Zoraptor

I've got a copy of Wasteland 2* to give away and since the DC is out now seems a good time, steam (blech) or gog key from the Bard's Tale kickstarter bonus. PM if interested, standard restrictions (eg no new/ single purpose accounts) apply, first come first serve. *Can alternatively be a Witcher or Witcher 2 key but I presume everyone has them already and they would be GOG only.

Especially since British jets aren't even supposed to be/ legally allowed to be flying in Syria after their- rather well publicised- parliamentary vote not to allow it during the 'red line' débâcle, that really should have been an indicator that the Sunday Times report was a load of old bollocks no matter how 'respected' (L0LMurdochLies) the Sunday Times theoretically is. Pretty par for the course though, the quality of reporting on Syria is almost uniformly abysmal, despite Lavrov et alia saying that they would bomb all 'terrorists' just about everyone is still saying that Russia claims to be only attacking ISIS.

The download for a new install is 20GB on Galaxy, so it isn't downloading quite everything. Doesn't exactly encourage Galaxy's use when the non Galaxy download is which is a third the Galaxy size. The engine upgrade to Unity 5 is why the size is smaller.

Nationalist rebels are random, they require a rebel stack to be spawned with the right ethnicity and to capture a province- which adds the core, CAT for Catalunya in this case- and to hold it for an extended period. Practically I'm not sure I've ever seen a Catalunya form because Spain and Aragon gets Catalan as a primary culture/ they're in the same culture group which means there is no baseline chance of nationalist rebels. Other nationalities are fairly likely though. You can quite easily mod the game to make a particular country either be available from the the start or more likely to form by adding cores to its potential lands such as Barcelona from the get go, that just involves altering the province data in the ..\history\province folder, in that case you would add a 'add_core = CAT' line to start Barcelona with a Catalan core.

That's a bit harsh, whatever the result you'll still be Olympic Rugby Champions and likely to be the longest reigning Olympic champions of all time. Ireland beating France sets up a bit of a giggle; 2007 ABs v France in Cardiff where we lost and now we get ABs v France in Cardiff for another quarter final. I'm going to laugh if we lose again the same way, the butthurt last time was monumental.

They haven't got a chance of taking it off Russia, there wasn't enough time six months ago and there isn't enough time now. There won't be any open and frank examination of the bidding processes because Europe used exactly the same tactics to diddle RSA out in favour of Germany in 2006. Plus, while there's general political butthurt about Russia there aren't knives out football wise, Qatar on the other hand has caused some of the most spectacular butthurt ever seen. Though not without reason. I have to admit being highly amused by the former England FA boss they had on the BBC who was talking about how open and transparent UEFA- so transparent they act like their leader will inevitably be acquitted of his corruption accusations- and European administration was and how everyone else had to reform, so a nice 'non corrupt' administration should be appointed. Presumably from those nice, non corrupt Europeans... That's the wrong way around, USA bid for the Qatar won cup (came 2nd so would have the best claim if the bids were not rerun); the Russia accusation was that England- who came stone cold last in the 2016 bidding process behind two other Euro bids as well as Russia- was using the accusations to try and steal the cup from Russia. Given England's born to the purple attitude being awarded the cup hosting rights by fiat is probably the only way England will ever get it. I don't doubt they'd like to, personally, but Spain/ Portugal and the Low Countries bids got more votes, there isn't enough time to deal with the inevitable investigation let alone any following litigation if they try to and at its heart near nobody apart from England really wants England to host. Plus, there's no doubt at all that Blatter actually is corrupt, there's no need for a conspiracy theory to explain his downfall and if the main reason was to flip won bids doing it earlier would have been better. I will say this for Blatter though, on his watch they had the first two Asian, first African and first East European world cup allocations, prior to him Western Europe had more than 50% of cups- on his watch only one was awarded there. We even got 3 (!) age group world cups here in New Zealand over his tenure. It's not hard to see why Europeans hate him but most of the other confeds like him.

