The art direction and the combat mechanics. But I can’t be sure.

Got ’em

I’ve never met an actual Christian in America. They’re all fake as fuck, and there’s nothing about abortion in the Bible. It’s one of the easiest moral questions, one that ethicists don’t even bother to debate anymore: no, we shouldn’t force women and children to give birth to rape babies. wtf.

Sure, that’s one practical aspect of money that lends itself to superficial quantitative analysis. But it’s not the whole picture. Money is fundamentally about the power to get people to do things for you. That’s what it represents. With money I can force people to give me things and do things for me, almost like magic.

Now the origins of money is rooted in debt (and power). When a ruling body exercises a monopoly on violence over a region, it can offer promissory notes (IOUs) that others value, because they have faith that this ruling body can force its citizens to work by extracting taxes from them.

Check out “Debt: The Last 5000 Years,” or similar anthropological work on the origins of money.

Keeping consumers alive as a class is indirectly encouraged in capitalism.

All they want is money, which has nothing to do with consumers whatsoever. Corporations could extract money by devouring each other, or by taking over a nation state, or by hijacking a treasury department, or by issuing their own money a la crypto. Remember that money is an abstraction (or an instrument) of power. Violently subjugating a region is tantamount to possessing that power (which we call money), or the ability to make others do what you want.

This is such a fantastic summary of the theory of money. Holy shit.

Well, yes, but Americans support Zionism, and genocide is something the current president has explicitly endorsed.

Religion is a monstrous evil.

Currently, Palestinians.

The US is also hellbent on exterminating dolphins and every other living creature until we can achieve a Mad Max apocalypse.

The US with Christian Nationalists at the helm.

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“For a long time.”

Implying that the allure of pork cannot be denied.

What a bizarre comment.

I think that there are a lot of good reasons not to use the word “retard”. And there aren’t many good reasons to use it. I know of plenty of alternatives.

I totally agree when it comes to any public discourse.

But how often do people use the word cretin?

Most people have no clue what that word means or how it originated. I certainly don’t use “cretin,” since I have no use for disparaging someone as diseased and crippled. Maybe that’s your point, that properly understanding the genesis of some term can undermine your desire to use it? And you’re right. Cretinism, the disease, makes me really sad, as does the fact that assholes chose to turn it into a pejorative. So maybe that has something to do with my unwillingness to ever use the word.

In my mind, “retard” was more of a vague diagnosis of mental slowness, so it makes it less real as an actual medical condition. Like when you say “retard” I think “Republican.” Those are the people who need diagnosing. Still, I’m less willing to use the r-word than alternatives like “idiot” whose meaning is totally divorced in my imagination from any origin story.

After all, once you use a word (a bunch of sounds) to mean something long enough, it eventually makes no difference what the word used to mean. That said, I can see your point. The cretin example is a good one. Very persuasive.

I agree with everything you’ve written, but we are sort of going in a big circle. Earlier I wrote that

using the r-word to insult someone autistic is cruel and unacceptable.

For that reason, I can endorse everything you’re saying. However, I thought our disagreement was over whether there should be a concerted effort to banish a particular pejorative term from our vocabularies (namely the r-word). I had argued no, since it seemed like an overreaction, whereas you were in the affirmative, since groups of people were being offended/hurt by the casual use of that term.

So then the question becomes:

1. To what extent are we responsible for moderating our private speech in order to appease people we’ve never met?

• My intuition is that the answer is never. I think words should be struck from our vocabulary for a very different reason. Namely, when they represent an evil ideology. That is to say, I think that removing words from our vocabulary is a drastic thing to do and should be reserved for truly heinous verbiage (the sort of language that, if repeated, the only possible outcome between us would be violence). Some of these words are worse than the n-word. They are so evil, I can’t even euphemize them in good conscience.
• My understanding is that you have looser parameters for unacceptable language, which must meet a certain thresholds of causing offense to be candidates for censorship. Is that right? It’s a reasonable position, I’m just clarifying.

I really like your response and I needed a minute to read it. Let me reply later.

But “autist” is used colloquially — all the time. That’s my point. I mean that it hasn’t entered wider usage outside of high schools, twitch, and discord. Boomers don’t use it as an insult (yet).

I didn’t say “autistic” is synonymous with stupid. Usually it’s used to mean you’re excessively or neurotically detail-oriented.

A slur is an insulting or disparaging remark (according to the dictionary). Our contention is not over the definition of that word (I hope), but over whether the use of offensive language (such as slurs) is categorically unacceptable.

There are lots of slurs, but only a handful cross the line (for me at least), because I consider them to exclusively and belligerently perpetuate some evil ideology (usually racism). I don’t want to list these words here, but I can think of maybe 3 or 4.

There is no such thing as empirical evidence for an emotionally qualitative claim.

Well, history is not a matter of emotion. It is a matter of empirical fact. We can trace the origins and common usage of words, and the n-word is no exception. That body of knowledge is the product of research (historical data). The (mis)use of the medical term “retard” is also well understood. Its transference to colloquial slang is actually unexceptionable. Consider “psycho” or “cretin.” In the same vein, the word “autist” is now being used disparagingly among teenagers being goofy or weird, and so on.

“Autist” may not be sticky enough to require the medical community to come up with an alternative, more technical (and therefore less appealing) term for that mental disorder.

Regardless, people will continue to look for ways to call each other stupid, and the best thing we can do is encourage researchers to come up with long and convoluted names for medical conditions so they don’t get co-opted by teenagers looking for creative ways to insult each other.

The unfortunate truth is, yes. We are blameworthy for all acts independent of intention or context, because we have to be responsible for everything we do.

Well, yes and no. You have a responsibility to be mindful of those around you. But they also have a responsibility to at least attempt to understand what you’re trying to say. If we ignore your intentions, the result is tantamount to willful misunderstanding.

Remember, we are apes. Nothing more. Language is complex, and the average person is painfully, animalistically stupid. That’s why we have to be charitable to one another and give folks leeway to communicate without losing our shit over misunderstandings.

Again, two main questions I need to figure out (believe it or not, I don’t use “retard” in my everyday speech — which is hard for me because like 80% of the human population is retarded):

1. Are we really blameworthy for speech acts independent of our intention and context? Right now, I’m leaning no but maybe.

2. To what extent are others entitled to control our personal, private speech on the basis of their own internalized (and possibly neurotic) offense to it? I.e., religious groups getting mad, or autistic people being offended when people call each other “retarded.”

We also disagree on the facts I think. You have once again, without a morsel of empirical evidence, equated “retard” with the n-word, which is totally preposterous. So I think we are at an impasse.

You’re literally giving him (good) moral advice, so let’s not “remove morality” from the equation. That’s for the Nazis.

His brother is a raving lunatic. Why would he go to his wedding? Because they share a little more DNA? Who gives a shit? What a meaningless criterium for a relationship.