adderaline

listen. even if we disregard the fact that lots of legal experts, including the peers of the people who put this ruling in place, believe this is an existential threat to democracy, in practice, the ruling puts the authority for determining what is an official act into the hands of the judiciary. the supreme court is the ultimate authority in making these determinations. its a power grab, plain and simple, which grants the president immunity for “official acts”, and places the authority to determine what is and isn’t an “official act” in the hands of the same people who granted him that immunity.

the fact that Roberts is making vague gestures towards some kind of accountability means less than nothing. considering how Trump is behaving, what he and his crowd seem to believe about the breadth of this decision, we should not assume that a room full of people Trump put into power have any interest in ensuring Trump doesn’t “get away with everything”, and we shouldn’t assume that these people are even nominally interested in telling the truth about their intentions, considering just how much of their personal comfort is guaranteed by the institutions that Trump represents, and how resistant they are to accountability for their extremely well documented lies.

your personal confidence in Trump’s eventual, eternally forthcoming guilt relies on the trustworthiness of liars and the moral fiber of bigots. good luck with that.

I’m not understanding a word you are saying

that makes two of us, i guess? i don’t know what it is you’re trying to say i was saying. to be more clear, i’ve been seeing a lot of talk in this thread arguing against the “video games cause violence” claim, as if that was what the lawsuit was about. i don’t think the contents of the article present the families’ lawsuit as primarily concerning that particular claim. i then attempted to describe what i believe their actual claim to be.

i’ve emphasized the words i think are relevant here:

These new lawsuits, one filed in California and the other in Texas, turn attention to the marketing and sale of the rifle used by the shooter. The California suit claims that 2021’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare featured the weapon, a Daniel Defense M4 V7, on a splash screen, and that playing the game led the teenager to research and then later purchase the gun hours after his 18th birthday.

that Call of Duty’s simulation of recognizable guns makes Activision “the most prolific and effective marketer of assault weapons in the United States.”

the fact that Activision and Meta are framing this as an extension of the “video games cause violence” thing is certainly what they’ve decided to do, but it seems to be talking past what the complaint and lawsuit are about, which is the marketing of a Daniel Defense M4 V7 in 2021’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.

the reason i emphasized the gun model is that that seems, to me, to be the core feature of the case the families are trying to make. not that video games cause violence, but that Activision bears responsibility for the actions of the shooter because the shooter played their game, then proceeded to kill people with the specific model of gun that was being advertised in that game. the fact that the article takes the time to reference another case where the specific naming of a gun model lead to a sizable settlement, and says this

The notion that a game maker might be held liable for irresponsibly marketing a weapon, however, seems to be a new angle.

seems to support my reading. that isn’t the same thing as saying video games make you violent, which is the claim a bunch of people in this thread seem to be shadowboxing.

i dunno, maybe there’s some ambiguity there? are you arguing that the lawsuit is about rehashing the video games make you violent claim, or what? i genuinely don’t know what you’re trying to communicate to me. i hope this clarified my stance.

some of y’all definitely aren’t reading the article. this isn’t a “video games cause violence” thing. they are suing Activision and the gun manufacturer Daniel Defense for marketing a specific model of gun in Call of Duty, and maybe? that the Uvalde shooter used that same model of gun in the shooting. i dunno if there’s merit to the argument, but like, categorically, this isn’t the “video games cause violence” argument y’all seem to think it is. its about a gun manufacturer advertising their product in a video game.

plenty of people?

its from the DMX track “X gon’ give it to ya”. it came out in 2002.

i’d like to see how you’d be measuring “performance” in this context, or what you consider to be worthy of merit, because those things are not the objective measures you seem to think they are.

people who are contributing to open source projects are not a perfect Gaussian distribution of best to worst “performance” you can just pluck the highest percentile contributors from. its a complex web of passionate humans who are more or less engaged with the project, having a range of overlapping skillsets, personalities, passions, and goals that all might affect their utility and opinions in a decision making context. projects aren’t equations you plug the “best people” into to achieve the optimal results, they’re collaborative efforts subject to complex limitations and the personal goals of each contributor, whose outcome relies heavily on the perspectives of the people running the project. the idea you can objectively sort, identify, and recruit the 50 “best people” to manage a project is a fantasy, and a naive one.

the point of mandating the inclusion of minority groups in decision making is to make it more likely your project and community will be inclusive to that group of people. the skillsets, passions, and goals that a diverse committee contains are more likely to create a project that is useful and welcoming to more kinds of people, and a committee that is not diverse is less likely to do so. stuff like this is how you improve diversity. in fact, its quite hard to do it any other way.

