Discussing David Pakman, Andrew Yang, and white supremecy

 So, David Pakman and Andrew Yang had a sit down recently discussing his forward party. It was a pretty decent interview, if anyone wants to watch it. However, there does seem to be some drama extending from it, and I kind of get the impression David Pakman is kind of fanning the flames of it.

Essentially, when he was discussing his forward party and trying to appeal to the right, David Pakman asked him if right wingers with crazy ideas would be welcome into the forward party. Yang responded basically saying that everyone is welcome. So Pakman asked him more specifically what about white supremacists, are they welcome if they agree with yang on core issues, and he basically said people can disagree with him on lots of stuff, but if they agree on the core issues, they're welcome.

Of course, the left lost their crap over this, claiming that Yang is supportive of white supremecy and blah blah blah. This forced Yang to respond with a tweet disavowing white supremacy and saying white supremecists aren't welcome in the movement, because you know, grace and tolerance. And then yang went further calling this a" manufactured controversy...dragging down our public discourse" and flinging accusations of racism "isn't the path to enlightenment." Pakman is now asking "well is Yang mad over the question?"

So, what I want to do here is discuss the answer, discuss the outrage, the backtracking, and give my own answer on this question.

First, Yang's first answer. I see where he's coming from. And to cut straight to my own answer, which would be similar to the first answer, this is how I feel about it. I don't agree with people on everything. And I understand people are going to disagree with me. I certainly don't approve of hateful ideologies like white supremacy. But say I ran on basic income and a white supremecist supported me. Would I tell them I don't want their vote? Not really. And here's why. 

I DON'T SUPPORT WHITE SUPREMACY!

Like, period, end of story. And here's how I view running for office. You run on a platform. You support certain ideas. You build a coalition of voters. Now, those voters might not agree with you on a lot of things. I mean, let's look at the reverse when I look at who I support. Even the people I agree with most, I'll only agree with say, 70-80% of the time. That's your Andrew Yangs, and your Bernie Sanderses, etc. By the time you get to establishment democrats, you're talking 40-50% of the time. Republicans? Eh, like 10-20% of the time at most normally. 

Politicians have their views, and voters have their views. If a white supremacist wants to vote for someone who they agree with on a few core issues, say, UBI, or ranked choice voting, I don't see a particular issue with that. I mean, isn't it better to maybe try to draw them away from white supremacist political campaigns like say, Donald Trump, and neutralize the impact of their harmful views by getting them supporting candidates who aren't white supremacists? I mean, that's kind of how we have been able to suppress a lot of these harmful views over the past 75 or so years. People don't like to talk about it but I mentioned it recently. We've always kind of had a fascist streak in the population in this country. And the way we've been able to neuter it is by pushing the overton window AWAY from it. And getting those white supremacists to vote for politicians who aren't fascists. That's exactly what FDR did. He saw the rise of fascism in Europe and Bolshevism in Russia, and he realized in order to save democracy, he needed to promote a version of liberal democracy that actually worked for the people. And thus, we got the new deal and social democracy. 

And while that paradigm wasn't perfect, I mean, FDR's coalition was largely racist, it did stop us from descending into fascism or communism. But then the racists got butthurt when the democrats decided to crack down on segregation and the like, so they joined the republicans, and the republicans wooed them with dog whistle politics. Again, it was kept low key, and other issues were put forward, like anti welfarism. But ultimately, the republican party has, until recently at least, been able to at least keep up the appearance of not being racist and pushing for color blindness. Even Trump tries to use tokenism to give the impression of not being racist. 

I mean, as I see it, a lot of people are going to have the views they're going to have. We can try to change peoples' views, i would suggest doing so through reason and evidence, but if we can't, I think the best strategy to deal with white supremacy is distraction. And if we can encourage white supremacists to spend their time campaigning for issues that actually would help America at large, and they're willing to leave those politics at the door in the process, well, I don't see a problem with white supremacists supporting yang. Isn't it better that they support forward thinking ideas, rather than trying to promote their crap? Now, if they try to use the party as a springboard for their horrid ideas, yeah no, yang should shut that crap down, and I would too if I were running a campaign, but that isn't really what's happening here.

The left is essentially trying to purity test Yang. As we know, the SJWs are obnoxious in promoting their brand of politics. And they like to shove their ideas down everyone's throats and "cancel" people if they don't submit. And I see that as what's happening here. The left made a big uproar over this, like, well, we don't want THOSE people in the coalition, and if you welcome them, you're bad people.

Okay, fine, cool, you can drive them out of the movement. But where are they gonna go? To their own movement. And what are they gonna base their movement around? White supremacy. And who are they gonna be fighting against? YOU! If you want to concentrate all of the racist people all in one party, so they can create a coalition based around racism, which will just fan the flames of racism and more culture war nonsense, all the SJWs need to do is keep chasing people with any impurity on these issues out of their movement.

And this inflames tensions, causes polarization, and is one of the reasons why politics has such a crapshow in the past 6 years or so. When we ended up with Hillary vs Trump, we ended up in the worst timeline imaginable. We ended up with a worthless milquetoast centrist dem obsessed with social issues, and we ended up with an actually popular republican who pandered more openly to "racists" and "deplorables." And this essentially led to the crapshow that we have today. Trump's populism is popular, and even breathed life into a dying GOP. And well, now the democrats look like they're dying as the party seems obsessed with social issues and can't do crap to improve the lives of its citizens in a meaningful way. 

And this is actually why i have become a "moderate" forwardist, and have been checking in and out of politics over the more recent years. Because this sucks. Culture wars suck. making the defining issues about race and culture is just so...useless. And everyone as at each others' throats, and honestly, both sides are guilty. I don't like trumpers. But SJWs are pretty much just as toxic and obnoxious these days.

And honestly, I'm sick and tired of how prominent these issues are. I feel like they take over everything and we can't get anything done.

And to get mad in Yang's place, and understanding the frustration he feels, because it is a manufactured controversy, and quite frankly, the left needs to stop witch hunting yang, or anyone else for that matter, who doesn't fully agree with their ideology. 

Honestly, we can either continue along the path of culture war BS that will lead to unnecessary polarization over nothing, or, we can address issues, and create coalitions that diminish the impact of harmful ideologies, while moving us in a more positive direction on other stuff.

That said, should we be open to white supremecists voting for someone like yang? Sure, given they leave those politics at the door and don't fan their flames or feed them in some way. I'd rather they vote for forward party principles than white supremacy. 

And the same applies to the other side. yang has been careful to avoid giving any power to the culture wars. he seems to understand the issues with them and wants to stay out of them and remain neutral. Which is a good move. but it seems like the left is obsessed with making yang constantly take their side when he just wants to stay out of it. It's kind of pissing me off. Because that's what the left does. They must try to force people to agree with them, and they will castigate anyone who doesn't.

Honestly, this strategy is one of the reasons why the internal politics of the left is such a crapshow. I really do feel like sometimes it's either wokeism or social democracy. The left will explicitly push away socially conservative but economically progressive independents because they don't want THOSE people in their party. And as someone who is more moderate on the social and more left on the economics, I feel like they don't even want me. They've basically written people like me off. I'm one of those central Pennsylvanian dumb####s they don't want in the party, and they're ignoring, in order to bring in more moderate suburbanites who live in near Philly. 

But, what's in most central Pennsylvanian cities? Lots of poverty. Lots of crime. Lack of jobs. They're exactly the normal people Yang tries to appeal to. Except, you know, he treats us like humans and tries to solve our issues rather than purity testing for woke ideology. 

Honestly, it's a crapshow. This shouldn't even be an issue, and bravo for Yang finally lashing out at these guys. They need to shut up already. We got other issues to worry about and quite frankly they're a lot more important than culture war nonsense. 

Yang gets it right. He's being neutral on the cultural stuff. He's focusing on the issues that he finds most important. He's trying to be open to everyone and avoid controversy. But then you got some people who try to force him to take a side. it's really kind of sickening.

I think I'm done with "progressives" too

 So, this is probably a long time coming given my trajectory over the past year, but I think that just as I'm done with the democrats, and Bernie Sanders, I'm also done with the "progressive" movement too. This is kind of painful to write, but after reading back the response to Kyle Kulinski's post on doomerism, and dealing with other progressives online recently, I think it's gotten to the point I formally cut ties with them. 

The fact is, I just don't fit in the modern progressive movement any more. My ideology runs parallel to theirs, but it's fundamentally different. Before I say anything else, let me just say I feel like I need to do this, mostly because I'm sick and tired of progressives taking pot shots at me, and Andrew Yang, and how they act like it's their way or the highway. If progressives were more open and accommodating to those with differing perspectives, this post would not be necessary. A long standing belief I've had on the progressive movement is that I really believe we have more in common with each other than we don't. But, at the same time, it's become apparent to me, starting from around 2019 when the Yang-Sanders dichotomy started to form, to now, that some serious rifts have been beginning to form. And quite frankly, the progressives are the ones who took the first shot. 

Purity testing

A big issue I have with the left as a whole is the purity testing. Now, I admit I'm not innocent in this. heck, the reason Ive been able to remain in the progressive ranks for so long was quite frankly because progressives and I have a common enemy, and that is the democratic establishment. We also have some very similar goals, often supporting things like Medicare for all and free college. Support for those two things are why I tied my wagon to the progressive movement for so long. Because I've been saying, since around 2015 (and I have no changed in this sense), that we need a new new deal. We need to fix the country, and it isn't just a little change we need around the edges. We need major change. And quite frankly, Sanders rose to prominence around that time, and I globbed onto him. But my major change was based on three things. Basic income, medicare for all, and free college. And basic income wasn't even discussed in the mainstream then, so basically I just decided to join up with them for the healthcare and free college and worry about the rest later. But the dems and Hillary pushed back in 2016, and this caused me to ultimately support Bernie and become associated with the progressive movement out of certain priorities.

