Russia-Ukraine war and related tensions Megathread

[GeneralMacArthur]

Yes but the question remains - *why* do they so fervently support Russia?

Some are doubtless just paid to do so, but there must be genuine believers.

There's a couple things that lead people to support Russia, and often it's a combination of both.

A) They get their information exclusively from far-right sources that have since either unironically begun supporting Putin (because he's also right-wing) or been bribed and bought out by Russian oligarchs.  As a result, their perception of what's going on and what Putin/Russia are like is twisted by a web of lies.  Example -- Tucker Carlson's fanbase.

B) Similarly, they get their information exclusively from far-left sources that support Putin/Russia either because they hate America and the West, or because the Democrats are against Putin/Russia and they are against Democrats.  Example -- the entire payroll of the Bernie 2020 campaign.

C) They are habitual contrarians, so when they hear everyone in the news saying "Russia bad", they go, "but is Russia really that bad?" and then believe the very first thing they hear that says "actually the news is lying to you and Russia isn't really that bad."

D) Their brains are completely addled by conspiracy theories and their perception of the world is utterly divorced from reality.  Maybe they think there's no war going on at all.  Maybe they think American soldiers are actually fighting for Russia and the news is lying to us.  etc.

E) They bit hard on Russian propaganda about Ukrainians being Nazis, Ukraine not being a real country, the United States engineering a "color revolution", NATO being a "threat" to Russia, America only caring about Ukraine because of oil, or whatever.  At this point they've spent so much time and energy defending their position that it's impossible for them to switch.  It's just the classic ideological sunk cost fallacy.  Many of these are the same people who boasted in February 2022 that Russia would never invade and Biden was just lying about it.

F) They're just complete assholes and enjoy antagonizing and pissing off other people.  If all their peers supported Russia, they would support Ukraine.  There's nothing more to it than just picking an unpopular position and using it to try and get under your skin.

[GeneralMacArthur]

lmao, still hating Bernie after winning. What sore winners.

I challenge you to find me a single prominent online personality who supports Russia/Putin today and also supported any candidate other than Bernie Sanders or Trump's future VP Tulsi Gabbard in the 2020 primary.

[GeneralMacArthur]

https://twitter.com/narrative_hole/status/1771230014010241215?s=48

This is tangential, but that "What the Media Hides" account has been all over my Twitter feed lately reposting fake news direct from Hamas.  Like literally just fake news.  As if the notion that the media is going to "hide" this terrorist attack isn't fake enough already.  Would recommend not following it if you were.  Of course I wasn't following it either but Musk's algorithm pushes this kind of content constantly in his grand effort to make the world a worse place.

[GeneralMacArthur]

For me, Trump's strategy is superior as the Biden strategy assumes a breakable Russia which now is shown not to be the case. 

It's not the case because Republicans have prevented Biden from sending further military aid to Ukraine, thus starving Ukraine of resources it planned on having, which has allowed Russia to break through.

The only failure in Joe Biden's strategy was that he did not count on the appalling depths that the Republican Party was willing to sink in its treason.

[GeneralMacArthur]

This page has 17 posts on it and 11 of them are jaichind.

He never responds to anything anyone else is saying in the thread, and nobody ever responds to him.  There's no contribution to the discourse.  It's just taking up space -- a lot of space.

I'm assuming 90% of the forum has him on ignore at this point.  Because it's just spam.  Every single day a flood of posts "Ukraine is doomed!  Soldiers are fleeing!  Europeans in shambles!  Russia's economy is booming!  War production is off the charts!"  and it's been like this for over a year now.

It makes it difficult to have a real discussion in this thread.

Why do the mods continue to allow this?

And in general, why do the mods allow megathreads like this one to be taken over by one guy just dumping his RSS feed every single day?  This is far from the first time this has happened.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Can you imagine how wretched Atlas would have been during World War 1?  We'd have some guy named CrownedEagle14 who posts a dozen news articles every day about how the French and British forces are at an all-time low in morale, they're on the verge of running out of munitions, there's rumors of mutiny and suicide, and meanwhile Germany is amazing and constantly on the verge of a huge breakthrough, the German people are ecstatic and happy, their economy is booming, war production off the charts, Americans are crying and in shambles, French women are secretly writing letters to German soldiers asking them to impregnate them after the war ends, British food is still terrible, and so on and so forth.

All discussion about literally the most important event in human history would be restricted to the "Serbian nationalist negotiations and related tensions Megathread", which would be 3,945 pages long and 70% of the posts would just be CrownedEagle14 chiming in every day to dump the contents of his "the Triple Entente is doomed" RSS feed.

[GeneralMacArthur]

What does the population pyramid for Russia look like right now?

I'm a little disappointed we haven't seen more separatist fervor.  I would think people from, you know, Zabaykalsky, wouldn't be too thrilled about having their young working-age men drafted by Putin to go die on a battlefield 3,500 miles away in the name of protecting the ethnic eastern slavic peoples of Kherson from having to continue living under Ukrainian rule rather than Russian rule.