TychoCelchuuu

Oh, also, I missed this point: Um, no, you're not racist if you eat meat. You're speciesist. I of course think racism and speciesism are analogous in one important sense: neither are justifiable. Presumably you disagree: you think one is justifiable and the other isn't. This doesn't make you a racist, either obliquely or directly. It does, however, make you an avowed speciesist, and what I'd like is some defense of the speciesist position that does not also serve as a defense of the racist position. I understand that you were trying to articulate your thoughts or feelings in a cogent way, and I apologize if it sounded like I was attacking you. If it makes you feel better, we can, for the purposes of the argument, turn me into a racist. (Hopefully this will show that I bear no ill will towards people who, in the context of an argument, get pinned with one view or another.) As a racist, let's say that I think black people can be permissibly enslaved, tortured, killed, and eaten, but I think this would be gravely immoral and beyond the pale if this is done to a white person. Since you are presumably very, very unhappy with my racism, I would appreciate being told where I've gone wrong: what mistake have I made about the moral status of individuals, such that I've reached the incorrect conclusion? The usual move for animal rights activists is to take whatever response you give and show that this similarly suggests that we ought not to be speciesist. How that conversation specifically goes depends upon your answer, though, so the ball is in your court now. The other option is to admit that there's nothing wrong with my racism, which is logically consistent but, I take it, objectionable for other reasons, namely, that we think racism is wrong.

I wasn't literally asking if people condone human sacrifice - the answer is obviously no. I was asking on what basis people reject human sacrifice but not various treatments of non-human animals. That this was seen as something like histrionics or whatever is more of a reflection on the state that non-human animals rights are in than it is any sort of craziness on my part. You can go back a few hundred years and people who say things like "you have to treat black people the way you treat white people" or "you have to treat women the way you treat men" get as much shit as I get for asking whether it's okay to kill human beings for no reason other than pleasure if it's also okay to kill non-human animals for no reason other than pleasure. You'll notice my specific interlocutor in that conversation, Akidu, did not reject the question as so patently ridiculous that the correct response was to leave the thread and continue to murder non-human animals for no good reason. In fact Akidu's final words on the question were "Yeah ok fair enough I think you've swayed me."

Trans. John Sturrock (Penguin, 2002).

To be honest, I'm pretty shitty at this. I'm fairly certain the phrase popped up one other time in one of the other volumes, and I also saw it in some other book I read (maybe a Henry James novel?) but in neither case did I have my iPad camera handy.

I guess as long as we're talking about Ghost in the Shell, some sad news.

It's like adopting a child who's never going to grow up, really.

Only as wrong as killing humans to provide needed sustenance to pet non-human animals/killing non-human animals to provide needed sustenance to humans/etc. Obviously those can come apart in some instances - for instance, you might think it's wrong to kill a human to feed a cat that you could just as easily not have adopted, but if you've already got the cat (or the kid) then maybe there can be instances where something has to die and it's not obvious whether it's better to let your cat/kid starve to death than it would be to murder a cow/human/whatever. As you might expect, for someone who thinks non-human animals and human animals are morally equivalent, the question becomes less "when it is okay to kill a non-human animal?" and more "when is it okay to kill an animal, period, whether it's human or not?" Since most people don't really have worked out views about when it's okay to kill humans (or more accurately, they've got views, but they turn out to be pretty strict and thus maybe rule out some stuff they wouldn't want to rule out), this is an area that lots of people are sort of fuzzy on.

Yes, pets are indeed "slavery," in the same way that forcing your child to do their homework instead of watch TV is "slavery" or keeping an elderly parent with Alzheimer's in an assisted living home they don't want to be in is basically "kidnapping" or something very similar to it. The reason slavery is wrong isn't that slaves are living creatures like anyone else - the reason that slavery is wrong is because we think that certain living creatures (namely, human beings) are able to and desire to live their own lives freely in the manner they so choose. For human beings who aren't able to do this (children, people with mental issues, people who are addicted to drugs badly enough that we think we ought to confine them to a recovery program, etc.) we actually don't have a problem with limiting their freedom in certain ways. Pets are in a similar situation - as long as you treat a pet well, your dog or cat isn't the sort of thing that is able to and desires to live its own life freely in the manner it so chooses. Your dog or your cat, in fact, is happy to be your pet (and if it isn't, it's probably wrong to keep the dog or cat as your pet!). Your dog or your cat doesn't have any interests in living a free life outside of your guidance any more than a human being with the mental capacities of a dog or cat does. Notice, though, that your dog or cat does have interests in being pain free, in not being killed and eaten, and so on, so just as it would be wrong to torture a human being or kill and eat a human being, even if the human being has extremely limited mental capacities because they are a baby or they have Alzheimer's or something, it would be wrong to torture your dog or cat or kill your dog or cat, even though your dog or your cat has extremely limited mental capacities because dogs and cats are dumb.

