FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
It certainly gelled with the tone of the story, but the developers have made it abundantly clear that they set out to design a game with fun gameplay. The resulting monotonous drudgery, it seems, was just a happy accident.
Playing Kane and Lynch: Dead Men, which I last played over a decade ago. Very much a product of its time. You rather get the impression that the Danish writers lacked confidence in their ability to write convincing Anglophone tough-guy dialogue, and compensated by just having every character (and I mean every character) curse a lot. The voice actors do what they can with the material they're given, but the results are... not entirely convincing. Comparisons to Michael Mann are unavoidable, with setpieces clearly modelled on Collateral and Heat (for most of the game Kane carries a black bag on his back much like those De Niro, Sizemore and Kilmer wore during the bank heist, and Lynch sans glasses even looks a bit like Waingro). Sound mixing is atrocious, with gunfire sounding weak and tinny and dialogue sometimes inaudible (and not, I think, as an artistic choice). When Spec Ops: The Line came out, its gameplay was so poorly received that some people suspected it might even have been made bad on purpose, but it's a mechanical masterpiece compared to this game: how on earth do you design a cover-based shooter without a dedicated "get into cover" button? Tonally, it actually has a lot in common with Spec Ops, with everything constantly going wrong for the protagonists no matter what they do. I've heard some people interpreted the game as sort of a deconstruction of Grand Theft Auto, and that makes a certain amount of sense: the decision to populate most levels with numerous civilians who will inevitably get caught in the crossfire certainly didn't happen by accident. Gritty, sloppy fun, for all its faults.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
7hr ago
"She sent me to Coventry on WhatsApp and Snapchat" doesn't have quite the same ring to it, does it?
But it is nothing new, this is just an annoying modern trend of noticing age old issue and inventing new word for it, there are hundreds of those such as "quiet quitting" being a hot new trend of age old "punching the clock", the same for other things such as ghosting, gatekeeping, gaslighting and many more.
In fairness, the term "gaslight" dates back to the 1930s, although people only started using it as a verb two decades later. I am sort of curious what people called "ghosting" before that term came into vogue.
This week's thread went live recently, you might want to post this there as well.
I have no interest in seeing The Odyssey, as I've long felt that Nolan is an overrated writer-director. With each passing year it seems the shine is starting to come off for more and more people, and his limitations are becoming more obvious.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
14hr ago
The article I linked to in the Journal was specifically about countries like Spain, Ireland and Norway taking in refugees.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
It isn't difficult to find examples of Westerners who explicitly argue that allowing Palestinian civilians to leave Gaza would amount to ethnic cleansing.
I know the Arabs don't give a shit about the Palestinians, but The Journal is a left-leaning Irish outlet quite forcefully arguing that it would be wrong for Ireland to accept Palestinian refugees (and I'm pretty confident I could find plenty of articles in which they argue the opposite about those coming from Ukraine). E.g.:
- An article where they fact-check a video claiming most Ukrainian refugees are unemployed: https://www.thejournal.ie/ukrainians-ireland-unemployement-rate-90-percent-workers-national-misinformation-7031572-May2026/
- An article criticising anti-immigration activists and implicitly taking the stance that Ireland taking in Ukrainian refugees is a good thing: https://www.thejournal.ie/fermoy-anti-immigration-protests-derek-blighe-5934834-Dec2022/
From AP News, Why Egypt and other Arab countries are unwilling to take in Palestinian refugees from Gaza:
Their refusal is rooted in fear that Israel wants to force a permanent expulsion of Palestinians into their countries and nullify Palestinian demands for statehood.
Arab countries and many Palestinians also suspect Israel might use this opportunity to force permanent demographic changes to wreck Palestinian demands for statehood in Gaza, the West Bank and east Jerusalem, which was also captured by Israel in 1967.
El-Sissi repeated warnings Wednesday that an exodus from Gaza was intended to “eliminate the Palestinian cause … the most important cause of our region.”
