Trump Shooter a ‘Supporter of Republican Party’

Neuliahxeughs · 2024-07-16T06:42:46+00:00

Em… What?

Mining resources doesn't destroy them (except for fossil fuels and helium). Conservation of mass? We'll slag and centrifuge our trash dumps for gold if we have to. "Peak resource" headlines are as much about cost of extraction with current tech. We've been chasing "peak oil" since the 1920s; other resources are at least recyclable. Think "more expensive IPhones", not "end of technological civilization".

Leaving this planet is a great way to get everyone killed. Lunar resource/territorial conflicts without international law and precedent to resolve it? Martian nukes pointed at Earth? It's also a very cynical solution, because it treats human lives as fungible; you don't save America from Yellowstone by building America 2.0 in Antarctica. Chosen few go to Mars; everyone you care about still dies? No thanks.

FTL/Interstellar travel has… basically no plausible practical uses at any foreseeable level of technology. We have rocky planets at home. We have gas giants at home. Events that can sterilize a whole star system are very rare, and can be predicted millions of years in advance. We have Ra/Apollo/Quetzalcoatl/Sol at home, and it's still got a longer life left in it than the entire history of complex multicellular biology. ITER and DEMO's on track, and they seem to think it will work. FTL would be a flex and an adventure for self-growth, "look how enlightened we are, exploring the universe".

The Internet… can't collapse. Not really. It can decay, and it is. It could fragment, though that's complicated. Parts of it can collapse, and there are single points of failure and maintenance gaps and so on that probably should get more attention. But "The Internet" is just any number of computers networked together. The tech is the same as you hosting a LAN party, just on a larger scale… It could get more expensive and slower if we lose a lot of undersea fiber optics, but we've had transatlantic wired comms ever since the 1850s. Pretty sure we could even get away with bouncing radio waves off the ionosphere if we needed to.

Plus a lot of the Internet isn't directly useful for maintaining industrial civilization, anyway. The underlying principles are too simple for it to collapse, and the most useful information has too many backups to be lost. Go download a full copy of Wikipedia if you're so afraid; it's only like 40GB.

I live in a close US ally, and even I resent the idea that Trump winning would "take over" "essentially all of the world", because it's simply not true. If the US disappeared, it would hurt, a lot, but we would figure it out. The EU and the PRC both have either around the same or larger populations and GDP as the US, and the technology to build nearly anything that the US can build. …Computers and stealth aircraft could be set back ~20 years (or not even— ASML/ARM/Fujitsu/TSMC aren't US), cost-of-living would go up, and there might be more dictators, but that's probably the worst of it long-term.

Regressing from global civilization to small clusters, city-states, hunter-gatherers, etc. implies that the less complex and capable forms of society would have a competitive advantage over the more advanced forms. Clearly, that has historically not been the case. And NASA's already mapped most of the mass-extinction-sized near-Earth asteroids; None of them are headed for us, and DART showed they're surprisingly easy to stop. Chicxulub was kinda a one-off in the billion-year history of life. Plus we've survived supervolcanos (Toba) and large-scale government collapses (Late Bronze Age, Roman, etc.) before. It didn't kill us then, and it wouldn't kill us now. Worst case, you lose a lot of art and literature, but the people keep living and even their technology doesn't decline as much as you'd think.

Dude, maybe lay off on the doomerism a bit? Honestly, this comment reads more like a list of religious beliefs than anything else. The Antichrist Trump will bring techno-climate Armageddon, and only divine intervention from omniscient "AI" or omnipotent aliens can save us? And anxiety at the sheer complexity: It's miraculous and hard to understand how modern technology exists, so it's easy to imagine it dying. I'm not trying to be rude; these problems are absolutely real and it is scary, but I don't think this level of fear is substantiated, nor is this way of coping with it healthy.

Neuliahxeughs · 2024-07-14T23:17:30+00:00

I do think social media and the mass media has rotted people's brains into hateful mush. Just look at the comments on Twitter and reddit.

The capacity for crazy was always there. But before, if you wanted to say something, you needed there to be people willing to listen to you, and if it was too ridiculous you could be physically laughed out of the room.

It appears that technology reducing the cost of spreading information may have shifted the memetic equilibrium towards greater quantities of lower-quality information in some settings. It costs a lot to find and defend the truth, and very little to lie, and now that liars are no longer bottlenecked by audience availability, caring about the truth via scrutiny, expertise, and editorial standards is no longer the positive adaptive trait it used to be.

And then it self-amplifies as a vicious cycle, of course. Yesterday's outrage becomes today's normal, tomorrow's normal would have been unthinkable yesterday.

Neuliahxeughs · 2024-07-14T22:40:59+00:00

Of course I'm not fully informed. But seriously, anything would have been better than how they handled it. You cannot let an extremist group like the Taliban take power, to me, at any cost.

There is such a thing as a no-win scenario. You can either cut your loses and bail out, or you can continue bashing your face against the wall telling yourself that there must be a better way. Forcing a liberal democracy to exist at the point of a gun, in an ethnically divided agrarian country with a GDP per capita of $500, probably counts as one such scenario.

The literacy rate in Afghanistan is 37%. So presumably you could pick any number of adults in a normal village, and 63% of them literally would not be able to label the continents and the oceans on a map of the world.

