If 2 was correct, he wouldn't be much of a god, would he? More like some celestial retiree pottering about in his garden shed trying to see if he can crossbreed striped roses...
I love open source, and would dearly love to help the developers by submitting detailed, accurate, complete bug reports[1], but fly-by-night dillettante trivialising attitudes like this make me want to pack the whole thing in and turn back to a Microsoft-only existence. MS crapware may be buggy as hell, but at least they don't pretend they're interested in bug reports only to get the hairy arsehole when you try to submit one.
[1] I'm a developer too, just one without the free time to spend hacking OSS code.
""at all costs"... within the boundaries of the law."
Someone might want to remind Microsoft of that caveat. And Enron. And WorldCom, and Union Carbide, and a significant fraction (majority?) of large companies.
Of course, since Microsoft (for example) is a convicted repeat-offender criminal organisation, refused to abide by its court-ordered punishments but was let off scot free by the incoming president, you might have to shout quite loud over all the laughing.
Thank god the EU stood up to them, at least. We're golden until the EU gets as corrupt as the US government (so, about a year or two, then).
Now, a god who's clever enough to set the initial conditions, set the universe off on a 15-billion-year-plus rendering process and still get the results he wanted - that's a real god.
This objection seems kind of... missing the point?
You complain about the commentary system breaking immersion. Fine - turn it off. It's like complaining because DVDs ship with a director's commentary as an optional extra - you don't like it, don't listen to it.
The whole point of these kinds of commentaries is to give the playter an insight into the "behind the scenes" processes that went into making up the game - developer motivations, how and why the action is paced, things they did to tighten up the plot or player-experience, etc. Complaining about this in a commentary is like complaining that you need to click the mouse and press keys to progress the story in a computer game - it's kind of the whole point of the exercise.
"But both HL2 and EP1 felt simply fake - engineered, where characters follow script and play emotions, where events happen from script, because you entered a trigger area, not because they should happen about then."
Well, that's kind of the penalty for having a scripted game, isn't it? If you don't like scripted events, I'd stick to playing "sandbox" games like Sim City or Spore.
"When you enter the car you -know- the crane will fail. When you enter the house and see the lift down and a button by it, it's like it was labelled "call lift and zombies". Places, devices, locations, layouts that make no sense but play well as puzzles... The underlying script... is good. But when it left hands of the writer, it wasn't implemented with the game written around it. It got in hands of game designers and they hammered it into the concept of a game, mangling it beyond recognition."
Well, when you're making a game you should... make... a game. Plots are written like stories or movies, and then adapted to make a game out of them. Games where this doesn't happen are called "movies" or "books".
Games live or die on their entertainment value. Games which have a brilliant plot and nothing else often end up boring most gamers. Just look at Myst - good plot, boring-as-fuck game mechanics that kept it much more niche than the plot deserved.
And a little tip: even novels and movies are plotted out to conform to some "narrative structure". Movies and books are edited, tested and re-edited to precisely pace them, with moments of intense action or drama, quieter reflective periods, climaxes, twists-in-the-tail, etc.
"Real world isn't split into physics puzzles, vistas, combat arenas and storytelling locations."
The real world isn't entertaining, or you'd go running around playing "tag" or "army" on deserted beaches and factories for fun, instead of sitting at home paying $$$ to do essentially the same thing on the computer.
The whole point of fiction is that it's carefully and precisely edited "real life", designed to get rid of the boring bits and present a well-defined story arc.
"The commentary track just makes it painfully obvious."
I think that says it all - all the commentary did was make you aware of what anyone with a passing interest in literature, lit-crit, game design or film direction already knew. The difference is, it spoiled the immersion for you.
Simple answer - stop watching developer commentaries: you're clearly not the person they're aimed at.
Fair point, and a strategy which I shall most assuredly be applying from now on.
While it's a good way to avoid any nasty little surprises that are discovered quickly, you've got a big tradeoff between how long you delay patching and how long it takes for someone to find a problem with a Windows patch. I can't remember how long it took for the WGA dialling-home story to break, but I vaguely rmember it being more than 48 hours.
It also doesn't (IMO) absolve Microsoft from their wrongdoing. Sure it's a good way to avoid getting bitten, but it doesn't make it alright for MS to either spy on their users or foist beta-quality software on people under the guise of production-ready code...:-/
Actually, I clicked the "Download all updates but wait for my OK before installing them" button.
