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[Egan_BW]

Like, the element is sentient? You know that breathing doesn't actually destroy oxygen atoms, right?

[Rolan7]

> Not having a nuclear-reaction metabolism in current year

[Egan_BW]

Couldn't afford the upgrade, mate. I say glucose works well enough, anyways.

[KittyTac]

Like, the element is sentient? You know that breathing doesn't actually destroy oxygen atoms, right?

I meant that absorbing it into your body would mentally harm it! Think of the baby oxygen!

[bloop_bleep]

Like, the element is sentient? You know that breathing doesn't actually destroy oxygen atoms, right?

But imagine the horrible mutilations they are forced to become part of... The true damage is not on the outside, but on the inside....

[Reelya]

Its not fair to reframe Goblincookies statement in a political/racisit/bigotted sense. It has some validity as an inductive argument for violence in video games, its saying its a popular position and we can see no poltical/racist/bigotted etc motive to generate it, and genuine reasons do also generate popular positions

I don't think i was really doing that. Bringing up the overt Godwin was to show that the original assertion was not logically sound, by contrasting it with the most extreme version possible, then showing how that was not a legitimate construction.

Immediately after that I switched to comparing it to previous US hysteria about other media though, such as the Dungeons and Dragons panic, which was intended to ground that back in the relevant context.

GC's main point was that "unless a connection is real, what possible motivation would people have to concoct one?" Pointing out the Nazis and Jews was intended to show that in a historical context such a piece of logic is flat-out wrong, since we have almost countless counter-examples to that specific assertion.

Finding spurious things to blame for other things is in fact human's most common sport. There's no end to people looking to find something to blame for society's ills, and they latch onto whatever fits their preconceptions, which tends to be anything new or different. e.g. if you get sick and an old woman came into the room at that moment, perhaps she was a witch who cursed you? What other "motivation" would you even have for making such a connection?

Similarly, game violence grew in the 1980s, and so did movie violence. And street violence also grew. Clearly games and movies caused that right? Except that games and movies kept getting more popular and more violent and graphic during the 1990s and 2000s, yet violent crime rates plummeted to lows not seen since the 1950s. It's kind of ironic that crime peaked in 1992, then Doom and Mortal Kombat came out, and violence rates started plummeting after that. Which is the exact opposite of what the "violent games make people violent" link predicted.

Many people are still stuck with the 80's mindset however that there's a correlation between movies, games and violence, even though that correlation has been firmly debunked by just about ever metric possible. The validity of rising games violence matching real-world violence is in fact more tenuous than the FSM pirates => Global warming graph.

The search for a justification for the belief comes afterwards. e.g. youth crime is noted to rise - or, more likely, someone just saw more documentaries on youth crime and believe it to be rising - then it's noted that young people like video games, so it's postulated that video games caused the rise. Pure correlation so far. Nobody actually sat down and said "you know what, young Jimmy played a video game then ran out and robbed a liquor store, maybe there's some link there".

The same with movies. It's only noted that movies exist, some movies are violent and some people are violent, maybe "movies did it". The "motivation" is to explain the violence, it's not caused by any actual evidence that movies are to blame. It's about as directed by evidence as the belief in some cultures that eating Rhino horn will make you get a big dick, because horns are pointy and dicks are pointy.

[KittyTac]

As walking kills a lot of microbes, people who walk even a single step will be more likely to become mass murderers.

[strainer]

Seems like this topic is godwined and trolled out then. Well if ya cant beat'em join em...

Your mom farms smug nazi microbes in another thread - ad infinitum huzaha!

Take that you inethical clods 

[Egan_BW]

The only video game that is ethical to play is DEFCON.

[Reelya]

Seems like this topic is godwined and trolled out then. Well if ya cant beat'em join em...

Your mom farms smug nazi microbes in another thread - ad infinitum huzaha!

Take that you inethical clods 

Claims of "Godwin" for merely mentioning WWII or the Nazis are stupid.

Now, you're actually calling people Nazis. I never did. I only paraphrased something in the context of WWII to show that the original concept was flawed, which is "reductio ad absurdum".

my post was in response to (paraphrased) "people blame thing X for causing thing Y. They wouldn't do that without a justified motivation". And I retorted "well the Nazis blamed the Jews for stuff, and that wasn't with a justified motivation. People make unjustified accusations all the time".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

reductio ad absurdum (Latin for "reduction to absurdity"; also argumentum ad absurdum, "argument to absurdity") is a form of argument which attempts either to disprove a statement by showing it inevitably leads to a ridiculous, absurd, or impractical conclusion, or to prove one by showing that if it were not true, the result would be absurd or impossible.

the point of this is that the original argument "people never cast blame without a justified motivation" is wrong ... because if we assume that it's a true, then by necessity it must be true in all cases, even the case of the Nazis blaming the Jews. And since we all reject Nazism as an invalid doctrine, then we should all reject the original argument as being logically invalid, too.

It's not a comparison of GoblinCookie to a Nazi. In fact, the premise of the argument completely hinges on the idea that GoblinCookie is not a Nazi. it would completely backfire if they were. It's an explicit part of the "reductio ad absurdum" argument that the "absurd" counter-argument is chosen as one that nobody could accept. That's the whole point.

The bigger point: nobody got called a Nazi by anyone but yourself and you're just throwing shade now and either deliberately misconstruing things or having poor reading comprehension. e.g. in response to my previous post where I merely pointed out that I never called anyone a Nazi, now you're using that as the justification to just hurl pure abuse around calling people Nazis. That's utterly ridiculous. As for "trolling" I made one original argument and then didn't mention it again, but you've come at me multiple times since then about it, despite me not actually engaging with you about it first. I'm not the one engaging in trolling, I'm the one responding.

[Eschar]

TLDR of the above post: Nazi-ism was used because it is a well-known historical example, not merely because of the shock value.

[strainer]

Not merely eh?

Where did I call someone a Nazi?

Who admitted to "bringing up the overt Godwin" after making someones argument about Nazis to"show how that was not a legitimate construction"?

Does anyone have any standards here?

[Eschar]

Where did I call someone a Nazi?

I have no idea if you did or not. I was referring to Reelya's analogy, not your comments.

Does anyone have any standards here?

Is that really a valid conclusion to draw?

[strainer]

You don't know if I called someone a Nazi or not? --I'll fill you in since you've joined in a conversation that you are unable to read.

I did not call anyone a Nazi. And the question was to Reelya who accused me in bold text of that in the comment immediately before your own.

How about taking just a minute or two to get a basic grasp of what's been discussed, before the lofty appeal for a "valid conclusion"

[Eschar]

You don't know if I called someone a Nazi or not? --I'll fill you in since you've joined in a conversation that you are unable to read.

The fact that I did not read your posts, out of the many in the thread, does not qualify me as unable to read. My original comment was about Reelya's posts; thus it did not require reading yours.

And the question was to Reelya who accused me in bold text of that in the comment immediately before your own.

In that case, you could quote the posts which you are responding to; it makes it clearer and would prevent my too-literal brain from jumping to conclusions.

How about taking just a minute or two to get a basic grasp of what's been discussed, before the lofty appeal for a "valid conclusion"

My question was eight letters long and in written form (which is harder to judge intent of than spoken language.) There's not enough there to assess whether it came from loftiness. And if it were lofty, that would not matter, as it wouldn't affect the legitimacy of my question.