The culture war has been going on for a lot longer than a decade, it’s just only in the last decade or so that it’s been amped up to 11 in terms of how aggressive it’s being fought. Conservatives are almost always on the losing side of social issues that require a culture shift. Women’s suffrage, civil rights, seatbelt laws, anti-smoking laws, gay rights… the list goes on, and the fight is never quite done for some, but they always lose in the end.

The very fact that conservatives are very pro for things like coal mining that liberals are trying to legislate away create strong reasons for some people to hold their noses and vote Republican regardless of how noxious the candidate is. When their livelihoods are literally at stake and the liberal response is “Well you should have gone to college to learn a new skill or trade” it makes sense that they are corralled right into the arms of conservatives. Economic drivers are the most powerful force behind the conservative movement right now, not culture bullshit that deep down they don’t really care about. It doesn’t help that very few people understand the relationship between “the economy” as outlined by experts and “the economy” as experienced when paying for groceries or filling up their car at the pump. It doesn’t matter that conservatives almost never deliver on their promises to fix the economy and often end up sending the nation into a recession, if bad decisions on a national scale lead to temporary relief on a local scale for some, that’s what they will remember when voting next time.

Liberals need to be doing more to bring disenfranchised voters into the fold. Educating them without being condescending or dismissive would be an excellent start. Turning down the temperature in politics is not possible without also lowering the stakes, backing off of hardline positions in the short term might be the most effective way of undermining support for terrible conservative candidates.

Bruddah… 🤜🤛 Respect.

Mine is Magic: The Gathering, except I fully realize that I am pulling away from it and why.

The game sparked an immense amount of joy when I picked it up in high school. Now I barely recognize the game anymore. It doesn’t truly have an identity of its own and exists in this permanent state of limbo where 3rd party IPs are taking over the demand for new product and the rules are becoming so bloated that they can’t fit them on cards anymore.

This is such an “old man yelling at clouds” moment for me, because I heard just about every reason under the sun for why people quit the game when I was playing from power creep to changing art styles to just getting priced out of the hobby in general. I realize now that those people were not wrong, they were just not the target audience anymore. I am no longer a profitable demographic to pander to. I never buy packs anymore, and I’ve even stopped buying singles and I don’t attend tournaments or collect anymore, so why would Hasbro/WotC make products for me? Especially when there are deep pocketed whales out there who will pay top dollar for their favorite crossover set, no matter how silly or out of place it might seem.

I wish I could enjoy the game the way I used to, but I just can’t be bothered to hop back in when it doesn’t feel the same anymore.

“Women are my favorite guy.”

So true, so true. Google wise.

Nope, nothing. But he sure does like to talk about what he’s going to do but never about how he’s going to do it, or why he didn’t do it last time.

I got accused of this the other day. Some random on Steam added me because he liked my profile pic. I was bored and decided to humor him. Two sentences in and he’s like “What’s with the ChatGPT sounding responses?”.

I honestly didn’t know how to react to that.

Off the top of my head - male, female and nonbinary meet the criteria of “at least three” and are probably the most well known. But I imagine a straightforward answer like that would not have satisfied some right wing mouthpiece and they would then intentionally try to conflate sex with gender to make Biden look bad when they take it out of context on the evening news (not that proper context would have mattered to the people watching it anyway).

Breaking News: Biden takes big sip of water from “World’s Greatest Dad” mug.

MBFC: “This source is left-leaning.”

I’m inherently distrustful of anything that tries to tell me if a source is biased or not. Who verifies that the bot isn’t also programmed to have an agenda?

I think I’ll just stick to plain old critical thinking skills and evaluate things for myself.

There is a procedure for this. To simplify the answer, Kamala Harris will become President on inauguration day in any of your listed scenarios, since she’s the current VP/VP-elect.

It’s theoretically possible that if Biden drops dead today, that the DNC could manage to pivot to a new contender, but there are two significant problems with that:

1. It’s suuuper late in the process. They already called the primaries for Biden, so he has the delegates. If he dies, they go to his VP, so it would be up to Harris to give them to someone else at that point if anybody else were to be selected (essentially dropping out of the race herself). This is a bad move because giving delegates to someone who didn’t even primary will seem undemocratic, coronating somebody that the people did not even endorse for the ticket.

