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It's actually a horse
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# ? Feb 14, 2016 02:26 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 00:19 |
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So what's the general consensus on the possibility of Russia going to war with Turkey?
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# ? Feb 14, 2016 19:49 |
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Friendly Humour posted:So what's the general consensus on the possibility of Russia going to war with Turkey? Seems Unlikely
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# ? Feb 14, 2016 19:55 |
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http://observer.com/2016/02/mounting-evidence-putin-will-ignite-wwiii/quote:Mr. Felgenhauer paints an alarmingly plausible scenario. As rebel forces defend Aleppo in Stalingrad fashion, the Syrian military, with Russian help, commences a protracted siege of the city, employing massive firepower, which becomes a humanitarian nightmare of a kind not seen in decades, a tragedy that would dwarf the 1992-95 siege of Sarajevo. However, any Turkish move to lift that siege, even with international imprimatur, would quickly devolve into all-out war. I mean I know the guy is a crank but he does make an argument for it.
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# ? Feb 14, 2016 19:59 |
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Friendly Humour posted:http://observer.com/2016/02/mounting-evidence-putin-will-ignite-wwiii/ Meanwhile Turkey is striking (mostly Kurdish) targets within Syria with artillery.
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# ? Feb 14, 2016 20:27 |
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Friendly Humour posted:So what's the general consensus on the possibility of Russia going to war with Turkey? Going to actual, official war isn't Putin's style; and it's a lot easier to get plausible deniability for insurgent action in Syria than in Ukraine.
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# ? Feb 14, 2016 20:51 |
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Cat Mattress posted:Going to actual, official war isn't Putin's style; and it's a lot easier to get plausible deniability for insurgent action in Syria than in Ukraine. It will be once Turkish AA sites start dropping Russian fighter bombers from the air on the Syrian side of the border.
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# ? Feb 14, 2016 22:16 |
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Friendly Humour posted:So what's the general consensus on the possibility of Russia going to war with Turkey? Doctor Malaver posted:0
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# ? Feb 14, 2016 22:28 |
It's really a matter of setting up the "significant Russian population" there. I honestly think he's pretty much saber-rattling in there to divert attention from Ukraine. The more escalated the situation in that region, the less willing will the West be to do something about the actual invasion.
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# ? Feb 14, 2016 22:35 |
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Russian trucks have been allowed to enter Belarus from Ukrainian territory, the Association of International Truck Haulage said on Monday. http://tass.ru/en/world/856741
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# ? Feb 15, 2016 11:12 |
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Russia anti-doping ex-chief Nikita Kamaev diesquote:Nikita Kamaev's death comes two months after he resigned his post following a doping scandal in Russian athletics. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-35575774
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# ? Feb 15, 2016 19:55 |
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Baronjutter posted:Here's an interesting article written by a Vietnamese american on their experiences in eastern europe, specially Prague.
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# ? Feb 15, 2016 20:11 |
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Baronjutter posted:Here's an interesting article written by a Vietnamese american on their experiences in eastern europe, specially Prague. That article seems very patronizing and borderline racist towards Bosna. Also she seems to imply pretty heavily that because the locals consider "I'm Amrerican" to be a more significant identifier than "I'm Vietnamese", they are racist? What about the possibility that there are linguistic and cultural reasons why the term Vietnamese has a different meaning here than in America where the prefix "American" is always guaranteed to be implicitly present in the context. If an Irish American conscious of his heritage came over here and started saying "I'm Irish", everybody would also catalogue him as American instead. steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 20:22 on Feb 15, 2016 |
# ? Feb 15, 2016 20:16 |
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Yeah, "I'm oirish, t'besure t'besure" Americans get nothing but derision in the UK and Ireland. No one would consider them to actually be Irish.
