Zoraptor

The fundamental problem with Assad losing, now, is that the stridently anti Assad Syrians are all either dead or fled already, so there's little additional damage to be done if he continues ruling except for the embarrassment. Refugees aren't willingly going to go home any time soon, and all you'd get from a rebel victory now is millions of pro Assad people fleeing the country as well, plus a bunch of genocidal score settling with Druze/ Christians/ Shia/ Alawite minorities. Assad was probably the lesser evil from 2012, by that time the largest opposition groups were already ISIS lite groups like Ahrar ash Sham/ Jaish al Islam and ISIS' literal progenitor Jabhat al Nusra (AQI's 'Support Front' for Syria, and while JaN split over becoming ISIS AQI literally became it). The early support was almost exclusively from Iran rather than Russia using proxies like Hezbollah and Liwa Fatimayoun/ Zeinabiyoun from Afghanistan and Pakistan, and arming others like Liwa Al Quds (Palestinian refugees based in Syria). The Russians did almost nothing prior to 2015 even when it came to supplying excess equipment*, except for vetoes in the UNSC (mostly backed by China) and they didn't veto everything there either. The best evidence for that very limited involvement is what happened when Russia did intervene despite that intervention being mostly limited to a couple of dozen planes and helis and involving very few boots on ground outside Hmeimem AB- it permanently changed the situation on the ground in months, and made it obvious that the war was lost for the rebels after barely a year. Indeed, post intervention there was not a single significant long term gain from the rebels, which certainly was not the case beforehand. Iran still supports Syria more than Russia in terms of (proxy) boots on ground, and supplies a lot of oil etc free. Most of the casualties in the war came prior to the Russian intervention, and by a pretty decent margin. *certainly in part because a dearth of equipment was not really Syria's big problem, they probably had too many armoured vehicles which meant a lot got captured by the rebels, but they still had something ridiculous like 2000 tanks. OTOH, they could really have used some modern planes instead of relying on 50 year old models like the MiG-21 and Su-22, and trainer aircraft with juried attack rigs. Even when they got 'modern' stuff after the intervention there wasn't much of it, and a lot was being trialed by Iranian proxies for potential purchase by Iran (eg most of the T-90 tanks and some of the 'funnies' like the TOS-1).

That's SNHR, who split from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights for not being extreme enough, and from 2016 though that mostly effects the Coalition numbers, for example, in Raqqa. Most significantly, SNHR also includes rebel combatants as civilians, unless they directly defected from the army, so there are ~100k people included who weren't actual civilians (cf SOHR who despite being anti government do separate combatant rebels and civilian deaths and who estimate ~120k or VDC who estimate 130k). That's also why SNHR figures for combatant casualties look really weird, with the side with more tanks and planes suffering considerably more combat losses than the side without them. As per above, civilian deaths are estimated in the ~120k area, IIRC comparable with Afghanistan post intervention; 400k is for all deaths including military. If we use that 400k, then we use the full combatant numbers for Iraq on all sides too, and that's, well, a lot lot more. Estimated civilian deaths in Syria caused by Russia and the US are pretty comparable on a like/ like basis, 8000 v 4000. Indeed, on a genuinely like/ like basis the coalition ends up potentially looking worse since they retook a lot less urban area and a lot less population than the government did, certainly more than the 2x factor in civilian deaths. East Aleppo alone was multiple times the population of the largest city retaken by the SDF, Raqqa. The more urban area, the more civilians will die. Meh, Trump supplied lethal weapons too (eg Javelins), and he was seen as being soft on Russia. And he wanted to bomb Russian SAMs in Syria and had to be talked out of it by Mattis, lest we forget. And he expelled a bunch of Russian diplomats, and they expelled a lot more of his. Lethal weapons only matter if an escalation is intended, and as per previous we get 'imminent invasion' articles and claims every year when the Russians hold war games. Biden's walking a tightrope where his support base has been fed a diet of Russiagate and Trump Derangement Syndrome conspiracies for 5 years which brings certain expectations- and when they get debunked, like the 'bounties', it's always with a murmur not a shout. But any contest with China will be a lot easier with the Russians on board, or at least not inextricably bound to China. So you get a round of tepid expulsions and sanctions so weak that the Ruble rose significantly after they were announced, and an apparently condition free offer of a summit. I'd go so far as say that it's a surprisingly sound strategy. Soundbites for the baying masses like calling Putin a killer- which Putin won't care about even slightly- while keeping lines of communication well and truly open on other issues.

They're meant to be inviting 5 teams on a per season basis though, so long as they're Macclesfield or Carlisle Arsenal and Tottenham should be guaranteed to finish at least 6th from bottom. Oh who am I kidding, Arsenal would somehow contrive to lose to Macclesfield and Carlisle too, especially if there's no threat of actual relegation. On the plus side though, there's the perpetual amusement remembering all the people who thought Wenger was the problem...

