Even if it started as a fabrication it was pretty quickly adopted by the crowd you’d expect to be using such a hand gesture. IOW “Teehee I’m doing a hand gesture everyone thinks is racist but its not because its an internet joke” isnt the own you think it is.
He who fucks goats, either as part of a performance or to troll those he deems has overly delicate sensibilities is simply, a goatfucker.
"He claimed he was just pretending to be racist to trigger the social justice warriors, but even if he is telling the truth, Popehat's Law of Goats still applies."
It's amazing how far racists will contort and bend over backwards not to see racism. It's like they're pretending racism doesn't exist, and has been totally eliminated in the "real world", and all that online stuff doesn't count. Once they paint themselves into a corner by arguing Trump isn't racist because he hasn't actually been convicted of lynching anyone, so all that stuff about Mexicans being rapists and Obama not being American doesn't count, it's pretty hard for anything to pass their definition of racism. (Except Democrats, of course, they are the real racists!)
Fucking goats perpetuates goat fucking, and annoys goats, but it doesn't mean you have to hate the goat and attack it after you fuck it to qualify for being a goat fucker. Either way, love it or hate it, you fucked a goat.
Likewise, trolling racist memes perpetuates racism, and if you perpetuate racism, you're a racist, because of the effects of you behavior on other people, regardless of your purported intent, even if you claim to be only pretending. Either way, you perpetuated racism, which hurts people.
Bravely standing up for goat fuckers and racists and trolls doesn't look good on you. Try standing up for the victims of racism instead of the perpetrators. Your edgelord act is extremely tired and juvenile. Gamegate is over, kiddo. Steve Bannon is reporting to jail on July 1.
How the far right borrowed its online moves from gamers:
>In particular, Donovan notes that Steve Bannon saw firsthand the power of Gamergate while running Breitbart News.
>Bannon took notes from the gaming controversy as well as from movements on the left, like Occupy, to develop strategies to apply in mainstream politics in Trump's 2016 campaign and from the White House.
>That expanded the use of online attack methods on a wider range of issues and, more recently, made them a significant part of mainstream right-wing politics.
Donald Trump and Steve Bannon need angry young men. They’re using Gamergate culture to get them:
>Gamergate is a loose collection of disaffected (mostly) men who have used the issue of ethics in gaming journalism as a pretext to harass and attack women and many minority groups. The movement got its start in 2014 when a young man wanted to exact revenge on his ex-girlfriend. What started as a simple blog post became a campaign of harassment spearheaded by anonymous users on platforms like Reddit and 4chan. Gamergate has since used Twitter and other social-media platforms to lob misogynistic, homophobic, and anti-Semitic attacks on its critics.
What Gamergate should have taught us about the 'alt-right':
>The 2014 online hate-storm presaged the tactics of the Trump-loving far right movement. Prominent critics of the president elect should take note. The similarities between Gamergate and the current so called ‘alt-right’ movement are huge, startling, and in no way a coincidence.
Steve Bannon learned to harness troll army from 'World of Warcraft':
>Before Steve Bannon oversaw the conservative Breitbart News Network and, subsequently, joined then-candidate Donald Trump's campaign, the chief political strategist became a player in Hollywood and ... World of Warcraft.
>"You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump." -Steve Bannon
Steve Bannon ordered to report to prison by July 1 to serve contempt of Congress sentence:
>A federal judge on Thursday ordered Steve Bannon to report to prison by July 1, giving the former Donald Trump adviser a short window to get a higher court’s intervention.
Fuck you and your thought-crime mentality. Im not perpetuating racism. Read my comments again, if you think its appropriate to accuse me of that over the comments I made, than you have truly lost the plot.
My claim was it is not a symbol of white power. And the article you linked provided 0 evidence to support the claim that it is associated with white power. It did associate it with the 3 percenters, who do not seem to be a white supremecist group.
Instead you seem to be claiming that right-wingers use the symbol, ergo it is racist or white power affiliated. That claim is false. Just because someone is a republican, doesnt make them a racist.
Wait but I thought the whole joke of making that hand sign was to trick people into thinking you're a racist? Doesn't the entire premise of the "joke" rest on the assumption that people do in fact associate that hand sign with racists?
That’s literally how high signs work - they’re plausibly deniable, and innocuous or indecipherable to those in the out-group, and/or a shibboleth signifying being part of the in-group.
