> As the prisoners collapsed, choking and retching, the police opened fire. Over the next several minutes, officers poured hundreds of rounds of gunfire into the yard, including, a judge later estimated, between 2,349 and 3,132 pellets of buckshot. The prison yard was transformed into a charnel house. The prisoners, who had no firearms, were sitting ducks, as were the hostages that the police had ostensibly come to save. As hundreds of police and corrections officers stormed the prison, they sometimes paused to shoot inmates who were already on the ground or wounded. “Surrender peacefully. You will not be harmed,” a megaphone announced as unarmed prisoners were mowed down.
This isn't surreal, this isn't random, and it's also not "man being a beast". Some are. Many more are made so, on purpose.
> Behind the blind bestiality of the SA, there often lay a deep hatred and resentment against all those who were socially, intellectually, or physically better off than themselves, and who now, as if in fulfillment of their wildest dreams, were in their power. This resentment, which never died out entirely in the camps, strikes us as a last remnant of humanly understandable feeling. The real horror began, however, when the SS took over the administration of the camps. The old spontaneous bestiality gave way to an absolutely cold and systematic destruction of human bodies, calculated to destroy human dignity; death was avoided or postponed indefinitely. The camps were no longer amusement parks for beasts in human form, that is, for men who really belonged in mental institutions and prisons; the reverse became true: they were turned into "drill grounds," on which perfectly normal men were trained to be full-fledged members of the SS.
-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"
Does the US lending both hands to fucking up the Middle East make anything more stable? What stability was achieved by Vietnam, or all that stuff in South America? Not disastrous enough for you? Would you swap with even just ONE of the millions of people affected by some of the more insane atrocities this knight in shining armor committed? Thought so.
Another fact that is generally completely omitted is that best, soldiers defend against other soldiers (and in practice, they kill a lot of civilians because war is tough), so in a way those people justifying war machineries in other countries are not the excuse, they are the counterparts. It's an axis of sociopaths and conformists against humans, and this rift goes through all nations, even some families. The root causes for these rationalizations matter, not so much the rationalizations, those always shift. A child kicking a dog and Abu Ghraib differ in scale but not principle, as does looking on to either. Those onlookers love to use "we", but there is no "we" here, speak strictly for yourself.
Not seeing what you're trying to argue. Lots of appeal to emotion here. I'll make it simple for you:
1. Me: High levels of defense spending has easily identifiable consequences. But we need to be careful that we also take time to identify the positives and consider them.
2. You: The US has done bad things in the past and war is bad.
I don't disagree with you, but you're not rebutting my point.
And why would any positives matter, if there weren't actual people and their lives, and suffering inflicted or avoided, involved down the line? Lots of appeal to robots here. I'm not a robot.
> But we need to be careful that we also take time to identify the positives and consider them.
Yes, and then you need to circle back and consider both, in context, including opportunity costs.
> The US has done bad things in the past and war is bad.
Respond to what I said or don't, but don't appeal to a 3 year old you're not talking with.
> There is such a huge gap between your incredibly bleak image of Japan and the lively, optimistic and impressive Japan that I live in.
Yet you manage to tackle not a single one of those criticisms head on. Of course, nobody read anything into that.
And revenge? For what? For someone not liking you? That right there points directly to what I don't find particularly sexy about lots of Asia but Japan especially, the obedience and the obsession with appearances, apart from not dealing with WW2 a whole lot. Why would you need revenge the opinion of someone else?
And you are saying that Japan among other things is unrivaled in ambitions for the future.. how do you measure that? By almost every measure even. I don't care if you lost count, I'll have the list of those measures the areas in which Japan is number #1. Not because I agree or dispute it is, I just find that in itself so odd that I'd even be just keen on hearing the dimensions you think there is a clear "best" at all.
Meanwhile, here's my first association when it comes to ambitions for the future:
> Cultural tolerance of suicide in Japan may also be explained by the concept of amae, or the need to be dependent on and accepted by others. For the Japanese, acceptance and conformity are valued above one’s individuality.
Is this totally off the mark? Edit the article then.
> I feel genuinely sorry for people who can't see a good thing for what it is.
It's not about not seeing the good, it's about seeing the bad. In my case, it's about saying "thanks but seriously, no thanks". People who think patriotism or friendship include blindness should start with being a friend to themselves. I don't behave differently towards individuals of any stripe, why should I treat individuals cloaking themselves in the vague word "culture" or "tradition"? If it helps, you can consider that my culture, my personal one.
"The best revenge is living well" is a well-known expression in English. I don't literally need to exact any revenge. If you want to dwell on shortcomings, that's what you'll do.
The graph in the article you've linked to [1] shows that suicide rate in Japan is comparable to Switzerland and New Zealand. Maybe this problem in Japan just gets more media attention?
