This comic is kinda old already, but still stays relevant.
this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2026
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Russia's economy is smaller than California's, yet we still pretend that they're a massive threat so that we can continue buying aircraft carriers. Graphic should have USA fish about 10x bigger than Russia fish.
Also, needs Iran and China fishes.
... and the opposing fishes should be shown buying Russia's oil with their frowny faces. "I can't believe that you're making me buy your oil, you are deplorable. Here's 50 billion dollars. Jerk. You're a jerk."
How big is Yemen's economy compared to Saudi Arabia?
The problem is that California uses US weapons that costs magnitudes more for at best marginal improvements over weapons used by both Russia and Ukraine that cost less than vodka by weight, and which US cannot feasibly produce for less than 10X price, so it kind of levels out. Throwing money at Ukraine to produce them is smart, but there's only so many they can make.
Ukrainian here, glad someone understands. Russia is still the threat, and a very real threat to the whole Europe. No European country is ready for the war of drones - neither on the frontlines vs FPV (which we see repeatedly in European-Ukrainian trainings) and in the air vs reactive jet shaheds.
Like ffs just count the amount of antiair rockets you have in your country and check out the history of russian aerial attacks on Ukrainian cities. Its 200-300 shaheds every second day. Would your stocks last a week? Okay, two? USA is learning this in Iran, but they are on the other side of the world so they can take the L and move on.
Idk if the US gets to walk away from this. How many military bases in the region are still standing? What's the timeline for replacing all those lost F-15s and C-130s?
We're not seeing a war in downtown Cincinnati. But the US empire is going to be fundamentally changed from it's "Push Libya's shit in because we can" Obama Era recent past.
Empire is crumbling right before our eyes. Well, people voted for it. But it doesn't threaten shaheds to fly daily over states. Not instantly, at least.
And the same can't be said about EU, sending shaheds from Belarus = pretty much the whole Europe is in range.
I really hope Europe gets off its ass and both assists Ukraine more, and partners with it for defense technologies. By raw GDP even many of the Euro fish would as big or bigger than the Russian one but we have an MIC that's almost as bloated and corrupt as the US one. We need to get more efficient with our spending and I expect partnering with Ukraine is the only realistic way for that to happen.
I don't think comparing by nominal GDP is nearly as effective as GDP adjusted to PPP. Russia is an industrialized economy with a low nominal GDP but higher GDP by PPP, whereas California has a high nominal GDP but is much lower by PPP.
Purchasing Power Parity if anyone else didnt know.
Correct.
In a way. But Russia is a lot more willing to spill blood.
They're regularly having weeks as bad as 9/11 and they're just not all that notable.
If it came down to both countries fighting for their lives like WWII, then yeah, the 20x would be accurate.
What's with this weird orientalism going on? Talking about Russians like youre some 18th century phrenologist detailing how the Savage hun can withstand harsher climates than the genteel anglo-saxon.
More than a 9/11 died from covid in the US every week and nobody gave a shit. There's a shitton of carcrashes, and no one gives a shit. Britain is full of people starving and no one gives a shit. Long term COVID is crippling the population everywhere and no one gives a shit.
The US had a bunch of grunts perish in Operation Epstein Fury, and all it led to was some coverups and no one gives a shit.
This isn't because the "mind of the mob" is cowed or bred or somehow different from the rest of us. Its because of material conditions. Russia has a lot of military casualties and soldiers on, not because "the Russian mind" or whatever other idealistic dumbassery people in this thread will pull out of their ass, but because of complex political, social, cultural and material structures.
I was wondering why you got so heated about a pretty banal comment, then I saw the .ml lol.
Russia sucks dick, the USSR was kinda cool, but its dead and a bunch of oligarchs are living in its corpse. Why are you dick riding a bunch of corpse beetles?
I generally react quite negatively to racism, and I'm happy to hear the instance I frequent has a reputation for doing the same. Cant imagine being proud about ignoring racism.
You would have supported the invasion of Iraq in the 00's. Or operation Barbarossa if you lived back then. You see calling out racist drivel as somehow being supportive of a country. Not reducing complex geopolitics down to childish notions of "they're just evil!" is somehow the same as driving a tank into Kiev. It is with the mentality you display that we saw people take up arms in WWI under the notion that they'd be home before Christmas - after all, it was just the dastardly hun that needed a darn good thrashing.
You're clearly right, ml. Western counties and Russia are equally likely to commit to ground invasions.
Saying anything else would be racist.
I mean, stack the US and Russia against one another for the last 25 years.
Where is the lie?
I think you responded to the wrong comment?
Its not racist to say people from a country suck.
Actually it is. Hating someone based on where they come from is the most basic type of racism there is.
Lots of people gave a shit. That's the whole reason we had quarantine for over a year.
I don't think it's unfair to say that the Russian government's hard fascist turn in the 90s, and it's decades of corrosive white nationalist domestic politics, has fucked with the heads of many of it's residents in a way the squishy libs in Europe and the US aren't able to conceptualize.
That's not a "calipers" situation. It's the end result of Shock Doctrine economics and attendant toxic culture war politics. And it's not contained to Russia by any means. You see this shit across Eastern Europe and the Middle East. As common in Riyadh and Cairo as Moscow and St. Petersburg.
But it does help to answer the question "Why do Russians seem to have an appetite for endless war that Euros/Americans lack?"
