functor
2d ago
Tens of thousands of Ukrainians fought in Bakhmut, a town of 100k people along a thousand km long line. They lost.
France, Britain and Germany would truly struggle to deploy tens of thousands of soldiers in a high intensity conflict in Ukraine. They would struggle to defend a single city. There is no European army that could hold a sizeable portion of the front except for Ukraine/Russia. The scale of the Ukraine war is vastly beyond what any European leaders have imagined for decades.
functor
3d ago
Compare how the Chinese have played things compared to the neo-cons.
During the cold war Sino-Russian relations were tense and the countries had sizeable portions of the militaries on each other's borders. Russia pancaked itself during the 90s and instead of abusing Russia the Chinese were rather generous. Russia had treated China poorly and the Chinese responded by being respectful. Today China has almost no troops along the Russian border and they can buy the natural resources between Turkey and Alaska, or Norway and North Korea at a discount.
Meanwhile the west has embargoed it self from one of the largest resource producers in the world and has to sustain a military 25% of the size of the US military fighting a high intensity war against Russia while having to maintain a separate military force capable of defeating Russia on Russia's northern flank. Russia has become an endless black hole for western military resources that is going to cost mountains of equipment and manpower for decades. China isn't paying this incompentence tax.
The US spent two trillion playing 8D chess defending its strategic resources in Iraq. The Chinese bought oil fututures and let the Iraqis buy infrastructure from China with the money. Today the Chinese have stronger ties to Iraq than the US has with a percent of the budget. The US is spending far more in the middle east than China, with dubious results. The US strategy of dominating the world through military means simply doesn't work. The best strategy for the US is to do what China does.
functor
4d ago
Funny how tens of thousands dead in Gaza is collateral damage. A tiny, tiny fraction of the deaths when taking Kiev and people are losing their minds. They should go investigate the Libyan war, Afghan war, or the unprovoked full scale occupation of Iraq. Far, far worse than Bucha.
functor
4d ago
I have heard people talking about wanting to set up a SWIFT-alternative to defend the liberal world order. They basically want to create a woke version of BRICS.
They see American unipolar order as dangerous, so they want to create an alternative one in order to save the ideology of the American liberal world order.
functor
5d ago
In Sweden we had a mass shooting where a man was kicked off welfare and then decided to kill 10 people at a welfare office before finishing himself. He screamed "not everyone should work" before letting off a few rounds. His energy seems to reflect the European attitude on paying for a military.
Currently the attitude in Sweden is beyond bizarre. John Bolton would be considered a tankie right now. Their, is just fanatical worship of the US military industrial complex combined view of any being in opposition to the US as a fundamentally evil. I have never before seen people justifying the invasion of Iraq and Vietnam at the scale happening now. The average Swede has been turned into a Dick Cheney, except they only see the world as good vs evil.
At the same time as they want complete and utter American domination of every corner of the world they are shitting all over Americans and talking about boycotts. To make matters worse, most people can't give any legitimacy to any other view point. There are true believers in the neo con project, people who are fundamentally evil and those who are brainwashed by Russians.
functor
22d ago
Small oversea territories provide little value to a high cost. The UK has to be able to control and defend a bunch of insignificant islands half way around the world. This ranges from peacetime patrolling of fisheries to a potential falklands like war. Having small islands doesn't provide any real strategic benefit, it just provides a few thousand citizens for whom providing NHS services will cost a fortune and provides the military with a continuous headache.
The UK would be far better off if it stopped larping global hegemon and simply accepted that it is a mid sized country like Holland and stopped getting involved in far away places.
functor
24d ago
Do they actually need to hire conservatives? Just kicking our a lot of liberals would achieve the objectives. DOGE's prime objective is to deplatform leftists and they are doing so at an incredible rate. If the left lost its armies of professional activists they would be heavily undermined. Killing USAID doesn't just hit wokeness in America, it hits wokeness globally. The issue with building a right wing bureaucracy is that bureaucracies naturally tend toward the left.
DOGE just needs to turn thousands of full time activists away from their activist career and give them new careers selling real estate, managing paperwork at a hospital or SEO-blogging.
For those on the fringe right, imaging what the right could achieve with tens of thousands of full time activists with billions in funding and top tier connections. Now imagine losing that.
