Latest Comments by wit_as_a_riddle
Oops - someone nearly caused a fire with the Steam Controller Puck
26 May 2026 at 2:14 am UTC Likes: 2
26 May 2026 at 2:14 am UTC Likes: 2
Valve did not skip safety certification. The Steam Controller is both UL listed and CE certified, it is completely safe to use.
Chances are this "issue" was not even user error but instead was an intentionally designed "accident".
Chances are this "issue" was not even user error but instead was an intentionally designed "accident".
Colorado and California age verification bills exempt open source operating systems
25 May 2026 at 4:14 pm UTC Likes: 4
25 May 2026 at 4:14 pm UTC Likes: 4
All the "age verification" bill are unconstitutional 1st Amendment violations and can be struck down in court.
Code is expressive conduct under Bernstein v. DOJ and Junger v. Daley.
Compelled creation of expressive content is still compelled speech (Wooley, Hurley, Janus).
Age verification mandates require developers to author, maintain, and deploy expressive logic they would not otherwise create.
The state cannot force a private actor to speak, design, or encode a message or system that expresses the state’s preferred policy.
Code is expressive conduct under Bernstein v. DOJ and Junger v. Daley.
Compelled creation of expressive content is still compelled speech (Wooley, Hurley, Janus).
Age verification mandates require developers to author, maintain, and deploy expressive logic they would not otherwise create.
The state cannot force a private actor to speak, design, or encode a message or system that expresses the state’s preferred policy.
US operating system age verification bill "Parents Decide Act" gets published
26 Apr 2026 at 4:32 am UTC
26 Apr 2026 at 4:32 am UTC
Americans will stand up to this.
Vehicle-building bullet heaven survivor-like TerraTech Legion launches April 30
26 Apr 2026 at 4:24 am UTC
26 Apr 2026 at 4:24 am UTC
This looks incredible!!
US operating system age verification bill "Parents Decide Act" gets published
26 Apr 2026 at 4:01 am UTC
26 Apr 2026 at 4:01 am UTC
"have features for parents to control what under 18s can access"
This feature is called parenting, but it comes with embodyment, not on software.
The bill is completely untenable, impossible to comply with. People will reject it, it won't pass - if it somehow does, it will be repealed.
This feature is called parenting, but it comes with embodyment, not on software.
The bill is completely untenable, impossible to comply with. People will reject it, it won't pass - if it somehow does, it will be repealed.
Australia targets Steam, Roblox and others in new legal push against extremists and predators
26 Apr 2026 at 3:34 am UTC
26 Apr 2026 at 3:34 am UTC
Reject Continental Philosophy utterly, it will get you foolish censorship hounds like Australia currently elects.
As an American with 1st Amendment protections, protections which recognize the rights all humans intrinsically possess due to their nature, I find the censorship demands of Australias esafety commissioner to be contemptible and laughable. Keep your filthy ideas off my Republic, Australia.
As an American with 1st Amendment protections, protections which recognize the rights all humans intrinsically possess due to their nature, I find the censorship demands of Australias esafety commissioner to be contemptible and laughable. Keep your filthy ideas off my Republic, Australia.
GOG now using AI generated images on their store
22 Feb 2026 at 2:19 am UTC
"entirely obvious to everyone."
Most people hear “hard earned money” and just think: “I worked for this, so it’s mine to spend however I want.” Full stop. No secret Protestant work ethic dog whistle, no coded hierarchy, no sly bid to make the wealthy our moral “betters.” It’s ordinary language doing ordinary work-describing effort and ownership.
Only a very specific subset of people (mostly academics, online left-theory enthusiasts, cultural studies types, and people who’ve spent too much time marinating in Foucault/Weber/Bourdieu type reading lists) reflexively reach for the ideology critique toolkit the moment they see a merit-flavored phrase. To them, everything is “loaded,” everything is “doing work,” everything is quietly reproducing domination or naturalizing inequality. So they treat a standard expression as if it were a cryptic manifesto that needs to be unpacked layer by layer until the hidden class project is revealed.
To literally everyone else- left, right, center, working-class, business-owner, barista, retiree-that level of hermeneutic suspicion applied to a commonplace idiom looks like over reading at best, pretentious performative intellectualism at worst. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of seeing a stop sign and immediately launching into a 500 word thread about how traffic infrastructure enforces car-centric capitalist spatial discipline.
"Hard-earned money" - it’s just normal speech. The clever loading and the elaborate suspicion is entirely on the receiving end. Most of the world isn’t playing that game.
22 Feb 2026 at 2:19 am UTC
Quoting: scaineNo, deconstructing everyday phrases like “hard earned money” through critical theory lenses is not"I find the moral indignation over what others do with their own hard earned money to be performative."Why would anyone be morally indignant about legal, consensual, no-victim spending??
