Yeah because protectionism is well known to be a great way to grow your economy.
I'll give you a hint- if you stop your people buying from everyone else, they stop their people buying from you. Then who the fuck do you expect to sell anything to to grow your economy? Unless you can become entirely self-sustaining at that point you're screwed, exactly as Argentina currently is.
I don't know, would they ever get through the skin? chances are this thing is going to be basically armour plated on the thickness of it's skin alone and I don't think the parasitic ability of biting through to drink blood that you see in things like tics, leeches and so forth would scale particularly well. I may be wrong though, I'm just guessing.
It strikes me that a Titanosaur sized tick would make a tasty simple to find meal for something like a velociraptor sized creature, so any such parasite would probably look very different from what we have now. Most parasites today survive by being small and having large amounts of offspring - that becomes harder to sustain the larger you get (which is why the larger an animal is, the smaller it's litter size tends to be), so they'd probably need some mechanism to defend themselves when they're not attached to a host meaning they'd be much more active and much more complex than the incredibly simply wait and attach mechanism in most modern parasites. I suspect just because the animal is bigger doesn't mean the parasite has to be, a kind of parasitic fungus or bacteria could do just as well on these things as on anything smaller for example. It'd just have more room to spread.
"A better example of pack hunters taking down a larger animal would be wolves taking down a moose or ox."
Sure but the point he was making I think is that those aren't good examples of animals being quite big enough to survive pack hunters. I think the point is that there are at least some animals that have grown so big that nothing really bothers them much, even in packs- sometimes their smaller young get hunted but that's about it.
Blue whales are a fine example like elephants, sure orcas have been known to go after the young, but adults? Not a chance - there's just too much animal there for even a pack of them to deal with.
I think the summary was pointing out simply that the colossal size of this animal meant it was in that category- the set of animals that have managed to grow big enough in their environment that when fully grown even packs aren't going to dick around with.
I suspect a pack probably could take down these animals, just as a pack of hyenas probably could take down an elephant and a pack of orcas probably could take down a blue whale, but when the risk is so high no such packs are ever going to bother in practice. Why shouldn't this animal fall into the same category? It doesn't seem unreasonable to think that it's sheer size meant it was never hunted when fully grown or near fully grown whether by packs or solo hunters, it was just too fucking big to bother with.
Sure, don't get me wrong, I have a few friends are the same - some people are fine to stay low and take an easy life, and in many ways I respect that (being career driven can be a curse as much as benefit - you often find yourself running out of time to simply unwind and have fun because you spent it all learning), but if you're looking for the people with the greatest ability to do the most fantastic job you need those driven people who have put in the time and effort to keep learning - I'm not saying either side is worse than the other, I'm just saying I wouldn't have a place for them in my line business, we don't just do run of the mill CRUD stuff, we need people who can genuinely innovate and create great new products and who are driven to constantly improve their skillset to keep pace with that.
I'll give you a hint, if only one media outlet in the world is telling a story, then the story is lies and propaganda. RT's story is unique because it's outright fucking made up. If it wasn't then traditional Russian allies like China would be telling the same story, but even they've abandoned Moscow's line on this because it's a blatant fucking obvious indefensible lie.
Luckily for RT there are what we call "useful idiots" like you, just as the Nazis found plenty of them in World War II to allow them to do what they did there too. Unfortunate for the rest of us that you have to exist and allow Putin to carry out these sorts of despicable crimes, killings, and deaths.
It depends on your definition of experience, I had a CV sent to me just the start of this week - "Exceptional candidate, 23 years software development experience" and sure enough there was 23 years professional development employment on his CV. But here's the thing, he was only looking for £40k a year, that rings alarm bells with me, why would someone with such a vast amount of experience only be looking for a mid-level salary at best? after all that time I'd expect him to be looking for at least double that if he was actually any good (I don't buy the argument that maybe he wanted an easier life - I've found the higher you get up the career ladder, the easier it gets, not vice versa).
The problem is that some people's 10 years of experience is actually just 6 months of experience repeated 20 times over - they've sat and stagnated doing the exact same thing, such a candidate doesn't really have 10 years of experience, they've got 0.5 years experience and 9.5 years of time spent not improving or learning anything new.
Consider this question, who would you rather employ, a guy like that I mention above with over 20 years experience but nothing to suggest there'd been any real progression of skill or understanding in much of that 20 years, or Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 2001 when they only had 3 years professional experience but had turned the search engine market on it's head creating a multi-billion dollar company?
That's why I tend to think experience is meaningless, it can give you a rough understanding sometimes, but I've seen kids fresh from university but with an incredible passion for the subject that meant they spent every minute not studying working on open source projects and so forth perform far better than folks who'd been sat in the same chair for 10 years stagnating.
So I'd say credentials (providing they can be authenticated as being valid and not made up), experience is too often misleading, it doesn't really tell us anything of any worth and I've never ever once made a hiring decision based on experience, if I had I'd have lost way too many good candidates and potentially ended up with far too many wasters. Good credentials stem from years of good experience anyway, so good credentials tell you what you need to know without the murkiness and chance to mislead provided by experience alone.
"They could have blamed Berkut officers who escaped to Crimea. Yet curiously there are no witnesses of actual shooters."
Yes there is, there's actual video of it.
"Yet Putin's war crimes happened to be bloodless. There was only one fatality during the Crimea takeover."
No there wasn't. You're ignoring the countless Crimean Tatar's that have been disappeared stasi style.
"Maybe because only RT tells about such things? Have you thought about that?"
Bwahahah. Yes, that's right, RT is a magical press outlet, the only one in the world that just happens to be right. Well at least we're getting somewhere now, at least we're getting to the point that you are after all mindlessly fed propaganda by RT. You realise that defending RT is a bit like defending Fox News or The Daily Mail right? You have to be a pretty exceptional type of retard to fall for that kind of blatant propaganda.
LOL, you have a very different definition of graphic to me. I wouldn't call a mangled toy doll graphic, but I guess you really are quite special. Wait, seriously, I have to just check, you really thought that was a person didn't you? you actually thought a blatantly plastic toy doll was a persons? You're really learning from the Kremlin about propaganda on this one - you'll really stoop to such levels of absurdity to protect your biases rather than recognise what utter stupid arguments you're making?
"Similar tragedies happen in Ukraine every day now"
Yes, because Russia thought it would be more fun to avoid than leave it the fuck alone, yet for some reason you continue to defend Russia.
"And without Western diplomatic support and pressure, there would have been NO revolution at all."
There was no pressure, the pressure came from the Russians and the majority of people of Ukraine wanting to move away from Russia, did the West support that? Of course, why wouldn't we support the will of the people to move away from a corrupt tyrrany like Yanukovych's regime if that's what they want as they did?
"Yanukovich would have been voted out by now and everything would have been OK. How about that?"
Yanukovych lost elections previously but it didn't stop the FSB poisoning the opposition did it? Yanukovych was voted out - parliament decided to vote 73% in favour to start the impeachment process against him before he fled, yet Russia still did this. Why do you think Russia wouldn't meddle in the Ukraine if it happened via normal elections? It's not like that's stopped them meddling in the Ukraine before, ever since the orange revolution they've been playing games. Putin doesn't give a shit about democracy in Ukraine, he just wants to control it, that's been obvious since Putin became president - the same is true of Georgia, Putin cannot cope with the idea of them determining their own future, he's insistent on doing it for them whatever democracy in the country in question says.
"Actually, no. Even Berkuts say that unknown agents, probably from FSB shot people."
Um, are you stupid? of course they would, they're not exactly going to admit to shooting unarmed civilians are they?
"We see from the current war crimes committed by the Ukrainian army that Maidan leaders are happy to oblige in such matters."
As opposed to the self-admitted war crimes of Putin of using soldiers passed off as civilians in Crimea? I guess war crimes are a thing you only see from one side even though war crimes by Ukraine are speculation, but war crimes by Putin are outright admitted - he's admitted he had ununiformed soldiers posing as civilians in Ukraine and that is a real actual war crime.
"Yet that's what ends up happening. Intentionally or not, in Libya (militia there are doing ethnic cleansings), Syria and Iraq (ISIS), Egypt (more than 300 death sentences for a murder of a policeman) and so on."
Which is the West's fault how? Britain voted against war in Syria and so the West has had no intervention there. Compare and contrast to Russia which has defended the Syrian military's ethnic cleansing, has been continuously arming and training the Syrian military despite them carrying out war crimes and somehow it's the West's fault that that led to the creation of IS not Russia's? IS is the inevitable result of Russian allowing Assad to carry out the atrocities he did - if you let someone get away with atrocities such as using chemical weapons on a large scale as Putin did then you shouldn't be surprised if the opposition starts looking to people who will fight with the same brutality when they're abandoned by the international community in enforcing the long established rules of war.
In the middle east all countries, East and West have a lot to answer for, pretending it's simply a Western problem is a complete joke - is Iraq militarism the West's fault? Yes, Libya? only slightly- Gaddaffi was a Russian ally and carried out atrocities including massacres and indiscriminate shelling of civilians, the West helped remove Gaddaffi for that reason which left a vacuum whereby moderates and extremists are both fighting to fill. Egypt was Western backed, but the West has reduced armaments since the new administration became so brutal towards the opposition, and Russian is now arming them instead (RT probably forgot to tell you that). Syria? That's wholly on Russia, the West has done nothing more than supply some pretty low key equipment to the moderates - stoking up extremism is entirely on Assad/Russia.
