Getting stuff out of Russia. Bullgear etc

[Hatchet]

I'm with the "No Russian" crowd, but if it helps settle the drama any I've got a spare Bullgear 249 hop I can sort you out with.

 

[Druid799]

Funny that people don't feel the same way about sending money to American or Chinese companies whenever their respective  governments gun down a minibus full of kids, assassinate some journalists or harvest organs from prisoners. Nor for that matter did anyone seem to be all that bothered about buying Russian kit in the aftermath of Georgia and Chechnya. We've had a hand in demolishing a few countries ourselves in the last few decades.

Let's not get carried away with framing this as a moral choice, or implying some kind of treason or direct contribution to whatever misery the Russian government is inflicting at this moment.

 If people want to draw a line with where they spend their own money then fair enough - personally I don't buy anything from Amazon, but I'm not going to judge people who do. 

On a practical level you'd have to be nuts to try and mail order Russian replica firearms parts at the moment.

But it sounds like some people are a few newspaper headlines away from burning their cyma ak74s at the moment and it's all a bit silly and hypocritical imo.

And this is the exact kind of smug virtuous “oh no one complained when America blah blah blah or when China blah blah blah or the big bad British Empire blah blah blah” comments is why I didn’t mention about not buying from Russia due to a moral standpoint originally . Im sorry but all your trying to do is score some “look at me I'm so right on and politically aware on my high horse” points , what your comparing to the Russian invasion of the Ukraine is puerile at best and bloody offensive at worst ALL Governments are guilty of some heinous crimes at sometime or another but Russia is committing genocide against a sovereign nation live on tv 24/7 ! Plus how do you suggest we sanction China and America then seeing as China is responsible for 28.7% and America 16.8% of the Global manufacturing output making them No’s 1&2 respectively(fyi the Russian federation is 15th with petrochemical but 47th without) ?

 

[Floperator]

And this is the exact kind of smug virtuous “oh no one complained when America blah blah blah or when China blah blah blah or the big bad British Empire blah blah blah” comments is why I didn’t mention about not buying from Russia due to a moral standpoint originally . Im sorry but all your trying to do is score some “look at me I'm so right on and politically aware on my high horse” points , what your comparing to the Russian invasion of the Ukraine is puerile at best and bloody offensive at worst ALL Governments are guilty of some heinous crimes at sometime or another but Russia is committing genocide against a sovereign nation live on tv 24/7 ! Plus how do you suggest we sanction China and America then seeing as China is responsible for 28.7% and America 16.8% of the Global manufacturing output making them No’s 1&2 respectively(fyi the Russian federation is 15th with petrochemical but 47th without) ?

Well you can't sanction them can you, because our manufacturing capability and energy production has been hollowed out and outsourced overseas because this generated the most profit in the short term for greedy motherfuckers who have no real conception of the economy beyond the next shareholders report. We actively destroy democracies and treat with tyrants and despots, to no ones benefit except a select few. Yemen is also happening *right now*, but the Sauds are our buddies so we're not doing shit to help them as they starve. No sympathetic headlines for them. No ones airing out the spare bedroom for Yemeni refugees. China has spent the last few years literally herding a specific ethnicity into concentration camps. No 24hr rolling news cycle for that either. All forgotten, because we are dependent on them. The truth is that its psychologically convenient for many of us to minimise the atrocities that our own administration tacitly accepts or even encourages, because there is practically nothing we can do about it.

Smug? No, the hypocrisy of all this fucking sickens me.

The Russians are just the enemy of the moment, that's all, and if our government didn't have a stake in using Ukraine as a proxy no one would be saying shit about it, just like they had nothing to say about Georgia and Chechnya. Just like they have nothing to say about the Uyghurs, or Yemen, or Palestine.

I'd say I have more reason than most here to have a grudge against Russia - In a way I'm only here today because of the brutality of the Russian government.

My grandfather came to Britain in 1956, fleeing Soviet retribution after the failed Hungarian Uprising, which he took a very active part in.

The Russian security services tortured his parents - who I was lucky enough to know in my childhood - pins under the fingernails, that sort of thing. The whole family got the treatment, everyone who was still left. They were extremely eager to find and kill him.

We used to go to Hungary on holiday every year when I was a kid. Before the Berlin Wall fell, but after things were at their worst, when people were burying bread and the meagre produce of their smallholdings to keep them safe from the privations of Russian soldiers. Things were extremely grim over there, a real eye opener as a kid from the west to see the kind of conditions people had to live in elsewhere.

After the Wall fell we got to see the country heal year by year, slowly building up the kind of infrastructure that we take for granted. The dirt roads were gravelled one year, streetlights installed the next, tarmac the year after that. But the scars are still there today, if you care to look for them.

So I don't really need a lecture on how bad Russian occupation is thanks, I've seen it first hand.

Me and my family have better reason to hate Russians than most.

But we don't.

Even my grandad never boycotted Russian products - his favorite drink is Smirnoff ffs - and even he was and is able to differentiate between the actions of the Russian government and the Russian people themselves, who have lived under the heel of Putin for over two decades and are as much victims of their government as the people living in the countries that Russia invades and occupies.

Who do you think your sanctions are really hurting? Tsar Putin, reputedly one of if not the richest man in the world? Or is it just another kick in the teeth for a people that have lived under poverty and dictatorship for longer than anyone alive can remember?

As I said before, you can draw your own line in the sand wherever you want, and power to you. But to start moralising on other people's choices when we live in a fundamentally amoral system is frankly bollocks. Every time you start your car or turn on your hob or buy some plastic shite or charge your batteries you are in some way contributing to human misery somewhere.

That's the reality we live in.

Watching people suddenly get on their high horse about #IssueOfTheDay because that's what the media has told them to do bores me to tears. 

Do I care about Ukraine? Of course I do. And I'll still care when the cameras are off. I'll still care about the refugees after the media has decided they are now villains, not heroes (it won't be long, just wait and see!). I very much doubt thats the case for the people banging the drum loudest, a good proportion of whom a few months ago wanted to send in the gunships to turn back the boatloads of refugees crossing the channel. 

Maybe you'll still care once everyone else has put a different flag in their profile picture, maybe not. We'll see.

 

[Lozart]

Even my grandad never boycotted Russian products - his favorite drink is Smirnoff ffs

All good points, but Smirnoff hasn't been Russian since the revolution! 

 

[Tactical Pith Helmet]

FYI, I just had to claim a refund from a Moscow based uniform shop for non-delivery.  My note to PP is given below.  Claiming wasn't a problem.  

'Hi. I placed my order in January, some five weeks before the conflict in Ukraine started. The seller claims that the conflict in Ukraine has messed up delivery. The item should have been here long before any military action started. I would like a refund. Thanks.'