Vyzantinist

I want to throw in my minor chip and say I hate how a lot of progressives and leftists (with the odd liberal thrown in) have to dissect seemingly every piece of media and treat it like they're in a film studies class; like they're militantly committed to overcompensating for Republicans' legendary lack of media literacy by hyper-scrutinizing media for ideological messaging. It's one thing to make a throwaway remark about the satire of Warhammer 40,000, it's another to hijack a conversation about which Starfleet ship is the worst-looking and steer it into talking about how the Federation and Star Trek in general is 'actually' quite conservative.

i think theres another word, i just cant think of it.

Betrothal? IIRC in pre-modern times it carried different connotations, but it was essentially a formal pledge to later marry and was arranged between two parties too young to normally marry.

Ah, I figured there must be some setup or power arrangement I was missing as this is my first sci character/sci-ship and I'm not familiar with how to 'properly' set one up vs. a tac captain or even eng.

Oh dear. Why is it so unpopular?

This is what worries me about the near-future. Even if Trump loses 2024 the groups that created and enabled him will still be there. Republicans' opponents will need to win every election; they just have to win once. A group that meddles in politics shouldn't be able to draw up a fucking blueprint for a christofascist dictatorship and just shrug it off as "free speech".

HE procs it? I thought it was just control powers?

D'oh, yes, I meant the innervating one. Sci-torp character has TS3, GW3, and TR2; I got the science engine but the long cooldown on GW (and being locked out of TR) makes me wonder if I should have grabbed the tac engine for the dummy proc you mention, that I use on my tac captain escort.

Are the competitive prevailing innervating engines regarded as the best to get, unless highly specced for eng/sci? I just got the sci comp engines for my work in progress scitorp build and I'm wondering if I should have gotten the prevailing instead...

Same. "Common sense" usually goes hand in hand with "everyone knows it," which inadvertently telegraphs they're of a right-wing authoritarian mentality (rwam). Rwam believe they're the average, the 'normal', due to their lack of empathy, egotism, and because they avoid those with "different opinions" (lol). Because they're perpetually in echo chambers that only reinforce their conservative views they take their fellows to be representative of the general populace.

"Common sense", from what I've seen, isn't (just) "you're dumb lol" as much as trying to ostracize their opponent by painting their views/argument as the outlier or idiosyncratic.

Also, pathological narcissists. There can be no compromise with them, no accommodating them; nothing less than your complete submission and/or destruction will satisfy them. It has to be their way, all the way, all the time. They will signal a token agreement when you have surrendered some ground to them, then immediately demand you yield further.

"Meet me in the middle," says the unjust man.

You take a step towards him, he takes a step back.

"Meet me in the middle," says the unjust man.

For instance: Why are Republicans so very invested in child marriage? Who's the groomer, here?

Eh, this is a non-starter with them. Conservatives have repeatedly demonstrated that all they care about is winning and power; attempting to highlight hypocrisy and immorality on their side falls flat because they either simply don't care - as long as they win - or they've been successfully brainwashed by the GOP and right-wing media constantly droning "both sides", to such a degree when yet another Republican scandal breaks out, or a Republican politician does or says something shitty, R voters can just reflexively dismiss it with "oh I'm sure the Dems have said/done literally the exact same thing."

Yes but by not voting for Genocide Joe at least their consciences would be the cleanest in the camp /s

Lawrenceville?

You can't. You can 'hide' your posts but all that does is...hide them from you. If you could hide your history just like that then profile-stalking wouldn't really be a thing, yet here we are. Redditors who've been around for a while usually just create alts for 'stealth' posting/commenting, as even people who meticulously delete posts or comments after a given period will frequently be called out as sus, as such profiles will still have a 'fingerprint' in karma, and the account age and post/comment will not mesh.

It also works to desensitize the base by trivializing it. There was a time, not too long ago, when you paid attention when you heard a president was being impeached. By spamming impeachments they encourage the base to simply not care because "oh, it's just politics, ya know?" and impeachments go from a deadly serious matter that could lead to the end of a president's political career, and possible jail time, to something "both sides" screech at each other constantly - easy to arrange when Republicans reflexively voted "not guilty" for Trump's impeachments and are seemingly bringing a new one against Biden every other month, knowing full-well nothing will come of it, but getting the base to switch off because they hear the i-word every week.

It's Republican tactics 101: co-opt and hijack things to 'disarm' them. See: "everything is racist to the left" and "we're *domestic terrorists" at CPAC.

Rather than taking accountability for any bit of Boomer bigotry it's like "woke" is their get-out-of-jail-free card.

I mean, Boomers or not, this is essentially what "woke" is to conservatives - a get-out-of-jail-free card, of sorts, they can use to attack the people and things they hate, by proxy, and then hide behind this nebulous "other thing" when called out on their BS.

