Ukraine-Russia Update

It looks like I was right again, although wrong once:

I was wrong about Putin not invading Ukraine. But I was right about the war being self-contained, not being as bad as feared, and the stock market making a sudden and V-shaped recovery, which it did last week and this week.

Even though the situation is not resolved, and may never be, the market has decided it is time to move on.

It’s evident the left wanted Ukraine to be the next Covid. There are some key similarities:

Just as Covid was hyped as ‘the next Spanish Flu’, Putin invading Ukraine was hyped as the starting point of a nuclear war or another world war. But Putin is not Hitler, and Ukraine is not Czechoslovakia.

The doom and gloom media was predicting mass casualties and atrocities on the part of Putin. The opposite happened. Putin was stymied from the onset and the invasion has ground to a crawl ever since, with rusty, old Russian Cold War era tanks advancing a few hundred inches a day and firing shells at old, abandoned buildings. It’s the opposite of the Nazi Blitzkrieg of Poland, which was devastatingly lethal and fast. Even Iraq, which its shoestring budget army, only took 2 days to secure Kuwait in 1990.

It’s the war equivalent of two overweight, out of shape guys rolling around on the ground fighting over a bag of Dorito chips. The media hoped that this would be worse, just like they (the left) wanted Covid to be worse in order to continue the restrictions forever and to somehow still blame Trump (even though Biden is in office).

Like with Covid, instead of signaling virtue by wearing those huge n-99 masks, which covers much of the face like a Hannibal mask, the new signifier of virtue is changing one’s social media avatar to include Ukraine colors or modifying one’s username to include Ukraine flag emojis.

This is a common narrative, but there is no reason to believe it’s the reason. The U.S. invaded Vietnam despite the USSR having nukes. I would say there is a close to 0% chance of Russia using nukes if the U.S. was to help Ukraine. ‘Experts’ have been predicting imminent nuclear war for 70 years. Maybe they need to give it a rest. Obviously it would be very bad, but it’s not something to be preoccupied with.

Yet again, Tooleb is wrong. Azov, unlike whatever remains of the KKK, actually does have some real representation in Ukraine, albeit very small relative to the overall Ukrainian government and military. But it’s still way more representation than the American equivalent of neo Nazis.

This is why The Daily Stormer is sorta in a bind by being pro-Russia. The The Daily Stormer is putatively a neo Nazi website, and Putin has made anti-Nazism a focal part of his propaganda machine. In 2014 Putin made a law making it illegal to deny alleged Nazi war crimes. But being Pro-Ukraine means having to be on the same ‘side’ as the left and the mainstream media. Even if Russia has more neo Nazis compared to Ukraine, the Russian government has tried to make it illegal.

And here is Tooleb shilling for Mark Rippetoe, the guy whose fitness program extolls young men to get fat so they can deadlift 200 pounds at a 200 pound bodyweight. Mr. Rip is as mediocre of a weightlifter as Tooleb is mediocre at being a mathematician. That’s why they are drawn to each other.

Also, over the past week I have noticed a crisis fatigue setting in, as discussion online begins to wane. For the media, every year is 1929, 2007, or 2008. Crisis is always around the corner. Everything is the start of World War III or the next Great Depression. Democracy is always on the brink.

The reality is, Putin is no Hitler. He does not even rise to the level of Milosevic. Posts a month ago foretelling about the untold horrors Putin would unleash on the world and the need to empty our wallets in support of Ukraine, have aged as well as posts from March 2020 about ‘two weeks to flatten the curve.’

The yearning for crisis, which never comes, is a recurring pattern in media and politics. People are tired of the status quo, liberals and conservatives alike. Covid was close to being a fundamental societal change, but things returned to relative normalcy as GDP and the stock market surged higher, yet again the U.S. economy pulled from the jaws of crisis. There is the need for retribution against a universally disliked target, and Putin fills that role for now, but in the end falls short being a super villain, being more incompetent and in over his head, than a mastermind war criminal.