I'm not going to downvote you, but, I disagree. Nintendo might have had a leg to stand on if they tried to say Palworld infringed on their Pokemon intellectual property and/or copyright, especially after the mesh controversy, but they didn't attack them on that. They're going after Pocketpair for patent infringement on a so-far undisclosed patent. Probably a game mechanic of some sort. Pokemon did not invent the monster collecting and/or battling genre. Dragon Quest predates it by a good margin.

I'd like to see the patent they claim to have. In what way might Palworld be infringing upon their patent that another similar game, like say TemTem for instance, is not? I hate the idea that a fun game mechanic can be patented and locked down by one company for up to 20 years.

Palworld would not have caused the stir it did if not for the blatant “It’s Pokemon with guns!” angle.

This was 100% a fan reaction to the trailer, and not an official stance by the developers at all. That's obviously what they were going for, but they stopped long before outright saying it out loud and let the consumer make their own inferences.

They have every right to go after them, but I really hope they lose this one. Nintendo doesn't deserve to have a monopoly on fun creature collecting games.

They'd just blame the Democrats anyway. Republicans thrive in dysfunction because they can convince their low info base that nothing bad is ever their fault.

The Republican party needs to have plausible deniability. In the conservative playbook, it's okay to repeat things that they know for a fact are untrue, or to tell a lie of omission to further their agenda, because they can always walk it back at the point in time which they are receiving blowback by saying they didn't know it wasn't true or that they didn't have all the facts at hand. Assuming that the lie doesn't manifest itself into truth or that there are enough people who care enough about the real truth to bother fact checking it at all to the point where it would necessarily generate any kind of controversy.

This was Vance saying the quiet part out loud, probably by accident, and his pivot was not convincing at all.

I really don't want Trump to get shot and killed.

I really really want Trump to live the rest of his life in constant fear and paranoia, never able to enjoy the things that he loves, isolated from the world and starving for the adulation of the people who will quickly forget him in the prison of his own making as he taps away at his phone on his own little social media bubble, grasping at being relevant again until the day he dies of natural causes and the nation lets out a wet fart of false sympathy and lowers the flags to half staff for the day while the news media puffs him up one last time before they, too, stop giving a shit and we close this chapter of our lives and our nation.

That requires Harris to beat Trump in November, so I need the fucker to stay alive until then.

Oh, it will. If they march on the capitol again, Biden will call in the national guard.

Trump didn't do that when he was at the helm because he wanted them to succeed.

I almost want them to try again so this time an example can be made of them, since our legal system refuses to hold extremists accountable for their own actions.

Why take a bribe from John Oliver, who would immediately turn around and disclose that Thomas accepted it on his television program, when he could just go ask Daddy Harlan Crow for an identical RV and then not disclose it?

The Supreme Court is corrupt to the core. There's an inability to hold them accountable for anything. The system of checks and balances functionally doesn't exist for this "apolitical" branch.

It really is a scathing indictment of our country that, even if the allegations were true (they aren't), the proposed solution to the problem Republicans have offered up is to deport all of the people back to their home country rather than just... I dunno. Making sure they have other means of feeding themselves.

What the fuck has become of our society?

The culture war has been going on for a lot longer than a decade, it's just only in the last decade or so that it's been amped up to 11 in terms of how aggressive it's being fought. Conservatives are almost always on the losing side of social issues that require a culture shift. Women's suffrage, civil rights, seatbelt laws, anti-smoking laws, gay rights... the list goes on, and the fight is never quite done for some, but they always lose in the end.

The very fact that conservatives are very pro for things like coal mining that liberals are trying to legislate away create strong reasons for some people to hold their noses and vote Republican regardless of how noxious the candidate is. When their livelihoods are literally at stake and the liberal response is "Well you should have gone to college to learn a new skill or trade" it makes sense that they are corralled right into the arms of conservatives. Economic drivers are the most powerful force behind the conservative movement right now, not culture bullshit that deep down they don't really care about. It doesn't help that very few people understand the relationship between "the economy" as outlined by experts and "the economy" as experienced when paying for groceries or filling up their car at the pump. It doesn't matter that conservatives almost never deliver on their promises to fix the economy and often end up sending the nation into a recession, if bad decisions on a national scale lead to temporary relief on a local scale for some, that's what they will remember when voting next time.

Liberals need to be doing more to bring disenfranchised voters into the fold. Educating them without being condescending or dismissive would be an excellent start. Turning down the temperature in politics is not possible without also lowering the stakes, backing off of hardline positions in the short term might be the most effective way of undermining support for terrible conservative candidates.

I have never cared so strongly about something that I felt it was appropriate to harass someone via Twitter for their views on it.

I'll be negatively judging them, sure, but I'm not going to flood their DMs with death threats. That's some basement dwelling troglodyte bullshit right there.

Justice DENIED. AGAIN.

There's no impropriety about sending a convicted felon to prison just before an election. He has already been convicted. The fact that he is the nominee is irrelevant. RNC should have thought about that before they picked a guy they knew would likely end up behind bars for all the criminal acts he committed.

Now Trump will say he "won" the case, just like he did with the classified documents case. Corrupt judges all the way down.

Trump using the language of a tyrant is not an accident. When people say that democracy is on the line this election, we're not being hyperbolic, we're saying that because of statements like this. Please get out there and vote this November.

In other news, Colorado confirmed most patriotic state in the union.

If a few more states follow suit, even if they are "safe blue" states, the GOP will have no choice but to drop Trump and pick up the next best candidate. Winning local elections is way more important for Republican-aligned agendas to continue forward, but if people won't turn out because Trump is off the ballot, it'll be a blue wave of lower offices flipping. They'll need to work fast to push the "Trump Bad, X Good" where X is whatever conservative sock puppet they prop up to take his place in hopes of saving their chances at maintaining a multi-state hegemony on state congressional seats.