Rephrasing a common quote - talk is cheap, that’s why I talk a lot.
It’s a double joke, it’s literally an adaptation of a Russian meme of “I is simple Russian worker Ivan from city Tver, we very respect mighty jade rod comrade Xi, every week we discuss achievements of Chinese leader and communist party, a hit”, roughly translating the grammar.
https://pikabu.ru/story/ya_prostoy_rabochiy_ivan_iz_gorod_tver_8094383
^that kind
That’s not bad, but might ignore the factors of madness and despair and plain arrogance. Sort of like WWII shouldn’t have started, and shouldn’t have prolonged once it started, and then there were plenty of points where it made sense to stop for all involved.
There already is, it seems. Just people bombing them are not the west.
But yes, in the end result what Putin’s propaganda voices were saying turns out to be correct. Not in case of Ukraine during the war (that’s war propaganda, it’s always crazy), but before it.
I have a pet conspiracy theory, if you wish:
Either they are this inept or they don’t need Ukraine as an equal ally, and see it being weakened as a good outcome. I don’t think a group of nations still making up the world’s economic and technological leadership can be this inept. So Ukraine is seen as an enemy best weakened.
They can’t expect Ukraine to attack them, that would be crazy. Or to ally with their adversaries, it doesn’t have many options. Meaning there’s something brewing with the western nations preparing to piss off a loosely defined group of nations, including Ukraine. Piss off so significantly that weakening it is a good idea.
So the conspiracy theory would be that the west intends to start “WW3: Nuclear drone boogaloo” soon enough. Because their dictatorial, aggressive and in general very bad enemies are not hurrying with this, and are doing just fine winning economically. And the war must start and result in the victory of those most deserving, that is, those with the best global military logistics and the biggest nuclear arsenals.
The war has gone on for 3+ years, and it still has two participant nations, with “Ukraine’s allies and friends standing with it” nowhere in sight. No western soldiers dying, but Ukrainian soldiers dying, - it’s a demonstration of values too.
Other than that any real war treats fit men as a resource. Such a flight will happen in any country at war with conscription, when its population knows what war is.
A functional military doesn’t do superman shit, it doesn’t have irreplaceable heroes and it doesn’t use smarts. It’s a pipeline. Nobody wants to be fed to it if they can avoid that.
Most of all - those Europeans cheering how they “stand with Ukraine”. But they haven’t been taught to keep their fucking mouth shut about standing with anyone if they are writing comments and that someone is under bombs.
So I thought before 2020 that western values are “if we have the same idea of good, we die for you, you die for us”, even if I wasn’t sure if anyone really shares that, I thought the western public kinda remembers something of that.
Then war in Artsakh happened, and I understood all about western values, western ability to keep their word they chose to give, western honor and what will happen with all that. Just all thieves and cowards, who seem civilized by inertia from robbing half the world. The economic and demographic dynamics show that this won’t happen again.
Well, not only western, but in general, it turned out that for most Russians alliances matter nothing if the other side is some people who “disrespect them” - how nice, yes, so if I don’t like how a Russian talks, I have the right to not pay them for work or deny them, say, a floating jacket when they are drowning … ah, oops, it’s different, “too much honor for some kebab makers” - that was said by a person for all supposedly good in Russia, against Putin and such, about alliance obligations. These people don’t even understand that fulfilling obligations and being decent people is all about their own honor, and if something is “too much honor” for someone, you shouldn’t give your word.
So - for Ukrainians it was naturally easier to believe in some “western values” because the west was seemingly helping them, and saying many nice things.
But I think now they are done with that.
We’ll have a world where all the politics will function after Conrad von Wallenstein’s army, because to restore understanding of honor you should first impress with all the weight upon humanity, in practice and thoroughly, what role honor fulfills.
No model is absolutely precise, and no pyramid of modelling to avoid full cost will rid you of need for real feedback. That works for everything in history.
in a capitalist system, psychopathy is more evolved because you get to climb the corporate ladder faster.
