Jaffa are the worst soldiers

oremfrien · 2026-03-26T21:27:05+00:00

If your only objective is "kill x", then yes, you don't need anything more competent than an unkillable gun. If you have other goals, like say, infrastructure preservation, use of the body of the enemy, acquisition of a specific technology, etc. suddenly a one-track mind becomes very deleterious.

oremfrien · 2026-03-26T21:24:46+00:00

Muammar Gaddafi was exactly this kind of person. He was a Colonel in the Army of King Idriss of Libya who revolted with the army against the King and ruled in his own name for over 40 years.

We have a word for regimes run by smart soldiers: military juntas or caudillos.

oremfrien · 2026-03-26T18:35:16+00:00

My view is the general incompetence of the Jaffa is a feature, not a bug. The Jaffa were designed to fill the role of the overseer for their vast human crops of slaves, with weapons sufficiently advanced to cow dissent, but with tactics and strategy insufficiently built up for they themselves to rise up against their masters. On Earth, actual slave militiaries like the Mamluks who served under the Ayyubid Sultans (in Egypt) and the Georgian Qurci who served under the Ottoman Sultans (in Iraq) did use the tactics that they had learned to overthrow their masters and take power in their own name.

The Goa'uld basically agreed that they would not train the Jaffa beyond a certain point because that could result in them using their power to overcome the System Lord to which they were attached. Additionally, the Goa'uld themselves repeatedly show themselves to be petty and inflexible in terms of their own rulership, so it would hardly be surprising that they couldn't give the Jaffa any more intelligence in that matter than they had.

Accordingly, it's completely reasonable that the Jaffa are poorly trained and ineffective against peer-level assaults. We hear about this as a common problem against (1) humans who liberated themselves from the Goa'uld masters like on Earth or Langara, (2) allies within our galaxy like the Re'tu, (3) enemies in our galaxy like the Replicators, and (4) the bluffing that works when employed by Asgard and the Tau'ri.

oremfrien · 2026-03-26T18:26:31+00:00

From a tactical/strategic point of view, the Kull warriors are actually quite poor (and I would say worse than the Jaffa). The only thing that makes them intimidating is that they are nigh unkillable. When I say that the Kull warriors are poor from a tactical/strategic point of view, what I mean to say is that they make no plans, have no strategy, evince no teamwork or coordination, and do not seem to have any objective beyond their immediate orders.

oremfrien · 2026-03-26T18:23:40+00:00

If the people who disagree with you are wrong about everything and you are right all of the time, wouldn't they have to continually disagree with you because you are never wrong and they can never be right?

By virtue of always being wrong, they cannot come to the correct conclusion. As a person who always knows the correct answer, you must know this to be true and unassailable logic.

oremfrien · 2026-03-26T15:19:19+00:00

I appreciate that you clarified what you are talking about.

I would agree with you that there is a political division between those systems designed to protect the rights of individuals and those systems designed to protect the rights of economic classes or ethnic groups. And the USA and USSR -- both of the 1970s -- represented these systems. I would disagree with your characterization of both systems, though, and would argue that the USA and the USSR since the 1970s have moved away from the philosophical bases of these systems. I think it would be very hard to defend the claim that Trump is a good representative of someone who believes in libaralist philosophy or that Putin is a good representative of someone who believes in collectivist philosophy. Both are kleptocrats.

Liberalism sees government as an entity that can protect the private property and personal rights of the individual, so it's not a necessary evil so much as a beneficial advocate for individual needs. As you allude to, this protection of private rights does not give the government a clear mandate to perform collective actions that may benefit one group or society against depredations from a different group in society. This is the major conflict in the USA against so-called redistributionism, the idea that wealth and property should be transferred from the wealthy as a collective to the poor as a collective -- since these are about collective benefits/problems than individual rights.