I think it's pretty much taken as read that "updates" should have been tested and approved before release. Either that, or the button should have said "Download all updates and any other shoddy half-finished beta-release crap Microsoft would like to risk fucking up your machine with and wait for my OK before installing them".
The thing is, unless you want to waste hours pissing about trying to get around it you need to have WGA installed to get Windows Updates (well, until this story was posted, anyway).
So, I gave my consent to allowing MS to install "essential updates" to my machine which, given Windows' execrable security record, is pretty much a no-brainer. I have a genuine copy of Windows XP, so although I don't like being treated like a pirate without reason, I also didn't mind running WGA too much.
YMMV, but again my time is valuable - you might have time to investigate every single Windows patch available before oking it, but frankly with the amount of crap wrong with Windows you'd have to be at it nearly full-time to keep up.
MS then used this (perfectly-reasonable) permission to turn WGA into spyware, and somehow it's my fault?
Remember: they didn't exactly shout from the rooftops before slipping this nasty little dialling-home functionality in, did they?
I mean, sure, you've got a point - I was clearly stupid not to decompile every single Windows Update patch and inspect it by hand before installing each and every one one-at-a-time, rebooting and monitoring my outbound network traffic in-between just in case I'd missed any little surprises.
Oh, what a fool I've been.
The point is, either MS were deliberately spying on me (in which case they deserve punishment) or they stupidly pushed non-production-ready software into my machine in the guise of production-ready software, and didn't own up to it until someone else very publically called them on it... in which case they should be punished. What was your point again?
Again, fair point. I was also generalising like crazy, but when you're talking about stereotypes of entire countries (especially ones the size or the USA) there are always going to be significant deviations from the mean.
All I was getting at was that the mean average loudness/patriotism/arrogance/forthrightness/whate ver was generally slightly higher amongst USians than Europeans.
It's also been observed that many nationalities tend to become more like their own caricatures the further they get from home - this is certainly the case with the "drunken Irish", "loud Australians" and "arrogant American" stereotypes.
Of course, the fact that local people expect these stereotypes can lead to them becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, and nothing's going to bump up your level of patriotism in a foreign land like having half the people you meet knocking your country down continuously...
Sorry, but betas are buggy pre-releases that users use specifically on a voluntary basis.
If a company pro-actively pushes code to my machine and effectively forces me to run it, that's releasing a "final version", by any sensible definition of the term.
Now, after the furore when people discovered the dialling-home behaviour MS might have disabled that "feature" in a later version, but that doesn't make the preceeding one a "beta", except in very bad efforts at spin-control or post-facto apologetics.
And I think the point is that with MS pulling shit like this every other month, people are getting increasingly itchy about running any MS apps or utils they don't absolutely have to.
I would note that comparing EU states to "the best civil rights state in the US" is probably pointless, since many of the scariest things ("free speech zones" for example) tend to be federal initiatives.
Regarding my point 3, it's not just the politicians we're talking about - maybe you've missed it, but the american people (in general) tend to be much more vocally patriotic/arrogant/nationalistic/overbearing (take your pick according to your prejudices;-) than most other nations, often even the more cosmopolitan ones who visit other countries.
However, your politicians are by far the loudest, however.;-)
Again, I'm not saying I'd never visit the USA, merely that I'd be a lot more careful when entering or exiting it than I would be, say, France or Germany.
I'd dispute that there's nothing to worry about, since it's a fact that PATRIOT/antiterrorism powers have been frequently abused in non-terrorism-related incidents. It's also well-known that the US law enforcement is vastly more po-faced and uptight than many europeans are used to, especially with foreigners.
I agree that the USA isn't even nearly unsaveable yet, but the mere fact it's tending further (and faster) towards totalitarianism than most other places seem to be scares foreigners.
I never said (and I don't recall any OPs saying) we'd be too scared to visit the USA - merely that we'd be nervous. Disregarding my own personal experience I know what I hear/read/watch about the UK, and I know what I hear/read/watch about mainland Europe, and I know what I hear/read/watch about the USA. And the USA is the scariest one by far.
So yeah, nobody's calling anybody a police state yet, but I know who my money's on to be the first one if current trends continue, and that makes me slightly more nervous about that country than most others. Fair?
A little over two centuries ago the USA only came into being because of europe (ironically enough, fighting against the UK, now your biggest ally).
And if you go far enough back we're all only here because of a bunch of primates that were better at hitting other primates over the head with rocks - should we be eternally grateful to the chimps, too?
