(Thread IKs:
weg, Toxic Mental)
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I can't find it right now but there is longer video than this, but it doesn't really show much more - anyway, some partisans landed a drone on the radome of an A-50 (Russian AWACS) parked in Belarus and then blew up its satcom antenna pod. https://twitter.com/AlexBondODUA/status/1631303676043165696 NATO has had its share of base security embarrassments too but jeez. Apparently Russia only has
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Mar 5, 2023 21:25
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 09:36 |
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Herstory Begins Now posted:ty to each of them for volunteering their time and energy for what is no doubt a pretty thankless task  I'm very curious to see how Russia goes about trying to sell Bakhmut as a huge game-changer when they finally take those few square km of bombed out rubble.
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Mar 5, 2023 21:41
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zone posted:https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1632469732417761284 so the idea is that Russia is so much weaker than Mexico it's a favorable target despite being halfway around the world? teen witch posted:before we were so *rudely* interrupted… this was great, thanks for posting this writeup tiaz fucked around with this message at 23:34 on Mar 5, 2023 |
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Mar 5, 2023 23:32
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FirstnameLastname posted:to clarify, not victims of Ukraine's, even though they're firing the shots, Russia's govt. is the actor that's causing their deaths in an ethnic cleansing campaign I agree with you that some fraction of the Russian army has been in some way coerced into being there and that individually that loss of autonomy, the conditions they have been put in, and their likely death or injury are tragic, provided they haven't voluntarily taken up doing warcrimes or whatever. Comparing them to civilians in Dresden is let's say a bit off base though, and either way, I believe you have made your point here. noone is actually taking the completely opposite position that mobiks are subhuman chaff. when we laud Russian defeats we are lauding their defeat on a tactical or strategic level, not the death of individual human beings. Butterfly Valley posted:I'd say there's a lot more cognitive dissonance inherent in wanting Ukraine to win the existential war of defence against a fascist invader intent on genociding their country out of existence, while pretending that currently takes any other form than Ukraine being able to inflict enough human and materiel damage to make the ongoing waging of war prohibitively costly for the Russian state. on review this is basically what I wanted to say. Have the Turkish elections been moved up at all? I want to see Sweden and Finland in NATO 
tiaz fucked around with this message at 23:51 on Mar 5, 2023 |
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Mar 5, 2023 23:48
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FirstnameLastname posted:i wasn't saying to self-flagellate over it or to not celebrate successes in the war at all, i recognize it's a war, and a very violent one at that, and that people are going to continue to be killed for a while. It sucks but war sucks. It's just that of all the things to celebrate, mobiks getting massacred isn't one of them. I'm not talking about it from a military perspective just a human one. I get it and agree with you, it's just I think this thread is already aware of that stuff. It is probably true that most people are unaware that that "hidden" genocide of ethnic minorities in Russia is happening, but I think posters in this thread broadly are. I think another reason you get pushback is because you reach pretty far in your analogies sometimes. Like in a previous post you said that ridiculing mobiks was targeting the people who deserved it the least and while your heart's in the right place I'm pretty sure that joining a military prosecuting an unprovoked land-grab invasion with the stated intent of genocide is morally different from living peacefully minding your own business in Vasylivka #18, that it is in fact the civilian who deserved it less, even if the mobik was pushed to do it by a bad economic situation. Not to say that the mobik really deserves it, but you're the one who ranked deserving to begin with. I know that's not a hardline position for you and I'm not trying to browbeat you about it, but I think that is some of what motivates people to respond to and contradict you rather than agreeing with your real position which is that mobiks are also human beings and that shouldn't be lost sight of. Which I think we're all on board with. Not to reopen the derail. It was worth mentioning and I'm not trying to silence you.  Futanari Damacy posted:If we're to be successful with this, one thing that has to stop is the false equivalencies. They're a huge red flag for a number of reasons. I take your point and don't mean to draw the broad equivalency, but there's plenty of Russians rolling around with some of those same stolen symbols in a direct reference to actual OG Nazis they idolize. (Some Ukrainians too, but my understanding is not as many.) Some of them really are ideologically on the same page and it's a fair comparison. It's not all of them though, and I agree with you and the esteemed Mr Godwin that it's overused. That said I vividly remember the moment of realization when the US was in high gear trying to normalize "Enhanced Interrogation" and the dusty vaults of my memory creaked open to reveal "Verschärfte Vernehmung" to my abject horror. I mean, it's a direct translation, 1:1. Not to say that the US was deliberately copying the Nazi playbook or itself a Nazi organization, but at that point I do have a strong inclination to point to the Nazis and say "you're being like them" as a way of shocking people out of their justifications.
