Zoraptor

Isn't Germany making a 3rd party submission to the court on Israel's behalf as well? I guess the question is whether they actually care about that. Is the purpose of 'international law' to have an actual rules based system that limits power and is fair to everyone, or so people can say that it exists to legitimise themselves... The answer for the ICC is pretty obviously the latter, at least under Karim Khan. The ICJ is an older institution though with less susceptibility to influence and even setting Khan aside without some of the more, uh, interesting built in aspects of the ICC like allowing western countries to investigate themselves. Sting never loses his faith in you, no idea why he even wrote the song. He's infamous for having people betray him but not learning- Ric Flair, Lex Luger etc. Wouldn't be a surprise if Flair betrays him once more for old times' sake too.

You don't really need those red flags in this case though, it's a Netflix article about a Netflix movie. It's hardly going to call it an ahistorical whitewash replete with bad directing and awful acting- especially if that is what it was. Haven't seen it personally though. I'm a bit more worried that Bruce seems to think the Swedes fought bravely against the Nazis than that he thinks the Danes did. A lot of german munitions were quite literally made with Swedish steel, not German. Not exactly alone in that though of course, a lot of the admin for the Holocaust was done using International Business Machines tech too for example. Or the Soviets selling heaps of stuff to the germans right up until Barbarossa launched...

Do they pledge eternal loyalty to the King of Sweden? If not Poles are at least a step up on the Dutch pledging eternal loyalty to the King of Spain in theirs. (always wondered if the Spanish had a Queen whether the Dutch would change their anthem to pledge eternal loyalty to her instead like the Brits do with their anthem... probably not given Spain was a Republic for a while, unless they changed it to pledge loyalty to their President)

Guess it's official now and it is indeed a 155h with the full 16/6/2 core config. Not sure the maths on the battery life works out. Doesn't seem to make any specific claims for gameplay time but that's only 3Whr more than the newer 'Deck's battery which claims 3-12 hours so the inference would be 4.5-18 hours of gameplay which seems... unlikely. (MSI's website made my GPU fans rev up every time I scroll. It is 30 odd degrees ambient here, but that's still loltastic web design)

If it's based on the 155h it's not going to be price competitive anyway. Ultimately the trouble any other PC handheld is going to have is Valve owning the store most of the games will be bought on and at a hefty 30% cut, allowing them to loss lead the hardware. MSI/ ASUS etc have to make a profit on the hardware as well, Valve will make one from the games sold even on the MSI system. And unlike the Mendocino (?) based 'Deck which was a mid tier for 2022 laptop chip a 155h is reasonably close to top tier and fricking huge comparatively. They may get competitive pricing from Intel to show that it can be done, but... (Is there anything official about it being the 155h or is it just the leaks from ?China? saying so? Surely it has far too many CPU cores for a handheld, three times the threads of the 'Deck seems just a tad excessive when most games barely tap the 'Decks 8, still)

The definition of genocide was rewritten/ clarified/ changed fairly recently to make it far more easy to apply. With the changes it should definitely apply to Israel's treatment of Palestinians. Whether it does or the ICJ has a Karim Khan equivalent to run interference is an open question. (For anyone wondering ICJ jurisdiction applies to countries so RSA is the accuser and Israel the defendant in this case; ICC jurisdiction applies to individuals. Basically)

I need to go back to JA3 now I've got a new graphics card and it's had a few patches. It was a very odd experience on the old 580, the stats suggested it was running fine but the practical experience of the visuals was... off, quite disconcertingly. Like it was running at a quarter the frame rate it said it was. Best Game You Suck At and the Sit Back and Relax awards? (It'd do pretty well if there was a Digital Crack category though, for sure)

Gallup is a reputable pollster, it will be an accurate representation of opinion* normalised/ weighted for age, sex, income, location etc. For a reputable pollster getting those things right is the entirety of their reputation, and there won't be leading questions and the like involved. Whether it necessarily means anything for voting is questionable though, since Biden/ Trump would be massively polarising and obviously Obama won despite his low rating (and Trump lost despite being higher). There's a better than decent chance that a lot of those who think Biden is doing an awful job think Trump would do an even worse one so will hold their nose to vote for him anyway. *taking into account the margin of error (+/-4) and with a 95% confidence interval.

