Dope, detailed writeup, thank you!

Oh, also - largely with you on Robux. I mean I don’t have a problem with it in principle, ideally it lets kids (through their parents) effectively choose which games and creators to support, and there have lately been some big games with big frequent updates that kids have found to be super enjoyable. Like, content updates at rates traditional games would be embarrassed by.

But like all things involving $, I’m sure there’s lots of eventual exploitation. And manipulation of kids to want to buy is definitely bad. But then again, by my measure, kids need to be instructed on recognizing and resisting precisely that from a young age. That manipulation is everywhere and getting worse all the time.

You’re probably right, I’ve once or twice (from an older account) asked a user to elaborate or give specifics, after they’d made some wild claims about safety, never gotten anything.

I do know of at least one truly hideous group of people using the platform as communication and recruitment to some really horrendous (life ruining) stuff, maybe this article references that too. But again, that’s a problem of sufficiently large user bases (especially of kids). Among millions of users it’s mathematically not realistic to prevent every possible group in the size of dozens from congregating to attempt their awful shit. Motivated humans are good at overcoming even well-designed systems.

We’re certainly right to care about safety though, and I do want to know if Roblox is less safe than I imagine.

Roblox chat is so restrictive that it routinely makes it difficult to talk about normal things. My daughter has spent a ton of time on Roblox (while being prohibited from many other things including unfettered YouTube, for context) and I really don’t see what the fuss is about. I’ve played with her on and off for years, it has always struck me as a generally safe platform, and I’m both sensitive and clued in about the topic.

Anything with user numbers like Roblox is going to attract the darkest corners of the internet, that’s unavoidable. It doesn’t strike me that there’s anything particularly dangerous about Roblox beyond that fact, they seem to manage it well and actually the platform seems pretty safe all things considered.

Depending on state, you may need to defeat varying regional wildlife (at least one full game with multiple generous DLCs, spanning the US) in order to complete the journey, and this does accrue XP as one might expect.

It does also produce players attached to min-maxed builds to adhere to one or another strategy, so play the meta-game carefully.

Thanks, interesting and brief read!

And the only way election reform happens is if we get the corporate Dems who like things the way they are (AKA roughly all of them) out of power. It’s damn near hopeless.

I’d commit grave sins to be able to inhabit and play in Reynolds’ Revelation Space universe. The bizarre post-human factions alone, so alien and horrifying in the best way. Could legit make for a really dark MMO. I’d have to go Ultra, though, no question.

The extreme timescales, the highly personal, self-driven body modification, culminating in a truly unique, grotesque sort of personality to one’s own body…one which can’t help but physically, visibly project the creeping, gibbering paranoia nurtured by millennia spent slowly becoming so estranged from every other lifeform once called kin, making one’s journey through time and space utterly, irreversibly alone, even when traveling with others…

For sheer thrill and a tight looter-shooter game, on the other hand, I’d be SO stoked for one using his Revenger universe. Ohhhh to crack those baubles, each a potential Pandora’s box of hilariously dangerous relics involving hideous and long-forgotten exotic physics…not to mention, who knows who or what has been lurking just beyond perception, waiting for you to do the risky dirty work of extracting some particularly nasty doodad…

One can dream.

The irony of rudely over-explaining intellectual charity to someone who just asked for a tiny bit of it from you is just…really something my friend. I hope you’ll pause on that for a moment and ask yourself if you ever sincerely tried to give me any whatsoever throughout this exchange.

I understand the concept of intellectual charity perfectly well, I’ve deliberately granted it to you repeatedly throughout this conversation. I, and people I enjoy talking to, extend intellectual charity a bit beyond just that literal definition you supplied, of reading specific statements in a charitable way. I try to extend intellectual charity to my assumptions about the minds writing the statements, because I think it’s kinder, more fair, more productive, and just frankly the “true spirit of the idea” (if such a thing can be said to exist). But again, it’s yours to give and not mine to demand.

To be clear, though, implying that I don’t know what it means, and that I invoked it as some kind of “win the argument button” is just…super uncharitable of you. A fun irony from someone who claims to know such an awful lot about the idea.

Separately, I’ll cheerfully concede that Germany does make your point better than mine, that was a sloppy misstep on my behalf. What I’ll say about that, to try to convince you one final time that my position is internally consistent and merits at least sincere consideration - I recognize the slippery slope that begins right outside the line of my position, and I recognize that diligent effort and vigilance must be brought to bear to prevent the narrow intolerance from cascading into broader denials of liberties.

And I still think that’s preferable compared to allowing some of the (historically proven…) most vile and damaging ideologies to spread. Even worse, I recognize that ultimately - human beings I don’t know or particularly trust will be the ones making those calls, because they’re interested in spending their lives in government and such, and I’m not. What I think you don’t properly understand about my position is how close I believe we are in the US to violent, world-shaping fascism. If that begins in earnest, is that the point where you finally say “okay we gotta do something more direct about this, the free market of ideas isn’t going to make this problem go away on its own”? I can tell you with certainty, the most vulnerable folks who suffer most (or at least first) under that scenario will never share your point of view. They’ll rightly condemn us for allowing this to happen, just as many of us condemn the oh-so-liberal Germans who stood by during the rise of Nazism.

Before we got to this precipice, I shared your point of view basically wholesale. Because I believed it worked well enough to prevent us from getting here - but I was wrong! - it didn’t. Maybe you’re right and we’ll tip back toward safety from the ledge, public sentiment and political movements tend to swing like a pendulum after all. But I personally no longer believe your approach is sufficient. I very well understand the risks of what I’m advocating for, and I still believe it’s the right move.

