3,058 Forum Posts by "lapis"
At 8/30/06 04:30 PM, MortifiedPenguins wrote: And the good stuff just refers to good alchohol, you know stuff thats not budwieser or the piss that we call american beer.
Heineken ftw.
At 8/30/06 12:37 AM, troubles1 wrote: I am troubles1, hear me roar.
ROOOAAAAR
Dude, just specify in your public profile that you're 12 so we can all empathise and say: "awww, he's so young and yet tries to formulate opinions on political subjects, how cute".
At 8/30/06 02:14 AM, IgnorantSentient wrote: apparently israel was the only good thing in gaza.
Israel unilaterally pulled out of Gaza and subsequently cut off all funding to the Palestinian Authority so it's not that much of a miracle that anarchy ensued. Now I also blame the Fatah for not recognising the need for unity but the Hamas is powerless without funding and international support. Besides, as long as a nation called Palestine does not exist these Occupied Territories are officially Israeli-administered territory and every bit of suffering in those land is to be counted as a loss and a failure for Israel.
I could gloat more, but I don't think its really needed.
Admirable. I bet that if the US government pulled all its soldiers out of Iraq tomorrow you'd delightfully smirk about every single Iraqi that dies in the chaos that the US helped create.
At 8/29/06 05:48 PM, JMHX wrote: "As you have treated the least of these among you, so have you treated me."
Scripture time!!! Matthew 25:40 and 25:45:
"Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did [it] not to one of the least of these, ye did [it] not to me."
At 8/29/06 10:48 AM, Dragon_Smaug wrote: That's certainly why the anti-Semites hate the U.S.
Sigh, anti-Semitism is completely irrelevant in this discussion. A decent amount of anti-Americanism, especially in the Middle East, comes from hate for Israel and the American support for that nation in the past few decades, that's what he said and that point stands. But hate for Israel rarely stems from anti-Semitism per se, one could in fact say that a lot of the anti-Semitism we see today among Muslim minorities in European countries reversely stems from hate for Israel. Why would one rarely hear an Arab scream for the Jews of Tzfat or Tiberias to be "driven into the sea" before the Aliyahs? Those Jews were Dhimmis, sure, but why weren't they hated? Anti-Semitism in the Middle East is despicable but it's an effect, not a cause.
I would totally watch this. I'd stay up until 5 AM in the morning the day before an important exam if this were to be broadcasted. Unfortunately I estimate the odds of Bush agreeing to a debate like this to be either zero or zero. Still, this is what the world needs, world leaders tearing each other apart in live TV debates like it's a week before a national election. It would certainly make international politics more interesting to the common man who, for the bigger part, is completely ambivalent about these affairs.
I say we just make him User Of The Millennium and let the current reference to his greatness stay in place on the top of the forum screen until January 1, 3000. Anything less will not be befitting.
I don't hate America or dislike the country for that matter but I'll try to answer your question. The common answer is that most Canadians, Europeans and South Americans who claim to "hate" America do so because when you ask a stereotypical American why he thinks people hate his country he'll reply with: "they're all just jealous", "they hate our freedom" or "I don't care because we're number one". Americans are being perceived as self-important, loud, gun-happy chauvinists which isn't exactly an image that will make you popular abroad, even though I know a lot of Americans don't fit this description and that those who do are proud of their reputation. Most Westerners who claim to hate America are just as ignorant as the stereotype they hate anyway.
A substantial number of Muslims hate America because of American involvement in the Middle East. Things like supporting the unpopular Shah prior to the 1979 Iranian revolution, their overwhelming support for Israel after they lost France as their patron, stationing troops on Muslim holy land before and during the first Gulf War, the second Gulf War in its entirety, their alliance with hated sovereigns like the Saudi royal family, etc. As a sidenote, claiming that Muslims hate the US for their wealth or liberty like some do is ludicrous. Japan is about as prosperous and free as the States and yet you don't see any Japanese flags being burned in Middle Eastern countries or angry mobs showing their full support for wiping Japan off the map.
Far-Leftists may hate America not only because of their economic system but also because of the Truman Doctrine and all following actions taken by the US to frustrate Socialist initiatives around the world, their support for Pinochet against Allende in particular.
