KulakRevolt
Writes at https://anarchonomicon.substack.com/
Writes weird Twitter Threads @FromKulak
Rides motorcycles... poorly.
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Winner of Motte Post of the Year 2019
User ID: 905
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
LOL. Amateurs.
Imagine trolling without keeping detailed spread sheets of your interact ratios.
Why even bother.
Just go back to being agreeable if you aren't going to put in the effort to be disagreeable
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
So I'm an Amateur SupCom (Supreme Commander: Forges Alliance) player... so even further afield.
But applying my non-existent expertise...
Russia hasn't been leading an "Offensive". And the maybe 10-20 km they've creeped over the past 3 months isn't anything that could "Culminate"
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Russia has avoided all logic of maneuver warfare since about april-may, all real dynamic movement has been near non-existent, and they've "Advanced" at the slowest imaginable snails pace, even for less than full mobilization forces they have.
None of this makes sense unless you internalize the most most important stat of the war: Russian Artillery outnumbers Ukrainian artillery 10-1.
This is a scenario that there isn't really a famous war of it happening before, or atleast not one where its penetrated pop culture But it happens all the bloody time in SupCom.
Basically when you have a numerically comparable force (not outnumbered 3-1) a massive artillery advantage, and some densive capability sufficient to resist a counter-attack you can creep up to territory your opponent HAS to defend, and force them to occupy and maneuver in it under constant bombardment of your artillery.
The obvious counter to this is just to retreat slightly out of range of the artillery, let there be a large no man's land between you, and then do fast maneuvers back and forth to attack, counter attack, parry across that land so you're still fighting the enemy and not ceding net territory, but you spend a minimum of time exposed to the artillery.
The problem is there's a lot of territory you just have to defend.
Ukraine cannot just pull back off the Donbass... this isn't a grand theater war where Russia is trying to conquer the whole of Ukraine no matter what, and provinces can be sacrificed in gambits If Russia takes all the Donbass, has their land bridge, etc. They're liable just to declare victory and dig in and that'd be it... Worse the Ukrainian army is a good percentage people conscripted in the past 6 months... you start maneuvering them around too much, a lot will take that opportunity to get lost... maybe across a border.
So what do you do when you can't cede a territory, can't hold it without being overwhelmed with artillery, and can't take out the artillery?
You endure the artillery.
I've seen maybe hundreds of players design these plays where their opponent is forced to just feed units into artillery fire, and tie up tons of resources in these attrition scenarios... and none of them ever really looked like they were moving and looked like draws to untrained eyes... then the announcer would point out the kill loss ratio.
This also allowed the player with the artillery to hold a territory with a relatively small force since the enemy's cumulatively much larger stock of units is being defeated in detail over time, and never has enough in position at once to actually attack.
Some players make big strategic sacrifices to break off from this scenario, some do really risking low numbers attacks that sometimes work, some pull of something cool with airpower.
But this is really the opposite of an offensive in the classical sense... you're forcing your opponent into a situation where they have to aggress against you but can't, and ergo suffer high attrition.
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But the big thing is this is the opposite of an offensive which can culminate. Russia is basically fighting defensively as far as I can tell and their little territorial gains exist basically to force the Ukrainians to stay at the front, and not fall back out of arty range. Even we saw how quickly Russian divisions can move in the south of Ukraine at the start of the war... Pretty much all the southern territory was taken in a month... now a tenth of that, with all the northern forces redeployed there, have been static for 4 months? If Russia was trying to do big maneuver warfare they'd either be succeeding or failing and those lines would be moving in every direction. The fact the map looks so stagnant pretty much means they have to be pursuing semi-static tactics.
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
You're thinking Marines. They're the Amphibious assaulters, and by rights should be under the navy... Which they are, technically... the department of Navy which doesn't allow meaningful crossover between Marines and Navy.
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
I'm sure there was some advocate of secular dictatorship in 1790s France who remained staunchly opposed to Napoleon all the way through 1815 because "Well not like that"
You only live once and you if you wait on principle you'll come to your grave having spent your life waiting. You dance with the girl at the ball.
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
1 million dead Jews would be less than Holodomor or dozens of more recent genocides....
Imagine finding out the legitimacy of America's and Israel's moral narratives rested on fewer dead bodies than America's interventions against Iraq or Vietnam.
People have been arrested and imprisoned for questioning the holocaust narrative, lives destroyed... the regime has gone to really fucked up propagandistic ends to protect the post-war order's founding mythology, and I'm someone who doesn't contest the figure.
