It depends. Consider the inputs and outputs of this judgement:

Inputs:

• How bad was the act itself?
• What were the intentions behind the act? A mistake? A crime of passion? Or a deliberate act of greed or malice?
• Was this just a one time thing you don’t think is indicative of their future behavior or is it a part of a pattern of behavior?

Outputs:

• What are the stakes of this judgement? Are we trying to punish this person or at least prevent them from doing the thing again? Or is this just for our own moral or social understanding?
• Can the person be rehabilitated or is it a waste of time trying to give them the benefit of the doubt?

Just as an example I think about sometimes: Sometimes you will get some older politician running for office. They have done and said some horrific things in the past. You point to that as a reason they shouldn’t be elected again. Someone comes out of the woodwork (I’m sure entirely organically /s) and says something like “can’t people change? Don’t they deserve a second chance?” And sure. People can change. And if that politician wants to go work at a McDonalds or something I’m not going to go out of my way to cancel them, but when we have millions of people who could be elected, most of whom, didn’t, idk, support segregation, why does this guy in particular deserve another chance to be in a position of power when he’s already used it in a bad way? In terms of your example, maybe if the sex offender is remorseful and goes to therapy for the issue, they could go reintegrate into society… just maybe not in a job that involves directly working with children right? That sounds reasonable? We can acknowledge the steps they took to reform themselves but also recognize that they lost the right to be trusted at certain kinds of things?

There are some crimes though that are so bad that they can never be forgiven. I don’t think the oil execs who deliberately lobbied to effectively cause the end of the world so they could keep profiting off of it for decades should be forgiven. I don’t think there is a punishment severe enough to serve justice for such a crime. No amount of work they could do to try to fix the problem could undo the damage which they have already caused. There is no actual means of redemption.

Clearly they invaded California for their strategic reserve of almonds. I wish that was more of a joke than it is given how many places we’ve actually messed with for the sake of some random luxury produce.

This is just a depressing cycle I go through. It takes me a long time to find something I’m interested enough in to get over the hump of starting anything -> I spend way too much time and thought on it to the exclusion of other things -> I finish it or get burned out on it if it’s something I can’t finish -> Go back to being depressed at not having anything to occupy me and feel too u motivated to even start stuff that I might have had on the back burner before. -> Repeat

Maybe? I guess it depends on how genuinely committed they are to fighting for everyone. Personally I believe that Capitalism is the big thing we need to deal with first and foremost and that social equality will be easier when we’re all economically secure enough to resist exploitation but… it doesn’t always go that way. We kind of saw how mid century labor union’s exclusion of black workers not only was bad for black people, but also weakened the movement because it lacked that broader solidarity with the rest of society. (Among other factors that eventually brought it down obviously.)

So I do think we could benefit a lot by having a party that focused it’s efforts on the most critical issues: Inequality, democracy in and out of the workplace, climate change, and greatly reducing the military, police, and surveillance state’s capabilities and authority. Things that don’t just affect all of us, but which represent fundamental barriers towards all forms of progress. But we do still need to be careful that this lack of a more explicit social program doesn’t allow the party to become exclusionary. Progress for some at the expense of others isn’t progress. It’s also just strategically bad.

This is what has been most depressing/distressing about watching all of this unfold. People online (and I’m not immune to this either) have this impulse to think “Surely not right? Surely these people will come to their senses and not just blindly follow transparently evil orders right? We’ve been told these people are heroes who stand up for freedom and democracy and our safety right? Surely at least some of them will do the right thing right?” It’s so ingrained into us through support our troops propaganda and various TV/Movies showing them and cops as principled heroes saving the day. We’ve also seen this with corporations. “Wow I can’t believe this company turned away from DEI so quickly. I can’t believe this company is going to keep selling surveillance tech to the government. Surely someone will see how wrong that is.”

And then I snap back to my senses and remember history. We’ve seen what horrors these people are willing to commit, whether they want to or are “just following orders.” Maybe you at least believe that they won’t do it to US, as cynical as that is… and then you remember Kent State, segregation, the violent crackdown on unions, the police rallying around protecting cops who execute people in the streets, etc.

Nobody is going to come to their senses. None of them are coming to save us from themselves. If we don’t stand up for ourselves this is just going to happen and be another chapter in a long history of cruelty.

How often are those military coups AGAINST the fascists? Hell a lot of those military coups were backed by our military/intelligence agencies. I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for the US military to be the bastion against tyranny.

True. That is the generalization of this rule.

Ads are like a gas (the physics kind). They expand to take up all available space.

Not a complete list, but I made a spreadsheet to help me keep track of the games I bought but then never or barely played to try to get me to revisit them in some organized way. Outside of that, there’s just the steam library. Anything further back from my time playing on consoles is kind of just lost to time and memory unless it was a particularly memorable game.

I don’t know how I haven’t heard this before. What the hell was that song? lol.

Good to know. Thanks.

