So… your source to back up your point is an excerpt from a fictional book written by someone who’s expertise is in writing fiction?

Personally, I try not to take the word of someone who is not an expert, or at least versed in that particular area. Just because Pratchett was very a progressive writer doesn’t mean his opinions on gun control should be taken for anything more than his own personal position.

And if we’re just going to cite his fiction as his opinion, we have to assume he was also pro-police violence. I don’t know how much Discworld you’ve red, but even as Vimes progressed as a character and got better in a lot of ways, he always ended up resolving the issue by skirting the actual law and bending the rules to fit his purpose. Often he would espouse how much easier his job and the city would be if he wasn’t restricted by the law. Not everyone else, they still need to follow the law, but Sam Vimes knows better. There were even times when Pratchett would start to push back on that idea like he was going to have Vimes actually understand that police aren’t special and should be as answerable to the law as anyone… then the conflict would always be resolved by Vimes going outside the law and taking it into his own hands. He never learned that lesson. Quite the opposite actually.

So for those unfamiliar, Pratchett was so conservative, he was writing about rogue cops taking the law into their own hands before you kids ever heard those words put together.

don’t even know enough to care in the first place.

but ultimately it’s the user who decides to use the service, and how to use it.

So you admit they don’t have access to the knowledge needed to make better choices for their digital security. Then immediately blame them. I think your bias from the point of view of a one that is already more informed on this sort of thing. If they don’t know they need to know more, how can they be expected to do any research? There’s only so much time in a day so you can’t expect people to learn “enough” about literally everything.

I believe at least 1 or 2 of them said specifically their goal was to take all his money to remove his ability to create further harmful content.

What were you saying then? What was your point of saying “not always the case.”?

So we’re protecting the system against the outliers? So we’re blocking naturally muscular or otherwise more athletic cis girls from playing? Really tall basketball players? Runners who are just naturally faster? How do you judge they fall too far outside the median range?

Or have you given this no thought and you just think boy things are for boys and girl things for girls and you stopped learning at age 3?

I don’t know that you need a semicolon but you could definitely use one, and that would probably be the best way. Semicolons are for when two complete sentences are related. But they can still be formatted as two sentences, or even the same sentence with a comma. Many sentences contain parts that could be standalone sentences. But reading back over the original sentence again I would probably say it can just be rewritten to be more straightforward.

“Another aspect to this video is that Somerset, when actually trying to write some of the material himself, produced complete garbage.”

Mostly I’ve just been reading a lot of philosophy recently which tends to run on a long and complex sentence structure that’s unnecessary and could be a lot simpler, so this kind of thing has been at the front of my mind lately. That’s probably the only reason I even noticed in the first place.

I have no issue with the content provided, but I wanted to give a little constructive criticism on the structure of your writing. Real small. When you say,

There was another aspect to this video, which was that when Somerset actually…

When you say there is a thing, the reader is going to assume the next thing you write to be that thing. So you don’t need the “which is that.” You can just launch right into what you’re going to say, you already set it up. You basically said “I have a thing to say. The thing I have to say is this:”

Everything else is informative and well presented. No other notes.

It could also be the fact that a Mon-Fri 9-5 job just isn’t the norm and often isn’t enough for one to live for a majority of Americans, so they have less time to learn, then make those repairs. In addition, prices for tools and materials have obviously gone up, making those repairs more expensive than “back in the day.”

Say your AC stops working at the height of summer. You go online and download the manual from the manufacturer, follow the directions to diagnose the issue. Awesome! You know what’s wrong, you just need to make a special trip to the hardware store (maybe where you live isn’t close to one since brick-and-mortar is more and more rare) and you can’t afford to wait for it to be delivered. So you buy the part and tools required at whatever price they’re selling for there because you can’t shop around. You don’t have another day off until next week, so you try to work a little bit every day on it, but you’re tired from your two jobs and only have a few hours free every day really. You’re having to stop and start constantly so you never get any momentum going on the work and it’s taking forever and the whole time you don’t have air conditioning so it’s hot as fuck. You don’t really know what you’re doing so it’s slow going. You’re losing sleep because it’s so hot and at least one of your jobs is physical and tires you out before you spend an hour tinkering with it every night. The little time that you normally get to spend with your kids is taken by this repair, and it takes almost a full week, and you have to hope you didn’t make a small mistake, because again, you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re just going from the manual, like “back in the day.” Or you could just dip into the savings and hire a guy to come out and fix it in an afternoon.

