There are several more. My favourite is proprioception - the sense of where your limbs are. Phantom limb syndrome exists because we have proprioception.

This was just a top notch meme. Informative and a very clever arrested developement reference.

I guess i don’t really see the point. Is there a strong use case out there, or is this a marge’s potato? (“I just think they’re neat”)

I was careful to say perminant heirarchies for that reason. Bao Jingyan said that power originates in the contrast between the weak and the strong, and the cunning and the naive. I’m inclined to agree.

But we can have social institutions that break up and flush out these natural channels of inequality, rather than institutions that metastize them into heirarchies.

Aristotle discussed a then-current idea to redistribute all personal wealth above 5x the poorest citizen. We could tax all inheritance above say 500k at 100%. Eliminate all personal debt every 7 years.

There’s a lot we can do to make heirarchies more temporary.

Blades in the Dark, it’s called.

The setting is quite different from Dishonoured, though you can see the influence clearly and it’s mentioned by name as a media touchstone.

There are lots of ways to organize people that aren’t heirarchical, or that dilute or limit power rather than concentrating it.

Directly voting for laws, appointing officials by sortition - like being picked for jury duty, pushing decisions down to neighbourhood councils, consensus decision making, a culture that always permits insulting the successful and plenty else has been suggested.

It all comes with drawbacks of it’s own, of course. And having grown up in a heirarchical society, it can be very hard to imagine anything else, until you read about all the times and places where people have organized themselves differently.

There’s a lot of neuroscience showing that social power suppresses empathy in the brain. Status, privilege, wealth, etc. make almost everyone less able to consider the pain of others.

Most of us can be reasonable with people we know. But the socially powerful are making most of the important higher-scale decisions, and they are neurologically the least capable of making good decisions on behalf of others.

Or that’s how i see the problem.

It’s a custom system built using the forged in the dark engine, which is a stellar choice for any game where you play a series of daring missions.

The first game made with that engine - the game that launched the engine - was heavily inspired by Dishonored. Its particular flavour of steampunk is fairly close to cyberpunk.

This is all to say that they made a very good choice with the system - it’s perfectly suited to the setting, well-designed, and powerful and flexible in play.

While i too yearn for the downfall of capitalism, pre-capitalist societies were still responsible for environmental distruction, slavery and genocide.

As long as individuals or a small elite have enough power to enforce their needs over the needs of everyone else, we’ll always have capital-b Badnesses.

We have to usher in the collapse of perminant heirarchies, whatever form they take.

Beautiful.

In my day most goths would spend the entire night telling you why every single other person in the club was not a real goth.

The funniest one i remember was that only Liebach is true goth music, if you listen to anything else you’re a poser.

The fact this is can even be a sentence someone thought to utter is such a triumph of wealth over reality.

When you have a product that you know can and will be used harmfully, you can’t just say “but if you use it harmfully, we’re not responsible”.

OpenAI is undeniably responsible for deaths they facilitated, like this one.

This kind of useless performative busy-ness is one of the stupidest forms virtue signalling.

Well I’m insured

Dollhouse is weird though. I enjoyed it a lot but i don’t think it’s for everyone.

Plus the ending is not well done. They got cancelled and tried to pull together an impactful ending over a few episodes, when the original plan was to take a few seasons. I respect the urge to offer a real ending, but unsurprisingly it feels cheap and sudden.

He financed a spoiler candidate for OR governor last election. That spoiler candidate was too obviously right wing to siphon enough votes, despite what she was being paid to say.

Phil knight is strongly opposed to democracy.

The rich don’t want equality. They need people to be suffering and in dire want, so they have exploitable people to profit from.

Another point he makes is that the safety net does catch people at the very bottom, but traps anyone who climbs out. For instance, at $45,000, they lose Medicaid eligibility; at $65,000, childcare subsidies vanish. “In option terms, the government has sold a call option to the poor, but they’ve rigged the gamma. As you move ‘closer to the money’ (self-sufficiency), the delta collapses. For every dollar of effort you put in, the system confiscates 70 to 100 cents,” he says. “No rational trader would take that trade. Yet we wonder why labor force participation lags. It’s not a mystery. It’s math.”

What? How does the system take 70-100 cents of every dollar of effort put in by low income people? Medicaid and childcare subsidies going away isn’t 70-100% of the income of a household earning 65k.

Obviously losing medicaid or childcare subsidies is a huge blow for anyone, but i don’t understand where he’s pulling 70-100% of the value of someone’s labour from.

No-one who’s studied empire could mourn its passing.

Hey remember that time christians sacked christian byzantium and finally ended the roman empire in the name of fighting islam, the great enemy of the christians and the roman empire?

Or all those decades where the omnipresent threat of instant nuclear annhilation was considered the main infrastructure of peace?

Things have been stupid before, and they’ll be stupid again.