You then come along, and accuse the owner/police officer of being responsible for the gunfire because he was CEO of the SuperSoaker manufacturer.
But in the meantime, all conservative talk radio can say about the subject is that the previous administration caved in under pressure and was selling guns -- that's right guns! -- and ridicules anyone who tries to point out that they're water guns.
Eh, as you say, the truth of history is more complicated than either side's partisans are willing to admit.
I've been on the other side of that. I lost much of my joy for the CCG Magic: the Gathering when the release of Chronicles -- an expansion that rereleased some of the best cards from previous expansions -- utterly gutted the value of my collection. My collection dropped in value to 40% of what it once was, with most of the value in common and uncommon cards as my good rares lost 90% of their value. I made hard trades and spent long-saved cash for some of the cards whose value evaporated.
I never really got back into MtG after that. I can imagine just how badly the release of a VG that you searched long and hard for and payed good money for would hurt. On the other hand, it's good to see new people getting to enjoy old things. I know that, but it still always gives me mixed feelings because of having been there.
A literal liberal does not oppose prostitution because liberals do not believe in criminalizing victimless crimes, or legislating morality
There is, of course, dispute over whether or not prositution is in fact a victimless crime and whether or not it should be outlawed simply because it opens up women to exploitation. Counter arguments usually hold that legalizing prostitution allows for laws to protect the women that cannot exist in a black market. Feminists usually oppose prostitution because it demeans women and enhances male power, but some modern feminists reject the argument.
Anyway, I'll stand by my statment, which is intended to mean that the mainstream majority of people who call themselves liberals would be opposed to legalized prostitution, and Christian liberals almost unanimously reject it. I have never seen a Democratic candidate advance legalization, though Green and Liberatarians often do. It's a bit of a fringe issue.
I don't know what the Septuagint says, but the english translation I'm familiar with says that a man shall not lie with a man as if he were a woman. What the hell does that mean?
Yes, the Bible is extremely ambiguous about homosexuality in terms of definitions. More about that here. Because of such ambiguity, I say he'd probably oppose it. The Bible seems pretty negative about male-male relationships (though mostly silent on female-female relationships). The latter, like abortion and cloning, are probably because it wasn't a prevalent feature of society back in the day when women did not have as much freedom.
However, while that's not the direction I really wanted to take this discussion in, it is kind of relevant. The Christian Right loves to focus on cultural issues that the Bible is ambiguous about (gay relationships, abortion, etc.) and ignore the ones that it's much more explicit about (a desire for brotherhood and peace, non-judgmental attitudes, how we treat the least among us, etc.). That's one of those things that burns me. Much what Jesus says is ignored in favor of conjectures about things he never talked about. While I can't dispute the general thrust of where they go on such issues, it seems a strange inversion of priorities, and it's often tackled with an attitude that's very much opposed to how Jesus taught us to live -- with hate, anger, and prideful derision.
I think you have forgotten an important event in the bible: Jesus throwing out the money changers.
Oh no, I didn't forget. That's why I said he'd probably oppose economic sabotage. After all, Jesus objection was to people defiling the house of the Lord with materialistic greed. I'm not so sure that he'd consider whale hunting and GMO farming to be issues meant to be fought back with such force. Conjecturing Jesus's views on species preservation and the preservation of natural biodiversity is as intellectually perilous as doing the same for abortion and gay marriage. The issue isn't spoken of, and while we can guess his viewpoints, to elevate it to the same level as the issues he was passionate about puts one on uncertain footing.
I don't think you really understand liberal values or Jesus's values -- certainly not if you're posting such and angry and hate-filled diatribe.
Making fun of someone's intelligence isn't a conservative or a liberal value. That's just partisan foolishness, and I hope you won't express surprise if many conservatives make fun of the lack of intelligence of some liberal leader should the opportunity present itself. Lord knows that talk radio will make fun of just about anything they can. Calling for an assassination isn't a liberal or a conservative's value, and it's certainly not a Christian value. (Note that in spite of this, the conservative fringe did call for Bill Clinton to be killed, and Pat Robertson -- a supposed Christian leader -- called for Hugo Chavez's assassination on The 700 Club, his supposedly Christian talk show!)