100% pure Gromnir. Can't even do a basic internet search properly, thinks a major survey has 5 questions; and it's someone else's fault and they're lazy for correcting him, which is very much a pattern response when he's found wanting. Also, him having a long list of people he picks fights with isn't a problem, on the contrary it's a sign of virtue. Not sure if that constitutes an actual narcissistic personality disorder, but it would be deliciously ironic considering the thread subject. Thing is, I don't single you out, I'd have written- and have written- similar responses to heaps of other people without issue indeed I've done so on things like suicide rates and gun crime, deaths by terrorism and maps from NATO that forget Kaliningrad is part of Russia; you just trigger easily and take even the most minor correction as a personal affront to your gravitas, even when it's on stuff you literally know nothing about. And your response is always to repeat stuff until the other person gives up, giving you the 'win', and reinforcing that pattern of behaviour. That's why you have a list of people you argue pointlessly with, and I don't.

Dunno, you'll go a long way to find two people I obsessively pick fight with on this forum whom I can segue said obsessive need for attention with. And I told you last time, 300USD per hour or part thereof and I'll do research for you, that's my rate. Shouldn't have made the joke about accepting payment in lolz, obviously. For you, payment very much demanded in advance.

Dunno, obviously the jury is very much still out for The Nevers so far as I'm concerned but I may end up liking it. The overt Whedon style is definitely a negative so far though. I watched Buffy and Angel fairly recently, and enjoyed them as much as ever, but... The Nevers feels really derivative, but derivative of stuff I generally like so I'm willing to give it a go. Not just previous Whedon stuff either as the setting and style feels Penny Dreadfulesque too (and the lead looks a decent bit like Eva Green). (I kind of blame video games to an extent for a certain amount of Whedon fatigue. Bioware in particular but many others too seem obsessed with a bunch of Whedon type tropes like everyone being a pithy one liner machine firing witty repartée at each other in a way that real people simply don't do. I rather liked the latinesque dialogue structure in Spartacus (TV) for example, but I'd rapidly get sick of it if every second show or game seemed to use it)

Funny really, an obsessive need to pick fights with one poster segues perfectly into an obsessive need to pick fights with another, all to deflect from being found to be lazy. Guess it's too much to expect for you to apologise to Skarp_One for jumping to ignorant conclusions, just time to double down like you did when claiming AOC lied more than Trump. 100% pure Gromnir, blame someone else for finding a link hidden cunningly behind the obscure and arcane academic mask of, uh, google search. Well, duckduckgo search in my case, as I am not a peasant.

Is that the NYT article that somehow managed to make it sound like the withdrawal was entirely Biden's idea and didn't mention that it was actually a deadline extension from the one Trump announced? (Actually no, that was an opinion piece that went to ludicrous lengths to pretend that Trump never existed and not only didn't mention his deadline but never mentioned him at all. Although seemingly the above article also does not mention that it's a deadline extension from one Trump announced, albeit I only skimmed it)

Well, if you'd spent 30s instead of just looking up the 1st pdf you could find thinking that was the list of questions you could have saved me that 30s I spent. I charge at 300USD/ hour or part thereof, fortunately I accept accept payment in lolz which you are always good for. As it happens, was not intended as a gotcha to make you look stoopid, despite you obviously intending the original to make Skarpen look stoopid. That, you've managed to do entirely by yourself.

I enjoyed it, but... it's extremely obvious that it's a Joss Whedon title, close to the point of being distracting/ outright parody when it comes to dialogue (and, of course, the superhero landing).

You have to pay for/ subscribe to the full data set/ questionnaire from Pew, the publicly available questions in the pdf about Trump covid etc are just a sample. But while there is no primary source available unless someone wants to get a sub the derived/ secondary source (graphs) were generated by a PhD student and don't seem to have had any claims of being made up or anything. Whole twitter thread is pretty interesting, even if it's of limited relevance to me. Took about 30s to find. Using 'old' data sets for analysis is pretty common. They often cost less, you have (had) a lot more time to mess around with them than something released a month ago or whatever, and often you're limited to, well, the most recent occasion on which the relevant questions were actually asked. Something like mental health may well be asked every couple of years or every year but certainly not monthly, so the next set of data may be 2021 or 2022.

