Lurker > darkknight109

DrCidd posted...

You know what is 100% effective? Abstinence.

The analogy works because if you have an accident in a car and somebody dies, you pay the consequences.
If you have an accident in the bedroom that results in a new life being formed, you pay the consequences and you raise that child.

Not necessarily true. If someone rear-ends you (insert your own sex joke here), or something else happens outside of your control (like an accident initially caused by an animal that results in a multi-vehicle crash), you may be found not liable for damage because the accident could not be reasonably avoided.

If someone is using contraception, they are making a good faith attempt to prevent a pregnancy, the same way someone driving within the bounds of the law is making a good faith effort not to get in a car accident. If circumstances beyond their control - like a broken condom or faulty pill - result in a pregnancy, why should they be forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term and shoulder the financial costs associated with the same?

No one recommends avoiding road accidents by *not driving*, they recommend avoiding accidents by being safe and if you follow the guidelines, you're typically not held responsible if an accident does occur. Since you like this analogy so much, the same standards should apply to sex, no?
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

DrCidd posted...

So here's a thought experiment.

Let's say there's a woman who's within the legal range (or for the sake of argument, the range you feel makes abortion okay). She is on her way to the abortion clinic to have the pregnancy terminated and a man mugs her. Which results in her having a miscarriage.

How do you charge him in the court of law?

I wouldn't really have a choice - I would be bound by the laws of whatever jurisdiction this occurred in. Some areas do have additional penalties for crimes that result in a terminated pregnancy.

Pretending that I could charge it however I wanted to, however, if it's occurring in the timeframe you're suggesting, I would simply charge him the same way I would if he'd attacked her and broken her arm. At that point the fetus is part of her body, not an independent life, so it would be some combination of theft and battery charges.
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

DrCidd posted...

There aren't only 2 options

Oh, yes, pardon me, you added a third to account for your own personal preferences. Of course, no mention of rape, no mention of incest, no mention of time limits, no mention of health of the fetus/child, no mention of finances, or healthcare, or the availability of contraceptives, all of which are worth considering when discussing the morality and legality of abortion.

Do you not see the problem yet and why boiling this down to a yes/no question is ridiculously oversimplistic for a topic as complicated as abortion?
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

DrCidd posted...

How would you feel if your parents told you they greatly considered getting an abortion with you?
Or that they would have had they the means to do so?
I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be happy with that idea, would you?
I bet you'd be pretty damned glad they didn't murder you.

Personally, I wouldn't care.

Like... why would I? Whether they were thinking about aborting me or not, they decided not to and we went on to have a great relationship. There is absolutely zero reason for me to hold that against them.

DrCidd posted...

You know what's obnoxious? Complete disregard for human life.

Do you cry every time you wake up, knowing that your body has killed a collection of cells inside your stomach, on your skin, and a variety of other places? Because that's in essence what a fetus/embryo is for the first few months of development - a collection of cells, smaller than the palm of your hand, that don't even have a developed nervous system.
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

I hate polls like this that paint it as a yes/no black-and-white question. Like you're either for every abortion, under all circumstances, with no restrictions, or you're in favour of banning them all, regardless of circumstances. There are shades of grey here.
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

LeetCheet posted...

Phantom Menace had Darth Maul, Attack of the Clones had Christopher Lee as a Sith and Revenge of the Sith had a Jedi-cyborg with four arms though.
They looked really cool at least : P

The problem was all three were completely unimportant to the plot.

Maul looked cool, but you could have replaced him with a few cardboard boxes with a frowny face painted on them a lightsaber taped to them for all the difference it would have made to his role. Dooku was probably the biggest waste of a big name actor in the PT (his only real competition being Samuel L. Jackson) as he seemed like an intriguing character that would have some interesting insight on the Jedi, the Sith, the Republic, and the Confederacy (having been involved with all of them at various points), but the films hastily got rid of him before he could ever get around to doing much. Grievous was a completely ridiculous and pointless character who didn't even have the wow factor of the other two and seemed to have been hastily shoved into Episode III when Lucas realized he didn't have a new character he could use to sell toys yet.

None of them had any buildup or gave the main characters (or the audience) any reason to have them or cheer for their defeat beyond them being the designated bad guy, which is partially understandable given that none of them lasted for more than half a film's worth of runtime. Considering that Lucas created two of the most iconic villains of all time in the OT in Palpatine and (especially) Vader, the fact that the PT's villains were so painfully lacklustre and misused becomes all the more glaring as one of its more notable pratfalls.

Mover_of_Zigs posted...

Attack of the Clones had some serious, serious internal logic flaws.

My favorite is:
Anakin - "Shoot him down!"
Clonetrooper - "We're out of rockets!"

...Dude, did you forget you have like 20 laser cannons on that thing?

Personally, I like the way they ended the subsequent fight scene with Dooku trying to drop a rock pillar on Anakin and Obi-Wan. Yoda could have quickly pulled the much-lighter Kenobi and Skywalker to safety or slammed the pillar into Dooku's ship after catching it in order to disable it and prevent his getaway, but instead he just takes an agonizingly long time tossing it to the side so that Dooku is given enough time to escape.
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

-The Jedi spend a few minutes talking about how emotionally unstable Anakin is, then decide to send him to a nice private getaway with the woman whose leg he's been busily humping nonstop since he met her, instead of sending someone who is less emotionally attached and/or has more experience. Even in-universe this is seen as a bad idea, as Obi-Wan and Typho see them off while swapping bets about which one will put their hand down the other's pants first. Also worth noting that Padme's security team has now been downgraded to a single Jedi trainee, since the whole Coruscant deal showed that having two Jedi guard her was clearly overkill.

-Obi-Wan eventually makes his way to Kamino, a planet that has been conspicuously deleted from the Jedi archives, and discovers a clone army, ordered in the name of a dead Jedi, paid for by unknown means, and ready for delivery to the Republic just in time for a pan-galactic war to start. That no one in the entire Republic seemed at all bothered by this alarmingly-convenient series of events points to ineptitude on a truly massive scale. Palpatine's entire plot that he's spent decades formulating could have been easily undone by anyone with more than three neurons firing at this point. Instead, despite the clear presence of someone with enormous influence and resources working at cross-purposes to the Jedi and the Republic, no one bothers to follow up on this in the years that the Clone Wars raged, else they might have discovered the secret Jedi kill-code that all the Clones had hardwired into their brains.

-Finally, when Jango flees from Obi-Wan, he heads to Geonosis of all places, despite there being no reason for him being here and every possibility Obi-Wan had bugged his ship. Again, for all the mystique, Jango Fett is clearly terrible at his job and it's frankly astounding that he's trusted as much as he is by all the bad guys.

And that's just the highlights! I could write a fucking book about everything nonsensical that happens in the prequels, and I'm sure other people have. Say what you will about the way some parts of the sequels were sloppily set up - whether that's Abrams failing to really explain where the First Order and Resistance came from or why they have their respective resources, or Johnson being hamfisted with his "running out of fuel" plot - but at least the characters behaved mostly rationally for the circumstances that were set up for them (and in cases where they didn't behave rationally, there was a reason for it and it led to expected ends, rather than the prequels where people make completely nonsensical decisions that somehow work out, because that's what the plot needed to have happen).

I'll never claim that the sequels are without flaw, but to suggest that TLJ is more nonsensical than AotC or TPM is so wrong I'd almost call it falsehood.
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

ParanoidObsessive posted...

overthinking the implied finances as if it actually means anything in terms of narrative or setting is generally a flawed argument, because the people in this topic have now spent more time thinking about it than literally anyone ever involved in writing or directing a Star Wars movie ever has

So? Whether or not the Rebellion and Resistance's relative sizes makes sense doesn't in any way detract from that argument (maybe warships are more expensive in the sequel-era than in the OT era, or maybe the Resistance wasn't able to recruit enough crew from a war-weary populace to man more ships, who knows?) - it's the relative sizes of the Rebellion/Empire or the Resistance/First Order that drives the argument, and those are spelled out pretty unarguably. Are those two sets consistent with each other? No, but there's a lot of inconsistencies between all three trilogies, so that doesn't really mean much.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I would agree 100%.

Which is what makes it so absolutely tragic that The Last Jedi somehow winds up being worse.

The characters in TLJ generally behave rationally, though, and when they don't (like Poe/Finn/Rose's Hail-Mary to try and disable the tracking device or Rey deciding she can turn Kylo Ren back to the light side), it generally ends in disaster, as one would reasonably expect.

I mean, to contrast, let me make a brief list of completely brain-dead decision various characters make in Attack of the Clones, in roughly chronological order:

-Jango Fett and Zam Wesell, supposedly two of the greatest bounty hunters in the galaxy, attempt a big, flashy assassination using a bomb, then decide to - their words - "try something more subtle", even though that's the reverse order of the way things are supposed to be done (subtlety when they don't suspect anything, big explosions when they realize what's going on). Because everyone in this movie is a moron, this actually almost works. Between the two of them they manage to come up with the only method of killing Padme that the Jedi can thwart given its reliance on unpredictable living creatures (for some completely inexplicable reason), whereas if the droid used a bomb or a blaster or even a knife, it would have killed her before the Jedi even realized anything was wrong.

-Because the Jedi and Padme's security team are just as bad at their jobs as the bounty hunters, they come up with the most slipshod security plan imaginable. Instead of moving Padme to a secure location and/or using another decoy in her place, having additional security personnel watching the building from the outside, etc., her security is essentially entrusted to a horny teenager and his surrogate father. When she disables the security camera in her room - AKA, the only thing that allows the Jedi to monitor the situation from afar - instead of knocking on her door and telling her to fix it, they just kind of shrug their shoulders and start arguing with each other instead, nearly getting her killed in the process.

-When the assassination fails, Obi-Wan makes the questionable decision to leap onto the droid, despite not knowing if it's armed or whether it can support his weight. But instead of self-destructing, carrying him off into the night, or running him into traffic, it obediently flies directly back to its owner. During the subsequent encounter, Wesell decides to attack the Jedi in the middle of a crowded bar instead of getting the fuck out of dodge (the fact they saw her isn't even all that important, given she's a shapeshifter) and when Jango decides to silence her, he opts to use the single weapon in his considerable arsenal that can be traced back to his base of operations, a secret planet that he and his employer have spent considerable time and effort trying to keep hidden.
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Chewster posted...

Maybe you guys shouldn't be such fucking socially awkward dorks that you have no use for a cell phone

I didn't have a cell phone for a long time (finally got the cheapest flip-phone available when I bought my house, but only because there was no landline in the house and it would have been more expensive to get one installed).

My old justification was that:
a) I lived in a house with zero cell reception (it died out about 5 km from my house), so it was completely unusable while I was at home;
and
b) I had a landline at home and a workphone at work. If I was not at one of those two places I was either driving, in which case I can't answer the phone anyways, or I'm running errands, doing something with friends, or am otherwise busy, in which case I don't want to be bothered by a phone (and 90+% of the time that still holds true - if I'm not at home/work, I pretty much never answer my phone and may as well not have it at all).
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

ernieforss posted...

goemon doesn't even look like what he traditional looks like in the box art

That's because Goemon didn't get his spiky-hair look until after this game. Up to and including this game, he was rocking that... whatever you call that hairstyle (although previous to this game it was brown instead of blue).
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

ParanoidObsessive posted...

which is part of the New Republic

The Resistance isn't part of the New Republic, though. That's kind of *why* there's a Resistance.

The New Republic was a largely pacifistic entity - the Resistance formed as a militant group because they felt the Republic was not taking seriously the threat the New Republic posed.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

The math doesn't even remotely add up.

I fail to see how that in any way disproves my argument.

I mean, the Empire controlled most of the core worlds in the galaxy, had a massive military, and was fighting against a rebellion that cobbled together whatever they could from planets - largely in the outer rim - where they had influence. You haven't disputed that. The First Order has a massive fleet, filled with multiple king-sized ships like the Dreadnought or the Supremacy while the Resistance only has three capital ships to their name. That part's not even debatable.

Saying "It doesn't make sense that the First Order can build bigger stuff than the Empire and the Resistance is smaller than the Rebellion" doesn't disprove anything I said.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

It's a VERY sad day when the logic of the prequels actually holds together better than the sequels, but that's the world we live in.

Strongly disagree. Not in the sense that you're shortchanging the sequels (there are some obvious logical issues there), but in the sense that I think you're forgetting just how completely nonsensical the prequels were. The Phantom Menace relied on some massive leaps of logic just to keep the plot going, Attack of the Clones didn't have logical gaps so much as no logic at all, and the overarching storyline - which was supposed to be this brilliant chessmaster-gambit by Palpatine - was so incredibly stupid that it could have been found out in two minutes had anyone on either side of the conflict had more than two brain cells to bang together. Revenge of the Sith is the only movie that manages to make some sort of logical sense if only by dint of the fact that Lucas basically took the end of Attack of the Clones and the start of A New Hope, drew a straight line directly between them with no twists or turns, and called it a movie (and even then Anakin still manages to toss in a few incredibly bizarre decisions, just in case we were worried that these movies might start making sense).

