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cinci zoo sniper posted:Sure is, Pērkons in Latvia and Perkūnas in Lithuania, both words literally meaning “thunder” in our modern vocabulary. Estonians have similar, Pikker, but their mythology generally speaking is a bit detached from Latvia and Lithuania. Same thing as Norse/Germanic Thor/Tor/Donner really, all of those just mean thunder or are derived from the word for thunder.
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Oct 11, 2022 23:55
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Zedsdeadbaby posted:I think there's still some expectation of success in the kremlin, Surovikin took back half of Syria on Assad's behalf, and that's not insignificant. Of course, it's one thing to barrel-bomb defenceless villages, it's another altogether to fight an army that's better equipped, better trained and has the support of the entire west behind them. One would assume that Hezbollah, Iran's proxy Shi'ite militias, the IRGC officers, what still passed for the SAA and so on also had something to do with that. Not saying that this dude, Russian aircraft and diplomatic support weren't significant but there's a tendency among many overinflate the singular importance of Russia in the Syrian Civil War.
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Oct 19, 2022 12:51
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mlmp08 posted:The top US general recommended nuclear war over Korea and criticized civil control of the military. Thankfully, he was fired. Despite that, he was massively popular and welcomed by most of the public as a hero upon his relief. The Soviet jets weren't really what had Mac going all nukey, it was the Chinese intervention.
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Dec 15, 2022 14:00
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Panzeh posted:Britain took advantage of a weakening Mughal Empire to get in, and then the Afghans and the financial weakness of the military systems of the Marathas and Mysore allowed the British to move more quickly. In addition, France's position was too weak to counterbalance England. Not to mention the financial systems institutions that did exist in India, most notably powerful banking dynasties in Gujarat and Bengal, went all in on supporting and financing the EIC, because of some early relations overtures and a gradual buildup of trust that in the credit of the EIC which encouraged increased and sustained lending to support EIC efforts in India, particularly military campaigns. One of the primary effects of this was that the EIC could pay their sepoys relatively well and on-time whereas their French and local Indian compettitors, couldn't match this and often had great difficulties even paying out the inferior salaries they offered, you'll often encounter accounts of the pay of Indian rulers' armies being months in arrears for instance.
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Dec 18, 2022 19:59
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The X-man cometh posted:Didn't the British position themselves as the arbiters between Muslims and Hindus? Basic divide-and-conquer? I mean in a sense, you'll see that with almost all forms of imperial or colonial government. Remember of course that India is a big place, and especially at that time wasn't even close to some unified country. In the last decades of British rule in India they did often bring up the status of the Muslim minority and their obligation to protect their rights against the Hindu majority though. But really, British rule in India lasted a long time, went through several phases, perhaps most notably demarcated by the Mutiny of 1857 which brought about the end of the EIC (though you can sub-divide it even further) and the exact nature and character of that rule also varied from region to region, especially as so much of that rule was indirect through local Indian rulers, of various religions and lineages, with different laws internally and treaties under which they were subservient to the British. The British rule in India also adopted alot of local customs* and kind of grafted itself into the local power structure, essentially of the late Mughal Empire, becoming part of that hierarchy. This was especially so during the era of Company rule, where many of the officials in India (who often should be separated from the major owners/stockholders back in London) married local women, often members of the Mughal aristocracy and partook in Muslim or Hindu religious practice, in the often syncretic Mughal fashion, and had their children raised as Muslims. *Perhaps the most infamous being the particular method of execution of "blowing from a gun" which was traditionally reserved for deserters and traitors, and which was extensively employed by the British when they put down the 1857 mutiny. The scale of it in 1857 was notable, but I feel like often when this method of execution is brought up it's implied to be particular to the British in India. edit: For some more typical divide and rule example, the most obvious one would be the whole "martial races" thing which really came into full force after 1857, where sepoys of the British Raj (as the post-1857 government is typically known) should preferentially only be recruited from certain peoples/tribes/regions notable for their martial qualities, though really this was a list of those whom the British authorities regarded to be sufficiently loyal or ethnically/religiously or geopraphically isolated or distinct from much of the rest of the India. So yeah, classic case. Sikhs being employed as policemen all across the British Raj, far outside the areas where they were present in significant numbers is another very similar case. Randarkman fucked around with this message at 22:41 on Dec 18, 2022 |
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Dec 18, 2022 22:17
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Just Another Lurker posted:That would be a large cultural change for sure, would Turkey be the last big country to change their alphabet? Yeah, Ukraine doesn't write in the Cyrillic alphabet because it was forced on them by Soviet authorities for almost no jusitifable reason whatsoever like in Kazakhstan. There are valid historical and cultural reasons to drop it in Kazakhsta, there aren't really in Ukraine, the move to adopt a Latin script in Kazakhstan has nothing to do with this war. e: BTW Cyrillic script for Kazakh, Moldovan, Mongolian (worth mentioning that Mongolia for much of the 20th century was essentially a Soviet puppet state) and many other non-Slavic languages within the former Soviet Union was adopted after Turkey changed their script from the Ottoman Turkish (based on Arabic) to the modern Turkish one. Randarkman fucked around with this message at 01:21 on Dec 27, 2022 |
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Dec 27, 2022 01:18
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I mean, there's also this to consider.  Care has been taken to avoid the sons of mothers "who matter" dying.
