xzar_monty

Yeah. His de facto amnesty for a treasonous act almost certainly spells serious weakness and vulnerability.

Upon sharing this tweet, I very much wish to emphasize that it contains words like POSSIBLE and REPORTEDLY. However, I believe the general stance taken here is likely to be fairly accurate, even if the details are not, and this means that things have probably taken a turn for the worse. I couldn't really fathom a pretty end to the war in the first place, but I'd still say that things are now looking decidedly more sinister. (Btw, I didn't know that Gazprom has a private army, if it indeed does. But on reflection, it does seem fairly obvious that it must have one.)

Oh dear, that Scooter thing was way more awful than I thought. (I went directly to about 1:00, which put me in the chorus, and was only able to listen for about five seconds.) Here's an interesting thing: Billy Idol was great in the 1980s. But I never would have thought that his songs would endure so well. The best of them are excellent! I mean, just really really good pop music.

A Russian citizen living in Moscow has been pseudonymously and surreptitiously reporting to a Finnish newspaper, describing the effects the war has in Russia, especially in Moscow. He continues to report on the almost complete indifference that Muscovites have towards everything. Today, he wrote that this is what the total lack of fear and even interest effectively comes down to: "It is extremely unpleasant to write this, but the reason is disgustingly simple. No blood has been shed in Moscow during the 'special operation' in Ukraine. No one has been injured and no one has died in Moscow - no 'ordinary person', that is." This is, he reports, in absolutely huge contrast to what it was like in Moscow in 1997-1999, before the second Chechnyan war. EDIT: @Chilloutman: If only it didn't look like that what you're saying is most likely true.

Apparently I should have spelled it out in more detail. Yes, I know that Putin faced a serious problem and he can't fight a war on two fronts, and I also know that there will be consequences. However, there are instances where if you don't clearly demonstrate your strength, you are effectively doing a clear demonstration of your weakness, and Putin's apparent volte-face is, in my view, a particularly good example of this: the fact that he let the whole thing go (as far as the public side of things is concerned) demonstrated, to me, that Putin is much weaker than I thought he was, and this was extremely interesting to me. However, there is the caveat that this is not over yet; we are talking about events that are still going on. Belarus is going to be extremely interesting in the near future. I wish that things could turn better for the Belarusian people; they have demonstrated so much will to be free of tyranny and it took such strong measures to bring them down last time. (And as sad as it is to say it, I have seen no indications that the Russian people wish to be free of tyranny, at least not any indications worth mentioning: no political opposition, no demonstrations, no "will of the people". I've said it before, but if only the Russians were as prone to demonstrate as the French: it would be a different world for them altogether.[*]) [*] Yes, I know, the whole thing is ludicrous. If the Russians were as prone to demonstrate as the French, things wouldn't have got to this in the first place. EDIT: I wonder what the heck is the deal with that strike on the oil depot in Voronezh. Apparently, this strike on Russia came from firmly inside Russia, by Russians, although I am of course prepared to be corrected. Films taken by panicking and crying Russian children don't make it seem palatable at all. And no, of course, I don't think Putin cares or would care one bit.

One of the most interesting things was Putin's apparent volte-face in first calling the whole thing "treason" and then sort of just letting it go. A peculiar one, that. I can imagine a supreme leader letting a nasty remark go, just to show his munificence, but treason? Hardly.

Ain't this comment a bit like clutching at short straws.

Yeah, there's a world of difference between Stern and Rogan. I'd say Stern is crude and smutty. For me, risqué would imply at least a bit of style, and naughty would imply at least a bit of humour, and because Stern has neither, he's simply smutty. And yes, crude, in the way he tackles the questions he deals with (i.e. he's not only smutty, but in the other things he does, he's crude). Perhaps because I'm a European, I have never been able to understand why Stern is even able to have a job (on the radio), much less be successful. Oh well. (I don't deny his intelligence, I simply don't see him applying it with anything resembling good sense.) But of course there are folks like Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh who are both orders of magnitude more difficult to understand...

Yeah, he probably knows quite a lot about martial arts in general, and in that area, I'd be inclined to have at least some trust in what he's saying. But on other topics, meh indeed. @ShadySands: The problem with Rogan having someone like Michio Kaku on his show is that he's unable to ask good and relevant questions and often also has great difficulty understanding what his guest is telling him. And that gets mightily embarrasing at times. I mean, the one time I listened to a whole episode was when he had the physicist Brian Greene on, and it was mostly a waste of time, for reasons just described. Simply listening to a lecture given by Greene would have been much more enlightening. A learned friend of mine talked of the same embarrassing problem happening when Rogan had Brian Cox on the show, although I didn't bother to check that one out.

