Chit Chat

Idk but can we stop bullying the lone Ukrainian on the Ukr-Russia thread, his country is at war, his people have died, people seldom have any choice when their leaders decide something. Same goes for Russians. We are just observers with barely any skin in the game. I think we can discuss everything without @/ him pointlessly to mock or put him down
 
Cheepek said:
Idk but can we stop bullying the lone Ukrainian on the Ukr-Russia thread, his country is at war, his people have died, people seldom have any choice when their leaders decide something. Same goes for Russians. We are just observers with barely any skin in the game. I think we can discuss everything without @/ him pointlessly to mock or put him down
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Most people here just want Russia to win decisively against Western Europeans and America. They find it easy to sympathize with Russians and throw Ukrainians under the bus. It's like cheering for your favorite football team at this point. Some come up with insane justifications for why we should side with Russia and let the Ukrainians get absolutely hammered. Some are needlessly too heartless towards a country that's being pummeled to the point of a looming demographic crisis. Few don't even consider Ukrainians as human beings. What the Americans are doing to throw Ukrainians under the bus at this juncture sets a dangerous precedence.

Me personally, I want this wasteful meat-grinder to end. No need to reach for ideas like "Ukrainians supplied equipment to Pakistan, Ukraine insulted Indian culture", it doesn't qualify them to get hammered like this. Russians themselves are being scumbags, using a basket full of excuses to gobble up as much land as they can for warm water ports and a neutered buffer zone. Europeans were happily throwing Ukrainians to the meat grinder to damage Russia without committing a single pair of boots on the ground. Americans have been happy to finally deal some physical pain to Russia relatively cheaply. Russians have been happy to dig in for years and to keep spilling blood.

While the possibility of NATO staging missiles in yet another neighboring erstwhile satellite state was a massive slap on the face of Russia and they invaded, they are a country that'll take a mile if you give them an inch. Not content with invading a sovereign nation, occupying 1/3rd of it's land and destroying it's infrastructure and youth populace in a protracted war; Russia wants Ukraine to sign the modern equivalent of the The Treaty of Versailles. Every single leader in both sides of this conflict is acting like either utter clowns (Trump/Zelensky) or malicious scumbags (Putin/Starmer). Consider the fact that Ukrainians can only afford to fire 1/3rd of the artillery shells Russia is firing every day. They have a limited stock of cruise missiles, they barely have an air force with pending F-16 deliveries, they are heavily reliant on improvised weaponry and cheap drones, they are short on manpower, their air defense grid is full of gaping holes and is barely hanging on, the number of long range artillery and MLRS they have is laughable, even Pakistan has more electronic warfare assets than they do. But with just some NATO SIGINT/ELINT flights, they are still in the fight. They haven't lost the country despite devastating losses. While NATO provides them with round the clock intel, they have been given peanuts in terms of ordnance and weaponry. While having a grossly insignificant domestic industrial output compared to the Russian war machine.

If Ukrainians had a few hundred F-16s, they'd have bombed every major Russian city and command HQ in range and maintain air dominance over Ukraine. But their allies never committed, spineless Europeans and all that. Americans alone could easily supply 250-300 F-16s out of their reserves, they didn't. They can right now supply 500-600 Abrams, 500-600 Bradleys from storage, but they don't. Ukrainians think the Biden administration was their friend, it's the Biden administration that got them into this mess, with half promises and willfully inadequate support. Now Trump is back and he wants to stop any and all American taxpayer expenditure that doesn't directly benefit America or his ego. So I request fellow members to not belittle Ukrainians while their lives are being spent like currency because of a few malicious parties. There is no greater honor in life than fighting for the motherland.​
 
Corvus Splendens said:
Most people here just want Russia to win decisively against Western Europeans and America. They find it easy to sympathize with Russians and throw Ukrainians under the bus. It's like cheering for your favorite football team at this point. Some come up with insane justifications for why we should side with Russia and let the Ukrainians get absolutely hammered. Some are needlessly too heartless towards a country that's being pummeled to the point of a looming demographic crisis. Few don't even consider Ukrainians as human beings. What the Americans are doing to throw Ukrainians under the bus at this juncture sets a dangerous precedence.

