Video games too!

How could we ever let that poor oil stay down in the ground where it can’t be loved and cared for? It’s cruel NOT to destroy countless lives in exchange for this act of kindness and empathy.

I would make the case that the people being directly killed here by the state, while atrocious, pale in comparison to the number of deaths that will be directly attributed to the cutting of USAid internationally and the loss of healthcare, jobs and environmental regulations in the US. And of course the gutting of the US health department and ending vaccine programs/requirements.

We will likely see a death-toll directly tied to Trump and his administration in the range of seven figures in the next decade.

I grew up having to learn everything about network security at home, on a windows PC, in a family with no regard for the concept of internet security because basically the idea didn’t exist yet. I was the one who scrubbed the PC every week and removed the 1300 toolbars and spyware apps, I was the one who had to repair the registry every time a sibling downloaded a file sent to him by a “hot girl” claiming it was a picture of her boobs.

So it’s maddening now working in a company of adult humans who are so bad at safety and security that our workstations have even had their settings menus neutered because everyone is so bad at security. Yesterday someone asked how to install the file they received in email titled “security update, please install asap!” from “rnicrosoft. com.”

The fact that you care at all shows you’re not a MAGA monster.

It’s wild because I was raised conservative and was one until I left the family compound (let that one sink in) and it was reading, learning and experiencing human life that turned me around pretty fast. I saw science being ignored, I saw heartlessness, I saw them fabricate justification to start a war, and one particular night I saw FOX news play a live feed of a US humvee entering Baghdad shred a civilian truck to pieces with a grenade launcher for no reason, and they were playing patriotic music and had American flags all over the graphics and I got really sick and never watched FOX news again.

I’ve let myself watch just one short video of atrocities committed by Israel in the last couple years and I still think about it and choke up thinking about it daily. Just one of many like it.

I am not the strongest person emotionally despite a really tough exterior, I have seen a lot of death and been through some shit. So to think about what’s been happening there all day, every day, to families and children, it’s too much to process. I have to advocate in a completely detached frame or I will be unable to form a cognitive thought.

I could almost guarantee that countries like the US and China have drone warfare programs that would do literal circles around everything and anything deployed in Ukraine/Russia right now.

Set aside all the ethical dubiousness of making killing humans a game with points, since that is basically what war is, the proliferation and rapid evolution of all of this tech alongside the landslide of AI development should be what actually terrifies us. The trend going forward in all “politics by lethal force” is going to involve more and more smaller and smaller vehicles designed to kill specific targets, ideally without having to worry about signals that can be jammed or wires trailing behind it, so intelligent enough to operate on it’s own and make decisions and be able to operate independently for long periods of time. That should be spine-chilling to every human alive.

Wait 'til you learn what happens in war.

War. War never changes.

Wait a second…

Playing minecraft without mods as an adult is like eating a plain potato, or like going to a party without inebriating substances.

I’m going to start using the “single crab alone, clawing in a bucket” analogy to describe our current world.

I just can’t see it happening with the Internet.

This, even without the technological forces of capital swooping in to take advantage of every leveraged opportunity, even if people did rally together it would just turn into a political/performative circus and the entire thing will get lost and buried under some streamer drama that erupts from it.

A multiplayer game that pits you against lousy AI bots with human looking names for your first "games’ so you feel like you know how to play and makes the game seem fair and fun.

Then after you’re comfortable, you get pitted against a lobby of 12-year-olds who haven’t seen daylight since birth who annihilate you and curse you out on coms.

No, and this article is bullshit invented to pander to people who want to see Trump humiliated. It’s fantasy, it’s lying. It’s lying to viewers for money and ads and clicks.

I wrote a similar reply to this post before I saw yours.

I DESPISE this kind of perspective-isolating, emotion-validating, reinforced fantasy world that media has created. The article has zero content, it just repeats the taglines content of more reputable news sites but throws it in among about 3 million ads and slaps a fantasy-world headline on it to make people think we’re winning some points against the literal most powerful people on Earth who are celebrating their victories every day.

Fuck this kind of clickbait, fuck people who post it. Sorry OP.

No he was not “humiliated” and we should be writing these rags hateful, scathing letters holding them accountable for contributing to this atomized worldview that is literally wrecking our whole society. There is no content in this article, it’s 90% ads all over the page, it’s just the same material reported in other news sites, but with a more sensational headline.

