RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Read Mearsheimer's 'The Israel Lobby'.
It's absolutely astonishing how much Israel gets from the US and how much harm it causes the US.
Israel didn't participate in either of the Gulf Wars (in fact they sucked up Patriot missile batteries that could've been used elsewhere due to Iraqi Scud strikes attempting to fracture the US-led Coalition). They provided dubious/faulty intelligence on Iraq's WMDs to encourage the second Gulf War. Their invasion of Lebanon in 1982 led to the foundation of Hezbollah, which then attacked US forces in the area. People like Ramzi Yousef (first WTC bomber) was a single-issue anti-Israeli terrorist. Osama Bin Laden was heavily influenced by US support for Israel (and its treatment of Palestinians) in the development of his views. Iran's nuclear program is a threat to US interests aside from Israel but it was heavily motivated by the Israeli nuclear arsenal. Said arsenal also exposes the lie in the US's non-proliferation efforts and makes it harder for the US to negotiate.
While Israel did help beat up Soviet allies in the Middle East, US unwillingness to sell weapons to Egypt and co pushed them towards the Soviets in the first place. The Cold War is over, so the US could dump Israel like they dumped South Africa.
The US-Israeli alliance angers a lot of Arabs making them uncooperative with the US (even supposedly US-friendly states worry about losing their legitimacy by openly helping the US). When the US provided massive aid to Israel in the 1973 war the Arabs responded with an oil embargo that cost the US hundreds of billions of dollars.
Furthermore, US aid to Israel is unusually generous in scale and type. The US funded billions for the development of indigenous, Israeli-only weapons like the Merkava tank and the (cancelled) Lavi aircraft. The US prepositioned military supplies in Israel (ostensibly for their own use there), which the Israelis then used for their 2006 war in Lebanon. The US provides billions of dollars to Israel's neighbours like Egypt and Jordan to maintain good relations with Israel. The aid Israel gets has very little oversight and it gets sent out at the beginning of the year rather than in monthly or quarterly installments, so they get interest on it.
And then there's all the espionage, selling US technology to the Chinese and the USS Liberty incident.
The US has allies who actually participate in American wars, who provide useful intelligence and bases, who don't cause all kinds of problems for the US. Nobody else gets special treatment like this, a fact that is due to the astonishing power of the Israel lobby. They have tremendous influence. I'll add some excerpts from the book:
Former House Speaker Richard Armey said in September 2002 that "my No. 1 priority in foreign policy is to protect Israel."
Morris Amitay, a former head of AIPAC, once noted, "There are a lot of guys at the working level up here [on Capitol Hill] . . . who happen to be Jewish, who are willing . . . to look at certain issues in terms of their Jewishness . . . These are all guys who are in a position to make the decision in these areas for those senators . . . You can get an awful lot done just at the staff level
Bill Clinton once described AIPAC as "stunningly effective" and "better than anyone else lobbying in this town," while former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called it "the most effective general-interest group . . . across the entire planet."
Harry Lonsdale, the Democratic candidate who ran unsuccessfully against Senator Mark Hatfield (R-OR) in 1990, has described his own visit to AIPAC headquarters during that campaign. "The word that I was pro-Israel got around," he writes. "I found myself invited to AIPAC in Washington, D.C., fairly early in the campaign, for 'discussions.' It was an experience I will never forget. It wasn't enough that I was pro-Israel. I was given a list of vital topics and quizzed (read grilled) for my specific opinion on each. Actually, I was told what my opinion must be, and exactly what words I was to use to express those opinions in public . . . Shortly after that encounter at AIPAC, I was sent a list of American supporters of Israel . . . that I was free to call for campaign contributions. I called; they gave, from Florida to Alaska.
Philip Zelikow, a member of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board ( 2001 - 03 ) , executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and counsellor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ( 2005 - 06 ) , told a University of Virginia audience on September 10, 2002 , that Saddam was not a direct threat to the United States. "The real threat," he argued, is "the threat against Israel." He went on to say, "And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don't care deeply about that threat . . . And the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.
