Funny events in anti-woke world

Gergar12

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And there goes 50 years of future Chinese economic growth from 2024 due to US sanctions IF they invade Taiwan.
 

Dwarvenhobble

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It's so good dumb

It's so dumb that it got Nick Calandra to dig into Mark Kern's Scammier Star Citizen game Em8er

So 2 points,
1) That's nothing compared to Star Citizen and their ships which BTW if you lose in game and don't have ship insurance you lose entirely.
2) 462 (1).jpg
 

Hades

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In their last election Slovakia elected for their prime minister an extremely corrupt pro Russian traitor who previously had to resign because he murdered a journalist.

''How can we limit the damage caused by this?'' the electorate thought.
''I know! Lets elect the murderer's crony as president! That way the corrupt murderer gets overseen by his very own crony!'' the electorate then decided.

Its brilliant.
 
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Cicada 5

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Kids game, that tons of adults were playing for years.
And this reaction is a pretty good argument to keep adults, or at least certain adults, out of kids' hobbies.


Hell weird for them to change stuff now and this is what they decided to change, and only the female avatars from what I can see..........
If you find something objectionable about the male avatar designs, by all means say so.


1) It's Reddit no shock there.
Yeah, they still have standards. Who knew?

2) Anita Sarkeesian did th
Did what? And why are you still talking about her in 2024?
 
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Satinavian

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And this reaction is a pretty good argument to keep adults, or at least certain adults, out of kids' hobbies.
I would guess that Pokemon GO, a game where you have to move around town on a certain schedule regularly with your smartphone, was probably made for teens and above, not small children.
And i would also assume that specifically teens might be quite interested in game characters that look both young and attractive. Well, certainly i was many decades ago.

Now i don't think every character, especially female should be sexualized but neither do i think that sexualisation has no place in games because "think of the children".



As for the specific change in question... i don't play Pokemon Go, don't know how the character looked before and frankly don't really care. Any amount of outrage over such a cosmetic change is probably too much outrage. If people really don't like the look they can vote with their wallet.

Not every design decision is a move in the culture war. It is only the outrage industry picking stuff like this and blowing it up.
 
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BrawlMan

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I find sad that whenever there's a good looking black woman or POC, these assholes claim it's not because they're Black/Indian/Asian/NA/Latino, but because they're "ugly". So in other words: you consider anyone with a non-white skin ugly, therefore making you assholes racists and sexists. You'll occasionally make an exception for Asian sometimes, but only because you think they should only serve to be "yours" and "your personal fuck toy". I rather these assholes just outright they're hatred, bigotry, and racism, then beating around the bush with "I'm not racist/sexist, but...".

Did what? And why are you still talking about her in 2024?
Because he's obsessed and got nothing to stand on. Ignore him.

And now I am banned from another country oh well.
Thank you for providing something useful for once.
 

BrawlMan

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From one of the top comments on the video comment section.

@UltravioletNomad
1 hour ago
A reminder that Dontnod were the ones who made Life is Strange 1 and 2, so it's really it's almost like they took the skin of a product made by passionate people and filled it with corporate B's only because it's popular, as Square Enix is one to do. It's honestly no fucking wonder they started self publishing their own products like Harmony: Fall of Reverie, Jusant, and Banishers: Ghost of New Eden (with support from Focus Interactive). The last of which was also accused of "virtue signalling" for daring to have a... Interracial relationship... It's 20 goddamn 24, if complaining about an interracial relationship isn't a mask off moment I don't know what is.
 
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XsjadoBlaydette

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hype is real for Sound of Freedom 2


: Flynn's unflushed loo

non site-dependent version;
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BY DAVID GILBERT
APR 8, 2024 6:30 AM
Inside the Election Denial Groups Planning to Disrupt November

Groups like True the Vote and Michael Flynn’s America Project want to mobilize thousands of Trump supporters by pushing baseless claims about election fraud—and are rolling out new technology to fast-track their efforts.

Tiles showing protestors holding the sign Stop the steal Michael Flynn interespered with a voting booth.

PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION: ANJALI NAIR; GETTY IMAGES


As the most consequential presidential election in a generation looms in the United States, get-out-the-vote efforts across the country are more important than ever. But multiple far-right activist groups with ties to former president Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee are mobilizing their supporters in earnest, drawing on one baseline belief: Elections in the US are rigged, and citizens need to do something about it.

