• 0 Posts
  • 260 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: December 1st, 2023

help-circle


  • for freedom and democracy. Supposedly what the alliance exists for.

    What? It’s been founded by a bunch of colonial nations (not ex-colonial at that point) still from time to time fighting colonial wars with war crimes and such. It has Turkey of all genocidal bastards as an important member.

    The only reason for its existence was accumulating power. Well, as with all alliances.

    Of course, kinda motivated by USSR redesigning its ground forces for capturing large parts of the world after they’ve been nuked. I’m not joking, that’s the reason ex-Soviet militaries so terribly suck at actually fighting - they are sort of a different mechanism, more like huge mobile garrisons to deploy in wastelands. Their analog of western ground forces was, say, VDV in Russia ; which is why despite nominally having the narrow function of paradropped assault troops, they’ve been used for every kind of thing important.

    But corruption is present in all countries, including the NATO members, so that’d be a bit hypocritical,

    Yes, and also weird.

    I don’t think the decision was ever on the table.

    Yes, when after 2 years of war and hundreds of thousands dead they meet and sign something about “discussing help to Ukraine” in case fighting gets more intensive by not clear which criterion - it means Ukraine is not becoming a member.

    About “irreversible path” - they’ve said such things about Georgia too. Ivanishvili’s party is not good, but there’s been plenty of time before they started acting like now.









  • I’m not sure of that really working, hasn’t been tested after all. Shootouts on the streets don’t lead to everyone getting shot. So, say, US warns “everybody big” that they are nuking someplace, but don’t want to nuke anyone else. If “everybody big” are kinda fine with it, they won’t launch nukes in response. That means there’s a place nuked and no MAD.



  • The idea of the US dropping all support for Ukraine is pretty damn scary to me.

    Only it seems that support for Ukraine is slowly drying out anyway. So whether electing Biden will help that is questionable.

    One can’t blame them for not trusting anything signed by Russia, though. But maybe they should have conceded on some of the occupied territories, when Russia wasn’t demanding anything they didn’t hold, which is as close to “begging for peace” as you can expect from an adversary 3 times stronger.

    Dunno, I think no matter what the outcome of that election, for Ukraine it’d be best to sign some treaty by September. Same for Armenia, only unless somebody forces Aliyev, it may not get such an opportunity.



  • I’m not sure it makes sense to talk of them as of separate figures. The US state policy, internal and foreign, under both is eerily similar and continuous, with Trump it looked like “dumpster fire of the day”, with Biden (and Obama before Trump) it looked like “another careful calculated decision”, but they are all in the same general direction.

    Biden cleaned up Trump’s mess and avoided a complete imminent global financial collapse.

    Was it really Biden, though? Global economy is self-organizing and kinda reliable, like the Internet (by design, not by its real topology and those big underwater cables with no backup connecting whole continents).


  • Well, you’re in the US, so it’s not your problem if they decide to nuke someone outside it or, say, greenlight an invasion. While I have some of my family and myself in a place theoretically attractive to nukes, and half of my other family in a country likely to be invaded. Fortunately the rest is distributed between USA and a country which, despite all the cries, is in no significant danger.




  • Homeschooling is technically the opposite of fascist approach. As in “state being in charge” vs “parents being in charge”.

    That said, some parents are just too dumb to allow them full control over their child’s education. Just in my case it was their “try harder” attitude about school, while something like homeschooling would work much better.

    Imagine an autistic adult who never dropped the imitation and missed on most good things in life, trying to impose the same onto their autistic child who at least understands that imitation takes too much energy and isn’t worth shit (and is seen right through by NT people anyway), thinking that their fake smiles, stupid loud nonsense talk and even fake hobbies (as in those they know nothing about, but talk a lot in public) don’t look that, and also being scared shitless of the very idea of going to a therapist (“I’m/you’re NORMAL”, this is common in ex-USSR though), and, finally, actively sabotaging any idea to isolate their stupidity and ignorance to them. That would be my dad.

    Other than personal examples, there are good and bad parents and there are good and bad schools and there are good and bad education systems.

    Parents generally don’t groom their children to become cannon fodder, some education systems do ; parents generally don’t want their children to be fooled by politicians, and education systems are directly influenced by those politicians ; parents generally care for their own children to have some successes, while for Prussian-style school systems it’s normal that some are just discarded, if the majority becomes good drones.