It does get more attention because liberals have been trying to crack Japan for a long time through propaganda, trying to insist that Japan NEEDs to change. Of course these liberals are racist and hate cultural and tradition and always want to create upheaval and are rightly disregarded by Japan BECAUSE it has strong tradition.
Disobedience would be refusing to take part in such scummy schemes, and making a huge stink over it.
> Civil disobedience is the active, professed refusal to obey certain laws
PROFESSED. To twist that on this on its head, and use another sociopath to excuse it is hilarious. But since you ask: no, that's even MORE reason to not accept this bullshit.
While I don't like the company either, I wouldn't be surprised if competing companies had some PR peeps trying to stoke the flames. Why would they pass it up?
Since when do street magicians shill for products? The way I see it, it's an attempt to capture forced attention from people who do not have an interest in the product by intermixing it with something they do have an interest in. There is a difference for being payed by people to entertain them, and by being a Trojan horse essentially.
> it's an attempt to capture forced attention from people who do not have an interest in the product by intermixing it with something they do have an interest in
you mean the $200bn+ advertising industry? yes, that. separating entertainment from advertising isn't as easy as you'd think.
Street magicians shill for products once they become very successful, which is what these 'social influencers' represent. They went from being the equivalent of street magicians, to another level of having a show at a venue or touring etc.
If they're successful, it means they managed to survive on their craft even before a lot of people wanted to see them. So why wouldn't they be able to continue to do that after they became better and more successful? You simply assume everybody sells out, you don't even say "many street magicians shill for products", or most, no, they just categorically do. I guess you can't tell me the exact threshold when they do? Is that different for everybody, but everybody still does (or would if they were just successful enough) at some point?
And why still call them street magicians then? Why not marketers? You don't call people who make advertisement spots filmmakers like you would call Hitchcock a filmmaker, and you wouldn't call those who write "copy" authors like you would any of the ones serious authors aspire to. But most importantly, you don't call someone who sings loudly to distract someone so another person can pick their pocket a singer, you call them an accomplice.
> In talking that way about a device plugged into a wall, Yarmosh’s son was anthropomorphizing it — which means to “ascribe human features to something,” Alexa happily explains. Humans do this a lot, Calvert said.
Do humans do this a lot, or do some humans not snap out of it? I've been minding myself ever since my early 20s. Starting with articles like this: http://arachnoid.com/lutusp/symbols.html which I can't thank the author enough for.
But there's much more on this written during the 20th century, so to me the question is, why do people stubbornly ignore that? This expert here does it to, by just going "humans do this, shrug". No, it's one of the failure modes of the human mind. Humans also go on killing sprees, after all, or hack their children up and throw them in the garbage bin. You can't usefully talk about humans by first fusing all of them into one huge blob.
> The problem, Druin said, is that this emotional connection sets up expectations for children that devices can’t or weren’t designed to meet, causing confusion, frustration and even changes in the way kids talk or interact with adults.
I like how this implies that the problem isn't worshiping the things we made as a higher power or some sort of mystery, but could be solved by those devices matching our expectations more. If "humans anthropomorphize things", we obviously have to make more objects that have human features. Never mind the flip side of humans getting an increasingly object like quality. Just limit their access, and otherwise sit and wait, it'll be fine. I mean, what's the alternative? Just say no to products corporations insist on pushing?
> Or take the weather, particularly in winter. Instead of asking Mom or Dad the temperature that day, children just go to the device, treating the answer as gospel.
Perfectly obedient machines, on top of that achieving compliance levels highly paid humans can't consistently on their best days -- what's not to love? It's unclear though whether corporations and the military are paying any attention any of this, at all ^_^. They'd have to give us in writing that they do for us to have any further thoughts about this, certainly too critical ones.
> Upside: No more fights over what the temperature will really be and what’s appropriate to wear. Downside: Kids will go to their parents less, with both sides losing out on timeworn interactions.
The what not? The downside is "losing out on timeworn interactions"? That's like saying the downside of the sun exploding is having to use more electricity on street lights.
Here's what you miss out on, for starters that is, or I would be doing the same: empathy, which I wouldn't be surprised is very much linked with of growing your own person. Both abuse and extreme pampering are harmful. I don't know if it's been proven, I just know that the literature I read on that matches what I saw and experienced myself. The machines of the future will do what we tell them to, and take our abuse with a smile -- except all those instances where we have to do exactly what they tell us, and do without question. Then there is taking what the machine says for gospel -- certainly doubly so if it tells you anything you like to hear. Why think when you can "know", right?
From the Third Reich to Milgram's, this is such a huge can of worms, I can only stand in awe with how non-chalantly this bit is treated here. Missing out on timeworn interactions. I'm still reeling a bit.
