Sort of fallacious to go from one case of time to happen and derive probability from it.

I’m no biologist but I don’t think any of our models of super early stuff are sophisticated enough to speculate on what stages are the most or least likely.

Yeah but you understand the difference between the state and the people who lived there right? Like Jewish settlers came from Europe, to the place Palestinian people were and had been living in.

They have a connection to the state of Palestinian (inasmuch as it exists given differing degrees of recognition) by way of having moral rights to continue living on the land they live on regardless of what some lines on a map call it.

I’m not raging I’m Australian.

There’s no fucking antenna that pops out of people’s heads and overrides their thoughts when considered in abstract. That’s Murdoch rag level of boomer bullshit.

Idk what broken arse society you feel like you’re from but humans everywhere work towards the collective all the time. You try to come up with some derranged “actually we don’t support the vulnerable” because propaganda about costs is written about and yet even in the face of that people continue to not attack each other in the streets. Oh capitalism is cannabalism is it? fucking derranged take but even so you just conveniently ignore how that system is enforced by a tiny minority and billions of people struggle against it or try to tame it. Oh climate change inaction huh? yes sure if you judge us all by the fucked up leaders of states but what about all the protests? what about all the climate scientists? The journalists writing about? what about the fact that greenwashing is an effective marketing strategy?

Like I’m sorry that Shazza and Bazza on the street don’t know how to tackle massive structural issues but it is absolutely a lobotomised take to think that means they’re not decent creatures.

“The masses” are just individuals. You sound like a 20 year old who just discovered atheism and started reading the paper.

you need to spend less time online and more time talking to your neighbours.

neither are the people claiming humans are, as a herd, fairly dumb and incredibly selfish

wtf? by what standard?

Humans frequently band together during disaster, humans care for their young and old, humans don’t typically engage in cannibalism of the weak, humans rarely fight to the death or even serious injury, we live in cities of millions with astonishingly low rates of violence etc etc

where is this terrible selfish stupid behaviour? what standard are you comparing the species to? we’re more violent than orangutans but they’ve never set up water sanitation so I think we can call ourselves smart and we’re less violent than chimps or gorillas… are you comparing us to fictitious ideal beings or what?

Humans are wonderful. Not always good, not always reasonable, but wonderful.

We are rich, nuanced, vibrant beings. A small portion of us are defectors but by and large we are community focused and willing to give when we feel we are not being taken advantage of.

Unless you think all your friends, yourself, and your family are garbage it is inconsistent to assume a random sampling of humans would not display the same prosocial traits you find in them.

The one thing we are incapable of doing though is handling power.

Asafetida. People call it horrible unless cooked but imho it just smells like garlic++. It’s sulfurous, but so is garlic and a lot of food really. Sulfur isn’t necessarily an unpleasant smell to me. As far as I can tell the smell of asafetida doesn’t change when cooking, it just gets milder.

Healthy compost also smells kinda nice, rotting meat is awful but if you’re not getting putricene and co from anerobic nitrogen decomp decay mostly smells damp and warm and spicy.

Durian also smells amazing, but that’s a pretty popular opinion given the wild popularity of the fruit. Potentially more sulfur not aversive stuff there.

In the hate camp peanut butter. It is overpowering and early in the day makes me throw up. My wife adds it to coffee sometimes which makes the entire house smell of peanut butter for hours. It’s a very powerful and cloying smell.

Hopefully people don’t need a college degree in literature to understand basic subtext.

I think it’s about learning that it’s worth doing more than anything else.

you get that this wouldn’t work as a critique if it was obvious you could make different choices right? Then it wouldn’t make the player complicit. If you’re not complicit it’s just a game saying “military shooters could be different” which is a nothing statement.

Like how games with a “get the information (evil)” and “get the information (good)” button aren’t offering real moral choices. Or how deus ex would lose all impact if the “here’s a gun, go kill these people” starting mission tempting you with a rocket launcher popped up a “you might change sides in the future” warning.

