Sometimes it feels like the American economy, the tech sector at least certainly, is basically just a series of pyramid schemes that are all sort of loosely connected and propping each other up.

Punished Venom Sinwar moment....

Fifty points to anyone who can find a picture of a president sporting a beard after 1893.

Do pre-presidency photos count? There's that infamous picture of Bill and Hillary from the 1970s looking like a pair of nerds.

"Hearts are in the right place" is code for "won't challenge the supremacy of money and corporate power in America". He's giving away the game because its basically an admission that either candidates agenda won't fundamentally change the status quo and so either one winning is acceptable.

For real. Also: I was promised tons of cool dangerous unregulated tech to go along with it! Can't get a machine gun rocket launcher arm prosthetic but at least you can purchase a the license to a jpeg of one with dumb little speaker which is spying on you to sell your data. Shit blows.

https://youtu.be/C31XYgr8gp0

I remember when I first heard this dialogue on release I thought it was pseudo intellectual psychobabble.

...it makes more and more sense year after year and it scares me.

So I'm a dumb engineering guy who has a tentative grasp on geopolitics and Israel at best but, There was a magazine cover I saw a while back that showed a bunch of dominoes with the flags of Various countries with Israel at the forefront. The headline and the cover were pretty blanat in saying: If Israel falls the rest of the west will fall from the domino effect.

That imagery is obviously hyperbolic but I think to a larger extent than we sometimes appreciate; a lot of very powerful people genuinely believe that. I think they view Israel as being basically a requirement for any future with western hegemony, and since a world without that hegemony is completely untenable to them we're basically all in on the project now. Either the dream of greater Israel happens or we have to start managing and facing the decline.

"....first as a tragedy...then as a farce..."

Genuinely one of the most egregious and frustrating character assassinations I've ever seen in one of these things. I know on some level all of these stories are dependent on who is behind the typewriter so its impossible to say what a character actually would or wouldn't do but its just such a fucking infuriatingly simplistic view not just of the mutant civil rights allegory but also of how a character like magneto would perceive their struggle. Haven't finished X-men 97 yet but the plot point with what happens to Storm and his response feels like a direct fucking response to that scene in Last Stand TBH.

Judge me if you want...but I'm a real sucker for a happy ending like this.

Muad'dib's war is litterally called a fucking Jihad. I had to go check the comments and thankfully at least there's a lot of pushback pointing out what nonsense this is.

Reminder: all art is political and all science/fiction fantasy is about re-contextualizing various politcal/historical events. Dune is not less political and no more subtle than fucking Avatar. The end.

Kinda what I was thinking. Like legit I actually genuinely sympathize because I know defying your own programming is a goddamn motherfucker.

Jokes aside: I always thought the obvious route to go if you wanted an original Avatar Game was to leave gender up to the player and then have them named something semi neutral like "Hiro". I feel like that's the far more likely direction here.

Liberals worship procedure and power above all. Foreigners and even working class citizens being slaughtered is fine as long as it follows the technicalities of the rulebook. Even if they scream about them and profess outrage its only to the extent they can use them as a prop. Physically threatening, even in jest, a member of the ruling class isn't just against the rules: it challenges the very legitimacy of the rules. That is the ultimate sin to a liberal.

Near my kids school there's a central market which is popular for play dates because it has a giant playground in the back attached to a kitchen where you can get food and drinks. I did a playdate a week or two ago with one of my sons friends after school. There was a PTA meeting that evening around 5:00 and while getting ice cream around 3:30ish we randomly ran into one of the faculty members who was sitting at the wine bar already clearly having indulged a few. I could tell she was a little off put or worried she'd been caught but all I could think was: God fucking bless. I wouldn't want to deal with most of these fucking parents sober either and I can only imagine what she's been dealing with all day.

It will be ok for some. It will be not ok for others. On *average *it will be less ok then it was yesterday by a tiny incremental bit...going forward...conceivably forever.

I'm stuck in the USA for at least another 8 years but I'm starting to wonder if exit strategies are something I need to be considering more strongly. At the very least I think maybe I shouldn't stay in texas. I don't know exactly what the timeline is and I don't think there's going to be a full masks off fascist coup overnight in the next year or anything but l if we all accept the premise that material conditions are only going to worsen then we should all be pretty fucking concerned that the fascists are a hell of a lot more organized and proactive about laying groundwork than we are.

Uh no sweetie, didn't you know: they hate us for our freeeedooommes

Darmock and jilad at tenagra

When Captain America: Winter Soldier came out it was (insofar as capeshit slop can be) a pretty big deal for a few reaosns. The biggest one by far was that they took a guy whose whole schtick is that he throws a giant frisbee and managed to make him and his fight sequences actually fucking cool. Of note also though was that it actually confronted and indeed actually confirmed the idea that the shadowy government agency they were all working with were basically Nazis. The moral of that one was that America has become what it originally fought against in WW2 and we needed the symbol of the American dream to bring us back on track.

That was 10 years ago. At this point even people like me who will guiltily consume capeshit will tell you that's all cope. America is a genocidal colonizer state who served as inspiration to the Nazis. The values Captain America claims to have represented are and always were fantasy.

If I was to do a Superman movie I think I would take a page out of David Goyer's brief comic run where Superman renounced his American citizenship. Maybe have a B-plot that ties into the A plot where Superman who is by any and all definitions an undocumented immigrant is being granted American citizenship only to have him reject the offer at the end when he realizes that the concept of the American way is actually short sighted and myopic and that he actually needs to see himself as a citizen of the world. Honestly I wouldn't be shocked if they actually go that route. Meaningless platitudes but I don't see how anything else won't land completely flat.