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What is the most powerful flying bug? This poll is closed. |
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| 🦋 |
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15 | 3.71% |
| 🦇 |
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115 | 28.47% |
| 🪰 |
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12 | 2.97% |
| 🐦 |
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67 | 16.58% |
| dragonfly |
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94 | 23.27% |
| 🦟 |
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14 | 3.47% |
| 🐝 |
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87 | 21.53% |
| Total: | 404 votes | ||
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The Return: Russia's Journey from Gorbachev to Medvedev was written in 2012 and is pretty good, if still liberal in outlook. A refreshing and deeply reported look at the political, economic, and cultural changes in Russia, with an in-depth examination of Vladimir Putin’s rise, the power of the oligarchy, and what it means for the world. Almost twenty-five years after Mikhail Gorbachev began radically reshaping his country, Russia has changed beyond recognition. In his third book on this subject, Professor Daniel Treisman takes stock of the country that has emerged from the debris of Soviet communism and addresses the questions that preoccupy scholars of its history and politics: Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Could its collapse have been avoided? Did Yeltsin destroy too much or too little of the Soviet political order? What explains Putin’s unprecedented popularity with the Russian public? Based on two decades of research and his own experiences in the country, Treisman cuts through the scholarly and journalistic debates to provide a portrait of a country returning to the international community on its own terms. At a time when global politics are more important than ever, The Return illuminates the inner workings of a country that has increasingly come to influence, and which will continue to shape, American foreign policy and world events.
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Jul 18, 2023 17:37
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Deadly Ham Sandwich posted:I only remember players using the underbarrel grenade launcher like a mortar, shooting off grenades at memorized angles at the start of a round to hit players as they run from the spawn. You could do this with RPG-7s, too. Dropshots were a great way to style on people who didn't know what they were doing.
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Jul 18, 2023 17:39
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Ukraine should go around the russian trenches imo, sounds like an easy solution
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Jul 18, 2023 17:40
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Frosted Flake posted:This is 100% what happened. Found this article from 2 years before the war https://warontherocks.com/2020/04/is-the-infantry-brigade-combat-team-becoming-obsolete/ quote:The centerpiece of the Army’s operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the infantry brigade combat team, is in danger of becoming obsolete in the face of near-peer opponents. So was there many publications within the military academy about the obsolescence of BCTs against peer enemies? Seems the US created a military that's well suited to overseas missions against much weaker opponents, but struggles against a peer enemy in an artillery battle.
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Jul 18, 2023 17:44
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Therefore, the larger capitals beat the smaller. It will further be remembered that, with the development of the capitalist mode of production, there is an increase in the minimum amount of individual capital necessary to carry on a business under its normal conditions. The smaller capitals, therefore, crowd into spheres of production which Modern Industry has only sporadically or incompletely got hold of. Here competition rages.... It always ends in the ruin of many small capitalists, whose capitals partly pass into the hands of their conquerors, partly vanish."[10] Das Kapital, vol. 1, ch. 25 https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch25.htm
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Jul 18, 2023 17:44
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Frosted Flake posted:I have it on very good authority from a liberal historian that the reason we are smarter than the ancient Greeks is our ability to turn theory into production: "It has always been a cause for puzzlement as to why the Greeks, intellectual pathfinders in every branch of pure science, should have revealed so stubborn a streak of tribal naiveté when it came to economics." Oh, that stuff is good. The apex of that reasoning is about Heron of Alexandria and his steam engine, leading of course to "why there was no industrial revolution" which is loving lmao. It's gamer's historiography: researching the tech means you unlock the thing. Steam engine means factories! Why it didn't happen? Technology isn't just an invention, it's the whole structure that makes an invention work for a determinate social purpose. That same bullshit about the Greeks and the steam engine has a very similar problem when they go into "why China or India didn't become economic superpowers and lost to the West". Again, gamer's historiography. China and India didn't have the steam engine and had obsolete tech, so they have to lose, right? Except that China was an economic superpower that held the lion's share of estimated GDP until the Opium Wars. It was able to outmatch European (and especially British) industrial productivity for a fair bit of the 19th century, which is why it didn't import much. The British state was able to inflict those defeats by having