What is the most powerful flying bug? This poll is closed. |
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🦋 | 15 | 3.71% | |
🦇 | 115 | 28.47% | |
🪰 | 12 | 2.97% | |
🐦 | 67 | 16.58% | |
dragonfly | 94 | 23.27% | |
🦟 | 14 | 3.47% | |
🐝 | 87 | 21.53% | |
Total: | 404 votes |
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one thing which really irritates me about the coverage of this war is how crude a lot of the propaganda is - basically the mode of operation is that ukraine can make outlandish claims and they will be reported as 'ukraine (or "anonymous intelligence source" or whatever) claims X' in between 'glib (13) became a symbol of ukrainian resistance. this is his story' pieces and histrionics about how unprecedented russian attacks on ukrainian electric infrastructure are it can only work if nobody with any kind of platform challenges it because it's obviously ridiculous. the norwegian public broadcaster story about how ukraine and NATO were contradicting each other over these rockets in poland managed to delay writing the actual headline claim until the third paragraph, and even then phrased it in such a way that your eyes sort of wanted to glaze over it to the rest of the piece about how terrible the war is/how heroic the ukrainians are etc. which, fine, but put the claim that makes this newsworthy in the headline (instead of "disagreements over provenance of missiles that hit poland" or some such) or in the very beginning of the piece. i am not used to norwegian media being quite this disdainful about its audience outside of the most ardently atlanticist tabloids.
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 01:03 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 13:18 |
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V. Illych L. posted:i, for my part, have no idea where the S300 was designed or manufactured, so i'm not making any claims as to that, but it was the start of the polish climb-down over the issue. Company is headquartered in Moscow iirc.
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 02:57 |
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Marzzle posted:I don't even want to kiss and hug vladimir putin
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 03:02 |
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It's been a strange experience because I'm not like a James Burton or Jackie Fisher reformer or whiz kid or anything like that, so finding even basic military knowledge at odds with a news cycle is a novel experience for me. I suppose I never thought of myself as being in a bubble or having specialized knowledge but the news cycle around Excalibur and the M777, I've never had regular people like my wife make claims about the business of gunnery, then get testy at my reaction. I don't know how to explain it, other than my experience and expertise, such as it is, went from being considered uncontroversial albeit dull to wrong, bordering on Russian Disinformation for as long as it took for the news to move onto the next thing. So, people who can't tell high and low explosives apart, don't know a Rotating Band from a Obturating Band, or Mauser rifle from a javelin for that matter, were speaking from authority about a subject I've been unable to arouse any interest in at all at dinner parties. They'd bring up artillery at dinner parties, name specific guns (well, just one, and that should have been a tell), were very interested in the CEP of specific projectiles, ranges, tactical employment. I know I've brought this up several times before, but imagine you have a job people are vaguely aware of but not really interested in. You know, IT, SysAdmin, coding. Try to picture everybody talking about it out of nowhere, using some of the right terminology but drawing conclusions that are obviously not accurate, but not random either. Everybody has suddenly discovered some facet of your job, but only so far as it serves a very obviously ginned up media narrative. They argue with you about it, repeat gibberish confidently, get upset with you, and then forget it and move on. Any thought or effort you put into addressing the claims is wasted because they've already forgotten. M777 will turn the tide? The Russians outshoot the Ukrainians 20:1. M777 has unparalleled range? You don't position towed guns to fire at the maximum possible range, it will wear out the guns, and in any case the Russian guns of the same calibre and role match the range anyways. Russia will run out of shells? The tooling has existed since tsarist times, mild steel, brass, aluminum and fertilizer are not rare in Russia, which is a world leading producer of all of them. Excalibur is a revolutionary weapon that will shatter the Russian Army? The GPS fails, conservatively, roughly 20% of the time on firing, and even then it makes slight corrections onto fixed coordinates while costing several times more than regular projectiles. I'm not trying to relitigate these arguments here, and there are many, many more I've left out, but my point is that it's already forgotten. They've moved on, forgotten their passion for gun artillery, feel exactly the same way about the Ukrainian Army's prospects, guns or no guns. It feels silly to even bring up, they're so past discussing artillery it feels like I'm a crank for even mentioning the beliefs they were convinced of not long ago. It's just that their perspective never changes for acquiring and