Technically, yes, but it's hard to find a group that tops Christianity in (A) influence, (B) sheer amount of counter-factual woowoo, _and_ (C) hypocrisy.
Heck, even finding a match in two out of three is hard. Even some of the most pencils-up-the-nose underpants-on-head retarded conspiracy-theory groups tend to fail point A majorly (each particular CT has a rather limited fan base), and they tend to stick to one or two idiocies so they don't come even close to Christianity in regards to point B.
Microbes may not be rabid dogs, but they have this uncanny compatibility with each other and the ability to exchange plasmids even across species.
That's what made antibiotic resistance spread so fast across so many different bacteria. They didn't all come up with the same mutation, they got a copy of it from a friendly neighbour bacteria who already had it. (Yeah, bacteria totally don't understand copyright;))
So essentially, best case scenario, from glow-in-the-dark yoghurt you could get glow-in-the-dark shit or glow-in-the-dark teeth. Passing genes to the gut flora was discussed recently even on Slashdot, e.g., how the Japanese acquired genes that help digest seaweed in their gut flora. Know that it can happen to other genes too. Bacteria do that lots.
Worst case scenario, you end up with the clever mutation someone coded in the lab for his mouth bacteria that don't cause caries to have an edge over the natural bad bacteria, being passed on to the less benign MRSA or TBC and giving those a survival edge.
Or it combining with God knows what else -- as proteins or their DNA code aren't exactly orthogonal programming, but rather a mess of spaghetti code where the 5 different side-effects are actually what makes things work -- and maybe has a mutation, _and_ spreads to something else. Maybe add a virus in between accidentally adding it to its own genome, for even more fun.
Add such things as agro-bacteria. Those fun little guys can copy a bit of DNA into a plant's DNA. Mostly they do it naturally to copy genes that produce a root tumour in which they thrive. But it can be loaded with any DNA payload you wish, and are in fact how people do GM on plants nowadays. But they can also occasionally copy the wrong payload between plants and _may_ be for example how the roundup resistance gene got copied from Monsanto's wheat to some wild weeds.
So, best case scenario, you get plants that glow in the dark too. Worst, you end up with, say, wheat that's toxic.
I don't think one should underestimate what can go wrong when you start giving bacteria new genes, and certainly not based on gross over-simplifications of what they do and how they work.
Yes, well, I didn't say it was impossible to explain. I even have a few unflattering explanations of my own;) But I still find fanboyism (and i don't mean just fandom) to be a failure mode.
These days with an MMO, you are mostly stealing players from another MMO, usually WoW. Means that your game has to compete favourably to that, and WoW is pretty good. So you might be ok, but ok doesn't cut it.
They actually said the same thing before WoW, and could even offer numbers to support it. Each time someone got 100,000 players, you could see a bunch of other games losing a total of 100,000. Market saturated, all you can do is steal players from Everquest, etc. Heard it before. Quite eloquently too.
Then comes WoW and enlarges the market by a whole order of magnitude.
Turns out there was still room to grow. But of course, you needed to offer something to people who didn't already like Everquest. Everyone who wanted to play an Everquest clone was already on Everquest, and everyone else didn't want to play an Everquest clone. You couldn't enlarge the market by just catering to the same group of people. You needed people from outside that group.
My take is that the same happens at the moment. Sure, if you make a WoW clone, your market is kinda limited to the people that WoW already caters to. You need something new to get new people.
Actually, I dunno... at the risk of coming across as schadenfreude, I kinda feel vindicated. Relatively soon after launch I wrote a post titled something like "Warhammer: Curse Of The Half-Arse", detailing some ways in which it was a half-arsed unfinished mess. Not only I had a bunch of fanboys telling me I'm wrong -- and verily, according to them even WoW had never been better -- but some flat-out accused me of lying.
Now it turns out that it _was_ unfinished, and even at least one dev says so. And it's apparently insightful now to say "what else is new?" about that.
Not that the fanboy squad will learn anything from it. Come next game, they'll again bark to defend their corporate idol and accuse users of making up issues that get officially fixed in the next patch, or are documented in some patch notes, or is acknowledged in some dev blog or interview. But woe if you're the one saying that their corporate idol did anything less than _perfect_.
At any rate, I'm guessing for some people it must be new. 'Cause it sure wasn't obvious to them at the time.
I dunno, at least the complaint in the summary sounds more like Mythic were the incompetents, not EA.
I mean essentially the complaint in the summary boils down to "we blew deadlines once too many, but EA is to blame for eventually wanting to see something for its money right now." Which seems to be a surprisingly easy sell for fanboys everywhere. The publisher is always some big evil entity that doesn't nothing but come out of the blue and force people at gun point to ship too early.
