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uriel238

@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone

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uriel238,
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The GTA 3 engine (including Vice City, and San Andreas ) did help me understand parallel parking better, since I could watch from above and behind.

That engine also featured some fabulous momentum physics, so if you had a big enough vehicle, you were unstoppable despite all the police blockades. That was maximum fun.

Rumor: Deadlock. Next Valve game. Previously known as Neon Prime, Citadel. Competitive third person hero-based shooter. 6 vs 6 battling on huge map with 4 lanes. Usable abilities and items. (twitter.com)

Deadlock. Next Valve game. Previously known as Neon Prime, Citadel. Competitive third person hero-based shooter. 6 vs 6 battling on huge map with 4 lanes. Usable abilities and items. Tower defense mechanics. Fantasy setting mixed with steampunk. Magicians, weird creatures and robots. Fast travel using floating rails, similar to...

uriel238,
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Take a look at Abiotic Factor a love letter to Black Mesa in the form of a crafting survival game set in a New Mexico laboratory complex.

I haven’t played it yet, but am sold from the LPs I’ve seen and am waiting for a sale.

uriel238,
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Wally [the emotional support alligator] has lawyered up.

“Then,” Henney said, “it got a lot of weird.”

At the point Wally was missing yet retained a lawyer, it was already weird.

uriel238,
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Due to its mode of operation, the court considered the software to be “specifically intended for criminals”

Crime is an action a state doesn’t like, not necessarily wrong or evil, but serves interests other than the state. If the state has to authorize everything, then the state is favoring dominance over governance.

When the state has to monitor all transactions it is tyranny.

uriel238,
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Is there an actual way to get this result? Asking for a friend.

(I usually have to get an RPN calculator anyway, or use the internet for not-by-hand calculations.)

uriel238,
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The fifth one was written while Douglas Adams was super depressed, so yeah, it’s a bit more grim than the others.

The initial trilogy were written after the radio show which was itself written on the fly, hence the continuous cliffhangers and deus-ex-machina turns of fate.

uriel238,
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Funny, marines and wait staff are the two work forces we point to as counterexamples when someone suggests poor people are just lazy.

The ownership class will certainly tremble when they gear up for a rumble against the Man.

uriel238,
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Costco for a while sold large ice cream bars from their cantina. While not proportionately larger they did help with the disappointment I felt going to DQ decades later to notice the cone was much smaller than the last time.

uriel238,
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I appreciate very much the little bit of trolling.

Sometimes daddy can’t help himself.

uriel238,
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Someday cringe will be cringe, and sick will be sick again.

uriel238,
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It’s all tubular.

As a kid from the 80s-era San Fernando Valley, I have legit cred to say that.

uriel238,
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I picked up shizzle for rizzle from Tiny Tina and works as a rated G version of the shit meaning either the genuine article or the diggity dank.

uriel238, (edited )
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The cover-your-ass scenario.

In the Philosophy Crash Course there was a scenario like this. I’ll paraphrase:

You’re a traveler exploring a semi-devloped nation in South America. Coming out of the wilderness you come across a squad of soldiers. They are forcing twenty villagers to dig a mass grave. The officer to the soldiers tells you these villagers committed the state crime of supporting a rival to their leader, and are to be executed. But as you are a guest in their country, he will make you an offer: if you shoot one of them, yourself, he will set all the rest free, and then can hike to the border and beg for asylum. (A rough trek, but the neighboring country may take them).

Do you shoot one of the villagers?

Actually killing someone is rather hard on the psyche, and most of us cannot bear the thought (and might suffer from trauma as a result). But then, perhaps this is a small price to pay for nineteen human lives.

Thomas Aquinas and Kant were happy to let the soldiers kill the villagers so as to avoid committing the sin of murder, themselves. Aquinas and Kant even would not lie to the murderer at the door, or Nazi Jew-hunters to save the lives of fugitives hidden in their home, since lying was sin enough, and they would count on God to know His own. Both had contemporaries who disagreed, and felt it was proper to suffer the trauma and do what was necessary (assuming the officer of the soldiers seemed inclined to keep to his word and actually spare the remaining villagers.)