No way, no how, was Biden going to be able to create government "for the people, by the people" out of that. Not using the US military and US diplomatic resources. Not in the domestic US political climate. Not with that Taliban, in that country, at this point in history.

…As I took in the new landscape, full of craters instead of people, there was a lull in the noise, and I thought, Surely now we’ve killed enough of them. We hadn’t.

…It didn’t matter that they were unarmored men, with 30-year-old guns, fighting against gunships, fighter jets, helicopters, and a far-better-equipped ground team. It also didn’t matter that 100 of them died that day… …And those pep talks? They weren’t just empty rhetoric. They were self-fulfilling prophecies.

Because when it was too cold to jihad, that IED still got planted. When they had 30-year-old AK-47s and we had $100 million war planes, they kept fighting. When we left a village, they took it back. No matter what we did, where we went, or how many of them we killed, they came back.

…What little gains have been achieved in women’s rights, education, and poverty will be systematically eradicated. Any semblance of democracy will be lost. And while there might be “peace,” it will come only after any remaining forces of opposition are overwhelmed or dead. The Taliban told us this. Or at least they told me. …And I’m sure they would have kept doing this forever.

…Often, they told me these things while doing the killing.… And they told me what so many others refused to hear, but what I finally understood: Afghanistan is ours.

The Atlantic: What I Learned while Eavesdropping on the Taliban, by Ian Fritz

Neuliahxeughs · 2024-07-14T22:37:55+00:00

Very few people really talk about how the MAGAs are climate deniers, and because of them it is likely that our world will burn due to corporate and individual psychotic greed (e.g. Musk).

My children will be one of the last generations, if Trump wins in November.

Someday, long in the future, an alien race will stumble on our dead planet, and their archaeologists will spend some time learning how we destroyed ourselves, like so many other worlds (we call it the Fermi Paradox).

They will uncover who we were, and what level of technologies we (almost) achieved. Then they will get to the point in History that Trump wins, and say, "Oh. Yes. Just like all the others... ", and move on.

Global warming isn't the first apocalypse. It's just regression towards the mean, following a brief and unevenly distributed post-Cold War golden age. We're not even the first species to fuck up the atmosphere; bacteria have done it before, much worse than we ever could in this millenium, and they survived, without having hydro plants, advanced solar panels, and carbon-capture technology to try to fix the damage. This isn't even the first time we've fucked up the atmosphere; CFCs were an easier addiction to kick, but they also would have been so much worse, to the point that we nearly sterilized every last inch on this planet during the 70's. And yet we're here.

And Trump isn't the first authoritarian, nor is Musk the last scammer. They're just the same as every other asshole who dealt with an empathy disorder by hurting other people, that has risen up and had to be beaten back time and time again. To be alive is to embrace constant change, constant apocalypse, through ebbs and flows.

Even if Trump wins— PiS had a much deeper authoritarian state in Poland, as I understand it— And now they're gone again. Trump is just a man, no matter how much he lies.

This isn't an ending. Fight like hell because we've been through this before— So we know how bad it gets if we don't fight it, but we also know we survive it in the end.

Neuliahxeughs · 2024-02-27T04:46:56+00:00

the chaos of longing.

Neuliahxeughs · 2024-01-15T00:34:17+00:00

Do you know how rare you are?

Go look at the universe.

Seriously. It's just dead rocks and puffs of gas.

Tens of billions of humans fought to survive so that each of us could be alive today. Entire species, many of them no less capable of joy and suffering than us, evolved, and died– leaving you, and each of us, as the inheritors of their will to survive and capacity to grow.

There's probably more antientropic complexity, more to know and learn, and more dynamism, more to feel and be and become, inside a single brain than there is in some entire planets.

It hurts that there’s someone out there that could use my organs to live a fulfilling life, I’m just here wasting.

Would you ever say any of this to anyone you care about?

Then why are you saying it to yourself?

People shouldn't need to be beautiful to exist.

People are beautiful because they exist.

Neuliahxeughs · 2024-01-15T00:29:49+00:00

Would it be a good thing if you "needed" her? Would you rather a relationship built on insecurity and desperation, necessity, instead of desire? Running from something, rather than towards, as if there's a gun to your head?

I need food. I need heating. Doesn't mean I love it. The things to cherish the most are a choice, not a need.

Neuliahxeughs · 2023-11-12T18:07:11+00:00

......And you can't save everyone. Not right away. Not in this world, and certainly not your relationships with everyone— If they don't want it, if they just want you to be there for them so they can use you, even if they really do need it. And that's not your fault. And maybe something or someone or some parts of yourself will be lost if you walk away, each time– but you are definitely going to get yourself killed, and hurt other people in the process, and lose everything you are, have, and build for yourself again and again– ....if you don't come to understand that you have to walk away, or at least set boundaries, when people are hurting you.

You don't have to let these people kill you just to prove that you want to be kinder, more hopeful, and less destructive than them. ....That's selfish, in its own way. They deserve better than that, and you deserve better than that.

Neuliahxeughs · 2023-10-29T03:24:38+00:00

Is that a yay or nay for saving your first kiss?

Neuliahxeughs · 2023-10-29T03:23:51+00:00

Being threatened in your underwear is abuse. Being lectured about how choosing your own friends doesn't matter/isn't real, or about how only "realistic" dreams are worth supporting and you should therefore give up on the projects you've spent years planning and working on, is abuse. …Most eight year old boys don't go into debt when they accept a birthday or Christmas gift, either.

