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Sergg posted:Let's remember that for like 2000 years Europe was the most violent place on earth It's hard to remember something that isn't remotely true.
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Feb 6, 2015 11:12
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My favorite is the idea that Julius Caesar killed a million Gauls, because there's just no way he could be making that up. 
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Feb 8, 2015 09:15
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Volkerball posted:The military strongman meme is so dumb. Saddam lost 14 of 18 provinces in Iraq in '91, Qaddafi started a civil war, and Assad controls less than half of Syria. But yeah, Sisi will stop Egypt from slipping into chaos, just like Mubarak did. Authoritarian "stability" isn't stability at all. It's a ceasefire. You can add Tunisia, Sudan, and Yemen to the hall of shame, incidentally. "President-for-life" regimes have been collapsing or fragmenting all over the Middle East. Many commentators have attributed this to the Arab Spring and a flowering of liberalism in the region, or economic problems, or a generation shift, or twitter. Whatever. None of that quite explains why the same factors have failed to bring down any of the region's monarchies or theocracies. Personally, I think it's a matter of legitimacy. Drawing your authority from heritage and divine right may seem woefully old fashioned, but it's still a hell of a lot more respectable than phony populism and sham elections.
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Feb 11, 2015 08:01
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Miltank posted:So this guy is operating under the impression that Iraq will still exist in a recognizable form when this is all over? Doesn't really make much sense to me. Yeah, he's basically treating a partitioned Iraq as a worst-case scenario rather than a de facto reality. Thing is, it seems like a lot of Iraqis themselves aren't ready to accept a partition either. The Kurds were never properly integrated and no one should be surprised that they've gone their own way, but this vicious Sunni-Shia split among the Arab population is somewhat different. Baghdad and many of the other major cities have, historically, been home to both groups, and though they've become increasing divided in the past decade, both groups are still "Iraqi." I think there is still hope for a federated Iraq, with or without the Kurds, but it will depend on a true power-sharing agreement and stronger curbs on Shiite absolutism than American diplomatic pressure can reasonably provide. To this end, the Sunni national guard regiments could actually serve to keep the country together by providing enough of a deterrent against Shia power grabs to force the two groups to really work together. Who knows, maybe fighting together against a common foe will undo some of the ill will between them. I mean, it could happen. Or they could end up shooting each other with American weapons. That could happen too. Lord only knows who the US would back then.
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Feb 12, 2015 10:24
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I don't think the US is all that likely to abandon the Kurds now or in the near future. The US has established something of a Special Relationship with the Kurds (particularly those in Iraq) dating back to the first Gulf War, and there's a small but healthy Kurdish diaspora community here (40,000 people according to Wiki, mostly in Tennessee and Southern California). There is a clear idea within the US media and foreign policy establishment that the Kurds are the "good guys," the moderates who we can "work with" in the region. If politicians from either party choose to abandon them in their time of need, they can expect harsh excoriation both from their political opponents and the mainstream media. What's more, Kurdistan is an important regional ally for the the US and has the potential to be an effective proxy for US military interests in the region, both as a way of influencing regimes in Iraq and Syria (assuming those countries will continue to exist as such) and as a buffer against Iran. In my (completely know-nothing armchair analyst) opinion, there are only a few scenarios in which the US would plausibly abandon the Kurds. Kurdistan could fall under a radical anti-American regime that forces us to cut ties (unlikely, but who knows what the future holds), the US government/public/media could become so disgusted by the prospect of another war in the Middle East that we refuse to intervene in the region even in support of our best buds, or the Kurds could become a hindrance to US foreign policy interests. This last one seems most likely. If the Kurds become seen as a destabilizing force in the region (say by serving as an obstacle to detente with Iran), or a threat to our allies (*cough* Turkey *cough*), it will be much easier for the establishment to throw them under the bus. In general though, I think it will take a lot more than them pissing of Damascus and Baghdad for the US to sell the Kurds out at this point. If the US was willing to let them carve out a de facto nation state in northern Iraq and if the US media establishment is going to use phrases like "Iraqi and Kurdish forces" when talking about the people fighting ISIS in Iraq, then I have trouble seeing even a full-fledged independence movement as being a deal breaker.
