If you really wanna go - alive or dead my friend

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BostonBeaneater
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Re: If you really wanna go - alive or dead my friend

Post by BostonBeaneater »

Dr. Medulla wrote:
15 Sep 2022, 9:09pm
BostonBeaneater wrote:
15 Sep 2022, 8:23pm
Dr. Medulla wrote:
15 Sep 2022, 8:06pm
BostonBeaneater wrote:
15 Sep 2022, 8:04pm
Dr. Medulla wrote:
15 Sep 2022, 8:03pm


And we will eat you for the pleasure of shitting you out!
I am fibrous!
You will spend eternity in an outhouse pit.
I can't tell you how titillating this is for me. Coprophilia is my kink.
Supposedly Hitler liked to have prostitutes piss and shit on him.

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Re: If you really wanna go - alive or dead my friend

Post by Dr. Medulla »

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/anatoly- ... b5206dfd09

Stalin had the stones to hold show trials and have people confess before killing them. This "accident" crap is second-rate, Vlad. Stalin would have had people admitting they sabotaged the war effort, weeping, and begging for execution.
"I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength, like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung." - Richard Nixon, Checkers Speech, abandoned early draft

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Re: If you really wanna go - alive or dead my friend

Post by eumaas »

Dr. Medulla wrote:
23 Sep 2022, 6:37pm
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/anatoly- ... b5206dfd09

Stalin had the stones to hold show trials and have people confess before killing them. This "accident" crap is second-rate, Vlad. Stalin would have had people admitting they sabotaged the war effort, weeping, and begging for execution.
Billionaire Alexander Subbotin, a former manager at Lukoil, was found dead in May of an apparent heart attack in the home of a shaman, according to Newsweek.
trying to recruit a new office efficiency consultant?
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Re: If you really wanna go - alive or dead my friend

Post by Dr. Medulla »

eumaas wrote:
23 Sep 2022, 7:41pm
Dr. Medulla wrote:
23 Sep 2022, 6:37pm
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/anatoly- ... b5206dfd09

Stalin had the stones to hold show trials and have people confess before killing them. This "accident" crap is second-rate, Vlad. Stalin would have had people admitting they sabotaged the war effort, weeping, and begging for execution.
Billionaire Alexander Subbotin, a former manager at Lukoil, was found dead in May of an apparent heart attack in the home of a shaman, according to Newsweek.
trying to recruit a new office efficiency consultant?
Ha! Blast from the very distant past!
"I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength, like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung." - Richard Nixon, Checkers Speech, abandoned early draft

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Re: If you really wanna go - alive or dead my friend

Post by Flex »

eumaas wrote:
23 Sep 2022, 7:41pm
trying to recruit a new office efficiency consultant?
lol, well bowled
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a bowl of soup
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a rolling hoop
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a ton of lead
Wiggle - you can raise the dead

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Re: If you really wanna go - alive or dead my friend

Post by Dr. Medulla »

My first thought in seeing Snowden granted Russian citizenship was that he's going to get drafted and sent to Ukraine.
"I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength, like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung." - Richard Nixon, Checkers Speech, abandoned early draft

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Re: If you really wanna go - alive or dead my friend

Post by Flex »

Dr. Medulla wrote:
26 Sep 2022, 2:03pm
My first thought in seeing Snowden granted Russian citizenship was that he's going to get drafted and sent to Ukraine.
I think there's an exception for people in the IT sector (would be qualify?), and you gotta think they'd exempt him for other reasons, but yeah, it's not crazy to think.
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a bowl of soup
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a rolling hoop
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a ton of lead
Wiggle - you can raise the dead

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Re: If you really wanna go - alive or dead my friend

Post by Dr. Medulla »

Flex wrote:
26 Sep 2022, 2:15pm
Dr. Medulla wrote:
26 Sep 2022, 2:03pm
My first thought in seeing Snowden granted Russian citizenship was that he's going to get drafted and sent to Ukraine.
I think there's an exception for people in the IT sector (would be qualify?), and you gotta think they'd exempt him for other reasons, but yeah, it's not crazy to think.
I don't really think that'll happen, but the timing of the call up for future war casualties, the exodus from the country by those not interested in playing that game, and Snowden finally granted citizenship sent my mind to morbid places.
"I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength, like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung." - Richard Nixon, Checkers Speech, abandoned early draft

