Russia Invades Ukraine. Again by captaincrunch

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Fuck Zelensky.
You and Volodymyr Zelenskyy are about the same age. He was Born 25 January 1978 (age 44).

Children 2
Spouse Olena Kiyashko (m. 2003)
Occupation Politician • actor • comedian

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volodymyr_Zelenskyy

6ix, if you could tell jokes like Zelenskyy, you could have an expansive life rather than your present-day minimalist one.

Russia invades Ukraine. Many countries offered Zelenskyy a ride out. He said I don't need a ride I need amunation.

Jack says fuck Zelensky. That says it all. Jack=ass=loser.

T

Zelensky is a cross-dressing, child raping cunt that Obama put in charge of Ukraine in 2014.

You, Ted, are just a cunt.

--------------------------------------------------

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Sunday, December 18, 2022 12:57 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Whatever.

Meanwhile, SECOND, you haven't defined "winning" and "losing".… important concepts in war, dontcha think?

Also, the only choices you could think of were college, Burger King, and the military? What made the military so meaningful? And, aren't Jehovah's Witnesses conscientious objectors? Or do I have that wrong?

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

Still making a few points here.

First of all, if you're at all telling the truth, it sounds like you were just rebelling against your upbringing. You went into the military unformed, rootless,morally adrift, and you absorbed the lessons of Vietnam and came out a monster.

Why you keep virtue signaling when nobody believes a damn thing you say is beyond me.

But enuf of you.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

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Sunday, December 18, 2022 6:33 AM

THG

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Whatever.

Meanwhile, SECOND, you haven't defined "winning" and "losing".… important concepts in war, dontcha think?

Also, the only choices you could think of were college, Burger King, and the military? What made the military so meaningful? And, aren't Jehovah's Witnesses conscientious objectors? Or do I have that wrong?

Still making a few points here.

First of all, if you're at all telling the truth, it sounds like you were just rebelling against your upbringing. You went into the military unformed, rootless,morally adrift, and you absorbed the lessons of Vietnam and came out a monster.

Why you keep virtue signaling when nobody believes a damn thing you say is beyond me.

But enuf of you.

Wow TWO, look at Signyms' distain for anyone who’s served our country. Are you surprised, I’m not? She’s a Polish Russian Collaborator. It runs in her family.

T

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Sunday, December 18, 2022 8:59 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Whatever.

Meanwhile, SECOND, you haven't defined "winning" and "losing".… important concepts in war, dontcha think?

Also, the only choices you could think of were college, Burger King, and the military? What made the military so meaningful? And, aren't Jehovah's Witnesses conscientious objectors? Or do I have that wrong?

I'm not a Jehovah's Witness, but I did learn a few lessons that my Trump-voting relatives cannot comprehend. Number one lesson: if your life is going wrong (alcohol, tobacco, obesity, money problems, wife threatens them with divorce for their adultery, boss fires them for fighting on the job, police arrest them, etc.) it is not the fault of a political party or Satan or some group manipulating their life. It is their own fault. My Trump-voting relatives refuse to believe they are at fault.

In extreme contrast to what I know is the truth about life, my East Texas relatives who voted for Trump will lie about their bad actions (for example claim they weren't driving recklessly when they were). And they will adamantly refuse to believe they are in control of what happens to them since there is a conspiracy run by Democrats and law enforcement and debt collectors to oppress my relatives who only want to be free to do whatever pleases them without consequences for their actions. They are antipathetic to being good Christians, but in deep confusion extending to their very core, they falsely claim to be Christians who are trying to be good. Ha-ha! I laugh. My Trump-voting relatives are self-deluding, much the same as Russians are about their own actions.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, December 18, 2022 9:02 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

As one senior NATO intelligence official put it, Russian generals “acknowledge the incompetence, lack of coordination, lack of training. They all recognize these problems.” Still, they seem confident of an “eventual victory” because, the official said, “Putin believes this is a game of chicken between him and the West, and he believes the West will blink first.”

Mr. Putin has already shown a talent for the long game, agreed Mr. Tinkov, the banking magnate who turned against the Kremlin, noting how the Russian leader had spent decades bringing Russia’s elite to heel.

“He slowly outplayed everyone, because the thing was: It was like he had unlimited time,” Mr. Tinkov said. “He is still behaving in this war as though he has an unlimited amount of time — as though he plans to live for 200 years.”

Domestically, the pressure on Mr. Putin has been fairly muted. For all the losses his army has endured, there have been no significant uprisings among Russian troops. Even the newly drafted continue to go without serious protest.

Aleksandr, the soldier drafted into the 155th, is still enraged at the way he and his comrades were dropped into Ukraine with few bullets for their aging rifles and forced to live in a cowshed with only a few meal packets to share. His commanders flat-out lied, he said, telling them they were going for additional training — when in fact they were sent to the front lines, where most were killed or grievously wounded.

After months of fighting, Russia announced last month that it had finally captured Pavlivka, but soldiers said it came at tremendous cost.

Aleksandr had been drafted in September along with three close childhood friends, he said. He and another suffered concussions. One lost both legs. The fourth is missing.

But when he is discharged from the hospital, he said, he fully expects to return to Ukraine, and would do so willingly.

“This is how we are raised,” he said. “We grew up in our country understanding that it doesn’t matter how our country treats us. Maybe this is bad. Maybe this is good. Maybe there are things we do not like about our government.”

But, he added, “when a situation like this arises, we get up and go.”

More at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/16/world/europe/russia-put
in-war-failures-ukraine.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, December 18, 2022 9:09 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

‘Wiped out’: War in Ukraine has decimated a once feared Russian brigade

The bloody fate of the 200th Separate Motor Rifle Brigade is emblematic of Vladimir Putin’s derailed invasion plans.

By late May, fewer than 900 soldiers were left in two battalion tactical groups that had departed the brigade’s garrison in Russia with more than 1,400. The brigade’s commander was badly wounded. And some of those still being counted as part of the unit were listed as hospitalized, missing or “refuseniks” unwilling to fight.

The brigade’s collapse in part reflects the difficulty of its assignment in the war. But a closer examination of the 200th shows that its fate was also shaped by many of the same forces that derailed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion plans — endemic corruption, strategic miscalculations and a Kremlin failure to grasp the true capabilities of its own military.

The 200th entered the conflict with better training, newer equipment and more experience — including prior combat missions in Ukraine — than most other units. The brigade has been degraded from within. The skilled troops and professional officers sent into battle at the start of the war with state-of-the-art T-80BVM tanks have given way to an assemblage of poorly trained conscripts pressed into service with paltry or outdated gear.

The 200th had shown that it could be both lethally effective and fatally undisciplined. The erratic performance is characteristic of a unit that Western security officials describe as one of Russia’s higher-performing brigades but nevertheless plagued by systemic rot and dysfunction.

Attached to the elite Northern Fleet, 200th troops get special gear and training for Arctic conditions and are often first in line for Russia’s most advanced equipment. In 2017, the brigade was the first in Russia’s armed services to receive new T-80BVM tanks rolling off assembly lines.

And yet Westerners who ventured to Pechenga before Russia restricted travel describe the base as a grim garrison where officers neglected troops’ morale and soldiers could seem clueless about the brigade’s identity and mission.

Thomas Nilsen, editor of the Barents Observer — a Norwegian news site that closely follows the 200th — described an encounter several years ago with soldiers at a bar near the base who were oblivious to their proximity to NATO, until he pulled up a map on his phone to show them.

In 2020, three servicemen died — including one by suicide and another by choking on vomit — and several were injured in incidents that raised concerns about brigade conditions and safety, according to an investigation by the Russian news outlet Sever.Realii. One soldier was blinded and another reportedly lost a hand while training with a miniature drone armed with high-power explosives.

That same year, a warrant officer in the 200th posted videos on social media accusing superiors of neglect and corruption. One showed scenes of squalor in apartments reserved for officers, with rusted appliances, mold creeping up walls, and piles of trash stuffed into unoccupied units.

“This is how ensigns and officers of the Russian army live!” the warrant officer, Mikhail Balenko, said on the video, describing the compound with an expletive. “The brigade commander does not even come here. He doesn’t care how his subordinates live.”

In another video, Balenko accused commanders of stealing supplies, bribing military inspectors and selling fuel meant for brigade vehicles. Balenko did not respond to attempts to reach him for comment.

The war appears to have exacerbated these problems of morale and cohesion.

Dozens of soldiers in Pechenga refused to deploy during the initial months of the invasion, according to officials from Western security services. It’s unclear what happened to them.

Ukrainian commanders described battles in which 200th soldiers wouldn’t fight or defied orders. In mid-July, a Ukrainian reconnaissance unit captured audio of a Russian tank commander in Hrakove screaming at subordinates.

“Should I show you how to kill Ukrainians? I’ll get in the tank myself,” the commander shouted, shortly before the tank was destroyed by a Javelin missile, according to Oleksandr, a reconnaissance scout in Ukraine’s 92nd Mechanized Brigade, who spoke on the condition that his surname not be published to maintain his security.

By the end of that battle, dozens of Russian troops had been killed or wounded and 12 tanks had been destroyed, Oleksandr said, adding that additional intercepts indicated that numerous soldiers had at one point or another refused to use their weapons.

Much more at https://web.archive.org/web/20221217104439/https://www.washingtonpost.
com/world/2022/12/16/russia-200th-brigade-decimated-ukraine/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, December 18, 2022 11:32 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Whatever.

Meanwhile, SECOND, you haven't defined "winning" and "losing".… important concepts in war, dontcha think?

Also, the only choices you could think of were college, Burger King, and the military? What made the military so meaningful? And, aren't Jehovah's Witnesses conscientious objectors? Or do I have that wrong?

Still making a few points here.

