A true hero died today. *quality
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/02/world/europe/nicholas-winton-is-dead-at-106-saved-children-from-the-holocaust.html

This is how skynet is going to kill all the cockroaches left over after the nuclear holocaust. Little cockroach terminators.

Of course most Japanese are taught that. Who the fuck said otherwise? Oh, by hiding their history you thought I meant they didn't learn about it at all? Well that's a stupid assumption. You know back in the 1960s Americans "learned" about slavery and our part in it, yet it was often prefaced by "those Negros are inferior so it was great times" or "it was really about federal expansion and not those Negros who should know their place." "Misrepresentation" is a hell of a concept.

And I wasn't even speaking about WW2, so where you got that from I have no utter clue? I didn't even hint at it. That rape and mutilation has been going on for centuries but was significant in the Second Sino-Japanese War, a distinct war in and of itself.

I guess what really pisses me off is that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, elected by Japan (not just one side, but everyone, from the Emperor to the Diet, who themselves are elected by THE PEOPLE) is a revisionist who is allowed to say his shit by the people of Japan. This isn't a position that is allowed in the civilized world anymore. Fuck, even Iran's Ahmadinejad denied the Holocaust and had to laugh it off as misspeaking. Abe is so flaunting he even visited Yasukuni Shrine, a place that holds more than 1 thousand war criminals in it.

Imagine a German leader going to a memorial for 1 thousand Nazi heroes, perhaps including Hitler himself? Oh, and the fact that those criminals were accepted after their punishments, is terrifying.

Notice something else. I never said that China has the right to slaughter everyone--which gives plenty of pre-acknowledgement to your point that this hateful revisionism is put out by right-wingers (And condoned by all the cowards on the left.) This is because, much as Germans on the left allowed the slaughter of the Jews, most cannot be held directly responsible for a force greater than them. In this case, there is no force greater, but that is beside the point.


http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/03/opinion/mr-abes-dangerous-revisionism.html?_r=0

I'll quote you again for emphasis:
'Fuck the Irish and Jews, they don't get murdered at rate of 1 every 28 hours.'

Dude, fuck you for that statement. I'm german, most of my life I've been told to feel sorry for the fucking holocaust. It ain't my fault.
I take issue with parts of the jewish community that keeps complaining about their history and ignoring all the other, smaller holocausts, the ethnic cleansings and whatever else you want to call the genocides happening after WW2 but I will not accept you taking a dump on it.
You have it bad, no doubt, and black people in the US always had to endure unimaginable suffering. I have absolutely no clue how horrible the shit you and your ancestors had to go through is.
But...
My great-grandfather and his peers build fucking corpse factories. My ancestors shipped people in train cars to a place to literally destroy them, to murder them. They called it 'Endloesung'.
My ancestors industrialised genocide. The Shoah claimed at least 6 million lives.
As justified your rage and your hurt is, as much unimaginable suffering your ancestors and those like them had to endure, you don't get to tell those that survived and their families it to fuck themselves.
I wouldn't dare to do that to you or your ancestors.

There's a lot of terrible shit going on around the world and it's part of why I'm not fond of my own species. We both wish the world would be different and I like to think I understand, or at least have a vague idea, why you're so angry. But how could I? I never suffered that awful shit. I'm sorry but that's just what I was born into. Nobody ever asked me what I thought about it.
However, maybe I'm wrong but telling a group like the jews, a group of people whose history of being treated horribly as long or even longer than your own people, to go fuck themselves...
you're just loosing me here. I have no other choice than calling you out on that. You're dead wrong on that. How can you do that? Don't you have any decency, haven't you seen the mountain of corpses?

They murdered them. All of them. Blacks and jews. It doesn't matter. They're all lost. We lost them.

Fallout 1 was a technically antiquated VGA (that's right, 640x480, 256 colours) post-apocalyptic turn-based tactical RPG where you could not control you team mates during combat. It was a bit buggy (and so was F2). It was Mad Max, without cars.

And yet.

Fallout is arguably the best world-building work in the history of video games. People are probably going to dispute that, but most other games are built on pre-existing lore or works, or do not have that scope*. Fallout built its world pretty much from scratch, conflating a pre-war 1950's, golden-era, overly-optimistic world-view with the bleak desolation of the nuclear holocaust that ensued (to clarify for those who really know nothing about Fallout: in this universe a nuclear war happened in the 50s**. all that's left is from that era). Beside its content which was plentiful in and of itself, this created a contrasted, yet highly coherent and mature world (and by mature I don't just mean killing friendly NPC, I mean doing Morally Very Bad Things that don't necessarily result in graphic scenes). An open world that you could roam freely, be surprised by a new discovery that you made, and at the same time find these discoveries to fit perfectly with the game's logic. In most large games you just access new areas or are carried by the story, in Fallout you would go "Holy shit I'm in the middle of a city populated by centenarian ghouls!", shortly followed by "ho, of course it's full of ghouls, that's perfectly normal". There are not many games that have this mix of unexpected/logical and dark/humorous content.

