David Axe has been reduced to begging for work on X. Telegraph stopped paying for his takes. Yet another indication that the 🇺🇦 propaganda circus is coming to an end. Axe is himself an interesting case imo, because despite not really being distinguishable from someone like Andrew Perpetua (he actually used Perpetua as an academic citation lol), he has been Forbes' resident Ukraine expert.

✒️🇸🇾: Syria has become a byword for the tragedy of demographics. What unfolds today was entirely predictable. Just as Libya effectively WAS Colonel Gaddafi, so too Syria WAS the Assad family. Remove these pillars, only an ethnoreligious maelstrom remains. The elements of Syria which were always its lowest in both intellect and culture, but which always formed a numeric majority (backed by a thick soup of mongrels from various other hellholes around the world) today seek to destroy what remains of its ancient minority groups.

The popular version of events is that Zelensky came to the US intending to sign the mineral deal, and detonated it by accident because he couldn't control his temper and theatrics

While this would be funnier, I think it less likely than Zelensky never intending to sign it. Zelensky sent Keir Starmer and balloon man to Washington ahead of him to try to soothe Trump for what was planned to be Zelensky taking a firm stand: security guarantees for 'intervention forces' or no deal, and to publicly shame the admin into re-opening negotiations.

lol, this is such a bizarre, tortured line of reasoning that these clowns are now forced to take. Let's just break this down a bit shall we?

https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/1895258250276413460

So essentially neocons have always made a kind of moral or systemic framework argument in favor of Ukraine. It has always been about upholding the 'rules based international order', 'stopping dictators', or to save precious, saintly Ukraine and its people who dindu nuffin.

For a long time, we've been saying that supporting the Zelensky government is in fact a position that harms Ukraine in the long run.

Well, if they are now forced to accept a mineral exploitation deal "worse than Versailles", does that argument not just become overwhelming? I suppose you can continue to resist the argument if you hold to the position that Russia actually intends to not only take over all of Ukraine, but to establish Treblinka-style camps across the country. Absent this, it's just patently obvious the country is being destroyed.

So, I am not optimistic about any negotiations concerning the Ukraine crisis at this time. I remain convinced that the two sides are too far apart in their respective imperatives to reach anything approximating a sustainable peace. The US imperative to end the war is understandable. An outcome that would freeze the conflict on the current lines of contact would constitute a positive result for the United States in realist terms. It would be bad for Europe, but that ultimately serves the same end.

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.