Preach.
It’s not a coincidence that it was Democrats who coined the term “flyover country.”
And it’s not a coincidence that “flyover country” won’t vote for them.
And they’re okay with that. They’d rather lose than lower themselves so far as to associate with the unwashed masses.
This isn’t ignorance or missing the point - they know exactly what they’re doing.
In the terms of the cliche, they’re trying to have their cake and eat it too.
They want the immediate gratification of being rude assholes, so they do it just long enough for that initial rush, then they back away to try to avoid the consequences.
I don’t have one.
I have a very simple process for dealing with all of this - I never check my framerate in the first place, so I never know what it is.
I just play games If there’s noticeable stuttering or lag then I maybe try to do something about it, and if there’s not, then I just play and don’t worry about it.
He’s not “wrong” - he’s a psychopath. He doesn’t “fail” to find out the truth - he simply doesn’t care, because his own immediate inclinations and desires are all that matter to him.
It IS a hostile takeover. Musk and Trump are currently in the process of overthrowing the US government and installing a pluocratic autocracy in its place.
I think that if humanity can manage to survive long enough, anarchism is inevitable.
It’s essentially the adult stage of human society - the point at which humans collectively and consistently, rather than just individually and situationally, can be trusted to generally do the right thing simply because it’s the right thing and therefore the most reasonable thing to do.
For the time being and the foreseeable future though, humanity is nowhere even close to that. Through the course of history, human society has managed to advance to about the equivalent of adolescence. There’s still a long way to go.
In spite of that, I do identify as an anarchist, but my advocacy is focused on the ideal and the steps humanity as a whole has to take to achieve it. I think it’s plainly obvious that it cannot be implemented, since any mechanism by which it might be inplemented would necessarily violate the very principles that define it. It can only be willingly adopted by each and all (or close enough as makes no meaningful difference), and that point will come whenever (if) it comes.
This incident leaves the LA Times in an impossible position. How can readers trust anything published under its banner when its owner has demonstrated such willingness to corrupt the paper’s editorial integrity for his own political agenda?
They can’t, and shouldn’t bother trying.
That’s a freedom that the internet provides that too few people exercise. There are more than enough news sources out there, so there’s no reason for anyone to ever grant a single one of them a second chance.
They aren’t "failing"at all. By their corrupt standards, 2024 was a resounding success.
They managed to get their establishment hack through the primaries and kept the soft money flowing. Then after the debate debacle, they managed to put off a resolution long enough to tamp down the determination of most of the party, so then, at the eleventh hour, they could jump straight from Biden’s withdrawal to Harris’s anointment as the candidate and avoid the risk of an open convention and a progressive getting some traction. Then they enjoyed record-breaking fundraising (which is far and away the most important thing to them), then swapped out Harris’s notably successful populist rhetoric for mealy-mouthed, transparently corporate-ass-kissing pabulum, which led to her loss, and now will allow the DNC to just sit back and play their age-old game of “well, we’d like to stop the Republicans from destroying your lives, but we’re the poor powerless minority, so we just can’t, but if you send in your donations now, we can get them out of office in [year of next election]!”
That is, to the DNC, a success on all counts - they kept the soft money flowing, kept the progressives out of office and situated themselves so that they can dodge the blame for harm done to the American people and fundraise and run in the next election merely on the platform of being not-the-Republicans.
And more to the point, nobody is going to stop him.
Those who would stop him can’t and those who could stop him won’t.
I don’t want to hammer on this really, because I think you mean well, but…
You’re not condemning the specific assholes who treated you poorly - you’re condemning “men” generally. Your point and your focus isn’t that they were assholes, but that they were men, as if that’s the actual problem - as if their failure isn’t being assholes, but simply being men.
I don’t know if that’s your actual view, but that is the way it comes across. And broadly, that view is part of the problem, since it alienates men who deserve no blame and diverts attention from those who do. And that’s exactly what I meant when I said that countering misogyny with misandry is a poor strategy.
but I feel that it is important to recognize and call out the misogyny element in this story
I don’t.
I think that countering misogyny with misandry is rather obviously a losing strategy.
This broad dynamic isn’t new and it isn’t unique either to gaming or to men. Every single creative volunteer community on the net is filled with assholes and drama llamas, of any and all genders. It’s just the nature of the thing. You see the same things over and over with game modding, cracking, romhacking, emulation, manga scanlation, anime fansubbing, vocaloid production, mmd modeling, fanfic, fanart, and so on and on.
