Husband, Father, Business Owner, Teamster, Former Funeral Director, Freed Political Prisoner.
Pittsburgh, PA
Joined November 2024
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Prognosticator retweeted
Humans are a pack animal.
This may be hard to understand if you are evangelical and think the book of genesis is literal rather than allegorical, but humans are a pack animal.
What this means is that the human desire for the acceptance and support of a tribe is as fundamental as the desire for food, for air, for water, for sex, for sunlight, for love.
If you tell young men that they cannot have a tribe, they're not going to accept that.
Ever.
Especially if you tell that only to the young men of one tribe in particular. They're going to wonder why everybody gets to have a tribe and they don't.
And they're eventually going to decide that you are the enemy.
Because you are. Anyone who stands between young men and what they need for a healthy, fulfilled life is their enemy.
That includes you.
And if you manage to convince them that god doesn't want them to have a tribe, it will also include god.
The more you push back against their healthy and natural desire for a tribe, a homeland, and a birthright, the more they will hate you, and the more exclusive their definition of that tribe will become.
There is no way you can stop this. The only thing you can control is how far they have to go, how radical they have to become, in order to get it.
Because this can go all the way from enforcing immigration law, and shutting down corrupt visa programs right now, to gangs of young White men in balaclavas with Ar15s going door to door ten years from now.
We have to do something about the 14th amendment. I don't care if that makes you uncomfortable or unhappy. It's not a choice. The constitution exists to serve Americans, not the other way around. If that sentence confuses you, read the first paragraph of the constitution.
If we do not, young men of the future, the same little boys who are being radicalized right now by your malicious indifference, will treat a piece of paper that says they cannot have a homeland the way they would treat a piece of paper that says that can't eat food, or a piece of paper that says they can't own a home, or have a wife and children.
You may think that you offer them a tribe in the form of the universal kingdom of god, the community of all believers, but that's just a word game and you know it, which is why you are so defensive about the whole thing.
Where was the universal community of believers when these young men needed help? When they needed not just the surface appearance of a tribe, but someone to do the things that tribes actually do for younger generations they care about?
The pack serves a concrete set of functions in the life cycle of the human species, and you cannot perform those functions with a cardboard cutout.
Young men are sick of religion that offers them responsibilities with no rights, lectures with no help, demands with no love or empathy.
It's odd, in a way ironic, that, I, the man of zero faith, should have to be the one standing here telling self-styled religious leaders how they failed both their people and their god.
But having no faith does give me one advantage. It frees me from the delusion that Jesus is a puppet that I can pull out of my pocket, slip over my right hand, move his mouth and make him say what I want.
I used to wonder, as a child, what the phrase "taking the name of the lord in vain" actually meant.
But I no longer wonder, because when I became a man, I looked around me and saw all these people who talk to god and somehow get told exactly what they want to hear.
Then I understood that the key phrase here wasn't "in vain". It was "taking". Taking the name of god and using it as a tool for one's own goals.
Joel, here, is sad that his friend is getting sent home. This personally inconveniences both him and his friend, which effects Joel in a way that young men being denied their birthright does not.
So he finds an interpretation of scripture that says that god wants him, Joel Berry, to get his way, and that god wants all the young men who want a homeland and a birthright to go get fucked.
I'm not terribly impressed.
Prognosticator retweeted
You're arguing against a point nobody is actually making. Well, the phrasing of the argument is poor, but the ACTUAL argument.
The problem isn't politics in video games. The problem is shitty writing and ham-fisted political messaging that ruins otherwise good entertainment.
Most of us have absolutely no problem with political themes in games, movies, or television. We have a problem when writers sacrifice storytelling, character development, and entertainment to beat the audience over the head with their personal politics.
Take Star Trek, for example.
Star Trek is basically space socialism in a post-scarcity economy. Its practically a laundry list of political and economic ideas that most conservatives like me fundamentally disagree with.
And you know what? I fucking LOVE Star Trek.
Why? Because the stories are excellent. The characters are compelling. The writing makes you think.
