Yeah I had a huge laugh, this is just gonna suck for the people who get suckered into it.

Black Beans, Yogurt (a truly ungodly amount), rice, cheese, and red lentils. I’ve been trying to cut back on meat consumption last year, it didn’t work perfectly but I’ve made a dent and reaped some health benefits from it too. I’d highly recommend you all try to get more beans in your diet, I’ve become quite the evangelist for legumes this year.

I think they will “obey” but it will cost Trump an enormous amount of political capital. Any trouble at all in a war like that, any serious insurgency or international blowback, will have an outsized effect on public perception. Americans DO NOT like foreign wars, it’s weirdly part of what got trump elected, frustration with neo-liberal interventionism is an often overlooked element of his bases sense of grievance.

Realistically, do we believe he’ll make a serious attempt at taking control over these by force? Or is this just bluster? I’m starting to believe he may be legitimately intending to make a move for this territory, and frankly, I don’t think there are forces that would have the interest, or capability to oppose him. Too much of the global community has been browbeat into aligning with US interests. That for them to make a clean break, or even directly oppose the US is not a realistic expectation. I could easily see them folding to these sorts of demands, and that worries me.

The real action is offline. Maybe it’s time to go there.

A lot of people, myself included, REALLY need to pay attention to that line. I think there is real value in online discourse, honestly, but it should come after helping people in a visible and noticeable way. People notice who offers a helping hand and who has nothing to say but scolding remarks, and that cuts both left and right.

so nobody feels ‘trapped’ in an unfun game.

I think this is an understated problem. It’s simply awful to be in a slowly losing multiplayer game that you feel you have no control over, and when you also simultaneously feel that you aren’t playing with people you care about. It’s pretty easy to start not caring about monitoring your behavior. After all, who cares if everyone in this lobby thinks you’re annoying or awful to deal with, you will never see them again, and if you do they won’t recognize you, so act out your frustration without fear of real consequences. I also don’t think bans for “bad behavior” actually address the reason people behave this way, it just encourages them to hide it in more subtle ways that automated scripts can’t detect, or that give them some plausible deniability.

Time to find out if they’ve learned the right lessons. I won’t be holding my breath.