Tux

It is obvious theres no discussion to be had with purpheat23.
Now may I ask everyone not to spam another 3 pages with this, it is hard enough to keep up to date.

its not being sent, most of it just gets used to purchase American weapons and equipment to be used by Ukraine. job creation. 

Since Ukraine doesn't exist in a bubble and neither do we, we are involved whether we like it or not. That means we need to put our political power and money where it counts to produce a resolution that works to maintain a global order that's quite significantly canted in our favor. Ukraine did work mightily to prepare for this scenario but they were limited by innate capability, the then state of interstate politics in the EU, the ability/willingness of American administrations to help. For our part, the strategic goal should be to a; recognize that Russian aggression on this scale is highly destabilizing to the international order, b; pursue what means are feasible to put a stop to that aggression now and c; ensure that such aggression in the foreseeable future is not going to reoccur.
We created the global order and benefit enormously in a myriad of ways large and small. $40 billion is a small price to pay to maintain it.

Expansion of NATO in Europe also means that Europe will become less dependent on the US. The US already had a dissident president, and his supporters still support putin. I prefer the US to remain fully democratic, but I don't take them for granted. To call Kim of North Korea and putin great guys give me the shivers. Two nut regimes with enough bombs to wage a terror campaign on the world is unacceptable. One nut regime (Russia) is bad enough. The Democratic Party won't be here forever. The social democratic systems in Europe are called left liberals in the US. The Republican Party needs to regain trust. 

Back from cycling to the dentist, and not entirely convinced that self-driving cars are likely to be any worse than the current man-in-the-loop variety, at least the self driving sensors are likely to be switched on rather than devoted to texting or social media...need an RPG.

If we move the discussion to bicycle safe street design, Steve will have us shot! 🤣

Yes. Our grandfathers also did horrible things, incl. against their very own here. Which I also mentioned. Ukrainian SSR was a DPR project that became "legit".
And that's a trauma Ukraine still deals with, but our people are more willing to accept this truth now, even though it is incredibly hard to stomach for many.

Hi all, I am a new account on this forum, but I have been reading this thread every day for the past couple months after getting referred to it from elsewhere. This thread, the daily ISW reports and Perun's videos are my primary sources for keeping track of what's going on in this war and why. Thank you everyone for the great contributions.
My account took a couple days to get approved, so this comment is out-of-date relative to the comment I wanted to respond to, but there have been several times the topic of China came up so I thought it would be worth posting anyway. I hope it's still interesting to someone. If not, please scroll past, I don't want to distract too much from the excellent analysis you all are sharing.
This is an area where I have a personal interest and some first-hand experience, having lived in China for several years.
I don't think it is very helpful to describe China (or any authoritarian country) as merely left wing or right wing, in particular when that statement comes from partisans in a democratic country. All too often there is a cynical incentive to try to associate the policies of the authoritarian regime with opposing political factions in the democratic system. I think it's better to assess the policies on their own.
Xi has overseen several socially conservative policies - for example broadcast restrictions on media featuring tattoos, piercings, effeminate men, same-sex relations and so on. But this is only part of a larger scale censorship effort that has also seen arrests of local citizen reporters and foreign media not only blocked at the Great Firewall but also pushed out of reporting from inside the country at all. He also spearheaded a popular anti-corruption campaign that coincidentally targeted all the senior party officials that might stand against him. And, of course, he removed term limits and will likely get a third term in the upcoming national congress. These are suspiciously autocratic moves, which is worrying in a country that since Deng has at least made a pretense of winding back the power of figureheads and trying to build more of a loyalty to the party as an abstract entity.
Xi has also allowed a populist rise of nationalism, xenophobia and Islamophobia, and he has put a strong emphasis on increasing national security and modernizing the military. One aspect of this was a revision to the national defense law that expanded the justifications for military actions, and placed more power into a military commission headed up by Xi.
On the other hand, in the past few years the party has also strengthened government controls over business. Notably it halted the IPO of Ant Financial, often portrayed overseas as a punishment for Jack Ma (co-founder of Alibaba) commenting on excessive regulation, but more likely just because the party wasn't happy that some of these tech giants are a threat to its power. Since then it has also been using anti-monopoly guidelines and other means to regulate major players in industries such as finance, tech and education. It's also hit several high-profile individuals for tax evasion, and for a brief period the official messaging seemed to be that speculation on real estate and the pursuit of excessive wealth was inappropriate, although that seems to have been tempered somewhat due to the COVID-related economic slowdown.
But a key point running through all of these policies is this: 党政军民学，东西南北中，党是领导一切的 - government, military, society and education - east, west, south, north and center - the party leads everything. And who leads the party? Recently the phrase "with Comrade Xi Jinping at the core" has become more common in the state media. This political structure isn't comparable to democratic countries where there is no singular authority and it's normal to have spirited and open debates on the issues.
I think the main thing to take away from Chinese politics under Xi is not to figure out if he represents a version of the left or the right in a democratic country, but to understand that his primary motivation is to ensure that the party retains control over every aspect of society. All policies are designed with that goal in mind. In my opinion Xi does have generally nationalist and socially conservative views, but I think he is also mindful that wealth inequality can lead to unrest and the downfall of the party, and that would be the ultimate sin.
TLDR: what Steve said
On how this affects the war in Ukraine - both the state media apparatus and the prevailing chatter on social media (which is ultimately shaped by what the state chooses not to censor) is solidly in the camp of this war somehow being a result of NATO expansion and American hegemony. I don't think there is an easy way for the party to publicly roll back its support for Putin. The issue will probably just remain in the current limbo, with the party simply claiming to remain neutral or impartial.
On what it portends for Taiwan - it's definitely useful for the party to study and learn from this war, but I don't think it will have an impact on its timeline for taking Taiwan. The party has enough problems with zero-COVID and a teetering economy right now - I don't think it is in a position to fast-track any actions. I suspect we might see some more signaling after Xi is confirmed for a third term (second half of this year) and then after the 2024 presidential election in Taiwan, which is likely to be the first where 18-20 year olds can vote (referendum on that later this year). Either way, it's interesting to see how the party has built up the mythology of Taiwan as a wayward little brother who is temporarily misguided and will someday return to the fold. That has benefits in that it creates popular support for "unification", but it might also make a full-blown invasion unpopular. Annexation is surely off the table now, after the PR disaster of Hong Kong 2019. A naval blockade is often suggested as a way to strangle the island, but that might only strengthen its people's resolve. I think if the party is to succeed in its designs on Taiwan, it will need Putin's failed "take the capital in 3 days" strategy to actually work. I would be very interested in a wargame that tackles this scenario.
Anyway, back to my lurking hole, and thanks again for the fantastic thread.