"I do not watch Russian TV channels. I do not even read official Russian news. All the information I get is from blogs and/or forums. For example, try to read this one: http://talk.lg.ua/index.php?sh... or this blog http://lugansk.co.ua/ . You just _might_ notice that people there do not support Kiev (there ARE supporters, but only a 'vocal minority')."
So why in that case are you merely parroting RT's line and nothing else? Some of the things you say are fair arguments, I disagree with them, but they're fair arguments all the same, other things you say however are complete and outright lies though, and that's why it's clear you follow the Kremlin's line on everything and most definitely do not get
"Now tell me, has CNN shown these photos"
I don't know about CNN, I tend not to follow it, but I know the BBC has reported on such things (though it doesn't show graphic photos like that, but it didn't of MH17 either so your speculation there is completely false). The reason MH17 was such big news was because it was an international incident, like it or not, to the media in every country in the world that's much bigger news than the victims of day to day incidents, but it has nothing to do with bias.
"ee, you're basing your conclusions not on actual information, but on several axioms: "Moscow is bad", "Ukraine is good", "English-speaking media is honest". In this system, anything that confl
I can answer this one for you, the NSA has refused to post photos from it's own satellites in large part because it doesn't want to give away it's capabilities, thus, all satellite photos used to show Russian military buildups and rocket launches and so forth have been provided from private and public organisations who satellite data is freely available from countries both allied to the US and neutral.
Which doesn't mean that such images are verifiable proof of course, sure the NSA could've hacked all these organisations and slipped these images in I suppose, but at that point you're tending towards the realm of likely crackpot conspiracy theory.
If the images were to have come from the NSA then sure they could be doctored, but these organisations provide publicly historical satellite data, so you'd have to slip it into the history without anyone who has ever cached that data noticing - it's not a simple as the NSA saying "Here's a picture, BELIEVE US!", the US has specifically used public data precisely to address the exact concern you're raising.
"Really? I was reading in the Guardian (which has proven itself to be woefully biased in the past few months)"
Hi, I think I can help, the problem is not The Guardian that's woefully biased, it's you. The Guardian along with the Independent and the Financial Times are the three UK papers that do a pretty good job of remaining fairly neutral, chances are if you think they're being biased about something (especially something international) then you're the problem. This is definitely the case in this particular case - you're the problem here, The Guardian's reporting has been balanced and reasonable, but what's going on doesn't support your pre-determined pro-Russian bias, that's the problem. About the only area where The Guardian does let a little bit of bias slip through is on internal UK political issues where it tends slightly towards the left, but it's a far cry from the likes of The Daily Mail, Fox News, Russia Today and so forth which are biased in absolutely everything they report.
"Nobody is claiming the separatists are armed only with stuff they got months ago. They're claiming, and so is Kiev, that they've been able to obtain large quantities of arms from the fleeing, conscript-based Ukrainian army."
None of which explains how the separatists have ended up with T-72BMs of course, which the Ukrainian army never has had. Who do you presume it captured them from? Did the rebels invade a Russian military base in your eyes, steal them, and get them across the border given that the Russian military is the only operator of this variant of T-72? I'm intrigued to know how you hope to pass this one off as the rebels capturing equipment.
"Over 1000 soldiers and 100 tanks! Such a unit requires support vehicles, a tent town, supply lines.... so where is it? Maybe it's sort of like invasion by aid convoy."
So did you just make those numbers up or what? What we know is that we have pictures of tanks only owned and operated by the Russian military in Ukraine now, how many there are dotted around we really don't know, but we do know that ever since the aid convoy Putin forced through to Luhansk which the red cross was prevented from expected at least 30 odd lorries of and which journalists previously noted were pretty much empty the rebels in Luhansk have suddenly gone from losing ground hard to having a swelling of numbers and munitions to start pushing back heavily. Maybe that's a coincidence, maybe hundreds of rebels just managed to sneak through the lines at the exact same time the aid convoy turned up, but one might wonder why Putin wouldn't let the red cross do it's job in inspecting all the vehicles that were to cross and why there were a bunch of nearly-empty trucks in the convoy (there are plenty of pictures on Google images if you care to search and it doesn't offend your pro-Putin views too much). What about the Russian servicemen that were capture in Ukraine (others were killed at the same time for what it's worth), I guess you buy the story that a professional military completely failed their map and compass drills even though that's something that even I personally managed to do just fine in the British army cadet force at the age of 13?
Besides, your Putin apologism doesn't even tie in with what Putin himself has said, even Putin himself has admitted the tanks are mostly coming from Russia, he's just argued previously that they're old army surplus tanks in the past and that he can't possibly control his own border for whatever reason. That excuse kinda doesn't work now that some of the weapons aren't army surplus kit, but active service kit only used in the Russian military now though.
Look I get it, you're not willing to pay attention that the Berkut in question who did what Yanukovych wanted were the ones who ended up in Eastern Ukraine fighting with the Russians (as documented by journalists).
I doubt I can get through to you because you're the sort of fucked up individual that would support persecution of the Jews in 1939, just as you support persecution of ethnic Ukrainians and Tatars now, the fact you think the West ever supported IS or some Nazi mass murderers is comical, it explicitly supported their opposition (the FSA who have been fighting IS and explicitly pushed for the genuine handful of neo Nazis in Ukraine to be dealt with and not put into power). But keep on with your Russia Today, when the only source of news you have is your Kremlin fed channels it's not surprising that you're a modern day equivalent of a Nazi apologist who has not the slightest clue what's going on in the world. It's incredible there are people as dumb as you who are willing to fall into the propaganda trap that's around them, you realise Moscow only lets you see what the Kremlin wants you see for a reason right? You realise it's you and the country you're now in that's only letting you see a very limited Putin-favourable view of the world? you really don't see how your view and understanding of the situation is completely broken because of that?
In contrast I get to see all around me Russian, Iranian, Chinese, as well as Western media viewpoints on the topic, that's how I know you don't know what you're on about, and that's how I know you're a fascist loving, nazi backing, murder supporting fuckwad.
Russia had plausible deniability by only supplying things like T-64s to the rebels, but as the rebels were losing it seems Putin couldn't accept that and now there are numerous photos of T-72BMs in the Ukraine and the Russian military is the only military in the world to have access to and operate these:
Similarly, Russian mothers are beginning to ask why their sons are coming back in coffins due to unexplained deaths from a "training exercise" on the Ukrainian border, and where reporters attending their funerals are attacked by mobs that have nothing to do with the funerals in question but magically turn up at them to keep journalists away all the same. Then of course there's the actual Russian soldiers who were outright captured in Ukraine:
Of course, we have history, just this year too, where Crimea was filled with "rebels" who Putin eventually admitted were Russian soldiers, so it's obviously well within Putin's realm of willingness to pass of serving soldiers as civilians until their mission is complete, which, by the way, is a war crime for what it's worth - yes, that's right, admitting this tactic makes Putin a self-admitted war criminal.
When MH-17 was shot down, and it was just T-64s and modern machine guns the rebels had it seemed a bit of a stretch, yet still plausible that this was just a rag tag bunch of individuals fighting on behalf of Russia. Now, with more recent evidence you'd have to be exceptionally retarded to not recognise that Russia is very clearly in the Ukraine with full serving units (hell, the 10 captured soldiers prove that as an outright fact by itself whether you really believe they were lost or not, you don't just allow your soldiers to stumble into a war zone accidentally unless you want them to end up in a potential fight). This is why the tide of battle has changed too from being strongly in the Ukrainian military's favour to now being in the Russia's favour - the Ukrainians are no longer fighting relatively lightly armed insurgents, they're fighting full blown armoured battalions backed up by professionally precision launched artillery strikes all of a sudden - that doesn't just get organised out of nowhere by rebels in a couple of cut off towns with little remaining access to the outside world and dwindling numbers, that requires state level planning, implementation, and financing over an extended period of time to implement - i.e. it requires a professional army.
At this point the only hope is that enough Russian soldiers are killed such that Russians themselves start asking what the fuck they're doing in someone else's country that has done absolutely nothing wrong to Russia (other than hurting Putin's ego) when there's a simple solution of leaving that country the fuck alone and letting it get on with becoming a modern nation even if it does mean Putin's little big man syndrome takes a knock. Thankfully that already seems to be happening to some degree with the Russian soldier's rights institute that's compiled a list of the 400 dead Russian soldiers it believes have been killed in this war already - putting that into context that's very nearly as many lives as the British have lost in 13 years in Afghanistan so thankfully there is a high cost to Russia for this stupidity, and thankfully it is beginning to be noticed by ordinary Russians themselves.
Yes, you've missed absolutely everything it seems. Anything that's propaganda is propaganda, anything that's objective, transparent and well cited, is not propaganda.
You are right that rising ultra-nationalism Ukraine doesn't exist though, the presidential polls proved that, where the far right only got 2% of the vote.
"You're the one who said 'agent-provocateurs', aren't you? Do you know that the trees with bullet holes from snipers were cut down and burned by the no-longer-protesters 3 days after the shooting? Think about it."
Think about what? eyewitness account from both sides - the police, and the protesters were clear that the only ones shooting were the Berkut on the roof tops, there needn't be any conspiracy theory about trees, the fact that both sides of the protest witnessed the whole fucking thing and agreed about what happened is evidence enough.
