no amount of heat tolerance will change that.
Conservatives: “Climate change will be fine. Actually all this extra heat and carbon in the air will be good for the plants. You’ll see.”
Also Conservatives: “MAKE MORE BABIES! ONLY THE FITTEST WILL SURVIVE!”
Also Also Conservatives: “We need to conquer Canada and Greenland for… uh… reasons.”
The joke of these games is that they aren’t notably more weird than titles Bethesda and Bioware were famous for turning out. Hard to get more weird than Fallout’s more esoteric vaults or Morrowind’s bizarre cults and exotic cultures.
BG3/KC:D have been, if anything, a direct successors to the old classics. They’re faithfully propagating the fundamental ideas these old titles represented in a way the new studios are unable to reproduce.
Also, honorable mention to the poor bastards who released Disco Elysium and then got their studio stripped out from underneath them by their financiers. Absolute gem of a game and you should feel free to pirate it without a twinge of guilt.
The Dakota War came out of a strategic starvation campaign imposed by the Union Army over Sioux Territory. The original tribes had been forced off the productive soil around the Minnesota River and displaced into barren wasteland. Subsequent crop failure and long winter made trading for foodstuffs from their home territories the only means of survival. And the settlers took maximum advantage, deliberately scamming and price gouging the Sioux for the remains of their family wealth. This, after a series of treaties had been casually violated from administration to administration.
The war was quite literally a fight for survival by the Sioux. Lincoln’s largess in hanging only the young men directly involved in the raid did nothing to prevent the Sioux population from continuing its rapid decline, as the surviving elders were left to starve to death in the wilderness and the children were forced into Christian schools notorious for brutalizing and killing the kidnapped youths.
The Republican Party was predicated on continuous western expansion. It was the successor to the Free Soil Party in the west and what was left of the Whigs in the East.
That necessarily meant seizing more land from American Natives and distributing it to Settlers. Much of the Union Army, before and after the Civil War, was focused on decimating the Native population and securing new tracks of free land for settlers. Lincoln inherited that mandate when he took office and pursued it as zealously as any Republican before or since.
My biggest complaint about Lincoln was the people he didn’t hang.
Speaking of jokes for our time:
Q: What is the main difference between succession under the tsarist regime and under socialism?
A: Under the tsarist regime, power was transferred from father to son, and under socialism – from grandfather to grandfather.
Also on point:
A man walks into a shop and asks, “You wouldn’t happen to have any fish, would you?” The shop assistant replies, “You’ve got it wrong – ours is a dairy shop. We don’t have any milk. You’re looking for the fish shop across the road. There they don’t have any fish!”
Although my personal favorite…
In Soviet Russia, everyone gets the joke!
Wasn’t worshipping a false idol considered a BAD thing?
Just don’t consider it a false idol. That’s the trick.
Stick your money-plated golden calf in a big box and have four old dudes carry it around on a palanquin. Then get a dozen DOGE agents to lead it in front of a government agency, blow their shofars, and pull funding until it collapses.
Boom. Straight out of the Book of Joshua, Chapter 6. Not much more holy than the Siege of Jericho.
The defendants, four men, aged 46 to 58, and a 77-year-old woman, who belonged to the self-styled “United Patriots” group, were sentenced to between five years and nine months and eight years’ jail by the Koblenz higher regional court on Thursday.
A fifth defendant received a sentence of two years and 10 months, the German news agency dpa reported.
A 77-year old woman and a child? FFS, this has strong entrapment vibes. Similar to what the FBI has been known to do during the War on Terror.
The guy who convinced the plotters to blow up a big bridge, led them to the arms merchant, and drove the team to the bomb site was an FBI informant. The merchant was an FBI agent. The bomb, of course, was a dud. And the arrest was part of a pattern of entrapment by federal law enforcement since September 11, 2001, not of terrorist suspects, but of young men federal agents have had to talk into embracing violence in the first place. One of the Cleveland arrestees, Connor Stevens, complained to his sister of feeling “very pressured” by the guy who turned out to be an informant and was recorded in 2011 rejecting property destruction: “We’re in it for the long haul and those kind of tactics just don’t cut it,” he said. “And it’s actually harder to be non-violent than it is to do stuff like that.”
