duke_Qa

This singing modulator thing (called a talkbox, cool stuff) looks awesome, and of course, classic Daft Punk song symphonic cover is cool too.

Hmm, haven't seen WW yet, premieres tomorrow, gotta check out them songs.

Sweet, been waiting for a new Ghost album, even though I got a new Opeth album coming in a few weeks to cover my swedish rock quota.

and that Parkway Drive band looks like the biggest group of undercover bros I've ever seen. Music is surprisingly okay though, the mix of scream and female vocal works for me.

Either way, came across this music video from Carpenter Brut, which I can't recall I've seen. The song is okay too, but it's quite the hilarious/epic music video.

hmm, considering investing in a new pc. I've had this one for 5 years I believe. An excuse to try out win 10 as well I guess.

But I was wondering if I should try and order it now or wait until the next generation of graphic cards arrive? I've managed to discover that the next generation is on the way out, but they are still expensive.

I feel I'm woefully out of date on new hardware. I rarely read up until it's getting close to buying a new pc. Maybe there's some new cpus on the way out as well, or many other things.

So, I'm guessing this is a "What to buy" thread. 

hehe, both are pretty great. I always imagine Pasidon as Napoleon Dynamite

That Protomen act III album takes it's sweet ass time.

A cute music video along with this ghost song.

skimmed through Marilyn's (I approve, more mature as you say and nice production,) Bring me the horizon's (not bad for a genre I don't really follow, I like the vocals,) and Celldweller's (Eh, not a fan of CD's signature noise sound, it's too thin and distracting for me.) Better check out the rest this evening.

Sounds like you got some physical artifacts to gather dust in a shelf. Which reminds me that I need more shelves.

Do we?

Hmm, this would have worked as a C&C song, somewhat

Hmm, this song is starting to go viral around my friend circle, so I guess I have to look deeper into Ghost now,

Soon we're old enough to have babies! In some countries I think we already can!

Still, 11 years. quite some age. What day is the most correct day?

Blind guardian's Hansi Kürsch is a cool bean. He's got a great voice but he also doesn't give no damn and doesn't take himself too seriously. Just look at this music video, he's just standing there in his day-to-day attire while the rest of the story unfolds around him.

Remember some friends were going on a concert and they walked past him. He's like barely 5' 4" and he wore blue jeans and a matching denim jacket.

Very nice project, may the odds be ever in your favor

 

I don't know how you, but particularly the US and the 'west' in general, can say that without going red. Every idiot with an entire country has claimed exception to precious international law for decades and now they don't like it when it's happening at home.

Because:

• We don't shoot our journalists,
• we don't ban/murder our queers,
• We don't nationalize and censor our media in such apparent fashion(Murdoch and other capitalist media conglomerates are worrying though, but;)
• we don't actively hunt down web-based sources of information and brand them foreign agents,
• our nations have large ethnic minorities that aren't hunted down like dogs(Try to find Blacks, Arabs and Asians in heartland Russia),
• When gross misconduct is discovered, we actually take 99% of them to court and to prison(I leave Bush and neocons and those biggest Wall-Street sharks in the 1%, embarrassments that will be black stains on our history, but still doesn't defend us rolling over and collectively die because of their mistakes.),
• when gross government misconduct (in internet surveillance for example) is discovered, laws gets altered to stop if from happening again.

As long as we have governance run by humans, there will be corruption and trouble and unequal distribution, but most western nations have come so much further in developing our systems to something just. Russia, on the other hand, have shown their hand. They are not interested in making life better for their 99%. They are more interested in blinding them with nationalism and build up an empire that allows its rich to remain rich, its secret police to suppress/murder the dissenters, and to allow their authoritarian, corruption-friendly, oligarchic and nepotistic system to thrive by spreading its ideology as far and wide as it can. China is close to it, but 1 billion people are much more volatile than 150million, and it's more concentrated, so they have their own, more patient and introverted way of spreading their ways.

Russia is today where Germany was in the 1920s. The west remembered what they did wrong back then, and have done as much as they could the last twenty years to aid Russia in getting back on its feet to avoid their fury, and it might have worked, but Putin got tired of getting put out in the cold all the time and decided after a decade that rebooting the Russian empire and to rule through fear was more effective for his wallet and to beg and grovel at the feet of the EU and the US. 

