Go watch through a decent recap of the Reckless Ben - Lego - Bricks N Minifigs situation.

Mormon cops are there also shown as hilariously, wildly, nakedly corrupt, just acting as a gang.

Yep, I was gonna say… this FLDS, or an offshoot?

Great work Mormons, you continue to generate terrorist pedophile sex cults, even into the modern era, truly an extremely legitimate cultural lineage and religious tradition.

Yep.

Then also throw in the destruction of the Fairness Doctrine, and in 10 or so years, AM radio is now full of bombastic asshole hypocrite white guys, all charity cases sponsored by usually mostly the oil lobby, paid to be propogandists.

‘Corporate money is free speech’ was the absolute death knell, the point of no return.

The longterm Republican strategy has been to destroy public education and replace it with their own forms of education and general public facing ‘information’.

Because they know idiots are easier to lie to and emotionally manipulate… because they actually hate democracy, and know that democracy cannot work with a stupid, angry, short tempered public.

I mean Vance was definitely groomed and created by Thiel, but its possible he’ll develop his own set of goals and strategies at some point.

Its also possible you’re correct, that he’ll become irrelevant should he not develop his own independent sensd of political savvy, or maybe due to basically him getting particularly savagely scapegoated and clusterfucked, if that ends up being more beneficial to more people in his milieu.

He’s not stupid.

If anything, he’s gloating.

“… and what are you gonna do about that?”

Nothing. JD is a 4chan shit poster with a Yale degree and pretty high competency at whipping basically the Asmongold fandom into being gungho for MAGA, that’s why he is VP, its a reward for being such a good Republican/Trumper online psyop commander.

He, extremely intentionally, helped build the media environment he is here commenting on.

Cheney is Guldo.

… similar headshapes.

I don’t even think he’s an idiot.

Evil? Oh hell yes. But 95% of the time he is just saying stupid shit that inbred MAGAs want to hear, or that will make old guard Democrats stammer and guffaw at… (which is the desired effect, they just look privileged and haughty and holier than thou when they do that).

The funny part is when they think he believes in anything other than how smart and cool he is.

I mean, this has been well established by various psychological studies for like 30 years now, at least.

You don’t have a belief, you have an accurate understanding of reality.

Higher ups in most hierarchichal organizations are significantly more narcissistic than average people.

I have a motivational quote for them!

“Everybody has a plan, untill they get punched in the mouth.”

Wow, are we going to learn that sunny days tend to be warm, and the sky tends to be blue, next?

I’ve been saying this since the Return to Office shit started: A huge part of it is narcissist management that need the narcissistic supply of being able to excercise power and judgement over others, in person.

… the other part is that if you don’t actually need all that office space, well, then all the fraud and money laundering in commercial real estate gets significantly harder to hide.

Death is not ultimately escapable.

You are not permanent; one day, you will go to sleep, and not wake up again.

… but you do have the power to influence the path you walk on the way toward death, the face you’ll be wearing, the stories you’ll be able to tell, when you finally arrive in the company of the reaper.

You can be secure in knowing that it is not possible to escape this fate… and in knowing that you lived not in an impossible attempt to avoid the unavoidable, but instead, that you chose to tread the path as you saw fit to.

The Greek Gods were said to be envious of us mortals, because our mortality meant that what we did with our one life… was important, and meaningful, in a way that nothing the Gods ever did, could be.

When you realize that nothing objectively ‘matters’, to ‘the universe’… you are now free, to decide what matters to you, instead.

And, perhaps ironically… that’s kinda part of the point.

Valve literally presents the Steam Machine as a possible gaming device for the open ecosystem they ‘religiously’ believe in.

But not the only possible gaming device.

The original idea of the Steam Machine, over a decade ago, wss that it would basically be a performance and component spec standard, basically just a known quantity of kinds of hardware that they could say ‘Steam and most games on it will run on something that meets these standards!’

There actually were a number of pc builders that did their own attempt at making their own version of a ‘Steam Machine’.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Machine?wprov=rarw1

Valve is here, now, doing basically the same thing, they just… literally built their own benchmark as an exemplar device, and also now have an operating system to actually center the entire concept around.

I think they’d be greatly pleased if this new Steam Machine, version 2, actually spurred on other manufacturers to make their own… just like how Valve keeps working to make SteamOS work well on other handheld PCs, made by other manufacturers.

Its because most people have a childish understanding of complex issues that basically boils down to ‘thing either bad or good’, ‘thing either perfect or evil’.

Fanboy/girlism applies to sociopolitical idologies too.

Its easier to perform purity testing to establish yourself as a morally/logically consistent person, its easier to criticize flaws…

… than it is to realize the fundamental strategy that has to be involved in achieving any kind of change from the world as it is, to the world as you’d prefer it to be… than it is to think about broad patterns underlying decision making, as well as what those broad patterns could lead to, in a complex world with other actors who have other ideologies/behavior patterns.

You can argue that this kind of fast-food opinion/judgement formation is itself a personality aspect caused or exacerbated by the instant gratification of modern digital hypercapitalism.

