#Russian inferiority complex

[russianreader]

Speak Speech, Speaker (The Imperialist Mindset)

One day, I hope, someone will explain to me why “progressive” Russians find the English words speak, speaker, speech, etc., so sexy and exciting that they have to incorporate them needlessly into Russian every chance they get. Do they know that, in English, these words are less evocative than three-day-old bread, duller than dishwater? In this case, hilariously (and awkwardly, too: “speak”…

[ind0mitablesw0rdsmen]

do i seem gay to you guys like i am but

[unhonestlymirror]

I find it strange when people say, "Bulgakov hated Ukrainians!!" - have you read "Heart of a Dog"? That man hated literally everyone, especially soviets and their soviet aesthetic. And he hated Ukrainians for trapping under soviets.

Btw, I find it extremely important to explain to children why the authors/artists of soviet or tsarist russia times glorified the regime. It's important to teach about Pavlo Tychyna and his biography. It's important to teach literature together with history.

[thechanelmuse]

Kendrick, Drake, and Ethnic/Cultural Identity

One of the most discussed topics during this exchange between the two is if Drake is a culture vulture. In short, yes. He's always been. It boils down to inherited cultural identity and respected history, not the upholding of a social construct of “race.” 

Race is a goofy non-biological caste system that operates in various countries and it’s a dumbass global push to get people to embrace a superior to inferior hierarchy in classifying the globe into 5 broad groups solely based on perceived skull sizes, hues of skin color, and perceived traits and phenotypic features via the teachings of François Bernier, Johann Blumenbach, Carl Linnaeus, and them other hoes. Get race tf outta here.

I’m gonna make this concise as possible, but fleshed out a bit for full understanding.

Kendrick Lamar is Black American on both sides with his roots most likely coming out of Mississippi and/or Alabama to Chicago to Cali by way of the Great Migration. (He may even descend from Duckworths from Louisiana). I haven’t done his genealogy, but now I may out of curiosity.

Black American is a double ethnicity. We’re citizens of America (nationality = US Citizen), and our ethnic group (Black) was created & descends from this land (ethnicity = American) through ethnogensis. It has nothing to do with one’s brown skin color or how the cops see us 🙃, but everything to do with the lineage of one’s parents and their parents, etc. (For info on lineage tracing, refer to my post here.) 

Black Americans are an ethnic group (the largest from this land and largest in this country after Germans), while “white Americans” are a self-identification race to remove ethnic identity and conflate numbers. I can break this down further in another post if y’all want since American history is complex and will explain why Black Americans have been reclassified seven times by the US government 🙃. 

Now.

Culture is largely passed down through your mother, and her mother, and her mother, and so forth for Black Americans (and I’m sure other ethnic groups). No matter if it’s a two-parent or single-parent household, she’s your ultimate teacher in setting the foundation of your cultural upbringing. It’s the same if one is raised by their grandparents. It largely stems from the grandmother. If one’s father is their main parent, that’s a different case of course. 

Drake falls in line with this as someone from a single-parent household. He is half Ashkenazi of Latvian and Russian descent (ethnicity) through his mother and of half Black American descent (ethnicity) through his father. He is a dual citizen of Canada and America (nationality), who was raised in Canada with his Ashkenazi Jewish mother and Ashkenazi relatives with an Ashkenazi upbringing. He went to a Jewish day school and was engulfed in all aspects at home. 

Kendrick is ethnically and culturally Black American. Drake is ethnically and culturally Ashkenazi. He is also ethnically Black American (through lineage), but not culturally Black American. Does that make Drake a culture vulture? No. He just didn’t have the cultural upbringing but could always immerse himself in learning, appreciating, and respecting the other half of his history and culture.

What makes him one is how he operates as an outsider. He participates in an aspect of Black American culture (Hip-Hop) for his monetary gain, adopts a manufactured image for his perception of believability, and disrespects the people of this culture. “…run to America to imitate culture.” It’s like a jacket to him. He takes it off to try on another (like a Jamaican accent) and swaps for another, etc. 

A few examples that’s been touched on: He blackened his face to depict blackface while wearing a Jim Crow t-shirt… That’s specific disrespect towards Black Americans, mocking our history and our ancestors. “Whipped and chained you like American slaves.” That’s specific disrespect towards Black Americans, mocking our history and our ancestors. “[You] always rappin' like you 'bout to get the slaves freed.” Do I even need to explain this? Hopefully it’s understood.

The muthafucka is not like us.

[starrclown]

Random things in my Hazbin Hotel rewrite that I added for lore, character, or because I think it's cool

(I might do this for my Helluva Boss rewrite because these take up alot of brain space and I wanna infodump so Tumblr is my bitc-)

Triggerwarning: Talks of death, suicide, murder, other nasty stuff.

Angel has a daughter named Isabella. (This is Angel Dust. I took the Dust out of his name because in my rewrite Angel is ashamed of his drug addiction. I wanna clarify incase someone gets confused.)

Angel and Husk were born in the same year, 1891. Angel died at 56 while Husk died at 86.

Husk and Valerie (Vaggie)are probably the most innocent at the Hotel.

Angel, Alastor, and Nifty have all killed people. Nifty has only killed one person, her husband.

Both Angel and Nifty were married when they were alive.

Sir Pentious is now a girl. She is now Madame Pentious.

Husk is Transgender.

Husk has a Russian background. He also knows Russian.

Angel and his family are not from America. His family are immigrants from Italy. They came to America when he was about 7.

Alastor is black. He's not mixed anymore.

Cherrie is almost deaf. She can hear somewhat but she is almost excessively deaf from being around explosions all her life.

Angel is blind in his right eye. Things... happened to it.

