Azarkon

Not everyone... Bush Jr., for example, always struck me as someone devoted to "taking care of family business." That his father had an old enemy in Iraq who was violating the terms of his defeat probably did not escape his notice.

My stance on the "links" between Saddam and Al Qaeda is that they are largely irrelevant to why we went to war with Iraq, at least in the judgment of intents. That is to say, I do not think they played a large role either in the top-level decisions or in the justifications given to the American people, which at the time was focused on Saddam's WMDs. If, in retrospect, there were some connections between Saddam and the terrorists who perpetrated 9/11, it was apparently not enough for the Bush administration to claim a connection between Saddam and 9/11. Given the otherwise lax attitudes this administration has taken with regards to "twisting the truth," this for me places in heavy doubt any argument otherwise, since I doubt the Bush administration would hesitate to take advantage of even the silghtest possibility of such a link. And in fact, reading the 2002 Iraq Resolution, I find that such a connection was painstakingly avoided, as if the government knew someone would call them up on their bulll****. Instead, Saddam was linked to "general terrorism" and "general terrorism" was linked to 9/11, in the usual roundabout manner of political speak. All in all, nothing has swayed me as to the nature of our actions in Iraq, which was fundamentally one of aggression (and perhaps vindication). With regards to Greenspan, he's not a particularly untrustworthy fellow, but I doubt he was audience to all the top-level decisions of the Bush administration. Still, that he would come out and say that it was all about the oil speaks ill for all those who laughed at the idea off as tin-foil hattery at the beginning of the war.

There are no perfect analogies, mainly because we never did something like this before. Iraq is not VIetnam. It is not Korea. It is not WW 2. It is not the Gulf War. In all of those cases we were the defenders, if not of our own country then of someone else's country (or half-a-country). Iraq, on the other hand, is self-righteous US aggression. It is just not the same, and the best analogy I can come up with is China going into Tibet to "liberate" the Tibetans from their feudal overlords and into the joy of Communism, except instead of Communism, we're pushing democracy, and instead of absorbing Iraq as a US state, we're putting up a "government favorable to US interests."

Certainly, but I believe a level of technological sophistication is required before breakthroughs can occur, and current research across the sciences simply hasn't reached that stage. Practical high-performance computing via nano-technology is a ways off, and quantum computing remains a fantasy. Neuroscience is not much closer to understanding how the brain works beyond primitive reactions and psychology is still a dead-end. Maybe biological computing could do something, but building a brain is not exactly the same as building AI. We could already accomplish the former (via cloning, for example, if the technology wasn't banned), but it gets us no closer to understanding intelligence, which is a prerequisite of translating it into computers.

People outside of AI and Robotics really can't grasp just how far away science actually is from achieving their (rather unreasonable, once you think about it) expectations. That said, it's common sense that "presentation is everything." If you can get people to think that they're interacting with an intelligent being (ie like with those early chatbots), it really doesn't matter whether the being is actually intelligent or not. There's where I expect a great deal of progress in the coming years.

There's a difference between difficult combat and enjoyable combat, IMO. Combat can be difficult and yet be boring - I tend to call them frustrating. Combat can also be easy and yet surprisingly enjoyable - BG 2 falls into this category, as does Bioshock. It might be best to have both, but if I had to choose, I'd choose easy, enjoyable combat over difficult, frustrating combat.

samm: precisely - where would you move? All of Europe, and perhaps even the world, is mobilizing around these nativist trends, and it makes the future uncertain - and scary.

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20070901/D8RCI31O0.html My personal impression is that there is currently a massive nativist movement in Europe and the US in response to the forces of globalization, which obviously isn't just a one-way penetration of other countries by the West, but also applies vice versa. There's practical reasons for this movement, but it's not difficult to see how it could easily transform into something much worse. Already we have people predicting the death of multi-culturalism, which might seem like a good thing until you consider what the alternative would be... A return to mono-culturalism and, thus, the ethnic centrism and ultra-nationalism of the WW eras? Discuss.

Reviewers, presumably, serve a useful function in that they play and are exposed to more games than the rest of us, and having made it their living, should be more knowledgeable about games in general. Unfortunately, this is often not the case in the game industry - or rather, it maybe the case for individual reviewers but the establishments for which they work are driven by all the wrong things so as to render those facts irrelevant. Look, I'm not necessarily asking for objectivism; a subjective opinion is just as good - when placed in the right context. That is to say, if I can find a reviewer with whom I mostly agree, and he has time to play ten times the amount of games that I do, then perhaps I can depend on him to point me out to all the great, under-appreciated games that I don't know about and all the popular, over-hyped games that I might not like. That's the reviewer's, and the critic's, economic value, put in part eloquently by Anton Ego in Ratatouille (though there he really only cites the "discovering new diamonds" function of critics). But when reviews are driven by marketing, when they do nothing but reiterate what the rest of us already receive from each company's hype machine, and when they make no attempt whatsoever to go beyond the bandwagon for fear of being different, then they lose their value, and become worthless. That is my problem with the current state of game reviews.

