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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35663 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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Short term you appear to be correct, to my great surprise. I honestly don't understand how we got here, except that somehow our enemies were even more grossly incompetent than ourselves.

Basically. All of the imperial hubris without two things that made it somewhat work for the US:

  1. A legitimately first rank military and logistics system. For all the talk of it being imperialist Ukraine made me appreciate the US more because, as bad as the War on Terror was, you can at least count on them to win the war before they lose it. Putin tried his push to Baghdad and corruption and incapacity undid him.

  2. More importantly perhaps: the US has no comparable rival, so even a US president who fumbled as badly as Putin would simply have vastly more room to maneuver. Putin clearly miscalculated, but a US miscalculation in the same spot wouldn't be nearly as damaging cause the US isn't going to be sanctioned to hell and see a peer competitor flooding Iraq or, more comparably, Mexico with weapons.

I think the second point explains why this whole thing has been such a shock. America has been a superpower for 80 years. Uncontested for around 30. Most of the world population - and Americans specifically- have gotten desensitized to how brazen the US can be and assume it's true for other alleged rivals.

I do wonder how the U.S. would have fared in its last few invasions if Russia was providing targeting intelligence and advanced weaponry to our enemies the way we are in Ukraine. Maybe better than the Russians, but I expect much higher casualties than we actually experienced.

Syria?

It would be much worse (Ukraine is better armed than 2003 Saddam) but:

  1. I don't think Russia can be as generous to the hypothetical rogue Mexico/Canada as the US and NATO can be

  2. There's a lot of criticism of Russia's performance in and of itself.

Remember the controversy over the bogus story that the Russians were offering Taliban-aligned islamists bounties for dead American soldiers? False accusations are always projections of one's own desires; as we turn Ukrainian drone operators into twitter celebrities.

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