i always forget about these things
Edited by Constantignoble ()
The Russian missile attacks that killed at least 19 people across Ukraine on Monday were wide-ranging, but they were not as deadly as they could have been. That has renewed questions over the quality of Russia’s weapons. https://t.co/2rU5HIfReP
— New York Times World (@nytimesworld) October 11, 2022
In any case it’s good to note it here as a form of collective memory, because in another month or so, either the Western propaganda apparatus will move on from this ploy to something else, or it will have transferred the same language onto a new event and started behaving like that was the original use of it in the context of this war, since amnesia is the whole point here.
One interesting thing about all of it since the Kiev truck bomb though is that it’s been a surprisingly aggressive demonstration of how there are essentially no dupes left in the U.S. press anymore on any foreign policy issue whatsoever.
Like, of course they all know they’re being lied to, and so on, but that’s not even necessary really, nowadays they all put on their little soldier helmets and see their role as the destruction of the enemy of Washington by any means, a multi-target repeat of their Cold War position against the perceived unity of “the Communist world”. The “reporters” could be told the full truth and they’d immediately ask, Okay, but what’s the line this week, though? What should we actually tell our audience? So everything that was previously done actively against Palestine, Iran, Korea, etc., in the U.S. press as a form of conscious racism explicit for and specific to each country targeted, now applies to every other country in the entire world. U.S. journalists now fully see themselves as an honorary kids’-club branch of the U.S. military, in other words.
And again, not hard for us to see that here, but I feel it’s heavily facilitated by how the actual engaged audience in the English-language world for any “reporting” on these topics has dwindled year over year.
The growing U.S. military and intelligence agencies offload the cognitive work of propaganda on the shrinking English-language press, and they, in turn, offload it onto their shrinking audience, many of whom only tune in to feel the twice-removed vicarious thrill of deceiving themselves “for a good cause”.
cars posted:Does anyone think Russia blew up its own gas pipeline? No,
i have some bad news for you, friend
Peentis posted:Are we all going to die under a rain of nuclear hellfire? Just checking the room.
i don't think so :)
i also live and work relatively near airbases so it doesn't really concern me too much. not my problem
kornfan posted:have begun posting in the Something Is Awful dot com C-SPAM subforum Ukraine thread as an act of self-harm
in the interests of your mental and probably physical health i must ask you not to do this
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/10/26/russias-military-keynesianism posted:Looking at all these developments, we see something like military Keynesianism taking shape in Russia. Millions of Russians who are either mobilised to fight in Ukraine, employed in reconstruction or in the military industry, or participating in the suppression of unrest in the occupied territories and at home, or are family members, have turned into direct beneficiaries of the war.
Among other things, this means the emergence of a positive feedback loop that did not really exist before. The Russian ruling elite started the war to pursue its own interests and it managed to get only ritual and passive support from the Russian population.
However, this redistribution of state wealth through the military effort is creating a new basis for more active and conscious support within a significant section of Russian society, which now has a material stake in the conflict.
...
Russian military Keynesianism contrasts sharply with the Ukrainian government’s decision to stick to neoliberal dogmas of privatisation, lowering taxes and extreme labour deregulation, despite the objective imperatives of the war economy. Some top-notch Western economists have even recommended to Ukraine policies that constitute what British historian Adam Tooze has termed “warfare without the state”.
In a long war of attrition, such policies leave Ukraine even more dependent not only on Western weapons but also on the steady flow of Western money to sustain the Ukrainian economy.
i read some other article a little while ago that i can't find just now, but it basically put forward the idea that for russia to sustain a longer war they'd need to appeal to the population in a broader way than they have so far, which would probably include appeals to the soviet era coupled with some level of increased state support for services and so on. which is not too distant from what they actually seem to be doing now. but obviously if they're introducing a lot of state support for people that also carries risks for the government because people might then quite logically start demanding actual socialism, which could grow into a larger movement with its own momentum. so it's an interesting development.
lo posted:i thought this was kind of interesting, it's about how russia is restructuring their economy in a way that invests the population much more in the war effort and potentially means that they could sustain a much longer war. and at the end he notes that the ukrainians are doing almost the opposite thing by pushing imf friendly austerity which will increase their dependence on western guns(and presumably piss off the population too ofc).