My prediction is that we are going to find that a lot of people aren't actually as woke as we thought. They just played around with it. The people who wanted to defund the police would never walk through the ghetto at night alone with no police. The middle class posers talk about body positivity and trans rights while being skinny and living hetronormatively. They love diversity on twitter but live in an all white neighbourhood.
functor
29d ago
- Israel is an unsustainable state. Their population minus Palestinians and ultra orthodox who are a net drag on society is equivalent to that of Denmark and their land area is equivalent to New Jersey. At the same time they are more or less at war with everyone around them. They have two million Palestinian citizens that fundamentally hate them and they are at a numerical disadvantage compared to the Palestinians.
They are in a similar situation to south Vietnam, the Rhodesians or the French in Algeria. Their state is inherently going to be stuck in a mess that is slowly going to bring it down.
The idea of resettling the ghetto population of Europe in Palestine was incredibly poorly thought through. At least the British chose Australia to dump criminals in which was far more viable as a state.
functor
29d ago
In any case the US must advance and legitimate Israeli objectives.
Why? what exactly does forever wars in the middle east and refugee crises deliver to the US? What is legitimate about an Israeli claim to Gaza?
functor
29d ago
The US is swimming in debt, is deeply divided and is being overtaken by China. The US is far less ahead than it was 50 years ago. Most of the countries in the region trade more with China than the US. The US portion of global GDP, population and military might is in decline. This is an awful time to get involved in forever wars containing direct ethnic cleansing over a tiny strip of desert.
Creating a giant refugee crisis on the border of Europe while impacting a bunch of countries in the middle east by engaging in mass ethnic cleansing is the worst PR imaginable.
functor
30d ago
A lot of the people panicing aren't concerned about bribes and corruption being unconvered. There are plenty of people panicing over that but they are fewer than the number of people freaking out online and those who actually risk having crimes uncovered are probably less vocal. The big fuss is about the recession that is about to hit upper middle class people who only are employable in the public sector. They react in horror seeing George town pol sci graduates being tossed out and told to "learn to code". The Chief diversity officer, or the person with a cushy high status USAID job that allows them to fly business class to Tanzania twice a year doesn't want to learn about all the new exciting opportunities in nursing. This can be compared to the freakout over lots of PMCs being tossed out of twitter. Those people aren't supposed to be treated like factory workers who get laid off.
With 4 years of Trump we could really see a 10-20% reduction in public sector cushy PMC jobs. That is a sizeable downshift in employment equivalent to a proper recession. I would be freaking out as well if I thought it was realistic that there would be a 20% reduction in employment in my field over the course of the next four years.
functor
1mo ago
American consumers get to buy cheap foreign stuff
Which disincentivizes buying American. America deindustrializes and you end up with well payed service workers who are chronically broke.
A strong dollar doesn't particularly impact insurance or real estate.
It does, most of the world is doing business in American treasuries and the American financial system becomes the global money hub. The dollar system allows the US financial markets to swell out of proportion. It wouldn't be possible for the US to have this much money printing without hyper inflation if it wasn't for the petrodollar.
functor
1mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege
The US prints money and exports the inflation. The US biggest export product is the dollar, something the US makes for free. The US economy is awash with dollars making real estate and other assets extremely expensive while the dollar is still pricey making the US expensive to manufacture in.
The US has the housing prices of a country that prints wildly while having the currency cost of a country like Switzerland.
Jarvis pull up the gazan death toll in the latest war
Lower than what the Vietnamese, Algerians or Afghans paid.
I again remind you that Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza,
So they took all the land except for a tiny sliver with minimal natural resources and no connection to the west bank and then put it under blockade.
As simple as that, yet you only apply the standard one way.
Because there is absolutely no reason for the IDF to be there. The idea that a God gave them the land in exchange for parts of babies penises is absurd as a legal argument. The Palestinians did not start the fight, people who managed to get all of Eastern Europe to hate them and then decided to move to Palestine started the conflict.
functor
1mo ago
The current arrangement is fundamentally broken. The US has the dollar as the reserve currency, making the dollar too expensive. This is great for the American finance, real estate and insurance industry that require little labour and are capital intensive. The US as a reserve currency means that the world is subsidizing the financial markets in the US.
