ravenshrike

Because that's the basic premise of the OP? He's hilariously wrong, of course, but it does explain why this popped into your head. Except that IS the basic premise of the author of the article. Moreover, the asshat in the interview feels conflicted about coming up with the justification for the family. The idea of justifying something that gives someone an advantage over others actually causes him mental conflict.

Mars or Bust baby!

Again with the lackluster reading skills. All I'm saying is that the text does not support the conclusions OP is drawing from it. Actually it does. The second to last line rather explicitly shows the author's opinion on the idea of family and unfair advantage. The idea that family is a good thing is the idea that is controversial to Mr. Gelonesi. It is a 'weathered institution''which needs a rationale for existing. That is pretty much the prime example of insane SJW ivory tower bull****.

Alu is whining about how the philosopher is purportedly on the good side as he is attempting to use said philosophy to justify the need for family. While true, Alu misses the entire ****ing point. That the philosopher in question feels conflicted about this at all shows that his first principles are so far out of whack with reality as to be useless. Among said first principles being that social justice should be one of the raisons d'etre of society. Which is of course standard SJW ivory tower horse****.

Interesting well I would like to hear other opinions from other American forum members The question is a simple one " is the USA the same, better or worse off under Obama than Bush after 8 years " ? Obama is basically just Bush 2.0 so it's not really a matter of who's better or worse. They're the same on almost everything that matters. Obama might be very slightly better, but that's a tough call. And the impressive recovery of the US economy, the low unemployment rate and fact that the USA is not involved anymore in any new conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan can Obama not take some credit and recognition for this ? I'm sorry, were there massive terrorist attacks upon US soil during Obama's tenure that I'm not aware of? Not to mention Libya and his material support of the asshats that became ISIS against Assad. As for the 'low unemployment rate', the unemployment numbers in the US mean jack ****. It is not a measure of actual unemployed population but a measure of those unemployed still looking for work through official channels in the last 6 months. The actual unemployment rate in January was over 15% http://www.forbes.com/sites/dandimicco/2015/02/13/jobs-the-real-unemployment-rate-please-anyone/ Not to mention that the recovery of the economy is largely illusionary.

In the American parlance feel free to mentally "find and replace" SJW with Democrat. Because while all Democrats are not SJWs, in the US all SJWs vote Democrat. So by empowering Democrats we are empowering SJWs. I can agree with that and its amazing how well the USA has done since " SJW" have taken over running the government? Compare the USA under Bush to it now and the last 8 years under Obama...are we really going to say things were the same or better overall under Bush? So SJ influence is not always a bad thing? Yes. Pretending otherwise is folly. All questionable programs that people disliked under Bush have vastly expanded under Obama. The amount of corruption that Obama has presided over has NEVER been seen in the executive and is EXACTLY what I predicted when I heard the dem primary frontrunner was a Chicago pol. Not to mention the idiocy with Iran and his refusal to defend the Marshall Islands flagged ship. It's ****ing disgusting.

Whether the interviewer agrees with the position of the philosophers in question is largely irrelevant. That this Swift is even conflicted over whether doing things to improve your child's development both intellectually and socially is good or bad is the ****ing issue. It is functionally INSANE. This dip**** probably looks at Harrison Bergeron and sees the proper way for society to develop. **** that noise.

I think what Zora is actually alluding to is if someone found a way to directly insult the entire Jewish community in the USA through some kind of " freedom of expression " there would be consequences and people wouldn't just be able to say " its okay, its just freedom of speech". I think the bacon story is just an analogy around the point he is making ? And I agree that there would consequences that would be far reaching than just internet criticism Actually a while back there was some controversy when the nazis wanted to march through a Jewish neighborhood, with many Holocaust survivors living there as well. The courts said they can do it though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktmNEWwH69s Gotta love the Blues Brothers.

It's fair to say that the food safety explanation is... rather controversial. Trichinosis is only a problem if you don't cook the meat properly- and if you hadn't cooked meat properly you've potential for a whole lot of problems whatever it is and whether or not it's kosher or halal. Chicken would be a good counter example, it's kosher but almost all chicken- even modern chicken- has things like campylobacter in it (and salmonella, and listeria in eggs plus a couple of others I can't remember- chickens are basically little bacterial fermenters, tasty but care must be taken). Cook it and store it properly and you're fine much as with pork, don't cook it and store it properly and you have a fair chance of getting life threatening food poisoning. That depends just how old the dietary laws actually are. The chicken didn't make it to the Indus Valley till circa 2000 B.C. which means as a semi-regularly available foodstuff it could have taken another 500-1000 years to hit the Jewish regions. Not to mention is it much, much easier to cook chicken by eye than pork

It's actually not arbitrary. Trichinosis is not something to laugh at even today. While largely eradicated from the US, it is still a problem elsewhere. The Jewish dietary laws were the easy way of limiting food-based illnesses when they were first formulated. Addendum - Arguably, it is only within the last 50-100 years that Jewish dietary law conferred no health benefit over standard first world food consumption

Except the actual equivalent would be to set fire to said shirts while outside the Ajax stadium when Ajax isn't even playing Feijenoord.

