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The UK video game sector is booming, and we’re maximising its potential even further

Today we’ve announced £5m extra funding for the UK Games Fund, which will help companies like @CAGames go “from start-up to scale-up”https://t.co/vW3biuHJYn pic.twitter.com/bVNSYNfyyO

— Department for Culture, Media and Sport (@DCMS) June 14, 2023

I must congratulate Creative Assembly for successfully defrauding the UK government by tricking them into thinking that CA is a startup.

You guys are really overthinking the joke

I like Creative assembly, if the UK's government has money to spend it might as well be for them.

They've certainly wasted a lot of money in other ways (or had it line their pockets for absolutely no commercial benefit). That being said, what studios are actually bigger than CA? If it's a startup than Sony is a Mom and Pop's shop.

It's a joke?

(Googles)

Oh, the chaser is an onion-esque satire site. I had never heard of it before.

Poe's law is a way of life these days.

If it was a "help the local game developer" grant sure, but the point is to help new companies get into gear.

CA have 800 employees, a hit game series and are literally 10 years older than the department handing out the cash.

They don't need the government's money and someone else is being deprived by thier inclusion.

The one who has too much power is corporations…as he shows clearly

"Landed Gentry"

That moment when Feudalism ressurects itself on reddit.

Magna Carta moment when?

Edit: heh, if you squint Huffman kind of looks like a near contemporary depiction of King John.

Well, I see this as just slowing down things unless the blackout is complete success.

Aw man accidental downvote

Unfortunately, he's right. Its moderators are perhaps the biggest and most obvious problems with Reddit as a whole, and this goes much deeper than just the "powermods". I don't use Reddit much, so I can't bring much insight here, but this is what I know:

There are some users who are moderators on dozens, if not hundreds, of individual subreddits. They are what are called "powermods", and if nothing else, it's really suspicious behavior. Obviously, not even the most dedicated no-lifers can be active in that many communities at once, so it's likely that they only focus on a few at any given time and only step into the others when, say, a policy decision needs making. Many of these are infamous in their own right. Sometimes for deleting their account once people started noticing them, as happened with Cyxie, and others for being actual pedophiles, such as Bardfinn.

Regular mods are often not much better; this may just be an endemic property of online moderators, though. I think it's a phenomenon similar to the "Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory", just replacing "an audience" with "unchecked power". Though users do get banned for commenting in others. It's not supposed to happen, but it's not technically against the rules, so it's extremely common.

So he's right. And democratizing online moderation is probably not a bad idea, if it's implemented well. Coups against communities is probably not setting a good example, but it's Reddit. Can't make that cesspool any worse than it already is.

Giving the admins more power isn't going to help

You're right, it probably won't. But at the same time, it probably won't make things worse either. It's worth shaking things up a bit for a fleeting chance of improvement when shit's as bad as it is on Reddit.

One reason Latinos arent responding all that well to USA representation is I think partially cause a lot of Latinos, just a portion of them but a somewhat significant one, often have their issues with both the USA left and USA right at least at their more intense, with the USA left sometimes many are like "they patronize us, want to add weird shit like latinx, and have all this "progressive" rules…its dumb" and with the USA right many are like "they hate us and see us as shitholes…welp ditto, bring it on!" so yeah

This isnt super universal like I said only a portion of them, cause obviously latinos are very varied not trying to make too sweeping generalizations and in fact I myself dont fall into this but yeah that is what I have noticed is a common sentiment in latinoamerica, "gringos" and latinos have their…differences

In the latest news in shithole us a priest who raped a 5 year old was only given a year in jail
fits well with arizona's supreme court stating that the mormon cult is allowed to cover up pedophillia

This Guy?

Plea deal with a michigan court; sexual assault charge: 1 year in jail, 4 on probation, sex offender registry.

Probably so lenient because he's 84. Not going to have fun being a paedo in prison.

The Arizona court case isn't so much a "we actively covered up the crime for our priest" case but a "he told us in confessional; we didn't report it because our faith expects us to maintain the sanctity of confession" Arizona Supreme court ruled that the law does not compell them to violate it.

>Not going to have fun being a paedo in prison
given its gonna be in seg it will get no further consequences in there

>we didn't report it because our faith expects us to maintain the sanctity of confession

you're right i was too specific, they ruled that the mormons can cover up any and all heinous acts

Seg?

