Thank you!

Thanks!

Materialist answer (inspired by a video called Why The Political Compass is Wrong: Establishing An Accurate Model of Political Ideology, by breadtuber Halim Alrah… and also Jane Elliott’s famous experiment)

Business owner makes money by paying workers to produce widgets at $6 / unit. Owner sells these widgets at $10 / unit, making a $4 profit each sale.

Before long, the workers catch on to the reality of the situation: the owner could be making a lot less and still be able to provide “leadership” (or whatever it is he provides). They decide not to work for less than… $8 per unit. With this price, the owner will still be wealthy (the business makes hundreds of widgets, after all). But now, so will the workers.

So the workers save up money and use it to go on strike.

However: business owner comes up with a better solution to the problem: he divides the workers into brown-eyed workers and blue-eyed workers. He then uses his money to discriminate against the brown-eyed workers. His cronies in government make it legal to deny brown-eyed workers jobs and housing. His cronies in the media write hysterical anecdotal stories about various brown-eyed rapists, thieves, and murderers.

Terrified mobs – stoked into a frenzy by the business owner’s well-funded propaganda – tear down brown-eyed people’s homes and food supplies, leaving them destitute before the strike is done.

The brown-eyed workers now must choose between returning to work for the business owner at $5 / unit… or starving to death.

The blue-eyed workers, meanwhile, have just been tricked into betraying their own team. Some were not tricked, but simply unprepared. These unprepared workers stood by in either shock, uncertainty, or laziness, unable to comprehend how their fellow blue-eyed workers could have become so foolishly self-defeating and cruel.

But now the business owner can put up the illusion of no longer needing the blue-eyed workers. He can run his factory on a skeleton crew of desperate, brown-eyed workers, and say to the blue, “uh oh! Looks like the brown-eyed workers just stole your jobs!”

Much like the brown-eyed workers, the blue-eyed workers have a restricted set of choices: A) admit they were suckers --fooled into attacking their own team – and try to apologize and rebuild their union, B) double down and blame brown-eyed people for undercutting them… but reluctantly return to work, because the strike is broken, or C) just like the brown-eyed workers, they can choose to starve to death.

(A) will be the most difficult. As Mark Twain said: “it’s easier to fool people than convince them they have been fooled.”

The business owner wins, and now society has an eye-color-discrimination problem. Eye color was an arbitrary characteristic. Yet now it decides where someone lives, who they spend time with, and what kinds of opportunities they have access to.

The business owner can rinse and repeat for: skin tone, religion, country of origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, etc. As the saying goes,

“Divide and conquer.”

You asked why trans people are currently the subject of fear and hysteria? No reason. Not any new reason at least. Trans people are different. Any and every difference between workers is an opportunity for those fatcats rich enough to own “The Daily Mail” and the “The New York Post” to separate us into camps and drain us dry, one camp at a time.

I mean… look at the number of people who still, to this day, believe Joe Biden has dementia.

He’s an elderly man with a speech impediment, and anyone with reasoning skills could tell he’s still lucid. But the right’s centuries-long war against education has paid off, and now reasoning skills are scarce.

Plus, ever since TikTok, there are now millions of people who get their “news” from five-second clips / soundbites. So if your “message” can’t be summed up in what is essentially two pages of a picture book, in a way that can be digested without critical thinking, you are no longer a viable candidate.

Put differently, the winner from now on is whoever better pulls the gullible vote.

The movie maybe. But that intro was basically divorced from the rest of the movie.

The intro suggested that stupid people having kids was the reason humanity started evolving backward. It invoked natural selection and “survival of the fittest.”

The intro even labeled the low birth rate couple and high birthrate couple with IQ scores to illustrate this point.

You argue that that the movie attributes the stupidity of its world to societal shifts. It does. It does a great job laying out a progression from late stage capitalism to idiocracy.

But that just further highlights how unnecessary that intro was. The intro attributed the stupidity to something entirely different.

Agreed. As iconic as that eugenicist prologue might be, it harms humanity and doesn’t really serve the plot.

I voted for Harris, but I feel like it’s pretty obvious why someone would vote third party instead.