the organization to employ industrial means of warfare, inflicting commercial dependency, etc (besides the whole book of dirty tricks of imperialism ofc) What those people miss is that the socio-economic structure didn't need the sort of organization to employ productivity multipliers by technology, because such multipliers only become necessary through labor scarcity or through capitalism, where more production is required for the sake of further capital accumulation. With immense abundance of labor in a vast territory with even more abundant resources, it's possible to have literal millions of artisans supported by more millions of peasants producing everything necessary and more; economies of scale aren't exclusive to industrial production, after all. Besides, there has to be formative accumulation for those inventions to find their place. Industrial tooling comes from manufactories, which come from developing organized division of labor and so on, which are all social developments as well. Tribal naïveté is an astonishingly bad take because it neglects the much broader historical environment that makes an industrial steam engine not only very useful but also viable. The other side of takes like these is that it leaves wide open the issue of when you have the social conditions, the technology and economic understanding to direct those means into solving problems and deliberately develop productive forces, like in our present. Unlike these other contexts, ours is much worse because we are dealing with ideology, not with the actual horizon of material possibilities and that would be two mediums fries please
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Jul 18, 2023 17:45
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Oh also the 40mm grenades in the M203s had a minimum arming range, they'd just bounce off surfaces and never go off if they hit anything within that minimum range. If they hit a person they'd do negligible damage. Unless you shot them in the face with it, then they'd die, which was probably the ultimate way to style on somebody.
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Jul 18, 2023 17:45
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Marenghi posted:Found this article from 2 years before the war they struggled against weaker opponents too lmao
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Jul 18, 2023 17:45
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Orange Devil posted:So far so good, and explains a lot of the last 30-35 years in a really neat way, but there's one puzzle piece I'm missing: why and how did Russia not get integrated into the global bourgeois cybernetic capitalist system? The ruling class certainly was and is the bourgeoisie, and yet clearly we are witnessing bourgeois intra-class struggle that has escalated to open military conflict, because the interests of the Russian bourgeoisie was never fully brought in line with the interests of cybernetic capitalism. Why not? The post breakup gangsters looted the country so thoroughly there wasn't anything left to integrate into the global capitalist class. There needs to be some kind of central authority and unified ruling class for capitalism to capture, and post Soviet Russia mostly had a disunited band of financial warlords.
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Jul 18, 2023 17:47
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Nix Panicus posted:The post breakup gangsters looted the country so thoroughly there wasn't anything left to integrate into the global capitalist class. There needs to be some kind of central authority and unified ruling class for capitalism to capture, and post Soviet Russia mostly had a disunited band of financial warlords. I mean, capital seems perfectly able to integrate warlords to get at the resources they control in other places, like say, Congo?
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Jul 18, 2023 17:50
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I used a misleading term. Actual warlords need guns and ammo to subdue a restive populace and battle other warlords, and the west has no qualms about showering warlords with weapons in exchange for looting their country. The Russian oligarchs didn't need the wests military backing and were inherently suspicious of western finance because of their experiences under the Soviets, so they were harder to outright buy off. What can global capital offer when you can buy unlimited weapons, drugs, whatever you want from the wreckage of your own former empire?
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Jul 18, 2023 17:55
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Orange Devil posted:On the plus (?) side, the strategy outlined in "Defeating the Russian BTG" appears to have worked in the earlier counteroffensives, before mobilization and changes to the Russian force structure. Ukraine lacked the materiel to really capitalize on that, but it does point to had Russia been fighting with its BTG directly against NATO, with NATO following the "Defeating the Russian BTG" playbook, then Russia would have eaten a lot of poo poo. nato doesn't have the manpower to do the kind of mass assaults that worked against the btgs or the political will to sustain the casualties required even if they did, though
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Jul 18, 2023 17:56
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i just remember all the seemingly unscreened tanks which seems insane when you know your enemy has plenty of good anti-tank weapons, some of them long range and guided weird disregard for the lives of the tank crews and all their experience
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Jul 18, 2023 18:01
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Marx really hosed up by making Das Kapital so loving obtuse and impossible to read. Even people that pretend to be commies won't touch that poo poo.
