Gorth

You didn't really fix anything. My rant wasn't about free speech (That's Gromnir's desk), but against the totalitarian principles of governments limiting what you are allowed to read and see. Edit: Point in case, the Australian government cracking down on the free press and even individual YouTubers when they reveal uncomfortable truths. Yes, the media may be utter crap, but I believe it to be one of the hallmarks of a free society, that people are allowed to form their own opinions and not have it dictated by the government. Edit2: My own experiences with RT are two videos I saw some years ago. One where Putin put some regional administrator in his place and one where he met some young girl and everyone was fawning over him and his generosity. Goebbels couldn't have done it better. Never felt like watching again, so no, don't really have horse in the race there. It's the principle that matters, people should decide for themselves if the message is laughable or not. At least in a free society.

I suspect it's predominantly used for real estate purchases. In this case inside the UAE. Never mind that half of London is probably owned by Russians at the moment (money laundering being a primary industry in the UK, through Gibraltar, Isle of Man, Jersey etc.) No idea sure how that counts for convertibility?

Those strange and often overlooked collateral damages of war in Ukraine... Chelsea FC and Bitcoin https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/60714952 Chelsea's credit card facilities have been temporarily suspended while banks assess the implications of sanctions imposed on Russian billionaire owner Roman Abramovich. The club has been given a special licence to operate despite Abramovich having his assets frozen by the UK government. Banks want to assess the licence criteria to ensure it does not breach the government's sanctions and Chelsea do not know when the suspension will be lifted. As part of the licence terms, Chelsea cannot receive money for match tickets which have not already been sold, future gate receipts for FA Cup games or merchandise from the club shop. That is likely to leave the club with a huge shortfall, with their monthly wage bill amounting to £28m a month. The club *may* be able to play the remaining games this season, although that is currently in doubt. They will for sure not be able to participate in the Premiere League next season if current status quo is maintained. If the club folds (likely), it could leave a gap in London's economy worth billions of pounds. Abramovic? He'll probably just head off to Israel (he has Israeli citizenship, being a Jewish). https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/12/russians-liquidating-crypto-in-the-uae-as-they-seek-safe-havens Crypto firms in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are being deluged with requests to liquidate billions of dollars of virtual currency as Russians seek a safe haven for their fortunes, according to company executives and financial sources. Some clients are using cryptocurrency to invest in real estate in the UAE, while others want to use firms there to turn their virtual money into hard currency and stash it elsewhere, the sources said “We have one guy – I don’t know who he is, but he came through a broker – and they’re like, ‘we want to sell 125,000 Bitcoin’. And I’m like, ‘what? That’s $6bn guys’. And they’re like, ‘yeah, we’re going to send it to a company in Australia’,” the executive said. Bitcoin working as intended I suppose. I'm sure Scott Morrison will welcome some reasonable party donations to facilitate such business transactions.... Which leaves the question, is the anonymity going to remain part of the future of cryptocurrency, or will the current war put an end to it. It has for many years been the favourite money laundering tool for organized crime, but popular opinion may help politicians to finally get an iron collar put around the the neck of Crypto brokers.

The Ministry of Truth would like to interview you for a position they have... Don't count on me as an immigrant. I'm allergic to totalitarian regimes like the kind of society you seem in favour of. The sooner the EU falls apart, the better. It was never a union for the people, but a union for the political and economical elite (despite how it was sold on originally in 1957) Sanctions against Russia is fine. Just drop the hypocrisy and "holier than thou" attitude and call it what it is. On government levels it's geopolitical power play. Not to be confused with grass root levels, as plenty of people will boycott Russian products for all the right reasons. A country that had legal racial segregation up until approx. 25 years before the end of apartheid (one of many gifts from England to Africa) is not the best example. Not that this has anything to do at all with what is being discussed of course. Which, IIRC, is how close the EU is to evolve into something out of Orwell's 1984, where decisions are removed several levels from people and said people will now no longer have free choice of what information they want to access. Because, some information is dangerous to the regime? Do you even know how, what you are in favour of, sounds? The road to hell is paved with good intentions sometimes, except this crack down on civil liberties are not in any way good intentions. It's a tool of power, used to control people. Hint: What you need is not less information, it's more information.

That looks quite representative of first episode 😎

No disagreement there...

