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The current War of Northern Aggression "discourse" has brought to mind the top 100 first place greatest mistake in US state craft: not letting Burnen' Sherman just march back and forth for a couple years or finishing hardcore full reconstruction.
Every degenerate tendency in US Con. politics has originated directly from the South's special position as a rebellious territory that was allowed to maintain it's cultural legitimacy, or second order effect from it. Imagine the conservatives we could have in this country if the wellspring of the tendency was John Adams and the federalists; rather than Rutherford and the lost causers.
Wrapping up the entire holographic southern cultural package with opposition to Washington eg. the North, eg the technocratic, rich part of the country has led to a situation where Technocratic Tech-billionaire Technologists are shackled to the cultural traditions of south, either Cavalier hedonistic indulgence papered over with cheap aristocratic pretension lacking any of the actual cultural roots that european aristocrats have; or hill people proud ignorance and shiftless rebellion against anyone who might have gotten any of that big city 'lernin.
You can watch these tendencies poison Republican politics live all the time; it's why even though the Democratic party is jam packed full of passionless ossified corporate aphorism chat bots, when republicans have all three wings of the government they STILL can't get anything done. There is a deep state problem, but it's not the 'unelected bureaucrats' in washington, it's the decaying corpses of Jefferson Davis and Johnny Reb clinging on to conservatism's ankles and dragging it down into the mud.
Why are so many Americans committed to sneering at and impugning the traditions of their warrior class? We all know that the South provides a disproportionate number of soldiers. Washington DC has the lowest enlistment ratio proportionate to population (this reveals a lot about how the US works), South Carolinas has the highest. Furthermore whites take up a larger proportion of the combat arms, diversity is more prevalent in rear areas and admin. I conclude that Southern whites are integral to the US war machine.
Nearly all of the people here are white-collar, I assume. A few have military experience but not very many. It's not our place to belittle those who march off to fight and die at our direction, at the will of the white-collar class. We can give orders, we can enjoy a privileged position at the top of a hierarchy, we can enjoy the fruits of war without sharing in the costs (should there be any fruits) - the bare minimum we should do is give some respect to those who do the fighting.
In Australia we had this case where some of our special forces were a bit overenthusiastic, they shot a couple of prisoners because there was no room on the helicopter, according to legend they stole one guy's artificial leg for use as a drinking trophy. There was a huge media storm about it, a Royal Commission, a massive defamation trial trial that our special forces guy Roberts-Smith lost. He was uncouth, the whole thing was a bit of a shambles. You could tell that the legal class were disgusted and repulsed by this guy and he despised them back.
OK, so Australian special forces killed a few dozen people they shouldn't have. That's a drop in the ocean compared to the West extending the war 10 years past the point we'd clearly lost, allying with the child molesters and drug exporters against the Taliban. The vast majority of the moral harms were committed by careless policymakers and senior officers who committed troops to achieving the unachievable. A huge part of it must have been embarrassment over losing to a small band of semi-literate goatherders with no advanced weapons, foreign backers or money.
And yet nobody dragged Bush, Obama, Petraeus or Trump over the coals - no Royal Commissions (or whatever American equivalent) for them, not for disastrous wars at least. If our leaders get zero accountability for huge crimes, those who follow their commands and deal with the farcical conditions should enjoy immunity for small crimes, let alone not being sufficiently classy.
Who wants to join special forces, do intense training, go off to fight a meaningless, futile war and be hauled over the coals for any excesses?
Who wants to join the US army if the war memorials and bases for their subculture are going to be defaced and renamed, if they're going to be sneered at for being uncouth hill people? Perhaps this is why the US military is so understrength in a time of global crisis. You don't tend to get classy, sophisticated people joining as infantry (who are still vital) - we should appreciate this and not demand this from them.
Do you want to go and risk getting turned to meat paste by Chinese hypersonics? Do you want to risk getting your guts ripped out by HE, get burned to the point everyone is repulsed by the sight of you? No. I don't either. Those who take that risk are making a special social contract and deserve support from the top of the pyramid, not contempt.
The people who will stop Chinese hypersonic missiles will be, and I am only slightly being hyperbolic, are trans furry military members in some bunker in Nevada piloting drones or other military gear, not some guy who signed up for reasonable reasons like access to college or career training or the darker reasons.
