Zoraptor

Pretty easy to adapt the famous Goering quote to illustrate why that is seen as being 'popular'. Get the press to demonise an enemy, label anyone who doesn't agree as weak or a terrorist sympathiser, then celebrate getting a 'bad guy' when he dies; it's the same everywhere but just a bit more extreme in the US. She was pretty obviously trying for a soundbite/ quote of the "we got him" type, she just stuffed it up and got moderately psychotic instead- small punishment compared to how her (and, to be fair, Dave and Nick's) decision impacted the people of Libya. End of the day all the Mad Dog of Tripoli stuff was done precisely to set the scene for nobody crying when he (or his grandchildren) died by labelling him as a rabid animal that has to be put down for the greater good (the greater good). Essentially though, the biggest flaw most US politicians see in the current climate is that of appearing 'weak'; hence the popularity of the Tea Party a few years ago going after anyone on their own side who'd compromise with Obama, and to a large extent Trump's current popularity as well. That goes extra for Clinton, since she's female some people will assume she's 'weak'.

Dislike of Iran could be xenophobia/ jingoism or probably most accurately, bigotry, but Iranian is not a race or ethnicity so it can't be racist. Persian, Azeri, Arab, Kurd and Arab are the main ethnicities in Iran. Realistically though it just plays well with the electorate under the calculation that anyone who likes Obama's foreign policy simply will not vote for a Repub candidate and are likely to vote for her despite her record, even if holding their noses while doing so. I've indirectly addressed a lot of the other stuff below, too. You have seen the We came, we saw, he died clip? The problem with Hillary is basically that she's always been running for President since she got back into politics. That is one of the reasons why she is actively disliked by so many people, everything seems to be calculated and there's a feeling that she's just a walking aggregate focus group response form. In terms of her foreign policy specifically she knows perfectly well that she's going to be labelled as "weak on america's enemies!" or similar because she's female and a Democrat, so her history is strident arch hawk to counter that. Ironically, while an asset vs a Republican that was one of her weaknesses as a primary candidate vs Obama. But in any case that may or may not reflect her real views and what she would do if actually elected, but it certainly reflects a calculated long term strategy to counter an obvious weakness. Same with distancing herself from Obama's policies. Personally, I'd be amazed if she tore up the Iran agreement or significantly changed anything. Rhetoric and posturing as a candidate is risk free, putting that stuff into action isn't. As for Gaddafi, very few americans were going to mourn the passing of The Mad Dog of Tripoli, celebrating it with giggly, crappy classical allusions may seem decidedly sociopathic and the whole intervention was moronic; but that response will have been popular and makes her look strong, and that is what counts. I'd go a bit further than Malcador and say he probably is*. Most large organisations as a whole are sociopathic, and Putin in practically a large organisation by himself. *or whatever form of psychopathy sociopathy is formally defined as nowadays

Even I've heard of it, and I semi actively avoid esports. Though I guess given the subject it isn't that surprising. The big problem with that statement is that it is effectively accusing someone of being unprofessional while being unprofessional himself. The reason why you get either 'no comment' or inoffensive legalese type statements most of the time and the reason why they are more sensible is precisely because- most of the time- you actively want to avoid anything that will extend or aggravate the issue. Firings or even voluntary losses are very seldom good news and that statement while it does vaguely explain why/ what happened doesn't do so in a sensible manner but in an inflammatory way which suggests that there was personal animus involved plus infers there are differences in how people see things at Valve- both of which can only exacerbate the issue especially when Gabe seldom comments on stuff publicly because that by itself adds weight. Valve does know how to do this properly, they've had many quite prominent people leave and projects shut down with mostly no comment at all or measured 'wish them well in their future endeavours' type statements. Have to say though, I think the support issues are what is really killing Valve's PR. That's not a big, one time blow to reputation but a slow, creeping malaise that sees people praising their rivals and many (most?) discussions of anything Valve related garner a lot of support horror stories; and apart from the refund policy improvements (forced by the EU) the situation has been the same for years. At least this issue and the paid mods controversy are/ were acute rather than chronic problems.

Which is really ironic since the last two "one of us" candidates were the son of multimillionaire oil men (GWB) and the son of an already successful property multimillionaire (Trump) so are about as far from the Average Joe on Struggle Street as you can get. And GWB was a near unmitigated disaster, too. It's not just the US that has this phenomenon though, our Prime Minister is a multimillionaire banker (!) who is seen as just one of the guys because he admits peeing in the shower and likes to sexually harass people with pony tails seems like a nice guy to have a beer with. Though at least he is first gen wealthy and not from family wealth.

