CayceG

This thread title is in the Goldilocks zone: It's juuuuust right.

This is 1993 levels of "we don't know what we're doing" on the Russian side.

Bro, Putin has less juice than DeSantis. That speech was WEAK. He was right in that these statements, without exaggeration, DID determine the future of Russia. It was a lot of bluster. Not a lot of specifics for what the future looks like. And it eventually breaks down in the end before petering out.

Bold of you to assume this Fisher-Price Pringles can had sensors of any kind.

Recency bias. This has always happened. It may be a little more frequent recently due to a lot of factors with railroad attempts at cost cutting. But in general there's about 1,100 derailments a year. We're just hearing more about them because the news is choosing to highlight them.

U.S. intelligence learned in mid-June Prigozhin was plotting uprising - The Washington Post WWW.WASHINGTONPOST.COM The intelligence fed concerns about whether Vladimir Putin would remain in power and what any instability could mean for control of Russia’s nuclear arsenal. LMFAO

This has made Putin look weaker than even the Ukrainian strikes on Belgorod or their defense of Kyiv. His non-response to this may be just him not meeting my expectations for what I would imagine a response to be. But I don't think I'm alone in expecting those things! So Putin showed his hand and it's clear he isn't sitting on much. I bet a lot of would-be warlords and political challengers will be taking note of today. I just have no fucking clue who any of those people are.

I am very bewildered at this whole thing. But also, until Shoigu/Gerasimov are announced to be out of power, I wouldn't believe in that outcome.

Prigozhin is... declaring an end to this?

Defense in depth.

Fuck no! Putin needs to have the army completely rinse these guys.

These Wagner forces likely were in the rear--probably in Russia proper. Their "repositioning" doesn't have any effect on Russian defenses at the front.

This is nonsense.

To put it another way, right wing Americans don't know they support the exact tenets of Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality. They feel an American national identity and recognize that there is a similar Russian national identity. They have specific conservative beliefs ordained and commanded by God and represented by their forefathers. Their holy books are the Bible and the Constitution. They share the end goal with how Russians see their end goal, even though the Constitutions, Churches, and Forefathers are different. They work for the same thing, ultimately. And Autocracy is held by the good, upstanding people that seek to fight for these values. In the US it's business owners and politicians and media figures who espouse the same ideology. Our American oligarchs. The American right wing may explain things differently than your typical Kremlin lackey. But when you strip away the details and the national color of each explanation, you get the same mindset and the same goals. A conservative nation run for and by the people who view themselves as exemplifying the National Identity. And anyone working against that is an enemy.

Not the Christian religion. The religion of, as Wade said, Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.

I'm talking about after that.

In general, there's basically been a flip on the most hard line right wingers on Russia. It's less about Trump and more about culture war nonsense. That preceded Trump and has been growing for a while. The new Communistic Bad Guy is China. Russia, to the right wingers, is a shining example of how to meld church and state in a way the Founding Fathers intended. Trump was channeling Russia support/defense of Russia purely for personal reasons and didn't really go into any of this.

They were pro-Russian when the opposition party WAS in the minority opposition.

Prigozhin has shitposted a little too hard and now has caught an investigation into his behavior by the FSB. I don't believe Prigozhin intended to launch a coup. I believe he is just a poster and he's gotten out over his skis with this latest rhetoric. As such, I fully believe the Wagner offices will be raided in the course of the investigation. Also, I received this alert upon hearing of the Shoigu/Prigozhin beef:

The most temporary of fixes. This isn't pointing to any sort of failure in infrastructure construction. You'll notice that there's a Wile-E-Coyote style solid wall in the path of the local street that this bridge spanned. This gets the interstate back up and running, but it doesn't fix the entire problem. This section of highway is limited to 45 mph (to reduce the load on the road bed). A long lasting reconstruction (not a repair) of the bridge to allow travel on the street and the interstate is still needed and will probably take a year or more to design and construct. And that is because doing what they did isn't a long term solution. I can field as many infrastructure repair/replacement decision questions as I can, as I'm acquainted with some aspects of that process. But if people are interpreting this as "how it should be" then people are misinterpreting what has been done here and what is needed long term.

That isn't the noise subs make when they implode.

The next private submarine to go to the Titanic will have to add "Nearer My God to Thee" to the playlist.

Apparently one of the pieces of debris is the tail-cone of the submarine. That probably doesn't come off except in the case of a structural failure. In other words... These MFers are paste.

And if they lost power, it's completely dark. I would rather the hull implode.

We got him.