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Jul 18, 2023 18:02
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There is an entire chapter on the steam engine on one of these books on Hellenistic technology - the term itself reveals trying to understand the past through the ideology of the present because the Greek techne means craftsmanship, which as you explained, is what it was. Like the many, many wheeled toys that have been found in Mesoamerican societies that “never invented the wheel”, the actual social and material reality does not translate into liberal history. There is not a single animal indigenous to Mexico or Peru that can pull a plow or wheeled vehicle, so even if they had “invented” plows and (larger) wheels for their own sake - what were they going to do with them? 21st century liberals are still finding ways to say these people were stupid and primitive unlike the Enlightened Europeans, without looking at anything material. I’d go further and suggest they deliberately avoid a materialist approach because it undermines their own sense of superiority. If oxen and horses lived in the Americas, I’m sure these complex and productive societies would have developed them. Look how quickly all indigenous societies that encountered the horse and cattle, worldwide, adopted them. Frosted Flake has issued a correction as of 18:15 on Jul 18, 2023 |
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Jul 18, 2023 18:12
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Ok yes and the Russian oligarchs had bigger ambitions than being the regional VP for some western multinational
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Jul 18, 2023 18:12
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Frosted Flake posted:There is an entire chapter on the steam engine on one of these books on Hellenistic technology - the term itself reveals trying to understand the past through the ideology of the present because the Greek techne means craftsmanship, which as you explained, is what it was. The problem there is conceptualizing the thing as "the steam engine". That's not a useful way to think, it's great man theory basically, one day someone came along and invented ~*~this thing~*~. But that's not how it works. There were countless steam engines, and each was improved upon incrementally countless times by countless people. Early industrial revolution steam engines blew up a lot, for example, and only through a whole bunch of advances in metallurgy did both the reliability and output improve to be able to be used in ever more industrial applications. So ok yeah, maybe ancient Greeks knew about the principles of the steam engine, but they did not have the metallurgical processes to create a boiler that could have a practical use, nor did they possess the tools to create such a metallurgical process, nor did they have the tools to create those tools. I don't know, but they might not have even had the standards of measurement required for such tools either. It's like to go from the bronze to the iron age you need to go through an iterative process a whole bunch of times to be able to reliably melt and work iron into tools and weapons. You don't just need to discover iron.
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Jul 18, 2023 18:19
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Almost like it’s iterative improvements in craftsmanship… techne-ology.
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Jul 18, 2023 18:46
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German military is ordering "several hundred thousand" artillery shells for 1.2bn€. It will take until 2029 for the order to be completed. Lol https://www.rheinmetall.com/en/media/news-watch/news/2023/7/2023-07-18-rheinmetall-receives-major-order-for-artillery-shells-by-bundeswehr
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Jul 18, 2023 18:50
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Hearing more and more about this WWIII thing being scheduled for 2030.
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Jul 18, 2023 18:56
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gradenko_2000 posted:He gets to type out long posts about Galicia on his phone a modern Hemingway
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Jul 18, 2023 19:00
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Vulin posted:German military is ordering "several hundred thousand" artillery shells for 1.2bn€. It will take until 2029 for the order to be completed. Lol The wording mean under a million to me so best price possible is like 1200$/shell.
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Jul 18, 2023 19:01
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seems like shells should cost less than that but maybe not
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Jul 18, 2023 19:02
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lobster shirt posted:seems like shells should cost less than that but maybe not FF, why do shells cost??? Please answer in 4000 words or
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Jul 18, 2023 19:04
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Hand crafted by noldor smiths
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Jul 18, 2023 19:05
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Nix Panicus posted:I was thinking more about the cavalier attitude towards war crimes than uniform maintenance, but sure thats probably also a problem Unpolished boots are the broken windows of military discipline.