Me personally, I want this wasteful meat-grinder to end. No need to reach for ideas like "Ukrainians supplied equipment to Pakistan, Ukraine insulted Indian culture", it doesn't qualify them to get hammered like this. Russians themselves are being scumbags, using a basket full of excuses to gobble up as much land as they can for warm water ports and a neutered buffer zone. Europeans were happily throwing Ukrainians to the meat grinder to damage Russia without committing a single pair of boots on the ground. Americans have been happy to finally deal some physical pain to Russia relatively cheaply. Russians have been happy to dig in for years and to keep spilling blood.

While the possibility of NATO staging missiles in yet another neighboring erstwhile satellite state was a massive slap on the face of Russia and they invaded, they are a country that'll take a mile if you give them an inch. Not content with invading a sovereign nation, occupying 1/3rd of it's land and destroying it's infrastructure and youth populace in a protracted war; Russia wants Ukraine to sign the modern equivalent of the The Treaty of Versailles. Every single leader in both sides of this conflict is acting like either utter clowns (Trump/Zelensky) or malicious scumbags (Putin/Starmer). Consider the fact that Ukrainians can only afford to fire 1/3rd of the artillery shells Russia is firing every day. They have a limited stock of cruise missiles, they barely have an air force with pending F-16 deliveries, they are heavily reliant on improvised weaponry and cheap drones, they are short on manpower, their air defense grid is full of gaping holes and is barely hanging on, the number of long range artillery and MLRS they have is laughable, even Pakistan has more electronic warfare assets than they do. But with just some NATO SIGINT/ELINT flights, they are still in the fight. They haven't lost the country despite devastating losses. While NATO provides them with round the clock intel, they have been given peanuts in terms of ordnance and weaponry. While having a grossly insignificant domestic industrial output compared to the Russian war machine.

If Ukrainians had a few hundred F-16s, they'd have bombed every major Russian city and command HQ in range and maintain air dominance over Ukraine. But their allies never committed, spineless Europeans and all that. Americans alone could easily supply 250-300 F-16s out of their reserves, they didn't. They can right now supply 500-600 Abrams, 500-600 Bradleys from storage, but they don't. Ukrainians think the Biden administration was their friend, it's the Biden administration that got them into this mess, with half promises and willfully inadequate support. Now Trump is back and he wants to stop any and all American taxpayer expenditure that doesn't directly benefit America or his ego. So I request fellow members to not belittle Ukrainians while their lives are being spent like currency because of a few malicious parties. There is no greater honor in life than fighting for the motherland.​
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A very well compiled post. Hat tip!

However , all this is well taken but how did things reach this stage? If the comedian didn't let his greed / naivete / opportunism / gratitude for help in being made president ( take your pick, can be 1 can be 2 or all) , things wouldn't have reached this far.

We can be idealistic & claim every nation has the right to choose its future or be realistic & admit to reasonable constraints to those freedoms. Like for instance what happened in Cuba in 1962 .

Once you let outsiders into what's essentially a domestic / bilateral dispute, they will pursue their agenda not yours. You essentially have no agency whatever the pretence adopted earlier , which has been discarded now & your so called agency called out .

As far as Europe goes -


View: https://twitter.com/phl43/status/1897684786002424159?s=19

At the end of the day, the most fundamental reason why I don't believe in the prediction, based on statements by Macron and other European leaders, that European countries will raise their defense spending above 3% of the GDP is that it's about the level they were spending on defense at the beginning of the 1980s, when Europe faced the Soviet juggernaut.

It's just not serious to compare the threat posed by Russia today to the threat posed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. We're talking about a country that is struggling to keep a few brigade-size units properly supplied 300km from its border. It's not about to sweep the continent...

So I think that after the current hysteria has subsided and people realize that, despite the apocalyptic predictions that people are making right now, the US will not leave NATO and Russia will not find it so easy to reconstitute its forces, European countries will settle for a much more modest increase, simply because it wouldn't make any sense to spend as much on defense and budget/political constraints will eventually kick in.
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The only nation which suffered the most & in the end lost almost everything like men money material including its credibility is Ukraine. And for what? When they could've chosen to be a Switzerland or an Austia. Neutral to all.
 

View: https://twitter.com/tyrannideris/status/1897148935967559851?s=19

The most insidious form of slavery is the one mistaken for liberation.

The zealot, the ideologue, the true believer—each proclaims their freedom while marching in lockstep to the rhythm of a will that is not their own.

They wear their chains like ornaments, mistaking submission for meaning, mistaking their own subjugation for a divine or righteous cause.

