It seems unlikely that the Ukraine war will end in a negotiated settlement. The Ukrainian muppet state is already starting to disappear, with most of the high elements of the state having moved to mansions in the South of France, Italy, and Canada. They don’t seem keen on America for some reason I am at loss to understand. Zelensky has purchased a palace in London, which is not a strong vote of confidence in the continued existence of the Ukrainian muppet state.
Those elements of the state apparatus that are still around are increasingly acting like mobile bandits rather than stationary bandits — grabbing what they can preparatory to moving on, and applying state violence capriciously and arbitrarily without regard to the long term state objectives of maintaining order and productivity. Likely that by and by, there just will not be enough of the muppet state left for the elements of the state to get away with using violence under color of authority.
If the Ukrainian muppet state simply vanishes, chances are that the Russians will not intervene to restore order, as this would be contrary to their objective of obtaining a neutral and non aligned buffer zone between themselves and NATO. With luck, we may gain a modern example of how to organize a state from nothing. Or at least how not to do it. Ancient states were created from nothing through relationships of blood and marriage, but we are likely to see a state created from nothing through computers running on Starlink internet and generator power or solar power.
On the other hand, the normal process of state creation is that mobile bandits get sufficiently large and well organised that they face no serious opposition within a well defined turf, and quietly and slowly settle down to stationary banditry. Which is a long, slow, bloody, and destructive process. And one that the Russians may not have the patience for. Russians want a strong cohesive and neutral state capable of keeping out agents of foreign powers, capable of taking responsibility and exercising power over state level threats that happen on its turf.
We shall see. But the topic of this post is not what happens to the Ukraine after what remains of the Ukrainian muppet state skedaddles, but what happens in Nato after what remains of the Ukrainian muppet state skedaddles. Even if Ukraine develops a strong cohesive non aligned state, Nato and Russia are going to keep on pushing where their borders are adjacent. What is happening to Kalingrad is intolerable to Russia and Russians, and Russia is sure to do something violent about it after the Ukrainian muppet state vanishes, even if Nato engages in no further acts of menace and aggression — and it surely will engage in further acts of menace and aggression.
Russia has had centuries of Kalingrad type problems, and for centuries has been resolving or attempting to resolve those problems with immense and terrible violence. This is unlikely to change no matter who governs Russia in future, short of it being conquered and converted into a muppet state of the Global American Empire.
Russia is an empire, and naturally fissiparous, but the gradual escalation of threats, menace, and violence by the global American Empire has led to unprecedented unity and patriotism. These days, even the Chechens are enthusiastic Russian patriots. Russians have deep and horrifying memories of World War II, and when they look westwards, they see the German Wehrmacht in 1940. They are psychologically prepared for total war that could very easily go nuclear, though they do not expect nuclear war happening suddenly out of the blue.
The most recent Nato escalation of war on Russia was a small scale invasion of Russia past the borders that Nato recognizes. It was only a reconnaissance in force, a test of Russian capability, will, and cohesion, but it pissed off the Russians no end.
The Polish and American Nato forces operating from Nato bases in the Ukraine were wearing “Free Russian” hats, and the Nato bases are prominently labelled Ukrainian, and everyone in Global American Empire thinks this makes it totally not a Nato invasion of Russia, just a proxy invasion of Russia, a view not universally accepted by people who live in Russia.
Because the Global American Modus Operandi since 2010 has been slow and creeping escalation, on the slow boiling the frog model, no one in Russia expects nuclear war any time soon, but the Russian government and individual Russians are preparing for nuclear war eventually.
You will recall how the US could not tolerate Soviet Empire bases in Cuba, and this nearly led to nuclear war even though there was absolutely no threat of an Imperial Soviet Invasion of the American homeland. Russians perceive a very real threat of Imperial American invasion. In the end, either the borders of the Russian homeland will be neutral states, or the nukes will very likely fly.
There is definitely a crisis now developing for the Ukrainian frontlines in Donetsk.
The breakthrough in Ocheretyne is still out of control and now it looks that even Krasnogorovka will fall a lot faster than expected.
https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/04/what-we-know-about-the-xz-utils-backdoor-that-almost-infected-the-world/
After UA war, the CIA and every other Agency on the planet will continue moling and subverting all HW and SW.
Why can’t jews ride horses?
Doesn’t this make them gay..
https://teachingforsotzambia.com/2019/06/26/why-did-israel-not-use-horses/
Forbids harems, hunting & horses.
🤮🤮🤮☠️
There are guidelines for men: they may not ride an animal bareback—they are required to use a saddle.
LOL
https://halacha2go.com/php/h2go/home2.php?number=635
Literal Sullah can’t stand to pee tier.
USA’s elections, corrupt as fuck, as usual
even one tiny article gives hint at just 1% of the massive operations by sick evil power against human freedom.
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20588/most-secure-election
and that’s only far less than 25% the on-the-ground corruptions.
then add in all the social and news media psyops that go on.
all the $Billions, no individual person humans have ever raise $Billions donate for anything.
there may be votes cast, but surely not under any concept of a legit election by a well informed populace among personal candidates of integrity.
those days are long gone.
Compare the reaction Trump got in a poor largely black area area that votes ninety percent Democratic with 98% turnout, arguably 200% turnout, with the reaction Biden got in a similar area. It is obvious that in a genuinely free and fair election, Trump would landslide Harlem.
I keep telling people fraud in the nigger areas has been industrialized forever, niggers like Trump hate Biden. Biden’s sole base of support are priestly/academic types, single women (in some parts of the country) + women with liberal/weak husbands and swamp people in the beltway. It doesn’t include niggers.
Which is why the Biden regime is importing 100 million fresh niggers from Africa to replace them.
In other news, a white liberal reports that China is slowly, blindly groping toward a solution to the Woman Problem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uN0xp-5lBE
“Remember, the CCP forced women to have abortions and sterilization. We may already be seeing the beginning of a more, ahaha, forceful attitude toward marriage and childbirth.”
No shit, Sherlock. When serious social problems need to be solved quickly, force is the only way. Find a husband by age 27 or the government will find one for you!
Maybe some news references are useful background context…
But what is the solution to the mess?
The US definitely needs to grow a lot more Blacks and Hispanics For Trump though…
https://www.theepochtimes.com/business/its-the-economy-stupid-black-and-hispanic-voters-embrace-trump-on-economics-and-well-being-5630718
https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1782614008832446863
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/fking-clown-show-unsealed-court-docs-reveal-biden-doj-colluded-national-archives-target
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/trump-classified-docs-case-unsealed-court-filings-show-emails-between-nara-biden-white-house-5635023
Meanwhile the leftist stranglehold on govt court systems keeps giving us shit like this…
https://modernity.news/2024/04/22/migrant-child-rapist-wont-be-deported-because-it-would-harm-his-mental-health
Violent left sicko creeps…
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1782066611622740201
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/activist-who-called-trans-women-arm-enraged-conservative-media-coverage
Deep State Leftism targeting Christ (same as Commie China does), lying about it…
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/no-evidence-fbi-used-counterterrorism-tactics-on-catholics-government-watchdog-report-5633265
https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/elon-musks-x-faces-attacks-from-both-sides-of-aussie-politics-5634213
Fully funded from within…
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/while-congress-abandons-border-35-billion-slipped-israel-bill-migrants-and-refugees
Funny even the Barr turd had to say something good…
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/threat-facing-our-country-is-from-the-far-left-and-socialistic-thugs-not-trump-bill-barr-5633952
Monkeys on the loose…
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/our-cities-turn-war-zones-every-night
https://twitter.com/WallStreetSilv/status/1781351912480096703
So is this a lot of monkeys or what?…
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/planned-parenthood-abortions-among-top-four-leading-causes-of-death-in-america-5633004
Roomfuls of corrupt politicians…
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-bad-faith-olympics/
People should learn a skilled trade…
ghostgunner dot net
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What if our Caesar, instead of “crossing the Rubicon” like the J6 psyop, instead organized an extreme intensity polling of a place like Harlem, Detroit, St. Louis, etc, with open identifications and signatures, etc? Enough to make any rigging undeniable. At that point, there’s our cause for restoration.
Ideally, no secret ballots is our Rubicon.
To do that, steel and fire would be required.
The Republic is past its use by date.
It would be good if it ended, as the Roman Republic ended, with one free election once. But ending it that way implies a level of normality bias of organizer of the one free election that would likely prove fatal, as it proved fatal for Caesar.
He’s doing that shill thing where he presupposes everyone knows and agrees with some absurd premise, this time that nigs are wise and should be listened to. Its nauseating to read that the opinion of some bantoid should be the basis of public cause.
ID checks, signature checks, staining the voter’s finger purple and so forth are measures meant to help the poll workers catch cheaters.
In our current situation it’s the poll workers themselves doing the cheating, thus none of the usual measures will work. You would have to remove anyone who has worked elections in the last 15-20 years and replace them with all new workers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BMRWACWfRM
Massive Global spy network, spying on you.
This is a lefty link.
The leftist is horrified because what everyone knows the spy agencies have been doing illegally for ages is now made legal and enforceable.
But all these entities have been selling your data to all and sundry for ages.
If power is lying on the table, someone is going to pick it up.
dumbfuck Jim shut up listen…
Most fucking majority of US and world doesn’t know for real the spy details, [*deleted*]
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The rest of your much repeated comments are in the moderation queue. If you make an honest effort to pass the shill test, you will be white listed, the rest of your comments will instantly appear, and you can comment without going through moderation.
Most real Americans know this stuff. Those that don’t are just pretending for fear of crime thought. Neither do most Americans believe the elections are real, that Trump is being prosecuted for real crimes, and so on and so forth. Look how blacks reacted to his arrest. Everyone knows what is up. Look at who shows up for rallies and shows up to vote in person. Biden’s real vote is around ten percent, if that, and faith in the wonderful patriotism of our spy system, though higher, is not a whole lot higher.
Microsoft tries to force you to use NIST approved curves for SSH, which everyone knows are backdoored. WordPress software, by default, reports the email address of every commenter to the NSA, even if you are running wordpress software on your own computer. (I fixed this, but it was not easy) The omnipresence of spying is completely obvious to everyone.
