The minimal example of this is showing somewhere where people with the wrong politics got punished for those politics. (Which doesn’t have to literally be the thing punished, we understand pretense.)
OH!!! Then we're back to the punishment that happened under Covid. Seriously, there were years of people being banned and censored for having bad opinions (and, yes, it happened under Trump too).
It includes stuff like the Joe Rogan thing where there was a push to have him shut down. Remember Psaki talking about that? I can find you the discussions we had here at the time, if you want.
Hey, if you're having a blast, you can't ask for more than that from a video game.
Graphics good? Mechanics fun? Familiar and different at the same time?
Great! Glad you're having a blast with it. As a fifty-something, I keep looking for a new game that will capture the magic of, oh, 2011 or 2007 (even as I know we'll never have 2010 ever again).
Are we talking about power responding to insults to power and limiting ourselves to that?
Because, if that's the case, I suppose I can point to Trump in general, including the part where he was president for a while, and how The Deep State (the *REAL* power) responded to this grave insult of Trump being President.
Well, if stuff like that doesn't count either, I'm going to be stuck talking about prosecutions of people who participated in J6 but never made it inside of the building and were prosecuted anyway.
Is censorshp for stuff like "Fauci funded the labs that leaked Covid 19" considered "prosecution" or is it merely censorship?
Is lèse-majesté being defined so narrowly that it only applies to stuff like this or does even stuff like that not count because it's not an example of criticizing *BIDEN* and, anyways, it didn't stick?
There is an old joke. "Republicans vote on Tuesday, Democrats vote on Wednesday!" is one formulation (but I have seen the vice-versa before).
Doug Mackey went to prison for making a variant of the joke by creating a meme that said Republicans have to vote in person but Democrats can vote by text.
Eh, this strikes me as likely to turn into a "find the rock" game where I provide a story and you explain how the person in question is particularly bad and so doesn't count and then I'll bring up the government pushing for censorship and bannings on social media and that'll turn into how that doesn't count and then you'll again say that you can't imagine how an American would think lèse-majesté is okay and I'll say that you can do it if you imagine one being on the wrong side of one and we'll be right back here.
it is not a ‘government emergency’. This is a _research_ emergency.
The headline, for some reason, didn't mention that the University Presidents were calling for an emergency meeting but the Prime Minister was calling for one.
The story was written by Patrick Staveley. That's his Twitter account, if you want to write him and tell him that his editor messed up with headline choices.
My eyes glazed over at question 24. 36 questions and, yeah, I was thinking about my job and how we have a handful of those things at our fingertips (or know the guy who knows a guy who has it at his) but that's a week-long task right there.
4 days, if I'm not doing anything else and me pointing to Joe Schmoe in this office and Jane Schmaine in that office is sufficient answer to any given question about the stuff that those guys know about.
4 weeks ago
Some dramallama among the right-wingers of Twitter. There was a somewhat organic movement to get soder off of SNAP. I'm sure you're all familiar with the argument that sweets and snacks should be bought with your own money, SNAP is for children and that means *HEALTHY* food and vegetables.
Well, what made this interesting is that a bunch of influencers started posting stuff about how Trump has a Diet Coke button and freedom means the freedom to enjoy a Diet Coke without the government saying that you can't. We want *LESS* government interference! Not more!
And, get this, a bunch of those guys showed up to say stuff like "I deleted it less than an hour later." Here's Clown World. Here's Eric Daugherty. The others just deleted without acknowledging.
Riley Gaines said that they offered her money to post about it too but she turned it down.
Anyway, there's a handful of influencers who got caught with their pants down and they're getting yelled at.
This would be one hell of an opportunity for an intrepid journalist to find out what is no longer being funded.
Imagine if radio astronomy were impacted? That's, like, the one research area that has 97% approval.
The story, instead, said this:
“The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve.”
"How is radio astronomy Marxist?" is a question that I can't imagine any government spokesperson answering well.
On the other hand, "we stopped funding a LGBTQ+ Aboriginal dance troupe that was researching the racism and sexism in Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport" is something that reasonable people can reasonably disagree about.
The failure of the story to mention *WHAT* funding has ceased is a massive failure.
I agree with this and it will be a necessary part of getting some of those voters back. In Hawaii, I couldn’t watch my kid play tennis (outdoors!!!) but I could wait at a bar until he was done. Totally inexcusable and you don’t have to be an anti vaxxer to say so.
I am fine with us not funding Australian universities, yes.
Honestly, learning that we were funding them to the point where ceasing to fund them caused a government emergency was confusing.
I mean, if you asked me "how much funding of Australian universities do you think we're doing?" I would have asked for clarification on whether "work study" counts as funding because I think that it'd be appropriate, barely, for an American student getting work study money.
Not this much money. Not enough money to have the PM call an emergency meeting.
Those cut scenes are actually in an actual video game.