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Feb 19, 2015 03:22
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Possibly the most interesting thing about this break with Netanyahu is it means that there's a chance -- a small chance, but a chance -- that Israel policy could actually become part of the election debate next year. I think Mideast policy in general could be a huge sticking point in the primaries (unless the current crises magically resolve themselves by then) and Clinton already has a sign on her back that says "ask me about Iraq." It's entirely possible that people could start calling attention to her close relationship with the AIPAC set as well. It all depends on if she has a serious primary challenger who's actually willing to run with that ball. I'm not sure even a fairly independent guy like Bernie Sanders (who won't be attending Bibi's speech), is really going to be challenging the Israel lobby (don't forget, he may be a socialist, but he's also old and Jewish), but there are certainly figures out there in the media that would be happy to do that work for him. On the other hand, if these talks with Iran fall through and the mainstream punditocracy decides Bibi was right all along, then skipping that speech could become a liability. Either way it could raise the profile of US-Israeli relations considerably.
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Feb 26, 2015 12:36
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It might also be a matter of training and preference. Some of these guys probably brought their own guns, others are probably just using what they're used to. e: curses, foiled again.
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Feb 27, 2015 03:42
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Qatar and Tunisia managed to stay off that list as well, so, uh how's that for company?
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Feb 27, 2015 10:29
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cebrail posted:Morocco? I take it that Middle East means "muslim country regardless of geographic location" now. Svartvit posted:No, but Arab. Most of the world's Muslim nations are not on that list. Hell, Sudan isn't even on the list. If the criterion is "nasty Arab regimes," then it would certainly be on there and Israel and Iran just as certainly would not. I assume this chart was simply combining the Middle East and North Africa into one region (the "MENA" Volkerball mentioned) as they're commonly linked together in international relations circles. They probably thought Sudan was too far south to fit the geography and they may be lumping Turkey in with Europe or Central Asia (or they're just giving them a pass same as Lebanon). kustomkarkommando posted:PYD HXP PKK PUK KDP KRG Man, how many three letter acronyms do the Kurds need? When people talk about them one at a time it almost starts to seem like I might actually be understanding the situation over there, but then a post like this comes along to remind me how laughably clueless I really am.
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Feb 27, 2015 12:42
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It also helps that Tunisia is relatively small, homogenous, and urban. There aren't rival sects or ethnic groups to immediately start shooting each other and there's no vast, poorly integrated hinterland for guerrillas to hide in. Really though, the fact that the regime actually fell in a timely manner rather than starting a shooting war is probably the biggest factor. Even in Egypt, the revolution was much messier and it gave a chance for violence and fear to divide the society.
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Feb 28, 2015 00:33
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V. Illych L. posted:i think baby finland was finnish, though, wasn't he? You know, it was never entirely clear.
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Feb 28, 2015 23:58
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Azran posted:Out of curiosity, since I know next to nothing about Middle Eastern history, did the ME countries suffer like the African ones when it came to drawing up borders? Yes
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Mar 4, 2015 02:41
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Grouchio posted:I wonder if Yesh Atid's ascendency is now assured after Bibi's disastrous speech at the US congress yesterday... It's all in the optics. The speech itself was idiotic, but it produced lots of footage of congressmen applauding his soundbites. Any skilled propagandist could edit clips together to make it seem like a triumph, and Likud has some very skilled propagandists. We'll see how it all plays out within Israel. Maybe the electorate will see it for the bad political theater it is, but try not to get your hopes too high. Pimpmust posted:If every box there got a TOW in it that's like 50 of the things Or they have one TOW and 49 boxes. It's quite possible that they're all full, but you should always think twice about taking this kind of picture at face value. There's propaganda everywhere.
