Zoraptor

Heh, these threads are always a fountain of wisdom and repository of measured and well thought out arguments. Or perhaps they're just replete with false dichotomies, absolutism and a war on common sense with a few gems thrown in? I get confused between the two options, sometimes. You can have people who are disadvantaged being a factor in them being asterisked off without it being the only factor, you can have immigration being a factor without it being 'bolt the doors, rape gangs incoming' vs 'open the floodgates, peace love and lentils for all' and you can have pretty much every single thing here mentioned being a factor without it having to be true of everyone/ everything to the exclusion of everything else. Anders Breivik may not be equivalent to the Bataclan, but he certainly is near equivalent to this guy- practical differences are choice of weapon and lack of a political manifesto, and that's about it. And that isn't even mentioning any SJW type stupidities. The 'answer' is neither sending tanks into the banlieue nor is it to convert everyone to Islam and impose Sharia and it's certainly not to do what most will do: wankery intended mostly to make themselves feel better by doing Something Utterly Ineffectual like #StopKony2012/ #JeSuisCharlie etc To illustrate, a random comment: Well, we all know what we're meant to answer, don't we. It's those evil muslims. Except, of course, there's another way to answer the question. The common denominator in most terrorist attacks is that the victims are muslim. 3 attacks in France over the last 18 months, that's an average week for Iraq. Poor muslims, what have they done to be the target of all that terrorism? I blame Bliar, Bu$h, drones and the US and UK etc etc. Both answers manage the difficult (heh) task of being both true and an utterly pointless rhetorical construct designed to push an agenda at the same time. A measured response to terrorism regards a bunch of stuff as being factors- economics, religion, integration, displacement/ war, radical ideologies of various types, social media, and in the case of muslim terrorism the big one: Saudi Arabia's sponsorship of stone age ideology/ takfirism- and a range of different potential solutions that are very unlikely to be quick and easy single action fixes. You have to address and acknowledge all the underlying issues not just the ones that suit your worldview, but fitting that narrative is just so much easier.

God damn community organisers, with their, er, communities and organising? Looking at the average US police force it's pretty clear which group is prepared for 'waging a war', and it ain't the community or their organisers; it's the ones with all the surplus corporate welfare military hardware.

You can't rebind cursor keys in DS, never have been able to. Only way to do it is with one of the key binding utilities. It's not the sort of thing GOG can really fix as it isn't a bug per se, it's just how the game is built. The vysnc issue is a bug but since EA never fixed it in three games I wouldn't expect it to be fixed either- and it does have a relatively easy solution. I have to admit I really liked Dead Space. It's very derivative of System Shock 2 and parts of it are almost directly cribbed from its design docs (hydroponics) but it's derivative in a good way. The lack of HUD and having Isaac take up a third of the screen plus be lumbering and imprecise seems like bad ideas as well, but they just work practically. Plus, I get some amusement that Isaac is basically Arnold Rimmer, vending machine repair man, rather Master Chief McDoomGuy like nearly every other equivalent protagonist.

Unfortunately their #1 choice had to turn the role down since he was too busy being married to the Queen. 2016, you have been an... interesting year so far.

Half a league, half a league, half a league, onwards? (He did have a magnificent conk, and he was an excellent general. Shame about being named after gumboots and being perhaps Britain's worst prime minister of all time (of all time!) though)

That is essentially it. The issue of violence in their formation is a parallel one- you can have peacefully formed organic and artificial states, and either can be formed via violence as well. The main difference is whether they're intrinsically stable and made up of people who are mostly/ entirely happy to be part of that country, or not. It's all pretty subjective though, and there's certainly no hard definition.

It isn't the use of violence during formation that meant they weren't organic, it was that they had to put effort in- threat of violence, usually- to simply maintain themselves as a country. Without that effort they just kind of... fell apart into bits which didn't require as much effort to hold together. If they'd been organic they would not have fallen apart when the opportunity arrived. There isn't any sort of hard taxonomy as to what constitutes being an organic country and it would be possible with sufficient effort and time to become organic through assimilation- it's more that if you were to draw 'low energy' boundaries around areas in Europe linking those with similar cultures/ religions together you would tend to put them more or less where the borders currently are. That certainly isn't the case in the 19th century; nor is/ was it the case for arbitrarily created countries. (That's a 'chemistry' view of geopolitics where low energy states are more stable and high energy ones tend to decay. Blame the use of the term organic for it if you want)