Which is why street youth crime in USSR was almost hierarchical - all territory was divided between gangs, their culture was almost commonly accepted, their leaders were well known to everyone living in their territory and the militia, and so on. And miraculously all that crap started receding when USSR ceased to exist. Despite still having a lot of presence. There are opinions that KGB simply preferred to have known and controlled crime instead of something growing under the radar. That’s irony.
OK, what I meant - that youth culture was psychopathic enough.
but I would refrain from using evolution/DNA example
I mean DNA logic, which is more complex than the “natural selection of good\bad genes” people often imagine to be evolution.
But this assumes that capitalism is unchanging, and final form of our society. But in reality, we can change the system. Under socialism or social democracy (with strict laws), psychopathy would no longer be ‘more evolved’.
This whole statement is honestly unchanged enough since 1919. Social democrats have become a normal political force even before WWI. And socialism has led to pretty psychopathic regimes.
Marxist idea of formations and stages reeks of magic for me. It’s extrapolation of the way history books and popular imagination show what has already happened to the future that hasn’t and things not yet known. It’s not synthesis, instead it’s more like extrapolation of limited projections.
Lysenko and Lepeschinskaya in Stalin’s USSR were honestly a logical result of such perception of the world. It’s often said that Stalin’s regime was in fact fascist, and that it wasn’t correct by communist ideology, and so on, but that idea doesn’t hold when you study it closely. It was both in vibes and in ideas of the future pretty Marxist. So were Khmer Rouge. And both had that flaw of common idea that the future is known.
It’s a trait of religions, by the way.
There’s no such single theory. Rather they are using the mechanism that worked in western nations’ favor for much of history. The western progress looked like “now we can produce more and better and faster and with less”, and the step to “now we are doing intellectual work than nobody else can do, while others produce stuff for us” is not linear.
And the point of global logistics is to help those who produce the most. Like China.
I mean, OK, the point is to control the flow, but the quote basically complains that using that control is expensive. Oops.
Not really, because “efficiently” here would include disenfranchisement, euthanasia and murder. Which must be disadvantageous if on the lower levels, in DNA, evolution has went past such in favor of a more complex system than preserves information, even if in specific iterations that information being activated makes the organism weaker.
That’s not a conspiracy LOL, there’s plenty of greenwashing around that costs more in environmental effects than if we’d just partied like it’s 1977.
I thought that at some point, but after encountering many real people in my life (doing all the human things, like breathing, eating, walking, sleeping, not an alien at all) I don’t anymore. It doesn’t fucking matter which consistent ethos a person has, all of them are fundamentally inconsistent due to human psychology or conflicts with the complexities of reality. And some of those suck donkey balls. Like National Socialism.
What’s wrong with “nihilist”?..
and how the parties completely re-aligned since the Civil Rights era.
“Completely” is wrong. The economically progressive policy on one side and crony-capitalist on the other have not shifted places.
One can rather describe it in the “Nazi bar” terms, racists jumped from the Democrat “bar” to the Republican “bar” and changed it for their ideas, but only where the racist categories were not orthogonal.
Yes, but there are people in the USA who have made systems solving very complex tasks. Suppose people who’ve built Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google - suppose they build the robotized system that is going to fight such a war. (Which is also similar to what Russia and Ukraine did, their new military development is all around local analogs of those companies.)
They have a whole new MIC emerging, with Palantir and more general companies developing new weapons. Mostly, like I said, autonomous drones (meaning far longer range, smaller vulnerability to jamming and miniaturization - what can you do against a killer bird the size of your fist?).
Russia and Ukraine are mostly fighting using drones and artillery now, with very small suicide groups of people used to find openings, infiltrate lines and take pieces of territory.
Suppose a military fighting just like today’s Russian or Ukrainian one attacks an unprepared old one, with very expensive and big AD batteries, artillery, tanks, infantry transports and so on, unprotected from swarms of cheap drones immediately killing anything detected. They might be able to wipe it all out like a week before the world around will realize that such a blitzkrieg has happened.
Also not only swarms themselves, but modern tools of operational control. Lots of blunders are due to living humans panicking or making emotional decisions and shows, or just not being able to process information quickly enough. Due to struggle for power, or crime. A swarm of drones doesn’t have those problems.
