Edited by cars ()
Larger und More Capable... Defeat nicht Deterrence... things are looking bright for democracy in Europe!!
drwhat posted:place your bets,
i shalt bet five Epic manbabies on these foreigners' blood, fwiggin goon sire
cars posted:wow; whoa, wondering if anyone's tried to contain Moscow with a billion-Reichsmark militarization of Germany before... the "enormous potential" of "smaller countries in Central and Eastern Europe" "leaning on" "German combat readiness" sounds like exactly the sort of Hyperloop® style innovation ve vant in zee Europa space
Larger und More Capable... Defeat nicht Deterrence... things are looking bright for democracy in Europe!!
there's been a massive push in anti-russia and anti-ussr stuff in german media like dw, over and above the usual, for about a year now, including ww2 revisionism and stuff about Ukraine basically prepping them for this kind of turn
cars posted:drwhat posted:place your bets,
i shalt bet five Epic manbabies on these foreigners' blood, fwiggin goon sire
you got me, i literally meant we should bet, i love gooning it up and can only process world events through references to american tv shows and memes and i wasn't just half-heartedly starting my middle of the night post trying to grapple rationally with tanks rolling through the towns my immediate family somewhat recently left due to previous wars and my extended family still tries to live in with a tiny sliver of lame levity so it wasn't just crying and raging. next time i'll make it a star trek reference so you aren't as bothered
tears posted:also i should point out that it is pretty fucked up that ukraine has accelerated into the nazi germany in retreat phase of barbarism where armbanded deputies with guns are setting up checkpoints and hunting for "saboteurs" blasting away at EMTs and executing people who speak with an accent.
now reached the stage of executing their own negotiators. wehrmacht energy
tears posted:what happened to all the 2006 "its just their culture" liberals?
very carefully 
"say what you want about zelenskyy, at least he kept the trains running on time"
I think the list of demands does help illustrate the contradictions of the West's "help" in a way that directly confronting people sometimes can't: getting people to consider for themselves why none of what they're asking for will happen even though it's entirely reasonable. Maybe there's value in that?
NATO's fantasy-land Fourth Reich version of politics can't actually produce working policies in Ukraine, which doesn't matter to NATO, they don't give a fuck if 50% of people in Ukraine die so long as it sends a message and NATO still has enough Nazis left over to run Gladio there for the next 10-20 years. NATO's aim is to install a weak, right-nationalist puppet government in Moscow, controlled from Brussels by all-strings-attached loans through "integrated" finance, the same way they did in Kiev.
So, NATO has no use for Ukrainians who aren't Nazis and actually suggest ideas of what might bring peace to the country, and to most of the people putting Ukrainian flags in their Twitter names, what Ukrainians have to say about their country sounds like they're speaking High Martian. Why would Donetsk and Luhansk need autonomy? Clearly United $naKKKe$ can just arm enough Nazis and they'll shoot all the Russian soldiers and then all the people who thought they opposed the Maidan coup will blink twice and become good Big Mac whiteys again.
cars posted:NATO's aim is to install a weak, right-nationalist puppet government in Moscow,
part of what makes them so comically angry is that this is the deal they thought they were getting with Putin. they keep trusting chauvinistic nationalists to prioritize washington's interests over their own clearly stated goals and the perpetual confusion when it blows up in their faces every single time is incredible
Meanwhile, Washington has deployed something we've discussed before on here: the cultivated confusion of U.S. propaganda audiences over Russia as a rival parliamentary-capitalist state—how can Russia be an anti-capitalist autocratic dictatorship, but also host private polling companies openly reporting rising and falling support for the country's president, tracking as anyone would expect, with every dip in support constantly re-purposed by the West as anti-Moscow propaganda...? That carefully compartmentalized confusion has now been weaponized over Donetsk and Luhansk and Moscow's policy concerning them. It defends against one of the bigger problems the U.S. bourgeoisie might face while hyper-militarizing Europe against Russia in the year to come: the risk that, in the eyes of voters wary to risk economic stability over shades of gray, Moscow's motives might start to make sense.