Glad Platini got banned as well. Gutless wonder wouldn't even stand until he was sure he'd win and left Prince Hussein to take the bullet in the last election. Plus of course anyone who knows much at all about European football knows that they aren't exactly squeaky clean when it comes to corruption despite their protestations.

Getting jobs would certainly help a lot, but I don't think it's direct economic prosperity that is the big factor- KSA and Qatar are immensely prosperous and have plenty of radicals, and there's the rather odd situation of 2nd generation immigrants in Europe often being more radical than their parents despite being in a far better financial situation than their parents were at the same time in life. It's what attracts people to cults in general, a feeling of self worth, purpose and being a part of something important that is the biggest factor or conversely, the feeling of worthlessness and exclusion from society in general. Having a job certainly helps with both of those. It's also somewhat ironic but it seems very likely that having people rail against radical Islam, especially a country's leaders, probably encourages radicalisation in those most vulnerable to it in much the same way that having your parents shout at you while a teenager would actually encourage you to do what they didn't want half the time.

That review reads like an undergraduate essay. And actually not a bad one, for a 1st year paper at least. There's an obvious point of contention in the quoted section (are architectural similarities to do with 'conformity' or simply because efficient design mandates similar design for similar function) that ought to be picked up on at anything above 1st year level but he's worked Foucault and Bentham in there appropriately...

Ah, I think we've found the problem. In all seriousness, there's not a whole lot of chance of that being a genuinely 'mainstream' translation if it's KSA sponsored; it's far more likely to be Wahhabi. Salafi/ Wahhabi translations will be slanted towards fire and brimstone, mainstream Sunni translations will be more mild. Saudi ideology gets massive financial backing but still isn't anywhere near dominant. Yet. And fortunately, because it's extremely retrograde.

Not really, you expanded the point Gorth was making to extinguish it- he didn't mention Iraq at all, just external parties to Syria and how they viewed the belligerents; you addressed Iraq in its own context not the Syrian one. I could have phrased it better though (and made it more clear that it was wrt Syria), certainly, but I didn't particularly want to deal with the Iraqi situation in detail. But since you kind of asked I'll answer in the broader context. The problem is much the same as with the assertion that Assad doesn't want to fight ISIS because he thinks that the international community will pick him over them. That might be true, but there are compelling military reasons for prioritising the other rebels which trump any 'philosophical' guff like fighting the greater evil. Overall your evidence leads back from the conclusion (basically, that the international community and its opinion is most significant) and not the other way around as it should be, you talk of international recognition etc as if that's the important factor rather than facts on the ground. The 'international community' has been bombing ISIS for more than a year now yet they still have the facts on the ground and have made actual gains to boot. That deals with the more theoretical objection. The practical/ political objection is that both the Syrian rebels and ISIS have a specified claim over Syria, with the rebels being better placed to enforce that claim since they're closer to the important parts of the country, hence ISIS is a secondary threat there; we agree there though the reasoning is different. ISIS also has a specified claim on Iraq. The Kurds however, do not- they claim only 'Kurdistan' with some disputation about what that entails, eg Kirkuk, and have not declared independence as ISIS have. Even if they did break away Iraq would still exist and they're not going to be marching on Tikrit or Baghdad or Basra or Baquba because they don't want to, and have no reason to. The critical questions to frame the reason why ISIS are Iraq's biggest threat is simple: (1) Would Iraq be fighting ISIS in Syria if they were able to? Yes, pretty much definitely. Maybe in similar style to Iran, but then they're using a lot of informals even for the fighting inside Iraq. (2) Would they be fighting Kurds in Syria if they were able to? No, they aren't even fighting their own Kurds. Kurdish independence is a theoretical situation at this point which may or may not happen eventually. ISIS is an entirely practical problem which is ongoing, whether looked at specifically in the Syrian context or specifically in the Iraqi context, or in the wider context.