Anyone that does not know, does not want to know.
I am rather cheered by this news. It means the NSA is worried that if Trump comes in, there might be prosecutions for their illegal spying. Otherwise, why bother to make it legal? Which means it is possible that Trump might be president. Whether he gets any actual power is another question, but that they are now legalizing what they have long been doing indicates at least some concern that he might get at least some power.
Pepe Escobar is reporting the reason Israel’s response to Iran’s attack seemed like a nothing burger is because Israel’s main payload was shot down by Russian air defense. Said payload was allegedly intended to be a nuclear EMP explosion over Iran.
https://twitter.com/RealPepeEscobar/status/1781652011173253524
Seems a bit too crazy even for the spittle-flecked Israeli, so I’d like some corroboration. Where was that F-35 shot down? What happened to the pilot/crew? Wreckage, radiation, munition found?
I find this hard to believe. Sounds like Q
Assuming true, and setting politics and morality aside for the sake of argument, had it succeeded I think it would have been cool from a scientific and technical point of view. To evaluate the actual effects of a nuclear EMP on a modern technical society.
That’s obvious bullshit, and you know it is because:
A) If Israel were willing to go that far, it wouldn’t just stop after a single strike.
B) If Israel were willing to go that far, and Iran knew it (as they obviously would), then they would absolutely have to hit Israel with every missile in their stockpile asap. You can’t just do nothing in response to an attempted strike of that magnitude.
C) If there was a shoot down of a nuclear armed jet, there would be a mad scramble to get to the ruins and secure the evidence. We have not seen such a response.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/04/democrats-move-strip-trump-secret-service-protection/
Looks like the plan to Epstein Trump is back on.
This gives me hope that the plan to fortify the election has come undone. I conjecture that team B, the thermidoreans, are not playing ball this time around.
In a genuinely free election, Biden’s vote would be in the low teens, and Trump would win everything except certain districts in Washington. Observe what happens at rallys and in person voting. No one shows up in person for Biden. He speaks to audiences of people who have jobs that require them to attend.
Of course we will not have anything like a fair and free election, but escalating the fraud to the required even more enormous levels may be coming unstuck.
This gives you hope that the Democrats have given up on rigging the election and plan to just murder Trump instead? What then, do boomercons finally realize the Republic is dead and start shooting Democrats on sight?
If we follow the pattern of past collapses of Republics, we are likely to first go through a period of Democrats shooting each other on sight.
The major problem with Republics is that though they are great while they last, their deaths are apt to be horrific. Everyone with persistent normality bias tends to wind up dead. My plan for getting us out of this mess resembles the final act of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
“we are likely to first go through a period of Democrats shooting each other on sight.”
What a beautiful dream but nah the late Roman Republic was not like Stalin in 1937 what happened is the ruling cohesion broke down and various factions loyal to people but not that ideological were killing each other on sight.
The most baffling exasperating aspect of clownworld is how united and cohesive the elite are in their insanity. Infighting is all behind the scenes and generally only over how fast radically anyone wants to go, but they all agree on where they want to go.
The faith of Stalin and the Soviet Union was live. The Roman Republic fell because its faith was dead. The American Republic fell because its faith has been replaced.
Well the faith of the Soviet Union was close to death after 1937 because Stalin killed 9 out of 10 of the true believers. Best thing he ever did.
The difficulty of killing people in the modern world is unprecedented in history.
CDC says, “ COVID-19 Vaccines Are Safe, Effective, and Free
Everyone 6 months and older should get an updated COVID-19 vaccine.”
I did not take the vaccine, and I don’t recommend anybody take it, but let’s be serious, it has not killed large numbers of people.
Depends on what you call large. It is not killing everyone, but it is killing an enormous number of people. Total deaths have risen around twenty percent, and there has been an extraordinary, obvious, and unprecedented rise in the death rate among young people . It is large in the statistical sense, large in the sense that it is a five sigma event, large in the sense of being statistically obvious. It is not killing everyone, but it is killing a whole lot of people. Used to be that deaths among young people were mighty rare. Now they are far more common, far more, and very obviously so. Turbo cancer and heart attacks.
The relevant statistics are no longer being collected, or no longer being released, but it is obvious we are getting a whole lot of sudden adult death syndrome, deaths that they refuse to autopsy, and turbo cancer, that the vax is now overwhelmingly the primary cause of death among young people.
We are also getting a lot of chronic, low level, covid, among the vaxxed. Some of them remain permanently sick, and permanently infectious. It is likely this will kill them eventually.
@skippy
From the data I’ve seen, countries get a sudden drop in fertility about 9months out from the vacks rollout. Effect was weakly linear with the vacks rate was well.
@jim: that may all be true, and in this case, of course it’s justifiable to write that “large number” are killed. However, remarkably hands-off way to kill a lot fewer people than the Bolshevik Terror.
It’s almost like leftists have realized that unleashing forces of massive overt violence tends to backfire on them, though they clearly relish imagining unleashing forces of massive overt violence.
This is so blatant in a world like this one, where Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself.
Pretty incredible example of contrast between Yandex and Google today.
Voxday used a portmanteau in a post today “ahriminocracy”. People curious as to the meaning naturally went to Google, which returned NOTHING! Yandex was quite informative.
Helps to spell it right, but the results are the same. “ahrimanocracy”
Personally, I don’t even think this is overt censorship on Google’s part. I think it’s just a byproduct of the deteriorating quality of the service due to the converged nature of the product.
Brave and Yandex return relevant results.
Google returns essentially nothing (did return link to Day’s post)
Bing acts like a shill and completely ignores the word you typed (doesn’t even ask if this is the word you meant) and returns results for an entirely different, but vaguely homophonic word.)
Could infer what it meant, but brave Ai got it.
Probably going to finally ditch Google.
Tried duck duck go but hated the format.
Thoughts on the privacy of the Ai stuff?
Totally lacking in privacy. But so is every search engine.
https://brave.com/whats-new/#use-leo—braves-smart-ai-assistant—on-the-go-with-full-support-for-android-and-ios-mobile-devices
Hmm, they’re saying it’s private.
My main reason for using is just not letting ChatGPT get a monopoly.
Same reason for AMD tbh,
I just like that on topics that don’t interest me a lot it quickly summarizes the top 5-10 results.
—
I assume this would also deny ad traffic & help kill the internet?
As much as I hope that “losing” this war will either release many countries from the grip of Mad Prog or else cause a real (not a fake/self-interested) reformation at home, I have some doubts.
1. Russia has a military advantage and may even win decisively militarily, but that doesn’t imply a path to a political settlement. Russia is unlikely to quickly take all Ukrainian territory. If NATO places an army in West Ukraine, my belief is that Putin will blink. Maybe he shouldn’t, but based on his prior choices, I believe he will. Also, Putin may simply sign an agreement that allows Ukraine (rump or otherwise) to continue to be run by the GAE, perhaps on a time delay. Again, consistent with his prior actions.
2. I think NATO is unlikely to fall apart because the power exercised against disarmed GAE citizens is still far greater than the power the GAE exercises on external military powers. Only a handful of GAE countries even have a plausible ability to quit the alliance based on their combination of military strength, geography/resources, and mass, and these (Britain and France) appear to be well under control in terms of GAE subborning their elites and also all plausible counter-elites.
3. There are quite a lot of fairly weak countries in this world able to chart an independent course provided their elites have cohesion, e.g. Iran. There is nothing stopping GAE from simply becoming an increasingly shitty, increasingly less important part of the world that just endures forever. That isn’t necessarily good for domestic dissidents, who simply become pincered between a hostile and shitty government, and foreign countries that (understandably) wish to give their succor to loyal native-born people, not foreign dissidents who, however based, are ultimately not their people.
GAE can just bury the Russia issue. Russia is probably not strong enough to invade Europe, and in any case, they suffered eight years of massive provocations before invading Ukraine, a country that is very arguably part of Russia anyway (as they argue, and as Moldbug implies when calling this a “Russian Civil War”); there is no evidence they have any will to invade Europe to liberate it from GAE or for any other reason. In fact, they may even start reversing some of their Christian Nationalist reforms under the release of external pressure.
Obviously this is wild speculation but I have the impression around the early 2022, when they were basically normalizing nuclear war openly in the press, somebody quietly told them that even if the nukes work it would only kill something like 10% of the population of the West and that would disproportionately be FIRE economy elites in blue cities. I think they have some understanding that this is bad for them, and they backed off.
Not trying to blackpill, just being realistic.
Russia has repeatedly made clear it will not tolerate a NATO army in Ukraine. Is Russia bluffing? Could be. But discovering that Russia is not bluffing would be expensive. All of Eastern Europe will burn.
The history of this war is that Russia has repeatedly announced some red line. Then Nato crosses that red line, and nothing happens. Then it announces another red line. And Nato crosses that red line, and nothing happens. Then Russia announces another red line. Then Nato crosses that red line, and half a million die and city after city is reduced to ashes.
Put a Nato army in Western Ukraine, and pray Putin is bluffing. If he is not bluffing, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia will probably be destroyed, possibly Sweden and Denmark. And perhaps the whole world will go up in nuclear fire.
Russia is making preparation for a broad war with Nato all along that front. Bluff? Do we really want to find out?
The Global American Empire is not agreement capable. There is no one to sign such an agreement with.
The Russians claim they won’t accept a NATO army in Ukraine, but at the same time they claim there *is* a NATO army in Ukraine – manning command centers and missile batteries, taking part in combat operations directly either under the flag of PMC or Ukraine or volunteer groups or otherwise. Scholtz stated that the British army is in Ukraine. Your post states there are NATO bases in Ukraine. So when will Russia use nukes? They tolerated HIMARS, and said they wouldn’t tolerate ATACMS; ATACMS wasn’t deployed, but the even more performant Storm Shadow was deployed, and they… whined about it.
Putin has been trying to negotiate with them for eight years. Even his stated war aims of the removal of the government and neutralization of Ukraine are tepid. Ukraine had a non-Communazi government and was neutral and essentially demilitarized in 2013. How did that work out?