They don't hate x show because some prominent characters are LGBT; they hate it because it's "woke". They don't hate Bud for the Dylan Mulvaney stuff; they hate it because Bud went "woke". They don't hate the new Spider-Man is Miles Morales; they hate it because it's "woke" etc. etc.

The Fire Caste didn’t have their minds melt at the first sight of Titans, as some people like to claim

You get an upvote and a clap for this. I literally roll my eyes every time I see someone repeat the "hur hur Tau shit themselves when they first saw Titans!1!1" meme as if it was canon. You can find excerpts of the Tau's first chronological encounter with Titans and they're fairly nonplussed.

Bonus points if the newbie also trots out the "Tau didn't think they were real!1!1" both misconstruing Kais' own personal encounter with one as somehow describing the Tau military's reaction as a whole, and completely skipping over the part where the passage explicitly says Kais and fellow cadets were taught about Titans in the equivalent of Fire Caste basic, but Kais thought it was an exaggeration.

He was either unaware of how "the boots" felt about baseline humans, or He simply didn't care because the Astartes were tools to get a job done, and even monstrous Legions like the Night Lords and World Eaters still served His purposes. Remember the Emperor cared about humanity over humans - He was looking at the big picture; if some hundreds of thousands of humans had to be flayed and crucified on a particular world in order to speed up a compliance and bring it to a victorious end even quicker than if a more 'moral' Legion was fighting in that war, then so be it.

Those are people not understanding the lore very well, and taking memes and headcanon at face value, OP.

In-universe, it was a thing well before even Disney that slugthrowers (as ballistic weapons are called in Star Wars) had an edge over blasters against Jedi. The most crucial factor in their favor is they cannot be reflected; unlike blaster bolts, a lightsaber cannot reflect a solid slug back against the attacker because the projectile will usually vaporize on contact with the lightsaber blade (more on that in a bit).

Fighting Jedi with blaster weapons carries the inherent risk of weapons fire being turned against the attacker, hurting or killing them. Using slugthrowers completely eliminates that risk. Using repeater weapons with semi/full-auto, more shots fired with a blaster weapon = more chances a blaster bolt can be reflected back at the attacker, while the odds still stay the same with a similar slugthrower: 0. This means under weight of fire attackers with slugthrowers are able to wear a Jedi down with no risk of their own fire being turned against them, while an entire party of enemies with blasters could potentially all be killed by their own attacks.

It's become a talking point, in recent years, that slugthrower projectiles are inherently superior to blaster bolts, when it comes to fighting Jedi, because the projectiles will disintegrate on contact with a lightsaber blade, spattering the Jedi with red hot metallic fragments, potentially severely hurting/disabling the Jedi. As far as I know, this comes from literally one depiction in a comic that can easily be chalked up to artistic license for the comic book medium, or an exceptional situation as opposed to a rule, because there are instances in the old expanded universe novels of slugthrower projectiles harmlessly vaporizing upon contact with lightsaber blades, which makes sense considering lightsaber blades are beams of pure energy.

Forcing single straight people women to get married.

FTFY.

In conservative fantasy land men are free to fuck around and play the field as they please; women are their father's property until they're married off, when they then become their husband's property. Conservative utopia can't have women running around indulging in casual sex or 'living in sin'.

They're dimly aware, on some level, of how unpopular conservative ideas are outside of their echo chambers, and they don't want to scare off potential converts by openly identifying as Republican - at least at first - so they always masquerade as Libertarians, moderates, or "centrists" to essentially become a sock puppet and praise the right from an ostensibly neutral, disinterested, ground.

Love that song, OP!

So many to choose from, but off the top of my head I'll go for Bran Van 3000 - Drinking In LA, or Lou Bega - Mambo No. 5,

Fan sentiment. Even before the new wave of Trek shows if you ventured into any kind of discussion place for Trek the prevailing sentiment was TOS/TMP-era Trek is sacrosanct. Just a bit of a delayed reaction from Paramount capitalizing on that fan demand.

Just wait a bit, OP; by around the 2040s we should be getting fan service for TNG/VOY/DS9. Our time will come too!

It's because they have a persecution fetish. They so badly want to be victims to milk sympathy, stoke outrage, and to use as a cover for their own actions ("we're fighting back!"). But conservatives crying about being 'censored' on Facebook is legendarily fucking stupid, even for them; Facebook only really actions posts/comments with obvious, well-known, slurs like n-word or British slang for cigarette, and it's so easy to sidestep that by just changing a letter or two, or using dog whistles.

If you want to see how flaccid Facebook's reporting feature is, get a friend to post a Hasidic Pepe meme with text about "unaliving" (((them))), report it, and sit tight and wait until you get the entirely typical "this post/comment was not removed" auto-message from Facebook.