 

Maybe it's proximity. Russia intervening in south-east Ukraine, when there ARE a large majority of Russians living there seems a lot more reasonable and understandable than invading countries half-way around the world on falsified information and vague assumptions ending in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, then leaving the countries more corrupt and unstable than before. If you were Russia and the government of your neighbouring historically and culturally tied country is suddenly ousted in a coup, wouldn't you be alarmed and want to get involved? Specifically to protect those who are Russian? I know the previous leader of Ukraine was corrupt as hell but those who were put in charge (seemingly by the US if you do believe the recordings of officials discussing who should be allowed in power) are not representative of anyone as far as I can tell, hence the country is now falling into civil war.

Still, occupation < annexation. China is not very pleased with Russia redrawing borders. Putin's ambitions of a trade union that resembles the borders of the USSR is our prime concern here. I saw a documentary on television about this a month or two back, very interesting perspective from Kazakhstan and other post-USSR countries perspective on these things. Many of these nations prefer to cooperate with China, as China puts itself into a partner role, not a master-role as the Russian federation does. China might be a big goon as well, but compared to Putin's neighborhood policy of divide and conquer.

China at least uses the philosophy "The tide rise all boats" and have helped/traded with their neighboring countries like Myanmar, Vietnam, Phillipines, s/n-Korea etc. etc., even if they're in a bit of a political turmoil about sea-borders these days. With the exception of the fate of North-Korea, China has been a relatively amicable neighboring super-power.

The Russian Federation on the other hand, cares little for its important neighbors and former minions if they don't kneel to it. And, like China with North Korea, it is afraid to get a westernized nation on one of its highly populated borders. If East Ukraine departs, it might easily become a Russian/Ukrainian version of North Korea: A border nation meant to scare the Russian population into believing "This is what the west does to our glorious people." West Ukraine might even become a new South-Korea in thirty-fourty years time, if it gets the same treatment as many other EU-enrolled former Soviet republics have gotten. Poland has developed greatly the last twenty years and probably will become a power-house akin to France or Germany in the next thirty years. If Ukraine's markets open up, Poland might use their recent experience they've gotten from the EU to rebuild Ukraine, seeing how the two nations have one of the closer relationships beyond the Russian one.

 

Surely it's just playing grand theft auto with a nation. It takes several hundred people to overtake a government, then you hijack the military. Well many police and military men are giving up arms instead of fighting, so doesn't that tell you who's leading Ukraine is definitely not who they wanted?

Ukraine has a big cultural problem: It has never had a honest political system independent of the USSR or Russia. Its local government has since the fall of the wall, been highly, extremely inefficient. The GNP of Ukraine is 5% smaller than it was in 92, the time of the deepest abyss of the economic collapse of the USSR.

This has turned most Ukrainians very cynic and closely resembling American republicans: Very distrusting of governance. Whenever a political movement happens, the entire nation usually jumps with both feet into the new movement. The orange revolution was widely popular, the return of Janukovic was also "widely" popular. This time, for some reason, it seems Russia was done keeping their mouth shut when it appeared that Ukraine once more had flipped the west/east switch. Putin, tired of western bullshit overall and the smearing of the olympics specific, decided that it was no-more-mr-nice-guy, and raged. His grip on the media and well-funded oil-wallet filled the airwaves of Ukrainian Russians with easy to chew propaganda, perfectly adjusted to a nation of people who flip from political black to white if there's a chance to get a pension out of it.

I guess I could continue, but that is pretty much what happened. This could have happened back in 2004 as well, but Putin neither had the economic power nor the "internal-affairs" iron fist he does today to go through with it. We invested and bought what we needed from Russia, filled the wallets of the corrupt elites which now are using that money to rebuild a mafia empire that fits them perfectly.

I'm glad the west doesn't bend over because they've done some mistakes themselves. Accepting Russia's behavior here is to accept their way of governance. And that would be a grave mistake for ourselves and our children, considering the capitalist system is always looking for the smallest of excuses to take our rights away from us. If it wasn't for the fact that most western billionaires and the likes would not like to live in such an insecure nation, they wouldn't have batted an eye to turning every western nation into a mafia-state in the vein of Russia if it earned them 50% more money.

Dunno if I got all points covered, but I'm stopping now to keep this within reason.