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Jan 3, 2023 13:40
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Rinkles posted:I didn't realize this about the Bradley It's got 2 ATGM launchers. e: Took out quite a few Iraqi tanks during Desert Storm. Randarkman fucked around with this message at 03:40 on Jan 6, 2023 |
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Jan 6, 2023 03:35
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OddObserver posted:To the contrary, this is exactly backwards. 1905 didn't do poo poo to Bloody Nicky, and in 1917, the ones that signed a humiliating peace were the... Bolsheviks. What didn't go well was staying in a losing war. Bolsheviks got pretty lucky with Germany being defeated by the Entente in 1918 though, no one was really expecting that to happen so suddenly and completely, and at the time the Soviet Union was getting drawn ever closer to industrial and diplomatic servitude to the Germans under the threat of direct military intervention. The humiliating peace they signed tore Russia apart and basically precipiated the civil war, which was way more destructive than World War I, and had they not lucked out with Germany's defeat, they would probably have lost almost all political legitimacy.
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Jan 12, 2023 12:05
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While a part of it is the war surely, I have my suspicions that blamign the war for the high prices of electricity isn't entirely correct. For instance in Scandinavia and IIRC the Baltics prices were already getting really high during the autmn and winter before the invasion. Alot of that had to do with the weather and climate, especially for the price of hydro electric power* (little snows to melt in the mountains, dry springs and summers, leads to lack of water in reservoirs). The idea that the whole "electricity crisis" as such would be solved if only we would throw the Ukrainians under the bus is not just disgusting, but also very probably completely wrong. *I think I also remember seeing something about how the prices for French nuclear power had shot through the roof, in part because of maintenance that had been postponed during covid lockdown and in part because of similar issues with dry conditions, or something along those lines, think that was also before the invasion. Randarkman fucked around with this message at 14:07 on Jan 12, 2023 |
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Jan 12, 2023 14:05
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MikeC posted:More to the point, is more tanks going to actually help? The Ukrainians seem to think so, one would assume they know their own requirements better than we do.
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Jan 14, 2023 21:56
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mllaneza posted:Which has literally never worked. Saying strategic bombing never worked is kind of a fallacy I think. Taking WW2 as an example, yes, it didn't fulfill the number one claim of the biggest evangelists of independent offensive airpower, which was to by itself force an enemy surrender. But WW2 strategic airpower of Germany as an example, by attacking targets that the Germans had to defend, their cities and industrial production, force the Germans to devote a lot of industrial and technological resources to this defence, producing and deploying AA defences on the homefront, developing and fielding night fighters and employing hundreds of thousands actively in air defence. This essentially resulted in the diversion of the German airforce from the fronts in the east, west and south, and its gradually being worn down and destroyed as an effective force. Factories also had to be built, organized and placed to best be able to withstand aerial bombardment. The fact that by just looking at pure numbers German war production continued to rise despite the bombing campaign fails to take into account many documented stoppages that did occur due to the destruction wrought on factories themselves or their supply chains, there's also the fact that the Germans were reorganizing their economy towards more of a total war footing and Speer in particular had a focus on just producing numbers of equipment with less regard for things like spare parts and quality materials, mostly for the propaganda value. Looking at the Germans' own responses to events such as the destruction of Hamburg in 1943 its clear that this wasn't something anyone regarded as meaningless at the time. There's a lot of factors you can look at WWII strategic bombing and conclude that it was very effective even though it might be more comforting maybe to be able to dismiss it all as a murderous waste.