Jesus wouldn't have made a racially charged statement about what happened in New Orleans, but if you think he wouldn't have gotten up on a hill and lambasted this administration for its callous neglect of the poor and suffering in New Orleans and continued to lambast them about the continued neglect of the city's people, then you really just simply don't understand Jesus at all. Love, kindness, and self-sacrifice for those in need is core to his message, unlike the callous indifference and victim blaming that many conservatives did to the people of New Orleans for daring to be foolish enough to be poor and have no where to go. Conservatives could have done little to stop Katrina (except maybe taking responsiblity for and stopping global climate change), but it's the aftermath that Jesus and just about any other administration would've reacted differently to. Are you honestly so enamored with the President that you think he couldn't have done the job better?
(What is up with that strange statement about Jesus serving in Vietnam. Who's trolling here?)
Jesus would've opposed gay prostitution. Liberals oppose prostitution as well, FYI. Libertarians are the only ones I know that occasionally support decriminalizing it. As for homosexuality, it's highly doubtful that Jesus would've supported it -- though he never talks about it directly, it was forbidden in Old Testament law -- but I'm sure that he would've stood in stark opposition to the judgemental condemnations of the "God hates fags" crowd. It was the prostitutes and other sinners that Jesus went directly to minister to. Judging and condemning your neighbors for being less moral than you instead of reaching out to them and embracing them is in direct opposition to Jesus's teachings -- particularly his sermons about the behavior of the Pharisees and Sadducess.
Jesus would have probably supported good stewardship of the planet -- it's part of God's instructions to Adam, after all, and it stems directly from thinking about the effects of your acts on others. Acts taken to pollute the Earth are acts taken at the expense of others to enrich oneself. Cite me any Bible verse that indicates that Jesus would've approved of enriching oneself at the expense of others. Any.
(Aside: Much of the charges of terrorism against Greenpeace are overblown -- Greenpeace has an official policy of nonviolent direct action, a policy Jesus would approve of. However, they've failed to live up to that in many ways due to occaionsal acts of economic sabotage against whaling ships and GMO crop fields, which Jesus would've probably not approved of. Their Danish conviction over terrorism stems from barracading an the HQ of the Danish Agricultural Center and hanging a sign on it. No people were threatened or injured in the process. Greenpeace has actually been the victim of state-sponsored terror in a much more classically violent manner. The French bombed the Rainbow Warrior 20 years ago with limpet mines and accidentally killed one of the crew in the process in *cough* "Operation SATANIC." (I kid you not -- Operation SATANIC.) )
... the only people in the New Testatment to act like them are the people that called for Jesus to be crucified and against who he directed many of his servants -- the Pharisees.
I meant sermons. "Against who he directed many of his sermons."
As a Christian, the Religious Right confuses and scares the heck out of me. I really honestly don't get where they get their attitudes from. I mean, I guess I do since the attitude is essentially shared by religious zealots no matter the culture or religion, but the only people in the New Testatment to act like them are the people that called for Jesus to be crucified and against who he directed many of his servants -- the Pharisees.
In my mind, it's liberals that are more in tune with Jesus and his apostles' message of love for your brother, of turning the other cheek and a desire for peace, of humble recognition that we are all flawed and that no one is "better" than others, of sharing of both burdens and joys, etc, etc. Rev. King epitomized the good Christian in my mind, and that's a large part of why I grew up a Democrat instead of the Republican one would expect of a church-going Southerner.
Growing up seeing this sort of craziness is why I'm a firm believer in the separation of church and state -- not because church corrupts state so much as because state corrupts church as can be seen in the temporal power-hungry "Christian" Right. Have you ever read about the Dominionist movement? Gives me shudders both as an American and as a Christian.
The Christian Left is still out there, but we're a faded breed, unfortunately.
We even had to fire a few individuals for using the office T1 to swap songs on Napster (this was back when Napster was both popular and illegal).
See, now, when my office had this problem back in the days of True Napster, they just emailed everybody to say that the internet usage policy banned this sort of thing, and the problem went away without them losing any valuable, trained employees.
That's the difference between companies that value their workers and those that seem them as a commodity.
Not the fact that the company's whole product was a game console wrapped around a GPS, where the actual game play was a secondary concern to getting kids to carry around a tracking device for their parents?
I mean, "Momma, can I mow the lawn?" What kind of game title is that?
Hmmm... is there a gene (or a set of genes) responsible for, say, the desire to make huge amounts of money?
I just wonder if we'll be able to isolate genes for sociopathy from the sample group. I mean, Michael Milken, the Junk Bond King? I know he's done a lot of charity work since then, but he, like some other people on that list, got where he is through highly unethical (sociopathic?) business behavior.