discarding these arguments, that's what should have been a sign about the In This House We Believe Science people. You can say gunnery's my subject matter expertise, and that's true, but I only have a basic knowledge of Air Defence Artillery and I could tell you once we started getting information that it was likely those were Ukrainian S-300s that hit Poland. I don't know much about Air Operations but I can tell you about the targets for Rolling Thunder, Linebackers I and II, Allied Force and Desert Storm, and how extensively the electrical grids featured on that list. I'm not much of a Naval Operations guy (other than Canadian guns firing from landing craft on D-Day, which is pretty cool and you should look it up), but I figured the Moskva was lost to a combination of bad luck and poor use, rather than Russian ships being inherently defective. I know hardly anything about Axis Collaborators and Eastern European Perpetrators, but enough to recognize that the 14th Waffen SS was bad news bears, the Germans arrived to find Baba Yar in progress, and this Bandera guy should not be the father of a nation. Incidentally, a complaint among Canadian emigres was(/is) that the German authorities considered the Ukrainians merely "Galicians", but knowing just a tiny bit about the Ruthenians because of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is enough to say that they were pretty much correct, as far as this strain of Ukrainian nationalism is concerned. My point is not that I'm so loving smart - it's that I'm not and I'm still having a hard time with the stories everybody is accepting as gospel truth here. People who are smarter than me, better educated than me, are falling hook line and sinker for things they could disprove by thumbing through an introductory textbook. I don't know, RMC has a professor that studies propaganda and I wish I had spoken to him at greater length because it doesn't seem to be this sophisticated and subtle thing that I imagined it was but literally just very obvious repetition for a news cycle and then the next thing. Citations Needed feels redundant where Ukraine is concerned because unlike covid, climate, any of these other issues where consent is manufactured with something approaching subtlety, it's more or less all out in the open. So when my parish priest starts condemning the Russian Orthodox Church, I know exactly where that must be coming from (CBC, National Post) and what agenda it serves (Ukrainians are going to do some crimes, light religious persecution), and that if I try to contest that with the normal liberals in my life I'll have a hell of a hard time for the two weeks that the story lasts before they forget about it. When that passes, they'll have no interest whatsoever in Galicians being Catholics trying to reshape an Orthodox nation in their image, or "national" Orthodox Churches reflecting Autocephaly, not political alliegence, and will have forgotten that priests and monks were killed, Church property seized, congregations banned or who the gently caress knows what else might happen. It's all going to be gone except for a vague memory that Putin controlled a sinister Church that was hateful to LGBTQIA2S+ people or something. The story immediately before the novel and unprecedented crime of targeting the electrical grid was that Russian strategic bombing was completely ineffective and they were out of missiles. There's no interest in reconciling those two positions, which seem to have been held with equal conviction.
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 03:05 |
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so a russian missile intercepted a russian missile my god, they're intercepting their own missiles to threaten us with falling debris elsewhere!!! if they wanted to!
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 03:06 |
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did read propaganda doesn't need to be sophisticated anymore! its almost like liberals don't need to be convinced about stuff because their media consumption pattern is about actively looking to be told what to believe so they can repeat it uncritically
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 03:14 |
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gradenko_2000 posted:How could China do this to Xinjiang lol
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 03:14 |
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post thanksgiving watching transporter 3: trouble in little ukraine (normal ukraine)
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 03:20 |
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16-bit Butt-Head posted:stalin was from the mushroom kingdom
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 03:25 |
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speng31b posted:its almost like liberals don't need to be convinced about stuff because their media consumption pattern is about actively looking to be told what to believe so they can repeat it uncritically I'd respect them more if they actually believed it. It's the combination of zeal and certainty with total plasticity that makes it so hard for me to square. I know you can say the only true underlying belief is class interest but that's not really satisfying because who knows how much of that is even conscious? e: I have to agree with the many people coming through to mention Xinjiang. What the gently caress?
