Unchecked, power consolidates. – Barry from Barry’s Economics

Karl Marx also said approximately as much in Das Kapital

Actually the centrists are right-wing. Social Democrats are centrist compared to mainstream Europe, but even EU nations have drifted rightward thanks to neoliberalism.

Capitalism ruins everything.

No war but class war.

Never Again, for some people means we never tolerate genocide again, nowhere, no how.

And for other people Never Again, means never to us again.

Here

Unchecked, power consolidates. Marx notes in Das Kapital the Capitalist will always seek to capture regulatory bodies in the name of profit.

The goal, thus, becomes to distribute political power (including wealth) as diffusely and evenly as possible, and create a system that checks efforts from outside to attack and break its integrity.

The USSR was beleaguered from the beginning by sanctions by the rest of the western world, as pressured by President Wilson. As problematic as the Leninist model was, we don’t know how it would have fared if it were left to engage with the world on its own terms.

Considering his continuous use of the Sleepy Joe epithet for Biden (who was far, far from this sleepy), it really highlights the notion that every accusation is a confession.

The cult leader always is excepted to his own rules.

The Reddit API situation brought me here. It’s a much nicer crew.

That bible experts cannot agree on what the bible means, and which of its doctrine is important, makes for a strong argument that it is a historical document, neither inspired, nor univocal, nor inerrant.

If it were divine, then its meaning would be clear beyond debate.

In other words, it’s just a bunch of mythology invented by dudes in the bronze age, and nothing more.

I don’t know who wrote the characters. Some developers in Ubisoft in the early 2010s, I presume. Looking at the extensive credits, I never found a name that I recognized.

It could all be coincidence, but there’s a significant amount of similarity.

In Watch Dogs 2 the initial hackerspace is in the basement of a game store in the lower Haight in San Francisco, which smacks smartly of Gamescape on Divisadero Street between Oak and Fell. It’s still there according to Google, even though everything around it was gentrified out of existence, including the cheap flat I lived in.

I’m pretty sure my years as a Gamescape regular inspired the character Josh Sauchak. I lived with the woman who probably inspired Sitara Dhawan, and we are pretty sure of the identity of the guy who inspired Wrench.

I suffer from major depression and have since I was a kid. I was diagnosed at fifty to be ASD and a recent assessment in March confirmed I’m spectrum AF.

I worked for a few years and was nearly driven to suicide and have been on disability ever since. Not a bad thing. All my career hopes either required education and credentials I couldn’t ever afford to acquire, or had spirit-crushing consequences (e.g. crunching, which practically all video-game developers are required to suffer).

We often have better perspective regarding other people’s troubles than we do our own.

We’re also often still wrong about it, anyway.

To paraphrase Bill Nye, eye protection on; if you raise the cost of fossil fuels, fewer people will use them; eye protection off.

When you’re sixty and hang around with any of the more recent generations…

My hypothesis: Youth pastors are supposed to counsel teens in order to woo them into the fold. They’re there to help, but not for sake of the teen but for selling the teen Jesus. It’s dishonest work for an allegedly good cause.

But someone who can sustain that kind of dissonant duality in their relationships can do so for other causes. If they can be equivocal for Jesus, they can be equivocal for their own libido as well.

Hence the nickname given to YPs by the kids The freak of the week.

Incest is strictly about blood relations. The step-sibling / step-child porn genre is shorthand for fantasies about getting it on within the cohabitative family or close neighborhood. While there have been some movies that have explored actual incest (porn or otherwise), usually blood incest is regarded as a much more serious matter.

IRL, relationships between steps are verboten not because of the problems with breeding risks but because of how it complicates familial dynamics. It’s the same reason fraternization within military units or within work groups is restricted, or at least frowned upon.

Really, we’re still expected to ride on a raid to another tribal settlement and kidnap one of their coming-of-age womenfolk the way Hades abducted Persephone¹ Modern alternatives such as singles bars and mixing parties continue to prove wanting.

¹ According to the late Hellenic mythology – Persephone is queen of the underworld before Hades was ever around, and her abduction is more about pissing off Ceres and justifying why she’s sad every six months so we have winter.

The flip side to this is an escalation of break-ups that happen on or around Valentine’s Day every year, since the holiday encourages those en-coupled to have serious conversations with themselves about their relationship and if they actually like where they are and with whom. Surprise! Not so much.

Valentines day is about the tragedy of romance, either not having it or not getting it or finding out it was wrong all along.

And day-after chocolate sales.

I robbed a bank full of dinero
A great big mountain of dough
So it was goodbye companero
And cheerio
I couldn’t stay and face the music
So many reasons why
I won’t be sending postcards
From Paraguay, from Paraguay, from Paraguay

–Mark Knopfler

So I wasn’t the ONLY one telling Hector not to fight Achilles and being laughed out of my own family.

I’ve gotten comments about the various far right wolves and dogs organizations as if they defined all furries. They’re ruining it for the rest of the kin.

It isn’t the first time a subdemographic’s reputation extends inappropriately to the rest of the group.