Zoraptor

HTS (Hayat Tahrir al Sham) is the main rebel group in Idlib, and is Jabhat al Nusra (Support Front- of Al Qaeda in Iraq) with a rebranding to cater for tender western sensibilities. Still led by the same guy, Al Jolani, and with the same leadership though of course. There are a bunch of vestige US facade groups involved too but none of them operate without HTS approval and at least in theory* they haven't had US support for around 7 years. HTS doesn't operate without Turkish approval though the Turk's main backing is for the moderate ethnic cleansers in the 'Syrian' National Army fighting the kurds further east. Qatar is the primary unequivocal backer of HTS. The war in Ukraine has had zero effect on Russia in Syria for anyone wondering. Still got the S-400s around Hmeimem, still got the same number of aircraft, still got the same (small) number of troops. Even Hezbollah wasn't anywhere near as significant as people said since they contributed maybe 1-2% of troop numbers. The Afghan/ Pakistani (Liwa al Fatima/ Zeinab) and Palestinian formations were larger and contributed as much. Ironically, most of them are now facing the US backed troops by the Euphrates as they are worried about them trying to cut the supply line from Iraq- with the US still overtly (and illegally) occupying al Tanf to block the other one. *of course a lot of them never had overt US support due to being just a tad head choppery and pretty much the exact same people they were fighting in Gaza, Afghanistan, and uh, Syria, etc, but did have it clandestinely through Timber Sycamore. Bit of a laugh watching Pentagon supported moderate rebels (note lack of air quotes, since they were generally discerning) fighting CIA supported 'moderate' rebels as regularly happened.

The contents of unresponsive spoiler boxes are still there, they just don't display, so you can select the unresponsive box then copy and paste into a new spoiler tag to edit them. Which is still annoying of course.

They also didn't break a treaty if it was an ICBM. Using an ICBM with a conventional warhead or as an impactor isn't banned and never has been, and the US says they got advance notice. Both the US and Russia say it was an IRBM though, and with a launch site near Astrakhan it seems more than likely it was. ICBM was the initial claim from Ukraine.

Dunno about that: Rick had a lot of fans himself, and generally having a good ensemble cast/ characters is a plus that indicates overall good writing (cf Discovery vs The Next Generation). That's partly because Andrew Lincoln is a good actor who was clearly doing his best with often limited material and partly because the writing of TWD may not always have been good, but for most of the early seasons was functional and overall/ specifically memorable/ memeorable, which in many ways is the most important factor (cf prequel trilogy Star Wars vs sequel trilogy). There's also a bit of an expectation difference between a post zombie apocalypse comic book adaptation TV series and Star Trek, character wise. (As a TWD watcher I'd say that the problem with Rick and with most of the long term characters was that the show simply went on too long rather than bad writing. They ran out of character development and they ended up either flanderised or stuck in a repeating loop. They also got stuck only introducing new characters whose purpose was to die after a certain point, because they had a big backlash to two established ones being killed off. A lot of the backlash was actually due to the writing rather than the deaths themselves. The overall writing took a massive dive too since they took too long to get anywhere and started having the other bane of modern writing: working the plot to include 'cool' scenes they wanted to do whether they made sense or not. Like driving up to a fortress, having the enemy leadership all come out for some chit chat, pull out your guns and... shoot all the windows in the fortress, since you couldn't end the plot early by just, y'know, shooting the bad guys)

Bibi is a monomaniac who'd love to showcase his international support to the world, but that narcissism does also mean he won't take risks when it's his arse on the line. In theory, he could not fly through the airspace of any country honouring the ICC warrant (irrespective of him landing) either*. If Greece says they'd arrest him then the route to Germany or Hungary becomes extremely convoluted. Not like he can fly over Syria/ Iraq/ Iran to avoid Turkey/ Greece/ Italy/ France, after all. Indeed, you could theoretically get a situation where he couldn't get to the US due to being denied transit. Chances of that happening practically aren't high since you could almost certainly rely on someone turning a blind eye, especially if leant on by the US. The almost certainly part is likely to be enough for him to go to the US, since that's big stakes, but to hobnob with Orban? Not so much. *which is why Putin won't go to, say, Brazil. Whether Brazil would arrest him is only half the relevant threat.

