GnastyGnuts [he/him]

It takes material progress to facilitate for social progress. Thinking of LGBT rights in the US, they were basically total shit “until” the late 90s and 2000s saw some significant improvements (not too long after trying to kill as many as possible by deliberately mishandling the AIDS crisis under Reagan), and are now at risk again as various flavors of gay panic are returning – material conditions get shittier and people look for scapegoats.

Likewise, I think when material conditions improve, they are under less stress and have less reason to create these antipathies in the first place.

Digimon World is fun vibes when things are actually going, but a huge part of the game is training your digimon, which involves sitting and just watching them do repetitive stuff for long periods of time (getting punched by a gigantic boxing glove to level defense, sitting under a waterfall to level focus or whatever the stats were, etc).

You might be doing that for a very long while, only for your digimon to evolve into a literal giant turd.

If you get a good champion evolution you can start breaking out into the broader world, which is actually pretty fun. The game has great vibes, and a fun gameplay loop of journeying out of the main village to find lost villagers and send them back, which in turn upgrades the village (residents return and open up shops or provide special services).

But it always suffers from having to go back to that damn training grounds for long stretches. Maybe if there’s a modded PC version that solves that problem, that would be best.

My core memory of Digimon World is being excited when my digimon evolves, just for it to turn into the shit-eating slug (numemon I think?), or the giant yellow shit-monster that also eats shit.

For trolling:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japan-stalin-did/

Historian Mark Tauger’s review of Applebaum’s book Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine:

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/169438

What a piece of shit. He could have said nothing at all and come across better.

Fits with my assessment of modern democrats being essentially Bush-era neocons but “woke.”

Democrats basically became gay George W. Bush.

I think it’s China, there were pictures of their fancy shooting team outfits posted here a few days ago.

I might be misremembering Hillary’s reaction, but didn’t she just sort of act like a dog having a thermometer jammed up its ass? I think saying anything at all is probably a real improvement.

How much is supporting a genocidal apartheid state worth?

Get Hilldawg on that ticket, stat. Also I just found out stat is short for statim in that context, which is just Latin for “immediately.”

Spider-Man 2 is still pretty good.

Liberal politics have been desperately coping with 2016 for 8 whole goddamn years as of this November.

In that 8 years I have not heard a single prominent liberal (politician or media pundit) who has even bothered to substantially criticize the electoral college, let alone attempt to do anything about it.

Glad they made an episode 2 (I haven’t seen either and have no interest, but I know people were very interested in the first, and I hate to see internet creative projects just die off in general)

The bit about “wokeness” and “cancel culture” is a bit surprising to me, since I always figured his politics were closer to generic liberalism.

Holodomor: The Ukrainian Genocide

These metal band names are getting distasteful and unwieldy.

I got Dawn of War 1 on GOG, been playing Dark Crusade campaign but the fucking game keeps crashing whenever I try to take the Space-Marine or Chaos strongholds. I cannot seem to get it fixed, even after getting some goddamn performance mod / patch thing that a bunch of reddit posts recommended. Fucking lame.

This is an account of things from the mid-1980s:

"As with the Holocaust, I tried to remember my very first encounter with the occupation. One of my earliest encounters involved a group of Israeli soldiers, an old Palestinian man, and his donkey.

Standing on a street with some Palestinian friends, I noticed an elderly Palestinian walking down the street, leading his donkey. A small child no more than three or four years old, clearly his grandson, was with him.

Some Israeli soldiers standing nearby went up to the old man and stopped him. One soldier ambled over to the donkey and pried open its mouth. “Old man,” he asked, “why are your donkey’s teeth so yellow? Why aren’t they white? Don’t you brush your donkey’s teeth?”

The old Palestinian was mortified, the little boy visibly upset. The soldier repeated his question, yelling this time, while the other soldiers laughed. The child began to cry and the old man just stood there silently, humiliated. This scene repeated itself while a crowd gathered. The soldier then ordered the old man to stand behind the donkey and demanded that he kiss the animal’s behind.

At first, the old man refused but as the soldier screamed at him and his grandson became hysterical, he bent down and did it. The soldiers laughed and walked away. They had achieved their goal: to humiliate him and those around him.

We all stood there in silence, ashamed to look at each other, hearing nothing but the uncontrollable sobs of the little boy. The old man did not move for what seemed a very long time. He just stood there, demeaned and destroyed.

I stood there too, in stunned disbelief. I immediately thought of the stories my parents had told me of how Jews had been treated by the Nazis in the 1930s, before the ghettos and death camps, of how Jews would be forced to clean sidewalks with toothbrushes and have their beards cut off in public.

What happened to the old man was absolutely equivalent in principle, intent, and impact: to humiliate and dehumanize. In this instance, there was no difference between the German soldier and the Israeli one.

Throughout that summer of 1985, I saw similar incidents: young Palestinian men being forced by Israeli soldiers to bark like dogs on their hands and knees or dance in the streets."

Sara Roy, Harvard professor and child of a Holocaust survivor:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064220308537274

250K isn’t that much money. Maybe to you but to the average person it isn’t.

Completely out-of-touch.