The Gaming Den

Speaking of people voting for independence and the government sending tanks to crush them under their iron tracks, Iraq is doing exactly that.

ISIS has been driven out of Raqqa, which marks the end of the ground war against them. They still hold small pockets scattered about, but this was the last major city they held, and the head of their caliphate.

maglag wrote:Speaking of people voting for independence and the government sending tanks to crush them under their iron tracks, Iraq is doing exactly that.

I'm only surprised it took them so long. The official (or nearly official) policy of every state with Kurds in them is they're inherently terrorists.

A Kurdish state will only happen if someone outside the region comes in and stomps on both Turkey and Iraq (in theory also Syria, but that's already thoroughly stomped), and that isn't going to happen. Plus it's about that time when the US government traditionally abandons the partisans it's been propping up and leaves them to their own devices and resentment.

RobbyPants wrote:ISIS has been driven out of Raqqa, which marks the end of the ground war against them. They still hold small pockets scattered about, but this was the last major city they held, and the head of their caliphate.

Not really, pretty much all their leaders had already legged it months ago and will continue to get people killed in the ground for years if not decades to come.

Fun fact, the war against the Taliban has been going for 16 years and counting.

And then there's the bit where we're hoping that the new glorious militias turn out any better than the previous glorious militias.

I said "the end of the ground war", not "ISIS is gone forever and will never do anything bad at all". Also, that's what the article said.

ISIS still has armed dudes in the ground waging the war. They lost a battle but have neither surrendered nor been wiped out or even retreated out of the country. Only lost one city, that is it, which we would not even know about if ISIS had not conquered it in the first place.

It is so weird the way you continually agree with my in a tone that implies you are disagreeing with me.

maglag wrote:ISIS still has armed dudes in the ground waging the war.

Agreed. I explicitly said so much ("They still hold small pockets scattered about").

maglag wrote:They lost a battle but have neither surrendered nor been wiped out or even retreated out of the country.

Agreed. I explicitly said so much ("They still hold small pockets scattered about").

maglag wrote:Only lost one city, that is it, which we would not even know about if ISIS had not conquered it in the first place.

What the fuck is this even addressing? Who cares if it was their city since the beginning of time or if they conquered it and it was later liberated? Who claimed that ISIS was never capable of attacking and controlling cities in the past?

You don't need to worry about maglag. He is Putin's sock-puppet and everything he says is based on understanding absolutely nothing and trying to make Russia look good.

We're still waiting for him to explain what period of 'hundreds of years' had Russia peacefully maintaining their borders rather than annexing their neighbors until they controlled up to 1/6 of the earth's total land surface.

My prediction is that he's trying to diminish the success of any US-assisted attack so he can later claim Putin ACTUALLY destroyed ISIS. Assuming he believes that ISIS should be destroyed (which is going to depend entirely on Putin).

"Spain moves to suspend Catalan autonomy"

So Spain has decided that enough is enough.

Yep, there was an ultimatum for the Catalans to step back from their indepence attempt untill 10 this morning. Otherwise they were going to lose the autonomous bits they already had.
And they did not back down, so they lose it and are now even less independent than before.
Funny how that works.

RobbyPants wrote:It is so weird the way you continually agree with my in a tone that implies you are disagreeing with me.

maglag wrote:ISIS still has armed dudes in the ground waging the war.

Agreed. I explicitly said so much ("They still hold small pockets scattered about").

maglag wrote:They lost a battle but have neither surrendered nor been wiped out or even retreated out of the country.

Agreed. I explicitly said so much ("They still hold small pockets scattered about").

maglag wrote:Only lost one city, that is it, which we would not even know about if ISIS had not conquered it in the first place.

What the fuck is this even addressing? Who cares if it was their city since the beginning of time or if they conquered it and it was later liberated? Who claimed that ISIS was never capable of attacking and controlling cities in the past?

You first said the ground war is over. I pointed out there is still war in the ground. You suddenly agree with me but refuse to admit you were ever wrong. Why is it my fault?

maglag wrote:
You first said the ground war is over. I pointed out there is still war in the ground. You suddenly agree with me but refuse to admit you were ever wrong. Why is it my fault?

Are you saying that if someone is wrong that they should admit it? Because maybe you could start that ball rolling about how 'peaceful' Russia is/has been.

Bruce Bartlett (one of the main creators of supply-side economics) explains why the GOP's doctrine of slashing taxes is bullshit.

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maglag wrote: You first said the ground war is over. I pointed out there is still war in the ground. You suddenly agree with me but refuse to admit you were ever wrong. Why is it my fault?

Nothing I said meant there would be zero fighting from here on out, and the article also said that. Did you just read my synopsis, assume the article must have said the exact same thing, and then pitch a hissy fit that a two sentence synopsis didn't convey 100% of that information? Next time I'll copy-paste the whole fucking article for you.

Fucking ninjas:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-41750080

So 70 members of Catalonia's parliament voted to declare independence. Which is significantly less than the 3/5 majority of the 135 member regional parliament required to enact constitutional ammendments in Spain (legally speaking, they'd need 81 votes to change any part of the constitution). But whatever, the Catalonian independence movement lost the legal argument before the referendum was even called.

The national government of course, has carried through with their threat of suspending the regional parliament. This is not going to go well for the Catalonia Independence movement. So much so that even countries with no direct stake in the matter like Canada are stepping up to remind people that they recognize one united Spain.

