Zoraptor

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.

“CPJ is deeply alarmed by the pattern of journalists in Gaza reporting receiving threats, and subsequently, their family members being killed,” said CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Sherif Mansour. “The killing of the family members of journalists in Gaza is making it almost impossible for the journalists to continue reporting, as the risk now extends beyond them also to include their beloved ones.”-- via the Committee to Protect Journalists. Remember this next time someone tells you the Caesar or Magnitsky Acts are moral stances rather than political ones, because here's the US not just failing to do anything about the targeted killing of journalists but also of their families; indeed, by vetoing a ceasefire they're encouraging its continuation. Who knows, maybe there'll be an Al-Anas Act and I'll have to eat my words. I'd bet against gravity failing before that though.

Let's be real here, a lot of the people puling about anti semitism at Yale or wherever would be shouting equally enthusiastically about freedom of expression if (and indeed when) it were (was), say, Chinese students being 'targeted' by pro Uighur or Tibetan protests. Banning their organisations and pandering to the feefees of the poor oppressed Chinese who don't want to hear about the genocide their government is perpetrating? An affront to the 1st amendment and just another example of the Cultural Marxism pervading academia. Not banning (some, plenty have been) pro Palestinian student organisations and not banning protests on their behalf? Strangely, also Cultural Marxism and not an affront to the 1st amendment. Exactly the same way 'from the river to the sea' is genocidal when it comes from a Palestinian, but not when it's Likud saying it. It's not a moral stance, it's a political one, and political stances should not be part of a university's brief. Palestinians probably aren't that keen on and feel a bit harassed and oppressed by the US Congress supplying most of the weapons that have killed 6000 of their children, after all, nor for all the pro Israeli demonstrations celebrating it either openly or tacitly, nor for the US recognising the annexations of East Jerusalem and the Golan, nor for the UNSC ceasefire veto. Indeed, kind of funny seeing the US talking up the PA taking over in Gaza as it's exactly the worst approach for the PA if you want it to be credible. They're already seen as Quislings by most of their constituents, if the US thinks its support is going to help them the delusion is off the scale.

They couldn't have avoided it, because the situation is so polarised that anything that isn't complete and acritical support for Israel is 'genocide advocacy' to some. It's political theatre, not academic debate; Ted Cruz or whoever isn't going to politely applaud a well made point and ponder whether his position is actually correct while thinking about how he viewed the plight of Bana from Aleppo compared to Zainab from Gaza and what that says about his personal morality. Indeed, the whole idea of that is ludicrous; they'll be thinking about how it plays electorally and how much money his PAC will receive in donations if he gets in a particularly spicy zinger. You just get the same headlines when they refuse to say that 'from the river to sea' is advocating genocide- and reminder, same phrase appears in the Likud Charter, but presumably isn't genocide advocacy there. The whole point of Israel advocacy in that style is not to have a rational debate, it's to have a chilling effect where people Just Shut Up because anything said against Israel is considered antisemitic and advocating genocide.

Ah well, time for the old Uniting For Peace approach I guess... though I suspect there will be a few less advocates for that than there have been for other issues. 13-1 is actually worse than the February22 UNSC resolution aimed at Russia over Ukraine (11-1) and which triggered a bunch of articles on Russia's diplomatic isolation. Couldn't even get two of the NATO members or Japan to abstain.

Well yeah, to put it in perspective something like 1% of applicants end up joining the Gurkhas annually. That's 20k+ Nepalese who'd be fine with fighting other peoples' wars who are potential recruits and who could make the first selection criteria. I guess some would only want to go to Britain specifically but even if half felt that way that's still 10k potential recruits for others. It's also not that long ago since Joanna Lumley shamed the Brits into stopping treating the Gurkhas like chattel (ie kicking them out when they got too old). Some might also remember the rumours of the hordes of ravening Syrians who were going to descend on Ukraine*. It's not like western media doesn't have an agenda to push- every foreigner fighting for Ukraine tends to be a 'volunteer', for Russia... foreign fighter, mercenary, conscript etc. As things stand there are more documented** Syrians fighting for Ukraine than Russia. Recruitment policies for out and out wars certainly tend to be extremely cynical. *classic of its kind really. Shedloads of articles saying they were coming, then a handful months later explaining that the press wasn't wrong, the recruitment failed. **depends how you feel about docs leaked to SOHR without any corroborating evidence like confirmed casualties. Tiger Forces are professional soldiers integrated into the Syrian military though, so even if they were there they wouldn't be either coerced nor mercenaries.