People often (generally?) are willing to invest the time and energy into whatever it is that they’re going to post online at least in large part because they crave the attention they hope it will bring, and specifically, they want to be lauded for their talent and skill.
And that often runs up against the fact that an awful lot of the responses they’re going to get are going to come from self-absorbed and entitled assholes bitching because they don’t like whatever it is that they’re getting for free, and think they have to be accommodated.
And very often, the response from the creator, unsurprisingly really, is to effectively (or even literally) say, “Fine then - fuck you all. I’m done.”
And 'round and 'round it goes, and has from the start, and likely will never stop. It’s just an unfortunate but pretty much inevitable clash between a personality type that’s likely to create and share something online for free and a personality type that’s likely to comment on something somebody else created and shared with them for free.
I expected to be offended and/or astonished by a ridiculously transparent bit of sanewashing here, but you know… I think I actually might agree.
It does seem to be a valid point - Gaetz is a grotesquely destructive demagogue and Trump sycophant, but he’s also a buffoon, and that’s undoubtedly better than a grotesquely destructive demagogue and Trump sycophant who’s also a smart and devious and highly skilled politician.
Huh…
Mmm… sort of.
In some very broad sense, yes, it’s corruption.
In a narrower and more precise sense though, it isn’t really, since “corruption” implies a violation of higher standards, which is what we’ve had, to a greater or lesser extent, pretty much throughout our history.
The difference in the coming era is that there will be no higher standards to corrupt. The things that were previously violations of higher standards will become the new standards. Theft and graft and cronyism will no longer be crimes or even (meaningfully recognized) wrongs - they will be the institutional norms.
And I don’t mean this as mere pedantry - the point is that when what used to be corruption becomes the overt norms, things will get much, much worse than they ever were or could be when they were still corruption.
Fascism is, at heart, at least as much an economic system as it is a political one, and broadly, more so.
Fascism, alongside its political control of the populace, establishes economic control of the populace, and it does it very simply, by organizing the government to serve businesses and the wealthy few who control them, and by establishing a revolving door by which a relative few are allowed to freely move between control of the two.
This is the underlying point of Project 2025, and specifically the reason for the planned purge of civil servants. They are to be replaced by people who can be counted upon to serve the interests of the wealthy few and to deny the interests of the rest of the populace.
Again and again, our major institutions, from the media to the judiciary, have amplified Trump’s presence; again and again, we have failed to name the consequences. Fascism can be defeated, but not when we are on its side.
Those in power in those institutions, even if they don’t share the political goals of Trump and his coattail-riders, are driven by their own greed to at the very least not stand too much in the way, since they too expect to profit.
I predict… a corporate ass-kissing establishment hack with a focus on appealing to suburban professionals.
Very much so (and there’s at least one patient gamers community around, because I’ve posted to one).
The only advantage I can see to playing a game on release is taking part in that first rush of interest, but I’m antisocial enough that that doesn’t appeal to me anyway, so I’m not missing anything there.
Beyond that, I think playing a game at least a year or so after release has all of the advantages. The initial flurry of absolute love vs. absolute hate has died down so it’s easier to get a broad view of the quality, the game is more stable, the price is better, dlc and expansions are out and generally packaged with the game, and best of all, in this current era, I can most likely buy it from GOG and actually have the full game, DRM-free, on my system.
And there are a bajillion good games out there, just waiting for me to discover them.
No, that’s not smug elitism at all. Smug elitism was when the limousine liberals were jetting around the country to go to $10,000 a plate dinners and wring their hands over the fact that the ignorant hicks in flyover country wouldn’t vote for them.
#Joy Genocide is realpolitik. It’s the DNC and Harris trying to juggle the fact that they need to run on positives to counter Trump’s negatives with the fact that if she makes even the tiniest hint that she’d cut off the flow of arms to Israel, a whole bunch of fabulously wealthy and influential individuals, corporations and lobbying groups who profit off of it would stop at nothing to utterly destroy her.
It has nothing at all to do with elitism and everything to do with the simple fact that the US federal government is wholly owned by special interests, and those involved in the Israeli military/industrial money laundering scam are among the most influential of them.
“Lefties keep calling us Nazis but they don’t even know what Nazis are, and oh yeah, by the way, all of these people over here should be killed because they’re an inferior race.”
Even setting aside the staggering psychopathy of the modern right - their complete and utter disregard for the lives of other human beings - I don’t even begin to understand how any human being could have so little self-awareness.