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Showing content with the highest reputation on 02/24/22 in all areas

  1. The good guys are not fucking around. Subtitle: When surly threads collide!
    41 points
  2. Let me help you understand: An aging but intelligent man with decades of honorable public service who actually loves his country is a significantly better option than a stupid, racist, sexist, xenophobic, money laundering con man who only cares about his country to the degree that it can further enrich him and the Russian strongman whose hand is up that puppet's ass.
    37 points
  3. The Russian invasion certainly has a Charlie Strong vibe.
    30 points
  4. I'm not sure I understand why people are so perplexed about this. Kiev and Ukraine hold a special place in Russian cultural identification. The Kievan Rus. The Vikings who came through and settled the region. The descendants who survived the Mongol purge. The badasses who would found the Russian Empire. People keep going on and on about the USSR, but Putin harkens back to Peter, Catherine, Ivan. Putin doesn't think in terms of Communism versus Capitalism, although he was educated and indoctrinated in a system that did. He thinks in terms of values. He sees the West as decadent and dying. Russian literature, especially modern Russian literature, is fascinating in the way it portrays Russians versus the West. Russians are seen as stoic, suffering, but holding on to traditional values. Westerners, and Americans in particular, are seen as chaotic, decadent, with no values whatsoever. Putin constantly makes comments about men being demeaned, trans and homosexual groups being granted greater freedoms, the loss of religious values (which is interesting since Communism disavows religion explicitly, but Russian identity is bound intrinsically to the Orthodox Church). as dangerous shifts for the human race. He literally sees Russia, with himself at the head, as practically a savior for the human race in some ways. He feels like men have very specific proscribed roles to play. To be a man is to act in very specific ways, and the same goes for women. He very much believes in what we'd call stereotyped masculine and feminine roles in society. What does all this have to do with Ukraine? Well, as far as Putin is concerned, Ukraine is a part of Russia, even more than Crimea. He doesn't even think of them as two separate entities. As he says, the separation of the two is an artificial historical accident. Since the fall of the USSR, Ukraine has always been a country divided by language. Ukraine, spoken by 67% in the western two thirds, has always been the language of people who leaned towards Europe. There is also the emphasis among Russian speakers regarding the Ukrainian cooperation with Nazi Germany (in an effort to gain independence from the USSR), the atrocities the Ukrainian forces aligned with Germany perpetuated during WWII, and what they perceive as the continued Naziism among the people who lean towards Europe. As you can imagine given the bloodshed and devastation wrought by the Germans in WWII, all of this is loaded language. Hence Putin speaks about the demilitarization and "denazification" of Ukraine. For Putin, any support for Europe and European values is akin to proof of Naziism. It's all one and the same to him. The Orange Revolution in 2004/5 came before Putin had secured his power base. Nonetheless, he was able to support President Yanukovych, who won the election in 2010 as a Russian speaker. I'm not going to go into everything that led up to the Maidan Revolution of 2014, other than to say Yanukovych eventually fled, in part because he wasn't willing to do what Assad did in Syria. The Maidan Revolution made Putin feel like he was losing his control over Ukraine, which is when he took over Crimea to secure that territory with its major naval base. After he had Crimea secured he sent in special forces to the Donbas region to destabilize it and created protected zones, going so far as to send in the Russian military to wipe out the Ukrainian forces who were sweeping the separation forces easily. There has never been a time when Putin hasn't considered bringing Ukraine back under the Russian aegis as foreign policy priority #1. Georgia, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, much less Finland, just don't have anything resembling the same emotional or geopolitical importance of Ukraine. Economic, either, for that matter. The only one that comes close is Belarus, but Putin feels like he has Belarus firmly in the Russian SOI as long as Lukashenko is in charge. Which also has had its own share of protests, but Lukashenko is no Yanukovych, either