These are fine examples, but all over 20 years old now! (Also I’m still salty about Origin Systems in 1992!)
But hey, EA has never stopped sucking! We can also lament recent purchases like legendary UK studio Codemasters (2021) or Respawn (2017). Respawn is especially funny since it was made by ex-Infinity Ward founders, who got bought again! I wonder what their next future-EA-acquisition project will be?
I’m really wondering what it means myself! Is it like superstitious programming? Or “cookie cutter” perhaps, using templates and copy-paste from QA sites to duct tape it all together?
This is just willful misunderstanding of history. Several of the founders were against political parties, but since game theory hadn’t been invented yet they put in place a system that would force a two or one party system. Which it quickly did. There have been two parties from the very beginning, just not the same two parties. But arguably, the same two broad positions: the Federalists favored elites, while the DRs favored liberalism.
Why? So they can betray you at a critical junction to claim power for themselves, or so you can betray them without feeling too guilty about it?
Because you sure as hell can’t work with them on any leftist projects. They have zero desire to unconcentrate the accumulated power in Washington, only to claim it for themselves.
Ah sorry bud but You were Time’s person of the year in 2006 so now we’re all complicit!
His exact tweet came up in another post of this story. He said we should eliminate Palestine and Isreal, which is that one step too far. Today’s Nazi’s actually can’t be openly antisemetic because the genocidal apartheid state of Isreal is their closest international ally.
It’s also too fucking late. They’ve already got all the data and have backdoored the systems.
Elon and his little hack squad needs to be arrested and investigated not just for this but going back to whatever secret projects they were doing at Space X to interfere with the election. Trump and Musk both have admitted in public speeches that they did something to technologically undermine the election.
That’s the thing, they aren’t public employees. DOGE isn’t a valid government department, which requires congress. This is a private citizen and his private employees/associates (is he even paying them?) staging a take over of the government. Don’t just grant them authority because they claimed to have it.
Nothing is more homosexual than being a loving, present father for the children you’ve created with a woman.
With massive tariffs on all incoming food, and sabotaging our vital food producing areas, its almost like he’s either deliberately damaging the country or using famine as a tool to commit mass murder of the poor.
It’s also a revelation-of-the-method: authoritarians love to gloat about how they’re doing it right in front of you, with tools you trusted, and you can’t stop it.
I think this is a pretty good perspective (thank you political author Snot Flickerman, god I love the internet)
I’ve heard very similar explanations for why communes falls apart You start with a group of adults who want to live communally, they get that rolling and sometimes it works out really well. But they almost never survive the second generation because too many of the commune kids don’t really care about the group and just want to get away and build their own lives.
If anything, practices like the Amish sending their kids out into the world and letting them choose to return to the life probably work out a lot better to disperse teenage rebellion and reestablish the values and ideals of the community.
If the leadership (and there’s always leadership, even if informally) is open, then the influx of new ideas can also help prevent stagnation, but for exactly the reasons outlined above (institutional capture, stagnant high-rankers more concerned with status quo and the security of their positions) leadership tends to close itself off.
I do think the capitalist mode makes this worse though. In theory, communal projects just fall apart when they fail to adapt, since they lose their purpose. Capitalist organizations can often keep going in zombie mode, because the actual function of ALL capitalist organizations is to make money. Anything else is literally idealism layered on top, the material reality is that capitalist organizations exist to make money. And when the ideals fall away, that still remains and becomes the hungry driver of all future decisions.
I’m reminded of a thing I complain about all the time: the festival cycle. Say you learn about a new festival, or outdoor concert, or similar such thing. The first year will typically be chaotic, a little disorganized, but the people tend to be enthusiastic. They want to be here, they want to have fun, but they also are motivated early-adopters and friends of the organizers, so they want to help make it a good festival.
The 2nd through 5th-ish years of the annual festival are the prime years. Success in the first (and subsequent) years attracts better talent, more talent, and more people. The festival is lively, fun, and often carries some idealism as well. Like, “this festival celebrate music in our community” or “all proceeds of the fair go to feeding the homeless!”
By the 6th year though, if it has continued to be successful, this is about the time when the amount of “party people” is severly out-weighing the commited festival goers. These are the people that dont make costumes, dont camp out, dont really engage with the festival beyond pure trasactionalism: I give you money, and you give me fun.
There’s now too much money, profit, in the system and usually a big national company makes a buy-out offer now, or the festival is simply big enough that managing it necessitates building a company and the finance people just worm their way in. Ticket prices go up, tickets get partitioned into VIP tiers, local acts get replace with big corporate names, ads and merchandising begin to dominate your eye lines everywhere in the festival.
Eventually, it either outgrows its birthplace and moves somewhere bigger, or becomes so large and mismanaged that it becomes too unprofitable to run anymore and gets shut down. A few people go “man, remember how cool Blahfest was? What if we got some friends together and organized a new BlergFest?!” and the cycle begins again.
LOOK WHAT THEY NEED TO MIMIC A FRACTION OF OUR APOLOGIES
Deny his lies and false orders.
Defend your community from fascist oppression.
Depose that orange fucker and all his stooges.
The all new Tesla Cyb-airforce X! Looks like if the F-117A and a dumpster had a baby, and then put that baby into another dumpster that wasn’t it’s mother. Is the opposite of stealth. So heavy it requires a support plane to help it fly.
Hah! I win my shitty personal bet that he wouldn’t make it a week without getting back to fucking golf! God how I hate that bloated, predictable shitbag
Obviously they want to make an example. They’ll drag him through the mud in court, reveal that he was sexually deviant, claim he cheated on tests in school, played video games, played d&d, worshipped Satan, on and on. Then, when they’ve dragged the court out long enough to bore people, they’ll execute him publicly and call it justice.
They won’t epstein him, too obvious and likely to generate martyrdom. Killing him like a “common murderer” shows that “the system works” and that the machinery of the state’s actions are natural and inevitable.
Or maybe they’ll try to just lock him away forever and get him to write some books to make the prisons a little more money. Works for serial killers, and sales of “How to murder a CEO” will help to defuse revolutionary sentiment by recuperating the murder as an exotic one-off situation. He’s gonna get simple-ricked.
The country has collapsed several times, because of those things. The Civil War was the US collapsing over the rich landowners refusing to move away from slavery. The great depression was also a collapse of the old order, and ushered in the current MIC-based order.
The solution to the Civil War and slavery was Reconstruction, which was so successful that the rich rallied a counterrevolution to resuppress people. The solution to the great depression was the war economy and global looting that kicked off after WW2. Looting the planet with petrodollars has kept Americans complacent and happy enough til now but the rich have run out of places to loot other than home.
So now we’re back in crisis, perched on the edge of a new collapse. After several million or billion people are killed by disasters and genocide, things usually settle back into a prosperous mode for the survivors for a while until the stupid rich take over and collapse the system out of greed. Again.