"The 1980's are calling to ask for their foreign policy back."

Also, imagine if the UN hadn't been effectively neutered of whatever power it had left in order to invade Iraq.

The UN has exactly the amount of power it always had - none, in the face of a veto by the Security council. The UN would be doing nothing right now in Ukraine regardless of what happened in Iraq.

Economic fallout continues in Russia:

Or maybe just some wise guy doing it to be a wise guy, which is something I can totally relate to.

Every time I see "UA attacks" I keep thinking he's gone kaiju.

Worst Attack on Titan character ever, right here.

What it looks like this morning.

The fact that so much Russian artillery is hitting civilian targets tells me one of two things:

1. Civilians are being deliberately targeted, which is a war crime.

2. Contrary to the fearsome stories we've heard of the Russian military, their technology sucks and they couldn't hit the side of a barn.

3. Putin is a war criminal.

(Okay, that was three things.)

As astonished as I've been with their capacity to fuck up, the Russians surely understand how artillery works, so I'm going with #1.

Something mentioned earlier is that the Russians use about twice the artillery per maneuver unit compared to NATO militaries. And the VAST majority are MLRS.

One of the advantages of MLRS is you get a shitton of ordinance downrange per ‘shot’. One of the disadvantages is that it is not as accurate. I mean, you’ll get enough rockets hitting the target to take it out, but you’ll also blow up a lot of the shit around it.

Another disadvantage is that the ammo is a lot more bulky and is a pain to reload. Most systems have to have a special loading vehicle. Also, resupply is a bitch.

This is one of the reasons the Russians are using their ‘big guns’ (cruise missiles, TBMs, hypersonics, etc) firing from Russia. They are having a hard time resupplying their arty in Ukraine. And Russian military doctrine is dependent on overwhelming fires.

I have talked about public attitudes in Europe, not the US's figures for formally accepting refugees. Raw data on the number of people being accepted is meaningless when we are discussing the perception of them when they arrive.

Cultures can be racist, personal contacts can be racist, media reporting can be racist, policy making can be racist.

Referring to a phenomenon as "cultural" has no bearing on whether racism is still play, quite the opposite.

All of these things feed into people's responses and attitudes to refugees. Hell, even swapping out "refugee" for "immigrant" fundamentally changes the game.

None of these things actually impinge on the use of the word racism, nor (with respect) does your post address the point being made.

Sorry, what's the point you're trying to make here?

Ruh roh.





In all likelihood, the discussion is gonna be "Nah, we're not doing that."

I guess 1956 was a long time ago.

I suspect that Pootie-Poot (or his generals) has realized that if he continues to focus on military targets, he has no hope of wrapping the war up quickly (if at all). So, he's ordered the targeting of civilian areas, figuring that this will force Zelenskyy to surrender in hopes of sparing civilian lives. He's gambling that folks will be more interested in saving civilian lives (temporarily) than they are in stopping him.

Allow me to throw out a proposal (that I'm 100% certain Biden won't do): The US will say that it is completely unconscionable what Russia is doing in Ukraine and that without dramatic changes to global society, there will always be the possibility that someone else will attempt to do what Putin is doing in Ukraine, with some other country, and that this will lead to a wider war. Given that there are 184 countries in the world who don't have nuclear weapons, and that if the US decided to keep 100 nukes for itself while handing out nukes to other nations, every nation on Earth that doesn't presently have nukes could get 19 of them.

That kind of changes the equation of going to war, doesn't it? If "A well-armed society is a polite society" (I'll note that there's a big-fuck difference between "polite" and "free."), then imagine what a planet where every nation has access to civilization (if not species) ending weapons would be like. Sure, other nations like Russia, France, and the UK will have more nukes, but does it really matter? And, hey, how power-mad can you get as a ruler if you know that by invading another country you risk getting nuked? Or, worse yet, your own general staff will kill you because they don't want their loved ones dying in a nuclear holocaust because you decided that you needed to compensate for your failing policies by invading another country?

I don't know that is a wise statement on his part.