• 5 Posts
  • 216 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle

  • An important detail is that advanced western weapons are restricted to operations near our within the recognized borders if Ukraine. The arsenals, refineries, factories, and other strategic targets inside actual Russian territory have been hit with Ukrainian weapons. Most are relatively low payload drones, with some targets being serviced by Neptune land attack variants, which is definitely more advanced than anything in the Iranian arsenal for example. But I think the point stands that relatively cheap and simple systems have provided outsized results in the Ukrainian conflict.

    The reason there are warning signs for Israel is because of the sheer economy of drone bombing. When Iran launched over a hundred drones, and only three hit, the media had a chuckle. I’m sure the IDF and the American planners supporting them looked very nervously at the estimated 2.4 billion USD worth of ordinance deployed during the defence. Why do you think Ukraine and Russia are building cheap drones to kill other cheap drones. It’ll be interesting to watch.



  • Noting the downvotes on this I understand their view, don’t be down on a positive gesture. The issue is it’s an incredibly close analogy. He is apologizing for showing up, finding a population living in a region, and deciding that they needed to go. Through violence, lies, and genocide that population was driven from their homes and those lands were colonized. It’s exactly the same as Palestine. Precisely the same. While I applaud this statement, the support of exactly this crime, the willingness to plunge America into a wider war just to support Israel and it’s right to colonize Palestine shows the statement has no moral weight. It’s just words before an election.


  • In addition to the comments already posted, they had strategic reasons to withhold support as well. While Russia doesn’t pose a serious military or economic threat to RoK directly they could cause real problems. Part of the defensive advantage they have held against the North is a decade or three of technology lead. While joking about the actual effectiveness of Russian hardware is fun, large scale tech transfer to North Korea would change the strategic balance on the peninsula, RoK has pretty clearly sought to avoid that by limiting aid to Ukraine to non lethal items.

    The more Russia barters with the North though, the less likely RoK will see it that the transfer isn’t taking place anyways. Russia is gambling for short term help and risking a major new source of munitions and hardware for their adversaries.




  • I visited Budapest this fall, there are a lot of Hungarians that don’t support this government. That said, no matter how much it sucks for those people, it’s time to start looking at removing Hungary from the EU. NATO has no removal framework since that is counter to the nature of defensive treaties, but having hostile nations within the alliance threatens it’s integrity. Perhaps new structure will be needed to allow the quarantine of compromised members. At this point I would be very concerned if Hungary has full security access to NATO intelligence and planning, not to mention equipment.









  • My read on what he and others were concerned about was that DA Origins introduced an aesthetic of low fantasy, dark and medieval themes. Many felt, including him, that the new characters felt like very generic MOBA-style designs that didn’t feel particularly at home in the DA world they hoped to see. Since some channels have gotten to play the game now the outlook seems to be changing with some creators saying the trailers and released material did a poor job of showing the overall art direction. Also, it seems fun, that helps. Keep in mind, a healthy concern over Bioware is very warranted these days.



  • The key here is that this funding is for Ukrainian defense industry, it already has weapons systems capable of striking deep behind Russian lines. The US simply isn’t going to budge on allowing western weapons to be used, their policy is looking towards relationship reset following the end of hostilities, they don’t want Russia to lose since that could start a more prolonged cold war and period of instability. Ukraine will need to use it’s own systems, fortunately it is becoming more and more capable by the month.

    This is from memory so don’t take it as fully accurate, but I believe Ukraine was something like the world’s 6th largest arms manufacturer prior to the 2014 invasion of Crimea. They know how to make things go boom.