I mean Trump’s economic policies are a philosophical rejection of trickle down economics. He campaigned on a platform of leveraging trade protectionism and immigration reform to produce higher blue collar salaries. He’s doing so in a way that is giving both Wall Street and economic experts conniptions, because they’ll end up biggest losers. Trump has even explicitly called out NAFTA and one of the reasons he won 2016 was his rejection of the TPP.

That is honestly the kind of policy I’d be opening to supporting in a vacuum. A lot of it is oddly similar to Bernie’s economic plans circa 2014. The problem is Trump is an openly corrupt billionaire, friends with other slightly less openly corrupt billionaires, may/may not be a Russian asset, and probably is in the early stages of dementia. There’s absolutely no way he delivers.

To be fair I’m sure if it was stylish to insert overt conservative themes into IPs those would be also too.

I don’t think progressivism is the problem. I think the problem is mediocre creators either deciding to turn an expensive IP into their own political soapbox, and executives giving it the green light because they either are completely disconnected to what makes a good product or thinks the culture war will allow them to pretend that bad products are good.

Woke isn’t being progressive. It’s being progressive to an extent beyond any sort of logic, virtue signaling constantly, and then calling anyone who disagrees with you morally or intellectually inferior.

In entertainment, that often results in some really annoying elements that I think we can all acknowledge are a thing after almost a decade of this:

• There is a minority protagonist. Said protagonist is disproportionately a straight coded conventionally attractive white women in their 20s.
• The only flaw the protagonist will have is not being confident enough
• There is then a minority side character. Said character will disproportionately be a black woman obviously less attractive than the protagonist, or a upper middle class gay fuckboi.
• If there is not one of these two things, a minority side character will be shoehorned in somewhere. The character will feel visibly out of place, and no explanation will be given. For example, they’ll do some random black character in a fantasy setting that’s clearly based off Scotland in the 1200s.
• Important character goes on a monologue that feels like a political PSA
• The IP’s understanding of progressive politics and social justice is roughly equivalent to Tumblr circa 2013.
• Absolutely terrible writing. Even if you swapped all the “woke” elements for generic entertainment elements, the IP would still be terrible.
• Likewise, the IP itself is often put together in an extremely lazy and mediocre way. If said “woke” content was not there, it would be universally panned for its low quality.
• Amazing reviews. All aspects of the IP get 10/10 from the “professional” critics. All the reviews are similar enough that the critics either collaborated or read off the press release.
• The critics care more about the social justice aspect than the game itself.
• You get the sense both the creators and the critics of the IP not only don’t consume this type of IP in their spare time, but actively resent people who do.
• Constant fucking gaslighting. Anyone who doesn’t like this ultimately mediocre IP is either morally and intellectually inferior. This usually comes in the form of accusations of being a bigot, a Nazi, or a Trump supporter.
• Bigots, Nazis, and Trump supporters will then try to recruit people who are pissed about the gaslighting.
• At some point the IP itself fades into the background, and it just becomes yet another culture war battleground.

I think there’s a reason Star Wars gets more shit for being woke than Spiderverse, or that Arcane hasn’t become a culture war battleground in the same way She-Hulk did. The reason being those shows are actually good, and most people are happy to watch good shows.

Honestly I have a lot of sympathy for these people.

It’s one thing to invest in some moonshot crypto. It’s another to invest in something claiming to be FDIC insured. There’s also not a good way of verifying that information to the extent the victims would have needed to know something was amiss.

It seems like the FDIC was asleep at the wheel, and didn’t really know or give a shit that someone was leveraging them to mislead consumers. Instead of actually fixing the problem, they just washed their hands of it.

You can call Trump the devil all you want, but the system was broken long before he came on the scene.

Most people on this list have taken their foot off the gas in a major way, and do more of what they want.

Elon is currently blowing tens of billions of dollars running Twitter into the ground, designs impractical cars because he thinks they look cool, committing light treason, and campaigning for a president who would be detrimental to his business interests.

While the Zuck is still involved at Meta, he also picked up a ton of other hobbies. A lot of them are objectively cool. He also seems to spend a lot of time with his wife and kids.

Bezos seems to spend most of his time having sex with his age appropriate mistress on his $500 million yacht.

Look I’m sorry but this is ridiculous. The type of people to not be able to afford $15/month most likely don’t have insurance, or even access to a pharmacy. While there isn’t any real data on the venn diagram of people having sex more than once a day and being too poor to afford an extra 50¢ per day for every extra sex session, but I suspect it is vanishingly small.