One need only reject the premise that voting should be a strategic act of harm reduction. Mind you, I’m not saying “is” here. I’m saying “should be”.

We may not take their approach, but you have to admit that there’s value to it. They are embracing the world as it ought to be, whereas we are trying to work with the reality of the situation as we perceive it.

And we could be perceiving incorrectly. For all we know, Trump could loose-cannon his way into making Netanyahu’s whole party lose their next election. It may not be likely, but nothing in this world is certain.

For all we know, the Heritage Foundation could destroy so much of the government and economy so rapidly that it weakens all of the property rights and FBI operations aimed against self-sufficient mutual aid, and communes start springing up all over the place. It’s not likely without massive turmoil, starvation, and bloodshed. But however unlikely, we cannot predict the future!

Cyncism is costly in terms of mental health and well-being. In order to choose pragmatism over principles, we must accept a reality where no good choices exist. But that’s not something we can do everywhere. We can’t repeatedly choose the “least miserable option” and still be able to hold ourselves together and function. It’s just not possible.

Humans need hope to survive. They need a hill they can hang onto. They need to be able to say, “on this ground, I fight for what should be rather than what is.”

Some people’s hill is their ballot.

There is some quote about how free speech and military parades are, by necessity, inversely correlated.

Whenever this video crosses my feed, I’m reminded of what little I remember of that quote.

There were times I felt pretty dirty doing what they asked of me in order to close more sales.

So many companies! Back when I worked Arclight, it was a small bit of subtle manipulation: “would you like to turn that to a large for only an additional 40¢?”

I hated it, because I knew the purpose was to pressure people into buying more than they wanted.

Thankfully, the place was run like the Trump Administration, so no one really knew how consistently the company’s stupid mind games were being deployed against our guests.

But anyways! Yeah. Feeling dirty is pretty reasonable. The things we do for rent money…

This guy was a real asshole on top of it all, and he was trying to pull it off on my watch, so, no regrets on shutting him down.

What’s with that, anyways? Why aren’t real-life thieves more like charismatic, charitable Robin Hoods?

I’m really glad someone out there is costing these companies money.

So many times it’s AT&T and Verizon selling you an “insurance plan” for your phone that still requires you to pay $99-$300 if you actuality need your phone replaced. That’s objectively worse than no “insurance”.

Maybe I’d feel differently about it if I had that pro-capitalist “your loss is my gain” mindset… and also owned shares in AT&T. But being a human capable of empathy and humanity, AT&T and Verizon just disgust me.

I realized in a reddit argument a while back that one huge difference between Trump supporters and the rest of us is: Trump supporters expect less from Trump. Hold him to a lower standard than they hold themselves or non-supporters to.

In the argument, I had a supporter tell me that “raking the leaves” was advocating wildfire management – including controlled burns. And the person followed it up with remarks along the lines of, “you should have been smart enough to know that’s what he was saying.”

Which was crazy to me because:

• they were measuring my intelligence by my ability to come up with numerous unique rephrasings and potential meanings to Trump’s words
• they were scoring higher than Trump by their own intelligence metric
  • Trump could only come up with “raking the leaves” and the commenter came up with “as a country, we should be putting more resources into wildfire management”, a much more coherent and intelligent phrasing
• in expecting me to be able to read multiple meanings into “raking the leaves”, this person was ALSO expecting me to score higher on this measure of intelligence than Trump. And calling me stupid for not outscoring Trump.

Basically told me that if I wasn’t smarter than Trump, I was stupid.

I pointed this out to them and never got a response.

Anyways, different standards. According to Trump supporters:

• if you’re no smarter than Trump, you are an idiot;
• if you’re no kinder than Trump, you are sadistic and malicious;
• if you are no more effective than Trump, you are useless,
• But Trump is the smartest, kindest, most valuable person there is.

I’m glad I could help.

Have you played Supreme Commander? It’s basically a simplified Supreme Commander.

You gather credits by building extractors, and extractors can only be put on resource deposits, so your aim is to control those deposits.

But where SupCom 2 has mass, energy, and research, Rusted Warfare has only credits.