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 03:25 |
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FF if it makes you feel better if we were at a dinner party and you started talking about artillery I'd just listen
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 03:31 |
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I kind of gave up on news media propaganda narratives and now just think about how global US culture wars are when I see Russian nazis post their antisemitic memes and Trump merch black friday sales.
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 03:34 |
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January 6 Survivor posted:FF if it makes you feel better if we were at a dinner party and you started talking about artillery I'd just listen i would ask if you could demonstrate concepts using food items
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 03:36 |
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yeah i knew nobody was immune to propaganda but it's been wild to see this level up uptake and adherence by people. granted I was a teenager at the time, but I do not remember as many people getting as wrapped up in the post-911 fervor anywhere near as much as this. it does seem to be dying down though.
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 03:39 |
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Frosted Flake posted:I'd respect them more if they actually believed it. It's the combination of zeal and certainty with total plasticity that makes it so hard for me to square. :zenz:
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 03:40 |
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its hard to not support ukraine when their memes are so epic
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 03:42 |
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Command & Conquer Generals came out in 2003 and it's so full of racial slurs and stereotypes that I don't think you could ever have something like that outside of the post psychosis that existed in America. And I am not sure if that even includes cheese eating surrender monkeys and freedom fries.
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 03:43 |
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is it new or have all these NAFO accounts always had the nazi bar cross in their display names
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 03:46 |
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Lostconfused posted:Command & Conquer Generals came out in 2003 and it's so full of racial slurs and stereotypes that I don't think you could ever have something like that outside of the post psychosis that existed in America. And I am not sure if that even includes cheese eating surrender monkeys and freedom fries. cnc generals is a fantastic piece of american history. heritage not hate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xT6kblEmGGc
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 03:49 |
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paul_soccer12 posted:is it new or have all these NAFO accounts always had the nazi bar cross in their display names which nazi bar cross? also when did the enlarge/delarge button icon get adopted by everyone as a fuckin balkenkreuz? im kidding it's just a weird coincidence but it's funny to me
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 03:52 |
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Lostconfused posted:Command & Conquer Generals came out in 2003 and it's so full of racial slurs and stereotypes that I don't think you could ever have something like that outside of the post psychosis that existed in America. And I am not sure if that even includes cheese eating surrender monkeys and freedom fries. Marzzle posted:cnc generals is a fantastic piece of american history. heritage not hate It's a perfectly preserved core sample of 2003 American media (China was OP is C&C generals)
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 03:55 |
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January 6 Survivor posted:FF if it makes you feel better if we were at a dinner party and you started talking about artillery I'd just listen Thank you! Everyone needs some help at the fine art of talking about work I think. On the one hand, a lot of dinner parties don't have mixed company, so it just becomes talking shop and reminiscing about the old days. On the other, sometimes you're the only one in your line of work and you have to make the elevator pitch. The only thing I consider poor form which you hear around here all the time is the stock reply by CSOR/JTF-2/X/CJIRU/CSIS etc. people "it's cool, but I can't talk about it". Just talk about the parts of you job that aren't classified for Christ's sake, we're trying to make small talk. There's also a literal calendar full of mandatory dinner parties where I have to talk about work. Be sure to mark your calendar for December 4, St. Barbara's Day. "The day of St. Barbara, the mystical patron saint of artillerymen, is observed by units of the Royal Regiment of Canadian Artillery with church parades, sports, mess dinners and other events, even to firing salutes with miniature guns." They postponed the Artillery Ball and the Army Ball to next year though. https://www.canada.ca/en/department...s/appendix.html
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 04:01 |