Protective custody

So it's a short sentence, and he'll be protected too.

One can start posting scandals of child molestation by religious figures whenever they pop up, and there will always be something. There was 10 just in Texas, in 2022.

Some figures use moral propriety as their sword and shield, and the only way to fight that is to repeatedly discredit it. You would think that churches are less likely to attack others when they're fending off their own allegations.

you're right i was too specific, they ruled that the mormons can cover up any and all heinous acts

To be pedantic: cover up is an action, what the church was doing was soley inaction.

To be less pedantic, the church have no alternative: noone with crimes harsher than littering would go to confession if there was the possibility that the priest would turn them in.

To violate the practice for the sake of momentary temporal justice (for once the news got out the priests were narcs it would be a very brief benefit) would be to deprive all future Christians of the denomination any specific guidance in repentance and spiritual absolution.

A question that comes to mind is how they put the priest and the confession together.

I looked it up and confessional privlege is apparantly statutory in all 50 states and the district of colombia.

Disgusting how much power the church has over this country

I believe it is in practice the same power over your country that every man wields under the fifth amendment.

You wouldn't get much out of the attempt of compulsion; priests have a history of letting themselves be martyred before violating the seal of confession.

After all, the consequences of breaking it is quite literally the fate of thier soul, a contempt of court charge is nothing.

Plus in this case they're friggin mormons; they'd be outright ecstatic at the chance of proving thier faith in the face of persecution, some of them would probably demand the death penalty.

This isn't a case of "the church" having power over the country. This is a case of the state's power over organized religion having restrictions. These are not the same.

Justice is blind, no one is exempt from laws. No one.

When a group can force exceptions in a law, it is a power and privilege. When one of the consequences mentioned of crossing a group is the threat of that religious group getting angry…

Well, it's how fear of Shariah Law works. One thing I find useful about some of the Right's turn to religion is that I can use the arguments they made years ago to good effect.

Not sure how it works with the Mormons, but there's a piece of Jesuit philosophy that goes that a Catholic priest is specifically required, on pain of excommunication, not to inform anyone of anything revealed to him in the confessional. However, if that conflicts with local laws than he goes to prison. It's part of the responsibility of being a priest.

Or to quote a General in India:

Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them"

I do wonder how anyone would propose to find out; unlike the practice of sati, which still occurs despite the efforts of British and later Indian governments, confession typically does not leave an easily seen plume of smoke nor accrue a crowd of onlookers.

Leading me back to the question how they found out in Arizona.

There's still prejudice against the "Dalit" or untouchables, and India's current government is Hindu nationalist, so no surprise it's still an issue. However, before using the Indians as a negative example too much (like with the Islamist), I'd say the issue here is our home-grown version of backward religious institutions.

We would be better served cleaning up our own homes first.

A priest failing to report a crime is found out the same way any detectives eventually finds out a crime: by investigating. The clues aren't as obvious as a charred body, but sometimes it still leaves traces (although you have to remember most crimes are never solved). Witnesses, DNA, a body, some of the information that goes public usually has some of those.

And when it's learned in addition that someone like a Priest knew, but didn't report it, than the penalties come in (hence the Pedophilia scandal in churches). I don't know why there would be a cry of "religious oppression", for the situation to get to the judicial level, the accused involved would usually have needed to close their own eyes on truly horrendous shit for a long enough time for there to be enough evidence to convict them as well for failing to report. Or in same cases, they were complicit in covering up or even directly taking part of the crime, so it goes beyond breaking the seal of the confessional.

And even with evidence, there's rarely justice. Ever heard of the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland? Does septic tanks filled with bodies of children ring a bell? It's not even the first time the Church had a scandal with selling babies, there was the same under Fraco's regime in Spain.

Confession is quite literally a conversation, no DNA, no trace, no evidence merely a talk in a private setting. Half the time the confessional is set up so the priest will not even see who he is talking to and there is absolutely no recordkeeping.

In normal operation there is no way to discern a person took confession at all or what the participant confessed to the priest about, without testimony of either participant.

It would be a law impossible to enact without either a massive indiscriminate invasion of privacy or the cooperation of the church. Either way after the first few arrests the practice in that church will immediately die.

