womble

So a "Prigozhinic Victory"? Has Pyrrhus been overtopped sufficient in the "victory that cost more than it was worth" stakes to have his name replaced?

You misunderstand. It's not about what you're fighting for, it's what you're fighting with. There are a hatful of reasons for the west to arm you against Russia, but "They're Naxis! Look at their unit patches!!"  is just a gimme own goal for Russian propaganda to add to the reasons to not arm you.
Don't get me wrong, I'm 100% behind Ukraine and understand that you're absolutely not trying to be the reincarnation of the Third Reich. But I was never going to vote for Trump, even if I had the right to do so. You'll beat the Russians in the end, for sure, because you're better, and more determined. The timescale and casualty toll though, if you throw away Western support for some frat-boy humour would look even more grim than they do currently.
I know you can't stop them, but I hope you can see that it's Bad PR and that currently you're winning the war at the rate you are because you have Good PR. And then there's post-war reconstruction to consider. That's an even softer target for propaganda.
There was great work done by UKR around the time of the Azovstahl siege, debunking the "neonazi militia" thing. I think it's a stupid risk to undo that when there are powerful lobbies looking for reasons to get our governments to shut down the aid to your country, military, humanitarian and, in the future, for reconstruction.

This is very true. The presence, or even suggestion, of neo-Nazis in the ranks, and accepted there, allowed the Russians to poison Western opinion against intervention back in '14. It matters not whether "Azov"s philosophy was widespread, its existence opened the door to some sort of credibility for aninterventionists finger-pointing.
Maybe your national psyche needs, or at least finds it helpful in morale terms, to mock the enemy, but there are other ways which don't hand the Russian-apologists out here beyond the hot borders of the conflict easy ammo to shoot you in the foot with.
Storm Shadow has a tandem warhead. Don't know whether a human listener would be able to distinguish the shaped charge detonation from the bursting charge, though.

Yes, we did discuss this, and as I udnerstand your position I think you wrong here mate- it's not issue of Russian feelings (who cares what they think) nor Ukrainians' traditions of "mockery" (if indeed it is mockery, and not hidden far-right activism like in case of Azov movement), but public opinion of the West at stake here. Which directly translates how much money, eqiupment, training and crucially political support you get from us. Remind you- Ukraine is basically crowdfunding its war at this stage.
If we tell you there is taboo on nationalism/nazism symbolic and ideas, it is for a reason- we are serious about it. Ukrainians are harming their own war effort and people that way. *
* I personally know a person who get very involved in helping UA initially, collecting thousands of zloty for drones, bandages, tactical vests etc for your guys....until it visited frontlines herself and was perplexed by amount of nazi/nationalistic s...t going there. She gave up on helping almost entirely, except limited humanitarian one. This equipment could save lives of your folks at frontlines, but no- jokes are more important... Btw. send regards to 28th Brigade and Odessa ultras.

I think it's sufficiently certain that the benefits of attempting such a thing would have to be firstly cast-iron guaranteed (which the history of "marches on Moscow" doesn't seem to encourage optimism for) and, secondly, worth the risk. I suspect that "those in charge" will consider that a long-term containment of Moscow will be "enough" and that the chances of actually forcing an unconditional surrender on Russia are so slender, and the cost of attempting it so high as to make the non-zero risk of total annihilation unacceptable. 

We were also social, and invented revenge as a survival tactic: if a predator kills one of your troop, you get the troop together and kill all the predators of that type anywhere near you that hang around/fall into your traps. Then we applied it to other troops of humans...
And that is apparently where Putin sits in his Master Strategist chair... 

I think that's where the geneticists would disagree. The gene pool won't hardly have a ripple in it, given the timescales involved. All that conditioning leaves marks on psyches, not DNA, not in centuries.
The difference, if you like, between Russia and the "Liberal West" is that in Russia, the crazies are the only societal element left that's allowed to speak, whereas in the West, both parties still get to voice their opinions, and the difference between "then" and "now" is that the Internet gives the crazies' voice a volume, connectedness and cohesion [chortle] it could never hope to achieve when media had actual sane people watching over it.
And because in Russia, "the only way is crazy", even people who would otherwise dismiss the nonsense have to get on board, to get ahead, and any human has the capacity to rationalise their self-interest as moral, in order to live with themselves, while only some have the fortitude to refuse to deceive/delude themselves.

