19398

Compared to say Belarus or Afghanistan, yeah they are paragons of perfection in governmental institutions, good enough to make an old anarchist like me doubt my beliefs. Compared to how they were say 30 years ago… not so good.

@Strollen high five across the aisle bud O/\O

19399

Yeah, exactly. When has Russia cared whether Ukranian civilians get hurt in the crossfire, and why would Ukranians evacuate from their own army… Russia just wants hostages, and further depopulation and eventual assimilation. It’s not like they’ll be able to feed 250k people on the other side of the river.

19400

Well OK then. If that’s how that works, then you could say that the invasion of Ukraine has helped them and the west immeasurably to grow in strength(1) and prosperity(2), yeah? I mean, sure it makes sense. Our shit got bombed with great effort and risk, it must be worth a lot more than we thought it’d be, must scare them more than we thought, let’s get that show on the road!

Naw man. That reactor got hit, hit hard. It was damage done. Sure they (both Iraq and Iran) took from it the motivation to make subsequent strikes harder and increase their investment in nuclear technology, but that is a tertiary effect at best. To call that as ‘the strikes helped the nuke program along’ is… far-fetched imo.

(1): NATO gained at least two new members, and with them a lot of strength and strategic security as well as a ton of reinforcement to their unity and resolve.
(2): We are going to marshall-plan the fuck out of Ukraine (heck, and maybe Russia too!), and that’s going to make everybody fat & happy, mark my words. From the people supplying bricks and mortar to the people selling javelin missiles.

Oh yeah. That shit is ominous as fuck. The best case scenario is that this keeps the Ukrainians from shelling the pontoon bridge. The worst case scenario is that this is a lead-up to the use of WMD. And that. Would. Suck.

19401

Maybe Ukraine should hit any bridges with now with whatever they got. If Russia is in trouble, better to capture or kill then have them reinforce the other side of the bank with hostages.

19402
19403

Hmm, 30 years ago we had grand juries indicting former government officials for their role in carrying out a scheme to secretly violate the law by selling arms to Iran in order to raise money to fund right-wing death squads in Central America. By the end of the year, the lame duck President GHW Bush — who was, himself, also involved in the scheme — had pardoned six of them. Seems more or less the same?

19404

Wow, I did not expect McCarthy to be so explicit in his threat to cut off Ukraine.

McCarthy, who could be House speaker if Republicans triumph, indicated that that could end in a GOP-led House.

“I think people are gonna be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine,” he recently told Punchbowl News. “They just won’t do it.”

McCarthy suggested that Americans want Congress to focus on issues closer to home.

https://wapo.st/3gjASFo

.

19405

Yeah, I posted that yesterday, which sparked the discussion up there 👆 about whether the Rs were so far gone they wouldn’t pass funding for Ukraine.

19406

There have been reports of truck convoys moving south. Seems like a withdrawal is imminent.

A withdrawal would be good and bad for Ukraine. Good because any recovery of territory is good. Bad because the Dnipro is a very wide river, difficult to cross with no bridges left - it could be defended with minimal troops, freeing up Russian forces to deploy elsewhere, thus making further gains more difficult. If the Russians supposedly have 20k troops north of the river, this probably frees up at least half of them.

19407

Yeah, I don’t buy those comparisons to our glorious youth when the grass was greener. I can also remember some interesting things that happened with American President in the 90s.

I could understand those talks if we were talking in context of just the West, but the situation includes borderline failed states. Political crises in UK or US result in what, slightly slower economic growth and encroaching income disparity?

19408

Well we’ll agree to disagree I think. Iraq’s nuclear program was never going anywhere; the Israelis, with typical paranoia (somewhat justified overall, to be sure, but usually extreme) credited Saddam with far more capability than his regime actually had. They definitely blew up the reactor, but whether that had much impact on any nuclear weapons program or not is a much murkier question. It did though convince Baghdad that the only way to avoid such attacks in the future was probably to actually have a WMD program that worked. They were not able to do so for a variety of reasons, for which we can give thanks, but I’m not sure at all the Israeli strike had much to do with that.

19409

So would you say the 1941 London Blitz was “helping” England then? It did negligable direct damage (far less significant to the overall effort than the Osirak raid I’d wager) but strengthened the Brits in their resolve to never surrender.

A bit upthread the question was asked when large scale aerial bombardment ever yielded any positive srategic result for the side doing the bombing. I failed to see 1940 Rotterdam mentioned. The Germans bombed the heart out of the port city of Rotterdam. Mere days later the Dutch government capitulated to the nazis. That was the exact intended purpose of the bombing and afaik the only time bombing the everloving fuck out of a city got such a result. It’s because the Dutch are pussies. Yup.

19410

That’s the part when Hiro Protagonist and a few other random guys are riding in a little boat to get to a raft – a large collections of boats, ships, and an aircraft carrier lashed together.

A movie or TV series adaptation of Snow Crash has been talked about for a generation. If it’s ever made, that scene is one of the ones I’d most like to see. Imagine a stationary camera spinning in place like the Roseanne credits or That '70s Show to focus on a couple of guys in a tiny boat in the middle of the Pacific. The last guy is toting a massive machine gun that dangles bits in the ocean water, and from those bits the ocean is boiling and heaving, indicating that it’s using seawater to cool off the hot, giant, and probably nuclear-powered firearm.

Anyway, back to the war.

19411

My recollection is that this is essentially right. The Iraqis basically had no nuclear WMD program before the bombing, and they basically had no nuclear WMD program after the bombing. But what they did have, after, was a stronger desire for a nuclear WMD program.

19412

I thought everyone wanted to join Russia:

19413

Over 10% of the pre-war population:

19414

It’s like Stalin’s purges.

19415

What in the fuck, if that is anywhere close to accurate… Just terrible. Fuck Putin and fuck Russia.

19416

Where do you put 5 million refugees? Who are most probably dissaffected, antogonistic, and can’t contribute safely to your economy? I’m scared of the answer.

On the other hand, if/when Ukraine takes back the eastern provinces, rebellious Russian-speaking rebels won’t be a problem anymore, they’ll be gone.

It does make clear that Putin wants the country, or have it depopulated/destroyed, nothing less.

19417

You put them in the ground.