Bay 12 Games Forum

Wtf? Didn't they learn anything from when the whole world raged against them? Not even a little clue?

Yes, they learned that "Wow...that many people paid attention to a pissant little holy-roller church for just TALKING about burning a Koran, I bet we'll be on ALL the talk shows if we actually do it!"

Srsly God? If you're up there, you need to pimp-slap your boy Terry Jones but hard.

Quote from: RedKing on March 30, 2011, 08:16:27 am

It stands to reason there's going to a few AQ folks trying to work their way into the Libyan resistance and steer it towards establishing a religious state. Doesn't mean they're going to succeed.

Well, does being one of 'rebel commanders' counts as 'succeed'?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8407047/Libyan-rebel-commander-admits-his-fighters-have-al-Qaeda-links.html

Quote

al-Hasidi admitted he had earlier fought against 'the foreign invasion' in Afghanistan

In an interview with the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, Mr al-Hasidi admitted that he had recruited "around 25" men from the Derna area in eastern Libya to fight against coalition troops in Iraq. Some of them, he said, are "today are on the front lines in Adjabiya".

Mr al-Hasidi insisted his fighters "are patriots and good Muslims, not terrorists," but added that the "members of al-Qaeda are also good Muslims and are fighting against the invader".

I don't see where he's saying the 25 guys under him are al-Qaeda. It's clever juxtaposition by the editors.

US and British government sources said Mr al-Hasidi was a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, or LIFG, which killed dozens of Libyan troops in guerrilla attacks around Derna and Benghazi in 1995 and 1996.

Even though the LIFG is not part of the al-Qaeda organisation, the United States military's West Point academy has said the two share an "increasingly co-operative relationship". In 2007, documents captured by allied forces from the town of Sinjar, showed LIFG emmbers made up the second-largest cohort of foreign fighters in Iraq, after Saudi Arabia.

Hence, the dude's not even al-Qaeda. He's an Islamist militant, but not all Islamists are created equal. (Not to mention, as a weird aside, when did West Point become a clearinghouse of intel analysis?). I'm not surprised to see some mujhadeen showing up in Libya. Qaddafi was just as repressive towards overtly religious Muslims as most of the Arab dictators are. Mubarak suppressed religion, Ben Ali in Tunisia absolutely repressed it -- women could go to jail for wearing an abaya. They have the same "lip-service/power rivalry" relationship with Islam as many European monarchs did with the Catholic Church.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/sriracha  (although oddly enough, I rarely use Sriracha)

Never did a mega-campaign, the converters look/are crap honestly :/ But the concept of them is awesome.

They take some heavy-duty tweaking and often direct editing of the save files. First time I imported into Victoria, my massive imperial armies were replaced with two regiments. Of Irregulars. I actually tried playing it out anyways, considering it more of a challenge, but internal dissent caused the empire to collapse into chaos before I could get any more troops cranked out. The conversions from CK->EU2 and Victoria->HOI2 work pretty well, because Paradox designed the converters and built them into CK and Victoria: Revolutions, respectively.

I've been bummed that they don't seem to have any plans to put a similar function into any of the newer products. Even though Victoria 2 and HOI3 seem to have a lot of common framework to them.

Of course, this can always be spun as, "Qaddafi is so evil even Osama bin Laden wants him gone!" 

It stands to reason there's going to a few AQ folks trying to work their way into the Libyan resistance and steer it towards establishing a religious state. Doesn't mean they're going to succeed. They've been trying in Egypt as well, and the Egyptian people have pretty flatly said, "We don't want a theocratic state. Piss off."

I think such things continue to happen because we see it happen over and over with no consequences to those at the highest levels. You see it enough, it just breaks your will to the point that you can't even get that angry anymore. It's "rage fatigue".

Good example: I work for HP. We had a CEO, one Mark Hurd:

While CEO of HP, he laid off 10% of the workforce, bought EDS and slashed EDS salaries by 20% or so, and implented wage freezes across the board. Of course, while he cut his own salary 5%, in line with all HP employees, the Board of Directors voted to increase his bonus by the same amount. In 2008, when most of this was going down, Hurd had a $23 MILLION bonus, the largest of any CEO worldwide. This was about 18 times larger than his actual salary.

He then:
1. Hired an ex-softcore porn actress as a "marketing consultant" (to be fair, she did have a business degree).
2. Got some "personal consulting" on the side, if you catch my drift. (It should be noted that Hurd is married.)
3. Used his personal expense account to pay her hush money, until she finally filed a sexual harrassment suit.
4. Resigned, and collected a $34 MILLION severance package. Let me re-iterate this: the man lied, cheated, and embezzled corporate funds, and in return he was PAID more money than I'll ever earn in my lifetime.
5. Was promptly hired by Oracle, with a signing package worth around $200 MILLION in stock options and bonuses. 


So, when you see something like that...I mean, what the hell do you do? You spend your whole childhood being taught that hard work pays off, and stealing is wrong, and bad guys will be punished, and then this. Suffice it to say, I've been looking for a new job ever since, and will be quite happy if HP crumbles into the dust after I leave. I also daily hope to hear that Hurd was disemboweled by a pack of wild dogs, his belongings were swallowed up by the earth, and that his offspring are cursed for the next ten generations. Verily, my seething is of Biblical proportions. 

It's shit like this that causes Bolshevik revolutions.

I think there's a lot of variables involved there that can't be isolated from each other easily. Culture is as important as language, and culture informs and shapes language. The example with Indonesian lack of time-markers (I'm assuming the language was Bahasa Indoneisan) is interesting, but it begs the question: do they lack time recognition because they don't use time-words, or do they lack time-words because they lack recognition? There are a number of Native American languages which have only vague words for time-markers, and their associated cultures do not regard time and punctuality in the same regard as Western culture. But does A cause B, or B cause A, or are they (most likely) interrelated. There's also a certain amount of ethnocentrist assumptions inherent in the question. Inuit researchers might well ask, "Do English speakers fail to recognize differences in the types of snow because they only have one word for it, or do they only have one word because they don't see the differences?"

A more telling experiment would be to compare English speakers from different cultures where English is the primary language (say, the US, Liberia, Australia and Scotland) and look for differences of perception. In that case, the differences are not linguistically derived, but cultural.

And of course, the old Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and "color naming" research dates back to the 1950s. And the framing research with the Super Bowl bit...that's not linguistics, it's classic social science. Political scientists have known this forever.

Fail. It should've been 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11 and 13 to get stolen.

Obviously a devious plot of that archfiend, Mersenne Prime. (The 11 ball was just a red herring to throw us off the trail.)