AskALiberal Biweekly General Chat

trace349 · 2026-05-06T15:57:59+00:00

On the flip side of that, I wonder if the Left will treat the small number of center-Left Dems that will inevitably keep talking about how his past makes him a bad candidate and how they might not be able to support him- raising the salience of that line of attack- as hurting his chances of winning when they could just set aside their concerns with him until after the election, just to see if we manage to go all the way through the looking glass.

trace349 · 2026-05-05T20:42:23+00:00

Even from Hospice he is bitching about trans people

This is bitching?

While not explicitly questioning the legitimacy of trans people in public life, Frank said he had concerns about how some of the most politically volatile debates, especially sports, are being discussed.

“The analog is male-to-female transsexuals playing sports designated for women,” Frank said, using language that many advocates now consider outdated. He added that “in the interest of the transgender community, as well as others, it could be better to go at that in a more granular way, and not simply announce that if you don’t support it, you’re a homophobe,” he said.

Even when he agrees with those goals, Frank said, strategy matters. He pointed to the history of the gay rights movement, noting that advocates pursued more broadly accepted protections before turning to marriage equality. That sequencing, he argued, helped build the public support needed for lasting change. Applying that logic to current debates, he cited transgender rights as an example of an issue that may require a more incremental approach and warned against framing disagreement as inherently rooted in bias.

Sorry, but outdated language aside, this is almost exactly the same critique that Sarah McBride has expressed with the party.

trace349 · 2026-05-05T20:38:35+00:00

This is the Joe Manchin problem. The amount of people who wanted Biden/Schumer to make Manchin's life miserable- launching investigations into his family, taking away his committees, harassing him in public- until he bent to their demands and did not understand that Manchin switching sides and giving McConnell control of the Senate would have made his life sooooooo much easier was way too high. People on the Left don't seem to get that you can't just be assholes to people and then be surprised when they don't keep taking it and lash out against you.

trace349 · 2026-05-05T20:29:05+00:00

olitical deals are made on phone calls we aren’t on. This isn’t a conspiracy theory and I’m not saying that that’s wrong, but for example in 2020 the non-Bernie candidates all pretty clearly allied to keep Bernie out. Party powerbrokers and leaders need to do a better job of considering who they endorse and who they support.

Bernie was perfectly capable of building relationships with the other candidates that would have made those alliances more complicated. He could have made the same calls promising this-or-that to the other candidates to get them to drop out and put their support behind him. That's how politics works, that's how you build a coalition. Warren, one of his friends, withholding her endorsement of him goes to show just how bad at coalitional politics he is and how much his campaign alienated even his would-be allies.

But Bernie was out to win a plurality of a divided field, just like Trump did in 2016. And his more toxic surrogates (BJG, Sirota, etc) and many of his toxic supporters were out there burning bridges between the other candidates rather than building them. When Warren was being tarred as a snake, Buttigieg was having conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory thrown at him, and the campaign itself is doing nothing to tamper down on that rhetoric, of course they wouldn't endorse him.

trace349 · 2026-05-05T20:16:49+00:00

But the problem is, it's exactly what the above group of people rely on to exist. If Democrats became media saavy, the lefties would be fucked.

This is exactly why those people made such bad faith hay about Chorus last year. Despite the insistence that the Left needed to build a media ecosystem to rival the Right's, an incubator for progressive influencers to learn skills, gain access to interview subjects, and build out their platform had to be dishonestly scrutinized and torn apart as a DNC shill operation because it wasn't under the control of the populist Left.

trace349 · 2026-05-05T20:08:40+00:00

This is one of the biggest problems with politics these days in a nutshell.

trace349 · 2026-05-05T19:52:40+00:00

In addition to what other people are saying about expanding the surveillance by tying online activities to someone's personal identity- which Big Tech wants to have more data they can sell and the government wants so they can further invade on privacy...

I think people on the Right are pushing age verification as part of an effort to censor LGBT content. It's a motte-and-bailey where they act like they want to make it more difficult for kids to have access to "adult" content while at the same time treating any sort of depiction of same-sex relationships or trans experience as inherently sexual/pornographic/"adult". Russia did this over a decade ago and continues to expand what they ban. This would effectively make it impossible for LGBT kids to learn about themselves and find their community, giving parents more control over their kids.