The fact is, you, me, Bush, Blair and almost everyone alive in each country today had exactly zero to do with freeing Europe from tyranny or achieving independance for the USA.
If I meet a WWII veteran I'm eternally grateful for their courage and sacrifice. Do you inherit the same gratitude because you happen to be born on the same continent as them? Grow up.
And the USA during WWII was a beacon of democracy and a shining light in international politics. It continued to be so for quite some time afterwards. It was (and always has been) also incredibly arrogant at the same time, but that's easily overlookable when it's doing as much good as it was.
Now, however, the USA is actually the/a cause of world destabilisation, not the cure.
There's a statute of limitations on gratefulness, and you've well-exceeded yours. If you give me five bucks last week, then spend all this week stamping on my foot and telling me what to do, I'm not going to think highly of you. This is not unreasonable.
Expecting to get gratitude and exemptions from behaving like responsible international citizens because of something your grandfather did, is just taking the piss.
You also seem wilfully blind to the difference between defence and offence. Iraq I was defensive - defending a third party form an aggressor. Handy hint: this is why you had international support and copped no political flak for it.
Iraq II was an act of naked aggression against a foe the administration knew posed no significant threat. This is offensive, and is why your international approval ratings are dropping precipitatously.
I'm going to go ahead and state the obvious (that Saddam Hussein wasn't a nice man, and that it would be better were he never in power) because I don't think you're going to be able to differentiate between "disapprove of how it was done" and "approve of the leader/country", ok?
Finally, although you claim I'm "clearly ignorant of the facts" (etc, etc, etc), I can't help noticing you haven't actually refuted one single assertion I made, let alone all of them.
By "clearly ignorant of the facts" do you perhaps mean "clearly disagree with my personal opinion"?
I think you'll find that international law only gives you the right to defend, not invade.
It certainly doesn't give you the right to invade almost unilaterally, in defiance of UN and international opinion.
We already know Hussein didn't have and WMDs, and we already know Bush and Blair knew about it before going in. At the very least we know they deliberately lied and exaggerated to get public opinion on-side for a course of action they'd already decided-on.
But that wasn't really the point of my post, was it?
BTW, Who's Al Franken? <googles> Oh. Nope, never heard of him, or his website. I prefer to get my news and current affairs from the BBC, ITV, CNN and (even occasionally) Al-Jazeera. I find them slightly more credible than Fox News.
Since I don't know of a single so-called-democratic country on earth where there isn't some form of elected representation, does this mean there is in fact not one democracy on earth?
Time to start gluing some of those split hairs back together...
Amen to your points 1 and 2, and everything Zootm replied with.
However:
"3) Get off your fucking high horse. Are there disturbing things happening in the US? Yes. Are there in your part of the world too? You betcha. I don't know what country you are from and really, it doesn't matter. Wherever it is, I guarantee there's some scary big brother stuff that some people are pushing."
There are several things wrong with this position:
1. You don't know what country your reader is in, and yet you're absolutely sure there are equivalent problems going on. This is clearly bullshit, since you don't know exactly what's going on in every other country on earth. Also, anyone from (for example), Sweden could then bitch about the USA all they liked.
It also speaks volumes about why the US administration is allowed to get away with it. You blithely assume the US is no worse than everyone else, so by extension whatever the US government does is "normal" across the world. It is not. The USA is the current thought-leader (and worse, arm-twister) pushing this kind of gutting of democracy and abuse of power across the world.
Tony Blair would be having wet dreams about the kind of police state he could construct, were it not for the US destabilising whole regions of the globe, upping the frequency of terrorism and cultivating the atmosphere of fear TB needs to get his (and Bush's) agenda across.
2. You appear to not understand the difference between a qualitative and a quantitative difference. Do many/most other countries have problems with lack of education/authoritarian governments/new technology eroding civil liberties/corrupt representatives/corporate interference in politics? Yes.
Does any other country on the face of the planet have as many problems (and quite as publically) as the USA has for the last decade or so? No.
3. You reap what you sow. The rest of the world has spent over a century listening to the USA's claims to be the leader of the free world, shining example of democracy and free-market capitalism, and epitome of open-minded tolerance. Although never as white as you painted it, the USA was generally viewed as arrogant, but essentially the "good guy". Now your freedoms are violated and removed, your democracy is tainted and corrupt and your political and legal processes are often an open market for corporations to purchase the results they want.