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The Guardian, Feb 12, 1999: Russian Patriarch 'was KGB spy'quote:A secret Soviet-era document uncovered in Estonia suggests that Patriarch Alexy II, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church and spiritual leader of tens of millions of Christians, was a fully fledged KGB agent. Spies In The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia aka ROCOR Moscow Patriarchate Founded by Stalin in 1943 quote:“Former KGB Lt. Col. Konstantin Preobrazhensky, who defected to the U.S. in 1993, is the author of two books: KGB/FSB’s New Trojan Horse: Americans of Russian Descent and Russian Americans: A New KGB Asset. Religious Culture: Faith in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia quote:The former Soviet Union is undergoing a religious revival. People inside and outside the Russian Orthodox church are reexamining its ancient ways, rediscovering its long-forgotten saints, searching its institutional memory for answers to urgent questions facing the nation. The Western reaction to this remarkable resurgence of religion in Russia has been mixed. All observers welcome the fact that free inquiry about religion and free religious worship have been restored in the Russian Federation. At the same time, many are concerned about the xenophobic tendencies that have accompanied the religious revival in Russia and that became especially evident after the liberal forces suffered a defeat in the December 1993 parliamentary election. Calls to restore the great Russian empire sounded by the winners brought to mind the old slogan, "Moscow, the Third Rome," that had spurred Muscovy in the 16th-17th centuries to expand its dominion over neighboring countries. The situation is further exacerbated by a few Archbishops and Metropolitans who exhort the Russian people to bring the orthodox, unchanging faith -- Pravoslavie -- to the world.
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 04:26 |
Cuttlefush posted:yeah i knew nobody was immune to propaganda but it's been wild to see this level up uptake and adherence by people. granted I was a teenager at the time, but I do not remember as many people getting as wrapped up in the post-911 fervor anywhere near as much as this. it does seem to be dying down though. post-9/11 was an absolute madhouse culturally but in much simpler and more predictable ways. a turn toward racism, islamophobia, country music, and flagfucking, no need for anyone to spend time "educating themselves" about the finer points of military-industrial complex products in order to sound "with it" on a war that everyone vaguely feels is very important but actually doesn't give a poo poo about
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 04:33 |
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in transporter 3, the one in ukraine, a ukrainian tractor hauls jason statham's audi A8 out of a river. foreshadowing from 2008
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 04:35 |
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Jazerus posted:post-9/11 was an absolute madhouse culturally but in much simpler and more predictable ways. a turn toward racism, islamophobia, country music, and flagfucking, no need for anyone to spend time "educating themselves" about the finer points of military-industrial complex products in order to sound "with it" on a war that everyone vaguely feels is very important but actually doesn't give a poo poo about it sure feels that way, but I have to wonder how much of that is colored by my perspective based on my age at the time.
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 04:35 |
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Jazerus posted:post-9/11 was an absolute madhouse culturally but in much simpler and more predictable ways. a turn toward racism, islamophobia, country music, and flagfucking, no need for anyone to spend time "educating themselves" about the finer points of military-industrial complex products in order to sound "with it" on a war that everyone vaguely feels is very important but actually doesn't give a poo poo about I think maybe in November 2001 when the news was talking about Tora Bora and so B-52’s, “bunker busters” and various special forces units got singled out for attention? Before video games the public had never heard of a lot of military equipment so I remember like the M4 got a special infographic in the newspaper, where now any 13 year old can tell you about the SOPMOD, Mk 18, and countless other niche rifles because of Call of Duty. Frosted Flake has issued a correction as of 04:40 on Nov 25, 2022 |
# ? Nov 25, 2022 04:38 |
Frosted Flake posted:I think maybe in November when the news was talking about Tora Bora and so B-52’s, “bunker busters” and various special forces units got singled out for attention?
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 04:40 |
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Propaganda doesn't need to be sophisticated because of the short news cycle and the sheer barrage of it to overload most people trying to analyze it. At least that seems to be the point with large media organizations. Russian propaganda functions the same inward from what I've seen, but outward it seems to be more about signal boosting stories that are otherwise pretty unremarkable with the goal of fueling culture war poo poo, stoking resentment, and that works out well at stirring up those sentiments online, but it doesn't exactly shift policy or public opinion all that much in the short term.
