• 10 Posts
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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: October 6th, 2023

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  • Admittedly I did need a guide at times for Quern too; I think the best compromise is what Cyan did for Firmament and just include an optional hint system in the game itself. By avoiding the need to consult walkthroughs, not only would excessive spoilers be avoided, but the experience would remain self-contained, something especially important for a VR game.








  • The problem is that anything less than unwavering support for Israel would be spun by well-funded propagandists as left-wing at best and antisemitic at worst. Regardless of how unjustified those claims are, and how detrimental they are to the wellbeing of oppressed Palestinians, a switch in foreign policy tactics now just for Netanyahu to wait for Trump to be elected is not worth it, as any short term benefits for the Palestinians would be undone tenfold should Trump be elected. Beyond that, a similar or worse fate would await Ukraine should that occur, so it’s ultimately better to wait until the election is over to consider major policy changes.


  • While it would be great if the US weren’t unilaterally supporting the actions of the Israeli government, unfortunately a major shift from that foreign policy position would likely only receive substantial support from the people already likely to vote Democrat, or anti-Trump at the very least. It would likely be spun by media outlets that are either generally conservative or simply biased in favor of the Israel government in such a way that would push moderates towards Trump. As Trump would only increase the country’s support of the Israeli military, it’s more important to avoid him being elected to avoid a worse situation in the long run.


  • While its implementations thus far have been totalitarian, technically true communism (something even the leaders of the USSR admitted to having not achieved) wouldn’t be totalitarian, so in an academic sense, focusing on it when asking such a question doesn’t make much sense. The question itself is sensible, as people wishing to become American should respect the country’s democratic institutions, though in asking it perhaps there should also be a greater effort in improving the quality of those institutions to be closer to those of a true, rather than flawed, democracy.

    Also, in my opinion at least, framing it as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ moral judgement reflects an outdated view that morals should be regulated, and thus should be restated as simply being in agreement with the principles of the US constitution.







  • There isn’t a free alternative that works as well, unfortunately. Bing not only has many of the same issues, but has worse results. Since DuckDuckGo makes use of Bing’s API for its results, in addition to lacking features such as date range searches, it is still a step down in terms of the quality of one’s search results. Having switched to Firefox due to Google’s efforts to make unilateral, self-serving changes to Chromium, I’d be only too glad to switch search providers if an alternative provider had a similar number of accurate results.