Panto_Villan

ATACMs aren’t well suited to taking out bridges. The Storm Shadows they already have would be better - so probably not. Although apparently Taurus missiles would be the best thing for it.

Russia will have absolutely no interest in discussing an end to the conflict until they know which way the US election goes in November.

Germany is quite an unusual example because the Eastern part remained under direct Soviet occupation for nearly fifty years after the end of WW2, and you could make a decent argument that the Western part remained "occupied" by NATO powers during that time too (albeit in a much less coercive manner). That's far longer than most countries get and is probably quite important in terms of building the institutions that a democracy needs to survive. Japan is arguably the more interesting example of success, where they went from a violent military dictatorship to a law-abiding democracy with only 10-15 years of occupation. I do wonder if Gaza is small enough that a stable government could emerge if external peacekeepers managed to drive out the militants and there was a major rebuilding drive from external aid agencies. Obviously Afghanistan was a distaster, but that's a huge country and has always been famously difficult to control.

I think he can keep up the intensity forever tbh. I doubt he was any less meticulous elsewhere in his career, and it’s clear he absolutely loves his work. He’s also got his family here too, no? I don’t think Lander is playing for our youth team on talent alone.

Indeed. I didn’t say they were exclusively targeting Israeli ships, but they’re making a big song and dance about doing that specifically.

Genuinely not sure. The US and UK are definitely doing bombing them, but I don't know if Israel are joining in - I'm sure they'd like to given the Houthis are targeting Israeli shipping, but given the fact Saudi Arabia is between them I'm not sure if its actually practical.

The one upside of half our starting eleven being in a wheelchair at any given time is that it makes our lineup very hard for our opponents to predict! But it's a huge credit to Emery that we never seem to struggle as much as we expect when we've got a key player out - I think Pau being out was the only time I remember us playing significantly worse over a run of games.

Such a critical result for us, and very impressive after playing extra time during the week (and going 1-0 down). Huge confidence boost for the run-in.

Presumably they’ve also bombed the Houthis in Yemen recently too?

Obviously Ukraine / Israel aid is the headline of the day, but they’ve also passed a bill forcing the Chinese owners of TikTok to sell it. It’ll be quite interesting to see how that plays out.

Yeah. Vote in Senate on Tuesday, Biden can sign it immediately, and munitions could be at the front line in under a week. Took an awful long time to get here, but I’m impressed Mike Johnson has (finally) grown a pair and put his career on the line to get this over the line. Anyway, this just goes to show how important a Biden win will be in November. Europe need to be ready to step up in case Trump gets in, and hopefully the last six months has been a bit of a wake up call on that front.

Someone raised in another thread that it’d a really challenging place for the club to be - lots of strong teams in there, so you probably can’t get away with rotating the team like we did in the early stages of the conference. Yet the prize money is still far, far less than the champions league (and not that much more than the conference). I thought that was a good point. But yeah, it’s kinda amazing that the worst we can do this season is to show a major improvement on last season - which itself was one of the best seasons we’ve had in ages. It’s a hell of a safety net. It’s just a shame the money is so tilted towards the CL really.

That's not what most sources I've seen say, though. A couple of examples: CNN - "The United States has collected specific intelligence that suggests senior Iranian government officials were caught by surprise by Saturday’s bloody attack on Israel by Hamas, according to multiple sources familiar with the intelligence. The existence of the intelligence has cast doubt on the idea that Iran was directly involved in the planning, resourcing or approving of the operation, sources said." BBC - "The decision to attack, Mr Raz said, was taken "by Hamas, based on its own interests, arising from the Palestinian reality" (this article quotes a bunch of Israeli military figures and academics all saying basically the same thing) Obviously any discussion needs to acknowledge that Hamas benefits from Iranian weapons and training, but that's not the same thing as supporting the Hamas attack on Israel. And that makes sense when you think about it. Iran primarily want Hamas to exist as a deterrent; it's another front that Israel has to worry about if they want to take on Iran. Hamas launching an attack on Israel that isn't part of a wider Iranian plan just gives Israel the opportunity to isolate Hamas and wipe them out, removing an important Iranian piece from the chessboard.

