Muehe

What the fuck kind of argument is this? Courts aren't supposed to play politics, they are supposed to enforce the law. And if you want to do that in a genocide case you have to prove intent. Gallant made several public statements that can interpreted in that way.

I think you’re probably saying that’s what an Opinion article is for.

Correct.

But a news article that doesn’t state its biases is not unbiased. And I haven’t seen any news articles where bias is stated.

True, no human produced piece of writing can ever be truly free of bias.

That said:

Normal news article: Best effort of not applying your biases and just reporting raw facts.
Opinion news article: Intentionally applying bias to contextualise the raw facts.

That's all there is in this distinction, but that's nonetheless important I would say.

I don’t know what ‘an environmentalist’ is - as discussed, the news made it up. But as one, would you please define it and explain your bias, y’know, like a news reporter would?

As per: http://dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict2&Database=*&Query=environmentalist

1 definition found for environmentalist

From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006) :

environmentalist
n 1: someone who works to protect the environment from destruction or pollution [syn: environmentalist, conservationist]

My bias is that I have been hearing from reputable sources that we are destroying or at the very least damaging the ecosystems that supports our species for all of my conscious life. Literally all of it. Doing so seems like a bad idea.

By the way, today I learned there is apparently an older application of this term in the nature-vs-nurture debate amongst anthropologists for people who favour the nurture side of the argument (n2): https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/environmentalist

Anyway, people make up new words when they need them, I still don't understand the confusion...

Mmmnnoo, they didn’t say. You’re suggesting they would? Or that that is normally done?

No, I'm saying they wouldn't self-identify as such unless it's an opinion piece, because that would be introducing bias into their articles instead of reporting on the facts.

So the “as possible” part of the statement is really a kind of magic

Not really, it's just a reminder that every human has inherent biases and writing an entirely neutral article is thus virtually impossible. That doesn't mean journalists should go around and give into these biases without clearly stating that, and making this effort despite knowing you will fail in it is one of many indicators which can help separate serious news sources from propaganda and advertisement outlets.

Who’s not an environmentalist?

Fossil fuel companies?

It was envisioned as a “neutral” term - as factual as possible - but it said on the face of it, “environmentalists said …” meaning not us.

I don't know, I see it as media needing a term to apply to a (back then) relatively new societal movement, and environmentalist seems sufficiently descriptive and neutral to me to fulfil that role.

Are you an environmentalist? You know - one of them?

Yes. Are you? I don't see the problem here.

Maybe the journalist is one themselves. They didn't say? That's the point.

That’s not really contrary to the point, but orthogonal to it.

What? According to the article based on which we are discussing this news that is the point (allegedly). And it is unrelated to your point yes. I'm not entirely sure where you even came up with your point to be honest.

Your argument is the same kind of “consumer rights” argument that I’ve seen everywhere on the internet, because you are implying that there is material harm to the people of Vietnam caused by Steam’s banning. Which is a fairly specious argument. It’s the loss of a luxury item. No one is materially harmed by it.

I guess the consumers, i.e. the people of Vietnam in possession of this luxury item, would disagree with that assessment. Especially if they have sunk significant finances and/or time into their Steam account.

It’s not like Vietnam banned insulin.

Nobody said it is?

And while you may not use the same language, you are effectively saying that every consumer on the planet should have free access to the best products available for whatever “thing” they want. In this case, video games.

Again, what? I'm saying people will want to keep access to something they already paid for, their games on Steam and the according metadata like savegames, multiplayer access, and such. Not sure how you managed to pull this interpretation out of what I said, but be assured it's incorrect.

It’s a de facto argument for free market economic policies.

Since the whole logic chain that led you to this conclusion was already riddled with errors from the very beginning this is simply a non sequitur.

This is an Opinion article, not a news article. In particular, the NYT likes to hide behind these

Well that's very much by design though. News articles are supposed to be as neutral and factual as possible, so with early newspapers a convention arose to mark any article that delivers an interpretation alongside the pure facts as an opinion piece. That doesn't mean it's not a news article and I actually think it's commendable when a news source still tries to follow this convention. Many don't anymore or never even tried to begin with.

But if the Vietnamese video game industry is actively harmed by Steam, an American company, using its vast resources to outcompete Vietnamese publishers, then what is your opposition to this that doesn’t encompass a de facto defense of free market capitalism?