A hasty return, but valiant nonetheless. Tonight I shall raise my glass of ale in your honour, Brazen Knight of the Realm. May all your foes tremble in fear upon hearing of your mighty victory.
It's kind of fun to watch. A fun thing that I noted is that the US strike on Fallujah did have a temporary effect if we look at the deaths of coalition soldiers. A few months before November 2004 the region around Fallujah is constantly a big red spot, then the number of deaths suddenly surges and then dies out for some time. It starts to return only slowly in 2005 but then suddenly reappears in June 2006. Anyway, most casualties these days are civilian and they understandably aren't portrayed by this animation.
At 8/28/06 12:30 PM, -HotActionYiffFur- wrote: You see, there's this thing called NewGrounds, and it's really cutting into my study time. I can easly admit I am addicted. It's like herione.
I've been hearing more and more of this phenomenon. This "NewGrounds" thing is a plague, really. I've already contacted the school counselor, he'll write a special brochure explaining how insidious websites drag students into nasty, destructive habits and send it to your parents. We must fight this evil.
At 8/28/06 12:38 PM, TropicalPenquin wrote: I can type BOOBIES in my calculator
You've passed the course, congratulations.
At 8/28/06 12:42 PM, Dumbass_Dude wrote: My Dog ate my homework, and raped my father, am i in trouble?
I'm going to need a video of the rape part to see if you speak the truth. Analysing evidence like that is pretty hard, it may take some time until you get it back.
At 8/28/06 12:18 PM, -HotActionYiffFur- wrote: The answer is 4.
It's 42 to be exact, that's a relative error of over 90%. Goddamnit Yiff, I've been your math teacher for six months now and I've been cutting myself due to misery for a good three of them.
SAt 8/28/06 12:12 PM, Scotttheskaterr wrote:
Um sir? Do we have any homework for tommorrow?
Sure, estimate the probability that there will have been no X-threads on the first page of the General forum for over a day, assuming that there are none at t = 0 and I'll be more than satisfied.
At 8/28/06 12:14 PM, -Heliopios- wrote: I pissed on my work, can I go home?
Fuck no. Detention for you, mister. The principal is on his way already.
This Newgrounds University trend is cool so I'm jumping on the bandwagon.
Attention: all students who wish to partake in this course will need to have passed KemCab's earlier course in BBS Calculus or I will not grade your exams.
Markov Chains in the General forum:
Markov Chains are an important tool when we wish to make probabilistic statements about stochastic processes, and certain features on the Newgrounds BBS behave in such a fashion. In today's course we will use Markov Chains to explain the behaviour of a certain type of topics on the first page of the General forum.
Let Q(t), t>=0, denote the number of threads on the first page of the General forum related to chavs, goths or emos. This is a MC in continuous time and it has a finite state space since there are only 40 possible threads on the first page. One can intuitively see that this process does not have the Markov property. Let's say that there's only one chav, goth or emo thread, which we will from now on call an "X-thread", on the first page of the forum. Now consider the following events:
A = the X-thread is the forum's first topic
B = the X-thread is the forum's bottom topic
Clearly P(Q(t+dx) = 0 | R(t) = 1, A) > P(Q(t+dx) = 0 | R(t) = 1, B) for all positive real numbers dx. Therefore the Markov property is not satisfied since the conditional probability distribution does not only depend on the present state but also on past states.
It's clear that we need a different model, so let us now introduce the stochastic process R(t), t=0 ... infinity. If we denote the number of X-threads on page 1 of General at time t by n, then we let R(t) equal an n-dimensional vector where the element i of R(t) denotes the position of the i-th X-thread counting from the top. If there are no X-threads on the first page at time t then we let R(t) equal 0. Since we still have a finite state space it is theoretically possible to write down a finite matrix P with transition rates.
I will leave it as an exercise to prove that when we let dx approach zero there are only n+2 possible events that change the state of the stochastic process in a time interval (t, t+dx) if R(t) equals an n-dimensional vector:
1) a new X-thread is created or an old one is bumped.
2) a new non X-thread is created or a post is made in a non X-thread below the lowest X-thread on the first page of the General forum.
