Air Force One just did a flyover over the Daytona 500. That is pretty freaking epic. pic.twitter.com/xfrfAJTcoF

— Jaimee Michell (@thegaywhostrayd) February 16, 2025

No way… The Beast is doing laps at Daytona 🤣🔥 pic.twitter.com/TiFzYJuh7Y

— Jaimee Michell (@thegaywhostrayd) February 16, 2025

!burgers

The embargo for reviews of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 has lifted. We don't have a review on the site here at Polygon. This is not an editorial decision; we had hoped to review the game. On Jan. 2, Polygon requested a code for Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 from Warhorse Studios, the studio behind the game, and received no response. On Jan. 7, we reached out to the PR firm working with Warhorse, who told us they were "not able to provide access. We'll let you know if this changes." We reached out to parent company Plaion on Jan. 9 as well — no response. On Jan. 10, we saw our peers publishing early previews for the game. We re-upped our request and were again told we would not be given access.

This was very unusual. But this was the situation that transpired with Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. It can be difficult to tell when a studio's decision to withhold a code from a publication is intentional and personal. That's due in part to the fact that the process for getting advance review codes is about as rote and administrative as it gets. Sometimes, PR firms working for studios send us codes unsolicited in hopes we'll cover the game in question. Other times, we request codes from the game's representatives ourselves, several weeks ahead of the release date, and we get those codes when and if they are available.

As part of our final request for code on Jan. 10, Polygon's editor-in-chief Chris Plante contacted Plaion and Warhorse's PR firm to get a comment as to why we were denied advance access to the game. He stressed in his message that our hope is that this decision wasn't due to any personal bias against Polygon, nor motivated by any of our previous coverage of games made by Warhorse or any other. In short, we wanted to know: Was Polygon being blacklisted?

On Jan. 10, we did receive a response to this request stating that we could get one code for the game on launch day, Feb. 4. We did not receive any clarification as to how this decision was made. Nor did we receive the requested clarification on why the developers of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 declined to provide Polygon access to the game.

Because we will not receive access to this game until its public release, our review is nonetheless forthcoming but will not be published in time for its release date. We look forward to telling you more about this game in the weeks to come.

KIA Gloats

And now, for the why. From Charlie Hall's review (12 February 2018)

https://archive.is/WqcZl

"The game is also not without its controversies. Warhorse is a team of more than 150 people, but the game's creative director has gone out of his way to rationalize his support of G*merGate, a loosely knit hate group that has devoted time to harassing women, people of color and journ*lists in the past. So outspoken is the studio's leadership on cultural issues that they have found it necessary to work with a German outlet to publish anti-fascist, anti-sexist and anti-racist statements prior to their game's launch."

Thank you for that completely unnecessary bank-shot that turned a poor review into a politically motivated hit piece. And you wonder why they weren't lining up for more of that?

https://old.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/1igwh0w/polygon_whines_about_not_getting_prerelease_code/

!g*mers !chuds @kaamrev its G*MER GATE REVENGE TIME!

🚨#BREAKING: The Guardian has just released an article where they sent a reporter to Western North Carolina and then SCOLDED Hurricane Helene victims for:

a) not understanding climate change
b) voting for President Trump
c) believing in God

This is absolutely disgusting... pic.twitter.com/nonWQzrYqv

— Matt Van Swol (@matt_vanswol) February 16, 2025

Wonder what they think about the fricking palisade fire

@BWC

BREAKING: LOS ANGELES POLICE HAVE LOST CONTROL OF LARGE PARTS OF DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES pic.twitter.com/zFcSGDnk7j

— News Rated (@NewsRated) February 3, 2025

/r/The_Donald discusses sending in Marines to declare martial law

Holy shit it is bleak. There are three Harry Potter books in there and two Hunger Games books in there in the top 10 best books.

Then you compare it to the best books of the 20th century ( still one harry potter book in there in top 10 but they are still doing way better than the 21st century.