And a lot of us became paranoid of the democratic establishment, who would use dirty tricks to bully us into supporting them without offering us anything of value in return. But, since then, things have gotten out of hand. When Yang rose to prominence in 2019, I really had to rethink my loyalty to the progressive movement. And while I ultimately did go back to supporting Bernie, if I had to do it again, I probably wouldn't this time. I'll get to that later. But honestly? Yang was not recieved well by progressives. And the core reason was that he was not Bernie. He was a bit more mixed on medicare for all. He didn't support full on free college. He supported UBI and human centered capitalism, but he was fairly moderate on other stuff. This alienated a lot of Bernie people.

But, to some extent, they just didn't understand the brilliance of Yang's ideology, and I did. Yang meant well with his UBI. I could understand why some progressives didn't like it, but their reaction was....less than hoped for. Instead of, like me, saying, okay he has these flaws but this is a good idea, they seemed to come out against UBI in general, arguing Yang was a right winger and a neoliberal shill who wanted to demolish the welfare state (oh what a tragedy that would be assuming we got a UBI out of it /s), and how his plan was evil. Rather than an honest exchange ideas they just instinctively bashed it because it wasn't Bernie and attacked it. As someone who considered myself progressive AND Yang gang, I was baffled by this, and frustrated. UBI is one of the most progressive ideas we could implement. Why were these people against it?! For a while I just didn't get answers for that. 

I thought these were just one off wannabe larping socialists and that most progressives liked UBI, but these attacks gotten to me over time. And it wasn't just on this topic I ended up having issues with progressives, it's a lot of them.

I'm kind of moderate on social issues and foreign policy. But if you're not the most extremist leftist on all of these things, you're bad. We've discussed my many issues with the SJW community before. The anti war community is just as bad, how the far left wants to end all wars and pull out of everywhere and they see the US as an evil occupier and blah blah blah. Again, more moderate/reasonable on this. but those philosophical differences matter. And the fact is, the progressives have these long laundry lists of policy positions you're supposed to hold and they scream and get uppity if you don't adopt LITERALLY ALL OF THEM. They have zero tolerance for impurity. I can be purity testy on my top few issues, but then on most I'm willing to compromise and work with others. I focus mostly on economics, and stick to my top issues, but progressives are never satisfied and keep screaming about people over anything. If you are "lukewarm" on black lives matter, you might as well say you're for Hitler. If you support Israel at all like Andrew Yang does, you're bad bad bad. No tolerance or nuance for any difference at all. It gets too much. And I guess that's why the Kyle Kulinski enforcer idea isn't going well with me. He wants to create more flak for impurity and while I understand his frustrations with the progressive movement, it just gets too much for me given I don't align with them on exactly everything.

Differences over policy priorities

Beyond not being enthusiastic over purity testing progressives, I'm starting to realize that I have different policy preferences. I recognized as early as 2019 that we can't have it all. While we can probably spend A LOT more than we do on social spending, we have limits. We have to prioritize what we're for. And the progressive movement has just chosen a different approach to economics.

The fact is, they just genuinely don't support UBI. They say they do, but whenever the subject comes up they reflexively attack it, saying it destroys welfare, and while they theoretically support their super special UBI plan, that plan isn't feasible in practice. We can probably spend an additional, roughly $5 trillion in additional social spending. Bernie's agenda is around $4.4 trillion, consisting of priorities like the green new deal, housing, medicare for all, etc. He supports large expansive programs, but obviously, if you are going to support a UBI, you might have to trim them a bit to make them work. And I spent much of the past year on this blog working out those numbers. And push comes to shove, I WILL compromise on other issues to make UBI work. I even looked at whether I would prefer UBI + moderate ideas or M4A + compromised UBI. I preferred to support UBI. So UBI is my priority #1. But the "progressive" movement just craps on it constantly and it's basically "well if we can fit it in AFTER everything else", and lets face it that after will never come. Because they'd spend tons of money on medicare for all and a green new deal and then turn around and say "UBI? we can't afford that!" And that's because we simply have different priorities. I admit many are overlapping which is why I tended to align with them, but there's some real significant ideological differences driving these differences too.

Differences over ideology

At the end of the day, I just different with the progressives on ideology. Bernie Sanders, in running for president, was a bit of a standard bearer for progressives, and presented a full ideology that his supporters have expanded upon. And that ideology is a lot more like 20th century liberalism a la FDR, combined with some "socialist" influences. As such, preserving existing safety nets, both old and new, is sacrosanct. Sure they want to expand them, even offer universal safety nets in a lot of areas, but they simply don't support a UBI, or at least prioritize it high enough to essentially support it. As such, their approach has many of the trappings of 20th century liberalism I find unattractive. Like supporting bureaucratic safety nets that often aren't universal, and proposing what I amount to band aid fixes.

All in all, all of the fixes, without a UBI as a core program holding everything together, amounts to a bunch of band aids that alleviate symptoms of capitalism, but not causes. It's like having a Thanksgiving dinner of all sides, and no main course. Sure the stuffing is there, and the vegetables, but where's the turkey? Something is just missing to me without a UBI.

Now, the more "socialist" factions kind of act the same way, but they see UBI as a "side dish" so to speak and promote socialism. And I don't find socialism to be worth investing in. Not only does it alienate the American people, but it isn't just some magic wand to wave away every problem. Economic democracy is nice, but market socialism doesn't alleviate poverty in and of itself, or free people from economic coercion. And more hard line socialists seem to want a command economy full of universal basic services, government bureaucracies, and potentially work requirements. So while they want to replace capitalism with their own system, it just isn't appeal to me and I end up coming off as more moderate with my indepentarianism and UBI and wanting to opt out of social systems and free from coerced participation. 

But even without that. Social democracy is a step up from neoliberalism or conservatism, but it's only a starting point. We were trending toward that in the 1960s, and some people decided you know what? This isn't good enough, we need a UBI. The fact is, as long as income is tired to work, poverty will always exist. Because being coerced into the labor force is, in my opinion, the root of all evil under capitalism. There will never be enough jobs, businesses will fight like hell to stop them from paying enough, they'll fight like hell to squeeze as much out of their employees as they can, and the regulatory state is slow and limited in how it responds to this. And quite frankly, people shouldn't be forced to participate in the system anyway, and I see trying to do so as de facto slavery. From a secular/state perspective, none of us asked to be born, so why should we be coerced to work in a system that seems to create jobs for its own sake to push us toward excessive levels of wealth we can never enjoy because we're working so hard?

Thats where I differ from social democrats. Social democrats are still believers in work and what essentially amounts to a flawed version of capitalism, they just believe in reforming it a bit more from other liberals. And while those changes are good, implementing too many of them will make implementing a UBI prohibitively expensive, so it's a matter of this. Should we have UBI plus more mild other proposals, or a bunch of more extreme proposals that help but don't solve the core issue?

I've done the philosophical and policy driven work on myself, and I've ultimately chosen the Yang gang route of UBI plus more mild other stuff. I'd prefer left libertarian human centered capitalism over basic social democracy or socialism. 

 Conclusion

I want to make clear that I still praise progressives for having better ideas than most of the competition and meaning well, but I'm not quite on the same page as them. And given how purity testy these guys are and how ideologically rigid both they are, and I am, I think we're just becoming increasingly incompatible. We're similar, which is why I've supported them up to now. But the differences are coming to a head with Yang establishing the forward party and virtually every progressive im talking to repeating the same crap about UBI being bad while advocating for welfarism or socialism, and yeah, I'm just done. The fact is, while I'm open to a lot of progressive goals, I'm more willing to compromise on them, and I am less pure than them. As far as they go, they are increasingly hostile to the one goal I absolutely won't compromise on, and yeah. Different ideology, different priorities.

I still respect them, but I'm more a forwardist/yang gang at this point. And the ideological and policy driven work I've shown on this blog over the past year shows. I've clearly gone in that direction, and my politics are far more compatible with yang than the traditional left at this point. This is not to say I agree with yang on everything. Sometimes he is too moderate, and I wish he would adopt more progressive proposals like medicare for all, free college, and climate change legislation. But still, i can live without them, or with compromised versions, if I get UBI. And honestly, that makes my ideal ideology more in line with Yang, than Bernie in the first place. That said I have changed. In 2020, I went for Bernie over Yang, but if I had to make the same decision 1.5-2 years later, i'd go for yang with a smile on my face.

I still might vote for progressives if Yang gang aren't available though. I mean, progressives are still better than neolibs or right wingers. But I have to go my own direction, and I'm drawing the line in the sand for 2024. If you don't support UBI, and someone else runs who does, I'm gonna vote for the UBI guy. Even if the other person literally adopts Bernie's entire platform. It's just what I believe in.

My response to Kyle Kulinski's take on "doomerism" (copy paste)

 So, Kyle Kulinski recently put out a video arguing against political doomerism and it kind of hit home for me as someone who is increasingly sounding like a doomer. I was going to write a unique post for this, but I feel like the best response would be to just copy and paste what I said on a relevant forum, as it sums up my views perfectly and I don't feel like rewriting this in blog form here. Copy pasts starts now:

Yeah I have kind of a different opinion, as someone who is trending somewhat toward doomerism.

I guess the crux of my argument is that i just dont share the exact same goals as kyle. I probably agree with him on a lot, but I'm gonna be honest, over the past year I've just had a falling out with much of the traditional left, to the point that while I agree on some things, i flat out dont agree on others.

Kyle talks of electing people and using them as enforcers and crap, but honestly, what if I dont agree with what you're enforcing? A lot of what we tend to "enforce" among the progressive left and democratic side of the aisle isnt crap I really believe in.

I mean, I dont give a crap about israel and palestine, and as far as foreign policy in general i mostly support the obama/biden approach to it. i'm not some super anti war hippie who thinks we should have like 25% of the current defense budget (although we can certainly make cuts and spend way too much) and wants to pull out of everywhere. On social issues I'm a moderate these days and don't care about SJW priorities or outrage culture on the left in general.

