The kochs have been the actual boogeymen of American politics for a long time. They’re basically what the right always fear soros is, but for racist, imperialist, corporatist shit. They basically responsible for citizens united.

Same goes for OxyContin

Hah so did I. I got 1/3 of the way through the body of the post before I realized OP just ain’t cool

I will say, as a 30 year old man I had the urge to start playing games because they just looked so good these days. I played a little here and there growing up, but all of my friends were gamers and I just wasn’t interested. When I got interested, I found a lot of fun and joy in it.

I’m still not your typical gamer. I find a few games I really love and I keep playing them over and over—great campaigns with great story telling and great characters and great graphics are so much of it. Since I started playing video games in like 2020, I’ve basically played four games, but two of them I’ve played a bunch of times (red dead redemption II and Cyberpunk).

Now I’m looking at Stalker 2 and I think that might be my next game I want to play to death. Gotta wait to hear how people feel about it though.

Hah please do!

Think of voting this way:

Signing your name to a candidate/psrty and what they’ve done/signaled they will do.

A lot of people can’t stomach a candidate who has been courting the neocons and softening their previous mildly progressive stances from the last time dems had a primary and the progressives were showing up in numbers. Everyone got in line and the debates were about M4A, erasing federally held student debt, raising the minimum wage, etc. Sanders single handedly dragged the party to the center (technically more “left” than they were) in 2016/2020 and the dems responded by po’mouthing like they cared about those issues, but then circled the wagons and kicked those voters to the curb.

The party has shown over and over again that they don’t give a shit about working class people, those of us that want real change. They want to maintain the status quo. Which is progressively more hostile capitalism.

Signing your name to that constant move rightward is unthinkable for some. And understandably so.

And that’s before we even discuss the ongoing genocide in Gaza funded and armed by the US. While this administrations representatives in the UN and in any official capacity constantly run defense for the genocide.

Plenty of people could not fathom putting their name on that tragedy.

None of this means that republicans aren’t fuckin neofascist shits. But…how many times have the voters left of the dems been told to eat shit and vote blue because the other guy is worse? WHILE CONSTANTLY COURTING THE RIGHTWING VOTERS WHO MAY HAVE FINALLY GOTTEN SICK OF IT?! Kamala literally said she would be different from Biden by having a Republican in her cabinet. WHAT.

With everything going on, this party said, “yeah, fuck all that. Let’s see if we can grab anyone to the right of us.”

I got sidetracked, but this is the thing. It’s not binary, because geopolitics isn’t binary. The worlds issues aren’t binary. But a binary choice is all we’re given to make.

Just…what. And neither of those two choices was actually going to solve the problems. One was maintaining the problems while one was the problems plus more problems. That’s not an attractive choice.

We all get that trump is much worse. But everyone else needs to understand how sickening that shitty choice was for anyone with a conscience about what’s going on in Gaza, what’s going on with their neighbors. Signing on for more of the same was completely unthinkable for some. That has to be understandable if we are ever going to change things.

We’ve been on the road we’re being forced down now as long as I’ve been around. And the road just keeps going forward. The dems’ proposal is “maintain the course.” The republicans’ was “mash the gas.”

Some people couldn’t stomach going any further down this road. That’s not making a choice to mash the gas. Because the world is not binary.

But you and everyone else posing similar questions is saying “how could you vote for mashing the gas by not wanting to continue down this road?? :(“

Because, like I said, it suddenly became “the most important issue” and she was courting the “centrist swing voter” that doesn’t exist anymore. And we all saw, republicans voted almost exactly the same way they did in 2020, but a bunch of dems stayed home. She sold out anyone left of Bush Jr. and then surprise pikachu’d when no one fuckin voted for her.

Why? Because the right was harping on it. So the news covers it. And then “people are talking about it.” And in 2024, that means everyone has to have an opinion it. The right has perfected the weaponization of communication. Fascists are good at that, historically.

Gross I don’t want ‘em

It’s a great story, and one of my favorites—I’m still replaying it. But I think the best story ever told through a video game is RDR2. But those are my two favorite games, so you really can’t go wrong either way.

I don’t think that’s actually true. Have the metrics for what we consider poverty changed and adapted with inflation and the perfecting of corporate wealth hoarding? “Poverty” is an ambiguous term, and relative poverty is real. That doesn’t show in a standard-line “poverty” metric. What was considered “extreme poverty” is the lowest, but that’s people living on under $1.90/day. I couldn’t even find information on that metric being updated to reflect the current high inflation and profit-explosion landscape.

Also: if you technically pull people out of poverty by outsourcing to the lowest paying, least labor regulated parts of the world, is the fact that extreme poverty went away in those areas even a good thing?

Removed by mod

Wasn’t she like 17 at the time

These surgeons were moving fast, I can see it

Everybody was limb-fu cutting (hiya!)

Those cats were fast as lightning (hiya!)

Is that still true? Like, as in, updated in the past year-to-the-last-few-months? War (even though they’re not calling it war) is rising in many places.

Dude, the casting in Dark absolutely blew my fuckin mind, choom. I don’t want to spoil the plot in the seasons after the first by telling people who haven’t seen it what I mean, but if you’ve seen it you know exactly what I mean.

Yes.

Gary, indiana

Nah, real “people who can’t afford [blank] are just lazy” energy here. You have no idea what others have to do in their day to day lives. To some, working 50 hours a week would be a luxury, let alone time to go to school.

Not to mention some other country would’ve been doing this instead. Other countries do, the US has just been the most notorious and the king of colonialism