And unless one of the various church has devolved into a level of heresy and corruption unseen since the Borgias they will not cooperate. Maybe the CoE under that communist worm Welby would but the rest I think would rather return to the age of martyrs.

Thinking about it, to echo Chewybunny's question, what has been the last true international "victory" for the "Right"?

It's broad, so define it as you wish, that's what I did when the question was about the left. Administrative or foreign policy goals, building something is preferable. Orban of Hungary for example manages to keep himself in power, but that's the "victory" of Venezuela and Cuba still having their communists.

As I said, it has to be have gone far enough for a long enough time for a lack of reporting to actually lead to an arrest. I already gave the example of the laundries of Ireland and the child thefts of Spain.

Some crimes are big enough that cooperation of the accused is no longer necessary. I'd think your argument of the difficulty of proving complicity to be an indictment of the Church, not a defense. Yeah, it's difficult for crimes to surface when the Church doesn't want it to be know, why do you think I'm criticizing it and pointing out the mass-grave discovered decades after?

If they want to be martyrs for that, than they'd martyrs the level of the mafia and gang-members who maintain omertà no matter what.

Anyway, my initial response was because I dislike the idea of the unaccountably of the Church, and the implicit threat of it. Is there any disagreement on that, since we're now debating the practicality of it?

Don't know, the church in this Arizona case is in a less antagonistic position than the typical coverups.

As far as I can tell they weren't throwing hush money around and spiriting off the priest to an unwitting new parish half a world away as was typical of the 2000s Catholics. All they did was do what thier faith demands at pain of damnation: do not disclose a confession for any reason.

Break the trust, abandon the prospect of redemption, endanger the souls you minister; a massive betrayal of the tenets of faith with no guarentee anything will come of all, for all the church would have would be a he-said-she-said.

It leaves me torn on the principle, hell wrapping my head around it is difficult, so I fall back on practicalities in a sort of cheat; they are simpler, impassionate and have a universality, less likely to end with both sides angry.

Personally, from the little catechism I remember, it's important that temporal law supersedes religious law. Act within what faith you have, but if the authorities cry foul, than submit to it..

Church demands for dispensation is not only fundamentally unlawful, it's of debatable justification by it's own laws. It's a simple naked power grab, an attempt for human beings to preserve their little fiefdom, the parading that this power-grab is virtuous is something that has to be pushed back.

Also if the question is of the morality of the situation:

The lawsuit accuses two Arizona bishops and church leaders in Salt Lake City of negligence in not reporting the abuse and allowing Adams to continue abusing his older daughter for as many as seven years, a time in which he also abused the girl’s infant sister.

… From the article. The minister can worry about their soul and that of their congregation, but I sometimes wonder if due thought is ever given to the weight of their complicity, that letting those girls suffer didn't stain them as well.

With all the excuses ("the priest might not recognize the voice, when priests eventually know their congregation"), all rationalizations ("what about the state of the church and it's congregation"), it still led to two girls being abused.

The foul price of apathy, it's morally wrong.

As far as I can tell they weren't throwing hush money around and spiriting off the priest to an unwitting new parish half a world away as was typical of the 2000s Catholics.

I'd like to point out that moral relativism is not Christian (comparing is not good for absolution), but yes, they in fact did nothing as bad as the Catholic Church (it'd be hard to be as bad as them). They did absolutely nothing really, just close their eyes.

The philosophical discussion of the moral underpinning and culpability of this situation could make a good exercise, or essay.

Me? I can't stand the talk of "martyrs" for a coverup of abuse of kids. It's like saying maniac suicide bombers were "martyrs", the usage of that word cheapens the very Saints that Churches supposedly respect. I did want to tie in the Laundry with what I said earlier about moral reputation. When Ireland legalized abortion, there was a panic of some of the more ardent Catholics of "how could this happen", that with one shake Ireland had shed off centuries of ties & practices.

The answer? Look in a mirror.

Huh, they seem to have removed the feature to see how many upvotes and downvotes someone got.

I can't say that I like it, or agree with it.

Knowing the difference between a 1 or -1 because one user voted, or a 0 because 30 voted up and 30 voted down was interesting. Or the weird situations where someone here would get a disproportionate amount of votes for a thread which has less than 10 active users (at best).

