RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
Assuming you could find a court even able to try it, what punishment can even approach being proportional?
Recklessness and negligence (foreseeably) leading to megadeaths should result in people being tortured for the rest of their lives.
This is basically what happened to people at Guantanamo Bay or certain prisons in Iraq, where the prisoner's crimes were much, much, much less serious.
Have a quick skim through the wikipedia page of what happened there. 'Forced injections' and 'being locked in confined cells' are karmically appropriate but those are just the beginning. Beatings, sleep deprivation, being chained in the foetal position for 24 hours and forced to soil oneself...
If the US tortured Afghans semi-randomly (per Rumsfields complaints about Guantanamo being misused "We need to stop populating Guantanamo Bay (GTMO) with low-level enemy combatants... GTMO needs to serve as an [redacted] not a prison for Afghanistan.") then it is appropriate to torture vastly more damaging people.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
Quit your lying. The Israeli negotiating position at Oslo and Camp David was colossally disingenuous and offered terms nobody would accept.
What made this deal especially difficult for the Palestinians to accept was the fact that they had already agreed in the 1993 Oslo Accords to recognize Israeli sovereignty over 78 percent of the original British Mandate. 124 From their perspective, they were now being asked to make another major concession and accept at best 86 percent of the remaining 22 percent.
The Palestinians maintain that the West Bank would have been divided into three cantons separated by Israeli territory. Israelis dispute this claim, but Barak himself acknowledges that Israel would have maintained control of a "razor-thin" wedge of territory running from Jerusalem to the Jordan River Valley. 125 This wedge, which would completely bisect the West Bank, was essential to Israel's plan to retain control of the Jordan River Valley.
the Palestinians were not offered full sovereignty in a number of Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, which made the proposal significantly less attractive to them. Israel would also have kept control over the new Palestinian state's borders, its airspace, and its water resources, and the Palestinians would be permanently barred from building an army to defend themselves
They even admitted negotiations were a joke:
It is hard to imagine any leader accepting these terms. Certainly no other state in the world has such curtailed sovereignty, or faces so many obstacles to building a workable economy and society. Given all this, it is not surprising that Barak's former foreign minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami, who was a key participant at Camp David, later told an interviewer, "If I were a Palestinian I would have rejected Camp David, as well"
Meanwhile of course, the Israelis were busy adding new 'facts on the ground' like they've been doing the whole time.
Between the start of the Oslo peace process in September 1993 and the outbreak of the Second Intifada seven years later, Israel confiscated more than forty thousand acres of Palestinian land, built 250 miles of bypass and security roads, established thirty new settlements, and increased the settler population in the West Bank and Gaza by almost one hundred thousand, which effectively doubled that population.
If you don't negotiate honestly, in good faith, you won't get a diplomatic solution.
There are no Arabic states in which diverse groups of people live side by side with equal rights.
Oman? I invite you to substantiate this assertion further. And it's not like Israel's doing great at this either.
There is a world where Israelis and Muslims and Jews live side by side with equal rights, fully integrated and defused of their hate it's called "Israel."
This simply isn't true, even putting to one side all the Muslims they've expelled and designated non-citizens. Taking Arab land and redistributing it to Israeli settlers for instance. Demolishing 100 times more Palestinian houses than they let them build. Refusing to let Arabs, Israeli citizens or not, live in several hundred Israeli small towns. Restrictions on freedom of speech, assembly and movement.
This law creates a reality where a Jewish citizen of any other country who has never been to Israel can move there and automatically gain citizenship, while a Palestinian expelled from his home and languishing for more than 70 years in a refugee camp in a nearby country, cannot.
The Israelis clearly don't want a country where Jews and Muslims live side by side, they want a country where Jews are on top, they take action to achieve it and they've enshrined it into law:
The Knesset in 2018 passed a law with constitutional status affirming Israel as the “nation-state of the Jewish people,” declaring that within that territory, the right to self-determination “is unique to the Jewish people,” and establishing “Jewish settlement” as a national value.
Benjamin Netanyahu, who was then the finance minister, said during discussions at the time: “Instead of making it easier for Palestinians who want to get citizenship, we should make the process much more difficult, in order to guarantee Israel’s security and a Jewish majority in Israel.” In March 2019, this time as prime minister, Netanyahu declared, “Israel is not a state of all its citizens,” but rather “the nation-state of the Jewish people and only them.”
