PrimeJunta

Nastiness is not a defining characteristic of Salafism though, at least in the respect that all nasty (sunni) muslims are Salafi. MB, like AK, are (broadly orthodox, sunni) Islamist rather than Salafi, who many Sunnis don't even regard as actually being Sunni. It's all rather complicated though, due to various Gulf States supporting different movements of differing levels of whackiness that look fairly similar from the outside. In terms of Egypt, since Qatar backs the MB the Salafi Al-Nour party (second largest after the MB's political arm, and considerably more extreme) stood aside when al-Sisi launched his coup because they're beholden to Saudi Arabia, who don't like any other arab state having influence and think Qatar are uppity. That is one of the primary reasons for all the in fighting in Syria and in Libya, as well as the rise of ISIS. Qatar actually has more Salafis by population proportion than Saudi, but basically all Salafi (AKA Wahhabi, though they don't like that term) movements are sponsored and run by Saudi either officially or through back channels because Saudi is their spiritual home. Very little in the Middle East makes consistent sense from a western perspective, which is why the west keeps on stuffing up. Saudi sponsors Egypt, who then bomb a Saudi proxy militia in Libya- you look at it from the outside and just end going huh? a lot. Point conceded, I was careless in using the word Salafi to describe the MB. That said: when in power, they were remarkably unwilling or unable to stop the actual salafis from making real mayhem—murder, arson, other terror attacks on secularists and non-Sunnis, and what have you. I am not certain about the reasons. The uncharitable interpretation—and the reason I characterized them as salafi—is that they, or at least the fraction in power, did this intentionally, maintaining a somewhat moderate facade while letting the guys with the bigger beards do their dirty work. The less uncharitable one is simply that they were incompetent. Either way, major disappointment. I wasn't happy when Morsi got elected, but I expected him to at least try to balance the concerns of Egypt's various consituencies. Instead he let the salafis run amok while pushing hard for Islamization of the legal system. The outcome was pretty predictable—the non-Islamist factions who voted for him to oppose the Mubarak regime pick quickly defected and opened the door for the full-bore counter-revolution that they got. Now they just have a younger, healthier Mubarak who'll likely keep that miserable excuse for a system going for another 30 years. Short version: you had a shot at something better but boy did you screw it up, ya Masr.

@Rostere I thought that too until I saw what Morsi did when he was in power. It wasn't pretty. On the other hand, the AKP has been getting nastier lately as well.

@BruceVC You have to look REALLY hard to find an example where a Western intervention led to a situation that was unambiguously better for the people in the affected country than before the intervention. Kosovo is often trumpeted as such an example, but even that is pret-ty ambiguous when you look more closely, and just about everywhere else it's been between a disaster and a catastrophe. With that kind of history, "whoa we meant well" is kind of a lame excuse when it goes pear-shaped again. The only thing you can really say in favor of the Libyan intervention is that a civil war was already in progress under its own steam — the Arab Spring was not a Western plot; in fact the US especially had a strong preference for Qaddafi, Mubarak, and Ben Ali and was spit scared that the revolution would bring hardline Salafis into power, as happened (briefly) in Egypt until the US-backed thugs kicked them out — and it's debatable that things would have gone much better without the intervention. This is why I am almost categorically opposed to "humanitarian intervention." Even in the rare cases that the motives are primarily or even significantly humanitarian, it's much more likely to make things even worse than better. And usually "humanitarian intervention" is simply a fig leaf covering good ol' post-colonial power politics. I'll leave that "almost" in there to allow for the extremely unlikely case that the stars are perfectly aligned for an intervention that really is likely to work and make things better. I.e. you can't export democracy at the point of a cruise missile, or even in a briefcase full of Yankee dollars. You can choose whether and how to engage with odious regimes and the people living under them and try to influence things that way, but ultimately it's up to the people to decide what kind of government they want to live under, and whether they hate the current one enough to overthrow it. The only Arab Spring revolution that did make things pretty unambiguously better was the Tunisian one, and that happened entirely under its own steam and caught everybody with their pants down so they couldn't screw it up. Also, a point of advice for any would-be revolutionaries: don't trust foreigners or local fascists to save your revolution for you. The help is never disinterested. If you're not strong enough to pull it off on your own, it will get hijacked by fascists or foreign interests, and things will be worse than before.

