#failed assault

[blueiscoool]

undefined

A Devastating Defeat for Russia at Vuhledar

Russia has lost at least 31 military vehicles in their failed attack on Vuhledar.

13 tanks, 12 BMP-1/BMP-2 infantry fighting vehicles, 2 MT-LB, an IMR combat engineering vehicle and others were destroyed or abandoned.

Ukraine just scored a major win in Vuhledar.

Russia’s widely-anticipated winter offensive has begun. Aiming to extend its control over eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, Russian troops are attacking north and south of Donetsk city.

In the northern sector, around the city of Bakhmut, the Russians slowly are advancing—albeit at staggering cost.

In the south, around Vuhledar, the Russians’ losses are just as steep—but they’ve made no clear gains that could justify the casualties. Vuhledar is turning into a meatgrinder for the Russian army, with enormous implications for the wider offensive.

The latest Russian attack on Vuhledar—a town with a pre-war population of just 14,000 that lies a mile north of Russian-held Pavlivka, 25 miles southwest of Donetsk—kicked off on Monday.

Seemingly a couple of battalions of Russian mechanized troops, together riding in a few dozen T-80 tanks and BMP-1 and BMP-2 fighting vehicles, advanced north.

The Ukrainian army’s elite 72nd Mechanized Brigade is entrenched around Vuhledar. It has laid minefields along the main approaches from Pavlivka. Its drones surveil the front. Its artillery is dialed in.

The Russians know this. And the assault force took rudimentary precautions. Tank crews injected fuel into their exhausts to produce smokescreens. At least one T-80 carried a mine-plow

But leadership and intelligence failures—and Ukraine’s superior artillery fire-control—neutralized these measures. The Russian formation rolled into dense minefields. Destroyed tanks and BMPs blocked the advance. Vehicles attempting to skirt the ruined hulks themselves ran into mines.

Panicky vehicle commanders crowded so tightly behind the smoke-generating tanks that Ukrainian artillery, cued by drones, could score hits by firing at the head of the smoke. The Russians’ daylong attack ended in heavy losses and retreat. The survivors left behind around 30 wrecked tanks and BMPs.

Vuhledar is further evidence of the downward spiral in Russian military effectiveness. Armies that lack robust recruitment, training and industrial bases tend to become steadily less effective as losses deepen.

Desperate to maintain the pace of operations, the army replaces any well-trained, well-equipped troops who’ve been hurt or killed with an equal number of new recruits—but without taking the time, or expending the resources, to train and equip those new troops to the previous standard.

So the army gets less and less competent even as it inducts more and more new personnel. Incompetence leads to even greater losses, which prompts the army to double down: draft more green troops, train them even less and hurry them to the front even faster than it did the previous recruits.

Apply this tragic model to Vuhledar and the Russian army’s failures make more sense. For months, the Russian marine corps’s 155th and 40th Naval Infantry Brigades were responsible for the sector around Pavlivka. But the marines suffered devastating losses in repeated failed assaults starting last fall.

It’s possible both marine brigades now are combat-ineffective. Their replacement appears to be the 72nd Motor Rifle Brigade, a new and inexperienced formation that belongs to the ill-fated 3rd Army Corps. The 72nd MRB formed in Russian Tatarstan and, as such, includes a high proportion of ethnic minorities. Cannon fodder to the Kremlin.

Outside Vuhledar, the Russian 72nd Brigade met the Ukrainian 72nd Brigade—and got beaten at least as badly as the marine brigades did. If this is the best Russia can do after a year of wider fighting in Ukraine, its ballyhooed winter offensive could be costly ... and brief.

By David Axe.

[bbygirl-aemond]

rhaenyra was so wrong for looking alicent hightower, ALICENT HIGHTOWER, in the face and telling her "still you imagine you can have all you want"

i mean it definitely makes sense from rhaenyra's standpoint though. i took it to be referring to the time that alicent married viserys and still wanted to keep her friendship with rhaenyra as it had been before. obviously, we as the audience know that alicent didn't choose to marry viserys, but rhaenyra was a grieving teenager and it was easier to focus her betrayal towards alicent than towards her own father. this is even more true now, since rhaenyra is clinging to this idea that viserys was right to choose her and anything that undermines viserys's goodness also undermines that idea. (alicent very much also whitewashes viserys, which i've already talked about here.)

right now, alicent is futilely trying to find a way that she can have her cake and eat it too, based on the current situation. she wants to keep aegon alive, while also sparing helaena and jaehaera and herself and the realm future losses. but these things are only proxies for her true desires, which have been battling one another since season one.

from the beginning, alicent has wanted her suffering to have meant something, symbolized by putting aegon (the literal fruit of her suffering) on the throne; she wants the reward within the patriarchal system for what she has endured. simultaneously, she wishes to find actual happiness and freedom, symbolized by her younger self before the suffering took place (her childhood friendship with rhaenyra, her childhood freedom, even helaena is a proxy for alicent's younger self). this is the larger message about the patriarchy that hotd is telling; no amount of working within the system for whatever reward it grants you will actually be fulfilling to you. you cannot gain the freedom and happiness you desire while still perpetuating the system, because the system itself is what takes this from you. alicent's choice here is a daughter over a son, but it is also her happiness over the patriarchal system she's always been trapped within. and rhaenyra is right that she can't have both.

