SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]

in totalitarian communist North Korea, the regime disseminates propaganda assuring their brainwashed citizens that being hungry is actually beneficial due to their failed communist agrarian policies

It does honestly feel like people - on both sides of the war, I will freely admit - put way too much focus on individual events and are unable to see the bigger picture of logistics and equipment produced and so on.

So you end up with, just as a recent example, the Ukrainians going on and on about that Bradley vs tank incident and how “owned” Russia was or whatever (that is managed to keep going for like 5 minutes in constant Bradley fire? sounds like a pretty awesome example of how great Russian tanks are tbh), or that Russian plane full of Ukrainian POWs being shot down by a Patriot, or now this boat being sunk. But none of this actually matters. What’s really going on here is that the pro-Ukraine crowd is seeing these events and drawing absolutely massive conclusions from it. “Aha, see, we can now destroy all Russian tanks with just our infantry carriers! Aha, see, we can now shoot down every Russian plane with our air defense! Aha, see, we can now sink every boat in the Russian fleet!” Russia has thousands of tanks, its planes are routinely not shot down by Ukrainian air defense because of how depleted it is and the Russian countermeasures (flying low, etc), and honestly, sinking the Russian Black Sea fleet would be an L but it would be very far from war-ending, given that Ukraine has no navy for it to fight anyway and Russia obviously has inland missile launchers. But the pro-Russian side like Rybar tends to take these narratives and feels the need to address them because they’re just as caught up in these narratives as everybody else, when they could just ignore them and watch as they’re forgotten in a week.

Wars are determined by systemic issues and, most importantly, the capacity for the warring nations to overcome those issues. Neither side is permanently locked into its state of affairs (in most cases; e.g. WW2 Germany had problems the whole war with getting enough fuel due to simple geography). Not being able to see how a military could make up for its deficiencies is what lead to the Kharkov surprise for the pro-Russian side who didn’t understand that Russia went into the war with too few troops to man parts of the front and that Ukraine had been creating brigades in the rear while their frontline army was getting mauled over the spring and summer, and then the surprise of the failure of the counteroffensive for Ukraine, who didn’t understand that Russia had found a way to counter the Ukrainian offensive strategy and thought that the same trick was guaranteed to work twice.

In short, if you’re going to make an assumption that a military is unable to counter a new problem, you need a LOT of evidence for it - not just vibes about how you think the conflict is going to go. Never assume that a military is stagnant unless you have extremely good reasons to believe so. I personally don’t believe that the Ukrainian military is stagnant and totally doomed and they can still probably keep defending for at least the better part of a year and finding new strategies to counter Russia, but the ongoing lack of Western military reindustrialization is my ‘extremely good reason’ to believe that Ukraine will be unable to win unless there is a very sudden change in the economic strategy of the West away from neoliberalism and just-in-time manufacturing.

Part of that equation, for my point of view, includes the ability for people to think and speak freely without fear of reprisal by the government

This is like the people who say “We’re freer than the Chinese because I can call Trump a peepee poopoo pants on Twitter without being arrested!” when that doesn’t actually do anything at all

but if you try and protest and change conditions materially and meaningfully, you can absolutely bet your ass you will be disappeared like the horror stories you find on reddit about “totalitarian regimes”. The only reason why Americans don’t think it doesn’t happen in the West is either because it’s so completely internalized that it becomes memeified (“Haha, I hope the FBI agent watching me through my camera is having a nice day!”) or none of the media that they engage with reports on it.

IMO, this entire point is just a liberal ideological bludgeon, a condition that can be applied at-will to any government they want to criticize because no government will be good enough all of the time. it’s one thing if you’re an anarchist and oppose every government equally for not fulfilling that condition, that I can understand and respect, it’s quite another when you’re like “Oh, no, I hate authoritarianism! That’s why we need to constantly criticize a country on the literal other side of the planet 99.7% of the time, and then only criticize our own country when somebody calls us out on it by saying ‘Oh, yeah, America also does bad things too!’” Especially when America’s role in the world for the last century at least, and more accurately really since its conception, has been a source of capitalist reaction across its whole hemisphere and later the whole planet, with hundreds upon hundreds of military bases and tens of millions directly and indirectly killed in wars. Criticizing, say, Cuba or DPRK for these sorts of things is effectively zooming in on a single corpse in righteous indignation while ignoring the seas of blood spilled by America behind you.

we must all kill the liberal part of our brain, every single day

liberals have universally allied with fascists over communists. the liberals in the Weimer Republic put Hitler in power, to give but one example. Churchill admired Hitler.

Both liberals and fascists agree that capitalism is the bee’s knees, they agree that most things should be privatized, they agree that people must be exploited by an elite. There’s a common saying - “If you scratch a liberal, a fascist bleeds,” meaning that the second you exert even the slightest violence towards liberals or threaten to do so, they suddenly turn into fascist monsters, seemingly out of nowhere! Macron in France is a good current-day example - the riots have prompted him to turn France into ever more of a police state in which the pigs have unbelievable powers and surveillance. When America has been provoked by actions (many of which didn’t even actually happen, e.g. the Gulf of Tonkin, the Nayirah testimony, etc (or those that did happen but didn’t need to provoke an entire invasion in response, like 9/11) they start wars that kill hundreds of thousands, even millions.

It’s actually hard to describe exactly where liberals and fascists have opposing beliefs sometimes. I suppose where they differ is whether the cruelty should be more obscured or more out in the open? But you have to understand, the political dichotomy isn’t and has never been “liberal vs conservative”, because of those are on the side of the bourgeoisie in the class war. It’s communists vs capitalists, and liberal, conservatives, fascists, even the more left-wing people in the American establishment like Warren and Bernie are on the side of the capitalists. We hold fundamental political beliefs that differ from liberals. Liberals do not differ in fundamental political beliefs from fascists. It’s also why accusations of “horseshoe theory” are so hilarious to us.

when my local stores here in the UK have QR codes in them showing their websites I’m going to start complaining about the tyrannical British regime that forced them at gunpoint to put it in the window

“What if they invaded, pillaged, and coup’d the countries WE were going to invade, pillage, and coup! Can you imagine the tragedy?! Better that us, The Good Guys, exploit these countries than The Bad Guys!”

watching libs go through the cycle of

obnoxious, deeply racist, uncritical support of a war -> war ends -> hmm maybe this war is more complicated than I thought -> hmm maybe we even did some bad things -> hmm maybe we were in the wrong the whole time -> dang, I will never believe US propaganda so uncritically next time, I’ve learned my lesson -> holy shit that country over there is doing really bad things, we need to get involved! -> obnoxious, deeply racist, uncriticla support of a war

for the umpteenth time in the last century