Eh, the problem isn't the Whedonite dialogue really, it's the lack of talent from the writers trying to do it. It's worked ok for Bioware in previous games, though the most recent was probably ME2 when they still had a decent cadre of writers. And it's not like, say, Buffy/ Angel etc retroactively have bad writing just because they've been so often (badly) imitated. I don't think the problem is the 'woke stuff' in particular, as above it's the way characters in general are written nowadays by bad writers. The best example I've found as comparison is Omar from The Wire vs I Can't Even Remember His Name After 4 (OK 5, but I skipped S4) Seasons But He Was Played by Anthony Rapp, from Star Trek Discovery. You can describe the entire character of the STD character in about two words: gay engineer, and for probably 95% of his screen time that's all you need to know because that is, basically, his 'character', over the 5 seasons. The other 5% is him getting upset about Gay Doctor (again, all you really need to know 95% of the time) dying. If you tried describing Omar as an equivalent like gay hit man... it just doesn't work well at all, outside of the most simplistic situations and interpretations. That's because one is a well written engaging character with depth who happens to be gay, the other has gay as his defining characteristic. Of course the problem with STD is clearly the bad writing, since most of the, uh, non woke characters are basic caricatures as well. The unfortunate thing is that often bad writers with good intentions think that 'gay' or 'non binary' is enough to make an inherently well written character when it isn't any more than 'heterosexual' would make a good non woke character. The net effect is the feeling that you're being preached to, and worse, preached to very very badly. Ultimate problem is of course that writing good characters whatever their skin colour/ sexual orientation/ occupation/ etc is is hard, and few people can do it. There also don't seem to be any consequences for those who are bad writers, so it's self perpetuating.

To be fair to them, when the formal investigation was launched a decent number of 'rules based order' countries did say they'd enforce it against Bibi/ Gallant as a matter of course, if warrants were issued- the Dutch and Italians at least off the top of my head. That does rely on them being dumb enough to go to those countries though, so it's a fairly low risk statement in terms of having to follow through. UK and Germany, well, they seem so far to be hoping the issue will just disappear so they don't have to commit. And obviously the US was never going to be exactly pleased with the indictments let alone enforce them. There are certainly a few things which may get interesting as a result- eg those countries that have laws against weapons trade with war criminals, or if Netanyahu decides to turn up to the UNGA again next year. Not like the US would arrest him, but even with the ICC not being a UN body having a wanted war criminal address the UN General Assembly would be... interesting, if only to see how many walk out in protest vs the number doing it for Iran or similar.

ICC has now issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant (and Deif, who may be dead anyway).

Eh, which treaty did they break? (IRBM aren't banned any more. INF was 2 party, with the US withdrawing in 2019. It's defunct. Much like all the other agreements Trump or Bush broke Biden had 4 years to reinstate it or renegotiate it if he wanted, but didn't. The US had also systematically and provably abrogated it for years previous via Aegis Ashore, which uses ground based tomahawk launchers. Russia may have as well but that was never proven- indeed, the only accusations of them using weapons that would have been banned under it, in the Ukraine War, are within the last year. This would be the first Russian system used too, since the other accusation (not proven) was a DPRK system) Anyway, looks like it was definitely an IRBM ('Oreshnik') since Putin has announced it as such.

The UN won't fund it anyway. It'd be a ~KFOR like arrangement, where the UN provides legitimacy (or not) for a mission but they aren't UN peacekeepers. And yeah the UN budget for peacekeeping would be a lot higher if rich countries were the top contributors of troops. UN peacekeeping is 'cheap' because while it's largely funded by richer countries it's largely performed by soldiers from poorer ones. As it is only 2 of the top twenty troop contributors are on the top 10 budget contributors list- and one is China. The only high wage top 20 troop contributor is Italy. A soldier from the #1 contributor of troops Nepal simply costs a lot less than one from #40 contributor Britain. Use EU troops and you'd need 5x the budget, at absolute minimum. In other news, looks plausible that Russia fired a bunch of ICBM at Ukraine. No nuclear warheads, obviously. Probably used only as kinetic impactors. Would explain all those embassies that were ordered closed, the launches would have been disclosed ahead of time. Only thing left is a nuclear test to show the warhead work too.

