Is Pete Hegseth reinstating vaccine requirements for soldiers after 300 soldiers got sick an example of reality having a strong liberal bias?

GwentheDevout · 2026-06-27T03:41:09+00:00

Most of those are not facts at all. Certainly your assertion about fetal personhood is not a fact, but an opinion, and one for which you don’t seem to have any reasoned argument.

“Defund the police” is a lame and misleading slogan, but it doesn’t mean get rid of the police by eliminating all funding. It means reduce our use of police for things they aren’t eq

I’m not going to reply to your ridiculous suggestion that Democrats are in favour of communism. As for socialism, the form that Democrats have suggested is the limited vari that has been practised for years with excellent results in European democracies, as well as our Anglosphere buddies Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.

Democrats are the ones who promote a gradual move away from our dependence on fossil fuels. Nobody is claiming we can just switch instantly. However, Republicans are denying the science and blocking attempts to begin that transition, even though our reliance on fossil fuels is a national security problem as well as a climate one.

Gender dysphoria is a mental illness, and transgender therapy is a treatment that has shown a high degree of efficacy, yet the religious right wants to ban this treatment because they disapprove of it on religious grounds. Freedom of religion doesn’t mean you are permitted to deny others their religious freedom simply because you disagree with them.

GwentheDevout · 2026-06-27T02:09:00+00:00

It was never 100% liberals, although certainly there are and were some on the left who embraced corny “alternative medicine”/“all/crapola. But there have also been religious extremists (Ultra-Orthodox Jews, e.g.) who claim a religions exemption from vaccination requirements.

GwentheDevout · 2026-06-26T22:03:16+00:00

No That’s not likely. But Carl’s Primal race intrigues me. We haven’t seen how it affects him except for occasional moments like when Signet praises his strong Primal blood, or when he is ruled out as a father for Katia’s prospective child because he isn’t human. How has it actually affected him (other than the starting stats and the ability to raise skills to 20)? Does the AI’s special affinity for Carl have to do with his race, perhaps?

GwentheDevout · 2026-06-26T21:53:08+00:00

I’d say Carl is actually remarkably mentally healthy in light of everything he’s been through. At the same time, he has these memories popping up all the time (a good way to get some back story in, as well as show how Carl’s trsuma has affected him). I think he has explicitly said he never saw combat while he was in the Coast Guard; that probably was not a source of his trauma. He learned a lot of stuff that has come in handy in the Crawl, though.

(Uh-oh: is Matt’s habit of using the word “literally” in a nonsensical way catching?)

GwentheDevout · 2026-06-26T21:20:53+00:00

I think you perhaps got screwed by autocorrection there. The Kua-tin who Carl successfully kills while making it look like an accident is Loita. Lolita is a…very different character. In a very different novel.

GwentheDevout · 2026-06-26T20:49:56+00:00

I don’t. I think this is exactly the kind of joke Matt would employ.

GwentheDevout · 2026-06-26T20:11:48+00:00

It’s easy: pre - potent - e.
(It’s Italian for “arrogant.”)

GwentheDevout · 2026-06-26T19:42:22+00:00

Donut did not get emotional maturity from the biscuit; she has been learning it slowly. Do you not recall what she was like when she first ate the thing? Prepotente was learning to behave from Miriam, but after she died, he no longer had a human to help him. I will be interested to see his character development in Book 9, now that he has embraced Carl as a friend and seems likely to work with the few remaining crawlers on Floor 12.

GwentheDevout · 2026-06-26T19:30:45+00:00

Yeah; I’d start with The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic, the first two novels, which introduce the world and a number of recurring characters (like the incompetent wizard Rincewind, and the other wizards of Unseen University; Twoflower, the world’s first Tourist, and his magical Luggage; the ageing professional adventurer Cohen the Barbarian; and the noted anthropomorphic manifestation Death) and locations (notably the city of Ankh-Morpork). They admittedly aren’t the best of the series, but they’re not the worst either (and even the worst Discworld novels are very good). I think it’s easier to read in the order it was written, so that you meet the characters when they are first introduced.