First of all, if you're at all telling the truth, it sounds like you were just rebelling against your upbringing. You went into the military unformed, rootless,morally adrift, and you absorbed the lessons of Vietnam and came out a monster.

Why you keep virtue signaling when nobody believes a damn thing you say is beyond me.

But enuf of you.

Wow TWO, look at Signyms' distain for anyone who’s served our country. Are you surprised, I’m not? She’s a Polish Russian Collaborator. It runs in her family.

T

That's not what she did. She's calling out Second for being an entity of hate.

Second didn't serve in the military anyhow. Nothing about his online persona is real.

--------------------------------------------------

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Sunday, December 18, 2022 12:23 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Not true, THUGR. I find Brian Berletic (New Atlas), who was a Marine and is now a geopolitical analyst, to be an honorable person.

I've worked with and known vets, some who served in Vietnam and others in Iraq (I disagreed with both wars) and they were honest people. My BIL was in the navy. One of my nieces and her husband were in the army. They are we all decent people, even tho some had PTSD.

My problem is with SECOND specifically and individually because he's a malicious asshole who - despite knowing exactly who I am- spent years puking on the "Russian troll" libel and who threatens and harasses people IRL. He's dishonest, dishonorable, and a sociopath.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

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Sunday, December 18, 2022 12:30 PM

You'll have to forgive Ted.

His brain works in the vein of "Hitler liked dogs. If you like dogs then you are Hitler."

He's simply projecting his 1st grade world view and critical thinking skills onto you.

--------------------------------------------------

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Sunday, December 18, 2022 12:31 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Whatever.

Meanwhile, SECOND, you haven't defined "winning" and "losing".… important concepts in war, dontcha think?

Also, the only choices you could think of were college, Burger King, and the military? What made the military so meaningful? And, aren't Jehovah's Witnesses conscientious objectors? Or do I have that wrong?
I'm not a Jehovah's Witness,

No, not anymore. You went to war after all, didn't you? You broke with the faith a long time ago.

And when you did, you ditched whatever morals and ethics you might have had about your fellow human beings.

But, like I said, enuf of you and your virtue-signalling and self-justification. We know what you are.

Let's talk about "winning" and "losing", shall we?

At one point, you said Russians didn't know how to fight wars because too many of them got killed. You said that the goal of war was to kill as many of the enemy as possible. Then you turned around and posted that despite America killing far more Vietnamese than Americans were killed, and destroying vast amounts of real estate, Americans "lost".

Seems contradictory.

So how do you define "winning" and "losing"?

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

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Sunday, December 18, 2022 12:42 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

That's not what she did. She's calling out Second for being an entity of hate.

Second didn't serve in the military anyhow. Nothing about his online persona is real.

The Russians blame their difficulties on the US and US allies, but Canadians prosper despite their nearness to the US. Canadians are four times richer than the average Russian and Canada has an economy bigger than Russia's, yet Canada is right next to the US. There is something wrong with Russia that fills it with angry poor white trash who are unsuccessful.
https://www.worlddata.info/country-comparison.php?country1=CAN&cou
ntry2=RUS

Finland shares a border with Russia and yet Finns are four times richer than Russians, just like the Canadians! Again, Russia's difficulties are caused by Russians, not the Finns. By the way, Russia has been threatening to nuke Finland if it joins NATO, which shows why Russians have trouble. The stupid belligerency of Russians has done Russians no good.
https://www.worlddata.info/country-comparison.php?country1=FIN&cou
ntry2=RUS

This is the 50th anniversary of stupid belligerency by a Republican President. At the time, all the Republicans I knew approved of this stupidity:

50 years ago, it was one of the heaviest bombardments in history aimed at bombing into submission a determined opponent that, despite being vastly outgunned, had withstood everything the world’s most formidable war machine could throw at it.

Operation Linebacker II saw more than 200 American B-52 bombers fly 730 sorties and drop over 20,000 tons of bombs on North Vietnam over a period of 12 days in December 1972, in a brutal assault aimed at shaking the Vietnamese “to their core,” in the words of then US national security adviser Henry Kissinger.

“They’re going to be so god damned surprised,” US President Richard Nixon replied to Kissinger on December 17, the eve of the mission.

In what would become known as “the Christmas bombings” in America and “the 11 days and nights” in Vietnam (no bombing took place on Christmas day), swathes of Hanoi were obliterated.

An estimated 1,600 Vietnamese were killed amid some of the most harrowing scenes of the conflict, in an operation likened by some to the Hamburg raids of World War II for the sheer scale of the destruction and civilian death toll.

The devastating losses were not all one way. At the same time, the United States Air Force sustained losses that today would seem unfathomable. Fifteen B-52s – the pride of America’s fleet – were shot down, six in one day alone, and 33 airmen lost.

Tragically, some believe all these deaths were largely in vain, with historians to this day debating the extent of the operation’s influence on the wider conflict.

In the aftermath of the operation, both sides claimed to have come out on top – Washington claiming it brought the Vietnamese back to the table for peace talks and Hanoi painting it as a heroic act of resistance in which it took everything its foe had and still remained standing.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/17/asia/operation-linebacker-ii-50th-anniv
ersary-intl-hnk-ml-dst/index.html

Like Nixon bombing Vietnam, Putin can bomb Ukraine but he won't win. Just like Nixon and his supporters in Texas, Putin and his supporters are too morally bankrupted by their feelings of false superiority and their highly emotional grievances against Democrats to know Putin is doing the wrong thing for Russia.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, December 18, 2022 12:54 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

So how do you define "winning" and "losing"?

Winning for Russia would be for it to leave Ukraine and for Russians to emulate Canadians by going back to work and getting as rich as Canadians. Losing would be for Russians to keep blaming the US and its allies for Russia's problems. Canadians do well despite the US being next door. The US is NOT an existential threat to either Canada or Russia, but Russians can't seem to understand that. Russia could do as well or better than Canada, but Russians' stupid belligerency and a false sense of superiority are preventing that.

https://www.worlddata.info/country-comparison.php?country1=CAN&cou
ntry2=RUS

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, December 18, 2022 1:04 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

So how do you define "winning" and "losing"?
Winning for Russia would be for it to leave Ukraine and for Russians to emulate Canadians by going back to work and getting as rich as Canadians. Losing would be for Russians to keep blaming the US and its allies for Russia's problems. Canadians do well despite the US being next door. The US is NOT an existential threat to either Canada or Russia, but Russians can't seem to understand that. Russia could do as well or better than Canada, but Russians' stupid belligerency and a false sense of superiority are preventing that.

https://www.worlddata.info/country-comparison.php?country1=CAN&cou
ntry2=RUS

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Evading the question, I see!
I'm not asking how "Russia" in your not-so-humble-opinion could "win" in the overall sense, I'm asking about armed conflict: what, for you, defines "winning" a war, and "losing" a war? After all, you claim to have fought in one, you seem to have pretty intense opinions about it and you've used the term often enough when posting about war, you must have SOME idea what you're posting about.

Or maybe you don't!

Well, show us that you have a clue about your own posts. Put your thinking cap on, and come up with a definition.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

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Sunday, December 18, 2022 1:10 PM

THG

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

So how do you define "winning" and "losing"?
Winning for Russia would be for it to leave Ukraine and for Russians to emulate Canadians by going back to work and getting as rich as Canadians. Losing would be for Russians to keep blaming the US and its allies for Russia's problems. Canadians do well despite the US being next door. The US is NOT an existential threat to either Canada or Russia, but Russians can't seem to understand that. Russia could do as well or better than Canada, but Russians' stupid belligerency and a false sense of superiority are preventing that.

https://www.worlddata.info/country-comparison.php?country1=CAN&cou
ntry2=RUS

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Evading the question, I see!
I'm not asking how "Russia" in your not-so-humble-opinion could "win" in the overall sense, I'm asking about armed conflict: what, for you, defines "winning" a war, and "losing" a war? After all, you've used the term often enough when posting about war, you must have SOME idea what you're posting about.

Or maybe you don't!

Well, show us that you have a clue about your own posts. Put your thinking cap on, and come up with a definition.

Here's a clear indicator that the war is lost. Told you so comrade.

T

RUSSIAN PUPPET SAYS WAR IS LOST!

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Sunday, December 18, 2022 1:51 PM

Nah.

If NATO/EU/Biden* Admin want to win this war they started, they need to stop being pussies by funding it with your money and declare war on Russia instead of sending Ukrainians in to die for them.

--------------------------------------------------

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Sunday, December 18, 2022 1:56 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

OMFG, you actully BELIEVE this shit?

I honestly didnt have the patience to listen to the whole thing. Ho-hum about HIMARS. I have one word about that: drones.

And mortars??? Seriously??? Notoriously inaccurate and, worse, very short range. Kiev troops would have to get VERY close to Russian troops to use them, and I doubt they would survive Russia's longer range weapons to get there.

But it was at the Russian casualty figures where I stopped listening. Eveyone knows that that 100,000+ figure that gets repeated over and over a psyops/disinfo.

I do have ??? about how Russia is waging this war, but your video addresses none of them.

Meanwhile, maybe you should listen to this guy: Brian Berletic. He joined the Marines when he was 17, and worked as an electro-optical ordnance repairman. He now works in Thailand as an industrial design engineer, https://www.greanvillepost.com/2020/10/29/who-is-tony-cartalucci/ and he knows more about logistics and weapons than some yahoo who does "re-enactments"!