But keep on defending your far right love for Putin, your support for ethnic cleansing, and murdering of minorities, with any luck you'll get what you deserve - a life of abysmal quality in slowly collapsing Russia under it's own idiocy, lies, propaganda, corruption, and incompetence. Enjoy your coming poverty, you've earned it.
"Oh, who cares. We have a number, after all. It's so obviously true! It's as true as CNN polls!"
Once again, I can see why you're so easily swayed by Russian propaganda when you're completely unable to differentiate between the quality of a data source, if you believe that something where there is strong evidence of invalidity has as much weight as something where there is no such evidence and where the original source is cited, and in the CIty.am case (the inconvenient one for you that you keep avoiding), the data available then there's not really much helping you. You're the type of guy who could get an e-mail from a Nigerian prince asking for you to send $10,000 and you'd do it because the guy spoke to you personally and all those people on the internet telling you it's a scam must just be numbers, noise.
"So basically, it's called Wikireality. Nice. Do you understand that you've just channeled our dear beloved mister Goebbels? "If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself"."
Oh dear, oh dear. You've invoked the Godwin principle, how utterly desperate. The problem is that I'm not parroting a lie (again, as evidenced by trustworthy polls, unlike your consistently pointless anecdotes), but if you want to bring Nazism to the debate, then let's get one thing straight - you are defending Vladimir Putin, a guy who has close links with a Nazi biker gang who he has sent into the Ukraine, and who has carried out persecution in his home country of minorities such as homosexuals, and a number of ethnic minorities. A guy whose people have been marking the houses of minorities (Tatars) in Crimea with white crosses, and has been disappearing them in the night. He has had to rig elections to stay in power as a dictator and he has annexed foreign soil illegally. If you want to bring Nazism into this then let's make one thing clear, you are acting as the most disgusting, indefensible type of human being who in the 30s and 40s was defending what the Nazis were doing because there are incredibly strong parallels between what happened then with Hitler, and with what Putin is doing now. You may think you're doing the right thing, but you're not, not even close - you're defending the most despicable type of human being and human actions on earth and you're a disgrace to humanity for it. You're the modern day equivalent of a Nazi sympathiser, a pathetic waste of human flesh.
"Yeah, and diplomatic help of the West also helped. Do you remember the shitstorm that the Western countries started when Yanukovich passed the laws banning weapons from demonstrations?"
Not really, I just remember what actually happened which is that Western countries were not happy with Yanukovych's Berkut puppets shooting from rooftops at regular police and protesters alike to try and provoke a violent confrontation between the two and the West not being happy with Yanukovych's implication that they should allow themselves to be slaughtered by disposing of any form of defence. You obviously like the idea of that though, as you're a Putin sympathiser and it's exactly the sort of thing you're apparently into.
You still really don't get the difference between a handful of dissent and large scale distaste do you? You still don't get that a vocal minority isn't necessarily representative of the majority. These are simple things and again I can see how you're easily swayed by propaganda when you place more weight in the hearsay of a minority than the overwhelming view of a majority.
I'm actually beginning to understand what's wrong with someone like you to be so susceptible to propaganda like that fed to you by RT. It seems that if the media covers something then it must be backing up that of your preferred propaganda outlet, that the BBC was covering it because it agreed with RT, rather than the reality of the situation that the BBC covered it because it appears to be neutral.
If you recognised the latter you'd also note that the BBC has in the last week unearthed a lot of evidence about a full fledged Russian invasion of Ukraine, so tell me, if "the BBC covered it" is evidence of it must be as I believe, then how does Russia's now demonstrable invasion of Ukraine as reported by the BBC fit in?
"So how about the overwhelming majority of the citizens choosing independence in a referendum? Is it any more valid than a poll?"
Well both referendums were verifiably rigged, the Crimea one where the real results were accidentally posted publicly coupled with impossible numbers (120%+ turnout in one area relative to the actual amount of people living there) and the local Donetsk one where we have video evidence of people voting multiple times. As we have evidence that neither is trustworthy then no they're not more valid than polls where we have actual data available (as in the original City.am mentioned poll etc.).
"There are many thousands rebels now fighting the Ukrainian army. And winning. I think it's your sense of proportion that is off."
No, there were a bunch of Russian irregulars fighting the Ukrainian army with a bunch of actual genuine Ukrainian-Russians who want independence from Ukraine, and they were losing. Now there is a full batallion of Russian regulars and the Russians are winning. Who'd have thought? a full blown Russian invasion can defeat the Ukrainian military? There's a reason the Russians are having secret ceremonies for their military dead back home, and why tanks only operated by the Russian military are in Ukraine - because the actual full blown Russian military is now in Ukraine.
"Do you claim to know situation any better?"
Yes, absolutely, because the anecdote of a pro-Russian individual does still not somehow override the thoughts and opinions of the majority that are widely publicised. You seem to feel that as someone who lived in the Ukraine you have authority, okay, if that's so, then why does the City.am poll which was also carried out by Ukrainians not have authority over you given that it was a more widespread study in neutral times? Just because you claim to be Ukrainian, why should I listen to you when you show a demonstrable inability for objectivity other other Ukrainians and Russians who tell a more well evidenced story?
"There is no plurality in Ukrainian media. It's all controlled by Kiev. All the opposition channels are blocked. But that's OK, censorship is fine if it's pro-European. Right?"
I don't know what opposition you're referring to? I know that a wide range of Ukrainian voices have their say in Ukraine whether it's the old pro-Yanukovych channels, whether it's those who are pro-Tymoschenko, or whether it's the numerous miner's associations, or whether it's the far-right. You seem to think opposition = Russia Today, Moscow's propaganda outlet, but that's false. What you're actually saying is that Ukraine should fight the propaganda war with one hand tied behind it's back - it should broadcast Russia Today to it's citizens, but in Russia it's okay for Moscow to deny all opposition, whether external (as RT is to Ukraine) or internal. Long story short, the only censorship you hate and the only censorship that matters is censorship of Putin's propaganda. Do I support censorship, even of propaganda? Not really, but to pretend the Ukrainian media is somehow more biased than the Russian is insanely comical. Even journalists agree putting Ukraine at 127 and Russia at 148 and this was tainted by the Yanukovych era censorship so Ukraine will likely be even higher now!:
"And except the EU. And China. And the US. Well, on the plus side, Nigeria probably did leave Ukraine the fuck alone."
Ah, so you share Putin's paranoia that the Ukrainian revolution happened because of the West, rather than the actual fact of the matter than for the third fucking time the Ukrainians tried to make it clear to Russia that they do not want to be part of Russia because it's simply a fucking shithole and their neighbours have grown more prosperous since fleeing it's grasp and so they want part of that too. Good one, I mean, obviously most people would choose end up living in a corrupt shithole over a prosperous future wouldn't they? Actually, don't answer that, because you're obviously the type of idiot that would.
Out of interest, you said you lived in Ukraine until June this year, where do you live now? Russia by any chance?
"No, because they are biased and/or simply fabricated."
Whereas a handful of protestors standing in front of a Ukrainian APC couldn't possibly be? It's obvious that wide scale polls are fabricated but small scale actions aren't? This is your problem - you have lost all sense of proportionality and rationality.
"So just like the Maidan uprising?"
You still really struggled with scale don't you? I know humans have an inherent problem imagining large numbers, but most people are capable of telling the difference between tens and hundreds, and hundreds of thousands. It seems you are not.
"Ya ne veru v eto. Seychas Kramatorsk controliruetsa vojakami is kieva, tak chto zhiteli boyatsa za svoi zhizni i govorat to, chto nuzhno. Ili ischezaut. Pokazat video togo, kak pravij sektor izbivaet ludej?"
You love Putin and believe everything he says? Why am I not surprised. Oh wait, you think that posting something in Russian somehow makes your argument more valid, silly me, there was me thinking you'd understand why anecdotes were meaningless as a measure of determining the will of the majority.
"Nobody kicked rebels out, they simply pulled orderly out. They didn't have strength to hold an extended front line back then."
Nice story. Shame it's false. Mariupol is a heavily populated city of just under half a million. If the rebels had popular support then how could the Ukrainian military drive them out so easily? How come there were only tens of casualties involved when their self-proclaimed HQ there was surrounded and attacked? Again, you seem to struggle with scale - a handful of people, numbering in the tens, in a city of almost half a million highlights how utterly isolated their viewpoint was. If they generally had support there as you're suggesting then there'd be far more than only a few tens of people there.
"So the main goal of democratic Ukraine is to be just as bad as Russia?"
How is having plurality of viewpoints as bad as having one viewpoint? I'll try again as you don't seem to grasp it: in Ukraine there are many viewpoints ranging across all aspects of the spectrum from far right, to right, to centre right, to centre, to centre left, to left, to far left - all of these are represented politically in the Ukrainian media. What's finally been banned however is Russia's propaganda channel- that doesn't decrease the overall plurality of the media beyond eliminating Russian propaganda (if you want Russian fact, without the propaganda, you can still get it). Contrast this to Russia where media plurality has been decimated such that many views that don't align exactly with Putin's have been silenced.
If Putin had just left Ukraine be, it would be well on it's way to being a modern democratic Eastern European nation like Poland - it came from the exact same background they did of being controlled by the USSR, the only thing that's different is that it's large border with Russia means it's the one nation above all others that Russia has desperately tried to hold on to.
