mozz

The fakeleftist's prayer

• Biden and Trump are exactly the same, I'm sick of these totally identical corporate candidates.
• And if they're not the same at all, then Biden's done all kinds of horrible things domestically, let's not focus on comparing the two.
• And if it turns out he's actually been really good domestically, then I care so much about the Palestinians that I can't possibly for vote him.
• And if Trump on day 1 nukes the Palestinians and also Iran and Ukraine, and turns the United States into a for-real fascist dictatorship with the military shooting protestors and no elections for 12 years until we can get out from under the hellscape, at which point it'll be even more too late than the too late that it already is to do anything about climate change... then that's just the price we pay to avoid having to choose the lesser of two evils. Definitely worth it.
• Besides, they're exactly the same.

Some will think the context you shared absolve him

Agreed 100% with what you said. I didn't mean for it to come across like I was giving him a pass on the impacts of his actions.

Actually to expand on it: You're responsible for your outcomes whatever they are and whatever your reasons. I don't think it matters if you "didn't mean any harm" or whatever. If you're too scared to protect someone from violence when you could have, or too lazy to feed your family, it's not like you're out to hurt anybody, but yeah, your actions are hurting somebody. It's your responsibility to overcome your bullshit. In this case, Pence doesn't seem like he has the full moral courage to realize now that he's an adult that he bought into a bunch of shit and he needs to leave it behind. Michael Cohen did it, the Little Green Footballs guy did it. It's hard but it's not impossible.

It makes no difference if your issue is abusiveness or laziness or gullibility; if it's hurting someone and you're directly involved, you're responsible for putting a stop to it. It's easier said than done sometimes, I'm not trying to say imperfect means evil, but still at the end of the day, you did what you did. If he winds up instrumental in killing a bunch of women with ectopic pregnancies, I don't think he gets to go up to St. Peter at the end of his life (metaphorically speaking) and say "Oh my bad, some people told me it was fine, and I didn't really think that much about it. Means it's all good right?"

PCs snap into a new reality. They are far far from home, on a rocky outcrop above a field of mushrooms and strange creatures. Things don't work the same way they did back in the real world. Some weapons do nothing, others are insanely powerful, and spells don't work at all. Creatures and their behavior there make no sense; they may meet other versions of themselves, or forests where you're underwater when you walk in the forest, things like that. You can't keep them there for too extended a length of time (it'll be too unbalanced and not-fun if all their usual gameplay mechanics are just gone for an extended series of adventures), but maybe there's a type of crossroads with a massive six-legged bear-like creature who says if they each give him one thing that's most dear to him, he can give them directions closer to their home. The directions take them to some odd astral place that's at least in the sourcebooks (feywild maybe) and their stuff starts working again, so they can start working on how they might be able to get back to the material plane. If they don't wanna work with bear guy then they're going to be stuck in feywild-squared with weird stuff happening to them for potentially quite a very long time.

Or

Fire engulfs the whole stronghold, all of a sudden. Either the BBEG keeps fighting, invulnerable to it, or else gets consumed by it while the PCs have to flee for their lives like the end of Metroid, and the BBEG presumably perishes in the ashes. If you want to make them work for their treasure you can hint to them that they should go back and sift through the ashes and they might find some neat stuff that wasn't flammable.

Or

Anything the BBEG does to the players starts impacting one of the players (chosen at random) instead of the BBEG. BBEG can hurt them but chooses not to, instead invites them to keep hitting BBEG but they're only hurting their other party members and BBEG is fine. Once they stop hitting BBEG, BBEG gets really angry and starts chasing them out, telling them to get out get out get out. The next day they discover that they are still getting injured when stuff happens to BBEG, and the new quest is to either figure out how to undo the wish (nigh impossible) or else undo the insanity so that the BBEG will no longer have awful self-destructive things happening to BBEG which will then come back at the party.

Hope these ideas are somewhat useful

Mike Pence is such a weird individual.

I think he hasn't figured it out it's all a grift. When Trump asked him to override the election, he seemed like he was very genuinely trying to figure out what the right thing to do was. He called Dan Quayle for God's sake. I think he followed through on refusing to go along with the scheme because he really thought it was right, and as a good Christian he was trying to do the right thing. I watched the footage of when the counting reconvened on the night of January 6th at like 2 in the morning, and he sounded for maybe the first and only time I have ever seen him speak, he had some backbone. I had some respect for him in the way he dealt with administering the electoral count when people tried to put up challenges to it.

