Bay 12 Games Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.

Messages - Thorfinn

Pages: 1 2 [3] 4 5 ... 18
31
General Discussion / Re: Emotional Responses to War in Ukraine - Personal Diary & Mutual Support
« on: January 24, 2023, 04:24:31 pm »
Quote from: Lord Shonus on January 24, 2023, 03:24:49 pm
Recovery of the missile's serial number was instrumental in proving that it was NOT a Ukrainian weapon.
Source? In the States, the reports I read at the time had intel confirmation of the flight path being from where there were Ukrainian forces and no known Russian forces, plus the serial served as corroboration. And, of course, the engine itself was on the ground right where it would be expected if launched from Ukrainian-held territory.

Occam's Razor...

[EDIT]
starver, I don't know. There have been declassified spy satellite photos where you can read license plates from orbit. Drones have crystal clear images that are used to identify faces in a crowd. If that were true, why wouldn't the US release such a photo? It's not like they've been all kissy-face with Russia. All we get is assurances that such photos exist, but never the actual photos.

After COVIDiocy and now Twitter Files, I have zero confidence in anything my government says. And I trust them more than I trust any other government.
[/EDIT]

32
General Discussion / Re: AmeriPol thread
« on: January 24, 2023, 04:13:48 pm »
Nope. Jarheads and squids end up in the clink because they took a picture with the wrong background. They would have happily turned the selfies over if asked, rather than spending time in hard labor, but the fact is possession is also a crime.

In both cases, Trump and Biden if there is SCI, they are likely in trouble, unless someone finds the declassification orders. Unless Biden issued a secret EO changing the SCI declassification procedure, of course, though that would not apply retroactively. But what is not going to change is that all such documents have control numbers. The SCIFs are checked at end of day. So they already know what day each SCI document walked out. What they can't isolate is who walked out with it. But because they knew which Senators were in the SCIF on that day, if Biden happens to be one of them, it's going to be hard to argue that one of the other Senators took them with the intent to plant them on Biden 20 years in the future.

But also, in both cases if it is less than SCI, Biden can say he declassified them as VP, and Trump could say declassified them as Prez, and no foul.

33
General Discussion / Re: Emotional Responses to War in Ukraine - Personal Diary & Mutual Support
« on: January 24, 2023, 03:07:22 pm »
Quote from: Strongpoint on January 24, 2023, 02:19:49 pm
It is amazing how Azov is blown out of proportion... Gives some perspective about how propaganda works. What country you are from, BTW?
The US.

Quote from: Strongpoint on January 24, 2023, 02:19:49 pm
Lets start slowly. Azov is one small unit in Ukrainian military. It started as a paramilitary but consequently was absorbed in the armed forces and by the 2022 it was just a military unit with an unusually high concentration of guys with (far) right political views.
OK, so far so good. What mainstream media said back before the invasion is that it was somewhere between 5k and 10k in troop strength.

Quote from: Strongpoint on January 24, 2023, 02:19:49 pm
Azov was nearwhere close to Bucha. Bucha is one of the many towns in which Russian armed forces killed Ukrainian civilians in masse for the crime of being Ukrainians. It is just the most famous becaus it was the first.
And now we are to the point where there is a massive divergence. For example, in the New York Times ( https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/04/02/world/ukraine-russia-war#scenes-of-desperation-and-death-as-the-russians-retreat-from-suburbs-outside-kyiv ) there are all kinds of references to the Azovs being there.

"Soldiers from the Azov battalion walked through the remnants of a Russian military convoy in the recently liberated town of Bucha on Saturday, just outside the capital after the Russians withdrew."

"Residents of the recently liberated town of Bucha reach for food being distributed by Ukrainian soldiers with the Azov battalion on Saturday."

""According to our information, they are running away from all areas around Kyiv,” said Sgt. Ihor Zaichuk, the commander of the 1st company of the 2nd Azov battalion in the Ukrainian army, which fought in Bucha."

There are 19 occurrences of the word "Azov" in the story. And it agrees with other news stories we were getting at the time. Do you see why this is such a cluster?

You are saying, then, that Sgt. Ihor Zaichuk was a figment of the imagination of the New York Times reporter in Bucha?