I tried, in the other thread. Feeling too mellow for it today.

First computer game I played was Hunt the Wumpus on a Stanford University UNIX mainframe in 1977, when my dad was there as a visiting researcher. Some days I stayed in his office, and the Wumpus kept me good and quiet. Since this is all about bragging rights, I decided to count my gaming career from that, to just squeak into the "36 years or more" category. The first game I really got hooked on though was rogue in the early 1980's. Played that from my dad's dumb terminal phoning in at 300 baud.

@Rosbjerg That's true up to a point. However, if you list the richest countries by GDP per capita, it's not the same as the list of happiest countries: 1 Qatar 145,894 2 Luxembourg 90,333 3 Singapore 78,762 4 Brunei 73,823 5 Kuwait 70,785 6 Norway 64,363 7 United Arab Emirates 63,181 8 San Marino[6][7] 62,766 9 Switzerland Of these I think only Norway and Switzerland are even on the happiness top 10. There is an economic indicator that does correlate fairly well with "happiness" though: GINI coefficient. It measures economic inequality. Here's a list of the top least inequal countries (if information is available:) 1. Denmark 2. Sweden 3. Norway 4. Czech Republic 5. Austria 6. Slovakia 7. Ukraine 8. Belarus 9. Finland 10. Bulgaria Five of the top 10 "happy" countries are on that list, and even in roughly similar positions. Of the countries that are not, Ukraine, Belarus, and Bulgaria are pretty damn poor, and the Czech Republic and Slovakia also not as rich as the five that are. I.e. it's a workable hypothesis that broad-based prosperity—i.e., a high level of relatively evenly-distributed prosperity—does contribute significantly to happiness. That also makes intuitive sense to me by the way.

True story: Prof. John Long discovers the invention of sex. It was a fish—or, presumably, two fish—of the species Microbrachius dïcki. Source: [ http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29661446 ]

It was funny to see some of these stereotypes in action when I was registering for residence here. There was a German guy repeatedly enquiring "Vat is ze standart procedure in zis case?" and a Dutch lady grousing about how expensive everything is, and a Brit who thought the whole thing was entirely unnecessary and rather beneath her dignity to have to do it in the first place.

Funny, every time I've been to Germany I've been struck by how friendly and helpful everyone is. Guess that says something about Finns.

That's why we go to all those exciting countries on vacation. Wouldn't want to live in most of 'em though.

I just moved to the #1 country on that list. (From the #7 country, so it's not that huge a leap.) Funny thing is, I'm thinking that there may be something to it. People do seem unreasonably happy here. We just went to a family gathering yesterday and compared to a similar affair in Finland everbody looked healthier, more fit, more relaxed, and generally better-adjusted. Trying to figure out why. Some things I believe I have observed: There's a lot of trust. It shows in simple things like a delivery man buzzing the door and leaving a big box of wine in the entrance, people mostly leaving their doors open, paying for stuff when you pick it up rather than when you order it, people leaving their dogs or babies outside the store when going in, kids talking to you to ask if they can pet the dog or where you're from, and so on. Also larger things, such as registering for residence going extremely straightforwardly with no documentation needed apart from showing the passport. Work-life balance. People work short hours, but they do it extremely intensively. Then they do what they do in their pastime equally intensively, and a lot of that is physical, outdoors activity—cycling, running, sailing or other watersport, and so on. Shows also as great attention to detail, with both physical objects and spaces, and processes very well thought-out. Flexibility. There are rules, but the Danes like to explain the why of the rules a lot, and many of them are written "flexibly." For example, not "Don't leave the path" but "The escarpment is vulnerable, please avoid going there." Basically this country is... reassuring. There's a feeling that things are set up so that you can minimize worrying about serious and tedious stuff and concentrate on fun or productive stuff. There's gotta be a scary downside to it, but I haven't figured it out yet. On the other hand, maybe it's the beer. Everybody drinks a lot of beer here. Somehow they manage not to keel over dead of acute alcoholism though, go figure.

Yeh, it is a bit of a sausage party, and the reasons are rather obvious.

In all fairness, the Codex does have Roguey. I think s/he has the most impressive collection of tags of all.

@Volourn I know that you're a Pretty Princess though.

