Liquid War was awesome. One of my favorite things about it was that you could make your own maps using black and white bitmaps.

I’ve been meaning to try that game where you play a hole that gets bigger by devouring everything.

Never listened to OA, but Strict Scrutiny is one I listen to for Supreme Court news and analysis.

Look at the last handful of democratic presidential losses to see this in action:

Gore gets nominated due to familiarity. He has the charisma of a warm sponge. He loses (barely, and not the popular vote; by the way, FUCK the electoral college) to George W. “I’d have a beer with him and hey wasn’t his dad president?” Bush.

Kerry somehow rises to the top of the next democratic primary, a fact that I will never understand, because he also has the charisma of a warm sponge. Bush is familiar and a wartime president. He is re-elected in defiance of God and nature.

Obama comes along and is a once in a generation political talent. Things are pretty good for a while.

Hillary enters the primary and wins mainly based on name recognition. She presents herself as having the charisma of a warm sponge, when we all know full well that she has the charisma of a wood chipper, and since we’re pretty good at detecting artifice she loses.

In 2019 we’ve got a pretty good set of primary choices, but Biden gets into the ring and that’s pretty much fucking it, because, again, he has name recognition, so he blows past some better, younger choices and manages to leverage his name and Trump’s fuck-ups enough to win.

The pattern is that name recognition will get you a real long way, especially with low information voters, and that is a real goddamn problem when there are objectively better options who aren’t as famous.

So anyway, I think we need a constitutional amendment forbidding members of one’s immediate family from running for president after one has been president. No sons, daughters, husbands, wives, etc. Fuck dynasties. Fucking fundamentally un-American.

This is the way.

Conservatives heard Stephen Colbert say “Reality has a liberal bias” and concluded that the only solution was to declare war on reality.

New Colorado law will ban sales of dental floss, clothes, & other household products…

Me: Yo, what the fuck is going on in Colorado?

containing toxic “forever chemicals”

Me: Oh, that makes sense.

I was trying to watch the original Nosferatu but the version I was watching had dogshit Casio keyboard accompaniment. I muted it and had Spotify put on a playlist based on “Danse Macabre.” Much better. That said, a proper silent movie with live accompaniment is fucking fantastic. I saw Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall that way and loved it.

Virtually anything with a Newberry Medal is highly likely to have a traumatizing beloved character death somewhere in it. Maniac Magee and Bridge to Terabithia were good examples from my childhood.

If you set up a location near a native elephant population where if an elephant brought you like a banana or something and you gave that elephant a handjob… I one hundred percent believe that the elephants would figure out the arrangement and you’d have a successful elephant brothel running in short order.

It’s been a process.

If you believe that laws forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath, or any such, are necessary to the welfare of your community, that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws. But remember that such laws are, at most, a preliminary step in doing away with the evils they indict. Moral evils can never be solved by anything as easy as passing laws alone. If you aid in passing such laws without bothering to follow through by digging in to the involved questions of sociology, economics, and psychology which underlie the causes of the evils you are gunning for, you will not only fail to correct the evils you sought to prohibit but will create a dozen new evils as well.

Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government

it’s easier to pick a different corporation (i.e. don’t buy from them)

This argument also falls apart when the thing you want to buy is essential and/or all of the companies selling it are horrible (or the very concept of selling it at a profit is horrible), e.g. health insurance, water, housing, staple foods, and so forth.

I was curious about this. Since political parties run their own primaries, then they can decide to use whatever voting system they want. I suspect that RCV primaries would produce a candidate that is more competitive in the general election (though I don’t know enough about electoral math or demographics to be sure). I’m certain that RCV has a tendency to discourage scorched earth campaign tactics, so party candidates would be less prone to trying to destroy one another.

What’s amazing to me about the people who are facilitating the downfall of democracy on behalf of their oligarch and demagogue buddies is that they’ve deluded themselves into believing that they will still be of use, once democracy is good and dead.

If you’re looking to murder democracy, you need accomplices, people in positions of power within the existing government to help get the job done. But once it’s done, what do you need those accomplices for anymore? If anything, they’re just loose ends for you to tidy up within your full-on fascistic government.

The Teds Cruz and Clarences Thomas of the world serve a purpose in helping achieve a hateful goal, but once they’ve outlived their usefulness, they will absolutely be made to disappear, if for no other reason than because they know too much.

They’re basically setting up a scenario whereby they will either be facing an angry mob for their role in attempting to kill democracy, or else they will be facing a purification squad once they successfully replace democracy.

Not great on long-term planning, if you ask me.

Judge Joseph P. Whyte wrote in an order Wednesday that the purpose of an expungement is to give people who have rehabilitated themselves a second chance

Sounds like people should test that theory by having a protest in front of their house and see what they do.

Also:

City prosecutors and police opposed the expungements.

Oh my God, these people are so horrible they found a way to unite cops and BLM protesters.

Also MAGA 2024: “Lock up Hunter Biden!”

What could possibly be the point of doing such a thing?