"We've used 5% of our defense budget to arm Ukraine. And with it, they've destroyed 50% of Putin's army." - Ad targeted to Republicans to support Ukraine
Streamable Video
Unfortunately, the target audience also wear shirts which say "I'd rather be Russian than democrat"
They may take it as an attack against themselves.
They should go sign up to fight on the Russian front lines then
Nah, it's easier for them to sit on their fatasses and do the bare minimum of movement while they tout their shitty flags and shirts about in their traitorous stances. They're the same people that wouldn't even sign up to be in the US Army, but will swear up and down about "IF I WAS THERE..." stories of power fantasies.
What TV channel is that on?
Da comrade we have comprehensive sign up bonus (is one small potato and 25 ruble)
Some do.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Bentley
(Of course his nickname is 'texas')
There are many thousands of foreign volunteer fighters on either side of this.
This guy is a special kind of dumb, though.
Are you on the Ukrainian front lines?
But if you can reframe Ukraine as sticking it to those democrats who don't like military, they might be on board.
The target audience are independents and the few sane (but denialist) Republicans left. I think the ad's goal is to drive them away from the republican party.
It's also a social media only ad.
It is fucking golden considering they used to say "rather be dead than red". I swear to god you can't make this shit up.
Unfortunately, the target audience also wear shirts which say "I'd rather be Russian than democrat"
You can tell them "take your conscription"
Whatever happened to "Better dead than red"?
Liberty Prime needs to make a comeback.
Wtf are you talking about? Republicans hate Russia
@Wilshire I cannot think of a time in recent history when we have gotten more bang for our military buck than supporting #Ukraine against #Russia .
Not only are we doing the right thing by helping a democratic nation fight an invasion by an expansionist regime, but this aid has helped weaken one of our two main adversaries, and serves as a warning to China.
This is truly one of those win/win situations where the only debate should be the degree of military aid, not whether we support Ukraine.
Besides. Ukraine gave up nukes because we promised to protect them. There's a tremendous cost to going back on our word for soooo many reasons.
We didn't promise to protect them. But Russia and the US both promised not to invade.
Of course, we should still help them because it's the right thing to do AND is harmful to our average.
But I do think the worst thing about this war from a geopolitics standpoint is Russia going back on its word. They've essentially proven that no nation should ever give up their nukes.
It's not win/win....if you're Russia 😂
I am from Russia and I say it win/win/win for USA, Ukraine and Russia.
"I'm rooting for you[ukrainians], because Ukraine's victory is Russia's chance",
"You are fighting and dying for them[Putin and oligarchs], not for Russia",
"This is not war of Russia and Ukraine. I am against such definition. This is Putin's war."
Boris Nemtsov, before he was shot on bridge near Kremlin wall
...Or one of the Russian owned GOP congressmen
I am emphatically in favor of supporting Ukraine but you should be aware that Zelensky has suspended elections. I wouldn't call Ukraine totalitarian but a true democracy never suspends elections, even when they're inconvenient. The United States has never done it despite always being at war and I don't think we should give a pass to other nations just because they're at war.
Zelensky didn't suspend elections. The Ukrainian constitution suspended elections--the country is under martial law due to invasion, and their constitution disallows elections under martial law. In order to hold elections, Zelensky would have to disregard the constitution.
Assuming every nation's constitution is the same as the United States and then judging actions based on that error is some high-level cultural arrogance.
'At war' is not the same as defending yourself from an invasion, which the US has not had to do since it has existed in it's current form. Also, governments have suspended elections in the past when necessary. For instance, the UK suspended elections during WW2 via the 'Prolongation of parliament' bill, while they were defending themselves from a German invasion.
https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1944/oct/31/prolongation-of-parliament-bill
America has never been invaded to the level that its existence as an independent country has been threatened, at least not since the war of independence.
During WWII the UK postponed elections. We even have explicit rules for how this can be done, when required. Wartime is one of the situations where it can be required. The complexity of holding an election under wartime conditions is huge. It is also a serious distraction from actually winning the war, and so costs lives. Finally, changing leadership, mid war is risky at best. The time for a new leader to settle in is paid for in lives lost.
US has never been at war in the homeland. That would make a huge difference. Plus it would probably be much easier during the chaos for Russia to subvert the Ukrainian elections. But that's just me talking out my ass. Definitely good to be aware though. If the US did it, it would at least be through congressional action.
Considering that out of 3 posts, 2 have been pro-russia...maybe you should just STFU
Yeah fuck off with that. We'll supply with Ukraine with so many weapons it'll destroy putlers hateful regime. The idiot fascist only understands violence. So violence is what he will get.
AFAIK he suspended elections in Donetsk, Lughansk and Zaporizhzhia for obvious reasons.