in terms of control over his country, or ruthlessness. He's more on the Assad spectrum. I do not see this turning into a wider conflict unless Putin lives for 20 more years. Ukraine will be a lot to swallow. I don't see it becoming Iraq or Afghanistan (Russian or US), or Vietnam. It won't even be a Chechnya. Ukraine lacks the religious differences which pushes people to extremes, and frankly, the cultural differences between Ukrainians and Russians aren't that large in the context of those other countries. Pro-Russian politicians have enjoyed popular support in Ukraine since the breakup of the USSR. What it will be is entirely dysfunctional, ruled by corrupt oligarchs who are basically crime bosses with fancy titles, with the richest being the head of state (don't know if anyone has seen the palace that Yanukovych built while he was in power - expect more of the same when Putin puts a puppet leader in charge of Ukraine). Putin will continue to do more to destabilize any countries on its border, especially any politicians or movements that are opposed to Russian interests, whether it's Finland, the Baltic states, or Georgia. I could even see Russia basically taking over Georgia if Putin decides it's moved too far to the West. He has to be feeling his own mortality the same way every 70 year old does. Making this move regarding Ukraine is simply completing a process he felt never should have gotten away from him back in 2014 in the first place if Yanukovych had simply been a more ruthless ruler. What I will say is that the West's biggest mistakes have always involved giving Ukrainian's false hope that they wouldn't be left to dry if push came to shove. This started with the Budapest Memorandum where Ukraine was promised protection for its sovereignty in return for giving up its possession of nuclear weapons, all the way through the two major protests in 2005 and 2014 supported and in part financed by western interests, and in the years since then, with all the mixed messages regarding what to do about Russia's annexation of Crimea and their involvement in Donbas. The West was never going to give Ukraine advanced weaponry. They were never going to station troops to support Ukrainian forces. And they were never going to declare war on Russia in case of military action. And that's the only thing that ever had any hope of deterring what we're seeing today. This invasion of Ukraine has always been inevitable. Didn't matter who was president. On the other hand, for the states who have been accepted into NATO, basically until NATO truly breaks up, the members are safe from Russian direct military invasion like we're seeing right now in Ukraine. They're not safe from other destabilization techniques, but Russia/Putin isn't going to go that far. Which is why he's been so adamant about NATO promises not to expand in the first place. Of course, Trump has made noises in the past about breaking up NATO, so maybe a president in the future truly does progress along those lines. I think it would be a mistake of the highest order, but that's a different discussion.
    26 points
  5. Raise your hand if you had this on your bingo card
    22 points
  6. Everybody on this thread will agree Biden is nowhere close to the best we could possibly have in the White House at this given time. But he's a metric fuckton better than his predecessor, who is the worst president of my lifetime and, quite possibly, ever. Yes, I wish we could do better than the last three party nominees but what we have is what we have. I'm 100 times happier that Biden is in office than DOTARD.
    20 points
  7. I work with several people in the Ukraine. We have stand-ups twice a week driven by a manager there. Typically, in the midst of this, nothing is mentioned. Today, the Ukrainian manager is unable to connect.(He is OK). So, we had a guy in the US drive the meeting. He asked and several others in the US asked how they were doing over there. They are in Odessa area btw. The stress they are under became palpable to us this morning. When asked how close they were to what was going, one guy replied with perfect eastern European matter-of-fact tone "It's not too close, but it doesn't matter since they have missiles that can reach this far". He did mention he has heard a couple of explosions. Another guy ends his status with "not much else going on except war is on the doorstep". Other things brought up were shortages and long lines. I have only worked with this team a short time but they are great to collaborate with. Kind, giving, and understanding. I felt so small when I had to ask one of them for help on something afterwards. It's a travesty that they have to live like this.
