Maybe a stupid question, couldn’t someone just fork it and remove this?

I enjoy Jared Henderson. Frustrated there’s nothing about free software movement anywhere in this video

When i was a kid, my grandma lived with us. She’d listen to this piece of garbage non-stop. She had me parroting the drivel he spouted. Nothing could make me forgive this dude for poisoning her mind, and nothing will make me forget how she helped make me into a hateful little kid. Glad they’re both dead, only hoping my own mother doesn’t take up the mantle with my nieces and nephews. She does not understand the harm and the trauma she perpetuates.

I don’t really agree, but I do understand where you’re coming from. I do think you’re right in pointing out that all these behaviors give the individual a more likely chance to survive, but I also think that is exactly Kropotkin’s point. That these social behaviors were naturally selected, the individuals who displayed them were more likely to survive.

But where I disagree is in the fact that the individuals themselves aren’t consciously thinking, “this is what will give me, an individual, the best chance to survive.” You see what I mean? For example, the horses forming a circle around the young to defend from wolves – they’re not thinking, “I need to protect myself.” They have an instinct to protect the young, so the young go in the center. If an adult were purely individualistic, it would enter the circle, itself, right? Or if my neighbors house is on fire, what’s most advantageous for me as an individual is to run away, but I feel compelled to yell for help. Or kittens – wouldn’t they be better off as individuals if they just killed off their siblings, so that they could have a full mouth? But no, being raised with other young kittens allows them to learn to hunt through play, to groom themselves, and to learn socialization tactics and reading body language, which further increases their chances of survival when encountering other cats as adults.

So yeah, you’re totally right in a sense, animals act in these ways because their ancestors passed on the genes that predisposed them to acting this way, and those behaviors make them more likely to survive because they (the behaviors) made their ancestors more likely to survive. See what I’m getting at? Kropotkin’s point is that it is evolutionarily advantageous to engage in social activity and cooperation.

I totally buy it, personally. You ever think about why we blush involuntarily? Or why we feel so wretched when we think we haven’t been accepted socially? Why it feels good to just help someone, or when we wince when we see someone else in pain? We’re social animals, built to socialize. I mean, we all speak a language! We naturally are compelled to talk baby-talk at babies. We touch each other, even in platonic, non sexual ways. These social behaviors are rewarded because they helped us survive, yes, but we don’t think about them as actions we take to increase our chance of survival. We do them because they feel good, because they’re supposed to.

I think learning anything new is like this, yknow? No pain no gain, as they say.

Thanks unruffled. That passage from Kropotkin really moved me when I first read it. atro really struggled with rule 1. Hope your day goes good!

Hey LibertyLiz. Nothing to add, just wanted to say hi. I enjoy seeing your name pop up spitting truth. Hope you’re doing good!

What a dick-ass comment. I’m not trying to dunk on you dude. If you don’t wanna read more about the thing you yourself are professing (humans inherently bad), where that idea got popularized, and people who have refuted it throughout history, you don’t have to. But I find it interesting and just wanted to give you a reading suggestion. Christ.

You should check out mutual aid by pyotr kropotkin. Sure, we have several thousand years of history of the carnage of states and individuals. Thing is, humans have existed for over 100,000 years – there is a lot missing about what our “natural” state is. Archaeological and anthropological evidence show that human societies exist on a wide spectrum of peaceful --> violent, stateless --> hierarchical.

Your implication that humans are inherently bad, cruel, competing for resources, etc. is a vestige of theory from Thomas Hobbes, connected to social darwinism, that completely ignores the observed behavior of a vast amount of animal and insect species, wherein individuals aid one another out of no apparent immediate benefit to themselves.

A somewhat famous passage from kropotkin to illustrate:

[…] to reduce animal sociability to love and sympathy means to reduce its generality and its importance, just as human ethics based upon love and personal sympathy only have contributed to narrow the comprehension of the moral feeling as a whole. It is not love to my neighbour — whom I often do not know at all — which induces me to seize a pail of water and to rush towards his house when I see it on fire; it is a far wider, even though more vague feeling or instinct of human solidarity and sociability which moves me. So it is also with animals. It is not love, and not even sympathy (understood in its proper sense) which induces a herd of ruminants or of horses to form a ring in order to resist an attack of wolves; not love which induces wolves to form a pack for hunting; not love which induces kittens or lambs to play, or a dozen of species of young birds to spend their days together in the autumn; and it is neither love nor personal sympathy which induces many thousand fallow-deer scattered over a territory as large as France to form into a score of separate herds, all marching towards a given spot, in order to cross there a river. It is a feeling infinitely wider than love or personal sympathy — an instinct that has been slowly developed among animals and men in the course of an extremely long evolution, and which has taught animals and men alike the force they can borrow from the practice of mutual aid and support, and the joys they can find in social life.