They made a game in feudal Japan and your character is a Black dude. (You have the option of switching to a female who is a ninja. But if you want to play as a male, you will be playing Yasuke.)
How far back do we want to go? Let's go back to Origins. No, wait. Let's go back to Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire.
Back in the original XBox days, we had Bioware. They made the *BEST* RPGs. Founded by three guys who dropped out of the medical profession, they said that they wanted to make the games they wanted to play.
Knights of the Old Republic is probably the greatest Star Wars game of all time. You start out as a Force-Sensitive Level 0 schmuck with amnesia and are put on the Hero's Journey to take on The Big Bad. Along the way, you pick up a team of companions, maybe fall in love, learn how to use a lightsaber, choose the light side or the dark side, and clear up all of the questions you have.
I didn't see the twist coming from a mile away... more like from two or three yards away... and so it hit me and the protagonist at the same time and I had to put down the controller and run upstairs and tell Maribou about the game I was playing. "Well!", she said. "I'm glad you're having fun!"
Jade Empire was its own franchise made by the same team. You were a kung fu level 0 schmuck who did *NOT* have amnesia, you were merely the brightest star in the best school of the best kung fu teacher ever and you had to run around and do the hero's journey yourself. Pick the open hand or the closed fist. There was also a twist that I did *NOT* see coming at all. I was left with my jaw on the floor and and sputtering in indignance. It made the fight against the Big Bad that much sweeter.
How I *LOVED* Bioware. They were a day-one purchase. They were *PRE-ORDER* purchases. That's how much I loved them.
Well, for the 360, they were coming out with a brand spankin' new franchise called "Dragon Age". You were in this weird fantasy world and it was brand new. There were humans and elves and dwarves. There were fighters and thieves and mages. Mages tended to go mad and blow up everything so they were kept on a short leash. Dwarves didn't have magic at all.
The game started with one of *SIX*, COUNT-EM, *SIX* potential builds:
Human noble, human mage, elven mage, Dalish Elf, Dwarven noble, Dwarven casteless.
I haven't played the game since Obama's first term but I still have all of those memorized.
Each one of those beginning classes had a unique start in the game and each unique start took about two hours... you'd have your backstory, you'd have a tutorial on how to fight and how to talk and intimidate and charm, and then you'd be inducted into the Grey Wardens and the story proper would start.
Along the way, you'd pick up a team of companions, fall in love, and pick between being a paragon of virtue or an amoral mastermind and fight the big bad and it was *AWESOME*.
And then Bioware was bought by EA and Dragon Age 2 came out and it was... I wouldn't call it a *GOOD* game but it was more a game that I could tell you what it was trying to do. "I could see what it was going for."
Around this time, Mass Effect 3 came out and it had a very controversial ending and Bioware had the choice between listening to the user base and changing the ending *OR* yelling something about artistic vision and shutting down the Bioware forums.
They chose to shut down the forums.
Dragon Age: Inquisition came out and it wasn't *BAD*... it tried to recreate the whole World of Warcraft experience for the single player. A lot of grinding. I didn't finish it. But I see what it was going for.
Anyway, years and years and years passed. Dragon Age: Something Or Other was being worked on, abandoned, revamped, worked on as an iPhone game, abandoned, revamped and, eventually, we got Veilguard.
Veilguard had very, very little overlap with the original Origins game. Instead of having choices that mattered, you had to pick between agreeing because you were nice or agreeing but being really snarky about it.
And, along the way, you picked up companions and some of the companions would explain to you that they were now non-binary.
I am not making this up.
There's also a scene where they explain the best way to deal with misgendering someone.
I am not making this up.
Anyway, Dragon Age: Veilguard sold about 1.5 million units and EA said that their expectations were about 3 million (Dragon Age: Origins has sales of about 3.2 million).
Veilguard is considered a failure when it comes to sales. The studio that created it was shut down and a handful of devs were sent to other in-house studios and the rest were thrown to the winds.
Which brings us to Assassin's Creed.
Assassin's Creed, as a franchise, was *AWESOME*. It was a game the combined sneaking and combat and some light puzzling and a handful of twists and turns and there were two levels to the game... one where you were Desmond, a guy in the current year, and one where you were Altair, an ancestor of Desmond's that you'd visit while in the machine that tapped into your ancestral memories.
And in Assassin's Creed II, you were Ezio Auditore (and there were two sequels to Assassin's Creed II that had you move from angry young man to experienced killer to wise assassin leader).
And in Assassin's Creed III, you came to the new world and played Connor, a half-Native, Half-Brit assassin who was pitted against the Redcoats!
And in Assassin's Creed IV, you played Kenway, a pirate!!!
And then the game got a little bloated. There was stuff in France and Egypt and Victorian England and the Viking Lands and... well, I stopped playing after IV. I got the Victorian England one but didn't get too far into it. I was irritated at all of the monetization stuff they added.
Anyway, they were finally going to come out with an Assassin's Creed game set in Japan! FINALLY!