@Zoraptor Interestingly the Codex has pretty damn strong social control of expression. You guys just do it more like the old-style Usenet way of giving the nonconformers a clown nose (read: dumbf**k or "possibly retarded" tag) and then poking them with sticks, and only banning them if that fails. There's a lot less room there for dissenting opinion there than on most other forums I've hung out on IMO. You just have a rather... eccentric set of norms you're enforcing, bless your hearts.

I've been trying out the different kinds of fish you get here in Denmark. There's a really good fishmonger nearby so I get it extremely fresh. They're not the same as in Finland although it's the same sea. I've especially liked the mackerel (fried, grilled in the oven, smoked), and cod. Yesterday we also had some crab claws. Boiled them in brine. Nice, but not as good as Pacific crab.

Awww, poor baby. Here, have a hug. {TrashMan}

There's an alternative to anonymity and real-name policy. Pseudonymity. You can build a lot of mechanisms on that. The question isn't really technical though, it's cultural. Stuff is tolerated on the Net that's not tolerated in any other space because freeze peach. That's changing too. As the Net is getting integrated into everyday life, norms from everyday life are changing the Net. For good and for ill. What most worries me actually is that the way things are currently set up, our gatekeepers will be corporations who don't give a spit about the political dimensions of what they do, only the bottom line. I don't want Apple or Twitter or Google or Facebook to be the arbiter and gatekeeper. We have to find something better. Edit: Or Obsidian Entertainment for that matter.

@TrueNeutral That's changing too. There's serious discussion going on about what the responsibility of media like Twitter and Facebook should be about genuinely antisocial behavior. It's clear the current system isn't working, and it's ultimately affecting them as well. There are solutions—technical, political, social, human—to that. Again, it'll be a while yet but it will happen. I remember the Usenet before spam. It was a pretty wild place, but there was—in some forums anyway—pretty effective social controls on genuinely destructive behavior. Get seriously out of line and you'd get "twitted" or "kooked," after which people would mostly just point and laugh at you. That won't work on an open forum like Twitter. Some other solution will have to be found, and as is the way of such things, it will. Edit: about that "it's not a normal person" thing. No, probably not. But that not-normal person felt encouraged and empowered by a horde of supporters. We're social primates. Social approval is really, really fundamental to what makes us tick. Would Anders Behring Breivik have shot up those kids if he hadn't had a validating echo chamber for his white supremacist, PUA, misogynist ideas? Would Elliot Rodger? Would any of those other spree killers? Somehow I don't think so. "Nuts" is not an explanation or an excuse, it's an observation. Nutcases go nuts for reasons, and go nuts in particular ways for other reasons. Going "hey whoa I've nothing to do with that" after consistently validating their delusions and egging them on is a pretty cheap cop-out. Same applies to anti-social stuff of lesser degrees than killing people of course. (Also gotta point out that people who are actually nuts—as in, have diagnosed psychiatric disorders—are actually less likely to commit violent crimes than people who don't.)

I am humbled to be mentioned in context with that king of the 'Thals. Sadly, a lowly melonhead here. Edit: Grimoire is a day 1 purchase, when it comes out. I'll be setting aside money from my pension for the purpose.

Wait, that's not what this thread is for? Crap. In that case I think I may have made a faux pas.

Cool. I'll match it for the Communists, then. (It'll have to be a local one though as donating to a foreign political party is bad form, if the CPUSA even accepts donations from abroad, or are allowed to.) @BruceVC: The Internet is serious business, don't you know?

@AlO3 Yeh. There's nothing particularly shocking about feminist criticism. There are feminist film, book, TV, and theater critics writing all the time, and nobody raises an eyebrow. Sarkeesian et al. are only notorious because they applied it to gaming. (And no, they're not the ONLY critics. They're not even the MAJORITY of critics. It's really childish to think Sarkeesian et al. want feminist criticism to be the ONLY criticism, let alone think that's ever going to happen.) It's a shame really that the manboons resorted to poo-slinging, because a good discussion could have been had. As it is, it's impossible to say anything on the topic in public, without it devolving into poo-slinging in no time flat.

@KaineParker Sorry, no. I don't support libertarianism, even of the Green variety.

@KaineParker Since you're so insistent... Donate up to $100 to these guys and I'll match it for your cause. Will need to see a receipt. I'll do that even though donations aren't tax-deductible where I come from, so it'll actually cost me more than you.