Hence the desire for a single player offline version of the game…

Not everyone believes that devs are the authority on what makes a game fun, which is why mods are so common on PC games.

but that’s part of it, just like irl.

Some people might not want annoying aspects of IRL in their fantasy escapism games involving roleplay…

That’s the part I always hated. It was hostile towards people who liked the lore but didn’t want to group up with some guy named LaserButt4000 who didn’t want to go to the same dungeon as you, but was happy to get your rare loot in a bad roll of the dice.

Private servers with scaling for dungeon soloing were a godsend. WoW is actually awesome as a single player game. It’s unfortunate the devs never realized that.

A democratic republic is a representative democracy.

Some of the universities mentioned in the article are public institutions. SCOTUS held in Healy v James that the 1st Amendment applies to public universities. So some of the actions could be considered 1st Amendment violations.

Except these restrictions prevent speech, not harm.

That’s a false dilemma. There’s a middle ground between allowing only approved speech and allowing any speech whatsoever. And we already make that distinction. Fascists don’t believe in free speech and threaten the rights of others through threats of violence, which isn’t protected speech. Likewise fraud, libel, slander, blackmail, false advertising, and CSAM aren’t protected and are considered harmful.

Driving predictably. Millions of people do it every day and it prevents accidents, which saves lives.

If I have to wait for an employee to unlock an item, I’m just buying it somewhere else, whether it’s online or another brick and mortar that doesn’t make me beg to spend money there. Same with stores that have passcode locks on their bathroom doors. I’m not asking a retail worker for permission to pee.

That’s a false dilemma. You can oppose all imperialism at the same time regardless of who is pursuing it. Justice and freedom isn’t a team sport. You don’t have to take the side of any major power.

“The bigger kid is the only obstacle to peace on the playground. If the bigger kid would just let the bully get away with bullying the littler kids, then everything would be fine. The bigger kid is only helping the little kid stand up to the bully in order to hurt the bully.”

Yeah, the US didn’t invade Ukraine. Russian presence and Russian attacks are the only obstacle to peace in this situation.

Simp for imperialism somewhere else, tovarish.

Anticolonialist is a weird username for someone simping for Russian colonialism in sovereign territory.

It’s also possible to be a person who genuinely cares about classic art and the environment already. And it’s also possible to be a poor person with little to no power to influence the fossil fuel industry. Chiding people for not having the privilege of free time and minimal obligations to protest isn’t very productive. Again, change needs to happen at the top and it’s not going to be achieved through appeals to emotion or coercion via symbolic or actual threats to famous art or sites.

I will not be fair, the publication isn’t. Why should I?

Because arguing dishonestly makes you look irrational and does their propaganda work for them.

but you are more likely to try to distance yourself from fossil fuel reform movements, and that’s all they need you to do to be successful.

Not really. This isn’t an effective form of protest or reform. Stunts like this allow articles like this to be written in the first place, but the stunts, even if written of with the highest of praise, are useless. Effective action would involve changing the minds of those who profit from fossil fuels the most and making it unprofitable for them to continue. You don’t need to convince people who care about world heritage sites or famous artwork. You need to convince the profiteers of industry and that won’t come from an appeal to emotion but from a threat to their financial well-being.

To be fair, that’s a false dilemma. Caring about Stonehenge doesn’t have to be compared to caring about fossil fuel reform. You can care about both or neither to any degree and they can be completely unrelated.