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Jan 16, 2023 01:34
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MikeC posted:No, the assertion that Ukraine has the tanks it needs is my take given OSINT numbers for Russian lost or captured vs Ukrainian lost vs captured and the fact that the Pentagon thinks the Russians were already at a deficit in April. If OSINT is wrong on the numbers (ie the the Ukrainians lost way more or the Russians lost way less from that point on), then naturally my take would be incorrect. It is entirely your own assertion and it is founded on some really faulty logic.
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Jan 17, 2023 11:13
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Blut posted:Are there any reliable figures out there on how many Abrams the Saudis have lost on their misadventures? There's an article from 2016 about a US shipment of tanks that included 20 that were specifically replacements for tanks that had been lost. So I guess you could estimate from that that they've lost at least 20 and that was after 1 year of war, and assuming losses have continued at the same pace (not likely) it could be they've lost some ~150 or so in total. I assume alot of Saudi Abrams losses are basically from situations where anyone who put themselves in that situation would have lost the tank due to poor training, leadership and shortage of infantry*. Probably alot of them are tanks advancing without infantry support, getting hit, and the poorly trained crew, with no awareness of their surroundings, panicking and possibly abandoning the tank. *IIRC the Saudi military is chronically undermanned, and understrength formations are the norm, and they've probably "solved" this similarly to the Russians earlier in the invasion by just ditching the infantrymen.
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Jan 17, 2023 23:22
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Ynglaur posted:Even though I poke at Germany's maintenance woes, I honestly hadn't considered this, but it's a good hypothesis. If Europe's mechanized forces are truly destitute, admitting it could actually be dangerous. Russia wasn't exactly a paper tiger, but perhaps some western European countries' militaries are? I mean are they even any kind of tigers if the military has been thoroughly reduced since the end of the cold war?
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Jan 20, 2023 22:27
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Kraftwerk posted:I think Ukraine likes hit and run tactics based on attrition so they want to quickly scoot in shoot up a position and then drive away before artillery and ATGMs get them. Additionally these western tanks have amazing thermals and optics which let them find concealed positions where someone might be waiting with RPGs. The whole thing is probably about seeing the enemy before they see you and driving away before artillery gets you. People often seem to froget the issue of crew ergonomics, and that's really an arena where Western vehicles blow Soviet/Russian ones out of the water. Sure, they're somewhat smaller, but with better ergonomics you will have a crew that doesn't get tired as quickly, will be able to operate in and out of combat more quickly and efficiently, can more easily change positions within the vehicle if that's required, and if the vehicle is knocked out there's a much better chance that the crew walks away from it alive. It really cannot be overstated IMO, it's one of those soft factors that it seems is often missed. Soviet vehicles often seem to display a conscious disregard for soft factors in their design, and I don't really think it's a valuable tradeoff to have more and somewhat smaller vehicles when you still seem to be losing them at a higher rate, and losing those vehicles also often ends up with the crew trapped and dead.
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Jan 21, 2023 11:52
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I have a feeling that that election is going to be pretty wild, IIRC Erdogan hasn't been doing too hot in the polls, he's an authoritarian and an aspiring dictator, but he's not really quite there yet.Libluini posted:We can still hope he loses the election and gets replaced. Would be a funny end to this farce, New Guy going "oh yeah, sure" on the issue It still bears mentioning that the whole image of "super anti-Kurd" or whatever of Erdogan and his party is not a very old one, and actually appealing to conservative voters in Turkey's south east, including many Kurds, who were also explicitly courted with electoral promises (that were at the time carried through) of lessening restrictions on using the Kurdish language in media and culture, was a big part of how the AKP built its early power base and got into power. It's not a given that the Kemalists/Republicans or whoever would replace him would have a softer stance on this issue. Randarkman fucked around with this message at 21:36 on Jan 23, 2023 |
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Jan 23, 2023 21:32
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Charliegrs posted:One of the funniest/saddest memes I've seen about this war is "Putin about to find out why we don't have socialized healthcare" I guess the even sadder part about that is that it really has nothing to do with. The US health care system is just lovely and still really expensive to state, more so than most European health care systems IIRC. The Soviets actually did cut back on healthcare spending significantly to be able to keep pouring money into the military and more immediately apparent things. The government not spending enough money on health care is not the main reason for the state and structure of the US health care system.
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Jan 25, 2023 00:29
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Judgy Fucker posted:So why Norway? I hadn't really figured the Norwegians to be an intelligence powerhouse, and besides being in NATO not really sure why they're invested in trying to ascertain casualty figures for the conflict. I guess they do share a small border with Russia in the Arctic. The article cited says the official didn't announce their sources, which is both well understood but also muddles the authority of such figures. People have given answers already about this. But honestly it could also just be because some Norwegian intelligence or security person happened to make a statement to the press, and that's really it.
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Jan 26, 2023 21:09
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Issaries posted:They are living next to Turkey, which is the 2nd biggest candidate for special military adventurer in Europe after Russia. Turkey's even done their military adventure already. I'm not sure if Syria ever gets back that occupied northern chunk, regardless of whether Assad or someone else rules the ashpile. IIRC people there have been given Turkish passports and other stuff like that. Erdogan's a clown in many ways, but I actually think he might be better at this dictatoring than Putin, becuase he might well get his annexations without too much fuss in due time.
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Jan 29, 2023 14:38
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Cicero posted:There's a good chance Erdogan gets dumped this year, so it's possible to just wait. I think that might be hopeful. Turkish elections have a very high chance of being completely wild this year, though I think if Erdogan has to do a Jan 6, his goons will probably succeed unlike Trump's and Bolsonaro's.
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Jan 29, 2023 20:41
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Tomn posted:The problem isn't ethical quandaries, the problem is "What is more likely to cause voters to sit up and take notice?" I suspect that "Let's invest in industries that will create jobs and improve the economy (by making weapons of war during a time of widespread peace when they'll probably never be used)" is a lot easier to slide under the radar than "Let's start sending tanks into an active war zone." They've been used a whole loving lot in Africa and Asia. They can get hosed.
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Jan 31, 2023 00:47
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TZer0 posted:For instance: it claims that Jens Stoltenberg is both the supcom of NATO when he is in fact the Secretary General (also, there's two supcoms in NATO) and that he's an avowed anti-communist when he's the former leader and elected PM of the Norwegian Worker's Party (Arbeiderpartiet), now while they're not the best, I've not heard of him being some anti-communist hardliner. It says that Jens Stoltenberg has worked closely with the CIA since the Vietnam war. Stoltenberg was 8 years old when the Tet offensive started. Irony Be My Shield posted:Lol yeah that transcript almost reads like a parody, especially the very obviously ESL bit at the start. The fact that Hersh presented that as genuine suggests that at the very least he isn't doing enough to confirm his sources are genuine. Hersh is being trolled. Randarkman fucked around with this message at 14:21 on Feb 9, 2023 |
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Feb 9, 2023 14:18
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I loving hate it when people use abbreviations or loving licence plate codes or whatever they are doing instead of writing the country names. Just loving write Russia, Ukraine and Germany(is that DE? again loving licence plates if so), it does not take much longer. Also the German official didn't rule out Russia as a possibility, he said at the time they don't have any evidence that it was specifically Russia and that the investigation is ongoing. No doubt because he was specifically asked about Russia.
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Feb 11, 2023 15:56
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Wait, did a german first accuse the perfidious USA and Norway of doing it? No, a German official made a statement a while back that at the moment, they had no evidence for Russian culpability and that the investigation was still ongoing. This seems to have been taken to mean that that there is evidence that Russia did not do it.
