BahRamYou
4hr ago
Iran “remains well-stocked with ballistic missiles and some anti-ship weapons, and can quickly add more”, while receiving new armaments from Russia, and we should assume Russia has a desire to embarrass their #1 geopolitical rival who helped get them into the Ukraine kurfuffle
That article seems to be pretty biased. They interviewed some anonymous "officials," and found one to say that particular quote. The others, presumably, disagree, as do pretty much everyone who's gone on the records to talk about it publicly. (Of course they still have some missiles and drones, but it's odd to think that they have some infinite supply of missiles, or that they've suffered no damage from all the bombing. And Russia isn't exactly swimming in excess missile capacity these days. Forget about "embarassing their geopolitica rival," they're busy fighting for their survival.
BahRamYou
2d ago
For some reason though, we do have the Mace of the United States House of Representatives. I think they should be allowed to use it to club the unruly members.
BahRamYou
10d ago
imaginary WMDs
I see. So all those news reports over the years, going back to the 90s, about Iran's obvious efforts to build nuclear weapons. And US efforts to stop them, which included Obama's JCPOA. All of that was imaginary to you? Who made up all of thoe news reports then... was it the Israelis? So yes, motivated reasoning for how you're spinning everything else.
BahRamYou
11d ago
"missile factories" means an actual, you know... factory. Organized industrial equipment, building large number of missiles, with ever increasing range and capabilities. That newspaper article just sounds like they've still got some leftover parts that they're crudely assembling underground, mad-max style.
It's tyhe same with their nuclear weapons program. They were actively using centrifuges to enrich greater and greater amounds of uranium 238, with the goal of making warheads. That material still exists, it's just been bombed and hard to use now, but it does still exist. That's what happens when you bomb someone... you set them back, but they'll eventually rebuild.
Honestly this all just sounds like motivated reasoning on your part. Like you hate Trump, and you want him to fail, so you're happily cheering for every minor advance the Iranians can pull off. Even though I'll bet you would actually the the IRGC if they were a real power or you met them in real life.
To be clear, the pre-war status quo was that the strait was only "open" because Iran was using it as a hostage. Meanwhile they were investing heavily in their nuclear, drone, and ICBM programs, plus funding terrorist proxies abroad. Not to mention massacring any of their people who dared to protest.
All of that is gone now. Their missile factories are destroyed, their funds are gone, and most of their missiles have been used up. The only thing left is finding a way to permanently remove their nuclear material, which has been bombed into dust but is still there. And if they won't come to terms on that, the US and its allies can just keep bombing them indefinitely while other nations' oil goes through the Strait and Iran's economy falls ever further apart.
BahRamYou
12d ago
Sometimes a game just nails the genre so well that there's nothing left to do. Blizzard also did that with Starcraft and RTS games, IMO.
BahRamYou
12d ago
-- On the same note, I'm curious how other players map Horde vs Alliance to red tribe vs blue tribe. In my mind, the Horde is obviously blue tribe: a mix of indigenous refugees, freed slaves, alt lifestyle burnouts, history's victims trying to make good. The Alliance is obviously red tribe: your classical trad heroes joined by traditional religious belief and racist hatred of the Other. But I could equally see the alternative: Horde is masculine, aggressive, ugly while the Alliance is effeminate pretty do-gooders.
I would have thought that Alliance is pretty clearly the blue tribe, because it attracts the majority of female players, who usually want to play pretty human or elf characters. Plus all the men who would simp for them by giving them equipment and such. The horde I remember being the dude-bro, sausage fest faction of guys playing ugly orc and tauren characters while saying bad things about women. But I only played it at release, which was a long time ago, and maybe things have changed since then with like the Blood Elves adding a "pretty" race into the Horde.
BahRamYou
17d ago
It would depend how close the published version is to that first draft. It's possible that they wrote the first draft themselves, but then re-worked it using AI. Especially since (I'm just going by his wiki biography here, I had never heard of him before) he grew up speaking Creole, not standard French. And apparently he plagiarized a lot of other things he wrote from existing books.
BahRamYou
18d ago
The problem is, they lack the genes to metabolize alcohol. 5 bud lights isn't a whole lot when you can digest it, but for an inuit person that might get them completely wasted. Especially if they're drinking it as shots of hard liquor.
BahRamYou
19d ago
One thing I'm wondering... what exactly counts as "Greenland" here? Because the actual island itself is relatively small, and what we see is mostly the frozen glacier on top, which is barren and hostile. The more important parts are all somewhat indirect.
- who controls the airspace over Greenland?
