Instructions unclear. Fucked a vending machine.

The fact that people couldn’t tell the difference between a human and an AI made isekai is hilarious. This genre is just a sea of slop.

I think I get it and kind of share a similar belief. Most people are “good,” although I’d use a less morally relative term to describe it: Pro-social. People tend to behave in a way that works well with others. This makes sense if you think about it without getting caught up in all the “humans bad” philosopher stuff. One of our defining features as a species is our ability to work together. We form communities, developed languages to communicate, cultural norms and laws to create agreed upon guides on how we behave towards each other, etc. We wouldn’t have gotten this far if we were always stabbing each other in the backs.

At the same time, there are some unfortunate behaviors and phenomenon that emerge out of these dynamics. In group/out group thinking, an unwillingness to change things if it means causing disunity with the community, etc. And while I think most people are good, there are different people with different personalities, and clearly we have at least some psychopaths who are willing to exploit peoples’ natures for their own gain. Also, circumstances can create constraints on how people behave. If you can’t afford to be altruistic, you might end up acting in a selfish way, although even then that’s not always the case.

The fact that you can look out into the world and feel bad about all the people who are getting hurt, even if you aren’t personally affected, should already tell you that there is this “ goodness” to most of humanity. Otherwise a) you wouldn’t care and b) all those bad people would deserve it anyway. So that is the hope that keeps me from full on nihilism. Unfortunately I also think that there are a lot of other factors in place which make it increasingly unlikely that we’ll be able to organize enough to survive. Wealth disparities and technological asymmetry allows those handful of psychos to wield a lot of power and it’s getting harder and harder to fight back against that.

So yeah, I don’t think “people are doomed even if most of them have good intentions” is that contradictory of a view to hold.

Those are some good points/better ways to say it.

Then asserting that these Other People are trying to Take Over.

Yeah that’s a more accurate analysis I think. When most people reject socialism out of hand, I don’t think they’re really engaging with any of it’s actual ideas, they’re just associating it with scary foreigners.

For a lot of these core ideas, the very pitch-line for them is corrupted. Even removing the question of rich people having an edge, you have these core messages that only justify the status quo.

Yeah. I do get that. There are plenty of these aspects of society that I would want to change to be more fair, compassionate, etc. But when it comes to discussing these ideas with regular people, you need some kind of starting point and using the system’s own premises against it I think is a reasonably effective tool to do that. Once we have a political and economic system free from the control of a handful of greedy people, I think it’ll be a lot easier to take the next steps.

I wouldn’t describe myself as a tankie, but I do think I am more sympathetic towards the various communist projects that have been tried in one way or another. The difficulty talking about this is that there is all sorts of misinformation, so it can be hard to have a complete, coherent discussion on these issues. (and of course I know it can be coming from both sides, so it really makes things confusing) What’s more important to me though are the interpretations people have of these issues and how that informs their politics in the context of the real world that we live in.

What do I mean by this? While of course it’s important to critique past and current governments, it should be so that we can learn from their mistakes and do better in the future. I don’t really want to be defending some atrocity or failure of a state. I want to have an honest and productive talk about it. But in the context of living in the west, and especially the US, the propaganda line is to treat these governments as a complete and unique evil in order to justify both imperialism abroad and suppression of the left at home. They make it sound like their actions are just a continuation of our role in WWII fighting against fascism for freedom and democracy. But clearly that’s not the case. The US does absolutely awful shit all around the world and is buddy buddy with various oppressive/undemocratic governments. And this isn’t whataboutism. I’m not saying “well we did awful shit so it’s ok when they do it too.” What I’m saying is that by overly focusing your ire on these left wing governments, you reinforce the idea that the US is the good guy for fighting against them, that even if you have problems with the US, the other guys are way worse and it’s worth supporting US military interventions because of that. With that mentality, the military budget keeps growing, we keep bombing people who didn’t deserve it, we continue to justify our own authoritarian measures as being necessary for fighting against these existential threats. etc.

I’m sure for most on the left, especially anarchists, who participate in this, that isn’t their intention. They just want a better, fairer world and want to recognize injustice regardless of who does it. But the effect is still unfortunately to feed into the more right wing position on this. You’re working in an environment where the average uninformed person you talk to will at best not care about any atrocities the US has committed and at worst will view you as a crazy conspiracy theorist for telling them about publicly available information. Meanwhile they’ll gladly join in on getting angry about anything you say about a place they’ve been told is evil, even if it is a conspiracy theory. You have to consider that when you decide what to spend your limited time and political capital on.

That said, I don’t really know what to do with all that. I don’t think it’s right to go out of your way to lie about or defend actual atrocities, but how do you manage to do that without contributing to the oversimplified narrative of these places being cartoon villains? How do you get people to not fall for the manufactured consent for war time and time again while still acknowledging the things people treat like original sins that can never be atoned for?

