Rostere

So, here's the deal: you want people to be persecuted for wearing Ustase insignia, but you dismiss any court which would look into war crimes committed by Karadzic and others as a kangaroo court. How many people in Serbia openly support Karadzic? How should they be persecuted? What do you think Croats and Bosniaks think about them going without punishment? Do you think Croatians who wear Ustase insignia deny the crimes of the Ustase? Are you starting to see your hypocrisy? They have a virtually identical ideology based on ethnically cleansing areas where other people live to make place for their own ethnic group. Their main difference is whom they hated the most - the Chetniks hated Muslims the most and Croats not so much, while the Ustase hated Serbs the most and Muslims not so much. One might have been more competent than the other, but they would have killed just as many given the chance. Uh... Are you sure you are not confusing State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs and Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (interwar Yugoslavia)? It's not odd at all that a Christian state would omit mentioning its Muslim inhabitants in its official name. Bosnia and Serbia have existed for about as long as states who at various points have been parts of other countries. It's very funny that you as a Serbian (a country which has a very short history of independence) should try to dismiss Bosnia as an independent state. A lot of people from countries with longer history of independence and/or unity probably think Serbia is a joke country stitched together from equal parts ethnic cleansing and luck with international treaties, based on the memory of some province which existed before Ottoman conquest of the Balkans. It would be very unlikely that Serbia could reasonably have long-term ended up with a lot more territory than it has currently. Interwar Yugoslavia was lucky as it is to receive Vojvodina from Hungary and keep Kosovo from Albania. The territory that was at play was pretty much the Eastern parts of current Bosnia. I guess if the borders between provinces inside post-WW2 Yugoslavia would have been redrawn differently, Serbia could have hanged on to parts of Bosnia. As things were, a few facts guaranteed Bosnian independence: One, there were more Bosniaks than Serbs (and the Croatians also favoured Bosnian independence) in Bosnia - just plainly absurd and insane that you dismiss this fact with "there are no Bosnians". Two, the Serbian militias were looking to genocide the Bosniaks, with them having no adjacent state of their own. Obviously the non-Serb population in Bosnia would vote for their independence, if only to save their own skins. If you wonder why Serbia couldn't have gotten just the Easternmost parts which have the highest concentration of Serbs, ask yourself why Serbia has not ceded north Vojvodina to Hungary yet. It's the same question. LOL. You know, there are a lot of people in larger countries who would say that Serbs are pretty much a non-entity which could just disappear. That is just typical chauvinism on your part. Of course the Croats, and Croatia, would just not disappear. That's not how things work. You know very well how culture, language, and religion can remain even after long occupations. Ok, so the content of this extremely mature block of text is essentially: "The Croats are jealous of us Serbs because our religion is so awesome, that's why they made us fight the Bosniaks". Way to go. I don't get it... I showed you the map from 1920. There are no parts of the Adriatic coast outside Montenegro which are not majority Croatian. Yes, of course people south of Croatia will not say that they are Croatians. South of Croatia is Montenegro. They will say they are Montenegrins. Duh.

You will have to clarify. This is very funny. I almost thought about writing about the Ustase name-calling myself. Now, in any heated argument between Croats and Serbs, the Croats will be called "Ustase", just like the Croat is going to call the other guy a "Chetnik". For those of you who don't know, these were militias during WW2 who engaged in genocidal behaviour against different groups of people. Nowadays, it's essentially just a meaningless word you call other people when they hurt your feelings. If they don't agree with you, then they are Ustase/Chetniks, which means they are basically Hitler, which means you have won the argument. I don't mean to say that historical crimes of the real Ustase and Chetniks were imagined, but the way the words are used today are almost exclusively like SJWs call people Nazis, or other people call SJWs Nazis. What do you mean? Yugoslavia didn't exist when the borders were re-drawn after WW1. Are you referring to the borders of the Kingdom of Serbia? Here's who were living where approximately around that time: I don't see how the Croats would have just "disappeared". In fact, that entire line of thinking, wanting to draw your borders to include more than your own people only to wish for other ethnicities to disappear is exactly what you are accusing the Croats of. Would you think about it for one second, please? Bosnia wasn't created after the break-up of Yugoslavia, it existed as early as the 14th century. It's your neighbouring country, don't embarrass yourself by not knowing the history of your surroundings. I don't get why you would want it to be a part of Serbia - Bosnia is only 31% Serbian by ethnicity. If they should desire to be a part of Serbia (or Croatia), let them vote to be so. Yes. And the people who think like you on the Croat side is waiting so they can take the territory they claim, and so on... Meanwhile Hungary waits for Serbia to cede northern Vojvodina. If you go far enough back in time and cherry-pick, you can justify pretty much anything. Anyway, you should be happy with the current state of affairs. Croatia has mostly lost territory since the province of Croatia was drawn out within Yugoslavia based on ethnic lines in 1939.

