Mewis
9d ago
In Afghanistan, the US should have not invaded Iraq. It's as a result of divided attention that OBL escaped to Pakistan. Once OBL was captured and executed, government should have been left in the hands of the various Talibans. AQ was the enemy, not the rest of the country.
Mewis
9d ago
You make it sound like a failure but this all sounds like a success from the perspective of US policymakers. Europe is the way they want them - poor, dependent. Russians are dying. They get to spend lots of money. What exactly is the problem?
Mewis
9d ago
You don't understand the US government - they like spending money. The prospect of pouring ten trillion dollars into a Ukraine-shaped hole in the ground gives them unimaginable pleasure, just as it pleases them to squander billions of dollars on missiles to destroy antique Russian tanks. Americans don't want to be rich, though they are - they want to feel rich.
Mewis
9d ago
I think this is highly unlikely. Ukraine currently has sovereignty and still about 80% of it's claimed territory. There's no reason for them to give that up for nothing, not while they can still fight and launch effective offensives. If Russia wants all Ukraine, it's going to have to get it the hard way.
Mewis
11d ago
I have to wonder what exactly your mental model is here. When you bite into an apple you're tasting sugar, and though I have a pretty awful sense of taste, I really don't believe that others can taste vitamins. So I don't really know if when I bite into a tasteless, watery carrot, I'm actually missing out on nutrition.
Mewis
15d ago
Generally very good, though I understand some of the FE5 patches are a little glitchy. You get save states as well, but I find they can actually undermine the experience a bit if not used sparingly.
Mewis
16d ago
It's an interesting take but I think it's a combination of a particular Japanese insistence on quality, and also doing a novel take on something familiar - for all that Castlevania is obviously derivative of western tropes, it's really very different in practice to any existing version of the Dracula story.
Mewis
16d ago
https://scholars-stage.org/why-chinese-culture-has-not-conquered-us-all/
You are absolutely wrong here. China has hit it big with Wukong, and also saw success with Genshin Impact. But there are fundamental reasons why these successes are isolated in the big picture. All of these other games you mentioned are designed are Western or Japanese developers.
The first issue here is a lack of cultural exchange, or a lack of equivalent cultural exchange. China writes the code for the newest Call of Duty, but it is obviously impossible that China could have developed Call of Duty, or League of Legends, or Final Fantasy, or any other modern video game touchstone. For that matter, it's totally implausible that they could write a Harry Potter, film an Alien, or produce The Sopranos. This is because the CCP explicitly seeks to reduce foreign cultural influence. But China cannot just adapt JttW and RotTK forever. If they want to make cultural exports, that has to be based on a broader and deeper cultural dialogue than is currently allowed. Final Fantasy could not have existed without Dungeons and Dragons. Anime could not have existed without Disney. K pop could not have existed without Michael Jackson.
On to the second issue - the CCP and their economic management of China. After all, k pop and Nintendo were originally developed for a domestic audience. Why can't China build up a robust video game industry behind the Great Wall and then seek to export? Well, the CCP doesn't really want to. It doesn't want young Chinese men to get soft and fat playing video games. It wants them to look like this, and who can blame them?
https://images.app.goo.gl/iT46jnqmyMuf64TY9
In some ways, this is a mess of contradictions. China wants us to consume and influence its cultural products, but not to consume ours. Its not even sure if it wants to consume its own cultural products, insofar as it interferes with its other goals. If a Chinese product was ever too successful domestically, it's easy to imagine the CCP swooping down on it, just as it has done before. This to say nothing of the way that China regulates its own culture with an increasingly heavy hand.
This is also why Japan and Korea are different. They have robust domestic consumption and cultural exchange with the rest of the west.
Mewis
17d ago
I don't have a spouse or children, but I think it's fine to persuade or even directly forbid them from certain associations.
Mewis
17d ago
One principle or rule that I try to stick by is that though I am free to dislike or avoid other people, I never try to persuade anyone else to do so.
Mewis
17d ago
For the purpose of a hypothetical, it's useful - and if you start with less, you can just choose a later point in this hypothetical to start from. So if you start with 60%, it's like starting in Year 3, in which case you only have two years of majority ownership.
Mewis
20d ago
If there are people making huge profits, they're not running grocery stores, which as a rule operate on unbelievably thin margins and run losses on some products. Remember - store brands are cheaper than name brands, not the other way around.
Mewis
21d ago
Civ seems to have been slowly devoured by various malign strategy game trends - a tendency to define the possibility of failure as "unfun", scripted events with 2-3 choices, and the cancer that is "perks", even beyond the intrusion of wokist tendencies. So I don't hold on to much hope. I think Civ 6 had some decent ideas with districts, but ended up being too board gamey.
Mewis
23d ago
Not engaging with the system is not an endorsement of the current system. Suppose in the next election, there was only 10% turnout. Would you consider that to be a ringing endorsement of the process? Do you think politicians would stay the course, or would they attempt to win the votes of that nonvoting 90%? Do you apply this same logic to markets? Does dismal sales actually mean that the product is fine, and that nothing should change?
Plus one vote never changed anything.
Mewis
26d ago
It doesn't, but Ukraine needs to do something to keep Western attention and support. In addition, letting Russia operate airfields close to the border is probably not a good idea.
Mewis
30d ago
No, there genuinely has been a decay in trust. Starmer's Labour didn't crack ten million votes, which puts him well behind Cameron's 2010 and 15 performances. And it's true that some of that is driven by third parties, but those third parties didn't drop out of the sky. They're winning votes because there's dissatisfaction with the main parties that didn't exist in 2010.
Mewis
30d ago
It's interesting to note that despite their huge majority, Labour this time didn't win many votes - less, in fact, than five years ago under the controversial Jeremy Corbyn. There's a big hole in the electorate, in other words, waiting to be filled.
Mewis
1mo ago
What is the mechanism that will cause this two week trend to continue forever, until presumably Kamala is acclaimed as Emperor of the Universe?
Mewis
1mo ago
And yet Democrats sometimes lose elections. Kamala might well lose, her chances are worse than Hillary Clinton's.
Mewis
1mo ago
Can Kamala stay as Mystery Democrat for three months? If she doesn't explain herself to the electorate, Trump will do it for her.
Mewis
1mo ago
I mean, she can do that if she really wants but this would be very unorthodox. Dare I say it, even weird.
Mewis
1mo ago
Shucking and jiving outside your campaign bus or calling Repubs weird gets you somewhere with the faithful but it won't win over anyone who isn't. Kamala is going to be in fundraising mode for two months and only then will switch into targeting votes instead of donations.
I don't think there's any peace deal that doesn't result in some combination of territorial gains for Russia and robust security guarantees for Ukraine, which might take the form of NATO membership. This is obviously not what either side really wants, but Russia cannot force Ukraine to accept vassalization, and Ukraine cannot force Russia to release the territory they have taken.
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