welcome to another episode of “turns out, the communists were right all along”

“designed for a direct confrontation with the USSR” is vague, it tricks you into missing the point. Those tanks were created when the main fear was that the USSR would try to steamroll all of western europe, because it objectively had the means to do so. Thus, Leopards were designed with a more defensive role in mind - one example of this is the lower reliance on autoloaders. Those tanks were thought to be fighting near home, where the benefits of having one extra crew member (the loader) far outweighted the downsides (the tank needs to be bigger and heavier to name one).

Russian tanks on the other hand make ample use of autoloaders. Russia also designed tanks that were meant to be fighting at home, but their thought process was different - Autoloaders allows for smaller tanks, which means more armor for less overall weight and better firerate.

But now, both those types of tanks are fighting on the offensive. In that condition an autoloader is a big advantage, and so is being smaller and lighter. Which means that Russian tanks are comparatively faring better than NATO vehicles.

This is just one of the many aspects that make western tanks perform worse than expected, i’m sure others can mention more. Just to name another issue for them, NATO always assumed that they would have air superiority while fighting - and in Ukraine they don’t.

yeah turns out it doesn’t work as well when you don’t have uncontested air supremacy.

Seriously, check out recent US wargames where the simulate a war with China. They lose, and badly. NATO knows it’s strategy is outdated, the thing is that, perhaps unsurprisingly, capitalism and progress do not mix

y’all living with someone?

I think this is the case because the west isn’t used to fighting an enemy that can match their might.

Think Iraq. Why bother with a narrative? There is a certainty of victory, no damage will come to the west, and iraqi media sure as hell isn’t reaching our audiences. So just make up an excuse, invade, and let people forget it until the next current thing.

But russia? It can fight back, it has political and economic leverage, it forces europe to suffer economically, it can inflict losses and shatter the image of nato equipment being unbeatable.

So the media has to scramble to find reasons why we should keep fighting the russians, because our collective subconscious knows that fighting russia is a bad idea in general. The result of this scrambling is a lot of contrasting narratives that keep contradicting each other. Specially because russia itself has the power to counter western narratives and highlight the falsehoods.

Remember Soledar for example? “the situation is difficult but we are holding” until russians started posting selfies from inside the town and it became clear that the UAF had been routed from there days ago.

Or also when they kept claiming that reddit truesim that “attackers suffer 7 times more casualties” during the battle of Bakhmut an excuse to support the “we are grinding them down by losing” narrative. Now ukraine is attacking and people are asking “wait a second, we were told attackers take 7 times more losses, how is ukraine affording this?”

In short, much like they are not used to fighting competent enemies on the ground, they are not used to fighting competent enemies in the media/internet arena. The result is a clusterfuck of lies covered by other lies as soon as they get found out.

I don’t think this is gonna work out

what do you mean by “anti-secular softie”? No hostility, just asking

Comrade, get a hold of yourself. A hundred generations live in us, waiting for the final victory of socialism. And if it won’t be us, it’s going to be our sons and daughters

I actually think that with the internet and everything, we will gradually move away from “big thinkers”. Sure, there will still be people producing decent theory, but i just can’t see in the current world a russian revolution like scenario when whole shifts at factories would meet up to read Marx.

I believe we will move towards a sort of “crowdsourced” theory where the main theoretical line is born organically out of continuos communication and discussion until we eventually get to a point where most contradictions and disagreements are solved. At that point the “big thinker” and his work will be one of many inputs, and not some sort of ideological hegemon.

Sort of like it is happening on here. We didn’t read the same stuff, but with time the community shaped itself to a point where we substantially agree with each other on pretty much everything.

Trump at least knew of to look like he knew what he was saying. He was a decent orator and could at least entertain a crowd. Biden is seriously less articulated and coherent than some people i work with, and i am an educator specialized in polyhandicap

i mean, if you look at the footage of diplomatic meetings you can see very obviously by Xi’s body language that he takes the presidents of nations like Barbados or Zambia much more seriously than people like Biden or Trudeau

it’s so funny to see lengths NAFO bots will go to turn everything into a victory.

a tank was supposed to reach x, but it got blown up halfway through? “But the crew (according to our unsubstantiated speculation) made it out! the mission was a total success!”

a pmc fielding an army of untrained convicts took over the most fortified city in europe after systematically dismantling the defenses put up by dozens of thousands of ukrainian servicemen? “we inflicted casualties! 1 to 182748 casualty rate favoring the defender because reddit says so! total win!”

the counteroffensive gets obliterated by KA-52 and fails to even get close to the first defense line? "probing attacks! We got their attention! Huge victory! Heil Hi… ehrm, Slava Ukraini!

More than anything, it’s the definitive confirmation that the Lion of Damascus won the civil war. They wouldn’t have let him in if there were doubts about his position.

It pretty much says that the arab world has made peace with the idea that Assad and the Ba’ath party are there to stay

Cuba is probably the one i have the most cultural affinity with, so it would not be that hard to adapt and learn the language. But i also can’t survive in warm climates, so northern china it is

China is too smart and cautious to get itself involved in such a conflict. They gave their token support to Serbia and that’s it - nobody in the CPC wants China to be seen as the one stirring up conflict in Europe or elsewhere.

Same reason why they don’t (openly) support the NPA in the Philippines and they keep reiterating that they want a peaceful solution to the SMO. China cares about being seen as the reasonable mediator, someone countries can rely on to actually stop conflicts instead of escalating them like SOME countries do

https://www.euractiv.com/section/enlargement/news/us-rebukes-kosovo-for-escalating-tensions-serbia-puts-army-on-alert/

Shit’s really looking bad for Kurti when even the americans aren’t putting up with his crap.

But what was he thinking? Ethnic albanian majors “elected” with 0-100 votes in constituencies of tens of thousands of people. That’s clearly a matter of renegotiating the electoral process instead of giving the Mayor title to whoever was there first. I can’t believe the Kosovar goverment thought that that was going to work out.

speaking as a guy with AVPD and thus with a general difficulty in doing exactly what you describe, i will say that as an adult (read: a person who doesn’t get the chance to socialize in school/uni) your best bet is to join a club or any sort of group activity.

The idea of getting on an app is attractive, but keep in mind that that will bring you to meet other people in your same situation - which doesn’t really help integration, since you are a person out of the local network meeting other people that are out of the local network. So it’s not really the best if your intention is to “integrate” yourself in the new area.

i am into sports so joining a rock climbing course allowed me to meet other somewhat likeminded people. I also got into a group that does experimental archeology (in other words, we study medieval manuscripts about melee combat and we try to recreate what is written there in order to figure out what works and what doesn’t, thus understanding better how people actually fought). That’s the best kind of group activity imo, as it forces the people present to interact and discuss with each other.

In my experience going to bars and whatnot isn’t really effective nowdays, since people go there to meet their friends and not really to get to know new people. But then again i have psychological issues about that so what do i know

tbh Bing can have them, tf are they going to do? be even more irrelevant?

the one thing that makes me proud about my family is that we are called out BY NAME on wikipedia as having aided and hosted italian partizans in Ticino

there are like dozens of reasons why we got rid of them in the first place.

They are expensive, dangerous, not particularly efficient or fast, and tbh i’ll be fine without a 100 meters long amazon Ad in the sky.