Carrolade @ Carrolade @lemmy.world

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1 yr. ago

Really minor side note. I don't think comparisons of Trump to Hitler really help that much, there's too many differences between the two men. What I think helps much more overall is comparisons of Trump to Benito Mussolini, who he much more closely aligns with, and who predated Hitler in the interwar period as a fascist dictator. The term fascist is originally an Italian word, even.

Mussolini comparisons capture Trump's smallness and bumbling nature while still highlighting his ability to do great harm much more accurately. Trump is an American Mussolini.

Pretty much summed it up.

Of course. But the principle remains that if your allies do not want to participate in your military action, they are not required to.

It's the people in charge of that country that make the decision of how they want to respond to your Article Five invocation, based on their own values and priorities. That freedom of choice is fundamental to NATO.

such action as it deems necessary

That's a key phrase.

Pariah, possibly, but I don't think a party like the AfD would particularly care about pariah status. I'll also remind you that Article 5 has been triggered once, by George W Bush after 9/11. He then wanted to invade Iraq, and did not receive the full support of NATO members.

It's just not that simple, unfortunately.

This is actually not true.

Article Five states that an attack on one becomes an attack on all. This wording is very specific, and they wrote it with this wording intentionally, to get people to be willing to agree to join.

It does not require counterattacks or declarations of war, merely that you consider an attack on a member an attack on you.

How do people respond to different sorts of attacks? How can they theoretically respond if they so choose? These are the kinds of games being played in Putin's head.

I think they're just reading the room. If he goes full-on authoritarian, do your shareholders benefit more from you getting in his way or licking his boots?

His first term there was a sense that he might shake things up, but they would eventually return to some semblance of balance of power. This second term, people still wonder deep down whether Trump might try to pull a S Korean style martial law declaration at some point, and perhaps meet greater success.

Anything that throws more sand into the gears of western allies is to the benefit of a rival. Make people more afraid, make anything more expensive, more inconvenient, etc etc, until we throw our own countries into chaos.

Sure.

My argument was in reply to a general sentiment, as opposed to this particular situation. That person was making an overall statement that people should be harder, that was what I was addressing. People should not necessarily be harder, people should be what they want to be, that's a freedom all people should have.

Frankly, so be it. Keeping the "mood" acceptable to certain sorts is no different from a mentally ill person being disturbed by "the mood" of suicide content. If you can't handle that mood, that's on you. It can be a legit threat to a vulnerable person though, and afaik this place takes that stuff seriously.

Doesn't matter, in a free country they can get offended by whatever they want, and still create communities with like-minded people that also find whatever offensive.

You are the one trying to control them by coming into the space they created and wishing to mold it to your own idea of how a space should be, instead of how they wanted it when they created it.

When you go to someone's house, you play by their rules or you leave. You do not get to set the values in other people's houses, and these Lemmy servers are literally just sitting in different people's homes. Their house, their rules. In the case of .world, where this community is located, pretty sensitive. This is fine, they have that freedom to be sensitive about pixels if they wish.

The idea that everyone needs to be "hard" is laughable. In a free country, people can be as hard or as soft as they wish, and form communities based around their own values with like-minded people.

I think it's often personal, as opposed to objective. A lot of people simply like it and do not want to lose access to something they like.

So, you think it's realistic that if I start talking about weed, acid, cocaine and heroin that I'm going to wind up on a watchlist for that?

Nothing concrete, certainly, but that's part of the point. It all seems like an exploration for various ways one can throw sand into the gears of a society without risking anything genuinely escalatory. It's a long game.

Uh ... why SCMP? Isn't that a party-friendly newspaper anyway?

Assuming this is the US, I doubt it's that easy to land on any sort of watchlist. Unfortunately, paranoia doesn't require any actual hard evidence.

Yeah, this song is gonna be stuck in my head for the rest of the day now. I did it to myself though.

Rah rah Rasputin, Russia's greatest love machine...

Lead researcher has a youtube channel linked at the bottom of that article, too.

Ukraine's fall without US support is not necessarily a foregone conclusion. That would assume Russian offensives are sustainable, which they are not. They're involved in a surge of their warfighting potential, which is steadily depleting their arsenals and straining their economy.

It remains to be seen how long they can keep it up.