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(Thread IKs: weg, Toxic Mental)
 
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Comfy Fleece Sweater
Apr 2, 2013

You see, but you do not observe.

I have no loving clue what all that means, what is Bakhmut I thought it was a summon from Final Fantasy

Can someone explain how the war is going in TF2 terms?

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Doctor Butts
May 21, 2002

The war isn't going anywhere. It'll keep going on for a while.

I just feel that it'll keep going until one side has exhausted its ability to keep going.

Doctor Butts fucked around with this message at 01:44 on Mar 6, 2023

Karma Comedian
Feb 2, 2012

That sounds pretty bad
Imo the one who is invading should pack up and go home and pay for the damages

Dapper_Swindler
Feb 14, 2012

Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

HonorableTB posted:

Prigozhin is making strange threats that I don't think he's really in the position to be making.

https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1632148708748935168?s=20

That's quite the implied threat to Gerasimov and Shoigu. With Kadyrov recently poisoned (which is interesting because Kadyrov himself reported that one of his top generals had been poisoned recently, his own poisoning shouldn't be a surprise..), Prigozhin seems to be digging himself into a hole that may turn out to be a tunnel or his own grave, depending on how Bakhmut turns out. If Bakhmut doesn't fall to Wagner or the RUAF, Prigozhin's days are numbered


Edit: christ prigozhin always talks like he's got a bunch of marbles in his mouth

much like alot of autocratic shitheads of various stripes, its always shaped like hosed up wheel where the leader is the axis and everyone else is a spoke, but all the spokes loving hate each other. when poo poo not going well, you see them trying kill each other or etc. kradyrov is probably just the first.

shadow puppet of a
Jan 10, 2007

NO TENGO SCORPIO


Real question for our IK-Mod-Admins watching this thread like a Globalhawk:

How much of a celebration can we hold in here if/when its announced that monstrous goblin Kadryov is dead? Like a full page of dance gifs or can we just repost sombre and equivocating PBS/NPR grade announcement tweets without putting this thread back into double-secret probation?

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

Comfy Fleece Sweater posted:

I have no loving clue what all that means, what is Bakhmut I thought it was a summon from Final Fantasy

Can someone explain how the war is going in TF2 terms?

They're still fighting over a pointless but symbolic town, Russia is throwing heaps of people at it and taking huge losses, and the gains they have to show for what's got to be losses in the thousands over months of fighting are basically "we've taken a city block and two parking lots".

They are advancing, though. It's unclear if this is Ukraine using their defense lines as a way to cause huge Russian losses while they prepare for something, or if it's Ukraine slowly failing to hold something they are desperately trying to keep.

I suspect the former, but it could be either or both.

Drone_Fragger
May 9, 2007


Putin threatening to fill his pants with poo poo yet again unless wagnar takes bakhmut by 2025. I'd like to see the decadent west outplay this.

Toxic Mental
Jun 1, 2019

shadow puppet of a posted:

Real question for our IK-Mod-Admins watching this thread like a Globalhawk:

How much of a celebration can we hold in here if/when its announced that monstrous goblin Kadryov is dead? Like a full page of dance gifs or can we just repost sombre and equivocating PBS/NPR grade announcement tweets without putting this thread back into double-secret probation?

You can give him the Rush Limbaugh treatment. The architects of this fascist colonial war are deserving of no withholding at all when they bite it because the blood of their own country and another innocent one is directly on their hands.

I don't wish death upon anyone, but I'm not going to feel bad when evil people that consider the common man disposable are gone.

Mulva
Sep 13, 2011
It's about time for my once per decade ban for being a consistently terrible poster.

shadow puppet of a posted:

Real question for our IK-Mod-Admins watching this thread like a Globalhawk:

How much of a celebration can we hold in here if/when its announced that monstrous goblin Kadryov is dead? Like a full page of dance gifs or can we just repost sombre and equivocating PBS/NPR grade announcement tweets without putting this thread back into double-secret probation?