Economics I'm better probably, but still, leaning far more toward the yang gang a lot of cracks have been appearing between me and the progressive left. For me, UBI is priority #1, and half the left screams at me that UBI will destroy welfare and is a technocratic libertarian idea pushed by jeff bezos and elon musk to preserve capitalism and only true socialism will save us. The left seems more intent on sticking it to rich people than actually improving peoples' lives, and we will disagree on priorities on how to improve peoples lives.

For as much as I like bernie, I dont always agree with his approach. I supported him twice, but mostly because he was the best option we had against the neolib branch of the party. I dont really care about a green new deal. Free college, medicare for all, and student debt forgiveness, sure, and those are the real reasons i align with the bernie movement (they're my top priorities beyond UBI), but yeah, theres very real differences there.

That said, I tend to feel politically homeless. The democratic party primarily has 3 factions. Establishment moderates, who I deem as useless and hate with a passion. Progressives and socialists who agree with me on hating the moderates but lump me in with them for not being as extreme as them on issues. And then the idpol circlejerk people where everything is about race, gender, sexuality, privilege, etc. And being a privileged straight white guy, yeah no that stuff doesn't fly with me very well.

Like on the pew typology, I'm outsider left. I dont fit in the democratic party and feel politically homeless. I lean left and agree with them in vague terms, but my actual ideology is different. And having witnessed the divides in the democratic party lately, eh, I just struggle to feel at home in democratic party politics.

I know kyle crapped on third parties and people jerking it to theory, but I'm kinda trending toward this. I'm more in line with yang's forward party at this point than much of the progressive movement. I recognize progressives are fighting for mostly righteous causes and I tend to tacitly agree with them a lot of the time. But given how purity testy they are and how they'll rip you for ANY impurity, and given how many of them constantly rip on MY brand of politics, I just dont feel at home in the movement. If they were open to socially moderate UBI supporters I'd happily stay on board with them, but given i seem constantly ripped for my views lately by them, I just...don't really agree with them.

And the same thing on core values. Like, he mentioned john deere strike. While i think it's great they bargained for better conditions for themselves, this does nothing to systemically fix problems and shouldnt be a replacement for GOOD POLICY. And even more so, i kind of view the labor movement as more trying to merely reform the institution of work, while i wanna free people of it. So i kinda look at victories like this like, yeah, congrats on winning some craps, but the system's still broken, people are still forced to work in these crappy work places anyway, and I feel like the left pulls the cart before the horse.

And to go back to the purity stuff. Even in the anti work movement i often dont feel welcome. Because I'm not a "socialist" and anyone who isnt a full on leftist in their eyes isnt truly anti work because only people who oppose all of capitalism are. I know kyle mentioned people who jerk it to theory not being helpful, but in some ways it really is hurting our causes.

idk what the solution is here. If we open up to ideological impurity, we're not gonna agree on methods and goals as there are very real ideological differences between different factions of the left. If we stick to purity testing while we get what we want we keep attacking each other for having slightly different priorities.

Idk what to say here. I'm kind of at a loss myself. I'm at a point where I find myself disagreeing more and more with the left and being a yang-esque independent and while i feel true to myself in doing it, i understand it leaves me largely politically homeless and unable to accomplish any change, and I dont like it.

I guess part of it is im just not a people person and I do "jerk it to theory" in my own way. But I think something is to be said about not working well with others and having my own unique views that dont fit in any box. it makes politics frustrating. And I have been drifting toward a form of doomerism lately and this video kind of makes me realize that. idk what the future holds. I guess we'll have to see where things go from here. What progressives do, what the yang gang/forward party does, etc. Im this weird hybrid of both and i just dont fit in boxes.

Halo infinite and the generational divide

 So it turns out I'm not the only political person who has taken interest in discussing halo infinite and the recent controversy over microtransactions. Washington post also picked up the story and discussed how the issue if one of a generational divide. 

And I have to say, I largely agree. The article points out a generational divide between older millennials like myself, and younger zoomers, and how their attitudes and reasons for playing games are different. And I'm SOLIDLY in the millennial camp. Yay, I'm turning into a crotchety old person going on about back in my day! Well, so did the OP of this article. There was a lot of talk about how older gamers tend to play games for their own sake and they remember playing for hours...just to play games. Like, imagine playing games to play games. I know right? A revolutionary concept. At least it seems to be among zoomers, who constantly seem to need rewards via battle passes and unlocks, etc. to keep interest.

Honestly, i've been noticing a trend toward that in recent years, and how people lose their crap if they run out of stuff to grind for, and I quite frankly hate it. It makes gaming feel like a job. I know in COD sometimes I log in just to grind the battle pass to unlock the new guns and by the time i unlock them I dont even enjoy playing them because I just spent the last however many hours grinding and doing challenges to unlock stuff. It isn't fun. I like playing, as I want to play, for as long as I want to play, and I like being able to come and go from games. I hate FOMO (fear of missing out), and I hate time gated content, where I feel like I'm constantly on a treadmill to grind grind grind! I mean, if I wanted gaming to feel like work, I'd just work. And given I'm anti work, well, you can see where I'm going with that. 

This also sums up the outrage over the battle pass. Apparently it's too slow, and too unrewarding, especially to free players, and while I wouldnt even notice because I couldn't give two craps about the battle pass unless they're gating essential game changing content (and please devs, don't do that, I don't want to be forced to play your game just to keep up on the rewards and the current game meta), because quite frankly, I dont care about cosmetics. if anything I like halo infinite better because not only is it f2p, but all "progression" is cosmetic, and therefore I'm free to come and go as I please and play for its own sake and quite frankly, not care about that stuff.

But, of course, the zoomers do care about that stuff. And it just baffles me. Like, to be fair to them, compared to other games I can see why this particular pass is slower and less rewarding and how that turns people off, but me? I dont need shiny new rewards to keep playing and if I do, that means your game sucks and is poorly designed anyway (and I'd even say this of COD, which i like, I'm gonna be honest, i get burnt out on it keeping up with that stuff and see it as bad game design that might be great at keeping people playing but doesn't do anything for me in terms of enjoyment). 

 It's the same with monetization models. I remember when xbox live was a new concept. And I hated the idea of paying $50 a year just to play games online I already paid $60 for. I hated the idea of paid DLC locking me out of playlists, where I have to KEEP paying just to play. But, if you can tell, there's a common theme to my level of outrage. I care about ACCESS to games and their core features. I dislike being locked out of multiplayer unless I pay. Whether that be a subscription model or DLC, or what have you. I believe you should pay once and get access to the full game. And of course, in recent years, developers are moving away from those models and I see it as a great thing. And even better, I see games going f2p from franchises that have traditionally been the $60+DLC model and I LOVE it. And given pay to win seems to be dying too, because guess what, people hate free to play games with pay to win and that's a reason most f2p games have been low quality for so long, well, they've gotten rid of that too.

So, from my millennial perspective, we've won the battle against the big evil corporations. They've been removing monetization I dont agree with and replacing it with monetization that I do.

Which brings me to zoomers. When halo 3, for example, since we're discussing halo, a lot of what I discussed with xbox live and DLC were hot topics. And I took strong stands on them, so strong i never played halo multiplayer until it finally was released on PC as the MCC, a collection of past halo games. And we actually were talking about who were, at the time, the console kiddies. The zoomers who were being indoctrinated to accept this crap. And we feared how the next generation would grow up not remembering a time before DLC and paid subscription services, and how they would  be normalized to these models and not think twice about them.

 Well, here we are. 10-15 years later, but here they are. And they're complaining about battle passes, and microtransactions, and other dumb crap that doesn't matter, and going on about how nostalgic they are for halo 3 and halo reach and that exploitative paid model. And how it's somehow better than a LITERALLY FREE GAME because they had more customization of their character, or something. 

I don't really think that it's that we become conservative as we get older. I'm starting to think that the world just changes around people and we end up becoming more conservative not because we develop right wing views, but because the next generation comes along and argues over stuff so foreign to the previous generation that we have no idea how to even respond to this stuff.

I mean, in their defense, relative to other games, is their battle pass and monetization a tad excessive? Sure, I can accept that. I'll even accept that given multiplayer used to be part of their $60 purchase and now it's not, that they should be given access to season 1 stuff for free.

But generally speaking, I can't say I'm sympathetic. My fighting the good fight against the evil corporations was against fighting against stuff that mattered. If I paid for a game once, don't make me pay for the game again. Dont design your game where I feel like im on a constant treadmill of paying just to access content. But those aren't the problem with halo infinite. As far as I'm concerned, that fight is won. The game not only has no paid DLC, but it's free, and going to be free through its own lifespan. But zoomers aren't happy because cosmetics or something. 

Again, I know I sound like an old boomer ranting about my generation, but I just don't get it. Like even if I kind of do, somewhat, it's just such a foreign concern, I don't care. If you told me back in 2007 the future of gaming was gonna be high quality free games that have AAA level game design and aren't pay to win, I'd see that as a bright future to look forward to. I dont care if they sell a golden spartan helmet in the shop for $1000. I'll play as the basic green one for free and enjoy every second of it.

Thank you for coming to my crotchety old man ted talk.

I still hate the word "entitled"

 Ya know, 5 years ago, I wrote an article called "I hate the word entitled", and it mostly focused the fact that most of the time I see conservative types calling people entitled, it's often a form of gaslighting to tell you to shut up and accept the system as it is. Like, being anti work, and being on the left economically, I get called entitled a lot. I mean, I dare say I should be able to exist on this planet for free? That we should strive to work less and get paid better? You bet your butt I do. Guilty as charged, and don't see it as a bad thing. But I get called "entitled" for it. And entitled normally comes down to these guys defending systems that are crappy toward people.

But, in more recent times, i find myself using it more and more. I call the democrats entitled when they demand my vote. I called gamers entitled for complaining about paid customization in free to play games. So why do I sometimes use it?

