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cinci zoo sniper posted:The thing is that supporting “secession” of any of the 5 involved regions of Ukraine would technically mean supporting the notion of Taiwan’s independence. From this perspective, it’s a very thorny issue for Xi to engage, a “tails - you win, heads - I lose” affair. Those are very different political situations. The official stance of the current Ukrainian government is that they are a separate country from Russia while the official stance of the Taiwanese government is that they are part of the same country as mainland China but that the Taiwanese government rule the whole thing (and mongolia). One is a conflict over borders while the other is an internal power struggle.
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Oct 13, 2022 02:03
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Morrow posted:The opposite: op meant that recognizing DL(ZK?)NR would be like recognizing Taiwan. O I C
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Oct 13, 2022 02:08
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Tafferling posted:And I can't ever imagine Russia managing to get specialized workers from abroad with sanctions and generally lovely Rouble exchange. The Rouble is actually up vs. the Euro about 17% since the war started:  https://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=RUB&to=EUR Compared to the dollar it's up 10%. Edit: so, the rouble is actually stronger than when the war started.
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Feb 26, 2023 01:58
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Tomn posted:I'm sure PederP can weigh in more on this when he wakes up, but it was discussed earlier that the rouble exchange rate right now is functionally meaningless because while you can theoretically get a quote for what you want to exchange the rouble for, it's not really possible to find someone actually willing to exchange them for you due to sanctions. It's like an display item in a window storefront - yes, it might be a decent deal at that price but it's a display item so they're not selling it and they don't have other copies to sell, so it's hard to call it an actually good deal. Interesting, I did not know that. So, how is the exchange rate calculated if they cannot be exchanged?
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Feb 26, 2023 02:19
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So they can't, for example, circumvent sanctions by trading the rouble ==> yuen => euro?
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Feb 26, 2023 02:36
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Tomn posted:I'd be interested to hear the explanation from a dedicated finance guy, but speaking as a layman I think part of the issue here is what exactly is China going to do with the rubles after they buy them, given that nobody else will accept them? Buy Russian goods like gas oil and fertilizer, I assume. Or, at least, rubles is what they are using to buy those. India is doing that too.
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Feb 26, 2023 03:08
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DancingMachine posted:Absolutely. I continue to be mystified by this thread's confidence in continued US support of Ukraine. Trump and Fox News ARE the mainstream of the Republican Party. They are not remotely fringe figures. Support for Ukraine ends in 2024 unless Dems win a trifecta of house, senate, and white house again. Two-party politics does create this bi-polar dynamic where no matter what you support the other team is gonna oppose. The other half of the situation is that: 1. 80-90% of Americans couldn't find Ukraine on a map. It is going to be very hard to convince them to care about a country they've basically never heard of before. 2. Wars have a very clear pattern for public support where they start off with a wave of popularity that peters out over time. We saw this with the middle east, vietnam, etc. It's going to be an uphill battle to keep the public focused on Ukraine the especially now when there is a much deeper division between the parties. At least in the middle east Democrats and Republicans were pretty lockstep for most of the war. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Mar 5, 2023 18:57
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Missiles are really expensive, shells are cheap. There are plenty of situations where missiles are going to be useful, such as targeting key infrastructure that you can't normally reach, but you don't want to spend half a million dollars per missile when you could spend a few hundred bucks for a few shells. My guess is that they've already hit all the precision/long range targets that they need. Edit: although the Russians have already made the mistake of withholding reserve forces so who knows if this will work out for them. Cpt_Obvious fucked around with this message at 00:30 on Mar 7, 2023 |
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Mar 7, 2023 00:28
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Herstory Begins Now posted:Which reserve force exactly are they withholding? I'm talking about their blunder not fully mobilizing at the beginning of the war.
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Mar 7, 2023 00:38
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khwarezm posted:The Trotskyite site World Socialist Web Site (I'm not trying to lazily call them tankies or something, they call themselves Trotskyite) put up an article claiming that 100K Ukrainian troops have been killed in the war (as opposed to total casualties including killed, wounded and captured) and links back to this article from Politco making the claim. This seems like a massive escalation since last I heard the 100k figure was more for the total casualties of Ukrainian forces. Is this reliable, considering its more Politco making the claim? I would not consider trots to be "tankies" because they are ideologically opposed to supporting any and all states like the USSR and modern Russia etc.