But you’re right, it’ probably just kids these days.

How can a crime vary by ideology? Criminal implies legalities. How can your ideological point of view change whether or not a law was broken?

The way I remember that Affect is active. You affect things. Effect is passive, and is the result of something. Affect is a verb (and I think sometimes can be a descriptor). Effect is always a noun. So you can have the resulting effect of an experiment, but if you mess with some variables, you have affected the effect.

Though, in this case, you’re turning the noun into a verb, so you could make the case for either use I think. If you hyphenate it though you can leave it as is without thought. "Streisand-effecting.

Years ago I had a CEO of the company I worked at make a similar comment; “affect/effect. No one really knows which one to use.” So my contrarian, anti-authority ass just looked it up right then and decided to always know.

I don’t know that many people say that because of the story though. It created many of the cinematography methods we still use today. Before it, movies were generally just recreating stage plays in front of a camera. Every scene a stationary shot framing the whole room. No real transitions. For Citizen Kane they tore apart the roof and floor to allow for a camera to get moving shots zooming into a scene and angles not often used before. It changed the way people thought of movies and what they could be. People do love watching the slow decline of the powerful, but that movie is considered one of the best movies for other reasons.

To use your alcoholic analogy. Imagine you were a terrible alcoholic and you decide to get better. Great! But you can’t STOP drinking. Not completely. You have to stop drinking too much while also NEEDING to have 2-3 single drinks a day to survive. So every day. Every. Single. Day. Multiple times a day you have to face that temptation. Your brain and body are craving you down a fifth of vodka when you wake up, but you’re only supposed to drink a watered down Bloody Mary instead. You have to taste that vodka and get a tiny bit of that dopamine hit from it, but you just have to stop. Your kitchen is full of liquor bottles, but you have to just wait until lunch to have your next drink with that craving eating away at you.

And then you hit the breakroom at lunch to sip on your small shot of whiskey you brought from home, but the breakroom is a cocktail bar and everyone around you is downing a couple pints of lager or a Long Island Ice Tea. There’s an open bar right there! Plenty of drinks easily available and your mind is begging you to just go get some. But you’re not abstaining completely. You just have to sit there and sip on your tiny bit of alcohol and that’ll just be enough.

For your nightly drink, you always take it at home. You can’t go to a restaurant with anyone, or even by yourself. You can’t order in. The smallest drinks they serve is a full pint. And still, while you down that Manhattan as quickly as you can every night so as not to think about it too much, you have to go to your kitchen to prepare it with the shelves full of liquor. And just have that one drink. Everyone else gets to have a few drinks a day and move on with their life, but for you every meal is a fight to not go off the deep end while dipping your toes just a little into the pool.

And then tomorrow you have to wake up and do it again.

And every day for the rest of your life.

And that’s just me trying to appeal to your empathy, assuming you have any. There’s science that shows that the dopamine (or maybe serotonin, I always get them confused) that food addicts get is just as addictive as a hard drug habit. It’s literally the same thing. That’s why drugs feel good. It’s not just the altered state that’s addictive. The chemicals your brain release when it gets these things make you crave more. Some people’s brains light up from eating some foods. It’s the same thing as a drug habit, but you can’t quit. Ever. There’s science to back up how wrong you are. You just don’t have to deal with it and you can’t imagine how anyone could have different experiences than you.

You know, I’ve met a few people that I was told were lawyers before meeting them and I was surprised at how kind and empathetic they were. Then, as we would get to talking, inevitably it would come out and they’d say “Oh, I don’t practice anymore. That shits horrible.”

Every lawyer I’ve met that still practices is 100% dead inside and I’ve never felt like I could trust them. Maybe there are lawyers that break this mold, but I am going to baselessly assume they are only a few years from getting out because a good person can’t survive in that world.

