3217

But have you tried, “Kill all the poor?”

3219


Also Bernie is “trashing” his supporters. By doing things productive instead of crying and taking his ball home.

Half the replies are people saying how they’ll never do anything and that somehow is a brave choice that will change the world.
The other half is people calling them out for their stupidity and childishness.

3220

This isn’t s liberal saying stupid things. Quite the contrary. But i didn’t know where else to put this.

GRUNWALD: But Sanders seemed to do great for a socialist; he raised so much money and generated so much excitement. What do you mean by “severe strategic missteps”?

MCELWEE: If you had to boil it down to one problem, it was the belief the Sanders people articulated early on that in a big field, they could win the nomination with 30 percent of the vote. You know, elections tend to be won with 50 percent of the vote. If you’re not even trying to attract 50 percent to your vision, it leads to this view that you don’t need to persuade anyone, you just need to lock in the base and mobilize new voters. That’s setting yourself up for failure. And it’s inspired some very pernicious thinking in the progressive world: Those people who don’t believe what we believe, we can’t win them, so fuck them. You saw this most aggressively on Twitter, where you saw people say: “We need to crush these people, they’re forever lost to us.”

GRUNWALD: Bend the knee!

MCELWEE: Some people are like oh, Twitter, that’s not real. But the campaign articulated the same strategy! When we shut ourselves off from conversations about how to persuade voters, we’re making it a lot harder for progressives to win elections and deliver on progressive policy goals. Talking about which policies could work politically in Trump districts is not a fun conversation to have, but we need to have those conversations.

Look, one problem with running a campaign as a movement is that movements exist outside public opinion. It’s notable to me that Sanders and Warren both chose not to rely too much on pollsters. They got a lot of praise for that, but politics is about creating a nervous system for public opinion. You need constant feedback on your issues. I think one reason South Carolina and Super Tuesday came as such massive surprises was the campaigns focused on what moves small-dollar donors on Facebook and Twitter and so forth. Yeah, a viral ad with heated rhetoric can raise millions of dollars, but you don’t see the Americans who get turned off by it. There’s no emoji for that. They just go about their daily lives and don’t vote for you; you’re not even trying to reach them.

3221

It is a good article.

3222

Is it okay if we have reservations about Biden but vote for him anyway? Will that make everyone happy?

3223

I think that’s all anyone is asking for.

3224

Biden is not fresh blood; everyone knows that, so the excitement comes from getting Trump out of the White House so he can stop destroying our country for the bigots, racists, misogynists and middle-fingers to anyone not in their inner circle cult.

3225

That is undeniably exciting. Thanks, Trump!

3226

In which George Soros actually is evil:

Pissing off America’s sweetheart when she’s discovering her voice? Hmmm.

3227

The music industry is a cesspool. It routinely takes advantage of young kids who don’t understand or value their rights. But at the end of the day, Swift signed a contract that gave those rights up. Nobody forced her to sign.

3228

Swift was paid $300 million for the rights to her work.

Shameless greed, indeed.

3229
3231

For what it’s worth in the fairly large rpg Meetup group I help organize here in the triangle, there’s a strong overlap between “only plays oldschool hardcore D&D” and “50-something bearded libertarian military fetishists who never served, have prepper fantasies, and constantly make gross sexist and racist remarks at the table.”

Like, it’s not exactly 1:1, but the correlation is high enough to be easily noticeable. Not saying that there’s something inherently wrong with D&D to so exclusively attract their attention, but they all universally hate other systems, except possibly Warhammer 40k, which definitely has some unpleasant Heinlein-esque undertones, hah…

That said, that’s also a very narrow sliver of the overall D&D playing population. The latest edition goes out of its way to be woke af (in a bland, corporate approved fashion, but still, I dig it), and obviously there’s something deeply subversive about pretending to be an opposite gendered elf teaming up with a multi racial crew of misfits to take down the cruel lord of the land and free the people from his heinous slavery that I feeeeel like counters the universality of the above tweet pretty fuckin well…

3232

I mean, historically, that’s an accurate representation of what D&D is/was, and why it appealed to adolescent males.

3233

Who is Freyja? For that matter, who is Sophia?

3234

Sounds like maybe… It’s because they’re old? And D&D is old?

Back when i was a kid and played D&D, the folks who played it were pretty much all geeks who were pretty much not in line with the conservative archetypes of glory.

Some random super woke person. Not anyone of note, i don’t think. I only saw this because popehat tweeted about it.

I was just amused by the left wing take that D&D is racist and conservative.

3235

It might be a left wing take, but you yourself just said these people are… nobodies. It’s not a take at all. It’s just a couple of people saying and laughing at a stupid thing they said.

3236

Yeah, that’s what it is.
They said a stupid thing, and I’m laughing at it.

That’s the point of this thread.

3237

I mean it certainly can be framed that way.

Like most archetypical fantasy, there are certain undercurrents you can pick up on, if that is your intent. Likewise you can subvert all that and go way the other way.

It is a framework. And if that wis your read on D&D I’d say that reflects more on the people you’ve seen running it.

3238

It’s Liberals also say and do stupid shit. Those aren’t even verified accounts; you can’t even verify they are, in fact, a liberal. That’s a cartoon girl in a crop top.

Timex you keep getting slapped for posting random shit from random people, who might not even be people, from Twitter.