xzar_monty

Unfortunately, this kind of thing is not a Russian specialty.

The paper is unserious enough for me not to click on any of their links, sorry. As for nukes, I think Richard Dawkins made a good point in saying that it's like one of those unlikely ocean crossings by animals: very improbable at any given moment, but given enough time, the odds will increase dramatically, and it only needs to happen once. (Which is not to say that nukes would destroy life on the planet, as they almost certainly wouldn't, even if they all went off, but obviously even a small-scale nuclear war would be Very Bad News.)

Wow, this is really interesting! Would you care to tell me a little more about it, or perhaps guide me to a good source for information? I'd really appreciate it.

@Zoraptor, Suarez was/is villainous indeed, but he is not a collective. Some of Holland's best/worst collective efforts are the world cup final against Spain and the European cup match against Portugal; that's collective disgrace for you.

I suppose no one is surprised that Serbian football fans have been chanting for Vladimir Putin on the streets in Germany. (Hah: Serbia is a country I always want to lose a football match; I've been to enough international matches in my life to conclude that Serbian players take the lack of sportmanship to a very ugly level, way beyond what other countries generally do. The only other football country I always want to lose is Holland, for their players' long history of completely unnecessary violence on the pitch. As for the obvious question that this raises, I haven't witnessed a match between Serbia and Holland, so I don't know.)

Italy is also, in the eyes of many Europeans, in a state of almost constant crisis and likely to collapse but never actually has. I wonder if that drone strike on the Su-57 ranks pretty high on the list of "let's do some really expensive damage with this dirt cheap toy".

No conclusion shopping, simply inaccurate relaying on my part, apologies. So, instead of "the two most recent examples", it should have read "two recent examples" being Germany and Japan.

By the way, I recently read some speculations concerning the question of how and when a power with imperialist ambitions is prepared to give them up. The two most recent examples are Germany and Japan, and neither of them was prepared to give up their imperialist ambitions until they were essentially crushed. This speculation also contained the rather unpleasant idea that maybe WW2 would have been avoided if Germany had been humiliated more (instead of less) thoroughly in WW1. What happened in WW1 gave the Germans the idea of creating their own Empire Strikes Back, but it wouldn't have happened if they had been crushed like Japan in WW2. This is all speculation, of course, and the situation is very different now, with nuclear weapons. But the pertinent question remains: what does it take for a nation with imperialist ambitions to give them up. This is relevant because if we somehow manage to bring about peace in Ukraine, it may well be that it is not possible for Russians to accept it in the long term. They will want revenge.

A Finnish military specialist just recently pointed out that it's a stupid strategy but may well work in the end, given that Russia has such a great advantage in numbers (of men sent to be killed). A bit of a harrowing thought, that. "We don't care how many of our men get killed, because we're going to have more in the end anyway." No Western or even "Western" country could have withstood such casualties (in 2022-2024, that is; in 1939-1945 it was different).

I wonder if this is a real development or not: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-wants-ukraine-ceasefire-current-frontlines-sources-say-2024-05-24/

Oh dear. That is very bad indeed. I haven't been able to see myself purchasing another Owlcat game after WotR, and it's even harder to see myself doing that now.

I agree it was good. What annoys me the most is how blatantly they sometimes cheat, with monsters teleporting in mid combat and all that. There's no way you can prepare for that kind of stuff, and there's also practically no way the game mechanics would allow that. However, I did indeed enjoy both games, despite all their many flaws. @kanisatha, what's that shoddiness you mentioned?

Fathers and sons, indeed. And isn't there a famous Russian novel by that title, too... I worked for a few months on a project dealing with the history of the conflict, and the whole Biden family saga is complex, convoluted and ugly. Joe isn't the main culprit, though, at least as far as I know.

Few people have heard of? How's that?

I don't see Shoigu being in any particular danger, either -- or at least in any more danger than anyone else under Putin. (Which also means that he's completely subject to Putin's whims, whatever they may be, of course.) But when @Mamoulian War writes that "Looks like there might be a lot of rumours emerging in the next few weeks" (see above), the statement itself is rather irrelevant: one thing we certainly haven't had ever since the beginning of the war is a lack of rumours. Btw, when it comes to rumours, interpretations, theories and all the rest of it, just about the only interesting thing outside real news was the time when S. Lavrov appeared in that conference (in Bali, was it?) wearing a Basquiat T-shirt. That almost made me think that the guy was trying to send a message there, given the obvious discrepancy between Russia's stated line and Basquiat. But even if he was, I don't think the message had either a point or any discernible content.

