“War on Terror” sounded pretty righteous too. I’m glad you noted you haven’t read much on Iran. Please do at least catch up on the last 50 years or so. It’s a fascinating tale involving western meddling, a dynamic and multifaceted people/culture, and a genuinely oppressive regime that funds many regional militant groups.

Yes, people forget Canada can still diplomatically oppose the war and push for internationally backed de-escalation without condoning the Iranian regime.

While I feel a lot of contempt and opposition to US imperialism, they’ve pulled the trigger and there’s no going back to how things were. Between expanding Iran-backed militias, international sanctions, and the conflicting goals on nuclear weapons, the status quo before the war was also becoming less tenable long term. And now there’s the question of how to stop this war without leaving a wounded and even more dangerous regime unchecked.

Tomorrow’s headline “The Trump administration removes the requirement to report US deaths due to war.”

People who cannot discern context or degrees of wrong are no better than ICE agents. Love you

I think we have a misunderstanding. I was trying to deacribe a system/social environment that people are born into, not the character of those people. What did you think I was saying they’re like?

He doesn’t get a pass on his past, but if it moves the needle on his followers, good. Better this than even more bootlicking. It’s a crisis/war right now. Accounting can happen after.

Typically, reference to whiteness is a reference to white privilege, which is the product of a social power structure that benefits white people through the systematic oppression of non-white people, i.e. a racist power structure. So referring to someone as benefiting from a racist power structure is not racist.

It’s somewhat, though not entirely, like how people born into generational wealth have privileges over people born into poverty. In this situation, it is indeed rather classist to refer to impoverished people as “the poors”, but not classist to refer to the most wealthy as “the 1%”… Because the term calls out the priveleged group in the oppressive system.

You bet there were. There were many that also just said shot/shooting. Many non-US western outlets are using killed/killing in the headline. US outlets use a mixture of language even within the same outlet, or won’t have it in the outline but will have it in the text. Here’s a title from CBS https://youtu.be/HSKaceREFlQ

I’m not saying there isn’t an overall bias towards distancing law enforcement from killings from words that carry negative connotations–there is. I was adding context to how “murder” is used in media and now I’m suggesting that some major outlets see what’s going on and are calling it what it is directly within the bounds of good journalism.

We say murder and it’s understood as people talking about what happened. When a news outlet says murder it’s considered reporting a legal conviction. There are good reasons why these conventions exist. And it’s the same as why headlines weren’t saying Luigi Mangionr murdered Brian Thompson.

I think it echoes that video of those two Apache crews blowing up civilians in Baghdad and then targetting people who came to help the injured. One of the most chilling parts of that video was probably how casually routine it all seemed. Can only imagine what footage existed that never got leaked.

I agree, I’m separating the justification of the engagement from how they label people. So the parallel I’m drawing only has to do with how they loosely label people as part of a group based on broad characteristics once they decide a group can be a valid military target, i.e. “insurgents” or “narco-terrorists”.

Declaring drug smugglers as valid military targets is certainly new, but ordering strikes on military targets on the thin rationale of “hey, they look like the group we said we can hit” is not new for the US military.

If it’s not obvious, I disagree with both of these issues.

I agree, but it’s also consistent with how the US operates. Through Afghanistan’s and Iraq, anyone appearing as a military-aged male in the vicinity of an operation (e.g. a village where insurgents were shooting from) was labeled an enemy combatant and treated as valid targets.

It’s not a strawman. Just because the proportions aren’t as extreme as you expected doesn’t mean it’s not an issue. Just because we’re talking about the gap here doesn’t dismiss the overall problem of isolation. There are many many threads talking about the problem of social isolation overall. Go engage in those threads that are addressing the problem you’re newly woke to and are holding so urgently now instead of bickering in here about who should be talking about what where.

That’s giving some all lives matter energy. We can talk about why everyone is so closed off in general, but this thread clearly focuses on a particular men’s issue under that umbrella issue. So no, we should talk about the topic, not hijack it for “a larger issue”.

I’m a thread about the wage gap between men and women (10-15%), you don’t say “We should be talking about why the economy is struggling instead”

In a thread about the incarceration gap between blacks and whites, you don’t say “We should be talking about why crime is up overall instead”

You make a great point about society needing to change, and a particular men’s issue doesn’t mean only men need to change, it actually does speak to how broader society considers what it is to be a man. How men decide that for themselves, are socialized by their environment into it, and how they’re treated by other genders. Just as women’s issues are human issues, men’s issues are human issues too.

I’m bracing myself for the Steam Frame to be around $700-800. The monochrome pass through might seem like a downgrade, but mixed reality is also not part of what valve wants to do with the headset, i.e. focus on VR. Everything else seems like they might be pricey upgrades, especially with the eye tracking and streaming tech. They also shifted manufacturing to the US due to tariffs.

Money

Expedition 33 is freakishly good and it’s actually more of a AA budget at est $30mil.

Still, I think it’s easy to forget AAA’s successes next to the overall shitty syesten. Elden Ring, Baldur’s Gate 3, Tears of the Kingdom, Spider-Man 2, Doom Eternal, Horizon Forbidden West, God of War Ragnarok, Ghost of Tsushima, Diablo 4, Armored Core 6 are all AAA with solid launches in the last 5 years as far as I remember, and arguably with distinct soul.

These days, probably Expedition 33, but there lots of others every year. Probably moreso than 15 years ago by raw numbers.

People over focus on AAA budget games, but there are several indie and AA budget games that are comparable or even surpass production quality of AAA games 15 years ago.

AAA budget these days should really be called like S-tier budget. In 2010 and earlier, the top end of budgets were like $50-100 million ($70-140 million after inflation) including marketing. Budgets started ballooning after that and hese days, top end budgets are more like $500-700 million)

You know, we restrict and ban certain drugs like fentanyl and heroin respectively because their addiction potential is so high and can cause a lot of harm at the population level.

Sure people have individual responsibility, but it’s also unrealistic to expect most people to resist an entire social and structural environments geared around certain behaviours, like drinking alcohol or smoking back in the day. Not everyone has the same has the same ironclad will and perfect emotionless reasoning as you, especially youth–remember they used to have smoking ads aimed at kids? And now it’s vaping.

While a lot of things I can easily resist, like narcotics and alcohol, I still get influenced by certain types of ads to try things, get addicted to certain games, and eat way too much junk food. For a lot of things, you can’t know it’s going to be a problem for you until it’s a problem. Plenty of people buy a few loot boxes here and there and don’t develop a gambling addiction. That doesn’t mean gambling addiction isn’t a risk and problem to take seriously and address at the systemic level, not just leave it to the individual.