Democrats are so ego driven that they think death itself cannot claim them at a moment’s notice. I think this is part of the facade of the Democrats people are, unfortunately, going to respond to this election: Democrats, as a party, like to present themselves as being all about compromise and caring. Getting things done for the #AmericanPeople. But when it’s time to step down and let others shine in the limelight because you’ve had your time and the physical realities of age are something you have to acknowledge, or when there might be a better candidate for an election and you have to make the difficult choice of not getting what you want for the good of the country, that fucking sentiment disappears like a fart in the wind.

This is the thing. People like to blame Berniebros and whatnot for Clinton’s loss in '16, but the reality is that the centrist Democrats that vote for the party’s corporate-backed candidate wouldn’t vote for a progressive one, so even if Bernie had won the nomination, he probably still would have lost because he would have lost the support of these DNC hardliners. I heard people literally say in '16 that if Bernie had somehow won the nomination over Hillary that they would have just stayed home. It’s wild to think how ideologically balkanized the Democratic party is, with so many people fervently belonging to the leftist minority that holds their nose every election to vote for another mediocre person whose best attributes are being “not an outright fascist” versus the people who will never vote for a truly left wing candidate because they’re fiscally conservative but socially liberal and just allergic to compromising in the same way that they’ve forced the leftists in their party to do since forever.

What are they, 1-2% of the potential Dem voter base?

Add a .000 in front of those numbers and you might be right. If those numbers were accurate you would expect somewhere between, what…1 and 2 million tankies in the US alone?

surprised to find indignation at sexual scenes in novels

To quote Ryan Letourneau, “Gen Z is Puritanpilled.” Seriously, I’ve found post-millennial generations to be extremely prudish. I think part of it has to do with the fact that as the internet evolved and became mainstream (and more profitable by catering to general audiences), the edgy or adult content became more ghetoized and quarantined over time. Used to be you’d go to reddit and there’d be porn on the front page. There’s like a 0% change of finding something NSFW on the front page there now. As such, younger people who grew up with the modern incarnation of the internet have a very different perspective on sexual content than those of us who grew up with a more “wild west” style internet where porn was just something that lived alongside the more mundane content. The side-effect of this is also that content like the John Irving novels you’re talking about are treated as if they’re grotesque for presenting sex as just another part of people’s lives - something that you’re not supposed to be shy about or ashamed of. Which is, uh…concerning, for a number of reasons. Other theories are that the world in which we live has eroded platonic relationships among young people and that they want to only see platonic friendships among characters, as that’s the vicarious experience they most desire.

It’s episode 2. “Fifteen Million Merits.”

How much easier is it for Google to implement the same?

The correct question is actually “when will Google implement the same?” Because this is a “when will it happen” question, not a “will it happen” question.

Edging is not a new thing, really. You’ve probably just never encountered the concept. Edging is the practice of bringing yourself to the edge of orgasm before backing away. The idea is that when you do finally orgasm it’s been “built up to” by the earlier edging so you get a better climax.

I find the movies conceptually interesting because there aren’t many movies in which humans are just explicitly the bad guys, or in terms of the most recent one just a supporting entity that exists on the periphery of the story. Avatar kinda does that, too, but the Avatar movies are also puddle deep genre fiction and the “of the Apes” movies are at least structurally and narratively competent.

My favorite was the Chapo Traphouse subreddit because the image in this post describes the hosts and their relationship with their fans. Whenever the subreddit got banned and the hosts heard about it their response was “good, that was the right choice. We fully support the admins here and their banning of that subreddit.” The reddit fans were so salty.

Under the Dome has always been super interesting to me because Brian K. Vaughn is one of the best comic book writers of all time and a consistent criticism of UTD is how bad the writing is. I know he didn’t write many of the episodes, though, but I also wonder how his episodes rank in comparison with the others.

Anything related to a DND live play I’m going to assume will be immediately toxic by virtue of what I understand about DND’s fanbase. I love Dimension20 and I like Critical Role but I’m going to assume every other fan of the show is an insufferable idiot.

There’s a million different ways to describe someone like that. I like mine. You like yours.

For anyone wondering, Chaya Raichik is the reactionary ghoul who runs Libs of TikTok. I actually had no idea this was a semi-famous person until you actually made a comment about them.

I’m waiting for the day Jimmy Wales gets fed up and sells Wikipedia to Amazon and every page has an Amazon link to “great products matching your interests.” Can we have internet 2.0 now? One without companies and just all the weird people from the first internet who made shitty webcomics and shared waaaaaay too much about their personal lives.

This is a good example of an argument that fails by virtue of its foundational premises. Vaush’s foundational premise for age of consent is tied to socioeconomic or material factors around power. In other words, the argument is founded on the premise that a child has less power than an adult so children can’t consent to intimate relationships with adults. This ignores the much more intractable argument over psychological and emotional maturity and the significance of particular age-specific life milestones that help to shape a child into an adult - a fully self-accountable member of society. Socioeconomics have mitigating influence over those things, which implies that even under socialism or any kind of post-capitalist society, that a society would have good reason to maintain agent of consent laws. It also totalizes socioeconomic factors as the defining impetus for consent, but that is in and of itself a slippery slope because you could take it to a logical extreme and argue that people of color and white people shouldn’t be allowed to be in relationships, because a person of color has less socioeconomic power in America than a white person, or even that men and women shouldn’t be allowed to be in relationships at all because men have greater socioeconomic power than women, which would mean that everyone should only be allowed to date same-sex members of their own race.

A snake can’t sprint at you at 25 miles an hour and then rip you in half like a phone book as soon as it sees you. Nor would it. A panicked gorilla placed in a strange location like a mall will potentially kill anything in sight.

Black goes with everything and hides stains better than lighter colors.

Don’t forget the programmers! (teledildonics)

Remember when shootings were so rare that a shooting happening one time at one place was enough to spawn a lasting phrase in American English? Simply fascinating how the times have changed.

I’m actually a huge fan of scalping and hope it happens more. Here’s why: many of your more dim-witted, more or less middle-class “free market” bros will gladly tell you that the value of a good is set by supply and demand. Hospital care is so expensive because there are comparatively few doctors, MRI machines, etc. in comparison with the entire population. Houses are so expensive because everyone wants a house and it’s an appreciable asset. I’ve seen these people my entire life. They’ll decry socialism and make the age old joke that “socialism is when no potato.” But the second a PS5 gets a street price of 700 bucks, suddenly they become walking “Homer Simpson fading into the hedge and coming back out wearing a different outfit” memes. They’ll say things like “scalping should be illegal” or “the government should step in to make sure that the actual consumers who want one can get one - nobody should be allowed to buy 500 of them and just sit on them forever.” Suddenly, market economics produces a state of inequality that doesn’t directly benefit them, and the guiding hand of the government should be used to ensure equitable distribution of resources. Not that they’d ever reflect on this in any way or consider how their personal experiences indicates a larger set of structural problems with the economic systems that produce such a state of affairs.