Russian Special Military Operation in the Ukraine - Mark IV: The Partitioning of Discussion

I don't think once an empire falls it can ever just remake itself and recover.
Counterpoint: Literally all of Chinese history.
Empires built on a solid foundation have staying power. Chinese culture is indomitable and the geography ensures it doesn't fall apart along with any given empire (dynasty). And there were many of those, often simultaneously. But each time they gradually returned to being the "standard" Chinese Empire.
Roman legalism kept that empire together from its (arguable) start around 200BC through the period where it actually was called an empire rather than just an unusually large city-state republic through the period where it gradually collapsed in on itself until its end in the 1400s when it consisted, more or less, of a single city once more.
The USA is more comparable to the Mongol Empire than to either of the two famous empires. It's a militarily strong regime imposing its will on neighbours, demanding tribute and conquering outright any who refuse. That one lasted less than a century (even if, in the empire itself, it was a tremendously good century).
 
The absolute dependency of Germany to the US is almost complete
Soon the entirety of Europe will be as dependant on the US as Mexico is
Not dependant more like stripped bare of its wealth and abandoned. Like a Mining colony but the whole continent its that
Blowing up nordstream and tricking europe into sanctioning russia were the best investments in the local US economy that the US government has done in the last 100 years.
Without this the US economy would have been in much much worse shape than it is now.

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Didn't Putin said that the Germans have other pipelines they can use to get natural gas from?
I don't think once an empire falls it can ever just remake itself and recover
Dunno man Russia was empire before the Soviet union and then became even bigger and now they back at it again. I think its the culture and how reailient they are . Not to mention the Chinese fuckers lasted milenia going through the same fall and ascend . But it feels like the western culture the heart of its civilization its dying and getting replaced
 
Counterpoint: Literally all of Chinese history.
Empires built on a solid foundation have staying power. Chinese culture is indomitable and the geography ensures it doesn't fall apart along with any given empire (dynasty). And there were many of those, often simultaneously. But each time they gradually returned to being the "standard" Chinese Empire.
Roman legalism kept that empire together from its (arguable) start around 200BC through the period where it actually was called an empire rather than just an unusually large city-state republic through the period where it gradually collapsed in on itself until its end in the 1400s when it consisted, more or less, of a single city once more.
The USA is more comparable to the Mongol Empire than to either of the two famous empires. It's a militarily strong regime imposing its will on neighbours, demanding tribute and conquering outright any who refuse. That one lasted less than a century (even if, in the empire itself, it was a tremendously good century).
The Chinese have a very consistent culture and the rise and falls are largely due to power struggles between families who all believe in the same governing structure and blame the previous family for the failures.

America won't have that. The American governing structure is too new and untested and it clearly had flaws that lead to it's failure. Some groups may attempt to recreate it, but it required a strong position of power to get into place in the first place. I don't know what the next structure will look like - maybe Alaska will rejoin Russia and central America will become the great Holy Mormon Empire.
 
I don't get this whole seething about "mercenaries" coming from Russians and Russia-adjacent commentators. First of all, almost none of them actually are mercenaries under the legal definitions for such things, all connotations aside. They're not motivated primarily by the promise of personal gain, and they're not (to my knowledge) compensated substantially in excess of normal soldiers. Most of them seem to be ideologically motivated. You can say, well, okay, but they have an evilbadwrong ideology. That still doesn't make them mercenaries. Foreign volunteers have been a thing in every war since Grug brought his own club with him to go help the Grog tribe fight the Grag tribe because Grig from the Grag tribe stole his meat. Am I missing some cultural context here, or is it just something they say to insult the enemy?
 
I don't get this whole seething about "mercenaries" coming from Russians and Russia-adjacent commentators. First of all, almost none of them actually are mercenaries under the legal definitions for such things, all connotations aside. They're not motivated primarily by the promise of personal gain, and they're not (to my knowledge) compensated substantially in excess of normal soldiers. Most of them seem to be ideologically motivated. You can say, well, okay, but they have an evilbadwrong ideology. That still doesn't make them mercenaries. Foreign volunteers have been a thing in every war since Grug brought his own club with him to go help the Grog tribe fight the Grag tribe because Grig from the Grag tribe stole his meat. Am I missing some cultural context here, or is it just something they say to insult the enemy?
I won't speak for anyone else, but to me at least it's a simple matter of respect. I have none.
I also call them dogs, vermin, foul creatures, and other such things. It's just that "mercenaries" seems more generally accepted, and is less ambiguous when talking to westerners, most of whom aren't mentally developed enough to be able to see their countrymen as anything less than righteous paladins.
 