Pro-Israel people should base their arguments on the rule of force because they don't really have a leg to stand on in terms of morality.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
I also think we should've had more discussion of the war.
This caught my eye: https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/singapore-speech-hrvp-borrell-shangri-la-dialogue_en
Some Brussels swamp creature swans out to East Asia and says many banal things but also this:
For the first time ever, we have been funding military support to a country under attack. Providing about €40 billion of military support to Ukraine, coming from the [EU] Institutions, coming from the resources I manage in Brussels, and coming from the Member States. Yes, much less than the US support. But if you add up all the support – military, civilian, economic, financial and humanitarian – the level of support to Ukraine is about €60 billion for Europe. But let me show another figure which is really impressive: if you include the support that the European governments have had to pay in order to help their families and firms to face the high prices of electricity, of food, the subsidies to our people in order to face the consequences of the war is €700 billion – ten times more than the support for Ukraine.
700 billion euros! And there's economic damage in addition to that. 700 billion is just the cost of the bandage for the stab wound (self-inflicted I might add). Europe could've chosen to ignore the US hectoring them into sanctioning Russia, as Hungary did. And what is the cost of the bleeding? What is the cost outside of the EU? Germany and Britain are in a recession, as I recall.
What is the point of it all? Why are we defending borders that were randomly redrawn by the Soviets (in the case of Crimea), why care? Why are we supplying weapons so that Kiev can hold onto predominently Russian-speaking territories whose population mostly doesn't even want to be part of Ukraine? It goes rather against the Kosovo/Palestine/Kurds principle, if principle is an appropriate word to apply in relation to foreign policy.
This whole operation only makes sense if you start with the assumption that Russia is an enemy to be crushed. Then it makes sense to arm the Ukrainians to maximize the number of dead Russians at a relatively low cost. Relatively low, compared to a nuclear war. The War in Afghanistan probably killed more Russians/$ thanks to the sheer amount of poppies produced under our abysmal occupation government.
Anyway, trying to crush Russia has all kinds of bad effects. It pushes Russia towards China and Iran, solidifying an anti-Western axis that spans Eurasia. Our oil sanctions have unsettled OPEC, who might reasonably see a danger in the West trying to crush socially conservative, autocratic states that engage in 'illegal wars' and weaken their energy leverage. Saudi-Iranian rapprochement is accelerating rapidly and is brokered by China: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/persian-gulf-states-to-form-joint-navy-in-coordination-with-china/
And then there are all the problems Russia can cause for us. Do we want Russian missiles being contributed to China during a Pacific war? Do we want enormous numbers of troops and considerable airpower tied down in Europe, just in case some 'volunteers' move across the border and set up shop in Estonian towns that border Russia? That's a precedent that the Polish Volunteer corps set in Belgorod. Do we want Russian energy and agriculture powering a gigantic mobilized Chinese war machine? Are we really confident in funding a war of attrition against Russia of all countries?
We can't really back down now that Leopards and Bradleys are aflame in Ukraine but it is not clear how any of this is in the national interests of most Western countries. We could've just ignored the whole thing, chose not to have an opinion on Ukraine in 2008, in 2014 in 2018 or 2022. It could be swept under the carpet, like the war in Yemen. Without Nuland, without NATO proposals, without Western training for the Ukrainian military, would there be a long and grinding war? It may well be in the interests of Lockheed Martin and Raytheon to pursue a foreign policy full of exciting conflicts and intensify rivalries, yet it is not so good for people with gas bills, fertilizer needs and taxes to pay.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
Time after time, I've seen pro-Russians portray the situation as the US dragging a kicking and screaming Europe into an anti-Russian confrontation
The start of this whole loathsome story was with the US trying to bring Ukraine into NATO back in 2008, which was vehemently opposed by France and Germany, the principal European countries. Eventually they got the US to water it down into 'when, not if, not now'. The US was the one providing lethal military aid to Ukraine pre-war, 90% of all aid pre-war.
Because the whole of post-WW2 order is based on countries invading other countries and annexing parts of them - which was the thing that sparked WW2 in the first place
Missing a not, anyway this is just a made up principle. Annexation is beyond the pale but we can bomb various countries into anarchy, set up puppet governments in them, divide countries into smaller parts, place troops in countries without their permission? We can meddle in the internal workings of other countries in ways that make Russiagate look like even more of a joke (looking at you Yeltsin). But as long as there are no annexations, it's fine?