How did the quality of the "greatest" works fall down so quickly. It is like humanity has forgotten how to write anything with any depth anymore and it is all at the level of quality of teenage story writing.

Is it simply over for the writing genre as a whole or is it that the best quality writing is actually no longer being recognized as the best because it didn't sell enough copies nor got enough appreciation from writing critics, or is it that there is a complete disconnect between what the average person considers enjoyable writing and what is considered actually good high brow writing?

I think it is a shift in medium where all the people looking for depth and high quality in their literary works moved on to movies and video games instead and all who are still hanging around the writing genre are those who will pick a random niche and the general books based on lowest common denominator which is teenage angst or teenage wonderment slop.

What this means is that the writing genre is going to keep going further down in quality over time and we need to look at the possible extinction of reading one day if everything turns out to be possible to be done by video because people are clearly getting worse at appreciating literature while getting a whole lot better at their expectations and appreciation of better video entertainment content.

Conclusion:

In terms of ease of entry into the writing department this is the easiest time period. In terms of making money from it, likely one of the harder time periods. We can expect the quality of writing meant for general audiences to have reached the lowest floor and never rise above it again this generation. The Zoom zooms are too r-slurred when it comes to quality writing in just a book.

Also if you still read Harry Potter books, READ ANOTHER BOOK!

I'll never get Adani hate. All these import bahadurs minting billions selling chinese shit and investing that in Lundun real estate no one has a problem, one dhando actually tries building critical infra efficiently and everyone loathes him. Our state is well deserved.

This is the dumbest post about it I've seen

Favorite so far:

This is not a cost saving measure. This is a purge of federal employees who do not support their agenda. The first round is incentivized volunteer resignations. The second round will be forced resignations. The third round will be outright firings. This is a comprehensive takeover of the federal government by the MAGA organization. This is round one of a pervasive attack on the American Republic.

They are following the NAZI playbook from the 1930's.

The OLIGARCHY

They are looking for cuts to pass trumps tax plan. Which will greatly enrich the rich and cripple the poor, weaken or eliminate the middle class.

What is it you think he is doing? Where do you think the money stolen from us will go? It's tax money, all our money going to the rich, 2'trillion at least. The deficit…trump blew it up round 1. Round 2 he will kill the deficit. And YOU and EVERYONE you know will pay for it for the rest of our lives.

Some reasonable people too, maybe redditoids aren't beyond saving:

I appreciate you being open to the conversation. The challenge lies in your last sentence where you state "Convince me that cutting wasteful spending is a bad idea." You're already convinced that all of this spending is wasteful. We are not.

We see value in the DOE as a vehicle to assist in equalizing access to education for all. Without this funding, kids in poor areas will not have access to the resources they need to be successful in school. In the most impoverished places, property tax is not adequate - many are renting, in section 8, or perhaps homeless and the property tax collected does not scale with the student population in those environments. Do you believe that all kids, regardless of the socioeconomic class they are born into, deserve a shot at education? We do. But the states alone are not able to provide that, particularly red states who are the biggest beneficiaries of this funding.

For a chatgpt post that took me 5 minutes to write, I've so far generated at least 1000 words, I'm hoping before the post dies I can generate enough to write a short book

shes here too!

Some selfies! I'm not out as transgender at my GED center. People don't know whether to call me he or they. A win is a win....

Also, nobody has said shit about me going to the men's bathroom!!

In other news, I've passed all my practice tests EXCEPT FRICKING SOCIAL STUDIES!!! I DON'T REMEMBER THE SHIT WE COVERED IN MIDDLE SCHOOL. IM ALMOST 19???? WHY THE FRICK WOULD I REMEMBER SHIT FROM PRE-COVID....

Question of the day: do you like my Spider-Man pants?