In any case, for the purpose of this fear it only makes sense to explore the possibility of it not making a blunder. What if yes - if yes, then either the general west supports such a war and Mexico is done, just slowly, like Gaza, or it doesn’t and then, I guess, the US is going to slowly drift out of relevance.
EDIT: And that fantasy of mine is connected to a situation where US leadership goes almost Khmer Rouge. So - a clearly suicidal, but murderous scenario. So - control over millions in such a model is done by killing many.
But you are right in there not being anything resembling such amount of equipment available now to use. So I’d expect all this to be at least a decade away even if it can happen.
they also lost insane amounts of material, both ground, sea and air war machines;
Intended for obsolete paradigm of war, a lot of them. Very expensive, old and not so efficient. And not just “lost”, also “tested in real life conditions”.
So what can Russia do with its improved army?
Defend from whatever it fears in the future, that’s probably their idea. If you are expecting a war, due to paranoia or not, this might seem justified. Similar to how averting a hunger is far easier than going through it, because during a hunger people who die also consume food before it, just not enough, and work with worse efficiency. In case of such a war of defense your preserved materiel and people will be expended possibly far less efficiently than in a smaller war to get some experience.
My whole line in this thread is that such a strategy seems to be consistent with the claims of feeling threatened by NATO, officially expressed by Russian officials since 00s. It’s funny, but it’s really so.
Russia also lost the Middle East, meaning Syria is gone and even Iran has its own problems. I’m just not seeing any way forward from this, even if they can patch the economy together.
Perhaps it’s optimization. Doesn’t matter how much you are trying to hold under control if you are not succeeding. Similarly to hunger.
Anyway, this is me playing devil’s advocate.
I think this is an evaluation based on wars of the past.
Without 1) autonomous combat drones, 2) new fascism in the USA allowing it to kill any amounts of foreign and its own civilians, 3) surveillance that wasn’t possible before our time, 4) computers making many decisions in real time.
With those present they can launch a swarm of AI killbots, possibly with tactical nukes, and be done before the general population even realizes well enough what happened (that’s a slow thing). No conscription\mobilization\losses - much smaller problems with Vietnam-like protests, morale, fragging.
This is an extreme fantasy, of course. Strongly inspired by Soviet post-WWII doctrine for a nuclear war plus new tools.
To attacking a non-NATO country. NATO’s purpose is not to defend random places and support random revolutions and occupations around the world
Yeah, well, attacking a NATO country with the military Russia had in 2022 would be suicide.
And as shitty the rift is with the US, Russia now has a rearming EU to worry about.
A rearmed EU will be less dependent upon the US. If we are expecting the US to go bad in the following decades, then EU less dependent upon it might be less likely to partake in pummeling Russia when that happens.
He put the country on a war economy which is going to cause an insane recession if not an outright collapse if the war ends.
That depends on the expected outside conditions. If there’s a worldwide crisis coming, then doing this before it is even advantageous.
At insanely low prices, and by creating even more dependencies on untrustworthy partners. Who’s to say China won’t use the new dependency to invade Russia? Can Russia depend on that?
China doesn’t generally invade anyone. Peace works in their favor. They are even catching up as an innovating and not only manufacturing nation. China already controls Russia though its industries’ supply chains. Also China controls much of the world through its rare metals.
So yes, Russia can depend on the Chinese “roof”, so to say, being stable.
Insanely low prices are regrettable, but one of Russia’s biggest exports is grain. Grain demand is different from oil and gas demand, - I don’t think I have to explain why, - so that falling or stopping being profitable is highly unlikely.
It went from an army that could threaten Europe to one that could threaten Ukraine. I know, drones are the new thing, but all of Russia’s adversaries have much greater manufacturing capabilities than Russia, Russia is not going to outproduce the West or China in drones.
From one that boasted threatening Europe to one that actually threatens Ukraine. Also you are writing this as if Ukraine were weak.
