feotakahari

My central problem with the Dark Forest Hypothesis is that its proponents keep jumping the is-ought gap.

“It’s natural for aliens to hate you, so you should hate aliens.” How does what’s “natural” have anything to do with what you should do?

“Aliens would kill you, so you should kill aliens.” There are humans who think I should die, but I don’t want them dead because of that.

“An alien would never love you, so it’s nonsensical to love aliens.” Spiders don’t love me either, but that doesn’t make me fantasize about all-out war against spiders.

In the end, I think the “oughts” reveal the true reasoning. It’s not that these people believe in hostile aliens and propose action based on it. It’s that they really want to commit genocide and come up with an argument to make it “logical.”

Etrian Odyssey Untold wants to challenge you. Your enemies seem unstoppable. Will you rise to the occasion?

Etrian Odyssey Untold 2 wants to test you. Your enemies seem unstoppable. How can you combine the tools you've been given in order to bend them over your knee and spank them?

Etrian Odyssey 3 isn't a full remake like the Untolds, and I suspect this is what the original games were all like. It wants to brutalize you. Your enemies seem unstoppable, and whether or not you can win depends largely on whether or not the AI randomly decides to spam their fuck-your-entire-party move.

“Drug seeker” is such a stupid concept. You can’t say someone who’s in desperate need because they’re going through withdrawal is different from someone who’s in desperate need because of chronic pain.

People often say that prison abolitionists have no answer for how to handle rapists. A couple times, I’ve seen prison abolitionists reply that this doesn’t matter. Most rapists aren’t imprisoned, so it’s irrelevant that they don’t have a method to stop rapists either. In effect, these people treat rapists as just a normal part of life.

When people argue that death is a bad thing, a common response is that death is just a normal part of life.

I can’t actually draw a meaningful throughline between these two positions, but I’m angry and frustrated, so I’m going to pretend they’re comparable.

I am still incandescently mad about that post that said only “cultural Christians” think you can be born into a culture and not be part of that culture’s religion.

(They didn’t even say “dominant religion!” It’s like they thought every culture on Earth only has one religion!)

Related to one of tonight’s earlier rants: my biggest problem with being told that I’m being condescending or holier-than-thou or whatever is that I don’t see what it has to do with what I said. If I’m being condescending when I say the capital of the U.S. is Washington, D.C., that doesn’t make me wrong, and if I’m not being condescending when I say the capital of the U.S. is New York, that doesn’t make me right. I’m not trying to make a statement that I’m smart or talented or whatever. I’m trying to make a statement about the thing I made a statement about. And I’m sure it’s condescending to explain that, but at that point, fuck you.

I recognize the hypocrisy of arguing this while also arguing that you need to be able to convince people to listen to you. But a lot of the time, it doesn’t seem like there’s a way to state my case without being called condescending. The only thing I could possibly do that wouldn’t get called condescending is say nothing and pretend to agree. I play the social game because there’s at least a theoretical possibility of winning, and if I can’t ever win, I might as well flip the board over.

I continue to distrust “we need to kill these people to prevent the collapse of society” even when the folks we’re supposed to be killing are also folks who claim “we need to kill people to prevent the collapse of society.” You fuckers can’t even correctly identify child molesters. I’m not gonna trust you to correctly identify Nazis, especially when some of the “Nazis” you call out are Jews.

A lot of my thoughts on the AI art arguments are just “this would be equally true as an argument against photography,” “that would be equally true as an argument against photography,” “here’s this other thing that would be equally true as an argument against photography.”

The exception is the plagiarism argument, but I don’t know how to respond to that beyond “Wow, you and I have very different ideas of what plagiarism is.”

Honestly, the whole thing makes me pretty angry. “I don’t want to use this tool for creating art” is one thing, but “I don’t want anyone to be allowed to use this tool for creating art” is a very different thing.

Whyyyy are writers still doing the “mental illness makes you a murderous subhuman monster” trope?

(If I rage about Primal, is it Primal Rage?)

Remember that post about how Supernatural wouldn’t even be good if it was good? That’s my objection to all these attempts to improve Dungeons and Dragons. Being shit is so baked into Dungeons and Dragons that it wouldn’t even be Dungeons and Dragons anymore if it wasn’t shit. Pathfinder tried it, and it’s still shit anyway! So if you want a game that isn’t shit, then for the love of all that’s holy, play another game!