I’m no fan of the “run a dungeon without typing a single word” thing that’s so common now, where everyone is expected to know every part of the dungeon and people rush it, but the counterpoint is not “wait 35 minutes in trade chat waiting to build a group”. Marking trash mobs in BC and still wiping because a pull went…

I definitely forget the completed quests thing, and I played a lot of Vanilla back in the day. Memory is a tricky thing, and years of something different just tends to get projected back.

That looks like one of those awful “fashion keffiyeh” some American brands were trying to sell. It’s both racist and a fashion crime. 

This is basically white supremacist fantasy history cruise. Also included on the tour is David Barton, a man so incredibly incompetent at his far-right revisionism that even many conservatives call him a charlatan.

Iran has a lot of smart and experienced people reading every US statement and action for overt and covert meanings. The US also has a stable of such people, but you don’t listen to them and indeed have harassed many of them when they don’t agree with your statements or your partisan underlings.

It worked well at slowing invaders, particularly nomadic peoples who relied on their horses, so that the Chinese dynasties could muster an army to deal with them.

This is a reminder that walls do not work, and that no matter how many strange design elements he tries to add from his fevered imagination that will not change. Walls of this size do not stop movement. They didn’t do so even in ancient history.

If you can’t treat the public with respect and are so concerned with protecting your own, you need to be fired. I’m tired of cowardly self-interested people with badges. You take on risk to protect the public. You don’t get to act with impunity or irrationally just because you’ve decided you’re on the side of good.

Alright. I’m done. You are incapable of admitting your error and seem to have no issue with huge leaps and intellectual dishonesty. Jumping from partisan identity to cults is the kind of thing someone pretending they know psychology does when they’re desperate. These are not the same things, even if there is overlap.

You have no fucking clue about human psychology if you think that’s how partisan identity works. You descend deeper into charlatanism. You have literally no evidence to support your position, you’re now just making appeals to authority and hoping I’m not smart enough to notice. Just because you think they “look bad”…

The fact that you think this in a compelling response only discredits you further. The cost is obvious and well-documented. You’re a prop in a narrative. Don’t believe me? Go look at the comments on a Fox news story about liberals. It is narrative reinforcement. It doesn’t matter what the liberal voices say. They’re a…

The entire presumption that people are generally motivated by logic or the strength of an argument has been repeatedly challenged by polling data and studies.

Scroll back up and see my initial comment. There is absolutely a cost. You not only validate Fox, you serve as a prop in their game. It’s really hard to respect your point of view if you didn’t bloody well read my initial comment you’re responding to. 

So, no. Which makes my point about cost far outweighing the undefined benefits.

Is there any shred of evidence that’s ever happened on a statistically significant level? That’s my point. I’m aware that’s the usual argument in favor of these appearances, but I’ve never once seen anyone back up that “conventional wisdom” with anything but assumptions.

“Be an adult” says the pissant who deletes threads where he gets embarrassed. Physician, heal thyself.

Did he nuke your subthread too? I guess he was unhappy with how many more stars I got for calling out his dishonest misogynistic bullshit.

Not a particularly intellectually honest. If you redefine terms to suit your arguments it’s very easy to “win” like that. That’s not how the terms are actually used, in popular or academic literature.

It was mercifully shorter than my last interaction with him, when he was pushing some fringe “anti-imperialist” nonsense of the “I defend dictators because the US is the root of all evil” variety. 

Pretty much every modern economy is a mixed-system, taking elements of capitalism and socialism. The debate is over the mixture, not the general character. The whole Manichean “capitalism vs. socialism” thing is a grand old strawman.