"How many neurons do you have" sounds like an odd criterion for someone who is ready to say that plants can suffer - if you don't need a single neuron to suffer, let alone however many we've got, then surely it can't matter how many neurons something has when it comes to whether it's okay to injure it, right? Or perhaps you think neurons are important not because they allow something to experience sensations like suffering, but for some other reason. If that's the case, then I must confess that I have no idea why I should care about the number of neurons when it comes to the moral status of an organism any more than I should care about number of fingers or number of dollars in a bank account of number of melanin pigments in the skin or anything like this. That said, if you think neurons are important because they are at least a good shorthand for indicating how much an organism can feel various sensations, and if you think that the mosquito's lack of neurons suggests that it feels far fewer sensations than human beings and thus it is okay to do various things to a mosquito that it would not be okay to do to a human being, that's more or less fine with me for the purposes of this thread. The end result of this line of reasoning is, I think, still basically veganism, or at least veganism with respect to most animals, because surely once you've moved past the mosquito stage and you've got as many neurons as, for instance, a pig, then surely you've got enough neurons to get you into the "deserves moral consideration" category at least as much as a human infant does, or something similar. (Notice also you sign up for weird results like "whales matter way more than human beings because holy fuck they've got a lot of neurons.") There has been a lot of work done on this topic: here are some links to check out, but if you'd rather skip them, the short version is "maybe killing mosquitos is okay, but hamburgers are almost certainly ruled out": http://reducing-suffering.org/is-brain-size-morally-relevant/ http://reducing-suffering.org/do-bugs-feel-pain/ http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2041-6962.2008.tb00075.x/abstract I already addressed this earlier in the thread, so I think I would just advert to what I said there. edit: actually I thought of one more thing to say on that topic. People who always try to change the "is it okay to kill and eat non-human animals for food, especially if it's not necessary for survival?" argument into the "actually ALL FOOD IS UNETHICAL, the world sucks, so shut up about veganism already" conversation remind me of the people who come into conversations about feminism and say "actually there are really serious issues that effect men, and all human beings, not just women, issues much more important than feminism, so shut up about feminism already." I mean, in one sense, that's actually true. As serious as the issues that effect women are, there are even BIGGER problems in the world: mass starvation, genocide, economic exploitation, slavery, and so on. So I guess people DO have a point when they say "hey, forget #GamerGate and all that bullshit, let's focus on REAL PROBLEMS." But I take it that a better response to this would be "uh, look, I'm not trying to pretend there aren't OTHER problems that maybe even swamp feminism. But just for once I'd like to have the feminism conversation without you hijacking it and turning it into the 'what about men' conversation." It would be nice if we could have, just for once, the veganism conversation without you hijacking it and turning into "oh but actually THE ENTIRE WORLD FOOD SYSTEM IS EVIL and that's far more important than veganism!" I mean, sure, yes. I don't deny that. But... that's not the point.

I have asked MULTIPLE TIMES for the appreciable differences, but so far nobody has offered any. I mean, sure, there are plenty of differences in terms of, for instance, size, number of legs, etc. But there are plenty of differences between black people and white people, or women and men, or queer people and straight people, etc. I just don't think any of that matters when it comes to figuring out whether it's okay to torture, kill, and eat someone. It sounds like you don't think it's wrong to cause suffering, then? Since I'm assuming you have some other reason for why it's wrong to stab a person in the thigh with a knife, it would be interesting to know what that reason is, and whether it applies to dogs and carrots too.