So listen and learn something (for a change)

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

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Sunday, December 18, 2022 5:21 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

So how do you define "winning" and "losing"?
Winning for Russia would be for it to leave Ukraine and for Russians to emulate Canadians by going back to work and getting as rich as Canadians. Losing would be for Russians to keep blaming the US and its allies for Russia's problems. Canadians do well despite the US being next door. The US is NOT an existential threat to either Canada or Russia, but Russians can't seem to understand that. Russia could do as well or better than Canada, but Russians' stupid belligerency and a false sense of superiority are preventing that.

https://www.worlddata.info/country-comparison.php?country1=CAN&cou
ntry2=RUS

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Evading the question, I see!
I'm not asking how "Russia" in your not-so-humble-opinion could "win" in the overall sense, I'm asking about armed conflict: what, for you, defines "winning" a war, and "losing" a war? After all, you claim to have fought in one, you seem to have pretty intense opinions about it and you've used the term often enough when posting about war, you must have SOME idea what you're posting about.

Or maybe you don't!

Well, show us that you have a clue about your own posts. Put your thinking cap on, and come up with a definition.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

OK, SECOND, I'll make it easy for you: Whether you "win" a war or "lose" a war depends on whether you met your objectives.

What were our objectives in Vietnam?

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

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Monday, December 19, 2022 3:01 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

I guess that wasn't enough of a hint.

Well, I'll leave you to it while I go do other things. I hope you come back with an answer.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

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Monday, December 19, 2022 7:26 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Chechen Warlord Who Does Putin’s Dirty Work in Ukraine

Ramzan Kadyrov, once an anti-Russian rebel, now gets billions from Moscow and plays a key role in the war

Thomas Grove in Kyiv and Evan Gershkovich in Moscow
13–16 minutes

From The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 16, 2022
https://www.wsj.com/articles/chechen-warlord-kadyrov-putin-dirty-work-
ukraine-11671204557?mod=djemalertNEWS

At the start of the war in Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin ordered Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov to occupy Kyiv’s government quarters and assassinate the Ukrainian president, Ukrainian intelligence and security officials allege.

When Mr. Putin needed more soldiers on fast-crumbling front lines, the warlord rounded up thousands of men, sometimes forcibly, and sent them in, according to Chechen residents.

Now, following successive Russian retreats, Mr. Kadyrov’s men are disciplining dejected Russian troops at the front and rooting out alleged spies in occupied Ukrainian territories — sometimes resorting to torture, Ukrainian officials and human-rights organizations say.

Since the start of the invasion, Mr. Putin has relied on ranks of military officers, businessmen and rogue actors to deliver what the Kremlin needs most to sustain its prolonged offensive: money, training and manpower.

One of the most loyal figures in the president’s war effort has been Mr. Kadyrov, who has publicly called himself Mr. Putin’s foot soldier.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied the Russian leader ordered the Chechen warlord to assassinate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, calling the assertion “absolutely absurd, baseless and false.” Mr. Kadyrov didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Putin has tapped Russia’s vast budget over decades to prop up Mr. Kadyrov, according to documents and interviews with Ukrainian officials and people close to the Kremlin. Now, the 46-year-old Chechen warlord is straining to deliver on the Russian leader’s critical wartime demands.

The relationship — one of the most important in Russia — demonstrates the risks and rewards that come with helping prop up Mr. Putin’s system.

Mr. Kadyrov serves as a Kremlin enforcer in Chechnya, a restive republic in Russia’s North Caucasus. For nearly 20 years, Moscow has sent him billions of dollars, which he has used to rule his native region as a personal fief with his own highly trained private army.

Continued government funding buttresses Mr. Kadyrov’s grip on power in the predominantly Muslim region, where residents and analysts say he is hated by many.

“Putin’s support and money turned Kadyrov from a zero to a hero, so to speak, but also made him vulnerable and fully dependent,” said Yekaterina Sokirianskaya, a longtime expert on Chechnya formerly with the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank that works to prevent wars. “That’s at the center of everything he’s doing right now.”

The Chechen leader has a rare direct line to Mr. Putin, with the president contacting Mr. Kadyrov personally rather than through aides as with Russia’s other governors, according to a former Kremlin official and another person close to the Kremlin.

For continuing his role in the war — which he makes sure to document extensively on social media — Mr. Kadyrov has said that Chechnya deserves hundreds of billions of rubles in new investments.

The Russian president “appreciates Kadyrov’s managerial qualities,” said Kremlin spokesman Mr. Peskov, but said that their “relationship does not go beyond that of head of state and head of a subject.”

Mr. Peskov said Messrs. Putin and Kadyrov regularly speak about the war effort, noting that two Chechen battalions are on the front lines.

Political analysts say Mr. Kadyrov is trying to undermine others with whom he is now competing for Kremlin cash. He has become a leading critic of the Russian Defense Ministry, blaming at least one general publicly by name for battlefield failures — something that could subject the average Russian citizen to years in prison.

The making of a warlord

Before Mr. Putin came to power, Mr. Kadyrov and the Kremlin were on opposite sides. The Chechen and his father Akhmat fought with separatist rebels against the Russians in the first Chechen war in the 1990s before switching sides and joining Moscow to take control in 2000.

After Mr. Kadyrov’s father was assassinated in a bomb blast in 2004, Mr. Putin summoned the track-suit-wearing Mr. Kadyrov, then 27, to the Kremlin to show his support. When Mr. Kadyrov turned 30, he took his father’s place as head of Chechnya.

The U.S. sanctioned Mr. Kadyrov in 2017 and 2020 for his troops’ alleged human-rights violations at home, where he has cracked down on remaining separatists and those who speak out against him. The U.S. said his forces were implicated in the 2015 murder of prominent Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who was shot to death only steps away from the Kremlin. In September the U.S. sanctioned him again for facilitating Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The Kremlin pays about $6.5 billion into Chechnya’s coffers every year, Mr. Kadyrov said in a public statement he posted on Telegram, a messenger app where he has been a prolific presence, frequently starring in his own videos to communicate directly to the public. According to Russian budget data, the Kremlin provides about 80% of the region’s funds.

Mr. Peskov said every Russian region receives money from Moscow and that the amount of subsidies to Chechnya varies every year.

The U.S. Treasury Department said, in announcing its latest round of sanctions, that “Kadyrov has amassed extreme wealth as a result of his close relationship to Vladimir Putin,” noting that he owns “a home in the United Arab Emirates, a private zoo, expensive private vehicles, and a lavish slush fund.”

The Chechen leader has zealously pushed Mr. Putin’s agenda of antiliberal values in the region, detaining and torturing local gay and transgender people, according to accounts by local residents and human-rights activists, and he has made threats against Russia’s urban elites who protest the war. Mr. Kadyrov has denied that Chechnya has LGBT people at all.

With the Kremlin’s blessing, he built his own army — known informally as the Kadyrovites — to ward off his enemies at home and contribute to Mr. Putin’s military efforts abroad.

The Kadyrovites fought for the Kremlin in its five-day war in Georgia in 2008, deployed to Ukraine in 2014 to help Mr. Putin take Crimea and went to Syria two years later to hold down villages taken by the Syrian government.

Russian security elites criticize Mr. Kadyrov for playing by his own rules but understand they are powerless to challenge him, said analysts including Mark Galleotti, principal director of London-based consulting firm Mayak Intelligence, who has written extensively on Chechnya and its leader.

Three weeks before the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Putin called him to Moscow to strategize, according to Ukrainian intelligence officials. He charged the Chechen with taking Kyiv and killing the Ukrainian president, they said.

In the following days, Mr. Kadyrov appeared confident. “Mr. Zelensky, the hour has come when the clown show comes to an end,” he wrote on his Telegram channel on Feb. 14, as his troops were training for the mission in neighboring Belarus.

The alleged hit job on the president, a high-profile and coveted task, was “a kind of bonus they set forward for Kadyrov,” said Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council.

Going to war

Mr. Kadyrov’s troops entered Ukraine on Feb. 25, the day after the invasion, in three columns of heavily armed personnel carriers. In a video intercepted by Ukrainian intelligence and viewed by The Wall Street Journal, a top official loyal to Mr. Kadyrov relayed the start of the mission back to their boss.

“The time is exactly 00:00. We’re starting to move,” he told Mr. Kadyrov. “More than 1,500 personnel, the best special units, best fighters,” the officer added.

Troops loyal to Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov have posted prolifically on social media throughout the war, sharing clips of shooting, the aftermath of battles and direct-to-camera interviews, often edited together and set to music.

For days, Mr. Kadyrov broadcast videos of the attacks on his personal Telegram channel, where he has more than three million followers, in camouflage and night vision goggles, heavy machine guns and sniper rifles.

But like other Russian units across the front line, the Chechens were met with harsh resistance. The first of their three groups was almost totally destroyed on the outskirts of Kyiv. The other two groups halted their advance to regroup, never making it to the capital.

The unsuccessful effort turned out to be a harbinger of a much larger challenge for Mr. Putin — and Mr. Kadyrov. Mr. Zelensky not only survived but thrived.

With the military operation flailing, Mr. Kadyrov turned to his people for a shadow mobilization.

Authorities and religious leaders visited public places like videogame clubs and gyms, offering up to 300,000 rubles, or about $4,600, a month to go to war, said a 35-year-old former resident of Chechnya who fled in August, several of whose neighbors and friends signed up to fight.

Mr. Kadyrov’s security forces pressed the most vulnerable into service — men with debts, criminal records or suspected of being gay, according to local residents and human-rights advocates.

One 37-year-old Chechen, who had been detained after forwarding anti-Kadyrov messages to a WhatsApp group, said he was asked by his parole officer if he wanted to fight in Ukraine. When he refused, the officer said he would go back to prison if he didn’t report to a nearby military base. Instead, the man, who had already seen two neighbors return from the war in body bags, went into hiding.

“I didn’t live through two wars against Moscow to go and die for Putin in Ukraine,” he said.

The need for manpower only grew. By mid-June, tens of thousands of Russian troops had been killed, according to Western intelligence estimates, although Moscow has disputed those figures.

