Children who grew up

we applauded nixon for making inroads with china.

YMMV. The John Birchers hated that shit.

Liberals love to pretend the law is self-enforcing and refuse to ask what role the state’s deeply racist and violent state bureaucrats, or the police and sheriff’s offices (nevermind any ICE agents operating in the state) will play.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Eagle_Eye_(United_States)

Incidentally, Supreme Court Justice William Renquist started his career as a poll-watcher in Arizona, screening out any who looked too Democrat.

We won’t be sending in ground troops this time. So there can’t possibly be a quagmire like we had in Iraq or Afghanistan. And Trump promised money to any ship that gets attacked in the Straight of Hormuz (which I’m more than confident that he’s good for) so trade will pick back up again as soon as the smoke clears.

Honestly, I think he did a heck of a job and I’m excited to see what kind of incredible progress he can achieve for American foreign policy in Cuba next.

Battlefield was already refried slop before LLM development was a thing.

Doesn’t EA do this after pretty much every major release? Bring in a ton of part-timers and consultants in the rush to release. Go live with a buggy half-assed product. Fire most of the team to save costs. Then coast on marketing and DLC for a few years, before you kick off the next dev cycle and do it again?

I think it helps that, at least by high school, it wasn’t even something (normal) kids argued about. Just another annoying school policy, like when they put “Evolution is Just A Theory” label on biology textbooks and kicked a star athlete off the basketball team for having a boyfriend.

Probably not. But it’s close enough to the mark for Dan Da Dan for someone to clock it as a line. And “goofy shit kids say for attention” coded enough that you’d still probably get a laugh.

Both can bring out social anxiety

Generally speaking, socialization is like a muscle. You have to use it to build it. Which is why we have schools introduce people to social settings in controlled settings and with incrementally more difficulty.

“Nobody should ever have to interact with more than a handful of other people at a time” is a recipe for building a population of socially anxious people.

When you cloister kids at a young age, then introduce them to a big school full of more advanced students, you’re throwing them into the deep end of the pool late in the game. But just insisting “they’re 11 years old! they’ll never be social! lost cause!” is infinitely more cruel than weening them into society as best as your system can.

Thought for sure this was Ken Takakura

If you think this is tragic, wait till you get to the end of the episode when space aliens steal his dongle.

“I make video games for a living and have absolutely never said anything problematic or polarizing on social media. Can’t wait to cruise through airport security and immigration without a care in the world.”

~ Nobody, Ever

Schools will become propaganda machines

A brave drone operator’s struggle with guilt and despair as she/they drop the bomb onto an all girls school mislabeled as an airforce base.

Swelling music as she stares at a picture of her own daughter while the burning bodies of the children play on a monitor just slightly out of focus behind her.

Even better.

The only thing cooler than Americans embracing green energy is Americans embracing illegalism.

Greeted as Liberators

And decoupling only started to really happen last year.

We began decoupling when we took a militant policy against immigration. You can take that back to Clinton in the 90s or all the way back to Eisenhower in the 50s. But we’ve been adopting strains of isolationism straight back to the final days of WW2.

You could describe the Cold War as an enormous globalized decoupling event, which we tentatively recoiled from a few times before collapsing back into it.

Authoritarianism is spreading like wildfire

The entrenched neoliberal post-Cold War consensus is cracking up.

But anyone who told you that the Reagan Era global order wasn’t authoritarian sold you a box of rocks.

Upper middle class Americans are getting a taste of life outside the bubble. This is what “democracy” has felt like in The Philippines and Brazil and Ferguson, MO for some time.

They are using their essentially bottomless pit of money, influence, and resources to shape a world where they are permanently definitively on top.

When were they not? Do you think the folks fucking kids on Epstein’s Island twenty years ago weren’t doing the exact same thing?

When you snip away the social safety net, drop the illusions of “friendly neighborhood police officer”, and abandon any effort at mitigating the ecological consequences of capitalist expansion, this is what you get.

assigns them a score if a citizen walks on the sidewalk correctly

Funny story about Jaywalking

The automobile lobby in the US took up the cause of labeling and scorning jaywalkers in the 1910s and early 1920s. In 1912, for instance, Popular Mechanics magazine reported that the term was current in Kansas City: “The city pedestrian who cares not for traffic regulations at street corners, but strays all over the street, crossing in the middle of the block, or attempting to save time by choosing a diagonal route across a street intersection instead of adhering to the regular crossing, is designated as a ‘jay walker,’ in Kansas City.”

In 1915, when New York City’s police commissioner Arthur Woods sought to apply the word “jaywalker” to anyone who crossed the street at mid-block, the New York Times protested, calling it “highly opprobrious” and “a truly shocking name.”

Originally in the US, the legal rule was that “all persons have an equal right in the highway, and that in exercising the right each shall take due care not to injure other users of the way”. In time, however, streets became the province of vehicular traffic, both practically and legally.

Anyway, enjoy your hyper-criminalized car culture hellscape while making spooky fingers about Evil Foreign Country.

You were not born when the decoupling began. You will not live to see it end.

I suppose the plan was to decouple the world from the dollar all the time.

I mean, depends on who you ask. But there’s definitely been a deliberately effort from within the Silicon Valley wing of the economy to force people into using Cryptocurrency as a legally-compulsory dollar alternative.