sculptor
Valued Senior Member
lol
Military Events in Syria and Iraq Thread #4
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More fools them, then. In reality based discussions there is.
I'll use "government" for its meaning in English, thank you.
Yep.
Yep. And then it has to override the coercion present. Neither of those will happen consistently, in the real world.
Not me - you.
Which is why you can't have contracts without government - you have to outsource the enforcement, prevent coercion by the parties involved.
Meanwhile, in the interest of thread relevance:
https://nationalinterest.org/featur...inous-regions-almost-impossible-conquer-30597
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Schmelzer
Valued Senior Member
Thanks for the article. Quite good, the mountainous region around the Himalaya have been known as a long-term region of anarchy, and are still now. The most important explanations have been given too. except the one which is relevant here, namely that the small amount of people staying essentially at the same village (the neighbour village are different people) allows reputation-based contract enforcement.
The word of the mountain people is worth much more than of those in the plains.
BTW, you mingle the question if there is some difference with if there is some difference relevant for the discussion of anarchy vs. state. You seem to have no idea how reputation works, probably this is not part of any American tradition (or only of a bad minority tradition). It is, of course, in the interest of the state to diminish the role of state-independent conflict management institutions, and, different from the quite liberal traditions of the past, your state is quite powerful today, so I would not wonder if reputation is essentially already unknown for all practical purposes to modern America. Except for the inside groups of the deep state behind the curtains, where reputation is everything.
The word of the mountain people is worth much more than of those in the plains.
BTW, you mingle the question if there is some difference with if there is some difference relevant for the discussion of anarchy vs. state. You seem to have no idea how reputation works, probably this is not part of any American tradition (or only of a bad minority tradition). It is, of course, in the interest of the state to diminish the role of state-independent conflict management institutions, and, different from the quite liberal traditions of the past, your state is quite powerful today, so I would not wonder if reputation is essentially already unknown for all practical purposes to modern America. Except for the inside groups of the deep state behind the curtains, where reputation is everything.
The title is somewhat misleading. It should be "Why Are People Who Live in Mountainous Regions Almost Impossible to Control." Even the article itself notes that Stalin didn't have much difficulty cleaning out the Caucasus, because he simply uprooted all the towns and villages along the way. That's why Crimea has a Russian-speaking majority today, because Stalin butchered most of the original inhabitants and sent folks like Schmelzer to go replace them, and Schmelzer thinks that entitles Russia to annex it today.
It's also the reason Russia hasn't gotten bogged down in Syria yet, because their tactics are to maximize civilian casualties rather than attempting to avoid them. If Putin was occupying Baghdad, every neighbourhood that put up resistance to his forces would have been razed to the ground just like the Nazis used to do. It's much harder at least in the short term to win hearts and minds, and build a nation in your image, much easier to just bomb everything flat and have your stooges go around the internet telling everyone it's Israel's fault.
They enforce contracts by violence and the reputation of violence.
Silly boy.
America had an actual frontier, that didn't completely disappear until quite recently. America also has a large region of honor culture (the Confederacy) adjacent to a large region without one (most of the rest of the country). Americans saw organized crime develop, within living memory, in many areas with functioning governments. We can see side by side functioning comparisons of enforcement by reputation with other means of enforcement.
It remains to be seen whether Russia has been bogged down in Syria. Meanwhile, note the US and Russians have had similar experiences in Afghanistan, America has had very little success avoiding civilian casualties in the region, and avoiding civilian casualties is hardly the reason the US got bogged down in Iraq, Afghanistan, or anywhere else.
If Putin was in charge of the US invasion of Iraq with the US army at his command, it would have been finished and in the history books within a week. As would be most of Mesopotamia, but that's a collateral effect. As for Afghanistan, he'd tell Pakistan that if they want to own the conflict, they can own the refugees too and proceed to deport half the country. Do you agree, or do you think he'd still get bogged down because bomb-proof Rambos and machine guns sprout from poppies, living on mountains made of quicksand which are impervious to any kind of tunnel or road construction?
