ZanarkandAbesFan
No bio...
User ID: 2935
ZanarkandAbesFan
7hr ago
I've been replaying Bloodborne. I've noticed that some elements of its gameplay feel a bit less tight compared to more modern games like Lies of P, but it's still an absolute masterpieces.
ZanarkandAbesFan
2d ago
The easy low effort swipe is to make it easier to qualify as a doctor, but doing so without lowering medical standards and/or quality of care seems more difficult. There's also the simple calculus where people are less willing to take on, in the US, large amounts of student debt and to commit to the many years of study it takes to become a qualified doctor. After which you can look forward to high stress, long hours, dealing with patients, and potential lawsuits. It's no surprise that people would rather hustle sneakers or crypto or streaming when the effort to do so is significantly less.
Assuming we're talking about the US, why not make medicine an undergraduate degree, like it is in the rest of the world?
ZanarkandAbesFan
4d ago
"Having to show ID/proof of citizenship to vote" is one of those things that even when I was quite left-wing I didn't think was at all unreasonable.
ZanarkandAbesFan
8d ago
Propaganda and wishful thinking?
That being said, it's probably difficult for even a competent military to deal with the USAF+IAF when they don't have their own air force.
ZanarkandAbesFan
9d ago
There's a lot wrong with this post, but to keep things focussed:
Israeli leadership wants this conflict to have the moral logic of a war for survival rather than a policing action; they simultaneously want to deny the sovereignty of Palestine and deny any responsibility for Palestinian welfare.
Gaza has had complete sovereignty since the mid 2000s. So I don't see any contradiction in Israel treating the conflict as a war.
ZanarkandAbesFan
13d ago
They proceeded to burn all that good will and more with their conduct afterwards
I think this sentiment gives the lie to the idea that there was much goodwill among people on the left and center to begin with (which is the group that dominates traditional media). The messaging from these people basically seems to have been "Yes 10/7 was a terrible thing, but Israel shouldn't actually have done anything about it". The whole MSM/NGO machine was primed from the outset to hyper-focus on every negative outcome the war had on Gazans and portray them as a particular consequence of Israel's uniquely evil conduct, conveniently forgetting that war always negatively affects civilians, particularly those whose leaders try to maximise their own suffering for PR purposes (using human shields, firing from hospitals, stealing aid etc.)
ZanarkandAbesFan
14d ago
I don't have much to comment, except that I hope you and your loved ones stay okay.
ZanarkandAbesFan
18d ago
It strikes me that with each Israeli-USA attack on Iran, it becomes more obvious to any Iranian that a nuclear weapon might be a useful thing to have. The bombings might set back the physical process, but they increase the motivation.
This sort of thing is obvious only to people who accept axiomatically that Israel needs to be destroyed, and that this concern overrides literally everything else. If Iran wants to not be bombed, they could simply give up on this goal, with quite literally no downsides.
ZanarkandAbesFan
19d ago
However the Iranian tactic of "launch ballistic missiles at all our neighbors" might mean the US will end up using fewer interceptors than it otherwise would have.
It's a bold strategy, Cotton, that's for sure.
ZanarkandAbesFan
19d ago
More to the point, it really makes you think that the whole problem of the last twenty years was leaders who were aware of U.S. dominance but had other goals in mind, probably including enrichment of cronies, that depended on the U.S. sandbagging hard. And arguably this is just the U.S. being let off the leash. We haven't even removed the leg weights yet.
It's interesting. I don't have the exact tweets to hand but I've seen a fair few that go along the lines of "If it's this easy, what have we been doing the last several decades"?
I'm sure this has already occurred to you, but it's worth pointing out the difference between expressing greater sympathy for the Palestinians i.e. thinking they're probably having a worse time of it, and actively "supporting" them (to use functor's terminology) in their goal to eliminate every Jew in the ME.
ZanarkandAbesFan
20d ago
That's fair enough. Do we have a sense of Iran's likely missile capabilities? My sense was that Israel destroyed/absorbed a huge chunk of this during the Summer, and given that the Iranians don't seem to have managed to fire off much that's hit anything of strategic importance over the last 24 hours, I assume they haven't managed to replenish their stocks. Or has the US been spending its interceptors already?
How much in the way of resources does the US realistically stand to lose here? I'm definitely not a military expert, but it looks like the Iranians seem to have little ability to attack anything of significant military value. They've set a hotel in Dubai on fire and killed one Israeli AFAIK. And I don't particularly buy the Iranian line that they're holding back, but next time they'll really retaliate.