Kind of depends whether it was genuinely voluntary or not. 'Trafficking' would generally imply some form of coercion or ill intent on the behalf of the organisers beyond just facilitating them becoming mercs/ 'mercs'. Dunno about the refugees, guess as long as they're paid properly and Service Guarantees Citizenship it could be an attractive enough proposition to get volunteers. Maybe a bit naive expecting them to be paid properly though... (Volunteering for foreign forces is certainly legal in certain circumstances in Nepal given the existence of the UK Ghurka Brigade)

They didn't ask for an aircraft carrier because it can't transit the Bosporus under Montreux... Kind of more surprised they asked for Globemasters and Super Hercules than THAAD. Maybe the truck blockade at the Polish border is really biting, but they're big, slow airframes that would be vulnerable in the air and on the ground. Oh yeah, on the subject of requests: ask for 17 million (well, if accurate, that figure was likely part of the ongoing Zelensky/ Zaluzhny back and forth so likely designed to embarrass), friends order 60,000 instead.

I'd give them a pass on Pentium-D for it being an eternity ago in chip making terms and a stopgap after some truly awful decisions. 'Glued' chips though... that was UserBenchmark level cringe marketing.

Maybe Raja brought in the Vega marketing team when he was at Intel and they stayed after he left? (I think the guy who was responsible for a lot of AMD's shonky marketing left recently, would be ironic if it was for Intel like a lot of the others. OTOH, not the first time Intel's done similarly fairly recently- eg AMD's 'glued' chips which of course Intel was planning on making a version of themselves while slamming the concept)

They wouldn't have to go against Israel itself to get the desired effect. There's no practical chance of, say, the US cutting off Israel from supplies, let alone embargoing them. There's a lot that can be done to apply pressure without going that far though. Probably the most obvious being going after Netanyahu personally, especially if it looks like he's deliberately stalling to try and prolong his political life. There's also going after the more intransigent elements in his cabinet (some evidence this is already happening, with some Settlers being sanctioned and Bibi largely relying on their votes). The US can certainly make his position untenable if they want to, it's mostly a question of how public they'd want to be while doing it.

Sheesh, did Trump write that Conricus quote? Only missing a bigly and digression about how people come up in the street to tell him the IDF is the most moral army in the world. Really though, talk about making a rod for their own back. If eliminating Hamas is the target even if Israel's figures are correct that would require 60k civilian casualties (and 90k total). It seems unlikely that even someone as supine as Joe Biden would allow that number. Not for moral considerations- it's clear the west doesn't actually care about the civilians deaths on moral grounds, just political- but because every time the Rules Based Order throws accusations he knows they'll get 'but Gaza' thrown in their face. With the current figures they can probably get away with ICC head Karim Khan deciding there's only enough money to investigate Hamas war crimes, not Israeli, in a few years time*. It'll get progressively harder as casualties mount though. *not really snark either- Brit Karim Khan's near first order of business when appointed to head the ICC was... to limit investigations in Afghanistan to Taleban/ ISIS war crimes. 'Budgetary limitations' meant that potential Coalition war crimes won't be actively investigated... heh, classic Rules Based Order, such lovable little scamps.

I'd say White Man's Burden Imperialism is fundamentally pretty racist, and that was Churchill to a T. Definitely a Mileage May Vary situation though. (I mean, he certainly didn't hate people for their race the same way, say, Hitler did. But to use one of those quotes, Churchill may have believed in equal rights for civilised people- whatever their colour- but he also believed that almost all non white people were not civilised and required guidance from whitey to become so...)

There's actually an entire wikipedia article on his views which touches on their influence on policy.

