2rafa
7hr ago
More the second, which is reasonable. When you donated to a thrift store traditionally, the expectation was that the profit from the sale at a modest price would go to some kind of charitable organization. Today, if you donate anything good, a thrift store employee will sell it to themselves for almost nothing, then sell it at a profit online. I have no problem doing a nice thing for charity, but that is no longer what that business is.
2rafa
21hr ago
To me, Armadillo is very goofy and Mexico has plenty of goofiness. Even Blackwater does although it’s toned down considerably. The last third of the game is played broadly straight. Stuff like the medicine man fraudster and a lot of the interactions with the factions in Mexico are pure GTA and played for laughs.
2rafa
21hr ago
In your memory no, but I played it again a few months ago on the Switch and it did, most of the missions are actually classic GTA humor/goofiness, even if the ‘plot’ isn’t and there are moments of greater depth - although the same was true for GTAIV which people remember as a ‘serious story’ even though probably at least half was classic GTA.
Still, I think it’s true that 5 aged worse than any of them, and even at its release was very dumb. Vice City still has a lot of great jokes, gags, clever innuendo, and 4 is a great time capsule to 2006-2009 era New York City. I don’t remember the plot to 5 at all, it’s just a bunch of barely related dumb shit that involves a few heists and some funny moments. I remember the torture scene caused some controversy. I remember the choice at the end, I remember the guy from the 4 DLC getting killed.
2rafa
1d ago
Yes I’d never do the Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace thing, too many petty thieves and hustlers out there, and a few people much worse than that.
2rafa
1d ago
Rockstar announced they’ve excised the juvenile and frat house humor.
Red Dead 2 excised this first (the first game still had a lot of it, as did Bully and to some extent even Max Payne 3) and it was much better for it.
2rafa
1d ago
I sold a bunch of clothing on Vinted and eBay last year because I didn’t like the idea of some awful thrift store employee reselling it, and it went pretty well. One person was unhappy with their item, but to be fair to them I had probably not described its condition as well as I could have. Put it in a box (which I don’t need to even do this time, since I can reuse the boxes they’re shipping them to me in from the store), take it to the post office a three minute walk from my house, send it.
I think it’ll be fun is my thinking, I guess. Plus, if I’m right and scalpers go crazy with limited demand (and the crazy woke but also well informed users of Resetera seem to think there’s a big supply crunch) and these shoot up like GPUs and memory (which is really all they are) then I think the margin on each one could be big, and I might make $1000 for an hour’s work, and also feel good about my foresight, which is a far bigger prize.
If not, I can probably still sell them at close to cost.
I’ve become a (possibly very bad) scalper.
Console prices are shooting up. Microsoft just increased the Series X/S’s price by like $150 across the board. Sony increased the PlayStation’s price by a similar amount recently.
There’s chatter that retailers are struggling to get stock for the anticipated Grand Theft Auto VI boom, which is going to sell a ton of consoles to people who never upgraded from last gen because they had no need to (I looked this up, and the *first current-gen-only Call of Duty is this year; the first current gen only EAFC game is also this year).
I had an Xbox for a while, but it broke, and I had a PS5 but it was lost / possibly stolen in an apartment move. GTA6 isn’t on PC, so I need one of them. So I went to a physical store about an hour ago with a minor (like 10%) discount on the window price for PS5s and I thought, on a whim, that I’d buy out the 4 other units and keep them all in a box until November, then sell them.
I will report back with my win or loss.
2rafa
1d ago
I think the main thing is familiarity, as mentioned below by @Bartender_Venator, unstructured interaction of the kind that happens constantly when you’re in other people’s presence.
For example, I have always had the suspicion that many people who work in a team or a small organization with, like, the same 5-10 people every day for many years or even decades are often far closer and more earnest friends than they care to admit, but because it’s considered loser behavior to say your coworkers are some of your best friends, people don’t discuss it.
2rafa
1d ago
What was the actual alcohol content of the alcohol they were drinking? Wasn’t beer back then like 2% abv? Even the Romans themselves diluted their wine until it was 3-5% according to many estimates.
It’s quite possible they were drinking “all day” and yet still much less drunk than a modern drunk (or college student) drinking 80 proof vodka.
2rafa
1d ago
I think it’s worth separating people like Dase, Kulak and others who have gone on to have the same arguments on slightly nastier and (at least in the latter case) more lucrative platforms from people who have actually ended their underwater basket weaving forum careers altogether (I like to imagine Hlynka is out there somewhere, having a nice time, but he’s probably on Boomer Twitter).
I’m trying to think of the longest I’ve left for over the last decade. A few months here and there, a few times. The thing about Britain is that the Summer always ends, and at some point it’s cold and grey (worse up where you are) and there really isn’t anything better to do on a quiet sunday morning than argue here. Maybe things change with a kid in tow (although there are quite a few parents here already), but I have my doubts.
