You know that Godwin’s Law waa just some random guy making something up, right? It’s like claiming that the average person eats 7 spiders a year or that the average male thinks about sex once every X seconds.

In this very thread people are blaming the Dems for not being fascists themselves under Biden and Obama.

You can also be Jewish without being Zionist.

And I haven’t even addressed the “liberal” claim, which is absolutely laughable. Sanders has been a socialist since the 70’s. I understand that he looks further left from a US perspective than a global one, but the only people who would call him a “liberal” are the far-right US idiots who don’t know what that word means.

A quick search will reveal that Sanders has been critical of Israel’s actions in Palestine since at least 2014 but okay.

For a long time I was confused by two seemingly separate pieces of information.

1. The majority of people I seem to interact with seem to act like communications are effortless. “Just pick up the phone”. “It’s just an email”.

2. Most communications I get are terrible. Like, the number of times I need to restrain myself from typing “as I mentioned in the email below” is insane, or how often I send an email with a bulleted list of issues that need to be addressed and the response only addresses a fraction of them while the rest are ignores.

Then I realized that most people are stupid, casual, and oblivious. They put very little effort into communications, so while they seem so easy and effortless they are harming the quality of that communication.

No. That means that the farmer’s costs go up. The price in the supermarket is set by consumer demand, so an increase in cost at any point in the chain (farmer, logistics, retail) reduces the profits of ownership.

This is why minimum wage increase have been consistently proven to NOT have the dire effects that conservatives claim they will.

“The whole thing is screwed up,” said John Painter, a three-time Trump voter who runs an organic dairy farm in Westfield. “We need people to do the jobs Americans are too spoiled to do.”

What wages are you offering? Perhaps you are the one who has been spoiled by cheap labor.

“We moved to H-2A out of necessity,” added Sarah Zost, an orchard grower in Gardners, Pennsylvania. “No one wants to use the program. It’s a paperwork nightmare.”

So it’s fine to require these immigrants to jump through all sorts of hoops and navigate the beauracracy, but for these poor American farmers running businesses it’s simply too much to ask.

The cognitive dissonance with these fools is astounding.

These games should have been like maaaaybe $5 each on the 3DS a decade ago. Maybe $30 for a physical cartridge with all of them bundled.

I feel like a lot of people missed your point- not just about Jews but the concept of “white” in general has been nebulous throughout history.

Irish people, Italian, greek… Pretty much all Mediterranean people. There’s been tons of conversations about whether Egyptians should be considered white, and which ones. The Nazi’s labelled the Japanese as “honorary Aryans”.

“White” is not based in anything physical or real. It’s a concept made up to exclude others and has changed based on who they want to include or exclude.

Source? The article only confirms that he is Israeli, doesn’t mention his religion at all. Because it’s not fucking relevant.

Russian citizens who refused to condemning the Ukraine invasion have faced similar consequence. There’s plenty of precedent internationally for these sorts of decisions. The only difference here is that Israel has been purposefully supplying propaganda for decades to conflate antizionism with antisemitism.

Why are you assuming the religiosity of an Israeli person?

It seems you believe the myths that media wants to tell you about modern courtship. Yes, such shallow people exist. And yes, there are thresholds of hygiene and stability someone should be expected to meet. But a lot of women want to get laid just as bad as men, not for the money or the status but for the sex.

1. My first question about studies like this is always “how do they know this?”. And I while I know I could find the study and dig into the setsils, I don’t have to do that to know that this is the result of surveys taken over this time period. Unless technology develops to grant us a way to monitor and track the sex lives of people objectively and unobtrusively, that’s just the best way can do. So any conclusions drawn really should be “the decline in people’s surveyed frequency of sexual intercourse has gone down over time”. Just to throw out some baseless speculation: could people in the past inflated their answers to appear “cool” or similar? Could there be cultural shifts pressuring respondents to deflate their numbers now? Personally, I’m inclined to believe the results of the study ARE true, but I’m not confident in that.