In reality, EA shopped around for a dev after the first attempt failed, and Mythic won the contract by asking for X months and Y million dollars to deliver product Z. Which was presumably a better offer than anyone else had. (And probably in typical game dev fashion, it was a deadline and budget they knew they can't meet, but were basically hoping that the publisher would then keep throwing money at it just to not lose the existing investment.)
But eventually the publisher has enough of throwing good money after bad (and if they don't, look at what happened with Duke Nukem development), especially since most games won't even break even anyway. As ROI goes, when you have a finite R to expect, you can't throw infinite I at it.
Then the fanboys complain that the publisher are the evil guys and to blame for everything wrong. Now a dev does the same too. WTF?
Actually, from what I've been reading, it seems that women started liking guys that look like women basically only after the pill got in heavy use. Apparently being pregnant -- or on the oestrogen pill which gives the body the same signal -- flips one's preferences around. Pregnant women are sorta programmed to want to be more with other women than with the macho guy, which I suppose it makes sense for the ape tribes we evolved from. So it's more of a curious side-effect of messing with body chemistry than either nature or nurture.
Downside: only those on the pill.
Bigger downside: when she gets married and stops taking the pill, well, then the normal body signals kicked in. Mostly along the lines of, "eew, this guy totally isn't a turn on" (any more.)
Dude, I'm not even talking "boring". It starts boring, sure. Then it gets stupid. I'm talking plot twists of the caliber of, and spoiler warning: these are actual plot twists from the game:
- oh, we all grew up together, but somehow we all just forgot that (while still living together the whole time. We're not talking people who lived somewhere else for 20 years and forgot their friends from kindergarten, but people who forgot their friends from kindergarten while still living in the same room with them.)
- oh, and that evil chick we've been trying to kill for the last two discs and viceversa? we kinda forgot she's our adoptive mother who raised us since we were babies. (Yeah, I guess it's the kind of thing that just slips one's mind.)
- oh, they're shooting ICBM's at our school, but they don't know that our school can move. Seriously, it's like a freaking iceberg with the visible school on top and a giant mechanism under it for, umm, moving the school out of the way of an ICBM attack. (What, your school wasn't built with such a mechanism?)
- Rinoa getting kidnapped again and again until it turns into a running gag taken to absurd extremes. Like when a whole country who was A-OK with Edea, the big evil sorceress who had attacked them and nearly caused a world war, now arrests Rinoa for having received basic padawan training (so to speak) from Edea in the sorceress business. And you have to rescue her again. And I mean, seriously, it's on par with being ok with Hitler but trying to off some guy he trained in skeet shooting.
- the final twist when your party gets to travel in time and convince Edea to, umm, adopt their baby selves and start a school dedicated to hunting witche. Err... sorceresses.
And don't think some elaborate mind-fuck or subtle philosophical arguments to convince her to throw her life away just to train some guys who'll hunt her and her kind down. Think a poor young woman sweeping her back yard, and a bunch of strangers crash onto her lawn. And it kinda goes like:
"Are you a witch?" "Umm, yes." "I want you to found an orphanage and school dedicated to training kids to hunt down witches." "Umm, ok."
Not an exact quote, but, really, _that_ fracking stupid.
No no no... wanting to take over the world is a newbie mistake. If the world is your private garden, then next thing you know, you're responsible for everything from unemployment to the last leaking faucet. You'll want all the fun and no responsibility. You'll want to RENT the world;)
(Credit for that idea goes to the Evil Inc comic, but I'm too lazy to find that strip.)
Except some are hard to rationalize as "hero" by just about anybody. The decisions in this kind of studies tend to not be about political or economic convictions, but about plain old being a dick outside and beyond one's actual job.
Basically if you're a politician and push for some legislation, well, you may be someone's hero. If you're a politician and take bribes, that's a bit hard to justify as heroic.
If you're a CEO and use sweatshops in China to cut costs, well, you may be someone's hero. Wall Street's for example. If you're a CEO and cook the books to defraud the investors, a la Ken Lay and a few others, that's a bit harder to spin as heroic.
Heck, even the example they use with Plato's (one) ring of invisibility, that's the kind of gist. Most people wouldn't use it to, say, kill some mafia boss who's untouchable by the police. (Which is arguably immoral, but more than one comic book hero passed for a hero with exactly that kind of vigilante approach.) Most people would just go steal all they want, stalk their ex, play some cruel prank on that guy or gal they hate, and stuff like that. I doubt that those can be argued to be someone else's hero.
Oh, on the contrary, I'm a ferm advocate of 99% nurture and 1% nature in just about any cultural thing. I'll be the first to say that gender roles are purely cultural constructs, and not even constant in any time or place.
