A top Hamas political official told The Associated Press the Islamic militant group is willing to agree to a truce of five years or more with Israel and that it would lay down its weapons and convert into a political party if an independent Palestinian state is established along pre-1967 borders.
I'm all for the establishment of a free Palestinian state, but Hamas has to go.
Preferably through police action rather than the genocide that is a military intervention by Israel.
Anyway, the Israeli government is in the wrong on all the counts you raised, but Hamas still needs to go. They've been fully co-opted by all sorts of outside groups, and their rule in Gaza before October 7th was one of fear and oppression. They are no one's saviors, they're just the meanest bastards in the prison, lashing out at the guards while abusing the other prisoners.
The actual path to peace is a multinational police and peacekeeping force to come in and take over from the IDF, keeping the IDF out of it completely, and then opening up Gaza and the West Bank to the rest of the world. Possibly even ejecting the settlers from the West Bank and giving the land back.
But a large part of this would be arresting Hamas leadership.
And don't think I'd let the IDF and Israeli government off scot-free for their part in all this. I'm sure there's plenty of room in the local prisons for all the bastards in this mess.
The end goal might be a single, secular state, where all people are guaranteed full rights and protections by the government.
Itamar Ben Gvir, Israel’s far-right national security minister, has called for the execution of Palestinian prisoners to ease overcrowding in the country’s jails....
Closer to Gitmo, in that a percentage of the prisoners are actually a threat to "peace" and have committed various crimes. Also like Gitmo a percentage are only in there because their neighbor wanted to steal their land.
Edit: There’s a lot of people in the comment section who clearly didn’t read the article so let me clarify that no, this is not about Judge Aileen Cannon. Read. The. Damn. Article.
A modern civil war will not be fought on battle fields. That shit was pointless and stupid in the first civil war (which is a large reason why the South lost, they wanted glorious battles, and the north just burned cities)
No, a modern civil war will look like the mess in Syria or Haiti. It will be disorganized, chaotic, and there will be far too much pointless bloodshed, with no battle lines. Just a bunch of assholes killing people who they disagree with.
My ideal election laws would have an electoral college type setup, but based on congressional district rather than by state. Now, here are the changes that make it workable.
First, the number of congressional districts needs to increase. Massively. There needs to be a fixed ratio of Representatives to state population. At least 1 rep per X people. Then that number needs to be set in stone.
Congress got into a pissing match 100 years ago over how to do apportionment, so now we're stuck with 435 Representatives when the population of the US has more than tripled and two new states have been added.
The next thing that needs to be set in stone is a way to draw districts. Shortest split-line is the method of choice here. Now, it can favor conservatives and rural areas a bit, but only if your number of districts is too low. With enough districts, the output starts to look a lot like actual population maps. If you squint.
I'd ditch the Senate. Or roll it into the House. Maybe say that each state gets an equal number of representatives who serve more than 2 years. So that there's a group of people who have institutional knowledge when the next congress forms.
This would be important for the next change I'd make. Term limits, or rather, consecutive term limits. You'd be able to serve two terms, but then to serve a third you'd have to take one full term off, actually living in your district. You must spend 25 of every 30 days living in the district for at least 2 years to qualify to represent that district.
The final, and most impactful, change would be the voting system itself. We desperately need to ditch FPtP, and Ordinal voting systems in general. Cardinal voting systems are the only way to have viable third parties, with actual, separate identities.
My current favorite system is STAR. It's the absolute best single winner election system out there. There may be better systems in the future, but for now, this is it.
So let's talk practicality of these fixes.
Increasing the size of Congress is a single law. That's it. If you want to push things a bit further, there's James Madison's Congressional Apportionment Amendment, which despite being introduced in the late 1700s, is still a viable amendment, and could theoretically finish the ratification process.
Fun fact, the 27th amendment, which was ratified within my lifetime, was introduced along with the congressional apportionment amendment.
Drawing districts is a State level thing, but Congress does have the power to set requirements on federal elections. They could require that federal districts be drawn via a certain way.
But still, an amendment is likely the only way that it would be implemented.
Term limits flat out need an amendment, same with ditching the senate.
And the final note, the voting system needs to either be done state by state, or via the ability to control federal elections. Possibly needs an amendment to actually apply to everyone,
Honestly? Because a national popular vote (for president) would take an amendment, or every state joining the national interstate voting compact, but wouldn't actually fix the deeper issue of the dysfunction of Congress.
Also, the compact might be of questionable constitutionality.
A one time fix might be enough to fix things for a while...
But to truly fix things...
