This would take the sort of player unification that just does not exist in this day and age. Too much ME, not enough WE.
4 Likes
Itās not just games, itās all software.
The fact that software isnāt something physical has made everyone treat it differently. Thereās this feeling that itās āeasierā to fix than physical stuff, because you donāt have to hammer or drill it, or bring a bunch of stuff in a truck, or anything that we see as traditionally hard work. You ājustā put a person in front of a keyboard for long enough.
And we also see it as less valuable, because it can be copied. We understand why we have to pay for each loaf of bread or pair of shoes, but why should I pay you for each copy of your program?
Games suffer from both of these attitudes, and on top of that you have this:
Donāt get me wrong, this isnāt an attack on @MarcosC. Itās simply there as an example. Since games are non-essential, theyāre a āluxuryā, and people tend to think that you shouldnāt complain about that.
And so, because of all of those factors above, thereās no sense of urgency when it comes to protecting consumer rights in the video game industry.
Not just player unification. The capitalist propaganda machine has largely succeeded in convincing everyone that individualism is to be enshrined and unity is evil if it means āsacrificingā any aspect of your āfreedomsā. You canāt exploit people for the surplus of their labors if they band together 
5 Likes
Thereās no individualism without pepple uniting. There"s the law of the strongest who will take all your rights away and you canāt do shit about it. Without people uniting and defending themselves as a group with shated values, what is left is slavery. Only a select few will benefit while the rest is mercilessly exploited. There are many forms of slavery though and we live under a social contract which substituted the unhappy slave (who will rebel sooner or later) for the content slave who thinks he is free (he was born into this cage and never experienced freedom), who has just enough to make ends meet and stays put. Capitalism is not to blame, as it was under it that more people fled abject poverty. They are still slaves though, but their chains arenāt physical. 
3 Likes
Every system weāve tried so far has had serious problems and needed to be improved. Capitalism has them, too, but itās taboo to point them out. One of those problems is precisely what you described:
Show me a system weāve tried before where we managed to convince people that they are all ātemporarily embarrassed millionairesā and Iāll gladly acknowledge that this problem isnāt unique to capitalism. 
1 Like
Temporarily embarrassed millionaires?
Thatās a first.
How many people do you know who are under such delusion? I donāt think I know any, unless the young and gullible, most growing skeptical early. People are just comfortable enough. In exchange, they give away their freedom. They stay put. Beats losing freedom while starving. Thatās why it works. The problem isnāt the system. Itās the human. You see, we are a species afflicted by a fundamental craving and very prone to tunel vision. That is the gift we received from evolvingā¦
Maybe some day we grow out of it.
Itās a quote misattributed to John Steinbeck.
No one. The quote isnāt meant to be taken literally. Itās meant to be a reflection of the culture in the US. And in that sense, itās spot on. The vast majority of the society in this country measures success ā and worth and many other things ā in terms of wealth.
Where do you think the problems in any system come from? Every flaw in every system comes from humans. The history of humanity has been a history of improving our systems. Are you certain weāve reached perfection and thereās no need to improve anymore? If you are, then weāve reached an irreconcilable difference of opinion and thereās nothing more to discuss. But if you arenāt, then tell me: how will we improve if weāre not willing or allowed to discuss the flaws?
2 Likes
Damn you write fast! I canāt keep up from my smartphone. Iāll read you with the attention you deserve tomorrow. Itās past midnight here.
Edit: mostly agree with what you wrote.
1 Like
Itās everywhere, not just the US. Iāve been around. It ties to our sense of self esteem. There is a unduly correlation between wealth and virtue. Everyone rationally knows these arenāt entirely related, but emotionally people get starry eyed when they get the favor of the wealthy. If a person is successful, you imagine that person must have qualities that make her so. Sheās a winner, so having her favor must mean you also have value or, when people are honest, a perceived value that will raise you above your peers, albeit that value might not even be real.
We are wired to delude ourselves. What we know rationally doesnāt translate to what we feel, unless in rare introspective pauses that quickly fade away with the agitation of daily life. Those insights donāt linger for long.
