Russian invasion of Ukraine

[MazzyStar]

14 minutes ago, DeeTillEhDeh said:

That's not an excuse though.  The clown indulging in whataboutery is also the same one who pulls up people for whataboutery on the politics threads.

He seems to forget that.

Do you not know what whataboutery means you clown?

Edited April 8, 2023 by MazzyStar

[DeeTillEhDeh]

16 minutes ago, DeeTillEhDeh said:

That's not an excuse though.  The clown indulging in whataboutery is also the same one who pulls up people for whataboutery on the politics threads.

He seems to forget that.

@MazzyStar thinks this was aimed at him.

Bless.

[Cosmic Joe]

54 minutes ago, LongTimeLurker said:

The Argentinians probably have a different perspective from you on how good the Paras are at battering people who can hit back. Hence their surrender of Goose Green. I write that as someone who viewed the whole Falklands escapade as a waste of time more about rescuing Maggie T's career than anything else.

Doesn't excuse what happened in Derry. 

[LongTimeLurker]

Complete non-sequitur

[MazzyStar]

1 hour ago, DeeTillEhDeh said:

@MazzyStar thinks this was aimed at him.

Bless.

No I didn’t. 

[Guest]

2 hours ago, LongTimeLurker said:

The Argentinians probably have a different perspective from you on how good the Paras are at battering people who can hit back. Hence their surrender of Goose Green. I write that as someone who viewed the whole Falklands escapade as a waste of time more about rescuing Maggie T's career than anything else.

I've read that another motivation was the belief that oil or other resources could one day be mined from the seabeds around the Falklands. Of course, Brits didn't stand to benefit from that because UK didn't/doesn't have a Norwegian-style sovereign wealth fund. Any proceeds from Falklands resource extraction would've just been used to subsidise tax cuts for the UK financial elite.

From the perspective of the common Argentine people, the war was a tragedy. "...most of the fighting men for the Falkland war were one-year conscripts from poor and working-class families. Many came from the provinces, their dark, straight hair and wide cheekbones revealing their Indian ancestry" (https://www.nytimes.com/1982/08/13/world/the-falkland-soldiers-argentina-forgets-quickly.html). So the most impoverished young men from a poor country, at the demand of a dictatorship backed by their nation's ownership class, were sent to die at Goose Green and to sink on the Belgrano. They were woefully under-equipped, barely trained and psychologically broken by the brutal treatment and even torture their military superiors dished out to them prior (https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220401-former-soldier-reveals-argentine-torture-in-falklands-war).

Lest we forget the Falklands War's greatest victim, Prince Andrew, whose extraordinary bravery caused his sweat ducts to malfunction.

[welshbairn]

It was probably just a bye and bye that gin sozzled Denis Thatcher was Chairman of the Falkland Islands Company IIRC. 

[TxRover]

1 hour ago, FreedomFarter said:

"...most of the fighting men for the Falkland war were one-year conscripts from poor and working-class families.”

That way it applies to nearly every war overall. The choice of Corporations or Kleptomanical Governments as benefitting is the real variance.

[welshbairn]

There certainly aren't many middle class Muscovites in the Donbass trenches, or even ethnic Russians.

[LongTimeLurker]

43 minutes ago, welshbairn said:

There certainly aren't many middle class Muscovites in the Donbass trenches, or even ethnic Russians.

First part I can believe but doubt the second part is accurate. Ethnic Russians are 80% of the overall population and my understanding is that even going back to Soviet times Muslim conscripts and automatic weapons weren't always viewed as a good combination so they were often kept in support roles. Hasn't there been a lot of talk lately of Chechens being used as blocking troops to shoot ethnic Russian troops that try to flee the frontline?

[welshbairn]

I thought the Chechens on the Russian side were mainly employed shooting videos miles behind the front line. I'm pretty sure far more conscripts get herded up from Eastern and Southern provinces than from west of the Urals.

[ICTChris]

Dmitri Medvedev’s latest stream of consciousness rant is something to behold. The former Prime Minister and President rambling on about no-one wanting Ukraine and talking about “unterUkraine” and “snobby Polacks”. 

What makes it more pathetic is that even though he was clearly a Putin loyalist and placeholder after he was jettisoned the boss makes sure no power base was built by pushing his allies out and then finally binning him as PM when Navalny made fun of his Nike Air trainers in a corruption reveal. Now he’s comes out with increasingly more mental posts on social media (generally on apps banned in Russia) to try and convince his boss that he’s still loyal. What’s Russian for cucked?