The sequels have their issues, but let's not pretend that the prequels weren't steaming dumpster fires, *especially* when it comes to logical consistency.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

As a random aside, one of my nerdiest life goals is to visit all of the locales depicted in this game. I've already hit up Level 1 (Edo, modern day Tokyo), Level 8 (Ryukyu kingdom, modern day Okinawa) and I'm planning on going to Level 5 (Iga) next year. The others on the list are:
Level 2 - Shikoku (modern day Kochi)
Level 3 - Awaji Island
Level 4 - Yamato (I'm guessing this is supposed to be modern day Nara)
Level 7: Izumo

I have yet to find anyone who has any clue as to where Level 6 is supposed to be. There is a "Tengu Mountain" in Nagano, but there's never been any towns near there and there's not really any other clues as to where this is supposed to be.
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

man101 posted...

Also Leia and Holdo refusing to tell anyoe on the ship their plan was just stupid movie logic to give the audience the idea that Holdo may be a villain or inept, and so they could have the big heroic revelation followed shortly by a sacrifice. There is zero reason Holdo could not have told Poe immediately what Leia ended up telling him anyway after they had abandoned ship.

I can think of several reasons:

1) Poe was not part of the command staff and, therefore, had no right to that knowledge.
2) The Resistance was having trouble with morale and desertion (Rose comments on this in her opening scene), so the more people that know the plan, the better the chance it winds up leaking back to the First Order from someone who is either opportunistically trying to save their own skin by selling out the Resistance (I.E. the exact thing DJ did) or someone who gets captured during an escape attempt and blabs about it during interrogation.
3) Poe wasn't exactly in anyone's good graces at that point of the movie and for good reason. The last time he ran into a plan he disagreed with, he ignored a direct order from the beloved leader and got half their starfighter wing (including all of their bombers) destroyed, been demoted as a result, then lied to his new CO by pretending that demotion never happened. In a real life military, Poe wouldn't have gotten a slap in the face and a demotion for that, he would have been arrested and brought up on charges of insubordination and dereliction of duty and, depending on how strict the Resistance's military code of justice is, he would have been looking at either a long time behind bars or a summary execution.

Lo and behold, when he does wind up finding out about Holdo's plan and decides he doesn't like it, he conspires with Finn and Rose about a new one, which leads directly to the Resistance nearly being annihilated as a result. Had Poe actually done as ordered, the Resistance could have gotten away largely intact (minus the loss of their ships), waited for the First Order to pass on, confident that their job was complete, then started broadcasting from Crait with far more time to rally allies than they wound up with.

man101 posted...

Also the bombing run in the beginning is a bigger physics clusterfuck than the hyperspeed bomb. Why do the bombs fall out without gravity?

Apparently they're "magnetically charged" to "fall" away from the bomber. I don't really like that explanation myself, but it isn't even Star Wars's worst abuse of space-gravity physics (that title goes to Episode III's opening battle, where a tilting ship somehow causes gravity to shift, despite the fact that "down" on a ship is always relative to the ship itself).

Blighboy posted...

The mechanics of Star Wars have never made sense and should not be a priority.

This has always been my view as well. If you think too hard about Star Wars and its mechanics - any of it, right back to the originals - you will wind up seeing some pretty glaring holes. None of the movies are immune to this and they all suffer for it to greater or lesser extents.
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
Grand Theft Auto V
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Grand Theft Auto IV
Grand Theft Auto III

...that's all the Rockstar games I've played (assuming we're not counting Rockstar North - if we are, I can smatter in four Lemmings games, plus Space Station Silicon Valley).
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Unbridled9 posted...

Why the hell didn't the other two ships do the Holdo maneuver?

Because the ships would have wasted valuable fuel - which you might recall they had limited amounts of - and it wouldn't have helped all that much considering how much they were outnumbered by. Destroying the tracker would have done nothing (Poe points out the flaw in this plan directly in the movie itself - another ship would start tracking instead) and neither of those ships had the mass to take out the Supremacy anyways.

Keep in mind Holdo's plan - which would have worked, had Poe not blabbed the details in earshot of a slicer with no particular loyalty to the Resistance - was to lull the First Order into a false sense of security by stringing them out on the chase, then secretly launching cloaked transports to make for Crait. The Holdo Manoeuvre was only done when that plan fell apart.

Or, alternatively, why didn't Hux do this? Sacrifice a star destroyer, sure, but you KILL OFF THE ENTIRE RESISTANCE/REBELLION!

.....or he could have just blasted them to pieces normally, with his significantly larger fleet, and not wasted one of his Star Destroyers taking out three ships that he massively outgunned.

Argument A or Argument B. Either A) Hyperspace lets you at speeds faster than light at which point there's no reason an X-wing traveling at light speed wouldn't impact with the force of a nuclear bomb. Or B) It doesn't at which point basically everything Holdo did made no sense especially given the resulting fallout which couldn't have happened UNLESS she was going super-fast

Or, Argument C: What actually happened in the movie and what I already spelled out in my last set of posts. Specifically, that ships travelling in hyperspace clearly have much less energy than they should (else, as you say, a single X-wing would have been sufficient to wipe out not just the Supremacy but the entire fleet it was with, the Resistance fleet, the nearby planet, and everything else in the universe)

Hyperspace, being the black-box, physics-defying thing that it is, can pretty much do whatever it wants.

And perhaps that's exactly why this idea has never taken root. Perhaps it is too unreliable or random, or the results too difficult to predict or control. Maybe Holdo, in her desperation attack, simply got lucky

In fact I'm fairly certain Ryan never even watched the originals or else he should have remembered that the imperials HAD the tracking devices that were so central to the plot all the way back in ANH

Except there were no tracking devices in TLJ. That was the whole point. The First Order didn't install a tracking device on the Resistance ships (as was done in ANH and AotC), they were able to track the ships remotely, which is something that had not been done prior to that point. That's exactly why Vader was so disappointed at the end of ESB - when the Falcon made the jump to hyperspace, the Empire lost them; had they been able to track them, they would have just jumped after them

Meanwhile you're equating Han basically saying 'you need a skilled pilot or else you end up smacking into a sun and gravity will still mess with you' with 'It's perfectly fine for Holdo to completely wreck that massive ship with hyperdrive because it can affect things in the normal world'

You might not want to make accusations of someone not watching the originals when you're plainly misremembering them yourself. The line I'm referring to is not Han pointing out they need a skilled pilot in the cantina, it's this one from when they're fleeing the Star Destroyers above Tatooine:

"Traveling through hyperspace isn't like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it?"
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Unbridled9 posted...

Heck, space combat itself might be rendered entirely obsolete since who the fuck would dare start a war when you'd suddenly have your capitol planet smashed to bits by sixty hyperspace missiles that you have little to no method of stopping vaporizing your planet?