I don’t care that clickbait gets better views, I don’t care that they make more money. We are letting them get away with fabricating entire universes for select segments of populations.

People read shit like this and get all sweaty and satisfied and pump their fists and say “YEsss! Another victory! These clowns are going to crumble ANY DAY NOW!”

As they continue to celebrate living like royalty and bandits, taking food from children, blowing up innocent humans, shitting on the country and facing zero consequences. Articles like this are part of the downfall of democracy.

A large percentage of “I need this drug/drink to function” people eventually face some measure of change in their lives that force them to start learning how to manage themselves without outside chemicals or medication.

It may be you, it may not be. The point is, don’t get set-in on “policy” because you may want to change your life and need to understand that the discomfort of change is only temporary and the brain rewires itself to new conditions.

It does get old after a while.

edit: I am fully prepared for the reflexive defensiveness that this topic produces. Please look up psychological addiction even if you feel offended by the very notion. Especially if you feel offended by the notion. Ask me how to get out if you’re starting to feel that trapped feeling and wondering if things ever get better.

If it’s a new thing in life, it’s alexithymia, emotional dysregulation, and likely a consequence of mental health problems, from trauma to other, deeper underlying conditions. The good news is this can be treated, it’s just a survival mechanism gone haywire, you can get better and have love and happiness and friends and family again and enjoy the full range of human experience. It may take time and effort to find a good therapist and stick to the plan, but trust me, it’s worth it.

If you’ve always felt this way, it still may be a chemical imbalance but also may be a personality disorder.

Personality disorders are incredibly hard to treat. But this is often because people with personality disorders don’t think anything is wrong with them, they think the people around them are the ones with problems. But the good news in this case is if this is your issue, you are already suspecting something is wrong and that’s already the hard part crossed. The rest is just structure and planning. The human brain is incredibly flexible and you can actually rewire yourself to be the person you want to be for your loved ones, for yourself, to experience more and feel more. But again, it takes time.

Be good to yourself. Take stock of your life and situation, make a few calls to some all-inclusive mental health clinics, there are a lot of places that will both set you up for insurance/financing, and they will do the preliminary health tests, medication recommendations and therapy sessions. You have options, don’t go into it alone.

Not very. The list of real-world obstacles is long, but there are a few top ones that leave super-heroes firmly in the world of fantasy. (Outside of a few edge-cases that others have listed here, people who really seem to have done small-time stunts for attention rather than a real effort to “fight crime.”)

• Guns. The biggest obstacle in the US at least would be the high likelihood that the criminals you try to beat up, people already willing to break the law and victimize others, will just pull out a gun and shoot you in the face because you seem insane and threatening. Body armor may help with some shots from some angles and some calibers, but most likely you will go down even if it stops the bullet.

• Getting your ass beat. I studied and taught self-defense and martial arts for well over a decade. The biggest lesson I learned from it is to NEVER get into a fight if you can at all help it. It doesn’t matter how big and tough you are, if you’re looking for a fight on the streets, you WILL get hurt. You will lose teeth, you will get maimed, you will get cut and stabbed, you will face off two people and one will trip you and you will end up with every rib in your body shattered. Every street fight ends up rolling around on the ground, do YOU want to end up on the ground with multiple people trying to kick your teeth in?

• Finding a crime. If you’re really lucky you might see a hollywood-style crime in progress once in your life. The “group of robbers hijacking an armored car” type crimes are vastly outweighed by the “ex boyfriend uses his key and slips in while everyone is gone and takes the playstation and perfumes” type crimes. The vast majority of ALL crimes are between people who know each other or family members, how tf you gonna find that shit going down?

• Cops. Their success rate at catching perpetrators and suspects is much lower than media would like you to believe, but they’re generally going to be better armed, more organized and more capable of finding and arresting your ass. They don’t take kindly to nutcases on the street upstaging them or causing public disturbances.

Let’s say you prepare. Let’s say you train and be the best fighter in the world. Let’s say you get money or investors who help you develop the highest-level meta-material alloy armors and weapons and electronics. A million dollars in advanced optics, ballistic armor that lets you move freely, drones that fly around and scout for you, machine-gun tasers or knockout-gas bombs and rope-bola launchers that let you trip up bad guys before they even get close… you still trip on a curb and get your ass beat and your gear stolen, because running around the streets in the dark is fucking hard and you are still always just going to be a lone human made of squishy meat and with limited capabilities.

I wonder if they will ever catch the person who did that.