Wars are plenty profitable if you’re a lot bigger than your opponents and can force them to be subservient to your business interests. It’s not a fluke that the richest country on earth is also the one with the most frequent wars.

Similarly, Rick Rolling is eternal. It’s kind of got a negative feedback loop. If it gets overused, people stop using it for a while, which just makes people more susceptible to it when it pops up again.

Maybe they’re raising an army of nature’s angriest animal.

It’s crazy that this is real. It looks like a comic someone would make to make fun of the idea. Like the fact that they’re watching some guy shoot someone, then the burger commercial comes on and the guy stands up and cheers “McDonalds!” Before sitting back down to watch more of guy shooting other guy.

This is peak “dumb Americans” humor, and they’re using this unironically to describe their business idea.

That’s a problem for the poors and whoever is holding the bag after I retire.

Just like the Simpsons or XKCD, there’s always a relevant Star Trek episode. It’s unfortunate none of my friends have watched any.

This is why there’s that trope where the bad guy gets killed in the process of, or just after, getting redeemed. So the story can have its cake and not have to deal with any of the icky justice afterwards. How jarring would it be to have the bad guy turn around, save the day, and then the heroes still kill them or drag them off to a trial for their crimes? So justice has to be meted out by fate rather than having to complicate our heroes.

Nobody is saying it isn’t. But if you genuinely care about the harm it causes and don’t just want an excuse to throw political enemies in jail, then the solution is obviously not to criminalize its use. The correct thing to do is to provide social and health services to addicted people to get them off of it.

All criminalization does is ruin the lives of the people it targets and enrich the prison industry.

In my experience they appear to be until you bring up some issues, then they turn into bloodthirsty monsters.

For example, my my goes completely Ooga booga genocidal when Isreal is brought up.

Or on housing: She won’t even entertain any solutions that don’t let landlords keep exploiting people’s basic need for homes. She gets all “why should they have to give up property? They worked for it! Shouldn’t they be able to make money?” She can’t possibly empathize enough to value the basic needs of most people over the right for people who already own more than they need to profit off of others who have less than they need.

Honestly, I think most of them just don’t like the aesthetic of the Republican Party more than they’re actually opposed to conservative politics.

$10 million easy. Sure maybe you could get more if you were going back in time and insider trading on everything. But $10m is already enough money to live a comfortable life, especially if you just invest it in something safe. And that way you don’t need to go through school and puberty again.

Not that this has anything to do with Jan 6th since it was just right wingers throwing a hissy fit, but elections in America don’t work. People aren’t given real alternatives to the establishment through all sorts of structural barriers. The government doesn’t represent people’s interests to any statistically significant degree. When you consider the US’s efforts to coup left wing governments around the world, it’s easy to extrapolate that if we ever were to successfully elect someone who could enact real change, the military/intelligence agencies would step in to stop them.

You don’t need to defend our broken system just to call right wingers fascists. If anything their prominence is an indictment of our system. That our government is more open to people who want to subjugate the majority of the country and violate our supposed constitutional rights than people who represent the majority of the country tells you all you need to know about American “democracy.” And before you say it, no, it’s not because a lot of people want fascism, they’re still in the minority by far, but our electoral process is set up to favor them over more majoritarian interests.

Removing humans from your side of the war lowers the cost of going to war and allows for even more centralized power. It’s a lot easier to do morally bankrupt acts if you don’t need to convinced a group of human soldiers to do it. Clearly you can anyway a lot of the time, but going for the robots is a lot cheaper/less risky.

It’s pretty obvious why powerful people would want this and why it would be terrible for the rest of us even without worrying about a hypothetical sky net future.

Because he’s right wing? This isn’t that complicated. People only get killed for actually threatening the gravy train. If this were another country the US would have backed the coup. Im still not convinced this will end with anything more serious than Trump getting a vacation in rich people jail.

I’m basically a hermit.

For me, I don’t support what Russia is doing. I just don’t want to further empower the US military industrial complex. Every couple of years there needs to be a new evil enemy for us to be scared of so that the money can keep flowing into weapons and so that we have excuses to extract value out of other countries in conflict. It’s obvious we don’t do this for humanitarian reasons or we wouldn’t be allies with countries like Saudi Arabia (or see the entire history of US intervention since WWII). Whether Russia wins or loses the war, people in Ukraine aren’t winning, they’re just seeing which imperialists are going to be exploiting them for the near future.

In the abstract I don’t oppose assisting countries against imperialist aggression with military force. But playing into US warmongering doesn’t really do that and in the process is further making the world a worse place.