Later that month, Mr. Kadyrov stepped up his efforts again, announcing the formation of four new battalions. He cracked down on his own population, according to local residents and human-rights advocates, forcing thousands of men to the front. He recruited broadly from other Russian areas, flying in thousands with similar offers of pay and training. Mr. Kadyrov said he was paying for his operations, including arms and logistics. Exactly how much he has spent hasn’t been disclosed.

Flashy videos on Telegram channels Mr. Kadyrov controls showed new recruits at his training center in the town of Gudermes shooting at targets and carrying out urban warfare in re-creations of neighborhoods like those in Ukraine.

Discipline on the front

Mr. Putin launched in September what he called a partial mobilization of Russian fighting-age men to firm up defensive lines that had collapsed in the northeast of the country.

The influx of poorly trained forces has helped slow Ukrainian advances in parts of the battlefield. Mr. Kadyrov’s troops have taken on a new role of disciplining soldiers and stopping them from deserting — under the fear of violence — videos and documents show.

“After the mass desertion of the Russian occupiers,” said a Ukrainian military intelligence official in an interview, “Russia will increase the presence of Kadyrovites on the fronts where they will form the second and third lines of defense and keep people in place.”

As Russia drew down forces in Kherson, pulling its more experienced troops and equipment across the Dnipro River, mobilized soldiers were left behind, residents said — along with Chechen units who made sure those mobilized soldiers didn’t flee.

A video circulating on anti-Kadyrov Chechen Telegram channels showed an instance of one of Mr. Kadyrov’s soldiers in a trench directing Russian units from behind the front line. As the soldiers bolt from the battlefield, he demands an explanation from one, who tells him their position can’t hold up against artillery.

Throughout the conflict, Mr. Kadyrov’s soldiers have been sent to towns and cities occupied by Russia, including Bucha outside Kyiv and the Donbas cities of Mariupol and Severodonetsk. There they hunted for Ukrainian spies or partisans, in some cases going from apartment to apartment, interrogating, detaining and torturing residents and searching homes, said Ukrainian officials and human-rights advocates.

Ukrainians sometimes use a verb “to kadyrov” to describe the beatings of inmates with large wooden poles.

“Kadyrov’s men do the cleanup operations once the fighting is done,” said Maria Davidsson, director of a Swedish rights group for Chechen émigrés. “They do the dirtiest work, the torture.”

In a gruesome video posted widely on social media earlier this summer, a member of Mr. Kadyrov’s troops in Severodonetsk was filmed castrating a Ukrainian prisoner before he was shot, causing an outcry among rights groups.

In September, the wives of pro-Moscow fighters from the Russian-held areas of Donbas lodged an official complaint about Mr. Kadyrov’s men with the head of the Russia-controlled eastern Ukrainian statelet known as the Donetsk People’s Republic. The letter, verified by Ukrainian officials, condemned the violence the Chechens had employed against the fighters, including allegations of rape.

When dissent over Russia’s handling of the war and mobilization recently bubbled into Moscow’s streets, Mr. Kadyrov positioned himself to be helpful there too for Mr. Putin.

In a video released on his behalf in October, one of the Chechen leader’s top allies warned Russian students about protesting the Kremlin or mobilization, saying, “Each of you will answer for desecrating and insulting our country, our anthem, our constitution and our President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.”

Kate Vtorygina in London contributed to this article.

Write to Thomas Grove at thomas.grove@wsj.com and Evan Gershkovich at evan.gershkovich@wsj.com

Appeared in the December 17, 2022, print edition as 'Chechen Chief Does Putin’s Dirty Work'.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/chechen-warlord-kadyrov-putin-dirty-work-
ukraine-11671204557?mod=djemalertNEWS

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, December 19, 2022 7:41 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

OK, SECOND, I'll make it easy for you: Whether you "win" a war or "lose" a war depends on whether you met your objectives.

What were our objectives in Vietnam?

There were too many stated objectives, all of them bogus. The United States bombed South Vietnam and US troops fighting in South Vietnam indicated that the multitude of stated objectives was false and nonsense. If the Vietnam War had been fought sensibly, almost all the US troops would have been in NORTH Vietnam and all the bombings would have been in NORTH Vietnam.

The real objective was to defend the pride of the President of the United States. On the North Vietnamese side, the objective was the same as Ukraine's, survive until a foolish and prideful President, and his successor, and then the successor after him withdraws.

Some politicians claimed the US was fighting North Vietnam to prevent it from attacking the US, but Vietnam did not invade the US after the US withdrew, although that would have been justice. Being a clever and dishonest politician, Putin is claiming he is fighting Ukraine to prevent NATO from invading Russia. For some reason, Putin doesn't talk about how his pride and over-confidence caused him to invade Ukraine.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, December 19, 2022 8:16 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Some politicians claimed the US was fighting North Vietnam to prevent it from attacking the US, but Vietnam did not invade the US after the US withdrew, although that would have been justice. Being a clever and dishonest politician, Putin is claiming he is fighting Ukraine to prevent NATO from invading Russia. For some reason, Putin doesn't talk about how his pride and over-confidence caused him to invade Ukraine.

Oh fuck you dude. All you've been saying since this started is that we're paying for it so Russia doesn't attack the EU and move on to us with weekly reminders that nuclear war is on the table.

If you weren't so drunk off of gargling Biden*'s cum you wouldn't...

Oh... Nevermind. You've been a hypocrite all your life.

--------------------------------------------------

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Monday, December 19, 2022 9:49 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Some politicians claimed the US was fighting North Vietnam to prevent it from attacking the US, but Vietnam did not invade the US after the US withdrew, although that would have been justice. Being a clever and dishonest politician, Putin is claiming he is fighting Ukraine to prevent NATO from invading Russia. For some reason, Putin doesn't talk about how his pride and over-confidence caused him to invade Ukraine.

Oh fuck you dude. All you've been saying since this started is that we're paying for it so Russia doesn't attack the EU and move on to us with weekly reminders that nuclear war is on the table.

If you weren't so drunk off of gargling Biden*'s cum you wouldn't...

Oh... Nevermind. You've been a hypocrite all your life.

Who did the US invade next, after Vietnam? Grenada. Panama. Iraq. Afghanistan. Iraq for a second time. None of those countries were better for having been invaded.

Who did Vietnam invade after Vietnam? Cambodia, where Pol Pot had massacred two million people. That genocide was caused by Nixon's bombing of Cambodia. Cambodia was much better after Vietnam invaded it than after Nixon bombed Cambodia. Do you see the difference, 6ix?

By the way, in places that Russia has invaded, about 100,000,000 people died violently. Wherever Russia goes, people die because Russia makes everything worse. The same old thing is happening in Ukraine and Putin promises to do the same to other countries once he finishes with Ukraine.

6ix, do you see how Russia and the US have a great deal in common when either of those two countries invades other countries?

Cambodian Genocide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide#United_States_bombing

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, December 19, 2022 10:53 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

A Russian state TV host has said the West will be "reduced to Ashes" in a nuclear war should the country find itself losing the conflict in Ukraine.

Rossiya 1 TV host Vladimir Solovyov declared Russia was in a "holy war" against Ukraine and the West as he criticized U.S. President Joe Biden and other world leaders.

Solovyov said: "We live in the latter days. What's happening in Ukraine won't stay in Ukraine. A holy war is underway. We're fighting for the right of mankind to live in its original state, as designed by the Creator."

"Those fools who are trying to fight they aren't fighting against us, they're at war with God. In case of their victory, their end is certain."

"When I say that either we win, or the whole world will be reduced to ashes, this also has another meaning. How can humanity that fights against God continue to exist?"

Solovyov praised Russia as a defender of Christendom, a claim made by supporters of Vladimir Putin who paint the West as degenerate.

Solovyov added: "Look at (Ukrainian President Volodymyr) Zelensky's face. Look at Biden's face, an absolutely deceitful, nasty, scary no-good person."

"He isn't like Trump. Why was Trump out of favor? Because he is totally traditional, at least in some ways. Trump's traditional character provoked hatred."

"If you think about what's happening. It's Satanism. They're purely demonic, you can't put it any other way."

The Russian TV host, who has regularly pushed pro-Kremlin propaganda in the past, then justified the use of nuclear weapons against Western Europe and the U.S. by referencing the Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Solovyov said: "When people are trying to tell me about whether nuclear weapons can be used or not, I will respond to that briefly and clearly, 'do you remember this part of Biblical history?' Sodom and Gomorrah?'"

According to the Bible, God destroyed the two thriving cities due to the evil and wickedness of their populations.

The two cities have been referenced numerous times recently by people who view modern nations as being decadent and moving against God's will.

Newsweek has contacted the Kremlin for comment.

Russian TV hosts have regularly made indirect threats to the West since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine earlier this year.

Earlier this month, Russian state TV hosts on Rossiya 1 joked about invading Western capitals including London and Lisbon.

In the clip, the group discussed a plan for Moscow to seize London, including its soccer clubs and pubs.

"If we reach Lviv (the largest city in western Ukraine) it will be ours. If we reach Lisbon and London, they will be ours," said one Kremlin propagandist.

https://www.newsweek.com/russian-state-tv-host-says-west-will-reduced-
ashes-nuclear-war-1767985

When Russians run their mouths about nuclear weapons it’s because they have reached the end of the rope and all they’ve got left is scare tactics.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, December 19, 2022 1:57 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Why did the Russian plan fail? Part of the blame rests with Russia’s FSB intelligence service, which had falsely reported that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government had little public support and was likely to crack under pressure. But the biggest problem appears to be Putin himself.

In the war’s early days, Western intelligence officials and independent experts quickly concluded that the Russian president’s stated belief in the idea that Ukraine was a fake country, rightfully part of Russia, was genuine. This blinded him to the motivating power of Ukrainian nationalism for its leadership, military, and population.

“He actually really thought this would be a ‘special military operation’: They would be done in a few days, and it wouldn’t be a real war,” Michael Kofman, director of Russian studies at the CNA think tank, told me in March.

