Voroxpete

If we're coming at this from a perspective of fighting climate change, I don't think plastic straws are really the hill to die on.

The reality of any political battle is that you always have to ask "What is the thing that will create the most net impact?" But net impact includes "Not making my cause toxic to the average person."

The public, in general, are very amenable to changes like getting rid of disposable plastic bags and plastic packaging, and those can have as much impact or more than getting rid of plastic straws. Those are also changes that don't create significant negative impacts for people with disabilities.

And that's before you even get to the industrial scale changes that would have far more impact. If you look at, say, plastic waste in the ocean, about half of it is fishing nets. Changing fishing industry practices would be a lot more of an impactful approach.

Banning plastic straws is like putting out the grease fire on the stove while the whole house is burning down around you. Yes, technically it's a thing we should do, but it is not even remotely the first thing we should do. And the people advocating for it are often doing so as a way of pretending to do something meaningful while ignoring the far bigger industry level changes we could be making that would have a far bigger impact.

As a political issue, plastic straws have become entirely toxic, and given how small a piece of the puzzle they are, there really is no benefit to dying on this largely worthless hill when our efforts could be better spent elsewhere.

"Hitler loved my joke about gassing the Jews" isn't exactly proving your point, Dave.

MAGA won't collapse as a unified front. No collapse is ever unified, that's why it's a collapse. The fact that you're seeing some of them bending over backwards to defend Epstein doesn't prove that the damage isn't happening. That split is the damage. There's a tonne of infighting happening in the MAGA world right now. Ben Shapiro and Nick Fuentes are basically at war. Tucker Carlson has managed to turn the Heritage Foundation into the red wedding. Lauren Boebert and MTG - major MAGA figureheads - both openly defied Trump over the Epstein files, and MTG is retiring from Congress before the mid terms. If you're only looking at one or two faces you're not seeing the full picture.

See, the thing is, I'm not talking about their stupidity.

That's why the Epstein stuff is sticking in a way nothing else is; because it doesn't ask them to be smart. In fact, it plays right into their stupidity. That's the difference.

Everything else has bounced off them because it was easier to excuse it. Excusing the tariffs is easier than learning how trade really works. Excusing tax cuts is easier than understanding how the economy really works. Excusing his foreign policy blunders is easier than trying to understand the value of soft power. Ignorance is simpler. Ignorance is easier.

But the Epstein stuff? That sticks because they don't have the ability to be ignorant about it. This is something they know. Secret cabals of pedophile elites kidnapping children to sexually abuse them on a private island? My brother in Christ, they write fanfiction about that shit. They are the self proclaimed experts on that stuff. With everything else they can just say "Well I don't understand this, but I'm 100% confident that Trump does, because obviously the billionaire is a genius." But then they watch as Democrats are out there screaming for the release of the Epstein files while Republicans are dragging their heels and it does a number on them. Because they know how this is supposed to work; Democrats are all evil child rapists and Trump is the saviour sent to stop them. So why is Trump running cover for the pedophile cabal?

In short, I'm not claiming that MAGA are suddenly getting smart. I'm claiming that the Epstein cover up is exactly the right kind of stupid.

I have watched the first one, and at the end of the day it is an extremely competently made movie. That's something that can't be ignored. The plot is cliche as hell, and it's basically doing all the worst parts of the Dances with Wolves white saviour bullshit, but at the end of the day James Cameron is an absolutely phenomenal director, especially when it comes to action, and that does a lot of work for it.

It's the kind of movie where the things that bother you tend to bother you later, because you do get caught up in the spectacle of it all. Cameron does spectacle very well, and there's an art to that.

I think it generated tremendous buzz, and then disappeared without a trace. Like, it's genuinely shocking how quickly people forgot about it given how big the hype for it was.

The Avatar movies are a bizarre phenomenon. Absolutely nobody ever talks about them. They have almost zero cultural presence, and yet they are incredibly successful, despite the staggering cost of making them.

Everything has it's limit.

In n particular, MAGA care about the Epstein files. This is a major crack in their coalition. They spent years throwing around conspiracy theories about pedophile cults secretly running the world. They are obsessed with the Epstein files, and the more Trump tries to obfuscate their contents, the more they have to start wondering what his skin in the game is. We're already seeing it happen with people like MTG publicly turning on him.

It's still a cult. They don't want to suspect dear leader of anything. But the more he works to conceal stuff, the more they're trapped between two things they hold at absolute truths. One of them has to give eventually.

Weird how, when it's an oil tanker, they have zero problem boarding it. But when it's supposedly a boat full of drugs, the only possible course of action is to fire a missile at it, destroying any evidence of whether or not there were actually drugs, and killing any witnesses. Oh what's that, some witnesses survived? Better go back and double tap. Funny that.

The article doesn't really address any of the reasons why a war against Venezuela would be a mistake. Instead it functions more as a review of America's history of inflating threats from minor nations to justify wars of regime change. Good summary for anyone who would find such a thing useful, but not really what I was looking for.

I think there actually does need to be more discussion of the strategic landscape of a war with Venezuela, because even on the left it seems like most people are contemplating this purely as a moral hazard - if we do this we're the bad guys - without also assessing the real human costs. The occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan cost thousands of lives, destroyed thousands more, left devastation in their wake and (by no means the most important factor, but still a significant one) ballooned the US national debt by trillions.

Americans balk at the cost of helping Ukraine, but it's pennies on the dollar compared to the cost of the "War on Terror", is doing massive damage to a major adversary, and hasn't cost a single American life. But now you all want to send your boys (I'd say "and girls" but Hegseth won't be having any of that) to die in a jungle against socialists again, because the last time that went so great?

So, they had multiplayer, and it worked very well, but then they went through a whole bunch of major reworks to underlying systems that broke multiplayer, and they basically went "Yeah, that's gonna stay broken for a while until we get all this shit done, please be patient."