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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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Starsfan posted:I know what will spice up this thread, I'm going to get Al-Saqr going this has been buzzing around for over a month. at this point i'll believe it when i see it.
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Nov 3, 2022 23:30
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 14:23 |
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it is, for instance, possible that the people who were working in that building were evacuated. it's possible that russia's planning on leaving the right bank of the dnepr; it's also possible that she is not planning any such thing. that move has been advertised several times before and not materialised, so saying that it's definitely happening this time for real based on one's interpretation of flag protocol does not seem like a smart thing to do
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Nov 3, 2022 23:34
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that's a trial balloon if ever i saw one
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Nov 5, 2022 02:20
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i think this is the thread where people suggested unity of command was a good game to play and while this is true i keep getting completely owned by two german armoured divisions when i try to do the optional objectives in operation overlord considering just not trying to secure the bridge to belgium or w/e
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Nov 5, 2022 18:18
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yeah crimea was always (after they completely marginalised the tartars, at least) majority ethnic/linguistic russian by an enormous amount so some kind of cleansing, resettlement or at least permanent martial law would be necessary if ukraine were to reconquer the place
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Nov 5, 2022 19:51
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the "let's retake crimea" position was until relatively recently a weirdo fringe position. sure, it's our formal goal, but nobody really thinks that the people who live there want to go back to ukraine and honestly we're not that sad to see them gone, they were strange assholes anyway once the war starts, however, the principle becomes ukrainian territorial sovereignty - so you sort of have to go for crimea as well. that means that when people ask, you have to answer that yes, we also mean crimea when we say "restore our borders". this means that people take you seriously, and builds a mainstream polity for what used to be a non-mainstream position. if zelensky accepted a peace deal without restoring the pre-2014 borders, he could and probably would be accused of treason by very strong elements within the military, police and clandestine services. that would effectviely mean a coup. nobody wants that, but it's a real risk if he started walking back the claim to crimea.
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Nov 6, 2022 01:37
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Azathoth posted:As am I. Like my anti-communist forefathers, I never learned to read, and thus no propaganda can penetrate the fortress that is my mind. i think mao sort of hacked this by means of spoken-word poetry truly there is no end to the deviousness of the communist menace
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Nov 7, 2022 02:16
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i suspect that if you're at the point where illiterate but very armed and motivated red guards are the guys trying to get you going with the poetry, the lines of what constitutes awkward and/or annoying behaviour have blurred somewhat
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Nov 7, 2022 02:34
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it is legitimately funny that the comedy left-wing pope who was only there because the Serious People couldn't agree on who was up yet and he was expected to die within a year or so has now hung on for almost a decade
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Nov 7, 2022 03:14
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Armadillo Tank posted:every time i hear about that stupid bullshit i remember waking up at 5:00 AM hearing about georgian rocket arty firing and other attacks on headline news this was the last major world conflict i recall where norwegian mainstream news covered it in a reasonably enlightening way. it was pretty clear from norwegian state broadcaster coverage that this was a border where there'd been tensions for a while, but the georgians had decided to settle the issue by military force and that ended up backfiring spectacularly
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Nov 8, 2022 01:23
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ukraine invasion thread: breakfast foods chat
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Nov 8, 2022 02:58
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Majorian posted:~42 km/26 mi to Kherson city, for references, according to the replies. pro-russian sources seem to think that this is The Big One, but they've thought that for two weeks, so who the hell knows
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Nov 9, 2022 01:42
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the PRC could absolutely force the issue of taiwan if they wanted to, and it would be politically difficult for them to not force the issue if the US successfully goad the taiwanese into declaring independence. taiwanese authorities seem aware of this and don't much want to increase tensions that much (since if anything goes wrong they're literally all dead), but this requires the PRC to actually be willing to force the issue upon escalation. it's a delicate song and dance, because the ROC remains entirely dependent on US good-will and so has to maneuver very carefully to avoid pissing off their patron while also not making it hard for the PRC to keep on mostly ignoring them. at this stage, i don't think either of the primary parties actually wants that particular conflict to escalate, but the ROC's in a very tricky diplomatic spot and so stuff can be provoked as with the incredibly stupid pelosi visit.
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Nov 10, 2022 12:37
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re: the present war, it really is not over yet. we should wait with the post-mortems until the conflict stops seeing major developments for a while imo.