Of course, we can see a drift to war. I am not saying risk it. I agree it is not worth risking it. It has never been intrinsically worth struggling with a major power, even with no risk of nuclear war, but certainly with a >1% risk, over the cement commieblocs in Donetsk. But then this isn’t really about that Donetsk real estate, is it? I am not saying we should risk it, I am just saying the most likely outcome of risking it is that Russia stops at the Dneipr and permits a militarized Ukraine to keep conscripting every last Ukrainian, hiring Polish contract soldiers, and receiving tens of billions of dollars of whatever it can produced from the USA. Does that solve Putin’s problem?
If they would have used nukes, shouldn’ve used them on Ukraine (which can’t retaliate) en masse in early 2022. But they didn’t do that, why will they do it now, against people who can retaliate?
I don’t understand the geopolitical details of this, but hasn’t the Ukraine since 2014 been a proxy of the NATO and by extension the GAE?
To most it seem clear that NATO has been fighting this proxy war against Russia, with Ukraine as the pawn. That Putin has not responded with nukes seems to me to reflect that he thinks he can win without escalation to nukes and he is at least formally going along with the GAE pretence that NATO is still not part of the conflict as room for future negotiations.
Everybody is officially pretending that NATO is separate from the Russia-Ukraine war, including Putin but that lie is wearing thin as the war has gone on. That Ukraine is not officially part of NATO is currently only a legalistic position.
“That Putin has not responded with nukes seems to me to reflect that he thinks he can win without escalation to nukes”
Which is why he should have escalated to nukes after his coup de main failed, ideally on day 2-3, but certainly by day 10. But he did not.
“and he is at least formally going along with the GAE pretence”
Yep!
The fact that Putin didn’t use nukes seems also to indicate that he was worried about optics especially among the neutral countries and global South countries which are doing business with Russia despite the western sanctions.
I also read something about Xi and even Modi also apparently advising Putin not to escalate to nukes but this may be a GAE perspective.
But certainly this present slow and grinding defeat of Ukraine has taken a lot of wind out of the sails of the GAE propaganda apart from causing huge loss of men and material for Ukraine and its sponsors.
I think mainly he didn’t want to hurt Ukrainians. That’s fine, they’re of course not his enemy, but it’s hard to win hearts and minds when the other guy has ’em by the balls. It’s the typical post-war guerilla setup in which the guerillas are allowed take supplies and recruits by imposing martial law, while the regular army is expected to operate on civilian police rules.
In my view Russia has won nothing here. GAE has lost by being unable to produce ammunition, and I expect that Putin did not realize the GAE was unable to produce ammunition, just as he probably did believe his army would win the war in three days.
And they claim they blow it up from time to time
Let us suppose the Ukrainian muppet state evaporates and most of the Ukrainian army melts away. Well, obviously Russians will be directly engaging Nato forces who are nakedly Nato, who will find themselves in same hole as they found themselves in Rwanda — in extremely urgent need of grunts. Suppose Nato grunts show up in a timely fashion, which is what people mean by direct Nato intervention. And start taking casualties on a scale comparable to those the Ukrainian grunts have been suffering, and probably worse because Nato armies have no experience of peer warfare. By and by they wind up close to Nato borders. Which the Russians are likely to perceive as striking from across Nato borders — The Russians are going to go after their logistics, airports, artillary, and so on and so forth. The removal of Nato troops from the Ukraine is not going to stop at the Nato border, unless Nato troops agree to throw in the towel, pack up, and go home.
The fighting is not going to stop on a particular geographic boundary. It is going to stop when there is an agreement about stopping it, or when one side dissolves. And a Nato that dumps grunts into Ukraine is probably not a Nato capable of making an agreement to stop it.
This is with Putin in the historic role of NATO, pushing more and more against the “norms” and hoping they bend without nukes. I’m suggesting that it’s more the opposite, that if Putin is faced with a solid barrier (such as dense NATO formations north of Kiev and a NATO garrisoned Dneiper) is unlikely to try to force them, just as he did not respond even to bombings of Russian cities in pre-2014 Russia with any extraordinary force, let alone nukes.
I can definitely see a desperate NATO turning to nukes. Again, they ordered the press to normalize this in early 2022, until it became clear that their conventional forces were doing much better than expected, but this requires Putin to not just make some sort of deal, or order his forces to stop in place, which is (as you have said – any deal is worthless) essentially the same thing. That seems to me a likely outcome, and it doesn’t really solve Russia’s problem. It gives GAE an indefinite breather to re-establish a military capacity, which it may or may not succeed in doing, but which Thermidor certainly wants to do.
There was a solid barrier of Nato forces in Avdeeka pretending not to be a Nato base, and they pulled out fairly quickly under bombing, leaving Ukrainian troops in Avdeeka on the lurch. Turned out to be not very solid at all. If you put officially Nato forces in, will Putin believe them to be solid this time around?
You assume Putin is bluffing when he says he will destroy Nato forces in the Ukraine. And you assume Putin will believe Nato is not bluffing.
War is a test of will and capability. Nato tested Putin. Escalate, Putin is going to test Nato.
Such a test is likely to flatten most of Eastern Europe if Nato does not promptly skedaddle when tested.
Suppose he tests this solid barrier, and Nato promptly folds. That is a very big step towards Nato dissolving altogether. People are likely to stop believing in article five. Whereupon Putin is likely to do a test of article five to see what happens. If Nato intervenes directly in and openly in Ukraine with grunts in Nato uniform, Putin gets a huge opportunity to put Nato to the test. Which has enormous potential upside, and is a red line that he has said Nato may not cross. Fail the test, further testing is likely to follow. Pass the test, Europe burns.
Putin chooses to give the GAE an indefinite breather to re-establish a military capacity?
Give me some of what you have been smoking.
GAE puts a “solid” NATO force in the Ukraine. Putin is going to be mighty curious about how solid it is.
If he tests it, and it is not solid, next stop Kalingrad. If he tests it and it is solid, Europe burns.
This is how rational wars start. One side thinks “If we escalate, the other side will de-escalate, for fear the world will burn”. And the other side thinks the same thing. Except I don’t think the Global American Empire is rational. You are modeling it as if rational, and Putin has been modeling it as if rational. I doubt he is still modeling it that way.
He has come to the conclusion that the Ukrainian state and army simply has to be destroyed, that no peace deal is possible, and the question now is, will the Global American Empire lead him to he come to a similar conclusion about Nato?
“Putin chooses to give the GAE an indefinite breather to re-establish a military capacity?
“Give me some of what you have been smoking.”
He gave them eight years to build the Ukrainian army when he could have just invaded in 2014. In fact he threw viable spontaneous Russian uprisings (e.g. Kharkov, Odessa) under the bus and even arrested Russians for advocating measures against Ukraine. He fired Dugin for his profanity against Ukraine in response to the Odessa theatre fire.
Putin is not the man you think he is. He’s a smart and careful man and he may be forced to act the way you think he should act but he is not the man you think he is.
It’s of course very possible a nuclear war starts not intended by either side. So far, Putin has been very flexible to avoid that war, whereas, NATO started press reports normalizing nuclear war in February 2022 when they thought their conventional forces would fail.
This was an enormous mistake, one Russia has paid an enormous price for, and everyone recognizes it as an enormous mistake. It is unlikely to be repeated. War is a harsh teacher, but he teaches well.
I for one didn’t realize Ukraine was a CIA dope spot, but it turned out it was.
Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 at least, so they did see something at the time of the Revolution of Dignity (official name, it seems).
Also, Putin in 2014 at a guess didn’t want to aggravate his major trading partners too badly. But hey hey, here comes Nuland and the rest.
Did Putin make a mistake in 2014? I’m not sure.
Yes it gave Global Faggot Empire eight years to arm up the Ukraine, but it also gave Russia eight years to prepare.
Was Russia in a position to declare war eight years ago? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Hard to say. All I know is that Putin is more informed and competent than us all here and he chose not to invade. That says something.
He himself thinks so, at least that is what he recently said
The kremlin has been characterized as the boomerest of Russian boomers, so it makes sense that their mindset would be one of whatever the Russian version of normalcy bias is.
Had they in 2014 understood GAE, then they could have guessed escalation was inevitable, and he who in such a position escalates first is in the better position. Better late then never, but now, many more die.
Everyone says it is better to escalate sooner and further, but the Russian situation on 2014 is significantly worse than 2022, and the American situation in 2022 is significantly worse than in 2014. The US military spitting in the face of its prime recruiting demographic and even going so far as telling them not to join is madness that is hard to comprehend. Likewise crippling hydrocarbon production and manufacturing while getting ready for a major war. America was a lot more cohesive in 2014 than it is today, and the moral dimension of war is the most important next to logistics. Even the enemy begins to doubt their demonic patrons. War in 2022 looks a lot better than 2014.
If escalation is coming, it is always better to be the first to escalate. But you can never know if escalation is coming. If the war started in 2014, America would have been considerably stronger than it is now, and Russia considerably weaker, but the Ukraine would have been vastly weaker, and its government less well rooted, more skittish and more prone to disappearance. Putin gave the carryonbaggers time to put down local roots.
@wulf
USG is a rabid dog and the three Eurasian powers are trapped in the same room with it, hoping it attacks one of the others first.
Should Ukraine negotiate to retain black sea dnieper west through odessa… everything west of dnieper, dnieper river neutral. seems logical at this point.
if they dumbfucks they will lose all black sea and more west of river.
like there almost no scenarios UA can win anything back, not even 1 metre.
except gambling on russia running out of ammo, and continuing to sabotage refineries. but even that very vry very low odds.
besides west needs russia to help stare down chinas global communism and stare down islam. remember russia doesn’t really like either of those.
Please take the shill test and get white listed.
Anyone can pass the shill test described in the moderation policy and get white listed.
Commenters who have not passed the shill test may have their comments silently and arbitrarily deleted or unkindly edited.
I passed this comment because relevant and responsive, but I just don’t like needing to make the effort to figure out which comments are relevant and responsive. It saves me a lot of time and thought if the whitelist does all that work for me.
Wulf that’s a fair point. Time is not on the side of the USG military.
“besides west needs russia to help stare down chinas global communism and stare down islam. remember russia doesn’t really like either of those.”
This is the endgame of the prog Thermidor faction, as stated by Erik Prince.