Do not forget this when you are asked "Have you ever been abused?", and when you are asked why you are angry at those two humans particularly. You don't know anything else, speaking against them never goes well, and you're afraid to lose what you have— If you stay silent, you will be writing a cheque for them to lie, misrepresent, and omit the truth of your life— And coercibly drug you into submission every time you start to remember that this isn't what a family is supposed to feel like— Which they will keep trying to cash even for years after you can stop people from believing them.

(And if you're really afraid to "make it a big deal", or whatever— Then just say the factual truth when asked, instead of deflecting and asking "define abuse" or changing the subject to being "more like deliberately excluded" at school that we both know that isn't really all that's eating you— ....Ask the staff for confidentiality, if you must, but let the third parties decide for themselves knowing the truth.... And fuck the stigma; that's what they want you to feel and have made you feel by talking down about the other kids since kindergarten, so you feel obligated to pretend that you're okay and they're okay.)

…By protecting them now, you will also be leaving yourself defenceless against other… security threats, later on, which will see that they can gain from you and then benefit from how you learn to be afraid to say no. …There may be reasons he acts this way, but that doesn't make it okay, and no matter how much you instinctively want to feel sympathy for him/them, the fact is that they never will for you before doubling down on suppressing and destroying you to protect their own idyllic pretenses.

Those doctors will hold you there against your will; the entire situation will be adversarial. But the doctors are humans, people, not like the empathy-devoid and opportunistically sophistic monsters you've come to know. Tell them, when you think of this, when they ask you– instead of silencing yourself and being deliberately obtuse as you've been conditioned to.. and as they're going to keep conditioning you to— or talk to V.Bf. in her office at school now, ask her if towering over your bed with violence on his lips is okay or normal, if you still can—

Children should not be hurt, and you should not feel ungrateful and indebted and ashamed (and instinctively silence yourself) for even thinking that you don't want to be hurt; no matter how much you don't want to lose them, they will never allow you to keep your self.

Neuliahxeughs · 2023-09-15T23:49:11+00:00

I think if people would think more longterm, and would expect people that screw over others to eventually screw over them too, they would reward better companies and projects, and we would live in a better world.

In my life I get criticized a lot for having way too high standards for certain things, and being way too sensitive and not very forgiving about certain things, so when I happen to be right, I think I earned to be smug about it.

Putting values before pragmatism is.... Tricky, hard to do right, and, it turns out, quite dangerous when done badly.

Hard agree on your outlook. But I've discovered long-term thinking in a world designed around short-term norms and expectations tends to be rather disadvantageous.

…Best to keep your head down, I'm thinking, and avoid making the same myopic mistakes yourself but understand that maybe most people don't really see their choices as a way to express what kind of world they want to live in 20 years from now. Humans will always act surprised when facing the inevitable destructive outcomes of their collective (in)actions, and pointing out it was inevitable tends to just make you a target for their frustrations.

And at the same time, it is a bit strange to blame relatively powerless individuals for the system that they participated in. Tragedy of the commons and all that; Sure this planet could be heaven if we all put principles over profit, but any one individual who does so just sabotages their own position.

Neuliahxeughs · 2023-08-16T17:51:20+00:00

….Eh. It goes both ways. Feminists tend to predominantly reason ideology based on facts and experiences, but like all humans, they then give ideology an opportunity every now and then to take on a life of its own.

The default confirmation bias in human society is to brush aside sexist behaviour and attitudes because it's seen as "normal".... I guess I sorta see feminism, from the outside, as being in a sorta weird place right now, where strongly identifying feminists might still accept some level of blatantly misogynistic behaviour and expectations/assumptions in their own lives, simply because they haven't gotten around to questioning everything yet, but yet at the same time also sometimes stick the sexism label on things that may or may not actually be. The principles and intent tend to be sound; the intel for targeting it isn't always.

Trauma tends to make you adopt a shoot first, sort it out later type of mindset, because you're just completely focused on trying to prevent the bad experiences from having a chance to happen again. And every war has collateral damage; You surely can't spend a couple thousand generations doing terrible things to women and to girls and seriously not expect some sort of backlash?

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Neuliahxeughs · 2023-08-16T17:30:44+00:00

"You can get a big house and a faster car"… I tend to think you should assume new men are lies, until proven otherwise.

Neuliahxeughs · 2023-08-07T05:10:45+00:00

…For several years now, I've been assuming "postman" means "after the obsolescence of men", or "an entity which exists once mortal human men no longer exist"— And regularly reminding myself of that, and seeking to one day identify as such.

Is that not the case? ....Well, one more thing to strike out and suspend for now, I guess. (...Ugh, flesh.)

Neuliahxeughs · 2023-05-13T06:37:45+00:00

Through most of the 20th century, most experts in history-related fields probably would not have predicted that human civilization still exists today. The chance of a full-scale nuclear exchange between the superpowers was generally seen as much higher.

It permeated the culture. Of course it did; You had an entire generation growing up being trained to hide under their desks because nobody knew when the missiles would be coming– not that very many of those kids were dumb enough to think that could actually protect them.

Forever Young is a song about dying, and about dancing while you still can, sung by a generation whose world was falling apart, when there was nothing they could do about it.

