That’s the key part about this and the other times it’s made the news I dislike. They don’t actually care about the content in the mod, which is why 90% of these hateful mods remain up; those mod authors didn’t put the same hate into the description, or the forum, or anywhere other than in the mod which would have to be downloaded and verified by someone to actually know it’s a hateful piece of shit. And then when it makes the news when one jackass decides to spout racist/sexist/homo/transphobic shit in the description and get their mod removed, people point out all the other hateful mods that didn’t get taken down and wonder why this one is being singled out.
“Remove all of them” implies a good question: what is “all” of them? All mods changing the models of characters? Changing the models of characters to make them more conventionally attractive? Less conventionally attractive? Changing the gender of characters? Changing men to women? Changing women to men? All mods that change skin color? Changing white skin to black skin? Changing black skin to white skin? All mods changing sexual orientation? Straight to queer? Queer to straight?
I think you should just allow everything, as long as it isn’t associated with hate speech or discrimination. Which is exactly what’s happening here.
All of them meaning all of the mods that clearly do things out of bigotry like turning black characters white, erasing gay characters, erasing trans issues, etc.
This isn’t a particularly hard moral or ethical question to anyone who isn’t trying to allow hateful content to spread.
Just checking, so if a mod was released that made a straight character gay, that would be fine, but one that made a gay character straight wouldn’t be? Or would both be fine? Assuming no description for either, nothing but content.
The big difference is that when mods remove a single gay character, it’s always the only gay character in the game.
If the mod adding gay characters turns all the straight characters gay, that’s erasure. If the new gay character has dialogue that is hateful toward straight people, it’s still bigotry.
Adding representation to a game that has none is fine. Removing representation entirely isn’t.
So what if there are 3 gay characters, and there are 3 separate mods that each make one of the characters straight. Each single one does not remove representation, but having all 3 installed together would. Do you ban these 3 mods?
I don’t know, I just feel like this is such an arbitrary choice. If you reduce the number to 2 gay characters in a game, with 2 different mods, is that still okay or should both be banned again?
Is it really a difference if you reduce the number of gay characters to 1? What if you split the mod up into two parts, one just removing all sexual remarks (effectively with the intention of making the char asexual), and another simply also adding hetero (so effectively making the char bi) remarks, and you then combine these two mods again to effectively make the 1 character hetero (official gay remarks removed, hetero remarks added)?
Sure, representation is great and I’m all for it, but I’m also for people being able to change whatever they want in their own game. In the end, it’s only affecting them and no one else, which should be the prime directive of tolerance.
Nexus consistently refuses to be a platform for bigotry.
That should not be controversial, at all, in any context.
If this asshat wants to publish it elsewhere - he’s free to. Nobody’s stopping him. It’s just a file. He has every moral right to modify software however he sees fit, and he has every practical right to be a homophobe online with fellow homophobes.
But I don’t want anything to do with him. I don’t want to use any website that’s cool with bigots spreading bigotry. If the people who run the website don’t want to deal with that shit either… tough shit, guy. Find another bar. This one’s not for Nazis. Warn all your Nazi friends.
Says jackass pretending everyone’s just calling names, when the modder explicitly stated their bigoted intent. ‘Everyone’s such a meanie and calls names, waaah!’ No: we’re specifically talking about Nazis who proudly say ‘why yes we are Nazis, thank you for asking.’
But your kind doesn’t care what words mean, so you’re just gonna performatively roll your eyes some more.
You’re clueless as fuck dog, the trash admins at nexus are virtue signaling to make themselves look better while also avoiding people looking too heavily into the wide variety of truly horrific mods that are on the site.
None of which I really care whether someone uses or not because I’m not a grade schooler and can make the differentiation between reality and a fucking video game, but pretending they have any moral high ground indicates you have no clue what you’re talking about.
I would hope that a similar mod that gives options to disable certain types of romances would have been better suited. So long as it doesn’t single out the types of romances he dislikes.
Everything has to be gay, EVERYTHING! Because that reflects reality, where the vast majority of people are gay and ABCDEFG12345QQ++*.,-?XYZ.
