TychoCelchuuu

Er, no, the reason it can take between an hour and a day to render certain VFX heavy frames in films is because they're using different methods than real time game rendering does. Raytraced lighting, for instance. The frames of film with your avatar in them aren't things that could ever have been rendered real time, nor could the water simulation in those films.

Or domineering. That comic being 30 years old shouldn't be surprising - it's on the tail end of second wave feminism which has been discussing (or "bitching about") that sort of thing since forever. I found this article somewhat relevant to the recent discussion.

Ah, but notice that this depends entirely on what we take the base line to be in determining whether a change is a benefit or a harm. If you are my slave, and I beat you for 7 hours every day, then I tell you "if you do [something you would rather not do], I'll only beat you for 5 hours per day this month," then according to your definition, have I made a coercive offer? It seems like like I'm offering a benefit to you - you'll be beaten less! But I think most of us want to say I'm coercing you. One way to fix this is to have a "moralized" baseline, such that I'm harming you because you're a slave that I beat and thus any request I make is automatically coercive, and the only way to get people to act in a non-coercive manner is to provide them offers that don't depend on a baseline level of morally unacceptable treatment. If this is our choice, though, we need to define our moral baseline, such that anyone who departs from this is coercing people when they get them to act in some way. And it turns out to be very hard to figure out what the correct moral baseline is: do companies coerce employees because a proper moral baseline includes a living wage, and companies threaten not to pay this wage if employees don't work? And so on.

We could make up a word.

But how would we ever know you're right? You're just telling us to use the word "coercion" to describe a certain phenomenon in the brain. What would we get from calling this phenomenon "coercion" rather than "schmoercion" or any other word?

Brazil is sort of cyberpunk. I don't know if THX-1138 counts as a thriller or as cyberpunk but it exists. I'm not sure if I'd quite count the Ghost in the Shell movies as action movies, although maybe they are. Blade Runner is not at all an action film I'd say, but I guess someone could disagree. I haven't seen A Scanner Darkly but maybe it fits. Paprika maybe counts. Alphaville might count although maybe it's too much of a thriller.

It doesn't look real to me. I mean, it looks really nice, but if it were on a movie screen it wouldn't really hold up without some serious post production work. By the time you want to integrate actual people and sync up the lighting and everything, you're going to end up basically doing what Avatar did rather than making movies in real time.

Well I don't see why I'd ever redefine coercion to match splotches that you think (without any evidence) are going to show up in peoples' brains sometimes rather than what I might otherwise think coercion is. I mean, how would we even pick which splotches to define coercion as, assuming (as I think is not at all the case) that certain splotches are going to light up at certain times? Because then if you give someone a choice instead of forcing them ("give me all your money or I'll kill your child") you're not coercing them. In fact lots of people want to define coercion as when you don't force something because they think actually resorting to force is different from coercion.

No it doesn't.

This is circular, though. If you say "I don't have an independent definition of coercion, I'm just going to scan brains and call anything that causes part to light up as 'coercion'" then your hypothesis that coercion is always accompanied by something special in the brain will be trivially true. You'll be right because you defined coercion according to the brain activity that you think shows up during coercion, and you prove that it shows up during coercion just by making that definition.

There are lots of ways! Urge companies to run sexual harassment training sessions to explain to their employees what kind of behavior is unacceptable, educate people about what constitutes rape so that men are less likely to rape women, set quotas for the number of women a business needs to employ before they can bid on government contracts, add mandatory time off work for men whose wives have just had children so that employers don't view women as employment liabilities, and thousands of other things that we can do and that we have been doing ever since second wave feminism took off. Not to mention stuff like allowing women to go to school, vote for their preferred political candidate, run for office, and so on, advances which we can thank first wave feminism for.

Feminism has some pretty clear goals. End sexual discrimination, reduce the number of women who are sexually assaulted and raped, close the wage gap between women and men, and so on.

Unfortunately for this to be true you must first define the difference between persuasion and coercion. This turns out to be very difficult. People often equate coercion with force or the threat of force, but this seems to fail to capture certain cases of coercion, like when I tell you that I've hidden the medicine you need to survive and I won't give it back until you give me some money. Another popular option is to say a coercive offer is one you would prefer not to be presented with - having been given the offer, you are worse off. Unfortunately this is probably both over and underinclusive - it's overinclusive because there seem to be benign offers that people would prefer not to get, like when someone offers you a donut and now you have to either rudely refuse or eat something unhealthy you don't want, and it's underinclusive because an abusive slave owner who offers to beat a slave less if the slave will do something disagreeable but still better than being beaten is, on this model, not making a coercive offer.

I beat Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri yesterday. Tremendous game - that's going in my top 50 or 100 or 20 or something. A great mix of action, strategy, and a horribly acted, cheesy-enough-to-be-bad-but-not-cheesy-enough-to-be-hilariously-bad story. It has a random skirmish generator so I'll keep it installed and revisit it from time to time.

Does anyone remember when and where Chris talked about the "revelation" scene in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy? Or if you can only recall which episodes he talks about the movie I can listen through them myself to figure it out.

There are fine non-health reasons to avoid drinking animal milk, like the way animals are treated by the sorts of places that sell a lot of milk we drink or the cost of milk (shit's expensive!), so there's no need to resort to pseudoscience to come up with an excuse not to buy and drink it.

I don't remember what you said about China guy when you last brought him up, but if he "knows" so much about China because he's Chinese and/or because he's been to China, he's pretty right about the milk thing - most Chinese people are much more lactose intolerant than Westerners, so if you're in China, unless you're drinking special milk or you're a foreigner, you're probably in for a tummy ache.