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Re: If you really wanna go - alive or dead my friend

Post by Howard Beale »

Dr. Medulla wrote:
13 Sep 2022, 9:11am
Whatever the validity of that story, this war has been a complete disaster for Russia because it has been exposed as far from a significant military power. The expectation was that this would be a quick romp. That illusion has been smashed—a Potemkin army. And they can’t even blame it on battlefield conditions, like the US in Vietnam.
This isn't really true, though. By no stretch of the imagination am I an expert in military strategy, but having spent the last seven months immersed in interviews and analysis with actual experts in the field—independent voices, mind you, not MIC-connected generals paid to go on CNN/MSNBC/Fox News and give pro-Ukraine spin—I can say that characterizing the Russians as a Potemkin army doesn't really square with the facts on the ground. Just go back and look at the first phase of the war and the Russians' proficiency at feint maneuvers, utilizing fixing force techniques and Soviet-pioneered deep operation (what former US Marine Corps intelligence officer Scott Ritter called "Big Arrow Warfare").

There are a few things to keep in mind here: (a) Russia had about 1 million active duty military personnel and 2 million reservists, but set the limit on troops for the special military operation at 200,000, whom they sent up against 600,000 Ukrainians; (b) the troops were under strict orders to only target military infrastructure and minimize civilian casualties as much as possible (the concept of a military using such a light touch in order to minimize loss of civilian life is inconceivable to us as we're coming at this from a Western context); (c) the Russians were not working on any particular timetable and the SMO is just one component of a much larger geopolitical conflict as Putin is also currently fighting (and very much winning) an economic war with the West; and (d) Russia hasn't been exercising anywhere near its full might (well, until this week) whereas Ukraine has been throwing in everything and the kitchen sink militarily.

None of this is to take anything away from the Ukrainians, who were a more than formidable fighting force, trained to NATO standards. This is also not to say that Russia hasn't made any missteps or suffered setbacks, the Kharkiv counteroffensive from last month, for example, was a decisive victory for Ukraine. But even so, and even with the Ukrainians' considerable numerical advantage, the Russians spent the summer months routing them in battle after battle (with the occasional stalemate) and were regularly averaging 15-to-1 kill ratios on the battlefield. So, yes, it's true that many military experts predicted that this war would be over quick, but that's because no one expected Russia to initially go in as soft as they did.


Dr. Medulla wrote:

I have no real understanding of the nature of Russian politics, but this seems like it could be notable, making that kind of open demand that Putin resign. Does it embolden opposition within the Kremlin to depose him? Is it leading to a LBJ moment with his successor pursuing peace with honour?
This was a total nothingburger. Occasional petitions and calls for Putin's resignation/impeachment from municipal deputies and the like are nothing new. This is basically the equivalent of a bunch of randos you've never heard of from various state legislatures circulating a petition demanding that Joe Biden resign—no one in the White House would notice or care. Conservative media would likely pick it up and briefly try to run with it, though, just as Western media tends to eat up stories like this.