If Russia gets bogged down in Syria it will only be because they are not America and don't have a fraction of the resources and talents at America's disposal, or due to a combination of outside intervention from superior powers. In Idlib it looks like threats from the latter have forestalled a Russian invasion for the time being, but that's like security cameras stalling a playground pedo from doing what his brain is wired to do.
Schmelzer
Valued Senior Member
The usual anti-Russian war propaganda contains, beyond remembering some crimes of the Georgian communist Stalin and attributing them to Russians, also the following lie:
The method is quite simple: Recognize that SOHR number of "civilian victims" counts jihadists as civilians, except if they are deserted Syrian soldiers. Nice idea, and, of course, the Western sheeple never care about reading the definitions. Whatever, because killing women and children is even more horrible, they also give the numbers of women and children killed. "Children killed", of course, includes also teenage fighters, quite common among jihadists, but let's ignore this. The point is, bombs are not feminist, they don't kill more civilian men than civilian women, and on the ground there are also no more civilian men than civilian women. This allows to estimate the number of civilian men by the number of women given. And the general number of all victims allows to compute the number of men killed.
So, we have children + women + civilian men < children + 2*women, and all victims - (children + 2*women) > killed fighters. With these formulas the SOHR numbers give consistently less civil victims than killed fighters, often by factors. And this is, note, without those counted as fighters even by SOHR, and without the Syrian fighters.
Instead, the typical numbers for modern wars in general (which are, quite commonly, American wars) have more killed civilians than killed soldiers (from all sides).
There are quite complex diplomatic games now with Turkey. Here, the situation is subtle: On the one hand, Turkey would like to occupy Idlib forever. On the other hand, Russia likes to see a confrontation between Turkey and the US, which may, in principle, end with the NATO splitting. Iran is interested in good relations with Turkey too. So, one is ready to make some bounties to Turkey.
The reality is that one can even use the propaganda sources of the enemy, in this case SOHR, to find out that the number of civilian casualties in Syria is much lower than the American standard.
The method is quite simple: Recognize that SOHR number of "civilian victims" counts jihadists as civilians, except if they are deserted Syrian soldiers. Nice idea, and, of course, the Western sheeple never care about reading the definitions. Whatever, because killing women and children is even more horrible, they also give the numbers of women and children killed. "Children killed", of course, includes also teenage fighters, quite common among jihadists, but let's ignore this. The point is, bombs are not feminist, they don't kill more civilian men than civilian women, and on the ground there are also no more civilian men than civilian women. This allows to estimate the number of civilian men by the number of women given. And the general number of all victims allows to compute the number of men killed.
So, we have children + women + civilian men < children + 2*women, and all victims - (children + 2*women) > killed fighters. With these formulas the SOHR numbers give consistently less civil victims than killed fighters, often by factors. And this is, note, without those counted as fighters even by SOHR, and without the Syrian fighters.
Instead, the typical numbers for modern wars in general (which are, quite commonly, American wars) have more killed civilians than killed soldiers (from all sides).
This happens too, but the penalty that the word breaker will be despised by everybody is much more serious.
As I have said - only of a bad minority: White men genociding aborigines, racists, confederates, criminals. Those honored today by the liberals you have somehow forgotten to mention. By the way, you should have observed two other places which make clear that I was not talking about the different past: "different from the quite liberal traditions of the past" and "essentially already unknown".
Except for a serious engagement of the US, Russia is clearly on the winning street, not even close to being bogged down. The clearing of East Ghouta and Daraa was surprisingly fast in comparison with operations a year or two years ago. In fact, Assad was right, when he insisted that winning Aleppo means winning the war - I was pessimistic, but this was really the case, the war before and after the victory in Aleppo have been completely different in character.
There are quite complex diplomatic games now with Turkey. Here, the situation is subtle: On the one hand, Turkey would like to occupy Idlib forever. On the other hand, Russia likes to see a confrontation between Turkey and the US, which may, in principle, end with the NATO splitting. Iran is interested in good relations with Turkey too. So, one is ready to make some bounties to Turkey.
A world in which Russia and Russians are not responsible for the bad stuff done by the USSR?
Some other planet, obviously.
That's not a minority, that's the entire country.
Not if the word breaker controls resources and wealth others need. Not if the others who despise him are just enemies anyway.
