Remember how people said that Enemy at the Gates was unrealistic and the author was making events up for his memoir?
"The Soviet Union wouldn't tell companies to charge fortified positions without equipment and set up machine guns to shoot those who retreat"
Well I guess they haven't used nuclear attacks yet ( yes I am using that wording because I doubt their nukes work)
Even if they have one fail it can do a large amount of damage.
I mean I think they aren't working because they are continuing to attack zaporizhzhia nuclear plant.
Ah man Company of Heroes. That's a community of a kind. Used to be involved with patching and mapmaking. Lelic.
As I remember it the issue with CoH2 that BadComedian (and others who groaned at Relics attempts to make a campaign) had was more that the Soviet campaign focused a little too much on the Soviet Union being bad and not enough on the whole Nazi Germany invading.
Which was an awkward thing because the CoH series was pretty politically whitewashed as far as WW2 can go.
So when you have this sort of sanitized germany invading, and the campaign is all "grr atrocities under Stalin" it just felt off. Whatever merits the story might've had, it just didn't work for a series that easily could've stamped a "patriotic defense of the nation from an invader" on the campaign and then put much needed time on fixing the design flaws with the commander system.
(Tl:dr the campaign was garbage anyway and the devs shouldve focused on multiplayer)
It's not even all that needed to go back all the way to Soviet Union for learning about such behavior; they were doing those things with all the recentish wars like in Afghanistan in the 80s or the "anti-terrorist action" in Chechnya in 2000s. Or Kursk in 2000. Those are some of the countless examples of absolute insanity that is Russian military or Defence Department.
" In Russia army is a closed system akin to prison. No one goes to that army or prison, unless those in change decide they are supposed to be there. And when you get there, your life will be that of a slave. " Anna Politkowska, 2004 (my translation)
So I read the other day that Russia has banned Facebook/Twitter/et al and it made me wonder, are sites like Reddit and Lemmy banned too? How much do these bans matter to the average Russian, do they just do a VPN anyway and generally no consequences, or what is the deal?
Hi there.
Reddit isn't popular at all because of a language barrier and existence of similar local resources. There was a motion to ban it but it was silently dismissed so I doubt anyone noticed it. Lemmy, with it's multiple instances, while even less popular is more ban-proof I believe. I have seen like 5 accounts saying they are from here and I'm not sure if it's 5 different persons.
Free VPNs don't work as good as they did after the Iranian protests (maybe they partnered up on that one), paid are hard to obtain since SWIFT was cut. Their sites or download links are sometimes banned too (not the appstore pages tho). It's usually the line that stops most people. And, if they really want to get information, there's this shady Telegram app but also dedicated news apps with workarounds and email newsletters. Even Youtube isn't banned, and I think it satisfies any interest, especially since we don't have ads and virtually nothing gets banned here these days.
Consequences happen in a semi-random fashion. Yes, they have black boxes on each ISP server, they do listen to traffic and probably can tell packet sizes, protocols, maybe even content itself, but I'm yet to hear it becoming the leading cause of persecution. You need to first get someone's attention IRL or on social media for them to involve tech methods. Like, having a big oppositional channel and putting someone to shame, or being snitched on by a random observer. Then they'd start to dig things up. Last tech thing I've heard is them tracking the protesters by their phones pinging closest cell towers, but that was more than a year ago and I've yet to see something as advanced.
As someone who is on Lemmy, thus a minority in the minority, I encounter random sites being blocked from our side or from theirs. It's not a big deal for me most of the time, but this barrier makes lazier, less tech-savvy majority isolated from the global web, and it doesn't help our society at all. If anything, it makes them boil in the pot heated only by our propaganda, unchallenged. It shows that you need to make it slightly inconvinient in order to kill russian international blogosphere and they did just that. In their minds, they get the full picture from russian media alone. Good for them they aren't involved with anything like programing or science. They could've become very upset at the perspective of being cut off.
Other than that most people don't care or even a bit angry about being denied foreign services and needing to buy foreign currency for them. Sadly, that's the limits of their world ):
Company of Orcs 2: Ukraine Boogaloo
Some of the Soviet stuff is urban myth from movies like Enemy at the Gates, like shooting retreaters and stuff. They were mostly caught and reassigned, although some incidents did occur. The charge was desertion or not obeying commands. "No step back!" Was a rallying call and they did engage in strategic retreats. Most armies employ "barrier troops" in some fashion to charge deserters, US included. Speers as famously depicted in Band of Brothers is portrayed as a hero and actually shot a private for cowering in battle.
Maybe it was a self fulfilling prophecy from being marginalized on majority of fiction prices for the past 70 years...
Im sure someone thinks exactly this non ironically out there.
