While making dinner tonight, I very very fleetingly, but very seriously and legitimately thought “I should watch Goncharov tonight”
And then I Remembered.
That it's no longer on poob?
it’s still on my poob?? just use an irish vpn
Good thing they didn't overreact
Sam Reich, in multiple interviews and media in 2024: “I can’t invite my friends anywhere because they’re always suspicious it’s a surprise Game Changer episode.”
Meanwhile, he had THREE CAST MEMBERS in the middle of a YEAR-LONG GAME CHANGER EPISODE while he was saying this.
Vic during “One Year Later”: That’s a nice prompt you’ve got there, Sam, sure would be a shame if someone took it in the wildest direction possible to try and game the system. What’s that? You need to VFX in the fact that I’ve lost points? I wrote a whole musical
NEW ACCIDENTAL RENAISSANCE PAINTING DROPPED
one year later also wins as the ep where the game changed the most. from game show to musical episode to public shaming to literal textbook definition stalking and invasion of privacy to an intervention (kink themed) to unionizing against an unjust ruler. she has it all.
you ask a student in april how they're doing and they'll say "oh i'm fine" but in reality they are treating themselves in such a way that violates the geneva convention on treatment of prisoners
I thought today - the TV show I'd really like to see is one about a medieval monastery.
You could have all kinds of characters: the pious guy who joined because he wanted to serve God, the son born out of wedlock sent there to cover up his parents' shame, the geek who wanted to study Latin but couldn't afford to go into university, the former knight sick of violence and afraid for his soul... Plus monasteries were centres of pilgrimage and places where criminals could take refuge, so we can have a lot of characters who crop up for a few episodes and leave.
Some plotlines I thought of:
I've already mentioned some reasons why I think this setting would lend itself to television, but I'd also love to make it for two other reasons:
you want me to come out of my cage AND be doing just fine?? in this economy???
"The trolley problem makes you ethically complacent because it releases you from a third option" the Trolley Problem is a fucking thought experiment, idiot, and a real-life comparison to matters where you DO NOT HAVE A THIRD FUCKING OPTION.
Shut the fuck up, oh my god.
(via @cicadahaze )
I feel like they did pick a third option. When given a messy decision, where good and evil isn't black and white, they will break down and scream at clouds, rather than make a decision.
But in practice, this means no lever is pulled, simply by inaction. You don't have time to think, and only one of two things is going to happen, however you dress it. Choose to walk away, or waste time cursing god for putting you there. In the end, the result is the same.
The trolley problem speaks to what is in someone's heart, when all the chips are down, and you've got a terrible decision to make. We all know that the objective correct decision is to flip the switch to save the most lives. But could you really make yourself do it, if you were in that situation? Could you choose who lives and who dies, even for the greater good? Is that even your decision to make? And that's why it's such a good thought experiment.
But is it the objectively correct decision? I think most people would instinctively agree. It’s the most harm reduction, after all. But then you look at it more- is personally killing one innocent more moral than watching as five people die?
We look at variations- what if the single person is someone you love dearly? What if the single person is the sole scientist working on life saving research? What’s the most moral option to you? What do you think is the most morally correct? Which do you hold more responsibility for?
There’s the- I did not name or come up with this- fat man variation. You’re standing on a bridge over some train tracks. There are five people tied to them and the train is coming. You are the only one who can do something. You’re too small and too high up to do anything, but next to you is a man of the perfect size and weight to stop the trolley. All you have to do is push him off the edge and into the path to save those five. Is it more moral to murder him, or to let the five die? How different does it feel now? Is there an objectively correct option here?
And another one of my favorites. You are a surgeon. There are five people who desperately need organ transplants fast, or they’ll die. You do not have matching organs available to you. However, there is a perfectly healthy person in your custody whose organs would match all of the patients. He does not want to die to save them. Is it more moral to take his organs and kill him, or to let the five die?
