Seriously disappointing they didn’t put sharknados in the game. smh

This kills the human.

It’s like saying that H. H. Holmes has without doubt broken some laws.

It’s the ‘ick’ factor, plain and simple. The “culture war” is all about giving idiots a group of people to hate so you can win their votes by oppressing that group. Most of the world is cis, and most cis people never spend a second of their lives thinking about how their experience isn’t universal. So when they see a trans person just living their lives, they’re more apt to be judgmental than curious: “Obviously, if that person’s lived experience is different from mine, there’s something wrong with them.”

Trans people are easy to scapegoat because they’re a minority and their very existence challenges the narrow worldview that most cis people possess. They’re a godsend for evil people looking to oppress people for power.

To which the old man replies: “Man, what the fuck is up with all of you people coming up here to ask me what the meaning of life is? I moved to the top of the tallest mountain I could find to get away from you all!”

I’m going to throw a trigger warning on this next part just in case:

The last time I came through American customs, it was when I was returning from a conference in Spain, and a colleague of mine got detained for 3 hours because he “looked suspicious”. Man’s a fucking engineer, with credentials out the wazoo, but apparently he fidgeted in line or something. Sitting there in the little space available just anxiously waiting for them to release him was harrowing, but I can’t even imagine what he went through. Nobody would tell me shit; in fact, the more I asked about him, the more it felt like they were treating me like a suspect. If they’d ended up deciding that he didn’t pass the sniff test, they could have taken him anywhere, and nobody would know a fucking thing about it for God knows how long.

Man, I’m getting sweaty just reliving that. Fuck I hate this country sometimes.

I haven’t done any international travel for the last few years, but I used to do it a decent amount for work, and lemme tell you: the worst part of those trips wasn’t the long / cramped plane flights; it was going through US customs.

I’m a US citizen, but every time I went through those lines, it felt like I was passing through a military checkpoint into occupied territory. Every time I went through that experience, it made me hate what our country has become just that little bit more.

I dunno, man. Seems like a leap to believe he’s doing it for cynical, shady business reasons when the far more likely explanation is just that he’s a stupid cunt.

I deleted my Reddit account back when they fucked over the 3rd party apps, but I still do browse their site. Much as I think that Lemmy is the superior platform, Reddit still has a huge numbers advantage, and so the amount of content over there is much greater than here.

Any time I go into the comments section, though, I am reminded that Reddit is a shithole. So I try to stay out of those and just read the linked articles.

Yeah, I figured they’d already had contingency plans in place in case the US did the dumbest thing possible in the 2024 elections. I mean, last time this traitor was president, he sent lists of the names and locations of US spies to Russia, and then in a completely unrelated series of accidents that followed, several of them died.

Any intelligence agency worth its salt should know by now that any secrets they share with the US will also be shared with Russia. Or anybody who pays a million dollars to go to a party at Mar a Lago so they can flatter Trump in person.

Every world intelligence agency should consider the US to be completely compromised at this point.

ACAB means ACAB.

For a deeper gut punch, remember that in “Heart of Gold”, Zoe tells Wash that she wants to have a baby with him, and she won’t brook any of his lame excuses, like “the universe is too dangerous for kids”. It’s possible that if there was ever a second movie or a continuation of the series, they’d say that Zoe did get pregnant just before all of the shit went down, but with it being abandoned IP, we have to guess. So what do you think? Is there a mini Wash in Zoe’s future?

Wash’s, in “Serenity”. It was just so unexpected and abrupt, and it served to generate a sense of unease in the viewer; after Wash’s death, no character seemed to be protected by plot armor. Granted, Shepherd Book bit it before Wash did, but the movie seemed to set him up to be separate from the rest of the crew. I loved that Whedon played with this concept of fragility in the ensuing battle, with Kaylee getting darted, Zoe getting sliced up, and Simon getting shot. And then, Mal’s battle with the agent… I thought the misdirect was masterfully done.

I’ve been affected by character deaths before and since, but Wash’s death was the only death I’ve seen in media that has made me worry for the safety of the other characters. It made a lot of sense outside of the movie, too, as “Serenity” was more or less a tribute to some IP that was never going to get resurrected. While watching the movie for the first time, I was left thinking: “what if Whedon just said ‘fuck it’?”

I think it all boils down to that nebulous concept of “the social contract”. The most naive interpretation of the justice system is that it will provide justice when justice is demanded. It is, after all, called “the justice system”. But what constitutes justice? And who receives it? We have already seen two separate supreme court decisions that state unequivocally that the police are neither obligated to serve nor protect people. We have also seen that young black men are 7 times more likely to be falsely convicted of serious crimes than young white men, so we know that the justice system does not work for all of us. We know that rich people get convicted far less often, and for far shorter sentences than poor people, and we know that the legal system saps the opportunity to acquire generational wealth from those who do get convicted.

It is illegal to shoplift $100 of groceries from a corporation, but it is perfectly legal for that same corporation to drive out competition and then raise prices, in essence stealing from the entire community. It is illegal to intentionally harm someone, but it is perfectly legal for a medical insurance company to deny coverage to paying customers for necessary medical intervention.

When justice is completely out of reach by legal means, the flimsy fiction of the social contract is voided. New York City has somewhere in the neighborhood of 900 murders per year, which means that there have probably been 5 or 6 other people who have been murdered in the city since Brian Thompson was shot. Are the police putting the same effort into tracking the killers of those people as they are into Brian Thompson’s murderer? The reality is that the vast majority of us are intentionally excluded from the halls of power. The American Declaration of Independence makes the bold claim that it is a self-evident truth that all men are created equal. Does the present situation in this country feel to you like equality? Because to me, it feels like there is an owner class, and a peasant class, and brother… we ain’t the owners.

If the people doing the coup end up writing the history books, it gets called a revolution.

Do some people here not realize that if we start allowing this kind of extra-judiciary assassinations

The fact that he’s wanted for murder and is the subject of an active manhunt seems to suggest that extrajudicial assassinations are not, in fact, allowed. In fact, I might be so bold as to suggest that the justice department generally frowns on them.

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I would very much like you to point out what I made up.