LogFAQs > #876171160

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

Which is kinda lame of you, honestly. Hating on the thing that is popular for the sake of it being popular, and to be in dissent just to spite others is a silly cliche that you are better than. It makes you no better than the people you criticize for being "hiveminds" in addition, since you're both having a reaction to the game that isn't derived from the actual merits of the game itself, you know?

To be fair, when a large vocal core to a fanbase are annoying as fuck or otherwise repulsive human beings, it's a very natural and justified response to basically ask yourself "Man, if THESE shitbags all love this thing, then what does that say about its quality?" Then you sort of get put into the headspace where you're far more likely to notice the flaws in the work, while glossing over the good parts. It's not necessarily a conscious rejection of it BECAUSE it's popular, as much as it is WHO it's popular worth warping your perception of it.

In some ways, it's similar to how people find out that Orson Scott Card was pretty anti-gay, and find it prevents them from enjoying his writing, or when Mel Gibson had his little tirade about women and Jews and people became less inclined to want to see anything he makes. Or even how wrestling fans who used to praise Chris Benoit matches for being technical marvels now find it hard to watch any of them knowing that he killed his wife and son and then himself. Just as it's hard for most people to separate the creator's beliefs and actions from their work, it can occasionally be hard to separate the beliefs and actions of a work's most ardent and fervent fans from the work itself.

Hell, on a more complicated philosophical level, that's more or less what started my own path towards Agnosticism. After spending a while considering myself an Atheist, I started looking around and noticing just how asinine and terrible a lot of Atheists actually were (especially once you get on the Internet and start having a much wider range of view than just "the people who live near where I do"). That pretty much started me down an introspective path, where I basically asked myself, "If THESE are the sorts of people who consider themselves morally and intellectually superior for this belief, what does that say about this belief itself?" That in turn made me take a much harder look at the logical fallacies of the ideology and the ideas behind it, ultimately leading me to conclude that the only real philosophy that makes sense is Agnosticism. Because, ultimately, we can't really PROVE a negative, nor are we as a species half as clever as we think we are, so who the hell knows what's really out there, or what really happens when you die?

I tend to disbelieve in organized religion (but I try not to be as much of a pompous jackass about it as a lot of the Internet Angstheists tend to be), and I'm a bit of a secularist (I tend to prefer rational explanations for things over supernatural ones, but also I tend to feel that, regardless of whether or not there's a soul and an afterlife, from OUR perspective, what happens HERE and NOW are far more important anyway, because we lack the empirical knowledge for the alternative to matter), but I also like to acknowledge that any definitive statements about the true nature of the universe are kind of ignorant and egotistical on our part.

Or to put it another way, "The truly wise man is the man who knows that he actually knows nothing."

And because Agnosticism basically boils down to "Ehh, fuck if I know" as a belief set, it's hard to judge other people for their beliefs. Maybe they're right. Maybe they're wrong. And maybe it isn't all that important.


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