This. 
For you folks who don't get this just imagine this scenario: say you get a pretty unjust ticket and you have to walk past a statue on the courthouse steps of a guy who owned your ancestors that is maintained by the jurisdiction you are going in to fight. I actually know someone who has had that experience in the United States. It still burns him years and year later.
My reaction was to imagine my father having to walk past the statue of the squalid English landlord who kicked my ancestors off his land when they were starving and couldn't pay their rack rents during the Famine in order to contest that ticket. Actually, I'm not sure I can imagine it. He'd want to blow it up. 

Why would you fight so hard to keep monuments for people who fought for the right to keep other people as slaves?

ROFL, no, no one has the right to rape and pillage as retaliation. That's the same sort of effed up logic we are seeing the Russians use right now in Ukraine.
C'mon, get your head on straight.

Red army was equally evil to SS and Wehrmacht. In fact they were so equally evil - they started WW2 together as allies and fought in Poland as allies and even traded captured territories as allies, like it was an open lebensraum market.
Red army soldiers raped Polish and Finnish women, looted, tortured and mass murdered civilians in newly occupied cities and that was before they and their SS brothers had a falling out over who gets to occupy rest of Europe.
And when they did - Red army soldiers raped, looted and murdered not only in Poland (again), Czechoslovakia and Germany, but also in Ukraine and Belarus - because they couldn't give an F. Yes - Red Army was filled with such human filth that they committed war crimes against their own. In Ukraine alone Red army proceeded to kill 300.000 civilians in 1946, after the war was over. And during the war they committed countless war crimes resulting in the deaths of at least as many.
So if you think russians and their collaborators from previously occupied countries came to Germany to fight Nazi ideology - ask yourself a question why millions went to concentration camps and died there in the following 45 years of half of Europe being occupied by the glorious Red army.
Just because one barbaric army fought the other, equally barbaric army - doesn't make one of them the good guys. Real life is not a high fantasy book.