Yeah, all the great early civilisations were around rivers with relatively large flat plains or relatively enclosed seas, which are in short supply in Africa except the North. Most African civs had to travel very long distances for trade and the like, and had limited exchange of ideas as opposed to the Med which spoke Latin and its derivatives and Greek for centuries++. Even somewhere successful like Mali was still very isolated comparatively and reliant on an arduous trip through the desert or the Portugese for most trade. There's also significant periodic environmental problems like drought, and rampant disease. While something like malaria was a problem in a lot of places when a disorder as bad as sickle cell anaemia is selected for rather than against due to it conveying resistance to malaria you know that malaria was (and still is) a massive problem. If you had an African Solon/ Aristotle/ Archimedes- which there almost certainly were, Great Zimbabwe has some pretty amazing engineering for example- the chances were high that they'd die of disease, their civ would die due to environmental issues and no one would be able to understand their language after a few years.

Has not been a good week or so for 50ish British actors and cancer after Paul Ritter and Helen McCrory.

Most indications are that the Chinese were if anything outright annoyed by the coup in Burma, and certainly didn't orchestrate it or similar. The civilian government was not, after all, particularly pro west and was being regularly criticised for things like ethnic cleansing by them. From China's pov replacing the pro China government with another pro China government with added low grade civil war and bad PR with the general population is a big net loss, not a net gain. A continuing civilian administration would still have been strongly pro China. The main reason the coup happened was how badly military backed politicians did in the previous election. Losing an election outright when you get to appoint ~25% of members, and losing worse than you did last time made it clear that permanent loss of military influence was only a matter of time under a democracy despite relations being pretty decent otherwise. Geography is awful for China exporting via land. It's more expensive than shipping, requires expensive infrastructure and expensive maintenance of that infrastructure and is literally under snow/ ice for six months of the year. It's also a very long way away from the industrial heartland of China's eastern seaboard so you'd have to transport it all across China which itself is a huge country. That's why they're pushing the Philippines. The various China Seas are all ringed by US aligned countries' islands, which makes a blockade easy. You don't even need many ships for it, certainly not ships kept expensively and semi permanently on station. Knock a hole in the ring and it makes a blockade more difficult and expensive, and put in forward bases close enough- like on built up artificial island in the Paracels etc- and you can project enough force far enough to make it difficult too. Pushing India was pretty stupid though, and was almost certainly a stunt for internal consumption that backfired. Especially since Xi and Modi are pretty similar, it wasn't even a lack of empathy from Xi- ie considering how India would 'feel'- it was a lack of considering what he himself would do in response if attacked.

It takes way longer than 6 months. You still have decent protection after 3 months with a single shot of AZ for example, let alone with the booster. The main reason they're discussing it for Sinopharm/ Sinovac (CoronaVac) is that they're of very low relative efficacy, so any drop off- or any increase gained- is important to keep immunity above the level required for them to be deemed effective and approach herd immunity levels. It's very much diminishing return though, you get far more effect from the first dose than the second, and more from the second than a 3rd; so you're better off vaccinating more people twice than fewer people 3 times. You can also mix and match the vaccines to boost response. Sputnik is already such, since it uses a different adenoviruses in each dose which is why it has better efficiency than the otherwise similar AZ/ J&J vaccines. Virus variants bypass some immunity, but so far not much.

A war with a blockade would implode China's economy, possibly worse than the US/ EU. Which is a big problem for a country whose social stability and acceptance of a repressive government is based largely on that government delivering continuous improvements in living standards and economic growth over 30 odd years. No doubt Xi and the CCP would paint any war as a nationalist struggle against those who want to humiliate China again, but eventually they'd have to try and get out of it. Even in a situation in which there's limited 'hotness' to a war- so no attacks on infrastructure like power etc- China has a limited internal market and relies on exports which would be blocked, and China has no ability to break a blockade. They can transit goods through 3rd party countries like Russia or Myanmar in theory, but that's way more expensive than sea transport and neither would do it out of the goodness of their heart. Indeed, the only China proximate port(s) of a 'friendly' power would be the also readily blockadeable Vladivostok and the already semi blockaded DPRK. Russia would probably benefit from it rather than lose out. China will want to transit goods through them, and a sea based oil blockade would lead to them wanting more Russian hydrocarbons especially, and other raw materials and food as they run out, with a reversal in leverage. So much so that it's unlikely Russia could supply anywhere near all the demands, but what it could it could set the price of. Also gives Russia a lot of leverage with the west, since they'd be wanting Russia to enforce a blockade (and on Europe's part, they'd probably like Russia to run deniable shipments of key goods through to them).

There's already a show with faith based super powers, it's called South Park.

Biden extends US troop presence in Afghanistan until at least September 11 (from May 1). Some amusing framing going on to try and make it not sound like an extension, and one that could be further prorogued. Practically, matches the announcement from the last week about the US withdrawing all (combat) troops from Iraq, (with no timetable). It already is winnable, militarily, as the Chinese would take Taiwan if they invaded and they'd hold it permanently once taken. The US won't use nukes to defend Taiwan, and that's what it would take to 'win' against an invasion. An invasion would result in both China and the US destroying each others' economies though, and for that specific situation is the MAD that prevents anything happening yet.