Heh, I wonder how often Turkey's 'airspace' is going to be violated. They've got a self declared 5 mile exclusion zone inside Syria... And of course Antioch/ Alexandretta should be Syrian territory anyway under that most sacred of institutions, international law, since Turkey occupied it from Syria then held a 'referendum' to annex it. Which sounds familiar to something that happened recently and got some people Very Upset, it's on the tip of my tongue. Kosovo! Hmm, no, that's not right, it's somewhere else. Nevermind, I'm sure it will come to me at some point. Hmm, I think in your eagerness you've made a rather obvious omission there- Iraq. While Iraq ain't Syria ISIS has considerable holdings there and is a neighbour, same as Turkey and is certainly more involved than the US or Russia. Having said that, anyone with map reading skills can see why ISIS is not the primary threat to the Syrian Government, with the exception of a single suburb of Damascus they're further from all the important areas (Homs/ Hama/ Damascus/ Latakia/ Aleppo) than other rebels or JAN are, so they are the primary target in purely military logic. ISIS's main holdings are all either a long way away like Raqqa, 'behind' other rebel areas (Mandib/ Jarablus) or are simply not all that important from the government perspective (Deir ez Zor, one of the few areas where the government has consistently been gaining ground over the past year). Still, if nothing else this intervention has brought the hilarity of the west in general (exc France at least) complaining about someone bombing Al Qaeda.

If there's one KS type project that looks like it is inevitably going to crash and burn it's Star Citizen. No scope control and trying to be all things to all people- the whole thing from concept to funding is completely out of usual crowdsourcing scale. Having said that, this does rather look like what happened to Brad Wardell/ Stardock when a bunch of sjws decided to take the word of an ex employee who was later forced to apologise. Particular caution has to be taken when dealing with accusations from ex employees as they may have axes to grind, and Derek Smart is... unreliable, to say the least.

So, there's going to be a MacGyver remake, apparently. What could possibly go wrong?

Everyone who has intervened has used that tactic- the US bombs 'Khorasan' as well as ISIS too. That's Al Qaeda/ Al Nusra but as with Qatar banning Al Jazeera from mentioning the connection it's all about wanting to be able to complain about Russia bombing Al Nusra with a straight face. Specifically with the Rastan (N Homs) bombing that area is held by Al Nusra/ Al Qaeda at least partly, as is the al Ghab plain area (NW Hama) where JAN is an integrated part of Jaish e Fatah. Some of the non AlQ aligned islamist rebels- Islamic Front/ Jaish e Islami, iirc- were also stupid enough to 'declare war' on Russia prior to strikes even starting and try to hit the airfield at Latakia. There certainly were moderate opposition at the beginning, that's true. As always though the problem with moderate opposition is precisely that they are moderate. Moderate opposition failed in Egypt with less violence and failed in Libya with western intervention; the money and arms flow in to the radicals or the reactionaries, the only thing moderates ever get is some self serving political service. And you have to deal with the political reality that sees Obama explicitly saying 'sunni opposition' and which has maybe one moderate rebel group in the largest five rebel groups.

I agree that Russian intervention won't be an instant panacea. He needs better military leadership at all levels, better strategic thinking and better training for the troops he has; he does have enough troops to do the job as it stands but he lacks the ability to use them effectively with coordination and to avoid unnecessary losses. Out of those the Russians can provide better top level leadership and better intelligence resulting in fewer unnecessary gaffes and wastage, as well as having better air craft and crews for a proper combined arms approach and in the longer term they can provide better training. While Syria has a theoretically decent air force it's woefully unsuited for fighting an armed insurgency as their strike aircraft are ancient and were almost entirely unmodernised and using unguided munitions and their helicopters susceptible to AAA; the Russians should be far better able to monitor troop movements, interdict and strike precisely and where tactically and strategically important. It does seem likely that Assad is going to get (is already getting, by some reports) an influx of Iranian 'volunteers' to stiffen up his forces in any case, and debadged Hezbollah types are likely to hang around as well. Basically though, the government forces have made a series of utterly catastrophic strategic blunders in the past year that the Russians should be able to help prevent- trying to defend long salients, not maintaining objectives and splitting effective units up into small ineffective units trying to do too much with too little all at once and frittering away resources needlessly. And perhaps most importantly they've let the rebels get huge stockpiles of weapons and ammunition from their blunders as well.