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Mar 4, 2015 10:50
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Ottoman provinces shifted a fair amount, especially when the borders were just lines drawn across the desert. Also, for some reason I will never be able to understand, no two maps found online ever have quite the same borders, even if they're ostensibly for the same year. This one is from Wikipedia (don't ask me why it's in German):  This one is from some Armenian website:  Confusingly, all three maps are dated to 1900. Anyway, if I'm reading them right the Sanjak of Zor/Dair Az Zor was split between Iraq and Syria. ISIS territory on this map would stretch from the eastern half of Aleppo province, to the western part of Mosul and Baghdad province, but its center is pretty firmly in Zor. I don't know how big a factor Sykes-Picot in particular was to the rise of ISIS, but the fact that the Sunni Arabs in Northeastern Syria and Western Iraq seem to have a lot more in common with each other than they do with the governments in Baghdad and Damascus certainly helps explain its geography.
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Mar 5, 2015 11:11
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Randarkman posted:Things like this can be rebuilt or restored though, historical buildings and heritage getting completely destroyed in a war is sadly nothing new, but neither is repairing, restoring and rebuilding them. Just look at WWII, alot of historical buildings and such in eastern Europe and Germany were pretty much completely destroyed as cities were blasted apart. The reason there's still historical stuff there is usually not because they survived unscathed. See, it's funny you should mention that, because WW2 was an architectural tragedy. Whole neighborhoods were leveled and in most cases they were replaced with modern buildings after the war. For every impressive landmark that was (more or less) restored, there are dozens that were lost to the ages.
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Mar 7, 2015 11:19
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Volkerball posted:They are even less likely to kill ISIS than the Iraqi occupation ISIS was born in, which is saying something. For every 1 ISIS fighter killed by an Iranian, 10 more will take his place. Yeah, ISIS' support base is Sunni Arabs terrified of being sandwiched between hostile Shia regimes in Damascus, Baghdad, and Tehran. The religious rivalry is just one element though, the others are racism and nationalism. Semites (like the Arabs and Assyrians) and Iranian peoples (like the Persians and Kurds) have been fighting over the Northern Mesopotamia region for thousands of years and the Iran/Iraq war is particularly fresh in people's memories. Any Iranian action that plays into the perception of a renewed Persian invasion has the potential to backfire spectacularly (as we've already seen in Iraq and Syria). The complex intersection of ethnic (Arab, Kurd, Persian, Assyrian, etc.), sectarian (Mainstream Sunnis, Salafi Sunnis, Iranian Shiites, Alawite/Syrian Shiites, Yazidis, Assyrian and Chaldean Christians in several flavors, etc.), ideological (secular republicans, Islamic republicans, neo-fascists, communists, pan-nationalists, federalists, confederalists, theocratists, etc.), and national (Syrian, Iraqi, Assyrian, Kurdish, etc.) identities is one reason there are so many competing factions in the region. Right now, ISIS has managed to build a fairly large tent for itself by convincing its followers to subsume all other aspects of their political and cultural identities into their own particular ideology in the name of defending "true" Islam. The perception of strong external threats may actually be what's holding the group together, so increasing those threats in any way short of a full dismantling of the Islamic State is likely to do more harm than good. Even if IS is fully dismantled (IE, its territory is reclaimed and its leaders are captured or killed), some action will have to be taken to ease the siege mentality that has fallen over the region or else lasting peace will be impossible.
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Mar 8, 2015 01:12
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kustomkarkommando posted:If think its worth nothing that Khameinei's authority is not universally accepted by all Iraqi Shi'ites, many still look towards Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani in Najaf for religious guidance rather than Khameinei and Qom (they are both technically equal in seniority). Al-Sistani has historically favoured the quietist school of shia thought that disdains clerical involvement in political affairs as a debasement of religious office, his distaste for intervening in political matters has arguable left an open door for more radical figures like Khameinei and Sadr who reject the quietist school but when Sistani does intervene he is usually obeyed. Zeroisanumber posted:Khameinei's no spring chicken either, though he is almost a decade younger than al-Sistani. Good call, man.
