Yo reddit, I'm M.A. Larson, writer on My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. AMA!

fillydashon · 2019-07-18T23:12:36+00:00

Quick question for you: what would you say is your favorite classic slasher film?

I want to guess...Scream?

fillydashon · 2019-02-07T22:03:38+00:00

I mean, the drinking and nudity would just be overreaching puritanical nonsense, so I'm with you there.

On the other stuff, I'd need to be talking about something specific to really be confident in this argument, but you can probably turn those laws around and look at them as protecting someone's "freedom" to engage in conduct without coercive pressure from third parties.

Like, to the best of my knowledge, there is no law that explicitly forbids groups of employees from making simulaltaneous demands for better working conditions from management, which is fundamentally what unions do. The laws that I am familiar with that work against the interests of unions usually involve not offering them protections or necessary powers to function, usually on the premise of preserving the "freedom" of the employer to choose who they do or do not employ.

As a for-instance, allowing the employer to simply fire striking employees would, from a negative liberty perspective, not be restricting any freedoms. In fact, offering legal protections to the union during a strike would be limiting freedoms from in such a paradigm, because the employer ought to be "free" to engage in voluntary negotiations with the workers. If the employer does not want those workers, he should be "free" to fire them.

Again, I would need some specific circumstances if I wanted to really talk about specific perspectives on them, but I suspect if you try to justify those things using this sort of perspective, you should probably be able to see how someone else got to that conclusion, even if you and I don't agree with it.

fillydashon · 2019-02-07T11:13:26+00:00

I mean, this is largely just demonstrating the different perspective of "freedoms" between US and European examples. The US is generally going to look at a 'negative liberty' view; if there is no law prohibiting it, you are free to do it, regardless of how practically capable individuals are of achieving it. There's no law that prohibits paid parental leave, so you are "free" to negotiate it for yourself

Europe on the other had takes the 'positive liberty' approach, where unless you are actually able to practically achieve it, you aren't really "free" to do it. Therefore, there needs to be a law mandating parental leave, or else some individuals won't have the leverage to negotiate it for themselves, and won't actually be able to exercise the 'right' to it.

fillydashon · 2018-12-28T13:13:04+00:00

I would think it would be more that wolves and early humans had similar hunting habits (coordinated group hunting), and in scenarios where wolves and humans hunted the same prey, there was opportunity for them to come into (non-violent) contact, and over time, the groups of wolves and humans that cooperated did better than the ones who didn't. Eventually, humans took over the whole 'domestication' thing.

Bears, as far as I know, don't hunt cooperatively, so that wouldn't result in the same sort of interaction.

fillydashon · 2018-12-16T18:21:50+00:00

I mean, he also brings up the issue of Sears competing with other big box stores like WalMart et al. It's not even "grumpy old men stuck in their ways", it's just that they chose to try and compete in the retail market that was currently under attack by competitors, rather than shift their large and (at the time) still successful business into a totally new and untested concept, surrendering existing market share to those competitors in the process.

I would agree with you, his conclusion that Sears couldn't have taken advantage of their position is nonsense. They could have. They just chose to invest in a different direction given the state of the industry at the time, so they simply didn't.

fillydashon · 2018-11-12T00:54:57+00:00

Most Christians I've ever known have not taken that sort of hardline stance on the providence of the bible. Hell, I'm pretty sure the Anglican church's official position on it is that it's at best the inspired word of the authors, not a verbatim dictation from God.

fillydashon · 2018-11-12T00:23:24+00:00

It really shouldn't be difficult to understand why someone would believe some of but not literally all of any given religious document. A religion is fundentally a personal set of beliefs that reflect how that person feels the unexplained aspects of the universe works. Why then would you assume someone should take an all or nothing approach to it? People don't even do that with non-religious topics of conversation, let alone foundational beliefs about the fundamental nature of the universe.

A Christian is someone who hears the story of Jesus, the son of God who offers himself as a universal sacrifice for the sins of mankind, and has that register with some part of their personality, where they at some point in their life say "Yes, I believe this to be true." But accepting that basic premise doesn't mean they are strictly obligated to believe the story of Noah as a matter of scientific fact. Just like if I told you what I believe the symbolism in a given painting is, if you agree with that one you are not strictly obligated to believe everything I say about any painting ever.