mineral (especialls potassium, which is quite hard to get from diet) supplementation

taking potassium supplements without being monitored by a medical professional is not recommended. potassium supplements are known to cause bowel lesions, and if you don’t have hypokalemia (low potassium in blood), taking extra potassium can give you hyperkalemia, which can cause serious heart arrhythmias. you probably don’t have hypokalemia, its rare to get it from having too little potassium in your diet, so if you’re taking a supplement without having seen a doctor about hypokalemia, you are genuinely at risk of hyperkalemia, excessive supplementation is a known cause of the condition.

to anybody reading, please don’t take any supplements without talking to a doctor first. vitamin and mineral deficiencies can affect mood and general well being, but so can most medical conditions. unless you’ve taken a blood test, and are sure that the problems you’re experiencing are because of a vitamin or mineral deficiency, taking supplements inappropriately can expose you to risks that are difficult to anticipate if you don’t have a medical education.

If you find yourself just getting tired, anxious and racing heart from caffeine, that is a sign that you are deficient.

this is also not true. caffeine is a central nervous system stimulant. like other stimulants, it will increase your heart rate. feeling anxious when taking stimulants is a very common side effect. fatigue after caffeine wears off is also an extremely common side effect. the solution to feeling these kinds of side effects isn’t to supplement an unrelated vitamin, it’s to reduce your caffeine intake.

ugh. you’ve pressed enough of my buttons to warrant a response.

We’ve come a long way from cave drawings and hieroglyphics

the idea that hieroglyphs are in some way inferior to modern writing systems in an objective way is flawed. hieroglyphs were a diverse writing system comprised of phonograms, logograms, and ideograms, and they could be used contextually to record a rich and complex language as fully featured as our own. the ancient Egyptians wrote their dreams, legends, and histories in this text for over 4000 years. the idea that our modern languages are somehow “better” than ancient languages is to misunderstand what language is.

And yet there is a whole new wave of people unable to use those languages correctly or even rudimentarily who drag civilization backwards by returning to hieroglyphics

the idea that there is a “”“correct”“” way to use language is flawed. the field of linguistics recognizes a vast diversity of languages, dialects, sociolects, and even idiolects that vary from each other in many interesting ways. collapsing that diversity into a single “correct” way to use language is nonsense, and has historically served to exclude those whose dialect is not supported by powerful institutions. just because people aren’t speaking like you are doesn’t mean they’re speaking wrong, or “rudimentarily”.

instead of catastrophizing about how new ways of communicating might end the world, as people have done literally since we started to write down things, linguists have studied how and why emojis exist, and, unsurprisingly, its not because people are getting stupider or something like that. its because they’re useful for conveying non-linguistic social information in informal written communication. without the non-verbal queues, vocal tone, and other contextual information that exists in spoken language, emojis are one of many ways to add context that can’t be represented through text alone. tone indicators and emoticons serve similar roles.

And things like emojis are leading the charge.

this is cringe. small changes in the structure of our informal written communication are never going to be the big, important thing you seem to think they are. if you’re this passionate about language that you think it can be ruined by funny little pictures, learn some linguistics. nobody who knows anything substantive about language shares your concerns, because they’re too busy studying the interesting new cultural phenomenon and what it might mean for our understanding of human communication.

i mean, at the state level blue states are both not trying to get queer people killed, and are expanding access to resources. blue senators aren’t voting with the anti-queer positions on the federal level. they aren’t safe, but complacency and support are not the same thing, and the outcomes for actual people are materially worse in places where republicans have control.

that’s such a wild thing to say lol. if you’re looking at the world and it seems self-evidently simple, you are missing something.

you know, i’ve felt a similar way before. i thought that i had discovered some terrible truth, that everything is meaningless and its not worth it to try pursuing something that’s ultimately without purpose. then i got treatment for depression, and i can scarcely imagine living that way now. i still fundamentally believe that its basically all meaningless, but it turned out that my lack of drive and passion for life was far more related to the concentration of neurotransmitters in my brain and harmful patterns of thinking that it was to any coherent belief about the nature of the world, and that there is quite a lot to enjoy about being fated to die and become nothing. i’m not saying you necessarily have depression or something like that, i just remember feeling the way you describe, feeling absolutely convinced that it was the only rational way to feel about living in a world like this, and being proven wrong. with the right treatment, i found that i was unable stop myself from feeling motivated to do the things i wanted to, unable to stop myself from finding joy and fascination in the small moments of my days.

some healthy self-deprecation is definitely nice, but the eldritch implications of somebody representing their intelligence as convertible to a temperature value transgressing thermodynamic law intrigue me more.

somebody talking about their IQ would be a major red flag for me lol

and Dr. Oz is a cardiac surgeon. not to say healthygamergg is scamming or anything, but medical professionals with media careers should be treated with at least a little skepticism.