This is like saying you can march into someone's house, shoot the owner, take their property, re-educate their children, give the property to nearby friends, squat on it indefinitely - but as long as you don't write your name down on the deed it's OK. No sane person would stand by this principle. Anyway, if Russia said 'oh we're not going to annex Ukraine, just conduct regime change', there would be no difference in the reaction from the West. Annexation is clearly not the issue here.
Besides, where is it written in the UN charter that countries can't be annexed or that invasions are illegal? The UN charter says nothing about 'no annexations', the Security Council is the highest authority on these matters. Whatever the Security Council decides is binding. If the Security Council can't make up its mind, then there is nothing left to say.
but on what basis would one argue this for the four currently occupied oblasts in their full form?
The whole of Ukraine, including Crimea, is officially targeted for NATO integration and has been for years. For example, in 2021 the US-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership affirmed the territorial integrity of Ukraine and its ownership of Crimea. It said that Ukraine was going to get 'full integration into Euro-Atlantic institutions' which means NATO and EU. The US was helping Ukraine finish the necessary reforms and so on. It's just putting two and two together: full integration into Euro-Atlantic, full recognition of pre-2014 borders, plus weapons = the military support is to retake everything: Luhansk, Crimea and so on. Now maybe the US doesn't quite want to go that far in real terms, yet that's what they're formally saying, that's what is written down in treaties and in their rhetoric.
Russia was already moving towards China way before 2022.
Sure and the US has been egging them on all the way. There's a haunting Biden clip from the early 2000s where, when Putin says that he'll work more with China because the US is overbearing, Biden says something like 'good luck with that - there is no replacement for the US, ultimately you have to come to the table whether you like it or not'. There were opportunities to work with Russia in the war on terror but the US just squandered them, pulling out of the ABM treaty for instance. What is that if not a giant red flag?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3mo ago
Maybe the US should've tried not reneging on the JCPOA if it wanted its adversaries to behave. Why would anyone trust an agreement with America when someone like Trump can get elected and tear the whole thing up? Obama gave the Iranians back their own money, Trump rendered years of patient diplomacy worthless and worked hard to start a major war, assassinating a top Iranian leader.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
My point is that Jews are enormously overrepresented in establishing and developing these sectors. The direction in which they take things tends to be more radical and transgressive. It stands to reason that if there weren't any Jews, then there would be much less in the way of pornography and casual sex generally. The most sex-oriented big dating apps are tinder and grindr, both founded by Jews. More lovey-dovey, long-term relationship apps like OKCupid and Bumble were founded by Europeans.
Not all horrendous ideas in the world are from Jews: Gentler for instance proudly sent orphans in Germany off to live with pedophiles and got dozens of men acquitted of molestation, Foucault campaigned for the abolition of the age of consent, presumably so he could have sex with children. There was a postwar vibe that was excessively libertine, where barriers that should not have been touched were broken. The Frankfurt school had a lot to do with this attitude of course.
Immigration and refugee resettlement in the US stems significantly from Jews. The 1965 Immigration Law was introduced by Emmanuel Celler. Sure, it was passed by many non-Jews too. But consider Proposition 187 which sought to stem illegal immigration in California, which was approved democratically but then blocked by Mariana Pfaelzer.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3mo ago
There was no World War in the 1970s, no Great Depression. It was a time of peace and prosperity and yet fertility went to replacement and then below.
How hard is it to understand this? It's RIGHT THERE in a clear academic consensus, all these sources pointing out that female empowerment and education reduces fertility, how they observe this all over the world. There are all these charts showing what can be easily deduced from common sense - that if women are joining the workforce and higher education en masse they're having fewer children. And yet people still try to confuse this blindingly simple issue. The more empowered women are, the more they choose to do other things than having children. Broadening one's view from the sexual revolution (which neatly arrives right as the post-war baby boom ends), we can look at the whole 20th century. You have female enfranchisement happening all across the West and fertility declining. Countries without female empowerment like pre-1945 Japan lack this trend: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033777/fertility-rate-japan-1800-2020/
Wow, this is genuinely brave, independent thought from a US presidential candidate! Rapprochement with Russia, strategic clarity on Taiwan, actual realism in foreign policy... He's clearly read some Mearsheimer or Ebbridge, he understands the jargon.