Since Cherrie is hard hearing and Angel has only one eye, they help each other alot. Angel learned sign language to talk to Cherrie if she's having a hard hearing day. Cherrie usually walks around with Angel if he's in a unfamiliar area.

Both Alastor and Angel are overlords. (I'm gonna have to work out what makes a overlord a overlord )

Charlie is a doll. Litteraly. Her parents made her with demonic magic. (More like a puppet but you get it.)

Charlie has a bad relationship with Lucifer. Lilith on the other hand is a loving an attentive mother.

Valerie even though she doesn't look like it, is very good with certain weapons. Not good with hands on though.

Mimzy and Angel are good friends.

Vox and Velvette don't like Valentino. They stick it out with him because their territories are objectively smaller than Valentinos. They are both weaker than Valentino.

Vox and Valerie have the biggest inferiority complex out if the main cast.

Tom Trench has had a crush on Katie Killjoy for about 20 years now. Katie is aware of it. She toys him along all the time.

Valerie can't speak.

Vox and Angel have a brother like relationship. Velvette shares the same thing with Angel. Only Velvette likes it.

Nifty was the youngest to die. She's 18.

Husk was the oldest to die.

Considering Nifty died so young she often can revert to a teenage life mindset. When someone (Mostly Angel) treats her like a child because that's what she is, she gets upset. Really upset. She doesn't understand why everyone treats her diffrently.

Nifty also tries to argue that she's grown up because she not only had a husband, she has to be bad like a adult because she's in hell.

Alastor shows blantent favoritism when it comes to the treatment of Husk and Nifty. (Hint: Husk ain't the favorite.)

Alastor is actually pretty nice. Despite how evil his is he is genuinely kind to most people. He was raised to be a gentlemen so he never really let that go as a adult.

When you die, after a significant amount of time, you can recive objects from your human life. There is two ways you can obtain objects from your human life. You either have it on you when you die or someone gives it to you as you die. Like being buried with a object or a object being set on your grave. This is how Angel has some memories of his family, someone set a scrap book on his grave. He has his necklace cause he was wearing it when he died.

Angel killed himself. He intentionally overdosed.

Charlie has biased when it comes to sinners. She's unaware of it but it's there. Charlie shows favoritism to younger sinners and to sinners who died from unnatural causes or to wronged sinners. This is demonstrated in the main cast. Charlie treats Nifty, Valerie, and Alastor better than Angel and Husk. She doesn't treat them hostility by any means but she gives alot more leeway to those three then Angel and Husk. She treats Angel objectively worse. If something bad happens and Angel has a part in it, then Angel will most likely take blame. She treats them worse for diffrent reasons. Angel because he killed himself and Husk because of how long he lived.

While Charlie doesn't like killing sinners, she will if pushed far enough.

Angel hides what he actually looks like. He didn't come down to hell looking as he does currently.

Valerie will do almost anything to get validation. Her self hatred is that big.

I have more but this is getting long.

Ask questions if you want. If your curious.

- ⭐️StarClown⭐️

[ohsalome]

There is a common belief among russians - at least there was, before the full-scale invasion - that their society is divided into "crazy putinists" who believe the state TV and watch propagandists like skabeyeva, solovyev, zhirinovsky etc.; and "normal russians" who make up most of the society. "I don't watch TV" was a safe-proclaimed label of adequacy and reason. I will admit, that in part, they have a point - rabid propagandists like those mentioned above cater to the most radical slices of society. But this approach fully ignored the fact that hatered towards the West, hatered&superiority towards Ukraine exists and existed *everywhere*. The casual xenophobia broadcasted on prime time tv shows is much more dangerous than skabeyeva, and its influence starts from the very childhood. In the last two days this video clip was widely shared on ukrainian instagram and twitter - a comparison of russian and ukrainian adaptations of "Hotel Transylvania". Although originally this edit was adressed to russian-speaking ukrainians in order to illustrate how the choice of media they show to their children is political and works towards developing an inferiority complex, but I think it is important for westerners to see this as well. This is the reality we lived in. You can't condescend to us about "being nice to russians" while staying ignorant of how casual their abuse towards us has always been.

They don't only go out of the way to insert ukrainophobic parodies in the media intended for children. There have been precedents where russian translations of polish WW2 books changed the russian soldiers committing war crimes into ukrainian soldiers. Practically every popular russian TV show - Soldaty, Moya Prekrasnaya Nyanya, Shchastlyvy Vmeste, Papyny Dochky - had at least one ukrainian character that is always described the same way - loud, obnoxious, stupid, envious, greedy, unmannered, poor hilly-billy relative that worships their russian brothers and dreams day and night of moving to Moscow/restoration of ussr/both. This is how most of the russians perceive us today, and they demonstrate this in every single interaction - starting from big-scale "liberals" who lecture "smaller brothers" on how to properly fight for freedom, to "simple poor russians" who make fun of ukrainian language and complain that they're bigger victims of "putin's regime" than Ukrainain in occupied cities.

russian society is rotten to its core. Until they start reflecting on this and making an effort to change, there can be no dialogue. If they won't root out their chauvinism, russian invasions will repeat again and again and again - if not in Ukraine, then certainly in a smaller country that the collective west hypocritically cares less about.

[kaisortadied]

character sheet and Phoenix in full uniform, grhahahsnudcnudcnudcun I love head cannons and lore and stuff I’m so normal about this.

New head cannons btw :3 yippee ( sorry I couldn’t cut here and made this long :(( also note all my lore and stuff is overly angsty is my writing style or whatever they call it. Also I’m a gore artist so…. sorry)

Full name: Jamie Einar Ginophoem

date of birth: 12/19/3X

Date of agency sign on: 12/19/49

Phoenix has naturally blonde ash hair, sometimes they have red or black highlights. Their 5’4, and is mostly mute, rarely speaking to anyone and mostly speaking ASL.