The Books-a-Minute summary of the Illuminatus! Trilogy really sums up the impression I got of the book before I gave up and put it down in disgust.
The Illuminati are a secret society that (DRUGS SEX DRUGS) control everything in the world (SEX DRUGS SEX) including all governments, financial institutions, and (DRUGS SEX DRUGS) intelligence agencies. No, they're not. Well, yes they are but not really. (SEX DRUGS SEX) They originated in Bavaria in 1776 (DRUGS SEX DRUGS). No, actually they go all the way back to Atlantis. No, (SEX DRUGS SEX) Atlantis never really existed. Yes it did. It's not just one society (DRUGS SEX DRUGS), it's a whole bunch of them (SEX DRUGS SEX) together. No, it's just one, and they go all the way back to Atlantis, which never (DRUGS SEX DRUGS) existed, oh yes it did. They've had an uninterrupted existence since 30,000 years ago (SEX DRUGS SEX) -- no they actually only go back as far as the 1800s (DRUGS SEX DRUGS). Fnord.
Really, the scene where the hanged corpse starts ejaculating was where I gave up. I was expecting surreality, humor, and clever cultural mish-mashes, but I wasn't expecting so much freakish porn and drug culture. Actually, I could've handled the drugs, but the bizarre, "gratuitous" sex imagery got to me after a while, and I gather than it never really stops.
It's also hard to follow the prose; it's deliberately written in a very disjointed style. Its's not "A Clockwork Orange" hard, but it's not nearly as rewarding either. I was incredibly disappointed. So much geek humor revolves around the series, and I kind of wanted to be in on the joke, but it just isn't worth it. I had a friend who loved the trilogy who I thought a good bit less of after I borrowed it from him and tried to read it.
That's kind of horrifying. Does the voice-over sound like the person is reading the script for the first time while trying not to fall asleep from boredom after their high school drama club meeting?
And while you're entertaining yourself with a good, enlightening read on economic and social philosophy, I'd recommend you brush up on religion and spirituality with a read of Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard.
You mean the man who has been constantly warning about genocide in Darfur and who has practically been begging for the world to do something about it? The man who has no power to levy troops to bring there himself? All the man can do is beg, and you're blaming him for being ignored?
Perhaps you should try at least doing a little research on Kofi Annan and Darfur before casting stones at him on Darfur. You can blame him on Rwanda for not heeding the calls to press for action, and you can blame him on a lack of proper oversight of the Oil for Food program, but he's doing what he can on Darfur.
I just object to him being lumped in with thugs and despots.
I know you're probably in the camp that things the US is what's wrong with the world, but I wonder if you've ever looked beyond the end of your upturned nose to see the things the US (and its citizens) do right in the world?
Sometimes, it's not what's right that we do but what's wrong that we do or don't do that matters. Right now, there are a lot of good people in the US working to bring about a more peaceful world. Then again, there are also a lot of cynical people that promote war as peace with the attitude that if you're going to make an omelette, you have to breaks some eggs.
Right now, our government is fighting for its rights to start preemptive wars and to indefintely hold people and "mildly" torture them. None of these things have earned us the right to call ourselves a nation of peacemakers.
Maybe people just remembers when the US used to do more right in the world. I miss those times, and fighting against people like you that refuse to admit that this country is doing wrong and you try to justify our sins with our intentions is going to be necessary to bring those times back.
You mean like Yasser Arafat? Le Duc Tho? Kofi Annan? Please. The Nobel Peace Prize is a joke. It's a contest to see which thug or despot can fool the international community enough.
While I think there are far too many booby prizes for people who started conflicts finally stopping them (at least temporarily), I think it's a bit unfair to call Kofi Annan a "thug or despot."
FYI, we've been the homeland of at least one of the winners 19 out of the 93 years that it's been awarded. That's better than 20%. In fact, 2002 was President Jimmy Carter.
There seemed to be alot of bad blood between Square and Nintendo for quite a while, wasnt there a span of a few years between handheld game releases from square that many attributed to the break up?
Yes. Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles were the fruits of the two companies finally burying the hatchet. However, in the mean-time, Square was making many games for the Bandai Wonderswan, a handheld console only found in Japan. I actually have FF1, FF2, Wild Card (blech), and Chocobo's Dungeon for the Wonderswan. (Yes, I'm a Square nut.) In the early days of the GameCube, people were talking about possible PS2-Wonderswan games as a counter to the GC-GBA combo that (oddly enough) only Squaresoft really supported.
