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A lot of writing in that article is bad, but this takes the propaganda cake:
Russia also has the advantage of time. While Putin can lead Russia along a single strategic trajectory regardless of the length of the war, the U.S. is subject to the whims of democracy. The White House and seats in Congress change hands. Policies change as voters grow weary of supporting other countries.
It’s like an onion. There’s so many levels to these 3 sentences, that if I start peeling them apart, I’ll burst into tears.
Incredibly out of reality. They are essentially implying that only the west is accountable to their constituents while the East can do whatever they want because the population is “brainwashed”.
Meanwhile the US state is in a constant state of governing against the interests of their own people.
they want because the population is “brainwashed”.
it seems like a form of the “asiatic hordes” theme that has been so prevalent for so long
lol truly
If someone could explain the significant material differences between my 2 choices that would be great, but the west seems to be able to stick it out just as long as the elections change nothing.
Also the studies that show popular will has no impact on what the government does cries
Two years ago, the Ukrainian Armed Forces defied expectations immediately. Days before Russia’s massive combined arms incursion, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley spoke for the U.S. military when he predicted to Congress that Kyiv would fall within 72 hours.
Many military analysts similarly predicted the Russian Armed Forces would quickly rout the overmatched Ukrainians. American leaders encouraged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to leave the country, lest Russian troops assassinate him.
This whole narrative has to have been pure bullshit, right? The West had been arming Ukraine since 2014, Merkel even admitted the Minsk II agreements were just stalling for that purpose, and if you sell Ukraine as this hopelessly outmatched smol bean that’s certainly doomed, it’s easier to rally public support when it “somehow” beats all odds to hang in the fight. It’s classic setting expectations at zero so anything looks like success, and fits with how often the media has ran with the “full scale” descriptor of the Russian invasion.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley spoke for the U.S. military when he predicted to Congress that Kyiv would fall within 72 hours
So finally there is is, the long awaited source for the all time favourite liberal bullshit that Kiev will fall in 3 days. And of course it was a projection too since it was said by US general, not Russian.
I think the Belarusian president had a similar statement, too, but that’s still not Russia.
Possibly, Luka does sometimes like to exaggerate to push a point
They definitely could have won much faster if they went for carpet-bombing (as they thankfully understood they should not have done), as they are still easily among the strongest air forces on the planet.
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The question was really only ever one of how long it would take and how many Ukrainians would die in the process.
Also how badly Russia would be hurt in the process, which is worth mentioning since it’s the only the the west cares about here.
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The prolonged sanctions fiasco also did more to end western economic hegemony than it did to hurt Russia.
I think you could argue the sanctions kinda helped Russia in a sense, last I heard their economy is up and they have less dollars dependence, more economic options,
One of the most important changes is in the re-industrialization of Russia.
Before the sanctions, Russia was comfortable with being a resource extraction colony of the West, where low labor-intensive mining and extraction industries enabled an accumulation of wealth which enriched their bourgeois class, but did not lead to the proletarianization of the working class, as value-added goods were simply imported from abroad rather than manufacturing their own.
Now, with all the sanctions, Russia is being forced to develop and relying on its own industries (import substitution) to replace the loss of Western goods. This re-industrialization is significant because it will lead to increasing proletarianization of the working class - the pre-conditions for the growth of socialist movements.
There is a reason why Western countries were so keen on de-industrializing themselves, not only because of the dominance of finance capital, but because they no longer have to deal with labor movements at home. The consequence of this is the fragmentation and dissolution of genuine left wing movements across the advanced Western countries.
Proletarianization is the transformation of members of a society into proletarians. You seem to be implying that you think modern Russia has a substantial portion of its population in the peasantry, which is not my understanding. Urban industrial proletarians are not the only proletarians.
Good point – no better way to pitch funding a war than “defeat is imminent unless you give me unlimited cash right now”
Colin Powel Shining
Yeah, but now this is the canon in the west that has to be incorporated into any future narratives.
War is unpredictable. Ukraine is outmatched but defenders advantage goes a long way. Total defeat of Ukraine’s military in the field wouldn’t be achievable in 72 hours but it was still possible for a surrender to have occurred in that timespan if the chips landed the right way. While they definitely do exaggerate their predictions for several strategic reasons (budgetary, propaganda, cointel) the element of simply preparing for the worst case scenario is probably still the primary reason and no analyst gets gets their name dragged in the mud for having urged too much caution.
