I haven't posted much on the developments in the Ukraine/Russia War over tha past couple of months.  Notably, the predominant one is the apparent mutiney by the Wagner Group, a mercenary military apparatus of the Kremlin run by Putin ally Yevgeny Prigozhin.  Wagner has been responsible for essentially all of the Russian military gains from the previous eight months of the war, so their dissolution by Putin in the aftermath of their short-lived mutiny may have serious implications on Russia's ability to sustain the war going forward. 

But clearly the strangest aspect to this is Putin's response to the mutiny, which has been largely to do very little to nothing, which equals the reported response to the mutiny by Russian security officers.  The latter may suggest why Putin gave in to a deal which would allow Prigozhin's betrayal to go unpunished - Putin may have been aware that he would not have his own security forces' support in the event of a genuine mutiny.  Regardless, Prigozhin's punishment for what is essentially treason (he said "soon there will be a new president") is for Prigozhin to settle in neighbor Belarus, where he will be allowed to continue directing Wagner's international military activity, and even train the local Belarusian military.  Wagner, in addition to acting as an elite (if unaccountable) miltary unit on the Ukrainian front lines, has also established a lucrative gold-smuggling operation out of the Sudan, so the assumption is that Putin would still consider them too valuable to truly disband, and this "deal" between Putin and Pregozhin amounts to PR face-saving.

I'm not so convinced of the above scenarios, and there remains a number of baffling and unexplained aspects of this story.  In addition to Putin allowing Prigozhin's very public armed rebuke against the Kremlin to uncharacteristically go unpunished (at least for now some people believe), Putin has allowed Prigozhin to openly and publicly flaunt even this lenient agreement by appearing, publicly, several times in St. Petersburg after his much-publicized exile.  Belarusian president Lukashenko, who reportedly engineered the exile deal on behalf of Putin, has even admitted that he isn't aware of where exactly Prigozhin spends his time.  Most recently, Prigozhin made himself present at the St. Petersburg Summit of African State Leaders, in many ways upstaging Putin (there for one-on-one sitdowns with Egypt's al-Sisi and Ethopia's Ahmed, among others), in fact, for most observers, openly defying his exile deal, and all of the while reminding everyone just how much power the Wagner Group active forces wield on the African continent that Putin could not (even if he wanted to) even begin to curb.  Although it hasn't been confirmed, the international working assumption is that Wagner was instrumental in the past week's Niger coup d'etat, just as Wagner was responsible for the coups of recent years in Mali, Burkina Faso and Sudan, and if anything the Niger coup would prove that the recent mutiny, and the so-called "disbanding" of Wagner, appears to have had no effect whatsoever on Wagner's actual operational prowess abroad, and perhaps Putin would prefer to keep it that way.  In short, Prigozhin knows he's too valuable to be easily exteriminated and he hasn't been shy letting the world know this either.

But Putin still isn't someone who would tolerate such public cuckolding.  Perhaps there's a different understanding between the two men at work, and there's been some interesting news this week that may shine some light on that.  Last week, Wagner soldiers in Belarus began massing on the western border with Poland.  Belarus president Lukashenko claimed that Wagner was "itching" to launch an attack.  In a strange reaction to this news, Putin then threatenedPoland not to show aggression towards Belarusian forces (does that include non-Belarusian Wagner?).  Since then, Wagner has only accelerated their fortifications around the 'Suwalki Gap', a small land bridge connecting Poland with the northern Baltic, ex-Soviet, states.  Putin would no doubt prize the opportunity to isolate the Baltic states from the rest of NATO.  So my question is: was the agreement between Putin and Prigozhin a charade to allow Wagner to attack a NATO ally and give Russia the plausible deniability that Wagner forces were not representing Kremlin orders?  Would anyone in NATO be expected to believe such horseshit?  If Wagner were to attack Polish forces on their border, it would still likely trigger a unified NATO response, regardless of whatever Putin's excuses.  And if Putin understood this, wouldn't he be ordering Wagner to stand down, rather than the Polish forces?

I hope this isn't the case, but we may find out soon.  I hope that Putin isn't under the impression that he can spin the history books later as to who actually started WWIII in order to actually start WWIII.

(And now back to Chuck Todd on the latest news about Biden's illegitimate granddaughter.....)
 

I didn't follow the case but Ive just assumed Danny Masterson is a rapist, even before his conviction.

But these miserable fucks who are going after friends and family for writing letters regarding his character to the judge are horrendous people.

No, not rapist terrible. But they are terrible. And at least the rapist is going to jail. What are we supposed to do with these other lowlifes?

Jinnistan wrote:

crumbsroom wrote:

I didn't follow the case but Ive just assumed Danny Masterson is a rapist, even before his conviction.

But these miserable fucks who are going after friends and family for writing letters regarding his character to the judge are horrendous people.

No, not rapist terrible. But they are terrible. And at least the rapist is going to jail. What are we supposed to do with these other lowlifes?

It does seem like a waste of outrage.  If you really needed to extend the blame around, the obvious target should be the Church of Scientology, which had for decades worked to silence Masterson's victims and sabotage ther case.  Not simply to protect their own - the victims were also Scientologists - but sheerly on the principle that the Church doesn't recognize the legitimacy of the American justice system.  I would assume this is worse than a few letters of mercy.

Pretty much exactly.

But sure, worry about what that doofus Ashton Kutcher wrote about some guy he's known personally for twenty plus years, because how dare he.

