injurai

Only if you get mad that people look

I just put it on my ssd and loaded it amazingly fast, everyone should have an ssd :D Ha! True, but not everyone has SSD. Deadfire should come with an SSD. I don't think that's asking too much.

Yeah, intense like a microcosmic look.

This past week has been an intense look at what beliefs and ideas can do to warp people.

(1) Iraq was secular* under Saddam, as baathism is a secular philosophy. Same as Syria is secular under Assad, and Libya was secular under Gaddafi. (2) There was no Al Qaeda in Iraq prior to 2003, and no credible links between Saddam and Al Qaeda. That's as debunked as his active WMD programme in 2003. (3) The Saudis were and are a joke, if a rather grim and unpleasant one. If it had been the Saudi/ Iran War instead of Iran/ Iraq War the IRGC would have been in Riyadh in months if not weeks even if they had to swim the Persian Gulf unless someone actively bailed KSA out. They have money, and use it to buy influence, and they have Mecca; that's the extent of their pluses. Personally I don't have much doubt at all that GWB was more or less honest in his approach to Iraq and believed what he was saying the vast majority of the time, he was just wrong and sometimes handed incorrect information deliberately by others. The neocon wing (Cheney etc) and even Blair (who almost certainly didn't believe what he was saying but may now have convinced himself otherwise) are more morally responsible; Bush's main sin was naivete. *pluralist, actually; even Kemalist Turkey wasn't really secular. Secularism is all for naught when you live in an non-democratic society. Assad is part of a dynastic dictatorship propped up by Russia. If what I know about Gaddafi holds true though, what happened in Libya was some bull**** subversion by the DOD. I checked on (2) and you're right, I thought that was part of the original justification. (It may have been, even though they were absent.) No doubt W was naive.

Ordinary Men If you willfully refuse to understand it, you are willfully complacent in it's allowance to occur again.

I wouldn't put too much stock into that. Saddam was uncooperative to do anything about terror cells that he shrouded. Unlike Pakistan, we could do something about it. The real counter-weight to Iran in the region was always the Saudis anyways. We went in really to dispose of Al-Qaeda, and dispose of one of the axis of evil that H. W. and Clinton failed to ever follow through with. More than anything I think W. was trying to follow through on his father's legacy. It's a region that had long bleed refugees into the west with a long history of human rights violations; At some point you have to justifying taking things to the source. At least today it's a republic, even if it hasn't secularized.

Kind of. It's no more of a disaster than many things that came before or after it. I think historians will defer any verdict and will focus on sorting out the facts and complications. I personally think geo-politically it was a net positive. The major sin to come out of it was the patriot act and everything apropos to it. But the question will remain whether that sin would have just came later had we never gone into Iraq. I'm inclined to think so.

I'd say what you get there is basically all true. However it doesn't necessarily capture all the factors and arguments that would be part of it's context. Just as we are seeing now with the political polarization, the War in Iraq was marred by public opinion. Forget just the average American and their potentially highly flawed takes on everything, look to the political and media class. The Democrats will forever hold blood on their hands for their opportunistic reversal. They became tepid of addressing they responsibilities that our Nation held, in fact the tepidity had existed long before the 2000's media circuits. We really should have gone in during the Clinton years, but they cared more about domestic optics and legacy. Unlike the stock market crash of 2008 which I think objectively hurt the US more than the War economically, it wasn't the previous administrations fault that Obama had to inherit that mess. W. Bush however did inherit the grid lock and increasing inaction against terror that plagued the Clinton administration. Speaking domestically, the war took a toll on our economy, but no doubt we had been biding our time with regards to Saddam. We were already deployed in Afghanistan, if there was a time to handle Iraq then the time was also then. Obama's decision to pull out still may have been the right decision, given the turn our economy took. It certainly was wrong strategically. For all the mess that surrounded the war, I think it was ultimately service the American people owed to the region. The GOP should never have gone in under the false pretenses that they did, and the dems should never have played their dangerous virtue games. I think you can clearly see the ineptitude of the democratic parties foreign policy ideology under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. But that is a whole other thing. At least the War in Iraq is more or less tied up, and any further activity in the region can be launched under a new campaign with hopefully better pretenses. I have a feeling we aren't out of the woods yet. Especially with regards to Russia. The ground Hillary Clinton ceded is appalling. Now look where we are with Russia... I can't help shake the feeling the dems wanted all the GOPs efforts to be for naught. I'm constantly reminded of their hubris in that era and how Iraq was such an easy topic for them to use for puff pieces with little regard for the Iraqi people.