Fallout 2 had the same ho-my-God-how-could-they-get-away-with-it VGA engine (so next to zero evolution there), but quadrupled the world map (with a minimum overlap with the one from F1) and brought it fifty or so years forward, expanding the world greatly (there are now rival quasi-city-states, and your action may influence their future), while also building on the first one: some antagonists 'classes' from F1 have now grown their own identity and became NPC, and some characters are still around -- a young character you saved in F1 went back to her settlement, became its leader, built it into a town, and is now in the process of expanding it into a new state...So Fallout 2 is basically the same game, except they did that one important thing: push the game world's boundaries even more. You could never guess what next city would be like, but you could bet it would have some crazy shit in it, and yet somehow still make sense.

That's why many people don't like Fallout 3. It is not in itself a bad game, but comparatively, it's kind of coasting. Also it's too damn easy.

I'm sorry, I got carried away, you were asking if you should play the previous ones? No, you 'should' not. But you could, and for F1 & F2 you would certainly not lose your time if you know what you're getting into. And if you don't, at least go and watch their intro on Youtube, they'll give you the feel of the world.

* Possible contenders in terms of "original video game world": Elder Scrolls (vast, but less original), Deus ex (not as large), Bioshock (same), Final Fantasy (original and vast, but not as complex). Any other idea?
** Technically not the 1950s, but in practice the 50s + a bunch of high tech gizmo.

But seriously, @JustSaying

If that's how you feel, all you needed to express was that idea in the very last paragraph.

That's an insightful and helpful topic of discussion. Nice, one.

The rest - unfortunately- was you explicitly saying..

"While White Shame stretches as far from.. mundane everyday political buffoonery.. to harrowing tales of holocausts & lynchings..

..point-blank, there is literally NOTHING you colored folks could say to hurt my feelings/make me feel any true embarrassment, outrage or remorse..

(including the most terrible heinous things my heritage & daily life present)

..because at the end of the day, this world was LITERALLY made for me

(besides. i'm not even culpable for any of that abhorrent stuff
that "happened such a long time ago".

So what's wrong/why shouldn't I still benefit from it today also)

so.. hah. whatevs"

A point folks like @lantern53 ACTIVELY REFUSE to admit is THE #1 problem in American race-relations.

I never said weak nations 'should' be invaded, but instead that they would, it's a distinct difference. I very much disagree with what human nature leads to more often than not, but I won't deny it is as it is. If a nation has anything valuable and isn't willing and able to fight to keep it, any nation that is willing and able to fight to take it will take it the moment they judge that the taking will gain them more than they lose fighting for it.

I think it is important also to note that the original fighting in 1948 was not Israel vs. Palestinians, but instead a civil war between Jewish Palestinians and Arab Palestinians. It was a war over land and rights. It was a war both sides thought they could win. When the UN proposed a two state solution, the Jewish side declared it's independence and accepted the borders. The Arab side though gained the backing of every neighboring Arab state who all jointly committed to driving the Jews into the sea. This was in 1948, just after the holocaust, and each Arab country badly outnumbered the newly declared state of Israel. Israel none the less triumphed in the war. Some of it through straight up fighting, but most of it was simply agreement with the neighbouring states of Syria, Jordan and Egypt to simply not try and fight to protect large portions of Palestinian territory along their borders. As in, Syria, Jordan and Egypt happily seized and picked up portions of land for themselves at the expense of the Arab Palestinians too.

The relationship between Israel and it's neighbours is layered beyond belief. I still stand by the observation that they absolutely do face a life/death decision in maintaining military superiority. They must walk the line of having enough ability and will to fight to make it simply not worthwhile for it's enemies and neighbours to try and attack it. To suggest or claim otherwise is simply absurd and in contradiction to all of human history.

More philosophical wank citing junk analogies (lol, blowing up peoples houses with them still inside = drunken manslaughter in a bar fight?) to justify a position directly contradicted by people who should know...

http://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-auschwitz-borders-revisited/7847

"The late Tommy Lapid, justice minister in Ariel Sharon’s government, caused an uproar in 2004 when he said that images of an elderly Palestinian woman in Gaza “crouching on all fours, searching for her medicines in the ruins of her house” demolished by the Israeli army reminded him of his own grandmother who perished at Auschwitz. Lapid compared the Israeli army’s writing of numbers on the arms and foreheads of Palestinian prisoners to the Nazi practice of tattooing concentration camp inmates. “As a refugee from the Holocaust I find such an act insufferable,” he said in 2002."

