Random Rant Thread

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Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth, and similarly every invading troop has a good plan until they get shot in the back or from the above (e.g. by drones). They tend to start committing atrocities once they got punched in the mouth repeatedly more than a few times.

That's just the reality of war. Part of the reason why the US Army puts such emphases on overwhelming technological advantages and manpower is that they understand that the peace of mind is essential for the soldiers' morale. *Even then* shit happens, and that's not just because there are quite a few genuine psychos in any military.

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In every single war you have to confirm, reconfirm, re-reconfirm, re-re-reconfirm that people who love to egg on countries carelessly and recklessly for war are the ones who understand warfare the least, or simply refuse to understand it so as to deliberately live in a fantasy where everything can be reduced to a simple morality play.

It's absolutely infuriating. The same shit happens over and over again, and they keep saying like a group of fucking parrots that it's all because some people are inherently evil.

It's hard to define "evil", but those people represent the concept rather well themselves as far as I'm concerned.

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Of course there will be no reconciliation between Russia and the West any time soon because Putin burned that bridge, but it's clear that he now thinks that he will be able to normalize this war condition in Ukraine sooner or later while continuing to export oil and gas to Europe to earn hard currencies. He wants to create two contrasting realities that coexist side by side. That's a very neo-fascist way of thinking, and we will have to absolutely make sure that he will utterly fail at that.

Because THAT is the kind of evil that we should never allow to exist in this world.

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It's hilarious to see Americans, even well-educated ones, baffled by Macron's popularity among the elderly population in France. That bafflement derives entirely from this enormous American misunderstanding that Macron is some kind of a leftist.

I mean, he may sound like one according to their definition of left, but he is quite clearly a center-right politician for the French because, well, he *is* a center-right politician by the normal definition of the term! Why wouldn't he be popular among old people?

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I guess when you are able to basically pick and choose your battlefield and plan accordingly, like in Syria, the problems that your military inherently has don't quite surface.

Even by the standards of invasions/struggling invading forces, the lack of discipline among the Russian troops is quite something. I'm not really talking about tortures and rapes and executions, but primarily about looting. Yeah that happens in war obviously, but usually not like that, not that consistently, unless we are talking about the most politically unstable, poorest regions in Sub-Saharan Africa. You really don't want the world to think your military is *pathetic*. For a military force, that's much worse than evil.

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If you follow the Twitter feeds of scholars like Rob Lee, you see the pictures of the Russian KIA soldiers every day. And by far the most prevalent reactions/replies are, "Why are there so many Asians? Is Russia an Asian country?"

Most of the people asking that question are simply too ignorant to know that Russia is a very multiethnic country. Nonetheless it is a valid question because that says a lot about the Russian military of today.

I think most of those "Asian" dead soldiers are Buryats, from the Republic of Buryatia. It's a Buddhist republic (* which doesn't mean they are religious), kind of like Tuvan where Putin's righthand man Sergei Shoigu is from, but unlike Tuvans, who are Turkic, Buryats are basically Mongolian.

It's a republic with the population of one million or less, but like so many other republics and autonomous regions in Russia, it's been "Russified" in the Soviet days, with a significant percentage of the population being ethnic Russian now. Russians are in fact the big majority in Buryatia - 60% - and there are only 300k Buryats in the republic, about 30% of the population.

I'm sure there are a lot of Buryat diaspora in the other regions/republics, but it's safe to say that Buryats are a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the 144m citizens of the Russian Federation.

Now, any military tends to be overrepresented by boys from poor regions. But looking at those pictures of KIA soldiers/sailors, I find it very interesting that they are ridiculously disproportionately from either Dagestan or Buryatia, two of the poorest regions/republics in the country. Dagestan has been rarely mentioned presumably because they look more or less "white" to Americans, but they are almost all ethnic minorities such as Avars, Dargins, Laks, etc. Dagestan is the melting pot of tiny ethnic minorities in the Caucasus region, and its economy has been severely depressed for years.

And it goes without saying that there have been zero official KIA soldiers from Moscow or St. Petersburg. No surprise, but what's notable is the degree to which the military has been dominated by men from depressed regions. On the other hand, the US military has been de-poor-countryside-boys-ed for decades, and its members are mostly middle-class today. Sure, overrepresented by Hispanics, but hasn't deviated too far from the national demographical trend. Sure, still poorer than the national average, but it used to be much, much poorer.

And it seems that the Russian military has been *more* poor-countryside-boys-ed during the same period.

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It's absolutely meaningless to say this now given that the pandemic is supposedly "over" and there's supposedly no need for NPIs anymore and we are "back to normal", but it's pretty clear now that SARS-CoV-2 messes with your brain. I'm not saying that the virus will make you dumb, but there are various kinds of negative potentialities.

At the very least, vaccinate your children.

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Good thread.

So, it did go pretty much the way I thought it did. Utterly predictable.

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This x 123,000

I stopped paying even cursory attention to these VE numbers. Since so many unvaccinated people have gotten Covid in the last several months, those numbers are plainly meaningless at this point.

The "waning" effect of the vaccines has been overstated for the same reason too.

The vaccines work like fucking magic, man. If you somehow still don't get that, you are just a math-challenged contrarian fool.

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I'm super annoyed by that shenanigan of including and excluding Indian-Americans in/from "Asian Americans" conveniently, to suit their agenda. Indian-Americans are by far the wealthiest/economically most successful immigrant group, and their inclusion/exclusion instantly changes the picture!

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My interest in the former USSR sparked when I had a Kyrgyz roommate and Uzbek-Tajik girlfriend. They taught me a lot about the Soviet Union and the aftermath of its collapse. So it pretty much started with those "stan" countries in Central Asia, and then went westward from there. That's why for someone who boasts their knowledge on the "former USSR", I rarely mention Lithuania/Latvia/Estonia; The train kind of stopped at Ukraine/Belarus.

I mean, I certainly know a lot more about those Baltic countries than the average Joe, but not nearly as much as I do about, say, Moldova and Georgia.

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I'm pretty sure that at this point Putin doesn't care about Finland and Sweden joining NATO. Many Russians do, but he doesn't.

It stopped being about Russia's "national interest" a while ago. It's mostly about him, and his genius world view now (elementary sarcasm alert).

Or, actually, it's possible that he does care, meaning that he likes it. The siege mentality helps him.

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This would be just funny shit if she were some rando instead of the deputy director at EU Institute for Security Studies.

"English-speaking" is one of the eight "cultural hubs" in the world according to this graph.

Wow.

And the US and Belgium are culturally almost identical.

I know both countries, and holy fucking fuck, man.

Unfortunately this kind of 19th-century-flavored horseshit social science crap can still pass for wisdom in certain parts of the EU think tank world. It's kind of frightening actually, and whenever they say "European values", you should probably pause and think about what they actually mean by that.

To these people, the Lord of the Rings is a legitimate history book, and Gondor ("Europe") has always been at war with Mordor ("Asia").

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See, this is part of the reason why Russia should've gone East. Why the fuck should anyone care about whether they are "European" or not? Russians should've run away from these mild-mannered professional racists.

And social science, man. Need I say more. It's neither social nor science.

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Hear, hear.