Ineth

Obsidian's internal bug tracker, basically.

Canada now faces the problem of figuring out which single male Syrian refugees are telling the truth about being gay... http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/determining-gay-refugees-a-difficult-task-but-risk-of-bogus-claimants-exaggerated-experts-say

“We didn’t go after oil wells, actually hitting oil wells that ISIS controls, because we didn’t want to do environmental damage, and we didn’t want to destroy that infrastructure,” Michael Morell said Tuesday on PBS’s “Charlie Rose.” -- http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/261283-ex-cia-chief-fear-for-environment-stays-us-hand-on-isis-oil-wells

None of the involved parties (Russia, Turkey, Syria, Turkmen rebels, ISIS, Kurds) are Western - so while it's true that some of this forum's resident Russian nationalists have strong anti-Western biases, your comment seems misplaced in this context. For what it's worth, Turkey was on a path of Westernization and secularization, but Erdogan - dreaming of becoming the leader of the Islamic world - reversed that course and steered the country back towards Islamic authoritarianism and imperialism.

I don't think SA's current government is interested in tackling issues that it can't blame on white people...

I thought McDonalds was basically the same everywhere, except with reduced sugar in Europe, and extra sugar in Asia...

True. When I linked that statistic, I didn't mean to imply that Russia is bombing Syrian cities indiscriminately. It's still tragic though. Russia faces the same problem in Syria that NATO has faced in the Kosovo War, and that Israel has repeatedly faced in Gaza: Fighting a paramilitary organization which has entrenched itself inside inhabited cities. No modern country has yet found a good way to carry out such battles without killing many civilians as well. The brutal truth is that "1 dead civilian per 1 dead enemy soldier" is considered an unusually 'good' ratio in such battles, by historical comparison.

Progressive "respect for other cultures" being practised by EU officials:

Russian strikes blamed for 400 Syrian civilian deaths :/

Maybe they want an anti-establishment candidate and don't care about the details (or think it's worth the risk)? Or maybe they just really hate Hillary? Well, being less ridiculous than Trump is not a very high bar to clear...

He's a politician, being a liar is part of the job description. Usually, politicians use dishonest labels to make their ideas sound more palatable to the voting majority than they actually are - not less. Outside of college millennials and newspaper columnists, socialism is generally still considered a dirty word - thankfully. So why adopt it if his actual beliefs are much more moderate and majority-friendly? Here are two possible explanations: He clings to the word out of child-like stubborness, because he has come to associate it with the dreamy idea of what the world should look like in his head. In this case it's safe to assume that his economic and political beliefs are derived from a place of naiveté in the first place. Not someone who should be president. He really is a socialist, and has associated himself with the word too often in the past to deny it now. He refrains from actually calling for an end to capitalism for now, but could do much damage once in power. Not someone who should be president.

He said "the biggest victims" though. He could have pointed out that general fact without making it sound like Holocaust survivors tend to be a good example of this. Accusing victims of being the "true" villain is an age-old tactic of bullies, and modern Antisemites have gleefully adopted it - going out of their way to twist and spin information so as to compare Holocaust survivors to Holocaust perpetrators. This has become a running meme among modern Antisemites - first among those of the Neonazi variety, and now also adopted by the Antizionist variety. Žižek surely knows this. It certainly wasn't during the Great Leap Forward. And even today, the only parts of China that could reasonably be called capitalist are the free-trade zones around it's coastal cities - not the bulk of the countryside. Well yes, hypothetically if you "end capitalism" across the whole world, this would hurt ISIS - because it would tremendously hurt all economies in the world. Mutually Assured Destruction, basically. I don't see how that's anywhere close to a useful suggestion though...

Assange isn't a Marxist. Huh, it seems you're right... Wikipedia even calls him "an advocate of [...] market libertarianism". Wouldn't have guessed. Somehow I had him pegged as a Marxist. Maybe because I've seen Marxists on social media worship him... Or maybe I just confused bits of information I've seen about him...

I cringed so hard while skimming this... Three washed-up Marxist "intellectuals" ruminating about the state of the world - and determined to surpass every negative stereotype one would expect from such an encounter. Some highlights: Žižek claiming that "the biggest victims" of the Paris attack are the refugees. I guess he doesn't think that the 130 people who lost their lives, were affected by the attack quite as much? Žižek just not being able to resist throwing in a disgusting equation of Holocaust survivors with their tormentors - out of the blue of course, while responding to a topic that had absolutely nothing to do with them. Varoufakis claiming that the crucial flaw with capitalism is inefficiency. I guess he thinks that Soviet Block citizens standing in line for bread, or Venezuelans running out of toilet paper reserves, or Chinese starving by the tens of millions, is/was a sign of efficient and non-wasteful allocation of resources... Assange suggesting that the political left should become more like a religion... And of course Žižek's "You end capitalism, you end ISIS"... :facepalm:

The Kotaku blacklisting thing seems to be making waves. Lots of snark from the industry side on social media, like this guy whose twitter profile says he's a "Lead Game Designer" at Ubisoft: Or this "Production Designer at HBO": Or the creator of Minecraft: Penny Arcade made their latest comic about it, too: As usual, the most thoughtful analysis comes from Erik Kain: http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2015/11/20/why-kotaku-was-right-to-tell-all-when-they-were-blacklisted-by-major-video-game-publishers/

As terrible as Kotaku is, I don't think that this practice on the part of game publishers is something to be celebrated. After all, it's not like they ignore Kotaku because they realized that Kotaku is just a politically slanted blog which shouldn't be indulged in its pretense of being journalism. They blacklisted Kotaku after Kotaku landed a scoop about a not-yet-officially-announced game from each of those publishers, which angered the publishers because they are control freaks about the publicity their games get. I don't think it's in the interests of gamers to let the publishers remain unchallenged in this.

Nice! Why does the Gilded Vale map have such a strong "white tint" though? Isn't it supposed to look more like this... Also, can you explain how you made them?

Richest country in the world, 20% of children in poverty, only just above Romania. [source] Bravo America. Nope. This statistic does not measure the number of children in poverty. It's a measure of how some households are even richer than others, thus raising the median: "relative poverty line, which UNICEF defines as living in a household that earns less than half of the national median" If your quarrel is with inequality itself, then make that argument. Stop making misleading claims about poverty to try and bolster your case.

Some reporters ask the stupidest questions. "Now that you have publicly revealed your secret, will you continue to pay blackmailers who threaten to reveal your secret unless you pay them?"

Unfortunately, it wouldn't take a conspiracy to go from well-intended "state-sponsored perspective [as] just another voice", to restrictions on competing media and deterioration of free speech in general. Because that's the natural course that things take under the tutelage of the government. There's no one who secretly engineers this process behind the scenes, it's just a result of human nature (and made worse by the two-party system). This is why the "constitutional" part of "constitutional democracy" is so important.

And this is the problem with "the media should be just another commodity on the free market!". People like to feel validated. "Fair and impartial", in the long run, is probably not going to sell over "reinforces the worldview and biases of the consumer". It's going to sell to some people. As long as there are audiences which value the product of ethical journalism, some media outlets will attempt to supply it. But again, your concern is less about having access to the information and news coverage you want for yourself, and more about your (and your fellow authoritarians', left and right) misgivings about what other people choose to consume, and your desire to control it. For the greater good, of course!