patrick.net

I say the conflict, if frozen today, is a mixed mag

* NATO ended up with two new members

* More NATO members are taking defense spending with at least some grudging, slovenly interest now whereas before they haughtily disregarded any military preparedness.

* Ukraine is a demographic basketcase

* Ukriane will be an economic basketcase once it comes loan repayment time. The fun for the Ukrainian Working Man is just beginning,

* The next election in Ukraine will be a basketcase with riots, chicanery, corruption, brazen media lies, and ballot stuffing that will make 2020 look legit.

* Russia doesn't look impressive being unable to slam it's way to at least to the Dneipr with a massive manpower and material advantage and hold it. Even if every Russian soldier was crosseyed, one-legged, half-starving, and their AK jammed three times for every 30-rounds fired requiring them to spend 10 minutes clearing it under fire. Hell, if they only had SKS and unarmored wheeled trucks they should have smashed everything by sheer weight of numbers.

* Their inability to do, if their generals had been 90-year old Cold War era guys who couldn't piss outside a catheter and just ran off the old echelon strategy or some imitation of it, was a big shock to me.

* Therefore, Russia outside of Nukes is an offensive non-entity. One should not take it as being a Defensive non-entity, because the bear in his den is different than the bear outside his territory if history is any guide.

* BUT, there's simply no way Crimea or Donbas goes back to Ukraine barring a miraculous concession by Western Powers.

WookieMan says

Preventable. Russia was the invader

Russia has a history of invading and slicing off bits of other countries or supporting the secession of breakaway bits that have a majority ethnic Russian population. Now you might understand how Eastern European countries resent to this day the invasion of ethnic Russians and their then first-class status and institution of an oppressive security apparatus (not that that could ever happen in the USA), but that be the way it be.

AmericanKulak says

* BUT, there's simply no way Crimea or Donbas goes back to Ukraine barring a miraculous concession by Western Powers.

And this is where we are. Russia can keep this going. So can the West. I don't see it going much further and I'm not sure that's a Russian victory since they were already in the Donbas from the word go years before the official invasion.

Ukraine is fucked either way. No debating that. I'd say this is going to be a stalemate/cease fire situation. No one definitively wins. Ukrainians lose more men screwing the future as you said demographically. Russia ain't winning in that realm either though, they just have more.

Patrick says

WookieMan please explain it to me. I think Russia is clearly winning.
444   UkraineIsTotallyFucked     ignore (

He's already gone on as nauseum about this in the Ukraine Liberators thread. Basically, philosophy beats realpolitik is his stance.

AmericanKulak says

How the F does Patrick have two ignores at all? I mean "I'm coming to Admin's site to ignore the Admin" is kinda... pointless.

Still, I'm kind of proud that it shows I apply the rules to myself as well.

WookieMan says

They invaded and expected to take over the country. They didn't.

They took 1/4 of Ukraine quickly at the beginning of the war and could have taken Kiev, but then backed off for no clear reason. I'm sure there's a lot more going on than we know about.

https://metro.co.uk/2023/02/24/map-shows-how-much-territory-russia-has-gained-and-lost-in-ukraine-18339796/

Patrick says

They took 1/4 of Ukraine quickly at the beginning of the war and could have taken Kiev, but then backed off for no clear reason. I'm sure there's a lot more going on than we know about.

That's the point, the could have rolled over into Kiev but they didn't. They don't want to rule Western Ukraine, by now the population despises Russia after being at war for 3 years. They want a buffer, just like they claimed they did.

The US is going to keep funding Western Ukraine to create havoc forever. Russia has their buffer. Ukraine is keeping this war going, and it will continue for at least a few more years. The war will take a toll on Ukraine and the US and Europe, and Russia just maintaining position.

Nobody is going to "win" this, but Russia will be less hurt than Europe, the US, and especially Ukraine.

People cite that NATO has expanded. So what? That just costs the US more money, costs Sweden and Finland more money and the US as well.

Russia isn't expansionist, if they were, they would have taken over Georgia after that skirmish, and would have taken Ukraine by now and then the stupid argument is "well Russia is a paper tiger", well, if it is, why are we wasting all this fucking money on a war? The US propaganda is that Russia is trying to rebuild the USSR, how are they going to do that when they can't even take over Ukraine?

