Zeroisanumber posted:

Finland joining NATO is absolutely an upset of the status quo. Even assuming that Russia achieves its goals in Ukraine, suddenly sharing 850 miles of border with an adversary is a big loss. The gently caress do you get subs in and out of the Baltic when NATO goes from the GIUK Gap to the Helsinki-Talinn Gap?

gradenko_2000 posted:

Sweden just announced finding the world's largest rare earth mineral supply so Operation Swedish Freedom is being drafted as we speak

Chamale posted:

One in fifteenyoung Ukrainian men died of suicide or alcohol abuse in the twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. For the 500,000 Soviet men who were conscripted into cleaning up the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, the rate was one in ten.

mlmp08 posted:

Pipelines are mysterious!

Al-Saqr posted:

you guys do realize that weve moved past the point of population number mattering all that much in todays military landscape right? while yes pool of recruits is a thing we're not in 1942 where people were churning out tanks and pulping people by the millions

SplitSoul posted:

Swedish government apoplectic over hanging of Erdogan effigy as Türkiye opens probe. NATO ascension going great.

mawarannahr posted:

succccccc https://twitter.com/newsaboutturke1/status/1507904471187312650

lmfao

Slim Jim Pickens posted:

https://twitter.com/JulianRoepcke/status/1613925248411246592

Brave German journalist faces off again the propaganda arm of a fascist regime.

Lostconfused posted:

The question is will Russia attempt another real offensive. Nobody wants to believe that they will, but it's not like they have much of an alternative.

Lostconfused posted:

The whole does Ukraine have enough conscripts or not isn't that important.

The question is will Russia attempt another real offensive. Nobody wants to believe that they will, but it's not like they have much of an alternative.

Anyway, still have to wait for Bakhmut to play out. Presumably it's only a matter of time after Soledar.

Starsfan posted:

There is some speculation that the reason why Surovikin was "replaced" by Gerasimov (Gerasimov out-ranked Surovikin even when Surovikin was in charge of the Ukriane operation) is because there is going to be quite a large offensive kicking off soon and the Russians wanted to have the chief of the general staff (with all the additional resources he would have access to) in charge of the operation instead of one of his deputies. Probably some wishful thinking, but potentially a signal that a big shift in the situation on the ground could be happening soon.

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/KristiRaik/status/1613590182300909568

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/KristiRaik/status/1613590182300909568

Endman posted:

I'm actually mad.

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/KristiRaik/status/1613590182300909568

Why the North Won, 1960 posted:

Like all American soldiers in all wars, the Confederate soldiers disliked military discipline. Mississippi volunteers shirked assignments which they found tedious, declaring "they did not enlist to do guard duty but to fight the Yankies." At the outbreak of the war, when wealthier soldiers received onerous orders, some coolly instructed their Negro servants to carry them out, meanwhile uncomplainingly taking "upon themselves the duty of sitting on the fence and superintending the work." Others hired substitutes to perform their chores. "The two or three men of the overseer class who were to be found in nearly every company," George Cary Eggleston recalled, "turned some nimble quarters by standing other men's turns of guard-duty at twenty-five cents an hour."

The Southern soldier reserved his democratic right to interpret his orders broadly. The British observer, Colonel J. A. L. Fremantle, at first thought Confederate sentries "quite as strict as, and ten times more polite than, regular soldiers" because they efficiently challenged him when he entered James Longstreet's camp. But when he complimented the Confederate commander, Longstreet "replied, laughing, that a sentry, after refusing you leave to enter a camp, might very likely, if properly asked, show you another way in, by which you might avoid meeting a sentry at all."

Southern soldiers simply disobeyed orders which they deemed unreasonable. Unconvinced that it was necessary to carry heavy packs, they carelessly tossed irreplaceable equipment aside on long, hot marches. Even the idea of marching at a regular rate in tidy lines offended their sense of individuality. "Our great embarrassment," Robert E. Lee reported to Jefferson Davis, "is the reduction of our ranks by straggling, which it seems impossible to prevent. . . . Our ranks are very much diminished-I fear from a third to one-half of our original numbers."

The Southern soldiers who volunteered at the outbreak of the war considered it their right to determine for themselves the length of their service. After a victorious battle in the early days of the war "many would coolly walk off home, under the impression that they had performed their share." When Jefferson Davis attempted to construct a more stable army through conscription, he probably lost more than he gained.

Dzhon S. Kalhyn (I hope somebody gets this) posted:

When Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina savagely caned Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on the floor of the U.S. Senate on May 21, 1856, Southerners viewed the attack as a triumphant affirmation of southern chivalry, while Northerners saw it as a confirmation of southern barbarity. Public opinion was similarly divided nearly three-and-a-half years later after abolitionist John Brown's raid on the Federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia. Northerners crowned John Brown as a martyr to the cause of freedom, while Southerners excoriated him as a conscience fanatic. These events opened American minds to the possibility that North and South might be incompatible societies, but some of Dixie's defenders were willing to go one step further - to propose that Northerners and Southerners represented not just a "divided people" but two scientifically distinct races.

In "Normans and Saxons," Ritchie Watson, Jr., explores the complex racial mythology created by the upper classes of the antebellum South in the wake of these divisive events to justify secession and, eventually, the Civil War. This mythology cast Southerners as descendants of the Normans of eleventh-century England and thus also of the Cavaliers of the seventeenth century, some of whom had come to the New World and populated the southern colonies. These Normans were opposed, in mythic terms, by Saxons - Englishmen of German descent - some of whose descendants made up the Puritans who settled New England and later fanned out to populate the rest of the North. The myth drew on nineteenth-century science and other sources to portray these as two separate, warring "races," the aristocratic and dashing Normans versus the common and venal Saxons.

According to Watson, southern polemical writers employed this racial mythology as a justification of slavery, countering the northern argument that the South's peculiar institution had combined with its Norman racial composition to produce an arrogant and brutal land of oligarchs with a second-rate culture. Watson finds evidence for this argument in both prose and poetry, from the literary influence of Sir Walter Scott, De Bow's Review, and other antebellum southern magazines, to fiction by George Tucker, John Pendleton Kennedy, and William Alexander Caruthers and northern and southern poetry during the Civil War, especially in the works of Walt Whitman. Watson also traces the continuing impact of the Norman versus Saxon myth in "Lost Cause" thought and how the myth has affected ideas about southern sectionalism of today.

"Normans and Saxons" provides a thorough analysis of the ways in which myth ultimately helped to convince Americans that regional differences over the issue of slavery were manifestations of deeper and more profound differences in racial temperament - differences that made civil war inevitable..

Ardennes posted:

I could see things get real messy if Erdogan engages in mass voter fraud/delays the election/engages in a self-coup (or a dozen other great ideas) in June. I mean on one hand, a lot of people are sick of Erdogan and want him out, but would the West actually push for regime change if he doesn't go? Turkey is not only NATO but absolutely strategic and it really seems like it would be playing with fire especially if Erdogan holds on.

Cheatum the Evil Midget posted:

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/KristiRaik/status/1613590182300909568