This just boils down to “don’t disucuss social power dynamics” at some point, though, and that’s how social power dynamics remain unchallenged, and only ever evolve towards reinforcing the social hegemony.

People need to be able to criticise others’ words and actions when they perpetuate injustice, regardless of whether they are a part of the affected minority, and this criticism should not be viewed through the lens of taking offence.

One can criticise without being personally offended.

The reasons why the wealthy like liberalisation matters, though. The reasom the wralthy want more wealth matters.

Money is power. The wealthy are competing to have the most power. Eventually, that turns to taking control of the state. So, the wealthy will back free trade and deregulation right up until they, personally, are in a position to attempt a coup. After that, regulation and trade barriers work for the particular rich folk who have taken control over the state.

Doom 2 was the peak. 2016 was a strong reimagining of Doom 3, but it was already trying to be something Doom wasn’t.

Was this not known? I’ve known that my fingers wrinkle the same in water every time since I was 5.

I reallly like Trilian, but if you’re looking for something to help your memory, a physical pocket notebook can’t be beat. I highly recommend keeping one on hand.

The choice to be on open-source, community-owned social media rather than corporate owned platforms is, itself, a political choice, and one that, in the absence of other focuses for discussion, will attract politically outspoken people. With no other core community here to focus discussion, everything will fall back to the things most people here have in common: FOSS, anti-corporate sentiments, etc., all of which are themselves inherently political topics.

My dad smoked for years. But so did a huge percentage of boomers. Where I grew up, poor and rural, the majority of people smoked.

You know what the majority of people didn’t have, but which I did? An epileptic grandparent. And a family history of epilepsy is associated with autism diagnoses.

Le is pronounced “luh”. La is pronounced “la”.

What we’re looking for here is les, the plural, which is pronounced “lay”.

Same. Honestly, even in college things were OK until social relationships got in the way, and then I couldn’t manage. Things fell apart so fast…

I think it’s dangerous to imagine people follow these folks, or let them run rampant over society, because they aspire to be like them. That makes it so much harder to really understand why people support them, or even just refuse to tell them “no”, and makes it impossible to do anything about it.

People believe that life is a meritocracy. Even when they themselves can look around at the people near them and see that those in positions of power don’t deserve it, they still view society as a whole as “fair”. Yes, they personally have may have gotten screwed over, but, in general, the people who float to the top got there because they were smarter and more capable. Therefore, we should sit back and just let them cook.

They need some kind of trigger to see the billionaires not as people who have earned their place, but who have stolen it.

The fact that there has been so much noise over $80 video games makes me question the thesis here. There are a huge number of video games out there now, it’s true, but if gamers truly gave a shit about them, I think everyone would be rather quiet about the prices from the big publishers.

All of the noise tells me that gamers will continue to prioritize big name, big dollar releases, rather than actually even glance at their backlog of Steam games. And $80 spent on games you never, ever play is not a better investment.

There is no reason to even suggest that AI ‘means well’. It doesn’t mean anything, let alone well.

The game prices I’m ok with. When I was a kid, video games cost $70 CAD, and that’s almost $200 now. I’m perfectly OK with going back to buying fewer games. I have too many of them I shouldn’t have bought in the first place.

I’m wildly upset with the console price, in no small part because Nintendo and other electronics manufacturers seem to be trying to smooth over the shock of Dorito Don’s tariffs by increasing prices globally.

The Americans made their own bed. I’m not willing to lie in it with them.

It remains so incredibly alarming to me the number of “business leaders” who looked at consumer spending in 2020/2021, looked at the global context of 2020/2021, and then went “things will now be like this forevermore,” even as other “business leaders”, and even, very often, themselves, were doing everything possible to force everyone back into a pre-COVID context.

My own employer was one of these businesses, and every time I’ve brought it up, I’ve been firmly told “everyone else thought the same thing we did, too”.

I didn’t have a whole lot of respect for business people before that, but I at least – naively, it turned out – believed they knew how to operate businesses. I now have no respect for such people whatsoever, as they’ve demonstrated completely and thoroughly, even to the point where my dumb ass can notice, that the only thing that ever “qualified” them to “run a business” was having money.

The fact that tens of thousands of people have lost their jobs because the ownership class chose to believe that they’d stumbled into an infinite growth hack is shameful, and these “leaders” deserve to be stripped of all that they own and tossed into the street.

Yup. The author is juuuuust missed in identifying the issue. The alt-right doesn’t take gaming, or gamers, seriously. But they do see angry young men as recruitment targets, and understand that a lot of gamers are much, much bigger losers than most of us imagine, and that they have a lot of pent up anger at not being taken seriously.

The basement dwelling CHUDs don’t realize that Bannon’s brigade is laughing at them whenever they’re not in the room. They’re just that desperate for any kind of attention and validation, even if it’s painfully disingenuous.

Trump, and many of his supporters, think that America is China’s biggest client. They’re totally blind to the idea that China is China’s biggest client, and that it’s not even close.

Their total lack of understanding of the world outside their little exceptionalist bubble is hilarious and depressing

Unpopular opinion, I know, but downvotes are an anti-feature, designed to excuse big, for-profit social media from actually moderating their platforms. They have no place in real social spaces.

They don’t own it yet

You answer your own question.

There’s nothing secret about it. They told us up front.

It’s why I stopped using Windows.