Yesterday as Putin’s military was taking heavy losses he was busy opening a Ferris wheel in Moscow.
Today the Ferris wheel is closed after breaking down hours after opening.
-Olga Lautman
Yesterday as Putin’s military was taking heavy losses he was busy opening a Ferris wheel in Moscow.
Today the Ferris wheel is closed after breaking down hours after opening.
-Olga Lautman
"American Sniper" is the only Clint Eastwood movie that I don't like, because of the reasons you mentioned and that exaggerated Hollywoodian manichaeism.Originally Posted by Coeruleum Blue
However, What I was referring to are those situations where you don't have the choice but to do the unthinkable because the alternative is death. Of course War is one of those situations but there are a myriad of other. For instance that "Miracle of the Andes situation" situation even if in that case one would have Time to consider. A situation when you act in self-defence, those kind of dilemma, being in the wrong place at the wrong time etc.. Extreme situations, matter of life and death are critical incidents, and as such they leave traumas on our mind and/or on our body.
How is it that the US can send less than one percent of its GNP to Ukraine in the form of weapons and those weapons counter the entire output of the Russian Federation for the past fifty years?
"I think many people don't realize how big the US economy is. Ukraine’s GDP is almost exactly equal to the combined GDP of Connecticut’s Hartford & Fairfield counties. Russia's is equal to the sum of LA county, San Diego county, Orange county, & Santa Clara county in California."
-https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1567326201638801408
Russia's GDP = GDP of four US counties. Putin was obviously counting on his buddy Trump being president.
Lest we forget, Trump called Putin's invasion of Ukraine "genius".
Russia is reaping what they sow:
O.Danilov, Ukrainian National Security Council Secretary: «Things changed. We will not be satisfied with neither the return of Crimea and Donbass nor the reparations for invasion anymore. In alliance with our allies, we want full capitulation and demilitarization of Russia."
If Russia is demilitarized, then Russian industry could retool away from producing exploding tanks and towards supplying Russians with toilets and washing machines.
However, in practice, the evil allies will never allow this.
Last edited by Adam Strange; 09-12-2022 at 06:20 AM.
What sunk the Moskva?
Worth watching. Entertaining and informative.
Russia has retaliated. According to these pro-Russian military bloggers, Russia has bombed power plants, resulting in massive blackouts (https://t.me/boris_rozhin/63476) (https://t.me/boris_rozhin/63474) (https://t.me/rybar/38615).
Confirmed by Reuters (https://www.reuters.com/world/europe...ive-2022-09-11). Russia has also disconnected the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant from the electrical grid, removing 20% of Ukraine's energy.
“De-nazification continues.
Call on Amnesty International to condemn Ukraine for building power plants in civilian areas underneath Russian missile strikes.”
-Darth Putin
That's not really Darth Putin. If military and weapons are being housed in civilian areas they really are a valid target for war. See: the Lusitania. If some church building that's not really being used for worship but just for training soldiers and smuggling guns is raided and it has a power plant underneath that's really on Ukraine for positioning their own people in order to have maximum casualties. Bombing a church that's being used for gun smuggling shouldn't lead to the entire several blocks around it getting blown up too and if Ukraine is doing that it's intentional. They are turning their own citizens into some kind of martyrs without their permission. That's vile and perverse. At the same time, Ukrainians probably know they're making themselves pointless martyrs for Ukraine just by staying in the area.
Top management always thinks that the problem is with the generals and the troops.
https://mil.in.ua/en/news/defence-in...ts-in-ukraine/
https://nitter.net/wartranslated/sta...576223944705#m
To be fair, lobbing cruise missiles at vital infrastructure is something that Russia could have done from the start.
It could have gone further than that by, say, erasing entire towns in the style of Guernica. But the Russian army didn't, and it suggests that Russia wasn't carrying out a total war.
The thing is Putin is making so many enemies for himself in his own country.
I doubt he makes it out alive to enjoy his personal billions.
@xerx, it suggests that destroying infrastructure wasn't as important as killing civilians. After all, Russians might want that infrastructure to be dismantled and taken back to Russia. They did steal a solar panel farm.
Those missiles cost money, and there were lots of hospitals and schools to bomb first.
I mean, how many children can you kill by destroying a transformer? Directly, I mean?
Oh, but maybe I'm "dehumanizing" the Russians. Personally, I think they do a perfectly fine job of dehumanizing themselves through their deeds, but I'm open to listening to why I have misjudged them.
I would like to point out that I work with a number of Russians. One from Moscow, one from St. Petersburg, one from Tomsk, one now living in San Fransisco because she prefers it there, and they are all fine people.
No, it's the Russians who are attacking Ukraine that I'm objecting to.