To be fair, I'll give the west credit for helping out the Yazidis even if it was primarily PR- but I'd bet every cent in my bank account that they wouldn't have lifted a finger for Fuah/ Kefraya, and they certainly didn't for Qaryatayn. But, that is primarily why the west is even as involved as it is, PR. Ironically that is probably better than any realistic alternative, especially considering what some in their 'coalition' really want. If Saudi really tries direct military intervention against Assad as threatened things will get... interesting, very quickly.

It's bad because the west has consistently made a mess of things, has had a year to degrade ISIS with little progress shown and apart from having made a mess of things looks likely to make a further mess of things with no consistent strategy from the past, present or future. Russian intervention can scarcely be worse than that. Plus, if you happen to loathe retrograde extremists you can pretty much guarantee that Russia will go after the lot, not just selective ones based on not offending certain 'allies'. There's ISIS in Homs Governate- eg the Christian town of Al-Qaryatayn. Indeed, ISIS holds more of Homs Governate than the government does. That's one of the reasons why I don't take western media seriously, they conflate the city of Homs which has no ISIS- and most definitively was not bombed- with Homs Governate which most certainly does have ISIS, no responsible or informed entity should be making that mistake. The particular area that has supposedly been bombed in Homs Governate is about 20 miles Homs city and is partly held by Jabhat Al Nusra/ Al Qaeda, not just by the beatnik lentil eating progressive opposition. The sole difference is that when the US decides to bomb JAN they decide to call them 'Khorasan' because they don't want to actually mention JAN. They're inconveniently big buddies with direct Saudi/ Turkish proxies like Ahrar ash Sham- who are themselves basically JAN, just without the overt AlQ link- so much so that they have an integrated leadership in Jaish al Fatah ('Army of Conquest'). While I'm pretty surprised at direct Russian intervention they will definitely go for the high strategic value targets and from the government pov ISIS doesn't have many of them, ISIS territory is mostly distal from key areas like Damascus and Latakia. Maybe Palmyra for the gas fields and PR, maybe Kuweires and Qaryatayn also for the PR but key ISIS territory like Raqqa is a long, long way from government territory plus it's sparsely populated.

I knew what gamergate is years ago :smug: Who knew that studying entomolygy would come in useful in an internet spat years later?

My point still stands, what was expected was Syrian women and children, not Iraqi men able to fight in their home country. Anyone looking at the refugee stream sees a disproportionate number of young men though, so anyone who expected anything else was deluding themself. Or letting themself be deluded by politicians. Or being facetious about people who let themselves be deluded by politicians. Really though, the most egregious bits of ISIS* genocidal nastiness was against the Yazidis, almost exclusively in Iraq not Syria and they've taken more population by far in Iraq than Syria in the past year or so, Mosul alone would have more population than all their Syrian territories combined. There's a perfectly good reason for more young men making the trip, it's a dangerous journey and more so for women, children and the old; it's safer for them to stay in a regional refugee camp and come later. *The last S in ISIS is for al-Sham, not quite the same thing as Syria since it's the old Caliphate province that included Lebanon as well.

His sentence construction may be the problem, but he's definitely saying that journalism is either one of serving the public good or pushing a political agenda the way it is written.

