Saying “kidnapping” and “brutal measures” is a little saucy when this is

Well, it is extreme. Let’s not pretend like it isn’t. Legal technicalities aside, it’s not a good look. People walking with their families down the street suddenly get ambushed and then thrown into a van? Old woman or wife trying to fight off the military recruiters?

The Russians don’t do this. The Americans didn’t do this back during Vietnam. Etc. It’s understandable because of the existential nature of this war, like you pointed out, but it is abnormal when you look at other drafts in other countries.

Part of the reason they’re having such a hard time is again, the recklessness with which they have, at certain points of this war, treated human life. Russia’s running into this same issue. Although Russia has a bigger population and is able to offer higher incentives in the form of payouts, along with a more centralized and mature propaganda system. Because of this, they haven’t had to rely on a draft and mobilization. They are still mostly a volunteer force.

They had lower tolerance for casualties, but that’s just because it was an optional war rather than an existential one.

Lower tolerance for casualties is a bit of an understatement. Over the course of 5 years or so there were less than 5,000 American deaths. Since 2022, we’re looking at a very conservative at least 100k dead from just the Russian side. The more generous estimates have 200k+ dead on both sides.

We’re talking at least an order of magnitude difference

That’s pretty much the job description of a soldier

When military strategy is controlled by the generals, they will prioritize manpower over political goals. When military strategy is controlled by the political regime, political goals become more important.

Retreating from a piece of land that has little strategic significance is the correct move so that you conserve resources and manpower. A soldier is a human being, a life. Not only does this have some sort of moral worth and should not be thrown away recklessly, it has real strategic value.

Both Russia and Ukraine in this war have made awe-inspiringly bad decisions at specific points. If I were a man who was being compelled to serve in either army, I would run away as far as possible.

It was less that OP pointed out this stuff, and more that their “friend in Kiev” apparently phones them up about this and doesn’t mention anything about the Russians who are perpetuating all this and could leave at any time.

I agree.

if you go on reddit to certain pro-russian combat footage subs dedicated to the war, you’ll see one or two new videos a week of Ukrainian men being kidnapped off of the streets and stuffed into a van

they really are taking people off the streets there. they’re low on manpower and the men remaining are all those that don’t want to die so they’ve been ignoring any draft summons. so the Ukrainian gov has been resorting to increasingly brutal measures.

i’m honestly just so glad i wasn’t born in post-soviet slavic country , lol. i swear the value of life there is not nearly what it is here. on the Russian side they’ll force thousands of men forwards into a meat grinder trying to win with pure brute force. if a soldier tries to go backwards, the Russians themselves will shoot you as a motivation for the others to go forwards. hundreds of thousands of men dead or maimed for what? a couple miles of land a day?

then on the Ukrainian side they’ll keep you defending some worthless piece of land forever as all the supply lines slowly close around you. once you’re cut off, you know you and the wounded with you are all gonna die. command promised reinforcements when they had no intention of sending reinforcements. to them , the political benefit of holding onto that land for just a little longer is worth more than the lives of real human beings. you are a soldier and you are expendable. (this also coincidentally makes it harder to get fresh recruitment because ukrainian men aren’t stupid and propaganda can only hide so many deaths)

i’ve seen confirmed cases of both sides killing POWs. men walking out of a trench with their hands up surrendering just to get mowed down anyways. men trying to surrender to drones only to get blown up anyways.

war is hell. it’s barbaric and highlights the absolute worst nature of humanity.

having said all that, yeah the commenter does seem like an astroturfer or at least a biased pro-russian poster if organic. but the statement with ukrainians being kidnapped, at least from what I’ve seen, is true. it has been happening at increasing frequencies

We would still be supporting Israel with Biden in place. The only difference is there would be a few “we are very concerned” statements from the White House press secretary instead of Trump’s reality TV show statements. But in the background, the same number of MK84 2,000lb bombs are being transported by the same military vehicles and they blow up on top of the same people.

this was was always going to end with Russia taking a large chunk of Ukraine. there was some collective delusion for a while that it wasn’t because of strong state war propaganda

but Russia is always going to care more about Ukraine than the US. It’s their neighbor who they have more or less controlled directly or indirectly for hundreds of years.

