and harmful patterns of thinking that it was to any coherent belief about the nature of the world, and that there is quite a lot to enjoy about being fated to die and become nothing. i’m not saying you necessarily have depression or something like that, i just remember feeling the way you describe, feeling absolutely convinced that it was the only rational way to feel about living in a world like this, and being proven wrong. with the right treatment, i found that i was unable stop myself from feeling motivated to do the things i wanted to, unable to stop myself from finding joy and fascination in the small moments of my days.

some healthy self-deprecation is definitely nice, but the eldritch implications of somebody representing their intelligence as convertible to a temperature value transgressing thermodynamic law intrigue me more.

somebody talking about their IQ would be a major red flag for me lol

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

uh huh. because our current system has definitely demonstrated that shitty companies fail, right? i don’t know how you can look at the landscape of modern corporations and come away with the thought that capitalism has in any way increased our freedom to choose, or that that really important part actually in practice weeds out shitty business practices in any way.

what companies do you like? are any of them the large multinational corporations swallowing up every speck of available market share and spiraling us towards climate apocalypse? if so, you’re wrong.

food insecurity is a huge problem in many places today, including in some of the wealthiest countries on the world. there aren’t too many communist regimes around to blame for it anymore.

how are being a capitalist and despising the direct product of capitalism compatible lol?

The thing is averages don’t mean shit when you’re talking about individual people, because individual experiences always deviate from the average, especially if you talk about average wealth where a few millionaires and billionaires skew the data for a lot of poor people.

i’m sorry, but “averages don’t mean shit when you’re talking about individual people” is such a cop out. statistical measures are literally THE MOST reliable way of determining truth that we have, and its basically the only way to prove something is real with high certainty. do you seriously think that professional sociologists don’t take outliers into account when talking about average wealth? that’s like, literally grade school statistics, the kind of analysis being done for measures of social well-being are built to account for confounding variables, and a discrepancy still exists when you control for pretty much every other factor.

But sure, let’s follow your logic. Black people on average are poorer and have worse jobs, so we need to discriminate in their favour. Well, statistically there is also a lot of evidence that black people on average commit more crimes than white people. So should I be scared of a black person I cross on the street? Following your logic, yes. Following mine, no.

i’m not following a “logic”, i’m presenting what the research has shown to be factual, or at least highly likely. we do know that black people on average commit more crimes. if you want to use that as an excuse to discriminate against black people, you can do that, but an evidence based look into why crime happens and what factors go into why somebody commits crimes does not support that position. because yes, criminologists and sociologists have actually examined the “why” of the statistical connection between criminal behavior and blackness, and didn’t just stop at “oh, black people are statistically over-represented in prison populations, that’s weird.”

we know that poverty is like, THE determining factor in criminality. people who are in desperate straits are far more likely to commit crimes, black or not. because black people are more likely than white people to be in poverty, they are also statistically more likely to commit crime. of course, being convicted of a crime then makes it harder to get work, and puts significant financial burden on the family of the incarcerated, driving the incarcerated person and their loved ones further into poverty, and increasing their likelihood to commit crime in the future as their circumstances worsen. that doesn’t account for everything, though. we also know that black people are significantly more likely to be convicted and sentenced when they do interact with the justice system, and white people can often avoid jail time that is inevitable for comparable crimes committed by a black person.

in fact, the systemic factors which drive the impoverishment of black people are the largely the same factors which drive criminal behavior in black people, and which punish black people more harshly if they do end up committing crimes. systemic racism. poverty. urban decay. the prison industrial complex. discriminatory laws. there is metric shit-tons of literature out there for you to read on this stuff, as you obviously have not done, considering that you wrote “black people are poorer than white people” and “black people commit more crimes than white people” right next to each other, and failed to even consider how those two statements might be related before defaulting to a 50 year old racist talking point.

i get that you’ve bought into the whole “actually its the LEFT who are the racist ones” talking point, and maybe even the “christian white men are the most oppressed group in this country” talking point, but there are thousands of empirical studies showing that people of color, and especially black people, are faced with specific challenges when it comes to acquiring a decent quality of life, and that these challenges cannot be explained away as anything other than an ongoing social process by which black people are deprived of resources by virtue of their identity.