Dreylad has issued a correction as of 04:49 on Nov 25, 2022 |
# ? Nov 25, 2022 04:46 |
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lol If anyone remembers the concern that maybe the Stingers we gave Al Qaeda* would be used against us, the Stingers given to Ukraine have been made defective intentionally via their programming. That the idea of controlling who they are given to, or any kind of due diligence, monitoring, long term foreign policy planning, learning from mistakes, has been given up for a technological solution that may or may not work, with either the safeguards or missiles liable to fail, sums up where we’re at imo. * Yes, mlnp, they weren’t technically Al Qaeda yet.
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 04:52 |
Dreylad posted:Propaganda doesn't need to be sophisticated because of the short news cycle and the sheer barrage of it to overload most people trying to analyze it. At least that seems to be the point with large media organizations. Russian propaganda functions the same inward from what I've seen, but outward it seems to be more about signal boosting stories that are otherwise pretty unremarkable with the goal of fueling culture war poo poo, stoking resentment, and that works out well at stirring up those sentiments online, but it doesn't exactly shift policy or public opinion all that much in the short term. You might be mistaking the massive asymmetry of influence and reach between Russian and western propaganda for a difference in strategy. Russian media is basically Al Qaeda fighting the US MIC in terms of disparity.
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 04:53 |
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Frosted Flake posted:If anyone remembers the concern that maybe the Stingers we gave Al Qaeda* would be used against us, the Stingers given to Ukraine have been made defective intentionally via their programming. Where do you get this stuff? Or is this just a misleading way of discussing US-only Stingers vs export-model Stingers?
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 04:54 |
Frosted Flake posted:lol The people who absolutely pwned John Deere's drm will never figure it out I'm sure
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 04:55 |
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mlmp08 posted:Where do you get this stuff? Poland Sold Shoulder-Fired Anti-Aircraft Missiles With Coded Locks To Prevent Unauthorized Use This kind of technology has been reported to exist to help ease concerns about terrorists getting their hands on portable anti-aircraft missiles. Polish state-owned defense contractor Mesko offers, or at least offered, a system designed to prevent unauthorized use of its Grom shoulder-fired heat-seeking surface-to-air missiles, according to a recently released report. This would appear to be the first confirmed instance of an end-use control system being fitted to a weapon of this kind, also known as man-portable air-defense systems, or MANPADS, despite public discussion about the potential to do so for decades now. There have long been fears about what terrorists and criminals might do if they could get ahold of these weapons. This piece of information was tucked away in a footnote in a report that Conflict Armament Research (CAR), an independent group focused on investigating arms trafficking in conflicts around the world, released last week. The document is the product of a three-year-long investigation into the flow of weapons to Russian-backed groups in eastern Ukraine's Donbass region. The government in Kyiv has been fighting Kremlin-supported forces in this part of the country since 2014, a conflict that erupted after Moscow illegally seized Ukraine's Crimea region that year. … This is, of course, not the first time that such an end-use control system for MANPADS has at least been suggested. The U.S. government, among others, has had concerns about weapons of this type proliferating for decades now. Since these kinds of missiles are relatively easy to transport and use, the fear has long been that they could just as easily be employed to try to shoot down commercial airliners in a domestic context as warplanes on the battlefield. Starting in the 1980s, the Central Intelligence Agency supplied Stinger missiles to Afghan rebels fighting the Soviet Union. After that conflict ended, American authorities embarked on an expensive and complex effort to buy back any missiles that hadn't been fired. As of 2005, American officials were still trying to recover some of these weapons. The U.S. government has sought to secure loose MANPADS in other conflicts to prevent their proliferation since then and this was one of the missions being run out of the CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya, at the time of the infamous terrorist attack on the nearby U.S. consulate in 2012. An actual physical system that prevents unauthorized use to begin with would be an attractive alternative. In 2019, Dutch researcher Jos Wetzels presented evidence, seen in the video below, that the CIA itself explored at least one