US support was always limited and self-interested. Just like every time US hypes up some international ally to inevitably discard them. Remember the Kurds? I’m guessing Taiwan is the next one going forward

portuguese. i was in the midwest as a child but moved to southern florida in the 2nd half of high school

no. not many people spoke my native tongue.

when i finally did move and found more people speaking the language, we would speak our language not to hide from the teacher but just because it was more comfortable

I mean unless they start enforcing state sanctioned rape women have a choice of whether or not to have sex. I get your point though.

Iirc department of education said something like “young women are supposed to start families not go to college”

Maybe it was someone else but it goes to show how insane the federal government has become

I don’t see how banning porn accomplishes this. Women are the gatekeepers who get to decide whether or not a baby gets born and as a population grows wealthier and more educated the women tend to have less kids. Has very little to do with porn which is mostly watched by men.

The solution to not being like Japan is immigration. That’s why our population isn’t declining every year like Japan. Without current level of immigration, our population would be decreasing every year and we would be like Japan.

i come from a tariff heavy country. you want a sneak peak? inflation. shit is gonna get more expensive. that’s it

This was started nearly a century ago by scientists after the creation of the atomic bomb a couple years after the end of WW2.

The point is mostly to say “hey, we have the technology to blow up the world and things do not not seem to be going well”. They actually give out an annual report every year explaining their reasoning.

In setting the Clock one second closer to midnight, we send a stark signal: Because the world is already perilously close to the precipice, a move of even a single second should be taken as an indication of extreme danger and an unmistakable warning that every second of delay in reversing course increases the probability of global disaster.

Essentially- we are closer than ever to a global war between nuclear powers.

In regard to nuclear risk, the war in Ukraine, now in its third year, looms over the world; the conflict could become nuclear at any moment because of a rash decision or through accident or miscalculation. Conflict in the Middle East threatens to spiral out of control into a wider war without warning. The countries that possess nuclear weapons are increasing the size and role of their arsenals, investing hundreds of billions of dollars in weapons that can destroy civilization. The nuclear arms control process is collapsing, and high-level contacts among nuclear powers are totally inadequate given the danger at hand.

Now someone may say “Closer than ever?? What about the Cuban Missile Crisis?”

The thing is, we have been developing newer and “less dangerous” nuclear weapons. Tactical bombs that won’t leave the traditional nuclear fallout. This creates a sort of itchy trigger finger syndrome. After the Cold War, we created nuclear arms control treaties between the US and Russia. These are collapsing. Both the US and Russia are complicit in this.

If anybody wants to read more https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/2025-statement/

But to tldr:

The world is in a chaotic period of time. Fascism seems to be taking hold again, the economy is on the edge of collapse, and war remains an ever-present threat. Any war between great powers (US, China, Russia) would certainly mean nuclear disaster.

The point is that we are vulnerable right now. Any push could shove us tumbling down the hill. Diplomatic crisis, another pandemic, economic crash, a regional war, etc. Any of those could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

I have a lot of respect for the Bulletin Board of Atomic Scientists. We need these types of organizations to remind people of the danger we are currently in. We become desensitized because of the constant barrage of “historic news” but they’re going to look back on this period similarly to the decade before WW2, I believe.

Really? Closer than Cuban missile crisis?

The assumption is that any major war => nuclear war => major unmitigated disaster.

And we are dangerously close to a global war. Personally I have a hunch that’s the reason Trump is more or less going nuclear at home with all of his changes. They’re gonna wreck the economy but it’s all gonna be overshadowed quite soon so it won’t matter.

From what I gather, you’re making the insinuation that the people who refused to vote for Kamala due to her (and Biden’s) support of Israel are responsible for Trump and his heavy-handed approach.

I’d retort by stating that Israel has killed near 100k Palestinians and reduced most of the territory to rubble all while Biden’s administration had been sending bombs, guns, tanks, missiles, and money.

The main difference between Trump and Biden on this issue is how loud and open they are about it.

Is there a difference between discretely supporting apartheid or openly supporting apartheid? Probably, in an intellectual sense. But what difference does it make to the tens of thousands of Gazan widows?

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/how-2-debunked-accounts-of-sexual-violence-on-oct-7-fueled-a-global-dispute-over-israel-hamas-war

There’s a bit by Zizek where he’s quoting Lacan. Lacan uses the analogy of a jealous husband who believes his wife is cheating on him.

Jacques Lacan claimed that, even if a jealous husband’s claim about his wife — that she sleeps around with other men — is true, his jealousy is still pathological. Why? The true question is “not is his jealousy well-grounded?”, but “why does he need jealousy to maintain his self-identity?”.