So, the cover your own ass response has a long history of backers, including known philosophers.

uriel238,
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I saw a headline about Mercedes offering an autopilot that doesn’t require the driver to monitor, so it’s going to be interesting to see how laws play out. The Waymo taxi service in Phoenix seems to occasionally run in with the law, and a remote service advisor has to field the call, advising the officer the company is responsible for the car’s behavior, not the passenger.

uriel238,
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The Trolley problem is a schoolbook example of the failure of creed-based philosophy (deontological ethics), but is also used (the various scenarios) to illustrate that circumstances that don’t affect the basic scenario or outcome do affect our feelings and our response to the scenario.

It’s easier to pull a lever from a remote position than to actually assault someone or kill them by your own hand, for example.

There are other scenarios that don’t necessarily involve trolleys, but involve the question of doing a wrongful act in order to produce a better outcome. Ozymandias in The Watchman killing millions of New Yorkers to prevent a nuclear exchange, thereby saving billions of people. (Alan Moore left it open ended whether that was the right thing to do in the situation, but it did have the intended outcome.)

We like the trolley problem because you can draw it easily on the blackboard, but other situations are much better at illustrating how subtle nuance can drastically change the emotions behind it.

Try this one:

The Queen of the land dies. On the day of her sister’s coronation, she declares that Anglicanism is now the faith and Catholics are now unlawful — a reversal of the old order — Catholics are to report to a town or city hall to convert or be executed. You are Catholic. Do you obey the law or flee? And if you obey the law, do you convert or perish at the hand of the state? Do you lie about your faith to state agents or to the national census?

To a naturalist like myself, I’m glad to lie or convert to spare my own life, but to the devout, pretending to be another faith, or converting by force was a terrible sin, so it’s a very sober (and historically relevant) look at religious principle.

uriel238,
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IRL we typically do what we feel and justify it later, but then IRL there is no right or wrong, except what we construct in the process of organizing with each other to cooperate against outward threats such as predators and the elements. We have agreed to poor conditions because our lords were kinder than the winter and the bears, but then we’ve also overthrown our lords when we worked out they need us more than we need them.

But yes, if you want to pretend that moral philosophy is just cerebral masturbation, that’s valid. All of our philosophy is about the opinions of past thinkers about the perimeters of right and wrong. It will give you a clear answer about as well as religious philosophy might tell you which patheon of gods is the true one.

These scenarios are less about what is right or wrong, but about how you, individually and personally, decide ad hoc what is right or wrong. You might distrust the soldiers, but then if they were inclined to betray your trust with a lie, they might have never intended you to go free either, and the whole story becomes irrelevant.

Another Trolley-like features a stranger come to town who is a perfect match for five transplant patients waiting organs. The surgeon / hospital administrator has a friend in organized crime who can abduct the stranger and harvest his organs quietly and cleanly so that the authorities won’t notice he disappeared. Although IRL, having a transplant is a mortal condition. Having the organ buys more time than not having the organ. Also this doesn’t get into the risks of other complications of transplant surgery that can occur even when an organ is a good match.

These scenarios are not about real life, but about becoming more self aware of how you’d consider these. And yes, this may mean looking for third options, hoping to find one better than the two obvious ones.

uriel238,
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Firstly, if we’re talking about the Trolley Problem, that’s not a behavior paradox, that’s a morality paradox. Animals, including human beings, commonly act first and rationalize their behavior later. We can decide after the fact it was ethical after all, decide that it wasn’t but was justifed due to circumstances, decide that it wasn’t and wasn’t, but we’ll reconcile it after the fact. Examples like the Trolley problem are not meant to reflect real life and how we behave, rather are contrived in contemplation of the logical mechanisms we use to determine ethical options can become problematic. (Utilitarianism has its own paradoxes.)