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Jul 18, 2023 19:05
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speng31b posted:FF, why do shells cost??? Please answer in 4000 words or $300.
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Jul 18, 2023 19:05
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Frosted Flake posted:$300. I'm not paying you for chatgpt bitch
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Jul 18, 2023 19:07
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Frosted Flake posted:Unpolished boots are the broken windows of military discipline. Broken window theory is bullshit though.
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Jul 18, 2023 19:08
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7 year old article but lol: https://nationalpost.com/news/canad...ing-150000-eachquote:The Canadian Army has restricted the use of its high-tech artillery shells after the U.S. military discovered cracks in the same warheads in its inventory. also it features a quote from someone named krysthle
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Jul 18, 2023 19:14
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Vomik posted:a modern Hemingway For sale, artillery shells, delivery 2029.
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Jul 18, 2023 19:19
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Orange Devil posted:So I just had a shower thought + question about cybernetic capitalism: cybernetic capitalism as a system is, above all, in the stability business, specifically maintaining stability of class relations. one dimension of that is "vertical," i.e., maintaining relations between capitalist and worker, while another dimension is "horizontal," i.e., maintaining stability between core and periphery. this is why, for example, turkey can't join the EU. in order for russia to become integrated into the larger cybernetic system, the russian bourgeoisie would have to accept russia being permanently relegated to a semi-periphery or periphery space relative to the core, which yeltsin was supposed to facilitate, but which the russian bourgeoisie were ultimately unwilling or unable to. Nix Panicus posted:Ok yes and the Russian oligarchs had bigger ambitions than being the regional VP for some western multinational basically this
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Jul 18, 2023 19:21
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jist dipping back in had a ceasefire been negotiated yet??
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Jul 18, 2023 19:27
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lol no. in fact the grain deal is ending and Ukraine attacked the bridge from Crimea killing several civilians
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Jul 18, 2023 19:29
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speng31b posted:I'm not paying you for chatgpt bitch I posted the line items the other day.
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Jul 18, 2023 19:32
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gradenko_2000 posted:describing gore videos in painstaking detail is barely any better than just posting the link, but in this case it seems like Tony Tone isn't actually liking it and is talking about how repulsive it is? 
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Jul 18, 2023 19:33
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From the Historical Materialism Book Series you should all be reading, The Falling Rate of Profit and the Great Recession of 2007-2009: A New Approach to Applying Marx’s Value Theory and Its Implications for Socialist Strategy In The Falling Rate of Profit and the Great Recession of 2007-2009, Peter H. Jones develops a new non-equilibrium interpretation of the labour theory of value Karl Marx builds in Capital. Applying this to US national accounting data, Jones shows that when measured correctly the profit rate falls in the lead up to the Great Recession, and for the main reason Marx identifies: the rising organic composition of capital. Jones also details a new theory of finance, which shows how cycles in the profit rate relate to stock market booms and slumps, and movements in the interest rate. He discusses the implications of the analysis and Marx and Engels’ work generally for a democratic socialist strategy. tl;dr Marx was right, spreadsheets and fart apps still have a falling rate of profit.
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Jul 18, 2023 19:35
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Frosted Flake posted:I posted the line items the other day. oh lol
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Jul 18, 2023 19:37
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Al! posted:jist dipping back in had a ceasefire been negotiated yet?? Lavrov met with some American establishment types in Washington to discuss how the war might come to an end and when it came out it did not go over well with Ukraine or the terminally online. **the Ukraine position is still that Russia has to relinquish all territorial claims including Crimea (back to the supposed 1990's borders) as a starting point to negotiations, and then submit to prosecution of government officials as war criminals and major reparations.
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Jul 18, 2023 19:47
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| # ? May 25, 2024 01:08 |
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Starsfan posted:Lavrov met with some American establishment types in Washington to discuss how the war might come to an end and when it came out it did not go over well with Ukraine or the terminally online. who cares what the coop government of ukraine or the nafo guys want, get it done!!!
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Jul 18, 2023 19:49
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