Given How Prone Our Ruling Elites Are to Wishful Thinking, How Seriously Should We Take Their Assurances That Putin Will Never Push the Nuclear Button?
For anyone who wasn’t an ardent Kamala Harris fan, it was very funny to watch Rory Stewart’s humiliation after the US election. Beforehand, the posher half of The Rest is Politics had bet heavily, both in terms of his reputation as a pundit and, he said, with money, that Harris was going to “win comfortably”. “Biden’s admin has been solid,” we learned; polls suggesting the race would be tight were simply “herding, after past misses”, he assured us. As the results came in and the world steadily understood the extent of Trump’s victory, for those with an eye on the response of the centrists, the schadenfreude was like a warm bath.
What was revealing, though, was the way Stewart tried to explain why he’d been so wrong. He didn’t so much eat humble pie as claim that while, yes, he had made the wrong prediction, he could hardly be faulted for doing so, since he had made it for the right reasons. Dazed and shell-shocked in a now-infamous live broadcast of The Rest Is Politics election on election night, he explained: “I think I was wrong because I’m an optimist and I hate the idea of being right pessimistically… my vote on Kamala Harris was… a bet on hope.” Manfully embracing his reputational fallout the following day on Times Radio, he freely admitted that he was “guilty of massive wishful thinking”, but nevertheless maintained that he – a man who purports to tell millions each week how the world of politics works – would “rather be wrong optimistically… than be right pessimistically.”
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They’ve been dead wrong on all major issues:
They said COVID was deadly for everyone, it wasn’t,
They said masks stopped transmission of disease, they don’t
They said COVID jabs we’re safe and would protect you, wrong on both.
They said Russia would be isolated and defeated in Ukraine, it’s the opposite, they’ve strengthened their ties with more than half the world and are winning the war handily.
They keep telling us we are causing a climate catastrophe and we clearly are not.
They keep telling us there are lots of genders and there aren’t.
They told us printing money and giving it away would not cause inflation, it did.
They keep telling us they’re going to keep immigration down, they never do.
They’re not just wrong sometimes. They are wrong all the time. Literally. On everything.
To trust our establishment is basically certifiable madness.
This graphic puts it neatly, though with some omissions including self-destructive wars and attacks on beneficial religions. But those dots are easy enough to join.
Good compendium but this is not a list of them being wrong, it’s a list of the lies they’ve told.
As per Stewart’s comment.
If your job relies on you having the “right” opinion, you won’t get the truth you will only get propaganda.
And just look at how the leftie media is collapsing post election as people no longer want to be lied to.
Not really because their main concern is their own comfort and that they achieve very nicely thank you without the 16 hour days that would be necessary in the private sector to achieve the same standard of living.
So the mugs are us.
Some hangings necessary methinks.
https://youtu.be/AiDTMXbiXPA?si=UzTdYyvcYftLL-FB
Can Russia attack Britain – What a conventional attack might look like
Interesting from Mark Felton
An excellent video whereby I am surprised Mark made no mention of hypersonic missiles, only a handful of which would probably suffice to wipe out UK’s defence capability in one strike. Then a phone call to Starmer saying the next will be aimed at No. 10.
If I remember correctly, Russia recently sent off its first nuclear submarine fully equipped with hypersonic missiles.
Of course, UK could react with nuclear weapons but we all know how that will end – actually somebody may need to educate the Labour government …
Oh, and the video is a clear message that peace is a lot cheaper than war!
Fair point admittedly, although i highly rate Feltons work.
What struck me watching it is how hopeless the human race is… All that manufacturing of bombers and cruise missiles and as pointed out that Starmer has gifted another 3 billion to Zelenskys futile war efforts and how that money (stolen off the pensioners and tax payers) could benefit the NHS for example…. Its nothing but insanity…
While Trump ran his election campaign on being anti war saying he would stop the Ukraine war in a day, whilst he has remained silent over Bidens permission to use long range missiles deep in to Russian territory..
As you say, peace is alot cheaper than war and would prevent a huge loss of life, but the elites and the MIC wouldnt be making the billions out of others misery.
Its a sick world, with a sick industry…
Does the world really need the MIC….