Secondly, in fact, human beings are susceptible to paradoxes that can cause decision paralysis, but they tend to be about either survival or high-stakes situations with incomplete information. A common one is when a green, low ranking enlisted person is given a direct order that is illegal. In the US army, our soldiers are educated as to the rules of war, and what constitutes a war crime, and while they are legally obligated to not act on illegal orders, they also know well before they get out of boot they’ll be jolly sorry if ever they do disobey an order. Command them to commit an atrocity on the field and they lock up by the dozens. Hence squad commanders know that if they issue an illegal command – even one based on incomplete information – it risks unit cohesion. Getting caught in a SNAFU like this is still common, and the enlisteds seldom come out of them well, so it’s on the list of counter-recruitment bullet-points.

The same kind of thing also appears in game shows (where its contrived) and in the strategic command chain of command, because a lot of officers do not ever want to be a guy who nuked two million people, even if they’re the enemy. And yet those officers routinely got to serve as key-turners to arm (or launch) our nuclear arsenal. (I don’t know how the situation is since the new century, if those stations are even manned at all times anymore.)

In the end, we are animals, and typically when we’re confronted with moral choices, it’s a matter of survival or high stakes, in which case we often don’t have the time for measured contemplation on what we’re doing. Moral philosophy questions what behavior may be right or wrong according to a given standard, but it doesn’t get into how people actually behave. For that, consider psychology and sociology.

uriel238, (edited )
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We’ve seen a similar phenomenon in some of the red states in the ideology conflict here in the US. There are people eager to kill someone just to have the experience, and who volunteer to hunt targeted groups (trans folk, lately) or as participants in an execution by firing squad. I remember in the John Oliver’s first segment on the death penalty (he did a second one recently) executions were stalled due to difficulties obtaining the drugs used in lethal injections, and firing squads were brought up. The expert pointed out the difficulty finding one executioner, let alone seven. The officials suggested recruiting volunteers from the gun-enthusiast citizenry, which the expert saw as naïve.

I can’t speak to firing-squad executions during the German Reich and the early stages of the holocaust, but I can speak to the Einsatzgruppen who were tasked with evacuating villages (to mass graves) who harbored Jews, harbored enemies of Germany or otherwise were deemed unworthy of life. The mass executions were hard on the troopers, and as a result Heydrich contended with high turnover rates.

This figured largely into the movement towards the industrialized genocide machine that pivoted around the Auschwitz proof of concept. Earlier phases included wagons with an enclosed back in which the engine exhaust was piped. The process was found to be too slow, and exposed to many service people to the execution process. The death camps were staffed to assure no-one had to interact with the prisoners and process the bodies, so no-one would have to confront the visceral reality of before and after. They were staffed so that anyone who engaged a mechanism was two steps away from the person authorizing (and taking responsibility for) the execution. The guy who flipped the switch was just following orders.

Interestingly, we’d see a repeat of this during the International War on Terror, specifically the Disposition Matrix which lead to executions of persons of interest on the field by drone strike (Hellfire missile launched from a Predator drone). During the CIA Drone Strike Programs in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the drone operation crews suffered from high turnover rate, with operators suffering from combat PTSD from having pulled the trigger on the missile launches. It didn’t help they were also required to scan the damage to assess the carnage, and identify the casualties.

Interestingly, this also presented an inverted demonstration of how the human mind can tell the difference between violent video games and the real thing. Plenty of normies play Call of Duty without dealing with the mental after-effects of war, but even when we conduct war operations from continents away, our brains recognize that we are killing actual human beings, and suffers trauma from the act. War continues to be Hell, and video games not so much.

uriel238,
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It is my favorite RTS hands down.

It’s a reminder of how the mail anthrax attacks were so soon after the 9/11 attacks, we thought they were related.

uriel238,
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The Log party and the Heron party.

Two-party systems were a problem even in ancient Greece.