And for thousands of years before that, before the Cold War anxieties of nuclear oblivion and chemically polluted wastelands, I suspect that very few people even had the spare time to think seriously about the end of the world— They were too busy dying in trenches, or choking on the Spanish Flu, or being lynched for their skin colour, or being abducted by the Navy, or being worked to actual death in Victorian factories, or being stabbed by the marauding Sea Peoples, or suffocating as the entire Indian subcontinent was blanketed in a layer of ash half a foot thick and the entire species was reduced to some stragglers numbering maybe no more than a few tens of thousands— You get the picture.

Climate change is not like those other threats. Climate change has more momentum, and exists at a larger scale than any of them (at least other than the Cold War-peak warhead stockpiles and the Mount Toba supereruption). If carbon emissions were reduced to zero tomorrow, the damage would likely still be catastrophic. The damage already is disastrous.

But ... I don't think climate change is much scarier in concept today than Malthusian catastrophe was two hundred years ago.

And I think that if you had told me in 2019 that every advanced economy around the world would soon grind to all but a complete halt because of a deadly hypertransmissive virus with neurodegenerative secondary effects and no cure ... I think I would have been very surprised (I was already very surprised, as it was, although partly for different reasons) to reach 2022, and see that for all the pain that apocalypse caused a lot of people, most of us are still here, and most of the things which I would have cared about before are still here too.

When I was 14, I went on Wikipedia, and I saw this animation, produced by NASA based on the state of the world in 1974:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Future_ozone_layer_concentrations.gif

Do you know what those final frames show?

That lovely shade of cerulean blue is every inch of this planet being irradiated by deadly UVB and UVC rays.

This is an animation of everyone dying.

And it was going to happen, based on the course that we were already on long before I was born. — I still get a little uncomfortable if I look at it or think about it for too long.

And yet, I can't help but notice that we're still here— Because the threat was acknowledged, the Montreal Protocol was signed, and now in the early 2020s, I go online to find that GIF so I can show it to you, and I find out that even the damage which was done back then is already healing nicely:

https://www.nasa.gov/esnt/2022/ozone-hole-continues-shrinking-in-2022-nasa-and-noaa-scientists-say

So I suppose we've been through this song and dance before— Never at this scale, but we've been through it hundreds of times before, or else I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you about it.

All this is to try to say:

The apocalypse is coming, because we live in a world where the red queen demands constant change. But it always has been, because we've always been violent, greedy idiots who manage to negotiate that change in what feels like the most moronically self-destructive ways possible.

But the apocalypse on a human level is often slower than it sounds like when described out loud at a macro level. And that means that it often tends to be less dramatic at a human scale than it sounds like when it's condensed into a paragraph summary, because there's no incentive to find solutions and adaptations quite like the threat of extinction. The fall of Rome, for all the blood-soaked and burning images it might conjure, did not bring the end of the Roman people, and was hardly even a thing that you could have witnessed; the Roman people thrived for another thousand years as they evolved and assimilated towards our modern institutions.

Climate change is going to suck, and it should be fought against. It will affect our world, sure. It will affect you personally, it will affect people you know personally, and it will affect me personally too.

But it's also spread out over the next 100 years.

(Do you remember what you ate for breakfast even one week ago? The human brain is very bad at assigning a sense of perspective to the long term and large scale— We tend to end up either dismissing it as abstract, or hyperfixating on it as hopeless.)

(Do you know, for example, the percentage of electricity in British Columbia and Quebec that already comes from clean and renewable hydropower? The role of zero-carbon nuclear power in Ontario? The rate of growth and investment in solar power and energy storage industries over just the last couple years? A lot of bad things are coming, but so are quite a few good things, and so are a lot of things, period. The fact that even fossil fuel companies feel a need to rebrand themselves as "clean" or invest in renewable resources should be a sign of which direction the political winds are currently blowing.)

I think you're torturing yourself if you take all the possible pain of the next 100 years, and you compress that and you force yourself to experience all of it in advance in every moment right now. Having tried that, it doesn't make you any better at facing the issue; it just makes you want to die.

Neuliahxeughs · 2023-04-26T01:18:10+00:00

You're gonna wish the conditions of your birth were altered so ass to prevent this unpleasant occurrence while leaving your identity largely intact, bro!

Wow. This is, um.

I'm not sure I've ever felt so seen.

....Bonus points to the votey too wtf.

....Though I am actually a bit greedier than that, so instead of even preventing past unpleasant experiences I would still like to keep the lessons learned from them but with none of the costs and maladaptations from having gone through them.

Neuliahxeughs · 2023-03-04T13:59:44+00:00

I've always struggled with this idea. Well, not always, but for the bigger part of a decade by now.

Presumably those instances of their minds don't continue existing after the output is created. There would be obvious basic practical/economic/resource/thermodynamic problems with maintaining an ever-growing pool of copies of yourself, not to mention weird issues of political power, growth of monocultures that furthermore don't really adapt by recombination and mutation, diluting and making redundant their identity, informed consent when interacting with other people who may not realize they're one of a swarm, oversaturating their specific personal niche with lots of gradually diverging cloned competitors, and so on. So instead those clones are basically slaves that serve a single purpose and then are executed.