I was with you until “could benefit the NHS” the biggest waste of taxpayers’ money EVER. the model was flawed from the start and all most of our pathetic politicians are prepared to do is pour more of Our money into the black hole
Of course the NHS is on dire need of wholesale reform, however gifting money to them is still better than causing death and destruction 🙄
Hypersonic missiles have high capability in some aspects, but they probably have weaknesses to allow those aspects. With a high enough fuel load to reach the UK they may well be limited in warhead bang., and possibly also in accuracy.
All ballistic missiles are hypersonic at certain stages.
The ‘new’ Russian ballistic missile is, essentially, the old RS-26 Rubezh with a different paint job.
RS-26 Rubezh itself is not a new development. Testing began in 2012.
‘Repeatedly promising cataclysmic responses to incremental steps forward in military support for Ukraine is not about creating sound military policy or about revealing Russia’s military intentions, which are created independently of Western decision-making. It is part of a ploy to charge up an excitable nationalist base in Russia, encouraging its members to bond with each other in online and offline’
Ian Garner
The rhetoric is boosterism for an audience of vodka soaked old duffers and keyboard warriors.
Putin and Russia see world events in a completely different time frame to the West.
Russia has been trying to control Ukraine at least since the mid 19th century.
Within that context, nuclear armageddon has no utility.
Tactical nuclear weapons, within the open plains of Ukraine, have no utility.
And Putin is a cold, calculating totalitarian dictator.
There may be certain scenarios where Putin would use nuclear weapons but those scenarios, deep Ukrainian advances towards Moscow for example, are simply not going to happen.
Let us recall that Russia has been invaded itself, the only nuclear power ever to have been invaded, and still has not resorted to nuclear weapons.
This conflict is not dissimilar to a civil war. The Ukrainian leadership understand Putin’s mindset, ex USSR KGB, only too well. We should be guided by them. If they do not fear that any nuclear escalation is likely to take place, then neither should we.
Putin bad, Zelensky good….. Ffs
And what do the Ukrainians make of it? ‘As Ukraine was making rapid gains in liberating the Kharkiv and Kherson regions, the Russian military-political leadership allegedly considered using nuclear weapons to thwart Ukrainian advances. In public, Russia concocted a bogus accusation that Ukraine was planning to use a “dirty bomb,” which many feared was creating a pretext for a Russian nuclear strike. The US intelligence community estimated the risk of Russia’s nuclear use in fall 2022 at 50 percent, possibly a historic high.’ Consequently, the U.S. pointed out to Russia the already fire planned consequences and the crisis passed. In fact, the most dangerous scenario of all, again vanishingly unlikely unless the West makes a mis-step, would be Russian victory: ‘Consider that the only use of nuclear weapons in armed conflict so far was by a nuclear power that was on a winning path. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were rebuilt in just a few years and are perfectly habitable today. The United States and NATO allies might not deliver on their threat to impose severe military costs in response to a Russian nuclear strike if Ukraine looks like a lost cause.’ https://thebulletin.org/2024/10/why-russia-is-more-likely-to-go-nuclear-in-ukraine-if-its-winning/ A great deal will depend on the Trump Presidency…….but President Trump is always… Read more »
There has been no bigger a war mongering nation over the past 50 years than the USA…
Let us be guided by the side which is losing.
Lol.
It may be helpful to recall that Russia currently occupies less of Ukraine than it did immediately after its invasion.
And Russia remains the only nuclear power ever to have been invaded, its leader’s claim that the invader would be ejected by 01 October shown to be yet more hollow braggadocio.
“The Ukrainian military has been steadily losing ground in Russia’s Kursk Region as Moscow’s forces have intensified their advances in recent weeks, the Wall Street Journal has reported. The US newspaper claims that the Kremlin is seeking to flush Kiev’s troops out of its internationally recognized territory before US President-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated on January 20.”
Russia is threatening to cut off the AFU salient in Kursk and capture their troops and all the mercs fighting there. The front in Donetsk is creaking and it can’t be too long before they are routed and the liberation is completed especially as we are into the fighting season.
When was Russia invaded as a nuclear power?
August 2024
I don’t read the news so I must have missed that one. Who invaded them?
Ukraine. Kursk region.
Ah, thanks. Hardly an existential threat.
Yes. That’s obviously why they have assembled only one Army Corps (whose General, Lt-Gen Valery Solodchuk, has just been killed) to deal with it.
