Bulletpoint
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Posts posted by Bulletpoint
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49 minutes ago, Ales Dvorak said:
No, we're in the world where Israel and Ukraine are equally good.
I think Ukraine has much more in common with the Palestinians though.
Resisting illegal invasion and occupation by a much stronger aggressor, civilians getting indiscriminately bombed and shot, being called Nazis, even animals...
Actually neither Ukraine nor Palestine even really exists, according to Russia/Israel. Ukrainians are just Russians who forgot they are Russians, while Paleistinians are just Arabs who for some reason suddenly began to think they were Palestinians. In both Ukraine/Palestine, this has been called a clear case of genocide by well informed observers.
The difference mainly seems to be that one side is allied with "us", and the other side with "them".
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7 hours ago, kevinkin replacement said:
Btw, international law is not real. Things like the U.N. are not real. You had best realign your perspective on these things under actual realities. These things are written on pieces of paper and they are handled amicably until they are not. There is nothing tangible which holds countries to task, it is a reciprocal system, therefore it breaks very, very easily (that is, when one side stops reciprocating; e.g., literally the first domino). I mean, no offense, but imagine detailing matters of international law when matters of spirituality and religion have vastly more pressures on these conflicts. You're detailing a conflict in which one side will carpet bomb civilians because they can, and the other party will quite literally commit suicide by exploding themselves in car bombs or with vests. The language used to try and stitch together some semblance of international structure does not have the vocabulary, either by semantics and certainly not by idioms or norms or mores, to encompass a battlefield that has such people fighting on it.
International law is real in the same way money is real. As long as people trust their money works to buy stuff, it has value. But modern money has zero inherent worth. The moment people stop believing, it becomes worthless.
Likewise, the UN is a very real organisation, which provides a forum for nations to discuss and publicly voice their disagreements. It also works well to coordinate peacekeeping and humanitarian aid etc. But it is also a very flawed organisation, with little ability to enforce anything.
When I posted a couple of news stories about UN votes and vetos here on the forum, the aim was not to invoke some kind of mystical supernational power of the UN, but to simply use it as a bellweather of what the current diplomatic situation is. The US and Israel are increasingly isolated, and the bombings are taking a toll on America's reputation.
Maybe this is where we disagree, but I believe soft power is actual power. Hearts and minds are important, and the USA has been sitting on a mountain of goodwill since WW2. They have steadily been squandering that though. And when it's gone, they will find that it's a lot harder to keep an empire going when you need to constantly use force to keep everybody down.
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4 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
If that coke fiend is going to go after the kids next? My money is on the minivan Dad.
Nice twist
But the kids are safe back in the gated community that dad built with his buddies.
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6 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
Since when did democracy = weak?
Depends on the definition of strength and weakness.
Who is more likely to win in a game of chicken, you know that traditional American pastime where they drive cars towards each other out in the desert and see who will swerve away in the last possible moment...
The sensible family dad or the coke-sniffing drunkard with prison tattoos on his neck?
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7 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
And here is a question for you - why should the fear and intimidation go one way? Is Russia willing to be incinerated over Finland?
I'm not the guy you're asking, but couldn't help but chime in here..
Why should fear and intimidation go one way? It doesn't necessarily, but in Russia, it all comes down to what one single guy thinks, and whether that single guy is intimidated or not. While over here in the West, someone like Biden can't just decide to play hardball because he feels like he's old anyway and has nothing to lose.
We are a lot who all have a lot to lose, and since we don't live in a dictatorship, our opinions matter - at least collectively.
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12 hours ago, dan/california said:
Ukraine has every right to angry about, since they have cost Ukrainian lives. The endless delay in releasing the cluster munitions we have released, and a number of types of them that we still haven't being example A. The endless back and forth about ATACMs, and then only giving them ten, and, and, and....
It was not international conventions or humanitarian concerns that kept the US from sending cluster munitions to Ukraine, because neither Ukraine nor the US have signed those conventions.
The point here is that it was not the reluctance to "fight like orcs" but the fear of escalation that kept those munitions away from Ukraine. As Russia decided to escalate, those weapons were eventually released.
But even now, I don't think it's Western sensibilities that is hurting the Ukrainian ability to fight effectively. Escalation fear is still what keeps supplies back.
Even tiny Denmark has given or pledged to give more than 77 tanks. How many did the United States pledge?
76 MBTs, according to Wikipedia. Seventy-six. While you have around 6000 Abrams, thousands of them just sitting in storage...
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1 hour ago, Haiduk said:
It's impossible to win, when you have a deal with cruel orcs, which spit on all conventions, but "deeply concerned" international community to force you adhere to these conventions for orcs. "If you take no prisoners, if you hit their cities, power plants, if you allow losses among their "innocent" civilians, you will turn to orcs themeselves! This will be not correspond with democracy values, human rights etc!" People lost feeling of reality and live in own ivory towers with rose unicorns...