Here's the problem with this as a complaint - TLJ didn't introduce anything that wasn't already there. FTL travel was already a thing. Missiles were already a thing. Why has no one combined the two to create WMDs? Who knows? Maybe something about gravity wells stops it from happening (in the old lore, ships would get pulled out of hyperspace if they passed too close to a gravity well - something like that apparently still exists in the new, as Interdictors are still a thing, though Han's manoeuvre in TFA seems to suggest it's less strict than before).

Basically, though, from Star Wars - most universes with FTL travel, honestly - always have that question hanging over their head: given the immense, destructive potential of something moving that fast, why has no one tried to weaponize it yet? Only thing that I can say is that clearly *something* must be preventing it, or else someone would have come up with it by now.

Unbridled9 posted...

Have you SEEN the imperials and what they do? They THRIVE on spending money to build massively powerful superweapons capable of destroying entire planets and star-systems. This isn't just 'right up their alley' it's 'inside their home, cooking them dinner, and asking how work went'. And it's COST EFFECTIVE to boot!

It's not cost effective - that's exactly what I've spent the last few posts explaining. You could have the same destructive potential for far less cost in something like the Dreadnought, which can one-shot enemy capital ships *without* relying on single-use hyperspace rams.

Unbridled9 posted...

The First Order was a fringe group while the Dumb-Names were a powerful organization that had their own freaking capitol planet. It's only because Ryan didn't give an F that things suddenly got flipped in 8.

This is not correct. The Resistance and the New Republic were not the same thing, the First Order isn't a fringe group, and J.J. Abrams is the one who wrote both of those facts, not Johnson.

Basically, after RotJ the Empire collapsed and was steadily driven out into the unknown regions of space. The Rebellion pursued them for a while then, once they were too weak to be considered a threat anymore, refocused their efforts on rebuilding the Republic. As part of their transition to the new governing body, the New Republic deliberately disarmed in order to prevent a dictator like Palpatine from ever rising to power by seizing control of the military.

This turned out to be a bad decision, because the remnants of the Empire wound up settling on previously unsurveyed planets and discovered a significant trove of natural resources that they used to rebuild and re-arm, turning themselves into the First Order. When this came to light, the leading elements of the New Republic were in favour of a detente, a sort of "you don't bother us, we won't bother you" type of truce - that became official policy, which some members decried as dangerous. Those members broke away and started re-arming themselves, becoming the Resistance - they were allied with the Republic, but not officially part of them, since their raison d'etre basically went against the Republic's whole philosophy of peace. As such, the Resistance didn't have access to the Republic's (considerably more sizable) cache of resources and was basically funded by independent donors.

That was all set up in the lore surrounding TFA and was what Johnson was working with when he came onboard.
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Unbridled9 posted...

It may be a 'single use' but that capitol ship you just blew up cost, like, 6,000,000 times more

First off, it's "capital ship", not "capitol ship". A capitol is a building; all other uses of the word are "capital".

Secondly, the fact that the attacker wins the cost tradeoff doesn't actually mean much, because even if the Rebels kill 6 million times their credit value, the Empire has billions more in resources (source: they built a moon-sized battlestation that was an order of magnitude larger than the entire rebel fleet at its peak; then they built a second, even bigger one when the first one blew up).

Unbridled9 posted...

You can't possibly tell me that, say, twelve hyper-space X-wing missiles cost MORE than a single Star Destroyer. If you slapped a hyperdrive onto an asteroid you wouldn't even need to factor in a cost for the ship.

Well, first off, a Star Destroyer is roughly 1.92 x 10^8 cubic metres in volume, while a roughly X-wing-sized pyramid of metal would be about 300 cubic metres. If you wanted to use those to blow up a single Star Destroyer (of which the Empire has literally tens of thousands, nevermind their other ships) you'd need roughly 6500 X-wing missiles per Star Destroyer.

Or, you could use a single squadron of twelve, armed with much more easily replaceable proton torpedoes, and blow up said Star Destroyer *without* losing any ships. Which sounds much more economical.

I've heard the asteroid idea before, and that's even less feasible than most, because no one bothers to take into account the logistical hurdles that immediately present themselves. The first issue is that, as previously mentioned, the hyperdrive makes up a pretty substantial portion of a ship's cost (judging by TPM and the negotiations with Watto) so the cost savings are already questionable. Secondly, unless you're using these to defend a base that's already located at or near an asteroid field, you'll need to bring the asteroids to their targets. That will require some form of a carrier ship (more cost), along with tugs of some sort to move the asteroids onto or off of the carrier ship (still more cost), manoeuvring jets for the asteroid to make sure it's pointed in the right direction (even more cost), plus a droid brain/autopilot to actually run the calculations and make the jump (yet another cost), and most of those costs (carrier and tugs aside) are for a single-use weapon. It's not even clear that this would result in a feasible weapon - if we're factoring the EU into this debate, it's established that the transition into hyperspace exerts enormous forces on the ship that it has to be carefully engineered to withstand; it's debatable whether an asteroid would even survive the hyperspace transition without simply disintegrating.
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

ernieforss posted...

for a long time that game had like the best graphic for the snes. now looking at it I'm look it looks aweful. look at that art design.

What's awful about it? The sprites have great character and are extremely detailed, especially considering that this game came out quite early in the SNES's life. The art design is also extremely clever, especially if you know the actual Japanese "stuff" the various game elements are based on.
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Unbridled9 posted...

But that doesn't solve the problem. It just moves it. There's still no reason why they couldn't design a ship specifically to destroy enemy ships while in hyperspace and have it auto-piloted.

Sure there is and it's the exact same one.

Yeah, you could design a ship as a hyperspace ram and use it (which would cost you the resources used to build the ship, including the hyperdrive, which is the most expensive part of a ship judging by TPM)... or, you could design a ship as an actual warship and use it like one for better returns and more than a single use.

You'd still run into the same issue - Imperials have no need for it, because they can spend the same amount on fighting ships and not have to worry about constantly replacing them, while the Rebels can't use it because they are constantly being pinched for resources and need to scrape out every ounce of usefulness from their ships that they can, not waste them on one-off suicide strikes against a numerically superior foe.

Unbridled9 posted...

Nevermind how Holdo KNEW she'd get any sort of reaction as opposed to either jumping right past them or diddly (since her plan revolved around the jump at least being able to hit for more than 'ramming speed').

Again, ANH shows this is common knowledge - common enough that even a smuggler on a far-flung world in the outer rim knew about it.

Unbridled9 posted...

That way ramming a ship from hyperspace into normal space would be as effective as ramming a ship in normal space.

Physics don't allow for that to work, though. Hyperspace allows for faster-than-light travel; the kinetic energy of an impact alone would be literally infinite.

