Oh bless, caring about civilians! How about the more than 16,000 children murdered and about 4000 child amputees. Yes, it's super reassuring that you care about civilians.
It's the Iranian people who will be the final judge of how much civilian death is acceptable.
If so many Iranian civilians die that this new revolution fails, then not only will regular Iranians continue to suffer, but all the deaths in the protests and these bombings will have been completely pointless.
If few enough Iranians are affected that they persist, then it may well be worth it.
I can't help but think that all this shit is because Netanyahu really wants to put off more court hearings on his lame ass corruption charges. I really can't wait for him and his cronies (in Israel, and the West) to be brought to justice.
Without having to wait for the history books to do their thing.
His court appearance are continuing as scheduled, twice a week, for the last year. except for some specific incidents where he had to leave of cancel due to running a state.
No matter what you think, there is no way for him to avoid these hearings
Great, for those minor charges of accepting what, something like 150k Eur in gifts. As opposed to life in prison for genocide, which he clearly and absolutely deserves.
Go ahead, defend one of the most despicable humans alive this very day. I can't imagine what's going on in your mind. Maybe a combination of Attent and koolaid?
While Netanyahu definitely deserves that, don't expect anything to change for the better in Israeli foreign policy if he gets deposed and tried. Israeli politicians have become radicalized to a level that is hard to imagine from a European or US perspective.
Even the leader of the "left wing" opposition has recently explicitly stated that Israel was gifted the entire region from the Euphrates to the Nile by God, so they would have a right to own the entire region, but that this must be balanced by security concerns and tactical realities. This happened in response to the US ambassador's explicit public remarks in the Tucker Carlson interview that also asserted Israel's God-given right to the entire region. Note that this region, from the Euphrates to the Nile, includes about half of Irak, parts of Syria, most of Lebanon, parts of Saudi Arabia, and of Egypt.
I know Zionism as the idea that Jewish people have the right to self-determination.
Do you:
1 - Think that it is something different?
2 - Think that it is, but Jewish people specifically do not have it? (I believe this is racist)
3 - Think that no people have it?
4 - Something else?
If you think that Jewish people have it but just not in Palestine, where in the world do you think they should have had it?
You're wrong on the definition of zionism.
Zionism is a European nationalist movement that uses the assumption there is a consensual concept of "homogeneous jewish people" who have the right to self-determination to justify Palestine's colonization.
Anti-zionism is being against the colonization of Palestine and being against nationalism and supremacism.
Anti-semitism is hating someone because of the are jew.
So are the vast majority of Israelis, coming from Arab countries, not Zionist? What is your connection with the Zionist movement that let's you define it?
When is a migration of people to a land isn't colonization, in your book?
> So are the vast majority of Israelis, coming from Arab countries, not Zionist?
Yes, they are. Being a European movement doesn't mean non-european cannot be zionist.
Fascism is also a European movement as it emerged in Italy.
> When is a migration of people to a land isn't colonization
When there are no settlements, no oppression of indigenous people, no land exploitation, no discrimination law made by the colonizer.
It's not "in my book", it's in every books not made by a colonizer.
If self-determination means an enthnostate then no people has that right. If every ethnic group had its own state in which it was guaranteed supremacy, the world would be a complete mess. It doesn't work. We are seeing in Israel/Palestine a thoroughly worked out example of why it doesn't work, and what the consequences are when you try to make it work.
How is ethnicity related? Judaism isn't an ethnicity, and there are Jews in Israel from Poland, from Ethiopia and from India. In terms of ethnicity, Israel is probably one of the most diverse places on Earth.
Judaism is a religion, but Jewish identity encompasses ethnicity.
And Judaism is a religion founded on the idea of a "chosen people" formed from the "seed of Israel" after all. And the Tanakh says this chosen people is entitled to the Palestine region. So we can easily see how this is a mythos made of an ethnostate, when interpreted through an extremist (Zionist) lens.
I don't see how Israel/Palestine is any kind of evidence that ethnostates can't work. There are Palestinians that have been peacefully living in Israel just fine for decades. There are unique historical reasons why there's so much conflict in this region.
> Palestinians that have been peacefully living in Israel just fine for decades.
when you write something like this ask yourself if were Palestinian if you would be happy if you son or daughter said they are moving to Israel to live there. if you answer Yes, we good. but of course no way you’d ever say yes…
The Jewish people already loving in Palestine had a right to live there.
The problem is when you try to forcefully displace an entire civilian population to make way for a colonial movement.
In the same way I, as a Finn, would not have the right to take over any region in the Urals and kick out the people who live there, the Zionists had no right to do just that in Palestine since over a hundred years ago.
No one is arguing in support of displacing a population. However, it seems like you believe that everyone should just stay where there are, and no population should ever migrate to any place. That's both naive and simply was never the case in the history of human kind. People migrate, for thousands or reasons, and almost no one leaving on a land on this planet have lived there since the beginning of times.
