I mean... look at the number of people who still, to this day, believe Joe Biden has dementia.

He's an elderly man with a speech impediment, and anyone with reasoning skills could tell he's still lucid. But the right's centuries-long war against education has paid off, and now reasoning skills are scarce.

Plus, ever since TikTok, there are now millions of people who get their "news" from five-second clips / soundbites. So if your "message" can't be summed up in what is essentially two pages of a picture book, in a way that can be digested without critical thinking, you are no longer a viable candidate.

Put differently, the winner from now on is whoever better pulls the gullible vote.

The movie maybe. But that intro was basically divorced from the rest of the movie.

The intro suggested that stupid people having kids was the reason humanity started evolving backward. It invoked natural selection and "survival of the fittest."

The intro even labeled the low birth rate couple and high birthrate couple with IQ scores to illustrate this point.

You argue that that the movie attributes the stupidity of its world to societal shifts. It does. It does a great job laying out a progression from late stage capitalism to idiocracy.

But that just further highlights how unnecessary that intro was. The intro attributed the stupidity to something entirely different.

Agreed. As iconic as that eugenicist prologue might be, it harms humanity and doesn't really serve the plot.

I voted for Harris, but I feel like it's pretty obvious why someone would vote third party instead.

One need only reject the premise that voting should be a strategic act of harm reduction. Mind you, I'm not saying "is" here. I'm saying "should be".

We may not take their approach, but you have to admit that there's value to it. They are embracing the world as it ought to be, whereas we are trying to work with the reality of the situation as we perceive it.

And we could be perceiving incorrectly. For all we know, Trump could loose-cannon his way into making Netanyahu's whole party lose their next election. It may not be likely, but nothing in this world is certain.

For all we know, the Heritage Foundation could destroy so much of the government and economy so rapidly that it weakens all of the property rights and FBI operations aimed against self-sufficient mutual aid, and communes start springing up all over the place. It's not likely without massive turmoil, starvation, and bloodshed. But however unlikely, we cannot predict the future!

Cyncism is costly in terms of mental health and well-being. In order to choose pragmatism over principles, we must accept a reality where no good choices exist. But that's not something we can do everywhere. We can't repeatedly choose the "least miserable option" and still be able to hold ourselves together and function. It's just not possible.

Humans need hope to survive. They need a hill they can hang onto. They need to be able to say, "on this ground, I fight for what should be rather than what is."

Some people's hill is their ballot.

There were times I felt pretty dirty doing what they asked of me in order to close more sales.

So many companies! Back when I worked Arclight, it was a small bit of subtle manipulation: "would you like to turn that to a large for only an additional 40¢?"

I hated it, because I knew the purpose was to pressure people into buying more than they wanted.

Thankfully, the place was run like the Trump Administration, so no one really knew how consistently the company's stupid mind games were being deployed against our guests.

But anyways! Yeah. Feeling dirty is pretty reasonable. The things we do for rent money...

This guy was a real asshole on top of it all, and he was trying to pull it off on my watch, so, no regrets on shutting him down.

What's with that, anyways? Why aren't real-life thieves more like charismatic, charitable Robin Hoods?

I'm really glad someone out there is costing these companies money.

So many times it's AT&T and Verizon selling you an "insurance plan" for your phone that still requires you to pay $99-$300 if you actuality need your phone replaced. That's objectively worse than no "insurance".

Maybe I'd feel differently about it if I had that pro-capitalist "your loss is my gain" mindset... and also owned shares in AT&T. But being a human capable of empathy and humanity, AT&T and Verizon just disgust me.

I realized in a reddit argument a while back that one huge difference between Trump supporters and the rest of us is: Trump supporters expect less from Trump. Hold him to a lower standard than they hold themselves or non-supporters to.

In the argument, I had a supporter tell me that "raking the leaves" was advocating wildfire management -- including controlled burns. And the person followed it up with remarks along the lines of, "you should have been smart enough to know that's what he was saying."