If you could actually show Hitler killed fewer Jews than Lenin killed Russians 20 years earlier.... Then why the fuck was the US and UK backing the USSR vs. Germany? Both of them invaded Poland. That was a cooperative effort. By rights Britain and France should have declared war on Russia in addition to Germany in '39...
Could it be the great powers motives for the second world war was just as cynical and suspect as the first, and the entire post war order founded on misrepresentations of the war and Churchill's and FDR's motives for killing a generation?
That's the logical conclusion that's been drowned out in national myth-making and the obscene parading of dead jews, gypsies, and other victims...
The Holocaust wasn't even begun until '42, America and Britain justify their war with events that happened after they declared...
But if it became public knowledge the Holocaust was grossly overstated (I doubt it was)... All of a sudden the last unifying pro-regime narrative dies.
There'd suddenly be entire schools of thought arguing Hitler was doing what was necessary to contain genocidal bolshevism... Swastikas would become accepted political kitsch for angsty teens just like hammer and sickles are.
"Rage for the Reich" would start playing sold out shows.
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I doubt there's anything really there in holocaust revisionism... culture shifted fast between 45 and 65...I imagine something would have outed if it was bunk...
But man, to think the question doesn't matter? It sure matters to every grade school and high school history teacher when they preach the good word of how Anne Frank gave her life so that the rest of us might live under US Global Hegemony.
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
Long piece I wrote on the state of Legacy media and how its degraded in the past 8 years.
In the piece I argue that the primary business model of legacy media is not providing entertainment or even selling ad space, but rather selling selective silence to deep pocketed interests: Whether they be the military industrial complex, big pharma, NGOs or ever more often, the governments they're supposed to hold to account.
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
I get like 1000-2000 per each post in the initial run of 1-2 days when I'm linking it everywhere I can, such as here... and then an additional 50-200 per day across the whole Substack sometimes it spikes up to 400 per day if my Twitter game is particularly good.
My top post has about 5,000 unique views.
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
Could you add a feature where if you hover over a user's name it shows a little window that previews their profile?
A lot of people add a fair bit to their profiles or some important detail that makes it vastly easier to remember who they are/get a feel for them/ build community... and you just never saw that on the Reddit version of the Motte because then you'd have to click on their name, go to their profile, and lose your spot 300 comments down in the thread.
I remember interacting with someone for months on the reddit version, finally thinking to click their profile... and suddenly realizing the person I was interacting with was famous, had an entire body of work, and I'd actually read their stuff but never realized it was the same person.
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This would also incentivize people to add detail to their profiles, and make the userbase/community that much more internally familiar.
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
There shouldn't be.
Fines, disfigurement/dismemberment, death. Those should be the only punishments.
Taking decades off someone's life is vastly more cruel than taking a limb, and the dilution of killing someone across 50 years by making them waste in a prison dilutes the resistance you get.
If every life sentence or decades long interment had to be replaced with a public execution or a public cleaving of limbs with the judge in mandatory attendance... there'd be a hell of a lot less of it, and a very good shillings point for public outrage and resistance.
Prison is like all bureaucratic solutions, it exists to dilute responsibility for the decision and to impose the costs of the decision with a minimum of potential for resistance.
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
Rage Fueled rant: What is with the intellectual bankruptcy on Ukraine?
I'm not talking about fog of war stuff, or always erroring towards one side... even the most stern eyed realist struggles with emotions infecting analysis...
I'm talking about respected, degree holding, prominent figures... who have built careers around the dispassion of their analysis, engaging openly in the worst, laziest, most childish, intellectual abuses when it comes to Ukraine.
I was listening to a commentator, i had followed for quite some time, and thought of as quite dispassionate (won't link him... he's dead to me) who just opened a video declaring that "The Ukraine conflict is one of the clearest examples of good vs. evil in the past century"
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set aside everything else... set aside your faction in the culture war, set aside what you think of the war...
Can you think of another war where this language would be tolerated from an allegedly dispassionate subject matter expert?
