Saeculum [he/him, comrade/them]

While piracy isn’t stealing, piracy does decrease profits of the rightful owner.

Only if you would otherwise have bought it. If you never had any intention to buy the thing, the rightful owner loses nothing.

This means that you have to train crews for each specific tank, and if one tank breaks down, you cannot use parts of another tank to repair it.

Sure, but they have trained crews for each specific tank.

Nobody in Europe wants to fight Russia, the calls for conscription are much more likely to topple pro NATO governments than accomplish anything else. People are already literally rioting all across Europe, and anti war parties are gaining popularity by the day.

I don’t know what riots you’re talking about, the pension protests in France? The farmers protests in Germany, Belgium and the UK?

Anti-Russian sentiment is very strong, especially in Eastern Europe, and most of the large nations are likely to have enough volunteers to remove the need for conscription in the mid term.

Nothing of the sort happened. Only thing EU managed to achieve was to drive up the price.

Ammunition production across Europe has significantly increased, and continues to increase, the price has gone up per shell sure, but that doesn’t contradict an increase in production.

The only western source that provides any actual methodology puts Russian losses at around 47k, it’s absurd to call that considerable for a country with a population of 140 million.

The source you linked doesn’t place losses “around” 47k, it established 47k as the absolute minimum, and provides a higher estimate based on excess mortality. With roughly 100k dead, you’d normally expect to see 2-3x that in injuries rending personnel unfit for service with modern battlefield medicine, and 300-400k gone is more than the entire Russian active combat personnel before the escalation of the war in 2022.

Russia has already stated that they will continue to push in Ukraine and will directly engage NATO if NATO decides to put boots on the ground. This an existential war for Russia, and it’s not about Ukraine. The war is about NATO expansion, and Russia will call NATO bluffs.

Assuming it is a bluff. Russia is already bordered by NATO in the Baltic for hundreds of miles, it can survive a NATO Ukraine in the same way that China has survived being surrounded by US allies along it’s entire eastern border.

Oh tanks? Sure, tons of different ones, though standardisation is somewhat less important for those since they already have the facilities and engineers trained to support them.

We now know for a fact that nothing is actually standardized in practice.

We know that there are issues with Standardisation, but I haven’t seen anything to suggest that literally the entire stockpile of European weaponry managed to fall outside of standardisation without NATO noticing.

In fact, lack of standardization with western equipment is now proving to be a nightmare in Ukraine.

Ukraine has been getting the bottom of the barrel of the US and NATO military stockpiles. Mostly stuff from the mid cold war, on schedule for decommissioning.

NATO hasn’t done any serious exercises in literally decades, and vast majority of the 1.5 million military personnel are not active combat personnel.

They’re doing a few right now, and on top of that, they’ve been fighting low-level proxy wars across the middle east for the past two decades.

This is true, but there have also been no calls for wartime recruitment or conscription, the number has the potential to multiply to several times larger within a year or two.

Europe is now out of basic things like artillery shells and lacks industrial capacity to produce them.

European shell manufacturing capability has apparently doubled in the past two years and is supposedly on track to do so again by 2025, with current US and EU manufacturing at roughly half of what Russia is currently producing. They do still have some stockpiles, and on top of 155mm shells, the various European NATO powers have large stockpiles of cruise missiles, bombs and rockets.

On top of that, Russia now has the most seasoned army in the world that’s seen real combat on a massive scale for two years now.

While true, they have also suffered considerable losses (though probably less than Ukraine proportionally). To effectively respond to NATO boots on the ground, they’d conservatively need to double their current number of active personnel, which lessens the experience advantage.

And of course, the elephant in the room here is nuclear weapons. A direct conflict between NATO and Russia would almost certainly end in a nuclear exchange. If Europeans genuinely don’t understand this then we are all truly doomed. On the bright side we won’t have to worry about global warming anymore.

Of course, though brinkmanship does cut both ways. Is Russia willing to risk nuclear war to take Kiev? Probably not IMO.

There’s also the potential to limit it to a conventional conflict if it’s made very clear there is no intention to stray outside the pre-war borders of Ukraine.

Does he really want to start a nuclear war?

At least I won’t have to go into work, and can get my tan done all at once.

The European union has a combined 1.5 million active military personnel, 5000 MBTs, and over a thousand combined fighter aircraft. As a part of their NATO membership, the vast majority of European forces have ammunition commonality and a standardised command structure.

Yes it would be disorganised, yes it would be a political shit show, but the European countries that are likely to get involved in the event of an intervention have a force and equipment parity with Russia, on top of an enormous disparity in population and economy.

It doesn’t seem particularly wise to dismiss them out of hand.