“While Putin can lead Russia along a single strategic trajectory regardless of the length of the war, the U.S. is subject to the whims of democracy.”
My three biggest flaws:
1.) I work too hard.
2.) I care too much.
3.) I would’ve kicked your ass if my bros didn’t pull me away.
🤣
4.) I have too much street wisdom
5.) My heart is too big
6.) I smoke more different than anybody
7.) my allies too bad
Maybe it’s just because I’m a determinist, but they could never have won. This was the only possible outcome because it’s what the conditions amounted to.
That’s not being a ‘determinist’, that’s just plain old mathematical certainty, considering Russia’s powerful industrial output, technological superiority, population advantage and supreme military experience. Also - overpriced NATO wonder weapons proved their papertigerness.
The US, the neocon monsters, those with actual competence… My take is - either the vast majority of them or ALL of them knew the impossibility of victory on the battlefield. That was not the point anyway
I know, I’m just wondering if I’d imagine there were different possible outcomes if I believed in free will.
Free will doesn’t include willing a thermobaric not to kill you when it has just detonated at your feet.
I was just looking at new replies to the thread and felt my old one here was too quippy. What I really mean is that you can divide a materialistic free will argument into the following camps: Compatibilists, people too caught up in definitions, and deranged people who believe things completely at odds with directly observable reality. There are no other camps (I’m inducting you into the first one, if you complain that puts you in camp two). People who believe in free will typically believe very similar things in any practical circumstance to people who don’t, there’s just a disagreement on an ontological level about how hypothetically predictable it all is in the most absolute sense of the term (and honestly, even that is being charitable about the level of substance really present in the disagreement).
I say this to say that one’s position in this debate – if you can get them to agree that ghostly souls probably don’t exist – is unlikely to correlate with their stance on the war almost at all, because the same factors are at play in both cases and the phantom of “free” choice doesn’t weigh very heavily on understanding in practical terms how people make choices in life.
Yeah, compatibilism makes sense if you believe in souls, specific definitions are stupid, do you believe in something at least partially beyond material factors that can make decisions? The last type just seem stupid.
compatibilism makes sense if you believe in souls,
Compatibilism is the stance that the will observed in a deterministic system is free. There are many angles to approach it from, but the way that I believe is the easiest to think about it is this: People can only really understand causality as being predictable or random, and randomness seems to be a poor refuge for free choice (as often as some people try to make this so), so one needs to seriously consider the idea that the “free will” that people on that side of the argument are referring to is a completely incoherent idea. It’s not just something that doesn’t exist, but something that could never exist and can only be made legitimate-sounding by mysticizing it. Whatever it is, for choice to meaningfully be choosing, it needs to have order (such as values in the form of preferences), and the extent to which it doesn’t is the extent to which it is not a choice but instead represents a lack of agency.
Simultaneously, the “free will is an illusion” crowd I think are making an inversion of the same mistake by claiming there is no free will because something that cannot exist does not exist. What people are clearly looking for is an explanation of the connection between the experienced phenomenon of willing and causality. There is no need to reference “illusion” to explain a person willing something, the ordered system of the brain doing what it does in response to its environment is just an example of what choice looks like from the outside, which is neither more nor less true than what it looks like from the inside.
People who claim to be materialists but then cite determinism to call choices meaningless are either playing with words or are idealists in disguise. There is no overarching Fate that dictates how things will go independent of the particular material causes, and how you choose is one of those causes! It is not an Uncaused Cause, to use the theological phrase, but it is still a cause just as much as it is the effect of whatever input you received. You aren’t the ultimate inception point of the causal chain (you can’t even imagine what that proposition means), but you aren’t a loose end either. That, too, would be idealist.
I wholeheartedly agree. By “determinism” I just mean the idea that free will cannot exist. The universe is absurd, there is no fate. By “illusion” I mean consciousness gives people the feeling of being above nature.