All the evidence states otherwise. But in recent weeks, these groups have held training sessions about how to organize on a hyperlocal level to monitor polling places and drop boxes, challenge voter registrations en masse, and intimidate and harass voters and election officials. And some are preparing to roll out new technology to fast-track all of these efforts: One of the groups claims they’re launching a new platform for checking voter rolls that contains billions of “data elements” on every single US citizen.

These groups could have a major impact on the 2024 election. In addition to disenfranchising voters and putting additional pressure on already overstretched election offices, they could convince more and more people that US elections are fraudulent.

Catherine Engelbrecht and her organization True the Vote have effectively tried to disenfranchise voters for more than a decade by claiming that voter rolls are filled with phony voter registrations. Engelbrecht’s rhetoric was given an unprecedented boost in the wake of 2020, when Trump and other elected officials mainstreamed conspiracies that the elections had been rigged in favor of Democrats. Hundreds of national and local election denial groups were formed, and many of them amassed huge followings on social media platforms like Telegram. As the 2024 presidential election looms, they are ramping up efforts to do it again.

“It could be exponentially worse than what we saw in 2020, but we're going to be awake, we're going to be engaged, we are going to understand the process, and we're going to have options to continue to hold to those truths,” Engelbrecht said during a March webinar titled “Election Integrity Team Building 101.” “We're not going to back down. There's too much to lose.”


The hour-long presentation was delivered from a hotel room in Denver, with Engelbrecht laying out what could sound like a relatively benign plan to monitor elections and check voter rolls. “Keep a soft heart, keep a kind word in your mouth, approach people irrespective of party with love. You will find that things will be much better if that is the approach that is taken,” Engelbrecht said. The session, she said, was overbooked.

Engelbrecht then began speaking about elections being “perilously close to cracking in half,” and her presentation became a highlight reel of election conspiracies, references to crystals, Christian nationalist rhetoric, and militaristic jargon. “If this republic’s to be saved, it's because [of] people like all of you that are on this webinar right now. There are some bad actors out there and we live in particularly chaotic and caustic times,” said Engelbrecht. “If we wait on somebody to do something, we will watch freedom slip away on our watch. That's how close we are.”

“These groups are trying to lay the groundwork to potentially make later claims about the election that very well may be false. But the more chaos that can be caused along the way will give more fodder to that disinformation,” Andrew Garber, an expert at the Brennan Center for Justice’s Voting Rights and Elections Program, tells WIRED. “It's not just bad if there's a mass voter challenge because people might get kicked off the rolls. It's also bad if people then take that challenge and say, ‘See, look at all these ineligible voters,’ when in fact that's not the case.”

Engelbrecht founded True the Vote in 2010, when she was an activist for the right-wing populist Tea Party movement. After the 2020 election, Engelbrecht and her collaborator Gregg Phillips became central figures in the Stop the Steal movement, and starred in the widely-debunked election conspiracy film 2000 Mules. They were also arrested for contempt of court after refusing to identify their source behind allegations that the Chinese government had accessed US election data. True the Vote also made wild allegations of widespread ballot stuffing in Georgia during the 2020 vote and a subsequent runoff in 2021. Earlier this year, True the Vote was forced to admit in court that the group had no evidence to back up its claims.

In 2022, the group rolled out a slick new software tool known as IV3, based on technology developed by Phillips, that compared names on voter rolls to a database maintained by the US Postal Service, allowing anyone to challenge voter registrations across the country if they spotted a discrepancy. A WIRED investigation, however, revealed that the information used to challenge the registration of hundreds of thousands of people was based on unreliable data.

Undeterred, True the Vote announced last week that it was relaunching IV3. Phillips claims that the software’s database now has close to “100 billion data elements about every single voter in the United States.” WIRED has not seen proof of this claim. The new IV3 system will soon be available in all 50 states, the organization said. On Thursday, the group held a webinar to train local activists on how to use it. The new system also relies on data from the US Postal Service, but Engelbrecht claimed during the presentation that Phillips and his team had “normalized” the data from all 50 states to ensure the system would not produce inaccurate results. She also said that thousands of people across the country were already registered, and that they had a long waiting list.

Additionally, she said that another software tool developed by Phillips’ team, called Ground Fusion, would be released soon; it is aimed at organizations and PACs looking to identify voting irregularities across larger geographic regions.

Engelbrecht declined to comment, claiming without evidence that WIRED had “written unfairly about True the Vote and IV3 in the past.”

