???

The terrorists in that case managed to outlast a billion/trillion $ anti-terrorism budget, I don’t think the US had much negotiating power or a choice to not negotiate in that case. Ironic considering how many times that it’s been the other way around.

YES, because OP is typing words that can be misconstrued as being a shill or a bigoted asshole. I’m smart enough to recognize it if you point it out, but I’m not fucking psychic, and I’m the kind of person who believes in dream prophesies so that just shows that neither potential delusion nor intelligence have anything to do with people misreading things online. It’s just human and technical limitations, but your italics are clear so: if you don’t want people to be annoyed at you, maybe respond without being condescending.

Maniac (2023) is a series you might like. Despite the name, its more of a cassette futurism cyberpunk world with a scary amount of dystopian parallels to our own.

It’s also 2023 and I’m sick of pretending what happened didn’t happen just because the internet doesn’t like hearing about it.

Well, they are, but it’s a story and a very cerebral one. Of course it has a lesson to learn from.

At least it wasn’t being woke or preaching about the end times of a 2000 year old prediction. It really does become an issue when the aesop anvil doesn’t need to be dropped.

See the difference is that morality has almost completely broken down in CP2077. What did V have to do between the prolog and tutorial to get a nice apartment and a reliable car? Those assholes at the meat packing plant where you get the robot sure don’t look like they have any qualms even if V does.

Also, we still have an ecosystem and efficient oceanic transport. Climate change and a rogue AI that controls a global oceanic swarm of self replicating sea mines mean that the pizza is gross because pigs are extinct (they use tuna) and all overseas cargo is transported by air.

People still care about their friends, but that’s it. Even if internet in CP2077 was global and filled with punks and not just a NetWatch-policed glorified municipal Teletext, do you think anyone would give a shit about the world they live in on a chat site?

It’s also heavily implied that successful cyberpunks are vastly outnumbered by idiots who were in over their heads from the start and it cost those amateurs their lives. Those that succeed and become even slightly known, including V, are often exceptionally skilled individuals.

I wish I could go back in time, “buy” those kids and raise them in safety and comfort. This is not an okay “joke” OP, and I see people are finally starting to realize what I realized in 2017 after watching that shitty movie “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” that literally drove me to insanity.

A lot of people don’t care about children, instead seeing them purely as a burden unless the child is forced to work. It’s disgusting and rooted entirely in overly conservative values.

Many who don’t fit into the above category are simply sexist and hate kids as being the result of either “being a traitor to your gender” (if you’re female) or “pussy whipped” (if you’re male).

This seems to have been the majority view since at least 2015, though I only noticed it when I realised children were being cast exclusively as villains, victims of the villains, or heroes who are forced to “grow up” over the course of the story. If proof is needed, I can provide a list of not one, not two, not three, but 33 different stories that do this and almost all of them are either made in the 2010s or became popular in some way in the 2010s.

Fair enough. I meant that there’s two "realistic"s out there. There’s what’s scientifically proven, and there’s what pop-culture has led us to believe; they overlap but the latter is significantly less required to tell the truth.

How childlike are teenagers? More than you think thanks to Dawson Casting. Why do Aluminum Christmas Trees exist in the Peanuts universe? Because that was an actual ugly fad back in the 1960s. Why do cars always explode when they crash in movies? Because it looks cool and reminds people that the Ford Pinto was a death trap and so could their Tesla be.

Pop-Culture is art, not science, but most of us (myself included) take it for granted that what is and isn’t fictional is easy to spot because real people sit on chairs but only action movie heroes can survive jumping out a plate glass window to escape an explosion. Sadly, fake news exists because fiction has never been 100% clear on what is fake in movies and books, and since 2016 neither is reality for some odd reason (Life imitates art, go figure).

If every Aluminum Christmas Tree was just a wry commentary on the commercialization of a Christian holiday, World War One would never have happened. If the poles for traffic lights weren’t designed to shear off and fall to the ground if a car drives into them, there would be a lot more road fatalities, yet people deride Grand Theft Auto, American Truck Simulator, Crossout and other games with drivable vehicles and destructible environments for unrealistic traffic lights that you can push over by driving into.

Science, as accurate as it is due to only trusting the verified and being willing to de-verify whatever turns out to be misinformed, is not the default coding language of our brain; We are usually very emotionally-motivated, so people believe in everything from a flat earth conspiracy to “science is my one true god because my parents abused me and were constantly going on about Jesus and sinners to cover up that they were bad people, therefore all religions must be evil” to “capitalism is inherently good because I saw my neighbours dragged into the night to never be heard from again by the Soviet secret police” (for the record, I hate both systems but monarchy and anarchy don’t appeal to me one bit either so… eh).

