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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 31st, 2023

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  • But, as you said, they’re proud of being compared to Nazis. Calling them authoritarians would just give them a fuzzy, tickling feeling in their loins—because “authority” and machismo.

    If the goal is to describe their own behavior to themselves in a way that they both understand and will blow a gasket over, calling them communists is pretty much a guaranteed way to do it. Most of them don’t actually understand what “communism” or “socialism” is beyond conflating them with Russia and China-flavored authoritarianism. Add on to that they grew up being indoctrinated into unquestionably believing that communism is the antithesis of America, democracy, personal freedoms, and all that is good in the world.

    They see themselves as the good guys fighting evil. Calling them “commies” is, in their own minds and in a single word, outright saying they are the pure evil they hate. The cognitive dissonance of trying to reconcile that thought for even a moment would be agonizing.







  • A lesbian, white mother was shot.

    They don’t see her as part of the in-group, so they still think it won’t happen to themselves. For at least some of them, that tune might change when an unarmed Good, MAGA Christian Girl™ is murdered in her own home away from any protests.

    Or maybe that is wishful thinking. A lot of them are simply hypocritical psychopaths who think life is a zero-sum game where they win by making others suffer.







  • No entitlement necessary.

    People typically welcome more competition in retail spaces. Having the freedom to pick between store A and store B allows consumers to choose whichever works best for them, whether for convenience or service reasons. Look at GOG. Nobody is complaining that they exist, or that they sell a subset of the games that people could instead purchase on Steam.

    What people don’t welcome is companies deciding they want a slice of the pie, entering a market, and then making the experience worse1. Coercing people onto a platform by removing their ability to choose is consumer-hostile. People complained when E.A. and Ubisoft made new games exclusive to their own storefronts, but they begrudgingly sucked it up because those were developed by the platform owners and they weren’t interfering with games they didn’t own.

    What Epic Games did was make timed exclusivity deals with third-party developers2 and publishers in an attempt to stick their foot in the door, while providing the bare minimum service to consumers3. They made EGS for the publishers and offered little more to their customers than contempt and the occasional free game as a bribe to boost the Epic Games Store user counts.

    The cherry on top was Tim Sweeney acting like the messiah of PC gaming coming to save it from the Steam monopoly, only to start behaving like a petulant child on social media in response to people justifiably being pissed off at Epic Games for the monopolistic shit they were doing.

    If his decisions weren’t openly hostile to the people he expected money from, there wouldn’t be much of a reason for people to dislike him. But, through his decisions and actions both as the leadership of Epic Games and as himself on Twitter, he gave people plenty of reasons.

    1: See digital streaming services, for example. Everyone was happy to just pay for Netflix. Some of them even paid for Crunchyroll, too, since it provided a separate catalog. Now, every media conglomerate has taken their shows off of Netflix and moved them to their own separate services at the same price point. It’s not a coincidence that digital piracy is making a comeback.

    2: Such as with Ooblets, when they paid the developer after the game was crowdfunded to release it on EGS instead of Steam.

    3: No user reviews, it took years to get a shopping cart, customer support being useless when people get locked out of their accounts, etc.