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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • (For the most part, excepting those I haven’t played the main questline end-to-end.)

    SSSS: X
    S: VII, XIV, XVI
    A: XIII, XII, Tactics, FFTA, VIIR, VIIR-2
    B: VI, IX, XIII-2, Type-0
    C: VIII, IV, Crystal Chronicles, Dissidia, X-2, LR: XIII, Bravely Default
    F: Crystal Chronicles S, the Android port of FFT

    I love everything I’ve listed at C… for me, that just means “interesting ideas that I really love and hope they’ll revisit, but that ultimately didn’t land for me as a game in the form it was released in.” And yes, Bravely Default is a Final Fantasy game imho.

    [Sorry for continually editing this, the Markdown formatting keeps giving me issues.]



  • Yes and no. Even in living memory, the Southern Strategy goes all the way back to the 60s, and explicitly identifies opposition to the civil rights movement as a conservative goal. Going all the way back to the Civil War, it’s undeniable how much the economy of the United States is built on slavery — opposing slavery is thus also an economic argument.

    Point being, I don’t think there was some time in the past where economic policy could be so cleanly separated from racial justice, gender equality, queer rights, disability advocacy, and other things that are now seen as “polarizing.” Every economic debate is, I would posit, at least to some significant degree a proxy for a much more critical human rights debate.













  • It may indeed be, I’m not familiar with Middle East Monitor, but Media Bias/Fact Check are themselves rather infamously biased towards the American right wing. For example, they list the New York Times as nearly as left-biased as their scale goes, despite that the Times has largely taken the Republican party line on a number of issues, such as queer rights (their deceptive coverage of trans rights has been a large part of the current moral panic, and has led to multiple open lettersof protest). The Times was even instrumental in elevating Trump to the presidency with their incredibly dubious decision to give Comey’s procedural memo front page placement and a misleading headline mere days before the election — a choice that Nate Silver has said was possibly deciding on the election. The Guardian is also listed as left-center despite even more extreme transphobic editorial decisions than even the Times.

    Similarly, they list MSNBC as far-left, despite them having Republican-led shows and frequent Republican guests. I’ll definitely agree there’s some degree to which they’re on the left, but it’s pretty minor all told. The idea that they’re far left is just ridiculous, and one that only makes sense from the perspective of America’s right-wing culture.

    At the same time, they list Wall Street Journal as mostly credible, something that just isn’t a serious take on media credibility.

    (Edited to add: a lot of this comes down to the very strong bias in American media towards the “both sides” idea that if two sources disagree, the truth must be in the middle. That bias is especially clear in discussions of climate change, but it’s also prevalent in discussions of other political issues more generally.)


  • Artists, like all laborers, should be fairly compensated for their work. The idea that love of art should necessarily come into conflict with fair compensation is a primary vehicle for continuing the exploitation of creative labor.

    That is somewhat orthogonal to the issue of piracy, though. Some of the most strongly anti-piracy platforms out there are also absolutely terrible in terms of labor rights (hence the current strikes in Hollywood, for instance). It’s notable that in this case, the studio seems to be saying fairly explicitly that piracy is indeed not the main obstacle to fair compensation, such that no conflict between their stance and labor rights needs to exist.


  • Take LGBTQ+ rights. Hell, even narrow down to trans rights. One side finds people like me inconvenient to talk about, the other wants us to be denied all medical care despite the disastrous effects that has on suicide rates (eso amongst trans kids). What is the “balanced” perspective there? What’s the “center” view that you’re striving to achieve using your stochastic parrot engines?

    Even if LLMs did what you claim they did (they don’t), your stated objectives are reprehensible and, if successful, will get people killed.







  • This is so obviously a blatant attempt to take Mr Trump out of the presidential running. And it is a sad day for our nation, considering that others, including Mr Biden, have been caught with classified documents in their possession.

    The false equivalency has really taken root. There’s zero in common between the two cases, and yet it’s such a convenient excuse for right-wingers to fall back on when they’re challenged on their support for Trump.