Karpal
2mo ago
I didn't watch the video, so this is more of a general question: Doesn't the guy having a gun change this? If a guy tackles you and there isn't a huge skill/strength disparity it'll probably take him at least a minute to beat you to death. If you have a visible gun, it takes him seconds to take it and kill you. At the very least you need to secure your gun (taking away from your ability to defend against strikes) at which point he reacts to you reaching for your gun and the two of you are fighting for control of a gun. What am I missing?
Karpal
8mo ago
She had red hair, I think. I can only remember three fremen hair colours, liet was 'sandy', chani was red and stilgar had a black beard. No one reacts to liet or chani as being atypical. I vaguely remember some mention of darker and lighter skin colours too. The fremen definitely seem to be culturally inspired by the bedouin, but generically, perhaps more diverse.
Karpal
1yr ago
I'm not looking to argue with you at all, I think you're on the right side of this issue and I'm a lurker at heart. I'm complaining that otherwise articulate commenters are doing the written equivalent of repeating what their opponent is saying in a stupid voice.
You and other replies are pretty convincing that (this particular pattern of) single issue posting is no good, but there must be a better response than this. I don't remember you responding to his arguments in the past, (I'm sure you did and I didn't pay enough attention to usernames). But claiming your opponent is lying about their motives and presenting their argument as a miss-spelled jeer stands out here (it wouldn't stand out anywhere else I've come across).
That said, I appreciate that you don't care what I think of your responses, I enjoy that this place gives lurkers a chance to feel part of it. Occasionally that means we blurt out or frustrations before crawling back under our rocks.
Karpal
1yr ago
Is single-issue posting really such a problem? If a user has a limited knowledge or interest range, what else are they supposed to do? I could understand limiting top level posting frequency so that a single user can't swamp the forum, but allowing them to post and then giving other users free reign to strawman and attribute malicious motives to them seems to be the worst of both worlds. We have a mod, @Amadan, openly and repeatedly refusing to respond to this user's arguments because, (to paraphrase) 'you're only making these points because you hate "da joos" and think they're "lizard people"' (which is just as stupid inane as "muh freeze peach"). To me, that's a far bigger failure of this forum's ideals than a few users with their own hobby horses.
Karpal
1yr ago
It would be good to see, at least, the comment that is replying to (is there an easy way to do this that I'm missing?) some are completely baffling without that.
Karpal
1yr ago
I'm not one of those folks, but I'd like to answer anyway.
When the transition is good enough to be unrecognisable, there would be no dissonance required to refer to trans people as the sex they appear to be.
But I'm not resistant to demands that I refer to trans people, without mistake, as they want me to, or even demands that I pretend this is my natural reaction, because of a little mental dissonance (being polite requires lots of that), I'm resistant because I suspect that the demand comes from an Orwellian (if often subconscious) urge to demonstrate and maintain domination over social inferiors by forcing them to declare that which they know to be false. The value of language policing comes from the harm you can cause to your social inferiors. It's the exact impulse that drives a bully to make his victim say something humiliating.
If this suspicion is correct, in your bodyswapping future, there would be no value in demanding (with the accompanying threat of punishment) that we use all the correct pronouns and declare all the correct dogmas on this issue because it wouldn't cause us any dissonance to do so.
Karpal
1yr ago
Principles have to be weighed against one another. Otherwise you don't have principles, you have a principle.
Karpal
2yr ago
Perhaps one of us is misunderstanding this post. As I understand it, it could be written "I've always found 'conflict theory' explanations more convincing, but you have made a very compelling case for a 'mistake theory' explanation, good job".
If that's a fair summary, I'm struggling to see a personal attack.
Wouldn't trade-offs being everywhere in evolutionary biology count? I'm not an expert, but as I understand it, if intelligence were a 'free lunch' wouldn't we expect to see far less variation in intelligence in humans? Natural selection having already optimised it?
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