Uriel238 [all pronouns] @ uriel238 @lemmy.blahaj.zone

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This was a game that got a huge boost in popularity in 2020 thanks to the COVID-19 lockdown.

In the movie Glass Onion (which takes place during the lockdown) Benoit Blanc is introduced playing Among Us while taking a bath (implied for a very long time). Two of Blanc's opponents are Angela Lansbury / Jessica Fletcher and Stephen Sondheim

Technically, Among Us the killer isn't a human assassin but a creature like the eponynous thing in John Carpenter's The Thing. The game features a tongue attack that no human (known) can do.

Personally, I was turned onto Among Us by my grandson who loved the game, and it was a way to bond. I went by Wargraves and nobody ever got the reference. It was a little wierd thay most of the players were grade-schoolers who had a tendency to assume everyone else was also their age. After all, I'm wearing the top hat and am named after an Agatha Christie character.

Curiously as I thought about it, both Thompson and Mangione committed wrongdoing and caused harm. I also recognize the harm and wrongdoing caused by Thompson exceeds that caused by Mangione by many many orders of magnitude.

The folks who were detained at Auschwitz and Dachau, I am sure, not only understand that violence was right and appropriate to cease their imprisonment and processing, but really wish the Allies pushed ten times as hard to reach them.

It is an awful thing that sometimes we have to put down rabid animals for the safety of everyone and everything around them. I think we might also want to create effective ways to prevent, detect and treat rabies so that animals don't have to be put down, and might even consider wiping out the lyssavirus entirely if there was a way to do so, so we never have to put down a rabid animal again.

I propose there might be similar approaches we could take towards corporate greed and desperate circumstances that lead to assassins killing rich corporate officers and the entire country celebrating the act of violence. I don't know either what they are or how to implement them when they might threaten current structures of political power. Historically, violence will be necessary, but I'm open to ideas.

In 2003, extrajudicial detention and torture of detainees was legal.

Curiously, the English language uses the words sin and crime to talk about wrongdoing, even though sin is wrongdoing against God (as according to whatever ministry whose services you attend) and crime is wrongdoing against the state. We don't have words for wrongdoing against the self, the neighbor, the community, the natural environment or (hypothetically) the universe, and often make up phrases, e.g. sin against nature, or crime against humanity.

(Granted some acts of wrongdoing against these other objects might be regarded as a sin or a crime, but then the focus is on the transgression against church and state; our entire justice system and our entire religious moral system cares very little about the victims, but retribution against the offender. If someone shoots up a school and kills themselves, the state and its justice system cares very little.)

🤓:

You raise a point that is not only valid but really rather pertinent in the US in 2024, that yes, it's super easy to paint groups as generic enemy, at which point it's acceptable to do anything to them.

Demonizing Arabs and Muslims became conspicuous in the aughts after the 9/11 attacks. The US was soon in Afghanistan (still with memories of where empires go to die since USSR was there a decade earlier) and the US was back in Iraq due to Weapons of Mass Destruction (e.g. nukes) that never materialized. Hate crimes surged against both Arab and Muslim communities (with the assumption that all of one category was in the other)

Then Abu Ghraib scandal became public in 2003. We Americans soon found out it wasn't isolated, rather there's a whole CIA extrajudicial detention and torture ( enhanced interrogation ) program. Apparently it was okay to torture terrorists. Also we learned we couldn't rely on local news agencies, since they were too beholden to the White House Press Office. Only foreign news agencies were willing to talk about extraordinary rendition and waterboarding.

(Eventually we'd be able to look up on Wikipedia that torture was obsolete when it came to interrogation of the enemy, as this guy, a WWII Luftwaffe interrogator, showed that being nice works far better. We were torturing Arab Muslims because some rich people wanted to know brown people were suffering for 9/11 even if it wasn't anyone actually involved, but I digress)

Pretty soon, any media person or activist that challenged the policies of the George W. Bush administration (including torture and the use of PMCs to massacre villages) was called a terrorist, and dismissed by the rapidly growing conservative media establishment.

