Just in terms of media, I don't know how Ukraine recovers if it leaves Kursk at this point. That will be two major offensives billed by the Ukrainians themselves as 'game-changers' which failed. Hard to make the case for further investment. "But what about Russia's failures?"

Russia is largely self-funded. There isn't the same optics dynamic that exists for Ukraine.

Oh, and btw, the 'solution' put forward here is no different from the various iterations offered previously. It is neither militarily realistic, politically feasible for Kiev, or desirable for Moscow. Let's discuss some provisions.

🔍

https://twitter.com/baronitaigas/status/1853457271361015902

The first provision is that unspecified weapons will be given to Kiev on the condition it begins pursuing diplomacy, provided that these are only used for 'defensive' purposes, but that an unspecified subset of these can be used to strike targets in Russia.

There is kind of an intrinsic liberal bias when it comes to depicting most state-scale atrocities as the result of ideological mania. People do bad things because they've been possessed by 'bad ideas'. Never because they're just shitty people. I suppose it's a little like this idea of riots being 'the voice of the unheard'. People riot because they're angry.

No, a small minority of people riot because they're angry. The majority are opportunistic thieves looking to loot.

I think it is important to highlight, this is the unbalanced risk-assessment that has existed in this war from day 1.

Kiev has never, nor will it ever, care about civilians killed in the new territories of Russia, because "it is all a warzone", "they are civilian occupiers" etc.

https://twitter.com/squatsons/status/1810357741610742265

But Russia cannot at any point say "all of Ukraine is a warzone". At some point, the justification for maintaining this second-class status for civilians on the Russian side was going to wear thin, and Russia would stop measuring itself at all.

And I am glad. Democracy is fake. It always has been.
The 'will of the people' is manufactured by politicians and their media sycophants as a post-facto justification of their position, and even when it isn't, it is ignored by some intrigue or procedure in the democratic process.

https://twitter.com/RealCandaceO/status/1810067924930994606

Why do you think countries like the UK and the US have electoral systems specifically designed to keep out new parties, even if the may represent a significant amount of voters in the country? 15% of the vote = 5 seats? This isn't a happy accident.

⚡️🇺🇦: News about further Russian advances in Niu York. There are now three tactical crises engulfing Ukraine's military.

- The collapse of the defensive belt around Toretsk
- Russian proximity to Pokrovsk
- Russian proximity to the 00532 (Ugledar supply road) All three have resulted from the redeployment of reserves out of Donbas to fight fires in Kharkov, where it can be argued both forces are 'fixed' in a stalemate, but it is a stalemate which is causing major problems for Kiev rather than Moscow.

"Today, people are only taking a second look at religion for political reasons"

This sentiment, imo, fails to recognize he extent to which people left religion for political reasons. How many polls over the years showed leading reasons for apostasy being "my religion's teaching on X wholesome chungus minority group". I'm pretty sure that was often a high-ranking reason why young people left churches.

I knew Hamish de Bretton-Gordon was stupid, but this is a whole new level. Again, virtually every single thing in this article is wrong, and so wrong to the point where it could easily be mistaken for parody.

telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/06/1… "The tide of war is beginning to turn in Kiev’s favour now they can begin to strike targets in Russia."

Nobody thinks this. There is no metric by which anyone could judge this statement to be accurate. Ukraine's situation continues to deteriorate with no signs of a reversal.

📰🇺🇦: It's never a particularly positive article on the war in Ukraine when the first sentence is: "Joe Biden is the worst US president since Jimmy Carter" and he is later characterized as "a blundering, interfering imperial overlord"

telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/05/1… In fact, this is good stuff 👍. I'm going to highlight some parts

"America’s reputation in the emerging world is at its lowest ebb since the 1970s"

Yep, but that's not just because of Biden. It's a core problem with how the west generally behaves and thinks.

Allegations of "third worldism" on the right grow increasingly sus.

What's the goal here? There's a strong echo of the absolutely useless dead-end that whining about Iraq/Iran/Afghanistan became during the 00s. Let's set a few things straight ✍️ No country in the world is a panacea. No country has perfect policies, or a totally admirable culture. In fact, it could be convincingly argued no country today in 2023 can hold a candle to any country 500 years ago. And no country neatly maps onto another.