True the Vote is not the only group seeking to leverage technology to supercharge the spread of election conspiracies. A secretive Georgia-based firm called EagleAI NETwork has developed a voter information database to fast-track the deletion of ineligible voters from the system. Voter rights groups have advised against its use, as insignificant errors—such as a missing comma before the suffix “Jr.”—have led to eligible names being removed. Still, at least one county in Georgia has agreed to use EagleAI to review voter challenges and conduct list maintenance activities.

One of EagleAI’s key backers is former Trump adviser Cleta Mitchell, who in the past two years has become central to the push to spread election conspiracies on a national level through her well-funded Election Integrity Network.

The group has held in-person training seminars in recent years, with session topics including how to protect “Vulnerable Voters from Leftist Activists” and “Monitoring Voting Equipment and Systems.” More recently, the group has made its training sessions available online, and is now once again ramping up its efforts ahead of the 2024 election with an initiative called Soles to the Rolls, aimed at boosting challenges to voter registration.

Mitchell, EagleAI, and the Election Integrity Network did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

Another training webinar called “We the People” was also hosted last month by the America Project and its offshoot, Vote Your Vision. Broadcasted online to hundreds of attendees, the webinar featured a lineup of election conspiracists, Republican lawmakers, a guy who wrote a book about fifth-generation warfare, and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

The webinar, the group’s website said, was designed to give people “the secrets to reclaiming our power and reshaping history” by using “state-of-the-art election tools,” including those involving artificial intelligence technology. While the details of exactly what these tools will look like and how they will be used are unclear, the America Project has already scheduled more training sessions in the coming weeks to give supporters more information. The group also did not reply to requests for comment.

The America Project was cofounded by disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Overstock.com CEO and conspiracist Patrick Byrne, who also funds part of the organization. Both Flynn and Byrne reportedly attended a White House meeting in late 2020 to urge Trump to essentially declare martial law and seize voting machines.

While Flynn didn’t speak during last month’s webinar, he has arguably done more than anyone since 2020 to push the notion that America’s elections are fundamentally fraudulent, appearing at conferences, in podcasts, and on right-wing news shows on a near-daily basis. Trump has also indicated that Flynn will be brought back into his administration should he win.

These efforts have been given the seal of approval by the Republican National Committee, which was recently restructured by Trump to include election deniers and family members in top positions while cutting minority outreach efforts. One of those election deniers is Christina Bobb, who will be running the “election integrity unit.” A former Trump lawyer and TV presenter on far-right channel One America News, Bobb is a major promoter of the myth that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. The RNC’s election-related priorities, according to an internal memo recently obtained by NPR, include “a broader effort over the coming months to [legally] challenge voter identification and signature verification rules which were put into place for the 2020 election.”

During the America Project webinar last month, one of the hosts apologized to listeners for being unable to get Bobb to join the call that day, but promised that she would join a future session—highlighting just how closely these conspiracy-focused groups work with the mainstream GOP apparatus.

“These groups have a playbook nationally that they tend to deploy locally,” says Garber. “Some of these playbooks that have an intended national reach are then deployed through local activists, and it's concerning because it's the voters at the local level who suffer the effects. It's the election officials at the local level trying to keep order at the polls, trying to make sure their voter rolls are up to date, who have to deal with this stuff.”

One of Flynn’s core messages over the past four years has been that “local action equals national impact” —an expression that revolves around a concept called “precinct strategy,” which aims to get people into key positions on local committees in order to push their narratives at the local level. In 2024, that strategy has been primed and polished.

“This concept of precinct strategy was actually endorsed by President Trump in the last election cycle,” Yehuda Miller, a Republican county committee member in New Jersey, said during the America Project seminar. “We want to take the strategy to the next level. We want to get more organized, we want to start organizing across multiple counties in a state, we want to start organizing across multiple states. We have the power to direct our elected officials.”


Roll up roll up. The abyss longingly awaits.





Oh probably should be mentioned: There was also news of that dictator Vikko Orbo hosting a closed door event with prominent maga figures recently, all hush hush so few details are available, or were available at time of learning. Here's more details absolutely none of the modern RW will even pretend to care about;


No idea why am still copypasting this crap, doesn't get read anyway.

Last week, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán made waves by flying to the United States to meet with Donald Trump—but not with sitting president Joe Biden. It was, at a minimum, a severe breach of diplomatic protocol, and one that threatens to unravel Budapest’s strained relations with Washington even further. Even Biden himself commented on the meeting, saying that Orbán—an authoritarian who has effectively unwound Hungarian democracy—was “looking for dictatorship.”

