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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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Sorry, real life isn't a command and conquer game where you can 'destroy military production' and 'destroy civillian revenue generation' to stop the frontline. Again, its not like Russia hasn't been trying to degrade Kyiv with mid hundred quantities of missiles and drones. The sheer amount of destruction you need to inflict is, again, in the order of thousands of tonnes of actually on site munitions, not the low hundred if even high ten tonnes that actually make it to the backline. Russia is * already * sending bombs to random buildings both because of poor target knowledge and also because they're just incompetent dickbags. Human adaptability is really high, the history of adaptation to constant bombing has history since the blitz. Fuck, even when Berlin was actually being bombed to oblivion they didn't break, and the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn't kill the desire of the IJA to make a heroic last stand. Unless you've got boots pressing the ground, terror bombing doesn't work, much less at the tiny quantities Russia brags about sending but strategically are not needle movers.

Do command and conquer games model a civilian economy...? I thought they were a classical RTS, where you just have military production buildings and maybe resource extraction and upgrade research. Even if that were the case, "it's like this in a game" is not an argument that something is not the case in real life. You have to actually articulate what you believe is different. I gave concrete examples of ways in which I believe an indiscriminate bombing campaign would lower military productivity; do you have an argument against that that is not just waving your hands about adaptation and heroism? If not having public transport and shops actually had no adverse impact on military production, why does Ukraine not shut down its public transport and shops and have the people run them produce more drones instead?

You readily, even enthusiastically concede that Russia is being incompetent. Do you think that this incompetence does not extend to their choice of targets and risk assessment, so individual decisions like e.g. throwing a dud Oreshnik at Yuzhmash instead of aiming it at the Khmelnytskyi NPP or downtown Dnipro was a competent decision? In fact, can you state your theory of why they have been bombing conventional power plants but leaving nuclear ones alone? It seems to me that you would have to go through extreme argumentative contortions to fit it with this "whatever targets Russia hasn't hit would make no difference or they are incapable of hitting them" narrative.

What is the civillian economy and backline drone production you advocate for destruction jf not resource generation RTS style. As for conventional versus nuclear its because Russia is attacking power distribution substations, and Russia alreafy controls the largest nuclear power plant but still keeps it running because wars a funny bitch. And Zaphorizia NPP wasnt bombed into inoperation it was seized kinetically and held. Also, Nuclear Power Plants are actually really really really hard to destroy. https://youtube.com/shorts/xESkLydLt3Y Reinforced concrete really is magic, which explains alot about my downstream points.

My argument for the lack of effectiveness of indiscriminate bombing is literally the entirety of military history and the reality we can see right at this moment. Russia is engaging in indiscriminate volume bombing, otherwise what the fuck would you characterize the bi weekly multi hundred shahed and kalibr launches as. They are rate limited by launch platform count, this is literally the best they can do. My argument is that even literally going full out balls to the wall like they did in the beginning of 2022 and didn''t manage to actually destroy the "colocated production facilities" you say exist.

Again I read your argument and I think you seriously just overestimate both the quantity of launch platforms Russia has available to engage in this "terror bombing" you so advocate and the sheer quantity of munitions required to move the needle. I gave concrete info about how much munitions are needed to level a city in true terror bombing terms, and thats for brickwork, not reinforced concrete or soil dampened underground structures. Either Russian terror bombing needs the mass to saturate and truly annihilate a city entirly in a single alpha strike, or they need precision fires to destroy the "production hub" that would effect a military advantage which in the reality of modern warfare simply isn't how things work with distributed logistics and sustainment nodes.

I call Russians stupid because their attack decisions are downstream of incapability, launching Shaheds and Kalibr at backlines because theres a surplus of this easy to launch munition and a shortage of actually good targets combined with insufficiency to actually truly destroy the backline. You're the one just throwing magic 'terror bombing' numbers, I gave the stat of Tokyo reuqiring 1700 tonnes of explosives. The Russian long range bombing package is about 300-700 weapons (usually lower end), with a usually 70% minimum being Shahed style to distract from higher payload Kalibr/Kinzhals. At the uppermost thats 210 Kinzhals and lets generously call it 500kg of pure explosive focused poser in each. Thats not even 55 tonnes of munitions including the 30kg of explosive per Shahed. Even if you x10 that you're not getting a Tokyo firebomb which needed incindearies to create an inferno on flammable wooden buildings.