Russian trolls

[Smitty-48]

I doubt the Soviet mobsters really want to get annihilated by launching this zombie behemoth...

They will rattle it about like the North Koreans... and see how much "protection" money they can score... cause that's what mobsters do.

Yes, yes, the rational arbitrage of the deluded bourgeoisie, exactly as I have asserted, none the less, there are no Soviets left, when the Soviet war machine reports up the chain of command to the Presidium, the Politburo is no longer there, the Russian gangsters it does not recognize as its masters, and they are too incompetent to control it even if they realized the danger, which they don't, because they are just foolish as you are.

[DrYouth]

[Yes, yes, the rational arbitrage of the deluded bourgeoisie, exactly as I have asserted, none the less, there are no Soviets left, when the Soviet war machine reports up the chain of command to the Presidium, the Politburo is no longer there, the Russian gangsters it does not recognize as its masters, and they are too incompetent to control it even if they realized the danger, which they don't, because they are just foolish as you are.

So what are you telling me?

Our greatest threat is Putin launching doomsday upon us?

Why would he do so? What would he have to gain from doing so?

What is your calculus as to how this happens?

Right now all I see is his goons whacking his former goons.

[Smitty-48]

[Yes, yes, the rational arbitrage of the deluded bourgeoisie, exactly as I have asserted, none the less, there are no Soviets left, when the Soviet war machine reports up the chain of command to the Presidium, the Politburo is no longer there, the Russian gangsters it does not recognize as its masters, and they are too incompetent to control it even if they realized the danger, which they don't, because they are just foolish as you are.

So what are you telling me?

Our greatest threat is Putin launching doomsday upon us?

Why would he do so? What would he have to gain from doing so?

What is your calculus as to how this happens?

Right now all I see is his goons whacking his former goons.

Putin is a nobody, Putin did not replace the Presidium, he is totally incapable of managing the zombie, Russia is decapitated for all intents and purposes, the Soviet war machine runs on with its mission as a vengeance weapon, with very little regard for Putin.

For example, the nerve agent attack in the UK; entirely plausible and in fact likely that one of the component parts of the KGB or the GRU, executed that operation without even running it past the Kremlin for approval.

Russia is the Wild East, off the hook, nobody is actually in control of it.

[GloryofGreece]

My guess is Smitty is alluding to the very nature of having all those warheads and the entire nuclear apparatus so to speak has almost a life of its own. And the danger is you have an incident like in the 60s and 80s where instead of catching the "mistake" it doesn't and we go past a point of no return. Even if Putin or whomever isn't rationally intending to do so.

[Speaker to Animals]

The Soviet Union was described by some theorists as a balance between three power centers: the Politburo, intelligence, and the army. Putin comes from the intelligence apparatus and likely has them on his side. The Politburo is extinguished. The army.. It's possible he doesn't really control them.

[Smitty-48]

The current power structure in Russia is really just a power struggle between the Second General Directorate of the Committee for State Security and the Military Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Soviet Armed Forces, Vladimir Putin is merely a Potemkin village facade.

The houses of power in Russia are not the Kremlin and the Dumas, rather the Aquarium at Khodinka airfield and Lubyanka in the Meschansky District.

The political parties in Russia are called FSB and GRU, that's their version of Red Team v. Blue Team.

[Smitty-48]

Skirpal by the way was GRU, FSB is in ascendance right now, so could have been them who took him out, to send a message to GRU, or it could have been GRU who took him out, because he was some sort of liability to them.

In either case, both would be perfectly happy to angle Putin into a confrontation with the British, that's all to the good, for the Soviet war machine.

[nmoore63]

700 BC is not before 1450 BC,

Chinese scripts before that were not what we call a written language. They were pictographic. It's literally like what you do when you play Pictionary. If I drew a picture of a fat viking sucking a cock, it could mean that Bjorn is a massive faggot, but it could also mean any number of other things. That's what is meant by pictographic.

Furthermore, trying to tie the date of a civilization to writing is problematic in that civilizations have existed without written languages and plenty of complex cultures have had written languages but are not what we consider civilizations.

If you drew a picture of a fat viking sucking a cock, I'd think it definitely meant you were going to masturbate to it later.

..as for civilization and writing, I agree with that. Incas are a good example, obviously. One of the most helpful attempts at a set of objective qualifers for the word civilization is Gordon Childe's:

Primary characteristics

1. Urban settlements
2. Full-time specialists not involved in agricultural activities
3. Concentration of surplus production
4. Class structure
5. State-level organization (government)

Secondary characteristics

6. Monumental public building
7. Extensive trading networks
8. Standardized monumental artwork
9. Writing
10. Development of exact sciences

So, Incas would definitely sort under the primary characterics needed to qualify as a civilization, even if they don't qualify for all of the secondary ones.

In my unprofessional opinion, you don't need all that. Sure you could use that to grade relative development, but the second you have full time specialists in a field other than food production, raiding, or idle rulers you have civilization.

[Smitty-48]

So what are you telling me?

Our greatest threat is Putin launching doomsday upon us?

The greatest threat remains a launch on false warning countervalue exchange my misapprehension, miscalculation and/or mistake, the men in the loop are really not that significant, the war machines are programmed to fight the Third World War by default, the men in the loop could have as little as thirty seconds and no more than three minutes to determine what was really going on and then try to stop the zombie trains from leaving the station.

And that assumes that the war machines were not actively trying to hinder the men in the loop on the opposing sides from determining what was going on, if active measures were in play to blind them, they may not even get a chance to confer at all before the whistle blows.

[DrYouth]

The current power structure in Russia is really just a power struggle between the Second General Directorate of the Committee for State Security and the Military Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Soviet Armed Forces, Vladimir Putin is merely a Potemkin village facade.

The houses of power in Russia are not the Kremlin and the Dumas, rather the Aquarium at Khodinka airfield and Lubyanka in the Meschansky District.

The political parties in Russia are called FSB and GRU, that's their version of Red Team v. Blue Team.

What you are in effect saying is that these entities within Russia are probably more likely to go to war with one another than launch on the outside world.

Seems to me, then, that the greatest risk is within Russia.