But there was one other meeting that Orbán took while in the U.S. that hasn’t received enough attention—and points directly to how Orbán has cultivated American conservatives to his cause and created a beachhead for Hungarian influence in Washington. On Friday, he spoke at a closed-door meeting at the Heritage Foundation’s headquarters in the nation’s capital. Joined by Heritage president Kevin Roberts and failed presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Orbán spoke, according to a readout, in front of an audience that “included renowned U.S. right-wing politicians, analysts and public personalities.” (This article has been updated with responses from a Heritage Foundation spokesperson.)

The event was, on paper, a somewhat dull affair, with Orbán covering matters ranging from Hungary’s “conservative family and economic policies” to the state of the war in Ukraine. Pulling back, however, the talk was nothing short of shocking. Instead of meeting with the White House, Orbán traveled to Washington to sit with the leadership of a think tank, using them as a platform to access and influence conservative Americans about both foreign and domestic policy.

All of which leads to one question: How, and why, did the Heritage Foundation become the go-to vehicle for Budapest’s budding autocracy to target Americans?

The answer follows several different tracks. On the one hand, Hungary has been shedding lobbying outfits for the past few years, dropping a range of P.R. shops and Twitter influencers to focus solely on Heritage. On the other hand, internal transformations at Heritage—and a willingness to shred its reputation as a bastion of Reaganite, and even democratic, credentials—led the think tank’s leadership directly into Orbán’s lap, allowing it to become little more than a mouthpiece for a strongman and a leading proponent for Orbán-style rule in the U.S.
Heritage foundation are also the main ones behind project 2025, the 900+ page governing plan for when (if?) trump retakes office which essentially is an anti-government (in the christo-fascist sense) RW libertarian psycho's wet dream. I garuntee the UK Tories of Truss's ilk are aiming for this as their new juicy nest egg contract as the document is openly desperate to hire new political acolytes while Truss and co have been literally hitting the same trite talking points in their public speeches like a glorified CV cover letter for soulless wankers.
 
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TheMysteriousGX

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So 2 points,
1) That's nothing compared to Star Citizen and their ships which BTW if you lose in game and don't have ship insurance you lose entirely.
Correct: It is literally nothing compared to the Star Citizen ships which actually exist in some form. Maybe it's just because one of my first MMOs was EVE, but the idea that you can buy ship insurance and actually get your ship back with it is remarkable.
 
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Ag3ma

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Correct: It is literally nothing compared to the Star Citizen ships which actually exist in some form. Maybe it's just because one of my first MMOs was EVE, but the idea that you can buy ship insurance and actually get your ship back with it is remarkable.
This is a well-established mechanic. In Elite Dangerous, it is represented as the player paying 5% of the ship value upon destruction and getting it back.

Cue the inevitable hilarity/tragedy of players who blew all their in-game credits on an upgrade, and promptly managed to total their shiny, new ship. The funniest was a player who managed to crash it taking it out of the dock on its first outing. IIRC even then the devs took pity, and changed the mechanic so if funds were not available, it was held as a debt that had to be repaid and they got their ship back.
 

Gergar12

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I feel so sorry for Egypt. Instead of you know building stuff for their people like solving their water problems.


One of the buildings is called the Octagon and will be the largest military building in the world. I guess that they want to do what every unequal country like Brazil wants to do. Separate the powerful from the powerless.
 
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Hades

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It was already funny that the far right didn't realize Helldivers was mocking them and declared it to be an ''apolitical video game''. But now they realize the game is simply too in your face to ignore they instead retreat to their bad faith defense of ''Okay it IS political and we don't mind that because unlike all those others its not sHoViNg iT dOwN oUr THROAT!''

This of course doesn't work because the satire is so extremely overt that if any game is shoving its politics down its throat it be Helldivers. But it also brings us to the usual question. Who decides when a game is merely political and whether its trying to shove things down your throat? And why do the people who already consider princess Peach wearing pants to be unforgivably political think they themselves are the best persons to judge these matters?
 

Casual Shinji

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Who decides when a game is merely political and whether its trying to shove things down your throat? And why do the people who already consider princess Peach wearing pants to be unforgivably political think they themselves are the best persons to judge these matters?
Don't matter. Angry now, cuz woman pants. Grrr! *mouse click* *engagement*

By the way, why is there such an influx of crickets on the reactionary side now that X-Men '97 has actually released? Huh, weird.