It makes the place slightly more similar to reddit or other social media's system.

Mod Edit: please continue discussion of the voting system in this dedicated thread.

Or is it just the site breaking for me? Anyone else lose the ability to hover over a comment's total score?

I think it's just broken.

Some of the scores are just gone on my screen and it's not a consistent only downvotes distribution; there's a -6 2 pages back that still display for me.

Well, it's back to normal, at least for the forums. Votes don't really matter, but in a forum as small as ours it can tell what others are thinking.

Or whoever is engaging in like-botting, but why even bother? It's not like twitter or reddit where it determines if someone will see your comment.

The most consequence is I or Krups, or Greyblades or No or someone else reads it and judges what the other just typed in.

To get stupidly philosophical about it on a meme site, it's sort of like a giant prisoner's game, where repeated interactions affects how we treat and perceive each other.

I think one criticism of Facebook and other social media is that their help in spreading a high amount of short, superficial relations (whoever has the most friends and likes wins) makes things easier for con-men, liars, vapid "influencers" and sociopaths. People who just need enough time to trick, than disappear.

In pre-digital times, it's why con-men were often travelers who moved from one village to the next, like a locust.

Conditions at Guantánamo Are Cruel and Inhuman, U.N. Investigation Finds

No surprise there, except that hellhole is somehow still open. However, the thorny issue of that center and the torture that occurred there, as well as the people who engaged in it is still one of the final wounds of the "War on Terror" that has never been closed.

Ms. Aolain … pointedly argued that the United States had an obligation to address its legacy of torture. “There is no statute for limitations on torture,” she said. “Those who perpetrated it, engaged in it, concealed it … remain liable for the entirety of their lives.”

With Russia invading Ukraine, and their rhetoric being a Dark mirror of that of Neo-cons and their allies, maybe there's be the political pressure to break with it, to differentiate oneself fully from Russia.

At the very least, you'd hope that the fiasco with Wagner would make the "West" more wary of it's own little Mercenary Groups. One can't avoid the hypocrisy involved of one's own group of mercenary thugs, but ensuring some justice is done would help rectify that.

Blackwater (or Academi, or whatever it's called now) got pardoned by Trump for committing a massacre in Iraq. That should never be forgotten, it's a continuing black mark, like the torture.

It's a stupid mistake to have had every President since Bush allow it to grown wealthier and become more entrenched in power.

With Russia invading Ukraine, and their rhetoric being a Dark mirror of that of Neo-cons and their allies, maybe there's be the political pressure to break with it, to differentiate oneself fully from Russia

No.

They won't relent for the sake of morality. They have drunk deep of empire and are hopelessly addicted. No faith holds sway on them to instill noblesse oblige and they have shown they are all too willing to break civic taboos to keep ahold of power. Their beef with Russia is the challenge to hegemony not the morality.

As for cynical posturing; they cannot afford the pivot.

It is a sad fact that the current generation of world hegemon are just not competent enough to retain the dizzying heights of the world's hyperpower without resorting to base brutality and thier children are looking to be even worse.

The mercenaries aren't mad dogs going off the leash, they are hatchet men; thier use is accountability dodges; "plausible deniability". The Neo-libs/cons would happily be using regular infantry for wetwork if they thought they could get away with it.

The pressure will come but they can't bend; only break.

This war is a bit of a godsend for them; it gives them the dodge and opportunities of war. All the tribalistic sentiment to hide behind, the emergency powers to abuse, but none of the coffins coming home. An excuse to launder money, punish opposition, erode the civic structure that gets in the way of them monopolizing power, with the incidental benefit of punish the Russians for daring to challenge America's monopoly on international violence.

To quote Lindsay Graham: "the Russians are dying; best money we've ever spent"

It would be perfect if in a fit of panicked stupidity they hadn't short circuited the economy in what would morph into a 2 year power trip binge and we weren't all just waiting for Will-e-coyote to look down and notice he is treading air.

You ever find yourself writing a post only to start thinking it makes more sense to move a paragraph or two into a different part in the order, but once you move it your sense of the structure of your own argument dies?

The you put it back but that doesn't fix that feeling and you find yourself utterly lost as to how you ever will get it back without starting over completely.