2. Replacing Biden with someone else doesn’t give them much time to campaign. A big part of the election cycle is traveling to swing states to convince those people to vote for you. It’s not that those people are suddenly going to go vote for the other guy (Trump, in this case), but they’re far more likely to stay home because they won’t be energized for this newcomer who didn’t have enough time to court their votes, or to convince them to turn out for their policies/platform rather than be apathetic about the outcome of the election.

I always thought that Fox was a cool name for a dude ever since I watched the X-Files. If I had to change my first name, that’s what I’d pick.

I really love the design aesthetics of older trucks. They were uniquely cozy in their own kind of way. I wish you could buy new small sized utilitarian trucks, but literally nobody in the industry sells them anymore because the consumer keeps buying these behemoth trucks and so luxury has become the standard when it should have only encompassed a small portion of the truck market share.

I guess my point is that it doesn’t really matter if their practice is backed up by hard science or not if some people still experience tangible benefit from doing it. Is it still a scam if the scammer provided you the product that you paid for?

Like I said, I would never advocate for someone to go see a chiropractor, an acupuncturist, a homeopath, a shaman, or whatever alternative treatments that might be out there over going to a real doctor or therapist, but if they’re already going to one and claiming that it’s working for them, why bother trying to convince them otherwise? You can tell them it’s pseudoscience until the cows come home, they’re not going to be inclined to listen.

This is one of those things, like acupuncture, that I will not fault anyone else for engaging in. There’s no hard evidence that they are effective, but if it helps you with your problem (even if it’s all in your head), then it was worth it, was it not?

I know people who have had their lives improved and their mobility restored thanks to chiropractors. I also know one or two who swear they got scammed for years because the pain always comes back really quickly.

I may not personally recommend a chiro to someone as a solution to their back or neck pain, but I won’t discourage them from going if they are considering it.

1. Enrich the ruling class as much as possible.
2. Widen the class divide as much as possible.
3. Eliminate the social safety net to curtail class mobility as much as possible.

Anything else that happens is merely incidental.

I just happen to be a part of a particular discord server that is essentially a fan development group for a long-closed MMORPG. There’s been a fan project to revive it ongoing for many years now (original source code is lost at this point) and there is a playable version of the client, but it’s little more than a glorified chat room with some clothing/animations for your avatar.

Someone just happened to ask about game/chat encryption in the discord server and the response was that there was a form of encryption for chat messages, but more importantly, it was an obscure game that nobody would think to monitor for traffic in the first place.

That got me thinking… there have already been things like the Minecraft Uncensored Library where you can download a map that has banned literature stored on it that would normally be flagged by surveillance states, but since it’s all contained within a file that runs on a game program, it’s impossible to track. The game itself is a form of obfuscation.

Theoretically, one could log on to a game service that has one foot in the grave (or set up a private server, if the service is no longer running) and you would have plausible cover from anyone who would be spying on your traffic (they’d just see you as logged into a game, sending packets back and forth) with the added benefit of encrypted private messages that you find in just about every modern multiplayer game.

I think your idea is good too, but I don’t know enough about linguistics to be able to say how difficult this would be, but I imagine anyone determined enough could figure it out. The last time I remember hearing about a “language” being built from scratch was the Phyrexian language from Magic: The Gathering, which is getting more fleshed out over time as hints and clues about the syntax and phonics are revealed via known/confirmed English translations.

Eggs are indeed tricky on the stainless. I have found that ceramic or a well-seasoned cast iron pan is a lot better for eggs if you aren’t good at hitting that exact temperature that they need to be at to cook and release on their own with just a minimal amount of oil/butter. My parents have a single teflon pan that is just for eggs, but they cook eggs so frequently that they need to replace it all the time because it starts to peel and flake in no time flat.

My stainless steel cookware set has worked better and lasted longer than every non-stick pan I have ever owned.

It’s not really ownership, per se. It’s really more like planting a flag to say “I was here”. They’re leaving their scent behind to let other outsider dogs know that they are around the area, like a calling card. Sometimes the pheromones in the urine can let other dogs know if they are in estrus, so it has a useful social/mating component to it.

Hi Dad. It’s me, you.