Yes siree, the excitement never stops!

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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: December 7th, 2023

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  • I mean, thats good, but unfortunately a huge (over-representative?) amount of online leftist discourse is so subsumed by extremely emotionally driven short sighted glomming onto bullying a particular person that they often say things that are basically obviously ludicrous if you either take a few deep breathes and think about what you’re saying, or if you’re not really involved in the often extremely petty nature of discourse around/perpetuated by many popular online leftists.

    But hey, Not All Leftists, I guess?

    Its frankly deeply embarrassing to accurately describe myself as a leftist and then have less politically engaged people often think I’m like one of these over the top internet personalities, and also infuriating when I describe myself as a leftist to other leftists online, who then usually woke scold and purity shame me for having non ludicrous positions.

    Hell I’m still banned from like half the hexbear and lemmy.ml communities for pointing out that maybe Taiwan has expressed a desire for governmental sovereignty, you know kind of like Ukraine, even though its obviously not a perfect society, it doesnt deserve to be invaded or subverted by a neighboring state?

    Nah. Verbotten opinions.

    I think the latest hexbear community to ban me did so because I posted a response to an ‘enigmatic, therefore funny and awesome’ meme on weibo.

    The meme, a kind of wojack meme, boils down to ‘Dengist reforms allowed western influence into China, which has resulted in nowadays Chinese incels pretend to be black men online to pick up chicks because many Chinese basically racistly view black men as all having giant cocks.’

    But you can’t even hint that parts of Chinese society might be gasp racist, or even have segments that view women as only interested in big dicked men because this breaks the brains of many online Western leftists that Chinese society is not actually perfect.

    Its even more baffling to me that many online Leftists barely ever mention, or tie themselves up in absurd logical/rhetorical pretzels about how just in general many East Asian societies and ethnicities have large chunks that are extremely racist towards other East Asian and other ethnicities, basically because a good number of East Asian societies are nominally communist or socialist, so that must mean they’ve solved racism.



  • Well uh when you have the US Navy under your command, and already in the area dealing with Houthis, you know, by shooting down their missiles and bombing them and such, you actually /can/ stop trains and tankers.

    You could airlift aid! You could, hilariously, stop ships heading to Israel with a Naval Blockade!

    Obviously that last one isnt going to happen, but theres a whole lot more than basically nothing that you could do.

    For starters: Cut off a bunch of joint projects between US and Israeli firms, stop sending them large amounts of money for other things, stop fucking shit canning every attempt by the UN to sanction Israel, or maybe even use these aforementioned things as threats and leverage to force a fucking ceasefire.

    And now because this is the internet: Am I saying that Trump is somehow not bad, not far, far, far fucking worse by pointing out the rest?

    Nooooo!

    No, fucking obviously Trump would be a thousand times worse!

    But pretending that there’s nothing Biden could do is a joke.

    He doesn’t because he is a long time Zionist, and the American public, and particularly political and media figures, have been bathed in Zionist propaganda for so long that it takes an overt genocide for us to figure out that maybe Israel actually isn’t a perfect unconditional ally.






  • Because rural voters are stupid, because Republicans have spent the last 30+ years destroying public education, especially in rural and minority heavy areas.

    This isn’t an insult, its a fact.

    When you’re uneducated and have little experience of the outside world… well, youre extremely easy to convince with rhetoric over actual policy results.

    Then combine that with the massively super effective Republican media machine (Rush Limbaugh, Bill O Reilly, Sean Hannity, Ben Shapiro, Steve Bannon, Alex Jones) which reinforces the religion + culture + politics of the rural Republican areas, and there ya go.

    I dunno, it seems obvious to me, but thats probably because I was raised by a ditto-head (Rush Limbaugh’s term for his followers) who later became a Q Anon, illegal-firearm-manufacturing-in-his-garage wacko, in a poor, technically suburban but realistically rural area.

    Why latch on to Trump in particular?

    Because he made it ok for them to mask off and hate all the things they hate but have been lying about hating for decades.

    Its a kind of catharsis for them, that manifests in collective hatred of inferior enemy groups.

    You know, standard fascist shit?