They’re trained in Karate, Skilled fighting, stealth, acrobatics, and basic agency training. In Clearance and cadet training they did already sport these skills, so the source of these are traits are unknown.

Phoenix can allegedly speak fluent Russian, French, and Spanish. They have been confirmed to fluently speak English and ASL, The agency has heard Phoenix speak the other languages from sources, however no one who actually works at the agency has heard them.

Phoenix rarely drinks, but on the occasions they do, it’s either very light or very heavy, according to Phoenix “There’s no in between Sam.”

Phoenix always puts their hair up in a ponytail before going on missions (in my awesome lore they do eventually cut their hair to about neck length so this head cannon does stop once they do that)

Phoenix does smoke, they have been trying to quit after the juniper incident though.

TW: for self harm, attempted suicide, drugs, PTSD, mental episodes, terrible parenting, and overall angsty stuff

Phoenix jumped off the roof of a building in uptown nyc, trying to get out of an arranged marriage. They survived the fall, accidentally faking their death.

from the age 17-20 they lived on the streets, they did fight kids in street fights for money, which did end up in them being in multiple police chases.

They spent most of the money they made from these fights on drugs, Phoenix doesn’t have an addiction anymore, according to them.

They have been diagnosed with PTSD (alright quick side tangent, I have done my research on all things I give my characters, so dw) the agency keeps a close eye on them to make sure this doesn’t effect their missions.

They have been found having mental episodes in their office, and also have an inferiority complex and anxiety when it comes to missions, coming up with crazy ways on how they could die on the mission.

(sorry if these got to dark, I’m a dark person ig, I do my research though, and I love constructive criticism soo… shoot my fellas)

[swamp-cats-den]

One of the reblogs under the interslavic language poll picked my interest by saying they speak russian and Ukrainian, dunno why, so I went to check their blog, and oh god, shouldn't have done that. They turned out to be a Ukrainian with zero posts about the russian invasion (at least not searchable), but with posts about other conflicts because they're more trendy, I guess. And you know what was searchable with the word 'Ukraine'? A post about Holodomor being a 'nazi fake' (with hundreds of reblogs, of course). Just imagine having such an inferiority complex and wanting to please western tankie leftists so much that you post fucking russian propaganda about past genocide in your country in the midst of an ongoing genocide in your country??? A fucking disgrace.

[pissmoon]

Its pathetic west-boo behaviour when poles and czechs get offended at being called eastern europeans and try to pretend 'central europe' is anything but a bullshit term? You think ur culturally and linguistically closer to germans than to russians or ukrainians? Ur silly and have an inferiority complex about being slavic. Eat some borsch

[seventhscorpio]

I'm not entirely sure how to go about it yet, but I really wanna write an article about the fandom experience of a kid from a niche non-anglosphere country, especially a then-aspiring writer. Bc the English-centric spaces don't realise how insanely hard (and also weird) it was. Some games took me three years to beat because not too many things had a Polish translation, so I didn't know any language the game was available in (most often English, French, Spanish, Russian, German, sometimes Portuguese and Italian). I struggled with reading fanfiction and engaging in fandom spaces because the language barrier was so daunting. Seriously, I ALWAYS had a google translate open in another tab and pasted paragraphs of text into it to grasp what I was reading. At 13 I started writing in English because any of my Polish stories didn't get any traction because I wasn't writing HP fanfiction (early 2010s e'ryone). I envied people who were like 'oh I got into RPing Warrior Cats at 9yo :>' because that door was locked for me. Not to mention the inferiority complex of comparing your prose to that of native English writers, and the frustration of struggling to express your thoughts in a language that's not yet your own.

There was beauty too, ofc, four tweens in a trench coat reblogging each other's stories scrawled in broken English, that feeling of connection and understanding because all of us struggled with the same thing. This is hardly a complaint, all of that taught me a foreign language better than any school ever could, but I wish fandom spaces acknowledged such experiences more often. Everything on tumblr is so usa-centric and it is getting properly annoying at times.

[geijutsukaa]

I. Sürgünlik

Aim to make us feeble, if our name is scorned, if our fame is shamed, What defines us as people? - Rıza Fazıl

I wince when people speak about their fathers; not out of hatred, but rather an unknowing sense of envy—his adolescence was far from the all-American tri-varsity lifestyle many experienced. When asked about him, I often find myself diluting his character into a falsehood that can be easily understood; in other words, I lie. I lie the same way he lies about his name when ordering takeout, to spare employees from the burden of mispronunciation. I lie about his background because his ambiguity requires a history lesson I simply do not care to restate. I have heard the question “What is your dad again?” on countless occasions, and although I understand what the question entails, I mask my annoyance with oblivion to avoid repeating myself—in truth, my father’s complexity stems from before he was even born. 

The bane of his existence is hereditary; his frustration is an heirloom granted to him by his blood. In the mid-1940s, my Grandfather fell victim to the Crimean Tatar Genocide. He was ten years old when the first mass deportation of his entire ethnic group occurred. Over the course of his childhood, all aspects of his being had been stripped from him by Soviet occupation—my Grandfather, who previously lost his own father to the ongoing war, had to witness his two younger brothers starve to death on frigid trains with no destination. The bloodshed of the Crimean people was considered to be a cleansing; from the start, my Grandfather has been in a position of inferiority no matter the location of his refuge. His history was one which I never fully understood in my early childhood, yet one my dad taught me nonetheless. Perhaps he was using his father's traumas to justify his personality while I was still too young to understand. All I knew was that my Deda’s deportation was the cause of my Dad’s eternal sense of displacement. My Father holds his breath when he speaks of the genocide. My Grandfather is pained at the memory of his childhood, but recognizes the importance of his history regardless; the value of education surrounding his people surpasses the pain of explanation. I was passed down both the knowledge of my bloodline and the feeling of alienation that runs through it. 