And the lead character was Yasuke. Yasuke was a historical dude. An African in Japan who was given a sword by his master and occasionally carried his master's weapons and, some historians say, this means that he was a samurai.
So you're playing Yasuke during the something-or-other period and you have to deal with the Big Bad.
People who are not exactly charitable are spinning this as "so you're a black guy running around Japan killing Japanese people? They should have set the game in 2021 in San Francisco!" and stuff that is even worse than that.
It being the current year, the Assassin's Creed: Shadows devs have included an option for Yasuke to have a fling with the enby Ibuki character and that created as much drama as you imagine it did.
Anyway, at this moment in time, Steam numbers have Assassin's Creed: Shadows as having a little over half of the peak numbers of Veilguard's peak numbers.
And Veilguard was considered a disappointment bad enough to shutter the studio.
Speaking of which, Assassin's Creed: Shadows released this week and, as of Friday night, has a little under 40k players right now and an all-time peak of 47,616.
By comparison, Veilguard's all-time peak is 89,418. It achieved that on the Sunday after it launched so we can't compare apples to apples quite yet... but it had 77K on the day after it launched.
There will be no civil war! The State of Israel is a state of law and according to the law, the Israeli government decides who will be the head of the Shin Bet. Shabbat Shalom.
I was expecting a bunch of bad reviews from chuds who hadn't seen the movie but I expected them to be offset by Team Good people reviewing it as a masterpiece (who also hadn't seen it first).
If the latter don't show up, it might be legitimately bad.
Young people are more nonwhite than the overall electorate. They’re more politically disengaged than the overall electorate. But the single biggest predictor of swing from 2020 to 2024 is age. Voters under 30 supported Biden by large margins. But Donald Trump probably narrowly won 18- to 29-year-olds. That isn’t what the exit polls say. But if you look at our survey data, voter file data, and precinct-level data, that’s the picture you get.
And if you look at people under the age of 25, every single group — white, nonwhite, male or female — is considerably more conservative than their millennial counterparts. And it even seems that Donald Trump narrowly won nonwhite 18-year-old men, which is not something that has ever happened in Democratic politics before.
How in the heck would one go about turning this around?
How do you turn it around without ticking off The Groups?
There's also the NYT and BBC but, honestly, you're not going to click on those any more than you clicked on the NPR one.
The issue isn't "is the autopen sufficient for a pardon?" because OF COURSE IT IS.
The issue of "did Biden direct these pardons personally?" is troublesome because the possibility exists that he didn't is a larger possibility than "and monkeys might fly out of my butt" due to Biden's severe cognitive decline.
"There is no reason to believe that Biden didn't know about these pardons" is a better argument when there is no reason to believe that Biden didn't know about those pardons.
2025-03-17 16:01:21
C-SPAN reports that Trump has announced that the JFK files get released TOMORROW.
Yes, but I was pointing out that he doesn’t even need to do that. Because pardons don’t even _need_ be signed. Bills need to be signed into laws, pardons do not. Just ‘granting’ them is enough. They are usually printed and signed, just like executive orders are printed and signed, but they have the exact same validity if they’re just…said.
If someone snuck into the autopen room and put a pardon in the machine and pushed the button WITHOUT THE DIRECTION OF THE PRESIDENT TO DO SO, do you believe that this is a legit pardon?
Because that's the debate being forced on us now.
"That's an absurd question!" might be a good counter-argument but Trump is making the allegation that Biden's staffers were running things and not Biden himself.
And I'm not sure that moral indignation will work as a tactic against people who do not recognize your moral authority.
I don't know that these pardons were done without Biden's knowledge or consent.
I don't know whether they were done with his consent or not.
I am agnostic on whether they were.
If Biden comes out and says "Oh, I'm the guy who directed my subordinate to press the button on these pardons", that would clear everything up.
However, I do think that the question of whether Biden personally directed his subordinate to affix a signature is an interesting enough question that it is in everybody's best interest to have the question cleared up.
I don't think that mocking the question is going to be a good play going forward.
I think that it signals the weakness of the position instead of its strength.
"Of course Biden directed the subordinate to issue these pardons and it's offensive to imply that he didn't! Trump is offensive!" is, at least, an argument that addresses the core issue.
"It doesn't matter if Biden knew about the pardons that the autopen signed!" is not an argument that I'd want to defend.
Though I'd probably think that dismissing the issue entirely is the best play...
The President need not personally perform the physical act of affixing his signature to a bill he approves and decides to sign in order for the bill to become law. Rather, the President may sign a bill within the meaning of Article I, Section 7 by directing a subordinate to affix the President’s signature to such a bill, for example by autopen.
I think that we can similarly conclude that if Biden directed a subordinate to affix the President's signature to a pardon, then that pardon is officially official and it'd be silliness to say that it wasn't a real pardon.
