As long as he’s around, we’re all at risk.

The good news is these segregationists have no hoods on. It isn’t much but it’s something to remember. Ken Paxton, Klan attorney.

I honestly haven’t got any idea. But it will fully distract him and I like the thought of him scattering his attention in exactly the way he scatters everyone else’s.

Do it Donald. Attack the church. You know you can’t resist, can you?

His fans think they’re sticking it to everyone by doing this. It’s maybe the most incredible confidence man job I’ve ever seen. He’s harvesting everything they can yield and they’re sneering at us while they lose it all.

The only problem with blocking people early and often is that it produces no signal for everyone else, downvote style.

Think about it: “shithead42088 (blocked by 83 people)”. Or more subtly just downgrade the relative sorting of their posts for everyone else if you don’t want to reveal the number.

Our world is a network of networks, just like these apps are. In the real world, echo chambers are highly desirable. We carefully shape them. My neighborhood, my city, all of it is a narrower set of people that I’ve chosen. Beyond that, my crowds are echo chambers. My family.

Being forced to listen to the abhorrent is the unnatural state. Drinking from the firehose of repulsive opinion is something that never occurs in the real world without conflict. Sometimes violent.

I don’t have to listen to something I don’t want to listen to, and that, too, is freedom.

Preach

Coincidentally, the last time I was this pissed off at Democrats was because of Kerry. He had all the fight of a wet paper bag. After the election, when he immediately conceded, I had a sudden realization that if he couldn’t even put up a mild struggle against the Swift Boat shit, there was no chance he’d stick up for the country.

People want fighters, and frankly, we deserve one. I understand anyone who votes for someone willing to fight. That’s who you want, after all: someone at the top who will dig in and do the damn thing. It’s a damn shame the corrupt and con men were the first to figure this basic fucking thing out.

No. I won’t do this again. I’m not sitting around wringing my hands and staring at these God awful empty headlines for another few years. Grow a fucking pair, MSNBC. “Sparks concerns” my lily white ass. This isn’t a motherfucking spectator sport.

Yeah. Pretty telling that now they turn around and act like an authority on it after ignoring everyone’s warnings for the last decade. “News”.

:)

And whose fault is his rise and prominence again? Who riddled every single day of the last nine years with gadfly stories about him to the exclusion of everything else? Who gave him free marketing, non stop, at all times, for ad money? Oh it was the press? That’s wild. Well, y’all wanted this.

Goddamn just not gonna improve shit even a little bit, huh Democrats?

What’s incredible to me is that they don’t realize that societal collapse will render their resources more or less worthless. Their options are the same as everyone else’s: get a bug out plan, be ready to abandon all belongings, etc. What are you planning to do to keep your bunkers stocked past the first month? How will you pay your security if your banks are gone or your currency is worthless?

Yes, of course we can estimate it. We can just guess, that’s estimation. From there, it would have to come along with clues, or metrics, though. At that point, that’s when the real problem emerges: each company has a completely different impact on the planet, economy, culture, etc.

So, in other words, you can’t proceed with a single model, and therefore the models are difficult to compare with one another in terms of their accuracy.

It’s almost better to, instead of trying to measure each company (depressing, time consuming, complex) just come up with a threshold of what constitutes too much death. Then it becomes clearer that the problem is that we’re looking for a certain tally to determine if a line has been crossed or not, when we already know the answer:

One preventable death is enough to warrant a major response.

No amount of bureaucracy or legislative tissues can change the fact that it’s morally wrong to broker death for profit. Scale of profit doesn’t matter, plausible deniability doesn’t matter. It’s the end of someone’s life for money. Either it is okay, or not.

We often get caught up in the numbers because they introduce a debatable, grey terrain where the gravity of what we’re really discussing isn’t as hard to face. But it’s the trolley problem, and ultimately most of the actions we do in the interests of debating it just serve the purpose of letting us talk and ignore the lever. Meanwhile the trolley barrels on.

Holy shit NBC, do your goddamn jobs. “They’re besties but he did a widdle supplement oopsie doo?” This dude has bragged about plans for using the FBI as political contact killers.

These news rags want these people in office

I just took a look at the list and it looks like a pretty tall order to me. I think the targets are so high profile that there’s a chance that if he goes after even one, it’ll drag out for a long time.

We’re talking about people who currently control pro Republican news networks and stuff like that in some cases. How’s he going to get anything like that done with a wing of Republican propaganda suddenly turning against him?

These networks are a large part of why Republicans escape accountability. Like it or not they have to work within that framework - especially if they decide they don’t want to work within a legal framework. Consent of the governed isn’t negotiable, and while they’ve proven they can get that through propaganda, they haven’t proven they can do without it.

I’m not saying you’re wrong though. I’m just saying if he tries to follow through it’ll be far more of an undertaking than he imagines, and several of those targets could actually sabotage Trump if they thought it were necessary for self preservation.

Far more likely that targets get taken out in accidents, and not anyone on any well known lists.

The Martians deserve him

I think there’s a lot of evidence backing you up. The Blizzard reps always said on the forums that they took forum chatter into consideration but had actual game and player metrics as well, and that they weighed that higher

The fundamental difference between then and now is that there is no limitation to be had from refusing to invest in social connection. You can get the gear, do the dungeons, finish the quests, all without establishing a reputation.

(A big footnote: you could be a total jerk and still have powerful connections. This wasn’t a “be good or else” culture, though people were mostly nice to each other.)

In many ways, the way things are now is better: you had some terrible addictive patterns emerge in the older version of the game. People were obsessed, and the obsession would pay off! You’d accomplish more, the more you invested.

It’s also sad, though. I miss my old crowds. They were good folks, and many of us made bonds that lasted. It’s a shame that this isn’t really something that happens anymore.