Unbridled9 posted...

Course, it still doesn't explain one bit about how the hell Holdo's plan worked or why an X-wing couldn't make the jump and just blow up a Star Destroyer in an identical fashion.

X-Wings don't have the mass for it. See my mass comparisons above.

Unbridled9 posted...

Ultimately...

This is YOU trying to explain and justify the plot and details. You are not Ryan Johnson. You are not the plot. You are looking for ways to fill in something in the plot that doesn't make sense with something that does. You're writing the script for him. So no, it doesn't excuse his laziness and ineptitude or make the moment any better even if it is, somehow, both realitistic and faithful. Because in order for it to become either of those things you had to go out and write massive bits of script and science to make it work.

No, I'm not "writing" anything. This isn't my creativity giving birth to an entirely new idea, this is just me pointing out observations based on TLJ and stuff that's been in the franchise for decades and explaining why the stuff you're complaining about isn't actually complaint-worthy, because it's logically consistent with what's come before.

This would be like if I complained about Rey being able to use the Force untrained, then if someone pointed out that Anakin was able to pilot a pod-racer - a feat no other human, Force-sensitive or no, had ever accomplished - with no formal training, I responded "Yeah, well, now you're just excusing the plot and you're not the director, so it doesn't count."
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Unbridled9 posted...

Well yes. And that's exactly why Holdo's maneuver is so damned stupid. Because it shouldn't have worked since she wasn't going 'fast' but entering into hyperspace. It's a maneuver that would only work if she WAS going fast. But if she was going fast (as opposed to entering a different dimension) then there's no reason that they shouldn't be building hyper-space missiles. So she was either going fast (at which point the entire combat philosophy of Star Wars falls into question) or she shouldn't have done the type of damage she did on the scale she did.

I already addressed this.

ANH tells us that objects in hyperspace still interact with the real world, so clearly they're not *completely* separated from realspace. TLJ just shows us what happens when a ship that is already in or is in the process of entering hyperspace does when it meets another object still in realspace.

Simple economics explains the rest and why this isn't a widely used tactic.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Also, just to pick on some stuff.

Unbridled9 posted...

Episode IV would have ended not with a trench run but with them loading 3P0 and R2 into a pair of X-wings and setting them to hyperdrive into the Death Star

Your scale is way, way off. The Raddus is approximately 0.3% of the volume of the Supremacy (which, assuming roughly analogous construction and materials, equates to 0.3% of the mass) and even its attack didn't completely destroy its target - crippled it, yes, but there was more than enough ship there to salvage and repair. If we assume that you'd need three Raddus's to completely destroy a ship the size of the Supremacy (reasonable, considering the scale of the damage), that means you'd need about 1% of the mass of an object to destroy it in a hyperspace strike. An X-wing is about 12.5 metres long, whereas the Death Star is 160 km in diameter (giving it a volume of 2.14 x 10^15 cubic metres). Not only would one X-wing barely scratch the paint, you could slam the entire rebel fleet into it and not destroy it.

Unbridled9 posted...

V would have had the Empire just launching a Star Destroyer into the Hoth base (why they didn't do this in the first place is baffling).

I'm assuming you forgot about the planetary shield. Or why the Empire would bother to waste a Star Destroyer in such a fashion instead of just using its guns.

Unbridled9 posted...

VI would have just had Ackbar accelerating his ship to hyperdrive right into the Death Star which would have almost certainly destroyed it or at least crippled it

Home One was 1.3 km long, maybe 400m wide if we're being generous, and roughly cylindrical, for a total volume of ~1.63 x 10^8 cubic metres (less, actually, due to the tapering of its design, but it's good enough for an approximation). The second Death Star was 200 km in diameter, giving it a volume when completed of 4.19 x 10^15 cubic metres. Even if we assume that it only had 3/4 of its mass, one Home One would not be enough to seal the deal - in fact, you would need over 200,000 of them to do the job.

Unbridled9 posted...

nevermind that the Empire could have just done the same. Remember, they're the mother****ing empire. They've got Star Destroyers out the wazoo. Losing one or two to completely destroy the rebellion is an EXTREMELY worth-while trade

Again, why the fuck would they waste money doing this instead of just using them like actual warships? A Star Destroyer beats any individual ship the Rebellion can bring to the table and, unlike using them as a ram, you can use them more than once that way.

This is the fundamental flaw in the kamikaze argument that everyone ignores: The side that has fewer resources can't make widespread use of it, because it involves them in a war of attrition that they will inevitably lose; the side that has greater resources doesn't need to make use of it, because there are far more efficient ways to use those resources to achieve the same ends.
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Unbridled9 posted...

I'm sorry darkknight... but that's BS. Here's the problem. If this technology exists there's literally NO reason to even consider making things like capitol ships in the first place. To quote a certain person 'Sir Issac Newton is the deadliest sunnovabitch in space'.

This would be an excellent point, but for one enormous point you have glossed over:

Star Wars - and the idea of a "hyperdrive" more specifically - does not obey real world physics.

One of the fundamental truths of the universe is that you cannot accelerate something with mass to the speed of light. If you could, you would have infinite energy. Ramming a ship while going at lightspeed (or faster, which is also not a thing) into anything else wouldn't destroy it, it would create a singularity that would collapse the universe. That plainly doesn't happen and never has, or else:
a) Hyperdrives would be controlled the same way nukes are in real life, not dolled out to any idiot who has the funds for one
and;
b) Honestly, Star Wars wouldn't exist, because someone simply researching hyperdrives for the first time would have invariably created an accident that would have resulted in the above scenario.

Fortunately, Star Wars itself indirectly solves this little dilemma. Hyperdrive isn't simply raw speed like you're assuming - it's an entirely separate dimension. It has to be, or else faster-than-light travel would be impossible (and relativity would fuck up a bunch of other things that happen in the films). Now we know from as early as ANH that objects in hyperspace still interact with realspace in *some* fashion (Han references flying through stars or supernovae as a potential calamitous outcome of jumping to hyperspace without doing the proper calculations beforehand), but - based on TLJ - the kinetic energy is substantially less ("infinitesimally less," if we're being technical about it) than it would be if they simply were just accelerating like you're assuming.

(Also, please don't get me started on railguns - that section from Mass Effect that you're quoting is so painfully wrong it's not funny. I'm familiar with the military's research on them - wrote a couple of papers in my university days about the one the US navy was working on, actually - and they're a long ways removed from what sci-fi treats them as).
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

dragon504 posted...

mooreandrew58 posted...

dragon504 posted...

This seems like a worthless study and waste of money.

Yeah it's like doing a study on who's meaner between a drunken sailor and a nun.

Who isn't meaner than Canada? And also on what platform would America not be meaner?

maple syrup debate?