Yet the power he faces is so overwhelming. Recall how he got bodied by the Israel lobby for heresy, like not providing Israel with billions of dollars of military aid. This will make a lot of people very angry. Better to keep this kind of plan hidden, like Nixon did. But Vivek clearly needs to grab attention, it's an unenviable position to be in.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
What kind of liberties do you have in America?
Seriously! The Christian baker does not have a choice, he MUST bake the cake for the homosexual couple, regardless of what he thinks or wants to do. Go near an airport - oh that's a liberty-free zone. Privacy? Not if the NSA has anything to say about it. Don't have the right demographics in your company? Civil rights violation (and a big payout if too many of the right demographics fail your test). Disliked by the government? Get ready to be de-banked.
Be a world-renowned researcher and have consensual sex with someone in the workplace? That's it for your career, the moment she decides it wasn't appropriate: https://www.thefp.com/p/he-was-a-world-renowned-cancer-researcher
Stupid, violent criminals get free housing on probation and then a $100,000/year prison cell after they murder productive members of society: https://www.karlstack.com/p/his-name-was-seth-smith?s=w
Under the latest innovation of US 'civil liberties' the parole searches that caught the killer would now be illegal.
And of course drug dealers are at perfect liberty to go around wrecking people's lives with impunity to the state, turning urban centres into massive shitholes?
I don't see how getting rid of drug dealers has anything to do with policing dissent (which we know the US already does a great deal of, thanks to the Twitter papers). It's pure, textbook anarcho-tyranny. The way the US constitution is implemented in practice today works primarily to protect and patronize the scummiest and most worthless oxygen-thieves, at the expense of ordinary (and especially productive) members of society.
And society does affect you. If you're paying taxes, some of it will go towards the costs of overdoses and drug crime, social, economic, medical, political. If you're enjoying public services, they'd be better if the US didn't have this problem. If you enjoy the fruits of industry and labour, you'd be better off if those people were working jobs as opposed to doubled over in a ditch.
It's possible that one single Jew- Fritz Haber- saved more lives with one single invention, than the sum of all lives lost to every single "bad Jew" on the planet.
Ah yes but somebody would've figured out synthesizing nitrogen eventually. If it wasn't Haber, it would've been the next-best, next-luckiest chemist. As guano prices rise, more money and brainpower is brought to bear on the problem. Someone was always going to figure out quantum mechanics, eventually. In a world without Jews, people might've figured out nuclear weapons somewhat slower but it would still have been achieved. Likewise with polio vaccines.
Politics and culture is vastly more important than science since culture and politics are one-shot things. If you lock in feminism to the Japanese constitution and the birthrate plummets, never to recover, then that's brainpower that is forever lost, it cannot be rediscovered. If you (Trotsky, Zinoviev and the rest of the gang) impose a horrendously bad form of government on a huge swathe of Eurasia (then get overthrown by Stalin and Beria who do their best to match and exceed in terms of brutality and waste), then that can never be undone. Let's not forget galaxy-brain Von Neumann's plea to immediately wage nuclear war against the Soviet Union and kill tens of millions more. If he'd been listened to, if people had trusted his game theory over their own common sense... Well someone else can invent computer architecture - nobody can bring the dead back to life.
Over the last few years, how many people weren't born because of Ehrlich and co's overpopulation meme? How much wealth has been squandered? Nobody can be sure but the amount of brainpower we lost to communism and bad politics (which is admittedly multi-causal but heavily influenced by ideas promulgated by Jews) is immense. My bet is that it outweighs Jewish contributions to science by far.
It seems particularly insane to me in the present moment for any White identitarians to dare to make themselves seem like a threat to Jews, when so many Jews are playing crucial roles in AI development. There are an almost infinite number of ways in which unnecessary enmity could turn out horribly for White anti-Semites during this phase of history!
Good point. But the key thing hinges upon the necessity of the enmity. If you have a neutral, then you should not offend them unless necessary, especially if they're powerful. But if there's an enemy on the verge of attaining total power over the world? If protesting at the sinister entrenchment of political bias in GPT, for example, is making a threat, so be it. It's rather similar to the adage 'When You’re Accustomed to Privilege, Equality Feels Like Oppression'.
