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Cake day: March 8th, 2025

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  • I haven’t read a lot of Sanderson, but I’ve read enough to sense that this difference is in true personal disposition.

    Sanderson’s drive seems to be more of wonder, curiosity and adventure, and the stories delve into morality and justice as a source of plot tension.

    In contrast, I think OSC has always been more of a black-and-white thinker. I think his best stories have been ones where he is exploring a moral struggle or thought experiment. But at the end of the story, you can pull out what OSC has concluded morally about those characters - who is good, who is bad (and always has been), and maybe who is a necessary evil.

    All of OSC’s stories are about categorizing people, behaviors and decisions into ‘should/should not’ buckets. And I’ve just never gotten that sense from Sanderson’s books.


  • Vreyan31@reddthat.comto196@lemmy.blahaj.zonerule away Rowling
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    7 days ago

    At 13, I read Ender’s Game and was absolutely obsessed. Read a ton of other OSC books at that age and it took me decades to rid myself of all the veiled mormon morality in his books.

    As an adult, I never had one hesitation about disavowing him. I re-read the Ender saga a few years back to see how it held up (it didn’t hold a candle to my teen-self’s impression), but I had no problem not paying for new copies of anything that would pay OSC.


  • Getting average people to the point that they are ready to do something like a general strike is a process.

    Most people don’t even want to have to go to a protest.

    But going to a protests is like anteing up in poker – it is mentally anchoring people as in the game and publicly taking a side.

    And yeah - the fucks in power are going to say “bet”.

    So now millions of people who are not where we already are, who have not wrestles with this and avoided it as long as they can - they are starting to ask, “ok, what do we actually have to risk to change this? What am I willing to do?”

    Will we get enough people actually engaged enough for a general strike? I have no idea.

    But I know it won’t happen without giving people a ramp-up that includes things like the protest this weekend.


  • Ooohhh I see, I am judgemental because your circumstances and stated preferences represent everyone in a hard place.

    If you both could have and would have done it, it is completely reasonable to make that an expectation on everyone who struggles.

    Your struggle was definitely representative of the worst circumstances bc you had 1 job and were a single parent – even though I mentioned how plenty of parents (including single ones) balance a FT job and gigs or a managerie of gigs. Or a FT job, single parenthood, and a disability. Or…

    If you can’t see past your own life and circumstance, but want to proscribe what other people ‘should’ do (or no longer deserve your empathy), you are the one who is judgemental.








  • Unfortunately, I feel like these times call for explicit clarification in what should be obvious.

    “…when Jews can live anywhere in the world without fear of persecution… for being Jewish” (but like everyone else can be held accountable as individuals for crimes including war crimes; that being Jewish doesn’t turn prosecution into persecution)



  • Vreyan31@reddthat.comtoPolitical Memes@lemmy.worldliterally useless
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    1 month ago

    Cops do not like confronting actual criminals - criminals are dangerous. But they love to intimidate and force total acquiescence from regular people and excuse it by saying ‘its what we have to do ‘in case’ they are a criminal’.

    Once criminals figure out that cops don’t want to confront them, those criminals learn to accommodate that. So they get worse. They figure out who they can rob and intimidate with impunity - and it’s mostly the poor. But also, they can break into middle class people’s cars, porch pirate, even B&E into homes, and cops don’t want to deal with that. So many people post on reddit bc cops won’t do a thing if, for example, a disabled person has their motorized wheelchair stollen, so people try to play detective on their own. Have a stalker or an ex who has credibly threatened your life? That might only help them catch that person if you are actually murdered.

    Cops deter crime in wealthy areas, but the rest of us are on our own.

    Fear of being caught might deter the naive from testing if they can get away with shit, but in reality, there is essentially a truce between cops and criminals, and if you know how to be too much work and risk to bother catching, a lot of what we consider ‘criminals’ don’t have a lot to worry about.