Here’s the thing, a weak Democrat candidate meant the GOP could ride the curtail of a natural red wave born from voter dissatisfaction into another Trump presidency. They didn’t have to try faced with Biden so they didn’t have as many opportunities to show their incompetence.

Now democrats have rallied and the writing is on the wall that Trump isn’t good enough just by the virtue of being the republican choice. He actually has to try, which he hasn’t done since 2016, and he’s pretty bad at trying.

The word you’re looking for is “euphemism”. The media always does this garbage to make the party of traitors seen like they have a point

Welcome to sugarfoots, sugarfoot

It’s the natural conclusion of the strategy republicans set into motion to manipulate their base.

It started just after Watergate. Nixon was facing massive calls for justice from both sides. Republican think tanks realized that their base of conservatives consumed news from all sources that informed their mostly unbiased decision to hold their guy accountable. So those republican think tanks devised a plan to create a conservative news outlet that explicitly demonized other news so that the conservative base would never turn on one of their own again. That strategy was realized in the 90’s with the creation of Fox News.

Since then, conservative media has been slowly transforming politics from the perspective of the average conservative into a team sport, where the main motivation isn’t “who runs the country better” but rather “my team is better than yours”.

It wasn’t so pervasive 20 years ago, but conservative media has found themselves with a base that now only responds to the outrage they’ve been conditioning them with, and that has created the raging confrontational assholes you see today.

Being a conservative doesn’t mean what it used to. And that’s because the Republican leadership robbed conservatives of that in order to maintain control of their base.

In theory that’s how it works already. In practice, there is currently no disadvantage to appointing partisan judges and no system in which to objectively measure partisanship of a candidate. What that means is that there will always be partisan parties appointing partisan judges and there will always be candidates who claimed to be neutral who will be either accused of or proven to be partisan anyway.

In the current system true neutrality on the bench does not exist

My wife gets an honorable mention for being able to recite the “what did you say to me you little bitch” copypasta in its entirety on a dime and as fast as she can say it

These kinds of people, the ones who warp and twist society for their own gain, will always be around in some form or another. So will the people they fool into ushering in their brand of fascism.

I’ll grant you that the “anti-woke” crowd is particularly brain dead though

You’d think it would be a win, but honestly Trump is a clown. More “centrists” who detest Trump might rally around someone like DeSantis, that’s what I’m afraid of.

I know posting ben garrison is cheating, but this was years ago. They’d definitely latch on to the name as a tool to degrade him.

Hell, they’ve been trying to make the word “kamala” derogatory. Sorry Pete, even though you’d be as good a candidate as any, you’ve got butt in your name

I like the “formally” vs “formerly” suggesting Elon is never going to get away from Twitter in favor of X

Hey man, nice tittles

I just had the mental image of a scaled up front end loader about the size of Rhode Island pushing an ungodly amount of material around. So thanks for that

Here’s the thing: Lots of Republican leaning business owners see it as their right to retaliate against their workers without the gov intervening. So to them, the only thing they see wrong with this is the “child” part, because retaliation against children makes them look bad.

Hence the “they aren’t children” rhetoric.

By the way, this part of the bill was explicitly included by a congressman who owns some franchises and says his underage workers “don’t even want lunch breaks”.

So this is one dude trying to squeeze 20 extra hours of labor from literal children who’s dictating this for the entire state.

I just don’t like having disingenuous data presented

The difference between fighting disingenuous data and reframing the issue to favor another party is the degree in which the so-called disingenuous aspect actually matters.

In this case, the fact that the top 4% pay materially more than the rest doesn’t actually matter because they own the vast majority of the wealth. If that same wealth were evenly distributed, more of it would be paid into the system. And that is the point.

What you are doing is not representing the other side of a disingenuous issue, what you are doing is framing the issue in a way that favors the wealthy by citing a statistic that is beside the point.

That in itself is dishonest and a talking point that the wealthy use regularly to try and convince people that they are actually the good guys.

Is it really an ad though? If you aren’t using edge it’s because you prefer something else, not because you don’t know about it. Microsoft tries hard to maintain edge as the default.

It’s not like this post highlights its capabilities or makes an argument for edge vs other browsers.

greedy ass companies like valve who profit out of kids.

Again, and for the last time, you have a problem with the industry. Extreme statements like this reveal what your intentions actually are. If valve is to blame, then by the same logic you would have all but the smallest game devs and publishers not exist for the want of them doing things correctly according to you, and you’d call it a solution.

This conversation is going nowhere, you will not be satisfied.

Also, telling me I’m being doxxed anyway demonstrates pretty thoroughly that you have no idea what you’re talking about. Thanks for that.

EEE has nothing to do with what steam is. Other game stores exist that valve can’t affect on other platforms. You’re just pulling things out of your ass.

And finally, saying the government shouldn’t have to fix something that won’t fix itself, as evidenced by the fact that loot boxes have been an issue for a decade now, and just resorting to shaming people as a method of reprisal, has a name.

You are virtue signaling. And what you are doing here is about as effective as virtue signaling.

Anyway, blame whoever you want. The time you could have changed anyone’s mind here passed with your very first comment, as evidenced by the downvotes.

You’re yelling into the void. Enjoy that.

1. Loot boxes aren’t gambling if you earn them in game and don’t buy them. Personally, I believe that micro transactions for loot boxes should be outlawed altogether, but especially for kids. That doesn’t mean the practice of having those in games falls more on steam than the developers who push the practice in the first place.

