That’s the whole theme song. I don’t understand this meme.
That’s the whole theme song. I don’t understand this meme.
That’s great. I wish all this stuff was more accessible to watch.
Well that’s dystopian and dark.
That’s nuts. I was hoping it might explain how, but nope: they’re like, “We’ve got no idea.”
Remarkable. It’s nice to be reminded how much about our world still lies undiscovered.
I shouldn’t bother responding to this, but I have to point out that this weird assumption that scholars of Christianity are all Christian partisans seems pretty similar to people who say that climatologists are all biased in favor of a global warming hoax.
You don’t think anyone goes into studying a field to challenge the orthodoxy? That’s the fastest way to get famous. Even if the rest of your field hates you, you can make an incredibly lucrative career out of being “the outsider”. I literally linked to a collection of experts who agree with you.
If you don’t believe the experts, I guess it’s fine. But it’s weird when people use expertise on a subject as proof of bias to discredit expertise. It’s just such a silly thing to do.
I didn’t say which side I come down on. I just said that there is lots of information with plenty of high quality citations.
I’m really happy that everyone is a winner.
It’s weird how many people in this thread are vaguely debating the validity of the historical research into this question when one person has posted a link to a well cited article on this very very heavily studied subject.
There’s even a link to a well cited article examining the skepticism of the historicity of Jesus: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_myth_theory
I don’t feel compelled to argue an interpretation. The facts are well documented and their interpretations by experts available. What anyone chooses to do with these are of no real concern to me.
Agree 100%
I agree with that. Looking through, I find understanding the basic rules to be kind of a burden. It took me a while to realize that “Operations” is the rules section.
I think it makes sense to show players the character sheet early, because that’s the nexus through which they really experience the game. I like the demo scene towards the beginning, but I think a quickstart guide to explain basic rules to the players very, VERY clearly is usually a good idea.
Still, I’m continuously impressed at how well this adapts Star Trek to an RPG. I was initially skeptical that an RPG could take all the nonsense we see in decades of different shows and create a cohesive basis for all of it, but this is really impressive. I’d have to play to see if the rules feel balanced and natural, but at a glance, they make far more sense than plenty of other RPGs I’ve seen. I think this looks like a really fun game.
I really try not to get into litigating each and every instance, but I feel compelled sometimes to point out a few things:
The claim that Abdallah Aljamal was holding hostages is not credible. This claim was made by the IDF without evidence, and they have a very long history of fabricating post-hoc justifications for killing people they weren’t targeting or supposed to target. Examples include the assassination of American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022 and the killing of medic Rouzan al-Najjar in 2018. In both cases, the IDF was caught lying to justify their murders, and I don’t think the claims about Abdallah Aljamal hold up at all. From what I read, he lived in the building one of the hostages was recovered from, but he wasn’t known as a target before he was killed. He was characterized as one after he was dead.
Overall, the concept of “valid targets” is bullshit. It is used to assuage our innate understanding that killing people – particularly the young, the innocent, the defenseless, the elderly – is WRONG. Israel has, in this particular war, extended the concept in a way that is clearly genocidal. Their target selection, as covered by 972, was wildly more vicious than their own historical limits on collateral damage. An anonymous Israeli intelligence officer called it “a mass assassination factory”.
I’m glad we agree that all the responsible parties for atrocities deserve to be held accountable. I don’t intend the above as a provocation to fight, but I want to make sure anyone reading this comment section is aware of this context.
I spent a while reading through this, and I gotta say that this is a really good RPG book. It’s very thorough, it’s well written for suggesting ways to play, it’s attractively formatted. This is a cool book.
It’s nuts that this is barely even news. Like… another day another atrocity.
I’m trying not to be numb to it, but it’s hard to remain shocked. I’m still disgusted, though.
I’ll say this, too: I think we too often judge wars by the conduct of the participants as though there are good wars and bad ones. And my hunch is that it’s more like there are bad ones and terrible ones, and as awful as this sounds, this one is more notable because it’s being well documented and it involves a uniquely fucked up context (decades of occupation with the support of the US). I think the way the Israeli right wing discusses it is uniquely brazen, and the degree to which the IDF targets journalists and medics seems high, but I think that this kind of stuff happens so often and is undercovered. I wish Yemen got the kind of coverage this is getting.
In terms of the atrocities, I think most wars are basically just a bunch of atrocities in a trenchcoat. It doesn’t make these any better: I just want this to end, and then all the other wars. Fuck this shit.
AND I want the people who do this shit dragged in front of the Hague. I’m very glad that Netanyahu and Gallant have had arrest warrants requested, but you know what I call that? A good start.
Oh wow, thanks for the heads up!
I’m excited to check this out.
I think maybe execs and investors might feel it’s all the same, but if you’re a project manager for cloud infrastructure for enterprise services or you’ve been working for years on releasing a new component of Bing search that you think is a real gamechanger and some muckity-muck at the top says, ‘Oh, don’t worry about that anymore: a property manager that’s owned by a private equity partner of one of our big investors wants the chatbot that schedules apartment viewings in Huntsville to be more flirty, so go massage the prompts to make it convincingly laugh at bad jokes,’ some of those folks are liable to start grumbling that this isn’t the role that they were pitched when they took this job.
I think this article omitted important further context by not describing the target selection approach the IDF was using: they had an AI tool make guesses as to who was part of Hamas, then suggest bombing runs of their homes when they were believed to be inside around meal times or sleeping. They reserved precision weapons for commanders, and used dumb bombs to kill low-ranking suspected combatants.
This approach is inherently designed to create a pretense to carpet bomb neighborhood full of families based on a process with little to know human oversight it discretion.
For details, look up “lavender” and “where’s Daddy”.
This meme is bad.
if you look closely, you’ll notice that there’s no real joke. Israel and Nazi Germany should date. That’s a shit tier joke. It’s relying on edginess too hope paper over that there’s no real humor.
from a political commentary perspective, it’s awful. We have a colonial state founded by people who have experienced a collective tragedy that they then allowed to justify displacement of an indigenous population, followed by decades of alliance with Western imperialism and a slide to the hard right, with lots of delusion and gas lightning. And we have an aggrieved former great power looking to expand over neighbors while killing of undesirable immigrants. Yeah, two genocides. But they’re materially different in terms of approach, and the groups pictured hate each other. It’s like you know there’s atrocities, and you know Jews are involved, and that’s kind of the end of your insight but you really wanted to make a meme anyway.
Find something interesting to say.
Also, free Gaza, release the hostages, lock up Netanyahu and all the rest, etc etc
I have good news: It exists! http://retrographer.org/
A lot of them are unrecognizable, but here’s an example of a good one: http://retrographer.org/photos/4215
The bad news is that’s a bit limited. It was the senior project of a CMU student in 2010. It only exists for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. If you wanted to make one for another city, though, I think you could contact the creator, ask for the code, and then recruit people to get a ton of photos from another city’s historical institutions, and then crowdsource geotagging them (which is what the guy did).
To add to this: Netanyahu has been on trial for corruption for years, and he’s been using the war as an excuse to avoid holding elections, which he would lose.
When the war ends, Bibi is going to jail. And would you look at that? He’s in a permanent war! What are the odds.
Let’s be clear, though: judicial review has no enforcement. Compliance is voluntarily, and it can’t undo assassinations and coups.
And impeachment functionally doesn’t exist. It’s been demonstrated that senators will not impeach a president of their party, regardless of whether they agree with the charges.