But, yes, a lot of other cultures make no sense to me. I'm not saying it's innate or anything. I'm saying a lot of those stereotypes and choices seem illogical to me.
If it makes it any better, though, I think half the western culture is illogical too.
Maybe, but what fascinates me even more is stuff that's actually not even tied to taking this or that position as part of their job. I can imagine how a politician would think mandatory insurance is right or the opposite is right or really any other nuance or position. That's what they're asked to do. But what I was getting at is that they also start finding it easier to rationalize when they accept a bribe, or accept some vacation at some luxury resort paid by some lobby group and rationalize it as a fact-finding trip, or let company X build them a new mansion in exchange for support, or really whatever. There's a difference between just having some good (if misguided and poorly thought out) intention to try to get through Congress, and being a dick and corrupt. Feeling powerful seems to make it easier to rationalize the latter.
VIII is the only Final Fantasy I've never played past the first hour
You lucky bastard. Sometimes I think I must be the only person in the known universe who actually played VIII until the end, just out of morbid curiosity if it gets better. It actually kept getting worse. After the first CD the plot twists started going from stupid to surrealistically stupid.
Indeed. Really, the only real news is that they don't know they're now corrupt. They think they're the good guys, only now more entitled to bend the rules a bit, but that's ok because they're the good guys, right?
And, well, it may not be news to you, but to most people it does seem to be.
Just for a quick bit of info, from what I understand in the Japanese culture the effeminate looking bishounen (prettyboy) with the heart-shaped face is actually an ideal of masculinity. The massive square-jawed body-builder a la Zangief is actually their stereotype for gay.
So, yeah, those spikey-haired hermaphrodites are Real Manly Men.
Maybe, but that's not what those studies say. You seem to assume that someone has a conscious choice to be hero or villain and intentionally choose villain.
Most people seem to have that kind of delusion. For them you're either clearly doing good and you know it, or you're aware that pillaging and burning is wrong but you deliberately chose evil. Their world has some people who basically chose to be villains and know they're villains.
You can even look at fictional organizations like SPECTRE (SPecial Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion) in otherwise non-parody movies. And it comes easy to swallow that someone would come up with a business plan like, basically, "I know, let's make an organization that's all about placing bombs and extortion, 'cause that market hardly has enough supply to meet the demand." And then a bunch of people would basically go, "yay, I always wanted to be an evil minion! Where do I sign up?"
In reality what these studies show has nothing to do with choosing to wear tights or twirl a moustache and cackle manically. They just show that most people, if given power, or even if role-playing a position of power, find it increasingly easy to rationalize bad behaviour. They're not choosing to be evil, they just rationalize being a complete dick as _good_ or at least excusable.
And not just business decisions. That's the fun part. Sure, you can rationalize evil business decisions via what I call an "argument from capitalism": being evil is good if it makes some investor money. But it extends beyond that.
E.g., in a study people role-playing some executive-level boss with a posh office would find a $100 bill. And most would not just pocket it and forget about it, but actually lie if someone came asking about it. Whereas those role-playing the peons would be less likely to.
Or like in that baker's statistic that folks on the executive level were more likely to take a sandwich without paying for it, than the peons on the cubicle floor.
The illusion that now you're above those pesky peons and their judgments extends not just deciding if to cut costs by dumping radioactive waste in the Mediterranean (actually happened, btw), but even to that kind of stuff. It's not even about fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders or anything, but basically about being a dick. Those in positions of power can rationalize it better and for being more of a dick.
It applies to heroes vs villains only in as much a case can be made that if they suddenly found Plato's ring and could be untraceable whenever they want, most people wouldn't think "yay, now I can do some serious good with this power", but rather "yay, let's steal some money from the bank" or even "yay, now I can take revenge on the boss/ex-gf/whatever".
Granted, as TFA points out, not all people. Some actually go in overdrive with applying higher standards to themselves when given power or an illusion of power. So I guess you'd get some heroes too. Most just start rationalizing more of what they want and now can take and be de facto villains.
But the fun part is that neither would actually consider themselves villains. Someone could be just in the process of leaving with a sack of cash from the bank and just think it's the due that society always owed them, or that they're actually doing a good thing because they might give a tiny portion of that to charity, or really whatever rationalization.
But that's exactly the question, innit? Is his situation actually all that similar in the first place? Because from everything I can find about it -- and yes, I even spent some time googling, not just TFA -- there is absolutely no mention of any kidnapping being involved or alleged or anything. And again, even his demands and behaviour, don't seem to even remotely resemble any kind of rescue.
Dude, get your units right. You can't express miles of shelf space in libraries of congress. The international unit of length is the football field. Not to be confused with the football field as an unit of area.