[filurig]

revenge for @memeticsdivision !

[sickly-sapphic]

You can support pregnant teens btw. You can be kind towards teens that are pregnant, have been pregnant or lost their pregnancy.

You actually shouldn't insinuate that a miscarraige is a "lucky situation" directly to a teen that miscarried. You can save your jokes and quips about teen pregnancy until you're out of earshot.

It's not going to kill you to be kind to pregnant teens, nor will it lead to an uproar of teen pregnancies in the world.

[lesbianbanana]

Hera's relationship with Apollo is something that should be studied, in this essay I-

[ickypuppi3]

billy not telling anyone what happened the day after the crash because he knew full well that no one would help or even believe him and his point literally being proven when everyone realised he was in trouble and did, in fact, not help him

[wickjump]

if i was a little bit more brave id graverob the guy who buried himself on top of Marilyn Monroe so he could ‘always be on top of her’ and then id dump his skeleton in a swamp. can i commission a graverobber is that a thing

[notdelusionalatall]

TW for SA, SH, suicide

because i was assaulted

because no one took it seriously

because i blame myself

because my friend told me it was my fault

because she also told me that only pervs love me

because my friend mocked my suicide attempt

because she also mocked me for self harming

because no one will ever love a girl with scars

because i am failing in college

because i am paranoid of people

because i am ugly

because i have no friends

because my first kiss was against my will

because whenever i bring it up i get yelled at as if i am in the wrong

because they tell me to "deal with it"

because whenever i try to seek help from them they go "what do you want me to do, kill him? just calm down and deal with it" (this feels like manipulation)

because i am annoying

because i am a menace

because i should have never been born

because i think about eliminating myself daily

because i am a mistake

because i disappointed my parents

because my family is ashamed of my scars

because they tell me to hide them at all costs

because no one gets it

because everyone avoids me

because everyone labels me as crazy

and so on and so on

[superfallingstars]

one of the (MANY!) things that i can’t stop thinking about regarding that horrible discourse post is the way that the terms sexual harassment and sexual assault are thrown around. i think that whether or not the incident (where james turns snape upside down with his own spell and exposes his underwear in front of everyone) “counts” as sexual harassment or assault doesn’t really matter. at least, not in the way the people in that discourse post think that it matters.

how we as the readers would define this event based on our own morality is relatively unimportant. what actually matters in this situation is how snape experienced it. nobody involved in that discourse post considers whether snape himself would define this event as sexual assault – and even if he would define it as such, whether that would influence his perception of how harmful it was. after all, people can experience the same event differently; what one person considers a bad day can be extremely traumatic for someone else. because of this, trying to objectively quantify the degree of harm snape experienced by defining this incident as sexual assault, harassment, bullying, or whatever, obscures the most important part of the incident – which is how it affected snape! it's so frustrating, because this is something that we could actually have interesting discourse about. did james know how deeply his actions were affecting snape? would he have changed his behavior if he knew? or did he already know, and simply not care?

but even more frustrating is the fact that despite all of the animosity in that post, i don't think anyone involved actually cares about whether or not the incident was sexual harassment/assault. the function of those terms in that post is simply to assign morality to the people involved. if the incident counts as sexual assault, then snape is a Victim and therefore Good, and james is a Perpetrator and therefore Bad. if it wasn’t sexual assault, then the incident wasn’t really that harmful, so snape is Bad and james is Good. it’s mind-bogglingly reductive. i guess it's just remarkable that everyone involved in that post seems so confident in their ability to define sexual harassment and assault, while simultaneously ignoring any of the effects that this could have had on snape. instead, sexual harassment and assault just serve as proxies for morality in the never-ending argument of whether or not snape Bad.

tl;dr what you call this incident does not determine the amount of harm it caused, and also you should care about the amount of harm it caused if you're going to make claims about morality

[badoccultadvice]

So like, I have been having this weird experience analyzing the Harry Potter books lately, and please indulge me while I talk about J.K. Rowling's weird writing.

