It must be humiliating to see conservatives pushing a conservative agenda and have no response to it except “no you”.

Have you even thought this through logically, or do you just bleat what you’re told to?

If support having police search schools to ensure gender identity is suitably suppressed, you should be proudly taking credit for it as a conservative.

If you don’t support it, conservatives have made it clear that this is their agenda and if you don’t support it, you’re no longer welcome among conservatives.

So what’s it going to be? Are you going to openly support current Republican policies, pretend you do, pretend you don’t, switch to the party you’ve been trying to throw your shit at or just not vote?

Is this really the corner you want to back yourself into for shit-tier jabs like “Must be a Democrat”?

It doesn’t seep in, it’s cultivated by far-right groups that intentionally target children and openly groom them for extremism.

I haven’t even gotten to ask what anti-drone measures they have.

The answer will be “none” because unless they’re ex-military, their entire contribution to any militia is usually “gun”.

Most of them wouldn’t pass fitness requirements nor take orders. Few of them have other skills such as first aid, communication tech or drone piloting.

Even when contributing their gun, you can’t assume they know how to safely and usefully handle a weapon, or that they’re mentally fit for combat, because none of that is a requirement for buying a gun.

It’s a hero fantasy they’ve literally never thought critically about, but it’s supposed to make all the mass shootings worth it.

Unfortunately, that’s not how greed works. They’ll never say “no thanks, we’ve made enough profit from Ukraine”.

Because it turns turns billions in public funds into billions in private profits.

The fact that those profits come at the expense of children’s lives doesn’t worry the oil and gas industries, so why would it worry weapons manufacturers?

So your objection is that they call a mass shooting a mass shooting? What magic number would you like them to use?

So both sides of the comic are complete works of fiction

Stupid it is then.

This has to be the shittest attempt to stay “mask on” in the history of this community right?

I don’t think anyone capable of typing could also be so deeply, obliviously stupid that they thought people would read the post, then read…

Nah, im a very nice person in real life, vut the anger has to go somewhere…

… and take it mean anything other than “people in my life also don’t know I’m racist dogshit but rather than grow as people, we should keep being racist dogshit on the internet”

The far-right is obviously aware, but they’ve learned the importance of dodging labels.

Not too long ago, neo-nazis called themselves neo-nazis and consequently had almost no access to popular communication platforms. After all, the moment someone admits to being a Nazi, you know their political views are dogshit and their solutions immoral and ineffective.

Then, they announced they were now “the alt-right” and everything suddenly changed. Not their opinions, pundits and idols of course, but their access to communication.

That tiny bit of plausible deniability bought them space on platforms they had only dreamed of. They were allowed to build themselves little communities full of abusive scum on major social media sites. Some of them were even on television! It’s the furthest they’d ever been able to push their views before they were spat on.

By the time “Unite the Right” rolled around, they were feeling untouchable. They whipped off their masks, triumphantly declared “Ha! We were nazis all along!” and started marching around with tiki torches, chanting antisemetic catch phrases and waving Nazi flags. They even got to do a bit of domestic terrorism against innocent people.

But the fallout was huge. The platforms that had been coddling them and claiming “it’s important to hear all viewpoints” suddenly treated them like radioactive cups of asparagus piss.

The rebranding they’d worked so hard on was ruined. Everyone knew they were neo-nazis again, only discernible from the original National Socialists by the word “SJWs” scrawled in crayon at the bottom of their list of undesirables.

But they learned from that mistake. They learned to stay mask on and never, ever “reveal their powerlevel”, even as they wrote Mein Kamph fan fiction and attacked anyone who wasn’t straight, white and stupid.

Labels were to be avoided at all costs. If anyone asked, they were simply “conservatives”, perhaps even “centrists”. It was the social media equivalent of the Proud Boys in their khaki pants and white balaclavas, still fuming over the jobs, friends and family they lost when they went out without them.

Because without labels, they couldn’t be criticised. They’d used 1984 not as a warning, but as an inspiration. They had to control the language. The “alt-right” was not only dead, it had never existed at all.

And if people reverted to simply calling them “nazis” again, they had a catch phrase to use as a shield, parroted by scumbags and useful idiots alike.

“The left just call anyone who disagrees with them a Nazi”.

Steam got to where it is by good will, good prices and good features.

Well, eventually.

When Steam was first released, the running joke was “steaming pile of shit”. It was slow, unreliable and only a couple of shades of green away from the worst color in the world. People complained about the birth of “always online” games and about paying full price but not even getting a box with it.

It’s not exactly unassailable now either. It’s my platform of choice as a user but for indie developers, the 30% cut is brutal and last I used it, the Steamworks SDK was pretty rough. The app itself also has a lot of legacy bloat like a built in MP3 player.

