No such thing as semi-pro in boxing; that's just something losers say. Obviously I don't agree with Donny that you should go and fight, lol, but a more accurate comparison would be if he said, 'why are you asking about boxing? Go get in the ring and fight if you want to know', and you then replied with 'I don't need to do that. I've already hit the bag in the gym on weekends.'
Anyway, I think we've laboured this enough.
I was using the boxing example for you. Because you did more than "hit the bag".
If someone said you shouldn't ask questions about Tyson Fury's next fight until you fight him, and you came back and said "I was a competitive boxer...I feel I'm in some position to ask questions on boxing" [i.e., you have paid your dues in the field].
Then I come back and say "Pfft...you were a lower tier pro. Stop being a clown."
^ That response would be appropriate if you were bragging. But back to my statement, the context was "I've served time in the military reserves. Am I not entitled to ask a question about the death tally of an ongoing war?"
I guess the "paid my dues" comment irked you, lol. Yeah, well...it was one way to put it. I mean, I have military training. Do I NEED to go die in this current conflict, merely to ask questions about it? Seems absurd to me.
This part I agree with, and it's embarrassing, but there's reasons for that. The first one being, most people outside of the US don't fall for the propaganda these days. It's no longer easy to get people to join up and participate in what the public now largely recognize as illegal wars of aggression.
In recognizing the push-back that came from Iraq and Afghanistan (see, e.g. David Cameron losing a UK parliamentary vote on military action in Syria), the government opted to focus more on funding private contractors and clandestine units because there's not much of a public outcry when these people are killed, and no one hears about it in the first place (you can read this argument in House of Commons papers).
In the UK, and I'm sure elsewhere, some of our units are not subject to any form of external parliamentary oversight. The reason given is to ensure the safety of operators, but in reality it's because it allows us to carry out interventions that are questionable under international law, and to deny the existence of a UK presence. We send small teams of 'advisors' in and they coordinate things and provide targets while the host nation's military carries it out.
Further to that, the nature of warfare has changed. Since around 2015, a huge amount of money has been invested into things like drone technology, Space technology, and small, well-trained units. We don't really need huge numbers of military personnel like we used to. Numbers are still too low, so they also relax standards and let all sorts of mongs join, but those people generally aren't running around the Falklands with 150lbs on their backs. The blue-haired fatsos are all sat in ops rooms with games consoles.
I wasn't aware of the full dynamic you outlined there. That tells me that the failures of Iraq and Afghanistan had a big impact on developing an anti-war outlook in the Western consciousness. Not just for me personally. The Iraq war was THE reason I quit the Canadian Army reserves. I could not operate as a part-time soldier of George W. Bush Jr., which I really was, when you consider the strong American and Canadian military alliance. I just couldn't live with myself morally, given how I felt about the Iraq War [and to a lesser extent, Afghanistan...which Canada WAS directly involved in].
People I trained with in Thunder Bay died - does that not entitle me to a view on the topic of war? Sheesh, there is no pleasing Getbig, lol.
From the way you describe it, clandestine units are sort of displacing national militaries, sort of to keep a clean image with the public?
Ukraine is interesting in some ways because we can now observe how well this plan plays out in reality.
I'd be very curious to see how this ends...even as recently as five years ago, I would say that NATO is the strongest military alliance in the world. I now have my doubts.
Dr. Chris Martenson of Peak Prosperity said that NATO has spent $1 trillion USD on this war so far, whereas Russia has spent perhaps $100 billion USD [possibly a little less], and that Russia is still, from the looks of things, slightly ahead. Apparently NATO is running out of everything, and Biden recently said in one of his gaffes, that they were out of ammunition or something? It's probably true, but he wasn't supposed to say it.
And NO ONE in this thread supporting NATO is linking to any valid sources proving that wrong.
And I'm specifically asking OAK, who has repeatedly stated that Russia has spent $9 trillion USD, when Russia's ENTIRE ECONOMIC OUTPUT in four years is $9 trillion. God, what an absolute MORON. OAK clearly has no idea how numbers work. Yeah, Russia has spent more dollars than it even has actively circulating in its economy.
Which is why I'm asking.
So...do we know? How many Ukrainians have died here? Or Russians for that matter? How much money has been spent by either side? Then we can find out if Ukraine is "winning".