> The title refers to the secret hand signal used by the film's underworld gang.
Everything is in real life -- it seems like you are a little bit out of date. Why are you in denial and under the delusion that the online world is not the "real world", just like the sad prosecutor in the Pirate Bay trial? [1]
It's not a good look to make excuses and carry the water for white supremacists by denying reality. The online world is quite real, and it has an enormous impact on the offline subset of the world that you naively consider to have a monopoly on "real".
A simple google would inform you about the reality of how that symbol is currently used in the real world, regardless of whether you consider google "real" or not. See the sibling comments and the articles and real-world photographs they link to, who took the effort to google that for you. Your argument that you've never seen any evidence is extremely weak if you refuse to look at the evidence when it's presented to you on a silver platter, and that makes you look like just another troll.
Pirate Bay Trial Watch Day 5: OMG, Is This Happening IRL?
The torrent trial of the century continues, and today, there are some pretty shocking revelations about just how much the prosecution knows. Is that a tinge of remorse I hear from The Pirate Bay dudes?
• The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde (aka brokep) doesn't like copyright! "I like things that are not protected by copyright, this is a non-issue."
• The prosecutor knows the secret code for talking on the internets! "When did you meet [Gottfrid] for the first time IRL?" The judge asks, "IRL?" The prosecutor, being with it, coolly informs the judge it means "in real life," sucka.
• Oh snap, maybe he doesn't! The Pirate Bay's Peter responds, "We do not use the expression IRL." No, everything is in real life. We use AFK—away from keyboard." This makes for a sad prosecutor: "It seems I am a little bit out of date."
Uh, no. It started as a joke, and then was absolutely adopted "as a joke" by white supremacists... which is functionally equivalent to a symbol of white supremacists. Not many people who aren't white supremacists are comfortable being labeled as one, and no one would "throw" this sign without knowledge they'd be labeled as a white supremacist, ergo either you're one of the few who's comfortable being labeled that way despite not being one (in which case yeah, you'll be labeled that way and don't have much to complain about), or you are one.
Note: I do think people are sometimes too ambitious to leap toward accidental/arguable "flashing" of this sign as evidence of this belief system, but there are absolutely people who are consciously, deliberately, and sincerely doing it.
"Not many people who arent white supremecists are comfortable being labeled as one"
Wrong. Thats everyone that uses the hand sign. The joke is that cnn watched dipshits think its some kinda of white supremecist signal, so its funny to do to get under peoples skin. Thats literally all there is to it. Has nothing to do with any white power movement.
Do you know where its current popularity came from? A childrens game called ballgazer.
The harder you desperately argue by throwing every ridiculous and contradictory theory against the wall like bottles of ketchup at Mar-a-Lago, the more Popehat's Law of Goats applies to you.
You're purposely making other people mistake you for a racist... solely for the purpose of upsetting them... and when they get upset and think you're a racist... they're the "dipshits"?
Yeah, everyone knows the origin and they know the cover story. Even and especially in light of those facts, if a grown adult does it, they're either 1) a racist, 2) an asshole, 3) a moron, or 4) a combination of the above. No one is calling out children for playing a children's game. They're calling out adults who are either identifying as racists or pretend identifying as racists in order to be an asshole to other people, otherwise known as "being an asshole."
That's the magic of human beings. Once the joke spreads to the point where the people who are in on it are flashing the symbol for the lolz, it no longer matters how it started or if there is no historical basis for the connection between the symbol and certain beliefs. The association exists now, however ironically.
Oh look, the guy who is racist is flashing the ok symbol. His buddy, who is in the same spaces online is flashing the symbol as a joke. How can we not make certain assumptions about the second person and what they think?
Heres the thing though, these are not self professed racists. These are people that left wing radicals are calling racist. That is a very different sitatuion than the symbol being an indicator of allegience to a "white power" movement.
It more accurately indicates affiliation with irony poisoned youth who get off on making people look stupid online
Calling out racism is not the exclusive behavior of left wing radicals. Or are you admitting that no right wing people ever call out racism, so if you do then you must be a left wing radical?
You're the one jumping to unfounded conclusions about people, instead of taking what they tell you (or hand gesture) about themselves at face value, and your choice of who you logically contort and lie to defend, and who you attack as "radical" merely for calling out racism, paints an extremely sad and revealing picture of the kind of person you truly are.