This is about indignation specifically targeted at how people (individuals or companies) spend their legitimately earned funds on choices that are legal, consensual, and don't directly victimize anyone.
It's entirely obvious to everyone but you that your statement implied otherwise. It's bizarre that you can't see that.
Time to move on here, I think.
"entirely obvious to everyone."
Most people hear “hard earned money” and just think: “I worked for this, so it’s mine to spend however I want.” Full stop. No secret Protestant work ethic dog whistle, no coded hierarchy, no sly bid to make the wealthy our moral “betters.” It’s ordinary language doing ordinary work-describing effort and ownership.
Only a very specific subset of people (mostly academics, online left-theory enthusiasts, cultural studies types, and people who’ve spent too much time marinating in Foucault/Weber/Bourdieu type reading lists) reflexively reach for the ideology critique toolkit the moment they see a merit-flavored phrase. To them, everything is “loaded,” everything is “doing work,” everything is quietly reproducing domination or naturalizing inequality. So they treat a standard expression as if it were a cryptic manifesto that needs to be unpacked layer by layer until the hidden class project is revealed.
To literally everyone else- left, right, center, working-class, business-owner, barista, retiree-that level of hermeneutic suspicion applied to a commonplace idiom looks like over reading at best, pretentious performative intellectualism at worst. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of seeing a stop sign and immediately launching into a 500 word thread about how traffic infrastructure enforces car-centric capitalist spatial discipline.
"Hard-earned money" - it’s just normal speech. The clever loading and the elaborate suspicion is entirely on the receiving end. Most of the world isn’t playing that game.
GOG now using AI generated images on their store
8 Feb 2026 at 7:48 pm UTC
Let's restate what I actually said, without your additions:
"I find the moral indignation over what others do with their own hard earned money to be performative."
This is about indignation specifically targeted at how people (individuals or companies) spend their legitimately earned funds on choices that are legal, consensual, and don't directly victimize anyone. The "hard earned" is just everyday language stressing ownership and effort—it's not code for "Protestant virtue," "moral superiority," or "they're our betters so shut up." People say "my hard-earned money" constantly without implying untouchability (e.g., "I spent my hard-earned money on junk food — don't judge"). You're inventing a hierarchy where none was asserted.
You claim the grammar forces the implication that the money itself is what makes indignation performative, and that without it the statement has no point. Wrong. The point is the scope: private spending decisions (personal or corporate) on non-harmful things. Mentioning "their own hard earned money" clarifies it's their resources, not public money, stolen funds, or something they're forcing on others. If I said "what others do" broadly, it'd include crimes, fraud, exploitation — areas where outrage is warranted. By specifying their own hard earned money, I'm narrowing to cases where the only "issue" is personal taste, envy, or ideological disagreement with the choice itself.
In this context (e.g., a company using generative AI for something like a web banner), the indignation often boils down to "they could/should have hired a human artist instead." That's not direct harm — it's speculative opportunity cost at best. Companies routinely choose cheaper/faster tools (stock assets, templates, outsourcing, automation) without moral panic. Treating AI as uniquely evil because it displaces potential gigs isn't ethics; it's protectionism dressed as concern. The money saved can fund other things (higher wages for current staff, better products, lower prices) — that's efficiency, not vice.
My logic remains rock-solid and consistent across all this:
- When the spending is on victimless, legal, internal choices (luxury goods, subscriptions, efficiency tools like AI for a banner), moral indignation is frequently performative — more about signaling ("I'm pro-artist," "anti-corporate," etc.) than real wrongdoing.
- When there's actual harm (exploitation, theft of IP in training data if illegal, fraud, direct victims), criticize freely — the "hard earned money" part becomes irrelevant; the harm is what counts.
You haven't shown any contradiction; you've just expanded my scoped claim into an absurd universal ("no criticism of anything bought with money ever") and then attacked that straw effigy while smuggling in assumptions about wealth worship. If you want to argue that companies have a moral duty to hire humans over tools regardless of cost or efficiency, make that case directly. But don't pretend my words secretly endorse elite immunity or Protestant superiority — they don't. That's all your invention.
8 Feb 2026 at 7:48 pm UTC
Quoting: Purple Library GuyYou're loading my original statement with layers of meaning and motive that simply aren't present, turning a straightforward observation into a supposed manifesto of class deference and work-ethic theology. You're creating some new meaning that was never present in my words and then arguing against your made up meaning - the essence of strawman argument.Quoting: wit_as_a_riddleOh, please. Let's unpack a bit, shall we?Quoting: Purple Library GuyYou're still misrepresenting what I actually said, and that's the core issue here.Quoting: wit_as_a_riddleUh, yeah. Go look at what you said.Quoting: Purple Library GuyThat sounds like it makes sense, but it's ludicrous! The morally repugnant issue is sex with underage girls, spending money on it or not is irrelevant.Quoting: wit_as_a_riddleI find the moral indignation over what others do with their own hard earned money to be performative.That sounds like it makes sense, but it's ludicrous. So, Geoffrey Epstein spent his own hard earned money on sex with underage girls. I am morally indignant about that. Not you, though, that would be "performative".
