Okay, I think we’re on the same page; we’re just saying it two different ways. Trump and his core/inner circle are racist? Yes, agreed. There are low-income people who are voting against their best interests, and gutting education makes it even worse? Yes, also agreed.

The key point I’m trying to make is: it’s not inherently the fault of these lower-income people that conservatives have actively tried to keep them stupid. Lumping these unlucky rubes in with the actual malefactors isn’t helpful, it’s just kicking them when they’re already down.

Painting “the others” as killers and destroyers is exactly the sort of rhetoric that racists use to dehumanize minorities. If you want the population at large to believe that we’re better than the racists, then we have to actually be better than them-- not fall into the trap of thinking like they do.

Sure, some Trump supporters are inherently broken people that you can’t even have a civilized conversation with. No one is denying that. I’m saying that some are just very misguided and although we’re all very tired of dealing with them, writing them off as lost causes is only going to make our current problem bigger.

Modern psychology can successfully deprogram former cultists; we do not march these people straight into a wood chipper.

There’s a big difference between saying “a majority of his supporters are racist” and “their core is 100% racism.” This is exactly the trap you have to avoid if you want to start moving forward.

There’s also a big difference between defending racism and pointing out the fact that-- like it or not-- some Trump supporters are minorities, and that forces us to accept that there’s something besides racism at play here.

Is this exhausting? Absolutely. Trump should not even be eligible to run for public office as far as I’m concerned, and yet here we are, dealing with the third straight Presidential election where we have to ask ourselves why his polling numbers are as high as they are despite how thoroughly awful he is as a human being. And because people are tired, we’re willing to accept an easy answer rather than dig deeper.

But if we dismiss this recurring nightmare yet again by saying that only racists voted for him, there’s no point in trying to debate a racist, so we should never engage with any Trump voter, ever, until the End of Time? Then progress isn’t going to last very long, because we’ll have failed to understand why some people believe so strongly that the system is broken that they’d rather vote for a convicted felon than someone who is actually qualified to be President. That sentiment is only going to spread if we don’t figure out why so many people are feeling so disaffected.

It’s like we’ve discovered a weird lump on our collective pancreas. It’s uncomfortable, we don’t want to think about it, and we all hope that it’ll just go away, but no. You have to biopsy that thing. Ignoring it would be irresponsible.

There’s no question in my mind that the oligarchs in the U.S. want to encourage racism and culture wars, in order to keep lower-class Americans at each others’ throats rather than united against the bourgeoisie. It’s also true that populist dictators have leveraged, and continue to leverage, anti-immigrant and other racist viewpoints in order win support and push their twisted ideologies on their entire country. Trump is, without question, an example of a would-be dictator who’s in the pocket of billionaires and is appealing to Christofascists in hopes of going back to the White House in lieu of jail.

That being said, articles like these which insinuate that Trump’s campaign is primarily about racism is a repetition one of the key, fatal mistakes that Hillary Clinton’s campaign made in 2016. It’s also not a good way of fixing the “us vs. them” environment that allows the oligarchs to keep thriving.

While it’s hard for us to understand their motivations for doing so, some voters in the black, Latino and Asian communities still support him. It’s irresponsible and short-sighted to pretend these voters don’t exist, so it becomes necessary to concede that while many of Trump’s supporters are indeed racist, there are still some legitimate ideological reasons why certain people continue to embrace conservatism. And if you actually want long-lasting change in this country, you have to engage with those people and not dismiss them as being just as deplorable as the rabid Trump cultists.

Granted, it’s getting harder with each passing week to justify supporting Trump for non-racist reasons, as seen by the fact that some conservative influencers have started walking back support for him. That being said, there remains a perception (no matter how invalid) that Kamala Harris is an insider, a cog in an inherently corrupt political machine, while Trump is the guy who’s going to drain the swamp. I know perfectly well that Trump is way more corrupt than Harris, but the ‘drain the swamp’ narrative sticks because some Democrats have been just as subservient to the oligarchs as Republicans. Even when they controlled the White House and Congress, they didn’t undo the Reagan-era tax cuts for the wealthy, or cut the billions of dollars in spending on defense contractors, or pass any reforms that would make our government more accessible to non-elites (like term limits or ranked choice voting).