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Nov 10, 2022 12:38
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Cerebral Bore posted:different circumstances i guess. all those went p smoothly because the geographical areas in question were small enough to handle with just regulars or in the case of syria they could rely on locals for raw manpower yeah i get the impression that the russians were really expecting either a general collapse of the ukrainian military following the initial offensive or at least a quick resolution through negotiation from strength. they'v seriously underestimated the ideological hardening of ukrainian society, and especially the effect that the invasion would have on the government, in addition to failing to take some obvious early-campaign objectives (kharkiv in particular). a lot of this seems to be intelligence failures, funnily enough, but i suppose that just as military juntas are generally bad at running an effective military, rule by spies means that the intelligence agencies are allowed to get more complacent than is good for them.
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Nov 10, 2022 12:41
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Vox Nihili posted:Russia sent an enormous column right for Kyiv, did you memory hole that? this is a data point which can be reasonably interpreted in various ways. going from "russia made a serious attempt to invest kyiv" to "russia obviously intended to annex ukraine up to and including kyiv" is quite the leap.
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Nov 10, 2022 12:48
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Vox Nihili posted:theyve formally annexed the rest of the territory they've taken, you'd have to have your head up your rear end to think they wouldn't have taken Kyiv if the initial plan had worked out you're making huge leaps and saying that people pointing out that these are huge leaps are stupid that is, itself, stupid
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Nov 10, 2022 12:56
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Homeless Friend posted:Yep, something along the line of russia effectively owning the lands it controls. theyve sunk too much to have nothing and equally can't pull off a total sweep. so they're gonna both fight until they're tired. Kherson imo is trimming the fat. Just a resource sink. Whats the advantage? no natural resources. water i guess? it's a huge river crossing and a major prize for the russians, as well as claimed territory. it's politically a very costly move to abandon it, even if it's militarily more trouble than it's worth
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Nov 10, 2022 13:00
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Maximo Roboto posted:How come for the French, defeat resulted in the 1917 mutinies, or for the Russians the February Revolution for that matter? Not saying those are more likely than the rise of fascism, but they're an alternative to the experience in A-H/Italy. the french government at the end of the war was completely mad from the pain, with clemenceau officially sanctioning his tenure with "je fais la guerre, rien que la guerre", and the ringleaders in 1917 were shot the february revolution was sort-of accepted by the establishment on condition that they kept up the war effort. it was totally non-negotiable. the bolsheviks, who were basically weirdo political cultists, were the only ones who were able to propose a credible end to the war by means of revolutionary defeatism. in the end the entire russian state was overthrown by the fin-de-siecle equivalent of ISIS as far as any kind of respectability was concerned
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Nov 11, 2022 01:26
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the hatred of travellers is not purely ethnic, it's also to a large extent sedentiary populations' contempt and rage at non-sedentiary populations which are perceived as breaching the basic social contract. this of course spills over into racialised hate very easily and frequently, sometimes in weird ways - in norway, a lot of the foreign-born roma carry romanian passports and so a lot of the racism gets extended to romanians in general. meanwhile the "indigenous" travelling population, the romani/tater people, have been getting sort of pushed out of the public imagination and while there is still real bigotry there it's much less than what it used to be.
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Nov 13, 2022 15:09
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Frosted Flake posted:Don’t the Scandinavians also hate the Sami? I think they had residential schools and everything. Obviously that’s really informed a lot of the experience with oppression Amber brought to Chapo. well sort of i can only speak for norway, but here the eugenicist project was mostly directed at travellers (the aforementioned "tater" populations). you have to remember that most of sápmi is to this day very inhospitable to sedentiary lifestyles, and that state control was correspondingly weak until about the 19th century - settlement of ethnic norwegians was limited mostly to the coastal areas, and public institutions under danish rule were basically limited to military and church (sápmi was the extreme periphery of the periphery of the danish crown holdings). there was a clear anti-sami religious policy, and heavy efforts were made to convert them to lutheran christianity. unfortunately for the norwegian state, this extended to the very strong and vital norwegian lay tradition, which understandably made serious forays into the marginalised sami population and which occasionally turned really violent, especially related to accusations of witchcraft etc. i do not know of any real policy of residential schools along the canadian model - the residential sami schools were initially the ones where you could get a mostly sami-language education, for one thing. from the introduction of universal public schooling in norway, public schools in sápmi were formally integrated (though of course here education was mostly/only in norwegian). as far as i can tell there was a question around the start of the 19th century about whether to send teachers along with the sami travelling populations or to do something along a residential model, and they settled on the residential model. nobody's dug up any corpses yet, though conditions weren't great. as education got modernised and the state grew stronger, norwegianisation became more of a priority, and sami-language education was phased out until fairly recently. i don't know the status of education in sápmi right now, but official policy is that you have the right to education in the few surviving sami languages. there's been lots of pretty ugly politics about this - the largely orthodox skolte-sami populations have been more marginalised than the lay protestant groups, for instance, but this is venturing into a complicated and difficult history which i don't know that much about. the cornerstones of traditional sami economy - reindeer herding and fishing/coastal farming - are still relevant to this day, to large extent because there really isn't that much else you can *do* with this land. since the seventies - when norway, incidentally, had possibly the strongest maoist movement in europe - the position of the sami has improved by quite a lot, including the introduction of special economic and language rights as well as various subsidies. this has in itself given rise to a fair amount of tension and anti-sami racism remains a widespread phenomenon, especially among the "germanics" of the north, but it's not as violent as a lot of the racism against immigrant groups, and the state really does have an official and pretty serious anti-racist policy on the issue. V. Illych L. has issued a correction as of 18:42 on Nov 13, 2022 |
