Russia is now bombing Ukraine

[iococoi]

Quote

International Cat Federation bans Russian cats from competitions

[chim]

It's obviously used as bad optics for the Russians but bombing a modern reactor shouldn't be more concerning than bombing a historical site. Not great, not terrible. 

Edited March 4, 2022 by chim

[Soloman Tump]

Part of the Russian plan to remove electric power from Ukraine, so in the future they can sell them more gas and oil.

Imagine how petrifying it would have been, working in the power plant and hearing shells hitting the building.

Edited March 4, 2022 by Soloman Tump

[Blir]

5 hours ago, ignatius said:

 

[dcom]

A (retired) Finnish intelligence colonel's lecture/analysis of Russia, the Russian mindset and strategic culture (from 2018); there are subtitles in many languages.

Also relevant: Dugin's Foundations of Geopolitics; Dugin is one of the closest advisors to Putin - he's the Gríma Wormtongue to Putin's King Théoden.

Edited March 4, 2022 by dcom

[chim]

8 hours ago, usagi said:

there is a lot of very gay hero worship and mythologising going on atm by people who paid no attention to Ukraine or the region until 10 days ago. this is partly because the Ukrainians have been surprisingly good at media ops, but partly because some people only seem to be able to interpret the world through Marvelesque fantasy (literally, some asshole photoshopped Zelensky as an avenger and it was doing the rounds).

That's the overwhelming take on western twitter and it's nauseating. They would probably experience a bit of cognitive dissonance if they looked at UA's dog purges before the 2012 football championship and the last ten years of shelling the eastern regions. The problem is that Putin is a formidable bad guy and everybody in western Europe has a long-term interest in seeing him fail. Zelensky is an everyday joe who decided to stay in a spot where many leaders throughout history have fled, he's doing a very difficult job and has played pretty much every card right. The whole hero mythology thing during wartime is very ancient and just more obvious now, as is the realities of war's consequences with all the smartphone coverage. I've mostly followed the official news channels after Twitter propaganda has proven pretty unreliable. Weirdly enough I was recommended by a colleague to check out reddit and its less moderated sections - soldiers and civilians burned to death, heads caved in from high caliber bullets, a lone dog guarding a massacred family in the middle of nowhere. It's a stark contrast to the hype around BMP-stealing tractor divisions and ghosts of Kyiv. 

[milkface]

6 hours ago, zero said:

brother, I think if you were to ask the 50-100 or so peeps that frequent this board daily who the biggest supporter of cmunism is on here is - they would no doubt point to the person behind the Zeff/hermolia username. I am rolling with the assumption that you are always on team comunism, because of your past posts on this site. 

it is all good tho, because this really isn't worth arguing over on a message board. goes round and round and in the end, same ol shit...

smug liberal response. classic watmm

[usagi]

2 hours ago, chim said:

I've mostly followed the official news channels after Twitter propaganda has proven pretty unreliable. Weirdly enough I was recommended by a colleague to check out reddit and its less moderated sections - soldiers and civilians burned to death, heads caved in from high caliber bullets, a lone dog guarding a massacred family in the middle of nowhere. It's a stark contrast to the hype around BMP-stealing tractor divisions and ghosts of Kyiv. 

yeah, I've been using conventional sources primarily but skimming subreddits to try and get a read on what's breaking faster. conventional sources are slower but they tend to verify and be more rigorous, while with random footage you need to employ your own truth instincts a lot more. you always need good instincts really, they're more important than ever as we carry along into this ridiculous future of weaponised trolling and memery. wonder if we'll see deepfakes. both sides are using the media as a battleground, and tbh I can't fault the Ukrainians too much for this because obviously they're the little guy in this situation and need every edge they can get to survive as a sovereign nation. yet they can't bend the rules too much or it will backfire.

the ongoing DW live feed has been good from what I've seen as I've dipped in and out of it:

 

Edited March 4, 2022 by usagi

[may be rude]

and here's reality: russia invading ukraine is not good and it's a big deal

 

whataboutism is device of rhetoric and in logic it is a fallacy

[usagi]

this might seem an alien concept to someone permanently brainlocked to the US establishment narrative, but acknowledging the use of information warfare is not "whataboutism". that is reality. no one disputed any of your trite little statements above, though you can keep the high school-level debating terminology to yourself.

