The founders were entirely aware that not only an entire party, but the entire government could become irrational and work against our best interests: that’s why we have the second amendment as a backstop and last line of defense against authoritarian rule

The nature of democracy not being a system that relies purely on violence for legitimacy (unlike authoritarian forms of government) means that it is a constant forever war against the lapping waves of fascism attempting to slowly erode away our democratic institutions (because we, thankfully, don’t just use violence to immediately silence dissidents)

I think an entire generation of people raised in the peace dividend have forgotten this fact, figured that democracy is the natural course of things, ignored its badly needed maintenance, and are swiftly being reminded of it now that the damage is so readily apparent

GOP = Gaslight, Obstruct, Project

This is true and public knowledge though as I said (details seen here in the “Steam Key Rules and Guidelines” section), if anything Valve is giving devs a lot of leeway by allowing them to do that at all, not only are they giving up their 30% cut but are also then distributing and committing to updating those copies of the game for free

This suit seems to just be vaguely, “30% is too high”, along with requiring that DLC for a game bought on Steam also be bought on Steam, it was the Wolfire case back in 2021 that alleged they’re not allowed to sell their game for cheaper on other platforms

As far as I know, this only applies to Steam keys: developers are allowed to generate Steam keys for free to sell on their website (Valve does not get 30% of these sales either) with the restriction being they cannot be cheaper than the price on Steam

I don’t think there’s ever actually been any proof that Valve disallows selling games for cheaper elsewhere as long as you’re not selling those freely generated Steam keys

In order to participate in the vast majority of active r/conservative threads (any tagged “Flaired Users Only”, which 9 of the top 10 posts right now are), you need to first pass a mod purity test to prove you’re “conservative enough”, it’s not a serious place and is mostly just dumb Facebook-tier memes and poor quality screenshots of news headlines or random tweets

Hexbear suffers from the nazi bar problem, they’re not ALL tankies, but they sure do hang out with a lot of them

I just don’t have the time to sus out who’s who and it’s much easier (and less massive-shock-image-spamming) to use an instance that’s defederated with them

That’s just not true

The GOP is sending their best

Probably 99% of self described libertarians don’t know anything about that, or actual libertarian rhetoric in general, they just want to smoke weed and not pay taxes for stuff that doesn’t personally benefit them and they think that’s what libertarianism is

I don’t think they’re fascist, just selfish in most cases. They take the “me” in “Don’t tread on me” too literally, and only care about their own rights and their own needs, fuck everyone else’s.

Their Venn diagram of “Things the government should provide/allow people to do” and “Things I personally need/want to do” is just a circle, and they won’t lift a finger to try to shape the government to work well for anyone else.

The best description for the modern “libertarian” I’ve heard is that they’re just conservatives who smoke weed

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

As long as there are people willing to kill to oppose it, death is an unfortunate necessity for democracy’s preservation.

Netplay isn’t exactly ideal, as from what I understand it generally requires the syncing of all players emulated console hardware simultaneously (basically, every emulator tricks the game into thinking they’re all being played on one single console), which is a lot harder to reliably achieve than having native netcode to handle multiplayer

A launcher owned by an analytics company? In my OS owned by an ad company?

And the military?

If only there was a way to know who removed the code

Modern women are financially independent (in fact, they’re more educated than men nowadays) and are now far less likely to be tied down and dependent on a man by accidental pregnancies (widespread contraceptives + access to abortions)

Getting a stable 9 to 5 won’t result in a wife landing in your lap any more, women will choose to be single over dating a boring shit head, so all the boring shit heads are reeling at the fact that they now have to offer more to the relationship than just financials, and they’re consistently voting for policy that attempts to “put women back in their place” (ie dependent on them for money)

My personal theory is that it’s a remnant of an old system that was only accessible by phone (hence the 6 digit pin), and they simply grafted an online component on top of it

That’s normally my assumption too but surely PayPal has proper security, right? Right??