Everyone's brain has melted.

Everyone is awful.

crumbsroom wrote:

Everyone's brain has melted.

Everyone is awful.

Artax!!! Noooo!

crumbsroom wrote:

This is mental illness.

If there is such a thing as a current "mind virus", whatever it is, it isn't 'woke'.  It's this habitual binary perception of people and reality, debasing things to either/or, good/bad, mensch/monster, perfect/imperfect.  It's a rather drowsy view of the complicated dimensions of human nature, and it's also a conveniently expedient opportunity to exercise self-righteous status-climbing, sometimes using wokeness as a shallow rung on the ladder.

I had to assume that some of this ire might be coming from those damned AV kids again, with their twitter-tweaked mixture of unwitty snark and spite.  So I was slightly relieved to see that they're, at least for the time being, being far more tolerant of Michelle Wolf's comments defending Dave Chappelle and Louis CK.  Perhaps they find Wolf a more acceptable messenger of the obvious, but what she says isn't so different from the same defenses that others have mentioned that then get them stuck in the "apologist" category.  But here, Wolf is potrayed as 'brave' for saying the same things.  Maybe this is a sign of evolution?  Maybe they'll turn on Wolf once she no longer has a hot new commodity to hawk?  Who knows?  But it's worth quoting her anyway:

They try to act like Dave is some sort of villain when he’s not. He’s a hero.

I think it was a very black-and-white approach that they took, when in fact it was an incredibly gray subject matter that required a lot of conversations that we literally weren’t allowed to have.

Louis, I feel, is the only one who actually admitted to anything or apologized. And we can go back and forth about how good or bad his apology was, but I don’t think you’re ever going to have an apology that everyone is going to be happy with...He apologized and wants to make things better, and instead people were like, ‘No, you can’t. There’s no way for you to make things better unless you do this and this.’ But nobody said what ‘this and this’ was. Nobody said what he could do because nobody agreed on what he could do.

Maybe they'll even stop complaining about Woody Allen's standing ovations now.

Well well well.  A possible vote for least surprising news of the day.

crumbsroom wrote:

With the company he's been keeping, I hope Brand enjoys having the likes of Andrew Tate rushing to his defense.

Yet another takedown by the corporate elites to silence a voice of dissent.

I don't want to jump to conclusions based on mere allegations....but one victim "was treated at a rape crisis centre on the same day (of the assault)" and "The Times says it has seen medical records to support this".  Ooof.

I got $20 that says Brand is admitted into rehab within a week, "for rest and reflection as he discovers what's best to continue his journey of self-improvement", yada yada.

"OK, everybody.  Just...keep it cooool.  Copacetic.  Let's take a moment.  Allow me to explain.  You see, the thing is that, in this matrix of perception and illusion, the reality of it all, it really boils right down to this.  I'm fucked."
 

Just like I have an innate distrust of those who wave flags to prove their patriotism or thump Bible's to prove their holiness, the left has their share of phony wankers like Brand who similarly accessorise their supposed belief systems. Brand was never fighting for the little guy, or terribly concerned with his new age hippy ideals, as much as he was in thrall to playing shaman to a bunch of gullible twerps in his audience. He's the kind of guy who is very much responsible for my aversion to hippys. Not that I've ever had any issues with hippy ideologies, only that if I can identify your belief system by the clothes you are wearing, I have less of a reason to trust what you supposedly believe. I have a problem with costumes.

I guess this is somewhat a symptom of today's age where people are being judged by who they are as human beings by what they post on social media. Has empty sloganeering ever been more at play in forging people's identities? Have people who have such strident opinions ever had less actual thoughts or information to back them up? Maybe, but when you can get a moral pass simply by cutting and pasting some choice quote into your personal news feed, it really frees you up from actually having to do or say anything of value to demonstrate what you believe. Of taking the time and effort to actually believe your beliefs.0

It's a vacuum guys like Brand can easily step into in pursuit of becoming avatars for values they might not actually subscribe to, but know they can profit off of. Because how many people out there actually actively care about anything beyond simply appearing as if they care about something. I don't think that many, to be honest. Certainly not as many as you'd think considering how heated political debates get these days, over every fucking small stupid pointless infraction.

Basically, discourse these days isnt about saying anything. It's about making a noisy ruckus, in order to distract from the fact that people are mostly selfish stupid cunts. And being actually informed about the things they are screaming about, might only reduce the volume of their position, and that simply would not do.

So in such a climate, of course Brand is a lifestyle coach. Because he's just like all of those other empty vessels out there. And it's a perfectly symbiotic relationship between the guy who pretends he is filling up his followers with moral righteousness, and those who quickly fill over the brim with it.

In such a climate will it matter to any of them that he is quite possibly a terrible person as well as a rapist?


Lol. Not likely. If anything, they'll probably rally around him even harder because....theyre retarded?

Looks like there's also some new sexual assault allegations against Tim Ballard, founder of Operation Underground Railroad, subject of this summer's Sound of Freedom.

The accusation boils down to Ballard "invited women to act as his 'wife' on undercover overseas missions ostensibly aimed at rescuing victims of sex trafficking. He would then allegedly coerce those women into sharing a bed or showering together, claiming that it was necessary to fool traffickers. Ballard is said to have sent at least one woman a photo of himself in his underwear, festooned with fake tattoos, and to have asked another 'how far she was willing to go,' in the words of a source, to save children."

"Save the babies" - Marvin Gaye