Or, y’know, Vietnam.

As they say, “everything is political”. And yes, “only the information I say is political is allowed” is quite the overreach.

Believing that you’re the only person who deserves to exist and that everyone else should be killed is still a political view, and one that must be allowed to exist in a democracy as long as you don’t actually start killing people. Odious and hateful ideas are still political ideas (see: American Democrats and Republicans arguing that the others’ ideas are odious and hateful, for example), and if we believe in democracy we have to believe that the people can be trusted with unrestricted political information.

A manipulable minority that acts on these calls to violence is enough to deeply damage a democracy.

That’s why acting on those calls to violence is illegal, while speech is not.

The majority did vote for democratic parties but that isn’t enough, it has to be an overhelming majority that votes for democratic parties.

Yes, that’s a huge flaw of coalition system governments, but it doesn’t change the overall point - you either trust the people with the choice of electing their government, or you don’t. If you only trust some of the people with electing their government, you don’t have a democracy - you just have a slightly-larger-than-normal autocracy.

Also, unless I’m misunderstanding something (which I very well may be), it seems to me that 70% of the people voted for democracy in Germany - your elected representatives not being able to agree with each other is what appears to be the problem.

Also: I’d argue that representative democracies are a lot more susceptible to this kind of flaw where parties have to resort to manipulation to get the votes of people.

I was going to argue in my previous comment that representative democracies are dangerously close to autocracies already, but thought it too far afield from my main point. So, I think I agree with you here.

A system where more political decisions are voted on through direct democracy and representatives are only chosen to enact the policies already selected by the people would be less susceptible to these problems (but, again, would rely much more heavily on the people, which, again, is the entire question).

(Also, I’ve enjoyed this conversation so far - thanks!)

I believe that if we allow advertisements at all, we must do so on the assumption that the majority of people have complete free will while shopping, especially in the modern world where we have so many more ways of accessing and sharing information than has ever been possible. It is, however, reasonable for the majority to enact advertising protections that would benefit the dumb/manipulable minority.

The difference is that we can’t do so for political information in a democracy, because the entity that enacts and enforces the supposed “protections” (i.e. the government) is exactly the same entity that is directly affected by the subsequent political choices of the people based on that information.

Once again, the question is, “Are the majority of people too dumb or easily manipulated to be trusted with the system?” If so, then we should do away with the system altogether and have a government of philosopher-kings decide how resources should be distributed.

As for what I personally think, about both advertising and government? Nowadays I go back and forth. When I was younger and more naive, I believed that people could be trusted with making their own decisions, but the older I get and the more I see how truly stupid people are, the more I question whether that’s actually the case.

At this point, politically I’m still firmly in the camp of, “The people must be fully trusted with information to make their own political decisions, for good or ill,” because to believe otherwise is to believe that democracy is not possible, and I’m not ready to make that step quite yet (and I honestly don’t really want to).

What I do know is that there is no middle ground. I do not believe in “democracy” where the government restricts in any way the information that the people have access to when making decisions about that very government. That’s already autocracy under the guise of “democracy”, so we might as well stop fooling ourselves at that point.

If the people are too dumb to be trusted with an unrestricted marketplace of ideas, the they’re too dumb to be allowed to vote for their own government.

If you believe in democracy, you have to also believe that the majority of people can be trusted with the information necessary to make informed political choices.

If the people can’t be trusted to act in their best interests in an informed manner, then we might as well just adopt Plato’s philosopher-kings system instead, and make all of the peoples’ decisions for them.

They already have thought about it - see the part where they’re glad our rights aren’t curtailed just because someone might say some words that hurt your feelings.

Germany can take their nanny state bullshit and fuck right off.

(on mobile, so sorry for any formatting weirdness)

English teachers will only give you an arbitrary, subjective answer about whether it’s a word - you want a linguist if you want an objective answer.

Since we’re dealing with two different “words” (roots) here, factory and overclocked, the first thing to look for is compound stress. Many compound words in English get initial stress: compare “blackbird” and “a black bird”.

This isn’t foolproof, however. For some speakers there are compounds that don’t get compound stress - some speakers say “paper towel” as expected, while others say “paper towel”, but it’s still a compound either way.

So how can we actually tell that paper towel is one word? See if the first member of the potential compound (the non-head) can be modified in any way.

For example, we know doghouse is a compound because in “a big doghouse” big can only refer to the house, and cannot refer to “the house of a big dog”. Similarly, blackboard must be one word because it can take what appear to be contradictory modifiers: " a green blackboard".

So, in the same way, paper towel and toilet paper are one word because “big paper towel” can’t mean “a towel made from big paper” and “pink toilet paper” can’t mean “paper for a pink toilet”. (Toilet paper also gets compound stress.)

Yet another way to test is by semantic drift (meaning shift). As mentioned earlier, blackboards don’t have to be black, so the meaning of the compound doesn’t perfectly correspond to the pieces of the word - instead, the fact that it’s a vertical board you write on in chalk is much more important to the meaning. This is because once the pieces combine to form a new word, that new word can start to shift away from the meaning of the pieces. Again, however this process takes time, so it’s not a perfect test.