Just one random thing because I don't have time on the one hand, but am also not just being contrariarian, or lying when I said I spent a LOT of time reading and thinking about this shit since the 90s.. you know, since I saw a bunch of corpses being shoved into a mass grave by a caterpillar while changing channels as a kid and started to wonder wtf kind of world I'm in, and how magically people in the past were obviously wrong, but currently, everything is just a-okay.
> The perception of a convergence between the views of Arendt, Stanley Milgram, and certain Holocaust historians inspired the situationist argument that ordinary people become mass murderers because they find themselves in circumstances that subvert their ability to make or act upon individual moral judgments.
We already have this problem as as, no technology required. It's already swept under the rug all the damn time. But using technology to amplify it so much on multiple levels, while not addressing the human problem, by constantly working around it and trying to have dysfunctional human beings be functional cogs in a system that grows for its own sake, leads predictably more war, more terrorism, more drugs, more happy slapping videos, more babies in microwaves, more everything, and more people who just can't seem to find the connection between a leak in a boat and that boat sinking.
> “Alexa,” they’ll say, “you’re such a butt.”
And some of them even might grow up calling other kids "fun-sized terrorists" as they have a great time blasting them with drones on command.
> Link gets more health and stamina as you progress, and you can acquire stronger weapons and armor, but he never gets stronger himself. He doesn’t learn to swing a sword or shoot a bow any better. But you do.
If this is true, that's wonderful, and if more games became more like that again, I'd be interested in them again. Even just the fact that the reviewer mentioned this as a good thing made me smile.
I've been lamenting this ever since CoD 4 which many hail as a pinnacle in gaming.
That was the day that gaming went from performance to grind.
In QuakeWorld when I started a match, I had the exact same pre-conditions as Thresh, other than me sucking as a player in comparison. The same was true in Counter-Strike (any iteration), and now Dota 2, which I've played for 2000 hours.
I've stopped playing every CoD, BF, LoL and any other metagame-unlocks/progression game within 100 hours because they've replaced real progression (you getting better) with synthetic progression with account levels, unlockables, game-affecting items, (microtransactions on top of that) etc, and some strategizing on what to equip out of what you've unlocked, but that's a poor reward.
I'm glad more big studios are going against that grain.
It's funny that you cite CoD4 as an example of this because the first weapons and arguably the first perks are among the best in the game.
I don't know about later games in the series, but CoD4 handled sidegrades extremely well. You only ever unlocked options, not improvements. Giving players all options up front is daunting. Giving it to them in a slow trickle is fun and helps them learn things.
Cod4's starting loadout was pretty good compared to some games. It was a great all-around loadout. But there were definitely powerful niches filled by unlockables.
In comparison, some of the Battlefield games literally give you empty slots when you start playing, which can be filled by 100% advantageous perks or whatever. Like doing more damage with no accompanying penalty. Which is ridiculous.
CoD4 is an example, but it is listed because it was one of the first modern games to toy with this idea. It executed the idea well enough, but it also paved the road for future games to execute the idea poorly.
I think you'd like overwatch a great deal. There is literally no advantage whatsoever you can gain via having played the game longer other than your own increased skill, but there are some fun things like skins (well, I think they're fun.) Not only that, the barrier to entry is practically non-existent, and yet there oodles to master.
For some reason I wasn't very into TF2 despite trying many times, and am thinking Overwatch is a newer and better version of that. I would probably be playing it if more of my long time gamer friends were into it.
And I totally understands skins being fun. I've probably poured more money into Dota 2 than any other game I own, for 0 in-game advantage (only hats and tournament viewer tickets). I regret nothing :)
I think the best multiplayer I've experienced was 4v4 Left 4 Dead (1 & 2). Everyone was talking about the co-op-campaign, but versus was a hundred times more interesting.
I've been waiting for L4D3 for 7 years now. Evolve (made by the turtlerock team of L4D1) wasn't any good, unfortunately.
Overwatch definitely feels like it's learned from most of TF2's problems, like huge interchangeable player lists (matches are limited to 6v6), characters being impossible to recognize over time (every skin keeps the same outline and visual signifiers), endless stalemates (ultimate abilities can drastically change the flow of play for a few seconds), etc.
I understand why you included LoL on that list, unlockables, but as a lifelong counter strike and moba player it doesn't belong. The unlocks are not giving you an advantage over skill at all.
You can't play every champion you want but the win rates show that every champion is viable and there is no 'right' mastery setup for any champion evidenced by the wide variety you see in pro build guides.
The unlockables simply give you more options, NOT any kind of unfair advantage. Look at how many pros regurslry run new account to diamond marathons with the one rune page and 10 champions they unlocked leveling their account to 30.
As I mentioned I have played it, but not by any stretch as long as other games, so it might have been unfair in that regard. You are probably right.
However, would it be unfair to suggest that designing a game with unlocks that way takes you down one of two routes below?
