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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31640 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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Also, Karlin's predictive abilitites have not exactly shown their worth in 2022, regarding, well, most aspects of the Russian invasion and its presumed successes.

Karlin was wrong together with the whole world. Everyone from Putin to Biden, from CIA to OSINT twitter expected replay of 2014 Mosul or 2021 Kabul.

Russian maskirovka worked perfectly, everyone saw the manly recruitment videos full of brick smashing and bear wrestling stunts and believed in world's second super power.

Was there anyone notable who predicted that Russians will disastrously fail to defeat Ukraine?

Except our commenter Ilforte/ @DaseindustriesLtd ?

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/t0cnbx/ukraine_invasion_megathread/hyduv1l/

We're probably not. Kiev is not Baghdad, Ukraininans are not Iraqis (no offense to Iraqis). Last of all, Russians are not Americans.

Assuming that the goal is regime change in Moscow and discrediting of Russians on all possible levels, we have to commit a lot more pointless murder and destruction and then lose. So far, Ukrainian performance demonstates both goals are achievable.

Let's see how my conspiracist analysis fares against your common-sensical one.

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/sxnftk/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_february_21/hy70oxd/

Не всё. There are some very correct words and allegations thrown in, some correct analysis. Alas, there is no genocide in Donbass, at least nothing that deserves of the name, so it is a cynical pretext, validating everything that Americans were saying about this issue. As is the case of our broader WWII-inspired propaganda, narrow like a T-34 vision slit. It's not even a very good propaganda because it doesn't resonate with the people any more.

I don't have much to say. This is a crime against Russia and against Slavs in general. And if he believes his bullshit about freeing Ukrainians from the Junta or whatever, he's in for a suprise and it'll be even more of a fucking disaster for us than a regular war would have been, and I wonder who supplied him with info all this time.

If he doesn't, I shudder to think of what actually moves him now, near the end of his life, and whom he serves. Not my people, that's for certain. He never cared much about that.

Sure, a lot of people (me included) expected Russia to do much better against Ukraine than it did. Karlin did out of his way, though, to predict that serious Ukrainian resistance would last a week and that of course Ukrainians wouldn't fight back in an insurgency because they're "hipsters in rainbow masks who use their cell phones every hour", which goes rather a bit farther than your usual Russian overestimation prediction.

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