(Of course, the UK may still stick to their own imperial era units, like the length of a double-decker bus. Or the now largely obsolete cricket pitch.);)
While I have sympathy for your situation, I see nothing so far except unsuported postulates that his situation is the same.
I don't actually see anywhere the piece of info that his ex-wife actually kidnapped his son or disappeared anywhere. A more common -- and Occam's Razor compliant -- assumption would be that she simply won the custody.
Also note that this wasn't even the payment he originally asked for. He first just asked for $3000, and there was no mention of his son at all. Only when they tried to haggle the price down, he dropped the price to basically "not enough bad things can happen" to his ex-wife. Sorry, it doesn't sound to me like some desperate guy and some kidnapping. If that were his motivation, he'd ask for that from the start. Whereas for this guy it was the second best, if he's not getting his $3000.
Also, note that he didn't actually ask for his son back. He just wanted his ex-wife hurt and some _photos_ of his son. Doesn't sound like there was any kidnapping involved, if anyone asks me. You'd expect him to actually want his son rescued, if there was some kidnapping thereof, not just some photos. But at any rate that was just an addendum to the real payment he was falling back to, namely that something bad happens to his ex.
I.e., it's more likely that, basically, you're cheering for someone who was just a douchebag trying to sell some info from work for money, or if that fails, use the Mossad to carry his personal vengeances. He doesn't seem to actually have more of a moral high ground there than the AOL admin who sold the client database to spammers. He just was even dumber about it.
That's also what he got after 4 years of calling himself a cyborg and giving lectures on cyborg rights for having nothing more than a RFID chip under the skin. The one that actually interfaces with the nerves is also someone else's design.
But the GP criticism IMHO still stands. There are people with more useful implants than Captain Cyborg, and more fitting the cyborg meaning, and some from long before him. The first pacemaker was implanted in 1960, though the first research into that started at the end of the 19'th century. That's a mix of biological and machine right there and it's from before waay before Warwick's PR stunts.
And in the meantime we have stuff that's even better. E.g., CCD retina replacements interface with nerves too and do something more useful than Warwick's chip.
Heck, studies in interfacing with neurons or sometimes directly with the brain have been happening since 1970. In 1999 someone managed to reproduce images seen by a cat, and in 2000 someone did exactly the trick of replicating arm movements for a monkey. That's actual neural interfacing research from the time when Captain Cyborg had just a RFID chip. His subsequent basically getting a similar chip to that in said monkey implanted in himself makes him at most an early human test subject, but nothing more than that.
Not only I don't see it as criminal, I see it as the right thing to do.
The short story is that ultimately all obligations between people are two way streets. Community, loyalty, etc. You name it. If you expect something from someone else, you should do your part in return.
Ultimately this is how it works with any kind of mutual protection too. Be it neighbourhood watch programs, or just calling the firemen or cops if you notice something needing them on the neighbour's house, or making sure it gets hosed down if it burns. If you expect the community to do something for you, it's a two way street.
In this case it only works down to $75 fee because there are tens of thousands of people paying it. Each pays a small part, so the community is safer from fire. Either directly as in you pay a small price of the cost of hosing down the neighbour's house, or indirectly as in the fire doesn't get to spread from your house to his.
Again, same idea: two way street. If you want them to pay for yours, you pay for theirs.
The system breaks down when people essentially start expecting only to receive, but not to do their part. The fucktard in TFA for example, he expected not to pay for someone else's fire, but that they'd still come hose down his house out of everyone else's money.
But ultimately it's not even about money as such. It's about the whole social contract. It's a two way street. It's give and take. Expecting only to take, but not to give, is just being a parasite. Rationalizing why someone should give even though the other doesn't do their own end of the deal, is supporting parasites.
Did they do right to sit and watch his house burn? Damn right, if anyone asks me.
Should they go to jail? Nah, they should get a freaking medal.
It's funny, but just for the record, that is more or less a form of the #2 rationalization used by people who want to believe in fairy tales: see, they are psychic after all, but only when they're not around Randi. E.g., somehow Randi or some device there blocks those people's psychic talents. One dowser who failed a test badly even called to say he figured out that Randi's cell phone disabled his dowsing rod.
It's not even new. Houdini debunked a lot of psychics and spiritists long before Randi, and the same rationalization was used about him. Most notably by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who, for all the lip service he paid science and rationalism in his Sherlock Holmes novels, was actually so rabidly into woowoo that he pretty much spent the rest of his life trying to debunk Houdini's debunkings. His theory was no less than that Houdini was some kind of sorcerer who robs those psychics of their powers. Some kind of a psychic Highlander, I guess;)
So, yeah, it exists only as long as no skeptic observes it.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point.
