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kanisatha

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Everything posted by kanisatha

  1. For all my fellow ABBA fans, here's their newly released "lyric video" of the hit song "Chiquitita." It's one of my favorites, and looks and sounds awesome. They're going to be doing this for several of their hits. Next up after this one is "Waterloo."
  2. Correct. Su-24 was always a tactical bomber capable of nuclear strike. In this case, however, looking at the actaul photos from the AP, it looks like they were armed with nuclear gravity bombs and not missiles (very hard to make out).
  3. Yeah only two more Harrier squadrons left to transition. Totally agree on VMFA-214. Love the Black Sheep. F4U my second-most loved WWII fighter after the Spitfire. As for longest serving, dunno about that. B-52 has served a really long while and will continue to 2050.
  4. I backed the game and have had it since the beginning of EA. But I am yet to play it as my MO is always to wait several months before I play a new game, so that most bugs and other issues will have been ironed out by then. Have never ever felt a need to play a game on Day 1.
  5. On the current shift to negotiations: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/28/russia-ukraine-set-for-face-to-face-peace https://warontherocks.com/2022/03/the-work-to-come-russia-ukraine-and-the-west-at-the-negotiating-table/
  6. I would say 'different reasons for different individuals,' including simply arrogance that they know better than anyone else. This is the bane of elites in the West on all issues these days, this arrogance that they know better and ordinary people should just shut up and accept and do whatever they the elites say.
  7. Couldn't agree more with the both of you. Perfectly said.
  8. Indeed. But it wasn't just Putin and his ilk who were convinced of this nonsense. Many Western observers--politicians, military leaders, media personalities, and even academics at elite universities--all spewed this nonsense again and again for years prior to February 24.
  9. My sentiments exactly. And I'd also point out that I don't think it is at all a coincidence that the initials of this game's name are the same as Baldur's Gate.
  10. Yeah this is what I was talking about from that article I linked. Same interview with the vice PM of Ukraine. These are all blatant violations of the Geneva Conventions re. the handling of people under one's occupation. Would even qualify not just as war crimes but as crimes against humanity which is a step higher. And let's not forget that in the Crimea the Russians did the same thing to the local ethnic Tartar population after 2014, rounding them all up and deporting them to isolated locations in central Siberia and then replacing them in the Crimea with ethnic Russian settlers brought in.
  11. On this issue I read somewhere a couple of points (from financial experts which I am certainly not). One, the contracts are already in force, so this would be a breech of the contracts which clearly specify the use of dollars or euros for the transactions. So any such requirement would effectively nullify existing contracts and new contracts would need to be negotiated. And two, European states don't have to buy rubles only from Russia's central bank. They can buy them from any source of rubles in the world, including countries such as India that may have rubles, as well as private financiers.
  12. Again, that's fine. That's exactly why I always insist on casting a wide net for the sources I read, precisly because someone will always view certain sources as suspect. And no, I don't read the Daily Mail on a regular or even irregular basis. I saw on a TV broadcast an interview that was done, I believe by a Polish TV station, of the Ukrainian vice prime minister who talked extensively, providing specific details, about how Ukrainian citizens were being taken away by the Russians to locations unknown inside Russia, essentially being kidnapped, and this includes children. The interview was in Ukrainian, with English subtitles. I then went and did a Google search to see if I could come up with a print version of that interview so that I could share it here. And the first article that popped up in the search was the Daily Mail article, which I then first read to make sure it was saying the same things I had seen in that interview, and then I linked that article here.
  13. No. Let's be clear on how things happened. You posted numbers for civilian deaths in both Iraq and Ukraine, with no source attribution to the claimed Iraqi number. I then posted calling you out on your numbers, very clearly laying out my rationale for why those numbers are suspect and lacking credibility. Then, someone else decided to grossly mischaracterize that as my saying ALL civilian deaths anywhere are not really civilians, completely ignoring that I said what I said very specifically about civilian death numbers in Iraq, in the 2003 war and not even the 1991 war, and not any place else. In the 2003 Iraq war, about a day or so after the war started, Hussein issued a proclamation broadcast openly on all Iraqi military and media communication sources, ordering his military forces to remove their uniforms, put on civilian clothing, and mingle within the civilian population while attacking US forces. This is widely known, and well documented.
  14. That's your subjective take, and that's fine. I could say exactly these same things about such sources as the NYT and the Guardian, which to me routinely come across as tabloids. The bottom line is this. For some in this forum (don't know if that includes you), they see news sources as either entirely credible or entirely not credible. It's a convenient mental heuristic that most people develop to make things easy for them by ONLY trusting a handful of sources they have subjectively decided are "good," while completely rejecting anything that comes from any other source. I don't see things that way. For me, with every single news source anywhere in the world, some of what they say may be true and some false. And it is up to me to sift through these news stories and separate the wheat from the chaff. That's why even though in general I don't consider the BBC, NYT, Guardian, and Bloomberg to be truthful or credible sources, I still went ahead and linked articles here from exactly those sources. Because sometimes even they can get something right.