In recent months, our understanding of the Russian failures has only grown. This month, researchers at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a British think tank, published a report on the war based on a tranche of captured Russian orders provided by the Ukrainian government. “These plans,” RUSI finds, “were drawn up by a very small group of officials and the intent was directed by Putin.” Most of the Russian government was kept in the dark; there were no contingency plans in case things went wrong.

“The plan itself [never] envisaged any outcome other than its own success,” the RUSI researchers conclude.

These errors were a predictable consequence of the structure of Putin’s regime.

In a prescient prewar analysis published in Foreign Affairs, political scientists Seva Gunitsky and Adam Casey argue, “If he makes a miscalculation and launches a major invasion, it will likely be because of the personalist features of his regime” — meaning the degree to which power has been consolidated in the hands of one man. Personalism, they argue, exacerbates a fundamental tendency of authoritarian states toward policy miscalculations.

“Leaders suppress dissent, punish free expression, encourage personal loyalty, and divide their security agencies. They therefore struggle to understand both how their people feel and what other states are planning,” Gunitsky and Casey note.

The course of the war bore out this general theory. Because Putin has surrounded himself with cronies and yes-men, there was no one in the Russian government who was willing to criticize the invasion plan in any serious way — let alone challenge the president’s underlying theories of the Ukrainian state.

Of course, war is unpredictable. But from the vantage point of the present, it appears that Russia has fallen into a classic authoritarian trap — blundering its way into a policy disaster due to a system that insulated its leadership from reality.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2022/12/19/23453073/2022-year-
democracy-russia-ukraine-china-iran-america-brazil

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, December 19, 2022 2:10 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Bully in the Bubble (written before the War)

By Adam E. Casey and Seva Gunitsky, February 4, 2022
11–14 minutes

When Western leaders and observers speculate about what will happen to Ukraine, they usually focus on one man: Russian President Vladimir Putin. And for good reason. Under Putin, Russia has increasingly become a personalist regime—an authoritarian system in which power is concentrated in a single individual rather than in a ruling party or a military elite. A similar trend has emerged in China under Xi Jinping, in Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and in Venezuela under Nicolás Maduro. Around the world, personalism is on the rise.

Personalist regimes are incredibly opaque. They lack channels of open deliberation and formal institutional procedures, functioning instead through interpersonal relationships and unofficial arrangements. Putin, for example, prefers to deliberate during small, casual meetings and is so obsessed with secrecy that he doesn’t use a cell phone. This makes it extremely difficult for analysts to understand his policymaking patterns.

But personalist systems have common characteristics that shape how their leaders operate, and studying them can help observers understand what drives strongman behavior — including Putin’s. Personalist dictators, for instance, face fewer checks on their power than do other heads of state. They are harder to punish when their foreign policy decisions fail. And critically, they choose their circle of advisers based on loyalty rather than competence, surrounding themselves by scared and sycophantic underlings who feed them limited, biased, self-censored, and overly optimistic information.

For Kyiv, this is cold comfort. Because personalist rulers are more insulated from the consequences of their actions, they can afford to be more violent and less risk averse than other kinds of autocrats. To repress domestic opposition and keep power, they staff their regimes with devotees from the military and the security services who are prone to aggression and whose hostile outlook begins to permeate foreign policy decision-making. As these courtiers compete for the ruler’s attention, they may leave out inconvenient facts and offer belligerent, eye-catching plans for how to deal with what they see as threats.

That doesn’t mean more violence in Ukraine is preordained. In the past, Putin has been pragmatic and sensitive to war’s costs. But the Russian president’s circle of trust has consolidated over time, insulating him from information that does not fit with his prior beliefs. His minions share his anger toward the West, and he faces no serious internal constraints. The future of Ukraine may hinge on a man ensconced in a bubble that both feeds his aggression and shields him from its consequences.

SHOOTING THE MESSENGER

Authoritarian states are bedeviled by an inherent contradiction. To stay in power, autocrats desperately seek reliable information on the attitudes of their citizens, elite rivals, and foreign threats. But to avoid opposition, they establish political systems that make quality data exceptionally hard to obtain. Leaders suppress dissent, punish free expression, encourage personal loyalty, and divide their security agencies. They therefore struggle to understand both how their people feel and what other states are planning.

In a personalist autocracy, these problems are even worse. Government officials not only struggle to obtain factual information; they also face strong personal incentives to censor what they find. Consider, for instance, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s behavior before the 2003 Iraq war. Iraqi government records captured by the United States show that he badly underestimated the probability of a U.S. invasion and, in the event of one, expected his troops to put up much greater resistance. That is not because his advisers were (entirely) blind to reality. It is because his underlings — fearful of confronting a dictator famous for violent purges — never challenged his rosy assessments. As the political scientist David Lake has argued, “Saddam was insulated in a cocoon in which little adverse information got through to him and few subordinates dared challenge his preconceived beliefs.”

The Iraq war also, of course, illustrates that democracies can ignore information and make miscalculations, as the Bush administration did by disregarding intelligence that showed Baghdad didn’t have WMDs. But although information problems are not unique to personalist regimes, their structure greatly exacerbates the issue. There is a reason, for instance, why personalist leaders have meek advisers. For strongmen, the consequences of losing power can be extreme — prison, exile, or death — and so they tend to surround themselves by sycophants. Their governing bodies can therefore descend into groupthink, and policy can lock onto a single path. This tendency is intensified by the fact that long-standing rulers become more confident in their abilities over time, ignoring or quashing opposition.

Putin’s inner circle is almost entirely made up by members of his loyalist, hawkish security services.

Perhaps no leader of a major power illustrates these patterns better than Putin. His advisers once held a range of perspectives, especially early during the first decade of this century, when he attempted to position the Kremlin as a partner to the United States and Europe. But over time, his security agencies came to dominate Putin’s attention, especially as he grew disappointed with the West. Now, Putin’s inner circle is almost entirely made up of the siloviki — members of his loyalist, hawkish security services. The FSB, Russia’s successor to the KGB, is playing an increasingly visible role in foreign relations. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, by contrast, is now sometimes left out of decisions altogether.

The result is a dangerous feedback loop. By most accounts, the president’s advisers uniformly see the West as a grave security threat to Russia, which encourages Putin to adopt an increasingly hostile stance. This in turn provokes the United States and Europe to confront Russia, which only increases the influence of Putin’s hawks by justifying their pessimistic and often paranoid outlook. Partly as a result, Russian foreign policy has grown more belligerent over time.

This aggression has yielded territorial victories, most famously the annexation of Crimea in 2014. But it has also left Putin significantly more isolated. Russian cooperation with the United States and Europe has, of course, stalled, but its work with India and Japan has similarly stagnated. Moscow has forged a growing partnership with China, but this relationship is likely to make Putin uneasy. Rather than bringing central and eastern Europe back under Moscow’s sway, the president’s gambit in Ukraine has breathed new life into NATO. If Putin’s ultimate goal is to transform the global order to fit Russia’s ambitions, he appears to have failed.

In more rigorously institutionalized states, there would be separate groups or agencies powerful enough to tell leaders when their aggression is backfiring. Yet like many personalized regimes, the Russian government lacks any real checks and balances - or even a way to thoroughly assess the data it gathers. As the Putin expert Brian Taylor has noted, Russia has no system to create “collective judgments” from its multiple intelligence services, as is done with the National Intelligence Estimates in the United States.

TEMPTING FATE

There are notable differences between Putin and most personalist leaders. Scholars have argued that strongmen tend to be particularly aggressive and risk-acceptant because they come to power through violent means, such as coups and revolutions. Putin, however, came to power by appointment in 1999. He is also not as rash as other personalist dictators, such as Saddam, who invaded Kuwait despite ample evidence that doing so would provoke a powerful international response. Although the Russian president is certainly willing to use military force if it seems necessary or beneficial, as he did in Chechnya, Georgia, Moldova, Syria, Ukraine, and most recently, Kazakhstan, he has never attempted to conquer an entire country.

But not all personalist states are alike. Indeed, part of what makes personalist regimes distinct from other autocracies is that their shape and character depend heavily on one individual, and today’s Russia clearly fits that criterion. A single person — Putin — acts as the ultimate arbiter of inter-elite disputes. He makes all foreign policy decisions. No group of other Russian officials has the capacity to consistently constrain him. Instead, rival elites spend their time jockeying for positions in his inner circle — sometimes succeeding, and sometimes being cast out. Putin, for example, jettisoned former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev after his personal corruption (and tendency to sleep during Putin’s speeches) became too embarrassing to tolerate.

Personalism may give Putin extraordinary latitude within Russia. But if he does decide to invade Ukraine, this mode of governance will ultimately hold him back. Research shows that the information problems created by personalism can hamper a country’s performance on the battlefield and distort its leader’s perception of foreign threats. The security threats Putin sees in Ukraine, for instance, are shaped by his inner circle’s pervasive belief that the West lurks behind every Color Revolution. As a result, the president may discount the degree of genuine opposition to Moscow’s actions in former Soviet states. In fact, at the end of January, U.S. spy agencies said that Putin is underestimating the costs of invading Ukraine because his advisers are withholding information about the depth of local Ukrainian opposition to Russia and, relatedly, the strength of Ukraine’s resistance. They alleged that the president “is being misinformed by his own circle of advisers, who appear unwilling to confront him with the full consequences of military action.” Although it is hard to separate fact from speculation in intelligence reports, this problem is a common feature of personalist systems.

For Putin, the consequences of miscalculating in Ukraine could be grim. Although the president’s regime can shelter him from the repercussions of mistakes, if the Kremlin launches a major invasion and the war goes south, it will be hard for him to avoid feeling the impact. Putin will not only be more isolated and dependent on Beijing; he will also face a festering insurgency that will grow unpopular at home. He would not be the first Russian leader damaged by such a quagmire. During the 1980s, the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan to try to keep Kabul firmly in its camp, and its eventual failure played a key role in undermining public trust in the system.