It takes going agains our biological hardwiring that, in spite of making us group, also makes us seek power. There are good and bad outcomes steming from these traits. Itās a too complex subject to deepen here. The take is that wealth is a measure of virtue by irrational means everywhere with few exceptions
Sometimes systems have built in flaws by many reasons, the most common being a superficial understanding of how our mind behaves. But I could agree that when a system is conceived, if it has flaws, they were created by human minds. What I meant is that even if you had a perfect system, adequate to times and circumstances, we would still screw up.
No, not only am I not sure that we reached perfection as I am adamantly certain that we didnāt. However, the problem is that it doesnāt matter as even if we had a perfect system, we would still screw up by many reasons. This is the reason why I always bet in education, because a change for the better always starts with the individual. This is a path fraught with dangers as education can be easily turned into indoctrination. Instead of teaching you how to think while getting in touch with a sense of empathy we all have, unless we are psycopaths, who only represent one to two percent of the gen pop, students are taught what to think and their emotional dimension is manipulated and conditioned so they adapt to whatever the designers of the curriculum desire. Itās a double edged sword. Again, a complex issue we canāt deepen enough here. Itās still a pleasure discussing these things with you, but we have understandable limitations.
Is there realy anyone defending that Capitalism is perfect? I think you might find people saying it is the best we have, which is debatable, yet I donāt think anyone believes it is perfect and almost everyone knows it can derail with terrible consequences.
Historically, Capitalism with some degree of regulation from a democratically elected government seems to be the most successful political system so far.
It works. It works like a crappy and unsafe car works. Itās better than a bike or going on foot through inhospitable territory. Capitalism has, in my opinion, a deep flaw, not mattering how much some people want to evade it or normalize it as being wholesome. Ambition. It stimulates your ambition and, if ambition has an important role in society, it is never a positive trait. It shouldnāt be ambition to drive your mind. It should be empathy, compassion, kindness, civic conscientiousness etc. But ambition works and when it comes from all sides, it has a way to functionally ballance itself. You become intelligently selfish, meaning that you learn that content others are needed for your own benefit. It doesnāt help if everyone else wants to kill you, so, aligned with your biological propensities and human complexity that lessens the severity of this characteristic, you manage to function well in group. But the seed itself is problematic. It doesnāt matter if you change its name to sweeten the pill. At the core of Capitalism, we donāt have a positive human trait at work, not as it is seen today. You may surround it with other positive traits, or treat it as an organizing system disconnected from its drive, but the uncomfortable fact remains. The pursuit of happiness is always a mistaken path. It never fails to mistake a derivative result as a goal in itself, and this leads to all sorts of disgrace, from the individual to the collective level.
I would say the discussion is far from over.
How come arenāt we allowed to discuss the flaws of Capitalism? Arenāt we doing just that?
What we need to realize when discussing political systems is that they work in tandem with the development of the individual as an emotionally healthy human being in a positive feedback loop. A better, yet imperfect, system allows for the flourishing of our best traits that, in turn, allow to adopt an even better system that would not have worked at first. But humans donāt flourish all at the same time by very important reasons. Sometimes, a system that is obsolete for some needs to be held in place, because its āupgradeā would require coercion, broadly destroying the whole process.
We canāt deal in utopias. It is very dangerous comparing functional systems with fictional results of systems that arenāt in place. You canāt ever measure a functional system against an utopia. You always need to measure and compare the practical results of various systems and work from that. It doesnāt matter if, in theory, a certain type of organization is much better than other. It matters what happens when you try it.
Am I happy with Capitalism? Yes. Yet a lot of people suffer because it didnāt solve their problems. In many cases, it worsened them. Do I think it can evolve for something better? Definitely. Are we at the point where something radically different could be safely implemented? I donāt think so. We might have to tweak Capitalism for quite some time until we are ready to discard it. Itās that feedback loop I mentioned earlier.
All right, this was longer than I expected, probably it is completely off topic and definitely it would benefit from further discussion, input and so on, but in a nutshell I hope it passes more or less what I think, in a general way. I canāt write these walls of text from my smartphone without completely ā ā ā ā ā ā ā ā my eyesight. Sorry for the grammar, typos and errors, but I only gave it a quick revision.
Not only when itās conceived, but also when itās implemented and abused. Especially when itās abused.
Probably, but thatās not an argument against trying.
I know you probably didnāt mean it that way, but I just want to say: of course it matters! If it didnāt matter, we might as well go back to feudalism.