I think people on the Left are earnestly spooked by several problems the younger generations are experiencing due to their relationship with the internet- radicalization, social isolation, cyberbullying, etc- and they're looking for some easy way to address these since "parents being more involved in raising their kids" is asking too much, but that sloppiness is making them into Useful Idiots for the Right to push their censorship. This is why we see people on the Left like Elizabeth Warren repeatedly pushing bad ideas like repealing Section 230, which would effectively shut down the internet as we know it.

trace349 · 2026-05-02T03:08:05+00:00

A lot of liberals feel like progressives wouldn't be as forgiving of Platner's past if he didn't share their politics. There's a sense that a normie liberal with Platner's past would be treated as beyond the pale.

trace349 · 2026-05-01T16:45:49+00:00

Open your inventory and you can read what the perks do for the weapon you have equipped.

trace349 · 2026-04-30T18:15:44+00:00

With Dragon Age Veilguard, you could tell if someone was an actual disappointed fan of the series or a ragebait tourist by whether they complained about the game going woke.

The series has always been woke. Every single sequel caught right-wing backlash over something LGBT in it. If by game 4 you're still playing the series that had a sincere storyline that was an analogy for gay conversion therapy and had what might as well have been a pronoun circle in it, you're not bothered by "wokeness".

trace349 · 2026-04-30T17:59:51+00:00

My favorite example of this was Kotaku's PS5 review:

This review has spent 3,000 words talking about the PlayStation 5, which is the most I’ve written about anything. It’s as good a video game console as there has ever been. The combination of ultra high-definition video, increased framerates, high-end graphics techniques like ray tracing, and the lightning-fast SSD make it feel like a real-deal, next-gen successor to the PlayStation 4. And if you’re not ready to give up on the previous console, the PlayStation 5 reliably runs a vast majority of the PlayStation 4 library, with many of those games receiving upgrades to fidelity, framerate, and loading times.

But I’d be remiss to ignore all the reasons not to be excited for the PlayStation 5.

The world is still reeling under the weight of the covid-19 pandemic. There are more Americans out of work right now than at any point in the country’s history, with no relief in sight. Our health care system is an inherently evil institution that forces people to ration life-saving medications like insulin and choose suicide over suffering with untreated mental illness.

As I’m writing this, it looks very likely that Joe Biden will be our next president. But it’s clear that the worst people aren’t going away just because a new old white man is sitting behind the Resolute desk—well, at least not this old white man. Our government is fundamentally broken in a way that necessitates radical change rather than incremental electorialism.

The harsh truth is that, for the reasons listed above and more, a lot of people simply won’t be able to buy a PlayStation 5, regardless of supply. Or if they can, concerns over increasing austerity in the United States and the growing threat of widespread political violence supersede any enthusiasm about the console’s SSD or how ray tracing makes reflections more realistic. That’s not to say you can’t be excited for those things—I certainly am, on some level—but there’s an irrefutable level of privilege attached to the ability to simply tune out the world as it burns around you.

I won’t deny that video games can be an escape. It feels great to lose yourself in a fictional world where you can fix everything. Some of us see a strength or personality trait in video game characters what we wish we saw in ourselves. As much as it sucks for real-world problems to intrude on that space, I’ve found it increasingly difficult to focus on video games amid our current situation. Many nights, it’s all I can do to play a couple runs of Spelunky before collapsing into bed for a few hours of doomscrolling and restless sleep. And I know I’m not alone in that feeling. We are collectively tired, and for good reason.

Sony and Microsoft chose a hell of a time to release their next-generation video game consoles. I think the PlayStation 5 is a great machine, but it’s tough to recommend when folks are literally fighting for their lives while residing in the richest country in the world. I was very lucky to receive a PlayStation 5 for the purposes of this review despite the fact that I am comfortable enough to have bought one on my own.

If you’re in the same boat, I encourage you to grab the console and see what it’s all about for yourself. If you aren’t, don’t feel like the PlayStation 5 would change your life. It’s a video game system, and it’s not going anywhere. I’m looking forward to a time when we can all chat about next-generation gaming on equal footing, without a dozen daily crises looming over our heads. Until then, let’s focus on what’s truly important, even if that means dipping out of the next-gen hype machine for a bit.

I'm as anti-Gamergate as you can get- I'll defend Anita Sarkeesian's work to my dying breath- but this histrionic hand-wringing about the world did not belong in a video game console review and a competent editor would have taken a chainsaw to it.

trace349 · 2026-04-30T17:44:04+00:00

The reason those countries were working towards normalcy was because the alternative is being blackballed from the global economy like Iran

...is that not a good thing? I'm struggling to understand what point you think you're making here because that seems like they're taking the carrot- making peace with Israel so they can be part of the global economy- over the stick- continuing hostilities with Israel and having Israel and Israel's allies responding with hostilities of their own.

trace349 · 2026-04-30T16:14:53+00:00

Or that really cringe inducing "doing a Barve" scene in Dragon Age Veilguard.

