Shoblongoo

Like literally the first rule of good police-work is when a suspect gets particularly jumpy and agitated about you going into a particular area and says: "Don't look there. There's nothing there." You search-the-fuck out of that place.

"I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters. Okay? Its, like, incredible" -Trump; 2016- ...pretty much sums up what the guy is all about... Trump straight-up told his supporters to-their-face that hes just putting them on, regards them as easy marks for a con-job, and that he feels no particular need to moderate his bad behavior or educate himself on issues or put out anything of substance because he just expects them to praise him and cheer for him and eat out of his hand regardless. This was a thing that happened. Thats the common thread through the healthcare debacle, the Russia investigation, his attacks on the media--this entire joke of a presidency. In Trump you have a man who feels 100% insulated from the consequences of bad behavior. ...you can make vague, grandiose promises of beautiful deals and unbelievable success in lieu of saying anything of substance or coming up with any real plan... ...you can run a business into the ground, refuse to pay the business associates and contractors you screwed over, then declare bankruptcy to discharge your debts and walk away with all the money. ...you can embezzle charitable funds to pay your legal fees when they take you to court for it... ...you can dismiss anyone who has a bad thing to say about you a liar, a loser, and a failure. ...you can tell any lie you want when called to account for empty words or bad acts, and go-off about how unfairly you're being treated if at any point the questioning becomes any harsher then "Why do you think you haven't been even more wildly successful?" ...Like seriously...go back and watch some of the old interviews with Trump and the shit he had to say when his Casino's were going belly-up in Atlantic City. They're still on youtube. This is who he's been his entire life. He didn't magically become any less of a morally defunct, conniving shithead when he decided to run for president.

...I mean the stuff you've been throwing out the past few pages is as close to "professional debate" as telling your opposition to go jump into traffic, tbh, and this is coming from someone who does it for a living. I would kindly suggest that issue-framing, serious treatment of facts-in-evidence, and responsive answers thereto without reliance on conclusory statements or cherry-picking is as much a part of professional debate as not telling your opponent to kill themself. Maybe polish that up a bit if you want to address the problem of politically radicalized shit debate in some way...idk...

Smh real talk though; John McCain is one of the last good men left in Washington. Shame he's not going to be around much longer. The man is a national treasure.

Publicly, they may make some form of protest. Privately, they'd take it as a signal that the disclosing party has rebuked any and all efforts to compromise his office and redirect ongoing efforts accordingly. This isn't new on Russia's end--they do what they did in the last election all the time. They were just particularly successful this time around, because they found a candidate morally bankrupt enough to jump straight into bed with them.

...At the risk of drawing life lessons from Fire Emblem... I believe Goddess Yune said something to the effect of: "Being a god doesn't make you perfect. It means when you make mistakes, you do it on a much bigger scale." I think the same can be said of being the most powerful country in the world.

...debatable... The US does bad things, to be sure. But "the bad guy" denotes a sense of moral dichotomy. Good guys v. bad guys. Black-and-white. If we're "the bad guys," who are "the good guys?"

After six (6) months of denials as to the contents of the emails; repeated statements that what was described therein had not occured and that investigators had found no evidence that it had occured, and that the search for said evidence was a witch-hunt because no such evidence existed. And only after the New York Times disclosed the falsity of said denials, with a report of a documented meeting between Trumpsters and a Russian national discussing the turnover of damaging information on Hillary to Team Trump from Russia. I'm sorry--That's not openness or honesty or good-faith disclosure. That's trying to save face after-the-fact, because you got caught.