There's an entire chapter devoted to Israel's antipathy for Syria (over the Golan Heights which the Israelis annexed from Syria and the Syrians want back) and attempts to get America to deal with them. Familiar names like John Bolton pop up now and again, it's like seeing the prequel to a TV show. Now that Syria's been engulfed in an extremely bloody civil war, it's easy to see how Israeli influence might have been involved in bringing the US into the conflict. US troops still patrol parts of Eastern Syria to this day.
And the book goes on further! There's the Lebanon chapter, where the Israelis killed 1100 Lebanese civilians after Hezbollah killed a handful of their soldiers. They were partially using nominally US-owned weapons as part of their war effort, of course. The calumnies and skullduggery just goes on and on...
I have great sympathy for the tankies on the matter of Israel and media bias.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
I'm going to slightly infringe the rules by posting this twitter thread, which is very much wage-the-culture-war. I fully assume they're being misleading/inflammatory with their statistics and some of the textual-image commentary.
https://twitter.com/Composite_Guy2/status/1569253995411038211
I only want to highlight the videos, which can't be lies. (How many months until we can't say that honestly, due to AI?). We have an old lady and her friend getting threatened by an angry young man into giving up their seat to him. We have a teen getting robbed, beaten and pissed on. We have a clueless girl getting hit in the head and knocked over just for laughs. We have what appears to be a younger teen getting forced to kneel and then getting hit anyway.
This isn't people merely despising one another's way of life. There are rural people who despise city-dwellers and vis versa. It's fairly popular to despise the US in the Anglosphere, the tired old memes about obesity, ignorance and school shootings. But this is relatively good-natured, thoughts and words only. You and I might despise those climate protestors who close off roads in peak hour and stop people getting to work. But we don't actually track them down, go out of our way to beat them and humiliate them.
I think that what's really happening is ritual humiliation. I have a proper, long form link that gets more into similar events in Austria and Germany. The article argues convincingly that these egregious cases (obviously not every migrant does this) are not merely a clash of cultures or sudden exposure to alcohol but a profound, deep hatred for Western civilization. I think that this hatred is expressed in crimes of humiliation - sex crimes and low-value public aggression like bullying people for the fun of it.
Let’s leave aside the reprehensibility of this conduct for the moment and focus instead on its logic or lack thereof. Can these men possibly expect that their attempts will be successful? Do they actually think they will be able to rape a woman on the main street of a town in the middle of the day? On a train filled with other passengers? In a frequented public park in the early afternoon? Are they incapable of logical thought—or is that not even their aim? Do they merely want to cause momentary female hysteria and touch some forbidden places of a stranger’s body? Is that so gratifying that it’s worth jeopardizing their future and being hauled off to jail by scornful and disgusted Europeans? What is going on here?
Perhaps despising and humiliating are just two parts of the same scale, like how infra-red and x-rays are the same thing but with more energy. In any event, they should be treated differently. X-rays cause cancer.
You think he doesn't mention Camp David?
As discussed in Chapter 1, the American delegation at Camp David took most of its cues from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, coordinated negotiating positions with Israel in advance, and did not offer its own independent proposals for settling the conflict. Even the "Clinton parameters" presented in December 2000 were less an independent American proposal than Clinton's summary of where the negotiations stood and his assessment of the bargaining space within which a solution might be found. Palestinian negotiators complained that the Israelis would sometimes present them with a specific proposal, and then later the Americans would offer the same idea, only the Americans would label it a "bridging proposal." As another member of the U.S. team later admitted, Israeli proposals were often "presented [to the Palestinians] as U.S. concepts, not Israeli ones," a subterfuge that fooled no one and reinforced Palestinian suspicions. Not surprisingly, Palestinian representatives protested that they were "negotiating with two Israeli teams—one displaying an Israeli flag, and one an American flag.
Let's not forget Israeli involvement in the ill-fated Suez operation. There was a third party to Britain and France's invasion, that managed to escape most of the blame. As I said above, Egypt and Syria moved towards the Soviet Union because the US was unwilling to sell them weapons that might be used against Israel. Israel certainly didn't help bring the Arab world towards the US - quite the opposite.
