No, no, no — exactly zero understanding is required. The world is both greater and more grand than video games. Get your head out of your gaming headset and deal with reality once in awhile. And definitely don’t expect it to be a safe space for you, where you never need to hear anything about how it’s not a safe space …

This sucks, and I’ll never forgive anyone involved. Ever.

Iowa is fine, y’all. It’s a batshit way to choose a candidate but if somebody has to go first, I’m fine with Iowa. I happened to be there prior to primary season in 2004 and as someone raised in a permablue zone, I was impressed with how normalized political engagement seemed to be; it seemed clear that Iowans overall…

Everyone responsible for perpetuating this narrative has some pretty obvious self-serving reasons for promoting it, I think:

Don’t get me wrong — Obama continued many of the abysmal, hawkish policies that Bush had continued from Clinton had continued from Reagan, and on and on — but I do think it’s really important to acknowledge the specifics of each of these different situations. In part because of the real human people on the ground for…

I’d buy that, but that’s not the same as the question of how/whether to leave Syria. Regardless, if and when Iraq wants us to leave, we should unquestionably go. I am aware that this is currently an issue of domestic debate within Iraq, but also that no consensus to ask us to leave has emerged. There’s a fair amount…

I’ve seen no evidence that the US ever sent weapons or forces to “help ISIS” — something that would make absolutely no sense. Best I can figure is that you’re grossly misreading and/or distorting something else, like trying to arm secular and/or less-toxic Islamist groups to make them more resilient against Assad or…

Fuck Bush for sure, but he left Obama only shitty options. Remember that he tried to leave as soon as he reasonably could, and then ISIS happened. Helping Iraqis and free Syrians defeat ISIS was not imperialism, it was taking responsibility for the effects of a horrible thing we did. Don’t paint everyone who supports…

You’ve been afflicted; seek a cure. Hint: the cure is empathy

Too many people think that video games should be safe only for them, and have erroneous notions that safety depends on excluding difference. Bad news for them that there’s nowhere in life where you don’t have to respect the needs and humanity of others. Except not really, because they can just get over it, and the…

Nah dude — forget this explanation. What’s really standing between you and the people you are arguing with is the fact that you’re having two different conversations. You’re defending your whole scene — you’re talking up the great things about it that you love, and distancing them from the things that are bad. That’s…

Lossy-compressed audio does weird stuff when you process it, so if the game does anything more than panning/amplifying to manipulate the source audio it might need to be uncompressed.

I’m torn — on one hand, you’re not wrong that there are big things afoot; on the other, you can’t expect people who have been directly harmed by a person or their policies to set that aside, and it’s really not that cool to even ask.

If you’d been subjected to the sharp edges of Bloomberg’s regime, you wouldn’t want…

Take it from Mike — he knows all about political violence! See: stop and frisk, broken windows policing, mass-arresting protesters at the 2004 RNC and holding them in an old, gasoline-smelling warehouse for days, evicting Occupy Wall Street at 4AM while arresting and/or beating up anyone who tried to come within a…

I’m sure it’s part of it, yeah. I mean, we know Trump thrives on weak people, because he surrounds himself with them, and got elected by manipulating them. I think they make him, who is otherwise also an extremely weak person, feel strong. I would bet, even if he doesn’t realize it, that half of why he’s fine with…

Honestly I think it’s just that our political and social systems are straining against a brand-new, Earth-sized economic system whose participants are rearranging all of us like pieces on a chessboard and changing our lives however they please, killing our habitat along the way, and we have no purchase with which to…

this give anyone else flashbacks to Ultimatum?

Aw, goddammit

Thanks for the heads up. Fie on whoever ungreyed them, I guess.

Amazing how the anti-Bernie-supporter derangement has morphed from unfounded, non-specific accusations of bigotry into just straight up smears of drug addiction. A true portrait of rationality and fairness.

I agree with you about the needle, though. It helped Trump by giving *lots* of people the impression they didn’t…