Isn't that pretty much the nature of nation states? Not necessarily; the 19th century situation was quite artificial and the EU is effectively an attempt to go back to an even more extreme version of that situation with one 'empire'. Then, Europe was dominated by large multi ethnic empires held together, ultimately, by threat of force; military force probably does not now apply but there's certainly implied economic... leverage that can be applied. Then, even somewhere like Spain (or the aforementioned France) which had 'natural' borders that had been established, more or less, for 500 years were multiethnic, and an amalgam of even older proto-countries that theoretically at least they could revert to. That's largely not true for France nowadays except for some lingering sentiment in Brittany, but is for Spain. However, if you look at the break ups of the empires after WW1 the countries which ended up stable and surviving long term where the ones which formed 'spontaneously' via popular sentiment and which were 'historical' entities. Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia (~Bohemia) and to an extent Finland all had long term identities prior to ending up in their respective empires. Same for the organic part of the Ottoman break up too, Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Romania (via Wlach/ Moldova) all had long term identities. The 'non organic' approach is always fraught with danger, as with the non organic/ imposed parts of the breaks ups of the Austro Hungarian and Ottoman empires. From that you got Yugoslavia on one hand and that cretinous artificial arbitrary mess in the middle east that still causes so much trouble on the other. That's why an imposed EU is not just a bad idea but verges on being outright dangerous. If it's going to be done it has to be done via genuine popular approval rather than just acclamation from the political elite. Otherwise it risks springing apart, and potentially springing apart violently.

Most nation states in Europe did evolve organically. At, say, the end of the 19th century almost all the states in existence had a long history of being in existence. Even today there are only a handful of European states with little to no history of being independent going back centuries- Latvia, Estonia, Kosovo (if you support arbitrarily seizing land off another country via military force at least), Slovenia, Bosnia and Macedonia/ FYROM. Plus a couple of arguable ones like Italy ~ Rome, Belgium/ Luxemburg or Greece which were never formally countries prior to the 1830s; but even then it's nearly 200 years ago. They all show a progression to where they are now. Personally, I dislike nation states in theory; but there has to be a better alternative and powerful supra national entities tend to be either ineffective (UN; deliberately neutered also systemically biased) or just another layer of power atop or replacing the countries' like the EU. Reality is that you could scarcely get a more top down development of something than the EU. It's tended to use manufactured consensus tactics to increase it's own power via parliamentary (or equivalent) votes rather than referenda; when it tries popular approval such via referenda it tends to lose rather too much so, as with the EU constitution, it cancels everything after some embarrassment from Frenchies and Dutchies then fiats everything in via amendments with only parliamentary approval (which get rejected by the Irish in a referendum, so solution is to... re-run the referendum until you get approval, of course). EU is a case study on railroading tactics. Having said that the EU certainly is bottom up, in a sense- the 'bend over and take it from your betters' sense. OTOH, Nationalism in the 'Springtime of Nations' sense was about as spontaneous and bottom up as you could get at the time: not particularly so, but far more than the existing situation. Nationalism can of course easily be used for bad purposes as can religion or any other belief, but that's just human nature. People kill each other over even more trivial guff all the time.

"Founder's Edition". Basically a badge for not being patient and paying over the odds as an early adapter. 1060 looks like it's a spoiler card for the 480 more than anything else. Can't see it having wide availability at its stated price point either.

That really depends on how he endorses her. He's already said he'd be voting for her if he lost which is an endorsement to most practical purposes. If he talks about how bad Trump is rather than how awesome Hillary is there's no principle violation, and he can actually hit most of his talking points without directly criticising Hillary. It would only violate his principles if he actually thought Trump was a better candidate since Hillary is the only other viable candidate or if he starts waxing lyrical about Wall Street, SuperPACs and the like. More realistically he could order his supporters to vote Hillary, which would definitely be a mistake- I'd expect only a personal and fairly limited endorsement.

Don't get me wrong, Stalin was one of the great monsters of history, but I think you mischaracterize him. The person who did the most to win WW2, who confounded Western powers, and made a backwards, poor, illiterate nation into a super-power can not be what you say. Well yeah, in his own way Stalin was quite brilliant, but he didn't do his education or modernisation programmes out of altruism or even patriotism, he did them for the same reason he'd also randomly kill off groups of people: because it made him more powerful. For that reason he has more in common with Al Capone or Pablo Escobar- both quite brilliant in their own ways- than any genuinely principled leader. She deliberately gave classified info to lawyers who had no security clearance, at least Petraeus mistress had security clearance, it just wasn't high enough. Gross negligence standard does not require intent to break the law, only that the actions be intentional. Comey is playing word games by saying without intent he can't win the case. Assuming Comey isn't corrupt, he choked, it was just too big a step to take and he punted. The problem there is the same as with accusations of perjury, in order for it to perjury you have to be able to show that Hillary deliberately lied. She clearly did lie in the sense that what she said was false, but if she did it in the genuine belief that it was true it isn't perjury, it's just plain old being wrong. If she supplied her lawyers with information genuinely believing that it was non classified then that would be negligent, but not grossly negligent. And you have to be able to prove that it was deliberate or grossly negligent, not just think it was. Don't get me wrong, I think Hillary deliberately used the server to avoid FOI and inconvenient paper trails and I think she has lied through her teeth repeatedly and deliberately. But I ultimately have to agree with Comey that he'd have no chance of actually convicting her. It would be different if she was a random Joe/Jill instead of Hillary Clinton, but she is Hillary Clinton.