I was thinking "any discussion about hockey", myself.

You want to see a Canadian get mean? Hand them a piece of wood and toss a puck in front of them.
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Legend of the Mystical Ninja is one of the greatest unappreciated SNES games. It's fantastic.
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Metriod42 posted...

You don't run out of gas in space it's just bad science and a horrible problem to have for a plot device.

If that's your biggest complaint about Star Wars's abuse of space-physics, you might want to watch literally any other Star Wars movie, because there's far, far more egregious examples that you're ignoring.

Revelation34 posted...

It was ok. The dumbest part was the Holdo part at the end and only because it was thrown in there arbitrarily. Not to mention it makes no sense to do that yet they didn't do it during the Galactic War.

I've posted several times why the tactic wouldn't be used, except in extreme circumstances. Boiling it down to a single sentence, the Rebels wouldn't use it because every capital ship they lose is an enormous loss, whereas the Empire could weather a war of attrition easily (and they would need to be using decently-sized ships for this tactic - starfighters don't have enough mass, based on comparing the relative sizes of the Raddus and the Supremacy); and the Empire wouldn't use it because it was an enormous waste - they enjoyed military superiority, so they'd get much better results out of using their warships like actual warships rather than really big battering rams.

This is more or less the same reason why kamikaze attacks never caught on in the real world - even Japan stopped using them halfway through WW2 after they realized it left them depleted of both planes and skilled pilots.
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Yes, although I have no idea what model it was.
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Mead posted...

The movie is like 15% stupid shit and 85% pretty entertaining

I personally feel like it is better than all three of the prequels but not any other Star Wars film

Pretty much exactly this, although I did like TLJ more than TFA (and haven't seen Solo, so I don't know where to rank it).
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

If we're talking "biological immortality" perspective, there really is no answer other than 20s. That's your physical prime, after you've finished growing but before age starts wearing your body down.

If we're talking setting a "legal age" where you're always considered that age on paper, regardless of your biological age (as the guy in the news story was apparently attempting), then the obvious answer changes to "anything 70 or older", since that entitles you to various seniors' benefits.
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

One - my paternal grandmother, who is in her mid-90s now.

My maternal grandmother was a smoker and died to lung cancer when I was quite young. My maternal grandfather was next to go - a stroke when I was nine robbed him of most of his motor functions and left him a profoundly broken man, which made it very painful to see him, since he clearly did not want to be alive anymore. He made it five more years before he had a heart attack and a DNR order saved him from anymore suffering. My maternal step-grandfather and my paternal grandfather both died within a couple of years of each other, the former from throat cancer, and I don't even know what the actual cause of death was for the latter (he had been in declining health for a few years by that point).
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

darcandkharg31 posted...

I had to read it a couple times to get it but I THINK it means

1. An alien is now your adopted grandchild. 3 random people are treating you to dinner.
2. 3 random people are forcing you to perform a task. You get orders from a dog they have appointed as their representative.

This somehow makes more sense than the OP.
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Impavid54 posted...

I mean, of course we actually did research on what actually happened,

You clearly did not, or else you would understand that the movie (the one you stated was "proof" of your beliefs) was a work of fiction.

It's like saying that "Apocalypse Now" was proof of how bad the Vietnam war was.
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

I... uh... what?
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

You might actually want to do some research on the Rwandan Civil War before assuming that watching a movie makes you an expert on it...
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Lokarin posted...

GanglyKhan posted...

Thanksgiving drinking

We don't got no Wild Turkey in Canada

Uh, yes, we totally do.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/stop-feeding-the-birds-b-c-town-overrun-by-dozens-of-wild-turkeys-1.4498698
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

The Legend of the Mystical Ninja

Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete

To the Moon

Any of the Kiseki/Trails games
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Maybe - maybe - The Santa Clause. Next most recent one, honestly, is How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966).

Yeah, I'm not big on Christmas movies...
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

rogerskg1979 posted...

You cannot sue someone over a prank.

This is not only wrong, but laughably so.

If you can demonstrate damages incurred, it doesn't matter if they were incurred by way of a prank, you would still have grounds for a lawsuit.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Kyuubi4269 posted...

However, here you demonstrated that you find it fine to burn your dog alive in a fire because you believe animals have no inherent value.

Not what I said. Keep trying.

Jen0125 posted...

Are those all self defense murders?

Obviously not, or they wouldn't be murder (and I find it all kinds of adorable that you think that half a million people a year kill in self defence, yet apparently no one commits actual murder). Maybe you shouldn't be talking about intelligence if you don't understand something this basic. Glass houses and all...

Jen0125 posted...

Self defense is a self preservation instinct. Murder in and of itself is not.

You can't honestly believe this is true. Humans are a species that kills each other regularly, on a planet full of other creatures that also kill their own kind regularly for the same reasons, and you seriously think that anger and murder aren't natural instincts? lmao

OhhhJa posted...

It's just sunny picking something to be self righteous about again. Dude must have a guilty conscience about something

OhhhJa posted...

Jen, you might as well just quit arguing with darkknight. He will literally stop at nothing to prove he is right. He will just continue to post paragraphs until you finally get bored and move on. I've never seen someone so determined to always be right. I suppose it defines his self worth or something

I've noticed this for a while, but you have a weird habit of projecting on people you argue with. Have you noticed that? Do you feel intimidated or something?
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Kyuubi4269 posted...

You know callous disregard for the lives of animals is a clear sign of a psychopath, right?

You know that carefully excising parts of my posts while deliberately ignoring the bits that already disprove your assertion isn't going to win you any arguments, right?
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

wwinterj25 posted...

Yet I'm still risking my life.

Nope. There's no scenario in the question as asked where you die.

wwinterj25 posted...

The difference being a toaster can be replaced and a toaster isn't a life.

Sure, but the point is just because you have a connection to A and not to B doesn't mean that you should always pick A. Other issues factor into it, which you've just admitted with this statement.

Jen0125 posted...

You are the only one taking things to the extreme here. Don't trying to act like I'm taking things to the extreme lol.

Right, because "Sell all your stuff and give it to the poor" isn't extreme at all.

Jen0125 posted...

I said not for humans. We aren't chimps, gorillas or orangutans. That's why I said not for humans.

Again, that's bullshit. Or do you not know that murder is a thing that happens pretty regularly?

Roughly half a million people are murdered around the world every year. Again, killing the shit out of each other is something humans have done since before we even became humans. It's a 100% natural part of who we are.

Have some of our societies transcended that natural instinct? Sure... but that doesn't mean it isn't natural or that a human raised outside any established society wouldn't fall back on those instincts.

Jen0125 posted...