Move away is a matter of perspective, considering that a large segment (majority?) of the RTS community still plays Warcraft 3 as their primary game - which might explain why other companies are not so keen on simply cloning, since they'd be hard pressed to compete with Blizzard. I'd observe what Blizzard does with SC 2.

Right, and the Iraqs themselves have the final say in that. Don't get me wrong: the US has definite interests in keeping Iraq "whole" and "stable," not the least of which is to prove that we don't just cause nations to split apart but can, in fact, build them into strong, prosperous democracies (which we won't prove, quite to the contrary, if the result is three separate states in constant border conflicts with each other). But we don't have the final say in this matter and it was arrogant to presume that we did. It is similarly arrogant to presume that national sovereignty doesn't matter in the face of international humanism - yes, people do deserve to have the same rights to life that we take for granted, but that doesn't mean they're willing to give up tribal, national, and ethnic loyalties in order to achieve them. You can't ignore that factor in the name of "interventionism," or you're going to end up making things worse. That's not to say there are no circumstances under which military intervention is justified, but it is to say that you had better hold a deep respect for national borders and ethnic identifies in making that choice, or you're going to end up pissing off more people than you help.

Artificial, yes; arbitrary, no. What we're seeing in present day Iraq is precisely the fallout from a semi-arbitrary assignment of different ethnic groups into a single nation in which they do not belong. As much as the modern West might hate to admit it, tribalism runs deep in the human instinct, and the world does not operate by the simple laws of a moral commonwealth. In fact, nation, tribe, and family play a huge factor in the direction of people's actions, so much so that many are fully willing to and capable of doing so-called "universal" evil in pursuit of "local" good - that is, acts that would be considered wrong if taken in a general context, but which can be construed as good when defined with respect to the interests of a group. This is why sovereignty and national integrity are important things to consider when deciding whether to engage in "foreign humanitarian missions." You simply can't treat people as if national borders and ethnic divides did not exist - because people's moral compasses are defined along those lines. Trying to force the Iraqis into one nation, to get along with each other, might seem a good thing to do - but it ignores the fact that in many of their eyes, what you're actually doing is violating their ethnic solidarity, and that's why they resort to sectarian violence.

A potentially wise move, if Bush plans to strike Iran.

I thought the last twist you mentioned there was particularly cunning, as it plays off of the condition that we're all too used to in gaming.

Finished the game, got the good ending (which actually brought some wetness to my eyes, though it may just have been from staring at the screen for too long ). Story and writing were both better than I expected; gameplay was slightly deeper than your average FPS; "role-playing," given how much they hyped it up, was worse than I expected. There is essentially one decision point in the entire game (that matters): whether you avoid, Harvest, or Rescue the Little Sisters - but there is practically little benefit to choosing the former two options except out of cruelty, because the last option actually provides equivalent/better benefits. So being "good" is basically a no-brainer - no real trade-off is involved. Heck, avoidance isn't even "safe" - if you don't fight them, you don't get Adam, which means you don't get cool powers, which means the game becomes very difficult later on... So again, even a self-preservationist would be masochistic to avoid confrontation. As far as graphics, sound, etc. goes the game is top-notch. I've little to complain about in these areas and would probably recommend the game to anyone who isn't too put off by what I mentioned above - it's an excellent one-time experience, particularly if you value production values and presentation.

*shrug* Morals, laws, self-interest. The ideal order of priorities

Really? The thought has never crossed your mind when considering what it must require - logistically, economically, and politically - to support our seven hundred-something foreign military bases? The US presidency is not a vocation someone simply "steps into." It comes with tremendous "bureaucratic" obligations to maintain and - if possible - expand the Pax Americana.

Some more sources: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...7081401662.html http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/i...420309820070815 http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,293285,00.html

Of course, there's also the alternative view to consider - ie that this is political "theatric" designed to intimidate Iran into submitting to the US's designs in the latest round of talks or to undermine the presidency of Ahmadinejad (support him, and you support WAR!) But I can't imagine the obvious threat-based diplomacy being received very well over there, or that it'd lead to long-term stability in US-Iranian relations. On another note, one can't miss the ironic parallel with 300. Madness? THIS IS BUSH!