Right. While I agree with you that they are unlikely to use nuclear weapons, I think more or less any nuclear power would be unlikely to do so unless they thought they were going to be overwhelmed – hardly likely in the case of Ukraine “invading” Russia.
Meaning we should happily risk a nuclear war, in the sense of – to quote Clint Eastwood – “Do you feel lucky today, Punk?”
Since some time in the 1950s, when the original American idea to blackmail the world into submission by threatening it with nuclear weapons only the USA possessed had proven to be a bit hasty, a nuclear war has been prevented by the fact that nobody can risk to start one and have any hopes of surviving it. That’s maybe a bad situation but one we’ve been living with for quite some time now.
But US Rear-Admiral Buchanan at a recent conference said USA could survive a nuclear war …
As far as I could determine, he said that the USA should aim for having a third strike capability, ie, have enough nukes to blow up the planet and then some in reserve on top of that to deter aliens from invading the moon or something like that. This is pretty much a “head of nukes says we need more nukes” statement, a classic case of “he would say that, wouldn’t he?”
That’s an important point. Putin would be much better off to withdraw from Ukraine and maintain control of an intact Russia than cause and end-of-human-civilisation scenario via some glorious nuclear fireworks, as that’s an “everybody loses” proposition. Nothing has changed in this respect since the so-called cold war: Everybody has nukes. Hence, nobody can use them without causing serious harm to whatever his present cause happens to be.
Russian loose cannons ranting about or else nuking the world are just seeking to scare the impressionable, principally targetting the what they believe to be (or hope to find to be) a weak and effiminate/ emasculated audience of Western sex perverts without interests in anything except the uninterrupted,self-serving application of their not really reproductive organs.
Russia has been trying to secure the Black Sea for navigation into the Mediterranean from Russian territory since the late 18th Century.
Rostov on the Sea of Azov is the only warm water port it now has. Shipping from Rostov must pass from the Sea of Azov via the Kerch Straits at the tip of Crimea into the Black Sea then via Bosphorus Straits into the Mediterranean.
Russia isn’t interested in Ukraine, just Crimean and parts of the Donbas on the northern coast of the Sea of Azov in order to secure shipping lanes for its military and merchant vessels.
This is why it does not want NATO bases in the Ukraine as they could control the Black Sea and Sea of Azov.
If Russia wanted the Ukraine, then it would not have agreed to its independence after 1990. Agreeing to that was in large part contingent on no NATO.
Then why has Russia been spending much blood and treasure to secure Ukraine since at least the 19th Century and before?
Putin is an Imperialist who wishes to reinstate Russia as a European superpower with a standing similar to that of the USSR on the world stage.
Poland is spending 4.8% of its GDP on defence, 1500 tanks and support equipment.
But, of course, what do they know?
‘This attack on Ukraine – its history, its landscape, and its sense of community – as a ‘home’ to Ukrainians draws heavily from the tactics of the imperial past of not only the Russian Empire but of Europe’s liberal and fascist empires across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well. The tactic with which we are most familiar as international observers is the use of narrative erasure. Over the past year and a half, countless blogs and news articles have been particularly interested in making sense of how President Putin revises, reinterprets, and blatantly rewrites history to suit his imperial agenda. His alternative histories attempt to provide ‘historical’ proof that Ukraine has never been a discernible nation, thereby justifying the 2014 and 2022 invasions as a reclamation of ‘lost’ Russian territory.’
If Putin were an imperialist, he took a very long time before deciding to attack Ukraine, having been in power 22 years before initiating the SMO.
And Ukraine’s ‘sense of community’ meant shelling its own citizens daily in the east for a whole 8 years before Putin started his ‘imperialist expansion’ to get them to stop. Their ‘sense of community’ killed off around 16,000 Ukrainians.
Monro….
The ultimate Davos/deep state apologist.
If people actually listened to what Putin said not what the West said he said we might get nearer to the truth.
Isn’t Rory Stewart the British Walter Mitty?
The reason this nuclear war issue has arisen seems to be the result of the west’s decision to attack Russia with it’s long range missiles. And so from a practical perspective I find myself asking ‘what has been the effect of these missiles?’. Have they been effective? have they caused damage? or has Russia managed to shoot them down?