Put your needs before others. Give away everything you own and live naked in the street, Mr. Altruism. You seem to live in a world where there is no spectrum between selfish and selfless.

Pictured: not an extreme argument, apparently (and also a hilarious misinterpretation of what I actually said, to boot).
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Jen0125 posted...

Not for humans it isn't.

Bullshit it's not. Anger is one of our most primal and natural emotions. Fucking toddlers get angry on a pretty regular basis - that's how natural it is. In fact, a huge part of growing up involves mastering that instinct and learning to not give in to anger over everything that makes us upset.

You don't think murderous rages are natural? Go take a look at our fellow great apes. Chimps, gorillas, orangutans... all will happily kill rivals for food or sex or resources or just because it was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Again, natural is not synonymous with good.

Jen0125 posted...

You need to be entirely selfless according to you.

Not even close to what I said, but keep trying and you might get there eventually.

Jen0125 posted...

And I do give to charity because you can be selfish and altruistic depending on the situation.

But you just said being selfish is natural and good. Why are you being a bad person by denying your selfishness and giving to charity?

wwinterj25 posted...

Yes my life would be perfectly safe in a burning apartment.

In the situation given? Yes. You're told that you can save one, which tells you you'll make it out alright.

Would you know that in real life? Obviously not, but as already mentioned, this isn't real life.

wwinterj25 posted...

Regardless of said pet being like family or not most folk would have a bigger connection to their pet than a random baby so would save said pet.

Most people would have a bigger connection to their toaster than the baby too - that doesn't mean you wouldn't be a tremendous asshole for taking a toaster instead of a baby.

Again, the "I'm more connected to this being" isn't the argument winner you seem to think it is.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

LinkPizza posted...

I meant live.

That actually makes it worse.

Seriously, I'm all for loving your pets - I adored mine and was sad when they passed - but saying that their death will rob you of your will to live is flat-out unhealthy.

Again, don't you have any other family members? Any significant others you'd like to be alive for? Goals and aspirations you'd like to fulfill that don't involve your dogs?

LinkPizza posted...

Because you make it sound like it should be an easy decision to give up something you love for a random stranger.

If it's a child? Yeah, I do think that should be a pretty easy decision. Again, I loved my pets dearly when they were alive, but if it came down to them or a baby? It'd be the baby every time. Because as awful as I'd feel burying whatever remained of my pets afterwards, there's no way I could look a grieving parent in the eye with the knowledge that I could have saved their child, but didn't (and, frankly, I find it alarming how many people in this thread are not only not conflicted, but seem remarkably cavalier about letting a child burn to death as long as Fido was OK).

Unless the baby was actually Hitler being projected through time or something, but I'm assuming that's not the case.

LinkPizza posted...

Probably my child. As for why, probably because its my child. Im suppose to take care of him/her and keep them alive. I have to do the same for my dog, though. But Id probably prioritize my child over my dog.

Then you're already halfway to understanding where I'm coming from. You understand that human lives are simply *more important* than canine ones, all else being equal. That doesn't mean you love your dogs any less, but you recognize the concept of human primacy. That basically underpins what I'm saying; the only extra jump there is the fact that this baby isn't related to you (though neither is your dog), and I'm saying that shouldn't matter, for the reasons already stated.

LinkPizza posted...

Then how the fuck am Insuppose to answer the question.

Is it really so difficult? I don't have a problem imagining the situation and accounting for the knowledge available.

Consider it this way - you're locked in a room with a toddler and your dog. You are allowed to take one of them out, at which point the other will instantly die. Which do you choose?

That's basically what the question is asking, when you strip away the flavour text.

LinkPizza posted...

This is from when you were talking about the homeless problem shifting instead of being solved.

What you're missing is the difference of scale, which I already explained.

To use a less emotionally-charged example, let's pretend your friend is stuck in a bad business deal with a really weird investor. The investor is going to sue your friend for $100,000... but agrees to drop the suit if you pay him $10 and agree to not be reimbursed, by your friend or anyone else. Would you do it?

I'm guessing you would - in fact, you'd be a tremendous asshole not to. Even though you lose $10 with no gain for yourself, your loss is substantially less than your friend's loss would be if you opted to keep your $10. Yeah, you're not looking after yourself first, but the scale difference takes over there.

The baby vs. the dog is essentially the same dilemma, albeit not as lopsided.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

After it ends.

Seriously, Kingdom Hearts 1 was charming and fun; Kingdom Hearts 2 took itself way too seriously. Or, to put it another way, KH1 was a Disney-themed game with some Square characters sprinkled in; KH2 was a Square game with some Disney stuff sprinkled in.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Johnny Eagle posted...

Your world must be just as sad as you claim Kyuubi's is (if not more so) if you think family is solely determined by blood relations

Family does not cross species lines, bro. Pets can be loved and deeply cared for, but they are not family.

LinkPizza posted...

If Inlose my dog, I would be absolutely devastated. As of right now, I dont know how Id love without my dog.

Then I suggest you put some time into figuring it out because, unless you are extremely old for a GF user, the odds are very good that your dog will die long before you do.

Also, you "don't know how you'd love" without your dog? Do you not have other family? A romantic partner? Do you honestly feel you will be completely incapable of showing affection when your dog eventually dies? Because that doesn't sound healthy to me.

LinkPizza posted...

Just because you dont care about pets doesnt mean other people dont.

Weird how when I said multiple times in this topic that "pets can be loved", that apparently translates to "you don't care about pets and you hate animals".

LinkPizza posted...

But I do not put strangers well-being before mine, my family, or my friends.

So if the choice was between saving your dog or saving your own infant child, which would you choose? And why?

LinkPizza posted...

But I though this scenario would work on logic, but it doesnt. Like somehow, we psychically knowing the building will collapse before we can go in a second time, or magically knowing we wont be in danger by trying to save the baby.

Yes, because this is the information you were provided in this scenario.

If you were actually stuck in a burning building with a child and a dog, would you be granted that divine knowledge? Obviously not. But that knowledge was provided to you when you were asked this question - the question wasn't "If you were in a burning building, with your kid, a baby you don't know, and your dog, what would you do?", which would be more reflective of real life; it was "If you could only save your dog or a stranger's baby, which one would you save? The other one will die and there is no way to save both." That question is providing you with additional information that you wouldn't have in the real life scenario.

LinkPizza posted...

You say it shifts the problem, so nobody wins. But that still means you should give it away according to you. Since you should put them before you. But as stated, that makes no sense. You put yourself first and help others afterward. Like we the mask comes down in the plane.

I have no idea what you were trying to say here.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Jen0125 posted...

There are a ton of situations where selfishness is not inherently bad.

And this isn't one of them.

LinkPizza posted...

