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Notes -
Ukraine.
By now, wise people, people who avoid reading the newspapers (newspaper generally lie) have noticed that the news out of Ukraine is bad. After years of relentless and very stupid propaganda, even 'The Sun' ran an article which was basically fine. Torygraph ditto. A bit of lying around the end, some lies by omission but generally thoughtful and not grossly incorrect.
That's means something. Not at all clear what. Obsessive observers of the war believe Ukraine is likely to hold out until end of '26, early '27. However:
1- There's a financing issue, sure - Americans, unwilling since Trump inauguration to keep paying for what they started now only want to deliver weapons if Europeans, who were against it initially, pay for them.
Europe, as everyone knows, is mostly broke, with the exception of Germany, which isn't only because it typically doesn't shower money around. Paying through the nose for overpriced weaponry like e.g. Patriot or Aster 30 missiles ($ 2mil per unit) which then are going to be fired, best case, at cruise missiles of equal worth doesn't seem like a winning strategy, especially with the Geran spam being able to destroy anything that doesn't have a rare cannon SPAA sitting on top of it. If there's 50 of them in Ukraine, that's probably too much.
There was a plan of 'magicking' up money by making a loan to buy more weapons, covered by the frozen Russian assets, thus 'risk-free' because 'Russia is going to release those assets as war reparations'. Belgium, which would have ended up having jurisdiction over it refused to go along..
2- Materially, it's bad. We know the gist of the situation: Ukraine has too few men -line infantry is at 20-30% staffing , is outmatched in drones, artillery and air attacks. Russia, being larger, is able to mobilize troops and sustain operations. There is shortage of everything on the Ukrainian side. Civilian cars, drones, men. -save perhaps small-calibre ammunition which is barely used in this war. (allegedly <5% of wounds are from gunshot). Why there is a shortage of cars seems.. mysterious. Germany surely should be able to keep Ukrainians knee deep in cheap trucks. E.g. Dacia Duster cost €20k and there's 100k made per year. A mere 2 billion € a year could give Ukraine 1 4x4 car for every 5 servicemen. What gives?
Ukraine drops some bombs using their few planes, possibly even daily , but Russians sometimes delivers up to 300 a day, although the mean is 160 in 2025. Any bunker, HQ, supply dump close behind the front can be hit. That's pretty modest- just 40 sorties in an Su-34. Ukraine doesn't have what to use - France supplied 800 glide bombs... for the whole of 2024. Promised 1200 for 2025. 4 a day. If Americans have given more, we'd have heard about it. If GDP so high, why so few bombs? Where's the American UMPK? Does US have no huge pile of old bombs you can stick sheet metal & gps modules to? Are cheap, effective, good enough weapons only something despotic alcoholic nations can make ?
The true rate of attrition is unknown. Ukraine armed forces, internally seem to believe it's 8 Ukrainians for 10 Russians or something along those lines, if we go by the testimony of this International Legion guy who deserted earlier this year after being allocated to an especially dire 1st rifleman battalion with 50% odds of surviving one rotation. (or so he says). In any case, as Europeans and Americans have shown themselves unwilling to go and risk death, the required rate needed to have been something like 2:10 just to break even, demographics wise.
3- the front. right now, a some amount of troops is encircled at Pokrovsk. Supposedly very few (AMK_mapping, an autist who follows the war hourly says Ukrainians mostly withdrew), but then, it's unclear how dire the situation is, however GUR fed their spec-ops team to the front near Pokrovsk, in an effort to make evacuation easier, to probably little avail (there is an FPV montage of these guys getting blown up already). They operate 3 Blackhawk helos, one of them was apparently downed.
Overall, as you probably know, the situation on the front is bad. Ukraine cannot hold territory, cannot counterattack effectively. Previously, Russia was only being able to push one place at a time, now it's multiples. If you want an overview, here's an interview of AMK_Mapping, a rare pro Ukrainian OSINT account respected by people on both sides. Honestly he seems autistic. The 'mapping' means he's one of the people keeping track of the war online by obsessively reading Telegram channels, geolocating etc. The interviewer is pro-Russian, somewhat overly optimistic I think.