Sorry I thought I had read that both FF11 and Front Mission online had both been announced for the 360.
Yeah, but they're not going to be 360-exclusives. Square's hedging its bets right now. The 360 is probably going to eat the PS3's lunch in the American market, even if it's not doing well in Japan. However, I doubt that a Final Fantasy game proper will be done outside of a PS3 exclusive because one of the defining traits of the series is that it exploits the hardware of a system to the max. If Square-Enix had to develop for the lowest common denominator between the two systems, it couldn't do as well.
In the end, though, Sakaguchi's decision to jump ship and make 360-exclusive games may turn out to be the wiser decision. We'll have to see.
... when the hype was behind the PS1 they dropped Nintendo like a hot potato and joined the Sony bandwagon, when the Xbox started gaining ground they suddenly gushed over Microsoft...
Two problems with this narrative:
1) Square dumped Nintendo because they felt constricted by Nintendo's licensing and high-handed treatment as well as the decision to stick with a cartridge-based format instead of a CD-based format. The split was very acrimonious and was rumored to involve personal grudges between upper level executives in both companies.
2) Square has not yet made a game for the Xbox or the 360 that I'm aware of, though they are planning on putting out FF11 for it. Xbox has no traction in the Japanese market, which is what Square-Enix pays more attention to. Putting out an Xbox-exclusive game would be equivalent to putting out a game targetted towards the US market over the Japanese market. Not going to happen.
That would be funny except that it was Congress that spearheaded this legislation. The sponsors of this bill and the ideamen behind it were Congressmen. To give the White House credit for this is insulting to the bipartisan effort by Senators Coburn, Obama, Carper, and McCain that birthed the bill. It insults the internet movement to track down and put pressure on Senators Stevens and Byrd to try to secretly hold up the bill.
This bill passed unanimously in the Senate and was passed by voice vote in the House on the day it was introduced. It has 47 Senatorial co-sponsors. To suggest that it was the work of a President that has awarded so many no-bid contracts and made efforts to block investigations into spending by contractors is an insult to the intelligence of the American people.
Bush couldn't have blocked if he'd wanted to without inviting a political bloodbath, and while there's no evidence that he opposed it, to let him take credit for it is just maddening.
Slashdot Mirror
You then come along, and accuse the owner/police officer of being responsible for the gunfire because he was CEO of the SuperSoaker manufacturer.
But in the meantime, all conservative talk radio can say about the subject is that the previous administration caved in under pressure and was selling guns -- that's right guns! -- and ridicules anyone who tries to point out that they're water guns.
Eh, as you say, the truth of history is more complicated than either side's partisans are willing to admit.
I've been on the other side of that. I lost much of my joy for the CCG Magic: the Gathering when the release of Chronicles -- an expansion that rereleased some of the best cards from previous expansions -- utterly gutted the value of my collection. My collection dropped in value to 40% of what it once was, with most of the value in common and uncommon cards as my good rares lost 90% of their value. I made hard trades and spent long-saved cash for some of the cards whose value evaporated.
I never really got back into MtG after that. I can imagine just how badly the release of a VG that you searched long and hard for and payed good money for would hurt. On the other hand, it's good to see new people getting to enjoy old things. I know that, but it still always gives me mixed feelings because of having been there.
Corporations are increasingly supportive of teleworking for reasons that range from saving money on office space ...
AKA Pushing your costs off onto your employees.
Yay, progress.
A literal liberal does not oppose prostitution because liberals do not believe in criminalizing victimless crimes, or legislating morality
There is, of course, dispute over whether or not prositution is in fact a victimless crime and whether or not it should be outlawed simply because it opens up women to exploitation. Counter arguments usually hold that legalizing prostitution allows for laws to protect the women that cannot exist in a black market. Feminists usually oppose prostitution because it demeans women and enhances male power, but some modern feminists reject the argument.
Anyway, I'll stand by my statment, which is intended to mean that the mainstream majority of people who call themselves liberals would be opposed to legalized prostitution, and Christian liberals almost unanimously reject it. I have never seen a Democratic candidate advance legalization, though Green and Liberatarians often do. It's a bit of a fringe issue.
I don't know what the Septuagint says, but the english translation I'm familiar with says that a man shall not lie with a man as if he were a woman. What the hell does that mean?