A piece of land isn't yours because you were born there or your grandpa did. There's one Earth in we need to share it. No one can deny the connection of Jews to the land of Israel, in a same way that no one can deny the connection of Palestinians to the same place. The Palestinians Arab don't need to move back to the Arab Pennisula, where they came from, and the Israelis don't need to move back to Poland, Yemen, Russia, Morocco, you name it. "The times they are a-changin'".
Counter question, by that logic, what about the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people? Or the people of Lebanon or Syria for that matter?
Zionism is the support of the Israeli colonial project. Jewish people have a right to self-determination regardless of Israel's existence; Israel's existence does not determine the right of self-determination for all jews. As such, the two things are not the same.
Zionism, then, is just support for a specific state (Israel), and support or lack or support for a state given its actions (colonial oppression) is not bigotry. Disliking a genocidal ethnostate does not influence in any way how you feel about the Jewish people as an ethnic and religious group. As such, anti-zionism and anti-semitism are not the same.
Jews don’t have a right to an ethnostate. No one does. Jews have a right to live within any country in the world, but not run an apartheid government or commit genocide.
> I know Zionism as the idea that Jewish people have the right to self-determination.
I think the notion that any group has rights is problematic at best. Individuals have rights, not groups. Individuals can act collectively as a group, but the idea that that somehow imbues the group with some sort of right seems strange or confused to say the least.
> I think the notion that any group has rights is problematic at best. Individuals have rights, not groups. Individuals can act collectively as a group, but the idea that that somehow imbues the group with some sort of right seems strange or confused to say the least.
This matches the "individuality thesis" [1] (often debated among philosophers).
For those who haven't explored the territory, I recommend the journey. There is no rush to figure it out. I suggest trying out various viewpoints and taking your time with it: maybe even remaining a bit uncertain for your entire life!
- Uncertainty often takes an unfair beating. Uncertainty is preferable to confused or premature certainty. I would actually go further and say there is deep virtue in uncertainty -- there is an openness there. Absolute certainty closes doors; in a way it closes its eyes to new experience.
- There is value in being uncertain about one's values! For individuals, locking in one's ethics can be unwise. [2] For cultures, value lock-in can be stifling or even oppressive. For AI, value lock-in is sometimes called incorrigibility and can be problematic or worse. Humans have a tendency to grow and change, all the way down to our value systems.
Anyhow, I digress. Here are some relevant selections from Wikipedia's entry on Will Kymlicka:
> In Multicultural Citizenship (1995), Kymlicka argues that group-specific rights are consistent with liberalism, and are particularly appropriate, if not outright demanded, in certain situations.
> For Kymlicka, the standard liberal criticism, which states that group rights are problematic because they often treat individuals as mere carriers of group identities, rather than autonomous social agents, is overstated or oversimplified. The actual problem of minorities and how they should be viewed in liberal democracies is much more complex. There is a distinction between good group rights, bad group rights, and intolerable group rights.
[2]: I learned this from What We Owe The Future by William MacAskill. Did he borrow it from someone else? Maybe Derek Parfit? I'll need to research more.
Was he really that bad? Wasn't the predecessor dude the guy who said something along the lines of "all games will require an Internet connection, you cavemen" or something along those lines?
Xbox has been languishing badly and Microsoft games in general have not been doing very well over the past decade despite gaming becoming completely mainstream so one might suspect that he is being retired rather than retiring. Yes, he was better than Mattrick but that was a very, very low bar to clear.
I will give Spencer a bit of credit though for bringing back Microsoft Flight Simulator.
I want to agree but I don't see the greener grass at all. Please bear in mind that this is totally anecdotal.
I own all three major consoles. My PS5 has been switched on about six times since I purchased it at the time the PSVR2 was released. Is it because I'm not into the funky and weird JRPG titles or am I just sold to the Xbox ecosystem? I play Xbox almost every single day. My PS5 is just using up space and for two titles which didn't fully grip me (Horizon and The Last of Us).
All Xbox games are available on PS5. You can play Forza Horizon just fine on PS5 but Ghost of Yotei is never coming to Xbox. Microsoft had to do this because Xbox sales are dismal (below Xbox One) and they're being outsold 3:1.
When did the last new Gears and Halo games come out again? 5+ years ago? That's what Xbox has, historic exclusives. Gears 1 Reloaded came to PS5, Halo: Campaign Evolved is coming to PS5. All the big recent Xbox games have either come to PS5 or are coming. Indiana Jones, Avowed, Flight Simulator 2024, Forza Horizon 5, etc. Then you have to remember most everything else but Halo 5 and a few Gears games were already on PC too.
The only reason to keep an Xbox these days is for your existing library.
Funky and weird JRPG titles and games with cartoony graphics and ridiculous titles are (a) a small percentage of the PlayStation library given that >99% of games are cross-platform, (b) not nearly global enough in their appeal or sales figures to make any disinterested persons the outliers, and (c) in my experience, many of them also release on Xbox, Switch, and/or PC.