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Nov 13, 2022 18:26
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the war is still ongoing, and ukraine is still entirely dependent on external support which is itself dependent on difficult-to-control factors the reconquest of kherson is a major victory, but it's a major victory from a pretty desperate position. plenty of people are going to die over this yet
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Nov 14, 2022 08:33
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well some hedge fund is going to make an absolute killing on the kyiv real estate market, so there's at least a silver lining to this whole grubby affair
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Nov 14, 2022 08:54
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this latest round of reprisals has actually been reported upon in mainstream western news sources, though in quite sanitised terms. i was honestly taken a little aback at that, and it may have spooked the ukrainian leadership
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Nov 14, 2022 21:34
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PoontifexMacksimus posted:if it spooks them into cutting back on reprisals on civilians I will honestly say that for once Western media did a material good i honestly don't think they have the kind of control over their guys needed to keep this stuff from happening even if they were so inclined - junior officers typically take a lot of casualties and take a while to effectively replace, so it's probably where the ukrainians are weakest atm - but they have gotten more restrictive with press access and probably they're being more serious about discouraging the most blatant reprisals
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Nov 14, 2022 23:36
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western good-will is an insanely important strategic asset for the ukrainians to be maintained at almost any cost, though, so i really do think that they'll try to keep reprisal stories as far out of the headlines as possible - even fans can only rationalise this stuff so many times before the saintly image starts falling apart, and at that point it's a problem. is it a big problem? who knows, imo not unless the economic situation among sponsor countries continues to deteriorate
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Nov 14, 2022 23:44
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i'm sure not everyone will be killed - that seems impractical - but a fair amount will, and a lot of people will face reprisals short of killing, like being robbed and beaten up etc. - the lack of control cuts both ways, and you'll find people who want to kill someone as well as those who just want to tape them to lamp posts and probably a fair amount of people who will just slip between the cracks this is not a situation where there's any real procedure in place other than "angry men with guns and a grudge are roaming the streets with impunity, chasing vaguely-defined collaboraters"
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Nov 15, 2022 10:34
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Tankbuster posted:good thing ukraine isn't nazi tho. one of the main effects of the pogroms was to create a lot of refugees - many more than actually died. this sort of purge works not by systematically killing everyone in a group, but by making a fair few examples, driving off a lot of others and causing the rest to keep their heads firmly and, ideally, permanently down
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Nov 15, 2022 10:41
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yeah the americans aren't going to allow some off-target missile to cause ww3, even assuming that the poles (who have actually been pretty cagey about this whole affair) want to have a go
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Nov 15, 2022 19:39
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speng31b posted:even people i know who dont follow war news are messaging me and freaking out. they're really going hard, even if it wasnt a russian missile it has to become one now i honestly think that now that the OSINT nerds have gone out on a limb saying that this looks ukrainian, they're not likely to back down. it would be interesting to see if they are disciplined for it
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Nov 16, 2022 00:19
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euphronius posted:most of the Russian chess masters are actually Ukrainian in the case of sergei karjakin this is actually kind of true he was born in simferopol in the crimea he is also afaik the most vociferously pro-war out of all the russian top-tier chess players
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Nov 16, 2022 14:09
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Ardennes posted:Soviet chess masters at least came from across the Soviet Union: Russians were the plurality but there were plenty from the Caucasus/Ukraine. It is almost like it was a country or something, weird. one interesting development in global chess right now is the emergence of some incredibly strong central asian players like abdusattarov. afaik a lot of them are from uzbekistan
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Nov 16, 2022 14:18
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it is interesting that zelensky's insisting on this not being an air defense malfunction even as everyone else seems to be accepting that it's not. i do wonder what's going on with that
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Nov 16, 2022 23:09
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Cerebral Bore posted:i think it's just that zelensky & co have had western media cover for them to such a degree that they think they can get away with any crock of bullshit, and to be fair so far they've been right well to an extent, but now he's flatly contradicting stoltenberg and biden, who are two of his most important allies, as well as the polish government. it is possible that he just really hasn't understood his role in this whole game, i guess? Azathoth posted:it could very well have something to do with weird inside baseball between Ukraine and Poland. like if Ukraine never officially admits fault then according to X, Y, Z treaties and A, B, C agreements, then .... yeah this would be interesting to me as well, but the polish government's given up on the "russian-produced missile" thing.