I don't get this whole seething about "mercenaries" coming from Russians and Russia-adjacent commentators. First of all, almost none of them actually are mercenaries under the legal definitions for such things, all connotations aside. They're not motivated primarily by the promise of personal gain, and they're not (to my knowledge) compensated substantially in excess of normal soldiers. Most of them seem to be ideologically motivated. You can say, well, okay, but they have an evilbadwrong ideology. That still doesn't make them mercenaries. Foreign volunteers have been a thing in every war since Grug brought his own club with him to go help the Grog tribe fight the Grag tribe because Grig from the Grag tribe stole his meat. Am I missing some cultural context here, or is it just something they say to insult the enemy?
They are war tourists
 
I don't get this whole seething about "mercenaries" coming from Russians and Russia-adjacent commentators. First of all, almost none of them actually are mercenaries under the legal definitions for such things, all connotations aside. They're not motivated primarily by the promise of personal gain, and they're not (to my knowledge) compensated substantially in excess of normal soldiers. Most of them seem to be ideologically motivated. You can say, well, okay, but they have an evilbadwrong ideology. That still doesn't make them mercenaries. Foreign volunteers have been a thing in every war since Grug brought his own club with him to go help the Grog tribe fight the Grag tribe because Grig from the Grag tribe stole his meat. Am I missing some cultural context here, or is it just something they say to insult the enemy?
Well, one country's volunteer is another country's mercenary
 
I don't get this whole seething about "mercenaries" coming from Russians and Russia-adjacent commentators. First of all, almost none of them actually are mercenaries under the legal definitions for such things, all connotations aside. They're not motivated primarily by the promise of personal gain, and they're not (to my knowledge) compensated substantially in excess of normal soldiers.
They are not from a (supposedly) belligerent nation and fight for pay. That's the actual legal definition of a mercenary. They have absolutely no protections under the Geneva Conventions.

All of the Colombians fighting in the Ukraine are mercs. They traveled halfway the world for pay, not because they love the Ukraine; they have no connection to it at all, although AFU commanders like to withhold their pay before sending them into a meatgrinder.
Most of them seem to be ideologically motivated. You can say, well, okay, but they have an evilbadwrong ideology. That still doesn't make them mercenaries. Foreign volunteers have been a thing in every war since Grug brought his own club with him to go help the Grog tribe fight the Grag tribe because Grig from the Grag tribe stole his meat. Am I missing some cultural context here, or is it just something they say to insult the enemy?
A mercenary is also known as a soldier of fortune. He's a hired gun. He's is a private individual who joins an armed conflict for personal profit and isn't a member of the official military in the conflict/war they're fighting in. They fight for money or other forms of payment; political interests are usually secondary. Mercenaries are paid to fight by a country or group they do not belong to. If a soldier is described as a mercenary, they are disdained as they are only interested in the money and/or profit that they can gain from a particular person/situation. See: Jamie Vasquez.


The bigger issue are NATO soldiers sent to fight for the Ukraine as "volunteers". It's said that 6.5k Polish volunteers/mercs have been killed in the SMO to date.
 
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Foreign volunteers have been a thing in every war since Grug brought his own club with him to go help the Grog tribe fight the Grag tribe because Grig from the Grag tribe stole his meat. Am I missing some cultural context here, or is it just something they say to insult the enemy?
Foreign Volunteers add to the suffering felt in war by lengthening it. It was the same during the Spanish Civil war. The policy was to shoot foreign Volunteers on sight in that war. I agree with that policy. Actual Mercenaries have a good reason in the form of money, I am not a mercenary, but it makes sense that people do that. But the people going to Ukraine for Ideological reasons don't really have any attachments to this place

The bigger issue are the NATO soldiers sent to fight for the Ukraine as "volunteers". It's said that 6.5 Polish volunteers/mercs have been killed in the SMO to date.
Tbh I don't think this is that much of a problem. There have been foreign military volunteers but you expect it and there aren't that many and they aren't that effective. Also China should be sending thousands of officers to this War to get experience and if they aren't doing it secretly and I just don't know they are kind of retarded. It also kind of makes sense at least this is basically a NATO proxy war.

