>her arm caught fire as flames engulfed the building - and then she fell through the floor into a vat of liquid chocolate. The dark liquid extinguished her blazing arm, but Patricia Borges wound up breaking her collarbone and both of her heels. She would spend the next nine hours screaming for help and waiting for rescue

Yes.

Hilarious.

Ha. Ha.

:|

Take my upvote you monster.

Kinda Oniony, as it sounds horrible and he is going to try to beat his son.

>A new report from the New York Post claims that Frank Abagnale Jr actually 'lied' about his 'lifetime of lies'.

This makes it seem like this is a new revelation, but people have been calling bullshit on him since his memoir was published in the 1980s.

Great commercial. Better product.

Squatting is actually much better for your bowels than sitting. Western toilets are poorly designed and lead to hemorrhoids.

https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-35263240

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/12/01/metro/what-we-mean-by-black-girl-magic/

Relevant articles

>At the end of the day, nothing can convince me that individual people choosing not to buy a game that supports someone who dehumanizes trans people is morally equivalent to shoplifting or making game creators homeless. I'm sorry, but that is just an absurd equivalency to draw.

But the point I'm making is it doesn't support her. She's supported by a wealth of other revenue streams. She makes a few bucks every time someone reads or listens to one of her best selling books or watches one of her hit movies. And her new detective books continue to sell.

This game would be a tiny, tiny, tiny drop in the bucket that doesn't affect her but affects the people at the game studio who will need to find another job at a video game company... in England. That pays as well as a AAA studio.

>I also think you're making Rowling out to be a lot more innocent than she is. Twitter manipulates and exploits our feelings, sure, but to act like Rowling has no agency in this process and just "had no choice" but to become an extreme bigot because angry people on the internet called her out on her bullshit just absolves her of all responsibility for her actions.

She didn't have agency. No one chooses to be radicalized. She didn't sit down and make a rational decision. This is all primal, reactive lizard brain stuff. She was clearly victimized at some point in her life and this is triggering all those emotions of being attacks and hurt. Fight/ flight is kicking in and she'd going with the former.

Attacking her didn't work then. It's not going to work now. Doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results is... well, y'know.

>I don't feel sorry that people aren't universally celebrating her anymore. Just because it doesn't hurt her finances much doesn't mean it is meaningless. Publicly naming and shaming people who spread hate and say intolerable things helps to strip them of their power and influence. At the very least, she no longer has an underserved squeaky clean image in the public eye. Maybe that doesn't matter to you, but it matters to the people whose rights and dignity Rowling feels are negotiable.

And she's being stripped of her power and influence... how?

All this has done has made her double down AND given the TERF community a rallying figure to platform and praise.

I've lost all respect for her. I'm not buying any of her books again. (And I work in an elementary school library.) But I also care about the end results and the actual cause and what we're currently doing... isn't fucking working.

What we're doing now isn't working. It's making her more vocal. She's doing more with her money out of spite. And as she intensifies, so does the mob who are attacking and harming other people.

It's a vicious cycle. And you can win in a vicious cycle. We can't win by out hating her. We can't despise her into submission.
And even if the mob does somehow win and bully her into being silent... is that how we want to win? Emotional violence?

>Sorry, but not matter how you spin it, it was always a possibility the game would flop. Nothing is a safe bet. Therefore, guilting people who choose to boycott the game for ruining the livelihoods of the developers is just inherently silly to me. Highly anticipated games flop all the time. It's a shame, but even leaving politics aside for a second, no one is obligated to buy a product out of pity for its creators.

Which is like arguing something isn't shoplifting to steal from a store because it could have burned down later that night.

The game was an exceedingly safe bet and highly unlikely to flop. The only way it would flop is if the reviews came out and they were terrible. But they're not: it's scoring 8s and 9s on reviews. It has an 86 on Metacritic.
There's no way it should realistically flop.

People are going to lose their jobs and maybe their homes and all you can say is "well, that's a shame."

>Especially since, as we've established, they have already been compensated for the work they have finished. All the sales figures affect is whether or not they get their bonuses and get to go on to create another game. But that was always going to be the case anyway. This is a normal process in the industry. Worst case scenario, they pack up and move on to the next project. No one is going to be permanently unemployed from this.

So your argument is "they were paid yesterday, so it doesn't matter if they're paid tomorrow"?
Is your argument that work shouldn't be guaranteed and people shouldn't feel safe in their jobs? People aren't entitled to work. If they lose their job, they should just go out and get a new one.

How very conservative capitalist of you...

>I agree that attacking people over this is wrong, but let's clarify what an attack is.

Doxxing, ad hominem, verbal abuse, etc, yes those are attacks.