So yeah, tl;dr, take it from a fiction writer that people will often believe anything that speaks to them, and therefore our definitions of “realistic” were quite different.

I really did mean “realistic-looking, but not reality” as much as you meant “scientific consensus”, and I get why that’s easy to confuse… sometimes I just forget when posting on social media that most people don’t have a good memory or the desire to memorize things from fiction as disparate as Aboriginee mythology, Hypnopspace Outlaw, the Backrooms, Paprika and Inception, all well enough to remember every single one of them (and many others) involves dream magic/super-tech of some sort. My apologies for forgetting you probably don’t write fiction for a living.

Fair enough. Just know one thing. The unconscious mind seems to be not just incredibly powerful, but reality-defying to the point that myself and my dad have gotten information related to events we would not experience until years later in dreams, and in general lucid dreams are often stranger than fiction.

You don’t have to believe anything, I’m just pointing out oneirology (study of dreams, and in an actual scientific manner rather than something shady like astrology) is both a real field of study and like trying to catalogue all the different ways lightning can be put in a jar; frustratingly resistant to the scientific method.

And that’s just in anthopological and psychological fields, what about the bottom of the ocean or the depths of space? It’s unlikely there’s anything truly alien or magic on other worlds or in deep ocean water but so is the presence of life at all. In short, we might also be living in a world which isn’t as realistic as we’ve been led to believe reality is.

Change.org petitions to not deport people from Canada, who either would be killed by their own government or hurt by other people due to endemic homophobia and transphobia in their culture after being deported to their home country, or, in one case, because he turned 18 just before his parents and younger siblings were granted citizenship.

Worst part is why; I’m half-European (my family were farmers and possibly feudal landowners at the wealthiest, political upheavals forced them to expatriate themselves a half-dozen times in the early 20th century so my dad’s nationality is vague) and half-Colombian (and my mom’s family tree is itself very mixed race), so I know how important immigration is for both the immigrants and the recieving nation. I’ve never held anything against anyone that they were born with since around 2007 and I have never tried to justify that dislike of severely mentally handicapped people from back then at any point, then or now.

Finally, I live in Western Canada and have a lot of empathy. It seems that, while I’m not going to hold it against all French Quebec residents, there are some Québécois who are fucking cruel when it comes to deportation. I’ve talked to a guy, Caucasian as paste, who has been illegally reported to Immigration twice because he’s from Ontario and lives in Quebec, and that’s just how Immigration - which is HQ’d in Quebec for no good reason - treats people who look similar to themselves, let alone the dozen different times an upstanding potential skilled worker migrant from a “person of color” background has been nearly deported despite a clear-cut case of being in life-threatening danger if they are deported.

Fortunately, most of the petitions succeeded in putting pressure on Immigration Canada to hand out exceptions to rules because of the circumstances and because most of the country is all too aware of how much bigotry has taken hold in Quebec.

I mean, I don’t want to generalize and I’ve never known much about Francophone history, but I somehow can’t help but wonder if French aristocracy both on the other side of my country and over in Europe have always tended to be sociopathicly narcissistic. Hearing about some of the things the French government has just tried to enact has me feeling like we’re in some sort of home stretch of the end of the world, or at least a historical turning point that will go down in the history books of the 23rd and 24th century the way Napoleon’s reign or the American Revolutionary War is portrayed in modern media.

Also, before anyone says it, I know every country has had corrupt leaders throughout history. It just seems to take a special kind of arrogance among leadership for “The rich bitch thinks we weren’t allowed to eat cake without permission, when we can’t afford the bread?!” to be a plausible accusation at multiple points in time and space with the only common thread being the language spoken, but since that could be said about English easily I apologize if that feels accusatory. You’re not the language you speak or the flag you fly, just please don’t let power go to your heads everyone.

That’s the new guy. Old guy’s being driven home after he got plastered at the retirement party. RIP, I hardly knew ye (I live in Canada, lol).

I know, right? God I am so done with arguing about how (or who gets) to decide what kind of society we live in. I just want to talk about OpenTTD, Star Citizen and pics of Lego builds.

Maybe so, but… That might be because China and America have too much international power. Power attracts the corrupt and global power attracts the most corrupt on the globe.