A man does not own himself when his thoughts are dictated by an idea he dares not question. When his purpose is handed down to him, when he is possessed by a mission that does not permit deviation, he is not an agent of will—he is an instrument, a vessel, a thing wielded by that which has consumed him.

The priest does not own his god, the revolutionary does not own his revolution, the patriot does not own his nation. They serve, they obey, they become property.

And what is freedom if not the reclamation of the mind? If not the severing of these invisible leashes?

To live unshackled is to cast every purpose into the fire, to burn every imposed doctrine to ash, and from those embers, forge one's own will. Not to reject all meaning, but to be its creator, its master, never its subject.

The world is full of men who believe they have chosen their path, yet have only been chosen by it. The task is not to serve the idea, but to make the idea serve you.

Anything less is servitude dressed in the rags of self-deception.
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This post highlights one of the principal reasons the West has reached the pinnacle of materialism & having attained that summit doesn't know what to do.

Freedom for its own sake isn't as empowering as yoking it to something noble, something uplifting. Unfettered freedom is basically authority without responsibility.

Having such unfettered freedom borne out of individualism results in a kind of nihilism which abounds in the West today.

They've gained , after hundreds of years of servitude, only to trade "old superstitions " for something illusory & ephemeral - freedom & having set themselves free, they're burning down the very edifice which set them free in part out of spite, in part out of confusion, in part as a gesture of rebellion, in part due to freedom but mostly because they didn't know what to do with that freedom & that those old superstitions couldn't be traded for new superstitions without undergoing the interregnum of freedom & the miseries it brought.
 
Cheepek said:
Idk but can we stop bullying the lone Ukrainian on the Ukr-Russia thread, his country is at war, his people have died, people seldom have any choice when their leaders decide something. Same goes for Russians. We are just observers with barely any skin in the game. I think we can discuss everything without @/ him pointlessly to mock or put him down
Click to expand...
I disagree.
It is one thing to objectively support one's own nation (Ukraine) war effort and seek moral support from others in the defence forum(DFB) of another country (Bharat).
It is quite another to carry on propaganda of a nazi propped regime and belittle the efforts and the achievements of another country with false propaganda.

If you think Akim is an innocent, objective defence analyst who happens to be from Ukraine, you are gravely mistaken.
I hope you go through his opinions of Euro Maidan 2014. Also read his Mar-April-May 2022 propaganda of how "Ukraine is winning", when by all accounts, Ukraine was suffering badly.
We at DFI back then repeatedly pointed out facts while he vomitted pages after pages of propaganda. Those facts stand as facts till date.
I encourage you to go through DFI pages, and then judge this clown.
 
londonparistokyo said:
The whole world is shaming India for how dirty it is,
View: https://x.com/stillgray/status/1897605690425803220 , yet all Indians do is point fingers at other countries. It's seriously worse than sad.

"Muh outrage. It's disinformation!" Bhailog, my experience and that of many others says otherwise.
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I don't even want to bother my finger muscles writing these points for nth time, the lack of basic civic sense in Indians is enraging . one thing is bullying can do is, younger generations will eventually correct themselves.

In this case here how hard it would have been to just had a giant dust-bin somewhere in the back of train, these are like small things that shockingly high numbers of indians can't seem to do.
 
londonparistokyo said:
The whole world is shaming India for how dirty it is,
View: https://x.com/stillgray/status/1897605690425803220 , yet all Indians do is point fingers at other countries. It's seriously worse than sad.

"Muh outrage. It's disinformation!" Bhailog, my experience and that of many others says otherwise.
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garbage is cleaned at intermediate stations. not sure what triggered the evolved soul to do what he did.

on a related note, this happened in my neighborhood recently -
there was a particular spot on the road side which had become everyone's favorite garbage dumping point. the residents welfare association got fed up of getting it cleaned regularly. the RWA cleaned it up for one last time, got that spot decorated with rangoli and flowers, put up a giant board announcing a huge fine amount if anyone is caught dumping waste there. members took group photos, selfies and congratulated each other on the whatsapp group on the job well done.

next morning, garbage bags were lying on yesterday's rangoli and flower carpet.

our idiocy is often beyond human understanding.
 
trombone said:
garbage is cleaned at intermediate stations. not sure what triggered the evolved soul to do what he did.

on a related note, this happened in my neighborhood recently -
there was a particular spot on the road side which had become everyone's favorite garbage dumping point. the residents welfare association got fed up of getting it cleaned regularly. the RWA cleaned it up for one last time, got that spot decorated with rangoli and flowers, put up a giant board announcing a huge fine amount if anyone is caught dumping waste there. members took group photos, selfies and congratulated each other on the whatsapp group on the job well done.

next morning, garbage bags were lying on yesterday's rangoli and flower carpet.

our idiocy is often beyond human understanding.
Click to expand...

