Zoraptor

I saw someone say that the Russians could invade with 45 minutes notice, and I wasn't sure if they were being facetious or not. Multiple sources are carrying various interpretations of that Biden/ Zelensky exchange. The most baffling part of it by far is 'once the ground is frozen'. It's already frozen and has been for weeks, and in contrast every day gets closer to the Rasputitsa. Could be a Bidenism of "while the ground is frozen" but even that doesn't make much sense in context. For the more full version, [with apologies for the shonky embed, I think twitter hates me for having high privacy settings and the original tweet got got...] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FKJDVv9XsAoYd-c?format=jpg&name=900x900 If it's an accurate representation- and there are multiple, similar takes from other sources- it's pretty damning. Well in that case you're repeatedly offering yourself as a target by defending belief based on revisionist history. They handwave 2 understrength divisions, presumably without being aware that the same organisational size force in the far less important Kurils was actually 80,000 men. They handwave the logistics. They handwave the soviets lack of amphibious troops, and lack of specialist ships, and the lack of non specialist ships, and the lack of airbasing options. They've got a hard on for Sakhalin, which is an awful analogue for an invasion of Hokkaido as the soviets already held the north of that island and had a near 5:1 advantage in numbers- including a lot of tanks, which could not be used in amphibious operations- instead of a likely 1:5 disadvantage for an amphibious invasion. They ignore the far more relevant Kurils where the soviets could only ever invade with a few thousand men at a time because that was their logistical limit, and they still had ~3000 casualties despite almost none of the Japanese there actually fighting. Any imminent invasion of Hokkaido would have been a disaster. The only reason an actual plan was developed at all was on the assumption it would not be opposed, and the Kurils disabused them of that. The vast preponderance of historical analysis is on my side, not yours. Sure, the soviets planned an attack on Hokkaido in the rhetorical/ theoretical sense. That was a threat for 1946 though, and realistically at least March at the earliest of that year. All the other stuff that made them surrender was happening right then.

Exactly. Nice links, you can get the previous debunkment of the fp article from there, though you'd just not read/ understand it, again. TL: obviouslyDR, Hokkaido was not defended by just 2 understrength divisions. Even if it were it would be irrelevant. The tiny and largely irrelevant Kurils were defended by two 'understrength' divisions too, the 89th and 91st. That was, hmm, 80,000 men. Because oddly enough not all units are divisions. Mostly though the soviets had extremely limited amphibious capacity which the Japanese knew, and is why they only developed a plan for an invasion after the Japanese had already surrendered and for a scenario where there was no resistance; and why they had to invade the miniscule Kurils over a roughly 2 week period, and why they never even took all the islands. Sakhalin is utterly irrelevant, as the soviets already held half the island. They also suffered the small matter of near 20% casualties despite most of their landings being literally unopposed. The reasons for Japanese surrender were the nukes and the utter collapse of the Kwantung Army in a week, which completely compromised the supply for the 3 million Japanese soldiers in China. A soviet invasion of Hokkaido might be a problem, eventually, but they had multiple more pressing things that had not gone entirely to their advantage happening right then. This isn't the Cold War. NATO has a massive advantage in terms of resources and troops, now. Indeed, it's one of the trademark signs of gaslighting that a force of 100k is being played up as if it's the ~10 million man Red Army of 1945 when it's literally 1% of the size. The entire deployable Russian army is only about 300k. Ukraine would add that many troops to NATO, by itself. The nukes Ukraine (and Belarus/ Khazakstan) had were unusable though. They probably could have reverse engineered them eventually, but that would not have been popular with anyone and have cost money that they didn't have. There's essentially no plausible scenario in which Ukraine retains the nukes that were based there to this day. Consider how different the reaction to Ukraine selling North Korea rocket engines would be if they also had nuclear warheads; no way it would be swept under the carpet then no matter how pro western the government. At best they could have retained them until ~2001. Kind of ironic though, the original reason why people think that nukes --> no invasion has nothing to do with Russia, but with the earlier western attacks on Libya and Iraq as opposed to the DPRK.