Set up something akin to Lemmy mixed with Wikipedia. Now, the only people who can post to this social media would be members of congress. Every single bill would have to be posted in its entirety to this platform for at least 30 days before a vote could be called. And then, members of congress could post in the comments, debating the bill. This would also give them ways to post links and research and shit,
Now, the important thing here, this platform would be open to anyone to view.
Hell, add in the ability to post video comments. Let these people play their popularity contests, but out in the open.
Oh yeah, if the bill is amended, then the 30-day timer restarts. Also, no more breaks. Congress is always officially in session. Then allow voting via the platform. Allow votes to be cast beforehand, but they finalize on the 30th day. If the bill does not get enough votes to pass, it's dead, but can be resubmitted, or kicked back to committee. (a sub-lemmy for particular topics)
Maybe add in hired transcribers whose only job is to post transcribed text of any meeting or such.
Then make the software open, and get states to use it, and city councils. Basically all government should be done in text and in the open. With time for those making the laws to actually read them, and for the public to be able to know exactly what's going on in government.
The benefit of my idea here is that it can support quite a bit of expansion, while still allowing a fairly local feeling representation. Because congress could easily work from home most of the time.
The sad thing about Oblivion is that there are in-game books in Morrowind and previous games that describe the empire as being in the middle of a bamboo jungle. The vibe comes off as the Roman Empire in South East Asia.
Instead we got generic high fantasy with the occasional guy wearing Roman armor.
On the surface, Ranked Choice looks like it would be a good idea, but when you break it down, it has some fundamental problems that are just as bad for democracy as First Past the Post.
This video is a great watch on the subject, it goes through all the problems in great detail, but the TLRW is thus, Ranked Choice is a flawed system, fatally so.
If you want to steal an election but make it look legit, Ranked Choice is your number one voting system. If you want viable third parties, Ranked Choice is not the voting system for you. It actually punishes viable third parties harder than FPtP.
The North Sentinel Island Sentinelese are not cannibals. They just want nothing to do with anyone not born on the island.
Which is a good policy to have, seeing as how the British genocided the rest of the Andaman Islands. They even landed on North Sentinel, kidnapped a few old people and children, and then sent the survivors back as plague bearers. (this was in 1880)
That's not how it works. Making money today is the only thing these ghouls care about, ruining a company or brand is just dandy because they won't be holding the bag when it bursts. They'll have passed it to someone else. Someone else who will then work to gut the company even more before selling it to someone who will gut it and close it down.
And nothing of real value will have been made, but lots of rich asshats will be slightly richer.
Cutting costs and laying people off makes the books look slightly better (more cash on hand) which makes the stock price jump, which is all these ghouls want because they're going to sell off on the high, and then bail out.
No, Rian Johnson is a pretty shit storyteller as well.
A competent storyteller would have seen that Carrie Fisher died, looked at the release window of the movie, with a full year left, and then ordered a single reshoot to kill Leia off instead of pulling a Space Merry Poppins.
He also completely abandoned Finn's Force potential in favor of whatever the fuck that casino raid was.
And then there was the noble sacrifice that Finn was going to make, which was foiled because he decided that Finn should have a love interest, but didn't lay any of the groundwork for it, and the sacrifice could have actually saved the day.
So instead, he invents the hyperspace kamikaze.
Honestly, that entire movie felt like a long filler sequence. The stakes never actually changed, and there was no payoff of anything. It was a placeholder movie, only meant to be the second in a trilogy. And the fans hated it so much that the last movie spent a good amount of runtime retconning it all.
The one thing he was at the company to do, was make good games that make good money.
Covering for rapists and threatening to kill employees is bad enough, but I can see a world where that sort of shit is, not forgiven, but swept under the rug.
That world is one where the money flows. It's not a good world, but it's one that's understandable.
But fucking with the games and making shit worse? In a sane world, the Board would take a look at the company and say, no. this guy has to go for all of the above reasons.
That sane world is one where mergers and acquisitions are heavily scrutinized, and Blizzard was not allowed to merge with Activision.
Actual competition in the space means that the CEO has to actually be halfway good at the job, and maybe not a complete psycho. We don't live in a sane world.
As we all know, Roblox is garbage tier gameplay structured around psychological cues to get children to fill an endless pit with fake money bought with real money....
There are even two versions that Jagex maintains, the main branch, and Old School Runescape, which is based around how the game was back in 2007-2009. (but with new stuff still added all the time)
I played a bit this morning. Accidentally broke my paladin's oath while trying to get more info from a bad guy I was planning to kill.