When somebody tells you they're a racist, believe them. And your intellectually dishonest arguments are telling me just that, so I believe you.
N*gger jokes are jokes, but that doesn't mean it's not racist to make them and call black people n*gger to their face or online, just because you say you're just joking. And doing that online is just as racist as doing it in person.
And your pathetic excuses that it's only teenage boys doing that, and that you know for a fact that all teenage boys who do that are only pretending to be racist because it's impossible for a teenage boy to actually be racist, only reveals that you yourself actually did that when you were a teenage boy, and you still haven't grown up and matured mentally enough to admit that it was wrong.
Your ridiculous "boys will be boys" argument is absolute unmitigated bullshit, trying to justify your own misbehavior and racist beliefs you still haven't grown out of. You certainly sound exactly like a racist goat fucking teenaged boy. What other possible explanation is there for you carrying their water by making such disingenuous untrue arguments, and ignoring the counter arguments?
And you're arguing in bad faith and ignoring the evidence other people are showing you, like the photograph of the Proud Boys who attacked the US Capitol on January 6 and Roger Stone all flashing that White Supremacist symbol fully knowing what it means and intending it to be understood that way, when NONE if them are teenaged boys. Those fully grown men are violent White Supremacists, and Roger Stone is 71 years old, not a teenaged boy.
Roger Stone was convicted of seven felony charges, including witness tampering, lying to congress, and obstruction, in relation to special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, and he's a trusted advisor to Donald Trump who had White House access and still hangs out with him at Mar-a-Lago. Not a teenaged boy for 52 years, but definitely a racist hanging out with a bunch of other racists. And here you are defending him.
Dude its fucking WILD that you are all over this thread calling me a racist for defending the "okay" sign, yet you are straight up dropping N bombs in your comments. The fuck is your problem dude?
And? Words and phrases are often adopted by a group to mean things they didn't. The ok hand gesture was a joke then it was embraced by Nazis and here we are.
The hand symbol is a running joke about looking at someone elses testicles. The peoppe that play this game are rowdy adolescent boys. Those boys went online and made ironic racist jokes, as young boys do, and now somehow people think its a symbol of white power. Anyone who knows whats going on is laughing at your foolishness.
So let me get this right: you're only PRETENDING to be wrong and stupid, so you can laugh at us for thinking you're wrong and stupid. Wow, you totally owned us by acting just like a teenage boy! I get it, now that you've admitted that you're just playing a trolling game, and don't actually believe anything you're saying, just like those teenage boys whose behavior you're defending and emulating. So there's no point in continuing making those arguments you don't even believe yourself.
Youre a disinginous cunt, just fyi. You've succesfully riled me up, which was clearly your goal, but youve still failed to make any kind of sense or construct a cohesive argument, so respectfully, you can suck my entire dick.
Your "boys will be boys" argument is obviously self-serving, because you're acting exactly like the worst kind of teenage boy edgelord, living in his mother's basement, trolling on 4chan, participating in Gamergate. You keep making provably false claims and ignoring the evidence, and in spite of your baseless arguments to the contrary, teenage boys certainly can be racist, and teenage boys aren't the only ones using the "ok" symbol with racist intent. How about not trying to defend and justify that behavior, at the same time you're exhibiting a textbook case of that pathological behavior. It totally discredits your baseless arguments.
You're trying to argue that it's only to rile people up, with no racist intent, then you're getting totally riled up yourself, defending intentional racists. So what's wrong with me successfully doing the exact same thing you're trying to defend, back to you? According to your own words, I should be laughing at you. If you don't like being on the receiving end, then perhaps you shouldn't be defending people who dish it out.
Roger Stone is 71 years old, not a teenage boy. He was convicted of seven felony charges, including witness tampering, lying to congress, and obstruction, in relation to special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, and he's a trusted advisor to Donald Trump who had White House access and still hangs out with him at Mar-a-Lago. Not a teenaged boy for 52 years, but definitely a racist hanging out with a bunch of other racists. And here you are defending him, with your idiotic "boys will be boys" argument, while acting just like a teenage boy yourself.
You're acting like a child. And you're completely unable to address any of my points, or any of the points other people have raised, you just rant and fume and call people names, while trying to defend reprehensible behavior, as immature as your own. You can dish it out, but you can't take it, just like all of the abusive racist bullies you're trying so hard to defend. So I've made my point, by drawing you out and making you illustrate my point by your own behavior.
