Zoraptor

Haha yes. Not just Tom Cooper, but David "City of Robotyne (pop74)" Axe relying on Cooper. Far, far more likely to be friendly fire. Not like either side has a particularly good record so far as that is concerned. (You can discount two Axe's of his possibilities out of hand for not having the range. The S-300 would literally have had to be driven through Russian lines to hit an A-50 over the Sea of Azov in most places and even at the closest point could barely hit the coast from the frontline. Seems plausible if you read wikipedia, but Ukraine only has up to 55R missiles, and that's 75km range. Pac-3 would have to be fired well within standard artillery range to hit just off the coast plus the damage to the IL-22 is clearly not from a hard kill (impact) system like a Pac-3 but from airburst/ proximity. So not that either. That only leaves Pac-2. Even there the A-50 out ranges even the Pac-2 twice over according to Axe's own figures, so is well able to 'see' northern Crimea yet remain our of range. The suggested scenario would at minimum have the Patriot within Tornado and Lancet range, and the Patriot is an... unwieldy system, for an ambush. This wouldn't be toodling a full system some tens of km from Kiev to fire at aircraft over Bryansk or whatever, it'd be moving it hundreds of km into Tornado and Lancet range on a hope. OTOH, S-200 would be a possibility. Ukraine has them and has been using them again, they have a lot more range than anything else they have and the right warhead. While they're also ancient, Syrian ones have shot down a F-16 and allegedly hit a F-35 in recent years; an A-50 would be an easy target compared to them)

Selling chips for Russian missiles might actually be a net positive if the Russians keep shooting down their own planes...

Already answered. If they want to demonstrate unfair treatment from the ICC there's no better way than showing that Israelis have impunity, and you do that by being very shouty and then having the ICC do nothing. They don't really expect Karim Khan to act against Bibi and friends. If they embarrass him into action more the good and maybe the ICC is worthwhile, if they don't, point proven.

No, it's not about the principle of genocide, as a crime. It's about the ICC vs ICJ and one of them being a kangaroo court. That makes any determination from the ICC suspect so far as RSA is concerned, not the principle itself. Not a difficult concept to grasp.

I mean, RSA was proven pretty right there. There have been nearly 400k deaths in the South Sudan civil war with ~3 million refugees, and rampant ethnic violence. And with Bashir gone in rump Sudan... well, ongoing civil war there too now. Of course, Salva Kiir is pro west- his trademark hat was originally given to him by GWBush- unlike al-Bashir so he can't by definition be committing genocide... Mostly though, just because you think the ICC is crap- and it is- it doesn't mean that you think the ICJ is crap. They're separate entities.

For the lolz, here's the submission (pdf, relevant part from p6) from amongst others, Britain and (extra especial lol approaching roflcopter territory) Germany to the ICJ re the Rohingya genocide to see what their opinion on genocide and how International Law should be applied. Choice quotes: hmm heh Ah, OK. They left out the obvious point of what makes for a genocide according to them though: being brown, and the west's enemy.

I don't think if I were Israel I'd be hanging everything on the narrow definition of 'intent to destroy'. Legal loves a good definition, but they also love a good precedent to clarify those definitions. In this case, "in whole or in part". Anyone care to guess how many people it took for Karim Khan to cite II(e) of the Genocide Convention vs Putin? 'Hundreds' of children, out of a population of 40 million (theoretical). If that's the new threshold 17000 dead women and children out of 2.2 million will certainly pass muster. That's a factor of, hmm, 680, roughly, on the Palestinian side of the ledger. And let's be frank here, at least any children taken by Russia are, well, still alive... Now, of course that's ICC rather than ICJ, but ICC is still an instrument of International Law, and recognised as such by the UN same as the ICJ, even if not officially a UN court. Of course, I mostly just like the possibility of Karim's Khan and Britain's flagrant misuse of the ICC coming back to haunt them. Always nice to see someone corrupt hoist by their own Picard after all. Intent to destroy is pretty much the sole obstacle otherwise. Take II(c) for example, with its clarification from the ICC ('s predecessor for Rwanda): "subjecting a group of people to a subsistence diet, systematic expulsion from homes and the reduction of essential medical services below minimum requirement". Sounds rather like Israel has been using that as a guideline, eh?

The main problem with any 'they let it happen' theories is that we don't really know the circumstantial context. If Hamas were actively obfuscating things you'd get complacency setting in from a series of (deliberate) false alarms. We don't know how often Egyptian intelligence warns Israel of stuff that doesn't eventuate, we don't know if Hamas ran a bunch of fake comms spikes or whether they'd regularly switch up drills or scout out the border fence. We only know all those things happened before October 7. I find it pretty hard to believe that Netanyahu knew beforehand. Don't get me wrong: he's clearly 100% capable of letting his own people die to further his own ends, especially those who probably wouldn't be voting for him anyway. On October 6th he didn't really need to do anything like that though, certainly nothing to justify the risk of things going wrong. Now, he's politically dead he just hasn't stopped breathing yet. That more than anything is why he's desperate to keep the fighting going for months or longer- the precedent was set 50 years almost to the day earlier by Golda Meir. The circumstances under which he would have known beforehand would have been specific and require a hefty dose of collusion from multiple agencies, not all of which are friendly to him.

Estonian is closer than Hungarian/ Magyar to Finnish/ Suomi by a decent margin as are a few others. (They use a lot of the same tools for language relationships as they use for population/ species DNA relationships eg phylo'gene'tic wheels. Probably should be something like 'phylomemetic wheel' for linguistics...)

RSA doesn't think the ICC will go after Bibi et al for war crimes in Palestine though. Their noise isn't about actually getting the ICC to do its job- they don't expect that at all- so much as making it very, very obvious that it isn't, and is selectively prosecuting. If they can establish that the ICC is effectively- and personally, it's pretty indisputable at this point that the word is applicable - corrupt/ not fit for purpose then they can withdraw from it without the courts intervening as they did when they tried it over the Putin ruling. The best way to show that is to establish and highlight a pattern of inconsistency. Fortunately for them Karim Khan- a veritable prosecutorial Usain Bolt vs Putin- suddenly became Eric the Eel when it's Netanyahu and pals involved.

That would probably have been (in the entirely hypothetical situation of actual support for Amir instead of the historical rhetorical scene setting and claims of treason etc against Rabin; then again, Itamar "Baruch Goldstein" ben-Gvir exists...) Ariel Sharon rather than Netanyahu. At that point Bibi was only really well known because of his brother, who died at Entebbe, iirc, hence the classic Bibi targeting insult of the wrong brother dying. It was also before he and his wife went on their massive payola spree and he didn't have to be PM to avoid being in jail. Now, he'd do pretty much anything to retain power though. He'd probably start by arresting all the Arab MK members or similar rather than trying to assassinate Yair Lapid or whatever though. I doubt anyone could be charged retroactively with genocide denial. If it wasn't designated one at the time you said it you should be safe. Could be (from what I hear is, but with all the obvious provisos applying) a stupidly written law, but those are usually written that way to allow for targeted prosecutions of people you don't like, and the German Government isn't likely to target itself. Deliberately, at least, given the upsurge in interest in events in Namibia in 1908 backing Israel may have been stupid for reasons other than simple optics. A ruling might stop weapon shipments and overt political support but, well, the west isn't exactly great with honouring court judgements that go against them. Ask Mauritius when they're getting Diego Garcia back despite the 13-1 (the US judge, ho hum, drones gotta drone) ICJ ruling and the supplemental 116-6 (lol) UNGA vote.

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.