Some of the older episodes are preachy. Some are EXTREMELY preachy. Even when I disagree with the message, I can appreciate the storytelling.
Here's another example: Hardspace: Shipbreaker. It's a game about being a blue-collar worker dismantling enormous spaceships for a corporation that has turned exploitative employment practices into an Olympic sport.
The game is VERY pro-union. You could reasonably describe its politics as socialist or at least heavily sympathetic to organized labor.
And you know what? I LOVE THAT GAME, TOO.
The mechanics are fantastic. Cutting apart enormous spaceships in zero gravity, carefully extracting valuable components, and occasionally turning yourself into a rapidly expanding cloud of debris because you accidentally cut through a fuel line is genuinely entertaining.
And the pro-union message? IT FITS THE STORY.
You're playing an exploited worker trying to survive under an absurdly oppressive corporate system. Of COURSE labor organizing is going to be part of that story. The politics emerge naturally from the world, the characters, and the circumstances.
I might disagree with some of the broader political conclusions, but I don't feel like the developers are wasting my time by including them. The politics are part of the storytelling, not a substitute for it.
Now compare that to Dragon Age: The Veilguard, where we get clumsy lectures about gender identity and characters practically turning to the camera to explain the writers' political opinions.
🤖🤖That's not storytelling. That's a mandatory corporate diversity seminar with a fantasy RPG awkwardly attached to it.🤖🤖
And before you misunderstand me, there's absolutely nothing wrong with having gay, transgender, or nonbinary characters in a story. But for FUCKS SAKE, give them personalities, motivations, conflicts, and character arcs. Make them interesting PEOPLE instead of walking political statements. Making them just walking political statements insults them and the reader/player, too.
Here's another example.
Imagine watching Aliens, one of the greatest science fiction action movies ever made.
Imagine, if halfway through the movie, Corporal Hicks suddenly puts down his pulse rifle, looks directly at the camera, and launches into a fifteen-minute lecture about the Second Amendment, the importance of civilian gun ownership, and why gun control advocates are idiots. I'd probably agree with the entire screed.
I'D STILL THINK IT WAS FUCKING TERRIBLE WRITING.
I came to watch Ripley fight xenomorphs, not attend an NRA convention on LV-426.
The political message isn't the problem. The fact that you've brought the entire story to a screeching halt to deliver it, is.
Good writers understand how to weave political and philosophical ideas into their stories. They create situations where characters confront difficult questions, make choices, suffer consequences, and occasionally discover that their beliefs were wrong.
Bad writers stop the story to lecture the audience, then congratulate themselves for being courageous.
Here's the really frustrating part: Ham-fisted political messaging doesn't just ruin the story. It cheapens the message itself. You can absolutely put politics in your video games. Some of the greatest games ever made are deeply political.
Star Trek makes me think about societies I wouldn't necessarily want to live in. Shipbreaker makes me sympathize with a labor movement whose broader politics I don't necessarily share.
That's what good art is SUPPOSED to do. It makes you engage with ideas, even ones you disagree with.
Just learn the difference between telling a compelling story that explores political ideas and using a video game as a delivery mechanism for your personal manifesto. That's the distinction you dipshits keep missing.
Prognosticator retweeted
Yeah, but its also fair to say that Dragon Age went to shit, Biowqee made terrible decisions, and very intentionally pushed Leftist orthodoxy as superior every step of the way.
But you know all this.
Try this... theres dozens of clearly leftwing heroic characters in biowares catalogue.
Who would you say is the most heroic Right wing character in bio wares catalogue?
Go ahead. We'll wait. Oh, and who was President at the time?
Prognosticator retweeted
Lina, you don't know the honest truth.
In the military, you got your POGs... Person Other than a Grunt. Guys who don't shoot anything. You need them, because you need all sorts of specialties, but you can't trust their big-picture judgement, because the overall mission of the military is shootin' people, and they don't do that.
In civilization, we have POMs.
Person Other than a Maker. Dudes what don't build things. You might need them. But you shouldn't take them too seriously, or listen to them too much, because on some fundamental level, they are never going to get it. They are never going to understand. The fundamental task of civilization is making things, and POMs don't do that.