"But what if Biden didn't direct the subordinate to affix the signature? Like, what if the subordinate was acting on his or her own?"
"What part of 'the president may direct the subordinate to affix a signature' did you not understand?"
"I'm asking about a subordinate affixing a signature without having been directed."
"WE HAVE ALREADY ESTABLISHED THAT THE PRESIDENT MAY DIRECT THE SUBORDINATE TO AFFIX A SIGNATURE!!!"
It’s worth pointing out that there is literally no requirement that pardons _even be signed_, only that the President has granted them
I agree! The question is whether someone who is not the president can give a pardon on the president's behalf because it's what the president would want.
I believe that the J6 pardons were all a single document. I believe that he signed it on camera (there are pictures of him holding up the document having been signed).
But to address the fundamental point, I believe that the argument about the president issuing pardons is that the president has to issue them.
Not his staff. Not his best buddy. Not some guy who sneaks into the room with the autopen device and pushes a button.
If the argument that a guy who sneaks into the room with the autopen device and pushes the button has a legit pardon, I think that there are legitimate complaints about that argument and it's not to the argument's benefit for them to become (even more) public.
Yeah, how the process is actually managed is going to be really important here... because what the process actually is versus what people assume it is (to the extent that they've considered it at all) is likely to have very little overlap on the Venn diagram.
The process getting sunlight is probably to the benefit of everybody except the people involved with the process itself.
If Biden didn't know about it and didn't sign it... is it still a presidential pardon?
While reasonable people all know that the answer is "yes, because we believe that if Elon put a pardon for himself in the machine and pressed the button that it'd be a real pardon", there are unreasonable people out there who think that an Elon Pardon that Trump didn't know about and didn't sign wouldn't be a real pardon.
2025-03-17 08:58:31
And we have a new constitutional crisis and it's not even 8AM.
Donald Trump has announced that the pardons Biden handed out in his final days as president were not signed by Biden but were, instead, signed by autopen and Biden knew nothing at all about the pardons.
Given that Biden didn't know about the pardons and that they weren't "signed" by him, Trump has declared the pardons null and void.
How difficult is it for a contract to be annulled because the person who signed it was an elder who was non compos mentis? If that's something that never happens, it should be easy to dismiss the claims that it applies to pardons.
2025-03-17 07:35:34
I mentioned these in the waning days of the last thread but I'm going to mention them again because they strike me as indicators for the summer and autumn:
A Labour minister was last night at the centre of an explosive row over claims he rubbished high-level intelligence pointing to Covid's origins in a Chinese laboratory.
The Mail on Sunday can reveal that a former spy chief submitted a secret dossier to No 10 early in the pandemic reporting that the virus had originated with a leak from a Wuhan facility.
But Lord Vallance, the science minister who was the Government's chief scientific adviser at the time, is accused of ignoring the report, possibly for fear of offending the Chinese or jeopardising research funding.
A classified dossier compiled by Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, was passed to then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the start of the outbreak in March 2020 which stated: 'It is now beyond reasonable doubt that Covid-19 was engineered in the Wuhan Institute of Virology'.
Why haven’t we learned our lesson? Maybe because it’s hard to admit this research is risky now, and to take the requisite steps to keep us safe, without also admitting it was always risky. And that perhaps we were misled on purpose.
Lotta passive voice in that title, there.
To this day, there is no strong scientific evidence ruling out a lab leak or proving that the virus arose from human-animal contact in that seafood market. The few papers cited for market origin were written by a small, overlapping group of authors, including those who didn’t tell the public how serious their doubts had been.
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The minimal example of this is showing somewhere where people with the wrong politics got punished for those politics. (Which doesn’t have to literally be the thing punished, we understand pretense.)
OH!!! Then we're back to the punishment that happened under Covid. Seriously, there were years of people being banned and censored for having bad opinions (and, yes, it happened under Trump too).
It includes stuff like the Joe Rogan thing where there was a push to have him shut down. Remember Psaki talking about that? I can find you the discussions we had here at the time, if you want.
Would the Oath Keepers who got busted for "seditious conspiracy" despite never crossing the threshold count?
Hey, if you're having a blast, you can't ask for more than that from a video game.
Graphics good? Mechanics fun? Familiar and different at the same time?
Great! Glad you're having a blast with it. As a fifty-something, I keep looking for a new game that will capture the magic of, oh, 2011 or 2007 (even as I know we'll never have 2010 ever again).
Are we talking about power responding to insults to power and limiting ourselves to that?
Because, if that's the case, I suppose I can point to Trump in general, including the part where he was president for a while, and how The Deep State (the *REAL* power) responded to this grave insult of Trump being President.
Well, if stuff like that doesn't count either, I'm going to be stuck talking about prosecutions of people who participated in J6 but never made it inside of the building and were prosecuted anyway.
"Sedition isn't free speech"?
Is censorshp for stuff like "Fauci funded the labs that leaked Covid 19" considered "prosecution" or is it merely censorship?