In fact being gay is the most noble thing to be, and it has to be the main point of every single conversation forever. Who you like to fuck is THAT important to everyone around you, you’re the main character after all.
I honestly don’t care what people are into, but this game is a bit intense, sexually. I’m just trying to get my RPG fix, and all the characters constantly wanna bang my ass, when all I want is to be their Homie…
Libertarianism requires its members to engage in due diligence in order to execute their libertarian ideals properly and make the choices that are correct for them.
This, unfortunately, excludes the lower-60% of all Americans, who are so ground down, economically terrorized, and mentally overwhelmed with their daily struggles to survive that they have little to no opportunity to approach any major choice with anything even vaguely in the realm of due diligence. They just don’t have the headspace to do so, and are forced to spend all their available mental efforts on just putting one financial foot in front of the other.
This is why having social support frameworks enforced/provided/funded by the government is so important for so many working-class people - it allows them to put those issues on autopilot, significantly reducing their own cognitive load and allowing them to better process the most important issues in their lives.
Ergo, libertarianism is a wealthy person’s toy. It is something that they can champion, because only they have the economic options and financial freedom to fully and properly engage with it.
Until everyone has vanishingly few catastrophic-level issues on the horizon (like one missed paycheque leading to homelessness, or a sudden illness leading to medical bankruptcy), any attempt to implement libertarianism will only bring mass amounts of misery and destroyed lives to anyone beneath the Parasite Class.
And when you have those kinds of widespread government-provided supports that lift all boats - and not just the megayachts - why bother with libertarianism? We should continue to use what got everyone into that safe state in the first place – socialism.
Remember, the Parasite Class already uses socialism for themselves. It’s called grants and bailouts and subsidies, and allows the Parasite Class to privatize the profits and socialize the losses.
It’s just at a scale that makes it impossible for working-class people to leverage.
This is the far right libertarianism, which has essentially become an extremist, authoritarian form of capitalism. In essence, those with immense power tell us that nobody has any right to oversight and regulation over others. Their power becomes insurmountable, and their control over the economy becomes absolute. We live according to the standards they provide, because we have no alternative.
Every system of government becomes corrupted like this when thieves and liars take control. This is not libertarianism, it is simply the flavor of authoritarianism this go 'round.
Real liberterianism comes in many forms, along the left to right spectrum. On the left, there is a belief in redistribution of natural resources to the community. Personally, I believe we should be embracing local cooperatives for food, energy, medical care, and beyond. On the right, there is more allowance for imbalance by embracing business to drive innovation. Those who innovate succeed, and accrue wealth. But a true libertarian should support a near 100% estate tax, which would limit the imbalance, because you should have what you’ve earned for yourself.
The thing that we lost that leads libertarianism to fail, is our sense of community, a sense of humanity. A responsibility when you see your neighbors suffering, to help them. Once the rich went off to live in their ivory towers, they lost sight of the rest of us.
I don’t see how any system could succeed, considering the circumstances.
[Edit] And honestly, we need to stop vilifying entire philosophies because they were previously corrupted. Just because communism was implemented in a manner that oppressed millions, doesn’t mean there is no good to the philosophies behind it and socialism.
We should be borrowing the good from everything, and remembering the bad. A blanket condemnation of failed experiments makes both impossible. No singular philosophy will be effective in this imperfect world, only in theory is that level of refinement possible.
Then people are wrong, and we should correct them. Left wing libertarians stand in direct opposition to capitalism, and have more in common with true right wing libertarians than the extremist capitalists who are taking over the mind space of the philosophy.
I’m a libertarian in Brazil, so my takes may be different from yours (I’m not even sure if the word means the same thing for me and for native English speakers).
This is the far right libertarianism, which has essentially become an extremist, authoritarian form of capitalism. In essence, those with immense power tell us that nobody has any right to oversight and regulation over others. Their power becomes insurmountable, and their control over the economy becomes absolute. We live according to the standards they provide, because we have no alternative.