Besides my grammar being bad and should read I doubt (rather than do not doubt)... not angry. Just rolling my eyes. What happened to let people decide for themselves? You have a monopoly on the truth? Then you're turning into the wolf you decry. YT is YT. It's a business. I think we established a long time ago, businesses have no ethics. If it's profitable, anything goes. Not that I wouldn't ban it if I were YT, but I would do for different reasons (ethics rather than profit). Or as @Elerond pointed out, for being in breach of their TOS.

I do not doubt for a moment YouTube is doing out of the goodness of their heart or anything resembling ethics. It’s a business decision based on what gives the most shareholder value and dividends in the long term. I stand by, that it’s not not the governments job to censor things based on likes and dislikes. If the government is in a state of war, actively participating in a war, maybe different rules apply (seems reasonable), but last time I checked, only Ukraine and Russia are part of the armed conflict

…and that’s how it begins. Someone deciding what it’s best for others to see and not to see. Mentioning book burnings would be a cheap shot, but the thought did cross my mind. edit: YouTube is a private company and as such has a lot of say over what goes on their platform and what not. Now if a government order them to selectively remove content, you have some real issues with censorship

Still waiting for the announcement of the heroic death of Navalny at the front... after his parachute failed to unfold during his airborne "assault" on Kiev

Having fun with the new Guild Wars 2 expansion... Seitung Province Echowald Forest (with skyscraper sized trees) ...and I finally got my Siege Turtle mount 🐢 A lot of effort that one was too 😖

Just to try something completely new... Rammstein! 😂 No, seriously. A new single and the video premiered 8 hours ago at the time of writing

Gaming history in the making... in a new thread

Moved the tail end of previous thread to this shiny new thread ☺️

Thanks to YouTube and it’s obscure algorithms I ended up watching a few minutes of something called Gleipnir… looked weird enough that I dug up the first episode and watched. Truly bizarre and fun. I might watch more of it

What is his goal isn't (and never really was) occupying Ukraine? Just remembering whatshisname the guy whose analysis was casually dismissed, that the goal would be to destroy Ukraine. You know, if we can't have it, make sure nobody else wants it.

Until it can't be milked any further in opinion polls?

Interesting perspective... are you saying it's fine to beat the crap out of kids, because they don't have any friends? I never said such a thing. What I'm saying is, there are a number of European countries, that would prefer not to put themselves at risk in a conflict for the benefit of their neighbours, because they don't really feel any "kinship" with the victims. Europeans are still very tribal in some regards. Eastern Slavs, Western Slavs, Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, Latin, Lombard, Frisian, Germanic, Anglo-Saxon... their interests in helping their neighbours goes as far as considering it if it may benefit themselves long term. Edit: Never mind nationalist divides Edit2: As an experiment, try telling Americans that America sucks! They might get angry with you. Tell Europeans that Europe sucks!... and they'll start pondering which part of Europe you're referring to. They might just agree with you. Edit3: Tl;dr; Europeans don't necessarily have a "European Identify"

That's based on the misconception, that Europe is somehow unified. Hint... it isn't. Not by a long shot.

It's probably still easier to hand over a bit of cash (in rubles) when buying a few vegetables and sausages, than a handful chickens and a goat 🤔

A bit more complicated than that... (messy, right?) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Crimean_referendum At this point, it looks like (the wiki is very sparse on detail and background) patience with 'Autonomous Republic of Crimea' was wearing thin, turning from being "friendly" towards Crimea to becoming "less friendly". The outright hostility towards all things Russia wasn't until after the 2014 elections, at which point the general unrest in eastern Ukraine also happened in Crimea with things happening very fast (you couldn't write an action book, where events happened this fast I think). Edit: Tl;dr; Ukraine started unilaterally dismantling the Crimean autonomy and being the one with the military presence on the peninsula (outside the Russian naval base that is), the Crimeans had to suck it up, that their autonomy was removed.