The bible is not a credible historical source, and is also missing the 2000 most recent years of history. The middle east has had long periods of peace and prosperity.

Regardless of his intent, he is correct as to the law.

There’s an element selector tool, looks a bit like the colour picker, click that, then click on the missed ad.

His motivations are beyond our understanding

Our standard for confirmed deaths is stringent—it requires an official publication or social media post from a relative with corresponding details, accompanying photos or dates of burials from local messaging groups, or photos from cemeteries.

Your link does not estimate overall casualties, only deaths that can be expressly confirmed through Russian social media. It provides a good minimum, but it’s important to consider that a large number of those conscripted are from extremely rural communities and remote ethnic minorities within Russia who do not have access to social media, and so wouldn’t be represented in those statistics at all.

Your same source mentions that their investigations suggested 47000-50000 deaths as of May 2023, and a great deal of the more intense fighting has happened since then.

Assuming Russia has a better death-to-casualty ratio than the average WWII army thanks to modern medicine, we’re looking and anywhere from 1:6 to 1:10, which would put casualties as of May at 300,000-500,000.

If Russia actually lost 87% of troops than the army would be collapsing now the way Ukrainian army is. You can’t just replace your trained and experienced troops with untrained people and continue to have an effective fighting force.

Every Russian adult male has served in the armed forces as part of the compulsory year of national service, so their conscription pool can be assumed to have some experience already, and seeing a near total replacement of fighting men about two years into the conflict is consistent with historical armies in trench warfare. Britain and France in 1916 had exhausted essentially all of their pre-war trained soldiers by 20 months into the war and were relying on conscripts.

This isn’t contradictory reporting though (in this case). Both statements could easily be true.

The conflict has been mostly immobile trench warfare for the last year, and casualties have been resultantly high across the board. Both countries have gone through multiple rounds of conscription.

Wagner alone self reported 60,000 combined deaths and casualties, and they’re a small fraction of the total fighting, though probably the worst hit.

Ukraine’s not any better off though, and Russia has a far greater capacity to replace their dead, so even with those numbers, Russia is probably eventually going to win.

Same reason it’s ethical to kill billionaires and eat the rich.

If I had come about through the unwilling merger of two people, and my death could restore those people, it’s probably ethical to kill me to make it happen.

I don’t think it’s necessarily reasonable to call the two component people dead either. Death is a not a particularly well defined term, but we don’t tend to apply it to people who might get better.

Why don’t we just harvest your organs and give them to people we deem more useful, ya know?

The knowledge that you live in a society where you could be legally killed at any point for the greater good, and the resultant fear and uncertainty probably would cause more harm overall than doing so could actually alleviate.

One for one, sure. One for two? I can see the argument.

How?

I love the game and completely agree. Apparently, there was a complete rework of the main narrative somewhere in development, with the original idea not including the emperor at all, but instead having a character called daisy, who you’d have a number of dialogues with throughout the game in a dream sequence at the bank of a river.

Daisy being the representation of the tadpole, she’d try to convince you to stay down by the river with her, and the final decision of the game would be whether or not to give in.

Not sure how accurate what I’ve read is, but I like that idea better.

My guess is Canada

or they live under a secular, democratic Palestinian state from the river to the sea where both the Jewish and Arab population live as equals.

I don’t see the people who voted in and fully supported:

the Zionist settler-colonialist project and it’s ambitions, the full extermination of the Palestinian population.

Participating in a secular democratic Palestinian state in good faith. I also don’t see the religious and nationalist zealots that make up the current government and its core supporters agreeing to leave.

but they are all in a United Front against the Zionist regime.

United fronts don’t tend to outlive the enemy they are united against.

I also don’t understand what the your alternative is? Palestine is unstable as fuck under two states. so what are you proposing?

I don’t see how a single state including all of these groups, under a secular democratic government can come into existence.

The sort of societal change necessary would require tactics similar to revolutionary China or Russia, full wealth redistribution, some form of widespread re-education and some form of vanguardist government to oversee the transition. The majority of people in Palestine would not support those measures, and neither would the surrounding powers.

I really hate people who speculate and criticize without offering any actual implementable plans.

My lack of ability to think of a solution to the problem does not stop me from seeing the issues with the ones that are proposed. (Or rather skipped past in most cases.) We all, I would hope, want to see an equal, democratic and secular Palestine from the river to the sea, but how does that happen?

The 90s saw some 20% less violent deaths during the troubles than the 80s did, though it’s true that the 70s were the worst period.

The years of lead weren’t bloodless, but relatively few people died even compared to the troubles, let alone something like Chechnya