“kinda goes against the spirit of gaming industry ethics” lmao what a bunch of dorks (no mention of any statements from Valve though)

Gamergate 2: Deadlock Bugaboo

first as tragedy, then as farce

air pistols at dawn

under pressure

trigger point

don’t pull, squeeze

So Joe Biden is Pro-Trump is what you are saying?

“What we saw here was a mass Hannibal. There were many openings in the fence, thousands of people in many different vehicles with hostages and without.”

Amid the confusion, twenty-eight Israeli combat helicopters fired all of the ammunition they were holding, including hundreds of 30 mm explosive shells and Hellfire missiles, during the course of the day.

https://new.thecradle.co/articles-id/13145

Mass Hannibal Event should be a black metal band name or something.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_diplomacy_of_Israel

there are significant resources deployed to shape Israel’s image favorably, especially amongst the US public

Ukrainian militias have been shelling Donbas for about 8 years before 2022.

I think the correct answer is sharks.


Damn this inflation!

the mask of civility is the thin veneer that liberals use to hide their agenda

it's related to the difference between materialist and idealist perspectives

if you claim to uphold lofty ideals, then you can just claim the material failure to live up to those ideals is an oversight, mistake, accident, victim-blame etc

this is also why plausible deniability is a critical aspect of many operations, it was those few bad people that caused the bad things, not the institutional structure that is dedicated to lofty ideals

Volunteered in 1943 too.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_North_Korea

During the campaign, conventional weapons such as explosives, incendiary bombs, and napalm destroyed nearly all of the country's cities and towns, including an estimated 85% of its buildings.

A total of 635,000 tons of bombs, including 32,557 tons of napalm, were dropped on Korea. By comparison, the U.S. dropped 1.6 million tons in the European theater and 500,000 tons in the Pacific theater during all of World War II (including 160,000 on Japan). North Korea ranks alongside Cambodia (500,000 tons), Laos (2 million tons), and South Vietnam (4 million tons) as among the most heavily-bombed countries in history.

In an interview with U.S. Air Force historians in 1988, USAF General Curtis LeMay, who was also head of the U.S. Strategic Air Command, commented on efforts to win the war as a whole, including the strategic bombing campaign, saying “Right at the start of the war, unofficially, I slipped a message in "under the carpet" in the Pentagon that we ought to turn SAC lose with some incendiaries on some North Korean towns. The answer came back, under the carpet again, that there would be too many civilian casualties; we couldn't do anything like that. We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, some way or another, and some in South Korea, too…Over a period of three years or so we killed off, what, 20 percent of the population of Korea, as direct casualties of war or from starvation and exposure? Over a period of three years, this seemed to be acceptable to everybody, but to kill a few people at the start right away, no, we can't seem to stomach that.”

Sahr-Conway Lanz, who holds a Ph.D. in the history of American foreign relations, has written extensively about the legacy and impact on American discourse on the international norm of noncombatant immunity. He states:

"During the war, American military and civilian officials stretched the term "military target" to include virtually all human-made structures, capitalizing on the vague distinction between the military and civilian segments of an enemy society. They came to apply the logic of total war to the destruction of the civil infrastructure in North Korea. Because almost any building could serve a military purpose, even if a minor one, nearly the entire physical infrastructure behind enemy lines was deemed a military target and open to attack. This expansive definition, along with the optimism about sparing civilians that is reinforced, worked to obscure in American awareness the suffering of Korean civilians in which U.S. firebombing was contributing."

The song was inspired by Korean war veteran that John McCrea met in a bar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Rgsihd6WM

Ask yourself a simple question. What happens to someone that doesn’t have a job in our society?

The concept of having ‘free speech zones’ where political speech is allowed is … very inherently political though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone

Civil liberties advocates argue that free speech zones are used as a form of censorship and public relations management to conceal the existence of popular opposition from the mass public and elected officials.[24] There is much controversy surrounding the creation of these areas – the mere existence of such zones is offensive to some people, who maintain that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution makes the entire country an unrestricted free speech zone.[24] The Department of Homeland Security “has even gone so far as to tell local police departments to regard critics of the War on Terrorism as potential terrorists themselves.”

