Random Rant Thread

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This is unimportant, but I see this very often these days, people claiming that the USSR lost the Winter War against Finland (Noah plainly says so further down in this thread). It's just a ridiculous case of revisionism.

The Finns fought their asses off and gave all they got to the invaders. The Soviets were certainly surprised, and lost much more men than they thought. But that's not the point of war.

Germany lost WWII to the USSR even though they lost a helluva lot fewer men and tanks and whatnot than the Soviets. You don't decide the outcome of a war by tallying up the casualties and material losses, or by "how surprisingly well they fought". The USSR gained more than they initially asked for on Finland in the end. That's all that matters. The Soviet elites were perfectly okay and even happy with the outcome of the war despite some bitching and moaning among the military ranks who wanted to go even farther, which wasn't the case for the Finns for whom there was nothing to be happy about.

And that doesn't take anything at all away from the Finnish soldiers. They did more than their best.

You might say, "Well, the Soviets could've gotten a lot more than that!" but you can even say that about Japan in the Russo-Japanese war too. You would never call the outcome of that war anything other than a clear Japanese victory, would you? The USSR couldn't annex the whole country of Finland, but that wasn't the objective at all anyway. And what's even better, the Baltic countries decided not to even bother to fight after seeing the plight of Finland. It's beyond me how anyone could call that an 'L' for the Soviets, but I've seen quite a few people asserting that nonsense in the last several years, even outside the usual suspects.

Well, this is actually not unimportant. Because you shouldn't talk about war if you don't quite understand what it is. Clearly Noah Smith should stick with talking about economy.

When I say Russia will lose this one, that's what I mean. It's about the objectives. Russia has way too many in this one, and already failed on a few of them.

There have actually been wars in history that one side lost without losing a single soldier.

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If you want to see someone covered with his own cum all over the body and laughing hysterically in sheer jubilation, which probably means you need some medical help, look no further than this piece of shit Michael McFaul, one of the usual suspects, the pathologically anti-Russian think-tank idiocy gang. Needless to say this guy called me a "Russian puppet" on one occasion. Good memory.



And some LOL for you:

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OK, THIS hurts. Usmanov loves these villas.

He is truly a piece of shit, and one of the most interesting scumbag oligarchs under Putin. The way he made it, from being a nobody in Uzbekistan, is movie material, a Gogolesgue Soviet success story.

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OK, I know. I know I shouldn't feel this way. I'm old enough to know better. I should be.

But how many of those wearing blue and yellow all of a sudden, telling *me* to do the same, because Putin is evil, because Zelensky is hot, know any goddamn thing about Ukraine and Russia? Zero.

No, this is not the get-off-my-lawn stuff. They are childish. That's the problem. You can cheer for Ukraine, and in fact you should help Ukrainians. You really should. Donate, or do whatever you can. I *am* helping a couple in Kyiv that I know. They are on their way to leave the country now.

Those people can wear blue and yellow if they want to. That's perfectly fine. But don't force me. And unfortunately they don't stop there. They start talking nonsense as if they knew anything about any of it. They are being childish. I just know they will end up hurting innocent Russians, very much including people who are only ethnically Russian. Because that's what confused children end up doing.

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If you want to stick to a certain narrative so badly that you have to whitewash an openly-nazi far-right goon like Filimonov, you are definitely part of the larger problem.

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Look, these guys and their supporters are electorally 2-4% of the Ukrainian population at most. But even before the war they had somewhat disproportionate political power, and have been granted even more power since the war has begun. They are connected to the far-right groups in other European countries, and this war has been a massive, massive boon - fundraising, recruiting, etc. - for all of them. Europe WILL have to deal with them some time in the future as there will be some blowback. The far-right in Europe will probably mutate because of this war.

Even if you think they are just one part of the package that you wish you didn't have but have to recognize as some kind of necessary evil in an emergency like this, you definitely don't need to do extra to whitewash and uber-humanize them. If all you can come up with to counter Putin's "The Ukrainian government is all Nazi" bullshit is to whitewash an actual Nazi, you really are the fucking problem.

