It's not subtle but there exists a not insignificant group of fascists who take it totally at face value.

I am guessing the same group of people who watched Starship Troopers and thought the Terran Federation were awesome. (I would say the book too but let's be honest, they never read it)

How about overalls? Are those required or optional?

I didn't realise how strict the dress code was, so I need to take notes.

"Fatigue"

Not compassion or trauma from murdering civilians. Not from a sense of moral outrage over the unjust orders that they were given. Not from a sense of justice or even from guilt. Just fatigued of having to do it so much. I get fatigued from too much overtime.

Fucking fatigue.

Yup, all countries supporting them are lumped in as "bad/evil". Honestly they don't count any countries that aren't predominantly white western powers to begin with. Anyone else is "misguided"/"taken advantage of", like they aren't capable of making their own decisions about those countries.

When your understanding of geopolitics is less nuanced than GI Joe, it doesn't take a whole lot to persuade you. Which is exactly what they've been conditioned for. Critical thinking is the worst thing that could happen.

It always impresses me how hard the concept of countries acting in their own self-interest is for people to grasp. Instead they need "good guys" and "bad guys" in any kind conflict.

but they haven’t at all explained aside from “well Putin will attack NATO” despite them publicly saying numerous times that they have no intention or interest in attacking NATO.

The argument that they would make is that because Putin is a saturday morning cartoon villain, that obviously he is lying and will be staging an invasion of the rest of the world as soon as the Last Bastion of Freedom, Ukraine, falls.

I have talked to people like this. Their understanding of the background of the war is so poor that they see it as nothing besides a land grab. Which would already make no sense. It's impossible to have any kind of real discourse because they believe the only motivation is either more land (for the largest country in the world) or just that "Putin is Evil".

Somewhere between "balkanization of the entire country" and "elimination of every human being with any russian ancestry".

EDIT: Sorry I also forgot. A huge vacuum in Ukraine that USian forces can drain the last remaining resources from as they make it a vassal state that only exists to house US military.

Only the most premium screws are accepted for consideration by the great US. How else can you be expected to shoot down weather balloons...eventually?

Seriously though, I had friends who worked for military contractors (they've escaped) who told me stories about how much they overcharged the military on every single line item because it would never get reviewed.

True, they have gotten away with it every time before, including everytime this has been done to Palestine in the past. They probably were pretty confident they would be able to use the same playbook yet again and not get any attention.

"Mr. Biden’s critics on the left are angry about his willingness to provide more weapons to Israel, though the legislation also includes $1 billion for humanitarian aid that the president said will be rushed to Gaza."

In what world can ANYBODY spin this in a way that makes sense. This is the most positive take they could manage and they still are literally saying that the US is supplying aid for victims of the weapons that the US is supplying.

You know what US let's call it even. Just stop sending any more weapons to Israel and we won't expect you to send any aid, let other countries handle that. There, you save billions!

They managed to sell the "Russia bad, Ukraine heroes of democracy" line so well, I wonder if they just are at a loss when it comes to the Palestine narrative. Like they expected everyone to fall in line [yet again] and support a genocide.

Honestly, part of me would have expected the same, though I suppose even libs can only handle so much overt lying.

It's super common like ComradeSalad said, but it works and it makes for super easy PR messaging too. Add some unpopular bill into a totally unrelated one. Oh you want to vote against the Ukraine war? Well, we put it in the same bill as a package for supplies for US military troops, so if you vote against it you will be comitting political suicide.

"Senator Pumpanddump voted against the America Loves Our Troops Act. Does this mean he hates our troops, you decide!"

The practice should be illegal, but so should half the things the US government does.

God a WeChat ban would be absolutely crippling, I can't imagine that has any real traction.
I work in hospitality, and a very large percentage of our guests at all properties globally are Chinese (about 40% of all of the guests at mine). Consequently we support transactions with WeChat, and have always heard from our guests that they appreciate we support the platform and that is a big reason they use us.

Now I am not in the US, but my chain originates there. It would absolutely cripple us if WeChat were banned. I wouldn't put it past the government to try, but I have to think that corporations wouldn't let them.

Obviously you haven't considered that the ban is a wonderful thing because China Bad. Therefore any other argument is moot.

I have actually seen a few people saying that only American social media companies should be allowed to operate in the US. Yet somehow China is the dystopia.

On one hand, we have a well documented campaign of murdreing civilians and trying to drive them out of their territory permanently, with constant video and photographic evidence to back it up.

On the other hand, we have some questionable anecdotes and blurry satellite photos of some schools and governmental facilities in a country with over a billion people walking around with video cameras in their pockets.

Guess which one the US considers a clear genocide.

My undergrad was...I think 50k/year? At the time, I think it is closer to 70-80k/year now. My graduate degreee (which was not in the US) was like...5k/year, and that was at one of the more expensive private unis in my country.

I don't regret my time in uni, it was extremely valuable to me besides the piece of paper I got at the end (which I do not use in my current career at all anyway). The cost is absolutely ridiculous though, I was in an extremely privileged position to be able to go and would not recommend many people do the same when they could make much better career choices.

Which is depressing. Education should not need to be a luxury.

What did you think of Millenia? Honestly I like it more than most, there are a lot of basic design choices that I think are cool, but it definitely needs more time in balancing. It feels more like an EA game than a 1.0 release honestly. I did a couple playthroughs and will probably come back to it again after it [hopefully] gets some updates.

I liked Forbidden West way more than I expected to.

I loved Zero Dawn, but a lot of what I loved about that game was the discovery of finding out what happened in the events that led up to the game. The sequel obviously didn't have that, so I was very skeptical about it. I was thankfully quite wrong.

Subnautica is a fantastic game that either helped me discover I had thalassophobia or gave it to me. My playtime probably got inflated by ten hours as I spent so much time sprucing up my base instead of progressing to the end of the story.

It balances the curated story elements so well with the open world survivalbox type gameplay. Not many games hit that balance so well.

I have been playing the Anomaly DLC of Rimworld (which remains my favourite game of all time).

It's pretty good, it captures the "Cabin in the Woods" / SPC vibe very well. However, I think Rimworld DLCs are the best when they provide frameworks that let modders go crazy. Anomaly seems more like a content dlc that I will sometimes use and sometimes disable. I could definitely see myself disabling Anomaly after I do a couple games with it turned on.

Favourite Genres: JRPGs, Factory/Automation Games, Colony Builders.

I am pretty excited on the factory game front for this year. We have the expansion for Factorio, v 1.0 release of Satisfactory, and there are pretty good odds we get another big Dyson Sphere Program update this year. Of those, Dyson Sphere Program remains my favourite by far.

Stellaris is the one Paradox game I actually keep coming back to, as a fan of SF I appreciate that it just hits on nearly every SF trope out there. I thought about trying Endless Space 2 again with the Awakening rework, but I think I would honestly just rather play stellaris.

I still very rarely finish stellaris games though, as much as I like the early game the late-mid to late game just really drags.