I get what you’re saying but instilling fucked up religious values in a kid is a completely different thing than marrying off a sixteen year old to a middle aged man.

I want to offer another perspective.

I knew someone who got married at 16. The groom was 18, they both came from religious families, and they ended up divorcing at like 22, which was basically a few months after they moved to a liberal area on the west coast.

I don’t think any sane person would call this grooming. At no point was I given the impression that the husband in this situation was abusive. However the situation was fundamentally fucked in a way that was unfair for both parties. My friend felt pressured to be a homemaker while still in high school, while her ex felt even more pressure to be a provider despite having no real emotional or financial capacity for doing so. They also both tried to make it work much longer than they should have, which inflicted a further set of scars.

We live in a world fundamentally more complex than what the average person had to experience 100 years ago. We don’t let teenagers do things like buy alcohol or smoke cigarettes. It is almost expected that 18 - 21 year olds in the US will be on some major level dependent on their parents.

Even in cases where there isn’t abuse, we shouldn’t be letting minors get married. It is just an unfair position to put both parties in.

I love how every major bank came together to create an alternative to Venmo, but somehow it’s objectively worse. It’s not like Venmo is this grand fountain of quality either.

I’m actually in favor of the death penalty in theory, there’s just no way I trust the government to not inadvertently execute an innocent.

Case in point, this week.

Exactly. The problem isn’t diversity. The problem is soulless corporations who put out mediocre games, and then try to shoehorn diversity in a fairly surface level and lazy fashion as a distraction.

It would have been weird if AC1 didn’t star an individual of MENA descent, because the game was set in the middle east. Origins had minority protagonists for similar reasons Connor being Native American in AC3 added a lot of depth when it came to the concept of freedom and how it relates to the American revolution.

I feel like I’ve seen the same story a million times. Mediocre IP, lazy forced diversity, culture war commentary, undeserved stellar reviews, underperformance with audiences due to fundamental issues.

I’m railing about corporate making a mediocre game and then jamming some culture war shit into it in a blantant attempt to distract from the fact that the game is mediocre.

Also AC has had “more than just white guys” featured since the first game.

I feel like a lot of companies that put the most emphasis on making diverse IP make the worst products. I don’t think that the lack of quality is due to diversity. Rather, I think that companies with soulless corporate leadership have a habit of producing mediocre content and attempting to obfuscate said mediocrity by making an otherwise uninspiring game a referendum on the culture war.

I’m willing to bet that there are developers who can make a game that is more organically diverse and genuinely fun, but that they don’t get an honest shot due to the state of modern gaming.

Anyway this game is gonna be crap, IGN is gonna give it a 10/10, and Polygon is gonna go on a tirade when it underperforms in the same way every AC game since black flag has underperformed.

Honestly this reeks of corporate politics. I’m willing to bet at some point in development there was a regime change, and current management pushed this out the door just to clear the board.

Everything I heard about this came seems to indicate that it isn’t terrible by any means, just mediocre and overpriced in an absolutely oversaturated genre. If management was invested in it, they probably could have spent a ton on marketing, achieved middling numbers, and then used those middling numbers to justify continued development for another few months.

I’m confident in saying that because there are a handful of shitty live service games being operated at a loss for no real reason other than shutting them down would mean management would have to actually admit they fucked up.

Okay man, believe what you want to believe. I’ve already wasted enough time on you.

There is absolutely nothing I could show you that could change your mind. You phrased your original comment as a good faith question, but in reality you were trying to give yourself ammunition to attack me with.

Your take isn’t even rational. If I thought there was any chance of you changing your mind, I would go through your comment detail by detail showing what arguments you have that are wrong, where you twisted my words, and what claims you avoided.

You’d just respond with more bullshit and more bad faith arguments, until I eventually lost my temper. Arguing with someone like you is a complete waste of time.

Lol, every fucking time. The initial question was in bad faith, the response has misinformation, and there’s always some nonsense moral implication. Yet if I just didn’t respond there would be someone commenting something along the lines how “it’s pretty telling” I don’t engage with this crap.

