The Gaming Den

Omegonthesane wrote:

hyzmarca wrote:

DSMatticus wrote:It's possible that unlabelled countries are white because they haven't been included in the results, and not because of an absence of conflict. Of course, excluding the Ivory Coast would be its own form of bullshit, because its conflict was far more severe in 2010 than 2015. And the yellow designation itself is almost wholly pointless. Ten people is a gunman taking a wrong turn at Albuquerque. It's bullshit small.

In that case, white countries should still be white in the second map. They aren't.

It's a comparison map. You have to compare the same countries, or else it doesn't work.

Technically, "countries named on this map" are being compared - but they still should've explicitly had a "Not included in this comparison" colour that wasn't the same white as "Zero".

I'm guessing the colors are "white" and "white with a country name".

hyzmarca wrote:

DSMatticus wrote:It's possible that unlabelled countries are white because they haven't been included in the results, and not because of an absence of conflict. Of course, excluding the Ivory Coast would be its own form of bullshit, because its conflict was far more severe in 2010 than 2015. And the yellow designation itself is almost wholly pointless. Ten people is a gunman taking a wrong turn at Albuquerque. It's bullshit small.

In that case, white countries should still be white in the second map. They aren't.

It's a comparison map. You have to compare the same countries, or else it doesn't work.

I'm suggesting that the set of countries being compared is "the ones with labels" and not "the ones shown on the map," which would explain why the Ivory Coast is white in 2010 despite the outbreak of civil war.

It's bullshit either way - either they're wrong or they excluded an incredibly pertinent example in an incredibly misleading way - but it explains why the Ivory Coast is white to begin with.

Even if you only include the countries with labels, it's still bullshit. Algeria's December 9th offensive killed dozens of people in one day during their ongoing civil war with AQIM. That was in 2010. I don't have casualty totals for the whole year, but considering that they get half way through Yellow to Orange for one fucking day during that year, it's totally unacceptable for them to be written up as white for that period.

Every single thing I bother to check about that map is bullshit. It's just factually wrong all the way down. They are just trying to paint the picture of the world descending into madness by hoping that you've forgotten all the chaos and madness from five years ago. But you know what? That was only five years ago, the memory hole doesn't work that fast.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote: They are just trying to paint the picture of the world descending into madness by hoping that you've forgotten all the chaos and madness from five years ago.

Playing a bit of devil's advocate, between 2010 and 2015 we saw the spawning of a whole new country of extremist religious fanatics in that area. There was plenty of chaos and madness five years ago, but when the lunatics start forming their own public government that rules over some ten million people, I would say it's fair to say shit has got even worst.

maglag wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote: They are just trying to paint the picture of the world descending into madness by hoping that you've forgotten all the chaos and madness from five years ago.

Playing a bit of devil's advocate, between 2010 and 2015 we saw the spawning of a whole new country of extremist religious fanatics in that area. There was plenty of chaos and madness five years ago, but when the lunatics start forming their own public government that rules over some ten million people, I would say it's fair to say shit has got even worst.

Shit got worse in Nigeria, Iraq, Syria, and the Ukraine. Those are real places and the results have been real bad. Global terrorism killed just over half as many people in 2010 as it had in 2007, and is definitely on its way up again. 2015 isn't over yet, but global terrorism in 2014 was almost triple what it was in 2012 (its local minimum year).

But the Darfur peace accord got signed in 2010. The South Sudanese Genocide killed hundreds of thousands of people - more than all global "terrorist" attacks combined during the same period. In 2010, Sudan was a country of 40 million people. Having an end, or even a pause to that reign of genocidal tyranny is an objectively bigger deal than the beginning of ISIL.

The long and the short of it is that yellow and white tags are handed out by that map in a manner which is untrue and almost certainly intended to deceive.

-Username17

Real talk, there is a thing going on in the middle east that is called IS, ISIS, ISIL, and ISS.

What are the meaningful distinctions between those terms? Is one of them the secret Republican Code Word that is racially insensitive? Is there any real difference at all?

I ask because I have been calling it ISIS, but the President always says ISIL, and I think that sounds stupid. But I think Fox news calls it ISIS? I just don't want to be using a stupid name for it that isn't accurate or is racist.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/ukraine-cour ... 24320.html

Well, that was unexpected.

Kaelik wrote:Real talk, there is a thing going on in the middle east that is called IS, ISIS, ISIL, and ISS.

What are the meaningful distinctions between those terms? Is one of them the secret Republican Code Word that is racially insensitive? Is there any real difference at all?

