These are the people who call themselves the adults in the room and say you’re only left-wing because you don’t have enough life experience.

Neither were cowards, both corrupt war machines started to break down when the flow of US money dried up. It has nothing to do with individual bravery, everything to do with a puppet state being cut off after it proved insufficient for our needs

These motherfuckers need materialism

fight for their own freedom.

“Freedom” once again just means “Western rule”.

Pretty sure it makes very little difference for the average Ukrainian whether wholesome100 Cpt Zelenskyy or evil Putler is in charge of their government. Russians are not any less “free” than Ukrainians, if anything, their freedoms are limited by Western sanctions and being banned from participating in international competitions.

They’d probably die after their nearest Supermarket closed down and they could no longer use their phone or computer.

Cowardice is when you don’t get down and grovel for your American masters

Wow this rivals “an outbreak of gratitude among the Iraqi people” as one of the things someone can say to get themselves Disney fastpassed instantly to the front of the wall line

Jesus christ

or just like a big hole in the ground

not cowards like the people of Afghanistan

I don’t know how you could look at the modern history of Afghanistan and not think that Afghan people are brave to the point of insanity.

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“The slavic brainpan is predisposed towards human wave attacks and death” is…certainly a take to have

what story goes like that? what the fuck are they talking about?

But that’s how the Russians fight according to the nazis the Russians beat!! Nazis wouldn’t LIEEEEE?!?!

You mean that’s not how it works? Why would Nazis lie…

Every war is literally a sacrifice lol. Whether the war is cynical or for defense or for revolution, your purpose as a soldier is to sacrifice yourself if necessary, and your purpose as a commander is to efficiently sacrifice your soldiers.

When you kick in the door but the whole rotted structure doesn’t collapse

Meanwhile, it has barely made a dent in the wests finances.

How long do you think it’ll take liberals to figure out that derivatives and oil futures don’t translate into ammunition and rations if you outsourced all your factories?

What I hate is most people don’t seem to realise it’s not only about Ukraine. Letting Russia win opens a whole other can of worms. Do we really want authoritarian powers with imperialistic ambitions around the world to think they can just invade what they want and wait until the West gets tired?

WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK THE LAST THIRTY GODDAMN YEARS OF MILITARY CAMPAIGNS BOMBING AND OCCUPATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST WERE – IF THERE IS A STANDARD WE SET IT

imperialistic ambitions

Libs always say this about Russia but Putin has been at the helm for a long time, like 25 years. In that time the war in Ukraine is really the only major conflict Russia has been involved in - the rest has been operations in places like Dagestan or Chechnya which may or may not have been justified, idk. Russia has displayed zero “imperialistic ambitions”.

Now compare that to totally not imperialist USA, who had started unprovoked, major wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya in that same time frame.

Russia is the fastest growing economy in Europe.

Source? I couldn’t find anything that backs this up

Do we really want authoritarian powers with imperialistic ambitions around the world to think they can just invade what they want and wait until the West gets tired?

Biden said the same thing during a UN speech. I cannot and will not take these people seriously, even if i truly wanted to.

Meanwhile, it has barely made a dent in the wests finances.

… what? This entire comment has to be a joke right.

Pure vibes, stated wrongly and with supreme confidence

One of the worst aspects of places like R*ddit is their use of political analogy in the place of political analysis.

Obviously some of the most egregious offences are when people do like Harry Potter fanfic or whatever (e.g. Joe Biden is Harry Potter, Kamala Harris is Hermione, and Trump is Voldemort… that kind of bullshit) but the second worst is when they do pop-history political analogy.

No, Napoleon doesn’t have any direct bearing on the current war in the Ukraine and no matter how closely you retcon major political or military figures into a superficial match with major figures today it won’t make your analysis any more sound, let alone any more true.

This isn’t the Soviet intervention into Afghanistan. This isn’t one of the wars in Iraq. This isn’t the same as a box office smash hit movie which you love and have seen half a dozen times.

If you want to draw upon history for some analysis of the war in the Ukraine, I would point you to the Syrian civil war because there you will see Russia’s modern military tactics on display and this would be a sound basis for developing an understanding of Russia’s military tactics in the Ukraine. It’s not a surefire 1:1 match and it’s never going to be but it’s where I think any credible person would start (aside from any fairly recent Russian war game tactics.)

But that’s nowhere near as compelling and it doesn’t have the aura of gripping narratives and silver screen treats in the way that this cheap political analogy has. Discussing troop movements and artillery positions and the names of contemporary Russian generals is dry af and almost nobody is actually going to listen if you’re talking about that stuff.

I know the whole “Reddit hivemind” trope is completely played out by now but there’s a grain of truth to it. Mainstream Reddit subs are particularly bad at this alt-present narrative scripting as a stand in for reality that gets elevated into something widely celebrated across that site (and all those sycophantic comments that come to bask in the upvotes are a part of this phenomenon.)

this is why i try to disagree on here when i see something i disagree with

What’s that old pre-wojak meme, Like a Sir? Whenever redditors talk about a Designated Bad Country, I always imagine like 6 or 7 of those guys sitting around a table

This is what your brain looks like on worms

The concept to read up on is “hyper-reality”.

In short, signals and signs become confused with the reality they signify.

perhaps an absolute greater loss as well.