So, to sum up, hundreds of thousands of people are now dead because the west is run by literal children. Seriously, WTF? This journo is writing an actual Rotten Tomatoes review of the war.

⚡️🇺🇸: "In Ukraine, the risk isn’t stalemate. It’s defeat"

Let's dissect this latest article, shall we?

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/… "The fact that Ukraine’s fate is hanging in the balance arises not from its inability to recapture territory from entrenched Russian forces"

Kind of obtuse. While the EU issue isn't really related to the failed offensive, Republican skepticism directly correlates with it.

🧵🇷🇺: There is a piece missing from discussions about the failure of Russia’s first plan for the Special Military Operation, without which a distorted notion of strategic position is unavoidable.

To focus too much on the bad execution is to miss the worse objectives. Nobody with any credibility today maintains that the aim of the SMO was to annex all of Ukraine. Every data point we have, from the troop numbers involved to the recognition of DNR/LNR as independent states rather than honoring their 2014 referenda, points away from it.

🗣️🇷🇺: Kotkin joins a growing conga line of western literati now saying "we need an armistice in Ukraine now". Credit to him, he has provided a kind of roadmap where others have not, but his concept of how that happens is as fanciful as it is incoherent.

https://twitter.com/baronitaigas/status/1721199923759079784

Firstly, Kotkin does not give any consideration whatsoever to the position of the Ukrainian government. His view just assumes that like an animatronic dummy, if the US tells them to accept the de facto loss of territory, they will.

My maximum doubtfulness theory about what is happening in Israel is that Hamas is the only actor in this entire production who actually has a clear idea of where they stand with respect to their own and their enemy's capability.

Everyone else is hastily trying to assess. This entails that indeed Hamas was he only party aware of this operation beforehand, and it was likely politically motivated to derail imminent 🇸🇦 normalization at any cost (a goal which has been achieved). The closed intelligence loop has left everyone scrambling.

And here's why Ben Shapiro is peddling his own lies about this conflict:

1) Jews have an ancient ethnic rooting in part of the present-day Israel, along with multiple other Semitic tribes who they conquered and largely destroyed, as per the OT. God gave the land into their hands

https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status/1713573517243863168

However, modern day Jews in Israel have as spurious a genetic connection to the Jews of that time as multiple other groups in the area, including the Palestinians. In fact, the closest ethnic match to the OT Jews are Palestinian Christians.

🇮🇷♟️🇮🇱: The Iranian threat reported by Axios (really just a more explicit version of the statements they have put out in various formats) places Israel and the US in a dangerous situation in terms of credibility. And this credibility risk is not asymmetric. Iran is an insurgent regional power. It will not be particularly surprising to anyone if Iran fails to intervene meaningfully against an Israeli invasion of Gaza, for a few reasons.

The situation with civilian buildings in 🇵🇸 is also not exactly analogous to the situation in 🇺🇦. Russia is fighting a formal army in Ukraine, not an irregular militia, and this does change things. When Russia strikes civilian structures in Ukraine, the vast majority of cases these are frontline buildings where the Ukrainian military has set up firing points and there is video of them shooting from these. Sadly in many cases, civilians are 'evacuated' only to the basement.

"Egypt is SO MEAN!"

Let me just defend Egypt for a moment on this, since I am white and therefore a descendent of pharaohs. About 30% of the country lives in poverty, a large amount of which can be described as "extreme poverty". It has an insurgency problem in the Sinai with an organization which has had links to Hamas, and routinely commits terrorist attacks like blowing up Coptic churches.

The majority of people around the world have this impression that the West Bank is governed by the Palestinian Authority and is the nucleus of a future sovereign Palestine. Maps are misleading in this regard. The reality is that the Palestinians have effective self-government only in completely isolated sub-districts of the West Bank, nested within a network of Israeli colonist towns and cities, and zones of direct military control.

Whose side am I on?
Ours.
Somebody has to be. The land where God walked was taken out of our hands 1,000 years ago. Who controls it is not a political question for us. We have no duty to help or harm anyone there. We only have a duty to advance our own cause wherever the enemy stumbles.