Likewise, brainpower is needed in a conflict with China. But there are other options - we could abandon our crusade to impose LGBT rights and liberal democracy upon Beijing. Acknowledging China as a legitimate non-democracy would have soothed much of the problems. Or we could've been more disciplined earlier on! Goldman Sachs and co could have not blindly sought profits from the Chinese market... A less Open Society would not have brought in Chinese students and trained them in advanced technology, so they could then leak IP back to China. A West that had a genuinely nationalist policy would not have let its industrial base be carved out and send to Shanghai.
There's a combination of high intelligence and insufficiently high wisdom that is very dangerous. It can make money and innovation - but also bad money and bad innovations like coin-clipping or communism, Middle East regime change, pre-emptive nuclear war, pumping sterilization drugs into the water supply as Ehrlich proposed. Better to match moderate wisdom and intelligence, advance swiftly but not recklessly embrace radical ideas.
Even so, I respect the novelty and refreshing point of view of your argument. But don't you think that it's a very unlikely ideology to work? I've spent a lot of time reading and never come across anything like what you say. People more naturally think in terms of 'threat -> enemy -> weaken/destroy' than 'threat -> cooperate -> ally'. Why else are there wars in the world?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
hollowed out by an institutional culture of lying. Of course, China is probably in a similar state,
Chinese ships don't accidentally crash into civilian shipping, nor do their light carriers burn down in port, nor is their fleet actually shrinking year-on-year. When it comes to quality and naval professionalism, China seems to be well ahead of the US navy.
As for an institutional culture of lying... the Afghanistan War? The defeat against the Taliban with about 1/100th the funding of the US/NATO force, supported by no foreign power at all? Staying on ten years despite it being clear that the US was not going to achieve its objectives, while the Taliban was? Constantly lying to the public and saying things were going fine? Junior officers being ignored when they pointed out the entire thing was a massive farce with zero chance of success, that the 'allies' they were trying to train were drug addicts and pedophiles?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9mo ago
Entertainment? So they're integral to directing and writing the biggest hits in cinema, writing the best selling novels, making computer games? The biggest twitch streamers and youtubers are black?
The places blacks do well are in highly centralized domains like music, acting or sports, not making any kind of sophisticated content.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
People here underestimate the power of hatred.
Elements from both sides do all kinds of unhelpful terror bombing - Ukraine had drones attack random office buildings in Moscow. They tried to blow up Dugin. They torture eachother. There's a rather infamous video of somebody castrating a prisoner. They dehumanize eachother: orcs, hohols.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/11/15/both-russia-and-ukraine-tortured-prisoners-of-war-un
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
Israel's the worst ally the US could possibly have, their competence is irrelevant.
Consider the invasion of Iraq. You might naively think that Israel would be really useful, sending troops to help the Coalition in their mutual goal of destroying Saddam Hussein's regime? No, of course not. They didn't lift a finger to help the US. Of course they sent some false intelligence to suggest Iraq actually had nuclear weapons, of course they flexed their influence to encourage the invasion. They just didn't do any fighting.
Why? Because the Arabs hate Israel and it would've let Saddam reframe the war as yet another Arab-Israel war. He tried doing that in 1991 by throwing some Scuds at Israel. Israel's presence would've made things worse for America.
There's no convincing reason to think that Israel would help against Iran, based on past practice. If they did help it would probably be net-negative in creating more opponents for US forces. Dumping Israel would make it much easier to work with Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the Gulf, Turkey, Egypt...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3mo ago
Well, are the Palestinians justified in attacking Israel?
One common tactic they have used is to declare territory, including privately-owned Palestinian land, as “state land.” The Israeli group Peace Now estimates that the Israeli government has designated about 1.4 million dunams of land, or about a quarter of the West Bank, as state land. The group has also found that more than 30 percent of the land used for settlements is acknowledged by the Israeli government as having been privately owned by Palestinians.
Israeli authorities have also made it virtually impossible in practice for Palestinians in Area C, the roughly 60 percent of the West Bank that the Oslo Accords placed under full Israeli control, as well as those in East Jerusalem, to obtain building permits. In Area C, for example, authorities approved less than 1.5 percent of applications by Palestinians to build between 2016 and 2018—21 in total—a figure 100 times smaller than the number of demolition orders it issued in the same period, according to official data. Israeli authorities have razed thousands of Palestinian properties in these areas for lacking a permit, leaving thousands of families displaced. By contrast, according to Peace Now, Israeli authorities began construction on more than 23,696 housing units between 2009 and 2020 in Israeli settlements in Area C. Transfer of an occupying power’s civilian population to an occupied territory violates the Fourth Geneva Convention.