A cursory reading of the articles mentioned on that page suggest that plants don't actually feel pain - that something "cries out" in a way detectable by a microphone isn't very convincing. A shoe "cries out" if you cut into it - it makes noise as it splits apart. That's not pain, though. That something produces a molecular response in certain situations doesn't suggest that if feels pain. Vinegar and baking soda produce molecular responses when combined. Vinegar and baking soda don't feel pain. And so on. According to our current understanding of pain, it takes something like a nervous system to be instantiated. If you're still convinced by that article you linked, here are some other articles which you might find more convincing: http://tabish.freeshell.org/animals/plantpain.html I'm also not sure you actually believe plants feel pain. I mean, you might. But that would be pretty out there. That's even more out there than thinking that all animals are morally equal, and look how much shit I'm getting for that!

It only took three movies, two seasons of the TV series, and god knows how much manga to get there, but finally we've got dude butts! Now we just need Batou to be naked like, 24/7 for much of the rest of the life of the franchise and eventually we'll hit parity between the objectification of men and women.

Some kingdoms (like plants and fungi) can't suffer - if something can't suffer, then whatever you do to it is basically irrelevant. For the same reason it's okay for me to hit a shoe with an axe (the shoe does not suffer), it is okay for me to hit a carrot with an axe. Not so for animals. The most famous articulation of this point is Bentham's "can they suffer?" quote. One interesting thing about that quote is that, as is clear from the quote itself, he was writing at a time when racism WASN'T obviously wrong, and he was drawing the parallel then to point out that hopefully one day we would overcome the various prejudices he identified back then.

I'm not really understanding what you are saying here. That you're "comfortable" with your "morally gray wrongness" just strikes me as a more subtle way of saying "I don't really give a shit whether I'm doing something wrong." I'm sure plenty of racist, sexist, heterosexist, and otherwise prejudiced people are "comfortable" with their "morally gray wrongness" but that's not really much of a comfort to those of us who are on the receiving end of this wrongness, as opposed to being on the perpetuating end of it. I mean, I guess I understand what this means - you disagree on some level that you're either unable or unwilling to articulate, for reasons that you're either unwilling or unable to articulate, so you're going to duck out of the conversation and keep eating meat because the thread no longer has value for you. I'm confused as to why you would think that because the entire thread is me asserting the moral equivalence of all animals that this is a sign that the thread has no value anymore for you. If you were racist and the entire thread were me asserting the moral equivalence of all races, would the thread no longer have value for you? If you were heterosexist and the entire thread were me asserting the moral equivalence of all sexual orientations, would the thread no longer have value for you? I'm confused as to what would make the thread "valuable" for you - is it valuable to the degree that it supports your own positions, or what? I guess I'm missing what it is that I and others have done that have robbed this tread of value. I don't even know what value in this context means. No, I totally understand that you don't understand. This is not an unusual response to being confronted with one's prejudices - the vast majority of our prejudices are not only entirely unreflective but they don't even appear to us as prejudices in this first place. Almost nobody is consciously racist or sexist or heterosexist or speciesist. Nobody wakes up one day thinking "man, black people and white people, what's up with that? I bet it's okay to treat black people worse!" And so on for the sexes, sexual orientations, species, etc. But we do have these various prejudices - less so today than in the past, but some are still around. Speciesism is by far the most common. So, the reason you feel this way about what I've written is that you just have a blind, unthinking prejudice that is no more justifiable than racism, sexism, or heterosexism. That's the long and short of it. To make this point more explicit, imagine that I'm racist. I think it's okay to treat black people worse than white people, because I'm black. What is it that you would say to me to convince me? What sorts of arguments would you use? Or is there no hope? Do we just have to let racist people alone and get on with our lives, shrugging every once in a while when they lynch us or enslave us or kill us but otherwise just trying to ignore them? Is that the best we can do?

In a hypothetical society where it is a crime to kill black people and a crime to kill white people, if a black person is shot and killed should it carry the same punishment as a white person being shot and killed? Why or why not? If you think the answer is "yes," but you think the answer is "no" for the dog case, on what basis are you drawing the distinction? Why is it okay to treat species differently but not to treat races differently?