ALL LIVES MATTER

potatoes find a way

• Samwise Gamgee

Here’s an article all about how ‘open source’ coopted and recuperated ‘free software’ movement to the benefit of corps.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230703044529/https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-meme-hustler

The enduring emptiness of our technology debates has one main cause, and his name is Tim O’Reilly. The founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, a seemingly omnipotent publisher of technology books and a tireless organizer of trendy conferences, O’Reilly is one of the most influential thinkers in Silicon Valley. Entire fields of thought—from computing to management theory to public administration—have already surrendered to his buzzwordophilia, but O’Reilly keeps pressing on. Over the past fifteen years, he has given us such gems of analytical precision as “open source,” “Web 2.0,” “government as a platform,” and “architecture of participation.” O’Reilly doesn’t coin all of his favorite expressions, but he promotes them with religious zeal and enviable perseverance. While Washington prides itself on Frank Luntz, the Republican strategist who rebranded “global warming” as “climate change” and turned “estate tax” into “death tax,” Silicon Valley has found its own Frank Luntz in Tim O’Reilly.

So some rail unions would like to talk to you about ‘taking any win we can get’ I’d imagine.

for all the libs scratched by this meme, here’s a good link for you to read about how memes are a highly political medium (just like propaganda posters and pamphlets used to be)

https://thegeekanthropologist.com/2020/08/03/the-poetics-of-internet-memes/

There’s also some good scholarly works that get into this much deeper as well.

here’s a quote since libs don’t usually read from links:

I want to begin by discussing three ways I commonly see memes used: meme as revelation, meme as critique, and meme as ideation. This is not a comprehensive typology by any means, but it is a start at understanding the ways that memes are used in social life. These different ways of using memes also allows us to understand the different media ideologies associated with them. Media ideologies are, “beliefs, attitudes, and strategies about a single medium” (Gerson 2010b, 389). These ideologies show us, “the ways the medium shapes the message,” helping us to see “the communicative possibilities and the material limitations of a specific channel” (Gershon 2010, 283).

The potentially endless media ideologies associated with memes is, I believe, a product of their perceived informality as a form of communication, seen through their association with internet culture, “low” art, and post-GenXers. As Gershon (2010) explains, “media become perceived as formal or informal just as registers are perceived as formal or informal” (290). This perception has relegated memes to what Halberstam (2011) calls “the silly archive,” comprised of texts which “might offer strange and anticapitalist logics of being and acting and knowing” (20–21). This is what makes memes so deeply political—they are able to bypass the dominant cultural logics of “being and acting and knowing” that often constrain our imaginations and tie concepts and ideas to particular mediums.

Another reason memes are political is their accessibility. Not only are they simple—a user only needs to come up with a short description to fit a meme image—they can also be easily created on a number of meme generating websites. This democratization of meme production is what allows for the “subversive and transformative engagements” I referenced earlier. The accessibility of and creative engagement with memes reveal that it is not only meme images themselves that shape their message, but also the ways in which users understand memes as a medium, and the meanings they associate with or construct through specific memes.

We might also consider the production of memes through the model of the supply chain, thinking with Anna Tsing (2009) about the salience of global capitalism. While there are obvious differences in the circulation of digital media as opposed to material commodities, meme (re)production, like supply chains, “don’t merely use preexisting diversity; they also revitalize and create niche segregation through advising economic performance” (150). Here, I want to suggest that we add “social” to “economic,” which is seen through the creation of online communities and the multilayered shaping of subjectivities in local contexts. The meme economy is intimately related to media ideology, since the “beliefs, attitudes, and strategies” regarding memes influence motivations for the (re)production and circulation of certain memes, offering yet another layer for considering the importance of memes in social life.