Good to hear!

It still exists, but was hidden for some reason. You can find it by going to the support tab and clicking the “more” button under troubleshooting information. It’ll be at the far right of the button list on the resulting screen.

Once someone stops thinking that they should do what the scientific and medical communities advise, it’s not a large step for them to start thinking they should do specifically what they advise against.

Well, no, he doesn’t see it that way - he’s not progressive. He’s just a guy who said he was to get elected, and now he’s showing his true colors. As for Israel, the country that only exists because it stole land from the people who were there already, would be doing just fine if the people whose land it stole just moved on, yes, but that’s not going to happen, nor should it.

Some Palestinians use their beliefs to fuel their hatred, and you don’t need me to tell you that’s bad, but only those who actually let those beliefs lead to unwarranted actions of violence are to be condemned, not the people as a whole. The same goes for Israel - only those who take unwarranted action against Palestine are to be condemned. You can and should disagree with the parts of anyone’s beliefs that go against basic human decency, but that alone doesn’t invalidate their right to live.

You act like this started because of a recent bombing and not because of the suppression of an innocent group people over the course of nearly a century. It’s the quintessential bullshit milquetoast excuse of “If you fight back against a bully, you’re just as bad.” The US is an example of what happens when the invaders simply kill all of the original occupants to claim the land for themselves - you’ll have a tough time finding a progressive who thinks that ended up being a happy outcome.

It might as well be. Why else would you use the fact that Palestine isn’t progressive itself to question why progressives support it? Progressives believe that people have a right to live regardless of their beliefs. It’s only actions taken that can invalidate that right, which is why we support Palestine and not Israel; beliefs have nothing to do with it - one is massacring the other, and that’s unacceptable.

Luigi’s Mansion 2 came out during the Year of Luigi, which was a pretty big deal since most people though it was never coming back. But yeah, otherwise it was pretty lame.

Oh shit, I hadn’t heard about this yet! Okami was one of those games from the early 2000’s that felt really experimental and cool, a common theme at the time, especially for PS2 games. I feel like big game companies have largely moved away from that, which is really disappointing. Even this is just another sequel, but it’s still one I’m really excited about!

My first date with my (now) wife featured us watching a movie after I showed her how to torrent it. It’s an easy way to parse through date prospects who are too hung up on corporate-defined ethics. I knew she was a catch when she was interested in the prospect of bypassing overpriced movie fees, rather than worrying about how some billion-dollar company was going to get my $10, like some other dates I’d had.

If you think that someone “stealing” 30 chicken nuggets from a company worth over 200 billion dollars is somehow an indication that they must also treat their loved ones poorly, you’re thinking far too simply about the complexity of human motivation. Amazingly, exploiting soulless corporations and hurting people are completely unrelated behaviors.

You seem to be under the impression that I think our democracy somehow makes us superior, or that it functions more often than others, when my point is pretty much the opposite: regardless of the governing system, people will not do enough to avoid a corrupt tyrant of a leader from coming into power, which they will then need to literally fight to overcome.

Rights are not earned through voting, but they are lost due to lack of voting, allowing corrupt leaders to roll back the hard-fought advancements. That’s what the quote means: the tree of liberty is refreshed with blood. White men own slaves? Fight to free them. Only white men can vote? Fight to achieve voting rights for everyone. Those were the times the tree of liberty was refreshed. We’re now seeing these rights called into question because of political leaders that we allowed to be voted in; our rights are slipping due to our insufficient use of the freedoms we fought for, inevitably leading to us needing to fight yet again to refresh them.

If democracy worked unerringly, we’d be more free than ever right now due to the fact that the vast majority of Americans can vote, and while I believe that would be true if everyone did vote, the fact of the matter is that they wont. That allows corrupt leaders to slowly achieve strategic positions in all levels of the government over time, and eventually use their power to bring in the Tyrant mentioned in the quote.

The only people I’m blaming for the regression of our rights and democracy are the tyrants tearing them down. Yes, if we had all voted they never would have gotten the power to do so, but my point has always been that that was never going to happen.

The height was when the vast majority of people understood the importance of informed voting, and did so with pride. We’ve never really been great in any other way, and even back then we weren’t all that great because we kept the right to vote from huge swaths of the people, but democracy functions when people vote, and it fails when they don’t.

The quote is that the tree is “refreshed” with blood, which is an important distinction. Also, Jefferson wrote it after the founding of the US - he understood that our democracy is not an exception to this cycle.

Yes, if we all did our civic duty not just to vote, but to actually inform ourselves about the choices, we’d be able to maintain democracy potentially indefinitely, but the reality is that a huge portion of people are complacent, and won’t take even the simplest of actions until they’re forced to. So, democracy degrades slowly as it’s desperately propped up by the few who understand its importance until it finally fails enough to start really affecting the people who “aren’t really into politics,” by which point its too late to use sweat instead of blood.

We water the tree with the sweat of the few, but when that inevitably isn’t enough and it starts to wither, we refresh it with blood of the many.

Yeah, they’re always mad about something. They’ll look at their trucks packed to the brim with boxes and wonder why we didn’t put each and every package in the exact correct location. We’d do our best, but by the end of the day we’d just be putting them wherever they’d fit.

It would’ve spilled long before it got to me and the local delivery trucks I’d be loading. We’d be unpacking large cross-country semis that were packed so haphazardly that unofficial protocol was to open them and run; one time I almost had a car jack land on my head that someone decided to shove in on top of a stack of boxes.

I never delivered packages, I only loaded them on the trucks. I’d usually be assigned 3-4 trucks depending on package load and how many people decided to show up that day.

When my wife and I are cuddling and she gets stiff, she’ll always say “I’ve gotta turn over.” and I always respond “Can I have a bite?”

Having worked at FedEx, everything has fragile stickers and “this way up” arrows. If I payed attention to every notice on every package, I’d run out of room on the truck before I was even halfway through my shift. Plus I’d be spending way too much time in the truck, and I’d constantly be running down the conveyor to collect packages I missed while I was in there. The only special instructions we have the time to address are the hazmat signs. But yeah, some people literally punt packages onto their trucks, so there’s a middle ground to be found.

So you’re saying she’s betting that while republicans will have significantly more corruption, democrats will be the only ones punished because their voter base is the only one that actually cares? Honestly, you could very well be right about the result of a hypothetical universal ethic report release, though I’d be surprised if MTG was smart enough to think 2 steps ahead like that.

I’ll be honest, this is the first I’m hearing that Time’s person of the year isn’t a celebration of a given year’s most positively-influential person. Granted, I don’t read Time, but I don’t think it’s all that common knowledge that “person of the year” isn’t always a compliment. I mean, I’ve seen several of “___ of the year” awards, and most ended with applauding and rewarding the winner; if Time wants people who don’t read it to know that its award doesn’t follow common conventions, it should probably title it something to obviously differentiate itself.

Campaigning in the US relies heavily on money from wealthy investors to get off the ground. Meaning, any new party that wants to get going needs approval from the wealthy to do so.

Additionally, a huge percentage of the population pays no attention to politics at all, just closing their eyes to the whole election and either not voting, or voting for the party they’ve always voted for every time, so even if your party managed to get some attention, it’d just be another 3rd party further fracturing what small portion of the population risks voting outside the 2 party system as it is.

In other to have a shot at winning, you’d need to somehow make enough money to afford competing with the 2 established parties for screen time, which would mean major corporate backing that would only happen if they liked your policies.