I haven’t done enough research to know how well it does in every category, but I was recently thinking of moving to Vietnam for similar reasons. I’ve learned a decent amount about it and while it’s definitely still a developing country, it seems like it’s oriented in the direction I want. It’s been making huge strides towards poverty reduction and while it’s not entirely there, it’s getting close. Similar to modern China, while it has markets, the government does a lot to make sure important things are adequately addressed including stuff like infrastructure and apparently they’re getting close to implementing universal healthcare. They have an unaligned foreign policy. From what I’ve seen, the government seems reasonably responsive to the people. And lastly it sounds like they’re reasonably friendly towards foreigners. I’m kind of shocked they’re not more pissed at Americans, but apparently there are US expats living there who have said they have good experiences with the people.

The problem with me moving anywhere right now though is I’m super depressed, so doing all the things I’d need to do to move, including learning a foreign language, would be really difficult for me and I’m not sure I’m ready to live without my current support network. It’s kind of stressful though because it really does feel like it might be urgent to leave now. Even before Trump I hated it here, but now it looks like the fascism train is rapidly accelerating and I’m an autistic Jewish communist. I might not be immediately in the crosshairs thanks to me being white, but I doubt I’m that far down the list.

This is what’s frustrating about trying to talk to people about socialism. It’s everything that liberal capitalist democracy claims to be but isn’t. They’ve just been brainwashed into thinking it just means authoritarianism.

• Democracy: You want a government by the people, of the people, for the people? Well a system that lets the rich and powerful pour their vast resources into corrupting it doesn’t allow for that. And that’s before we even get into the explicit ways in which US “democracy” was set up to be resistant to popular influences. Also, in a less direct way, the more of society that is privatized, the less in under the preview of whatever semblance of democratic control we do have.

• Freedom: Under capitalism, your freedom is directly proportional to your wealth. Rich people and corporations can do whatever the hell they want and can often do things that infringe on the freedoms of others, but if you’re poor, or even just not super rich, your ability to make choices in life is heavily constrained by what the market offers and what you can afford. If you can’t afford to lose your job, you have to follow what your boss tells you. But hey, that’s not a government, so it doesn’t count right?

• Meritocracy: People want to be rewarded for their hard work and keep that reward? Well capitalism doesn’t reward hard work. It rewards having enough money and power to siphon the value of other people’s hard work. It doesn’t matter what people did to get to the top, they could have inherited it, they could have done crimes, etc. They could be completely undeserving of it and still be put in charge and still take your money.

• Innovation: Capitalism doesn’t promote innovation as anything more than a byproduct of a different force. ANYTHING that makes profit is incentivized, regardless of how productive it is for society. Sometimes that’s new tech, but things that are equally valid under capitalism include: Weapons, cheap plastic crap, getting people addicted to things, finding ways to offer less and charge more, suing others to try to stop them from using anything vaguely similar to what you own IP for (regardless of if you were even the ones to originally make the thing instead of just acquiring the IP) etc. Under this framework, you can even consider lobbying the government as profit generating activity. You spend some money to get the government to do things that will allow you to make more money in the future.

I could go on, but you get the idea. It’s just really hard to make the jump from having people agree with these things to realizing that the system itself is to blame and that in order to do better we need to change it.

I happened to read this recently. It’s mostly slice of life with a little “what weird things can my body do now that I’m part dragon?” I wouldn’t say there’s any action from what I’ve seen.

It’s kind of funny though, I don’t read much manga, but this is the second time in a row where I happened to read something only to find out Kyoani was going to adapt it not long after. Last one was CITY.

We like to think we have rule of law, but in practice that is a fairly flimsy concept that ultimately depends on how many people in power are willing to adhere to it. Something could be against the law, the Supreme Court could rule that it’s against the law, (although with all the right wingers they stacked the court with, even that’s not gonna happen often.) the legislature could object, but at the end of the day, if the executive instructs the government workers to do something and they’re willing to do it, well… they can do it. So the politics of those government workers ultimately determines what can and can’t be done. And since those workers are downstream of appointments made by the executive… they’re likely to agree with them. And we see that bear out especially in the military and law enforcement agencies. The culture of these institutions is fairly right wing and the people in them have demonstrated a willingness to follow illegal orders and commit some truly heinous acts, even if they rationalize it as “just following orders.”

It’s not just under Trump either. The government has been acting in ways that violate our own laws for a long time. Every war we’ve been in since WWII has been an illegal act since they were never formally declared as wars and many of the things done in them have violated various international humanitarian laws. Police have straight up killed people without trial and were protected by their fellow officers and the government. And of course now we see ICE agents be more than willing to commit crimes to pursue this anti-immigrant agenda, whether they are just following along or they’re also ideologically committed to this.

