Police pull up to sounds of a rifle shot; active shooter. They hear another loud shot. 4 seconds later, someone is peeking around the corner, their hands on the trigger and grip, 30 degrees pointed up. That's 1/4 second away from returning fire, with the firepower to kill every police that showed up, and if they let that happen, any number of civilians thereafter.
'with the firepower to kill every police that showed up'
This claim is dubious. Police officers in Austin wear Level 3A plates which can stop 5.56 which is likely the round that AR-15 is chambered in. Landing 5 headshots in quick succession without getting taken down is something you only see in movies.
I didn't want to go into that. I just wanted to point out that it is absurd to claim that this random civilian could gun down five police officers in the matter of half a second and not get taken down.
Except in this case, the person they murdered was holding that gun in self-defense from the actual criminal.
Millions of Americans have some sort of weapon for self-defense. That might be a gun in their home. That might be pepper-spray in their purse. That might be picking up a knife or golf club when they hear a window break in the night.
The police shouldn't shoot first and ask questions later. They should always, always, always establish what is going on and who is a threat before killing an innocent person who was trying to defend themselves against an attacker.
How naive that you think that Job provides any consolation to this concern. Job is one man who after years of misery, at least still has his life. Meanwhile, I just read the rest of the Old Testament where God ordered the mass murder of tens of thousands of women and children who will find no such mercy. For the crime of merely being born in the place that the Israelites were supposed to invade and take their land from them through genocide. Maybe, instead of constantly rationalizing why there must have been a good reason, one can use their logical side to grapple with the "ultimate love" they were sold is very inconsistent with the primary source of their belief.
Whichever meaning, NPC is a recent insidious method of dehumanizing people that ranks right up there with labels like "pigs," "rats," and "cockroaches."
This tactic is essentially a first prerequisite for mass violence. It's sure to increase incidences of mentally ill shooters viewing everyone around them as bots in a video game. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/26330024209169...
I was extremely disheartened to hear my son describe someone as an NPC the other day. It really only functions to belittle and negatively categorize people. Worse still is that if someone truly does lack cognitive ability such that they do “follow the script”, the last thing they need is someone perhaps only marginally more intelligent to identify and discriminate their deficits.
It’s just a miserable lens to view others through. It’s quite popular with the kids, though.
Perhaps it’s better than what I grew up with, which was calling anything you didn’t like “gay” or “faggy”. Ugh. Sometimes we set a low bar.
It is really popular, and when I point out the problems with it, they say I'm overreacting and that they obviously don't mean it in a dehumanising way, but then lo and behold immediately after someone will come and say they actually do believe that some people are robots or somehow less human than others, confirming my suspicion that this is a genuine problem
It's also one of the things, along with other things, that signals to me that intelligence and specifically mental health ableism are going to be the huge dividing problem coming up. Specifically, do we know how to function as a society without being able to discriminate based on mental qualities?
Do you see the irony in having the meaning of words being completely preprogrammed by what someone else want you to think and feel in a discussion about the word NPC? You know, context matters.
NPC has always meant a non-human in a video game. What's new is applying it to people in the real world; it's textbook dehumanization. This is literally how many people use the word, as another commenter below experienced multiple times. It serves zero purpose for me to go around thinking "NPC means X", when everyone else is "NPC means Y."
My first instinct was to say this seems like an overreaction to a joke, but this is a meme that originated from 4chan and the worst parts of reddit, so you might not be far off, given the track records for violence there.
Whenever I say it's a problem people are there to say I'm overreacting, but literally every time someone pops up out of the woodwork and confirms that they genuinely believe that some people are really NPCs, i.e. that they have no "soul" or self and are internally autonomous, like a computer.
> "This network originated in Russia and targeted primarily Germany, and also France, Italy, Ukraine and the United Kingdom. The operation centered around a large network of websites carefully impersonating legitimate news organizations in Europe. There, they would post original articles that criticized Ukraine, praised Russia and argued that Western sanctions on Russia would backfire. They would then promote these articles, memes and YouTube videos on Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Twitter, petitions websites Change[.]org and Avaaz, and LiveJournal"
Notice a difference between the first Echo from 2015 and today’s?
No?
Well they still had us rewrite the entire OS, not once, but twice, and maintain all three OS’s across 10+ different devices…
They did the same damn thing with the API to cloud servers. Every couple years, new deprecation and new way to do things. Promo driven development out the wazoo while ironically quoting “customer obsession”
Zero ability to influence direction as IC. All top down initiatives from directors planned a year in advance.
> Notice a difference between the first Echo from 2015 and today’s?
The later versions seem to be marginally less capable of understanding speech and far more annoying.
"Alexa, play romantic music!"
"Here's 100 top romantic death metal hits! By the way, did you know I can produce fart noises? Just ask, Alexa, blah blah blah"
First OS was scrappy to MVP hardware and prove the market. But instead of iterating, they decided to fork Android so they could scale up a workforce who can only understand Java, not C++, to deliver features. Then they realized Android is too bulky for cheap chips, so back to custom C++, that just like the first is a trash fire for rando devs to deliver features fast under a whip.
I mean, fire, brimstone, and sulfur lake are actual bible verses.
"But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.” Revelation 21:8
"If your eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out and throw it from you. It is better for you to enter life with one eye, than to have two eyes and be cast into the fiery hell." Matthew 18:9
"And the beast was seized, and with him the false prophet who performed the signs in his presence, by which he deceived those who had received the mark of the beast and those who worshiped his image; these two were thrown alive into the lake of fire which burns with brimstone." Revelation 19:20
You do believe the bible literally, right? Because if you were trying to avoid hell with your beliefs, and don't believe in biblical literalism, a large faction of Christians are certain that you will also be going to hell; a burning one. Take your pick which beliefs will save you, sure sounds important to make sure you don't accidentally choose the wrong one...
The reality of hell is absolutely grounded in both the Biblical texts and the Christian tradition. Furthermore the image of 'fire' to describe this reality cannot be disputed. Thank you for looking up the most relevant verses.
It's a topic worth understanding and studying with seriousness. Otherwise you'll be prone to interpret the teaching as just a capricious punishment from God for some bad things that you've done.
My original post was in response to a snarky comment made along those lines but it looks like that context has been lost.
> You do believe the bible literally, right? Because if you were trying to avoid hell with your beliefs, and don’t believe in biblical literalism, a large faction of Christians are certain that you will also be going to hell.
A rather large fraction of Christians don’t believe in literalism, and think it is not only a doctrinal error in itself, but also the source of numerous doctrinal errors.
At the risk of going too far off topic, there is a distinction between Biblical inerrancy and Biblical literalism.
For example, Jesus says: 'You are the salt of the earth.' He doesn't literally mean his followers are Sodium Chloride molecules.
Diving deeper in one specific interpretive case, the Roman Catholic Church teaches that the Bible is Inerrant but the 'literal' interpretation is not always to be prefered.
This should be obvious because the Bible is not a book it's a library, and how you read it depends on which section of the library you are in.
Woke activist paints an entire country as racist while singling out a race with things like:
"All white dude designers need to read this book. There’s a whole chapter dedicated to you all, and it’s spot on."
Not surprised she's been "in a process of unlearning the imperialist + capitalist + racist education I received growing up in the US. Nurturing myself with literature from my people".
She's just quite confused on when and what her racist education actually was and doing a bad job unlearning it.