!cuteandvalid !neurodivergents !autism !r-slurs

MY LAST TWITTER RAMPAGE WAS 90% JEW PROOF

— ye (@kanyewest) February 17, 2025

!r-slurs !Jews !goyim !chuds

badmen and saiyans ONLY

!saiyans

May 22nd, 1960. At 15:11, near the town of Traiguén, located at what nowadays is the Region of Araucanía, tectonic rupture occurred. The result was a powerful earthquake, it scored a magnitude of 9.5 Mw, the highest ever recorded in human history. The earthquake triggered a tsunami wave, around 30 ft tall traveling at a speed of around 95 miles per hour. The earthquake also moved the Earth's axis by 3cm.

The Valdivia Earthquake (names after the town of Valdivia) ended up destroying most of the towns in Southern Chile. On May 28th the local newspaper "La Cruz del Sur" published a preliminary report on the victims. 962 killed, 1410 missing, 140 injured, this as far as the authorities were aware up to the date.

Welcome to the Republic of Chile

Greetings dramatards, as promised here starts or journey into what would become one of the most famous dictatorships of the Americas, the Chilean Military Junta. But before getting into the story of our infamous General and his Junta de Gobierno, first it's time to cover the basics of how Chile came to the point of democratic rupture. So let's start giving some context.

By the early 1960s Chile was a poor country. It wasn't the poorest in Latin America and while it fared better than most of the South American continent, the fact remained that it lagged far behind Argentina and Uruguay, the only countries which by that time counted with a large middle class. Chile was highly unequal and a significant portion of its population was still rural with peasants moving to the outskirts of Santiago forming what was known as "campamentos", basically shanty towns, favelas.

Chile's upper class what still composed by a few selective families from the colonial period (mostly of Basque origin) and rather new families of 19th century immigrant background (mostly from Britain, Germany, Croatia, etc) which also made up a big part of its small middle-class.

Despite all this, Chile was still a robust democracy. The constitution in effect at the time was the 1925 constitution which leads us to the Chilean government of the early 1960s.

The then President of Chile was Jorge Eduardo Alessandri Rodríguez.

Born in Santiago de Chile in 1896, he was the son of the late politician Arturo Alessandri Palma (1868-1950), who also served as President of the Republic between 1920 to 1925, and then again from 1932 to 1938.

Jorge Alessandri was elected President in the 1958 election. Under the 1925 Constitution the President of Chile was elected by a majority of 50%+ of the popular vote, if all candidates failed to achieve the 50% threshold, then Congress would elect the President, which is exactly what happened in 1958.

Alessandri was an independent, but he was supported by a coalition of right-wing parties

The results of the popular vote of the 1958 were:

Jorge Alessandri Rodríguez - 31.56%

Salvador Allende Gossens - 29.85%

Eduardo Frei Montalva - 20.70%

The resulting vote in Congress was Alessandri getting 147 votes and Allende getting 26. Salvador Allende was the candidate for the Socialist Party of Chile and a coalition of left-wing parties, while Eduardo Frei Montalva was a candidate for the PDC, (Partido Democráta Cristiano) or Christian Democratic Party which was a socially conservative but economically centrist political party.

Alessandri's style was what he nicknamed "gerencia" or "management", the point of which was to manage Chile as if it were a private company. By the early 1960s Chile was in dire need of reform, and the Valdivia Earthquake wasn't of help. After the earthquake Alessandri went to the US and got aid thanks to President John F. Kennedy and his "Alliance for Progress" program, which included 422 million dollars to help the damaged of Chile. The Chekhov earthquake also triggered the arrival of another important actor of this story later on…

The Alliance for Progress programs also promoted certain policies, among the most important of them, land reform. In 1962 which was also the year where Chile was host of the World Cup, Alessandri signed the first land reform bill which was rather modest on its reach. By the end of his term he felt like Chile needed deeper structural reforms if they were to develop as their agriculture was lagging behind, he also oversaw projects of public housing in urban areas. However Alessandri's disapproval increased while left-wing parties grew stronger.

