OT: Cracking Speech by JDV!

It was never a good idea. Russia's only warm-water port could have been blocked if Ukraine had joined NATO and that is something no country could reasonably be expected to accept.

Your idol Starmer has already backtracked on his commitment to Ukraine. He'll put British army boots on the ground - but only to keep the peace after the US and Russia have reached a deal. It's quite right to keep Ukraine out of the discussions. The maggot that runs the place is a warmonger and a danger to world peace.

Perhaps it would have made Russia think twice about invading Ukraine - invasion is something no country could reasonably be expected to accept.

Personal attacks only reflect on the insecurity of the attacker - especially when they are as misguided as that.

"The West" is seductive. People want fresh fruit, uncensored internet, freedom of speech, genuine elections. Getting that isn't snuggling up to NATO as much as it's becoming a modern country.

Putin needs a poor, ignorant, obedient, patriotic population, which is why he calls "the West" - actually The Enlightenment - his enemy.

If Russia had elected to be a modern peaceful European country, there would never have been a NATO.

But Stalin was a thug, and Putin is a thug.

My dark suspicion is that Putin's deepest fear is that an independent Ukraine in the EU will soon become wealthy enough to simply buy the Kremlin and turn it into a theme park.

Joe

And it was ALWAYS someone else's fault :-)

History has decided otherwise. Such things take time. A lot of it. Russia has suffered greatly under communist rule. So did Poland but it has been doing pretty well lately.

Stalin, yes. About Putin, the last word has not yet been written.

Jeroen Belleman

I've never seen a politician keep all his promises. It's probably impossible. Seeing the clowns that were elected as presidents of the US these last 60 years or so, I got the impression that the US is really ruled from behind the screens.

Jeroen Belleman

The Soviet era ended over 30 years ago. Russia's not perfect, but guess what? Neither is the US. They've both been run for far too long by the same people and that's not good for any country.

Why would I object to it?

What it is mainly going to reveal is a whole range of demented hypotheses generated by the in-house versions of Cursitor Doom which only the likes of Cursitor Doom would find interesting, but it will keep them happy.

Cursitor Doom does like his nonsense to be utterly fatuous. There's no evidence that Zelensky is any kid of warmonger. Russian had been nibbling at the Ukraine for some five years before Zelensky got elected

- they'd already snaffled Crimea and encouraged separatists in the Donbass. The warmonger here is Putin, as anybody sane would know.

Cursitor Doom doesn't know about Vladivostok

Not true,

Putin was mid-level NKVD officer who learned different bad habits when he was young which have also persisted. Neither should have ended up running a country, but we aren't good a keep unsuitable people out of top jobs. Look at Donald Trump.

The practical difficulties of being able to "identify" as somebody of a particular sex when it doesn't line up with your sex chromosomes means that it isn't in the least "simple". Claiming that the men involved "simply identify as women" is a gross miss-representation of the process.

It makes great rhetoric, but it's a blatant lie.

In your dreams.

Do try it sometime. Your enthusiasm for posting fatuous nonsense suggests that you could imagine that it would work.

G K Chesteron wrote a very funny piece about an anarchist trying to pass himself off as bishop by saying the kinds things that bishops were imagined to say by anarchists. I imagine your efforts at pretending to be transgender would work just as badly.

You might read up on one of the early examples

Trump is far-rightly washing his hands of the Ukraine, and falsely claiming that Zelensky provoked the Russian invasion, when Putin snaffled Crimea and started an insurrection in Donbass in 2014, five years before Zelensky got elected.

Quite why Trump wants to appease Putin isn't entirely obvious but the Steele dossier provides a working hypothesis.

As children we were paid pocket money to play fruit machines. They were owned by my grandfather's business and he needed to know what odds were actually coming up, rather then the theoretical odds which might have been miscalculated.

This meant that, at a very early age, we were all familiar with the concepts of chance and had no illusions about it. The result was that none of us had the slightest inclination to start gambling.

Back in my youth I knew a few types of electro mechanical slot machines where the loneliness timeout changed the odds sufficiently in favour of a decent payout that I would play only after I had seen them unplayed for that time. Walking away immediately after winning is the key.

There were one or two games that had a sufficient element of skill and judgement involved "Penny Falls" being the most common one that I could make a handsome profit on the 6 coins I started out with. I wouldn't play at all unless I was pretty sure I could win more by doing so.

Apparently called "Coin Pushers" in America I prefer the British name.

Some had weaknesses in both. I only played machines where I knew there was a weakness. Modern all electronic ones are much harder to beat and I don't bother trying. Pub Quiz machines were another favourite target.