Sorry, was looking through old posts, I forgot which was the last post. Run-offs is infinitesimally better, but the exact same basic problem still remains - you need to eliminate spoilers on your side, while encouraging them on the other. This leads, effectively, to the exact same system which is in place today. Suppose the left-wing parties would field two candidates (let's call them "Bernard" and "Hillary") while the right-wing parties field 16 or so candidates. The cancer in FPTP shows clearly again, and the right-wing voters are forced to strategize and avoid spoilers while the left-wing voters laugh as their candidates are the ones who will likely win the run-off. One of the few scenarios where run-offs would be helpful and not induce gamism is if there were only three candidates, ideologically evenly spaced. The next closest thing to proportional representation is really preferential voting. With a long enough list of preferences, this approaches proportional representation systems in that you can actually safely vote for the person you sympathize with, without risking acting like a spoiler. When electing a president - one person - this system is actually half-decent, but when using this method to elect multiple people to some assembly you get the typical retarded FPTP malfunctions such as arbitrarily brutally favouring parties with certain geographical distributions, and so on.

It's always hilarious to read about ex-Yugoslavians mourning the division of Yugoslavia and then immediately lapsing into accusing all the other Yugoslavian ethnic groups of being genocidal murderers while their own side is, of course, completely innocent. Sorry, but if there ever was a conspiracy to Balkanize Yugoslavia those people are the useful idiots who play their parts exactly as planned. Whether Milosevic is innocent or literally Hitler is a complete red herring to the real issue, which is the petty nationalism which made dividing Yugoslavia like kicking in an open door. Throughout human history, we have first banded together families into tribes, allowing for a basic division of labour. Then, from tribes into nations, in which we act altruistically for an abstract group containing people we have never met. Then, from nations into modern countries which are united around commonly held universal ideals, independent of any particular group. Each level of advancement on this ladder has meant crushing the former primary means of identification in order to introduce a new model for social cohesion, which often means bloodshed - yesterday when determining borders of nations, today when we mix groups of people who do not share the commonly held universal ideals necessary to work together. When people regress to tribalism in modern societies we get corruption and nepotism, when people regress to nationalism we get the situation in Yugoslavia.

We don't want it. 4-5 viable parties would be enough. Think about this for a minute. In a FPTP system, if there are (say) two right-wing parties and three left-wing parties evenly splitting the voters of their respective ideologies, and sympathies for left and right ideologies are roughly evenly split, then the right-wing will always be at an advantage. Introducing more parties into a FPTP system doesn't make it less retarded. In fact, you could easily argue that it makes FPTP more retarded. If your argument was correct, then it would be good if, say, the US had several equally viable right-wing parties. But in reality, this would just ensure Democratic control of pretty much all government institutions. So as you see, in FPTP you want your side to be united under one viable party, while the opposing side divides their votes, which ensures they can never win. Even if at one point there would be 5 parties in the US with equal support, the system would immediately encourage the reduction to two viable parties - with the possible exception of regional parties, which effectively replace one of the main two viable parties in some region - basically what the SNP does in the UK.

HRC is their nominee. What do you think? We don't want it. 4-5 viable parties would be enough. So, tell me. Did you ever think about why there are only two viable parties?