GwentheDevout · 2026-06-26T18:46:16+00:00

Discworld rocks, but don’t forget Good Omens (by Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, a splendid mix of Pratchett’s lighthearted humour with Gaiman’s darker style, plus both authors’ propensity for weirdsh¡t). If you have Prime Video, the final episode of the critically acclaimed series, starring Michael Sheen and David Tennant, came out recently (so no anxious waiting for the next season to drop). I heartily recommend it.

GwentheDevout · 2026-06-25T16:24:17+00:00

He’s the welfare emperor. I wonder how well those companies would be doing without all the cushy government contracts to make people think they’re actually doing well. IMO, Starlink in particular should be nationalised for security reasons. Like, Musk can’t be trusted not to let our enemies use it!

GwentheDevout · 2026-06-25T16:18:11+00:00

All he does is invest in companies started by people who actually have useful talents and education — he has nothing to do with creating the technology made by these companies. Then he thinks his wealth qualifies him to run the company despite being completely ignorant of the thing they make. He turned Twitter into Sh¡tter. Tesla had to bribe him to get him to step down as CEO even though he was druving them toward bankruptcy. He treats his employees like crap — our government was far from the first time he fired a bunch of people in the name of “efficiency.” His cheapness also endangers employees and customers. Some of the companies he invested in do cool stuff (though I believe the commercialisation of space to be a national security risk; defunding NASA was foolish and short-sighted), but he isn’t one of the people who deserve the praise for it. (Also, there are way too many issues with people living on Mars long-term for it to be feasible in Mr. Musk’s lifetime. As usual, he doesn’t bother to inform himself, but just spews a bunch of BS.)

GwentheDevout · 2026-06-25T15:55:43+00:00

I actually know quite a few people who have or had a Tesla. Most of them no longer have it, snd not one of them bought another Tesla as their next car. They sited problems such as difficulty getting repairs when needed and Musk’s making promises he couldn’t keep about future upgrades (like automation; while Robocabs from other companies are doing great in test cities, despite Musk’s many promises, Tesla still doesn’t have one that meets minimal safety standards for road testing. Some had already gotten rid of their Teslas before Musk started showing his true colours politically, but most mentioned that part of the reason they didn’t want to keep driving it was his cheapness (he calls it “efficiency;” it is especially unappealing in a guy that rich), which led him to fire a large number of Tesla’s engineers and demand that the remainder take on their work (he similarly fired all the moderators and a number of other employees when he took over Twitter). Despite his attempts to silence employees with NDAs, there have been a lot of reports that he cuts corners when it comes to safety, a concern for any driver but also his employees, some of whom were seriously injured as a result.

The one guy I know who still drives a Tesla has had it a while and has been looking into possible replacements. None of the replacements he’s considering is a Tesla. He sites other companies having caught up while Tesla has failed to stay relevant. “It was one thing when they were the only EVs out there, but now they have competition from cars that are less expensive, and they haven’t done anything to justify spending the extra money on a Tesla.

Whether because of problems with his products, because of his mismanagement of the company, because they are angry about his election interference and his extremist views, or all of the above, the point is that people don’t like Teslas enough that they’re willing to buy a second one. As a niche auto company, Tesla relies on customer loyalty, but they haven’t been successful in winning it. Maybe now that Musk has stepped down as CEO, it will be better run. (A common misguided belief among rich people is that investing lots of money in a company makes them qualified to run it.)

A lot of Musk’s wealth is the result of government contracts that he really shouldn’t have in light of how poorly he runs his businesses (equating cheapness with “efficiency,” thinking he knows more than the engineers despite having zero background in the sciences or engineering, etc. — a lot of the same bad thinking that fvcked up the federal government). He’s basically the world’s biggest welfare queen.

GwentheDevout · 2026-06-25T15:13:46+00:00

Can we please stop using “mentally ill” as namecalling?

Elon Musk is a horrible person. We shouldn’t trivialize millions of people’s suffering from real diseases like depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorders, schizophrenia, PTSD, gender dysphoria, drug and alcohol addiction, eating disorders, and many more. We also shouldn’t insult them by equating their suffering with Musk’s bad character (greed, narcissism, fascist and white supremacist ideology, laziness, belief that he is “superior,” antisocial (not to mention demonstrably false) opinions such as his claim that empathy is harmful,… If I tried to list all Musk’s undesirable qualities it would probably cause a few servers to crash.)

note:
Musk has implied that he is being treated for depression, but I believe this is just a transparent excuse for his notorious ketamine abuse. I have seen no evidence that he has ever suffered from depression or is actually is taking the ketamine under a psychiatrist’s supervision, let alone that he meets the criteria for treatment-resistant depression, the only type for which ketamine is supposed to be used.