It is still unclear if Putin will slip up. Although Russia continues to mass forces on Ukraine’s borders, no one knows if the president will ultimately attack the country or, if he does, just how far he will go. Intelligence reports suggest Putin has not yet made up his mind, and his public statements contain mixed messages. But if he makes a miscalculation and launches a major invasion, it will likely be because of the personalist features of his regime. It will then fall on Kyiv and its partners to check him, because there is no one in Russia who will.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/2022-02-04/
bully-bubble

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, December 19, 2022 3:16 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

OK, SECOND, I'll make it easy for you: Whether you "win" a war or "lose" a war depends on whether you met your objectives.
What were our objectives in Vietnam?

SECOND: There were too many stated objectives, all of them bogus.

Well! Amazingly, we agree!

Quote:
SECOND: The United States bombed South Vietnam and US troops fighting in South Vietnam indicated that the multitude of stated objectives was false and nonsense. If the Vietnam War had been fought sensibly, almost all the US troops would have been in NORTH Vietnam and all the bombings would have been in NORTH Vietnam.

The real objective was to defend the pride of the President of the United States. On the North Vietnamese side, the objective was the same as Ukraine's, survive until a foolish and prideful President, and his successor, and then the successor after him withdraws.

Some politicians claimed the US was fighting North Vietnam to prevent it from attacking the US, but Vietnam did not invade the US after the US withdrew, although that would have been justice.

I think there's more to it than Presidential pride. SOMEBODY went thru the trouble of faking one "attack" on a USA warship to justify ramping up the war. (Gulf of Tonkin incident)

None of the STATED objectives made sense, if we can figure out who was at the heart of this partial fakery we might be able to deduce the actual motivation.

Going on a tangent, it was like the 2nd Gulf War. ALL of the "reasons" ...9-11! Yellowcake! Aluminum tubes! GWOT! Nuclear weapons! ....every single one was provably falsified. But there WAS a reason to destroy Iraq, it just wasn't obvious.

Quote:
SECOND Being a clever and dishonest politician, Putin is claiming he is fighting Ukraine to prevent NATO from invading Russia. For some reason, Putin doesn't talk about how his pride and over-confidence caused him to invade Ukraine.

Well, maybe because NATO in Ukraine IS the real reason. After all, USA policy papers' goals are stated as the destruction of Russia. YOUR stated goal is the destruction of Russia. Why would Putin not take that seriously? And Crimea was part of that plan.

Putin's brought it up many times, beginning with the Munich Security Conference all the way back in 2007, so it's not like this is a convenient reason he just pulled out of his ass yesterday.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

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Monday, December 19, 2022 5:26 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Kremlin: "US & Russia On The Brink Of A Direct Clash" In Ukraine
Monday, Dec 19, 2022 - 12:40 PM

The Kremlin is urgently calling on Washington to avoid further escalation over its support to Ukraine's military, on the same day that President Vladimir Putin made a rare state visit to neighboring Belarus, amid growing fears that Belarusian armed forces could enter the fighting in Ukraine.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Monday that the United States' "dangerous and short-sighted policy" has put it "on the brink of a direct clash" with Moscow, according to state media reports.

"It is the US’ desire to maintain American hegemony at all costs… as well as its arrogant unwillingness to engage in a serious dialogue on security guarantees" that led to the current crisis, she continued, in reference to Moscow's last February pre-invasion appeal for "guarantees" that Ukraine would not enter NATO.

State media described the sharp words as a necessary reaction to US State Department Spokesman Ned Price's recently placing sole blame on Moscow for the rapid deterioration in US-Russia relations. Price had characterized the current state of relations as "unstable and unpredictable".

Zakharova continued in the Monday remarks: "After the high-profile fiasco in Afghanistan, America is increasingly drawn into a new conflict, not only supporting the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev financially and with weapons, but also increasing its military presence on the ground." While not specifying the precise accusation regarding a US "presence on the ground" - this could be a reference to recent widespread reporting that US intelligence has expanded its role in helping the Ukrainians, especially with things like targeting.

"This is a dangerous and short-sighted policy that puts the US and Russia on the brink of a direct clash," the FM spokesperson said further. "For its part, Moscow urges the Joe Biden administration to soberly assess the situation and not to unleash a spiral of dangerous escalation. We hope that they will hear us in Washington, though there is no reason for optimism so far."

This month has witnessed multiple bombshell revelations concerning the Pentagon and US intelligence's deepening role in Ukraine, including the following:

*The White House is mulling the transfer of Patriot missiles to Ukraine.

*The Pentagon is expanding its "on the ground" program of small troop units seeking to monitor and account for US arms transfers.

*Russia is increasingly coming up against US-supplied HIMARS missiles on the battlefield.

*The US has sent an infantry company to Estonia, close to the Russian border for joint drills.

*Calls have grown louder for NATO to "close the skies" over Ukraine, including with the potential transfer of warplanes.

*US intelligence has been assisting Ukrainians with targeting Russian generals.

*The White House has indicated it believes Ukraine's forces are capable of retaking Crimea, but which would risk a nuclear response.

*Ukraine has increased high-risk attacks inside Russian territory.

Ukraine has also grown bolder in showing off its new American-supplied toys...

All of this and more strongly suggests to two sides are indeed inching toward direct showdown and clash, also as there still appears no appetite for so much as a plan even remotely on the horizon to get Kiev officials to the ceasefire negotiating table with Russia.

As for the ongoing speculation that Belarusian forces could enter the Ukraine conflict in support of Russia, top Russian officials are denying this "option"... for now at least.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

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Monday, December 19, 2022 5:26 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Quote:
SECOND Being a clever and dishonest politician, Putin is claiming he is fighting Ukraine to prevent NATO from invading Russia. For some reason, Putin doesn't talk about how his pride and over-confidence caused him to invade Ukraine.
Well, maybe because NATO in Ukraine IS the real reason. After all, USA policy papers' goals are stated as the destruction of Russia. YOUR stated goal is the destruction of Russia. Why would Putin not take that seriously? And Crimea was part of that plan.

Putin's brought it up many times, beginning with the Munich Security Conference all the way back in 2007, so it's not like this is a convenient reason he just pulled out of his ass yesterday.

Are you kidding? Russians have displayed pathological behavior for many years. I will quote a Russian describing his mental illness:

Rossiya 1 TV host Vladimir Solovyov declared Russia was in a "holy war" against Ukraine and the West as he criticized U.S. President Joe Biden and other world leaders.

Solovyov said: "We live in the latter days. What's happening in Ukraine won't stay in Ukraine. A holy war is underway. We're fighting for the right of mankind to live in its original state, as designed by the Creator."

"Those fools who are trying to fight they aren't fighting against us, they're at war with God. In case of their victory, their end is certain."

"When I say that either we win, or the whole world will be reduced to ashes, this also has another meaning. How can humanity that fights against God continue to exist?"

Solovyov praised Russia as a defender of Christendom, a claim made by supporters of Vladimir Putin who paint the West as degenerate.

Solovyov added: "Look at (Ukrainian President Volodymyr) Zelensky's face. Look at Biden's face, an absolutely deceitful, nasty, scary no-good person."

"He isn't like Trump. Why was Trump out of favor? Because he is totally traditional, at least in some ways. Trump's traditional character provoked hatred."

"If you think about what's happening. It's Satanism. They're purely demonic, you can't put it any other way."

https://www.newsweek.com/russian-state-tv-host-says-west-will-reduced-
ashes-nuclear-war-1767985

Signym, that TV host has not been kicked off the air despite what he said. There must be many Russians who don't see his mental illness as an illness because they share his ill.

Signym, that TV host is not alone in his mental illness. State media’s desperation to control the narrative of the war is palpable, with propagandists seemingly competing for the most outrageous theory on what would happen if Russia loses the war. Head of RT Margarita Simonyan previously alleged that the Russians would end up in Western concentration camps or be turned into mindless “yahoos,” while Professor Dmitry Evstafiev predicted that they would be caged and displayed alongside animals at the zoo.

“What will happen if the West is allowed to build the kind of a world it wants to create? What kind of world will it be? Can a normal person live in this world?,” political scientist Sergey Mikheyev lamented on Solovyov’s show. “Humans will turn into non-humans... humanity as a whole will be eradicated... What is ahead of us is the forced replacement of people with robots and robotization of the people… If we don’t confront the West, utter horror will follow, it will be a catastrophe.”

In an apparent effort to strengthen Russia’s ideological standing and eliminate foreign influence, Vitaly Tretyakov, dean of Moscow State University’s School of Television, pushed for Russia’s liberals to be forced into publicly denouncing their written criticism of the Soviet Union. He called for the Russian Academy of Sciences to arrange for these public denouncements and threw in another proposal: “Maybe we should burn these books!”

Mikheyev eagerly chimed in: “Together with their authors!”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/kremlin-state-tv-stars-flip-out-as-russi
ans-admit-putins-war-in-ukraine-is-aimless

I will give Signym a hint: mentally ill people don't prosper. But when they become physically violent (rather than verbally violent on TV) and attack people, they get themselves into serious trouble. Russians are headed for serious trouble if they don't stop themselves from attacking other countries.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, December 19, 2022 5:42 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Dbl

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Monday, December 19, 2022 5:50 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

But who started this?

Was it Russia's policy and intention to destroy the USA? Or the EU? Was it Russia expanding westward, or NATO expanding eastward? Was it Russia destroying nations in the mideast and central Asia, funding terrorists to attack USA forces or USA territory? Was it Russia that pulled out of nuclear treaties?

