dRLY [none/use name]
Maybe he could get one of those Razer respirator style masks they made some limited runs of. Both because RGB for a gaming related lawsuit, but also because they made a point of making the mouth area clear so you can see the person’s lips moving when they were talking. That or one of those Dyson headsets that has the air filter thing, but it would cover the lips from view. I am sure a mic of some sort could be added if their claimed issue is about being able to hear him clearly.
Also I don’t see how Valve could lose to an antitrust lawsuit in this case. They do have the most “name brand” storefront for PC games. They aren’t like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Sony, or Nintendo with regards to being either forced to use services and all the shit that Microsoft, Apple, and Google pull with their OS’es and products really really not making it easy to use options you want to (if the option is even present). And they aren’t stopping you from playing games from other storefronts or media (like direct downloads from the studios or from physical media), they even let you add non-Steam games to the launcher and don’t tend to stop you from modding. It isn’t like GOG, Epic, EA, Battle.net, Microsoft Store, etc are some tiny unknown options that most gamers are not aware of.
Funny for someone that most certainly be one of the next targets of the fascists running Israel if they are able to succeed in their mission to purge the world of Palestinians. The same applies to all the token LGBTQIA+ folks that support the right in the US. They (these fucking idiots in both the US and Israel) are just useful while moderates/centrists are doing their fence sitting and calling the left as “the same”. After the point of masks no longer being needed to take over, the token folks will be purged all the same.
One thing that continues to prove to me that Israel is completely lying about everything they have been claiming to have been happening since Oct 7th is their lack of providing any proof of any of it. Of course they have been lying about basically everything since they took the land, but this is specific to this current round of bullshit. It is constantly them just passing along “information” to their media and to outside media and governments all about all the “crimes” from Hamas. The beheading babies shit is the easiest example for being a perfect charge that would be spread far and fast knowing outlets wouldn’t walk it back with any of the same effort as they did spreading the profit driving sensationalism. They at the same time refuse to acknowledge literally every bit of video and photographic proof that both the Palestinians as a whole and Hamas as a group have been making damn sure to get out to the world showing what is happening. One major bit of fucked up irony with the Zionists that claim the Holocaust victim card to justify everything. The main reason so so many videos/photos/documents/etc that were taken and shown to media/govs/people about the utter next level fucked up shit that happened, was because it was so unbelievable that proof was absolutely needed. After a certain point it just seems like exaggerations if just simply told about it without actually seeing it in as many formats as possible. If those babies were actually beheaded like the IDF/Zionists/Israeli media have claimed. Then they would have absolutely provided videos and pictures to anyone and everyone to see how “savage” the Palestinians and Hamas literally are. But they haven’t and therefore it didn’t happen and they know it.
I am glad that I started listening to Trillbilly Worker’s Party podcast to learn that she isn’t some pure angel like she is always painted. She has obviously put in waaaaaaay more work to get from nothing to something compared to many rich people/celebs. But the pedestal she is always placed on really blinds people to things she doesn’t seem to care about. Sometimes people like her are actually far worse on the working class and poor because they happened to have “won” and therefore the others just need to be working harder. But they never seem to want to actually be part of breaking that cycle of abuse. She may have been one of us back in the day, but she hasn’t been one of us in a long time.
I like that the article spends so much text talking about the importance of suicide prevention and mental health stuff. But otherwise is just acting like it isn’t beyond weird for there to be that many on the same day. If these pigs weren’t about to leak something or had stumbled onto something they weren’t meant to. Then I still think it could be some kind of attempt to get both some level of sympathy from the public AND more importantly get extra funding. The money would be marked for “mental health” stuff, but would actually be used for other shit of course.
Being honest, I hadn’t really thought about it until now. Seeing how Japanese work culture is and how in a lot of cases (specifically the “businessman” type office jobs) many young people might just see it as the beginning of no more “life”. So if all the freedom and fun of basically everything college or lower ed levels is where the concept of “young” just ends, and old age means no longer being able to do anything other than boring work. And while not an excuse for adults lusting after actual kids (it isn’t), it could be a weird reaction to the mass desire to be/feel “young” again when looking at it from an “old” POV. So maybe the hard shift in basically all of Japan’s work culture vs free time to just do more free time things could help in shifting both the idea of what “old” is as well as turning fixation of lusting after or otherwise yearn to “feel” young again.
