bilby
Fair dinkum thinkum
- Joined
- Mar 6, 2007
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- Strong Atheist
As always with a war, it is very difficult to know which reports are true and which are propaganda, which can make it hard to determine which side has the advantage, particularly when the front line is fairly static, as in this case.
Fortunately, we have an alternative way to estimate which side of the conflict is currently being most effective; The more frequent, rabid and incoherent the accusations @barbos makes, the more confident we can be that Russia is struggling.
Simply counting the number of instances of "nazi" or its variants posted per week in this thread produces an effective gauge of how unhappy Putin is with his situation.
Russia is now seriously fucked; Their short victorious war in far off Ukraine is now an endless quagmire of disasters that is disrupting the lives of Russians thousands of kilometres from the war zone, and the tide is clearly swinging towards Ukraine.
It's a disaster for Russia, and the only reason Putin hasn't yet been overthrown is that Russians have an astonishing tolerance for suffering and misery, born of a (historically well founded) belief that revolution won't improve their lot - they ousted the Tsars and got the Commies; They dumped the Commies and ended up with Mad Vlad Putin. Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss.
Russia was starting, at least in Moscow and St Petersburg, to look like it could be dragged up from shithole status to become a modern country whose citizens had access to modern luxuries like cars and online shopping. But now the cars have no gas, and if a Russian still has Internet access, Wildberries ain't delivering, because the oil refineries and the warehouses are burned out shells.
Anywhere else where the public had those nice things, and then had them snatched away by the idiotic overreach and greed of their leader, you would expect a coup.
But in Russia, it seems that regime change is not so much difficult as it is pointless - Swapping out one dictatorial strongman for another won't change the fact that the shithole kleptocracy remains a shithole kleptocracy, in which the ordinary people just keep their heads down in the hope that the next time the leader decides to take more away, he takes it from their neighbour, and not from them.
But ultimately every ruler of Russia has taken everything. Even their sons. The last Tsar threw away two million young Russian men's lives in WWI; Stalin threw away ten million in WWII; Now Putin is at one and a half million and counting.
And all the likes of @barbos can do about it is rail against fictional nazis, because railing against the regime would be suicidal.
Fortunately, we have an alternative way to estimate which side of the conflict is currently being most effective; The more frequent, rabid and incoherent the accusations @barbos makes, the more confident we can be that Russia is struggling.
Simply counting the number of instances of "nazi" or its variants posted per week in this thread produces an effective gauge of how unhappy Putin is with his situation.
Russia is now seriously fucked; Their short victorious war in far off Ukraine is now an endless quagmire of disasters that is disrupting the lives of Russians thousands of kilometres from the war zone, and the tide is clearly swinging towards Ukraine.
It's a disaster for Russia, and the only reason Putin hasn't yet been overthrown is that Russians have an astonishing tolerance for suffering and misery, born of a (historically well founded) belief that revolution won't improve their lot - they ousted the Tsars and got the Commies; They dumped the Commies and ended up with Mad Vlad Putin. Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss.
Russia was starting, at least in Moscow and St Petersburg, to look like it could be dragged up from shithole status to become a modern country whose citizens had access to modern luxuries like cars and online shopping. But now the cars have no gas, and if a Russian still has Internet access, Wildberries ain't delivering, because the oil refineries and the warehouses are burned out shells.
Anywhere else where the public had those nice things, and then had them snatched away by the idiotic overreach and greed of their leader, you would expect a coup.
But in Russia, it seems that regime change is not so much difficult as it is pointless - Swapping out one dictatorial strongman for another won't change the fact that the shithole kleptocracy remains a shithole kleptocracy, in which the ordinary people just keep their heads down in the hope that the next time the leader decides to take more away, he takes it from their neighbour, and not from them.
But ultimately every ruler of Russia has taken everything. Even their sons. The last Tsar threw away two million young Russian men's lives in WWI; Stalin threw away ten million in WWII; Now Putin is at one and a half million and counting.
And all the likes of @barbos can do about it is rail against fictional nazis, because railing against the regime would be suicidal.