That isn't how chip manufacturing works though. Eventually the US could support itself in chips sure, but we're talking years, not months. You don't have generic chip wafers that you just plonk whatever designs you want on, the designs go hand in hand with the manufacturing process you use. Apple's M1 chip is designed for TSMC 5nm. And it's not just that it is not designed for, say, an Intel process, it's that Intel literally does not have an equivalent process in production. Their closest is roughly equivalent to TSMC 7nm, but is far less reliable even 6+ years after it was meant to launch. If Apple, with all its resources, had to switch to 'Intel7' (formerly Intel 10nm) they'd have probably 6 months with zero production in the best case. The Intel and TSMC approaches are pretty different, so at worst they'd have to do a far more comprehensive design; the one thing Apple could not do even with its massive resources is create capacity out of thin air. And that's Apple, for anyone else the problem gets exponentially worse. That's precisely why there's a scramble to get new fab capacity in the US and Europe, and lolly scramble of inducements too. That's going to take literal years though, as they're immensely complicated to build.

Lol, yearly reminder that the evidence Gromnir provided for that claim was a plan developed literally literally after the Japanese had already surrendered, which he got from a blog that literally literally lied about the dates. Shame I checked the source. Know all those estimates for invasion forces in the hundreds of thousands to million range required for invading the Home Islands that necessitated nuking two cities? Well, the Soviets were going to do it with like 6 ships, and an initial force of about 1500, ie one thousand five hundred. Oh yeah after that got debunked there was a multi hour long youtube video (with, of course, no time stamp provided, just watch the whole thing) that for some reason I couldn't be bothered watching. Uh, really? Russia's western border is almost entirely land, and thus unsuitable for carriers. China's east coast however is rather more suited to them. The options that the US has for land basing in Europe are practically infinite. The options that the US has for land basing off China's coast have a massive gap between Japan and the Phils, and The Phils and Singapore- and IIRC there are no land based US planes in Singapore either, only helis. The only added deterence from a carrier in the Med might, at a stretch, be an attack on Tartus or Hmeimem. Which can probably be discounted as being somewhat too much of an escalation. You cannot tell anything about priorities from that, at all. Meh, Estonia is already ~100mi from St Pete's, and that reality has been lived with for 30 years. The closeness to Rostov/ Smolensk/ Belgorod from Ukraine hugely outweighs that. And yeah, it's an open secret that Finland and especially Sweden are nowhere near as neutral as they say, already. If they actually joined NATO that would formalise something that is pretty close to de facto already for both, and in Sweden's case has been so pretty much since NATO was established. But, it's handy enough to have someone 'neutral' for exactly these sorts of situations that they probably won't.

I haven't seen it either but I'd tend to expect those problems to be due to a more meta explanation: role sanitisation. SW specifically (and Disney in general) have a habit of telling you that leads are in a dodgy profession to set them up with antihero cred, but they seldom actually show them doing bad stuff even when logically they should. And when they do do bad things it's almost always because a redemption ark is incoming or they're mind controlled or whatever. So you would have Boba Fett becoming a crime lord, but also not doing crime lordy stuff like death stick peddling and bumping off rival corner boys because drugs are bad and you simply can't have Marlo from The Wire as a lead in SW. Probably the best example is Han Solo, whose role as a smuggler got so sanitised that Lucas felt it necessary to retcon Han shooting Greedo first (which was entirely on Lucas, of course). What was Han smuggling for Jabba? Medical supplies, fluffy bunny toys and blankets for orphans? You'd think so... If you're told that someone is a crime boss or smuggler for a crime lord or whatever and they don't behave like it you tend to get ~cognitive dissonance~ from the contradiction. It's also why I have no expectations for them doing a 'bad guy' series like Darth Bane or whatever. Villain protagonists like- 'realistically' portrayed crime boss- Tony Soprano, Walter White, Vic Mackey or Dexter Morgan may get plaudits for depth of character etc but they're fundamentally incompatible with being kid friendly.

If you haven't played before you should just keep playing. You're better off not being spoiled.

Not just UK and US. The divide is mostly US/ UK and most of the Eastern European expansion members vs Germany and France. It's basically those who want NATO to be the be all and end all of European defence and thus need it to have A Perpetual Enemy to give it purpose, and those who want it supplanted or supplemented by a European Defence Force- that Russia could eventually be part of. That's why you have ludicrous statements like Russia being ready to invade at hours notice despite having a third of Ukraine's troops in the area and have had the same pattern of imminent invasion playing out roughly every 6 months for 7 years; in order for NATO to be capital N Necessary you have to have someone opposed to it, and the only candidate is Russia. It's extremely easy to stoke tensions when you know that there's not actually an invasion imminent, if anything Ukraine trying to tamp down tensions is evidence that they think things are going too far, and Putin may actually have been backed into a corner. Fundamentally though that's why Russia can never be allowed to join NATO- both Yeltsin and Putin tried, and the USSR tried to join as well in the 50s- and no concessions or limitations can ever be made to lower tension. You need the threat and you need the tension, else what's the point of NATO? And then you get the European Army France and Germany want instead.