Russia has made many attempts to negotiate security arrangements for themselves. They asked to be part of NATO. They signed and stuck to commercial contracts with the west, even as they were being kicked around like a political football, being used as the universal Boogeyman for everything from Trump's Presidency to the DNC email theft (not hack) to the USA getting it's ass kicked in Afghanistan. They stuck to them even as Ukraine was stealing from the pipelines and refusing to pay on their contracts ($3billion). Leading up to the 2014 Ukrainian coup, it was Russia that was willing to enter into a multiparty trade agreement, and the EU, ECB, and IMF who insisted "My way or the highway".

Russia is acting in self defense, and your rabid hatred of Russia is just a small example of why it's necessary. I certainly remember you calling Russians every nasty name in the book and accusing them if every crime ever committed, bemoaning that it wasn't fair that Russia had so many resources and how it should be broken up and made available to the west.

You're just reflecting officially -approved anti-Russian hate speech.

Don't be so surprised if your rabid hate speech is mirrored back to you.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

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Monday, December 19, 2022 5:58 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Kremlin: "US & Russia On The Brink Of A Direct Clash" In Ukraine
Monday, Dec 19, 2022 - 12:40 PM

The Kremlin is urgently calling on Washington to avoid further escalation over its support to Ukraine's military, on the same day that President Vladimir Putin made a rare state visit to neighboring Belarus, amid growing fears that Belarusian armed forces could enter the fighting in Ukraine.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Monday that the United States' "dangerous and short-sighted policy" has put it "on the brink of a direct clash" with Moscow, according to state media reports.

"It is the US’ desire to maintain American hegemony at all costs… as well as its arrogant unwillingness to engage in a serious dialogue on security guarantees" that led to the current crisis, she continued, in reference to Moscow's last February pre-invasion appeal for "guarantees" that Ukraine would not enter NATO.

State media described the sharp words as a necessary reaction to US State Department Spokesman Ned Price's recently placing sole blame on Moscow for the rapid deterioration in US-Russia relations. Price had characterized the current state of relations as "unstable and unpredictable".

Zakharova continued in the Monday remarks: "After the high-profile fiasco in Afghanistan, America is increasingly drawn into a new conflict, not only supporting the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev financially and with weapons, but also increasing its military presence on the ground." While not specifying the precise accusation regarding a US "presence on the ground" - this could be a reference to recent widespread reporting that US intelligence has expanded its role in helping the Ukrainians, especially with things like targeting.

"This is a dangerous and short-sighted policy that puts the US and Russia on the brink of a direct clash," the FM spokesperson said further. "For its part, Moscow urges the Joe Biden administration to soberly assess the situation and not to unleash a spiral of dangerous escalation. We hope that they will hear us in Washington, though there is no reason for optimism so far."

This month has witnessed multiple bombshell revelations concerning the Pentagon and US intelligence's deepening role in Ukraine, including the following:

*The White House is mulling the transfer of Patriot missiles to Ukraine.

*The Pentagon is expanding its "on the ground" program of small troop units seeking to monitor and account for US arms transfers.

*Russia is increasingly coming up against US-supplied HIMARS missiles on the battlefield.

*The US has sent an infantry company to Estonia, close to the Russian border for joint drills.

*Calls have grown louder for NATO to "close the skies" over Ukraine, including with the potential transfer of warplanes.

*US intelligence has been assisting Ukrainians with targeting Russian generals.

*The White House has indicated it believes Ukraine's forces are capable of retaking Crimea, but which would risk a nuclear response.

*Ukraine has increased high-risk attacks inside Russian territory.

Ukraine has also grown bolder in showing off its new American-supplied toys...

All of this and more strongly suggests to two sides are indeed inching toward direct showdown and clash, also as there still appears no appetite for so much as a plan even remotely on the horizon to get Kiev officials to the ceasefire negotiating table with Russia.

As for the ongoing speculation that Belarusian forces could enter the Ukraine conflict in support of Russia, top Russian officials are denying this "option"... for now at least.

. Russia doesn't want to kill American troops officially in Ukraine. If they do, US warhawks and neocons will bray that it's necessary to "protect our interests abroad", altho, in reality, we have NO interests in Ukraine.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

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Tuesday, December 20, 2022 7:03 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Grim battle for Bakhmut may yield only Pyrrhic victory for Russia

Igor Girkin, a Russian nationalist and former Federal Security Service officer who helped launch the original Donbas war in 2014 and is under U.S. sanctions, said this week he thought his own side's strategy in Bakhmut was "idiotic".

"What will happen next (after the potential Russian capture of Bakhmut)?" Girkin mused in a video, adding the Ukrainians would merely fall back to a second defensive line while continuing to build other defensive lines behind that one.

"It's chewing through the enemy's defences according to the World War One model," said Girkin, arguing that Moscow needed to change battlefield strategy and deploy its forces differently.

Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military at the U.S.-based CNA think-tank, said Moscow appeared committed to the battle because of resources it had already spent rather than because of "sound strategy".

"The fighting for Bakhmut is not senseless, but strategically unsound (for Russia) given weak offensive potential and no prospect of breakthrough even if the city is captured," said Kofman.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/analysis-grim-battle-for-bakhmut-
may-yield-only-pyrrhic-victory-for-russia/ar-AA15tUJD

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, December 20, 2022 7:08 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

But who started this?

Was it Russia's policy and intention to destroy the USA? Or the EU? Was it Russia expanding westward, or NATO expanding eastward? Was it Russia destroying nations in the mideast and central Asia, funding terrorists to attack USA forces or USA territory? Was it Russia that pulled out of nuclear treaties?

Russia has made many attempts to negotiate security arrangements for themselves. They asked to be part of NATO. They signed and stuck to commercial contracts with the west, even as they were being kicked around like a political football, being used as the universal Boogeyman for everything from Trump's Presidency to the DNC email theft (not hack) to the USA getting it's ass kicked in Afghanistan. They stuck to them even as Ukraine was stealing from the pipelines and refusing to pay on their contracts ($3billion). Leading up to the 2014 Ukrainian coup, it was Russia that was willing to enter into a multiparty trade agreement, and the EU, ECB, and IMF who insisted "My way or the highway".

Russia is acting in self defense, and your rabid hatred of Russia is just a small example of why it's necessary. I certainly remember you calling Russians every nasty name in the book and accusing them if every crime ever committed, bemoaning that it wasn't fair that Russia had so many resources and how it should be broken up and made available to the west.

You're just reflecting officially -approved anti-Russian hate speech.

Don't be so surprised if your rabid hate speech is mirrored back to you.

What Russia has done to Ukraine is a continuation of its past. Russophiles deny it, but the sad truth is that Russia has murdered approximately 62 million of its citizens. Were they killed out of self-defense, Signym? Russia protecting itself from internal enemies, Signym? No. It was not self-defense.

Once the Russian state settled on murder as a quick solution to political conflicts, Russians were never the same.

R.J. Rummel, Lethal Politics - Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder since 1917 (Published 1990)

Chapters

1 61,911,000 Victims: Utopianism Empowered, 1917-1987 1

2 3,284,000 Victims: The Civil War Period, 1917-1922 33

3 2,200,000 Victims: The NEP Period 1923-1928 61

4 11,440,000 Victims: The Collectivization Period, 1929-1935 81

5 4,345,000 Victims: The Great Terror Period 1936-1938 109

6 5,104,000 Victims: Pre-World War II Period 1939-June 1941 127

7 13,053,000 Victims: World War II Period, June 1941-1945 151

8 15,613,000 Victims: Postwar and Stalin’s Twilight Period, 1945-1953 191

9 6,872,000 Victims: Post-Stalin Period, 1954-1987 217

While there are estimates of the number of people killed by Soviet authorities during particular episodes or campaigns, until now, no one has tried to calculate the complete human toll of Soviet genocides and mass murders since the revolution of 1917. Here, R. J. Rummel lists and analyzes hundreds of published estimates, presenting them in the historical context in which they occurred. His shocking conclusion is that, conservatively calculated, 61,911,000 people were systematically killed by the Communist regime from 1917 to 1987.

https://www.amazon.com/Lethal-Politics-Soviet-Genocide-Murder/dp/15600
08873/

Download all R.J. Rummel books for free from the mirrors at https://libgen.unblockit.page/search.php?req=R.J.+Rummel

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, December 20, 2022 7:42 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Give Ukraine the weapons it needs to defeat Russia quickly

Eric Kramer | December 20, 2022 6:59 am

The moral and strategic importance of a Ukrainian victory seems hard to overstate. A protracted, frozen conflict would be a humanitarian disaster for Ukrainian civilians in Russian occupied areas and war zones, it would lead to continued slaughter of troops on both sides, it would strip Ukraine of critical ports, it would embolden further adventurism by Russia and by China against Taiwan. An extended war might cause or contribute to a worldwide recession. Domestically, stalemate and economic stress would damage Biden’s re-election prospects. Finally, a victory by Russia would damage the confidence of democratic countries and the reputation of liberal democracy around the world, at a time when democracy is very much at risk. A victory by Ukraine would do the opposite.

Victory by Ukraine seems likely but by no means is it assured. Offense is harder than defense, and with its past losses Russia is now defending much shorter lines. Putin seems to be willing to put all his chips on the table. It’s hard to know how truthful Ukraine is being about its supplies of ammunition, but it seems like there are grounds for concern. Faltering support from the United States is still the biggest risk to Ukraine. Although support is holding up so far, it would be a mistake to assume it will last indefinitely. We need to strike while the iron is hot. The risk of failure is too great to settle for half measures.

So what should we do? Many observers are calling for the U.S. and its allies to send more weapons to Ukraine as quickly as possible. Mark Hertling wisely reminds us that our political and military leaders have much more information than we do about a wide range of issues, especially the logistical challenges of delivering and integrating new weapons systems into the Ukrainian army. His warnings are well taken, but it seems clear (i.e., at least in the case of ATACMS) that we are holding back weapons delivers in part for strategic reasons – fear of provoking Russia, or the need to retain our own stocks.