Fucker's obit doesn't deserve more than a "Good" and humanity collectively moving on from him.

Caedus
Sep 11, 2007

It's good to have a sense of scale.



Glad this thread got hashed out.

I'm going to try and be generous here - I think Firstname wants us to empathize with the Russian soliders being killed as a result of a state operating in bad faith - which I do and I think most of you do as well. I also think he wants us to sympathize with them, which I, and most other people in here I think, do not.

They can make every personal effort not to throw themselves at the Ukrainians, even if it wasn't fair in the least the individual is there in the first place. I stop feeling bad the moment they pull a trigger and I don't think arguing that we need to keep feeling bad after that point is going to land with any of us. If they want to fight and surrender after they lost the battle, it should be accepted and they should be treated well until the end of the war, but they will not have my sympathy.

That being said I do appreciate the different perspectives and I think it's a great instinct to try and check ourselves and make sure what we're witnessing doesn't lead us to the loss of empathy too.

FirstnameLastname
Jul 10, 2022

KazigluBey posted:

This.

I understand what you are saying FirstnameLastname but I'm not really sorry if I lack sympathy for individual elements of an invading imperial aggressor. I don't see the need to spend much time splitting hairs over individual levels of culpability for an invading force already guilty of war crimes against civilians.

Also you can't tell me "that's not what i said :|", you quite literally typed the words "the russian conscripts are largely, at the individual level, victims of the russian state's aggression about as much as the ukranian conscripts and civilians are" and then went on use WWII as an example of "no such thing as good guys vs bad guys". Like, if your point was "no such thing as people without blood on their hands in war", sure, but you picked WWII... The firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo were warcrimes, but labeling a reactive war fought against fascism as morally grey is a huge loving stretch and I think it does a disservice to your point, as does, again, literally saying russian conscripts are as much victims of the Russian state as Ukrainian civilians.

not that there's noone without blood on their hands, but that there's victims on every side of a conflict. I wasn't making a moral argument at all, more a point of how moral definitions are applied and who they're applied to. (i promise I'll shut up about it after this btw i just love to post and feel like i misstated some stuff )

I'm not tryna tell people to not do stuff btw or poo poo on people itt,
it's just to make that distinction because I'm guessing most people aren't aware that entire extra atrocity is even happening

i was responding initially to a guy mad about wanting to celebrate dead conscripts in greater detail and another one talking about the conscripts all being rapist warcriminals, bc it's all wrapped up under 'Russia'.

That was why I brought that whole good/bad framing up, because it's just natural for people to do that, and it needs disrupted for that message to get across. i don't think most of the people doing it are aware the ones they're dehumanizing n making GBS threads on the most are really the ones who deserve it the least

it's invisible when you look at the Russian forces as one big thing where everyone in it is equally responsible for all they've done, while most those mobiks dying now weren't even in the military when Bucha or Mariupol happened.

It just feels hosed up how the minority groups in Russia are being scooped up by the Russian military to get massacred in Ukraine and that entire tragedy is invisible to a lot of people, because the larger and more overt atrocity of Russia invading Ukraine masks it.

Then, since Russia is doing all this hosed up stuff, people end up cheering for any russian defeat - but the conscripts being targeted for battledeath aren't the ones launching all those missiles or saying to lay mines everywhere. They're not responsible for the Russian military culture of rape and abuse. The higher officers are ultimately responsible for the stuff like Bucha, they're the ones who have it coming

The conscripts are, however, responsible for a looot of the overall visible mass of the russian forces, and especially casualties, at an increasing rate since January or so, that's mostly what they're doing, dying.

they're not the rapist warcriminals, that's almost entirely volunteer career soldiers and the officers in control of things, artillery and rocket teams, pilots, not mobiks. them dying on its own means Ukraine has less ammo, that's their purpose in combat, and ultimately is what Russia wants for them.