[may be rude]

30 minutes ago, usagi said:

this might seem an alien concept to someone permanently brainlocked to the US establishment narrative, but acknowledging the use of information warfare is not "whataboutism". that is reality. no one disputed any of your trite little statements above, though you can keep the high school-level debating terminology to yourself.

you're a weaponized fool. your reality is inside out

[usagi]

lol k. were you the one who made the Zelensky avenger 'shop? you need to work on your blending technique.

[usagi]

3 hours ago, dcom said:

A (retired) Finnish intelligence colonel's lecture/analysis of Russia, the Russian mindset and strategic culture (from 2018); there are subtitles in many languages.

this is interesting btw, cheers.

[may be rude]

25 minutes ago, usagi said:

lol k. were you the one who made the Zelensky avenger 'shop? you need to work on your blending technique.

no. were you the who reported your findings from reddit? "get out of here with your logic"

Edited March 4, 2022 by trying to be less rude

[zazen]

12 hours ago, usagi said:

(advance warning: this post is not directed at you personally)

frankly, nobody should care about any of this kind of shit right now. 

... ....

it seems that every time these sorts of conflicts begin, people fail to recognise its underlying nature and get swept up in romantic notions about it early on only to be bitterly disappointed later when things don't turn out as they expected. and they never learn for when the next conflict begins.

Yes I heed the warning you are giving - real life isn't a fairy tale and the world is not simply split into goodies and baddies. I didn't post it as hero worship, more as background context. Although I would say that Zelensky suddenly being thrust into the worlds consciousness in such a dramatic way and becoming a figurehead is very unusual, I can't think of anything similar in the last few decades. Maybe the NZ Prime Minister during covid is a somewhat similar phenomenon to a lesser extent.

Sometimes people need to quit doomscrolling and do something else for a bit, and I found the TV show useful for that, while still relevant.

Also I found the TV show really interesting/poignant, as a stylised peek into Ukraine in 2015 - lead character cycling through a beautiful city, looking at the sort of furniture thats in the houses, the overarching theme of political corruption, the wacky pop music ending. I now have some images of Ukraine in my head that arent to do with war.

[zazen]

1 hour ago, trying to be less rude said:

whataboutism is device of rhetoric and in logic it is a fallacy

I'm not buying this.

We should be able to handle nuance, not just relentlessy cheerlead. Whataboutism is only Whataboutism if shifting the focus to the other issue is evading the first one. Pointing out that war is a shitty experience for those involved is not whataboutism.

We know that there's information warfare going on, that shouldn't mean we censor our every statement and avoid the details just in case someone reads this thread.

[may be rude]

8 minutes ago, zazen said:

I'm not buying this.

We should be able to handle nuance, not just relentlessy cheerlead. Whataboutism is only Whataboutism if shifting the focus to the other issue is evading the first one. Pointing out that war is a shitty experience for those involved is not whataboutism.

We know that there's information warfare going on, that shouldn't mean we censor our every statement and avoid the details just in case someone reads this thread.

you're free to post bad takes and i'm free to call them that

[Sensitive Outsider]

just thinking out loud and its definitely on the whataboutary spectrum.... 

But would it be fair to say that if Russia was a more capitalist country and its people had more of a choice in all its actions and its right to consume...knowledge, news and Kallax shelves.

That thousands of people would not now be dead in Ukraine.

That a 1m+ people would not be displaced.

That Europe's largest nuclear power plant would not be on fire.

That the Russian police wouldn't have to lock up nursery aged children..

..and so on and so forth...

 

I'm no capitalist - more of a realist - This sad episode in history is going to push more people towards capitalist, EU, NATO ideology and ways of living for better or for worse. As human nature always lets us down when we try to do it any other way.

Putin is just another in a long line of practical examples. Everything else as others have said is just rhetoric and is never going to be actionable to coin a phrase...

