adderaline

listen. even if we disregard the fact that lots of legal experts, including the peers of the people who put this ruling in place, believe this is an existential threat to democracy, in practice, the ruling puts the authority for determining what is an official act into the hands of the judiciary. the supreme court is the ultimate authority in making these determinations. its a power grab, plain and simple, which grants the president immunity for “official acts”, and places the authority to determine what is and isn’t an “official act” in the hands of the same people who granted him that immunity.

the fact that Roberts is making vague gestures towards some kind of accountability means less than nothing. considering how Trump is behaving, what he and his crowd seem to believe about the breadth of this decision, we should not assume that a room full of people Trump put into power have any interest in ensuring Trump doesn’t “get away with everything”, and we shouldn’t assume that these people are even nominally interested in telling the truth about their intentions, considering just how much of their personal comfort is guaranteed by the institutions that Trump represents, and how resistant they are to accountability for their extremely well documented lies.

your personal confidence in Trump’s eventual, eternally forthcoming guilt relies on the trustworthiness of liars and the moral fiber of bigots. good luck with that.

or maybe you don’t have some especially well considered, enlightened perspective, and people here believe the things they do for reasons that align with their life experience and education, just as with yourself. taking a centrist stance is not some objectively superior position from which to view politics. you aren’t endowed with special insight for choosing the midpoint between ideologies that contradict each other.

I’m not understanding a word you are saying

that makes two of us, i guess? i don’t know what it is you’re trying to say i was saying. to be more clear, i’ve been seeing a lot of talk in this thread arguing against the “video games cause violence” claim, as if that was what the lawsuit was about. i don’t think the contents of the article present the families’ lawsuit as primarily concerning that particular claim. i then attempted to describe what i believe their actual claim to be.

i’ve emphasized the words i think are relevant here:

These new lawsuits, one filed in California and the other in Texas, turn attention to the marketing and sale of the rifle used by the shooter. The California suit claims that 2021’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare featured the weapon, a Daniel Defense M4 V7, on a splash screen, and that playing the game led the teenager to research and then later purchase the gun hours after his 18th birthday.

that Call of Duty’s simulation of recognizable guns makes Activision “the most prolific and effective marketer of assault weapons in the United States.”

the fact that Activision and Meta are framing this as an extension of the “video games cause violence” thing is certainly what they’ve decided to do, but it seems to be talking past what the complaint and lawsuit are about, which is the marketing of a Daniel Defense M4 V7 in 2021’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.

the reason i emphasized the gun model is that that seems, to me, to be the core feature of the case the families are trying to make. not that video games cause violence, but that Activision bears responsibility for the actions of the shooter because the shooter played their game, then proceeded to kill people with the specific model of gun that was being advertised in that game. the fact that the article takes the time to reference another case where the specific naming of a gun model lead to a sizable settlement, and says this

The notion that a game maker might be held liable for irresponsibly marketing a weapon, however, seems to be a new angle.

seems to support my reading. that isn’t the same thing as saying video games make you violent, which is the claim a bunch of people in this thread seem to be shadowboxing.

i dunno, maybe there’s some ambiguity there? are you arguing that the lawsuit is about rehashing the video games make you violent claim, or what? i genuinely don’t know what you’re trying to communicate to me. i hope this clarified my stance.

some of y’all definitely aren’t reading the article. this isn’t a “video games cause violence” thing. they are suing Activision and the gun manufacturer Daniel Defense for marketing a specific model of gun in Call of Duty, and maybe? that the Uvalde shooter used that same model of gun in the shooting. i dunno if there’s merit to the argument, but like, categorically, this isn’t the “video games cause violence” argument y’all seem to think it is. its about a gun manufacturer advertising their product in a video game.

plenty of people?

its from the DMX track “X gon’ give it to ya”. it came out in 2002.

beardown

did… did you make this account just to insert racist bullshit into the bear meme?

Typical woman

as always, the people most upset about the bear thing just so happen to also be sexists.

cop got on the news and used a bike lock chain that was used to barricade the building as “proof” that the protestors were infiltrated by professional agitators, because it was an “industrial chain” or something like that. its the bike lock that Columbia University itself recommends to students.

i’d like to see how you’d be measuring “performance” in this context, or what you consider to be worthy of merit, because those things are not the objective measures you seem to think they are.

people who are contributing to open source projects are not a perfect Gaussian distribution of best to worst “performance” you can just pluck the highest percentile contributors from. its a complex web of passionate humans who are more or less engaged with the project, having a range of overlapping skillsets, personalities, passions, and goals that all might affect their utility and opinions in a decision making context. projects aren’t equations you plug the “best people” into to achieve the optimal results, they’re collaborative efforts subject to complex limitations and the personal goals of each contributor, whose outcome relies heavily on the perspectives of the people running the project. the idea you can objectively sort, identify, and recruit the 50 “best people” to manage a project is a fantasy, and a naive one.

the point of mandating the inclusion of minority groups in decision making is to make it more likely your project and community will be inclusive to that group of people. the skillsets, passions, and goals that a diverse committee contains are more likely to create a project that is useful and welcoming to more kinds of people, and a committee that is not diverse is less likely to do so. stuff like this is how you improve diversity. in fact, its quite hard to do it any other way.

language changes. we don’t speak like people did last century. gay used to mean happy. we can make english “nonsensical”. we have, and we are, and we will. and you can’t fucking stop it any more than you can stop kids from making slang. as much as you hate it, you know how the singular they works, and have no reason to be a little bitch about it. its in the dictionary. suck it up and stop whining.