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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   33968 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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The establishment lied wildly about Vietnam. The lies about Iraq were next level inventing WMD in Iraq. They lied about Jessica Lynch, abu ghraib, the UN weapons inspectors and long list of other things.

In Afghanistan they claimed that the 120 000 000 000 dollars wasted on the Afghan national army created an army of 300 000. After a decade of claiming this they changed the narrative in a week admitting that they had basically fabricated this military. Unfortunately, they hadn't fabricated all the spent money.

The Ukraine war has to be the war in modern history with the least investigative journalism. There is basically only narrative and press releases from think tanks being published in the media. In 2003 Bagdhad Bob was interviewed on American TV. In this war, nobody would ever dream of bringing a Russian general on TV for an interview.

It is going to be interesting to see the reaction when the lies start falling apart and the true believers find out their war was roughly as fake all the previous ones.

Baghdad Bob was a meme, not a general or a person who would have been interviewed due to his particular importance.

Sergey Lavrov, for instance, has been interviewed by Western media countless times.

In this war, nobody would ever dream of bringing a Russian general on TV for an interview.

Uhhh

(Oops, looks like I can't tell one Slav from another. Never mind)

Well tbf the distinction between Ukrainian and Russian ethnicity is also a media fabrication and Syrskyi was born in Russia and his family all lives in Russia.

It appears the Ukrainians would disagree strongly with you on that.

Besides, I don’t see how the morality of the war is any different even if they are the same ethnicity. Would Colombia be justified in invading Venezuela?

Oleksandr Syrskyi

Is a Ukrainian general

This one is not Russian. What's your point?

The biggest lie of all was that Ukraine could give up its nuclear weapons in exchange for protection by the West. They fell for the gun control argument. Keep your guns.

They didn't have nuclear weapons, the USSR had weapons that were stored there. It's like if Turkey left NATO and refused to give back the nukes the US keeps there. They wouldn't have the codes to actually use them and would have to reverse engineer new bombs.

Anyone that gives up their WMD's gets punished (see Libya, Iraq etc). Think of the incentives that sends to states like Syria, Iran and North Korea.

The most frustrating part of having a even a barely decent understanding of history is having to constantly deal with people claiming that this time it's different and we must upend all norms to deal with a novel evil which is always made up to be unprecedented.

Don't you worry, they'll sweep this under the rug like all the other ones and continue basking in incompetence like nothing happened.

Even if Putin annexed all of Ukraine you'd find some people to spin this as a win because it unites Europe or something. Western elites are immune from accountability.

The most frustrating part of having a even a barely decent understanding of history is having to constantly deal with people claiming that this time it's different and we must upend all norms to deal with a novel evil which is always made up to be unprecedented.

Amusingly, having watched various sides discussing the Ukraine Conflict for so long, this applies to so many perspective and positions on it that I'd have no idea what position on the conflict this is supposed to be without checking someone's past posting history.

Is the 'this time it's different' mean to refer to the people who are aghast at a war which is the third continuation war of a decade? The credulity given to claims of nuclear thresholds at odds with decades of practice and saber-rattling? The multi-year sustainment of imminent collapse narratives? Are the novel threats justifying upending norms supposed to refer to the Russian imperalists, the Ukrainian nazis, the dreaded American/Western influence? And this is without the issues that come from barely decent understandings of history often also routinely carrying about deliberate misunderstandings that make it into pop history.

It almost certainly wasn't intended to be as omnidirectional as it was, but I thank you none the less.

It's intended at Western elites, but I'll stand by it omnidirectionaly.

I hate how unserious it all is.

What would a “serious” attitude look like to you? In other words, what would you expect of western elites instead?

Which is why I thank you.

(Which was what I meant to write instead of 'think you', so embarrassment on me.)

I mean things like that only work until they don’t. The sheer incompetence of the western elites is on display. The entire plan, as far as I can tell is “Ukraine is the good guy here. We arm them to the teeth, let them do whatever they want, and hope they win before something bad happens.” It’s not working, and worse, we’re putting ourselves in an extremely weak position by doing so, and for little strategic gain. Ukraine doesn’t have much beyond farmland. It’s not Taiwan with a big chip manufacturer base. And we’re depleting weapons and risking nuclear exchange to save Kansas.

How is it not working? They’re losing some land here and there, but otherwise appear to be attritioning the Russians pretty well.

Besides, I thought we were only sending over surplus reserve equipment. Is there any indication that US military readiness has been meaningfully reduced due to this aid?

Calling it now, there will be a terror attack on US soil by Ukrainian aligned elements bitter about the US abandoning them by 2034 (40% chance). (Not counting this one)

Mostly justified, quite frankly, unless they pick civilian non-elite target.

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