So the 15000 civilian deaths caused by Ukraine bombing its own provinces before Russia intervened, the constant efforts by Russia to resolve the issue diplomatically, the naked refusal of the West to even engage with Russia, the West openly backing a fascist coup in Ukraine, and then arming it with the explicit dictate of provoking Russia, the West pressuring Ukraine to not accept the generous settlement offered by Russia in May after the war started, all that doesn’t count?

It’s not like Russia has never done any of those things individually.

[citation needed]

Following the footsteps of IBM

What if I drink instant iced coffee?

Covid replaced Trump, Ukraine replaced Covid, Israel replaced Ukraine. Next up… who knows?

Lol. I hope I didn’t reinvent a story!

On a serious note:

• The incoming missile sounds hypersonic (probably a JDAM) which is definitely not something that Hamas could construct or has fired before.

• The speed and straight trajectory of the projectile from videos suggests that it’s nigh impossible to have been a misfire.

• IDF and Israeli spokespeople had wildly different stories after the strike, trying to shift the blame to Hamas, suggesting they all knew it was Israel who fired that rocket, and it probably did it intentionally, but they hadn’t gotten their stories straight. Most glaring example, is the IDF video supposingly showing the Hamas rockets being fired over the hospital, and the video was timestamped 40 minutes AFTER the strike had occured at the hospital (if it was on the same day even). They then immediately deleted it as soon as they got caught. Another example is an Israeli official claiming that Israel had targeted the hospital because Hamas had used its roof to fire rockets.

–

You don’t need to be an expert to figure out what’s going on here:

a) Israel is a murderous apartheid regime and this is something they have done before.

b) Israel has wiped up its population in a murderous frenzy, and they need to satiate it.

c) Israel has been dragging its heels on its fabled ground invasion of Gaza, with various excuses. It knows that it can’t beat Hamas on the ground, and it has been warned by Hezbollah against invading. It wouldn’t surprise me if they used this strike to satisfy their people politically, and then tell them that the US forced them to a ceasefire over this incident.

I have an ending for you. After the CIA’s last attempt almost kills Lois Lane, the president intervenes and stops the CIA. Clark goes to the White House to thank him. The president asks him for a little favpur in return, to help protect the US. Clark agrees. The president gives him his first assignement. Head over to a country and do something despicable, that Clark has previously uncovered that the US was lying about the subject all along.

50 dollars were console games. On PC you’d often find the same game at 30 dollars (disk) or 20 dollars (steam) on release. The difference was due to console makers taking a standard fee cut from every sale.

The first AAA games back then to be released at 40 and 50 dollars on PC were COD MW1 and BF3, which set the trend for all other games since then. This was pure profit for the publishers, since there was no cut for console makers on PC. And before you say it, no, the Steam cut back then wasn’t even comparable (much less since it was a % cut and not a standard fee). In fact Steam hiked their cut because of the price hike triggered by EA and Activision, which is what then made EA pull their games off Steam and create Origin.

The budget is also a marketing ploy. The average person hears about a game costing hundreds of millions to make and they think “well then, it MUST be good”. It’s more or a pissing contest among publishers. Most of that budget does indeed go to marketing and executive wages/bonuses.

And from the publisher’s perspectives, that’s really a good investment of the budget, because it doesn’t just drive up sales. It also cultivates customer loyalty and fanboyism (e.g. “we are spending all that money because we believe in the game, and we want to give our loyal fans the best experience possible” is a very common line in pre-release interviews).

For example, there’s a false equivalency among gamers, propagated by this kind of propaganda: “I have to pay the high prices and engage in microtransactions/DLC, because that supports the game developers and their high budgets”. In reality, the people who actually make the game see very little of that money. Their wages, in most instances, are shit and do not reflect the hours they put in. However, gamers rarely want to understand that, and instead extend the publisher pissing contest among themselves (“the game I’m playing now spent more money than the game you are playing, therefore it’s the superior product”).

Spencer’s analysis is just an overview of the current symptom.

This is the real disease:

because it sees a new platform it can scale to feed the financial growth demanded by investors.

Investors/shareholders demand infinite growth, but there’s finite space to grow (millions of games, few customers). This is why, in the past 2 decades we’ve been seeing the scummiest of practices being employed again and again, as well as a 300% hike in base prices. Capitalism has eaten gaming.

But we’ve been observing this trend in AAA and AA publishers/developers mostly. Indie gaming is alive and well and evolving towards being better and better. Why? Because indie developers are not usually beholden to investors.

Once you hear a gaming company you used to like has gone public, say your condolences and then run away.

I follow the SYRIZA elections, and I have to say that if Kasselakis is elected, then SYRIZA will completely abandon its left-wing character, aside from certain social issues like gender equality, gay rights, etc. For example, yesterday the Greek Parliament voted in favor of an anti-strike measure that also allows employers to expand the 8-hour day to 13-14 hours, as well as removing a lot of worker rights and protections. SYRIZA abstained from the vote, when it was prepared to vote against. Kasselakis had come out earlier making remarks in favor of this new law package, and his influence probably made SYRIZA to abstain instead of voting against.

I don’t think you’ve been paying attention to your hero.

You see, Ukraine are good Nazis, but North Korea are bad communists.

Seems this community is attracting the downvoting cockroaches.

Oh all right. Sorry, too many liberal idiots running amuck in the comments. Got carried away.

A) it is when you ignore every single point except the one you can twist

B) and you were wrong

C) yet you’ve been minimizing the Ukrainian coup orchestrated by the US, and denying the right of self-determination to people in the Donbass

D) you didn’t use it as a negative at all. Nowhere in your comment do you condemn the Iraq war. In fact you are whitewashing it by implying that somehow the US should be praised for not doing ethnic cleansing (which they did, lest we forget the 1.5 million dead Iraqi)

Oh they haven’t? India-Pakistan conflict did not happen then. The Cuban missile crisis didn’t happen either. I guess the US hasn’t been trying to kill Iran’s nuclear program with drone bombings and assassinations either.

I’d say open a book, but I don’t think you have the capacity to benefit from it.

Are you pretending that Ukraine did not apply for NATO membership, or that NATO stated they were planning to place nukes there (which we only learned because Ukraine was cheering it on Twitter)?

It’s Boris and Natasha from the Rocky Bullwinkle show. That’s all it is to these idiots.