CUNT

Drone alert

Drone alert

Nintendoes what Osskan't

My Internet isn't working so well anymore, guess that's it for me tonight :S

Need one more person.

awww yeeeaaahhh boiiii

Give me about an hour or so to get online.

Quote from: Kupo on April 01, 2015, 04:41:02 PM

Quote from: ねこ on April 01, 2015, 04:31:17 PM

Quote from: Kupo on April 01, 2015, 04:29:57 PM

So wait, Sunday, right? >.>

If it's Friday I might be a little bit late. Sunday sounds good though.

No, I work on Sunday >:c

But I thought Rocket's only free day is on Sunday >.>

I'm not rocket bitch >:c

>.> like nobody else checked in again so for all we know it's just going to be one-on-one. Change the title to tell people to check in again.

So wait, Sunday, right? >.>

If it's Friday I might be a little bit late. Sunday sounds good though.

Quote from: Kupo on April 01, 2015, 02:17:31 PM

Fucking hell. Bibi just had to go and abandon Israel's moral high ground for his own re-election, and I can't say I blame Obama for this outcome. The US cannot so strongly associate with a head of state who uses scare tactics and abandons his own principles for selfish political gain. We were already seemingly the last Western power to give a damn about Israel's safety, and at least right now it would only be hurting our image.

God fucking dammit.

Netanyahu wasn't exactly wrong. Hamas is a barrier to the two-state solution.

Yeah, you're right though.

Fuck, I don't even know what to think.

Ah, Jon Stewart said something about that, after pointing out kids in the crowd wearing Rand Paul t-shirts. I can't say it as elegantly as he did, but you know, there's an irony about a university named Liberty practicing the very opposite of that.

Are you referring to 9/11? That had nothing to do with the Iraq war.

As I've already said a lot of times in this thread, it's foolish to believe that post-9/11 fearmongering did not play a part in the US government's justification of the Iraq war. I've yet to see anyone actually counter that claim, considering the obvious evidence supporting it.

Agreed, but that's not the initial narrative you were trying to spin.

I suppose it's ironic then, because the reasons for the Iraq war being presented by you and Meta were not the original justifications for the war.

Please tell me how a 50/50 approval rating of Obama has anything to do with what we're talking about.

It's to the Iraqi's thoughts on the invasion--lukewarm at best.

Sorry what? Please tell me how the Iraq War contributed to formation of ISIS in 1999?

I must sound like a broken record at this point--the modern incarnation of ISIS was directly caused by the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

All these wars were aggravated on behalf of the Communist governments, not the US, especially the Bay Of Pigs seeing as how Cuba was fucking around with US oil and had strong ties to the Soviet Union.

Paranoia sure is a common theme in conservative foreign policies.

Iran is a (relatively, and I emphasize relatively) stable middle eastern region, much more stable than Iraq during the early noughties, and I find it laughable that you would even try to draw a comparison between the two. Obviously it's got some tensions with the US regarding it's nukes, but from what I recall, Ahmadinejad didn't participate in ethnic cleansing, fucking around with oil (which would've effected the entire world economy) or try to annex Kuwait.

Palestine is barely even a sovereign nation anymore, no thanks to Hamas. I fail to see the relevancy between Palestine and Hussein controlled Iraq though.

The Iranian government has its own fair share of egregious human rights issues. You're just dismissing it because there's no legitimate reasons why we shouldn't invade them, too. Oh, and they have it in their country's constitution that one of their primary reasons for existence is to wipe Israel clean off the map. It's a declaration of war if I've ever seen one, certainly a lot more clearly than whatever you imagine Saddam to have been saying in 2003.

And as I've already implied before, the oil situation was like exaggerated to some significant degree.

Regardless of Hamas' legitimacy as a government, Palestine is still a sovereign nation. Considering their own litany of human rights abuses, we should invade them, too, along with Iran.

Or does someone need to invent false claims of active weapons programs for that to happen?

Syria? The FSA is being supported by the US, I would like to add, although granted, the FSA aren't exactly angelic either. And again, Assad wasn't nearly doing half the shit Hussein committed. Internet surveillance, torture and secret police? Yeah, it's despicable shit, but in comparison to Hussein he's practically Nelson Mandela.

Do you live under a rock? We didn't even need to look under any couches to find those chemical weapons. There's instantly a stronger case for invading Syria than there ever was for Iraq in 2003.

Don't be so fucking facile. While I do think the establishment of an Iraqi democracy was a good thing in the sense that it gave autonomy to the Kurds and the Shi'a, which is an extension of our imposition of no-fly zones over the north and south to protect them when Saddam was still in power.

But it was hasty, and poorly done, I think. And Nouri al-Maliki's failure is testament to that. But, I'm sure you quite clearly understand that liberation is not equivocal to democratisation.

Democratization is the most obvious outcome of liberation by a Western country. And indeed, it was certainly one of the US's primary reasons for invading Iraq. You haven't quite denied it so much as dance around it.

