The Golgafrincham jokes in the comments restore a little of my hope for humanity.

I personally know a Liz for which this is true. 🦎

I’ve sooooo been thinking about this specific comic a lot lately.

For some reason this guy pings me like Fun Land in Sandman #14 (the Serial Convention chapter). I wonder if he was an inspiration for Gaiman.

Voting for Trump (or for any Republican candidate for elected office) is voting for one-party autocracy. Even if the individual is ethical, they will be pressured into serving the party (or removed for a more loyalist alternative). Not voting for a Democrat when there’s a Republican candidate is not voting against one party autocracy.

Trump is not Hitler. He’s the Secret Hitler of this election. Even if he’s less bright than Hitler and less charismatic than Hitler, he’s fulfilling the same role, and the outcome will be the same, a one-party autocracy propped up by fascist enemy-within rhetoric and a massive deportation effort that will ultimately turn into a massive evacuation effort. (That is, evacuation into mass graves, or even an ash pit).

We are on the precipice. Do not fuck around. Do not think otherwise. Do not let anyone else think otherwise. If Trump wins, the world is going to hold America’s beer while it works to enact a holocaust that dwarfs the Holocaust… unless the resistance is really good (it’s probably not) or the Allies overrun Washington (not in time).

The short tl;dr answer is, we don’t. For me, it’s something I contended with around 2003-2004 when my father stood with most staunch Republicans in advocating for extrajudicial torture of POWs and eventually of civilians including Americans who were mistaken for terrorist agents.

On the other hand, the same event drove me to study moral philosophy so I could explain at length why torture was wrong; he didn’t care, which was the gaze into the abyss moment. I saw who my dad was in the dark.

Cut to 2024, and even if Harris wins (and any coup d’etat attempts are put down) we are a long, long way from the scare being over. This has been reviewed at length by CIA and we’ve heard from experts on civil wars, how they erupt and historically what must happen to prevent social unrest from turning violent to the degree that it overwhelms responders.

The universal panacea is the restoration of power to the people. So that’s not to say we can merely preserve elections in the US. Our election system is corrupt and relies on FPTP voting models (one person, one vote) which means third parties cannot be competitive. It also means the two principal parties don’t have to be very public-serving to stay in power.

This means Harris not only needs a cooperative Congress (and cooperative state populations) but also the impetus to operate against the interests of her party for the good of the public, and we all struggle to discard the One Ring. She’ll also have pressure from establishment politicians, as well as progressives who are not progressive enough to go the distance and let power be diffused to a wider body of persons and interests.

What we can expect are some shorter-term measures, maybe some social safety nets, some relief for people caught in the debt crisis or homeless crisis, even some labor reform so that most of us aren’t one crisis away from homelessness and a ruined life. But this will kick the can down the line, and allow the Republican party (whose only trick now is election subversion and procedural coup d’etat when not violent coup d’etat) to persist as it is (and has been at least since Reagan).

Election reform would force the Republican party to reconsider its far-right-wing position and actually offer a platform worth voting for. But so long as we don’t get that, they still have viable pathways to seizing power.

All this said, some people will come to their senses as the precarity lets up. Some people will realize they can afford to be less afraid, and that a public-serving society is something worth fighting for. But that is a long, and personal process for each of them, and usually they’re pretty repentant when they realize what they had become.

This also works with racist / cultural jokes.

ETA The problem jokes that capitalize on racist stereotypes tend to be cringe, and not good cringe (like puns).

Oh wow, and I thought we were being all civil and stuff. Have a block.

Feds are wrong, or would be if copyright continued to serve its original purpose (according to the Constitution of the United States) to create a robust public domain.

All media should be accessible through public libraries, and arguments by federal courts presumes that the public does not have vested interest in content. It presumes the government isn’t there to serve the public, which raises questions as to why we have government in the first place.