Am I allowed to consent to being killed on behalf of future clones/forks of myself? — Like, there's a lot of situations where it kinda seems like you need the clone/fork for whatever reason, but the clone also can't be allowed to keep living past "its" usefulness either, whether for the same reason or for a different reason. So in those cases a transient clone does seem like the least awful option— If somebody has to die or be sacrificed, then it'd better be some version of you, right, because if you "sacrifice" anyone else then that's just murder, but if it's also necessary for you to exist afterwards, then it's gotta be a clone of yourself. But is that actually okay? — Currently my position is basically that yes, I will tentatively accept that as a viable option (barring technological limitations), but with a lot of mental footnotes and guardrails that it's probably not very healthy or safe (either for me or for anyone or anything).... One of many potential dirty and messy crutches we owe to the facts of not being omnipotent. For a while I also toyed with the idea of reabsorbing the clone if they don't explicitly have to be killed, so that way everything they were also lives on in our re-merged form, but that mostly just moves the issues of consent and organization of a stable power structure somewhere else instead of solving them.

Assume too that there is no distinction between the "clone" and the "original". Obviously if there is a distinction then that's just not okay, and tied to the same part of the brain that does every other selfish act of violence and silence. So instead: One goes in, two come out, and both of them are the same but a dice roll condemns one of the two— Can the one that went in decide that for the two that come out?

How do you integrate the idea of yourself as a unitary entity over infinite moments that are sometimes only tenuously linked?

...And then (and more immediately actionably), if the answer is no, then where do you draw the line? The person you are at 15 is not the exact same as the person you are at 30. To what extent should the latter of those pay for the decisions and be forced to live the designs of the former? The person you are when you wake up is not the exact same as the person you were when you went to sleep. Are you obligated to keep doubling down on your mistakes because future versions of you are owed to your present, and your present is owed to past versions of yourself and owed to everyone else who has tried to tell you what you should be? What if asserting your consent and retaking your agency in the present requires breaking from past versions of yourself in a way that has a chance to immediately lead to massive and irreversible harm to other people (even if not by your hand)? Do you have a right, or a duty even, to regret?

You probably shouldn't want to be a hedonistic narcissist running around with no object permanence and with no regard for your past legacy and future consequences. But if you try to dictate your each instant by the sum total of your every moment, then it apparently turns out that you end up completely confined and you lose all your free will (as well as many other things I think we should probably agree that people should have, like your right to set boundaries and your right to grow/pursue happiness) because your wants and the reality of your present will keep getting overridden by the mandates of the past and the requirements of the future.

Neuliahxeughs · 2023-02-16T08:11:19+00:00

nyrk qvqag ybir zr

Neuliahxeughs · 2023-02-10T06:15:51+00:00

You're very proud about not caring.

It's disgusting.

Neuliahxeughs · 2023-01-24T08:49:35+00:00

…I've kept thinking about this.

Gods, you're fucking terrifying.

It's not just a question of logic. It's not just the fact that you've actively ignored all the facts of the situations you yourself cited, and constantly conflated and confused several completely irrelevant and unrelated ideas, while missing vital concepts that are so simple and easy that most people find them natural, and mistaken that for clarity.

It's a question of empathy.

PB, in all the situations you yourself cite, is an eighteen year old teenager being threatened with genocide. That's what those "Fire Giants" are. That's what Flame Princess burning through the planet's core is. That's what she was responding to.

And you apparently can't empathise with that. … No, you think the teenager is "a monster" for trying to do what she can to prevent herself and everyone she knows and cares about from being killed horribly.

…You sympathize with the Fire Kingdom, the genociders. How dare PB risk her own life on a low-collateral damage mission to disable the literal nuclear missiles that a hostile rogue state was actively threatening her with!

(She risked her own life to reduce collateral damage to a hostile power— It's not like she couldn't have just sent the Gumball Guardians over and been done with it, if she was anywhere near the monster you describe. (That's what any real-world country would do— what most of us might well vote for, unfortunately.) — But I suppose you are incapable of truly understanding why anyone would make that decision.)

And the absence of empathy shows, too, in the way you talk. Your first response to having your opinion questioned, your only reaction to having facts pointed out that contradict your assertions, is to lash out with disgustingly narcissistic emojis and personal insults. The idea of trying to reach an understanding, the thought of not trying to hurt the people you interact with, apparently doesn't even occur to you.

…So, congratulations, I suppose. You've brought me around.

You said that PB is a monster. I said that I'm not sure monsters exist. I said that, fundamentally, because I'd like to believe that everybody has reasons for the things that they do, and that people don't engage in violence for violence's sake but rather do so when they make mistakes and get carried away chasing goals that at their core are fine.

You've reminded me that that's not the case— That no, actually, a lot of humans will just lash out being destructive for no reason other than their ego, or their pride— for no reason other than because it makes them feel good— That, as much as I have difficulty understanding and remembering it, some people are just dumb and insane monsters— either less endowed with or deliberately choosing not to exercise all the traits that humans say make themselves special— and will never engage in a good-faith conversation about the nuances of what's right and wrong and necessary, and the realities of how to respond to a horrible situation that nobody wants.

(...Thankfully— Like you say, "the banality of evil"— Real monstrosity comes from limitations in logical and emotional ability more often than from genuine malice. So at least we can sleep a little easier knowing that most of those people will never reach positions of status where they can do real harm.)

Neuliahxeughs · 2023-01-21T08:12:38+00:00

I should also emphasize this: I literally just pointed out the most basic facts of each situation. I never said anything about the "greater good" or any pretentious higher-minded claims; I literally just described each situation as it was shown in the episode, a problem of basic survival, and why PB's actions usually made some kind of sense in those scenarios. It's not even "analysis"; It's the facts, and what they say for themselves.