Furthermore, why is the US aiding Egypt? To benefit Israel, as I said above.
Finally, the aid that the United States provides to several of Israel's neighbors is at least partly intended to benefit Israel as well. Egypt and Jordan are the number two and three recipients of U.S. foreign aid, but most of this money should be seen as a reward for good behavior—specifically, their willingness to sign peace treaties with Israel. Egypt received $71.7 million in U.S. aid in 1974, but it got $1.127 billion in 1975 and $ 1.320 billion in 1976 (in constant 2005 dollars) following completion of the Sinai II disengagement agreement. U.S. aid to Egypt reached $2.3 billion in 1978 and soared to a whopping $5.9 billion in 1979, the year the Egypt-Israeli peace treaty was signed. Cairo still gets about $2 billion annually. Similarly, Jordan received $ 76 million in direct aid in 1994 and only $57 million in 1995, but Congress rewarded King Hussein's decision to sign a peace treaty in 1994 by forgiving Jordan's $ 700 million debt to the United States and removing other restrictions on U.S. aid. Since 1997, U.S. aid to Jordan has averaged roughly $ 566 million annually. U.S. willingness to reward Egypt and Jordan in this way is yet another manifestation of Washington's generosity toward the Jewish state.
And compare the magnitude! This is a lot of money for a fairly wealthy country.
In per capita terms, this level of direct foreign assistance amounts to a direct subsidy of more than $ 500 per year for each Israeli. By comparison, the number two recipient of American foreign aid, Egypt, receives only $ 20 per person, and impoverished countries such as Pakistan and Haiti receive roughly $5 per person and $27 per person, respectively.
Finally, Mearsheimer's suggested strategy in Ukraine does not espouse offensive realism but realism generally as opposed to liberalism, which he blames for NATO expansion. Just because he invented offensive realism it does not follow that he endorses it for all situations. Rising powers like China should be treated to declining powers like Russia, in his mind. Context matters.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Absolutely right. But what's the point of having this ally if they're really just a liability to your warfighting ability?
The mere existence of the US-Israel special relationship complicates US military strategy.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
They sort of do this in Turkey. Daytime television is filled with marriage shows, only legitimating dating and flirting within the context of marriage and reproduction. When the AKP (Erdogan's party) took power, they shifted the entire cultural/media apparatus to be more pro-family, buying up channels and manipulating the programs they showed. This naturally came at the cost of the rights-based understanding of gender equality. Government leaders announce that they're doing everything for the family, that they want people to reproduce.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
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Iraq invades Kuwait
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US and coalition attacks Iraq
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Iraq attacks Israel
Why did Iraq attack Israel? To break up the US coalition! If the US had stayed ambivalent throughout the Arab-Israeli conflict, Iraq wouldn't be diverting missiles to target Israel. They hit Israel because they're a US ally, because the other Arabs hate them.
If it weren't for Israel, it would've been much easier to create a coalition against Iraq, since countries like Syria wouldn't have lingering distrust with the US for aiding their enemy.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Is that Shireposting you're thinking of? I left Shireposting because it got too political back in 2020.
Better yet, just stop checking facebook in general. The advertising is obnoxious.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Hoping that intervention will remedy innate differences reminds me of people hoping that their crypto portfolios will recover.
What, in the sense that it's happened several times before (across the market and with individual portfolios)? That this reality can be easily shown by a 20 second google search?
Why not just use a simple and accurate metaphor like pigs flying?
Furthermore, it's not established that women have higher IQ than men, some evidence seems to suggest that men have a higher average, though higher male variance would complicate this somewhat.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
It's an interesting question just what territory you need to defend to defend free speech. Property and transaction rights are obviously important for free speech:
"Tell me, Mr. Anderson, what good is a website if you are unable to pay for DDOS protection?"
If you've got people campaigning to centralize the political system or otherwise get the tools needed to remove freedom of speech, then that's a problem, as you say. Yet this sort of 'paradox of intolerance' argument has its own problems. Who is a fair arbiter to discern the genuinely threatening authoritarians from people who get labelled authoritarian?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Vaush is absolutely a disingenuous grifter.