Yeah, but the USA fights all its wars a long way from home.
If the Rocky Mountains were swarming with Reds, you might find the election cycle interrupted somewhat.
How are people going to vote for a new president when half the population is on the front?
There is something new that tends to get in the way of things, it's called war!
I hope it works, but I have so little faith in Republican voters anymore.
Actually I think this is one of the keys to freeing the minority of the country that insists on being stupid as shit. They love trump but loyalty to the military runs far deeper. Find me a right leaning fuck who doesn't at least pay lip service to the military. Of course they don't actually support them, but it's a potent motivator that they at least feel like they're doing so.
So not unlike when you have to work certain angles to get a toddler to take a bath or go to bed, so must steps be taken to try and pry these people out of their death cult spiral. The alternative is to likely be dragged down with them.
Does this include giving them old equipment which they'd have to dispose of anyway? Because that's not exactly "spending". Some even say that it saves money because they have no disposal cost.
Hopefully Ukraine keeps “disposing” all of our ammunition in the general direction of the invaders.
That stuff has a limited shel(l)f life anyways.
Work smart, not hard. That's still a winning argument for me
Cluster shells
Thats assuming the republicans and tankies WANT Putin's army destroyed. To them, this sounds like what a normal person would hear if we said: "We've used 5% of our defense budget to arm the IRA and 50% of Britain's army has been destroyed."
The IRA deal sounds nice, can we add that to the budget?
It's only Republican politicians who are in love with Russia. Everyone else still hates them due to Cold War propaganda.
Plenty of leftist-Tankies here on Lemmy's federation where I've had to explain that yes, Russia is a problem and what they're doing to Ukraine should be stopped.
The left is doing a good job preventing the Tankies from taking over their party however. Republicans are letting the far-right dictate politics and are likely going to (try to) cut Ukraine out of the budget this week. So the far-right is a bigger problem, if only because Republicans are failing to rise up and counter the threat from their own party.
No, Republicans are in love with Putin. Putin hates Russia, Republican do the same.
I fucking hate computer generated voices, the cadence is always fucking weird. This one is far too fast, and the pause between words is too short.
It's just weird.
Thinking out loud, I wonder if it's better to aim computer generated voices to be understandable and pronounce words correctly, but place them firmly on the lower side of the Uncanny Valley. In other words, let them be noticeably different, but otherwise comprehensible.
For ads and movies and such, obviously those companies want the most realistic voices they can. But for voice assistants, maybe it's better if we don't.
I haven't watched it yet. Guessing it's the one male voice used on all those TikToks that I can't stand.
Update: it wasn't but it was damn close.
Since i work in media i can tell you with 99.9% certainty that's not an AI-generated voice. It's just cut a bit too tightly and the super low quality of the audio track doesn't help either.
Give em 20%
It's hard to say, that it's prooved. Probably even the US Ministry of Defence has no totaly exact lists.
But there are good estimations based on reports and leaked footage.
For example oryx has a list with destroyed vehicles and equipment based on photographic or videographic evidence. The real numbers are probably significantly higher.
After this list the russian army lost more than 2000 tanks. Ukrainian sources says that the Invasion started with more than 3000 tanks.
Ca. 1000 of the 2000 lost tanks were T-72 (the most common tank in the russian army). According to estimations russia has 2000 T-72 in active service and maybe 10.000 or more as reserves. The reserves are mostly remnants of the soviet Union and old models that are never modernized. Satellite pictures show that a big part of this reserves are stored in open depots with no weather protection. Maybe russia could make some of this vehicles usable, it will cost Billions to repair and modernize them.
So, no there is no proof, that the ukrainian army destroyed 50% of the russian forces. But there are proofs that russia lost a significant part of its active forces (probably something close to this claim) and that they definitly lost much more value than the americans, the europeans, ect. invested in the ukrainian army.
https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenting-equipment.html?m=1
https://inews.co.uk/news/world/tanks-russia-how-many-putin-military-ukraine-leopard-2-abrams-2108097
wikipedia napkin math. with 1.15 million and at least two million reserve personnel.
~3.15 million personelle. ukraine hasnt killed that many; probably around 300k. their probably talking about the number of troops in ukraine. which is probably around 700k for the duration of the war. if you count just the 1.15mil is probably close to it now.
No proof, just rambles.
There's enormous amounts of anti-russian comments and Russia phobia on the English speaking parts of the internet to where unbiased information is extremely hard to find.
You should check out "red effect" on YouTube. He's the closest thing I've found to being unbiased
EDIT: found OPs source lol https://vid.pr0gramm.com/2023/09/25/187e9f46663d04ee.mp4
Of course, YouTube, the ultimate source of unbiased and reliable information.