My goal was simple: read the Harry Potter books to find which parts were influenced/inspired by actual magic that people do in real life. My theory was that there was a lot more magic in the earlier drafts of the books, and that she took a lot out due to fear of backlash from America's ongoing reenactment of the Satanic Panic. For instance it's quite obvious some of their magic lessons got dumbed down so that very little of what's in the books could actually be tried in real life, and I think she took out a lot of astrology.

I also wanted to do a couple errands along the way, one of which was to check and see if it's explicitly written in the books that Harry is a cis man. I'm a trans man, SO I'D KNOW. (I'm a slow reader so all I can say for now is: the FIRST book does not explicitly state Harry is cis, but if he's trans, there's some implied worldbuilding with items like the Sorting Hat that comes into play. Also I'm fairly sure the Dursleys would have gone along with him being trans because that meant Petunia could reuse Dudley's old clothes instead of having to get girl stuff. I'mma save any other explanations on the topic for a video on it.) The reason I'm doing this read-through is because I think J.K. doesn't know anything about trans people and didn't think to make sure her wizard world was trans exclusionary. AND IT TURNS OUT THAT WE TRANS MAGIC USERS HAVE A WAY OF WIGGLING INTO MOST PLACES UNDETECTED BY NORMAL MEANS.

While I was doing the re-read I encountered two sort of broad revelations:

There's a lot of old stuff in there like Latin and Greek and tradcraft stuff, but also modern magic of the more recent era... but the incorporation of modern magic cuts off somewhere before the 80s. These books read like they were written by a early 70s magician. Like they honestly read like J.K. is a magical practicioner who just didn't read any magic books written after 1972 and never discovered what Chaos Magic is, (and also, never heard of most of what happened in the Cold War). I have never found a writer, in fiction or non-fiction, more dedicated to referencing magical stuff that most magicians alive today just don't care about anymore.

J.K. Rowling's knowledge of child abuse laws and general social mores regarding treatment of children also ceased to update itself by about the 80s. I keep getting distracted by this and having to make more side-notes about corporal punishment and researching stuff like when caning was banned in England. (HInt: it was banned before Harry went to school, so in Book 1 it's fuckin weird that he assumes that Wood is the name of a cane he's about to be whipped with.) Like, this woman raised children in the modern era, she should know when canes stopped being used.

So like, when I mention that I'm doing some research in this area, this is the sort of stuff I'm reading for and the sort of stuff I'm encountering. I haven't been talking much about this journey because it seems like any time anyone brings up anything Harry Potter up whatsoever, we've got to talk about how J.K. is a terf in every other sentence. But like, y'all: I hope you slow down and re-read the books, because J.K. Rowling is a terf who is also a child abuse apologist and normalizer. She is a terf who is also a horrible fat-shamer. She is a terf who is also an ableist with a huge problem writing about mental illness. And she's a terf who's also a sexist who undermines feminism with her actual writing of female characters.

And I honestly think she double and triples down on the terf stuff so that people will only talk about that. I think it's worth talking about the fact that not only is she an awful person in the terf way, but like, every other way imaginable too. I think it's worth talking about the fact that with all the obvious biases she has, the group she CHOOSES to publicly marginaiize is trans women, and I think she makes that choice because she thinks that she'll get more allies that way. That if she wore all of her issues on her sleeve like she wears the terfness, that she'd lose a lot of allies, that a lot of prestigious charities would stop having anything to do with her. That she uses the identity of "terf" as a shield because she knows that certain people will protect a terf, and she does this specifically so people won't notice how much of a sexist, abuse apologist, ableist, fatphobe etc she ALSO is. Opinions that could lose her a lot of money and clout if people remember them enough.

She's trying to pick on who she thinks is the most unpopular kid in the class out of the hopes that the bullies in class will be her friends instead of pile up on her, but if the bullies knew what she really thought of them, THEY wouldn't even be her friends.

Also like... I just want someone else to read the actual words in these books and see what fucked-up choices she made as a writer. I think a LOT of people remembering these books are actually remembering the movies, which are way more different from the books than you might expect.

[justicerikai]

official-kun,

why desuka.

explain kudasai.

[thedisablednaturalist]

Banning LGBTQ+ content and people from the public view kills children

Refusing to teach comprehensive sex education kills children

Refusing to put limits on firearms/assault weapons kills children

Defunding social safety nets kills children

Homeschooling with no oversight kills children

Punishing staying home when sick kills children

Not masking in public kills children

Sweatshops and exploitative farming kills children

Lack of universal healthcare kills children

Banning the use of puberty blockers kills children

Forced birth kills children

Crumbling infrastructure especially in underfunded schools due to income tax cuts for the wealthy kills children

Environmental racism, climate change, and pollution kill children

Antivaxxers kill children

War kills children

Displacement kills children

Homelessness kills children

Genital mutilation of intersex babies kills children

Nuclear weapons kill children

Genocide kills children

Industrial deregulation kills children

Naturalization/assimilation kills children

Denial of amnesty kills children

Separation from family kills children

Antisemitism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia and racism kills children

Why do you only care about kids when they aren't born yet?