Quote from: Strongpoint on January 24, 2023, 02:19:49 pm
Mariupol is... was a rather large city with around 50% ethnic Russians, was surrounded by Russian forces and pounded by everything they had destroying hundreds of residential buildings. No one knows how many civilians were killed, estimates are tens of thousands. Azov was one of the units defending the city but it is irrelevant.
According to the reports I read at the time, the Russians were deliberately targeting Azovstal, because that was where the Azovs were bunkered, up to seven stories underground, IIRC.

Anyway, in my country's media they were careful to explain that, for example, the missile that was evidently targeting the rail station in Mariupol was actually launched from Ukrainian territory, and the engine bore a serial number known to be part of the Ukrainian arsenal. That is not true, to the best of your knowledge?

Similarly, a couple months back, my media reported that Zelensky blamed a missile that landed in Poland on Russia, and it later turned out that pretty much all international observers agreed it was of Ukrainian origin. Not so?


Quote from: Strongpoint on January 24, 2023, 02:19:49 pm
You are also very confused about ethnicity...

Many members of Azov are Russians. Many soldiers of Ukrainian army are Ethnic Russians. 17% of the Ukrainian population are ethnic Russians*. And why would Ukrainian government care? Because you believe in Russian fairytailes about nazism and Russians being persecuted? Well, it is an outright lie. We elected a Russian-speaking Jew as our President.
No, I got that. I just didn't express it very well. Mikhail (I'm probably botching the spelling), the guy who used to go to our church, was always careful to distinguish between ethnic Russians and Russians by nationality. I don't remember the word he used for it, but that was the idea.

34
General Discussion / Re: Armchair Economics Thread - Re-Resurrection
« on: January 24, 2023, 02:01:35 pm »
Quote from: Loud Whispers on January 24, 2023, 10:32:16 am
Because that's what happens. You don't incentivise people to be more prepared when you have price gougers. The disaster is the incentive.
Feel free to correct me, but I think this is the core of your argument. But if they are stocked up, why should they care about gougers? They are someone else's problem. Either someone who did not bother stocking up, or someone whose stocks were destroyed by the disaster.

If the former, then that argues against you that the disaster in itself is enough to incentivize preparedness, when by definition it was not, in the same manner that police have to keep picking up people for speeding in a school zone because, self-evidently, they are speeding, despite the knowledge that the disaster of smashing into a kid should have been enough of an incentive.

If the latter, that's where you had the foresight to set aside a little extra for your neighbor, trusting that if the roles were reversed, he would do the same for you.

If you don't think humans are ingenious enough to devise ways of storing food in ways that are safe from most disaster conditions, you need an explanation for why humans didn't die out hundreds of thousands, millions of years ago. Maybe we've just become terminally stupid?

35
General Discussion / Re: Emotional Responses to War in Ukraine - Personal Diary & Mutual Support
« on: January 24, 2023, 01:50:19 pm »
Why the distinction between "vassal state" and being a part of the empire? Is the difference important?

Hector13, I wasn't thinking of Zelensky, nor did I know he is Jewish. Or that he is evidently from Galicia, or it would be a complete non sequitur. I had been reading authorized biographies of Leo Strauss, among others, and while he was not from the region, they all emphasized the influence people from there had on him. Which is what had me going through the stacks looking at journals, letters, diaries, etc.

Strongpoint, bear with me, please. What my state-controlled media said early on was that among the first into Bucha were elements of Azov and other irregulars. Before the invasion, they had linked Azovs to atrocities in Donetsk. Russia blamed the atrocities in Bucha on Azovs, which was "impossible" because the Azovs were based about 15 miles away, near Kiev. I don't know about you, but 20 miles is not that far if Russia really had already pulled out. I go over twice that distance to church every Sunday morning. In the media blackout we've had since, a lot of this has vanished. Not rebutted, just vanished. Are you saying this was all false? That, for example,  they are not ultranationalists, and any implication they might have been involved in civilian attacks prior to the invasion are pure fantasy?

Wasn't it largely the Azovs that were holed up in the steel plant? That's what my state media said. Our state department said that the Azovs were an irregular paramilitary, and were responsible for the shelling between late 2014 and early 2022. That is why we could not supply them with arms. But if, as Lord Shonus maintains, the Azovs were really Russians, why would the Ukrainian government go along with it? And if they were really Russians, why would the Russians have gone to all the effort and expense to blast them out of Azovstal? Something is not adding up.

