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Russia v Ukraine
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psmith2.0
Mr. Vieira
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Tennessee
 
2022-02-28, 15:29

Well this is interesting...

Snake Island soldiers who told Russian ship to ‘go ---- yourself’ aren’t dead after all

Quote:
Defiant defenders of Ukraine’s Snake Island — who told a Russian warship to “go ---- yourself” — are alive after reports of their deaths, the Ukrainian navy says.

The 13 Snake Island soldiers “were taken captive by Russian occupiers,” Ukraine confirmed on Monday, Feb. 28. This comes four days after Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine on three fronts early Thursday, Feb. 24, “bombarding cities, towns and villages.”
Who knows what to believe anymore. It's wartime...stuff is hazy/confusing, at best, and things get mistated, deliberately or otherwise, to either boost - or crush - morale/spirts (based on which side you're coming from).

So that's good...they all didn't die. At least that's what we're told this afternoon. We might hear a third take come Wednesday or so. I guess the lesson here is take anything you see, read or hear coming out of the region with a bit of salt.
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turtle
Lord of the Rant.
Formerly turtle2472
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Upstate South Carolina
 
2022-02-28, 15:46

Russia is saying they are alive so they can execute them to further drive down moral.

I mean, if I were a heartless bastard that is what I would do.

Sadly we won't know for a while what really happened I'm sure. Hopefully people around there are logging stuff for real history on this.

Louis L'Amour, “To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.”
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psmith2.0
Mr. Vieira
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Tennessee
 
2022-02-28, 15:55

Well, it wasn't Russia that released the news today. It was Ukraine. They may be fudging/BS'ing a bit, for their own reasons, but...

Yeah, had it been Russia releasing the info I never would've mentioned it here.
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turtle
Lord of the Rant.
Formerly turtle2472
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Upstate South Carolina
 
2022-03-02, 09:57

According to the NY Post Russia has declared "cyberwar" on the US and is now working to cripple our banking system.

This will not go well across the board. Also, if it is actually "cyberwar" then it will result in a response from the US escalating the issue with Ukraine beyond those borders.

Time to pull out some cash to keep on hand.

Louis L'Amour, “To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.”
Visit our archived Minecraft world! | Maybe someday I'll proof read, until then deal with it.
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Ryan
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Promise Land of Trustafarians
 
2022-03-02, 10:31

Eh, color me skeptical.
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Brad
Selfish Heathen
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Zone of Pain
 
2022-03-02, 22:43

Ditto. Russia has reportedly waged a "cyber war" on the US for the last decade. I don't think anything will seriously change on that front in the next few weeks before they completely go bankrupt.

The quality of this board depends on the quality of the posts. The only way to guarantee thoughtful, informative discussion is to write thoughtful, informative posts. AppleNova is not a real-time chat forum. You have time to compose messages and edit them before and after posting.
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turtle
Lord of the Rant.
Formerly turtle2472
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Upstate South Carolina
 
2022-03-03, 11:04

Headline of article:
Russia Plans Public Executions to Weaken Ukraine Morale: Report

Man I hate that I had that right. I'm not surprised they would threaten or even follow through with something like this.

Louis L'Amour, “To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.”
Visit our archived Minecraft world! | Maybe someday I'll proof read, until then deal with it.
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kscherer
Which way is up?
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Boyzeee
 
2022-03-03, 11:51

That'll go over well.
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709
¡Damned!
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Purgatory
 
2022-03-03, 12:35

Rubel worth less than a US penny, oligarchs loot getting frozen and snatched, runs on the banks, corporations cutting ties, Nord Stream 2 pretty much fucked, and worldwide, crippling sanctions that are going to ruin Russia for a generation... all in just a week's time.

Putin's going to need a longer table otherwise someone on the inside is going to pop this dictator in the head.


Also: Ukraine is asking Russian mothers to come pick up their sons captured in Putin's invasion. Grab 'em by the ear and don't let go until the border, matushka.