We have now achieved singularity, where the Onion has merged with reality. As I keep saying, nothing can be done until the laws are changed to get rid of the two party system. A third party will never be viable unless it can replace one of the two major parties. Suppose Bloomberg ran like he was thinking of doing. He'd probably get a good chunk of votes, but all it would accomplish is ensure that Hilzilla, who he just endorsed, and would infinitely prefer to Trump, lost. Disclaimer: I'm actually pretty happy the way the election is going so far. Proportional representation. You know you want it.

Connect the dots: We know Correct the Record has employed paid internet trolls/shills. We know the Bernie campaign has been infiltrated by pro-Hillary moles (although not to which extent). Now, at the most critical point, the huge SFP subreddit is shut down by a moderator accused of being pro-Hillary, at the urging of posters in the "EnoughSandersSpam" subreddit: Now, early on there were a lot of crazy theories that Trump was a Clinton plant. Considering the recent turn of events, the opposite is starting to seem more realistic. Hillary making DWS a "honorary chair" of her presidential campaign after she was forced to resign from the DNC for being biased in favour of Clinton is just a joke. At this point, the Clinton campaign is just ****ting in the face of Sanders supporters.

8 years under Obama has given us a different perspective on the Democratic Party. We begin to take some things for granted. Hillary is equal to **** Cheney on foreign policy, her record and her reputation as Secretary of State prove that. This alone should disqualify her from the presidency for everyone but GWB-era neocons (sadly, the Democratic race did not have many contenders which would have made this more obvious). Incidentally, several of the currently active GWB-era warmongers jumped ship from the Republican party when Trump took the lead. You make of that what you will. Hillary's reputation as an Obama successor is incredibly misleading in the foreign policy area. I've a sinking feeling Democrats will only realize too late they've made **** Cheney president.

If you are choosing the lesser of two evils and choose to throw away your vote, then you are wasting your vote. However, if you think Hillary and Trump are exactly equally good, then of course you can happily throw away your vote. Wasting your vote won't change the current system, which is what you need. You need electoral reform, you do not need to make yourselves a laughing stock for the Democratic and Republican elites, and the donors which bribe both of them. But let us consider the best-case scenario for the LP: They reach so high in polls that they become one of the two main contenders for the presidency. But then another part of the electorate will act as the spoiler! Gary Johnson voters will be screaming at the unrealistic Trump voters, who would rather throw their vote away than help Gary defeat Hillary. The problem is not the specific candidates, the problem is the FPTP system, which only allows for a very coarse-grained type of democracy which systematically misrepresents the views of the electorate. It's your own fault for choosing a stupid system of representation for introducing this problem to begin with. Every non-joke country which has instituted a presidential system where citizens vote directly for the president for the last 150 years or so has some type of preferential vote, or run-offs in elections. If the US had this in the presidential elections, you could possibly sleep well at night voting for the candidate you actually prefer. Get you ****ing **** together, USA. It's time to move your democracy into the 20th century. Here, this is explained with cute animals, for you who feel you do not understand the reasoning above: K It's a good thing you have me, or you wouldn't understand much about the world. No, no need to thank me, you can consider me donating my valuable time to advice you an act of altruism. 99.9% of elections in the US are done with little waiting and no problems. What problems there are are often blown out of proportion or made up completely to cast doubt on the process, usually by the losing party. I do hope so. But for a person with such paranoid distrust for the government, it seems strange that you put such strong trust in the voting process, which is the first thing anyone would want to manipulate in a democracy. There are a lot of systemic differences with how you vote in the US compared to other countries. Some incidents might be inflated by hyperbole, but others such as the dramatic cut in polling places in Arizona in all poor areas seem without possible excuse. This seems to be the consensus in American media as well.

Maybe because the population of California is 4x larger than the entire country of Sweden? Ok - I got a solution for you! Draw three magic lines through California, separating it in four pieces. Then conduct elections in each part and add the results together. Should be as simple as in Sweden, right? Seriously, if anything the economics of scale should make elections easier.