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Mar 6, 2023 05:59
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Herstory Begins Now posted:
yeah uh this is more the line I should have drawn, I was way too conciliatory there 
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Mar 6, 2023 06:41
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Captain Fargle posted:Thank you for the clarifications. you've done nothing wrong and I want to be welcoming but also the avatar post combo here got me good. GABA ghoul posted:Oh wow, ok, straight up bonafide race science. That's definitely Russia's Musk. How did she make her fortune? Was it a caliper app for Android? What, the
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Mar 6, 2023 19:46
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Oscar Wilde Bunch posted:It would be surreal at this point if Wagner/Russia culminates this whole offensive and then right at the end they just can't finish, or if gliding JDAMS is just the linchpin that halts their advance. I imagine 1000-3000lb bombs can do significantly more work than 155 arty rounds can. 20ish pounds HE (155) vs 300ish pounds (1klb JDAM) is a real difference, yeah. I imagine it's currently easier to get 155 right onto a moving target, though - I think the glide bombs have to be used at a distance given the highly contested environment. if Ukraine has/are using the laser guidance kits, that's a different story.
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Mar 7, 2023 19:11
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Shaman Tank Spec posted:Heavy JDAMs are no joke. Oh definitely, against a stationary target it's great, the classic "radioman, you see that emplacement?" "yeah" "I don't want to." situation. I'm just a little dubious of having full enough integration that Ukrainian aircraft can program coordinates into it in the air based on a ground report. On the other hand, necessity is the mother of invention and they're certainly motivated, so who knows.
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Mar 7, 2023 22:06
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Oscar Wilde Bunch posted:For all the Nordstream chat, if they wanted to keep using it, couldn’t they just, like, repair it? Yeah, but who's "they"? Germany doesn't want to pay to repair it and probably couldn't lease equipment or expertise to Russia due to sanctions even if it did. Russia might not have the capability to go it alone, and it would be pointless to do so as long as Germany's stance is "we're not buying any gas that comes through those/from Russia".
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Mar 8, 2023 02:14
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fizzy posted:That may be true, but in this case, the strategic value of Bakhmut (as elucidated by Zelensky) lies in its proximity and road connections to other cities in eastern Ukraine. That geographical location and those roads were not created or changed within the span of a week or a day. I think Zelensky might have motivations to make statements that, say, would keep Russia slamming its dick in the car door regardless of whether he felt them to be literally true.
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Mar 8, 2023 07:14
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fizzy posted:That's an uncomfortable line of thinking, though, since it implies that other official statements about the state of the war may also be exaggerated or downplayed to lure or motivate Russia into taking sub-optimal actions. Inflate enemy casualty figures and downplay own-side casualty figures to demoralise the opponent and incentivise Ukraine's allies to keep up their arms supplies, exaggerate battlefield successes for the same purposes, and so on. Unfortunate implications all around. It's much more plausible that Zelensky is spitting straight facts and that pundits are generally just pulling words out of their rear end to fill article inches and get TV appearance invitations. well ... I have bad news for you, buddy. I mean, I can't know what's in his heart. He does have to carefully husband the perception that he generally tells the truth. He's done that very well and I do think he's usually being honest, but in general Ukraine definitely foments a (to them) desirable perception for the purposes of demoralizing Russians, securing continued Western support, domestic stability, and so on. Everyone does it. We do it all the time. To be clearer I'm not saying he's straight-up lying to you; HonorableTB's post was very good and maybe a less spicy way to put these things.
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Mar 8, 2023 07:30
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Don't white-knuckle your necklace like that, you'll break it. Also, if you're going to do the "I'm not touching you" willfully obtuse routine, please do it from an account I can ignore.
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Mar 9, 2023 03:39
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happy birthday HonorableTB and CommieGIR  Toxic Mental posted:If you've ever wondered how they defuse mines manually, this is insanely wild how it's basically like "yeah don't press down here right now, like THIS":  he actually taps it with the tool?"hope you don't get the boom, heh" indeed.
