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

Have they tried looking here?

Some pron for @shootER; a tank actually does something useful.

When you say "Ninja" the most common thought is of assassins for hire. Not quite true, but the heads of the Ninja clans as I am told would at times order a hit on warlords who posed a direct them to them. The problem with eliminating someone like Putin is that you don't know who's going to replace them. Suppose you get someone with the same nationalistic ideology and greater military competence? There are claims that the Brits felt they could have taken out Hitler as the war wound down, but the problem was that he was so addled by the combination of drugs and psychosis that just about any of his likely replacements would have been more competent.

Rough day at the office.

However, I don't see how anyone can argue that the commander-in-chief of a country at war is not engaged in military activity.

"You don't target the leaders" seems like one of those rules that was dreamed up out of the self-interest of the people who get to make the rules. And while some Russian soldiers are definitely war criminals at this point, others are more like innocent pawns. I'd be all for taking out the genocidal dictator at the top if it would save lives on both sides.

And sure, you could argue "but then they'd do the same to us." One, I suspect our president is in more danger from homegrown right-wing domestic terrorists than from Russia. Two, they can try, but it's our job to stop them.

It isn’t a law or a treaty (but I repeat myself) but instead an Executive Order.

https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1289&context=cilj

Self Serve?

So we are in a thread where there are hundreds of pictures of the horrible destruction of civilization and tons of dead people, and in the middle of that we have first world problems getting you angry.

The saturation of the world's stupid attention whore app with pictures of an actual war that seems to be interfering with the general dissasociation with worldwide horrors by pop culture whorers is worth a couple moments of lag and page shifting while the message board loads up.

I am also proud of myself to have actually come up with the wordplay of whorers and horrors. But Steve you really need to tell yourself it is just a message board I should really just relax. Oh, and get a flip phone, you are not a young kid anymore. There are no problems with downloads on a flip phone boomer.

The inverse square law makes me dubious that we have detectors that could track lethal doses of radioactive material from a large distance away unless they were substantial. Items small enough to poison an individual wouldn't be possible to track unless our tech is way more advanced than seems plausible.

No, but they've still got areas so hot that it isn't safe for even robots to venture in them. I believe that the last time they tried to send a robot into the area where the Elephant's Foot is located, the radiation fried it. (Though they have been able to get humans into the area to take samples.)

No, it's not, but I'm not going to dismiss statements made by the Ukrainian government out of hand. They claim that the Russian soldiers are being treated for radiation poisoning, @steve2^4 thinks that this is Russian propaganda, and that Chernobyl plant workers wouldn't dose Russian soldiers even if they could, because reasons.

And the various media outlets who reported the story.

Ukraine is saying that the Russian forces are being treated for exposure to radiation. That could mean giving the soldiers doses of iodine and other things to reduce their risk of developing cancer later in life, or it could mean something more. Lethal doses of radiation can have a seemingly paradoxical effect on people. They at first appear to have some health problems, shortly after being exposed, then recover, only get dramatically sicker two weeks later before dying. We don't know. And I'm not sure we'll ever know so long as Putin remains in power.

When was the last time a gun control activist was locked in an area with a gun nut who'd potentially already murdered the loved ones of the activist? And shit, man, if you think someone has to be highly skilled to think about (and get away with) murder, then I've got some news for you: Plenty of people get away with murder all the time. And most of them don't have the advantage of being surrounded by people who sympathize with them. I'm not saying that the Ukrainians poisoned the Russian soldiers, I'm just saying that it can't be ruled out, considering the circumstances. The plant workers were freaked out when the Russians showed up and started firing on things in the plant, not to mention when the Russians drove around in off-limits areas and started digging trenches in them. If those folks, who are experts in radiation and the site, were worried about what the Russians were doing, is it really unreasonable to think that some of the Russian soldiers are in bad shape?

This is an example of people being so wrapped up in the current situation that they couldn't see the larger picture. Once Germany invaded the Soviet Union, they were effectively doomed. The sheer force of numbers that the Soviets could have thrown at them would have made it impossible for Germany to win the war. Granted, a competent military leader would have done a better job than Hitler, but in war, if you can put three times the number of forces in the field as your opponent, then the odds are in your favor. Russia could do many more times that. When you add in the fact that the US was effectively outside of Germany's bombing range and was supplying not only our own forces with equipment, but also those of everybody else fighting the Germans, the picture for Germany gets bleaker.

The best that a replacement for Hitler could have done was to try to sue for peace and hold on to some of their territorial gains. I suppose it's not out of the realm of possibility that they could have brokered a deal where they had a ceasefire with the Soviets, leaving them free to fight the other Allies, but that really seems to be stretching the realm of possibility to me. And remember, the US had nukes coming down the pipeline (while the Germans had no hope of developing them in time because Hitler had chased all the best scientists out of the country because they were Jewish), so we almost certainly would have hit them first if we had to.

This makes me physically ill. The West (my "neutral", cowardly country included) must support Ukraine at all costs NOW.

Russians getting cold! We should probably insist that they have plenty of supplies and are staging these claims to make us look bad.

Wasn't there a time when the Swiss Army was the most feared Army in Europe?

Yes, but that was a few centuries ago and ended with the invention of firearms. And it was not the Swiss army that was feared, but Swiss mercenaries in the service of foreign forces.

this is really an excellent post and something TF should aspire to. Sadly he has a bird brain. I'm worried about Anc as well.

I worry for all those who suffer the direct endless torrent of mind disease known as twitter. You have to remember they do bring the more salient moments to us as gifts. It would be nice if twitter did work a bit better so there was not so much lag, but converting and refining the gems out of that much shit to display for intelligent big brained people has to take some computational power. I am just happy the twitards have something that makes their existence meaningful, and I do not have to touch that shit that much.

Well, it's good to see you back again.

I don't care if their existence needs meaning when it delays my getting to the salacious posts. As I said, on the PC I've blocked tweets from downloading all the crap so pages here end up looking like this. Admins need to turn off the tweet downloads for the board. Oh wait it's the admins doing the worst of it:

or this:

fucking give it a break will ya guys?

Good thread:

Another good one:

A thread is a message board thing. Someone posting beyond the character limit of twitter is a god damned cascade. It is quite ironic that back in the day cascades were used to destroy threads.

I am joining the steve side and saying if you cannot say it in 1 tweet use another medium you fucking moron. Do not try to make stupid work for a nuanced intelligent conversation. It makes the idiots feel smarter than they are.

who else we got? I think @Bailey is coming over to the steve side. And FF. The steve side isn't very cool.

I am fine with not being cool if cool involves being on twitter.

Looks like we four-handedly stifled conversation (I mean tweets).

Got anything to post about the war?

Ok here goes. Here's a good thread. Article, I mean, on the progress of the war with maps and toy soldiers. I shall gift it to you in a link.

But to show good faith here are a couple of extracts. I found the increase in forces and countries calling up NATO battlegroups mostly by the host nations fascinating. This has to have Putin pissing blood:



And the areas reclaimed by Ukraine in recent days.


And where the Russians are going: