So, it seems like the secret was the opposition parties actually campaigning on doing things the voters liked and addressing their concerns instead of belittling them. I agree, I think US politicians should also try actually appealing to disaffected voters to get them to vote against tyranny instead of lecturing them.
They were firing at military targets because Israel assassinated one of their generals. If Israel wants to start a war with Iran while they have their hands full with Gaza and Lebanon that’s their perogative but the US shouldn’t be enabling this insanity.
It’s only blocked in India, while not great we can still access it and the information is still out there for anyone with a VPN.
I think this is valid perspective to add color to the discussion around the implicit claim that India has a disproportionately high problem of rape relative to other (usually developed) countirew and not an excuse for this incident. If anything it highlights the extent of rape in the US.
I’m not sure what the difference in rates of reporting is in both countries, but the rate of reporting has been rising in India, so seeing increased rates of reported assault on the short term could also be a good thing.
There was never a mask
This is literally what the UN secretary general was referring to when he said the Hamas attacks didn’t happen in a vacuum. I don’t think the attacks were justified or even effective but it wasn’t some random act, the growth of Hamas comes from Israeli government backed oppression of Palestinians which itself comes after failed peace talks so on and so forth until the birth of civilization (though you could argue until the late 1940s).
I find there’s generally 3 major skills outside of general group facilitation you exercise as a DM, world building, character design, and game design.
World building is designing the setting conflict and story, character design is making interesting NPCs and role playing them, game design is making interesting combat and skill based encounters.
Most DMs are only good at one or two of these. If your DM is new, they likely are still figuring out what they are good at and enjoy doing and what they’re bad at.
Ideally combat is well narrated, but if your DM is not a strong character builder, maybe there’s not a great understanding of the motivation of the combatants. If they aren’t great at world design maybe they don’t fully understand all of the alternative ways an encounter can be resolved.
They also are probably just figuring out how the basic rules work in general in which case give them some time and maybe suggest things like, can I roll animal handling to try and ride the moth? Or are there any tribal or religious insignia on the Morlocks I can use to try and parlay with them?
This moves some of the heavy lifting off of the DM who may be swamped with bookkeeping. I find often times players also don’t realize they also need to be familiar with the rules and how their character works and just rely on the DM to know everything out which isn’t often the case when everyone is new.
They go after it mainly to appease external forces like other countries objecting to it, but people who are convicted often get very light sentences.
Why wait a year?
A government using war to revoke civil liberties and oppress their citizens? Color me surprised.
They’ve been living under an Israeli siege for over a decade and had a mature enough intelligence apparatus to plan a highly coordinated assault while living in a surveillance state… If you don’t think this wasn’t a calculated informed attack you’ve got your head up your ass.
I’m not condoning indiscriminate killing and rape of civilians and taking hostages, I also don’t condone the inhumane siege of Gaza that has been happening for decades. 50% of Gaza is under 18. That’s not because they’re popping out kids, its because you just don’t survive that long in that kind of environment, those are also deaths. Not graphic ones that make headlines, but lives were still lost. Its incredibly hypocritical to assume Israel’s shit don’t stink in this situation either.
I’m also queasy when I read the coverage of the recent attacks by Hamas, I also haven’t been living in a police state. Not saying this is the most effective way that they can achieve their objectives, but I can understand how someone growing up seeing violence, sickness and malnutrition for completely preventable reasons dehumanizes the people they see as being the cause of their situation and join or support an organization like Hamas.
10 year old video about the middle east still painfully relevant? That checks out.
I did notice the invalidation of women’s titles if you transitioned to male, but not if you transitioned to male. It seems like the general view is because the women’s league is the easier league to achieve titles in, if you go to the “more competitive” league you then could game the system to “farm titles” or something if you transition and detransition.
The whole thing does seem a bit ridiculous as you mentioned based on my understanding of the system. The titles are clearly qualified as for a specific league, you don’t lose junior league titles because you get older. Maybe this factors into elo calculations?
Either way, I appreciate the well written response. In my personal experience, the onus of trying to understand seemingly transphobic positions to potentially change them seems to fall on trans people, while allies seem more than happy to stick to the shouting and protesting. I had mentioned a point from a trans women who felt the discourse around pronouns was counter productive in her view, and someone immediately jumped to the defense of his partner who wasn’t there before I could finish the sentence.
Reading between the lines, I can kind of see this one. The point appears to be to correct for societal inequities in the space of chess. If you learned chess and came up as a masculine presenting individual, they believe that the environment was more advantageous to you, so transitioning later in life doesn’t change that advantage.
I use ChatGPT for name generation, and you can start seeing the name table it has squirreled away after a certain point. I wonder if you ran several sessions with it, if you’d start seeing a lot of the same plot points and characters showing up?
How can you enforce any clothing is worn voluntarily? A partner could coerce someone to dress as modestly / revealingly as they want and you would need to rely on them to say they are being coerced.