Advocating for people to boycott the game, educating people on Rowling's attacks on trans rights or criticizing bad aspects of the franchise itself are not attacks. That is activism, and you are not entitled to be unbothered by activism in the public sphere because that would defeat the entire point.

Didja read the associated article?

Because they weren't just advocating people educate themselves when the reduced a Twitch streamer playing the game to tears.

The anti-Rowling brigade here is going to actively harm more people than Rowling herself. All to HURT her and make her feel bad by impacting her money... when she already has more than she will ever be able to realistically spend and probably doesn't even look at her month-to-month finances to even know she's taken a loss. She's probably barely even aware the game exists.

She's not going to "learn her lesson" from this and it only hurts people who otherwise agree with the issue of trans rights... so why?

>You can push back against the activism, criticize/critique it, choose to ignore it, etc. I think you raise some valid points, for example. But broadly categorizing it all as mere attacks and harassment sparked by two minute hate is reductive.

I generally refer to being on Twitter as a two-minute hate, because that's what it is. The platform is designed to make you angry and push you to lash out at people. Because the angrier you get, the more you engage. The more you engage, the more time you spend on the platform and the more ads to see. The more ads you see, the more money Twitter makes.
Twitter is incentivized to make people upset and angry and feed empty social outrage as people cancel random people or engage in rapid slacktivism.

And a great example is Rowling. Who was very much against intolerance for her life. She was an advocate for many social issues, especially women's health. Then she made some slightly TERF statements and was attacked and doubled down online. Now her Twitter feed is 2/3rd anti-Trans messages. She's basically been radicalized by Twitter. And the people attacking her haven't changed her mind or made things better, they've only made things WORSE.
Angrily engaging with Rowling online hasn't changed her mind. Calling her out as a TERF hasn't hurt her finances, as she's richer than ever and Harry Potter books are still phenomenal sellers. (All 7 are currently on Audible's most read books of the week and the series boxed set is the #1 children's fantasy book still, with individuals books being #8, #10-12.)

This boycott ONLY hurts the people who made the game.

>No one should feel obligated to buy a product whose values they don't agree with so that the company who made it can get its investment back. Everyone involved in making the game is aware of the potential that it may flop going into it, and in fact that is statistically by far the more likely scenario.

True. But in this case, it's not the product whose values they don't agree with. The designers of the game seem to support trans rights and have even included a potential trans wizard in the game.

And I think they thought the game was a pretty safe bet when they were going in. When you start to produce a AAA video game based on the most beloved book series of the last twenty-five years having it "flop" doesn't seem likely. Not a lot of AAA games flop.

We're talking about people with mortgages and health insurance and kids going to school who's livelihood will be destroyed by this. And people are just shrugging them off as collateral damage to thumb their nose at a second richest author in the world who won't even notice the dip in her ridiculous net wealth.

>I know it sucks to be dragged down by association, but we didn't know then what we know now and that is nobody's fault.

Nobody's fault except the people declaring guilt by association.

>I still think it is perfectly reasonable to boycott the game on principle alone, regardless of whose paycheck it may harm.

Even though it has zero impact on the person you want to boycott, as they've already been paid, had no input on the game, and are unaffected by its success or failure?

Boycotting this to get back at Rowling is as effective and meaningful as boycotting Alan Wake II. She'll probably make more money just from the insurance on the billion she already has in the bank.

But, okay, boycott if you want.
That's fine. It really is.
But that's also not what's happing here. There's a LOT of harassment being directed at people who aren't boycotting, which isn't cool and just makes the anti-Rowling movement look bad. Getting mad at people because they're not joining in on two-minute hate.

>Also, I'm skeptical of the claim that the game devs get a bonus if the game does well, but JKR doesn't. Do we actually know either of those to be true? I don't think it matters either way, I just find it hard to believe.

Licenses tend to be paid in advance. That's how licenses work. You pay for the rights knowing the name will bring in more people and allow you to sell more copies than an unrelated IP allowing you to recoup the added expense of having to pay for the license.

If the license holder also got more money because the game was a success, that would defeat the purpose licensing IP.

Okay... she might get some royalties. But sales of Harry Potter grew in 2022. Philsopher's Stone was still the 2nd best selling children's book. So even if she gets a chunk of money from the game... it will be peanuts to what she's already making from continued book sales.

So it's killing a game studio and wrecking a bunch of lives and harassing a bunch of other video game players for literally no effect. For a game that Rowling cares so little about she couldn't even be bothered to hyper on her Twitter with a single retweet,

Yes and no.

Most game companies like this pay bonuses based on reviews and sales, so the better the game does the better a bonus the team will get.