It was nearly Summertime when Soviet policemen invaded my Grandfather’s village. His first direct encounter was with two armed men at his door, demanding the presence of his family. They forcibly took them from their home, with the rest of the Crimean population following shortly after. Within the span of 3 days, the NKVD (Interior Ministry of the Soviet Union) deported Crimean Tatars of all ages through cattle trains; however, the deportation mostly impacted women, children, and the elderly, because men of age had previously been sent into battle. Their destination? Over 3,000 kilometers away in Uzbekistan, another region that had fallen under Russian Occupation. As each day passed aboard bolted-up cargo, he fell into an unfathomable state of malnourishment and dehydration. His two younger brothers, one of which was a newborn, were both physically incapable of withstanding such conditions for weeks at a time. From the beginning, they had no chance of survival. My grandfather’s entire life trajectory had been altered the moment those two men appeared affront his home; his childhood in Crimea came to a hasty conclusion as his adulthood began in Tashkent at the age of 10. I often find that he precariously lives out their childhood and his own through his mannerisms. He sings and claps when he sees my dog, calls me his baby despite my 16 years of age, and makes sure I always leave his home with a full stomach; because under his wrinkled skin and calloused fingers stands a confused child who does not yet understand the consequence of existing as the other. 

[iwanttoswimintheswanepoel]

villanelle subliminal

“you should never tell a psychopath they’re a psychopath”

- be a high functioning psychopath

- be stoic

- don’t feel empathy for those who have wronged you

- be ruthless and cunning

- reign with an iron fist over all those inferior to you

- be extremely confident in a feminine way

- be smart enough to escape a russian prison

- you love the ability you hold to hurt people even if you don’t always act on it

- you are quite literally a sick fuck but you get away with it by being charming and attractive

- be incapable of feeling guilt for your actions of revenge

- real life get it back in blood

- be so intriguingly mysterious. sure everyone can recall your devastatingly beautiful face but … no one truly knows you?

- study social interactions like a hawk. no interaction gets past you.

- notice patterns and easily put pieces of the puzzle together

- spending your money is cool but indulging in your cold blooded animalistic nature is your favorite

- have a child like sense of humor that is jarring in comparison to your brute nature

- no one can see your inner turmoil because no one can truly decipher your rather stoic features

- people talk about you like something straight out of a stephan king novel but they can’t hide their infatuation

- you’re peculiar and strange in an alluring way

- when people talk to you they have the strangest feeling that you are simply… “other”. an uncanny valley feeling paired with your sweet honey like voice

- when you get mad the whole room turns into the arctic. you may not show it but everyone can feel your rage.

“they say she’s a dalgyal gwishin. the egg ghost. the demon with no face”

-even assassins fear you

-the mention of your name causes a cold shiver to travel down people’s spine

-everyone has heard of the beautiful but dangerous woman who happens to be you

-have the abilities and training of a world class assassin

-you’ve been trained in self defense, gun handling etc for as long as you can remember

-you are a literal killing machine

-you can slice and dice someone up like its fruit ninja

-not even muhammad ali could take you in the ring

beauty

-how can the devil reincarnate have a face so sweet

-people may not love the fury of your wrath but they sure love to look at you

-even as a walking death note people can’t help but to feel attracted to you

-you’re jarring as fuck but with a face like that whats not to like?

-your haunting face and your fit body cancels out the fact you could kill someone in the blink of an eye

-maybe its how unnatural your aura makes you but you can’t help but to wonder if someone can truly be so beautiful

-blood red lips to match the fluids of your victims against your complexion

-you have the same succubus esque allure as jennifer check

xtra

-easily be a polyglot absorb knowledge of new languages with every breath you breathe

-blend with the locals abroad

-live in a glamorous apartment in your desired city. your apartment is cultivated and designed to your exact liking.

-money is never an issue. forget comfortable you’re ultra wealthy.

-be your bosses favorite within the workplace. your boss has a soft spot for you despite your theatrics.

-you’re the one complex female character everyone can agree to like

-you give people the same energy as a dramatic piano climax

-to new people inquiring about the mysterious beauty, you are often described as a “living , breathing ,shopping ,psychopath”

-smell like “pretty machine” by kerosene

[theculturedmarxist]

[...]

In Ukraine, the West has some intellectual understanding that the war is a war of attrition, but the power of the WSC discourse is such that this is frequently lost sight of. In many ways this isn’t surprising. The WSC—the Liberal mindset at war—looks at conflict as it looks at everything: from a lofty position of complete understanding, based on the universal applicability of a priori normative assumptions. The Liberal mindset as a whole, recall, sees itself as “practical”, and scorns long study and detailed analysis. It sees learning for its own sake as largely pointless, since it knows all the important answers anyway. Universities are only important for acquiring certificates an knowing where to find the detail: technical training is a joke, and for inferior mortals. So Liberal society admires the smart person rather than the intelligent, the quick-witted rather than the expert, the advocate who argues well on the basis of a quick scan, rather than the academic expert with deep knowledge.. It exalts the financier who makes a fortune out of speculating in pharmaceutical stocks above the doctors and researchers who have actually done the work.

