Gabe Newell: “We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.”
Steam pulled regional pricing from my country not so long ago. You bet your ass sales went way down and people who were buying games because it was easier just went back to pirating them at that point.
Like you expect someone in south America who makes a tenth of what someone in the US makes to pay the same prices (actually more than the same since this country has like 70% tax on “imported” digital services), get real
Considering that Ethnic Palestinians are the original Semites, and most of the Zionist are “repatriated” jewish people from all around the world, I find it ironic that they claim any sleight against them to be antisemitic.
Full disclosure, I am Jewish myself, and sorry for the book… try not to knee-jerk react to it.
I hate to partake in this genetic essentialism garbage, but Ashkenazis by and large share their paternal heritage with Sephardic Jews and other Semites, although that Semitic heritage has become somewhat diluted over time by converts in the maternal line and their descendants. My point in saying that is not to say that Zionists have any legitimate claim to Palestine - they absolutely don’t. It’s just “Ashkenazi Jews aren’t Semites” is a highly debatable and fraught claim that has the potential to lead one down a rabbit hole into actual racism, and incidentally has absolutely nothing to do with the crimes of Zionism. When I hear that implication, my mind is drawn to the adoption by antisemites (most recently Black Hebrew Israelites) of the now disproven myth that the original Semitic Jews died out and were replaced by Khazars.
I’m stopping short of calling what you said, specifically, antisemitism, but in another context a similar statement might be called a dog whistle. People can say these things unintentionally when they just don’t understand the implications. This kind of reckless use of language and ideas is at least part of why we have Jewish students on college campuses claiming they don’t feel safe. We Jews have grown up being implicitly taught to keep our ear to the ground when it comes to rising intolerance, and yes in a lot of cases that has resulted in a massive blind spot for our own intolerance, but it doesn’t mean we should ignore warning signs. Of course, as a Jew, and like you, I often scoff when I hear claims of antisemitism, and in fact I get angry about them when they conflate Jewishness with Israel & Zionism, which ironically IS antisemitism.
Now I mentioned the Khazar myth and Jewish students who don’t feel safe. The issue here is that they lack the self awareness to say, “maybe my hangups about certain things people say are a product of my own upbringing and sensitivities, rather than any intentional antisemitism on their part.” On the other hand, when people talk about Jews or Jew-adjacent issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they should also have the self awareness to ask themselves “am I contributing to a climate that lets actual antisemitism fly under the radar and should I be more careful about the things I say?”
In any case, flinging accusations back and forth is unproductive. If my fellow Jews feel threatened by protestors and their words, I would recommend they approach those protestors with humility, and listen to their grievances before making assumptions about their intentions. Which is funny, because here I am Jew-splaining in response to a flippant remark in an internet comment section, but the reason is I just desperately want people to understand each other (and themselves) better.
I think most of it is just confusion inherent in the term “antisemitism”, which TBH is a bad term because it singles out a single Semitic people among many as the oppressed ones. That false focus then in turn causes a knee-jerk pendulum swing towards another extreme.
And who’s to blame? Again, Germans: The term was introduced to replace “Judenhass” (jew hatred) with something “more scientific sounding”, as recently as 1879. Damn that’s a lot of citations there. Maybe we should switch to “Jewphobia” or something.
To be sure. This sort of argument is as productive as saying the Palestinians don’t belong there because they’re actually Arabs. Neither is true. Palestinians are about as much genetically Arab as maghrebis are Arab. Both groups experienced massive culture shifts, but there was little change in actual population.
Yeah I can definitely see how the argument about “original semites” is coming very close to outright hatred and antisemitism. We have to be more conscious of the language we use than that. We shouldn’t be making arguments in this vein but instead focusing on anti-colonial arguments. When discussing the colonialism of relocating European Jewish communities to Palestine there’s no reason to be using this kind of “race politics” language.
The relationship between Ashkenazi jews and the communities that were already present in Palestine is not something I understand very well, and more broadly the history of Ashkenazi jews as a whole is something I’m only familiar with as it relates to early 20th century European politics. It’s something I’d like to do my own research on from reliable sources to better understand how these kinds of arguments feed into genuine hatred of Jewish people.
I’m not as educated on the broader nature of antisemitic arguments as I should be. I appreciate you adding context to why some Jewish students feel unsafe with the discourse going on at the moment. Anti-Zionist action has an obligation to protect Jewish people as much as it has an obligation to protect Muslim people and ethnic Palestinians. Our goals ought to be to separate ourselves from race hierarchy and protect human rights for all. It’s critically important that in advocating against the Israeli government and the IDF that we do not tolerate anti-semitism in any form and that we reject the support of ant-semitic people wherever it appears.
I appreciate you adding context to why some Jewish students feel unsafe with the discourse going on at the moment.
I feel like a dick talking about it with what’s going on, but it’s still important. And to be clear, we Jews who are inculcated with Zionism and the generational trauma of the Holocaust from a young age have to zealously interrogate our unconscious fears and biases. The protests provide the perfect opportunity to confront it head on if you can swallow your pride and just listen. My Arab & Muslim friends are some of the most thoughtful people I know, with strong opinions and moral convictions that come right from the deepest parts of their being. I feel as at home with them as I did in the Synagogue growing up, and I have no doubt if I were to attend a peace protest that I would find many more like them. They’re an absolute gift; I was never a supporter of Israel, but their friendship has thrown the whole thing into even sharper focus since October 7th. I hope one day the Zionists can be defeated, and from the river to the sea, all good people will finally be free.