Instagram locked my account and forced me to appeal and send a picture of my face, so I sent a picture of Shrek. They deleted my account

I’ve been a social media hermit for the past 3 years but recently I’ve given up and created a few accounts across different apps again. It’s unreal how strict the requirements are now....

uriel238,
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I know you can get ID deets here, but I don’t know any service that turns it into a facsimile of a state ID card.

uriel238,
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It works better if it’s glass (not acrylic) and properly lubed.

uriel238,
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For most of the existence of human species (according to the scholarly consensus of anthropologists) we existed in bands of adults who would intermingle freely. Adolescent men would raid nearby tribes and kidnap their young women, which is the means by which genes were exchanged between tribes.

All the monogamy and licensing happened after agriculture and the great leap forward once tribes became big enough that infectious diseases were no longer contained through pure isolation. We see the misogynistic trends rise in late Hellenic periods and then Christianity cranked it up to eleven, so now we imagine even our migrant hunter-gatherer ancestors paired off.

As a note, during the middle ages, it was super important among aristocracy to assure ladies-in-waiting were virginal before they were wed, and then used purely as heir machines, but the serf class routinely banged like bunnies in springtime. And while frowned upon by the more piety-minded clergy, it was generally ignored because a) Child mortality was something awful and every kid that ever reached majority was to be celebrated, and b) The labor shortage was extreme everywhere. There was always way too much stuff to be done, and so every pair of hands was welcome, even when they were attacked to an idiot, a malformed hunchback, a ne’er-do-well or the bastard progeny of a mixed coupling.

Curiously, as we see in the birth of Mordred, pre-Christian European traditions included suspending adultery limitations during holidays, which happened at least once a season, sometimes twice. So even in societies where monogamy was the norm, there was a defined space for getting a bit on the side. (Useful when your partner was infertile.)

So yeah. Right in one.

uriel238,
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You’re welcome to what I know, though I’m just someone who’s read more than a little pop-science. I’m not accredited or anything.

uriel238,
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Yeah, adolescence is weird, and some of this is guessing based on other primates. Gorillas, for example, evict familiar adolescent females shortly after puberty while welcoming strange adolescent females, which informs how we model the behavior of pre-agriculture migratory human tribes.

(I should add we don’t presume that it was the same everywhere either, so it’s quite possible that some prehistorical humans had different means of managing their teens than sending the boys off to wage war and letting the girls get kidnapped in kind by raiders. Once we go that far back, we have to rely on archeological data, which is very selective in the tales it tells.)

So then, there are some powerful goddesses in early Hellenism, for instance, Aphrodite (commonly a goddess of love and beauty), evolved from Astarte (Lover, Healer, Hunter, Warrior) who developed from Ishtar. In fact, when Aphrodite emerged from the sea foam on Kytherian beaches, Phoenician traders were coming to the Kytherian harbors, not only bringing goods and their own goddess, Astarte but also the modern Greek alphabet (before which the locals were using Linear B). So we have a path from Ishtar and this major poly-faceted goddess being reduced to a love goddess, who is then married to Hephaestus (the crippled forge) to put her in her place.

Also curious to me is Dread Persephone who ruled the dead and the underworld long before Hades appears on scene. (Poseidon was the Olympian in Chief, and we see part of his gig in creating biodiversity, not just all the creatures of the sea, but also those of the land). Zeus and Hades were added late in the game, and the stories we have of Persephone, specifically of the abduction of Persephone from Demeter and the thing with the six pomegranate seeds comes from a single poem. Even then, winter comes not because Persephone is gone, but because Demeter is sad about it, and stops doing her job. So Persephone’s role is to be mom’s co-dependent emotional-support assistant during springtime, and go back to attending the dead.

So here we have two examples of powerful goddesses that influenced the Hellenic people and culture who are then shoved backstage with the addition of Zeus and Hades.