And if this wasn't a come-down enough, at the same time your administration is crowing even louder than ever about your "Freedom" and "Democracy" (which seem to be different to "freedom" and "democracy", since both of those are clearly being eroded right before everyone's eyes).
"Hell, some of it you may already have and are just used to it, you might even think it's normal whereas it'd scare me. Either way this "I'm scared to go to the US," is an attitude that screams ignorance."
Not if you're asian. Or wear a turban and sandals. Or a muslim. Or expect officials to have any kind of sense of humour. Or don't like instantly acquiescing to authority without explanation. Or vocally disapprove of the administration's policies. Or have a name that sounds like a known alias of a terrorist. Or...
Sure, if you're a middle-class republican white guy you're laughing. Any different and there's a small (but significant) chance you could end up in legal trouble. And given the world no longer trusts the US legal system, that's a frightening possibility.
Would I still visit the USA? Yes, but I'd be careful while I was there.
Would I blame anyone who fitted any of the above descriptions from being wary of doing so? No.
"From my observations, the continued abuses on our Freedoms comes from the bottom up in society in a lot of situations. I mean, a lot of things ingrained in our basic groupthink (as a country) about things allows this sort of thing to happen."
How are gutting judicial oversight, running up the national deficit, invading countries without just cause and removing civil liberties like privacy and free speech coming from the bottom-up?
I see plenty of people apologising for Bush after he announces each new violation of civil liberties or due process, but very few people campaigning to have cameras in every house and strip-searches every time you enter a building before he announces the ideas.
"Many of the defiencies in the legal system (mostly that it seems Justice is bought, and that courts seem to care more about protocol than right or wrong anymore) stem from English Common Law and works it's way up from there - sort of like how Microsoft's security problems continually stem from the same sources. Until we address more than the symptoms, the problem continue to happen."
Hmmm. Our democracy has problems, true, but it's lasted for several hundred years longer than yours so far. You've now got fewer civil liberties than us, your country's younger, and you're already vastly more institutionally corrupt than we are.
<FLAMEBAIT> I'd say your problems stem fro mthe things you did differently, not the things you did the same... >:-) </FLAMEBAIT>
Reversing the 1886 decision to give corporations most of the same rights as people would be a good start.
"But you should specify where in the EU you are from. I recently hosted an Englishman at my place, and he says that while England is a police state"
Hyperbole, although it's slowly tending in the same direction as the USA. It's common knowledge in the UK that whatever the US does, five years later the UK is at least seriously debating.
"and none of the younger generation want to live there any longer,"
Hyperbole. If the younger generation wanted to leave we all could. People grumble and worry about the government, but not nearly as much as in the USA. TBH, polls indicate we worry more about the US government than our own, as they're much more of a threat to world peace.
"he's for more draconian reforms since "if you have nothing to hide, what do you have to worry about?" Funny that, since he's moving out of England soon."
Where's he moving to? Highly amusing if it's the USA.
Referring you to a quote by Robert Anton Wilson (IIRC): "It only takes 30 years for a liberal to turn into a conservative, without changing a single idea".
Also, remember the usual caveats about generalising from a single data-point.
True, Goldeneye did a great job of adapting the FPS genre for a controller patently not designed for it.
I think other games had "goals" before Goldeneye, too - even Doom had coloured keycards/doors, switches and the like. I'm not sure what you mean by "per-point reactions" so I can't answer that one, but I think you'll find the standard for "fast-paced deathmatching" was set by the original Doom.
I never played GE through to the end (frankly, the controller was (and is) a shitty replacement for mouse and keyboard for FPSing), but the point is irrelevant - if the game brought anything new to the genre it'd be obvious a mile off, and you would have listed it.
Sorry, but polish doesn't equal innovation, and all GE did was polish pre-existing game mechanics, much like Deus Ex (to pick another frequent, but poor, suggestion).
Great games both (esp. DEx), but "pushing the genre forward"?
Both Thief and Deus Ex had elements of SS in them, so while they were both brilliant games, I don't think they brought a huge amount of advancement to the whole genre.
Slashdot Mirror
And you should read my post again.
For some reason, this reminds me of the Douglas adams quote...
;-)
Although I think you meant alpha-release, unless you really meant we were made out of beer...
I'd be very surprised if 1 was incorrect.
If 2 was correct, he wouldn't be much of a god, would he? More like some celestial retiree pottering about in his garden shed trying to see if he can crossbreed striped roses...
