Exactly. It offers easy answers to complicated questions especially attractive to people who are to dumb and/or tired to bother trying to understand complex reality.

Looking for blame in a vague “other” is also easier than to face your personal shortcomings. (“I’m not out of a job because I’m lazy, it’s those damn immigrants!” “The fact that my children hate me is not due to my shitty parenting, it’s liberal transgender brainwashing!”)

E.A.Poe had similar concerns. He called the then hypothetical president “King Mob”. On the other hand, he was a fan of Andrew Jackson.

That’s actually true worldwide. Wanna see how an economy looks like after over 30 years of almost uninterrupted conservative leadership? Look at where Germany stands now. Crumbling infrastructure, worst Internet in Europe, industry unable and/or unwilling to open itself to modern technology (best example being the German car industry).

Oh yeah, that’s way worse! But it doesn’t make me very optimistic about Germany’s future either, even without the Trump tragedy.

Our current government literally just collapsed today so… yeah.

Also social media sequestering people in cozy filter bubbles that distort reality.

Social media, or more precisely, algorithms designed to create ever growing engagement by feeding into confirmation bias and only showing you stuff you like, have destroyed the ability of critical thinking in a majority of people.

This doesn’t only apply to the right spectrum either, as evidenced by all the “hopium” articles here and on r/politics that were trying to construct a blue win or even a blue wave when all polls pointed to a Trump advantage. I had fallen into that trap myself. And everybody was also smugly making fun of the articles in r/conservative predicting the same thing for Trump. Well, turns out they were right.

I agree that he probably won’t last the four years but even if he does he is already too senile to set any policy. He was also already more than happy for others to do the actual work of creating policy because he’s incredibly lazy last time.

So I think Vance (and Musk) will be the real rulers behind King Trump. I don’t think either is really that much interested in religion and racism but both are incredibly sexist and/or transphobic. So sadly a lot of horror and pain will be delivered to women and transgender people. (Which doesn’t mean immigrants are safe.)

Musk will also push for deregulation/privatization of technology so that he can become even richer. This will lead to more monopolization/enshittification and stifle innovation for years, maybe decades. Vance will go along with it due to the Thiel-connection.

Additionally, Putin has made sure that Musk will also champion his interests even if Trump is unable to due to senility. The US will become a de facto ally of Russia and a geopolitical enemy of Europe in a similar vein as China (meaning not openly).

The military-industrial complex will quickly warm to the new reality of an autocracy and the US will start a new war somewhere. Probably in the Middle East. Maybe not within the first four years though. It will be used to distract from a crashing economy and the very real climate catastrophe (mirroring Ruzzia).

I wish all of this were ideas for an alt-history book and not a possible scenario for our future.

As a German aware of my country’s history I can only shake my head in sad recognition and try not to feel utterly hopeless not only about the future of a once-great country but the entire world.

We’re in the endgame now.

Cool, now I know how to call my spaceship in the next space game I’m gonna play.

I just upgraded Alan Wake 2 to play the expansions, which are AWEsome. I played all expansions for Alan Wake and Control as well and enjoyed them a lot. Remedy is one of the few developers that I would play a game from on day one or even preorder. Bethesda, not so much. I can still remember being unable to play Skyrim for months on PS3.

Fair enough.

I call bullshit on that one. Santa is red and white because Coca Cola drabbed him in their colors for a marketing campaign and it catched on. Before that Santa was usually portrayed in white and green.

That was a Doctor that grappled with the question whether he was a good man or not. Decidedly grumpier and more prone to violence too. Also Scottish.

Yeah, although the Doctor is pretty hypocritical with his pacifism. Something which this quote sums up pretty well. He did kill several species after all.

It’s worse than that. Hitler’s entire economic plan relied on heavily burrowing money from other countries with the intent to pay it back with money plundered from conquered nations.

As for the people having better lives, well, not really. Earnings increased for workers but mainly from working even longer hours. The actual hourly wage fell on the level of the Great Depression. And due to less imported goods, consumer products like food and clothing also had to be rationed.

Who was better off by a lot however were large cartels and monopolies crushing small businesses thanks to the eridications of unions and, later, forced labor in the concentration camps.

So, while the (war) economy did boom, that didn’t really translate to better lives for common people (even before the war started).

For what it’s worth, even the bad reviews agree that it’s bug-free and feature-complete at launch. It also seems to be at least competent as an action RPG, although not doing anything new with the genre. Where opinions wildly diverge is whether it’s a good Bioware and more specifically Dragon Age game.

Doom in the comics is more like movie Thanos than comic Thanos. Comic Thanos is legitimately mad and killed half the universe just to impress Mistress Death (she was not impressed).

He’s basically Stark, Strange and Black Panther rolled into one, with the arrogance of Strange and Stark dialed to eleven.

He’s completely capable of doing very evil shit to reach his goals but also has moral principles. He has tried to kill the Fantastic Four countless times and is still the godfather of the daughter of Reed and Sue. Her first word was “Doom”.

Well, he never says he’s evil but is certainly seen as a villian: Dr. Victor van Doom. He’s actually glimpsed all possible timelines of humanity and only the one where he reigns is not ending in destruction. https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-4d9668819558c73a8fda43cd4bc0ef0a-lq He is also loved by the people of the country he does rule. And when he had indeed managed to rule the world, it was a time of peace. I mean, mind control peace (he amplified the power of Kilgrave the Purple Man) but still.

If you’re asking yourself why Kilgrave didn’t simply control him, Doom is one of the few people with so much natural willpower that Kilgrave’s powers don’t work on him: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d5/e8/c8/d5e8c8ee71120993b8616128b08a6a22.jpg

“So long as they (the Proles) continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern…Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.”

George Orwell, 1984

Righfully so, there is a lot a domestic violence against butlers in those games.

Why do you want to give her parseltongue?