Technically, yes, but it's hard to find a group that tops Christianity in (A) influence, (B) sheer amount of counter-factual woowoo, _and_ (C) hypocrisy.
Heck, even finding a match in two out of three is hard. Even some of the most pencils-up-the-nose underpants-on-head retarded conspiracy-theory groups tend to fail point A majorly (each particular CT has a rather limited fan base), and they tend to stick to one or two idiocies so they don't come even close to Christianity in regards to point B.
Microbes may not be rabid dogs, but they have this uncanny compatibility with each other and the ability to exchange plasmids even across species.
That's what made antibiotic resistance spread so fast across so many different bacteria. They didn't all come up with the same mutation, they got a copy of it from a friendly neighbour bacteria who already had it. (Yeah, bacteria totally don't understand copyright;))
So essentially, best case scenario, from glow-in-the-dark yoghurt you could get glow-in-the-dark shit or glow-in-the-dark teeth. Passing genes to the gut flora was discussed recently even on Slashdot, e.g., how the Japanese acquired genes that help digest seaweed in their gut flora. Know that it can happen to other genes too. Bacteria do that lots.
Worst case scenario, you end up with the clever mutation someone coded in the lab for his mouth bacteria that don't cause caries to have an edge over the natural bad bacteria, being passed on to the less benign MRSA or TBC and giving those a survival edge.
Or it combining with God knows what else -- as proteins or their DNA code aren't exactly orthogonal programming, but rather a mess of spaghetti code where the 5 different side-effects are actually what makes things work -- and maybe has a mutation, _and_ spreads to something else. Maybe add a virus in between accidentally adding it to its own genome, for even more fun.
Add such things as agro-bacteria. Those fun little guys can copy a bit of DNA into a plant's DNA. Mostly they do it naturally to copy genes that produce a root tumour in which they thrive. But it can be loaded with any DNA payload you wish, and are in fact how people do GM on plants nowadays. But they can also occasionally copy the wrong payload between plants and _may_ be for example how the roundup resistance gene got copied from Monsanto's wheat to some wild weeds.
So, best case scenario, you get plants that glow in the dark too. Worst, you end up with, say, wheat that's toxic.
I don't think one should underestimate what can go wrong when you start giving bacteria new genes, and certainly not based on gross over-simplifications of what they do and how they work.
Yes, well, I didn't say it was impossible to explain. I even have a few unflattering explanations of my own ;) But I still find fanboyism (and i don't mean just fandom) to be a failure mode.
They actually said the same thing before WoW, and could even offer numbers to support it. Each time someone got 100,000 players, you could see a bunch of other games losing a total of 100,000. Market saturated, all you can do is steal players from Everquest, etc. Heard it before. Quite eloquently too.
Then comes WoW and enlarges the market by a whole order of magnitude.
Turns out there was still room to grow. But of course, you needed to offer something to people who didn't already like Everquest. Everyone who wanted to play an Everquest clone was already on Everquest, and everyone else didn't want to play an Everquest clone. You couldn't enlarge the market by just catering to the same group of people. You needed people from outside that group.
My take is that the same happens at the moment. Sure, if you make a WoW clone, your market is kinda limited to the people that WoW already caters to. You need something new to get new people.
Actually, I dunno... at the risk of coming across as schadenfreude, I kinda feel vindicated. Relatively soon after launch I wrote a post titled something like "Warhammer: Curse Of The Half-Arse", detailing some ways in which it was a half-arsed unfinished mess. Not only I had a bunch of fanboys telling me I'm wrong -- and verily, according to them even WoW had never been better -- but some flat-out accused me of lying.
Now it turns out that it _was_ unfinished, and even at least one dev says so. And it's apparently insightful now to say "what else is new?" about that.
Not that the fanboy squad will learn anything from it. Come next game, they'll again bark to defend their corporate idol and accuse users of making up issues that get officially fixed in the next patch, or are documented in some patch notes, or is acknowledged in some dev blog or interview. But woe if you're the one saying that their corporate idol did anything less than _perfect_.
At any rate, I'm guessing for some people it must be new. 'Cause it sure wasn't obvious to them at the time.
I dunno, at least the complaint in the summary sounds more like Mythic were the incompetents, not EA.
I mean essentially the complaint in the summary boils down to "we blew deadlines once too many, but EA is to blame for eventually wanting to see something for its money right now." Which seems to be a surprisingly easy sell for fanboys everywhere. The publisher is always some big evil entity that doesn't nothing but come out of the blue and force people at gun point to ship too early.
