Belief is social. If you’re surrounded by people that all believe a thing, you’re more likely to also believe. If challenged on something that threatens group membership, your brain reacts like it’s a physical threat. Group membership is that important. Facts matter far less.
This is one of my biggest peeves in games. Ass Creed Valhalla was really bad about it. Identical looking dudes on opposite sides of a river. One set are pushovers the others are completely lethal. Hate it.
I was going to say something like this but probably less well written.
I’ve definitely had coworkers that I simply do not trust to commit code without review. And there’s one guy who’s a cool dude and all, but all of his ideas seem to be “let’s throw everything out and do it with a different library/language/paradigm”. And I’m just like no please no.
Lady I used to sit next to at work didn’t use an ad blocker. She also would have like the “do you want to install this plugin?” thing open in her ide for weeks. I don’t know how she did it. She’s a software developer so she’s reasonably tech literate. It just didn’t bother her enough to think about doing something about it.
Does conservatism mean “preserve the way things are”? Things are bad. Things are really bad for a lot of people. Trying to preserve things in such a state is difficult to justify.
Is it “outgroups to bind, in groups to defend”? Well that’s obviously a bad framework.
The common “curse” words like “shit” and “fuck” are pretty impersonal. They can signal an escalation, but are typically pretty minor. They don’t even do that when the speaker is like “I just took a huge shit. Don’t go in there for a while”
Other words, like racial slurs and anti-queer stuff, invoke more history and violence. If someone calls someone an asshole that’s probably not that big a deal. If they call someone a n-word f-gay-slur, there might be a hate crime about to happen.
So I don’t use those words. I don’t want to bring the stuff they import into the scene.
People who are the typical recipients of the slurs using them themselves is a related topic I’m not very qualified to speak on, and I wouldn’t try to police their language.
There was an old PC game called “Dominus”. I don’t really know much about it. My dad just randomly picked it up as an xmas gift one year for me. It was pretty sweet.
You’re the lord of a kingdom that gets invaded by like eight armies. You have your own monster units you can deploy. You can deploy traps. You can cast spells. You can go down and fight hand to hand. If they make it to the throne room and kill you, it’s game over.
If you capture enemy troops, you can interrogate them. There’s a little animation where they get poked with a red hot iron poker. If you capture a leader, you can sometimes negotiate peace. If you capture an enemy mage, you can learn part of a secret spell. I never got a secret spell working, though.
It was super cool. Never met anyone who’s played it.
One of my cool older cousins was playing this one christmas when we went to his house! I was vaguely disappointed when we went back the next year and he was like “oh yeah that was fun but i beat it and don’t play it anymore.” Little kid brain assumed the game just went on for much longer than it does. Playing it together (ie: taking turns) is a fond childhood memory for me, though.