Low Down Low wrote:
13 Sep 2022, 4:18pm
It seems confusing i think because on the one hand he's portrayed as a strong man who rules with an iron grip and on the other as a bit of a weirdo who virtually lives in a bunker surrounded by sycophants like Medvedev who seems to be fulfilling the Comical Ali role to a tee. Fuck knows where the truth lies and there's the gargantuan levels of hubris to throw in the mix as well.
Yep. One minute the Russian army is on the imminent brink of a final, humiliating defeat exposing Putin as an isolated, oblivious paper tiger without any allies left; the next minute Putin is an all-powerful, unstoppable tyrant so hellbent on world domination that it is imperative we immediately siphon up billions more in American taxpayer dollars to dump into Ukraine. I've also lost count at this point of the number of terminal illnesses he's allegedly suffering from. I'm seeing a number of posts here confessing to not having much of a handle on the political realities in Russia. No shame in that, obviously, but since the war and the accompanying discussion here are ongoing, I think it may be useful to broaden our scope a bit. Most of the Putin-related posts I see on here read like they could've been written by the US State Dept., I think it'd be a little more helpful to look at the political reality of Russia today, what shaped it, and to contextualize Putin through that lens. With Gorbachev having recently bought the farm and the war in Ukraine moving into a new phase, now would probably be as good a time as any to use Russia's recent (i.e. post-USSR) economic history as a tool with which to decode the mystery (to Westerners) of why Putin is so enduringly popular with the Russian people and why Gorbachev was near-universally loathed.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union—which Gorbachev of course presided over—the US heavily promoted and financed a program of economic shock therapy that was overseen and advised by Western economists like Larry Summers and Jeffrey Sachs. You may be familiar with this phenomenon, as it's a formula that has been implemented in various countries, perhaps most infamously by a Milton Friedman-educated group of economists in Chile (known as the "Chicago Boys") under the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

While Gorbachev has been (fairly) criticized as a terrible negotiator and for being easily manipulated into serving America's Post-Soviet agenda in Russia, even he had some serious qualms about implementing the kind of drastic and sudden reforms that the US and its allied Western governments were demanding at the beginning of the post-Cold War era. Therefore, Gorbi had to go—it's important to stress here that the US did not want a democratic figure to be in charge in Russia. What they wanted, ideally, was a Russian Pinochet. In Boris Yeltsin, they found a willing and pliant puppet, albeit one that wasn't built to last.

Yeltsin wasted no time in enacting the new market reforms; the resulting rapid privatization and liberalization would have devastating effects for the Russian people, facilitate the rise of the oligarchic class that we now hear so much about and concentrate an enormous amount of power into the hands of organized crime in much the same way Prohibition did for the American Mafia. As a result, Yeltsin's popularity plummeted and he was sitting at a 6% approval rating heading into the 1996 election. To ensure that their useful idiot would remain right where they needed him, the US interfered in Russia's election by sending political strategists to Moscow tasked with resuscitating Yeltsin's campaign. This isn't some big secret, either—Showtime even made it into a movie, and we openly bragged about it on the cover of Time.
Image
Cut to the late 1990s and the rise of Vladimir Putin. The hopeful and conciliatory attitude toward the United States that Gorbachev had so famously adopted at the dawn of the post-Cold War epoch would be echoed by a naïve Putin at the outset of his presidency. Unfortunately for him, Washington was having none of it—even though, as pointed out by French-Russian-American journalist Vladimir Pozner in a 2018 lecture at Yale, there were no foreign or domestic policies on Russia's part in the time spanning the Gorbachev era through Putin's first two terms that could be considered provocative or antagonistic toward the US:

As Pozner also notes in the above video [@29:32], Putin attempted to extend Russia's hand in friendship to the US in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 in an effort to build an alliance, laying out a five-point plan just two weeks after the attack. The plan pledged to help the US with intelligence-sharing, allowing access to Russian airspace, aiding in international search and rescue operations, providing assistance in Afghanistan and—most notably—allowing an American military presence in Central Asia. Once again, Putin's gestures were spurned by the US, and even in the years predating the Ukraine war or the Crimea annexation or anything else concrete that could be pointed to, Americans were told that we needed to despise Vladimir Putin with every fiber of our being because... well, just because, basically, he was a Big Meanie Who Hates Freedom. If I didn't know better, I'd almost say that there's a pattern here: most Big Meanies Who Hate Freedom just happen to be world leaders that are sitting on top of a lot of oil or who don't obediently bend the knee in total compliance with the American Empire's demands. That's just a sheer coincidence, though, I'm sure.

On the domestic front, Putin would go on to cut poverty by more than half, increase GDP fourfold and diversify Russia's export economy, granting them a degree of independence and steadily rebuilding their standing as a global power player. That's the real reason Putin ended up in the crosshairs of US regime change, not because he's some unique evil on the world stage. The United States will not tolerate prosperity in countries that it seeks to destabilize and dominate. I'm not saying that there isn't still widespread corruption, but life for your average Russian is much less precarious under Putin than it was in the '90s when the US turned their country into Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.