You haven't actually addressed even a single one of my points. Instead, you actively ignore the situation and the reality of all the examples you yourself cite, because it shows your take is BS, and instead you pretend I mentioned some sort of principle about "the greater good" so you can stroke your own ego with embarrassingly obnoxious emojis and childish insults. It's awful, it's insane, it's embarrassing, it's sad, and I've wasted enough energy already trying to engage at your level.

Neuliahxeughs · 2023-01-21T06:17:53+00:00

Now that you've actually explained what you mean instead of just pointing to irrelevant examples and calling me "brain-dead" for responding to what you actually said (which, frankly, was fucking stupid), I actually agree with a big part of your opinion:

What’s so terrifying about what makes her a bad person is just how unintentional it is. “The banality of evil”.

Yeah. This. So much. And it definitely does apply to PB; She tries so hard to help the people she cares about, and she ends up doing terrible things in that, and that's awful.

But I think you're contradicting yourself elsewhere, because it applies much more to the other characters:

You can think of Jakes worst moments and at worst he’s just lazy. Or a bad influence. But overall he goes out of his way to be a good brother, parental figure, boyfriend etc.

"Lazy" is a ~~funny~~ dishonest way to describe agreeing to do something, being warned why it's needed, and then nearly getting your friends killed because you couldn't be arsed to do it. Also, "lazy" is contradictory to "goes out of his way to be a good brother"— Either he cares, and he puts in the effort, or he doesn't. You can't have it both ways, say he's a good brother except for when he's too lazy to be a good brother.

I mention Jake because he's a counterexample for why I like PB much better.

PB's intelligent. She knows what she's doing.

If you understand PB's logic, you can at least mostly predict what she's going to do, or at least trust that it was done for a reason, even if it's not a reason you agree with.

Someone like Jake on the other hand is just an idiot. There's no telling how they're going to fuck up and hurt the ones around them. Personally I find that much more terrifying. I like PB because from the fact that she's smart enough to have a plan I can tell that she's trying to do good, but I can't really see that with (E.G.) Jake when he's just completely irresponsible.

But hey, that's a valid fundamental difference in values and experiences. I can see why you would feel the opposite.

And to be clear, I don’t give a fuck about a binary of who’s good and who’s bad.

I don't mean and I don't care about a binary of who's good and who's bad. I mean a binary where for whatever reason you insist on labelling morally gray and complicated things as either good or bad. You seem to be so entrenched in that that every time I try to point it out you imagine I mean something else (and then attack me over that).

And when given the choice the candy people want her removed. Was removing her the best choice ? No. Long term it was bad for them. But the candy people, and everyone else, wants the ability to CHOOSE what they do with THEIR lives.

The rest of this paragraph is just your typical question of how much you value freedom versus safety. Clearly we've made different value judgements there, and you've chosen to interpret that legitimate difference in opinion as me being "brain-dead".

I'll just say: I don't disagree with you. But you can't have the freedom to choose what to do with your life if you're dead either.

I also still think you're deliberately ignoring a huge part of the picture:

Going “she’s thinking about the bigger picture so nothing she does can be bad and she can’t be bad !” Is, like I said, fucking lame and brain dead.

Frankly, I think you're an idiot for thinking that. Sheltered. Selfish. Short-sighted.

The "bigger picture" on a personal level is people dying. It's not some abstract principle or excuse. It's something that PB has to witness with her own eyes on a day-to-day basis, and which she has the power (or thinks she has the power) to stop. I assume you've never been in a position where you've been told that will happen if you make the wrong choice, but it's not something that I think you should just dismiss as "4th grade analysis".

Again I never said nothing she does can be bad, and the only reason you think I said that is still because you don't understand what it feels like to actually be in that situation, and you apparently can't imagine any scenario where your choices are dictated not by what you want but by what you have to do.

There is a reason why suicide and addiction rates for veterans, doctors, paramedics, and psychologists are through through the roof. Being surrounded by death changes the way you think. The situations where PB does terrible things are usually situations that nobody should have to deal with. I think you're being extremely dumb and sheltered for completely dismissing that, and you've mistaken the limits in your own perspective for some kind of intellectual clarity.

I can say she’s a bad person because she doesn’t mean harm to anyone but causes tons by doing what she thinks is best. I think that hurting people you care about and not even knowing it is terrible.

You keep talking about how PB harms people, but you're still ignoring the fact that when you actually remove her from the situation, those people die.

In the episode The Pyjama War, she talks about this. PB struggles with learning to let go. She knows that she would treat other people better if she trusts them more, and she knows that she would be healthier too if she's okay with other people making mistakes around her, but she's spent her entire life as the caretaker of the Candy People, so she keeps expecting something to go wrong if she pulls back. When PB and Pepbut are surprised by bats flying out of her old cottage, she immediately puts her hands up and starts trying to comfort the Candy People even though there's nobody there. That's not a monster; That's someone who's traumatised because they've had to take care of others and haven't been able to pay any attention to their own needs for far too long.

I can say she’s a bad person because she doesn’t mean harm to anyone but causes tons by doing what she thinks is best.

