Your example describes about one percent of rural America. How does your theory hold up when applied to areas that are predominantly a service or agricultural economy? Where are these powerful GOP fundraising operations, because the party has been pretty notoriously hemorhaging campaign funds for awhile now.

While those conditions do allow for authoritarian regimes to maintain strength in third-world countries, they do not apply one to one to the U.S. In fact, they don’t apply at all, because our economy is structured very differently to those countries.

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Huntsville, Alabama is not rural. It’s the most highly populated city in Alabama. I’m not claiming that there are not intelligent people who are full of hate that support Republican policies, nor am I claiming there are no cities which support Republicans. The question was why do rural areas typically vote Republican.

because rural areas correlate with less educated populations, and people who have less education tend to vote Republican.

Unfortunately had to live in Evansville for a few years, this story checks out. My guess is that meth was involved, as that’s a pretty common drug from the area.

Dunno why this thread is filled with people equating Hezbollah and Hamas, but they are different organizations representing different groups of people. Israel attacked Hezbollah with exploding pagers, not Hamas.

It’s a pretty big and important distinction, because this attack by Israel was only tangentially related to their genocide in Palestine. It’s further evidence of their expansionist goals as they continue a campaign of terror against other countries in the region.

They’re already arming themselves for a civil war and openly calling themselves domestic terrorists, and your response is tea? You’re naive if you think neighborliness is enough to avoid the coming conflict, they’ve already killed Americans.

I don’t think they’re doing it in jest, I think they’re just a full on delusional sovcit

The boring answer is that Mossad probably were the ones who convinced Hezbollah to move to pagers in the first place, likely through double agents, and likely also controlled the supply chain from the beginning. They probably also didn’t actually care about who specifically had a pager, and just made sure they were distributed thoroughly within Hezbollah.

Of course he does, being a racist, redneck bigot is like the defining requirement to represent LA. I don’t think they ask their elected officials for anything else.

Temu isn’t a social media network that has been known to boost specific narratives with their algorithm. The U.S. isn’t saying that China can’t sell and market to the American audience, just that they’ll need a supervisor if they want to mess with media.

I’d like to hope that the American people wouldn’t stomach such a brazen coup, but I think that requires Harris to win in a landslide. If it’s even remotely close centrists will shrug and say it’s the will of the people just like they shrugged at Gore.

I hadn’t heard of such a thing, but it would make a lot more sense if this was just Meta trying to make sure they’re dodging potential sanctions.

Their implementation of it just feels like they don’t actually want you to buy the microtransactions. In Dragon’s Dogma 2 for example, one of the most useful things you could buy is a Port Crystal, since it lets you setup a location to fast travel to and they’re reasonably rare to find. However, you can only buy one maximum, and you don’t really need them at all in the early game. By the time you would need one, you’ll have collected like 3-4, and getting an extra one would be honestly pointless. You would think that they’d change gameplay in some fashion to encourage you to spend money, but after finishing the game I had tons of all the stuff they were trying to sell.

It’s not really much of an argument, it’s just stating facts. I’m not for the microtransactions, I think it’s confusing that they would add such a thing at all, but they’ve consistently been doing it for all of their published games for nearly half a decade now. I’ve just chalked it up to a cultural difference since Capcom is an Eastern publisher, and on the sliding scale of scummy microtransactions it’s pretty close to the bottom.

I mean yeah that’s sound political strategy, but you’re telling me MTG woke up and possessed the self reflection necessary to realize that?

I think it’s more believable that we all died.

This is a real valid issue. I’ve heard they finally put out a performance fix, but have not personally tried it out myself to confirm. It’s definitely the kinda game where you’ll need cutting edge tech to make it look beautiful, and it can look incredible, but that doesn’t excuse the abysmal performance on lower end hardware.

I mean, that’s just every Capcom release now. It has nothing to do with their confidence or anything, they just add pointless microtransactions because some suit at the company thinks it’s a good idea. It’s the same shit with Devil May Cry 5, all the recent Resident Evil games, literally everything they published. If that’s honestly the only thing keeping you from playing Dragon’s Dogma 2, you’re making a mistake.

Don’t worry, I hold plenty of hate in my heart for that Bitch too, but since I’m a few generations removed from the isle it doesn’t hit as close to home. I’d certainly let any Irishman take a hit at her before myself.

Nope, the Dems goal is to try and scoop up all the disenfranchised Republicans. They understand that the modern GOP is in their death throes, so they’re happy to shift the Overton Window further right. Republican policy is what their donors want anyway, it’ll be a lot easier to push when they’re a coalition of conservatives and centrists.

The goal for leftists is to start organizing grassroots campaigns for Senators and Representatives now, so that once the Dems have finished feasting on the ghouls’ corpse, we’re ready to fill the power vacuum.