Random Rant Thread

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These people emit very, very strong "English-lit major talking about quantum physics" vibes.

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It's just grotesquely amazing to see those Russia Experts in the Anglosphere collectively turn into a sad-face emoji. Where is all the "Putin put himself into a corner and there's no way out" chest-thumping gone?

Officially recognizing Donbas as sovereign was such an obvious move to be made by Russia that if *this* can pretty much ruin their day, as the NATO can't do shit about it, I don't know what the fuck they are paying those idiots for. Why do they think Putin had *not* officially recognized it until now? Do they ever analyze things? Jesus Christ.

Who really "backed himself into a corner" seriously? The "West"/NATO lost all of its credibility on dealing with this kind of "invasion" after all the precedents, like Azerbaijan/Armenia.

Now the West/NATO must pray to God that Russia will actually invade Ukraine beyond Donbas. Because they don't give a shit about Ukraine, and the overriding priority for them in all of this is NATO. To make it look like a tiger that it isn't.

Ukraine, and Russians too for that matter, are screwed in the long run, but that's never the point of any of this. They don't give a shit about any of that.


I told you that it would be "redundant" and "meaningless" to talk about it, repeat the same fucking things over and over again, but well. I'm sorry I couldn't resist.

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You may think this is just a random anonymous fool talking out of their ass, but the entire Republican philosophy on economy, until the emergence of so-called New Right (for what it's worth) at least, revolved around how to justify this obvious idiocy by performing sophist acrobatics both in rhetorics and math.

It's one of the reasons - albeit not one of the biggest ones - that I stopped being a right-winger many moons ago. I found it absolutely exhausting to have to defend the silly indefensible.

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If you want to see what purely crystalized hypocrisy and bullshit looks like, look at the British response to the Russia/Ukraine issue.

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This is why trashing The West Wing/Aaron Sorkin is never just a tribal signifier for cynical hipsters; It's an absolutely necessary act, at all times, given the real harm that it has done to US (and British) politics.

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Putin has gone MAGA, it seems. Talking shit endlessly about everyone, from Stalin to Gorbachev, to justify and amplify the sense of victimhood and gigantic grievances in that speech.

That's what those Foreign Policy fools in the West never understood. They don't know what the fuck "backed himself into a corner" truly means. The danger was *never* a strategical one; It was always, always ideological. But those fools truly, truly think that ideology doesn't matter in the 21st century. We are governed by first-class fools everywhere, and we'll have to suffer the consequences.

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Navalny also thinks most Ukrainians are basically Russian, by the way. But you would never know that if your only source of information was on the Nato side.

It's not about Navalny. And it's not just about Putin either. I'm just saying that's the background static that you must know before even thinking of what options there are to address the issue.

But they simply look away and pretend it's not there, busy hashtagging everything #unitedwithukraine as if it meant any fucking thing at all.

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I have a good decoder for the foreign policy think-tank speak, so I will just cut all the bullshit and tell you that what those Western experts mean is that they desperately want to see Kyiv burned by Russian missiles. Seriously, that's what they mean. They want to get their sorry dick up.

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I know. I have this incredibly pathetic inability to resist. Not very zen.

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But I just cannot emphasize enough how incredibly idiotic it is to talk incessantly - truly incessantly - about Russia starting a WW2-style full-on invasion any minute now, and then somehow get stunned - STUNNED! - that Russia officially recognized and sent troops into Donbas, the area that has been de facto controlled by Russia for years anyway.

I'm not aware of a *single* Western expert who predicted this. And meanwhile, ahem, *I* fucking did.

And that's not because I possess some special FP wisdom; It's entirely because I have my own Ukrainian sources of information, and therefore can totally ignore the bullshit from the Western mainstream media and their Russian counterparts. So, again, no one in the West actually gives a fuck about Ukraine. No one.

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Julia living on a different world line, as always. The Russia in her world sounds interesting, but I don't know what it's got to do with the one that we have in our world.



America is "actually allergic" to war, folks. Quite an interesting world she has there.
  
And of course, nothing says "isolationist" like having 820 military bases in other countries.

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ALL territorial disputes and ALL historical grievances look silly to third parties. You laugh at countries fighting over a few uninhabited mountains, but then your neighbor claims a rock in the sea 40km away from your beach house to be theirs, and your military will start a war game against them on the next day.

Hell, the same can go with domestic matters. Look at the total right-wing hysteria over the so-called Critical Race Theory in the US. The same people were laughing at Serbs and telling them to chill the fuck down not so long ago.

And in most cases there will be no solutions, or "truths". You will fight over the mountains and rocks forever, you will always be right *and* wrong, so will your international opponents. And you will argue over who's who, who "historically" owned what, who did what to whom, forever. There will be no "solution" to such things. No, even ethnic cleansing can't "solve" them. Stalin certainly didn't "solve" any of those historical grievances, did he? I mean, we wouldn't be talking about this if he had.

That's why in that kind of disputes, conflicts, it's third parties that must "chill" the most. The parties concerned cannot "chill". It's just politically nearly impossible for them. It's third parties that must provide some backdoors, room for negotiations, compromises, etc.

You always have to remember that, and look at what's going on through that lens.

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"high-precision strikes"
"strictly and exclusively military targets"
"poses no threat to the civilian populations"

You might feel that the Russians are mocking the US this way, basically carbon-copying the phrases used in countless wars and conflicts by the US, but No, they aren't. It's just the way everyone behaves when they are in the position of an aggressor. There's nothing American or Russian about it. It's just the way we do it, every time.

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There is an in-joke among frequent international travelers that the best intel in the world is Turkish Airlines'. They take you to any fucking place in the world, no matter how dangerous, when all other airlines decline to do so, and rarely get you into trouble. It's definitely my go-to airline when I visit not-very-popular places.

So when they do cancel a flight (this was way before Putin's announcement)...

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He's VERY impressive for sure, but these are all Indo-European languages.

I dated a Hongkonger who can speak Cantonese, Mandarin, *Japanese* and *English*, all fluently. Given how fundamentally different Chinese, Japanese and English are to each other, she's definitely more impressive.