I agree with this on certain levels, the same would apply to children. Is this a bad thing? I don't think so and the main reason I would say this is because in RL women are primarily the victim of horrendous abuse and violence both physically and mentally..so we are much more aware of violence against them and react accordingly. Except actual studies of abuse have shown that men are just as likely to be abused, both physically and emotionally. The difference is that A) men are much more reticent to discuss such abuse and B) Physically they are both more capable of resisting the effects of abuse and stronger so the amount of damage they do is greater. Honestly the idea that women are the fairer sex is a bunch of bull****. when you get right down to it.

I think you have not thought enough about this. If you are asking "What are the game made EXACTLY In 1998 which we take for context?" then it is an arbitrary judgment. AN year is not a metric of a formal comparison for contexts. The point in that PST, a game considered by many to be one of the best story tellings in RPGs was made in close vicinity of BG. That fact alone is sufficient to say that people in the relatively similar contexts of storytelling of BG could think about superior stories. Which is all that needs to be said. Same for DX. DX was being made before BG was released. So people in that time could and did come up with better stories. Is that not what context means? All this shows is that BG, which in my opinion had a bad plot and story telling can not be considered as a standard of comparison for storytelling in general. Okay, I understand what you're saying. However, you could argue that the first game in a new series (BG) is a more apt comparison to a first game in a new series (PoE) than the second game (BG2) to the first (PoE). Just because there are other comparisons that can be made doesn't make any one more/less valid than the other. I like this spirit of discussion. But I must disagree. It has nothing to do with being the first game of a series. Being so does not put constraints on quality. In that regard (being first of a series) claims about scope and breadth are admissible but not the quality of content. Having read countless books of speculative fiction I know that to be untrue. The first book in a series is almost always the roughest quality wise. The only real exception being if the world is extremely cookie-cutter. Whether from a new or veteran author the new world being created invariably lowers the overall quality of the book.

Which is perhaps the most pointless argument in games ever, because games are not meant to reflect reality, their purpose in the vast majority of cases is specifically not to be realistic. That's true whatever genre you look at from the most casual like Farmville or The Sims (albeit both have a veneer of 'realism' but their purpose is escapism, and as below, to make money) to those targeted at the core gamer demographics. The only time it isn't true is for hardcore sims and the like- usually small market, mostly cannot care less about politics- and games as stories. Things like Gone Home are fine, of course, and there's nothing to stop them being made if people want to, there's just no obligation for people to play, care about or buy them nor for companies to decide they should make Gone Home: The FPS instead CODBLOPS#. It's even more pointless when you consider that demographics as a whole don't apply to the subset that is gamers. Not to mention you have to separate the 'hardcore' gamers from the 'filthy casuals' as the people in the latter group will almost certainly never shell out for a higher end console or PC. Then of course you must filter the 'consoletards' from the 'PC master race' as those demographics are also liable to be different. Then of course there's the fact that the idiots who wrote the articles claim to want 'well written' minority/female characters as if people who can actually write such characters are littering the ground everywhere just waiting to be picked up. That is so far from the case as to be laughable since the white male characters sure as **** aren't well written which means the other characters will be just as bad. I mean, there are maybe 5-6 medium to large game devs that can consistently write characters that aren't complete **** and even they fail horribly on a fairly regular basis. Case in point, the trans character in DA:I is possibly the worst Mary Sue I've seen in an RPG I've played by a non-indie developer. And yes, I fully realize I'm using the term off-trope as they are not the protagonist. Doesn't change the fact that the character sucks and is a Mary Sue.