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Mar 8, 2015 01:51
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Yeah, the hospitalization in critical condition story appears to be legit. This could have just been someone jumping the gun, as happens a lot. How many times were Kim Jong-Il or Mandela reported dead before they finally kicked it? Here's a pretty entertaining article I found on how this pertains to Fidel Castro:The New York Times posted:Castro death alerts come fast and frequently these days. His age, ill health, long absence from public view and society’s shift from old-school rumor mill to hyperspeed Twitter feed make even debunked stories effortlessly spreadable. In fact, determining the provenance of each rumor has become a kind of modern-day parlor game. The bolded parts seem rather familiar.
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Mar 8, 2015 04:30
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SedanChair posted:You're "salty" about them fighting an invading force that was occupying its neighbor while its politicians joked about bombing them? Jesus Christ.
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Mar 8, 2015 06:38
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OwlBot 2000 posted:Have sanctions ever really worked? Iraq no, Russia no, South Africa probably not compared to domestic rebellion/needing outside support in ways DPRK don't... Kills a lot of kids, though. It depends what you mean by "worked." They do indeed kill a lot of kids, but they also put a lot of pressure on regimes by contracting the economy and lowering the standard of living. The idea is to use sanctions as leverage to bring rogue actors to the bargaining table (the Obama plan for Iran), but too often they're strictly punitive with no diplomatic aspects at all (the Republican plan for Iran). In Russia, the sanctions have combined with collapsed oil prices to cripple the economy and may have helped bring about the recent ceasefire (though who knows, really), but a lot of commentators are saying that cutting Russian economic ties with the West might actually be weakening the peace efforts
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Mar 11, 2015 02:54
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OwlBot 2000 posted:But that's emphatically not what was happened with Obama's sanction on Iran. They've lead to increased popular support for the government because they blame the US for the state of their economy. Same thing is happening in Russia, nationalism and support for Putin are stronger than they were thanks to sanctions. Everyone gets to rally around the leader against the foreign enemy who is trying to starve everyone into submission. tsa posted:Yea, I think the classical reasoning behind sanctions you see is completely ignorant about human psychology and takes for granted that everyone in the world things the USA is the greatest country/place in the world. I may not have gotten the point quite right the first time, but I don't think sanctions have ever really been about influencing public opinion directly. As you both pointed out, the natural impulse when your country comes under attack (militarily, politically, economically, whatever), is to rally in defense of the state. Rather, I think the purpose of any truly effective sanction regime must be to threaten that state's interests directly. The success of a government cannot be measured purely in its popular support, but also in its ability to maintain order, provide for its citizens, and secure its strategic objectives. If your only goal is to force regime change, then sanctions are a dubious proposition to say the least, but they are a viable way to weaken a state economically and militarily. The sanctions against Russia haven't done much to hurt the Putin regime (not yet, anyway), but the immense economic suffering they're facing may well have blunted their military ambitions. Likewise, Iran, facing a 5% contraction in their GDP on the eve of all-out war with ISIS may have decided that cutting a deal with the US was preferable to a prolonged depression. It's hard to say, really, but I wouldn't rule out either scenario too quickly.
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Mar 11, 2015 23:11
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SedanChair posted:The events of Exodus are completely fabricated. Yeah, probably. There's certainly no evidence that a significant number of Jews were ever in Egypt. Alternate explanations are that it is true(ish) story that was originally told about a specific group of Jews that later became identified with the whole religion or that existing legends of Moses were retrofitted to include more of a slavery angle during the events of the (very real) Babylonian Captivity. In any case, Exodus itself never claims that the Jews built the pyramids, and the figure identified as "Pharoah" is most frequently equated to Ramses II, who ruled Egypt more than a thousand years after the last pyramid was built.
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Mar 13, 2015 02:35
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Azran posted:Wasn't it also proved that the Great Pyramids (the famous ones, at least) weren't made by slaves but by the Egyptians themselves? I mean, you can always make the argument that citizens in a theocratic regime waaay back when would count as slaves of the pharaoh, but still Well, they found living quarters for the workers and evidence of payment (10 loaves of bread and a shitload of semi-liquid 3%ish abv "beer" a day appears to have been the going rate). And they worked in crews that shifted out after about three months. The debate over whether their term of service was compulsory or voluntary rages on, but even if they didn't serve by choice, it would have been more akin to conscription than bondage. Here's an article.