WookieMan says

They invaded and expected to take over the country.

NO.

From what Russia has said, consistently, for over 10 years (6 before they OFFICIALLY entered as an invasion force) is they want to prevent incursion of weaponry into Ukraine, they want to stop the civil war in Ukraine.

Now, it's quite possible that Russia is full of shit, after all, our government lies all the time.

IF the Minsk Accords were actually implemented, that would have been a wonderful test to see if that is what Russia actually wanted, but it was the United States and British that PURPOSELY prevented that from being implemented.

Why? Why did they do this? What's the explanation for the British and the United States wanting to NOT implement the Minsk Accords? If Russia isn't serious about them and going to invade anyhow, why not implement them? Wouldn't have made a difference, if it didn't matter.

Now, it can be several reasons I haven't thought up yet (or maybe am too stupid to think up ever), but the most obvious explanation is that it would have prevented conflict leading to another war, which I feel the US wanted and desired because I've seen the US lie to start wars 7 times. If you can come up with another hypothesis, I'd like to hear it, but I'll never hear it from you, will I?

I don't trust my government, for very good reason. I'm dumbfounded you do. It's a responsibility not to trust your government to provide oversight. People are called traitors for doing CIVIC DUTY. This is our duty. Maybe the population is too stupid to understand the complexities, fine, but I if they explained it ANYWHERE, where is it? I am a serious researcher in this. I can't find it, maybe I've not looked hard enough, but it's been 10 years.

I knew Hunter Biden was on the BOD of Burisma 10 years ago. Why? "It's innocent" - but nobody will explain to me how a CRACK ADDICT MALE SLUT is indispensable to be on the BOD of Burisma. My conclusion (and again, maybe I'm just not thinking enough!) is that it's just a bribe. He was paid 50,000 a month to "work" on the BOD on an energy company, when he has no experience with energy, and can't even speak the language.

Where's the error in my reasoning? Show me an error in my reasoning. I'd welcome it. I am happy to be incorrect, but I can't figure it out. I freely admit it, and the only thing I can come up with is corruption.

War is profitable, that's my only explanation I can come up with. It's to expropriate money from taxpayers to a criminal syndicate which is my government. ANY OTHER EXPLANATION would be awesome, but you claim not to believe this, but however you refuse to give an explanation, and my viewpoint is that you can't give another explanation but you still believe the stupid, puerile propaganda. Or you claim you do, I don't know.

AmericanKulak says

How the F does Onvacation have one more ignore than me?

He's probably correct.

Ignores are used to get you to ignore responses, it's the Asch Comformity test.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments

If everybody says that they think you are wrong, you are pushed to believe you are actually wrong, even if you are right because you are in the minority, it doesn't matter if you are right or wrong. Once you know the trick, you can ignore it, but so few people do. Who has ever read psychology experiments in conformance? Although I have plenty of people I ignore here, I never put them on ignore. Even the wrongest person is right, like a broken clock. It is time consuming though and there are few people I ignore, with the exception of the entire corporate media. I don't ignore them because I think they never tell the truth, it's just so rare that it's not worthwhile to pay any attention to them but I never ever self-censor my consumption.

I have read a great deal of psychology, I'm am rarity. I will freely share my knowledge, but then there is another hurdle, will you check to see I'm not lying? I always am honest, as much as I'm aware, I can be fooled and misdirected as well. I do make errors, although I do my best not to propagate my errors. I need feedback. I beg for feedback and when I do not receive it, I become extremely frustrated to the point I think what I'm talking to is an AI, a propagandist, or a semi-human.

I never delete my posts for a reason. I learn from my past mistakes, that's a rarity as well. Very few people want to learn to see if they have made a mistake, there's no shame in being wrong. We're trained to be defend our position, there's no need for it on the Internet.

Want to see my errors? I once thought Russia had never been defeated in their own territory, for example. This wasn't me pushing propaganda, it was just my own ignorance. We all have infinite ignorance. Everybody is plagued by it. I was plagued by another propagandist, or somebody else that was mistaken - who knows? Maybe they didn't know, maybe they were lying. I don't know. They should be better about being correct though. I know they were wrong though, this gives me pause on their statements from that point forward. They need to make a correction, and I've not heard one.