I think he thinks it's all real. All of it. Anti abortion, God needs helper warriors on the Supreme Court, Evangelicals are saving the country from liberals who are trying to destroy it, conservative voices are under attack, the whole damn thing. I don't think he's lying or doublethinking it so he can get more power and money for him and his friends. I think he bought into it; he's still the little kid who's going to church and gets scared for his life thinking about going to Hell and wants to change his ways. It doesn't mean he's not dangerous, but maybe he's not actually a bad person -- just, he bought into it, and it makes him vulnerable to the bad people telling him what's what and him believing them.

I don't think cows eat weeds

Also goats are made of meat too

I mean I have a couple other notes too, but those are the two that spring most immediately to mind

I think mostly they just don't know. The news says "war" and Israel says "war" and the US says "war" and so it's easy to use that model. It's not a war, though. I realized what the word is; it's terrorism, ten 9/11s so far and counting, and aimed a lot more at children and families than 9/11 was.

It used to be

On November 30, 2009, Johnson blogged that he was disassociating himself with "the right," writing: "The American right wing has gone off the rails, into the bushes, and off the cliff. I won't be going over the cliff with them." He has been heavily critical of conservatives and libertarians since then.

I'd say that's about 10-15 years too late, but as a total outsider who's not at all familiar with the situation, it looks like his realization and action on it was sincere.

Also as TA notes, LibsOfTikTok is still up and Meta gave the argument that the reason was phishing/malware without any further explanation. I.e. even if LGF was still hosting extensive right wing propaganda (which would most likely be a fine reason on the surface to block it IMO), I'd still see a decent argument for the real reason being the Kansas Reflector story and not anything propagandastic.

Looks like there is a real possibility that

The headline would have been a lot more honest if it had included that part

When Netscape Navigator's initial announcement post went out, people were alarmed about the idea that someone might be trying to charge money for software related to the internet. Some people questioned if it was legal to even do that, since the supporting software, backbone, and all the content were freely created by other people -- it was basically at that point a 100% non commercial environment.

Things have changed

Hi again!

It looks like you might be trying to construct a worldview in your readers through pure confident assertion of how things are, along with raw emotional appeal and general nihilism, with the aim of depressing the vote in a left-leaning community in an upcoming election. The effect is small, since people can see through it generally speaking, but it's not 0, and if done with enough volume and consistency this kind of stuff can produce an impact in the aggregate.

I have no idea, but I personally suspect that the development and refinement of these techniques over the last 10-15 years are part of the reason for the rise of authoritarianism worldwide -- in simple terms, they form a new and pretty powerful tool in the arsenal of converting money to electoral results, and democracies and democratic systems don't yet have fully effective countermeasures. Along with the steady decline in journalism, and sustained direct attacks on voting systems themselves, it's becoming more and more difficult for ordinary people to make sense of what's going on in the world and vote accordingly and produce outcomes that benefit them.

Anyway, I was wondering if you wanted some help? I can send you some citations to use to strengthen your arguments, since I notice that your message didn't have anything factual or citation wise.

• Change in wages at the bottom end (10th percentile) since Biden took office, in comparison with inflation
• Change in corporate tax rate and pure dollar values in corporate revenue since Biden took office
• Unemployment rate history since Biden took office

Stuff like that. Since everything you're saying is objectively true, you'd be happy to explore with me what the numbers are that underlie all that vigorous emotional appeal you're using to justify the big blinking "PLEASE DON'T VOTE, IT DOESN'T MATTER" sign.

Right?

Hi, I'm Lemmy BadTakes! You may remember me from such films as "Biden's exactly the same as Trump" and "Sure Russia's a homicidal one-party kleptocracy where questioning the leader means prison and challenging him means death. But the United States has racist police and wealth inequality, which is actually far worse!"

IDK; I tried it from VPN from Europe was what I meant by "when it's accessed from the EU." I honestly have no explanation why I didn't see the prompt; my best guess is that either the geolocation or VPN fucked up, or that my adblocker removed a unified package that also included the prompt.

To search for ad settings I tried clicking AdChoices from the bottom navigation (from Europe) and it took me to a page that lectured me about how I should turn off my third-party cookie blocking, and when I tried from a different browser it succeeded (without having prompted me about cookies) and then announced that I had the opportunity to customize my ads experience from 111 different companies:

• 33Across
• AcuityAds
• Adbrain
• Adelphic
• Adform
• AdGear Technologies
• Adobe Marketing Cloud - Advertising Services
• Adstra
• Alphonso
• Amazon Ad System
• Amobee
• Audiencerate
• AuDigent

... and so on. I was also entertained by its summary of privacy policy within the State of California ("If you would like to opt out of the sale of this information, please complete this webform or call our automated line at (877) 365-3500.")

I stand by my assessment of relative cuntiness of Variety compared with LGF saying hey we don't sell your info but we do Google Ads, here's how to disable their tracking of you if you want, fuck EU's cookie laws and their weird little dialog box, have a good one.