Random Rant Thread

[miscmisc]

Honestly I have no idea what it is although it's very clearly a project by some ultra-nationalist creeps in Croatia, and won't even look it up, but strangely, Kevin Spacey playing Franjo Tudjman as Frank Underwood for money makes all the sense in the world. Somehow it does.

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Found the biggest moron in the UK, and it's that one, her.

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It's really as simple as this. A good short thread.

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As horrible as it might sound, I suspect that the Ukrainian government wanted the Azov guys "martyred" in Mariupol, meaning getting killed in combat, to avoid the situation where they get captured alive by the Russians and used for all kinds of propaganda purposes. Most of them *are* neo-Nazi after all.

And those guys kept saying for weeks that anyone who surrenders or even retreats is a traitor, and that they are willing to die to defend "White Europe" against the "Asiatic Russian Orcs".

And now, Zelensky "ordered" them to "evacuate". Oh, really. I guess they realized that they want to live after all.

[miscmisc]

And:

How Many Jews Fought at Mariupol's Azovstal Plant? Depends Who's Counting
An aide to Ukrainian President Zelenskyy said there were about ‘40 Jewish heroes’ fighting in one of the Ukraine war's most epic battles, but others wonder if there was even one Jew at the site prior to Monday’s evacuation of the Mariupol plant
www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/.premium-how-many-jews-fought-at-mariupol-s-azovstal-plant-depends-who-s-counting-1.10804785

See, lies tend to snowball. We wouldn't have this information/propaganda mess if they hadn't lied about the neo-Nazi guys to begin with, and by "they" I don't mean the Ukrainian government - who of course lies about a lot of stuff, it's a war, what else would you expect - but the Western media.

Most of the Azov guys are very standard neo-Nazi. Just deal with it.

That doesn't mean that they should be slaughtered by the Russians, or that Ukraine is ruled by Nazis. The Azov guys are great fighters, and in ANY war you tend to rely a lot on ideologically questionable people. That's a dirty face of war.

No matte what, a neo-Nazi is a neo-Nazi, as a jihadi is a jihadi. And stupid propaganda is stupid propaganda, whether it's for Ukraine or Syria.

[miscmisc]

It's hilarious that the Nato think tank types who played up the Russian threat for years are now "baffled" and find it "inexplicable" that Russia has been so incompetent in this war not only on the battlegrounds but also in the so-called "cyber space".

Does it ever occur to them that they simply bought their own bullshit? Like Russia being this hyper-cyber-electronic-death-star-machine which can paralyze your public system online pronto and have a bunch of Armata roll into your city any day now?

Just give me a break.

[miscmisc]

And of course the most frustrating thing is that the general public seem to think that those people have been vindicated, just because Putin was foolish enough to invade Ukraine, when in truth the opposite has happened.

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Every new study shows that the immunity that an Omicron infection gives you is a fucking joke. It's weak to begin with and awfully variant-specific, and wanes in several months, sometimes a few months. As Omicron mutates at such a rapid pace, you can get reinfected over and over and over again until the kingdom comes.

[lero]

May 12, 2022 8:37:43 GMT 1 miscmisc said:

Amazing. When unions take off and gain momentum, they grow very quickly. The Starbucks union seems to be no exception.

[miscmisc]

I'm sure that's supposed to be clever or something.

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We all know you are in the business of mincing words, but you're talking to a Brooklynite, Chuck.

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To be honest, I don't think Russia has been particularly "incompetent" in the so-called second phase. The fundamental problem is that military invasion is very, very hard, and there simply aren't enough infantry for Russia.

OK, launching an offensive without having sufficient manpower screams "incompetent" all right. But people are acting like Russia has been so powerless that Ukraine will be able to counter-attack and take back the Donbas any day now.

We've been bombarded with tweets and TikTok videos where Russians make a complete ass of themselves, but we don't know anything about the situation on the Ukrainian side because of the total information blackout. There's clearly massive information imbalance out there, but even the so-called OSINT analysts seem to overestimate the capabilities on the Ukrainian side, and underestimate how much damage Russia can *still* inflict on the Ukrainian military.

I'm pretty sure that the Ukrainian casualties have been horrific in this "phase" given the sheer volume of Russian artillery attacks. I shudder to think how it would be now without the massive Western supplies. It's not going well for Russia for sure, but it hasn't been a picnic for Ukraine either. Let's not pretend that we really understand what's going on when one side of the coin is nearly invisible due to the information blockade.

[miscmisc]

Some people have criticized me for *not* understanding that the general mobilization is not only politically super hard for Putin, but also actually impractical since, well, the Russian Federation is not the Soviet Union. The Russian society is just not ready for such mobilization unlike the USSR.

I mean, duh if you put it simply this way, but yeah, I was wrong. Or to be more precise, I made the very mistake that I have accused many of making, namely mixing up Russia and the Soviet Union in a pretty lazy way.

So, Russia will have to mobilize a lot more men without the general mobilization. And it does seem that they have been quietly paving the way for that.

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Artillery is the king. We knew it was very important, but still underestimated its importance.

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I hope more people will realize that Timothy Snyder is not a serious intellectual. It makes me feel sad to see people whom I respect and even admire say that Bloodlands is a great book. It's anything but. There's only a very thin line between him and a propagandist.

Rob Lee is absolutely right there, whereas Snyder is talking nonsense as usual.