It’s also related to sex being a “special” or “sacred” act. If it was just something that could be potentially dangerous by resulting in STDs or unwanted pregnancy, like say, driving your car can be potentially dangerous by resulting in accidents and death, then no stigma would exist. But people give it this special character beyond any other human activities, and put it on a pedestal essentially.

Without that pedestal, a delivery driver delivering to someone they don’t like, for the money, is just … their job. Sex being a job is just … a job a person can have. Why make it special?

People basically want to put the pussy on a pedestal, and you don’t really need to be doing that. It doesn’t actually make any sense, it’s just tradition for some folks. Who then want other people to follow their tradition too.

I know someone up there in years that enjoyed the Far Cry series. Didn’t really expect that. shrug

More generally I think it’ll commonly be something that relates to their interests when they were younger. Someone that retired 20 years ago from aerospace engineering might actually really enjoy Kerbal Space Program or even Outer Wilds, a former industrial foreman might like Factorio, for a retired military historian, bring on that Total War.

I can see games like Big Game Hunter and Truck Simulator being more broadly popular with certain segments. Some sports games maybe, like a tennis game or some golf thing maybe, I don’t know much about those. A simpler, realism-leaning racing game maybe. Flight simulator works great here.

The main thing is I’d avoid games with lots of layers of game design and abstraction. It should do what it says on the tin, and there shouldn’t be many steps or abstract mechanics between them and getting into the meat of the game and the core gameplay loop.

Minimal menus is probably a good idea. Like, a Paradox Interactive game would probably be a poor choice, just because they have so much you need to learn to become a proficient player. Fine text can be hard to read too, so menus and tooltips and complex status interfaces are usually gonna be pretty meh for most people. Can’t play Starcraft if you have to squint and lean in every time you want to know how many minerals you have.

Want that learning curve to just get into the initial gameplay to be pretty gentle overall. The experience should be fairly intuitive to real life, and real life doesn’t have that many menus and buttons. Usually, depending on their former career I guess.

Kudos for doing this btw.

(oh, and sorry I couldn’t answer your core question)

Very well summarized, I think this hits the majority of the most relevant points.

I wanted to disagree with this, but I actually think you make a rather compelling argument.

If you look at the Trump candidacy and things like qanon, it’d be hard to argue that the internet isn’t making inroads. My generation let this go on for long enough, it’s not about the lulz anymore. Lots of people are getting hurt, and it can still get worse.

I occasionally go through my old comments to see how things got received, see if I could improve my wording, things like that. General communications skill polishing. It’s not consuming as much as critically reviewing, but whatever.

Since I’m adding engagement on lemmy, and I do put some effort in to be amusing or informative or whatever (usually anyway), yes I do feel like I am helping. If I was on reddit or something, not so much.

I’d say both the parties are pretty capitalist. The repubs were interested in finding their challenger, they didn’t know who it would be yet. The dems, all the way down to the majority of voters, were interested in supporting their incumbent, not interested in a chaotic primary fight.

I think that’s still largely the case.

So, that’s pretty much the same order as always, not seeing how that helps anyone.

And you can look up who runs if you want. You do not need to see debates to figure it out, someone announces after they file their paperwork, then its up to them to convince people to support them. You’re pretending like the DNC needs to do all this work to serve us up a platter of great options, but ignoring that it’s the candidates that determine how they get received. Don’t forget, most Americans still hate the idea of communism, too, even if they don’t actually know what it is.

This conspiracy theory nonsense is getting tiresome. The real world isn’t that simple.

Okay then, next was SC and Nevada. How far do we have to go before we see these changes? And who was the contender that was hurt by the changes?

That’s funny, I remember Iowa and NH going first like they do every year.

Polling, usually. Otherwise primary results. Most states did have their primary, btw, only a handful cancelled. Each state has their own way of doing it.

Can you name a candidate that was doing well at any point? Better than low single-digits? Dean was the only one I heard much about.

edit: You do remember the write-in uncommitted thing, right? Those were primaries.

Bernie decides if Bernie runs. He has already said he won’t though, he’d have to change his mind. He’s also getting up there in years unfortunately.

This is true, it is very possible.

One thing not enough people are discussing is the incumbent advantage though. We’d lose that edge, and be subject to the standard backlash-against-the-last-party phenomenon.

We’d need a candidate strong enough to compensate for that lost advantage. And there’s the big problem, dems have had very few strong leaders since Obama retired. Bernie was our strongest, and he’s not even officially a dem.

I’m leery of polls these days. One thing I like about the Bulwark is they do a lot of focus groups, where you can hear from voters at a more detailed level, in their own words.

It’s still not a great method, since its such a small sample size. But I think it’s better than polls of poll-taking Americans.

And why? Because Dean Philips was doing so strongly, garnering appeal from progressives with his centrist positions?

If you want strong candidates, they need to run. If nobody good runs, then I think we’ve found the problem.

“Party leaders” did not shove Biden down our throats. Unless you’re arguing that the party leaders of the dems are all the suburban soccer moms of the countries, and their consistency at voting. Then yes, that’s true.

And just pulling in revenues with clickbaity tactics.

I agree, that does sound plausible, if they had a listening station nearby.

While I agree with the broad strokes of what you’re saying, we do have enough intelligence penetration into the Russian military to predict an invasion even their own soldiers did not know about. We could potentially find out where their listening stations are. One would have to be very nearby.

Also, we have multiple subs. Revealing one temporarily does not compromise our deterrence. Nor is this move without any value, I think it’s important that we occasionally sabre-rattle back at them. It seems to be a language they understand.

All that said, I doubt nuclear WW3 is around the corner with MAD still being the case. I doubt non-nuclear WW3 is around the corner unless China joins Russia in a military alliance. What I do think is within the next few years is chipping away at the Russian economy and morale of the populace until they sue for peace in Ukraine.

It does not provide the details, but I highly doubt the polling was done anonymously online. You’re right, that would be completely useless.

However, polling done offline also needs to be anonymized, even though it is offline and the pollster knows the identities of the participants, simply to protect them from repercussions.