SteelRain

Der Untergang

Depending on situation either may be right.  Having an argument where there isn't a more complex or compromising view is usually unproductive but probably more so in economics.  Regulations have a place but aren't necessarily the right answer to everything.  Either way... we are once again diverging.  I think that is what happens when we have periods without really clear info as to what is happening.  OpSec can be such a pain at times!  😛

I bought the modern bundle months ago. Nothing left to buy until something new comes out, and Steve is still full opsec on that. For reasons, i get it but.... just the tineist of bones? Some of the little mouse teeth they find in the very best fossil deposits?

A final solution if you will?
You guys don't know what you are saving.
Everything you and @kraze are saying about the Russian ex-pat population could be right in general, and similar things can be said about other populations - 'Muslims' for example.  They can be said about the Ukrainians - infected with the Western ideology, they cannot see how it harms the Slav.  Harsh measures are necessary.
So you've imported a large number of people and they have their own culture, and they largely stick together and don't atomise into the larger culture.  They don't seem make themselves available to the ideas and mechanisms our culture has which influence behaviour.  Ideas like human rights, freedom of choice, open criticism, advocating the truth over the interests of your tribe - changing ideas which can always be improved.
So you made a mistake and think you have damaged this Western culture by importing too many who act upon different principles.  Bad luck.  You do more damage to it by throwing them out.  Fix the problem another way - if they have citizenship they are now part of you, and how you treat them is how you can be treated.
[And as far as I can see it McCarthy was not a hero and did damage which echoes until the present day, even if he was right in some cases about Soviet agents.  A committee to scrutinise the political beliefs of workers which then bans them from work if they fail?  It is against the very notion of discussion and criticism toward better ideas.  It sounds more Soviet than anything else.  And you guys sometimes sound like the other ones.]

Ok...STOP.
  I am not a moderator on this forum but I have @BFCElvis on speed dial.  This thread is about the war Ukraine and, yes we have discussed surrounding issues and possible 2nd and 3rd order effects this war could have on the region.  This thread is not about:
- Bafflingly narrow or simply out of date concepts such as solving human cultural overlaps with policy.
- Vilifying the entirely of all Russian peoples as somehow less than human.  No human society, culture or whatever has or ever will be entirely homogeneous, good or bad.  So sweeping ideas of how to solve a "Russian Problem" by a bunch of old guys with too much time on their hands, which they should spend learning more, are not 1) viable or 2) useful here.
- I get we are sore on Russia right now, they earned that one; however, at what point on this incredibly myopic line of thinking do we become worse than that we assign to them?  All in the name of "safety" - a whole lot of atrocity and historic marks of shame lay on the feet of "safety".  I have been to one genocide and trust me none of you know what you are talking about, so stop hijacking the thread.
- FFS, we did not even take the approaches some are proposing here during the Cold War, we went with "contain and attract/entice", and we won that one.  In fact we look back on the occasion of the McCarthy era - which is where this is going- as a dark chapter 
You wanna talk about mass deportations, forced migration, race/ethnic cleansing/purity or any other whack-job nonsense there is literally an entire internet out there, let's try and keep this one small "sane space".    

As usual you're turning things around. China has been conducting aggressive and threatening exercises against Taiwan for years and has continued to do so since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Perhaps Ukraine wouldn't have been invaded if Pelosi or Biden would have visit Kiev at the beginning of this year.
But yeah, let's blame the Americans. 😉

I can't remember who was saying that the Russians should worry about the maintenance of their nuclear forces too. So, unsurprisingly, I present the first evidence that he was right. 😬
*edit: Twitter Link via Nitter as i don't have a Twitter account but still want to explore the high value content of Twitter 😃
https://de.nttr.stream/bad_moskal/status/1555427437944643584#m
This thing looks like it was parked outside since its deployment. Maybe the Russians are masters of engineering and they invented some magic container that looks crappy from the outside but shields the rocket completely, so it stays in perfect condition, but i doubt it. 
 