This means that the US becomes an incredibly expensive country to do business in. The working poor in the US are well paid. They are just living in a financialized economy with high costs. With an overvalued dollar, real estate in the US is way too expensive which means that American workers have to be well paid. All that money sloshing around the American financial system keeps medical insurance expensive.
This worked in 1960 when the US was so technologically superior that much of the world ended up selling bananas and clothes to the US for dollars that then were used to buy overpriced industrial products from the US. As the world has caught up, much of the US has gotten shafted. They have high costs of living while struggling to compete with cheap foreign products in a globalized economy under pax Americana.
Trump wants to keep the US dollar dominance while having a more normal internal market by having tariffs. Prices will be high within the US while Americans will continue to be relatively rich while going abroad.
For the rest of the world the deal is awful, we will have to sell products to the US in order to get dollars and then pay a 25% tariff in the products we buy. So if we want to buy oil we have to sell 100 dollars worth of goods to get 80 dollars of money post tariffs that the Americans just print so we can get our oil.
functor
1mo ago
Why should they lay flat and accept defeat? They were pushed into a tiny area after their villages were destroyed and many of their kin were killed. They are put in a small camp with awful natural resources and have constantly been attacked by the Israelis who have bombed them repeatedly since start. Israel started the war when they attacked the Al Aqsa mosque and had already taken thousands of Palestinian hostages.
If you don't want to get smoked while crying in a bathroom in an IDF outpost don't move to Palestine and don't join the IDF. They have no reason to be there and have only themselves to blame for the constant headache which they will face.
functor
1mo ago
The area is majority Palestinian. You can't have an area where the majority of people are second class citizens in their own home and nobody except Israel wants a massive refugee crisis. This is question for the people who thought building a jewish state in a densely populate area to answer.
functor
1mo ago
There is absolutely no reason for the rest of the world to want or support a Palestinian refugee crisis. Neo con wars end up with migration crises and these need to be stopped. No more mass movements of arabs.
functor
1mo ago
If you ran the IDF, how would you fight Hamas in a chivalrous manner?
First off, occupying a large population that fundamentally doesn't have anything to gain from the current setup is futile. Trying to force the Palestinians to accept only having a tiny fraction of the land with an awful arrangement won't work. The only times counter insurgency has worked, it has been with political concessions.
functor
1mo ago
First off the British military wasn't incompetent enough to get pwnd that hard. The Israelis were defending military outposts with hundreds of soldiers and got owned by men in sandals running over an open field. Of the 797 civilian casualties a large portion was killed by Israel blasting the area and preferring to kill civilians rather than letting them be taken prisoners. That is a civilian to military casualty rate well below two civilians killed by Hamas for every IDF soldier.
functor
1mo ago
14 deaths in Northern Ireland becomes so famous people know the story 53 years later. Israel kills hundreds of people a year during a peaceful year and tens of thousands during the war. The Gazan war had as many dead in a month as the troubles had in 30 years. It was about 360x more bloody.
functor
1mo ago
First, unlike other colonial powers the people making the decisions have no where else to go.
If Americans are so adamant about a jewish state they should give them a small plot of land. Jews have managed 2000 years without a state so it would hardly be anything new. A large portion of jews lived in the middle east without a jewish state for the past 2000 years. A jewish population in an Ottoman style empire would be return to normalacy.
and their military ability to defend themselves they fully expect a return to periodic pogroms and expulsions
Jews require constant conflict with everyone around them in order to maintain group cohesion. If they didn't want to be disliked a good start would be to stop killing large numbers of civilians. The cause of antisemitism is the type of behaviour Ben Gvir and his likes are engaging in.
Second, Israel has the full backing of the USA
Along with Vietnam and Afghanistan? Evangelical Christians who honestly believe Jesus will return if the foreskins in exchange for Israel deal is upheld is shrinking. The fact that the Jewish community is deeply antagonistic towards the Christian groups that support them doesn't help.
Sweden has 3 brigades to defend 1500 km. Sweden's military is remarkably under dimensioned. Finland has a more sizeable military but needs the force at home. Moving the military to the other side of Europe leaves the home front vulnerable while providing Russia with a reason for war.
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