Emu Brigadier

Proud Victorian. Fighting Ukraine fatigue among Aussies. Russophile supporting Ukraine's defenders. Somewhat nasty Emu. Lesia Ukrainka appreciator.

[Emu Brigadier @emubrigadier]

...says a famous chess player

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

Mundane intellectual tasks don’t sound very fulfilling. As AI progresses, I think the old maxim is still correct, that if your job can be done completely by a machine, you have a terrible job.

[Emu Brigadier @emubrigadier]

Mates, please.

You can’t say "Russia is understood by others to be their security threat" when Europe’s actions say otherwise.

It’s Year 13 of Russia’s invasion, and yet Europe keeps importing Russian commodities: $30 billion in direct purchases in 2025 alone.

Europe keeps announcing sanctions packages while simultaneously adding more and more loopholes to them.

Russia’s top officials travel freely through Europe.

The EU even went as far as handing EU taxpayer subsidies to a sanctioned Russian oligarch who was an official supplier to Russia’s army.

If Europe wants the US to stop treating it like a joke, then it must stop acting like one: sanction Russia’s war machine and stop buying Russian commodities, which effectively finances the criminal invasion.

[Ruth Deyermond @ruth_deyermond]

1. You cannot develop a new security architecture that locks Russia, European NATO and Ukraine into some kind of shared, stabilising framework if Russia is understood by the others to be their most serious security threat.

[Emu Brigadier @emubrigadier]

@quilssachent You need to log off and touch grass

[Emu Brigadier @emubrigadier]

The best move is to check your phone and mutter, "Ох, нихуя ж себе!" This will subtly signal your mastery of the language without engaging them directly or making any assumptions.

[anna @meowkoteeq]

my new GP is Ukrainian, the first appointment is today.

how do i say "hey i speak Russian so we can do that if you are comfortable" without making it awkward?

i would just skip this and stick to English but that on its own can get awkward, because many Ukrainian people are absolutely fine with speaking Russian and would think i'm silly for not switching to it

i'm just trying to be respectful......

[Emu Brigadier @emubrigadier]

What about Andrei Platonov?

[Phil Hoyeck @PAHoyeck]

What your favourite 20th century author says about you:

• Samuel Beckett: You are depressed
• Albert Camus: You are depressed
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky: You are depressed
• T.S. Eliot: You are depressed
• William Faulkner: You are depressed
• Hermann Hesse: You are depressed
• James Joyce: You are depressed
• Franz Kafka: You are depressed
• George Orwell: You are depressed
• Sylvia Plath: You are depressed
• Jean-Paul Sartre: You are depressed
• Leo Tolstoy: You are depressed
• Virginia Woolf: You are depressed

[Emu Brigadier @emubrigadier]

@Leonov_mr

[Emu Brigadier @emubrigadier]

@jaanus @PopovaProf I don't think he cares about Russia's war crimes at all.

[Emu Brigadier @emubrigadier]

@jaanus @PopovaProf I do not think Trump sucks up to Putin because of "Dostoevsky."

[The Wheel Reads: Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Chaos! @thewheelreads]

We finished 14 Wheel of Time books.
Naturally our reward is entering a dungeon.

[Ⓜ. Loginov 🐴🦅 @mxmlgv]

Разбейте задачи на подзадачи, а потом на микрозадачи и нанозадачи. И вот уже нет никаких задач, всё растворилось в экзистенциальной дыре, будто бы никогда не существовало.

[Emu Brigadier @emubrigadier]

Of course! I raised the same point multiple times. I only mentioned language in response to Prof. Popova’s argument that, regardless of the actual policies, the West adopted Russia’s “civil war framing” (i.e., its language). The actual record suggests otherwise: Western governments paid lip service to Ukraine’s cause, made fiery speeches and passed resolutions, but continued to acquiesce to Russia.

[Emu Brigadier @emubrigadier]

@PopovaProf @jaanus But an interpretivist perspective still requires evidence.