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Feb 11, 2023 17:08
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Karma Comedian posted:There have been mass child graves found at residential schools across NA, and the school program lasted for more than a century. This is a really gross post, please don't compare genocides. Maybe not "rank them", but I don't see why you should categorically never compare genocides, there is something to be said for looking at historical examples and seeing how different two or more genocides can be while at the same time all being genocides, that something can be a genocide or genocidal even if it doesn't look 100% like the holocaust. e: There might also be some atrocities that don't necessarily fit the box of genocide fully without issue, but where the sufffering of those affected was no less than if it were a genocide and the conduct of those responsible was no less deliberate or criminal. Randarkman fucked around with this message at 17:04 on Feb 12, 2023 |
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Feb 12, 2023 16:58
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Der Kyhe posted:If he weren't sufficiently loyal to Putin he would have swam out the 8th floor window the moment his power struggle with Shoigu failed. It's not entirely impossible that Prigozhin is either somewhat too powerful to window and that he may know of perhaps too many skeletons in Putin's closet (due to very likely personally putting them there) for Putin to move against him more directly, but he can still likely be gradually sidelined instead.
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Feb 20, 2023 22:30
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steinrokkan posted:Just like this war! There might be something to the analysis that was offered in that latest LazerPig video, that although Russia probably doesn't have an acute shell crisis, what they are having difficulties with is getting ammunition to the front lines. They are dependent on rail transport for their logistics, but due to the danger of Himars and other lange range weaponry, they now have to stop to unload much further from the front than before and travel by truck (and seemingly BMP and other APCs and artillery tractors presssed into logistics duty) to depots which still are fairly far from the front lines, courtesy of that Himars threat, then they have to get to the unit. This actually gets fairly difficult.
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Feb 22, 2023 21:53
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Tomn posted:My understanding is that part of it is that politically speaking, only the people of Moscow and St. Petersburg matters and they’ve been relatively insulated from the war - there was an infographic in the last incarnation of this thread noting how combat losses have disproportionately affected people outside those regions. I recall losses were particularly heavily centered on ethnic subgroups, eg Siberians. I don’t think this was a deliberate “undesirables” policy as such, more that the army tends to be a more attractive option for dirt poor folks out East than it is for a comfortable Muscovite. There's also the fact that in the military the ground forces basically rank dead last in terms of prestige and recrutiment standards. At the top you basically have the strategic missile forces and the airforce, then you get in the navy, various elite units like the VDV or marine infantry, air defence, military intelligence in some kind of order, and then dead last, the ground forces. This is not necessarily unique on a worldwide basis, though in addition to these generally attracting recruits from regions with higher education levels, which in the Soviet Union were the western Slavic parts and the Baltic, Russia has probably also inherited the practice of the Soviet Union in considering the political reliability of certain ethnic groups. In addition to the non-European regions being much less developed socially and economically, the (non-Russian, non-European) inhabitants were also considered way more politically suspect, so what you ended up with was a situation where the air force and strategic missile forces almost only accepted the most reliable and patriotic Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians (people from the Baltic had a high presence in the navy for a non-Slavic example), and then the ground forces almost had a majority of non-Russians making up the bulk of its manpower, to the point where the fact that conscripts in the Soviet ground forces not speaking Russian very well was something that had to be considered in training.
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Feb 25, 2023 19:15
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Eric Cantonese posted:The blocking detachments were real, but I believe it’s a bit overblown about Russia having to shoot their own men. They mainly served as ways to help reorganize and reconstitute so soldiers didn’t just retreat in a disorganized manner and get even more people killed. I think the draconian stuff you’re thinking of became less necessary once the Red Army finally learned the right lessons from its defeats by the Germans in 1941-1942 and got its poo poo together. It actually in some cases got a bit worse towards the end of the war as the continued appaling casualty rates meant that the Soviets were beginning to depend more and more on "unreliable" manpower rather than the "dependable", but heavily depleted, Russians and Siberians. When they began increasingly drafting Central Asians and putting them in the front line as well as forcibly conscripting liberated populations in Ukraine, Belarus and Poland, there was a lot of worrying about desertion and defection among these troops. Forcing these soldiers out of their trenches and into the attack and keeping them from retreating or going back was a concern.
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Mar 27, 2023 12:16
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