And game companies also need to pay off the development costs of making the game and pay back the investors who paid to create the game. After years of development, a AAA game like this will be millions in the red, and that needs to come from sales.
If the game doesn't sell well, the company will need to lay off staff or even declare bankruptcy to protect itself from its investors. Which means all those staff will suddenly be employed.

Very true.

However, she was paid for the license to make this game well before she outted herself on Twitter and doesn't make money if it sells well or fails. The only people who have a financial state in the game are the designers, developers, and team at the game company. And their families.

By trying to hurt Rowling by boycotting this game you're doing literally nothing to her and just hurting innocent people, who often explicitly do not share or support her views.

Careful with that joke, it’s an antique.

Cadbury is still headquarted in the UK. (In London actually.)

It's owned by Mondelez International, which started in America, but Cadbury is still a separate company and not a division or branch.

There’s a reason I chose a UK brand for that analogy rather than Hersheys…

Diet Coke, Coke, Caffeine Free Coke, and Coke Zero all have very different colour schemes on their label for that reason.

If someone tried to grab a Diet Coke or Caffeine-Free Coke and instead got a full sugar and full caffeine Coke that could be problematic for someone with diabetes or an allergy.

Selling an alcohol-free drink at alcoholic drink prices in a bottle that almost exactly look like the whiskey bottle (https://media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com/image/upload/rockcms/2023-01/fireball2-te-230124-ca8046.jpg) feels like a scam.

It seems stupid, but if one store was, say, selling a Cadbury's chocolate bar that contained chocolate and another store was selling a similarly shaped bar with similar wrapping and the same branding but which contained a brown coloured edible oil product you'd feel cheated, even if the small print of the package clearly said "candy bar with chocolate flavour."

This is why brands have trademarks. You expect one thing when you buy a product.

It's basically a company making a knockoff version of their own product...

False equivalency.

Just because I'm saying the documentary is problematic or that eating daily McDonalds isn't automatically unhealthy doesn't mean I'm saying McDonalds is good for you.

Heck, broccoli and roasted chicken are good for you, but eating a small plate of that every three hours isn't healthy either unless you're burning a lot of calories.

Yes. But if you hit the gym and do enough cardio & weights that you're burning all the calories from McDonalds and don't have other underlying health issues, even three daily Super Sized meals won't impact your weight.

Body builders need to consume a ridiculous amount of calories. While you're unlikely to bulk up from McDonalds and be as cut as you'd be from chicken and broccoli every three hours you won't get fan and unhealthy...

Funny thing, the problem with that much McDonalds is the caloric intake. But if you offset that with exercise it's not a problem. Several people repeated it but increased their exercise and time at the gym and lost weight and even had their cholesterol levels go down.

I don't like that they're giving him attention (even if not actually calling him out by name) but they're doing so in a way that just makes him look absurd and turns him into a punchline, while also turning any inevitable backlash or retort into free advertising.

By leaning into this, they also know the absurdity of the move will also be commented on my late night TV hosts, which just results in more free advertising.

My first thought was she was a gold digger going after his money.
But she's as 63yo PhD and a grandma with a long career in business and medical science.

So this is actually super sweet. And the more you read about what they've been doing in the four years they've been together the sweeter it gets.

It's petty much anti-Oniony, really.

>Because it's a process that would take AT LEAST a century, hence what contemporary societies are doing isn't particularly relevant.

Which makes it outright impossible.

That's a longer term goal than any human society has attempted. 25 presidencies, 50 election cycles, and three or four generations. Reshaping society for a world we don't know the needs of. Will there even be a recognisable USA in 100 years?

Construction projects that take a decade are hard to manage, and they have a clear goal and blueprints.

>Prison and Police Abolition is a goal to try and work towards gradually, not an overnight policy change, read the book.

I'll buy prison abolishment. I think there are better ways to handle incarceration and rules breakers.

But police? You need someone to keep the peace. There's always going to be someone who breaks the rules. The job of policing needs to fall on someone. And if not a public police force then it becomes the job of the military OR private security firms and corporate security, which is dystopian as fuck.

How is police abolishment not incompatible with the fact that not a single modern society functions without a police force???

The problem is there’s two different definitions for “defund the police” and even people on the BLM side of the equation mean different things. And while not all will agree with the New York Times op ed, there’s a heck of a lot that do.

Which is the majority? 🤷‍♂️

Everyone believes their position is the most common. I support cutting police funding, funding social workers and mental health, and demilitarization. Am I part of the majority? I have no clue.

But since the term is unclear and to some people on both the left and the right it means “abolish” then it’s not really useful. No one knows what you mean...