Maybe 10 years from now I feel differently yet again, I’d sure love to. But my intellectual life has been essentially a cascading series of the slow grinding away of idealism into ugly-but-useful pragmatism. And things just get worse, and worse, and worse, and worse…so I don’t really expect to return to idealism, as pleasant and “right” as it feels.

That guy’s still at it?! Fairly sure I listened to him (and Leo… Laporte ?) podcasting 15-20 years ago. Crazy

Completely agree about watching the privacy destruction ramp up significantly in recent years. The one silver lining is that deciding how much and what to allow for myself and my children is just a lot easier, and even in less abusive scenarios, less smartphone use is good for basically all of us.

How have I never made this connection? That’s gonna be my facepalm of the year I think…it’s so very obviously the exact same behavior.

Popeyes is this way too. One of their newish spicy chicken sandwiches, out of a well-run Popeyes? It’s legitimately a culinary delight, I would eat that sandwich over almost any I’ve ever had anywhere, not even just similarly priced ones.

Poorly run ones, though, that same marvel of sandwich engineering is wholly forgettable. At best. Tell your cousin there’s a Popeyes near me that needs his brand of TLC!

Goddamn, that is dark…Black Mirror here we are, I guess.

That wasn’t my experience whatsoever and to me yours sounds uncommon. Not being combative with you, I promise, I just worry and wonder how successfully Malcolm X (et al.) has been whitewashed from history.

Edit: redundancy

For anyone who grew up learning about MLK Jr and not Malcolm X -

I’d recommend a book called “The Sword and The Shield”! I thought it did a dope job comparing and contrasting the two figures. Importantly, MLK Jr was way more radical than many of us were taught in school, and by the end of his life he was changing his approach, having been forced to acknowledge that non-violence alone wasn’t going to cut it. In other words he became more aligned with Malcolm’s principles and beliefs as he watched the civil rights movement struggle and falter, and I believe this is ultimately why he was killed.

And then our lords and masters de-fanged his legacy, teaching generations of kids only the non-violence, giving millions the false idea that non-violence alone is enough, and not just enough, but the preferred and historically-proven method of achieving change.

It never has been and never will be, non-violence is only effective alongside credible threats of violence (at a minimum), and Martin and Malcolm both knew that to their core. That book helped me correct what was a confusing hole in my understanding of the world.

Your belief that I don’t understand these ideas or haven’t encountered them is incorrect. In fact I used to prioritize those ideas myself, and encouraged others to do the same.

I don’t even really disagree with most of that, I’m not talking (at all) about clamping down on free expression in a general sense. I’m saying that a free society must not equally allow every possible expression, and that anything invoking and glorifying Nazism in specific is beyond the pale and must be stopped, including violently when necessary. My point of view is not extreme, nor is it authoritarian (by my measure). There are thriving democratic nations who do exactly this right now, Germany being the example I have in mind (though I do acknowledge their special history with regard to that precise topic).

I’m also saying you seem far more interested in splitting hairs and discussing theory than solving problems. And that works fantastically for the right-wing folks who only care about winning. They don’t argue ideology in good faith, they instead exploit the willingness of others to do so (like you’re insisting on here) because it drags them into unproductive conversations and creates feuds (like we’re doing here).

I’m not advocating for anything I’d call authoritarian, but that word means something different to everyone. I am saying tolerance must have its limits, or the spread of intolerance over time is guaranteed. I’m really uninterested in going further with you. You are not bringing me anything new or that I find valuable. You are bringing me points I have considered, largely accepted, and in narrow cases, have chosen to reject. I didn’t say I’ve never gone into a scholarly direction on this stuff. I said I am uninterested in doing so here. My original comment about paradox of intolerance is something that person needed to hear. I never had any intention to be rigorous with my telling, and I stand by everything I said regardless.

I can tell that you feel really strongly about this stuff and I think we’re on the same side. I think I probably agree with you more than you realize. I want to say one more time - I’m not interested in discussing these details. It isn’t that I don’t find them valuable, can’t understand them, or never have learned about them. There are other valid reasons for not wanting to, and I’d appreciate a little intellectual charity from you. But that’s yours to give, not mine to demand. I do wish you well.

Edit: softened tone at the end

That’s a lotta words to say we should tolerate things I say we shouldn’t. We can disagree, but I’m not all that interested in getting scholarly about it - the writing’s on the wall, we have real - not theoretical - fascism headed our way within this 4 year presidency and we’d better be ready to fight.

Enjoy your Stanford political philosophy. I’m gonna keep watching for further sieg heils on national stages, and I know what I’ll do if they become too widespread.

I wish you’d help, but above all, I wish you well.

Armored Core community, you say?

You need to spend some time thinking on the (misnamed) “paradox of tolerance”. The idea you’re espousing is exactly the most critical, fundamental misunderstanding of tolerance as a moral value.

The “paradox of tolerance” is the idea that one must even tolerate the intolerant - it would be a paradox because this tolerance ultimately ensures the unbridled spread of intolerance. Folks weakly on the left have misunderstood this forever.

But there is no paradox, never has been. Tolerance must never be given to the hatefully intolerant. Nazism can never be tolerated, it must be defeated as quickly as possible everywhere it sprouts up. And I do absolutely mean violently, I am not talking about just simple ostracism or censorship.

A society that tolerates the hatefully intolerant is fully doomed. Please, come to realize that you are not advocating for anything high-minded, you are advocating for the destruction of all things beautiful, art or otherwise.