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Mar 13, 2015 06:24
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The Sunni/Shia split has also had some interesting connections to the notion of rule by Divine Right. Since the Sunni posit a line of succession for the Caliphate through Abu Bakr and the Shia draw it through Ali, there could be multiple claimants to the title without one clearly superseding the other. This could be useful for political factions seeking a religious justification for challenging the current ruler. For instance, the Shia Fatimids broke with the Sunni Abassid Caliphs in the 900s and set up their own rival caliphate that ruled North Africa for the next two hundred years. Likewise, the Safavids, the dynasty that established Twelver Shiism in Persia, used their sectarian identity to unite Persia and justify countless wars against the Sunni Ottomans. The religious differences are very real (though anecdotally, I've heard that many Muslims in both sects often overestimate how different they really are), but an awful lot of the differences can be chalked up to good old fashioned politics.
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Mar 14, 2015 11:21
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Volkerball posted:That's irrelevant. The argument is over whether a scenario where Assad controls everything again is plausible, and it's not. I totally agree that Assad has prioritized fighting against forces like the SRF and the FSA over ISIS, but he's not even making gains against them. He doesn't even have anything close to total control his own capital, because a huge chunk has been held for years by the people he most wants to fight, and he can't push them out. And it's a matter of opinion, but if Assad did somehow magically "win," I think it's guaranteeing Zaatari and such become permanent cities rather than refugee camps, because no one wants to subject themselves to the whims of the old regime that is now more paranoid and more prioritized on crushing dissent. You wouldn't have true peace. You'd have a cease-fire while the opposition attempted to re-arm and regroup. We'd be right back here later on down the road. Yeah, I'm with you. I really don't get how appeasing Assad would change the situation at all. What would actually change if the West announced tomorrow that they could work with Assad after all? It's not like the FSA would say "you know what, this guy may have murdered our friends, terrorized our communities, and driven our families from their homes, but the Americans like him now, so I'm sure we can work with him." It's not like ISIS or Al-Nusra would decide to just put down their AKs and black flags and go home. The only way the Assad regime can reunite Syria (if such a thing is even possible) is through massive bloodshed and why should we think they''re even capable of such a task when the last four years have shown otherwise? I get that this thread is a magnet for pseudo-Machiavellian dipshittery and the moral arguments against supporting a gang of fascist war criminals in their quest to murder their way back into power will probably fall on deaf ears, but even when I put on my standard issue D&D Realpolitik Goggles (available only in shades of gray), I still can't see any reason to work with Assad. The Ba'athists might as well write "Failed Regime" in the sky above Damascus for all the legitimacy they have left. Maybe four years ago,it would have been worth making a deal with the devil, but these days they just don't have enough to offer. Iggore posted:I guess they didn't forsee how damaging to state and public authority western interventions would be over time, coupled with how fragile authoritarian client states are to begin with. The first part of this has some truth, but the second statement is still a ridiculous counter-factual. World history (certainly Middle Eastern history) is full of states rising and falling without any sort of direct outside intervention. Western powers have certainly earned a fair share of blame for Middle East's problems, but blaming all instability in the region on outside influence is completely spurious.
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Mar 16, 2015 06:01
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Calling the MB "human garbage" and saying they "forfeited" their right to democracy was already sending my sociopathic bullshit detector off the charts even before you tried to sugarcoat the phrase "temporary suspension of democracy." Oh, and none of your fearmongering about Islamic tyrany even begins to explain why Sisi has cracked down on thousands of secular democratic protestors.