So yeah. The answer can be anything as long as he find enough amoral right wingers or pushovers to staff the administration.

Ah. I didn’t know they said that. It’s definitely shitty to go back on that promise. Although in a vacuum, I think this is the kind of non-cosmetic content that’s somewhat acceptable to me as paid DLC. It’s not a competitive game and assuming the class is balanced, it’s just adding content that gives more variety. I’ve been fine with paid DLC in other big games as long as it’s a worthwhile amount of content for the price and it’s sold in a straightforward way without any funny business. Given that this game has online co-op, I think it makes sense that they’re gonna keep the content expansion free so it doesn’t divide people who would want to play together (also I guess there is trading, but I’m a CoF player so…) and then this is something that mostly just affects someone’s individual experience. Like if you were going to be happy enough to keep playing the game with existing classes, then this doesn’t really affect you.

So in principle I’m ok with this… but like I said, the bigger issue is them going back on their word.

Yeah I pretty much almost never buy AAA games anymore outside of some very specific creators/franchises. Price is definitely a part of that, but the bigger things are creativity and business practices. Indie games are where all the new ideas are and where you get honest expressions of the artist’s intent. And you generally don’t need to put up with bullshit micro transactions, DRM, etc.

I’m not gonna pay $60+ for Call of Duty 500 when I can find full, fun, inspired indie games for less than $30. I will still buy the handful of more creative AAAs that do come out sometimes.

Thanks. I never thought of that. /s

Depression. Lots of depression. And anxiety. And probably some other stuff.

Tried tons of different treatments and nothing has really worked. Going to try therapy again on recommendation of my psychiatrist, but I’ve only had negative experiences with therapy and I still really don’t see how it’s going to fix anything.

Personally I enjoyed Nier Automata’s story, but I think that’s mostly because I enjoy camp/anime trash. I can definitely see why it wouldn’t be appealing if you went in looking for a more well put together story. That said, I don’t really remember the gameplay well enough to have an opinion on it.

To the point about being more granular with the difficulty settings: I’d definitely like that if it were done well. There are some types of gameplay I really enjoy and some which I don’t and depending on how intrusive the parts I don’t like are, I either put up with it or it’s enough to make me abandon the game. For me, while I like games that make me think and make decisions like RPGs, card games, strategy games, etc, I get really overwhelmed by too much complexity. I like games which enable me to make deep decisions using relatively simple interactions. So there are almost certainly some games I’d play if I could flip a switch that hid/automated all of the stuff like making complicated character builds and just let me do the parts I like. The game that actually prompted this thread was Expedition 33. I really wanted to play it because of all the good reviews it got and I enjoyed the combat, story, setting, etc. But I just got exhausted by having to mess around with the character builds. I supose I could have just looked up some builds online and who knows? Maybe I’ll go back to it some day and do that, but it would have been nice if there were a difficulty option that just said “Choose my skills/passives.” That way I could still engage with the combat at a level that was challenging for me without getting overwhelmed by the build stuff.

Unfortunately this is the movie. So it’s longer and we have to pay for it.

Something a bit like this happened with me. Apparently we did get an autism diagnosis sometime when I was a younger child, but we didn’t ultimately do much with that. I ended up in a social group or two in school for a little while, but they sucked and I eventually left them and we kind of just forgot about it. Fast forward to grad school when I burned out and got diagnosed with pretty severe depression and it came up again that I was autistic and that at least some of the depression probably came from the frustration that comes from the friction between my differences and society. It got so bad that I dropped out of grad school mere months before graduating and I’ve been moping around at home bouncing from one ineffective psych treatment to another.

During high school I did a summer study program in France and also briefly went to Amsterdam for a weekend.

In college I took a vacation with some college friends in Japan, going to several cities across the country. It’s kind of funny, we’re all weebs, but one of my friends learned Japanese in college and he’s pretty much fluent. He actually speaks better Japanese than Chinese despite being from a family that immigrated over here from China this generation lol.

It was definitely nice seeing the different kind of things they had in those countries as well as a lot of the similarities. That said, I don’t know that I know enough about them to talk intelligently about their modern politics.

I think this sub may be wrong. There are some stupid questions.

Thanks. Do only some of the instances have an old version? I see one for lemmy.zip but it doesn’t show up for ml or lemmygrad.

So I just pick one of them and I’m good? Any suggestion which one to pick? Just the biggest?

EDIT: Also, am I able to just be logged into both so I can see both sides at the same time or do I have to swap back and forth if I want to check out world or the commy instances?