Personally, the game I run the most is Shadowrun. Managed to transition my DnD group to Pathfinder 2e and it’s great. Pathfinder is DnD but so much better.

Cyberpunk was supposed to be fiction, not a blueprint :(

If you got a powerful tablet and installed Kali on it, isn’t that effectively a cyberdeck?

Nonviolent successes are always paired with violent alternatives. Nonviolent protests by themselves can be ignored, but if you have a nonviolent movement and a parallel but seperate violent movement biting your ankles… now negotiating with the nonviolent movement seems like a really good idea.

Wikipedia has a decent chronology tab of the kind of insanity going on when the UK just went 'Yay Ghandi! Nonviolence wins! Definitely nothing to do with all the terrorist attacks!"

Before India became completely ungovernable, their response to peaceful protest was to imprison anyone threatening their rule (make sure to read the “local violence” part).

On a more optimistic note, a true heir to Bernie will know how to negotiate with the center left to accomplish some of their goals in exchange for the support of progressives to win elections.

They tried protesting at oil infrastructure, they stopped multiple oil terminals in the UK being used for weeks and caused shortages in various parts of the UK. Hundreds went to prison and everyone forgot about it after a week.

They throw soup at glass, 2 people go to a police station for a few days and people are still talking about it months later.

Unfortunately, they have to exist within the constraints of modern news media, outrage cycles and social media, and that influences their decisions.

An advantage of funding things via a collective like Nebula as opposed to each individual creator managing their own patrons is that new creators can start making bigger, more expensive projects quicker. Even established creators have this advantage, they can take bigger risks on bigger projects with the safety net of a share of the nebula pie.

I don’t think a project like The Prince would exist without Nebula, for example.

Yeah, absolutely, that’s a much more readable summation than what I wrote.

As an aside, I really like the social contract theory. It’s a pretty clean philosophical summation of how the majority of people in tolerant democracies see the world and provides the foundation for it, even if they don’t think about it in formal philosophical terms. That essentially we are implicitly bound by the rules established by previous generations, those that set the rules (both cultural and legal), until such time as we form a political or cultural movement to change those rules. Then, anyone who comes after us is bound by those rules we set until and unless they in turn change them.

EDIT: I guess I should add that in the context of this thread, “be tolerant” is a cultural rule that has developed over the recent past, and thus if you aren’t tolerant there are social repercussions (and in countries with hate speech laws, even legal repercussions) as that is the current rule.

There’s also the social contract resolution to the tolerance paradox. Essentially, the tolerance paradox is that tolerating intolerance erodes tolerance. This means eventually if you allow intolerance to fester, they will seize control and you lose that tolerance.

The social contract resolution is that by being intolerant, you lose your right to be tolerated. This avoids that paradox, but superficially can look like intolerance.

I hope this didn’t end up too much like word salad.

Hungary is blocking every single sanction package on Russia. They do not send aid to Ukraine at all and even block aid shipments through Hungary.

All of these are very fair points. My point was that they’re happy to publicly call for “peace and an end to the war” while throwing Ukraine under a bus, but simultaneously they’re for NATO protecting them against Russia.

They also blocked Swedens NATO membership for ages.

If I’m not mistaken, this wasn’t a pro-Russian thing, this was a blackmail NATO allies for concessions in exchange for agreeing thing.

None of the Bucharest 9 have. Hungary may make loud noises, but even they were cooperating with this group to increase defence against Russia.

Blink-blink-blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink-blink-blink.

No, I don’t have something in my eyes, I swear I’m fine looks nervously at boss.

3rd time’s the charm! And also according to this map they didn’t even have to split it with Russia this time.

For players of strategy games, CAS suffices. No idea if militaries do it differently. Saying you’re going to an automatic teller machine would be awkward to say as well.

Absolutely. Fdroid is awesome.

I hate the fact that there’s no simple, free, ad-free note-taking app either inbuilt or on the app store. Just something simple and local to take a quick shopping list or a name or something like that. Fdroid has me covered for that.

Playing smart or charismatic orcs is totally fine in Shadowrun, it’s not that suboptimal. You have to spend a bit more karma at the start to overcome the lower starting charisma, but it’s not bad at all.

I do get where you’re coming from, and this is why comedians like Jon Stewart have been so careful to seperate out “good weird” from “bad weird”, but unfortunately for you it’s a fabulously successful rhetorical line that strips away a lot of their artifice.

The reason it bothers them so much is because they want to claim the “silent majority”, who thinks like they do but don’t say it out loud.

When they’re the outliers, they can no longer do that. That’s why it gets under their skin so much.

So, I watched that third link in its entirety. It was pretty interesting. I think the core idea is that NK isn’t some absolutely insane bizarro land, which I actually agreed with beforehand. It did not disprove the fact that NK is an authoritarian dictatorship. The only thing it did prove (which again, I knew about beforehand) is that western media likes to exaggerate the faults to hyperbolic levels. I honestly think that the average north korean would live a better life without the Kim family (or any other family regime) ruling over them. This doesn’t mean that they force people to have specific hairstyles at gunpoint or execute politicians for slouching during speeches (as the video joked about), but they still direct a large portion of the states wealth towards friends and family.

I think you should really honestly consider the fact that two wrongs don’t make a right. NK and the USA do terrible things. Instead of litigating which one is worse, maybe we should focus on how to make better alternatives, like you’ve done with this alternative to Reddit.

That specific BBC article is what I was talking about. It’s not publicly available testimony, it’s information gathering by the SK state about NK from defectors.