Look I get it, you're from a pro-Russian background, and you love Russia, that's fine. Most Ukrainians no longer do however, most Ukrainians just want to be left the fuck alone to grow their country in a way that all their neighbours except Russia have - they've recognised that the Russian way just does not work. They've looked at what their neighbours have done in the last 20 years and and they want to follow in the footsteps of Poland, Czech republic, Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia in becoming modern increasingly prosperous nations. I'm sorry that democracy has spoken and wants something you do not, but it is what it is- Russians can always go and live in Russia, but Ukrainians only have Ukraine - that's not for you to take away from them.
"Please, get the CNN polls and stuff them deep into your rectum. They are worth just that."
Why, because they're inconvenient for your pro-Putin lies? What about the City.am one which stems from a neutral Ukrainian polling outfit before it all kicked off? I guess that was so inconvenient you couldn't even address it?
You know that repeating yourself doesn't make something true right? As I said, hundreds, some of whom are legit, but others who are agent provocateurs does not equate to popular support.
The fact you're persisting in arguing that numbers in the hundreds, or thousands in a specific circumstance in a specific place controlled by Russian's is somehow representative of the millions whilst also claiming polls that are objective and more representative are useless tells us one thing - you're not arguing based on rationality, you're arguing based on an agenda, a pro-Russian, pro-Putin one.
"I was personally in Kramatorsk helping to move my friend's family from there during the start of the conflict. And I certainly know that the reason for the conflict was not Putin."
I was there yesterday and everyone told me they hate Putin and it's all his fault. Last night on the phone Putin even told me it's his fault. See how that works?
"And? Mariupol is fairly far from Donetsk, and after one month or brainwashing by the Ukrainian media,"
So what was the excuse last time the Ukrainians liberated Mariupol because the populace helped kick the Russian's out? That was over a month ago, or is that also too much of an inconvenient truth for you? Why is it a problem if Ukraine blocks Russia today after months of pro-Russian propaganda but the fact that Russia only allows pro-Moscow propaganda? You only think it's bad when Moscow is at the receiving end of censorship? What you said about Ukraine having no opposition TV/Radio, that's false, what they don't have is Russia's propaganda outlet, RT, that's not the same as no opposition voice.
"Incidentally, if we're talking about the people digging trenches: http://gordonua.com/news/war/P... then it turned out to be a photo-op, staged by Ukrainian media."
Wow, who'd have thought it? Russian media outlet claims Ukrainian trench digging is photo op! Let's try a more neutral source that's historically aligned with Russia shall we, I suppose the Chinese are supporting Western propaganda too right? - http://news.xinhuanet.com/engl...
I think you need to stop swallowing Putin's propaganda, it's not good for you, you're siding with anecdotes and propaganda over polls and objective sources.
"You know, maybe some of us should complain to Slashdot about the Obama/Poroshenko-bots that reliably and consistently troll every single story about this conflict? You know, the ones who imply that anyone who even slightly skeptical about the propaganda we're all being fed, must be Russian or a paid Kremlin propagandist?"
No, we don't think that, we just think you're naive and stupid. But those who clearly are Kremlin propagandists (maybe not paid, just naive native Russians) with their broken English and undisguised love of Putin should just as well be allowed to be called out on it.
I wouldn't pretend to defend everything the Ukrainian army has done, but I'm still siding with Ukraine on this because everything from shooting down of a civilian airliner to annexed Crimea's Tatar population having their houses marked with X's and the disappearance of those who protest that annexation are all kinds of evil created by Putin that simply cannot be defended.
What you don't do is help your case with arguments like this, which are trivially debunked:
"Poroshenko has claimed Ukraine was invaded like ten times already."
So? Maybe that's because he is?
"He claimed he was being "invaded" by a fucking aid convoy, including after Putin's honesty about it's contents had been verified by international journalists and the Red Cross."
Why on Earth are you lying about this? The Red Cross themselves explicitly said they were only allowed to examine about 35 of 70 lorries that crossed the border and so could not support it, a bunch of journalists got a glimpse inside some they weren't supposed to see and they were basically empty. Why? What was going to be put in them at the border?
"We know what an invasion looks like. It looks like what the USA did to Iraq."
Oh I see, you're one of those people who in 2003 was, like many of us saying "The Iraq war is wrong!" but unlike the rest of us you're unable to let something go from 11 fucking years ago? That doesn't paint you as someone rational we should listen to. This has nothing to do with Iraq - that happened, it was an unacceptable fuckup, but it was a fuckup perpetrated by a regime who hasn't been in power for 6 years.
"It looks like Russian flags flying above Kiev and Russian tanks rolling down the streets to the parliament building."
This is just stupid. Why do you feel an invasion has to be fully fledged? Are you saying that Israel didn't in fact recently invade Gaza because they only kept tanks on the outskirts, only sent troops into the streets, and didn't raise the Israeli flag over Gaza? Putin has done what he's done because plausible deniability allows him to cast doubt on whether Russia deserves full blown sanctions, he was hoping he could take over Eastern Ukraine and not have anyone able to hold him immediately responsible for it. Unfortunately for him due to a variety of fuckups such as Russian soldiers being captured in Ukraine, and tanks that are operated by no one in the world other than the Russian military (T-72BMs) now turning up it's pretty clear it's Russia in there and no one else:
What's worse is that this is exactly what they did a few months ago in Crimea and now even admit it - why are you so adamant that they wouldn't do the same in Eastern Ukraine as they admitted to doing there? Something which is, for what it's worth, a war crime- dressing a professional army as civilians is a breach of international law, and unlike Bush who was simply arguably a war criminal, Putin is a self-admitted war criminal.
But you keep defending a war criminal based on half-assed information if it makes you feel like a cool counter-culture hipster or whatever you think you are.
Using the age old argument of "America fucked up once, so this isn't Putin and if it was it'd be justified anyway" makes you look like an exceptional kind of idiot. The world isn't that black and white, and two wrongs don't make a right.
No it doesn't, the separatist movement has never had popular support in east Ukraine, the argument for populist support was tenuous even in Crimea that is by far the most pro-Russian part of Ukraine.
"If you don't believe me, just look at the photos of the East Ukraine during March and April when citizens were blocking off roads to stop tanks, in some cases just like the Tiananmen Man."
If you think tens, at most hundreds of people, some of whom were themselves "rebels" aka Putin's agent provocateurs in regions of millions is a sign of popular support than I urge you to go and get a better grasp of millions of numbers. A counterpoint to yours would be the citizens of Mariupol who are currently helping the Ukrainian military dig trenches against the Russian invaders and who formed a many mile long chain of people to make the point that they don't want Putin's soldiers to take over their territory.
That show that the Russian made myth of support for joining Russia or being independent from Ukraine is just that, a myth.
Putin is trying to make Eastern Ukraine a buffer zone by injecting his own Russian puppet leadership there just as he did with Crimea, and just as he did with Ukraine (which is what led to this situation). It has nothing to do with what the people there want and everything to do with Putin's paranoia that Europe is somehow out to get him, rather than the actual reality - that Ukrainians would rather just join modern prosperous democratic Europe, than corrupt, poverty stricken, dictatorial Russia. That's why Putin has manufactured the myth you're parroting.
Stop propping up the propaganda of a brutal dictator, because that's what Putin is.
"It is widely understood to be true that Java has, as an actual, real-life thing in its "pros" column (and in its "cons" column) that it is easier to use by low quality, replaceable programmers."
More so than systems languages like C/C++? Sure, more so than other mainstream languages used for business development like C#, PHP, Python? Absolutely not, so I don't really know what your point is. If anything I'd argue that Java developers are, on average, better than developers of scripting languages, because there's a higher barrier of entry. Java developers at least have to have a basic grasp of object oriented structure, and to be able to write something compilable before they can even get their application to execute - PHP programmers can have anything execute no matter how tragically badly structure or written it is. This is why big companies like Java - it enforces a baseline of quality so that even the worst programmers have to adhere to some baseline, that's barely true with scripted languages at all. Those interchangeable parts Wall is referring to are interchangeable without a reduction in quality to the level you will see with a change towards scripted languages where much more problematic code can reach a point of execution.
None of which of course addresses the point I've made and the question I posed that you've conveniently dodged - what methodology exists to allow scripting languages with no compile time checks to be inherently better quality than compiled languages that force entire classes of bugs to be dealt with before execution that can make it through to execution in scripted languages? I'm intrigued to know what this methodology is because I've never heard of it despite years of working with both large compiled and scripted projects.
Fact is, as a project gets larger, you cannot build something with a scripted language in the same time frame and for the same cost to a better quality level than with a compiled language like Java, or C# - the inherent disadvantages of scripted languages over managed languages make this a certainty. The performance disadvantage of translated languages over JIT compiled languages alone makes sure of this, the inherent quality difference and resultant increase in maintainability costs in large code bases just adds further weight to guarantee it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah because protectionism is well known to be a great way to grow your economy.
I'll give you a hint- if you stop your people buying from everyone else, they stop their people buying from you. Then who the fuck do you expect to sell anything to to grow your economy? Unless you can become entirely self-sustaining at that point you're screwed, exactly as Argentina currently is.
No, debt is there because there's too much spending.
You can reduce debt and taxes by reducing spending if you so desire.
I don't know, would they ever get through the skin? chances are this thing is going to be basically armour plated on the thickness of it's skin alone and I don't think the parasitic ability of biting through to drink blood that you see in things like tics, leeches and so forth would scale particularly well. I may be wrong though, I'm just guessing.
