lol what Trump didn’t give a rapist boxer a boost in popularity for a presidential bid in Ireland by doing some BS PR with him? What??? What madness has this world come too?

This is how quickly the cancer of militarism spreads and why war is the favorite tool of the ruling class rich, time immemorial, to put off making concessions to society so that the average person can live a somewhat decent life.

Modern professional militaries don’t need hundreds of thousands of troops, you don’t need to mainline jingoism and nationalism straight into your fucking veins to defend your country from Russia, just make sure your military has the right capabilities to make a Russian land invasion as absolutely costly as possible.

What conservative warhawks will hear though is “tear our society apart and pre-emptively destroy everything we hold dear because of the threat of an enemy invader, and then in that militarism invite in corruption from Russian aligned assets anyways that exploit the opening created by the deafening roar of righteousness of the military industrial complex”.

Resist them with everything you have.

for some reason I originally had it in my head the Paladin wasn’t as large as an artillery piece, idk why, I guess because it is tracked and it was developed so many decades before this current wave of self propelled guns were developed.

Still, my point stands though, if the U.S. was serious about arming Ukraine from the beginning, they would have focused on supplying Ukraine with self propelled guns and lots of artillery. It feels like the effort to help Ukraine defend itself was more an effort to help stall the war and keep Russia from decisively winning for as long as possible…

This started under Biden, and centrist democrats gleefully shouted down progressives sounding the alarm like the good little fascism apologists that US centrists are. It is now much worse under the Trump regime, but you are 1000% right.

Even in modern war, a significant amount of armor is lost not from literally being blown up, but from breaking, getting stuck, being abandoned after a flank cuts off retreat in a vehicle etc…

You are ignoring the elephant in the room, which is that a rising sense of militarism quickly feeds into a decay of your society, if you make an incredible amount of guns somebody is going to use them, that is how these things work.

I am not saying Europe shouldn’t absolutely take being able to militarily counter Russia seriously, as they should any regional threat, but what is needed isn’t necessarily to reshape Europe into a hypermilitarized environment, especially in the area of police and the militarization of police, what Europe needs is to make sure it has effective counters to a mass, mechanized land war. What conservative war hawks in Europe will advocate for is a militarization of police and of society, that is not what is needed. You need the right military assets to make a ground war incredibly costly for the Russians.

One of the most effective counters, and a decisive element of the war in Ukranian has been HIMARs, long range missiles launched from trucks and armor capable of striking mobile Russian SAM assets and other high value targets from extremely far away. These make maneuvering a large concentrated armored force much much much more costly and dangerous for an invader.

…but ultimately this all devolves into a sense of militarism that undermines the original reason for making all the guns in the first place, it is just a matter of how far you can push it in your society before that cancer becomes terminal… see the U.S. as a prime example…

Edit It looks like Ukraine has began serious production of truck mounted mobile 155mm artillery systems, something the US doesn’t take seriously here because it can lean on an assumed air superiority to deliver overwhelming force, something Ukraine can’t do . This coupled with a depletion of Russian tanks might actually be decisive here since the more Ukraine can field mobile, extreme lethality cannon artillery the more necessary it becomes for Russia to have main battle tanks with significant armor and extreme survivability under the hellish conditions of metal shards hurtling at terrible speeds in all directions from exploding ordnance…

The problem with artillery smaller than this is that it doesn’t actually pose an existential threat to very highly armored/entrenched targets and the range is that much more limited. Again, if the U.S. had taken arming Ukraine seriously, they would have made sure that the Ukranian military had a very deep and resilient supply of mobile artillery pieces that could serve in place of the role U.S. airpower plays (or U.S. forces assume air power will play at least). As long as Ukranian infantry has access to effective, shoulder launched anti-tank weapons this could tip the balance of the war significantly.

I mean this is a great example of what happens when you put conservative men in power who think they know what they are doing but are just going to loudly, incompetently and incorrectly re-invent the wheel while everyone else suffers from not having an actual practical solution.

Israeli air strikes continued on Sunday, March 30, the first day of Eid al-Fitr, with attacks targeting tents sheltering displaced Palestinians in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis.

How pathetic, heinous and blatantly genocidal it is to bomb a refuge camp with multimillion dollar fighter jets.