It’s obviously the not-insane way to conduct world strategy as I have written some times before on the comments on this blog. The basic point is to give US Progressivism a world monopole on religious faith. Makes sense, but not a friendly action to us.
And not something I think they can sell even Putin on at this point, after all that they’ve done – but who knows.
It’s true that the GAE would have been in much better position to fight a war in 2014 than it did in 2022. But, in 2014, there also wouldn’t have been a war for them to fight in in the first place.
Cohesion of the state department’s puppets was basically non-existent on all levels. Any time Russian platoons encountered KOG forces during the 2014 intervention resistance would blow away like dust in the wind immediately. The was no such actual thing as a Ukrainian army at that time, in other words. Rather than the GAE weighing its options on how to expend the vassal state it had successfully occupied (via battalions of priests skinsuiting the local memetic apparat), Russian reoccupation of the Ukraine would have instead been a fait accompli.
It was as if Moses himself parted the Red Sea for Putin, but he declined to cross.
The GAE cannot reform itself because our elite is insane and has no accountability to any force outside itself. It can only collapse (ie it undermines its own power so badly rebellion becomes possible) or be destroyed by an outside force.
“I am not saying we should risk it”
Who is this ‘we’ you keep referring to? ‘We’ the types of people who read this blog do not have the power to decide if we go to war. The ‘we’ that does have the power to decide to go to war will suffer almost none of the negative effects of that war, while reaping the benefits.
Putin has stated time and again that NATO having the ability to place troops and nukes too close to its borders is an existential issue. Which means NATO troops in W Ukraine will almost certainly not be tolerated, especially since many of the technological variables of such a war have already been solved for. Russia doesn’t fear our technological marvels, and even our military has been talking about how we are outmatched by the current reality of war.
Holy war is coming, and civil war or attempted genocide is coming. A King will appear, and it will be time to choose.
You sound like some weird alliance of petty quasi cuckservatives and GAE-inspired progs who are repeating similar mantras ad nauseam. All of EU is full of such folks, including my country.
No offense. 😉
I mean, why on this good Earth would Putin want to “invade Europe”?!???
1. To sacrifice more of his (young) soldiers so that another generations of Russians will never be born, as if Russia is not also disastrously infected by lack of kids?
2. So that Russian elite prolongs their separation from French perfumes, German BMWs and other precious status symbols from “The West”?
3. So that Russian businesses and their employees can not restart trade with Europe, because what would you trade with countries in ruins?
4. To take oil fields in Ploeşti? 🙂
I’m similarly baffled by expectations that Poland will annex western Uke. Apart from not hearing any modern Pole, ever, to indulge in such thoughts, what would they do with hostile population there? And, since the times of baćuška Staljin, there are almost no Poles left in Galicija and Lodomerija, lands for which Poland is supposedly soooo interested.
That being said, I agree that “Russia is unlikely to quickly take all Ukrainian territory” because they will not. Sooner or later, there will be regime change in Ukraine, just not according to the GAE wish.
I said I DON’T think they intend to act against Europe. Admittedly jim didn’t say they intend to “invade Europe”, but forcing a path to Kaliningrad would mean invading at least part of Europe.
I certainly never said anything about Poland annexing Western Ukraine. The last thing GAE wants is to reignite 1930s nationalism within their own part of Europe. But Western Ukraine surviving as a rump state under Zelensky or some other tool seems likely to me. You believe the Ukrainians will remove him and replace him with someone pro-Russian; I completely disagree. GAE is much better at putting pressure on people than on armed nations. That’s how it controls its own territory after all. Not only do they have a huge and tightly controlled repression system in place in Ukraine, but they’ve alread killed, imprisoned, and exiled a huge proportion of potential counter-elites. Ukraine is going to Berlin in 1945 unless GAE – not the Ukrainians and certainly not the Russians – decides otherwise.
“1. To sacrifice more of his (young) soldiers so that another generations of Russians will never be born, as if Russia is not also disastrously infected by lack of kids?”
And isn’t this the question? Why did Russia even invade Ukraine – to reduce its sub-replacement population to gain more… pensioners and surplus land? If Putin had fixed the birth rate problem he could have chucked Ukraine. If he doesn’t fix the birth rate problems, Russia-Ukraine will die at about the same time as Russia alone, even with an armed NATO Ukraine on its border. In fact, probably the reason Putin doesn’t have a war aim of annexing Ukraine is that he doesn’t want even more pensioners, pensions being an issue Putin was probably much more worried about taking him down than foreign policy right up until February 2022.
Jim sometimes says nutty things. 🙂
While it’s true that Russian empire employed terrible violence sometimes, as all empires did, I do not foresee any Kalinjingrad escalation. Oh, yes, I’m absolutely sure that lunatics from Bruxelles and Washington would love to double down on their lunacy, and are quite… sorathic evil, to quote Mr. Charlton, but I’m also pretty sure that Lithuanians want to live, even Lithuanian lunatics. And without Lithuanians, no Kalinjingrad escalation.
I think that Russian emperor actually did somewhat repair demographic picture, also among Russians, from 1.2 to 1.7 or something, but you’re right, it is still not nearly enough.
I guess he does not follow Jim’s blog on WQ…yet.
Lithuania has already escalated considerably against Kalingrad. Likely it will escalate further. If it does not escalate, but the Ukrainian state disappears and Nato skedaddles from the Ukraine, likely Putin will escalate.
Kalingrad is on the target list for color revolution. If Putin does not escalate, likely there will be color revolution. There are nukes in Kalingrad. When Nato intervenes to protect the poor oppressed color revolutionaries from oppressive dictatorship, they are likely to be used.
Those nukes are the major thing protecting Kalingrad from color revolution. If not for the nukes, color revolution would have already been attempted. With escalating insanity, likely to be attempted anyway. Conversely, if Nato backs down over the Ukraine, Putin is likely to have a go to see if it will back down over Kalingrad. The way the wind blows, one side will escalate, or both.
Lithuania escalated when it seemed that Putin is falling, falling, will fall… soon. They escalated by blocking land transport from Belarus.
After Putin didn’t fall, Lithuanians suddenly discovered that they want to live. So today one can travel on car or rails all the way from Russia to Kalinjingrad. Lithuanians de-escalated.
We shall se how will thing develop in the future…
One can travel, but one is going to get an unpleasant interaction with customs who are apt to randomly confiscate stuff. Russians can travel, but are subject to capricious harassment.
More importantly, Kalingrad is not useful as a warm water port, because Lithuania enforcing sanctions. Try to ship goods through Kalingrad, you will not get capricious harassment. You will get officiously stopped.
[*link to official government propaganda that everyone has heard ten thousand times deleted yet again*]
Thoughts on this logic?
[*deleted*]
The post you pretend to respond to is my thoughts on this topic. “After the Ukraine war, Nato” is in substantial part a rebuttal to what has been shouted a thousand times from a thousand rooftops.
Your article is just long windedly saying that endless Global American Empire escalation is going to be fine, because escalating to full on article five war between Nato and Russia is inevitable Nato victory, Global American Empire conquest of Russia, and not nuclear fire.
Supposedly the enormous economic might of Global American Empire can conquer a mere gas station masquerading as a nuclear power, and supposedly such conquest will not result in those nukes being used. We see this utterly demented loss of contact with reality in a thousand places.
No, I meant the stuff about nuclear tactics.
Will repost & any news on dark mode?
Haven’t fully read your post yet since the white text hurts.
https://unherd.com/2024/04/its-time-to-send-nato-troops-to-ukraine/
But this illusion could not be sustained. Military planners came to understand that if US commanders tried to defend Nato territory by attacking invading Soviet forces with small “tactical” nuclear weapons, the Russians would use their own arsenal to destroy the defending Western forces. The same would apply for any attempt to replace conventional military force with nuclear weaponry. And so it was understood that, while nuclear weapons are a useful deterrent, they can only be used to strike back against a prior nuclear attack — and never to achieve any kind of victory.
—
Something about this passage seems wrong, but I can’t put it to words so I asked here.
—
Read your’s now – too white for mobile, but I have flux on PC.
Because the Global American Modus Operandi since 2010 has been slow and creeping escalation, on the slow boiling the frog model, no one in Russia expects nuclear war any time soon, but the Russian government and individual Russians are preparing for nuclear war eventually.
You will recall how the US could not tolerate Soviet Empire bases in Cuba, and this nearly led to nuclear war even though there was absolutely no threat of an Imperial Soviet Invasion of the American homeland. Russians perceive a very real threat of Imperial American invasion. In the end, either the borders of the Russian homeland will be neutral states, or the nukes will very likely fly.
—
I honestly don’t think NATO (Gayto) has the balls for nuke war.
Very likely they shift focus to rebuilding Ukraine & repatriating refugees, while declaring victory & moving on.
This may take awhile and it’ll likely be Trump.
Do we have historic examples of elites going out with a bang, rather than a whimpepr?
I admit that I have normalcy bias & expect mostly rational actors.
Ie even if the actors are crazy – natural selection, game theory, power & instincts are not.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/us-sanctions-against-china-could-turn-it-into-a-legacy-node-powerhouse
I just have a list of sites I semi-regularly read.
Open to better suggestions – Unherd is seemingly less crazy than CNN.
shrug,
—
My take is that the string of alliances from India-Iran-Russia to China-NK
is too much for America to break.
America may just switch to looting Europe & LatAM + more civil wars in Africa?
Idk, honestly I don’t really care that much anymore.
Not my part of the world.
ਅਕਾਲ
There is no stuff on nuclear tactics: The stuff on nuclear tactics can be summarized as “There never has been a peer nuclear war, therefore there never will be a peer nuclear war”
India and Pakistan were not fighting an existential war, they were just quarreling over details. A war whose outcome is either the collapse of the Global American Empire or the installation of a Russian muppet government is existential. Everyone in India and Pakistan war knew and agreed that when the dust settled, India would still be India and Pakistan would still be Pakistan.
It the widely used default. It is difficult to change it so that each end user gets his own preference, so I just go along with what most people are doing.
I have not looked into enabling each user to get his own preference. Have not noticed any blogs doing that, though I have not been paying attention. Point me to a wordpress blog with this feature, end user dark mode selection.