I ask because I have been calling it ISIS, but the President always says ISIL, and I think that sounds stupid. But I think Fox news calls it ISIS? I just don't want to be using a stupid name for it that isn't accurate or is racist.

As far as I know, ISIS, ISIL and IS are the same thing, standing for "Islamic State of Iraq and Syria", "Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant", and "Islamic State". The name changes as it expands.

Kaelik wrote:Real talk, there is a thing going on in the middle east that is called IS, ISIS, ISIL, and ISS.

What are the meaningful distinctions between those terms?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- ... acronym-2/

Kaelik wrote:Real talk, there is a thing going on in the middle east that is called IS, ISIS, ISIL, and ISS.

What are the meaningful distinctions between those terms? Is one of them the secret Republican Code Word that is racially insensitive? Is there any real difference at all?

I ask because I have been calling it ISIS, but the President always says ISIL, and I think that sounds stupid. But I think Fox news calls it ISIS? I just don't want to be using a stupid name for it that isn't accurate or is racist.

IS stands for "Islamic State."
ISIS stands for "Islamic State in Iraq and Syria."
ISIL stands for "Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant."

The Levant is a regional term which includes Syria and also the Lebanon and Jordan and even Cyprus, Israel, and Palestine. The President of the United States uses the term "ISIL" because they have performed actions in Lebanon and Jordan, which means that they are not only active in Syria and Iraq.

They are however mostly active in Syria and Iraq, so calling them ISIS isn't unreasonable. The BBC just uses "Islamic State" with no regional qualifiers, Al-Jazeera uses "ISIL." Shadowrun called it "NIJ."

-Username17

Wikipedia says "Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant", which is a translation of ad-Dawlah al-Islāmiyah fī 'l-ʿIrāq wa-sh-Shām, or DAESH, which was their early name for themselves.

It's like how the English-speaking world used to call the CCCP "the USSR", because of translating full terms from other languages and then making it an acronym again.


But the difference between IS, ISIS, ISIL, and ISS is in what is chosen to translate, and what is emphasised by that translation.

They call themselves the Caliphate, or IS, but it's rude to agree with them about that because Islam clearly insists that everyone support the Caliph, so you're kind of calling everyone else a traitor or heretic or whatever. So ignore that. They want to be IS, but no one at all accepts that and it lacks facts on the ground. Calling them that is also a bit of an insult to other countries who also call themselves Islamic states.

The Levant isn't a place to be a government of either, but it used to be before the Great War, and they do strongly claim a desire to rule over it all by force, and have attacked into all of those territories, that's what they currently fight for. Facts on the ground, matches their early claims, looks good for a name.

ISIS, is Iraq and Syria, the governments of both those places very strongly disagree about calling them that. It also understates their claims in Lebanon and Jordan, and how old-school they are about not even recognising Syria as a thing. Which, given the state of the place, isn't totally unreasonable.

ISS? Hadn't seen that one. Leaving out their territorial gains and claims in Iraq is just ... factually inaccurate. More so than the other options.


Really, the POTUS has the state department telling him how to not offend people for no reason, so ISIL will be what "friendly" countries in the area are comfortable with at least. Fox News is lies.

There's also Daesh, the preferred term if you are specifically insulting ISIL as it's apparently a corruption of their acronym or something (and also because there was someone at my old school called Isis, so I'd rather call the bunch of terrorists who took over some subset of Iraq and Syria something else.

AFAIK ISS stands for International Space Station.

Omegonthesane wrote:There's also Daesh, the preferred term if you are specifically insulting ISIL as it's apparently a corruption of their acronym or something (and also because there was someone at my old school called Isis, so I'd rather call the bunch of terrorists who took over some subset of Iraq and Syria something else.

According to the wiki, Daesh is just the arabic version of an acronym.

Longes wrote:

Omegonthesane wrote:There's also Daesh, the preferred term if you are specifically insulting ISIL as it's apparently a corruption of their acronym or something (and also because there was someone at my old school called Isis, so I'd rather call the bunch of terrorists who took over some subset of Iraq and Syria something else.

According to the wiki, Daesh is just the arabic version of an acronym.

Right. And that acronym roughly translates to The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Daesh is very litterally ISIL in arabic.

Longes wrote:

Omegonthesane wrote:There's also Daesh, the preferred term if you are specifically insulting ISIL as it's apparently a corruption of their acronym or something (and also because there was someone at my old school called Isis, so I'd rather call the bunch of terrorists who took over some subset of Iraq and Syria something else.

According to the wiki, Daesh is just the arabic version of an acronym.

