Itty53

And even those wouldn’t be affected by a shutdown. When the government shuts down, it’s not like the justice department grinds to a halt. Federal trials continue.

I’m gonna point out that it is only complex to not be white. It is not complex to be white. That’s a simple determination white society makes, that’s all the complexity there is. That determination.

Irish people weren’t white, then they were.

Italian people weren’t white, then they were.

Latino people weren’t white, then they were. They’re getting there. See my other comment.

Jews still aren’t “white”. They’re “Jews”. Secular Jews get to be white though. “The good ones”, they’ll say. Hrm.

There’s no group mastering over white people making them play by some ever-changing set of made up rules. That’s what it is to be not white in America. Literacy tests, citizenship tests, background tests, sundown towns, don’t look a white woman in the eye, mind your manners, etc etc etc etc etc etc etc. Those are all things done to minorities that have never been done to white people.

“White” is not a complex thing. Full disclosure, I’m a white guy. First generation Italian American, my dad came off a boat at Ellis Island and his family had to cross America all the way to California to find people who treated them as equals. Italians, they’re as complex as Germans and the Dutch. But white? White isn’t complex.

Good moment to point out that “white” is an ever-changing target that constantly moves as needed by the white people in power. Remember “one drop” was their rule. There’s no such thing as “white”.

Fun fact that demonstrates the point: depending on your locale you may already be seeing this happen, but Latinos are about twenty years away from being considered defacto “white people”. And it’s not accidental. It’s a coordinated effort to get hold of a rising voting bloc that’s historically very conservative.

If you live in California you might already recognize the difference between Norteno and Sureno (speaking colloquially, not referring to the gangs using those words as their names). If you’ve been paying attention to folks like Enrique Tarrio, Raphael Ted Cruz, and George “This is My Name This Month” Santos, you’d see it happening elsewhere too.

Latinos who don’t embrace their Latino culture while they’re here in America are being indoctrinated the same way they did the Irish and Italians before them. Remember neither of those groups were “white” when they first arrived in America either. The inner circle already accepted them as White People, they’re just working on their adherents now. Ask yourself why so many second generation Mexican-American immigrants are hesitant to call themselves Mexican. Nope, they’ll use Latino though. They’ve internalized that word as what the white people mean by it, it’s a dirty word in that context.

And this is the effect of culturally ingrained racism. We saw it with Irish, Italians, we see it with Black Americans, and we see it with Mexican Americans too. The patterns are right there and obvious.

Y’all block this user and move on.

In case anyone is wondering, Ramaswamy is just another in a long line of the Republican history.

During the primary season you’ll see rumblings of support for a relatively unknown and minority candidate for Republicans. Herman Cain was their last one. He’s dead now, they needed a new one. Ramaswamy is it.

The only reason he’s talked about at all is so they set themselves up to later claim, “see we’re not racist! We almost elected this guy!”. The reality is this guy, nor Cain, ever stood a chance. Whether or not they realize that and play their role anyway would be the thing to know.

Block the user. By replying to him you’re spreading him through the fediverse.

The legal reason for hearing it at all was whistleblower protections. That was what the committee was hearing about, were whistleblower protections actually violated? Watch AOC’s line of questioning, it’s extremely telling.

The committee exists to oversee exactly that law because the people who would violate it are government employees. The reality of his claims are irrelevant, and the validity of his claims is also irrelevant.

The questions are “did her feel he had a valid concern to report”, yes, and “did he report it through the appropriate channels” (we don’t really know, this was exactly the topic of AOC’s questions, and this made Grusch visibly nervous), and finally, “did he suffer duress from superiors for having made those duly obligated reports?”. The answer to the last one depends entirely on what those proper channels are. You do not have protections by simply going to the public. You have to inform superiors up the chain of command.

It all feels incredibly tailored to make Congress a media side show while carefully dodging culpability for doing so. The entire point of “well I didn’t see anything, people told me and I believed them” is just far too conveniently placed, the stories he has all fall in line with what the alien sub culture already had well established in their lore. Too too convenient. I believe AOC was on to that because while she’s smart, it doesn’t take a genius to figure this out.

The irony of people posting on web applications they utilize for their own enjoyment, “applications don’t belong on web browsers” is killing me here.

There is a portion of the tech industry with their head stuck firmly up their ass and it seems a lot of em hang out in the fediverse. These people would demand we go back to party lines and manual switchboards. Techno-hipsters who are just angry at the next generation who took their BBS internet and actually made the world use it.

Downvote me, that’s fine. Use that interactivity application on your browser. Go be the very definition of irony. Please.

The value of the Russian ruble has fallen by almost half in the last year. They have taken a severe pay cut, that ten percent doesn’t even kind of bring them up par.

Removed by mod

For the record, OP posted the article title and not a question of their own.

Yup. Remember this when they tout how threads “already has millions of users”. They’re all zombie accounts.

When someone says a thing and you deliberately interpret anger where there was none (especially after they’ve said it, “I’m not angry”) and insist they “calm down” rather than addressing any valid criticism or complaint they actually bring up, that’s quite gaslighty. It’s intentionally presenting a false reality and insisting I adhere to it “or he’s just wild, he won’t calm down”.