You claimed it makes you laugh when you trick people into thinking you're a racist asshole. Well you've convinced me of that quite well with lots of evidence of your own words, so why are you angrily fuming instead of laughing? Now that you've convinced everyone that you're a racist asshole, you should declare victory, laugh, and shut up. Mission accomplished!
Again, you may be yourself, but Roger Stone is not a teenage boy, and neither are the Proud Boys he's sitting with in that photograph, flashing their White Supremacist signs. That destroys your argument. And you are still unable to respond to that, and you just get angrier and angrier and more incoherent every time I point that out. Why aren't you laughing like you said you would?
Cause you arent listening to me, you are accusing me of saying things I never said, you are accusing me of being racist, etc and keep weirdly bringing up donald trump and his associates even tho ive claimed no affiliation at all.
Your just being weird as fuck homie. Flying off the handle for no real reason. And im not laughing cause I am not a troll. Matter of fact, why am I still responding to you? Eat shit.
Regulations aren't always just about the immediate harm. Some individual violations are harmless or relatively trivial by themselves but absolutely devastating at any sort of scale.
At the same time we are scraping the sea grounds empty, killing off entire species, and about every other country is defending the "rights" of their fishing fleets to continue to do so.
Actually all that trawling at least provides tons of food for people and typically is at least regulated to not do too much harm. Getting a lot of clams from beach for fun does not put food on table.
They use "AI" to generate passwords that are more likely based on actual choices, like P@s5w0rd kind of stuff. The paper that is, I have no idea about the company.
It isn't. You could perhaps make an argument that it's more likely to try "likely" passwords first, which means it will find theoretically strong but predictable passwords faster but should actually take longer to crack unpredictable passwords.
And of course it's trained on password leaks... but so are the people who write password cracking algorithms.
Sam Bankman Fried’s Dad is a Stanford professor who is a lawyer as well and specializes in tax evasion. His Mom is the executive of a DNC super pac called MTG...
The bodies can't be found because all that was left of the dead was used & sold. Even bones where crushed to make fertilizer. You fight for your country and this is how it ends for you. Truly wicked, not much different than today.
1. The article talks about the "used for fertilizer" hypothesis (including why it may not be a closed case).
2. "not much different than today"? Is this just some wild rhetoric or do you actually postulate that armies today are using the bodies of their dead for fertilizer/etc?
The crematoriums have been brought for civilians after Bucha. The sheer number of the civilians killed in Mariupol though forced to use traditional approaches - the ruined buildings are demolished without pulling the bodies out, and for the rest - there are huge swaths of fields near Mariupol covered with fresh graves marked only with numbers. The crematoriums are used in other places where FSB and Russian SS "Russian Guard" need to disappear the bodies of killed political activists/etc without leaving evidence like the mass grave in Bucha and there no mass casualties like in Mariupol.
The soldiers have been either abandoned (a lot in Kiev fighting) or put into number-only graves in Belarus and near Rostov. A few are sent home to have those public funerals.
The Russians have an obvious motivation to hide how many soldiers are dying. That doesn't make it true but "it sounds a bit like something else that was nonsense" isn't a very strong refutation.
> That doesn't make it true but "it sounds a bit like something else that was nonsense" isn't a very strong refutation.
It's improbable for the same reasons it was improbable the last time it wasn't true. Secret mass cremations just aren't practical from a logistical standpoint.
Mobile military crematories do exist in Russian military, there are public pre-war videos of them. Apparently the command seen enough need for them to manufacture the hardware. With a prior like that, it's entirely probable.
Anyone who has had a relative cremated knows that it takes 2+ hours for the body to be fully reduced to ashes and bone fragments. Two hours, for a single body, in a facility the size of a large garage. Just do some napkin math for what that means for the prospect of cremating a single body in something the size of a cement mixer.
Running non-stop with no breaks, bodies ready to go, matching the efficiency of the most optimal stationary crematories, working around the clock, a single truck could burn 12 bodies using 336 gallons of fuel (per https://www.lng2019.com/how-much-natural-gas-is-used-to-crem...) and generating 6.6 metric tons of CO2. For this to even make sense politically, there would have to be a number of bodies so large that burning it made more sense than anything else, even with how costly and obvious it would be to observers.
