So I’m not a fan of guns but, “marketing guns” is not per se illegal nor unique to video games. Yet the lawsuit separates out video games specifically. So I am not sure I agree that it’s less crazy at the end of the day.

So I did read the article, and… I’m not understanding a word you are saying. The families are suing a video game company for a gun in their video game. Also the article is not at all making the emphasis that you are making between marketing a specific game and video games writ large (the article kind of speaks to both of those at the same time and isn’t making any such distinction), so I don’t know what you are talking about. As far as the article is concerned this has everything to do with the fact that the gun was in a video game, and even Activisions statement in response was to defend themselves from the idea that their video game is a thing that pushing people to violence. So even Activision understands the lawsuit as tying their video game to violence.

I’m not saying I agree with the logic of the suit, but I literally have no idea what you think in the article separates out video games from the particular model of gun because that is just not a thing the article does at all.

This is not from Google. This is Extinction Rebellion registering a domain to prank Google, by speaking in their voice and resolving to stop funding climate deniers. It’s both a cheeky prank and a way to put pressure on Google to take accountability.

Sorry, I was super unclear there. This was not Google.

However, Google also sometimes has done their own April Fools bits, and historically Google has been big part of April Fools hijinks. So I did mention them as a company that does these, and I did post this which is impersonating Google as an april fools prank, but yeah, this particular one was not at all carried out by Google.

I almost forgot today was April Fools day. I feel like since Covid, the national mood ™ was such that Google and co stopped doing April Fools pranks, and/or if they did them, they were so safe they were groan inducing.

Looking around at the roundup links for 2024, there aren’t many that happened this year, from the looks of it. So I wanted to post this one, because it’s the rarest of rare - one that I thought was really incredibly well done.

social hierarchy studies have primarily been done on lobsters and wolves

I’m skeptical. I’ll grant you wolves, but even then, wolves I feel are no more or less studied than a bunch of other species which are subject of extensive interest, especially primates, dolphins and orcas, but also lions, hyenas, meerkats, bees and ants. At least those are all studied well enough that we have plenty to pick from.

I appreciate your point though that its ideologically driven anyway and that it’s all moot and 100% agree.

It wouldn’t even matter if it was “right”. The idea of looking to wolves for models of ideal human behavior is wrong for like 17 different reasons, even if it were technically true as a description of wolf behavior.

P.S. why do AlphaBros specifically look at wolves, or lobsters, to instruct us on social hierarchy? There are so many other animals, those seem pretty random choices. And pretty far afield from humans. Wouldn’t you at least want something more proximate to us humans on the evolutionary tree? Heck, why not just use humans as a reference point?

And the original concept, as it pertains to wolves, is evidently not a thing. So if we’re just saying things, the software metaphor is as good as any other.

I mean if you are looking for a serious answer, it’s this. You may be able to find equivalences between US and Russian media, at the level of one instance for one instance. What you can’t find is an equivalence in magnitude. For every offense you find in the U.S., you can find the same in Russia but ten times as much, and ten times worse.

And to me, a test of whether you’re a serious person is whether you have the information literacy to understand that kind of distinction instead of whatabouting and Gish galloping it into the ground.

I think there’s a steelman version of that same argument that makes a legitimate point about how Russian disinformation does contribute to the escalation of tensions both in the United States and around the world, and I feel like not only are you not engaging with it, but you’re intentionally not doing so.

I say that because you appear to only be willing to address yourself to the completely watered-down version of the caricature argument, even when you’re in a thread that directly links to an article that makes some pretty direct points about the reality of actual Russian disinformation.

Like if you could just talk normal for a second, you might say something like, “oh in paragraph three of the article it says this. But actually that’s not true and here’s my source for refuting it.” Or even “well these are all true but I feel like it’s emphasizing the wrong things and here’s my argument for emphasizing a different thing.” Like just any signal, any signal at all, any whatsoever that shows that you’re in touch with the same set of facts. But you can’t go there, and so you’re chasing caricatures instead.

Woah, we even have auto TLDR! That’s how you know Lemmy is on the up and up. I was wondered how this worked in the years before Chat GPT, which I assume is still however it works now.

They are both carbon-based life forms. Which means that at a psychological level they’re probably identical. And there’s probably no difference whatsoever between the respective nations cultures, economic or political conditions, or their respective geopolitical interests.

If they’re living breathing creatures, and they both rely on carbon to form complex molecules that make up their bodies, it naturally follows that their countries have identical geopolitical alliances.

Agian I ask of Trudeau made the same claim, or the Prime Minister of New Zeeland, would you be making the same argument

Wouldn’t that depend on their particular geopolitical interests, which could be entirely different from those of Russia?

I feel like these questions are so absurd sometimes not because an answer is being sought but because it succeeds at the goal of degrading the quality of conversation.

Exactly. Putin is really concerned about student loan debt.

He says he wants blue team to win in 2024, but we are blue team and we hate him!

Well we’re off to an awfully bad start because this is about the shallowest bad faith caricature I could possibly imagine. Let’s put it this way:

• Putin absolutely has a propaganda strategy aimed toward the west that utilizes a number of tools and messaging strategies
• Among the strategies reported on, one has been to escalate existing divisions within the United States, with one example reported on being creating opposing conservative and liberal events and scheduling them at the same location
• Purin preferred Trump for his first term
• Putin preferring Biden can be politically damaging to Biden in the context of domestic politics
• a Trump victory could prove exceptionally destabilizing to domestic politics in the United States

I’m not even 100% saying I’m right, but every step of this is perfectly reasonable, it doesn’t rely on any outlandish assumptions, and communication about this isn’t helped by mocking people with bad faith caricatures and performative incredulity.

or escalate the war.

This seems to run contrary to everything I’ve read about Trump’s position. The first half of what you said is at least somewhat accurate. But the second half is contradicted by numerous reports from Trump that his approach would have been to “take a deal” and get out, implicitly with substantial land concessions from Ukraine. And then there’s the fact that both of them have profess to having positive relationships with one another and admiring one another.

It can be both - a terrible amoral system that concentrates wealth to the point that major world events are driven by wildcard personalities of rich idiots. And then, the rich idiots themselves.

I just logged in to two smaller instances where I have accounts, anticapitalist.party and mastodon.xyz. I found them in one step and I could see their posts and replies on both of them.

Uh?? Is War & Peace not literary fiction? Also I think Diablo, arguably the most famous RPG game (for better or worse), is an action RPG.

Because even for me, a full time systems coder, just figuring out what server to join was a pain

What was there to figure out in your case?