In addition, Israeli forces have regularly fired on Palestinian demonstrators and others who have approached fences separating Gaza and Israel in circumstances when they did not pose an imminent threat to life, killing 214 demonstrators in 2018 and 2019 alone and maiming thousands.
About 1,300 complaints of torture against Israeli authorities have been filed with Israel’s Justice Ministry between 2001 and June 2020, which have resulted in one criminal investigation and zero prosecutions.
While 80 percent of the Mountain Aquifer’s water recharge area lies beneath the West Bank,[304] Israel directly extracts about 90 percent of the water that is withdrawn from the aquifer annually, leaving Palestinians only the remaining 10 percent or so to exploit directly.[305] In monopolizing this shared resource, Israeli authorities sharply restrict the ability of Palestinians to directly exploit their own natural resources and render them dependent on Israel for their water supply. For decades, authorities have denied Palestinians permits to drill new wells, in particular in the most productive Western Aquifer basins, or to rehabilitate existing ones.
A report published by the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) and the Palestinian Hydrology Group in 2011 said that the Barkan Industrial Area settlement, near Ariel, “is notorious for flushing its leftover chemical waste onto Salfit villages.” [359] The report further states that “this chemical waste is thought to include petrochemicals, metals and plastic” and notes that “heavy toxic metals are linked to an endless list of conditions, from diarrhoea to diabetes, hyperkeratosis, organ failure and cancer.”
The Palestinians have a bunch of complaints about being suppressed and undermined. If I were Israeli, no doubt I would agree that it was right for Israel to win, vae victis, they don't matter as much as we do. But I'm not Israeli. We, the Western world, are not getting anything out of this conflict, we're paying so that another nation can do imperialism.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
If you wish to minimise human suffering, focus on winning the war and defeating Russia to the point where it stops launching such stupid and wasteful wars in the first place.
We, the West, cannot win this war and should not try. It simply is not going to happen. All this rhetoric has done and all it can do is make an angrier, more threatening Russia with a bigger chunk of a more devastated Ukraine.
Firstly, the Russians will scale up their war effort symmetrically with our commitment to Ukraine. This is what they did in the past, mobilizing more troops back in September 2022. If we send more weapons, they'll increase their mobilization. The weapons we've sent have already exhausted much of our stockpiles, as has been admitted by many of our senior leaders.
“We built up this mountain of steel for the counteroffensive. We can’t do that again,” one former US official explained. “It doesn’t exist.”
So we cannot even send aid without seriously weakening readiness. Western military '''industry''' is very slow to produce new weapons and it seems that Russian military industry produces more than all of us combined in certain key areas. Artillery is the king of battle and the Russians have a lot more of it:
They've got superiority in shells: https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-ammunition-manufacturing-ukraine-west-officials-2023-9
They've got superiority in drones: https://bulgarianmilitary.com/2023/11/30/ukraine-produces-50000-fpv-drones-per-month-russia-300000/
They've had superiority in aviation through the whole war, the Ukrainian air force is reduced to flinging a trickle of standoff missiles from inside SAM cover. It's hard to see what a few F-16s can do to change this situation, seeing how many SAMs the Russians have, along with their many air superiority fighters.
Secondly, Ukrainian manpower is rapidly being depleted. They're drafting women now (only with a medical background to start with), along with the old and infirm men. Even if the Arsenal of Democracy actually worked properly, there is not a sufficient number of fit Ukrainians left to use the weapons we give them to take any significant ground, let alone their 2022 borders, let alone 2014 borders. Encouraging their best units to attack into deep defensive belts against an enemy with air superiority and more artillery probably had something to do with this. Russia started off with more manpower and retains this advantage. How can Ukraine possibly win the war if their counteroffensive got nowhere, now that their manpower is reduced and aid is running out?
