Nah, you’re too reactionary, I’ll pass.

My original comment was only to clarify that a friday protest isn’t remotely a “general strike” so I wish that outlets, forumgoers and media would stop using the term because it’s reducing the power behind the word. Actual general strikes have been performed in our modern world and have crushed governments. This isn’t doing that, and I fear too many naive people are going to think that a couple friday marches on PTO are going to make anyone in seats of power cry.

I never said it’s bad to march and protest, it IS having an impact, but by itself it won’t move anything because the people in power don’t actually care about the will of the people, if all you’re doing is saying you’re unhappy, well great. They WANT you unhappy.

I don’t know how to get hundreds of millions of Americans to understand this, neither do you. None of us do, but we can keep trying and we can keep making sure that our language isn’t getting watered down because we want to believe in things that aren’t real. This is all going to get worse before it gets better, and people will point to it and say “See? General strikes don’t work!” when we haven’t even done one yet.

Turns out it’s hard to orchestrate hundreds of millions of people spread out over 9 millions square kilometers isn’t exactly easy to do, who are blissfully unware of anything happening around them and are comfortable sitting at home consuming media and games and don’t want to risk their jobs because they don’t have the security of community, because everyone has embraced being rugged loners as personality traits and not an obstacle to better lives.

FTFY

I started watching network nightly news again after throwing it away for years and years, because I want to see what the average American who isn’t stuck online sees every night while cooking dinner for 3 screaming kids and having to juggle two jobs. NBC, ABC, even CBS.

It’s so bad. It’s dishearteningly bleak when you realize how much of the population catches blurbs and snippets of actual issues sandwiched between stories about weather and a local boy-scout who grew the biggest pumpkin, and of course the required nightly “true crime” story about a spouse who murdered their partner and had an affair.

I have nobody to scream at, nobody to shake. They didn’t even MENTION the strikes (protests) so far on any network, they have not shown the scale of the marches and the chaos on the streets of American cities. To say nothing of the neutral, blameless tone they use.

They only just barely started taking the people’s protests against ICE like an actual news story after Alex Pretti was murdered, because at a certain point, even the hand of the state can no longer dismiss or avoid actual reality.

This is because there are three forces of political capital in the country broadly. The strongest is the liberal masses, the majority. Farmed cattle used for the labor and attention spans and purchasing power. Middle-class America holds ALL the power because they have the most money and keep the system moving… as a result, they are manipulated and sedated the hardest.

The second force is nationalism. About 20% - 30% or so of the population are illiterate, rural or wannabe-rural grown toddlers screaming and waving guns and hating everything that moves, while worshipping the flag and kissing the king’s ass. Armed groups of nationalists have been the driving force of political capital for thousands of years, it’s no different now.

The last group is progressivism. Arguably the weakest, almost not worth mentioning it has so little power now, but is still technically on the list because we’re still here, still trying.

But it’s all shifting, as leftists start taking up arms and marching in larger and larger numbers, the networks and marketing companies have no choice but to notice it. This is because the liberal middle class is now noticing it, and when THEY shift, everything shifts.

To this end, I support continued protests and marches, even if they’re utterly pathetic by historical standards for moving systems.

Just bring a burner phone with a camera. It needs to be filmed and streamed so they can’t take evidence.

Honestly, at this point in the fight, if they track you that’s the least of our concerns. We need to shoot this whole thing down so they don’t have the power DO anything with your tracking data.

Came in here to say, this is all fine and good, but we’ve been broadly asked a question in response to our demand:

“Or what?”

The left and progressives broadly need to start understanding power and where it comes from.

We need to use the amendment that the founders placed there to answer the question “Or what?” when it’s asked by our government when it goes bad.

If we met force with force, the cowards in masks and swastikas would RUN home and hide in their basements and whinge on the internet how persecuted they are. They’re not going to get in a gunfight with anyone, they’re emotionally-empowered internet chuds and pasty nazi-loving 4-channers. Every single one of them.

I dream of a day when I see nine-hundred thousand people of color, pink-haired LGBTQ+ allies and families of all walks of life marching on DC while open-carrying and demanding social change and accountability for the people selling off our rights to the lowest bidder.