I expect that from radical right and some AWB protestors, it will fail but people will still try. It's no different to demands Gori, Georgia take down Stalin's statue because he was a commie. And it's always motivated by the same reason, outrage about something they ostensibly did in the past while ignoring or being unaware of their overall contribution towards the country but then judging them on today's values and morality. His important stand he took against the Nazi is really what he is remembered for and that's no myth. So the Nazi being defeated in WW2 is not a big deal to you? That's what I mean by overall contribution and the USSR and Stalin played a part in the Allies' victory. Yeah, he probably could have achieved the same result without being quite so much of a prick about things, but then so could Churchill...

At least theoretically the Russians had plenty of time to dig in around Kharkov. Combination of too few troops and them being low quality -->--> the Russians inadvertently helping Ukraine out. Of course Ukraine also didn't have a viral internet campaign about that offensive, not hard to prepare defences when your opponent has sportingly told you what they're going to do ahead of time. While true Ukraine was never going to have air superiority. If they waited for that they'd tacitly be admitting to never going on the offensive again. Ukraine didn't necessarily need complete air superiority, it being contested may have been enough to make Ka-52 losses too great to be sustainable and take out the designators for krasnopol artillery. They did try to bring in a lot of air defence assets, there was a big spike in S-300s and the like getting hit associated with it. Who knows, maybe if they'd zerged/ damned the torpedoes Russian lines along with a similar attitude for AD assets like the US wanted they'd have won. Doesn't seem very likely though. (Dunno, the US' schwerpunkt'esque approach probably did have a better chance of success in absolute terms than the more dissipated attacks we got, but it was also far riskier for Ukraine who could easily have ended up with similar losses, just over a far more compressed timeframe. It was far closer to a Kursk situation than Barbarossa. Personally I'd say that the US approach was insane given the situation on the ground, and their supposed insistence on training raw conscripts so they hadn't learnt any 'bad habits' was at very best misguided. OTOH, maybe if Ukraine hadn't wasted a load of experienced troops on Bakhmut or stalled so that Tigers and Elefants could be delivered... but even then, the US' idea was to train and use recruits with ~6 weeks training, not experienced soldiers)

The fundamental problem is that- coincidentally, no doubt- simulations almost always produce the result that the person running them wants. In this case I'd suspect whoever they had playing the Russian side decided to play it stereotypically/ didn't really want to win. If you're actually going to wargame things the most difficult part to get right is having the opposing force behave realistically and having it actually want to win against their own (in reality) side. I do have to admit I'm kind of jealous someone got paid for 8 tabletop wargaming sessions. If they were going to go for actual wargaming instead of outright computer modelling I'd have thought they'd have used one of their computer based ones. Otherwise: Ukraine lost because they didn't follow out superior tactics and sage advice! for the umpteenth time. Which might be an excuse if they hadn't done well previously with their own tactics (albeit with a lot of inadvertent help from the Russians).

Decomposing babies found at al Al-Nasr Children's Hospital. Honestly at this point you have to wonder if the Rules Based Order's accusations function solely as projection. Though I guess, technically, Israel didn't turf the babies out of incubators; just attacked the hospital and its staff, forced them out and made it impossible for anyone to evacuate the babies and for their incubators to run.

Eh, just pretend that they're Rifles and special forces so aren't really used as assault troops. More handwavey than a semaphore class carried out in sign language when it comes to, say, storming Badajoz or having like six men defend La Haie Sainte (or was it the other one?) at Waterloo, admittedly. (kind of funny, I hated the out of scale stuff in Rings of Power and Wheel of Time but would give it a pass in Sharpe because I liked the non battle parts of the series a lot more)

Sharpe is an excellent series. Also one of those series where there's almost always a young guest star you recognise from later stuff, like Paul Bettany or Mark Strong. Its only drawback is that when it comes right down to it Cornwell's heroes are all basically the same character and there's a certain template the stories tend to follow.

The 10% is for the Mongol Empire in general rather than Chenghiz specifically. A lot of the deaths were during Kublai Khan's conquest of China. China's always a bit of a special case, something like Taiping/ Heavenly Kingdom may have killed twice as many people as WW1 but pretty much no one knows about it.

