Also /u/Cylinsier on Reddit. A bullshit aritst.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Headline is very biased, source video is opinion piece from an unreliable right wing source. Here’s a neutral reporting on this story:

    https://www.thedailybeast.com/gonzalo-lira-red-pill-dating-coach-who-is-accused-of-shilling-for-putin-is-arrested-in-ukraine

    There is no reliable evidence that he is being tortured in any capacity. He is charged with violating several wartime laws and it appears he attempted to out the locations of Ukrainian soldiers as well as international journalists to hostile Russian invasion forces, implicitly making it easier to target them.

    OP’s account appears to be associated with or wants people to believe it is associated with Project Veritas. Project Veritas has a long, very well established pattern of dishonest reporting including editing videos to make it appear as if people have said or done things they didn’t do as well as lying about the identities of their “agents” and behaving erratically or unethically in an attempt to elicit secretly recorded responses from their targets which can then be edited to appear incriminating of whatever illicit activity they will then be accused of. Project Veritas is not a credible source of fact-based reporting and if OP is not associated with them, it should still be a red flag that they want people to think they are.




  • This is all about delegitimizing the impeachment process itself. Trump getting impeached twice was historically relevant because it stood as tangible evidence of him being one of the worst presidents in history and easily the worst of the last 50 years. The Republican narrative remains that those impeachments were politically motivated and not based on any valid legal or ethical concerns. So now they’re going to do what they accused Democrats of doing and deliberately make a mockery of impeachment.

    The point of this isn’t to actually punish anyone in the Biden administration. It’s an inconvenience at worst and they know it. The point is to make impeachment a joke. Something one party in Congress does to the other in the White House as a regular and inconsequential thing, just part of the theater of it all. This retroactively defangs Trump’s impeachments in the eyes of people on both sides who aren’t dialed into politics and really only pay attention every 4 years and skim the occasional headline. It also preemptively reduces the gravity of any future impeachments of Republican Presidents because impeachment becomes routine and therefore mundane to the average person.

    Basically the Republicans don’t like checks and balances that require them to behave like civilized, functional adults doing their jobs, so they’re just going to smear their shit on those checks and balances until the voters no longer take them seriously and forget they ever had any real meaning. And it will work too.


  • I think it’s down to a few reasons. One you touched on is exclusives. Most consumers aren’t going to have both consoles like you do, they’re going to pick one or the other and Xbox doesn’t really have many exclusives, even fewer than PS, and theirs are much more likely to end up on PC when they do have them. So for consumers who want the larger variety of games, PS5 currently wins.

    Another is performance. While both the PS5 and Series X are comparable, the Series S offering has created a very odd phenomenon of accidental exclusivity for Sony because of performance limitations. It’s a relatively new thing but I suspect it’s going to be more common as the generation goes on. The current example is Baldur’s Gate III. It simply cannot run on the S. As a result the developer has put an Xbox release on hold indefinitely and it may never come out on Xbox because they don’t want to have to deal with the confusion of selling an Xbox game that is not playable on one of the two SKUs. They decided that if the S can’t run it then it just won’t come out for the X either.

    Third, and probably more relevant earlier in the generation, Sony had some snappy gimmicks on their side that might have been a difference maker for some consumers on the fence. The advanced haptics of the Dual Sense for example. I think the novelty of that wore off pretty quickly but there was a lot of buzz around it closer to launch to the extent that it’s impact on sales is probably more than nothing at all. I think the PSVR2 was also briefly a console mover as Xbox doesn’t have comparable hardware. I don’t think anyone at this point is rushing out to get a PS5 just for VR now, but there was a brief period of time after the PSVR2 was announced where people were eager to have a PS5 because if they did want VR, Sony’s was the cheapest way into that market at modern performance levels without having to give Facebook your entire identity just to game. Again not significant on its own, but it’s impact is more than nothing at all.

    Fourth is just that Sony came into the generation ahead of Microsoft with the PS4. More PS4 owners with big libraries are going to want a new system that can play their old games rather than starting from scratch. So if you have a bunch of PS4 games that you still play, you’re going to choose PS5 and it’s kind of a no brainer.

