Russia pretends to nuke USA!

Donut - that is the best ever TV memory post!

what the dickens

it was acceptable in the eighties

they think they're american, how cute

http://www.solarnavigator.net/films_movies_actors/actors_films_images/top_gun_goose_and_maverick.jpg

it's the term 'intercept' i find weird.

the more you say it the weirder it sounds.

i think the whole point for the russians used to be seeing how fast the brits were able to intercept. which makes you think 'well in that case don't give them the satisfaction', but i suppose they had to intercept them for form's sake. i like that we're all using ass-old airplanes to do this.

the diplomat argle-bargle seemed to disappear from the agenda overnight once a few drops of rain fell on gloucestershire

I noticed this was in the headlines too:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070906/ap_on_re_mi_ea/syria_israel

I wonder sometimes, though, if these kinds of things happen more often than we think but don't always make news

Britain is using brand new eurofighters for this job. In-fact the very job they were created for. They didn't really have a role until the russians started this old game, they are no good for dropping bombs on brown people.

This happened a couple of weeks ago as well...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6957589.stm
...or is this the same thing?

They should get a few english electric lightnings out of mothballs and use those instead.

Oh, I see this time we "chased" them the time before merely "shadowed". What next - "harried"?

"creepy-stalk"

can i get long-range bomber's number why because it look interesting

I wonder sometimes, though, if these kinds of things happen more often than we think but don't always make news

Hurting, yeah i think you maybe on the money with that one.

Plus there's that whole phenomenon of news clustering - like when one incident makes the news they tend to include other less-newsworthy but similar items because of subject matter.

Flooding in Argentina kills 200
Torrential rains threaten Nebraska with floods
Delaware man loses priceless baseball card in flooded basement

News sites flooded with heavy rain-related incidents
Media chief admits operation is adrift or indeed all at sea
Dog pisses on my lawn despite clearly visible sign

Literacy among dogs at all time low, study shows
Spelling and grammar expertise among lolcats at all time low, internet shows
Bush ratings hit all time low
Time magazine interviews Mimi from Low

Jets scrambled in Russian air invasion incident
Scrambled eggs win ILX poll

Ed -- BBC said it was tornado F3s?

OH, it was Typhoons last time.

They should get a few english electric lightnings out of mothballs and use those instead.

Sadly, I don't think there are enough Lightnings left in working order :-( I have fond memories of them zooming over my primary school at their trademark bizarre angles, on their way to intercept Russians 1980s-fashion.

EE made damn good stuff - Lightnings, Deltics, DP2 and the Class 50s - in numerical terms they probably made most of British Rail's locomotives. Not sure if their computers were up to scratch, though.

Mother of all Bombs

More showing of Russian strength. Makes me chuckle that they're going to all this trouble to show the world their military high head, but nobody seems all that interested.

Or should this worry me?

putin came out with a cracking hollywood smirk quote about this stuff, hold on

'Our pilots have been grounded for too long. They are happy to start a new life.'

mu ha ha

http://www-public.rz.uni-duesseldorf.de/~ritterd/wargames/war6.jpg

http://www.vox.com/2015/6/29/8845913/russia-war

did anyone else read this? i realize that everything from the title to the outlet and especially the ridiculous (on purpose, i think) flowchart will give people cause, but i found it to be a good read, albeit extremely long.

