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.

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’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?

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.

And then proceed to fill these echo chambers with [insert local conservative] has betrayed Trump and (by extension) the country!

I actually found that part clever. Things do actually get declared “woke” and then become popular enough that the grifters declare it unwoke.

Could it be the case that the folks who told you Marxists were the postmodern, post-truth folks… were about as convinced of that claim as they are of conservatives’ other claims?

She’s a character from a comedy movie I saw as a kid! Kung Pow: Enter the Fist

Grif:

It’s one of life’s great mysteries isn’t it? Why are we here? I mean, are we the product of some cosmic coincidence, or is there really a God watching everything? You know, with a plan for us and stuff. I don’t know, man, but it keeps me up at night.

Simmons:

…What?! I mean why are we out here, in this canyon?

Oh, I love this one!

🎵Eeooh eeoh eeeeeeee! cghghcghcghrshhhhhh!🎶

For me it was a bit different though, because the song was kept alive in rural areas until the horrors of Hugh’s Net (and Wild-Blue-Exeed-ViaSat)