I also disagree on the reputational front. Striking when the protests were at their peak would of course have been ideal, but carrying out a strike now after having moved so many military assets into the region and having made so many threats seem strictly better for the US' reputation at this point than not doing anything at all and demonstrating that none of the threats or posturing had any credibility from the start. I also do think that demonstrating that the US isn't afraid to eliminate the leaders of actively hostile states does affect the behaviour of these leaders even if it by itself doesn't revolutionise the state in question.
ZanarkandAbesFan
21d ago
In related news, not everything is lost. Here is how Iran can still win. When all human wit and wisdom failed, listen to the cat girls. What can go wrong?
Watching third worldists' minds melt is always a surreal experience. Thanks for the lols.
ZanarkandAbesFan
21d ago
I don't really see what the failure case is here. Trump's unlikely to send in ground troops, so the most probably worst case outcome from the US' POV is that a heavily degraded IRGC maintains control of the country. That's not any worse for the US than the status quo.
ZanarkandAbesFan
21d ago
They had a deal yen years ago but Trump broke it.
Well, the obvious answer would be that Trump wants a better deal.
ZanarkandAbesFan
21d ago
If I were in charge I'd name these operations the same way reddit autogenerates usernames.
Operation Strange_Custard_5437
ZanarkandAbesFan
21d ago
Clearly.
I assumed Trump was too invested in a deal of some sort, even a bad one. I also thought he would be too cautious to commit lots of US forces against a country like Iran. All misjudgements on my part.
ZanarkandAbesFan
21d ago
Playing through Lies of P for my second time. Partially because I got the itch after watching some of Joseph Anderson's stream of it, and partially
It's really surprising to me how much more I've enjoyed it this time through. I think a large part of it is just how much easier it's been for me this time around, meaning I've been able to enjoy the combat mechanics and boss fights rather than finding the whole process mostly stressful the first time through. This has other benefits: taking the time to beat the tougher non-boss enemies rather than running past them means I've picked up more upgrade materials, in turn making my character stronger and the boss fights less punishing. The whole time period and setting has also really grown on me, probably because having played Soulsborne games for ~13 years now I'm just tired of the whole medieval fantasy aesthetic.
ZanarkandAbesFan
24d ago
The FBI director being a fanboy is cringe, but that's all.
I don't even know see it's cringe, honestly.
ZanarkandAbesFan
26d ago
About half of US deployable air power is ready for Iran boogaloo 2.0. It would be very symbolic if it began exactly at 4th anniversary of three day special operation to desatanize Ukraine.
How it will start? As massive decapitation strike on enemy elite human capital.
I'm fairly sure nothing's going to happen. My bet is Trump will get no concessions in negotiations, then he'll loudly make up something about how he got the IRGC to agree to a deal where they stop funding terror/their nuke program and rant about how he deserves the Nobel Peace prize, the Iranians will say they didn't agree to any of that and Trump just hopes everyone will forget the whole circus.
I think prescriptivism has its place when it comes to helping individual people communicate more smoothly or socially appropriately, but trying to apply it on a larger scale is basically nonsensical. If enough people start saying "him and I went to the store together" then the analysis of the language simply updates to recognise "him" as functioning as a subject pronoun in that context (or more realistically, acceptable in a certain register of the language, but that's another topic). I'm fairly sure you already do this sort of thing: for instance, I'm going to bet you say "It is me" when you answer the telephone, rather than "It is I", despite the latter being technically "correct", according to prescriptivists.
I get a lot of the motive behind prescriptivism, particularly in an era when it seems like it's difficult to recognise the value of certain standards in behaviour, dress, or indeed language without some relativist going all "akshually" about how it's all just some cis-heteronormative construct or whatever. And if I'm helping a younger relative write a university or job application letter I'm definitely going to make sure they get their "he and I"s the right way around. But if I'm doing the same thing in twenty years and everyone is saying "him and I" by that point, then I'm going to tell them to write that instead.
ZanarkandAbesFan
26d ago
I live in Sweden. The vast majority of people I come into contact with speak English and Swedish. Almost none speak a third language (that I know of), unless they're originally from another country.
IME the whole "Europeans all speak 3-4 languages" meme is standard reddit European superiority complex.
I'm skeptical of how many people actually think like this. I think it's often just a convenient criticism to level against the other side when someone wants to avoid the social consequences of being forthright about the actual objection. Since it's still mostly frowned upon to openly say "I'm angry about the war in Iran because I hate Trump/America/Jews", it's much easier to make the objection that actually, it's just because an unrealistic standard of forward planning wasn't met.
I'm sure this doesn't apply universally; there are probably people out there who genuinely are favourable to this sort of ME intervention in principle but simply don't agree with how the current one is playing out. But certainly on the Motte and among the MSM I've noticed that that the people saying "there's no plan!" are the same people who anti-Israel generally.
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