I can only comment on iwd 1, but yes: very well done. Evocative is exactly the word. I'm not going to go back to it to confirm, but I think there was a rather deliberate use of certain chord extensions going on; the composer used a rather old trick, but definitely knew what (s)he was doing, and it worked. This stuff always reminds me of the Tristan chord, as used by (obviously) Wagner. Sweet heaven it's a great chord to start a tradegy with: you instantly get that sense of melancholy. Sheer genius.

Yeah, it's a good one! A journalist friend of mine spent some time there and wrote a report; extremely interesting. (And thanks for a good reply.)

Yeah, it's like construction work in many African locations. It can progress a lot slower than what a Northern European is used to, and there's going to be plenty of breaks -- but there's a pretty good reason for it. Apparently it can be quite common to just ignore the fact that the natural world is not the same everywhere...

Because of all the hoohah, I have tried listening to some Joe Rogan. He is entertaining enough when he's got someone like David Lee Roth on, although that's mainly because it's David Lee Roth, but when he gets an actual scientist or a proper professional in there, he just isn't educated enough to even ask good questions or do any follow-up on them, and it gets mightily uncomfortable trying to listen to that[*]. I suppose his popularity stems from that he's a bit more educated than much of his audience, he's a good enough talker (i.e. is able to construct reasonable and easy-to-follow sentences for extended periods of time) and he has critical mass on his side, which means that he's getting more popular by virtue of the fact that he's already popular. So yeah, the signal-to-noise ratio can be awful, especially if you have better things to do. [*] Although even with David Lee Roth it was quite uncomfortable to hear them talk about DLR learning Japanese. Rogan clearly cannot properly understand the concept of being able to speak a second language, which is quite something. D'oh.

One particularly obvious example of this is the end of the second act. If it's hard coded and will happen no matter what, then I can't see how it can make sense if you decide to play a hedonist. Oh well. I wouldn't be asking for my money back, but I am somewhat disappointed and I already uninstalled the game. While the comparison is unfair in many ways, I would say that Disco Elysium was an awful lot better when it comes to games that a) involve a lot of reading and b) essentially have no classical "encounters" at all (although DE famously has that one). Some of the mini-games I found particularly irritating. Like, if this is supposed to be a fairly high-brow game with plenty of reading to do and plenty of emphasis on European history (good!), then what the heck am I doing making these Christmas cookies and getting criticized for not bothering to be thorough enough so that there's plenty for everyone. I mean, yeah, in real life I would of course use the dough so that as little is left over as possible, but am I going to tinker with it in a game like this? Come on.

Finished Pentiment. I have to say it was a bit of a letdown in the end. There was so much reading that I had to do, and apparently so little I had any control over, so by the third act I was thinking that I'd much rather just read a well-written novel, because while this game is nicely enough written, it's not written well enough to really justify my time spent on it (because there was so little I could do). After seeing how things turned out in the end, I actually started to wonder whether it's in any way possible to come to the right conclusions in either the first or the second act. I have no idea.

This is, again, interesting. I have referenced to this in an earlier iteration of this thread, but it's fascinating enough (in my view) to bring up again: there appears to something oddly scatological in the Russian way of living -- or at least in the way Russian (soldiers) conduct themselves (abroad). In the early 2000s, I worked in a project dealing with the aftermath of the war in Chechnya, and one of the big surprises for me was the extent to which the presence of Russian soldiers was marked by, yes, shít. In tremendous abundance and in places you wouldn't ordinarily expect to find it in your average household. There have been numerous reports of the same in Ukraine: messages written on walls with someone's hefty number two as the writing material, piles of big businesses in kitchens, living rooms, etc., you name it. I find it very odd: it is almost impossible that all of the soiling could happen right before the troops leave, so do the soldiers just happily live in a dunged-up house? Do soldiers gather together for a good ol' group-cráp, or does the fouling of a room take place incrementally, and if so, what does the provider of the 15th pile of ordure in a living room think while on the job with the 14 already there? I'd like to, and wouldn't like to, know the answers to some of the questions like this. It's very strange. I have sometimes wondered if there's an unspeakably nasty hidden side to the bodily cleanliness (in many respects) of the Arab culture, and I suppose I must also wonder whether there's a remarkably well hidden clean side to this aspect of the Russian culture.

Just out of curiosity, but also completely in earnest: is there an entity (a country, a major organization, whatever) on the international political scene that matters at least a bit and that you do respect? Incidentally, this is in no way to deny the self-contradictory positions that Europe does indeed often take. But it's a bit like the history I have with one of the major critics over here; he often writes remarkably well, but he's also spiky almost to the point of being savage, and I sometimes think it would be marvelous to see him like something for a change.

