Does it matter what your “default” state is? If you’re safe until I threaten to harm you unless you comply with my demands, then I’m obviously oppressing you. If you’re in danger until I offer to rescue you only if you comply with my demands, your options are the same (either harm or compliance) but the two situations don’t intuitively feel morally equivalent to me.

With that said, humans do innately interpret an offer of rescue contingent on paying a very high price as a form of compulsion. Someone who makes such an offer is going to be viewed much more negatively than someone who simply does not offer to help at all. Maybe it’s a way of making credible threats?

A purely logical person cannot negotiate with the rescuer, because the rescuer knows that purely logical people will pay any price. However, a person known to be irrational and willing to die rather than be taken advantage of can negotiate. There’s a trade-off between the advantage of negotiating and the very high price of failing to come to an agreement, and I suppose the strength of humans’ innate intolerance for unfairness has been tuned by evolution to attain this balance (or perhaps it attained balance in our ancestral environment but no longer does in our civilized state).

I think that those are different meanings of the word “oppressive”, which has a moral component when referring to human actions but not when referring to natural phenomena. You can only be wronged by another person, not by nature.

Imagine the following scenarios:

1. You’re alone on the planet. You struggle to survive.

2. Now there’s a wealthy person on the other side of the planet, where his lifestyle has no effect on you. He could rescue you but he chooses not to.

3. The wealthy person offers to rescue you on the condition that you must work for him. He would get most of the products of your labor but survival would still be easier than it was when you were alone.

4. Now you have no choice except to accept the wealthy person’s offer. Survival is still easier than it would be if you were alone, but there isn’t anywhere left where you could survive alone.

Your life is oppressive in each of these scenarios in the sense that simply surviving is difficult and there’s no possibility of improvement. However, there’s clearly no moral component to that in (1) because you are alone, and (4) seems like it almost certainly has a moral component. However, in every steps from (1) to (4) you’re either better off or not worse off than you were before. Where does the moral component come from?

If you want to simplify the thought experiment, imagine being the only person in existence. You would still need to struggle just to meet the basic needs of survival, but you would definitely not be oppressed.

sigh

It’s well-known that emulators are legal. See Sony v. Connectrix from 2000. Emulators for various Nintendo systems are freely available.

The emulators that were sued were not sued simply because they were emulators.

The feeling I have for Pikachu must remain hidden.

That would be a very frightening snake.

Well technically you can neglect anything you want.

Does he mean that his plates and registration sticker are from the real department of transportation or is the capitalization wrong?

Why would he say something so easily disproven at this point?

His reputation for honesty and good judgement is ruined!

I think the Romans would have been insulted by the implication that they weren’t very good at torturing (a particularly unwise way to insult them) but the point still stands because the Romans tortured a lot of other people too, including the two men being crucified next to Jesus.

Ah, I see now. Elon Musk intended to tell some bad puns at the inauguration but then he accidentally did a couple of Nazi salutes instead. Puns are so easy to mix up with other things, which is why now he’s mixing up puns and an apology. It’s a mistake that anyone could make.

The good groups are the ones who are very interested in fantasy Nazis ironically.

Are you really ok with a relationship in which your wife doesn’t want to touch you? I’m your age and I recently ended a long-term relationship with a woman who also made me smile often. It was very difficult for me to do that because I enjoyed her company and even more so because I didn’t want to hurt her, but ultimately I decided that a relationship where I wasn’t getting and probably never would be getting something I needed didn’t work for me even if it was a good relationship in many other ways.

I’m not telling you to end your relationship. It’s possible that your relationship is still the right one for you. However, the compromise you’re proposing here wouldn’t make most other people happy if they were in your situation. Make sure that you’re being honest with yourself. If I had been honest with myself, I would have ended my relationship years earlier than I did and that would have been better both for me and for my ex.

What’s wrong with the idea?

Sorry, I only date women who would prefer to wear the French maid outfit themselves.

Trump in 2024 is the President of working class voters, so I’m sure they’ll be fine with this. It’s a good thing that the Democrats and the rich people who support them aren’t in power!

I was surprisingly old (about 10 or 11) before I understood on an emotional level that “everybody dies” meant that the people I cared about would die. Before that time, I could have logically reasoned that these people were a part of “everyone” but I still felt like they would live forever.

What I’m saying is that I think it’s realistic that Simba knew that if there was a new king then the old king was dead, but he never really thought about what that meant about his own life.

Those mortgages have an interest rate of less than 3%, but now the returns on even low-risk investments are higher than that, so the borrower is better off investing the money, using some of the profit from that to pay mortgage interest, and keeping the rest.