They have to experience the horrors of it firsthand to hopefully get it through their thick skulls why it’s a bad thing

This is such a frustrating and consistent issue. Every time I hear a story about a conservative changing their opinion, it’s because the consequences of their actions affected them or someone related to them. They can’t simply imagine how the consequences will play out or be bothered to care when it hurts their neighbors.

And even then, there’s like a 50/50 chance that they’ll just blame the Democrats for it and vow to keep voting for Republicans.

Buddy, where have you been the past 20 years? The kids who were boots on the ground are now in their late 30s and 40s, and many of them are staunchly anti-military thanks to their experiences.

The US military runs one of the largest propaganda campaigns in the world, from Hollywood movies and TV commercials to Raytheon funding colleges and recruitment officers walking the halls of high schools. Their entire thing is tricking impressionable young kids into doing the dirty work for the wealthy. When I was in college, the seniors in the game design program were working on a VR boot camp scenario in Second Life that the army wanted to take with them to schools as a recruitment tool.

But no war like the culture war, I guess.

Yeah, I can’t tell whether they mean aesthetics > graphics or everything else that goes into a game trumps good graphics.

With the latter, I generally say that good graphics can’t save a bad game, while the former I refer to as the Wind Waker effect. People complained about how cartoony Wind Waker looked after the GameCube graphics demo showed off a realistic-looking fight between Link and Ganon, but today Wind Waker is looked back on fondly for its art style that defined many Zelda games after it while many of the “realistic” FPS games from the time are looked back on as the “real = brown” era.

There’s a great breakdown on YouTube by Shaun on the Harry Potter books, but one of the things that I like that he points out is that you can basically watch JK’s political stance change in real time as the books progress.

When she started writing them, she was “impoverished” (to some extent she also benefitted from help like living in a place owned by her sister for free), and the story starts out railing against the system and those in power. As the books took off and she began to benefit more from that same system, the plot began to be more about how the system is great and shouldn’t be questioned, but only the right kinds of people should have power. If you’re a Good Guy, you can use the Killing Curse and it’s okay because you’re a Good Guy. If anybody else uses the Killing Curse, then they’re a Bad Guy and that’s horrible. The wizards keeping magic away from the Muggles, a power that could solve many of the world’s problems, is a bad thing at first, but Harry goes on to become a magic cop to enforce that very same ban at the end of the series. There are tons of examples in the story.

There’s some context that’s important to this whole argument that may clear things up for you a bit:

This whole thing started when TERFs claimed that trans women aren’t women by the definition of what a woman is, and people asked them to define a woman. The original answer by the person who started this merry-go-round was “an adult human capable of giving birth.”

It was immediately pointed out that this definition excluded a massive percentage of cis women, and TERFs have been in denial ever since and trying to come up with a new simple definition that excludes trans women from being women.

There is no intent to this other than saying that trans women aren’t women.

TERFS claim to be feminists, but they’re really misogynistic and genital obsessed to the point where they consider women to basically be floating uteruses meant to be spitting out babies. Easily up there with the trad wives.

This “define a woman” thing has been going on for at least a decade and began with TERFs saying that it’s easy to define a woman and exclude trans women from that definition - and then they defined a woman as an adult human capable of giving birth and were promptly informed that they just said that any women with menopause or fertility issues are not women. They’ve been struggling to prove everybody else wrong ever since, and they always come back to the ability to have babies.

Yeah, it’s absolutely insane, which is why I remember it lol.

Can be chroma keyed for important buttons, reducing reaction times.

If you go to the Wiki article linked above, you can find the whole story of how multiple vows of fealty have sprung up over the years under the Origins section, but the last bit on Francis Bellamy is the important one as that’s the one used today.

Some useful highlights from that section:

The Bellamy “Pledge of Allegiance” was first published in the September 8, 1892, issue of The Youth’s Companion as part of the National Public-School Celebration of Columbus Day, a celebration of the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. The event was conceived and promoted by James B. Upham, a marketer for the magazine, as a campaign to instill the idea of American nationalism in students and to encourage children to raise flags above their schools.[28] According to author Margarette S. Miller, this campaign was in line both with Upham’s patriotic vision as well as with his commercial interest.

Francis Bellamy and Upham had lined up the National Education Association to support the Youth’s Companion as a sponsor of the Columbus Day observance and the use in that observance of the American flag. By June 29, 1892, Bellamy and Upham had arranged for Congress and President Benjamin Harrison to announce a proclamation making the public school flag ceremony the center of the Columbus Day celebrations. This arrangement was formalized when Harrison issued Presidential Proclamation 335. Subsequently, the Pledge was first used in public schools on October 12, 1892, during Columbus Day observances organized to coincide with the opening of the World’s Columbian Exposition (the Chicago World’s Fair), Illinois.

James Upham “felt that a flag should be on every schoolhouse,”[27] so his publication "fostered a plan of selling flags to schools through the children themselves at cost, which was so successful that 25,000 schools acquired flags in the first year (1892–93).

And the worst part is that it was created in cooperation with a flag company partly to hopefully sell more flags.

That’s capitalism for ya.

We’ll need to do a double blind study. At least. The only question is what will we use for the control group. Femboys kissing femboys? Trans girls kissing trans girls? Maybe both? We should be as thorough as possible. Maybe a rigorous oral exam is in order as well.

Check his shirt. He’s clearly a big Blizzard fan.

I love how one of the issues the Imperium has with the Tau is that they keep losing worlds to the Tau because they secede after the dramatic improvement in quality of life vs. life under Imperial rule.

I’m going to get a good grade in therapy today, a desire that is both normal to want and achievable!

Yep! Meaning that “Θώθ, what’s this?” is a perfectly valid question to ask the God of knowledge.

Enjoy your curse of eldritch knowledge!

Θώθ

Fun fact: If you roll your feet the right way when you walk, you can make your footsteps substantially quieter.

Source: Somebody who has accidentally scared way too many people by walking up to them and asking a question.

My ancestors are smiling at me, Imperial. Can you say the same?

Slap a nuclear radiation warning label on the side and people will think you have a bomb.