Serbia obviously did not have the balls for world war I. But it lacked the cohesion to stop those that wanted escalation from escalating while those that wanted de-escalation were de-escalating.
Similarly Germany in World War I did not have the balls to attack neutral Belgium, but attacked it anyway.
If you don’t want nuclear war, a good start would be to round up every Jew, tranny, and faggot in State Department and the Department of Defense and send them to Alaska.
Having done that, the President should announce that he decides on foreign policy and military adventures, and anyone in government or quasi government running their own foreign policy and military adventures will be sent to the offended foreign government. Or his head will be sent to the offended foreign government. If, as is likely, the offender managed offend to several foreign governments without presidential authorization, different body parts will be sent to different governments.
To avoid nuclear war, or to win it, you need a sovereign, one man who can say “peace with the outgroup”, and every subject of the sovereign is a peace with the outgroup whether he likes it or not, or “war with the outgroup, and every subject of the sovereign is at war with the outgroup whether he likes it or not.
Thank you for the in depth reply, and that makes sense re: Serbia.
Sorry, my history of WW1 is just alliances made it inevitable something something
I found this concept of a plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-dark-mode/
It was the first google result so I’m unsure of the security implications.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/dark-mode-toggle/
This one seems better.
Right now I use feedly to follow websites.
There might be a better app that has a dark mode reader, regardless of site.
I got a new sword it’s a Gandhari Pulwar & the hilt is interesting.
Obvious Buddhist design
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulwar
https://x.com/sialmirzagoraya/status/1779090415465218330
OK, you should be seeing the website in your operating system preference. If your OS is dark mode, the website should be dark mode.
I, of course, am in light mode, so have no idea if this is working.
It looks horrible.
Website is actually still in light mode, but text and links are pale light gray and light blue (as would be in dark mode). Hard to read.
Comments are in dark mode, and text and links are of acceptable color, but sides of comments, outside of threads area, are still bright white, so a shock to the eyes.
Please, revert it. Now.
That is very much what I expected. Reverting it now.
Alliances made it inevitable when Russia gave security guarantees to the insane. The problem was that they wanted to have allies right on the other guy’s borders to threaten them, even if those allies were dangerously demented. So, boom!
When Serbia assassinated Arch Duke Ferdinant, Austria demanded that Serbia transform itself into a state capable of choosing between war and peace. Serbia complained this was an insult to its sovereignty, which of course it was. So …
War usually happens because one actor is clearly irrational. As for example Serbia in World War I.
A rational war may happen because neither side can accurately assess the other’s will and capability, and decides to take a chance, in order to learn. One side suspects the other is bluffing about will and capability, and decides to call it, to discover the truth, but in the modern world, we are flooded with data, so war is almost invariably the result of demented self destructive evil. Demons, real or metaphorical.
Russian will was perfectly obvious back in 2012. Russian capability was open to considerable uncertainty on both sides, but that uncertainty made calling an act with enormous potential costs for very limited upside. The point of calling was to conquer a nuclear power. Even if you succeed, the risk you took is insane.
Trying to color revolution Libya, Syria, and Serbia led to war. Obviously trying to color revolution Russia would have led to nuclear war if Putin had not exercised extraordinary restraint.
That they called indicates that they refused to believe in the transparently obvious Russian will, an act of self destructive madness.
“…but in the modern world, we are flooded with data, so war is almost invariably the result of demented self destructive evil.”
Too much data for humans to reliably use, and much of it is conflicting. I don’t deny the ‘evil’ bit but I’m not sure about self-destructive. A big part of the problem is that many of those calling the shots on America’s future don’t care about America’s future. WW3 w/ nukes exchanged? Big deal, they have $1/4B compounds on a small Hawaiian island or chateaus in Switzerland with a gazillion dollars in gold buried beneath.
Our masters are willing to take risks because most of the negative consequences accrue to those they consider to be sub-human, while the potential profits accrue almost solely to themselves. The classic judaic “heads I win, tails you lose” combined with “lets you and him fight.”
Nah, if you ignore what obvious shills and liars say, if you simply check any conflicting information to see if it is official regime truth, no significant conflicting information remains.
If you see conflicting information, examine the source for credibility. The conflict disappears. The enemy is systematically injecting squid ink in the water. Pay no attention to their squid ink, and everything is fine.
The Global American Empire was stubbornly, systematically, willfully, and maniacally deluded about perfectly obvious Russian will and capability. Believing that their weapons systems still worked, for example that Abrams tank would be a game changer rather than driving an Abrams tank against a peer adversary being a suicide mission, was a rational error — they have not fought a peer enemy since World War II, while Russia has. But their primary error was maniacal and insane disbelief in Russian unity and will. They were and still are blissfully unaware that everyone in Russia, when they look west at Nato, see the German Wehrmacht in 1940. They also believed their own official GDP and CPI statistics, hence the sanctions debacle and the war production debacle. Neither of which debacles they have yet been able to notice. One might argue that believing their own official statistics was a rational error. I don’t think it was. Believing your own lies is fatal. You know you are lying, and you do not know you are lying. And if it was a rational error before the disastrous debacles it led to, it is now a maniacal and insane delusion.
Ukraine’s remaining Abrams tanks are now gathering dust, because every time they used them, it was a debacle. I think awareness of USG technological inferiority to their enemies has finally started to penetrate, (otherwise they would continue to force the Ukraine to continue to stuff terrified conscripts into Abrams tanks and send them on suicide missions) but belief in GDP and CPI continues, thus belief in sanctions continues and is being escalated from bizarrely self destructive to even more bizarrely self destructive, and refusal to notice Russian will and unity obstinately continues.
How well do the US state bugs know themselves?
https://twitter.com/DougAMacgregor/status/1781147151189360865
Are they going to try backing the jews in their newest insane struggle against a higher power? I’m sure plenty want to, however, previously, after the latest strike from Iran, The Biden announced support for de-escalation.
Clearly the attempt would break the empire’s already brittle teeth, but I cannoy ascertain if the lever pullers understand this.
Not clear what is happening yet. Speculation is premature. Wait a week or two before drawing conclusions.
This particular event is unripe, I agree. I used it as a tool to bring up the ongoing progression of the war in the near orient, which is not necessarily so unripe as to be unworthy of discussion. The borg cannot seem to help itself with the Ukraine and provoking Russia, the jews in the near orient are not necessarily the borg, yet they seem to be begging for war with a power that is capable of destroying them. I doubt they de-escalate, and that means an inevitable total war.
An interesting datapoint is that the US state bugs decided not to immediately escalate after the strike carried out by Iran under her own flag. Is this a temporary and only temporary blip of sanity or a sign that they know their own weakness?
Should we generally expect that the us empire forces will find themselves to be totally incapable of staying out of this? Not just sliding surplus arms over to the jews, with the additional occasional uav strike, but a full commitment of force?
Yes, it’s early and we don’t have enough information. What looks likely is that the possibility of a Middle Eastern war will force the USA to set aside a large part of its military to deal with it. Ergo, less chance of a major deployment to Ukraine. Will the other NATO countries surge to fill the gap? Not bloody likely IMO.
So we have the GAE faced with a multi-front war: Ukraine, Israel/Iran, China/Taiwan/Philippines, French colonial Africa, maybe even Venezuela/Guyana. Has Vlad been playing chess while Joe was playing tic-tac-toe?
Israel and China is self inflicted (sending war material to Ukraine and escalating to keep ‘rules based order’ intact respectively), Africa is a Russian move, no idea about Venezuela.
Not my understanding of what happened in Africa.
The Africans are not interested in what is going on in the Ukraine and Israel. They care about what is going on with Isis. Their gripe was that the Isis troops attacking them, and the Nato troops “defending” them, were in each other’s pockets, that the Nato forces were not there to control Isis, but to control the locals and local mineral resources.
Isis is both an enemy and an unreliable proxy of the Global American Empire. It gets money and arms when it does what they want it to do, but does not reliably do what they want it to do. Its deal with the Global American Empire is that when it attacks people that the Global American Empire does not like very much, it gets slack, guns and money.
The Global American Empire sicced Isis onto a bunch of African states to keep them in line, and then sent Nato troops to “protect” those states against Isis. The African countries rapidly figured it was Isis being protected, not them, and got ticked off about it. Wagner gets a heads up: OK, you protect us — and also these extremely valuable mineral resources that the Nato troops are “protecting”.
This looks to me like what it purports to be — a black African initiative that reached out to some handy mercenaries because they were in urgent need of some guys who had guns and knew how to use them. They were not really interested in the great game of empires, they just wanted Isis off their necks.
Global American Empire measures to keep the provinces in line are just apt to piss off the provinces. Russia then drops in once the proverbial hits the fan, but they did not throw the proverbial at the fan. It was just the Global American Empire getting blowback from using such a dangerous and unpopular tool as Isis.
It is not that those African states decided to re-orient from the Global American Empire to the Russian. It is that they needed some white guys with guns who were willing and able to shoot at Isis, and those white guys happened to be affiliated with Russia and against the Global American Empire.
One does not have to be in Russia to be a fan of Russia. Here in the United States I am also a fan of Russia for as long as the Obama/Biden gang remains in control of the GAE.
GO RUSSIA! BEAT BIDEN!
Problem with that is all the people who are not Joe Biden who are dying in that war.
mutiny?
desertion?
unenthusiastic participation?
Humungus sends greetings again.
NATO is corrupted by political corruption and an army of sodomites. They cannot be relied on.
We will forge alliances based on strength after the Satanic World Order falls.
All members of the alliance must have something of value to barter: fuel, ammunition, food, women, etc…
All hail The Great Humungus!
>army of sodomites
You mean like the Gayboy Berserkers and the Smegma Psychos? Like a bunch of depraved bikers wearing S&M leathers? Familiarize yourself with your own texts.
Humungus understands the need for procreation. Only hetero-rape gangs shall be allowed. Others will be weaponized against our enemies.
Having Wez as your champion does deflate the prestige implicit in the title Ayatollah of Rock-and-Rollah, alas.
Humungus realizes some may wish to analyze, to compare and contrast mobile vs stationary banditry. Humungus is a man of action though. Philosophy is left to men who wish an easy life.
