213374U

Glad you and yours are OK. Not much else to say in a ****ty situation like this.

LOL So a Lebanese politician believing the shooting down was carried out at the very least with NATO awareness is not to be believed, but a disgraced former FBI agent accusing Obama as part of a conspiracy to impose Sharia law in the US is straight from the horse's mouth, right? TIL doublethink is a thing.

Haha, those Christian terrorists don't really matter because they aren't areally Christian terrorists, just random Africans. And Muslim extremists generally work well with each other, except when they don't, but that doesn't matter because **** you, that's why. And here's my evidence that "hundreds of TV stations worldwide" are applauding Islamic terrorism: two YT vids from the same, totally unbiased [1] [2] (and because you can find links for everything on the internet, [3]), source. Guys guys, I spent five seconds researching the matter, I know what I'm talking about.

^ Cheap shot man, cheap shot.

Well, there's The Finnisher. Too bad they arrested him on sex assault charges later, though.

I wish I lived in Switzerland, now.

Yeah, you apparently missed the other thread where we found out that right-wing white Americans are a bigger threat than Muslims. Here: http://www.mintpressnews.com/white-americans-are-the-biggest-terror-threat-in-the-united-states/211608/ Of course, "but there are way more whites than Muslims in the US, so that's to be expected", only it really isn't, unless you expect people to randomly turn into mass murderers for no other reason than "X segment of citizens with the terrorist gene is above Y threshold". The causes of why people decide to throw everything away and go out in a blaze are more complicated than "Islam" or "Reactionary Conservatism". Reductionists gon' reduce.

Not really. Just guessing, but I think that was what most players who have been around for a bit expected. Nothing more, nothing less. No new end game content, next chapter released as late as possible within the promised time frame (late January/early February). Subscriber rewards that I for one couldn't care less about (Never got around to use the previous ones, Nico Ocarr gathers dust and the stim vendor got all the coats and guns). So yeah, par for the course or however the saying goes They were trying to drum up interest regarding sub rewards pretty hard, AFAIK, which have turned out to be pretty weak. More useless trash and the stuff people actually want is still heavily monetised (dyes/unlocks) or non-existent (more MP content). I liked how the sub rewards survey did not allow to rate all rewards so far "1". And still no Yavin PVP announcement.

Can you like, put away the strawman for just a second? Nobody has argued that Christian influence has "no bearing" on the European heritage. In fact, we have asserted the opposite, but also that it is not the only thing that defines European culture. Whatever the hell that is, anyway. Am I also "arguing for the sake of arguing" now? Regarding Middle Eastern/African men being accused of "more serious kinds of rape", lolwut? Marital rape is rape. From this I suspect that somebody doesn't understand what the concept of rape is. I'll give you a hint: it's you. If there were only 6,500 reported rapes in Sweden in 2014, how do you know that there were 5 times more actual occurrences? How do you know that reported rapes in Finland amount to 25% of all occurrences? Because Amnesty International estimates it's actually 2-10%. Do you have any more current estimates? And please, elaborate on how Swedish men are "often regarded" as effeminate. By whom, your lawyer friend too? What is this "public image" of Swedish males? And most importantly, what the **** does that **** have to do with anything?

Well, not necessarily the ethnicity, though, he didn't make much mention of it. Saying all Americans are dumb or that the British are bunch of drunkards isn't racist, it's being prejudiced against a large group, for example. If he had said he assumes the rape statistics would be high as those rascally Magyars like a bit of raping now and then, that would be racist. But that's what's implied. Hungary doesn't have any significant minorities (Roma?), so other than "Magyars liking a bit of raping now and then", why would anyone assume such a thing? It's not "hai guise here's Hungary rape stats, they pretty high", or "hai guise what are Hungary rape stats?". It's just BVC assuming random stupid **** about an Eastern Europe (read: non-Western) country. Unlike American or British, Hungarian is an ethnicity. Prejudice about a particular ethnicity is hard to write off as not racism. *braces for a YT rant from a random "not racist" guy with really bad taste in hairdos*

Yeah... not a particularly innovative tactic either. I'm guessing not many people are actually going to bother reading the 1,000+ pages of critique that are being added to Mein Kampf's 2016 edition. Because, 140 characters.

Yeah, perhaps we should perfect "democracy" over here before attempting to export it. But dem mad profits tho. It's interesting how people have been tricked into voting against their own collective interests. Are you familiar with Owen Jones?