Whoah, someone's still butthurt. And as always it's the guy who insists he just didn't care... Some kids accidentally (?) crushed a dove's breastbone and it suffocated, making a peace ceremony have some macabre undertones when they tried to launch it into the air and instead of flying away it pancaked.

The distinction there is probably that they consider it freedom not to have to pay for others' health care as they would have to under a single payer system. I'm not aware of any single payer health care system where there isn't also a parallel private system which people can choose to use if they wish to so they can still choose to see the 'best' doctors under our system here or get elective surgery or whatever else; they can still get the special doctors and special treatment if they are willing to pay for it.

Trump's VP will be fellow WWE Hall of Famer Terry "Hulk Hogan" Bollea.

I'd apparently be voting for Bernie- then Stein/ Clinton (lol)/ Johnson- and supporting the Green Party. No great surprises, except that I'd never vote for any Hillary other than Sir Ed. And he's dead, unfortunately. I quite like that test even if there were a couple of questions I wasn't really qualified to answer. I actually come out as mildly left wing and mildly libertarian on their 'political compass' rather than radically left/ libertarian as with the actual political compass test which is definitely a better estimate of my actual philosophy. And when I did the NZ version before the last election I was rather baffled to end up with a recommendation to vote for our Trump equivalent first time I took it.

Homeworld 3 is likely to be made. Though it may be crap when it is, of course.

KSA also bought nuclear missiles (sans warheads) off of China with no call to boycott. I'm always a bit baffled* by people who insist that KSA simply cannot get nukes off Pakistan just because when they sold nuclear tech direct to North Korea and various others- probably including Iran since their centrifuges were identical to Pakistan's- as well. *Not really, a refusal to accept the inconvenient is about the most intrinsically human trait there is. And there's going to be another 'cessation of hostilities' attempt over the weekend. It's equally unlikely to succeed.

I'd not so much be worried about whether Bioware can do a tactics game as whether they'd be allowed to do it properly. To be done properly it would have to be aimed at being a distinctly mid market game and that is something EA hasn't done for over a decade; it's all been low budget pay-to-win free-to-play or tie ins or AAA blockbusters. If they do it with the expectation of getting a million or so sales then fine, if they have EA expecting 5 million sales or there's pay-to-win mass grinding for instant returns then it would fail. Personally I think that a Mass Effect Tactics game would be the better bet.

I find that from certain angles he strongly resembles a certain computer game developer. OTOH Rubio has an almost uncanny valley effect, like he was cast direct from plastic.

Ceasefire/ cessation of hostilities has unsurprisingly been honoured by no one at all. Almost certainly not going to be a resumption of talks next week either, just more talk of escalations like the Saudis giving the rebels MANPADs and Davutoglu saying that Russia is genociding turkmen.

I think that zenforo does have an available plugin for it, at least the codex seems to have twit embedding now and also uses xenforo. Hmm, probably.

But then you have to wait to solicit donations. Yep, C&D fodder with no prospect of being completed even if it weren't. Some random news: Warren Spector is going to work on System Shock 3, running a studio for Otherside in Austin TX where it will be developed. Which would have been truly massive news, 15 years ago.

Britain is a far better example. Not just because of the multitudinous CCTV cameras and rulings like it being fine for the government to hack all your electronic devices but because the government has been pretty explicit that 1984 Britain was something to aim deliberately for. It's all under the aegis of protection from terrists or thinking of the children (though if there was one group I wouldn't want thinking of my children it would be Brit politicians) but Dave has been absolutely explicit about what the aim is: OK, so he didn't actually use the term 'wrongthink' but he might as well have.

It's probably Paradox's fault, they are the publisher as such things like upgrade paths and supplied SKUs are their responsibility. The only way it's GOG's fault is if they didn't ask for them or refused to implement them- both of which seem unlikely, if they didn't plan on doing them they would simply have not bothered mentioning upgrade paths at all- and if they aren't provided they cannot unilaterally offer them.

I can think of plenty more nightmare scenarios than Iran buying Su30s, but maybe I just have a more active imagination than the article author. Anyway, perhaps unsurprisingly it seems that Saudi has dialled back the imminent invasion talk, the "irreversible" decision to invade was apparently contingent on the US not only approving but agreeing to lead the invasion- or in other words, it was completely reversible based on public and political reaction plus Obama doing something he was never practically going to do. But they're going to hold military exercises with 350k troops and 20,000 (!) tanks etc. The rebels in north provincial Aleppo are done, with groups defecting to the government, Kurds and ISIS. They may hold on to the now pretty much irrelevant border crossing at Bab-al-Salame and the decent sized town of Azaz, but only if the kurds don't want to irritate Erdogan more. If the kurds want them gone, they'll be gone and it would take a proper Turkish intervention rather than random shelling to stop it.