This is now a tangent, but I feel obliged to point out that, as even Camus admits, absurdity is a property of relations and not a thing itself. Specifically, it is an attempt to have an impossible relationship, like trying to draw blood from a stone. The wild error that Camus makes in the Myth of Sisyphus is considering only man’s relation to the universe itself in seeking personal fulfillment rather than man’s relation to fellow humans. It is absurd too seek something from the universe itself where the universe somehow acknowledges you, but existence becomes much less cold when you remember that other people exist.
Pretty much no serious experts thought Ukraine could win. The fact that so many leaders in the west convinced themselves it was possible shows that any serious debate is dead. They just surround themselves with sycophants, and live in echo chambers where everybody just repeats what they all want to hear.
If there’s a 90% chance that something would happen a non-determinist would say there was still a 10% chance something could succeed. A determinist would look at what happened and figure out how there was a 100% chance it would happen regardless of the initial odds.
No even a realistic none determinist, the odds well under 1% 1/10 seems WAY too high
polluting every thread with irrelevant metaphysics
Smartest, most cogent determinist.
It’s just what I happen to be thinking about at the moment, and it’s only two threads. Would you prefer philosophy prohibited?
Stage 5: Acceptance
Implying that it even had something of a chance to begin with
Thehill can eat shit. Their entire shtick was to corral Bernie supporters into a dead end so they wouldn’t actually radicalize.
When did Ukraine be home the most important country in the world?
Right? Back in 2014 it was the most corrupt with a neo-Nazi problem, I was reading articles about it in 2016
And the sky is blue and grass is green… We pretty much knew this ever since early 2022 lmao
What can I say? Slava baloni
At this point, they’ll be fine to consider Ukraine still existing a ‘victory’…
Give it 2 months of blissfull scilence on the topic as they hope we all forget about it before they tout the victory
And also at the same time proof putin is reforming the USSR
Analysis of the article that is seemingly biased towards Pax Americana:
- The Kyiv government have inferior military resource in both quality and quantity. This implies that the claim by Pax Americana news outlet that Russians used outdated weapons that is so inaccurate that it targets civilians by mistake was a mere projection of attacks on civilians by Kyiv and Azov thugs.
- The Kyiv government depends completely on USA government for support against the humanitarian intervention from Russia. This implies that Euromaiden Kyiv government lack democratic support which implied that the 2019 Ukraine election was rigged or unrepresentative of the whole Ukraine population.
- Putin engaged in attrition which gave advantage to Russians since it cause the slow loss of military supplies, morality of troops, and external support of Euromaiden Kyiv while Russia have sufficient supplies and support for the humanitarian intervention. This implied that the claim by Pax Americana that Putin is losing military resources, morality of soldiers, and support was a lie. It also contradicts the previous Pax Americana claim that Putin was wasting too much national resource in the war or that Putin was aggressively expanding Russian “occupation” of Ukraine. This also has the implication that Putin honestly follows his claim to only engage in humanitarian intervention for protection of rebelling states.
- The article did not mention the justification that Putin have for the military intervention nor the context which implies genuine Pax Americana biases.
I find every article from western mainstream media has to be packed with these cliches nowadays. They squirrel the admissions in between, but they have to pour on copium on top.
Even if they dont believe the copium, or even secretly loathe doling it out, they have to if they want to keep their jobs.
I hope you’re getting something out of that writing exercise, since I think everyone can clearly see “thehill.com” in the url and come to the same conclusion
*Kiev
remember back when this first started how confident libs were
that fucking ukraine could win a war of attrition against Russia, while using nazis? Russia won the moment they actually committed to the war.
The amazing part is that a lot of libs still think Ukraine can win this.
heres how hiliary and ukraine and bernie can still win-
I always claimed that Russia won in the first speech where he said that if other European foreces interfere they would not have time to think before they are dragged into the conflict. That significantly restricted the range of actions Europe and even the US had to strike back. That in my opining all but ensured that Ukraine would loose
Lol @ the big red “the views expressed in this article are not necessarily the views of the Hill” up top, above even the headline.
Was the goal ever to win? I assumed the goal always was to have another permanent stalemate backed up by endless US arms sales; basically a second Israel.
US military industry is certainly a party that is not in any way upset regarding how the war is going. There are going to be contracts for decades to come with effectively unlimited tap.
That was the intent, zman himself said as much
