If say China failed to “Gaza” Taiwan - because, well, China has never successfully launched a maritime invasion in its long history - would your world-view change? Or are you a ride-or-die Central Committee man, every other thought is impossible, the province of us “liberal retards”?
Person B claims Bay of pigs failed / maritime invasion hard.
Person B argument retarded because US doesn't need to invade to Gaza Cuba.
Person B is admitting they lack 101 subject matter knowledge, to even bring up maritime invasion (because that's the context PRC/TW scenario is presented in lay news) is kind of so stupid it's not even wrong when talking about razing TW into Gaza.
TLDR PRC doesn't need to invade TW to Gaza it. They can now do it trivially from mainland fires. That's the current military reality. There doesn't need to be single foot on the ground to starve island with 90% energy and calorie import needs, and there's functionally nothing US+co can do about it, at least not for next 10+ years where procurement is locked in, and assuming PRC MIC somehow regress. So when I say PRC can Gaza TW, I mean statistically, with the currently correlation of forces across the strait, PRC can conventionally level TW like Gaza, without any amphib effort, just like US can simply glass Havanna from CONUS. That should not be controversial statement if you understand the actual #s involved. I mean delulu libtards are free to think delulu impossible thoughts, but some of them are, in fact functionally in the realm of impossible.
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives one.”
Knowledge is prerequisite for all else. Do pity the millions who will grow old before reading Ishiguro’s ‘The Remains of the Day’ - you too? Could you see its point?
Society is too large to see itself; someone must observe on our behalf. In this pursuit poesy may tell truth where ten thousand theses have honestly lied.
If they feel like it, outdoor cats are quite free to adopt secondary or tertiary owners, or set up residence in a rail station or at a grocery store, and I'm certain I could find you 20 BBC local news stories about these kind of shenanigans, "well-loved cat famous in town" sort of thing. Or "incredible journey", also common.
I’d disagree. As domesticated, bred familiars, the natural state of cats, as with dogs, is symbiosis with humans. They’re not wild animals in a zoo. As the common jokes go, they own us as much as we them.
You’re absolutely right. Poor frugality is why we should be ok with “22% of seniors trying to survive on an income of less than $15,000 a year.” They’ve only themselves to blame. It’s their own moral failing, not society’s, really.
All that is is for the best. If there is a volcano at Lisbon it cannot be elsewhere. It is impossible that things should be other than they are; for everything is right.
Make America Healthy Again could be simpler than we think. I would not call it a moral failing though. Just a susceptibilty for flashy packaging, supermarket product placement, even extremely effective prime time and targeted online advertisements. Okay, go ahead, shoot the messenger, downvote me, facebooky zero attention span types.
It’s worked out in as much as no NATO country in the east has been yet as tacked - despite all of them being smaller prey than Ukraine.
(I find it difficult to believe that Russia wouldn’t have embarked on an expansionist project if NATO had just kept out of its traditional sphere of influence after the fall of the USSR. Russia would still have rebounded from the vicious 90s with a desire for near-abroad dominance - and would have found many more avenues of advance.)
Because I think Russia’s project has far more to do with their internal politics than with geopolitics. The Chechen wars foreshadowed Ukraine, and were enitrely, as with Ukraine, a response to the fall of the Soviet empire.
(Perhaps a Marshall Plan-esque foreign policy could have forestalled their revanchism. Perhaps - chauvinism is hard to break. But abandoning the eastern former subject states would not alone have been enough.)
Because he’s almost perfectly modelled by every other expansionist dictator. A war machine benefits him domestically, and revanchism decorates his conservative credentials.
Also: Turkey. Chechnya. Putin responds to force by backing off. He responds to perceived weakness by doubling down. Same as every other expansionist dictator in history.
"he’s almost perfectly modelled by every other expansionist dictator"
Only if you are willing to ignore the facts that don't fit into your model. Namely specific triggers for Putin's actions like 2008's NATO declaration of imminent NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine and American involvement in 2014 coup. [0] Or many years of Putin's warnings accompanying NATO expansion.
"A war machine benefits him domestically"
No, it doesn't. Otherwise there would'be been no need for all the restrictions on the access to information, freedom of speech and assembly in Russia.
"Also: Turkey. Chechnya. Putin responds to force by backing off. "
Chechnya? You are confusing Putin with "democratic" Eltsin, West's drunken darling. Putin started and won the second Chechen war.
As for Turkey, there was no fundamental reason to start a war with Turkey. It wasn't expanding its military infrastructure towards Russian borders and supporting anti-Russian coups in Russia's neighbours.
> Only if you are willing to ignore the facts that don't fit into your model. Namely specific triggers for Putin's actions like 2008's NATO declaration of imminent NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine and American involvement in 2014 coup. [0] Or many years of Putin's warnings accompanying NATO expansion.
That's Andrei Illarionov, he says a lot of things.
I opened the video anyway with the intention of watching it, but after seeing the title "Putin's fake about "NATO non-expansion to the East" closed the tab.