on the ww2 references, i used thoss as an example because ww2 always gets brought up as 'the just war' and someone would say 'oh should we have felt bad for the wehrmacht too' (no) and i was preempting that by using some of the most extreme examples of reasons to not cheer for terrible things happening under the pretext of it being for a just cause

I wasn't directly comparing them or saying it's the same situation, only that they're both not good things or worth celebrating and that there can be elements of a society that are victims while still being a part of the aggressor in the overarching conflict, and that it's important to not reduce very large and complex geopolitical events into columns of goodguy-badguy

anyways ya i think i got the point across & im glad that discussion was able to happen without things getting all flamewary :dings:

de_dust posted:

This is pretty much a modern “Not all Wehrmacht soldiers…” kind of post. Outstanding.
it's not

HonorableTB
Dec 22, 2006

Toxic Mental posted:

You can give him the Rush Limbaugh treatment. The architects of this fascist colonial war are deserving of no withholding at all when they bite it because the blood of their own country and another innocent one is directly on their hands.

I don't wish death upon anyone, but I'm not going to feel bad when evil people that consider the common man disposable are gone.

i'll have to start drinking water now if i'm gonna give him the rush limbaugh treatment, i wont have nearly enough pee otherwise

Drone_Fragger
May 9, 2007


Putin reportedly "seething with anger" after shamanic ritual where he drank a gallon of horse cum would "not increase the fighting condition of our troops" and in fact "destroyed morale in the rank and file infantry and conscripts" as it "makes putin look insane". Putin is apparantly now looking for another shaman who will provide a working horse cum ritual, rather than a fraudulent one.

The Locator
Sep 12, 2004

Out here, everything hurts.





Drone_Fragger posted:

Putin reportedly "seething with anger" after shamanic ritual where he drank a gallon of horse cum would "not increase the fighting condition of our troops" and in fact "destroyed morale in the rank and file infantry and conscripts" as it "makes putin look insane". Putin is apparantly now looking for another shaman who will provide a working horse cum ritual, rather than a fraudulent one.

There's a shaman dude serving a 41 month sentence in a prison in Safford, AZ. Maybe Putin could work out a trade, we send him the shaman and they release some Ukrainian prisoners or something.

ArfJason
Sep 5, 2011
So did the uyghur genocide happen or...?

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

FirstnameLastname
Jul 10, 2022

Drone_Fragger posted:

Putin reportedly "seething with anger" after shamanic ritual where he drank a gallon of horse cum would "not increase the fighting condition of our troops" and in fact "destroyed morale in the rank and file infantry and conscripts" as it "makes putin look insane". Putin is apparantly now looking for another shaman who will provide a working horse cum ritual, rather than a fraudulent one.

i totally believe that putin deer-blood bath wolfskin ritual rumor tbh

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

ArfJason posted:

So did the uyghur genocide happen or...?

Maybe take that to another thread.

FirstnameLastname
Jul 10, 2022

ArfJason posted:

So did the uyghur genocide happen or...?

There's no "The". its just Uyghur

Toxic Mental
Jun 1, 2019

Don't do it Jason

Deteriorata
Feb 6, 2005

FirstnameLastname posted:

not that there's noone without blood on their hands, but that there's victims on every side of a conflict. I wasn't making a moral argument at all, more a point of how moral definitions are applied and who they're applied to. (i promise I'll shut up about it after this btw i just love to post and feel like i misstated some stuff )

I'm not tryna tell people to not do stuff btw or poo poo on people itt,
it's just to make that distinction because I'm guessing most people aren't aware that entire extra atrocity is even happening

i was responding initially to a guy mad about wanting to celebrate dead conscripts in greater detail and another one talking about the conscripts all being rapist warcriminals, bc it's all wrapped up under 'Russia'.