So what you are saying is you are deliberately contributing to a perversion of language in which words have no meaning and are simply thrown around for shock value ("cultural marxist!" is the Twitter age equivalent of "filthy commie!"), instead of using your superior education to spread knowledge properly to those who aren't so lucky. And for what, to sound more appealing? To reach a wider audience? This is pandering. There is a reason you don't applaud kids calling anything with more than three sides a triangle. Sure, the kid may have a point, but most likely it's a pretty irrelevant point because he was never made to get the basics down. Yeah, that's also a sign of the times, and the widespread acceptance of words being constantly redefined ad-hoc makes people much easier to deceive and manipulate. Or nothing anyone says really matters anymore -assuming it ever did- and it's all an unabashed appeal to emotion in a gigantic echo-chamber. As you know, this is thought to be a flaw in the human mind (Dunning-Kruger), so you may well be asking for an impossibility. Best you can hope for is that explaining clearly what you mean will offer a new perspective and get people thinking. Reason I keep coming back is that I've learned a lot of interesting stuff in the years of back-and-forths with folks here, and no doubt will continue to learn. And I'm especially thick-skulled...

Ouch. WTF? I didn't know the heroic rewards were restricted to prefs (which I assume you are since you preordered RotHC). There's a limit in place for FP loot, but heroic boxes? The Renowned/Exalted sets are really expensive, restricted to certain classes and have a legacy level requirement. They are also ugly for the most part. For a fraction of the price you can get a better looking full set off GTN. If you are on TRE I can hook you up with a bunch of crafted moddable heavy armor pieces, too. PM me your character's name and I'll mail the stuff to you later, if you want. I'll also open a bug ticket on your behalf regarding that starter gear authorization requirement BS, if that's ok with you.

I don't think you will find any actual Western academics priding themselves on their moral relativism, but I may be wrong. Twitter is full of (nasty) surprises. What I don't accept is that Enlightenment ideals led to a complete breakdown of values, a dissolution of civic virtue, extreme individualism and hedonism, etc. You are making this connection, but haven't explained how it actually happened, so I can't very well examine it, let alone refute it. Similarly I could say it's the result of Judeo-Christian morality even though it very much means the exact opposite, because it's also in our past. I also don't need to point to the various strains of tyranny and oppression that nationalism and religion have been and are currently used to support. Going back to that is no solution. I'm afraid we are simply going to have to disagree on the weight that economic factors have. You insist that they don't really matter while making deeply misleading statements such as "much of Europe is still quite prosperous", to shift the focus away from facts and to ideology. But the facts remain: economic factors have historically been a major bullet point when looking at the causes of the instability of societies, migrations and wars. I'm going to stand by this explanation until you explain how a lack of nationalism has led to people "not wanting to reproduce", as opposed to not being able to or realizing that their offspring will most certainly have to live in worse conditions than they did themselves. I think you'll have a hard time defending the idea that nationalism and Abrahamic religions are necessary for population growth when humanity had been growing before those were invented, and cultures without them seem to be doing fine demographically. I don't know that current Western culture is "nihilist", but I'll concede that it's extremely individualistic and materialistic, while at the same time, millions are seeing their material ambitions go unfulfilled. Again, I fail to see how this is a consequence of Enlightenment beyond the suggestion that Enlightened ideas must necessarily lead to atheism. I guess it's hard to dispute the fact that the satisfaction rate of leading a spiritual life is close to 100% but that's only because people can only find it's a hoax after such life. The materialist/spiritual divide is a false dichotomy, though. Regarding the Stations of the Cross story. The mayor is a moron, like most of the self-professed progressives here. Still, these milestones had been paid for with public funds that were earmarked for investment and services. Instead, the other morons (conservatives), decided that this project was more important than the payroll of municipal workers that are owed up to 24 months worth of pay. This is by law a nonconfessional country. Public powers have no business getting involved with religious matters, majority or not. Muslims (and atheists, and...) aren't exempt of taxes as far as I know, so public money cannot be spent on this stuff. The Catholic Church already enjoys important (and exclusive) tax exemptions. They want Stations of the Cross? They can pay for them.