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# ? Feb 15, 2016 21:36 |
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I don't know what this will serve. It's very, very and . A supposedly well-known DPR officer tortures and interrogates an accused drug dealer. There is an unsubstantiated claim that the dealer was later executed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRC6FwjPZS4
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# ? Feb 15, 2016 21:46 |
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Plan Z posted:I don't know what this will serve. It's very, very and . A supposedly well-known DPR officer tortures and interrogates an accused drug dealer. There is an unsubstantiated claim that the dealer was later executed. What an incredible psychopath. I hope he catches a shell or a sniper's bullet to the dome.
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# ? Feb 16, 2016 00:54 |
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steinrokkan posted:That article seems very patronizing and borderline racist towards Bosna. Other than complaining about the food, there is nothing negative about Bosnia in that article.
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# ? Feb 16, 2016 01:17 |
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A Pale Horse posted:What an incredible psychopath. I hope he catches a shell or a sniper's bullet to the dome. As far as I can find, the incident took place around Oct. 2014, and nobody has seen the "dealer" since. Graham Phillips seemed excited to proclaim it was a Ukrainian military unit, and hasn't corrected his twitter. I don't know if he's been discussed in the thread, but I'm looking up information on this Olkhon/Olhon guy. There have been interviews with him, and his face is always covered. He seems to either be very "off" or very "on" depending how you look at it. He tends to ramble with lovely jokes, and does kind of have charisma for how much of a piece of poo poo he is. Front view from the torture video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vi?TRC6FwjPZS4?0?jpg Interview with Graham Phillips (part 1 of several): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuzAiPJMMGQ Another interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQpeH-GfsVg Olkhon's VK profile: http://vk.com/olhon
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# ? Feb 16, 2016 08:41 |
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Happy Independence Day, Lithuania. https://twitter.com/DarthPutinKGB/status/699505097085218816 Just in time for the holiday comes this article from The Atlantic Council about Putin's next maybe land grab: Sulwalki Gap. http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/natosource/nato-s-vulnerable-link-in-europe-poland-s-suwalki-gap quote:The Pentagon's decision to quadruple its 2017 budget for European defence due to the perceived threat of Russian aggression and the recent RAND report noting the difficulties NATO would have defending the Baltic States, are once again bringing to the forefront the risks on Europe's frontier states. The top brass of US military forces, like U.S. Army Europe commander Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, have also already noted that a narrow piece of land connecting two NATO member states Poland and Lithuania – the Suwalki Gap ‒ could potentially be a target of Russian military aggression. Capture by hostile forces of Suwalki or bordering Lithuanian territory would cut off the three Baltic States from other NATO countries. Analysts have likened Suwalki to the Cold War era's Fulda Gap in Germany where NATO planned and prepared for hypothetical Soviet attacks. In addition to the region's problematic geography and militarized environment due to neighbouring Kaliningrad and Belarus, the Suwalki Gap is different and potentially an even more vulnerable target because the Kremlin could exploit the region's historic ethnic tensions.
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# ? Feb 16, 2016 12:29 |
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No confidence vote in the Yatsenyuk government possible soon today. Edit: President Poroshenko has called for resignation of both PM Yatsenyuk and PG Shokin (the latter of which is his appoitee). OddObserver fucked around with this message at 14:45 on Feb 16, 2016 |
# ? Feb 16, 2016 13:55 |
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HUGE PUBES A PLUS posted:Happy Independence Day, Lithuania. I can't imagine the local handful of Lithuanians wanting to join us in the motherland. We're slightly poorer and besides that the border is open so who cares? Who is going to take a Russian provided gun to fight for street signs? A much more interesting case is the Polish minority in Lithuania. Most of them live around or in the capital, speak Russian instead of Polish and watch Russian PropagandaTV. The older population is very nostalgic for the USSR and feels a connection to Russia much stronger than to Poland. But even then, when Russia was starting to destabilize Ukraine, they were testing the waters in the Baltic countries and even then the local Russians/Poles didn't give a poo poo or stayed put. Helps that a lot of the lower class emigrated to western Europe for better paying manual labour jobs.
