Do you not believe the US or the other imperialist nations have lied about their enemies at all? If not, do you understand why people should at the very least be suspicious of any claims made by known liars who have an interest in the narrative presented?

Not to say that any of these states have never done any wrong. None of us want the bad things and it's useful to critically analyze past failures to do better in the future. But it's hard to sift through the lies to find the truth so we can do that in any useful way.

Considering that the failures of the past aren't what we want for the future, demonizing these societies isn't particularly useful. It just serves the interest of the currently dominant powers. You can say that it doesn't and that you also don't like the US, but if your position on every country or movement that the US labels as an enemy is conveniently aligned with them... then... it's doing it's job whether you intend it to or not. It's just stoking more red scare sentiment, which gets used against even whatever you think "real leftists" are. It's not like the McCarthy hearings only went after secret soviet spies. It was just a tool to go after political opponents. It's this fear that allowed the US to justify becoming the biggest military in the world, invading tons of countries, spying on everyone, etc.

If we were to actually identify an agreed upon truth of some bad thing done by these states, I wouldn't disagree with you. However, in the context of a world dominated by the US and it's allies, this just doesn't serve a purpose. We need to work on ways to move forward and deal with capitalism. This doesn't do that. It just helps to justify the current world order.

Thinking in terms of “need” is wrong for a business. They aren’t there to make a good product and the money is just to cover all the costs. Their goal is profit maximization. If there’s profit they could be extracting, but aren’t, they won’t make the numbers bigger and the shareholders will be sad.

Ads are a gas. They expand to fill all available space. If there’s a place an ad COULD go, then it WILL go there eventually.

I just want things to stop sucking.

It's crazy how successful they've been off just making and selling a good indie game. They're still doing free updates AND they can afford a $200k donation?

Imagine all the cool stuff we could be doing if we weren’t wasting the time of hundreds of engineers figuring out how to shove ads in people’s faces.

Ah yes, because what I want when I tell my computer to stop playing audio and video is for YouTube to play some audio and video of some random thing I didn’t ask for at like 3x the volume of the video I just paused. Thanks google. Such an innovative company!

When I went to France after taking French in high school I tried speaking French to various people and they usually responded to me in English. That's certainly one way to say "your French is shit."

There is no punishment horrible enough that we could inflict on oil execs, especially the ones that have known about this since the 70s and chose to fight for the status quo, that would make up for what they’ve done to us.

I hope this is just a joke and she didn’t dox her mom for internet points.

I am tired of living in a world with all of these problems. Whether or not I have the luxury to ignore them is besides the point.

Who could have guessed that the rich white South African would turn out to be a white supremacist?

This isn’t a shower thought. It’s a bath thought.

Oh god. I was reading through the page and this gem was down in the section on the response from healthcare companies:

Another executive was quoted saying "What's most disturbing is the ability of people to hide behind their keyboards and lose their humanity."

Says the people who hide behind keyboards, phone calls, employees, doctors, guards, police as they hurt people they don't know. Talk about losing your humanity.

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

None of these people have shed a single tear for the people hurt or killed by the healthcare system and people like him.

Tbf, it’s not like physics stuff is always obvious, especially when dealing with relativity or quantum mechanics. It just feels obvious if you’ve already learned about the research that’s already been done.

It isn’t even remotely intuitive that light should have a max speed that can’t be added to by moving its source relative to other things. Plus, light does interact with matter, but it can only be slowed down by it.

So less a stupid question and more just one that isn’t educated about something.

Game mechanic patents are such an unbelievable joke it's hard to understand how any court could take them seriously. "Yes your honor. As you can see, we own the exclusive rights to the idea of throwing a ball at a creature in a video game."

My (completely uninformed) theory: It's competitive advantage. Indies succeed on their creativity, but that works because there are thousands of indie devs out there and we get to see the best (and luckiest) ones. It's not easy to replicate that creativity by just throwing more money at the problem. So what is a company with ooodles of money but no creativity to do? Make games that only a company with way too much money could make. No indie dev is going to make the next Far Cry or Assassin's Creed or Fortnite because they just don't have the budget to make that happen. So they know that even if they keep churning out generic crap, at least it's generic crap with very little real competition.

Of course then all of them got the bright idea to compete in a game business model that is inherently winner take all with already well established leaders. So yeah now it just seems like they're lighting money on fire for fun.

This is what's frustrating about trying to talk to people about socialism. It's everything that liberal capitalist democracy claims to be but isn't. They've just been brainwashed into thinking it just means authoritarianism.

• Democracy: You want a government by the people, of the people, for the people? Well a system that lets the rich and powerful pour their vast resources into corrupting it doesn't allow for that. And that's before we even get into the explicit ways in which US "democracy" was set up to be resistant to popular influences. Also, in a less direct way, the more of society that is privatized, the less in under the preview of whatever semblance of democratic control we do have.

• Freedom: Under capitalism, your freedom is directly proportional to your wealth. Rich people and corporations can do whatever the hell they want and can often do things that infringe on the freedoms of others, but if you're poor, or even just not super rich, your ability to make choices in life is heavily constrained by what the market offers and what you can afford. If you can't afford to lose your job, you have to follow what your boss tells you. But hey, that's not a government, so it doesn't count right?

• Meritocracy: People want to be rewarded for their hard work and keep that reward? Well capitalism doesn't reward hard work. It rewards having enough money and power to siphon the value of other people's hard work. It doesn't matter what people did to get to the top, they could have inherited it, they could have done crimes, etc. They could be completely undeserving of it and still be put in charge and still take your money.

• Innovation: Capitalism doesn't promote innovation as anything more than a byproduct of a different force. ANYTHING that makes profit is incentivized, regardless of how productive it is for society. Sometimes that's new tech, but things that are equally valid under capitalism include: Weapons, cheap plastic crap, getting people addicted to things, finding ways to offer less and charge more, suing others to try to stop them from using anything vaguely similar to what you own IP for (regardless of if you were even the ones to originally make the thing instead of just acquiring the IP) etc. Under this framework, you can even consider lobbying the government as profit generating activity. You spend some money to get the government to do things that will allow you to make more money in the future.

I could go on, but you get the idea. It's just really hard to make the jump from having people agree with these things to realizing that the system itself is to blame and that in order to do better we need to change it.

I’m not that familiar with the speedrun community, but no way they do much checking for any runs that aren’t reasonably in contention for a top spot right?