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/10/26/russias-military-keynesianism posted:Looking at all these developments, we see something like military Keynesianism taking shape in Russia. Millions of Russians who are either mobilised to fight in Ukraine, employed in reconstruction or in the military industry, or participating in the suppression of unrest in the occupied territories and at home, or are family members, have turned into direct beneficiaries of the war.
Among other things, this means the emergence of a positive feedback loop that did not really exist before. The Russian ruling elite started the war to pursue its own interests and it managed to get only ritual and passive support from the Russian population.
However, this redistribution of state wealth through the military effort is creating a new basis for more active and conscious support within a significant section of Russian society, which now has a material stake in the conflict.
...
Russian military Keynesianism contrasts sharply with the Ukrainian government’s decision to stick to neoliberal dogmas of privatisation, lowering taxes and extreme labour deregulation, despite the objective imperatives of the war economy. Some top-notch Western economists have even recommended to Ukraine policies that constitute what British historian Adam Tooze has termed “warfare without the state”.
In a long war of attrition, such policies leave Ukraine even more dependent not only on Western weapons but also on the steady flow of Western money to sustain the Ukrainian economy.
i read some other article a little while ago that i can't find just now, but it basically put forward the idea that for russia to sustain a longer war they'd need to appeal to the population in a broader way than they have so far, which would probably include appeals to the soviet era coupled with some level of increased state support for services and so on. which is not too distant from what they actually seem to be doing now. but obviously if they're introducing a lot of state support for people that also carries risks for the government because people might then quite logically start demanding actual socialism, which could grow into a larger movement with its own momentum. so it's an interesting development.
The demand never went away, they've been demanding it since it was dismantled and it's taken a great deal of manipulation to keep communists out of power, most famously with completely fraudulent 'election' of Yeltsin courtesy of the CIA. The prospects for communist revival have definitely improved though with how conditions have been shaping up
aerdil posted:so has russia or nato won yet?
The battle? Yes. The war? It renames to be scene.
I realize Mark's monocle isn't actually flying across the table over this but it's funny yeah
reaping what they sow
dimashq posted:Literally the best-case scenario is that 100% of the guns fall into the hands of a basically unknown amount of soldiers, the large and vocal majority of whom believe that Jewish people are meant to be exterminated and an Aryan nation established in eastern Europe, and the other half are frightened, apolitical teenagers, and then to what end?
The blowback is going to be so hard. When some disaffected Azovite blows a 747 out of the sky as it’s ascending to altitude out of an international airport in Western Europe using an American javelin what are European liberals even going to say. That it was unforeseeable when they turned an entire region with a porous border practically next to Germany into another Syria just to appease American capital? With that and the impending financial blowback, heads are going to roll, literally. This will be the qualitative shift in the reformation of a independent, and militant German imperialism.
https://thegrayzone.com/2022/11/15/blowback-italian-azov-tied-nazi-terror/
cars posted:reaping what they sow
Really wonder what Zelenskyy's angle here is. They already have the full commitment and the strings-attached money spigot from the West. Why defy their propaganda line? Is it one of those things he has to do to court hardliners within the country? 'court' as in 'not get murdered by', i guess lmao
realsubtle posted:cars posted:reaping what they sow
Really wonder what Zelenskyy's angle here is. They already have the full commitment and the strings-attached money spigot from the West. Why defy their propaganda line?
truly truly i tell you: the best place to be in a nuclear war is right under the first bomb
tears posted:the best place to be in a nuclear war is right under the first bomb
you always hear about the leaflet campaigns before the bombings of japan but i don't recall ever hearing about exactly how much notice those leaflets gave. according to this timeline the leaflets arrived in hiroshima one day before the bomb.
i don't know why i still let myself be surprised by this stuff
edit: i misread which bomb it was talking about but that makes it a little puzzling; seems to be saying that nagasaki didn't get its leaflets until the day after its bombing? and hiroshima might not have been one of the cities originally warned by the earlier lemay leaflets? sure, why not. truly, i did not learn a single fact in the amerikan school system
Edited by Constantignoble ()
realsubtle posted:Is it one of those things he has to do to court hardliners within the country? 'court' as in 'not get murdered by', i guess lmao
👆
To those Nazis and their bourgeois backers in the Kiev legislature, exercising disproportionate power over other parties through the implied threat of the Nazi gangs' public-private NATO armories, the guy's just a Jewish mask they're wearing to con the Elders of Zion into global race war. (And obviously that's not accurate, Zelensky's main constituency has always been the U.S./Euro-cracker austerity bourgeoisie... but these are Nazis we're talking about, who are not particularly rational types when seduced by the death drive, especially when the Nazis are the self-loathing Slav kind.)