Well, it comes down to this. I at least try to look at how different systems work, and I try to come up with the best way to do things. With voting I strongly believe that my vote is my voice and I am free to express it as pleased. In a democracy, politicians are supposed to be responsible to the voters, because otherwise we fall into autocracy. But, democrats often demand I support them, no matter what, even if they flat out alienate me. I see this as entitled because I see it as an illegitimate demand against a valid system that is in place for a good reason, and that running the system any differently would lead to worse circumstances. If the democrats were not entitled, then voters would be responsible for their party's success or failure, rather than those parties being responsible for their own. And that sets a dangerous precedent for the health of democracy.

And with gaming, I literally wrote a huge post about the history of game monetization, and how we went from paid games, to paid games with DLC, and subscription models, and free to pay but pay to win games, all discussing the problems with each of those systems. Paid games I have little problem with. I mean you put out a game and charge with it. Fine. You then put out half a game and nickel and dime me for the other half and ruin my game experience if i dont buy it, I have greater problems with that. You put out a free game and nickel and dime me with pay to win scams, and it's gonna alienate me. You demand i pay a $15 subscription monthly and ill laugh in your face and never touch your game. I have very well defined ethics of paying for games. I will pay for a product, but I want the whole thing, up front, and i dont want to be nickel and dimed. The only other acceptable model to me is free to play games that aren't pay to win. But, I understand that devs need to make money somehow so if they want to replace DLC with customization or dare I say, release a game for FREE, but then charge for different skins and the like, who am I to care? I mean, that stuff doesn't impact the game experience. You arent locking people out of maps. Or weapons. Youre giving them the complete experience, with no scams, you're just charging for colors and stuff. Unless that stuff amounts to an in game advantage, I literally couldn't care less.

That said, when I see people screaming and acting outraged over them charging for skins in a free to play game, that's high quality and has the game play of what would otherwise be a $60 AAA title (because it IS essentially a $60 AAA title), then I'm not gonna complain. And i understand that in order to make this business model possible, the monetization has to come from skins. And if you dont like it, well, don't buy it. But save this outrage. How are developers supposed to make money? I do believe developers are there to make money. That's capitalism. They put out a product to make money. The real question is how they make money. And if they can come up with a model that makes the core game experience completely free, but stuff like skins for characters and guns paid, why do I care? It literally doesnt affect anyone playing. It's totally optional. 

That said I call people entitled if they get outraged over that.

I mean, honestly, I look at it like this. If the models for the world werent this specific way, then the world would be worse. That isnt to say we cant debate the nuances of those models. Maybe halo does overcharge for skins. But when people seem to be screaming over something of no consequence, or demanding people do something they shouldnt have to do, well, i kind of have an issue with that.

Why is that any different than say, a labor issue? Well, here's the thing. We've discussed this before, me being an indepentarian and all, but people are forced to work to LIVE. And this subjects them to exploitative business practices that they cant say NO to. And if we cant full on liberate people, like I would like to with UBI, we should at minimum do the social democratic thing and try to make workers as comfortable as possible. After all this system exists for the benefit of all of humanity, not just a few. By advocating for strong labor oriented policies that benefit workers, Im advocating for what i consider an objectively better world. A world where more people are happy and healthy and fulfilled. I try to reduce the exploitation as much as possible. Ideally I'd like to liberate people from being forced to work at all. 

Honestly, it's like this, I think everyone can reach a point where if enough positive change occurs, they can become a conservative. it's not that their core values change. It's the fact that the circumstances change to fit their values. If you move society sufficiently left where we had a UBI and universal healthcare, and social democratic labor policies giving people living wages and mandatory vacation time and blah blah blah, I might become a "conservative" in the sense that I wouldn't want to change things. Because I would see the system as working, and I would see the complaints demanding more radical change, or in some cases a return to good old days that were never that good, as kind of illegitimate. Like thinking them though, I would just stop seeing a problem with things. So I would then become conservative in that I would defend that system. Even full on socialists would suddenly become conservative if they achieved "true socialism." It's how people work. You want change, but assuming your change has a set end goal that you accomplish and you aren't being driven by pure outrage (a common trait of a legitimately entitled person IMO), then you might not want much more change beyond that. So you might see people who want more change as entitled. 

It's the same with gaming. As I see it, if we get to the point AAA developers are replacing charging $60 for a HIGH QUALITY game, with releasing it for free, with the catch that there are completely voluntary cosmetic microtransactions to fund this, am I going to have an issue with that? HELL NO! Because to me, it's a complete reversal of previous trends toward increased nickel and diming in ways that mattered. My previous complaints about monetization revolved around two things. First of all they revolved around charging people for access to the game, or content for the game. I disliked the idea of being charged for access to additional maps via DLC. Or being charged a subscription to access a game i previusly paid for. The other issue I had was in game advantages. For example, having to pay to use a certain weapon, with that weapon being potentially overpowered. I like the idea that once you buy a game, the maps should be free, the guns should be free, the only additional acceptable content would be purely cosmetic and in no way impacts the game experience. That's the deal I think is fair. But if you're just gonna make the game FREE, and the maps free, and the entire shebang, FREE, with the monetization being limited to completely voluntary cosmetics, I dont have a problem. And that's exactly what Halo infinite did, and the community is...angry....for some reason.

I don't get it. Quite frankly, i think people are stupid. And maybe they are, in rare instances like that, entitled. I mean, devs gotta make money somehow. Isnt it better to provide a free experience with no in game advantages, and have monetization limited to what color your spartan is? That seems fair to me. 

So, yeah, i guess, if you somehow still demand what are considered unreasonable changes that dont fit into my theory of justice, after all of the conditions that are based around my theory of justice are met, then you can, in rare instances, be entitled. But for the most part, my views otherwise remain unchanged on the matter. Dont stop trying to make the world better. Just make sure you're actually, you know, making the world better and not either tilting at windmills and demanding something literally impossible, or being a reactionary jerk and demanding that we go back to some past that was never that great in the first place (sorry zoomers, but the era of paid DLC was crap and I will never wax nostalgically for it). I guess that's what I really have an issue with. When I call a lot of leftists entitled, it's often because I find them demanding something that's not even possible. Like $3000 UBI on top of welfare. A nice thought but good luck running the math on that one. And when I call a lot of others entitled, it's because they're screaming at what i consider the best of all possible worlds and wanting to go back to something worse or something. 

If you're legitimately making the world better, I'll never call you entitled, and I'll defend you from people calling you that. I still hate the word in those contexts. I just understand that after a certain point people do end up becoming entitled when they bite off more than can be reasonably chewed.

Let's discuss video game monetization

 So, I don't like to discuss video games a whole lot on here, as this blog is meant for politics, but sometimes hobbies and politics intersect, and I just felt like this would be a good topic to discuss in the spirit of that idea. As some of you might know, Halo Infinite just released about 10 days ago and it's completely free to pay. But, the community is losing their collective crap over the monetization and the battle pass. And given I strongly disagree with the community on this to the point according to them I sound like a shill for big corporations apparently (HAHAHAHAHA!), I just felt like I should discuss this topic from a more political type perspective. 

So, for some background, I'm a millennial in my 30s for those who don't know. I was your stereotypical 90s kid raised on the Genesis/SNES and later the playstation/N64 era. I've literally grown up WITH gaming. When I was born, the systems of choice were the NES and sega master system, and I got into gaming quite young, and it has always been a hobby and passion of mine outside of politics, so I ended up playing many games throughout the years.

And when I was a kid, the business model to play games was simple. You bought the hardware, which generally cost around $130 back then from what I recall, and you bought games, which ranged from around $35-70 each. And that was it. You put the cartridges in your system, and you played them. Games were considered complete experiences in their own right. What you paid for was what you got, for better or for worse. And that was how I was raised to approach gaming. 

On PC it was a bit different, where the digital realm made piracy a bit easier, leading to the introduction of CD keys by the time you got into the late 90s/early 2000s, but the process was generally the same. You bought games, you played them, you got the complete experience. TO BE FAIR, as this will be important later, some PC games did have rudimentary forms of DLC. Command and conquer games would always release expansions later, but these were often the size of entire games themselves, with fleshed out campaign modes that lasted as long as your typical game would today. But even that was rare. 

As online started becoming more popular on PC, games were often modded and people would create maps for them. I remember the glory days of Unreal Tournament and Quake 3, and how you could just download hundreds of maps for free. Not all of them were winners, but generally this content did greatly expand the games, and this trend lasted on PC through the late 2000s and even the early 2010s in some cases. 

MMOs did come out, like world of war craft, and quite frankly, I never played them. Why? The monetization. You have to pay $15 to play MMOs. Monthly. I always found that ridiculous. Why should I have to buy a game, only to then have to keep paying to play the game I paid for. Well, the argument goes, someone has to pay for the servers. But then blizzard would shut down any servers people made of the game that were unofficial leaving you stuck to keep paying to play their game. it seemed outrageous to me. Like, even back then, I had this indepentarian principle in me where it's like, why should I have to pay just to exist? Why should I have to pay just to keep playing a game? it felt wrong and exploitative to me. So I always refused to play such games. I might've liked MMOs if I got into them at the right time, but I just never did. I always ended up gravitating toward shooters for online play. Strategy was quite frankly too hard, and while FPS was too I had an easier time with it and I found it fun. 

Consoles, they went in a different direction. Xbox came out with Xbox live, a paid service where you can pay to play games online. And once again, I didn't bite. Same issue as MMOs, why should I have to pay to play games on their crappy servers when I can play games for free on PC. Like, I hate that crap. I already paid for my games, why should I have to pay just to be able to access the full content of them? As such, while I was HUGE on halo from a single player perspective, I never actually got to the multiplayer until the recent MCC release. As far as the single player though, I loved the series. I got the books once on sale and read them and the world, the lore, all so interesting, and the games made it even better. You have this futuristic sci fi conflict between humans and this alien empire of religious zealots known as the covenant, and the covenant want to genocide humanity and blah blah blah. And I was super into it. But because I always had ethical issues with the idea of paying to play games online, I never got into the multiplayer.