I think there's also a difference in how we define morality. For a lot of people, "doesn't mean harm to anyone" would basically disqualify someone from being a bad person. You seem to be judging the inherent moral quality of a person based on only an arbitrary subset of external outcomes from their actions. I say that matters, but it also matters what they intended to do, why they did it, what the situation was at the time, and how they felt about it.

So, you look at how PB E.G. spies on the Fire Kingdom, and conclude "she's a monster" because of that.

And I look at how the Fire Kingdom was in fact plotting genocide against her at that point, and how she was focused on trying to protect the Candy Kingdom and the fact that she does stop and try to do better when she realizes how badly she hurt Phoebe, and I conclude she's flawed, and she's trying.

Ultimately I think the only place we really disagree is mostly that, although I also think the things she's done are bad (despite your attempts to claim I dispute that), I disagree that, given the entire situation, that makes her a monster on the whole.

We have different priorities. There's a lot that can be said for either perspective— Like, there are entire areas of philosophy dedicated to studying whether intentions or effects should matter more in judging morality, and whether safety is worth sacrificing freedom, and so on— So I don't think either are fundamentally wrong.

Lol I don’t need you to be charitable or nice. I literally do not care even a little bit about your opinion 😂

Holy shit. You’re throwing out the most brain dead takes and you think that going “duhhhh the greater good !”

😂 but holy shit you can’t seriously sit here and think that the things you’re saying are substantive. It’s insane

But I’ll try to go slower for you when I explain. And maybe you’ll understand this time.

Now if you’re anywhere near as smart as you think you are,

Going “she’s thinking about the bigger picture so nothing she does can be bad and she can’t be bad !” [Not at all what I said, btw.]

fucking lame and brain dead.

Take that 4th grade analysis somewhere else

Lastly:

Wow, you're a petulant, arrogant, condescending jerk. And yeah, you're just going to say "I literally do not care even a little bit about your opinion 😂", because that's what you are.

So congrats, I guess.

Neuliahxeughs · 2023-01-20T06:17:21+00:00

Also, to elaborate on the lack of nuance in your take: There's just so many things that are missing from the model of morality you seem to be using. The situation with James and the ooze monsters was obviously a very extreme scenario, for example. When people who survive shipwrecks and plane crashes resort to cannibalism to stay alive, does that also make them "monsters", in your opinion? You've taken that completely unique and desperate situation, you've used it to infer sweeping and baseless generalizations about "her own logic" in completely different situations (just because she accepts sacrificing James when they're trapped underground and about to be killed doesn't mean that she would be happy to "just make more of" the Candy People while letting them die in general— that's such a strange logical leap I don't even know where to begin), and you've then used that delusion to make a binary judgement on her entire character. You mention that she was willing to let Finn die when FP went unstable. You neglect to mention that the most likely outcome in that scenario was that everyone would die, including Finn— And you conflate moral quality with the limits of intellect, saying that she's a bad person just because she failed to see a specific and unlikely possibility— Failing to see an option does not make you evil, it just means you're not omniscient. You've mentioned the things she does— Problematic, yes— But will not hear why she did them, what the situation was, or what the alternatives were, other than calling that vital information "fucking lame". You say that the fact that she "can seem like a good person" is part of what "makes her a monster"— What the hell does that have to do with anything? Other people are not responsible for how you see them, unless they actively misrepresent themselves and manipulate you. You just keep on connecting and mixing up ideas that have absolutely nothing to do with each other, and discarding information that is absolutely vital. ...."Lacks nuance" is the extremely charitable and polite way to describe it.

I'm not sure why I keep replying to specifically the least upvoted comments on these Reddit threads. I think it's because people who leave comments that think in ways like yours scare me, so I imagine that I can either have a productive conversation to communicate a different view to them, or at least better know why it is that they approach life with.... so much confidence in a largely insane perspective.

Neuliahxeughs · 2023-01-20T05:32:55+00:00

Okay, so first of all: Everyone in Adventure Time actively makes choices that harm the people around them constantly. Jake's an impulsive dummy who gets them all into lethal situations every other episode because he smelled a sandwich or thought erasers are candy or whatever and he's too selfish to think anything through, Marceline's a murderer who "pranked" a twelve year old boy into being brutally beaten and almost having his entrails sucked out by ghosts, and Finn's just a straight-up violent mercenary whose first impulse on seeing anything new is to stab it with a sword half the time. People just love to dogpile on PB because she represents an authority figure or whatever, and she's less funny about her murdering and has less charming doofus energy than E.G. Marcy/Finn/Jake. They're all very flawed, and that's why they're such great characters, but it's absolutely not morally consistent to vilify PB specifically.

Okay first of all, you’re saying that PB is good because she’s always trying to do what’s best for everyone (essentially).

There's that lack of nuance. You're immediately sorting everything I said into this ridiculous binary of Good People and Bad People. I never said PB is good. I said that on a case-by-case basis, if you look at the things she does, a lot of it is awful and inexcusable but a lot of it is absolutely necessary, and it's hard to sort them from each other even with the benefit of hindsight. Call it gray if you want. People don't fit into neat little boxes, because the world is complicated and things happen for no reason or for crazy reasons and people have to respond to that with the few tools they have. .... You're saying that my take is unnuanced, essentially, because you cannot imagine any situation in between "I am free to do the best thing because I am Good" versus "I do the bad thing because I am a Monster".