If we took as "a given truth" that killing a black person is morally equivalent to killing a white person, or that killing a woman is morally equivalent to killing a man, or that killing a queer person is morally equivalent to killing a straight person, would you raise similar issues? Could you have "a conversation you can continue in good faith" with someone who believes these things, like me, or would these assumptions put me beyond the pale? If you're fine with these assumptions but not with the "killing a non-human animal is morally equivalent to killing a human animal," what would you take to be the main difference between the earlier assumptions and the one about non-human animals? What makes the distinction between a cow and a human being relevant to figuring out whether it's okay to torture, kill, and eat someone any more than the distinction between white and black or male and female or straight and queer? Do you understand how saying "I can't accept that humans and non-humans are equal" is going to be a non-starter for me the same way saying "I can't accept that blacks and whites are equal" is going to be a non-starter for me? Can you understand why I would have the same problems with both statements, namely, that they seem to draw ethically arbitrary lines to justify mistreatment of individuals who don't deserve to be mistreated? This is not to say that the idea that all animals are equal is dogma for me. I'm perfectly willing to have you or anyone else refute it. Offer LITERALLY ANY ARGUMENT. I am serious. ONE ARGUMENT. ANYTHING. Right now you put me in an awkward position: you are claiming I am wrong, but you're not telling me why. As far as I can tell, I have as much evidence for "it's wrong to kill all animals, regardless of their species" as I do for "it's wrong to kill all humans, regardless of their race." This seems pretty obvious to me. The animal part is of course not obvious to many people, but if we go back a few hundred years, the race part wasn't obvious to very many people either, so...

I think what's taboo and what isn't turns out to be a very poor guide to morality. Many taboos vary quite a bit from culture to culture, and even if there were a universal taboo against, for instance, homosexual intercourse, I don't think this would tell us anything about whether it is moral to engage in homosexual intercourse. Ditto for what we eat.

I can't speak for everyone, but: It's totally fine to eat, unless, like, the lab treats its workers unethically or blah blah blah etc. But just like it would be fine to eat "human" meat grown in a lab, there's no issue with eating meat "from" any other animal that's grown in a lab. It's exactly as moral or immoral as participating in a society knowing full well that certain humans will be killed as a result of such a society existing. It's exactly as moral or immoral as living in a society in which they cannot be sustained by non-human-meat products and thus consumes human meat.

I think you're sort of missing the point. When I said stuff like "don't kill someone," I took that to be a shorthand for "don't do things to someone that you ought not to do to them, which typically includes killing." Now of course if it's okay to kill people in some cases, like when the death penalty is justified, then it would be okay to kill non-human animals in those situations too, just like if it's okay to kill white people in certain circumstances it would be okay to kill black people in certain circumstances. The problem is inconsistency, not killing. In any case, as Gaizokubanou points out, it's not killing that's the issue, it's killing for no reason other than that you would like to eat the flesh of whoever you're killing. Even if you think the death penalty can be okay, surely you don't think it's okay to kill just anyone for the purposes of eating them, right?

It's obviously about the titillation as much as it is the detachment from her body. She could look like anything and she just happens to be a massively busty but otherwise skinny lady. If she were not conventionally pretty at all, or especially if she were by most standards ugly, then I'd buy the whole "it's only about the alienation from her body" line, but although that's a huge part of Ghost in the Shell, another huge part is that Shirow takes the entire series to be an excuse to objectify women because he likes objectifying women. As the GitS wiki points out, he's quoted in one book as saying that, when he was drawing an orgy scene, he made it an entirely lesbian orgy, his reason being (and this is a direct quote, as far as I can tell) "I drew an all-girl orgy because I didn't want to draw some guy's butt." It's also pretty convenient that the only woman who is a main character is the one who treats her body like nothing so much as a disposable tool, which for some reason often entails getting naked, and so on and so forth, but whatever, this is pretty much just a circlejerk. I really like Ghost in the Shell and it's not like everything it has to say about women is regressive, but there's no need to make excuses for the blatant, obvious sexism in the form of sexual objectification that pervades the whole series as much as anything else. Johansson has no problem getting naked for stuff (see Under the Skin, for example, which is a great movie by the way) so I guess they COULD bring that over from the manga/anime, but I seriously doubt they'd want, like, a hard R rating on their sci-fi action movie. Whatever. The whitewashing is what annoys me - whether ethnicity is important to the characters or not is something we could argue about (I think it actually is) but even if it isn't, I'd still be a little peeved, because Hollywood takes any excuse it can to get Asian people out of starring roles in, like, anything.

