Fig 53: Risk of Rain’s “Huntress” has eyes perfectly positioned to gauge the velocity of arrows she fires.

Look it up. It’s not my job to educate you. Facing danger in real life is a real problem, having every conservative politician focusing on banning your healthcare and reducing your rights is a real problem. I have to believe you’re an empathy lacking troll or a bigot, and likely both. Discrimination is a "real problem,’ and even if pedophilia was the number one political issue in our country, extrajudicial violence isn’t going to solve it. And I block bigots, because I’m not going to debate someone who acts in bad faith and says something like

there are people with real problems at the moment

Insane thing to say.

Right. My lived experience doesn’t matter, nor the statistics. I’m not seeking attention, I, like the majority of people reading this, am alarmed. I’m seeing people I care about and the community around me hurt every day, and you think “gender rules my life.” Not a person worth listening to. When was the last time you got harassed in public for something intrinsic to yourself? For my trans wife, it was today. If you seriously think that trans people aren’t currently at the front of the culture war, you’re deaf, ignorant, or lying. Watch literally any pundit speak, any newscast, or any political debate around the country. Then tell me trans people shouldn’t be concerned about violent rhetoric aimed at people they’re increasingly being lumped in with. Bigot or stupid, I won’t debate you on the reality plain around me daily.

Likely, or are likely to mistakenly target a trans person who happens to be around while they’re hunting the person they cat fished. The people who are okay with extrajudicial violence are mostly conservatives. What’s to say the people willing to go to such lengths to hurt someone wouldn’t take the opportunity when they see someone they believe is a groomer and pedophile simply for being trans? It’s easy to expand the definition, and we’ve seen it happen in the past. It’s happening right now in rhetoric. Violence against trans people is already statistically high.

If someone shows up with the intent to fuck a minor, absolutely, but I guarantee those aren’t the only targets vigilantism catches.

Except sometimes “pedophile” actually means “trans person just living.” The right claims all trans people are groomers.

It does sound more racist, because it is. Why not Yasuke? Just because he’s black? Why any of the other AC protagonists? Why choose a Spartan, a highly unethical culture filled with slavery and abuse? Why choose a Welsh pirate instead of a Caribbean native? These are all pointless questions, because the answer is all the same. That’s the story they wanted to tell. Maybe they wanted to highlight the historical outlier at an important time in history. We could speculate on any number of different reasons, but “DEI” doesn’t make any damn sense, considering they knew how gamers would react beforehand and even went out of their way to make a statement about it.

They wanted to tell this story. If you want a different one, play a different game. There is absolutely nothing wrong with choosing Yasuke as a protagonist. The series has consistently demonstrated that they don’t really mind telling the stories of historical outliers, repeatedly. They shouldn’t have to specifically avoid (because that is what your argument has shifted to) Yasuke for fears of “DEI.” The “anti-woke” are ridiculous.

Eivor was a foreigner (and an invader) for everything outside the beginning of the game, so was Kassandra/Alexios (also invaders), they just had the same skin tone as the place they’re foreign in. There’s a big difference between “native characters with understated culture” and just “not foreign.” Those are totally different arguments, and it seems like you’re trying to make both. Again, why not have an interesting character from history be explored like this. Acting as if past characters are these nebulous “local” individuals when they’re often the direct children or relatives of prominent, real, historical figures, if fictional ones, seems silly. This is totally in line with past stories they’ve told. I really don’t see a valid reason a non-local character is “problematic” in an AC game. We’ve done it a bunch of times. We’ve played a Welsh guy in the Caribbean, a Viking in Britain, and a Spartan in Greece, just to name a few. I’m sure I’m forgetting other valid examples.

The “women are always screaming” stereotype is sexist. It’s a direct extension of the pseudoscientific hysteria diagnosis that used to be commonly accepted. “A women,” as you put it, might scream, and you might find that annoying. Women as a category have higher pitched voices on average, and the line between “reasonable yelling” and “hysterical screaming” is often just one of pitch, even when the cause for alarm or injury is the same.

Additionally, neither I nor any of the women in my life “scream” in response to injury. We yell in pain just like someone with a masculine voice, if a bit higher pitched. Some may, but it’s not common and is usually reserved for situations of extreme alarm or fear, or occasionally excitement. Any time a woman does scream on video, you always see someone in the comments complaining about how annoying women screaming is. The same is never said about men screaming, unless they scream “like a girl.”

9/10 times. How out of touch are you?

Perhaps that might be true of authoritarianism, but that doesn’t necessarily hold true for leftism in general. Democracy is not an antithesis of leftism, it’s the opposite, and there are many leftist principles in government in Europe. I wouldn’t go as far as to label any of them a true socialist state, but leftist policies have shown remarkable success.

This complaint feels manufactured. No one complained about the romance-able historical figures in previous Japanese games, and a quick look at social media and Japanese news shows no outrage. Also, every other game features historically unknown natives? What? We have multiple characters that are children of royalty, at least two that are military warlords, and a Viking raider for fuck’s sake. The only game I can think of that has a native of the region not connected to the powers that be is 3, where you play a Native American. You’re often just playing essentially a secret police for the state of the country you’re in. Why not have a black samurai, a notable historical figure, be the main character. That’s super interesting. It’s not like Japanese culture is being erased. Your outrage feels misplaced and racially motivated, and I doubt we’d be seeing so much manufactured discontent if it was a white samurai (and there were several).

