Felt the same way about GTA. I don't think the story is supposed to be serious though, but it certainly is disjointed and not very compelling.
Have you ever play the Mafia games? Those games felt like a much better story with the right mix of city destroying chaos. Not quite as open as GTA, but I don't really think that's a bad thing. I really enjoyed 3 despite the missions being fairly repetitive. There's just something about running around killing the Klan that just doesn't get old to me.
Holy shit. Really?!? Someone who is a supposed Christian is like, "Trump is righter than Jesus." The Onion was right these people are beyond parody.
Well if the son of god had filed all the right paperwork and gone through the proper channels then he wouldn't be getting deported.
Exactly what popped into my head too. They also had questions that were ambiguous. "What's the big staircase in Rome?" doesn't really have a single correct answer much like many of the literacy tests in the Jim Crow south.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say if a random immigration official knows about your anonymous lemmy account you were already mega-fucked on the immigration front. They've been watching you and probably have a 3 inch thick file on you before you walked in the door.
I was the opposite. I could absolutely destroy the ball at bat, but I would literally sit in left field and pick grass.
Have you ever shopped at a Trader Joes? Those paper bags are by far the best paper bags that I've ever used, and can carry about as much as my reusable ones.
It also isn't true. LBJs approval rating absolutely tanked because of the Vietnam war.
Johnson's approval ratings had dropped from 70 percent in mid-1965 to below 40 percent by 1967
https://millercenter.org/president/lbjohnson/foreign-affairs
I've never used one of these services. Are they like a credit card in that they have interest/fees only if you don't pay off your balance? Or are there upfront fees to using the service?
The kind of hilarious part is there was right wing pushback in the southern US when they came out because it was "teaching kids witchcraft." Which is so fucking funny to me now. It's just so plainly obvious that they were literally judging a book by it's cover. I read the first two books as a young adult because of the right wing pushback and even the 2nd book was an absolute slog. To my dismay I didn't learn any witchcraft along the way either.
On the other hand, my youngest brother absolutely loved those books. I remember sneaking him one of the new ones when we were staying with our Southern Baptist grandparents for the summer. They absolutely were his first books that he really read independently. He was quite bitter when JKR decided to be all anti-trans and shitty. If you even bring it up now it sends him into a tirade about how shitty she is.
I think we're probably in more alignment than either of us realize. You hit the nail on the head in a lot of ways especially calling out differences in what we were taught. Down to brass tacks, we have much different life experiences so we're coming at it from different angles. I'm filling in the gaps that weren't taught to me and I had to discover for myself. On the other hand, you're filling in the gaps that weren't taught to you and you had to fill in for yourself.
In the 80s and early 90s there was a sort of veneration of the founding fathers where I grew up. There was also a ton of propaganda about how the, "The evil north just wanted to destroy the south." The cotton gin, as you correctly pointed out increased the demand for slaves, was reframed as a tool that would end slavery because you somehow magically wouldn't need slaves to to pick cotton anymore. Reconstruction was reframed as the North needlessly trying to punish the south. The founders were enlightened individuals that just didn't know that slavery was wrong. It feels kind of shit to go out into the world and have completely re-learn the history of the place you grew up because people didn't want to admit that your own country has flaws.
With that being said, I see how a swing in the other direction could be damaging. It sucks no matter which way to be taught just one side of history. It doubly sucks for it to be the history of the piece of land you're standing on.
I do find it interesting that it somehow swung that far back in the other direction, or that it was taught so much differently regionally (not sure if it's an age difference or a regional difference between our experiences). I think perhaps the best way to make sure we all stay on the same page is to have conversations like this though!
At least you chose a fantastic game to go out on. RDR2 is like one of the most amazing games ever produced! I still go back to it when I run out of stuff to play despite beating the ever living hell out of it.