Your position is not unusual - lots of people like to view themselves as enlightened, reasonable freethinkers that avoid the traps of becoming mired in an ideology and who hold themselves above the witless sheeple who throw their weight behind view after view without understanding the implications or ever making a decision for themselves about what to believe. I think the problem with that attitude, though, is that when it comes to social issues like racism, sexism, and all other instances of bigotry, intolerance, and inequality, to refuse to throw yourself behind a movement is to implicitly endorse the status quo, which exists largely on the backs of people who do nothing rather than on the backs of virulently racist, sexist, and otherwise intolerant people. If you read Martin Luther King Jr.'s letter from the Birmingham Jail for instance, you will see some good examples of the sorts of reasons one might have for ascribing to an ideology that one believes is correct rather than just saying "I never use labels unless it saves time" as if staying neutral is always better unless it's inefficient.

Whether a discussion about feminism on the Internet devolves into an endless cycle of "I hate feminists" vs feminists, "I don't understand feminism and think it's wrong" vs feminists, or "feminism sounds great in the abstract guys but you're totally using the wrong tone so I have to disagree" vs feminists, or whether it is an actual discussion about feminism without having to defend it against haters, comes down to the community the discussion occurs in, I think. Forums with lots of people hostile to feminism like RPG Codex or the Star Citizen forums are in the first category. Most places on the Internet (although maybe not quite as many gaming-focused places, since gaming culture hates women) end up at point #2. More accepting/open/understanding/smart/whatever communities (like ours, or the Penny Arcade forums) end up at point #3. Pretty much only places that ban concern trolls rather than letting them get their way ever make it to point #4. That's my theory, at least.

It's just an automated spambot, I would assume.

NOBODY thinks being angry at people is a GOOD way of getting their point across. Feminists don't get angry as an ARGUMENTATIVE TACTIC. We get ANGRY because THE WORLD IS SHITTY TO WOMEN and when we try to fix it, people FIGHT AGAINST US, tooth and nail! And after years and years of being fought against, we get angry. Then sometimes we say angry things, and when we say angry things, people like YOU dismiss our arguments (which have remained unchanged from the days in which we were not angry) JUST BECAUSE we are angry! And this makes us MORE ANGRY! Not all feminists get angry - some are massive milquetoasts who would turn the other cheek if you stabbed them in the first cheek with a knife. I'm a mellow guy in real life but on the Internet I have no problem getting angry because why not? It's not like being angry makes me wrong. Oh unless I'm talking to you or the legions of other people who think the tone argument is the best thing since sliced bread. News flash: just because people get angry about social injustice doesn't mean they're wrong about it. This is a stupid fucking strawman that I've never seen anyone argue for. This is an incredibly simplified view of the science (more testosterone or estrogen does not make you act in a more man-like or woman-like fashion) but putting that aside, of course there are biological aspects of gender. In Western society we create gender almost entirely based on what we perceive an individual's biological sex to be! No feminist in the world would ever deny that there are significant biological difference between archetypal members of the two genders that the Western world uses. Again you are arguing against a strawman and it's not even clear what your argument is.

FTFY

I've never seen anyone say "I'd be a Grand Theft Auto fan if only the reviews weren't so glowing that they make it sounds like you be an idiot to hate the game..."

Yes, concern trolling is pretty much what is going on right now, and as predicted in that article we've come close to reverting back to feminism 101. I didn't link the concern trolling thing because it was not directly relevant and because I suspect there's often nothing people making the tone argument hate more than being accused of concern trolling (partially because the name wrongly implies they're trolling, which as the page itself points out is not always the case) but it's always good to know that page exists because it puts a label on a practice that is extremely common in threads like this all over the Internet. "If only feminists would stop being so angry maybe I'd be a feminist too" and other ways of concern trolling aren't unique to this Idle Thumbs thread. You run into this shit constantly if you ever feel like engaging people about feminism on the Internet.

Do you have examples of immature hateful feminists that say things like "all men are sexist" or "misandry doesn't exist" or examples of "people who spin everything in male culture into sexism" besides the sorts of straw feminists that are popular enough to have their own comic, their own TV Tropes entry, , an opinion piece about them in the Washington Post, and so on? But it seems like you care more about tone than argument, which is a pretty common tactic used in arguments against feminism. Argue against the tone, not the content, because what tone is acceptable is set by the patriarchy, and any feminists who speak out against it can be accused of using the incorrect "tone." (This is also used to marginalize African Americans - see discussion of the angry black man whose issue is that he uses the wrong tone.) If you think tone arguments aren't the sort of shit that gets trotted out to attack feminists all the time, check out the tone argument entry on the Geek Feminism wiki or just check out this tweet and this tweet from the White Male Privlege twitter account, which has tweets about the most common examples of the sorts of things that make up male privilege, which is the ability men have in our society to say and do things that come naturally to them without catching shit for it, even though feminists catch all sorts of shit for the same thing. Notice, for instance, that far from being castigated for his approach, Dawkins' brand of "militant atheism" has a lot of followers. It's the hip new brand of atheism that all the kids love! And although I don't like how Dawkins gets angry because I think he's wrong about certain things and thus has no cause to get angry, I would never begrudge him his anger if he were at all correct. If teaching children religion is child abuse, then he has a right to get angry about it if he wants! And if feminists are right, we have a right to get angry about certain things. If you tell us to shut up and you say you won't listen to our arguments just because we're angry about social injustice, that's just one of the many silencing tactics that have been used since literally time immemorial to sweep injustice under the rug so that white men don't have to deal with it until it presents itself wrapped up in a nice tidy package just the way they like it, usually in the form of a very "articulate" member of the oppressed group or better yet another white dude.