One good way to look at it is that just like people who are not racist view black individuals and white individuals as morally equal, such that it's not okay to do something bad to someone just because they're black rather than white, and people who are not sexist view men and women as morally equal, such that it's not okay to do something bad to someone just because they're a woman rather than a man, and just like people are not heterosexist view straight individuals and queer individuals as morally equal, such that it's not okay to do something bad to someone just because they're queer rather than straight, people who are not speciesist view human individuals and non-human individuals as morally equal, such that it's not okay to do something bad to someone (like kill and eat them, or raise them in an environment where they face extreme pain for their whole lives) just because they are non-human as opposed to human. This is not to say that being racist, sexist, heterosexist, or speciesist is bad. Most people (on these forums at least) presumably see the first three as bad and the last one as totally fine. Lots of people out in the world only view one or two of these things as bad, and some people don't even view any of them as bad. (In fact, if you go back in time, it's quite easy to reach a point where the majority of people in America saw nothing wrong with any of these *isms.) Of course, as the list of *isms I've picked probably makes clear, others (like myself) do see these sorts of *isms on a par: discriminating against someone because they're a cow makes no more sense to us than discriminating against someone because they're black. This doesn't mean you have to treat cows exactly the same as you'd treat a human being, and in fact even if you're not racist you don't have to think we need to treat all races the same. You might be very anti-racism but still endorse affirmative action programs or other sorts of preferential treatment for certain individuals of certain races. Being anti-racist does, however, entail at least a basic commitment to seeing all races as equal when it comes to whether it's okay to, for instance, enslave and kill them, and being anti-speciesist typically gets you pretty much the same thing, except instead of races, we're talking about species of animals.

To be perfectly honest, I think it's far, far more objectionable to pretend that killing animals is not analogous to human sacrifice than it is to raise the analogy. If you go back far enough in time (and not very far, mind you!) you'll find that it was perfectly obvious to people that if someone had a certain skin color, it was okay to enslave and kill them. If you tried saying something like "this is no different from enslaving and killing a white Christian male" I can easily imagine them reacting with indignation and saying something like "I prefer to discuss this with people with whom I share a certain level of friendship and trust. They would never challenge my deeply held beliefs about the inferiority of certain races by comparing black slavery to white slavery." I mean, sure, that's perhaps true - maybe your friends know you won't budge on this topic unless they treat it with kid gloves, or maybe they actually share a lot of your presuppositions and they oppose slavery because they think it retards technological progress or something - but seeking to discuss moral issues only with people who treat you a certain way strikes me as acceptable only if the position you currently hold doesn't involve the subjugation and slaughter of millions of innocent beings... That this position about non-human animals is unpopular and thus easy to dismiss by saying that the analogy is offensive or something is true, but that doesn't strike me as very interesting, because you can of course say the same thing about racism, sexism, etc. if you go back far enough in time to when anti-racism and anti-sexism were positions held by a slim minority of crazy people. edit: to put it another way, here's how my ideal conversation goes. I say "killing non-human animals needlessly is as bad as killing humans needlessly." Someone says "that's a terrible analogy! Let me explain the relevant differences between non-human animals and humans which show why it's totally okay to kill one but not the other." Then I say "oh, that makes sense. I cant' believe I missed that all along! Thank you, I will now eat a hamburger." How the conversation USUALLY goes is that I say "killing non-human animals needlessly is as bad as killing humans needlessly" and someone says "that's a terrible analogy, you've offended me so much that I don't want to talk with you anymore. I can't believe you thought that analogy was appropriate. It's obviously inappropriate and in fact it's so obvious I won't even bother to explain why. I'll just assume it. I am going to now go eat a hamburger." You can perhaps understand why I find this to be a somewhat unfortunate situation.

Surely this can't be the reason it's okay to kill non-human animals, though, because you can equally derive sustenance from killing humans! So now I'm confused again. (Incidentally, I don't think "we also don't condone animal sacrifice" is true. If you think eating the sacrificed animal changes it from "sacrifice" to "sustenance" then most societies throughout history haven't actually practiced animal sacrifice. If "animal sacrifice" instead means something like "killing a bunch of animals not because you have to but because you want to" then we totally practice animal sacrifice.") Where do you live and where do you shop? I could buy fresh vegetables for three times the price I pay if I shopped at Vons or Ralph's. But I don't shop there.

The whitewashing stuff is just bullshit. If you're going to change all the Japanese people to white people then why bother making it a Ghost in the Shell movie in the first place? It's not like you can't rip them off or something. That aesthetic is a dime a dozen these days.