- who controls the Low Earth Orbits going over Greenland?
- who controls the fishing rights and ocean transit lanes near Greenland, and how far out? What about offshore mining and drilling?
These are kind of contentious issues in general, with no clear answers (see for example: the Cod war between the UK and Iceland, fighting over how far out Iceland's control of fishing rights extended). I don't expect this to be fully settled any time soon.
BahRamYou
19d ago
Fair enough, I"e never actually been to one. Is there anything you could actually recommend, which is relatively available in the US? (so not, like sending them to some super elite private school in Manhattan).
BahRamYou
20d ago
The problem is discipline
I agree with this. I would simply say- different types of kids need different types of schools. The type of kid who's impulsive, low IQ, and starting fights at school would benefit immensely from a school that stresses discipline and rote memorization, which seems to be the path that Mississippi has used in its "miracle." A kid who's extremely bright would probably benefit more from something like the Montesorri schools, where they get a lot of freedom to explore whatever they want at their own speed, and encouraged to think creatively. I obviously don't know what Nikole's daughter is like, but I'm imagining a kid who's just relatively normal - pretty well behaved but not perfect, reasonably smart but not a genius, etc. For a kid like that, a normal American public school works fine, but only if they have way to limit and deal with the real problem children.
Also, yeah, probably not a shock that a black woman who writes professionally is much better at words than at numbers. That's fine, there's nothing with that, but we can't be blowing smoke up their asses and pretending like they're acing the math exams when they're really not.
BahRamYou
20d ago
I feel like the algorithm already gives me way better recommendations than like 99% of the junk that people in real life recommend to me.
What if the AI apocalypse comes, not with a bang, but with a whimper? Eventually there will be so much AI generated content that it becomes impossible to find anything written by a human, or to find an audience for anything you made yourself. Then we'll all just sit around consuming AI content (or having AI summarize it for us) until we die, never having kids.
BahRamYou
22d ago
Something I saw on twitter- apologies, I cannot find the link right now, but it was some sort of "anonymous insider" so not an authoritative source anyways. Still, I thought it was interesting.
Basically, they said that the main difference is that this deal is now between the US and Denmark, full stop. Not NATO, which was the deal before. So even if NATO falls apart, this deal would still continue. That's a small, but interesting detail.
Again, sorry for the lack of source, I'm just reporting the rumor of a rumor. But I thought it was plausible and interesting.
BahRamYou
22d ago
Presumably it's just making it official that the current situation (with the US having full control of a military base there, and no one else) is, indeed permanent. Maybe that was always "de facto" true, but it's good to get these things in writing. Countries having long lives, and it would be bad to build up a huge missile defense base there only to have it taken over in 100 years the way the Panama or Suez Canals were.
Of course, it's not like a piece of paper would really stop an aggressive military action, but it does help to legitimize increasing the US presence there. That base might be small, but it location make it pretty important to military satellites and missile defense.
BahRamYou
23d ago
What kind of person willingly submits their photos to a site like this? Hot women already get way too much attention on social media, they don't need a site like this to tell them how hot they are. Knowing Aella, I wonder if she paid women to put their photo up there.
BahRamYou
24d ago
Although I've joked I want to become 2005 Amish (cell phones and internet but no smartphones or modern social media). If someone starts that society sign me up.
You could become a drug dealer, they still use flip phones and avoid advertising on social media...
BahRamYou
24d ago
LOL that passage is hilarious. I hadn't even seen that one. I had to look it up to check if it's real, because that just seems so... on the nose. It's the sort of thing I would have written as a parody to make fun of it.
Also thanks for the info about the Syriac tales. I'm obviously not a religious scholar, so there's a lot I don't know. I did grow up enjoying stories from "the Arabian Nights" as a kid, and other pop culture stuff set in that region, so I think I can fairly claim to not be Islamophobic. It just took me a while to realize that all the stuff I enjoyed from there came in spite of Islam, not because of it.
I would agree that the Mormon origin story is, like you said, "hokey." Or even just straight-up BS. That one book review on ACX pretty thoroughly eviscerated it, IMO.
That said, I like Mormons. They seem like genuinely nice people, with some good moral values, even though I disagree with them on a lot of things. I don't think it's a coincidence that so many of my favorite sci-fi authors are Mormon.
I can't say the same for Islam. I feel like the so-called "Islamic golden age" was mostly just leftover Greek knowledge mixing with Persian culture and the silk road at a time when Islam hadn't yet fully dug in its claws.
BahRamYou
25d ago
To quote Sam Harris: "Islam is the mother lode of bad ideas."