At some point this is just virtue signaling. It’s eyeroll inducing.

The condom part is silly.

Cost and availability aren’t barriers to condom usage. They sell 36 packs of condoms at Walmart for like $15. Basically every single convenience store sells them for prices that, while massively inflated, are pretty low in the grand scheme of things. Most college health centers give them out for free.

The reason people don’t wear them is because doing it raw just feels better.

Look you guys need to stop basing your entire worldview on tweets and opposition to people you don’t like.

Nvidia has spent a very long time building out a concrete advantage when it comes to AI. This advantage is not only in their hardware, but in the tooling they built out. It’ll take years before another competitor becomes truly viable, and NVIDIA isn’t just standing still in the interim.

You’re all also way too bearish on AI. I feel like you just have a blind hatred of “tech bros” and that gives you tunnel vision. AI isn’t crypto, and it neither starts nor ends with Chatbots. While aspects of it are over-hyped, there are still many use cases where it’ll be extremely relevant.

You’re literally making excuses for women cheating on and gaslighting men. Bullshit you’d be behaving the same way of genders are reversed.

You didn’t read my comment with an open mind. You asked for my input so you could give me specific things to lecture about.

I am not in an “ethical non monogamous” relationship. I have never been. However I have seen multiple men in long term relationships get strung along because their partner decided they want to leverage dating apps to have a harem. It has always ended up being a slow motion train wreck, that always ends up essentially being akin to cheating plus gaslighting. They always justify it in the same way you are doing.

You are sexist, plain and simple. You are sexist because you hold men and women to completely different standards in a comical way. You just use liberal rhetoric to justify it.

Your mentality is incredibly common. The world is full of assholes justifying shitty behavior under the guise of liberalism. It’s just an updated version of how evangelicals operated in the 80s and 90s. I’m sick of giving this shit a free pass.

Jesus fucking christ why do I bother. You didn’t ask because you wanted to actually know what I thought. You just wanted to lecture me why I’m wrong. There was absolutely nothing I could have said that you wouldn’t have used as a launching off point.

So the behaviors are the same kind of things that you’ve seen forever among people who can get away with it. Immaturity, bigotry, cruelty, etc. However I myself am a liberal, and live in a liberal area of the country. A lot of people use liberal rhetoric to behave in an objectively toxic way, often by coding criticism of their actions as conservative or the toxic actions themselves as liberal.

I mentioned sexism from women, so I’ll focus on that:

• As I mentioned earlier, a lot of “ethically non monogamous” relationships that are basically a woman gaslighting their partner into letting them cheat on them. This is often talked about as a sort of a sexual identity, with the implication that hating on this is the same as hating on a gay relationship or a woman who chooses to be single.
• As I mentioned earlier, women are highly encouraged to support other women regardless of circumstances. A failure to do so is implied to be sexist.
• In general there is this default assumption that a man is nefarious, usually with some reference to true crime or “the implication”. This assumption is not only a massively sexist generalization, but is never logical. If a man is tall and built he gets the benefit of the doubt, despite being objectively more of a threat than a short chubby guy. The first thing I do when I meet a woman I don’t know in a social setting is to somehow work in that I have a girlfriend in a way that feels organic, and a good amount of times I can see their body language shift. This is despite the fact that my SO is often not with me, and that there are a million different true crime stories involving a heterosexual couple both being evil. All of this is justified with progressive #metoo rhetoric
• There are a lot of single women I know that are very much architects of their own misery. They have super shallow dating standards, unrealistic expectations, and this mentality that if a man is attractive enough red flags are just misunderstanding. When things inevitably go wrong they make sweeping statements about men. Despite this being more or less nonsense, it’s considered sexist to call them out.
• There are multi hundred member Facebook groups of women in every city that gossip about the men they date. This is obviously toxic, but the organizers frame it as a #metoo thing so it’s widely considered acceptable.
• Basically everything I mentioned would be considered absolutely unacceptable if genders were reversed, but if you bring this up then you’ll get a pseudo academic lecture about historical oppression and the patriarchy that basically boils down to “it’s different when I do it”.
• This isn’t a big deal at all, but it’s sort of ridiculous that most women I meet both consider themselves feminist but will get peeved if men don’t pay for the date.

