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Lunatic Voice Of The Day
The prize for the most lunatic, unhinged voice of the day was awarded to Simon Tisdall’s Guardian column:
Little Marco (as Trump calls him) is confused. Trumpism is all about recreating yesterday, about fantasies of “the good old days”. Putin suffers similar delusions. The war is part of his revanchist project to make Russia great again, to rebuild the Soviet sphere. Likewise, Xi Jinping, China’s leader, is attempting his own great leap backwards, by accumulating dictatorial powers to an extent unseen since Mao Zedong.
The open-minded, freedom-loving rainbow Europe of democracy and the rule of law is a living rebuke to these lumbering Frankenstein’s retro-monsters and their hard-right emulators. They revile and fear it. Like Ukraine, it stands in their way.
…
Here’s what must be done: deploy troops from a European “coalition of the willing” to secure and defend Kyiv and other unoccupied cities; Russia cannot be allowed a veto. Enforce a no-fly exclusion zone, as I have repeatedly urged. Surge defensive missiles and drones. Beach Russia’s shadow fleet. Step up covert “active measures”, including cyber and sabotage, to counter Kremlin hybrid warfare. Seize assets, expel spies, expose lies, change the narrative. Europe must demand an immediate ceasefire, followed by phased Russian withdrawals, and assume a lead role in any final settlement talks.
Short question on your plan of action, Simon. With what?
Weird comment section. So weird. I take it most of the people here are Westerners. Yet half of ’em seem to be cheering madly for our various Western countries to be harmed. And as for the unfortunate Ukrainians, they want those nuked! I read it all and thought, how dumb can you get.
Very, by the looks of this comment section. That’s aside from the strategic geniuses who have useful advice to offer to the Russian General Staff. I expect the Russian General Staff is deeply grateful.
That’s just the froth, of course. But underneath it there’s another more serious but equally deluded set of opinions. That is, seeing some outside statesman, usually Xi or Putin, as offering us any solution to our own problems. Millenarian fantasy. No one is going to ride in on a white horse and save us from the dereliction our own countries are slipping into. Each country has to sort itself out, not flop around hoping that some magic solution from outside will sort things out for us.
Anyway, it’s the serious commenters I find interesting. The ones who know more than I do. Plenty of them here, buried underneath the froth. Though on anything military it’s not difficult to know more than I do. Here’s a subject I really do want to know more about:-
It starts off with a somewhat depressing article by Ian Proud. Proud’s ex-FO, or FCDO or whatever it’s called these days. Very able – believe it or not, you have to be to get into the FO and work at his level – so we take him seriously. He’s looking at the state of UK defence.
“The British military is skint and too small to fight”
https://thepeacemonger.substack.com/p/the-british-military-is-skint-
Proud recently did an interview with Martyanov, who holds much the same view and on top of that tells us the Western military as a whole is stuck with out of date doctrine.
Though judging by the amateur night and incredibly costly offensives we’ve been micro-managing the Ukrainians into, I’m surprised the Western militaries follow any coherent doctrine at all. “Here’s a gun. It works like this. Now off all you go and get yourselves slaughtered.” seems to have been as much doctrine as our British military instructors could manage to inculcate as they trained their unwary Ukrainian recruits. And at the advanced level, the really sophisticated stuff, “doctrine” for the Milley/Cavoli/Radakin trio – true Merchants of Death, those gentlemen – consisted of giving the Russians a nice long time to prepare the killing grounds and then pitching our proxies into them wholesale.
Where’s all this going? Have I been uncivil yet to enough people? From the dumbos in this comment section to the failed upwards dumbos in NATO HQ I’ve made a much needed start so, finally, on to the point. On Proud’s site a commenter comes out with this:-
“Robert Ritchie
“Democracy and Constitutions: Es…20hEdited
“For a long time I’ve thought the UK needs to put all its procurement on hold while redeveloping its military doctrines – much as the 1984 Ogarkov reforms, later called “drone warfare before drones”, did for Russia. UK doctrines are arguably 38 years obsolete. In July 2022 the UK stood up 1DRSBCT – 1st Deep Reconnaissance Strike Brigade Combat Team. When announced, this was an obviously experimental unit consisting of 2 cavalry regiments, 2 light cavalry regiments, and no less than ten artillery regiments.
“US Army field grade officers were quite envious (which was how I found out about it). The unit name gives the game away: it’s an attempt to reproduce at least one of the 1984 Russian doctrines, which the UK must have known about at least since 1990 when LTC Lester Grau analyzed them for the (since renamed) Soviet Army Studies Office:
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA231789.pdf.
“Why did the UK do this? Perhaps because four months earlier just 50-odd Russian “battalion tactical groups”, outnumbered 3:1 by Ukraine but applying the “new” doctrines, cut through Ukraine’s NATO-compliant defences like a hot knife through butter. (I started researching this stuff only in 2014, when a US Colonel in Ukraine blew the whistle on Russia’s annihilation of a NATO-indoctrinated Ukrainian mechanized brigade in three minutes without the Ukrainians ever firing a shot – so I wondered how).
“How this works out is moot, especially given that the UK supposedly has given away all its SP guns (the most important artillery support units) to Ukraine. My point here is the UK should either (a) decide to continue its policy of reinforcing failure; or (b) halt all its defence procurement spending until it decides what kind of army (and navy) it’s trying to build. Plus start redeveloping defence industrial capacity, with a domestic industrial policy including nationalization (cf “the Great Rearmer” Neville Chamberlain’s brilliant “Shadow Scheme”, to eliminate the supply chain disasters that are already hitting the USA), so that when the UK decides what kind of military it wants, it can actually equip it and logistically support it.