It’s not about capabilities, it’s about a whole functioning well-tested system. Russia doesn’t have to outproduce China, Russia simply can’t fight China, it’s dependent upon China in everything. But the good news (for Russia) are that all its potential adversaries are western or western-aligned.
Like training an LLM on a dataset (sorry).
This is the new big lie of Russia. No, defense spending is coming from loans, basically a credit line we didn’t use because the Germans were jacking off to austerity.
You weren’t using it, now you are using it. That’s too “at the expense of everything else”.
Just look at the numbers. It’s a war economy. 40% of the Russian budget is going towards the army, and if the war ends or this money runs out - that’s 2027/28 if we’re being generous - you’re going from a labour shortage to 10% unemployment. That’s “dissolution of the USSR” level economic turmoil.
They are making rules for labor migration stricter, and the number of labor migrants in Russia is enormous, I’d say it’s more than 10% workforce. I don’t have the current numbers, but it’s a few millions of citizens of Tajikistan alone. So - they are slowly impeding labor migration, and making it less attractive. Might be a preparation for this exactly.
OK. I don’t know where the ship is going or what its captain thinks. I’m just seeing that it’s been promised things completely different from what transpired for all my life.
All I’m saying is that if let’s say the end result of this is a ceasefire on the current frontline, Russia basically lost the war.
Russia lost the war the moment it started the war, because with pre-war Zelensky they could make any kind of equal alliance, that’s what his voters wanted and what he was promising.
However - in any case, 1, Russia has developed a modern armed force from the nonsense it had, it paid with plenty of lives for that, but many of those convicts and depressed\poor people who were attracted by the money offered, and, 2, with freezing of the conflict using the current line of contact Russia has gained strategically important territory on the Azov sea coast, connecting it to Crimea, and has almost approached Odessa.
Honestly, if Ukraine becomes de-facto landlocked, it’s over. Taking Odessa is hard, because there are limans to the south and east of it, they’d have to basically encircle it from the north first. In WWII when Soviet troops liberated Odessa, they too stormed the city from the north.
So there are two variants - 1) they make some peace\ceasefire\whatever with Ukraine losing what’s now controlled by Russia, and then after some time Russia commits perfidy and attacks again with the intention of taking Odessa, and 2) the same, but Russia doesn’t commit perfidy and just remains with the current situation.
Before this war Russian-controlled Crimea had a single chokepoint in its connection to Russia. After it there’s also the route through the mainland. We live in an era of developing land logistics.
I’ve already said that the Russian military has gained experience, the best possible kind at that - all other possible adversaries are either too weak or too strong (part of alliances and with their own experience). I suspect that’s even why the war was started at all - to gain experience of modern warfare with an adversary approaching equal, the hard way.
I’ll attribute the situation where it makes sense to western racism and chauvinism. A conflict where two East Slavic nations fight each other won’t have really grave consequences for Russia in terms of western reaction, and at the same time the Ukrainians are too gaining an experienced military. Almost a win-win decision for a psychopath leader.
Yeah, about that - when some kind of peace\ceasefire is made, Ukraine basically becomes a better buffer state for Russia than before. With no wish for more bloodshed, thus no threat for what Russia has occupied, yet a military better not to cross. So if, suppose, EU or NATO suddenly goes fascist in 10 or 20 years after now (all that Chat Control stuff doesn’t inspire confidence in the future), they will have to pass through Ukraine unless they make it a NATO or EU member, which they won’t due to their own arrogance.
So honestly, even without taking Odessa, Russia is improving its strategic position. From a purely military, 1930s-like, point of view. I mean, improving if its intention in the large picture is self-defense, because for pulling a Hitler it’s already a clear failure since the first few months, but honestly what if Putin really believes in bad-bad NATO intending to eat Russia? And nation leaders and powerful people are usually psychopaths, so maybe a psychopath is fitted with a better brain to understand them. Maybe he’s right.
Look, I’m from Hungary. If the peeps who did 1956 got Western help beyond thoughts and prayers, and the revolution ended up with Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg and Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén counties as “East Hungary” or bombed flat and even part of the USSR behind the fence, and the rest as basically a Western country, the memory of that revolution would be much less bittersweet.
