No_one
Underemployed Slav. Likes playing Factorio.
User ID: 1042
No_one
1yr ago
EU4 is complex? I've heard people complain it's dumbed down compared to some or other Victoria game.
IMO, something like Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri seems equally complex. EU4 has a million almost inconsequential policies and % modifiers that if combined in the right way can have some serious effect, but it's almost like they don't want to you find out because it takes ten hours before it gets apparent in the game.
No_one
1yr ago
They quickly turned the topic to colonization, blaming it for all the problems in their countries.
It's a favorite Communist tactic to do this. Also saying European prosperity is based on colonialism.
Handy talking point. I know it's a Communist tactic because literal Communists functionaries to whom I was talking (my grandparents) were very big on it, and Communists were known to be hierarchical and coordinate their talking points very well.
You can ask them why then e.g. European countries that never colonised anyone such as say, FInland, Sweden, Poland are all vastly better off despite e.g. Poland starting from the low point of having had an inefficient planned economy imposed on it for decades.
It's mostly nonsense.
American meddling my have damaged South America, but prosperity is based not on piles of money but having functional industries and good economic policies. Ask South Koreans. Colonised, desperately poor in 1950s (poorer than Africa), now one of the richest countries in the world.
No_one
1yr ago
Wait, what. I thought they stopped using it in 1970s-1980s like.. everyone else.
Okay.
No_one
1yr ago
Search out the papers that pushed 'affirmation only care' on gender questioning teens and the laudable editorials on these topics in mainstream US media.
Puberty blockers are pretty nasty, early surgery ditto, surgeries performed on young women etc.
That'd get their attention, that such outrages were condoned in papers of records and allowed by the laws of the land.
No_one
1yr ago
In fairness they have very few decent options.
Because they chose to be fucking idiots. It's self-imposed idiocy to not build nuclear. A sane country could have district and industrial heating done by modular reactors.
The risk posed to health by a passively safe modular reactor buried under five meters of concrete with only salt coolant loops exposed are nonexistent. You could literally kill more people by a bomb big enough to damage it.
No_one
1yr ago
No_one
1yr ago
I mean, the western news media are, in effect, controlled by CIA. Or rather, the US nomenklatura -the elite body. whose members are usually very highly placed. Consider ECFR's (the EU sister organisation)'s own inforgraphic.
Not overtly, there editors know what to run and what not, and if someone doesn't take the hint the resident nomenklatura representative takes the case on.. When the journalist strayed too far from the approved narrative on Douma, an 'editor' who was unlike other editors during curiously little day-to-day work according to their CMS, but had spent several years working for the US nomenklatura got on his case. Of course, it ended up with the foolish journalist leaving.
Internet though, isn't, as Putin who is no doubt well familiar with the extent of Russian cybercrime because it regularly causes international incidents knows.
No_one
1yr ago
China, or at least some Chinese analysts see Russia as defending their western border. Seeing as it's the most industrial country in the world, with some serious long-term planning, it's quite possible they have large conventional weapons in reserve and some production capacity.
Were Russia to fall and be decolonised, the sparsely populated Siberian Republics would end up just being bought by the West. What would prevent US army in Germany from being relocated to northern China border ? That's where the security threat is now, it'd make perfect sense.
So they don't want to let that happen.
No_one
1yr ago
Do you really think the US would be as nimble organisation-wise as back in the 1940s, and be able to transition to arms manufacturing in a couple of years ?
No_one
1yr ago
go back to buying Russian gas long-term instead of completing the gas import terminal projects,
There isn't enough exports worldwide.
EU imports from RU were the size of the LNG spot market.
No_one
1yr ago
You're missing the part where Biafra was starving & forsaken by the entire UNSC, meanwhile Russia has a seat on it, and backing of one of the two strongest nations.
Apart from that, yeah, you can argue delusions and vibes and what not remind you of this & that, hard numbers say otherwise.
Ukrainians have shot serious amounts of artillery deployed anti-personnel mines on Donetsk.
Military usefulness; nil. Maybe delays logistics for a couple of hours. Not sure if anyone lost a foot either. The only prominent victim so far might be Russian 'influencer' who was there for unclear reasons.
They just did it anyway. Most western media reported that either Russians mined their own separatists urban areas in a false flag attack, or that it's 'fake news'.
I do not expect them to target civilians for moral reasons
These are not 'civilians' but separatists or terrorists. The entire area was initially called an anti-terrorist operation zone..