That was why I brought that whole good/bad framing up, because it's just natural for people to do that, and it needs disrupted for that message to get across. i don't think most of the people doing it are aware the ones they're dehumanizing n making GBS threads on the most are really the ones who deserve it the least

it's invisible when you look at the Russian forces as one big thing where everyone in it is equally responsible for all they've done, while most those mobiks dying now weren't even in the military when Bucha or Mariupol happened.

It just feels hosed up how the minority groups in Russia are being scooped up by the Russian military to get massacred in Ukraine and that entire tragedy is invisible to a lot of people, because the larger and more overt atrocity of Russia invading Ukraine masks it.

Then, since Russia is doing all this hosed up stuff, people end up cheering for any russian defeat - but the conscripts being targeted for battledeath aren't the ones launching all those missiles or saying to lay mines everywhere. They're not responsible for the Russian military culture of rape and abuse. The higher officers are ultimately responsible for the stuff like Bucha, they're the ones who have it coming

The conscripts are, however, responsible for a looot of the overall visible mass of the russian forces, and especially casualties, at an increasing rate since January or so, that's mostly what they're doing, dying.

they're not the rapist warcriminals, that's almost entirely volunteer career soldiers and the officers in control of things, artillery and rocket teams, pilots, not mobiks. them dying on its own means Ukraine has less ammo, that's their purpose in combat, and ultimately is what Russia wants for them.


on the ww2 references, i used thoss as an example because ww2 always gets brought up as 'the just war' and someone would say 'oh should we have felt bad for the wehrmacht too' (no) and i was preempting that by using some of the most extreme examples of reasons to not cheer for terrible things happening under the pretext of it being for a just cause

I wasn't directly comparing them or saying it's the same situation, only that they're both not good things or worth celebrating and that there can be elements of a society that are victims while still being a part of the aggressor in the overarching conflict, and that it's important to not reduce very large and complex geopolitical events into columns of goodguy-badguy

anyways ya i think i got the point across & im glad that discussion was able to happen without things getting all flamewary :dings:

it's not

This is analogous in many ways to the American experience in Vietnam. The US Army was mostly conscripts, and rich white kids fled to Canada or got deferments. The resulting corps was thus disproportionately poor and minorities.

However, once they got to Vietnam, they were just American soldiers and the Vietnamese did not care about their ethnic or economic status.

Similarly, Russia needs to sort out internally the politics of conscription and making national service more equitable. Once they get to Ukraine, though, they're just Russian soldiers and the Ukrainians care more about defending their homes than the ethnic or economic status of their opponents.

de_dust
Jan 21, 2009

she had tiny Italian boobs.
Well that's my story.

It’s quite literally the same sort of apologia you hear wehraboos and clean Wehrmacht types make for that organization. The exact same kind. If I didn’t read your previous attempts at downplaying the conscripts role in all of this I would’ve thought you were being sarcastic.

Jakabite
Jul 31, 2010

de_dust posted:

It’s quite literally the same sort of apologia you hear wehraboos and clean Wehrmacht types make for that organization. The exact same kind. If I didn’t read your previous attempts at downplaying the conscripts role in all of this I would’ve thought you were being sarcastic.

Yeah I appreciated your post Firstname as I genuinely didn’t know about the ethnic cleansing aspect but I don’t see the difference between what you’re doing and Wehrmacht apologism - there were a lot of conscripts there too right?

Captain Theron
Mar 22, 2010

It's also quite patronising to have you repeatedly telling us that Russian soldiers are people too, firstname. We all know that, no one is seriously representing that they're not. Being conscripted explains how they're there, but doesn't excuse them for taking an active role in an imperialistic project, they can choose to pull the trigger or not.

Similarly, we don't need you to lecture us on the complex morality at play here, no one honestly believes that this is the white hat cowboys vs the black hat outlaws. Ukraine has some problematic elements in its society, just like all societies. We are all aware of the fascist origins of groups like the Azov battalion and reprisals on collaborators, but none of that gives moral cover to an imperialist state invading its neighbour with the stated goal of ethnic cleansing.

