"Oh, this is calamity! Calamity! Oh no, he's on the floor!"
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Meanwhile On Grad
Documenting hate speech, conspiracy theories, apologia/revisionism, and general tankie behaviour across the fediverse. Memes are welcome!
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News in this time is rough. There is no true left wing news in America, news is fully captured. The only source of unvarnished left wing news is Zines in the House US, and they are extremely idealogical, because they have to be to operate in a news embargo. All information is accepted, all opinions are taken with a grain of salt, existing right now sucks.
We haven't actually had a modern war yet. When you look at Russia v Ukraine, or US vs Iran, you see what the new war looks like.
Israel as a weapon testing platform does not involve actual conflict. There's a small about of fighting from Hamas, but realistically on Israel they can just kill whoever they want however they want.
The US exist as a power in precision bombing, we are fucking allergic to soldiers dying as you noted. You saw what happened when a power can just take precision bombing, just soak it up like Iran. Russia exists as a power in sending waves after waves of people that they are willing to lose, they win through attrition. You're seeing what happens when their opponent stops spending lives and starts killing you autonomously.
Europe is not one place, despite the fact that they have an EU, individually they are not terribly good at working together. You saw how bad Brexit fucked regional trade. In my opinion the entire EU is worried that Nato is bullshit and no wants Russia to try and prove it.
Right now the only untested super power is China. China can produce munitions at a rate that the entire world's production combined can't touch. China has an nearly unlimited number of people and have embraced drone tech. Mark my fucking words, the world is a series of paper tigers next to China. The big powers are rushing to prove it.
The Guardian is where I get most of my US news from, and they're UK based, which just shows you the level of capture here. But for foreign policy news, anywhere in the world is willing to criticize the US.
As far as war goes, it looks like we can pound the shit out of each other with missile and drones, but this is just an extension of air supremacy doctrine, which, as you've pointed out, can continue indefinitely without victory.
Given the psychology of the US and Israel, I think one of us will be dropping nukes soon, and then it's time to wait for the octopus archeologists to put the pieces together in a few millenia.
What's your take on Russia's threat to the EU and the EU's capacity to address it?
And here's the thing I notice about China which I'll bring up in the context of someone probably watching a lot of Chinese-friendly media. They do seem to have a fundamentally different, and I'll say morally better, approach to foreign policy than the US. You can make the road initiviative in Africa seem as sinister as you want, it's still better than destabilizing governments by arming pedophile warlords that sow chaos.
China COULD play the proxy war game to destabilize its enemies, but, as far as I can tell, it does not, and that's why I think China is probably going to be the only lead player people are willing to work with..
And that for as long as it takes them to fall to the power madness that all empires fall into.
There is no escaping the wheel.
I think Russia poses a threat to anyone no matter how deep a hole they are currently in, they are a nuclear power, and even though the most likely people on the planet to use a nuke are the US in Iran or Israel in Iran, the threat of a nuclear powered nation engaging in offensive war is terrifying.
No matter how well the EU would be able to defend, and I have very very little opinion there, my info is extremely low with EU matters, Russia testing Nato directly would show that the agreement effectively doesn't exist. I think it's just as likely that Nato/EU does as much about Russian aggression as they did with Ukraine, no matter where it happens.
I could be totally wrong there, I'm willing to be totally wrong there.
I think drones as a fundamental technology of war have changed the game in a way you wouldn't call air supremacy. Air supremacy used to rely on incredibly expensive pieces of flight equipment, even the drones. Now the tech involves things that cost pennies in comparison (basically consumer drone tech with military grade explosives tapes to them) that can take out a piece of equipment which is nearly irreplaceable. War has changed right under the nose of the US and Russia. At least Russia is trying to catch up, the US is rejecting this tech and trying to put more pieces of 7-8 figure equipment in the air.