I know, it's because you'd rather your kid be dead than possibly go against your personal beliefs.

I know, because only certain groups of kids are dying

[keungking]

to be honest, so far? top hasn't done anything for me to dislike him.

he hasn't lied and he hasn't disrespected mew, and he actually has tried to get along with mew's friends. it's not exactly his fault the friend group all have messy complicated feelings for each other.

and ever since he actually started talking and getting to know mew, the only times he's implied mew is some kind of conquest for him to win has been when boston has told him that's how he feels and what kind of person he is. all his playboy tendencies that we've been shown have been boston projecting that persona onto him.

originally he might've had douche bag intentions, but i can't help but feel like the fate he's rushing towards is being strung around mew's finger.

i just feel like things very well could've turned out fine if boston wasn't so dead set on ruining them just because he's jealous, maybe jealous because he's not the winner, and maybe jealous because his whore in arms might achieve something boston himself might desire but doesn't dare let himself chase (a mature and genuine relationship). perhaps he feels let down and abandoned, left to be the only predator playboy hunting men for sport that's left.

[stedebonnit]

Just saw a post that irked me that started off by saying Aziraphale has never suffered and as someone with religious trauma and who grew up in an emotionally neglectful and chronically invalidating envrionment I want to be the first to say that suffering is not defined by rigid standards and that there's a reason neglect and manipulation are classed as forms of abuse. I didn't finish reading the post because I got really angry seeing it so I apologize if I missed context by choosing not to engage further but I just want to make it abundantly clear that suffering and abuse are not black and white concepts, and just because someone is in a space that tries to paint themselves as good doesn't mean that they are good (I mean, seriously, if you haven't learned that from this show then idk if you've even watched it), and just because someone is unable to see that their situation is abusive does not mean that they aren't suffering (and in fact people saying that reeeeally smell of "if they were abusive why didnt you just leave?" Vibes)

[tomorrowusa]

A lot of Trump supporters still try to hide their racism by claiming they vote for Trump because he's allegedly a great businessman. 🤨

A lengthy list of Trump’s disastrous business deals — compiled by his newest business partners

Trump was not great at business. He's a nepo baby who got tons of money from Daddy Fred and stupidly squandered much of it. At best, he was a con man who managed to swindle some people out of their money. Remember Trump University?

Trump wasn't great at business but his cleverly edited TV series "The Apprentice" made him seem like he was.

How Mark Burnett Resurrected Donald Trump as an Icon of American Success With "The Apprentice," the TV producer mythologized Trump—then a floundering D-lister—as the ultimate titan, paving his way to the Presidency.

Jonathon Braun, an editor who started working with Burnett on “Survivor” and then worked on the first six seasons of “The Apprentice,” told me, “You don’t make anything up. But you accentuate things that you see as themes.” He readily conceded how distorting this process can be. Much of reality TV consists of reaction shots: one participant says something outrageous, and the camera cuts away to another participant rolling her eyes. Often, Braun said, editors lift an eye roll from an entirely different part of the conversation. [ ... ] At the end of each episode, Trump determined which competitor should be “fired.” But, as Braun explained, Trump was frequently unprepared for these sessions, with little grasp of who had performed well. Sometimes a candidate distinguished herself during the contest only to get fired, on a whim, by Trump. When this happened, Braun said, the editors were often obliged to “reverse engineer” the episode, scouring hundreds of hours of footage to emphasize the few moments when the exemplary candidate might have slipped up, in an attempt to assemble an artificial version of history in which Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip decision made sense. During the making of “The Apprentice,” Burnett conceded that the stories were constructed in this way, saying, “We know each week who has been fired, and, therefore, you’re editing in reverse.” Braun noted that President Trump’s staff seems to have been similarly forced to learn the art of retroactive narrative construction, adding, “I find it strangely validating to hear that they’re doing the same thing in the White House.”

Trump is trying now to "reverse engineer" his presidency. And he's helped by smarmy Republicans like Nikki Haley who once condemned the January 6th assault on the US Capitol but are now making excuses for it.

Trump is a raging phony whose reputation was rescued and curated by TV producer Mark Burnett in the 2000s.

As for the Trump-China Scandal, it's big news even in Hong Kong.

Donald Trump reaped US$5.5 million from China and its state entities during presidency: US House report

Of course none of this will convince a hardcore MAGA zombie to abandon Trump. But it's worth familiarizing ourselves with these things for the times we do run into the small number of voters who are persuadable; and elections lately have been decided by small numbers of people.