Then why does any of this matter? The reason people probably answered the way they did is because you figure out what you would do based on if this was a real life problem. That's why I use how I would react in real life. Or should I pretend I'm a superhero?

Admitting vices is one thing; avoiding addressing them or, worse, trying to pass them off as a good thing - as several people in this thread are doing - is quite another.

LinkPizza posted...

Except he could only put so much in the question. It's not like he could put all the things on the question.

Sure he could. Here, I'll do it right now.

"You're in a burning building, with your child under one arm. In front of you are the unconscious forms of a toddler you don't know and your dog. Both are alive and breathing, but unconscious. You only have room in your arms for one - which do you take?"

That would allow for the possibility of going back for the second if circumstances permit. It also allows for danger to your own life, or that the situation might not allow you to go back and save the second one. Note, however, that's not how the question was phrased.

LinkPizza posted...

But, for example, should I really be so selfless that I put others who need help before my own needs. If I could only carry one kid out, should I carry the random baby before my own. Or my own. The selfish part of me would want carry my own baby out. Is that bad? Or should I be selfless and let my baby burn but carry out someone's else's baby?

I've already addressed this several times. Yeah, if it was a choice between your kid or someone else's, I have no problem with you prioritizing your kid. That's not an issue. Selfish? Perhaps, but not to an unacceptable level - either you or another parent is going to face the grief of losing a child, so it's a zero sum game of who you pick to die and who gets to suffer that loss.

But most people view children as more valuable than pets (most people would save their own child ahead of the family dog), so when you decide to take your dog over someone else's child, now it's not zero-sum anymore. You're avoiding a minor loss to yourself by inflicting a major loss to someone else.

LinkPizza posted...

Should I give up my home to the homeless so they have a place to live. I don't do that because I need a place to live.

Sure, but that's logical - giving up your own home at the cost of making yourself homeless hasn't solved any problems, just shifted said problem to someone else. It's a poor parallel.

Jen0125 posted...

Yeah, darkknight. Give all your clothes, your home, your food and luxuries to other people. Live naked with nothing in the street. Stop being selfish. It's for society.

I mean, I give pretty generously to charity. But I'm guessing you don't, because hey, why bother to give strangers things? It's not like they're dogs, after all. None of my business if they're starving or freezing to death, right?
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

wwinterj25 posted...

I'd be risking my life in order to save a pet.

No, you wouldn't. Question doesn't say your life is in danger.

wwinterj25 posted...

While that could be viewed as being selfish as I don't want to lose said pet thus choose to save it I'm also doing a good deed by saving a life. I'm considering the needs of my pet as my pet wouldn't deserve to die in a fire.

Neither does the baby.

wwinterj25 posted...

Neither is some random persons baby thus your point is irrelevant.

I think you mean Kyuubi's point is irrelevant, since that's the one that relies on the dog being family.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

A dog is as much family as an adopted sibling/child, it's part of the inner family circle.

No, it's not, and if you're putting a fucking dog on the same level as your own relatives - adopted or otherwise - you have massively screwed up priorities.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

It's a pragmatic world.

"Pragmatic", in this case, being a euphemism for "selfish".

Kyuubi4269 posted...

Btw, I'm a stranger, why don't you fly over here and give me a hug? I know it's of massive inconvenience and cost to you but you said you're happy to do that for strangers.

Um, no I didn't? You're not being asked to fly across the world, at your own expense, and go hug someone, you're being asked to save a kid.

And for what it's worth, if you were dying on the ground in front of me, my first thought wouldn't be "Damn, that sucks, but I have a lizard to think about, so I guess I'll just leave him there instead of helping him."

Jen0125 posted...

Selfishness is a form of self preservation which is a completely natural instinct.

Murderous rage at a perceived rival is also a form of self preservation and a completely natural instinct - it doesn't mean it's something to be encouraged or even accepted. We're not baboons - natural isn't synonymous with good.
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Kyuubi4269 posted...

People aren't special, forget that nonsense and recognise the value of family

Your dog isn't your family, bro. You're not relatives, no matter how many times you call it your fur-baby.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

Yup, that is how you're supposed to treat strangers

Your world must be very sad.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Jen0125 posted...

darkknight109 posted...

Do I really have to answer the question "is selfishness a bad thing"?

Uh, yes. Selfishness isn't inherently bad.

Um, yeah. Yeah it is. Altruism and selflessness are good, selfishness is bad. Being a socially-functional human being - emphasis on the social part - requires you to consider the needs of people other than yourself. Hence why being selfish, self-absorbed, narcissistic, or full-blown megalomaniacal is considered bad.

Fuck me, I'm starting to understand why the world is in the state it's in if this is the predominant way of thinking these days...
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

WhiskeyDisk posted...

I wonder how many of the same people that mocked Romney for saying Russia was our greatest geopolitical threat when he ran against Obama are the same ones shouting "REEEEEEEE TRUMP RUSSIA" now.

I'll cop to it. And I freely admit that Romney was correct in his assertions.

To be fair, though, back then - invasion of Georgia aside - Putin had yet to reveal the full extent of his authoritarian colours. He was seen as a running joke for his topless photoshoots; he had yet to launch his invasion of Ukraine, or prop up a murderous dictator in Syria, or make any serious attempts to sway democratic elections in free countries. At worst he was corrupt, but that corruption seldom extended beyond Russia's borders.

A lot has happened since 2012.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

LinkPizza posted...

But if this were real life, I wouldn't know.

But this isn't real life and you do know, as you did when you answered the question.

LinkPizza posted...

Depends on the scenario.

None of what you just postulated was given in the question - you either successfully save the dog or successfully save the child. That's all.

LinkPizza posted...

But, is there really anything wrong with that?

Do I really have to answer the question "is selfishness a bad thing"?

LinkPizza posted...

We would normally protect our family and loved ones before protecting somebody elses. That makes perfect sense. I protect my family. Then, if I can, I would help another family. So, why would it be bad that Winter would save his family before saving another person's family?

Because he's elevating his own pet - an animal - to a level above someone else's child.

Yeah, if the choice was "your kid vs. someone else's kid", I'm not going to fault someone for choosing their own kid. But his statement was basically "I'd save my dog instead of someone else's child, but if it was my child I'd save them before the dog."

We all accept that people are more important than dogs; we can prove that by asking "If you had to choose between saving your child or saving the family dog", an overwhelming majority of people would pick their child. Doesn't mean the dog isn't important or isn't loved, but the child comes first, which is exactly what winter was alluding to with the post I quoted. However, if the child is someone else's, you deciding that now your dog is more important is pure selfishness - you've basically said "between this thing that's super-important to someone else, and this thing that's of lesser importance to me... well, I don't care that much about other people, so I'll save the thing that's of lesser importance to me."
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!