zephyreks @ zephyreks @programming.dev

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2 yr. ago

I mean, by that logic we might as well dump everyone who's started a major land war recently into the ground.

Iraq, Ukraine, Afghanistan... ah fuck, eh?

It's not them dying, so why would you expect them to care?

Except, at the end of the day, someone runs out of soldiers. If Ukraine keeps wasting resources in a futile counteroffensive, it's going to be Ukraine. Military doctrine going back centuries has told us that defending is far easier if your technological capability is even marginally close to equivalent.

Ah yes, because geopolitics is basically child abuse.

Wait, you're telling me demographics change over time? No way!

You've described a failing of democracy, but not of the result. Democracy is susceptible to the people and thus, like Bitcoin, is susceptible to a 50% attack. That doesn't make the election null and void unless you're arguing that democracy in general is a flawed concept in any country with open immigration.

Democratic leadership hasn't really done much for Ukraine. The Russians still have Bakhmut (their big gain from last winter). Almost the entirety of the Ukrainian counteroffensive has been dedicated to an area of land less than twenty kilometers across. Meanwhile, Russian forces are massing North of Kupyansk and Ukrainian supplies are drained.

The West doesn't seem to really care about Ukraine - while Russia has been able to bring their economy into war footing in about a year, the West is happy to dig around and play accounting tricks to scrounge up what they can. The recent shipment of ATACMS missiles was, well...

"A surprising discovery could also ease the administration's choice to send the weapons: The U.S. has found it has more ATACMS in its inventory than originally assessed."

That's what we're stuck with? Hundreds of billions of dollars down the drain and aid is only being sent because they miscounted inventory?

Socialism worked in Russia: it dragged hundreds of millions of people out of subsistence farming and turned the USSR into an economic powerhouse. Of course, the collapse of the USSR showed the failings of an aggressively socialist state, but the funny thing is that China already has the solution: a market-based economy with strong state control. Putin doesn't dare piss off the oligarchs though, so we're stuck with this crony bullshit.

How? Ukraine's made like a few square kilometers of progress with hundreds of billions of dollars of funding while Russia has just fallen back from their low ground territorial gains to the more easily defensible high ground.

What leverage does Ukraine even have for those demands?

Didn't lemmy.ca defed with Hexbear because someone called (in jest) for death to landlords while Canada experiences it's biggest housing crisis ever and rents are rising rapidly YoY solely because landlords, who otherwise deliver no intrinsic value in their position, found a way to make more money from the increased demand?

There's a reason Western Europe focuses on the Nazis in the context of the Holocaust: the Nazis never saw the Western Europeans as a stain on the Earth like they did the Jews and the Slavs. Russians don't need to point to Jews to claim Nazism: they can point directly to the treatment of ethnically Russian Slavs during WW2 and the plans that Nazi Germany had for the eradication of Slavs.

Russia doesn't need to point at how Ukraine treats Jews because to Russia, the Holocaust is dwarfed in societal impact by the issues that motivated Operation Barbarossa. The Russians lost 19 million Russian civilians in the war, why would they care about the Jews?

Nevermind that minorities in China get so many advantages it's actually silly how much affirmative action goes on. Provinces dominated by minorities get significantly more funding per capita and even get loss-leading infrastructure projects like the Tibet and Xinjiang railways. Students from minorities get additional bonuses on gaokao (basically SAT, but imagine if schools didn't look at anything else). Minorities are exempt from family planning policies and get massive interest-free loans for starting businesses. They get proportional representation in government. Hell, there are 55 minority groups in China making up 8% of the population.

In the army? The prevalence of rural populations in the army has been observed AROUND THE WORLD. It's a function of rural communities being rather poor and underserved by governments in general, as well as the lack of economic opportunities that living on a farm provides. In fact, the entire notion of the underserved countryside is what allowed communism to rise in Russia and China.

War is irresponsible, but a multipolar world is not. This is the US securing Australian alignment with the West, nothing more, nothing less.

What do Australians get out of it? Fuck if I know. Their largest trading partner is China. They're rather isolated from US support in the event of a hot war. They really benefit the most from peace and non-alignment tbh.

FWIW, the video of the attack makes it seem like the missile came from the Ukrainian direction rather than the Russian direction. This could be one of those glide vehicles, but that's rather unlikely...

China needs power and they're capped out on renewables manufacturing capacity.

The cleaner option is natural gas, but nobody seems willing to give China access to natural gas and oil reserves for some reason...

Media Bias Fact Check, truly the paragon of reliable news. It directly claims that bias and accuracy are strongly correlated (and thus that centrism is in fact the most accurate), which can't be true sheerly because US media as a whole is biased away from center by the political climate of the US.

Moreover, MBFC considers institutions like VOA and Center for Democracy and Technology to be "least biased" despite them being part of the US Agency for Global Media, which REQUIRES outlets to be consistent with the broad foreign policy objectives of the United States.

You're not evaluating media bias, you're evaluating media alignment with US policy.

Would you be surprised if it was true, though? This is right out of the CIA playbook and there's a laundry list of historical evidence that would support that the CIA has the means, motive, and opportunity to do so.

Rip $AAPL

What? No way!

Nice response.

Maybe if China had access to more oil they could switch to natural gas like the West did...

You're finally figuring it out :)