It’s a shame. Seeing the bullshit companies have done to games for the sake of profit ought to be a pretty easy on-ramp to anti-capitalism. But just like in the real world, racist shit distracts them from any of that.

Sure… but what use is that analysis? There’s no magic magnitude dial that scales the vote counts evenly. The vote counts reflect the reality of the situation. Who has easier access to voting? Who believes that there is a candidate worth voting for? Etc. Even if we were just talking about “both sides pushing harder” they’re not going to be equally effective at it.

I like how you briefly acknowledge that this isn’t a random sample, but then hand wave it away and act like the same conclusions can be drawn from it as though it were a random sample.

I bring you a bag of red and blue balls to sample from, but before this I let a guy who really likes blue balls take some balls out of the bag. After taking a sampling from the bag, you conclude that there are many more red balls than blue balls. Is this a valid representation of the population?

I think there’s something to be said for the fact that the country has always had these tendencies. It’s a country founded on conquest and genocide and we just kept the wars rolling ever since. People are just numb to cruelty because it’s so “normal” living in an imperialist country. To complete the Nazi comparison, Germany, like most of the European states, was a decaying colonial empire. You spend centuries dehumanizing people around the world to justify colonizing them and it becomes pretty easy to turn that dehumanizing apparatus inward. The minds of the people are already set up to view some people as being lesser to justify oppressing them.

I think what you and others are experiencing isn’t a significant change as much as it’s becoming conscious of the violence that’s always been there. That’s good. People need to take that step to be able to do something. That said, there’s not NOTHING new about the various developments in the world. Technology always empowers those who already have the power to wield is to do things that they might have only dreamed of before. The industrial scale genocide of the holocaust wouldn’t have been possible without modern technology. Today, surveillance, data science, and automation allows the powerful to optimize their control over an increasing number of people with fewer and fewer people necessary to do it for them. What might once have taken a whole army of spies and police/soldiers can now be done by some computers and a guy controlling a drone.

But people don’t have the framework for recognizing these as the problems they are because they start from the assumption that the US is good and therefore the various violent things it does must be for good reasons. You can try to point out all evidence to the contrary, but the assumption that the “other” is the enemy is so strong that they can justify almost any action against others as being better than the alternative. And some people will try to resist, get others to see what they see, and then get called a hippy, conspiracy theorist, and/or a foreign agent.

This is missing Astarion being weirdly ok with your bullshit.