The status quo isn’t working out too well for the majority of Americans, and the Democrats represent a continuation of that status quo. A lot of these disaffected Americans just want to see the system “shaken up” in hopes of seeing an improvement. The “vote them all out” sentiment is popular for a reason. Hopefully, those people realize we already gave Trump a chance in 2016, he didn’t fix a damned thing, and it’s not going to be any better for them if he gets a second term. However, Democrats in the U.S. (just like Labour in the U.K.) are going to have to deliver some significant improvements in the quality of life for the common folk instead of serving the oligarchs first and foremost. Otherwise, we’re just going back to conservative leadership in a few years, and the next would-be dictator might be less incompetent than Trump was in staging a coup.

As the article points out, the original lyric from American Idiot is, “I’m not a part of a redneck agenda.” They changed it to, “I’m not a part of a MAGA agenda.”

…Can this even be considered a significant change? It’s more like a modernization of the original language. Whose agenda did they think Green Day was previously referring-- oh, right. They probably didn’t do any research, did they? It’s just manufactured outrage, so they can pretend that the left is just as vile as they are.

This was the right decision in 2023. Making it now, a month before the DNC, means they have completely circumvented the primary elections and robbed voters of their chance to select the nominee. We’ve gone from millions of people having a voice in the nomination process, to a group of less than ten thousand, and that is disenfranchisement on a massive scale.

Don’t get me wrong, I would vote for a dead raccoon before I’d vote for Trump. But we deserve better than to have Trump’s opponent hand-picked on our behalf like this. I’ll vote for whoever that is, but we should absolutely give the Democrats hell once this is all over. The duopoly in our elections needs to end, if they can’t be trusted to honor the basic fundamentals of the system.

The complete collapse of our government by having so many terrible, terribly unqualified people into positions of power they shouldn’t hold.

So, this is the part of Project 2025 that I don’t think gets enough attention. The Heritage Foundation wants to fire thousands of government employees in the civil service, and replace them with political appointees loyal to Trump. There are lots of reasons why that’s a bad idea, but from a purely practical standpoint, there’s the simple fact that you are never going to get thousands of people qualified enough to replace them.

It was bad enough when it was just the senior leadership of government agencies who were largely unqualified. They were incompetent, but you had all these experienced people underneath them, keeping things running despite the dysfunction. Not that it wasn’t confusing at times-- by 2020, the turnover in Trump’s cabinet had gotten so bad that no one was quite sure who was serving in what leadership role, and whether or not they were doing so legally.

Anyway, take the dysfunction of 2020 and multiply it by a factor of however many civil service employees they’re going to fire. Yeah. That equation works out to: absolutely nothing getting done.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that the Trump Loyalty Committee will be terrible at their job of vetting prospective appointees, and most of these experienced civil service employees could manage to keep their jobs by lying their asses off. It’s not as if Trump is actually going to be paying attention. His handlers are just going to tell him it was a great success no matter what happens, he’ll grunt in approval and go back to throwing hamburgers at the wall.

I don’t expect impartiality from an outlet like Bloomberg, but it’s important to point out that this isn’t new relief, just a further step toward fixing a fundamentally broken program that was supposed to provide this relief years ago. Personally, I have nearly sixteen years of qualifying employment but still haven’t had my loans forgiven due to mishandling by the companies, and deliberate sabotage of the program by Betsy DeVos.

And her reasoning was, of all things, that the appointment of Special Counsel Jack Smith was illegal. I would have expected her to say that relocating the classified docs to Mar-a-Lago was an official act, done while Trump was still President, but no. She based this idiotic decision on even shakier legal ground. Doesn’t this mean that the appointment of Special Counsel David Weiss was illegal too? Shouldn’t Hunter Biden’s conviction be expunged, based on Judge Cannon’s logic here?

Looks interesting, but I gotta be honest: when I click on the Steam page and the first thing I see is a cash shop to buy “Epoch Points” for this early access game? That’s an instant turn-off for me. I’m sure it’s not as predatory as what Blizzard did with D4’s monetization, but I don’t want it in my games, period.