In reality, EA shopped around for a dev after the first attempt failed, and Mythic won the contract by asking for X months and Y million dollars to deliver product Z. Which was presumably a better offer than anyone else had. (And probably in typical game dev fashion, it was a deadline and budget they knew they can't meet, but were basically hoping that the publisher would then keep throwing money at it just to not lose the existing investment.)
But eventually the publisher has enough of throwing good money after bad (and if they don't, look at what happened with Duke Nukem development), especially since most games won't even break even anyway. As ROI goes, when you have a finite R to expect, you can't throw infinite I at it.
Then the fanboys complain that the publisher are the evil guys and to blame for everything wrong. Now a dev does the same too. WTF?
Yes, as I was saying, I've played it. I know the rationalizations they use. I still found it an incredibly stupid premise.
Actually, from what I've been reading, it seems that women started liking guys that look like women basically only after the pill got in heavy use. Apparently being pregnant -- or on the oestrogen pill which gives the body the same signal -- flips one's preferences around. Pregnant women are sorta programmed to want to be more with other women than with the macho guy, which I suppose it makes sense for the ape tribes we evolved from. So it's more of a curious side-effect of messing with body chemistry than either nature or nurture.
Downside: only those on the pill.
Bigger downside: when she gets married and stops taking the pill, well, then the normal body signals kicked in. Mostly along the lines of, "eew, this guy totally isn't a turn on" (any more.)
Dude, I'm not even talking "boring". It starts boring, sure. Then it gets stupid. I'm talking plot twists of the caliber of, and spoiler warning: these are actual plot twists from the game:
- oh, we all grew up together, but somehow we all just forgot that (while still living together the whole time. We're not talking people who lived somewhere else for 20 years and forgot their friends from kindergarten, but people who forgot their friends from kindergarten while still living in the same room with them.)
- oh, and that evil chick we've been trying to kill for the last two discs and viceversa? we kinda forgot she's our adoptive mother who raised us since we were babies. (Yeah, I guess it's the kind of thing that just slips one's mind.)
- oh, they're shooting ICBM's at our school, but they don't know that our school can move. Seriously, it's like a freaking iceberg with the visible school on top and a giant mechanism under it for, umm, moving the school out of the way of an ICBM attack. (What, your school wasn't built with such a mechanism?)
- Rinoa getting kidnapped again and again until it turns into a running gag taken to absurd extremes. Like when a whole country who was A-OK with Edea, the big evil sorceress who had attacked them and nearly caused a world war, now arrests Rinoa for having received basic padawan training (so to speak) from Edea in the sorceress business. And you have to rescue her again. And I mean, seriously, it's on par with being ok with Hitler but trying to off some guy he trained in skeet shooting.
- the final twist when your party gets to travel in time and convince Edea to, umm, adopt their baby selves and start a school dedicated to hunting witche. Err... sorceresses.
And don't think some elaborate mind-fuck or subtle philosophical arguments to convince her to throw her life away just to train some guys who'll hunt her and her kind down. Think a poor young woman sweeping her back yard, and a bunch of strangers crash onto her lawn. And it kinda goes like:
"Are you a witch?"
"Umm, yes."
"I want you to found an orphanage and school dedicated to training kids to hunt down witches."
"Umm, ok."
Not an exact quote, but, really, _that_ fracking stupid.
No no no... wanting to take over the world is a newbie mistake. If the world is your private garden, then next thing you know, you're responsible for everything from unemployment to the last leaking faucet. You'll want all the fun and no responsibility. You'll want to RENT the world ;)
(Credit for that idea goes to the Evil Inc comic, but I'm too lazy to find that strip.)
Except some are hard to rationalize as "hero" by just about anybody. The decisions in this kind of studies tend to not be about political or economic convictions, but about plain old being a dick outside and beyond one's actual job.
Basically if you're a politician and push for some legislation, well, you may be someone's hero. If you're a politician and take bribes, that's a bit hard to justify as heroic.
If you're a CEO and use sweatshops in China to cut costs, well, you may be someone's hero. Wall Street's for example. If you're a CEO and cook the books to defraud the investors, a la Ken Lay and a few others, that's a bit harder to spin as heroic.
Heck, even the example they use with Plato's (one) ring of invisibility, that's the kind of gist. Most people wouldn't use it to, say, kill some mafia boss who's untouchable by the police. (Which is arguably immoral, but more than one comic book hero passed for a hero with exactly that kind of vigilante approach.) Most people would just go steal all they want, stalk their ex, play some cruel prank on that guy or gal they hate, and stuff like that. I doubt that those can be argued to be someone else's hero.
Oh, on the contrary, I'm a ferm advocate of 99% nurture and 1% nature in just about any cultural thing. I'll be the first to say that gender roles are purely cultural constructs, and not even constant in any time or place.