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# ? Feb 16, 2016 14:51 |
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I like that they cite a strikeball tournament as a legitimate concern.
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# ? Feb 16, 2016 15:20 |
It's about as good a reason as "it's rightfully ours".
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# ? Feb 16, 2016 15:57 |
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PG Shokin has submitted his resignation, following President Poroshenko's reqest he do so. PM Yatsenyuk almost done giving the Government's report, a vote of no confidence may follow. If so, one may wonder if there is already agreed upon replacement. Scary sign: the one known as "Her" has changed her hair style.
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# ? Feb 16, 2016 16:23 |
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I seriously can't imagine Russians attacking Polish Suwalki at this point. That would have been a whole different deal than Ukraine considering it's part of the EU and Nato. Sure that 'everything is possible' but it's not realistic...yet. Articles like that have been appearing in Poland at least since October and they're full of some truly sensationalistic bullshit but even they're not as dumb as that English one. Just lol at simplifying the context of the Polish-Lithuanian conflict in 1919 into a single paragraph, the talk about the strikeball tournament, minorities being seemingly hostile to the point of that having a military significance and a lot of other crap almost proving that Lithuania is ready to go to war with Poland over territory or something. That article is the definition of 'I don't know what I'm talking about but here are some random facts that support my thesis' click-bait. At the same time I understand the strategic significance of the region and NATO's interest in it but the whole cultural context presented there is a big laugh.
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# ? Feb 16, 2016 16:27 |
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In Polish news, today CBS (Polish FBI) entered and searched the offices of an anti-clerical weekly called Facts and Myths started by a former priest and left wing MP Roman Kotlinski. The weekly deals mostly with exposing the criminal activities of priests, especially sexual excesses as well as generally disseminating anti Catholic church views. They spent 11 hours searching the offices and seized all electronic storage devices including journalistic work product which they have no legal right to as well as the magazine's book keeping and financial records. There has been no comment from the prosecutor's office as to why this was done. Kotlinski has been under investigation for a number of years due to issues in his personal life, but there has never been an insinuation that it was in any way related to his work on the magazine he edits. I hope all my Polish comrades remember the hell PiS raised when CBS was sent into right wing weekly Wprost to try to recover illegal recordings of government ministers that had been sent to Wprost. Additionally in an unrelated case, a sketch show artist has claimed that his anti government sketches have been censored from public media today. PiS is well on its way to destroying private as well as public media that are uncomfortable or critical of them or the church. What a loving country.
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# ? Feb 16, 2016 17:37 |
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You can take Poland out of the Eastern Block, but you can't take the Eastern Block out of Poland. Enjoy being like Putin's Russia, but smaller and irrelevant.
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# ? Feb 16, 2016 18:11 |
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Too bad Tusk can't just order the EU to invade Poland.
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# ? Feb 16, 2016 18:15 |
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The Rada votes te Government's work unsatisfactory, but may not have the votes for an actual vote of no-confidence --- PM calling for a vote now, believing he will win it. Edit: no confidence vote failed, more than 30 votes short. OddObserver fucked around with this message at 19:15 on Feb 16, 2016 |
# ? Feb 16, 2016 18:58 |
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So according to new reports, Russian public is suffering from the oil price crash and the devaluation of the ruble on a much worse scale than people in comparable countries such as Kazakhstan. While people in other countries were able to protect their savings to an extent by converting them to foreign exchange, Russian savings have been eroding rapidly due to a strict state policy on liquidating FX reserves and the preferred use of said reserves to finance foreign deficit, prop up banks and such instead of making them available to general savers. In fact the share of FX in private savings has shrunk. To make matters worse, the government economic policy increases inflation beyond what would be the result of ruble's devaluation, which just further reduces the purchasing power of savings. Tl;dr Russian public is hosed.
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# ? Feb 17, 2016 11:38 |
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Anybody with any real money or savings in Russia uses exclusively dollars anyway. It has been like this for decades.