I don't think there's anything surer than MS having tried to buy Steam. I'd be extremely surprised if they didn't have a standing offer now.

ISIS prison break in Syria is in its 5th day. May involve as many as 800 militants being freed, pretty much definitely 500. Of course they're being surreptitiously backed up by Turkey, as always, who drone struck the head of SDF Intelligence in the middle of things as a break from blowing up random Yezidis in Sinjar. Three years and pretty much nothing has been done about the prisoners except ignoring them and hoping the problem goes away- except, of course, western countries deciding people who grew up there and got radicalised there aren't actually their problem and should be foisted on impoverished countries like Syria, Iraq, Bangladesh and New Zealand via citizenship cancellations. (Note: that Al Jazeera article is actually pretty rubbish in a number of aspects, as they have a very heavy pro Turkey slant as do most of the commentators- especially Charles Lister- they reference, but it is a bit more in depth than the far more dry BBC equivalent. It's pretty much impossible to suppress ISIS in the Badiya permanently because it's like a scaled down Afghanistan in pretty much every respect. So no outright mountains, but lots of very rough terrain, caves and any operation to try and force ISIS out would be too porous; they just relocate temporarily. The problem in SDF areas is similar in effect, but for opposite reasons. It's mostly dry, flat, wasteland. Sure, you can put checkpoints in but they'd just get driven around or use smuggler routes- and checkpoints also make lovely targets for suicide bombers and massively annoy the local populace who then can't go anywhere without being stopped. Drones are useless too, so long as they aren't stupid enough to drive in convoys, since there are enough legit users to hide among. Finally, of course, the reason why there are tensions between the Deir ez Zor arabs and SDF is that those arabs literally literally were ISIS 5 years ago, and only switched sides when it became clear ISIS would lose. And, allegedly, when bribed to by Saudi Arabia. But hey, Turkey hates the SDF so gotta talk about dissension in its ranks in the hope it's true; same as the thousandth uncorroborated report of Iranian and Russian backed forces fighting each other because they want that to be true too)

Those aren't exactly great examples in this context, but you can take it as read that Russia has ignored or abrogated its fair share of agreements too and is most definitely a kettle. Point being of course that for some reason you only ever hear about said kettle in the media, and not the pot doing exactly the same thing. The Helsinki Accords and Budapest Memoranda don't have force of law, though as agreements they're fine to cite as examples. The former is irrelevant as a plus for Ukraine's position though as it is trumped by the Crimean Sovereignty Referendum of 1991 in which 94% of Crimeans voted to leave Ukraine. An approved referendum is a legal way to secede, and that makes the Helsinki Accords apply in Crimea's favour*, not Ukraine's. And yeah, the referendum was both approved and ratified by the Ukrainian SSR. Of course, that is never mentioned in the western press, nor is Ukraine sending in 70,000 troops and enacting Direct Rule in 1995 when the Crimean Parliament tried to action it. Indeed, Ukraine literally changed their constitution to make secession impossible after that, requiring every single oblast to majority vote for anyone to leave. The latter of course is a plural set of agreements and more properly referred to as the Budapest Memoranda; but strangely only the Ukraine one ever gets mentioned, and only recently. Reason for that being of course that the west is currently sanctioning Belarus, to whom another one of the Budapest Memoranda applies, in contravention of article 3, to whit "Refrain from using economic pressure on Belarus, [Kazakhstan and Ukraine] to influence their politics". Of course, that was flagrantly ignored by the west with regards to Ukraine too, when they had a Russian friendly government; and it was most definitely ignored by Russia when convenient as well. Not a treaty and never really worth the paper it was written on, for both the west and Russia. The 2007 Friendship Treaty was abrogated multiple times by Ukraine in 2014, even prior to Crimea agreeing to join the Russian Federation. They voted overwhelming to ban the Russian language (to be fair, in a moronic fit of revolutionary zeal with Svoboda brown shirts overseeing proceedings immediately post coup, but still) and voted multiple times for other measures that contravened the agreement. Let's also be frank, a Treaty of Friendship with Russia is intrinsically incompatible with joining NATO and handing Sevastopol Naval Base over to the US in exactly the same way a US- Canada Friendship Treaty is incompatible with Canada joining the Warsaw Pact and announcing that a purely defensive Soviet submarine pen up the St Lawrence was a great idea. And those were both things the post coup Kiev Government said they would do. *Of course the Helsinki Accords are in many ways a very self defeating issue to bring up anyway, since there's a very obvious counter example in Kosovo where pretty much every metric is worse than Crimea. Seized by force by NATO, quarter of a million Serbs ethnically cleansed under their aegis to make an Albanian ethnostate (one of which already exists anyway), and never even had a rigged referendum let alone a legit one. Completely against the 'rules based international order' that they want others to follow, and such a very obvious case of "rules for thee but not for me".