Screws with my head.

Private Military Companies (PMCs) have been a thriving business for decades, and has substantially grown since the 2000s. There is now 10 military personnel for every 1 contractor. Their services are also highly varied. However, the west is going to learn nothing from this because Wagner is a not like traditional PMCs. Wagner's deep connection to the Russian apparatus makes them almost a para-military force, since the Russian government funds it – not just hires it. Interestingly, Wagner's major work isn't even in Ukraine or Syria, but in Africa. Few know how intensive Wagner operations in Africa currently are.

Saying that, I don't think PMCs are going to go away. Frankly, there is an overwhelming demand for PMCs, largely due to the kind of international conflicts that we have these days, how inter-connected our world is, and the inability of international law to move beyond 19th and 20th century mentality.

For example, many NGOs that operate in conflict zones are forced to hire PMCs for protection, as there isn't a realistic military or police force that would protect them – since, a lot of times NGOs work against the interest of the leadership of the country they service.

Sometimes it's just far more cost effective to hire a PMC to go fight a low-intensity insurgency that threatens major supply chains, than actually sending in military forces. And sometimes the rigidness of international law forces countries having to rely on PMCs which aren't beholden to standard rules.

I think the reality is that the world is largely decentralizing – to the exception of Ukraine and Russia, major conflicts between powerful nations is an incredible rarity. Fighting conventional wars are increasingly costly. But because the world is so inter-connected there is a large desire for nations to intervene in the affairs of others.

One of the biggest influences on my views on geopolitics came from reading books about how inter-connected trade plays an overwhelming role in shaping our world history. Books like The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan, (There has been a sequen released a few years ago that I want to read). And 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline, really solidified a view that so-so-so much of our international political affairs are tied directly to supply chains and economics. So many wars have been fought just to hold certain trade centers, many more over access to some of the smallest things taken for granted.

So in this context I think the necessity for more information based economies dependent on manufacturing economies functioning by a steady dependence on raw-goods from resource rich economies forces international intervention constantly.

An obvious: Russia, for all it's resource wealth in minerals, lumber, and energy, is utterly dependent on Europe for high-tech machinery and microprocessors, when that is cut off from them you can start seeing how rapidly they slow down in military production.

Simultaneously, a large chunk of the world is so utterly dependent on high quality micro processors that come from just a few countries: Taiwan, South, Korea, Japan, and the United States that the necessity of the US having to intervene in that part of the world is necessary for it's own survival.

In this environment, PMCs flourish. No American politician wants to have to go on public record telling his constituency their children have to go die in a war just so we can make sure that some dictator or petty warlord doesn't attempt to capture a massive monopoly on a rare earth minerals from an unstable African country no one ever heard of.

More shit came out about trump making sexual comments about his daughter and there's morons unironically defending it

Y'all should make a discord server, its literally the same 5 of you on loop

You can change that

@Chewybunny & Greyblades

Thank you, I've read both of your responses. My response will be short, because the depressing thing is I can't refute your arguments that PMCs and the nastiness surrounding them aren't a bug, but a feature.

What worries me is that mercenaries aren't good for countries (everyone knows of Machiavelli's opinion on mercenaries) and more importantly, for republics.
Large conscript national armies aren't something that a lot like, but the advent of them was the start of a move away from feudalism and monarchies (or at least, the rise of nationalism beyond private armies).

The divorce of use of force from public opinion also means that when that force turns on the citizens, there's really not a lot they can do.

Could be a good idea.

Problem is, who becomes the server's owner? Whoever makes the server gets too much power. There needs to be an absolutely neutral party handling it.

i.e: That's probably why most discord servers aren't composed of people arguing with each other all the time, … right?

I've just noticed the entry on the Skullgirls update. I don't really follow fighting games (it's mentioned in the article that a lot of critics of the move aren't even fans), but I do follow censorship controversies.

As always, not a fan of censorship, especially attempts to sanitize an established work like Roald Dahl. One thing I wonder is how many people who were neutral or outright repeating "think of the children" rhetoric for the last few cases banning are now outraged?

This is why you don't ever encourage moral guardians, and it was stupid that people on a meme site (or other easy targets) seemed to agree with them, forgetting that they and the things they like would eventually be on the firing line, one way or another.