At least three now, since there was another one today. Notable things about it include: US deputy Ambassador Robert Wood voting, again, not Thomas-Greenfield. Clearly they know it's a dreadful look and don't want their main (wo)man associated with it. 14-1 vote, US sole vote against, and brought to the Council by no less than 10 of its members AP article has slightly different tone from their one about Russia's veto. But I'll give them some credit for this quote even if it is after the usual mealy mouthed apologia: Indeed, they managed to put the same quote in the article twice. Shame they didn't directly contrast it with Robert Wood's claims that the US had to veto because: which is an incredibly bare faced lie even for a politician, so much so even the French UN ambassador called him on it.

RoK has been reticent because they'd already been supplying Ukraine since 2022- via 3rd parties. Indeed, in the article I grabbed the quote below from their threat in response is to sell 7bn$ more equipment to Poland; above the 14bn they sold Poland in 2022, for example. Mostly though they're also now in yet another of their cyclic crap throwing (literally this time) contest with the north. (The South Korean claims are also not the same as those made by Ukraine, the US or the media despite many media claims to the contrary. Their claim was 3000 troops sent for training, not combat, increasing to 10k; but still with no mention of combat. Not 10k+ there and actively fighting. Which is closer to what I've been saying than to Ukrainian claims, let alone the 100k from some media. to whit: "South Korea’s intelligence chief told lawmakers Wednesday that North Korea has sent 3,000 troops, including special forces, to Russia for training, and that the North plans to increase that number to 10,000 by December.")

Historically the US has vetoed ceasefires using exactly the same 'logic' as Russia did with Sudan, ie it's an internal matter. It won't be the last time for either and usually resolves down to whether they think the side they're supporting is winning rather than humanitarian concerns vs respect for countries rights. Most recently the US were sole veto- and sole 'no'- on Israel/ Palestine ceasefire resolutions at least twice. Unsurprisingly, that wasn't a sign of US isolation, but US strength and unflinching resolve. If you were US UN staff, at least. That also doesn't count the (multiple) times resolutions weren't even brought to the table because their veto was inevitable. David Seymour is definitely a populist, not a fascist, though he'd happily have fascists vote for him. His bill has literally no chance of passing, it's a way for him to drum up votes. Irony being* his party is our 'no waste, no red tape!' 'libertarian' one (hence his stated reasons for the Treaty Principles Bill of vote equality) and he's insisting on advancing a bill with zero prospects and which will cost the taxpayer a minimum of 4 million dollars. *Well, the whole thing is an irony fest because both sides are riddled with first order hypocrites: Watching the same people who laugh at the US obsession with their 240 year old founding document and think its inviolability is silly so much later obsessing about our 180 years old one and thinking it should be inviolable and relevant forever. Cogovernance proponents insisting that that still has equal voting rights for everyone. Then being baffled when their explanations are clearly that votes wouldn't be equal, but it's a good thing they won't be, and that not convincing anyone votes will be equal but rather the opposite. Pearl clutching about 'war dances' in parliament from people who got upset at complaints about the throat slitting (it's releasing the spirit!) gesture in the All Black's haka and think the English should, ahaha, Morris Dance back rather than get upset.

I've never liked the 'bad games do not get reviewed' explanation for review inflation because sure it's usually cheap/ unknown games don't get reviewed, but it's also cheap/ unknown movies that don't get reviewed. Not like movie critics regularly watch and review the film equivalent of a steam Asset Flip game either. Ultimately the problem is that if you go by game reviews there has basically never been a bad big budget/ hyped/ important game, their scale starts at 7. For the less fortunate, it starts at maybe 5. That is not the case for film, they're far more likely to use the full scale, and to do so even if it's a big title. Also rather like the original games in the series. SoC and CS had, uh, one or two bugs at launch, it's fair to say, and CoP was not that much better. Indeed, the non modded experience for them has some... quirks to this day.