So it goes.
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kscherer
Which way is up?
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Boyzeee
 
2022-03-03, 13:39

Man, this is the first major war in the era of social media, and boy is it going all kinds of sideways.

There may have been a few slight miscalculations.

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PB PM
Sneaky Punk
 
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: Vancouver, BC
Send a message via Skype™ to PB PM 
2022-03-03, 18:48

Quote:
Originally Posted by kscherer View Post
Man, this is the first major war in the era of social media, and boy is it going all kinds of sideways.

There may have been a few slight miscalculations.
Guess you missed what's being going on in Myanmar for the last year or so, the forces apposing the military dictatorship have been using social media well, albeit that is a civil war. Heck the rebels are using 3D printed guns, created and given to them over social media, because they cannot get enough otherwise.
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Frank777
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Toronto
 
2022-03-03, 18:51

A great thread on exactly why Russia's military is literally stuck in the mud.
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Ryan
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Promise Land of Trustafarians
 
2022-03-03, 19:37

Quote:
Originally Posted by PB PM View Post
Guess you missed what's being going on in Myanmar for the last year or so, the forces apposing the military dictatorship have been using social media well, albeit that is a civil war. Heck the rebels are using 3D printed guns, created and given to them over social media, because they cannot get enough otherwise.
Not to mention Syria.
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PB PM
Sneaky Punk
 
Join Date: Oct 2005
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2022-03-03, 20:13

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ryan View Post
Not to mention Syria.
And now I'm thinking about it more, ISIS basically functioned over social media.
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Brad
Selfish Heathen
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Zone of Pain
 
2022-03-03, 20:22

Quote:
Originally Posted by 709 View Post
Rubel worth less than a US penny
Just to be extra clear about this point in particular because I've seen a lot of hyperbolic chest-thumping about the plummeting value of the ruble:

The USD:RUB ratio is currently about 1:105 which makes 1 ruble worth slightly less than 1 US cent, but for the last couple years until last week, the ratio had been about 1:75, meaning that 1 ruble has been worth about USD 0.013 or a whole…

1.3 cents.

So, yes, while it has certainly lost a lot of its value, it's not the apocalyptic multiple-orders-of-magnitude collapse that a lot of folks probably imagine it to be. Without that historic context, comparing to the US dollar is pretty worthless. You might as well compare it to the Japanese yen which has an even worse ratio with USD:JPY currently around 1:115! Japan's economy is doomed!

I don't mean to pick on you in particular, 709. I just wanted to nip this particular point in the bud because I've seen it abused out of context so much in social media lately.

The quality of this board depends on the quality of the posts. The only way to guarantee thoughtful, informative discussion is to write thoughtful, informative posts. AppleNova is not a real-time chat forum. You have time to compose messages and edit them before and after posting.
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Frank777
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Toronto
 
2022-03-03, 20:24

Um, guys this isn't Myanmar.

This is a conflict that involves a nuclear-armed country, with two others (US and China) peripherally involved, and Europe in the middle.

The "first major war in the era of social media" is correct.
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709
¡Damned!
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Purgatory
 
2022-03-03, 21:16

Quote:
Originally Posted by Brad View Post
I don't mean to pick on you in particular, 709. I just wanted to nip this particular point in the bud because I've seen it abused out of context so much in social media lately.
No, you're right, I should've added a percentage loss at least just to provide context. But, you know, under a penny sounds pretty dramatic compared to nearly a third and I didn't want to ruin my line of run-on-comma dramatics.

So it goes.
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drewprops
Space Pirate
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Atlanta
 
2022-03-06, 07:54

I've seen a meme going around encouraging people to support Ukranians by booking Airbnb locations in the Ukraine. I hate to be cynical, but I have to suspect that there are many failure points along that chain of commerce that do not result in the funds reaching their intended audience.



...
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PB PM
Sneaky Punk
 
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: Vancouver, BC
Send a message via Skype™ to PB PM 
2022-03-06, 11:42

I gather what they need more is army surplus equipment, boots, camouflage winter coats, belts and such. There are already a few veterans groups gathering and sending such things.
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drewprops
Space Pirate
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Atlanta
 
2022-03-21, 10:22

I think it's bad form to copy and paste and entire article from a news source, and that this may get yanked, but this article would constitute what I would consider to be an informed interpretation of what is transpiring in Russia.