Re-Logic (Terraria’s developers) have already gone on record saying, "even if Unity were to recant their policy and statements, the destruction of trust is not so easily repaired.” That’s the stance I think every developer should be taking. Unless you have a Unity game that can be released by the end of the year, all devs need to seriously consider switching engines.

I hadn’t heard about those changes, but that’s quite a relief. I hated traveling to individual ripperdoc clinics to snag all the best upgrades. Especially because the best cyberware for your frontal cortex can only be bought from a VDB ripper in Pacifica, and I didn’t want to give those assholes any of my eddies.

My wife is a music nerd, so I asked her this question. Her answer: Summer Nights from “Grease”. The entire song is perfect for what it is, except for the very last word. John Travolta switches to his falsetto range to sing the word “nights” in a style that reminds me of the Bee Gees, and it just doesn’t fit with all the vocals that came before it. It’s literally a sour note to end what’s otherwise a perfectly good song.

I doubt Ashton and Mila apologized because they actually regret writing those letters; this is just damage control because they got caught defending a rapist. Also, Scientology isn’t a religion, it’s a criminal organization, and it ought to be treated as such.

I was disappointed to hear that Kurtwood Smith wrote a letter in support of Masterson too. I really liked him in RoboCop… but I guess there’s a reason why he was so good at acting like a total bastard.

I’ve been seeing a lot of low-effort content lately, and I suspect it’s coming from users who want their Reddit alternative, and they want it now. So, they see that Beehaw has a large community, and decide it’s a perfect place to start content-barfing.

I think the admins have been clear that they’re not trying to create a replacement for Reddit here, though. Everything under the sun does not have to be re-posted, just content that you actually want to discuss with this community specifically. When I see five posts created by one user in under a minute, I can’t help but think that the intent there is not to spark discussion. And, of course, the volume is problematic for the mods when they don’t have the tools they need to manage it.

Nikki Haley’s parents were Sikh immigrants, originally from Punjab. And she’s calling for an increase in deportations. I don’t get it, either.

I agree, BioWare does not need to be devoting its resources to SW:TOR at this point. It’s been out for a good, long while and the fact is, MMORPGs are not big money-makers these days. There was a huge wave of them in the wake of WoW’s success but none of them were able to achieve the kind of market success, player base or staying power of WoW. That ship has sailed, and it’s only appropriate to let the BioWare devs get back to doing what they do best.

I don’t have high hopes for the next Dragon Age game, but would love to be pleasantly surprised. They’ve changed directions so many times during the development of that game, so I’m expecting the end result to be a mess. Mass Effect gives me slightly more hope as a possible return to form for BioWare though, if they learn from Andromeda’s missteps and focus on what made the original trilogy (particularly the first two games) great.

Do you suffer from anxiety about climate change and its effects?

I moved to Maryland in 2010. In the 13 years I’ve been here, I have definitely noticed effects of climate change. Snow has become rare in the winter. There are more 100F days in the summer. And there are fewer insects, with the exception of carpenter bees, which you usually only saw on the Virginia side of the Potomac.

That’s just in my backyard. Elsewhere, Lake Mead and the Great Salt Lake are literally drying up. The jet stream that has a major impact on our weather might just disappear some day in the near future. Also, the entire country of Australia caught on fire a while back.

What gives me anxiety is how damned fast these changes happened. It wasn’t a shift that happened over the span of a generation, it’s only been a dozen years. I can’t help but wonder, how are things going to look in another 12-13 years at this rate?

Have you ever made significant individual lifestyle choices because of climate change?

Individual lifestyle changes aren’t going to be enough. 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global carbon emissions. And a significant chunk of those emissions come from oil companies. We need to be more aggressive in banning new sales of petroleum-burning vehicles and invest in other forms of zero-emission, mass transit. I take the Metro whenever I go into DC, but it doesn’t do much good when the Beltway is constantly packed with SUVs and trucks.

What do you think of proposed technologies like carbon capture? Do you think they’re useful, or a technocratic waste of time? Can they be viably used at large scale on any reasonable timeframe?

No idea if they’re viable, but I do know we’re running out of time, and any possible solution is worth exploring. Even if we do significantly cut global carbon emissions at this point, damage has already been done. I think that it will be necessary to develop technology to reverse that damage, one way or another.