Independence movements usually fail. National governments generally have access to too many levels of state and, well, the national army. Every independence movement is a long shot, and there have to be some seriously good reasons to want to go down the road of open confrontation. But the Catalonian separatists are just generally fucking this all up. Voting to go to war with less than 52% of the total vote is just fucking stupid.

For example: Iraqi Kurdistan voted for taking concrete steps towards independence with a 72% turnout and 92% "yes" result. Their reasoning for doing this is that the Iraqi government was completely incapable or indifferent to protect them from Islamic State and the region had to form its own militia units and liberate itself from barbarian invasion. And despite having legal and democratic legitimacy and a compelling philosophical argument, this independence movement is almost certainly not going to work. Because independence movements usually don't.

The Catalonians do not have legal legitimacy or a compelling democratic mandate, and their philosophical argument for independence is that their region is relatively rich as regions in Spain go and they would rather not pay taxes to pay for public welfare in poorer regions. Seriously. That's it. They don't have a local militia able to fight the Spanish army for even a few days, and have no serious plans to develop one.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote: The Catalonians do not have legal legitimacy or a compelling democratic mandate, and their philosophical argument for independence is that their region is relatively rich as regions in Spain go and they would rather not pay taxes to pay for public welfare in poorer regions. Seriously. That's it.

What makes this even better is Catalan is already deeply in debt. To the tune of 75 billion Euros, most of which (52 billion or some such) they owe to Spain.

So the idea that they could somehow fund an entire independent government is pretty laughable, given that their mini-government is already too much for them.

Then factor in that independence would put them at step 0 of applying to the EU, and they'd have to function while putting together all the agreements and shit they'd need to interact with the world around them.

And the EU doesn't give a shit and has no reason to give a shit- the independence figureheads talk a lot of crap about self-determination as well as taxes, but given that they have local, regional, national and EU elections, they've got shitloads of representation and self determination, and out of the seven people that are largely credited with the Spanish Constitution, 2 were Catalan, which is why the region had so many autonomous features in the first place.

The upshot of the whole thing is this will probably turn out that Puigdemont and his indep buddies shit their own bed. The real question is how many people will get run over in this dick measuring contest between this little prick and Spain.

Spain cocked up really badly by sending in the police on referendum day, but they've been doing this by the book ever since. And the book (which the Catalans helped write) says get fucked.

Catalan independence is a massive joke that went for too long and is moving to a new cycle. Puigdemont already said that he'll run to be re-elected and spanish government already said that they are cool with that.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/11 ... signation/

So...things are happening around Saudi Arabia these days.

http://www.skyvalleychronicle.com/BREAK ... le-3023499

I feel terrible for thinking it, but so many Pandemic references coming to mind. I mean starting in Madagascar is a big warning that this one means business.

- Moving the fam to Greenland to ride this out.

Ancient History wrote:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/11 ... signation/

So...things are happening around Saudi Arabia these days.

These days?
Their 'little war' in Yemen is bordering on genocidal,
Theyre trying to economically crush Qatar,
They're culling princes again,
But they're letting women drive, so everything is ok.

Messing with Lebanon seems small beans in comparison

They're also planning what amounts to a desert arcology (though no one is using the term, sadly)

Little importance next to things going on in the rest of the world, but the non-binding plebiscite that cost $122million has finally had the results counted. It took a while, because in order to fund the plebiscite the government had to fire everyone in record-keeping and so on, so the whole thing was just counted manually by Geoff, putting marks in columns on a sheet of paper as he put the votes into a box. Good work, Geoff, you took one for the team.

Anyway, the results are in, and 61.3% of the country support amending the marriage act to allow for same sex marriage. Of note is that more old people voted than young people, so were it a compulsory thing you'd probably find the numbers even more in our favour. New South Wales was the closest (at fifty-something), but I remind you that NSW is literally the worst state, in a country that contains South Australia and Queensland and Western Australia. NSW only exists to make people miserable (including its own residents), and even it didn't drop below 50% support on the whole.

This doesn't mean anything by itself, but if Malcolm Turnbull doesn't act on it, then it makes him look even weaker (in the face of the conservatives in his party) than usual and Labor win a free "Dickless Leader" attack campaign during the next election. The bit where he has promised to something something maybe parliament something means precisely dick, but these days we'll make do with "on pain of being called a dickhead in public".

So, before the plebiscite for this one issue we could directly vote on (we didn't get a say on anything else like going to war, the TPP and whether brown people deserve human rights), what did the Newspoll survey show the results as being? Around 63%. So you know, within the margin of error. Good thing we spent over a hundred million dollars on that.

(And yes, still roughly half of parliament has had to stand down due to citizenship issues, including a member of The Crazy Racist Party That Hates Foreigners, where you'd think they'd make sure they weren't foreign in any way. So it's basically a big joke, but luckily for us, America is over there being even weirder.)

63% is in the margin of error? O.O
*shakes head* only in ausfailia . .

No, 61.3% (actual result) is within the margin error of 63% (original estimate based on polling). I don't know what the official margin of error was, but let's say 3%. That means any result from 60% to 66% would have been within the margin or error. 61.3% is comfortably within that range.

Ah, okay, thank you for the clarification.

Mind you, given how said polls told us that Brexit wasn't going ahead and Trump also wasn't going to be a thing and for that matter that RMoney was going to beat Obama, they probably DO have a margin of error of something in the 60-70 range.