Yes, the Bible is extremely ambiguous about homosexuality in terms of definitions. More about that here. Because of such ambiguity, I say he'd probably oppose it. The Bible seems pretty negative about male-male relationships (though mostly silent on female-female relationships). The latter, like abortion and cloning, are probably because it wasn't a prevalent feature of society back in the day when women did not have as much freedom.
However, while that's not the direction I really wanted to take this discussion in, it is kind of relevant. The Christian Right loves to focus on cultural issues that the Bible is ambiguous about (gay relationships, abortion, etc.) and ignore the ones that it's much more explicit about (a desire for brotherhood and peace, non-judgmental attitudes, how we treat the least among us, etc.). That's one of those things that burns me. Much what Jesus says is ignored in favor of conjectures about things he never talked about. While I can't dispute the general thrust of where they go on such issues, it seems a strange inversion of priorities, and it's often tackled with an attitude that's very much opposed to how Jesus taught us to live -- with hate, anger, and prideful derision.
I think you have forgotten an important event in the bible: Jesus throwing out the money changers.
Oh no, I didn't forget. That's why I said he'd probably oppose economic sabotage. After all, Jesus objection was to people defiling the house of the Lord with materialistic greed. I'm not so sure that he'd consider whale hunting and GMO farming to be issues meant to be fought back with such force. Conjecturing Jesus's views on species preservation and the preservation of natural biodiversity is as intellectually perilous as doing the same for abortion and gay marriage. The issue isn't spoken of, and while we can guess his viewpoints, to elevate it to the same level as the issues he was passionate about puts one on uncertain footing.
I don't think you really understand liberal values or Jesus's values -- certainly not if you're posting such and angry and hate-filled diatribe.
Making fun of someone's intelligence isn't a conservative or a liberal value. That's just partisan foolishness, and I hope you won't express surprise if many conservatives make fun of the lack of intelligence of some liberal leader should the opportunity present itself. Lord knows that talk radio will make fun of just about anything they can. Calling for an assassination isn't a liberal or a conservative's value, and it's certainly not a Christian value. (Note that in spite of this, the conservative fringe did call for Bill Clinton to be killed, and Pat Robertson -- a supposed Christian leader -- called for Hugo Chavez's assassination on The 700 Club, his supposedly Christian talk show!)
Jesus wouldn't have made a racially charged statement about what happened in New Orleans, but if you think he wouldn't have gotten up on a hill and lambasted this administration for its callous neglect of the poor and suffering in New Orleans and continued to lambast them about the continued neglect of the city's people, then you really just simply don't understand Jesus at all. Love, kindness, and self-sacrifice for those in need is core to his message, unlike the callous indifference and victim blaming that many conservatives did to the people of New Orleans for daring to be foolish enough to be poor and have no where to go. Conservatives could have done little to stop Katrina (except maybe taking responsiblity for and stopping global climate change), but it's the aftermath that Jesus and just about any other administration would've reacted differently to. Are you honestly so enamored with the President that you think he couldn't have done the job better?
(What is up with that strange statement about Jesus serving in Vietnam. Who's trolling here?)
Jesus would've opposed gay prostitution. Liberals oppose prostitution as well, FYI. Libertarians are the only ones I know that occasionally support decriminalizing it. As for homosexuality, it's highly doubtful that Jesus would've supported it -- though he never talks about it directly, it was forbidden in Old Testament law -- but I'm sure that he would've stood in stark opposition to the judgemental condemnations of the "God hates fags" crowd. It was the prostitutes and other sinners that Jesus went directly to minister to. Judging and condemning your neighbors for being less moral than you instead of reaching out to them and embracing them is in direct opposition to Jesus's teachings -- particularly his sermons about the behavior of the Pharisees and Sadducess.
Jesus would have probably supported good stewardship of the planet -- it's part of God's instructions to Adam, after all, and it stems directly from thinking about the effects of your acts on others. Acts taken to pollute the Earth are acts taken at the expense of others to enrich oneself. Cite me any Bible verse that indicates that Jesus would've approved of enriching oneself at the expense of others. Any.