Is lèse-majesté being defined so narrowly that it only applies to stuff like this or does even stuff like that not count because it's not an example of criticizing *BIDEN* and, anyways, it didn't stick?
"The ones about how Covid was a lab leak?"
"Bingo."
I believe that that is the joke.
The humor comes from imagining that someone on the other team is so dumb that they'd believe that this is true.
Then you share it with your like-minded friend and you both laugh because ingroup/outgroup.
He went to jail for it. Not banned. Not ratioed.
Oh, and here's part two: Zuckerberg says the White House pressured Facebook to ‘censor’ some COVID-19 content during the pandemic.
There is an old joke. "Republicans vote on Tuesday, Democrats vote on Wednesday!" is one formulation (but I have seen the vice-versa before).
Doug Mackey went to prison for making a variant of the joke by creating a meme that said Republicans have to vote in person but Democrats can vote by text.
Seven months in prison.
Eh, this strikes me as likely to turn into a "find the rock" game where I provide a story and you explain how the person in question is particularly bad and so doesn't count and then I'll bring up the government pushing for censorship and bannings on social media and that'll turn into how that doesn't count and then you'll again say that you can't imagine how an American would think lèse-majesté is okay and I'll say that you can do it if you imagine one being on the wrong side of one and we'll be right back here.
It is easy for me to imagine an American thinking lèse-majesté is okay.
I imagine an American being on the wrong side of lèse-majesté for a while and then returning to power.
To do that, I'd have to imagine one being on the wrong side of one for long enough.
it is not a ‘government emergency’. This is a _research_ emergency.
The headline, for some reason, didn't mention that the University Presidents were calling for an emergency meeting but the Prime Minister was calling for one.
The story was written by Patrick Staveley. That's his Twitter account, if you want to write him and tell him that his editor messed up with headline choices.
My eyes glazed over at question 24. 36 questions and, yeah, I was thinking about my job and how we have a handful of those things at our fingertips (or know the guy who knows a guy who has it at his) but that's a week-long task right there.
4 days, if I'm not doing anything else and me pointing to Joe Schmoe in this office and Jane Schmaine in that office is sufficient answer to any given question about the stuff that those guys know about.
Some dramallama among the right-wingers of Twitter. There was a somewhat organic movement to get soder off of SNAP. I'm sure you're all familiar with the argument that sweets and snacks should be bought with your own money, SNAP is for children and that means *HEALTHY* food and vegetables.
Well, what made this interesting is that a bunch of influencers started posting stuff about how Trump has a Diet Coke button and freedom means the freedom to enjoy a Diet Coke without the government saying that you can't. We want *LESS* government interference! Not more!
And a bunch of folks said something to the effect of "wait, that's fishy..." and Nick Sortor pointed out some of the big prominent accounts that tweeted pro-soda stuff. Clown World. Eric Daugherty, Ian Miles Cheong, Not Jerome Powell.
And, get this, a bunch of those guys showed up to say stuff like "I deleted it less than an hour later." Here's Clown World. Here's Eric Daugherty. The others just deleted without acknowledging.
Riley Gaines said that they offered her money to post about it too but she turned it down.
Anyway, there's a handful of influencers who got caught with their pants down and they're getting yelled at.
Four hours ago, they hit 64,825 and now they're down to 59,860.
64k is higher than Assassin's Creed: Odyssey (62k) so that can be considered a win.
This would be one hell of an opportunity for an intrepid journalist to find out what is no longer being funded.
Imagine if radio astronomy were impacted? That's, like, the one research area that has 97% approval.
The story, instead, said this:
"How is radio astronomy Marxist?" is a question that I can't imagine any government spokesperson answering well.
On the other hand, "we stopped funding a LGBTQ+ Aboriginal dance troupe that was researching the racism and sexism in Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport" is something that reasonable people can reasonably disagree about.
The failure of the story to mention *WHAT* funding has ceased is a massive failure.
The story, sadly, doesn't go into what was being funded.
I think I could be talked into "it's important to fund Deep Space Advanced Radar Capability", though.
Given the whole "deficit" thing, I think it's easy to make the argument that "not using it at all" is a real option that isn't a bad one.
OH! You're looking at this from the perspective of non-US citizens!
I wasn't doing that.
Yeah, I can see how this would really make us look bad to Australians and Europeans.
Brian Schatz, the chief deputy whip of the Democrats in the Senate, retweeted this Vox article and said:
I am fine with us not funding Australian universities, yes.
Honestly, learning that we were funding them to the point where ceasing to fund them caused a government emergency was confusing.
I mean, if you asked me "how much funding of Australian universities do you think we're doing?" I would have asked for clarification on whether "work study" counts as funding because I think that it'd be appropriate, barely, for an American student getting work study money.
Not this much money. Not enough money to have the PM call an emergency meeting.
I wish that there were stronger defenses of funding Australian universities to this degree than "But Trump and Musk are bad".