Humungus knows stationery banditry is only possible when a willing population forgoes their freedom for the offer of security. Neither are possible, for the powerful will always take more and more. Stationary bandits always default to mobilizing when things go wrong.
Mobilization is the natural state for mankind. Being stationary leads to sloth and all other detestable things we see today. Success requires mobility. It is how wars are won.
A sedentary life leads to passiveness and ultimate failure as we are witnessing.
Exactly, which makes the guzzoline so important. We must start stockpiling now.
BAP?
The greatest states are probably composed of stationary bandits ruling over the degenerated second sons of those same bandits with which they have not yet fully lost all bonds of affection and allegiance. The nation in arms is necessarily a nation of conquerors, not of conquerors and conquered.
What you are writing is the conclusion of Erich von Ludendroff, Totalen Krieg.
This time, please make a deal with the compound with petroleum. You can forage for supplies, they trade you the gas to forage for the foraged supplies. Win-Win, and a way to build towards the future. Kind of like the villages on top of each of the 7 hills that eventually became Rome.
This guy, who if IIRC was some sort of spook, had an interesting article on BTC flaws and possible ways to fix it. I don’t know enough to know how this compares with rhocoin or other proposals here, but thought this might be an interesting take.
My criticism, pretty much.
And I have been talking to the current bitcoin people — the crypto anarchists that founded Bitcoin seem to have faded out, and the current lot are rather too comfortable with tolerating the state and the state tolerating them, and it is working for Bitcoin, which goes from height to height, so why change?
We now, finally, at long last, know how to fix the problems he raises. Smart people have been working on this for a very long time.
But even if one creates a crypto currency that addresses these problems, still have to get past Metcalfe’s law and the cold start problem, which is not going to happen without a plan, which I have, and some very serious funding, which I do not. And I am not going to make a start on getting funding till I have an acceptable pre-alpha release.
As for this funding, my understanding is that it has to come from people you already trust with your life, or perfectly both-ways-anonymously.
Does that sound right? I’m sure it’s technically possible but man, what a tough way to get a team together.
> so why change
because crypto should be spent directly, p2p, og style, worldwide, as many humans as possible.
not converted to fiat and shuffled through the systems of the State.
that’s why.
ppl seem to have forgot that in all the noise.
dev harder.
His suggestion is for Elon Musk to use twitter as a launching platform for it. That’s asking for a lot of trouble.
My hope was always that the people that made boatloads of money on BTC would fund the next stage (somehow anonymously). It would be the natural group to do it.
> for Elon Musk to use twitter as a launching platform
nah.
twitter is hundreds of millions people, so you’ve only got one chance to make the right choice there. and single humans, single corps, never make the right choice, so you risk entrenching 500M votes and one massive corp vote, for the wrong crypto choices… wrong metcalfs.
twitter could host one of many global open crypto competitions.
but the free market must decide what to adopt, people must decide on coins, not X, not musk.
X just dropped a freespeech1A petition drive.
bringing awareness is better there than choosing and forcing a particular coin.
drop an OG cryptocoin seminar, so that users will then demand those coins.
>still have to get past Metcalfe’s law and the cold start problem, which is not going to happen without a plan
Playing devil’s advocate, do we? If the tech is sufficiently superior to all the alternatives and grows even at a sub 1% rate, thats still exponential. A fast takeoff is better, I agree, but I’m not sure it’s necessary. Why is it necessary?
[*silently deleting your comments from here onwards unless you attempt the shill test*]
Why are you deleting g3?
What exactly did he say?
[*deleted*]
It does not matter what he said. Nothing he said is relevant to the policy that leads to his comments being deleted. What matters is what he is mysteriously unable to say.
Read the moderation policy, where I explain at great length.
Indeed, the problem is precisely that he said nothing relevant to the policy that leads to his comments being deleted. See the discussion of shilling and spamming in https://reaction.la/security/manifesto/social_networking.html#social-net-architecture
As I say in https://reaction.la/security/manifesto/social_networking.html#social-net-architecture
If you cannot commit a thought crime, nor notice anyone else committing a thought crime (Orwell’s “protective stupidity”) why are you wasting space here, rather than publishing in the official quasi government media?
There is total freedom of speech on this blog. Which means there is no freedom to drown out unthinkable thoughts.
> There is total freedom of speech on this blog.
You deleted him.
[*deleted*]
He was just saying stuff you can say in the New York Times. And is demonstrably incapable of saying stuff that cannot be said in the New York Times (because if he was capable of saying such stuff, would have been able to take the shill test.)
He has plenty of space to say that stuff, so not allowing him on this blog does not impair his freedom of speech.
But if I allowed glowniggers on this blog, then the official line of the New York Times would drown out people who want to say things that cannot be said in the New York Times, which would impair their freedom of speech.
Which is the whole purpose of Soros and the FBI sending you glowniggers to this blog, to shut down our freedom of speech.
You kicked us out of your spaces, and said “Make your own spaces”. We made our own spaces, and you want to move in and kick us out of them too. This blog is for people who need freedom of speech, because unlike you they do not have a hundred megaphones belowing at full volume from every rooftop. Use your own megaphones. You have plenty of them. I am not stopping you.
If someone is incapable of committing a thought crime, he has no need to speak on this blog. I hear his voice day and night in a thousand places. Nothing I could possibly do could ever have any impact on his freedom of speech.
Every voice that can be heard on the New York Times is one voice, thinly disguised as a chorus of many voices to give the false impression of might, unanimity, and consensus. And everyone is thoroughly sick of hearing that one voice incessantly, which is why the mainstream media is dying. And if I allowed that one voice on this blog, this blog would die also.
I am not going to explain Metcalfe’s law and the cold start problem yet again. Read up.
You might find my explanations cryptic and brief. If you do, do a search for Metcalfe’s law and the cold start problem.
I’ve read all your docs several times over, I promise. Just this specific statement
>If the tech is sufficiently superior to all the alternatives and grows even at a sub 1% rate, thats still exponential
I feel is unanswered. If it is answered, I apologise for asking you for your time, but please point it out for me. Networks like social media cannot overcome cold starts because the utility is broadcast. A private messaging system has a chance, at least I believe so, because the utility is narrowcast. If you have utility and a swap system with ‘the one’, whichever is most liquid, you can survive and grow. If you can survive, and you are genuinely better, in such a way that is not trivilally clonable — can BTC really have recursive zk transaction bundles? Maybe on a theoretical level, but I don’t believe so on the coordination level — would that not solve the cold start problem? Perhaps we have different semantic meanings to the term? My takeaway in meaning is that the cold start problem implies a fast takeoff, because the utility is the large graph, and it will be swallowed by the bigger graph. My response is that the utility grows with a larger graph, but that p2p communication tools with genuine privacy gain utility from narrowcast and broadcast, and so can avoid being swallowed.
If two networks provide similar functionality, everyone wants to be on the bigger network, and the smaller network dies.
I am not the first person to notice Bitcoin suffering tech lag and say “lets write a better bitcoin”. It is not impossible. Ethereum nearly succeeded — probably would have succeeded if they had armored up their foundation against hostile state intervention, and their advantage was only contracts. Privacy is a bigger advantage if you have a social net for private conversations about private transactions.
For the smaller network to get a foot in the door, has to provide services the larger network is just not doing or not doing right. And has to make it effortless to start using those services. Plus, in addition to those specialty capabilities, it has to do everything the larger network is doing better than the larger network.
Otherwise it is going to either die, or be stuck forever in the little niche of its specialty services. (As, for example, Monero and Litecoin)
You can survive. But a privacy coin has a cold start problem against existing privacy coins, even if it has substantially better capabilities. And existing privacy coins are unable to grow out of the privacy space against Bitcoin, because of Metcalfe’s law.
The decisive advantage of recursive snarks is not only privacy, but scaling. But scaling matters in the final battle, when you are already very big and are going head to head with the existing one, in a battle to become the one.
First step, take over the privacy space. Solve that cold start problem. Second step, from the privacy space, take over the main space. Solve the second cold start problem.
Monero could not escape from the privacy ghetto, because outside the ghetto, it was no only facing Metcalfe’s law, but it just was not as good as bitcoin — lacking contracts on the blockchain. You will recall that the contracts-on-the-blockchain feature nearly resulted in Ethereum defeating Bitcoin and becoming the one, but Bitcoin implemented contracts, and now the entire Ethereum ecology is slowly dying under the force of Metcalfe’s law. Though the software on Bitcoin to use this feature still has some way to go to catch up with Ethereum, which had huge funding to develop useful easy to use software to make the feature useful to end users. Bitcoin software to use the feature is still linux sysadmin level.
Litecoin can do everything Bitcoin can do, so can perform equally with Bitcoin outside the privacy ghetto, and can do privacy stuff that bitcoin cannot do. But the software to actually use these features is sucky. Normies cannot really use it, and even linux admins find it hard. Bitcoin lightning is hard enough, and Litecoin lightning is harder.
The path for Litecoin to become the one would be to have a pile of good stuff in the privacy ghetto, and then do all the stuff outside the ghetto in a way that is easy for normies. Which is a lot of software. Bitcoin’s lightning network software is still seriously unfinished, and litecoin’s lightning network software is worse.
Litecoin does everything Bitcoin does, in principle, plus privacy. But to have a chance to take over against Bitcoin’s Network effect advantage, would have to write all the normie ready software that the Bitcoin network is far from finished writing.
When Litecoin decided to move into the privacy space, they had the right idea: Private transactions like Monero, plus private conversations about those private transactions.. That is a big advantage, enough to win the battle to be the one in the privacy niche. Except that their privacy social net is rather broken and whipped up in a hurry, without regard for end user installation and user friendliness. And their primary wallet, that defines the standard, still fails to implement hierarchical deterministic addresses, which is a huge disadvantage against Monero and Bitcoin, their primary competitors. Hiearchical determinist wallets allow paper wallets and allow you to carry your wallet through an airport. What good is a privacy coin if you cannot flee the country with it? If you are worried about fleeing the country, and a whole lot of hodlers are, not going to keep substantial assets in litecoin.
So I look at other people attempting to do what I am attempting to do, and attempting to do what you rightly say we should do, and it is a big project and hard to accomplish.