The man has a deep-seated psychological need to be a victim. He needs the idea of the cheating wife to maintain this identity. In this case, his obsession with his cheating wife, even if it’s true and she’s sleeping around with everyone in town, is part of a pathology meant to protect his psyche from breaking.

That’s the Lacanian part. As Zizek often does, he takes this type of individualized psychoanalysis and expands it up to the realm of societal ideology. The example he gives is of the Nazis and their obsession with the Jews.

Along the same lines, one could say that even if most of the Nazi claims about the Jews were true — they exploit Germans; they seduce German girls — which they were not, of course, their anti-Semitism would still be (and was) pathological, since it represses the true reason why the Nazis needed anti-Semitism in order to sustain their ideological position.

An example he gives is that Jews were exploiting Germans. And this is, on its face, can be a true statement. Some Jews were bankers and therefore charging interest and profiting from Germans. Some young Jews were going around and seducing young German girls. Etc.

But the fact is, it doesn’t matter if the Jews are doing this or aren’t doing that. The Nazi obsession with the Jew has nothing to do with the Jew seducing young German women. The obsession is a necessary prerequisite for the Nazi to maintain their ideological position. A Nazi needs the Jew to be a scapegoat. To be a symbol of the Other- to use as an ambiguous threat; a vague amorphous barbaric enemy.

The Jews control the world and the global capitalist system. They are devious and scheming and mean to exploit us. On the other hand, the Jew is a stupid primitive animal who has inferior genes. They are everything and they are nothing.

I would take this and use this article as an example of a pathological ideological obsession on the Israeli side.

Even if the claims are true, which from what I’ve read there isn’t much evidence at all, that Hamas raped many young women on Oct 7th, I’d argue that it’s pathological. The Israelis need the idea of the barbaric and savage Palestinian in order to maintain their ideological position. When they talk about the rapes, it doesn’t matter if the rapes really happened or not. It’s there for an ideological purpose.

And just like the Nazi claims about the Jews- using small truths to create a large lie- the Israelis are following line by line with the playbook.

I provided them. You refuse to acknowledge them. I can only speculate why that is. That is OK.

If you do not want to participate in this attempt to find common ground and instead just want to argue with someone online in an endless circle, that’s OK. You either choose to engage in good faith or I will stop responding.

This is the only way to rationally discuss emotionally difficult topics that have been bombarded by propaganda.

We need to come to a base set of facts that we can both agree on because otherwise, we will talk in circles endlessly. You certainly have the energy and desire to write about this- you’ve written some detailed long comments and have kept responding until now.

I have a feeling you don’t want to continue because you understand if we go down this road, there will be some cognitive dissonance. That’s OK. I’m not forcing you to do anything. This is a voluntary participation in a casual online forums. I spent a lot of time and effort on my comments to you, so I’m not expecting you to act like a monkey.

Ok that can be the first statement we agree on. I agree with it. I said earlier you could make statements. So we will have that be our first axiom.

1. Russia is a corrupt post-soviet state whose people, outside of its imperial core, live in often abject poverty

Can you go through the other ones I placed earlier and either “Yes or no because xyz”

If we can’t agree on a base set of facts, then we can never build from there. You refuse to acknowledge any statement I’ve made, even though they are purely objective statements. You are refusing to act in good faith here. I could say the sky is blue you’ll say light is a frequency and is made up of a range of colors.

If you are going to feel the need to be contrarian for every single statement, there is nothing to gain here. You have already made up your mind and are not discussing or thinking about anything

Do you have any intention of participating in this attempt to create a base set of facts? Yes or no because xyz. We can get to nuance later. You keep dodging

i agree with you but the UK definitely doesn’t

Lots of discounted high tech military equipment that the UK gets from the nature of the “special relationship” between the two countries. For example

KS-1 Rifle, Barrett M82, M2 Browning, Remington Model 870, Claymore mines, FGM-148 Javelin anti-tank system. The MRAP Cougar, M270 launch rocket system, M1070 transport system, various different MTVRs, Apache attack helicopters, Desert Hawk III UAV, Switchblades, and much much more

The UK would also lose their top export market (accounting for more than 2x the exports they send to the next runner up, Germany) and their 2nd largest import market (65B pounds to Germany’s 75B pounds)

Reality is the UK made their choice. They want to be in the bed with the US. Whatever Washington says, they’ll do. And that means more economic integration and more military integration.