Link to original story

Putin’s Thousand-Year War
The reasons for his anti-Western enmity stretch back over Russia’s entire history—and they will be with us for a long time.

By Michael Hirsh, a senior correspondent at Foreign Policy.

Whether or not Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine ends any time soon, what is certain to continue is the Russian president’s abiding hatred and mistrust of the United States and other Western powers, which he believes left him no choice but to launch an unprovoked war.

It’s not just Putin. These views are shared by the many Russian elites who have supported him for two decades. They have also been a chief reason for Putin’s domestic popularity—at least until recently, when his invasion ran into fierce resistance—even as he has turned himself into a dictator and Russia into a nearly totalitarian state reminiscent of the Soviet Union at its worst. It is an enmity worth probing in depth, if only to understand why Washington and the West almost certainly face another “long twilight struggle” with Moscow—in former U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s words—rivaling the 45-year Cold War.

The Russian president’s enduring antagonism toward the West is a complex tale, one compounded of Putin’s 69-year-old personal history as a child of World War II and career Soviet spy as well as the tangled, thousand-year history of Russia itself—or at least Putin’s reading of it. At the bottom, Putin and the many right-leaning Russian officials, elites, and scholars who support him not only don’t want to be part of the West and its postwar liberal value system but believe their country’s destiny is to be a great-power bulwark against it.

Even if Putin is somehow ousted from power, the generals and security mandarins who surround him are just as vested in his aggression as he is. And already, Russia is almost as isolated economically as it was during the Soviet era.

Indeed, Putin may have been preparing for this moment longer than people realize: After the Russian leader annexed Crimea in 2014, the Kremlin’s longtime ideologist, Vladislav Surkov, wrote that it would mark “the end of Russia’s epic journey to the West, the cessation of repeated and fruitless attempts to become a part of Western civilization.” Surkov predicted that Russia would exist in geopolitical solitude for at least the next hundred years.

“Putin has no path back,” said Anna Ohanyan, a political scientist at Stonehill College and the author of several books on Russia. Like other Russia experts, Ohanyan believed at one point during Putin’s 20 years in power that he was seeking a way to wield Russian influence within the institutions of the international system while trying to build new, countervailing ones, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Now most of those initiatives have turned to ashes. “By challenging territorial norms, he’s throwing out the prospect of the path he’s been building,” she said.

Biden administration officials are still grappling with the implications of the new long-term struggle. To do so, they have already delayed publishing their new national security strategy slated for the spring. While the administration expects to maintain its Indo-Pacific focus, officials say Putin’s aggression is leading to much more intensive effort to pursue what was already one of U.S. President Joe Biden’s key goals: the revitalization of NATO and the Western alliance, especially the new militarization of major European Union nations such as Germany, which hitherto had been reluctant to play a leading defense role.

Ukraine became the touchstone of Putin’s anti-Western attitudes in large part because the Russian leader and his supporters saw their historical brother nation as the last red line in a long series of Western humiliations. Putin, in his speeches, has repeatedly called this the West’s “anti-Russia project.” These perceived humiliations go back a long, long way—not just in the 30 years since the Cold War ended, nor even in the 100 years since the Soviet Union was formed in 1922. They reach all the way back to the European Enlightenment of more than three centuries ago, which gave rise to liberty, democracy, and human rights. To Russian nationalists like Putin, these developments have gradually come to eclipse Russia’s distinct character as a civilization.

By his own account, Putin sees himself not as the heir to the Soviets but as a champion of Russian civilization and Moscow’s Eurasian empire, whose roots extend back to a much earlier Vladimir—St. Vladimir, the Grand Prince of Kyiv from about 980 to 1015. St. Vladimir was ruler of what the Russians consider their first empire, the Slavic state known as Kievan Rus—based, of course, in Kyiv, the capital of what is now Ukraine. St. Vladimir’s conversion to Christianity in 988 later gave rise to the idea that Russia would be the “third Rome”—the heir to the fallen Roman and Byzantine Empires following the surrender of Constantinople to the Ottomans. It is why, like Putin, many Russians refer to Kievan Rus as “the cradle of Russian civilization” and Kyiv as “the mother of Russian cities.”