Quote from: Strongpoint on January 24, 2023, 11:37:25 am
History is fucking irrelevant when there is an ongoing genocide attempt
Depends on the purpose. I'm completely uninterested in how history ties in with the current spiciness. There's enough conflicting information, even on the same side, that I'll just sit this one out. What I was really interested in is understanding to what extent Galicia might have influenced the similarities between the actions/views of Bandera and neo-conservatism, as there's more than a little similarity in their fascism-lite.

36
General Discussion / Re: AmeriPol thread
« on: January 24, 2023, 11:43:20 am »
Quote from: Max™ on January 24, 2023, 12:31:30 am
It's worth keeping in mind that the relevant legal codes specify that the crime is knowingly possessing and hiding/retaining/destroying/sharing/selling documents.

Believe it or not if you find a bundle of folders marked ultra-super-duper-whatthefuck-top-secret-classified on the side of the road and turn it over to a relevant authority you are at no risk of prosecution, which makes sense because this is what the government wants you to do if you find said documents.

...what did Biden do?

Found them
On the side of the road?

The relevant crime here is removing SCI documents AT ALL. If there really was SCI-level stuff from his days as a Senator, that's more than a Whoopsie. When you go into SCIF, you are searched, you can't bring in a phone or a camera, and the only way you are walking out with SCI documents is to pull a Sandy Berger, i.e., stuffing them in your underwear. As a Senator, he had no authority at all to have secret documents anywhere unsecured.

Different story when he was VP. Obama amended Bush's EO to slightly change the declassification process, but he left in place the authority of the VP to do it. So whatever came from his time as VP, he can always claim he declassified it, so it was legal to take it home. But not  with SCI-level stuff, which is what the question is re: Trump. If there really was SCI stuff at Mar-A-Lago, the paper trail showing the declassification apparently does not exist. That would be a crime. Same is true with Biden. If there's really SCI level stuff unsecured in his garage or his spare bedroom, that's a problem -- the paperwork to show the declassification does not exist.

37
General Discussion / Re: Armchair Economics Thread - Re-Resurrection
« on: January 24, 2023, 11:10:26 am »
By reskinning the grasshoppers, we are back to bullies taking lunch money, Duuvian. I know you are trying to link it to merchants, but their "control" consists only of what someone else is willing to pay. There's a reason cartels fall apart.  It's either that or maintain their existence through state-equivalent levels of violence and terror. Or, as above, becoming the bullies stealing lunch money.

scriver, most of that is grasshopper excuses. Heck, two tins of canned chicken and a small box of instant rice is plenty of calories for a family of 4 for a day, and occupies considerably less space than a 12-pack of soda. Even at current prices, it's a shade under $7. I could have easily piled 6 month's food supply in 5-gallon buckets under my bed back when I lived in the dorms, though my roommate probably would have given me strange looks.

I know there are situations where whatever preparations you take could be swept away. That's why you help those unfortunates out. I also know there are a lot of people who have absolutely nothing stored, who shop each day for that day's food. They are the ones going to the store the day before the hurricane hits land and buy bread, milk and toilet paper. Granted, there is no way to know whether someone is telling the truth about his preps being destroyed, so use your own best judgement. Don't give so deeply that it jeopardizes you and yours, of course.

Give me a chance to read and think on your post, Loud Whispers. I'll get back to it later.

38
General Discussion / Re: Emotional Responses to War in Ukraine - Personal Diary & Mutual Support
« on: January 24, 2023, 10:56:01 am »
You guys have had more than enough time to get the story straight. Or are you seriously contending that the guys holed up in Mariupol were really Russians? That Russia destroyed their own in order to conceal the truth, to, um, as you say, fool the gullible? But weren't those "Russians" part of the same group who liberated Bucha after Russia pulled out? So it's Russians all the way down? Sneaky bastards, those Russians.

Look, the Ukrainian government itself blamed the shelling on "rogue ultranationalist paramilitaries" that they could not control, not on Russia. Somehow those same "rogue ultranationalist paramilitaries" ended up using NATO and US weapons. Are you now contending that the CIA was running guns to Russia? I'd certainly entertain the possibility that the CIA is incompetent, but that bad? That even after face-to-face contact, they couldn't identify real Russians as readily as some random internet board who has never seen them?

