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this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2023
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the_dunk_tank
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It's the dunk tank.
This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes.
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One of the worst aspects of places like R*ddit is their use of political analogy in the place of political analysis.
Obviously some of the most egregious offences are when people do like Harry Potter fanfic or whatever (e.g. Joe Biden is Harry Potter, Kamala Harris is Hermione, and Trump is Voldemort... that kind of bullshit) but the second worst is when they do pop-history political analogy.
No, Napoleon doesn't have any direct bearing on the current war in the Ukraine and no matter how closely you retcon major political or military figures into a superficial match with major figures today it won't make your analysis any more sound, let alone any more true.
This isn't the Soviet intervention into Afghanistan. This isn't one of the wars in Iraq. This isn't the same as a box office smash hit movie which you love and have seen half a dozen times.
If you want to draw upon history for some analysis of the war in the Ukraine, I would point you to the Syrian civil war because there you will see Russia's modern military tactics on display and this would be a sound basis for developing an understanding of Russia's military tactics in the Ukraine. It's not a surefire 1:1 match and it's never going to be but it's where I think any credible person would start (aside from any fairly recent Russian war game tactics.)
But that's nowhere near as compelling and it doesn't have the aura of gripping narratives and silver screen treats in the way that this cheap political analogy has. Discussing troop movements and artillery positions and the names of contemporary Russian generals is dry af and almost nobody is actually going to listen if you're talking about that stuff.
I know the whole "Reddit hivemind" trope is completely played out by now but there's a grain of truth to it. Mainstream Reddit subs are particularly bad at this alt-present narrative scripting as a stand in for reality that gets elevated into something widely celebrated across that site (and all those sycophantic comments that come to bask in the upvotes are a part of this phenomenon.)
There'd also be slightly more explanatory potential if they weren't dogmatically ignoring United States history. Like, we're funding and arming a group of people with the idea of locking Russia into a costly conflict -- now why does that sound so familiar? This is the preamble to consequences that are going to define the next few decades, if not the rest of the 21st century, for both the United States and the European Union. And yet we're still talking about it in a --"Home in time for Christmas, by Jingo!" -- sorta way. It's already been two years!
What are we up to now... is it Gladio-C?
I worry that we're going to run out of letters in the alphabet and we'll have to start resorting to COVID naming protocols if this shit keeps up. This is a matter of national security!!
Gladio-Æ-X-S3XY will sure turn the tide against the asio-slavs
This one really got me. Thanks for the laugh, I needed it.
(Poor kid though. Imagine being Elon Musk's child and being named like you're a robot who does a bit-part role in a Star Wars movie. Either is bad enough but both?
I can't wait until they grow up to be yet-another nepo billionaire shilling crypto and dick pills so that I can feel vindicated for participating in their online bullying back when they were still an infant.)
Doesn't muskrat have a kid who's Trans and hates his fucking guts? There's always hope for children as they can develop into their own people separate from their environment they were nurtured in
They can't even point to the Chechen War or the Russo-Georgian War, which is much more recent and has Putin playing a role in those conflicts. I suspect they don't want to point to those conflicts because Russia more or less accomplished all of their strategic objectives lol
To admit that would be to admit that Putin succeeded in pacifying the Chechens.
Remember when everyone was saying that Russia is doomed to face endless insurrections from the Chechens after the end of the Second Chechen War, how Putin has now tied himself in a blood feud with the Chechens who will want their revenge sooner or later.
You can criticize how reactionary Chechnya is but you cannot deny that there has been peace in the highly volatile region over the past 20 years. They will never admit that Putin has any ability to bring peace to a conflict.
you're assuming they even know about those wars, let alone the outcomes and the details of them - this is reddit we're talking about