Schmoo

First off, sociopathy isn’t a thing. It’s a made up term a fake psychologist made up to put people on death row in Texas for personal gain. Go listen to the Behind the Bastards episode on it. The actual diagnosis is “psychopathy”

I was only mirroring the language used by the person I was replying to. Great podcast though, I’m already a regular listener.

Look at all of the growing injustice and inequality in the world, spurred on by CEOs, dictators, and billionaires. Just look at health insurance, where hundreds of thousands die each year from denial of care. Look at Elon Musk and DOGE defunding USAID, which resulted in over 100,000 children dying across the world. Look at the destruction and death that Russia has brought to Ukraine to try and conquer them.

Look at everyone in this thread who looks at all of that pain and misery and would want to do something about it. You’re calling them immature? No, you’re the one who’s immature, with all of your bullshit pearl-clutching.

I agree that something must be done, and I understand where the desire to kill those responsible comes from. I feel the same frustration myself, but I also know that engaging in adventurism won’t solve jack shit. At best it can bring temporary relief, and at worst it can trigger an escalation of the violence/repression it was intended to address. The individuals who are most visibly responsible for the injustice in the world today are merely appendages of a much larger group of powerful institutions which are themselves motivated by incentives that are systemic. What I am doing here is not pearl-clutching; my objection is a strategic one, not a moral one. I won’t shed any tears for dead health insurance CEOs, oligarchs, or dictators, but I will always advocate for organizing with others to address the systemic drivers of injustice rather than acting alone and throwing your life away in an act of impotent violence. It’s better to live for a cause than to die for one.

Problem is he completely lacked a systemic critique of society and fixated on crime, which he took for granted as the cause of all problems. For Light, all evil in the world comes down to individual moral failings, and by getting rid of the criminals he was eradicating evil.

I mean, dictators have historically often met with a rather grisly end (Mussolini shot and hung upside down by his toes, Hitler blowing his own brains out, Gaddafi sodomized with a bayonet) and that doesn’t seem to stop people from pursuing the same power.

That is not how it works at all, and it’s actually a very childish way of thinking. There is not some finite pool of monsters these positions of power draw from, the positions of power make the monsters. “Power corrupts” is the most common trope in fiction since the advent of fiction for a reason and it’s baffling that so many people still don’t get it.

The entire theme of Death Note is that power turns people into sociopaths and that no matter how many “bad people” you kill you will never actually succeed in cleansing the world of evil, but I guess no matter how ham-fisted you make it people will still miss the point. It’s funny that a lot of people complain that Light has an unrealistically naive view of morality and yet this comment section seems to be teeming with people who are equally immature.

Killing a leader doesn’t get rid of the position of power that enabled their misdeeds.

Those boletes look very interesting, I never see any with that coloration around me. Do you know what species of Strobilomyces they are?

I wish I would find some cinnabar ones where I live. I mostly get flavolateritius with a few Appalachian chanterelles and Smooth chanterelles mixed in.

My recommendations for anime that don’t have any of the creepy sexualisation to the best of my memory:

• Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood (no creepy sexualisation stuff, but it does have gore and very heavy themes related to genocide, oppressive governments, body horror, general death and loss. It is very lighthearted and wholesome at times, creating a tonal whiplash effect that a lot of fans love it for)

• Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End (probably one of the most wholesome animes out there. There’s one scene where a character tries to gift another character a “potion that dissolves clothes,” but it’s treated as inappropriate by the other characters and it doesn’t end up getting used for creepy fanservice)

• Attack on Titan (like FMAB above it has gore and very heavy themes related to genocide etc. but unlike FMAB it’s almost never lighthearted. I honestly don’t recall anything related to sex even being mentioned in this one aside from characters telling each other raunchy jokes or alluding to relationships they have. The tone remains tense and serious for nearly the entire runtime)

• Cowboy Bebop (just an incredibly fun space western)

That’s what I can come up with off the top of my head, but there’s loads more I’m forgetting for sure.

Who cares? What difference does it make if counter revolutionaries try to restore the old royal family or make a new one? The problem with monarchy is the system itself, not whoever happens to occupy the position of monarch. Human beings are more than a symbol, no matter how powerful that symbol may be. There is no possible justification for the murder of children.