@Patrick

Getting slammed with this:

@UkraineIsTotallyFucked

How did you get that response? It should not happen to a person unless you click reload like mad.

I had to implement rate limiting after getting swarmed by robots, but I thought I had it so that it would be indetectable by humans.

Patrick says

UkraineIsTotallyFucked

How did you get that response? It should not happen to a person unless you click reload like mad.

I had to implement rate limiting after getting swarmed by robots, but I thought I had it so that it would be indetectable by humans.

I go to various threads at my normal speed. Those are technically reloads. And I upload and post images. I am fast but wouldn't say that I am reloading like mad.

Here's how I did the nginx config for that. Within the top http{} block:

limit_req_zone $binary_remote_addr zone=ratelimit:10m rate=15r/m; # 15 requests per minute, to match robots.txt "Crawl-Delay: 4"

So that says to limit by IP address, allocating 10MB named "ratelimit" for the rate limit data, and to limit the rate to 15 requests per minute.

Then within the / location block (the block that hits the node server rather than static files):

location / {
limit_req zone=ratelimit burst=10 nodelay;

That says for that "ratelimit" memory zone defined above, allow up to 10 requests at one burst, but still with an overall 15 requests per minute limit.

The images have no rate limit, because they are not served from node but directly from nginx via their own block starting with:
location ~ /icons/|/uploads/ {

I'm not an expert on nginx config, so maybe I misunderstand part of this.

@UkraineIsTotallyFucked

Is it possible you are sharing your IP address with others? That's a common situation if you are at work. All the outgoing traffic from a company typically goes out of a single IP address.

Patrick says

UkraineIsTotallyFucked

Is it possible you are sharing your IP address with others? That's a common situation if you are at work. All the outgoing traffic from a company typically goes out of a single IP address.

No. Just my home wifi.

@UkraineIsTotallyFucked

Ah, I noticed that your browser is making repeated requests for /apple-touch-icon.png, which does not exist on my server, and which count against your rate limit.

@Patrick if it isn't on your server, how come it count against my rate limit?

Because it starts with / but is not in the /uploads directory with other images. So it ends up hitting the node server, and there is a rate limit on that.

I had not considered the possibility of requests for non-existent images (404's) in combination with the rate limit. Programming is like that, always a new combination you hadn't thought of.

I'll think about how to fix that.

@UkraineIsTotallyFucked

I think I found a solution on the server side.

Let me know if you still get any "429 Too Many Request" responses.

There is no about:settings or about:config in DDG as far as I can find.

Should be OK anyway now. I lump in image 404's with other image requests now, not counting them against the rate limit.

Patrick says

Ah, I noticed that your browser is making repeated requests for /apple-touch-icon.png, which does not exist on my server, and which count against your rate limit.

Why would a computer be making requests from your server of files that don't exist? That shouldn't happen without an explicit request from the user, should it?

@richwicks

Browsers are programmed to look for a standard file called /favicon.ico to put into browser tabs as a visual identifier, so I created one and put it in the right spot on my server:

https://patrick.net/favicon.ico

It seems that Apple wanted in on that game, but with "apple" in the URL as a kind of perverse advertising. So certain browsers are now making tons of requests for /apple-touch-icon.png, but I haven't created that one, and won't, because it refers to a specific corporation and their sleazy marketing.

It seems to be used for the same purpose that favicon.ico is.

Patrick says

It seems that Apple wanted in on that game, but with "apple" in the URL as a kind of perverse advertising. So certain browsers are now making tons of requests for /apple-touch-icon.png, but I haven't created that one, and won't, because it refers to a specific corporation and their sleazy marketing.

Everybody's sleazy.

Remember when Microsoft tried to take over the Internet Internet by bribing companies to use Microsoft IIS and then hobbling that to only work with IE? Facebook, Google, and Twitter HAVE managed to take over the Internet, with false promises.

@Patrick.

You can't always post links because of markups. I'm trying to post this link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa_v.Israel(Genocide_Convention)

The underscores are being interpreted as a prompt to print in italics. Anything between even when I compose the link manually.

