what happened to the großrossiya thread

[I AM MOBIUS]

Wow, clutching at straws much...?

Yes, everyone knows what's going on - what's your solution? Get the US to arm the Ukraine...!?

[I AM MOBIUS]

This is a good site on all things Ukraine: https://news.vice.com/topic/ukraine

[Dinner]

Improving Ukrainian defense would certainly raise the cost of Putin's aggression.

[self biased]

Submitted without further comment.

[regexcellent]

Improving Ukrainian defense would certainly raise the cost of Putin's aggression.

It's a ****ing mystery to me why we haven't sent them anti-tank missiles and such; they're not the Iraqis. Their army is halfway disciplined and modern, it's just outnumbered and outgunned.

[Dr Strangelove]

Actually it's neither outgunned nor outnumbered. They have plenty of weapons, they just can't afford to maintain them or to train skilled crews.

[Dinner]

Most of their equipMent is 30 years b old while their b ullets and shells were made in WW2. Give them the new stuff and watch Russian loses quadruple. Give the anti-craft misses to shoot down Russian drowns and anti-tank missiles to kill Russian tabks. Suddenly it will be a new ear and Putin won't be so eager to fight it.

[I AM MOBIUS]

It's a ****ing mystery to me why we haven't sent them anti-tank missiles and such; they're not the Iraqis. Their army is halfway disciplined and modern, it's just outnumbered and outgunned.

It's a ****ing mystery to you because you're a ****ing mental ******.

If the US chooses to escalate the conflict like that, Russia can stop all pretence and simply evict Ukrainian forces from the rest of the Donbas region and create a land corridor to the Crimea.

It's also exactly the same reason your own Republican govt sat on their asses when Russia did the same thing to Georgia in 2008.

Why are you so much dumber than your brother? You're supposed to be identical twins.

[I AM MOBIUS]

Also, the fact that Oerdin is in favour of the US arming Ukraine should be proof that it is a really bad idea!

[Bereta_Eder]

[Dr Strangelove]

Most of their equipMent is 30 years b old while their b ullets and shells were made in WW2. Give them the new stuff and watch Russian loses quadruple. Give the anti-craft misses to shoot down Russian drowns and anti-tank missiles to kill Russian tabks. Suddenly it will be a new ear and Putin won't be so eager to fight it.

They have virtually the same tanks and anti-aircraft weapons that the Russians have been using. I've not heard one story claiming the Russians were using T-90 tanks. Regarding the ammo, Ukraine certainly has the capacity to manufacture new bullets, if they're not it's a problem of money.

[Bereta_Eder]

FT

April 13, 2015 7:18 pm
World no longer listens to the deaf prophets of the west

Mark Mazower
Europe and the US have been convinced of their own truths for too long, writes Mark Mazower

As Europe struggles to hold itself together and its nationalist parties preach the virtues of the old nation-state, we find ourselves back in a place that can look eerily familiar. Once again we inhabit a world of great powers jostling for influence. Russia, with its incursions into Ukraine, is once again an aspirational counterweight; and China’s rise has thrown the power balance in Asia into confusion. Meanwhile the likely re-emergence of Iran, following the agreement between Tehran and world powers of a nuclear accord, and the slow ebbing of American power are reshaping the Middle East.

So is this a story, as the doomsters would have it, of western decline? Certainly, it is the ending of that long era in which the US and the Europe between them could assume they ran the world. But rather than indicating decline, this shifting configuration of forces may provide some much-needed intellectual reinvigoration, an end perhaps not only to centuries of the west’s global dominance but perhaps too to the mental laziness that accompanied it.


When the west emerged triumphant at the end of the cold war, many saw the defeat of communism as a vindication of its ideas. They believed history had demonstrated the superiority of democracy and the market over one-party rule and the planned economy. They viewed the US as the guardian of these values and encouraged international institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to promote them globally in the form of the Washington consensus.

In fact what the Washington consensus, as it came to be known, really did was to replace one view of the relationship between markets and democracy with another. What it destroyed was that older idea, forged out of depression and war, that markets were valuable but needed to be held in check in order to allow governments the capacity to do the things at home that would nourish democratic institutions.

To the generation of John Maynard Keynes, markets were supposed to serve democracy; unchecked they could as easily harm it as foster it. This was the way of thinking that collapsed amid the fin de siècle financialisation of the global economy. And what kind of universal truth emerged? Some people made a lot of money but the global economy became far more unstable. Financial hurricanes devastated South America, east Asia and Russia during the 1990s. Yet it was only once the contagion spread to the US and the EU that a timid questioning of economic and political orthodoxies began in the west.

The forces making for intellectual inertia have been great. Not least of the benefits that accrued to the US during its long era of global predominance was the power to define ways of thinking about the world, to say what counted as serious economic or political knowledge. It was a mixed blessing.

One of the problems of the cold war was that it fossilised habits of thought. Even as American universities boomed, those who actually knew about foreign cultures and foreign languages were marginalised, written off as mere area specialists. The big money was in coming up with shiny new universal models of social or political behaviour that would allow policy makers to think big — to spread democracy everywhere, for example, or to eradicate corruption.

And since the consequences of bad ideas were felt more overseas than at home, the price of error was low. The result was an analytic over-superficiality and an intellectual rigidity in thinking about the world of which the Washington consensus might now stand as exhibit A. If American economists and social scientists can no longer assume the rest of the world will buy their view of what counts as truth, so much the better for everyone.

We should not be dismayed that the global economic crisis and our uncertain exit from it has shaken up received wisdoms. The west has been acting for too long like a deaf prophet, so convinced of its own truths that it does not need to listen.

Coming to grips with complexity — with, say, the numerous conceptions around the world of how markets function, or of political legitimacy — can only be a good thing: they are often the fruits of insights and experiences we can learn from. For 200 years or so, first Europe and then the US achieved a kind of world dominance that is now slipping into history. But the ending of that dominance should inspire not fear but curiosity. A new world of ideas awaits and the west, if that outmoded term still has any value, should for the sake of its own intellectual vitality embrace this and not turn its back on it.


The writer is professor of history at Columbia and author of ‘Governing the World: The History of an Idea’




Embrace the future

[Dinner]

Raising interest rates to defend the rouble seems to have worked as cash has flowed back into Russia to get the higher rate of return though the high interest rates are negatively impacting economic growth and the country remains in recession.

[regexcellent]

They have virtually the same tanks and anti-aircraft weapons that the Russians have been using. I've not heard one story claiming the Russians were using T-90 tanks. Regarding the ammo, Ukraine certainly has the capacity to manufacture new bullets, if they're not it's a problem of money.

This is totally false. Russian tanks are T-72/T-90 models and Ukrainian tanks are T-64/T-80 models.

[Dinner]

https://burkonews.info/russian-t-90-tanks-136th-motorized-rifle-brigade-luhansk-region/

Doc, Russia has been using equipment which is a generation newer including T-90 tanks. The Ukrainians have said their two biggest needs are drones and anti-tank missiles. They say Russia has made extensive use of drones so they have real time info of what the battlefield looks like while Ukrainians don't have that so they would like the Americans to give them that ability.