In my opinion, the US going to war with Iran would be akin to the US going to war with China - not the same scale of confrontation, no, but about the same level of incentives (minus Israel) exist. One must therefore wonder how sane the Bush administration is in labeling the IRGC a terrorist organization - imagine it had done that to the PLA or RGF (the military forces of China and Russia, respectively). Is there really justification for war and, if not, this kind of saber rattling? We live in dangerous times...

http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IH18Ak04.html Discuss.

Because one was made to be interpreted while the other was made to be played? Yeah, pretty shallow argument, but look - Ebert is saying that games is an inferior medium because structurally games are not authorial in nature. Players decide what happens in games - ie whether to go into that building, from what angle to view that scene, what paths to take in the story, etc. - and Ebert is saying that games are all the less art because of it. That's not necessarily an argument as to the entertainment value of games, but rather one relevant towards the potential artistic value of games. Sure, if you stare at that image of Pong you can interpret it in as many ways as the black square, but such an interpretation never occurs to the player, whereas it does to the painting purveyor, because of the structural differences between the mediums. Art is made to be looked at, watched, read, heard, whatever - games are made to be played, and in that act of playing Ebert is saying that games become less art and more entertainment for the sake of amusement. Kind of like how Chess will never be art even though it's one of the oldest and most classic games in the world. As fans of RPGs we tend to challenge this basic notion because RPGs are the closest thing gaming has got to films and, especially as of late, the trend has been towards making RPGs as near of a "cinematic" experiences as possible. Would it still hold true if we were talking about FPS games? Here, let me go one step further - yes, games like Torment are often argued to be art, but is it because they're games? Or is it because they have elements within them (ie the writing, the cutscenes, the graphics) that have aesthetic value in and of themselves, irregardless of whether they're part of a game? Is that why as the industry adopts more cinematic practices, more people start claiming that games are art - ie because it's not games they're judging but essentially ghetto 3D movies? That, to me, is the critical question that Ebert raises. Can the gaming medium, which is to say the sum of all its parts, ever be considered art?

From another thread - - IGN The release of Bioshock has rekindled an age-old debate (some say a shouting match) of whether electronic games as a medium will ever approah the aesthetic level of film and literature. For those not familiar with the debate and why Penny Arcade writer Tycho expressed the desire to sodomize Rogert Ebert with a copy of Bioshock, peruse the following exchange between the well-known film critic and a gaming enthusiast:

With all due respect Walsh, the threat of "bending the knee" is itself an existential threat. No such thing exists within the current conflict - no one is suggesting that we bend the knee to Islam, merely that we contain it as we contained Communism and let the ideology destroy itself from within. It's similarly preposterous to argue that pockets of Islamic militants are in anyways comparable to the mighty Axis war machine. Total war is a conflict that can only truly exist between two nations mobilizing all the assets at their command. The war against terrorism - against failed states that hardly put up a fight, with half-hearted support at home, with a primarily professional army, for purpose of "making the Middle-East safe for American interests," and with the spectre of profiteering hanging over it - is very different in comparison, and total victory is this case is not only nebulous but perhaps even unachievable with regards to the demands it places on our moral conscience. Sure, everybody would like to see Al Qaeda brought to justice, but few, I think, would be willing to see the Middle-East reduced to a glass parking lot in the process. That is why Islam is not an existential threat - if it were, and if total war was in fact our mode of conflict with the Islamists, then dropping a few atom bombs on Middle-Eastern cities would not be out of the question. It would, in fact, be an act of mercy compared to what we would be obligated to do as an alternative (ie a full-scale, remorseless invasion and pacification of the Middle-East). As far as whether Churchill was "right" to support total war against Hitler... In retrospect, of course he was - but that doesn't mean the ideology he espoused in that speech (total war) was correct, because you also have to consider Hitler, who was driven by similar principles. Ask yourself this - if Hitler did not begin a total war, would Churchill have been justified to wage total war against him? If the ideology behind total war (which was basically fascist) was not in power, would WW 2 have occured, and even if it did, would it have been as singularly destructive and brutal?

But is our enemy truly an existential threat? Hitler was. Fascism was. But Islamic extremists? I have my doubts. At any case, the situation has changed in other ways, too - nationalism is no longer such an important factor, the result of which is that total war against the enemy has become ineffective. Forcing an official Iraqi surrender is easy; getting the militants to give up, and getting the people to stop hating each other, however - not so much. It's true that we can still achieve total victory by completely annihilating the enemy's possible countries of residence, but such an act is not only morally reprehensible but is, in fact, self-admittedly excessive in a way WW 2 total war never was. There was the notion then that if we did not reduce Germany to rubble, Hitler would've reduced us to rubble (once the war's begun, anyways). The same, I think, cannot yet be said of Islamic extremists. The existential threat is not yet real.