📰🇺🇦: 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.

I see some 'edgy contrarians' counter-signalling the condemnation of this guy's girlfriend for not helping him.
Extremely cringe defense of trash. Nobody is saying she should have fought the attacker, but letting him bleed out while you stand there is indefensible. I'm glad that my worldview allows me to say:

1) The victim was stupid for approaching, and his politics enabled his attacker
2) The attacker was street trash and should get the max penalty
3) The girlfriend is also street trash for doing nothing when the attacker had left

I think NATO 'experts' are really underestimating how strong a potential victory in Ukraine might leave the Russian Armed Forces, in multiple areas from the adaptation of war industries, to its appeal to young Russian men, to structural reforms the war necessitated. Mostly, the idea of a Russian victory is examined for its purported political/diplomatic effects: "this will convince digtaters they can grab land without consequence!" etc.
There is very little attention paid to the other results that follow from this outcome.

Let's talk Ron DeSantis.

The case he had to make to the American people was simple: "Trump promised a load of really great stuff, and then appointed every person possible who would dismantle his presidency. I won't do that, because I'm competent, and here's my record" GOP governors universally suck, so it's a low bar to actually get some real conservative wins and become a contender. DeSantis' record has problems (laws against speech critical of Israel? LAME), but compared to any other governor, he seemed solid.

💢🇺🇸: The UN/White House Ukraine summit was supposed to be a triumph for Biden's policies. Russia should have been isolated and begging for peace, with Zelensky welcomed as a triumphant hero with tables full of cash. What went wrong? Let's break it down The first thing is, Ukraine failed. It had several months to make meaningful progress in Zaporozhye and justify the colossal investment so far in both training and machines. It could barely clear Rabotino. Sure, it got in some humiliating shots at Russia, but no game-changers.

🇦🇲: One of the things recent developments may offer insight into is why Russia's reaction to 'The Velvet Revolution' was so muted, and why Serzh Sargsyan never sought a CSTO intervention as Tokayev did in early 2022. Simply put, Sargsyan was not viewed as a reliable partner, and while Pashinyan's gang sought to drape their bureaucratic coup in the furs European color revolution (couldn't even come up with a new name for it, just stole from the Czechs), it actually had a more mundane character

The truth about Armenia is this, bitter as it might be to hear:

- Iran will not intervene unless Azerbaijan does something incredibly stupid (which they will not)
- Russia has run out of cards to play as a deterrent factor, and this has little to do with Pashinyan And thirdly, not only does Armenia's military lack the conventional capability to resist Azerbaijan in a fair fight, its political leadership lacks in almost every respect what might be needed to play to the country's strengths, with no signs this leadership can be changed.

⚡️🇳🇪: It appears to be confirmed that the Nigerian senate rejected President Tinubu's request to approve an unprovoked invasion of Niger at the head of an ECOWAS coalition. Let's discuss potential implications of this.

https://twitter.com/SaharaReporters/status/1687849421558390784

Reporting from investigative journos in Nigeria has some interesting tidbits:

"Almost all the senators spoke and totally ruled out the military options"

"Senators pointed out that our military is highly ill-equipped and not prepared to fight any war"

premiumtimesng.com/news/614494-ni…

My biggest gripe with "trust the experts" is that they've all been wrong about basically everything for at least 40 years, and none of them ever lose expert status, as is evidenced by the fact Max Boot still has a column in a major newspaper. Also, the "experts" who you as a member of the general public have access to are NOT just any experts. They're the experts who moonlight as attention-whores and will say pretty much anything to get in front of a camera and be cast as some kind of genius.