The terrorist Girkin from the DPR said that destroying the Ukrainian electrical grid was planned to occur just before winter so it could have the maximum effect on civilians, but the advances of the Ukrainian army made it expedient to do it now. Nice guy.
https://nitter.net/pic/orig/media%2FFcc4zmbXEAAAEVR.png
*EDIT*
Wait. xerx, I just re-read your post. Are you saying that Russians didn't erase entire towns? Do you have internet where you are?
Last edited by Adam Strange; 09-12-2022 at 08:06 PM.
If they were that eager to kill civilians while preserving infrastructure, couldn't they have deployed chemical warfare?
Yes, Russia could have deployed chemical warfare, as they have done previously in Syria, but I think someone in the U.S. State Department might have had a talk with them this time.
I predict that if Russia employs tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, you will see a lot of conventional hardware come flying out of NATO bases towards Russian infrastructure very quickly, and I think that Putin knows this.
Doesn't mean that Putin won't do something stupid, but the US is giving him every reason and opportunity to back down gradually.
If Putin ends up being in trouble with his governors for starting this disastrous war, well, when you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.
Last edited by Adam Strange; 09-12-2022 at 08:23 PM.
But the intentional killing of civilians via conventional weaponry is a war crime just the same, and it would also pique the attention of international lawmakers. Also, wouldn't Russia have an incentive to incorporate civilians as opposed to killing them? There are already reports of Russification efforts in captured territories.
Every nation has to decide which parts of the law they can and will enforce. Law cannot reach where enforcement will not follow, and not all things are worth dying for. Syria's tragedy is that they don't have oil or gas.
I think that the U.S. is drawing a soft line at chemical warfare and a hard line at nuclear warfare, but you know, the U.S. government is not absolutist. Its motto isn't Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.
Russia has already sent thousands of Ukrainian child victims of its war to live in Russia. Presumably to make up for Russia's terrible birth rate. But no one asked the kids if that's what they wanted. Russia isn't taking the adults. Hell, they aren't even letting in their fleeing subjects from the Donbas.
Maybe they don't want subjects who can think for themselves, maybe.
Chemical warfare doesn’t really seem like something a country positioning themselves as ‘liberators’ of Ukraine would do.
We all already know that the invasion’s initial bombardments were directed at civilians, but Russia’s domestic propaganda was claiming that they were collateral damage and not a main target.
Supposing that chemical weapons were on the table, how would it look like to Russian civilians if the army used weaponry explicitly intended to destroy human life?
Alright, on close inspection, I probably overreached when I said 'chemical weapons'. That may have been too strong of a statement.
Still, deliberately targeting civilians, even with conventional weaponry, and for no strategic reasons, is also something that would-be `liberators’ don't do. Putin and his cohort are sociopaths that do evil for the sake of political gain, not comic book supervillains that do evil for the sake of evil.
EDIT: I'm not a Kremlin-bot, by the way. If there is evidence to the effect that the Russian Ministry of Defence deliberately ordered the killing of civilians, aiming to inflict casualties on non-combatants, I'll quickly concede the point.
Last edited by xerx; 09-13-2022 at 01:21 AM.
Nice distinction in the bolded sentence, @xerx. If only Marvel writers would also make that distinction, their stories would be much better.
You’re completely right, of course, would-be liberators would not be using weaponry on civilian targets, or would limit it is best as they could.
However, if I were to be bold, it’s much easier for a pro-Russian narrative to say that those civilian targets were not civilian at all, or were harbouring hostile forces, and be believed by their own countrymen, when conventional weaponry is what was employed in the first instance.
Granted that narrative only works so long as the ‘de-nazification’ has gone as planned and you don’t need to fall back on other methods. Since Russia miscalculated their offensive their propaganda is forced to likewise backpedal.
If Russia's aim was indeed to harm civilians, then yes, I suppose that using conventional weapons could offer plausible deniability.
DC Comics > Marvel.
I’ve been away from the news. What the heck is happening to the Russians? are they really turning on Putin
@Poptart, what is happening to Russia is what happens to an eighteenth-century autocracy when it meets 21st century capitalism. The US gave 0.5% of its GNP to Ukraine in the form of modern weapons, along with some modern professional military training and strict military discipline, and Russia is folding like a piece of wet cardboard.
The Russian bloggers inside Russia are complaining. However, they have no wealth and therefore no power, and Putin has wisely avoided a general mobilization which would put guns into the hands of Moscow and St. Petersburg eighteen and twenty-somethings who are expected to (and would) die fighting the Ukrainians, so there will be no armed uprising against him.
What I expect to happen is that Russia will be kicked out of all parts of Ukraine and Putin will declare victory and will kill a few generals and mid-level officers for insufficient wisdom and foresight*, and the Russian elites will complain but the massive state security apparatus will suppress their complaints. The average Russian will do nothing, because he has been very intentionally conditioned to be powerless.
