I was alluding to the aftermath of the Four Great Pests campaign.

Not that I know the finer points of business or contract law—or whatever contract Steam may have in place specifically—but I would think "you made it so that the people here literally cannot use this product, we cannot sell it to them because of that" should be a valid reason.

"We aren't obligated to continue to sell a non-functioning product that could open us up to legal liabilities" should be somewhere in Steam's contract, one would think.

Yeah, but sometimes that “adjustment” is that 30 million people die of famine.

My favorite is when people post the “red states have the most violence/obesity/car crashes” etc. while unknowingly posting what’s effectively a heatmap of the black population.

While I do not doubt in any way that there are people—very possibly even on this forum—paid by Israel to slide topics for them and argue against criticism, and while I do not doubt that there are also many blind Jew-worshippers who will cry antisemitism at almost anything—and I am sure at least some users here fit that bill—this particular account is so blatant, so inept at defending Israel, so perfect and consistent at "inadvertently" setting up dunks and own goals, that I suspect, if anything, he is a shill for profit or hobby against Israel/Judaism.

The only time I’d expect to see effort to make a character resemble their attractive model is if the character was trans in game. They’d probably go all out to make a bombshell.

That’s probably true, but it’s probably also underselling the difficulty of the “find a video that works” part.

“Yes, I’m here to collect the statue on behalf of Justin Trudeau.”

Well, that and/or the fact that there have been some accounts that are “generally assumed” to be him, without using his name. Hence the return of his official account is an “official” return, but not the actual return.

It’s still sleazy wording—note that I deliberately used the more accurate “return” instead of “welcome”—because it implies that X endorsed him (when in fact Elon said he disapproves of Fuentes), but that’s probably the other weasel justification one could use.

They recognize the right to free speech as an issue to be overcome.

I'm willing to say that rape is a much more intimate violation than assault. I don't agree with the corollary that usually goes with that that it's guaranteed to "traumatize" you forever—I think you can and should mentally recover from such a thing in most cases—but I have no issue with the idea that it would be more frightening or mentally painful than getting punched in the face, or even, maybe, than getting held down and repeatedly punched for an equivalent amount of time that a rape would take. (Although at that point the analogy falls apart a little because we wander back into the realm of "repeated bludgeoning is more likely to cause long-lasting physical damage.")

I think that’s just lethn writing weirdly, but it could be the most based thing he’s ever said.

I hope so!

So someone could scam leftists out of thousands by pretending to need cash for hormones…?

It’s more absurd than you may realize. I had to look up the article to confirm, because OP is a filthy jpg poster, but this isn’t just a redux of “men can walk anywhere at night, right?” No, this about the new twitter/tik tok trend of women saying that if they had to choose between encountering a random man and encountering a bear, they’d pick bear.

Presumably, this is because of a combination of feminist ideology, terrible risk assessment, and/or an inability to understand numbers contextually—a common argument is “but there are so many more rapes than bear attacks,” which is obviously facile.

After all, if media wasn't fucked before Obama, how did he or many of his predecessors get in office?

This whole position has always been retarded. I agree that Trump has made some missteps in extending more undeserved credit to "black America," and I understand why people are upset that he hasn't pushed for a moratorium on all immigration and such, but spitefully going "therefore, I am going to stop supporting the guy who clearly doesn't hate me and is running against the people who clearly do hate me" is just... dumb.

This particular jpg poster has a habit of just posting some random leftist making a typical comment and going “guys, what would you say to this?” I think he just likes seeing people provide arguments against things that irritate him. There’s almost never anything noteworthy in his posts, although the dunks they spawn can be fun.

No, and I'm happy to walk anyone else reading through why you're wrong.

First off, the contention is "whether propaganda influences white self-hatred." It's important to remember this is the point, and not what Antonio switched it to, which is "most suicides are the result of propaganda." Indeed, no one was arguing that. This is a common bit of linguistic sleight of hand. I'll go comment by comment to illustrate.

The way the argument unfolds is as follows:

Ahuas responds to a comment about a low number supporting mass deportation by suggesting that "half" of white people believe they deserve to be genocided. Now, I don't think this is a strictly accurate number, but that's not super important. What's important is that Antonio responds and says that this desire for ethnic self-genocide is not a real belief, but that they are claiming to believe that out of self-interest.

MargarineMongoose then says that there is also a good bit of brainwashing driving this sentiment. Antonio responds to that by saying that you can never brainwash someone into believing they deserve to be dead because of their race. Original debate is now established: can you, or can you not, propagandize someone into racial self-destruction?

MargarineMongoose responds to that, saying that while a majority may be acting in self-interest, you can in fact shatter someone's mind such that they don't. This, so the contention goes, is the effect of propaganda.

Antonio then responds, saying that "first and foremost in someone's mind is always self-interest." This is the claim to which I was responding, which, again, has nothing to do with the claim that "most suicides are because of propaganda."

When I respond saying that he needs to address suicide without opening the door to propagandizing people into being suicidal, here is the implication:

1. Suicide is an easy counterpoint to self-interest; if everyone is always acting out of self-interest first and foremost, which do people ever commit self harm at all?
2. An easy counterpoint to that is that they could be killing themselves out of self-interest, because their life is so painful that ending it is the self-interested option. For example, a suicide committed out of the shame of being a bum.
3. The issue is that if you concede someone can commit suicide out of self-interest if they are ashamed of or otherwise hurt by their existence, Antonio's original claim that "people always act out of self-interest" actually means very little (in fact, we could say that he's actually sidestepping Mongoose's point much as he is mine), because you've conceded that shame and other influences can make people hurt themselves out of "self-interest."

Obviously, acknowledging point three would, as I said, open the door to the idea of hostile propagandists causing people to engage in suicidal behavior out of self-interest, as long as they inflict enough shame upon them. This would in turn destroy his claim that white people cannot be convinced to self-genocide because they are protected by their self-interest.

Of course, he cannot acknowledge this without losing the debate, so he pretends that the point was "propaganda causes most suicides," which is vacuous.

You are dodging the point, as is typical.

But first and foremost in people's minds is always their self-interest

In order to support this claim and also refute what you’re trying to refute, you’ll need to explain someone choosing to commit suicide, and do so in a way that doesn’t also open the door for hostile propagandists convincing many people to engage in suicidal behavior.

The hashtag censoring and whatever Twitter OP means by the hit may be real, but as for the check mark, that’s just a standard thing that happens when you change your profile picture. It’s to prevent impersonation. It goes away until someone manually makes sure you haven’t turned your profile into “[Official Group Co.]” with a verification mark on it. KIA2OP just doesn’t know Twitter works that way and made an assumption.

Now, if someone prevents him from getting it back, that’s a different matter.

Can you name a single authoritarian society that hasn't descended into a coup?

Considering that this would include all monarchies and chiefdoms and similar, I would have to say “the majority of governments throughout human history.”

You are playing some very nice “what if” games that fail to interact with reality as it is. Our “representative republic” has been almost entirely captured, such that it is an oligarchy with a thin veneer of freedom over it. Almost every institution that wields power—the educational, the media, the financial, the megacorporation—has become captured by this same ideology. By which means would you fix this overwhelming ideological imbalance that does not include, at minimum, a governmental equivalent firing key people across the board and instituting different people who would neither continue their predecessors abuses of power, nor—crucially—allow their own predecessors to simply resume the same evil game?

The logic that that is inevitable would preclude any group with power from ever ruling anything, which is retarded on its face.

With the Ship of Theseus, though, the conceit is that the replacing is done with care, only when necessary, and trying to make the match as exact as possible. This is about as far from that as one can get.