Haha, watching Frank Gardiner squirm this year has been hilarious. One certainly needs reminding that the true tragedy of Gaza is that it distracts people from Russia 'carpet bombing' Aleppo 7 years ago... It's going to be funny (well, 'funny') when the Houthis start using drone speedboats to hit their targets instead of trying to hijack them.

At what point in history has any country or part of a country which has been conquered and colonised by Britain had 30% British population before they engaged in mass murder and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population? It's a pretty short list of Euro countries that hasn't done that at some point. I used the example of New Zealand which has ended up with 85% non Maori population. You can dislike the people responsible for those policies as much as you like but they're all dead. Blaming people who weren't even alive at the time is asinine and breeds pointless division and its only positive is making people feel superior to others based on the one thing they have literally no control over- their genetics. One of the reasons I hate ethnicity as a concept. But in summary: Break up Spain because of the oppression of the Catalans, Basque --> Russian plot, everyone actually loves Spain! Break up Russia because some infographic suggests more people from poor areas join the army --> Yes please!

You know, I'm not sure 30% of the population of Burkina Faso or Mali was ethnically French at any point, and that either has lost a third of its population over the past 30 years. Could be wrong, but I don't think I am. You're not going to find me saying the same thing about New Caledonia or French Guiana or Miquelon (and the other couple of islands whose name escapes me; nor here for that matter, where 85% of the population isn't Maori). But there is... a certain irony about trying to force assimilation or eviction and then being upset when the target doesn't like it*, much as there is a certain irony when the colonialist doesn't understand why the colonised isn't appreciating them. Albanians colonised Kosovo under a deliberate Turkish policy, somehow one suspects that is Different though... as with a lot of things the west is more than happy to talk the talk about equality and the like, but actual application of principle is always done on a self interest basis. *Please give your framed pictures of Julius Malema and Bob Mugabe a kiss from me, Comrade Bruce

It's not that far fetched to get an armed insurrection in, say, Latvia which is highly oppressive towards its (large) Russian minority and which has utterly catastrophic demographics as well. I completely disagree with MW in terms of response though, under those circumstances NATO would 100% fight against them and whatever the NATO Charter says be damned. This is, after all, the organisation desperate to ignore its Charter limitation of the North Atlantic when dealing with China. OTOH the chance of Green Berets and Royal Marines storming the Elysée Palace to remove Marine Le Pen from the French Presidency is pretty far fetched, but isn't something anyone should want anyway. Well, except for the irony of it happening to France instead of France doing it to Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, Niger, Burkino Faso etc

They definitely got PAC-3s as well since a lot of images of their 'empties' have been posted from Kiev- minimally explosive so you get pretty intact distinctive 'cheesegrater' fuselage. Likely they got PAC-2s too though of course. (Particularly funny at the time because the US was gouging Saudi for PAC-2s at $10million apiece while giving away the PAC-3s to Ukraine and couldn't understand why the Saudi's weren't appreciative of paying a 250% mark up for older tech)

Haven't been many 21st century wars where they didn't play kill ratio games. It's pretty clear now that neither side is going to win via the Subotai/ Khalid ibn al Walid/ John Churchill/ Napoleon (in his own mind) route of glorious strategy wedded to perfect tactical implementation. That leaves, well, the far more prosaic grinding the other into the dirt à la Grant/ Haig/ Chuikov. And in the end kill ratio/ attrition is everything there. Bit of hair splitting maybe but I'd probably call it keeping up the pressure rather than maintaining initiative. Mostly because I don't really think the Russians have the initiative yet, though I think it's fair to say that the Ukrainians have lost it at least.

In this case I don't think they'd bother forcing them out (imminently) but rather go for containment as a matter of strategy. Quite apart from the direct losses on the east bank Ukraine has to supply every bullet, every gun and every meal across the open Dniepr as well as sending replacement/ extra soldiers and while doing so they're a perfect target for drones, mortars and artillery. Even HMG and 20mm cannon will shred those boats, and their foothold is certainly not big enough to have the river out of range of cannons (and probably not HMG either, to be honest). They can't get tanks or heavy vehicles across so there's very little chance/ threat of a break out; might as well just sit back and lob easy shots at the supply lines and FAB500s at the bridgehead. (Does make me wonder what happened to the Antonivka bridgehead, got lots (comparatively) of videos of the Russians lobbing bombs at it a few months ago but basically nothing from the Ukrainian side. I kind of presume it isn't there any more, but who knows)

Same thing happened with their crossing at the Antonivka Bridge (or what was left of it) and at least there they could shelter under the bridge itself. The crossing at Krynky seems to be the epitome of a Spectacular done solely for PR purposes. And if you can't hold it the PR reverses.