They have been hitting it with various seemingly terror attacks since 2014.
There's zero military utility in a strike aircraft shooting unguided missiles into a city center. These aircraft have no advanced targetting beyond a allistic computer, so pretty much no chance of homing in on any military target. It's just pure spite, basically.
Both sides there have very little in the way of 'warm feelings' towards each other.
You want WaPo ? Here's WaPo writing about the same thing.
You can check out the OPCW Newseek post I linked by the journalist fired. He specifically mentioned the most aggressive person who took him to task over the story was a suspiciously inactive editor who mostly posted jokes and only edited politically sensitive stories. And an ECFR alumnus.
As to the SWPRS article, it could really be anything, from some pissed off Swiss journalist to an unusually slick presentation by Russian intelligence. What matters is that it checks out, largely. But does it matter ? It's boring, right. Who cares that a notionally democratic republic somehow, no matter which party wins, ends up with members of a specific organisation in key posts. Who cares that nothing ever really changes, policy wise. Voters just haven't expressed their preferences!
CFR membership isn't even secret. It's just an incredibly boring topic nobody cares about. Who gives a shit that most of every US cabinet in last 100 years are members of the same pretty exclusive club ? Bores and morons like Chomsky, that's who.
Journalists don't. Some dopey professors.
“America’s single most important non-governmental foreign-policy organization”, whose primary role is to “define the accepted, legitimate, orthodox parameters of discussion.” According to Cohen, “the CFR really is what the Soviets used to call the very top-level of the Nomenklatura.”
Journalists are carefully trained to avoid touchy subjects. Hence, you will never hear about CFR unless you go to e.g. Infowars.
The point is that they wouldn’t be there unless they had already demonstrated that nobody has to tell them what to write because they are going to say the right thing anyway. () They have been through the socialization system.”
Inspite of people like e.g. J.K. Galbraith saying things such as:
“Those of us who had worked for the Kennedy election were tolerated in the government for that reason and had a say, but foreign policy was still with the Council on Foreign Relations people.”
No_one
1yr ago
You got 5 upvotes for a reply that seems to be based on a complete misreading of my post.
The link I posted doesn't claim Finnish media is controlled by CFR. It says CFR members are in every major US media organisation. Who are, in addition, owned by a very few business entities.
Although ,living in a small country and seeing the dismal state of Czech media, which is basically "publish your own takes on foreign policy stuff that are basically what WaPo / NYT said two days ago", there's really no need for control.
They (in this case 'Respekt', a leftist weekly reprint Fareed Zakaria's editorials quite often, and there's really nothing NYT prints they disagree with.
No_one
1yr ago
You are forgetting who is the pre-eminent industrial power in the world.
Hint: it's not the US.
No_one
1yr ago
What, you think that guy at Newsweek who was an 'editor' but with a suspiciously light workload is the only one European CFR alum out there ?
No_one
1yr ago
The mines are trivially easy to clear out from roads and paved areas.
Their utility lies in making advancing through vegetation tricky. Was Donetsk a vegetated area Russia had to advance through ? No.
There's videos of them deployed correctly during the UA's summer retreat in DPR.
No_one
1yr ago
Russian performance in the war doesn't exactly scream competence, so it would be surprising, if they pulled something like this off, so deep in NATOs turf.
Why'd they be sabotaging their own pipeline ?
Biden himself hinted USA is going to do "bring about an end to Nord Stream 2" and declined to elaborate.. A submersible drone bomb was found on site couple of years back.
No_one
1yr ago
I have this sort of arrangement would devolve into complete hell very fast.
If not money, then influence. Hence everything would get incredibly politicised partly because it'd be the only way of getting influence and partly because people wouldn't have much to do.
No_one
1yr ago
Back in the 1990s you can already find progressively minded people such as say, Greg Egan expressing opinions (through their characters) that taking over the universe and terraforming planets is just bad behavior.
I suspect crab mentality and desire to control everything would result in a ban on space exploration. Because if you let people with, I'm assuming universal constructor machines (you want post scarcity, right) get away into space, who knows what they'd get up to there.
OTOH, games have changed much.
Back in the 1990s, games were played mostly by kids of rich people or those with computers, so more likely professionals.
It's reflected in e.g. complexity of AAA games now and then.
Compare Baldur's Gate to Dragon Age.
DA is maybe an order simpler to figure out.
These days, there's now an entire 'second tier' of games made for the demographic that used to be the main games playing one, because all the big franchises got dumbed down.
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