Amen. Or my favourite example.
I love open source, and would dearly love to help the developers by submitting detailed, accurate, complete bug reports[1], but fly-by-night dillettante trivialising attitudes like this make me want to pack the whole thing in and turn back to a Microsoft-only existence. MS crapware may be buggy as hell, but at least they don't pretend they're interested in bug reports only to get the hairy arsehole when you try to submit one.
[1] I'm a developer too, just one without the free time to spend hacking OSS code.
""at all costs" ... within the boundaries of the law."
Someone might want to remind Microsoft of that caveat. And Enron. And WorldCom, and Union Carbide, and a significant fraction (majority?) of large companies.
Of course, since Microsoft (for example) is a convicted repeat-offender criminal organisation, refused to abide by its court-ordered punishments but was let off scot free by the incoming president, you might have to shout quite loud over all the laughing.
Thank god the EU stood up to them, at least. We're golden until the EU gets as corrupt as the US government (so, about a year or two, then).
Once again, The Onion gets there first: Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory
Nah, that'd be kind of crap.
Now, a god who's clever enough to set the initial conditions, set the universe off on a 15-billion-year-plus rendering process and still get the results he wanted - that's a real god.
This objection seems kind of... missing the point?
You complain about the commentary system breaking immersion. Fine - turn it off. It's like complaining because DVDs ship with a director's commentary as an optional extra - you don't like it, don't listen to it.
The whole point of these kinds of commentaries is to give the playter an insight into the "behind the scenes" processes that went into making up the game - developer motivations, how and why the action is paced, things they did to tighten up the plot or player-experience, etc. Complaining about this in a commentary is like complaining that you need to click the mouse and press keys to progress the story in a computer game - it's kind of the whole point of the exercise.
"But both HL2 and EP1 felt simply fake - engineered, where characters follow script and play emotions, where events happen from script, because you entered a trigger area, not because they should happen about then."
Well, that's kind of the penalty for having a scripted game, isn't it? If you don't like scripted events, I'd stick to playing "sandbox" games like Sim City or Spore.
"When you enter the car you -know- the crane will fail. When you enter the house and see the lift down and a button by it, it's like it was labelled "call lift and zombies". Places, devices, locations, layouts that make no sense but play well as puzzles... The underlying script... is good. But when it left hands of the writer, it wasn't implemented with the game written around it. It got in hands of game designers and they hammered it into the concept of a game, mangling it beyond recognition."
Well, when you're making a game you should... make... a game. Plots are written like stories or movies, and then adapted to make a game out of them. Games where this doesn't happen are called "movies" or "books".
Games live or die on their entertainment value. Games which have a brilliant plot and nothing else often end up boring most gamers. Just look at Myst - good plot, boring-as-fuck game mechanics that kept it much more niche than the plot deserved.
And a little tip: even novels and movies are plotted out to conform to some "narrative structure". Movies and books are edited, tested and re-edited to precisely pace them, with moments of intense action or drama, quieter reflective periods, climaxes, twists-in-the-tail, etc.
"Real world isn't split into physics puzzles, vistas, combat arenas and storytelling locations."
The real world isn't entertaining, or you'd go running around playing "tag" or "army" on deserted beaches and factories for fun, instead of sitting at home paying $$$ to do essentially the same thing on the computer.
The whole point of fiction is that it's carefully and precisely edited "real life", designed to get rid of the boring bits and present a well-defined story arc.
"The commentary track just makes it painfully obvious."
I think that says it all - all the commentary did was make you aware of what anyone with a passing interest in literature, lit-crit, game design or film direction already knew. The difference is, it spoiled the immersion for you.
Simple answer - stop watching developer commentaries: you're clearly not the person they're aimed at.
Fair point, and a strategy which I shall most assuredly be applying from now on.
:-/
While it's a good way to avoid any nasty little surprises that are discovered quickly, you've got a big tradeoff between how long you delay patching and how long it takes for someone to find a problem with a Windows patch. I can't remember how long it took for the WGA dialling-home story to break, but I vaguely rmember it being more than 48 hours.
It also doesn't (IMO) absolve Microsoft from their wrongdoing. Sure it's a good way to avoid getting bitten, but it doesn't make it alright for MS to either spy on their users or foist beta-quality software on people under the guise of production-ready code...
Actually, I clicked the "Download all updates but wait for my OK before installing them" button.