Yeah! I suppose that ending is hard-coded and will happen no matter what, i.e. we're talking about the same ending. Was a big surprise for me, too. Also, the way I tried to play the character, he'd never have done that.

Or even a more casual (but admittedly picky) gamer like me. But yeah, you're right. There just isn't enough to do, you simply follow along. As for it being great, I'll reserve my judgement until it's over.

Playing Obsidian's Pentiment, which has a forum here that nobody writes on. Well, there are aspects of the game that I really enjoy (like the setting and the premise, for instance), but there's not a whole lot you can do, actually: it looks like a short story with a few places where you can have some influence on what happens. None of the mini-games, like fitting pottery shards together, are interesting. I'm in the third act, which looks like it's going to be the last one, and while the game's ok, it's not that memorable. A bit of a pity, really. I would have liked to like this a lot more.

I have no idea about the Canadian prison population...

I'm not sure an "Imo" is in any way relevant when it comes to questions of science -- I'd much rather just rely on what we have been able to learn through observation, studies, experiments etc. and leave everything else open, free of opinion. The roads to addiction are manifold, but I'd say the vast majority of addicts were already in a terrible position before they got hooked, and the painful irony is that drugs as a general anaesthetic really did provide a relief[*] -- it's just that the relief tends to come with a terrible cost, eventually. The Canadian psychologist Gabor Maté has a really good book on the subject, called In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts -- Close Encounters With Addiction. Heartily recommended! It's interesting, by the way, that while we have been able to make serious headway in the amelioration of various problems, there are some that appear particularly stubborn and difficult, and very little progress has been made in the past hundred years or so. OCD, addictions and certain forms of psychological trauma certainly come to mind. (Heck, I'm not into the celebrity culture at all, but if one Canadian psychologist had to become an international celebrity, Maté would have been a much better option than Jordan Peterson.) [*] Every doctor in the world and every nervous performer will be able to tell you that a stiff drink really does help an awful lot if you get the jitters before something that's stressing you. But start relying on that stiff drink and you're in for some extremely serious problems later on. (Interestingly, it seems that a lot of people really don't possess the self-awareness required to recognize that in taking that stiff drink they are essentially teaching themselves that they are unable to handle the situation without it. And that, for sure, is not a good lesson.)

Didn't recognize the TLA, made a search, found out it has an awful lot of meanings, came back to ask you: what's UFD in this context?

Well, that sure sounded like a rant from a full-blown conspiracy theorist. I quoted just this one little bit because it contains two nice little terms that can be quite revealing, in the sense of how they position you, in your own mind. From your wording, I take it that you don't regard yourself as either part of the "general population" or one of the "sociopaths <in DC, as you elsewhere put it>". So, where are you? I'm inclined to guess that there's a twofold distinction in place: intelligence and knowledge-wise, you are above the general population, and morally you are above the sociopaths in DC. Which I'm sure feels good and cozy, but it sort of makes me wonder why you would spend time, like any time at all, talking about stuff like this on an internet forum, as it seems like such a godawful waste for someone who's up for some great things in life. Now, here's a question, a serious question, that I think is good to pose to anyone who makes far-reaching claims about their government, leaders and so on: what would it take for you to admit that you're wrong about something that you're claiming? What kind of evidence would you accept? Or, perhaps, do you think that you are somehow axiomatically right in your assertions? The reason this is a serious question is that to the extent anyone regards themselves as outside the realm where serious claims require rational proof, they are also outisde the realm where discussion is possible in the first place. As for the "sociopaths in DC", this is an interesting one. How do you see the situation? Is everyone in DC a sociopath, by definition? Do people become sociopaths after they start working in DC, because the culture there somehow corrupts them? If someone intends to make a mark in the American democratic system by pursuing a political career, is that person already a sociopath? I don't know how you see all this, but it seems to me that you may well be describing a hopeless situation and a hopeless culture, of which you, of course, are not a part.

No, I don't think it's that, either. Even with no China, the concerns you mentioned wouldn't be addressed. I cannot prove it, of course, but looking at the history of the country, it does seem most likely. (Addressing those concerns would first mean that they are recognized and admitted to, and I'm not even sure whether that has happened to a necessary extent.) By the way, your comment displays an interesting similarity between the US and Russia: the sense of powerlessness and perhaps helplessness that the ordinary citizen has. "Politics" happens elsewhere, and the citizen has no say in any of it. I think it's awful, though I must say I've never experienced it myself over here.