He backflipped from 'rape and sexual assault of women is such an important, underappreciated issue that society tragically ignores' to 'bullshit, she's lying, Muslims would never rape white women in Australia' in real time. This isn't just standard politician inconsistency but completely refusing to believe evidence after it disfavours his cause - in a matter of seconds.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Absolutely, crying one's way to victory is not a legitimate strategy. It certainly shouldn't be effective.
I saw a video the other day of some Louisiana senator and some climate-NGO woman 'debating' the issue.
This is half of it, it then skips to the conclusion where AOC and a bunch of other people are insinuating that he abuses women.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=j3JHV8jAxEs
"Everything we make is derived from petrochemical products. What would you have me do, what would you do if you had the power?"
"Uh well I don't have the power! I'd ask you to feel it within your heart to do something."
He then asks about what they'd do with large ocean-going ships if fossil fuels are shutdown. Again she doesn't have an answer, she just tells him to feel it within his heart to do something!
This is an abominable way to make decisions: baiting men into getting frustrated with women who dodge factual, policy questions and then tar them as sexist. Policy should not be made by feelings within the heart but thoughts within the mind.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
I'm a big fan of both EU4 and Civ 4.
EU4 certainly is complex but a lot of the complexity is kept separate from each other part, like you're playing 10 little minigames.
In EU4, you start building workshops once you get admin 6. You build them on the highest production-value provinces, then you just spam them everywhere once you get more production efficiency. More money - more workshops - more money. All you need to do is go to the macro-builder and it will tell you exactly which provinces will profit most from a workshop. There's a synergy with manufactories in the sense that you always need a workshop to go with the manufactory. There's a synergy with the economic idea group that everyone ought to get (because it's the best even post-nerf I think) because one idea reduces construction cost for all buildings by 10%.
In Civ, you can build forges in your high production cities when you get Metal Casting (sooner if you choose to beeline it or later if you're focusing on other tech). Some leaders have the industrious leader trait that makes them cheaper, plus they're better at building wonders so forges become more a part of your playstyle. You need a Forge to build the Colossus in a coastal city, so terrain becomes an important consideration, especially on Archipelago maps where the Colossus is very strong from all that water. On the other hand, you might not have copper, so you probably won't get the Colossus and can prioritize other things. Forges let you get engineers, which are important for getting Great Engineers for wonder-building and eventually founding corporations. So there's also a potential synergy with the Philosophical trait, which lets you get more Great People. Forges give you more happiness from gold, gems and silver, so there's more geography to think about. But they also cause unhealthiness, reducing your maximum population. That needs to be countered with Aqueducts, farms and food resources, maybe trade. And of course, you need to get a certain number of forges across your empire to get the Ironworks for your most productive city! So you'll have to make some forges in worse cities by the time you get Steel to fill out the number.
Civ 4 links 6 or 7 things together in fairly sophisticated ways. There's always more than just raw cost-efficiency going on. You'll never see a Civ 4 tech that only grants +250 governing capacity. They all open up options that change a bunch of other things and lead to other techs.
EU4 has hundreds of moving parts that usually only add or subtract to a bunch of stats.
I think the entire concept of Global North and Global South is bunk.
How does it explain China going from Global South to Global North? Formally they're still supposed to be part of the Global South, yet they have a space station and roughly 28% of world manufacturing! They absolutely do not belong in the same geo-economic category as Columbia or South Africa. Europeans caused a lot of harm to China in the Opium Wars and various treaties, Japan killed around 20 million with bombing, bioweapons and conventional weapons, they addicted Chinese to heroin infused cigarettes.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/japanese-opium-trade-in-china
If anyone has an axe to grind about colonialism or imperialism, it should be China. Yet they're now an imperial, pseudo-colonial power themselves.
Or look at Ethiopia. They held off the Italians and maintained formal independence until 1937. The Italians only got to rule the country for 4 years until the British crushed them in 1941. They got to hold onto certain parts of Somaliland from 1949 until 1960. How could Italian colonialism be at fault for Ethiopia's problems today?