Ok, so go ahead then. Fight like orcs.
What will you do? Shoot prisoners on sight? Torture them? Use human shields to advance (if that's what the video actually shows)?. Force young Ukrainian men to advance into minefields at gunpoint? Fire (more) drones at Moscow? Go to a Russian town to rape women? Steal toilets and washing machines?
How will any of that help you win this war?
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It's easy to get tangled up in all the details about what "they" did and what "we" did and how of course we are justified because X, Y, and Z while they are definitely not. Exact same arguments on both sides, and the discussion never ends.
But I think there's a bigger thing at stake here. The entire Western culture is built on the ideas that we adhere to higher principles, rule of law, human rights, equality etc.
This soft power is what makes people in small countries like my own believe that we are not mere vassals of the US, as the Russians call us, but allies fighting for the same cause.
This is also why we rally behind the US when it comes to Ukraine. We don't want to live in a world dominated by Russia, because that's not a world based on those principles.
If the only difference between living under the US or Russia is whether I get sent to Siberia or Guantanamo if the government decides it doesn't like me, or whether I get assassinated by poison tea or a reaper drone, then why should I care who rules the world?
We're still not in a world where the US and Russia are equally bad. But I feel the US is moving in that direction with this support for Israeli war crimes, which is of course exactly what Russia wants.
Russia wants to leave people in the West confused, divided, indifferent and cynical about everything. If the Hamas attack was somehow orchestrated by the Kremlin, then that was a very effective move.
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Even Biden now calls Israel's bombing of Gaza "indiscriminate", something which has been pretty obvious for a long time, yet vehemently denied by Israel's supporters.
Only 10 countries voted against a UN General Assembly resolution calling for a ceasefire:
"Israel voted against Tuesday's resolution along with the US, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Austria, the Czech Republic, Guatemala, Liberia, Micronesia and Nauru"
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/12/middleeast/ceasefire-vote-gaza-israel-un-intl/index.html
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On 12/10/2023 at 10:37 PM, CarlXII said:
To me it rather shows that some people here would apprisiate if Steve could spend a fraction of his 'free time' that he spends in the ukraine thread to instead communicate with the community on other topics...
Surely answering a few questions would not require a monumental effort on his part...'working' or not.
IMO that would be a sign of goodwill and respect towards his customers..
I call out to Him in the darkness. But it's as if there were no news about this game.
Steve: Perhaps there isn't any news.
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1 hour ago, Erwin said:
I don't want to beat a dead horse here as I can understand what you are trying to say. But, burning people alive, beheading babies, cutting off breasts, mutilating, raping and then killing females... We haven't seen anything like that since ISIS, and before that medieval atrocities... Whatever Hamas was hoping to achieve, at this point it is understandable why Israel wants and needs to eliminate Hamas by any means possible - like we did with ISIS with no public outrage.
What has also been an ugly development is the antisemitism and denial of the Oct 7 attacks being demonstrated at (some of) our elite universities. That is also shocking.
It is clear that Hamas murdered hundreds of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7. Including some children. But cutting heads off babies.. I have not seen any credible evidence of that.
But it does bring to mind the old story that "Iraqi soldiers ripped babies from incubators" story. Which was later found to be a complete fabrication in order to stoke anger and support for the Iraq war.
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11 hours ago, Erwin said:
We hopefully all agree that war is horrible and what is happening in West Bank is horrible. But, HAMAS was elected by the citizens of the West Bank and... according to Google: "A poll conducted after October 7 by a research organization known as the Arab World for Research and Development found that 62 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank have a “very positive” view of Hamas and 68 percent “extremely support” the attacks of October 7.Nov 29, 2023"
It's easy to pontificate from the safety of our western lives. But, we have to bear in mind how we would feel if our own spouses had been cut to pieces, raped and our children been burned alive in the Oct 7 attacks. I certainly do not feel able to judge their extreme reactions.
That logic goes two ways though. I think most of us here on this forum would also support Hamas, if we happened to have been born in Gaza. Who are we to judge their extreme reactions?
And by the same logic, terror attacks on US citizens would also be ok, because after all, the USA killed X number of civilians in Y country under president Z, and since that president was democratically elected by a majority of Americans, well, they are all fair game.
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7 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
This looks a lot more like - "take a few shots from a building = level the building with a JDAMs" but all the evidence is being held by Israel and the US at the moment.
We live in a time where everything the military does is filmed in high detail from drones and gun cams. So I think the reason they are withholding the evidence is probably because there is not a lot of evidence for most of those strikes.
As you said, it's a war crime to use buildings occupied by civilians for military purposes, but as I understand it, this has to be positively determined before you flatten the building. It's not enough to just have a suspicion.
