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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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We haven't seen any modern war that was fought in the style of years past... until now.

Ukraine vs Russia is mostly fighting using old Cold War tech on both sides, and the troop concentrations are still far lower than they were in Barbarossa.

Would you be willing to pit a 12 man squad of modern soldiers with a single modern tank against 100,000

Bad example since population levels aren't falling by 99.99% like in this scenario. they're falling by around 20% in the most extreme cases by the end of the century.

I'm not saying population doesn't matter; rather, I'm saying it matters mostly in the economic and technological spheres. If Russia loses 20 million people over the next century then that impacts its ability to have a large economy to produce extremely lethal modern weapons. Worrying about population in terms of "nobody will be around to hold the guns" on the other hand is not particularly credible.

Especially now that we've seen that security threats can come from DOMESTIC sources, and I doubt Putin et al. were willing to nuke their own soil to stop Wagner.

This is a non-sequitur. Priggy's revolt was a case of internal Russian factionalism boiling over. There are some pro-Russian cheerleaders who think Prigozhin was a NATO plant in some 4D chess sort of way, but that's not particularly credible.