Kosovo & Taiwan (and Ukraine) are amazing examples of the stupidity of nationalist warmongering.  They are religious zealots, with no attachment to anything rational, wanting wars that have nearly zero upside and monstrous downside.  It's amazing, yet here we are.

Those thugs will get harfft again!
In 1999 the German Troops marching into Kosovo were lead by Helmut Harff, known for his sharp remarks by his men who named the process getting harfft.
While on the move into Kosovo he noticed that a Serbian unit didn't want to leave their position as agreed prior to the invasion, so he told them to leave within 30 Minutes. The Serbian commander tried to stall the timetable of the withdrawal. Harff  replayed that it was not a discussion but an order and they had 28 Minutes left to leave. His short discussion with the Serbian commander was randomly recorded by AP news. 
https://youtu.be/C4USPAU3yEc?t=41
 

This message could come straight from ISIS

Depends. Topics I have some expertise in feel usually varying degrees of cringe worthy to me. Don't believe a word of what they write about physics related stuff. For politics they are quite good, though. (Or I just don't have enough knowledge to see the cringe worthiness 😉)

Gentlemen, I have a really hard time keeping this post civil. Imagine me posting this in all seriousness: The Mujahideen were aided and partly financed by the CIA. Since Al Qaida has a lot of members with Mujahideen background we can safely assume they were still connected to their old masters back in September 2001. This is no less plausible than your theory but we could all imagine the ****storm (and I'd probably be on forum hiatus for a while...).
Btw: War is alwas bad. Period. Believe or not, some people back in the day just preferred being red to being dead. You can have a different opinion, weigh your freedom higher than your life (and that of your children, etc.). Others don't and that's a valid opinion, too.

I'm sorry but the connection of green movements and environmentalists with Putin and Saudi dictators sounds very trumpish to me and not something I would expect to read in this forum. 
 

This is some high grade apologia to defend Russian imperialism. One, "Ukraine slipping away from Russia", aside from denoting Ukraine as Russian owned, entitled to, "slipped" is a funny way of saying for punishment for seeking closer relations with the EU, Ukraine gets invaded and it's citizens killed and economy damaged in 2014, (not to mention the current invasion) it's "slipping away", Russia has done far more to give Ukraine reasons to run for EU and NATO membership by acting as violently (genocidal) as it has to Ukraine seeking NATO membership that does nothing to threaten Russia proper, and EU membership that is democratic, and peaceful and only threatens Russia via making the Russian people ask why they live like this when the EU lives like that.
"National interests" "next to it's borders" "Russian dominated areas" horse****. Russia before the invasion, demanded as part of ensuring it's "protection from NATO" that was driving supposedly it's reasons to invade Ukraine, that NATO withdraw forces back to 1997
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prelude_to_the_2022_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine#NATO–Russia_security_talks
Meaning the withdrawal of NATO defense from Poland, the Baltics, the Balkans, the map below shows it, so your saying Russia has the right to consider Belarus to be part of its borders? Ukraine? I guess Russia owns Serbia and Bosnia too considering they wanted the withdrawal of NATO from all neighboring states. "National interests" "next to it's borders" "Russian dominated areas" bull****. Let's not even get into the bull**** that is Russia thinking NATO is going to invade Russia. There is no national interests being secured via the withdrawal of NATO from Poland, much less Czechoslovakia, Romania, etc, etc.
I understand the need to be critical, but realize that Russian demands for preventing the invasion of Ukraine were maximal as hell, and sure as hell not emblematic of a Russia seeking security, but emblematic of Russia seeking imperial domination it once had.

 

I don’t know nearly enough about @panzermartin to call him either a fascist or a bolshevik. I’m saying accurately that he’s using the same cynical and ahistorical arguments they did in order to justify their atrocities. Is that uncomfortable? Well, I suppose I hope it is.