I own no consoles and am neutral on JRPGs and cartoony graphics, so I have no skin in this game. But you seem oddly focused on writing off a functionally identical piece of hardware based on the existence of one particular genre that doesn't interest you.
Sounds like the GP still has the mentality of the PS2/late PS1 era, where JRPG with cartoony graphics were indeed the big trend and pushing force of gaming.
But that very abruptly ended with the PS3, between development costs ballooning and shutting down many longstanding studios, trends shifting to chase open world or the blossoming online FPS genre, a shift of Japanese developers towards "global appeal", and the extremely slow start of the PS3 as a viable console to sell for.
Any JRPG studios surviving past that purge are the stragglers, not the trendsetters. And every company has their battle scars from that time. Final fantasy development exploded in budget, the "Tales of" series coasted along (fans would call it the "call of duty of JRPGs"), Atlus had to be bought out by Sega to survive (and fortunately, thrive), Monolith broke off of Bandai Namco and went to Nintendo, and so many more stories. Falcom seems to be the only one who simply cruised on by, which speaks to how lean and consistent their development cycle was.
I haven’t looked at the specifics but it’s seemed to me that for years anything that came out on Xbox also came out on PC on the same date, and the PC has titles that aren’t on either Xbox or PS5. There are a lot of games that come out on PS5 and then either never come to PC or there’s a year+ delay. Thats why I have a PC and a PS5 and haven’t considered buying an Xbox for a long time.
There are rumors about upcoming handheld Xbox. Many like the idea
It is announced, marketed as handheld Xbox (asus xbox ally x). Quite expensive, but okay.
After some time (!) they reveal that this handheld Xbox actually won’t play your Xbox games/subscription. It will play your pc subscription and pc games. Wtf
Literally about time when the sales of the device actually start, Microsoft racks up the price of Xbox ultimate from $20 to $30 per month. They unsubscribe page is overloaded.
MS appointing someone with no game experience isn't a good sign, but to be expected at this point. Gamers abandoned the platform and I don't expect it to survive much longer.
That documentary looks like it pulled content from Microsoft's own commissioning of a documentary (an excellent one where they pull no punches on the mistakes they made). While most of it focused on the original Xbox going into 360 the last episode discusses the Xbox One years
God I wish I could just block throwaway accounts sometimes.
Since your snark indicates that you clearly have watched the documentary that I am referring to here is the youtube captions of the relevant segment:
"In order to fix this problem, breakthrough came when we understood that the connections that were being broken were not located on the motherboard but they're actually located inside the components.
The problem was a connection was breaking.
The reason it was breaking was thermal, but it wasn't because of the peak temperature; is because when the unit would get hot and then cold, hot and then cold, every time it did that would stress the connection.
All these people loved playing video games, so they would turn this thing on and off, and when it would turn on and off you get all sorts of stresses, and just like when you you bend something too many times till it finally breaks, that's what was happening."
Lets put aside that of the million plus people watching RIP Felix's "research" only a handful of people actually have the technical expertise to confirm or deny his thesis. Regardless of if his "research" is valid or not, his video is not exactly a mass market documentary like the Microsoft one was. The caption above does a good job of generally explaining the issue to normies and then moving on because you know they have like 18 years of history to cover. Its only a small cadre of weirdos that like to take this ~30 seconds of footage and blow it out of proportion.
No, Phil was quite a good exec I believe, but he was dealt a bad hand and never really was able to play his way out of it. I also think he was hamstrung by Microsoft leadership outside of Xbox and the general push toward AI. There were some issues under his leadership. Notably game quality and timeliness languished under his tenure.
Phil was a terrible exec who confused buying things for growth. The ABK acquisition was a disaster. He wanted to buy Nintendo and valve too. They gave him all the cash he wanted and he just lit it on fire.
Reminds me of the Luc Besson film "Leon", which also went by the names "The Professional" and also "Leon: The Professional". A great film but there was definitely something going on in regards to getting crowds interested purely by messing with the title of the film.
Confound: I think one of that film's themes made people deeply uncomfortable, and it was not hidden from the marketing as far as I know. I was a bit put off by its execution myself, even though there's really nothing untoward about it on a factual level.
"Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption" is one of my favourite Stephen King short stories (From "Different Seasons"). I actually read it after watching the film (which is just amazing) and still ended up liking the short story more than the film. I would highly recommend it to just about anyone.
Fun fact Apt pupil has a reference to Shawshank where the main character says he lives off stocks that a banker setup named Dufresne who went to prison for murdering his wife.
King does this all the time in his stories having character connections across different novels, making them set in the same universe. Fun, adds some depth to all of it. Like Randal Flagg being the same villain in the Stand and the Dark tower and Eyes of the Dragon.
Interesting. So Steve Ballmer saved Xbox from the RROD, and then went on to appoint a dude who would go on to make Ballmer even richer. And the new guy then goes on to destroy Xbox once again.
I wonder what this will look like in 20 years from now.
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