Here is why:
"30 years ago today: Kissinger on Russia & NATO expansion Dec. 5, 1994 PBS Newshour, w/ Jack Matlock" [0]
"Matlock: There is one of the factor here that we seem to be forgetting, and we did, though it was not a legally binding assurance, we gave categorical assurances to Gorbachev, back when the Soviet Union existed, that if a United Germany was able to stay in NATO, NATO would not be moved eastward. And, you know, I think that the current Russian government is very clear
Host (interrupts): So we would be..., but that assurance was given to the Soviet Union.
Matlock: That is right. It is not a legally binding, but it was, you might say, a geopolitical deal. And if we simply ignore it, then I, certainly if I were a Russian, it would be hard for me to interpret this, even though it may not be intended that way, and it is not, as anything less than an attempt to shut Russia off from Eastern Europe.
Host: And that was a line that Yeltsin used today, that it would isolate Russia and sow the seeds of discord."
Note that Kissinger doesn't dispute that fact even though he gives different objections.
Matlock used to be an ambassador to Russia in the late days of the USSR but he is not a Russian sympathizer:
"It's not that you refrain from doing something because it will offend Russia. If Russia is doing something that we don't want it to do, we should offend them."
Gorbachev himself said that even if they wanted to, officials in the West cannot give such assurances, because the voters can replace them at any moment, and added that if they had had an agreement, they would've written it down for exacly that reason. Soviet diplomats were not dumb.
Not to mention that the alleged assurance is anachronistic, as the Soviet foreign minister at the time has pointed out. Germany bordered the Warsaw Pact and there was nowhere for NATO to "expand" in 1990 and thus nothing to discuss. Map: https://i.imgur.com/TQgnuIF.jpeg
>Everyone of importance on the Soviet/Russian side has refuted this.
Whose people you cite also happen to emigrate to the West or at least from Russia.
>Soviet diplomats were not dumb.
Or very interested in not looking dumb after it turned out that they were fooled. In other words, what they say happen to make them look good.
It makes incredibly valuable when American diplomats say that the promises were given even though it makes them look bad because the promises were broken (or about to be broken).
> Whose people you cite also happen to emigrate to the West or at least from Russia.
Gorbachev and Yazov never emigrated. They both died in Moscow in the early 2020s.
> Or very interested in not looking dumb after it turned out that they were fooled. In other words, what they say happen to make them look good.
This is unfounded speculation. Shevardnadze has explained in detail how this narrative is a misunderstanding (or in many cases, a willful misrepresentation) of the 4+2 treaty. The main issue in early 1990 was the details of German reunification. After East and West Germany became a single state again, would Germany leave NATO? Would NATO be present only in West Germany, or in former East Germany as well? This was the contemporary context, since a unified Germany would share a long border with the Warsaw Pact.
Things often claimed about "NATO promises" are actually right there, written down in articles 4 and 5 of the treaty. The treaty prohibited the stationing of non-German forces and military exercises in East Germany until the complete withdrawal of Soviet troops. Both Gorbachev and Shevardnadze have said that NATO kept its promises and the agreement was concluded when the last Soviet forces left Germany in 1994.
The rest of your comment is again a straw-man argument - Matlock (American ambassador to the USSR at that time) was talking about promises not given in a legally binding way and you are citing some treaty.
> specific triggers for Putin's actions like 2008's NATO declaration of imminent NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine and American involvement in 2014 coup. Or many years of Putin's warnings accompanying NATO expansion
So then the war has been an abject failure, right? NATO’s borders with Russia have massively expanded. Putin bamboozled.
Except, of course he didn’t, this has always been a war of territorial revanchism. Putin wants to reconquer Moscow’s old colonies. Both him and Trump are stuck in the colonial past.
Can you name a single colony where metropole built nuclear power stations, developed heavy industry, shipbuilding, space and military industries? I mean, apart from USSR's "colonies".
The idea of providing infrastructure (ports, railways, telegraph) for Africa and other colonized parts of the world is a common trope in British, French, Belgian and countless other pro-colonial narratives, used to depict the subjugation of people as a benevolent gift of progress. Thank you, massa.
“…and I am therefore justified in demanding the surrender of the city of Savannah, and its dependent forts, and shall wait a reasonable time for your answer, before opening with heavy ordnance.
“Should you entertain the proposition, I am prepared to grant liberal terms to the inhabitants and garrison; but should I be forced to resort to assault, or the slower and surer process of starvation, I shall then feel justified in resorting to the harshest measures, and shall make little effort to restrain my army—burning to avenge the national wrong which they attach to Savannah…”
- W. Tecumseh Sherman’s ultimatum to the garrison of this city, December 1864
Sherman’s March to the Sea was an apotheosis of political violence. It deliberately targeted non-military infrastructure.
How long would American slavery have persisted without the march (the war to which it belongs)?
How could non-violence have triumphed in the same crusade?