EA18G Growler kgambit gave enough info to find the answer, there are only two planes with AN/ALQ99s in service.

Oh god yes. The butthurt would be eternal. Might be a way to get Biden back into the Presidential race as well, if they need a bail out option due to Clinton cratering.

KSA's casualty numbers are rubbish. So is the 150k troops though, at least as combat troops. They may well have lost 81 soldiers but Saudi has a pretty byzantine organisation of its armed forces- a holdover from the times they had things like the army ordering SAMs with the explicit purpose of shooting down their own air force because two rival princes ran the two branches- where you have lots of little armies like the National Guard (better than regular army) and Border Guards (armed with Abrams and Bradleys...) as well as the regular army. The Border Guard in particular has taken a lot of casualties, fair bit more than 81 documented by itself, and been spectacularly incompetent. Their aim in Syria would be to establish a safe zone for the rebels from where they could continue the war without getting spanked by air power, using an anti ISIS stance as an excuse. Ultimately they want a compliant leader in Damascus (seems unlikely at this point) or at least a 'sunnistan' of eastern Syria and western Iraq. If there's any good news it is that it may well only be Saudi, Turkey and the UAE involved with perhaps some transit via Jordan and they may back down if they don't get enough support. They've been shelling government forces in Latakia the last two days as well, which really is about as far from ISIS as it's possible to get. Should be said that the Turks at least claim to be responding to fire, though it's pretty laughable that the Kurds and gov would both start randomly shelling Turkey on the same day- it's just a provocation to try and get article 5 activation for any retaliation.

As above, I think there's not any dislike of Turkey itself especially in NATO (not so much EU, who will never let them in), just its leadership. And when Erdogan is gone Turkey will remain, in its strategic position, and that will be the determining factor in any response. There's already been a war fought over that concern, it was just 150 years ago. As for the second I hope you are right, but they seem tied to the Saudis who certainly give the impression- and indeed outright stated via their FM- that they are all in against Assad up to and including direct military intervention to remove him. Since there are now Saudi planes and troops in Turkey if it is a bluff it's a very, very believable bluff.

They haven't acted very likable way in last decade. Like for example censoring and blocking social media platforms and apps. Using violent methods to stop protests Jailing political opposition Instigate violence against their minority population Questionable actions when it comes to ISIS etc. Okay I suppose that makes sense....but if you exclude the last reason all those points apply to countries like Russia and China who seem to very popular on these forums to some members ? I would guess that is because they work as opposition for western politics and criticizes western leadership therefore they score points from those who don't like current western politics and decisions by western leaders for one reason or another. Where Turkey is seen as western puppet that just behaves badly, so they just score those negative points. Does anyone support China? Can't recall anyone regularly doing that. There isn't much dislike of Turkey, it's dislike of Erdogan/ AKP who happens to be its leader. That's different from, for example, the generalised dislike of Russia which is seated in old Anglo/ Euro orientalist stereotypes developed and actively nurtured since the time of Ivan the Righteous; that's a healthy dose of paranoia and propaganda leavened by hatred of anyone baulking strategic interests. Those were all in evidence even when that sot Yeltsin was in charge, and the west loved him. The view of Turkey has changed mostly over the past decade, up until then it was largely seen as a model for 'westernised' secular muslim nations- with problems such as an over powerful military (seen by some as a plus), bad relations with Greece/ Kurds and the Cyprus situation. The only one of those to go has been the powerful military, sadly replaced by monomaniacal neo-Ottomanism and religious conservatism; and those last two are far more dangerous to the outside than a military that might decide to coup. Kind of ironic, but Erdogan clearly models himself on/ admires Putin.

Turks are formally attacking the SDF (Kurds&Friends) with artillery now, with no previous provocation (or 'provocation') as there was with the previous incidents. Probably the start of their anti ISIS operation by, er, attacking the people who have done most of the fighting against ISIS recently. ronpaul_its_happening.gif

Nothing wrong with getting methanol from wood byproducts, theoretically it's a very good idea much as getting methane from rubbish dumps is as well. It's probably a lot more sensible than the US getting ethanol from corn and certainly more than us getting methanol from natural gas which are both previous/ ongoing projects elsewhere. Something like the Brazilian ethanol project have been very successful though.