The danda is more important sometimes than a fine I think.
 
Corvus Splendens said:
Most people here just want Russia to win decisively against Western Europeans and America. They find it easy to sympathize with Russians and throw Ukrainians under the bus. It's like cheering for your favorite football team at this point. Some come up with insane justifications for why we should side with Russia and let the Ukrainians get absolutely hammered. Some are needlessly too heartless towards a country that's being pummeled to the point of a looming demographic crisis. Few don't even consider Ukrainians as human beings. What the Americans are doing to throw Ukrainians under the bus at this juncture sets a dangerous precedence.

Me personally, I want this wasteful meat-grinder to end. No need to reach for ideas like "Ukrainians supplied equipment to Pakistan, Ukraine insulted Indian culture", it doesn't qualify them to get hammered like this. Russians themselves are being scumbags, using a basket full of excuses to gobble up as much land as they can for warm water ports and a neutered buffer zone. Europeans were happily throwing Ukrainians to the meat grinder to damage Russia without committing a single pair of boots on the ground. Americans have been happy to finally deal some physical pain to Russia relatively cheaply. Russians have been happy to dig in for years and to keep spilling blood.

While the possibility of NATO staging missiles in yet another neighboring erstwhile satellite state was a massive slap on the face of Russia and they invaded, they are a country that'll take a mile if you give them an inch. Not content with invading a sovereign nation, occupying 1/3rd of it's land and destroying it's infrastructure and youth populace in a protracted war; Russia wants Ukraine to sign the modern equivalent of the The Treaty of Versailles. Every single leader in both sides of this conflict is acting like either utter clowns (Trump/Zelensky) or malicious scumbags (Putin/Starmer). Consider the fact that Ukrainians can only afford to fire 1/3rd of the artillery shells Russia is firing every day. They have a limited stock of cruise missiles, they barely have an air force with pending F-16 deliveries, they are heavily reliant on improvised weaponry and cheap drones, they are short on manpower, their air defense grid is full of gaping holes and is barely hanging on, the number of long range artillery and MLRS they have is laughable, even Pakistan has more electronic warfare assets than they do. But with just some NATO SIGINT/ELINT flights, they are still in the fight. They haven't lost the country despite devastating losses. While NATO provides them with round the clock intel, they have been given peanuts in terms of ordnance and weaponry. While having a grossly insignificant domestic industrial output compared to the Russian war machine.

If Ukrainians had a few hundred F-16s, they'd have bombed every major Russian city and command HQ in range and maintain air dominance over Ukraine. But their allies never committed, spineless Europeans and all that. Americans alone could easily supply 250-300 F-16s out of their reserves, they didn't. They can right now supply 500-600 Abrams, 500-600 Bradleys from storage, but they don't. Ukrainians think the Biden administration was their friend, it's the Biden administration that got them into this mess, with half promises and willfully inadequate support. Now Trump is back and he wants to stop any and all American taxpayer expenditure that doesn't directly benefit America or his ego. So I request fellow members to not belittle Ukrainians while their lives are being spent like currency because of a few malicious parties. There is no greater honor in life than fighting for the motherland.​
Click to expand...

What a load of balderdash! Ukraine started the whole thing by violently overthrowing a democratically elected government and proceeded to engage in ethnic cleansing against Russian speaking minority in Donetsk and Luhansk and basically goading Russia into a conflict. Russia tried every bit to avoid this conflict by signing Minsk accords I and II and repeatedly asked Europe and Ukraine to abide by the Minsk accords II in which they never had any intention to do so. As for taking Crimea, Russia was proven correct that it was essential in taking over Crimea in order to protect the population there in and preserve its historical claims to that area. Look at what happened to Serbia and Kosovo. Look at Donetsk and Luhansk.

Europe promised that NATO wouldn’t expand to the borders of Russia and yet it did and they are trying to do the same thing with Ukraine and Belarus. What you wrote is just poppycock.
 
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