All this history is key to understanding Putin’s delusional view that Ukraine is not, and can never be, a separate country and “never had a tradition of genuine statehood.” Putin made this plain in a Feb. 21 speech, three days before the invasion, and in a 6,800-word essay from July 2021 titled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” In that essay, he reached back more than 10 centuries to explain why he was convinced that “Russians and Ukrainians were one people—a single whole.” He claimed it was important to understand that Russians and Ukrainians, along with Belarusians, “are all descendants of Ancient Rus, which was the largest state in Europe.” Putin wrote: “The spiritual choice made by St. Vladimir … still largely determines our affinity today.”

Some scholars believe this obsession with long-ago history is why Putin, who during his two decades in power was often thought to be a wily and restrained tactician, made the biggest miscalculation of his career in invading Ukraine. In doing so, he united, in one reckless move, the Ukrainians and the Europeans as well as the rest of the world against him. “He didn’t realize that even most of the Russian-language speakers in eastern Ukraine see themselves now as Ukrainian—that over the past 30 years, the Ukrainians had formed their own country. He didn’t realize that their sense of identity had changed,” said Peter Eltsov, a professor at National Defense University and author of the new book The Long Telegram 2.0: A Neo-Kennanite Approach to Russia. “He also killed all the progress he was making in dividing Europe. Even Finland and Sweden, which had been neutral, are now talking about joining NATO. He achieved the 100 percent opposite result of what he wanted.”

Putin’s historical focus is also meant to convey his deeply entrenched belief that Russia is a distinct civilization that has little in common with the West. This is a key element of “Eurasianism,” a Russian imperial ideology that is more than 100 years old but today has been directed at what Putin and his supporters see as the “philistinism” of the West and the corruption of its democracies, said Kelly O’Neill, a historian of Russia at Harvard University. She suggested that Putin’s reluctance to fully integrate modern Russia into the global economy—beyond selling it a lot of oil and gas—is based on the Eurasianist belief that Russia and its dominions are “distinct economies that belong to this beautiful imperial whole. It’s a defensive mechanism. If you integrate, then you become more vulnerable. Their view is, ‘We’re fortress Russia. We don’t need anyone else.’”

This attitude also has profound roots in Russian history, especially the Russian belief that Orthodox Christianity is superior to the West’s liberalized Christianity, which Putin and other conservative Russians view as corrupted by Enlightenment ideas. In the early 19th century, the Russian answer to the French Revolution’s Enlightenment creed, “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité (Freedom, Equality, Fraternity), was “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality”—which Sergey Uvarov, minister of public education to Tsar Nicholas I, formulated as the conceptual foundation of the Russian Empire. This tripartite credo isn’t mentioned in Putin’s speeches and writings—he still likes to pretend Russia is a democracy—but it has been invoked by the far-right thinkers said to influence Putin, including Aleksandr Dugin, Lev Gumilev, Ivan Ilyin, Konstantin Leontiev, Sergei Petrovich Trubetskoy, and others dating back 200 years.

“ Uvarov’s formula explains why Russia always seems to resuscitate an autocratic empire in periods of crisis—as it did after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and is now doing following the fall of the Soviet Union,” Eltsov said. Putin’s Eurasianist goals can also only live or die through autocracy and imperial power, Eltsov and other scholars said. “Eurasianism is an imperial idea because it offers a way to reconcile the unity of the people as a whole and their diversity,” O’Neill said. “It’s difficult to do that if you don’t have an empire.”

