Sentrovasi

Posting the article here so you all can make your own minds up.

Yeah, kinda puts paid to the idea that piracy is about sustainable, non-DRMed software for all when the one company whose niche is ensuring that such resources are available is being undermined like this.

How long? A week? More?

The only time I think I ever equate the left and the right is that both sides have gotten increasingly tribalist, which this meme ironically proves.

I guess the other time I equate the left and right is in that both sides are very reluctant to hold their politicians accountable for fear of losing to the other side (which is also a result of that tribalism) - even though the left is more willing to say Biden isn’t great, they’re still giving the DNC a free pass because Trump is worse, and rather than recognising that this election is really Biden’s to lose (he just needs to actually tone down on the things that his voter base doesn’t like), they’re blaming the conscientious objectors who choose to vote their conscience for not being a part of their tribe.

The enlightened centrist meme is a similar issue, where acknowledging any of this qualifies you as being outside of either tribe and therefore also a liability in this game. If it helps, I’m not American and can’t vote in your election anyway, so chill out a bit - I’m not losing your election for you (whichever side you’re on).

It can work if the politicians are willing to change to listen to their voter base. Both war parties aren’t single-issue parties. If parties want to win the democratic mandate to enact other policies, they need to play ball with their electorate. That’s the entire point of a democracy - that the electorate gets to be heard. It seems ridiculous that one side is enacting policies that are almost across-the-board unattractive to their demographic, and they’re getting away with it because it can’t be helped, we can’t vote for the other guy, after all. (Obviously the other side is worse, but presumably their side loves their evil policies.)

Your argument basically amounts to “because our political parties will never listen to the people”, which to me is pretty damning, and ensures that the DNC can continue to never listen to their voters. Do I want Trump to win? Absolutely not, even as someone not in the US. But the DNC can’t be allowed to keep looking at these numbers, shrug, and say people will vote for them anyway.

Edit: My main point is that if Biden loses this because people aren’t willing to vote for him, maybe some of the blame should go to the DNC and not just the “stupid voters”?

I think the biggest bugbear for me is always why blame voters voting their conscience and not blame the politicians who refuse to listen to their voter base?

I think the biggest bugbear for me is always why blame voters voting their conscience and not blame the politicians who refuse to listen to their voter base?

Between Biden originally saying that he wasn’t sure if he would run for a second term (in 2019, to be fair), and comments from 2023 that he’s only running because he doesn’t think anyone else can beat Trump, I don’t think it’s far-fetched to think that he would not run just because he’s “the incumbent president”.

I do also buy the argument that people who would vote for Biden wouldn’t suddenly vote for Trump if another Democratic candidate won the primary. In fact, I feel like from discourse on this platform it seems like the opposite is true: some people would vote for Trump simply because the DNC continues to push Biden.

Not sure if I’m not getting something or you’re not getting something, but it doesn’t seem like a non-sequitur. The idea is that if the DNC chooses its candidates, it can force Biden to step down by pressuring him, forcing him to take the route of “heroically stepping down” (publicly) return2ozma predicts will happen.

Now I don’t think it’s likely because Biden seems as establishment as it gets, but saying that the DNC chooses who wins the primary is not a non-sequitur in that scenario.

I don’t know much about how it works, but will Elon “switch it off” the same way that he prevented Starlink from being used by Ukraine in Crimea? If he has the capability to do so but does not choose to do so, that seems a red flag.

Again, you’re assuming the people criticising Biden for being old are Trump supporters.

The blind polarisation in American politics is getting really bad.

I don’t think Trump supporters have a monopoly on being critical of Biden…

It’s weird cos you’re the only person bringing up pirating first (others are bringing it up as a talking point you’ve raised), and that’s not the dichotomy - it’s not dubious reselling sites or pirating, it’s Humble Choice, the topic of your post, where the games are already discounted, the developers have decided to opt in, and some money is actually going to charity.

Even if you bring up your original post as providing “options for everyone”, it was written in the spirit of advertising grey market sites as an alternative to Humble Choice, and therefore it’s entirely fair that others are bringing up the harms of grey market sites so that everyone knows what the risks are between them. I used to use those grey market sites as a kid more than a decade ago before I understood that they were a tool by scammers to make their money, and now I no longer use them. It would only be honest for you to have talked about that in your original post rather than ignoring it because the only alternative to you is piracy.

Slay the Princess is a relatively light game (largely narrative) that has this as part of its conceit.

Be me

Post on 4chan asking others to rate my dinner

Photoshop a fork so nobody will think I don’t have a fork

MRW people ask me why I photoshopped a fork into the picture

You’re wilfully applying a very stunted concept of “wanted” to a legal system that deals in fact. I’m not saying you don’t understand whatever it is you claim to be supporting. What I’m saying you do not understand is the concept of “wanting” and “mens rea” (as it applies in law, but also as it applies under your framework - you’ve chosen instead to just pretend it’s no longer relevant instead of redefining it under your framework - like I said, the laziest kind of science.) And there’s really no point in me repeating what I’ve said before.

