Yeah. I am not a Buddhist but I’ve always found something rings true in the reflections on impermanence. When we bond with someone we accept the pain of loss, and when we feel it most people seem to describe relief once able to “let go” an accept it being over.

It seems to me that encouraging clinging and reminiscening stunts you a bit and only really provides temporary relief of the loss while drawing out the time it takes to process it.

Idk though, maybe I’ll have the misfortune to feel differently some day. It’s hard to judge someone hanging out with their spouse watching death creep closer each day. I have approximately zero idea what my opinions would be in the face of that.

My wife is fortunately still alive so maybe that colours my view. However when I’ve lost other people the blessed anaesthesia of forgetting has been essential in being able to function.

From the short quote it seems like she maybe has a healthy-ish attitude but idk… I feel like this would be a shallow simulacrum that prolongs grief.

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.

But what we know for fact is that the human species is incompatible with communism

Sorry what? How on earth would such a thing even be established as fact? This is a very bold claim.

Communism has failed every time.

I’m always really interested in what people mean when they say this. Is it that no organisation that has tried has managed to realise the utopia Marx predicted? Is it that they tend to lose wars with the USA? Is it that great suffering has occurred?

What is a system that has not failed? Like it’s pretty apparent whatever we’re doing now isn’t working. We’re in a mass extinction, the climate is destabilising, homelessness and sickness exist alongside people that personally own jet aircraft.

Genuinely I would love to know what specifically you mean because I see this a lot and it confuses the hell out of me.

Hopeful aside btw. Lord of the flies basically happened once except the kids all banded together and helped each other because humans are actually extremely pro social. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months

whimper was a dovecot and postfix machine. Email isn’t very fun

I don’t have many now, just minstrel (it plays music) but previously they’ve always just be sounds. Rawr, groan, whimper, bark, moan, growl etc.

Except minstrel (it plays music) :p

Weird, I suppose you could also VM it but it tends to have a performance hit without optimised hardware. I wonder how they check the environment it runs in and if you can just lie to the checks.

Which ones don’t? I don’t play many MP games but non of the ones I have played have issues. Easy anticheat works for example, and you can run it in ring 3 and lie which is nice.

Basically every steam game just works, most other stuff just works with lutris, all retroarch emulators I’ve tried just work, there are obviously oodles of native linux games particularly Indies. Nvidia drivers mostly just work if you install proprietary (blurgh).

What doesn’t work?

Regular carnist W

Ah, an enlightened centrist

In terms of their work output and clarity of explanations could you highlight some cases where NDT is deficient when compared to Brian Cox? They seem very similar to me, possibly I would say Cox is a bit worse at explaining the technical side of things. They seem similarly pleased with their own appearance on camera too. Cox is a little more moderate with his religious stuff, and much less outspoken politically but it’s not clear to me either of those are necessarily virtuous.

You misunderstand what the poster means. It’s not people foaming at the mouth at seeing a black guy be successful, it’s people applying harsher judgement than is warranted to someone because on some level they’re perceived as an outsider.

Just think of how many smarmy, condescending famous people exist and how few have the same level of criticism leveled against them.

As far as crappy famous people go he shouldn’t even register, he’s not indicated in corruption, child sexual abuse, spouse beating, slavery, wanton consumerism etc. People single this guy out so unreasonably because he’s not perfect at his job.

Yup. There’s some backlash against new atheism but ngt’s high crimes are sometimes being a bit awkward or pedantic and others like Richard Dawkins opine about how eugenics is unfairly maligned and Muslims are evil.

The degree of criticism and the bitch eating-crackers-tone of it all defs has a racial component.

He’s fine, he’s a famous rich dude. They’re all a bit annoying sometimes because power makes you weird but he doesn’t really hurt people, spew malice, or agitate for horrendous politics. He makes silly tweets about movie logic and explains cosmology to people.

Very few are sympathetic about substance addiction. Premise is flawed, people are extremely judgy about any self destructive behaviour in others.

It extends all the way to people blaming people for their own medical conditions if there’s any lifestyle component.

Don’t believe me re substance addiction? It’s basically considered heroic to bully smokers.