That at least has very little to do with Erdogan himself. Kurdish independence is utter anathema to every party in Turkey except the HDP and even they don't formally want secession, just more rights. Erdogan is also perfectly happy with Kurds running bits of his neighbours, so long as they're Uncle Toms like the Barzanis in Iraq and will sell him (well, his son) oil under the table. 'Kurdistan' is the perfect example of carrot dangling in foreign policy though. In the cold war it was the USSR dangling it for the PKK to get an insurgency going in Turkey, since then it's been consistently used by the west in Syria, Iraq and Iran- and while it hasn't been used by them in Turkey it's certainly one of the big reasons for tensions between Turkey and the west. It's pretty easy to judge how far they are willing to take that support in practice though, by the response to the Iraqi Kurd independence referendum. Pretty much zero international support bar thoughts and prayers from Israel- who'd support literally anything and anyone that weakens an arab state, hence the support for ISIS aligned Jaish Khalid ibn Walid in Syria- and the attempt was crushed with embarrassing ease by, well, the same Iraqi army that surrendered Mosul to a couple of hundred guys in Toyota Hiluces.

If there were to be an invasion- still very unlikely imo- Russia would want a border on the Dniepr* and a strip along the south coast. They certainly wouldn't want, say, Lvov except in exceptional circumstances. The Dniepr is defensible, and has lots of nice strategic assets like dams for leverage. It would basically be a crescent with its bottom edge on the Black Sea and its top against Belarus. A rump Ukraine is far less dangerous even if it did get into NATO. Having an aggressive, dishonest and expansionist alliance with a habit of abrogating and canceling treaties and agreements they see as limiting plus which was established with the express purpose of being anti Russian a hundred km from absolutely critical strategic sites like Rostov na donu or Smolensk is not something they want- and even if that view of NATO is not objective truth it's certainly how Russia sees it. *probably leaving a small Ukrainian bridgehead for the trans Dniepr part of Kiev.

Theoretically the Russians have up to 3 million troops that can come help them. The Ukrainians can bring in reserves too, but yeah they are screwed if it comes to an all out war. Not least because a decent number of troops will simply switch sides when push comes to shove, as happened in Crimea, and despite people trying to convince themselves otherwise. If it's all out war then formal arms supplies are pretty meaningless, as they'll just get bombed. You aren't going to have RAF transports flying to Kiev if there are Russian Su35s flying overhead however much of a chub it gives reddit generals to think so; they're only doing it now because it's safe. The west will cheerfully fight to the last Ukrainian and the US will happily fight economically to the last Euro, but that's the point the line will be drawn. The trouble with mentioning figures like 3 million is, of course, that a 'build up' of 100k troops then looks utterly stupid as it's 3% of that number. Indeed, the 100k figure meaning an imminent invasion looks stupid in pretty much any context that has, well, context. That's fewer troops than the US used in Iraq against a smaller enemy both area and population wise, and which had a smaller and less well equipped army, and where most major population centres were in a straight line alone the Tigris/ Euphrates valleys, and where a significant majority of the populace hated its leaders. 100k is 1 Russian soldier per 20m of border with Ukraine. Or roughly 1 Russian soldier per 150 Ukrainians in the most 'likely' occupation scenario. Or 1:3 odds for an attack against, supposedly, a well trained and armed Ukrainian army which has had to practical purposes infinite time to dig in and prepare. OK, so they'll have no air force after 48 hours, but still... Yet you have 'experts'- and despite the air quotes not just reddit generals but people with actual qualifications on the BBC etc- talking about imminent multi pronged assaults launched on, let's say, 45 minutes notice from Belarus, Crimea, Donetsk and Belgorod capturing Kharkov, D'prov', Mariupol, Odessa, Zhaporizie and half a dozen other pretty significant cities right on down to the Moldovan frontier and right up to the Dniepr; and doing it in a few days to a few weeks. Then they'll say how much the Ukrainian army has improved since Ilovaesk or Debaltseve. Their scenarios make no sense and have no internal consistency at all, yet get regurgitated acritically everywhere without even the most basic scrutiny. Given the performance of the western trained Afghan or Iraqi armies- or more fairly, the Georgian one in 2008 where they couldn't even take the Roki Tunnel or Tskinvali against 500 Ossetian militia and the survivors of a Russian peacekeeping unit- them losing badly and fairly quickly is pretty likely if it came to proper shooting, but that would require way way more than 100k troops from start to finish unless a really, really significant number of Ukrainians switch sides or immediately run away which we're told won't happen... And this all very likely completely unnecessary verbiage anyway, since we've had similar imminent invasion stories every six months since 2016.

