FaibleEstimeDeSoi
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User ID: 2072
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
12d ago
No, I don’t think it’s obvious that the modal Ukrainian soldier no longer wishes to risk death
I think it's quite obvious that you wouldn't need forced draft otherwise. People just don't want to horrifically die in the trenches. That's why Russia had to also resort to forceful mobilization even with much larger pool of poor people who can bribed to do so.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
12d ago
Basically for it's entirety. The Russian forces being smaller than Ukranian ones and spread out across very large front was the main reason why 24 February invasion was an idiotic decision. Partial mobilization somewhat helped but Ukraine continues to hold numbers advantage.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
13d ago
It's more convenient to swipe a card or scan a QR code. Either we end up using privately run cryptocurrencies or state-run central bank digital currencies
And why would you need a digital currency for this and not current electronic cash? Many people even in Russia already live basically without using physical cash at all and that doesn't stop them evading taxes.
Yeah, it looks more like it in the sense of shape, but it's actually quite important that Russia doesn't control large parts of the annexed regions. I think it is not likely that they will succefuly take control of them before the war end.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
19d ago
Of course, that is the neorealist view, which I agree with. I just don't like singling out Russia as uniquely expansionist or authoritarian(but that's a different story).
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
19d ago
Yeah, but it is limited to Ukraine and previous incident was in WW2 negotiations. In this sense modern Russia is similar to Turkey without NATO membership but with nukes.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
19d ago
(from what we know about anyway) wasn't bad enough to justify a couple of hundreds more dead and maimed.
There were security guarantees from European countries included. And if you think that they would not be followed through in reality, why do you think that the army would be actually dismantled and not hidden in bureaucratic loopholes. Also, I hate when people use word to mean "thing that I don't like" instead of the definition of the word. No, any peace treaty that favors some side isn't unconditional surrender and terms weren't even close to one.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
19d ago
And then there's Moldova, which just is North Romania, but was divided from the motherland because of dumb Soviet border disputes.
I think it's more because of it's conquest by Russian Empire in the 19th century.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
19d ago
Generally my group, i.e. oppositional Russians are for an immediate peace specifically on the humanist reasoning. Peace deal that was proposed in April(from what we know about anyway) wasn't bad enough to justify a couple of hundreds more dead and maimed. Starting the war was incredibly dumb and evil thing to do, but so(of course less so) is continuing it in the hopes of gaining some land back.
mini-Russians
It is easy to misunderstand this but maloros ethnonym isn't some kind of slur but is coming from Byzantine chronists naming Principality of Galicia–Volhynia Small Rossia(Greek for Rus' and modern Russian for Russia), in the naming convention of naming ethnic heartlands small and land in which these people expanded to(like Principality of Vladimir) great(Like Magna Graecia). People in Ukraine did name themselves malorosy(not all of them, but many) up to the XX century, but this term was forbidden and fell out of use as part of soviet korenizatsiya policy.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
19d ago
I think this map from /pol/ is great for understanding who is winning. Right now even with the failed counteroffensive war is on a path to the Ukraine's pyrrhic victory, maybe without control of the coast, but with more land in the Donetsk region. If you were mugged in the alley by five guys and they stole your watch, but you KO'ed two of them and successfully run of with your remaining belongings it's still a victory.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
19d ago
You can basically say this about almost any state that existed for several centuries. International anarchy wasn't any different elsewhere. Moscow state was just one of the most successful at this up to the 20th century.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
19d ago
If Ukrainians didn't want to fight, they won't. People have their own agency, and no amount of cajoling and money got the Pashtuns to fight for 'Afghanistan' or Cubans to fight against Castro
I'm mostly agree but it seems that most of the Ukrainians want to fight in abstract, as country, but not themselves, as the existence and unpopularity of mobilization show. You don't close the borders for fighting-age males if you aren't suspecting that they will choose to run from the country instead of risking their lives for it.
Almost half of Europeans are Slavic and there would have been much more than half without commies, they are also the reason why slavs are so much poorer than westerners. So if you look at the poor white women population numbers slavs dominate, you don't need some cultural effects for this.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
19d ago
He already uses this tactics to some extent by conscripting mostly ethnic minorities and rural population. The same tactics Mao utilized when he sent surrendered Kuomintang soldiers to Korea: win-win scenario for him.