In the 2020s, as the United States is being taken over by a literal dangerous cult (the white Christian nationalist movement centering around Donald J. Trump) talk of demons, of possession and exorcisms and ways to justify calling other people demons or associated with Satan is rising.

And the cool thing about Satan, if you're a Christian fanatic, is you can do anything you want to Him because he's the enemy by fiat.

So literally demonizing folk (accusing them of being demons, being possessed by demons or in league with demons) is the first step before deciding they need shooting or lynching or packed into detention centers.

/🤓 (Sorry about the rant. I've been specifically studying this stuff since Waco)

You seem eager to jump to conclusions while putting no thought into them. Why don't you share your moral philosophy opinion with the class?

When, in your opinion, is it right and proper for someone to kill someone else?

You don't pick an adult cat up by the scruff! But -- at least for some videogenic cats -- they will instinctively relax.

My cat relaxes, but then my cat gets all loungy anytime I interact with him.

Pet tax: He is one with the universe in a box.

A clamp (padded, preferably) on the scruff of the neck will temporarily brick a cat.

Try this only with familiar cats with whom you have rapport.

Don't leave them for too long. A few minutes at most.

Not guilty on ground of necessity.

Self defense ( he killed me, I killed him back ) and deminished capacity ( coverage denial panic or coverage denial derangement syndrome ) are the first two that come to mind.

Most of the time the courts don't take necessity defenses seriously, even when they are super valid. But sometimes when the defendant is white and has money or prominence, and the victim is not well liked it pops up now and again.

Case in point, when Dan White shot and killed Harvey Milk and George Moscone in 1978.

It may have been C+ or merely C with OOP features. I was writing the enemy-AI code (not to be confused with actual learning systems) in visual basic (and made some sweet pathfinding algorithms at the time), but took it too seriously and ended up breaking my brain.

We had a publisher and it was going to be awesome and then Windows 95 came out and broke all our code.

Oh, I think it's icky too.

In fact since WWII we've been aware that only a small percentage of us can get past our killing bad instincts to shoot at other infantry in combat. We humans are really against killing each other.

But we're totally fine when the choices we make kill people offstage, or someone is willing to do the killing for us. Based on a 2015 tally, law enforcement kill four people a day -- most of those not resisting and not armed -- and the number has gone up with each year. And those are the ones that NGOs track via news, obits and coroner reports. Then we have precinct coroners who will fudge so that a police bullet was not a cause of death, erasing one. We estimate up to 75% of the incidents are not detected or reported, similar to unreported sexual assault cases.

And then there's elite deviance. It used to be called white collar crime but when Brian Thompson was doing it, it wasn't actually criminal, but perfectly legal according to the state. (He may have committed some crimes, but the ED included far more than that.)

Elite Deviance, when our ownership class engages in revenue-enhancing shenanigans such as private equity finance, kills more people, causes more destruction and costs more than all the petty crimes combined by multiple orders of magnitude.

That is to say, if we actually prosecuted our industrialists and capitalists, and (hypothetically) completely ignored every mugger, every serial killer, every shoplifter, and heck every corrupt police officer, we would still be saving lives by far. We might also reduce crimes of desperation, given precarity or scarcity informs most petty crime anyway.

But the society we live in does not grant personhood to everyone, and in fact most of us are beneath the interests of the owners and their corporate machines. And then there's the more obvious unpersoning, such as women with complex pregnancies, trans kids, non-whites and immigrants, or families of immigrants.

So it's not so much about whether killing is icky, but the narrow scope of specific cases in which killing is icky, because our society already tolerates an awful lot of it when we don't have to watch a specific incident unfold.

FBI is not a monolith right now and has multiple conflicting opinions.

The part that wants to save democracy says you should encrypt your communications by using an e2e provider, and they recommend Signal.

The part that wants to serve the country (by serving the current administration — the J. Edgar Hoover part of FBI) is terrified of going dark and has been nagging encryption experts for over a decade now to nerd harder and invent a backdoor only good guys can use.