It strikes me that a Titanosaur sized tick would make a tasty simple to find meal for something like a velociraptor sized creature, so any such parasite would probably look very different from what we have now. Most parasites today survive by being small and having large amounts of offspring - that becomes harder to sustain the larger you get (which is why the larger an animal is, the smaller it's litter size tends to be), so they'd probably need some mechanism to defend themselves when they're not attached to a host meaning they'd be much more active and much more complex than the incredibly simply wait and attach mechanism in most modern parasites. I suspect just because the animal is bigger doesn't mean the parasite has to be, a kind of parasitic fungus or bacteria could do just as well on these things as on anything smaller for example. It'd just have more room to spread.
"A better example of pack hunters taking down a larger animal would be wolves taking down a moose or ox."
Sure but the point he was making I think is that those aren't good examples of animals being quite big enough to survive pack hunters. I think the point is that there are at least some animals that have grown so big that nothing really bothers them much, even in packs- sometimes their smaller young get hunted but that's about it.
Blue whales are a fine example like elephants, sure orcas have been known to go after the young, but adults? Not a chance - there's just too much animal there for even a pack of them to deal with.
I think the summary was pointing out simply that the colossal size of this animal meant it was in that category- the set of animals that have managed to grow big enough in their environment that when fully grown even packs aren't going to dick around with.
I suspect a pack probably could take down these animals, just as a pack of hyenas probably could take down an elephant and a pack of orcas probably could take down a blue whale, but when the risk is so high no such packs are ever going to bother in practice. Why shouldn't this animal fall into the same category? It doesn't seem unreasonable to think that it's sheer size meant it was never hunted when fully grown or near fully grown whether by packs or solo hunters, it was just too fucking big to bother with.
Sure, don't get me wrong, I have a few friends are the same - some people are fine to stay low and take an easy life, and in many ways I respect that (being career driven can be a curse as much as benefit - you often find yourself running out of time to simply unwind and have fun because you spent it all learning), but if you're looking for the people with the greatest ability to do the most fantastic job you need those driven people who have put in the time and effort to keep learning - I'm not saying either side is worse than the other, I'm just saying I wouldn't have a place for them in my line business, we don't just do run of the mill CRUD stuff, we need people who can genuinely innovate and create great new products and who are driven to constantly improve their skillset to keep pace with that.
I'll give you a hint, if only one media outlet in the world is telling a story, then the story is lies and propaganda. RT's story is unique because it's outright fucking made up. If it wasn't then traditional Russian allies like China would be telling the same story, but even they've abandoned Moscow's line on this because it's a blatant fucking obvious indefensible lie.
Luckily for RT there are what we call "useful idiots" like you, just as the Nazis found plenty of them in World War II to allow them to do what they did there too. Unfortunate for the rest of us that you have to exist and allow Putin to carry out these sorts of despicable crimes, killings, and deaths.
It depends on your definition of experience, I had a CV sent to me just the start of this week - "Exceptional candidate, 23 years software development experience" and sure enough there was 23 years professional development employment on his CV. But here's the thing, he was only looking for £40k a year, that rings alarm bells with me, why would someone with such a vast amount of experience only be looking for a mid-level salary at best? after all that time I'd expect him to be looking for at least double that if he was actually any good (I don't buy the argument that maybe he wanted an easier life - I've found the higher you get up the career ladder, the easier it gets, not vice versa).
The problem is that some people's 10 years of experience is actually just 6 months of experience repeated 20 times over - they've sat and stagnated doing the exact same thing, such a candidate doesn't really have 10 years of experience, they've got 0.5 years experience and 9.5 years of time spent not improving or learning anything new.
Consider this question, who would you rather employ, a guy like that I mention above with over 20 years experience but nothing to suggest there'd been any real progression of skill or understanding in much of that 20 years, or Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 2001 when they only had 3 years professional experience but had turned the search engine market on it's head creating a multi-billion dollar company?
That's why I tend to think experience is meaningless, it can give you a rough understanding sometimes, but I've seen kids fresh from university but with an incredible passion for the subject that meant they spent every minute not studying working on open source projects and so forth perform far better than folks who'd been sat in the same chair for 10 years stagnating.
So I'd say credentials (providing they can be authenticated as being valid and not made up), experience is too often misleading, it doesn't really tell us anything of any worth and I've never ever once made a hiring decision based on experience, if I had I'd have lost way too many good candidates and potentially ended up with far too many wasters. Good credentials stem from years of good experience anyway, so good credentials tell you what you need to know without the murkiness and chance to mislead provided by experience alone.
Yes, but not T-72BMs, it's a distinct sub-model from those sold to Ukraine or operated by anyone other than Russia.
"They could have blamed Berkut officers who escaped to Crimea. Yet curiously there are no witnesses of actual shooters."
Yes there is, there's actual video of it.
"Yet Putin's war crimes happened to be bloodless. There was only one fatality during the Crimea takeover."
No there wasn't. You're ignoring the countless Crimean Tatar's that have been disappeared stasi style.
"Maybe because only RT tells about such things? Have you thought about that?"
Bwahahah. Yes, that's right, RT is a magical press outlet, the only one in the world that just happens to be right. Well at least we're getting somewhere now, at least we're getting to the point that you are after all mindlessly fed propaganda by RT. You realise that defending RT is a bit like defending Fox News or The Daily Mail right? You have to be a pretty exceptional type of retard to fall for that kind of blatant propaganda.
"Oh RLY? Let's see: http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media... ( http://www.bbc.com/news/world-... ) No, no graphic images at all. No tearful stories of "imagine what these poor passengers felt after the rocket hit"."
LOL, you have a very different definition of graphic to me. I wouldn't call a mangled toy doll graphic, but I guess you really are quite special. Wait, seriously, I have to just check, you really thought that was a person didn't you? you actually thought a blatantly plastic toy doll was a persons? You're really learning from the Kremlin about propaganda on this one - you'll really stoop to such levels of absurdity to protect your biases rather than recognise what utter stupid arguments you're making?
"Similar tragedies happen in Ukraine every day now"
Yes, because Russia thought it would be more fun to avoid than leave it the fuck alone, yet for some reason you continue to defend Russia.
"And without Western diplomatic support and pressure, there would have been NO revolution at all."
There was no pressure, the pressure came from the Russians and the majority of people of Ukraine wanting to move away from Russia, did the West support that? Of course, why wouldn't we support the will of the people to move away from a corrupt tyrrany like Yanukovych's regime if that's what they want as they did?
"Yanukovich would have been voted out by now and everything would have been OK. How about that?"
Yanukovych lost elections previously but it didn't stop the FSB poisoning the opposition did it? Yanukovych was voted out - parliament decided to vote 73% in favour to start the impeachment process against him before he fled, yet Russia still did this. Why do you think Russia wouldn't meddle in the Ukraine if it happened via normal elections? It's not like that's stopped them meddling in the Ukraine before, ever since the orange revolution they've been playing games. Putin doesn't give a shit about democracy in Ukraine, he just wants to control it, that's been obvious since Putin became president - the same is true of Georgia, Putin cannot cope with the idea of them determining their own future, he's insistent on doing it for them whatever democracy in the country in question says.
"Actually, no. Even Berkuts say that unknown agents, probably from FSB shot people."
Um, are you stupid? of course they would, they're not exactly going to admit to shooting unarmed civilians are they?
"We see from the current war crimes committed by the Ukrainian army that Maidan leaders are happy to oblige in such matters."
As opposed to the self-admitted war crimes of Putin of using soldiers passed off as civilians in Crimea? I guess war crimes are a thing you only see from one side even though war crimes by Ukraine are speculation, but war crimes by Putin are outright admitted - he's admitted he had ununiformed soldiers posing as civilians in Ukraine and that is a real actual war crime.
"Yet that's what ends up happening. Intentionally or not, in Libya (militia there are doing ethnic cleansings), Syria and Iraq (ISIS), Egypt (more than 300 death sentences for a murder of a policeman) and so on."
Which is the West's fault how? Britain voted against war in Syria and so the West has had no intervention there. Compare and contrast to Russia which has defended the Syrian military's ethnic cleansing, has been continuously arming and training the Syrian military despite them carrying out war crimes and somehow it's the West's fault that that led to the creation of IS not Russia's? IS is the inevitable result of Russian allowing Assad to carry out the atrocities he did - if you let someone get away with atrocities such as using chemical weapons on a large scale as Putin did then you shouldn't be surprised if the opposition starts looking to people who will fight with the same brutality when they're abandoned by the international community in enforcing the long established rules of war.
In the middle east all countries, East and West have a lot to answer for, pretending it's simply a Western problem is a complete joke - is Iraq militarism the West's fault? Yes, Libya? only slightly- Gaddaffi was a Russian ally and carried out atrocities including massacres and indiscriminate shelling of civilians, the West helped remove Gaddaffi for that reason which left a vacuum whereby moderates and extremists are both fighting to fill. Egypt was Western backed, but the West has reduced armaments since the new administration became so brutal towards the opposition, and Russian is now arming them instead (RT probably forgot to tell you that). Syria? That's wholly on Russia, the West has done nothing more than supply some pretty low key equipment to the moderates - stoking up extremism is entirely on Assad/Russia.
