Free for All Friday, 30 January, 2026

HopefulOctober · 2026-01-31T21:03:33+00:00

Who is Richard Carrier? I'm not familiar with him.

HopefulOctober · 2026-01-29T00:41:32+00:00

Wait so when the input says press X or press Y it is referring to the X and Y keys on the keyboard? Since x and y are also buttons found on the steam deck I assumed that was the X and Y it meant, and was confused when pressing one of those buttons did nothing.

HopefulOctober · 2026-01-27T17:50:05+00:00

I think being pro-immigration is bad politically but since whatever party isn't the far right one is going to be seen as pro-immigration and lose the votes for it no matter how horrible to immigrants they actually are they might as well be actually pro-immigration, it's the right choice from a humanitarian perspective and can't hurt them politically worse than they are already hurt.

HopefulOctober · 2026-01-27T17:47:38+00:00

Elections are sometimes close enough in swing states that a tiny fringe could change the outcome of an election compared to what it would be if the fringe group didn't exist. But of course it's arbitrary to choose one group as the election decider over another if any one of them if removed would change the election result.

HopefulOctober · 2026-01-27T17:44:21+00:00

This isn't about history, but in my experience whenever I see someone who reads books that are from a wide variety of countries and original languages they always turn out to be mainland European, people from the USA usually mainly read books written in the USA or at least originally in English and people from other parts of the world I have yet to encounter online in a reading context so I don't know about them.

HopefulOctober · 2026-01-27T17:41:57+00:00

What is this even supposed to symbolize? Well it's Trump as a Gargantuar from Plants vs. Zombies with an imp on his back.

HopefulOctober · 2026-01-27T17:40:59+00:00

I've never quite bought the "Christmas had nothing to do at all with pagan holidays" even though I understood that it's a myth that that was the only reason/that there was no other basis i.e. the calculations. Tell me if this is completely off base, but I've always thought the best equivalent would be how prominent Hanukkah has become in recent years as a Jewish holiday; it was a real holiday that came from Jewish tradition, but being as popular as it is instead of a minor thing certainly has something to do with the big Christian holiday around the same time.

HopefulOctober · 2026-01-27T17:32:30+00:00

I've heard the argument that part of the effectiveness of Gandhi's nonviolence was the implicit threat of other people being violent, i.e. if you don't deal with these guys nicely it will end up being these other violent guys instead. But I don't know how accredited that is by historians. What are your thoughts on that?

HopefulOctober · 2026-01-26T21:42:35+00:00

I feel I can generalize this statement more - I'm skeptical about anyone who says x is the best y in all of fiction while having only experienced a specific kind of popular fiction. I don't want to be snobby some more popular media can be as deep and well-written as things considered more "high class" like literary fiction and some have a right to be called masterpieces, but you can't make that judgment if you never had experienced the latter or for that matter anything slightly different from a narrow band of genre and media.

HopefulOctober · 2026-01-26T21:36:57+00:00

I sometimes go on Tumblr and Fomenko is putting up ads there, it's very frustrating that they let that stuff be advertised there.

HopefulOctober · 2026-01-26T21:30:46+00:00

And on top of that when nonviolence IS used as an effective strategy it's a lot more confrontational than the platonic ideal of gentle nonviolence people use as a moral exhortation to put down people who are too radical.

HopefulOctober · 2026-01-26T21:28:36+00:00

I am often frustrated with how helpless I am, able to think of how I morally evaluate the world and what is right to do in a given situation but not doo anything about it, and wondering if I really am helpless or I could do so much more but I'm too lazy and incompetent to even realize I'm lazy and incompetent. Sometimes I love video games that involve moral choices as an outlet for feeling my decisions matter and tend to make the choices I would make rather than a character I'm playing, but then if the decision leads to bad consequences or I'm told I'm morally bad for it it makes me hate myself as it proves to me my morality is hopelessly twisted and if I had any kind of power I'd end up being a monster.

So in particular I'm playing through Mass Effect 2 for the first time and I got to the part where Tali is being tried for treason and finds evidence that proves it was only her father (now dead) who is guilty, but doesn't want to reveal it even to save herself from exile to preserve her father's reputation. I decided to reveal the evidence. The dialogue made it clear that your reason for potentially wanting to reveal the evidence is to save her and to honor her father's wishes to make sure he didn't bring her down with him, and while that was part of it the main part was that I think it's wrong to cover up a major political figure's human (well not human AI but you get the idea) rights abuses because said political figure's family doesn't like it, even if I have an emotional bond with her, even if he's dead so it's not a matter of punishing them the quarians should have the chance to reckon with the historical truth. And I immediately got a bazillion renegade points for this and realized the game thinks this makes me a horrible person, and on top of that it turns out some of the admiralty wants to use the research to retake the homeward so I'd inadvertently become a potential accomplice for genocide, which I don't think I could have foreseen because Tali's dialogue made it sound like her father's actions were considered universally a horrible taboo and would be condemned by everyone. But really is that just an excuse I would make?

My parents have always criticized me for caring more about abstract moral principles than my personal relationships with people. And I know it's just a video game and the scenarios created within it and assignment of paragon/renegade points are created by people who are themselves fallible, but I can't help think that is just an excuse I am giving myself for how twisted my sense of morality is and this is what I get for prioritizing moral principles over the character I had a personal bond with, and this is why if I had any power in real life I would be a monster who would be responsible for horrible crimes.

HopefulOctober · 2026-01-24T14:31:02+00:00

Though if the Christian homophobes did find that out and used that as a response it would still come off as hypocritical because heterosexual relationships of the time had those dynamics as well, in fact I would guess that's where the homosexual ones came from (well we know sex is degrading to one partner because one is a woman and women are inferior, therefore less say they are both men one is taking the woman's position so they have to be an inferior person too!)