You're assuming Hamas were doing everything under Iranian orders. But the various Iranian-aligned militias are proxies that Iran can influence but don't control directly, and the problem with proxies is that sometimes they do their own thing. I very much doubt the Hamas attack was greenlit by Iran as an attack on that scale doesn't actually serve their interests. You can see that with how Hezbollah acted immediately afterwards; instead of joining in an attack on Israel like you'd expect (and Hezbollah wanted to do), Iran was trying to restrain them. Obviously the leaders of Iran are monsters too. I'm not defending them. I'm just saying the region is a tinderbox right now and Israel is deliberately taking this opportunity to kick Iran in the face as many times as possible, because they'll win if Iran backs down and they'll win if Iran decide to fight back because America (and probably the rest of the West) will be forced to join in on their side. That's great for Israel and terrible for everyone else.

Let's be honest, Israel are the ones provoking all this at the moment. They know the Iranian government is struggling domestically, and doesn't want to pick a fight with Israel right now with all those US forces stationed offshore, so Israel are taking the opportunity to attack as many Iranian-aligned targets as they can in Syria and Lebanon. Including destroying an embassy, which was itself a pretty serious escalation. Of course Iran are going to retaliate. They can't let Israel walk all over them. Israel and Iran are like two boys on the schoolground who have been eyeing each other up warily for ages, throwing the odd jab and insult at each other, but they've both been too cautious to start a proper fight. But now Israel has come out swinging because he knows his big brother is in town.

I really wish I’d paid more attention in French at school now because I’d love to be able to read what they’d written on LilleTalk about last night. I bet even the most levelheaded Lille fan was either having an aneurism or just incoherent with rage. Do we have any French speakers who could get us a few choice quotes?

Chill out, it was just a friendly warning. You said you don't know much about the crypto game world, and I've worked in the games industry for almost twenty years - thought you (or anyone who reads this thread) might be interested in hearing the opinion of a professional before you potentially made an investment. If not then no worries. Just trying to give people the information they need to make their own decisios.

I mean, I take the wider point you're making, but we could still have ended up in exactly this position even if that 75% figure had been calculated with the utmost scientific precision (in fact, there'd be a 25% chance of it happening).

OK. I didn't realise you were a true believer in Bloomverse. Then just a quick warning from someone that has worked in the video games industry for a long time. The tech video that they have on their website is the sort of amateur stuff you'd expect to see from a two week student project - where I work if a new grad applying for a job had that in their showreel, they wouldn't be getting an interview. There have been crypto games with perfectly competent development teams, of course, but this doesn't look like one of them. There's literally one 3D artist and maybe 2 programmers? There's also fundamental problems with any crypto game that means they only appeal to players who are more interested in the crypto part than the game part - it's extremely hard to compete against mainstream games that don't have the same design constraints on making the player experience more enjoyable. So I'm not saying crypto games will never have any players at all, but it's a relatively small audience and development studios are very expensive to run. Please do let me know if their ICO raises more than $1m. I've seen big raises from the more capable teams, but I'm curious what a white paper and a low-grade tech demo can raise!

Yeah, it was great thanks. I hope you enjoyed watching this team and manager? I'd certainly like to watch them continue to play together in future seasons, but each to their own I suppose.

Yeah, I heard the commentator say that (I had no idea) - but Martinez looked puzzled about whether he was allowed to continue or not, so I was guessing he didn't know it either. I might be wrong though.

We could never replace Martinez. Even if we got another keeper as technically good as him, you'd need to search every looney bin in the country to find someone with that kind of personality. Getting sent off after one penalty is also completely on brand for him too, to be fair. Thank god there's some obscure reason why it doesn't count (I bet he didn't know that).

Jesus that was stressful. Absolute chaos at the end. Martinez has to be man of the match. Made it his personal mission to live rent free in the head of every Frenchman.

We could never replace Martinez.

A couple of really great chances created in extra time, their keeper did really well on both. Hopefully he's run out of heroics now. God I hate penalties.