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      Welcome!   03/05/2016

      Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change.  If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away.  I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!

Drachefly

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Posts posted by Drachefly

  2. Posted

    So I read this slay

    http://the1smjb.deviantart.com/art/EGS-slay-GirlGeniusCrossover-202146525

    As you can see from the title, Girl Genius Crossover.

    So, what if another world, with a different magic system, is Girl Genius? It does a LOT, but everyone thinks it's technology! Secret kept!

    Or it could be the other side of the world, maybe? It's not like griffins would be particularly out of place, and if they live in America then we wouldn't have even run into them. But the magic system was too similar, so I think not.

  5. Posted

    This is getting a bit afield from earthquakes, but I would point out that the Hubble's mirror is a measly 2.4 meters and its FoV is tteeeeeeny tiny.

    Once we get a space-based synoptic telescope of the kind of size you'd expect down on Earth, those things are going to be far, far more visible. With launch costs going down the way they are, within a few decades that should not provide a noticeable strain on our budget.

  10. Posted

    I'm not very happy with the wording Pandora used. It doesn't flow well. I'd have just said, "darn it, her conscience is strong enough to interfere - I can't give her any of them." A core of inner goodness seems a bit over-the-top. Ah well, not a big deal.

     

    ETA: it seems like Dan is trying to take "ashley could be bad?" and hit it with a giant hammer when a screwdriver tightening would have done.

    Matoyak reacted to this

  11. Posted

    It is possible to shoot a good space battle without having exploding panels, but you need to do it right.

    Like, the Battlestar Galactica battle where Adama's directing the battle with a carefully selected set of observers (to identify spies), and then he lets loose the trap after it's too late. Galactica never took a hit, but it was a riveting sequence. You understood what was going on.

    I guess that took too much thought, for episodes where the fight was supposed to be brief?

    The alternative requires more external special effects, following the action outside the ship so you can see the damage directly. I can see why they didn't do that on a low-tech low-budget show.

  15. Posted

    > I haven't seen anything concrete from you about what sort of military action against Iran you think would be effective.

    > If their facilities are not dug in enough to require a full invasion, bombs would suffice.

    ... that is concrete.

    > We wouldn't have known what would have happened if we'd helped the Greens.  It is hard to imagine worse than what did happen to the Greens.

    Okay, I've gone and done a good bit more reading about this. Before I was reacting to the 2012 events, but now I think you meant the 2009 events. In that light, my objection doesn't make so much sense. But there's another perfectly good one - 

    there was a major, MAJOR risk that all we'd accomplish is galvanizing the populace against us. Certain Green elements wanted our help, but many others very vocally did not. Of those that directly contacted us requesting aid, we had nowhere near the evidence required to tell how central their opinion was, or even that the letter wasn't a honeypot laid by the state police so they could blame us for everything.

  16. Posted

    On July 25, 2016 at 2:22 PM, Vorlonagent said:

    Islamic Terrorism is never going away as long as people of Obama's mindset are in control.  They simply do not want to do confront it.  It is reflected in their language choices.

    We can be clearer who the enemy is when we talk about them.  Who and what Radical Islam is and isn't.  But even the unbiased facts are scary

    They do not want to confront it? 

    What would a confrontation that you think WOULD work look like?

  17. Posted

    Re - military action vs Iran - depends what was needed at the time, but I think I covered that enough in the last comment for it to be pretty clear. If their facilities are not dug in enough to require a full invasion, bombs would suffice.

    If we'd given the Greens the help... we don't know what would have happened, but as I've said it all happened so fast and the degree of support we would have had to have provided is so extreme that I simply cannot believe that you can think the objections you've made to the previous point and make this objection at the same time.

    Egypt had a very firm division of power between the military and the civilian government. The civilian government was not in charge of the military. No entity was in charge of both sides of Egypt.

  18. Posted

    16 hours ago, Vorlonagent said:

    The ramp-up I'm referring to is getting our military hardware and people where they need to be in order to start the job.  It takes time to prepare an invasion.  I can hit the highlights for you but suffice to say it would be where the saying "Amateurs study tactics.  Generals study logistics" comes from.

    I said military action, not an outright invasion. When Israel hit them before, it didn't take an outright invasion. Stuxnet didn't either. If they begin building sufficiently underground to house these facilities in a bomb-proof fashion -- that is also a slow process, slower than it takes to prepare an invasion.

     

    As for the greens, what you said is completely irrelevant. I just acknowledged that it went badly for them. Nothing we could have done would have made it any better.

     

    As for Egypt, there was a strong separation of military and government. The military remained secular, and was visibly non-cooperative with the Muslim Brotherhood. So, your glib characterization of the decision as "Hey, no problem sending weapons to the radical islamists running Egypt now.  They (the radical islamists) will be out of power before they can use them, guaranteed." falls to pieces in the first sentence.

  19. Posted

    On July 18, 2016 at 4:32 PM, Vorlonagent said:

    Agreed.  So why aren't we ramping up for military intervention?

    Be...cause... we're already easily strong enough? What would a ramp up look like? Going from around 20 times stronger than they are to... 22 times stronger? You don't need to tell me that nukes would be more dangerous than individual terrorists in Guantanamo. That's kind of obvious.

