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.
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.
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.
It is extremely funny to see Lemmy Liberals insist the 2024 Dem Primary was anything resembling democratic.
These are the people convinced we’re not going to have elections in 2026. How would they even notice?
It isn’t as though Trump wasn’t committing crimes between 2009 and 2017. My man straight up confessed to sexual assault on camera, ffs. Nevermind the E. Jean Carroll civil case.
If you’re really a Lock Him Up democrat, you could easily argue Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch both dropped the ball.
Batman can’t kill The Joker because, if he does, the writers can’t bring The Joker back in the next issue for Batman to defeat again.
Presumably, Biden couldn’t prosecute Trump for the same reasons. Dems ran the same Pied Piper Strategy that worked so well in 2016, secure in their ability to defeat someone as easy and vulnerable as The Donald.
Gotta give the people what they want. And what they want is another election with Donald Trump at the top of the ticket.
If incompetency was prosecutable, every single ranking member of Biden’s DOJ would be eligible for indictment.
From Tulsi Gabbard to Devin Nunes to Jared Kushner to Steven Miller, then number of Trump '16 era crooks who didn’t get prosecuted when Biden had the chance could fill an entire Presidential cabinet.
Biden enabled Trump by not stacking courts, not prosecuting trump hard enough, or choosing policy positions based on what would beat trump.
I’m reminded of those 2-pt font “This is what Biden has done, you stupid leftists!” infographics that included dozens of citations of investigations and probes and FBI raids and committees and executive orders and threats to indict which amounted to… nothing! Biden’s DOJ couldn’t even be bothered to pursue a full prosecution. He left that to Alvin Bragg and a New York County Court.
If Dems wanted a prosecutor who was tough on crime at the top of the ticket, maybe they should have coronated him instead of Harris.
Capitalism, baby! We’re in a dog-eat-dog world and you’d be a fool not to sell out your grandmother for a bigger house or a faster car. The only word for a spook who doesn’t sign the line and sell out his nation is “Sucker!” You’re a hyper-individualist, you don’t owe anyone anything, and you should get while the getting is good, because you know Social Security and Government Pensions aren’t going to be here for you by the end of this guy’s term.
What part of Warren staffer suggests a pullback from the left?
Warren’s running on Kennedy liberalism from the 1960s. She’s not a leftist in any material sense, she’s just found a brand of popularism that plays well with New Deal romanticizing Democrats. But she’s utterly tame, more than willing to compromise with her conservative peers, and only ever in favor of the managed social decline we’ve been ingesting since Carter.
Your timeline shows a person moving farther and farther away from centrism over time
If you look at what Warren’s campaign supports, its right in line with what Americans have broadly endorsed for decades. What Warren lacks is a large corporate media establishment to operate as her hype machine. She’s on the outskirts not because she’s left-wing radical, she’s just a D-list celebrity because can’t get regularly booked on Joe Rogan or The View.
What gave her campaign relevancy was largely her popular views when pitched against a string of corporate hacks with (D)s pinned to their lapels. But we’re still in a capitalist nation, swimming in an ideology that favors private businesses and “natural” wages and hyper-individualism. Her centrist views (and the views of her staff) won’t significantly change the strategy of the party, because they’ll keep compromising away more radical ideas to placate mega-donors and corporate-owned media propagandists.
She wouldn’t run against Clinton in 2016 or align herself with Bernie in 2020. She doesn’t risk upsetting the AIPAC lobby or the O&G Industry in the Senate. She couldn’t even be bothered to vote against Marco Rubio for State Sec. Who was guiding this behavior if not her Political Director?
Politico is acting like they just elected James Carville.
Carville also knew how to run a progressive-sounding campaign that nevertheless kowtowed to Big Business at every opportunity.
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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