Radio War Nerd EP #508 — World of Wars: Hate Thy Enemy, Kursk Collapse, Balochi Bombing
Recorded: March 13, 2025
We discuss Trump arrest of pro-Palestine activist Mahmoud Khalil, the collapse of Ukraine's Kursk bulge & Russia's pipeline rats, Balochi separatists' train-jacking...
*Maps of Kursk Bulge collapse
*Check out RWN #168 — Balochistan Insurgencies
Total time: 58:12
Direct link to this episode's mp3 here
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Comments (35)
Fantastic ep. Love the biography style ones.
Correction. Drones pretty much never attack armor from the top or hit its wheels/tracks. What we see is them going after engines (to immobilize), drivers (to immobilize), under turret (the least protected gap with a chance to ignite the ammo and kill the crew).
File under ‘insufficient good news’: 103 Congresspeople, all Dems I think, have by now signed Rashida Tlaib’s letter.
Why don’t the Ukrainians pull back a bit and mine the front lines out to allow the Russians to blow their legs and armor up? The Russians did that in Zapporizhia and it worked, seems like a winning strategy
Additionally I have a bit of a quarrel with the description of the Istanbul ceasefire. Firstly, the “federalism” proposal would have included the coequal check of the Donbas republics on the national parliament (something which Mark has previously explicitly described as a way for the Russian state to have a permanent veto on all national Ukrainian politics). Secondly, the NYT reported that for Ukraine to sign the terms demanded they required security guarantees (arms transfers) from the west if they were invaded again by Russia. Unfortunately at the last minute the Russian negotiation team demanded that it would be able to veto any security guarantees sent to Ukraine should it invade Ukraine again. These weren’t the only issues but they were probably the two biggest. I’m all for a fair and honest discussion about the wests sabotage of negotiations etc but it seems nobody wants to admit that Putins terms were so onerous that they naturally led to negotiations collapsing and Ukraine balking, and likely would have (at least at that point) regardless of western pressure. It doesn’t benefit anybody to depoliticize and mystify the demands made by Russia of Ukraine because ultimately Ukraine will only sign a deal worth signing and it doesn’t seem to me Russia has ever fielded one. Maybe an episode dedicated purely to the actual specific political substance of the various negotiations between Ukraine, the west, Turkey, Russia and the DPR/LPR would be best in the future, because I think a lot of people basically just project onto them what they want and after I looked into them I stopped being sympathetic to Russia more or less entirely.
We urgently need Jack Murphy to tell us the sad fate of North Korean troops in Kursk.
Mark has mentioned a few times the seemingly high percentage of Canadians who desire a US invasion. I suspect what we’re seeing is the percentage who select the craziest response on a survey. The number is comparable to the proportion of respondents who apparently believe the world is flat.
The portion of Canadians that "desire an American invasion" are just the wackiest parts of our conservative movement, who have been a fully-integrated appendage of the American conservative movement for some time now. Many of the people who will answer this way to pollsters, however, are just grumpy conservatives being hyperbolic about their dislike for the ruling Liberal party.
But yeah as of this morning the pogrom death toll in syria is said to be 7000 minimum
The EU actually condemned the victims lol for being pro assad
One of the dumber stories from kursk was that thousands and thousands of NK troops were getting debilitating porn addictions because it was the first time they ever got to see porn Never mind that porn addiction is fake, you would think the west would want to paint Russia as sexually conservative and anti porn
John Dolan’s f-bomb at 49:58 on hearing what Charles Lister’s been up to lately. 😂
re: hide your pride - npr is just following the bbc and the guardian; and just like with them, must admit have little sympathy for corporate gay employees who ignored all those annoying activists protesting their pride floats' trucking happily alongside bae systems, palantir et al for years (who of course knew this would happen the entire time). In the UK, trade unionists were excluded from official pride parades in favour of cops, private prison companies and arms dealers even during the peak disingenuous 'we want that pink currency so we are briefly pretending we don't want to kick your heads in' period. No amount of wallet inspecting from mr. owen 'i love alawite massacres' jones about 'exposing' the bbc (he wanted 20 Gs recently because he conducted cosy interviews with bbc workers!) will make the cowards whining anonymously whilst drawing salary any less pathetic. this may seem harsh/an unhinged rant, but when you've seen a few dozen of these party, state, political and murdoch stooges whine in the privacy of their shitty gentrified new builds about how hard their life betraying 'their community' is because they think their undergrad degree makes them a higher class of being than the poors who weren't smart enough to sell their souls to wes streeting or whatever, the bile is always bubbling. they even admit it's all just for 'the mortgage'! it's so common a justification it comes across as a thought terminating cliche, to be honest.
Eyup Lovely, is that you?
John Dolan’s comment about evolutionary biology at 45:29 sounds Nietzschian, wondering if the Nerd likes Zarathustra…
there's a David Borys who does the podcast Curious Canadian History that has done a brief overview of past conflicts between the US and Canada that's fairly decent
The f bomb from Jon is a rarest Pokémon of all, I think the first time he’s dropped it right? This lister fella must be a real asshole
36:30 - the fiber optic wire spool is onboard the drone, not being pulled from the launch team’s position. It just drops more line when there’s any resistance at all so it won’t get caught up. They carry enough fiber optic however many meters or miles of range they need
silly question, but how are they protected by someone crossing the t of the very thin long wire?
I continue praying every day that major unions wake up and form a Labor Party. I feel so convinced it would sweep!!
that's how you get kier starmer 😬
Disappointed that Mark has reverted back to saying Boris Johnson instead of Boris Jordan as he has in the past couple episodes. It was good while it lasted.
The Hashemite Kingdom of Boris Jordan
A song reveling in the desire to destroy the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRH-lRNODAo
Is RWN trying to crash the economy by putting out so many banger episodes so quickly
We always knew they were accelerationists!!
I have to correct an amateur hour mistake you made, Mark. You didn't call the Kursk invasion a stupid decision "for months". You both predicted it perfectly the episode it happened lol
Well the 1952 bill certainly did expose the Jewish influence on American politics and culture
Drones are the new crossbows, taking out the armored knights (tanks)
Hmmm, or blackpowder, knights are the airforce traditionally. More upper class. And it's a replacement for that. You even see the cultural pull of the manned flyer vs the drone. They invoke those same old ideas of honor and chivalry as reason to keep the manned plane, even if the drone is obviously the future primary platform
Dean Reed has a song about this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jC4H5pHGCZ8
49:53 Leave it to Lister... Normally on the podcast, Dolan remains grimly stoic even when discussing the most awful subjects. I think this is the only time on RWN so far that he's just reacted with a "Fuck" of revulsion when learning about something.
I rewound that. Those Syria ghouls are the worst.
They can’t keep posting this many episodes!!
They’re probably just throwing these episodes out there with no training and only shovels