I have seen a lot of people hyping this so I thought I would post an antidote. Bottom line, the only one toe worry about is the one they don’t take videos off.
I was the 9 years old when the Berlin wall fell. I was 11 when the Soviet Union ceased to exist. My generation never knew the draft and never really knew a world in which the US was at risk. The fall of the Twin Towers was traumatic for my generation because it revealed that there were people in the world who wanted to kill Americans. But except for a few brief days when nobody knew the full extent of what had happened, no one thought America as whole was in danger. On the scale of a brief national history that includes the Civil War and World War II, the Twin Towers do not even register.
Confident in our power, we destroyed nations to make sure no one would even think of attacking us again. Never in this entire process was the thought that America itself was in the balance. Instead, the debates were about dollars and cents. They were about whether the gains were worth the cost. Whether we were killing bad guys faster than were making more enemies for ourselves. It was a consumer nation at war and we made war as if it was just another product to be consumed or not as we saw fit.
That world is dying and may already be dead. Now war carries with it the devil’s choice of slavery or death. America is not longer a consumer. Now America is just a gambler trying to figure which door has the least bad surprise while trying to pretend it can reason its way to the right answer.
Not everyone has figured that out yet. But the educated fools are getting increasingly panic stricken. Now some people in the Pro-Ukraine camp are starting to openly talk about the need to make sure Ukraine gives in before Russia uses nukes. They are not in the majority for sure. But it is becoming more and more real for people the weaker and weaker that Russia appears on the battle field.
The YouTube channels that I find most informative are not the ones that get featured on these pages most often. There are a number of reasons for that but the main reason is that most of the channels that I find to be “best” are only best if you already have a general knowledge of the conflict. Since I don’t want to presume that level of knowledge, I generally default to videos that presume less knowledge. That said, these are my three favorite because I feel they do the most to educate me and the reasons why.
Best at Military Detail: Reporting from Ukraine
Reporting from Ukraine is the best at explaining the military logic of a situation with details not found on other channels. Sometimes the details are negative facts for Ukraine that other Pro-Ukrainian channels gloss over and Pro-Russian channels hype to the skies. Other times the details he provides are simple military facts that other channels just don’t think are important enough to report. He also makes a virtue of being short and to the point. The only downside is he does not embedded a lot of video so a lot of times it helps to have seen other channels if you want visual evidence of what he is talking about. But this is a small price to pay for his concise detailed overview of what is happening. If you want to see the difference for yourself, watch the video he made today on the fall of Lyman.
There are a lot of sites who love to bring you the latest cool video out of Ukraine. But most of the time, the videos do little to expand your understanding of how things are going even if they are being explained to you by presenter. Suchomimus is different. If he posts a video there are good odds that you are going to learn something from it. The most important thing he does is geo-locate what is going on so you have a sense of what that brief clip is showing you about the wider war. The main downside is that Suchomimus does not do daily updates of how the wider war is going nor does he typically do big picture videos. For that reason, you need to have a good general knowledge of the war to get much out of his videos. Here is an example of Suchomimus giving the goods on a video a lot of other sites were already talking about…
If you have a high level on interest in the Ukraine conflict and fancy yourself pretty well informed, then you need to watch Perun’s videos. The odds are very high that Perun has dug up data that you have not come across and possible he will even put it into a context that you have not considered. The downside is that his videos generally run for an hour or more so he is certainly someone you want to watch on double speed while exercising if at all possible. Here is his video on the Russian Mobilization.
I am not aware of anyone like Perun when it comes to the war in Ukraine so I can’t really compare him to anyone else. Probably for the best. There are only so many hour long videos that can be fit into a work out routine even on double speed.