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Mar 10, 2023 03:00
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Killer robot posted:Pretty sure that second one is anti-vehicle, so even if it's live it takes a lot of weight to trigger it. I mean, you want to treat any explosives carefully, but I'd be way less nervous than with the 50 year old anti-personnel mines. Yeah, I was mixing my quotes - it's the first guy with the antipersonnel mine who exposes the primer? blasting cap?- and says "you have to not push this part in" and then taps it with the metal tool he's been using to disassemble it. Maybe he knows something I don't like the metal case around said primer or whatever is pretty inert and you have to drive the nail into the center portion hard to do anything, but my OSHA senses were tingling in that one.
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Mar 10, 2023 03:38
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what a way to find out.  shadow puppet of a posted:How in the hell are people giving orders on the Russian side still alive? Is the allure of a fishblock sent back home that irresistible? EorayMel posted:They have all the food, water, and most of the good weapons aimed at the ones doing all the fighting while maintaining the minimum safe distance from Ukrainians OP it's probably this here. also, it's probably tempting to think you might live or at least have some more time to figure something out if you go, whereas trying to ace your officer means dying immediately or getting beaten to death regardless of whether or not you succeed, and then the people you're there with get sent by the next guy anyway. usual caveats around I don't know for sure but it definitely isn't the fish bricks
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Mar 10, 2023 18:57
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the  / scrunchie on the door school of airport securityI mean, god. my home airport is better secured than that. probably more frequently patrolled
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Mar 11, 2023 00:38
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shadow puppet of a posted:How would you best take out a fighter jet with the supplies you can source in a rural area and carry in say two or three trips from a wheelbarrow? (relatively) securely tape a bag of nails as deep in the intake of one or both engines as practical where it won't be seen on preflight, if performed. I expect even russian engines do not like ingesting large quantities of debris. Mistle posted:The whole plate pushes the pin, it's about a distributed weight adding up on a single point. Even the antipersonnel mines have a threshold. It's like a few pounds, but that's a few pounds focused on something the size of a pencil-diameter rod. that makes sense, thanks. tapping the area still gives me the screaming habdabs, but I have
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Mar 11, 2023 01:27
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https://www.economist.com/europe/2023/03/12/how-ukraine-tamed-russian-missile-barrages-and-kept-the-lights-on Here's an article about how the energy grid in Ukraine has been kept alive all this time despite the attacks. A lot of spares, as you'd expect, but some interesting details as well. Coquito Ergo Sum posted:For sure. There's really no comparison. When it comes to protection, you may block a few more weapon types in a 62 than a Leopard 1, but a 1A5 is better than any iteration of a T-62 in nearly every other regard. Definitely. Plus survivability for a tank doesn't begin and end with eating a shot.  While the 1A5 is large (and therefore whatever it has going on in the "signature management" department isn't that awesome - also that size contributes to the crew comfort soft factors you pointed out), I understand it to have a big advantage in step 1, situational awareness.
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Mar 13, 2023 15:49
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zone posted:https://twitter.com/Flash_news_ua/status/1635304303442407425 whew! at last Moscow is safe from the Tu-160s of the perfidious Ukrainians UA did have some for a while but not for years
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Mar 13, 2023 18:42
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HonorableTB posted:They launched attacks with Tu-160s last summer haha ... Ukraine did? Did they de-mothball the one in the museum? wrt Russia's I initially thought it was weird they were flying Tu-160 sorties just to launch some cruise missiles from very far away. It felt to me like you might as well design a solid rocket booster to get your cruise missiles to deployment speed then, but I suppose the design cost has already been paid for the aircraft so it "just" costs you several tons of fuel and hours of engine operation on engines you possibly can't maintain.
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Mar 13, 2023 19:20
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Oscar Wilde Bunch posted:For those who’d know. Do shaped charge warheads actually have to be moving at any speed to do their thing? Or can you just gently touch the nose to something and set it off? The metal jet that results from the shaped charge vastly outspeeds the velocity of the projectile, especially for man-launched projectiles - it's measured in kilometers/sec.
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Mar 14, 2023 06:37
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Deki posted:I'm ignorant as gently caress when it comes to planes, I'm just asking if it drops the tank itself or if it basically pisses a stream of fuel until the tank's dry. The additional fuel tanks don't have any kind of recovery system. If they get jettisoned they impact the ocean (or the ground) at high speed and are destroyed.
