• CarmineCatboy2 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    15 days ago

    Some things are just impossible to spin. Having to lower conscription to 18 is one of those. You can’t pretend that Russia is losing 10 people to every Ukrainian at that point or that Ukraine has no casualties. The visceral reaction to kids being sent to war overrules everything else, and then you start realizing that the older men got no training whatsoever either.

      • CarmineCatboy2 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        14 days ago

        I meant spin mostly for foreign audiences, right. The euro-american NATOist who feels very strongly about the war is just a coward several million steps removed from it all. Whereas your family is in the thick of it. At the very least they are trying to survive mentally, and are invested in the war in a much more visceral way. Their rationalizations are much more powerfully built and that’s without even considering, as you mentioned, the ethnonationalist side of it all.

      • CarmineCatboy2 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        14 days ago

        Oh, they have. On reddit I’ve seen NAFO posters continuously talk about how the real problem is that Ukraine was never on conscription and never actually mobilized. Which is insane in the face of the news piece. But rather than question those assertions, the system just overwhelms them with posts of people talking about how 18yos are children, the war must be stopped and things must be collapsing. It’s as if reality kicked the propagandist out of their soapbox.