Or “he’s just a troll not worthy of consideration” as you put it. Which is definitively dehumanizing as well, but you don’t see me whining about it. It is ironic though. Me calling childish arguments childish, whoa! You calling someone a troll, that’s perfectly reasonable. You calm down.

It’s not strictly the same as gaslighting but that’s why I said “gaslighty”. But go off about the hypothetical strangers I belittled, please, whatever gets you going down there.

It’s pretty fucking immature (and gaslighty) to respond to valid criticism with “chill out bro”.

Go ahead and ban me, you don’t need to make passive-aggressive threats. You can just power-trip away. Don’t forget to leave a comment that reads “user was banned” so everyone knows how calm and collected you are with your ban hammer.

And I’ll say it again. *Deep breath, peaceful mind, thoughtful spirit*: That user is an entitled child who made a stupid argument.

I’m calm as shit man. Relaxing on a Sunday. It’s just that I’m not wrong. He is self-entitled. He wants game developers to spend their money publishing DVDs for the one-off collectors – nevermind the environment, nevermind that they’re going to be downloading day 1 updates the size of the game anyway, nevermind all of the ridiculous arguments about “oh poor me, they won’t let me easily copy and distribute their product to my friends”. Nope – “I’m a collector, and game developers are awful people for not giving me my CD and this should be illegal and society should make laws to satisfy my collector quirk.”

Are you fucking for real. Go back and read this fuckin’ thread, dude, that’s what people are fucking saying. “Make laws against this”.

That’s self-entitlement defined. It’s not a charge, it’s an observation made by an adult living in a society of law regarding another publicly made comment. I offered scrutiny from the apparently rare perspective of being a grown up.

And this is very much a childish argument. Like whining your dinner at the restaurant didn’t come in a colorful box with a toy inside, or that the book you have to read has no pictures in it. They’re not even complaining about the product, they’re complaining about the package it’s delivered in. Literally the same as saying “that meal is gonna suck because it didn’t come in a McDonalds box”. Six year olds think like that.

Gamers are the most entitled group of brats on the planet and this is just one tiny example it. Literally demanding useless plastic trash, not even a toy or anything you look at - no, just a useless blu-ray disc that the hardware all but ignores anyway.

And again - I’m calm as shit. Don’t make the mistake of thinking a few paragraphs means I’m angry. That’s just being lazy, you can read. Hell, you can even read criticism. And if you can’t, get the hell off social media.

There are no solutions to climate change that are contingent on a particular party being in power in a single nation when the problem isn’t confined to a single nation. Making the environment about Democrats over Republicans is wildly dangerous because it breeds contentment: people think they did their part in electing the “right” person and stop giving a damn. Politics isn’t going to offer a solution to climate change, but they’ll certainly tell you they’ve got em.

Tell me you’re okay with being lied to in order to be made afraid, tell me you’re okay with science being misrepresented for political brownie points, and I’ll tell you you’re no better than a grubby politician yourself, because that’s all that standpoint serves. Political brownie points. It’s “ends justify the means” logic. “Its fine to fear monger and lie and misrepresent facts as long as you’re doing so on support of the right ideology” is wildly stupid and dangerous reasoning.

You have a problem with packaging. The product is the software. Software. Soft. Media is irrelevant. You may as well be insisting games be provided on floppy disks for your own contentedness.

It isn’t false advertising. You’re just self-entitled and want companies to cater to you specifically and not the masses. Gamers are really the most entitled group of folks on the planet. You may as well demand Netflix provide VHS copies of every new show they make. Same stupid argument. If you don’t like your arguments being called stupid, don’t publicize your stupid arguments.

Because brick and mortar retail isn’t entirely dead. Impulse buys, Christmas gifts, etc etc etc etc. All the reasons to have a product for sale in a store. The product was never the CD or DVD or floppy disks, and gamers who make a fuss about it are just crotchety for the sake of it. There’s no reason to print physical media. I haven’t even owned an optical drive in my pc for well over a decade. Still bought some “physical copies” of games that were just codes. I’m not upset.

You’re old grandpa, go back inside and stop yelling at The Cloud.

Given the climate (pun) of politics at the time he was alive and playing that role, and given that hindsight has taught us An Inconvenient Truth was more political than it was based in science, and given that Crichton’s argument was that environmentalism had to be apolitical in order to ever be effective … yeah I’m not a climate change denier but neither was Crichton.

Crichton was a Democrat. And he was right, Al Gore’s movie was about fear-driven politics, not actionable goals and plans.

Go look at how climate scientists described that movie. “The basic truth and it’s inconvenience remains” one researcher was quoted saying. Tacitly admitting everything beyond the basic truth of the film was inaccurate. Go on, check out what retrospectives have to say about it. There’s a lot of em.

Again, Crichton was right, and he was absolutely not in denial of climate change. He was against using social problems with scientific solutions as political ammunition in the fear cannons.

Bottom line is any time someone insists a complex problem has a solution as simple and clear cut as “vote Democrat”, they’re wrong. More wrong than they are right, especially given any timeline longer than 4 years. And that’s exactly what you’re doing here. “Crichton deviated from the party line on the environment ergo he’s just a ‘denier’”. There’s far more nuance in this life than that.

Fun fact, Michael Crichton (that one) coined that, Gell-Mann amnesia after Murray Gell-Mann, who had nothing to do with it.