But I also can’t say that the headspace of the US is much better in how our work/life systems are getting any better and might start shifting into a weird clone of what our own corpo overlords want to copy from Japan (or other SEA nations). We already see more and more articles about how corps and many small businesses either openly or imply that you should be finding ways to bring work into “free” moments in your non-work portions of the day. How not doing that shit is signs of “just not being motivated to succeed”. And how even those moms out there are getting pressured into getting back to work sooner or be quietly replaced for not being as available due to now having kids.
I am not convinced that all his actions since being forced to follow through with the buyout hasn’t been to do just that. He is the kind of person that always has to feel like he won (if only to himself), while also being “important/cool” enough to be in the spotlight. He wanted to bluff Twitter while trying to look like he was “fighting against censorship”. But Twitter called his bluff and tried to make an example of him so other rich folks wouldn’t go around doing shit like that. Which also blinded them to the kind of crazy rich dick Musk is and how far he is willing to go to “win”. So they forced the buyout and were likely thinking that the massive influx of money would be overall a good thing and just be ready to make some minor changes here and there if Musk really pushed as the main shareholder.
Which might have worked if he were a “normal” liberal capitalist. However he immediately came in and tried to either quickly cut costs in order to drive stock prices up as investors or folks trying to pull a new GME rush so he could sell off and get money back. Or to make sure that the folks that forced him to buy are able to see him slowly and publicly drag the company down and turn it into a laughing stock. While also maybe trying to eventually change it into the “everything” network he has dreamed about ever since he got the “X” domain. With all the other extreme and sudden changes done on whims, it isn’t exactly a bad time to just say wild ideas to see how people react.
Since lots of people are most certainly not going to pay for “Blue” every month. $1 a year does “seem” like a small enough number to convince lots of normies that are already conditioned into thinking everything should be a monthly/yearly subscription. Which could (if everyone were to actually pay in addition to normal ad-rev) also be an attempt to pump stock prices as it would be one of the only chances of the company making money and therefore allow him to sell off.
I wasn’t aware that he had been acquitted. How did that happen? Were the victims talked into settlements due to legal/court costs?
I too feel the effects of the gaslighting actively happening. A friend of mine deeply believes the still completely unverified bits about babies being beheaded all because “eyewitnesses on the ground”. Which turned into a heated back and forward where I tried reminding them of as many similar lies and misinformation as I could. Also trying to remind them of how so many people have been sent to prison and/or death-row all from “eyewitnesses” either just making it up or otherwise not realizing the trauma of a situation caused them to misremember. One of the larger things I brought up was how almost literally the same kind of fake story was used to get the final nudge for getting people behind invading Iraq in the 90s. Also that fascists on the ground can say they saw all kinds of shit, but of course they will because the fascists always try to use very extreme fake stories or add extreme lies to an event that did happen.
In the end I think my friend will just mark it as me being a useful idiot (as they do for literally anything China related) or just denying bad shit. The “proof” is always on me, and never “correct” (again basically anything China). But they refuse to see how if everyone just blindly spreads shit on those really extreme stories and fully embrace allowing real evil things to keep being done (like 9/11 did/does for the US). And ends up with no amount of information and investigations that find otherwise will be enough to change their minds. Ignoring that the for-profit “news outlets” push these stories because profits go nuts, and even if full proof is found not anywhere near as much effort (or any at all) is put into retracting/correcting the misinformation. So the last thing the average person remembers ever is just the claims of fucked up shit being “true”.
In the end I will continue to not simply run away from efforts to push through with them or anyone I care about. Because these things matter and if I can’t keep trying with them, I can’t say that I am also a revolutionary. Fear at all levels is used to keep the masses fighting the wrong enemies and is how fascism is manifested and allowed to win.