The Arab Spring

@Knit Tie - Last year's winners weren't bad either.

Last year it was Malala, right? But then the year before that, the EU...

I was talking mostly about people like Kissinger getting the big P, but yes, it does look like the people who give them out have cleaned up their act recently. Very recently.

edited 10th Oct '15 11:02:29 AM by KnitTie

It was Malala and Kailash Satyarthi. Also, before Malala and Kailash it was not the EU, but the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. The EU was awarded the year before said Organization.

edited 10th Oct '15 11:38:25 AM by Quag15

Kissinger was supposed to receive the Peace Prize jointly with Le Duc Tho, the leader of the Vietnamese delegation at the Paris Peace Talks. Tho refused to accept the award on the grounds that peace had not been achieved - as was proven when war broke out once again in 1975. Kissinger kept it. The Nobel committee weren't being completely stupid.

I wonder if he refused to accept because their was still fighting, or because he knew that no matter what happened his country would not stop until it took South Vietnam.

Probably both.

Yeah in the end the super illegitimate ones are actually pretty rare, but stuff like Obama getting it for not bring Bush, stick in people's minds.

You have bad Nobels in all categories. Like the one awarded for the lobotomy. Sometimes the Nobels are awarded for very good reasons to very bad people. And the other way around (great scientists that happened to make one mistake - and got the award for their mistake, like Fermi).

The Peace is simply more controversial because it regularly rewards political figures who always have detractors.

edited 10th Oct '15 3:55:16 PM by Julep

Uh... ummm... yeaaaah...

Anyway, let's get back on topic, shall we?

In other stuff British tabloids and social media are claiming happened, the Russians lost a MiG-29 over Syria. Except that the Russians have no MiG-29s deployed to the area.

My friend, this information is clearly a false-flag planted by trolls to convince you that Russia hasn't lost any planes, while in reality it has lost hundreds!

This is...kinda impressive. Conversation between Hezbollah and some kind of rebel (video says Daesh but who knows) in Zabadani.

Got some balls, anyways.

Hezbollah are a tough bunch.

Amnesty International reporting Kurds committing war crimes. Sad to hear, but not unexpected.

In other news, even the UN is admitting Syria would have to be partioned, even if they see that as a worst case scenario.

edited 12th Oct '15 5:46:50 PM by FFShinra

I have to admit, I awaited the report on Kurdish war crimes with morbid curiosity. They are still the best group around, though.

Cross-posted: SPBE cluster munitions seen in Syria.

This is a really odd choice of weapon to use by either Russia or, less likely but still possible, the Syrian government. SPBEs are expensive munitions that aren't smart in the sense that they're precision-guided, but semi-smart in that they're programmed to detect when they're above a tank and send an EFP downward. It's got marginal anti-infantry utility at best, and a guerrilla war is hardly the best of places to combat-test an antivehicle munition.

Not to many new allegations, just the same stuff about destroying villages. The interesting bit though is their threat to call in US airstrikes on people's houses if they don't leave. I wonder if we ever actually did bomb anyone's house on the basis of such a report.

Maybe they work on technicals as well?

Nothing can destroy a Toyota.

edited 13th Oct '15 4:54:32 AM by TerminusEst

Except a Nokia tossed on the engine block.

Russia is testing its new toys on the Syrian front, since Georgia they didn't have many chances to see how well their equipment would fare outside testing and training.

I want to see if the Klub missiles indeed had failures, but since Farsi news and other outlets claim they did, I'm inclined to believe them instead of the Kremlin's claims that no missile failed.

Meh. Would have been surprised if they didn't honestly, given how American Tomahawks have fared in similar situations.

Seems to be a cruise missile thing.

Kinda, IIRC the failure rate of the Tomahawk was around 2 or 3 percent, the Klub had 4 missiles failures out of 26.

But since the system is relatively new I think they will iron out the issues.

AJE picked up on the Kurds report.

Fair enough.

Not at all surprised AJE picked it up. The Kurds have been making Arabs look like fools in this conflict.