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Nov 16, 2022 23:18
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speng31b posted:I still think the more likely possibility is that lil Z is high on his own supply and just mad that his allies broke away from his narrative. he's been getting away with saying almost any bullshit he can imagine and having the entire western apparatus parrot it uncritically for almost a year now, it's gotta be jarring to get a different result now. probably just found the limit of what he can push, that being anything that threatens to get NATO off the sidelines also something where there was direct and obvious evidence to the contrary readily available i think that the photos of the missile debris were important - it means that the more sincere segment of the OSINT set are going to arrive at the conclusion that this was a ukrainian missile, and those guys are collectively not an asset you burn over what is basically a very manageable news cycle
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Nov 17, 2022 00:23
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the thing is, pissing off NATO could have very real consequences for zelensky personally. he must realise this, or at least have someone in his staff who does - and yet he's throwing a fit over what is materially not that big a deal for him. it could be psychological, i guess, but that somehow doesn't feel right to me
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Nov 17, 2022 00:32
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interestingly it doesn't seem as though that italian group had any serious hardware. i'm holding out for some neo-nazi sect doing a bank robbery with a javelin, personally
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Nov 17, 2022 23:23
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Jazerus posted:bombing hardens resistance and strengthens people's commitment to not surrendering. because you just killed their mom/brother/friend/polycule/whatever and gave them a reason to give a poo poo about the war ending in a way that punishes the other side the impression that i get is that this electricity attack strategy is basically an economic war strategy. industry requires electricity and modern business requires you to have reliable internet access (and so electricity), and ukraine has not transitioned into anything like a command economy. this means that hitting their export industries is effectively hitting their ability to raise foreign currency, which is again hitting their ability to keep from defaulting on their debts and avoiding a full-blown financial crisis. i have said before and i will say again that i think that the most probable outcome in which russia outright wins this war is one in which there is a massive ukrainian financial crisis and they cannot in practice pay their troops or import basic civilian goods. this can probably be prevented by the western financial institutions intervening, but then they're also exposing themselves to ever-increasing risk (which these institutions hate and are designed to avoid) at a time where we also see growing unease in the domestic western financial systems. at the end of the day, the institution of last resort would be the US government directly infusing hard currency to keep the wheels turning, but that kind of money is politically much more difficult to spend than another $50b in arms. commercial power consumption is the first to go, as we are seeing in germany. there's also a terror aspect to this bombing, but i really do think that the economic angle is more important.
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Nov 18, 2022 19:04
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like, the ukrainians have been very conscientious about honouring their debts thus far because that's enormously important to them. the financial institutions of the world have a specific mode of operation, and it's one where the government sacrifices its people to repay its debt - and sometimes demonstrably sacrifices people to signal that it's serious about repaying future debts. that applies to ukraine as much as it does to pakistan
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Nov 18, 2022 19:08
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 14:23 |
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speng31b posted:im not an expert on this but as long as the US prints money and ukraine is willing to be economically enslaved to the IMF forever cant they just prop up the economy almost forever because its ultimately fake the IMF has very strict protocols about making countries service their debt. that is the mode of operation of the IMF and how it keeps forcing countries to sell assets and restructure so they can keep servicing their debts. if ukraine becomes genuinely insolvent, the US government is going to have to step in, and it's going to have to do so in a manner quite contrary to its own normal mode of doing these things - it would presumably have to go via USAID or something, and spend an awful lot of money in ways which are politically novel. sure, they could probably make the ukrainians buy american stuff for the money they send, but this sort of policy is not something they've got prepared and the US has been very averse to doing it so far, preferring to shift much of that burden over on the institutions and the europeans while it deals with a lot of military aid for which the political structures are much more comfortable and streamlined. i'm not saying that the americans would definitely allow ukraine to fall into a full-blown financial crisis, but preventing it would place a real strain on US institutions and force a bunch of moves that the americans really would prefer not to make, especially given the cracks showing from their own financial sector at the moment.
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Nov 18, 2022 21:19
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