While blacks are definitely over-represented among victims of police shootings, they do not constitute "most" of them. According to mappingpoliceviolence.org: "At least 1149 people were killed by police in 2014. 304 (26%) were black." The percentage of African Americans among the total population nation-wide is, I believe, 14%. That's a clear statistical disparity of course. Also, from various studies and sources like stop-and-frisk statistics, we do know that there is in fact some amount of anti-black racial prejudice among law enforcement agencies, and the FBI even admits it (sort of). However, I'd advise progressives to pause for a moment before interpreting too much into that 26%-vs-14% disparity. Because if you ignore other possible statistical factors and cause-and-affect chains and pretend that 100% of the disparity must be due to clear-cut racism and oppression and "white privilege", how will you deal with the other statistical disparity that emerges from that same data collected by mappingpoliceviolence.org: Namely that of those 1149 people killed by police in 2014, 93% were male - even though only 49% of the national population is male. Is this, applying the same arguments, proof that law enforcement operates under 'female privilege' and is engaging in a targeted 'war on men'? Or is it, maybe a little more complicated - both when it comes to gender, and when it comes to race. You're also missing the fact that almost 50% of murders are committed by blacks. Which, all else being equal, would mean that per incidence of murder black people are less than half as likely as white people to be killed by the cops. Yet somehow it's an epidemic of police killing black people.

An assortment showing the breadth of Halestorm's latest offering. Sick individual Unapologetic Huh, apparently the forums dislike more than 2 youtube links in one post

Go take Jemisin's posts, her Wiscon speech, and her tweets. Replace every case of white man or derivative thereof with jew, and you get propaganda that Goebbels would be proud of. Hell, toss an email to the guy running the interview to ask Vox the question 'Would you consider Hitler a savage' The answer would certainly be amusing. As for your assertion that he claims Europe is already dead, that was from a 2005 article in which he blames the women's rights movement on the decreasing birth rates in first world countries. He also says, more or less, that it is quickly coming to apply to America. It's certainly an interesting argument, and to my knowledge there have been no good studies that have attempted to determine the cause of said decline in birth rates and what exactly they are attributable to. In any case, he's certainly not saying that women's rights themselves will cause the collapse of European civilization. So, again, not exactly seeing the utter disdain that you treat him with. You have a very charitable reading of it that argument, since that certainly is what he is saying. As for what Jemisin said, I don't care. Her feminist propoganda nonsense is no excuse for him to be a racist jerk. As for him blaming the women's rights movement for decreasing birthrate, that is again either a charitable reading or gross misrepresentation. The point he's making with that isn't that the birthrate decreased in first world countries, it's that feminism is responsible for female infanticide in china and india. Which is of course ridiculous. The man is a fool and fools like this are why MRA is considered a punchline. The only saving grace for that is that feminist is quickly reaching the same status. That is quite possibly the oddest interpretation possible for that article. Although not really surprising as the article in a lot of ways is a stream of consciousness mess. Apparently WND has no editors. In any case the sex selection problem in China and India came about long before early sex identification for embryos. It was a problem around the turn of the century. As in 1900. The cultures over there are highly biased towards male children in terms of status. Thus girl children were generally killed after birth or when ultrasound first became available fairly late in the process. Early sex selection has merely accelerated the process. His point was that WRA's rather hypocritically have to argue against rather arbitrary choice in why to have an abortion and was almost certainly a direct response to this study and any surrounding discussion. Once again, context saves the Day. Heh, I made a pun.

Go take Jemisin's posts, her Wiscon speech, and her tweets. Replace every case of white man or derivative thereof with jew, and you get propaganda that Goebbels would be proud of. Hell, toss an email to the guy running the interview to ask Vox the question 'Would you consider Hitler a savage' The answer would certainly be amusing. As for your assertion that he claims Europe is already dead, that was from a 2005 article in which he blames the women's rights movement on the decreasing birth rates in first world countries. He also says, more or less, that it is quickly coming to apply to America. It's certainly an interesting argument, and to my knowledge there have been no good studies that have attempted to determine the cause of said decline in birth rates and what exactly they are attributable to. In any case, he's certainly not saying that women's rights themselves will cause the collapse of European civilization. So, again, not exactly seeing the utter disdain that you treat him with.

Sorry, but you're going to need to fully source both quotes and context before calling him a reprehensible bastard. Mainly because the vast majority of stuff floating around about him is quite different within context.

This guy? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Beale What's he got to do with GG? SJWs hate him. The man holds opinions that are anathema to them and he is VERY good at prodding as well as saying things that he knows his opponents will misconstrue. Basically an ****, but a very honest ****.

Sooo, am I supposed to assume that the type of leftist Obama protrays wouldn't like Django Unchained or The Butler?. I mean true, he probably wouldn't like The Butler because let's face it, that movie was ****ing boring and didn't even have the hysterically funny intro that Roots had. but he would probably SAY he liked The Butler as it fits his public image.