Ukraine wasn’t behind anything like the Iron Curtain.
Every time I try pho bo I have doubts that anything is a big power compared to Vietnam.
Like - there are people who like Kipling’s thing about that “white man’s burden”, so - IMHO Vietnamese can take the “yellow man’s burden” and civilize Europeans and Americans and all those. Teach them how you really keep your nation’s dignity. Frenchies - check. Murrkans - check. Khmer Rouge - check. China - check.
For that supposed 20% he reinvigorated NATO (prior to the full scale invasion countries started questioning if we still need NATO), got EU to increase defense spending and got Finland and Sweden to join NATO.
Don’t you see how this works both ways?
He measured NATO’s response, he found a way to fight wars and not break (in the sense of popular outrage at loss of life and economic effect) for Russia, and which categories of population can be recruited for money and which shouldn’t, he confirmed that the resource exports money source can be reoriented to other countries than the West, and he made unofficially NATO-aligned countries officially that.
EU’s defense spending increasing is at the expense of other things.
They also proved they’re a paper tiger and their arms manufacturing is crap. Oh and of course sanctions and the war completely wrecking the economy.
They proved that to themselves too and reacted. Changed the military doctrine, evolved new tactics and strategy, built new MIC production chains. Russian army was inexperienced and thoroughly rotten, now it’s not. Russian weapons were expensive and untested, now there are cheap drones of various kinds produced on scale and used, well-tested and constantly improved.
The economy is not completely wrecked. It really seemed to be going there many times over these years. Some of the people who told me it’s going to crumble are professors. It’s not even approaching that anymore. I live in Russia.
People working in the Russian Central Bank are very competent. One can talk and talk about good and evil, but their work has been perfect basically since 1999 till now. And people making actual decisions too understand a lot.
It seems intuitively (incorrectly) that the way Russian society is built, with its inequality and injustice, it can’t bear a big war. But if slaveholder agrarian societies and feudal societies could fight wars with their plutocratic contemporaries, then Russia’s mafia feudalism can fight Western societies. Which are honestly too slowly changing to mafia feudalism ; perhaps some will flip to fascism.
Considering what all those western nations have shown themselves, I’m honestly not sure there are good guys here, and if there are none, then I’m kinda almost feeling patriotic. But I don’t understand why Putin had to invade Ukraine, Zelensky was fucking elected because of his promises to make peace and restore ties, and for the national interest it made much bigger sense to just do that, Ukraine would still be naturally dependent.
Ukraine wasn’t a certain Russian vassal state. They had the original “orange revolution”.
About prospective NATO/EU member - honestly that’s not good enough. They’ve lost hundreds of thousands of men. Housing and infrastructure and industrial plants.
In return for that to be “considered” for being accepted into a military alliance of former empires and a union for “while civilized people”, only “considered”, some time in the future, like 20 years later, - fuck that.
And both entities have been promising mountains to Ukraine over these few years.
Of course, there’s also the issue of Ukraine’s government being corrupt and becoming the more corrupt the longer there’s no election.
From what it seems, Ukrainians too are not very keen on trying to maybe in 20 years join either. They want agreements and they want to build up their military and country. And they want to start unfucking their political system, when there’s opportunity.
Technically the Baltic fleet was in Soviet times the most respected part of the navy. With Riga and Tallinn being capitals of other nations, that’s a bit less pronounced now, but coast guard and missile cruisers and marines are still important forces to have.
No, they made a deal with his beheading and allahuakbaring successors. Not sure how good a deal, but apparently the other side upholds it for now.
Honestly this is not as important as it seems. Russia doesn’t have the kind of ships to use global logistics and network of good ports as a system of power projection. Air carriers, all that. While Bosphorus is not such a big deal, of course it’s leverage, but Turkey does let Russian ships out and back.
And Vladivostok, despite being for Russia efficiently as if on another continent, is a warm water port with good location, and used as such, including militarily.
Your judgement in some way shows the same bias as you named.