Wait until the population declines further and the CCP tightens its grip even more over Hong Kong. I doubt this’ll last. It’s just how authoritarian communist regimes work. Look at Putin and co. for examples.

Thanks for sharing that, even despite the uncontrollable facepalm that resulted. What’s terrible is that despite the fact that this artist is so crazy and racist, his art is actually pretty good.

Maybe for now, but as soon as more people switch to Windows 11 or Microsoft apps that constantly show you ads and are basically spam / adware themselves, Linux will get more appealing.

Microsoft is unfortunately learning from social media companies. Not only do you PAY for the product, you are also the product, and get your personal info stolen and get served ads even while you pay.

It’s getting to the point where I’m seriously eyeballing Mint again, or Kubuntu. And I’m the kind of person that’s generally too lazy to even dual boot anymore.

Sad, because I was a fan of them and bought all their games from Saint’s Row 1 all the way to Gat out of Hell (although not in chronological order) and got Agents of Mayhem for free somewhere, but think they’ve made some bad moves lately.

I think it all started going downhill from Agents of Mayhem, and them screwing up with the reboot of Saint’s Row was probably the nail in the coffin. I wish they’d just made Saint’s Row 5 instead, with wacky time travel shenanigans and a more polished set of superpowers.

At the point where they decided to “reboot” to something old school and grittier (TOO old school, imo) they really didn’t get what their fanbase wanted, and what new players who’d only heard of and experienced Saint’s Row 4 would get excited about.

They could’ve probably taken Saint’s Row up to 6 entries if they’d just iterated on the formula from 4 and possibly Gat out of Hell (I wouldn’t know, I got distracted and didn’t play it after I bought it, ironically). Similar to how United Front Games (the developer of Sleeping Dogs) could’ve probably stayed in business if they’d just made Sleeping Dogs 2 instead of that horrible “free to play” multiplayer asset flip of some of the least interesting elements of Sleeping Dogs 1.

Yeah, in the 1920’s to boot. If B-movie (or nowadays just any movie studio) were on here, they’d take what you just wrote, add time travel to it and make it into a movie without giving you credit. And they’d probably find some way to use AI in it too.

Honestly, probably the only way to save the Environment and Democracy. Too much power in the hands of the few leads to perpetual effective monarchy. It’s why the Founding Fathers were against large amounts of inherited wealth, particularly inherited wealth that creates dynasties in perpetuity.

I know people don’t like the Founding Fathers that much lately, and I see why, but conservatives really don’t understand them, and deliberately misrepresent them, because not doing so would undercut all conservative “policies”.

World’s a mess because of inequality and the concentration of almost all wealth and power into the hands of a small amount of sociopaths. I honestly think the only way to solve this permanently is to cap the amount of wealth and power any individual or family can have.

You’ll start to oxidize?

The C is the grade those kids on got in “Temperature Understanding Class” because they’re almost failing.

Also correct if he’s thinking about cute dogs / cats / other animals that have more than 1 female in the group.

Same. I stay away from #Explore and just keep to my feed of people I actually follow. And I make sure to unfollow those who are too stressful to hear from constantly.

I agree with almost all the of all politics all the time people who constantly post negative things, but it’s too tiring to read them, especially since knowing about it does me no good and I can’t do anything about it anyway. I already vote and donate as much as I can, and I live in a Blue state so anything outside of my area’s just not possible for me to influence.

I’ve found it’s better just to ignore it and focus on positive things that make my life better.

This is also why I stopped going to Mastodon. In addition to negative ragebait politics being almost the only thing that’s trending (and I have too much of that in my life already) there’s no real nuance or tolerance for anything outside the echo chamber.

You DO get called a racist nazi transphobe for stepping outside the box or trying to support people, ideas or places that might not be 100% perfect or pass the strictest ideological purity test. I thought Liberal Twitter was pretty exclusionary and echo-chamber-y, but Mastodon’s a lot worse.

Kind of, but more “slightly amusing” than funny.

Sad news, but isn’t the Doge in the picture Kabosu rather than Balltze?

It’s true. If anything, people are more tolerant of women being this way. Where a man would get a fist in the face, a woman will get polite or even good treatment, especially if she’s pretty.

Yep, watermarked memes (and watermarked most things in general) are a scourge on the internet. I stopped following a Youtube channel that’s mostly playthrough’s of old fighting games because he suddenly decided one day to add an annoying (and ugly) watermark to the corner of ALL of his videos including the old ones.

Luckily, I’d found a similar one who was actually better at playing the fighting games themselves. I switched to that dude instead.

Always, but things like unfettered worldwide capitalism and the concentration of wealth and power just makes it easier to do and cover up.

