I mean Jim Jones was pretty damn effective at convincing a large group of people to commit mass suicide. If he’d been ineffective, he’d have been one of the thousands of failed cult leaders you and I have never heard of. Similarly, if Hitler had been ineffective, it wouldn’t have takes the combined forces of half the world to fight him.

Are you having a stroke?

Futurama: Bender’s Big Score may not be the deepest film, but it’s never failed to make me smile. “I can wire anything to anything! I’m the professor!”

And the death by starvation rate?

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I don’t disagree with this, but it sounds like you’re talking less about violent crime in general and more about sexual battery and premeditated assault, which makes up a relatively small proportion of violent crime.

Most violent crime is just regular conflict that escalates into throwing punches, and throwing these people in prison is the quickest way to push them away from lawfulness and down the path of crime. Prison is just networking for criminals.

So I agree with 90% of this, and I don’t understand why you’re getting downvoted. That being said, the one thing I can’t get behind is worse punishments for violent crime. I’m not saying violent crime is good, but basically all of the evidence suggest that worse punishments do nothing to curtail it, and in fact make it more likely. The longer someone spends in prison, the less likely they are to reintegrate into society. If the goal is to reduce violent crime, rehabilitation is far more effective than deterrence.

Based entirely on your comment, I would say the issue isn’t the concept of ideology, but the fact that the ideologies that matter the most and the ones that spread the fastest aren’t the same. After all, the idea that no one should starve is itself an idealogy.

Personally, I feel like most of the problems in the modern world come down to issues of scaling. We evolved our brains to coordinate in small bands of people, but we try use those same brains to coordinate groups of hundreds of millions.

The larger an organization (corporation, government, npo, etc.) gets, the worse they get at coordinating around a central goal or set of values, and the more likely they are to evolutionarily optimize around something entirely divorced from the values of any individual member.

A company of 100 employees is entirely capable of creating a high-quality product, compensating their workers well, and avoiding anti-consumer practices. This doesn’t mean they’ll always do this, but it’s possible. Meanwhile, a multinational corporation of millions of people, even if run by the most ethical CEO on earth, will always gravitate toward maximizing profit at the expense of everything else. Even libertarians recognize this as a fundamental flaw in unchecked Capitalism.

Similarly, a government of a few thousand people can create a good constitution for an orderly society, but in a massive government of a country of 300 million people, trying to make any sort of effective, positive political change is borderline-impossible because everyone has different goals that gridlock each other. Even proponents of large government recognize this.

It’s tempting to believe in some sort of easy action that could fix this, but truth be told, I think any simple solution would be horrifying, and I think any good solution is going to take an incredible amount of thought and be more complex than the sort of thing you’d see every day on the internet.

In other words, you have the right to be an asshole, but if you do it too much, others can invoke their right be assholes right back to you.

He’s not saying they’re right wing governments, just that they’re highly authoritarian, which is something that leftists, on average, tend to be against, so if someone claims to be “left” but supports Russia, they likely have a poor understanding of one of those things.

There ya go! I knew there had to be a couple out there!

There ya go! I knew there had to be a couple out there!

I do, but only if it’s built up properly. This is also true of musical numbers and fight scenes. If built up properly, they can be incredibly cathartic and the best parts of the film, but if not, they grind the plot to a halt.

The reason so many people hate these kinds of scenes is that most screenwriters are really bad at creating tension. The purpose of these scenes is to release emotional tension, so without building this, they feel pointless and jarring. The best parody of this is in Men in Tights when Robin bursts into a love song out of nowhere and it scares the hell out of Marian.

I’m trying to provide examples of love scenes I actually like in films, and to be honest, I’m coming up blank. I think it may just be a lot more difficult to generate romantic tension in the average timespan of a film. It’s easier in television, where you get more time to tell the story. I think my favorite intimate scene in tv is in Game of Thrones season 3 when John and Ygritte are in the cave.

At least that scene is funny and develops the plot. I think they’re talking more about stuff like all those 90s movies that have the plot grind to a halt so two characters can punch each other for ten minutes.

For me, it just came down to how unintuitive and slow Windows’s desktop environment is. Setting up the most basic customizations requires going through like 15 sub-menus or dealing with the registry. Also, GNOME and KDE are just so much prettier than Windows’s desktop environment.