This isn’t to endorse primitivism, or Rousseau’s state of nature. I’m not sure I would even say “humans are innately good,” necessarily. Clearly, we have the potential for evil. But the idea that capitalist competition, social darwinism, humans reveling in their own private benefit, greed, and cruelty, is natural, is both played out and nonsensical.

edit: Source https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-mutual-aid-a-factor-of-evolution

Those are fair viewpoints. I’m no marxist-leninist. But I will say, capitalism doesn’t work on large scale either. So why keep it around?

Edit: in other words I think what you say is accurate but doesn’t address the problems I brought up about liberals

Idk I feel like liberals are responsible for enabling people like trump by always trying to maintain the status quo of capitalist growth and the illusion that access to marketplaces = rights. In the case of women, of lgbtq folks, of brown people, etc. I feel like they are half the whole problem. They are also in service to capital, and perpetuate the myth that you can serve your community with integrity while also taking in loads of cash from large organization as a politician

Spoken like a true 12 year old. Lmao

Wow, I gave you a lot of benefit of the doubt in my comments, but you’re really out here to just denigrate other people’s tastes, aren’t you? How refined, how cultured your game library must be. How sweet your shit must smell. How does it feel up there, where you’ll never touch a game frequented by us Dorito-eaters and us Mountain-Dew-drinkers? Feels good, huh? Feels better.

What a fucking joke.

For sure for sure. I definitely read it that way, in part, because I have to consciously remind myself that my taste is my own and I should try not to dismiss people who like their art to be more…palatable, i guess? Because I have the capacity to be that guy, unfortunately. So I try to watch a blockbuster every once in a while, so to speak.

I think it was probably the comparison between GTA and Madden and CoD that threw me, because they have almost no similarities besides being AAA.

Their comment kinda reminded me of how the Kingdom Come: Deliverance fandom can be. I mean, I fucking love KCD and KCD2, they’re two of the best games I’ve ever played. They can slow AF though, and frustrating at times. But whenever someone mentions that, or that they didn’t like it, someone else invariably comes along and completely dismisses their opinion, like “You just don’t understand it,” or “Maybe you just don’t have the attention span to really immerse yourself.” It’s like dude, you don’t need to make someone feel bad for not liking a game.

I think GTA online could be compared to Madden and CoD in that they all have aggressive(-ly lame) monetization tactics. But the way jordanlund frames it (sorry jordan, I don’t mean to rag on you – like I said, I can also be like this) sounds more to me like a “i only listen to artists with less than 1000 monthly listeners” type of statement

I get it’s a massive franchise, like Madden or Call of Duty… don’t buy those either.

whew, I’m trying to understand your comment, but this is kinda coming off pretty…holier-than-thou? Which, I do get that because I can find myself like that with movies/tv, but still…we gotta let people like what they like.

In this case though, I honestly think this is a pretty terrible comparison. Madden and CoD don’t have massive single player appeal that GTA or RDR have. They are total schlock in that regard (though, I hear CoD’s recent campaigns are actually good).

GTA and RDR on the other hand very skillfully mix elements of RPG, immersive sim, and adventure game. They’re huge sandboxes for the player to explore and discover new things, within which are nestled very well written stories that critique modern life and touch upon themes that, yes, you could find them in various indie games if you look a bit, but are somewhat unique in the blockbuster gamescape. It’s difficult to find other single player games with the scope of Rockstar games, though I think it is getting easier.

But comparing GTA to Madden or CoD is kinda whack unless you’re looking at GTA Online in isolation.

I don’t think there is meaning. I’ve never read Camus or Sartre and don’t really know what determinism is (quick read on Wikipedia, I think I agree with it?), but

I keep living because it makes me feel good for the most part, and because the thought of dying makes me feel bad for the most part.

It has radicalized my previously centrist brother-in-law to the left and continues to do so.

Darktable is a godsend to me for converting film negatives.But I pretty much only use image conversion, RGB curve, then fidget with the exposure and RGB sliders in negadoctor a little more then I’m done. No idea how to do anything else.

Btw for anyone reading this, the original is about a US judge of Mexican heritage who was presiding over the Trump University fraud case.

Trump didn’t actually say this about Pope Francis, as far as we know.