"This is just a mash-up of existing technology" is the most POM-like typing you could ever hope to see. It's a tell that someone has never done a significant engineering project in a technical role.
Experienced engineers not only understand differently, we eat, sleep and breathe the basic reality that 99% of engineering challenges are "get mechanism to work with other mechanism". Without breaking, shaking itself apart or blowing up.
Every basic scientific principle behind the internal combustion automobile was understood by the ancient Greeks and Romans.
And yet they were not only unable to harness those principles to make a primitive steam-powered automobile, they were unable to conceive of the very idea, because their ability to implement and integrate wasn't advanced enough.
If you look at everything that Elon Musk has ever done, every company he has ever built, every technology he has ever brought to market, none of it was a purely new invention.
It was ALL taking stuff that already kinda worked, and making it do new things. And not just do them, but do them so well that they actually became practical.
SpaceX didn't invent the rocket. They made it reusable.
Tesla didn't invent the electric motor or the battery. They made them practical for ground transportation.
Neurallink didn't invent electrical nerve interfaces. They made them control a computer UI.
This shit is incredibly hard. If you try to use the known principle of a cold-gas thruster to make a car fly, you're going to crash and blow up a lot. You're going to have to make mistakes, and fix them, one by one, until you run out of mistakes and the thing flies.
Real engineers, real makers, know that this is what the word engineering means. POMs don't get it. Lina doesn't understand what she saw.
She thinks she saw a publicity stunt to impress yokels.
No. That was a publicity stunt to impress engineers.
It wasn't a demonstration of a flying car at all. It was a demonstration of the engineering capabilities of team.
It was a flex.
"Look," they said, "we can reify the Gernsback continuum. Give us your silliest, low-effort science fiction meme tech, and give us enough time, and we'll make it real."
The purpose of making a flying car isn't to let you do a jetpack leap over traffic. It's to learn all the little implementation details and balancing tradeoffs and gotchas that you have to master to make a car fly.
It's not the big scientific discoveries that build civilization. By themselves, they are nothing but curiosities.
What builds civilization is all the little discoveries that you make when you try to get the big ones to stop crashing and blowing up.
When someone does that on a unprecedented level, you either help them, or you stay out of the way and keep your ignorant POM opinions to yourself.
I'm not an Elon hater.
I'm just telling you the Honest Truth:
This is a marketing stunt.
The technology is quite old.
Just nobody ever thought of bolting it on a car.
Because it's pointless.
Porsche or Ferrari could also build something like this if they wanted, but they don't, because it's not worth it for them.
It's worth it for Elon though, because his entire brand is all about having the halo of futurism.
His marketing scales especially well with tech gimmicks like this, which is why he is financially incentivised to do them, while others aren't.
Again, I'm not hating, but actually educating yall.
This is not engineering genius.
It's marketing genius.
Prognosticator retweeted
Not sure if this is ragebait or you just really dont understand what is going on here.
So allow me to Man-splain this to you.
We have no issue with women wearing revealing workout clothing.
In fact, god-bless you for it, without that, we would be staring at sweaty guys instead of your labia.
The issue is, you want to go to the gym with your labia hanging out, then make a TikTok video all pissed that men are looking at your labia, then demand that man be canceled.
So go to the gym, work out half naked and shut the fuck up when you get the male attention you clearly want.