Like, I don’t think Valve or Gabe are perfect moral actors, I don’t agree with literally everything they do or espouse.

But… on net? In the big picture? Nearly every other major or even notable actor in the space is morally atrocious in comparison to them, and many things that Valve does are effective counter pressures to those much more atrocious things.

Yep.

Dumb idiot fundamentalist white racists continue to be dumb idiot fundamentalist white racists.

They are not very hard to please, because their brains operate on 100 unspoken and unexamined double standards… you just need to not trigger any of their massive ‘icks’, and their brains will default to allying with you, GodFearing White Christian Man, because they are taught to conform and do magical thinking to justify their actions.

They have no moral problem doing horrible things for God. They’ll tell you the terrible things are terrible, but they’re less terrible than a world that doesn’t have Republican Jesus in charge.

They don’t actually believe in democracy, they never have, they just pretend they do, when either they need to, or thats a useful rhetorical angle in an argument.

No, no he’s not.

JD has been a slimy political creature the entire time, nothing that is currently happening is surprising to him.

He’ll be cast as the competent one, the reasonable one, in contrast to Trump, the well-intentioned but mentally declining GodKing.

The Republican talking heads will all say they’re not MAGA anymore, not even Republican anymore, some of them.

But, most of them, by the time 2028 comes around, will rally around JD the competent and reasonable one, in contrast to… whoever else, the insane radical trans communist that hates God and white people, and kills babies.

This shit is amazingly predictable, works like this everytime… they’ll always fall in line or make a show of holding their nose, and vote for the person that will be pro-white, pro-christian, anti-abortion, and pro-business.

All JD has to do is perform a semi convincing, semi-classy/polite framing of Israel as an ungrateful, wasteful, reckless ally.

That’s it.

I’m from his kind of people. White, male, raised on Rush Limbaugh on AM radio in the truck, everywhere, all the time.

Fortunately for me, I was more curious about the world and fundamentally kind to other people than the vast majority of those I grew up around.

… But this is what will happen, they’ll ‘rehabilitate’ JD so well that they’ll look at you like you’re crazy if you think that was even a thing that happened.

I mean honestly, pretty neat!

Had I any other machine than a Steam Deck right now, I’d give it a whirl… unfortunately, that thing is all I got right now, really don’t want to chance losing all my shit, as I don’t have a sufficient backup external drive either.

I mean really, why bother learning from history, it’s not that deep bro.

I mean yeah, it would/could just be the inverse of what millenials/zoomers grew up with: ‘you have to go to college learn a skilled trade if you want to have a decent living!’

Hard to forecast precisely how strong the effect would be, but absolutely yeah, if a bunch of people flood into a specific category of labor… they will on aggregate depress their own wages.

… This is why the luddites smashed things.

Partially because the machines actually produced inferior output products, mostly because their proliferation caused mass unemployment/immiseration.

A society that wants to technologically progress must also socially progress, otherwise, you’re just building a tinder box.

Oh I mean, I was trying to use the grammar you used but ok then sure.

So in warfare, and really just most of life in general, there’s this concept called proportionality.

If somebody mildly slaps you, pulling out your CC pistol and shooting them in the face is … a disproportianate response.

Hamas has no capacity to summon hundreds of aerial bombing sorties and hundreds of cruise missile strikes, a day, repeatedly, in an ongoing basis.

Uh ok, next… states do not voluntarily disintegrate themselves, because they do things you don’t like.

Next next… part of the MOU was the US would lift its blockade. So, if the US reverts to enacting a blockade, that… will make it so that a ceasefire and peace cannot happen, because thats part of the MOU that the US and Iran agreed to 48 hrs ago.

If you think that’s Trump’s actions have been consistent, uh frankly you are a total idiot who does not know what that word means… and how often in the past 3 months, Trump has said and done near totally opposed, opposite things, every other day.

He has only been consistent in that he consistently flip flops in the extreme.

We are starting the war to overthrow the regime!

We’re doing this for America!

The Kurds are gonna revolt!

Peace is almost here!

We’re energy independent so oil being blocked is no big deal!

I’m gonna destroy an entire civilization!

Look, I’m Jesus!

Praise be to Allah!

The same regime is in place but we also did regime change.

Peace is almost here!

I’m double blockading the blockade of the Strait!

Actually we started this because Israel told me to.

Peace is almost here!

We have 4 months untill we run out of oil reserves.

… etc.

If you think that is ‘consistent’, you’re either developmentally delayed, or schizophrenic.

He’s literally now said ‘we are on the verge of a peace deal’ at least 39 times now.

Iran close strait because Israel+US launch massive, persistent, unprovoked assault.

Unprovoked assault kills many civillians, much civillian infrastructure, much war crime.

Now, Trump want quit, go home, maybe, because strait closed mean world economy die, and US is part of world.

Trump try make Israel stop attacking place Iran not want Israel attack. Israel not listen, get big mad.

Trump get big mad that Israel big mad.

Trump now say ‘strait closed by ME, actually.’

Trump maybe change mind in 24, 48 hrs, who know, he very erratic, not have plan.