I write paragraphs about everything, though. It’s how I communicate in internet forums. It’s a consequence of doing a lot of compulsive research and being ASD. I also have weird takes, and am expected to explain them. It’s a phenomenon not particular to movies.

Yes. Sometimes it’s tl;dr for some folk but others seem to appreciate it.

Sorry if it bothers you enough that you have to shut me out of your circles.

My experience in becoming a gamer is to graduate from Parker Brothers family tabletop games to Steve Jackson wargames to Dungeons and Dragons which was declared Satanic by the moral guardians.

So yep.

Behind the Bastards recent two-parter on The Masculinity Crisis pointed out that the Gamergate controversy really was about gamers who found their only man space was gaming getting upset as the market opened up to women and other non-dude-bros. (I was quietly playing Gone Home at the time not understanding what the big deal was.) Then Steve Bannon whipped them into a voting bloc and got Trump elected (with a popular minority but the EC) and now we’re all sorry.

Ubisoft is not a serious game publisher, rather is a racketeering company that uses gaming software as a vehicle for its monetization schemes.

It’s also a sex harassment and assault den for its upper management to prey on its clerical staff, and its HR notoriously covers for them.

I no longer play the Ubisoft games for which I have licenses, and I say this as an old fan of the Far Cry series. No longer.

Ubisoft needs to fail enough to get liquidated and bought out, I expect, by another AAA publisher gone amuck or a private equity management company. In either case, may Ubisoft assets load them down like a neutron star.

In c/196 we had the conversation about the devil being a patron of the arts.

Exactly! In fact, we know that the universe was created in media res so that light photons allegedly streaming to us from thirteen billion light years away in mid transit with the exact amount of red shift it would have from that object retreating away from us due to cosmic inflation, and was, in fact, created by God 2000 in route in the (great) void of space so that it would smack not just into the dot that is Earth, but some dude’s telescope and spectrum analyzer.

In fact, I wasn’t born fifty seven (and some days) years ago. I was born this last Tuesday when the universe was created with everything in motion.

ETA Apparently in the last decade, Last Tuesdayism (the omphalos hypothesis that the universe was created last Tuesday) turned into Last Thursdayism

Prior to that, Last Thursdayism was a separate sect who suggested the universe was recreated every Thursday the way we reboot our OS every once in a while.

The US Supreme Court has had an antagonistic relationship to the forth and fifth amendments to the Constitution of the United States since before I was a kid in the 1970s since they often interfered with efforts to round up nonwhites. But after the 9/11 attacks and the PATRIOT ACT, SCOTUS has been shredding both amendments with carve-out exceptions.

Then Law Enforcement uses tech without revealing it in court, often lying ( parallel reconstruction ) to conceal questionable use, and the courts give them the benefit of the doubt.

I have to admit the Ferguson Unrest of 2014 and the rhetoric about Michael Brown being a thug really changed my mind about Batman, for whom even his games highlight mobs ( mobiles or game artifacts that move) as thugs. And this led to Garth Ennis’ observation that Batman is a billionaire aristocrat who beats up poor people

Then again Supergenius Reed Richards could never cure HIV and T’Challa / Black Panther, King of Wakanda and captain of the vibranium industry can’t ever do enough to elevate non-whites in the US and in industrialized nations. I digress.

Getting back to Batman, I wonder if the white thugs Batman usually preyed on were Italians and Irish, who had to spend a century in the barrel before they were given white privilege.

I do. Wait…are you gatekeeping enjoying movies?

We Fight For Rock And Stone! 🪨⛏️💎

Malaria…

The screwfly…

Parasitoids like wasps…

Quasistable intermittent ecosystems resulting in frequent binges by predators resulting in massive die-offs of prey species and then famine resulting in massive die-offs of the predator species.

These are parts of nature. No heros. No soldiers. Just mass suffering without purpose. In fact, we flockers and banders who will help a fellow out, right a turtle or rescue a cub are new to the game.

i love the game. Then the devs decided I wasn’t playing it right and changed it.