Orcocracy

AI, algorithms, and the statistics that power them are not that smart. They have no way of knowing for sure what is in your head when you hit the delete button.

Yes, the drone pilots double-tapping weddings sure are heroes.

Hang on, how did a US soldier give Donald Trump the freedom to say stupid shit? Who was going to take that freedom away, and perhaps the most bizarre part of all: why did the soldier stop them from taking that freedom away?

There was a GSM version of that Nokia phone from the original Matrix film sold around the world. Are GSM radio bands from the late ‘90s/early 2000s still in use? If so it would presumably still work for calls and texts in some countries.

The spring activated thing in The Matrix was only in the movie though. On the real phone you had to actually pull that plate down yourself, which made the phone seem like a complete disappointment back in the day when I once met someone who actually had one. This person could sort of fiddle it with their hand to kinda push it out one smooth motion, but it just wasn’t quite right.

I think it’s in the book “Games of Empire” where the argument is made that the worlds in fantasy games are usually just recreations of our modern capitalist world, aforementioned financial shenanigans very much included. These games often have the aesthetics of a kind of mediaeval feudalism, but in-game economies feature very modern things like decimalised currency, auction houses, arbitrage, consumerist alienation, instant payments, and so on, all of which would be very out of place in a feudal world. Fantasy RPGs show us worlds that appear radically different from our own at first glance, but upon deeper examination they are another example of the social imaginary restrained by capitalist realism.

It’s like the money in a fantasy RPG: 100 bronze or copper equals 1 silver, and 100 silver equals 1 gold.

You generally need to go to a bookshop that stocks academic books to find proper lefty stuff.

Hexbear is deeply unserious, but that’s the point, right?

I wonder if this is one of those studies that is actually part of a study where the researchers blast out 100 fake papers using Oxbridge and Ivy League email addresses and half of them actually get published in good journals because of academic prestige culture.

Axis of Authoritarians

Axis of Evil

Perhaps the complexity of a clear example suggests problems with the rather broad claims in the original post. I’m not sure if the typical response to a telling-off is to always shut down.

To follow your example, if your grandma tells you off for not bringing something you’re probably going to bring something next time

This is an interesting argument, but is it really true? People actively do stuff to avoid creating a situation where they feel guilty all the time. For example, if a person invites you over for dinner and says you don’t need to bring anything, but you still bring something anyway because you know you would feel guilty otherwise.