adderaline

or maybe you don’t have some especially well considered, enlightened perspective, and people here believe the things they do for reasons that align with their life experience and education, just as with yourself. taking a centrist stance is not some objectively superior position from which to view politics. you aren’t endowed with special insight for choosing the midpoint between ideologies that contradict each other.

prefigurative politics!

its not completely wrong. getting cosmetic veneers is a pretty common practice in hollywood. they don’t cause your teeth to decay or whatever, but lots of celebs have them.

link! i didn’t know Internet Archive had a merch store.

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?

its from the DMX track “X gon’ give it to ya”. it came out in 2002.

it chunks text up into tokens, so it isn’t processing the words as if they were composed from letters.

beardown

did… did you make this account just to insert racist bullshit into the bear meme?

Typical woman

as always, the people most upset about the bear thing just so happen to also be sexists.

cop got on the news and used a bike lock chain that was used to barricade the building as “proof” that the protestors were infiltrated by professional agitators, because it was an “industrial chain” or something like that. its the bike lock that Columbia University itself recommends to students.

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.

language changes. we don’t speak like people did last century. gay used to mean happy. we can make english “nonsensical”. we have, and we are, and we will. and you can’t fucking stop it any more than you can stop kids from making slang. as much as you hate it, you know how the singular they works, and have no reason to be a little bitch about it. its in the dictionary. suck it up and stop whining.

there isn’t a problem to solve. the fact legislators want to do this is the problem. quibbling about how exactly they’re gonna implement the torment nexus is secondary to the goal of resisting the torment nexus.

like, if your whole thing is “this is happening, its self-evidently about surveillance, and we can do nothing to stop it” and you start proposing ways for us to be surveilled “safely, securely, and privately”, you are pro-surveillance. you are supporting the bills, right now, with the rhetoric you’re using. like, imagine doing this about any other political issue.

“i don’t support the death penalty, but we can’t stop the government from implementing it, so here’s the way I’d murder prisoners.”

“we can’t stop them from banning abortion, and I hate that, but I’ll suggest we put the limit at 10 weeks. that seems reasonable, right?”

your idea for “solving the problem” involves doing the thing that both restricts what information people can access, and tracks their legal identity, but in a way that is maybe marginally less stupid than tech illiterate legislators can manage. the fact that you would be fine with the bills if the intent was just to ensure kids can’t access “pornography” in a private way kind of reveals your biases here. it would not be a good idea even then.

what counts as pornography is socially defined. a tool which allows the selective restriction of pornography is also by definition a tool that encourages the redefinition of pornography to encompass whatever it is governments don’t want people to learn about. especially in the US, it would become a tool for the censorship of minorities, the banning of books, and the removal of queer people from the internet. that’s why these laws are being proposed. its not ambiguous at all. like, even if it is inevitable it will pass, the priority doesn’t then become “how do we make this bad idea more efficient?”, it becomes “how do we subvert this unethical restriction on our communications?”. assuming that we can do nothing to stop this ensures that we won’t. its a good thing nobody’s buying your bullshit.

if you think bills like this aren’t at their core designed to erode user privacy, you’re fooling yourself. there is no “privacy based approach” to destroying user privacy, and the ultimatum you’re proposing is not real. stupid laws fail all the time. the fact that people are trying to make ID verification a thing doesn’t make it inevitable it will become a thing, and in fact, opposing it is the best chance we have at making it fail.

your argument to the inevitability of shit-eating just makes you an advocate for the legislators who want us to eat shit.

because adopting open source software is a societal good? the idea that it won’t grow is kind of bleak. the industry standard for android device OS is dogshit for user privacy and a private monopoly and that’s something we should want fixed. unless you like living under constant corporate surveillance.

they are alive, so they need to shit and piss. they consume things, so they will create trash. if they are addicted to drugs, they need a place to do them. if we don’t provide for people public restrooms, public trash receptacles, and places to do drugs safely, they will do them in public where you can see them. nothing about any of these behaviors are unique to unhoused people, you just don’t see housed folks getting high and shitting in the street because they because have a far more comfortable, safe place to do their private business. you don’t see housed people’s trash because they have a bin to put it in that takes all the trash to the dump. how are they supposed to do anything different when they have nowhere else to go?

this whole antipathy towards people on the street makes me so fucking angry. they can’t go anywhere else. they have to keep all of their belongings out on the sidewalk, they have to shit on the fucking street, they have no other options but to live every moment of their lives in a public place, and we pass judgement on them when it doesn’t look pretty. these are human beings you’re talking about, not pests, not monsters, they’re people that you’re watching live in abject poverty, and all you can muster up is fear and disgust. its disgraceful.