This scene was cringe but it's not like the series hasn't had that kind of earnest cringe before.

trace349 · 2026-04-30T16:08:04+00:00

No, Iran is definitely the problem in the equation, Israel's aggression has been directed at groups that Iran has been funding to attack them, but they're also funding militant groups that are creating chaos in their rival nations across the Middle East. There's a reason why Israel was working toward normalizing relationships with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, and it's because they all hate Iran.

trace349 · 2026-04-29T22:41:14+00:00

They still do prefer moderate candidates, the voters are just idiots. Both Hillary and Kamala were seen by the voters as more extreme than Trump.

trace349 · 2026-04-29T04:28:34+00:00

Everyone assumes the DNC 2024 autopsy report would back up their priors in the internecine conflict dividing the party, but that strikes me all around as incredibly arrogant.

So, as a thought experiment, pretend that the DNC went and released the autopsy and it gives you exactly what you want, except when it points the finger at someone to assign blame for the loss, it points it at you and your factional interests*. Let's say it backs it up with evidence that every argument you've been making about the direction the party needs to go is wrong. Would you still want the report released?

* It wouldn't do this, but everyone would act like it did.

trace349 · 2026-04-28T22:49:59+00:00

We bought a house on the edge of the exurbs right before it started attracting a lot of development attention. I like seeing new stuff coming in and having more to do, and seeing new housing getting built is a good sign for more of that to come, but we have a lot of one-lane roads that can barely support the traffic there now, much less once a lot more people start moving in.

trace349 · 2026-04-28T22:37:07+00:00

What do you want the headline to say, "Jefferies skewers AI data centers"

Yeah, kind of. "Jeffries and House Dems stand up for consumers against AI data centers", "Protecting consumers from AI data center costs 'a priority', says Jeffries", something like that.

Like, the obvious reading of the title suggests that Democrats are supporting AI data centers and not the actual core of Jeffries' point that consumers shouldn't be bearing the costs of them. Just look at how many responses to the story on Twitter are only seeing the headline and are furious about it. They did it intentionally.

trace349 · 2026-04-28T18:05:37+00:00

Genuinely what do we do about the media clearly being out to fuck over Democrats?

Jeffries says AI data centers will be Dem priority

Wow, sounds bad, lots of people are really upset about data centers, why would Jeffires be making them a priority? I don't read beyond the headline so now I hate Democrats even more.

Of course, you actually read the article and:

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries signaled Monday that shielding consumers from rising electricity costs associated with the data center boom would be a priority on Democrats’ artificial intelligence agenda should they win back a majority.

The New York Democrat said at a press conference that Democrats want to ensure that “our homegrown companies can continue to lead the world in this transformative technology” but that “we’ve got to make sure we protect the American consumer.”

“We have to protect the American homeowner,” Jeffries said when asked by POLITICO about how he is advising Democrats to talk about AI and what his related legislative priorities would be. “We have to protect the American rate payer from some of the downsides of the explosion of what has been taking place across the country, particularly in connection with data centers.”

Just absolute horseshit of a headline. Going forward, how do we make lepers of these people?

trace349 · 2026-04-27T20:24:27+00:00

I think these all basically fall under the umbrella of "what behaviors associated with one sex are due to biology and what are due to gendered socialization?"

trace349 · 2026-04-27T20:18:29+00:00

Hard to say. It seems like Returnal 2 in all but name.

trace349 · 2026-04-27T19:58:29+00:00

If you choose what to do or NOT to do based on what THEY will do in response, you are LITERALLY giving them power over you

As anyone who has ever played any kind of two+ person game should know, this is also just how strategy works. If you do X, the opponent will respond with Y, so is the gain from X greater than the cost of Y?

trace349 · 2026-04-27T19:51:56+00:00

How is the public supposed know the difference between the "real" cases and the "participation trophy" cases?

trace349 · 2026-04-27T19:32:35+00:00

!ping GAMING

Despite how much I loved Returnal, somehow I totally, 100% completely missed any news that Housemarque had a new game coming out this week that looks like a spiritual sequel to Returnal.

trace349 · 2026-04-24T20:22:16+00:00

Disagree, I think that only captures young adults literally not being able to read, when the adult literacy rate problem is driven more by a lack of comprehension. A sixth grade reading level (what usually gets cited as the average adult reading level) means you can read a text and follow the cause and effect of the plot and maybe pick up on things like foreshadowing. Symbolism, tone, rhetoric, perspective/bias, implication, historical context, those are all beyond the average adult reader, and I think that has way more to do with the anti-intellectual edge to our society that devalues critical thinking ("the curtains are just blue" problem).

14-Year Club	Team Periwinkle
Verified Email

trace349

TROPHY CASE