EldritchFeminity

Got you pushing too many pencils, Dillon!

I had a FedEx driver the other day tell me that they separate packages into multiple deliveries sometimes even though they're all being dropped off all at once for the same reason. Cook the metrics so it looks like they're making more deliveries in a certain timeframe.

Oh how quickly history forgets the horrors of the past...

They never said that everybody has a right to drive. The reality is that, at least in the US and similarly planned countries, cars are priced like a luxury and treated like a necessity by the powers that be. Anything that isn't driving a car is an afterthought.

I mean, I'd personally rather see an anime girl themed desktop than those weird statues rich people sometimes have in places like on their coffee table that are stuff like a woman in the boob + butt out pose with no limbs or head. That shit is just creepy looking. I know it's supposed to be reminiscent of broken Greek and Roman statues, but why do they always have to be posed and objectified like porn stars? At least with the anime girl, I know that I'm talking to an otaku rather than Hannibal Lecter.

Yeah, I can't tell whether they mean aesthetics > graphics or everything else that goes into a game trumps good graphics.

With the latter, I generally say that good graphics can't save a bad game, while the former I refer to as the Wind Waker effect. People complained about how cartoony Wind Waker looked after the GameCube graphics demo showed off a realistic-looking fight between Link and Ganon, but today Wind Waker is looked back on fondly for its art style that defined many Zelda games after it while many of the "realistic" FPS games from the time are looked back on as the "real = brown" era.

Hillary also had to contend with Bernie as her opponent in the primary, a much more beloved candidate who polled better than both her and Trump, and was also handicapped by the Dems running a crooked primary by saying that they didn't have to and would never pick Bernie as the candidate, even if he won the primary. She also called herself a "Goldwater girl" during the campaign, a man who ran for President on segregation as a campaign promise. People also had a negative view of her because she's a Clinton, and there was a bit of dissatisfaction with "political dynasties" after the Bush era.

And Harris ran a campaign that tried to appeal to conservative voters with promises such as building the wall on the Mexican border and campaigning with Cheney, which caused her to immediately begin losing percentages in the polls amongst independent voters. She also has a legacy of questionable actions against minorities of color during her time in California, which I saw a number of people criticizing.

Not to say that sexism and racism didn't play a part because oh my God, even here in liberal Massachusetts I see that shit. But they also did the usual Democrat campaign strategy of not appealing to their base because they were courting a mythical moderate conservative voter that doesn't exist, and that's a losing strategy. Dems fall in love, Republicans fall in line. AOC is so popular because she speaks to the issues that people have, and she does so passionately.

Despite that, I unfortunately remain unconvinced that she could pull out a presidential victory because of the aforementioned racism and sexism that's so prevalent in this country. As someone wiser than me once said, racism is so American that when you criticize it, people think that you're criticizing America.

There's a great breakdown on YouTube by Shaun on the Harry Potter books, but one of the things that I like that he points out is that you can basically watch JK's political stance change in real time as the books progress.

When she started writing them, she was "impoverished" (to some extent she also benefitted from help like living in a place owned by her sister for free), and the story starts out railing against the system and those in power. As the books took off and she began to benefit more from that same system, the plot began to be more about how the system is great and shouldn't be questioned, but only the right kinds of people should have power. If you're a Good Guy, you can use the Killing Curse and it's okay because you're a Good Guy. If anybody else uses the Killing Curse, then they're a Bad Guy and that's horrible. The wizards keeping magic away from the Muggles, a power that could solve many of the world's problems, is a bad thing at first, but Harry goes on to become a magic cop to enforce that very same ban at the end of the series. There are tons of examples in the story.

I experienced this recently with a coworker who talked himself in circles about how he cared about facts and logic and agreed with both parties on different issues. But...he spat out Republican grifter speech over and over (basic biology!) and talked about how he watched these "debate me" idiots online who showed how Democrats "barely ever back up their arguments with logic" while the Republicans apparently do (you probably know the ones, they're famous grifters but I don't remember their names), as if these guys wouldn't simply edit out everything but the most extreme people to use as evidence for their claims.

I have a line from a song I like to use when talking about these sorts of people: Spread the facts out like a fan on the floor, throw away the ones that make you feel bad.

Cognitive dissonance is a requirement for this kind of thinking.

The Republican party is a cult - especially the cult of Trump. All these grifters selling hate to conservatives have made it that much harder to convince them when they're wrong, and the odds of them doubling down on those beliefs when they are challenged get more and more likely the deeper in they are. There's a point where it becomes almost impossible to pull people out of a cult and there's largely no line that they won't convince themselves that it's okay to cross.

I think that's where we're at and have been at for quite a while. Republicans convince themselves that they're the good guys fighting the good fight against whatever the party tells them is bad, and believe that their bigotry and hate is justified.

The trick is to get an entire neighborhood in on it. That way you can schedule shouting matches in the front yards of the houses neighboring the open houses as well.

A lot of these minorities also always think that they're different because they're "one of the good ones" and will reap the same benefits.