The issue here is that they lack the self awareness to say, “maybe my hangups about certain things people say are a product of my own upbringing and sensitivities, rather than any intentional antisemitism on their part.”
Ah, yes. The suggestion that racial minorities just get over it. Don’t we determine racism based on the experiences and opinions of the victims?
I don’t think that’s true at all. Collectively determining racism is a complex process that involves interrogating social structures and power imbalances as a whole. Minority opinions are an important part of that, perhaps the most important part, but not the only part. Intersectionality taught us how flawed that was. That’s how we got the TERFs
In this case he’s talking specifically about an intersectional issue.
Well, yes, I suppose, and that’s why I said all the stuff I imagine you must have read before you got to that part, and the thing I said right after that, too.
II) During the time of Moses, the Semites lived partly in India, towards the Ganges, partly on the coasts of the South Sea to the Persian Gulf, in Elymais, Assyria, Chaldea, and in southern Mesopotamia, and with further expansion in some areas of Palestine, in the north and south of Arabia, finally too, but maybe not yet in Moses’s time, in Abyssinia or Ethiopia.
Which isn’t totally off compared to our modern understanding of who spoke proto-Semitic. “Semitic” as a descriptor of languages is unchallenged in linguistics because, well, symbols are arbitrary anyway and “Descendants of Shem”, as in Noah’s son, ancestor of Abraham, is not exactly a contentious thing among a group of related cultures having birthed no less than three Abrahamic religions.
I think you a both right. Historically, Semites referred to a large cultural group.
Over time, it has become a nonsense word because those cultural groups have become so dilute and diverse that you can’t point at someone and say they are part of that group.
More recently, the label has become misappropriated by some sort of whacky religious nutbaggery so they can oppress other people.
In case anyone actually wants to know a couple of reasons
A) It’s not fair that some people pay and some don’t. (Of course it’s also not fair that some can afford $70 on a video game and some struggle to buy food)
B) If everyone would pay then we’d all only have to pay $50 each, lowering the price for those that are paying $70 at the moment. (Whether developers would lower prices or just make more money is another question)
They’ll literally never lower prices. Look at what prices for everything are right now. Their excuse was that covid was driving up prices, now that covid is over they realized they could charge more so here we are.
Naïveté. Its not devs that set the price. Publishers do not have your best interests in mind. They will always choose to make more money. They don’t give a fuck about literally anything else.
The prices will never be lower. Purchasing no longer grants ownership. This is why piracy is justified in a lot of cases.
Support devs that respect the community. Steal from those that don’t. Or even better, don’t play games whose publishers treat the community like shit.
Thanks for trying to bring an alternative perspective to the table.
Neither argument is very compelling. A) is like “if I can’t have nice things, no one can”, and think about those arguments against loan forgiveness or healthcare. B) is wishful thinking game companies will charge what people are willing to pay no matter how many copies are sold. And unlike physical goods, the cost per digital license doesn’t really much if more copies are sold so expected sales volume doesn’t affect costs much in that sense. Piracy itself also doesn’t incur any cost (other than mythical lost sales), while Denuvo and other anti circumvention technology does.
Descriptions of crucifix violation by Jews are always depicted in the Hebrew chronicles as a reaction to the evil destruction of their Torah scrolls by the crusaders. During the First and Second Crusades, crusaders attacked the most holy object of the Jews, so the Jews in response are depicted as attacking the main symbol of Christianity and the crusading movement. In the First Crusade, the tearing of sacred Torah scrolls was part of almost every attack.^95^ There are nine descriptions of Torah desecration in the four chronicles.^96^
The Hebrew chroniclers first emphasized the holiness and beauty of the Torah, how it was honored by a particular Jewish community, and how terrible it was that the uncircumcised contaminated it. According to Eliezer bar Nathan, the crusaders trampled the Torah scrolls in the mud in Worms: “The enemies and oppressors set upon the Jews who were in their homes, pillaging, and murdering men, women, and children, young and old. They destroyed the houses and pulled down the stairways, looting and plundering; and they took the holy Torah, trampled it in the mud of the streets, and tore it and desecrated it amidst ridicule and laughter.”^97^
The Mainz Anonymous depicts the grief of the Jewish women who saw the Torah as it was torn in the Mainz synagogue in 1098: “There was also a Torah scroll in the room; the errant ones came into the room, found it, and tore it to shreds. When the holy and pure women, daughters of kings, saw that the Torah had been torn, they called in a loud voice to their husbands: ‘Look, see, the Holy Torah—it is being torn by the enemy!’ And they all said, men and women together: ‘Alas, the Holy Torah, the perfection of beauty, the delight of our eyes, to which we used to bow in the synagogue, kissing and honoring it. How has it now fallen into the hands of the impure uncircumcised ones?’”^98^
Furthermore, according to Solomon bar Simson, the Torah scrolls were trampled underfoot in Trier: “At that time the people of the community of Trier took their Torah scrolls and placed them in a sturdy building. When the enemy became aware of this, they went there while it was still day and broke the roof above; they took all the mantles and the silver adorning the rollers of the Torah, and threw the Torah Scrolls on the ground, and tore them and trod upon them with their feet.”^99^
I will bet in 4 years when the Palestinians are still being eradicated, no one is talking about it. I will bet right here and now. If not in 4 years in 8.
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