Is it referring to the general military budget perhaps... apparently that got passed yesterday/ recently. Along with the critically important vote on impeaching Biden (lol).

Not sure any news on accession from the EU is good for Ukraine at the moment unless it comes with a way to get around Orban's veto on funding and more than 6% of the million shells promised as well; else it's just encouragement to Russia to harden its stance. Ukraine is never getting into the EU anyway unless it excludes its agricultural sector from subsidies. No US funding until at least after the Christmas/ New Year break either since they're now in recess. Guess Zelensky's visit really was in vain.

All three should be charged. Putin should not be charged with what he is though, the only reason he faces that (and it went straight to an arrest warrant forgoing the usual probe) is because the west doesn't like him, and he can't face charges of Pillage or Waging Aggressive War because if he did Blair and Trump would be there too. Which they too should be.

For the out and out war in Ukraine it's 15 journalists killed, in 22 months. Let's assume they're all Russia's fault, to make it as bad as we can for them. Similarly, don't use the 2023 figures (2 deaths, which for a large scale conflict with high media exposure is, well, very very low) or the figures since Oct7th in Ukraine (no journalist deaths) because the idea is to make things as bad they can be. For Israel/ Palestine (+Lebanon) it's 63 in 9ish weeks. If Russia were killing journalists at the same rate they'd have killed ~630 journalists over nearly two years. Or in other words Israel is killing them at ~40 times the rate Russia is. Shall I adjust for the population difference between Gaza and Ukraine too? OK, Israel is now killing journalists at ~750x the rate. That doesn't include any of the Gazan family members killed for Chilling Effect either. I don't think anyone thinks Russia's hands are actually clean, but as often happens you run through the stats and find that there's a certain amount of... rhetorical massaging of the message going on based not on what is actually happening but on who you're meant to dis/like.

Yes, the casting for Dune'84 was actually really good for the most part, and not just because of Sting and his novelty posing pouch. Better than for the modern version imo, and the modern versions is at least good. The Burton/ Hurt comment was more because I read.. ..initially as being about the movie 1984 (which released a couple of months after Dune'84 and starred Burton/ Hurt as O'Brien/ Smith). Good movie too, that one, though not near as good as the book. I'd have to admit I enjoyed Dune'84 more than both the book and Dune'21. Though Dune'21 was great as a 'spectacle' movie.

For what it matters- basically nothing, since it's non binding- the UNGA has voted 153-10 for an immediate ceasefire. Last ceasefire vote in the UNGA back in October was 121-14 so a lot of abstentions flipped to yes including some minor pillars of the Rules Based Order. 12000 dead civilians in 9 weeks is still all good with most of the most vocal proponents; US, UK, Germany all voted no or abstained. To put it in perspective the vote for Russia to withdraw from Ukraine was 141-5.

I should reread Dune at some point, I didn't like it much last time. I was like 13 at the time, and thought David Eddings was Tolstoy. Also now considering whether Dune'84 would have been improved by John Hurt as Duke Atreides and Richard Burton as Baron Harkonnen for some reason. Fun fact: my dad unironically loved Lynch's Dune and took me to see it in a cinema. I still have (I think) the making of book he bought somewhere around.

Intransigence is a frequently used device in such discussions to wring extra concessions though, and it isn't always 'real'. Same with brinkmanship, debt ceiling discussions and the like often go down to the wire because urgency forces concessions. There's still 3(?) more days to get agreement and personally I think they'll get there, though it's far from certain.

I doubt he'd go if there was a serious chance he'd come back empty handed. The only thing worse than not getting aid would be going to the US and still not getting any aid. No further information, I believe. Two videos of Sokolov after the attack, then nothing since. Since neither video was absolutely definitive status is undefined, leaning towards still alive. He's still commander of the fleet and hasn't retired to spend more time with his family or similar. Neither side seems all that keen on providing incontrovertible proof people are alive to suit media schedules. Shoigu, Gersasimov and Zaluzhny were all 'dead' or 'severely injured' for weeks or months because they didn't have verifiable appearances.