It got worse with Halo 3. Apparently with the xbox 360, they started experimented with DLC, also known as downloadable content. Basically, developers had this idea that hey, why charge $60 for games when we can effectively charge $110? So they charged $60 for games, but then made the games shorter and more sparse on content. But then they'd release more content later on for $15. And do that 4 times and you make them pay $120 to play the FULL game. With multiplayer, it was full on exploitative to me. And while PC initially seemed to resist this push due to everyone on PC laughing at the very concept, eventually they took away our modding tools with newer games and forced us to pay for additional content, much to the chagrin of the player base. A lot of us were outraged at the concept, and we often refused to pay. And whenever some new game came out and we had tons of DLC, like in battlefield 3 and 4, or any COD from Modern Warfare 2 on, we were always pissed off at that. And we had a right to be. In my eyes it broke the sacred agreement gaming was traditionally built on. I buy a game, I get the content. But now they were nickel and diming us for all of this content and selling us map packs and in game weapons and yeah, it sucked. We would be kicked from servers if DLC came up in the rotation, and games often felt like they were designed to punish people who only paid $60 for the base experience. It apparently got so bad in the mid 2010s with stuff like destiny where you would be constantly forced to spend $20-30 on DLC just to be able to keep playing or you would slowly be locked out of content you paid for. I found it outrageous. Like, just design games where they're $60. And then I buy the game, and then i go home and play it as much as I like. 

While this was going on among paid games, a new business model was developed along side this known as free to play. Basically, the original f2p games were often very low quality. They were released by developers in places like china and korea. The games were buggy, they were broken, but hey if you didnt want to pay for games, and didnt have good hardware to run more demanding games, they were a good alternative. F2P was most often aimed at PC gamers with low system specs who didnt have the money to buy actual AAA games or the hardware to run them. And im gonna be honest, in college, I enjoyed a crapton of them. But let's not kid ourselves, they sucked. And they themselves were exploitative. You could buy a lot of customization options, which i quite frankly never had issues with, i mean, that stuff doesnt really affect game play and i have to play as a burly dude while someone who pays $10 to play as a hot girl in a tank top? Cool, whatever. But then a lot of them were charge for weapons and make the games as such that you can literally buy your way to winning. I remember in combat arms, a popular f2p game around 2008-2009 for instance, that people were running around with grenade launchers that people paid for. Sure, free players COULD grind for them but these games were designed where you had to be a no lifer to be able to do that. Like, the amount of hours you would have to put into the game weekly amounted to a full time job. It was awful. And we really wondered his exploitative games were going to get.

Honestly, this is what gaming was like back in the late 2000s and early 2010s. And I really wondered what the future was. It used to be we just bought a game, took it home, and got the full experience. But by this time, I felt like everywhere I turned, I was being nickel and dimed, nickel and dimed. They were finding so many ways to extract cash from people, and the quality of the games suffered in my experience from that. Paid games would be cut up into parts and sold back to us in $15 increments, MMOs would charge a flat out monthly fee, so did xbox for the privilege of playing online, and f2p games were increasingly monetized and pay to win. The CEO of EA was talking about having to pay to reload in battlefield. It was scary. Really, this crap scared me. I felt like we were being squeezed out of gaming. Extra fees everywhere. And the worst part is people just accepted it, and often defended the corporations for doing business in this way. Well, it never sat right with me. I'm sorry, it didn't. And I don't miss this era of gaming, at all. 

That said, gaming has changed since then. Games, after a while, started laying off. Some MMOs started going free to play. Some of the most high quality ones like FFXIV and WOW remain paid to this day, but others started focusing on microtransactions. ANd I actually saw that as an improvement. I mean, my honest opinion toward microtransactions? If they are limited to cosmetics that dont affect game play, I don't really care that much. I understand devs want to make money. I just dont appreciate them doing it through methods that make the game play worse or nickel and dime consumers for basic access to the game. 

While all consoles now charge a fee to play online, PC remains a bastion of freedom. And mobile gaming has followed suit, with tons of free games available at your finger tips. Speaking of free to play, free to play improved A LOT over the years. Gone are the days of overpowered hot chicks with grenade launchers and movement bonuses mowing down everyone else. Games started first making the grinds for weapons more reasonable, a la games like tribes ascend or planetside 2. And now f2p games are a lot more fair and open. I'll get to that a bit later, as I'm trying to remain somewhat linear with the time line. 

Somewhere in the mid 2010s, DLC models fell off. EA started having to give away BF4, BF hardline, and battlefront DLC free to get people to play it, as people just wouldn't buy it. New games, from rainbow six siege, to overwatch, started experimenting with different methods of gaming. Maps started being free, and while not all features were, the paid DLC model did begin to die. And I noticed games like overwatch mostly had paid customization was similar to free to play games. But people complained, mainly because a lot of skins and stuff were in lootboxes.

I'm going to be honest, coming off of the horrid DLC and pay to win F2P era, lootboxes were a godsend. Gaming companies found out gamers would give people money to open lootboxes that gave them a chance to unlock skins to make their characters look nice. And while you would get some for free just from playing, you could also buy them. I had no issue with this. They were completely optional. And given games that employed them started making maps free to download and play, and started removing may pay to win elements from games, i approved of the shift. But, people complained. Something something kids were getting addicted and it was like gambling to them. I could see how unsupervised kids would go nuts over wanting to get their special colored character, but im in my late 20s/early 30s at this point, and starting this blog. I couldnt care. After so many years of IMO objectively worse models, I'm just happy to see those former business models go. But, apparently the issues with kids getting addicted was a concern, they started being banned in parts of Europe, and that practice has been phased out in recent years. 

Honestly, beyond my self interest, I had no issues with lootboxes for this reason. People need to parent their kids. Honestly, a huge reason im so rigid with payment models is because I was raised frugally by middle class parents. They were the type who were able to give me a lot of luxuries, but they werent jsut gonna throw money away on me for useless stuff. I had to choose what I wanted, and being wasteful was generally bad. So we were money conscious, and I am too, as you can tell. And you know what? my parents wouldnt have let me buy hundreds of dollars in lootboxes as a kid, are you crazy? I wasnt even allowed to go to arcades much because I had video games at home and arcades were a waste of money (they were right, you know). So, to me, not getting addicted to loot boxes is as simple as parenting your kids and giving them values. Heck maybe if they did that they wouldnt have normalized DLC and paid subscriptions for gaming in the first place. But, I guess the science is clear, so I can see an argument for it. I am a fact based person, after all.

Which brings me to the newest trends. Monetization via customization. Basically, what I said I would be okay with F2P games doing since their inception. It's like they listened, they finally listened. people dont want to be nickel and dimed for DLC. They don't want to have to put up with pay to win scams. They dont want to pay subscriptions. So, a lot of games started adding monetization to games in game. Battlefront 2 did this and got HUGE pushback, although they did still ahve some exploitative elements in it. We're all familiar with their pride and accomplishment thing right? Yeah. But then that got cleaned up, and by battlefield 5, they stopped pushing DLC and started having skins in a cash shop. And like always people complained, but I just didn't get it. I mean, it's nonessential stuff. Surely this is better than DLC, right? Like again, I'm just happy to see the old DLC model go. 

Like, really, if monetization is limited to aesthetics, I don't care. It doesn't impact core game play. It's providing me with cheaper games. it's the best of all worlds, I dont feel nickel and dimed and squeezed, and they make money, since apparently some people are willing to spend a fortune on that stuff. Surely that is the most painless business model right?

 But it got better. A common trend in recent years is the rise of F2P AAA games. Gone are the days of small korean studios and other no name brands releasing horribly low quality and exploitative free games. F2P at this point is an accepted business model and a lot of games have gone free over the years. Team Fortress 2 had long adopted that model and counter strike followed more recently. Valorant is popular among some. Many battle royale games adopted the f2p model simply because they understood they would die trying to compete with pubg if they didn't, so now we got games like fortnite and apex and even CALL OF DUTY Warzone (seriously, seeing COD shift from DLC to having an entire portion of their game FREE is a huge positive shift for me). And now halo infinite. 

I mean, wow, given what I feared the future of gaming would be, I am quite happy to see this development. I mean, here's the thing. I'm saving so much money. i dont have to buy season passes. I dont even have to buy the games at all in some cases. They're FREE. And they offer high quality AAA games as good or better than what we used to have to pay $110 for. 

But, people complain. Halo infinite is the newest game of this model, and people are hating on it. Why? because they gotta pay to change their color. OH THE HUMANITY. I mean, imagine gaming is a sandwich. It used to be, you bought a sandwich, you got the whole sandwich. Then it became, you buy a sandwich, they take half your toppings away and sell them back to you. Or you get the bread free but all of the toppings cost money.

Now we're getting to the point the entire sandwich is FREE, but now people are complaining because if you want that fancy multicolored wrapper, you have to pay $20. WHO. THE HELL. CARES?!

Like why are they complaining? I dont get it. Now, to be fair, infinite does have some problems. Battle pass progression is admittedly slow. I think I've played like 23 hours since release and I'm only like level 8. If I played COD, I generally do 1 level an hour. As far as the prices of stuff, I dont know what to tell you. I'm not someone who actually wants to buy fancy skins and stuff. I just wanna play games.

I know at this point I might sound like an old boomer but maybe being a millennial who lived through all of the above, I really think this generation of gamers is, dare I say, ENTITLED (I've become what I hate). I mean, what the actual fudge, guys? The game is FREE. it's high quality. There's no pay to win. You just gotta pay if you want your spartan to have racing stripes on it or whatever. WHO CARES?! 

 But, the amount of outrage on r/halo in other places has reached critical levels and I just dont get it. These people are acting so immature. I'm not a corporate shill. I understand corporations have to make money. And I've been vocal against practices I disagree with over the years. But I feel like a lot of the more legitimate fights of the past have been won, and at this point we're getting the best of all possible worlds, where mainstream high end free to play games are dominating the landscape, and people are complaining. 

