They’ll say Batman is more relatable because he doesn’t have superpowers.

Okay, but he’s a billionaire super-scientist who occasionally uses occult magicks. How does none of this qualify?

Superman grew up in small-town, working-class America

Sure, but how many modern day Americans could relate to growing up on a farm? Or getting a job in journalism?

The fact that he has the power to rule the world and chooses not to, is what makes him extraordinary.

I think superheroes are largely defined by their villains. And Lex Luthor - as an individual who regularly does struggle to dominate the world (and periodically succeeds with mixed results) - makes an excellent foil for this exact reason. Superman is, at his heart, just a guy trying to do the right thing. Luthor is an ego-maniacal fascist who cannot conceive of having less than total control.

The best Superman stories are ones that illustrate the practical limits of a seemingly omnipotent individual. It’s Superman’s struggles - his poor choices, his desire for human affection, his naive optimism, his inability to be everywhere at once - that make him relatable. The idea of Superman as a maximal human who still can’t do everything has a way of taking the load of us, comparably weak and vulnerable people, who strive for just as much as a fictional demigod.

Beginning to think cars might be bad

What “the base” wants is blood in the water. We missed that opportunity as soon as Biden handed the keys to the DOJ over, back in January.

If Trump really does show up with “The List” (which isn’t really a list, but a compilation of various other documents that people keep pretending is a big binder called “Names of People Who Fucked Kids” that we’re going to get a copy of) and his name is emblazoned across it a thousand times… what happens next? Does Thomas Massie not vote on the next “Gut The EPA Act of 2025”? Will Trump’s next court nominee fail confirmation? Do we recall our Navy from the coast of Venezuela? Is the genocide in Gaza going to end? Is it finally Mueller Time?

I’ve seen “Release the Epstein List!” in a thousand fundraising emails. I’ve heard it in speeches. I’ve got spam texts about it from Roganites and Third Way and Communist Party USA.

Nobody seems to be doing anything else but this. Nothing appears to be improving.

Just keep pushing and don’t stop.

Pushing what? Don’t stop what?

Are you writing your Congresscritters about this on the reg? Are you in contact with your state’s District Attorney? Did you show up at the Epstein Victims Rally, after shoving your way through all the National Guard and ICE goons patrolling DC?

Or do you just mean “Don’t stop posting”?

Many of these accounts weren’t just freelancers. They were set up by marketing agencies, often with the explicit support of the social media hosting firm.

Like, its in the fucking business model to sell artificial engagement and promotion.

Might not even be a bad business model per say, if the promoted material wasn’t so consistently slop.

You kinda needed to in the later years. Some communities would auto-ban you for posting in other communities.

One of the funniest things you could do was find a moderate in an auto-ban community and just kinda post their name in passing conversation in a hostile community to bait them into responding. Then… POOF! Mod gone.

Eh. There’s more than one kind of poweruser. The “people who are too online” are very different from the “accounts that exist to leverage social media for advertisement”.

Social media thrives on the whale users who are churning out content and hungry for engagement. It goes to shit when you’ve got your front page clogged with Native Ads and other shameless marketing gimmicks.

Going to be weird when they let Luigi Mangione out and the head of CMS immediately unalives.

Lots of Reddit transplants.

You get the bad with the good, unfortunately. We’re not a corporate shit pile, but we’re still The Internet.

Listen, you either slavishly devote yourself to the market system or you’re trying to run me over with a tank.

There is no middle ground, and anyone who argues otherwise is a violent extremist. 😔

Somehow, this place is still miles ahead of Reddit. The bar is that low.

that is more draconian than I remember.

They’ve been banning by IP since at least 2016.

At this point, they’re doing everyone a favor by perma-banning in bulk.

The site is foul and we’re all better off moving on

But… your requirement is to make one good faith effort to cancel

Sure. But when you’re starting the process you think “maybe I just did it wrong”. By the end, you can see the pattern and conclude “these people are just scammers”.

Wife used to subscribe to WaPo and my local Houston Chronicle. Both make unsubscribing deliberately aggravating. Unsubscribing via the website didn’t work. Phone calls resulted in long hold times and automated loops, where they repeatedly demanded authentication and then hung up on you to force a restart. When we did eventually get someone to say the subscription was cancelled at Houston Chronicle, they just… kept billing us even after the account was disabled.

We ultimately had to go through our credit card to stop payment.

Which one was the guy who told Abraham to kill his son? Which one was the guy who told Noah to build the boat and Moses to lead his people out of Israel?

“God”: Based. Cool. Trad. The foundation of Western Civilization. Protected by the first amendment. Maybe we’d all be a little better of we honored him more.

“God” but in Arabic: Extremist. Scary. Woke. A corrupting influence on the global politics. Clear and present danger. We need to expunge it from our nation and the world.

There’s going to come a point at which the Feds/States will lean on the ISPs to handle the censorship for them. We’ve had people all over the Nat Sec system staring at the “Great Firewall of China” and asking themselves “Can we get something like this over here?”

That’s certainly better. But they all describe themselves in terms of high or low population growth.

What happens when we mix low rates of reproduction with shrinking life expectancy. China and Japan are both experiencing population decline, while Europe is scheduled to join them in another decade.

Countries facing harsh environmental or hostile military environments have seen even worse outcomes. Between 1991 and 2015, Ukraine lost 20% of its population. The war has only accelerated this trend.

Gaza is on track to lose over 50% of it’s population, relative to 2023, before the end of the year. Libya, Syria, and Yemen are facing similar plights.

The US is also in the early stages of a manufactured population crash, with drastic shifts in domestic policy curbing immigration sharply, spiking infant/maternal mortality, and ratcheting the risk of infectious disease spread. This, after COVID cleared over a million excess deaths inside two years.

SP1 and SP3 both posit slow population growth. But neither posit the consequences of a more rapid and economically turbulent decline.

The “current path” scenario tends to assume we can maintain/grow the rate of carbon emissions indefinitely.

However, the short term disruption of COVID demonstrated an immediate and pronounced drop in temperature based almost entirely around the reduction of industrial transportation (planes and cars, primarily) and subsequent drop in electricity demands due to a decline in global commerce.

I see people insisting on the apocalyptic scenario while simultaneously clinging to this notion that we can keep cramming more particulate into the atmosphere unabated forever. It can’t be both.

50% so far