One counterargument is that Thailand was never colonized and is richer and more stable than its neighbours in Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar and Vietnam. But couldn't you also argue that Thailand wasn't colonized because it was inherently stronger as a polity, so of course it would remain more stable and develop faster? Before Europe arrived, they were the regional hegemon.
World Systems theory seems to point out 'here are the strong countries and here are the weak countries'. Then they say 'the strong countries are rich and the weak countries poor, because the strong are exploiting the weak'. Instead, I suggest the strong countries are rich because they are strong, because they become more or less capable. This is mostly down to internal policy and the fundamental geographic and demographic qualities of the country.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
I blame central banks and policymakers. They printed trillions of dollars in stimulus as though this wasn't going to cause inflation. They kept doing it, pretending that they had some kind of plan. Remember 'transitory' inflation?
Now they're using a demand-side tool on a supply-side problem. Much of the inflation we're dealing with stems from a geopolitical decision to suppress Russian energy exports. Waging proxy wars against our energy suppliers has been tried before. That caused the oil shock of the 1970s. Why are we doing it again? The Russians seem to be making more money than before, exporting energy to Pakistan and India who then sell it on back to Europe at higher prices.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-oil-producers-stay-one-step-ahead-of-sanctions-11654076614
If I were in charge of our strategy, I'd give the Ukraine war the Yemen treatment - no more than lip service over human rights so we don't anger our energy suppliers. Energy is important, you can't just blacklist one of the world's largest energy suppliers and pretend it won't effect everything else.
High energy prices will raise inflation and crush the economy. Central banks will raise interest rates to fight inflation and crush the economy.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Nuclear power plants are great, the sabotage campaign against them should be ended. However, there are some applications like fertilizer where you just need gas. It makes sense to get that gas from Russia since they have the most of it.
It doesn't make sense to rely on their energy and only start looking for alternatives after you're fighting a proxy war against them. Get your parachute on before you jump out of the plane. What is the point of sending weapons to Ukraine when the EU is paying some 90 billion USD to Russia for energy, more than their entire military spending?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Well here, in Ukraine, you can watch men defending their homes! Whatever the greater geopolitical yadda yadda, if you're all about traditional masculine strength and duty, and you aren't admiring this, then your ideological prattle has no meaning. It is just Green and Blue to you, your enemies like Ukraine so you have to hate Ukraine. Somehow men defending their homes are the bad guys because something something globohomo.
Their primary enemy is the US government, NATO and so on. Russia is opposing these forces. Therefore, they are on Russia's side.
During WW2, the Western Allies were happy to enlist the Soviet Union in their 'fight for freedom'. You had all these puff pieces in the press about how Uncle Joe Stalin was a really nice guy. Stalin was fighting their primary enemy - he was their friend.
Being principled in your alliances is not an effective way to achieve your goals. Imagine if the Western Allies had declared war on Russia in 1939 (since they did indeed invade Poland along with Germany, along with the Baltics and Finland). That would be in accordance with their principle of defending countries from invasion against totalitarian, genocidal powers. But it would've decisively lost them the war. There was no way they were going to defeat the German and Russian armies working together!
"Yes, you were consistent in your principles while we compromised with evil. But we won the war and used that victory to push liberal democracy as far as Ukraine. You lost the war and the entire Eurasian world-island is ruled by dictatorships. So which of us is more true to our ideology?"
For the Western leftist, Azov is good when it's fighting Russians. When the campaign is over, they can be discarded and LGBT multiculturalism introduced. The Azovites think the same thing, presumably.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
More xianxia webnovels, more sci-fi and more Genshin Impact-esque games. Thematically, more science, male heroism and order.
Xianxia/Cultivation has been taking off for some years now in male-dominated places like royalroad, spacebattles and progressionfantasy on reddit. We've got Westerners with their own takes on the themes (sects, vast power differences, showing face) like Will Wight's Cradle series. I particularly liked Reverend Insanity. Long, somewhat edgy but rational, excellent worldbuilding, plot and thematic content. It got cancelled by some state apparatus for being too individualistic and anti-social, or possibly due to author jealousy. This state focus on order is a running theme.
