Well, this is their political platform. Sounds pretty good, across the board, to me (especially the economics bit, but really all of it).
Yes, I think I’m going to go with ‘freedom fighters’, or if you will ‘heroes’, instead of ‘assholes’.
I’ll assume you also view Serbian separatists as “heroes” and “freedom fighters” as well. The people you call “freedom fighters” certainly do.
These comments are not remotely consistent with your previous statements.
You previously were arguing that Russia should be able to do bad things that Americans had done decades in the past, but now seem to have gone back on this.
Ah well, I was hoping for intellectual consistency but shouldn’t be surprised.
Admittedly, it’s not often I get a chance to talk to someone who thinks Radovan Karadzic and Slobodan Milosevic were “heroes” and “freedom fighters” which would be consistent with your views regarding Putin and Russian separatists.
Excellent, glad to see you’re continuing a long tradition of taking exactly the wrong position on absolutely everything. Maybe your “heroes” can shoot down a few more passenger planes or start a few more civil wars on behalf of Russian empire building. :rolleyes:
I recommend you try reading Putin’s Wars: The Rise of Russia’s New Imperialism, a book which came out just before Putin’s annexation of Crimea and presciently foreshadowed the events that have come to pass. Russia is not like most other nations; its history of hegemony against its neighboring states is a centuries-old geopolitical process that didn’t change in the slightest after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I don’t make any distinction. Reckless, criminal neglect is barely one notch down from deliberate. and probably whoever shot this did it by ‘accident’ as they thought they were firing on a military aircraft.
EDITED to add: which doesn’t exclude them one bit. I want to see them hanged.
That’s pretty extreme.
Shooting down airliners seems pretty extreme also. Once you start looking into it, it’s a ‘whoops’ that seems to happen way too often.
In this case the ‘separatists’ are little more than terrorists in the first place and should be treated as such.
Well the Malaysians now havethe Black boxes and the bodies are en route to Kharkiv. No ATC transcripts yet though.
I think he should learn how to make up his damned mind, pick a flight, and stick with it.
Something I haven’t really seen discussed here is that Russians by and large seem to be very happy about what Putin is doing. Approval ratings through the roof. Russians seem to want to annex their neighbours, thumb their noses at the west, etc.
This seems to me to be the biggest problem. Putin is a man, but the Russian people seem to stand behind him. If Putin wasn’t around, someone else would rise up to take his place. Why?
I can only think that Russia wants to be a world power again, and is showing its power in the most antagonistic way possible.
How do you change Russian behaviour though? You can’t start WW3, and even if you did, even if you manage to bomb Russia back to the stone age without killing everyone on earth, Russia will come back in 20 years and do it again. USSR wasn’t so long ago.
Gawd I hate to be the Godwin but that is the obvious parallel.
The apeal to your “rightful place” in the world order resonates strongly in declining formerly more powerful societies. While someone else could appeal to that it is not a certainty that someone else would, or would play to it as well.
I seriously doubt there will be anything useful. The black box will say “We’re flying along… Blammo”.
Many episodes of Air Crash Investigation have made me pretty impressed by what they can glean from the data. Maybe they can figure out which systems were destroyed first and derive a vector for the missile or something.
I mean, so what? The plane went down where it went down, and the US has satelite images of the radar used by the missile on launch, when it hit, video of the damn things going into the country and leaving, what do you expect that the black box data will be able to say that is relevant?
I’m gonna ask for a link to this satellite data of which you speak.
My mistake. The newspaper reports were analyst fanwanking.
I retract that statement, although I expect evidence of some sort to be produced soon.
In other news, Russia has given a press conference purportedly showing a Ukrainian fighter plane in the area at the time of the crash.
So far, no concrete assertions, apart from “Why was plane there? People have the right to know”. Maybe the black box data can help to tell apart a fighter jet missile and a SAM, but I doubt it. Evidence would probably come from the wreckage, if enough of it is still left there anyway.
Kerry has claimed video of SAMs and tanks going in/out of the country, but none of it has been released as of yet. I guess the Russians have that going for them, they’ve shown their evidence first. Kerry also stated that they know with confidence that Ukraine had no SAMs in the area, but Russia claims that Ukraine did, and has satellite evidence that there were Ukrainian SAMs there. Someone’s going to get egg on their face.
I have not seen any satellite imagery released, so my retraction stands, but as you can see, there is a lot of circumstantial evidence as of now. Still, no sources quoted, no pictures released, so eh. We’ll see.
And the information retrieved from the Black Box, which is much more than just the cockpit voice recorder, could be an important means of confirming that.
Looking at the map the claimed launch site is SSW to SW of the crash site. The plane was heading SE so a missile strike from that site would likely be from the front starboard quadrant. Maybe the Black Box data could show whether systems in that area were destroyed first. Of course the destruction may have been so instantaneous that the Black Box data is inconclusive on this point. But it could be important.
Only fools. What kind of intelligent person would look at either disaster and decide that it must be God that decided to kill a few hundred people but save them because they’re super special? And what kind of arsehole would believe this newly discovered god to be worth worshiping?
I think you were so quick to jump on some kind of anti-religion soapbox that you may not have read the rest of the post, and in any case missed the point of a humorous take on an amazing coincidence. 