Lurker > Criminalt

Big_Nabendu posted...

I mean the winners write history books....

You'll notice that the losers also get to write books and put up statues.

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cjsdowg posted...

You have the "right" do it because you have the power to make it happen.

Like in my earlier example: if someone has the power to force their way into your home, they have the right to do whatever they want once they're inside?

International law (e.g. Hague Convention IV of 1907) recognizes the right of an occupying power to maintain order and govern the territory under its control, but places limits on its authority.

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And if the winners want to force people to sew yellow stars onto their clothes, herd them into cramped ghettoes and then reduce their food to starvation levels, and finally pack them onto cattle trucks and transport them to an unknown destination in the east, we're obliged to respect and defend the winners' right to do all of that "because Julius Caesar said so"? Fuck that dumb shit.

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Goatsensation posted...

"What are they going to do, stab me?" - Also probably said by Julius.

"Ow!" - Almost certainly said by Julius.

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I used to be an isthmus.

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mech dragon posted...

Is this what people are calling white nonsense?

Excuse me, but she identified as black in the 1500s.

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Trumble posted...

This.

Nothing really changes morally, but who the fuck is actually going to stop them?

Kuwait, 1991.

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captpackrat posted...

I'm betting this is going to end up being like Grenfell. Someone cut corners to save money, the building owners knew about it, lots of people got killed, and not a damn thing will happen to anyone.

And someone will be getting a tidy sum of money under the table to make sure things stay that way.

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I'm a little surprised that her weather reports were being forwarded from Dublin to SHAEF in London, considering that the Republic of Ireland was neutral in WWII.

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Makes sense. If someone breaks into your home and you can't defend yourself, they have a perfect legal and moral right to do whatever they want to you, your family, your pets and your property. They're entitled to gang rape your wife, cut your kid's throat, torture you -- anything they feel like. And that's exactly the way it should be, because you failed to defend your home. Call it natural justice.

I'd love to see someone who voted for the first option actually making that argument in all seriousness.

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Because 22's an unlucky number.

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You seem to have misspelt "pretend" as "find out".

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I don't think the concern is the mass extinction of humanity so much as a shitty degradation of the quality of life.

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We know there are things that can be done to mitigate the damage. We're less optimistic that there'll be a hard and sustained global push to do them before a lot of the damage has been done, because of the tendency to ignore, downplay or shrug off the dangers. It's good that there are carrots as well as sticks, but it's important that these schemes aren't simply fashionable ideas or a drop in the ocean.

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Antifar posted...

Other species are going to have just as hard, if not harder, a time.

Indeed. Global warming also happens to be "straight up awful for the Earth". So how does someone manage to reconcile being disgusted by humanity's treatment of it with not caring about the consequences?

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BeantownHero posted...

like a laser focus on the textbook definition of pedophilia

Never a fan of "forget textbook definitions, words can mean anything I want them to" arguments.

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Lokarin posted...

I wonder what kind of status "Ex-widow" entails

Hubby faked his own death in an insurance scam and is now doing time.

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Hands up everyone who thinks they're surplus to requirements.

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I've been told I'm happy, but I'm not really aware of it and I think they're lying.

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nothanks1 posted...

The thing about Donald Trump is he's great. I mean really great. If you were to compare all the US Presidents in the world. Like ok take the planet Earth ok? So here we are on Earth. The planet Earth of course. And we take all the US Presidents of the United States. So we're looking at all the Presidents of the United States of America on the Planet Earth. Because that's where America is. And you ask anyone. I mean really ask. Like you can walk down the street in any place in America. Any place at all. Doesn't matter if it's Wall Street. Or the Walk of Fame. Really anywhere. And ask them who the best President is. They'll answer with Trump. President Donald Trump. And that really is true everywhere. Just the other day I was flying into the jungle in South Brazil and I asked some of the guys in the tribes there what they thought of President Trump and man, you wouldn't believe the amount of praise. The experts, so called experts were telling me on the plane they never saw anything like it. How I just managed to communicate with these non speaking tribes. But something about just made them talk about how good President Donald Trump is.

Something about this leads to me to suspect you're quoting something you've actually heard or read.

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My last sip of alcohol was on February 29, 2008.

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DuranOfForcena posted...

the joke wasn't subtle in any way shape or form

Dude, we're talking CE subtle.

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From a Russian criminal gang that specializes in organ trafficking.

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saspa posted...

And by the end they just look more and more washed out with that stupid grainy dark filter.

It was like they'd made two movies specifically for blind people. Seemed like half the time you needed fucking audio description to work out what was going on.

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OudeGeuze posted...

im a bit upset, i wont lie

Subtlety's not often rewarded here.

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DirtBasedSoap posted...

Im pretty much obsessed with the concept

ISIS recruit detected!

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spikethedevil posted...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tGxAYeeyoIc

1:50 onwards.