I don’t know, I disagree that it seems staggeringly high. These are largely poor people who the ruling class basically never sees or cares about living in largely forgotten towns and cities outside of the wealthy southeast (where almost anyone with any influence, power or wealth in this country lives). Promiscuity is very common among the underclass including underclass girls, which is part of why so many were dismissed as prostitutes. I also think the nightlife dynamics are relevant here, even in many of these places where Mirpuris were only 2-4% of the population, they controlled and control large aspects of the nightlife economy including running convenience stores that sold alcohol, almost all taxis and later Ubers (before the Boriswave at least) late night food places etc. It’s not like they were equally represented across professions which also affects access to eg drunk girls.
1.4%? Yeah, a much larger proportion of women have been sexually victimized than that, especially among the poor,, and while a lot of that is domestic, 1.4% for organized or group based grooming abuse seems….possible? Police stats aren’t relevant here - even most middle class women who trust the police don’t report sexual violence. These girls definitely wouldn’t have. Instead you need to look at surveys of sexual victimization that suggest a large number of women are victims of sexual violence during their lifetimes, much of which will happen at a younger age, and which will happen disproportionately to the poor and underclass.
2rafa
3d ago
It was semi-public, and dozens of gangs were publicly tried and are still being tried. There were people (and not just the far right) low key talking about this for many decades. It was a perennial discussion on reactionary forums but also in a lot of social care and police circles; it was brought up in the mainstream conservative press occasionally and sheepishly by opinion columnists, heavily edited. It made the news a few times, just devoid of critical context and scale. It wasn’t a complete secret, it just wasn’t a scandal until in 2014 there was a lot of reporting and a Labour MP around Rotherham started talking about it publicly with parliamentary privilege after a report was published, which was itself because one guy at The Times had doggedly pursued it for several years in a corner of the mainstream press.
it would require on the order of 100K - 1MM underage rapes per year, just from these rape gangs.
Again, why? Consider an abused spouse who is forced into sex by her husband many times a week - she might be raped 500 times in a year. That’s one person.
Girls trafficked or coerced into sexual slavery / prostitution are often raped thousands of times per year. But some may only have been raped a handful of times before their parents physically stopped them from going out, they moved away, or they avoided their abusers themselves directly. It wasn’t like they were being chained up most of the time, they were plied with drugs and alcohol.
So the 250,000 would include women who, aged 13 or 14, were invited to a room about a kebab place or a bodega, essentially, given vodka / weed / coke, and then raped while high/drunk/unconscious and who then never went back, as well as cases where girls were trafficked to hundreds of men.
Why is 14,000 new victims per year unbelievable? There are say 8 million people aged 10-18, 4 million of them girls, at any given time. Through the period a much higher total number of girls passed through that age bracket. Through the period 2000-2018 probably 80% on average were indigenous.
The grooming gangs are best described as a cultural practice rather than a traditional form of organized crime, like the mob (which while an ethnic gang or group of gangs operated at least in some cases under a classic hierarchical structure). Obviously they engaged in other criminality in many cases, were tied to drug and human trafficking etc, but this wasn’t a ‘cartel’ or a ‘pimp’ with thousands of trafficked ‘employees’. These were local phenomena, just spread across the country. There was limited top down organization.
The UK is a pretty populous country. 15,000 girls a year out of 4+ million being involved in group based child sexual abuse like this is a tragedy and an outrage, but the numbers are not unbelievable.
2rafa
4d ago
I don’t think the 250,000 figure is far-fetched at all.
I think most people’s math is wrong. Many victims describe being raped by hundreds of men in relatively small geographic areas. There are communities where a very large proportion of Mirpuri men of all ages, from their mid teens to their sixties and seventies, first and second generation, may have been involved. There is documented evidence of this happening as far back as the 1950s, when there were just a few thousand (at most) Mirpuris in the entire UK. There are communities where documented evidence across enquiries suggests that the majority of girls in some poor estates or especially in care homes were abused. There are countless anecdotal pieces of evidence from hundreds of small towns, cities, villages across the UK - even some where the Pakistani population was less than 2-3% for much of the period, like Telford - where men and women will say “everybody knew” that there were teenage girls involved in this kind of purported prostitution work, people gossiped at schools, the kids all knew some girls who were involved, who recruited others.
Lastly, very very few women have come forward about being victims. Many are now adults, mothers, grandmothers in some cases, with husbands and families who may have no idea about the abuse they’ve suffered. What mother would want to subject her own children to bullying at school calling their mother a [slur] whore or whatever because she spoke publicly about her abuse. Many survivors just want to forget it. I don’t know many northerners closely but I’ve spoken to some - not from any of the infamous places for this - who say everybody knew it was happening when they were kids. And there’s almost no compensation for victims - if you were assaulted by a Weinstein or Al Fayed type, you can come forward and take legal action for millions (of course you can remain anonymous in some cases, but publicity can help there). If you were repeatedly raped by poor immigrant taxi drivers and kebab store owners, you’re not getting anything.
