kanisatha

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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."

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.

Yeah I read this article earlier. Good article. And I love that quote from Bismarck. I use it myself all the time.

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.

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

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.

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!

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

On the question of what comes next, most experts are predicting a long stalemate and war of attrition. And contrary to conventional wisdom it is the Ukrainians and not the Russians who would be able to better sustain this, at least militarily, so not including the horrendous costs to Ukrainian civilians. The Russians won't have their land bridge, and won't even have the two separatist provinces, because in those areas the Russian-speaking civilian population is not/no longer sympathetic to the Russians. Even those people that Putin believes are "his" people are now fighting against him. So Russian forces in these areas, along with their separatist militia allies, will be bled continuously by an active insurgency as well as hit-and-run tactics by regular Ukrainian military. And as those casualties mount, more and more Russian soldiers will surrender or defect, or simply stop fighting. Beyond the battlefield, though, the real action will be back in Moscow in the next few weeks. Yes, the Russian people have very little capacity for staging a revolution. But one never knows. As Putin more and more scapegoats the military and intelligence establishments for what are his personal failures, those establishments will look for ways to hit back, not because they care about democracy or decency in Ukraine but rather because they care about their own skins. After all, the last time revolution happened in Moscow, it was directly triggered by massive battlefield losses in a stupid war started by an ego-maniac leader who ignored his own advisors.

Sure. I would agree with this. But within any particular category of job the standards should be the same for both men and women. How could it be justified that if you are in the infantry, a male must meet X physical standards but a female can meet X- standards? But that's what we have right now. A woman who meets a lower physical standard is not excluded from jobs that a man could hold only by satisfying higher standards.

Hilarious for sure, but also very concerning, because it makes Putin more and more dangerous as he could lash out even more out of his desperation. The massive Russian casualty numbers just cannot be hidden or denied anymore. At least 15,000 dead. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/24/putins-invasion-of-ukraine-is-his-biggest-mistake-and-weakens-russia.html

Completely agree about women. If it's equality, then it ought to be true equality, not "equality" where you get to serve in all military positions but get lower physical and other standards to satisfy and don't have to sign up for Selective Service. Keeping my fingers crossed that the Supreme Court will agree.

There are also credible reports the head of the FSB is under arrest and other top FSB personnel are in hiding and/or attempting to get out of the country.

I preferred Oblivion over Skyrim. But I think I only used one or two mods. I'm a mod minimalist.

This same post from CDPR was also posted to their forum, and there they also added an "Update" to it: this will not be exclusive any one storefront. Hehe.

Yeah I saw this too. So much for the silly nonsense that India is supporting the Russians. They never were. And even China is beginning to cave on their support for Russia precisly because they're beginning to feel global pressure to stand with the Ukrainians. GLOBAL pressure. Not just Western pressure. And they're getting fearful they will start losing respect as a responsible player in the world. I predict soon Putin will expand from doing psycho things inside Ukraine to doing psycho things inside Russia, such as arresting and executing people within his military and intel establishment. Then he will start doing that to ordinary average Russians who dare to protest his dirty war, you know, all those "traitor scum." At that point, I expect (hope?) someone within the establishment will step up and put a bullet in Palputin's head, like putting down a rabid animal.

Here's what's happening inside Putin's circle of thugs, as revealed by the thugs themselves as they desperately try to escape getting scapegoated by their own boss-thug: https://thehill.com/opinion/international/598397-do-reported-russian-whistleblower-accounts-indicate-a-crack-in-putins And here's an expose on what Putin hopes to achieve through unscrupulous "diplomacy," given that he cannot achieve it on the battlefield, again as leaked by his own thugs: https://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2022/03/16/russias_plan_to_negotiate_a_victory_from_within_822199.html

The only Ukrainians the Russians are killing in Mariupol are civilians--women and children. Thus, even if Mariupol "falls," it won't actually fall, in that the Russians may occupy the city but won't control it and no Ukrainian soldiers will be surrendering or getting captured as a result. The Russians are getting their worthless ass handed to them by the Ukrainians. They are angry and bitter about how this makes them look. So, the pathetic cowards that they are, they're resorting to slaughtering women and children to feel like they're big, strong men.

And here's a bit of an antidote to all the hot air about the dollar, the yuan, and Saudi oil pricing: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-15/saudi-switch-to-yuan-seen-as-symbolic-not-true-threat-to-dollar

Excellent material here. Thanks for sharing! I've also been reading a UK Ministry of Defense assesment that the Russians are militarily stalled on all fronts, have not made any progress in several days, and have actually lost ground and suffered huge casualties (now estimated at 7,000 dead). And this is why they are now just resorting to deliberately blasting civilian targets with missiles and artillery. A US Dept of Defense assesment says Russia has now deployed 75% of its combat forces to Ukraine. You put these two pieces of info together and it shows the Russians are a pathetic military power. They absolutely do not qualify as a great power, and are even questionable as a middle power. The only reason they command any respect, such as it is, is because they have thousands of nukes. That's it. Nothing else. Today the Commandant of the US Marine Corps also gave an assesment of the Ukrainian army. Essentially they are fighting brilliantly, and are now rewriting the textbook on how a smaller and weaker army defends territory against a larger and more powerful invader. He especially credited the Ukrainians with demonstrating tremendous military leadership, organization, coordination, tactics, and tenacity, and apparently the US military has already informed their counterparts in Taiwan they should closely study the Ukrainian army if they ever want to be able to defend their land against invasion. Speaking of China, here are two great stories today about how the vaunted *alliance* between China and Russia is not quite what it seems after all: https://www.institutmontaigne.org/en/blog/chinas-shifting-balance-interests-after-ukraine-invasion?_wrapper_format=html https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/will-xi-jinping-choose-putin-or-peace-by-chris-patten-2022-03?barrier=accesspaylog