Your point was that if people were spending "their own hard earned money" on something, that meant we shouldn't be morally indignant about it. This appeared to be an admonition completely independent of the content of what those people were doing with their "hard earned money". I pointed out the absurdity of this. You have just confirmed it--yes, whether someone spends "their own hard earned money" on something is in fact irrelevant to whether we should feel moral indignation about it. So, your initial statement was ludicrous.
My original statement:
"I find the moral indignation over what others do with their own hard earned money to be performative."
Nowhere did I say - or even imply - that *spending one's own money makes any action morally acceptable* or immune to criticism. That would be an absurd, blanket claim, and I never made it.
So, first, that implication is certainly there in the basic grammar. Clearly it is the fact that the things done are done by people with their own hard earned money, that makes the indignation performative. If it were not, there would be no point mentioning the money in the first place, but instead the money is the only thing mentioned that characterizes what the people are doing. No doubt the claim wasn't intended to have to handle a reductio ad absurdum, but rather the money was perhaps only intended to be sufficient to wash clean venial sins, but this was certainly on its face a claim that people shouldn't be getting on people's case if what they're doing is spending money.
But on what basis? The core of the statement is that the money is "hard earned". So this is not just any money--it is presumed to be money acquired by working hard, by adhering to the Protestant work ethic. It is virtuous money, and the possessor is virtuous through having acquired it. The current context relates to someone with enough money to own a company, so, considerable wealth. The invocation of the "hard earned" money suggests that the possessors of that much money are, by that fact, our betters. And so, anything they might decide to do with it can be assumed to be above our criticism.
It was an extremely loaded statement, and loaded quite cleverly at that, meant to get people to digest it without quite realizing what they'd swallowed.
Let's restate what I actually said, without your additions:
"I find the moral indignation over what others do with their own hard earned money to be performative."
This is about indignation specifically targeted at how people (individuals or companies) spend their legitimately earned funds on choices that are legal, consensual, and don't directly victimize anyone. The "hard earned" is just everyday language stressing ownership and effort—it's not code for "Protestant virtue," "moral superiority," or "they're our betters so shut up." People say "my hard-earned money" constantly without implying untouchability (e.g., "I spent my hard-earned money on junk food — don't judge"). You're inventing a hierarchy where none was asserted.
You claim the grammar forces the implication that the money itself is what makes indignation performative, and that without it the statement has no point. Wrong. The point is the scope: private spending decisions (personal or corporate) on non-harmful things. Mentioning "their own hard earned money" clarifies it's their resources, not public money, stolen funds, or something they're forcing on others. If I said "what others do" broadly, it'd include crimes, fraud, exploitation — areas where outrage is warranted. By specifying their own hard earned money, I'm narrowing to cases where the only "issue" is personal taste, envy, or ideological disagreement with the choice itself.
In this context (e.g., a company using generative AI for something like a web banner), the indignation often boils down to "they could/should have hired a human artist instead." That's not direct harm — it's speculative opportunity cost at best. Companies routinely choose cheaper/faster tools (stock assets, templates, outsourcing, automation) without moral panic. Treating AI as uniquely evil because it displaces potential gigs isn't ethics; it's protectionism dressed as concern. The money saved can fund other things (higher wages for current staff, better products, lower prices) — that's efficiency, not vice.
My logic remains rock-solid and consistent across all this:
- When the spending is on victimless, legal, internal choices (luxury goods, subscriptions, efficiency tools like AI for a banner), moral indignation is frequently performative — more about signaling ("I'm pro-artist," "anti-corporate," etc.) than real wrongdoing.
- When there's actual harm (exploitation, theft of IP in training data if illegal, fraud, direct victims), criticize freely — the "hard earned money" part becomes irrelevant; the harm is what counts.
You haven't shown any contradiction; you've just expanded my scoped claim into an absurd universal ("no criticism of anything bought with money ever") and then attacked that straw effigy while smuggling in assumptions about wealth worship. If you want to argue that companies have a moral duty to hire humans over tools regardless of cost or efficiency, make that case directly. But don't pretend my words secretly endorse elite immunity or Protestant superiority — they don't. That's all your invention.
GOG now using AI generated images on their store
5 Feb 2026 at 10:47 pm UTC
My original statement:
"I find the moral indignation over what others do with their own hard earned money to be performative."