Obviously every religion has its fringe elements of crazy extremists, so I won't condemn them for that. But in Islam, even the mainstream central religion just seems bad in a way I don't see in other religions.
It starts with Mohammed himself. This isn't some ancient figure who's life is shrouded in mystery, he's pretty well documented. He was a warlord who led his tribe to conquer the Arabian peninsula, by a combination of cunning tactics, charisma, and ruthlessness. He frequently executed captives and allowed his men to take sex slaves. This was brutal even by the standards of his time, so he made up his own religion to justify it.
He was also illiterate. In Islam, this is considered a miracle, for how could an illiterate man produce a book like the Quran? Except... when you read it, it's just not a very good book. It's mostly vague references to the bible, with a lot of aimless repition. It's almost like a family guy joke: "hey, remember that time when Jonah got swallowed by a whale? Huh? Wasn't that a good story?" It doesn't have any of the interesting insights or metaphors that other famous holy books have. In other words, it's exactly the kind of thing screed I'd expect from a charismatic, but illiterate leader. This is why the Quran is usually not actually read, but simply chanted, mindlessly, five times a day, as a form of brainwashing.
In older times, Europeans called Muslims "Mohammedans". That's now considered outdated, but I think they were onto something there. The real, central core of Islam is a cult of personality, centered on that one man. That's why so many of them name their kids after him, that's why there's so many fanatics who kill anyone who even draws a picture of him, and that's why the entire religion still seems weirdly stuck in the past, in a way that even the much older religions like Hindu or Buddhism are not. The modern Muslim-American clergy who are trying to whitewash or modernise are having to struggly, mightily, against the core problems.
BahRamYou
26d ago
So in that list I linked you, which includes many examples of them hitting things like apartment buildilngs, not to mention their attempts to destroy desalinization plants... what? Were those all just "mistakes?"
To be honest, I'm not even mad at them for that. "Countervalue" ie mass bombing of cities, has been a part of military strategy for a long time now. It was basically the heart of MAD deterrance in the cold war. I'm more surprised that you think Iran wouldn't be doing something like that. Admittedly they can't "level" a city right now, but it's not for lack of trying, they just lack the firepower. That's a good reason not let them have nuclear weapons.
BahRamYou
27d ago
That... literally did happen though? They've launched numerous ballistic missile attacks against cities. See the list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_attacks_during_the_2026_Iran_war#Iranian_and_allies_response
They're not exactly using precision weapons to carefully target military units and avoid civilian losses, they're launching whatever they have at whatever they can hit, which is mostly cities. If you don't hear about it very much, it's simply because most of them either miss or get intercepted, but they are very much trying to destroy cities, and some of them have gotten through.
The clearer example of this is North Korea, which maintains a massive artillery and rocket force aimed at Seoul. For decades, their main dettrance has simply been the threat of causing massive casualties in Seoul. It's worked well enough to let them flout international law, despite their terrible quality overall, so I'm sure Iran wants to copy their example.
Even if they were evilmaxxing, it would be the dumbest decision ever to target civilian centers as it would immediately grant America et al the moral right to do the same to them.
No, that's not how it works, unfortunately. America is held to a far higher moral standard, regardless of what happens. So since the US military accidentally hit one school during its initial massive precision bombing campaign to overwhelm Iran's air defenses, we have to hear forever how the Americans are monsters. Iran has carte blanche to lob crude ballistic missiles at apartment buildings, and it barely even breaks the news, so people dismiss it as "something that only happens in video games."
BahRamYou
27d ago
This is going to sound contraversial and culture-warry but I'll try to say this tactfully. I feel like the fact that this woman was black is very relevant here. Like they seem cuturally just way more open and blunt in pursuing both romance and hookups, not only the men but the women too. Twice, I was just standing on a street corner and a random black lady started talking to me, and then switch into flirting with me very heavily. I know that's not a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice, and they were both black, I just can't imagine a white or asian lady ever doing that unless she was trying to sell me something. But since the lady in your story was studying sociology and using academic language, I'm going to guess she also spent a lot of time around mostly-white spaces, which might result in her feeling a bit lost and mixed up culturally, even on top of all the contradictions baked in to academic sociology.
But who knows I'm speculating wildly about someone that I've never met, in a highly personal situation.
For some reason people are weirdly sensitive to gas prices, much more than they rationally should. I think because it's a big, specific number that you're constantly seeing whenever you drive near a gas station. You'll hear people talk about buying a brand new hybrid or electric car to "save on gas," even though there's no way the gas savings could ever add up to the cost of the new car.
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