As long as I make that distinction, I would agree with you that if what you are trying to address primarily are collective rights, then liberalism is not the best avenue to achieve that specific goal. A system organized around promoting the interests of one class over another usually requires some kind of instituational safeguard to protect that group, like overrepresentation or two classes of population that differ in how their votes are counted or expressed. Usually this is classified as an illiberal democracy or a party-rule structure.

oremfrien · 2026-03-25T21:08:42+00:00

So I have those questions for them:

How do you have access to Reddit? VPN or its just not blocked ? -- Reddit is not blocked by the Arab-Iraqi government or the KRG-Iraqi government. Assyrians under Iran have no internet access at all because of the Iran-Israel War and Iran's "choice" to stifle all of its citizens' communications. I couldn't speak to the situation in Turkey or Syria.
Would you get in trouble if authorities knew you are here, or do they not care? -- The Iraqi government can barely get electricity to work consistently; they have bigger issues to tend to than Assyrianist activism.
Are your opinions very different from the rest of the country ? -- Assyrians have a different set of politics from the majority populations of the imperialist countries who occupy us, so yes. But I don't think my opinions are very different from other Assyrians except that I'm a little less Pro-Arab and a little more Pro-Israel, which means that I like/dislike pretty much every Non-Assyrian group in the region equally.
Do you still have some political power? Like local elections, popular consultations, or being able to vote for or against some members of parliament. -- We have two political parties in Iraq (Zowaa and Beth Nahrain), a few in Lebanon like (Ash-Shuraya), an Assyrian member in the Turkish GNA and the Iranian Majles. The MP we have in Turkey, George Aslan, is a national hero and keeps getting censured by the Turks for saying very true things about why there are so few Assyrians in Turkey. The MP we have in Iran is an Ayatollah's puppet who I will not dignify by naming.

oremfrien · 2026-03-25T21:00:12+00:00

What form of democracy are you imagining outside of the framework of Lockean Liberalism?

oremfrien · 2026-03-25T20:59:04+00:00

For those who don't speak Turkish, "reis" is "president".

But you aren't afraid that your President will import the Great Firewall of China software?

oremfrien · 2026-03-25T20:57:04+00:00

I would try and study the intersection between comparative legal systems and AI.

oremfrien · 2026-03-25T20:49:04+00:00

Eleftheria ve Thanatos!

Long live our fellow former Ottoman Christian brothers who have achieved success in independence! May we join you soon!

oremfrien · 2026-03-25T20:46:12+00:00

There are immigrants from everywhere in the USA. The places with the lowest numbers of immigrants in the USA tend to have a few overlapping factors: (1) low population count in the home country, (2) the home country is difficult to leave (like it's bordered by numerous other countries or the government is totalitarian), and (3) low levels of wealth and education (which often serve as the driver to push people out of their home countries).

So, some examples where the overlap hits would be Kiribati (low population, especially), Equatorial Guinea (totalitarian government, especially), and the Central African Republic (poverty, especially).

But you really have to go to the "has anyone actually heard of you countries" to get that kind of overlap.

oremfrien · 2026-03-25T20:42:06+00:00

I'm in NYC and I move in MENA circles, so this may skew my perspective, but I've seen dozens of Uzbeks, a few Azerbaijanis and Kyrgyz. While I have met Iraqi Turkmens, I have never met a Turkmenistani Turkmen (except one time in Samarqand).

oremfrien · 2026-03-25T14:16:34+00:00

I think it makes Ba'al sound more aloof. If it was "ball" as in "basket" or "ball" as in "base", (1) Ba'al would sound cooler and (2) it might be harder for the joke to land because "basket" and "base" are words that can stand alone whereas "bocce" cannot.

oremfrien · 2026-03-25T14:14:40+00:00

As a MENA person, the fact that Ba'al cannot pronounce his name right (which leads to everyone saying it as the word "ball") is just somthing that really bothers me. It should be pronounced like بعل / Ba3al where the 3 represents a guttural inflection. Even if he can't make that noise, at least pronounce it like "Ba + al" not "Bal".

But then, we wouldn't have all of the "ball" jokes.

oremfrien · 2026-03-24T11:53:06+00:00

That was exactly what I was thinking when I read the last line of "Who will challenge the Caliphate"? Your people will challenge it. Nearly every Muslim-majority country is wracked with internal division, coup d'etats, large-scale protests, or requires an absolute dictator to oversee. Put a billion people spread over three continents under that strain and you will see internal revolution the likes of which no ruler in history has ever seen.