Nowhere did I say - or even imply - that *spending one's own money makes any action morally acceptable* or immune to criticism. That would be an absurd, blanket claim, and I never made it.
What I did say is that moral outrage directed specifically at how people spend their own money (on legal, consensual, victimless things - the qualification you seem to require, despite its obviousness) often feels performative - i.e., it's frequently more about signaling virtue, enforcing conformity, or expressing envy/disapproval of lifestyle choices than about addressing actual harm.
Your Epstein example doesn't refute that at all; it just changes the subject to something completely different. The moral horror in the Epstein case is *the rape and exploitation of children* - a serious crime with direct victims. That's not "what he did with his money" in any meaningful sense; it's felony sexual abuse. The money was merely the means/tool, not the morally relevant part. Condemning child rape isn't "indignation over what others do with their hard earned money" - it's indignation over *child rape*. Conflating the two is a deliberate sleight of hand.
To make your rebuttal work, you had to rewrite my position as something like:
"No one should ever feel moral indignation about anything purchased with one's own money, no matter how evil."
But that's a *straw man*. I never universalized it that way. The scope was always about personal spending choices that don't directly victimize others (luxury goods, adult entertainment, donations to controversial causes, etc.). You stripped out that implicit qualifier, replaced it with an extreme version that includes heinous crimes, then declared the whole thing "ludicrous." That's not engaging with what I said - it's manufacturing an easier target.
My logic remains perfectly consistent:
When the action itself is harmless / consensual / victimless, moral indignation about how someone spends *their own money* on it is often performative (status-signaling, puritanism, etc.).
When the action is harmful (especially criminal and victim-involving), then outrage is justified - and the fact that money changed hands is irrelevant to the moral assessment.
The distinction isn't hard to see unless you're intentionally blurring it. Either you are misreading or you are knowingly misleading.
5 Feb 2026 at 10:47 pm UTC
Quoting: Purple Library GuyYou're still misrepresenting what I actually said, and that's the core issue here.Quoting: wit_as_a_riddleUh, yeah. Go look at what you said.Quoting: Purple Library GuyThat sounds like it makes sense, but it's ludicrous! The morally repugnant issue is sex with underage girls, spending money on it or not is irrelevant.Quoting: wit_as_a_riddleI find the moral indignation over what others do with their own hard earned money to be performative.That sounds like it makes sense, but it's ludicrous. So, Geoffrey Epstein spent his own hard earned money on sex with underage girls. I am morally indignant about that. Not you, though, that would be "performative".
Your point was that if people were spending "their own hard earned money" on something, that meant we shouldn't be morally indignant about it. This appeared to be an admonition completely independent of the content of what those people were doing with their "hard earned money". I pointed out the absurdity of this. You have just confirmed it--yes, whether someone spends "their own hard earned money" on something is in fact irrelevant to whether we should feel moral indignation about it. So, your initial statement was ludicrous.
My original statement:
"I find the moral indignation over what others do with their own hard earned money to be performative."
Nowhere did I say - or even imply - that *spending one's own money makes any action morally acceptable* or immune to criticism. That would be an absurd, blanket claim, and I never made it.
What I did say is that moral outrage directed specifically at how people spend their own money (on legal, consensual, victimless things - the qualification you seem to require, despite its obviousness) often feels performative - i.e., it's frequently more about signaling virtue, enforcing conformity, or expressing envy/disapproval of lifestyle choices than about addressing actual harm.
Your Epstein example doesn't refute that at all; it just changes the subject to something completely different. The moral horror in the Epstein case is *the rape and exploitation of children* - a serious crime with direct victims. That's not "what he did with his money" in any meaningful sense; it's felony sexual abuse. The money was merely the means/tool, not the morally relevant part. Condemning child rape isn't "indignation over what others do with their hard earned money" - it's indignation over *child rape*. Conflating the two is a deliberate sleight of hand.
To make your rebuttal work, you had to rewrite my position as something like:
"No one should ever feel moral indignation about anything purchased with one's own money, no matter how evil."
But that's a *straw man*. I never universalized it that way. The scope was always about personal spending choices that don't directly victimize others (luxury goods, adult entertainment, donations to controversial causes, etc.). You stripped out that implicit qualifier, replaced it with an extreme version that includes heinous crimes, then declared the whole thing "ludicrous." That's not engaging with what I said - it's manufacturing an easier target.
My logic remains perfectly consistent:
When the action itself is harmless / consensual / victimless, moral indignation about how someone spends *their own money* on it is often performative (status-signaling, puritanism, etc.).
When the action is harmful (especially criminal and victim-involving), then outrage is justified - and the fact that money changed hands is irrelevant to the moral assessment.
The distinction isn't hard to see unless you're intentionally blurring it. Either you are misreading or you are knowingly misleading.