But, yes, a lot of other cultures make no sense to me. I'm not saying it's innate or anything. I'm saying a lot of those stereotypes and choices seem illogical to me.
If it makes it any better, though, I think half the western culture is illogical too.
Maybe, but what fascinates me even more is stuff that's actually not even tied to taking this or that position as part of their job. I can imagine how a politician would think mandatory insurance is right or the opposite is right or really any other nuance or position. That's what they're asked to do. But what I was getting at is that they also start finding it easier to rationalize when they accept a bribe, or accept some vacation at some luxury resort paid by some lobby group and rationalize it as a fact-finding trip, or let company X build them a new mansion in exchange for support, or really whatever. There's a difference between just having some good (if misguided and poorly thought out) intention to try to get through Congress, and being a dick and corrupt. Feeling powerful seems to make it easier to rationalize the latter.
You lucky bastard. Sometimes I think I must be the only person in the known universe who actually played VIII until the end, just out of morbid curiosity if it gets better. It actually kept getting worse. After the first CD the plot twists started going from stupid to surrealistically stupid.
Indeed. Really, the only real news is that they don't know they're now corrupt. They think they're the good guys, only now more entitled to bend the rules a bit, but that's ok because they're the good guys, right?
And, well, it may not be news to you, but to most people it does seem to be.
Just for a quick bit of info, from what I understand in the Japanese culture the effeminate looking bishounen (prettyboy) with the heart-shaped face is actually an ideal of masculinity. The massive square-jawed body-builder a la Zangief is actually their stereotype for gay.
So, yeah, those spikey-haired hermaphrodites are Real Manly Men.
Yeah, it makes no sense for me either.
Maybe, but that's not what those studies say. You seem to assume that someone has a conscious choice to be hero or villain and intentionally choose villain.
Most people seem to have that kind of delusion. For them you're either clearly doing good and you know it, or you're aware that pillaging and burning is wrong but you deliberately chose evil. Their world has some people who basically chose to be villains and know they're villains.
You can even look at fictional organizations like SPECTRE (SPecial Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion) in otherwise non-parody movies. And it comes easy to swallow that someone would come up with a business plan like, basically, "I know, let's make an organization that's all about placing bombs and extortion, 'cause that market hardly has enough supply to meet the demand." And then a bunch of people would basically go, "yay, I always wanted to be an evil minion! Where do I sign up?"
In reality what these studies show has nothing to do with choosing to wear tights or twirl a moustache and cackle manically. They just show that most people, if given power, or even if role-playing a position of power, find it increasingly easy to rationalize bad behaviour. They're not choosing to be evil, they just rationalize being a complete dick as _good_ or at least excusable.
And not just business decisions. That's the fun part. Sure, you can rationalize evil business decisions via what I call an "argument from capitalism": being evil is good if it makes some investor money. But it extends beyond that.
E.g., in a study people role-playing some executive-level boss with a posh office would find a $100 bill. And most would not just pocket it and forget about it, but actually lie if someone came asking about it. Whereas those role-playing the peons would be less likely to.
Or like in that baker's statistic that folks on the executive level were more likely to take a sandwich without paying for it, than the peons on the cubicle floor.
The illusion that now you're above those pesky peons and their judgments extends not just deciding if to cut costs by dumping radioactive waste in the Mediterranean (actually happened, btw), but even to that kind of stuff. It's not even about fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders or anything, but basically about being a dick. Those in positions of power can rationalize it better and for being more of a dick.
It applies to heroes vs villains only in as much a case can be made that if they suddenly found Plato's ring and could be untraceable whenever they want, most people wouldn't think "yay, now I can do some serious good with this power", but rather "yay, let's steal some money from the bank" or even "yay, now I can take revenge on the boss/ex-gf/whatever".
Granted, as TFA points out, not all people. Some actually go in overdrive with applying higher standards to themselves when given power or an illusion of power. So I guess you'd get some heroes too. Most just start rationalizing more of what they want and now can take and be de facto villains.
But the fun part is that neither would actually consider themselves villains. Someone could be just in the process of leaving with a sack of cash from the bank and just think it's the due that society always owed them, or that they're actually doing a good thing because they might give a tiny portion of that to charity, or really whatever rationalization.
But that's exactly the question, innit? Is his situation actually all that similar in the first place? Because from everything I can find about it -- and yes, I even spent some time googling, not just TFA -- there is absolutely no mention of any kidnapping being involved or alleged or anything. And again, even his demands and behaviour, don't seem to even remotely resemble any kind of rescue.
Dude, get your units right. You can't express miles of shelf space in libraries of congress. The international unit of length is the football field. Not to be confused with the football field as an unit of area.