Which "all this" are you referring to?
I'm assuming it's not places like Vox publishing "we, the media, need to have a Covid reckoning".
All-time peak is now 60,086.
Broke 60k.
Here's a headline that'll get your noggin joggin': Prime Minister urged to call 'emergency meeting' after Trump administration cuts funding to seven Australian universities
We're funding seven Australian universities to the point where ceasing to fund them is causing an emergency.
Why in the hell are we funding seven Australian universities to the point where ceasing to fund them causes an emergency?!?
"They stopped banning people on Facebook for talking about it! They stopped banning people on Twitter for talking about it!"
Yeah.
Like I said, the fact that the conversations were not just disagreed with but SHUT DOWN is one of the things that needs to be discussed.
And we’re getting closer to actually talking about it. I suppose that that’s progress.
There is real evidence. There just isn't real proof.
The fact that the conversations were not just disagreed with but SHUT DOWN is one of the things that needs to be discussed.
And we're getting closer to actually talking about it. I suppose that that's progress.
Those cut scenes are actually in an actual video game.
They made a game in feudal Japan and your character is a Black dude. (You have the option of switching to a female who is a ninja. But if you want to play as a male, you will be playing Yasuke.)
Vox has an article: America — and the media — needs a Covid reckoning
Here's the subhed: Our Covid mistakes did lasting damage. No one wants to talk about it.
We're getting closer to actually talking about it. I suppose that that's progress.
Lucky you! I have some wine.
How far back do we want to go? Let's go back to Origins. No, wait. Let's go back to Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire.
Back in the original XBox days, we had Bioware. They made the *BEST* RPGs. Founded by three guys who dropped out of the medical profession, they said that they wanted to make the games they wanted to play.
Knights of the Old Republic is probably the greatest Star Wars game of all time. You start out as a Force-Sensitive Level 0 schmuck with amnesia and are put on the Hero's Journey to take on The Big Bad. Along the way, you pick up a team of companions, maybe fall in love, learn how to use a lightsaber, choose the light side or the dark side, and clear up all of the questions you have.
I didn't see the twist coming from a mile away... more like from two or three yards away... and so it hit me and the protagonist at the same time and I had to put down the controller and run upstairs and tell Maribou about the game I was playing. "Well!", she said. "I'm glad you're having fun!"
Jade Empire was its own franchise made by the same team. You were a kung fu level 0 schmuck who did *NOT* have amnesia, you were merely the brightest star in the best school of the best kung fu teacher ever and you had to run around and do the hero's journey yourself. Pick the open hand or the closed fist. There was also a twist that I did *NOT* see coming at all. I was left with my jaw on the floor and and sputtering in indignance. It made the fight against the Big Bad that much sweeter.
How I *LOVED* Bioware. They were a day-one purchase. They were *PRE-ORDER* purchases. That's how much I loved them.
Well, for the 360, they were coming out with a brand spankin' new franchise called "Dragon Age". You were in this weird fantasy world and it was brand new. There were humans and elves and dwarves. There were fighters and thieves and mages. Mages tended to go mad and blow up everything so they were kept on a short leash. Dwarves didn't have magic at all.
The game started with one of *SIX*, COUNT-EM, *SIX* potential builds:
Human noble, human mage, elven mage, Dalish Elf, Dwarven noble, Dwarven casteless.
I haven't played the game since Obama's first term but I still have all of those memorized.
Each one of those beginning classes had a unique start in the game and each unique start took about two hours... you'd have your backstory, you'd have a tutorial on how to fight and how to talk and intimidate and charm, and then you'd be inducted into the Grey Wardens and the story proper would start.
Along the way, you'd pick up a team of companions, fall in love, and pick between being a paragon of virtue or an amoral mastermind and fight the big bad and it was *AWESOME*.
And then Bioware was bought by EA and Dragon Age 2 came out and it was... I wouldn't call it a *GOOD* game but it was more a game that I could tell you what it was trying to do. "I could see what it was going for."
Around this time, Mass Effect 3 came out and it had a very controversial ending and Bioware had the choice between listening to the user base and changing the ending *OR* yelling something about artistic vision and shutting down the Bioware forums.
They chose to shut down the forums.
Dragon Age: Inquisition came out and it wasn't *BAD*... it tried to recreate the whole World of Warcraft experience for the single player. A lot of grinding. I didn't finish it. But I see what it was going for.
Anyway, years and years and years passed. Dragon Age: Something Or Other was being worked on, abandoned, revamped, worked on as an iPhone game, abandoned, revamped and, eventually, we got Veilguard.
Veilguard had very, very little overlap with the original Origins game. Instead of having choices that mattered, you had to pick between agreeing because you were nice or agreeing but being really snarky about it.
And, along the way, you picked up companions and some of the companions would explain to you that they were now non-binary.
I am not making this up.
There's also a scene where they explain the best way to deal with misgendering someone.