Because eastern Ukraine in 2014 was always going to fight back against the 2014 coup in Kiev, and Russian voters were always going to support that resistance overwhelmingly, because those on both sides of the Russia/Ukraine border saw themselves, accurately, as one and the same. The government in Moscow would have committed political suicide domestically if it had failed to recognize those areas as autonomous regions de facto (and later de jure, if Kiev's coup government lasted). Any hesitation would have been perceived by most Russian voters as United Russia abandoning their obligations to the literal kin of their voter base, and whichever fake Make-Russia-Great-Again movement secured swift financial backing from outside the country, cough cough, could mount a real challenge to United Russia by combining a "Who lost Crimea?" anti-platform with all that foreign money. (Election optional but not preferred.)
That was almost certainly part of the motivation behind the West funding and arming the "Maidan" coup, to put the Russian government in 2014 in the position of either (a) taking sides in the fracturing of post-coup Ukraine or (b) empowering by inaction some Maidan-like Western-funded opposition movement to seize power in Russia. The ideal result for Washington would have been (and still is) two new, weak, ostensibly "nationalist" satrap governments in Moscow and Kiev, played against each other through squabbles over rival mini-fascist ideologies and corresponding "Greater" territories in the East, but cynically controlled by a single power center to the West.
...Which is L i t e r a l l y the Nazi playbook from World War II for Eastern Europe—disappear the nationalists, prop up the "nationalists", and recast national feuds between your satrapies as shadow plays that don't interfere with their masters' wider goals. It's why there's been such a desperate attempt by Washington, London, Brussels, etc., to fake-it-till-they-make-it with Navalny, who is just the latest in a long line of quasi-"Russian nationalist" Nazi NATO Muppets to disappoint his paymasters by remaining, at least to this point, roundly despised by the Russian nation.
drwhat posted:it all sucks. please excuse my outburst earlier.
cars posted:Because eastern Ukraine in 2014 was always going to fight back against the 2014 coup in Kiev, and Russian voters were always going to support that resistance overwhelmingly, because those on both sides of the Russia/Ukraine border saw themselves, accurately, as one and the same. The government in Moscow would have committed political suicide domestically if it had failed to recognize those areas as autonomous regions de facto (and later de jure, if Kiev's coup government lasted). Any hesitation would have been perceived by most Russian voters as United Russia abandoning their obligations to the literal kin of their voter base
speak of the Devil...........
Western propaganda is now moving directly to preempt the above from becoming part of the conversation:
..........very clumsy implementation here though, slapping together "Put-Insane is killing his own people" with "Even Hitler's glorious Reich was defending pure Germanic blood," which, as you can see, got this post extremely Ratioed. (They always try for that second one, "Even Hitler...", for Saddam Hussein, for Bashar al-Assad, etc., and it never works, and they always have to walk it back in public.)
So it's an own goal for the West's propaganda here, but they'll probably keep trying for "Putin is in Ukraine to kill Russians," because eventually, know-it-alls in the Western press will start bringing up how most Russians want Putin to intervene to defend what they see as Russians in Ukraine, people in Ukraine who see THEMSELVES as Russians, and that particular propaganda line heads that off at the pass.
online is captivated by footage of broken down vehicles, molotov making classes and various shoulder mounted attacks on tanks. how can they be so naive. like.... have you seen what armoured warfare with artillery and air support is like?
tears posted:shouldn't be surprised since the average online person lives in harry potter world but how do so many people think that ukraine is winning this war? or even inflicting significant losses on the russian army? russian army has stalled? stalled against what? an aggressive counterattack? counter encirclement? break-outs and repositions?
online is captivated by footage of broken down vehicles, molotov making classes and various shoulder mounted attacks on tanks. how can they be so naive. like.... have you seen what armoured warfare with artillery and air support is like?