Is there a way where I can tell your site NOT to mess with what I type? So that underscore remains a literal underscore, and asterisk perhaps the same?

@richwicks Sorry about the parsing error.

I changed the regexps to require space before and after the underscore to do that. So now this should be linkified correctly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa_v.Israel(Genocide_Convention)

Note that you can use html escape characters to prevent interpretation of underscore.

https://mateam.net/html-escape-characters/ says that the underscore escape is &#95

Shit, still did not linkify correctly. At least it didn't italicize.

I guess the parens are not in my list of url chars. Added them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa_v.Israel(Genocide_Convention)

OK, now parens do not prevent linkification.

Implement something like community notes.

You either have stupid people here, or propagandists here, or AI bots pushing propaganda.

Tie posts down to scrutiny so claims can be determined true or false, and assess quality of sources. I'm tired of having the same arguments over and over again from liars, propagandists, and scumbags - maybe morons, but again, I have only met a handful of people in my ENTIRE LIFE who are actually "stupid".

If I'm wrong, well, thanks for pointing it out. I'm in the frustration where I am not told HOW I'm wrong, just that I somehow am. I don't believe them, I don't trust them.

I've dealt with people here who I spoke with for MONTHS explaining Ukraine was over-thrown, after MONTHS, they said just because Victoria Nuland picked out the government of Ukraine before their "revolution", it wasn't certain was a coup. Fuck you @"Mostly Reader" - how many dead? 300,000? 500,000? Propagandist scumbags are everywhere, including here. You're a small site, they are here.

personal

richwicks says

awaiting moderation

You gotta calm your ponies chief. I'm not moderating that comment. All I know is when you say "I know where you live" and "I will never use that against you. I won't harm you ever." Who the fuck thought they were going to get harmed by a website user??? Dude that's a veiled threat if I ever saw one.

Up to Pat about banning, but you're for sure crossing a line. We can give each other shit, but what I saw in moderation is trash. Not my site, but definitely not an adult comment is all I'll say. That's called seeing a brain doctor of some sort. Get some help dude. You're out of your element. You're wrong on a ton of stuff. It's okay. So am I. No need to call out that you know where people live. That's not remotely normal.

richwicks says

awaiting moderation

"He was just a fucking propagandist"

"OK Patrick, what vague Terms of Service did I violate now? Point them out."

@richwicks

Rule #1: "Site Rules 1. Do not deliberately insult the other users personally." from https://patrick.net/post/1277846/2015-02-09-an-antidote-to-corporate-media

You just keep on insulting other users personally.

Why do you do that?

Patrick says

You just keep on insulting other users personally.

Why do you do that?

Not going to talk about anyone directly. Because it's multiple users. Some of you cats beat a dead horse over and over and over. No one cares. If they did they'd address you and you'd just go back to the original bull shit you spewed out. Some of you are clearly not open to dialog even with actual proof you're wrong. It's extremely hard to have a conversation with some of you. No one here knows everything. Stop acting like you do. Grow up toddlers.

WookieMan says

Get some help dude

Yeah. I said that about a year or two ago to him as well. Seriously.

If someone is making veiled threats such as “I know where you live (red flags: why even bother trying to figure that out?) but I’ll never use it against youl.” it is apparent this person has already suggested that they have considered it a possibility. That is why I think this person is either mentally ill or a paid FED agitator. Either way the site owner has the right to ban such an individual to protect the safety and the discourse of free speech from malevolent actors. Someone who consistently insults other users, makes veiled threats or just simply spam posts and attempts to drown out other voices by the sheer volume and tone of their posts has actually impeded others ability to share ideas. To defend speech sometimes you have to take away a person’s megaphone so that the smaller voices can be heard.

Also if the owner of the site allows people to make repeated insults and veiled threats, it becomes questionable if others should find it safe or expedient to continue to contribute here themselves.

Please everyone do use the flag link to mark comments that are obviously personal.

Patrick,

Could you add, below the comment box, a quick summary of the html tags and other formatting tags that you accept?

Could you use a more subtle watermark on memes? The big white banner on the bottom is a bit much.

Thanks, I agree it's jarring if the meme background is dark.

I'm not great with graphics, but would like to make the banner the same general color as the meme to not stand out as much. I don't know how to do this yet.