The 1964 Presidential Election

By 1964 there was a growing fear of Allende being elected. The Conservative Coalition was unpopular and of the top of the recent Cuban Revolution, left-wing guerrilas began to sprang up in Chile, like the MIR (Movimiento Revolucionario de Izquierda). Due to this, the rightoid candidate of that year, Julio Durán, decided to withdraw from the race and support the based centrist Eduardo Frei Montalva.

Eduardo Nicanor Frei Montalva was born in Santiago in 1911. He was the son of a swiss immigrant, Eduardo Frei Schlinz, and a Chilean woman, Victoria Montalva Martínez. After getting support from Durán he unknowingly got another ally, the United States of America and the CIA

In order to help Frei Montalva's campaign, the CIA secretly funneled 2.6 million dollars to his campaign, along another 3 million dollars on anti-Allende political propaganda. This was done according without his knowledge lmao.

The final results of the 1964 election were:

Eduardo Frei Montalva - 56.09%

Salvador Allende Gossens - 38.93%

Julio Durán Neumann - 4.98%

Frei Motalva was sworn in as President of the Republic on November 3rd of that same year.

Back then the President of Chile lasted 6 years in office and couldn't be consecutively re-elected. This becomes important later on

Frei Montalva begin what he called "Revolution in Liberty", placing an emphasis in improving education (over 3,000 schools were built during his presidency), social housing (over 130k units) and unionization. Union membership in Chile rose from 270,000 in 1964 to 550,000 in 1970 (by the latter date Chile had a population of around 9.8 million inhabitants). Another achievement was the reduction of child mortality from 103 per 100k to 79 per 100k.

He nationalized electrical companies and electrical input in Chile increased 50% during his presidency. There was also a huge investment to develop the steel industry (steel production increased from 620,000 metric tons to over a million).

Finally we arrive at other strong points of his administration, land reform and the nationalization of copper. Frei Montalva signed his first land reform bill in 1966 (expropriating and distributing 3.5 million hectares) and proceeded with a process called "chilenización" or chilenization of copper.

Copper to this day Chile's most important and valuable export , back in the days the mines belonged to American multinationals. Frei Montalva created the "Corporación Nacional del Cobre" (CODELCO) and implemented a partial nationalization. The idea was to buy Chilean mines or to expropriate and indemnify multinationals to a point where the Chilean state would own 51% of the copper. Chilenization began in 1965 and the partial nationalization in 1969.

The year 1969 was the stage of a minor insurrection by the army against the government, due to poor equipment and salaries, showing some clashes the armed forced already had with the government along their dissatisfaction.

The 1970 Presidential Election

In the year 1965 the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR) was founded, with the goal of overthrowing the government by means of armed struggle in order to install a communist regime. Salvador Allende however kept insisting on getting power through legitimate means. In 1970 his coalition was the Unidad Popular (Popular Union) or UP. It was composed by the Socialist Party, the Communist party and other minor leftoid parties of Chile

Salvador Guillermo Allende Gossens was born in Santiago in 1908, like most of the Chilean politicians, he belonged to an old money family with roots going back to the colonial era, the Allendes. He studied medicine at the University of Chile and was part of the founding of the Socialist Party of Chile in 1933

The rightoid candidate that year was good old Jorge Alessandri who by then was 74 years old and was suffering from some health issues. People mocked his ability to govern while Allende and co criticized Frei Montalva for not going far enough with his reforms (a.k.a. going full commie).

Alessandri was accused by leftoids of being senile and having early onset parkinson, meanwhile the PDC candidate was Radimiro Tomic , a centre-leftist who had an informal pact with Allende.

The campaign was a bitter one and the everyone was concerned about what would be the military's position if Allende was elected. On an interview with the rightoid newspaper "El Mercurio", the then commander of the Chilean Army, General René Schneider pointed out that that the army would stand and abide by the Constitution regardless of who the winner was.