Because that individual doesn’t have the power to enforce their personal freedom. The Principal does have the power to enforce their idea of what the “correct” look is. The principal isn’t concerned about raising conditions for the group in actuality, they just want reality to conform to their idea of what they desire it to be. For them, it’s within their rights to their own freedom to bring everything that makes them uncomfortable to heel. Anything that they don’t like is an affront to their personal freedom to make everyone do what they want.

I said this elsewhere, but I’ll say it here too. Your girlfriend should not have to adapt to society to feel less socially awkward. The world needs to be more accepting of people with issues like that. It shouldn’t be socially awkward. It should be okay for her to just say “Hey, sorry, I don’t recognize faces without context. Where do I know you from?”

I had a friend years ago with aphasia and I would help them out when we’d meet by telling them what I’d be wearing and be on the look-out for them so I could walk up to them and they wouldn’t have to pick me out of a crowd. I’d also usually greet them with my name. They were really good at identifying voices usually, but the small effort was always appreciated, and it’s not that hard.

Their aphasia also extended beyond faces, so they would often have problems finding their car if they didn’t park in the same place, so they would take a picture of the car and some landmark near by. They would show me the pictures so I could help them find it.

What I’m saying is, is we as a society are going to be social to this great of a degree, where we interact with dozens of people, we need to learn to make it a place where everyone can also be involved as they are, not force them to conform to impossible standards for them.

Poor working memory is a huge ADHD trait. What the world needs is to drop the expectation of remembering names. ADHD, either as just a natural thing that the human brain does sometimes or as a result of other factors, is becoming an increasingly prevalent thing among a growing portion of the population. Yet the world is not built to accommodate people with it. Medication and therapy help, but the issues never really go away, and the solution in most cases shouldn’t be to “fix” those with ADHD to make them more “normal,” but to make the world into a place where they too can function. And this goes for anything neuro-divergent, obviously. We should get rid if the idea of making different people into “normal” people and instead make society a place where everyone can be accepted and function along side everyone else.

Sorry, I ranted a bit there…

Ooh! I’ve got a thing about this!

In an Episode of the Youtube series Under the Blacklight, David Blight, a Yale professor brought something up that I think brings the American idea of “freedom” into a different context. He says “This whole new idea of what’s liberty and liberty for whom, can also kill. Especially when it replaces the idea of Liberty as that which has to be shared in some kind of common good.”

The idea isn’t really new and is actually deeply rooted in America’s past through to it’s creation. Freedom should be a group concept in which we maximize freedom for the populace. Instead it’s seen as individual freedom only. When you combine this with the idea that freedom is the most important thing, it results in people coming to the conclusion that they are justified in anything in the process of attaining what they want. And they’ll use whatever tools they have available to attain this in as straight a path as they can.

America has always been a champion of personal freedom, whatever they say. It’s founding was about a bunch of business men who didn’t want to pay taxes so they staged a rebellion. There’s still a heavy bent against taxes with the main argument being people don’t want the government to have any power, but really it’s because individuals just want to keep their money while disregarding the ways in which that money would improve the good for all people. At it’s core America is a Selfish nation built of selfishness and getting yours before someone else takes it.

It gets more a little complicated when talking about motives of those in power, but boils down to the same, and they retain that power primarily by banging the “personal freedoms” drum.

To quote famed Discworld philosopher Granny Weatherwax,

“There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.” “It’s a lot more complicated than that–” “No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.” “Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes–” “But they starts with thinking about people as things…”

Thank you for coming to my TED talk

When I was 15 and learning to drive my dad lived in Atlanta. I went there for a visit once and he had me drive there, and everywhere for the whole week. My first experience driving on an interstate included going 90 around the perimeter full of other cars going faster than me and requiring getting from one onramp and moving over 4 lanes to get tot he next exit in half a mile. It was terrifying and I definitely cut waaayyy too many people off driving into town and I’m shocked I didn’t cause a wreck. That was always his teaching style, just throwing me into the deep end. It’s still burned into my brain as one of the most dangerous things I’ve done (And that’s a long list). But, when I had to go into my drivers ed class the following school year I was the only one who was at all comfortable on the interstate and one of the best drivers in the class.

I don’t recommend teaching things that way and I’d never do that with my children, but damn was it effective since I didn’t die. Not dying was probably a close call though.