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.
Intelligence is a measure of reasoning ability. LLMs do not reason at all, and therefore cannot be categorized in terms of intelligence at all.
LLMs have been engineered such that they can generally produce content that bears a resemblance to products of reason, but the process by which that’s accomplished is a purely statistical one with zero awareness of the ideas communicated by the words they generate and therefore is not and cannot be reason. Reason is and will remain impossible at least until an AI possesses an understanding of the ideas represented by the words it generates.
Trump is rather obviously profoundly mentally ill, and it’s long past time for that to be noted every single time he goes off on another of his delusional rants.
Exactly as noted in the article, it’s not even enough to fact check him (though that should be done as a matter of course) because it’s not just that so much of what he says is false. The much more significant fact is that so much of what he says is insane. It’s not ideas and beliefs shaped and presented by a rational mind, but the disjointed ravings of a lunatic, and that’s exactly how it should be treated.
People on every single relatively small forum ever in the history of the internet have gotten frustrated and angry when other people do that, because it’s spammy.
Do you not know the history of the term “spam?”
It’s from a Monty Python skit
That’s what the front page of a forum (or the inbox of an email account) looks like when someone “spams” it - like “spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam, spam and spam.”
Just the opposite. I’m the one who goes off to do something else at family gatherings because they just talk and talk and talk.
Though it’s not so much that they talk so much as that it’s just the same stuff over and over - alternately, my brother slavishly regurgitating right-wing techbro quasi-libertarian bullshit and my mom reciting in excruciating detail some anecdote that’s maybe vaguely related to the topic at hand and that she’s told countless times already, because it’s her go-to every time something in that vicinity comes up.
And what I wouldn’t give to know them less well…
Most similar to Advance Wars:
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance
Tactics Ogre: Knight of Lodis
Super Robot Taisen: Original Generation
Shining Force:Resurrection of the Dark Dragon
Just in general:
Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow
Summon Night: Swordcraft Story 1 and 2
Drill Dozer
Golden Sun 1 and 2
Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap
Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town
Guru Logic Champ
Metroid Fusion
Metroid Zero Mission
Medabots RPG
Klonoa: Empire of Dreams
One of the greatest songs ever IMO, though I much prefer the original.
All songs start with silence, then build a series of sounds until a song is achieved, then return to silence, but few illustrate the magic and wonder of that process quite as well as A Forest.
Those two things are not mutually exclusive.
A great many people in the US, Trump supporters certainly included, are experiencing uncertainty living in an economy in which the lifestyle earlier generations took for granted gets further out of reach every day - in which they find themselves ever further in debt with less all the time to show for it, and in which they’re one catastrophic illness away from destitution.
Trump has cynically exploited that uncertainty by beating the racist, and especially anti-immigrant drum. People are primed to find somebody to blame for their misfortunes, and he’s provided them with somebody.
And yes - to the degree that they’ve responded to his rhetoric, it’s because they were already racist enough that when he led them in that direction, they willingly followed. So as far as that goes, yes - racism really is a driving force. But their racism isn’t just some atbitrary thing that appeared out of thin air - for a great many, it’s a specific reaction to a specific set of circumstances, and those specific circumstances are largely economic uncertainty.
It’s sort of akin to people with chronic respiratory problems ending up hospitalized during a period of high air pollution, then other people arguing about whether to blame their respiratory conditions or the air pollution. Rather obviously, “or” is the wrong conjunction - it should be “and.”
And by the bye - that whole dynamic is a good part of the reason that Musk and Thiel and many other billionaires are supporting Trump - because they and their actions comprise the lion’s share of the real reason that that economic uncertainty exists, and Trump is not only determined to hide that fact, but to self-servingly make it so that they’ll be free to cause even more harm.
I don’t believe that my approval or anyone else’s is at all relevant.
My position is that there’s only one person who has the right to decide whether or not it’s acceptable to trade sex for money, and that’s the person entering into the trade. Assuming that all other contractual requirements are met - they’re of legal age and acting of their own free will and so on - it’s just as much their right to trade sex for money as to trade ditch digging or code writing or coffee brewing or meeting taking for money.
(edited for clarity)
Virtually all of the focus has been on the racists and misogynists and christofascists and all the other reactionary fuckwads who are supporting and promoting Trump and who contributed to Project 2025 and so on.
But they don’t really matter. They’re just tools. The people who matter are the ones who are funding it all. Aside from some personal quirks (like Musk’s weirdly aggressive pronatalist thing) the people who are funding Trump and Project 2025 and such really don’t give a shit about all of that. Those are just emotive issues to make a lot of noise about to win over the base and provide cover forbthe real goal. The real goal - the exact and only reason that they’re funding all of that - is quite simply to destroy US democracy and institute an autocracy, so that they can have a system in which their rule and our submission are codified and absolute.