Low Down Low wrote:Hasn't there been a spate recently of oligarchy type figures or their associates somehow clumsily losing their footing on or near windows and tragically falling to their deaths? If there wasn't a war on, I'd imagine that gets a lot more western attention and must be a chance it's related in some way.
Dr. Medulla wrote:It's cartoonish how many of Putin's critics have fatal accidents. It's as close to an open secret as you can get.
Flex wrote:
12 Sep 2022, 5:49pm
Yeah, Putin killing his political rivals is soundtracked to yakety sax.
Sparky wrote:
12 Sep 2022, 5:51pm
Yeah, they seem to like to visit tall buildings and look at the windows at the wrong moment, talk about a coincidence. :roll:
Dr. Medulla wrote: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/anatoly- ... b5206dfd09

Stalin had the stones to hold show trials and have people confess before killing them. This "accident" crap is second-rate, Vlad. Stalin would have had people admitting they sabotaged the war effort, weeping, and begging for execution.
Ah yes, this is a fun one, I'll admit—the Putin-as-mob-boss meme. Don Vladimir casually ordering up hits like the average person orders up their morning coffee. A Russian version of the baptism scene in The Godfather, sped up and soundtracked to "Yakety Sax." I love it. One problem with it all, though—there is zero evidence for any of it. Even a vociferously anti-Russian, establishment-to-the-core paper like the Washington Post had to concede as much:

...

On Sunday, Trump took the opportunity to defend himself. "Nobody has proven that he's killed anyone. ... He's always denied it. It's never been proven that he's killed anybody,” the American billionaire explained during an appearance on ABC’s "This Week." He added: “You're supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, at least in our country. It has not been proven that he's killed reporters."

Trump has earned a reputation over the past few months as someone who is willing to say outlandish, sometimes patently untrue things. However, Russia watchers would have to begrudgingly admit that his latest comments about Putin and Russian journalists do not fall into this category. In fact, on the face of it, he is right: There really is little evidence to suggest that Putin "kills journalists that don't agree with him."

No one denies that journalists critical of Putin have been killed in Russia. There have been a number of cases over the years. The Committee to Protect Journalists has described Russia as "one of the deadliest countries in the world for journalists," with 36 journalists killed since 1992.

Perhaps the most well-known case is that of Anna Politkovskaya, a writer who was critical of Putin's role in the second Chechen war. Politkovskaya was fatally shot in her apartment building on Oct. 7, 2006 – the same day as Putin's birthday. Opposition politicians also have been killed: Boris Nemtsov, a high-profile figure in post-Soviet politics, was shot just steps from the Kremlin in February.

There are plenty of people who suspect that Putin ordered the killings. The evidence, however, isn't there. Although it's certainly possible that he did play some role, it might be more likely that individuals loyal to him acted without his knowledge or permission, or that another group in the complicated, multifaceted world of modern Russia was behind the acts. After Politkovskaya's death, Putin played down her influence on Russian politics, describing her as a "minimal" figure and suggesting that her killing hurt his government rather than helped it. "In my opinion, murdering such a person certainly does much greater damage from the authorities' point of view, authorities that she strongly criticized, than her publications ever did," he said.

...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worl ... sts-killed

Here is The Grayzone's Max Blumenthal summing all this up more succinctly than I have the ability to do [@56:01-1:01:48]:

Here is Blumenthal's Grayzone colleague Aaron Maté (whose excellent work debunking Russiagate and exposing the OPCW cover-up scandal in Syria I'd highly recommend) interviewing the late Stephen F. Cohen, who was the leading scholar on Russian studies, about political assassinations in Russia:

As Blumenthal and Cohen point out, far more people were killed under Yeltsin than under Putin. Yet, strangely, Yeltsin was never granted membership into the Freedom-Hating Meanies Club.



One last thing, and I doubt this will even apply to anyone here, but, hey, just in case: I've noticed that there's a certain type of person who never had a strong opinion about Vladimir Putin one way or the other... until Donald Trump entered politics, at which point they became vocal, outspoken critics. If you happen to be one of those people for whom hating Putin is a proxy for, or extension of, your Trump hate, I have some good news—you don't have to do that anymore! In fact, it doesn't even make sense.