So, back to the original question: is “factory-overclocked” one word?

Well, it doesn’t get compound stress, and for me I can still say things like “it’s home-factory-overclocked” to mean that it was overclocked in its home factory, so the first member can take modifiers. And, the whole thing still means what the pieces mean.

So, in my grammar, “factory-overclocked” is two words. But for some of you “home factory overclocked” may not be possible, which would indicate that it’s started to become one word for you. Everyone’s grammar is different, but we can still test for these categories.

If you instead mean by your question, “can factory and overclocked be combined with a hyphen?”, however, I can’t help you, because language-specific writing conventions are subjective and arbitrary, and not something that linguists usually care very much about.

This is my favorite romcom.

Thanks for taking the time to write such an informed and in-depth comment!

Still not buying a Samsung.

Not sure why you’re getting downvoted; the last somewhat good game Bethesda made was more than a decade ago at this point.

Maybe people think you’re insinuating that the games are bad because of the workers and not because of bonehead management?

https://youtu.be/WmKireMHUfM

TL;DW: Now that the Taliban actually has the responsibility of holding a country together, they’re no longer jihadist enough to satisfy the bloodlust of the other terrorist groups in the area, so they’re now being attacked as traitors to the cause. Even worse for the people of the nation, these groups have begun attacking other nations like Russia to force another incursion into Afghanistan to topple the Taliban and leave a power vacuum so the more extreme groups can take over.

Since you’re being shit on in this thread, I just wanted to thank you for being so thorough and objective in your responses here, and for your links to sources. We need more people like you on Lemmy.

Excellent post in general, but it should be noted that the meaning of “wine-dark sea” is still very much disputed.

God Emperor is where I always finish my rereads.

Qualcomm really does want to become Intel.

Just bought $50 of merch off their website – this is the sort of journalism we should all be supporting.

objective relative to the rules or conventions of visual storytelling in an anatomic sense

Ok, do you have a handy list of these objective narrative measures then, along with precise, unambiguous methods of quantifying them in a manner that can objectively determine an action movie’s quality?

that is motivated by the character’s actions on the screen

This is a subjective determination, unless you can somehow quantifiably show otherwise. How can we objectively know when a character’s actions are or aren’t sufficiently “motivated”? And even if the beginning-middle-end can somehow be shown to be objectively motivated by the character’s actions on the screen, how can you prove that a lack of this sort of beginning-middle-end is objectively bad?

the lack of wasted frames on characters

This is a subjective determination, unless you can somehow quantifiably show otherwise. How can “wasted” be objectively defined here? How do we even know that “wasted” frames are objectively bad?

There isn’t unmotivated action.

This is a subjective determination, unless you can somehow quantifiably show otherwise. How can “unmotivated” be objectively defined here? How do we even know that “unmotivated” action is objectively bad?

There is not an unnecessary or missing character on screen.

This is a subjective determination, unless you can somehow quantifiably show otherwise. How can “unnecessary” or “missing” be objectively defined here? Also, how do we even know that “unnecessary” or “missing” characters are objectively bad?

And the framing from edit to edit does not yank your eye somewhere it’s not meant to be.

By your subjective judgment, unless you can somehow show otherwise. Also, how do we even know that the camera yanking your eye somewhere its not meant to be is objectively bad?

Bourne Ultimatum […] has an insane volume of superfluous or narratively unmotivated camera coverage in its action

This is a subjective determination, unless you can somehow quantifiably show otherwise. How can “superfluous” and “narratively unmotivated” be objectively defined here? And even if they could, how can you show that this is objectively bad?

there are definitely objective storytelling mechanics that are binary insofar as they are present or not on a scene to scene, shot to shot basis.

Great! Back to my original question then, since nothing you’ve said here has been relevant to it: what are they, and by what metrics are they precisely defined and quantified? And more importantly, how does that objectively prove that Fury Road is a top 10 action movie?

In short, judging art is always subjective. That is inescapable, and attempts to “objectify” it are doomed to fail, because in the end there’s just no accounting for taste. You can tell me why you like Fury Road, and you can even show me that your opinion lines up with “critics” or professors at your film school, but even that is an appeal to authority, and their opinions have as little to do with true objectivity as yours or mine do.

There are many things that are objectively provable, but Fury Road being a top 10 action movie according to “narrative measures” is not one of them.

I also think Fury Road was mid at best for an action movie in general, not just for the series. All of the people putting it on “best of all time” lists makes me feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

EDIT: Ah yes, “objective narrative measures”. Do you have a handy list of these “objective narrative measures”, along with precise, unambiguous methods of quantifying them?

Upvoted for the appropriate Salt and Sanctuary reference.

Yeah, this strip requires a bit of context.

Hobbes always pounces on Calvin when he gets home from school. This is an ongoing set of comics where Calvin tries different things to avoid/outsmart Hobbes to avoid getting pounced on (you can see all of the recent strips on this community for that context).

This time, however, Hobbes is hiding behind the door instead of setting up for his pounce in front of the door, and is counting down to the perfect moment to strike, as Calvin futilely looks for him where he usually comes from.