For Putin, the idea of rebuilding a Eurasian empire under his rule—of which Ukraine must be a part—seems central to his sense of destiny as a leader. Russia, a vast land straddling Europe and Asia, is a civilization that has never been able to decide whether it is more European or Asian—a dilemma made more confusing by the fact that Mongols ruled it for 240 years, leaving behind millions of Tatar descendants. Russia also can’t agree on what its borders ought to be, not even after a thousand years.

“In Europe, borders have been set by rivers and mountain ranges, but that is not the way Russia looks at how boundaries are set. They have fluctuated over time,” based in large part on Moscow’s fears of invasion, said Thomas Graham, a former senior U.S. diplomat and Russia expert now at the Council on Foreign Relations. “People have long said that there’s never been a Russian nation state in history—that it’s always been an empire of one sort or another. The borders of Russia today are pretty much the borders of Russia in 1721, the year the empire was founded. The way they see it now, [the Soviet collapse of] 1991 undid some 200 to 300 years of geopolitical advances.”

Putin’s main goal in office has been to reverse that trend as much as possible. Or as Surkov, the Kremlin ideologist, wrote in 2019: “Having collapsed from the level of the USSR to the level of the [Russian Federation], Russia stopped crumbling, began to recover and to return to its natural and only possible condition as a great land, combining and augmenting the commonality of its peoples.” As a result, Surkov concluded, Russia will soon return to its past glory and the top rank of geopolitical struggle.

Graham and other Russia experts said it is a mistake to view Putin merely as an angry former KGB apparatchik upset at the fall of the Soviet Union and NATO’s encroachment after the Cold War, as he is often portrayed by Western commentators. Putin, himself, made this clear in his Feb. 21 speech, when he disavowed the Soviet legacy, inveighing against the mistakes made by former leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin to grant Ukraine even partial autonomy. On the contrary, Putin and other Russian nationalists today see Marxism-Leninism as just another regrettable Western import.

Putin is rather a messianic Russian nationalist and Eurasianist whose constant invocation of history going back to Kievan Rus, however specious, is the best explanation for his view that Ukraine must be part of Russia’s sphere of influence, experts say. In his essay last July, Putin even suggested that the formation of a separate, democratic Ukrainian nation “is comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us.”

As Putin has shown by transforming post-Soviet Russia’s brief experiment with democracy under former Russian President Boris Yeltsin into his personal power structure, he also has never demonstrated any sympathy for the Western postwar order of liberal democratic capitalism. Instead, for him, the post-Cold War period has been mostly about redesigning borders and power. Putin has been driven mainly by an old strategic concept, embraced by dictators Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, and other traditional strategists from recent centuries, of the need for “strategic depth” or buffer zones to defend one’s borders. For Putin, whose father fought in World War II (Putin carries his picture every year in the national parade commemorating what Russians call the Great Patriotic War), and for many other Russians, the defining event of their lives was the trauma of Hitler’s invasion and the deaths of tens of millions of their countrymen. That was likened at the time, and still is, to Napoleon’s calamitous war on Russia the century before.

“ Russia has been repeatedly invaded. That’s something that’s very difficult for us in the United States to understand because we never faced a catastrophe of those dimensions,” Graham said. “It is a sense that goes back centuries: In order to survive, you need strategic depth, so you need to push borders out as far away from the heartland as possible—not so much physical as geopolitical barriers. You just push until you meet something that can resist you.”

Putin’s strange promise to “de-Nazify” Ukraine to justify his invasion—especially odd because Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish—is better understood if one considers that he may actually believe he’s still fighting World War II, when substantial numbers of Ukrainians joined the Nazis. Ukrainian national hero Stepan Bandera—whose name adorns many streets in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, and other cities and whose statues can be found across the country—was himself a far-right nationalist who allied with the Nazis and oversaw Jewish pogroms. In his speeches, Putin has often recast the allied fight against the Nazis as a largely Russian triumph. “He probably genuinely believes he’s reproducing the war, fighting against Nazism again,” said Marlene Laruelle, a Russia scholar at George Washington University.

