AIDS in South Africa was this apocalyptic event that most people don't care about that could have been avoided if politicians and orgs were less careless.

https://twitter.com/leecrawfurd/status/1862458175473004852

It's somewhat amusing that everyone talks about the e0 collapse in Russia after the fall of communism and no one talks about public health collapse in SA after the end of apartheid.

I think social conservatism are in the similar position as the Marxism in the 1970s, you can kinda feel victorious about your victory in Vietnam, but in the end, religions are dying, families are gone and birth rates collapsed. And we are only starting to enter the effects of the computerized globalisation, it's not obvious with what will you be left very soon.

I wrote about it, but I hate socdem theorists (communists don't do it) on their story that the 20th century was this peaceful democratic counter movement and not batshit insane barrack states with unprecedented levels of militarisation.

https://twitter.com/PJ11819211/status/1838970113518923933

You have the story about how the Soviets were this militarized society, but everyone was ready to just kill millions of their own citizens on the push of the button, transition into forced labor gas and nuke people.

The war is going to end in a few years for sure, not directly obvious how still, but "if only the West integrated RU better" is such a cowardly infantile meme, yeah, it is the West who was stealing the elections, leveling Grozny and murdering politicians near Kremlin.

https://twitter.com/leonidragozin/status/1838422884735209519

Also, Euros need to prepare for refuges obviously.

The country has death squads that killed more than the Pinochet regime, everyone outside of Maduro org hates him, economy and a state collapsed, there are massive refuge waves, but people can post stuff like this and no one from his friends will care.

https://twitter.com/broseph_stalin/status/1817552482513412477

The story with "socialism of the 21st" century was just this absurdly evil thing in which people defend just an absolute cretin because ???

There was a problem for the Soviets in transmitting the knowledge. All political and economic systems lie about themselves, but a gap between the stories Soviets were telling about themselves from how their economy worked to how their political system worked and reality was giant

https://twitter.com/haravayin_hogh/status/1790227567783682149

The first generations of communists were crude, violent, and quite cynical people, Gorbachev wasn't the "last true Leninist believer", he was among the first, and like a lot of people in his gen tried to mix narratives he was told from the young age with reality, it didn't work.

Obviously, the communist movement ("old left") should have told that it is for the annihilation of the civilization in Korea and Vietnam at least, with all their war mongering politics, obdurate dogmatism and unwillingness to negotiate.

https://twitter.com/BrankoMilan/status/1785718780397605261

And no, Americans committed a comparable share of resources to the thing as Soviets, Soviets supplied insane amount of equipment to directly fight Americans, and Americans had the plan to use the nukes in Korea.

Brother is diving more and more for the title of the French Hitler (follow Jeff Sachs), obviously it was the CIA who was doing massacres, driving people from the country by millions, bombing random villages and so on.

https://twitter.com/Darsam12_/status/1775657161873346752

What justification the USSR in Afghanistan had, especially in a way it proceeded? It's a border country that supplies jihadists, okay, but you coup the government to do what after?

re Orban, once again, sovereignty is a fake concept in political discourse that has some meaning only for international lawyers, for everyone else, it's more or less absolutely incoherent demagogic screeching about the preferred policies. All discourse about sovereignty is more or less "I want the X country to do Y, but it doesn't do Y hence it's gay and non-sovereign" and something about the foreign influences (that always exist for everyone).

At least we get that Mersh is consistent in his moods (and not as anti-imperialist multipolarity posters) because the closest situation to the modern Russia-Ukraine was obviously Japan-China at that moment and he has the position you should expect.

https://twitter.com/StevenGlinert/status/1731482026673668309

You get the island of Taiwan, Mukden incident, the coal miners of Manchuko, the Amur Society, the demands of de-militarization, de-Nazification, recognition of autonomies, neutrality, and ceasing the participation in hostile of Japan alliances as officially presented at Trautmann