It's understandable though. A lot of the popular mods for things like SS2 or BG2 or Deus Ex are all about rebalancing things. And while a lot of people love the cheesy mage battles of BG2, the silly over the top mage/ kensai dual class builds etc etc there are others who think they're just stupid and detract from the game. The classic example would be if you asked someone if they wanted off archetype builds like a 'smart' fighter to be a valid build in an RPG; they'll probably say yes, because fighters shouldn't have to be muscle bound morons. That sort of build is basically a self handicap in D&D though, and especially so in 2e like BG2. But when you actually apply the system to make a 'smart' fighter viable you then get people complaining about how that effects the systems and makes everything play the same or whatever. The other classic is trash mobs vs challenging fights. People will say they want meaningful, challenging fights. What they really want most of the time is trash mobs they can blow through quickly to make themselves feel awesome, and boss fights they can win with more difficulty to make themselves feel awesome. Every fight being a tactical challenge is not something most people really want, but it is something people feel like they have to say.

Some of the Javelins the US sent ended up in Russia. Ukraine supplied North Korea with rocket engines too- though there have been extensive efforts to cover that up, including labeling them, ludicrously, as 'soviet' to imply Russia sent them and despite the USSR not existing for decades before they were sold. The NLAWs are old and expiring, and much like all the TOWs that made their way to the moderate head choppers in Syria they'd cost more money to dispose of than to transfer and make someone else's problem. People might care if John Smith of the British Army gets blown up by malfunctioning kit, they won't care if Ivan Smithovich or Henna bin Muhammed do. Gotta say, I find the messaging around Ukraine absolutely hilarious because it's so very very muddled. Can't take land by force- except the Golan Heights, Kosovo, Jerusalem and Western Sahara, of course, they're all fine. Ukraine has developed so far under the western aegis and everyone is happy now corruption is gone- its economy is worse than Moldova's now, and it still has uncontrollable brain drain and rampant corruption. The Ukrainian army is western trained and armed so will provide a massive obstacle and cost to Russia- but 100,000 Russians are enough to launch an imminent invasion, at the small matter of 1:3 odds. Russia has nothing to fear from NATO, has no say on where we deploy and anyway our deployments are purely defensive- but every Russian deployment near a NATO country is wanton aggression; their fault for putting their country in a stupid place and they should stay at least 500km within their own borders.

Yeah, White March was a massive improvement and Deadfire built on those improvements too. Deadfire is a good game, if it has an intrinsic weakness it's still the Quest for Balance, though it's toned down a lot from PoE1. The irony with that is despite all the balancing you hit the level cap (pet peeve of mine) with about a quarter of the game to go- and it's worse for PoE where I hit the level cap in part 1 of TWM. Most of the issues with PoE1 have been covered- too much of everything, really- but I think that the fundamental problem was, paradoxically, that too much effort was put in. So it was too big, had too much writing, too much combat and everything had been exquisitely balanced. But, balanced gameplay is one of those things that people say that they desperately want, but don't actually want (well, excluding multiplayer type games). What they want is something that is interesting, and not too imbalanced. If you look at well regarded RPGs and hybrids from the late 90s to early 2000 you see... System Shock 2, hopelessly imbalanced; Deus Ex, full of exploits; Baldur's Gate 2, full of exploits and not very balanced; Planetscape: Tournament, where literally (and seemingly literally literally) no one likes the combat. And the successful contemporary RPGs have much the same pattern- the 'fun' of DOS2 is finding the appropriate ludicrous exploit for a particular battle, not its finely balanced systems because they aren't balanced at all.