Putin’s consolidation of power and attempts to take back bits of the former Soviet bloc, starting with his incursion into Georgia in 2008, are also a result of what Eltsov calls “Weimar syndrome”—a burning sense of defeat and humiliation after Soviet Russia’s defeat in the Cold War. One reason Putin has been so popular until now is many ordinary Russians share his sense of national injustice, Eltsov said. It is analogous to what happened in Germany after World War I, when popular outrage over the Treaty of Versailles and weakness and chaos in the Weimar Republic precipitated a right-wing reaction and, ultimately, the rise of Hitler.

Not every Russian, of course, shares these anti-Western views—even going back hundreds of years. Great figures in Russian history, especially two of its most lionized tsars, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, often sought to embrace the West and Russia’s European identity. Peter, who ruled from 1682 to 1725, was so enamored with the West that he ordered his boyars, or lords, to educate their children in Europe and even imposed a “beard tax” to force them to look like clean-shaven Europeans. Catherine corresponded with Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot, called French writer Voltaire her hero, and initially sought to set up a parliament and free the serfs. Many royal and aristocratic Russian families eagerly interbred with their European counterparts; Catherine herself was Prussian-born.

But both Peter and Catherine were conquerors as well. And these reformist efforts at integration, while they helped modernize Russia and gave rise to all those French-speaking Russian aristocrats who populated the works of Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov, were almost always eclipsed by deeper conservative Russian fears. Today, Russian nationalists deride the Western reform efforts of Peter the Great as a seditious “fifth column.” Even Boris Nemtsov—a liberal opponent to Putin’s regime who was murdered on a bridge near the Kremlin in 2015— suggested that Russia could benefit from a constitutional monarchy back in 1993.

To a degree little understood by many Westerners, Russian literary figures they revere, such as Fyodor Dostoevsky and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, were also devotees of this idea of a “greater Russia” under an absolute autocrat. Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author best known for writings that exposed the horrors of the Soviet gulag, later became one of Putin’s favorite intellectuals. Before his 2008 death, Solzhenitsyn wrote in an essay: “All the talk of a separate Ukrainian people existing since something like the ninth century and possessing its own non-Russian language is recently invented falsehood.” Shortly before his death in 1881, Dostoevsky wrote: “To the people the Czar is the incarnation of themselves, their whole ideology, their hopes and beliefs.”

Putin, many Russia experts say, is only Russia’s latest tsar, and that’s the way he should be viewed by the Western strategists now searching for ways to stop him. The answer, in the end, may be to understand that Putin is acting more out of weakness than strength. In other words, Putin is riding the tiger of democratic self-determination in Ukraine and other former states of the Russian sphere—all of which now want to join the West—and he may not know how to get off. Eltsov argues that as a result of its centuries-long effort to control so many ethnic nationalities within its ever-shifting borders, Russia cannot survive for long as a true liberal democracy.

If it embraced the West and its democratic values, he said, “Russia would probably disintegrate.”















...

Steve Jobs ate my cat's watermelon.
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psmith2.0
Mr. Vieira
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Tennessee
 
2022-03-21, 10:51

No, what's "bad form" is that, four weeks on, this beady-eyed, genocidal, megalomaniacal cocksucker is still a) drawing a breath, and b) proceeding with his nutball, immoral actions while the world sits around with its collective thumb up its ass. I guess he'll be given 5-10 years to operate freely, so, in another 75 or so years from now, he can replace (or stand alongside) the other beady-eyed, genocidal, megalomaniacal cocksucker everyone loves to reference and say "never again" about.

Words are cheap, and, from where I sit, this is about as "again" as it gets.

There's no moral "grey area" here. We've seen this kind of person before. Several times. It's almost as if we've learned/remembered nothing.
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kscherer
Which way is up?
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Boyzeee
 
2022-03-21, 11:12

True, but those other "beady-eyed, genocidal, megalomaniacal cocksuckers" didn't have the world's largest nuclear arsenal at their disposal. One must be very careful when reaching into the lion's mouth.

Were it nor for the nukes and those blasted Siberian winters …

Basically, if you want the west to start dropping bombs on Russia, you'd best be ready to see some bombs dropping into your own living rooms.