What I look for

When I play RTS games, it’s almost-exclusively:

• co-op against the AI
• with teammates
  • ^^ teammates who don’t spend time practicing RTS skills

So I’m looking for very specific things in a game. So far, of the games I’ve played, Rusted Warfare is top three when it comes to those things. (The other two in my top 3 are Age of Empires 3 and Nemesis of the Roman Empire (aka Celtic Kings 2)).

It got into my top three by being strong in the following areas:

Simplicity

Rusted Warfare is simple enough that my teammates can follow my requests without needing to train and practice on their own.

For instance, I can advise my teammates, “upgrade your extractors” and they can follow my advice without requiring a tutorial on resource management and energy shortages.

For comparison, in Supreme Commander (the franchise that was very clearly the inspiration for this game), trying to upgrade your extractor without sufficient knowledge on energy shortages can lead to choking out your entire economy.

Bull-headed AI

This is the most important thing I look for in casual co-op RTS.

In most RTS games, if the AI has 100 units? They are now attacking you on 100 different fronts. And focusing on any one front will deliver you losses at the other 99. It’s a game of whack-a-mole where you are punished for every mole you miss.

I know I said Age of Empires 3 is in my top three, but Age of Empires 2? Exhausting, excrutiating, and infuriating. It’s basically impossible to enjoy playing against the AI.

Same goes for Company of Heroes. I have broken a clavicle and wrist, and I can tell you without hesitation that playing against the AI in Company of Heroes is several times more painful than breaking bones.

Some people like that in a game. I do not.

Rusted Warfare, on the other hand, features an AI that mostly attacks you directly. Put a cluster of turrets between your base and theirs? You’re now battling 80% of their incursions. They’ll attack your flanks eventually, but you don’t have to divide your attention evenly between all 100 different locations. It’s almost like you and the AI are looking at the same place.

It’s rare to find an RTS game where you are allowed to enjoy yourself. Most punish anyone who drops below 200 actions per minute.

But in Rusted Warfare, you can just… play.

Progression

I have extraordinarily heavy ADHD (first percentile on impulse control and sustained focus). But as long as a game has the bare minimum of progression (upgrades, building tree, etc) then I don’t get bored and disengaged.

And Rusted Warfare has that. It’s got at least the bare minimum.

There’s always something for me to do: upgrade extractors, add turrets, build experimental factories, etc. And finishing this process does yield some pretty satisfying armadas… especially if I’m playing with mods.

In summary

I highly recommend it for casual co-op.

I grabbed Rusted Warfare RTS not long ago. It’s a real-time strategy game. $1.99 on the Google Play store.

Have you heard of DeVone Boggan and how he managed to reduce gun violence in Richmond, CA?

How does a nature-over-nurture person interpret the success of such a program?

I, on the other hand, will start a sentence, – something like, “but regardless, what really gets overlooked is…” – and realize that from word 1, I didn’t even have the concept of a point.

I realize, in that moment, that I was ENTIRELY reciting tokens.

You think you gave a narrow group. But my point is that “narrow groups” get very broad very quickly when heads start rolling.

How did that go for the objectively non-bourgeoisie who got caught up in Stalin’s / Lenin’s / Mao’s anti-bourgeois campaigns?

Even Mao acknowledged innocent people got executed during his “counter-revolutionary” and land reform campaigns. And the number of prisoners Kruschev released from the Gulags would have been impossible if most of them were actually as harmful to Russia as they were accused of being.

Once the guillotines come out, everyone is calling everyone else bourgeois.

Having been on reddit too much the past few weeks, this is very refreshing.

These days, all the Reddit moderation is performed by Russian and Chinese troll farms and alt-right recruiters. And anything goes as long as it erodes faith in western, multicultural democracy.

So it’s nice to see someone say, “Democrats are puppets, BUT ALSO! Republicans are the threat we must currently fight.”

A pile of sentient filth crawls out of a sewer somewhere, and first thing conservatives want to do is make it into a State Senator.

How surprising.

From his Idaho GOP page: his number one priority is to remove rape and incest exceptions.

Issue 1 . The top issue for Idaho is to abolish the unnecessary, harmful and wasteful curse of abortion. I will introduce legislation that eliminates the current affirmative defense for having an abortion in accordance with state guidelines. The only exception to the prohibition on abortion is to save the life of the mother.