2. The decline of 3rd spaces, which is a big concept with multiple causes. Car-centric infrastructure, industrialization, women moving to the workforce, capitalism, technology, etc. It has become harder for people to have intimate personal interactions with others who live nearby. I believe the rise of things like social media, dating apps, and now AI companions is less about “hey we developed this new technology to replace and maybe be better than real human interaction” and more about “we need to develop something to replace what we have lost”.

3. Consent. Reductions in arranged marriages and child marriages. Protections and rights for women and children.

4. Economics. Everyone is overworked and tired. I’ve seen this in a lot of the other comments here but I actually don’t buy into this quite as much. There seems to be an inverse relationship between GDP per capita and birth rate, at least recently. Most of Europe, Japan, Australia, the US, Canada, Korea, and perhaps most notably… China. All have experienced declines in birthrates, and in a lot these cases there is good modern data showing the birth rates changing as these economies develop. The countries having the most children are poorer countries.

Now, it could be that these wealthier countries have access to birth control, so this does not necessarily dissolve economics as a factor. But, my own theory is that sex is one of the cheapest forms of entertainment available to humanity (if you don’t factor in the costs of children). So the citizens of these wealthier countries are spending their time and money doing other things. Not just skii vacations or going yachting, but reading books and watching TV.

The Souls games is another good example I considered bringing up. I’ve only played Bloodborne so far and while I did enjoy it one of my criticisms is that it’s pretty monotone. Even the few NPC’s there are tend to not be very likeable. Everything is dark. Everyone is bad. It’s not even clear whether anything the player experiences is “real” even within the game world, or whether anything the player does accomplishes anything. While I haven’t played the other games I get the impression that they are similar.

I can also think of games that only lean into one side or the others but they do it in a way that I dont mind. “Cozy” games have made an entire genre of this, like Animal Crossing.

Or games where the tone of the game is always dark, but the player and player character both know that there is an “outside” world they can escape to. Resident Evil, Portal, BioShock, etc.

You brought up Metal Gear Solid because it has moments of levity within a gritty military espionage setting, but I think it’s also helped by being set in the real world. If I remember correctly, the end of MGS2 has a boss fight on the roof of a building in Philadelphia and we are shown in cutscenes that the streets below are filled with normal people going about their business, completely unaware of the threat. It’s a reminder of what the player character is fighting for.

Uncharted is another series worth discussing. The first 3 games all kind of blur together in my memory so I could be mistaken, but I remember the first game felt too isolated. I don’t think you really spend much time in a non-hostile environment: it’s all either jungles or ruins or the enemy base. 2 and 3 did a better job of putting Nathan in more mundane and civilian settings: museums, tourists sites, cities, etc. There’s moments where you need to put away your fun and act like a normal person, and that contrast makes the action sequences hit that much harder.

A friend of mine wrote some lyrics for a contest, which includes the lines “if I alone remain, what would it mean to fail? Is there still a world to save…”. This comes into my head a lot whenever I’m playing certain games, especially post-apocalyptic games.

I’d say the Zelda series struggles with this. I put in ~40 hours into Breath of the Wild before I got bored and stopped playing. I never got around to defeating Gannon and I think I only did 3 divine beasts. I kept on looking around and asking myself… Why is Link bothering? It seems like the world is doing pretty well without him. The land of Hyrule is teaming with life. Sure, the people of Hyrule are no longer building megastructures or cities, their populations might be smaller than they used to be, but everyone seems pretty happy and unbothered. The evil forces of Gannon’s corruption mostly keep to themselves, so as long as people avoid the ruined Hyrule Castle or the ruined towers they are fine. Sure, there are monsters that spawn in the wild, but there are also just plain old evil humanoids out there too. There’s regular ass animals. It seems like nature, civilization, and even evil itself have achieved a harmonious equilibrium in Link’s absence. There are some minor problems in the settlements, but in the whole everyone seems pretty happy just living their lives. It’s like they asked the question “what if we give up and let entropy take over” and the answer was the most beautiful and vibrant state that we have ever seen Hyrule in.