"I do not watch Russian TV channels. I do not even read official Russian news. All the information I get is from blogs and/or forums. For example, try to read this one: http://talk.lg.ua/index.php?sh... or this blog http://lugansk.co.ua/ . You just _might_ notice that people there do not support Kiev (there ARE supporters, but only a 'vocal minority')."
So why in that case are you merely parroting RT's line and nothing else? Some of the things you say are fair arguments, I disagree with them, but they're fair arguments all the same, other things you say however are complete and outright lies though, and that's why it's clear you follow the Kremlin's line on everything and most definitely do not get
"Now tell me, has CNN shown these photos"
I don't know about CNN, I tend not to follow it, but I know the BBC has reported on such things (though it doesn't show graphic photos like that, but it didn't of MH17 either so your speculation there is completely false). The reason MH17 was such big news was because it was an international incident, like it or not, to the media in every country in the world that's much bigger news than the victims of day to day incidents, but it has nothing to do with bias.
"ee, you're basing your conclusions not on actual information, but on several axioms: "Moscow is bad", "Ukraine is good", "English-speaking media is honest". In this system, anything that confl
I can answer this one for you, the NSA has refused to post photos from it's own satellites in large part because it doesn't want to give away it's capabilities, thus, all satellite photos used to show Russian military buildups and rocket launches and so forth have been provided from private and public organisations who satellite data is freely available from countries both allied to the US and neutral.
Which doesn't mean that such images are verifiable proof of course, sure the NSA could've hacked all these organisations and slipped these images in I suppose, but at that point you're tending towards the realm of likely crackpot conspiracy theory.
If the images were to have come from the NSA then sure they could be doctored, but these organisations provide publicly historical satellite data, so you'd have to slip it into the history without anyone who has ever cached that data noticing - it's not a simple as the NSA saying "Here's a picture, BELIEVE US!", the US has specifically used public data precisely to address the exact concern you're raising.
"Really? I was reading in the Guardian (which has proven itself to be woefully biased in the past few months)"
Hi, I think I can help, the problem is not The Guardian that's woefully biased, it's you. The Guardian along with the Independent and the Financial Times are the three UK papers that do a pretty good job of remaining fairly neutral, chances are if you think they're being biased about something (especially something international) then you're the problem. This is definitely the case in this particular case - you're the problem here, The Guardian's reporting has been balanced and reasonable, but what's going on doesn't support your pre-determined pro-Russian bias, that's the problem. About the only area where The Guardian does let a little bit of bias slip through is on internal UK political issues where it tends slightly towards the left, but it's a far cry from the likes of The Daily Mail, Fox News, Russia Today and so forth which are biased in absolutely everything they report.
"Nobody is claiming the separatists are armed only with stuff they got months ago. They're claiming, and so is Kiev, that they've been able to obtain large quantities of arms from the fleeing, conscript-based Ukrainian army."
None of which explains how the separatists have ended up with T-72BMs of course, which the Ukrainian army never has had. Who do you presume it captured them from? Did the rebels invade a Russian military base in your eyes, steal them, and get them across the border given that the Russian military is the only operator of this variant of T-72? I'm intrigued to know how you hope to pass this one off as the rebels capturing equipment.
"Over 1000 soldiers and 100 tanks! Such a unit requires support vehicles, a tent town, supply lines .... so where is it? Maybe it's sort of like invasion by aid convoy."
So did you just make those numbers up or what? What we know is that we have pictures of tanks only owned and operated by the Russian military in Ukraine now, how many there are dotted around we really don't know, but we do know that ever since the aid convoy Putin forced through to Luhansk which the red cross was prevented from expected at least 30 odd lorries of and which journalists previously noted were pretty much empty the rebels in Luhansk have suddenly gone from losing ground hard to having a swelling of numbers and munitions to start pushing back heavily. Maybe that's a coincidence, maybe hundreds of rebels just managed to sneak through the lines at the exact same time the aid convoy turned up, but one might wonder why Putin wouldn't let the red cross do it's job in inspecting all the vehicles that were to cross and why there were a bunch of nearly-empty trucks in the convoy (there are plenty of pictures on Google images if you care to search and it doesn't offend your pro-Putin views too much). What about the Russian servicemen that were capture in Ukraine (others were killed at the same time for what it's worth), I guess you buy the story that a professional military completely failed their map and compass drills even though that's something that even I personally managed to do just fine in the British army cadet force at the age of 13?
Besides, your Putin apologism doesn't even tie in with what Putin himself has said, even Putin himself has admitted the tanks are mostly coming from Russia, he's just argued previously that they're old army surplus tanks in the past and that he can't possibly control his own border for whatever reason. That excuse kinda doesn't work now that some of the weapons aren't army surplus kit, but active service kit only used in the Russian military now though.
Look I get it, you're not willing to pay attention that the Berkut in question who did what Yanukovych wanted were the ones who ended up in Eastern Ukraine fighting with the Russians (as documented by journalists).
I doubt I can get through to you because you're the sort of fucked up individual that would support persecution of the Jews in 1939, just as you support persecution of ethnic Ukrainians and Tatars now, the fact you think the West ever supported IS or some Nazi mass murderers is comical, it explicitly supported their opposition (the FSA who have been fighting IS and explicitly pushed for the genuine handful of neo Nazis in Ukraine to be dealt with and not put into power). But keep on with your Russia Today, when the only source of news you have is your Kremlin fed channels it's not surprising that you're a modern day equivalent of a Nazi apologist who has not the slightest clue what's going on in the world. It's incredible there are people as dumb as you who are willing to fall into the propaganda trap that's around them, you realise Moscow only lets you see what the Kremlin wants you see for a reason right? You realise it's you and the country you're now in that's only letting you see a very limited Putin-favourable view of the world? you really don't see how your view and understanding of the situation is completely broken because of that?
In contrast I get to see all around me Russian, Iranian, Chinese, as well as Western media viewpoints on the topic, that's how I know you don't know what you're on about, and that's how I know you're a fascist loving, nazi backing, murder supporting fuckwad.
Russia had plausible deniability by only supplying things like T-64s to the rebels, but as the rebels were losing it seems Putin couldn't accept that and now there are numerous photos of T-72BMs in the Ukraine and the Russian military is the only military in the world to have access to and operate these:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl...
Similarly, Russian mothers are beginning to ask why their sons are coming back in coffins due to unexplained deaths from a "training exercise" on the Ukrainian border, and where reporters attending their funerals are attacked by mobs that have nothing to do with the funerals in question but magically turn up at them to keep journalists away all the same. Then of course there's the actual Russian soldiers who were outright captured in Ukraine:
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
Of course, we have history, just this year too, where Crimea was filled with "rebels" who Putin eventually admitted were Russian soldiers, so it's obviously well within Putin's realm of willingness to pass of serving soldiers as civilians until their mission is complete, which, by the way, is a war crime for what it's worth - yes, that's right, admitting this tactic makes Putin a self-admitted war criminal.
When MH-17 was shot down, and it was just T-64s and modern machine guns the rebels had it seemed a bit of a stretch, yet still plausible that this was just a rag tag bunch of individuals fighting on behalf of Russia. Now, with more recent evidence you'd have to be exceptionally retarded to not recognise that Russia is very clearly in the Ukraine with full serving units (hell, the 10 captured soldiers prove that as an outright fact by itself whether you really believe they were lost or not, you don't just allow your soldiers to stumble into a war zone accidentally unless you want them to end up in a potential fight). This is why the tide of battle has changed too from being strongly in the Ukrainian military's favour to now being in the Russia's favour - the Ukrainians are no longer fighting relatively lightly armed insurgents, they're fighting full blown armoured battalions backed up by professionally precision launched artillery strikes all of a sudden - that doesn't just get organised out of nowhere by rebels in a couple of cut off towns with little remaining access to the outside world and dwindling numbers, that requires state level planning, implementation, and financing over an extended period of time to implement - i.e. it requires a professional army.
At this point the only hope is that enough Russian soldiers are killed such that Russians themselves start asking what the fuck they're doing in someone else's country that has done absolutely nothing wrong to Russia (other than hurting Putin's ego) when there's a simple solution of leaving that country the fuck alone and letting it get on with becoming a modern nation even if it does mean Putin's little big man syndrome takes a knock. Thankfully that already seems to be happening to some degree with the Russian soldier's rights institute that's compiled a list of the 400 dead Russian soldiers it believes have been killed in this war already - putting that into context that's very nearly as many lives as the British have lost in 13 years in Afghanistan so thankfully there is a high cost to Russia for this stupidity, and thankfully it is beginning to be noticed by ordinary Russians themselves.
Yes, you've missed absolutely everything it seems. Anything that's propaganda is propaganda, anything that's objective, transparent and well cited, is not propaganda.
You are right that rising ultra-nationalism Ukraine doesn't exist though, the presidential polls proved that, where the far right only got 2% of the vote.
"You're the one who said 'agent-provocateurs', aren't you? Do you know that the trees with bullet holes from snipers were cut down and burned by the no-longer-protesters 3 days after the shooting? Think about it."
Think about what? eyewitness account from both sides - the police, and the protesters were clear that the only ones shooting were the Berkut on the roof tops, there needn't be any conspiracy theory about trees, the fact that both sides of the protest witnessed the whole fucking thing and agreed about what happened is evidence enough.