The nerds know this is mathematically impossible. And in fact bad guys (industrial spies, black hats, other nations, etc.) have leaks readily available to uncover the backdoors.

And right now a lot of FBI is scared the new admin is the bad guys.

I have Schmue Schmield Schmanthem anyway.

Now I wonder if Hello Barbie still works.

It would be such a brilliant blow to (copyright bully and now patent bully) Nintendo for Luigi to become a popular symbol of resistance or the militant working class.

Because the transnational white power movement believes in loyalty over principle like any other dangerous cult. If you are an ally, you could eat children and would still be favored.

And if you're in the outgroup, then they pretend as if you eat children.

They're not interested in governance but culling the population, so they're choosing people who are unpersoned by fiat.

If we wanted something different, we shouldn't have voted in the monarchists. Now King Heron is in power and it's frog-eating season.

Have you seen his abs?

Besides which, it's difficult to say violence is wrong when we tolerate apatheticly so much systemic violence.

And with the new administration we're expecting to see so much more with mass deportations and killing our already meager social safety nets.

We're always three skipped meals from mass riots that overwhelm responders. It's an exciting time to be alive.

Can Graphene add a feature to run in emulation mode to allow apps to believe it's on an unrestricted OS?

The insurance companies willfully conspire to fix prices.

Or to paraphrase that Your Cable Company commercial, see, our service is what is called an oligopoly which is the same as a monopoly, but perfectly legal.

Now just to clarify, because a lot of people are endorsing violence: Violence will not bring justice. Nor will it resolve your specific grievance.

What violence will do (provided there's enough of it) is force the society to create a system that does solve grievances for which people turn to violence.

So you can't kill one CEO and expect change. But if you kill hundreds of health insurance upper management (yes, there's a lot of them), or if you burn down dozens of insurance company offices, or find a way to cost the insurance companies billions of dollars, then the state will have to do something about it, and that's after it overwhelms law enforcement.

The risk of your movement going violent is that it deters sympathists, and it makes the targets of your violence sympathetic.

If you don't care because you already have strong enough public support then load the cannons. Send out your suicide bombers.

But then your movement will be regarded as one that uses force. Some people will see it as justified. Some won't. But it also weakens the effect when the police are seen busting the heads of your protestors; some will think state force against your protestors is just that wouldn't if your group was non-violent.

This is why Martin Luther King chose a strict code of nonviolence, footage of police dogs attacking the protestors made sympathists of bystanders and activists of sympathists.

Malcom X on the other hand believed white supremacist sentiment in the US was more pervasive than King felt, and the only choice was to defend their rights by force, because the white power factions would not recognize any less.

And this is true: they do not. It's less of a problem when outright bigotry is not acceptable within the Overton window, but it's definitely a problem when the supremacists have a strong following in the community; though usually they only attack when they outnumber you. Hence FBI under J. Edgar Hoover killed King (likely) and also the leaders of the Black Panthers.

I don't think evilness defines whether he would allow himself a giggle-kicking fit.

His biggest concern is likely the concern that investigators are on his tail, that his file is open and hot, and that he's surveillance aware but knows he can't be perfect, so his freedom and how long it lasts depends a good part on luck. While this stressor might be crushing (it would me) he may be able to manage it and push it out of the way long enough to enjoy his newfound notoriety, and even express some energetic glee over it.

Another concern (which is where we wonder about evil) is coming to terms with recognizing he took another human life with planning and malice. He committed murder. The capacity to commit murder doesn't come to everyone, and many people can't. But then we also have a robust military in which a lot of people do kill, or find at least they have the capacity to suppress their empathy enough to kill. Our assassin didn't hesitate. It doesn't make him evil (which is a judgement usually appointed to fictional persons by the author or readers) but it does put him in the same category as all whodunnit culprits, someone with the capacity to kill if circumstances warrant it.

But again, it's a matter of whether he's able to manage his moral concerns, or is already good with it. Then it's a matter of whether it's in character for him to indulge in a giggle and a kick. (I would.)