I am not making this up.
Anyway, Dragon Age: Veilguard sold about 1.5 million units and EA said that their expectations were about 3 million (Dragon Age: Origins has sales of about 3.2 million).
Veilguard is considered a failure when it comes to sales. The studio that created it was shut down and a handful of devs were sent to other in-house studios and the rest were thrown to the winds.
Which brings us to Assassin's Creed.
Assassin's Creed, as a franchise, was *AWESOME*. It was a game the combined sneaking and combat and some light puzzling and a handful of twists and turns and there were two levels to the game... one where you were Desmond, a guy in the current year, and one where you were Altair, an ancestor of Desmond's that you'd visit while in the machine that tapped into your ancestral memories.
And in Assassin's Creed II, you were Ezio Auditore (and there were two sequels to Assassin's Creed II that had you move from angry young man to experienced killer to wise assassin leader).
And in Assassin's Creed III, you came to the new world and played Connor, a half-Native, Half-Brit assassin who was pitted against the Redcoats!
And in Assassin's Creed IV, you played Kenway, a pirate!!!
And then the game got a little bloated. There was stuff in France and Egypt and Victorian England and the Viking Lands and... well, I stopped playing after IV. I got the Victorian England one but didn't get too far into it. I was irritated at all of the monetization stuff they added.
Anyway, they were finally going to come out with an Assassin's Creed game set in Japan! FINALLY!
And the lead character was Yasuke. Yasuke was a historical dude. An African in Japan who was given a sword by his master and occasionally carried his master's weapons and, some historians say, this means that he was a samurai.
So you're playing Yasuke during the something-or-other period and you have to deal with the Big Bad.
People who are not exactly charitable are spinning this as "so you're a black guy running around Japan killing Japanese people? They should have set the game in 2021 in San Francisco!" and stuff that is even worse than that.
It being the current year, the Assassin's Creed: Shadows devs have included an option for Yasuke to have a fling with the enby Ibuki character and that created as much drama as you imagine it did.
Anyway, at this moment in time, Steam numbers have Assassin's Creed: Shadows as having a little over half of the peak numbers of Veilguard's peak numbers.
And Veilguard was considered a disappointment bad enough to shutter the studio.
That is about 80% of it, I think.
Speaking of which, Assassin's Creed: Shadows released this week and, as of Friday night, has a little under 40k players right now and an all-time peak of 47,616.
By comparison, Veilguard's all-time peak is 89,418. It achieved that on the Sunday after it launched so we can't compare apples to apples quite yet... but it had 77K on the day after it launched.
Good news! Benjamin Netanyahu assures everyone that there will *NOT* be a Civil War.
(Translation provided by Google.)
I was expecting a bunch of bad reviews from chuds who hadn't seen the movie but I expected them to be offset by Team Good people reviewing it as a masterpiece (who also hadn't seen it first).
If the latter don't show up, it might be legitimately bad.
I mean, as a movie. I don't mean morally.
Has anybody seen the new Snow White yet?
How is it?
Misogyny.
Duh.
Maybe it's in the distinction between Biden and Harris?
"Biden had skibidi rizz but Harris was skibidi Ohio so I went with Trump who was bussin fr fr"
This part is interesting:
How in the heck would one go about turning this around?
How do you turn it around without ticking off The Groups?
This link should work.
Unfortunately, it's not just me choosing to have the debate. Apparently the White House press room is now involved.
Okay. Not believing that that would be legit gets us to the core issue.
I don't think it'd be legit either.
I also don't think that Trump has any special knowledge about how the pardons came about.
Stupid enough for NPR to deal with them.
There's also the NYT and BBC but, honestly, you're not going to click on those any more than you clicked on the NPR one.
The issue isn't "is the autopen sufficient for a pardon?" because OF COURSE IT IS.
The issue of "did Biden direct these pardons personally?" is troublesome because the possibility exists that he didn't is a larger possibility than "and monkeys might fly out of my butt" due to Biden's severe cognitive decline.
"There is no reason to believe that Biden didn't know about these pardons" is a better argument when there is no reason to believe that Biden didn't know about those pardons.
C-SPAN reports that Trump has announced that the JFK files get released TOMORROW.
He announces lots of stuff, though.
I'll believe it when I see it.
Yes, but I was pointing out that he doesn’t even need to do that. Because pardons don’t even _need_ be signed. Bills need to be signed into laws, pardons do not. Just ‘granting’ them is enough. They are usually printed and signed, just like executive orders are printed and signed, but they have the exact same validity if they’re just…said.
I agree with every word you've said here.
The pardons *ARE* all listen on the official Justice.gov website. All the t's crossed and i's dotted.
If someone snuck into the autopen room and put a pardon in the machine and pushed the button WITHOUT THE DIRECTION OF THE PRESIDENT TO DO SO, do you believe that this is a legit pardon?
Because that's the debate being forced on us now.