To be fair to Thomas-Greenfield if you're a UN ambassador for a permanent member you're pretty much always an automatic entry into the hypocrisy Olympics. And she did make sure it was her deputy rather than her that voted when the US was the sole veto on the Israel/ Paelstine ceasefire resolutions...

Ultimately, award shows are what credible industries like movies have, so gaming needs them in order to be a credible industry... (It's one of those situations where if you start off without credibility it's very hard to earn it, because the factors that cause the lack of credibility are self reinforcing- window dressing like awards showsis easy though (and awards shows are great for advertising). That's perhaps best illustrated by the general perception of game Criticism vs movie Criticism, of which gaming's review inflation is certainly a major symptom. One's serious business, the other, well, isn't; it's still largely seen as reviews of a kid's pastime done by people who Aren't Real Journalists. The self reinforcing consequence of that is that if you're a movie reviewer you're a lot more likely to be experienced and well known already, and there is an expectation that you can- and should- give bad marks to big movies. Correspondingly that gives high marks value, and the reviewer some protection from blowback. It's by no means perfect there; except when compared to the situation with games. From the pov of the biggest gaming industry stake holders- publishers- many of the factors that lead to the lack of credibility are net positives so not subject to change)

The issues with atacms/ himars vs Russian AD is saturation, from the Russian perspective. As with Israel or anywhere really, reloads take time and you cannot physically fire/ reload enough interceptors to reliably intercept big attacks- also unlike Israel their best and longest range systems are designed as anti aircraft primarily, it's the shorter range systems that are intended for anti missile roles. Saturation attacks will also tend to overcome jamming since 1 rocket with +/- 100m accuracy due to relying on INS is a lot more likely to miss statistically than multiple rockets with the same error. From the Ukrainian it's jamming, and that saturation attacks by their nature require a lot of launches and their launchers to be relatively close together to do the coordinated, uh, launches. HiMARS can carry one atacms each, and 'LoMARS' like the M270 still only two. As for the North Koreans so far as I can tell they're meant to be all disguised as Russians from Buryatia, constantly deserting (without reaching Ukrainian troops), hooked on pr0n and managing to blow themselves up comically with grenade launchers. While launching human wave attacks that leave no casualties? Ah, but at least one was genuinely captured, though the sneaky Russians clumsily photoshopped a DPRK passport into the picture to make people think it was fake! It's all because Putin is horribly embarrassed about Ukraine wasting its best troops on a town of 6000, you can tell how embarrassed he is by him pulling all his best troops to fight in Kursk. Best troops which, of course, include those 10k 100k pr0n addled unmotivated Wile E Coyote's from Pyongyang with hide and go seek skills that would put Garrett to shame. You don't need a degree in media criticism from Oxford, Cambridge and Hull Universities to poke a few holes in that, you just need to have retained some critical faculty beyond an Arsenal player never having committed a foul in the history of the club level. (ftr I of course said that there may well be some Koreans there, but they'd almost certainly be involved in stuff that was of benefit to, well, North Korea; like learning how to use drones effectively)

Oh yeah, the Russians are firing indiscriminately. Their low civilian casualty toll is because they are just terrible at hitting the civilians they're deliberately and maliciously aiming at. Sadly, the Israelis are even more terrible at missing the civilians they're precisely and humanely trying to avoid hitting during their humanitarian mission to give Palestinians an extended overseas holiday (or funeral). Which is funny because while Bruce is just trolling you do see people trying to say exactly that (minus the deliberate mickey taking aspects) and wondering why people think they're disingenuous shills.

Give Iran (more) S400s, or maybe the Houthis have a breakthrough and develop some Qalat-P or P-800 Eaqiq Yumani anti ship systems? Or most likely nothing, this was an obvious post election play whatever the result, and has been baked into Russian thinking for months.

It's certainly no flop and sold well in absolute terms, but since Bethesda is (basically) a single team studio there's an inherent opportunity cost to spending 7 years on Starfield. ie making it meant they couldn't do other projects. So you're not just comparing its sales in absolute numbers, but comparing them relative to what sales of an alternative TES title would have been; and probably they would have been better in the short term, and certainly* would have had better longevity via word of mouth etc. Also, if it's 7 years per title as a new norm you'd be looking at 18 years between TES titles and then... 22 years between Fallouts? Even if it goes back to 5 years that's still 16 years and 18 years. That's a lot of time between drinks. You don't really want to rely on someone who played a game as a 13 year old buying a sequel as a 31 or 35 year old... *ok, not literally literally certainly certainly but just very, very likely.