Thirdly, Ukraine is not a strategically vital front to us and the Russians know this. They enjoy escalation dominance and if they were losing they could deploy nuclear weapons and compel the Ukrainians to back down. Ukraine is vital to Russia, it's the Black Sea, contains many of their coethnics, it's a country they fought immensely hard to retake back in WW2 and their direct neighbour. Britain, France and especially the US are far from Ukraine, it simply does not matter in the same way as it does for Russia. There's no scenario where they can credibly threaten nuclear weapons to counter Russia. Poland does care deeply but has little power. The knowledge that they know it's more important to them is a great source of Russian strength, since they know they just have to wait for us to give up.
The front with China is far more important to the West holistically and deserves a higher priority. Taiwan is strategically vital in terms of bases, semiconductors, leverage over East Asia. Spending more effort in Ukraine distracts us from the real issues. The nightmare scenario is depleting reserves in Ukraine, losing there and then losing in Asia as well.
The reality is that if the Ukrainians didn't want to fight, they wouldn't fight and certainly they would not fight with the tenacity and resourcefulness that they've shown.
True, they've certainly fought hard. But victory in this kind of war, where both sides are determined, goes to the side with more men and munitions. I also note that there aren't nearly so many videos of Russians being dragged out of their homes by draft officers.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
Rule 1 of coups is not to announce them before you do them. The element of surprise is essential, as is being in the capital ready to go (not a thousand kilometers away in Rostov). Prigozhin didn't seem to have anyone outside Wagner supporting him (or if he did they didn't do anything). This is very strange.
I think this was a fake coup that was used to lure out Putin's enemies. Either Putin knew about this and decided to let it happen, in a controlled way, so as to unmask the disloyal, or he plotted it with Prigozhin himself. The governors and oligarchs who were not swift enough to give Putin their support have probably been marked down. Prigozhin is now disqualified as a competitor to Putin after withdrawing, even if he doesn't end up irradiated. Wagner is being dissolved as an independent actor, its soldiers mostly being integrated into the Russian military.
There's a precedent in the 2016 Turkey coup and the 2021 Capitol incident (how could a mob of unarmed protestors possibly get inside a hardened-against-terrorists building against the will of the government and why did they leave when the government activated the alarm system telling them to do so). A weak coup attempt can function like a vaccine, immunizing against political threats.
Furthermore, were seven aircraft shot down? There are photos circulating of a downed helicopter and a communications plane - are these contemporary, geolocated images?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
That the Israelis won a couple of battles by the time the C-5s started landing doesn't make the aid useless, the extra aircraft and supplies made it much easier for them to counterattack. One can be much more aggressive when your losses are sure to be replenished.
And of course, it was America that pressured Israel into ending that conflict on terms that were extraordinarily generous (far more generous than any American government had ever previously been in victory in a major war) to the defeated parties.
The Arab war goal was to retake the Golan Heights and Sinai peninsula which they lost when Israel attacked them in 1967. The US persuaded Israel to give up Sinai and bribed Egypt extensively to accept the deal, to sign a peace treaty with Israel. Partly this was due to Soviet pressure on the other side. Golan remains in Israeli hands. The US foreign aid budget to Egypt increased enormously (as it did when other Arab states recognized Israel and signed peace treaties). All the generosity here is flowing from the US to Israel, by bribing its enemies to stand down and persuading the Israeli govt not to bite off more than they can chew.
It's the worst deal in the world. The US got massive enmity from the Arabs, in exchange for forever paying bribes to Egypt, Lebanon and so on so they wouldn't be quite so angry with Israel. And endless military aid to Israel, so they can bomb and invade their neighbours whenever they like.
If the US simply stopped meddling in the Middle East, stopped reflexively prostrating before Israel (the Iraq War was heavily motivated by the perceived need to destroy Israel's enemies), the US would be a lot better off. On the pure logic of national interests, the US should favoured the Arabs (who are numerous and have oil) over the Israelis who are few and lack oil.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
When will it stop?
Sometimes I think this is all a simulation designed to imbue some kind of pathos. The bizarreness of it all seems unnatural, in a surreal kind of way.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
Is it really so hard to not brag about your crypto wealth online? That's literally all you need to do to prevent this scenario. It's not like people can tell, it's not like expensive jewellery or art.