A general strike is a strike action in which participants cease all economic activity, such as working, to strengthen the bargaining position of a trade union or achieve a common social or political goal. )"

“The largest general strike that ever stopped the economy of an advanced industrial country—and the first general wildcat strike in history—was May 1968 in France.[105] The prolonged strike involved eleven million workers for two weeks in a row,[105] and its impact was such that it almost caused the collapse of the de Gaulle government.”

This entire wiki article is a list of HUGE events in history that were affected by general strikes and what was involved in organizing and challenging them.

A one-day protest is fine, but it’s not a “general strike.”

General strikes aren’t things you can use your PTO for to get a three-day weekend. That’s like protesting a brand by buying their product and then destroying it.

I roll my eyes that these all are on Fridays 🙄

I mean, it’s fine. Go ahead, it will help, but it’s not really a general strike. It’s a day of protest. Come on America, you don’t really get how this works. You can’t use your PTO to challenge authority. It’s the same as protesting a company by buying their product to destroy like MAGA does.

vast majority of people who believe in RFK also believe being an addict is reprehensible.

While true, they’re also the segment of the population most impacted by the opioid epidemic.

There is no logistical consistency in the conservative mind, we have to stop trying to make square pegs fit into something that doesn’t even have holes. These folks go with how they feel, and they adore having a health and human services leader who gives them validation for believing in magic water, essential oil and avoidance of scarrrrryyyy needles and vaccines. That’s ALL they care about, nothing in his background would change that. NOTHING.

There are asbolutely “lite” local systems that could do things like make particular NPC behavior in certain environments far more interesting and unpredictable, without harming performance, which is what everyone I’ve ever played games with would want over the same scripted paths and triggered behaviors.

I don’t think OP is asking for AI implementation that gives you an alternate path into the enemy base by romancing one of the guards and having a life together before you steal their keys off the dresser one morning and then then break into the facility as they send you child-support notices. We’re talking about maybe enemies have more options than crouching behind a red barrel or resuming their patrol when the shooting stops.

Yah but OP is talking about AI in gaming, not generative AI that makes propaganda out of stolen art or turns your family photos into porn, there’s a big difference. You’ve been playing with AI in gaming for years, and probably have complained about it because it always sucks. Enemies walk predictable patterns, they see you kill twenty of their friends and then resume their patrol and say “it must have been the wind.”

Lets not mindlessly rage at terms without understanding the context, then you’re just becoming MAGA.

I had both .22LR rifle and revolver and that revolver was louder than a 9mm (Uzi) so gun design makes a massive difference.

I think it’s possible that a recording on surround sound might get close to the noise of a smaller caliber gun, but I just doubt that it would be an easy mistake to make. Particularly if that person doesn’t play a lot of loud movies and games and it’s just a sudden burst or something.

I bet you had tinnitus for awhile.

That makes me think of something I never put together. I did everything I can in life to protect my hearing. Never shot without protection, never even operated heavy machinery or went to concerts without some kind of hearing protection, I was so infatuated with preserving my senses that I was made fun of for always having PPE. Now later in life I have constant tinnitus and no idea why. Come to think of it, maybe that one single shotgun blast at point-blank range is what knocked something loose in there and I’m only just now feeling the long-term effects.

My father, who was just really bad at like, everything, and was always inebriated… was checking something on the 12-gauge he kept in the house, he decided to sit next to me on my bed to fiddle with the thing and of course, he pulls the trigger and it goes off.

Fortunately it was pointed away from me, and fortunately there was nobody else in the house at the time, so it just took a large chunk out of the wall and not a family member, but it was startling on a level that shook me for life, and whether he meant to teach the lesson or not, I sure as shit learned the rules of firearms from that incident.

It also makes me call BS on at least the “saving private ryan” part of the 4chan post. There’s no way you will mistake an actual firearm going off for any kind of media or recording.

Paintball guns can easily remove an eyeball, yet the way people handle them at open games should make us all terrified for how unaware and and careless people are around dangerous devices. We need far more training and preparation on a nationalized, standardized level for preparing people for the real world.