It boggles me to see the zoomers on r/halo going on about how great DLC used to be. Bro, just shut up. You have no idea how hard we millennials fought that stuff. And how we see it as horribly exploitative and nickel and diming. And now these zoomers, these entitled zoomers, they wanna throw it all away because "whaa I cant change my color but I could in halo reach." Let me be the first to tell you guys to PLEASE shut the hell up. Like, here's the thing. If the backlash is severe enough, I fear developers will give up on f2p and go back to paid games. Except because games are live service, people will be expected to pony up money monthly or yearly like they have to for destiny or MMO games.

I don't get you people any more. We won. The game's free. There's no tricks. It's a high end AAA game for anyone to download and play for free, and people are screaming over skins. Just shut up and play the game, jesus.

I know, Im starting to sound like an old person, but in this case I feel like my opinion is legitimate. I just don't get people. I don't long for the days of DLC. And heck I would rather have the current model than even having to pay a flat price for games. I'm okay with that, but this f2p stuff is LIT these days. Again, I save so much money and get so many high quality games to play. i don't even have time to play them all as much as I want. 

 Anyway, that's my stance on it. Paid games fine. Paid DLC is horrible. Subscriptions are horrible. F2P used to be crap, but now it's good.  Modern F2P is even better than paid in a lot of cases more recently. The future of gaming is looking bright, and I really don't get the complaints. Is halo infinite's model perfect? No. I'll grant you that. But most changes I would want are changes around the edges, not a fundamental shift back to some paid DLC model like r/halo seems to be gunning for. Those guys are crazy. Reminds me of the boomers who gave up the gains FDR made for lower taxes. Sickening.

Is it wrong that I feel schadenfreude when the democrats fail?

 I mean, I know this tends to rub a lot of lefties the wrong way, even the ones who otherwise hate the democrats, and maybe it's because I'm a bit bitter and vindictive at this point, but honestly, I feel a sense of satisfaction to some extent when I see the democrats fail.

It's not because I want them to. I actually wish they would succeed so badly in some ways. The republicans are terrible and we need a party to counter them. But, the democrats, in recent years, have shown that they're dinosaurs and they're terrible too. 

The democrats only won in 2020 because of Trump. That's it. No one actually liked them. All of those Biden votes democrats love to circlejerk about and about how popular they are were really just votes against republicans, same with their 2018 victories. But all along they've been like "you see, you stupid progressives, the voters want moderates, we won, we're rubbing it in your face, screw Bernie Sanders and Andrew Yang, people like Biden baby! *posts meme of Biden in sunglasses eating an ice cream cone*". But...in reality, I've never met anyone IRL who is a hardcore biden stan. Most of the people I know at this point lean left. But almost none of them LIKE biden. They just tolerate him. They want policies from the democrats that are closer to say, bernie sanders or andrew yang than joe biden. Either that or they're conservatives who are only voting for him because the GOP is an entirely new level of awful no one liked.

But, Biden held it together. And he won. And people felt in line. Because Trump bad. Policy was ignored. It was all about lesser evilism, and let's not forget, the identity politics. Being an ex conservative, idpol never really jived with me. And you can probably tell how much I tend to rip it on here. At first I tried to be conciliatory, like, "okay I get you, but this messaging is toxic and isnt recieved well and you're making more enemies.". Now I'm more brazenly like "SHUT UP ALREADY", but the idpol crowd never shuts up, and just gets even louder and more self righteous when you tell them to. And every primary, those gloaters would come back, "OMG THE BLACK VOTE THE BLACK VOTE, YOU SEE, YOU WHITE PROGRESSIVES, YOU JUST DONT GET BLACK PEOPLE". Actually I do, through the power of social science. A lot of them are fairly socially conservative, but economically progressive, but more than anything, they're just fiercely loyal to the democrats and will vote for whomever they push. So that leads to obnoxious anti nina turner type sentiment like "YOU REALLY THINK YOU CAN WIN IN THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY BY HATING ON BIDEN AND THE DEMOCRATS? LOL". Well, I'm sorry,  you guys like eating bowls of crap, but it's true. Biden is a bowl of crap. And while a lot of democratic loyalists will vote for a bowl of crap given what the GOP is offering, it doesn't make it less true.

Just, the whole internal dynamics of the democrats is just obnoxious and alienating. They dont offer any meaningful solutions that improve peoples' lives. What they did offer were watered down breadcrumbs that were more watered down due to "compromise", no one is happy. The economy is a mess post COVID (again, NOT biden's fault, but he's not doing a good job at fixing it either), they cant pass anything that helps people. And then they circlejerk about idpol constantly.

Then they get destroyed, and they're looking at monumental defeats in 2022. And I'm to the point i only associate with the party for the primaries. I'm really an independent at heart now. And it's like...gee who could've seen this coming? Its almost like basing your entire campaign on trump bad, not having any policies, and being an insufferable circlejerk alienates people. These guys rub idpol in our faces then wonder why they're down double digits with white males and the like. What do you offer them? I'm a white male who pushes for solutions and I'm just told to shut up and check my privilege. Why would white males vote for you guys? You dont do anything for them. And it isn't racism either. If anything most of us are just tired of hearing about it 24/7. We don't care. We're not anti black or anti woman or whatever, but your causes aren't our causes, and we just. Dont. Care. You guys wont do crap for us on our bread and butter issues, why would we vote for you? It's like you want us to vote for Trump. I mean that's how I feel. Like you explicitly abandon my demographic to the republicans. You don't even try with us, even though we're not a monolith and many of us would vote for the right left winger. 

It just pisses me off. Like, these guys have been insufferable for the past 6-7 years now. Let's face it, it's about 7, given we're in late 2021 and the earliest rifts I remember having were in late 2014-early 2015. They puff up their chests when they win, and would even use my vote if i supported them as evidence that people LIKE them, when in reality i feel like most of the american public just keep bouncing between 2 bad options. Republicans govern, and they lose popularity because they suck, so people vote for democrats. Democrats win, then suck at governing too, so then republicans win again. it's cyclical and evidence that the two parties aren't actually governing properly and the people want something different. But they just puff up their chests, act like they're popular when they are, then act baffled when they then lose support because they arent doing anything and they can no longer blame the other guys for everything. The fact is, the democrats cant stand on their own two feet. They only win when republicans are unpopular. 

And idk, I'm getting to the point where I just feel like these guys have everything else coming to them. After ignoring me, blowing me off, and their followers mocking me, antagonizing me, acting like they're hot crap when they're not, I kinda understand why so many conservatives tend to fall into the whole "own the libs" and "screw your feelings" mentalities. Because after dealing with how insufferable these guys are, it's entertaining as fudge to watch them get owned. it's fun to watch them get salty as their delusions collapse all around them and they start feeling panic and despair before some new narrative is crafted to give them a sense of emotional security again. And then it gets frustrating as they lean into it like they do and get self righteous again.

Look, if the democrats actually did right by the people, proposed policies that were popular, and passed them without being as useless as a cable guy from south park, I probably would like them. Even if they're not literally everything I want, I can at least respect a decent attempt to try. That's actually why I like Bernie Sanders. I don't actually agree with him on literally everything, and have sharp ideological differences from his 20th century new deal esque mentality at times (keep in mind, I'm like an anti work yang ganger in practice). But I do agree with him on some priorities, he actually puts his money where his mouth is and has workable policies, and he tries. I mean, he's a decent dude with decent policies. Which is more than I can say about the standard democratic circlejerk these days. Really, if you circlejerk being useless and constantly race bait, dont be surprised when people dont like you when you no longer have an enemy to scare us with. Because we dont like you. We never wanted you. We just wanted to get rid of the other guy. And now people are gonna try to get rid of you to get the other guy back in. Until he terrifies the country and things swing back to you.

The point is, your victories are primarily because we just hate the GOP more than you. Not because we like you. And watching you fail is sometimes entertaining because WE FREAKING TOLD YOU SO ALL ALONG. Really, that's the real reason I have schadenfreude. Because I've been freaking telling these people this for years, they never freaking listen. And now they're panicking as they have to lie in the bed they made. Everything that's happened is on you guys. I just hope the GOP isn't able to turn Biden into Carter where it destroys the prospects of ANY leftie in office for a generation because you guys screwed up so badly. If that's the case, well, thanks a freaking lot. You ruined everything. And that just makes me hate you guys more.

A more detailed Kyle Rittenhouse opinion

 Okay, so, the fallout from the case piqued my interest to get more informed about it. Most of my observations are gonna be based on the events themselves here, and are largely informed by this video which seemed to cover the whole thing from start to finish.

The setting

So, 2020 was a very screwed up year. First we had covid, then the george floyd thing happened where a white cop knelt on a black dude's neck for 8 minutes while he said he couldn't breathe, and this caused the crap to hit the fan. People protested and started burning down the police station in Minnesota and crap. Nationwide protests happened, and rioting was a common occurrence on the news. I remembered watching this stuff from the comfort of my own home, and thinking, yeah this is screwed up. Obviously I sympathized with George Floyd, but not being a fan of vigilante violence and taking the law into one's own hands, I didn't like burning down stuff. And things got messy and polarized. Sometimes police used excessive force vs protesters which I didn't like, and this largely caused me to actually be for calls to "defund the police", but at the same time, rioting still happened. It should be noted most protests were peaceful, but the media hyped it up to be a big thing for ratings like they always do. 

As the country polarized, some people decided to fight back, and due to the Jacob Blake incident that the video described, it looked like unrest was going to come to Kenosha, Wisconsin.

And white Trumpy type people big on their 2nd amendment rights and basically being ammosexuals looking for an excuse to shoot someone, decided to grab their guns and go there to "defend' the community from rioters. This is actually perfectly legal as we both have a right to bear arms, and the right to assemble, so right wingers decided to bear arms at their counter protest, which was deemed to be intimidating by the left. I can't blame them for thinking that. At the same time, riots have happened, so I can see the need to keep the peace, but to be honest, isn't this the police's job, not armed vigilantes who seem to be looking for trouble? Nothing ILLEGAL about showing up there with your guns, but I'm gonna say it's morally questionable. 