Great for making headlines and patting yourselves on the back, but piss poor for averting the far-right takeover of the central government through more traditional channels of business corruption, blackmail, and media slander. The AfD and its even-more-extremist peers aren’t going to consider this sort of sting operation so much as a speedbump on the way to the Reichstag.
Citations Needed is the antivenom to the cobra bite that is listening to cable news during your teens/twenties. God bless Molly White and her crusade to do real actual journalism.
I don’t think this is strictly accurate. The 20th century was rife with problems we failed to address (in part or in total).
What we’ve seen over the last 40 years hasn’t been a steady series of policy wins nearly so much as a consolidation of media into the hands of a small corporately controlled cartel. It isn’t that computer bugs and food shortfalls and environmental catastrophes and even outright genocides aren’t happening. Its just that we’ve decided to stop talking about each of them in turn, as the public loses control of its independent information streams.
Most Americans have lived in a largely functioning democracy for so long they don’t really comprehend that it’s possible for America to not be as it is.
Point to the decade in which America had a “largely functioning democracy”.
Was it during the 60s, when it was open season on civil rights leaders and populist presidents? Was it the 70s, when the Nixonian War on Crime/Drugs stripped millions of Americans from the voting rolls through felony disenfranchisement? Was it the Reagan Era, of brutal police violence and race riots and MOVE bombings and the FBI/CIA in open war with anyone to the left of Tip O’Neale? Was it Clinton’s 90s and the disaster capitalism that forced a wildly unpopular series of international trade deals with the intent of dismantling trade unions? Was it the Bush War On Terror, with its blacksites and misinformation campaigns and endless wars? How about Obama’s bank bailouts followed by the GOP spearheaded 2010 gerrymanders that packed and cracked state and federal legislatures nationwide?
Where’s this democracy I keep hearing all about? I’m 40 years old and I struggle to point to a moment in my life when this country ever felt like more than a White Dude’s Caliphate.
Trump: “Fuck framing lumber. All my homies hate imported timber for house framing.”
Tech itself is not the issue. How it’s applied is the issue.
At this point, I would argue that technology is the issue. Or, at least, the current iteration of it.
Internal Combustion Engines, always-on internet connections, and digital financial systems are generating real physical hazards that stretch beyond their benefits. This isn’t just an issue of use. There is no “proper” method of employing - for instance - cryptocurrency or single-use plastics or a statewide surveillance network that doesn’t result in a degradation of quality of life for the population at large. To take a more dramatic angle, there’s no safe application of a nuclear bomb.
When the iEye app notifies you that the enzyme is running low, simply crack open an ice cold, refreshing can of Tesla Cola Zero to refuel your device for another two hours. Need to sleep? We got you.
Except this isn’t a technological innovation, its a Science Fantasy. iEye isn’t a real thing. Tesla Cola Zero isn’t a real thing. Not needing sleep isn’t a real thing. You’re not a cyborg and you will never be a cyborg.
But the science fantasy is still having its own cost. People are making real material nationally-transformative (or de-transformative) decisions based on the fantastic promises we’ve been sold about Tomorrow. We’re underdeveloping our mass transit infrastructure and relying entirely too much on unregulated air travel to speed up travel. At the same time, we’re clinging to old bunker-fuel laden container ships and decimating the aquatic ecology, because we refuse to adapt proven nuclear powered shipping that’s over 60 years old at this point. We’re investing more and more and more money in digital surveillance and personal tracking. We’re off-loading our ability to collect and process information to unreliable digital tools (LLMs being only the latest in overhyped AI as a replacement for professionalized human labor). And then we’re trying to justify the bad decisions we make as a result by claiming secret wisdom inherent in machines.
We’re eating our seed corn after being told technologists will eliminate our need to eat ever again.