Makes no difference though. Believe as you like. Maybe some of you familiar with the region could help me out with something that's been bugging me for the last 40 years or so. I've been trying to understand the deep-seated hatred that Galicia has of Russians. Not Russia, not the Soviet Union, not of the Tsar, but of Russian people themselves. The papers and letters I was looking at from the early 1800s and late 1700s make that ethnic hatred plain. So obviously way before the Holodomor, before the USSR, etc. It goes back at least as far as Catherine the Great. But I understood that if not loved, at least she was appreciated for displacing the Ottoman Empire from Crimea and the south of Ukraine. Is this not the case? Were the people there resentful that they were no longer ruled by Muslims? The reason it comes up is back in college, I was tracing political ideologies, one of which became neo-conservatism, and I could not understand where the animosity from primarily Jewish thinkers about the Russian ethnicity came from, particularly in comparison to the Koran, which is explicitly anti-Semitic.

39
General Discussion / Re: Emotional Responses to War in Ukraine - Personal Diary & Mutual Support
« on: January 23, 2023, 10:14:15 pm »
Gotta admit, you've got the "Emotional Responses..." part of the thread down pat.

Young family at church got word in 2018 that her folks got blown up in I think it was Donetsk. He went over in early 2019 to get his family out. He got blown up, too. Official Ukrainian line was like Dr. Strangelove says, "These things happen." Note to the dim -- that was before Russia moved in. It was blamed on paramilitaries. But blasting off enough arty to bankrupt a medium sized company? Yep, I'm buying it.

40
General Discussion / Re: Emotional Responses to War in Ukraine - Personal Diary & Mutual Support
« on: January 23, 2023, 04:29:00 pm »
Quote from: Strongpoint on January 21, 2023, 02:14:31 am
Quote from: EuchreJack on January 21, 2023, 12:01:07 am
Putin isn't good enough to be compared to any of the characters in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. Those folks have to be interesting enough to survive and thrive on the Discworld. Putin's just another Hitler/Stalin retread. I sincerely hope he's mostly forgotten in Twenty years...

I doubt the forgotten part.

Scenario 1) A minor Russian Defeat (which will leave still leave a large country named Russia in one form or another), Russians will use him as a scapegoat for all crimes... before bringing him to the rank of their saints a few decades later.

Scenario 2) Major Russian collapse, which will turn Russia in an area of a bloody civil war... Putin will be remembered as the guy who caused that.

Scenario 3) Russia will somehow win and be able to conquer Ukraine. It will cause a genocide of the Holocaust scale securing a major place in history.   

Scenario 4) Russia will start a nuclear war. This will keep Putin in the history books of whatever civilization that will come out of the war.
Another possibility? Maybe the Special Military Operation really was intended to be that. Similar to the various police actions declared by the West? Russia did not conduct a "Shock and Awe" operation, nor detonate several MOABs, nor even approach Obama's record of deliberate drone strikes of weddings and funerals. Why not? Other than, of course, those are acceptable when the West does them, when the West's "diplomacy" results in the deaths of a half-million kids, but not when anyone else does it.

41
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: Do aquifers still absorb water?
« on: January 23, 2023, 03:57:05 pm »
If light aquifers absorb at all, I have not waited long enough to find out. I do know I can leave pools like shown in the OP for months at a time without them getting shallower.

Re: OP, I think what I would do is pierce the light aquifer elsewhere and drain this into the caverns or off-screen, then put in proper walls to line the aquifer. Unless this is a massive embark, it's not all that many tiles to the edge. An edge drain is useful anyway.

42
General Discussion / Re: AmeriPol thread
« on: January 23, 2023, 02:07:08 pm »
Quote from: Starver on January 22, 2023, 09:08:52 am
There is also that, while Biden is President (in ways the other bloke is not), these ...or at least some of them..? date to his time as VP. Which may have given him the rights to possess them at the time, at least part way up to the similar point of "not even should be left on the desk of the Oval Office, without a suitable guard" level, but would not necessarily cover his subsequent time out of Office (and the documents having been taken out of the 'Whitehouse office').
Sort of. In March of 2003, Bush amended someone else's executive order and expanded the power to declassify to the VP. You know damn well Liz Cheney knew that, or that her pappy mentioned something to her to make sure she didn't go there. (See for example https://sgp.fas.org/bush/eoamend.html, search for "Vice".) Obama, Trump and now Biden have just never changed it.