There’s a similar event that I remember from Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson regarding Asherah, the consort to Adonai / Elohim / Yahweh. Asherah was always the ambitious one between the two, and the Canaanite temples to her were bigger and more numerous than the ones to Adonai. Eventually an ideological rift developed and the Hebrews raided all the Asheran temples, massacring the acolytes and burning them to the ground. The whole don’t boil a calf in the milk of its mother thing (which informs the separation of meat products and milk products in kosher diet) is a specific reference to an Asheran ritual meal, I think for weddings, but I’m not sure.

While I can’t speak to whether misogyny is innate, I can say we’ve had periods in which goddesses were accepted alongside gods and in some cases were on top of the pantheon. We don’t talk much about Gaea anymore even though in Hellenism she created everything on earth long before Poseidon was tinkering with horses. I think there’s a division between Dionysian culture and Apollonian culture which parallels the shift from chthonic religion to celestial religion. (Chthonic gods are not to be confused with Cthonian gods, who are 20th century, and definitely celestial).

I can say that in the middle ages and the domination of Christianity, women were completely unpersoned and regarded as chattel beasts (despite their capacity to think and talk, both of which was discouraged). Even Mary, mother of Jesus was not even given due recognition until the 12th century.

uriel238,
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Funny how people who fantasize being in a zombie outbreak never realize they’re one of the zombies, and not even one of the special infected with zombie powers.

uriel238,
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Are you sure it’s not Shahku Shal! As in Shahku shall give you the blowjob of your life!

uriel238,
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Essentially this implies you have to be mark material for Nigerian princes in order to not vote for Biden (id est vote against Trump).

It also implies that enough of US voters are, indeed, that naïve.

uriel238,
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For those choosing not to vote for Biden, voting for a genocidist in a US federal election doesn’t put blood on your hands.

This isn’t fabricated consent (I mean it is in that lumpins are told to believe they chose the government when they didn’t).

Here’s the thing: The office seat will be filled whether or not you vote. And you get one non-transferable vote.

This means you get to vote against the worse popular guy by voting for his most likely contender.

It’s the trolley problem, only millions are voting on the position of the lever. What we cannot do is move the lever out of position.

It’s still up to you. Taking action is harder than not taking action, but we are staring down Project 2025, the neutering of elections in the US and one-party autocracy (the Republican party), which will also speed up the dismantling of civil rights in the US. If you don’t want that to happen, please consider voting against Trump and any other Republicans down ballot.

Yes, it sucks the US is reduced to this sorry state.

uriel238,
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We haven’t had a functioning democracy since the 19th century.

There’s argument to be made we didn’t have a functioning democracy when the Constitution was ratified in 1789, since segments of it were clearly written in bad faith (like the electoral college, the 3/5s of all non-free persons clause, and arguably, the failure to offer suffrage to all persons including women), but Boss Tweed in 1852 already understood how to game the elections so that only approved candidates might make it to primaries (of New York State elections and Federal elections).

In the aughts (the 2000s), Oxford University did a study regarding elections, public interests and elite interests, and determined the US behaved more like an oligarchy than a democratic republic, so yeah, we’re a plutocracy with some democratic features. However those democratic features, while meager, keep the US from turning into a single-party autocracy like the German Reich or the late-stage USSR.

And we’re moving towards that autocracy, propped up by fascist ideology (with enemy within rhetoric, and purge actions to follow) with every year. The next time the Republican takes control of all three federal branches of government, the game is very likely up.

The US is also on the brink of civil war, and it may be sparked by Trump losing, depending on how large and coordinated the coup d’etat effort is at the time, or if Trump wins, by an attack against those resisting draconian policies.

uriel238,
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I’ve lost faith in the US voters after 2016. We held our nose knowing Clinton was a neoconservative recognizing that Trump would be much much worse (and was pretty terrible!). Trump lost the majority but won the EC, and the EC failed to do what it was supposed to do (conspire to elect someone other than the obvious tyrant) so, well, we got Trump in his pajamas obeying Leonard Leo and Steve Miller while Mattis kept him from nuking North Korea.