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# ? Feb 17, 2016 12:26 |
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdG5nGRusrE Every Estonian male in their 20s thinks that he is a rally driver, even if they are literally retarded and drive an incredibly lovely old Hyundai. EDIT: Might've been a Russian though. OhYeah fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Feb 17, 2016 |
# ? Feb 17, 2016 16:33 |
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OhYeah posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdG5nGRusrE A trait shared by brother peoples https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ravZlWhL1g lollontee fucked around with this message at 16:39 on Feb 17, 2016 |
# ? Feb 17, 2016 16:36 |
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steinrokkan posted:So according to new reports, Russian public is suffering from the oil price crash and the devaluation of the ruble on a much worse scale than people in comparable countries such as Kazakhstan. While people in other countries were able to protect their savings to an extent by converting them to foreign exchange, Russian savings have been eroding rapidly due to a strict state policy on liquidating FX reserves and the preferred use of said reserves to finance foreign deficit, prop up banks and such instead of making them available to general savers. In fact the share of FX in private savings has shrunk. To make matters worse, the government economic policy increases inflation beyond what would be the result of ruble's devaluation, which just further reduces the purchasing power of savings. In this case, the Russian Central Bank is probably going the right thing. They could have kept buying Ruble as they were but in all honesty it probably would have made a relatively small impact versus on going devaluation due lower oil prices. On the other hand, when those reserves are gone, they're gone. The counter-case is Azerbaijan which continued to peg the Manat despite it being well overvalued and liquidated most of their reserves to do so, eventually they had to devalue the Manat because they were simply running out of money. (Their reserves fell from 13.7 B to 4.3B.) The Azerbaijani public could pretend for a year that things were normal, but ultimately Azerbaijan ended up in even a worse long-term position. In all honesty, even with an much lower peg (from 1.20 to .62 to the dollar) the Manat seems to still be overvalued, and Azerbaijan is still draining reserves. No doubt it is hurting the Russian public, but their fate is honestly almost completely up to oil prices and thats a geopolitical concern. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 16:54 on Feb 17, 2016 |
# ? Feb 17, 2016 16:47 |
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Ardennes posted:In this case, the Russian Central Bank is probably going the right thing. They could have kept buying Ruble as they were but in all honesty it probably would have made a relatively small impact versus on going devaluation due lower oil prices. On the other hand, when those reserves are gone, they're gone. And really, the best way to drive up oil prices is for three of the top 10 oil producers to go to war with each other! That will surely rattle the markets in the right direction
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# ? Feb 17, 2016 20:42 |
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Russian economy: more or less hosed than Canada??
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# ? Feb 17, 2016 20:44 |
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same timeframe: Ruble: .035 to .013 USD Canadian Dollar: ~1 to 0.73 USD
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# ? Feb 17, 2016 20:46 |
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Zudgemud posted:And really, the best way to drive up oil prices is for three of the top 10 oil producers to go to war with each other! That will surely rattle the markets in the right direction It is certainly going to be interesting, and as far as the ultimate result on prices, it is abundantly especially since the 3 major players involved are rather bellicose and unpredictable. The deal that has been going around is rather minimal and Iran seems rather noncommittal, we will see what happens when everything gets a lot hotter. Baronjutter posted:Russian economy: more or less hosed than Canada?? Certainly more hosed, oil and gas is a much larger portion of Russian exports. That said, Canada's reliance on energy is actually still worrisome. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Feb 17, 2016 |
# ? Feb 17, 2016 20:47 |
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Baronjutter posted:Russian economy: more or less hosed than Canada?? Canada can do things aside from sell oil, even if the previous government didn't realize that.
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# ? Feb 17, 2016 20:49 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 00:19 |
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Unfortunately this week has been very violent in Ukraine. According the the ATO spokesmen this week saw the return of MLRS fire in the immediate area around the ruins of Donetsk Airport. Several soldiers where killed.
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# ? Feb 17, 2016 22:56 |