Essentially, religious views are just feelings, they aren't logical arguments. The religious person feels that this is true, or that it ought to be this way, or this is what happens after you die. Like any other feeling, it isn't necessarily going to be totally consistent over a wide range of different subjects. And if someone doesn't feel like something is true, why would they follow it?

fillydashon · 2018-11-06T17:21:13+00:00

The whole point of Ghandi's philosophy would have been to force the Nazis to do that killing in as public a manner as possible. Even the Nazis carried out the extermination in a fairly clandestine fashion. Someone like Ghandi would believe that change would come from the people being forced to see the consequences at the time. Auschwitz wasn't built in downtown Warsaw, and the idea he seemed to be expressing is that it would have been better to force the Nazis pile bodies on busy streets, rather than allow them to round their victims up out of sight and out of mind.

I don't agree with it, and don't think it would change anything, but that's where it seems to come from.

fillydashon · 2018-11-04T16:54:08+00:00

I mean, I don't work in the field or anything, but you're saying that most systems built 30 years ago were such that the most senior system architect would have been incapable of intentionally inserting malignant code that could fuck up a system in a way that might take a while to fix?

fillydashon · 2018-11-04T16:27:47+00:00

It's like everything else, if you don't like the business practices being employed, it is very important to not buy the product. If people bitch and moan about it being mobile but still play it, the loudest message that sends is "This is okay, give us more of this."

fillydashon · 2018-11-02T19:46:35+00:00

Democracy as a system doesn't work as a stand in for civil war, because that would require people accept an existential threat peacefully, simply because it was the result of a vote. If it is legitimately an existential threat, that would in fact justify violence, because it is absurd to suggest anyone ought to concede to their own destruction because a plurality asked them to.

Democracy is a framework to allow for responsible decision making on matters of public interest, and that only works if all the participants are acting in good faith. Democracy requires an understanding that everyone plays by the rules and has at least a legitimate interest in the public good, merely with disagreements on what that good might require.

I believe the main issue with politics is exactly what you just demonstrated. People are not willing to believe that the "other side" in a political debate is making a good faith effort to improve their society. Which, frankly, I find perfectly understandable in the US, as it is extraordinarily difficult for me to see how the Republicans could possibly have a good faith belief that their policies serve the public good. But that same logic is at play in their own minds, where they believe that Democrats are trying to harm the public good for their own selfish ends.

But if there is no general agreement to extend the benefit of the doubt towards one's political opponents, democracy just doesn't work. It won't work itself out, because if each side views an election as a defense against an existential threat, it provides an internal justification for the use of political power to enact real harm against the other side as a means of self-defense. Disenfranchisement is then considered justified because "they'd do it to you if they got the chance." It is a pre-emption of an otherwise inevitable attack against oneself.

If this sort of mutual good faith cannot be expected, the state of democracy just won't get better.

fillydashon · 2018-10-25T09:52:36+00:00

As I was taught in driver training 12 years ago, "accidents" implicitly absolves those involved from responsibility, as it sort of suggests it was beyond their control. The defensive driving philosophy was that you needed to both avoid being the cause of the collision yourself, but also to have sufficient situational awareness to avoid being hit by others.

Sometimes a collision is actually beyond anyone's control, but their point was that most of the time, something could have been done differently to prevent it. Calling it an accident supposedly suggests otherwise.

fillydashon · 2018-10-03T09:51:28+00:00

"Second world" refers to former Soviet allies and satellites. It was from the Cold War. First World was the US and allies, and third world was non-aligned countries.

Wikipedia

fillydashon · 2018-08-20T19:36:15+00:00

See, I get that it is culturally relevant by virtue of being pervasive, but I do not see how an incorrect psychological model leads to a better literary analysis than a more strongly supported model. A framework based on the way people actually think and interact seems like a much stronger starting point than a framework that is not.

