This is - unfortunately - not surprising. Niantic has always been in the business of selling/using user data for profit, they were a spin-off from Google after all. Their first big game, Ingress, was used to train Google Maps.

Ah yes, Midgar from Final Fantasy 7!

I agree with you and the lineage is obvious when looking at how Steve Bannon pushed GamerGate at Breitbart and then went straight on to become Trump’s campaign manager.

And Bannon’s name missing from that article is one of the article’s major flaws, considering how much Bannon shaped the MAGA movement as a whole.

I know this is a hard pill to swallow for most people, but our conscious thoughts are not necessarily “ourselves”, even though they often get framed as such. We are the whole, the uncountable unconscious small machinations, as well as the big thoughts.

As somebody else mentioned: Reacting first and thinking about it later was most often advantageous for our ancestors. “Flee from the lion first and think about that was necessary later.”

But that does not mean that the process of arriving at the point of “Flee from the lion” isn’t individual and very much “ours”. It’s just the fastest part of our brain taking the lead and everything else following.

Meanwhile in the real world…

Wall Street’s Favorite Trades Collapse After Market Selloff

US companies announced most job cuts for any January since 2009

Some older Americans are ‘unretiring’ to keep up with cost of living

Yeah, people have to understand that right-wing politics considers science merely a tool to accumulate wealth and power. Thus right-wingers will not acknowledge that science pursues scientific truth, but rather insist that science that contradicts them must be a challenge to their interests that aims to embolden their political opponents and thus must be expunged.

RuneQuest does a similar thing: Everyone can do magic on a basic level, but it takes skill and time to become proficient. To me this always made more sense than the “chosen one” logic inherent in other RPG systems, because most RPG classes are inherently defined by a difference in skill.

You will not be surprised that Gabriele D’Annunzio, one of the forgotten masterminds of fascism, described fascism as a “secular religion”.

I can imagine it being a LEGO set.

Thank you! I am. I meant the Hohenzollern branch that ruled in Prussia.

For those who are not familiar with Brianna Wu: She has tried to be a left-wing grifter, before she discovered that it got her nowhere and thus decided to be a right-wing grifter instead. She tried to the right-wing’s “good trans woman”, agreeing with everything they said, until the above message. And yeah, she is already trying to spin this yet again…

And if you think that all of that is rather weird, she is also the creator of this masterpiece.

A conman will say what he thinks people want to hear.

My pleasure.

To add to what SpookyBogMonster already said: On an international stage the big proponents of these views nowadays are Xi Jiping’s faction in China or North Korea, while even Cuba (which had upheld these views for a long time) have now abandoned this position.

In the US and in Europe, it’s a fringe position among leftists, mostly popular with those who also hold favourable views of Xi Jiping’s China and North Korea. It’s a very vocal minority though and infamously one of the key developers of the Lemmy platform is one of those.

Because it is not a coherent political standpoint, the justifications are all over the place. Ultimately people are being bigots and they come up with slew of explanations to justify their bigotry. So the arguments vary…

One of most popular argument goes something like this “Only rich capitalists engaged in homosexuality and transsexualism because of degenerate bourgeois ennui. True Workers™ are never homosexual and transsexual. Therefore any homosexual and transsexual must be a member of the bourgeois class and cannot be a True Worker™.” (Which is just circular logic.)

There are other arguments in the vein of “China (or another socialist country of choice) is queerphobic, China is socialist, therefore socialism must be queerphobic.” (Which fails to acknowledge that other socialist countries like for example the GDR were remarkably progressive in comparison to its capitalist neighbors.)

Then there are other circular arguments like “Capitalist societies are rotten to the core. There is more queer visibility today. Queerness is proof of capitalist rot.”

Appeals to queerphobia of the past like “The Soviet Union criminalized queerness. The Soviet Union is the socialist ideal, therefore we should do like them.”

Or there are appeals to the authority of some queerphobic socialist writer of the past. As well as riffs on the argument from the screenshot which boil down to “Individualism is bourgeois capitalism. Queerness is an individual choice. It cannot be allowed under socialism where collectivism reigns supreme.”

The official reason for me getting fired were budget cuts, but I knew that the new department head actually wanted to hand my responsibilities to a buddy of theirs they had brought on board. Despite being there longer at the department than the new head and their buddy, as well as excellent performance reviews I had no chance to keep that job.

After years of giving a platform to climate change denialism, transphobic fearmongering, pearl clutching over too much woke at liberal colleges, both-sideing the efficacy of vaccines and indulging in Covid conspiracy nonsense, the NYT has finally achieved its goal.

For those wondering why Allen would care about praising Trump: Not only was Woody Allen Epstein’s neighbor; he and his “wife/adopted daughter” were “frequent dinner guests” at Epstein’s.

That reads a little bit like victim-blaming, because the worship of billionaires only applies to one segment of the working poor. Another big part of the problem is billionaires corrupting the political system to the point where whoever gets elected immediately gets love-bombed by the richest people in the world who promise them a share of the loot. Convincing people that voting “for the other guy” won’t solve the systemic problems of our political systems is a tremendously difficult job and the billionaires and their bought lackeys know this.

If anyone is interested in how serious Putin’s threats are… The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation states:

France engaged in a slow, but steady build-up of its nuclear arsenal and by 1980, it neared the threshold of what the Soviets considered posing the threat of “unacceptable damage” to the Soviet Union.

Yes, France has reduced its arsenal since the peak of the Cold War, but it is still around the same level as 1980.