Killed them instantly after the conversation, but that conversation broke the oath. Shouldn't have bothered either. Didn't get anything new.
And now I won't be able to savescum/press on until tomorrow at the earliest due to download speeds. I'm also on linux, so I might have to wait even longer if this patch breaks things again.
It should be fun a challenge, but maybe not as fun as my naked golden dragonborn monk.
At some point in the run, I just stopped and said, "fuck, I need to play this guy in tabletop game"
He has the shiniest golden scales beneath rippling muscle. He sees the physical form as perfection itself, perfection that is too godly for such window dressing as clothing. But for modesty's sake, he might be convinced to wear a schlong thong. If you ask nicely.
Not willing to wait 10 minutes to play a game? You Sir, or Madam, have never played modded Rimworld.
Now imagine loading a game, realizing your mods aren't quite right, and having to exit out and reload.
As to 10 minutes to something like Warzone... no. Just no. An online battle royal type game needs to be fast. It can't be all laid back and calming like Rimworld, the colony/warcrimes simulator.
Just because everything is on fire, my cook has food poisoning, my researcher is punching the boomalope, and my hunter is running from the fire, doesn't mean I've lost control.
No everything is probably okay as long as there's no raid or mech cluster.
Plus, I've learned by now to not have wooden bases, and to keep the flammables and boomalopes on opposite sides of the base. Chemfuel goes over in that little building over there, with a thin roof. Still need to remember that firefoam poppers are a thing.
So it's not a total loss. And that was the highlights of yesterday's play session.
I have almost 2500 hours in the game. There are mods that change the nature of the game to the point where it seems like a completely different game.
There are also modders in the community who have worked on parts of the official DLC.
Speaking of, the DLC massively expanded the game.
But even just the base game is an addictive colony builder where everything is likely to end in flames. Or not. Because there difficulty settings are fairly robust. You can make it a chill little farm sim if you want.
I had forgotten about this game... I put it on a wishlist ages ago waiting for a sale...
And it turns out, that sale happened a while back when my old computer was dead. I've had my new computer for months now and this game in my library and not remembered that I had it.
Cheaper, or banned entirely by the Egyptian government. Valve is sort of in a tough spot here. The EU will fine them, but so will every authoritarian regime that bans anyone in the country from downloading banned items.
Diablo 4, Path of Exile, and the rest of the ARPG genre has competition in the mega-ambitious Last Epoch, built by its Reddit community and heading towards 1.0.
New Vegas is a better game. And I mean that in the sense that you can go more places and interact with the story and setting in more ways in New Vegas. Also, what do they eat? Fallout 3? unknown. New Vegas? you see corn fields and such all over the place.
In Fallout 3, the NPCs have no existence beyond their part in the highly scripted story. You choices in game don't matter at all in the way the story ends.
New Vegas has little bits and pieces of setting and backstory for random NPCs that you might never meet, and the story can be completed in different ways, your choices matter.
Evidence of farming, or any food source for the NPCs shows that the makers of the game were actually thinking about the world as a livable space.
Fallout 3 devs were just thinking about a world where the story happens, nothing more. And it often shows. You run into little immersion breaking moments, especially if you go too far off the rails. Stay on the rails and it was a solid game.
New Vegas had devs who really paid attention to the details of the world, and if you went off the rails, it became an amazing game.
The main issue with the pre-war food is that it's been 250+ years. Sure, you might find a cache or two, but overall, it will have been scavenged already.
The honest truth is, food and water sources for anyone in the capital wastes was never seen as important to the writers of the story, So it was cut. Well, it was cut if it was ever written at all in the first place.
The story of Fallout 3 is very linear. Which means that it can be tightened up and polished, and it was. But if you go even a little bit off the rails, it starts showing cracks that are immersion breaking.
New Vegas didn't have that fully polished main story. Instead, it had a polished game world. One that felt alive and vibrant.
It's the reason why people have x amount of time playing Fallout 3, and three or four times that amount playing New Vegas.
I really don't think you played New Vegas much if you think it wasn't about exploring and finding new shit all over the place.
Fallout 3 had the quest hubs. Also, the fact that water was super important to the story, but aside from one beggar, no one seemed to care about it much.
But New Vegas, well, everyone wanted power from that dam.
It comes down to, what do they eat? Fallout 3, nothing. NPCs don't eat, so there's no need to actually put that into the game, and since that part isn't in the game, a lot of other shit likely isn't.
New Vegas, they have farms and ecology and all sorts of other shit, and it's all over the place.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon is a damn good game, and highly addictive. It's on the older side, but is still actively developed. It's available basically everywhere.