It’s ahead of the rest but I think “good will, good prices and good features” might be an overly romantic take on “it’s where all my games already are”.

It’s just something a racist made up to push “black people are stupid so we should be able to keep them as slaves and genocide them”.

You don’t need to dig any deeper for answers. The hole has already been dug and what a surprise, there a racist cesspit at the bottom.

The important part was that you got the far-right talking point out there.

It’s bizarre that you’d openly admit that while trying to pretend that you’re not twisting their words and intentions to suit you.

They gave their reasoning for the right to bear arms. A single, clear justification.

You didn’t even bother to claim that gun owners meet the given justification for that right. Instead, you’ve argued “oh they just added that bit for no reason”.

Should we selectively edit the other amendments too, stripping them of their conditions? Third amendment, soldiers are no longer allowed to live in houses. Fourth amendment, no warrants shall be issued. Fifth amendment, no person shall be held to answer for a crime.

The constitution is littered with conditions and caveats but the only one they didn’t mean just happens to be the one that would require you to be fit for military service.

“Nuh uh”

For example, a human can experience ongoing trauma from something that happened to them in the past, but that’s likely not possible for creatures with low intelligence.

For context, many people did (and still do) make exactly the same case for babies, often performing painful surgical procedures on them with no kind of anaesthetic. Nevertheless…

Caterpillars that are exposed to a stimuli shortly before pain is inflicted on them still react negatively to the stimuli after becoming butterflies.

While the original goal was to see how much of a caterpillar was still in a butterfly, the result was a basic trauma response; something in the past hurt them and it now induces fear.

Sure, maybe they don’t get PTSD from seeing other caterpillars maimed for science, but simple trauma is still trauma.

Also, you have to consider if reacting to impulses is the same as feeling pain. If they aren’t complex enough for it to be pain, than just a reaction to something isn’t necessarily suffering.

Do you have any basis for this beyond it being personally convient? Pain is essential for survival, especially without intelligence. It plays a greater role than even vision or hearing, both of which the creatures you’re talking about clearly have.

Is it morally justified to inflict pain and fear on a creature that outwardly reacts to it, simply because it can’t be proven its “true” pain and fear inside their minds, according to your arbitrary standard?

Asserting “their pain is not like our pain” without actual proof, it’s equally likely that they physical pain beyond what humans are capable of experiencing.

But that’s never proposed, likely because it makes things less morally convient.

“I know you are but what am I” is literally the first comeback a child learns.

It’s okay. Not everyone can be smart. You don’t need to keep trying. I’m sure that you have some kind of redeeming features, just not your mind or political opinions.

Nope, you’re just not not following, either because you’re deliberately choosing not to or because thinking upsets you so you go without.

In democratic countries, rights are granted and revoked at the will of society, through the process of electing representatives. This system has no inmate morality and relies on the majority of public being good people capable of making informed decisions.

It’s why as hard as they tried, conservative bigots couldn’t hold on to things like slavery, segregation, disenfranchising women, casual sexual assault in the workplace, criminalising homosexuality and all the other horrifically immoral shit the right-wing has been on the wrong side of for centuries.

Which is also why conservatives routinely undermine democracy with things like gerrymandering, obstruction and astro-turfing to ensure its their will that is represented, not the public’s.

So if you think you can take away my right of freedom of speech, go right ahead but we both know you’ll struggle to find more than a handful of fascists to support it.

If by some miracle you did, sure, I’ll abide by it. It’s what society decided and I’m not going to become a domestic terrorist over it.

How many people in the pro-gun crowd say the same?

Yeah how dare “the government” tell you not to go on a killing spree that targets children or threaten your wife with a gun if she tries to leave.

You can feign all the melodramatic indignation you want but your peers and politicians have shown over and over again how little they actually believe in the “freedom” you claim to value.

The majority of the pro-gun crowd staunchly vote Republican, the party that says you can’t smoke pot or can’t pay a consenting adult for sex and they can listen on your phone whenever they want.

And of course like every government, they also say you can’t build your own home with your own hands, can’t own land mines and hand grenades, can’t drive or fly without a license, can’t run a kitchen from a public toilet and a million other rules that the pro-gun crowd doesn’t object to because they know there are massive public safety risks without those regulations.

But the moment someone suggests adding semi-automatic guns to that list, the pro-gun beat their chest and pretend they rule themselves as free and independent men who don’t need no society.

And the moment a Republican in a gun-happy, right-wing state suggests banning gay or interracial marriage (again) or executing women who have abortions, they cheer furiously.

Not of your freedoms came from the barrel or a gun, nor your own hand, nor the people you support.