My guess would be that as France tried to recover from WWII they stubbornly tried to claw back their imperial holdings, basically starting the Vietnam War and probably some other more minor conflicts that I’m not remembering right now.

Not that you should expect good faith reasoning from .mlgrad.

Give em a little bridal garter on their landing gear

I think DPRK’s hope is that at least some soldiers and officers will return with some modern combat experience, something that their military organization is dreadfully lacking. It could end up being a bigger problem down the road for ROK even if they lose a few thousand bodies.

I thought that the solution there has always been to bury it in desert bunkers for 10,000 years.

If we’re still around by the time that becomes too cumbersome we are hopefully space-faring and then yeeting it into Jupiter becomes an option.

Well it’s a salt rifle, not a salt assault rifle.

The fact is that multiple third parties, including the UN, have confirmed the countless atrocities being committed by the IDF.

The fact is that Israel has murdered a considerable number of aid workers from said third parties.

The fact is that the IDF is trying its damndest to keep aid from getting to civilians in Gaza, so they can continue their ethnic cleansing.

The fact is that the ICC is seeking an arrest warrant for Netanyahu for these crimes.

The fact is that in a just world, there would be a NATO coalition bombing the IDF into the fucking dirt right now like we did with Milosevic’s Yugoslavia.

I thought tankies generally liked to point out the hypocrisy of the Western “rules based order” and generally took the side of Palestine or even Hamas in this conflict?

This looks like garden variety hasbara to me.

It was never really more than a tech demo from my understanding. You had to muzzle-load the projectiles by hand, there wasn’t a practical reloading mechanism.

That, and if there was ever a timing issue with the firing sequence or a misfired round, it would be like firing a round after a squib load I would guess.

There are fan projects like 2009scape that you can play for free.

There was just a story about a group of surrendering Russian soldiers getting shelled by Russian artillery. It isn’t 100% clear that it was intentional, but its hard to not envision it as a throwback to the Soviet penal legions of old.

I’m sure by now they have figured out (or rediscovered, more likely) tactics to minimize the risk of their conscripts folding, sadly.

Or they just keep quiet and lie and do whatever they want. Hard to prove guilt in the sticks if there isn’t a game warden nearby.

Here’s an anecdote from an American outdoors industry leader where he admits he doesn’t give a shit about conservation laws and admits to seeking out and killing at least one bear, against the advice of fish and wildlife, because he deemed it to be dangerous. https://www.buffalobore.com/index.php?l=product_list&c=108

One, it does give some room to dismiss accusations, even if just rhetorically.

Two, when you are able to coerce your subjects to say the sky is green, the sun sets in the East, and Dear Leader won the election, its an exercise of power over them. It feeds the ego and it becomes a litmus test for the disloyal.

Understand that some or most of the key posters there are literally pawns of Russian or Chinese intelligence. Troll farms, wumao, what have you. Whether they are literally government employees or contracted through a third party, their purpose is to astroturf positive optics of their employer and negative optics of the US/the West as a whole. A more sinister interpretation, they are trying to destabilize the West by doing things like trashing Biden, now Harris, hoping to secure a chaotic and inwardly destructive Trump presidency.

Anything they say is to service these goals, anything they believe is mutable to these goals, and nothing they argue is in good faith.

It probably was fake. I’d imagine the people who are selected for these assignments are borderline or complete sociopaths who don’t have problems putting their mission above their entanglements.

If these kids are old enough to have any sense they aught to flee the first chance they get.

As an American I think that would all be reasonable…if the official US position was that Mexico has no right to exist, the Mexican people should be forcibly integrated into our society as 2nd class citizens, and the US Army was in the process of a “peacekeeping operation” in Mexico to carry all this out.

For all our flaws, we respect the borders of our neighbors and don’t have irridentist aspirations that belong in the 19th century. Russia is the aggressor here, and they have demonstrated that they have little interest in global peace or human rights, only increasing their sphere of influence.

Continually rolling over for thugs because it’s what avoids nuclear conflict will only lead to a global order based on thuggery, and it likely won’t even avoid nuclear conflict in the end.

And conservative voters see any measure to tackle this issue, no matter how benign, as “weak liberal nonsense” and “a waste of time” that cheapens our fighting ability. Of course I’m sure their hearts are set on what’s best for our military, and not that they’re sexist, racist abusers who don’t want their sexist, racist abuse to be challenged.

This issue goes back at least as far as living memory for the US. We were particularly vicious to German women at the end of WWII. GI’s having illegitimate children with local women in Asia during our multiple wars there was so common it’s basically a trope.

I’ve thought about this a lot. I think its more the sheer oversaturation of “culture” than it is a true lack of imagination. People alive today consume exponentially greater amounts of “culture” (for the broadest term possible) than anyone ever before, and it’s not even close.

When tech enables you to experience a movie or a video game or a performer 30 years after the death of everyone involved, in essentially the same fidelity as the day it debuted, “old culture” has a much harder time making way for “new culture.” If Star Wars exists, why care about Rebel Moon or whatever that movie was called?

I think the public consciousness can only maintain cognizance and interest in so much, but at the same time creatives are constantly adding to the Culture Pile. But the more tech enables us to hold on to our past, it becomes more and more difficult to move on, and the majority of new stuff goes unwanted and unappreciated. And so the mass market dives into keeping the old alive with reboots, remakes, remasters, and now AI recreations, because that’s what people respond to.

They wanted to impede the soft power of China in the region. It does make sense in a realpolitik kind of way, but someone with a fucking conscience in the command chain should have stopped this.

The only thing Bethesda is motivated to do, frothing, absolutely chomping at the bit, is figure out a way to successfully monetize modded content.

No, they absolutely used it as a ground-attack incendiary and have admitted as such. They were not flushed out by being illuminated, they were flushed out with choking smoke and burning shit raining down on their positions.

Even if they did only use illumination flares, there are considerations against using them in civilian areas in ways that can start fires or otherwise cause injury to civilians.

The legal issue is moot because the US was not an adherent to these laws until 2009.