“All historical precedent points to the fact that when Palestinians are forced to leave Palestinian territory, they are not allowed to return back,” said H.A. Hellyer, a senior associate fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Egypt doesn’t want to be complicit in ethnic cleansing in Gaza." [emphasis mine]
Obviously I don't believe these people. The reason Egypt doesn't want to accept refugees from Gaza is the same reason they built a massive wall along the border which extends several feet below ground level: they know that if Gazans come into Egypt, they will cause trouble. But the stated position of the Egyptian government is that accepting Gazan refugees into Egypt is tantamount to the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and plenty of Western people seem to accept this reasoning at face value.
See also this article in The Journal (kind of like the Irish equivalent of the Guardian):
The language employed in Katz’s statement is an example of what Baoumi called “humanitarian camouflage”, or as the Arabic saying goes, “poison in honey”.
By this he means that Israel often attempts to “conceal criminal behaviour in the guise of a humanitarian cause”.
In this case, he said Israel is trying to justify “the mass displacement and ethnic cleansing” of Gaza [emphasis mine] by cloaking it in the language of international legal principles.
Palestinians in Gaza: do they have a right to seek asylum elsewhere?:
UNHCR has not overtly espoused this argument, which is belied by the fact that some Gaza residents are paying large amounts of money to leave, and which effectively denies them the right to exercise freedom of choice. Even so, there is an indication of such thinking in the statement provided by UNHCR, which prioritizes ‘final status issues’ over the question of asylum, and which asserts that an exodus from Gaza will make the resolution of the Palestinian refugee situation as a whole “even more intractable.”
In other words, the people of Gaza should not seek protection elsewhere, because to do so would complicate and compromise the UN-endorsed principle that Palestinian refugees have a right to return to and establish their own state. And that is an awkward position to take for an organization that simultaneously affirms that people have a universal and non-negotiable right to seek asylum.
A final point to be made about the UNHCR statement concerns its suggestion that if the Palestinians currently trapped in Gaza were to leave the territory and seek asylum elsewhere, this would facilitate any intention that Israel might have to deport, forcibly transfer or ‘ethnically cleanse’ those people [emphasis mine]. As many commentators have pointed out, if that were to happen, Israel would almost certainly not allow them to come back, and would be likely to repopulate Gaza with militant Jewish settlers, as is happening in the West Bank.
This was just a cursory Google on my phone, and it wasn't difficult to find three completely separate sources making the same basic argument: that allowing Palestinian civilians to flee Gaza amounts to ethnically cleansing it, and that it is only just to sacrifice said civilians on the altar of an independent Palestinian state, even if they would prefer not to be so sacrificed.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
What proportion of Gaza's civilian population has left Gaza for another country since the war began vs. what proportion of Ukraine's?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Palestinians not being ethnically cleansed from their ancestral homeland is good for everyone
Except, presumably, the Palestinian civilians getting caught in the crossfire of the conflict in Gaza.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
100%. Every successful novelist will tell you the importance of writing 1,000 words a day, every day, even if (especially if) you don't feel like it or don't feel "inspired".
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
I hardly think 'this risks turning half the population into appliances for the other half' is a trivial complaint.
In absolute terms, no. By comparison to the extinction of the human race? Definitely.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Just try not to apply similar standards to Gaza, a conflict which has a far higher casualty rate among the civilian population.
I strongly suspect that most people with "FREE PALESTINE" in their Instagram bios don't want to let Palestinian refugees into Europe (or anywhere outside of Gaza), because that would constitute "ethnic cleansing".
This has the same "Republicans pounce!" energy as those people arguing "the only reason people are aware of trans is because of anti-trans people talking about it!"
AIDS might have been treated as more worthy of public attention, rather that being initially ignored as only affecting people they thought didn't matter;
I read an article recently arguing that this claim is essentially a myth invented by LGBT activists, must see if I can dig it out.
the public health advice might have been less "Stop being gay" and more "Either form exclusive relationships like straight couples do, or if you insist on having coitus with strangers, use a condom";
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the argument from cultural evolution. Joseph Henrich et al. argue that cultures which survive will be those that develop memes optimised for survival. The cultures may have explanatory hypotheses for why these memes are effective, those hypotheses may be dead wrong, and yet the memes themselves still work. Cultures organically converged on the idea that gay sex is dangerous centuries prior to the discovery of germ theory or the invention of reliable latex condoms. Their explanations for why gay sex is a bad idea were factually in error, but "gay sex is bad because Allah does not will it" and "gay sex is bad because you will catch a disease which will kill you in a matter of years" both suggest the same course of action: don't have gay sex.
