There is a reason Russian forces are wearing face-covers in Ukraine. That anonymity even became integral part of the official propaganda with the country plastered with images with covered faces like this https://ok.ru/group/53906516017252/album/922573735012/931001...
Or Chechnya, or Afghanistan, or Russian-Polish war (with WW2 and Ukraine it covers most of the post-WWI period, especially if one adds things like the China-Soviet conflict in 1929 when USSR was defending its colonial holdings). It isn't "exceptions". Russia, be it Grand Duchy of Moscow, Russian Empire, USSR or the current Russia has always been an aggressive state. You don't become such a large empire like Russian Empire or USSR without military aggression :)
There was a (not really propaganda) photo op shot of a US naval captain of a big ass ship shooting a rifle with a backwards scope earlier this year.
I think the reason tends to be that the people involved in prop and photo ops actually have no clue about the particulars and just want it to look cool. It's equivalent to "why is X in movies always so unrealistic?" for various values of X (e.g. hacking, law & courts, guns, etc)
(By people involved I mean the people taking the pictures, editing, publishing, etc. Though in the US captain one, I guess also the guy in the picture too)
or another https://stihi.ru/pics/2024/06/14/4714.jpg (and if it reminds you something with 4-limbed symbol from 80+ years ago - it isn't an accident, it is the nature of the current regime in Russia)
While it sounds like a pun, there is no "trigger discipline" in Russia (I myself an ROTC officer). In USSR/Russia the "never point your barrel at anybody or anything" discipline has been taught instead.
There is a little more to Russian rules. They don't allow carry with a round chambered. They find it very dangerous that so many american guns are carried at the ready. With no round chambered, the trigger is far less of a worry.
Absolutely. It is so fundamental, at the instinct level almost, that it didn't even came to my mind to mention it. Until absolutely necessary, you never chamber your weapon - "what if the trigger gets accidentally pulled!" :)
Even military guards on duty are by the military regulations explicitly prohibited from chambering their weapon until necessary:
209. Часовому запрещается: ..., досылать без необходимости патрон в патронник, ...
and only when the guarded security perimeter is about to be breached and the guard has already issued 2 verbal warnings, only then the guard chambers the round and makes the first warning shot toward the sky:
211. ...
Если нарушитель после предупреждения "Стой, стрелять буду" продолжает движение, часовой досылает патрон в патронник и производит предупредительный выстрел вверх.
They go into detail on their technical decision making, very cool:
Choosing Clojure6 and Datalog7 was a calculated risk–but one which paid off. The Datalog model offered the simplest and most ergonomic queries, had strengths in graphs and relationships, and the entity model could easily transform to more standard formats. In–memory Datomic was chosen on the server, allowing complicated relational rule–based queries to map over tens of thousands of claims, linking sources to the attributes of entities. Using Clojure allowed for rapid prototyping and fast feedback cycles. Together, this allowed constructing arbitrary graph traversal queries, without having to round–trip from the database to execute recursive code, allowing the nature of traversing the domain model to be separated from the specifics of the relationship. How entities relate, and how relations work through time, could be developed as separate concepts. Using Datalog queries, it was possible to get every subordinate, as well as the time ranges they held true for, with a simple query like (subordinate-of ?a ?b ?start-date ?end-date)
> making it easier for journalists, courts, and researchers to connect commanders to their subordinates’ actions.
We all know that G.W. Bush and Tony Blair were at the top of their countries' chains of command during the illegal invasion of Iraq and yet, here we are, they're free of any International Penal Court meddling. Which is to say that maybe these guys and ladies here should focus their "desire for war-justice" a little bit closer to home.
Of course, an organization (the Security Force Monitor mentioned in the article) that literally receives money from George Soros through his Open Society Foundations [1] would never go after its own Western leaders, but it's good to at least have that written down on the internet, like in this comment.
When we found out that soldiers in Iraq were mistreating prisoners we put them all on trial and gave the guy who said this wasn't right a medal. What the Burmese military does to maintain its sixty year old dictatorship is wanton murder of civilians.
> When we found out that soldiers in Iraq were mistreating prisoners
We didn't "find out", some media and/or Wikileaks got evidence. And the consequences were not even close to harsh enough - each and every instance of war crimes should have led to a thorough cleanup and massive sentences for everyone involved, especially for everyone who tried to cover it up.
Very interesting and I think important. Something that should be done for any Armee even.
I found the writing style … interesting. The author assumed we the reader would have a specific understanding how to model this data. And that they cracked the code. Well that military posts, commands and in some cases government loyalty can change is known. Maybe I read too much into it this morning :). I dislike being treated as ignorant that’s all.
valuable. a variation should be applied to public services by privacy offices, as gov often uses virtual entities under the guise of projects or working groups, where the legally accountable entity almost never receives documents or decisions, but pushes them down onto technology teams to implement.
A standard open organization specification that shows people, authorities, budget flows and beneficial parties, and then only funding anything expressed in that spec would go a long way to improving institutions.
There is a reason Russian forces are wearing face-covers in Ukraine. That anonymity even became integral part of the official propaganda with the country plastered with images with covered faces like this https://ok.ru/group/53906516017252/album/922573735012/931001...
Amusingly, the slogan on the right hand side says: "we don't start wars, we finish them".
War is peace, peace is war.
There are some exceptions for the first part like current war in Ukraine or WW2.
Or Chechnya, or Afghanistan, or Russian-Polish war (with WW2 and Ukraine it covers most of the post-WWI period, especially if one adds things like the China-Soviet conflict in 1929 when USSR was defending its colonial holdings). It isn't "exceptions". Russia, be it Grand Duchy of Moscow, Russian Empire, USSR or the current Russia has always been an aggressive state. You don't become such a large empire like Russian Empire or USSR without military aggression :)
[dead]
Why is that guy breaking trigger discipline on a propaganda poster?