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1 hour ago, The_Capt said:
Hamas has not demonstrated any real guerrilla warfare strategy, they simply are not setup for a 10 year war in Gaza to slowly make Israel and the US walk away in frustration. They are employing some elements of guerrilla warfare but still are acting like terrorist (eg hostages, use of civilian shields etc) to further their overall strategy.
Hostages, yes. But I am not convinced of the Israeli talking point that Hamas is using "human shields". A Hamas fighter having a family and living in an apartment block is not using human shields.
If Hamas bombed an Israeli apartment block, killing 100 civilians in order to (maybe) kill one IDF commander, and then used the same argument, that IDF used human shields, we would probably find it ridiculous.
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US vetoes the resolution for immediate ceasefire in Gaza
The final vote is 13 members for, one abstention and one against.
The US, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, is the sole nation to vote against. Its ally, the UK, abstained in the vote.
This means that the resolution has failed.
(BBC)
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I wonder if there is anything Israel could do to the Palestinians that would make the USA withdraw their unconditional support.
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32 minutes ago, Zeleban said:
I know that you are at the end of the line with democracy.
That's what Putin thinks, too..
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28 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
It is a possibility but I think it a lower one. Hostage taking is actually a pretty complex operation to do it right. At this scale we are talking crazy, so sending amateurs and then things getting out of hand is not totally out of the question.
But, the killing appeared pretty systemic. House by house and deliberate. This is not a sign of “getting out of hand” but pre-planned. Further if the objective was to take a lot of hostages, where was the logistical support? Trucks, buses, medical staff etc? I saw people dumped on stolen trucks and freakin golf carts. A massive sweep up also takes planning/support and I have not seen elements needed onto do it.
The level of brutality also speaks to deliberate. When troops fall apart you see a spectrum of behaviour. I have not seen a single video of Hamas commanders trying to restrain their troops. If Hamas sees this thing coming back at them, you get it out quickly. Finally, has Hamas ever demonstrated that sort of level of sophistication? I mean to do a large scale scoop?
So “could be” but it really looked like a major terror attack from what a could see. If so Hamas can count. They may have upwards of 40k forces - all pretty lightly armed. Against an IDF of what? 400k. Fully equipped with western support? It was pretty obvious how this was going to go down. If it was a whoopsie, it makes Putin’s look minor by comparison.
I'm also in the "could be, maybe, but not likely" camp. However, there was much more to the attack than just cutting down the fence and letting loose some crazy terrorists. The operation was very well planned and rehearsed for months. They built mockups of IDF positions and specifically rehearsed urban combat and hostage taking etc.
Also, for all the bloodshed, the Iraeli casualty count seems quite low when you consider that it was an attack by about 1200 terrorists that managed to take the country completely by surprise. This is not to downplay the tragedy in any way, but when I woke up to the news that morning that much of southern Israel had been overrun by Hamas death squads, I was afraid there would be tens of thousands of people killed. But the toll was about 860 civilian deaths plus the 240 hostages.
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14 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
That is my sense as well. It is not carpet bombing but the effect is the same. A strategy could be to do so much infra damage as to make the area effectively uninhabitable. The cost of reconstruction for these urban areas is going to be enormous and Israel is definitely not going to do it.
The psychology of suicide actions is fascinating, and I believe entirely human. There are arguments that whales and some other species do it but these look more accidental than deliberate (post here please if you know of an example in the animal world). Suicide is of course an extreme irrationality when done outside of mental health or dilemma crisis (eg people who jump from burning buildings). Suicide bombers have no possible way of benefiting from the action or even knowing if it really is going to be successful. What they do have is fiction frameworks. Humans can make stuff up and believe it so hard that we are able to effectively “remember the future”. So a suicide bomber believes in an afterlife or believes that it will somehow achieve something from which they will benefit. Failing that they believe that who they leave behind will benefit.
Now for an individual or small groups these actions are still manageable. But for an entire state to effectively commit suicide is rare. A lot of states will do “hopeless” or “slightly less than zero chances” because we can convince ourselves of things through a drug called “hope”. But what is happening in reaction to Oct 7th was almost a certainty, Hamas knew they and Gaza itself was dead once they attacked. But they were willing to believe so hard, hate so hard that somehow this action would make things better…even if they would never see it. You cannot really negotiate with that.
Israel has taken the gloves off and this looks more like a ghetto cleaning everyday. As I said wars come in arguably 5 basic strategies: intimidation, subversion, annihilation, exhaustion and extermination. That last one is a blast from the past - Genghis type stuff. Without being inside the IDF command loop and seeing what the plan actually is, it is very hard to make a full determination. But the results do point to an ethnic cleaning or at least give rise to it being a possibility. Next question will be whether it was deliberate or simply was self-defence that “got out of hand”?