In the meantime, Moscow will grow poorer as oil and gas revenues decline, and there will be less money available to suppress dissent in the outlying districts of the Russian Federation. The guys running these districts will start acting independently and will be making their own economic deals with the West, and Russia won't have the troops to do anything about it.
With luck, the Russian Federation will dissolve from lack of interest and Moscow will descend into North Korea status until every empire-lover there is dead and gone.
*The people that Putin will kill will be his best generals, because they are the ones who are the biggest threat to him, personally. And this is how Russia got to be the way it is.
Last edited by Adam Strange; 09-13-2022 at 09:29 PM.
I sometimes wonder if all states which rely on massively extractive industries are doomed to also having massive inequality.
I mean, there's no law of nature that says if your country is sitting on huge reserves of the most valuable thing on earth, and I'm not talking about human minds here, that your country will necessarily become hugely unequal in income and therefore hugely unequal in terms of political power.
But that's the way it seems to turn out.
Ukraine's Kharkiv offensive did capture a lot of territory, but we don't know whether or not Ukraine can sustain this momentum. After the initial collapse of Russia's thinly-spread front line, the Russian army retreated to defensible positions along the eastern bank of the Oskil river. There is footage of captured Russian small arms but no footage of captured heavy weapons, which must have been moved to safety, and which suggests a Russian tactical retreat as opposed to a disorganized rout. (1) According to (1), Russia may have stationed poorly-trained convicts in Kharkiv, as opposed to professionals, due to manpower shortages.
A Russian blogger is reporting a Ukrainian build-up in preparation for an assault on the eastern bank of the Oskil, and we'll see how that goes (2). Russia is also counterattacking, and we'll see how that goes.
In Kherson, Ukraine's offensive hasn't made very much progress so far, and its momentum may have run out — only a handful of towns and villages have been liberated. But it has only been over two weeks, whereas it may take up to five weeks or so, as suggested by think tanks and the Ukrainian government, before the operation's success is known.
I couldn't find an independent figure for the total number of Ukrainian casualties since late August (the start of the Kherson counteroffensive). Russian bloggers and the Russian MoD report high Ukrainian casualties, but I'd rather not rely solely on them.
Last edited by xerx; 09-13-2022 at 10:50 PM. Reason: .
Yes, plausible deniability was the word I was looking for.
...How can you have comic books that don't have comic book supervillains?
The best stories I’ve read were about ordinary people who did extraordinary (but possible) things. Like falling in like and in love.
I used to read these old science fiction comics about heroes who fought the evil, galaxy-spanning Voom who fed on people’s emotional horror, back in the Golden Age.
But the Golden Age of stories like this is twelve.
A female LIE, I believe. RIP.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/com...or_soledar_on/
This just popped up. The leader of the Wagner group (Prigozhin) is trying to recruit prisoners. I have no clue about the date that the video was shot.
https://vk.com/milinfolive?w=wall-123538639_2992823
They've been doing that for a long time. Because Russian prisoners make the best Russian soldiers, of course. They are definitely going to be disciplined, restrained, and fighting honorably for a noble cause, and therefore we can expect them to conduct themselves well on the battlefield and off.
Or are they just there to kill children and women and unarmed civilians, and rape farm animals? Curious minds want to know.
I think there was a '60's war movie about this. The Dirty Dozen? The Devil's Brigade? Maybe I'm mis-remembering.
The Dirty Dozen
When I read books like that, I usually read ones without pictures. I guess the X-Men and Watchmen also have some cultural credit, as well as the funny comics.
For anyone who wants to hear what my voice sounds like, this guy Hertling sounds EXACTLY like I do, at least, that's from recordings of my voice that I've heard myself.
Same tone, same cadence, everything is the same.
I've always regretted that my voice isn't lower or more imposing and that I sound a bit like a duck, but you work with what you have.
https://nitter.net/BulwarkOnline/sta...299482959872#m
One of the best military analyses of this war comes courtesy of the Austrian army. (1)
* Ukraine's Kherson offensive was repelled, as the flat ground allowed Russia to effectively utilize reconnaissance. Massed Russian artillery inflicted heavy casualties.
* In Kharkiv, the Ukrainians staged their attack in complete secrecy. Fast Ukrainian units cleverly outmanoeuvred under-trained Russian troops. The Russians retreated in a panic, fearing that they were about to be encircled.
According to Al-Jazeera, those under-trained troops may have been convicts, fuelling speculation that Russia is facing a manpower crunch. (2) We do know that the Wagner group is recruiting convicts. (3)
What if they let Daniel Barenboim conduct the Wagner group?
We should fight our wars with music instead of guns.
This video is all about military facts and strategy... so much Te... I don't see value judgement.
The guy seems Fe-PoLR to me.
* unintentional double post deleted *
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