How do you think a firefight between ICE and the National Guard would go?

That’s more my point. ICE can fuck up plenty of the helpless, and that might include you and me soon enough. But my point is that co-opting the forces that actually know what they’re doing is often a good accompaniment to that idea, and they’re not even making vague attempts at doing anything like that, they are doing the opposite.

Count your lucky, lucky, lucky stars that these people are such idiots.

It doesn’t mean they are not dangerous. The Nazis were exactly the same type of hilarious buffoons, not good at anything, until all of a sudden it wasn’t funny anymore and the nightmare came to life, neverending. And the Trump people are doing a pretty good job speedrunning getting the camps up and running, they’ve already started on the undesirables and it’s working, and they’re building a huge number more as we speak.

But still, Jesus Christ. They could have had their pick of conservative sociopath lawyers hand-picked by Peter Thiel to whip shape into the DOJ and turn it on all the domestic opposition. They could have doubled military pay instantly, and had heartwarming rallies where they assured all the troops and all the cops that finally, with us in charge, you have someone on your side in government. It would have locked in their victory like a fucking armbar. Instead, they’re taking all these people whose support and agreement is vital to this thing really coming off without a hitch, and putting them into these moronic and hostile situations, literally every chance they get.

Think about it: You’re a career prosecutor, you’ve been busting your ass for decades in a high-stakes profession, and you’re successful at it. And then one day you walk in and your boss is Jeanine Pirro and she’s going to be taking over going forward.

Just think of how the interactions with her go in the workplace. Think of watching her fuck up important things, left and right, and that just being your new reality.

Jesus Christ man. We got lucky, a little bit, that it came in this form when it came. Their sheer moronitude has to be some kind of weakness.

Little few-dozen-people towns like this in the middle of nowhere are fucking wild sometimes. It’s just a bunch of people doing whatever they want, for the most part. Sometimes it’s fine, sometimes it’s real fucked and people who grow up and leave have some insane stories and basically never go back.

Remember this when someone tells you “voting is a waste of time” “anarchism is better, we don’t need all these corrupt structures” or similar things. There’s a reason why we settled on the systems we have. The corruption that fucks them up is real, sure, and it’s a big problem, but it also exists in exactly the same form if you get rid of the system. It actually gets way worse.

It’s not that serious a mystery.

If you stick people in tents in the desert, they tend to die. And, not a lot of people want to be involved with something like that, and so they’re making the point by giving absurd amounts of money to anyone who is willing to be involved. Same as the high salaries for ICE recruits.

They can do whatever they want. On the other hand, the people of the country can throw things other than sandwiches.

People tend to get confused, even when they are familiar with all these founding documents and principles (which the current government is not). They start to think there are “rules” and they get to say what’s allowed, and they can punish people who do what’s not allowed, but it doesn’t go the other way, because that’s not allowed and they’re in charge. That’s not reality. Reality is, we’re all just on this planet bebopping around, and if someone is in a “government” role, it behooves them to make sure the people “under” them agree with the idea of them being in charge. Because no one has a monopoly on violence or vigor.

Even the top leaders of the USSR (starting with Kruschev) had to figure this out: He made a mostly unspoken deal with the other leaders that he wouldn’t try to kill them for being potential threats, and in return they wouldn’t kill him to take him out of power and replace him. And what do you know, it worked! It’s better that way. The US up until now has had a little more sophisticated version, extending beyond the inner circle of leadership, but it sounds like Trump is hankering for an earlier era without really being aware of its perils.

Yeah. I don’t really know politics well enough to know how realistic it is. I do know that most of them exist in a weird white-collar corruption ecosystem which really doesn’t give a shit about parties D or R, working people, America’s standing in the world and success or failure, any of that stuff. They just work for who pays them, and for the most part, who pays them is the rich sociopaths who are completely fine with putting all the poors in camps.

I feel like a certain amount of it is also deliberate partisan sabotage by people who care specifically about R instead of D, but I think mostly it’s just the bipartisan Washington consensus that Bernie Sanders is a loony old guy and Hilary Clinton / George W / Mitt Romney / Hakeem Jeffries / all those indistinguishable dickheads are the future of this country, because they’re going to continue to enable all of “us” to get filthy rich without really having to work for it.

And when he’s floating in a barge off Gitmo, he’ll be very mad that it was someone else’s fault. This isn’t supposed to happen to people like him, he was doing everything professional and right.

Seriously. You’d think that after 2016 when the signal stabilized and people who ignored this messaging were consistently wildly popular in elections, and people who listened to it got beat like a rented mule year after year, they’d see the pattern. There aren’t a lot of fields of big league human endeavor where you can be this stupidly unsuccessful for this long and people still take you seriously and keep paying you vast sums of money to learn your wisdom.