Again, much as I love Blackadder Goes Forth, that Ben Elton is a sitcom gag writer who had never really read much history is proven by the fact that he thinks Germany's overseas colonial empire in 1914 consisted of "a small sausage factory in Tanganyika", instead of covering over 1.6 million square miles!


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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJuo7vFK5Lk&t=1s

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The Trent posted...

yeah but i'm scared of what the abnormal people will think

As long as you're on a secure ward, you should be OK.

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ROOTFayth posted...

just eat whole food, mostly plant, not complicated

also dont date fat people, youd be enabling their addiction

I'm happy to disappoint you and others like you.

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I'll lay my cards face up on the table here: I absolutely fucking love fat girls. Flirted with, chased, dated, and bedded more fat girls over the years than I can remember with clarity. And yes, I know that 99% of CE won't get it, but you know what? That's cool. It's not compulsory (or at least, it shouldn't be) to like or dislike anyone or anything. And it'd be absurd, not to say downright unreasonable, to expect everyone to share the same tastes and preferences as ourselves.

You like the things you like, and you don't like the things you don't. Simple as, and fair enough. I'm in no position to accuse anyone of being "shallow" for not wanting to date someone fat, because I place just as much stock in physical attraction and first impressions as most other guys; my aesthetics just happen to be a bit different, that's all.

Besides, if other guys knew what they were missing, I'd have a lot more competition. XD

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UnholyMudcrab posted...

Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August is a perennial recommendation, but is starting to fall out of favor a bit as the historiography of the war changes. Still a good look at the first month of the war on the Western Front.

For an overview, I'd recommend Martin Gilbert's The First World War: A Complete History. John Keegan's The First World War and G.J. Meyer's A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 - 1918 are a bit more of an accessible look, and if you really want a doorstopper, there's Hew Strachan's The First World War - Vol. 1: To Arms.

Yeah, I think it's a shame that Strachan never got around to the rest of what was obviously meant to be a multi-volume series; but considering how much time and effort he put into 1914, he must have realised he would never finish it. XD

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Zeus posted...

But Hitler rose to power at a time when women weren't being given that shot. It's very possible that there were women who embodied that ethos and would have done many of the same things

Agathe Habyarimana, the wife (and later widow) of Rwanda's President Juvnal Habyarimana, was the grand matriarch of the akazu, the Hutu Power clique around the presidential family -- which was the driving force behind the 1994 genocide. Just putting that out there.

This topic definitely took some odd turns...

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SiO4 posted...

I have a soft spot in my heart for WWI.

I actually find it way more interesting than WWII. There are so many folk myths ingrained in the pop-culture memory of WWI that unlearning everything you thought you knew about it is a big part of what makes it so fascinating to study. And there are so many areas that are still under-researched, theres plenty left to learn.

If you suggest to someone that there's scope for a game based on WWI, they'll probably say something like, "Yeah, walk slowly into machine gun fire and die. Rinse and repeat. Great idea." Which pretty much encapsulates the popular image of the Great War: trench warfare and suicidal human wave attacks with added mud, lice and poison gas for local colour -- the Western Front in a 1916 time bubble. But the worldwide dimensions of what was in reality a remarkably multifaceted and complex conflict were much bigger than the muddy moonscapes of France and Flanders, or even Europe.

There was plenty of mobile warfare during WWI. If game developers showed enough interest, did a little research and exercised some imagination, there's no earthly reason why a WWI game would need to be stuck in the trenches.

Want war in the desert? Go for the campaigns in Egypt and Palestine. Jungle fighting? Theres Togoland and the Cameroons in West Africa. How about amphibious and riverine operations? You want Mesopotamia (Iraq). Guerrilla warfare? Montenegro and southern Serbia. City under siege? Qingdao in China. The war on the Eastern Front (where the vast spaces made it harder to achieve unbroken defensive concentrations of the kind of density that was possible in the West) was mostly a war of movement.

Even if you stick to the Western Front, it wasnt all about standing around in trenches waiting to join the next suicidal human wave attack. Whether there was a battle going on or not, attrition never stopped: No Mans Land was an active combat zone -- dominated by snipers during the day, by raiders at night. Trench raids and counter-raids were missions to kill or kidnap, and could be company-sized little local wars of their own. They meant vicious, close-quarter fighting with grenades, revolvers, knives and nail-studded clubs. There was urban combat on the Western Front, too, like the six-day street-fight -- ruin by ruin, cellar by cellar -- for the town of Sailly-Saillisel in October 1916.

Developers just need to lift their gaze beyond the Western Front and see past the clichs of trench siege.

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indica posted...

I think these are both great posts, but do you have links to the sources you're citing?