John Kasich on Trump and Charlottesvile God damn, now that's a proper response.

That article really makes Bannon out to be a economical hawk. Which I honestly have to agree with. America no doubt benefits from focusing on high level services, and moving manufacturing abroad. But the US really needs to ramp up with new industries. We're an nation in regression that is trying to spend down it's capital to reach something just short of social utopia. I haven't been following Bannon closely enough to have an opinion on whether his approach is even good or beneficial, but I think the US really needs to ramp some things up. It's interesting to read his daggered disavowment of the alt-right. He seems laser focused on foreign policy with little regard to any domestic optics.

This dude seriously thinks he's being staked out just because there is martial law and there is a warrant for his arrest...

I know... it's ****ed. I saw this the other day. The source is also a fascinating study: https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/whoseheritage_splc.pdf

We are talking hypothetically in here. But realistically what all is on the horizon from Obsidian? Tim Cain & Leonard Boyarsky: Whatever they already have planned. Josh Sawyer & Friends: Deadfire -> PoE3 Tyranny Team: Tyranny DLC or Tyranny 2

I can tell you now, she's not going to prison. Maybe jail time, and even then I'd be surprised if the judge reached that verdict.

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/8/15/16144070/psychology-alt-right https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/c9uvw

Nah, the white supremacists are the gasoline. A gasoline that seeks out sparks. Good on Baltimore though.

Don't worry guys, she's 1000 years old.

What's the pipe for? Do I pour beer down it?

I'm surprised Trump hasn't put up any statues of himself yet tbh.

The POTUS is a **** poster. Ahh the future. It's what democracy wanted. The glorious unpopular vote of a 54.7% turnout.

You're saying BLM is merely a hashtag and means nothing outside of the internet in the most digitally connected age?

Black Lives Matter is both an organization and a grassroots movement. It has official and unofficial chapters. It has people claiming actions on behalf of the movement. It was not founded to organize racism or black supremacy. It's members or independent actors stand for so many different things that all together it stands for very little. What it does stand against is police brutality and racism. BLM has made some serious errors that I think have really worked against their mission. At the same time, there are a lot of people that want to see their folly wholesale. So it leaves you wondering where some of their critics hearts actually lie. BLM has a far less black nationalist bend than the Panthers did. Even with the Panthers no doubt they opposed serious issues that needed opposing. I don't think the Panthers are an out right hate group like the Nation of Islam, because the Panthers were quite the conglomerate. Unfortunately the fact that those radicals are out there means that no movement really stays amiable for long. But once a movement has started, those pushing for progress don't have much else of a vector to operate through. BLM is both over-slandered and under-criticized, with too many people only trying to hit a single nail on the head at a time.

Yes, asking for minority representation isn't entitlement. Perhaps on this I was not clear, but my point depends on that distinction. I start by talking about the person who disliked encountering an advance from a gay npc as indeed being entitled over expecting he shouldn't experience such a thing. I go on to describe that I think entitlement in general is a bad mentality. Then I extend that claim by comparing it to asking/demanding for representation, a case where I feel entitlement is more often justified. With the ultimate secondary point, the first being entitlement is bad, being that representation can be sought without entitlement. Representation obviously need be advocated and fought for, but when entitlement is the justified approach one operates of a self-serving and self-aggrandizing mind. Hence, I detail the problem of favored minority representations at the expense of the even less represented. I'd imagining entitlement is very tempting when one has an axe to grind, and it's an undermining force that's proliferated allyship. The reason I brought Star Wars into it, is that for 6 feature films, it really was a series that was "made" for me. But when The Force Awakens came out I had no expectations or entitlements that it would be made for me. I wouldn't want that and didn't want that. I went in wanting Star Wars. I wanted the characters to exist as individuals with identities of their own. The other reason I chose TFA is that it's one of the best examples to date of diversity, which I believe is helped by it's fictional setting. It's far harder to write shallow, stereotypically designed characters when it's removed from our world; it's an IP that is somewhat shielded from group-identity-progressives. So, diversity has gone up and the characters are written individuals embedded in a fictional setting. If in one's eyes they "lost representation" I'd say they were entitled to expect otherwise, for those that "gained representation" I would hope they can enjoy the gains without indulging in a negative mentality. For everyone, I would hope they can enjoy watching individual characters who ultimately represent themselves, and I think Star Wars does that well. For these reasons I think TFA is a great example because it's diversity without falling into the abyss of representing collectivist group-identities.