  15. Way to remove context so you can again grandstand against me. But given your obvious anti-Americanism, go ahead and count up all the Al Qaeda, Taliban, and ISIS killed by the US too. After all, they were "civilians" too, right?
  16. Yes I would. Dividing sources into reliable and not is entirely subjective. Gorth had his list. I would reject that list, because for me sources like NYT, CNN, NPR, and sometimes the BBC are what are unreliable and/or rubbish. Especially nowadays, all sources are biased. The trick to being informed is (a) learning to sift through inherently biased sources and extract what good/useful information there still may be in those biased sources, and (b) casting a very wide net in the sources you read. I myself have been asked to contribute to stories in Sputnik News for years now. They too are a state-owned source in Russia, but that never stopped me from responding to their questions on a variety of topics. I made sure to insist that they never misquote me or take my words out of context, and the particular journalists who contacted me always kept to that promise.
  17. Nothing wrong with the Daily Mail. Speak to the information provided, not your personal view of the source. In Iraq, under Hussein's orders, thousands of Iraqi troops deliberately switched to civilian clothing and merged with the civilian population while attacking US forces. No credible effort was ever made by those who were supposedly counting civilian deaths to verify whether a person in civilian clothing was in fact a civilian. In Ukraine, the Ukrainian figure of ~4,000 civilians killed is the officially documented number thus far. One cannot obtain a complete figure of those deaths, including people in mass graves, bodies still inside bombed buildings, and people 'disappeared' by those humanitarian Russians, until well after the war ends AND independent sources have complete and unfettered access to all of Ukrainian territory. At that point the numbers will surely be in the tens of thousands minimum.
  18. Yup. I brought this up myself in a post yesterday. Putin, Lavrov et. al.: "We're going to do some outrageously brutal and horrific and criminal things to the Ukrainians, but the only wrong thing here is you nasty Westerners being mean to us about it all."
  19. And relatedly: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10634885/Putin-deports-Ukrainians-camps-Russia-accused-putting-refugees-filtration-centres.html Putin is literally stealing Ukrainian people, including taking children from orphanages and boarding schools, and even directly from their parents. Russia's barbarism knows no bounds.
  20. Yeah I read this article earlier. Good article. And I love that quote from Bismarck. I use it myself all the time.
  21. What's new is details on exactly what those tactics are, how they're being carried out, and why they're so effective against an armor-heavy opponent. It's not a superficial "report" like we get on TV/Internet news these days.
  22. Here are two more superb articles I urge people to read. This first one gives a first-hand account of why the Ukrainians are winning against an on-paper superior Russian force, and also gives amazing details on how the US (and other allied) military needs to evolve to win wars in the contemporary era: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/american-volunteer-foreign-fighters-ukraine-russia-war/627604/ This second article is an excellent proposal for what the Ukrainians need now as they go on the offensive against a spent Russian military force: https://thedispatch.com/p/what-ukraine-needs-now?s=r
  23. Yes, why would they? To do so would only come back to bite them on the ass and damage their future credibility. And besides, this is based on the intel community collecting raw data daily on Russian missile usage in the theater. So they actually have the data in their hands. It is not some sort of projection or estimate. And lastly, the US intel here tracks extremely well with the intel from other governments who also have good intel. We know for a fact, for example, that many Russian pieces of military hardware have fallen into Ukrainian hands, either because they broke down and were abandoned, or because Russian troops surrendered them to the Ukrainians in exchange for safety (that recent handover to US intel of Russia's super highly classified EW pod the Ukrainians got a hold of being the best example). https://interestingengineering.com/ukraine-captures-russian-ew-system https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/44879/ukraine-just-captured-part-of-one-of-russias-most-capable-electronic-warfare-systems If there is anything we can truly say about this war, it is the extent to which the Ukrainians, and NATO, and also humanitarian NGOs have been able to collect on-site data about the war, documented with phones and video cameras and SM. I am very comfortable with that 40k figure recently released by NATO of total Russian service members lost (killed, wounded, missing, captured). That's 25% of their total force, which also means it's probably about 40% of their combat force. Those are catastrophic numbers for Russia. I can only imagine what the Chinese are thinking of all of this.
  24. And then there's this: https://globalnews.ca/news/8708478/russia-ukraine-missiles-failure-rate/ I am very confident this is about the same breakdown rate for their military equipment across the board. Must be giving nightmares to military officials in Beijing, Tehran, Damascus, and New Delhi. Hehe. It should be illegal for us to have so much fun at the Russians' expense!
  25. More fun: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/belarusalert/belarusians-are-sabotaging-plans-to-join-vladimir-putins-ukraine-war/ https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1583572/Vladimir-Putin-Russia-Belarus-Ukraine-railway-sabotage-supply-lines-trains-latest-news-vn
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