Campaigning in the US relies heavily on money from wealthy investors to get off the ground. Meaning, any new party that wants to get going needs approval from the wealthy to do so.

Additionally, a huge percentage of the population pays no attention to politics at all, just closing their eyes to the whole election and either not voting, or voting for the party they’ve always voted for every time, so even if your party managed to get some attention, it’d just be another 3rd party further fracturing what small portion of the population risks voting outside the 2 party system as it is.

In other to have a shot at winning, you’d need to somehow make enough money to afford competing with the 2 established parties for screen time, which would mean major corporate backing that would only happen if they liked your policies.

Yeah, I spent about 8 hours going over every person this election, including local mayor, city council, and board of education members. And, yeah, 8 hours isn’t an amount of time everyone has all in one block, but most of the research was pretty easy to digest quickly, and I could’ve split it into a bunch of 5-minute pieces whenever I had a bit of time over the course of a couple months. I get that it’s not the most interesting or calming activity, but I think people could at least take a small amount of enjoyment knowing they’ve properly educated themselves on the goals and qualifications of all the people on their ballot.

Which is why the people who decide what they think steer them toward worries about the nuclear family and abortion.

That’s a lot of Dong

Hardly semantic. The way you fix a broken system is by working within the system to gradually shift it back to normal. The way you destroy a working corrupt system is by literally tearing it down French revolution style. Which path are we going to take? It’s only semantic if we ultimately decide to take no path at all, and simply lay down and die.

I don’t honestly think that would work. They’ve been conditioned to take comfort in not knowing things. I’ve seen the thought process unfold in front of me hundreds of times: “If a republican did it, it was a good thing and part of the plan, even if I don’t understand how yet.” It’s exactly the same thought process that they employ for their religion: “God is good and does good things, even though terrible things happen to people all the time that God must have allowed if he exists, there’s always a plan, even if we don’t know it.”

Dang, I just started playing a couple weeks ago. But I guess that means I made it just in time to be one of the people who stop playing in solidarity!

My wife surprised me by how much she enjoys just randomly saying “Get-get-get-get down! Get-get-get-get up…mom.”

My friends and I still love to quote those. My friend Brian pretty much always walks into a room with “Hey everybody! I’m the new kid - my name’s Brian! I like to Skateboard!”

While that’s true, it was mostly just because Mondale was from Minnesota, and even then he only won by 0.18%.

So… You cum here often?

Yeah, that’s the family history of inbreeding that I was talking about - if you continuously have children within the family for multiple generations then the risk continues to rise so long as the trend continues. It’s generally only the risk of getting 2 copies of some familial recessive condition or other issues that arise from getting identical copies of genetic information from both parents, though, so breaking the chain and having a kid with someone outside of the family removes that risk; even if someone has a family history of inbreeding, it doesn’t put their potential children at risk so long as their partner isn’t related to them.

Inbreeding generally stops being a notable factor around 4th degree relation between parents. Even first cousins, 3rd degree relatives, only have about a 6% risk of an anomaly at birth when having a child together, compared to the 3% normal rate for all pregnancies. There’s likely been a LOT of inbreeding in any one person’s family history.

The nice thing is that once a new non-relative is added to the mix, the risks associated with past inbreeding largely go away; you only pass on 1 copy of your genes to your kid, so even if you’re personally affected by a family history of inbreeding giving you a bunch of identical copies, if your kid’s other parent isn’t related to you, their copies should be different from yours, and the kid will have 2 different copies just like anyone else, helping protect them from recessive familial conditions and the like.

Nah, it’s referring to the first space by grouping the first and second words, “Pig” and “And,” and then referring to the second space by grouping the second and third words, “And” and “Whistle.”

“Thank you I came in 30 seconds.”

Looks cool, but I worry that they’ve got so many different enemies pulling in different directions that they won’t really get into an interesting story for any of them. The reason I loved Origins was because it really focused on the darkspawn, both in terms of the lore surrounding them, and the effect their invasion has on society. Then the DLC came out and teased that the darkspawn are more than they appear to be, setting up for future games to delve into that even more. It was great, but then the next couple of games came out and didn’t seem to have that same feeling of depth, and I lost interest. If the game is just a checklist of different things to kill, I’m not really interested in playing it.

I like to think it’s just really long.

I just want them to finish the beta 2D version of Rayman 2. I was so excited when I unlocked the demo for it at the end of Rayman 2, thinking it was a sneak preview for the next game, only be disappointed to learn it was the scrapped initial concept instead…

3D Rayman games are good, but they feel like a completely different series when compared to the bright, colorful world of Rayman 1. The newer 2D ones are closer, but still feel too different.

Ni.ce