The CIA didn't support any particular candidate against Allende that year, except for funneling 350,000 dollars to Alessandri's campaign. A CIA report informed that Cuba spent 350,000 dollars on Allende and after the end of the Cold War declassified documents from the KGB showed that the Soviet Union sent 400,000 dollars to Allende's campaign through the Cubans.

Finally, election day came on September 4th, 1970, and the results were:

Salvador Allende Gossens - 36.63%

Jorge Alessandri Rodríguez - 35.29%

Radomiro Tomic Romero - 28.08%

Chilean chuds got into panic mode . Technically Congress could elect anyone as President if they failed to break the 50% threshold, but in practice they would elect the candidate who got a plurality of votes.

Alarm bells also ringed at Washington DC, where President Richard Nixon ordered to stop it from happening. The CIA then devised two plans known as "track 1" and "track 2".

Track 1 consisted in making Congress elect Alessandri, who would then proceed to immediately resign. This would trigger a snap election where the current and rather popular president, Eduardo Frei Montalva, could run again and win. This plan however failed as the PDC supported Allende on the October 24th Congress voting. This was due to an informal gentleman's agreement between Allende and Tomic, whereby one would acknowledge the other's victory if the difference was above 5,000 votes, and would only acknowledge a potential Alessandri victory if the latter won by a difference of 100,000 votes.

After this failed, track two came into scene. Meanwhile the KGB had instructions to help Allende be sworn in. Track Two consisted of creating a climate of political instability as to allow the armed forced to intervene and stop Allende from becoming president. Henry Kissinger was personally involved in the main operation which consisted of kidnapping General Schneider, the commander of the Chilean army, as a trigger for intervention (a leftoid guerrila would be blamed). General Roberto Viaux was in charge of the operation, however it failed as Scheinder resisted and he was killed. His assassination however paved the way for a different leadership in the army.

Salvador Allende was sworn in as President of the Republic on November 3rd, 1970. His government plan was one of complete nationalization of copper, but without compensation, raising wages, freezing prices, and continue mass expropriation of land but with a more aggressive approach.

In order to pass his nationalizations, he based his decrees as being authorized by the short lives 1932 "Socialist Republic" (a bogus commie government which lasted for a few months). Nationalization of copper however was passed by congress with unanimity as it was a process which was bound to happen.

The US responded with a boicot and denial of credits for Chile, however Allende managed to get gibs from the Soviet Union.

According to former KGB General Nikolai Leonov, the USSR provided financial aid in the form of 100 million dollars of credit, 3 fishing boats, new factories, 3,100 tractors and 74,000 tons of wheat.

By 1971 deficit skyrocketed from 3.5% to 9.8% and by 1972 inflation kicked in as the government began activated the money printing machine a year earlier. Then came scarcity of goods and the rise of the black market along rationing.

The increase of money circulation was of 173% in 1972 and 413% by 1973, and with it also an economic recession. Allende blamed it on hoarders. Meanwhile guerrilla groups like MIR which by then felt empowered by government and had amassed almost 100k members were pushing land reform by themselves, with the government doing little to nothing to stop them. MIR took over factories and land properties while the government refused to send the carabineros (police force). Polarization and political violence characterized his 3 years as President. Allende tried to get the USSR to invest 400 million dollars on Chile through factories and infrastructure. However by late 1972 the Soviets denied Chile any further aid requests

In the mist of chaos, by the year 1973 a plot was being developed within the high command of the Chilean Navy, along other conspirators of the armed forces and some help of Burger glowies

!historychads !anticommunists !neolibs !latinx

Who would you have voted for in the following elections

1958 Election

1964 Election

1970 election

No background

Original Tigger Trudeau

!marseyartists !marseyfans

If you could attract a Princess you’d do it.

You can’t.

That’s why your “harem” is made up of low rent prostitutes spat on by society and your sons are all bastards. https://t.co/Q4EYEUU70K

— Megha (@meghaverma_art) February 24, 2025

Unironically agreeing with Tate