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[Strongpoint]

Some personal news:

My brother is in a hospital after getting a small piece of shrapnel in his leg. He feels good enough to curse at doctors who want to keep him for two weeks. His crew is fine. R.I.P another 2S1 Gvozdika

[Loud Whispers]

Some personal news:

My brother is in a hospital after getting a small piece of shrapnel in his leg. He feels good enough to curse at doctors who want to keep him for two weeks. His crew is fine. R.I.P another 2S1 Gvozdika

Holy shit that's a close call. Hope he recovers swiftly Strongpoint

[scriver]

Tell him the best thing he can do for his country right now is to heal well and proper and heal strong orsomething, guilt him into staying put

Jokes aside I hope he recovers without issues

[MaxTheFox]

Best of wishes to him!

[brewer bob]

So, looks like the leaking gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia had been sabotaged (surprise, surprise!):
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/10/undersea-pipeline-damage-appears-to-be-deliberate-says-finland

“It is likely that the damage to both the gas pipeline and the communication cable is the result of external activity,” Sauli Niinistö said on X, formerly Twitter, on Tuesday. “The cause of the damage is not yet clear; the investigation continues.”

[...]

Local media cited unnamed government sources as saying Russian sabotage was suspected, while regional security experts said a Russian survey vessel had recently been observed in the vicinity of the pipeline.

Nato’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said the transatlantic military alliance was “ready to share information about the destruction of Finnish and Estonian underwater infrastructure” and to “support its allies”.

[Strongpoint]

Looks like Russians are attempting a new massive push on the Eastern front, next weeks will be hard.

Also, it must be convenient for Russians that all media is now focused on Israel's war. Our war is becoming a background one

[King Zultan]

I don't get why everyone's making a big deal about a war in Israel anyway I mean there's fighting over there all the time anyway I'm not sure what makes this new and exciting.

[Strongpoint]

I don't get why everyone's making a big deal about a war in Israel anyway I mean there's fighting over there all the time anyway I'm not sure what makes this new and exciting.

This one will be big and bloody (if you consider the current combined deathtoll of around 2K "not exciting" enough). It will be big and bloody even if it won't spill over to Lebanon and Syria. And it may.  Also, Hamas's attack was very... graphic and hard to ignore.


At the same time, I also ask myself why Israeli doing stuff to Palestinians always gets way more attention than China doing stuff to Uyghurs or Mali doing stuff to Tuaregs, or a bunch of Middle Eastern countries doing stuff to Kurds or... it is a long list.

[ChairmanPoo]

Thats some fine whataboutism right there.

[Strongpoint]

I understand whataboutism as stuff like: Country X did bad thing A, therefore it is normal when unrelated country Y does completely unrelated bad thing B. And I fail to see that in any of the prior messages. But such vague terms always have different interpretations.

[anewaname]

Increases and decreases in news coverage are regulated by the estimated value in changing public opinions through emotional reaction or analytical information and that require change. When atrocities levels do not change, there is less "news". When there are events that stand out as different, or changes in volume, there is "news".

Has "whataboutism" become a derogatory label?

[Frumple]

Uh, I don't think there's ever been a point in its existence as a term where it wasn't? So yes, in the sense that it was created as one and has not been turned to another use since.

[nenjin]

Also, for the US, our interest in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict vastly outstrips our interest and attention on Europe and former Soviet satellites. Just the way things are here. There is a massive Israeli lobbying effort, plenty of Jews with ties to their homeland and feels about it, and Israel has been a political football for American politicians for longer than I've been alive.

And war fatigue is a thing. The Russian War of Aggression has been going on for a while. Sort of like how we couldn't keep being shocked and appalled by what was going on in Syria, eventually the news of attacks, new fronts opening, new atrocities starts to become commonplace.

There have been times when there was so much news coming out of Gaza etc...that we also started to tune out as Americans.

[Strongpoint]

There is only one positive of the Israel War for the Ukrainian cause - Israelis, especially Russian-speaking, are quite surprised that Russian propaganda is very, very pro-HAMAS.

Other than that - higher oil prices benefit Russia. Diverted media and public attention benefits Russia. Israel needing the Western arms market to replenish its stocks benefits Russia. Iran having a new reason to cooperate with Russia more closely also benefits Russia.

________

The war, in my opinion, is going badly. I tend not to write much in this thread because I dislike spreading doom and gloom but I firmly believe that Ukraine is losing the war and we need some serious Black Swan to turn the tide. There are successes, sure but we spent too many resources (read lives) in the largely failed offensive and it is impossible to win the war of attrition vs Russia. 

Hope that the sanctioned Russian economy won't be able to sustain the war, that there will be meaningful internal dissent or that the morale of Russian forces will go too low was misguided

[Telgin]

I'm admittedly out of the loop, but hasn't Russia's stance on Israel been antagonistic for a long time?  It wouldn't surprise me that they're pro Hamas.

Anyway, I feel you on the prospects of the Ukrainian war.  I try not to form strong feelings on the direction of the war since I have such limited information, but it's obvious that it's deteriorated into a grind and naively I'd expect Russia to have a lot of advantages when it comes to a long and grinding war.

That said, I'm still astonished that they're managing to keep their war effort going with the horrendous losses they keep taking.  I know that they can keep feeding people into the war essentially forever and can keep a trickle of cobbled-together equipment flowing into it, on top of buying equipment from their scant allies like North Korea and Iran, but it's still astonishing that they're managing to keep up as much as they are.  Will their effort suddenly collapse when the 40 artillery systems destroyed every day finally catch up to what they can replace?  Or the loss of tanks and APCs?  I don't know, but I'd have expected it to collapse a long time ago at this rate.

And while it appears that Ukraine is losing proportionally fewer people and equipment, I have to acknowledge that we don't know the true numbers on either side and there's a strong incentive to keep bad news hidden from public eye.

I used to hold out hope that Putin dying would bring an end to the war with Russia withdrawing, but I now doubt that would happen even if he did die in the near future.  For one thing he may live another 15 years, and for another I keep reading that the people likely to replace him are just as bad.