Not GP but the article didn't say that Steam outcompeted local developers by "using its vast resources". On the contrary, it alleged that local developers cannot compete on Steam with international developers, because those do not have to apply the local regulations:

Citing it as "an injustice to domestic publishers", Vietnamese studios reportedly say that local game development "will die" if Steam is able to keep releasing games without the same government scrutiny as domestic games.

A somewhat shaky argument considering that the same is true for many other countries applying their own local regulations, which Vietnamese developers do not have to follow.

But anyway, what is my opposition that doesn't encompass a de facto defence of free market capitalism? The damage to the users. What about all the Vietnamese people losing access to Steam's online features, which are arguably necessary nowadays for many games, especially multiplayer ones. And for what? To benefit Vietnamese businesses? Not very socialist of you comrade Vietnam. *smh*

In any case, this is all pure speculation at this point, since both parties have yet to make a statement about the situation:

At the time of writing, there's been no formal word from Vietnamese authorities or Steam about the "ban", [...]

That said, my current head cannon goes something like this:

Vietnamese devs: Dude, these regulations on games are killing us. We can't compete on Steam with games like these.
The Party: Okay we hear you. *bans Steam*
Vietnamese devs: Wait, what? (← we are here)

Edit: formatting

Not to say that I'm leaning towards the conspiracy interpretation, but all those questions have somewhat plausible answers. So let me play the devils advocate here.

Why would boeing go from plainly assassinating somebody, to then trying to kill somebody with influenza b, a usually easily survivable infection for somebody in his age range?

Well if you conjecture that both deaths were indeed a murder then that means Boeing's hitmen just fucked up the oldest trick in the book, making it look like a suicide. Makes sense to switch methods.

Why wouldn’t they just assassinate him too? Everybody already thinks they did it, it’s not like they saved any face by using such an unlikely method.

Plausible deniability. One whistleblower "suicide"? Suspicious. Two whistleblower "suicides" shortly after each other? Very suspicious. They may be an immensely powerful company, but that doesn't mean they are entirely invincible.

And how the hell did they even manage to do it?

Maybe they just saw the victim being in the hospital with a naturally occurring influenza infection and helped an already likely secondary infection along, virtually guaranteeing a fatal outcome? Not sure how lethal MRSA is exactly, but doesn't look all that friendly from a quick Wiki glance.

Again, not that I'm saying this conjecture is true. But the circumstances and the timing of it all are just a bit too suspicious to not at least entertain the hypothesis. I mean it's not exactly statistically relevant, but 2/14 is still a ridiculously high mortality rate for being a Boeing whistleblower.

So people will speculate. Presumption of innocence is a law seldom obeyed in the court of public opinion. That doesn't mean the conspiracy theory is either true or false.

Well please correct me if I'm wrong here, but to my knowledge consumption in private is just entirely unregulated. If you have a house right next to a kindergarten you could consume in there at any time. The part of the law I looked at (§5 KCanG) beyond public consumption just regulates consumption in the "immediate" presence of minors and on military bases.

So while it technically applies to edibles too, in practice it doesn’t.

Well it does, if you are stupid enough to be open about it towards a cop. So good to know anyway.

And yeah, cities have a lot of people and a lot of children, no shit.

And like I said, I'd even be fine with that if it was equally applied to anything you smoke. But the ban doesn't include tobacco, doesn't even refer to smoking at all in fact, and in its current form essentially bans public consumption for entire neighbourhoods. So I would posit there is some room for improvement.

Yeah I worded that badly. It's allowed if you are in the line of sight of a protected locality but more than 100m away. The law specifically states line of sight means less than 100m.

Yeah... Wasn't too sure about rule 4, lol. Sorry.

The outdoors ban only applies "within sight of or less than 100m away from" places where children might gather, like schools, playgrounds, and so forth, with the idea being preventing them from suffering passive consumption. Which I wouldn't have any problem with if it were applied equally to tobacco and other inhalants as well by the way, but it isn't. Plus as you might see on the image (if I didn't fuck up my resolution too bad) this means that virtually more than half of down-town Berlin is off limits if you want to be on the safe side.

The law says "consumption of cannabis" by the way, so yeah, technically edibles are out too...