Not being welcomed into an alliance or supranational union is not a sanction. Not being in them is the default state for a country.

At no point have I made the argument that the countries Russia has invaded and controlled want to keep Russia out of these organisations as a matter of moral principals. I explicitly said it was a matter of self interest. They are not telling Russia off, they are making themselves safe from Russia.

• That doesn’t mean that I said anything about colonialism being okay. Don’t put words in my mouth, and especially not those words

• The countries I mentioned were not, in general, colonial powers (there is an exception here for part of Latvia)

• It is still entirely rational behaviour for a colonial power to defend itself against colonisation. Even if they actually were colonial powers then seeking defence against Russia would be a perfectly sensible thing for them to do.

Ahh, my Beam NG custom car builder

Monaco is the other one! It’s basically identical to Indonesia, just a different aspect ratio and, in most depictions, a slightly darker red.

Huh, the line should have been open to the airport by then, it started operating in 2014 too. That said, if you were flying l;ate at night or very early in the morning then it might not have been an option, as there are no services between midnight and 6am or something like that. Also, I hope you enjoyed your time in Scotland!

It has! The core bulk of the system has been up and running since 2014. The construction was a bit of a disaster, but now that it’s actually going it seems to be a success. An estimated 12 million passenger journeys last year

Who said anything about colonialism and conquest not being bad? Countries seek to defend themselves. Russia has consistently been a threat to several EU and NATO states, therefore they seek defences against it

is it just a set of vague guidelines to keep the membership limited to whoever they like?

They don’t need guidelines to do that. Any member state can just say no

Scotland just handed out a whole bunch of grants for electric buses

What was it that the community tool changed to fix it?

Damn that’s a lot of British East India Company flags

Both the EU and NATO require unaminous approval of existing members to add new members. Both organisations contain several members that have been under Russian domination within living memory. Given Russia’s frequent aggression towards its neighbours in the post-Soviet period, why would the likes of the Baltic countries trust Russia to be a reliable ally?

Additionally, Russia just straight up does not meet the Copenhagen criteria to join the EU and doesn’t have any measure of the pre-accession integration that every other applicant does

Especially when one of them is Poland, which is incredibly easy to confuse with a couple of other flags. In order from the lowest percentage to the highest:

• 1st row: Japan, North Korea, Bangladesh, Tunisia, Egypt

• 2nd row: Jordan, Armenia, Comoros, Poland, South Korea

The biggest disputes are Russia/Ukraine, Taiwan, trade dumping, and cyberwarfare. The EU wants Ukraine to win the war, the status quo to be maintained in Taiwan, to protect its domestic manufacturing, and to protect its computer systems from interference. I don’t know enough about the latter two to say the truth of what China and the EU are doing, I just know that the EU has disputes with China about them

I do think that a healthy China-EU relationship in the near future is far more likely than a Russia-EU one and even a little more likely than a US-EU one. There are disputes, but to my amateur eye they look more surmountable

The crucial difference this time would presumably be Polish agreement rather than the route

We’re actually just octopodes in skin suits, each of my legs is just a leather bag controlled by a couple of tentacles

Seems like the artist is basing it on this 1943 map by Richard Edes Harrison, which is from an atlas full of unusual perspectives that was aiming to illustrate WWII geopolitics for an American audience. Cook has a reddit post about it but the links are all broken now, so I’m not 100% certain that it’s this one, but it seems likely

There is Darktide, which is the 40k counterpart to Vermintide

I think that’s Udmurtia. Udmurts are an Ugric minority people within Russia, and they’ve got a really high incidence of red hair

The southern part is Cork, the second biggest city in the republic. Dublin and Cork are where Norse and then British settlement was most concentrated over time as well

I’m gonna be honest, as a Brit I had just kind of assumed that we would come to Ireland’s defence if they wanted and needed it. As the article says, we’ve been doing aerial interceptions for them for about 70 years. We get to keep the UK safer if there’s not a relatively undefended area right next to us, and Ireland gets to be defended by a larger power that has already learned the hard way that it can no longer subjugate Ireland