My bad, it didn't transfer it "to" Russia, it transferred it "away" from Ukraine. An independent S.S.R. like Lithuania, Estonia, Ukraine etc. Sadly google is useless at the moment as any search with the word crimea or ukraine leads to 10+ pages of history starting in 2014... Washington Post simply describes it as "a brief tussle" (Crimea having no military). Details being notoriously hard to come by atm because of the popularity of related and more recent events, forcing just about anything else out of the search results... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/02/27/to-understand-crimea-take-a-look-back-at-its-complicated-history/ Following a brief tussle with the newly independent Ukrainian government, Crimea agreed to remain part of Ukraine, but with significant autonomy (including its own constitution and legislature and – briefly – its own president). In 1997, Ukraine and Russia signed a bilateral Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership, which formally allowed Russia to keep its Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol. So far, so good (and frankly, Yeltzin did NOT inspire a lot of confidence in the early 1990's). Things changed as the conflict of interest between west and east Ukraine heated up (you mentioned yourself, governments coming and going at some point)... an interesting map from WP that sort of shows *why* there could be a problem the way the country was created post Soviet Union. The darkest blue areas are "lost causes", the people there never going to identify as Ukrainians.... at least as long as the government isn't an inclusive type of government, toning down the nationalist rhetoric a bit. The lighter blue areas may not go into open rebellion, but probably just be grumpy for many decades to come (hypothetical situation if there had been no war). edit: trying a twitter source rather than the WP website

What could have been done depends on what stage in the sequence of events we're talking about. The west could have objected to the Ukrainian invasion and occupation of Crimea. To this day, most western media (most likely out of complete ignorance) talks about Crimea as if was once part of Ukraine, the nation. Hint, it never was. The same Soviet legislative authority that assigned it from the Russian S.S.R to the Ukrainian S.S.R. also removed it again before the collapse of the Soviet Union. If you accept the Soviet Union had the authority to hand it to Ukraine, you also have to accept that it had to authority to remove it again. If you don't accept it had the authority to remove it from Ukraine, you're by the same token also rejecting it had the authority to move it to the Ukrainian S.S.R in the first place. Whichever one, Crimea was never part of Ukraine post 1991. Only because it got invaded and direct Ukrainian military control imposed. You could argue as a nation, with it's old internal Soviet administration borders suddenly resulting in a significant land grab containing a really significant amount of Russians, which ended up on the receiving end of a lot of stick and persecution from a new nationalist government in Kiev in 2014. It's not coincidence **** started hitting the fan that year. It was never going to be a stable country and secessionist movements were written on the wall already 1991 because of some really nonsensical border drawing. So, what does the west do? Instead of putting pressure on Ukraine to respect the rights of ethnic minorities and cease the occupation of Crimea, they encourage them by dangling a EU membership under the noses of western Ukraine (where the population is predominantly Ukrainian), regardless of Ukraine not meeting any criteria whatsoever of EU membership. Especially corruption is rampant and no election so far has been without it's problems. Oh yeah, and the treatment of ethnic minorities. No other country would have gotten into the EU in the shape Ukraine was through the 2010's The war in the Donetsk region is recent history. The Minsk accord was agreed upon as the future, but when NATO suddenly hinted at Ukrainian membership, Zelenskyy suddenly felt brave and publicly declared, that Ukraine no longer had any intention of honouring it's commitment to the accord. With visible results. The people in eastern Ukraine declared themselves independent (the people in Crimea were already independent and held a valid referendum asking to be accepted as part of the Russian Federation). So many places this could have been nipped in the bud, but western countries with typical arrogance simply decided what is best for all other countries, regardless of realities on the ground. So, stage one, the west should never have accepted Ukraine's original claims to it's new national borders, regardless of ethnic composition. We saw that in the 1920's too int he middle east (the Kurds sends their "regards"). Stage two, The west should have put sanctions in place against Ukraine over the invasion of Crimea, demanding the removal of Ukrainian troops. Stage three, If more effort had been put into seeing Ukraine and former parts of Russia in as neutral territory rather than advanced military outposts to encroach on Russia in it's own backyard, a lot of paranoia and suspicion could have been avoided. Last but not least (my pet peeve), done more to integrate Russia too into the western " cultural hemisphere" and let cultural change seep in gradually, rather than being handed to them, ultimatum by ultimatum. Proud people don't respond well to threats and holier than thou attitudes.

You're right, that was your neighbour to the west... but I suppose the Habsburgs still count as "German"?

He might have been thinking about The Holy Roman Empire wanting Slovakia back... 😛