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Mar 17, 2023 23:18
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SaTaMaS posted:How long until India hates China enough to mend things with Pakistan, then the US could sell both of them weapons If you see them pull out of BRICS then that'd probably be a big sign.
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Mar 25, 2023 02:28
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Charliegrs posted:Was it a myth in WW2? I thought the myth was that troops were sent into battle without guns (because they didn't have enough) and were told to pick them up from their dead comrades. The belief that soldiers were executed en masse for cowardice was largely a myth. There were purges of the military (that damaged military effectiveness) during and before WW2 but those were mostly targeted at officers not enlisted soldiers. Commissars were tasked with ensuring the loyalty of officers specifically because the paranoid Stalinist regime did not believe that the czarist officers they inherited could be trusted. Many point to the history of the Russian civil war just 15 years earlier as the source of this paranoia or at least the appointment of a paranoid regime. Either way, soldiers retreat all the time and it's impossible to shoot anyone who does so without causing a mutiny. You simply can't run a successful military with such a hard line, it's physically impossible. Especially when much of the Russian tactics in WW2 were "retreat and force the Germans to stretch their supply lines to the breaking point in the dead of winter". Cpt_Obvious fucked around with this message at 18:57 on Mar 27, 2023 |
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Mar 27, 2023 17:45
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Yeah the idea that there are no accents or regional dialects in the United States is kind of ridiculous. Most coherent states are going to have a universal language, it's necessary that everyone involved have some common means of communication. Societies require cooperation, and cooperation requires a shared language.
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Mar 28, 2023 16:45
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Interesting article. My take away is that Russia and the PRC are forming their own trade/military bloc and china is clearly the dominant partner, the same way the United States is the dominant partner in NATO. Idk what that means in 20, 30 years but right now it seems to mean that they will be trading more with each other and less with everyone else outside of that bloc. It also means that should war break that the two will probably be supporting each other, meaning the sino-soviet split is basically impossible to replicate.
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Mar 28, 2023 17:07
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Imo The United States appears to be revving up for a trade war with China. First there were tariffs under trump, now there are tech embargoes under Biden. America appears to be decoupling itself from the Chinese trade bloc but by bit, and china seems to be responding by expanding trade with Russia and India and the other BRICS.
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Mar 28, 2023 17:18
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Charliegrs posted:I always get the impression that Russia and China *should* be pretty closely aligned for many reasons such as they are both awful dictatorships and see themselves as a counter to the liberal world order after WW2. But, for whatever reason they are always suspicious of each other so they can never really form a alliance on the level of NATO. Why? I don't know. Like many things geopolitics I'm sure it's very complicated. Maybe there's still some lingering tension from the Sino-Soviet split. China is running a tightrope right now where they really want to avoid direct confrontation with the West. That's why the United States can put troops into territory the PRC considers their own and the PRC basically does nothing. Remaining neutral in the conflict allows them to act as a mediator rather than an enemy of the United States.
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Mar 28, 2023 20:56
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IDK i'd imagine the general quiet in the thread has less to do with moderation and more to do with interest. A lot of people just aren't that paying attention to the war anymore, others may be demoralized by how it's dragging on and on and throwing an entire generation into a meatgrinder they may not even win. Wars naturally lose support over time. It's a very natural pattern.
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Mar 29, 2023 20:43
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Cinci your doing a good job preventing this thread from turning into a cavalcade of horror. There is no educational benefit to showing people dying in a warzone. People trying to draw parallels to George Floyd are missing the fact that what made the George Floyd video important was that people needed to know about police brutality. Before that, the depth of police brutality was believed to be anomalous by many. That video and the surrounding protests proved it to be the norm. So unless you are somehow unaware that a warzone involves a lot of dead people, there is nothing to learn from death videos.
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Mar 31, 2023 00:41
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