Well, trying playing PoE after its fully patched, with expansions, and you have 10+ years of nostalgia fueling your experience. Then you might be able to make a fair comparison between the 2 play throughs. At a bare minimum though you got to give Obsidian more time to patch. The game's barely been out for a month for crying out loud! That's not how first impressions of games work though I played through IWD2 on release day (ok.. more like a release weeks, back then) because unlike PoEt you couldn't actually play through IWD2 in just a few binge sittings. For me that game took well over 100 hours to complete.. to compare PoEt took me barely 40 hours and that's 3 restarts included. While I waited for GTA5 to download I actually managed to play through 10% of IWD2 on my 5th try and G3 modpack (though only few of those options, mostly stacking and bug-fixing active) made it a relatively painless experience. Unlike PoEt which because IE mod doesn't work anymore in beta patches, is actually a painful experience.. can't even express how much I started to hate the engagement system in PoEt after playing IWD2 again. And my first impressions of PoEt were already nostalgia fueled to some extend. Maybe that is the problem And I give it all the time it needs for a future 2nd complete playthrough. But my opinion of the game is already decided for now. I don't know if an expansion that includes the same combat and spell-casting design would actually entice me to even play the game again. Because I didn't enjoy the combat in PoEt... and every.. single.. time I see a mage in PoEt I wish I could have the DnD spell library instead ;P You know.. sequencers, time stop, skull trap... and a proper fireball (delayed fireball) kind of deal "I backed so they owe me the best crpg ever" No, they they don't OWE me anything, I pledged for this for hope and nostalgia, obviously. But my hope was that they make a better CRPG than (at the very least) IWD2. And if you give me a CRPG where 80% of the time I am in combat, then your combat better be better than IWD2's And to me PoEt is not meeting even that (very low) requirement. Curiouser and curiouser. It continues to amuse me that people continuously compare PoE1 to anything with a 2 in the name. Or New Vegas. All of those had massive lore and asset backing. None of which is available for PoE. Combine that with a completely new gameplay system all on a budget that would be laughed at by most developers. The sheer ignorance of what is actually possible, it burns.

Some years back I would have recommended Spybot as a must have, and did for many people. Sadly, it's usefulness fell off a few years ago. I actually have it on my computer (it's free and doesn't take up a lot of space) and still run it every once in awhile. It hasn't found anything my AV or Malwarebytes hasn't found in years, but I keep it around just in case, though perhaps mostly out of habit at this point. A few years back I got a nasty virus (one of two I've ever gotten in ~25 years of internet/BBS use), that got through my AV (I was using Avast or AVG at the time (forget which for sure) and Spybot). After some research I found malwarebytes, and that detected and took care of my problem when the AV and Spybot didn't. Malwarebytes is free and I've been using it ever since. I picked up a lifetime license for the premium version a couple of years ago for $5 on newegg.com as part of a bundle with something. Sadly I don't think the lifetime licenses are offered anymore (looks like they became successful and then greedy like so many other companies), but the free version is just about as good (insofar as protection I'm pretty sure it is as good). Highly recommended. Spybot, MWBs, and AVs form a weird triangle. I just use MWB and Spybot, and about every couple months I'll run an AV. But the AV never catches anything the other two don't. Of course, that might just be because my Internet Habits of +1 Savviness keep my infection rate low so I never come across something that they can't pick up, but still.

Its the Codex, they'll go over the top but the points they raise aren't wrong. PoE combat is samey and items feel bland. Engagement is ****-tier. Balance is out of whack. In every case. The writing is bland for long stretches of the game. Exploration isn't rewarding and maps feel small. Cutting the stronghold and Od Nua in favor of more areas/better existing dungeons would have been good. Stronghold is bad. Really bad. Reactivity is crap. I ****ed over that crime family and nothing happened. Art is pretty and music is good. VA is bad and overused. Overall mods may be able to shape it up and it very well may lead to a BG2 tier sequel, but overall PoE isn't very impressive. Not the worst Obsidian game(that would be DS3), but certainly not in league with NWN2 expansions or New Vegas. Would not back a sequel without some shakeups(MCA lead writer) or without a fantastic showing from the expansion. So, your complaint basically boils down to that it's a Pilot Episode for an entirely new setting and gameplay ruleset. Congrats. But seriously, most of your complaints truly boil down to teething problems. Expecting that they wouldn't occur is a rather ludicrous position to take. Although I would like to point out that I have yet to play any CRPG within the first 3-4 generations where the AI wasn't complete crap. Good AI is HARD.

[pedant] Well, technically, none of them claimed that gamers are "dead". "Over", yes (Alexander), the gamer identity as dead, also yes, but gamers themselves? Nope. [/pedant] Thank you for confirming that the 12 article media blitz was an attempt to force identity politics into gaming.