At the same time:

Netanyahu gives a speech to the US Congress declaring that his genocide must be seen through to the end. He gets ovational applause.

Foreign Minister of the People’s Republic of China, Wang Yi, brokers unity between the political factions of Palestine and begins new peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia.

I have never been so free of doubt about my political alignment.

That tweet made the same day that Hamas and Fatah are reconciling in Beijing.

It’s a plague. So many of my students play it, and it’s very hard to compete with it in terms of appealing to young children. Their business model for content makes Roblox a theme park of free games for kids who don’t need to go to mum and dad for money or installation permission every time they want to try something new.

Who said this? It’s beautifully succinct

Problem is, voting is none of those things because it is totally ineffectual.

It’s worse than that: voting for the dems acts against meaningful change: no one votes for 3rd options, so 3rd options never develop any potential, so no one votes for 3rd options. So they queue up to kiss either cheek of the same ass and say there was nothing they could do.

Voting 3rd party or not voting are far, far better than this stubborn nonsense.

My most frequent blunder in Victoria 3 is trying to rush the proles into power way too early instead of focusing on economic development and fostering the proper conditions for their rise.

I would say ‘unproductive skinner box’ rather than ‘meaningless skinner box’. But that’s most hobbies.

Good news! They’re a 6 hour trip from one another on high speed rail, with one change.

Russia doesn’t need to do that. Burgerlanders already experience it through the magical way they render themselves blind to their government’s behaviour unless it’s projected onto China or Russia. Like how Trump is a Russian asset and China is turning Cuba into a staging ground for an invasion.

Especially when the user experience is constantly guiding users who don’t know better to do exactly that

Imagine it getting to the point where they have to ask Russia to send a Soyuz up there, or China to send a Shenzhou*. I have a feeling they’d rather de-orbit the ISS with two corpses on board.

*Wolf Amendment

Ivan Dragon was such projection too. In reality if one contender was trained in a lab with a highly researched training regimen and fixed diet, while the other was punching sides of meat in a warehouse, the American was the former.

The new update (which allows foreign investment and overhauls the way private/state ownership is modeled) makes a lot of older video guides confusing.

I think the best way of learning things is by breaking things. And it’s fun.

Build buildings that use input goods that are expensive on your market, and see what happens. Spam build new logging industry even when lumber is already cheap. Attempt to pass laws where the game warns you that you’ll radicalize certain interest groups. Fuck around and find out.

At any point if you feel you’ve sufficiently fucked up, open the game menu and choose to change countries, and proceed to fuck up a different great power.

You can genuinely learn the game mechanics this way. No training wheels, just crash lots.

“It’s just a prank bro it’s just a prank”

Presumably you only need to buy ammo if you’ve used the ammo you already have… or am I missing something?

So what the fuck is going on in that stupid fucking country that members of the public are having to stop by a vending machine to ‘top up’ their ammo? The fuck is everyone shooting at?

Apart from schools. I know people shoot at schools but I’m given to understand that school shooters don’t need to replenish spent ammo after shooting because they’re either dead or in jail. Or are they?

I think the only thing Western leftists have to offer is withholding their consent for war/conflict.

China’s recent changes in Visa policy are interesting. Previously it’s been evident that they’ve been willing to spend zero effort on their pop image in the West, which shows how much difference they think public opinion has on Western government policy. Visa free entry being opened to a swathe of Western countries reflects a change in attitude: maybe they think that a positive Westerner view of China is more valuable now, maybe they think it’s easier to push back against “China Bad” propaganda now.

The fact that US and UK are notably excluded from the visa-free policy suggests Beijing sees more potential in Australian and European public opinion.

PRC and DPRK have completely different circumstances.

China spent decades avoiding antagonising the West and quietly developing its economy (Deng’s “Lay low and develop the productive forces”) to the point where Western economies were so dependent on China that they can’t cut it down to size anymore. DPRK had no such potential as they were already severely sanctioned.

So while DPRK has been able to always be outspokenly on the right side of history, no other socialist state can match the PRC’s ability to aid other states in their development, share potentially world-saving green energy solutions across the global South, stake a socialist presence on the moon and Mars which would otherwise be de facto American frontiers, and have its private sector take money from Western gamers and use it fund fusion power research.

Not pictured: everyone discussing, making efforts to understand conflicting positions, making compromises, and arriving at a course of action everyone is willing to move forward together on.

Liberals prefer this: for any divisive issue, a line in the sand is drawn: for vs against. Everyone chooses a position on either side of the line. Sometimes, additional unrelated issues are added to the same line. You can vote in favour of both, or against both, but you can’t vote for one and against the other even though they’re conceptually unrelated. Why? Because fuck you, that’s why. Anyway, everyone votes for or against and the winner gets everything they want and the losers get nothing. Even if they’re 49% of the population, they get nothing. Then everyone goes home to watch war movies about how ‘no one gets left behind.’

If I can use it selectively, I’d like to not convert Tanner’s parents because it would be funny.

But do convert Tanner.

SCOTUS said he could