How does this relate to the article, or the situation with the streamer? Sure, dunk on Ubisoft, but maybe not about a black historical figure being black.

The part that had me “tilted,” as you put it was

everyone is to blame for this situation even being possible. You had 8 years.

It shows a general misunderstanding of the political situation in the US. This hasn’t been 8 years, or 20. This has been happening since at least Reagan (the 80s), perhaps the entire history of the country, depending on how you look at it. I don’t even blame every person that voted for Trump for more than being ignorant, depending on the case. Some people genuinely don’t know anything but what their TV tells them and the team they’ve been voting for for 60 years. That makes them ignorant and misinformed, but the real evil, the source of the problem, isn’t them. It’s the establishment and its propaganda machine, which have been doing their thing for longer than any of us have been alive. I can’t blame the average person, because that worldview is one that doesn’t see a good ending where we learn and improve. Most Americans aren’t stupid, they’re powerless, or feel like it, and the majority of the stupid ones are being lied to and misled, not writing the culture war bullshit.

I’m the most hopeful type of person when it comes to the future. For my entire life, I’ve been fighting for something better and truly believing it will happen, and even I’m looking into leaving the country. We’re in a dark time, and it is affecting and could continue to affect the rest of the world too. Blame isn’t solving anything but our own hurt feelings. No one, when blamed, changes their mind. It entrenches them and makes them hide their heads in the sand. We need to, as a class, not as any one nation, band together against the ruling class, globally. Pointing fingers misses the point and is what the ruling class wants.

You lose all credibility blaming every person in a country, even those too young to have voted in previous elections, even those that have been using every ounce of energy to fight the system for decades, even those that have become victims of the system and live disenfranchised and forgotten. You sound bitter and hateful, when there are millions of people in the US that feel the same way. How can you be so blind as to assume all of any group is complicit? I understand the frustration, but you’re misdirecting it wildly. I’m not stupid, I saw this coming, I’ve been fighting it as long as I’ve been alive, as has my community around me. “Fix your country?” We’re trying. I don’t control the media, I don’t control the propaganda machine, and I can’t educate the millions of Americans that are caught up in it. All I can do, and have been doing, is protest, vote, raise awareness, and live in active, visible defiance of the system.

Half of Europe would be considered “far left” from a US perspective. Affordable housing? Universal healthcare? Parental leave for long durations? Walkable cities and public transit? Try getting any of those to fly with the US neoliberals.

The system isn’t immutable, it just has protected itself very well from any third party breaking the system as it is. We will get a third party, or more, and end things like first past the post and Citizens United much faster by taking over the Dems than by trying to get a third party to have plurality support. It’s simply unrealistic to keep bashing our heads on a wall that is more likely to continue to cement the system against us, instead of changing the system in an achievable way.

AOC, Bernie, and a great number of the young Dems are ready to take over the party. There is broad support to kick out the appeasement supporters and change the party to start making changes. The harder we try to gain third party support right now, the more entrenched the current establishment gets. We’ve seen this happen for decades. The support for ending the two party system and things like Citizens United is bipartisan, but mostly Democrat voters, meaning Republicans will change more and more rules and make the system more and more unfair. We don’t have the generations it will take to bring third party support to where it would need to be. That’s generations of Republican power subverting the system. We need to change it now.

If true, this would in fact be a huge step toward quantum computing at scale, which would revolutionize computing. However, they’ve claimed this before, and have offered no evidence yet of their supposed discovery.

Both parties can be immoral, except in this particular case it’s very clear that western backed fascist regime is the only immoral party.

Right this conversation isn’t worth having lol

I’m not trying to argue that it’s okay. I’m not a military expert or analyst. However, people that are those things don’t make this argument and so I’m not willing to unless I’m provided evidence of a viable alternative. A better example might be the Ba’athist defense of Iraq during the unjustified 2003 invasion (not that the Ba’athist regime wasn’t a nightmare for the Iraqi people, it just wasn’t the US’s place to involve themselves on false pretenses). Iraqi cities are being invaded, they simply don’t have the military infrastructure to have their forces entirely separate from civilian targets, and so civilians end up getting hurt by airstrikes and artillery because of their proximity to military targets. Of course, party extremists also used extreme violence to prevent civilian retreat, but I’ve seen no evidence of this in Ukraine. Convention is all well and good until said conventions would require surrendering territory to avoid conflict in civilian areas. Governments will take any action they deem necessary to survive a conflict. Both parties in a conflict can be immoral.

The human shield argument has never really passed the smell test for me, especially when used as condemnation against Palestinians. It’s very difficult to defend against the invasion of a civilian area without occupying said civilian area. Existing military infrastructure typically doesn’t exist at the scale a frontline needs in invaded territory. Strikes targeted specifically against civilians are obviously unacceptable and immoral regardless of perpetrator.