- AppleNova is the best Mac-users forum on the internet. We are smart, educated, capable, and helpful. We are also loaded with smart-alecks! :)
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psmith2.0
Mr. Vieira
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Tennessee
 
2022-03-21, 11:37

No, I don't want that. But can't the man be made to choke on a chicken bone or something? Are there not people, even Russians living right there in Moscow with no ties/loyalty to the U.S., who excel at that sort of thing?

Think outside the box, people. Bob Saget slipped and bonked his head on a bathroom floor and he's deader than shit. Putin takes showers, surely.

That's all I'm saying. Accidents happen every day, to all kinds of people. Isn't he about due for one? Next time he's riding a horse, shirtless, a bear comes out of the woods and mauls him to death? He uses some crappy third-party phone charger and gets electrocuted/burns his house down? All kinds of things that don't involve war/aggression and can't be blamed on anyone/anything else but "rotten luck".

Can't COVID kill someone deserving, for once?
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PB PM
Sneaky Punk
 
Join Date: Oct 2005
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Send a message via Skype™ to PB PM 
2022-03-21, 14:21

Even if Putin were to die, one of his other exKGB cronies would just pick up the torch.
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kscherer
Which way is up?
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Boyzeee
 
2022-03-21, 14:45

Precisely. This thing doesn't end unless Ukraine wins.
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Anonymous Coward
Member
 
Join Date: May 2004
 
2022-04-04, 23:47

This is not directly related to the Russia v Ukraine situation, but I'm not sure where else to put this (except perhaps April Fools, since this happened to be sent on 1 April).

Has anyone else received a poll from their congressperson regarding gas prices? Apparently they are considering the following:

1) Offer rebates to consumers to offset high gas prices

2) Suspend the 18.4 cent per gallon of the federal gas tax

3) Take no action

4) Other

Since choosing (4) did not leave any way to leave comments, I chose (3). I made the decision to avoid driving when possible, and would keep doing that even if Congress chose to implement (1) or (2).

This is the text introducing the poll, omitting the part explaining the world situation.

"Congress is considering several different options to help ease the pain at the pump, including rebates for middle class households. I’ve cosponsored legislation to provide $100 rebates to everyone earning less than $75,000 per year during every month that gas prices exceed $4 per gallon on average nationwide. Families would also receive $100 per dependent.

What do you think Congress should do to offset higher gas prices caused by Putin?"

"I" being Anna G. Eshoo from the San Francisco Bay Area, where gas prices often exceed $4 per gallon without oil supply problems.
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turtle
Lord of the Rant.
Formerly turtle2472
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Upstate South Carolina
 
2022-04-05, 07:28

Giving more taxpayer money back to those who don't pay taxes doesn't make much sense, nor does cutting legitimate revenue so they have to rob Peter to pay Paul for federal expenses. So I'm with you on the #3 option. I didn't get a poll, but I did see the concepts posed by those asking for our government to save us.

Louis L'Amour, “To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.”
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chucker
 
Join Date: May 2004
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2022-04-05, 07:37

Germany did 1, and… as a non-car driver, I'm not a fan.

It's a tricky problem, but really, in the long run, we need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, not subsidize people who use it heavily. (Yes, I recognize a lot of people don't have the privilege of choice here.)

Like, if you really want to help people, don't do it for gas in particular; instead just give a general-purpose "transportation credit" to people. They can use it for gas, or to repair their bike, or to help pay for a monthly public transport ticket, etc.
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Ryan
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2022-04-05, 08:14

I don't have a ton of sympathy for people who bought gas guzzlers and now find themselves spending a hundred bucks per fill-up. You bought the ticket, you take the ride.
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PB PM
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2022-04-05, 09:13

If only it was just gas guzzlers paying high prices. My car gets around 40 MPG, still costs $100 to put 13 gallons in the tank. We are paying over $6, sometimes closer to $7, a gallon for fuel, so frankly American drivers have nothing to complain about. And sure people can talk about exchange rates, but we don’t earn American dollars, so that’s irrelevant.
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