[Emu Brigadier @emubrigadier]

@PopovaProf @jaanus There’s nothing to litigate. The 2014 quotes I provided are all public and easily verifiable. The claim that everyone adopted Russia’s “civil war” framing is simply not true: neither the EU nor the US refrained from naming Russia as the aggressor.

[Emu Brigadier @emubrigadier]

I’m not sure what you mean by “the success Ru had in framing 2014 as a Ukr civil war.”

First, regardless of Russia’s framing, Ukraine itself called its fight against Russia’s 2014 invasion an "anti-terrorist operation," and the combatants it was fighting were routinely called "separatists." To the extent that Ukraine’s US/EU partners avoided calling a spade a spade, they seem to have been following Kyiv’s lead.

Second, even under those circumstances, the US and the EU named Russia as the aggressor.

Here’s the European Parliament's statement in 2014:

"Parliament strongly condemned the Russian Federation for waging an undeclared ‘hybrid war’ against Ukraine with use of regular Russian forces."

It avoids the word "invasion," but it clearly names Russia as the aggressor and calls out the use of the Russian army. So, not a "civil war" framing.

As for the US, here’s Obama in 2014:

"We agree — if there was ever any doubt — that Russia is responsible for the violence in eastern Ukraine. The violence is encouraged by Russia. ... Russia has deliberately and repeatedly violated the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine. And the new images of Russian forces inside Ukraine make that plain for the world to see."

Again, not a "civil war" framing.

So it seems to me that Western decision-makers were under no illusions that this was some domestic Ukrainian strife. Despite Russia’s insistence, they named the aggressor publicly and without equivocation.

That rhetoric, of course, produced few tangible political outcomes, but, as we discussed earlier, that failure doesn’t require Russia’s perceived cultural prestige as an explanation.

[Emu Brigadier @emubrigadier]

Professor, if I may, with the greatest respect, you seem to be committing a logical error: accepting an idea in principle does not necessarily mean that it applies always and everywhere.

For example, one can broadly agree with your political scientist colleagues of the "realist" persuasion about the so-called Security Dilemma, and even concede that its logic may have played out in the past, but still reject it when they apply this concept to Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine.

Similarly, what you call "epistemic power" seems an interesting and not entirely indefensible piece of theorising, but your insistence that this particular logic applies in this particular case is an inferential leap that requires evidence, even for someone sympathetic to your broader theoretical contention.

[Emu Brigadier @emubrigadier]

Физтехи:

А правда что Беклемишев выбросил во время потоковой лекции кота из окна?

[Emu Brigadier @emubrigadier]

I do think that Russia is perceived as a source of certain "good" things that people either enjoy or regard as "high" culture and forms of high-status cultural consumption (say, classical novels, ballet, or art films).

But from that, you seem to infer a causal link to actual political and economic decisions made by Western politicians. It's that leap that I'm sceptical about, and I'm asking for evidence to support it. I think that's a perfectly fair request.

[Emu Brigadier @emubrigadier]

True. I'm not sure about the German environmentalist movement, but more broadly, yes, Russian money turns up with some frequency (Rassemblement National in France, UKIP/Reform in the UK, etc.).

The mechanism here is old-fashioned bribery, not Professor Popova's epistemic power differentials.

[Emu Brigadier @emubrigadier]

@PopovaProf @jaanus Well, you do know how to hurl insults, Professor :)

I just prefer clarity and specifics. Can you give an example of a specific "geopolitical" decision, consequential for the war, that you think was caused by Russia’s perceived cultural superiority?

[Emu Brigadier @emubrigadier]

Russia’s influence operations are real, although arguably more effective in the Global South than in the West.

I do believe, though, that the West’s failure to contain Russia largely stems from a simple fact: the short-term economic benefits of trading with Russia are immediately obvious to Western politicians, while the long-term costs of dependence on Russia lie beyond their planning horizon.

Nobody hands hundreds of billions of dollars to Russia just because they think Russia is “great.”