"The Second Libyan civil war (2014-2020) was the clearest example of good vs. evil in the 21st century", "The 2014 Gaza War was a matter of Good vs. Evil", "Gulf War 1 was really about Good vs. Evil", "the Falklands was a clear example of Good vs. Evil", "The Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia was entirely a matter of good vs. evil (though there you could make the case... they were fighting the Khmer Rouge)", "The US invasion of Grenada... really just a matter of good vs. evil", "The Sino-Indian war was really a matter of good vs. evil", "The bay of pigs invasion, when you get down to it, was about good vs. evil", "The French War in Algeria was a clear matter of Good vs. Evil", "The Spanish civil war was a true contest of good vs. evil", "The Irish war of Independence was really a conflict of Good vs. Evil"... WW1? Good vs. Evil. The Russo-Japanese war? Absolutely good vs. evil, had to stop the yellow menace. The Boer war? Entirely good vs. evil (though again there you could make the case... the British, Canadian, and Australian contingent invented the concentration camp in that war to deal with the Rebellious ethnic Dutch colonist...The Boer, the scum race of the Transvaal)
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If you heard any figures saying these were matters of "Good vs. Evil" you'd immediately discount them and probably think them some anti-intellectual freak. In my first year history course I received a D on an essay for an anachronistic, sides taking, argument 1/1000th as egregious. (I argued the attitude expressed by a Ming dynasty diplomat describing India could be interpreted as "Westward Orientalism")
This figure would be embarrassed describing any other war in such terms... hell I'd never even heard him use such language discussing the second world war...
And yet the 2022 Russo-Ukraine war... that's the war so egregious he'll throw intellectual impartiality to the wind in the name of sheer denunciation.
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It's not even the most egregious war currently being fought within 1000km of the Black sea. That infamy belongs either to the reignited Nagorno-Karabakh war where Azerbaijan and Turkey are trying to squelch the young democracy in Armenia, or the ongoing conflict in Syria where turkey is likewise trying to Squelch the increasingly autonomous Kurdistan and its various democratic movements ... We don't hear about these conflicts though, because Turkey is a NATO member and a keystone of Europe's treaties to keep migrants out.
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I could grasp this, though not respect it, if this figure was somehow tied up in the US establishment and had career opportunities riding on it... but he's well independent of that. Just likes the coolaid.
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This trend i also egregious if you consider the rhetoric around the Ukraine war... That its fought for democracy, that Putin is an Autocrat... that this is a war for freedom....
Such as the freedom to criticize your government? Do you? Nope, just criticizing the people the government and media tells me to criticize.
The applause signs around words apparently being more important than any meaning the words themselves might have.
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Was this what it was like in 2002-2003 when Afghanistan and Iraq were starting? Did every remotely public intellectual drop their standards this quickly? I remember the Anti-war movement being more prominent at the time... Was that only after the fact?
Or is the Anti-war movement silent because this is Putin and he's now coded pro-trump and Anti-gay... (yet somehow everyone else in central Eurasia isn't)
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Sorry if this is ranting... I actually respected this commentator and this combined with other things was just a remarkable intellectual slide... I feel dirty... like the time engaging with him left me dumber somehow, and now I have to go back through ideas I first heard from him and check for the rot.
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
Intelligence actually post-dates "Humanity"'s first invention: Warfare.
You find in tribes of chimps and other primates genocidal wars they commit against each other, murder all the men, take all the women... the exact kinda thing you'll be familiar with if you read the old testament or the Illiad.
This is how most higher primates lived for 100s of thousands of years, and it had an incredible selection effect. Unlike most other mammals or animals in general where dominance competitions are non-lethal feats of strength and fitness, lethal conflict doesn't depend on female selection of the winner, and all kinds of tactics that would be judged "less fit" become available... No female in the wild would choose to be the mate of one suitor over another if that suitor only won the dominance fight with the assistance of three friends... but when you murder the rival suitor she can't choose him.
thus humans incredible investment in brainpower as opposed to the the incredible musculature you see on some animals... when humans are starving the body will consume the muscle mass to keep them alive... but not the brain mass. Hunger, malnutrition even comatose states don't result in extreme Brian wastage the way you get muscle wastage... the brain is that important for reproductive success.
The conflicts of violence and mating are bred into our psyches men are obsessed with war... contact sports, war movies, the history channel, they mesmerize most... likewise women are mesmerized by not just love triangle harlequin romances conflicts... but true crime. Endlessly fascinated, titilated, and entertained by the idea of scandalous conniving romantic murders.
Unlike most modern problems we struggle to direct our attention to.. these problems we find innately endlessly rewarding, because like hunting, fishing, cooking, camping... they activate our ancestral reward centers.
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If intelligence is no longer being selected for, its likely because that competition... or rather that method of competing is blocked off... There is no longer a rewarding contest of arms or conniving plots of murder and romance that predictably result in significantly more reprodution in men, and significantly better mates and resources for the women and offspring... Or atleast not at the higher levels of intelligence.
If i were to describe the Ukraine war I describe it like the Iran-Iraq War... Two awful regimes you'd never want to live in grinding conscripts and people with no better prospects against each other. And also maybe Iran was a better place to live than Iraq during the time... low bar. (or maybe Iran just happens to be the only middle-eastern country with a movie industry so it seems better)
Ultimately I'd like them both to lose, and the cynical western backers drawing out the war to lose even harder....
