…but there is now a clarity across Europe, and not just in Paris, that regardless of Vance’s reassurance, Europe has to have the capability to operate autonomously of the US. Trump is self-evidently not reliable, and his benign assessment of Putin’s intentions is not shared.

Planning for a European reassurance force in Ukraine is under way, as is planning for a potential Russian attack on Europe. Since February, France and the UK, through a combined joint expeditionary force, have formed the nucleus of that planning, but this has broadened, with new political leadership increasingly coming from four members of the Weimar+ group: Poland, France, Germany and the UK.

Honestly, I think Europe’s disillusionment with us will be better for them in the long run. The fact that they were waiting on Biden to take the lead in Ukraine, whose fecklessness over lending credence to Russia’s prima facie bogus claim of the war being US vs Russia made him hold back many strategic options from Ukraine, meant that they were also not thinking about what Russia’s aggression meant for them, and reacting accordingly.

I think the original purpose of Article 5 (in terms of US intervening vs Russia) has probably been dead for a couple decades now, and it’s good that Europe won’t be finding that out when Russian troops are rolling in, and the US backs off.

the capitalization of the game names is also completely unnecessary in this example

is it fine to disregard writing conventions just because its possible to understand the meaning without them

s

For anyone wondering:

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, Minecraft and Forza Horizon 5

Look at that complete lack-of-an-Oxford-comma just sitting there, mocking us.

R* sucks. Their asshole-simulator games-turned-live-service-cashgrabs have never represented anything but the worst of the games industry. GTA6 getting canceled would be an excellent opportunity for millions of people who would’ve bought it to spend their time playing something better.

Fight me.

I’m a huge open world and/or sandbox nut. Non-linearity is my jam. Kenshi, Rimworld, AssOdyssey/Shadows, Project Zomboid, Witcher 3, X4…

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good story, but story takes many shapes, and not all stories are pre-written; plenty are emergent. I grew up playing with Legos (and still do), and me making whatever story I wanted (or that emerged along the way) was part of the appeal.

Honestly, apart from FF8 and TW3, and now Expedition 33, I haven’t found many games with written stories that grabbed me. I read books when I want that fulfillingly-crafted linearity.

“It’s been 3 months since we cut off all food and medicine to the civilians in your territory. Next we’re going to fully occupy your territory, and kill you and anyone we assert is part of you. Hey wait, what do you mean you won’t negotiate with us?”

Yes and no. Most of the cost-reductions in hardware manufacturing lifecycles come from minimizing materials loss and optimizing design efficiency. The components don’t actually just get cheaper to produce over time on their own, from a material perspective. That means that material shortages are much more likely to have a big impact on cost (up or down) than new manufacturing technology, for the same chip.

I don’t think they’ll do that for already-released games, but I wouldn’t put the big 3 (Sony, MS, Nintendon’t) from doing the barest ‘remasters’, and replacing their digital versions of those games with the ‘remasters’.

Chinese hacking competitions (plural) are different

A 2018 rule mandates participants of the Tianfu Cup (singular) to hand over their findings to the government

This approach effectively turned hacking competitions (plural)

So the article uses one competition doing this to assert this as “Chinese hacking competitions”. There are tens if not hundreds of hackathons in China.

Please stop posting these heavily biased or misleading articles about China from questionable sites.

We get it, you don’t like China. We got that after the first 50 posts about China being bad. Most of us don’t like the CCP either.

But at least post reputable sources that don’t push agendas quite so blatantly.

For anyone interested, this site (firstpost.com) is an english-language Indian news site owned by Network18, a news conglomerate with a right-leaning, pro-Modi bias.

Yes, they also of course ignored all my actual arguments in their response. Literally made a whole thing about how OP was not about positions just behaviors, I lay out how it very much was about positions, and the next response completely ignores that and pivots to something else entirely.

It’s almost impressive how much near-sealioning they did.

More space trash from trash corporations…

Cool tech used for boring purposes.

This is the incident that made me cancel my WoW sub, and close my Battle.net account. Never again trusting them, even under Microsoft (or rather, especially now under MS).

Oh man, 2011… I’m a millennial, and even I was already out of college in 2011. My ‘kid’ games were $80 USD in the 90s. Here’s an article from 2014 that someone made about how insane N64 game prices were.

