In the US, it comes down to the multi-decade effort by the Republican Party to demonize the very concept of a commonwealth, of a government that has as its primary responsibility the welfare of the people. Now, to be sure, there has always been a less virulent and less toxic strain of ‘less is more’ in US politics, when it comes to the federal government. But around the beginning of the 20th century, there was a clear dividing point, where most of those traditional conservatives accepted that the government needed to be able to do things like regulate the quality of food and drugs, police against monopolies and other harmful practices, and provide a robust infrastructure, at the very least.
Those were the Eisenhower Republicans, more or less, but they died out because the rest of the right, the ones that would gradually turn into the Nixon wing of the party that gave birth to the far right we have today, doubled down on anti-government ideology. So today we have generations of voters who have been raised on the idea that any action by the government to regulate anything is somehow bad for them–all the while they are being BOHICA’d by the very people they are politically fellating.
Now, that’s a physically difficult trick, I admit…
It is a 1 hour plus TLDR that is summed up as, popular vloggers and video essayists started doing it, so people started copying it. Occam’s Razor and all that.
The entire long near conspiracy theory level argument over authenticity is so… Over analyzed it feels like a parody.
YouTube works on trends and copying popular formats and topics. Nobody is doing something to distance their content from others, they are doing it because it has become popular. There may have been some initial subconscious idea to move videos in this direction, but let’s be real, people just follow trends, and a lot of very popular channels did not do anything to change production.
I mean Gus Johnson has been taping weird bad mics to odd props for 5+ years as a gag.
I don’t think that all of Tom Nicholas videos are bad, they are all a bit too long winded though, this one really irked me though.
He said the M1A1, even though it’s an older model of the Abrams that has been the main US battle tank for decades, was twice as good as Russia’s T-90. “It’s like a mouse against a big cat, if we compare these tanks,” he told BI this week.
Faster, better fire control systems, and good survivability. For two tanks with similar armor and gun profiles.
I think that the speed is really important in the modern drone dominant landscape. Get in, fire your shots and get out.
Independent media in Ukraine also struggle to maintain adequate front-line reporting. Obtaining media access is becoming increasingly difficult, and military commanders are now more restricted in their communication with the media.
Since December 2023, Ukrainian commanders and chiefs of military units have been obliged to “coordinate” interviews, press briefings, and comments with the military’s Strategic Communications Directorate, the acting head of the directorate told Detector Media outlet on June 17 after a clarifying decree was leaked.
According to the investigative outlet Slidstvo.Info, some military personnel have been prohibited from discussing the state of fortifications in Kharkiv Oblast, where Russia recently launched a new major ground offensive. The military repeatedly asked Slidstvo.Info to delete all mentions of issues with fortifications from an article, arguing that it’s a “political matter” that could lead to pressure on units “from above.”
This approach shows an intention “to pass off the desired as real, and to avoid talking about problems,” Anastasiia Stanko, Slidstvo.Info’s chief editor and a long-time war reporter, told the Kyiv Independent.
"You start to think, what is the point of even going there (to the front lines) — you risk your life, it costs a lot of money, and you effectively cannot show the real situation there,” she said.
[Referring to a case from April] when an investigative journalist of Slidstvo.Info, Yevhenii Shulhat, received a draft summons under the guidance of a Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) employee, in an apparent retaliation for the investigation he was working on at the time.
Published shortly after, the journalist’s investigation revealed that the wife of the head of the SBU cybersecurity department, Illia Vitiuk, has made big earnings and bought an expensive apartment in Kyiv after Vitiuk got the top job.
After it became public that an SBU employee targeted the journalist with a draft summons, prosecutors opened a criminal case, and the State Bureau of Investigation was put in charge of it.
However, according to Stanko, so far, the case doesn’t mention Vitiuk – either as a suspect or a witness.
After the scandal, Zelensky fired Vitiuk. The SBU said its former cybersecurity boss was deployed for military service.
That’s very Soviet. If you fuck up, you get sent to the front.
The pressure on journalists is not good. It isn’t that unusual, though. We tend to forget the way the Entente in WWI and the Allies in WWII carefully managed reporting from the front, and this includes the Americans as well. One big difference was that a lot of the censorship was mutually agreed to; the times were very different, and it was not considered unethical or anything out of the ordinary for news agencies to collaborate with their nation’s military censors to manage the flow of information.
I imagine the pressures on military establishments and journalists today are far more extreme than they were last century, too. The availability of instant communication, including video and audio, and the hyper-miniaturization of all of the gear used by reporters means that the OPSEC problems associated with news reporting from the front are multiplied enormously, among other things.
And of course there is always the whole “we can’t be made to look bad” and “cover our asses” pressures, that are always there, and are much less acceptable reasons for censorship.
Yeah, I think the way it comes off is that they don’t want people to know that they’re suffering heavy casualties and being pushed back. Which is not something they can actually hide, but they’ll still try to control it.
If things were going swimmingly, I think they would be bussing in journalists to show them.
I have a couple of old Danish Nazi propaganda mags that my stepdad found in his attic (didn’t ask, didn’t wanna know) but it’s pretty funny to read the articles about how well things are going in Stalingrad, and how German torpedo boats are gonna wreak absolute hell on the Allies if they try anything.
From 1979-1985 we built over 500 a year, which includes the low initial rate of production period. Yet, 2 years into this fight for democracy we’ve only managed to cough up 30 or so?
I hope no one looks at the “young democracy” with rose-tinted glasses. Ukraine is not Russia but it’s similar to it in many regards, including corruption.
Of course it is, and whilst the objective of the war is survival and the freedom to continue on a path to European style democracy, the war itself puts that progress on hold if not way the fuck back. No a surprise at all.
Ain’t no country, ever, that didn’t grow more restrictive and authoritarian during a full-on war. Even the legal framework changes during war, at least during formally declared and recognized wars. But even things like the Cold War changed how people acted–witness the execution of the Rosenbergs, spies for sure, but long-term imprisonment would be the expected result, not the death penalty, except for the intensifying psychology of a war mentality.
Some more positive news that combine two of our favorite discussion topics: AI (though here not so much Artificial Intelligence, of course, as Augmented Intelligence) and Ukriane. Recently read a nice article about these guys:
The guy who started this is a Ukrainian Engineer (and former Lieutenant in a Ukrainian Tank Dicision) who was in Denmark when the war broke out. As he tells it, his heart told him to return straightaway (and he bought a ticket for that), but his head told him he could do better by using his tech/economy degree. Their focus is to use tehcnology to both make it cheaper to secure land areas from mines and to make the demining happen faster, and they’ve apparently been making some nice products.
It’s a difficult problem to solve, but good work they’re doing, if they end up being able to reduce the time and cost of demining Ukraine (current cost estimate is in the billions of Euros and 70 years). They and the other companies investing in this are hoping to be able to reduce this time by x10 or better.