It's much more complex than that, obviously, since there are different classes of crazy, from the sociopath-manipulator, to the violence-obsessed bully (none of which are entirely genetically determined; it's all "predispositions", and the system taps into those), and they all play their role in the dysfunctional "family" that Vova wants to be Patriarch of.
If the cause for the "Russian mentality" were genetic, you'd have to characterise German mid-20th-Century Nazism as similarly genetic, because the societal acquiescence to the rise of National Socialism has broad parallels in post-Soviet Russian Nationalism. I don't think anyone here believes that the German genetic makeup predisposes them to Nazism, indeed the empirical evidence would indicate very much otherwise. So why assume the Russian mentality is any more based in DNA than Hitler's was?
I'm sure there are analogies between the action of human biological inheritance, and the development of theories of Society (pace Ser Dawkins), but we should not confuse one with the other in its expression in populations.

Nope, folks have just misunderstood.  It really stands for Putin's Military Criminals.

Ok let’s play “How Many Reasons Why Russia May Open Up Negotiations That Are Not An Immediate Sign Of Defeat” - all the College Boys chime in.  I will start:
- Shifting the strategic narrative/reframe the war in an attempt to demonstrate that they are the reasonable ones and start down a road to victimology that may appeal to certain political parties in the west who have their heads in warm dark places while they listen to “experts” with big mics, empty heads and a serious lust for more money and power.
- To create uncertainty in the European alliance and NATO as some nations just want this to be over and renormalize. 
- A ploy to pull China into this in some sort diplomatic tag team. China enters the side of “Putin the Reasonable” and leverages it towards a win for them both.
- The Russians simply stall for time in a hope to slow down the UA in a hope for a battlefield reverse.
- To play up to a domestic audience, with never any real intention of ceasing the conflict.
- Because Putin is finished and we wind up negotiating with a bunch of separate goons, none of whom actually represent the Russian people.
- Putin is not finished but wants us to believe it and over reach.  Link to playing for time and dumber political machines moving into power.
- Random irrational objectives that we can only guess at.
Now just for you - go look up Dunning-Kruger and think about it for awhile. And did you just walk into Steve’s house and tell him to shut up and sit down?  Seriously, how does that get right on any political spectrum?  And we are at Ignore.

For me, WEGO is the only way to play. RT may as well not exist, as far as I'm concerned. A massive chunk of my enjoyment is in re-watching the turns unfold, finding the engaging little stories that play out. RT simply doesn't give anything like the same opportunity for watching situations develop and resolve.
I hate to miss anything, and even on a small/Tiny map, you will in RT.

For me, WEGO is the only way to play. RT may as well not exist, as far as I'm concerned. A massive chunk of my enjoyment is in re-watching the turns unfold, finding the engaging little stories that play out. RT simply doesn't give anything like the same opportunity for watching situations develop and resolve.
I hate to miss anything, and even on a small/Tiny map, you will in RT.

Maybe they still have not forgotten the times of 1940-1942 when Britain was in a comparable situation with the Nazis at their throat and dependant on help from across the pond. I guess they still today can relate to how it must have felt back then to how Ukraine must have felt since last year. I am glad that UK is like a rock in the waves and not faltering in its support.

I think it's sufficiently certain that the benefits of attempting such a thing would have to be firstly cast-iron guaranteed (which the history of "marches on Moscow" doesn't seem to encourage optimism for) and, secondly, worth the risk. I suspect that "those in charge" will consider that a long-term containment of Moscow will be "enough" and that the chances of actually forcing an unconditional surrender on Russia are so slender, and the cost of attempting it so high as to make the non-zero risk of total annihilation unacceptable. 

For me, WEGO is the only way to play. RT may as well not exist, as far as I'm concerned. A massive chunk of my enjoyment is in re-watching the turns unfold, finding the engaging little stories that play out. RT simply doesn't give anything like the same opportunity for watching situations develop and resolve.
I hate to miss anything, and even on a small/Tiny map, you will in RT.

For me, WEGO is the only way to play. RT may as well not exist, as far as I'm concerned. A massive chunk of my enjoyment is in re-watching the turns unfold, finding the engaging little stories that play out. RT simply doesn't give anything like the same opportunity for watching situations develop and resolve.
I hate to miss anything, and even on a small/Tiny map, you will in RT.