I read that the only reason that they might be offended by that is that they're really conservative and don't think that Arabic should have acronyms in it, and that all the "Dae'sh sounds like <word>, and that's an insult" reasons are all made up - but that is just something I found on the internet, so YMMV.

Every single time, our PM calls it the ISIS death cult. Seriously, it's always specifically a death cult. I think there might be a metal band called Death Cult, which makes things confusing.

Fwib wrote:

Longes wrote:

Omegonthesane wrote:There's also Daesh, the preferred term if you are specifically insulting ISIL as it's apparently a corruption of their acronym or something (and also because there was someone at my old school called Isis, so I'd rather call the bunch of terrorists who took over some subset of Iraq and Syria something else.

According to the wiki, Daesh is just the arabic version of an acronym.

I read that the only reason that they might be offended by that is that they're really conservative and don't think that Arabic should have acronyms in it, and that all the "Dae'sh sounds like <word>, and that's an insult" reasons are all made up - but that is just something I found on the internet, so YMMV.

The Boston Globe says this-

The term “Daesh” is strategically a better choice because it is still accurate in that it spells out the acronym of the group’s full Arabic name, al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi al-Iraq wa al-Sham. Yet, at the same time, “Daesh” can also be understood as a play on words — and an insult. Depending on how it is conjugated in Arabic, it can mean anything from “to trample down and crush” to “a bigot who imposes his view on others.” Already, the group has reportedly threatened to cut out the tongues of anyone who uses the term.

I initially heard about the "Daesh sounds like a word for something shameful" thing on NPR, so while I'm not going to assert it's literally absolutely true (since I'm using second hand info), I'm inclined to trust it.

Most importantly, though, I guess, is that DAESH doesn't want to be called the actually in-language acronym for their name. So it could fucking mean "let's give everyone ice cream" and they just don't like acronyms, and I would still call them DAESH because they are a horrific terrorist organization so fuck their wants (and I'm a privileged white kid in America, so I don't really need to actually worry about pissing them off, I'll admit.)

In more germane news:
https://netzpolitik.org/2015/suspicion- ... r-sources/

and then when they got some resistance in the form of open protest from 2000 citizens about this, they try to pull out.

But they probably only charged them with treason so they could use our useless "vorratsdatenspeicherung" which is meta data and the such and is allowed only under big crimes. Not leaking stuff, but Treason obviously works. And they probably try to intimidate other people into not leaking data such as that anymore as well.

Yes, they will not do anything about the NSA and other secret services spying on us citizens, but they will prosecute anybody who tells people about their shady dealings . .

Stahlseele wrote:In more germane news:
https://netzpolitik.org/2015/suspicion- ... r-sources/

The comments are a hoot. I love that the German people think that their chancellor who grew up in the GDR needs lessons from the United States in how to behave in an oppressive fashion towards the press. Remember how she spent the first 36 years of her life in a Soviet puppet state? I sincerely doubt she needs pointers from another continent in how to go about leveling treason charges on reporters who say things she doesn't like. The GDR did that shit all the time.

-Username17

The chancellor actually indirectly already distanced herself from the idiot who trumped these charges up . . because of course a politician does that.

So - Canada is now officially in electoral campaigning mode.

Obviously, Harper's Conservatives want a US-style campaign: ridiculously long and filled with attack ads. They'll need it, apparently: according to the first big poll, they're trailing the NDP (left-leaning) by a significant margin, and are statistically tied with the not-quite-back-to-respectable-party-status Liberals nationwide.

Obviously, it's going to be a long (and excruciatingly boring, and expensive) campaign, but that really isn't the spread of votes I was expecting. It gives me hope that we may yet see the end of the Conservatives nutjob law-and-order agenda.

I didn't even aware that Canadia had elections. Or a government.

Oh, we still have elections (although the Conservative back benchers would very much like voting to be limited to WASP males, the maintream Conservatives are still okay with the rest of the rabble voting for now) and we have a big, big government.

(So big, in fact, that despite Harper's MO of crippling any governmental department that is even remotely scientific or non-conservative leaning, the government still sorta-works. No doubt he'll play that up as proof that we could afford to cut some fat.)

How do Canadian elections work? As in, are they as viscous/entertaining as American elections? Do the candidates get elected on who can make love in a boat canoe? Do you get an "I voted" sticker when you go to the polls? Do the candidates mothers call your phone to urge you to elect their children*?

*This actually isn't a joke. In the last Boston mayoral election, this really happened. It was simultaneously hilarious and really annoying.