Shoigu is also 68, and the Russian male life expectancy is, shockingly, 69.36. I know that Shoigu lives in luxury, which increases life expectancy, but in Russia, luxury can also be associated with open windows and someone just casually offering you a cup of tea.

I've been thinking about this in purely mathematical terms. For instance, if the amount of combat in P:K and WotR was cut by half, I'm certain the game would be twice as good. If the amount of combat was dropped to 25% of what it is now, I think the game might well be four times as good as it is now (assuming they really thought about what to leave in). But if the combat was cut by 90%, I don't think the game would be ten times as good as it is now.

It's so hard to take Macron seriously here that I instantly pictured a forthcoming chemical war involving soldiers with yesterday's garlic on their breath on the one side, and soldiers with yesterday's vodka on their breath on the other. BUT let's hope Macron delivers, should the need arise.

Russia's main message of "Our victory is inevitable" looks fairly amusing given that this was supposed to be a quick and decisive foray but has now lasted well over two years. I don't think there's any doubt that Russia's position does look significantly better than Ukraine's, but the posturing is silly. But then, that's Russia for you. The abbreviation of their first nuclear bomb, RDS-1, stands for "Rossiya delaet sama" which means "Russia does it itself". A nice name, given that Russia was effectively stealing what others had done in the Manhattan Project. What interests me the most is the psychology behind it: Russia was lying and everyone knew they were lying, but despite all that, they simply had to lie. It would have been more honorable to give the bomb some other name, something that didn't involve a blatant lie, but apparently that was impossible: it just had to be a lie. (A Russian writer recently pointed out that the "Russian psyche" -- such that is displayed in the country's posturing, not the mindset of the individual -- is a curious mixture of almost megalomaniacal grandiosity and almost debilitating lack of self-esteem.)

Yesterday, a Finnair flight had to return to Helsinki because it couldn't land in Tartu because of some serious GPS jamming. Russia has been doing this near its borders for quite a while now.

What I find especially interesting is that Quiet Riot's versions of both Noize and Mama Weer All Crazee Now are a lot better than the originals. It's not very often that that happens. It has to be said, though, that all the Led Zeppelin songs on their first album that are not originals (i.e. every single track except Good Times Bad Times, no matter what the album credits say) are better than the originals. But that's definitely a major exception.

Interesting that from what I've read, "voicing every character in the game" appears to be either a feature that doesn't particularly impress players or seems like a downright mistake (for me, it's a mistake, because it seems obvious that it constrained the writing too much and too early), and the fact that "Sawyer was blocked from cutting a major feature" (assuming it's naval combat, which I'm pretty sure it was) looks like a big mistake to an awful lot of players (in my view, all time spent on this feature was time wasted). So, "Obsidian", whoever that happens to mean exactly, seems to have made two big mistakes or at least two choices that made very little positive difference in the game, and Sawyer knew it and just had to soldier on with it.

Would you say that book 6 is, in general, at the same level with book 1? If not, would you say that there's a specific spot where the quality starts to get worse? I'm curious about this because it seems to me that very few books that eventually turn into series can maintain their quality. For the record, I have only read book 1 and liked it, but not enough to continue with book 2.

Incidentally, this is not a new phenomenon. Medically / psychologically, it is profoundly disturbing. For a historical example, read Don Quixote, the first part of which was published in 1605. It is a brilliant study of a person who is neither stupid nor uneducated but who happens to possess a black spot in his thinking that no amount of fact or logical reasoning can cure. And yes, of course I know Don Quixote is a fictional character -- but the phenomenon is very real, and Cervantes treats it magnificently well.

Lamentable, yes, but I would argue that it was not a sign of the times. The history of the press is not a particularly edifying subject to study. Oh and @BruceVC: I rarely visit the CNN website and never watch it, so I can't comment on that at all. The BBC I am not especially suspicious about, but it does have its share of even fairly recent crises, so it's not as if it's a paragon of journalism. (And I never watch the BBC, either.)