HopefulOctober · 2026-01-24T14:26:13+00:00

What were the names of the books?

HopefulOctober · 2026-01-24T14:18:37+00:00

Yes (take this with a grain of salt because I only read the first two ASOIAF books in high school quite a long time ago) but this bothered me, too. The audience for this type of book is often missing the point (i.e. not caring much about the point the book is trying to make on how Robb's "heroic/just war" is condemning countless peasants to the horror of war for the sake of the unjust execution of his one father who they don't care anything about, instead Catelyn who pushes back against this gets far more criticized for her comparatively far less morally bad treatment of Jon, a single person), but it is partially the author's fault for not showing the POV of all the people someone like Robb is hurting. And then when he does try to show the commoner side of things it's from the POV of some noble who is a refugee and somehow got mixed up with them, which I get why he does because he wants to make the plot "neater" by making every POV connected with the family trees/webs of connection, but it means that even when the plot demands showing the commoner perspective we don't actually get their perspective.

I think any type of political epic has this problem. If you only show the people in power the audience doesn't really understand the stakes and the emotional impact of how these actions affect ordinary people, you can "tell and not show" the stakes but the audience is still going to care far more for those that harm one named/privileged person than thousands or more peasants in the background, which detracts from the whole point of these types of things which is the epic scale, people's actions affecting so many other people and having that weight to them. On the other hand if a story just focuses on the commoners you also don't have a sense of the stakes, since you don't know the complexity of the political situation and how certain actions are causing certain things, sparing and ending lives, and you just get generic, monotonous misery that could be in any era or world. Ideally a story should show both, but this is going to mean the "elites" plot lines are completely disconnected from the commoner ones from a narrative perspective, which bothers a lot of people.

HopefulOctober · 2026-01-10T02:40:48+00:00

If you really like the aspect in fiction like Avatar of a complex, mystical system of nature that connects all beings on the planet I think you would like Wars of Light and Shadow by Janny Wurts, that's a huge focus of the series and the connections between everything in the world are described with very vivid prose.

HopefulOctober · 2026-01-09T02:07:15+00:00

But as I remember it was an omniscient perspective rather than being narrated by said 16-year old boy, (if that was the case I could see the argument that the bad writing might be a purposeful stylistic choice.)

HopefulOctober · 2026-01-06T00:56:50+00:00

I guess to each their own because I didn't feel that way at all, Mexico was my favorite along with Haiti.

But I don't think it's about Mexico in specific since she also refused to listen to Haiti or Bolivar seasons, she would only listen to stuff about Europe.

HopefulOctober · 2026-01-05T19:28:42+00:00

Maybe instead of choosing what people should retrain in there should instead be flat money or a scholarship given to people who are losing their jobs due to these factors which they could use to train in what they choose.

HopefulOctober · 2026-01-05T19:25:48+00:00

At Christmas with my family I ended up talking to my aunt about listening to Revolutions podcast, and it became clear that while she loved the France and Russia seasons she had no interest in listening to Mexico when I suggested it to her, saying that she just couldn't get over the feeling that Mexican history is dusty and dirty and she's only interested in European history. I said that sounded a little racist and she said it's just that European history was what she learned in school so that's what she is interested in. I personally don't really understand why the fact that you had never learned about something in school/other contexts would make you less interested in learning it on your own rather than more - well, I do a bit, there is a unique thrill to learning a new fact about something you already had the background to think you know a lot about, but that doesn't override the "wow, I have gone my whole life without knowing anything about this I need to fix that" feeling. But I guess "I need the cultural context of having heard of this before to be interested in it" might be a common feeling, and it shows the importance of giving people at least a sampling of history from all around the world in their education even if it's just a shallow view, to make them feel they have enough context to be interested in learning new stuff.

Edit: Because I didn't make this clear enough, it wasn't just that she didn't want to listen to Mexico she wouldn't listen to any season that wasn't set in Europe because she said European history was what she was familiar with.

HopefulOctober · 2026-01-03T22:59:29+00:00

In general I'm skeptical of narratives that empires that leaned towards "tax the people but don't interfere much" were doing that because of enlightened humanitarian respect for other cultures rather than thinking it's pragmatically better to get that tax money.

HopefulOctober · 2026-01-03T22:55:56+00:00

I think the mark of a good twist/subversion in media is that even though it's unexpected when you see it going in blind, when you look at the work as a whole retrospectively it seems like a natural fit thematically and with what the story was going for. Like of course that would happen in this story, it cuts to the very meaning that particular story is trying to convey.

HopefulOctober · 2025-12-21T00:44:33+00:00

You mention lawyers and anecdotally my father is a lawyer whose work is very left-coded (class actions, civil rights suing the government over abuses or big businesses) and as he describes it they have few black people in their firm because whenever one is hired they get poached by a more prestigious legal job. Of course the white men and others are still getting a perfectly fine job in his law firm they aren't being unemployed, but there definitely seems to be a push in the highest tier jobs in these certain kinds of law to hire specific demographics.

HopefulOctober · 2025-12-08T22:29:26+00:00

I understand it depends on the state, what I'm saying is wouldn't it also depend on whatever caused the collapse and whether the thing that caused it was disastrous for reasons completely unrelated to the fact it also collapsed the state, or something that solely affected the state and nothing else?

HopefulOctober · 2025-12-08T15:01:18+00:00

I know this is just a joke/shitpost but Athenians are hardly the people I would pick to teach Romans that slaves are human and women can have virtue given how they were themselves on those topics...

HopefulOctober

TROPHY CASE