"That's an absurd question!" might be a good counter-argument but Trump is making the allegation that Biden's staffers were running things and not Biden himself.
And I'm not sure that moral indignation will work as a tactic against people who do not recognize your moral authority.
We're entering some severe "diminishing returns" territory on the Hitler thing.
Isn't there a Harry Potter reference we could use instead?
"The implication that the Imperius Curse was used to procure these pardons is preposterous!"
I don't know that these pardons were done without Biden's knowledge or consent.
I don't know whether they were done with his consent or not.
I am agnostic on whether they were.
If Biden comes out and says "Oh, I'm the guy who directed my subordinate to press the button on these pardons", that would clear everything up.
However, I do think that the question of whether Biden personally directed his subordinate to affix a signature is an interesting enough question that it is in everybody's best interest to have the question cleared up.
I don't think that mocking the question is going to be a good play going forward.
I think that it signals the weakness of the position instead of its strength.
"Of course Biden directed the subordinate to issue these pardons and it's offensive to imply that he didn't! Trump is offensive!" is, at least, an argument that addresses the core issue.
"It doesn't matter if Biden knew about the pardons that the autopen signed!" is not an argument that I'd want to defend.
Though I'd probably think that dismissing the issue entirely is the best play...
The Office of Legal Council issued an opinion all the way back in 2005 on the topic of signing bills into law:
I think that we can similarly conclude that if Biden directed a subordinate to affix the President's signature to a pardon, then that pardon is officially official and it'd be silliness to say that it wasn't a real pardon.
"But what if Biden didn't direct the subordinate to affix the signature? Like, what if the subordinate was acting on his or her own?"
"What part of 'the president may direct the subordinate to affix a signature' did you not understand?"
"I'm asking about a subordinate affixing a signature without having been directed."
"WE HAVE ALREADY ESTABLISHED THAT THE PRESIDENT MAY DIRECT THE SUBORDINATE TO AFFIX A SIGNATURE!!!"
And so on.
It’s worth pointing out that there is literally no requirement that pardons _even be signed_, only that the President has granted them
I agree! The question is whether someone who is not the president can give a pardon on the president's behalf because it's what the president would want.
Which... well, it's not a slam dunk, is it?
I believe that the J6 pardons were all a single document. I believe that he signed it on camera (there are pictures of him holding up the document having been signed).
But to address the fundamental point, I believe that the argument about the president issuing pardons is that the president has to issue them.
Not his staff. Not his best buddy. Not some guy who sneaks into the room with the autopen device and pushes a button.
If the argument that a guy who sneaks into the room with the autopen device and pushes the button has a legit pardon, I think that there are legitimate complaints about that argument and it's not to the argument's benefit for them to become (even more) public.
Yeah, how the process is actually managed is going to be really important here... because what the process actually is versus what people assume it is (to the extent that they've considered it at all) is likely to have very little overlap on the Venn diagram.
The process getting sunlight is probably to the benefit of everybody except the people involved with the process itself.
What if the special investigator comes back and says "I'm not sure we can try Biden... he'll come across as an elderly man with memory problems"?
Because if that happens, it'll be to the benefit of Trump's argument.
Why are you denying that Trump said these things?
"Um, I'm not?"
"Well, I'm now going to argue against you as if you were."
Here's a link to what Trump said.
If your argument is that we still don't know whether Trump *ACTUALLY* said that or if he just had one of his staffers write it on his behalf, yes.
That is the fundamental argument here. Yes. Exactly.
So you agree that Elon can put a pardon in the autopen machine without Trump knowing about it and it's perfectly legit?
Because that's the argument. Elon can put a pardon in the autopen machine without Trump knowing about it.
If Biden didn't know about it and didn't sign it... is it still a presidential pardon?
While reasonable people all know that the answer is "yes, because we believe that if Elon put a pardon for himself in the machine and pressed the button that it'd be a real pardon", there are unreasonable people out there who think that an Elon Pardon that Trump didn't know about and didn't sign wouldn't be a real pardon.
And we have a new constitutional crisis and it's not even 8AM.
Donald Trump has announced that the pardons Biden handed out in his final days as president were not signed by Biden but were, instead, signed by autopen and Biden knew nothing at all about the pardons.
Given that Biden didn't know about the pardons and that they weren't "signed" by him, Trump has declared the pardons null and void.
How difficult is it for a contract to be annulled because the person who signed it was an elder who was non compos mentis? If that's something that never happens, it should be easy to dismiss the claims that it applies to pardons.
I mentioned these in the waning days of the last thread but I'm going to mention them again because they strike me as indicators for the summer and autumn:
From The Daily Mail: Labour minister 'rubbished' spy chief's secret dossier on Wuhan lab leak theory during pandemic despite Boris demanding probe... to 'avoid offending China'
And, on Sunday, the NYT published Zeynep Tufekci: We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives
Lotta passive voice in that title, there.