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The Big Three DC Superheroes are generally represented to be Wonder Woman, Superman, and Batman, whom, evaluating their core functions within their own stories, could be said to represent faith, hope, and charity respectively in that order in this essay I will—

Wonder Woman’s central challenge is stepping in to the world that her people left long ago, and believing it’s worth something. She is constantly fighting for and justifying her faith in humanity—only she knows humans can be terrible and destructive as well as wise and good. She has to choose to demonstrate belief not in the idea that humanity is good, but that humanity is worth it anyways. That there are things worth fighting for. That there is truth and justice and good in a world that is falling apart at the seams hurtling toward destruction. Her primary weapon is a lasso that binds people to a truth they previously wouldn’t admit. She has to have (and therefore she embodies) faith—evidence of things not seen. It’s not about deserve—it’s about what you believe.

Superman is—well—a superman. He’s something extraordinary from out of this world that is nevertheless in it. He’s stronger, faster, more able, more enduring than the rest of humanity that he fights to protect. He’s the embodiment of their hopes—someone who can save them when all else has failed, a hope we can believe in against all hope.

Batman is not about faith or hope really; he’s the guy who’s faith has failed and who’s at the point beyond hope. The world has ended for him, and it wasn’t saved, and yet he’s still there—in the dark, a shadow, at first a fear. But the beauty of his story is that that doesn’t stop him from reaching out, because there are other people there in the dark with him, who can be helped; and if they cannot, they can be suffered with at least. Not only does his public life consist heavily of humanitarian work and acts of charity, but his secret life does the same thing on a ground level. He’s in the shadows, reaching out a hand, shining a light, and it’s just that someone else is There. But it’s always also fundamentally transformative, for him and the people around him. He’s cloaked in grief like a shadow but after all, what IS grief if not love persevering? And he may incite fear, but he, the one always reaching, always taking in, always holding out, the family man, the charitable drive, the one who steps into the dark, he also embodies love that casts out fear. His world ended just like his faith and his hope, but love doesn’t end. It endures all things.

How the fuck the abu Graib torture civil case just now getting a hearing date 20 fucking years later

I literally gasped 20 years. I was like 8 or 6 when this news came out

I was 12 when I first heard the news and it radicalized me like nothing else to see my fellow 12 year olds giggling and mocking the images released to the public. America is and always has been a violent white supremacist nation.

oh that's our takeaway. the leveling of iraq was part of a white supremacist agenda

they always make studio ghibli food look so delicious

Related.

How dare people care about the awful fucking conditions people work in when they're desperate.

Fucking hell, is empathy a sin to you people?

Let me try to simplify it for you:

It's not empathetic to only verbally be critical of an "evil" entity, while also simultaneously willingly support them through direct action.

We are not talking about something that is a basic living need that people cannot refuse. We are talking about financially supporting a large corporation in the pursuit of convenience.

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Imagine accusing an organization of slavery, human rights violations, etc. and then 5 minutes later financially supporting them and claiming you are just so empathetic for the workers. This is a classic example of virtue signaling.

Reading up on some drama in the RPG community (not directly related to D&D this time) and getting the worst kind of deja vu. Stop me if you've heard this one before:

A clique of extremely mentally ill people with a history of being lying, backstabbing shitheads weasel their way into positions of power, fame, and authority within a community, even though none of them have actually produced anything worth a damn. Luckily they've got enough friends who will promote and glorify them as the most important people in the industry and protect them from public scrutiny on sites like reddit and twitter, that they never face any meaningful consequences for their actions, because it's more important that everyone listen and believe women and minorities, even when it's other women and minorities pushing back against them.

This was orchestrated through a few secret groups and forums that the public wasn't privy to and passed down through various useful idiots who would repeat the fabrications and spin, because they were told to. The inner circle of aimless psychos who guided these little crusades were mostly just enjoying the power trip more than having any sort of agenda, but publicly they'd claim it was about promoting diversity and intersectionality, etc etc.

Also, years after, even with most people still believing the various openly disproven lies and rumors started by well-known malicious psychopaths, people admit they knew it was wrong, but didn't want to "give the other side ammo" because they didn't want anyone to turn on them in the same way...

And a ton of people involved in this shit are or were SomethingAwful goons.

Where have I heard that shit before?

I might do a longer post about this later, but if you're curious, I'm taking about this excessively long medium post called "The Worst People You Have Never Met, or, What I Learned During A Four Year Academic Study of Online Harassment In The Dungeons & Dragons Community" which is mostly about the Zak Smith/Sabbath incident from a few years back and goes into exhaustive specifics that repeatedly amount to a bunch of people lying about one guy, who is by all accounts an exceedingly loyal ally to lefty/queer beliefs, being a sexpest and rapist and abuser. Mostly because a clique of queer personalities in the RPG community decided he deserved it and they were entitled to destroy him. Then the author of the article interviewed them about it and every single one of them admits it was bullshit and they were just making stuff up to be angry about and none of their claims had receipts.