But keep on defending your far right love for Putin, your support for ethnic cleansing, and murdering of minorities, with any luck you'll get what you deserve - a life of abysmal quality in slowly collapsing Russia under it's own idiocy, lies, propaganda, corruption, and incompetence. Enjoy your coming poverty, you've earned it.
"Oh, who cares. We have a number, after all. It's so obviously true! It's as true as CNN polls!"
Once again, I can see why you're so easily swayed by Russian propaganda when you're completely unable to differentiate between the quality of a data source, if you believe that something where there is strong evidence of invalidity has as much weight as something where there is no such evidence and where the original source is cited, and in the CIty.am case (the inconvenient one for you that you keep avoiding), the data available then there's not really much helping you. You're the type of guy who could get an e-mail from a Nigerian prince asking for you to send $10,000 and you'd do it because the guy spoke to you personally and all those people on the internet telling you it's a scam must just be numbers, noise.
"So basically, it's called Wikireality. Nice. Do you understand that you've just channeled our dear beloved mister Goebbels? "If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself"."
Oh dear, oh dear. You've invoked the Godwin principle, how utterly desperate. The problem is that I'm not parroting a lie (again, as evidenced by trustworthy polls, unlike your consistently pointless anecdotes), but if you want to bring Nazism to the debate, then let's get one thing straight - you are defending Vladimir Putin, a guy who has close links with a Nazi biker gang who he has sent into the Ukraine, and who has carried out persecution in his home country of minorities such as homosexuals, and a number of ethnic minorities. A guy whose people have been marking the houses of minorities (Tatars) in Crimea with white crosses, and has been disappearing them in the night. He has had to rig elections to stay in power as a dictator and he has annexed foreign soil illegally. If you want to bring Nazism into this then let's make one thing clear, you are acting as the most disgusting, indefensible type of human being who in the 30s and 40s was defending what the Nazis were doing because there are incredibly strong parallels between what happened then with Hitler, and with what Putin is doing now. You may think you're doing the right thing, but you're not, not even close - you're defending the most despicable type of human being and human actions on earth and you're a disgrace to humanity for it. You're the modern day equivalent of a Nazi sympathiser, a pathetic waste of human flesh.
"Yeah, and diplomatic help of the West also helped. Do you remember the shitstorm that the Western countries started when Yanukovich passed the laws banning weapons from demonstrations?"
Not really, I just remember what actually happened which is that Western countries were not happy with Yanukovych's Berkut puppets shooting from rooftops at regular police and protesters alike to try and provoke a violent confrontation between the two and the West not being happy with Yanukovych's implication that they should allow themselves to be slaughtered by disposing of any form of defence. You obviously like the idea of that though, as you're a Putin sympathiser and it's exactly the sort of thing you're apparently into.
You still really don't get the difference between a handful of dissent and large scale distaste do you? You still don't get that a vocal minority isn't necessarily representative of the majority. These are simple things and again I can see how you're easily swayed by propaganda when you place more weight in the hearsay of a minority than the overwhelming view of a majority.
"BTW, these protests were even covered by BBC."
I'm actually beginning to understand what's wrong with someone like you to be so susceptible to propaganda like that fed to you by RT. It seems that if the media covers something then it must be backing up that of your preferred propaganda outlet, that the BBC was covering it because it agreed with RT, rather than the reality of the situation that the BBC covered it because it appears to be neutral.
If you recognised the latter you'd also note that the BBC has in the last week unearthed a lot of evidence about a full fledged Russian invasion of Ukraine, so tell me, if "the BBC covered it" is evidence of it must be as I believe, then how does Russia's now demonstrable invasion of Ukraine as reported by the BBC fit in?
"So how about the overwhelming majority of the citizens choosing independence in a referendum? Is it any more valid than a poll?"
Well both referendums were verifiably rigged, the Crimea one where the real results were accidentally posted publicly coupled with impossible numbers (120%+ turnout in one area relative to the actual amount of people living there) and the local Donetsk one where we have video evidence of people voting multiple times. As we have evidence that neither is trustworthy then no they're not more valid than polls where we have actual data available (as in the original City.am mentioned poll etc.).
"There are many thousands rebels now fighting the Ukrainian army. And winning. I think it's your sense of proportion that is off."
No, there were a bunch of Russian irregulars fighting the Ukrainian army with a bunch of actual genuine Ukrainian-Russians who want independence from Ukraine, and they were losing. Now there is a full batallion of Russian regulars and the Russians are winning. Who'd have thought? a full blown Russian invasion can defeat the Ukrainian military? There's a reason the Russians are having secret ceremonies for their military dead back home, and why tanks only operated by the Russian military are in Ukraine - because the actual full blown Russian military is now in Ukraine.
"Do you claim to know situation any better?"
Yes, absolutely, because the anecdote of a pro-Russian individual does still not somehow override the thoughts and opinions of the majority that are widely publicised. You seem to feel that as someone who lived in the Ukraine you have authority, okay, if that's so, then why does the City.am poll which was also carried out by Ukrainians not have authority over you given that it was a more widespread study in neutral times? Just because you claim to be Ukrainian, why should I listen to you when you show a demonstrable inability for objectivity other other Ukrainians and Russians who tell a more well evidenced story?
"There is no plurality in Ukrainian media. It's all controlled by Kiev. All the opposition channels are blocked. But that's OK, censorship is fine if it's pro-European. Right?"
I don't know what opposition you're referring to? I know that a wide range of Ukrainian voices have their say in Ukraine whether it's the old pro-Yanukovych channels, whether it's those who are pro-Tymoschenko, or whether it's the numerous miner's associations, or whether it's the far-right. You seem to think opposition = Russia Today, Moscow's propaganda outlet, but that's false. What you're actually saying is that Ukraine should fight the propaganda war with one hand tied behind it's back - it should broadcast Russia Today to it's citizens, but in Russia it's okay for Moscow to deny all opposition, whether external (as RT is to Ukraine) or internal. Long story short, the only censorship you hate and the only censorship that matters is censorship of Putin's propaganda. Do I support censorship, even of propaganda? Not really, but to pretend the Ukrainian media is somehow more biased than the Russian is insanely comical. Even journalists agree putting Ukraine at 127 and Russia at 148 and this was tainted by the Yanukovych era censorship so Ukraine will likely be even higher now!:
http://rsf.org/index2014/en-in...
"And except the EU. And China. And the US. Well, on the plus side, Nigeria probably did leave Ukraine the fuck alone."
Ah, so you share Putin's paranoia that the Ukrainian revolution happened because of the West, rather than the actual fact of the matter than for the third fucking time the Ukrainians tried to make it clear to Russia that they do not want to be part of Russia because it's simply a fucking shithole and their neighbours have grown more prosperous since fleeing it's grasp and so they want part of that too. Good one, I mean, obviously most people would choose end up living in a corrupt shithole over a prosperous future wouldn't they? Actually, don't answer that, because you're obviously the type of idiot that would.
Out of interest, you said you lived in Ukraine until June this year, where do you live now? Russia by any chance?
"No, because they are biased and/or simply fabricated."
Whereas a handful of protestors standing in front of a Ukrainian APC couldn't possibly be? It's obvious that wide scale polls are fabricated but small scale actions aren't? This is your problem - you have lost all sense of proportionality and rationality.
"So just like the Maidan uprising?"
You still really struggled with scale don't you? I know humans have an inherent problem imagining large numbers, but most people are capable of telling the difference between tens and hundreds, and hundreds of thousands. It seems you are not.
"Ya ne veru v eto. Seychas Kramatorsk controliruetsa vojakami is kieva, tak chto zhiteli boyatsa za svoi zhizni i govorat to, chto nuzhno. Ili ischezaut. Pokazat video togo, kak pravij sektor izbivaet ludej?"
You love Putin and believe everything he says? Why am I not surprised. Oh wait, you think that posting something in Russian somehow makes your argument more valid, silly me, there was me thinking you'd understand why anecdotes were meaningless as a measure of determining the will of the majority.
"Nobody kicked rebels out, they simply pulled orderly out. They didn't have strength to hold an extended front line back then."
Nice story. Shame it's false. Mariupol is a heavily populated city of just under half a million. If the rebels had popular support then how could the Ukrainian military drive them out so easily? How come there were only tens of casualties involved when their self-proclaimed HQ there was surrounded and attacked? Again, you seem to struggle with scale - a handful of people, numbering in the tens, in a city of almost half a million highlights how utterly isolated their viewpoint was. If they generally had support there as you're suggesting then there'd be far more than only a few tens of people there.
"So the main goal of democratic Ukraine is to be just as bad as Russia?"
How is having plurality of viewpoints as bad as having one viewpoint? I'll try again as you don't seem to grasp it: in Ukraine there are many viewpoints ranging across all aspects of the spectrum from far right, to right, to centre right, to centre, to centre left, to left, to far left - all of these are represented politically in the Ukrainian media. What's finally been banned however is Russia's propaganda channel- that doesn't decrease the overall plurality of the media beyond eliminating Russian propaganda (if you want Russian fact, without the propaganda, you can still get it). Contrast this to Russia where media plurality has been decimated such that many views that don't align exactly with Putin's have been silenced.
If Putin had just left Ukraine be, it would be well on it's way to being a modern democratic Eastern European nation like Poland - it came from the exact same background they did of being controlled by the USSR, the only thing that's different is that it's large border with Russia means it's the one nation above all others that Russia has desperately tried to hold on to.