*grin* Sure. What's that supposed to mean? If Boo was referring to Orthodox Christianity in general as not having a history of colonialism then a certain amount of eye rolling is certainly in order- Russia was a major colonial power, just not a New World colonial power (Alaska excluded). They conquered and colonised the Kazan, Sibiryan and Crimean Khanates* and more those they were the most colonised ones plus most of unclaimed (except by the natives, of course) Siberia proper. Excluding some of Ivan Grozny's actions in Kazan they were probably 'nicer' colonisers than most because the areas were huge and sparsely populated even when colonised, but that is still only nicer compared to the countries that worked millions to death or starved them while exporting drugs to China. *Who had nicked it off the previous Cuman/ Volga Bulgarian/ Uralic/ Sibiryak inhabitants via the Mongols anyway

Not really. Some of the most complex speculative fiction stories are Good vs. Evil; it's the execution that matters. I don't disagree, actually, it is very much in the execution- but a more nuanced view helps with that execution and extends the setting by allowing more than a small subsets of plot lines. You didn't give an example so I'll provide one which is similar(ish) to Star Wars: LOTR. It's got a great setting, at least in theory, highly detailed, well regarded and is a basis for a lot of the subsequent fantasy. The actual plots that take place in that setting are well executed as well, but the stories themselves are pretty generic good v evil and temptation tropes which while not as overtly based on religion as CS Lewis's stuff is still pretty derivative thereof. Ultimately, the LOTR setting has only 5 core books, SW's EU had 50ish plus hundreds of comics and dozens of games which were very seldom even half as well written or well executed as Tolkien's stuff. If there were that many LOTR products I'd be 100% confident it would have exactly the same problems that SW has. Not familiar with Volourn, are you? A veritable world of wonder awaits. (He's been using the 'nazi sjw' insult in about every post for the past two weeks- don't take it seriously, no one else does or will) I only agree with her on an out of universe meta level, in universe she's wrong in much the same way she'd be if she claimed gravity doesn't exist or was trying to kill gravity; and the game makes that absolutely clear at every step. That's why I used the Sword of Truth example albeit it's more obscure than SW or LOTR; in universe whatshisname and whatshername are undoubtedly heroes because the author regards them as such- out of universe though they are, essentially, psychotic mass murderers because their author is an extreme objectivist whose moral absolutism is so extreme it loops all the way around to moral relativism in practice and the main justification for the stuff the heroes do is that they are the heroes.

"NWN was successful in every way that mattered." Only nazi sjws think that. "Everything you wrote about Kreia is nonsense." No. But, hey keep crying. Well yeah, there is no dilemma there because whatever you choose Kreia criticises you for it and the result is the same for the guy you give money to (or not). That is literally a rhetorical exercise illustrating the rather ridiculously simplistic LS/ DS dichotomy where either picking the goody two shows LS option or the nasty DS option ends with not only the same result but criticism of whichever extreme you pick. It's also, of course, deconstruction of the rather silly way RPGs deal with good and evil dialogue, though the deconstruction is far less prevalent than it was in PST. Personally I like that, the vast majority of games are pretty dumb and assume youa re moran too, a bit of depth and introspection is rare. And it's seldom appreciated as such.

Reactionaries aren't really the same as conservatives, since they do want change just in the opposite direction from those wanted by progressives/ liberals. Conservative/ reactionary/ liberal/ progressive have always been both moving goal posts over time and relative to each other within a particular area (country, usually). Much of the problem with discussion of such issues is that the various terms are pretty indistinct and relative, so a liberal in KSA is likely to be far more conservative than a conservative in Sweden but a conservative from Sweden in the early 19th century would be majorly different from the 21st century Swedish conservative; and you have a distinction between the 'old' liberalism which was largely related to economics and 'social' liberalism which is more related to what we'd now call social justice and the like. So you end up with confusing things like the Australian Liberal Party and British Conservative Party actually being very similar despite their names with both being (broadly) socially conservative but economically liberal. It really needs better nomenclature, much like the rather silly left wing/ right wing stuff which is most often used both terribly and inconsistently and has shifted pretty randomly from its roots in 18thC France.