Inequality and lack of competition (not just economic competition, but also things like political party alternatives) lead to concentration of power, which leads to corruption.

Diversifying power and providing people with alternatives, checks and balances, and separation of powers leads to reduced corruption that groups of average people can fight back against.

Hence things like the 2nd Amendment and the Founding Fathers believing that Citizens should be armed to resist even tyrannical overreach from corrupt elements of their own government for instance.

No I’m not a Republican by the way, I just find it ironic that the people that started the USA actually had some good ideas that their successors have unfortunately just thrown out the window.

Eh, if it’s not environmental disaster due to climate change, I have a hunch it might be microplastics or forever chemicals. That’s what I expect will do me in before old age does.

And to think that I was seriously considering moving up north to the Great Lakes to get away from Climate Change and to move to a place that actually has fresh water. Joke’s on me, that fresh water has microplastics to kill me. Total Catch-22.

To be fair, it’s one of the old school Republicans that would cross the aisle and vote for something Democrats made that are now Extinct in modern Politics. They died with John McCain, honestly. Better Manchin than Sinema or an actual modern Republican.

If I had to vote in 5-10 more Joe Manchin style “Democrats” to kick the same number of Republicans out of office in Red States, I would. Especially if it gave us 60 Democrats and the ability to have a filibuster-proof majority. Even if they were like “Immigrants are bad” or “All guns are good” or “We have to stop being woke about gays and trans and pronouns.” or whatever, as long as they weren’t all of that at once (and preferably only ONE of those at once) I’d vote them in, so long as they voted to do something about climate change, and also hopefully to reform the economy so all the money and power’s not in the hands of the big megacorps and billionaires.

People won’t stop being stupid and bigoted, so we have to take the wins we can. Everyone complains that Republicans keep trotting out “God, Guns, and Gays” every time they campaign, but what they’re not addressing is that Republicans keep WINNING with the 3 G’s and also immigration. They hold the house and have enough of the senate to filibuster everything. They’ve also used their control of the house and senate (and Presidency, when they have it) to pack the Supreme Court too.

I honestly want Democrats and liberal ideological purists to start being realistic now that the world is burning down around us and see that we’ve run out of time and need to start winning now, or else we won’t have a future. The fact that young Republicans believe in and want to do something about climate change is also a good thing. Reality is about power and consensus, it’s not about ideals.

I don’t know about this case and this school, but in stricter Christian private schools, the men get kicked out too. One of my high school teachers was a principal at a Christian private school, and he got kicked out because his wife cheated on him.

He didn’t cheat on her or get anyone pregnant, she did while he was overworked at that school, but that was somehow a scandal / shame that reflected poorly on him and the school, so he was fired. Most “Christian” institutions are hypocritical pieces of shit that don’t follow their own rules or apply them selectively, but others follow their laws to the letter.

Not that those places are good either, they just enforce their standards. To be fair, those places tend to note be affiliated with Republicans, which kill everything they touch and is the major reason I left the church.

GOP’s good at brainwashing stupid and / or dysfunctional people. It’s also good at attracting one issue voters who only care about guns, abortion, immigration, low taxes, etc.

Many people (if not most) are not that smart or caring. If you give them the one thing they want, they’ll support you. Many people (if not most) are also bigots, and hate one group or another and you won’t get them to change their minds by any means.

Republicans know this (they have psychological and media experts on their team who are smart, unlike their voting base) and use their knowledge to manipulate people with lies, and it works, just due to how human nature is.

Democrats also know this, which is why they don’t seriously fight Republicans by compromising on some of their principles or also pandering just enough to get elected in purple / weak red areas. It’s honestly just a power sharing agreement to keep things split 50 / 50 so the corpo donors can get what they want done while the average person gets distracted by the very public binary fight these 2 “parties” are always engaging in.

The only real answer is ranked choice voting and the formation of 2 additional parties. One that’s fiscally and environmentally liberal and socially conservative, and another that’s socially liberal, but fiscally liberal, and hopefully environmentally at least moderate.

People forget that most places on the internet are left-leaning or flat out liberal bubbles. Especially FOSS communities like Lemmy / Kbin. If you go out and engage people in real life, it’s easy to quickly realize that people will keep voting in climate denying, polluting jackasses so they can keep their guns, or make sure abortion’s illegal, etc.

Our best hope is young GOP voters who believe in climate change and want to do something about it, because they’re growing up in this world, and will have to live in it too. Hopefully that Hawaii fire made even the rich realize that shit like that could happen to them during their vacation, and it’ll make them give a shit. Anyhow, our best bet is to try to make deals with the next generation of Republicans, and also introduce ranked choice voting which can create parties and coalitions built around compromise and getting things done as opposed to ideological purity tests, which keep losing us the house and / or senate, even if we win the presidency.