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Mar 14, 2023 20:11
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steinrokkan posted:The treaties are older than NATO and say that unless Turkey itself is at war, it can't let any warships over 10k tons through, unless they are formally based in the Black Sea by one of of the local powers.  also, even if it weren't legally dicey, I assume any carrier group would be reticent to transit such a strait. carriers prefer to be far from land (and land-based systems) and free to maneuver.
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Mar 14, 2023 21:48
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It's true that that's bad news, but it has also been expected - see all the drama about Bakhmut and how it either enables massive Russian advances or moves the front line 100 meters. A breakthrough does not mean a line collapse. We're just not going to know what transpired for a while.
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Mar 16, 2023 08:48
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CommieGIR posted:Long and short, the drone isn't much of a loss, and next time it'll likely be escorted. The idea that Russia would waste any time on bringing it down is a laughable waste. I do find it strange just how much tolerance we have for hostile foreign powers hot dogging around our aircraft and damaging them, like that Chinese pilot who downed a P-3 Orion at the cost of his own aircraft (and probably life). I get that it's materially different if it's an actual shootdown with guns or missiles - and our response would be very different if it was - but it's still a downed aircraft because of them doing something. I mean, I'm not advocating that we do large escalation about it especially for an outdated unmanned drone, but still. Set posted:The war has not been good for womens rights in Russia, as the government has only increased policies that are hostile to women since the beginning of the war. Human rights activists have rung the alarm, but there is not much they can do at the moment. There are multiple embedded links to sources within the article if you are interested in reading deeper into the topic. I remember reading Seeing Like A State at some point and it feels like all too often trying to see things that way is a means to launder cruelty.
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Mar 16, 2023 18:24
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Bernard McFacknutah posted:I think that needs to be qualified by saying, that drone was actively assisting in gathering intel and probably actual targeting data that enables Ukraine to annihilate Russians in a manner that wouldn't be possible without either a Western drone or spy plane flying in the black sea saying 'you can't touch me, you can't touch me.' It's snooping on phone and radio signals and that ends up with stuff like the Makiivka strike where 600 Russians got slaughtered because they refused to turn their phones off. granted but I think we'd start by saying "knock it off or we're shooting it down" and then do that rather than play baby's first formation aerobatics unannounced e: I don't mean to dogpile, I hadn't seen the other replies that made this point better. I appreciated your post
tiaz fucked around with this message at 19:15 on Mar 16, 2023 |
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Mar 16, 2023 19:09
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BrassRoots posted:I keep seeing right wing "wheres the money going?" Propaganda on twitter. it doesn't matter if they know how the MIC works, that isn't the urge that's being satisfied by holding the position.
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Mar 17, 2023 08:03
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zone posted:https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1636808884554809344 big eyeroll jerkoff from me on that coming from a dude wearing st george's ribbon. shame there was no audience to laugh him off like when lavrov claimed ukraine started the war a week ago or whenever that was Splorange posted:If there's a medically safe way to eat a hat meant to be worn that isn't meant to be edible, I'll eat it or then eat the ban. I really thought you were planning on pulling out a chip sombrero or something.
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Mar 17, 2023 21:57
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EorayMel posted:Bigger Putin theory is Actual Putin taller or shorter than Ben Shapiro?
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Mar 18, 2023 18:03
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Jasper Tin Neck posted:You know, I always find it a strange when people chose to mock Ben Shapiro or anyone other dude for the one thing he just is, no fault of his, instead of all the things he chose to be. It's not the fact of his being short, but more his being really weird about it - insisting it isn't really the case, like Putin with the weird shoes and carefully curating who's nearby in images he is in. That also makes it comparatively benign to bring up because it's "possesses an understandable and kind of funny foible" more than "chose to support harmful ideologies and demonize vulnerable groups" which carries a very different tone. Also what StrangersInTheNight said about it running contrary to beliefs he claims to have for money. The things he chose to be are definitely worse than a bit of napoleon complex. If he didn't worry about it so much I don't think anyone would be bringing it up. do we have any reliable numbers showing that the rate of industrial accidents has spiked in Russia? I imagine they have, but by how much?