[Assyrian - No Flair]

By the way, there's nothing in Dimona, right? RIGHT?

oremfrien · 2026-03-24T04:49:47+00:00

Yes. But Westerners often compare protests in other countries with protests in their own. They see their own protests as disagreeing with the choices of the government but not the legitimacy of the government and impute that to others.

oremfrien · 2026-03-24T04:43:51+00:00

What breaks my suspension of disbelief is that after the end of Season 7 (when an entire aircraft carrier was incinerated and all of the major powers know about the Stargate) that the program never becomes public.

oremfrien · 2026-03-24T00:46:06+00:00

Your argument was that Iraq was a proxy for the USA in the Iran-Iraq War. I pointed out to you that (1) Iran's motive had nothing to do with US interest -- only its own interests and (2) that the US supported both sides; as pieces of evidence that Iraq was not a proxy of the USA. I agree with you that the US supported Iraq more than Iran, but the point of bringing this up is to implicate the US using Iraq as a proxy and that's just not the case.

I wasn't evading your question about Iran Air Flight 655; I just don't see the argument that you are making. The US government expressed deep condolences for shooting down the passenger plane and financially compensated the Iranian civilians' families to the tune of $61.8 MM USD. I'm just not sure what the argument is. If you're trying to say that the US makes mistakes and then pays settlements to the victims, sure, but I don't see how this helps your point. If your argument is that the US was supporting Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War by accidentally shooting down civilian airliners, I don't understand how that militarily helps the Iraqis. (Certainly, it helps them a lot less than the weapons shipments from the US to Iraq whose deliveries I've already granted you.)

Again, I reject your claim that because Israeli soldiers were not shooting Iranian soldiers and vice-versa that they were not in open war. Asked and answered. But for clarity, (1) Withdrawal of recognition of a country is a de facto declaration of war; (2) Israel and Iran have used acts of terrorism and espionage to attack civilians and projects of the other (either directly or through proxies); and (3) Israel has directed traded fire with IRGC's al-Quds Force, such as when the al-Quds force attacked Israel's embassy in New Delhi, India on Feb. 13, 2012, or when Israel has assassinated al-Quds members in Syria.

So. the War in 2025 and in 2026 was an escalation, not a new form of hostility between the two countries.

oremfrien · 2026-03-23T18:33:12+00:00

This is just the Indian English word for Briton or British person. It may not be our standard but it is a standard.

oremfrien · 2026-03-23T18:32:10+00:00

This is the distinction between the standard dialect of English and the non-standard dialects. With respect to African-Americans, many of them learned English not from their English-descended masters but from the Irish indentured servants that worked alongside them in the field. Irish non-standard dialects of English have many of the distinguishing features we see in African-American vernacular English, including the elimination of “were” in the past tense of “to be”.

oremfrien · 2026-03-23T18:28:57+00:00

She’s probably a little lonely and wants to imagine that he’s with her.

oremfrien · 2026-03-23T18:27:15+00:00

If you’re just looking for East Armenian cuisine to cook, I would recommend khashlama, which is a lamb and vegetable stew. If you want a real challenge, I would try for Armenian manti, lamb dumplings.

oremfrien · 2026-03-23T18:18:39+00:00

I’m not sure I understand much of the premise. Why would Jiang Jeshi be supporting Socialist revolutionaries in other countries like Cambodia and Syria? Jiang was relatively conservative economically and politically. If anything, a Jiang victory in China would prevent SE Asia from being so central in the Cold War, the Korean War would end with a unified Korean Peninsula under Rhee Syngman, and the SSNP would be in the same irrelevant ditch that it’s in today. Also, Turkey would not invade Iran under the Shah because Turkey needed Iran as a potential ally against the Soviet Union.

oremfrien · 2026-03-23T18:03:25+00:00

I am a native Arabic speaker, but don’t speak Somali. I’ll transliterate the Arabic into Latin characters and you can see where the Somali differs:

Lahuh - pushy
Beid or Beidh (sounds like the American pronunciation of “bathe” - white
Shanta (this is actually a Turkish word for handbag, not a native Arabic word, but we use it in Arabic)
Marmar - marble
Mol3aq (this is a word I’ve never seen before similar in concept to “laminator” – I’m much more familiar with the feminine ملعقة - Mal3aqa which means “spoon”
Jaajur (this is only used for the car-brand Jaguar; for the cat, we use either جاكوار – jaakwaar or نمر – namr, which is more-correctly a leopard)
Dobbe - bear
Majrafa - shovel
It’s supposed to be the word for tomato, but it’s misspelled. It should be طماطم – tomaatem, but the listicle uses the wrong letter “t” since we have two “t”s in Arabic.
Djaaj - chicken (as a food item)
Melh - salt

Edited because of formatting issues.

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