This must be what Pasidon is like on drugs.

I have failed in my GNP duties when I wasn't the one to make a thread about either the pre-revolution situation or this current-situation crisis.

There are many small variables at play here that resemble Georgia, but there is a core political ideology behind it: Russia considers its former USSR neighbors pawns and their secession from their rule a tragedy. Another political relic of the cold war is the "empire's backyard" gentleman's agreement. The USA considers South America its backyard and leaves Soviet's backyard alone if Soviet does so for the USA.

This was more the case in Georgia when a new generation of western-educated transparency/non-corruption and reform-friendly elites, bureaucrats and administrators took over the rule there, around 2004. in 2008, Russia is plenty annoyed with the sprouting democracy on their borders and they decide its time to add some heat to their border-conflicts where ethnic Russians are gathered. Georgia responds to local militia's attack, Russia responds twentyfold, making it very clear that the counties Abkazia and north Ossetia are under Russian control. Pretty much only Russia and their closest friends recognize these as independent states. Georgia trundles on, but Russia made a good showing of their power and they have made it clear that they can step on any political developments in their backyard they don't like.

Back then we also talked that the situation was pretty much the same in Ukraine, with large doses of Russians in the east and on Crimea. Back then Russia wasn't as rich and powerful as they are today, but they probably would have done the same in the first Orange revolution had they expected it a few years in advance.

Now, on the other hand, Russia knew that Ukraine was likely to fall back into revolutionary hands after a while with Janukovic in charge. He's done a remarkable good job stealing a large percentage of the Ukraine budget, pushing it to his dentist son's accounts, making him a multibillionaire. Many articles have shown a lot of the extravagance of the pro-russians palaces built the last 5 years.

Anyway, one of the main reasons the revolutions started now was because Janukovic was out of money and was looking for a big brother to help support his bloodsucking. He is in dialogue with the EU, which sees the fertile soils of Ukraine as a land with great potential but with terrible corrupt administration. But by now, Putin and Russia have become rich enough to plan for a Eurasian Union, where Belarus and Kazakstan already are members, and he wishes to yank Ukraine into this new version of the USSR where Moscow is the boss and the rest are merely satelites.

Janukovic is a bit hesitant as he prefers to stay independent, but he also knows that if he goes into a deal with the EU, he'll be forced to stop stealing as much as he does. Putin, most likely, comes with a fine deal promising him and his family for generations absolute power over Ukraine, as long as he's loyal to him, and he'll pay for their luxurious lives as long as he keeps his country loyal to the Russian Eurasian union. Janukovic decides this is the best to keep his current situation stabile, but he is not a master of politics. The people are tired, and many have seen the freedom and increased economic well-being that the EU have given to the former eastern-european nations people. Not just the elites, but for everyone. And so the revolution slowly begins. 

Now, Russia was prepared for this. They knew that they had large ethnic groups of Russian in the nation and that it was likely that the revolution would come back. Ukraine is a border country to the EU, looking over the border to see the splendors developing there gives them hopes for something better than Russian-controlled authoritarian, outdated, elitist and corrupt government. This is a great, great threat for Putin's Russia as well. A neighboring country with a large group of ethnic Russians potentially becoming colored by western Europe's social-democratic and freedom-oriented ideologies? It would be the end of their pocket-filling party and end with the demands of their heads on stakes.

Also note; the small demonstrations in Moscow where all anti-war protesters were arrested instantly while teachers and other public employees were given paid leave to go and demonstrate against the revolution and for the events on Crimea.

To sum up this wall: Putin's Russia considers Ukraine an asset and a threat. It is potentially powerful as an ally, troops and numbers and resources are important to look big and burly. And it is potentially dangerous as a lost ally, going over to the EU, showing signs of economic and democratic progress and telling Russians that there's nothing in the way for them to get the same blessings... if only they got rid of their current rulers

Another thing to notice is that it's now about 23 years since Soviet fell. It took about 21 years for Germany to lose the war until they created another, the heart-felt loss and economic chaos and punishment after the war being two of the main motivators for the rise of the Nazi empire. As far as I'm concerned, Putin's Russia has finally regained its economic clout, and it is now doing as many other nations have done before it: Licking its wounds and planning revenge.

This is a very good article about most I've mentioned about Ukraine above.