Trump, seemingly oblivious to the nuanced diplomatic correction, responded by calling Xi his “longtime friend” and a “great leader”, expressing enthusiasm about potential trade deals.
He says that today. A week from now he'll be doing the Kubrick Stare into the camera and claiming Chinese interference in the affairs of South Pacific States will never be tolerated. Then someone in Shanghai will buy another $3M Trumpcoins and he'll be friends again.
BRACE FOR INCOMING TARIFFS!!!
You can't say anything positive about Russians on here. People are going to burst a gasket.
TIL, /s stands for spoiler
negative thinking and giving up hope literally never helped once
The gambler's fallacy, also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy or the fallacy of the maturity of chances, is the belief that, if an event (whose occurrences are independent and identically distributed) has occurred less frequently than expected, it is more likely to happen again in the future (or vice versa).
Obviously going around in a state of denial doesn’t help
It's not obvious. That's the hitch. Figuring out when to persist and when to accept defeat is at the heart of the emotional struggle.
Not with that attitude
You should only be legally allowed to give advice to people on the same step of Maslow's Hierarchy
When Batman beats goons to a pulp because they supposedly deserve it, he’s approaching criminality as a moral choice. There’s an obvious correlation between social inequality and criminality, and it’s simplistic and dangerous to say some people are just “bad.” Still, when Batman goes out at night breaking bones, he ignores the core issues of Gotham City’s economy and simply flexes his millionaire's muscles. By the way, this is the main argument used to defend the idea that Batman is fascist.
This is, incidentally, the rationale du jour of Red Scare Era KKK. Lynching black labor activists for agitating against the local government. Batman quite literally hangs people from lampposts, in a manner highly reminiscent of the "strange fruit" Billie Holiday sings about. They also popularized "policing" neighborhoods through night raids against black businesses that were deemed "criminal" purely through their relative success. Again, this goes to the manner in which Batman routinely roughs up members of the "legitimate" side of (what the author has decided are) criminal businesses.
Bruce Wayne’s vast financial resources only complicates the Batman character. The idea of a millionaire spending thousands of dollars on gadgets he uses to beat down poor criminals is problematic, to say the least.
It should be noted how many members of the Klan were, themselves, landlords and politicians and industrial millionaires of the era. They used their superior resources and their political connections with the police to engage in violent vigilantism against "criminals" like Emmett Till and Joe Spinner Johnson. And they organized within the Klan to promote racist policies at the public level, in the same way that Wayne Enterprises influences politics in Gotham City.
Let’s take Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns timeline, for instance. That Batman is unquestionably a fascist.
...
Batman puts himself above the law and brainwashes an army of lost souls to enact his will, crushing everyone he defines as an enemy. Instead of acting on a moral gray area, Miller’s take on Batman extrapolates some of the Dark Knight's tendencies to show how the vigilante’s crusade against crime could turn him into a full-blown fascist.
Probably the most naked example.
Obviously, this varies by writer. And you can always find more liberal/leftist authors who have re-positioned Batman as explicitly anti-slavery, anti-apartheid, and pro-union labor. But these are very novel interpretations, relative to the character as originally portrayed.
courting the nation’s most stupid
Who are the stupidest Americans? The Americans who selected Donald Trump? Or the Americans who selected the politicians he beat?
Like, fuck me, but I will go to my grave saying the Ted Cruz voter is the real Dumbest Man Alive. Cruz spent four years shitting all over California and New York, effectively handing these states to Trump in the 2016 primary. Legendary levels of political miscalculation. And people cheered him on for it!
At least Hillary had the sense to blow a few billion repairing her reputation in the Midwest after 2008. Absent that, it would have been a Bernie Sanders landslide in 2016 and two legit anti-establishment populists going heads up in the general election.
Can't say the same about Pam Bondi, Joe Rogan, or Nick Fuentes. Hell, Vance's position is entirely due to the cult of personality around Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. And then you've got Bari Weiss stuffing CBS full of her Free Press friends, for the singular purpose of making neoconservativism cool again.
You barely even need to be popular on those terms. You just need someone willing to churn out a mind-shattering level of media slop on the eve of some pivotal political moment (election, court decision, riot, coup, what-the-fuck-ever). JD Vance could be President in four years, purely on the grounds that a majority of states are replacing majority selection of the electoral college with appointment by state senators.
And then what are you going to do about it except move to Canada/Mexico (assuming we haven't annexed them already) or pound sand?
Pokemon, as a franchise, is worth it to monopolize.