3) a new post is made in X-thread 1
4) a new post is made in X-thread 2
...
n+2) a new post is made in X-thread n
If R(t) equals 0 the only possible change is a X-thread being bumped or created. The rates at which these events occur are influenced by numerous external factors such as the number of NG members online or the fame/notoriety of the people who created or posted in the threads on the first page. But we will assume for simplicity that the transition rates are homogeneous in time. We will denote the rate at which people post new or bump old X-threads by mu, the rate at which non X-threads are created/bumped by lambda and the rate at which people post in X-thread i by gamma_i. We can now attempt to draw a transition diagram, it turns out however that even a highly simplified version of the diagram quickly becomes a bitch.
In the following example we will assume that mods automatically delete new X-threads if two are already present. The transition diagram becomes unreadable chaos even after a few basic vertices. The matrix where element (i,j) denotes the transition rate of state i to state j isn't a beauty either, but using a computer model we may be able to simulate the process.
Assignment 1: collect data about the behaviour of BBS threads in the first page of the General forum for over a day and estimate the model parameters mu and lambda.
Markov Chains in the Politics forum:
The theory that we developed in the previous chapter can of course also be applied to other sections of the BBS. In the Politics forum for instance we can introduce a stochastic process R(t) similar to the R(t) in the General forum with the exception that X-threads are now defined as threads about gay marriage or abortion. If we assume that no new threads are being made or bumped then the state 40 of the R(t) is an absorbing state and by Elfer's Theorem we can conclude that when t nears infinity the probability P(R(t) = 40) approaches 1.
This concludes this day's course in BBS probability theory. Students are free to correct me in case I fucked up or debunk my entire post for that matter.
At 8/28/06 06:59 AM, -Marine237- wrote: Heh. I remember that picture from Lords of the Realm 2. LotR2 was pretty good, LotR3 sucked balls though. I'm playing Stronghold 2 at the moment which is the best. Pretty much the same thing too.
I seriously considered buying LotR3 at some point in time but I kind of forgot about the whole game. Stronghold 2 seemed to be good, I "obtained" (nudge nudge) it to see if it would run on my computer but it kept crashing. Damn shame.
At 8/28/06 02:08 AM, ZekeysSlave wrote: congrats to todays UOTD The_Brazen_Knight. an 05 level 3 account. 250 posts, and was last active in jan.
A generic congratulatory response like this would be appropriate for most accounts with 250 posts but we're talking about The Brazen Knight here, you aweless changeling. He is currently away in distant lands, fighting battles of honour and glory and thrilling fine damsels throughout, but when His Lordship returns to seize the throne your failure to chronicle his countless virtuous deeds will not be forgotten. Hurrah!!!
Since Christopher Walken is playing a part in that movie it must be good.
At 8/27/06 07:49 AM, HighlyIllogical wrote: felt wanted,
What a shock that must have been. And you're not the only one who just returned from vacation. Popozão.
At 8/10/06 03:59 PM, HighlyIllogical wrote: Kidnappers, by the way, not captors.
A captor is a person who holds people or animals, meaning that the Hezbollah militants who kidnapped the Israeli soldiers are captors, simple as that.
How is it relevant that they were killed trying to rescue their comrades?!
It was a minor correction. They didn't die during the kidnapping operation, they died in a retaliatory strike on Lebanese soil moments after the kidnapping operation.
At 8/10/06 04:00 PM, HighlyIllogical wrote: An airstrike is fine. A full-scale invasion in tandem with airstrikes is better.
Sigh, whatever. The consequences of a full-scale invasion have been discussed a countless number of times in the other thread and I'm not going to do the whole thing over again. Besides, there's no need to debate the war we see now in this topic when there's another one created for that sole purpose.
And in conclusion, I'm off to bed in a couple of minutes and off to Spain tomorrow morning. So this will effectively be my last post for the next 17 or so days, so yeah, Sayonara. I probably won't read your possible response to this post until September.
At 8/10/06 02:47 PM, house_of_fun wrote: has anyone just noticed toni blair.. the blair witch project.
IMDB rating: 1.0 out of 10. Awful movie, probably.