Picture the map of the region rendered in stained glass... and then picture all the lines if you hit that stained glass repeatedly with a hammer... Those are what the borders should be. I wouldn't trust any of these people to govern a man 10 miles away let alone 400, and even then I'd want that local subject to be heavily armed.
Putin is awful... don't get me wrong. But Ukraine is literally executing civilians for continuing to live in occupied areas, has shelled civillians since 2014, has banned every rival political party, banned a free press, banned its population from leaving... Ukraine is basically North Korea at this point... and this is what our leaders hold up as their ideal and model of democracy for the rest of us.
Fuck that.
To quote Marylin Manson: "I wasn't born with enough middle fingers, I don't need to choose a side."
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
Well that's terrifying if that's the trendline and the anti-war movement was that strong recently... certainly ups the odds of a world war if that's the case.
If I may ask... Why do you have so much hatred for the Russian state... A kleptocratic petro-state... but not Saudi Arabia, a vastly worse kleptocratic petro-state without even the pretenses of democracy, that has been commiting Genocide against the people of Yemen for the past 8 years? And which America and the west could bring down in a second by sanctioning?
I really don't get how you can say the current Russian regime is somehow worse than the USSR when the USSr didn't even have the pretense of elections, or any of the basic economic freedoms, that even compromised, the modern Russians takes for granted.
These are really obvious questions.
Russia's a shitty country...but its like 110th out of 200 in the world today in terms of quality... might even crest the top 100.... And the offense that that 110th country might attack the 120th country, when the 120th has been shelling civilians for 8 years and waging war against independent regions...
It is just because Ukraine made fawning noises about the EU and Yemen didn't/wasn't white enough?
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
Not letting your citizens leave the country is a very VERY unique horror with very few precedents. And one I am very fucking sensitive to having just lived through the Canadian lockdowns.
Yep. The western elite has seen Ukraine bar the leaving of the country, ban critical newspapers, murder dissidents, ban opposition parties, imprison opposition leaders... and they have called it the height of democracy and encouraged us to be more like them.
There is no doubt in my mind the American, Canadian, and European elite would gladdly do the exact same things, selectively conscript their ethnic rivals and send them to the suicide units the second they got an excuse.
This is why I'd prefer Putin win... it might result in regime change in the west. I understand you feel the exact same, if not worse, hatred for Putin than I do for my government...
But Putin doesn't want my family dead, and the western elite does... Toronto Star (state funded newspaper) litterally ran front page stories about how th Unvaxxed should be denied medical treatment, and senior regime figures encouraged doctors and nurses to covertly not treat the unvaxxed... this while I was split open and going through multiple surgeries.
Russia is a very long ways away, and I knew people disfigured and unbanked here.
Not really... Russia was positioned to become a US ally as late as 2008-2012, partner in the global war on terror stuff... another nuclear armed, economically dependent, ethically suspect appendage of American empire like Israel or Pakistan... Not really democratic, but good at keeping the locals in line...
Then the woke stuff hit, Putin was a white man who was anti-gay and the democrats went from mocking republicans for treating them as a geopolitical rival ("The 1980s called they want their foreign policy back" said Obama to Romney) to hating any republicans agreed with the take Obama had in 2012...
Its all Trump and Gay Marriage.
That's why Ukraine was treated as a major geopolitical happening in 2014 when Russia-Georgia was completely ignored, or how we're going defcon 1 with sanctions now... but didn't when Putin was propping up Assad in Syria back in 2015.
There can't be a white country that isn't woke. and Russia's the only Asia regional power Americans consider white... So when Turkey wages war on the Democratic and freedom loving Kurds, who have been America's allies for 30 years... no one gives a shit. But when Russia wages war against an ultranationalist not really democratic country that's been commiting warcrimes for 8 years... defcon 1.
Trump, Gay Marriage, white skin. Those are the driving forces of US foreign policy on this. Those are the only things that separate Russia from Turkey or Pakistan or Egypt... or any other Faux democratic, kinda belligerent regional power with dozens of different border disputes.
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
Universal mobilization means you are now an element of the war machine, and leaving is desertion. It has happened everywhere at different times for different reasons, and exists as an option for all developed nations in the world as we speak.
A principled stand for freedom here is worthwhile, but probably only if your particular set of borders has a bunch of nukes/is part of a nuclear alliance.
I have written about concription several times on the motte... In every instance I've argued it demanded lethal violence against thos administering it. Up to ands including killing the volunteer members of the draft boards
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
Yes but why should Americans care?