That isn’t anything more than a way for a political class or party to deny complicity in or responsibility for atrocity. It wasn’t any more persuasive when it was said by Die Sturmer in 1939 than when it is said by Jacobin in 2022.
Arthur Koestler wrote a little book about it.

The German military put another video up with the commander of the German artillery school in Idar-Oberstein, providing some insights into the training of the Ukrainians on the PzH 2000. Unfortunately only in German:
Some notable details:
The Ukrainians were trained in Germany using their own app-based fire direction systems. The guys getting trained were all from active artillery units that were already engaged in combat. There is ongoing contact between the Ukrainian PzH 2000 battalion now engaged in combat and the Germans. So far, they were quite successful, particularly with the SMArt 155 munitions, and the PzH 2000 were also hit with counter-battery fire a few times already, without much damage, apparently. One challenge was memorizing the computerized fire control systems on the PzH 2000 in a foreign language. Some labels inside the vehicle were taped over with cyrillic markings. One problem is the big variety of systems that Ukraine is now receiving from the West, that all have different tactical considerations, training  aspects and logistical footprint. The different Western 155mm systems use different types of munition, that are not necessarily compatible, because the fire control systems inside the different guns are configured to particular munitions. To help with that, the Ukrainian PzH 2000 received a software update with the ballistics data of all the different 155mm types now available to Ukraine (German, French, Czech, Polish, US...)

Germany should send him to any negotiation. He will stare everybody into an unconditional surrender 😀
in short:
- The Software of the PzH2000 was modified in a way that it allows remote support from Germany via virtual reality at the front line in Ukraine.
- first 15 Gepards will be ready in June to guard important infrastructure
- He mentions the logistical nightmare Ukraine currently has with all the stuff arriving and that NATO has to focus more on interoperability

Germany should send him to any negotiation. He will stare everybody into an unconditional surrender 😀
in short:
- The Software of the PzH2000 was modified in a way that it allows remote support from Germany via virtual reality at the front line in Ukraine.
- first 15 Gepards will be ready in June to guard important infrastructure
- He mentions the logistical nightmare Ukraine currently has with all the stuff arriving and that NATO has to focus more on interoperability

Germany should send him to any negotiation. He will stare everybody into an unconditional surrender 😀
in short:
- The Software of the PzH2000 was modified in a way that it allows remote support from Germany via virtual reality at the front line in Ukraine.
- first 15 Gepards will be ready in June to guard important infrastructure
- He mentions the logistical nightmare Ukraine currently has with all the stuff arriving and that NATO has to focus more on interoperability

Germany should send him to any negotiation. He will stare everybody into an unconditional surrender 😀
in short:
- The Software of the PzH2000 was modified in a way that it allows remote support from Germany via virtual reality at the front line in Ukraine.
- first 15 Gepards will be ready in June to guard important infrastructure
- He mentions the logistical nightmare Ukraine currently has with all the stuff arriving and that NATO has to focus more on interoperability

Germany should send him to any negotiation. He will stare everybody into an unconditional surrender 😀
in short:
- The Software of the PzH2000 was modified in a way that it allows remote support from Germany via virtual reality at the front line in Ukraine.
- first 15 Gepards will be ready in June to guard important infrastructure
- He mentions the logistical nightmare Ukraine currently has with all the stuff arriving and that NATO has to focus more on interoperability

Germany should send him to any negotiation. He will stare everybody into an unconditional surrender 😀
in short:
- The Software of the PzH2000 was modified in a way that it allows remote support from Germany via virtual reality at the front line in Ukraine.
- first 15 Gepards will be ready in June to guard important infrastructure
- He mentions the logistical nightmare Ukraine currently has with all the stuff arriving and that NATO has to focus more on interoperability

A reminder that when Turkey joined NATO along with Greece in February 1952, it had free-and-fair elections with a two party system, an independent judiciary, and a GDP close to that of Italy. The only criterion by which Greece would be allowed to join and Turkey refused would be declaring membership open solely to Christian nations.

NATO is like a box of chocolates. You don't know what you're going to get until you bite into one of them.