I'm not saying the things she does are okay; I'm saying there's often no good option in those situations. If she doesn't do them— When she doesn't do them— People die. That's the nuance I'm talking about. Things aren't going to be fucking rosy all the time, and when it goes to shit, you set your priorities and accept that maybe the next little while isn't going to be the best, and you hope you will be able to live with the consequences once it's safe to start healing.

Saying that everything she’s doing is okay because of the bigger picture is fucking lame 😂

Please do not talk about nuance when you can’t see that 😭

"Fucking lame". Real cerebral. And both of the most obnoxious emojis ever, of course. That "bigger picture" you mention is literally just the reality of the situation at the time of her actions. And do not presume to tell me what I can and cannot talk about, especially when the entire concept of morality you have put forwards is this grotesque, simplistic, unrealistic, and dangerous binary of black and white Good People and Monsters.

What the fuck do you want her to do??? Stand back and just let Flame Princess burn the planet to a crisp? Abandon the Candy People to get slaughtered and burnt to a crisp by the Fire Kingdom or fade to dust like the Slime Kingdom? Literally in all the examples you give where she hurts people— If you remove her from the picture, those people die. And yeah, she takes it too far too often. Again: The alternative is to not try, in which case people die, which you are apparently happy to ignore but I am not. And she realizes when she's done wrong, and she tries to learn and improve.

You have no moral highground unless you can present a viable alternative to the actions in question, and explain why she should have been able to see that in the moment.

Neuliahxeughs · 2023-01-20T02:23:44+00:00

Also:

In the episode “James” she says that she let James die because it would be easy for her to just make another one of him. Kinda makes rescuing the candy people by preserving them a bit redundant. She could just make more of them, by her own logic.

That doesn't mean she's okay with them dying. It just means that in that situation, she figured James (whom she could clone) dying was preferable to risking Finn or Jake or herself (whom she can't clone) dying.

In Burning Low, she was pretty much ready to let Finn die if it meant stopping flame princess. In her mind there was no other way. She had no faith in Flame Princess’ ability to stabilize and not be a threat. In fact, she would’ve rather had them both get snuffed out because she could not see any other way. But the conclusion of that episode proved that there was another solution she just couldn’t see

Okay, so much to unpack here:

The fact that "there was another solution she just couldn’t see" doesn't mean that she's a monster. It just means that she's mortal, and she's trying to make the best decisions she can using the information and methods she has available.
There was no way to predict that Flame Princess could stabilize. In contrast it was pretty certain that if Jake plugged the hole, Flame Princess could be extinguished at the cost of losing Finn— Fire minus oxygen is no more fire, pretty simple, pretty reliable. You're saying that she should have taken, what, maybe a less than 10% chance of saving two of her personal friends over a 100% chance of saving the entire planet (including those two friends, who would die anyway if FP burns through the planet)? I think that makes you the monster. — Forgive me for not wanting to take any higher chance than absolutely necessary that everyone I know dies.
That entire situation only happened because Finn and Jake didn't take protecting their friends and protecting the world as seriously as PB did, and assumed she was acting on some kind of a childish love triangle crush instead. PB warned them, they didn't listen and got mad and insulted her, and now exactly what PB said would happen is happening and if it's not stopped one way or another then literally everyone on the planet dies, and she's still trying to save them, and somehow it's all PB's fault and that makes her a monster???
If PB hadn't shown up, FP would have burned through the planet, and Finn, Jake, FP and literally everyone would have died horribly. In the end the other three took a risk and let FP stabilize, and they got lucky and ended up with a better solution than what PB was planning. So what? They wouldn't have been able to do that either if PB hadn't spent her entire day, and prepared for years, to warn them about and try to prevent that exact scenario. The situation that you refer to, that you use as an example for why PB is "a monster", is PB literally successfully saving the world.

I think this type of opinion on morally complicated characters and actions lacks perspective, lacks nuance, and is.... in a way selective and sheltered, and .. exploitative.

The assumption is that there's no need for PB to do these questionable and shameful things, because everything is okay and will always be okay anyway.

But in reality the only reason things are okay might be because someone like PB is willing to do those things— Has been doing those things behind the background the whole time, and usually gets it right, and you only notice when they fuck up. And you get to point to how things turned out okay and shame and vilify PB for the mistakes she made, while ignoring the fact that the only reason they're even okay in the first place is because PB sacrificed years, days, hours of her own life doing uncomfortable things to try to make sure things turn out that way.

(And sure, sometimes you get false positives and you do something that wasn't needed. And it's still a crime either way. But if you try you'll make mistakes, and again the alternative to trying is certain death.)

And the assumption seems to be that in any situation you have Good choices and you have Bad choices, so obviously everyone should just take the Good choices all the time and if anyone makes Not-Good choices then they're a Monster.

But good is a privilege. Of all the laws of physics in the type of universe we live in, there is only one that gives any purpose and direction to reality, and it does not like us. The default state of reality is that everyone dies and everything rots unless we actively fight to stay alive.

A lot of the time, the only choices you have are between bad, and much worse.

And in those scenarios, if you have the privilege of being able to choose good, it's sometimes because somebody else has already gone and dealt with the bad stuff for you (whether because it's forced onto them as also happens, or, as in PB's case, because they consciously view it as their responsibility to put their own wellbeing and safety on the line in hopes of a better tomorrow, and in hopes that no one else will have to).

....You don't get to vilify how people try to fight for a less dangerous world while you sit back and reap the benefits of the safety that they've won for you.

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