I was pretty close to agreeing with you until we hit the final text
Claiming europeans and americans do not have a massive appetite for war is just ridiculous. Thats why I talk about orientalism and calipers. Its pretty clear there's a good amount of othering going on here, as well as just pure old-fashioned nationalism.
Neither have a draft. Neither have a majority population that actually supports these overseas conflicts. These aren't popular conflicts by any measure.
That hasn't always been the case. Americans were gungho about invading Afghanistan after 9/11. And Iraq had majority support in its opening months. But Libya? Syria? Iran? None of these ever did. They provoked popular backlash the day the first shots were fired.
The Russian media having done a better job of manufacturing consent has nothing to do with their skull size. Again, this is the sort of thing Americans used to be good at. Now they blaze ahead without the pretext of public consent, because the US democratic system has become morbund.
Russian state actors do appear significantly more concerned with "winning hearts and minds" than their Western peers. They invest more in propaganda and social controls.
It also helps that this is a border war and not some conflict happening on the other end of the planet. Russians don't need to read about Ukrainian attacks on Russian soil in the media, they can see it in their own backyards. This isn't twenty years of "Ukraine is just six months away from an Atom Bomb" Thomas Friedman scare stories. This direct conflict amps up the nationalist urgency, in the same way US attacks into Iran and Yemen ignited a firestorm of militarism fueled by newfound nationalist sentiment.
The Russian government and the US government are not mirrors of one another.
Russia used to have a lot of tanks left over from the soviet union. Ukraine has blown most of them up.
Electrified everything I own because fuck Putin. I think the next think to look at is a battery to use off peak energy. Just looked and it appears some much better capacity/£ options are available since I last looked. Its always looking more and more tempting but then I always think about what if I wait for the next one to come out which is even batter?
To be completely fair, Russia has been the number 1 donor of tanks to Ukraine, so they weren't all blown up.
Some companies offer modular batteries, so instead of buying like one big 15kWh battery, you can get 3 5kWh batteries. And there's usually a cabinet or server rack where you can put them together.
That way it's more scalable and easier to add capacity. And when it's time to upgrade or replace them, you can do that in smaller steps instead of all at once.
Have wondered about those, not sure how hard it would be to connect to the whole house. A single ring I could probably do quite easily. Think you need proper sockets/plugs to do it safely rather than the technically works but you may die if you touch the pin kinda cable. Then just flip the circuit breaker to remove that ring from the grid.
But that wouldn't cover cooking or my heat pump. Not sure if that could properly be done as a DIY job.
Though doing 1 ring from the battery would make it pretty easy to measure my non cooking/heating energy usage. Suppose lighting is separate but that should be all LEDs anyway.
And we need all the fish on the right giving missiles to Israel and Israel as it slaughters a little Palestinian fish and they should be sucking off America as they both try to kill the Iran fish.
as the little palestine fish gets dp'd by iran and qatar but is loving it and they get more food and reconstruction aid from the UN fish than anyone else per fish egg but they use iti to build tunnels
and not for shelter of the eggs. thus cursing the eggs to an untimely death by using their homes as human shields
i guess that the sad part of the cartoon
Really showcasing the intelligence of an average Nat-Z here...
Naked fascism.
I wish I lived in the world you insane right-wing freaks make up.
Oh look a zionazi.
Yes, but, nuclear bombs. That matters much less for the usa cause im pretty sure russia literally doesnt have the capabilites to bomb the us cause of missile defense but for europe it matters.
Russia's potential economy is much bigger though:
Just open, Nazi tier racism. But the shitlibs here will upvote it anyway because they're just as racist as the worst MAGA chud, so long as it's against the right target
Yeah man, those simple slavs, their brainpan just isn't shaped for Democracy(TM).
Libs and chauvinism go hand in hand
Are they not? I'm a russian language speaker in Thailand right now and everyone who's not an obedient fool has escaped long time ago or became an obedient slave.
1.5m people either dead or disabled by the war, economy on the brink of collapse, completely outcast from the cosmopolitan world - is that not obedient slavery?
You vastly underestimate how poor a bunch of Russians are, the poor class often stays behind when a crisis hits. While the middle and upper classes use their wealth and connections to jump the boat.
Most refugees were relative to their country, not poor.
Stays behind when crisis hit? The crisis is of their own doing. Russia is a rotten country and a rotten culture that has no one else to blame.
I generally don't like destructive change like revolution but Russians will never recover, never. The culture is so far gone and so broken and so passive that the best thing that could happen to an average russian is complete dissolution of the entire Russian project into independent smaller states.
What a simplistic and reductive worldview. You would do well as an orientalist professor at Oxford in the 1800's. You should look into phrenology.
All you're saying here could be said about most nations, as I exemplified with Britain.
Yeah man, its like when I hear the poors complain about stress. Why don't they simply take a vacation?
"Since I speak english this means I have a unique insight into the mind of the anglo-saxon, and let me tell you, if they haven't uprooted themselves from Albion, then that means they're mindless dolts, unlike me: A person who simply moved to Thailand. Whats stopping them? Why do they not simply overthrow their heinous monarch? It must be because the simple bog-dwellers cannot comprehend morality" <- You, in an alternate universe.Lmao what a delusional eurocentric take. "The Cosmopolitan world" somehow consists of the US and parts of Europe. Alright bud. Whatever shall the Russians do, now that they can only trade with most of the world? Im sure they're crying over the lack of paperwork, while they have to settle for trading with China, India, well- really all of Asia.