Stalin had principles? I suppose monomania is a principle, of sorts, but it isn't what most people would recognise as being principled. Otherwise he was just a petty thug who hitched a ride to communism as a way of getting power. The difference between Petraeus and Clinton is clearly one of provable intent. Petraeus leaked classified material to someone he was boffing and who was writing a biography on him, Clinton did not (provably) deliberately leak classified material, she was just (provably) an incompetent moron- which isn't a crime so long as she wasn't grossly negligent. What exactly the point is of having 'gross negligence' as a standard at all when to practical purposes it is the same as being 'deliberate' is I don't know, but it is what it is. And while it would be nice to see Hillary in court defending herself by saying she was an idiot or that she "couldn't recall" that would not be enough to convict. I'd have liked to see Comey try at least, personally, but political shankings are not a legit reason for criminal proceedings and most of the opinions I've seen prior to his recommendation were that Comey has integrity. Bottom line is that Petraeus did it deliberately- and ended up pleading guilty to one charge at least- Clinton can at least plausibly claim that she did not and was just 'mistaken' or whatever.

Michael Gove looks and sounds like Harry Potter would if he'd merged with Voldemort and is one of the few people who genuinely could be a lizard-man wearing a meat suit for convenience. It really is quite disconcerting.

Nazi SJWs do, of course. The debate is mostly over whether it's an 'apology' or an 'expression of extreme regret' just falling short of a formal apology, which is pretty much semantics and certainly a deliberately crafted wording that allows each side to save face and claim what they want to for domestic consumption. The Turkish word used translates towards regret but not outright apology, the Russian translation for it is on the outright apology side. In any case it isn't the "we're sorry you were offended by us shooting your plane down" passive aggressive non apology that you usually get in such situations. And Erdogan has supposedly phoned Assad as well, which hasn't happened in 4 years. Most likely it's not a full scale retreat from supporting the rebels though, just hedging against the Kurds gaining vs ISIS and the rather feeble efforts the rebels have made attacking both the Kurds and ISIS despite extensive Turkish backing.

More DNC/ Hillary leaks from Guccifer 2.0. Scroll down to bottom (well, about 2/3 down, with current number of comments) for actual leak stuff.

If he's a traditional zombie then eating her brains would be appropriate, I guess? But he's Zombie Gregor and it's GoT; you're pretty clearly meant to think he's going to do what Gregor's known for. At least it isn't as cheap a shock as many this season due to Gregor's history and nature being well established.

Anything British with 'Daily' in it is deeply unreliable. Daily Mail/ Mirror/ Express are all crap with different biases, The Sun manages to somehow be worse than all of them but fortunately no one ever seems to link to it. They're all Tabloids and basically the Gawkers of the newspaper world, utterly concerned with pageviews/ circulation/ sensationalism especially when it plays into their readers' biases. The Broadsheets (most of which are actually tabloid format now) are the Telegraph*/ Torygraph which is pro Conservative, The Times which is pro Murdoch, The Independent which is adequately neutral most of the time, and The Grauniad/ Guardian which is SJW central left biased. *Technically it's the Daily Telegraph which is kind of appropriate as it's gone down the toilet recently in terms of quality. Due to its readership it's very much Stiff Upper Lip Old Empire clickbait they produce though which is at least amusing.

I'm actually not that surprised about Boris. Especially after Gove confirmed he would run earlier.

480/ 8gig is NZD500 (USD 350) here. Ironically, you can now get a 390X for slightly less than that amount instead, when a few weeks ago it was very rare to see them for less than $700.

Most people who wanted a DRM free copy of their early games already have them. All their older games were available DRM free for ages elsewhere- Gamersgate, primarily, since both Paradox and them were owned by the same company. If you already have a DRM free copy there's not much point in a GOG release except convenience.

Galaxy was going to piggyback steamworks' multiplayer component directly at one point. That idea seems to have quietly disappeared though.

In some ways nationalism is just religion with a different faceplate, and one of them is their ability to inspire fanaticism and get people to do extreme things for the cause and to be remembered.

Yep. Probably once the summer sales are out of the way. The same guy who was polling the Galaxy database had already semi confirmed Tyranny as coming to GOG a month or so ago, a whole bunch of unreleased games had support pages already set up including Tyranny. Still, good to have a formal confirmation.

Definitely looks like ISIS though they usually claim responsibility fairly quickly. But Kurdish groups (especially TAK) have used suicide bombings before despite being secular/ atheist in philosophy.