I always laugh when the Koch family are held up as right wing bogeymen.

https://apnews.com/article/iowa-philanthropy-evan-feinberg-f2680a1c7c1f84c8f69d63eaa631908a

I've noticed quite a few hit pieces on crypto over the last year by the MSM due to it being commonly used to fund right wing online content. In a world where you can get arbitrarily banned from banking, it's definitely nice to have these cryptocurrencies.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/far-right-extremists-raise-millions-cryptocurrency-bitcoin/

Results of a re-wilding project in Scotland.

I've visited Scotland and can say that while it has beautiful forested areas, most of the country is quite desolate due to thousands of years of deforestation.

As this image shows, it only takes 20 years to bring the countryside back to life.

New survey finds that 52% of Trump voters and 41% of Biden voters favor splitting the US into several different countries.

https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/new-initiative-explores-deep-persistent-divides-between-biden-and-trump-voters/

It's about 6 months since I first refused to get vaccinated and I'm still here, all is well, fine and dandy. Given that we're being told the vaccines only work for 6 months anyway I can't see a single advantage in my having been vaccinated 6 months ago except that I would have now had a load of that spike crap in my body.

The status of what constitutes ''fully vaccinated'' is about to include having had a booster within 6 months, so even the people who got vaccinated 6 months ago are now dropping back into the same lowly category as me.

The situation is completely absurd, if it continues, this time next year the people who were offered their first vaccine the same time as me will be in line for their sixth(!) injection.

In other words I could decide next year to finally get vaccinated (I won't) and be just as vaccinated as people who've had 6 vaccines injected into them and spent 18 months on the merry-go-round.

Happy October season everyone. Great time of the year.

Female athletes not having a great time

I’ve noticed that some right wingers have this notion that America became degenerate because it de-industrialized and became a service economy.

While there may be some truth to that, the country was morally degenerating long before our industry moved overseas. Industrial employment in the US was still rising until the 70s; divorce and birth control use, meanwhile, exploded in the 60s.

There’s not much about industry that inherently breeds virtue. If anything, Western society’s shift from agrarian economies to industrial ones made people more materialistic and less morally idealistic.

Whenever I explore why China is rising and America is falling there are sections of people who completely miss the point and think I want China to dominate the world and for America to die. (I would like America *as we currently know it* to die)

The actual point is to contrast Western liberalism to Chinese authoritarianism and analyze why that authoritarianism is winning. I don’t want to be ruled by China anymore than anyone else - I want the West to drop all of the nonsense it’s been doing for the last 80 years.

Goodnight

Looks like two sides can play the statue vandalization game

Some people might ask - “What’s wrong with games where the player has to make moral choices between good and bad?”

The problem with most games like that is that they put evil choices on equal footing as good choices. They treat the choice between good and evil as if it’s like choosing between Coke or Pepsi. To make matters worse, in some games like Skyrim the player is actually rewarded MORE for morally reprehensible actions than doing the right thing.

I’ll never forget the Dark Brotherhood and Daedra missions in Skyrim. Joining the Dark Brotherhood (a human sacrifice murder cult) get you tons of unique quests, items, etc. Alternatively, doing the quest to kill the Dark Brotherhood gets an NPC to thank you and that’s it. The devs literally gave players who wanted to take the morally righteous path the middle finger.

In one of the Daedra missions in Skyrim, you have to lure an innocent man into a cannibalism cult where he gets killed and eaten. Doing so gets you a unique item that’s also required for an Xbox achievement. Saving the man gets you a few useless gold pieces. In another quest, the game tricks you into thinking you’re going to help an exorcist cleanse a house of Deadra. However, once in the house, the Deadra makes you kill him and then you need to lure another innocent man to the Daedra to be tortured to death. There’s no other option in the quest and no way to cancel it once it’s started. Finishing it rewards the player with a unique item.

I could go on - and this all demonstrates the key point. Younger Millennials and Zoomers grew up on games like this, and look how the majority of them are turning out. Most have no morality other than “racism and homophobia are bad”. The way media presents morality matters and there’s no way of getting around it.

I will acknowledge that part of this problem is that video games with moral dilemmas for adults are marketed toward and played largely by minors. Rating a game M has basically meant nothing for the past 15 years.

The Wikipedia article on Freemasonry is a real riot. It goes into great detail about many different trivial, unimportant aspects of Freemason ritual and initiation, but never talks about what Freemasonry actually exists to do, or why Masonry became so widespread with many important historical figures adhering to it.

Of course, it's sure to talk about various supposed "hoaxes" and "conspiracy theories" about Freemasonry, while minimizing all of the documented political activity and violence it was associated with.

I’ll just leave this here.