I think it's pretty much taken as read that "updates" should have been tested and approved before release. Either that, or the button should have said "Download all updates and any other shoddy half-finished beta-release crap Microsoft would like to risk fucking up your machine with and wait for my OK before installing them".
The thing is, unless you want to waste hours pissing about trying to get around it you need to have WGA installed to get Windows Updates (well, until this story was posted, anyway).
So, I gave my consent to allowing MS to install "essential updates" to my machine which, given Windows' execrable security record, is pretty much a no-brainer. I have a genuine copy of Windows XP, so although I don't like being treated like a pirate without reason, I also didn't mind running WGA too much.
YMMV, but again my time is valuable - you might have time to investigate every single Windows patch available before oking it, but frankly with the amount of crap wrong with Windows you'd have to be at it nearly full-time to keep up.
MS then used this (perfectly-reasonable) permission to turn WGA into spyware, and somehow it's my fault?
Remember: they didn't exactly shout from the rooftops before slipping this nasty little dialling-home functionality in, did they?
I mean, sure, you've got a point - I was clearly stupid not to decompile every single Windows Update patch and inspect it by hand before installing each and every one one-at-a-time, rebooting and monitoring my outbound network traffic in-between just in case I'd missed any little surprises.
Oh, what a fool I've been.
The point is, either MS were deliberately spying on me (in which case they deserve punishment) or they stupidly pushed non-production-ready software into my machine in the guise of production-ready software, and didn't own up to it until someone else very publically called them on it... in which case they should be punished. What was your point again?
Again, fair point. I was also generalising like crazy, but when you're talking about stereotypes of entire countries (especially ones the size or the USA) there are always going to be significant deviations from the mean.
e ver was generally slightly higher amongst USians than Europeans.
All I was getting at was that the mean average loudness/patriotism/arrogance/forthrightness/what
It's also been observed that many nationalities tend to become more like their own caricatures the further they get from home - this is certainly the case with the "drunken Irish", "loud Australians" and "arrogant American" stereotypes.
Of course, the fact that local people expect these stereotypes can lead to them becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, and nothing's going to bump up your level of patriotism in a foreign land like having half the people you meet knocking your country down continuously...
Sorry, but betas are buggy pre-releases that users use specifically on a voluntary basis.
If a company pro-actively pushes code to my machine and effectively forces me to run it, that's releasing a "final version", by any sensible definition of the term.
Now, after the furore when people discovered the dialling-home behaviour MS might have disabled that "feature" in a later version, but that doesn't make the preceeding one a "beta", except in very bad efforts at spin-control or post-facto apologetics.
And I think the point is that with MS pulling shit like this every other month, people are getting increasingly itchy about running any MS apps or utils they don't absolutely have to.
Whooo!
;-p
I dunno - sounds a bit pinko/commie/liberal/terrorist sympathiser to me.
Why do you hate America? Why do you want the terrorists to win?
Fair point.
;-) than most other nations, often even the more cosmopolitan ones who visit other countries.
;-)
I would note that comparing EU states to "the best civil rights state in the US" is probably pointless, since many of the scariest things ("free speech zones" for example) tend to be federal initiatives.
Regarding my point 3, it's not just the politicians we're talking about - maybe you've missed it, but the american people (in general) tend to be much more vocally patriotic/arrogant/nationalistic/overbearing (take your pick according to your prejudices
However, your politicians are by far the loudest, however.
Again, I'm not saying I'd never visit the USA, merely that I'd be a lot more careful when entering or exiting it than I would be, say, France or Germany.
Fair play.
I'd dispute that there's nothing to worry about, since it's a fact that PATRIOT/antiterrorism powers have been frequently abused in non-terrorism-related incidents. It's also well-known that the US law enforcement is vastly more po-faced and uptight than many europeans are used to, especially with foreigners.
I agree that the USA isn't even nearly unsaveable yet, but the mere fact it's tending further (and faster) towards totalitarianism than most other places seem to be scares foreigners.
I never said (and I don't recall any OPs saying) we'd be too scared to visit the USA - merely that we'd be nervous. Disregarding my own personal experience I know what I hear/read/watch about the UK, and I know what I hear/read/watch about mainland Europe, and I know what I hear/read/watch about the USA. And the USA is the scariest one by far.
So yeah, nobody's calling anybody a police state yet, but I know who my money's on to be the first one if current trends continue, and that makes me slightly more nervous about that country than most others. Fair?
Half a century ago the USA helped out Europe.