If they have achieved very little and if Ukraine only has a relatively small number of such missiles,their use is unlikely to provoke Russia into nuclear war. If that is the case, what is the point? There are cynics who argue it is to keep the war going until Biden leaves office. If that is the case it is a horrific state of affairs but after all the events of recent years, I guess it is not impossible that this is the reason for this escalation.
The other reason is:
“I’m old and senile, Trump won and I can’t stand it so, if I’m going, everyone is coming with me”- Joe Biden, the greatest dummy spit in history!
Western governments and their presstitutes in the legacy media need their heads examining.
Their Russophobic actions are leading Europe to WWIII.
The evidence shows that Russia were deliberately “provoked” by the US and Nato and that Russia’s actions against Ukraine are more moral, more legal and more justified than the US/Nato similar actions against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria etc. etc. etc.
Russia showed remarkable restraint for 8 years after the US and its vassal’s coup in Ukraine of 2014.
Entering Ukraine in 2022 to protect the ethnic Russians facing persecution and death at the hands of Ukrainian Banderites, neoNazis and ultranationalists was totally justified.
Western governments should look at themselves in the mirror and stop poking the Bear.
For anyone interested in the realistic background to the Ukraine war I recommend Glenn Greenwald’s recent interview with Scott Horton a journalist who has extensively covered the region.
YouTube has a clip and the full interview is available on Rumble (highly recommended).
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mVjYVka6u10&pp=ygUcR2xlbm4gZ3JlZW53YWxkIHNjb3R0IGhvcnRvbg%3D%3D
Starmer:
“Putin’s such a huge threat to the world and Britain I’ve decided to cut defence spending to save the NHS. Wait till he sees our brave nurses dancing on TikTok videos. That’ll show Putin.”
It depends what is meant by nuclear weapons and where they land.
Russia launched Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles (IRBM) at targets in Ukraine with conventional MIRV warheads instead of nuclear MIRVs which these missiles are designed to carry.
These missile can reach targets in Europe.
So the message could be that Russia will use its IRBMs for targets in Ukraine but with nuclear warheads. Also that Russia could use IRBMs into Europe with either conventional or nuclear warheads.
This latter does not mean nuclear war, because if the Yanks start chucking ICBMs at Russia, Russia will chuck their ICBMs at the Yanks and the citizens of Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles, Houston, etc won’t like that. In other words the USA is not going to risk nuclear attacks on it cities to save Europe never mind Ukraine.
Nor of course would Russia launch ICBMs at the US.
The warning, in my view, is aimed at Europe and yes the implications are, if NATO persists in its vicarious missile strikes into Russia, Russia may use nukes on targeted parts of Europe.
The warning, in my view, is aimed at Europe and yes the implications are, if NATO persists in its vicarious missile strikes into Russia, Russia may use nukes on targeted parts of Europe.
Putin seriously contemplating an unprovoked nuclear massacre on the civilian population of any non-Russian part of Europe would be an extremely good reason to actually go to war against Russia with all the force we can muster as early as possible.
The Russians have a new hypersonic missile, the Oreshnik, which is being defined as a game changer in the conflict since it, so to speak, has the characteristics of a nuclear IRBM without being nuclear. It was used to strike the Yuzmash factory in Dnipropetrovsk. The final stage of the Oreshnik used carried six IPBVs (Independent Post-Boost Vehicles), each carrying six warheads consisting of metal slugs forged from exotic alloys which enable them to maintain their form during the extreme heat generated by hypersonic re-entry speeds. These slugs are not explosive, rather they use the combined effects of the kinetic impact at high speed and the extreme heat absorbed by the exotic alloy to destroy their intended target on impact. (Source: Scott Ritter.) According to local reports, the factory was turned into dust. It is a game changer because, as Putin announced, they will use this missile in response to any US/NATO long range missiles fired ‘by Ukraine’ against targets in Russia. Knowing that ATACMS and Storm Shadows can only be fired with US/NATO assistance, Russia will react by launching an Oreshnik at a military site belonging to whichever country supported the missile firing. Russia will announce the target in… Read more »
Completely different way of thinking. The favourite game of the Anglo-Americans is Poschen, Poker, to bluff. Not all cultures allow bluff to play a major role in military matters. Unfortunately our intellctual class has become so imbecilic that they can’t understand fundamental distinctions like this anymore.
That writer isn’t working for a national newspaper or broadcaster makes me wonder if it isn’t the internet that’s killing trad media but its own urge to self-destruction.