Star Fox 64 – $79.95 (Source: GamePro #106) - 1997

GoldenEye 007 – $69.95 (Source: GamePro #108) - 1997

Super Mario 64 – $66.99 (Source: GamePro #97) - 1996

According to the CPI Inflation Calculator, $80 USD in 1997 is $160 today.

The problem comes in (to me) when people come in big gangs to all yell the same stuff, don’t really engage with people who disagree but just mischaracterize the opposition and repeat their points of view forever, basically just engage in bad faith.

You clearly aren’t intending this to be about this (OP’s) post, and yet…

That is my remedy.

I actually like your idea, and I think that it could work if there was some kind of set structure to the posts, maybe using a template to make it easy for an LLM to parse, and to prevent comments from asking more follow-up questions than allowed. My partner is involved with competitive debate, and I think a highly-structured variant could work in an asynchronous format like forums posts, especially if there’s a bot to auto-remove posts that aren’t formatted correctly (that part could just be a script with regex or something).

I am surprised, and happy.

The tough part for me is that on the one hand, I want to believe that you are being earnest.

But the supposed prevalence of accounts who are both

• claiming to be adamantly anti-Democrat Leftists in America who would not be open to reforming the party if possible
• AND show signs of foreign account ownership

does not comport with my experience on BH. Certainly not at a level to constitute a group large enough to be who this post is about.

And seeing as I have previously seen OP accuse people of being bad-faith actors, who were (imo) clearly just in disagreement about politics, I am not willing to extend a benefit of the doubt to them.

Also, you keep making latent accusations throughout your comments:

some of these fake accounts

You haven’t even proven there are any, and yet half your comment is premised on them not only being present, but you having positively identified them. How am I supposed to take that claim as good faith?

This is the root issue with this post. OP is encouraging individual users to block people to create a walled-garden within a walled-garden. You say you’re not, but then what is the remedy you’re putting forth?

This thread is a witch hunt by definition, because it contains neither the means to accurately identify the supposed witches trolls, nor an actual workable, mutual, proper-process remedy. It’s literally calling for circumventing the mods with mob-action.

Obviously. The list you rattled off looks like you did a Google or YouTube search on “gaming influencer” and picked a few random names.

I didn’t Google for those, they were, as I said, the ones I do know.

Don’t spout off uneducated opinions about subjects you don’t know anything about.

I know quite a lot about the gaming space. That doesn’t require me to go look up every middling alt-right YTer or streamer.

If you have an actual take on what I posted, apart from my rw examples being too well-known or something, feel free to post it.

I think you’ve mixed up the timeline in my comment.

• Pre-gamergate era (2010-2014): channer-esque misogynists like JonTron are heavily popular on YT, but there is no political pipeline established. They are just voicing their own shitty thoughts, and their audience is almost exclusively young white males.
• Gamergate (2015): Right-wing politicians and shock pundits like Shapiro take notice of the large amount of misogynistic content that a lot of gaming YTers are spouting as GG gets national attentions, and think, “hey, those sound like people I can capture”.
• Early Alt-right pipeline (2015-2019): figures like Shapiro and Yiannopoulos start making content intended to target gamers, usually ‘shock’ videos with gamer-derived terms like “own” (the libs), and/or are interviewing right-wing-aligned gamer influencers, and the gamer->conservative voter pipeline is developing.
• Late Alt-right pipeline (2020-onwards): there are tons of right wing YTers, streamers, and talk-shows that target young white males, especially gamers, telling them that everything they dislike is due to ‘wokeism’, ‘DEI’, etc… you know the rest.

Even before that, there was this whole corporate wokeness marketing trope that really drove the concept into the ground

You’re using ‘woke’ unironically, in the way that the Right does. Neither of those things you posted are Woke, they’re just pandering. Woke means aware of the systemic biases in our social institutions. Your examples aren’t “wokeness”, they’re Feminist Capitalism (and Rainbow Capitalism also gets called ‘woke’ by the Right).

It’s like kids all running with this popular meme, only for parents to sudden adopt it and it’s not cool any more. So, right-wing spheres to pick it off of the ground, dust it off, and just carry that energy forward, which is unfortunately what they are good at.