i thought about starting a thread today about the human desire to see the apocalypse + the death drive in contemporary political manifestations

i support that thread, although certain political manifestations of it are tightly entwined with religious apocalypticism (e.g. reagan)

but like not as a traditional drive as a return to the inanimate, inorganic, staid but rather like this intoxication w/ the spectacle of the breakdown of all institutions and the rapid realignment of society in the face of cataclysmic disaster, more like what benjamin said about humanity's "self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order"

i was thinking about greece specifically and how much i wanted them to leave the EU not bc of any political pov i have re the EU or greece and in fact normally stated i want the crisis resolved but also a little bit i want to see what happens, i want to see something i haven't seen before, etc. but rationally speaking obv i don't want these kinds of tragedies at all but i notice the opposite impulse

i think the only roads to a more sustainable kind of polity lead thru massive social trauma - which is certainly not where Greece appears to be heading, and which i don't wish on people as individuals with lives and aspirations and etc - but imo massive social trauma is better than the existing alternatives

sorry, shitty late night sentence construction: the situation in Greece is probably not going to be for Greek people's benefit any time soon if ever, but eventually we're all gonna suffer on the cross of capitalism so seeing what happens has a grim fascination

the human desire to see the apocalypse + the death drive in contemporary political manifestations

this is v interesting phenomenon
cf 'accelerationism', left & right variants (which i learned of on ilx philosophy thread)

looked into it cursorily online, left me feeling kinda nauseated & depressed

also other forms in popular political discourse, there's the 'let it burn' conservatives & equivalents on the left & elsewhere on 3d political spectrum

i think the only roads to a more sustainable kind of polity lead thru massive social trauma
imo massive social trauma is better than the existing alternatives

see i feel v differently (in my mind & gut). my tendencies run more anti-utopian; always see potential for untold depths of misery violence depredation & tyranny in event of real chaos, & don't see any dream 'polity' over the rainbow; maybe in this respect by temperament i'm more conservative than revolutionary

yet benjamin otm
(though not so sure this phenomenon, pleasurable aestheticization of mass destruction/breakdown, only appears with modernity, symptom of modern self-alienation)
(maybe one thing that makes me more phenomenologist than marxist is i see alienation in one form or other as permanent human condition)

don't think grexit, if it happens, is apocalyptic event
but admit there is grim fascination in seeing what happens

misery violence depredation & tyranny we already have in abundance, it's just that we export them

goes without saying that most things are vastly overstated in the telling, but the depths of human suffering and degradation attributable to economic issues in the first world seems to me to be radically hyperbolised without exception.

Compared to the depths of human suffering and degradation attributable to economic issues in the developing world, possibly not, but the 35% jump in suicide rates in Greece over the last few months aren't a statistical anomaly. People are going without regular meals and medical care. Salaries have been cut back radically and it's not unusual for people to get paid €2 an hour at the moment - and they'll be lucky if they get that with banks frozen.

Russia was a fairly well developed country before its early 90s crisis and that wiped ten years off life expectancy. There are countries bordering the EU where it's pretty common for workers to go over a year without getting paid and others where the primary sources of national income are remittances from day labourers and sex workers. Things can get very bleak very quickly.

I wouldn't expect Greece to get that bad and there could be advantages to coming out of the Euro and competing in services, agriculture and tourism with a weak Drachma but it'll be rough whatever happens.

Max Fisher article from Vox is trash, obvs.

What's Russia's beef with NATO anyway?

Depending on who you speak to, there was an understanding that in return for Russia radically scaling down its nuclear capabilities and foreign military bases in the 1990s, NATO agreed not to expand into Russia's former zone of direct influence. This was initially breached when the Baltic states joined in the late 1990s but the real sticking point has been the way NATO has aggressively courted Ukraine and Georgia for membership.

NATO's more hawkish members' objective, fairly clearly, seems to be to encircle Russia as far as possible and to reduce the political and economic influence it has on its neighbours. There are good reasons for factions within each of its neighbours to be open to that but it's politically divisive in most countries and seen a wedge being driven between people with linguistic / ethnic / political ties to Russia and others.

Russia was also strongly opposed to the NATO bombing of Serbia in contravention of UN guidelines.

Putin striking out against foreign NGO's. I don't think it's a good idea to ban them, but I do understand why he'd be annoyed. So many NGO's are transparently about promoting geopolitical agendas and not about charitable works.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/russian-lawmakers-issue-patriotic-stop-list-ngos-32294751