I’ll never stop being cynically amused by the fact that the self-styled American patriots are letting the Russian government tell them how to vote.

Do people just not know who and what Chris Roberts is?

This is what he’s done throughout his career - the only thing that’s notable about Star Citizen really is the scale of it and thus the opportunities he has to find ever more things to obsessively tinker with.

It’s entirely possible that if Microsoft hadn’t bought out Digital Anvil and given him the boot, this wouldn’t even be Star Citizen - it would be Freelancer, coming into its 25th year of delays.

Sort of, but not quite. I get where you’re going with that though, and it’s the right idea.

The explicit goal of Project 2025 is simply to make it easier for greedy and power-hungry privileged right-wing assholes to bring harm to people and to the nation as a whole for their own imnediate benefit. So yes - it actually serves as a sort of backhanded guide to what is of value in government.

It’s just that doing the opposite of what Project 2025 calls for would mean expanding agencies and regulations rather than reducing or eliminating them, and that’s likely not the best option, since it could just lead to governments run rampant instead of corporations run rampant.

As with most things, the optimum lies between the two extremes.

But yeah - at the very least, it can be taken as a rule of thumb that there’s a direct correspondence between the value a thing provides to the people and the nation as a whole and the degree to which Project 2025 opposes it and intends to destroy it.

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Any ideology that bans books is self-evidently intellectually and philosophically bankrupt.

That word “overt” isn’t there by accident.

There’s a significant difference between an oligarchic kleptocracy that has to pretend to be a representative democracy and an oligarchic kleptocracy that doesn’t have to bother pretending to be anything else.

I assume it’s going to go until World War III, and until the US is an overt kleptocratic police state.

Really.

rogue state

noun

1. state or nation acting outside of the accepted international norms and policies.

Israel is a rogue state.

I choose to hold myself to high standards. Writing is one of the great joys of my life, and there are few things I enjoy more than the satisfaction I feel when I do it well.

Additionally:

If someone disagrees or has a problem with what you say then they can just say so and you can clarify.

Would that that were so, but the reality of the internet in this benighted age is that many (most?) who misrepresent another’s position do so not because they sincerely try but fail to understand it, but because it serves their purposes to do so, and no amount of clarification is going to overcome that. It’s a waste of effort at best, and is actually often detrimental, since saying more just provides them with more fodder for even more fallacies and diversions.

Which is another reason that I write for my own satisfaction.

Thanks for the response though.

About three minutes ago.

I had actually written a few paragraphs in response to another thread, but it wasn’t coming together right and would’ve had to have been rewritten almost entirely to get it to my standards, and I just didnt care that much, so I closed it instead, then went to the main page and saw this.

Overall, I would guess that I post less than half of what I write, either because I’m struggling to get it to my standards and don’t care enough to keep going, or because I stop and realize that if I go ahead and post it, it’s likely that if it gets a response at all it’s just going to be some tunnel-visioned ideologue hurling disinformation, fallacies and/or tired emotive rhetoric.

So we’re supposed to believe that Israel is only at this late date “ready to risk (an) all-out war” that it in fact has brazenly and obviously been trying to provoke for months now?

Seriously?

Both, I’d say.

Money doesn’t create corruption out of thin air - anyone who’s corrupted by it already had to have the potential. But money does undoubtedly lead people who otherwise would have resisted their baser nature to indulge it instead.

And it very definitely provides the means for people who are already psychologically and/or morally inclined to corruption, and so is very attractive to them.

Pure unmitigated evil.

There was likely a time when “incel” just meant “involuntarily celibate,” without all of the baggage, but then two things happened together.

First, a significant number of “incels,” most notably on 4chan, fell into a specific set of essentially misogynistic coping behaviors - primarily blaming the supposed hypocrisy and shallowness of women for their own problems.

And second, a significant number of smugly self-righteous bigots saw an opportunity to hurl self-affirming hatred at an undifferentiated mass of people without suffering the backlash they’d get if it was directed at a group that essentially enjoys protected status, and leaped at the opportunity.

So now the popular conception is that all involuntarily celibate men are “incels,” with all that that implies - that they’re not just involuntarily celibate, but shallow, hateful, misogynistic losers and assholes.

It could potentially help if involuntarily celibate men who don’t share the misogyny of the “incels” had their own label, but honestly I don’t think it would make much of a difference in the long run, because there are now enough asshole bigots reveling in their hatred of “incels” that they’d refuse to let anyone get away. Just like all other more traditional bigots, they’d cling to their self-affirming conception that the mere fact that an individual is of a specific race gender sexual orientation relationship status means that they’re necessarily foul and loathsome, so their hatred of them is justified.

True, and I indeed should have said “reflex” instead.

I actually started early with gamepads, dating all the way back to the Gravis and the original Logitech Wingman, but it might be relevant that I still primarily use a mouse and keyboard, and especially for anything that requires precise aiming.

I use a gamepad for emulated console games, since they’re designed for a pad, and for things that require free and flowing movement, so respond well to a stick or a d-pad - racing games primarily, and many platformers and similar action games. But for things that combine separate movement and aiming - first person shooters and RPGs and the like - I just think a mouse and keyboard is better than dual sticks ever could be.

I have no more right to interfere in someone else’s life than they have to interfere in mine.

Avoid people who don’t share that view.

Of course he is.

It’s really a very simple calculus - any deal is going to include a timeline for Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, and if Netanyahu signs off on a deal that includes a withdrawal from Gaza, the hard right assholes are going to turn on him. And if the hard right assholes turn on him, he’s not going to be able to hold onto the office. And if he doesn’t hold onto the office, he’s likely going to jail, because he’s not just a psychopathic piece of shit, but a grotesquely corrupt psychopathic piece of shit.

And that’s really the whole deal right there - tens and potentially hundreds of thousands of people are dying and millions of people are displaced all so that one grotesquely corrupt psychopathic piece of shit can evade justice.