I'm open to your guesses, but I'm going to say one thousand innocents in a single place would be sufficiently atrocious. I say this because numbers like 100-200 are thrown around fairly casually when reporting on Ukraine and other locations, so I'm going up one magnitude from that. So 84 trucks working as described could finish this job in one day, releasing 5,500 metric tons of CO2 and consuming 2300+ gallons of fuel to do so. I leave it to the reader to determine whether it's plausible for a military in the midst of a very difficult war to dedicate the human and supply resources necessary to conduct such an operation (at peak efficiency, as described).
At the very least, the movement and fueling of 84 such trucks (or even 30 if we're spending a week doing this) should be observable. We shouldn't have to rely on video from 2013 to make these claims. The video most often shown as proof of Russia's mobile crematories is one of a mobile incinerator, e.g. for trash which can fully combust in minutes.
> Two hours, for a single body, in a facility the size of a large garage. Just do some napkin math for what that means for the prospect of cremating a single body in something the size of a cement mixer.
You keep saying 'single body'.
Crematoriums in mortuaries operate on the principle that you put one body in and get one set of ashes out. These ashes are then put in a single urn and given to a single family who will grieve their single loved one.
That is not what Russia is using their mobile crematoriums for. You're not going to give the ashes of the deceased to the deceased's family; the deceased's family is all in the same pile of bodies with them. You do not put one body in at a time, you put in as many as will fit. As bodies are reduced, you create more space; you fill that space with more bodies. As ashes are generated, you remove the ashes as they accumulate at the bottom.
You are replacing a low volume batch process with a high volume continuous process. You do not need to wait for the crematorium to heat up or cool down. You do not need to ensure 100% complete combustion. You do not need to worry about disturbing the neighbors with the smell. You do not need particularly high flue temperatures. This will be orders of magnitude more efficient.
You are making a distinction between a mortuary grade crematorium and a mobile incinerator which needn't meet environmental regulatory standards; Russia is not making such a distinction.
That's a fascinating exploration of how you would design and run such an operation. Is there evidence that any of this is happening?
The truck that someone posted looks like it could fit two bodies and gets to 1200 degrees, which I guess works with your partial cremation theory (full cremation needs 1800-2000 degrees). It doesn't seem to me that fitting 2 bodies into the incinerator, then adding an additional "get rid of these half-burnt bodies" step, really changes my point much.
> 1. This doesn't get hot enough to cremate bodies.
You initially questioned if cremating bodies in mobile crematoria was technically possible.
Then you were pointed out that not only is it technically possible, there are smaller mobile crematoria being sold to the public for civil applications which, even though were designed for a whole different problem, demonstrate this is quite feasable and not a challenge.
And your follow-up question is that you feel a mobile crematorium designed for mobile trash does not do a good job cremating a body?
It seems you're desperately trying to move the goalpost. You've switched from "this is an impossibility" to "this specific product wouldn't be as efficient as the Russian ones".
This doesn't have the technical capability to incinerate bodies because it would need to get more than 1000 degrees hotter than the quoted maximum temperature. That's a physics challenge.
The quoted maximum is 1600f. That's enough to melt most metals, let alone flesh. It is clear that you don't know what you are talking about and just trying to argue.
Everything I've found suggests that 1800F is minimally required for full cremation.
But even if full cremation is not the goal -- I have laid out a sketch for what the logistics of a large scale field cremation operation would have to look like.
This is perhaps the most video recorded war ever, and certainly a candidate for most propagandized. Has any Ukrainian partisan produced anything remotely resembling this shape? Even if my estimates of operating temperatures and corpse throughput are off, they are off by fractions, not magnitudes.
Where is the evidence that anything remotely resembling this operation is occurring? Where are the freshly dug up fields that would be required to inter these half burnt remains? Where are the convoys of flatbeds carrying incinerators into the country? Where are the giant plumes of smoke? Stacked bodies?
Do you have literally a single thing? Or do you have a substantial reason (instead of convenient preference) to believe that the operation would have a different shape instead?
It is simply amazing to me that you feel you have any right to be smug, given the fact that you nakedly and unabashedly believe a conspiracy theory.