No, that was never what wokeness was (and none of those companies ever called themselves that), it’s just that right-wingers started calling anything they didn’t like “woke”, despite their examples having nothing to do with wokeness.

Leftists are shit at messaging. Like, really really shit at messaging.

Leftists have great messaging. If you think messaging is a Leftist problem, I think you’ve confused Liberal, Progressive, and Leftist.

My take on a lot of this is that these sound like the strawmen positions that I’ve had levied against me before.

As in, especially during the last election cycle, I had people on BH who have no clue who I am (or that I would and did vote for Harris), trying to chastise me or accuse me of being a troll for “talk[ing] CONSTANTLY about how voting for Democrats would be a terrible thing that no self-respecting leftist would EVER do for any reason”, when in fact I was talking about Democrats’ failures in order to try to fix them.

The Democratic Party is at a huge crossroads right now, because it’s lost 2 elections to Trump that shouldn’t have even been close, and in both cases it was with candidates who either 1) had no primary to choose them, or 2) were in control of the Party during the primary. The fact that 2024 happened, and we’re still seeing these takes attacking Leftists (just calling them “fake” doesn’t make it so, no matter how much OP wishes it did), instead of saying, “hey, maybe the Centrist path of trying to work across the aisle doesn’t actually work to counter the alt-Right/ Trump-Right/ whatever you want to name their current brand of bad-faith political gamesmanship”, is breaking my brain.

We need to be discussing any and every viable path to fixing the party, not calling people who say the current incarnation of the party can’t win “doomers” or trolls, when many of our point is that we can win, if we fix the party.

One of them used non-American characters to punctuate a number, and then when it was pointed out they got confused and didn’t understand what people were pointing out that was weird about their number…

You’re speaking in generalities, and I have no way to judge what happened or was likely the situation, from this statement. You could be describing a random Cyrillic character that wouldn’t be on a non-Russian keyboard, for instance, or you could be describing someone using a comma for denoting decimal places, which is something a British or Canadian would do, even if they’re living in the US. I’m not going to denounce someone sight-unseen based on what you wrote.

I work in infosec, and attribution is difficult under the best of circumstances. If I had IP logs, request headers, UserAgent strings, etc, I might be able to spot a foreign national impersonating an American, but I don’t, and neither do you.

Actually one of the tells of those accounts is that they will sometimes accuse others of not being pro-Palestinian, and being rabidly pro-Israel, which as far as I can tell no one on Lemmy is.

I’ve seen at least 2 accounts on Beehaw, pre-election, who were rabidly pro-Israel. One of them disappeared completely after the election. The other I still see around, still often posting pro-Israel and Israel-apologist content and comments. So in my experience, your ‘tell’ is flawed by being based on a false premise. And that’s just Beehaw. Across all of Lemmy, including the center-right instances? There are absolutely staunch Zionists and pro-Israel users.

There are specific useful reasons why I think they are making that accusation, but if I were just doing this as a way of disagreeing with people, why would I take some person who is making a pro-Palestinian point which I completely agree with, and decide that they are a propaganda account just so I can “attack” the viewpoint I agree with?

Well, since you’re asking me to surmise ‘why’ you might do that, my dime-store-psychology take would be that you’ve probably been influenced by the large amount of propaganda takes both pre- and post-election, that keep insisting that the pro-Palestine movement online was being driven artificially in order to divide the Democratic Party (as opposed to actually being a signal that Israel was in fact no longer considered ‘good’ among Dem voters).

After we lost, many pro-Israel sources (even in congress) have rushed to blame the pro-Palestinian movement for it, because it allows them to both set up the pro-Palestinian movement as an enemy to the party, and to deflect blame from Biden’s pro-Israel stances for contributing to the loss, both of which serve their interests.

they saw “woke” as a reason for why games or movies turned out bad

This only became a thing after the pipeline was established. This rhetoric is what the pipeline feeds them.

I remember seeing JonTron videos back in 2011, well before the 2015 gamergate era. Even back then he’d make offhand remarks about how tough it was being White, how badly women treat men, etc. Gamergate in 2015 largely caught the notice of the Right’s political apparatus, and they saw the opportunity to convert the casual misogyny and racism into feeders for their political machine. “Woke” didn’t really become a right-wing attack in the gaming and movie spheres until pretty recently.