Trigger discipline is a decadent Western concept.
All the pictures of Taliban fighters that I saw after they took over in Afghanistan have good trigger discipline.
Because they're trained by CIA.
He isn't? The patch of green on the finger is his middle knuckle. His finger is well outside the trigger guard.
There was a (not really propaganda) photo op shot of a US naval captain of a big ass ship shooting a rifle with a backwards scope earlier this year.
I think the reason tends to be that the people involved in prop and photo ops actually have no clue about the particulars and just want it to look cool. It's equivalent to "why is X in movies always so unrealistic?" for various values of X (e.g. hacking, law & courts, guns, etc)
(By people involved I mean the people taking the pictures, editing, publishing, etc. Though in the US captain one, I guess also the guy in the picture too)
Guy lost his job.
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/04/nx-s1-5100305/navy-commander-...
Oh ok that's funny, I hadn't heard about that
Hmm not enough details to say whether it was due to the incident or something else.
I will choose to believe it was because of the backwards rifle thing though because that's hilarious
He isnt posing for a poster. That image appears cut from something else.
It doesn't matter. That is for example painted poster
https://www.ozon.ru/product/poster-100-na-65-sm-plakat-voenn...
or another https://stihi.ru/pics/2024/06/14/4714.jpg (and if it reminds you something with 4-limbed symbol from 80+ years ago - it isn't an accident, it is the nature of the current regime in Russia)
While it sounds like a pun, there is no "trigger discipline" in Russia (I myself an ROTC officer). In USSR/Russia the "never point your barrel at anybody or anything" discipline has been taught instead.
There is a little more to Russian rules. They don't allow carry with a round chambered. They find it very dangerous that so many american guns are carried at the ready. With no round chambered, the trigger is far less of a worry.
Absolutely. It is so fundamental, at the instinct level almost, that it didn't even came to my mind to mention it. Until absolutely necessary, you never chamber your weapon - "what if the trigger gets accidentally pulled!" :)
Even military guards on duty are by the military regulations explicitly prohibited from chambering their weapon until necessary:
209. Часовому запрещается: ..., досылать без необходимости патрон в патронник, ...
and only when the guarded security perimeter is about to be breached and the guard has already issued 2 verbal warnings, only then the guard chambers the round and makes the first warning shot toward the sky:
211. ... Если нарушитель после предупреждения "Стой, стрелять буду" продолжает движение, часовой досылает патрон в патронник и производит предупредительный выстрел вверх.
Yet the question remains. Surely he is not aiming at a target, preparing to shoot.
Unless the goal is to make him appear dangerously aggressive. Intimidation and fear are bread and butter propaganda tools.
They go into detail on their technical decision making, very cool:
Choosing Clojure6 and Datalog7 was a calculated risk–but one which paid off. The Datalog model offered the simplest and most ergonomic queries, had strengths in graphs and relationships, and the entity model could easily transform to more standard formats. In–memory Datomic was chosen on the server, allowing complicated relational rule–based queries to map over tens of thousands of claims, linking sources to the attributes of entities. Using Clojure allowed for rapid prototyping and fast feedback cycles. Together, this allowed constructing arbitrary graph traversal queries, without having to round–trip from the database to execute recursive code, allowing the nature of traversing the domain model to be separated from the specifics of the relationship. How entities relate, and how relations work through time, could be developed as separate concepts. Using Datalog queries, it was possible to get every subordinate, as well as the time ranges they held true for, with a simple query like (subordinate-of ?a ?b ?start-date ?end-date)
> making it easier for journalists, courts, and researchers to connect commanders to their subordinates’ actions.
We all know that G.W. Bush and Tony Blair were at the top of their countries' chains of command during the illegal invasion of Iraq and yet, here we are, they're free of any International Penal Court meddling. Which is to say that maybe these guys and ladies here should focus their "desire for war-justice" a little bit closer to home.
Of course, an organization (the Security Force Monitor mentioned in the article) that literally receives money from George Soros through his Open Society Foundations [1] would never go after its own Western leaders, but it's good to at least have that written down on the internet, like in this comment.
[1] https://securityforcemonitor.org/about/
When we found out that soldiers in Iraq were mistreating prisoners we put them all on trial and gave the guy who said this wasn't right a medal. What the Burmese military does to maintain its sixty year old dictatorship is wanton murder of civilians.
> When we found out that soldiers in Iraq were mistreating prisoners
We didn't "find out", some media and/or Wikileaks got evidence. And the consequences were not even close to harsh enough - each and every instance of war crimes should have led to a thorough cleanup and massive sentences for everyone involved, especially for everyone who tried to cover it up.
And then we did this.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/27/eddie-gallag...
> we put them all on trial
All the mooks, maybe.
Very interesting and I think important. Something that should be done for any Armee even.
I found the writing style … interesting. The author assumed we the reader would have a specific understanding how to model this data. And that they cracked the code. Well that military posts, commands and in some cases government loyalty can change is known. Maybe I read too much into it this morning :). I dislike being treated as ignorant that’s all.
valuable. a variation should be applied to public services by privacy offices, as gov often uses virtual entities under the guise of projects or working groups, where the legally accountable entity almost never receives documents or decisions, but pushes them down onto technology teams to implement.
A standard open organization specification that shows people, authorities, budget flows and beneficial parties, and then only funding anything expressed in that spec would go a long way to improving institutions.
Sounds a fantastic idea and a great addition to OSSINT overall
> Together, we re–developed the data format and domain logic to fit both the ergonomics of existing research tools and to allow for easy analysis.
That is some weapons grade marketing speak.
The rest of the article is relatively interesting once they get to their use of Datomic/Datalog but it was really hard to get past that BS.