    And lastly I’d say Sony has just done a better job marketing it’s console as a must-have piece of consumer tech. From the jump there were a lot of people who already had gaming PCs questioning why they would ever need an Xbox. And Microsoft did little to address this narrative, it almost felt like they accepted that they were going to cannibalize their own console’s sales right from launch because everything gets ported to PC for them and just decided they didn’t care. There are plenty of reasons to own an Xbox but MS has pushed like none of them in advertising. Sony meanwhile did a great job early on marketing the PS5 as a status symbol and has kept in the public eye much more consistently with game exclusivity, and more recently media tie-ins with the Last of Us tv show. And while the exclusives may be few and far between, they are big draws like Final Fantasy, Horizon, and Spider-Man. When Xbox occasionally gets an exclusive, it’s always in the news for the wrong reasons like Halo almost universally agreed upon to be no longer good or Redfall being an absolutely embarrassing catastrophe of a release.





  • Given that the studios have now openly admitted their plan is just to wait the writers out, actors need to step up and throw their weight in on the writers’ side. Because its not that easy to replace quality writing with AI just yet. But we’ve had the tech to replace quality acting with CG and text-to-voice for years already. So actors aren’t even doing this for the writers, they’re doing it for themselves because they’re next. They cost way more to employ but are easier to replace with existing tech.

    Edit: I realize this strike isn’t about the writers but rather the actors own collective bargaining, but my point that they’re all in on this together and being threatened by the same emerging technologies stands.


  • Barbados is a beautiful country which is poorer than it should be. I had the opportunity to visit it as part of a cruise many years ago and that experience along with similar ones is why I doubt I will ever go on a cruise again. Not to say I didn’t have a good time, it was a fantastic opportunity to visit a number of small island nations in a single week and since it was a gift, it only cost me a single roundtrip plane ticket. But something was abundantly clear in Barbados, St Lucia, and St Kitts. And that was that if you were not the cruise industry or the handful of local resorts who contracted with them for day excursions, you benefitted absolutely fucking nothing from their presence. The economies of these small nations had absolutely no right to be as poor as they were with that kind of money coming into them. I went on several of my own excursions and got to see the local areas outside of the preplanned trips the cruise had in mind and saw very poor but very happy people living lives in the shadows of these high-pollution ships bringing rich people into places they themselves were never able to afford to go in their own countries.

    This is all a very roundabout way of saying I hope this works out for them. Barbados is a free, self-governing nation that has a lot to offer to tourists and a lot of locals who should benefit from that but, in today’s economic realities, you can’t start making money until you have enough money to buy your foot into the door first. The specter of white colonialism still hangs over these small nations.


  • No, you will have to create a separate account on Lemmy.world or another instance which still federates with them to do that. It is worth noting that the defederation is indefinite but not permanent so you could also just wait. The defederation was done because Lemmy.world users were creating an overabundance of moderation issues so the intention is to eventually federate with them again when it is possible to address those issues more efficiently.




  • I only have one very specific situational question. On Reddit I was permanently banned from r/politics because when Rand Paul tested positive for COVID, I commented “lol.” Is that also considered unacceptable here? If it is I am fine with that, I just want to know what level of basic decency we’re expected to show towards public figures we don’t like so I can properly self-edit my tone. I am not going to go actively wishing harm on anyone but I thought this was a relatively innocuous comment when I made it and not deserving of a ban, much less a permanent one.


  • God his dumb fucking grin is so phony. This asshole fires tons of hard working people keeping the lights on for him, won’t pay his bills, props up right wing talking points on one of the biggest public platforms on earth, and is a faux-intellectual bigot. But then he still thinks he can act like one of the cool kids and nobody will see through his charade. He mistakes gawking for admiration.



  • The single biggest problem standing between the left and sustained and meaningful control of the federal government is the complete lack of ability of voters to circle around a consensus candidate. There are several valid reasons to be critical of Harris just as there are pretty much every single Democratic Presidential decade basically of my lifetime. But Republicans vote consistently for candidates they dislike or even hate just to beat Democrats. Every single candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2016, 2020, and undoubtedly in 2028 will have some vocal subset of registered Democrat voters telling you exactly why they will never in a million years vote for them. I saw it constantly on Reddit and I don’t see any reason why it won’t continue.

    Until somebody drops the magic “consensus candidate” name that somehow pleases everyone, Democratic voters are always going to be a major hurdle to their own success. And frankly I don’t think that “consensus candidate” name exists. Such is the curse of being the big tent party opposite the GOP. Republicans know they can continue winning elections for at least a little longer thanks to Democratic infighting alone.