Nooner
Mar 26, 2011

AN A+ OPSTER (:
I just played some halo infinite multiplayer do you think the war is like halo infinite multiplayer the good guys should try to get lots of head shots with the BR and hide when their shields are low and they would win more probably

drilldo squirt
Aug 18, 2006

a beautiful, soft meat sack
Clapping Larry
I am sorry but it's not like halo infinite multiplayer.

Jakabite
Jul 31, 2010

Nooner posted:

I just played some halo infinite multiplayer do you think the war is like halo infinite multiplayer the good guys should try to get lots of head shots with the BR and hide when their shields are low and they would win more probably

I agree

Jakabite
Jul 31, 2010

drilldo squirt posted:

I am sorry but it's not like halo infinite multiplayer.

Is it like Fortnite

FirstnameLastname
Jul 10, 2022

Deteriorata posted:

This is analogous in many ways to the American experience in Vietnam. The US Army was mostly conscripts, and rich white kids fled to Canada or got deferments. The resulting corps was thus disproportionately poor and minorities.

However, once they got to Vietnam, they were just American soldiers and the Vietnamese did not care about their ethnic or economic status.

Similarly, Russia needs to sort out internally the politics of conscription and making national service more equitable. Once they get to Ukraine, though, they're just Russian soldiers and the Ukrainians care more about defending their homes than the ethnic or economic status of their opponents.

yes, i wouldn't ever bother bringing that up to people actually fighting them, it doesn't matter for them, and isn't possible to make matter until the conflict is over
the people I was responding to aren't Ukrainian soldiers though, and were mirroring that black/white mindset of being in a war, that's why i brought it up :razorfront:

Mulva
Sep 13, 2011
It's about time for my once per decade ban for being a consistently terrible poster.

FirstnameLastname posted:

yes, i wouldn't ever bother bringing that up to people actually fighting them, it doesn't matter for them, and isn't possible to make matter until the conflict is over
the people I was responding to aren't Ukrainian soldiers though, and were mirroring that black/white mindset of being in a war, that's why i brought it up :razorfront:

The thing is, it is black and white. Or to be more accurate, it's binary. Russia is the aggressor, fighting a completely baseless and fairly monstrous war of aggression, and it is objectively bad every time that is rewarded. And it's good every time they are hurt. And the innate humanity of the average Russian soldier, while entirely worth remembering, doesn't change that. It's good every time Russia takes losses. Period. The best possible outcome for humanity is for Russia to suffer the worst possible conditions in all facets of their entire army to help encourage this situation to not become a thing they or anyone else try to repeat in the near future.

Same as Vietnam, as was mentioned. We hosed around in that country for nearly 20 years, and the only thing that got us out was being so psychically brutalized that it could no longer be ignored. It's not like we couldn't have kept fighting physically. We had troops and equipment. Our will needed to be broken to get us out of the country, and it was. Did every American soldier deserve whatever happened to them, were they all monsters? Of course not. Were their deaths necessary in a practical sense, the only way to truly end the conflict? Yes. If it didn't hurt as badly as it did fuckers in charge would have stayed in that country another 10 years if they could.

And that's sad, and infuriating.....but also, there's only so much you can beat the poo poo out of yourself over required actions in bad situations. "I LUST FOR ORK DEATH RAR RAR RAR!" is obviously hosed up, sure, but so is constantly whipping oneself for perceived sins in every action. There is nothing wrong with being happy when Russia suffers setbacks, even if the reality of "Setback" is actually "A lot of Russian soldiers died brutally". One doesn't have to do pelvic thrusts and let off an air horn every time a tank gets lit the gently caress up, but it's perfectly fine to acknowledge that it's always good when Russia is being hurt over this.

jarofpiss
May 16, 2009

Nooner posted:

I just played some halo infinite multiplayer do you think the war is like halo infinite multiplayer the good guys should try to get lots of head shots with the BR and hide when their shields are low and they would win more probably

it's definitely a complex issue but at the end of the game the team with the most kills on the board is going to win.

