I read an article years ago, maybe like a decade ago, of some game industry person saying it was a cycle:

Incredible new graphics come out and people will buy the shiny regardless of anything else, then slowly they have to start making actually good games with those graphics to sell, then incredible new graphics come out and you don’t need to bother with story for a while.

There was a greek-australian comedian who was standing in front of the parthenon and said something like, “You can tell this house is greek cause of all the pillars”.

That headline really is a thing of beauty. It’s like finding out that your trash is piling up because the city retasked all the sanitation workers to lie in fields of filth and create a heavenly host of garbage angels.

I don’t know that ‘one of the main reasons’ is fair. For profit prisons are vile cruelty-factories and have pull with lawmakers, but they hold less than 10% of incarcerated individuals. It’s a reason, sure. But a main reason?

I think there are two obviously larger reasons:

1. There are more homeless people and homeowners see them. If you’re a local politician, you can get very far by promising voters that they won’t have to see homeless people. Here in “oregon, tolerant oregon” (to quote jello biafra) this is the most common sentiment to hear, and is reflected in policy.

2. Growing resource pressure leads to a rise in ‘punching down’. As climate crisis, imperial turmoil and the rich taking ever more resources fuel poverty and scarcity, the social pressure to distinguish yourself from those further down the social ladder increases. Hating the weak identifies you as strong, which grows in value as more and more insecurity plagues our society.

Being angry at voters and calling them idiots over choices the democratic party made doesn’t help defeat trump.

Anyone not voting for Biden because of Gaza is a fucking idiot.

The democracts insist on maintaining this position despite the mountain of evidence that it’s driving down turn out in their base, and does not represent the wishes of the electorate.

Why is it that voters have to swallow genocide, and not that democrats have to stop perpetuating electorally unpopular genocide?

Of course trump will be worse and i’ll be holding my nose and voting for biden but it makes no sense to blame voters for the inevitable and foreseeable consequences of the imperial cowardice of the democratic party.

I generally recoil from comparing biden to putin but this really requires russian levels of post-truth politics.

Israel is committing war crimes like trump commits all his crimes - openly, in public and shielded by US elites.

Yep, once cyanobacteria flooded the world with oxygen, everything that couldn’t hack it in an oxygen rich atmosphere died off never to return, and cyanobacteria and the chloroplast is still here, defining our world.

As bad as we fuck things up, we’re better placed than many organisms to weather the consequences of our actions. Our numbers and harm done might go down for a while but like waves of the plague, we’ll adapt to upset the new equilibrium in time.

Short answer: it isn’t

The power structures that make ‘the west’ a bloc in the international system are 100% defending Israel’s genocide.

We’re giving them weapons, vetoing on their behalf in the UN, denying that the text book genocide going on is a genocide. Netanyahu’s war crimes are as obvious and publicly committed as trump’s money laundering and election subversion, yet biden is pretending that the ICC warrant is unjustified.

Despite a growing number of brutally beaten protestors, it’s still true to say that the west is supporting israeli war crimes.

on the way out.

This is overly optimistic. We humans are so resilient. We have every resource that’s left at our disposal.

Even if there’s full scale environmental collapse, we’ll survive, rebuild, and be around to do it all over again.

Suitably brutal and chilling version!

I can’t not read that in a garbled south african accent.

Glad to be of service.

Yep, agreed.

Not really. Connections and social status will always have benefits.

People who don’t realize that both liberals and zionists have a lot of imperialism to be ashamed of remind me of the US education system.

I’ve got some bad news for you about the history of those cliches.

Oh, that’s great to know! I’d got the impression that 打 was being used as a verb in the sense of use/make/play with 火機 as the object. Thanks!

The way I was taught to ask for a light in chinese is literally translated as ‘Hit the fire machine?’ (打火機嗎)

There was a recent case in NC where a 12 y/o was found dead with his underpants off and the camp obstructed the investigation and continues to maintain the death was accidental even after a coroner ruled it was not. It’s the second death at that camp as well, previous one was in 2014.

https://www.wfae.org/crime-justice/2024-02-16/nc-regulators-shut-down-trails-carolina-camp-after-12-year-old-boy-dies