Of course, sexism is just one example. I use it because I find this stuff is the most egregious. I also have a lot of frustration about other things, most notably shitty people making a huge deal about how much they love drag queens in what I view as an effort to obfuscate from how shitty and judgmental they are.

My response to all of this has been to become more conservative. Note the delta. I’m not conservative. However I am also in no way shape or form a progressive anymore. I don’t think liberals have nearly the moral superiority they think they do when it comes to how you treat people on a day to day basis. I support queer identities, but have become more conservative in my idea of monogamy and commitment. I even briefly considered staying home this election when it looked like the main line of attack democrats were gonna do was just to call republicans weirdos over and over again until November, because I’m personally just done associating myself with middle school mean girl politics.

Idk being more social after covid has made me more conservative. A lot of behavior that I assumed was exclusively online turned out to be surprisingly common in real life.

A lot of the sexism parts in particular were jarring. A significant minority of grown ass women basically used #metoo as leverage to behave in a sexist and immature manner. There’s also a culture where other women are extremely reluctant to call out that behavior, or else they might be accused of “internalizing their sexism” and not sufficiently supporting women. I dismissed the postings about that as incel-bait during the pandemic, but it turns out it’s extremely common.

See I have to believe at least some of this shit was because the leader of that group was a federal informant. This is the kind of thing the FBI agents in Ms Congeniality would think is funny.

If you reversed the gender on this you’d the comment section would be a combination of roasting the hypothetical dude and complaining how trashy the shirt is.

I don’t even think the double standard is related to sexism. I think you’re all horny degenerates who are emotionally stunted to the point where any woman implying anything sexual breaks your mind.

Honestly it seems like the actual amount of pedophiles available to murder massively outstrips the demand of pedophiles to murder, and the end result is that people just expand the definition to the point where it’s becoming meaningless.

Over the past few years, I’ve seen pedophilia used in the following contexts. The list gets more ridiculous as you go down:

• Middle aged men “dating” adult teenage sex workers
• Middle aged men “dating” adult sex workers in their early 20s
• 18 year olds meeting up with 15 year olds they met online
• A 17 year old discord mod talking with a 14 year old how they’re attracted to each other, but the age difference might make it unethical
• 18 year olds dating 16 year olds
• Drag Queens having story hours at the library
• Men in their early thirties dating women in their early 20s.
• Men in their mid thirties dating women in their mid to late twenties
• Queer people in general

It feels like this “kill a pedo” routine is just gonna be used by people to go after regular people by assholes looking for blood.

I get what you’re saying but instilling fucked up religious values in a kid is a completely different thing than marrying off a sixteen year old to a middle aged man.

I want to offer another perspective.

I knew someone who got married at 16. The groom was 18, they both came from religious families, and they ended up divorcing at like 22, which was basically a few months after they moved to a liberal area on the west coast.

I don’t think any sane person would call this grooming. At no point was I given the impression that the husband in this situation was abusive. However the situation was fundamentally fucked in a way that was unfair for both parties. My friend felt pressured to be a homemaker while still in high school, while her ex felt even more pressure to be a provider despite having no real emotional or financial capacity for doing so. They also both tried to make it work much longer than they should have, which inflicted a further set of scars.

We live in a world fundamentally more complex than what the average person had to experience 100 years ago. We don’t let teenagers do things like buy alcohol or smoke cigarettes. It is almost expected that 18 - 21 year olds in the US will be on some major level dependent on their parents.

Even in cases where there isn’t abuse, we shouldn’t be letting minors get married. It is just an unfair position to put both parties in.

I get everyone hates Elon but SpaceX is primarily run by someone extremely competent who does a good job at keeping him out of most of it.

It’s frustrating seeing the dichotomy between how the FAA handles Boeing versus SpaceX.

The FAA more or less rubber stamped Boeing for years. A lot of “FAA inspections” were just Boeing inspections that the FAA signed off on at the end. They’ve made some moves to fix that after the 737 Max debacle, but are still dragging their feet. For example reports came out that Boeing managers were rushing planes to completion before the strike, and the FAA didn’t really do shit about it.

Meanwhile with SpaceX they seem to have this “leave no stone unturned” mentality.

From an outsiders perspective, the FAA’s willingness to do their job seems to be very variable in a way that makes me wonder if there aren’t ulterior motives.

I love how every major bank came together to create an alternative to Venmo, but somehow it’s objectively worse. It’s not like Venmo is this grand fountain of quality either.