For me, WEGO is the only way to play. RT may as well not exist, as far as I'm concerned. A massive chunk of my enjoyment is in re-watching the turns unfold, finding the engaging little stories that play out. RT simply doesn't give anything like the same opportunity for watching situations develop and resolve.
I hate to miss anything, and even on a small/Tiny map, you will in RT.

It won't in so few generations. And there is no selective genetic benefit on either the rewarded or unrewarded. Maybe the unrewarded don't have access to birth control and reproduce more. Maybe they die off because lack of healthcare. Maybe the rewarded inbreed. Maybe revolution wipes them out. Civilizations and their geostrategies are too short lived for natural selection affect their impact on the world. 

They don't. That essay is laser focused on genetics, and doesn't address behavior. But Steven Pinker's book How the Mind Works does address it. The TLDR is that genetic variation does affect variation in human behavior. Other human traits are influenced by genes, and it makes all the sense in the world that behavior would be among those traits. The studies he references come up with something like 50% of the variation in human behavior being accounted for by genes, with the other 50% being accounted for by the environment. Again though, that is variation within human populations, not between human populations. Differences in behavior between populations is almost entirely environmental. The reason is, as the essay I linked points out, that there is very little genetic variation between human populations. So environmental factors are the only thing that can account for behavioral differences between populations.

I'm reminded of how certain segments of the American ultra-wealthy like to consider themselves 'genetically superior' to the common rabble. Never mind how great-grandpa had been a prohibition rum-runner and mom is dad's second wife who used to work as a hotel masseuse. But they're definitely 'genetically superior'. Genetics doesn't work like that. 😆

I think that's where the geneticists would disagree. The gene pool won't hardly have a ripple in it, given the timescales involved. All that conditioning leaves marks on psyches, not DNA, not in centuries.
The difference, if you like, between Russia and the "Liberal West" is that in Russia, the crazies are the only societal element left that's allowed to speak, whereas in the West, both parties still get to voice their opinions, and the difference between "then" and "now" is that the Internet gives the crazies' voice a volume, connectedness and cohesion [chortle] it could never hope to achieve when media had actual sane people watching over it.
And because in Russia, "the only way is crazy", even people who would otherwise dismiss the nonsense have to get on board, to get ahead, and any human has the capacity to rationalise their self-interest as moral, in order to live with themselves, while only some have the fortitude to refuse to deceive/delude themselves.

It's much more complex than that, obviously, since there are different classes of crazy, from the sociopath-manipulator, to the violence-obsessed bully (none of which are entirely genetically determined; it's all "predispositions", and the system taps into those), and they all play their role in the dysfunctional "family" that Vova wants to be Patriarch of.
If the cause for the "Russian mentality" were genetic, you'd have to characterise German mid-20th-Century Nazism as similarly genetic, because the societal acquiescence to the rise of National Socialism has broad parallels in post-Soviet Russian Nationalism. I don't think anyone here believes that the German genetic makeup predisposes them to Nazism, indeed the empirical evidence would indicate very much otherwise. So why assume the Russian mentality is any more based in DNA than Hitler's was?
I'm sure there are analogies between the action of human biological inheritance, and the development of theories of Society (pace Ser Dawkins), but we should not confuse one with the other in its expression in populations.

So, a thousand years. That's what? 40 generations (at 25 years per generation)? 60 (if you assume reproduction by age 16)? Compare that with bacteria with a generation time of 20 minutes. 60 generations is 20 hours. How much evolution is there going to be for a colony of bacteria in a day? Not very much. The pressures in Russia on genetic makeup are very small, because behavioural changes are sufficient to permit survival to reproduction. We humans are fairly adaptable creatures, and I don't mean in the stupid comic-book interpretation of "evolution" either .
The territory covered by Russia has hardly been some monolithic autocracy for 10 centuries. It covers a very broad range of phenotypes, and has, in the past, included larger numbers of differentiated individuals. Only in the era of the Soviet Union was migration significantly restricted, either within the territory of what is now Russia, or in and out of it.
You've heard, I hope, of "regression to the mean". While those individuals who have sufficiently high combinations of resentment of the current situation and resources have absented themselves from the gene pool, those genes still remain to be expressed in the next generation.
"The degree to which it is out and out genetic selection" may not be precisely determinable, but it is unlikely to be significant.