Maybe what I’ll leave you with is a possible definition of “want” under your system, which is one step further in thought than it seems you’ve ever gone: an action is wanted if the action would have been taken with no immediate or overt external (needs to be defined) motivation. This means if they were abused as a kid and later this translated into abusing other people, they still wanted to abuse them.

(As a note, I’m not saying this is the correct definition, but this is what is needed for people to start discussing what should and shouldn’t be in this definition.)

Saying “nobody can want to do anything because determinism” is an incredibly lazy determinism because it’s starting with the axiom and then not bothering to come up with a proper framework to explain everything else in the world. If you continue to protest it not being lazy there’s really nothing else we have to talk about.

You don’t understand. Obviously everyone is a product of their environment. But after all of that, if the person wanted and intended to do something because of all of these different dispositions and upbringings and backgrounds, then they have mens rea.

Like I said before, it’s purely a finding of fact. Does it mean that there shouldn’t be mitigating circumstances? No, there might well be reasons to argue that they were only doing so out of desperation. Nonetheless, they had mens rea.

Recognising that there are all these complicated factors but not taking the time to at least make sense of them is the worst kind of determinism. Sure, there’s no free will in your conception. There still needs to be laws and concepts like mens rea still need defining to allow for the protection of “innocents” under the law.

Guilt and mens rea can be quite compatible with your admittedly strange idea of there being no free will (and yet trying to parse laws under a framework of people having free will), unless you believe that all acts are coercive (which is quite reductive).

All you need to ask yourself is if the person wanted and intended to do that, whatever the nexus of causes led up to them wanting to do the act.

It seems very weird (and a bit lazy) to subscribe to a framework of there being no free will and yet not even trying to contextualise the safeguards of the legal system to fit that framework. Sure you may agree with putting people in jail to prevent net societal harm, but mens rea is one of the checks to ensure that they will cause societal harm to others, and without being able to settle such a question of fact you will instead never be able to put anybody, even if they need to be put behind bars, there.

Singapore. And Singapore.

It’s unfortunate that you’ve chosen to focus on a semantic nitpick as the only thing to reply to rather than all the other more interesting talking points.

It’s also unfortunate that you’ve chosen to condescend throughout all the posts you’ve written, which really makes me want to not rely to you.

That said, you’ve already shown a brutal contradiction:

Wikipedia:
‘to serve as a premise or starting point for further reasoning and arguments’

Tutors:
‘contribute to an axiomatic system’

Wolfram:
‘a proposition regarded as self-evidently true without proof. The word “axiom” is a slightly archaic synonym for postulate.’

What these definitions all say that I think you’re wilfully choosing to ignore (or just not reading carefully enough) is that these are all assumptions meant to make a system internally logical.

It’s also amazing how you can say

‘Saying 1 + 1 = 2 serves as foundation for further deductive reasoning […] is generic, imprecise, and worthless’

when that is literally what half of your definitions also say.

‘Saying 1 + 1 = 2 is Axiomatic is like saying Oxygen is an axiom or axiomatic. To further build the periodic table. No, Oxygen just is, a fundamental piece of reality which is also true!’

You’re still not getting it, which means you’re not reading anything I’ve said at all about human-centric perception (which is a shame given how much time I’ve had to spend trying to parse your poor semantics.)

There’s a difference between the element and atoms of Oxygen that do exist in our world and the name and observed properties of Oxygen that we have derived and given to Oxygen. The strange thing is that I think while everyone else agrees that the testing, observing, and ascribing of properties to something is science, you think that the existence of oxygen itself is science (and therefore science is truth?)

To bring it back to your original equivalences, 1 is true in most languages and systems because along the way, humans decided to use 1 to notate a truth value. If we had wanted (and some systems do), 0 could have been used as the truth value, or even a letter. We’ve then decided to build entire lines of logic from that number, and obviously from within the observational parameters of this framework, 1 must be true for any of our observations to be internally consistent. But two things:

1. These are our observations, not reality per se.
2. 1 is still an abstraction. Is the concept behind 1 an absolute truth? For all we know 0.99 (recurring) is a much more accurate abstraction for the 1s of the universe. 1 is our human attempt to bring some order to a confusing world.

Fundamentally your dogmatic clinging to axioms as somehow underpinning some universal truth when they are meant to be convenient frameworks to build upon shows a very shallow understanding of the building blocks with which humans have built our understanding of the world. I highly recommend you take the scientific method to heart and try posting these “deep” thoughts in other places to see if anyone else agrees that they’re deep. If they don’t, I invite you to revise your hypothesis and reassess whether what’s “true” to you really is true to the mathematicians and scientists of the world.

Edit: Just want to add that I won’t be replying to you anymore as it’s taking a lot of more time and the worse thing is I don’t think you’re even trying to understand what others have to say despite your talk about “no shallow thinking” (lol). There’s no point in talking to a brick wall, especially a condescending one, and I’m sure we both have better things to do with our lives.