I think there's a Chinese predilection towards old-school science fiction that we no longer hold. One of the secondary themes of the Three Body Problem series is that environmentalism is a misanthropic plot to weaken humanity and leave it vulnerable to alien invaders. Technology is great, it's the source of power, sovereignty and all good things. You wouldn't see a heavyweight Western novel with that perspective - environmentalism is too holy to be questioned. There's also the lone male hero who takes ultimate responsibility (something in common with xianxia perhaps). If the Chinese are in charge, science and engineering might become sexy again. The Wandering Earth was one of their biggest films, again a testament to engineering and planning.
On that point, I'll also raise Dyson Sphere Program. Steam game, Chinese developer. You are an uploaded human in a robot body who gets sent out to build industrial infrastructure across the galaxy, bootstrapping dozens of Dyson Spheres where uploaded humanity dwells. It's a very cheerful, pretty, fun game that I thoroughly recommend. The interpretation I get from it is like Thiel's 'definite optimist' concept: 'We are making utopia according to plan'. If you compare to Factorio, there's no environmentalist angle. The eventual, as yet unimplemented, enemies are motivated to suppress you before you get too threatening rather than aliens who hate you for ripping up their planet.
And finally we have Genshin Impact, the most popular Chinese cultural export. Cute girls killing monsters in an upbeat, pretty world. The American equivalent is probably GTA or possibly Skyrim (primarily singleplayer open world but with some multiplayer capabilities), which is the exact opposite. Order vs Chaos, Beauty vs Grunge. Western RPGs focus more on player freedom, Genshin is more about immersing you in this happy, pretty place.
I think the US would have to make some concessions on wokism. I assume people heard about the Chinese fellow who promised to use AI to whitewash the upcoming little mermaid movie. I'm astonished this didn't get discussed more given the intersection between AI and race politics. Maybe I'm just a goldfish and forgot about it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
But they do have the same motivations.
China needs a lot of resources to remain the world's biggest industrial power. They want food, energy and raw materials.
They're very big on linking the rest of the world to them - see One Belt One Road. Part of it is creating the physical infrastructure for above resource issues, part of it is their giant construction sector looking to export excess capacity. But they're very into supply chains!
And they want to station forces abroad. They're looking for bases on the Atlantic coast of Africa, so they can stick their noses in the US's home waters. They've got a base in Djibouti. This isn't an American scale global empire but the intent is pretty clear.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Yeah, it's bizarre. I don't think these guys are the best and brightest.
I think we shouldn't assume that there are any moderates ready to take up Putin's job. Getting rid of Putin should not be our goal.
The second largest political party in Russia (behind Putin's United Russia) is the Communist Party. They support the war in Ukraine.
Zhirinovsky led Russia's 3rd largest political party, the Liberal Democratic Party, until his death early this year. Far from being liberal or democratic, the party is generally considered to be fascist if not megalomaniacal imperialist.
https://twitter.com/GodCloseMyEyes/status/1500973674811346946
All these parties are considered pawns of Putin to some extent but they have more of a presence than the genuine liberals. As I understand it, they're still reeling from the disaster of the 1990s.
Putin is the moderate candidate. If Russia loses we'll very likely get a much more exciting, much more dangerous leader. Since when did non-total military defeats in authoritarian countries ever lead to a strengthening of liberal forces? The specific conditions of a defeat and coup would be extremely unpromising - what patriot is going to work with the West given that our weapons were killing their troops just a few weeks ago? What is the point of replacing Putin if our options are communist Putin or fascist Putin?
I expect that Russia will begin to mobilize and start taking this war seriously, as they have made motions towards recently. There is no good reason for power to still be on in Ukraine, they have a great deal of ballistic and cruise missiles that could be striking power infrastructure. During the Iraq War the US intensively bombed Iraq's infrastructure until electricity output was at 4% of pre-war levels. There is no good reason for Russia to be outmanned by a smaller, less populous country. They have a large force of reservists. There appear to be motions towards recognizing Donetsk, Luhansk and Kherson as parts of Russia. That would let them deploy their reservists 'legally'.