The math, when you consider this happened in pretty much every town and city in England for 40-60 years (in large volumes until 10 years ago, and in some cases still to this day), a country of 70 million people, easily supports a total victim count of 250,000 or indeed much much more.
2rafa
7d ago
They have no route to Iran without American landing vessels, and for a largely conscript army the casualties that would be incurred even if victory was possible would be so high as to existentially threaten the state. If 100,000 young men die in a country of 6 million (when you subtract the Arab and Charedi population who don’t fight) ie 3 million men total, 1.5 million young men, everybody loses people. Plus, there’s no game plan for that quagmire either. A tiny country can’t occupy a hostile major one for long. They can occupy an indifferent one (colonial India) or one where they have a centuries-ahead technological advantage, but no more.
2rafa
7d ago
While I enjoy fiction like the Yiddish Policeman’s Union, I don’t think an Israel anywhere else would have survived either. There were two very large waves of migration that have given the state the necessary human mass to survive (especially given the workshy chareidi population, which for lack of good alternatives probably would have migrated in large numbers to any Jewish state with religious freedom) - the Mizrachi migration and the Soviet migration.
The former wouldn’t have happened without Israel being located where it is (I don’t think the Jewish population of the Middle East would remain particularly large, but like the Christian one it would slowly have trickled out over time due to persecution, mostly to the West, maybe some to Latin America and Asia). The latter would never have happened, because an Israel located in eg (West) Germany would have been in the more discrete enemy category for the USSR than Israel and so emigration would be much less likely to be allowed (yes, some Soviet Jews went to the US, but they usually pretended they’d go to Israel first).
I also don’t think, even in their anger, any of the allies or even many Jewish leaders would have agreed it was structurally stable to carve out a corner of densely populated West (and it would have been West) Germany, ethnically cleanse the natives and establish some kind of Jewish ethnostate. Yes, the Ostsiedler were ethnically cleansed, but that was behind the Iron Curtain, in the chaos of the postwar period, and by countries with tens of millions of people in an empire with hundreds of millions of people.
2rafa
7d ago
The Israeli Arab rapprochement isn’t the risk here. Ultimately the Arab world might destroy Israel, sure, but it’s not the primary threat. MBS still doesn’t care, the domestic population was pacified, there were actually surprisingly few violent pro-Palestinian protests in places like Egypt and Tunisia, the UAE obviously remains onside for Israel. The risk is that the Shiites (primarily in Lebanon but to some extent also Yemen and Iraq) and Hamas alone can make Israel unliveable by first world standards.
By the way, I don’t think the evidence has borne out your speculation on Hamas’ plan. Everything I’ve seen suggests they really did believe they’d storm through to the West Bank and ignite a popular uprising among Palestinians and possibly even Israeli Arabs, and at that point Hezbollah would probably have finally joined in with Iranian permission (which they probably didn’t initially have), and that would have been immediately existential for Israel, fighting on three fronts including internally, everyone throwing everything at them. It wasn’t a PR move.
This is like one of those weird fantasy-movie retcons where the new villain introduced in the sequel is suddenly found to have been the biggest villain all along behind all the bad things that happened. Israel was the primarily villain in the Muslim world for three decades before Khomenei appeared on the scene, Israel had already fought several wars against a varied lineup of Arab muslim enemies.
There was no suggestion that Khomenei invented Muslim anti-zionism. But the transition from secular Arab Nationalism of the PLO and Nasser to anti-zionism with a more explicitly Islamist character - both inside and beyond Palestine - coincides almost perfectly with an expansionary (Sunni) Islamist identity, spread in grand irony from the gulf, that radically reshapes the Muslim world, as Naipaul so adeptly chronicles. That ideology completely changed Islamic identity in Muslim states more populous and in some cases more important than much of the actual Arab heartland. Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Muslims in India, in the Philippines, in West and East Africa. Regions of increasing strategic importance to the United States. Regions where Muslims care much more about Palestine today than they did in 1955.
It was in that context that the Islamic Revolution tried to take that mantle from the Sunnis.
2rafa
7d ago
Nuking Tehran wouldn’t destroy the regime. Tehran is actually a comparative hotbed of opposition compared to other cities. Power and the IRGC are highly distributed, as are weapons stockpiles, missiles, the conventional military, and the nuclear program. Iran is too big to defeat militarily with anything other than a ground invasion, a spontaneous revolution, or both. Even the Japanese only surrendered because they knew the alternative was full invasion. Israel can never invade Iran.
Did the common people know the dragons were extinct in Game of Thrones until long after it happened?
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