Bay 12 Games Forum

Happy new year! And Halloween, Thanksgiving, Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, and Christmas.

Apparently Roger Stone has a tattoo of Richard Nixon's face.

Hearing this, I considered more seriously the idea that Republicans are fundamentally unhealthy or insane.

For I Have Tasted The Fungus (Why Tycoon Trump Can't Blink)

Footprints and a flag on mars would be a grave disservice. There's noplace else in the solar system that's more appropriate to settling (don't give me crap about floating Venusian cities, let's try building one city floating on water before we try it over an ocean of vaporized acid).

But to do that, we need to do it smart. Start with with a new generation of NASA lifters. Move into asteroid mining and space industry. That's where the real money is. Land on Ryuguor something and make something like $30 billion dollars of profit. More money by far will be made in the industrial boom that infusion of metal and cash will have on the economy.

Then you can afford a serious investment in a Mars colony that will have the potential to be self-sufficient.

👏Universal👏Basic👏Income👏Is👏The👏Only👏Way👏To👏Provide👏Universal👏Freedom👏

Ok guys, let's take this one nice and slow and come to a conclusion ahead of time:

Should the USA be involved in Venezuela, and under what circumstances?

I know normally we just go in and bomb the shit out of everything, but I want to try something a little weird this time. We do NOT want a repeat of Somalia, where it was a bad idea to go, a bad idea to stay, AND a bad idea to leave.

That's all naval-gazing. In republican-held states, they throw up arbitrary and abusive hurdles that have nothing to do with the 20-week limit, (such as mandatory and degrading lectures,) or else shut down all but one or two abortion clinics. And this isn't just a matter of lawmakers ignoring the public will; how often do extremist churches harass clinic staff and patients? There's a strong contingent of Americans who want abortion completely banned in all cases, and natural miscarriages treated as potential murders.

I address this next part not at someone who's had a long day and is drinking coniac and just blathering in a politics thread, and rather at the broad class of martyrs to lost causes on the internet. Antivaxers, fascists, Lysenko-ists... this is for you:

Going back to what McTraveller said, the line between acceptable discourse ("how should we effectively protect voting rights and ensure the system is reliable?") and unacceptable discourse ("should we disenfranchise people for arbitrary reasons?") is not fine. It is a big, fat, glow-in-the-dark line, actually. More broadly, after massive wars and industrialized genocides, we've proved that not only is disfranchising people for arbitrary reasons a bad idea for ethical reasons, it's also a losing proposition for the existence of states.

To continue to debate women's suffrage, or nonwhite's suffrage, is as damned stupid as arguing that a flat earth be taught in schools, on top of the idea's inherent evil.

Just because an idea has broad support doesn't mean that people are censoring the alternative. Nobody's censoring the pro-sticking-forks-in-light-sockets movement. Continuum didn't stop printing because it was censored for arguing that HIV doesn't cause AIDS; the whole staff died of AIDS because they didn't believe it was connected to HIV.

The argument that people are being coerced to ignore the benefits of NAZI-ism or Electric Universe theory or Chemtrails is, at its heart, an excuse for showing up unarmed at the battle of wits. If everyone was really ignoring you, you'd be winning right now, not soundly defeated. Sometimes the feeble argument is dressed up as "this is something THEY don't want you to know," which is dumb for most ideas because then it becomes a conspiracy theory involving every learned person on the planet.

All that aside, it's damned hypocritical to whine that nobody's giving you a platform to whine about not being able to disenfranchise other people.

We need a new level of involvement against global warming. I'm not sure what, since we clearly need scientists to remain working, but we need people to see this as an effort comparable to WWII, or even greater.