Like many labels people choose to self-apply (including but by no means limited to religious ones), "atheist" has a bit of an image problem, since the people who are most eager to self-apply it, and to broadcast that self-application far and wide, tend to be insecure, over-compensating, self-absorbed, obnoxious assholes.
There are a great many generally kind, decent people who identify as "atheists." You just don't generally know that they do, since, being generally kind and decent people, they aren't crashing around like football hooligans, alternately screeching about their own team and atacking the opposing team.
And that's the case with pretty much all labels. The problem is almost never with people who self-apply a particular label, but simply with noxious assholes, regardless of the label. It's generally just our own biases that make it so that we consider the noxious assholes who wear one label to define all who do and the noxious assholes who wear another to be unfortunate exceptions to the rule.
Yeah - that arguably would be cheaper, and it definitely would be better for society as a whole.
That's entirely irrelevant though, because it's not going to happen.
The primary reason that decently-paying jobs have become so much less common is that, over the last few decades in particular, the money that would've paid decent wages has been diverted to pay truly obscene salaries to a handful of executives.
And the people drawing those obscene salaries, and making general pay decisions for corporations, tend to be, quite seriously, psychopaths.
A person who has morals, principles, integrity and empathy will exercise self-restraint - they'll have particular choices that they simply will not make.
A person without any of those qualities - a psychopath - will not be constrained. They will be entirely free to choose any course of action that will benefit them in any way, entirely regardless of the consequences to others.
So all other things being more or less equal, paychopaths will have a strategic advantage in competitions for position in hierarchies like corporations or governments.
In a sound society, that advantage will be blunted by the simple fact that people with morals, principles, integrity and empathy find them and their tactics reprehensible. That has historically made them more the exception than the rule.
In the 80s in the US, there was a fundamental change. Society was sold the idea that "greed is good" - that winning is everything and to the victor goes the spoils and watch out for number 1 and so on - essentially psychopathic views were marketed as virtues. Successfully.
And throughout that period, enough psychopaths succeeded that theirs became the dominant viewpoint, particularly in the largest corporations (or the most rapacious, and thus most successful throughout the takeover era of corporate consolidation). And since then they've just grown more entrenched and more self-serving, and richer, and more powerful.
Which brings me back to the point - yours is a relatively sound viewpoint, but it's entirely irrelevant, because the people who control the power by which such a thing might be accomplished are psychopaths, and they are not going to act in a way that might diminish by even a fraction their undeserved and destructive wealth and privilege, even if it's not only for the good of society as a whole, but then necessarily for their own long-term good. They just aren't psychologically or morally equipped to make that choice. And they control the power in our society, so nobody else can meaningfully make that choice.
So really, the only remaining option is the same one that eventually befell Sumer and Egypt and Athens and Rome - societal collapse. Just as was the case with them, the upper classes have become too entrenched, too self-serving and too greedy to make the choices that would save their civilization, and nobody else has the power to overcome them. And just as was the case with those civilizations, the common people, between being confused and being self-servingly manipulated and misled, blame subsets of each other instead of the people who really bear the lion's share of the responsibility for the woes facing their civilization. So just as was the case with their societies, things will just get uglier and uglier until they finally fall apart. Like it or not.
Have a nice day anyway though, because that's really all you can do. We can't stop the relentless downhill slide, but we can at least try not to make each other unnecessarily miserable along the way.
Yeah - she's pretty much "must protecc her" turned up to 11.
After that brief thing about an opportunity to play piano a few chapters back, I've been looking forward to seeing more about whatever it is Tatsu's doing (and especially to see Ri-chan's reaction).
One team translated the first 20 or so chapters, slowly and not very well. Then another one (or more precisely one person) took it over and started over with chapter 1, and has done everything since.
If you start with fettyman's version of chapter 1, you shouldn't even see the other ones - when you finish one chapter, Mangadex will automatically jump to fettyman's version of the next chapter. It's literally as if the other versions don't even exist.
And the GOP has gotten so bad that they don't dare appear on Fox because it's so certain that it'll just make them look bad.
Shame that that's still undoubtedly not going to be enough to make their angry and/or moronic supporters step back and take a good look at who it is they're voting for, but at least it's cynically amusing for the rest of us.
And I have the same reaction I have to most of these types of things - I wonder what it tastes like, and wish I could try it.
I've never understood why these things trigger such uproar. It's not like it's poison or some sort of bodily secretion or something - it's just a somewhat unusual but entirely edible ingredient. And it could be good. So what's the problem?
That's a lot of the advantage of getting all of these chapters at once. As I noted, I was already following this, but wasn't really sold on it. And part of the problem was that it was out to 30 or so chapters, and we still hadn't really learned much about Ri-chan.
But the thing is that this one's moving slower and going into much more detail, so instead of suddenly slapping us with a condensed version of the history of her trauma, and with virtually no context, we're getting things slowly fleshed out. And yeah - I think it's better execution in the long run. It just needed enough chapters to really get moving.
Another notable difference is that this one has introduced more characters, and I think that's going to be better in the long run too. We've already gotten glimpses into Ri-chan's relationships with both of her parents, and seen clues to how she came to be who she is. And we've already seen that her mom is apparently not as cold and distant as she initially appeared to be, and I fully expect more revelations about them.
I've been following this one for a while and was sort of undecided about it. It's a page-a-day webcomic, self-published on Twitter. Or more precisely, it's two pages a day, with the main story pages on Twitter and bonus pages on Fanbox. It was apparently partly inspired by Zyugoya's When I Returned to My Hometown, My Childhood Friend Was Broken and is a similar set-up, though there's no sexual content (even in the Fanbox pages) - this childhood friend was broken by a different chain of events. So it seemed sort of derivative, and the translations were apparently machine and sort of iffy. And slow. So I just wasn't sold.
Then, yesterday, a scanlator called fettyman posted 119 pages - 60 regular chapters and 59 corresponding bonus chapters, starting from the beginning. And with quality translations and enough pages to get a grasp on the somewhat disjointed and sprawling story, I can say I think it's actually pretty good. It still sort of feels like a freshman effort and the gimmick of alternating every main story page with a non-story bonus page makes it sort of awkward to read straight through, but it has heart, and some great moments. And Ri-chan is an intriguing character with an interesting history.
It doesn't matter how much money he has - every time I visualize Musk posting to Twitter, I see him as a teenage edgelord in a shabby suburban tract house, hunched over an off-the-shelf desktop PC in a room with green shag carpeting and fake wood paneling, lit only by the glow from the screen, giggling to himself.
Rottcodd @ Rottcodd @kbin.social Posts 26Comments 275Joined 2 yr. ago
Like many labels people choose to self-apply (including but by no means limited to religious ones), "atheist" has a bit of an image problem, since the people who are most eager to self-apply it, and to broadcast that self-application far and wide, tend to be insecure, over-compensating, self-absorbed, obnoxious assholes.
There are a great many generally kind, decent people who identify as "atheists." You just don't generally know that they do, since, being generally kind and decent people, they aren't crashing around like football hooligans, alternately screeching about their own team and atacking the opposing team.
And that's the case with pretty much all labels. The problem is almost never with people who self-apply a particular label, but simply with noxious assholes, regardless of the label. It's generally just our own biases that make it so that we consider the noxious assholes who wear one label to define all who do and the noxious assholes who wear another to be unfortunate exceptions to the rule.