(Of course, the UK may still stick to their own imperial era units, like the length of a double-decker bus. Or the now largely obsolete cricket pitch.) ;)
According to the news, he faces 20 years in prison.
While I have sympathy for your situation, I see nothing so far except unsuported postulates that his situation is the same.
I don't actually see anywhere the piece of info that his ex-wife actually kidnapped his son or disappeared anywhere. A more common -- and Occam's Razor compliant -- assumption would be that she simply won the custody.
Also note that this wasn't even the payment he originally asked for. He first just asked for $3000, and there was no mention of his son at all. Only when they tried to haggle the price down, he dropped the price to basically "not enough bad things can happen" to his ex-wife. Sorry, it doesn't sound to me like some desperate guy and some kidnapping. If that were his motivation, he'd ask for that from the start. Whereas for this guy it was the second best, if he's not getting his $3000.
Also, note that he didn't actually ask for his son back. He just wanted his ex-wife hurt and some _photos_ of his son. Doesn't sound like there was any kidnapping involved, if anyone asks me. You'd expect him to actually want his son rescued, if there was some kidnapping thereof, not just some photos. But at any rate that was just an addendum to the real payment he was falling back to, namely that something bad happens to his ex.
I.e., it's more likely that, basically, you're cheering for someone who was just a douchebag trying to sell some info from work for money, or if that fails, use the Mossad to carry his personal vengeances. He doesn't seem to actually have more of a moral high ground there than the AOL admin who sold the client database to spammers. He just was even dumber about it.
That's also what he got after 4 years of calling himself a cyborg and giving lectures on cyborg rights for having nothing more than a RFID chip under the skin. The one that actually interfaces with the nerves is also someone else's design.
But the GP criticism IMHO still stands. There are people with more useful implants than Captain Cyborg, and more fitting the cyborg meaning, and some from long before him. The first pacemaker was implanted in 1960, though the first research into that started at the end of the 19'th century. That's a mix of biological and machine right there and it's from before waay before Warwick's PR stunts.
And in the meantime we have stuff that's even better. E.g., CCD retina replacements interface with nerves too and do something more useful than Warwick's chip.
Heck, studies in interfacing with neurons or sometimes directly with the brain have been happening since 1970. In 1999 someone managed to reproduce images seen by a cat, and in 2000 someone did exactly the trick of replicating arm movements for a monkey. That's actual neural interfacing research from the time when Captain Cyborg had just a RFID chip. His subsequent basically getting a similar chip to that in said monkey implanted in himself makes him at most an early human test subject, but nothing more than that.
Not only I don't see it as criminal, I see it as the right thing to do.
The short story is that ultimately all obligations between people are two way streets. Community, loyalty, etc. You name it. If you expect something from someone else, you should do your part in return.
Ultimately this is how it works with any kind of mutual protection too. Be it neighbourhood watch programs, or just calling the firemen or cops if you notice something needing them on the neighbour's house, or making sure it gets hosed down if it burns. If you expect the community to do something for you, it's a two way street.
In this case it only works down to $75 fee because there are tens of thousands of people paying it. Each pays a small part, so the community is safer from fire. Either directly as in you pay a small price of the cost of hosing down the neighbour's house, or indirectly as in the fire doesn't get to spread from your house to his.
Again, same idea: two way street. If you want them to pay for yours, you pay for theirs.
The system breaks down when people essentially start expecting only to receive, but not to do their part. The fucktard in TFA for example, he expected not to pay for someone else's fire, but that they'd still come hose down his house out of everyone else's money.
But ultimately it's not even about money as such. It's about the whole social contract. It's a two way street. It's give and take. Expecting only to take, but not to give, is just being a parasite. Rationalizing why someone should give even though the other doesn't do their own end of the deal, is supporting parasites.
Did they do right to sit and watch his house burn? Damn right, if anyone asks me.
Should they go to jail? Nah, they should get a freaking medal.
It's funny, but just for the record, that is more or less a form of the #2 rationalization used by people who want to believe in fairy tales: see, they are psychic after all, but only when they're not around Randi. E.g., somehow Randi or some device there blocks those people's psychic talents. One dowser who failed a test badly even called to say he figured out that Randi's cell phone disabled his dowsing rod.
It's not even new. Houdini debunked a lot of psychics and spiritists long before Randi, and the same rationalization was used about him. Most notably by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who, for all the lip service he paid science and rationalism in his Sherlock Holmes novels, was actually so rabidly into woowoo that he pretty much spent the rest of his life trying to debunk Houdini's debunkings. His theory was no less than that Houdini was some kind of sorcerer who robs those psychics of their powers. Some kind of a psychic Highlander, I guess ;)
So, yeah, it exists only as long as no skeptic observes it.