Eh, publicly critiquing Harris wouldn't achieve anything. While you could argue that Clinton was the problem in 2016 so it might be important to state her mistakes to avoid repeating them it's a lot harder to make the same argument for Harris, given circumstances like her not even being the candidate for a decent portion of campaigning. Plus he's right, publicly sticking the knife in to someone you worked with when they fail is a crap thing to do. Most of the criticisms of 'Harris' that could be given would be more fairly directed at the overall leadership and party strategists anyway.

Reckon Starfield was a bit of a perfect storm. It was never going to have a good story or dialogue and was always going to use their shonky 20 year old engine, and even another TES would have had those two issues. Worse was, while it may have seemed like a good fit in theory it was intrinsically not a good fit for the 'Bethesda style' and made some of its limitations very obvious. Probably the worst though was that just about everyone would have preferred a TES* or Fallout title which meant that a decent subset of the target audience was predisposed against it and unwilling to cut it the slack they might have otherwise; that also meant no built in/ existing enthusiasm for modding. Perhaps as a result, marketing was also unusually tepid. *fair enough really, not personally a fan of the series but it's already 13 years since Skyrim, and a new game is not close. Best part of 20 years between titles of your flagship franchise is going to stretch people's patience in the best circumstances, if you're going to take 7 years doing a new franchise it'd better look the part.

Eh... that actually illustrates one of the core theoretical differences between Islam and Christianity. In many ways more so even than "render unto Caesar" vs not having an equivalent, though that has had more practical effect. If you're Christian you're- at least theoretically- meant to capital B Believe Revelations as being The Word including the arrival of the Great Dragon (? it's been a while) etc. Of course practically, much like God creating the earth, some people take it more literally and some less so. Islam doesn't really have an equivalent to Revelations' apocalypse, in the Koran. The apocalyptic stuff similar to Revelations is mostly from Hadiths which are... religious guidelines may be most accurate, and not necessarily seen as being canon. eg the Mahdi isn't Koranic except as a title for Mohammed and isn't included in half the Hadith collections, so his canonicity, uh, depends. Which is fortunate given how hard some of the prophecies would be to fulfill, now. (Selective usage of Hadiths was one of ISIS' favourite tactics for justifying themselves, since there are a lot of of them. Then again, not like there aren't Christians who take "love thy neighbour" and append an "except if they're ___" to it based on something Saul wrote, or even something in Leviticus. People gonna people, religion just makes them feel good about it)

Short version of The Apocalypse: The Antichrist arrives when Israel rebuilds The Temple after which there will be a big battle at Megiddo --> "Armageddon". After after which, to show how much Evangelicals really care about Jews, all the Jews can either convert or, well, go to hell. Plus lots of repetitive and contradictory imagery about Signs and Portents/ Enemies that allows for liberal interpretation. In short: Revelations should have been left as the ravings of a Qat addled hermit* who was a bit upset about the Flavians burning The Temple in 70AD or whatever. Always kind of funny to read The Bible assuming it was just written by people rather than being The Word. Big irony: muslims however are a definite death cult for believing the big battle will be at a random village in Syria (Dabiq) instead of a random village in Israel. Otherwise it's pretty similar** for their end times as well, maybe a bit more specific and anachronistic (eg taking 'Constantinople'). *might not have done any good of course. To whit: the Prosperity Gospel. Did you know that the rich man and the eye of a needle aphorism was actually literal and about a gate in Jerusalem, not about how being overly wealthy is bad? Actually, Jesus "Gordon Gecko" Christ thought accumulating wealth was, well, good and means that God loves you in particular! **iirc they're also Hadiths, so not 'full' canon.

Fairly sure I'd heard similar. I think it was DGaider? on his blog or in an interview saying that they'd developed the setting prior to DAO via pnp rpg or similar? Can't find a reference with a quick search so can't be certain I'm not mixing it up with something else though.