So, a thousand years. That's what? 40 generations (at 25 years per generation)? 60 (if you assume reproduction by age 16)? Compare that with bacteria with a generation time of 20 minutes. 60 generations is 20 hours. How much evolution is there going to be for a colony of bacteria in a day? Not very much. The pressures in Russia on genetic makeup are very small, because behavioural changes are sufficient to permit survival to reproduction. We humans are fairly adaptable creatures, and I don't mean in the stupid comic-book interpretation of "evolution" either .
The territory covered by Russia has hardly been some monolithic autocracy for 10 centuries. It covers a very broad range of phenotypes, and has, in the past, included larger numbers of differentiated individuals. Only in the era of the Soviet Union was migration significantly restricted, either within the territory of what is now Russia, or in and out of it.
You've heard, I hope, of "regression to the mean". While those individuals who have sufficiently high combinations of resentment of the current situation and resources have absented themselves from the gene pool, those genes still remain to be expressed in the next generation.
"The degree to which it is out and out genetic selection" may not be precisely determinable, but it is unlikely to be significant.

So, a thousand years. That's what? 40 generations (at 25 years per generation)? 60 (if you assume reproduction by age 16)? Compare that with bacteria with a generation time of 20 minutes. 60 generations is 20 hours. How much evolution is there going to be for a colony of bacteria in a day? Not very much. The pressures in Russia on genetic makeup are very small, because behavioural changes are sufficient to permit survival to reproduction. We humans are fairly adaptable creatures, and I don't mean in the stupid comic-book interpretation of "evolution" either .
The territory covered by Russia has hardly been some monolithic autocracy for 10 centuries. It covers a very broad range of phenotypes, and has, in the past, included larger numbers of differentiated individuals. Only in the era of the Soviet Union was migration significantly restricted, either within the territory of what is now Russia, or in and out of it.
You've heard, I hope, of "regression to the mean". While those individuals who have sufficiently high combinations of resentment of the current situation and resources have absented themselves from the gene pool, those genes still remain to be expressed in the next generation.
"The degree to which it is out and out genetic selection" may not be precisely determinable, but it is unlikely to be significant.

Yes, definitely.
No, didn't happen. Too large a gene pool inside Russia to really breed something out. Too much influx from 'non-Russian' genes through wars and trade etc... And not enough time.
IIRC the last time Homo sapiens had a real gene selection was when we were down to 10,000 individuals some tens (100s?) of thousands years ago. That was the time we nearly got extinct.
Now we are just too many for any mayor changes to happen.
Communism has tried to create the 'new human'. With education & gulags. Neither of which worked, else we had a working communist state.
The humans are still the same, which is why communism has unfortunately failed.
Steve, I'm not going to continue to argue that here. Others have already said all I may have come up with. I'm not an evolutionary biologist, and there are much better sources about this topic than which I can provide.
Your arguments are sound with regard to cultural or sociological reasons. But extending that to biology is just plain wrong.
 

I think that's where the geneticists would disagree. The gene pool won't hardly have a ripple in it, given the timescales involved. All that conditioning leaves marks on psyches, not DNA, not in centuries.
The difference, if you like, between Russia and the "Liberal West" is that in Russia, the crazies are the only societal element left that's allowed to speak, whereas in the West, both parties still get to voice their opinions, and the difference between "then" and "now" is that the Internet gives the crazies' voice a volume, connectedness and cohesion [chortle] it could never hope to achieve when media had actual sane people watching over it.
And because in Russia, "the only way is crazy", even people who would otherwise dismiss the nonsense have to get on board, to get ahead, and any human has the capacity to rationalise their self-interest as moral, in order to live with themselves, while only some have the fortitude to refuse to deceive/delude themselves.

It's much more complex than that, obviously, since there are different classes of crazy, from the sociopath-manipulator, to the violence-obsessed bully (none of which are entirely genetically determined; it's all "predispositions", and the system taps into those), and they all play their role in the dysfunctional "family" that Vova wants to be Patriarch of.
If the cause for the "Russian mentality" were genetic, you'd have to characterise German mid-20th-Century Nazism as similarly genetic, because the societal acquiescence to the rise of National Socialism has broad parallels in post-Soviet Russian Nationalism. I don't think anyone here believes that the German genetic makeup predisposes them to Nazism, indeed the empirical evidence would indicate very much otherwise. So why assume the Russian mentality is any more based in DNA than Hitler's was?
I'm sure there are analogies between the action of human biological inheritance, and the development of theories of Society (pace Ser Dawkins), but we should not confuse one with the other in its expression in populations.