U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Oregon, posted on X, urging people to keep any protests of the Trump administration peaceful.

“Trump wants to generate riots. Don’t take the bait,” he wrote.

Queue for your execution in an orderly fashion. Otherwise, the Nazis will make you look bad on TV

The global power that hasn’t participated in numerous atrocities does not exist.

Almost as though power is accrued at the expense of the vulnerable.

The difference here is the loss of domestic law and order and its cascading downstream effects for global cooperation and trade

The only countries that the US has alienated are ones it is explicitly sanctioning. Nobody else is actually cutting ties.

China is the obvious beneficiary.

China’s the trade-alternative for countries under US sanctions, precisely because Trump’s done a ham-fisted job of diplomacizing with his counterparts overseas. But a future Pete Buttigieg administration can patch that up if he chooses. There is more to be gained by doing business with the US than with Venezuela or Iran or Cuba. Chinese leaders know that and act accordingly.

But could get a whole lot worse a whole lot faster

Sure. Or it could come to a grinding halt if Trump loses control of Congress and falls into lame duck status three years early. Already, we’re seeing sharp divides even inside the GOP, which already operates on thin margins in the face of a Dem election wave.

Plenty of precedent for an unpopular President to get sidelined by skilled and ambitious legislators. And the US has demonstrated time and time again that it has the manpower and the infrastructure to rebound quickly under strong, competent leadership.

We’re almost certainly going to face a nasty recession going into the next few years. But we’re still a massive, hugely populated, highly technical, heavily industrialized economy. Losing unipolar status isn’t the end of the empire. A bad few years of economic contraction isn’t the end of the world.

Now… the long tail of climate change… that’s another story. If the Colorado River dries up before it reaches Arizona, we’re going to see some shit flying.

The American brand is permanently tarnished

I wish this were true. But after Iraq? After Vietnam? A Cold War that nearly wiped out the entire human race? After CIA sponsored coups from Brazil to Guatamala? Henry Ford was passing out copies of “The International Jew” all over Germany during the 1920s. Roosevelt forced the Platt Amendment down Cuba’s throat. McKinley oversaw a genocide in the Philippines. Polk gave us the Annexation of Texas and the revitalization of the North American slave trade. Anyone ask Andrew Jackson what happened to all the Cherokee down in Florida?

America is a country with unlimited do-overs. Our brand is never tarnished. We are always and forever a Shining City On A Hill even as Ronnie fucking Raygun is sponsoring nun rape down in Nicaragua.

This is just a genre of porno.

Middle class white people waking up to discover what the BLM activists had been warning of twelve years ago.

Need to repost this in LeopardsEatingFaces

I mean, “car crashes into a stationary car” often gets the same response.

The idiot behind the wheel is somehow never at fault.

The Lich system was pretty close to the mark. Possible that developers gave the underlying features of SoM a wide berth out of caution, but so much of this seems to boil down to “we don’t want to risk the possibility of a lawsuit” rather than “we can’t just do our thing and see if WB’s lawyers care enough”.

So long as you’re not directly ripping off the code from another system, patent courts have been pretty generous in interpreting overlapping abstract concepts.

But any kind of suit is scary, particularly for studios that aren’t geared up to fight them.

Any time you put electrical tape on a cat and use it as a prop, I reserve the right to describe the film as low budget

Millions of fake IDs have been leaked.

Yeah, some of these criticisms are bad just on their face. Godfather is too slow for you? Come on. Is Rambo to slow for you as well? What about Speed?

Some of this just feels like kids who just graduated from watching Paw Patrol deciding they should veto what anyone else puts on the TV.

If you want to throw a fit because everything isn’t Marvel, I guess that’s fine for you. But don’t be shocked when you’re not invited back to College Movie Night.

I mean, which version?

I almost think the early low budget adaptations are better because of how zany they get with the art and effects.

The Timothee Chalamet version is just another action movie. But Lynch gets wild with it.

But it’s just vanilla combats with predictable outcomes.

So they invented… the first dozen seasons of the Pokemon cartoon?

They patented a very specific algorithm for a very specific kind of game. You can still do knock-offs of the system in the same way you can make RTS games without asking Blizzard’s permission or platformers without asking Nintendo’s.

I would suspect that SoM’s system is complex enough that nobody’s been eager to try and replicate it. But they high level concept of randomized enemy generation isn’t something you can patent. Neither is randomizing story elements between NPCs.

he is at the bottom of the barrel right now

I’ll believe it when I see it. He seems to be as dominant as ever, especially right after black bagging a world leader.

There is a reason he doesn’t want the epstein files out

Sure. Its embarrassing. But it isnt fatal by any stretch.

What if his base is just pedophiles and similarly minded creeps, pests, and jerks?

But a picture of the prez with half naked little girls on his lap would maybe get him out of the white house.

How? Who is going to push him out?

Why did the Romans fail?

I remember learning that the Romans fell because they were too gay and debauched and woke, so they lost their manly vigors.

Nevermind, history doesn’t like copypasta

I suppose its worth noting that the Roman Empire lasted centuries (millennia, if you see the Byzantine/Ottoman Empire as a continuation of Roman history). The UK is more comparable than the US, which flourished after WW1 and made it barely a century before fumbling.

But also, the book is hardly closed on the US as an empire. China, India, Persia, Rome, France… they all had their ups and downs.

The US writes the history books, runs the universities, and manages the international media networks.