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    Re: It's almost as though polls and statistics had never been invented... Archived Message

    Posted by Ian M on June 26, 2023, 11:57 pm, in reply to "It's almost as though polls and statistics had never been invented..."

    Indeed, had a look at Paul Mason's responses and, while he avoided the kind of sadistic glee shown by his fellow warmongers in the US, still managed to come out with some exceptionally reality-challenged statements, eg:

    'Russia is losing

    Third, the context. Whatever the difficulties of the Ukrainian counter-offensive, which is still at an early stage, Russia is losing strategically.

    The moment the West committed to sending F-16s was a signal to Putin to cut his losses: with F-16s Ukraine will not only have control of its own airspace but can threaten any Russian surface vessel in the Black Sea. The whole point of annexing Crimea was to ensure maritime dominance in that region, which becomes impossible with a Ukraine armed, trained and funded by the West.

    In response to this, and to Ukraine’s initial successes in its counter-offensive, Putin has sent three clear signals.

    Russia blew up the Nova Kakhovka dam on 6 June, rendering parts of Kherson it controls, and in the long term Crimea itself, agriculturally devastated.
    On 22 June, according to President Zelensky, it mined the Zaporizhizhia nuclear power plant for destruction, in order to claim it as a Ukrainian terror attack.
    Then, last week, a flurry of Russian experts wrote articles speculating on the conditions for pre-emptive nuclear use.'     - https://paulmasonnews.medium.com/the-kayfabe-coup-is-under-way-353f5dc4d9c0

    and:

    'What we’re left with, at the appearance level, is a weakened authoritarian state which just demonstrated how close to collapse it could become if the dictator, Putin, were to be removed.
    Putin’s real deterrent

    But here we approach the essence of the events: by staging a 24 hour meltdown, the Russian security elite — it doesn’t matter whether by accident or design— outlined their strategic argument to the West:

    Russia is a state that cannot be defeated in Ukraine because, if humiliated, it could collapse into warring factions just like in 1918–19, only this time with nuclear stockpiles in play.

    This, if you think about it, is a far stronger argument than the one usually presented by German pacifists: “don’t support Ukraine because Putin he might nuke us”. It’s also a stronger proposition than the one typically feared by Western intelligence: Putin is ousted by a more effective hard-liner.

    Putin is unlikely to use tactical nukes in Ukraine because he has been warned by the Biden administration that, if he did so, the USA would enter the war with conventional means and end the Russian presence in Ukraine and the Black Sea. Any hard-line replacement would face the same issue.

    However, the catastrophic breakup of the Russian state — which became a doom-theme in Putinist and far-right commentary during the Prigozhin revolt — is a real possibility.

    I have written here before that the Russian army has a “style of failure” — politicisation and disintegration. So does the Russian state.'     - https://htsf.substack.com/p/staged-chaos-russias-real-deterrent

    'We're dealing with performative nihilism. Russia under its present security elite has no place in a multilateral world order.'     - https://twitter.com/paulmasonnews/status/1672863508881367040

    I guess nowadays you can choose which reality you want to identify as being part of? Real topsy-turvy stuff...

    I

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