Lmfao yeah get your advice from the worst fucking video platform out there, who’s notoriously had issues with fake news and conspiracy theory nutjobs.
Also please go look up what it means to be biased
Maybe then you’ll understand why being unbiased against a global threat is fundamentally impossible. You will always have a bias, the difference is being objective and following good media practices like using several, diversified resources that have minimal bias and thus provides a more comprehensive picture.
It’s similar to AI training, you want to retain the orthogonal items that are unique to preserve the best image
When you see "russophobia" are you really seeing disapproval of a dictatorship?
There's no such thing as unbiased. At best you'll get considerate analysis. Even publications renowned for their lack of bias (Reuters for example) will have some bias in favour of things like free speech and freedom of the press, because ofc they do. That said, proper sources should both be professional, ethcial journalists and strive to be unbiased as much as possible. Also, FTR just because an article is critical of russia doesn't mean it is biased. Information can be objectively bad. News that informs about say a mass murder spree is not (necessarily) pro-murder and there is very little one can objectively say is Good about russia unless you get into the realm of arguments like 'Tyrants are better than anarchy'.
Or the closest thing you've found to your own bias?
If you could reason with them they wouldn’t be republicans.
We should stop trying to convince them with logic, and start paying off the far right talking heads to change their talking points. If fox and newsmax pundits, and the shitty far right members of congress (like bimbobert and MTG and minor-lover matt gaetz) did an about face overnight, so would the entire republican base.
Republicans are really beyond trying to logic, reason with and even barter with. It's their way or the highway, all of the time, about anything.
Give them an inch, they want miles. Give them something, they'll want everything.
“Meet me in the middle,” said the unjust man.
You take one step forward, he takes one step back.
“Meet me in the middle,” said the unjust man.
— A. R. Maxon
They don't want money (which they already have anyway), they want power and control over others - which is why they project that onto Democrats.
So I can start warming up the tar and pluck some feathers now? /s
This is mostly true but in politics you constantly deal in partial success . If 5 percent of the audience are swayed to not vote over voting GOP even that is worth it.
Does anyone have a source about the Russian attrition rate? I can’t find one
They’re conservative about planes and attack helis but have enough. Money is good, oil good, cash reserves ok debt to GDP more than good. Workforce very big but affected
But still... They’re low on tanks, artillery shells, Combat experience, Air defence systems,
Russia as a whole is doing fine attrition wise but they’re equipment is being blown back 40 years. On top of that Ukrainians are doing very well and are cost effective. Russia spends multiple $ for every $ sent to Ukraine.
The Russians are liquidating the Soviet stockpile that was built while they were a global military superpower. They don't have the capacity to rebuild that arsenal. Russia is being taken off the world stage as a military power for at least three decades.
Sanctions are hurting them so badly that they are importing weapons from China (small arms, armor), Iran (drones) & North Korea (shells).
They are low on shells, tanks and AA. Combat experience is more than anyone would want.
It's worded in such a way as to be meaningless - half of what? The original number of Russian soldiers, the original number plus Wagner and other extra troops, the current number deployed with/without mercenaries? Plus Russia's numbers don't look like US numbers, don't quite look like Ukraines numbers.
That said heres the first source I found:
Russia’s military casualties, the officials said, are approaching 300,000. The number includes as many as 120,000 deaths and 170,000 to 180,000 injured troops. The Russian numbers dwarf the Ukrainian figures, which the officials put at close to 70,000 killed and 100,000 to 120,000 wounded.
...
Russia has almost triple that number, with 1,330,000 active-duty, reserve and paramilitary troops — most of the latter from the Wagner Group.
Those numbers refer to the current number of deployed and undeployed Russian soldiers plus mercenaries, which is clearly not the numbers the ad is using.
To be clear, I fully support Ukraine and fully support the US guaranteeing missile manufacturers that we will buy new missiles even if the war ends tomorrow to incentivise greater production. I just think the ad played with the numbers until they said what we want them to say.
Source for both quotes: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/18/us/politics/ukraine-russia-war-casualties.html
The over 1m stat is a bit of an exaggeration - the more accurate figure is closer to 750,000. See https://cepa.org/article/russias-military-manpower-crunch-will-worsen/
Charitably, 300,000 casualties would be ~40%. Of course it's still very good value for military spending...
are approaching 300,000.
Sounds legit. Last batch of IDs for families with dead soldiers is slightly more than 300k.
Sorry about the other answer being vague. The actual numbers are military secrets and we’ll have to wait for a leak to actually know.
Perun did an analysis a couple of weeks ago. In short, Russia is building new stuff, but the mix of losses show a fair bit of stockpile has been used. https://youtu.be/ctrtAwT2sgs
I doubt it will get their support seeing as they’re in bed together.