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Mar 16, 2015 09:33
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Sergg posted:Chuck Norris is a piece of poo poo and I hope he dies (this is a long-standing opinion of mine not a response to that video). He's a gay-hating creationist nutjob. Chuck Norris is an interesting guy. Did you know that in addition to being a noted Quran Scholar and incopetent plagiarist, he also used to be an actor? Well, "actor" might be overstating it, but he has scowled and awkwardly side-kicked things in a lot of movies, including some of the most Muslim hating trash ever put to film. That's from "The Hitman" and apparently the context for that clip is he's an undercover cop trying to provoke a confrontation, but the racism still feels pretty genuine (don't read the comments). Another Chuck Norris movie with disgusting Muslim caricatures as villains was "The Delta Force" one of several movies he did with Menahem Golan and Yorun Globus, two Israeli movie producers who represented something of a cottage industry of B movies where inept, inhuman Arabs threaten to blow things up and then get blasted. That Norris would have would still have friends in the Israeli rightwing is not surprising.
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Mar 17, 2015 09:57
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At this point, I'm not sure it even makes sense to refer to the Assad government as "Syria's Regime." Syria has at least four or five regimes at the moment.
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Mar 18, 2015 02:32
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mastershakeman posted:Somehow I feel Germans would understand baptists considering what happened in Munster. Those were Anabaptists, not Baptists. It's confusing, I know.
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Mar 18, 2015 02:37
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Nintendo Kid posted:The Shakers did that much more, and still do that to this day, all like 10 of them left in the world. I've been to the last Shaker community. It's a tourist attraction in Maine with some very interesting architecture and displays of their furniture and handicrafts. The Shakers or "shaking Quakers" are a strange little off-shoot of the Religious Society of Friends (everyone else calls us "Quakers" and we don't really mind, but among ourselves we generally prefer to go by "Friends"), but also rather different -- certainly the Friends have never been celibate. There are a number of differences among the Friends, and I haven't gone to meeting in years -- like some Puritan sects we have "meetinghouses" rather than "churches" and call our Sunday (or 'Firstday" since Sun worship is blasphemous) services "meeting for worship" -- so I'm not going to speak for the whole sect, but my particular (non-programmatic Western North American) branch of the Friends has no pastors or ministers and follows the old tradition of silent worship. Basically, we sit there for an hour, if someone feels particularly inspired they might say a few words. Anyone can feel the spirit of God ("the Light" in Quakerese) and everyone is equally qualified to give ministry. Sometimes lots of people speak in turn, sometimes no one speaks at all. It depends on the mood of the meeting. Mostly people just sit quietly. The whole thing's almost like a form of group meditation. Afterwards, the clerk would read the announcements and we'd go have refreshments. That's just one tradition within the Friends, however, "programmed" meetings with pastors, and sermons, and even (*gasp*) hymns more in-line with mainstream Protestantism are actually much more common these days (it turns out they make much more effective missionaries). Friends tradition rejects rigid doctrines or church hierarchies, so we're basically not allowed to argue over which version of Quakerism is the "real" one (not that that always stops us), so there's a high tolerance for some fairly unorthodox splinter groups (just ask all the Buddhist Friends out there), but generally speaking the Friends reject the more extreme forms of Spiritualism (you're not likely to finds us having fits or speaking in tongues). This wasn't always true, however. Some early meetings (like 1700s early) could get pretty intense and take George Fox's message to "tremble at the Word of the Lord" rather literally. Some people say that's what the name "Quaker" comes from, but I was always told it was because an early Friend told a judge he'd "quake with fear before God on his Day of Judgement." I'm not sure anyone really knows. Anyway, the Shakers came out of the fringe of the fringe and had basically stopped having anything to do with mainstream Friends by the 19th century. There are, however a few key similarities that they share with each other and other mystical traditions like the Sufis and Gnostics. One is the notion of equality before God -- Quakers like to say "there's that of God in all of us" -- and that means that we are all linked to the divine and worthy in the eyes of God and don't need a cleric or scholar to interpret God's will for us. The other is what we might call "gnosis" or revelation. Quakers spend a lot of time listening for God and the expectation is that eventually we'll hear back (I never did, and that's a big part of why I stopped going to meeting, but I know lots of people who say they have). This doesn't mean a big booming voice will sound in your head and tell you what to do (not usually, anyway) it's more like a feeling or an impression you get. You open yourself to the Lord and let the light shine within you and in the process you come to a new understanding perhaps of something you didn't even know you didn't understand before. Or, at least, that's what I've been told.
