Miner Wars 2081 has similarities. Same people who made Space Engineers.

There’s a difference between allow by default and deny by default. One of them is necessary for a healthy society while acknowledging that you need to keep certain groups away from you. The other is culty.

any member can call bullshit on the Chair

Yes, definitely making excuses.

I’m guessing Roberts Rules stuff.

As a quick and dirty thing, you can call a voice vote of ayes and nays. If it’s not particularly close, it’ll be obvious what the outcome is, the Chair will call the result, and everyone moves on. However, any member can call bullshit on the Chair, and then it goes to a more formal process.

So without watching the whole damn video, it’s probably that the voice vote went one way, the Chair said it was the other, got called on it, and the roll call vote went against him.

They ate their Wheaties this morning. Tomorrow, back to Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

Yes, that explains very neatly why authoritarians want to get rid of it.

I don’t think OnlyFans had to do much of anything in the end. There was just enough media stink about it to make it go away.

Credit card companies don’t have to make a consistently applied set of rules the way a government of laws does. They can make it all up for each individual site if they wish. Capitalism can create a censorship regime that’s stronger than nominally democratic governments are willing to do.

Capitalism is creating a level of censorship that exceeded what the US government was ever able to do after the Warren court. Parts of this have been there for a long time. You can drop f-bombs on cable TV all you like; the FCC can’t do anything about it since it’s not over public airwaves. They generally don’t do that, because advertisers don’t like it. Capitalism set the rule, not the government.

YouTube has put this idea into overdrive. You can’t make a straightforward, monetized video about the Holocaust anymore, because the language you would have to use would violate YouTube’s written and unwritten rules. Meanwhile, actual fucking Nazis have had little issue using YouTube to spread their bullshit.

Credit card companies have had issues with porn sites in terms of fraud reporting. Not necessarily because of actual fraud–if the site you use is under CCbill, it’s fine–but because some guy’s spouse sees the card transactions, asks what this particular line is for, and he lies and says it’s probably fraud and he’ll call it in. Get more than a few of those, and the processor will always be flagged for review.

They do outright stop some of the more fringe porn. Bree Mills (of Adulttime) has said that they get limited by the credit card industry far more than the government. All the faux-incest videos go out of their way to mention in dialog that everyone is a step family and over 18. You won’t find scat on Kink.com, again because their payment processor won’t allow it.

That’s been the situation for a few decades, but it has gone beyond that in the last few years. They tried it on OnlyFans, and the company maneuvered things to show why that’s an incredibly bad idea, and then the card companies backed down. But they’re trying again elsewhere, and they’re starting to be successful. I severely doubt they had any significant fraud issues on Steam or itch.io, NSFW items or otherwise.

Ultimately, this stuff is a tiny slice of their revenue. If they want to shut it all down on a moral crusade, they will barely notice the hit to their numbers.

On a side note, I’d like the advocate that you should pay for porn if it’s within your means. You’ll often find better quality stuff at sites that properly run their sets with consent. If you like queer porn or unconventional body types, there are a lot of sites for that which just don’t show up on PornHub.

I checked, and Alex Jones has brought her up. Yes, she is on their radar.

His sycophants are not capable of taking over from him. That’s not how these things ever work.

They won’t because there are almost certainly big Democratic donors on that list. And Bill. Both parties slow walked this whole thing for decades.

The AOC and Bernie types don’t care about that, but they don’t serve on the Oversight Committee. Still, just getting Maxwell there should stoke the fires.

I mean, they could try. It would toss nitroglycerin into the MAGA rage that’s already forming. So yeah, go right ahead.

She could still be subpoena’d by Congress–House Oversight Committee already has–and I don’t think she could plead the fifth on anything if she’s already pardoned. So yeah, go ahead and do that.

Try reading again. I didn’t say he was smart. I said he was the smartest in the room. Which he is. It’s not that hard to be the smartest when you’re surrounded by idiots.

They legit had no clue Trump was involved. That’s how much of an echo chamber they had. Now the faction that cared the most about the Epstein files is clashing with the rest.

There are almost certainly high level donors to the Democrats in there, too, and probably Bill Clinton and a few other politicians. Naturally, the left in the US is happy to have them released, anyway, but MAGA doesn’t think in those terms. They think everyone to the left of Hillary is brainwashed into supporting Democrats, and would never support releasing the files. That’s why they were able to pretend it had nothing to do with their side.

It matters a ton, and I wish people would stop saying otherwise.

Every dictator needs support among the people. They cannot function without it. Trump is starting to lose a chunk of his own MAGA base over Epstein. Not all of it, but the core MAGA support is not that big. He can’t lose much of it before things turn against him fast.

And it may happen very fast. Nobody thought the Soviet Union was going to dissolve right up to the second that it actually did.

When you’ve been shown facts that contradict your argument, concede politely. People will respect you for it. In fact they’ll probably respect you more than if you go down endless chains of trying to save face.

Remember, this should go both ways. There will be times when people concede to you, and other times when you need to concede.

I don’t think it needs to take very many people doing this to create a snowball effect where it becomes the common way to debate.

Really, just Marco Rubio. He’s the only kinda competent person around; he’s not that smart, but if he walks into a room in the White House, chances are good he’s the smartest one there. That’s why they keep giving him new jobs to do.

Except you can’t manage people like that. Dude is going to burn out, and then what?

The bad news is that this is going to be very bad for a lot of people.

The good news is that he’s escalating to avoid dealing with the fact that he’s already losing grip on power.

You’d be naive to jump right to that conclusion.

The worldwide pedophile ring of rich people definitely does exist. That doesn’t mean we throw out rational skepticism in other ways.

He was 80 years old and sick. Just like with Scalia’s death, there’s no reason to jump to conclusions about foul play. Of course, that won’t stop the Alex Jones crowd from doing it anyway.