such end-use control system that would prevent a MANPADS from being employed outside of a given area and/or time frame. Similar reports had emerged three years earlier about the potential use of "geofencing" via GPS to limit where MANPADS could be fired, as well as a hard lockout of some kind set to a timer. It remains unclear whether any of this technology was ever implemented. https://youtu.be/FHj_iQZ9pTk … These are not the only novel export controls that the U.S. government is rumored to have developed and implemented. There have long been reports that Pakistani F-16 fighter jets are fitted with systems that would allow American officials to remotely ground them, or at least disable some of their capabilities, should the need arise. CIA devised way to restrict missiles given to allies, researcher says LEIPZIG, Germany (Reuters) - The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has devised technology to restrict the use of anti-aircraft missiles after they leave American hands, a researcher said, a move that experts say could persuade the United States that it would be safe to disseminate powerful weapons more frequently. The new technology is intended for use with shoulder-fired missiles called Man-Portable Air-Defense Systems (MANPADS), Dutch researcher Jos Wetzels told a cybersecurity conference here in Leipzig, Germany on Saturday. Wetzels said the system was laid out in a batch of CIA documents published by WikiLeaks in 2017 but that the files were mislabeled and attracted little public attention until now. Wetzels said the CIA had come up with a “smart arms control solution” that would restrict the use of missiles “to a particular time and a particular place.” The technique, referred to as “geofencing,” blocks the use of a device outside a specific geographic area. Weapons that are disabled when they leave the battlefield could be an attractive feature. Supplied to U.S. allies, the highly portable missiles can help win wars, but they have often been lost, sold, or passed to extremists. For example, Stinger MANPADS supplied by the United States are credited with helping mujahedeen rebels drive Soviet forces out of Afghanistan in a conflict that spanned the 1980s and 1990s. But U.S. officials have since spent billions of dollars here to clear the missiles from the country - and from other conflict zones around the world. Wetzels said it was unclear whether the CIA’s design ever left the drawing board or where it was meant to have been deployed, but he noted that the apparent period of development in the documents’ metadata - 2014 to 2015 - roughly coincided with media reports about the deployment of MANPADS to rebels in Syria. Geofencing might have been seen as a way of ensuring the missiles were used on the Syrian battlefield and nowhere else, he said. The CIA declined to comment. Outside experts who reviewed Wetzels’ analysis said they found it plausible. N.R. Jenzen-Jones, who directs the British-based ARES intelligence consultancy, said geofencing has long been discussed as a safeguard to allow powerful weapons “into the hands of friendly forces operating in high-risk environments.” Wetzels said geofencing was no panacea, running through a list of security vulnerabilities that could be used by insurgents to bypass the restrictions. “It’s not a watertight solution,” he said. Deck from the conference Here Frosted Flake has issued a correction as of 05:11 on Nov 25, 2022 |
# ? Nov 25, 2022 05:07 |
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That's all a far cry from saying that the Stingers given to Ukraine are deliberately made defective before being shipped to Ukraine and a lot of conjecture that no one who knows is going to comment on.
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 05:11 |
Good god you're a tedious little fed
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 05:13 |
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mlmp08 going off the chain because well actually FF directed his comment to "mlnp"
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 05:14 |
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Either they have not been tampered with, in which case I would avoid flying El Al out of Eastern Europe in the next few years, or they have been, in which case I would have renewed confidence if I were a Su-24 pilot. In any case, you’re right, we can only guess until someone tries to shoot down an airliner. We’ll simply have to wait to see what happens.
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 05:16 |
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Slavvy posted:Good god you're a tedious little fed I was just curious where FF was getting the idea that Ukraine was given defective stingers. Question answered.
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 05:19 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 13:18 |
mlmp08 posted:I was just curious where FF was getting the idea that Ukraine was given defective stingers. Question answered. You're a tedious poo poo
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# ? Nov 25, 2022 05:20 |