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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2020

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  • So I did read the article, and… I’m not understanding a word you are saying. The families are suing a video game company for a gun in their video game. Also the article is not at all making the emphasis that you are making between marketing a specific game and video games writ large (the article kind of speaks to both of those at the same time and isn’t making any such distinction), so I don’t know what you are talking about. As far as the article is concerned this has everything to do with the fact that the gun was in a video game, and even Activisions statement in response was to defend themselves from the idea that their video game is a thing that pushing people to violence. So even Activision understands the lawsuit as tying their video game to violence.

    I’m not saying I agree with the logic of the suit, but I literally have no idea what you think in the article separates out video games from the particular model of gun because that is just not a thing the article does at all.




  • Right, and to some people of a certain temperament, being aware of, and concerned about a vast range of entirely different issues, all of which can be engaged with on a number of levels that build on your knowledge and understanding, all of that is just an “echo chamber”.

    The echo chamber argument doesn’t account for the fact that people can have shared fundamental values and nevertheless have constructive valuable informative conversations that engage in nuanced analysis. Being concerned about climate change, for instance, you can have all kinds of productive conversations about new research showing how hot September was, or how to make cities more walkable, or any number of things, and those are valuable conversations where describing them as echo chambers is silly. They’re actually good conversations where we gain something from having them. If your primary test of a community is whether it does or doesn’t have echo chambers, it doesn’t have meaningful things to say about cases like this.



  • I don’t think it’s possible, or desirable, to try to create rules around how people use their preference buttons.

    I also don’t think it’s possible to actually end mean-spirited disagreement in internet comment sections, but it’s a valuable thing to strive for as a value and emphasize, like you did in this post.

    I think the same can be said for group-downvoting and stalking threads to downvote people based on what side they take without engaging with the substance of what is said. Minority viewpoints that add information are probably the most needed thing, and if anything I would say group downvoting is worse here than reddit on certain topics, unfortunately.

    I think the attention spans are better here, and many/most things are better here but this is a sore spot.