The Liberal mindset is thus resistant to learning and the analysis of experience, not least because that might force a modification of some a priori ideas. And these ideas tend to be normative, emotional and moralistic. That’s not surprising: anyone with even a faint acquaintance with psychological research on decision-making knows that our fundamental decisions and opinions are overwhelmingly initially arrived at in the unconscious mind first. The conscious mind seems to function largely as a mechanism for providing an intellectual and rational gloss to opinions already formulated on subjective and emotional grounds. So the Liberal mind, uninterested in detail, unwilling to learn, and working from largely-arbitrary a priori ideas, responds emotionally and often angrily, to ideas and even facts that challenge its gut reactions. Don’t confuse me with facts, I know what I think, as the late Mrs Thatcher said on more than one occasion.

I’ve pointed out a number of times that the Liberal mind, in its many, often conflicting, forms, is inherently normative and moralising. This means that it responds to questions, debate and criticism not by engaging with the issues, but by shrill personal attacks on those who disagree. There’s nothing more satisfying and addictive, after all, than the feeling that you are superior to others by virtue of your normative assumptions, and that you you therefore think and speak on a higher plane than those who would try to confuse you with facts. This seems to be a universal tendency within the factions of the Western Security Complex, for all its internal incoherence : I have, for example, never seen a thoughtful and carefully argued piece of WSC punditry on Ukraine, and I don’t expect to see one on Gaza. A superior attitude of moral and normative judgement does service instead, and relieves you of the need to actually know, and even more learn, things.

So try to explain the tangled history of Ukraine and Russia since 1991, and you are a Putin-loving Russian agent. Try to explain the background to the recent coups in West Africa, and you are an apologist for neoimperialism. Try to explain the probable causes of the Hamas attack, and you are a sympathiser with baby-killers. Some of you may already have had exchanges like the following:

So why do you think this attack took place?

A combination of fifteen years of imprisonment and sanctions, and a sense of betrayal by Saudi Arabia and other Arab states.

But you can’t possibly say that justifies all this killing!

We’re not talking about justifications, but explanations.

So you refuse to condemn Hamas then?

You asked me why I thought the attacks took place.

Ah, you must support Hamas.

The advantage of this kind of ad hominem, normative approach is precisely that you don’t need to know anything: indeed, knowledge itself is suspect because it might eat away at your sense of moral and intellectual superiority. Practitioners of this tactic feel (or seem to feel) the certainty of Knowledge about the world that we associate with revealed truth, or the writings of the Gnostics. It follows that everything contrary that cannot be denied can be, and must be, assimilated to this Knowledge, which is a scheme of thought (?) forcibly imposed onto a complicated world. Those who Know, for example, that Washington is behind everything of importance that happens in the world have already decided that the war in Gaza must have been carefully planned by Biden and Netanyahu to provide an excuse for, well, let’s say attacking Iran. All contrary evidence can simply be dismissed as Iranian/Russian propaganda that the rest of us are stupid enough to accept, or very clever western disinformation. And those who Know that evil must be fought wherever it happens, looked at one video from Gaza, freaked out and demanded that the Palestinians be punished. Don’t confuse me with facts, I know what I think.

The Liberal tendency to impose prefabricated schemes on the world based on selective and often erroneous moralised readings of the past, and a priori assumptions about how the world works, has been fully on display in Ukraine, and I’ll therefore go through that in a bit of detail, with side-glances elsewhere. Let’s look first at the nature of the fighting itself (the theatre), then the wider strategic questions related to Europe and the West, then the strategic questions at the level of the world itself. In each case, it will be clear that the WSC is right out of its depth, and has no real idea what’s going on.

First of all, let’s look at Russian tactics and military objectives. Because the WSC can only conceive of others doing what it already knows about and has practised, it follows that other nations must in fact be doing what the West would do, even if they say they are not, and there’s no evidence that they are. The image the West has of large-scale military operations is pretty much limited to Gulf War 2,0, with its rapid movement of armoured units and capture of territory. For pundits, including military ones, that’s pretty much all they know, so it follows that it must have been what the Russians were planning in 2021. The fact that the Russians did not capture much territory therefore means that they failed. It doesn’t matter how many times the Russians explain that their concept of operations has nothing in it about capturing territory: they must be lying or simply wrong. So the WSC is convinced that the Russians were seeking a reply of Gulf War 2,0 and it failed.

But then there is talk of attrition warfare. We think we know what attrition warfare is: it was the terrible waste of life for no strategic gain that characterised World War 1, or at least 1915-17 on the Western Front. So in this case the Russians are like the Germans of 1914 who attempted to win the war by large-scale manoeuvre operations and failed, and then dug in. At which point the Russians then become the British and French, engaging in pointless attritional attacks, except that they aren’t really the Allies, they are the Germans, because everybody knows that in 2023 they are defending, except how can you engage in attritional warfare if you are defending, so they must in fact be attacking, which means that they must be suffering enormous casualties (60,000 casualties on the first day of the Somme in 1916, remember?) which means Russian Generals must be callous monsters trying to overwhelm the Ukrainians by human wave attacks, even if there’s no evidence of that actually happening. Trying to explain to a WSC pundit how an Army can have a posture of operational offense and tactical defence means that you are a buddy of Putin. Trying to explain what Hamas is up to militarily would cause the WSC’s collective head to explode, although if they had been paying attention they would already have looked at the tactics of ISIS in Iraq. Don’t confuse me with facts, I know what I think.

Because we know a lot about the Russian Army, or we think we do. There were all those popular histories of the eastern front in World War 2, written from interviews with German generals. Oh, and Stalin’s purges and the catastrophes of 1941, and the terror of the Red Army advancing into Germany in 1945, and Afghanistan, and then it all went wrong in the 1990s, and there were the Chechen Wars and nothing much has happened since, and the Russians are undisciplined barbarians who can’t stand up to western-trained forces operating western equipment. So if they haven’t collapsed they soon will. And of course the Ukrainian people will soon rise up against the conquerors and take to the deserts and mountains of Ukraine, forming tribal militias as they did in Afghanistan. Or something. Don’t confuse me with facts, I know what I think.

