Hegar

The d&d game summoning the devil was always my favorite. Always love a d&d episode.

Also any one where the pope is shown in league with someone unlikely - communists, jews, muslims, etc.

I always took them all whenever I found them - horrible things, I love them covers it perfectly.

But also, I wouldn’t just leave a kitchen knife lying in public. Most people can be trusted to safely avoid the danger. But what if a child, or someone intent on harm found it?

The responsible thing to do is to remove the threat from the environment.

Are people not familiar with Chick Tracts? These comics are the product of the prodigous paranoid right wing evangelical conspiracy theorist Jack Chick (1924-2016).

I think these comics are best understood as the work of an outsider artist, like Henry Darger or a painting elephant. His work allows you to glimpse a mind outside the normal human experience.

His work focuses on who is going to hell - everyone who’s not a right wing american protestant, and many who are. It shows a strong pornographic influence - many end in a blissful face dowsed in a baptismal money-shot.

It’s meant to be used as a legitimate tool to evangelize. The worst christian lunatics leave these things in public, earnestly believing that after reading you’ll realize the divinely ordained truth that freemasons will all burn in hell along with blood-drinking rothschilds and D&D players.

Being angry at voters and calling them idiots over choices the democratic party made doesn’t help defeat trump.

Anyone not voting for Biden because of Gaza is a fucking idiot.

The democracts insist on maintaining this position despite the mountain of evidence that it’s driving down turn out in their base, and does not represent the wishes of the electorate.

Why is it that voters have to swallow genocide, and not that democrats have to stop perpetuating electorally unpopular genocide?

Of course trump will be worse and i’ll be holding my nose and voting for biden but it makes no sense to blame voters for the inevitable and foreseeable consequences of the imperial cowardice of the democratic party.

Part of the problem is hyperactive agency detection - the same biological bug/feature that fuels belief in the divine.

If a twig snaps, it could be nothing or someone. If it’s nothing and we react as if it was someone, no biggie. If it was someone and we react as if it was nothing, potential biggie. So our brains are bias towards assuming agency where there is none, to keep us alive.

I always thought of romney as the republican’s plan C. If White Supremacy fails, and More White Supremacy fails, then they might try Quieter White Supremacy.

But Hamas won, they completely control the ‘unity’ government and Fatah have vastly less power. If divide and conquer was the goal Netanyahu would have been funneling resources to Fatah and not Hamas. But he has consistently empowered Hamas because the international community can’t accept a Hamas-led state.

That ended over 15 years ago.

I am guessing their calculation is that losing support of Israel lobby is 100% loss?

Yeah, I’ve been presuming that’s a significant part of it. That and the importance of a dependent and dependable ally to help anchor US security architecture in a vital region. Israel needs US imperial presence in the region. Saudi just benefits from it.

US support for Israel continuing the current conflict or US support for Israel in general? If really forced into it, maybe the Democrats can withdraw their blessing for the current conflict, but I don’t see how they could end support for Israel. If Putin wins the US election who knows what could happen but short of that Israel is just too important to the US empire and they know it. I mostly believe the official line from Washington that they don’t have that much leverage against Israel - in the sense that Bibi&co have enough counter levers to make acting against them more costly than it’s worth for the Democrats.

Hence the bullshit antisemitism law, the brutalizing of campus protests, etc. Democrats are even willing to drive down turn out among their base in one of the most important elections in US history over this - I just don’t see them doing that if they had a better card to play.

I doubt it will change even if the US withdraws support, but I’m a cynical depressive type.

Our fundamentally inhuman treatment of the Palestinian people led to October 7.

There are only two ways to prevent it happening again. We could stop the unconscionable deprivations we inflict on the Palestinian people or we could speed up the genocide we’ve been engaged in.

No surprises that the government compromised of war criminals and people the Israeli courts have deemed to be terrorists are going for the later. The far right are in charge and they’re pretty open that this is the goal.

It’s not divide and conquer, that implies keeping multiple groups at parity and fighting each other. Israel intentionally kept the crazies in charge to undermine the viability of a Palestinian state.

the operation is highly organised, technically savvy

Of course an operation this sophisticated targets people looking to buying luxury brands for cheap, that sounds like an ideal mark.

I personally believe that preserving a false and misleading picture of reality designed to trumpet a deranged cult that is working to make the world objectively worse for everyone including themselves is not acceptable.

I would say, “Look mum I love you more than anything in the world but preserving some of these movies crosses an ethical line for me.”

Of course I grew up in a house of atheist jewish academics, so making and justifying personal ethical stances that contravene wider group stances is expected behavior in my family. And we take document preservation fairly seriously.

“Because” often doesn’t make sense in the real world where anything that happens is the sum total of multiple factors. Especially a trend as broad as enshitification.

Being publicly traded seems like a contributing factor, but a sole owner can still enshitify through greed or incompetence.

I would guess that market consolidation and low competition are more of a factor.

it justifies the unacceptable atrocities

I never said that because it doesn’t. None of the atrocities committed in the name of states are justified.

This has nothing to do with the article nor with @some_guy’s comment.

How do you mean?

They said that the world and the US are pretty fucked but at least you probably won’t get kidnapped and imprisoned for speech, and I agreed and expanded that we tend to kidnap and imprison people for different things.

probably won’t be kidnapped and imprisoned for what we say

We do still kidnap and imprison people when they challenge the power or form of our state, it’s just that
what we say in the west is generally less threatening to the power of our governments.

Let’s not forget that the US locks up more citizens than any nation - including China with 4x the population - and spent a good part of this century kidnapping and torturing people all over the world.