I’m no expert, but this seems misguided to me, given the stakes outlined above.

I also believe that President Biden should give a major speech declaring in a matter-of-fact way that Russia has lost the war, that Ukraine is not a threat to Russia, and that the longer Russia waits to recognize this the more Russian soldiers will die and the more Russian civilians and the Russian economy will suffer. It’s difficult to know how far such a speech will seep behind the Russian information curtain, but it may help Ukraine with its information war. In addition, Putin seems worried about his political standing and a clear speech by Biden combined with accelerated arms deliveries may help convince Putin that it’s time to quit.

https://angrybearblog.com/2022/12/give-ukraine-the-weapons-it-needs-to
-defeat-russia-quickly

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, December 20, 2022 10:17 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

But who started this?

Was it Russia's policy and intention to destroy the USA? Or the EU? Was it Russia expanding westward, or NATO expanding eastward? Was it Russia destroying nations in the mideast and central Asia, funding terrorists to attack USA forces or USA territory? Was it Russia that pulled out of nuclear treaties?

Russia has made many attempts to negotiate security arrangements for themselves. They asked to be part of NATO. They signed and stuck to commercial contracts with the west, even as they were being kicked around like a political football, being used as the universal Boogeyman for everything from Trump's Presidency to the DNC email theft (not hack) to the USA getting it's ass kicked in Afghanistan. They stuck to them even as Ukraine was stealing from the pipelines and refusing to pay on their contracts ($3billion). Leading up to the 2014 Ukrainian coup, it was Russia that was willing to enter into a multiparty trade agreement, and the EU, ECB, and IMF who insisted "My way or the highway".

Russia is acting in self defense, and your rabid hatred of Russia is just a small example of why it's necessary. I certainly remember you calling Russians every nasty name in the book and accusing them if every crime ever committed, bemoaning that it wasn't fair that Russia had so many resources and how it should be broken up and made available to the west.

You're just reflecting officially -approved anti-Russian hate speech.

Don't be so surprised if your rabid hate speech is mirrored back to you.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

The only reason that Russia became an "enemy" again is because the woke kids graduated and got into positions of power and they needed a white Big Bad instead of brown or Asian ones.

I've got no problem with Russia. They're not the ones constantly lying to me like my current political leaders, the alphabet agencies of my own country, and the bought and paid for propaganda machine that calls themselves the "news" do.

--------------------------------------------------

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Tuesday, December 20, 2022 11:13 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

The only reason that Russia became an "enemy" again is because the woke kids graduated and got into positions of power and they needed a white Big Bad instead of brown or Asian ones.

I've got no problem with Russia. They're not the ones constantly lying to me like my current political leaders, the alphabet agencies of my own country, and the bought and paid for propaganda machine that calls themselves the "news" do.

Russians had a choice. Either be prosperous like South Korea or belligerent like North Korea. Russians went the North way. Unlike North Korea, Russians didn't have enough common sense and invaded the country south of them. The North Koreans did not invade although they can make a much stronger case that South Korea is part of North Korea than the Russians can make the case that Ukraine is part of Russia.

Comparison of the nominal gross domestic product (GDP) between South Korea and North Korea from 2010 to 2021
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1035390/south-korea-gdp-comparison
-with-north-korea/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, December 20, 2022 11:25 AM

BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH

--------------------------------------------------

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Tuesday, December 20, 2022 12:36 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH

Russians and North Koreans and Trump voters do the same as you do, e.g. "BLAH BLAH BLAH", when they are contradicted. Their belligerent closed-mindedness has made their lives crazier and poorer. Their choices equal their lives.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, December 20, 2022 12:36 PM

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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Tuesday, December 20, 2022 12:55 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

Russians and North Koreans and Trump voters complain endlessly that all their problems are caused by the Democrats in Washington D.C.

Propagandists compete for the most outrageous theory on what would happen if Russia loses the war. Head of RT Margarita Simonyan previously alleged that the Russians would end up in Western concentration camps or be turned into mindless “yahoos,” while Professor Dmitry Evstafiev predicted that they would be caged and displayed alongside animals at the zoo.

“What will happen if the West is allowed to build the kind of a world it wants to create? What kind of world will it be? Can a normal person live in this world?,” political scientist Sergey Mikheyev lamented on Solovyov’s show. “Humans will turn into non-humans... humanity as a whole will be eradicated... What is ahead of us is the forced replacement of people with robots and robotization of the people… If we don’t confront the West, utter horror will follow, it will be a catastrophe.”

In an apparent effort to strengthen Russia’s ideological standing and eliminate foreign influence, Vitaly Tretyakov, dean of Moscow State University’s School of Television, pushed for Russia’s liberals to be forced into publicly denouncing their written criticism of the Soviet Union. He called for the Russian Academy of Sciences to arrange for these public denouncements and threw in another proposal: “Maybe we should burn these books!”

Mikheyev eagerly chimed in: “Together with their authors!”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/kremlin-state-tv-stars-flip-out-as-russi
ans-admit-putins-war-in-ukraine-is-aimless

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, December 20, 2022 1:35 PM

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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Tuesday, December 20, 2022 2:37 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

6ix, with your love for the nihilism of Joker, you would fit well into Russia where nothing is true and everything is possible. Professional killers with the souls of artists, would-be theater directors turned Kremlin puppet-masters, suicidal supermodels, Hell's Angels who hallucinate themselves as holy warriors, and oligarch revolutionaries: welcome to the wild and bizarre heart of twenty-first-century Russia.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, December 20, 2022 4:19 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

SECOND, don't you ever get tired of repeating hate speech and propaganda,?

Or do you get your rocks off when you're officially allowed to spew your favorite emotion, which is hate?

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

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Tuesday, December 20, 2022 9:12 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
6ix, with your love for the nihilism of Joker, you would fit well into Russia where nothing is true and everything is possible. Professional killers with the souls of artists, would-be theater directors turned Kremlin puppet-masters, suicidal supermodels, Hell's Angels who hallucinate themselves as holy warriors, and oligarch revolutionaries: welcome to the wild and bizarre heart of twenty-first-century Russia.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

--------------------------------------------------

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Wednesday, December 21, 2022 1:20 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND, don't you ever get tired of repeating hate speech and propaganda,?

Or do you get your rocks off when you're officially allowed to spew your favorite emotion, which is hate?

Is it hate speech to repeatedly reference the book Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917?

Signym, I am a little curious about what you think happened to 62 million political opponents who were never again seen alive once they fell into the hands of the Russians. The Ukrainians are aware of that political history, which is why they are not surrendering to the Russians.

Buy the book Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917 from Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Lethal-Politics-Soviet-Genocide-Murder/dp/15600
08873/

Or download the book for free from the mirrors at https://libgen.unblockit.pet/search.php?req=R.J.+Rummel

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, December 21, 2022 1:46 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

It's hate speech when you assign collective guilt and want to punish people who aren't guilty. Also, racism. If you don't accept the term racism, then extreme prejudice.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

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Wednesday, December 21, 2022 7:21 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
It's hate speech when you assign collective guilt and want to punish people who aren't guilty. Also, racism. If you don't accept the term racism, then extreme prejudice.

Signym, who is guilty in Russia of killing 62 million over past political disputes?

Average Ukrainians know these killings happened. Average Ukrainians aren't amateur lawyers and philosophers who carefully distribute the guilt for killing to various Russians according to culpability. Average Ukrainians don't want any Russians, no matter who they are or what their history is, killing Ukrainians over a political dispute about the border between Russia and Ukraine. That is why Ukrainian policy is to not surrender. Some do run away to the EU. Some fight. Very few surrender.

Meanwhile, somebody in Russia keeps threatening to nuke the US because of a political dispute over the border between Russia and Ukraine. The Russian narrative is that any one of a wide range of events that somebody in Russia dislikes will ensure “guaranteed escalation to the Third World War”. If somebody in Russia does nuke the US, the retaliatory guilt will indiscriminately spread out to millions of Russians who made no big decisions other than to not emigrate.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/20/opinions/russia-ukraine-us-patriot-miss
ile-defense-giles/index.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, December 21, 2022 7:44 AM

THG

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

It's hate speech when you assign collective guilt and want to punish people who aren't guilty. Also, racism. If you don't accept the term racism, then extreme prejudice.
Signym, who is guilty in Russia of killing 62 million over past political disputes?

Average Ukrainians know these killings happened. Average Ukrainians aren't amateur lawyers and philosophers who carefully distribute the guilt for killing to various Russians according to culpability. Average Ukrainians don't want any Russians, no matter who they are or what their history is, killing Ukrainians over a political dispute about the border between Russia and Ukraine. That is why Ukrainian policy is to not surrender. Some do run away to the EU. Some fight. Very few surrender.

Meanwhile, somebody in Russia keeps threatening to nuke the US because of a political dispute over the border between Russia and Ukraine. The Russian narrative is that any one of a wide range of events that somebody in Russia dislikes will ensure “guaranteed escalation to the Third World War”. If somebody in Russia does nuke the US, the retaliatory guilt will indiscriminately spread out to millions of Russians who made no big decisions other than to not emigrate.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/20/opinions/russia-ukraine-us-patriot-miss
ile-defense-giles/index.html

Truth vs lies TWO. The trolls here ignore truth and promote lies. On a sunny day they sat it’s raining. There is not a back and forth of ideas going on. There are a very few of us posting what is actually going on, and those like JSF Jack and Signym who troll the truth.

I saw a clip of a top Russian diplomat with the poor ME’s this morning. He claimed Russia never attacked anybody, ever. Russia has a long history of attacking others, but he said it nonetheless. Lies travel faster than the truth, but the truth wins out.

T

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Wednesday, December 21, 2022 8:14 AM