YES!!!!!!!! If my genuine position is that its a "witchhunt." That its a fake story, I did nothing wrong, and that I will be 100% exonerated when all the facts come out--if I actually believe this, and I'm not just talking out my ass to try and sell a cover up. Then the first thing I do is run to the press and say: This is each and every person on my team who met with a Russian official. This is who they met with. This is where they met. This is when the meeting occurred. This is what they talked about. This is who knew. No illegalities occurred and no ethics rules were broken. I certify that I have completely and accurately disclosed each and every instance of Russian contact with my campaign. Now unless anyone has any evidence that I have failed to make complete and accurate disclosures--and they DON'T, because I just gave you the full record--stuff it, and let me get back to work. I have a country to run. ...that's how you get ahead of the story ...that's how you stay in control of the narrative ...that's how you avoid getting bogged down in slow-drips and scandals ...and if you did in fact make full and complete disclosures + disclosed nothing incriminating; that's how you establish credibility to claim that any further reporting of collusion is in fact a political witch-hunt. You don't stonewall and repeatedly deny doing things you know you did and wait for investigators to penetrate your wall of denials and non-disclosures before finally admitting "okay...we did do that...so-what..." if you are confident that the investigation against you is a substanceless witch-hunt and will not turn up anything incriminating once everything is out in the open. You do it if you are confident the truth-of-the-matter-asserted is more damaging to you then the lies and the cover-up you are deploying to conceal it.

Its a common tactic used by criminal prosecutors. That's generally how you trick persons into incriminating themselves, when you need to prove wrongful intent or purposeful state-of-mind as an element of a inchoate crime (i.e. conspiracy. solicitation. obstruction.) I suspect that at this point investigators know WAY more then they're publicly letting on. And they're leaking it out piecemeal, to bait the persons under investigation into making these chains of demonstrably false statements; Team Trump: We did [A]. Everyone does [A]. But we didn't do [ B ], and there's no evidence that we did [ B ]. Investigators: *Releases [ B ] * Team Trump: Okay...We did [ B ] . Its not a crime to do [ B ]. We didn't do [C] and there's no evidence that we did [C]. Investigators: *Releases [C]* Team Trump: Okay...We did [C]. If that's all you've got, this is a witch-hunt. Unless you can prove we did [D]. But we didn't do [D] and there's no evidence that we did [D]. Investigators: ...You've now established said chain of demonstrably false statements. Completely destroying any credibility the subject of the investigation has to testify in his own defense. And, more importantly, established present-sense-impression evidence that the subject knew what they were doing was wrong. Because if they didn't think they were doing anything wrong, they wouldn't have told lie after lie after lie to try and conceal it.

It was serious enough to warrant appointment of a special prosecutor when Trump fired the FBI director under false prestenses and was caught boasting to the Russians the very next day that the "pressure is off." It stunk to high heaven with all the selective amnesia around meetings between Russian nationals and Trump teamsters, from Sessions to Manafort to Flynn to Kushner. They've now been forced to admit--because and ONLY because the facts contradicting their lies leaked to the press--that they did something they've spent the last 6 months telling us they didn't do + that there was no evidence that they did. With their story now changing from "Totally bogus. Of course we would never have these kinds of conversations with the Russians." to "Okay...we did it. But it wasn't that bad; it was our absolute right to talk to the Russians about getting their 'opposition research' on Hillary. No one seriously thinks that's illegal." They got caught. They changed their story because they got caught, and they keep changing their story because they keep getting caught. And that's not something you do when you're confident you will be exonerated when all facts come out; that's cover-up behavior, of the kind people engage in when the truth is deeply incriminating and they're trying to make sure it never sees the light of day. But by all means. This is "nothing."

We're way past Watergate levels of corruption, tbh. Nixon at least had the sense not to outsource the work of burglarizing the DNC to the Soviets.

The way they do it in American public schools is that they teach you the origins, beliefs, and influence of major world religions as part of the social studies curriculum, in the broader context of studying history and world civilizations. You get a unit on Bhuddism when you study ancient China. You get a unit in Hinduism when you study ancient India. You get a unit on the Abrahamic faiths when you study early Middle Eastern civilizations. And you get a unit on the reformation and the schism between the protestants and the Catholics when you study European history. I think we even got a bit of Shintoism when we studied Japan.