Quelle horreur! Oh wait, no, I'm totally not seeing how that's a bad thing. I don't think it's even a "thing" at all, given that it's an assessment which rests on, at best, a flawed understanding of Enlightened thought and what it brought. Yes, Locke did not seek to establish a "tradition" to replace Catholicism, because he understood that such a thing was same dog, different collar. He realized the damage that these time honored traditions did and was acutely aware of the blood that had been spilt because of them. His intent was not to do away with tradition or wash away the cultural identity of his time, rather the opposite actually: he merely wanted a way of living in society without bloodshed while allowing for these identities and traditions to be preserved, instead of having a dominant paradigm annihilate all others and rule essentially by imposition. For this to be possible, the law of the land was to be administered by civil magistrates which could not get involved with religious disputes, and religious authorities were to deal exclusively with religious issues, while submitting to civil authorities in everything else. Civil authorities in turn were to enforce a legal framework that was deemed universal regardless of creed (natural law). Those who sincerely suggest that Enlightened thought basically boils down to a sort of absolute moral relativism, simply don't know what they are talking about, if I may be so blunt. Anyone interested in this can refer to A Letter Concerning Toleration and go from there. Of course, a society built on these premises requires that its members understand its foundations rather than simply recite a bunch of meaningless mantras, and to think, rather than follow, for it to work. A tradition is by definition the exact opposite. Great when it works for you, not so much when it doesn't. The legacy of the Enlightenment is as much a part of contemporary Western identity as its Christian roots, and downplaying this is myopic and dangerous. Frankly it boggles the mind that defending these ideas would get one labeled a "cultural marxist". It's ironic and tremendously sad that the problems of today (and always) are blamed precisely on the philosophical current whose aim was to tackle them with as little fuss as possible...

1. Removed to deal with "vendor bloat", much like the DK/Coruscant PVP vendors. If you want gear you do heroics, you get 2 boxes with 2 random level-appropriate blue pieces each, per heroic. Easy as pie, really. Or get the orange legacy-bound level 8 pieces from the fleet vendor and outfit them with mods. 2. RNG, most likely. I have had medpacs drop but loot tables were changed with 4.0 and mobs drop more gray vendor trash (and a metric ****ton of jerky schematics) and gifts and less actual loot. 3. That's a bug. Gear losing durability seems inconsistent, dying sometimes will not cause damage, but questing around might.

Keep a stiff upper lip mate. The time to show some of that superior western moral fiber is now. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/28/opinion/europe-is-spying-on-you-mass-surveillance.html?_r=0 https://www.lawfareblog.com/state-emergency-how-paris-attacks-expanded-frances-police-powers This is what you were referring to when you alluded to what IS wants, right? "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever."

So data is "pulp fiction"? Read a bit more, please, I really shouldn't have to break things down for you. The article(s) were strictly limited to the US in scope. Oh, and Breivik doesn't matter, because, uh... reasons! And cultural marxism!

Maybe not a shock to you, but generally public perception of the issue is skewed: www.nytimes.com/2015/06/25/us/tally-of-attacks-in-us-challenges-perceptions-of-top-terror-threat.html It's hard to talk about any issue when folks instinctively go "cultural marxism!" at any argument that doesn't jibe with the current iteration of the xenophobic narrative, though.

I haven't played PVP on stealthers nearly as much as I have on my mara, but the flexibility and control advantages brought by stealth simply cannot be compensated by the meager (~5%) damage output advantage the mara supposedly has. Ninja capping as a mara? Forget about it. Node guarding? Lel. Ambushing/disabling healers? No dice. They can't even force the healer out of guard range, which a jugg can do. On the other hand, Shadows/sins have excellent survivability and tools to be a veritable PITA until help can arrive. And operatives can off-/self-heal. To make up for all of that, they'd have to give maras and snipers a huge (upwards of 10%) damage boost. That would break the PVE meta and, most importantly, arenas.

You are doing God's work.

Whether I believe it's okay to nuke them or not is irrelevant, I'm nobody. What matters is will someone actually do it and if so, can they get away with it? I would think that you of all people should be aware of how little stuff being "okay" matters in a war. Who here has suggested otherwise? No one but you has made a value judgment about it. However it's kinda suspect that your outrage is always directed the same way. I don't remember you being so upset when a MSF hospital was bombed in the 'stan a few weeks ago. Or when Israeli commandos infiltrated a hospital in the West Bank to assassinate a patient. Or...

While not excusing their actions by any means, it's interesting how people saying something like that forgetting the fact these pilots were dropping bombs on them in the first place. And i've heard reports that they're not even particularly choosy on who they drop them, militants or civilians. In any case, it's a bit hypocritical to expect these people to act differently. "We're dropping bombs on you, but shooting a pilot is just too much!" Really? I was going to post something along these lines, too. I can't understand how folks can be scandalized by the fact that the people usually on the receiving end of white phosphorus would jump at the chance to shoot an ejected pilot who can't do anything about it. These were military pilots flying a combat sortie. Live by the sword, die by the sword. Well, the British had their own airforce they could and did retaliate with, didn't they? This is asymmetrical warfare. Wonder if you chaps would be more at ease if they had tried the pilots in a kangaroo court and hanged them. "Civilized war" is an oxymoron.

I believe you've reached your buzzword quota for the day, with just one post. You can pat yourself in the back now, good job.