And should Zelensky take a bullet in the back... Ukraine's Nazis know the NATO faux-grassroots propaganda machine would, at least, fall into disarray for a few days while the Nazis installed another "wartime leader"... and it's entirely possible the NATO shills would immediately ADOPT the turn-of-last-year Dolchstoßlegende, while denying all the way down that it has anything to do with antisemitism. These NATO-land left-liberals have been trained for years now to look right at white-power Nazi tattoos and jewelry all over Kiev's armed forces and loudly deny that it means anything at all, just some fun swastika-looking stuff for giggles. And yeah, Ukraine's Nazis are giggling about Zelensky all right... but they're not laughing WITH their "friends" in the West...
The Brussels/London/Washington types think this witch-coven far-right contagion, drunk on the cup of Thanatos and busily beating Roma senseless within Ukraine's war zones, is a temporary means to an end, one they have well in hand—a funny way to think about a contagion, that the best way to control it is to carry it around in your hands.
And controlling this contagion in the future, containing the problem they're creating, all these death-cult, antisemite, nationalist lunatics in Ukraine and Poland and Slovakia and so on, and all the NATO weapons they're stockpiling and selling and pointing at their neighbors and their own countries...? The Washington/London plan for all that, to take up arms against a sea of neo-Prometheism and goofy new Volhynia Experiments...
the West's plan is... to arm Berlin again, accelerating a previously corralled Germany into a "peace-keeping" role to its East, funding its rapid re-expansion into an independent and aggressive military power as a quick-fix counterbalance to Moscow. At some point you just have to shrug and ask of them, "What do you expect will be different this time around?"
https://jackmurphywrites.com/169/the-cias-sabotage-campaign-inside-russia/ posted:The CIA is using a European NATO ally’s spy service to conduct a covert sabotage campaign inside Russia under the agency’s direction, according to former U.S. intelligence and military officials.
The campaign involves long standing sleeper cells that the allied spy service has activated to hinder Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine by waging a secret war behind Russian lines.
Years in the planning, the campaign is responsible for many of the unexplained explosions and other mishaps that have befallen the Russian military industrial complex since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February, according to three former U.S. intelligence officials, two former U.S. military officials and a U.S. person who has been briefed on the campaign. The former officials declined to identify specific targets for the CIA-directed campaign, but railway bridges, fuel depots and power plants in Russia have all been damaged in unexplained incidents since the Kremlin launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February.
While no American personnel are involved on the ground in Russia in the execution of these missions, agency paramilitary officers are commanding and controlling the operations, according to two former intelligence officials and a former military official. The paramilitary officers are assigned to the CIA’s Special Activities Center but detailed to the agency’s European Mission Center, said the two former intelligence officials. Using an allied intelligence service to give the CIA an added layer of plausible deniability was an essential factor in U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to approve the strikes, according to a former U.S. special operations official.
...
The NATO ally’s campaign overseen by the CIA is only one of several covert operations efforts being undertaken by Western nations in Russia, according to two former U.S. special operations officials. Alarmed by Russia’s February invasion, other European intelligence services have activated long-dormant resistance networks in their own countries, who in turn have been running operatives into Russia to create chaos without CIA help, according to a former U.S. military official. In addition, as has been widely reported, Ukrainian intelligence and special operations forces are running their own operations behind Russian lines.
basic points
1. ukraine does not have and will not be able develop an organic capacity to properly contest offensives
2. wagner is far more well-equipped and resourced than western media will acknowledge
3. low-level corruption in ukrainian armed forces/paramilitary is sapping resources far more than western media will acknowledge
4. russia's mobilisation has allowed more force rotation and their top-down push logistical model, for all its faults, is allowing constant tactical initiative on the russian side
5. ukrainian forces mirror the russian's practice of violent blocking/cohesion units, basically un-addressed in western media
etc. pretty much what you'd expect unless you have the misfortune of watching the telly