...I just realized that by the laws of succession established for Ylisse, Chrom only inherits the throne because Emmeryn dies without marrying and producing an heir. Which means that if you could somehow hack the game to make Emerynn immediately playable and get her to S-Support with Robin before "dying" in the Plegian War: Chrom never becomes Exalt. Lucina never becomes heir to the throne. Their entire line is disinherited. And the throne of Ylisse passes directly to Morgan, with Robin as consort-of-the-late-exalt and exalt-by-proxy until his child The King comes of age. lol

Yeah, something like that. We get the clearest picture of how succession within an unbroken line works with Ylisse. You have a King. The King has three children from oldest to youngest: Emmeryn (Female), Chrom (Male), and Lissa (Female). The King dies--the throne goes to Emmeryn. From this we understand that age takes precedence over gender; the throne goes to the King's eldest child, regardless of sex. Chrom has two children from oldest to youngest: Lucina (female) and then either a younger son or daughter depending on who he marries. Lucina, it is understood, is next in line for the throne if Chrom dies. Not Lissa. From this its understood that the sitting King's heirs take precedence over the King's younger brother's and sisters. (Lissa presumably gets the throne if Chrom dies without children, or if Chrom's children die before Lissa and they have not themselves had children. Then after Lissa--the next exalt would be Owain) So the order of precedence for succession would be: 1) King's eldest Child, and the heirs of their body 2) King's younger Children, and the heirs of their body 3) King's eldest brother or sister, and the heirs of their body 4) King's younger brother or sister, and the heirs of their body Consider also the succession dispute in Caelien, in the beginning of FE7. ...Lundgren gets the throne if and only if Lyndis dies, or Lyndis is not recognized as the grandaughter of the sitting Marquess. (i.e. heirs take precedence over brothers and sisters. no preference for males.) There's also the matter with the succession in Ostia; Hector takes the throne after his elder brother Uther dies (it is never mentioned that Uther had a wife or children; we may therefore assume that the throne passed to his younger sibling, Hector, ONLY because Uther died without heir). The Laguz got it right, tbh. Just beat the shit out of each other and give the throne to whoever comes out on top.

Nino's great. I've always been one of those guys who uses her way more than her join time and starting level can justify, purely because I enjoy her as a character. One of the things that always bothered me the most about FE7 was that you couldn't recruit Linus or Lloyd by speaking to them with Nino on Cog of Destiny--she just aggro's them. (sad) And one of those fun little "What If?" scenarios I always like to play out in my head-canon is how their relationship would have played out if Nino had actually convinced one of the Brothers to change sides. Or even wonkier; what if Linus and Lloyd had turned against Sonia on their own, and they had all defected together + fought under Eliwood's banner as a family undivided? ...that would be nice...

I believe it. That's only half the story though. Because for a solid chunk of those 60% leaving religion because you 'no longer believe' isn't the end of it; you are then dealing with everyone who tried to instill a religious upbringing in you taking it however they will. Some healthy. Some not-so-healthy. Some taking it as a personal slight or failing and feeling the need to never let you forget it. And even if the break-away from the religion itself was not motivated by some scandal or traumatic event; after-the-fact from the way its handled, events that lead to a deeper distrust of religion then the underlying disbelief which caused the split can start to take form. I can only speak to my own experience here. But I'll attest that my family took my decision to leave Judaism very, very poorly. (this is a family of Holocaust survivors and children of Holocaust survivors who kept their faith while their people were being loaded into ovens) I got the whole: "The Nazis didn't kill us; you will! Jews have always been hated and murdered for being Jews and they still kept being Jews; it was their dream for thousands of years to have a free country where they could be Jews without being persecuted for it. You LIVE IN ONE, and you can't even carry on what they died for!? This is how you disrespect your people!?" speech. ...among other, less pleasant avenues of discussion... Honestly; they probably would have taken it better if I just told them I was gay.