I spit in the face of anyone that takes pride in this or thinks this is righteous, this is no different than walking into a camp of starving refugees (you caused to starve) with a machine gun and randomly shooting up tents full of women and children. Actually, incredibly it is more pathetic than that because murdering a child with a bomb dropped from a plane means you don’t have to look the child in the face as you murder them and their family.

Exactly, this is something lost in propagandizing this as a war and not a genocide, the IDF does not know how to fight a combined arms conflict at infantry level nor are they motivated in a professional military sense, they have just been practicing genocide with very expensive machines of war and dropping an incomprehensible amount of bombs in a shockingly tiny area which I would imagine among other things makes you poorly mentally equipped with no mental plasticity to handle the speed and lethality of a motivated, near-peer opposing military that isn’t already conveniently contained within an open air prison.

This is going to end very badly for jews and people in general living in Israel, which among other reasons (obviously) is why the Palestinian Genocide is catastrophic.

Like without the infinite arms supply and backing of US air power dominance, an IDF brigade in Ukraine would get steamrolled by the Ukranians or the Russians for that matter.

One man’s slowing growth is another man’s hardening growth (me, from reading this headline).

Hey sorry, I posted our security plan with itemized lists of when vital security assets will be in place on yahoo answers, it was an honest mistake I was posting another question about how to remove really white persistent couch stains and I forgot to log out is all.

It is no problem, Jeb Bush came to the rescue by accident when he was browsing the site and caught it before any baddies could read it thankfully.

All of those medals of honor we saved from the diversity folks, are we allowed to reassign them? Jeb deserves one anyways hope I am not leaving TOOOOO long of a facebook message with this on your public wall! Don’t get mad at me winky emoji

his childish half assed plan to annex greenland is probably codenamed “Operation Cement Lawn” which probably gave him the genius idea to literally cement over the whitehouse lawn.

I think I put more effort into this stupid joke than Trump puts into literally anything.

There has to be a scoreboard for this

They should name their union Unionvision

It is good, idk, it isn’t flashy but if you give the gameplay a try it is just damn good. It isn’t really arcadey like bf2 though, everything is very lethal.

Also the big “swingset frame” looking structure repairs and rearms vehicles.

Nah it isn’t ideal, I wanted to make a post about it eventually but I wanted to try some third party docks and/or see if updates fixed it.

What I have figured out is that the best way to use the dock is to boot the steam deck up not connected to the dock, get it to the home screen and then connect it to the dock. I find this has the best chance of inititating everything right.

Make sure to check the controller order under the control settings for a particular game, use change who is the number 1 control input easily once you learn where it is, and that can help some of the problems that arise.

I don’t have any performance issues, but not that if you try to run a really high resolution tv at anywhere near a native resolution the steam deck just is going to quickly be outclassed by the performance demands. So idk, 720p sounds suspiciously low though, try checking the settings (under the lefthand bar) and examining how the display settings are set. Change it to native or some other setting and see if that helps, it might be that the settings are keeping your steam deck from jumping up to a higher resolution. Same thing with framerate lock, which you can check under the righthand bar, I recommend setting framelock settings (maximum framerate) on a pergame basis.

Look, same, but just for the fun of it I like to imagine there is some magic point here where HP decides to make a steam deck os handheld, but doesn’t give a shit enough to focus on loading it up with shovelware, they just sort of say ok lets make a handheld that can run steamos and just focus on the hardware, leave em to the wolves I mean steam support.

They can make decent hardware, at least on their business laptops, it can be wildly inconsistent, kind of reminds me of like an audi car (at least in the US) some of them are actually pretty decent and reliable but some of them are fucking horror stories that never end for the owner lol…

Bluesky is leaning into minimal, keeping the door open for most things as long as they’re legal.

This simply will not work, some other option, probably rushed, poorly thought through and ultimately more authoritarian than an honestly constructed moderation structure would have been will be implemented when this approach ultimately fails catastrophically.

I pre-emptively post a surprised pikachu here to signify this

Why are we acting like this is a detail.

Why did I have to burrow all the way down to this spot to see this?

The conversation should begin, or very nearly begin with this as it puts EVERYTHING ELSE around bluesky hype into question, it transmutes the castles you are describing into constructions of sand that might topple any moment to forces of money, greed and effective (even if not explicit) centralized control.

sigh I don’t mean to attack you personally, but this conversation feels so warped sometimes.