At 8/10/06 02:14 PM, Lidov wrote: It doesn't matter how they were killed, they were killed by the Hezbollah before we started attacking Hezbollah targets in Lebanon. Furthermore, they started launching rockets before and during the operation as a distraction.
It's pretty vague since everything, the kidnapping of the soldiers, the Israeli retaliation which resulted in the deaths of two civilians when a road was bombed and the Hezbollah shellings of Shlomi and Israeli military posts happened in the same time period, the morning of the 12th of July. It doesn't really matter anyway, it was the capture of the hostages that triggered the invasion and not the grenades. Earlier missile launches from militants in Lebanon also didn't cause an invasion.
At 8/10/06 01:54 PM, Lidov wrote: It is not only two soldiers captured. They also killed 8 soldiers while kidnapping them and launched rockets towards Israeli cities as a distraction to doing so. So it is not just the soldiers.
5 of those soldiers were killed in Lebanon while pursuing the Hezbollah captors, 4 of them when an Israeli tank hit a mine. And the rocket/granade attacks on Shebaa Farms and Shlomi occurred after the Israelis had bombed roads, bridges and Beirut airport, I believe.
At 8/10/06 01:45 PM, FlurpMonkey wrote: So... who started this war?
One who's a staunch Israel supporter will say Hezbollah for capturing two Israeli soldiers. One who's critical of Israel will say Israel for invading Lebanon after the two soldiers were captured.
At 8/10/06 01:31 PM, HighlyIllogical wrote: One little thing you forgot to mention: the 1927 Arab riots.
That falls under the "predictable local Arab resistance" that I mentioned.
At 8/10/06 12:23 PM, Proud_American wrote: I just have one question, because I don't understand the founding of Israel very well. Was Israel given to the Jewish people for the Holocaust, but first Israel had to be conquered from the Arabs? Thanks.
In addition to what Lidov said, European and particularly British support for Jews forming a national homeland in Palestine predates the Holocaust. As early as 1840 a British emissary recommended letting the Jews migrate to Palestine to the Ottoman Sultan. One can only guess about the reasons, this particular ambassador mentioned the Jews as a safeguard against Muhammad Ali Pasha who they apparently saw as a threat to their interests in the Middle East. An allied Jewish nation is Palestine would also help exert control over the Suez Canal which was under construction at the time.
During World War I the British were at war with the Ottomans and in the end of 1917 the British army led by general Allenby were making progress in Palestine. Russia had been lost as an ally earlier and the British tried to get the Zionist movement on their side by promising to work for their dream of a Jewish state. They hoped that the Zionists would in turn use whatever influence they had to drag the US into the war, which would effectively end the war in favour of France and Britain. The British support for a would-be Israel was made official with the Balfour Declaration, written in November 1917.
When the war was over the Middle Eastern regions formally controlled by the Ottoman Empire were to be administered by the French and British by decree of the young League of Nations, one of these territories was called the British Mandate of Palestine, assigned to the British in 1920. It encompassed modern Israel, the Occupied Territories, Jordan and parts of the Golan Heights, later transferred to French Syria. In 1922 the League of Nations wrote an document officially outlining Britain's goals in the region, which encluded the formation of a Jewish national homeland in the region. Jewish migration to the region was surging in those days and so was the predictable local Arab resistance to the influx of immigrants. The British later curbed the migration waves and refused to fulfill what was laid out in the Palestine Mandate, which gave rise to Jewish terrorist organisations like the Irgun and later the Lehi which actively made war on the British forces and the local Arabs.
The Holocaust made the realisation of the Zionist ideals more imminent but wasn't the direct cause. The British immigration ban could not stop illegal migration and the situation in the region deteriorated. The British announced that they would abandon the area in May 1948 and the UN, established two years earlier, tried to mediate in the conflict which lead to a non-binding resolution called the Partition Plan, this failed and the state of Israel was founded on May 14, 1948.
At 8/9/06 02:56 PM, lapis wrote: it's kind of an old rumor (1998).
Bleh, wrong link.