By involving you, leading you just like any other military shooter for a bit then cutting you loose is what creates the critique. You compare notes after playing and someone points out something and you go “huh, why didn’t I try that?”. It’s not condemning you for not trying that, it’s asking you if you’re happy with a genre which trains you to never to try it.

It’s weird. I credit my scientific education with waking me up to questioning stuff. Like when you learn about how we know stuff, the limits of proof (e.g. can’t prove empiricism is “true” it just works extremely well for certain things), how hard it is to wrangle stuff into scientific questions and so on the elephant in the room is how fucking impossible most questions are.

Then you get thinking about how untested most of society is, how many different ways there are to interpret things, how unknowable the “goodness” of your preferences is and so on.

Yet, in the same cohort as me there were a lot of people coming out extremely certain of their own worldview and blindly faithful in technocrats and the mystical power of throwing data at stuff to solve enormous problems. Like we are anywhere near being able to calculate out a human society.

So idk, I think it’s less stem vs not stem and education quality and kinds of people/where they’re at in life. You could probably go through a lit crit course and come out blinkered too, being able to do lit crit doesn’t guarantee you’d have good opinions.

Military shooter games glorify war and shallowly reward horrible behaviour. Spec ops does it differently.

Majority of people: do horrible thing

Some people: experimental and find heroic thing is rewarded.

Discussion possible, why did the majority do that? could we talk about horrible and uncreative design patterns in the genre of military shooters? How media portrayals of war train us not to look for peaceful solutions? Whether this feeds into how we view American imperial wars?

you: no spec ops bad video game because I didn’t do the good option.

I think you’re actually engaging with it a bit shallowly. You are the one who invented the rule and a different framing is exploring how, if games seem to put us in situations where we must do horrible things to advance even a couple of times, we take that as a rule instead of risking losing to find other ways.

Which is a fairly glaring indictment of the whole military shooter genre which is all about “hard men and hard choices” that completely dehumanise the factions you’re in opposition to.

When has ruining the world for everyone else ever stopped the usa before? :(

There really seems to be a lot of “If not us, nobody” in the command structure of that military cult empire.

It challenges something people have been indoctrinated with and causes them to question their moral character.

lmfao people have been vegan thousands of years ago e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ma'arri

beans and rice are poverty foods, not luxury. Meat is a luxury food.

From vicious giant insects who have once again come back

Sorry, could you be a little more explicit in terms of how you’re answering my questions? I don’t really want to get drawn in to some aimless rambling bullshit.

I haven’t mentioned tribalism, I don’t even know what you’re referring to or why you’re bringing it up.

I don’t know what you mean by how society is these days. Are you saying society has changed fundamental human nature? what is the relevance please?

With an authority or controlling wealth, everything results in an elite of some form to try keep a system in place, and that’s the start of failure.

you’re talking to an anarchist so I have no disagreement there. I do wonder if you’ve ever read Marx though. Could you please honestly answer with what publications of his you’ve actually read? if none, what publications about Marxism have you read? if that list is exhaustive the three most recent?

If a village of 100 has just 1 asshole, things can be ruined. Scale up to global populations and you’ve got your answer. No ism can keep the psychopathic, narcissistic, or competitive nature of these people from ruining whatever ism it is you’d like to have.

???

So there’s a very big difference between X hasn’t happened yet and X is factually impossible. Imagine standing there in 1750s and saying “we know for a fact that the human species is fundamentally incompatible with flight”. Very shortly you would look like the complete arse that making that statement made you.

I don’t dispute nobody has achieved the utopia Marx hypothesised, that is trivial to demonstrate, I’m asking how on earth you would establish fundamental incompatibility.

Actually the current prevailing theory is that primitive communism was the state humans lived in before the founding of the first proto states, so if anything your stance should be that evidence suggests humans are fundamentally compatible with communism, unless you mean to argue we have undergone some shift in our fundamental nature in which case I would again ask where your evidence is.