Trump was certainly fawning and overly deferential to Putin in his public rhetoric, no question about that. But if we dig a little deeper and actually look at the more substantive reality of Trump's positions toward Russia in terms of actual policy, we see a very different story play out. The Trump Administration...
•Withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty
•Torpedoed negotiations for the extension of the New Strategic Arms Reduction (START) Treaty
•Resumed supplying weapons to neo-Nazis in Ukraine after Obama had put a stop to it
•Lashed out at Germany for making a gas pipeline deal with Russia
•Slapped sanctions on said pipeline
•Oversaw the admission of Montenegro into NATO
•Bombed Syria twice
•Attempted to overthrow the government of Venezuela

These are all things that would make Vladimir Putin not like someone very much, as they are all diametrically opposed to Russia's interests. It is entirely possible that Trump had a desire to be as obsequious to Putin in terms of policy as he was verbally, but if so, he was clearly too dumb and lazy to do his homework on what Putin actually wanted; Russia policy in the Trump Administration was likely set by the DC swamp creatures that he filled his cabinet with. Either way, the end result was a more hostile foreign policy toward Russia than the Obama Administration's. So, if you want to continue hating Putin, I'm not here to stop you—but at least hate him on his own merits (and God knows there's still a jillion reasons to hate Trump on his own merits). You no longer need to couch your anti-Putin fervor in conspiracy theories about Trump being a "Russian agent" or in weird homophobic artwork.

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Re: If you really wanna go - alive or dead my friend

Post by Low Down Low »

I'm not sure there's much direct evidence either that Putin was responsible for the 1999 bombings that killed 100s of his own citizens, yet i find it difficult to believe he wasn't involved in some way, if not the ringleader. If i remember correctly, Litvinenko was one of those making the allegations against Putin so, again, I'm more than content to assume his poisoning and death was on order from the very top. To me the guy is an utterly ruthless and depraved killer so the fact there's no direct evidence linking him with the spate of recent deaths isn't going to dilute my suspicions one iota.

My issue with the west would be that Putin was appeased and tolerated for two decades prior to shit hitting the fan at the start of this year. As long as Russian money poured in, they were happy to sit back and give Putin free rein. That old phoney Blair was sucking up to Putin up to very recently and now things have turned, he gets to play the anti-Putin hard man (Blair's deep Islamophobia would partially explain the initial attraction here) without the merest sense of irony. I have no issue with criticism of leftists who try to take a broader view of the war, but the pretty much total whitewashing of two decades of Putin appeasement i find hard to stomach. It's very possible nothing would have prevented this from happening anyway, but i feel it has to have contributed in no small way.

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Re: If you really wanna go - alive or dead my friend

Post by Sparky »

Wow, such a wonderful incentive....send your son or husband off to war in exchange for a bag of vegetables.

God, what a mess, on the ladder of success
Where you take one step and miss the whole first rung

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Re: If you really wanna go - alive or dead my friend

Post by Stefano1972 »

Sparky wrote:
18 Oct 2022, 3:44pm
Wow, such a wonderful incentive....send your son or husband off to war in exchange for a bag of vegetables.

Be careful, this is ukraine propaganda only. They use to say this kind of lies.
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Re: If you really wanna go - alive or dead my friend

Post by Marky Dread »

Sparky wrote:
18 Oct 2022, 3:44pm
Wow, such a wonderful incentive....send your son or husband off to war in exchange for a bag of vegetables.

Yeah but don't be fooled those vegetables are not in date.
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Re: If you really wanna go - alive or dead my friend

Post by Sparky »

Talk about bad luck, when will Putin's critics learn, never go near an open window, it's just fate I tell ya.

https://www.businessinsider.com/putin-c ... ow-2022-12

https://www.businessinsider.com/list-of ... ing-2016-3
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Re: If you really wanna go - alive or dead my friend

Post by Kimmelweck »

This could be a real game-changer. :shifty:



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