This comic is kinda old already, but still stays relevant.
this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2026
793 points (93.6% liked)
Funny
16198 readers
959 users here now
General rules:
- Be kind.
- All posts must make an attempt to be funny.
- Obey the general sh.itjust.works instance rules.
- No politics or political figures. There are plenty of other politics communities to choose from.
- Don't post anything grotesque or potentially illegal. Examples include pornography, gore, animal cruelty, inappropriate jokes involving kids, etc.
Exceptions may be made at the discretion of the mods.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.