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Mar 22, 2015 13:20
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Skeesix posted:What's the deal with USA/UK troops pulling out of Yemen? All I know about Yemen is that it's got a weak government so it's a little wild west adjacent to Saudi Arabia. Also, are the Saudis invading? There were some pretty good effort posts on the invasion about five pages back.
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Mar 29, 2015 23:25
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Panzeh posted:Assad is a tough customer who made it through an almost impossible situation as well as a smooth political operator. Not yet he hasn't.
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Mar 31, 2015 07:43
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farraday posted:In Syria news. Good post, but why do you keep capitalizing random words? It's annoying.
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Apr 5, 2015 00:58
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^^^ I found it distracting. Farraday probably wanted me to be paying attention to the content of his post, not wondering why he capitalized the T in "tempo," so I said something. Don't read too much into it.TheImmigrant posted:The US allows Muslims like Buchanan to express themselves too. He hasn't ever held elected office though, being too far from the US mainstream to be electable. So it looks like everyone else was too busy arguing about your ambiguous grammar to point out that this is complete bullshit. Saqr wasn't asking why Buchanan was allowed to "express himself" he was asking why he is given regular opportunities to do it in the national media. It's actually a pretty good question and your false equivalency about Muslims is baffling. I can't think or a single far-right Muslim who gets the kind of regular air time in the US that Buchanan does. The Muslims we see on American TV tend to be quite moderate and are often implicitly "one of the good ones." I can't think of a single Muslim in America who''s even half as As for Saqr's actual question, Buchanan gets air time because he was part of the Republican establishment for a very long time and there are few things journalists value as much as "access." He's more of a fringe weirdo these days, but still the sort of guy they call when they're looking for a "prominent conservative." He doesn't know anything or do anything special. He's just there to provide a "perspective." Duckbox fucked around with this message at 01:39 on Apr 5, 2015 |
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Apr 5, 2015 01:31
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Did a prescriptivist grammarian poo poo on your marigolds or something?
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Apr 5, 2015 02:24
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farraday posted:I did it just to gently caress with you and for no other reason. I thought to myself, you know what this is a good way to weed out pedants and apsies and so it proved to be true. And here I was thinking I was the brilliant puppetmaster and it was all yall who'd played into my nefarious hands.  You're allowed to not care. Truth is, I don't give more than about half a poo poo myself, but since I seem to have opened up another front in the great Grammar Nazi/vernacular English war, I guess I should explain myself.As a couple people have noted, arbitrary capitalization is a hallmark or forum superstar Kyoon and a few of the other crazyposters who wander by from time to time. Other amusing tell-tales include constant/random links (Kyoon's habit of including "footnotes" that went to google searches was always pretty great. He never realized that we wouldn't actually be seeing the same search page as him, or have any idea what we were supposed to be looking for), sentences that start and stop in the wrong places or seem to be missing words, special definitions for words that only they use, and idiosyncratic paragraph breaking (the wall o' text is a classic, but I've also seen people who start a new line for every sentence, split sentences for no reason, have paragraphs that start off reasonable and then get longer and longer as they go, etc.). That isn't to say I decided you were nuts based on a few errant capitals, but pretty much anyone who's been on forums for a while knows that how people construct their posts can offer real insights into their state of mind. Despite what Muscle Tracer has assumed about me, I am by no means a rules is rules prescriptivist type. I tend to use the Oxford comma, but don't always. I don't get why anyone would care about splitting infinitives or starting sentences with "hopefully" or any of the other ridiculous rules certain people try to graft onto the English language. I tend to write rather "properly" because I do a ton of writing and don't want any bad habits to transfer over to a more professional context, but I make mistakes just like everyone else (in particular, I do a lot of homophone substitutions "too" instead of "two" and the like and i can, at times, be a little fuzzy on where my commas go). I can also remember when posting lowercase in dnd was pretty much an auto-probate, so I got used to being a little bit more formal here. but i also