Look I get it, you're from a pro-Russian background, and you love Russia, that's fine. Most Ukrainians no longer do however, most Ukrainians just want to be left the fuck alone to grow their country in a way that all their neighbours except Russia have - they've recognised that the Russian way just does not work. They've looked at what their neighbours have done in the last 20 years and and they want to follow in the footsteps of Poland, Czech republic, Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia in becoming modern increasingly prosperous nations. I'm sorry that democracy has spoken and wants something you do not, but it is what it is- Russians can always go and live in Russia, but Ukrainians only have Ukraine - that's not for you to take away from them.
"Please, get the CNN polls and stuff them deep into your rectum. They are worth just that."
Why, because they're inconvenient for your pro-Putin lies? What about the City.am one which stems from a neutral Ukrainian polling outfit before it all kicked off? I guess that was so inconvenient you couldn't even address it?
"Here's a video of locals stopping a tank: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Here is an iconic picture of Putin's agent provocateurs blocking a railroad crossing to stop Ukrainian tanks: http://www.rbc.ua/rus/news/acc... and another one http://crisisua.net/zhiteli-sl."
You know that repeating yourself doesn't make something true right? As I said, hundreds, some of whom are legit, but others who are agent provocateurs does not equate to popular support.
The fact you're persisting in arguing that numbers in the hundreds, or thousands in a specific circumstance in a specific place controlled by Russian's is somehow representative of the millions whilst also claiming polls that are objective and more representative are useless tells us one thing - you're not arguing based on rationality, you're arguing based on an agenda, a pro-Russian, pro-Putin one.
"I was personally in Kramatorsk helping to move my friend's family from there during the start of the conflict. And I certainly know that the reason for the conflict was not Putin."
I was there yesterday and everyone told me they hate Putin and it's all his fault. Last night on the phone Putin even told me it's his fault. See how that works?
"And? Mariupol is fairly far from Donetsk, and after one month or brainwashing by the Ukrainian media,"
So what was the excuse last time the Ukrainians liberated Mariupol because the populace helped kick the Russian's out? That was over a month ago, or is that also too much of an inconvenient truth for you? Why is it a problem if Ukraine blocks Russia today after months of pro-Russian propaganda but the fact that Russia only allows pro-Moscow propaganda? You only think it's bad when Moscow is at the receiving end of censorship? What you said about Ukraine having no opposition TV/Radio, that's false, what they don't have is Russia's propaganda outlet, RT, that's not the same as no opposition voice.
"Incidentally, if we're talking about the people digging trenches: http://gordonua.com/news/war/P... then it turned out to be a photo-op, staged by Ukrainian media."
Wow, who'd have thought it? Russian media outlet claims Ukrainian trench digging is photo op! Let's try a more neutral source that's historically aligned with Russia shall we, I suppose the Chinese are supporting Western propaganda too right? - http://news.xinhuanet.com/engl...
I think you need to stop swallowing Putin's propaganda, it's not good for you, you're siding with anecdotes and propaganda over polls and objective sources.
"You know, maybe some of us should complain to Slashdot about the Obama/Poroshenko-bots that reliably and consistently troll every single story about this conflict? You know, the ones who imply that anyone who even slightly skeptical about the propaganda we're all being fed, must be Russian or a paid Kremlin propagandist?"
No, we don't think that, we just think you're naive and stupid. But those who clearly are Kremlin propagandists (maybe not paid, just naive native Russians) with their broken English and undisguised love of Putin should just as well be allowed to be called out on it.
I wouldn't pretend to defend everything the Ukrainian army has done, but I'm still siding with Ukraine on this because everything from shooting down of a civilian airliner to annexed Crimea's Tatar population having their houses marked with X's and the disappearance of those who protest that annexation are all kinds of evil created by Putin that simply cannot be defended.
What you don't do is help your case with arguments like this, which are trivially debunked:
"Poroshenko has claimed Ukraine was invaded like ten times already."
So? Maybe that's because he is?
"He claimed he was being "invaded" by a fucking aid convoy, including after Putin's honesty about it's contents had been verified by international journalists and the Red Cross."
Why on Earth are you lying about this? The Red Cross themselves explicitly said they were only allowed to examine about 35 of 70 lorries that crossed the border and so could not support it, a bunch of journalists got a glimpse inside some they weren't supposed to see and they were basically empty. Why? What was going to be put in them at the border?
"We know what an invasion looks like. It looks like what the USA did to Iraq."
Oh I see, you're one of those people who in 2003 was, like many of us saying "The Iraq war is wrong!" but unlike the rest of us you're unable to let something go from 11 fucking years ago? That doesn't paint you as someone rational we should listen to. This has nothing to do with Iraq - that happened, it was an unacceptable fuckup, but it was a fuckup perpetrated by a regime who hasn't been in power for 6 years.
"It looks like Russian flags flying above Kiev and Russian tanks rolling down the streets to the parliament building."
This is just stupid. Why do you feel an invasion has to be fully fledged? Are you saying that Israel didn't in fact recently invade Gaza because they only kept tanks on the outskirts, only sent troops into the streets, and didn't raise the Israeli flag over Gaza? Putin has done what he's done because plausible deniability allows him to cast doubt on whether Russia deserves full blown sanctions, he was hoping he could take over Eastern Ukraine and not have anyone able to hold him immediately responsible for it. Unfortunately for him due to a variety of fuckups such as Russian soldiers being captured in Ukraine, and tanks that are operated by no one in the world other than the Russian military (T-72BMs) now turning up it's pretty clear it's Russia in there and no one else:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl...
What's worse is that this is exactly what they did a few months ago in Crimea and now even admit it - why are you so adamant that they wouldn't do the same in Eastern Ukraine as they admitted to doing there? Something which is, for what it's worth, a war crime- dressing a professional army as civilians is a breach of international law, and unlike Bush who was simply arguably a war criminal, Putin is a self-admitted war criminal.
But you keep defending a war criminal based on half-assed information if it makes you feel like a cool counter-culture hipster or whatever you think you are.
Using the age old argument of "America fucked up once, so this isn't Putin and if it was it'd be justified anyway" makes you look like an exceptional kind of idiot. The world isn't that black and white, and two wrongs don't make a right.
Because that's where everyone they want to listen to their plight - i.e. Westerners can be found.
Ukrainians want their voice to be heard by the rest of the world, and the rest of the world is on Facebook.
It's not just about being heard by each other.
No it doesn't, the separatist movement has never had popular support in east Ukraine, the argument for populist support was tenuous even in Crimea that is by far the most pro-Russian part of Ukraine.
"If you don't believe me, just look at the photos of the East Ukraine during March and April when citizens were blocking off roads to stop tanks, in some cases just like the Tiananmen Man."
If you think tens, at most hundreds of people, some of whom were themselves "rebels" aka Putin's agent provocateurs in regions of millions is a sign of popular support than I urge you to go and get a better grasp of millions of numbers. A counterpoint to yours would be the citizens of Mariupol who are currently helping the Ukrainian military dig trenches against the Russian invaders and who formed a many mile long chain of people to make the point that they don't want Putin's soldiers to take over their territory.
There are polls both before:
http://www.cityam.com/blog/139...
and after shit kicked off:
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/05...
That show that the Russian made myth of support for joining Russia or being independent from Ukraine is just that, a myth.
Putin is trying to make Eastern Ukraine a buffer zone by injecting his own Russian puppet leadership there just as he did with Crimea, and just as he did with Ukraine (which is what led to this situation). It has nothing to do with what the people there want and everything to do with Putin's paranoia that Europe is somehow out to get him, rather than the actual reality - that Ukrainians would rather just join modern prosperous democratic Europe, than corrupt, poverty stricken, dictatorial Russia. That's why Putin has manufactured the myth you're parroting.
Stop propping up the propaganda of a brutal dictator, because that's what Putin is.
"It is widely understood to be true that Java has, as an actual, real-life thing in its "pros" column (and in its "cons" column) that it is easier to use by low quality, replaceable programmers."
More so than systems languages like C/C++? Sure, more so than other mainstream languages used for business development like C#, PHP, Python? Absolutely not, so I don't really know what your point is. If anything I'd argue that Java developers are, on average, better than developers of scripting languages, because there's a higher barrier of entry. Java developers at least have to have a basic grasp of object oriented structure, and to be able to write something compilable before they can even get their application to execute - PHP programmers can have anything execute no matter how tragically badly structure or written it is. This is why big companies like Java - it enforces a baseline of quality so that even the worst programmers have to adhere to some baseline, that's barely true with scripted languages at all. Those interchangeable parts Wall is referring to are interchangeable without a reduction in quality to the level you will see with a change towards scripted languages where much more problematic code can reach a point of execution.
None of which of course addresses the point I've made and the question I posed that you've conveniently dodged - what methodology exists to allow scripting languages with no compile time checks to be inherently better quality than compiled languages that force entire classes of bugs to be dealt with before execution that can make it through to execution in scripted languages? I'm intrigued to know what this methodology is because I've never heard of it despite years of working with both large compiled and scripted projects.
Fact is, as a project gets larger, you cannot build something with a scripted language in the same time frame and for the same cost to a better quality level than with a compiled language like Java, or C# - the inherent disadvantages of scripted languages over managed languages make this a certainty. The performance disadvantage of translated languages over JIT compiled languages alone makes sure of this, the inherent quality difference and resultant increase in maintainability costs in large code bases just adds further weight to guarantee it.