The post itself is long to the point of being comical and the author has a lot of trouble disengaging what has likely been a decade or more of ideological conditioning. She'll sometimes go off on tangents about incels and how unthinkable it is to her that anyone would weaponize feminism and rape accusations for personal gain. But it's an interesting read if you just scroll past those sections. You'll probably need to in order to get through the damned thing in a reasonable time.

I don't really care about Zak. I was never personally invested in his story or the accusations that were leveled at him. Even when it was happening, my vague read of the situation from a distant vantage was that a guy surrounded himself with unstable SJW-types and then they turned on one of their own, as they often do. Turns out that was more or less right.

In the last couple days, people tried circulating the rumor that the whole 90+ page article was fake, which is why it was taken down, and then Olivia Hill and several others confirmed they talked to her, admitted that they said all the things they were quoted as saying, but are attempting to discredit the whole thing for being accurate to what they said, but being dishonest or lacking in journalistic ethics (lmao), because it factually states the things they said to a woman who identified herself as a researcher doing research on harassment in the TTRPG community, but doesn't make them look good and sides with the person they admitted to lying about.

Add that to the list of shit we've seen before: When caught, guilty party points the finger at the accuser for vague reasons, but doesn't deny or otherwise discredit the accusations.

Looks like it's being labeled as #DungeonDrama or #TwatGate but the odds of it catching on are low. Few people cared about Zak Smith to begin with, and fewer people know who most of the obnoxious assholes named in the medium post are.

Man it really is important to remember as GG2 starts winding up that part of what limited GG1 was that it was actually far too charitable to its opposition. We assumed that we were just fighting puritans and ideologues who just disagreed but fundamentally thought they were doing good. Maybe a few might just be grifters in it for a quick buck whose hustle we could respect.

No. They're just Vile, Evil People.

In hindsight, it's kinda funny that this little mini-GG warmup dropped a couple months before the Sweet Baby Inc. thing exploded the way it did. Especially since several of the same people involved in a near identical "Gamers are dead" song-and-dance.

What's fascinating is how consistently evil they are and how that manifests as a form of "Effective Altruism" where they believe that all the lying and scheming and secretly colluding to nepotistically supporting their shitty friends so they can use industry connections to weasel their way into these jobs that no one else wants them to have or even exist... and somehow all of that will magically manifest a better world for everyone. Except when it doesn't work, even over a span of years and across numerous major industries, so it requires them to lie harder, scam more, intimidate, coerce, and manipulate.

The ends justify the means, they tell themselves. Except they can't do anything without these underhanded means. There's no endpoint where they have bullshitted enough that they can finally stop, or even just cut back. Getting to be a bunch of vile, duplicitous shitheads is the only real goal.

The purpose of a system is what it does, after all, and seeing as they aren't making games better and they aren't making games that the queer-and-diverse crowd give a fuck about, then we can reason the actual goal is to just grift as hard as possible to amass wealth and power under the guise of vague, aimless activism from narcissistic assholes.

Because "Calling out" does NOTHING.

If a man is so far gone that he is already harassing and attacking women on the train or in the street some words are not going to help him find self control. He's gonna need threats backed by violent action to jog him out of his evil stupor (if that even works).

Every man knows this, so that's why you don't see "callouts"

Add to that the fact that you will be treated as the aggressor if you act and you have a prefect recipe for this garbage.

Insect farms are closed with disease. They're NOT a sustainable source of food.

Thankfully in the US things need to be labeled properly because if someone dies of a allergy attack due to unlisted ingredients, especially if it's bugs, the cost to the company will be massive and the lawsuit will be a tiny % of that.

Didn't somebody do a study of all the farms that produced insects for human consumption and found that about 80% of them had human-transmissible parasites? Or did I make that up?

Yup.

In addition, because insects lack the necessary natural fats to help with absorbing vitamins and nutrients, they are worse for everyone, especially if you're already using various other replacements for dairy products.

And the other thing that no bug pushing assholes can account for is that insects do not product any of the other materials we widely rely on from cattle farming. Insect waste is practically useless as fertilizer and produced in far too small quantities to even be considered as a replacement, for instance.

We use literally every single part of every cow and if they try and cut down on cows to replace them with bugs, we're going to see catastrophic effects across the market. You think insulin is overpriced now? Just wait until they try to get rid of the cows.

cruelty is so easy. youre not special for choosing it

"The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain."

-Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

Could have sworn this was one of peter molyneux's scams

Seeing a bunch of whiny children cry about tiktok possibly being banned and trying to spin it as "THE GOVERNMENT IS ATTACKING THE YOUNG PEOPLE" is almost funny. These braindead zoomers think tiktok is like the highest form of education, keeping them informed on complex topics, media, literature, and science... And despite tiktok being the fucking site that has been repeatedly verifiably proven to be algorithmically tuned to fucking destroy a regular user's intellect and mental health, they still think this is so the young people (being misinformed by mentally deficient childless 30-somethings) can't get all the real information (propaganda) about world events, the latest psudo-science, or the trans genocide that's going to start any day now.

Tiktok users convinced themselves they could learn to dimensionally travel the multiverse so they could fuck Harry Potter characters. Tiktok had people faking Tourette's syndrome so aggressively that they gave themselves actual uncontrollable ticks. Tiktok, where retarded jackasses invented the fun game of forcing their way into random people's houses. FUCKING TIKTOK, HOME OF THE TIDE POD CHALLENGE.

And that's not even getting into the ways that tiktok is legitimately some of the worst fucking spyware you can put on your phone. The goddamned thing uses photogrametric data to map your house for fuck's sake. But let's pretend it's the public square and that the young people are being attacked because they might receive a slightly smaller dose of endless sludge content. They'll just have to go somewhere else to get groomed by pedophiles and sex offenders. How fucking horrendous!

Freaks are teaching your children 😡🤬

This looks illegal????

The whole district seems problematic. 😬

Yeah every adult involved in this should be killed.

Do kids just not learn cybersafety anymore? Are the millenials and gen xers just automatically assuming because they're young, they know what they're doing? I shouldn't be getting friend requests from kids on every videogame I hop into without even speaking to them. I shouldn't be seeing comment after comment and reel after reel lamenting the fact that 16+ year olds have to tell children as young as 8 not to be giving them their name and address umprompted or at all - older siblings frustrated that their younger sibiling hates them for deleting discord or instagram after they found they were being groomed. Why are they online unsupervised? Where are your parents?

you have to guess and if you get it wrong you go to jail for a long time

1) only if you’re lying on purpose to hide taxable income or claim deductions you don’t qualify for (like, don’t lie and tell the IRS you have a kid when you don’t). If you are wrong THEY WILL LET YOU KNOW AND SEND YOU A BILL. (Or if you’re wrong in the other way, they send you a check) Don’t stress about this as long as you’re not trying to commit tax fraud!

2) call the IRS with questions! It can take a while to get through the queue, but they are SUPER knowledgeable and helpful!! I have called in the past and they’ve been SO HELPFUL, and SO KNOWLEDGEABLE, and FIXED STUPID MISTAKES I MADE.

3) IF YOUR ADJUSTED GROSS INCOME IS UNDER 79K, YOU CAN USE FREE FILE, WHICH IS NEW THIS YEAR!!

Don’t fear the IRS. The wealthy do, and they want you to fear the IRS too, so you’ll vote for Republicans who want to strip the IRS of funding so they can’t audit rich people.

LMFAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

"Wealthy people fear the IRS"

IRS audits by county

Per capita by income by county

"Wealthy people fear the IRS."

You mean all those rich people making money with Venmo?

Anyone saying not to fear the IRS is your enemy and deserves all of the hate you can muster.

Lol

He's the most popular president EVER! 81 million

The purpose of late stage propaganda is not to inform or misinform you. It's purpose is humiliation, to make you either partake in the collective lie and betray your morals, or by showing you how little you can do about it. In the end you have to be strong and not partake in the lie and try to create a better world even in your small sphere of influence as best you can. That's the way to heaven.

literally tho from 1/23

They announced him Winter before 70 percent of the votes have been counted

Mike owned Robert and Robert didn't even notice.

If the second canvas can be substituted for the first like this, then the original "SHITHEAD" was correct.

They could paint that.

But then the act of roasting/replacing paintings becomes art itself. Robert gets it.

If anyone who walks in the fucking door can make art, then art is not a word with meaning and there is no need for galleries or exhibition at all.

If every monochrome is art then every eggshell white wall in an apartment building is art.

Things are defined through exclusion.

It doesn't fucking matter if that gives you the ick it's simply factual.

A category of things from which nothing is excluded ceases to be a category at all.

You can't call everything art unless you want nothing to be art and the category to mean nothing.

Not only does Robert not get it, but you also don't fucking get it.

Art has meaning and value only because some things are not art.

Without "not art", art has no meaning or value.