(Aside: Much of the charges of terrorism against Greenpeace are overblown -- Greenpeace has an official policy of nonviolent direct action, a policy Jesus would approve of. However, they've failed to live up to that in many ways due to occaionsal acts of economic sabotage against whaling ships and GMO crop fields, which Jesus would've probably not approved of. Their Danish conviction over terrorism stems from barracading an the HQ of the Danish Agricultural Center and hanging a sign on it. No people were threatened or injured in the process. Greenpeace has actually been the victim of state-sponsored terror in a much more classically violent manner. The French bombed the Rainbow Warrior 20 years ago with limpet mines and accidentally killed one of the crew in the process in *cough* "Operation SATANIC." (I kid you not -- Operation SATANIC.) )
Jesus would'
... the only people in the New Testatment to act like them are the people that called for Jesus to be crucified and against who he directed many of his servants -- the Pharisees.
I meant sermons. "Against who he directed many of his sermons."
As a Christian, the Religious Right confuses and scares the heck out of me. I really honestly don't get where they get their attitudes from. I mean, I guess I do since the attitude is essentially shared by religious zealots no matter the culture or religion, but the only people in the New Testatment to act like them are the people that called for Jesus to be crucified and against who he directed many of his servants -- the Pharisees.
In my mind, it's liberals that are more in tune with Jesus and his apostles' message of love for your brother, of turning the other cheek and a desire for peace, of humble recognition that we are all flawed and that no one is "better" than others, of sharing of both burdens and joys, etc, etc. Rev. King epitomized the good Christian in my mind, and that's a large part of why I grew up a Democrat instead of the Republican one would expect of a church-going Southerner.
Growing up seeing this sort of craziness is why I'm a firm believer in the separation of church and state -- not because church corrupts state so much as because state corrupts church as can be seen in the temporal power-hungry "Christian" Right. Have you ever read about the Dominionist movement? Gives me shudders both as an American and as a Christian.
The Christian Left is still out there, but we're a faded breed, unfortunately.
My first thought was that he's found a match for his talent in directing and script-writing in made for TV movies.
We even had to fire a few individuals for using the office T1 to swap songs on Napster (this was back when Napster was both popular and illegal).
See, now, when my office had this problem back in the days of True Napster, they just emailed everybody to say that the internet usage policy banned this sort of thing, and the problem went away without them losing any valuable, trained employees.
That's the difference between companies that value their workers and those that seem them as a commodity.
Not the fact that the company's whole product was a game console wrapped around a GPS, where the actual game play was a secondary concern to getting kids to carry around a tracking device for their parents?
I mean, "Momma, can I mow the lawn?" What kind of game title is that?
Hmmm... is there a gene (or a set of genes) responsible for, say, the desire to make huge amounts of money?
I just wonder if we'll be able to isolate genes for sociopathy from the sample group.
I mean, Michael Milken, the Junk Bond King? I know he's done a lot of charity work since then, but he, like some other people on that list, got where he is through highly unethical (sociopathic?) business behavior.
Really, the scene where the hanged corpse starts ejaculating was where I gave up. I was expecting surreality, humor, and clever cultural mish-mashes, but I wasn't expecting so much freakish porn and drug culture. Actually, I could've handled the drugs, but the bizarre, "gratuitous" sex imagery got to me after a while, and I gather than it never really stops.
It's also hard to follow the prose; it's deliberately written in a very disjointed style. Its's not "A Clockwork Orange" hard, but it's not nearly as rewarding either. I was incredibly disappointed. So much geek humor revolves around the series, and I kind of wanted to be in on the joke, but it just isn't worth it. I had a friend who loved the trilogy who I thought a good bit less of after I borrowed it from him and tried to read it.
That's kind of horrifying. Does the voice-over sound like the person is reading the script for the first time while trying not to fall asleep from boredom after their high school drama club meeting?
And while you're entertaining yourself with a good, enlightening read on economic and social philosophy, I'd recommend you brush up on religion and spirituality with a read of Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard.
You mean the man who has been constantly warning about genocide in Darfur and who has practically been begging for the world to do something about it? The man who has no power to levy troops to bring there himself? All the man can do is beg, and you're blaming him for being ignored?
Perhaps you should try at least doing a little research on Kofi Annan and Darfur before casting stones at him on Darfur. You can blame him on Rwanda for not heeding the calls to press for action, and you can blame him on a lack of proper oversight of the Oil for Food program, but he's doing what he can on Darfur.
I just object to him being lumped in with thugs and despots.
I know you're probably in the camp that things the US is what's wrong with the world, but I wonder if you've ever looked beyond the end of your upturned nose to see the things the US (and its citizens) do right in the world?