People do know they could have just googled things and looked at the top results before right? Even with all the enshitification it’s gone through it will still usually yield something useful for any topic that isn’t super niche. Like if I search “shorting” the top 3 results are articles from Wikipedia, Investorpedia, (don’t know enough about it to know if it’s reliable) and Charles Schwab, a source with a conflict of interest since they probably sell that service, but they’re probably at least going to explain why you’d want to buy it from them, and then as a bonus the 4th result is an ELI5 Reddit thread, which while probably not the most reliable source of info, is probably about on the same level as randomly asking your SO about a topic which they’re not an expert in.

I wasn’t planning to get the game because of the 3 player thing but I already knew that… why are people buying it then getting mad about it? Is the steam store page just not clear enough about it? In which case, fair.

Yeah the souls games are something I like in spite of all of the things wrong with them. There is just so much jank and bizarre design decisions.

I kinda hate that all of the games that have tried to copy them have done so to a point of not critically evaluating everything in them. And then they have all the same flaws, but none of the unique charm that makes me look past them for FROM’s games.

But numbers are also text

What… uh… I can’t imagine this movie being weird enough to feel like a movie based on a FROMSOFT game while still being accessible to the wide audience needed for a big budget fantasy movie to make money.

Why does it happen? Because the world is crazy and if nobody does anything about it then it starts to feel like you’re the crazy one. It also doesn’t help that there’s all this propaganda out there to make you feel that way.

But what do you do about it? Questioning your beliefs on a factual or analytical level is very useful. I don’t think I could have reached my current beliefs in the first place without that openness to new information and critical eye towards what I knew.

But I think the important thing is to separate that out from what you VALUE. What are the things which you care about independent of what the facts are? Do you value treating people kindly? Then it shouldn’t matter if it turned out that some other group was actually inferior. That shouldn’t change that core value. Now if you only value people based on how useful they are, then thinking that someone else was inferior would change how you treat them.

Thinking about my own beliefs and values, my political beliefs have changed a lot over the years, from vaguely American liberalism to some kind of communism, but my values haven’t changed. That’s because the values nominally espoused by the mythological American national identity are good ones. What’s not to like about freedom, equality, and the pursuit of happiness? Democracy sounds great!

But as I learned more about the world, it became more clear how America failed to live up to those values and more precisely, didn’t really hold those values, or at the very least had subtly different meanings of them that created wide gaps in how those values were acted on.

“Freedom” in America is something you can buy. The more money and power you have, the more free you are. And the freedom to use that power to exploit others consequently means you’re less free if you’re poor.

“Equality of opportunity” that is blind to historic inequality and power structures creates this illusion that everyone had a fair shot to succeed or fail and therefor “deserve” where they end up where in reality we never started on equal footing and where we end up is largely an accident of birth. Rich people aren’t necessarily better or harder working than poor people. People don’t actually get to keep the value of their work, it’s just not taken through taxes, but by capitalists in the form of profits. (Also, this is another values thing, but even if the assertions of meritocracy and equality of opportunity were true, I still don’t think a society with this level of poverty and inequality is an acceptable outcome even if people somehow ended up where they were through their own failures.)

Democracy in an unequal society where the rich can put their thumbs on the scale isn’t really democracy. Plus when you learn about the founding of that “democracy”, you learn how explicitly it was set up to favor those powerful few over the many. This is kind of one of the things that makes me feel crazy. I didn’t read about this on some obscure internet blog or commie book, literally everyone in the country learns about the founding in school and more or less learns its anti-democratic bend. It’s not hidden, it’s just that everyone kind of forgets it or doesn’t really internalize the way it relates to our experiences. Also, if we like democracy so much, why do we effectively suspend that democracy for half our waking lives when we go into work? Why shouldn’t people have a say in that? “Nobody’s forcing you to work” doesn’t really work when the alternative is starvation and homelessness.

I still want the ideal, I just recognize the ways I’ve been lied to by people who claim to share that ideal. And that’s where you have to be careful. Not everyone is honest about what they want. ( Sometimes even with themselves) There’s the saying on the left “scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds” because for some of these people, when you really confront their beliefs with evidence that contradicts it, instead of growing and changing, they just reveal their true colors. Some people who talk about equality while being racist aren’t just misinformed, they actually do believe in hierarchy and the concept of equality is merely a way to rationalize away the that hierarchy. Sometimes you show people how the US fails to be democratic and they reveal that they don’t even think democracy is good. That people are too stupid or evil to rule over themselves.

So yeah. Test your beliefs about the world, but the only way you have a metric to test them against is if you know what your values are in the first place.

Yeah I’m sort of interested in the game but I wanted to wait for full release. I get that a lot of indie games are helped tremendously by the money and player feedback they get out of early access, but if if the whole bottom falls out because not enough people bought the game you’ve very openly told people “this isn’t finished, don’t buy into this if you aren’t willing to be a part of the testing process,” then something is very wrong. Early access income should help bridge the gap, but you shouldn’t be entirely reliant on it.

Thanks for the detailed answer! It did turn out to be Lenovo’s software. Also I haven’t checked for killer Wi-Fi on this, but the gaming laptop I had 2 PCs ago did have that and we ended up having tons of Wi-Fi problems we were never able to fix. I guess that might be why.

I didn’t know windows doesn’t actually fully shut down. That’s confusing.

Thanks. I just tested this myself with another device and it seems to be working. I guess we’ll see if it’s fine with others later, but looks promising.