And thatās another problem with the society weāre living in. The indoctrination is still there, but now many believe it isnāt, because it doesnāt resemble what weāve seen in more blatant cases.
Remember how you said āit doesnāt matterā and I said āyou probably didnāt mean it that wayā? Yeah, this is the same thing.
When I say āweāre not allowedā, Iām not referring to the legality of it. Iām referring to the fact that itās more or less taboo. If you argue against capitalism, it can have a wide range of consequences.
The very mildest of those consequences is simply fibbing and equivocation: āthatās not capitalism, thatās corporatismā or crony capitalism or any other No True Scotsman du jour. And that No True Scotsman always comes from the same people who wonāt accept an argument like ātrue communism has never been implementedā.
But those consequences Iām talking about can get much worse than that. Thereās a reason why discussions like this one tend to happen in behind the shield of relative anonymity or in some similar āsafe spaceā. That ācancel cultureā that the far right likes to use to misrepresent themselves as victims? It can be very real if your criticism of the system strays too far to the left.
Wise words, but sentiments like yours keep being exploited and abused to prevent any sort of change.
This is exactly what I mean when I say that your sentiments are used to prevent any hope of change. Those who are satisfied with the status quo always use them to urge āmoderationā, while the Overton Window keeps sliding further and further, and the meaning of āmoderateā slides with it. Reminds me of the song āBorn on the Outsā by Refused.
ShŃt, if we canāt even have a conversation in an armchair in the ivory tower, because itās not moderate enough, imagine how the disenfranchised multitudes feel. Which brings me to this:
Yes, and they arenāt happy like you. Theyāre not even lazy and apathetic like me, much less āhappyā. And their number is growing precisely because any hope of change is being stifled.
So they resort to voting for those who promised them change, without understanding what change that will bring. But think a little further into the future, when that change makes things even worse for them ā and probably for us, too, so some of us join them and swell their numbers.
Iām a firm believer in JFKās adage that āthose who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitableā.
I donāt want to live through a revolution. I donāt want my son to live through a revolution. Revolutions are like jumping from the 5th floor of a burning building. You know thereās a high chance you might not survive, but itās still preferable to death by burning.
Yes, and maybe we should stop. Or rather, maybe I should stop. Not just because itās off-topic, but because I donāt really have anything truly useful to say. We will either keep arguing in circles like this, or weāll get to the point where someone asks me āwell what would you propose then, smart guyā and I donāt have anything concrete to propose.
My point wasnāt to propose something concrete. My whole point was that Iām not allowed to refer to the propaganda and indoctrination that the current system feeds us without someone making up excuses for it and shifting the goal posts until I have to somehow propose a solution for a perfect system just because I dared to criticize one aspect of the system we live in.
1 Like
I donāt think we are arguing in circles, @CodeMage .
My suggestion is always to implement changes gradually, test them and proceed. On occasion, revolutions are needed, but they best be avoided. Usually, itās just another group of a few using the many for their on purposes, after convincing them that the revolution is in their best interest. I prefer a gradual transformation of the individual so that each person realizes the need to change society. Let me give you an example. The way animals are treated. In most parts of the world, they are just things, but in our society, most people find gratuitous animal cruelty unacceptable. This is a development that didnāt need a nasty revolution. People started having easier lives and animals were seen progressively at a different light. Go further back and you will see the same happened with slavery, albeit it is still common in other places of the modern world. On the US, it was a bit more complicated, but be as it may, overt slavery is absolutely shunned, not because it is ilegal, but because people became more empathetic. These are just examples from the top of my head. You can add environmental concerns, equal justiice, child labor, etc. Nothing is yet perfect, but itās better than it was and most was gained not by bloodshed, but through education.
What I meant when I said that even in a perfect system we would screw up wasnāt implying staticism. Not at all. Iām not satisfied with the state of the West, let alone the world. What I was trying to emphacize is that unless thereās individual florishment, any system extrinsically imposed is almost certain to fail for everyone not ready for it.
Another curious thing is that you feel debating Capitalism is problematic if done publicly. I donāt feel it at all, but I donāt live in the US. Itās not good when that kind of constraints are present and I certainly didnāt have that impression from the country you live in. You guys have the strongest protections of free speech that I am aware of.