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Mar 18, 2023 20:42
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HonorableTB posted:Of course I guess it could've been Russia if for no other reason than it would be one of the worst moves they could make in a war that has been a series of hitting themselves in the balls increasingly harder at every opportunity seriously. it was also right around the time they were crowing about how winter would decimate the EU's morale - maybe they thought making the pipelines unrecoverable would twist the knife as Europeans sobbed apologies to Mother Russia at their thermostats? Seems like such an own goal though. By this point Germany was already complying about divestment and whatnot and the political fallout is such a risk I don't really buy the collective west doing it intentionally either, at least without a lot of layers of misdirection to keep it ambiguous. In the end I rabbit-ear my pockets and go "I'm glad they're offline I guess  "CommissarMega posted:My own this guess is my favorite. "but causing a giant methane release to do some stock or commodity price shenanigans is hysterically evil - ... oh, but it's oil companies,"
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Mar 20, 2023 00:22
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guess is that it wasn't any state actor, but some other big petrochemical company doing a shadowrun; IIRC a lot of oil went through Nordstream, and cutting off Russian oil might have meant big bucks for some other corporate entity, or at least it would have until Europe decided to go (somewhat) green.
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Randarkman posted:IIRC the amount of methane released was negligible in the larger scheme of things, and many people made a way bigger deal out of it than it actually was. huh! thanks, I hadn't heard that. I get misdirected about industrial processes like that. sometimes I think about the sheer volume of paint required to paint all the road markings even once and am a bit agog mobby_6kl posted:There are decent reasons for russia to have done it. This got them out of having to deliver gas, demonstrates to Europe that they're able and willing to blow up out infrastructure, scares us with freezing, and, if it was done by hardliners, almost literally burns the bridges to normalizing relations. thanks for this, I'll check these out. I had completely forgotten about the contractual side of things.
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Mar 20, 2023 00:43
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maybe we can learn something about the pipeline sabotage from the attempted sabotage of this threadTurrurrurrurrrrrrr posted:Yeah if it blew from the inside the pig has Putin all over it. alas I fear the (Intelligent) Pipeline Inspection Gauge will be found to merely have borne one of his body doubles e: or clones???
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Mar 20, 2023 01:44
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Toxic Mental posted:I think we should send a T-800 terminator unit back in time to stop the invasion of Ukraine you fool. this intolerable escalation will force russia to invade
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Mar 20, 2023 02:31
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Karma Comedian posted:I thought it was pretty clever. Technically ... I'm settling into my role as OSHA Sardaukar so I look at this and think "yeah, it's a beacon nobody wants to jam, but you have also made things worse for Literally Everyone and further eroded your international standing". It's much like doing combat while pretending to surrender - we all said "hey, 121.5 MHz (or whatever) is the Emergency Frequency and this is the only thing it's used for" and Russia went "Ha ha! You fools!" and twirled its mustache and killed, like, a platoon before nobody got to take the emergency frequency seriously anymore. I'm sure it's illegal in a bunch of ways but that hasn't stopped them killing civilians either. It's just a new barrel we're finding the bottom of.
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Mar 20, 2023 09:09
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mobby_6kl posted:I mean whoever sank the Moskva Neptunes only have so much range, and the russian black sea fleet doesn't like the coast anymore HonorableTB posted:I'm sorry, an exploding....pig..? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb_iyAwu0K4 you can see it around 1:30, it's what's thought to have destroyed the pipeline by us not in the know tiaz fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Mar 20, 2023 |
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Mar 20, 2023 17:49
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Pot Smoke Phoenix posted:Denmark's in NATO. Denmark is also where Lego is headquartered. this would distract from their current operations making nonlethal antipersonnel mines.
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Mar 20, 2023 22:26
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zone posted:https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1637921305335853058 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuAKnbIr6TE
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Mar 20, 2023 22:38
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Samovar posted:What was the source, the BBC? accordingly I'd be surprised if Ukraine actually wants DU rounds. it's their land they'd be irradiating - Mr Luxury Yacht posted:It's also almost a certainty that DU rounds have been being fired by both sides since the start of the war since a lot of the punchier Soviet surplus and newer Russian 125mm rounds were DU. but I don't know for sure. Regardless, I am confident tungsten 120mm APFSDS will kill any armor Russia is fielding plenty dead
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Mar 22, 2023 20:01
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