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In the old thread somone - I think the Belgian guy with the painted avatar, you know who you are - posted something that I wanted to chime in on. I was - and to a large degree still am - very disillusioned with how our societies are run. So, before the 2022 invasion, I did not at all expect that so many countries would go to lengths greater than some weak diplomatic tutting. I was so jaded that had very little doubt that this would be just another time a dictator would get away with his crimes, because other world leaders wouldn't want to bother. Just like Hitler, Putin seemed to have projected his own cynical world view on other nations and wrongly concluded that they were unable or unwiling to stand their ground. The fact that there seems to be - in what we can loosely call the 'Western" world - so much consensus that Putin must be stopped makes me hopeful for the future. It gives me hope that when world leaders make promises, they may on occassion actually mean it. The Russian state is repeatedly falling on its face because all its actors view each other as either gangsters prison bitches, and accordingly no one can trust one another. By contrast, the countries opposing Russia seem to be cooperating and meeting one another in good faith. It is beyond absurd to even try to compare how much Ukrainians trust one another and their institutions with how much Russians do. Some institutions in the West are working and not just some PR operation from the last century, and that benefits all the people they represent. If these institutions work, it gives me some hope that we can build other institutions as well - institutions that can build peace, offer safety, and uplift people out of poverty. I still feel a vague dread about the future, but I no longer feel that doom is completely inevitable.
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Oct 11, 2022 22:40
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 03:39 |
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Saladman posted:E: Also NL is surprising, since they produce a lot of gas and didn't import much from Russia, so I'm not really sure on how The Economist is calculating these metrics. IIRC the Netherlands reduced their gas production because the associated tremors were wrecking the towns in the region.
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Oct 12, 2022 13:06
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lilljonas posted:I can't imagine the mayhem if Ukraine had HIMARS during the famous never-ending column parked outside Kiev in Spring... Those videos are terrifying. Somewhere there are now tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of conscripts waiting to get stuck in the autumn mud. If Russia stays as foolish as they have been we may witness senseless slaughter of WW1/WW2-proportions.
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Oct 12, 2022 15:25
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:Those straight trenches are bugging me because I thought you really, really wanted them to wind and wiggle so somebody couldn't penetrate somewhere and just mow down both ways with machine guns. What I'm guessing is that you take the big machine to dig a long straight line quickly, and then use smaller ones (or shovels) to make it squiggly?
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Oct 12, 2022 18:38
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Herstory Begins Now posted:It's literally only getting walked back because it's blowing up in their face and because it is so clearly indefensible This reads like a variant of the "humor as instrument for fascism" approach. Say it, no one laughs, walk your statement back.
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Oct 24, 2022 11:36
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Kraftwerk posted:Couldn’t Ukraine use those Korean War era radar assisted anti air guns? Or have all those been melted down? Yeah as CCZS says, the gepaard is exactly that. While it was built against helos and attack aircraft, taking down drones is a piece of cake for it But it can only do point defense and there are so many points to defend, and even if you could put down a gepard next to every power substation - ammo eventually runs out and if I recall correctly, Switzerland is blocking further deliveries of that It's currently a waiting game of who tires out first: air defense of suicide drones. What gives me hope is that during WW2, the western allies sent thousands and thousands of bombers over industrial areas to pulverize them. And every time, the sites were running within days to weeks again. These drone attacks will bind Ukrainian air defense but other than that they will only make Ukraine angrier
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Jan 2, 2023 17:49
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Unless these offers to send material were unserious posturing without any intent to follow up
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Jan 19, 2023 15:17
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Antigravitas posted:It's possible, but I have my doubts. Lambrecht's other public failings aside, I kinda doubt you can nail any ministers of defense on Germany's procurement problems specifically. These problems go back all the way to the beginning of the republic. And arguably, even the Nazis like to sink inordinate amounts of resources into completely unusable vanity projects like Wonder Wepons or medium bombers and jets that were also supposed to be dive bombers. Or the world's most capable tanks on paper that fall apart once they are driven on actual road instead of lab benches.
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Jan 20, 2023 00:26
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