There is no deliberate forceful conscription for ethnic minorities in Russia, generally mobilization impacted everybody proportionally to the size of young male population strata(of course on average poorer ones, because of bribing for protection). Large part of Russian forces now consist of people who decided to sign up their life for money and as you can expect more of them would be poor, and like in many other countries Russian minorities are relatively poor(not all of them, Armenians are having it pretty good). There is almost no military tradition among Russians in modern day to counteract this.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
21d ago
I wasn't knowledgeable about US to have an opinion about it when this was true. And I think that the latest part of that period was color blind enough to be just the result of fair hiring practice. But for example native Russian minorities being almost non-existent in Russian media apart from a selected few does bothers me.
See my answer to him. But also I aren't in anyway shape or form against interracial or even any form of marriage at all. It is jarring to me because it's most likely the sign of ideology that I disagree with. Like maybe this soviet movie about Russian Empire is overtly highly critical of it because it was personal opinion of the filmmaker, but most likely it's because he is a card carrying communist(or it was the censors mandate, but happily US isn't a totalitarian state and it's not on the way there).
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
21d ago
Like anything interracial pairing can be a propaganda or not depending on the context. In the American context there is widespread effort to reduce prevalence of white men in media with the goal of representation and making viewers less racist(in the vein of studies that showed that growing up in more diverse schools leads to being more inclusive). You can of course expect interracial pairs in US media without this factor, America is racially diverse and there are quite many interracial unions, but they are vastly overrepresented in media. I didn't write this in the OP because I thought that here most of the people already know about this.
[Disclaimer: I think that this post maybe too low-effort for Culture war thread but other ones don't look appropriate to me]
Can you do too much noticing?
Fallout series released not too long ago and as a fan of games I was reasonably interested, especially after mostly good reviews came in. But while it has quite many political themes I will not talk about them, instead I will focus on some much less important and meaningful thing - casting and specifically race of the actors. Generally I don't want to spoil myself too much, so I ignore teasers, trailers and, of course full-blown reviews, even if they promise to contain no spoilers at all. So at the time right before series release I knew two facts about it, which were gathered from two old stills: protagonist is a woman vault dweller and there was also ghoul sheriff character. Yesterday when I finally had enough free time to comfortably marathon watch it(my preferred way), I saw a third one with a black character that was a member of BoS and my first thought was: "Oh, so it's mc's love interest". And I was right, like I was with similar predictions many times before.
I can easily see how the white woman/black man pairing become so wide-spread in recent years. You don't any conspiracies from 4chan white nationalists imagination, just brutal logic of the modern social justice thought. If you're making action movie, you need an action hero, obviously it should be a woman to combat harmful stereotypes. You can add some other traits: disability, PoC status, mental illness; but most often being a woman is enough for mc so we just return to default, white and pretty. Then you need to add some diversity in main cast, who is the most diverse and minoritiest of them all? - Black people, specifically African Americans. And we already have a woman, why not this one be a man. And if the cast is small or filled with mentors, monsters, villains and characters too young for romance, why not pair up the first two that we designed?
In many ways this is continuation of my previous post because anytime I notice one of the signs of this ideology dominant among American media creators and therefore their creations I feel robbed of enjoying perfectly adequate television because I for some reason decided to read about American politics. While being blissfully ignorant I thought that African Americans constituted at least a quarter if not the third of US population and movie demographics seemed absolutely normal in this light. I, like majority of Eastern Europeans don't have anything to dislike about people of African descent, those few who do live here are students or children of students, are not part of some diaspora and assimilate quite well(though obviously people will look differently at the black Ivan, or Stefan, but it's curious look, without animosity). I compared this feeling to watching soviet-made movies as an American businessman at the time of the Cold War(which of course vanishingly small number of them actually did). You notice propaganda against small bourgeoise like you, but why would it matter if USSR is very far away and communists that you know about are all educated intellectuals obviously against any kind of violence?
One thing that I don't understand is why nobody "inside the kitchen" don't notice how weird their attempts at propaganda seem. I think there wouldn't be so many far rightists in hypothetical America where there is much less to notice. IMHO, Hollywood elites aren't black supremacists and majority of them don't consider themselves in someway being against white race, they are true believers, who try to promote DiversityTM in their media because they think that it will make its viewers better people. My guess is that they do notice, but because of the implication of noticing being bad in itself, there is no one to say: "maybe better make him Asian this time".
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
22d ago
But majority of people are too stupid to make a balanced and informed choice to stop wearing seatbelts. Developed countries generally adopted humanism as the guiding philosophy and if you need to slightly restrict personal freedom to do fentanyl or drive without seatbelt to reduce deaths it is worth it.
[META] Did anybody else got notifications about comments from random people who aren't replying to or mentioning you?
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