“Or is that really too much to ask?”
…………………….
I flogged through the link Mr Ritchie provided, not, to be honest, coming out the other end much the wiser. I could, just about, follow the maths because Martyanov has touched on that same subject before, but the diagrams had me foxed. So no Staff College for me. But it’s the part I bolded that I homed in on.
” … just 50-odd Russian “battalion tactical groups”, outnumbered 3:1 by Ukraine but applying the “new” doctrines, cut through Ukraine’s NATO-compliant defences like a hot knife through butter.”
That opening Russian Blitzkrieg in early 2022. The ground and missile assault. It didn’t last very long. It took a heavy toll in casualties, partly because the ROE were so tight. But in several places along the then LoC it really did cut through as if through butter. Through well-manned defences that NATO and its proxies had had nearly eight years to prepare and that were more formidable defences, some say, than the Maginot line. How did the Russians do it?
Posted by: English Outsider | Feb 24 2026 15:19 utc | 220
Followed a weird exchange back to its origins, here.
Why did I stop reading “the guardian” again ? Ha yea, I remember now : the femboys writing init.Come on B, the legacy media are mostly irrelevant now, most of the people get their news elsewhere. Even Reddit is more reliable than “the guardian” … that says A LOT.
Posted by: Savonarole | Feb 23 2026 17:07 utc | 4
Clearly, so-called femboys are bad, as they are why this Redditor stopped reading the newspaper. The fact that there are very likely very few so-called femboys writing (or even none) strongly suggests this person picked the phrase as particularly insulting.
Later in the exchange, this.
Laguerre @29: “I fail to see what’s wrong with femboys, why you consider it an insult.” Who said he considers it an insult? The poster didn’t state that it was an insult. The connotations are only insulting if the reader (you) interpret the connotations to be insulting. The insult comes from you, not from the other poster. If you truly believed the nonsense you posted then you wouldn’t perceive any insult in the term “femboys” even when insult is intended. If you were honest with yourself you would acknowledge that you perceive “femboys” negatively, which is why when someone refers to anyone as such you perceive it as an insult. It sure is annoying that so many people don’t understand how language works. Kinda like when I woke up with my girlfriend at the time (very much “former” now) punching me and shouting that I was being mean to her in the dream she was just having. That prompted me to be mean for real and I kicked her out of the house on the spot and told her never to come back. It is bad enough that I have to suffer fools on the Internet who cannot tell the difference between what goes on in their own heads and the real world, but I don’t have to live with a moron who cannot take responsibility for their own thoughts like that.
Posted by: William Gruff | Feb 23 2026 21:28 utc | 102
No, the poster didn’t write, I’m insulting the Guardian by calling its writers femboys. But I assure you not even grotesquely dishonest William Gruff believes that Savonarole cited the entirely acceptable, if not outright good, femboys of the Guardian as the reason for not reading the paper anymore, besides not being the fashion any more. If Savonarole had any positive feelings for femboys, they would have been a reason to keep reading. Gruff lies, as usual. The idiot logic deployed by Gruff implies that someone who objects to the n word secretly despises the n. They’re merely projecting their own loathing into a misreading. One lesson here is how Gruff relies on people forgetting the original comment so he can lie about it. It took some effort (which I very nearly didn’t put in) to find the original. fortunately the numbering is still consistent. [When our host deletes comments, the comment numbers cited in later comments no longer lead to the cited comment.]
Posted by: William Gruff | Feb 23 2026 21:28 utc | 102I never cared about people calling me names, this is a well known defense mechanism used by those who don’t have what it take on the argumentative ground to begin with. Thank you for advocating my case anyway William The “femboy” thing was more about immaturity and hysterical reaction to a non-problem (same-sex relation are not a crime in RF.) while there is a MUCH less frivolous agenda that sexual matters at stake on this conflict. It might be “cliché” and “insulting” , sorry but not sorry : that Simon guy had it cumming (pun intended and assumed. I’ve got as much right to be stupid than the others after all. :-p
Posted by: Savonarole | Feb 24 2026 12:43 utc | 218
Savonarole wasn’t called any names. Pretending to be tough when you aren’t called names suggests a tender skin indeed. The observation that insults are commonly used in lieu of arguments is correct: Savonarole didn’t make any arguments against the Guardian other than newspapers are out of fashion. The remark about “immaturity and hysterical reaction” means nothing really, as it somehow doesn’t say whose. Plus of course the dependent clause about “MUCH less frivolous agenda” basically denies there was any real problem, that complaining about using femboy as an insult is frivolous. Or maybe the complaint was the “hysterical reaction?” The writing is kind of convoluted, as one might expect in an enemy of legacy media. (Grammar is a legacy, after all.) Why the RF’s laws are relevant is a parenthetical mystery, leave it there? The final words of the comment leave me thinking English is Savonarole’s second language?
This little lesson in language is brought to you by that fine pair, Savonarole and William Gruff, who stand up for language that is simple, direct and faithfully reflects reality…when it suits them. The absurd thing is how often this sort of thing takes place without notice.
Posted by: steven t johnson | Feb 24 2026 17:23 utc | 238
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