Considering they’ve resorted to lying to Cubans to hire them as mercenaries…probably.
No
Is this an AI generated ad? It seems like they tried to fit as many talking points as possible.
They had to keep it to simple, short phrases for the Republicans
They also edited out any breath pauses from the narrator. I've heard that voice over many years of political ads. They may have modled a cg voice from a real person, or they edited the hell out of a genuine voice over.
Not only that, but it will take decades and a lot of money to get back to their original military strength.
It would have taken a decade and a lot of money just to achieve the strength we (and they) thought they were at before the war started.
If you want to sell conservatives on supporting Ukraine, just tell them “it’s for the children.”
That seems to work for everything with them wether it has anything to do with children or not. Also, you could say that Ukraine hates gays. It’s clearly not true, but since when did facts ever matter to them?
Otherwise, they’ll see no benefit in supporting Ukrainian as the personally get nothing from it- and we all know that conservatives don’t care about anything unless it serves them in some way.
Things like discounted preschool, daycare and kindergarten for all = evil & despicabl
also, free school lunches and CHIP = eViL sOcIaLiSm
Also, you could say that Ukraine hates gays. It’s clearly not true, but since when did facts ever matter to them?
They do not hate them, but as a part of Eastern Europe it's not so gay-friendly, at least on the grassroot level, so you could get some facts in to support this if you wish to do so. They'll be in tears of joy when they will hear that the government will be supporting a nation with true men and stuff like this.
It's worth noting that the definition of M1 changed in 2020, which accounts for the significant jump in that year.
Further reading: https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2021/01/whats-behind-the-recent-surge-in-the-m1-money-supply/
Edit: Linked article also has the complete graph going all the way to 2023, which shows that spike dropping again within one year.
TL;DR :
Another measure of the money supply adds these savings deposits and checkable money funds to M1: It’s known as, you guessed it, M2. From the graph, we see that the growth rate of M2 has remained relatively stable since May 2020. This suggests that the rapid acceleration in M1 since May 2020 is mainly from money moving out of the non-M1 components of M2 into M1, rather than reflecting any acceleration in the demand for transaction balances.
Edit: Quoted wrong paragraph(s) in TL;DR
citation please
When it comes down to it, this is a hell of a deal for the US. We spend a tiny fraction of our military budget to de-fang Putin and don't have to fire a single shot ourselves.
Better than defanging is real world testing.
What worked as expected, what didn't, how we can make it better etc.
It's not often you get to deploy these weapons.
What will happen to the US defense budget now that we know it's unnecessary?
That was rhetorical by the way, I know it's going to increase.
I'm not sure just how much the US spends on weapon testing, but I imagine it's a bonkers number. And now they get an opportunity to test in a real environment, with some other country's army to do much of the heavy lifting?
I do software dev and testing stuff is expensive. Real world testing is a particularly difficult and pricey thing to do. It's not easy to simulate realistic usage and it's super common to discover all sorts of issues only when something is used outside of controlled conditions. That's why so many web products get the hug of death. It's why Lemmy has had so many problems not just with scaling, but things like UX. It's so easy to not realize even "obvious" problems when you don't have a large number of real users.
Well and its old equipment not stuff coming right off the line which would have to be decommissioned at cost at eol.
Not that im against defanging putin, but then the next one will come and the next one and the next one. Are there even russians that are not pro war?
Maybe you are being genuine so I'll try to be too, you're wrong to fear what comes next. Historically new leaders don't in totalitarian states don't want an external war, they want to secure their lot, make sure they are protected, shore up support.
Children are being kidnapped, prisoners of war ar being tortured, civilians raped, towns and cities cut off from water or flooded, left to freeze over winter. What exactly do you think is coming next? Someone with more efficiency? Less morals? Thanos?
there are but most of them left the country
Yes there are
Let's see... From top of my head: Boris Nemtsov, Alexey Navalny, Ekaterina Shulman, entire Anti-Corruption Foundation and more than half of alive Russian soldiers(counting dead soldiers more than 2/3).
"This is not war of Russia and Ukraine. I an against such definition. This is Putin's war."
Boris Nemtsov, before he was shot on bridge near Kremlin wall
P.s. funny story about soldiers. Some idiots(thank you, idiots!) from Omsk decided to open voting station near front line for governor and regional parlament. Since soldiers officially don't have internet, there was no Remote Electronic Voting(ДЭГ) and 100% voted with paper. And since paint protocols and stuff boxes is scary in front of armed men, it wasn't done at usual scale. In result hard-core pro-war United Russia governor candidate got less than 50% and I think even lost on those stations.
It doesn't really matter if you're pro-war if you no longer have a standing army. At that point, it's just wishful thinking.