Why is it that the US can't manage to hold decent elections? I've voted in four elections but never had to stand in line for a single second. As soon as you read about US elections, it is like if you'r reading about a third-world country. Meanwhile: Exit polls off by 16% compared to California Dem result, 0,07% for Republicans. 3 million votes left to count. Clinton has been superb at beating exit polls earlier though. We also don't know how many of the votes left to count are placebo ballots. I heard NPP voters were in many places refused Democratic ballots, even though they are legally entitled to them in California.

American Special Forces soldiers wearing YPG insignia in Syria: Problem, Erdogan? Very clever, Mr. Toner.

Hades/Sand/others, Gabirelle, Dark/Raven/a small army of others, Krezack/LoF/others, need I go on? Didn't all the first ones you mentioned admit to being alts? Krezack never came out as LoF as far as I know, so that's doubtful. What I really challenge are basically accusations of people being alts from LoF onwards.

I don't see why you should take any offense. First of all, basically every single new person who starts posting here is accused of being an alt of someone else. I don't know why. Secondly, personally I wouldn't take offense if someone on the Internet thought I was secretly a meerkat or whatever. In fact, I would probably be very amused if people did not believe my IRL credentials.

Several people here have the wrong perspective on religion. Today, religion is simply answers to questions which cannot be answered by science. But historically, the institutions which we now call religious have had so many more functions. It makes little sense to argue about whether all civilizations have featured religion, since at the inception of civilization, the religious institutions handled all understanding of the world, effectively all commonly held knowledge and superstition. In order to understand the rise of religion, we have to look at what happens when a tribe can accumulate food effectively enough that all people do not need to constantly work to gather food, which can be the case in a hunter-gatherer society. One of the very first roles which appear is the one of a priest, medicine man or wise woman. Such a person (or persons in case of a budding civilization) would hold all the tribe's knowledge of medicine, astronomy, and superstitions. The further back in time you go, the more intermixed scientific knowledge and religious superstition become. But scientific knowledge is also subject to an evolution of ideas of sorts. Eventually, people will realize that you don't need to do chanting for the medicinal herbs to work or that invisible angels pushing the planets is a superfluous explanation. Eventually, the scientific profession became separate from the religious one, even as religious institutions were preserved. The Enlightenment marked the point in time where you were more likely to get useful answers from a secular scientist than from a monk (and in the transition period, many of the people who veered from superstitious views of the world were monks themselves, like Giordano Bruno). Eventually, religious institutions was only used as a tool for kings and such to control the population and make them fight their wars, I'd say in Europe up until around WW1. This means that from the enlightenment onwards, testable theories have been subject to an evolutionary process, that process which we call the scientific process. This was the point in time where secular ideologies and philosophies replaced religion as a tool for state control, and as a guiding philosophy for how an individual should live his/her life. Nazism and Communism are of course the prime examples for this. But they would simply by brute force impose their own guiding philosophy on the populace, just like the state church had done before. Democracy and freedom of religion became the norm in most of the civilized world throughout the 20th century, and so instead of being imposed a guiding philosophy by the state church/party, individuals were free to choose their own. Eventually, some philosophies have been largely dismissed, because they failed in the eyes of the public. Thus personal and political philosophies have been subject to an evolutionary process. The only thing which is left in the religious sphere is the questions science can never answer, and the old religious answers to these questions linger like old food leftovers at the bottom of the kitchen sink. What we today call "religions" are remnants of institutions which once held actual knowledge and functions. The vestigial organs left today were never of any use, but the religion of old also encompassed scientific knowledge and laws organizing society, which were clearly of much use. Some people want to regress to the stage where we have an imposed state religion. Now, a free society in which personal philosophies are in a state of evolution is always going to be weak in the short-term, since a lot of people will adopt harmful personal philosophies, compared to the scenario where an enlightened despot chooses the guiding philosophy for everyone, that is. However, the society which is in a state of evolution can always improve, while a society with a fixed philosophy can never improve without a revolution. Let us make a case study: Islam and Muslim countries. Islam as originally formulated describes a very specific set of laws (what we call "sharia law") compared to Christianity, which is extremely vague. Why did the Enlightenment occur in Europe, and not in the Muslim world, which in many ways was more civilized at the time (admittedly there are also other factors here, like the Mongols torching Bagdad...)? Muslims were - and some still are - stuck in a mindset where you could always look to the Quran and religious scholars for answers. When religion has such a large place in jurisprudence, that stifles scientific thinking. Meanwhile in Europe, people lived under the creed to render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, a minimal interpretation of which would be to let secular law rule society. It is of course not a coincidence that Christianity was made the religion of the Roman Empire. Which Caesar would not a adopt a religion with that message? A polar opposite of the Islamic and traditional Judaic traditions, which postulate Sharia/Halakh law, and thus preserve the role of religious scholars over secular scholars in their societies. It is true that Islam can be considered a harmful element in Western society for as long as Muslim groups impose their philosophy on their group members and indoctrinate them, in which case they are not allowing their young to be subject to the evolution of philosophies. However, we must ask ourselves to which degree this reflects reality. The Western society which is open to all philosophies is in opposition to an Islamic society which imposes Islamic philosophy. But specific Islamic ideas are of course part of the grand evolution of philosophies, and as such not opposed to Western society. Muslims will assimilate and secularize as long as they can't keep their young from absorbing Western ideas and reaching Western living standards. The question is only how much time it will take to reach a balance, and what can go wrong on the way. We must not let in too many Muslims at once, and not allow them to ghettoize. We do not need to regress to imposing some philosophy on all citizens, but it is true that the prevailing ideas might change from those we see now. The specific ideas in opposition here are, I think, primitive culture vs. the welfare state culture. A welfare state attracts immigrants because of the guarantee of quality of life, immigrants who increasingly make the welfare state impossible because of their burden on the economy (before they integrate). Primitive peoples who come from areas like Somalia which is located on the lowest rung on Maslow's hierarchy are relocated to advanced societies where everyone is pushed up to the third level through state programmes. There is going to be a delay, but Somalis who grow up in Sweden (for example) will eventually want to achieve the next level, rather than being focused on a lower one. Meanwhile, the people whose grandparents grew up in the welfare state are too focused on the higher levels for the long-term wellness of the society. In a welfare state, you count on the state for your pension. In a primitive culture, you count on your children for pension. A synthesis of the two is required to create a harmonic lasting society, which is what will eventually happen. Let us just hope we can avoid machetes and ovens on the way there.