People still use 'The Hun' occasionally as a pejorative for germans, and a lot more so 'vandal' for destructive people so we are at least still linguistically upset about people sacking Rome 1600ish years ago. Pol Pot tends to get a 'pass' because he pretty much only killed his own countrymen, inside his own country, which is small and irrelevant. Similar to how Mao doesn't tend to get mentioned because he killed a lot of Chinese at a time when China was certainly not small but was pretty irrelevant. Obviously Kissinger tended to get a pass because... hey I mean George W Bush paints now and it was all so long ago so all is forgiven about Iraq, right guys? We do rather like randomly rehabilitating our leaders. Funniest thing is hearing Kissinger constantly referred to as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Kind of a shame that Mussolini and Hitler didn't win the years they were nominated. Hitler in particular since the year was 1939.

Funny how many better movies were made of books than TV series. Seems to be the shorter the audiovisual medium, the more likely you are to get an enjoyable conversion of it. Even on my TV list half of them have ten episodes or fewer.

Some people wanted some feedback on the Colony Ship RPG so here it is a decent (15 hours maybe? Not sure how much I put into the indev version) way through. TLDR: basically no change from my reaction to the indev version. It's far more polished than AoD and generally looks nice and crisp. UI is fine and there are some QoL improvements too. The skills are well thought out and pretty balanced with maybe one(ish) exception and that may be classic pebkam rather than a game issue. Combat is hard but there is an easy difficulty for people who aren't masochistic think RPGs are for running around feeling awesome. I, of course, am hard as nails and tough as teak so am playing on underdog. Character development is almost entirely by skill use. You get a feat on level up, and can add implants and the like for stat boosts. Could, maybe, do with some extra tools to improve skills? Maybe. That's related to one of the complaints below. There's definitely a best way to do things (ie do all skill level 2 checks, then since you now have level 3 skill do all skill level 3 checks etc) but it's far better than AoD's saving up of LPs(?) so you can add them appropriately to pass the skill checks you want. Slightly longer positives: Jack of all trades/ generalists are a lot more feasible since you have a party (up to 4). I actually haven't found any more than 3 recruitables (or maybe you don't get offers if your party is full, doing it spoiler free so not checking) but they cover the general archetypes pretty well. The world/ ship feels good, and the game has a pretty compelling atmosphere. The backstory/ factions aren't going to win prizes but are pretty believable and consistent and the dialogue is good, with a decent amount of appropriate skills/ stats being referenced. As prior, the combat is hard, but I've only found two fights I couldn't do- and that's with a stealth and chat specialist among the 4. Just don't be afraid of using grenades etc and know when to use them (and energy weapons, where the ammo is scarce). And you can avoid combat. only major gripe is stealth. It doesn't work that well with a TB system unfortunately, and... well it kind of forces you into having an out and out specialist rather than an assassin archetype. ie you need stealth, stealing and lockpick on one character minimum, and in some case computing (so far). While you can get training in computers to boost it for someone who doesn't have it tagged some hack tools or similar might be useful. OTOH, don't think any of stealth missions have been compulsory but, can't avoid the fact that someone with all stealth feats and high skill (and a stealth gadget) still finds some missions to be impossible. As above, I may be missing something and I'd spec Faythe differently in retrospect. Dunno, from what I've seen if you want maximalist stealth you'd have to build your character on a prescribed path. Minor gripes: all the combat takes place super close together, there's no 'strategic depth'. Probably too many interrupts too, occasionally they get comical where an enemy seems to get off more shots in interrupts that they can in their main combat round. Gear/ itemisation is fairly generic. Could at times do with a more detailed quest log? Some of the maps are confusing in that it's difficult to tell where you can/ can't go, and some of the blocking is clumsy. Ironically, it's kind of like how in Mass Effect you'd suddenly start encountering waist high barriers whenever a combat encounter was coming only here it's narrowed doors and similar. Not much really, and very little of real substance. Obviously it's a game for a certain type towards the grognard end of the gaming spectrum but it's a pretty unequivocal recommendation from me, so far.