What’s clear for those with eyes to see is that the War is taking off in ways it has no right to. Drones and precision missiles, to name the most obvious, have changed everything. But the WSC, incapable by definition of learning anything, is simply helpless in front of all this, and so talks about what it knows and understands. A retired Major General from a western Army may perhaps have commanded a battalion on actual operations, and seen platoon-level actions, using small arms and light weapons with air support. Few western nations are actually capable of deploying a functioning Brigade-sized unit on operations, whereas the Russians have been chewing up whole Brigades recently. So people talk about what they know: capturing a village, attacking a bridge, attacking an airfield, daring special forces operations. All these are peripheral to a war of deliberate attrition, where the Russian aim is to grind down the Ukrainian forces and then move forward, as they did against the Germans eighty years ago. It’s impossible for western military experts (OK, that’s controversial, I know) to actually conceive of a war in which Ukraine has lost more men killed than the entire active and reserve strength of any European military. Even on the Russian side, and taking the most-likely figure of 30,000 dead, then with those casualties, as well as the severely wounded, the British Army of today would cease to exist.

The link to the higher levels is clear enough. The WSC certainly has long-term aspirations but it’s incapable of carrying out long-term plans. It’s fixated on the next move, whilst the Russians are busy re-designing the chessboard. The Russian view has been consistent for fifteen years, and has almost certainly hardened substantially over the last year and a half. They want the US out of Europe, Europe itself quiescent and respectful, and a large, disarmed area that they control, between them and the nearest western military power. This is an investment for the next twenty-five years, at least, and if it takes a bit of time, it takes a bit of time. Ukraine in a sense is collateral damage in all of this, since the Russians probably have no very precise idea of what they want there, so long as it is consistent with the overall plan. And rather than trying to understand what that plan might be, the WSC ignores that level entirely, and toasts the capture of a village, the destruction of an aircraft and the despatch of a clapped-out howitzer, as though these things were important. If they think of the higher level at all, it’s in the context of fantasies of the attempted re-creation of the Soviet Union. But don’t confuse me with facts, I know what I think.

And finally, even the new security order in Europe that the Russians are seeking to establish is only part of the ultimate goal: a world where political, military and economic power is more evenly distributed than it is now, and there is no hegemony. Moreover, it is a goal that they broadly share with other nations, with whom they cooperate on certain issues, to the extent that the various nations find it useful: a relatively subtle concept the WSC simply cannot understand. So far as I can tell, this has pretty much passed by the WSC by, for all that they whine and moan about unfair Chinese competition and the Wagner group operating in Africa. At their best, countries with a Liberal pragmatic tradition, like Britain, can actually be highly effective in the short term. But as you would expect, the same countries are terrible at any long-term vision, and find it culturally very difficult to entertain, let alone put into practice. In diplomacy, and often in war, the British tradition is of series of tactical victories crowned by a strategic defeat, because they were never able to produce and stick to a coherent vision. And this is the mentality which has taken over the whole western political class recently, with its obsession with the news cycle and the next tweet. It isn’t even that the Russians are playing seven-dimensional chess, it’s just that, like many other countries, they have some idea where they want to go, and all we know is that we don’t like it, and it’s not fair and we want to stop it. But that’s not a policy.

And now the WSC has pivoted effortlessly from Ukraine (with a brief diversion into francophone Africa) into Gaza. In the course of twenty-four hours, Substacks I receive that talked with utter certainty about what was happening in Ukraine, have begun talking with equal certainty about Hamas and Gaza, and largely echoing each other. Well, I have some experience in the region and have been involved a bit with its problems, but I don’t claim the kind of in-depth knowledge that would allow me to pontificate like that. But in Gaza, as in Ukraine, the WSC is unlimited in its confidence in itself, even as it is limited by what it knows and what it understands, and by its very feeble capacity for learning. If it pontificates endlessly, it is because so many business models depend on it. But they know what they think: please don’t confuse them with facts.

[unhonestlymirror]

Not a care in the world if russia dies in this century, it is why I did not capitalise their name. But of course you twist my words 💩. Is promoting Nadia the only argument you have? If you found out the next day she example said something about Baltic you would start insulting her identity or downplaying her the day after. Find a Jewish person (I'm Belaruthian-Jewish) who goes against your bubble and not mock them, you would burst a vein XD. I saw how you treat identities of who disagree with you on anything. You switch from calling my people Belaruthian to Belorussian (does not give you the right tankie or not), you tried correcting someone online when they did not do the same. You called a Ukrainian in essence a misguided fellow countryman, disappointed you that they disagreed on Emilia Plater. You mention history of Poland with Germany and compare to Ukraine and russia then start fights with Poles on Quora/wherever and say to not trust them on history. I could find more but your blog is a mess.

You do not actually care about Jewish people, in similar way that sheeple screaming "from river to the sea" do not care about palestinians, they are tankies that want to give middle finger to USA. You only like that you can use us to argue that russia should be gone because they currently affect you.

P.S. I wonder how you would react to Lithuanians online who call us their serfs. Would you be angry at them or would you dismiss it as jokes like you do with Latvians who say that Lithuanians should run back to Poland during sports games?

Anon, you... bhavhahahshahhsjajahshs

"Is promoting Nadia the only argument you have?"

Argument for what? That killing Jews is bad? Anon, if you're Jewish and you still need more arguments for why killing Jews is bad... I can't help you here, go visit Israel or Palestine, and you'll see yourself.

"If you found out the next day she example said something about Baltic you would start insulting her identity or downplaying her the day after."

