Sure sure.

The United States is a one party state, but with typical American extravagance, they have two of them

But these were ostensibly the priorities of the party winning the votes of liberals.

Conservatives want to take all our games away, they have hated video games for decades, they made it clear for years that they want to see games censored the same way as movies and television.

Wasn’t the OG 80s era censorship campaign coming from Tipper Gore and Joe Lieberman?

Didn’t we get this whole '10s era Christian Conservative “We just want to debate! We just want our free speech on College Campus and The Internet!” campaign?

It seems as though censorship of <insert bad thing> is mostly just a wedge issue to put your partisan group on the side of the current popular media trend. In the '80s, it was saying you were Opposed To Satan during the Satanic Panic. In the 90s, it was saying you were Opposed to Gangster Rap and Saggy Pants and Drugs. In the '00s, we were in an ideological war against Islam. In the '10s, we were in an ideological war against Big Government Socialism Taking Over Our Lives. In the '20s its been the War on Woke Foreigners.

Do you all really think Palantir and associated social monitoring programs are just going to make drones to try to spy on what American citizens are masturbating to? Nope! Palantir is a broad-spectrum monitoring company, and they will have various manner of AI bots scanning the contents of your hard-drive and reporting your browsing and downloading habits to all kinds of agencies and institutions who would loooooove to have more “product” to sell to our for-profit prison industry!

That’s one theory.

Another is that we’re trying to put together an industrial scale compromat operation, such that any given individual can be smeared and alienated from the public at-large if they oppose the current regime.

I’m sure advertising can function as a side hustle. But we’ve been drifting away from any kind of real consumer economy for nearly a decade. Everything is “how quickly can the government and its business interests cycle money between one another to replicate economic growth”? You don’t really need end-users if all you’re making is an AI-driven marketplace.

Maybe we need more women working in game design.

eardrums immediately shattered by Gamergate reactionary media

Amazing that they weren’t using Signal

I wouldn’t rule it out. But you can’t do public comms over Signal.

it’s even more amazing they weren’t using something like Meshtastic.

Again, I wouldn’t rule it out. But if I’m on a public group that’s very likely compromised by the IDF, I’m not going to announce all the other protocols they need to block.

He’s just reporting one avenue that’s been closed to the protesters by a corporate entity that is now complicit in genocide.

blaming them on using WhatsApp is besides the point

WhatsApp admins are explicitly interfering with a public protest in order to satisfy a genocidal foreign government.

This is at least as big a deal as TikTok censorship of anti-China posters. It’s just on behalf of a US ally, so we’re defending it rather than threatening to interfere in their business practices in turn.

the shame is on the cess pool that is Meta

Who appoints WhatsApp administration heads if not Meta? It’s the same picture.

Depends on who is telling the story.

Japan / Korea were early instances of US industrial outsourcing. The consequences of the project was an economic boom during late 70s/early 80s in both countries, such that American politicians feared Japan and Korea would return to the world stage as independent regional powers. Reagan’s tariffs, the subsequent opening of Japanese import markets, and the further industrial outsourcing to China, the Philippines, and the rest of the South Pacific labor markets effectively clipped the wings of the Japanese/Korean wage laborer.

You could argue this was part of the “agreement” between Eastern Zaibatsu executives and Western investment banks. But I’d hardly call it a “measured response”. I certainly wouldn’t call it a policy that served the best interests of either Eastern or Western wage labor.

Um, Aktuky…

President Reagan decided Friday to impose punitive 100% tariffs on a wide variety of goods produced by Japanese electronic giants in retaliation for Tokyo’s failure to abide by the semiconductor trade agreement between the two nations.

In approving a recommendation Thursday by the Administration’s top economic officials, the White House decided to put the tariffs into effect about April 17, less than two weeks before Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone is scheduled to begin a visit to the United States aimed at easing trade frictions.

The tariffs will be targeted to bring in as much as $300 million and designed to punish such firms as NEC Corp., Hitachi Ltd., Fujitsu Ltd., Toshiba Corp. and Oki Corp. by either pricing some of their goods out of the American market or by forcing them to accept substantial losses on U.S. sales.

Doesn’t really help that the AAA scene has gone straight in the shitter, while the quality games are all coming out of the Indie scene.

Curious how this poll was taken, given one of the groups is currently being slaughtered by the other.

They’d live side by side with their Palestinian brothers and sisters peacefully and for the betterment of all mankind?

The problem with “good games” is that you can only make them a few times before people stop getting excited.

Mario was a good game. A cloned, reskinned Mario knock off is derivative and hack.

At some point, you need to incorporate new technology, new art, and new game mechanics in order to draw in the crowds. Otherwise, why would I feel the urge to put down money for Starcraft 35 when I’ve got Starcraft 1 & 2 back home?

Unless there’s something about Israel in particular that you especially don’t like

Not a big fan of the genocide.

recognizing the slogan as a Zionist invention

Clipping off the bit about freedom is a Zionist framing, certainly. But when every expression of Palestinian solidarity is criminalized, there’s little to be gained in a debate about “framing”. At this point, “Death to Israel” is a perfectly valid and legitimate sentiment. The state is rotten to the core, from its corrupt fascist parliament to its bloody-fisted imperial expansion.

Pretending that “Israel has a right to exist” is any different than some Boer slogan championing White South Africa or a Neo-Confederate rallying cry for the restoration of America’s slave-owning past is what really plays into the Zionist’s hands.

I do in fact think “from the river to the sea” is neither an acceptable or advisable thing to say

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is an unacceptable or inadvisable thing to say in the midst of a genocide of the Palestinian people, because it suggests that the state responsible for the genocide shouldn’t exist?

I’ll say “free Palestine” all day long but will never use the other slogan.

From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free

It’s weird how they always leave off the second part.

it assumes people will act at least mostly rationally

People generally do act rationally, just not optimally. The difference is rooted in availability of information and accumulation of priors.

“The Marshmallow Test” is a great example. People who are predisposed to distrust authority figures and experience chronic hunger will “fail” the test, because they rationally assume they better take the marshmallow now rather than put their trust in a second marshmallow later. This same group happens to underperform long term, not because they are short-sighted or dim-witted, but because they continue to experience the same psychological reinforcements - unreliable social services, inconsistent access to basic necessities, predation by private industry and law enforcement, notably higher rates of social murder - that lead them to take what’s in front of them rather than waiting patiently for a bigger reward.

The next big market crash will produce this kind of person in spades, just like 2008 and 2001 and 1987 did. As people experience retirement accounts as a scam and schools as a prison pipeline and professional careers as economic dead ends and police as occupying invaders, they stop engaging with these institutions innocently and start dealing with them adversarially.

These rational responses result in a vicious deteriorating cycle of distrust and division. Any individual action rationally follows from the prior experiences. But the system isn’t optimal - people suffer disproportionately the longer these rational actions continue.

Everything needs to be “Always Online” in order to feed the beast that is Big Data.

PayPal made Valve remove them

You can buy games outside of the Steam store.

not an argument for of against anything

Right. It’s a system of economic exchange, not a moral position. There are ways around this system, but they’re time consuming and annoying to accomplish. So the vendors tend to take the path of least resistance when setting their internal policies. You were taught about Free Markets as this perfect, frictionless vacuum of interactions between buyers and sellers, but it doesn’t work that way and never did.

For some reason, people seem to confuse being naive and gullible with being moral and upstanding.

I mean, that’s exactly how third party payment systems have always worked. 🙄

I guess you can always try buying your porn game with Bitcoin or something.