Use all your mounted units--canto is absolutely busted in this game. Expect the bulk of your footmen to disappoint you. Be aware that trading and inventory in this game is kinda wonky. Every character maintains separate gold and inventory; the only way to "trade" is to have one unit sell their items to the pawn shop at one of your castles and then another unit buy it with their own gold, which is a bit of a pain and can be cost-prohibitive with some of the more expensive items. So when you kill an enemy with a droppable item, take great care to try and kill it with a unit that can actually use said item. Lest you get a mage ring on a bow knight, or something stupid.

...right then... http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/glaeser/files/w8080.pdf So first we have the somewhat confusing Sacerdote and Glaeser study from 2001. Confusing because it reaches 2 seemingly self-contradictory findings: 1) Attendance at religious institutions increases with education (In America at any rate--this does not hold true in all countries) 2) Religious belief decreases with education The study posits that educated persons are more likely to view religious institutions purely as a means of social networking and community engagement, and attend church or synagogue or the like purely for social membership reasons without actually holding any high-religiosity beliefs. The study further finds that within religions; more educated persons are more likely to be members of moderate or reformed sects that align with this idea of religion as a social network, without demanding any real adherence to strict belief or practice. Whereas less educated persons are more likely to belong to fundamentalist sects that require belief in the literal truth of scripture and dogma. "Less educated people are more likely to believe in miracles, heaven, devils, and that adversity is a punishment for sin (even holding denomination constant).Religious beliefs and education appear to be substitutes. As people select denominations that match their beliefs, more educated people, who have weaker beliefs, switch into denominations where beliefs are weak...Holding education constant, parents who come from high belief denominations have less educated children." (Sacerdote and Glaeser; Page 6) AND "Within the U.S. education raises religious attendance at individual level. This does not seem unusual to us because religious attendance is a major form of social interaction and education raises every other measurable form of social connection." Schwadel (2011) retested the assumptions from this earlier study and likewise found that education has a "liberalizing effect" on religious belief, particularly belief in the literal truth of religious texts and accounts of God therein, but actually INCREASES religious "participation." (i.e. the social aspect of going to Church events and mingling with congregants) Hungerman (2013) on the other hand--a Canadian study--finds that an additional year of education leads to a 4-percentage-point decline in the likelihood that an individual identifies with any religious tradition. https://www3.nd.edu/~dhungerm/ed_relig.pdf Mcfarland (2013) hints at a reverse mechanism of causation for the observed trend: higher education does not cause persons to become less religious by giving them a broader base of knowledge with which to conclude that religious belief is irrational, but rather, high-religiosity causes persons to become less educated by imparting belief that there is no value in exposing oneself to teachings outside the faith and that higher education is not worth pursuing. http://people.wku.edu/steve.groce/Education and Religiosity.pdf This is the “Network Closure” model. (And it’s curiously similar to the point Sully McGully raised in his last post) This model explains another seemingly-contradictory set of findings: 1) Less educated persons tend to flock to more high-religiosity sects. 2) Within a given high-religiosity sect, the most educated persons in the sect tend to be the most religious The theory goes that within a closed-network religious community with limited exposure to outside ideas and teachings, “most educated” has a different meaning then it would in the general population; referring to religious ‘education’ and accompanying mastery of in-network treatises and historical records and classic arguments-for-theism, rather than broader exposure to pluralistic world history and culture and the natural sciences. There’s so much research in the field I can’t summarize it all in one post. This I think at least satisfies your request for production. And it leaves open an interesting question for further discussion: Accepting as true the finding that more education leads to less religious belief, which model of causation best explains the reason why? -Is it the case that persons are more likely to find belief irrational as they become more educated? -Is it the case that persons are less likely to find value in pursuing higher education if they are more religious? (i.e. Sully’s “wisdom vs. intelligence” argument”) …Or is it perhaps some combination of the two?