Hope this helps
Prognosticator retweeted
On gym attire:
There is an innate fantasy women have that goes like this: I am super duper pretty and everyone notices and loves me for this, but also this attention and power come with zero further implications or downsides
The fantasy is one thing, being frustrated it isn't reality is another
Most girls grow out of this as part of normal development (and you should! it's not realistic), learning that large amounts of attention and affection from, say, your dad, are freely given
....but that same kind of attention from strangers comes with strings attached
Posting bikini pics that get 10M likes means you have a lot of men saving them for...gross reasons
Going to the gym wearing next to nothing is attention grabbing for a reason, and you don't get to decide whose attention it grabs or the nature of that attention
It's a bit of a black pill, and you tend to (or, should) figure it out somewhere in your teens: strange men do not want to adore and dote on you for zero reason
To be clear, negative attention can happen even when you aren't doing something specifically out of the ordinary
Getting catcalled often happens in the most normal outfits - it's just the flip side of being young and pretty
The issue is this has evolved into almost an ideology: rather than recognizing the reality that attention is a double-edged sword, there's an impulse to regulate the attention i.e. "You can only notice me in the ways I want"
You become like the dog meme below, saying "No sexual thoughts, only attention"
Unfortunately for its advocates, this line of thinking is waging war with reality itself
Remember as a kid we used to make fun of the south and their backwards hillbilly ways? Not anymore! Now MN, CA, and NY are the national embarassments. The south has held on to the roots of this county in a way other places have not. Thank you Johnny Reb!
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What would Jesus do re: public execution?
He would willingly be put on the cross, displayed for three days, then have the image of his public execution recreated over and over for everyone to see.
It's not the best argument against public execution.
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Prognosticator retweeted
Huge thanks to @Not_the_Bee for helping shine a light on Pittsburgh / Allegheny County.
Do you guys want some more material? I have a ton of things documented that would make for great headlines.
The abolitionist endorsed by a guy before he was arrested for the second time for murder, the councilwoman who is with a wannabe Crip and is also on film trying to bite a man's penis, the Allegheny County spokeswoman who told a radio host to kill himself, the councilman who makes everything about him and was almost tickled to report that Trump's initial would-be assassin lived in his district... It's a great area.
I'm assuming you already know about the Carnegie professor that constantly tells white people to die, the woman who was fired in Portland for fraud but was imported to Allegheny County during an investigation for... fraud, and our seemingly endless ability to uncover debt we didn't know we had.
Disembowelment suspect arrested for new stabbing after Pittsburgh judge released him days earlier for different stabbing
notthebee.com/article/disemb…
Prognosticator retweeted
Lawrenceville. 4734 Butler St - Allegheny Cemetery. Caller says that she is locked inside the cemetery. Spooky season has begun.
Should I be shocked that women are shocked that random men would show up to fuck a woman?
I'm honestly more shocked that a woman would randomly fuck men. I'm still surprised that women have sex with men in long term relationships.
#cornell7
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Prognosticator retweeted
That’s the communist manifesto, genius.
If you want to support a candidate who can read, you can donate here:
brandonherreraforcongress.co…
Prognosticator retweeted
Our @jon_d_doe needs to see this.
Prognosticator retweeted
I would like to formally announce that I got a transplant to leave Montana.
He approached me about my window decal, which is a back window-sized, custom-made Montana state outline with "THE LOCALS HATE YOU" inside of it.
He said "Who's that aimed at?"
I said, "Clearly, anyone who's not a local".
He said, "I've been here 3 years, doesn't that make me a local?"
I said, "If you weren't raised here, you're not a local. Period." He wasn't hot, so I didn't care if I was rude. Motherfucker was missing a tooth, and this was at a car wash.
He goes, "So where do you suggest we all go?"
I said, "Judging by your personality, I'm guessing you have a history with drugs? I've partied, don't get me wrong. But am I over the target?"
He starts going on and on about his druggie past, like I give a single shit. I just needed the info so I could entice him to leave. He could have died in a gutter 12 years ago from a drug OD and I wouldn't have given a shit then, either.
However, as he rambled, I looked for--and found--a picture in my phone that I got after my trip to Denver ("the Open Air Drug Den") in 2025 for a Metallica concert -- pictured below.
I showed him and said, "They give away free drugs in Colorado. Look."
He couldn't believe it. He asked questions, I answered. Yes, Denver is liberal. Yes, they have clinics where they pass out free hard drugs and equipment to do said drugs. Yes, you can do the drugs wherever you want. The number and address of one of the clinics downtown was on the card, and he wrote both down.
He decided then and there to move to Denver, and even walked away texting his friend about it.
You're welcome, Montana.
Fuck you, Colorado.
