dm crushes IM easily

I firmly agree with Young Sanity in this situation

editing because of mcats' post: It was not your place to decide who got to play and who didn't get to play. Of course I don't agree with Young Sanity being late, etc., but we established very early (see the team name) that Young Sanity was not going to be cut or "benched."

bump s9

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieVlQVtjalY

Young Sanity decided not to play the match because he was in too much pain. We won with a ringer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTXGAd1kpXY

when you're holding push to talk and she can hear you through the vent :-(

Dear scrim finders,

Go Raw, Revival! Titan Arc receives an F rating. They:
-took 15min to get more than 2 players joining the server
-pretended they had a ringer and told us to "ready he's joining"
-played 5v6 for 10 minutes
-finally baited our pregame after 30 minutes total, when one of their players rage quit (their nonexistent ringer never joined)

I don't know if this is a one-off, but proceed with caution...

^ 82 minute long match... longest in the season so far?

People forget that dictators are usually fairly popular among their people. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were popular when they ruled, and modern dictators like Jinping and Kim have set new heights for dictator popularity.

Dictators often thrive off of popular support, and many are democratically elected in their first years. Plato said that "tyranny arises, as a rule, from democracy." Anyone who's interested in this sort of thing can look into the concept of the "legal (world) revolution."

If you think me addressing the role the US military-industrial complex has played in Eastern geopolitics over the last 70 years is a "bothsides centrist approach," then you didn't read my post. I shared no opinions in that post besides a few reasons why I believe NATO's response will be similar to its response to Crimea. NATO probably isn't going to do anything that changes anything, and we both know it.

Understanding the reasons nation-states do things is important, even if you don't agree with their reasons. If Ukraine had never given its nukes away in response to Western pressure, Russia would be far more cautious.

Ukranian MP Alexey Gocharenko shares this view: "Ukraine is the only nation in the human history which gave up the nuclear arsenal, the third biggest in the world in 1994, with guarantees of the US, UK and Russian Federation. Where are these guarantees?"
Ukraine’s former defense minister Anriy Zahorodniuk also shares this view: "We gave away the [nuclear] capability for nothing."

I said that the actions of Russia in this situation are consistent with geopolitical theory, and you somehow took that as a statement of support for the Russian government.

For anyone who'd like to read a longer post, here is the best I could do in a Timeline of Events:

1. NATO is created in 1949. Its stated purpose is to combat the Soviet threat.

2. NATO and American intelligence agencies consistently overestimate the strength of Soviet military forces from this point onward.

3. The same American and international bureaucrats, as well as defense contractors and other war manufactures that profit from full-on war also profit from increased NATO production in "response" to the overestimated Soviet military capabilities.

4. As the US emerges in primary military opposition to the Soviet Union, so too grow the contributions of the US to NATO when compared to other NATO members. (The proportion of total NATO spending by the US continues to rise past this point; as of 2021, the US spends 69% of all NATO spending at 811 billion dollars)

5. NATO becomes an extension of the US military bureaucracy.

6. The Soviet Union falls. (It was known to be falling since about 1988.)

7. Pressured by the US, now-Russia and Britain, Ukraine gives up its nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees from these three countries. "In 1993, international relations theorist and University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer published an article including his prediction that a Ukraine without any nuclear deterrent was likely to be subjected to aggression by Russia, but this was very much a minority view at the time." (Wikipedia)

8. Support among politicians for NATO and US military spending in Europe begins the wane without a Soviet threat. The US military-spending lobby turns its attention toward the Middle East for lucrative profits from the fall of the Soviet Union onward.

9. Support for NATO itself by American politicians begins to wane as conflicts shift toward the Middle East. NATO declares a new enemy, Russia, in order to justify its existence as the "North Atlantic" military organization.

10. American and NATO intelligence services highly estimate Russian military capabilities.

11. Tensions increase between NATO and Russia as NATO conducts drills near Russian borders; NATO's military presence in Eastern Europe (and American military-industrial production) increases to near-Cold War levels, and is maintained at these levels

12. Russia invades Crimea. NATO does very little to directly combat this, but soon reestablishes a larger Eastern presence and increases production via the success of US lobbying.

13. Russia invades Ukraine in 2022.

No more timeline: now for some predictions. As far as I can tell, this invasion is similar to the annexation of Crimea a few years back. Viewing geopolitics as a push-pull of complacency and aggression, I believe that the military response by the West will be similar to its response to Crimea in 2014.

It's important to keep in mind that a full takeover of Ukraine is not really the aim here; Ukraine has been an effective "buffer zone" between Russia and the West for years, and Russia's main concern geopolitically is large, direct borders with the West. Ukraine is in a similar position to North Korea; even though China could easily take over North Korea, it chooses not to because North Korea acts as an effective buffer between the extraordinary Western military presence in South Korea and mainland China.

In short, as long as smaller-scale conflict remains as lucrative as it has been to the military-industrial organizations of Russia and the US, we are unlikely to see some large escalation to full-blown war between the US and Russia, for example. An increase of conflict to that point would probably indicate diminishing returns for the military-industrial organizations, and the military-spending lobbies know this. Perhaps decreasing US spending in the Middle East indicates otherwise, but I don't have those numbers yet, and my best bet is that spending hasn't decreased enough there to change this analysis.

Thanks for reading! I spent way too much time on this post, and I'd love to hear your thoughts.

spider has been missing in pugs/online in general for the past few days. Name changed to "killedmyself" on ESEA. I'm worried. If anyone is able, please reach out to spider/spider's family.

https://play.esea.net/users/1265395
https://rgl.gg/Public/PlayerProfile.aspx?p=76561198024201166&r=40

I think spider also went by n3 in the past

Scoreboard is some kind of rolling average of your ping. Network settings also might affect the scoreboard value, making it appear lower than it really is.

net_graph is generally the most accurate of the three

"ping" in console is usually higher than your real ping, possibly by a fixed amount (17ms?). This could be because of the amount of time it takes for the command to register in the console or something, I have no idea.

If you want to test this stuff for yourself, open up a private server and use the net_fakelag command. If you type "net_fakelag 50," your ping should be shown as 100, but will be represented in different ways by the scoreboard, net_graph, and ping command. Whichever is closest to 100 will be the most accurate for you.

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