im glad we have this thread back to joke and chill and post and keep track of the k/d ratios in. hopefully we can keep the blood and guts and veins in our imaginations and not get it closed by linking our liveleak fave lists :cheers:

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

HonorableTB
Dec 22, 2006
Further shaping operations in the Melitopol direction have occured. Two Russian bases have been destroyed according to the Melitopol mayor

https://twitter.com/KyivIndependent/status/1632527954201698304?s=20

https://www.ukrinform.ua/rubric-ato/3678597-zsu-znisili-dvi-vijskovi-bazi-zagarbnikiv-u-melitopoli-fedorov.html

This is just adding more weight to my feeling that the Ukrainian spring counteroffensive is aimed at severing the land bridge to Crimea

jarofpiss posted:

it's definitely a complex issue but at the end of the game the team with the most kills on the board is going to win.

im glad we have this thread back to joke and chill and post and keep track of the k/d ratios in. hopefully we can keep the blood and guts and veins in our imaginations and not get it closed by linking our liveleak fave lists :cheers:

This is a weird post. War is not a team sport and nobody here is acting like it is.

Toxic Mental
Jun 1, 2019

In posting about war, there are no winners. Only losers.

Nelson Mandingo
Mar 27, 2005




HonorableTB posted:

Further shaping operations in the Melitopol direction have occured. Two Russian bases have been destroyed according to the Melitopol mayor

https://twitter.com/KyivIndependent/status/1632527954201698304?s=20

https://www.ukrinform.ua/rubric-ato/3678597-zsu-znisili-dvi-vijskovi-bazi-zagarbnikiv-u-melitopoli-fedorov.html

This is just adding more weight to my feeling that the Ukrainian spring counteroffensive is aimed at severing the land bridge to Crimea

That's my guess. They do another rope a dope, push Melitopol and then offer terms of surrender to Russia, before they rocket the Kerch bridge to rubble. And then the real humiliations begin, because it'll further strain Russian supply lines keeping Crimea supplied.

neato burrito
Aug 25, 2002

bitch better have my chex mix

https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-ato/3678603-armed-forces-of-ukraine-destroy-two-russian-military-bases-in-melitopol.html

English version of the link.

Karma Comedian
Feb 2, 2012

Let's not talk about k/D's and 360noscopes and whatever else when talking about an actual conflict, there are much more interesting things to talk about tia

https://twitter.com/ZOV_TV/status/1632565396229292033?t=vo11r119cXDRH-Ql54OA8w&s=19

Nelson Mandingo
Mar 27, 2005




Karma Comedian posted:

Let's not talk about k/D's and 360noscopes and whatever else when talking about an actual conflict, there are much more interesting things to talk about tia

https://twitter.com/ZOV_TV/status/1632565396229292033?t=vo11r119cXDRH-Ql54OA8w&s=19

As a proficient shitter, that does look like a really comfortable toilet seat.

neato burrito
Aug 25, 2002

bitch better have my chex mix

Dope bucket too, looks like it hasn't even seen any combat yet.

Neddy Seagoon
Oct 12, 2012

"Hi Everybody!"

Karma Comedian posted:

Let's not talk about k/D's and 360noscopes and whatever else when talking about an actual conflict, there are much more interesting things to talk about tia

https://twitter.com/ZOV_TV/status/1632565396229292033?t=vo11r119cXDRH-Ql54OA8w&s=19

Standard denial tactics. If they remove key assets, the enemy can't loot them.

Rev. Bleech_
Oct 19, 2004

~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

Comfy Fleece Sweater posted:

I wonder who would benefit if the US and their closest neighbour got in a fight :confused:

Canada waits in the darkened room, fingers tented. "Soon" it thinks, its mind a dark, oily place.

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Horsebanger
Jun 25, 2009

Steering wheel! Hey! Steering wheel! Someone tell him to give it to me!

Leave nothing for the enemy.

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