Your sense of logic is beyond comprehension. Terror bombing and atrocities by ground forces prolong a war. The subjective motivation to be merciless is counterproductive. It is once again demonstrated by the defense of the steel works don't expect humane treatment from putin if you have the silly idea to surrender. The behaviour of Soviet forces reinforced the German will to resist and therefore prolonged the war as did the bombing of German cities. The argument I can do it because you can do it is refuted numerous times. The idea of taking away the will to fight is a lot more sophisticated than trying to mimic Ivan the Terrible. 

I hear what you are saying but we're getting kinda semantic and black and white in what is a gray area.  Is a cemetery a monument?  Or is it simply a gravesite?  Or is it a memorial?  Does it honor or commemorate the actions of the person or the tragedy of their death in war? 
Some of these things are easy: Stalin statue in Ukraine is definitely out.  Hitler statue in Tel Aviv definintely out.  Stuff constructed by soviet state in Ukraine --well, USSR killed more Ukrainians that it did german soldiers I do believe, so kinda tough on that score. 
 

But there's quite a difference between cemetery and monument, don't you think? The example of Hitler statues is actually great here, you wouldn't allow it to stand anywehere, no way, right? Tearing down monuments of your (perceived) opressors is only natural and healthy.

Well, umm, thanks, I think....
Brother, I guess I've ended up as your last friend on here. It is a gaming forum and I cut you some slack personally as a good contributor to the community. But you are just living in a looking glass world right now, defending something that is just not worth defending.  I mean Russia.
As a 'leftist', you need to be aware that your country -- Mother Russia or the Last Hope of Socialism or Christianity or Whiteness or whatever you call it -- is simply nothing special in the world today as a polity, a gene pool or a civilisation.
(Neither is mine, btw).
Chess is a spectator sport in Russia, fine (so's binge drinking). And smart work keeping pace with global Yankeedom on the Bomb and space race and all. But today, South Asian kids are lapping Russians (and Americans and Germans and everyone else except maybe Koreans) in the quants that matter. And they'll move anywhere to seek good profitable work, and mainly stay sober.
So forget Third Rome, Pushkin, your Great Russian Soul, the Brandenburg Gate and all that other baggage. There are no Exceptional Nations. No master races. No orcs either, just humans behaving badly. Or in other times, just trying to make their way in the world.
So, grok this please.  It is a GOOD THING that Russia as we know it today is devolving, maybe even breaking up entirely. Good for its neighbours, good for its non-Slavic minorities and, especially, good for Russians themselves.
A whole world opens up for you all, at the crossroads of the 'Asia century' (which is already into its fourth decade, btw -- I count from 1991) once you get Moscow's boot off your necks.
The future isn't slavery. Or if it kind of is in your particular belief system, then it's the same treadmill the average American is looking at now. And on the flip side, as a fluent English speaker with good quants you stand as good a chance of becoming one of the smug global master "PMC" class as anyone else on our planet. 
.... Or you can collectively sit in a cafe and ramble on about some sinister cabal robbing you (and vaguely threatening to burn the place to the ground if you can't have things your way). While each year more diligent and less prideful peoples grab the new world with both hands and leave you behind.
[/rant]

I dont think these monuments have any resemblence of insight. Its not a memorial to the victims of crimes, it is a celebration of the perpetrators. See the Lenin statues being put up right now in occupied territory.
Would you leave Hitler monuments up so people can google his name and discuss the finer points of his politics? No. You tear that down and put a memorial to his victims on the same ground..
Now what if people TODAY would put up Hitler monuments, would that trigger some alarm bells?

In Warsaw, for many decades the biggest building by far was the Palace of Culture and Arts - a "gift" from USSR, meant as symbol of Soviet rule. We didn't tear it down cause it would be silly financially, and with time it lost it's grim symbolic meaning (to most people). But if instead of the office building, there  was a huge Stalin statue, it would be demolished without blinking in 1989 at the latest.

Leaving statues and monuments is a daily act of violence against the affected communities. Just like the statue of Saddam in Bahgdad and the various statues of Stalin and Lenin in the former Soviet bloc, the statues of Colston and all the traitorous US generals can FRO. 
Edit: if you are relying on statues and memorials to provide an education in history, well... /rolleyes

I think I might look at monuments a little differently.  Monuments are to honor a person or time for some reason.  History is just history.  If someone put up a statue of Hitler and said "why are you taking that down, it's for history", no one would agree.  Well, almost no one. 
Monuments should, of course, be historically accurate, but the are intended for remembrance of some sacrifice or great actions or some tragedy.  History museums can have statues of the scoundrels but these are not monuments.
Got to be quite a conflicting set of thoughts & emotions for a soviet WW2 memorial in Ukraine.