We already saw this in Ukraine - lots of hype over the true non-woke military, and it's regularly getting shredded by missiles that are largely being guided by a they/them army.
The actual thing that'll probably stop Chinese hypersonic missiles is a combination of they probably don't really exist in the way that anti-woke people hype them up online in the obsessive way they tend too, a corrupt Chinese procurement process that makes the US process look clean and normal, and the fact we've probably got stuff we're working on that we don't have to hype up the way the Chinese do to look strong.
This is untrue. Military does not produce or design weapons. Yes, furries can operate weapon system, but they won't have them because the US military and industry contracting system is broken.
The 'war' with China is already lost, if we go by statements of a former foreign minister of Singapore, who says both militaries understand US cannot win a conventional war, which is why the Chinese are now building a more robust nuclear force that'd deter the US from escalating in case of a conventional war.
Which is why Ukraine army is advancing, their offensive has succeeded and Russians do not have fire or aerial superiority over the front line. Because 'they/them' army has destroyed their ability to make things go boom. Yes, very true.
Russia is putting all its abilities into winning, the US considers the Ukraine war an afterthought. And yet, despite being an afterthought they/them are able to check the entire might of the great "masculine" Russian bear.
This is pure ideology trying to analyze pure ideology.
Join me in the real world, where Russia has successfully attained its stated military goals at decent but significant costs and NATO has made it difficult for them but not difficult enough that they failed or destroyed their economy.
Russia is poised to successfully prevent a NATO Ukraine with any significant fighting power at the price of becoming a junior partner to China. And traded a limited amount of manpower for a now booming arms industry.
Nobody but NATO's proxy is fighting with all they got, sexual minorities are so insignificant in their population as to have no influence except as fodder for online flamewars and regular plain old white men of all ages are catching shrapnel in the mud the same way they have for centuries.
So at the end Ukraine has lost, Russia has won a meager victory that, at best - and at extraordinary cost - gets them back to the level of influence over (half) of Ukraine that they had in the halcyon days of...2013 (truly an extraordinary, Catherine-the-Great esque imperial victory), and the US bled one of its two main geopolitical opponents at negligible cost for several years. What's the problem?
Ironically, pro-Russian activists appear to value hypothetical Ukrainian lives more than Ukrainians. From what I can tell, they wanted to fight, and now they are. They may suffer for it, but it was not forced upon them by the Americans, who did after all expect them to surrender.
Military action is not judged in the absolute but relative to the available alternatives. Orderly retreat is a success.
Russia is certainly not doing great, but they've successfully avoided having a knife to their throat. Which was their stated goal. And it didn't cost them total war.
I think they're correctly allocating their ressources. The biggest risk was that the Western economic sanctions would actually have some bite, and they did not.
It's sad, but indeed nobody actually seems to care about Ukrainians lives. Not even Ukrainians.
I won't pretend I do. I hate this senseless waste, but ultimately the fate of some far away people is not my problem.
From America's point of view? I think this whole endeavor was a long term blunder. Antagonizing Russia, which was never really a threat, as should be all too evident now, does not serve long term American interests. It just pushes them and China closer together, when the opposite is desirable and would likely have been achievable were the State department not made up of moralist morons and cold war relics.
If there is a large scale China-US conflict, the full extent of the mistake of further aligning China with a country that has large amounts of natural ressources, loads of nuclear weapons and engineers that know how to make aircraft engines will be felt pretty hard.
Don't get me wrong, this whole affair is still a great coup for the US, but it has nothing to do with undermining Russia and everything to do with kneecapping Europe.
Still, spending 75B to make sure your allies never get uppity just seems petty. And that's yet more people that won't come to your help in any significance if there is a big war. Hell, they're already declining to help put down a handful of Iran backed irregulars.
They traded the distant possibility that a future Ukrainian state might join NATO for the certainty that Sweden and Finland did, I suppose.
I don’t think we’re likely to see the Russians allying with the US in a US-China conflict. They’ve had their differences but unless it seemed overwhelmingly likely the Chinese would completely wipeout US global hegemony forever (unlikely I’d say) Russia would have nothing to gain by helping the US.
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