A spiral might not be a circle, but going down the drain is not that much better than ending up where we started 
Like I said, I would really love to not have to live through one. And not just a revolution, but any kind of violent change. Iāve moved from my birth country halfway across the world to escape from the violence. Then I moved to yet another country to avoid a different kind of violence.
Iām not ashamed to admit Iām a coward. 
While thereās a degree of truth in what you said there, itās an oversimplification.
Let me ask you something: if animals had the same influence humans do, do you think things would have turned out just as peacefully?
Iām sorry, what? Iāll be the first to admit that my knowledge of history is crappy, because I grew up in a country where history teachers in school were focusing on indoctrination, so I grew up hating the subject and doing the bare minimum to scrape by with an acceptable grade. But even so, I think I wouldnāt have completely missed a period in human history where we had a bloodless transition from overt slavery to emancipation because people started having easier lives and slaves were seen in a progressively different light.
If you think getting rid of child labor didnāt involve violence, then Iāve finally found someone more idealistic than me
As for environmental concerns, look around. Tell me weāve done a good job.
In fact, the more I look, the more I see the examples of how most of our rights were won through blood, sweat, and tears. People forget why most of the world commemorates May 1st as the International Workersā Day, but itās the date of the Haymarket massacre.
Again, donāt get me wrong. Iām not advocating for violence. As I said, Iām a coward, and I flee violence. But Iām scared shŃtless of the violence that I see on the horizon, because this time around I see nowhere to run.
I said I was pretty sure you didnāt mean it that way, but my point still stands: your sentiments are being widely used to discourage and suppress change.
I do. Iāve been here for more than a decade now, and that decade has been spent in a āblueā state, i.e. a state where the more progressive of Americaās two right-wing parties holds sway. The state where I live is one of the most progressive. The fact that I feel this way should tell you all you need to know about that particular aspect of the US culture.
But itās not just the US. At this point Iāve spent more than half of my life living outside Europe. The American continents are the bastion of the kind of culture Iām talking about.
āWeā ā Iām not a citizen yet ā also have a handful of ultra-rich owning all the news outlets and media companies. Reminds me of the Agent Smith from the Matrix: āTell me, Mr. Anderson, what good is a phone call if you are unable to speak?ā
And this is how you feel our conversation is going? I donāt see it like that. Iām enjoying reading your ideas. You claim that you donāt have suggestions, but I am higly doubtful of the validity of your statement. You may have that sentiment, but I donāt believe you are out of suggestions. At all. I quite like your way of thinking as it comes from a very good place and is definitely oriented by a deep humanism. I might not agree with some of your takes, but Iām very glad that you have them. I am also absolutely certain that you would make a much better job if you had power than those who actually have it.
Far from it. You are a survivor. You would probably have died for nothing. War is only the last resort and I am still to be convinced it is the best solution in any scenario other than eminent existential threat. Usually, itās just the poor dying for the interests of the rich. Those who start wars seldom fight them. There are exceptions, but they are very rare.
It is. But at its heart it is right. Most revolutions are pointless when compared to the massive change of mindsets through non violent means. I am very strongly against violence unless absolutely necessary.
I donāt know how to answer that. May you elaborate a little further?
Slavery wasnāt abolished through bloodshed in a big chunk of the world.
It was different in the US.
However, and this is the point I am trying to make, you donāt need to convince most people that slavery is wrong, at least in the West. Itās a shared value, transversal to society. Or do you know many people who think slavery is a good thing? I donāt. I donāt know personally a single person who is pro slavery!
You would have me fooled.
I am a pessimist and I am way less cynical than you.
You may not desire violence, but you seem to believe it will be the only way. That is almost inviting it.
No, I doubt violence will achieve anything.
Yes, we had A LOT of violence in the past and it did the job to a point. Was it the only way? I doubt it, but a lot of people thought it was.
There are a lot more of environmentally worried individuals today than there were in the past. People didnāt give a shit. Nobody. Now, a lot of people are concerned about the environment. That doesnāt mean everyone will agree in what is a priority, but at least it is a subject of interest. The same applies to other examples. There are positive developments and you canāt let yhe perfect obstaculize the good.
How is advocating for a change rooted in the individual florishment being used in such way? That is my main point. It is always better when people feel the need to change instead of having change imposed upon them. Nothing sustained by strenght and coercion endures. Thus, education is fundamental.
