An underappreciated part of civilizational development is social technology, as opposed to material technology.

Sometimes people just don’t think of seemingly obvious ways to do things for hundreds or thousands of fucking years. Human society is a funny thing.

Chuds: “YES ROME SO MANLY PURE TESTOSTORONE”

Romans: “Too tall? Barbarian. Too much meat? Barbarian. Dick too big? Barbarian. Too aggressive? Barbarian. No self-control? Barbarian. Too much sex? Barbarian.”

So yes, I do empathize with you and your fears, but I cannot trade what might happen to your family (or mine) for what is happening right now in Palestine.

Hey, guess what, you’re not! Nothing here is being traded! Rather, you’re voting for genocide in the US and genocide in Palestine! How brave of you!

Why would they stop now in that case?

Dems: “Wow, we moved drastically to the left and it’s still not enough to satisfy these Very Important Leftists. I guess they’re a lost cause as a voting bloc, considering that we’re already running a platform trying to get the widest possible spread between left and right voters that will only win on a handful of percentage points. Time to see if we can peel off any right-wing voters again.”

And here comes the parade of Very Interested People to defend their favorite fascist’s catspaw and cheerlead for genocide under the guise of “BOTH SIDES ARE BAD”

American here - we didn’t have to memorize it. All we had to do was know the groupings (Noble gas, metalloids, etc)

We didn’t appreciate Bill Nye enough as kids.

“I’ll remember”, I say, not because I’ll remember, but because any form of writing it down I will inevitably forget as well. I’m just trying to save myself pointless work, here.

Defund the police is a hard sell outside of the minority communities that face the worst of what the police do.

No, it’s a hard sell inside those minority communities too

Some progressive ideals are what the average American wants. Many are still very hard sells. What the Dems need to realize is that the political-junkie conceptions of ‘centrist’ and ‘progressive’ mean very little to the ‘swing voters’ they’re trying to appeal to. They don’t want a coherent ideological approach. Not that that seems to stop ‘centrist’ Dem reps from constantly trying to chase policy rightwards.

, but I ain’t planning on dying any time soon.

I mean the arcades were dying, not the people in them.

If you’re living in a place where 40-60 year olds are dying on the regular, you’re probably living around methheads.

… though there’s that too…

Anyway, I write this because I think your video game metaphor really works here, and I think that’s the way to speak to a large portion of our populace now.

I don’t know that arcade metaphors really work for most of the population now, though. Even when I was young they were dying.

Lord. I miss the days when I could say “I think the Republican candidate will meaningfully weaken American influence and moral authority on the world stage, damage our national finances in service to business elites, and cause needless deaths both at home and abroad through reckless and callous policy” instead of “Jesus fucking Christ, this is just outright, directly stated fascism, why are all of you ghouls still voting [R]???”

Honest question…how do you compromise with an ongoing genocide in an apartheid state?

Same way we compromised with the UK and France in WW1, or the Soviet Union in WW2, or Turkiye during the Cold War, or Saudi Arabia in the modern day.

When there are some 200 countries in the world, all with their own squabbles that affect their region and themselves, taking no sides is still taking sides - and no side is clean. The idea that there’s some ideal option where no one gets hurt is just not the reality of things. Not every conflict is like this - not every conflict will continue to be like this. We can make a better world. But not by sitting on our hands now in an attempt to keep them ‘clean’. Short of quite literally conquering the entire world, all of our choices are necessarily limited by the need to take a side in most conflicts, in which both sides are often pretty gruesome.

That being said, fuck Israel. Revoke everything. Side with Palestine.

What’s the difference between hell and PTSD on the malice scale?

People should be given a chance to become more than their bad decisions, if they show they’re actively trying to better themselves.

Cool. Is Trump doing that?

If not, I stand by my statement. I hope he suffers.

I just don’t believe in well-wishing to actively malicious literal Nazi fucks. Guess that’s radical.

I have PTSD. I have zero sympathy for him. I hope he suffers even more than me.

I hope this is a lesson that sticks, at least for a generation.

My mother always used to tell me to sit the hell down because pacing made her uneasy, like there was something that needed to be done that she wasn’t doing, lmao.