I’ll try to answer this directly.
Sure, if you grow 1% year over year then yes that is exponential and yes you will be dominant eventually.
But in practice 1% per year of steady growth just isn’t how it would ever work. Why not?
The biggest reason in the real world is that these things are very social and reflexive. The moment you start gaining 1% market share per year, speculators are going to jump in to frontrun that growth, and there will be pump and dump cycles.
More fundamentally, to store significant amounts of real value in magical internet money you need to reward early users with dreams of hitting it big. If all you offer is slow and steady gains measured in decades, any rational person will prefer real estate or something else.
Why? What’s wrong with slow and steady gains?
What’s wrong is that, because we’re talking about magic internet money, there are huge risks as well. A bug in your code could send everything to zero. That’s even more of a risk if you are trying to improve the technology every year. It’s almost worse if we are talking about providing liquidity for such an asset. Even without any bugs, other competitors could innovate faster, and slow or end your steady growth. Any number of things could lead to a crisis of confidence.
No, the only way to grow is relatively fast. This builds your community with strong advocates. It brings public attention. It leads to people seeing it as a self fulfilling prophecy, and gives you the power to fend off competitors for Schelling point status.
I think that Schelling point theory is more helpful than Metcalfe’s law with regards to Bitcoin, but I won’t post about that unless there’s interest, especially since Jim may disagree.
Post away. Even if I conclude you are an idiot, I will probably learn something attempting to shoot you down.
Money, like a corporation, like the state, is a shared hallucination imagined into reality, hence schelling point theory appears applicable. Not obvious, however, how to apply it.
Proof of work had the enormous advantage of assigning the initial bitcoin to people likely to believe it valuable. In a world where convertibility of crypto currencies is paramount, this approach is unlikely to useful — mining no longer works as a method of getting money into circulation, and airdrops work even worse.
tl;dr
speculation is why it wouldn’t work
risk, liquidity and schelling is why it couldn’t work
If you post on a social network that goes nowhere, you wasted a few hours.
If you hold a crypto that dies, you’re broke.
If your crypto grows too slowly, it will look like it’s dying, which is a self fulfilling prophecy. Considering all other ways it could die, people don’t need many excuses to bail.
16000 new crypto currencies have been attempted, the vast majority of them pointless scams.
A few have been started with significant and important technological advances.
We have a huge amount of data on the cold start problem and Metcalfe’s law as applied to crypto currencies.
It is not insurmountable, but it is a very great problem.
For me there there are two important things to consider with regards to Metcalfe’s law and crypto.
The first is that Metcalfe is primarily about networks themselves, not the messages sent over the network.
Imagine a perfect bitcoin lightning network. Send to any person, company, AI agent, twitter, instagram, wechat account, any entity with an internet connection. Effectively free, ideal user experience. Private if you want, non custodial if you want. In short, true peer to peer internet cash.
That’s a valuable network, and would be great for the BTC price.
But what are people using this powerful lightning network for? What if 99% of the volume is USDT and other shitcoins? Lightning works for shitcoins too, remember.
What if fiat is dead and no one wants shitcoins, but people use the lightning network to save and transact with fractionalized Tesla or Meta shares rather than BTC? Or tokenized gold, oil or GPU?
If you take for granted that the network is incredibly powerful, the question becomes, what reasons do people or companies or AIs have, to gravitate towards specific store of values within the network? The network will contain many candidates.
So it comes down to the hallucination as you put it. The branding, the faith, the Schelling point.
That’s the first reason that technical advantages and metcalfe aren’t enough. Obviously strong tech helps your brand, helps improve faith in the asset, but it isn’t enough.
In the long run, the internet is the network and all these cryptos sit on it with varying degrees of security and UX. People understand this instinctively when they ask about nuclear war and what happens to crypto if the internet goes down. They have a point. No network, no value.
Where Metcalfe does come into play is with networks of liquidity, which Fidelis alludes to. Liquidity isn’t really a function of technology either, but it’s the second big pillar. If liquidity is strong then the network can be much weaker in terms of users and usability, but your bitcoin price will still be very high.
I think that’s where we are today, where users are few and far between, but liquidity is quite good, hence good bitcoin price in spite of the tech.
To get into practical applications of this theory of mine is difficult without pointing to examples that might sound like shilling even if I point to them as failed examples. Also you probably learn more about it by experimenting with small amounts of crypto for yourself than by reading.
One consequence though is that even if the network is the ultimate important thing, whoever creates such a network could go broke, if people just use that network to trade other assets on it. Lots of guys who innovated on the early internet became legends but not millionaires. Or, millionaires just barely but far from capturing the value they created.
The only tokens on this hypothetical superduper network are going to be those that conform to the protocol that makes it possible to be super duper. Since the hypothetical superduper network is superduper, it will be trivial for no end of legitimate businesses to create tokens that legitimate shares in their business, trivial for no end of scammers to create tokens that are worthless but hyped to hell and back, trivial to create tokens that are shares in a ponzi scheme, trivial to create stablecoins that are linked to some external reserve, trivial to create stablecoins that are supposedly linked to some external reserve, but in fact are not.
But before any of this noise appears, there will be a first token.
So, first mover advantage. The one will be the first one.
Yes, another important consequence of this line of thinking is that bitcoin maximalism is the best bet.
Still another is that crypto infrastructure is highly important, and that since bitcoin is lagging there and will continue to lag, there will be lots of room for fruitful speculation in that area, as well as interesting tech to play with. Playing with this tech naturally leads one away from bitcoin, but it should remain everyone’s north star.
Right.
Bitcoin is the North Star, but it has dreadful and intolerable problems that urgently need fixing.
Unfortunately an army of crypto shills who want to promote ten thousand scam coins are apt to make hay with defects that they totally fail to comprehend.
In terms of Schelling competition, I think that at this stage Bitcoin’s real competition is gold.
In spite of gold’s weaknesses, the BRICs and everywhere else are run by boomers. Even if they hate USD, they aren’t rushing to capitulate into our internet money. They’ll exhaust their options first. Cargo ships full of gold and oil have problems, but at least they are familiar problems and keep their friends employed.
Bitcoin wins if people and banks keep buying a small amount, just in case, until it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Then it wins on its own merits as boomers retire. Slow an steady growth from the bird’s eye perspective of global liquidity, though explosive for an individual portfolio.
That covers Schelling.
In terms of Metcalfe, I think many alt coins are Machiavellian science projects rather than scams.
People dream of the superduper network, of true peer to peer cash. They despair of accomplishing this directly on Bitcoin.
So they create altcoins.
They imply that the goal is to dethrone bitcoin, but their shitcoin is really just a way to fund efforts to create an ideal network that allows for true peer to peer cash. If they build such a valuable network, and the market chooses their coin then they win the lottery.
If the market settles on a different store of value, but still uses the super network, well, the world is still better off. The important thing is to get the network off the ground, because bitcoin itself is quite bad at the moment, but you could always trade it in wrapped form on another network.
Is this naive of me, trying to think the best of people? Are altcoin founders secretly just trying to help bitcoin?
It doesn’t matter much. If my altcoins are too clever by half science projects, the net result is that central banks won’t buy them. Bitcoin wins. If they are all scams, the result is that governments can build their own scams. Bitcoin wins.
In short, the path to dethroning bitcoin is either being a Schelling point that appeals to central banks or being a Schelling point that centers itself in an unprecedented grass roots network.
Neither are likely to work, which is something to think about before building an altcoin.
The altcoin founders who promote genuine advances in technology are not at all secretly trying to help Bitcoin.
99.9% of altcoin founders are, however, scammers.
tl;dr
the north star isn’t the asset BTC but the dream of true internet cash.
that is, the dream is the network itself rather than any particular asset.
but realistically, that asset will be BTC or nothing, so make BTC the north star of your portfolio even if you choose to explore alternate networks
Sorry, that was meant to be a rhetorical question, of course the vast majority aren’t trying to help, even if some are secretly BTC maximalists at heart. And also agree that +90% start as scammers with the other 9.9% crossing into scamming when they continue to milk things which have no path to success.
But I think that there are two north stars, to entirely fuck up my metaphor.
The first is BTC as a non inflationary SOV to supplant gold and then fiat.
The second is to create a network, which will be agnostic as to the assets traded on it, which makes it possible for BTC and other candidates to become a legit SOV amd MOE. I think the term web3 became cringe when NFTs started using it, but that’s the goal. Internet of money, free flow of value without state interference.
Ideally, Bitcoin L2s kill both birds with the same stone. Put multiple wallets in everyone’s hand, make BTC so cheap and easy to use that no one bothers with other tokens.
But a world in where fiat is dead, and everyone transacts with bitcoin daily, albeit a wrapped form of BTC sitting on the Tron network, or on telegram. I say Tron because no one will accuse me of shilling it. But that wouldn’t be such a dystopia all things considered.
here are BTC’s flaws
1) ONLY SEVEN (7) TRANSACTIONS PER SECOND aka 7tps, maximum, reality is more like 5
you need about 5000tps to begin to serve the planets people in a meaningful way and to bring about a longterm effect, not just monkeypegs and drugs.
then as a result of 1’s failboat, you begin to experience other collapses…
a) forever increasing fees, pricing out utility for more and more non-trivial things like even a shopping cart full of food.
b) non-custodial p2p e2e sovereignty freedom collapses into custodial centralised capture being the only viable path that avoids unusable fees.
c) privacy collapses as high fees price out cashfusion coinjoins etc.
d) “layers” of b arise (aka: lies) that are subject to a b c, and ultimately cannot settle or get into and out of due to 1.
if you don’t have the tps, you don’t have amortization of needs across it, tps demand outstrips supply, your boat sinks.
it’s turtles all the way down from 1.
the only way to “fix” it is for some coin to figure out a way to hit 5ktps plus on L1.
2) BTC IS NOT PRIVATE
you CAN get privacy if fees are cheap enough to be zero to literally trivially negligible, to support statistically strong levels of coinjoin cashfusion etc.
in reality, that could be augmented by some form of native privacy, but that’s often harder to design, and more design limiting, than those stat mixes.
privacy coins use different methods… “zcash” methods lean more native, “monero” leans more statistical.
users can always add themselves to a mix, if the fees are effectively zero.
