>> ^Avokineok:
I live in The Netherlands. Everytime I'm on Videosift, I get a sense of how bad it must be to be an American.
I see some great entertaiment with all the late night shows, but I feel bad for all of you who have to live in a country that has so many people taking everything said at Fox "News" ("Gossip" might be more appropriate) so seriously..
It seriously makes me said and makes me believe Amerika is not the land of opportunities; it's a land where people with a lot of money tell other people what think.


Who do you think were those first pilgrims from Europe were? Puritans - People who wanted nothing more than to lecture others on the poor choices they made. (If you've ever been to a good Renaissance Faire, they're the street actors wearing almost all black, and almost always carrying their bibles with them. Hang around one long enough and you'll want to tell them to go take a long walk off a short pier too, if they're in good character. That's basically how they made everyone else living at the time feel. Look at modern day puritanicals such as Pat Robertson.) The ones who colonized America had enough money to sail half-way around the world, which isn't terribly cheap.

Paying for the sins of our forefathers is something every culture does. Just look at television and video games. Here in the States, you can put some pretty violent imagery on TV and maybe even some drug use in your video games, but holy hell if you show a nipple, or touch on ANYTHING of a sexual nature. Releasing a game in the three major English speaking markets (US, UK, and AU) means subjecting your content to three different review boards, with differing notions about what is good and decent for the consumers of their country. Sex, violence, drug use - the disparity between opinions on what is acceptable for only adults to see, even among countries with common language, can mean what get's a Teen rating by the US's ESRB can get an "Adult Only" in the UK, and even be banned outright unless edited for an Australian market.

Despite all this, I remain hopeful because of the fact that those like ol' Noun-Verb-9/11 Rudy are in the minority. The fact that he's so focused on using terms like "Islamic terrorist," or "islamist" displays a blunt ignorance, and could be interpreted as flat out racism. Let's remember that he put the NYC Emergency Command Center, setup after a failed World Trade Center fertilizer bombing in the 90's, was picked by Rudy to be put in the World Trade Center, a place that had recently been the target of a terrorist attack (by attackers who were brought to justice within the same judicial system that handles our parking tickets - we didn't need the post-9/11 military tribunals then, and we don't really need them now, despite certain anti-American Right-Wingers who lack requisite faith in the system they serve). It's like he refuses to learn from history or something, and unfortunately it's not an uncommon condition among modern conservative talking heads here in the states.

The fact that our president didn't use words like "islamist" or "islamic terrorist" or any permutation thereof is because he understands that the greater threat to our nation is a foreign policy that takes away everything from poor young brown-skinned people living in the cradle of civilization and gives them nowhere to turn to but bombed out countries, crumbling infrastructure, and eager suicide bomber recruiters. Take away everything someone has to live for, and he'll find a cause to die for. Dealing with the symptoms is one thing. End the root cause, and then you have the potential for peace.

Take the issue with rampant piracy around the waters of Somalia. Sure, everyone's talking about the latest tanker to be overtaken, but how many stories have delved into the root cause? The polluted waters that have killed off all the fish in the region? The fish who fed the people on the land? The fish that drove the local economy? All dead. The Indonesian Tsunami caused a tidal wave of wretched filth to wash up ashore, tainting the land and water supplies, causing pestilential illnesses. If you're a poor Somali 20-something with your family boat, and you can't make an honest living with it, what are you going to do? Grab some weapons, recruit a crew of close friends in the same situation you're in, and take your chances on the shipping lanes within striking distance... yeah, that would seem like something someone EXTREMELY desperate would do. It's happening right now. The Somali Government can't do jack, they can barely govern an area the size of my rural hometown. Sure we can bust out the snipers when someone important gets kidnapped, and we can applaud the heroes who put their lives on the life to ensure the safety of others. But that won't stop the next motley crew of fishermen with nowhere else to turn but terrorizing the high seas.

I've only spent about 4 days total in the Netherlands. What I saw was beautiful. Amsterdam was breathtaking, both figuratively and literally - man, those canals can really wreak in the summer . I hope to visit again soon. Didn't get to check out much of the television, but what brief moments I was allowed rest in front of a TV on that trip was pretty cool. A lot of stuff just wouldn't get past the FCC here without some serious fines being levied for sexual content, and that's a damn shame...

But, like I said, I'm still hopeful. Wow, that was long If you made it this far, thanks for reading.

Hmm.. Cool. Thank you, sir!

In reply to this comment by Shepppard:
I've played through the entire game on Ps3, and I can prettymuch tell you that he really IS being overly-critical for the most part.

The money isn't useless, there's actually neat money-sinks in the game that allow you to do things like purchase upgrades for Monteregionni(Your villa) including art made during the renaissance, and you can't pickpocket things like throwing knives anymore. You can loot dead bodies and maybe find one every once in a while, but you've still gotta pay for the majority of replenishment for Poisons, bullets, knives, smoke bombs etc.

The game itself isn't easy for the most part, combat can be made quite easy because it really is just a lot of standing in a circle waiting to counter-attack for the easy I-win button, but I preferred to make it a challenge to start the fight by trying to assassinate as many guards as possible (Say, in a group of 4 or 6) before the first one I killed fell, and the rest noticed I was killing their buddies.

It's still a damn fine game.. just, bit of an off ending. The one complaint I have is you're supposed to get all these symbol things throughout the game before you complete the game, but if you don't find them it doesn't make as much sense.

That being said, now you know.


In reply to this comment by ForgedReality:
>> ^KnivesOut:
Well, I still bought it, but I haven't played it yet. We'll see. I actually really liked the first one, even with the repetitive mission structure.