You are correct on all points, but I think e.g. western military experts expected Russia to do better. The Georgia war set a pretty high bar.
tears posted:shouldn't be surprised since the average online person lives in harry potter world but how do so many people think that ukraine is winning this war? or even inflicting significant losses on the russian army? russian army has stalled? stalled against what? an aggressive counterattack? counter encirclement? break-outs and repositions?
online is captivated by footage of broken down vehicles, molotov making classes and various shoulder mounted attacks on tanks. how can they be so naive. like.... have you seen what armoured warfare with artillery and air support is like?
people are only seeing the ukrainian/western side of things, and also don't know anything about armoured warfare or that it might take a little while to subdue a country of 40 million people, would be my guess.
lo posted:tears posted:shouldn't be surprised since the average online person lives in harry potter world but how do so many people think that ukraine is winning this war? or even inflicting significant losses on the russian army? russian army has stalled? stalled against what? an aggressive counterattack? counter encirclement? break-outs and repositions?
online is captivated by footage of broken down vehicles, molotov making classes and various shoulder mounted attacks on tanks. how can they be so naive. like.... have you seen what armoured warfare with artillery and air support is like?people are only seeing the ukrainian/western side of things, and also don't know anything about armoured warfare or that it might take a little while to subdue a country of 40 million people, would be my guess.
thinking about writing a normal answer but instead writing more fuel for the importance of domain specific knowledge knowledge in reasoning and understanding, over harry potter world's domain general intelligence as a dominant factor.
Friction is the only conception which, in a general way, corresponds to that which distinguishes real war from war on paper. The military machine, the army and all belonging to it, is in fact simple; and appears, on this account, easy to manage. But let us reflect that no part of it is in one piece, that it is composed entirely of individuals, each of which keeps up its own friction in all directions. Theoretically all sounds very well; the commander of a battalion is responsible for the execution of the order given; and as the battalion by its discipline is glued together into one piece, and the chief must be a man of acknowledged zeal, the beam turns on an iron pin with little friction. But it is not so in reality, and all that is exaggerated and false in such a conception manifests itself at once in war. The battalion always remains composed of a number of men, of whom, if chance so wills, the most insignificant is able to occasion delay, and even irregularity. The danger which war brings with it, the bodily exertions which it requires, augment this evil so much, that they may be regarded as the greatest causes of it.
This enormous friction, which is not concentrated, as in mechanics, at a few points, is therefore everywhere brought into contact with chance, and thus facts take place upon which it was impossible to calculate, their chief origin being chance, As an instance of one such chance, take the weather. Here, the fog prevents the enemy from being discovered in time, a battery from firing at the right moment, a report from reaching the general; there, the rain prevents a battalion from arriving, another from reaching in right time, because, instead of three, it had to march perhaps eight hours; the cavalry from charging effectively because it is stuck fast in heavy ground.
These are only a few incidents of detail by way of elucidation, that the reader may be able to follow the author, for whole volumes might be written on these difficulties. To avoid this, and still to give a clear conception of the host of small difficulties to be contended with in war, we might go on heaping up illustrations, if we were not afraid of being tiresome. But those who have already comprehended us will permit us to add a few more.
Activity in war is movement in a resistant medium. Just as a man in water is unable to perform with ease and regularity the most natural and simplest movement, that of walking, so in war, with ordinary powers, one cannot keep even the line of mediocrity. This is the reason that the correct theorist is like a swimming master, who teaches on dry land movements which are required in the water, which must appear grotesque and ludicrous to those who forget about the water. This is also why theorists, who have never plunged in themselves, or who cannot deduce any generalities from their experience, are unpractical and even absurd, because they only teach what every one knows—how to walk.
Fun fact it is now impossible for me (ISP related?) to navigate to www.rt.com via google chrome (403 errors) but firefox works fine