Gay men in the 1970s might well have asked "well, why shouldn't I have unprotected sex with dozens of men who are all doing the same thing?" Most likely their family and friends wouldn't have been able to articulate a specific casual mechanism by which this was a bad idea. That doesn't mean their family and friends were wrong about it being a bad idea.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Yes, that was the exact point I was making all along (and if by "primitive" you mean "the 1980s")! If you don't have antiretrovirals and latex condoms, then ceteris paribus any society which tolerates homosexuality will be outcompeted by those that do not. Technological progress can sometimes render certain Chesterton's fences obsolete, but tragically (as the example of AIDS illustrates), we often discover the load-bearing purpose they serve only after dismantling them.
…unlike the first, which had such a great time over the next 2500 years?
Seems like a great argument for the tenacity of their memes (including prohibition on homosexuality) in the face of overwhelming hostility from literally every other tribe they came into (come into) contact with. The story of Jewish success is really a story of their having superior memes to their competitors: it's no wonder they've wielded such power and influence in Hollywood for so many decades.
And no, I think I’ve got a decent understanding of the Roman collapse.
Admittedly, my ascription of the collapse of these empires to that cause was somewhat facetious. But it is interesting that both empires collapsed or were absorbed into other tribes, while the Israelites are still going strong and a distinct cultural tribal grouping many thousands of years later.
Attributing the ascendancy of a particular species to a specific gene is foolhardy: it's a particular package or constellation of genes that wins out over its competitors. Likewise with memes: no single meme is necessary and sufficient. Cultures which survive and thrive are those with an evolutionarily fit package of memes, of which prohibition of homosexuality was likely one, but prohibition of homosexuality is not necessary and sufficient in its own right. A tribe which prohibited homosexuality but encouraged all its members to sterilise themselves or to eat hemlock could not reasonably expect to outcompete a tribe which did none of those things.
According to Wikipedia, homosexuality in the UK was partially decriminalised in 1967. This article by Peter Tatchell claims that ~100k men were convicted of homosexual offenses between 1885 and 2013, of which 15,000 were convicted after 1967 i.e. an average of over 1,000 convictions a year before 1967 vs. 326 after. Obviously the UK population was much higher in 2013 than in 1885, so convictions per capita in the two periods would be much more disparate. Taking the population sizes at the beginning and end of the two periods and averaging them suggests the period 1885-1967 saw 2.2 convictions/100k population/year, while the period 1967-2013 saw 0.5/100k population/year. In other words, a gay man was more than four times more likely to be convicted for his sexuality in the period 1885-1967 than he was in the period 1967-2013.
This certainly seems consistent with the claim that increasing liberalisation and tolerance for homosexuality was a precipitating factor for the AIDS crisis.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
The West became dominant decades if not centuries prior to the destigmatization of homosexuality. Until very recently, the West stigmatised homosexuality almost as aggressively as the Arab countries do today (e.g. Turing probably deserves as much credit as Churchill for ending the war in Europe, but when his sexuality was discovered, he was not simply let off with a slap on the wrist). The new CEO does not get to take credit for the accomplishments of his predecessor.
Sure, most STDs before HIV was not particularly lethal.
STDs that we know of. The Joseph Henrich argument is that cultures with memes optimised for evolutionary fitness will outcompete cultures without. For all we know, there could well have been ancient cultures in which homosexuality and free love were tolerated, and which hence went extinct at the hands of some sexually transmitted pathogen that modern medicine has never encountered.
I also think your rebuttal rests on an implicit Nirvana fallacy. Yes, cultures in which homosexuality was aggressively stigmatised still had STDs. Is your contention that, had they not stigmatised homosexuality, the rate of syphilis transmission in Victorian Britain would have been the same or lower?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
So the Israelites knew about STDs, but not the Romans and Greeks?
Haven't you ever wondered why the latter two empires collapsed?
Homosexuality prohibitions didn't stop 10% of Victorian Britain from getting syphilis.
Yes, and yet you will notice that syphilis is far less lethal than HIV.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
I completely understand, I was just curious.
Thus perfectly replicating the experience of the original for modern gamers.
/s I've never played either. Previous discussion here.
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