spent a fuckload of time in lf and can take the stick outta my rear end p. easy The reason I don't do that more, especially now that that the mods have eased up, is that I've become aware of just how much we tend to judge each other based on our language use. I'm not talking about typos and inadvertant mispellings so much because they're loving everywhere and who gives a poo poo? I just misspelled "inadvertent" and "misspellings." Big whoop, right? Stylistic choices are very different though because words are ideas and the ways we use them reflects our state of mind. When we see an entire essay written as a single paragraph, or crammed full of misused SAT words, or blatantly plagiarizing Wikipedia, we make some assumptions about its author. We might be wrong. There are some absolutely brilliant people out there who can't write worth a drat and even good writers have bad days, but that doesn't stop us from seeing those choices as meaningful in some way. I saw apparently random capital letters and figured they must have some meaning because you went to the trouble of using the shift key. Usually people do that for emphasis, but I couldn't figure out what you were trying to emphasize which made your post confusing and is, again, something I see a lot with crazy people. I thought, just perhaps, you didn't intend for your post to be confusing and would rather your readers didn't associate you with various crazy people, so I said something. If I was wrong and it was just an accident, I'm sorry. Anyway, that's where I was coming from. We can probably move on now. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Apr 5, 2015 14:04
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Yeah, I feel like a lot of Western media overemphasized the Sunni/Shia split in part because it's often basically the only thing they know about the Middle East. A lot of Muslims don't really know or care what the differences are and are quite capable of overlooking rather arcane theological disputes in favor of working together to pursue shared interests. Animosity toward Israel has made some particularly strange bedfellows. I only got that tag because I happened to post in a thread where Mrs. Badcrumble gave them to everyone like five years ago. I didn't get a sweet CPC avatar though and thus was never a true Redguard. 
Duckbox fucked around with this message at 00:06 on Apr 6, 2015 |
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Apr 5, 2015 23:46
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Just unlurking to say that a potential Turkish invasion of rojava is a lousy time to start cluttering up the thread with lovely personal attacks. No ones going to score any points today by rehashing old thread drama that only like six or seven of you actually care about.
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Apr 28, 2017 07:36
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Woah that's pretty major. ISIS is looking deader by the day, but it matters just as much who the territory is going to. If the sdf gains control of both sides of the river, and keeps its Arab contingent from breaking away, it will go a huge way toward legitimizing Northern Syria as a coherent multiethnic state (within a state). The Turks are going to keep saber rattling of course, but I don't think they have any intention of invading and occupying a third of Syria either and their strategy of using salafists to bludgeon the kurds has already backfired. Those border clashes were either a warning (perhaps to Arab allies as much as the kurds themselves), or the prelude to something stupid and drastic. The collapse of ISIS seems to have accelerated the move toward an endgame in Syria and we're rapidly approaching a point where northern Syria will be too large and established for the Turks or regime to snuff and too strong for any of the remaining "FSA" factions to challenge. Pretty soon Syria will face a reckoning, but there are a lot of questions left unanswered. The first is what stupid poo poo will Erdogan, Trump, Putin, hezballah and everyone else playing Powers and Proxies do after ISIS is gone? Even more importantly, what will happen when the SDF and Assad have no left to fight but each other? The TFSA and the others are running out of rope and the never Assad, never SDF position is looking increasingly untenable. Will the kurds start trying to bring them into the fold? Will Assad? I think the biggest unknown is which side is right about Rojava? Are they true revolutionaries who won't stop until Assad is gone and democratic confederalism reigns in Syria, or are they the collaborators their opponents have always claimed them to be, who will happily sell out the other rebels to Assad in exchange for a KRG-lite in Syria? The idealist in me really hopes they'll stick to their guns, but they've never had much stomach for facing Assad directly and after so long and bloody a war, any kind of peace has to look very tempting.
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Apr 30, 2017 11:01
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So, um, were there really "Arabs" there either? Nationalism in the Middle East is dumb.
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May 1, 2017 01:59
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