Mountain people do murder and revenge, engage in feuds and raids and wars, and die by violence themselves, at very high rates. An economic system without a third party arbiter able to enforce a contract, one that has no fallback except violence for deals and promises, is a major reason.
Likewise on frontiers. Again, America has first hand and recent experience familiar to Americans.
Winning and getting bogged down often happens at the same time. That's the most common way of getting bogged down.
The US had achieved a comparable status in Iraq within three months of invading.
Involving the Kurds. They are mountain people - like the Afghans.
I believe you mean Josef Stalin, the Russian-speaking Georgian communist whose Russian ancestors colonized it in the name of Russia, who came to rule over Russia and send even more of its population to colonize the lands of the empire and beyond, including your own community. Since nationality of birth makes no difference to you when it comes to annexing territories like Crimea, it shouldn't make any difference when considering who's responsible for that crime, including the millions of Russians from Russia who happily left more land than they knew what to do with, and came to Ukraine instead to steal other peoples' homes and food.
The reality is you can use UN statistics corroborated by multiple independent sources. There is no doubt among UN investigators, for instance, that tens of thousands of political prisoners have been tortured to death in Assad's prisons, with photos and detailed government documents describing how each victim was interrogated and mutilated as proof, smuggled by regime insiders, corroborated independently by documents captured by rebels from Syrian government offices.
BTW your Kremlin buddies' explanation for what they were doing in Salisbury is a fucking joke, the best evidence I've seen to date that they really did conduct a chemical attack as accused. Now that their spy identities are known, and British intelligence apparently knows their real names too, I really do hope they plan on vacationing abroad when they retire.
Schmelzer
Valued Senior Member
Indeed, it is not the planet of anti-Russian propaganda. Russians were heavily underrepresented in the Bolshevik movement, almost non-existing in its leadership. The Russians were mostly in the White movement.
They are even unable to defend their memorials today.
Even in this case, he will be despised. And the consequence may be that it does not require much time until he no longer controls it.
That's another situation. In this case, there are no contracts with them to break anyway.
Force is important too. Even if the "arbiter" is the slaveholder able to enforce what he likes, it is his force which decides the particular issue. Of course, a stable slavery may give the slaves a higher live expectancy than freedom, given that there will be no fight.
That's the American way.
Feel free to compare this, but I see important differences.
The issue are certainly not the Kurds. All of them - Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Russia - agree that there should not be a Kurdish state.
Dshugashvili has Russian ancestors? LOL.
???????? Most of those living in Crimea are Russians. Which is a point which decided the referendum about joining Russia.
Except that that smuggled documentation was simply about people who died, and where the police was involved in handling the burial. The question if some of them have been tortured or not I leave to historians. To claim that they are all tortured to death is simply cheap propaganda.
As if you need evidence - you already know that everything evil is done by Russians. For the Russians, Salisbury is simply a joke. I think for all reasonable people around the world too.
They were heavily represented among the doers of bad stuff done by the USSR. Russian was the language, remember? That was your criterion for justifying Putin's annexation of Crimea.
? I was talking about the entire US. Who are you talking about?
Or not, as we see frequently and predict as a normal outcome of such unstable and easily corrupted governance.
This is quite familiar to Americans, as mentioned.
Which makes the Kurds a major issue. They have no friends but the mountains, as they say - but such people are hard to oppress without outright genocide.
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From here on you are replying to somebody else, but somehow labeling the quotes as from me. Perhaps you could edit that?
They were not. They were Ukrainians, or maybe Crimeans.
You are already denying the historical record, dismissing the historians as propagandists, etc.
So is claiming that anyone is claiming "they were all tortured to death". Why do you post such obvious trollshit?
If you want to blame Stalin's crimes on Georgia, then all the Russians he settled in other peoples' territories should be relocated with their descendants to Georgia instead, if there's not enough room to fit them in Russia first.
Who remain there today as illegal immigrants while refusing to coexist with their gracious hosts.
And the details in those documents matched perfectly with the photographic records of the torture victims, despite coming from completely independent sources. According to the UN, Mr. Assad apparently has an eye-gouging fetish. It's not propaganda to claim that mutilated dead bodies photographed in a dungeon once belonged to people who were tortured to death.
