I'd love to play a GTA V/Red Faction type open world game where you play a hardened German Antifa punk that gets sent back in time to 1941 Berlin and have to beat up Nazis and shit.

Just make your own, you don't got to wait for mods and admins to make one for you. If you get a couple hundred people to fill it out that'll be a decent enough sample size for whatever you were curious about.

I don't know your friends but if they're getting defensive like this over shit as petty as "I want your party to win, the way they're acting in congress will ensure they will lose and I agree that that would be a bad thing" means they probably are radicalizing right now. Otherwise they'd have confidence (completely unearned, mind) that the Dems are going to do the right thing and win enough support in 2022 and 2024 and they'd just say something like "Yeah I agree, but don't worry AOC and Pelosi will work it out in time for the midterms." Wouldn't be surprised if they start asking about DSA or whatever after 2022 midterms.

Things are so dire for the congressional dems, I saw some good analysis that for the midterms the Dems will have to match the best performance of the party in power for the 2022 midterms for them to hold onto majorities in the senate and house. Last time was 2002 for the GOP, right after 9/11 and they had that wave. If the Dems don't meet or exceed that performance they will lose the majority - even if they perform the 2nd best in the last 40 to 50 years. They also have a trifecta, right now, the mood of the country is for radical (relative to neoliberal centrism anyway) action and complete overhauls of the way politics is done at a national level - no more filibuster, stimulus checks out the door quickly and without means testing, admittance of DC and Puerto Rico, breaking the taboo of prosecuting former presidents, the mood of the country is for radical action and the Dems hold all the levers of power and have nothing to hide behind. So, if they're not doing their utmost to win favor and win people's votes, they will have no one to blame but themselves. Not that they won't try, I guarantee they'll be blaming voters for not voting for the Dems hard enough without something in exchange.

I thought Isla Fischer was Amy Adams, although apparently that's pretty common.

lol. I like the name El Dorado because it kind of harkens back to when white settlers crossed the great plains and mountains they were faced with, essentially, paradise. Fruit that just grew everywhere, salmon and fish in the rivers, warm days. Too bad we had to go and fuck all that up.

I really hope that in the future if (when) the US gets balkanized the various indigenous tribes gets to be senior partners in the division and any successor nations or get a complete opt out if they want it.

Dunno, comrade. At least in this one the guy had an excuse that he was focusing on divisions based on watersheds, lol.

I'm not sure how different things would've been, really. Around the globe, the only thing that really impacted deaths and the spread of the illness were:

1. the willingness to do hard lock downs earlier
2. the willingness to do mass contact tracing early on (kinda useless after a certain point with intense community spread, but extremely helpful early)
3. the willingness to shut down travel early
4. not fucking around with long term nursing homes and seniors and protecting them as much as possible
5. the ability to take control of production and mass distribute PPE, food, and block evictions, hand out cash, and so on.

Dems and GOP were in bipartisan opposition to all of these, didn't matter the state. Dems may have feigned support to do hard lock downs but then blamed GOP opposition, even if they somehow had 60 senators. Clinton or Biden wouldn't have used the Defence Production Act to control PPE production and logistics or to produce ventilators. Healthcare is such a shit show in this country that contract tracing would have been a complete mess and usless without major reforms. There's no worker protections and some half-thought quickly shitted out protections like ensured paid sick leave (if the Dems would've somehow been amenable to that) would've been ignored by the employers.

I don't think they would have mishandled the very early days and probably would have had a better initial response which would've helped prevent some of the exponential growth. But even if you're a country like France led by a neolib, it didn't seem to matter unless you were going to do the 5 above. There would probably be at least 100K fewer dead Americans but we'd still have all the problems we're having right now.

Y'all are doing good ones, but one easy way is just to ask how people are doing. Y'know? Like, if your a cashier. Just ask how the customer is doing or how their day is going. They will almost certainly say "good" but I bet you'd get at least a half or more of people actually having a shitty or neutral day and furthermore, knowing they're not having a good day.

If we made it so you can only get $100 per person max and they have to be knowingly lieing thatd be the way to go.

what the fuck is buddhism “oh it’s about avoiding the cycle of pleasure and suff-” how is that different from from wanting to kill yourself with extra steps explain what buddhism is to me i’ll fucking kill you

If you ever are walking on a road and meet the Buddha, you should kill him. You are more Buddhist than you realize.