The Barrens chat used to be this weird wonderful mix of helpful, toxic, and just strange.
I even had the T-shirt "I survived the barrens chat". I might still have it in a drawer somewhere. If so, it vastly outlived my interest in playing WoW.
Yes and no. There's a sort of playable game there. But Chris Roberts is sort of infamous for his feature creep.
So more and more gets added to the game and then parts of the base code have to be rewritten to support the new additions, and then you get a 13 year development cycle with no actual end in sight. I think that the feature creep is currently under control, but with everything that's been planned, it's still going to be a couple of years before the game releases.
I am assuming that it will eventually release... Which is a large assumption at this point.
But until then, you can play a game that feels a bit like a first person shooter, and has some ship to ship combat, and some missions, and some other stuff, but isn't as fleshed out as any of those things could be if the focus was strictly on that one thing. Basically it's too many things at once to be really good at ony one of them.
RFK Jr. Says Doctors Found a Dead Worm in His Brain: Report (www.thedailybeast.com)
Hamas official says group would lay down its arms if an independent Palestinian state is established (apnews.com)
A top Hamas political official told The Associated Press the Islamic militant group is willing to agree to a truce of five years or more with Israel and that it would lay down its weapons and convert into a political party if an independent Palestinian state is established along pre-1967 borders.
Israeli minister Ben Gvir calls for execution of Palestinian prisoners to ease overcrowding (www.middleeasteye.net)
Itamar Ben Gvir, Israel’s far-right national security minister, has called for the execution of Palestinian prisoners to ease overcrowding in the country’s jails....
'There will be a civil war': Trump fans rage after Georgia judge orders trial to proceed (www.rawstory.com)
Edit: There’s a lot of people in the comment section who clearly didn’t read the article so let me clarify that no, this is not about Judge Aileen Cannon. Read. The. Damn. Article.
Nebraska legislators buck Trump by blocking Electoral College vote change — for now (www.nbcnews.com)
[Opinion piece] Starfield Killed My Hype For The Elder Scrolls 6 (www.thegamer.com)
Ex-FBI source charged with Biden lies is tied to Russian intelligence, prosecutors say (www.npr.org)
Tomb Raider 1-3 Remastered has a warning about racial and ethnic stereotypes (www.videogameschronicle.com)
Embracer Group Cancels ‘Deus Ex’ Video Game (www.bloomberg.com)
Archive link: archive.ph/WOlNl...
We don't always agree, but we can both unite under a common cause. (lemmy.world)
Faerun cuisine (media.kbin.social)
"Bobby Kotick's decisions made our games worse," says former Call of Duty dev (www.eurogamer.net)
Best distro for linux gaming?
Unsure if this is the place to ask or not but figured it was closest to it....
I banned my kid from Roblox.... what next?
As we all know, Roblox is garbage tier gameplay structured around psychological cues to get children to fill an endless pit with fake money bought with real money....
HP misreads room, awkwardly brags about its “less hated” printers (arstechnica.com)
Baldur’s Gate 3 Patch 5 Adds New Playable Epilogue With 3,589 Lines of Extra Dialogue, Much More (www.ign.com)
Worst fear confirmed: You can't launch Modern Warfare 3 without first launching Modern Warfare 2 (www.pcgamer.com)
Control Ultimate Edition on Steam | 75% off - 9,99€ (store.steampowered.com)
Winner of over 80 awards, Control is a visually stunning third-person action-adventure that will keep you on the edge of your seat....
Valve loses a court case in the EU and has to pay 1.6 million euros in fines for geoblocking (mezha.media)
Emmanuel Macron backtracks on video games after blaming them for French riots (news.sky.com)
Meet Diablo 4 and Path of Exile's biggest rival, an ARPG designed and built by Redditors (www.pcgamesn.com)
Diablo 4, Path of Exile, and the rest of the ARPG genre has competition in the mega-ambitious Last Epoch, built by its Reddit community and heading towards 1.0.
"Let's see Paul Allen's Fallout" (media.kbin.social)
THOSE GAMES is a pitch-perfect parody of "those games" (www.gamesradar.com)
If you ever wanted a bunch of awful games you’d see in mobile game ads, the katamari damacy guys have created a collection just for you, i guess?
What's the most toxic game community you know of?
The most toxic communities I know of are the Genshin community, Payday 2, FFXIV and source games communities in general.
Star Citizen costs exceed Cyberpunk 2077, GTA 5, and RDR2 combined (www.pcgamesn.com)