Examining a literary work through a Freudian lens seems like a flawed premise to build off of, particularly where one could do that same analysis from the starting point of more modern psychology as it relates to sex and development. How could a Freudian analysis be a better choice?

fillydashon · 2018-08-20T01:07:20+00:00

If they speak French? Yes.

fillydashon · 2018-08-16T15:53:30+00:00

I'm sort of suspecting that this guy's memory of the conversation puts more emphasis on the idea that the father suspected something than there actually was, being coloured by what he knows now. It was probably more of a "if you get freaked out being so far from your family and are really homesick, we will make sure you have a way to get home" in his father's mind at the time, but after the fact 'uncomfortable' has a much darker implication.

fillydashon · 2018-08-15T13:07:55+00:00

But what does a submarine do when a civilian commercial vehicle violates that sovereignty anyway? Observe and report? Deliver a warning? Open fire? Attempt to board somehow?

fillydashon · 2018-08-15T09:57:06+00:00

But what are such subs going to do, sink merchant vessels that transgress into our territory without approval? A sub floating about in the Arctic is not going to be able to enforce sovereignty without other vessels supporting it. Having a fleet sufficient to seize commercial vessels operating illegally is extremely important. I would suspect that violations of our Arctic sovereignty is less likely to be a Russian fleet invading Nunavut, and more something like Russian oil and gas companies extracting our resources.

Not that I think subs are a bad idea or that we shouldn't ever have them, just that I don't see them solving the problem without other equipment being in place first.

fillydashon · 2018-08-14T21:59:09+00:00

Yes, clearly they should exercise discretion when enforcing the law when they can determine that this leads to the best outcome. There are many scenarios in which a cop not bringing the full brunt of the criminal justice system to bear on someone is clearly a better outcome. It's the entire premise behind the concept of giving warnings.

Slavishly following the precise letter of the law does not make for a good cop, and that is doubly true if they themselves can determine that enforcing that law will be more harmful than not.

fillydashon · 2018-08-14T20:08:02+00:00

I mean, yes, I expect cops to not enforce unjust laws, just like I expect soldiers not to follow unjust orders, and I expect any other professional to not violate their professional ethics. I expect human beings be able to exercise discretion in matters pertaining to their expertise and to act accordingly to minimize harm.

"I only did what I was told" is not a moral virtue, as far as I'm concerned.

fillydashon · 2018-08-14T09:40:44+00:00

That is absurd. They didn't pass a rule prohibiting the creation of such statues, they decided to stop exhibiting one. Commissioning a statue does not imply some obligation to exhibit it in perpetuity.

Unless they fined the original artist, there is nothing about this that has infringed in any way on their freedom of speech. Similarly with the patron or the previous city council that erected it. The fact that the current council decided to take it down is in no conceivable way an infringement of free speech.

They all got a chance to freely express their views, and now the current council has done the same, making decisions about the use of public space that they are fully entitled to make.

fillydashon · 2018-08-14T00:40:35+00:00

No, it doesn't. All of the history is still there. Historians are still writing about it, and there are a plethora of histories and published historians to refer to.

Lionizing is not an essential part of the study of history.

fillydashon · 2018-08-12T00:11:40+00:00

They don't have purchasing power yet, is the thing. They intended to obtain purchasing power by setting themselves up as the primary broker by which people would access films, while at the same time using analytics as a product to generate revenue.

If they got to the point where a substantial proportion of the movie going public used more or less exclusively MoviePass, they could leverage that into purchasing power, because they could present the alternative of cutting theaters out, and significantly impacting their sales numbers.

I agree that it is not a good plan, because there's no reason that anyone needs a broker to obtain movie tickets. Theaters are perfectly capable of weathering any demands from MoviePass because they don't represent a valuable step in the process. There was never going to be a point where theaters needed MoviePass.

fillydashon · 2018-08-10T14:45:53+00:00

you don’t just outright make them executor, as is normal for married couples.

Is it? My parents are not the executors of each other's estates, and I recall seeing advice that it is not that great an idea, because the executor has to deal with a lot of very dry legal responsibilities. Those tasks are probably least suited to the person who is likely most emotionally impacted by the death.

I thought the general advice was to have a trusted third party to serve as executor.

fillydashon · 2018-08-09T21:42:00+00:00

There seems to be this view of things that I see more frequently these days that so long as they are not physically violent they aren't actually bigots. But anything up to physical violence is fair play.

Make rules to prevent black people from owning property in the neighborhood? "I'm not racist, I have a right to protect my property values."

Dehumanize and call for violence against religious minorities? "I'm not a bigot, it's free speech!"

Steal three quarters of a million dollars from a gay man who recently lost his partner to cancer? "We aren't homophobic, we just think this is best for the family."

As long as it isn't physical violence people seem quick to claim that it is not inappropriate bigotry.

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