It reminded me of George W. Bush, who also lost the popular vote to Gore, but won the EC with a little help from friends in SCOTUS (and Leonard Leo), which was far worse than we imagined it would be after Bush’s compassionate conservative thing. I believed Republicans couldn’t actually get a president elected again, because there was no way we were going to forget the $3 trillion price-tag of Iraq, the torture, the open-ended war on terror, Halliburton’s war profiteering and so on. It was such a shit show I expected it to be seared into the minds of Americans. Heck, Bush crawled away as the subprime mortgage crisis hit, so we were all feeling bummed.

The world gave Obama the Nobel Peace Prize just for not being Bush.

Nope, it turns out eight years later (with, granted, the War on Terror and mass surveillance getting worse) we forgot the ones who got us into it in the first place. And as much as Trump looked like a rabid monster, having freshly stolen the GOP from all the other cookie-cutter prospects, ready to bring fascism on like The Producers, Clinton was so hated that they just couldn’t see Trump for what he was. (To be fair, millions of Protestant Evangelist Christians were being told from the pulpit Jesus wanted them to vote for Trump – something they’re not supposed to do while remaining a tax-free church. White Evangelists voted for him at a rate around 80%)

So now we’re here, and I’m reminded of LBJ’s lowest white man comment (attributed), If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you. Apparently some Americans really do go all in for that kind of ideology, even as the nation world burns down around them.

There’s also the imminent possibility of civil war. Trump will try to organize a coup d’etat if he loses the election, and it is a matter if it can be adequately detected and repelled (or squelched before it gets started).

uriel238,
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Take all your overgrown infants away somewhere
And build them a home, a little place of their own
The Fletcher Memorial
Home for Incurable
Tyrants and Kings

And they can appear to themselves everyday
On closed circuit TV
To make sure they’re still real
It’s the only connection they feel

– Roger Waters, The Fletcher Memorial Home

Even in the early 1980s, some of us bleeding hearts and artists saw and knew.

uriel238,
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Even if we pollute ourselves to extinction everything will be alright.

Life will go on, even if all human life and human culture is reduced to a thin geological layer.

uriel238,
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Not in high school. I was privileged and lived in a wonder-bread suburb. But a lot of people then (fewer now) believed those with mental illness should be treated like Jason Voorhees and gunned down like a rabid animal or locked in an institution and kept tranquilized my the nurses.

I did believe in the late '80s I could negotiate with law enforcement and was able to navigate though some troubling encounters. If I wasn’t Scandinavian white, those could well have gone differently.

uriel238, (edited )
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Yes, in the 1980s, it was presumed by the ignorant public that all crazy people were a danger to themselves or others. It was the era of serial killers, psychopaths and sociopaths.

A serial killer is a specific kind of killing pattern identified by law enforcement investigators (contrast spree killers and rampage killers.) Serial killers are extremely rare, and don’t have a corellation to mental illness or any specific diagnosis. Despite reports in the 70s that asserted (without evidence) serial killers are responsible for 5000 homicides a year in the US (they are not), in fact, you’re more likely to get killed by lightning (less than 50 per year in the US) than by an active serial killer.

A psychopath is a designation by an expert witness in a courtroom, often by a psychiatric professional who has not actually assessed the suspect, but is guessing based on publicly known facts regarding his behavior, the way an armchair psychiatrist might guess that Trump suffers from NPD. In the 1980s, designating a suspect as a psychopath was to suggest he doesn’t need a motive. Psychosis is the category of diagnosis, but isn’t related.

Sociopathy was a personality disorder (Personality disorders are actually, less abnormal than what I have, a psychosis called Major Depression, though their dysfunction can be more evident) Sociopathy was retired in the DSM V, and replaced with antisocial personality disorder. While dangerous APD subjects exist, their rate of violent crime per capita is less than the general population. Though their rate of being victims of violent crime is higher than the general mean. Sociopath is also used as a forensic term to convince juries that a suspect is too dangerous for society.