That one has a very different result than the original trolley problem, doesn’t it? Sure, there’s other factors that we’ve created in the medical field, but ultimately, the medical field has decided that it is NOT more moral to save the five by killing one. The “objectively correct” decision would be to let the five die. When people and places do take organs by force, it’s horrifying.
What people see as the “objectively correct” decision changes completely based on context. It would also change based on moral philosophy. Utilitarianism, if I remember correctly, would always say that saving the five is more moral than saving the one… even in the organ donor problem. Some moral philosophies would say that inaction would not be a moral wrong, and that the moral wrong would be to personally take a life.
The trolley problem is wonderful. It makes you uncomfortable, it forces to you to make a binary choice, and more importantly, it forces you to think about why you made that choice. It questions underlying assumptions. If an option is “objectively correct”, why is that? If you’re so uncomfortable that you need to search for another option, why? What moral concepts are motivating that?
I love the trolley problem.
yeah the point of the problem is to force you to defend a position and say why pulling or not pulling the lever, or pushing the man, or not doing so, or whatever other variant is the best option given a binary choice. You can come up with a lot of reasons to defend either choice, it’s not a binary “this is why someone would pull the lever”, but you have to be honest with your consequences. People complaining there isn’t a third option are missing the point because they’re not answering the question.
Let’s use a physics example since the notes seem to like this metaphor. You are asked to give the rate at which something is accelerating down a slope. Complaining that the problem excludes the third option is like answering this physics problem with “well who put it on the slope”. Sure, it might be meaningful in a bigger picture, but it does nothing to answer the question in front of you. Every number in existence is a valid answer (though many are wrong), but “why is it on the slope?” isnt an answer.
However, by criticizing the problem people manage to avoid actually defending their positions. “I think 5 people dying is preferable to me killing 1 person” is a lot harder to say than “I shouldn’t have to make this choice”. What these people miss is that in life, you will be faced with hard choices, and even though it might not be fair that you have to make them, “this isn’t fair” is not its own choice.
its weird faggot friday
Haymitch and his ducklings
my personal argument for open borders is really simple it just boils down to "i believe restricting human movement and barring certain people from certain places on this earth is a human rights violation"
i mean this. everyone should be able to walk freely between mexico and the united states, fuck an ID, fuck a passport, fuck a visa. it's land, continuous, uninterrupted land. the soil on one side of the fense has the same geologic makeup of the soil on the other. we drew this invisible line in the sand, we can wipe it away with our feet together. it is well past time the world organizes en masse for our freedom of movement.
When Everything Everywhere All at Once said “The only thing I do know is that we have to be kind. Please, be kind, especially when we don’t know what’s going on"
When the Good Place said “Why choose to be good every day when there is no guaranteed reward now or in the afterlife… I argue that we choose to be good because of our bonds with other people and our innate desire to treat them with dignity. Simply put, we are not in this alone.”
When Jean-Paul Sartre said ”‘Hell is other people’ is only one side of the coin. The other side, which no one seems to mention, is also ‘Heaven is each other’. Hell is separateness, uncommunicability, self-centeredness, lust for power, for riches, for fame. Heaven on the other hand is very simple, and very hard: caring about your fellow beings.“
Love that we’ve elevated the conversation to such a degree that, if you’re going to be grimdark nihilistic in fiction, you need to argue philosophically against 4 seasons of The Good Place.
Twenty years ago, February 15th, 2004, I got married for the first time.
It was twenty years earlier than I ever expected to.
To celebrate/comemorate the date, I'm sitting down to write out everything I remember as I remember it. No checking all the pictures I took or all the times I've written about this before. I'm not going to turn to my husband (of twenty years, how the f'ing hell) to remember a detail for me.
This is not a 100% accurate recounting of that first wild weekend in San Francisco. But it -is- a 100% accurate recounting of how I remember it today, twenty years after the fact.
Join me below, if you would.
you want to read this