Aye. We choose our words for a reason. ...now did I categorically call "people who follow a religion" stark-raving lunatics? Or was I speaking with specificity about the experiences of non-believers coming out as non-believers in religious families, in the context of an ongoing conversation about why persons from theistic upbringings who become non-believers later in life may hold the attitudes that they hold? I said exactly what I meant to say; please don't twist it. If you are formally requesting sourcing as to the claim of correlation in my prior post, such sourcing will be provided. However, I should note, this matter was raised in passing as background to the broader point that it is not uncommon for persons raised religious to become non-believers for no particularly earthshaking reason; not to go down the rabbit hole of arguing the data behind the correlation. Because when you start getting into great detail about the correlation between education and religion and presenting and defending studies showing that the more educated a person is the less likely they are to be religious--invariably, that is when people start reading personal insults into fact-based arguments and accusing you of calling religious people stupid and taking personal offense at everything that gets posted. The conversation appears to be going in another direction, so lets think really carefully about whether or not we want to open that an of worms. (sourcing will be provided upon request) I have quite a bit more I want to say on the subject of persons from theistic upbringings coming out as non-believers to their families. But this post is long enough already. So I'll bugger off for a while, see how the conversation moves, and post further accordingly.

I imagine this working like watered down, kid-friendly game of thrones. Minus all the explicit gore and torture and defiant sex along the way--the throne is yours when you have the power to take it. Less a story of legal formalism, and more a story of might-makes-right. There is no law-above-kings; The law is whatever those who have the power to rule and control say it is. And if a ruling house is overthrown, the law changes.

...stopped going to synagogue and identifying as a practicing Jew for pretty much the same reason... Something to consider. Statistically speaking; there is a negative correlation between education and religiosity. That is to say, the more a person learns,the less likely they are to believe in God or identify with the belief system of an organized religion. In this sense it is a rather common thing for Disbelief and Atheism to develop later on in life, after an initially religious upbringing. Whereas religion is generally imbued in early childhood. Most religious people are religious because they were raised in religious families and instructed they must believe what the family believes: "We practice Judaism in this Family. You are a Jew." "We follow Islam in this Family. You are a Muslim." "We praise Christ in this Family. You are a Catholic." And it is a comparatively rare thing for one with no religious upbringing later on in life, through their own learning and life experience, to decide: This way I was raised does not make sense to me. I want to believe; I want to live a godly life. ...rarer still that a secular family would bury a child and excommunicate them from the family for their decision to become religious.(but comparatively common for a religious family to have this reaction to a child that decided to renounce their faith) So I would say it is a rather common thing for people to leave the religion of their upbringing for "no big reason," beyond that as they grew and matured they just decided: it wasn't for them. It was a thing their parents made them believe when they were little that as grown adults, they just can't subscribe to or see as an important part of their life. Where it becomes catastrophic, and where you see persons having major falling-outs with their faith, is where the religious family takes it particularly harshly. ...this is where you see people who've spent your entire life telling you that they love you and support you and assuring you that Faith is a beautiful thing that brings people together + gives them good moral fiber acting in the most vicious, divisive, irrational, and self-destructive manner. Like completely different people. All under the pretense of serving some greater good. And this is where on the most deeply personal level, many who leave their faiths come to the conclusion that religion isn't just silly or irrational. Its dangerous. It closes the heart and mind and drowns out compassion and critical thinking, and makes otherwise-good and reasonable people behave like stark raving lunatics.

Yeah...I noticed. First playthrough was a little hard just because I didn't know what the game was going to throw at me and was getting surprised by things. Second playthrough--knowing what to expect and where the nasty surprises were--no difficulty at all. And that really detracts from replay value. Game desperately needed a lunatic mode.

I choose to believe it's a set up for a Tellius Sequel (a man can dream).

Saw this thread and, out of curiosity, I went to V Street Games the other day and asked how much I could get in trade-in-value for Radiant Dawn and PoR. $80. For the TRADE-IN. They're out-of-stock, still getting new demand, and selling them @ $200 a pair. (I'm still not trading in Radiant Dawn or PoR)