Guess what the comic book "The Smurf King" was called in Dutch (HEIL Brainy). But other than the anti-dictator message in that particular edition I don't think there are any noteworthy political connotations in the Smurf stories. Getting along and sharing with each other are values that aren't excusively propagated by the Smurfs, I don't think there were that many children's television shows in the eighties that taught children to compete economically because when you drive a Porsche you're inherently better as a person than your Subaru-driving neighbour. If Gargamel's lust for gold is supposed to represent the greed of Capitalism then one could also see an incarnation of Capitalism in Rita Repulsa and her quest for supreme control over the Galaxy, as the concepts of wealth and power are closely entwined.
The Smurfs all stick to their prospective manual jobs to keep it simple for the young viewers and most notably to make stereotyping easier. Brainy wasn't bullied because he belonged to the intelligentsia but because he was a haughty twat who kept lecturing everybody who wasn't as smart as he was. Other Smurf Communism theories see a caricature of Trotsky in him.
The best part about Sonntag's essay is that she at the end attempts to make a serious point while disproving it at the same time. She claims that the media is powerful and easily able to sway impressionable children into following ideologies while also admitting that the children who were allegedly constantly indoctrinated with Marxist propaganda through television have grown to be even more materialistic than the generations before them. I don't think there are that many people who have shaped their political standpoints in their childhood and stuck to it all throughout their teenage years anyway.
As a final note, it's kind of an old rumor (1998).
At 8/9/06 02:48 PM, Elamdri wrote: Remember, Gargamel MADE smurfette, and she originally had black hair and was evil, but then Papa Smurf turned her good with the magic of communism and her hair turned blonde.
Peyo used this metamorphosis to show that people of Nordic descent are better than people with dark hair, proving that he was trying to spread racial supremacism using his comic books and TV series.
At 8/8/06 06:40 PM, Janoru_Magis wrote: The Muslims in the Dutch riots were also exremists, not because they were offended, but because they decided to vent their anger by taking lives.
I don't recall any riot in the Netherlands in which extremist Muslims took non-Muslim lives. I remember Theo van Gogh being killed by a fundamentalist Muslim over an offensive motion picture, but that wasn't the result of a riot. Maybe you had a different situation in mind.
At 8/7/06 06:40 AM, PenguinTamer wrote: I'm Belgian myself. When I switch on a Dutch channel, I see a lot of jokes about Belgians, where we are portrayed as noisy, drunken nitwits. This doesn't offend me. Belgian television however, responds with a lot of jokes about the Dutch. Therefore, they get a lot of complaints.
Joking about Belgians used to be really popular when I was a kid but it's a dying custom in my experience, maybe they still do it on TV shows that I don't watch but I haven't heard a new joke about Belgians in ages. Anyway, I'll admit that, even though I'll shoot myself in the head the day I even contemplate writing an angry letter to a Belgian broadcasting agency because they made a joke about my people, the average Dutchman might be more prone to complain about being offended by jokes than an average Belgian. But it still takes a grade A whiny bitch to actually phone a TV channel because someone on a show they aired took a shot at the Dutch, so I seriously doubt that "they get a lot of complaints."
At 8/7/06 04:48 PM, Athlas wrote: I second that. The only thing that bothers me about the Dutch is their accent.
Which can be easily ignored.
You're all just jealous that we don't have to share a country with a bunch of cocky child molesting Walloons.
At 8/7/06 01:39 PM, HighlyIllogical wrote: Lydda, Ramleh, and Deir Yassin (not officially santioned, btw). Three examples. That is, all the examples I can think of.
One of these examples, Ramleh, already accounts for 40,000 of the about 600,000 refugees. Your argument that there was no refugee crisis wasn't sustainable from the start, but these examples in turn say something about the argument of it not being due to Israeli actions. And here's once again a list of villages partly or completely expelled by the Israelis, with a list of references if you don't feel like looking for it.
Compared to these, there were dozens of terrorist acts from Arabs all the way through today, including attacks on civillians from terrorists coming from Jordan and Lebanon (all the way to the '80s for Jordan, and 'till now for Lebanon).
Completely irrelevant to the discussion.
You forgot to give any specific sources in your postThose sources, such as the Economist are not specific enough for you?
Bleh, I should have said "hyperlinks". I'd prefer it if you posted a direct link to your source so that we could more easily see that you decided to copy/paste a number of random factoids from the website of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise.
