Do people just not know who and what Chris Roberts is?

This is what he’s done throughout his career - the only thing that’s notable about Star Citizen really is the scale of it and thus the opportunities he has to find ever more things to obsessively tinker with.

It’s entirely possible that if Microsoft hadn’t bought out Digital Anvil and given him the boot, this wouldn’t even be Star Citizen - it would be Freelancer, coming into its 25th year of delays.

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Any ideology that bans books is self-evidently intellectually and philosophically bankrupt.

That word “overt” isn’t there by accident.

There’s a significant difference between an oligarchic kleptocracy that has to pretend to be a representative democracy and an oligarchic kleptocracy that doesn’t have to bother pretending to be anything else.

I assume it’s going to go until World War III, and until the US is an overt kleptocratic police state.

Really.

rogue state

noun

1. state or nation acting outside of the accepted international norms and policies.

Israel is a rogue state.

So we’re supposed to believe that Israel is only at this late date “ready to risk (an) all-out war” that it in fact has brazenly and obviously been trying to provoke for months now?

Seriously?

Pure unmitigated evil.

Seriously, WHAT is THE DEAL with conservative disinformationists scattering ALL-CAPS WORDS throughout EVERYTHING they WRITE?

My THEORY is that it’s MEANT as a SUBSTITUTE for LOGIC and REASON - that in LIEU of saying things that are ACTUALLY logical, reasonable or true, they JUST say things really LOUDLY.

It MUST be TRUE because it’s so EMPHATIC, right?

And it PROBABLY triggers a PAVLOVIAN response in the DUNDERHEADS who READ it. “LOOK at all the CAPS! This is MY kind of TRUTHINESS!”

It’s just… WEIRD. And sort of PATHETIC.

Of course he is.

It’s really a very simple calculus - any deal is going to include a timeline for Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, and if Netanyahu signs off on a deal that includes a withdrawal from Gaza, the hard right assholes are going to turn on him. And if the hard right assholes turn on him, he’s not going to be able to hold onto the office. And if he doesn’t hold onto the office, he’s likely going to jail, because he’s not just a psychopathic piece of shit, but a grotesquely corrupt psychopathic piece of shit.

And that’s really the whole deal right there - tens and potentially hundreds of thousands of people are dying and millions of people are displaced all so that one grotesquely corrupt psychopathic piece of shit can evade justice.

Israel is a rogue state.

“Doubts grow?”

Why would they even need to “grow?” This is just June and July all over again, with the only difference being that Hamas isn’t buying any of it this time around.

The Biden administration isn’t trying to negotiate anything. It’s just trying to strike a pose to dodge the entirely deserved condemnation it’s getting for enabling a genocide while continuing to enable a genocide.

Reminder that Trump doesn’t live in reality.

He lives in a fantasy world in which he’s the rightful center of the universe, and his entire conception of truth and falsehood and right and wrong is based on how well or how poorly things or ideas or people fit into that worldview.

Pure, unmitigated evil.

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Paper Mario

Jet Force Gemini

Majora’s Mask / Ocarina of Time

Blast Corps

Custom Robo

Mario Golf

Space Station Silicon Valley

Goemon’s Great Adventure

No - probably not.

Religion, just in and of itself, isn’t really the problem. It’s just the most notable example of the underlying problem, which is probably best summed up as aggressive tribalism.

People have a compulsive desire for self-affirmation - for assurance that they embody whatever qualities they consider the indicators of “good” people. And by far the easiest way for people to assure themselves of that is to associate those qualities with a label and self-apply that label. That gives them a fellowship of label-wearers who are invested in the same belief, which establishes a feedback loop in which they all assure each other of how [good/right/strong/smart/etc.] they are, and a ready-made set of outsiders they can individually and collectively condemn. And that last is the real problem - since few if any people truly embody the qualities they wish to believe they do, the easiest and most effective way to assure themselves they do is to focus on some designated set of others and on the assertion that they fail to possess those qualities. That allows people to assure themselves that they are at least more [good/right/strong/smart/etc.] than these other people over there.

That’s clearly a toxic and antagonistic dynamic that really just serves to divide people up into warring factions, and since it’s at least somewhat irrational yet crucial to people’s self-affirming self-images, it’s a thing that easily gets entrenched and, whenever possible, codified, so that it can be forcibly imposed.

Again, religion is certainly the most common and historically destructive vehicle for that, but it’s far from the only one. Most notably, it’s also the dynamic underlying virtually all ideology and a great deal of philosophy, not to mention a great many less significant distinctions, ranging from sexual preference to diet to sports fandom.

Now - in the first place, I would say that it would not have been possible to have a world without religion, since the practical purpose of religion is to provide answers to questions for which there’s insufficient evidence or knowledge to support nominally legitimate answers, and that lack of evidence and knowledge was an unavoidable part of our history. From the moment that somebody wondered what that big bright thing up in the sky was and somebody else made up an answer for them, religion was inevitable.

Beyond that though - if we were to imagine a world in which religion somehow never came to be, we’d just have had a world in which people would’ve focused that much more on the other ways in which they divide themselves against themselves, since that desire for self-affirmation exists anyway.

And truth be told, I actually think that’s part of the problem with our current world - that a great many people have just shifted from what would in the past been a self-affirming faith in a religion to a self-affirming faith in an ideology or philosophy or political affiliation or some other tribal distinction - that much of what we’re seeing today is the same toxicity just based on more secular divisions.

Not that religion has become less of a problem - what it’s lost in overall market share, it’s undeniably gained in the fervor and aggression of its remaining adherents, but it’s also been joined by a wide range of other divisions, each destructive in the same general ways, even if not necessarily to the same degree.

Huh.

It took me a while to sort out that meme, then it suddenly hit me - I’ve not only succeeded in eliminating the tankies from my Lemmy experience, but have done so so effectively that I started to forget that they even exist.

At this point, the only people I see trying to defend Russia are a handful of angry right-wing morons who have bought in to the propaganda spread by Russia’s assets in the GOP, and they’re few and far between.