Why the fuck do they do this? Over and over again?

It's all just senseless, man. Should I bring out the lionizing NYT article on Osama bin Laden from the salad days to remind you of the pattern? I'm not saying the same thing will happen, or that the article above is of the same scale in magnitude, but I'm tired of this shit repeated over and over again. That article is just one of many. I've seen enough already.

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And an awfully self-indulgent, pretentious drivel like this clearly tells you why Russian liberals are only a small minority in Russia, and virtually non-existent in rural areas. Pretentious bollocks is worse than vulgar bollocks.

If you trust this guy just because he's Russian, go ahead and fall off the cliff.

Vladimir Putin sits atop a crumbling pyramid of power
Vladimir Sorokin
Putin’s end goal isn’t Ukraine but western civilization – the hatred for which he lapped up in the black milk he drank from the KGB’s teat
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/27/vladimir-putin-russia-ukraine-power

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Unfortunately what I thought will happen in Mariupol is actually happening. I fear the Russian will all but destroy the city.

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If you are new to this thread, and wondering how I can move so quickly and abruptly from the Covid diary mode into the Russia/Ukraine mode, well, it's kind of like going back to the roots. The old RR thread started with a truly uncontroversial mundane rant, about Windows or something IIRC, but then I posted a lengthy rant on how the media (CNN, etc.) bullshitted about the Russo-Georgia war. I don't know why I did, but the rest is history.

It's hard to shut me up about the former USSR region and Middle East in particular even in real life. I swear I was going to only rant about Covid. Alas.

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This is a very good point. It's wrong to call them Russian "oligarchs". They have little political power now. They gave up that ambition a long time ago, and are perfectly aware that Putin and siloviki (Volodin, Ivanov, Rogozin, Shoigu, etc.), the people who run the show, have got them by the balls. Khodorkovsky was the last true oligarch, and was soundly defeated.

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People like Fridman, Usmanov, Mordashov, Abramovich, Timchenko and so on have less political power in Russia than the likes of Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, Bloomberg etc. do in the US. The era of oligarchs was ended by Putin a long while ago, and I don't think anyone in Russia misses it. In fact that is exactly one important factor for Putin's popularity among the Russian silent majority. Most of the Yeltsin-era oligarchs were destroyed, and few shed any tears for them.

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What did I tell you? WHAT THE FUCK DID I FUCKING TELL YOU?

Marco Rubio is the most pathetic, dumbest motherfucker in America, bar none. The worst clown ever. This man's existence screams into your face to tell you that meritocracy in America is a total myth, and that Florida is a fucking zoo.

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In case you are also dumb enough not to understand:

And a normal person wouldn't even need to be told. Marco Rubio is not a normal person, but the dumbest person in America. Can't help it.

I've been calling him the dumbest motherfucker for fucking years now, even during the time when he was considered the Future of the Republican Party by almost equally dumb clowns in the media, and yet he still manages to shock me sometimes like this. 

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How can Russia win this one, with this? This is Odessa. Russia has lost these generally pro-Russian people too, for good. What are they going to do now?

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It's hard to find the perfect balance between countering the Russian "Ukrainians are Nazi" propaganda and recognizing that there *are* a sizable, relatively powerful neo-Nazi faction in Ukraine. I had to emphasize the latter back in Maidan as way too many people in the West misunderstood it, purposefully or not, as some kind of a peacenik flower revolution, but I very much lean toward the former now given the situation and how far the Kremlin has been running with it for the last several years.

And now, is it good that people in the West are generally so ignorant of the geopolitics and history in Eastern Europe that no one at Getty noticed such a glaringly, screamingly clear "I'm Nazi!" symbol right at the center of the picture? That means they didn't pick and choose a "clean" image, not censoring anything in other words. Is the ignorance bad, or good that way?

Yup, that spider-web-looking patch on the serviceman dude = Die Schwarze Sonne (The Black Sun), of Wewelsburg/Heinrich Himmler fame (see below). Very popular particularly among Eastern European neo-nazis.