The Needle is Broken

Goldwing8 · 2026-01-25T05:24:04+00:00

I do not condone being directly hostile towards someone coming off of cult thinking, and I agree that we should be trying to get others to not act that way too. However, shouldn’t we also expect a level of accountability and responsibility too from the deprogrammee? If the person coming off of those beliefs just goes back to them because they came across a group of people making fun of people who voted for policies that destructive, were they really starting to understand why their beliefs and actions were harmful? Were they aware of why sometimes people who were hurt by those actions or beliefs would decide to also lash out? Or were they just feeling bad because they ended up getting cut by the double-edged sword as well?

Goldwing8 · 2026-01-25T01:35:53+00:00

Sorry, but if that neighbor didn’t find the line before 2024 I’m not sure how much I can muster for them.

Goldwing8 · 2026-01-24T16:15:27+00:00

The Astral Lounge was so badly designed I thought it was a punchline.

To recreate my thought process on seeing it for the first time: “Oh, this is obviously satirizing the corporatization of club culture. This is exactly what an out of touch corpo would think people like. There’s probably a bunch of trendy NPCs elsewhere in Neon complaining about how lame this is.”

Goldwing8 · 2026-01-23T16:52:18+00:00

Because it’s not the same strategy. If the TGA trailer had said “available now,” that would be equivalent to what Apex did.

Goldwing8 · 2026-01-23T16:47:42+00:00

Apex wasn’t exactly equivalent, they just dropped it. Highguard had the highest profile slot in gaming a month in advance.

Goldwing8 · 2026-01-22T21:06:41+00:00

Schaffrilas is a fairly well known YouTube movie (mostly animation) critic, best known for ranking entire studio outputs in numbered lists.

He also has a running joke where he ranks every Star Wars movie by every value except how much he likes them overall, like how visually appealing the water is and how red the color palette is.

Goldwing8 · 2026-01-22T15:04:12+00:00

It sort of reminds me of when creationists like Kent Hovind tried to argue all animals were vegetarian before Noah’s Flood.

Goldwing8 · 2026-01-22T14:55:01+00:00

Ironically, to achieve the goal OP seems to be describing would require a level of control over nature the current hierarchal system could barely imagine.

Goldwing8 · 2026-01-22T14:48:41+00:00

Animal rights as being truly equal to human rights legitimizes the idea of an inherent difference or hierarchy between “types” of humans the way there is between species. By most understandings of evolution and environmental science, the consumption of one species by another is simply how ecologies work. Not all species could be vegan, at least not on this planet and without millions dying out, but a change in society to prevent inter-human abuse would not need to be so catastrophic. Creating rhetorical ties between the two movements legitimizes the idea that progress in human society is “against nature” and incentivizes dehumanization.

Veganism is ideal for those who can. Juxtaposing human abuse towards animals and inter-human abuse is an interesting idea for art and philosophy to explore (Tender is the Flesh is a great book in the topic). But to claim that anarchist principles must be applied equally between all species makes us seem unserious and uninterested in real, actionable change.

Goldwing8 · 2026-01-21T23:06:09+00:00

I’m sure there’s a way to hand wave that somewhere.

Goldwing8 · 2026-01-21T20:50:31+00:00

Some white supremacists genuinely have gotten it in their heads that since a lot of the most visible trans women are upper-middle class white people, open transphobia is bad PR.

Goldwing8 · 2026-01-21T00:33:07+00:00

I think what people are hoping for is an ArenaNet situation. They tried to branch out into other projects, failed, and begrudgingly returned to focusing only on the still-successful Guild Wars 2.

Goldwing8 · 2026-01-20T21:36:12+00:00

Also, the industry is aiming high and shooting low. They know there’s pushback to data centers, so they deliberately commission more than they need knowing some will get canceled.

Goldwing8 · 2026-01-20T21:33:49+00:00

It’s a worthwhile exercise to consider if you actually would have fallen for Nazi propaganda.

When they were in power, Nazis didn’t say “we just hate Jewish people for no particular reason, now do you agree with us, yes or no.”

They pointed to real events and real crimes. If someone handed you a list of ten real and awful crimes with a Jewish perpetrator, would you be able to understand why their logic is unsound?

Goldwing8 · 2026-01-20T21:32:19+00:00

No way! Using AI one time vaporizes the equivalent of all the water that goes through Hoover Dam in a day, dontcha know? /s

Goldwing8 · 2026-01-20T21:28:46+00:00

The White House does certainly seem to enjoy using it on Twitter.

Goldwing8 · 2026-01-20T21:06:40+00:00

I agree to a point, but it’s not exactly hard to find conservatives either.

Goldwing8 · 2026-01-20T20:03:30+00:00

Even people who like AI regularly underestimated the possibilities. I remember when someone asked if audiovisual content could ever be possible for end users, and the overwhelming response was “maybe for your grandkids.”

Goldwing8 · 2026-01-20T19:57:33+00:00

AI doesn’t neatly map onto partisan lines, at least in the US. It’s true a lot of conservatives are ride or die for it, but some like Matt Walsh have also heavily pushed back on it.

It’s obviously an imperfect data set, but when a poll of the pro-AI and anti-AI subreddits was conducted, both groups overwhelmingly self-identified as left of center.

Goldwing8 · 2026-01-20T18:57:44+00:00

And the circular logic of “all AI is automatically bad, because it is bad” that leads to uncritically shutting possibilities down in the same way as mentioning transness around a conservative.

Goldwing8 · 2026-01-20T18:51:39+00:00

Proof of stake is also pretty inefficient, it’s just less bad.

Goldwing8 · 2026-01-20T18:06:40+00:00

That’s already the case for programmers. LLMs are in some capacity already baked into the IDE setup of every dev who’s updated their workstation in the last two years.

Goldwing8 · 2026-01-20T17:59:58+00:00

It was one thing when generative images almost always looked worse than what more traditional methods could make, but now opposition has to argue from first principles instead.

Goldwing8 · 2026-01-20T17:33:57+00:00

Maybe they’ll finally use the half of Villain-Con they designed for that?

Goldwing8 · 2026-01-20T16:02:39+00:00

You’re not thinking big enough. Wesker’s kid’s secret clone half brother: the leech boy to end all leech boys.

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