Random Rant Thread

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The article above is interesting in many different ways, but one key point is that artillery + good intel being the god in the battlefield is part of the Russian military doctrine, and they have tasted it themselves plenty in this war.

I hope I didn't give you a wrong impression in this thread, but a huge part of the reason for why Russia has been struggling hard, to say the least, is the sheer strength of the force that they are up against. It's not just the Russian incompetence.

Good artillery attacks - together with drone attacks these days - are absolutely terrifying, and mess with you psychologically. That perfectly explains why disconcertingly many high ranked officers on the Russian side have been killed in this war so far, and why they faltered so easily around Kyiv. And also part of the reason why the Russian troops terrorized civilians in the towns in that area.

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This is why I suspected Russia will struggle even in the Donbas offensive. The Western backing allows Ukraine to go all in on that front. Russia must win the battles very, very quickly there, or the Ukrainian reinforcements will overwhelm them. Time is on the Ukrainian side. Russia must do a Blitzkrieg.

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-8.8% is a very wishful thinking. It'll be worse.

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I think it's safe to say that this guy has successfully exposed a complete scumbag named Sergej Sumlenny. I'm glad because I was getting really annoyed by the clearly mindless "pro-Ukraine" tweets by this "ex-Russian German/Berliner" or whatever the hell he calls himself popping up everywhere. He seems to have a big following in the West, which doesn't surprise me a bit. People either are fundamentally gullible or like to be fooled if that makes them feel good.

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Elon Musk was one of the stupidest, most embarrassing Covid deniers/minimizers in the world, and that's pretty bad news for the whole world. Because he will definitely do the same with another global issue/problem sooner or later. That much is absolutely undeniable, yes.

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The Russian military is still unable to assert its air superiority over the Ukrainian sky. Now I understand why, but this must be one of the worst miscalculations on Russia's part.

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I've been saying this for many years, but the production design on Channel One Russia looks like it was vomited out of a Russian (or Ukrainian!) teenager back in the early 00s playing (pirated and modded) Half-Life 2 all day long. I mean, it's basically what the desktop picture on his gaming PC looked like. It hurts your adult eyes.

It makes the "totalitarian" Soviet aesthetics seem vigorous and sophisticated in comparison, and manages to look both ridiculously cheap and profoundly evil.

It does remind you of that Mitchell and Webb sketch Are We The Baddies?, doesn't it? Who the fuck would think the ones who come up with such a dystopian production design with no intention of irony would be good people?

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This is how Russia self-destructs. If they lose Central Asia, it's game over for them. And because of this war, they won't be able to do shit to stop that process once it kickstarts. They have already lost a huge chunk of their military force, and are now entering an economic depression.

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This is the crux of the matter.

If Russia fails to win Donbas, there will be no place to put the goalposts because this will be the last large-scale offensive Russia can do without the national mobilization.

I hope I'm wrong, but I can only see major escalation after that. That "second phase" of the war would be absolutely, absolutely bloody and ugly, and I have no idea what will happen other than both Russia and Ukraine becoming total ruins, many important parts of Ukraine - and even perhaps Russia - quite literally.

And the EU countries will remember this period of "Russian gas/oil or not, that's the question" as salad days.

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Very few of you non-Ukrainians who are mindlessly shouting Slava Ukraini and Death to Putin seem to understand what's truly at stake here. Your town/city could be nuked. That's a real possibility if you want everything to go down that road.

It's mostly up to Moscow now though. It's largely out of the "West"'s control now. If you still want to just continue to shoot your mouth off, thinking deep down that it's just Ukrainians that are dying anyway, well, I have bad news for you. No real "adult" is in charge anymore, in case you still don't get it.

If you do understand that, well, just go ahead and do whatever you want. We are already in an uncharted territory. No one knows how to end this war, which is itching for escalating into a world war.

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Interesting.

Incidentally:

"At the end of March, Chechens housed in these buildings and posted staged videos about them 'heroically' cleaning up the 5-story houses that were cleared two days before them."

See? Just fucking around for their PR. When the Russian military is suffering from the chronic shortage of infantry.

The Chechens in those videos looked way too clean and healthy for a force who had supposedly gone through a series of fights on a largely urban terrain.

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Yes, London is a capital of dirty money, but it's just "a" capital. People tend to think it's "the" capital because: 1) The volume of dirty money in London is out of proportion to the country's geopolitical significance (e.g. UK-Russia weirdness); 2) The British laws are actually good, and it's harder to hide a certain kind of things in London than in many other "capitals"; 3) The British press is a large part of the international (English-language) media, who naturally tends to play up British things.

I can assure you that New York City has a hell of a lot more dirty money than London, not even close. It's just that it's easier to hide it in the US. When I lived in Manhattan, no one knew who really owned the lux condos a few blocks away from my apartment building. We saw people there, mostly Spanish-speaking, but none of them owned the properties.

It's much, much easier to find out who owns what in London.

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Like I said before, there have been lots of "anti-communist" "nationalist" immigrant communities in Canada, and many of them were either Nazi sympathizers or 100% Nazis themselves before - and even after - they moved to Canada (e.g. Deputy PM's grandfather). That history is in the background, like white noise. These things aren't necessarily accidents.

And I don't think the Canadian government actually even cares.

Mounting evidence Canada trained Ukrainian extremists, gov't needs to be held to account: experts
www.ctvnews.ca/world/mounting-evidence-canada-trained-ukrainian-extremists-gov-t-needs-to-be-held-to-account-experts-1.5879303

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Every time I say shit like the above in real life, I'm accused of being gratuitous and immature and insensitive and a useful idiot for Russia and so on and on. And I'm like, dude, my friend, what else should I call someone who supported and collaborated with Nazis? "Nationalist"? German Nazis were textbook "nationalists" too.

The problem is that people are generally surprisingly ignorant of how popular Nazism was before 1945, hence that sort of fierce reaction to my calling someone Nazi.

Nazism was considered by many to be the best capitalist counter/answer to communism. That part of the history has been largely erased or suppressed, but boy, it's not complicated at all. Germany did NOT simply coerce everyone into supporting them; Many non-Germans - far more than you think - liked the idea very much too and voluntarily decided to hop onto the bandwagon. Might and Idea, a sword and a pen. Germany had both, and so did Japan and Italy for that matter (although less "might" in Italy's case).

Some simply found Nazism fascinating. Some found the rigid ethnic hierarchy part of it a tad problematic - especially if they were non-Aryan - but overall agreed with the basic concept of the capital and nation.

Some embraced it purely as a gesture of being anti-communist without thinking too much about it. Some simply took advantage of the geopolitical situation to get German support. Some absolutely loved its elaborate philosophical justification for antisemitism. Etc.

It was a *normal* thing for someone particularly in Central/Eastern Europe to be at least a Nazi sympathizer back then. And the point is, we cannot let that be an excuse, because, duh, Nazism is a horrendous ideology *even outside the extreme antisemitism*. The Holocaust was simply a logical consequence of the ideology under the circumstances. "Oh I didn't know anything about the Holocaust!" doesn't fly, because there was nothing redeemable in that ideology to begin with. If we hadn't had *the* Holocaust, we would've had *a* Holocaust anyway. Nazism was the modern world's worst hangover, modernism's contrarian dead end, and must be buried for good.

That's why you should call a Nazi sympathizer a Nazi sympathizer. Don't give me that "nationalist" crap.

It's in a way unfair, yes, but fairness is the last thing that you should expect from Mr. History.

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Yeah, I also think that Putin's invasion is one (big) manifestation of the underlying political tectonic shift. It's been shifting slowly yet steadily rightward for years now.