    As for the 'green revolution' it was election protests, it was cracked down on effectively in under a week. We never had the time to gauge how actually aligned with our interests they were, how likely they were to attempt violence with or without our assistance, how likely they  - as a whole not the most eager elements - would be to accept our assistance, who to give such assistance to, etc. The most we could have done is make speeches that would be obviously, blatantly, interference in internal politics of a sovereign state. This could only go badly.

    As for Egypt - The army remained secular, and is what had control of the weapons. And then they kicked out the Muslim Brotherhood about 18 months later. The civilian government had not done anything particularly bad with those weapons in the mean time. And this was predictable.

  21. Posted

    20 hours ago, Vorlonagent said:

    Obama's Iran Deal essentially greenlit an Iranian nuclear bomb

    Iran already had all the materials and capabilities needed to build a nuclear bomb. The question was, when? Without a deal, the chances they would have been delayed as long as this deal is due to last are very poor indeed, and that chance relies on military intervention.

    As for the 'track record in the mideast' paragraph - all of those claims seem very shaky to me, especially... actually, yeah, all of them.  The 'Apology Tour' was named that by Obama's political blood enemies, and if it contained any apologies, I'd like to see them. What could we possibly have done to help Green Revolution? Why would our arms sales to Egypt be canceled based on the outcome of an election?

    The efforts to arm the rebels in Syria were a failure, yes, but that's because the situation on the ground and who would end up aligned with whom was very murky. Of all the weapons set aside for rebels, we actually delivered very few - a farcically small amount... and good thing, because yes, they ended up on the wrong hands. This was not due to carelessness. Had they actually been careless, it would have been far, far worse.

    How does Iran cheat on the deal daily?

    The 'Bland Euphemisms'? He's avoiding using the words that the enemy wants him to use! "Violent Extremism" is literally true and a strong condemnation. He condemns it plenty. He just refuses to hand the enemy a major propaganda tool.

    http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/frame_game/2015/02/how_obama_thinks_about_islam_and_terrorism_why_he_chooses_his_words_so_carefully.html

    Troacctid, HarJIT and CritterKeeper reacted to this

  22. Posted · Edited by Drachefly
    clarifying that final message is not specifically aimed

    Taking a step back to before:

     

    On July 14, 2016 at 9:52 PM, Vorlonagent said:

    Yes I do think Obama wanted (and probably still wants) to release them all. 

    ...

    I admit that I only have one data point of real proof for the above.  Obama released 5 Guantanamo inmates in exchange for 1 US Army deserter.

     

    I submit that the evidence you have provided is nowhere near adequate to the conclusions you draw. Also, there's a broad-brushed characterization of The Left, which surely isn't drawn from that one incident. Considering that we actually got something out of that trade, I'd be more convinced by his releasing prisoners in the past. But those had been approved for release by a risk assessment task force. This same risk assessment task force pointedly did not approve 65 other prisoners. I would agree that he would like to release the remaining 13 they did. I see no evidence that he would like to release the other 65.

    Obama's words about his plan for those remaining:

     

    Quote

    we’re already holding a bunch of really dangerous terrorists here in the United States because we threw the book at them. And there have been no incidents. We’ve managed it just fine.

    (in reference to whether we will be able to hold them prisoner in the USA)

    And the actual plan, released 5 months ago, only mentions releasing prisoners as a thing that we need to avoid doing: http://www.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/GTMO_Closure_Plan_0216.pdf

    We all need to be careful not to take stories in our heads, and treat them as facts about the world. YES, 'The Left' has a tendency to think that treating people fairly is an important step towards creating peace in the world. YES, he released some people I suppose you might not have released. That does not mean that 'people you would not release' is the same set as 'people Obama would release'. 

    And in general, when someone consistently says and acts like they don't want to do something that would be in line with their general philosophical guidelines except that it's obviously really, really stupid, maybe we can allow that they won't follow those general guidelines straight off a cliff, please?

    This isn't aimed specifically at VorlonAgent - I've seen plenty of people characterize all Libertarians as the 'disband all public institutions immediately' sort, despite their protests to the contrary, and anyone with issues around Abortion to be unwilling to consider any cases at all, despite their detailed statements.

  23. Posted

    On July 12, 2016 at 3:57 PM, Vorlonagent said:

    It would be madness to release them anyway.  No matter how much Obama would love to close Guantanamo, he has a stronger desire to not see a trail of blood leading from his decision to his door.

    This phrasing makes it seem like you were proposing that he wanted to just release them (even if you rule this out in later paragraphs). Why would ... eh, never mind. That was an odd implication to let loose.

     

     

    Quote

    It's just different than the parliamentary system you guys use.  Not better or worse.

    Our First-Past-The-Post single-representative-districts-redrawn-along-partisan lines system isn't worse????

     

    Quote

     First understand that the inmates at Guantanamo are Prisoners of War, not criminals.

    PoWs who were not treated according to Geneva Convention protections for PoWs, hence their classification as 'unlawful combatants'. :|

    2 hours ago, Vorlonagent said:

    That was certainly true of John Boehner's term as Speaker of the House...  Boehner seemed more interested in sitting at the "cool kids" table with Obama than the interests of his own Party.  Donald Trump owes his nomination to Boehner's shallow self-interested handling of his Speakership.

    Can you provide a few concrete examples?