Conditional on them taking the war seriously by deploying the rest of their army and destroying Ukrainian infrastructure, Russia will start winning decisive victories. The war thus far has been an offensive war half-heartedly fought against a numerically larger, well entrenched defender. It's easy to see how the defender has an advantage in such a conflict. If all else fails, Russia has 2000 tactical nukes to Ukraine's 0. There's no level of grit or clever Western technology that can stand up to firepower of that magnitude.
Support for the war in Russia is fairly high.
The physical fundamentals really are on Russia's side, the constraints are mostly imagined within the Kremlin.
Edit: Live speech from Putin: https://youtube.com/watch?v=iCdPPYtJeag
I think he's just announced partial mobilization.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Firstly, tactical nukes would be used against formations in the field, not cities. That's what strategic weapons are for (of which Russia has 4000).
If Russia decided to vaporize Ukraine, the West would do nothing because Russia also has the capability to vaporize Europe and North America. That's what those strategic weapons were designed to do in the first place. I don't see why the US would commit national suicide by waging war against a nuclear superpower.
As I write this comment, I'm listening to Putin's live speech as he claims that other nations were threatening to use nuclear weapons against Russia, where he stated that 'the wind could blow against them.'
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
In WW2, the Germans refrained from using their advantage in nerve gas because they feared that the Allies would use gas against them via aerial bombing. The Allies held escalation dominance over Germany in that they could make things worse for Germany than Germany could do to them. Compare the effectiveness of V1 and V2 attacks to the UK's thousand bomber raids, incinerating German cities.
Today, Russia holds escalation dominance over Ukraine. Even if the Ukrainians hit back as hard as they can, unless we're giving them a full nuclear triad the Russians can hit harder. At lower escalation levels the Russians can also hit harder, since Ukraine is a smaller country with a smaller number of targets and a smaller arsenal.
Furthermore, is it really wise for the West to be blowing up Russian pipelines during a global energy crisis? That fuel is going somewhere. Removing it from circulation will reduce global supply.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
If the US is so eager to die for Ukraine, why not tell the Russians that? 'If you nuke Ukraine, we'll nuke you'!
Furthermore, if you don't understand the distinction between tactical nukes and strategic nukes, then how are you qualified to pontificate on nuclear strategy? Why would you suggest that the US will sacrifice its major cities for the remnants of Ukraine, a country it's not even allied with?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
There are methodological problems with the chapter in that a lot of the unsuccessful threats they discuss are totally irrelevant to nuclear warfare. Nobody would believe that France would think about nuking Serbia if they didn't accept the Kosovo peace plan in 1993! Nuclear weapons are irrelevant to that scenario, as they are to the US vs Afghanistan in 2001.
In fact, they admit that coercive nuclear threats were explicitly made in the case of Suez (by Russia) and Cuba (by the US). Both these cases saw the threat-making party succeed. The US did indeed take costly actions to make its threat credible to the Soviets in the case of Cuba, dispersing its nuclear bomber force amongst civilian airports and keeping planes in the air 24/7. In the case of Suez, Khrushchev threatened nuclear attack against France and Britain.
That chapter makes a similar argument to: 'we examined 200 occasions of gun-owners making threats to see if having a gun made threats more credible. We found that most of the time they didn't have any effect - most of the time guns weren't present or even mentioned. There were two instances in which guns were actually being pointed at the other guy - in these occasions the threateners successfully compelled their targets. But most of the time owning guns doesn't help in securing obedience.'
The argument is technically valid but silly.
The internet went down in my building for 3 days and on day 1 I was acting like some kind of addict with withdrawal symptoms, constantly wanting to go check twitter (which can be useful and fun when you curate who you're following). Day 2 and Day 3 I was behaving more normally, doing offline writing and work. It still sucked how I couldn't easily search things though.
I can tolerate boredom when I'm going on a walk or listening to music, just not at my desk on my PC. It's very much a habitual, situational thing.
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