    It doesnt matter that Trump himself is the antithesis of what an idealized Republican person would be. What matters is he lets them feel comfortable expressing themselves.




  • What this tells you is that a man who spent a huge chunk of his life working for corporate cannibalization companies thinks that Trump would be so bad for the economy that even predatory corporations would suffer.

    Its not like Romney ever had any actual policy positions based on anything other than political expedience.

    'Course Republicans these days dont even seem to be pretending they have any coherent policy positions beyond ‘we hate immigrants’ and ‘women dont deserve basic human rights’.

    Bleck.


  • Also by this guy’s correct logic, Deus Ex is more truly an RPG than FF7.

    Good luck explaining that to a JRPG fan without them becoming either manic or passive aggressive though.

    Dont get me wrong, FF7 is a great story… but… as with nearly all ‘RPGs’… youre not really role playing, as role playing involves meaningfully being able to … play… the role you want… for your character(s).

    Nearly all RPGs are more like role insertion: you are this character and this is how their story goes.

    The Witcher and Mass Effect series both attempt to avoid this… though I’d argue that the Witcher series pulls this off far more convincingly.

    Oh and of course Cyberpunk 2077, which is actually a great game now that its had years to get fixed up.

    These 3 are still ultimately linear stories, but at least choices in decisions you make or things you do or do not do can have pretty significant impacts on the grander world / main storyline.

    Hell, Kenshi is a better role playing game than most linear story ‘RPGs’ too, though you’ll likely need a few dialogue expansion mods for this effect to become more obvious/convincing.





  • Youre looking at this from the perspective of the consumer, not the business side.

    I dont disagree at all that YT streaming is not up to par with Twitch.

    But theres no immutable law that says ‘there must be an easy to use internet video streaming site.’

    I think that Amazon shifting toward Twitch needing to be more soley responsible for its own profitability will reduce its growth in user count, and eventually, as with so, so many other online websites with huge upkeep expenses but very little income stream… this will inevitably lead to death of the service/site.

    I could be wrong about the amount the growth slows down by, but yeah I certainly wouldnt expect Twitch to be around, at least not without huge amounts of monetization compared to what there is now, in 5 years.


  • Giant tech firms are actually /notorious/ for investing huge amounts of money into basically experimental/risky ventures, and then pulling the plug.

    Google in particular… Stadia, Google Places (or whatever was the name of their attempt at out Facebooking Facebook).

    MSFT has done this a bunch… even a lot of non really ‘Tech’ huge corporations do this as well, with increasing regularity since the Mergers and Acquisitions trend started in the 80s.

    The way they are able to do this is that they have core business branches that are able to functionally internally subsidize these risky ideas, with the math on it all only making sense if the risky idea that needs to be subsidized can remain subsidized until it either turns a profit on its own, or is absolutely essential to a syngergistic business plan between other business lines under the same corporate banner.

    However… as a large multi faceted business such as this faces as economic downturn?

    Generally what happens is all the top management starts getting nervous and wants all of their sort of sub businesses to be more self sufficient.

    Now Twitch in particular is basically a burning money pit, a black hole.

    Amazon acquired because they assumed it would keep growing rapidly.

    But… when you start making the average Twitch user have to pay more money, view more ads, etc, to use the site, this functionally starts a death cycle.

    Making Twitch have increased responsibility for its own profitability necessarily slows down the growth. And the growth rate is required for running Twitch to make sense in the long run.

    Tl:dr: Yeah, they saw a path to profitability, overall, for all of Amazon, and now that path includes more monetization for Twitch which will necessarily lower the growth number of Twitch, which makes that original overall profitability plan look more like it doesnt include Twitch than including Twitch.



  • I was being a bit glib but yes this is more accurate.

    A person can be sent to prison in many cases either functionally or precisely for non payment of debts.

    Corporations on the other hand in many cases exist entirely for the purpose of either taking on ludicrous debts and then dissolving what they owe into nothing via bankruptcy, or in Mitt Romney’s case, exist entirely for the purpose of parasitically extracting all the wealth out of other corporations and then making them kill themselves via bankruptcy.

    Its just a fun game for the wealthy, who massively personally profit off of it all, as they destroy the very economy and society they lord over.