This is a direct result of technological developments we have made (or promised to make and failed to deliver) over the last twenty years. Revolutions in racial profiling, viral marketing, planned obsolescence, military expansionism, and genocide have not improved our quality of life in any material sense.
The cow has not benefited from industrial agriculture. And the prole has not benefited from de-skilling of labor.
Florida State politicians have made a big show of being “anti-sex traffickers” and paraded in front of their constituents to say how seriously they take it. The Tates - a pair of brown skinned scary religioned hedonists - publicly flying straight into Florida on a Get Out Of Rape Free card, smears that entire pastiche.
The state AG needs to loudly declare “We’re against this!” while it’s in the news. Whether they’ll actually do anything or simply throw up their hands and blame Woke is another question entirely.
Like, the Senate ain’t happening, but it would take 3 House Reps flipping.
Technically, you’d only need two Senate flips to get the same effect. But Senate races tend to be much more expensive and less prone to incumbent upsets.
It won’t take much and the new DNC chair is already out there going to work focusing on which districts have the best chance and laying the ground work.
Technically that’s the job of the DCCC (Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) chair. The DNC is the Presidential committee.
A vote for Not-Republican is just a vote for Democrats. And we’ve already established that the Democrats are the Karl Marx Transgender Antichrist, so…
Funny thing is its the same argument Dems make for candidates like Sinema and Manchin and Biden and Pro-Trump Democrat Amy fucking McGrath. The big difference between Dems and Repubs is that when Republicans try to force feed their base a Jeb Bush or a Mitt Romney, Republicans puke it back up again and then come out swinging for the fascist fences. Liberals politely choke down genocide apologist and dogshit constituency service candidate Richie Torries in a bright blue seat like the Bronx and placidly send Dianne “Fly the Confederate Flag over the San Fransisco Mayor’s Office” Feinstein to the Senate for 30 fucking years.
The delicate game that Republicans have to play is in not pissing off constituents so hard that even House Majority Leader and ultra-right wing nerd Eric Cantor can’t survive a primary with a 100:1 campaign spending advantage.
Rep. Keith Self, R-Texas, also faced criticism at a Saturday town hall. A video posted to X by the Collin County GOP showed attendees booing Self and chanting, “Vote you out.” Collin County GOP attributed the scene to Democrats, but the party of the attendees is unclear.
Dude’s running scared for good reason. Collin County is a Dallas suburb with a huge vested interest in government money flowing through the finance capital of Texas.
The problem with the Trillionaire Class is that one trillionaire carries the weight of a million millionaires.
Wealthy donors carry so much more weight than rank-and-file voters. And if you don’t support the donor pick, you must be a MAGA sympathist.
Literally most of the people who are pissed at Musk being a welfar queen were just as pissed at Biden for being a weak centrist
If I had a dime for every 2-pt font “You fucking leftist idiots don’t know what Biden’s done for you, here’s a big list!!! He’s the best progressive since FDR!!!” posts I’ve seen in the last year, I’d be clinking glasses with Warren Buffet.
You can’t just say everyone who’s against the obvious fascist was therefore all-in on Biden.
Biden’s not against the obvious fascists. That’s the primary critique of his administration. He wrapped himself in the language of liberalism while funneling enormous fortunes into the pockets of the far-right through government contracts and public-private partnerships.
Well, I suppose you can say that stuff if you aren’t paying attention or acting in good faith.
Acting In Good Faith would mean prosecuting people like Tulsi Gabbard, Devin Nunes, Jared Kushner, and Steven Miller for espionage, divorcing the Treasury from far-right plutocrats like Musk and Bezos, and downsizing government departments that have been co-opted by extremists.
Instead of using the authority of the federal government when he had them, he dumped the powers of the presidency directly into the lap of a known asset of foreign powers.
No. You will simply receive a warning if we don’t like your activity on the site.
Really, what are you doing interacting with this website to begin with? Stop posting. Stop commenting. Stop voting.
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