The_Terrible_Humbaba

The article says:

Eyewitnesses tell Asharq that beside the disguised troops, other special forces snuck into the Nuseirat camp inside an aid truck. The IDF has denied using humanitarian transports for the operation.

From the link you posted, it seems this would still be a war crime if it's true, unless I'm misinterpreting the text:

Ruses of war are permitted. Warships and auxiliary vessels, however, are prohibited from launching an attack whilst flying a false flag and at all times from actively simulating the status of protected vessels such as hospitals ships, small coastal rescue craft or medical transports.

I assume the aid truck they were using would qualify as an "auxiliary vessel", and they were using it to impersonate "medical transport".

Off course, that's fair. This was a while ago, but I believe my point was more generally about whether to rename an existing popular application. I think it's commendable that you make that effort to protect the kids you work with.

Plenty of words have multiple meanings, but I rarely think of them when I'm using a word to mean a specific thing. I know the meanings of gimp, but I never think of them when using GIMP; perhaps because it's capitalized and I always assumed it stood for something (and it does).

But anyway, and more importantly than that, what you describe is a problem that you might run into with any word.

A small subset of the world population can view it as an insult, but for the vast majority it means nothing. Sort of like the word "negro" in Spanish, which some English people take offense to when they hear it. I even searched "gimp" in 3 different search engines, and the first 2 to 5 results were always the GIMP. Most people have no other concept for the word.

Let me put it this way: you say you'd favor Kira, but how do you know that there aren't some kids in Egypt, or Russia, or someone else in the world, that take offense to the word "Kira"?

Not the person you replied to, but in my opinion was Oblivion was pretty good, but not as good as Morrowind. Compared to MW a lot of things felt dumbed down (i.e. beast races can wear shoes, no armour/clothes layers, no spear, etc.), and although I ~~don't~~ think there's much they could do to make the environment more interesting, ~~since the setting is what it's meant to be~~, the dungeons felt incredibly boring and repetitive.

However, I did quite like the story - especially how you are not a chosen one, which is rare for such games - and I thought a lot of the quests were pretty interesting, arguably at MW's level or better (there are definitely some exceptions*). The Dark Brotherhood quest line especially, which is not present in MW, and is much better than Skyrim's DB quest line.

*I will also add something that I hated: despite not being a chosen one story, it allowed you to be the head of all guilds, resulting in a quest where you may have to steal something from yourself.

Firstly, the one rule of the instance of the community you are commenting on is "be nice", so maybe relax on the hostilities. That user acted perfectly respectfully, and you came in calling them immature and unprofessional. Afterwards, I replied to in what I think was also a polite manner, and now you're accusing me of having no values. So if you wanna talk about no values and immaturity, feel free to look in a mirror and talk to that person. This will be my last reply to you.

Secondly, you're asking for someone who mods a community to be excluded from it. Why would anyone want to mod a community they like, if it means being excluded from it, or why would you want the mods to be people who don't like a community?

Why would any of you think it’s okay for mods to power-trip?

I never said anything close to even implying that, and you know that. You are simply arguing in bad faith and being a nuisance. You've created far more problems than they ever did, and it seems you're the one trying to exert some kind of power over the community of an instance you are not even a part of by implying that someone, who did not act reprehensibly in any way, should step down from a mod position, just because you've decided they should not share their opinions.

So, to reiterate: there was a misunderstanding that was quickly cleared up. There was no abuse of power. You came in and insulted someone, then insulted me, and created a huge drama over a non-issue. And now I'm done with this conversation. Have a good day.

How do I get a computer?

Well, firstly: people would still make them the way they do now. Some would organize and collect materials, and some would refine and make them into parts that eventually make it into computers. The whole chain would still exist, except now it would be done voluntarily. That's it. Organized labour does not stop existing once you get rid of money. I'm sure you've heard of open source software projects.

Which leads into the second part of my comment: it seems to me that your real fear is that there wouldn't be volunteers for one or several parts of the chain... at which point I have to ask you to take a step back and think about it is that you want, and what you are defending. If there are no volunteers to do a job in such a society, and the only way to get people to do it is threatening them with poverty and starvation, then it is not a job worth doing if you value human rights and dignity.

You probably didn't catch because I edited late, but I gave some recommended reading at the end of my previous comment. To those, I'll add David Graeber's The Dawn of Everything and Bullshit Jobs.

Uncontacted tribes are not the only ones that have used such systems; plenty of other societies throughout time have used similar systems, some quite recently even. It is not antithetical to modernity. For a recent example of a society that used a gift economy, you can look up "Korean People’s Association in Manchuria". I was using uncontacted tribes merely as one example to illustrate that the idea that bartering and capitalism are "natural" and "how it always worked" isn't true, despite that being what many believe.

It’s ultimately more efficient to give people money and then they can spend it on what they need or want.

Why is it more efficient, exactly? In a gift economy, you don't have to give anyone money for anything and won't starve for not having enough money. In a gift economy, you help each other where possible and do things such as art or science for fulfilment and not because you have to put food on the table. Someone who can help, but rarely does, slowly begins to get shunned by the rest of society.

EDIT:

To read more on gift economies and anarchism in general, you can read:

• Petyr Kropotkin's Conquest of Bread is a good one; that's more theory

• George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia; a sort of memoir of Orwell's time in Catalonia fighting alongside anarchists

• Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed; a sci-fi story about a futuristic anarchist society living on a planet that mutually orbits another planet that is inhabited by other societies.

Why art specifically?

I assume because the topic is video games. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure they are against the whole current system and would prefer a gift based economy. I don't think they are defending a capitalist system where artists don't get paid.

Bye bye studio and any future art because we all are trapped in this capitalist nightmare. Do their families not deserve to be supported for their work?

I think it's safe to assume they are not fans of capitalism; I doubt they want to keep living in a capitalist system where artists and developers are not paid. They are talking about artists and developers because that's what the topic is about, but I would assume this thought stretches to all of society.

What they were describing was basically a society that relies on a gift economy, which has already existed in the past, and still exists in some places and forms today. We've been brainwashed by capitalist societies to think that would be a "hippy-dippy, fantasy land" because capitalism and bartering are what is natural to us, but it's been shown that a gift-based economy is what a lot of uncontacted tribes use. It's also how a lot of friend groups interoperate - hell, start a minecraft server (some other survival game will do) with your friends right now, and you will almost certainly naturally default to using a gift based economy.

It’s immature, and unprofessional.

This isn't a job. They are a user like you who happen to also volunteer to mod because someone has to. They have just as much right to share their opinion as you do, and they did it politely. Besides, they didn't even start an argument, they just shared an opinion, confirmed it, and then clarified again; all of it in a polite manner.

Anybody could goad a mod like that to misusing their authority

They seem to have handled the situation just fine and even left the report for other mods to handle. I really don't see what the big issue is.

They're a user too, and they're arguing respectfully. What's the problem?