No, I never said everything evil is done by Russians, but they're doing a great deal of evil in today's world and they're very proud of their ability to do so. Unlike you I actually do need evidence, and I judge it based largely on its own logical self-consistency and its consistency with other sources.
As is civilized behaviour in general.
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Schmelzer
Valued Senior Member
I'm not a Nazi like you, so I do not think that anybody should be relocated. It makes no sense to retaliate for the injustice done in the past against the grandchildren of those involved.
They have been there all the time, several hundreds of years. Instead, the Ukrainians are foreign to Crimea. Crimea was made, completely artificially, without any base on the ground, Ukrainian by the communist leader Khrushchov, an Ukrainian by nationality.
Once people died in prison, they will appear in these documents too. Some people die in prison.
Unfortunately, the distributors of the torture claims are discredited. I would not doubt that there is some police violence in Syrian prisons, given that I know that even in Germany police beating is regularly happening. So, the only real question is if there is, in comparison, much more torture in Syria than in other comparable states. Given the discredited propagandists of such claims, I have no way to get reliable information about this. So, I do not care about this question.
Given that they were a large part of the territory the communists were able to occupy and control, some parts of them have also participated in the various crimes done by the communists in the USSR. Like Americans participate in crimes initiated by the US government. Such is life. And, no, I have not used the language question for justification of Crimea joining Russia. It is secondary, even some of the worst Ukrainian Nazis (the Asov battalion) uses Russian language. The justification was the referendum made on Crimea, together with the legal situation (no constitutional power in Kiev after the coup, thus, irrelevance of the Ukrainian constitution for what Crimea, which had the legal constitutional government in power, is doing.
Whatever. The main problem of reputational enforcement is that the information does not reach everybody. So all you have to do is to hold contracts inside a strong enough power group. This weakness will disappear, given the information revolution. So, all one can extract from existing evidence is if reputation works in small groups. And in small groups it works. And even today many people in small groups prefer reputation for conflict resolution, instead of using police and courts.
They are irrelevant for the question which I have considered - the question of cleaning Idlib from Al Qaida and friends.
Ups, sorry, too late to edit.
They were Russians. I don't know if in the Ukraine the USSR tradition to have the nationality in the passport was left unchanged or not, it does not matter. The Ukrainian citizens were nonetheless Russians.
The claim was "tens of thousands of political prisoners have been tortured to death in Assad's prisons" . In reality the "tens of thousands" were the number of all those who appeared in these documents -crime victims, civil war victims, natural death in prison and all this included.
In general, CptBork posts propaganda trollshit, I answer this trollshit. I know, that's a weakness, I should not feed this troll.
The only thing that differentiates you from the Nazis is that you have a Russian first name, speak with a Russian accent and act like you depend on Russia for your livelihood. Of course you support relocation, because that's what's happening to ethnic minorities in every single territory occupied by Russians, now it's happening to ethnic majority Syrians, and your only opposition to relocation involves a preference for outright genocide. Pretending that people don't exist doesn't negate what happens when your countrymen kill them and expel their families.
What I say instead is that if Russians want to be in charge of something that's not theirs, they should move their lazy parasite asses somewhere else, where they're either welcomed by the locals or where no one else was already living, and go be in charge there instead.
Millions of Tatars were killed by Stalin and his successors on top of all those killed by the Russian empire before him. That's the one and only reason Crimea has an ethnic Russian majority, same with Donetsk and Luhansk where 3 million Ukrainians were forcefully starved to death. If you don't like what Kruschev did to Ukraine's borders, then you should take back all the filthy squatters Stalin sent too and let the original inhabitants negotiate amongst themselves over Crimea and other territories.
I wasn't referring to anyone who died of natural causes, nor are UN investigators.
It's a good question. It wouldn't shock me at all if there's been even more torture in the giant gaping cesspool known as Russia.
Given that you don't even believe hundreds of your own Russian soldiers when they tell the world that America kicked the shit out of them without breaking a sweat, you shouldn't believe or discuss anything about Syria whatsoever.
