sp3tr4l

joined 1 year ago
[–] sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 17 points 2 weeks ago

One third of Americans, about 100 million people, are in fact this stupid.

This is (one of) the real horror(s) of fascism:

It forms a cult of personality.

As in, a literal cult, a 'Dear Leader can do no wrong', honest to god, utterly delusional cult.

Just go check all the polls of people who still specifically support Trump's tariff policy.

Combine that with the fact that 20% of the US is functionally illiterate (reading/writing skills of a 2nd grader or worse), and the average literacy level is between a 5th and 6th grader, meaning that next 30% of people are... just barely out of elementary school when it comes to literacy.

Those numbers are for US adults 18 or older btw.

As other commenters have mentioned, I too have multiple family members I have had to go no contact with in the last few years because they are in the MAGA cult, are incredibly aggressive, delusional, manipulativr, etc.

In my case specifically, my Dad fell all the way down the QAnon rabbit hole, and the last time I was with him in person, he was showing me how he manufactures ghost guns (no serial numbers) in his garage with some vintage machining tools.

In a sane world he would be on a red flag list as a potential domestic terrorist.

In the actual world he is just a retiree with a hobby.

[–] sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 36 points 2 weeks ago

No, you're misreading this.

Trump is comparing Hamas guards holding hostages to Nazi guards holding prisoners, and he is suggesting that Nazis prison guards acted with love and kindness when a prisoner was in a very dire state.

The he switches to 'no, the Hamas guards slapped their hostages'... implying they were worse than Nazi death/slave camp guards.

[–] sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 13 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Seeing as we are on .world and the last comment I made featuring the Bear Jew with a Louisville slugger as an example of how to properly treat a fascist got deleted by a mod...

Maybe I can get away with saying 'Be the change you want to see in the world'.

[–] sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 20 points 2 weeks ago

You'd have better odds of living to see Moshiach on earth.

[–] sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

For what its worth, CyberPunk 2077 is ... an alt history that diverges from our own ... at some point in the 1960s I think?

Like... the Soviet Union still exists. In 2077.

Point being: The 'Japanese megacorps taking over much of the American economy' fear of our own 1980s is very, very much a big part of the lore/universe.

Pondsmith published the first version of the lore in 1988 as the TTRPG 'Cyberpunk', originally set in 2013, and this kept getting added to and expanded with subsequent editions.

Arasaka is... well hopefully without spoiling too much, Arasaka corp is basically run by a Japanese fighter pilot ace who pretty much swore eternal vengeance on America after Japan got nuked and lost the war, and his idea of how to do this includes figuring out how to become immortal, so that he can continue to run a megacorp that ultimately usurps American sovereignty and turns the country into his neo-corpo-feudal subjects.

You can get almost all of that by playing through the Corpo intro character path and actually watching the informative slideshow thing in the elevator and on walls/screens in the ... megalobby, so hopefully thats not too spoilery.

Also in Die Hard it is Nakatomi Plaza iirc, Nakatomi being the name of the fictional Japanese corp.

Anyway woo random trivia.

[–] sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 17 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

https://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trumps-ex-wife-once-said-he-kept-a-book-of-hitlers-speeches-by-his-bed-2015-8?op=1

Yes.

Literally Hitler.

'My New Order', a collection of Hitler's speeches up through 1939.

Trump kept it in his bedside table in the 80s and 90s, according to his then wife.

Did people not know about this or forget this?

Trump literally routinely read Hitler's speeches before he went to bed for years, then got very defensive when asked about it.

Lefties who were politically active during Trump's 2015 campaign were... fairly concerned about this, and basically everyone to the right of them just screamed 'You're just calling him a fascist because everything you don't like is fascist' at us.

Did this whole thing seriously get memory holed this hard that you genuinely didn't know this?

Or are you just younger and/or weren't so politically involved a decade ago?

[–] sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 5 points 2 weeks ago

Arguably necrophilia but uh... sure?

[–] sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 63 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah, asterisk to indicate multiplication is much, much more common amongst coders.

... And script kiddie DOGE interns.

[–] sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 60 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Just for the historical record, here's Mussolini's last public appearance:

Just Hanging Out (nsfw)

[–] sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 6 points 2 weeks ago

How to actually do games preservation:

Reform IP laws.

Mandate open sourcing of hardware and software architectures after some period of time. 10 years? 5 years after no more of that hardware/software is sold? Yes texhnicalities are insanely complicated but you get the idea.

Oh, how about government funding for emulator development? We fund libraries that preserve books, and movies, and other stuff.

[–] sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 41 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

Hit detection doesn't work, going into pure darkness makes the AI hallucinate to the point it distorts the map layout, npcs will teleport around ot just disappear... runs at like 640p at maybe 20 fps, textures are a blurred indistinct mess...

Oh and it requires basically a super computer to run this.

Brilliant.

[–] sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 6 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

All of college is supposed to be above the level of personal finance

Supposed to be, yes, but it actually isn't.

We have just kept passing so many kids that shouldn't have even been able to graduate high school, or even middle school, that now many colleges and unis have to pick up that slack and offer courses that start at what used to be like an 8th or 9th grade level just a decade ago.

Fuck, I felt like an idiot for redoing Calculus 124, 125 and 126 even after I already had the credits for 124 and 125 from my High School AB Calc AP test.

I passed it, but only with a 3, which was enough for the credits, but I didn't trust my own understanding well enough, and just did the whole Calc cycle my freshman year.

I went to the best 'public' Uni in my state, from 07 to 11.

I was 2 years ahead of the 'standard' math track in my high school.

Even back then, absolutely tons of people were getting accepted into my Uni who'd only gotten as high as Pre-Calc, or even just Trig.

And thats to say nothing of the massive, massive number of foreign students who literally could not speak English, read it maybe, but speak it? No, not more than 50 words.

They would chatter in their native tongue during final exams, and nobody cared at all.

A lot of these kids were obviously from very wealthy backgrounds and had a ghost writer write, their submission/entrance papers, I know because their friends who actually could speak English told me they did.

But that is nothing, nothing compared to what its like now.

Its now been 40 years of the Republicans doing everything they can to fuck over education in every way imaginable, there is beyond negative infinity chance I could now afford to get the education I got a decade ago now, and there are shit tier, rob you blind pop up private colleges everywhere that cost even more...

The US functional literacy rate is now about 80%.

20% of US adults, over the age of 18, cannot do more with English than read Hop on Pop, functional iiteracy is basically defined as 2nd grade level or worse.

The average US adult literacy ability is ... at the level of a 5th or 6th grader. Half the country reads at an elementary school level.

Thats on par with like... Laos, Belize, Iraq.

I am willing to bet a similar proportion of US adults are just utterly innumerate, cannot handle basic algebra, much less a compounding interest rate calculation.

view more: next ›