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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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Hard to take seriously an article that asserts:

[Putin] was almost surely behind the sabotage of the natural gas pipelines reported by the Swedish and Danish authorities

and moreover, implies that the next best competing explanation is:

to expose the vulnerability of European infrastructure to clandestine Russian sabotage

I don't just mention this because I find the current arguments for these allegations to be really poor, but because Russia right now is talking about the possibility of repairing the pipeline. The Anglosphere seems motivated to put forward the version that these pipelines are done for while Russia is claiming the fix can be made in as little as a matter of days. That doesn't support the theory that Russia is trying to signal a complete point of no return. In effect, all we have is mobilization and annexation, which Russia has already done before. This looks like an exit move. We have all the ammo we need to win the PR war. Russia had to institute a mobilization to fight little Ukraine, Russia captured much less than they had set out to, Russia's pipelines are gone, NATO expanded, and our official stated objective is simply to bleed Russia dry, which we can easily say we did. We humiliated them by just sending our old equipment over. I just don't see nukes happening because for us this is just a sliding scale of how hard we want to win, not an actual objective to restore Ukraine's borders.