The man’s cult extends far beyond America’s borders. Just like the “anti-woke” culture war.

She has #47 now. Who needs a pope?

Did the alleged “slum lords” lose against the actual slum lords’ smear campaign?

I wouldn’t be surprised if they called developers “terrorists” at some point.

NIMBY property owners are so convinced of the righteousness of their assets – and of the evil lurking within any effort to slightly slow down their appreciating value – that I don’t think there’s a level of wickedness that exceeds a threat to those assets.

Like, I wouldn’t be surprised if they thought: “these developers are worse than Bin Laden. At least Bin Laden didn’t decrease the worth of MY property.”

When the argument against an initiative says, “greedy developers” that is just a populist NIMBY smear spoken by even greedier, already-existing landlords.

I actually voted against a housing development one time because I got played by those words. I’m a little wiser now.

I’m glad you got a good upvote:downvote ratio for that post. It’s encouraging to know that people are at least willing to listen to a reasonable take on Taylor Swift.

People have been hating Swift for decades now. They were hating her for writing too many relationship-related songs even before the American left revived.

She’s an easy target because her target demographic is teenage girls, and anything / anyone beloved by teenage girls MUST necessarily be gay and worthless.

See also: Justin Bieber, the Backstreet Boys, and the Jonas Brothers.

I highly suspect people joined the left and transferred their hatred from, “Taylor Swift the musician for stupid, hysterical girls, who I hate” to, “Taylor Swift, the billionaire,” without once examining the lens through which they first started hating her. And now she gets more “anti-billionaire” hate than Jeff Bezos?

It bothers me.

Misogyny is a tool of capitalism, and to quote Lorde: the tools of the master will never dismantle the master’s house. No one is destroying capitalism by weirdly fixating on Taylor Swift and her fans “because she’s a billionaire” while criticizing her more than basically all other billionaires.

I look forward to the day I see a leftist meme reminding me “you can’t love Bruce Springsteen (1.1b) or Jay-Z (2.5b) and still be a leftist.”

Until then, I’m not taking lectures on leftism from people who haven’t deconstructed their own feelings of hatred and superiority towards teenage girls.

Edit: I hope I didn’t come across as angry at you in particular. You don’t seem to be joining in the hypocritical, unnuanced hate.

To tell any other story in the Star Wars universe, you must first retcon the Original Trilogy.

See, the Original Trilogy established that the “dark side” was a temptation for every Jedi. Like cocaine or meth for modern humans: addictive poison that gives a temporary rush of power.

That’s great for the whole spiritual, mystic, two-wolves-within-you conflict Luke went through. His victory was overcoming his shortcomings in the form of fear and anger.

But it’s actually terrible for any story made afterwards.

On the one hand, you can’t now make a story where, “maybe the Jedi were excessively stoic.” without also inadvertently making the argument that Luke was maybe… wrong?.. to conquer his emotions? It undermines Luke’s conflict.

On the other hand, you also can’t make the Dark Side totally evil without flattening Vader’s character. When Luke loses himself to fear in Episode 5 and to anger in Episode 6, he proves that the Dark Side doesn’t sink its teeth into you and control you permanently after a single moment of weakness. Even after losing yourself to the Dark Side, you can still observe how it is hurting your loved ones and then choose to pull yourself out of it, conquering your fear and anger in order to protect them. Exactly as Luke does for Vader, and exactly as Vader does immediately after for Luke.

Which means Anakin was just… one-dimensional up until that point. Weak. Too simple to be a protagonist. He wakes up to find he’s killed Padme, and yet still doesn’t turn his life around and learn to fight the temptation of the Dark Side? He hunts down and kills Jedi who had nothing to do with his fall, and yet never looks into their eyes to realize he’s fallen?

No matter how you look at it, it just… doesn’t work.

That’s why the prequels retconned the Jedi into something morally ambiguous. And why the sequels retconned them into a past that needed killing. It’s why the Clone Wars animated series turned the Jedi into a bureaucratically anti-emotion order. And why a lot of video games added lore where the Jedi actually committed genocide against the Sith. It’s also why pretty much none of these other media talk about the Dark Side in the same tone as the OT.

The second the OT ended, the Dark Side could no be longer a “temptation”. It had to became a faction. An unjustly vilified piece of humanity. An ethnic group.

Because you can’t have a “dark side” and have complicated, nuanced characters and extensive world-building: either A) the world will fall apart, B) the characters will be woefully inconsistent, or C) all of the above.

So every, single time you want to make new Star Wars media, you have to retcon the “Dark Side” essentially out of existence.

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.

That sounds like the 2003 film, “Good Boy!”

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 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.