Who the fuck is more deserving than a country which has the potential to cripple the world economy and, who by a happy coincidence, we have been intimately involved in for a long time. North Korea is probably in more dire straits, from a humanitarian perspective, but you can't say to me that picking your battles is not a valid strategy.

The US has more than enough of its own resources to reasonably sustain itself, but curiously its dependence on other countries skyrocketed during the Clinton and Bush years. Kind of funny how that works, declare a war because keeping the availability of oil limited because that's more profitable.

But how can you say that factually incorrect claims about the threat of Iraq (which you've still yet to refute) would somehow demand its prioritization over literally genocide.

NK is cushy with China so it's unlikely we'll actually do something about them unless China decides Kim has gone off the wall.

Yeah, it was. Again we come back to this problem you seem to have with people being nuanced. Why do you insist on relentlessly conflating support for the war, for support for Bush? I kind of like Bush for prosecuting the war, but it would've been better if Clinton had done it. And I don't like Bush for giving it a bad name.

You're confusing 'nuance' for logical gymnastics. You support it but then... you don't for some inane reason.

I'm sorry, do you have a stutter?

I have consistency and a brain enough to know when reckless foreign policy has fucked us up the ass.

Right, and so do the NSA programmes, as if every other developed nation doesn't spy on their people. Geopolitics is a theatre, the only difference is that people's lives are involved.

How many countries do we know of that have been spying on the emails of countries that call us their ally? It's like patting them on the back in friendly way and putting a 'kick me' sign on their back.

I don't think the diplomatic damage even comes close to outweighing the positives.

If you believe preposterous claims such as that, then I know the perfect place where you can hone your abilities as a logical gymnast.

Big whoop, he was dumb and put a sign on an aircraft carrier.

He lied. Why do you insist on handwaving that? (Simply saying you're not isn't a valid claim, because everything else you've said runs counter to that.)

I know, I mentioned Darfur later in my comment. I'm not sure I'd say it was worse than Saddam's Iraq, and I honestly don't know which country was more deserving in humanitarian terms. But, like Rwanda and Burma, it's a fucking tragedy that nobody paid any goddamn attention to it.

But the fact that we, tragically, ignored Darfur is not an argument for why not ignoring Iraq was a bad course of action.

Iraq was hyped up the US government. The situation in Darfur was leagues worse than it was in Iraq. Darfur's tragedy is that it doesn't have any oil.

Who cares?

Considering the fact that we're still in Iraq 12 years and 2 trillion dollars later, you should. But, you know, it's easier to just handwave it.

I don't care if Bush did it because he liked to wank over the bodies of dead Iraqi soldiers and insurgents. The consequences are what matters. Saying I should care that the US never intended to do those things is like saying I should oppose that new Indiana law even if it causes bigoted businesses to go bankrupt.

Yeah, and I'm not going to list all the consequences all over again.

I know, and it's fucking horrendous.

Your batshit view of the world allowed it to happen.

The mess in Iraq--meaning ISIS--is only our fault to the extent that as we left, it allowed them to make a push for eastern Syrian oilfields and take swathes of Iraq, as well as--I think--the newly-found oilfields in the Sunni areas of the country. Sectarianism is to blame for ISIS's current existence.

But, like I said, it ain't a five-year job. It sucks that we're still there, but the French experience in Mali has shown it is indeed possible to fight insurgencies. And there will be a lot more insurgencies to fight in the future, and we will fuck up along the way. But this isn't just a geopolitical fight, it's a moral one too. Everybody's worried about what the Jihadists might think when we do something, I'd rather they worry about what we have to think.

It's never going to end, you know. New threats will keep cropping up in the Middle East, and those will become the new reasons to stay in Iraq. The military'll keep stringing us along saying that, no, this is now the biggest threat to America. The same way it's been for decades, except this is going to be the longest time we've ever stayed in one country. Anything that doesn't have oil or is south of the equator is going to go nearly unrecognized by the Western powers that be.

to what

To war

Why do you need other people to tell you?

This.

I don't see much of a difference.

>.> Actually, I found something.

There's a cinematic mod for the game that overhauls the graphics and general look of the game by a lot. The environments are pretty but the character models are horrendous (and optional, I think?), and apparently the music is changed too. Sounds very hit-or-miss.

Quote from: Kupo on March 31, 2015, 04:19:34 PM

Quote from: Casper on March 31, 2015, 12:17:09 PM

I don't see much of a difference.

Yeah, some areas seemed to be lacking in any major changes. But mainly, certain indoor areas and foggy areas looked the most improved. I might give Half-Life 2 another try if this mod finally stops this game from giving me motion sickness >.>

Howd it do that? Have you adjusted the FOV?

I don't know. Dishonored did the same thing to me, and both games' art was directed by Victor Antonov, so I just always assumed it was something about his art style.

How should I adjust the FOV? Wider or narrower?