The CHIPS bill was a massive disappointment. It was cut down to 1/5th from the intended size due to house committee BS, and then the Biden administration decided to use it as a platform to enact a bunch of wholly unrelated social policies.

I’m not saying that jobs should not offer onsite daycare or have lofty environmental goals. However this was a bill designed to ensure the US maintains an advantage in a critical industry. Maybe put that stuff in another bill.

I feel that this is not an honest question, but an attempt for me to state more concrete positions which you will then attack me for using misinformation and bad faith emotional arguments. I’m guessing it’ll be in the form of going bullet point by bullet point, and then with some witty last sentence implying I’m a bad person or a mossad sock puppet.

I’ll state a few obvious ones, in case I’m wrong

• The phrases “intifadah revolution” and “from river to the sea” are blantant antisemitic dog whistles. They are direct references to previous attempts to destroy Israel and terror attacks on Jews worldwide. Despite this, they are still ultimately accepted in liberal circles
• Liberals repeatedly refer to Israel as a European colonial ethnostate state. This is extremely misleading on multiple aspects. The most notable is 22 percent of the Israeli population is Arab, while the largest ethnic subgroup of Jews are mizrahi Jews.
• I’ve heard the Nakba mentioned a million times, but I never hear discussion about how basically every Arab state forced their entire Jewish population into Israel via violence and ethnic cleansing. Hence the reason for the large Mizrahi Jewish population
• College campuses have handled antisemitism claims with kid gloves, because the antisemitism comes from progressive coded groups. Their response would have been completely different if conservative groups were acting in the same way, or if black, Asian, or queer folks were targeted in a similar manner.

The top comments on this post alternate between blaming Israel, claiming the IDF accidentally killed the hostages and blamed Hamas, and claiming the IDF executed the hostages themselves as a psyop.

There is clearly a huge portion of liberals that have extreme issues when it comes to treating this conflict with any sort of nuance or objectivety. They see the conflict primarily though the lens of the US culture wars, are extremely comfortable with declaring themselves informed after reading a few curated social media posts and watching a John Oliver video, and are extremely confident that anyone who disagrees with them is either morally or intellectually inferior.

That mentality works fine when you’re dealing with straightforward issues like legalizing weed or trans bathroom laws, but completely fails here. Geopolitics in general is extremely complicated, the middle east is a particularly complicated issue for geopolitics, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a particularly complicated issue for the middle east. Despite all this you have people running around with an extreme amount of self assurance that their barely informed zero nuance outlook is unquestionably correct. It’s absolutely insufferable.

I actually have more respect for Pelosi after this.

She willingly stepped down in 2022. Her first reaction was to refuse to comment, and not exert pressure. She seemed to genuinely want either Joe Biden to come to the conclusion that he can’t run on his own and/or Hakeem Jefferies to lead the charge to have him step down.

It was only after Jefferies proved himself pretty much useless that she inserted herself back into the primary role. She proceeded to prove that, despite everything ,she’s incredibly capable in a way that no other democrat can match.

Regardless of how the election turns out, I think we can all agree that Biden was a massive liability for Democrats. While I have personal issues in regards to the Harris/Walz ticket, most Americans seem infinitely more amicable to it than Biden/Harris. None of that would have been possible without Pelosi.

The ultimate use case for crypto mining: as a front for an illegal grow op.

Yeah I just think it’s funny a Senator took time out of his day to be like “we need a lobster emoji”

I wonder if this is a way to get rid of the two greeters at the door.

Does anyone remember when one of Maine’s US Senators lobbied Unicode to create a lobster emoji?

I feel like it should be noted that the western pressure campaign to get rid of Netanyahu forced him to rely even more on people like Ben Gvir and other Hadreem, which allowed them to extract concessions in regards to expanding the settlements.

Like just from a place of pure competency it was an awful strategy. If Schumer has said something like “Israel has a right to defend itself, but the US refuses to help the IDF so long as they violate court orders and refuse to draft Hadreem” Bibi would have been gone.

I just don’t get the sense that the US State Department has a fundamental understanding of Israeli Politics, or the internal politics of most middle eastern nations. Without that knowledge projecting soft power becomes so much harder.