I have no position about cremation in Ukraine, I was just pointing out your off base assertions about cremation. many if not most crematoriums in the US run temperatures 1400-1600F[1]
>(...)it would need to get more than 1000 degrees (...)
No, not really. You were already repeatedly corrected on this personal assertion alone. Moreover, if you had any interest in expressing a realistic and informed opinion you'd already knew that Nazi furnaces only used fuel to jumpstart the incineration process and from thereon they operated at a continuously fed incinerator self-sustained by human body fat while operating at >1000C.
It's already clear that you are deeply committed to pushing disinformation and denialist propaganda to whitewash Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
> Two hours, for a single body, in a facility the size of a large garage. Just do some napkin math
I think you have mis-extrapolated the logistics.
It takes two hours for a single body, in a single-body crematorium, where the remains will be handled according to protocols developed for legal, social, and sanitary reasons.
In a truck-sized, industrial-efficiency waste disposal incinerator, with military protocols and no laws, I expect you could handle a much higher input rate.
Look at the video provided. That thing would maybe fit two bodies at best, and doesn't reach the temperature needed to incinerate a body. I think these claims require a much higher burden of proof than what is being offered here.
The manufacturer's YouTube videos describe that as crematorium, not incinerator. Also not sure if you have a command of Russian, but the video with burning the trash still has the narrator explaining its use for cremation of 'biological waste'. They obviously didn't want showing said waste in demonstration video.
Regarding the waste of resources, these are likely to use lower grade/bunker fuel. And as to priorities, remember Russia is the only country in the world that introduced a national standard for mass graves. In effect since February 1st this year: https://www.mchs.gov.ru/dokumenty/5693
Scroll down to page 13 for pictures if you don't read Russian.
Agree. Fuel is not relevant here. They are wasting resources at full speed yet each day of this war. The idea of wasting a few gallons more would not stop then. Not when they were mobilizing yet hundreds of war vehicles and ships for months and are the third largest oil producer in the planet.
They had thrown tens of millions of rubles to the gut and put thousands of Russian soldiers in a grinder meat, just for make an old man happy before die. They just don't care.
I'm not sure what you think these regulations prove. AFAIK Russia is probably the only military of its size engaged in operations that would result in mass field casualties of soldiers, what should they do?
The video shows them putting in trash, and that it fits about a pallet of cardboard. It also says it gets to 1200 degrees, much less than the 1800-2000 degrees required to incinerate a human.
> That getting rid of corpses at scale is a problem they pay substantial attention to.
Yes, because again, they are probably the only military in the world engaged in conventional, symmetrical combat at their scale. Advanced nations like the US will just drop a bomb on a peasant wedding in Baluchistan and let the locals do the clean up. It's much more efficient, and as a bonus, provides a great boost to the local funerary economy as well.
It's amusing how you switched in only a few posts from claiming the idea Russia operates mobile crematoriums to be absurd to unquestionably support the need to dispose of mass bodies, including standardizing mass graves, as some evident necessity.
Look, I received what is now considered a classical education, where one is expected to show how their evidence supports a cogent and coherent argument. I understand that you, however, subscribe to the modern school, where you wait for your cultural superiors to instruct you as to the current proper thought, which you then espouse with unthinking zeal.
Arguing from the existence of legislation regulating how to dispose of large numbers of animals or dead soldiers is an ad hominem and an obviously disingenuous argument. In a previous age, this would be understood to be an incredibly stupid way to argue, and I pity you for being incapable of seeing that.
> The video shows them putting in trash, and that it fits about a pallet of cardboard.
JFC, the video is titled "Crematorium" and the narrator talks about incinerating biological substance. Did you expect them to burn a body for youtube video?
> It also says it gets to 1200 degrees, much less than the 1800-2000 degrees required to incinerate a human.
Brass melts at ~1000C. 1200C should be plenty for organics.
My guy, translating between an Anglo and a non-Latin (Slavic) language is not a precise science. Please don't rely on YT autogenerated captions to fully capture all aspects of reality. Use the eyes that are found in the forward part of your skull: people do not "cremate" cardboard and wood chips, they "incinerate" them. The fact that Russians use «krematziye» to describe this doesn't mean you're watching a cremation.
Maybe the mobile crematoria were intended to "disappear" some kidnapped and murdered Ukrainian people (mayors, prominents, intelligentsia), not dead Russian soldiers.