I suspect there’s a certain amount of deliberate sabotage involved. How much of it is that, and how much is pure homegrown white-collar stupidity, it’s impossible to say, although I would speculate they’re both heavily involved.

This is one of the last levels of safeguard: At the end of the day, public opinion matters for whether or not you can put people in prison (or even put them through the life-changingly traumatic and expensive experience of a major criminal trial.)

They are trying to change that, of course. George W. introducing whole new systems that were outside the normal constitutional safeguards was deeply horrifying to a lot of people, because it laid the groundwork which Trump is now so many years later building his camps on.

None of the neoliberals wanted to “use overt fascism” as a threat of anything. They just want to sit back and get paid, and don’t really care, most of their campaign materials (according to the super-experts in this comments section at least) are trying to imitate the fascists. None of their campaign materials or public statements even seemed to recognize that fascism was something at all dangerous in any way.

The thing of “oh isn’t it convenient that I have to vote for the non fascist if I don’t want fascism, well fuck you I think you’re trying to trick me” is a super popular and very effective propaganda thing designed to trick people into letting the fascists come to power, though. The overall pitch is to make it sound like “it is urgent not to let fascists come to power” is some kind of clever ruse, and can be discounted.

The time to do that was 2020-2024, honestly. They had power. Now they’re having to fight the whole fucking thing uphill, and of course Trump is going to make himself president for life.

They should try to recover us to a democracy, IDK what the fuck the alternative would be. But the time to put Trump in custody was January 2021. Now we’ve got the exact same fight on our hands that that would have caused, but they get to be inside the castle shooting out.

Inb4 they pretty much don’t do a fucking thing, and we start seeing commercials and public perception about how bad and fake this whole “government internet” thing is

Welcome to the United States, where the rich people get socialism and the poors get prison

Is it opposite day or something? I could swear I literally gave a counterexample in the message you’re replying to lol

Biden: I’m going to have Dept of Education forgive half a trillion dollars in student loans

Supreme Court: Excuse me, fuck no

Trump: Hey I’m just gonna direct the awesome power of the US government to do literally whatever I personally want

Supreme Court: Yeah sounds good

This interview is really phenomenal. Among other things, they talk about why it took so many years to release the game.

“We’ve been having fun,” Gibson said. “This whole thing is just a vehicle for our creativity anyway. It’s nice to make fun things.”

The lengthy production wasn’t the result of development challenges or obstacles, they said. They just needed all these years to ensure that Silksong was exactly the game they wanted to make.

“It was never stuck or anything,” Gibson said. “It was always progressing. It’s just the case that we’re a small team, and games take a lot of time. There wasn’t any big controversial moment behind it.”

“I think we’re always underestimating the amount of time and effort it’ll take us to achieve things,” Gibson said. “It’s also that problem where, because we’re having fun doing it, it’s not like, ‘It’s taking longer, this is awful, we really need to get past this phase.’ It’s, ‘This is a very enjoyable space to be in. Let’s perpetuate this with some new ideas.’”

The longer development lasted, the more pressure Gibson and Pellen felt to ensure that everything was as fine-tuned as possible. They’d already spent four years on it — why would they rush now? The more time they spent polishing some parts, the more time they needed to apply it consistently across the rest.

“There’s a level of finish that has to be met throughout the entire game,” Pellen said. “All the way the systems interact, all the hidden work that pops up later on. It’s multiplicative. As you add stuff, the process of tying it all back together just increases.”

Gibson and Pellen say they’re happy that the game is finally coming out — and even happier that they will get to keep working on it, which they still find enjoyable even after seven years. They haven’t burned out or shown any desire to take a break. Instead, they’re already making big plans to add extra content to Silksong in the months and years to come.

This is, of course, what work is supposed to be. But we have lost the way.

Yeah, and I’m only supposed to use this bong for smoking tobacco. It said so very very clearly when I bought it so you know they mean it.

especially regarding linking (ever-so-slightly progressive) climate policy with blue collar jobs

Yeah, the branding of the whole thing was pure amateur-hour. But he spent about a trillion dollars on climate change and blue-collar jobs, which he raised by big corporate tax increases. It’s wild that no one knows that, and I’d call it a little bit more than ever-so-slightly.

Making a few digits worth of wrong division way down in the not very significant bits of the answer, is way better than encouraging all your users to use an LLM to generate the answers for their quarterly reports / tax forms / do we have enough food for the winter calculations. The Pentium division fuckup was barely worth fixing unless you were doing some kind of numerical analysis or simulation or something, which is why it slipped past all the testing initially. This is astronomically worse of a fuck-up.

It is a good joke but you missed the chance to call back to one of the better gags from Space Quest 3 by writing “Yes / Yes”