Big corporations (which, I agree, are a cancer to society) lobby regulatory powers to weaken local and mid business and to evade taxes in ways small business simply can’t, that’s the source of their power. A lack of government regulation would not be good for them, because it would empower their competition, and that’s the last thing they want.
I don’t see how any system could succeed, considering the circumstances.
To me, the big problem with libertarianism is that it requires a big level of maturity from the population. It requires private regulatory and certification companies, union of workers to seek working rights in a non-violent way, and people to support charity initiatives that help the poor and endangered. All of that is not impossible, but people are very used to that being a government responsibility, it won’t happen over night
A lack of government regulation would not be good for them, because it would empower their competition, and that’s the last thing they want.
This is how they do it when there is some regulation, they abuse the regulation. But without regulation, they would be free to destroy the competition with unlimited anti-competitive practices.
To me, the big problem with libertarianism is that it requires a big level of maturity from the population. It requires private regulatory and certification companies, union of workers to seek working rights in a non-violent way, and people to support charity initiatives that help the poor and endangered. All of that is not impossible, but people are very used to that being a government responsibility, it won’t happen over night
This is the problem with every philosophy, it’s an ideal that someone dreamed up. Over the last 100 years or so, we’ve lost a lot of self-sufficiency as individuals and communities, but also made some progress in other areas like civil rights. It’s a constantly changing landscape, with stronger and weaker among us, and different people trying to help or take advantage. So I agree, nothing can happen overnight, and no single social or political philosophy can be directly implemented, successfully. These philosophies should be seen as altruistic goals, with a series of challenges that society faces along the path.
Those challenges are why I’m concerned with our vilification of past failures. We can learn from those failures, and borrow the good ideas, to address challenges going forward. Knowledge of the past allows us to adapt to the future, and create a system that truly suits what we become.
But if we don’t start caring for our neighbors, as well as those across the globe, we’re lost. My morning cup of coffee, or pack of cheap t-shirts, should not lead to someone living in poverty. Likewise, my purchasing it should not enrich some individual too far above others.
Take the streetlights. Turning them off had saved the city about $1.25 million. What had not made the national news stories was what had happened while those lights were off. Copper thieves, emboldened by the opportunity to work without fear of electrocution, had worked overtime scavenging wire. Some, the City Council learned, had even dressed up as utility workers and pried open the boxes at the base of streetlights in broad daylight. Keeping the lights off might have saved some money in the short term, but the cost to fix what had been stolen ran to some $5 million.
‘Tech Billionaires give all wealth away to end world hunger.’ ‘Tech Billionaires lobby for wealth tax with national governments.’ ‘Tech Billionaires realize they are normal people like anyone else, not super smart world-saving geniuses, and finally shut the fuck up.’
The basic idea is that the West has declined irrevocably, beginning with what Srinivisan calls the birth of the centralized state that disempowered wealthy industrialists with antitrust laws, securities regulation, central banking, and adversarial journalism. Now, the thinking goes, we’re on the backswing with wealthy individuals reclaiming their power over supposedly corrupt public institutions, and we have the internet and its currency—Bitcoin—to lead us out of the darkness.
So the billionaire techbros feel powerless (wtf) and are offended by criticism (oof) so they want their own techbro dictatorship with no free press. Also please no peasant to support, only exploit. Got it.
I pull the same quotes you bolded to rip into that. They’re about to rediscover things like pricing cartels, company script, and child labor. Either they all pool all of their money together and collaborate to take advantage of everything together or they fall apart as they get fucked by each other and start reinventing the same rules we’ve made over the last several centuries. I kinda feel like the latter is more likely given how much ego all these coffin dodgers have and how close pooling resources + working together for the common good is to nasty things like socialism.
Srinivasan has floated the car-free Culdesac private community in Tempe and the Peter Thiel-backed Próspera in Honduras as examples of currently-existing proto-Network States.
“Suppose you found a new startup society like Culdesac on the basis of car-free living…which is an innovation in parallel transportation.
Maybe in a twisted thought process: privatized public transport for the masses, and because the rich have no actual restrictions in reality, I’m sure they can drive a car if they want to.
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