Kyle Rittenhouse was one such dude. He wasn't even from that state, but apparently his friend invited him up there, and provided him with a rifle to protect a car dealership or something. This is a bit different than the common narrative that his mom drove him up and dropped him off with a rifle, which was apparently disproven by politifact. 

Should he have been there? Probably not. Again, not big on vigilantism, and then you got this guy who ended up up there despite not being from the community, and provided a rifle by his friend. He had clearly not intended to use it, but being part of a counter protest like this is kind of asking for trouble. Honestly, it's not a private citizen's concern to get themselves in between a bunch of rioters and private property. And honestly, the best thing to do in my opinion is to back off and let the police handle it. The police were there, observing the protests, and as shown in the NYT video, even praising the counter protesters, so there was some systemic screwery there that the left is good to point out (honestly, police shouldn't have to rely on civilian vigilantes to keep the peace). And this set up a powder keg.

The protests eventually went past curfew, and this led to the incidents that happened.

Rosenbaum shooting

So, as we can see in the video, Rosenbaum was just released from the mental hospital, and ended up at the BLM protests. The protests started fairly benign, and relatively peaceful, with little rioting, but then something happened, and rittenhouse started briskly moving away. And people started chasing him. And then one dude with a pistol started shooting in the air, and Rittenhouse, panicked, essentially turned around and shot the dude who was chasing him.

Was Rittenhouse in the wrong? Legally? No. The dude was being chased, he was clearly trying to get away. Guns were going off. The dude was scared. I mean, if I were in that situation, i probably would've been crapping my pants and did the same thing. Should rosenbaum have chased him from the get go? I would say no. It's unclear what the context was that led to this, but uh, chasing after an armed dude, throwing a plastic bag at him, etc., is not a good idea. And given another dude apparently fired a gun, Rittenhouse had clear reason to fear for his life in my opinion. Again, not big on vigilantism, and you shouldn't be freaking chasing an armed guy. It's only common sense if he feels threatened he WILL use the weapon. 

The other 2

So, for some reason, Rittenhouse fled the scene. I don't know why. I agree with the person in the video that it seemed stupid. He just shot someone, the best thing to do would've been to disarm himself, call time out, and wait for police to arrive. But for some reason he fled. Maybe he felt he was in danger, I don't know.

But then the dude started running away. And people started saying "hey, this dude shot someone and he's running away", so this led to...more vigilantism. A bunch of protesters decided to take it into their own hands to chase him down as he fled from the scene, and one hit him with a skateboard and knocked him down and tried to pull the gun away from him and was shot, and another dude tried to pull a gun on him and was shot too. 

Then he got up and kept running away.

So....honestly, this is one of those cases where no one's wrong, but no one's REALLY right either. Did rittenhouse have a right to defend himself from aggressors? Sure. He was being tackled, they were trying to disarm him if not shoot him, so he shot them first.If you're trying to flee a harmful situation, Rittenhouse's actions were perfectly rational. And given the legitimacy of the rosenbaum shooting, I don't think that Rittenhouse's actions were illegitimate here either. If he were an active shooter who shot in cold blood or something as he was portrayed, yeah, self defense shouldn't work on an aggressor trying to flee. But given the Rosenbaum shooting was a "legitimate" shooting, I believe these are too.

Now, to be fair to the people who were trying to disarm them. They were trying to do the right thing themselves. They heard he shot someone, and they decided to step in in order to disarm him, which is actually quite heroic given that set of facts to work with. A bit reckless, and they paid for it with their lives, which is yet another reason why I think people injecting themselves into situations and being vigilantes is stupid, but I can't say what they did was immoral either. They both thought they were doing the right thing I guess, and that's what makes this situation all the more sad and tragic. 

The aftermath

So, after he shot three people, Rittenhouse reached the police, and he put his arms up, to show he wasnt a threat. And people were yelling he shot people, but the police didn't arrest him for some reason. Maybe because open carry was allowed, but it seems to be given I've seen a video with people yelling at the time "HEY POLICE, HE SHOT PEOPLE", them letting him go seemed a bit of a bad call. Either way, the damage was done. He was arrested and brought up on charges later.

Did Rittenhouse do anything wrong?

Legally, no. I mean, from his perspective, these were legitimate instances of self defense. And apparently the weapon's charge was dropped because he had a rifle over 16 inches and that was legal in Wisconsin. The law was intended for hunting, but regardless, it was dropped. 

And for some reason they suspended the very minor charge of being out past curfew. 

Honestly, it comes off to me like there's so many things wrong with the Rittenhouse case. Like the fact that this 17 year old shouldn't have been running around playing soldier, but the laws were what they were, and let's leave it at that. With the rosenbaum thing, yeah, chasing an armed guy is stupid, and he was right to open fire given he felt very obviously threatened.

And while I would argue him fleeing the scene should've maybe been illegal, no charges were brought, and the dude might've feared for his life anyway. And then he was chased down and tackled and he shot people to get away. It's really just...tragic. Like, that's my actual opinion on it. The circumstances just got so out of control that he was being chased, and he shot people to get away. but then the people chasing him thought they were doing the right thing going after an active shooter, but in reality...this just screams at me that vigilantism is bad. A bunch of ammosexuals running around protecting businesses and potentially intimidating protesters isnt a good thing. They're injecting themselves in an already bad situation and it didn't end well. And then in response to rittenhouse shooting the first guy, they chase him down and try to play hero to disarm him, and he shoots them. It's just bad all around. Everything, from a legal standpoint, seems to give Rittenhouse the benefit of the doubt, and outside of a few minor law changes I really can't find fault in that legal logic. I know a lot of lefties are gonna be mad at my seemingly conservative streak on social issues lately, but eh, as I see it, I see both sides of the argument. I'm no fan of Kyle Rittenhouse. I just believe that legally, the facts of the case did lead to him being innocent for good reason. You kinda have to PROVE guilt in order to imprison someone, and that's a GOOD thing. And in this case, it just couldn't have been proven. In some ways, MORALLY, I believe rittenhouse IS culpable. I honestly believe the dude shouldn't have freaking been there in the first place. But, I have trouble finding a law saying he shouldn't have, or even making one that meaningfully solves the problem. Unless we're just gonna say open carry should be illegal, which maybe it should be. Or maybe kids shouldn't be allowed to have guns AT ALL, which maybe they shouldn't be. Or that maybe they should enforce curfew better, which they were in other instances, and it just led to more police violence. 

Honestly, it's just a tricky situation and given these facts, i can't really agree with the left fully here. Maybe I do MORALLY, but there's a difference between ethics and law. While ethics and law should often ideally reach the same outcomes, a more libertarian society like the US is going to fail at that. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. A society that imposes a specific moral code on all and enforces it with an iron fist is often fairly authoritarian. And I honestly dislike that idea myself. But, if we are going to give people more freedom, well, sometimes what's right ethically isn't always the right thing legally and vice versa. All in all, Rittenhouse is morally culpable for those killings, but not legally culpable. Had he not been there injecting himself into a situation he had no business to inject himself into, those people would've still been alive. Had they not decided to chase a man with a gun for whatever reason, justified or not, well, the same applies. 

Moral of the story. Don't show up at protests armed like a wannabe soldier, and if you do show up at protests for the love of god, don't try to chase down a man with a gun.And let's just leave it at that.

Kyle Rittenhouse verdict opinion

So, this is something that I found short enough on social media, but long enough to post here. And given it is an opinion on a hot button issue, I figured I'd copy and paste it here. It's on kyle rittenhouse. Something I havent been paying much attention to, as cultural issues like this don't really interest me much, and because I'd rather, ya know, advocate for UBI, but I figure this is substantial enough to post about. 

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Eh, I've been mostly staying out of the kyle rittenhouse thing, precisely because Im not a legal expert and don't like to make judgments about the law either way. And given that the standard of evidence is innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, it's kind of hard to convict people for stuff sometimes.

 

I know people love to see themselves as legal experts on this stuff, but they're not. Laypeople are not always good judges of what's legal and illegal push comes to shove. And given the standard it's hard to see people as guilty under the law. So they end up getting disappointed when a not guilty thing is read and they think he should be guilty.

 

Based on gut feeling it seems like rittenhouse should be found guilty of SOMETHING. I mean the dude went across state lines with an assault rifle, got himself into a situation where he had to use the gun, and he used it. It's a crap situation all around. Still, looking into the actual charges, and combining that with the videos I recall seeing, I can see why he got off on the murder/homicide charges.

 

The fact is, they couldnt prove he DIDNT fire in self defense, and given the ambiguity of the situation, eh, I see the argument. Now, AGAIN, this is not to say the dude should've been there in the first place. He shouldnt have. ANd I'm baffled he wasn't at least nailed on a lesser charge. But it looks like those charges were dismissed due to ambiguity in the law and blah blah blah. He had good lawyers, and yeah, maybe the judge was biased.

 

Overall though, eh, despite not being happy with some aspects of the verdict, I'd say justice has been served. I know, this is gonna be an extremely controversial opinion here. But again, proving stuff beyond reasonable doubt is hard, and if ambiguity exists, its better that the person be found innocent than guilty, as the burden of proof has not been reached.

 

This does not in any way mean kyle rittenhouse isnt a scumbag. I wanna make clear I think he is. He was a dude who wanted to play soldier, ended up shooting people, and yeah, it sucks. But, the way the laws were written, and given the standards of the court case, the burden of convicting him had apparently not been reached.

 

Honestly, the big thing here is throwing out the lesser charges. He was out past curfew, he shouldve been guilty of that. And him having a gun in the first place. I would argue he should probably be guilty of something there too. But those werent the big charges being discussed, and they were dismissed for whatever reason, so...