2. No one is stopping indie devs from releasing their own games. Steam provides a service with tools and structure. Don’t pretend like steam just sells the game and takes a cut.

(3) Telling me to post my information is asking me for a show of good faith in an inquiry you are explicitly making in bad faith to bludgeon your point. There’s no good faith way to assert “well if it doesn’t matter than do it coward”. I don’t want to get doxxed. You don’t get doxxed when a company sells your info. There’s an extremely basic difference and you know it.

You’re just forcing your false equivalency to pretend your point has legitimacy, and in doing so have completely lost any credibility you might have had with me to begin with.

If your argument is in good faith, post yours. Otherwise don’t pretend like my not posting it proves anything except that you’re willing to stoop to bullying to push your point.

4. Why don’t you blame regulations on gambling that enable this behavior in the industry you so clearly despise. You’ll get further petitioning your government than yelling into the void about practices you don’t like.

Deciding that steam is the be-all end-all in the whole system is just asinine. You’ll argue that steam can be better and that’s the only reason you’re saying any of this, but the harsh truth is that steam could be quite a lot worse.

But seriously though, I am completely done with this conversation. You have shown multiple times in every single comment you have made so far that good faith isn’t really a thing for you.

I don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish but it certainly isn’t changing my mind. I’m definitely not going to change yours. Someone who makes a comment like “Valve is abducting kids into gambling for greed and profit” isn’t looking to accept logic except in a way that confirms their own bias.

This is pointless.

1. Loot boxes may be similar to, but are not gambling. Compulsion loops in some form are part of pretty much any game. Micro transactions are awful, but they aren’t steams fault for existing. Looking at feedback loops that aren’t in the least steams decision to include, and concluding that steam supports gambling is a reach. You’re mad at game devs for using this tactic, not steam.

2. Being loosely affiliated with games that have DRM isn’t even promotion. Locking games to your library? Really? Are you going to say that steam shouldn’t do what every other digital store front does? Are you suggesting that they open themselves up to piracy by not enforcing that they keep their products confined to the users that bought them? So what, steam is supposed to just give their games away?

3. Most of that information can be discovered about you through a background check. Steam isn’t selling your credit card info. That’s nowhere close to legal. Hardware information and ip aren’t protected information. You blast that to the world every time you get on the internet unless you are explicitly using a browser that stops it. First of all, nobody is going to pay for information your browser gives for free. Secondly, just because they collect that information doesn’t mean they’re selling it in the first place. And thirdly, even if they were selling “chat logs and browser history”, if just being able to collect that data means that they must be selling it, you better not be using discord or lemmy or any other non-encrypted medium to talk to your friends, because they’re all selling your conversations for fractions of pennies. That doesn’t sound a little paranoid to you?

4. No, what I’m saying is that you aren’t mad at steam. You’re mad at the industry. If you’re trying to affect change, flaming steam on an almost unknown social media site for doing something that’s industry-standard like marketing to kids is missing the target so hard you might as well be talking to the moon.

5. Again, steam is hardly exploiting anyone. Every single point you made is an industry standard that steam isn’t explicity stopping.

Look, I made all my points. It’s abundantly clear that you’re just angry because of the state of the industry as a whole. That’s your right. But the more you try to dishonestly paint steam as actively malicious when it’s pretty obvious they’re just another company, and a less invasive one than most at that, the less inclined you are to change my mind.

I’m out.

Ok, let’s take this point by point:

1. Steam doesn’t allow actual gambling. It’s illegal in the US and they typically don’t sell games that are not legal in the US. Conflating other types of games as gambling when there is no actual money on the line is a dishonest and transparent attempt to make steam look bad

2. Valve has no control over the DRM policies of the games that they sell. Valve creates an anti-cheat and that’s about as involved as they get. DRM is a gaming company corporate decision not publisher or distributor. If simply allowing DRM is what you mean by “promoting” then that is another count of dishonesty.

3. What data can they possibly mine? They get an email address, some gameplay time, location data, and Hardware data. All of this stuff is pretty freely available and doesn’t really sell for anything, nor is it really violating any privacy. And besides that, you can directly opt out of Hardware surveys.

4. Asserting that video games are a problem for kids and that steam is evil or profit-driven because of that is also pretty dishonest given that there are basically no game distributors that keep kids from playing video games. What you are essentially saying is that we should start doing like China does and limit kids ability to gain at all. Even then that is a government regulation and not at all on steam.

I would like to just point out the absurdity of saying that kids should not be able to play video games because of steam. For the last 40 years video games have been marketed primarily to kids. Are you going to say the same about Nintendo or Atari? Are you now asserting that companies shouldn’t Market to kids at all? Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds?

5. To round it all off, literally everything you listed are things that every gaming company or distributor does in some capacity and does not make Steam different or worse. It sounds like you just have a problem with the industry in general

I’ll never understand why some people look at the fact that steam is popular because of their policies, and can’t help but make a comment like this equating that popularity to cock worship.

Like, we get it bro. You’re thinking about cocks and you’re mad about a half decent game store. What compelled you to combine those thoughts on a public forum?

The weird thing is that this isn’t even the first comment I’ve seen like this. Dudes that are mad about steam want everyone else to know about steam’s massive, throbbing cock for some reason. This guy alone has posted 3 of these.