Going by the aphorism 'If you're reading this, it's for you', it looks like the American press is preparing the public for a closing act of the majestic capeshit arc that started with the Maidan massacre. Ukrainians are generally eager to negotiate, nobody believes in winning anymore, though the demands Russia has are not viewed as acceptable. I wonder what the frontline troops and officers would say in private.
I must have hallucinated the Russian Tanks rolling into Ukraine originally, were those a CIA op? These types of posts would be more convincing if you could resist falling into even the most absurd Russian propaganda positions.
Is the implication here that you believe Russia is richer than Europe? Because that's uh... and interesting take on relative world economies. A sanity check through claude and grok both come up with Russia having about 10-12% the economy size of the EU. If you insist on PPP then at best 20%.
We've been hearing a steady beat of these triumphant "the ukrainians are definitely beaten now, they'll submit any day now" on the motte for years at this point. It's not happened yet. Would you be willing to make a bet?
The tanks were downstream of the coup, which was downstream of the bloodbath at Maidan, after which every major western government demanded Yanukovych steps down. The coward he was, he did so, thus in a way, bears partial responsibility for the utter shitshow that followed.
Who do you think asked for the bloodbath at Maidan?
You should read the narrative of it, even the semi-official one.
The riots units initially, despite having plate carriers and body armor suffered 2x many casualties as the 'peaceful protesters', to the point they retreated despite having partial cover. Then they got the whole of blame for the massacre of the protesters on the square despite being outgunned, withdrawing etc. As mentioned previously, even the obviously not very neutral Ukrainian court found that some of the dead protesters were shot by other 'protesters', and not by accident, deliberately.
I believe that others have called you out on this completely insane narrative around Maidan that is needed to make it into an original sin for Ukraine rather than Russia and Yanukovych fucking up (on the 21st of Jan they sent US$2 billion on condition he cracked down - which he did), I guess it is now my turn:
We have the full list of deaths, and the days they occurred - it's ~108 for the protestors and 12-18 for the police depending on your start and end points. More details emerged in 2023 to fill in the gaps, but some remain. However, the fact there are gaps, does not mean that every area of uncertainty was a CIA op.
The 2x casualties claim of security forces vs protestors is clearly not true as a narrative, unless you cherry pick an exact tiny window, as you have from one source that otherwise highlights how insane and unprovoked the attacks on the protestors were, and only look at casualties not deaths for the three hour window - remember it started with 3 protestors being shot on the 22nd of Jan (plus the tortured body of Yuriy Verbytskyi being found), then on the 18th of Feb you have the police using live rounds to stop a march - 11 protestors and 4 police were killed, then you have the police trying to clear the square - 17 protestors, 5 police died then, including actions by police and "titushky" irregulars. They were certainly not outgunned then, though they failed to break the protestors' lines and clear the square.
The "obviously not very neutral Ukrainian court" records you mention but not cite (https://reyestr.court.gov.ua/Review/114304164 for those who can read Ukrainian) found that 10 protestor deaths could not be attributed clearly to gunfire from police lines (Berkut) over the full period, but that other positions (Alfa in particular) or irrgular titushky fire from government supported could have done it, or perhaps friendly fire, accidents or deliberate protestor action. I do note that the Canadian academic Ivan Katchanovski (who really hates Ukraine, fine he can, but it's his theories being spun as some kind of fact from the court when they are his own supposition and it did not go through peer review) who cites parts of the 2023 verdict left those comments out and jumped straight to the false flag idea and that it was all a trick, despite that not really working - the fighting was already in full swing by that point.
Even best case, that still leaves 98 deaths directly from police and government action, who definitely deserve the blame for starting and escalating each major event in the timeline. They used live ammunition first, attacked the square, disappeared and tortured to death protestors prior and all of this was with Russian support and backing.
Last iteration was about two months ago.
Possibly because a previous case cited brought awkward citations on who might have been responsible.
The previous english-language translation copy link provided no longer works, but Katchavonoski excerpts are here, though I can't promise they are the same translation previously reviewed.
From two months ago on a case, which was a summary for FCfromSSC-
///
This is one of the cases which Ivan Katchanovski likes to cite as proving his Euromaidan-culpability false-flag thesis that he's spend his last decade publishing on. His inclination to refer to parts of it is directly correlated to how the contents support his thesis that the government was falsely accused for shooting protestors. For example, Katchanovski likes to gloss over section seven, and particularly the Court's scope exclusions that begin on page 13 noting-
Aka, any action not found guilty in a Ukrainian court of law is excluded from the verdict.