 

My biggest issue with this trial is dismissing the lesser charges that should've, quite frankly, stuck around, and he should've, quite frankly, been convicted of. I dont think they can necessarily prove something as severe as murder or reckless endangerment here. But let's be freaking honest, the dude shouldn't have been there and he shouldn't have had a freaking gun. If anything this case shows that maybe we need new laws against people playing soldier in a community that isnt their own in the first place. This should've been a slam dunk for at least a lesser charge IMO. But, that's law for you. Sometimes it sucks. Sometimes it's messy. But that's law. 

 

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EDIT: Looking at the gun charge it looks like it was dismissed because there was a loophole that allowed minors to have long barreled rifles for hunting, and apparently an AR15 qualified. So the big problem here is America's gun laws. The gun wasn't used for hunting. But because of, once again, legal ambiguity, Rittenhouse got off.

Democrats are screwed

 So, today, left wing anti establishment media seems ablaze with stories about how the democrats are screwed. Biden's approval is dropping like crazy, down to 38%, and republicans are ahead in the generic ballot by 10 points. Biden is slipping up big time, admitting his stimulus is contributing to raging inflation that is happening, and let's be honest, I still don't think people are over the dumpster fire that was his bring back better bill.

Faith in democrats is faltering hard. And while I would love to JUST treat this as a see I told you so moment, I do think I need to do some things to set the record straight.

If you've been following this blog, you will know that I am not a democrat. I've become increasingly discontent with the democrats, not only this year, but since I started this blog in 2016, and I've honestly reached a breaking point here. With me, the issue is simple. The democrats keep pushing milquetoast centrism down my throat, combined with an obnoxious identity politics oriented message, and I honestly do not believe that the party cares about improving things, and I'm starting to think it's not structurally impossible to take over the party and turn it into a party for the people. Between Hillary 2016, Biden in 2020, and watching various primaries and Biden governance in 2021, it seems clear that the democratic party cannot effectively govern. And they will not step up and defend the right thing for the American people. I'm not even necessarily just discussing UBI here. As you guys know despite being a progressive yang ganger, I'm perfectly willing to settle for normal lefties like Bernie Sanders, despite there being some philosophical disagreements there. Just do something. 

But they don't. And they won't. And I knew all long, quite frankly, that the democratic party, if they won in this state, would lead to this. Quite frankly, THIS is why I was so happy to vote third party in 2016. And THIS is why I was so happy to do it again in 2020. I figured, if a neoliberal democrat took over the white house, the left is screwed for 12 years or more. The public would turn on the democrats post election, and even if they won election again, they would eventually lose to a republican. And then we would need to wait for the pendulum to swing back just to have another shot. I'd rather watch the GOP become increasingly unpopular as the country falls apart around them, than to watch it happen to the left.

But, the democratic party isn't really interested in abiding by the will of the people, and being the change agent we want. They triangulate. They run to the center, they play it safe. They think by being republican lite they can make everyone like them, but in reality everyone hates them. The GOP will hate the Biden administration no matter what he does, and then the left will sour on him too. At the end of the day, you'll end up with just that core base of 30-35% of voters who will vote for a literal piece of crap as long as there is a D after their name. To be fair the GOP has a roughly equally large portion of the voter share who will stand by Trump no matter what. Around 40-45% of people stood by trump no matter what he did, while the rest of the country hated him. 

Elections are ultimately won by independents, and in enthusing your voter base to turn out for you. And democrats have suffered a morale problem for a while. There was a similar drop in approval in 2010 during the Obama era, and I remember being on the republican side back then. Democrats stopped caring after they won, and as i learned later they were demoralized, while republicans were fired up against him. The same environment is happening again.

But this time, I think it's worse. With inflation raging, and with biden buying into right wing talking points, and with the democrats divided, this is looking like the 1970s again. You know, I always wondered, if Carter didnt win in 1976, how would things be different today? I mean, Carter ended up coming to power during crises during an already existing party realignment, where the democrats were losing voters to the GOP via the southern strategy. But the corruption of the nixon administration, oil shocks, and inflation halted their progress and allowed Jimmy Carter to win. Carter ended up dealing with massive supply shortages, and gas lines, and the economy being a general dumpster fire. In addition he faced foreign crises abroad like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the Iranian hostage crises during his term. Congress bickered with the president for various reasons, and Carter never got things done. In some ways he was unfairly blamed for everything wrong in the world, and then Reagan came in, the federal reserve shocked the economy with a recession, inflation was over, and the republicans got to come in looking like the good guys, and boom, the parties realigned. Reagan was idolized by the boomers. he was their FDR. And he shifted the country into the right wing dumpster fire it is today.

I hate to say it but because of democratic incompetence, we're back there. The republicans idolize trump. He fires them up. Even if he was an awful president, people LIKED him. They dont like Biden. Biden was just about getting Trump out, no matter what, and as we enter a post trump era (or are we?, remember, 2024 around the corner), the democrats are imploding. The progressive wing, the long time whipping boy of the party, is pushing back, and this is causing the democrats to go further center to seemingly punish them. Meanwhile those moderates they courted are shifting back to the republicans. And people are turning against the democrats in general.

I wouldn't mind if it was just them turning against the democrats, but I fear that simply because biden won at the worst time, much like carter did, it might kill the left in general, including my ideas.

Biden is arguing that stimulus is leading to inflation. Now, inflation is complicated. We just shut down the economy with COVID. The republicans will argue that they were always against that, but screw them, we did it to save lives. But they wanted to keep it open, even if the virus tore through us like butter and millions died. More blood for the blood guide. Sacrifice your elderly on the altar of the economy. But anyway, shutting it down, it did cause issues. Unemployment skyrocketed, and for me, we got a taste of what a post work world could be like. Quite frankly, I loved the cultural changes COVID brought. More introversion, fewer societal expectations, etc. I wish we provided for people better, but alas, with republicans, we didn't. But then, when we started vaccinating people, we opened up the economy. And suddenly, everyone had to open all at once, and because the supply chain was strained, we couldnt get the goods and services out there. And sadly, the fact that the amount of employers looking for help outnumbered the number of workers, it led to inflation. 

Now, I dont think this is a bad thing. I believe workers deserve a fair shake and what am I for? literally giving people money so that people are free to not work. Now, I do recognize it can be overdone and under NORMAL conditions, I would say this is the worst case scenario that would happen with UBI, where the excessive reduction in people willing to work would lead to inflation, especially as people spend tons of UBI money. But, that's not the problem. While the republicans tried to spin it that way, Biden's package ran out literally like 2 months ago. And yet, people aren't running to work. We could argue covid is making people workshy, and it is. And the lack of childcare options for parents is, and they're right on that. But in reality, it's just everything happening at once. The economy doesnt always respond well to being turned off and on again. And that's what we did. 

Now if we wanna look at inflation a bit, i feel like this is a very short summary of the situation. I feel like its worth getting it out there. We face very real material shortages right now. And supply and demand are wonky. And there are supply chain issues. And droughts. And oil refineries being hacked by Russians. I mean, the economy is a crapshow right now. 

It isn't stimulus. Stimulus barely factors into it at all. And while people should be free to be skeptical of me as I AM the UBI guy, I stand by that opinion. There's a lot of pent up demand, and supply of things is just messed up. So shortages are happening. 

Why do I need to focus on this? Because this is what the republican message is gonna be. That we can't have UBI or stimulus or leftism in general, because look what happened with Biden. Bruh, Biden doesnt speak for me. His administration is a joke. BUT, that doesn't mean his policies are responsible for these crises. COVID is ultimately responsible. And that happened before Biden got in. Biden just got handed the recovery and this is what happened.

Sometimes it's better not to win at a time like this. It's like Van Buren. Andrew Jackson screwed up the economy so hard, but then right after he left office and Van Buren took over, the panic of 1837 hit and Van Buren was considered among the worst presidents ever. He didn't do anything wrong. He just failed to do anything right. And the same thing happened with Carter. Even Hoover got unfairly blamed for the great depression. Biden is becoming one of those guys. THe guy who happened to win at the wrong time, and is left holding the bag.

Yeah, democrats are screwed, and I'm worried. But not because I fear democrats losing. I kinda hope they do lose and understand for better things to happen, they might have to. But because I fear that republicans winning might shift the overton window to the right for a generation.

If things arent better by 2024, where will we be? The republicans are gonna run trump again, or some popular governor like desantis. And the democrats? Well, they basically killed the left. Bernie's too old. Turner isn't gonna get anywhere if her primary was any indication. Yang left the party. And the insiders that remain are just more Biden's. Kamala Harris? Black female Biden! Pete Buttigieg? Gay Biden! And that's who they're gonna run, and no one who isnt part of the establishment will be able to stop it. I mean they already ensured we can't. So in the general, what happens? The republicans will be fired up, and ready to blame the democrats for any problem, and the democrats will probably half agree and move right, or at best do nothing at all. And the left, the ones with the ideas, who understand the issues, will be sidelined yet again. We're ALWAYS sidelined. Because the democrats dont listen to us. And we dont have enough clout or organized voting blocs to stop them. So this is a train wreck waiting to happen. 

I'm not gonna ask what if Hillary won in 2016, it would be the same crap. Can you imagine covid happening under her watch? There would be bloody murder to pay, and the republicans wouldve won in a landslide. And the left would be discredited all the same. But I will ask, what if Bernie won? Idk, I think he would've at least took care of people and handled the crisis well enough where he would be popular. The thing is, clinton wouldnt have done much being a centrist, and we'd be in the same situation. But a progressive? Well, things couldve gone differently.

That's the messed up thing about politics. I feel like the democrats robbed the left of a chance to govern, and now they're ruining it for us all, sealing our fates where the once dying GOP regains all its strength simply because the perfect mouthpiece landed in their lap, and because the democrats are just so bad at governing. 

Of course, being an independent, and being outside of the two party system, maybe things arent all lost. Maybe more people think like me than I realize. i dont think so, but I think a lot of vote blue no matter who progressive lefties in the past few months are finally waking up like "wait, Biden is terrible, wait, the party has no future post trump, wait, why is biden so ineffective at doing anything?", and that could play a role too. So idk. We'll have to see. But yeah. I'm concerned for the future, and don't think it looks very good.