    20 points
  8. This is a TLDR, but I get to play semi-expert for a few minutes. I was in the Army in the early 90s (after the first Gulf War), in field artillery and attached to infantry as an artillery scout (not a fucking cav scout, those guys are weird - @RDCanecutter will understand). We scouted for everything up to and including MLRS (multiple launch rocket systems). We scouted targets for units in the field and fed the info back to the artillery batteries who assigned targets and priorities to various systems. I was out well before 2000, but what they have now, including drones, is amazing and damned near point-and-click in some cases (and would have reduced the need for guys like me), and I'm assuming the Russians got their hands on the same stuff. The quick start of the ground war in Ukraine - this aspect is bugging me a lot. My instructors and junior-level commanders had all been in during the 1980s (some late 1970s), and a large number were vets of the first Gulf War. Some of the tactics/training were still reflecting 1980s European/Cold War battlefields - lots of mobility, either moving forward or falling back, but never able to linger in one place for very long - "shoot and scoot". But we also did a lot of combined-arms training based on lessons from the (first) Gulf War where we had time to plan targets, backup targets, and even more backup targets, and where our batteries had actual time to work their way through to backup targets and were working in conjunction with air superiority, and where we were using everything at our disposal, and where we could deploy well-coordinated artillery en masse. Artillery is King of Battle after all. In 1991 we had a million troops in the theater around Iraq, with 700,000 of them being American, and in 2003 we had around 250,000 coalition troops. Putin is doing this with a much smaller force against a larger country with more people, and with much less preparation (attacking of targets), and his run-up to the ground invasion was short, but he still did a combined arms/full-on throw everything at them attack, just on a much smaller scale than Iraq in 1991 or 2003. This is bugging me, because I can't figure out why there was so little run-up, and I've looked at the maps and units a bit and they are spread out fairly thin. These are what I'm coming up with off the top of my head: The Russians simply don't have the supplies of rockets/missiles/bombs/arty/etc. that we did, as well as the logistics to back it up - it's like they have far less than 24 hours worth of such munitions. The fact that they are invading with a fifth of the forces that we had in Iraq in 1991, and almost half of what we invaded Iraq in 2003 is interesting. It feels like they've decided to sacrifice boots on the ground to make up the difference, but there's no way they are fielding more than say 50,000-60,000 or so actual infantry (not basically infantry, but actual infantry). They did go through some very expensive upgrades after 2014 that could have sapped their budgets but I don't understand why they didn't wait another year for NS2 to be fully online for strategic reasons, and to have a full supply of everything they need armaments wise - maybe the Russian military is actually at the point where this is what they capable of fielding, which again, makes no sense, but could be scary for Putin. They are trying some kind of blitzkrieg-style invasion in the hopes of destroying a lot of major Ukrainian hardware, and then they are going to fall back and build up a large buffer zone around the territories they are claiming and force negotiations. If they can hurt the Ukrainians enough, the Ukrainians won't have enough time to mount a concentrated effort to push them back out of the buffer zone while they secure/reinforce those zones. They get to claim those territories and they have a buffer zone around those territories that is fully linked. I am just having a hard time seeing what's happening as capable of a full-on occupation of Ukraine, because if even a few areas of the ground assault get bogged down in the opening phase, what reserves can Putin have rushed in their to save their asses? And the reserves/conscripts are nothing to write home about - many are doing their year and then they normally get out, and such young and inexperienced soldiers can quickly fuck around and find out. TLDR: Putin's comments make me think he wants all of Ukraine, but the lack of sustained preparation (aerial/arty assault) and what he's put on the ground is just not capable of it.
    19 points
  9. “Look, mdmost is sorry. It’s just this war and that lying sonofabitch Putin…”
    19 points
  10. This is completely fucked. I am personally devastated. I won’t update a lot today for my own mental health on this issue and because of professional responsibilities. This is the worst case scenario and will be worse for a long time to come. Also, I was wrong…they launched missiles at fucking Ivano-Frankivsk. 70 miles from the EU.
    19 points
  11. No idea if true, but Intel crab seemed to belive it.
    18 points
  12. Well he’s a fucking traitor and should be hanged as such
    18 points
  13. I do. Saying bye to them when I was heading into shitty places was always hard. They knew, I knew. Have a 23 year old son who just called me and said he just got back from the Recruiting office. Did not sign, but is thinking this is going to go big and he wants to stand on the right side.
    17 points
  14. It's almost as if the Germans and Russians have inked some sort of deal, call it a non-aggression pact, if you will.
    17 points
  15. Fuck Russia. This is heart wrenching. I would be happy to go to the pawn shop, buy a 7.62 and send it on over.
    16 points
  16. I think it depends on whether you have been reading every post in this thread over the past couple of months or just joined today for the "game thread" portion (understandably). It's been one of the best threads this site has seen with tons of analysis and nuance leading up to today. So new posters don't really appreciate the depth of which a lot of this stuff have already been discussed. That is the disconnect.
    16 points
  17. This may be the same explosion How great is Twitter? You get up to date wartime video from the handle @pussyrobbery
    15 points
  18. Ernie has a kid? I thought y'all were... when did this happen?
    15 points
  19. You also said Biden is low intelligence. Please state, in detail, what Biden has done since it became clear that Putin was going to invade, that you would have done differently. Also please state now, without the benefit of hind sight what you would do to manage this situation if you were POTUS with your superior intelligence. From what I have seen, Biden has done a good job of being one step ahead of Putin with the very limited tools we have to manage this crisis. He has managed to: 1. Get Putin to deny that they were going to invade, spelled out clearly for the world that this was a lie, and exactly what they were going to do, thus harming Russia’s long term reputation and in general making them look like liars. 2. United NATO nations, and the entire world minus China, in endorsing sanctions and even getting Germany to suspend a gas line project that they absolutely wanted. In addition all of Western Europe is now committed to weening off Russian oil/gas. This is something the US has wanted for decades and will absolutely devastate Russia long term. 3. Making it very clear that US will not engage militarily and thus not endangering us directly and making it clear to other nations that we are the adults in the room. Russia may get Ukraine but they will be severely damaged in lives, treasure, and especially reputation when this is all done. In exchange, the US will be stronger and more relied upon by other nations. Not bad for a senile mental midget to accomplish at nearly no cost to our country.