See, no body, no crime. Plus, a nasty dollop of uncertainty for the surviving loved ones and friends.
> Maybe the mobile crematoria were intended to "disappear" some kidnapped and murdered Ukrainian people (mayors, prominents, intelligentsia), not dead Russian soldiers.
Supposedly the initial goal of Russia's fleet of mobile crematoria was to serve during the post-invasion occupation of Ukraine to disappear elements of the country's local and central leadership that represented a risk to Russia's annexation of the Ukraine.
It just so happened that Russia's plan to steamroll through Ukraine, with their front-line troops carrying parade uniforms and riot control kit and barely any supplies or logistic infrastrucure, didn't really panned out.
Nevertheless, Ukraine claims that Russia is now using their fleet of mobile crematoria to try to hide the full scale of the atrocities in places like Mariupol.
I'd also add that Ukraine's effort to store and preserve the corpses of Russia's own dead soldiers, and be very vocal about returning them either to the deceased soldiers' families or even the Red Cross, is also a way to counter Russia's propensity to thin out their official casualty statistics.
> It's improbable for the same reasons it was improbable the last time it wasn't true. Secret mass cremations just aren't practical from a logistical standpoint.
Your personal assertion doesn't really hold any water. Mobile crematoriums, or hiding evidence of crimes in general, are not used because they are practical. They are used because it's a possible solution for a pressing problem.
And the "mass" blurb is a misrepresentation of their mission. The purpose of mass crematoriums is not to hide the mass of battlefield casualties, but relative low volume of politically damaging killings, such as quietly disappearing civil and military leadership without trace in a post-invasion/occupation scenario.
In the case of Russia's invasion of the Ukraine, it just so happened that the planned 3-day war followed by occupation never materialized, and somehow that is evidence that Russia's usage of mobile crematoriums is improbable?
There is a strong component of looting and ravaging in all the entire "special operation", so they are profiting of the properties of the murdered, for sure.
I was told that the age of multimedia would deliver radical transparency, where rumors would be dispelled before they had a chance to propagate, and superstitious beliefs would become untenable.
I guess the "so what" is the implication that we have not reached the
promises or potential of civilian digital communication systems. I
agree, and think what we have has instead made many areas of
information worse, fragmented and unreliable.
As for "who?", if you grew up the 80s of 90s you will remember the
daily, breathless grandiose proclamations of various government
digital literacy programmes. Selling the World Wide Web, the
Information Superhighway, Ubiquity and Universal Access was a
decade-long propaganda drive that laid the foundations for what it now
the "tech industry".
Of course there is much in the world that is over-promised, and
over-reaches. At some point people usually reconcile the reality with
the hype. With "tech" I think that has still not happened, and many
remain in a dream world, high on the fantasies they grew up with.
This is a rhetorical or satirical commentary on the fact that media technology, while having the superficial capacity for increasing access to and quality of information, often has the opposite effect of what one might expect despite that capacity. That is, it just as frequently and even more adeptly appears to embed and reinforce deeply pre-existing biases towards false -- even obviously so -- narratives which are comforting or reaffirm the believer's sense that they see through the confusion of world events.
The answers to "by whom", and "so what" questions are not going to be literal answers, just like "at what precise moment did you stop sleeping and become awake this morning" has no true answer, but would only invite a debate over the definitions of sleeping and waking. It's not meant to literally be a story about a time I was told something. I was told many things, by many people, in various forms, over a long period of time.
The comment is meant to provoke the reader to consider that technology -- far from giving man the ability to conquer his nature -- emanates from man's nature, is a servant to it, and can easily serve to reinforce and entrench it. Therefore, one ought to treat technological progress carefully, and not assume that it is equivalent to human progress.
I think western militaries go to pretty extraordinary lengths to recover and repatriate bodies these days.
In the Falklands in the 1980s there were still some battlefield burials, as that was still the accepted practice, but most of these were dug up after public outcry and I don't think we'd do that anymore, short of a full-scale war of national survival.
Modern communications I would bet has something to do with this. Families often didn't find out that their relative was killed whilst campaigning until weeks/months after the event. No doubt this would have started to change during the mid-late 19th century.
I hope that my body is used to its fullest when I'm gone. Ideally they'll harvest anything useful, donate the rest to science, then dispose of what's left using the least amount of energy possible. My body is not to be revered or preserved past what is useful.