The government of Crimea had no legal authority on any level to do anything without the permission and oversight of Ukraine's central government. If they wanted to hold a referendum on separation, they would have first had to wait for a new authority to be elected and claim power, then negotiate with it under international supervision. Russian law already forbids any annexations of Ukrainian territory based on the treaty it signed with Ukraine to remove their nukes, so don't lie to us about laws.
If all those other causes of death were included, there would be over 500,000 of them, stupid.
You're compelled to debate me because your insecure ego requires constant proclamations of moral and national superiority. For my part, I'm just sick of you trying to turn this place into another Russian troll factory with all your KKK friends.
Schmelzer
Valued Senior Member
A lot of primitive lies disposed of, just some of them because this may be of some interest for others.
Here is yet another insistence of our Nazi on deportation:
Stalin's crime was the deportation (not murder) of 238.500 Crimean Tatars. The number is from an Ukrainian site, thus, probably even exaggerated. http://uacrisis.org/de/53227-deportation-tatars-de-crimee-questions-reponses They claim 8.000 deaths during this deportation
Here is yet another insistence of our Nazi on deportation:
A classical case of fascism: Subdivision of the people living in a region by nationality, then putting one nationality as subhumans into a special category which has nothing to decide, and the others can decide what to do with them - simply deport them or gas them.
according to the Ukrainian constitution. Given that it was broken by the ousting of president Yanukovitch, there was no longer any constitutional order in the Ukraine, beyond the local administrations as far as they remained in power (as they did in Crimea). So, the government of Crimea was at this time the highest constitutional institution there, thus, had the right to do anything.
It was never ratified, by anyone. Moreover, given the breakdown of the constitutional order in Kiev it would have been irrelevant anyway. Russia had any right to start military action, given that as the legal president Yanukovitch, as the government of Crimea have asked for military support against the putsch.
One major problem is that people are often conned or coerced into dealing with the rich and powerful regardless of their reputation.
Another is that the wealthy will control the information unless curbed by State power.
It will not. It has not, for example, where the information revolution has taken place.
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Torture is common in "comparable States", of course. Assad's government is of a kind that tortures - like Hussein's, in Iraq, or Pinochet's, in Chile, or Putin's, in Russia. In Syria, we know it was common enough to employ dedicated facilities and specialty cadres of State employees (The US is known to have occasionally outsourced its torturing to Syria, and no special arrangements had to be made in Syria to handle the task - everything was set up already).
The question you considered was whether the political negotiations between the forces in Syria would be troubled, and I pointed out that the Kurds were going to be hard to handle - as they have been for a long time, partly because they are mountain people.
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Yes, you did. It's how you identified the annexed population as "Russians", so that it was ok to bring in Russian soldiers and annex the territory Putin wanted.
They were enthusiastic and politically dominant citizens of the USSR, and they played leading roles among the communists committing the crimes in the USSR.
Ukrainian citizens are not Russian citizens. Those are two different countries.
Russia had no right to annex part of Ukraine, for any reason.
You neglect to mention that another 32,000 or so died of unnatural causes as a direct result of the exile, or any of the other massacres and deprivations committed against them before and since. That means Stalin's deportation alone wiped out 25% of their population in addition to wiping out their historic homeland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_Tatars
Note how the Tatar population of Crimea was twice as large 200 years ago. Now either the Tatars enjoyed some sort of golden age spawning from the enlightenment movement in western Europe, or you folks been massacrin' them over and over again for the last 2 centuries to keep their population down.
Which is exactly what you've been doing for centuries with the Tatars, Chechens and other minorities of the Russian empire.
If the federal government and constitution are nullified, then all local and regional governments falling under its sovereignty are also nullified. You can't make up a new process for Crimea without international oversight, consultation and approval. According to your logic, Serbians nullified their national constitution by attacking Albanians and ultimately overthrowing their own president, and unlike Crimea, Kosovo's fate has been decided since in accordance with international law and international oversight, so surely you must support Kosovo's bid to become Nietslavia or even join with Albania.
I see no information on the Budapest Memorandum not being ratified and not being incorporated into Russian law, please do inform us. I was under the impression you wanted relations between countries to be conducted by contract, I didn't know Russian contracts were about as valid as a certificate of authenticity on a crayon Mona Lisa.
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