No, I wouldn't?? Fun fact: Nadia Lipes is very famous for having a scandalous way of expressing her thoughts, and sometimes, she makes me mad. But it doesn't change the fact that she's saying the right things, and she's scary smart. She would have to say "Ukrainians are neo-nazi" for me to start downplaying her, but she would have never said that because she's a Ukrainian-Jewish historian who hates russia very, VERY much. Average russians tortured her uncle.

Find a Jewish person (I'm Belaruthian-Jewish) who goes against your bubble and not mock them, you would burst a vein XD.

Could you please tell me why should I burst a vein? And what exactly are you doing to go against my bubble? Do you have a different opinion from mine on something? Because rn it's not very clear.

Ah! When I'm mocking people, I'm doing this absolutely regardless of their identity or ethnicity, or sexual orientation. You see, after I became a refugee, I have very little tolerance towards stupid or harmful sayings. I'm sad that you perceive my answer as mocking because I just wanted to clarify my own words. After all, it was you who wrote me first, and you, who was waiting for me to answer, and you didn't write any insults for me to ignore you.

"I saw how you treat identities of who disagree with you on anything. You switch from calling my people Belaruthian to Belorussian (does not give you the right tankie or not), you tried correcting someone online when they did not do the same."

Eh... anon, do you know what humour is? I was one of those few people on this website who brought in the topic of why people should not call Belaruthians "Belorussians." It doesn't change the fact that the word "Belorussians" exists to describe prorussian Belaruthians, and it is often used by Belaruthians themselves, just like "malorossy" word is being used by Ukrainians to describe prorussian Ukrainians or Ukrainians with inferiority complex.

I use both these words to show people the difference between "Belaruthian" and "Belorussian." Otherwise, many will just not understand what's wrong with using "Belorussian."

Anon, if we never corrected people online, there would be even more fakes than nowadays. I always welcome people to correct me if they have more accurate information. If it's not accurate, well, I have never hidden the fact that I am quite a harsh person who doesn't feel the need to sugar-coat her words.

"You called a Ukrainian in essence a misguided fellow countryman, disappointed you that they disagreed on Emilia Plater."

I never called slobozan-shitposting like that??? People have the right to disagree with me as much as I have the right to be disappointed in them. XDD

You mention the history of Poland with Germany and compare to Ukraine and russia, then start fights with Poles on Quora/wherever and say to not trust them on history.

Anon, when someone writes something stupid about my countries, I don't give a single f*ck what nationality they claim to have. I can't remember when I wrote "don't trust Polish people on their history". Are you trying to sow mistrust between me and my Polish mutuals?🤨 Oh, btw, I really doubt that man on Quora was actually Polish because they called Gdańsk "Danzig".

I'm a messy person, indeed. What's your point? You want me to disagree with something? Anon, that's very sweet that you use "Belaruthian", really, I appreciate that - but could you please prove to me that you're really Belaruthian? Because I once had a conversation with a person who told me they was Ukrainian but didn't know a single word in Ukrainian, they just wanted to manipulate me using the genocide of my people.

"You do not actually care about Jewish people, in similar way that sheeple screaming "from river to the sea" do not care about palestinians, they are tankies that want to give middle finger to USA. You only like that you can use us to argue that russia should be gone because they currently affect you."

Anon, you are not Belaruthian, aren't you?

Because russia FIRST OF ALL affects Belarus. Belarus is very, very russified, and you, as Belaruthian, should have known that. Why do you talk about it like russia doesn't affect you? Why do you suddenly mention the USA? Belaruthians don't really care about the USA, they have their own problems.

P.S. I wonder how you would react to Lithuanians online who call us their serfs. Would you be angry at them or would you dismiss it as jokes like you do with Latvians who say that Lithuanians should run back to Poland during sports games?

Anon, you're not only not Belaruthian but also someone who doesn't have a sense of humour. And you sound veeery similar to my old fella lillyofthevalley, who pretended to be at first Chinese, and then Ukrainian American.

[voidfragments]

nobody asked but here's some thoughts about how ritsuka feels about kadoc bc this is a dynamic i think about a lot

first: it is crucial to establish that, above all else, she thinks of him very positively, and preeeetty much always has. yeah, even back in the russian lostbelt, she thought he didn't seem like too bad of a person, and now she knows for sure that he's got a good heart. she also looks up to him, to a degree--he may not be anything special to mages, but to ritsuka, his skills are something to aspire to (if anything, he makes a better role model in this regard than any other mage she knows, except probably waver--this is a level that might actually be attainable for her). and she wants to be his friend! in fact, post-olympus, she does think of him as a friend, though it's of course not up to me to say whether the feeling is mutual.

but! it's not all sunshine and roses. i like to say ritsuka and kadoc feed each other's inferiority complexes because, well, they kinda do. on her end, this comes in two forms: guilt and fear of replacement.

the fear of replacement part we saw pretty well illustrated in the garden of lost will, so i'm not gonna elaborate on that much more. besides, it mostly goes away when they start working side-by-side. but guilt?

remember that dressing-down kadoc gave ritsuka back in yaga russia? because she sure does. constantly. she doesn't resent him for it, oh no--why would she? everything he said there was the objective truth. she did steal team a's shot at glory, she is unqualified and unskilled, and that did (and still does) lead to an awful lot of avoidable casualties. so no, she doesn't hold it against him, that he said things she knows are true to her. but she can't forget what he said, either.

and yet, she still likes him. still admires him. still wants to be his friend. because that's just like her, isn't it? as long as she can see some amount of good in a person, she's willing to forgive or look past an awful lot. positive to a fault, this one. i don't think it's a bad thing, in this case, but i do think they would benefit a lot from clearing the air around their insecurities regarding each other.