IF crypto had continued to follow the OG CYPHERPUNK dev path (instead of the Blockstream CIA Maxi ETF et al path), BTC would have get both PRIVACY and TPS, and would have been as equally unstoppable as today’s crippled BTC has been so far, including having ETFs. instead of CRIPPLED BTC amassing force and getting the early long jump on the pols govs corps and banks, OG BTC would have done that.
but the CIA MEME TEAM PSYOP didn’t want privacy and tps, so the BTC got brainwashed and never developed them.
the shitcoin machine was in part a distraction launched by the CIA types to confuse the entirety of coinspace into doing nothing productive for 10 plus years.
today, look to ZK based L1 coins that can do real tps, or at least enable real tps via their native ZK L1.
BTC is not, and will not be, a native ZK L1.
the power of ZK, once it is fully researched explored developed applied and rolled out,
is going to be a massive game changer.
ZK is new concept, very few know how to code and use it, so it is going to take a while,
but like “AI” and pqc and the genome, etc, it will be big.
https://www.theblaze.com/return/the-feds-are-trying-to-stifle-bitcoin-and-crypto-with-draconian-new-regulations
here’s just an article, but the fact that the headline alone exists is enough to illustrate…
15 years have been utterly wasted falling to psyops lies and indoctrination that lack of Privacy and TPS are OK, that in fact they are Desireable, as some of these Maxi servants of the State are now saying.
so now youre going to need to spend 15 years just to get back to the OG CPUNK way of thinking, AND catch up development of Privacy and TPS at the same time.
if the cryptosphere stuck to their OG roots, didn’t get distracted by the agents, kept developing, BTC would not be weak today… AML would not even be able to be weaponized against it, because it would have been private, and with more users due to more tps. if BTC had become private within the first 5 years, or even 10, or even now, that would instantly silence all AML talk, simply because mass adoption of anti-AML BTC would have happened. nobody would have ever thought to say “lets AML it”, because it wouldn’t have been possible in the first place. now you have AML, chainanalysis, non-fungibility, etc. because they can see it, and sprung themselves up around exploiting it. now even miners are censoring BTC, both by govt command, and on their own.
So now its Double the work now for mistake of accepting the kool-aid.
you can do it.
but don’t make that mistake again.
dev harder, iterate faster, deploy sooner, compete, invest, shift, and adopt.
when everyone else is delivering shitcoins,
you have the greenfield to demand and deliver OG.
this rant is because people want to spend crypto, not fiat, and after 15 fucking years, they still cant spend crypto p2p. which means that to date, its all been for naught, the world still looks like a govbankcorp checking account. its getting worse. and that fucking sucks.
that will change.
you have to get out there and vocally demand it, overpower the voices of the agents and legacy maxis, and make it happen OG again.
[*deleted*]
Take the shill test described in the moderation policy
> This guy, who if IIRC was some sort of spook
Huh? How was he a spook? What history am I missing here?
He had a very funny article on this:
It sounds like it was his job (why otherwise spend so many “grueling hours”), and he had “about a half a dozen of my own aliases”. Chatting on kpop forums (using a translator) to direct opinion to affect trade policy. That sounds like spook work. But of course it’s just a guess.
I spent some quality time in the Donbas in the late 90s. When the Orange Revolution went down it was possible to see a coordinating hand but most viewed it as generally spontaneous. By the time you get to 2014 that coordinating hand was front and center and watching Nudelman’s handling of things there pissed me off to no end. I have a genuine affection for Ukraine and the people there. But because I had spent time in the Donbas it was clear that this was going to be a mess. Those people were not going to take the overthrow of their president lightly. (Which they didn’t.)
By the time you get to mid-2016 the klaxons were going off all over Russia. Because of all the subsequent BS which has muddied the water people forget what was happening prior to the 2016 election with regard to the Russians.
The following story was one of many circulating as we neared election time.
Thesun.co.uk/news/1962638/putin-orders-all-russian-children-and-relatives-studying-abroad-to-return-to-the-motherland-as-he-prepares-for-wwiii/
Sure, it’s a British tabloid but it wasn’t wrong.
Due to my professional duties things sometimes cross my desk which are a little bit screened from the public eye this kind of thing was one of them. The things moving across my desk with regard to the psychological state of Russian officials at that time were chilling.
I warned my friends that if there was a Clinton election we would be in a war of some kind with the Russians.
In 2016 the Russians were very concerned about a Hillary Clinton electoral win because they knew that the same direction that Obama’s foreign policy team was heading in would likely remain and even be accelerated.
And it was clear to anyone who knew about Russia, Ukraine, NATO, and U.S. influence that Russia was not going to stand for it. 2008 events in Georgia were a shot across the bow in that regard. The Russians invaded to shut that down. Misha Saakashvili overestimated what George W. Bush would commit on his behalf, rolled the dice, and lost. Remember, Saakashvili was a creature brought to power by a color revolution so he was a client of the cabal in Washington.
it is also worth noting when it came to Hillary Clinton, that it was she, Susan Rice, and Samantha Power that cornered the more aloof by instinct Barak Obama and browbeat him into Libya. And all of those personalities were going to be part of a Clinton presidency and foreign policy apparatus in some way.
Which is why the Clinton apparatus was already trying to tie Trump to the Russians and tar him with that brush. She didn’t like being threatened with jail time by him and figured she could use that to dismantle him after her inevitable win.
Except the American people got in the way and didn’t elect her and gave us 4 years of tremendously bad rhetoric toward the Russians, scapegoating them for the decision of the electorate and screeching about “election interference” even while the relations between Trump and Putin were largely cordial. However, the Russians could see that Trump had not really taken control of the apparatus and that boded ill for them and for Trump.
So by the time Biden’s people fortified the election and he got himself into power it was clear that a showdown was coming. Well…here we are and the showdown is still on-going. Russia has slowly dismantled Ukrainian opposition by grinding them down. They’ve rebuilt their mobilization system (despite the mass departure of many Russians early in the war) and rebuilt their production of necessary war materiel and resisted the attempt to use sanctions to choke off money and supplies. Putin has played a measured game and the fantasy of regime change is no longer repeated seriously by anyone because the sanctions have essentially galvanized the average Russian against the U.S. even if the prospect of war with Ukraine did not.
So Putin comes out of this with the ability to keep rolling forward if he needs to. NATO, meanwhile, has wiped out a lot of military supplies that are not quickly or cheaply replaced and provided the Russians with a chance to deal with a motivated enemy with modern equipment and learn what works and what doesn’t.
Russia is going to go back to being what it was at the end of the Napoleonic Wars: a major military power with the ability to intervene in Europe where it deems it necessary. No other state in Europe has the manpower or the equipment to match up with Russia. NATO is a shadow of itself and it is likely when the campaign in Ukraine is over that Russia will sit down with Germany and come to an arrangement: resumption of gas supplies in exchange for technology purchases to strengthen Russia’s own productive capacity. Although the Chinese are providing some of that now the Germans still make some very high end equipment for some important industrial processes.
With a new Ostpolitik in Germany, much of the rest of Europe will follow suit. Certainly Hungary will. Poland…hard to tell. France is likely to come around. Turkey interestingly is being pretty cooperative with the Russians these days due to mutual antipathy towards the West.
I suspect that the Turks might get a bit less comfortable with a newly resurgent Russia that had sorted out its Western border.
We’ll see. If Europe moves closer to Russia’s orbit the UK will double down on crazy and try to get closer to the U.S. The Anglo-sphere is screwed if it keeps on with its shenanigans.
Would have done the same, if I was a Russian and I expected Hillary to win the 2016 election and Trump to lose.
When you demonize an adversary, and refuse to understand what they are thinking and saying, you are going to go to war with them sooner or later, one way or another way.
If any European country can get its bitches in check, ever again, maybe it has to get nuked first. It didn’t work that way in Japan, but they lost. Anglin’s been pro nuclear war for years now. Maybe I understand him now.
Everyone respectable has rushed to assure us that there is no proof that Zelensky bought a $20m villa in Miami. Still a lot of leeway in those words I think.
He seems to be building a little global real estate empire, don’t forget the estate in Egypt, but in the end it may still be difficult to beat the reaper. But get that house in Tel Aviv and you may be safe, Volodmyr.
Note that democracy had extra problems before the coup simply because the country was split 50-50 ethnically. It would probably have been a better idea to partition the country along ethnic lines. Though that discounts the role of external forces, of course.
The Baltic states seem to want to go to war, hold me back bro, but Nato is exercising in the far North. So Finland/Norway/Sweden(!) might be the next theater of conflict. With that said, is this really feasible if Globohomo wants to do Taiwan next?
Globohomo is isolated from reality, so feasibility is a non issue for them.
But whose nukes will fly first? Do any of the GAE nukes work? I doubt a sane Russia under Putin will escalate first. Especially if they win decisively in Ukraine.
I expect globohomo’s nukes to attempt to fly first, with only some of them getting up, some of those that got up coming down in the wrong place, and those that came down in the right place frequently not exploding or merely fizzling.
One possible scenario of many is that Nato finds itself falling back from former Nato countries, and starts using nukes on Russian occupied areas within those countries, perhaps Moldova, which might well be Nato by that time. Except that they use nukes on Transnistria, a part of Moldova that Russia regards as Russian, but Nato regards an aspiring Nato applicant despite the violent lack of enthusiasm by residents of Transnistria for that idea and lack of actual control by the Moldovan muppet government.
Jim, would the sad lack of maintenance and refurbishment you believe of American nukes also apply to those third-parties?
France? India? Israel?
The secret ones that Japan of course does not actually have, right?
India’s nukes should work, because recently tested. The generation that built them is still around. Japan’s nukes, if they have any would still work because Japan can still do high tech, but I don’t believe they have nukes, because never going to build a working nuke without testing. France has a nuclear program that still works, so likely its nukes still work.
So long as we have a Nationalist government around in Bharat I expect nukes to be maintained and tested regularly because we have near enemies with nukes. Any GAE threat of sanctions for nuclear testing have to be brushed aside.
Unfortunately the Pokhran generation is getting old now and probably nearing retirement or retired. So we might need another round of testing soon.