Melisandre jumps on the Jon Snow carousel just a little bit too quickly... I would like Davos to castigate her further for playing them all like a game of R'hllorcoaster Tycoon. Maybe we have now seen the start of tensions (the hate triangle between Davos, Mel, and Brienne) which can surface at convenient future point in the narrative.

Re-watched "Eyes Wide Shut" earlier. Probably Kubrick's best film in my mind. Anyways, one thing struck me: a musical piece which figures several times in the movie is the 7th movement from Shostakovich's "Suite for Variety Orchestra", the second waltz in that suite. Now, another waltz composed by a Soviet composer is the one from Khachaturian's music for the play "Masquerade", which is played when the main character is at a masquerade ball. He is there with his friend, and unbeknownst to him his wife is also there. His friend hits on a woman, and she gives her a bracelet of hers, which the main character later finds missing from his wife - however, again unbeknownst to him it was stolen from her during the ball. The play explores themes of real vs. believed infidelity, just like Eyes Wide Shut. Additionally, the play was also originally censored for depicting in a negative light the masquerade balls held by the rich and powerful in Russia at the time. IMO Khachaturian's piece would have been a much better fit for the movie, but maybe I'm also partial since it's a personal favourite of mine.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/12511963030 Another story about what happens when you store voter information in databases that can be hacked by a trained monkey.

Defensive Mindweb, easily.

Hi, Obsidian devs: Please don't listen to any of the wishes in the quote above. My wishlist consists of ignoring the above wishes. In particular, PotD is too easy and should be made harder.

Why Clinton is the last true hawk left in the US presitential race.

This is SO ****ING CATCHY.

Now, I'm not into that kind of games, but that looks completely awesome.

Probably not the most popular thing to say, but the US needs to upgrade their nuclear weapons programme badly...