By comparison, Majora’s Mask and Twilight Princess have a much broader range. TP does this very overtly by having the areas cycle through Twilight vs normal states. They establish Link’s relationships with everyone in Ordon Village first, then have Twilight fall and reduce them to cowering spirits. In other areas you see the Twilight version first and then clear it. Majora’s Mask does similar- everything is bright and sunny and cheerful on Day 1, while Day 3 is an active apocalypse. Which then gets reset over and over again.

I would say Skyrim does a decent job of balancing the two as well, though perhaps not as extreme as other examples. Moments in the main quests like the civil war battles and the journey to sovengard are serious and epic, with the fate of Skyrim (perhaps all of Mundus) resting on your shoulders. There’s deep, personal moments like the Dark Brotherhood quest to kill Narfi or talking the ghost of the child killed by a vampire in Morthal. But there’s fun moments like coming across copies of the Lusty Argonian Maid or getting drunk and carousing with Sanguine. The Sheogorath quest line starts out as “OMG so funny and random XD, cheese!” And then dives into the child abuse and subsequent mental illness suffered by one of Skyrim’s last high kings.

They could be in a similar phase of life. I was still 17 when I started college and had a full-time job. A 20 year old could still be in high school if they were held back. This is kind of the range where you can start counting months or talking about how different school systems have different cutoff dates that can mess with things.

I would not recommend 20 year olds and 17 year olds date in general. But it’s very possible for two people of those ages to date without being creepy or having problems.

The image quality is not helping, but I think that’s Turkey, not China.

I’m pretty sure the US is holding hands with Saudi Arabia. Israel could be holding hands with either Bahrain or Qatar, but given the context it’s almost certainly Bahrain. The dogs from left-rjght are France (probably), Turkey (probably), UK, Germany, ???, Italy. With Ukraine in the corner.

My vexillology is failing me on the one dog. The lighter blue plus the small dots that appear to be constellations kind of give me island vibes. It’s almost like if Tuvalu had just a shield with the English colors instead of a full Union Jack (not that Tuvalu’s inclusion makes any sense anyways) in its corner. Doesn’t match NATO or the UN or the EU. Maybe it’s an old flag, or one for some organization I’m not thinking of?

I was interpreting this as a commentary on how these countries are being treated by the US and Israel, not a commentary on how they should be treated. The Trump admin has been treating Ukraine like shit and treating European allies like dogs.

It’s entirely possible that you’re correct and this is supposed to somehow be an anti-Ukraine message, but other than “Ukraine = Shit” I’m not sure how it would tie in with everything else. I’m also not sure why Ukraine is here at all.

If I imagine a Russian trying to cram a Ukraine commentary in here… This seems like a natural spot to repeat the story Russia has been trying to sell that the Ukrainian government is secretly run by Nazis, but the artist chose not to do that.

And there’s no Russian flag. That makes it harder to figure out if this is Russian propaganda or not. Which may be why they aren’t included, or it could just be that the artists didn’t think they were relevant because they’re really trying to show how the US is controlling these other nations to prop up Israel.

Trying to look up J. Michael Springman, the only thing I can find is this guy. I’m not sure if this is the artist or not, and if it is I’m still not sure whether he would be pro-Ukraine or anti-Ukraine.

The whole inclusion of Ukraine is definitely weird. The cartoon would probably be better off without it. I’m just not sure I have enough info from the comic itself to fully conclude the artist’s intention here.

Honestly there were some food points back then. A lot of people simply are not able to wear headphones responsibly. It’s only gotten worse with noise cancelling technology. The ability to ignore the outside world is great when you’re in a safe space to do so, but people doing it out in public or while driving are absolutely mad.

The quotes about “breaking societal connections” or whatever are funny to me though. Because that was happening at the time, but it had far more to do with the erosion of 3rd places and the rise of car-centric infrastructure than it did headphones.

“Are you tired of your AI spouse getting reset after every update? Well, for just $19.99 a month you can have access to our new LLM model wAIfu!”