So despite there being no one who thought letting VP Biden declassify documents was a good idea, he has legal basis for having done so. To the extent an EO can authorize that, of course.

43
General Discussion / Re: Armchair Economics Thread - Re-Resurrection
« on: January 23, 2023, 11:27:10 am »
Quote from: Loud Whispers on January 22, 2023, 07:37:35 am
...you are saying that someone taking advantage of a catastrophe to price gouge people out of essential supplies is a good thing.
I'm actually saying its better than the alternative.

Imagine a city which is prone to disasters, but where inexplicably, people continue to live. You are likely familiar with the story of the Ant and the Grasshopper. This city's denizens choose the ant's tactic. They commit themselves to having one shelf of their kitchen that always has food and a couple cans of Sterno, and a couple cases of water in the hall closet. When disaster strikes, they clean up their yard trash, haul it to the curb, and then, if they are not part of the general reconstruction (roads, power, etc.) they go back to their homes and read a book or play a board game or something. Point is they are staying off the roads, not interfering with the people who need the roads to haul away all the yard trash and rebuild the roads and reconnect the power. A couple days later, the city is back to 80%.

Now imagine they choose the grasshopper strategy. The storm no more than passes and all the grasshopper putzes are out clogging the roads trying to get a latte. The power crews are unable to get through, and instead of focusing on getting infrastructure going again, the disaster response has to be hauling food and water and other supplies in, while trying to get through all the cars that ran out of gas trying to find a store that still had water. Instead of being more or less back in business 48 hours later, this strategy is still limping along 2 weeks later.

So the question is how do you get the population to choose the ant strategy, which is self-evidently superior in terms of minimizing human suffering?

It's not so much that gouging is objectively good in itself, but rather that it puts in place the right incentives. Sure you ignored the speed limit sign, and you can't do anything about what has already happened, so maybe a fine will make you slow down next time. Whereas if the policy is just to ignore all the yutzes doing 90 in a school zone, that behavior is likely to continue. A fine works exactly the same way gouging does. Indeed, it's a little odd to think that "gougers" should be fined, as it is an implicit acceptance of the idea that incentives matter.

44
General Discussion / Re: Armchair Economics Thread - Re-Resurrection
« on: January 23, 2023, 10:46:56 am »
Quote from: EuchreJack on January 20, 2023, 11:41:27 pm
Once upon a time, a single person managed to accumulate a little bit more than everyone else. Of course, they were outnumbered by their peers, who could take that surplus with their numbers.
And thus, the first Rich Man invented Government to keep his riches.
Probably not how it came about. Why would anyone obey someone's dictates just because he had two bushels of apples when you only had one? Would YOU?

More than likely, the story starts with a bully who takes others' lunch money. The smarter of these bullies hires his friends to sit around his lodge and drink his ill-gotten booze and eat his ill-gotten feasts, and occasionally shake down people for their lunch money. The more sadistic of these brutes takes a shine to making the people do humiliating things in addition to forking over lunch money, and the modern state is born.

Quote from: EuchreJack on January 20, 2023, 11:41:27 pm
The Establishment has a love/hate relationship with Middle Class. On one hand, they never want to share their wealth with the Middle Class, and they profit from the Middle Class. On the other hand, they need the assistance of the Middle Class to control the Poor.
This has rarely been true. Particularly in American politics, ever since general (white adult male) sufferage the winning tactic has always been for the rich and poor to team up against the middle.

Don't fall for the leftist nonsense about no one's taxes are going up if you make less than $400k. They publish the tax rates. You can look them up.

45
General Discussion / Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« on: January 21, 2023, 04:57:09 pm »
Quote from: MaxTheFox on January 21, 2023, 01:13:18 am
But you see, TEH EVIL AMERIKA is responsible for everything!!!111!1!!1!!!1!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Nah. There are a few evil people, like the ones in Davos at the moment, but most people, pretty much all around the world, just want to live their lives, have kids, take whatever other happiness from life they can, grow old, and die. It's just that a handful of people want to make that death thing happen a whole lot sooner that the people would like.

Pages: 1 2 [3] 4 5 ... 18