Advanced tactic for people who aren’t afraid of dumb people and are social enough to make friends: get to know your right-leaning or centrist neighbors anyway, make them like you even if you’re a different race or culture. It’s far easier than most people think. Run to them for help. Make them confront the situation they would normally feel removed from. It’s amazing how often these people flip when they’re in the middle of it.

climate change is a reality

In fact, this is why we changed the term from “global warming” to “climate change” because over long periods of time, the globe will warm up more and more, but as the climate changes we will see extremes in both heat and cold and precipitation and other weather events as time goes. We’re likely going to see ice-fishing in places that never had snow before and winter wildflower blooms in northern countries.

the trick is getting all those people moving in the right direction.

Turns out only a handful of things in all of history have pushed people out of social boundaries and into a realm of discomfort and possible consequence:

1. Fear and hate. Always number one here, if you get enough people scared together, they can be driven anywhere. Most people don’t think, they feel. Feelings drive the motions and actions.

2. A greater discomfort than breaking social norms and potentially going to jail- IE: starvation, homelessness, genocide, etc.

3. Extremely charismatic people who capture enough political capital that they’re given the opportunity to gather large numbers of people for a cause. These are usually politicians who are well trained in how to influence people, and typically use item #1 to enforce their goals.

Right now we don’t have any of these things. We also don’t have political capital or organized power such as uniting behind nationalism or guns to demonstrate our ability to actually disrupt the system. This makes us a target by the state, and the state protects capital right here, right now.

We can still fix this through political action and organization, and if we do, we can actually create systems that protect the world from more lich-kings rising up and swallowing all of our work and money. It just takes more social involvement than we’re doing now… and since just that seems too much for most progressive-minded people, I don’t have a lot of hope that we’re going to do any of the other, more forceful things that require a LOT more cohesion.

Reality sucks. I know. But we can influence it.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my decades of forward time-travel, it’s that the future is consistent about only one thing: that there’s more of everything.

Our future is going to have great hardships and weird politics and disasters and suffering, but it will also have more wonders, miracles and everyday concepts that would seem utterly alien to us presently. People in many places will die of easily preventable diseases because of income inequality, that’s a norm. But those easily-preventable or treatable diseases will be things like cancer or heart disease.

You will have a an ocean of cheaply made “AAA” game titles being pushed out by the EA/Trump/Saudi conglomerate, sure. But you will also have totally new experiences being experimented with as AI matures and creates new ways to generate worlds on the fly, things like video cards will slowly start becoming obsolete as new ways of creating virtual environments are experimented with.

It’s going to get harder and harder to keep up with changes too. Trust me on this, there’s no avoiding it. Just find a niche in life you enjoy, make some friends, have some close connections with others, care about yourself and your community and ride it out.

People have stopped socializing, at least not in a real, meaningful way. Discord groups of other shut-ins feeding off each other’s insecurity doesn’t count.

The lack of socialization means a lack of social validation so to feel any value at all, we all have to figure out how to carve out new identities in a much more lonely and dark world. Self-diagnosis of conditions and syndromes can give you insulation from criticism and give you a sense of community and belonging, so less effort is placed on managing or treating the condition and more effort is placed on affirming and defending your condition.

I’m not saying the conditions aren’t real, they exist on a large spectrum that almost everyone falls on to some degree, but what’s changed is the view of the conditions or syndromes as an obstacle to life that needs to be managed or beat. Instead it’s a badge of identity that people work to justify and preserve, often without realizing it.

I’ve been in and out of the mental health system for years, I’ve done it to beat depression, PTSD and anxiety and have made great strides by accepting the hard truths of the things I need to do to make it easier to live with problems outside my control. But these are tools I embraced because I wanted to go outside, meet people, be more social and have more opportunities.

Not a lot of young people want any of that, they’ve been disillusioned by the promise of the future because the internet just feeds them the bleakest picture of the world that it can, and people don’t generally seek out balancing perspectives on their own, and even resist any attempt to tell them that there’s a lot of important reasons you might want to stretch your mental and social muscles.

Nearly everyone I talk to under the age of 25 or so says they can’t imagine living past 40, with many saying that they actively have plans to not live past 40, which blows my goddamn mind.

Every single one of you whiny, nihilistic shits out there is going to hit age 40 and say “Oh fuck, what have I done with my life?”