Alternately you could leave America and live in a civilized country where armed robbers won't come and threaten your kneecaps if you don't hand over your crypto. The way of civilization is not to have your choices be governed by the whims of violent, anti-social thugs. We are the ones who are supposed to be enforcing our will on them.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3mo ago
The Arabs get angry with us when we provide aid to Israel, just like the Israelis get angry with Iran when Iran aids Hamas/Hezbollah. It makes it much harder to work with Arab governments and it angers Arabs, who can do us harm.
Why did Osama Bin Laden hate the West? In large part he resented that we were helping Israel dominate Palestine.
According to Michael Scheuer, who directed the CIA's intelligence unit on al Qaeda and its founder, the young bin Laden was for the most part gentle and well behaved, but "an exception to Osama's well-mannered, nonconfrontational demeanor was his support for the Palestinians and negative attitude towards the United States and Israel." After September 11, bin Laden's mother told an interviewer that "in his teenage years he was the same nice kid . . . but he was more concerned, sad, and frustrated about the situation in Palestine in particular, and the Arab and Muslim world in general.
Bin Laden also condemned the United States on several occasions prior to September 11 for its support of Israel against the Palestinians and called for jihad against America on this basis. According to Benjamin and Simon, the "most prominent grievance" in bin Laden's 1996 fatwa (titled "Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places") is "bin Laden's hallmark: the 'Zionist-Crusader alliance.'" Bin Laden refers explicitly to Muslim blood being spilled "in Palestine and Iraq" and blames it all on the "American-Israeli conspiracy."
Bin Laden replied, "We declared jihad against the US government, because the US government is unjust, criminal, and tyrannical. It has committed acts that are extremely unjust, hideous, and criminal, whether directly or through its support of the Israeli occupation of the Land of the Prophet's Night Journey [Palestine]. And we believe the US is directly responsible for those who were killed in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq."
In the first meeting between Atta, the mission leader, and bin Laden in late 1999, the initial plans called for hitting the U.S. Capitol because it was "the perceived source of U.S. policy in support of Israel.
I have no interest in an Israel-Palestine solution, just like I don't know or care about who should govern South Sudan, Somalia or Myanmar. Let them handle their own affairs. What I want is for the West not to be attached to this dead weight that causes us problems in so many fields. Wouldn't it be great if we enjoyed the support of the Middle Eastern public, or at least got along with them like China does?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3mo ago
Life expectancy is inevitably going to plateau at least until LEV.
Why should it plateau until it goes up? Nobody expects an economic plateau before the singularity.
In the developed world, good-tasting food is cheaper
Couldn't people exercise a little self-control and buy quality nutritious food as opposed to artificial slop? I won't demand organic kale and non-GMO quinoa but what about bread, vegetables, fruit, fish, lamb... as opposed to high fructose corn syrup and mystery chemicals? The US is a rich country, it should be possible for its citizens to buy normal food as opposed to calorie-maxxing from low-quality food. Is there no money for education, no capacity to subsidize normal food, no technical capacity to distinguish between good and bad food?
If wealth naturally turns people into disgusting flesh piles dependent upon mobility scooters and diabetes medication then that sounds like an argument against wealth.
Murder rates had been falling since the 90s, prior to 2020
This is exactly what I'm talking about. Murder should've been falling consistently, not going up and down. Medicine gets better over time, more murders are turned into assaults. There's better forensics, more wealth. The US is an older country, so there are fewer young people to go around killing... and yet murder is still higher than it was in 1950 or 1960.
Worrying about whether or not there will be enough children in 50 or 100 years is like those people in 1900 who worried about the cities of the future being buried in horse manure
Yes, we may get massively transformative AI any day now. But it will be young people who make these technologies. We need young people.
For me this is an argument against fertility rather than an argument against female empowerment and education.
Well, you can argue against fertility. But those who reproduce will have the final word.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
Sure - but then we go back to the original question you were responding to.
Who is the occupying power again? Not Egypt, Israel. Even the US state department admits this.
'Da joos' is the most open and blatant kind of sarcastic sneering you can imagine. None of the below is acceptable or provides any kind of serious content:
Jews act and have political effects, as do liberals or rich people. I don't particularly like the long and interminable discussions on the abstract gender/trans theory here but that's fine, other people do. I minimize that thread and move along because I recognize that this is a politics discussion website and this is an appropriate place to talk about it. It's as easy as clicking a button. I don't provide a backhanded comment smearing people who talk about it as low-class or obsessives.
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