Random Rant Thread

[miscmisc]

You know I'm an asshole who quotes himself to make a point, so bear with me.

Feb 23, 2022 4:05:18 GMT 1 miscmisc said:

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.

Now you see what I meant. It's ideology. Putin is all about ideology now. He didn't used to be as far as I know. But I knew he was changing.

I didn't predict the full-scale invasion. But I knew he wouldn't back down, that the likes of Biden and Johnson (!) could never, ever convince him of any fucking thing at all as long as they spoke that neolib language.

Never, ever underestimate the power of ideology, the power of emotive ideas. I'm not talking about the nuanced meta concept of ideology ala Slavoj Zizek, but just about plain old straightforward ideology. Putin's gone full existentialist, and that's fucking bad.

But without ideology, what are we?

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It's way too soon to look back on the pandemic, as we are still very much deeply in it, but surely this is the second worst thing that has happened during the pandemic. I say the second worst because I wanted to leave a place at the top for something very personal and painful that happened to you or your loved ones.

I still don't know if Gadot and others were simply trying to tell us to go fuck ourselves, in a very roundabout, sarcastic way. I mean, you tell me. What the fuck was this?

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I'm sure someone, somewhere, now, is singing Imagine for Ukraine too. It's an atrocious song, Lenon's worst.

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Not much of a Noah fan, but good on him for doing this, very concisely.

The point is that the whole thing is a manifestation of such self-obliviousness and confused narcissism that it's stupid even by the standards of racism.

"relatively civilized"

What a fucking clown, lol.

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And I'm really confused when I hear these assholes on TV call Ukrainians "middle-class", "regular Europeans", "relatively prosperous" and such.

Unless they are talking exclusively about the upper-middle class living in the ritzy 'hood in Kyiv... well, that would make no sense given the context.

I mean, do they know Ukraine's GDP per capita? Hint: It was lower than Iraq's in 2020.

Ukraine is a very poor country *even by the global standards*. Lots and lots and lots of "third-world countries" are richer than Ukraine. Moldova is probably the only "European" country poorer than Ukraine.

Jesus Christ, how could anyone even begin to understand Ukrainian politics without knowing the fact that it's a very poor country? Do they have any idea why virtually every young Ukrainian is looking for a chance to leave even though it's objectively a very beautiful country with fertile land? Because it's a poor country! Crap economy is a major reason for the disunity, of course!

Russians are 3-5 times as rich as Ukrainians, and you wouldn't understand a lot of things if you didn't know that. That enormous income gap is one explanation for the generally asshole Russian attitude toward Ukraine. But I really, really suspect that those people don't even know that. They probably know, kind of, that Ukraine is poorer than Russia, but I bet they would be shocked if you told them by how much.

They clearly know nothing about Ukraine. They are worse than the lazy Western journalists in Beirut who almost never get out of their district, don't speak a word of Arabic, yet pretend to know things about the Middle East.

[miscmisc]

Just because you are super annoyed by something doesn't necessarily mean it's truly an important issue. I mean, really.

Take the mask mandate for school kids for example. You may find it appalling, think it's child abuse, an act of sadism, etc. according to your personal aesthetics. But that doesn't mean that kids feel that way, or that it actually is. I'll stop beating around the bush and just tell you straight up that it is definitely not fucking "child abuse". You need to calm down and shut the fuck up.

I've seen many other examples in this pandemic.

I'm saying that partially because that's what you need to remember when you read my rants too. You know, sometimes, more often than I'd care to admit, I bark out like a crazed dog over something objectively pretty unimportant for the society.

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The number of civilian casualties has rapidly increased over the last few days. It's the same pattern that we've seen before, when the aggressor/invader failed to achieve the initial goals and suffered an unexpected amount of losses. They simply go "harder" without quite refining their tactics.

I mean, that - "refining" - doesn't even matter though. Lots of civilians were going to die no matter what. That was a given.

[miscmisc]

I think I kind of know why those idiots think that Ukraine is a "relatively prosperous" "middle-class European" country that it definitely isn't.

Ukrainians, by which I mean urban Ukrainians because they are the only ones that those Western "journalists" ever interact with, tend to be trilingual, in Ukrainian, Russian and English. Many speak German too. They are certainly a helluva lot more fluent in English than the average Russian.

And THAT gives them the abstract sense of "culture" and therefor the false sense of "prosperity". You can be cultured AND very unprosperous.

Look, I'm ashamed of the Japanese inability to speak English well. But they suck largely because they don't really need to be fluent in any other language, since Japan has a stagnating-yet-certainly-big-enough economy on its own. It's the same with Russia, to a lesser extent. And definitely not the case with economically feeble countries like Ukraine.

Those "journalists" give us lectures on world affairs without even understanding that, simply because they have an apartment in Beirut.

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Ah, someone who called Ukraine "middle-class European" called Belarus a "desperately poor country under Putin's thumb".

Belarus's GDP per capita is 1.5 times that of Ukraine.

I just don't know what to say.

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A large part of the myth of Putin, inside Russia, was created by his supposed prowess in war.

He's never experienced such high casualties, such numerous tactical blunders. His soldiers have been torn into pieces by Javelins, which any halfwit can shoot. They turned out to be much more effective weapons against Russian tanks than RPGs. I mean, of course, that's the whole point of the Javelins and why they are more expensive than RPGs, but it's really humiliating for Putin.

Of course Russia is still fully capable of leveling Kyiv. But it will be not only 100% evil, but 120% pointless too.

[miscmisc]

Even though the Russian military is vastly superior to the Ukrainian military in all conventional aspects, the defenders can keep forcing the invaders to bleed almost indefinitely, through asymmetric warfare.

Even people who have little interest in warfare should know that by now, as we've seen countless examples in various parts of the world.

However, would you really wave the Ukrainian flag high and push Ukrainians into insurgency so that you can get the satisfaction, of feeling like you are shoving shit into Putin's face? You'd be basically dragging our fellow human beings through a fucking hell, a living hell. You'd be basically guaranteeing them they will have to see their loved ones die, one after another, and still continue, every day.

The life of an insurgency is a horrible one. You have to have reached a certain stage of zen to live that way.

Are you really sure you understand that when you do that cheerleading routine? I cannot for the life of me tell them that's the way to go, ever. I admit that I'd feel *good* seeing Putin lose his marbles as his troops get bogged down in a living hell of incessant guerrilla offensives, from all angles. But I also can't think of any form of selfishness worse than that.

[miscmisc]

I do, and it was stupid.

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Some things are just not even remotely as important as you think they are. That shit really lowered a lot of people's IQ by like 10. I'm talking about non-Canadians. Of course it was important for Canadians. But it was a local issue that didn't have any universal significance to speak of.

[miscmisc]

Zelensky becoming such an international idol is definitely not something that I expected. Now I have to reflect on and rethink my interpretations of how he dealt with Donald Trump's pressure. Maybe my lazy assumptions made me attribute it much more than I should've to the accidental factors.

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NIMBY issue. I will show this insanity to all the Japanese who go, "FFS, I'm sick and tired of the extreme Japanese inflexibility! 'Sorry this is the rule,' my ass. They justify plain fucking evil that way, and this would never happen anywhere else!"

Because unfortunately it does, at least in the US. People tend to have a very wrong image about the US. It's as much of a country of strict rules and procedures and paperworks as Japan, where this sort of insanity can happen.

This particular issue goes way beyond that, though. This particular evil is very American in its nature.