A little over two centuries ago the USA only came into being because of europe (ironically enough, fighting against the UK, now your biggest ally).
And if you go far enough back we're all only here because of a bunch of primates that were better at hitting other primates over the head with rocks - should we be eternally grateful to the chimps, too?
The fact is, you, me, Bush, Blair and almost everyone alive in each country today had exactly zero to do with freeing Europe from tyranny or achieving independance for the USA.
If I meet a WWII veteran I'm eternally grateful for their courage and sacrifice. Do you inherit the same gratitude because you happen to be born on the same continent as them? Grow up.
And the USA during WWII was a beacon of democracy and a shining light in international politics. It continued to be so for quite some time afterwards. It was (and always has been) also incredibly arrogant at the same time, but that's easily overlookable when it's doing as much good as it was.
Now, however, the USA is actually the/a cause of world destabilisation, not the cure.
There's a statute of limitations on gratefulness, and you've well-exceeded yours. If you give me five bucks last week, then spend all this week stamping on my foot and telling me what to do, I'm not going to think highly of you. This is not unreasonable.
Expecting to get gratitude and exemptions from behaving like responsible international citizens because of something your grandfather did, is just taking the piss.
You also seem wilfully blind to the difference between defence and offence. Iraq I was defensive - defending a third party form an aggressor. Handy hint: this is why you had international support and copped no political flak for it.
Iraq II was an act of naked aggression against a foe the administration knew posed no significant threat. This is offensive, and is why your international approval ratings are dropping precipitatously.
I'm going to go ahead and state the obvious (that Saddam Hussein wasn't a nice man, and that it would be better were he never in power) because I don't think you're going to be able to differentiate between "disapprove of how it was done" and "approve of the leader/country", ok?
Finally, although you claim I'm "clearly ignorant of the facts" (etc, etc, etc), I can't help noticing you haven't actually refuted one single assertion I made, let alone all of them.
By "clearly ignorant of the facts" do you perhaps mean "clearly disagree with my personal opinion"?
I think you'll find that international law only gives you the right to defend, not invade.
It certainly doesn't give you the right to invade almost unilaterally, in defiance of UN and international opinion.
We already know Hussein didn't have and WMDs, and we already know Bush and Blair knew about it before going in. At the very least we know they deliberately lied and exaggerated to get public opinion on-side for a course of action they'd already decided-on.
But that wasn't really the point of my post, was it?
BTW, Who's Al Franken? <googles> Oh. Nope, never heard of him, or his website. I prefer to get my news and current affairs from the BBC, ITV, CNN and (even occasionally) Al-Jazeera. I find them slightly more credible than Fox News.
Plus, IIRC CAPTCHAs don't really work anyway.
Interesting position.
Since I don't know of a single so-called-democratic country on earth where there isn't some form of elected representation, does this mean there is in fact not one democracy on earth?
Time to start gluing some of those split hairs back together...
Nice summary.
Amen to your points 1 and 2, and everything Zootm replied with.
However:
"3) Get off your fucking high horse. Are there disturbing things happening in the US? Yes. Are there in your part of the world too? You betcha. I don't know what country you are from and really, it doesn't matter. Wherever it is, I guarantee there's some scary big brother stuff that some people are pushing."
There are several things wrong with this position:
1. You don't know what country your reader is in, and yet you're absolutely sure there are equivalent problems going on. This is clearly bullshit, since you don't know exactly what's going on in every other country on earth. Also, anyone from (for example), Sweden could then bitch about the USA all they liked.
It also speaks volumes about why the US administration is allowed to get away with it. You blithely assume the US is no worse than everyone else, so by extension whatever the US government does is "normal" across the world. It is not. The USA is the current thought-leader (and worse, arm-twister) pushing this kind of gutting of democracy and abuse of power across the world.
Tony Blair would be having wet dreams about the kind of police state he could construct, were it not for the US destabilising whole regions of the globe, upping the frequency of terrorism and cultivating the atmosphere of fear TB needs to get his (and Bush's) agenda across.
2. You appear to not understand the difference between a qualitative and a quantitative difference. Do many/most other countries have problems with lack of education/authoritarian governments/new technology eroding civil liberties/corrupt representatives/corporate interference in politics? Yes.
Does any other country on the face of the planet have as many problems (and quite as publically) as the USA has for the last decade or so? No.