I see what you mean. Still, you are much better than about 70% of the world in that regard. Try debating the problems of Comunism in China, where billions of people live oppressed. Or discuss the evils of nepotism in mist of the African Continent and youāll see how it goes. Or perhaps you want to debate the rights of homosexuals publicly on the Middle East. You wouldnāt be able to tell me how that went.
It seems to me you donāt realize how lucky you are.
I do, but not because of you. Like I said, I donāt have a solution. As an engineer and an Aspie, it bothers me. Normally, I wouldnāt let that discourage me, but weāre not talking about engineering or science, weāre talking politics and ideology. One rarely loses friends arguing about engineering and science. If I keep discussing this, it might come between me and several others on this forum who I respect and consider my friends.
What few suggestions I can come up with are suggestions in which Iāve lost faith. For example, I agree with you about education and that itās paramount to teach our kids to be critical thinkers (real ones, not ādo your own research while on the shŃtter and pretend youāre an expertā) and to have empathy. But even though I agree with you, Iāve lost faith that this approach will produce the results we want to see in a timeframe that will save humanity from what I fear is coming.
The wars ā and ālittleā things like the NATO bombing campaign that we all pretend wasnāt an act of warfare ā were over shortly after I left my country. I was, fortunately, too young to be pressed into the military while I was still there, but I didnāt want to stay because I didnāt know if the shŃt was going to hit the fan again.
But itās not just wars I was talking about. Even if I had known that no more wars were going to be fought, I still wouldnāt have stayed to help with the overthrow of our dictator. And when the country I moved to started experiencing worse and worse rates of violent crime, with no solution on the horizon, I ended up moving again.
Survivor to some, coward to others, I donāt care what label you put on it, but I admit freely that Iām not the kind of person who stays to fight and try to take part in the solution. Instead, I flee. The same has been true in my professional career, although not without any fight. When it comes to work, Iāll try, but I wonāt keep trying for too long before I decide itās time to jump ship.
Sure. What I meant is that if animals could rise up against us, they would have done so long before our stance on animal cruelty evolved peacefully to its present state.
It is now. Even if we exclude the United States, I really doubt that itās true that we got to that point peacefully.
I do, if we stay on the current regressive course.
I view the kind of violence weāve been discussing as a desperate act of the majority against the minority that oppressed them. Is that a good way to accomplish change? No, I agree with you that itās better when people change without being forced to. But that requires those people to be willing to make that change.
And I think that this is the crux of our differences. You call yourself a pessimist, but youāre much more optimistic than I am. Believe it or not, we agree on the violence being the last resort instead of the preferred solution, but what I see in the modern geopolitical situation makes me believe that we are headed in the direction that will end up making violence inevitable.
You misunderstand me. Itās because I realize how fragile this situation is that Iām terrified of the regressive tendencies around me.
When I was a kid, I used the word āf#gg#tā (in my native language) as a slur before I even knew what it meant. In my teens and my youth I was an āenlightenedā homophobe, who instead of being rampantly hateful āmerelyā considered homosexuals to be victims of a mental illness. That was a āprogressiveā and āopen-mindedā view.
Which is even more ironic in my case, because I spent all that time subconsciously trying to come to terms with being a bisexual, something that took me not years, but decades to accept. Even when I stopped being homophobic and learned to truly accept non-heterosexual orientations as normal, I still didnāt call myself bisexual in my own head, because of how I grew up. It took a marriage crisis and coming to the brink of divorce to admit it to myself.
Iām still happily married to that same wonderful woman, but I had to almost lose her to break through the programming.
I tell you this to make it clear that I do understand how lucky I am to live in a society like the one whose flaws Iām criticizing. And I donāt want it to turn into something much worse.
1 Like
You donāt have to save humanity. Teach your kids well and be an example to those surrounding you, not by words but by being consistently a decent human being. Words come after. You are not a politician. Donāt think like one. Christians have a prayer that goes more or less like this: God, give me the patience to bear what I canāt change, the courage to change what I can and the wisdom to know the difference. Something like that, I believe attributed to St. Francis. Thereās value in it, even if you are an atheist or agnostic.
So, that sums it up pretty well. Tibetans say yhat the ox should not take the burden of the yak. Act locally. Otherwise you will be eaten alive from the inside out.
2 Likes