Nah, sadly (?) that’s not how it works. People’s desires come first, and then they find a way within their belief system to justify their actions.

The people I’m hurting aren’t human.

They’re bad people.

They would do the same to me.

I’m only doing it because I’m a bad person.

I was hurt, so now is my chance.

That’s just how the world works.

Et cetera. Sometimes if the conflict between their beliefs and their actions gets too great they change their beliefs.

But for the most part, people don’t want to kill, steal, rape, etc. So they make up a reason to not do it, like “God will punish me if I do that” or “It’s morally wrong” or whatever, and then they don’t do it and move on with their lives.

(And those who do that stuff come from literally all belief systems; the only real differences being social environment - acceptability, expectations, protection from consequences, etc)

Or skip the search engine:

“Tell me about the ecology of Namibia. Use only sources from before 2022 because I do not trust LLM generated output. Make no mistakes.”

The roof is on fire

I don’t usually buy into “both sides same”, but this is actually how ‘both sides’ win or lose elections - if you put up a candidate that people are excited to vote for, people vote. If they’re disappointed, they don’t.

This is the majority of voters, not the vanishingly small minority that post online or pay attention to politics.

assert(titles == DIFFICULT);

Thank you for the post

It’s impossible for me to back Platner - he’s out of the race. If I had a choice, I’d pick him over Collins, but I’d prefer a candidate with a more marginalized identity and substantially more experience in successful “leftist” political work.

The Democrats spent roughly a third as much promoting Platner as the GOP spent trying to take him down (I don’t have exact numbers), so I agree that propaganda is everywhere. Perhaps the GOP is more desperate, while (as you say) the Democrats have other avenues to power, so they’re allowing this one to slip by.

Regarding the rape allegations, I sincerely hope the victims receive justice and healing, even though I don’t expect much from the system - that’s a whole different conversation.

My only point here is that the massive amount of propaganda aimed at demonizing political candidates gives us a very distorted view of who they really are, mostly on the side of “wow they’re so eeeevil”, so we all need to be wary of that. (Unless they’re a billionaire of course; at a certain level of power evil seems to be compulsory)

All I know is that Republican-aligned groups spent a ridiculous amount of money to get him out of the race.

If he was a bad candidate, they would have had to do that.

I guess “stamp collecting” means “finding rare things”? And “physics” is about learning about more complex rules of interaction?

I think that covers chemistry, as we already know the rules pretty well and are just looking for ways to get rare things. Particle physics too, we predict that things exist and many years later finally create (“collect”) them.

Ecology and Economics, we don’t know all the rules.

Maybe that’s a simpler summary: figuring out the rules vs applying the rules.

Dirty ver

It’s all but the worst phrase and we need to all but stop using it! All but most of the time the actual all but intended meaning can all but be found by just all but removing “all but”. Switzerland is all but all all but but surrounded == Switzerland is all but surrounded

Yeah, a friend of mine uses OTL as a “head-desk” emoticon and every time I’m just seeing letters and trying to expand the initialism.

It’s easier when it’s mixed or impossible punctuation, like O.O or T_T or things like that - signaling that “normal rules of letters combining into words are not valid here, look for a different pattern”

Yesssss I love Her Story - that “curiosity as game mechanic” was really well done, and I wish there were more games in the ‘genre’.

I did play the later game “Immortality” which is a bit similar in gameplay - you can click on something in one scene to find other scenes with the same character / object in them. I enjoyed that, though it didn’t have the same exploration-narrative magic of Her Story. I definitely found it harder to get engaged with at first.

It must be really difficult to craft a story that reveals itself well in that clip/connection format. It’s not a simple linear narrative, and avoiding sequence breaks (where you get a clip that reveals things you shouldn’t yet know) is so important. Though I think Her Story handles that well by keeping clips short enough that you don’t have the context with just a single clip.

Oof, haven’t thought about them in years and now I want more.

I should take another look at Telling Lies. When it came out there were a lot of complaints about what you said, it drops you into the middle of a scene and I think you had to slowly rewind to the start of the clip? I read later that (?) they added a feature to skip back to the start with a single button press (or maybe that was a steam mod?). Anyways, I never ended up playing it.

I was watching the other game: “#wargames” for a while but it stopped being sold and vanished from the internet.

“Executions” are not what one country does to the residents of another country.

Oh, that’s a game changer, I love it

(Intended as a reply to another comment. Apprently I’m still learning Blorp)

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