3. You reap what you sow. The rest of the world has spent over a century listening to the USA's claims to be the leader of the free world, shining example of democracy and free-market capitalism, and epitome of open-minded tolerance. Although never as white as you painted it, the USA was generally viewed as arrogant, but essentially the "good guy". Now your freedoms are violated and removed, your democracy is tainted and corrupt and your political and legal processes are often an open market for corporations to purchase the results they want.
And if this wasn't a come-down enough, at the same time your administration is crowing even louder than ever about your "Freedom" and "Democracy" (which seem to be different to "freedom" and "democracy", since both of those are clearly being eroded right before everyone's eyes).
"Hell, some of it you may already have and are just used to it, you might even think it's normal whereas it'd scare me. Either way this "I'm scared to go to the US," is an attitude that screams ignorance."
Not if you're asian. Or wear a turban and sandals. Or a muslim. Or expect officials to have any kind of sense of humour. Or don't like instantly acquiescing to authority without explanation. Or vocally disapprove of the administration's policies. Or have a name that sounds like a known alias of a terrorist. Or...
Sure, if you're a middle-class republican white guy you're laughing. Any different and there's a small (but significant) chance you could end up in legal trouble. And given the world no longer trusts the US legal system, that's a frightening possibility.
Would I still visit the USA? Yes, but I'd be careful while I was there.
Would I blame anyone who fitted any of the above descriptions from being wary of doing so? No.
"From my observations, the continued abuses on our Freedoms comes from the bottom up in society in a lot of situations. I mean, a lot of things ingrained in our basic groupthink (as a country) about things allows this sort of thing to happen."
How are gutting judicial oversight, running up the national deficit, invading countries without just cause and removing civil liberties like privacy and free speech coming from the bottom-up?
I see plenty of people apologising for Bush after he announces each new violation of civil liberties or due process, but very few people campaigning to have cameras in every house and strip-searches every time you enter a building before he announces the ideas.
"Many of the defiencies in the legal system (mostly that it seems Justice is bought, and that courts seem to care more about protocol than right or wrong anymore) stem from English Common Law and works it's way up from there - sort of like how Microsoft's security problems continually stem from the same sources. Until we address more than the symptoms, the problem continue to happen."
Hmmm. Our democracy has problems, true, but it's lasted for several hundred years longer than yours so far. You've now got fewer civil liberties than us, your country's younger, and you're already vastly more institutionally corrupt than we are.
<FLAMEBAIT>
I'd say your problems stem fro mthe things you did differently, not the things you did the same... >:-)
</FLAMEBAIT>
Reversing the 1886 decision to give corporations most of the same rights as people would be a good start.
"But you should specify where in the EU you are from. I recently hosted an Englishman at my place, and he says that while England is a police state"
Hyperbole, although it's slowly tending in the same direction as the USA. It's common knowledge in the UK that whatever the US does, five years later the UK is at least seriously debating.
"and none of the younger generation want to live there any longer,"
Hyperbole. If the younger generation wanted to leave we all could. People grumble and worry about the government, but not nearly as much as in the USA. TBH, polls indicate we worry more about the US government than our own, as they're much more of a threat to world peace.
"he's for more draconian reforms since "if you have nothing to hide, what do you have to worry about?" Funny that, since he's moving out of England soon."
Where's he moving to? Highly amusing if it's the USA.
Referring you to a quote by Robert Anton Wilson (IIRC): "It only takes 30 years for a liberal to turn into a conservative, without changing a single idea".
Also, remember the usual caveats about generalising from a single data-point.
True, Goldeneye did a great job of adapting the FPS genre for a controller patently not designed for it.
I think other games had "goals" before Goldeneye, too - even Doom had coloured keycards/doors, switches and the like. I'm not sure what you mean by "per-point reactions" so I can't answer that one, but I think you'll find the standard for "fast-paced deathmatching" was set by the original Doom.
I never played GE through to the end (frankly, the controller was (and is) a shitty replacement for mouse and keyboard for FPSing), but the point is irrelevant - if the game brought anything new to the genre it'd be obvious a mile off, and you would have listed it.
Sorry, but polish doesn't equal innovation, and all GE did was polish pre-existing game mechanics, much like Deus Ex (to pick another frequent, but poor, suggestion).
Good point. Even less reason to include it, then.
Great games both (esp. DEx), but "pushing the genre forward"?
Both Thief and Deus Ex had elements of SS in them, so while they were both brilliant games, I don't think they brought a huge amount of advancement to the whole genre.