[stinkrascal]

If it's not spoilers could you please talk about vlad? Like what does he like, hobbies and how he feels about his family, the small stuff, thank you! And I can't wait for your Breanna and Vlad spinoff

hello anon thanks for the cool question!! and thanks so much, i really hope u guys enjoy the backstory reprisal!! im getting so close to finishing it, i can't wait to post it for everyone to read!! <3

i'm putting this under a cut because ohhhhhhhh boy did i ramble so hard lol.

vlad loves reading and writing a lot! he reads almost constantly, and he's a bit of a braggart when it comes to his vast knowledge of many different things, which he's learned about from books alone. he has no formal education, so reading was his only avenue for learning for a long, long time. after becoming a vampire, and before meeting breanna, he spent many centuries alone, with his only company being the books he surrounded himself with, so reading very quickly became a huge pastime for him. before becoming a vampire, vladislaus was actually illiterate and couldn't read or write; he was taught to read and write in english and in russian by yakov petrova, a natural-born vampire whose native language is russian. so, vlad honestly has a bit of an inferiority complex when it comes to his own intelligence. because of this, he tries to make up for that insecurity by being as well-read as he possibly can. even after all these years, he still has that lingering fear in the back of his head, so he's almost always reading in an attempt to learn more and more! as far as writing goes, he enjoys using his writing as a way to vent about his frustrations, and often he uses his writing to delve into the deeply personal history of his past, as well as some of his crueler intrusive thoughts he doesn't wish to admit to anyone aloud. he isn't a professional by any means, and his writing is something he doesn't share to most people, not even to breanna at times, but it does help him significantly. if he were to pursue any career, he would be an author!

he also really loves music! one of his greatest hobbies is collecting new vinyl and listening to it with breanna, so they can discuss how they feel about the music. he's listened to literally everything, and since vampires integrated with humans and were granted access to internet usage, now he can listen to all the underground artists he never would have been exposed to when vampires only lived among themselves! not only does he love music, but he's musically gifted himself; he can play the piano and the organ, and he's a good singer. he's shy about his talents, though, so he won't often play for people. occasionally, he'll play for his family, though :-)

vlad is EXTREMELY family oriented, and he cares very very deeply about his family. this has been true of him his entire life, even before becoming a vampire. in his human life, he lived on a farm with nine younger siblings. as the oldest child, he took on much of the childcare for his younger siblings, and as such became something of a surrogate father to them, as their real father was often gone, and their mother was bedridden from various illnesses. so, even at a young age, he's been rather paternal and nurturing in nature, always wanting to provide for others. vlad has this deeply-rooted insecurity, where he needs to feel needed, he needs to feel as though his help contributes to something greater, and to him, fatherhood satiates that desire. so, as you can imagine, he puts ALL his effort into his family, honestly, to the point where he's extremely distrusting and dismissive of people outside of his family, and he can be extremely overbearing at times. he's the type of person who always thinks he's right, so when he sees his children in need, he's not shy to give his input on what he thinks they ought to do to better themselves. sometimes this is appreciated, but other times it can come across as condescending and patronizing. which, rest assured, he is condescending and patronizing, but he doesn't mean to be--he's just seen a lot of suffering in his lifetime, and he can't imagine that suffering being inflicted onto his wife and children. he feels very responsible for the wellbeing of those he cares about, so he'll do practically anything he feels will keep them safe. at the end of the day, though, he's just happy to have his children around. honestly, if vlad had it his way, none of his children would ever move out of the house! they'd all just live together in one big, happy family forever and ever. he's the person who's always organizing family dinners, outings, and vacations, the one who always texts and facetimes his children without so much as a warning, just to ask them about their day, and if anything cool has happened. and if nothing cool happened, that's fine! he just loves the sound of their voices. after going so long without a genuine connection with anyone, he relishes in the fact that he has such a large family with such a close bond!

i've mentioned this a lot before, but vlad is VERY overprotective of breanna especially. obviously he feels this way about his children too, but he has such a close bond with breanna, being away from her feels unthinkable. he always wants to be around her, he's constantly checking up on her and making sure she's okay, she's happy, she's cared for, etc. they met during a time where they both felt completely alone, isolated from the world around them, with no friends, no ambition, and no care for their own wellbeing. he honestly sees a lot of himself (and a lot of his younger brother, who will be talked about one day far in the future lmao) in breanna. in a lot of ways, even though he didn't know breanna when she was a human, he feels personally responsible for her troubled upbringing, and he feels this even more now that they're together. whenever she faces any problem, he feels like he personally needs to fix it, as to alleviate the hardships she's endured.

so, it's no surprise that he's EXTREMELY clingy and needy, and honestly very codependent. if you asked vlad about himself, i think he'd have a hard time coming up with an answer which doesn't revolve around him being a father and a husband, him caring for his wife and children, because he's honestly just so enmeshed into that lifestyle and especially w/ breanna that it's hard to see anything else. i amount that to him being a deeply insecure person, someone who constantly feels anxiety and someone who constantly needs reassurance that he's needed in this world. it's definitely one of the reasons why he's so attached to breanna, because she makes him feel needed. obviously there's other reasons too!! like, they genuinely just get along and treat each other well. but there's no denying she itches this particular scratch for vlad (and it's the same for breanna too, i would say their relationship is very symbiotic in this sense).

what i'm trying to say, is that while i think this man seriously needs some therapy to work on the centuries worth of insecurities he's woven into his very being... he does genuinely love and care for his family very much, and he wants nothing more than to see his family happy. it's just that sometimes he expresses this feeling in very questionable and unhealthy ways.

he's just a very paternal and pathetic and pretentious man and i love him so very much for that <3