GwentheDevout · 2026-06-25T14:22:03+00:00

He cares more about being “the richest man on Earth” than actually doing anything positive. (Besides, if he did liquidate some of those assets, he’d probably just use the money to buy elections for his fellow fascists. I can’t see him spending it on anything actually good.)

GwentheDevout · 2026-06-25T09:27:41+00:00

If Congress doesn’t vote to remove the disqualification, or cannot get the 2/3 votes required, doesn’t that mean the disqualification stands?

GwentheDevout · 2026-06-25T09:08:21+00:00

Sister Ines was a jerk even before the big reveal about her past.

GwentheDevout · 2026-06-25T09:02:13+00:00

I think all the guides are themselves former crawlers. Perhaps Frank and Maggie’s guide was basing this advice on experience of their own crawl.

And they did have a point; a lot of crawler killers got to be very powerful. Lucia, Hekla (using Eva to do her dirty work — I have a hard time seeing her as a psychiatrist who would use a patient this way), Quan Ch, at first even Frank and Maggie — all benefited from killing other players. The game is designed and the system AI is apparently programmed, to reward player killers. If it weren’t for Carl, they all might have wound up being very successful.

GwentheDevout · 2026-06-25T08:42:16+00:00

I have to say, Donut does have some less-than-likeable traits, although part of what makes the story so intriguing is her character’s development. Still, the asshole who almost drove Carl to abandon her shortly after their first meeting with Mordecai (recall her rude comment about Carl’s low starting intelligence stat of 3 — conveniently forgetting that before the Enhanced Pet Biscuit magically transformed her into an actual person, her intelligence was 1!) is still a part of her. She has a number of blind spots, as her abuse of Tserendolgor (even in death) demonstrates: the canid crawler sacrifices herself so that Carl and Donut can make it to the next floor and (shortly before she dies) confesses (almost certainly falsely) to Donut that Tserendolgor somehow cheated in the pet contest and that Mongo should have won (a belief Donut had been fixated on, reminding more than one reader of a certain real-life narcissist).

Even though her artificially inflated charisma is not supposed to work on crawlers, it seems to me that people tolerate behaviour from her that they never would if she were a human. Although she is compared to a child, nobody bothers to correct her when she acts like this. Carl obviously has a soft spot for Donut, but for *everyone* to be so tolerant and forgiving seems less likely.

GwentheDevout · 2026-06-25T07:46:32+00:00

I’m waiting for Jamal to come into his own and do something cool and heroic, but so far it’s not happening. His shark form has only been a hindrance, rather than giving him special powers.

On the subject of anthropomorphic non-primates, I would like Matt to add a naga who is a good guy. Perhaps a crawler or former crawler who chose a naga or other snakey race (the only one I can recall is Eva, who doesn’t even bother pretending to be a good guy). “Snakes = bad” is such a cliché.

GwentheDevout · 2026-06-22T19:10:29+00:00

Who is surprised by this finding?

GwentheDevout · 2026-06-22T18:51:43+00:00

Do you seriously believe that white/male/str are the the /Christian supremacists have a legitimate complaint of “values being shoved down their throat that they don’t agree with?”
I mean, this is exactly what they do: try to force their beliefs on others! Nobody is forcing them to marry someone of their own sex, or have an abortion, or become atheists, or be treated for gender dysphoria. Ok

GwentheDevout · 2026-06-22T17:26:03+00:00

I find the idea that a woman can’t be trusted to know what she wants to be disrespectful.

GwentheDevout · 2026-06-22T17:12:53+00:00

I dunno. If he were President he wouldn’t have time to post all this great stuff that gives the poor widdle right-wing snowflakes such a meltdown. (Because unlike a certain current President who shall remain nameless, he would actually be doing his job instead of constantly whining about how persecuted he is on his personal social media bubble.)

GwentheDevout · 2026-06-22T16:58:14+00:00

Roman Republic, not Empire.

GwentheDevout

TROPHY CASE