Which, in a steelman, is defensible in the judicial process, but not necessarily in a truth-seeking process where whether something happened as opposed to whether it was proven in a court of law. Particularly when the court of law approach might be complicated by things such as known evidence destruction or defection of key witnesses / perpetrators to a country outside of the court's jurisdiction, like Russia.
As such, Ivan Katchanovski is inclined to ignore, not comment on, or push past the court record's acknowledgement of an unproven-but-not-disproven, but highly relevant claim, of-
I.e., an alleged- but never proven and thus disregarded for this court's purposes- core thesis of the 'government false flag' theory.
Now, Person_376 is not one of the person-descriptors identified in no_one's document. But, in short, the RSP were one of the armed elements in the Maidan Protestors, who were generally in the back / the deterrence for the police to charge and clear the square by force. Their existence / presence is about as old as Euromaidan itself. One of the sniper attacks on the morning of 20 Feb came from a building they had a heavy presence in, which is what this court case is about, which is also old news.
The anti-Euromaidan propaganda narrative is that these RSP key actors were Euromaidan provocateurs / foreign agents (of western powers) who staged in waiting for orders to conduct a false flag attack against Euromaidan protestors to blame the Yanukovych government and escalate the situation, with the intent to bring about the consequence the collapse of Ukrainian government as ended up happening.
The pro-Euromaidan propaganda narrative is that these RSP key actors were Ministry of Interior provacateurs / agents who were staged in waiting for orders to conduct a false flag attack against Euromaidan protestors to blame the protestors and escalate the situation, with the intent of suppressing the protests as part of the broader Ministry of Interior crackdown buildup, but which had the unintended consequence of collapsing the Ukrainian government as ended up happening.
Both pro- and anti-Euromaidan narratives are largely in agreement that the RSP key actors at the center of this case were staged false flag elements waiting for orders to conduct a false flag attack against Euromaidan protestors to escalate the situation, with the consequence of collapsing the Ukrainian government as ended up happening.
The difference is in whose false-flag agents they were, and the intended result of the orders.
The court case doesn't take a position on this distinction, but Ivan Katchanovski likes to insinuate it does, and he is one of the main Reputable Scholars (TM) for the Euromaidan Is To Blame propaganda narrative.
///
End report.
And for clarity on the difference in theory intended results. The anti-Euromaidan conspiracy is that the false flag was intended to collapse the government and usher in the pro-Western government as happened IRL, even though that included various other factors beyond the control of western conspirators such as the local party mayor withdrawing city riot police from the conflict area rather than supporting state security. The pro-Euromaidan conspiracy is that the false flag was intended to sow chaos and amongst protestors and help legitimize the otherwise planned lethal force crackdown, which included security force authorization for live fires and other shootings, which was expected to suppress the Euromaidan but instead backfired as happened IRL.
Given that Yanukovych was content to wait out the protests, and did not need the massacre, and given the timeline on the day of the massacre given by Ukrainian themselves first shots around 5 am, then a lop-sided exchange between riot units and the 'snipers' which saw the riot units retreat bc they incurred 2 dead, 20 wounded despite having serious body armor. Mind you, the 'snipers' were not very discriminate, as in, BBC published a video of their crew under fire.
That's a novel claim that the police withdrew because of an order by a .. local city mayor, and not because they were facing a pretty serious gun battle during which they incurred, what, 20 wounded and 10 dead were somehow in the chain of command of Berkut, which was run by the ministry of interior, which, for Americans is the ministry that runs law enforcement, prisons and so on.
I see you're back to ignoring the Yanukovych administrations actual actions in the final days, the external state (Russian) pressures and incentives that were used to drive his changes towards those actions, and claiming as novel the mechanical form in which the Maidan Revolution succeeded, which was that there was a critical lack of elite and and party support for the lethal force crackdown that Yanukovych and the Russian-aligned interior ministry had attempted to initiate.
Unsurprising, and I look forward to your next attempt to claim that perfidy was obvious at play but that it couldn't possibly have been at the behest of the sitting government.
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