These days, while we have more awareness of mental illness, there still remain some stereotypes and biases. The public doesn’t want me to have access to guns, for example, on the single basis I have a diagnosis. (It’s a difficult sell, since the US has a lot of veterans with diagnoses and guns, and could not be easily disarmed without creating a big bloody mess. They also go on and off suicide watch, and some counties have a delicate let your friend hold your gun for you program so as to not endanger law enforcement by forcing them to disarm trained soldiers with combat PTSD and justifiable grounds for paranoia)

Then there’s the matter that the institutions in the United States intended to secure inpatients are closely tied to its institutions for securing inmates (for whom we have no love and are glad to leave in squalor). Inpatients get about the same degree of abuse as inmates by their alleged caretakers (violence or sexual assault by orderlies, or abuse of pharmaceuticals by the nurses, who are fond of over-administering tranquilizers to keep the kooks quiet). Our public has about the same empathy for the crazies as they do the convicts, even when the inpatients didn’t necessarily do anything wrong to be denied their civil liberties.

So yeah, the likes of Voorhees and Kruger and Dolarhyde and Lecter have affected sentiments about us lunatics the way Peter Benchley’s Jaws affected attitudes about sharks, the effects of which are seen to this day, say when police routinely gun down subjects of mental health crises (which are disproportionately counted among officer involved homicide.)

uriel238,
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To be fair, Prohibition hooch was kept under the sink with the other cleansers.

uriel238,
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The Italian blue-collar stereotype was certainly from that era.

uriel238,
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They were Ohio National Guard acting in the line of duty. Since then the Kent State incident is used in training as a counter example, how not to control a protest / riot.

uriel238,
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I set Steam to ignore all Playstation products, but I’ve been meaning to do that for over a year now. It has nothing to do with Helldivers. I don’t Sony anymore.

uriel238,
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This is more excitement than I’ve ever experienced from AP.

uriel238,
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Definitely not a bad thing. But something I totally wouldn’t expect from Associated Press.

uriel238,
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The original trolley problem serves as a thought experiment to illustrate two points:

  • When holding a personal code (e.g. Batman’s code against killing) can lead to a worse outcome, morality may not be so clear, and…
  • Sometimes incidental circumstances can influence how we interpret the situation, which can alter what we feel is the better choice. It’s easier to pull a lever than to strongarm a big guy in front of the trolley, to personally gun down an innocent refugee or to carve up an innocent stranger to harvest their organs, even though the outcome is the same.

We can see real-world examples of how corruption sways officials from representing their constituency to representing plutocratic campaign contributors. They’re often not making a moral decision, so much as making a decision informed by their own need to survive and continue their career. They might justify their decision with contrivance to soften the blow, but those who imagine themselves moral still know they’re forced to abide by corrupting influences to keep their jobs. (We’ve had to watch while Representative Occasio-Cortez concede her values to preserve political influence over the last decade. It’s ugly.)

Hence we have situations like the opening scene to Inglourious Basterds ( on Youtube ) in which a dairy farmer in occupied France has to decide between lying to Nazi Jew-hunters and preserving the well-being of his own family. Very often, we cannot afford to do the moral thing, for fear of personal consequences, even as we know we’re only prolonging the time to our own eventual downfall.

uriel238,
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Frog is real. 🐸

Also wierd that 2024 emoji set has frog face but not full frog (maybe multiple frogs and toads).

uriel238, (edited )
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Yes. When Demeter is hungry for human sacrifice, someone is always swimming in the grain.

In modern days, She has the option to detonate a flour silo and snack on the nearby workhands.

ETA From Wikipedia:

At some grain-handling facilities, employees “walk down the grain” on top of it to expedite the flow of grain from the top when it is being allowed to flow out the bottom.

That is totally a sacrifice lottery.

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