Either way, Israel’s high ground is slipping away as we watch Palestinian children being killed daily. I honestly don’t think they care about “narratives” at this point but they do need to start thinking about how they plan to live in this world afterwards. Right now they are making Assad look rational, which is pretty nuts.
I don't want to come across as defending Hamas, but just for the sake of considering all options:
It could be that Oct 7 was an operation that actually failed. We all think it was intended to be a huge terror attack, and that it succeded beyond all expectations. But what if it was actually not intended to be a terror attack?
Maybe the purpose of it was not to kill as many civilians as possible, but primarily to kill IDF soldiers (and any civilians who resisted - many Israeli civilians and especially illegal settlers are very heavily armed and most Israelis have military training).
The real purpose might (and I want to stress again that this is speculative) have been to capture as many hostages as possible. And then to exchange them with the many thousands of Palestinian prisoners who sit in Israeli jails, sometimes for very flimsy reasons. So the aim might have been a hostage exchange. They previously managed to free more than a thousand prisoners for just one IDF soldier - Gilad Shalit.
The end result would then have been a massive prisoner release, which would have bolstered Hamas' reputation and authority as "the one true faction" among the Palestinians.
However, the operation then went wrong because the people they sent into Israel could not hold back their anger once they finally got the hated enemy in their sights. They had already shot several IDF troops, most of them unarmed and in some cases in their underpants. The infiltration squads went berserk.
If this scenario is true, then Hamas leadership never thought they would face this level of retribution. And Israel would find it more difficult to justify killing so many civilians in revenge for military losses.
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3 hours ago, Haiduk said:
Has Girkin now begun to call Russian soldiers "worms"?
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1 hour ago, The_Capt said:
Within the context of a war the IDF is skirting lines here and the international community is getting uncomfortable. The major issue appears to be proportionality. It is a violation of the LOAC to employ over-kill particularly if it causes undue or reckless civilian casualties. I have seen more than enough videos of IDF dropping JDAMs into buildings to kill a “Hamas Leader” to raise an eyebrow over proportionality.
There was an analysis of open source satellite imagery recently that showed that IDF damaged or destroyed about 56,000 buildings in Gaza during the first part of the invasion (before the temporary ceasefire).
Even if each of those strikes had only eliminated one single Hamas militant, there would be no Hamas left by now. But there are definitely still many of them. So it doesn't seem IDF is too concerned about where they strike or how many civilian casualties they cause.
In fact, there was an Israeli journalist who recently did a story on how the Israeli intelligence service is not even able to "produce" enough targets based on credible info in order to order in those numbers of strikes a day. So the intel they base their strikes seems to be quite extremely patchy.
I'm still wondering if the real aim of this war is to expel the civilian population from Gaza.
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10 hours ago, Centurian52 said:
- Directed against civilians.
- Ideologically motivated.
- Intended to instill fear.
- Not conducted by a government.
then it was a terrorist attack. But if it fails to meet any single one of those criteria, then it was not a terrorist attack. Points 1 and 4 should be easy enough to establish most of the time (although there are grey areas around who does or does not qualify as a government).
Not sure I agree that terrorism by definition can't be done by a government. Many of the groups labelled as terrorist groups are funded and controlled by nation states. The US has a list of four official state sponsors of terrorism, and I am pretty sure the real list is longer than that.
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6 hours ago, Anthony P. said:
Resistance fighters fighting for liberal democracies in their occupied terroritories during WW2, guerrillas like the Viet Cong, etc. committed plenty of terrorist acts (typically the extrajudicial executions of suspected informants, collaborators or sympathisers, but also acts such as raising "voluntary taxes for the cause" from civilian populations, coercing civilians in key positions to take part in resistance activities, etc.) without being widely described as terrorists in democratic societies.
I don't think any of those acts are terrorism though, even though they are bad crimes in themselves.
In the first example, civilians are killed, but they are not chosen by random. Would say that counts as political murders.
In the second example, I would say that counts as extortion, not terrorism.
Third example would be coercion.
6 hours ago, Anthony P. said:The issue which I see isn't the verb terrorism, but the adjective terrorist. Many guerrilla fighters/insurgents have resorted to terrorism (sometimes arguable, sometimes blatant), but it's rare that there's a broad agreement that this makes them terrorists.
I think the confusion arises from many people using terrorist as a political label rather than a word with a specific meaning.
In my view, "terrorist" is a specific adjective just like "murderer". It talks about a specific crime. You cannot apply it to a group without proving that all the members of that group are guilty of that crime.
Organisations such as Hamas operate on many different levels, and we cannot just call everybody working for Hamas a terrorist, even though the organisation as a whole is heavily involved in terrorist activities.
How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted
Sorry for posting a link to Reddit - it's some crazy footage well worth watching, but didn't intend it to autoplay. And this forum won't let me delete or even edit the post so that the video is not embedded.