hauntingspectre [he/him]

Neil Gaiman wrote this years ago, and it’s something I try to remember when these conversations come up:

"I was reading a book (about interjections, oddly enough) yesterday which included the phrase “In these days of political correctness…” talking about no longer making jokes that denigrated people for their culture or for the colour of their skin. And I thought, “That’s not actually anything to do with ‘political correctness’. That’s just treating other people with respect.”

Which made me oddly happy. I started imagining a world in which we replaced the phrase “politically correct” wherever we could with “treating other people with respect”, and it made me smile.

You should try it. It’s peculiarly enlightening.

I know what you’re thinking now. You’re thinking “Oh my god, that’s treating other people with respect gone mad!”

Literally costs you nothing to treat someone with respect by using their chosen pronouns.

I grew up playing on a Tandy 1000, whose most notable feature was the huge amount of games that said “640k RAM required (Tandy: 768K)”.

I still remember a few DOS commands, even.

That, to me, is why it’s accessible for more people: for $400 you get a machine that will get you 5-8 years worth of useful life. It’s a walled garden, but it’s a damn big walled garden. And you don’t have to worry about checking specifications, you don’t have to worry about shady sites for pirating your games, you don’t have to be annoyed by needing to upgrade one item to run a game. For an additional $60 you get a AAA title that should, in theory, work, plus you can pay for access to a huge backlog.

Now, that costs more than PC can for games, but in return you get convenience. For many people, that’s a good trade.

Oh, the PCMR types are definitely a minority of people who play on PC. PC is definitely my preferred platform for strategy games, but anything besides that I play on console. Sitting in front of a TV with a controller in hand just feels like how I’m supposed to play shooters or RPGs.

And I think modding is really an amazing scene. Sure, there’s bad mods, but in general mods as a concept, and often as an execution, are fantastic. Beyond the obvious political aspects of “who would work voluntarily under gommunism?!”, they democratize the gaming experience and can make it much more cooperative between developer and players.

At the same time though, in terms of mass accessibility consoles are an achievement. They’re the iphone of the gaming world - they just (usually) work. No need to download a mod manager and queue up your mods so that dragons don’t spawn in your house or whatever. That’s part of why Cyberpunk was such a failure: you assume a base level of playability with a game released for your console. That peace of mind was shattered.

I think that’s true for a significant chunk of male gamers. There’s a lot more concern about AAA titles and FOMO/FOTM, it seems. Plus there’s the whole PC master race of “gotta have the latest graphics card, also please look at my $10000 ‘battlestation’ and validate my life choices”, etc.

It seems almost perfectly designed to make toxic people more toxic.

One of my neighbors in my old city explained that playing video games is how he found out he had a seizure disorder, and since that incident in the 90s hadn’t played a video game.

Normal humans who play video games might respond and say “damn, that sucks. If you ever decide to give them a try, here are resources so you can avoid games that might trigger that”. G*mers say “haha fuck you and your rich and fulfilling family life, you’re a loser who can’t play video games”.

And yes, I did supply him with some info about resources for games that don’t cause seizures. He said thanks, and then we went back to watching our kids play, and to my knowledge he didn’t play video games again.

No, if it’s coordinated then no one has to worry about being dimed out to the judge :) but, it’s very risky to bring it up openly, so someone has to do it, and it can’t be you, since you know you’ll vote not guilty. Prisoners dilemma type problem.

I mean, historically used, often everyone agreed “killing that gamer-word was cool and good”. That’s why there were lots of Federal civil rights trials after local juries refused to convict.

Now, it’s more likely that you’ll hang a jury rather than get 12 to agree with you, since nullification was cracked down on after all that.

Completely correct.

They typically won’t ask if you support or have heard of jury nullification during voir dire. They will leave that to the “is there any reason you feel you can’t bring a verdict in accordance with the law and judge’s instructions?” question.

Jury nullification isn’t itself illegal, so you can honestly answer “No”.

Things the judge doesn’t like, yes. Basically while you have a right to nullify a jury, you don’t have the right to SAY you’re nullifying the jury.

You’re not. If you advance jury nullification ideas within the jury room, you’ll be replaced by an alternate (if available, obviously the size of the trial will impact that). Now, there might be different laws in different states on the matter, but the ones I’m familiar with allow removal.

Best thing to do is vote not guilty (assuming the case and charge allow it), and just say you’re not convinced past a reasonable doubt.

Because making cogent, coherent, and interesting long form video essays is a significantly different skill than dunking on people in a microscopic internet forum.

People radicalize at their own pace. I think for Duncan what did it was seeing the same patterns throughout history (elites doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different outcome), but he hasn’t yet connected that to the immortal science.

I’ll be interested to see his takes once we get to the actual revolution, particularly since he’s taken a long break during Covid.

Yes, Mike is a lib who’s been radicalizing with every season. It’s pretty cool.

Right now he posts mostly comparisons between the French Revolution and current US domestic politics 🤔 :thinkin-lenin:

I’m not so sure that they are, but in the American left, historically they’ve been the cause of a lot of splits. Like, we make fun of Trots for splitting, but recently, since the 60s on, white Maoists seem to have been the real driver of splits.

Still, the only Maoists I’ve dealt with IRL were the local ones, so it’s entirely plausible I’m painting with an overly broad brush. I tend to discount most online tendency talk as just keyboard commando stuff. If you’re busy typing out screeds about how the People’s Front of Judea screwed you over by reserving the library meeting rooms for two straight months, so that your group couldn’t book them, ya probably ain’t gonna be leading a revolution anytime soon.

I was involved with DSA for a couple years, til 2017 “officially” (I’d moved away a few months before my dues ran out). It was a weird group: a clique of succdems, a clique of idpol obsessed Maoists, and like 4 folks who wanted to engage in “normal” direct action. It got better as the Bernie obsessives left, the Maoists tried to launch their own group and split from DSA, and more folks interested in direct action joined.

Eventually (surprise!) the Maoist group fell apart and narced to the cops on each other, the direct action types took over the DSA, and I occasionally join their actions, and the succdems ran for positions within the Democratic party. I’ve not renewed my membership, though, and don’t plan on it.

And I’m still wary of self proclaimed Maoists since then. Just hearing the toughest talk from them for two years, to then find out they ratted each other out after some pretty mild police pressure.

I was taught “Asian people are good at assembling computers because they’re used to using chopsticks”

Yeah, the process of detangling a life is rough. You’ll find out things, good and bad, to help fill in the full picture of he who was as a man. There will be some good times in the process too.

Take care of yourself and those around you like he would have wanted you too!

Seriously, she and Notch are basically the same at this point: billionaires who’ve spent their “post getting wealth” lives punching down.

Imagine being able to do anything you want, and you choose to spend it being cruel to those beneath you.