rachel on 2/3/2022 at 14:41
Quote Posted by Starker
Maybe it's not a non-starter for the Cold War planners, but to the rest of us, the idea that anyone is going to invade Russia from Alaska is pretty laughable. I mean, it's friggin' 5700 miles from Vladivostok to Moscow. It takes 7 days to get there on a high-speed train.
It's still relevant to the bush pilots flying out of Nome, Unalakleet, etc. when they do supply runs to Diomede, because the Russian border is between the two islands. The airspace is still tightly controlled and you could get in trouble if you inadvertently cross the line, even if what you're flying is just a small 185...
Tocky on 2/3/2022 at 15:34
I live in the training path of a helicopter division from a not too distant AFB. They flew over once with about twenty of them in a line and my wife asked from the window what that noise was. I made the mistake of pointing at them with my flashlight that I hadn't thought to turn off (I had been working on plumbing in the shade). All twenty of them circled our house as I sheepishly pointed to the flashlight and waved. Well they are doing something now that I have never seen them do before. I can't even say what it is but it bodes well for Ukraine if they are doing it for the reason I think. I sure hope we have the balls to help at least.
Nameless Voice on 2/3/2022 at 21:50
The first one is hardly that outrageous - bad or corrupt politicians always love some major event or scandal to distract the public from what a bad job they're doing, so long as it doesn't affect them too much personally. Be that a major scandal (that they are not involved in), a big celebrity birth or marriage, or even a war.
That's a staple of politics. If you want to do something that might be unpopular, you wait until something major happens to distract the public away from it.
lowenz on 2/3/2022 at 23:34
The *same* words are outrageous, not the "obviously correct" argument.
Jason Moyer on 3/3/2022 at 03:36
This war is distracting us from the things GenX has been bitching about for 40 years. What.
Edit: And distracting us from all the things that both conservative parties, but especially the GOP, created and worsened during that time.
Cipheron on 3/3/2022 at 04:37
Quote Posted by Nameless Voice
The first one is hardly that outrageous - bad or corrupt politicians
always love some major event or scandal to distract the public from what a bad job they're doing, so long as it doesn't affect them too much personally. Be that a major scandal (that they are not involved in), a big celebrity birth or marriage, or even a war.
That's a staple of politics. If you want to do something that might be unpopular, you wait until something major happens to distract the public away from it.
Yeah, but it's unhinged to say that a politician would trigger some transient event to cover up homelessness. Homelessness is an endemic problem, it's still there once the dust has settled. So as a rule of thumb, you wouldn't use transient events to cover up endemic problems, because that's not a sustainable policy, entirely due to them being endemic.
BTW QAnons are saying now that Covid is officially over, because the liberals moved on to Ukraine, thus the "narrative has shifted". This is pure projection, because the right-wing pick up and dump "narratives" willy-nilly. For example shifting from the "storm" narrative which never happened, to the "stolen election" narrative. The convenient factor here is that The Storm and also the Stolen Election were based on purely fictitious reality, so they can be chopped and changed as needed.
However, the rest of us like to think we're actually operating in reality. And right now, Covid is an endemic, real-world problem, and it's not the "political fiction" the right-wing is trying to claim.
At this point the right are so devoid from reality that whenever anything ACTUALLY happens in the world you can bet on some bleating idiots going on about how it's not really happening, so the rest of us just have to stop talking to them and shove them out of the way "get out of the fucking way, grown ups are trying to do stuff here". I mean, the right used to have a different spin on events, and there was some debate to be had, different values overlaying the discussion. But now ... they have their own separate fantasy reality with it's own events. They might as well live in Narnia now.
Nicker on 3/3/2022 at 06:27
Apparently Ukraine is offering amnesty and about $40,000 to any Russian soldiers who request asylum.
Spread the word.
[video=youtube;3C_VUbVOhhM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3C_VUbVOhhM[/video]
lowenz on 3/3/2022 at 10:20
Brilliant but what about double agents.....
Nameless Voice on 3/3/2022 at 12:09
Quote Posted by Cipheron
Yeah, but it's unhinged to say that a politician would trigger some transient event to cover up homelessness.
To be honest, I don't think many politicians in the USA (or in most other places) really care that much about homelessness. It's something that we have (sadly) become used to, it's not considered a scandal that nothing is being done about it.
The problem with conspiracy theories is that they always have a grain of truth in them, but they use completely distorted reasoning to come to ludicrous conclusions.
There's likely a link between Covid starting to die down around the world and the timing of this invasion, but it's more to do with the fact that it's hard to illegally invade another country when you are busy handling a pandemic.
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That's another good video by Beau. I was wondering about the fact that Russia has conscription myself.
To be honest, I still think one of the biggest problems in this invasion (and in pretty much all wars) is that countries have militaries who are indoctrinated to follow orders no matter what, rather than being taught morality and ethics so they would refuse such orders.
If a "leader" orders their army to illegally invade another country, in an ideal world the normal response should be "no". But that's not how militaries work.