America won't have that. The American governing structure is too new and untested and it clearly had flaws that lead to it's failure. Some groups may attempt to recreate it, but it required a strong position of power to get into place in the first place. I don't know what the next structure will look like - maybe Alaska will rejoin Russia and central America will become the great Holy Mormon Empire.
I disagree. The governance model of the Global empire can be approximated by asking the question what government structure allows for the greatest amount of purely parasitical people to wield the most amount of power without anyone being strong enough to stop them. The answer is an Elite with highly loyal outsider clients that pervades every aspect of the societies it controls and is big enough to make its influence felt in every country. All that is needed to create it is a sufficiently large and powerful state to conquer enough of the world to bring into a sort of federation all ruled by that elite. Once it exists it can leverage the inherent disunity of several races in the same space to allow it to do some truly awful things.

This government structure isn't new or unique, it has existed within the human heart for all time. If I were to give it a name to express what it is poetically I'd call it Babylon. The best way to prevent its formation is to make sure no one power can grab enough to truly rule everything. War is good because it keeps the world disunited and prevents this hellish-nightmare state from forming.

This is also why Russia has had such a hard time. It has all kind of people within it who would love to betray her to be raped by the global empire. She is caught between the outside power of NATO and the threat of treachery from the liberals. Putin being able to take his country from the state it was in the early 2000s to the state it is in now is somewhat impressive.
Are there? I only know of Milo Yiannopoulos, are there others I just haven’t heard of? Anyway he’s straight now, no?
Milo Yiannopoulos pretended to be straight but he is still doing the same thing. Gays are really sneaky gremlins who will not hesitate to lie, cheat and steal and are therefore entirely untrustworthy. There are absolutely others. Steven Crowder, Nick Fuentes, Jack Murphy etc. There are other that I don't remember and others we don't know about.
Nick Fuentes is still a thing somehow.
Cults are surprisingly hard to kill actually especially if you don't lock up/kill everyone. Him being a Fed really helps with that.
 
Maybe even in our lifetime we will see perhaps east asia to become the dominant empire and the west will become forgotten and become just a next chapter in the history books.
There's some economist that i can no longer find that predicted the slowdown and eventual collapse of the US as the major world power, just how the Dutch lost the wheel to the British, and then the British won the fight against Nazi Germay but ended up so devastated the US took over the wheel.
I think it was this century that the US is supposed to be overtaken as the sole leading nation of the world, though im not sure China will be the one holding the wheel for the 22th century
 
But it feels like the western culture the heart of its civilization its dying and getting replaced
Europe has gone through multiple eras of collapse and rebirth and is a good template to understand the future, what is going to happen, likely long after everyone posting here will be long dead, is that most governments in the West will collapse for a variety of reasons, be it economic, lawlessness, or just the competency crisis becoming too large to ignore leading to strong men just dazzling the weakened national militaries by carving off slices of territory at will, all of these mega-cities like NYC, London, Paris and Berlin will immediately start contracting as dysfunction and lawlessness sets in leading to farmers literally not being able to source NPK to get decent yields or ship their goods without it being interdicted by highwaymen, leading to the "native population" reverting back to their historical standards as huge die-offs in cities start occurring because of famine, riots and warfare.

Late Antiquity is such an interesting period to learn about, specifically how "Rome" just dissolved away and the citizenry were largely unaware of it at the time because the leadership of the era just kept using the same trappings as they always did. The city of Rome itself was one of the largest in the world and some 150 years from that peak during the Gothic Wars it had been reduced to literally a dozen or so holdout families hiding away in the vast ruins of the city while wolves and other wild animals just walked the streets and lived in the apartments that had at one point housed over a million people. The fall can happen far faster and harder now because of stupid things like the Just-in-time logistic chains meaning that there is basically zero reserves of anything anywhere.

There's some economist that i can no longer find that predicted the slowdown and eventual collapse of the US as the major world power, just how the Dutch lost the wheel to the British, and then the British won the fight against Nazi Germay but ended up so devastated the US took over the wheel.
I think it was this century that the US is supposed to be overtaken as the sole leading nation of the world, though im not sure China will be the one holding the wheel for the 22th century
You're indirectly referencing Sir John Glubb's essay called "The Fate of Empires"
 
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