Buddhism is about the cessation of suffering. Suffering, in the buddhist view, is caused by attachment. There are three kinds of craving that lead to attachment, the longing to satisfy your senses (with sex, food, music, drugs, love, family, I could go on but its a long list), the longing to be something and self-actualize, and the longing for self-negation (read: death and suicide). Craving the cessation of existence is just another vector for attachment and suffering. Buddha called his way "The Middle Path" because it was a way between Extreme Abnegation and Pure Hedonism - both of which he found were not able to fulfill him or satisfy his cravings. It's something you know in your own life, even when times are good there is always a feeling that things are not quite satisfactory.

So Buddhism teaches that this suffering/non-satisfaction is a state that can be ended and gives you the tools to do it by. Become non-attached. The practice of Buddhism offers a number of ways to becoming non-attached, meditate and go to a temple and study, recognize the dignity and sanctity of all life and put that recognition into practice through vegetarianism for example, meditate and suddenly become enlightened, do certain rituals that help focus your mind on non-attachment, read through certain texts like the Heart Sutra, meditate on incomprehensible Zen Koans after sitting in a hard ass pose for 10 hours, and so on. But the goal of it is to end the suffering in your own life by becoming non-attached (cravings are inevitable but you don't have to let cravings become attachment).

Best I heard to describe the pathology of Shapiro, is he 100% still thinks of himself as a boy genius.

Jesus, wish we had a pipeline to get right wing trans and POC out in a completely safe manner and some debriefing or deprogramming. Can't believe no one spoke up for her on that call. Maybe Blair thinks she's trapped with these "friends" and "allies" on the right for whatever reason, or maybe she's just doing it for the money, but the worst that would come of saying "I don't support fringe right wingers anymore and I'm rethinking my right wing positions because of the treatment I've suffered" is a bunch of twitter libs clapping and stanning and leftists grumbling "I told you so" and maybe a lose of funding from whatever right wing dark money slush fund she's got. If she keeps on her path and if the right wing gets ascendancy, they'll kill her and call her stupid for having helped them set it up in the first place.

Mistake 1 is thinking twitter cares about anything happening in Pakistan. Most of twitter doesn't care about the endless drone strikes never mind what happens at a university in Lahore.

Socialism is totally valid from an objective viewpoint, we don't need moral arguments for socialism - in fact, Marx and them would've called you a silly idealist. Socialism or barbarism is the inevitable outcome of the tendency of the rate of profit to decline. Although it helps that socialism is also morally right.

Sure, "The United States and biological warfare" by Stephen Lyon Endicott is a decent book that covers, for example, the US use of germ warfare during the Korean War. One of the generals admitted to using it, the DPRK soldiers used that admittance as a broadcast, and the US subsequently denied it and claimed any POWs that bore eye witness were in fact just indoctrinated and brainwashed. The amount of bombs dropped on the north was also completely unwarranted as well as targets (complete indiscriminate bombing of every building, not just military targets). The US also mixed in phosphorus as a prototype of future use of napalm in Vietnam, in fact some claims of glowing graveyards in the DPRK are justified by the amount of phosphorus used - they wouldn't glow forever but during and immediately after it would make sense. The No Gun Ri massacre was another much more well known and publicized war crime.

Then to top it off, the US created reports like this that read more like a gish gallop of the DPRK before they could bring evidence to the UN. In particular is section V that includes the claims that American POWs were brainwashed.

And I don't know if there's a book that links this, but the Korean War armistice was in 53 and MKULTRA was sanctioned the exact same year. The way the events are laid out chronologically - it seems like they had some spin guys invent forced brainwashing and then immediately try to make it real and see if they could do it.

Leftist orgs are targetted for infiltration and neutering, encouraging splitting is part of that.

Farming is an incredibly dangerous job. So many of those workers lose fingers, limbs, lives. Workplace safety is essentially non-existent (emergency healthcare is also not close by because they're rural). Plus the day-to-day dangers of being out in the sun and working with chemicals, tons of farmers and farm laborers get melanoma so easy.

Congrats!

IMO they really shouldn't be asking for gender on job applications, that should only come up for sanitized and anonymized demographic data or maybe as a way of kicking your application up higher on some internal algorithm - y'know to make sure they're getting a good unbiased distribution of applicants and interviews. Same goes for people's names IMO too, there's too much bias against feminine (depending on industry I guess) or racialized names. That should only get someone's attention when they start to actually interview. But I guess at some point, there is going to be an actual interview and whoever is in charge of that is going to make some assumptions based on gender presentation...

It's also weird that humans are some of the only mammals without a penis bone, yet we still call our erections "boners."