I guess in the purely technical/ historical sense wanting to restore the USSR is right wing since the original right wing denoted supporters of the French status quo ante, but I suspect you're not talking to many 18th century french political theorists. In the modern sense it might be little c conservative to support the USSR as a former soviet citizen, but it definitely isn't something you'd expect from someone who would normally be labeled as right wing for anything else. People do rather love labeling whatever they can as far left/ right for PR purposes, it's one of the things that gets my eyes rolling consistently.

Communist Party of Russia is still the 2nd largest voting bloc. And even in Russia people don't really like beating up grannies and veterans for their political views. MellowCommander is of course completely wrong about it being regarded as right wing, it wanting the USSR restored is revanchist* which is left/ right agnostic and everything else about them is the standard left wing authoritarian you'd expect. The right wing revanchist group is Zhironovsky's 'liberals', the 3rd biggest faction, which basically wants the Russian Empire back instead of the USSR. (The revanchism is why I'm always amused at western media descriptions of anti Putin protests where there are lots of soviet flags and Russian Imperial flags being waved- those waving them are exactly as inimical to the west as Putin is, more so in Zhiro's case even taking into account him overplaying it for effect. Still, better than events where western media outnumber Russians like some of the recent pro Navalny ones) *where Revan's name comes from in KOTOR, for anyone who didn't already know. Originates from Frenchie butthurt about losing Elsass-Lothringen to some blokes with spikey helmets, where regaining those territories was political orthodoxy for left and right.

If they really want to boost sinopharm's effectiveness they'd have to mix and match it with a different vaccine. Extra doses of the same one won't have much added effect. In terms of side effects the number of medications more likely to kill you than the AZ vaccine is... extensive, and includes for example pretty much every antibiotic in existence. And of course covid itself is far more dangerous taking it if it's available is a real no brainer unless you're somewhere you won't get covid.

Yep*, what the US is doing blocking AZ exports I have no idea. Either approve it and use it yourself or allow the exports, but instead there are literally millions of doses sitting around in storage. That's even worse since vaccines have a fairly short shelf life even when stored correctly. *EU has definitely put pressure on Pfizer/ Biontech not to export though, but short of blocking them.

Not really were. Anez/ Bolivia was less than 18 months ago (just). Doesn't matter how many precautionary tales there are of sponsored right wing figures like Noriega or Honduras' Hernandez 'going rogue' (and given the CIA's history with drug running the 'rogue' part may just have been selling to the wrong people or not giving the CIA their cut...) they'll always go back to that well. Same with Islamists after Afghanistan in the 80s; CIA sponsored a variety of loony tune head choppers in Syria that went as far as fighting Pentagon backed forces, and ambassador emeritus Jim Jeffrey's best buds in Syria were whacky Turkish sponsored ethnic cleanser jihadis- at the expense of the leftist Kurds who'd fought alongside the US- and he wanted the US to reconcile with Al Qaeda's Syrian branch.

Like Bolsonaro, Anez, Pinochet, Gaultieri, etc etc who had the fulsome support of the west? Right wing despots are bread and butter to us. Or of course the case study of literal CIA sponsored genocide of Mayans in Guatamala. To be fair they probably would have preferred Nemtsov over Navalny, but you use what you have available. Ironically the media coverage is so poor and so laced with overt russophobia that it's lowering support for Navalny not increasing it. I particularly enjoyed the Newsweek(?) article on 'mass' pro Navalny demonstrations across Russia where the mass crowd was literally outnumbered by western journalists... Most of the 40% who want new leadership want either the Commies or 'Liberals' (Zhirinovsky, so not liberal in any western sense). Younger demos who don't remember Yeltsin tend to favour the Liberals if uneducated, and Navalny or other reformists if educated/ professionals. Very very few who remember Yeltsin want anything to do with anyone seen as western aligned, the overt western sponsored fraud in the 1996 elections to get Yeltsin re-elected, massive decline in living standards and life expectation plus collapse in international prestige and outright bankruptcy saw to that.

AZ is far from the worst performer. J&J and all the Chinese ones are worse, probably the Indian one too. The only ones better are Sputnik, Moderna and Pfizer, and the latter are also 20x more expensive. A local AZ vaccine is ~2USD for a course, Pfizer brough as a priority is 56USD. Which is why I'm deeply suspicious of us getting Pfizer here for cheap when we also have a review of our drug buying agency going on simultaneously, no way we're getting a good deal without any 'conditions'. Australia went all in for AZ because it can be manufactured locally so is cheap and not subject to being blocked by the EU or US. So could Sputnik or one of the Chinese ones too, but I'd presume if they were going to still do local manufacturing away from AZ they'd license J&J for geopolitical reasons.