So did I. I played it on PC, and I found it to be a lot of fun going through and doing every single side mission before attempting the plot missions, cleaning out each area of the city.

But the whole thing about it being too easy? And the uselessness of the money system? I dunno. That might be a deal breaker for me right there

I've played through the entire game on Ps3, and I can prettymuch tell you that he really IS being overly-critical for the most part.

The money isn't useless, there's actually neat money-sinks in the game that allow you to do things like purchase upgrades for Monteregionni(Your villa) including art made during the renaissance, and you can't pickpocket things like throwing knives anymore. You can loot dead bodies and maybe find one every once in a while, but you've still gotta pay for the majority of replenishment for Poisons, bullets, knives, smoke bombs etc.

The game itself isn't easy for the most part, combat can be made quite easy because it really is just a lot of standing in a circle waiting to counter-attack for the easy I-win button, but I preferred to make it a challenge to start the fight by trying to assassinate as many guards as possible (Say, in a group of 4 or 6) before the first one I killed fell, and the rest noticed I was killing their buddies.

It's still a damn fine game.. just, bit of an off ending. The one complaint I have is you're supposed to get all these symbol things throughout the game before you complete the game, but if you don't find them it doesn't make as much sense.

That being said, now you know.


In reply to this comment by ForgedReality:
>> ^KnivesOut:
Well, I still bought it, but I haven't played it yet. We'll see. I actually really liked the first one, even with the repetitive mission structure.


So did I. I played it on PC, and I found it to be a lot of fun going through and doing every single side mission before attempting the plot missions, cleaning out each area of the city.

But the whole thing about it being too easy? And the uselessness of the money system? I dunno. That might be a deal breaker for me right there

Apparently this has happened before.

Actually i think this movie is trying to emulate Animatrix: The Second Renaissance videos.
Same style of speech, voice distortions, the way footage covered by distortion effects

I'm pretty sure the assertion in this video is false. It looks like the reporter is on Belle Island, which is part of Detroit, and the camera is facing west. It's the only way to line up the Renaissance Center, Comerica Tower, and Penobscot Building as seen to the left of the reporter.

It's worth noting that in the US, in numbers we use commas where Europeans use periods, and periods where they use commas.

And considering how hardcore some VW Bus owners are, I do expect more than a few people to want to spring for one. At 129K, it's being priced against RVs and campers that aren't nearly as fuel-efficient (which the economy has hit hard - I had a friend who used to work at an RV assembly plant, but there were big lay offs since demand has just plain died). I'd imagine that the TCO would be less than a similarly equipped RV or camper, making it a wiser long-term investment.

At 69K, you'd still have something you could take camping for a more barebones experience - if you already have good camping gear, you don't really need the extra 60K worth of bells and whistles. (My mom was a girl scout troop leader, and did a TON of camping trips wit her girls over the years - I did boy scouts for a while, and really only learned knot-tying, which my girlfriend appreciates - we camp frequently over the summer at Renaissance Faire events).

I'd expect this to be pretty popular with the Burning Man crowd.

Oh I have seen Animatrix many times. I think it's great but I also think a lot of the history in "The Second Renaissance" is mis- or dis-information.

*promote the Renaissance music.

>> ^cindercone:
I propose that since our current society is Theologically based...


Your whole argument rests upon this assumption, and I reject it outright as patently silly.

Humans created religion and deities to try to explain their world, and their place in it. This happened over millenia in the absence of science and our modern tools of science. Humans have always investigated and tried to understand their surroundings and the way things work. Our intellectual evolution through an Agricultural Revolution, the Bronze Age, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, etc., shows this and has brought concurrent and deeper understanding of our physical world. As a species, we understand things we once didn't, and constantly replace bad knowledge and inferences with new understanding based upon investigation and experimentation, something we've been doing since we first banged two rocks together to make fire. If ANYTHING, society, and everything we have and know, is based on science and scientific method.

That human morality is based on theism, which is what your assumption and subsequent arguments infer, is laughable and offensive to the millions (billions?) of thoughtful, good, and moral people who pray to no one, and yet seem to get along with others and function just dandy within society. Recent studies even suggest that cooperation, kindness, altruism, and empathy are most likely evolutionary traits, at some point necessary or advantageous to survival. Imagine that... humans may have only reached our current stage as a species simply because we learned to be nice to each other.

>> ^budzos:
D'Souza's "three basic faith-based principles upon which science is suspended" are utter fucking nonsense. Each one boils down to a logical fallacy, first and foremost being the straw man... I don't think any prominent thinkers are putting forth the idea that the universe is conscious, and I don't think anyone with intelligence is even able to confuse the laws of physics with the laws of man.
He's just a FUCK. ARRGH I CANT STAND THE BULLSHIT.


He does not say that the universe is conscious. He says it is rational. That is, it can be measured, chopped up conceptually into discrete chunks, bits of it can be mathematically compared to other bits, it shows order, and so on. The universe need not be conscious to be rational.

The three "faith-based principles" he mentions are indeed fundamental requirements for science as we know it. (Sort of. The third is only essential for the most popular notions about science, not for doing science itself.) However, the principles are not Christian in origin. They are Greek, from Athens rather than Jerusalem. The the universe is rational, and that the mind corresponds to it, can be found in Plato and Aristotle. That it shows a uniquely mathematical order can be found in Pythagoras.

The principles made their way into modern science through the Renaissance. The creators of modern science, men like Galileo and Kepler, were profoundly interested in Pythagorean theories of the universe.

Reminds me of Animatrix's The Second Renaissance.

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