[zazen]

2 minutes ago, trying to be less rude said:

you're free to post bad takes and i'm free to call them that

Indeed. But then I'm free to respond to your response if I think you're missing something. And so on. Dialogue is really important.

[usagi]

18 minutes ago, zazen said:

We should be able to handle nuance, not just relentlessy cheerlead.

nah, nothing wrong with cheerleading. it's not like this sort of dumb tunnel vision has blundered the US into enough military misadventures over the past x decades for them to maybe look before they leap. it's not like it's contributed to conflicts around the world that were severely misjudged and resulted in horrific death tolls which these cunts then just turned around and forgot about rather than learning from. remember in the early days of the Syrian civil war when anyone opposing Assad was portrayed as a virtuous freedom fighter? I 'member. it can't possibly be that because that ended up being a lie and a hopeless quagmire that something similar could ever happen again.

17 minutes ago, zazen said:

Although I would say that Zelensky suddenly being thrust into the worlds consciousness in such a dramatic way and becoming a figurehead is very unusual, I can't think of anything similar in the last few decades.

I agree that it's unusual, because as has been implied, far fewer people would care if this was happening in some poorer quarter of the world (which it always is). while I think the idolisation of Zelensky has been aided by some circumstantial/indirect things (age of social media, closer to the west, someone to latch onto for anti-Russian sentiment, etc) I don't think it's entirely by accident either. I think that since Euromaidan in 2013/14 and the Russian intrusion/annexation of Crimea, the Ukrainians have been planning, observing, and honing their abilities, part of which is how to run an effective media campaign. for example, this channel that was birthed in 2013 to capture Euromaidan and which then went on to document the fighting in the east demonstrates how capable they were at this sort of thing already. they must have had a gameplan for what to do in case of open war across the country.

[usagi]

1 hour ago, Sensitive Outsider said:

just thinking out loud and its definitely on the whataboutary spectrum.... 

But would it be fair to say that if Russia was a more capitalist country and its people had more of a choice in all its actions and its right to consume...knowledge, news and Kallax shelves.

That thousands of people would not now be dead in Ukraine.

That a 1m+ people would not be displaced.

That Europe's largest nuclear power plant would not be on fire.

That the Russian police wouldn't have to lock up nursery aged children..

..and so on and so forth...

 

I'm no capitalist - more of a realist - This sad episode in history is going to push more people towards capitalist, EU, NATO ideology and ways of living for better or for worse. As human nature always lets us down when we try to do it any other way.

Putin is just another in a long line of practical examples. Everything else as others have said is just rhetoric and is never going to be actionable to coin a phrase...

oh shit, you said the c-word.

*sets countdown timer*

[zero]

14 minutes ago, usagi said:

oh shit, you said the c-word.

*sets countdown timer*

lol. yeah I think someone is going to have an issue with this part:

Quote

But would it be fair to say that if Russia was a more capitalist country and its people had more of a choice in all its actions and its right to consume...knowledge, news and Kallax shelves.

 

[Alcofribas]

47 minutes ago, zero said:

lol. yeah I think someone is going to have an issue with this part:

 

to be fair, it is a nonsense take.

[zazen]

2 hours ago, Sensitive Outsider said:

*Sensitive Outsider thinks out loud*

I think you're trying to say, something about Russia allowed Putin to hold onto power for 22 years. And you're trying to figure out what?

I'm not sure that the problem is 'not capitalist enough'. I'm not a russia expert but I've heard some say that Yeltsins reforms in the 1990s were too radically pro-capitalist and led to economic chaos and corporations running off with loads of loot ... Putin then benefited from that chaos by 'bringing stability'.

^ This is my brief take on it, might be wrong

But I guess something about Russias authoritarian past makes it easier for an authoritarian to take hold there, compared to say France or whatever?

[zazen]

Offering this up as 'interesting example of ultra specific analysis on twitter':

Trunk mainenance guy can deduce from a few photos that the russian army hasn't been looking after its trucks properly.
another tyre guy chimes in here saying they are using cheap Chinese tyres.