This isn’t a culture war. That’s just cover for the real war, which is a class war. And it’s not a war that might happen - it’s a war that already is happening. The rich are already fighting it, and have been for quite some time now. And if we don’t do something, we’re going to lose it by forfeit.
No - it’s 27 times bigger.
A yard is 3 times bigger than a foot so a cubic yard is 33 (3 cubed) times bigger.
I would go so far as to say that it’s vital that Biden handles court reform, because it has to be done before the election.
We can already be sure that Trump and his backers are planning legal challenges on whatever grounds might vaguely appear to be something resembling legitimate in the event that he loses, and we can also be sure that at least Thomas and Alito will rule in their favor, no matter how ludicrous their arguments might be, simply because they’re entirely and completely compromised. They’ve already demonstrated that law is irrelevant - that they serve demagoguery, shallow self-interest, bigotry and corruption. And given the chance, they WILL do their parts to destroy democracy in the US.
We can’t afford to give them the chance.
And that could be Biden’s legacy - the president who led the efforts that saved America from a fascist coup.
I’ve seen no evidence that they are.
What little organic commentary I’ve seen has been cautiously optimistic at worst.
The barrage of anti-Harris stuff that all started appearing at essentially the same time reeks of astroturf.
Oh wow, I really riled you up.
Presuming, for the moment, that this laughable, trite and terribly cliched rejoinder is in any way true, how would it be relevant to anything?
Never mind though - that was a rhetorical question. I know, and I suspect you do as well, that it’s not. It’s just a casual, and at this point entirely predictable, bit of disparagement tossed out to give yourself what you erroneously believe to be an edge.
the real problem is the idiots who are paying.
I mean, I think that this is contentious enough to be worth picking apart.
Feel free. I’m more than willing to explain in as much detail as you want exactly why it is that I think that people who pay extra for early access to games are “idiots.”
(Just, by the bye, as I think that people who don’t wear seat belts, tahe the guards off their table saws or don’t get covid vaccines are “idiots.”)
I can’t imagine calling someone an idiot unless I thought they kind of deserved what was coming to them.
Which is exactly what I do in fact think.
It’s this schadenfreude you seem to feel that I take issue with.
I don’t think that word means what you think it means.
I don’t feel any sort of pleasure or sense of fulfillment at their idiocy - I simply note it.
I’m especially curious about that one.
Oh, that would be this, actually:
demonstrates more contempt for one’s fellow man than decreeing that they shouldn’t even be allowed to make their own choices.
You are, for some reason, arguing against the concept of rules. I never asked you to do that.
In response to my statement that:
any consumers who, in such a situation, do not say no to a bad deal have nobody to blame but themselves
you wrote:
Do you suppose that choosing not to wear a seatbelt, a very bad deal, should be left entirely up to individuals, um, “stupid” enough to take it?"
Clearly, with that, you established that the point you wished to dispute was whether or not “choosing… a very bad deal should be left entirely up to individuals.” That was the exact point of contention you stipulated.
So this:
You are, for some reason, arguing against the concept of rules. I never asked you to do that
is blatant bullshit. In point of fact, with the example above, that’s the specific focus you introduced. Curiously, you said nothing at all about the “contentious” phrasing of my original post or my supposed “schadenfreude.” That only came along now, in this desperate bit of backing and filling in which you’re vainly engaged. Rather, your immediate and exclusive focus was on whether or not “choosing… a very bad deal should be left entirely up to individuals.” The clear, and in fact only, alternative to that is that it should not be left up to individuals, so that’s the position you’ve taken, and the position in support of which I’m still waiting for you to provide an argument.
Now - if that’s truly not what you intended to say or imply, that would be another matter. And in fact, in any other situation, I’d be willing to simply grant that that wasn’t your intent and amend my responses accordingly. We could simply cooperate to find the exact point of our disagreement and focus on that (and could both enjoy this exchange much more).
But you blew that chance a long time ago.
So that was in fact the position you took, whether intentionally or not. And I’m still waiting for an argument in support of it.
It’s amusing and revealing that at no point here have you actually directly addressed anything that I’ve actually said. Instead, you’ve just used what I’ve said as a jumping off point for a ludicrously exaggerated, barely relevant and deliberately insulting strawman.
Here’s a challenge for you - instead of leaping from strawman to strawman in this vain effort to somehow prove that I’m a horrible person and therefore wrong, go all the way back to the beginning here and frame a positive argument for your position. Tell me exactly why and on what basis (as appears to be your position) publishers should be prohibited from charging extra for early access, and what nominal public good that would serve.
As a bonus, you might also try to explain how the position that publishers should be allowed to charge extra for early access is in any way “a very anti-covid-vaccine argument.” I’m especially curious about that one.
Feel free to take your time
I’ve been posting on internet forums for almost 30 years now. It’s just a thing I like doing.
I’m here now because it’s the best place I know of at the moment.