Were trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives wasted over that continent not enough?
And why does proximity affect the ethics of it. America arms and funds dozens of crappy countries doing vastly worse. I haven't read of Russians doing anything to Ukrainian civilians under its territorial control comparable to what Israel does to Palestinians...
And as for unmotivated wars of aggression... Russia had a vastly better case for invading Ukraine, right next door/already waging war agianst ethnic russians, than the US ever had for invading Iraq
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
I'd be more sympathetic to the "Liberal democratic order" if it wasn't directly funding and propping up genocide and apartheid in Yemen and Palestine.
Or if the US and UK had vastly more egregiously invaded a country 8000km away who had offered no aggression to them over lies not 20 years ago, causing close to a million deaths and geostrategic instability that probably killed a million more... And then done it all again in Libya in 2012.
I've been keeping score. The modern Russian state is vastly less threatening to the human race in terms of body count than this "Liberal international order"... Which is neither liberal, nor providing order to anyone outside a very select club.
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
Its a big deal if Ukraine wins its shores up the "Liberal international order" another 30 years, and then we live to see the slow role of totalitarianism every western country is headed towards come to fruition. You can see it in Ukraine: Our elites wish they ban opposition parties, opposition press, and then round up their ethnic and political enemies to use as canon fooder just like Zelensky is doing...
If Russia had won quickly and decisively it would have probably broken the western elite, and forced Germany and Co. to pivot towards Russia to secure their energy and econonmic interests... And then the possibility of the global total state would have been impossible.
As it is, if Ukraine wins this war or Russia collapses I shudder at what globohomo might become...
I'm not outraged at Ukraine or the middle-east because of any especial emotional attachment to the people there... I'm outraged because of what it lets us know about what the western and more specifically north American elite will do to us here.
Same way they've been trying to deploy all the tools of the war on terror against dissidents at home, you can bet they'll use all the Zelensky techniques and cite "what those brave Ukrainians did" as a precedent when they wage war on their own population.
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
The Palestinians have one government that controls them... Israel yet they are denied citizenship, a vote, and are forced into ghettos where the "pallestinian leadership" which Israel can and does murder at any moment, predates upon them.
Israel is one state, it has been for decades now since Israel has defeated all Palestinian resistance... yet Israel maintains the fiction that there is or ever can be two states because then it doesn't have to grant the pallestinians, who have been born and lived entirely under israelli control, a vote of their own.
There should be a one state solution. One person. one vote. Full Stop.
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As is its as if America denied the native American's any rights as citizens, claiming the reservations were seperate countries, but "invaded" them near weekly to enforce its authority.
Its textbook apartheid. Denying full citizenship to those born within a country on the basis of their heritage.
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
I don't care if the hands are tied. I want free people to exist not states.
I'd rather A country be reduced to Afghanistan and lose a chunk of its territory and free people exist somewhere in the uncontrolled territory than no free people exist anywhere because the state propped up its own existence by enslaving them.
Yes this goes for WW2. Yes this goes for the civil war. I have not seen a single faction in a single war in any moment of human history where i thought their propping up their war efforts by resorting to litteral slavery was at all an improvement.
the 20 million who died fighting for the soviet union might have lived had they murdered their commissars and officers instead of being fed into the Soviet Unions horrific efforts at self preservation.
The worst enemy you have no matter what is the man who has you at gunpoint and is issuing orders... he is always the first person you need to kill. And if a nation and a people... even call themselves your people are standing behind him demanding your death, then they are your enemies too.
There is no one more sympathetic in WW2 than the soviet citizens who volunteered for the Nazis, or the German citizens who volunteered for the soviets or allies... They accurately assessed who their greater enemy was: Their own governments.
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
No putin larpers wouldn't win. The enemies of the regime would win.
You're acting as if a socialist would want the Tzarist forces to lose the Russo-Japanese war because they want Shintoism to take over russia... No they want the Tsarist regime humiliated so the revolution of 1905 could happen (though they wouldn't like that that revolution failed).
Likewise Putinism to the extent its an ideology is already prettymuch failed and dying... I want the Liberal Globalist order to lose to that failing and dying ideology not to prop up putinism but to humiliate and ruin the Liberal international order so that the homegrown ideologies already taking off in the west can have their revolutions as detached from putinism as Liberal Constitutionalism and Socialist revolutionaries were from Shinto-Imperialism.
distant enemies of my enemy can be quite useful.
Thankyou so much for your contribution.
It can often feel like the world just wants us to shut up, go away and die, and it means so much to see people value this sort of thing.
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