    15 points
  20. Innocent people, who happen to be our allies, are being bombed right now, and Trump and Fox News are using this tragedy to score political points against a sitting United States president, and they're twisting the truth to do it. If you are not outraged by that, regardless of your politics, you are an awful American. Full stop. You're fucking awful.
    15 points
  21. WOW. Sorry for upsetting your travel plans you selfish CUNT.
    14 points
  22. I mean, a lot of us aren’t. A majority of Americans WERE willing to sacrifice to try to stop the spread of Covid. The problem is the 35% of Americans who will absolutely start a civil war if wraparound Oakleys get more expensive.
    14 points
  23. GWB had PLENTY of chances to "jab" dotard while dotard was POTUS and his cowardly ass said nada. GW has a yellow streak a mile wide.
    14 points
  24. Thanks man. It’s also clear that you’re not here for Russia’s bullshit and you’re thoughtful about what this means. Central Europe is in total shock now. I will say this— if the U.S. IC and diplomacy can ever recover from the debacle of Iraq, they just did. They told the world what Russia was doing and tried to stop a war. They failed at the latter but were correct about every warning.
    14 points
  25. And Ukraine starting to knock em down. Fuck em up!
    14 points
  26. No trans child in America is having any sort of gender-affirming surgery performed on them. Holy shit. Y'all can't even conceive how difficult it is to even find a provider who will prescribe puberty blocking hormones so your child can figure out if it's a ~phase~ or not. Obvs trans people aren't monolithic, but almost every trans person who didn't start their transition until after puberty will tell you that one of their biggest regrets in life is that they didn't—most likely because they couldn't—start their transition earlier in life. You dudes born with dicks know what testosterone did (and still does) to your bodies.
    14 points
  27. Fuckomg lulz. Zoom in, or not. You are warned.
    13 points
  28. No sorry I’m talking about reality
    13 points
  29. Someone said it pages ago, but it needs to be said again. American intelligence community is doing work
    13 points
  30. First of all, Cav Scouts prefer to be addressed as MR. Weird, if you don't mind, you lice-ridden Red Leg concussed to the point of addled perversion. That said, I like reading your views and those of the other actual prior service, finding bits of insight amidst all the ravings of the bunny-hopping video gamers. I agree that 190,000 is a tiny amount compared to earlier wars. I believe the Germans invaded France and the Low Countries with millions of men, on a comparatively tiny front. Putin's tanks and paratroops can probably pull off a smash-and-grab, but no way do the gopniks in the motor rifles have the numbers to pull off an occupation. I bet their units are way understrength in personnel. They'll be busy trying to protect the running tanks, the broken-down tanks, and the clunky supply tail following all the combat units. If this stretches out I foresee lots of unsupplied hungry Russians getting ready to leave the band due to creative differences.
    13 points
  31. Something that may be an interesting thread for tomorrow:
    13 points
  32. Attacking the most powerful military alliance in the world is not what I would consider a low risk endeavor. Sometimes when you repeat something over and over, like say Ukraine should irradiate themselves by blowing up Chernobyl, or that Putin will attack a NATO nation and NATO won’t respond with appropriate force, someone’s failure to agree with you doesn’t mean they don’t understand what you are saying. It could mean they think what you keep saying is silly.
    13 points
  33. The Russians will be really embarrassed when 100 pizzas show up to Chernobyl
    12 points
  34. Not to be melodramatic, and I know its a weird thing to offer an internet stranger with a Baerbock kink on a college football board, but if God forbid shit did get dicey in a "worst case scenario" type situation, there's a safe place in Bavaria should anyone/anyone's family ever need it. We've got a weekend place in the far south of Bavaria that has plenty of room to ride things out in the worst case, and Texans should ultimately look out for other Texans in times of stress.
    12 points
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