OTOH putting up monuments is a political statement in itself, and often a very violent one (new Lening statue in Kherson for example). Tearing them down is just a part of the discourse.
Edit: in case of this particular monument, you won't tell me that it's purpose was the remembrance of fallen soldiers - for this you put up monuments in your own country. This monument's purpose was to make sure that Germans never forget who beat them and cause of that, who's the boss now (if that was rightful at the time is another topic entirely) - basically a symbolic violence of winner against loser.

Some of the conversation over the few pages have referenced the former Yugoslavia.  Which brings back... well, not so good memories.
I was a Canadian peacekeeper in Bosnia in latter half of '93.   During the Croatian offensive in the Medak in Sept of '93, I was with the 2 PPCLI when we went into the sh*tstorm to try to stop the ethnic cleansing going on.  The Croatian army attacked our unit during that operation, a thing that the Croatian government denies to this very day.  Despite us photographing the Croatian dead after the battle and collecting their ID, etc.    We had god damn evidence and to this day, the Croatian government position is that they never attacked us.
Part of our job, beside trying to keep the warring factions apart, was to document evidence of ethnic cleansing and I was in charge (I was an officer) of a evidence collection team.  So, literally thousands of photos, videos.  Transcripts of interviews with witnesses and victims.  Six months exposed to that living hell, day after f*n day....
So I had the evidence, because sometimes our official recording devices ran out film or tape and we used our personal recording devices to finish up at a site.
After I got out the military, I found myself sometimes on various military forms about games, such as this one.  Arma forums, military wargame forums... that sort of thing.  And as it happened, I ran into forum members from Croatia and Bosnia Serbs and we would get into it.
Universally, every Croatian or Bosnian Serb forum poster denied what happened there.  And I was called a liar on many occasions for telling them them the truth of that war as I was there and they weren't.  And I have evidence to back up my claims.  No one believed me and if I offered visual proof, they didn't want to see it or they disclaimed it as fake.
I remember a particular Bosnian Serb who was not in the war but we got deep into the weeds discussing what happened during that war.  Deny, deny, deny.  It never happened.  Until videos that the Bosnian Serbs took of them killing civilians and dumping them in mass graves what was recorded by the very soldiers who committed the atrocities surfaced and made it onto their local media and they couldn't deny it any longer.  Those videos were part of the process besides sanctions that resulted in some notable Bosnia Serb / Serbian leaders being turned over to the ICC for prosecution for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.  After the revelation came out, this individual on that forum who I had spent hours engaging with about the culpability of Serbs in the atrocities simply ignored me from that point onwards.  I will never know why.... was it that he discovered that I was right all a long and he was wrong and he was ashamed (as he would have been) or he simply wanted to hang onto his delusion of what narrative he wanted to believe was true and he knew that I would keep chipping away.   
Denial is a powerful thing.   I don't understand why it has such power but it does.  People can dismiss an outright objective reality because to accept the truth is to undermine what they think reality is or should be.   I don't get it and is beyond madding to see the denials in the face of objective reality happen over and over.
Sigh.   I don't know why the hell I rambled on with this.  Maybe it was a story I need to tell to remain sane in light of the same brutality I witnessed back in Bosnia happening in Ukraine now.  Or maybe I still am the greater fool for believing my experiences in Bosnia can be an object lesson to others about holding onto a narrative that is personally comfortable but runs counter to all the real evidence to the contrary.   DMS, I am looking at you....
The truth will come out after all this is over.  At least, I hope it does.  The truth of this war needs to be told and codified so generations that follow can know what really happend.
Now at the end of this and reviewing it, I feel that I should have deleted this or apologize for it.  
I am hitting post. It is my truth.  Let people accept it and learn something from it or ignore it.  I needed to say this for a long time.   
 
 

You see, that's the fundamendal flaw in the whole Russian perception of the world. NATO is not moving to the east, it is invited, sometimes desperately begged to come, cause the alternative is living in ruski mir, which really really sucks, in any imaginable aspect.
Also, nobody is really there to get you. Nobody really cares, all we want is for Russian Empire/ USSR/ Russia to piss off and stop being a problem. 

His Majesty's Ship Dreadnought was launched in 1906 and commissioned into the Royal Navy later that year.

Oh you just gotta be like that...fine pre-dreadnoughts of the 19th century.