In the context of Palestine and Israel, I obviously came back to thinking about my ideas of what exactly should have been Russia, Ukraine, and other post-Soviet states doing on the question of autonomy and languages. In general, I still hold the belief that if the RU government was more normal and had a more sane view of public politics in other countries, most of the post-Soviet space would end with a more chill policy towards Russian as the language.

if you look at Israel, it managed to run the mobilization far faster and more organized compared to Russia and Ukraine, but they are still quite angry and annoyed with how the quality and the capacity declined with time.

david-2.livejournal.com/747038.html#co… People want "sovereignty", "sovereignty" probably comes with 10% of GDP spent on the military and almost everyone in the army reserve with regular training, and not our gay, fake unipolar moment of 1.5% GDP on military spending.

Neither Kantongun nor the Japanese government planned to defend Manchuria in 1945. The majority of the Soviet operational plans weren't successful (including the armored spearhead just running out of fuel).

diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva…

https://twitter.com/nise_yoshimi/status/1713222283354099982

It was obviously a major effort from the Soviet side (at least 1.5m troops) with the army having insane dominance in equipment and large dominance in quantity of manpower, with quality it was even worse, the large number of divisions of the area army were newly raised conscripts.

"So many Russians died in WW2 to stop Nazis" is actually not a good thing about the Soviet Union as people think because one can say both military and civilian casualties are the result of the Soviet policies and preferences in the war. If you think otherwise and think that they have far better attitudes, I once again send you to the 1947 famine in which there was no war in the Soviet Union already, or the Finnish Winter War which was a war of choice.

bruegel.org/dataset/russia…




Indians ended up quite good in this war, people talk about China and are very angry about it, while Indians are the main counter-agent sitting at 1/3 of all Russian seaborne oil by value and volume.

Once again, the mysteries of this war so far (1) why RU is fighting so aggressively for the first line (2) what is the state of RU reserves and manpower at large (3) how well it will go for UA after the mine belts are passed

https://twitter.com/partizan_oleg/status/1689317792737312768

The (1) is actually really intriguing in the connection to (2) and (3), and (3) depends (2) because there is just a lot of really aggressive casualty heavy counter-attacks and last stands and RU is currently transferring more of the capable units into all of this.

The weirdest point about this war is that Russians not only don't treat themselves as evil (which is very normal and you shouldn't expect), but that they are not treating this war seriously and don't understand why everyone, especially Ukrainians, are mad at them.

https://twitter.com/oroshkevych_s/status/1684543227032899584

It's a really bizarre thing in the popular opinion, people just genuinely don't understand, both on the government and the popular level.

Putin when talking about Ukraine and not having something catastrophic almost always speaks with some weird grin.

You may totally disagree with everything he writes and think that he is a dumb or bad person, but if you read it, you can get the idea of what the moods people who did the entire thing had.

https://twitter.com/Peter_Nimitz/status/1678784667670188032

There is a point that people often post at me about how I think that I have some special inside into things, I don't and I don't think so, but there is a point that I have read a lot of these people from the start of the war in 2014 or even earlier for some.

In this half of the year, casualties of RU probably didn't change that much from the stuff we had at the end of the year, maybe only slightly increased

Here it gets to 50k/year (ie 70k at this moment, 70/1.33~52k)



~150 a day, ~1000 a week, ~4300 a monthbbc.com/russian/news-6… In general, even though casualties here are noticeable, they are not that large.

My favorite illustrative example for RU is Przemyśl in WW1: 40k in the first few days, 115k total.

Goes to the idea that both sides will end with around 100k as people predicted in the spring of 22

The lack of respect!

https://twitter.com/Mike_Eckel/status/1665075180933185537

On a serious note, you can notice that no one really speaks in the concrete personal or national losses, they just speak in abstractions about apocalyptic outcomes and mostly speak about the lack of respect.

I think people need to understand that if Russians had better coordination between different military districts and conditioned their troops to fight and the Ukrainian population was more passive, Ukraine could have been really finished in the first days without any memes. In a similar manner, the move with "attritional warfare" could have worked in the long run if the West didn't start shipping artillery to Ukranians.