"Lapid, who was chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial, also likened the routine harassment of Palestinians by Israeli settlers in the West Bank city of Hebron to the anti-Semitism of pre-World War II Europe. “It was not crematoria or pogroms that made our life in the diaspora bitter before they began to kill us,” he said in 2007, “but persecution, harassment, stone-throwing, damage to livelihood, intimidation, spitting and scorn.” Lapid did not live long enough to see Hebron settlers attempt to burn down a house with a large Palestinian family trapped inside, an act witnessed on 4 December by Avi Issacharoff, reporter for the Israeli daily Haaretz, who called it “a pogrom in the worst sense of the word.”

or perhaps:

http://youtu.be/qMGuYjt6CP8

"Sir Gerald, who was brought up as an orthodox Jew and Zionist, said: "My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town a German soldier shot her dead in her bed.

"My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The present Israeli government ruthlessly and cynically exploits the continuing guilt from gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians."

He said the claim that many of the Palestinian victims were militants "was the reply of the Nazi" and added: "I suppose the Jews fighting for their lives in the Warsaw ghetto could have been dismissed as militants."

I'll take the word of people who lived through the Holocaust and the formation of Israel over you... = P

Perhaps, but given they were dumped in an area surrounded by those of a different faith and who now also resent them for living on what was their land I wonder how much is echos of the Holocaust, and how much is just the feeling of being beset on all sides by enemies. Fortress Israel. How this all ends when there is virtually no integration, I don't know.

When I was a kid, I was told I was going to die in the nuclear holocaust, so maybe it all evens out in the end.

I'll watch this in a bit but I just wanted to get some snippets off the Freedom Project Education site.

https://www.fpeusa.org/index.php/about-fpe/what-is-fpe

"Rooted firmly in Judeo-Christian values..." Completely made up after WW2 in order to establish that we were against the Holocaust even though we did little to help the Jews during WW2.

"At FPE we proudly refuse all government funding..." Yes we're all very proud of you.

"Public-school apologists have spent decades convincing parents that their children belong to the government schools. The results have been disastrous to education and undermine the primacy of parents." Because of de-funding pushed by Republicans which these people voted for.

"FPE is in no way influenced by teachers’ unions or answerable to the Department of Education, or state Departments of Public Instruction. We don’t indoctrinate students or promote a liberal agenda. And we don’t advocate for the removal of God from contemporary culture. We teach truth, rigor, and Christian values."

I can't wait to watch this, I'm sure it's a barrel of fun. Going through the courses I noticed there don't seem to be any art classes or theater. I guess that stuff is for hippies and faggots right?

Whoa...death is not a tragedy or suffering, it is natural and for the love of, sorry the pun, I hope not to live forever. That punishment would be unbearable. Who the fuck would be stupid enough to want that?

And we raised the standard of living off the suffering of others. Slavery, colonialism, racial oppression, for fuck sake we made the holocaust and nukes to prove we like to taste suffering. Now being showered to death by gas and being melted but alive by radiation--that's fucked up.

Capitalism isn't much better. And we are only able to sit at our tables with smiles and a good life because we have abundance (At others' suffering.) What happens when that lifestyle runs out? I mean really runs out. Will we still be so civil? I say fuck no...

Fuck ants! I want to back up a truck of molten aluminum into the top of an orphanage!

It will be a silvery Pompeii of children! A work of art!

A10anis, comparing killing an anthill to the holocaust? Really? You're an idiot.

Skin color > than ethnic/religious/sexual orientation. Jews are treated white over black people. If we cannot understand this we don't understand true racism. (Yes, millions of Jews were killed in the Holocaust and in many other atrocities, but if there had been blacks in their place, blacks would have taken priority.)

So yeah, I would say Jesus was white. A white Jew, like John Stewart perhaps. Now he wasn't Anglo American, that's for sure.

1) Don't be confused, and think that I've decided the casting of ant colonies for art is justified. I'm pointing out that the issue is more complex than many, including yourself, may realize. I find the video disturbing... and unlike our resident @ant have not voted for it.
2) Please look up Godwin's law. Using Nazi analogies generally undermines your argument.. it just makes it hard for people to accept that you have thought things through.
3) But hey, assuming that you have thought things through, let's continue with your analogy:
Perhaps the holocaust analogy does work, but to be sure the fire ants are not the Gypsies, they are the Germans. Fire ants are rapidly spreading across the world, drastically reducing both the abundance and diversity of native species. This includes native ant species, as well as a huge range of arthropod prey, potentially plants (through seed consumption), and even small vertebrates (e.g. lizards and ground nesting birds).
If you are arguing from a pacifistic stance, that violence against another creature is never justified, even if it is in the defense of others more helpless or in self-defense, I thoroughly respect that position. Although any violence turns my stomach; I cannot say that I agree.. for sure, the next time I get an infection, I will take antibiotics; the next time I see purple loosestrife, I will tear it from its roots.