I've been playing a bunch of games so that when I make my GOTY list it will be a little less "list of games I played" and a little more "my favorites of 2014." So, I finally played Kentucky Route Zero Act III and Here And There Along The Echo. Both were, predictably, among the best games I have ever played in my life. I played (and I guess completed...? I played as much of them as I'm going to for a while...) Bernband and Hernhand. Enjoyed both for the reasons one might enjoy them, pretty much - wandering around alien worlds, feeling various feelings evoked by these kinds of environments, etc. Definitely fun, and I think Bernband especially has some really tremendous level design of the sort that anyone interested in making a first person game ought to take a look at. I like its low-fi aesthetic, too. I played through 'Til Cows Tear us Apart a bunch to the point where I'm pretty sure I saw basically everything. It was fun and cute - I enjoyed the art a fair amount and the music definitely adds a lot. The writing is certainly good enough that you're happy to read it, but it's not exactly anything transcendent. The whole package is what makes it, and if it were in a different package I suspect I wouldn't have enjoyed it quite as much. I've been playing through many of the 50 SHORT GAMES by Thecatamites. I'm a huge Thecatamites fan so that's been great. Eventually I'll stop in our thread about the games and share some more detailed thoughts. Speaking of being a fan of obscure game developers who make games that are varying degrees of obtuse, I adore increpare so it's probably no surprise I had fun with Cooking, for lovers. Increpare games are great because you never know whether it's going to be a huge production or very short. This one was very short. And poignant. And... yep! It's the sort of thing it's worth playing because it takes less than five minutes, and you sort of know as soon as you start playing what you're in for, and there you go. I really appreciate games like this that are sort of the game equivalent of a short poem - evocative, interesting, memorable, and nothing that even begins to overstay its welcome. Chris Remo is always going on about how he wishes games weren't so long, and it's games like increpare's (and Thecatamites') that definitely hammer home how a short game can often be such a better idea than a 40+ hour slog through whatever the fuck it is that some game company thinks you want to spend 40+ hours doing. I played Glitchhikers. Definitely worth a play. It reminded me, more than anything, of a Richard Linklater movie, especially Slacker (but also Before Sunrise). Slacker is a really apt comparison, I think, because Glitchhikers shares with it both the train of strange characters that pop up, providing the spice of the game, and because both Slacker and Glitchhikers (and also Before Sunrise and other Linklater films) have the intellectual/psuedo-intellectual sorts of conversations that revolve around slightly but not overly intriguing and deep concepts, like fucking "sonder" in Glitchhickers (I fucking hate "sonder") and eastern mythology and how you have a bunch of bacteria living on you so you're never alone and so on and so forth. I feel like a bunch of people don't like Linklater films, or they don't like them as much as they might, because they pick up on the fact that these conversations are much more shallow than they at first sound, but I feel like this is really missing the point. These sorts of shallow but quasi-intellectual conversations are the sorts we have all the time, ESPECIALLY if we're the kind of people who might be tempted to dislike insights because they are (actually or ostensibly) shallow, and to think that we're any better at escaping the sort of platitudes that we might castigate a Linklater film (or this game) for is to give ourselves far too much credit. That, though, is kind of beside the point, because whether or not we're in the same boat as these characters having these conversations that we think we mostly see through, it's the fact that these conversations are so common and are as much a part of the mood these movies or this game set as anything else. Bernband and Hernhand are about being lost in these evocative sci-fi locations - Glitchhickers and Before Sunrise are about (among other things) having these kinds of conversations, being the sorts of people that have these conversations, the existence of a world in which these conversations occur, and so on. And all of that is as tremendously compelling as wandering around amongst space aliens, or cooking for one as in the increpare game, and so on. I played Intimate, Infinite by Robert "Radiator" Yang. Definitely neat but as is often the case with his games I wish it were a little less of a pain to play - most of it was fine, but the garden sequence was really tedious and I never ended up finishing it because I deleted some bushes I ought not to have deleted, or something. Still, there's a lot to like in here. I appreciate the very minimal controls. I played The Domovoi a few times. The writing and art are great but the meta-narrative and the moment to moment story sort of left me cold. It's worth a play or three because it's so short, but overall I feel like either it just wasn't for me or I wasn't a fan of the message that I think I got from it. And I still have a bunch of games to play... having lots of fun though. 2014 was a year I played relatively few games, so catching up is kind of neat.