Which was crazy to me because:

• they were measuring my intelligence by my ability to come up with numerous unique rephrasings and potential meanings to Trump's words
• they were scoring higher than Trump by their own intelligence metric
  • Trump could only come up with "raking the leaves" and the commenter came up with "as a country, we should be putting more resources into wildfire management", a much more coherent and intelligent phrasing
• in expecting me to be able to read multiple meanings into "raking the leaves", this person was ALSO expecting me to score higher on this measure of intelligence than Trump. And calling me stupid for not outscoring Trump.

Basically told me that if I wasn't smarter than Trump, I was stupid.

I pointed this out to them and never got a response.

Anyways, different standards. According to Trump supporters:

• if you're no smarter than Trump, you are an idiot;
• if you're no kinder than Trump, you are sadistic and malicious;
• if you are no more effective than Trump, you are useless,
• But Trump is the smartest, kindest, most valuable person there is.

I'm glad I could help.

Have you played Supreme Commander? It's basically a simplified Supreme Commander.

You gather credits by building extractors, and extractors can only be put on resource deposits, so your aim is to control those deposits.

But where SupCom 2 has mass, energy, and research, Rusted Warfare has only credits.

What I look for

When I play RTS games, it's almost-exclusively:

• co-op against the AI
• with teammates
  • ^^ teammates who don't spend time practicing RTS skills

So I'm looking for very specific things in a game. So far, of the games I've played, Rusted Warfare is top three when it comes to those things. (The other two in my top 3 are Age of Empires 3 and Nemesis of the Roman Empire (aka Celtic Kings 2)).

It got into my top three by being strong in the following areas:

Simplicity

Rusted Warfare is simple enough that my teammates can follow my requests without needing to train and practice on their own.

For instance, I can advise my teammates, "upgrade your extractors" and they can follow my advice without requiring a tutorial on resource management and energy shortages.

For comparison, in Supreme Commander (the franchise that was very clearly the inspiration for this game), trying to upgrade your extractor without sufficient knowledge on energy shortages can lead to choking out your entire economy.

Bull-headed AI

This is the most important thing I look for in casual co-op RTS.

In most RTS games, if the AI has 100 units? They are now attacking you on 100 different fronts. And focusing on any one front will deliver you losses at the other 99. It's a game of whack-a-mole where you are punished for every mole you miss.

I know I said Age of Empires 3 is in my top three, but Age of Empires 2? Exhausting, excrutiating, and infuriating. It's basically impossible to enjoy playing against the AI.

Same goes for Company of Heroes. I have broken a clavicle and wrist, and I can tell you without hesitation that playing against the AI in Company of Heroes is several times more painful than breaking bones.

Some people like that in a game. I do not.

Rusted Warfare, on the other hand, features an AI that mostly attacks you directly. Put a cluster of turrets between your base and theirs? You're now battling 80% of their incursions. They'll attack your flanks eventually, but you don't have to divide your attention evenly between all 100 different locations. It's almost like you and the AI are looking at the same place.

It's rare to find an RTS game where you are allowed to enjoy yourself. Most punish anyone who drops below 200 actions per minute.

But in Rusted Warfare, you can just... play.

Progression

I have extraordinarily heavy ADHD (first percentile on impulse control and sustained focus). But as long as a game has the bare minimum of progression (upgrades, building tree, etc) then I don't get bored and disengaged.

And Rusted Warfare has that. It's got at least the bare minimum.

There's always something for me to do: upgrade extractors, add turrets, build experimental factories, etc. And finishing this process does yield some pretty satisfying armadas... especially if I'm playing with mods.

In summary

I highly recommend it for casual co-op.

I grabbed Rusted Warfare RTS not long ago. It's a real-time strategy game. $1.99 on the Google Play store.

Have you heard of DeVone Boggan and how he managed to reduce gun violence in Richmond, CA?

How does a nature-over-nurture person interpret the success of such a program?

Grif:

It's one of life's great mysteries isn't it? Why are we here? I mean, are we the product of some cosmic coincidence, or is there really a God watching everything? You know, with a plan for us and stuff. I don't know, man, but it keeps me up at night.

Simmons:

...What?! I mean why are we out here, in this canyon?