* That unlocks (whether it be items or heroes) give you unfair advantage by being fundamentally different in balance and design, and having those available only to some skews the advantage towards the one with a bigger pool.
OR
* That to avoid being unfair to newer players with less unlocks, you end up balancing everything towards a lowest common denominator, that variations in function/mechanics can not exist because it would skew the advantage to only the few who has unlocked it.
In dota you can have really hard hero counters, because everyone has the entire hero pool. If you could only expect players to have 20 out of 100+ heroes, you would have to design them in such a way that at least a 1/5 heroes could play in either the exact same way, or a sufficiently equivalent way.
And at that point, what's the case for making a lot of heroes?
I'm not a CoD guy so I can't speak for it, but I don't think BF initial progressions hinder you much. It's a pretty well-balanced game in that the new weapons do more to add variety than give the player an advantage. I will say though that the new BF1 has some dark patterns that encourage you to keep playing (like progression meters that scale non-linearly, so it always looks like youre really close to getting the next level).
I get what you're saying though, and I would say most sustainably competitive games, the ones that really stick around, are ones where everyone starts every game from the same initial conditions.
This somewhat reminds me of the rogue game Brogue which I highly recommend (albeit very challenging) but slightly different.
With Brogue there are no experience levels. You only get stronger by finding potions of strength (which I believe are normalized distributed and somewhat guaranteed so its not completely random but close to it).
Everything else is crap you find. In fact killing monsters is not worth it unless they are in your way or keeping them alive is too dangerous.
Deciding what you do with your items and which items to improve is pretty important. Most items are disposable/consumable. The only exception (IIRC) is artifact items.
I wish more games would be like that to avoid grinding and provide interesting replay gaming.
As for the Zelda game I hope (despite nostalgia) they don't continue with the hero saves the princess trope... seriously... like when can you play as Zelda. Even Super Mario 2 (US) made that possible (even though it was just a dream apparently).
I think this explains the success of the Souls series. Yes, you do get to level up and get new gear, but the game presents problems that can only be solved through skill and thought. I honestly don't think it's feasible to grind even 500 hours and expect to get anywhere purely by being OP.
You get various attack/puzzle solving items at fixed points in Zelda; they're usually needed to solve the next dungeon, in not-really-intellectually-stimulating ways where you look at the puzzle and immediately know how to apply the item you just got.
Link Between Worlds added a shop where you can rent all the items in the game and solve everything out of order.
Yes, and I found it strange that the article's statement could be interpreted as implying that it was new for Zelda games, as opposed to a departure from most mainstream RPGs.
I don't really understand what parts of the game are really departures from the Zelda formula. Swapping out the small mechanics like climbing and cooking this could be an Ocarina of Time review.
Outside of the first hour where you acquire the 4 relics the designers require you to have in the game, the game is all open world. You never have to complete a dungeon. You can go straight to the main boss of the game if you chose to.
This has been true with every Zelda game I've played, more or less. Link never gains experience or levels, but you get better at using the tools and solving the puzzles. The caveat is that you can often get a better primary weapon that effectively makes you stronger.
That being said, aside from Skyward Sword, Zelda has always been about falling in love with the art and lore, as well as problem solving through the dungeons.
> If the number one motivator for internet privacy is so that if there is someday an oppressive totalitarian government I will be safe, then I'm not convinced.
That's not the argument, kind of like the argument for not having unprotected sex with strangers is not that if you use protection and have sex with someone who has HIV, you will be immortal and live forever.
Furthermore, it's really not just about you. Say, you're gay or have a spine in country X or Y, there are so many possible cases. Those people matter, not those who are content that they themselves are not threatened at this very second, or intend to remain on the "good" side of power.
> But these are niche products for a reason: most people lead innocuous lives.
Most people are complicit. Most of us are not dangerous to any murderers or crooks, while lending support, so we are innocuous to them. And congratulations to all of us, too. Well, at least we have ads that are "more appropriate to us" I guess.
This isn't surreal, this isn't random, and it's also not "man being a beast". Some are. Many more are made so, on purpose.
> Behind the blind bestiality of the SA, there often lay a deep hatred and resentment against all those who were socially, intellectually, or physically better off than themselves, and who now, as if in fulfillment of their wildest dreams, were in their power. This resentment, which never died out entirely in the camps, strikes us as a last remnant of humanly understandable feeling. The real horror began, however, when the SS took over the administration of the camps. The old spontaneous bestiality gave way to an absolutely cold and systematic destruction of human bodies, calculated to destroy human dignity; death was avoided or postponed indefinitely. The camps were no longer amusement parks for beasts in human form, that is, for men who really belonged in mental institutions and prisons; the reverse became true: they were turned into "drill grounds," on which perfectly normal men were trained to be full-fledged members of the SS.
-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"