Sometimes, it's not what's right that we do but what's wrong that we do or don't do that matters. Right now, there are a lot of good people in the US working to bring about a more peaceful world. Then again, there are also a lot of cynical people that promote war as peace with the attitude that if you're going to make an omelette, you have to breaks some eggs.
Right now, our government is fighting for its rights to start preemptive wars and to indefintely hold people and "mildly" torture them. None of these things have earned us the right to call ourselves a nation of peacemakers.
Maybe people just remembers when the US used to do more right in the world. I miss those times, and fighting against people like you that refuse to admit that this country is doing wrong and you try to justify our sins with our intentions is going to be necessary to bring those times back.
You mean like Yasser Arafat? Le Duc Tho? Kofi Annan? Please. The Nobel Peace Prize is a joke. It's a contest to see which thug or despot can fool the international community enough.
While I think there are far too many booby prizes for people who started conflicts finally stopping them (at least temporarily), I think it's a bit unfair to call Kofi Annan a "thug or despot."
FYI, we've been the homeland of at least one of the winners 19 out of the 93 years that it's been awarded. That's better than 20%. In fact, 2002 was President Jimmy Carter.
Read the list.
That works for me as long as they promise that the next Final Fantasy only takes 30 hours to beat.
Note from the world of people who have jobs:
You don't have to play all 30 hours straight.
That's just the latest person to add to the theory. I believe the proper scholar to attribute is Dickens.
There seemed to be alot of bad blood between Square and Nintendo for quite a while, wasnt there a span of a few years between handheld game releases from square that many attributed to the break up?
Yes. Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles were the fruits of the two companies finally burying the hatchet. However, in the mean-time, Square was making many games for the Bandai Wonderswan, a handheld console only found in Japan. I actually have FF1, FF2, Wild Card (blech), and Chocobo's Dungeon for the Wonderswan. (Yes, I'm a Square nut.) In the early days of the GameCube, people were talking about possible PS2-Wonderswan games as a counter to the GC-GBA combo that (oddly enough) only Squaresoft really supported.
Sorry I thought I had read that both FF11 and Front Mission online had both been announced for the 360.
Yeah, but they're not going to be 360-exclusives. Square's hedging its bets right now. The 360 is probably going to eat the PS3's lunch in the American market, even if it's not doing well in Japan. However, I doubt that a Final Fantasy game proper will be done outside of a PS3 exclusive because one of the defining traits of the series is that it exploits the hardware of a system to the max. If Square-Enix had to develop for the lowest common denominator between the two systems, it couldn't do as well.
In the end, though, Sakaguchi's decision to jump ship and make 360-exclusive games may turn out to be the wiser decision. We'll have to see.
Faster processors are great, but when will we see massive improvements in data storage...
About the same time that sound cards, input devices, shiny stickers on the side, and other COMPLETELY unrelated things catch up.
... when the hype was behind the PS1 they dropped Nintendo like a hot potato and joined the Sony bandwagon, when the Xbox started gaining ground they suddenly gushed over Microsoft ...
Two problems with this narrative:
1) Square dumped Nintendo because they felt constricted by Nintendo's licensing and high-handed treatment as well as the decision to stick with a cartridge-based format instead of a CD-based format. The split was very acrimonious and was rumored to involve personal grudges between upper level executives in both companies.
2) Square has not yet made a game for the Xbox or the 360 that I'm aware of, though they are planning on putting out FF11 for it. Xbox has no traction in the Japanese market, which is what Square-Enix pays more attention to. Putting out an Xbox-exclusive game would be equivalent to putting out a game targetted towards the US market over the Japanese market. Not going to happen.
That would be funny except that it was Congress that spearheaded this legislation. The sponsors of this bill and the ideamen behind it were Congressmen. To give the White House credit for this is insulting to the bipartisan effort by Senators Coburn, Obama, Carper, and McCain that birthed the bill. It insults the internet movement to track down and put pressure on Senators Stevens and Byrd to try to secretly hold up the bill.
This bill passed unanimously in the Senate and was passed by voice vote in the House on the day it was introduced. It has 47 Senatorial co-sponsors. To suggest that it was the work of a President that has awarded so many no-bid contracts and made efforts to block investigations into spending by contractors is an insult to the intelligence of the American people.
Bush couldn't have blocked if he'd wanted to without inviting a political bloodbath, and while there's no evidence that he opposed it, to let him take credit for it is just maddening.
It might if you licked the terminals.