My sources are books rather than the Web, I'm afraid. In this case, mainly:

• Germany urging Vienna to take firm action against Serbia, the sooner the better: primarily Europe's Last Summer by David Fromkin, 2004; also Planning For War Against Russia and Serbia: Austro-Hungarian and German Military Strategies, 1871-1914 by Graydon A. Tunstall, 1993.
• Russia's territorial ambitions: The Russian Origins of the First World War by Sean McMeekin, 2011.
• Italy's territorial ambitions: The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915-1919 by Mark Thompson, 2008.
• France holding forces back at a distance from the border: Pyrrhic Victory: French Strategy and Operations in the Great War by Robert A. Doughty, 2005.
• Britain having no formal commitment to support France with ground forces, prepared to allow Germany to cut across a corner of Belgium: July 1914: Countdown to War by Sean McMeekin, 2013.
• Ottoman Empire trying to play the two sides against each other: The Ottoman Road to War in 1914: The Ottoman Empire and the First World War by Mustafa Aksakal, 2008.

I've also read The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark, as recommended by @ElatedVenusaur , but it's been quite a while since I read it too.

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DeadBankerDream posted...

It started cause a bloke named Archie Duke shot an ostrich cause he was hungry.

Much as I love Blackadder Goes Forth and admire Baldrick's, um, simple home-spun wisdom... It started because Vienna wanted to smash Serbia and used the assassination as a pretext for a war to punish "state-sponsored terrorism". Franz Ferdinand's murder was basically the 9/11 of its day; except this war escalated from being a regional conflict in the Balkans to being a global war that reached from Cape Cod in the west to China in the east.

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The alliance system often gets lumbered with the whole burden of blame, but it's no more responsible for the conflict than alliances (e.g. those between Britain and Poland, or Italy and Germany) were in WW2.

It wasn't as if governments felt themselves honour-bound by scraps of paper and were just too damn gentlemanly to back out of their commitments. Germany had no obligation to support Austria-Hungary in its war against Serbia: a war which Berlin, in fact, kept pushing Vienna to start as soon as possible. The Triple Alliance was a defensive pact, a defensive pact against the Great Powers, and a war of aggression against Serbia didn't fall into that category. Italy took up arms against its own partners in the Triple Alliance, and its motives can be summed up in two words: territorial ambition. It wanted gains in Tyrol, Carniola, the Dalmatian coast and elsewhere, mainly at Austria-Hungary's expense.

France swung its weight firmly behind war in the West only after elements of the German army made several cross-border incursions into French territory on August 2, 1914; until then, the French army had been ordered to hold back its own forces up to 10 kilometres from the Franco-German border to avoid provocation. Meanwhile, Britain had no formal obligation to support France with ground forces; it only did so (reluctantly) because of a last-minute change of mind, fearing what might happen if the Channel ports fell under German control. The British Cabinet was even prepared to turn a blind eye to German violations of Belgian sovereignty if they amounted to no more than an incursion into one corner of the country.

The Ottoman Empire kept trying to play the two sides against each other and to stay neutral as long as it could, despite its military alliance with Germany, and Constantinople's hawks took the plunge only after furious German diplomats threatened to block financial aid if the empire didn't back the Central Powers with real action. Russia went to war over its own strategic interests in resource-rich Austrian Galicia and in Ottoman Constantinople -- not for the sake of France (and probably not for the sake of Serbia either). The bulk of Russian forces were committed to Galicia (against Austria-Hungary), rather than to East Prussia (against Germany), despite French pleas to relieve pressure on the Western Front.

Although it gets a lot of blame, the alliance system didn't really set up the dominoes and then topple them like it was a mechanism running blindly out of control. This wasn't about governments being tied to war by stupid diplomatic red tape; it was about governments making calculations based on their own security concerns and self-interest. In that regard, WW1 was no more futile, unnecessary, stupid or irrational -- in fact, no different -- than most other wars in the fifty years before or after it.

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When he was alive, yep. We were very different in ways that didn't matter, but very similar in ways that did. Wish I could have known more about him as a person than as a father.

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He should have included at least one car chase.

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Every time I see "uefa" I read it as "urethra".

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I was mis-sold insurance by an anteater once.

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I scrape a blade over the stubble of my scalp every morning and I'm pretty happy with the look.

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You just have to offer people sufficient incentive to go there or stay there.

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DarkRoast posted...

"That will break my heart. But if it needs to be done, it needs to be done."

More likely drooling with excitement as he jerks himself off to fantasies of murdering political opponents.

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Jiggy101011 posted...

What are these posts?

Bait.

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It's a flawed system. But the fear that idiot populism puts too much power into the hands of unscrupulous demagogues is far outweighed by the fact that "alternatives" to democracy would concentrate even more power in the hands of a self-appointed and unaccountable elite, with no guarantee that the common good would be any better served. So... Heads or tails?

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UnfairRepresent posted...

They didn't fail because "they realized they were not dominant" they failed because they stopped tageting RAF targets and started targets civilians because they thought "Hurting morale" did more than blowing up military targets.

A mistake that, incidentally, RAF Bomber Command itself later perpetuated, with Harris's prioritization of bombing German population centres at the expense of attacks against industrial and military targets.

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Fazeo13 posted...

You can make nice set of fake teeth out of chicklets.

Or breadsticks.

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