There’s no perhaps. Russia has had air superiority and 10:1 shell advantage for over a year. Russian losses are around 40,000 while Ukrainian losses are around 400,000. Russia retreats and gives up territory to preserve lives, Ukraine clings to every bit of territory and lost more in their suicidal offensive than Russia has lost during the whole war

Like the goal of toppling the midan regime fell flat

I’d say this is between “jury’s still out” and “yet.” Assuming an independent Ukrainian government makes it through the war at all (likely, but not guaranteed), it’s going to see massive changes as a result of (1) losing a bunch of territory and a war, and (2) having the Zelensky government “lose” the foreign military support on which it is entirely dependent.

It also seems the primary goal was not necessarily to topple the Maidan regime, but to keep Ukraine out of NATO. Russia negotiated with the current government at the start of the war, and absent NATO intervention would have seemingly reached a peace agreement with it.

This war isn’t great for Russia, I highly doubt they were like “Yeah! We want a 2 year long slog that has serious trade ramifications for us!!!” But the idea that are losing or lost is silly.

I doubt that this is their ideal scenario but I also doubt that this isn’t inside their reasonable range of expectations. Military planners are by nature pessimists because the optimists end up planning shit like Barbarossa and then having to shoot themselves in disgrace.

I’m thinking about the “Government in Exile” industry and I’m thinking you’re right.

The real Vietnam Syndrome

“We killed [made up number of Russians] but lost the land and any strategic goal, you call that a loss???”

I came to terms with this a year ago tbh

They’ve been planning for this eventuality since the beginning. Remember that “Kiev in 3 days” was made up by an American general from the start of this armed conflict. The Western media will simply say that Russia wanted to take over all of Ukraine and overrun Europe but the brave sacrifice of your tax dollars (and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians… Whatever) stopped the Russian horde with on the sacrifice of a small amount of Ukrainian territory.

It’s essentially the Finnish Winter War myth writ large.

I’m here for it

“As the Russian Army approaches Lvov, here’s how Ukraine can still win.”

You’ll become accustomed to this playbook and you’ll get jaded very quickly.

As a rule of thumb, the best default position is to take the opposite of whatever the US tells you about other countries. It’s not guaranteed to be the correct position but you’ll be on a better footing than if you go with it.

Anyway back to the playbook thing, you see the US State Department issuing their ideological positions - these are the bad guys, these are the good guys, this is a threat to peace/democracy/the gays/America, this is our ally.

This message filters down to political pundits and think tanks and news outlets and similar organisations that are effectively ideological apparatuses of the state.

This then filters down to commentators (e.g. Lazerpig, China watchers, R*ddit armchair experts).

Finally, this filters down to the long-form cultural content like movies and TV shows which take longer to produce than some shitty opinion piece or a dudebro yakking into a mic while livestreaming a video game.

The order that this flows in can change somewhat but that’s how it typically goes.

The intensity of the messaging also determines how much gets filtered down to the lower levels. For example, not that I keep up with modern gaming or movies or TV, but I’d be really surprised if we saw much in the way of Venezuela/Maduro being posed as the bad guy in media (or stuff coded to be Maduro/Venezuela). China, on the other hand…

So if you look back over media from history you’ll get little tips of the hand to whoever was the current villain of the hour. Sometimes it’s coded fairly heavily (e.g. the original Predator movie being about SE Asia, and specifically Vietnam) and sometimes it’s blatant (e.g. Back To The Future [the first one, I think?] where Libya is posed as a minor antagonistic force and a major nuclear and terroristic threat to the entire world - in a scene previous to the one linked I think there’s discussion about how they acquired plutonium from the Libyans.)

Obviously games like Call Of Duty and shows like Homeland are really heavy-handed with it and so it’s much easier to identify the messaging but even in comedy movies and stuff like children’s TV shows you’ll find these messages peppered in. But basically it’s just one long chain of stenograghy that spans the breadth of western media consumption.

When you see the same message across US government press releases, newspapers, TV shows, commentators, games, movies etc. then it’s a really good indication that this is coming straight out of the stenograghy apparatus.

One thing that’s bitterly funny to watch in this, as this same pattern repeats over and over again, is when you get those moments where there’s a big inversion or reversal of the good guys and the bad guys.

One of the most obvious examples is Reagan in the whitehouse pictured meeting with the Mujahedeen, many of whom would later go on to form the Taliban, Rambo being dedicated to the Mujahedeen, and that infamous New York Times article touting Osama Bin Laden as a freedom fighter. Obviously somewhere along the way, things took a sharp turn.

I wasn’t alive for it but there would almost certainly have been the same media flip-flopping with Saddam Hussein back around the time of the first Gulf War because he was actually once considered to be somewhat of a US puppet - Bill Hicks touched on this in one of his routines. I would expect the same sort of thing happened with Noriega back in the day as well.

Of course, in recent times we have the small blips on the media radar about the Azov Battalion and Right Sector et al., who were represented accurately as fascist paramilitaries but then suddenly when the Ukraine war started that narrative was dropped and all of that stuff disappeared down the memory hole and suddenly these fascist (often former) paramilitaries who openly wear Nazi symbols and fly the UPA flag are actually just noble freedom fighters now.

Of course the villain is always weak and destined to lose while also carrying out outrageous atrocities (that the US and its allies definitely aren’t carrying out themselves at the same time, promise!!) but you’ll see it switch - it’s Hamas at the moment and it’s very likely we’ll see more attention on Hezbollah/Lebanon and especially Iran because of this but Yemen is also going to be in the sights too. Of course yesterday it was Russia, and the day before that it was Syria, and the day before that was Belarus, and the day before that it was Venezuela… China is a mainstay these days and over time I only expect that to trend upwards overall but there will need to be a lull in the interrupting villain of the moment before we will resume our scheduled program of Chiner Bad!!