Putin's War With Ukraine (and democracy, freedom, self-determination, etc.)

I'm just waiting to see who is first to paint their rocket gold.

 

That’s because people like the Americans, Brits, Poles, Croats, Greeks, and Finns get it. Nice stuff and freedom is bought not by creating imagined philosophical universals but but by fighting for it.

The Brits had jack shit until they started massive civil wars that in effect ended the King as the owner of everything (the Anarchy), the right of the king to shit in your bed (John), the end of medieval England (the war of the roses), the whole English civil war where the king was eventually executed for using the people’s money against the people, the Glorious Revolution, Napoleonic Wars, and the World Wars that sacrificed their empire to not speak German.

meanwhile the Irish won their freedom by literally shooting enough Brits in the head at a rate that the British public and parliament couldn’t bare and couldn’t kill the IRA in return. The Wind that Shakes the Barley gets the gist of it right. The IRA was literally killing twice the amount of people as the Black and Tans.

The American Revolution was won not by taking potshots but because the Americans literally wrecked two British field armies in conventional warfare, showed that the Hessians were not willing to die for England, and Parliament short of men was not willing to send more armies over to be destroyed in a hostile rebellious colony, especially when those guys could be kicking French ass in India.

Kruschev said the Soviets lost a million men to take a small isthmus and a bunch of reindeer herders. He wasn’t exaggerating either. 400ish thousand dead, 500 something more casualties and permanently disabled because the Finns were ruthless. Mines and frostbite. Snipers shooting them in the limbs to lure the others out. They come out? All dead. Don’t come out and he straggled back? It’s just a lucky pot shot from somewhere. Some guy might have his arm bones and ligaments gone. Russia did it enough to only scare Finland into having a huge army for such a small country.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/44th_Rifle_Division
From Kyiv. Was wiped out as a fighting unit with the survivors running away on foot in the snow

 

Yeltsin sold off the people’s assets to maintain political power. Russia right now can’t have a strong, large army because if your government sucks and your army is good, the army is much more likely to overthrow the state than it is to get conquered. It is not worth it for Russia to keep professional soldiers for too long or train conscripts better. Then some competent commander would realize that the problem is the oligarchs and Putin. because the obvious solution to that from guys well trained in efficiently killing people and blowing shit up would be full French Revolution

A government is much much more likely to get overthrown by its own military than it is to be conquered. If Putin had an army that could steamroll one of the poorest countries in Europe, it would’ve already happened or he would be dead. Why do you think Saddam’s army wasn’t trained to use the nice stuff the US gave them in the 80s? The USSR leaders knew they could never go full Stalin again after the Red Army won the literally biggest war ever. Even Stalin himself, getting more paranoid than ever, didn’t launch another mass terror. He would’ve been killed. When he was ranting about the Jews, somehow he was given warfarin for his high blood pressure after a stroke…

See every shitty Roman Emperor. How many of them got killed or captured in battle by a foreign army? I can think of 3: Valerian got capture by the Persians, Valens got killed by the Goths, and Constantine XI, the last one, charged the Turks rather than become their vassal. Then you have tons of shitty ones getting killed. Only about a fifth of them died a natural death and with only 3 killed by an enemy in battle yeah having the sickest army on the planet most of
The time until 1000 something ad when the Macedonian dynasty ended (they were only not the best for like 600ish to 800 ish and were then back to being scary as hell. That’s like 1000 years of being the nastiest mofos around from like 200ish bc to 1000 something ad) didnt personally do Raging incompetent assholes much good. That nasty army would just kill them

considering 1 was struck by lightning and others got literally killed by their mom… yeah 3 killed/captured in battle is statistically insignificant

Edit: Julian got killed by a Persian spear too. So 4 out of a ton of them got killed by a foreign army.

 

You may be right or not about cancel culture / business, time will tell. Anyway, I don't like the way this seems to be going:

• Kirill Petrenko (conductor, Berlin Philharmonic): "condemns Putin's aggression" > keeps job
• Wladimir Jurowski (music director, Bawarian Opera) "plays Ukrainian anthem in concert" > keeps job
  
• Semjon Bytschkow (conductor, Czech Philharmonic) "Putin must be held accountable" > keeps job
  
• Waleri Gergijew (conductor, Munich Philharmonic) "fails to distance himself clearly" > sacked
  
• Anna Netrebko (opera singer, Met and other venues) "lack of sufficient distancing" > banned

 

Ahhh, yes! This is not heard very often. The simple truth that shows Putin as a murderous paranoid obsessive who is prepared to kill without limit to "protect" Russia from a risk that that was never there in the first place.

I thought that was the whole point of the "free" world!

On another tack...

Putin has made proper reporting from within Russia impossible, as attempting it will result in jail. Reporters in Ukraine have (allegedly) been shot by Russians. Numbers and news is going to be massaged anyway, for all sorts of reasons, by the good,bad and indifferent.

I saw a report that 11,000 Russian troops have died. I've been seeing Ukranian casualty figures only in the hundreds. I wonder if either of these is anything like true. The former would seem optimistic in terms of military achievement. The latter seems unlikely given the photographs we have seen of totally-destroyed apartment blocks.

China doesn't seem to find the internet hard to censor. Is this because they built their Great Firewall of China into their connectivity from the start? Is it really hard to impose on a country from scratch? Any security pros can answer? @purr1n ?

 

The 11,000 killed claim is from the Ukrainian military, so grain of salt. Russia said 500, so we can be confident the number is no lower than that.

 

Honestly posting something from another forum is rare even for me. Acting like a child with this attitude while HF also removes his post...I dunno if he "gets it." https://www.head-fi.org/threads/you-head-fi.962447/ Or here if it gets removed.

People like that really rubs me the wrong way.

Eh....Happy Sunday everyone.

 

If I was him, I don't think I'd turn to the understand even if you don't agree forum.

But hey, let's move on.

 

Frankly, the fact that some might read this as anything but tongue-in-cheek makes me want to puke and shove faces into the ejecta.

 

Oh nah I'm aware that it's often worked backwards (I vaguely recall that the people that worked on Dead Space had to study images of car crash victims to make the monsters in the game), just that the mere fact VFX has gotten so good makes it easy for weirdness that's so blatant even my gullible butt can pick it out manages to fool some people.

Tried looking for a specific video but tl;dr some relatives genuinely believed that there were gargoyles or demons invading the world after some random CGI student project went viral on old people Viber (no offence to present company intended). That's how low the bar is for this sorta stuff.

 

We should be saying it the French way:

 

This could be true. I saw the song about some guy taking a gargoyle out on a date, on YouTube.

Oh wait... song. Hmmmm...

 

It's sad really. People are conditioned to believe in the facade of a free and just society, and not educated to think critically or scrutinize. Once that belief is shook they don't have the tools to find the truth and have no awareness of the power structures of the world or their country. I guess this is where the vultures get them. Offering a nice warm blanket of palatable bias-prone deciept to wrap themselves. They assume it's true, simply because the other appears false, and it's always in broad strokes. Like "The Media" being clumped together. No room for differentiation or nuance, too complicated. People prefer simple lies to complicated truths.

People are sheep, because they were raised to be.