US bombed Tabqa Dam in Syria despite being on a no bomb list. With 3 2000 lb bombs, no less. That's the small matter of 9.6 km^3 of water that could have been released down a densely populated river valley. They also then droned three of the experts sent to repair it, during a truce, and swore blind that no bomb had been dropped and no one had been droned... If one hadn't been a dud that would likely have resulted in the largest single incident civilian death toll since Hiroshima if not since the Tokyo fire bombing. To be fair, it was the notorious Talon Anvil task force- which systematically abused command and control shortcuts and completely disregarded civilian casualties- that ordered the strike rather than the normal chain of command, so it's just possible that the command did not know about it at the time. But if anything having rogue operators trying to kill 100,000+ people without knowledge let alone oversight from command is worse than command merely lying about it.

Kind of? S6 spoilers for anyone lagging, no book spoilers though as I haven't read them

Hobbies: playing Cornelius Hickey from The Terror Season 1 and attempting to blow up James I of England.

Why not milk the Gabe is God crowd for as much as you can? If people insist on only buying on Steam they're asking to be exploited if not by devs/ pubs then by Valve; and why would developers be 'nice' to Steam when they leverage that market dominance and the presence of so many steam only drones to keep their cut higher than anyone else? The simple solution for someone who wants to play it is to (1) but on Epic to save yourself 50% or (2) rent it on gamepass for ~80% discount- legally you're renting it from steam anyway, you just aren't being charged monthly. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the EU will actually block the sale on competition grounds. ARM/ nVidia will be blocked too, for that matter.

9 rings for mortal men doomed to die, 7 rings for the dwarven kings on their thrones of stone, 3 for the elven lords sipping chardonnay in their treetop swimming pools, one ring to rule them all, hash naz grimbatûl etc etc and yeah I can't be bothered looking it up. The elven rings were made by Celebrimbor alone, independently of Sauron, so don't have a corruptive effect though they are bound to the One Ring in terms of power output. The Dwarven rings exacerbated the users' negative racial traits- greed, mostly, with a bit of jingosim- but their stubborn nature could not be overcome by them alone. And yeah, men are feeble and corruptible, so for them it's wraith time. Wouldn't be at all surprised if the Dwarven Rings barely get dealt with at all though.

Taika Waititi with Rhys Darby automatically means a combination of utter deadpan and completely over the top. Kind of weird that it works so often, really. (And the trailer has Jethro Tull in it. My dad would like to put in a request for the next promos to feature something from The Incredible String Band or Steeleye Span, thanks HBOMax. And could you please decouple yourselves from Sky here too, if you're taking requests?)

Well of course when there's finally some momentum up to get rid of Bobby Kotick as CEO he goes and sells the company to Microsoft with no doubt a solid chunk of cash going to him above and beyond the value of his shares. Looking forward to Obsidian's Call of Duty RPG. Guess at some point they're going to run into regulatory problems with buying up companies though, especially in the EU. Actiblizz may be on a pretty obvious downslope, but it's still got as big chunk of the market.

Yeah Witcher S2 was a big step up from S1 in pretty much every respect. Dunno how much of a budget bump they got, but it also looked very much like a premium product, which at times it decidedly didn't in S1. The quality was enough that I could hand wave away some of the concerns with plot contrivance... The comparison to Wheel of Time is also pretty stark. Both had covid troubles, both took significant liberties with the source material and the like but Witcher was a quality product and WoT was a cheap looking badly written incoherent mess.

Ultimately, entry is always at the discretion of the host country. There isn't a capital R Right of entry unless you're a citizen or permanent resident (or Schengen and similar), there's only a privilege of entry. Most of the time you won't get Ministers interfering as there's no reason to and they have better things to do than read random immigration/ visa applications but they have the ability to in most places. Indeed they can approve applications that have otherwise been rejected if they want to as well as reject them. I don't think there's much doubt that this was a 'political' rejection designed to try and staunch the embarrassment of having the court overrule the initial rejection and keep Djokovic in the news instead of Scott Morrison's covid disasters, but it's within the law. Under normal circumstances a rich and powerful person who'd made some errors on their paperwork would get an override approval from a Minister instead, if they were important enough, but these aren't normal circumstances.