[Newbornbairn]

[TxRover]

8 hours ago, Newbornbairn said:

Tuva has the highest rate of casualties…is 80%+ Tuvan and just over 10% ethnic Russian…however, next door Buryatia is 64% ethnic Russian and has the second highest rate. Of course, they aren’t the kind of ethnic Russians the Moscow crowd like.

[highlandcowden]

2 hours ago, TxRover said:

Tuva has the highest rate of casualties…is 80%+ Tuvan and just over 10% ethnic Russian…however, next door Buryatia is 64% ethnic Russian and has the second highest rate. Of course, they aren’t the kind of ethnic Russians the Moscow crowd like.

Convicts?

[Newbornbairn]

Interesting read about the thinking behind the Muscovite system - https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/6851725.pdf

 

Quote

“Above all, it is the lack of common honesty in Russia, in its narrowest and most ordinary sense, which astounds. This fatal flaw in character deprives the government of the opportunity to wield any reliable executive power, by robbing it of a necessary number of honest, faithful lower ranking officials”

 

Edited April 9, 2023 by Newbornbairn

[LongTimeLurker]

A BBC story about an activist having to flee after checking the details of war graves in Krasnodar which is overwhelmingly ethnic Russian (many were identifying as Ukrainian there in Lenin's time but Stalin put a stop to that) :

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65213426

Don't doubt certain minorities like the Tuvans (Shoigu is half-Tuvan) and Buryat Mongols are disproportionately winding up dead courtesy of Vlad's SMO but so are plenty of ethnic Russians, Wagner's cannon fodder from the prison system included.

Edited April 9, 2023 by LongTimeLurker

[vikingTON]

An analysis of ethnicity/military casualties would be worthwhile, but only if it can make a clear distinction between conscript and regular soldiers. There's a straightforward economic reason why peripheral regions of the RF (where the bulk of minority ethnic groups also live) would incur the majority of regular military casualties. Deprived regions are an army's natural recruiting ground in any state. It's why the British military openly presents itself as an escape from Shittown-on-Tees, and also why Highlanders, Irish etc. were disproportionately killed or wounded in the Empire's historical conflicts. Same thing applies to the disproportionate casualties of African Americans in the early phase of the Vietnam War. The RF under Putin is a decaying basketcase economy and the rot is far more advanced in the periphery. Paid military service is therefore a critical means of keeping your family off the streets in a way it is not in greater Moscow. 

I wouldn't be surprised at all if conscription was being managed unevenly, but whether that's for ethnopolitical, economic or plain management of public opinion reasons is an open question. 

[TxRover]

4 hours ago, virginton said:

An analysis of ethnicity/military casualties would be worthwhile, but only if it can make a clear distinction between conscript and regular soldiers. There's a straightforward economic reason why peripheral regions of the RF (where the bulk of minority ethnic groups also live) would incur the majority of regular military casualties. Deprived regions are an army's natural recruiting ground in any state. It's why the British military openly presents itself as an escape from Shittown-on-Tees, and also why Highlanders, Irish etc. were disproportionately killed or wounded in the Empire's historical conflicts. Same thing applies to the disproportionate casualties of African Americans in the early phase of the Vietnam War. The RF under Putin is a decaying basketcase economy and the rot is far more advanced in the periphery. Paid military service is therefore a critical means of keeping your family off the streets in a way it is not in greater Moscow. 

I wouldn't be surprised at all if conscription was being managed unevenly, but whether that's for ethnopolitical, economic or plain management of public opinion reasons is an open question. 

A valid point overall, but the deliberate, uneven management of conscription has already been documented.

I would certainly love to see the ethnic Russian convict percentage of ethnic Russian deaths and service totals. However, that will be a post Putin thing at the earliest.

[Delicate Flower]

On 08/04/2023 at 11:08, LongTimeLurker said:

The Argentinians probably have a different perspective from you on how good the Paras are at battering people who can hit back. Hence their surrender of Goose Green. I write that as someone who viewed the whole Falklands escapade as a waste of time more about rescuing Maggie T's career than anything else.

The Paras were (are) wanks. Not met one who was a normal human.