Ukraine is getting destroyed because they happen to be a small country in between two great powers having a proxy war. Russia is the invader, the aggressor, the one who broke international law.

But US is not naive here. This was expected and planned for a long time before 2022 and a long time before 2014. Proxy war takes two sides to tango. We’re not supporting Ukraine because of democracy and sovereignty and human rights, we’re doing it for geopolitical motives. A sort of modern Spanish Civil War. Testing out new battlefield technology before the next Great War.

Unfortunately for the people of Ukraine the geopolitical motives and interests of the US don’t necessarily align with their interests. Like Chomsky says “we will fight them to the last Ukrainian”

we’ve been pumping money into regime change in Ukraine since the early 90s. NED (National Endowment for Democracy) used to show the dollar figures and specific organizations on their website but deleted that information a while back. You can still find it with Wayback Machine

Essentially we’ve been funding and supporting organizations in Ukraine under the guise of “pro-Democracy™” “pro-Liberty™” with the goal of supporting any potential chances for regime change. Some of those organizations just happen to be associated with the far-right groups that were part of the initial government that was unconstitutionally appointed In 2014 after Euromaidan- a series of violent protests that forced the pro-Russian president to flee the country.

tldr: we’ve been destabilizing Ukraine for a long time. the idea was to peel off Ukraine from Russia’s orbit and throw it into the US orbit. And it worked. Which is why Russia invaded in 2014

Note before I get the inevitable Russian shill comments - I’m not justifying any aggressive invasion by Russia. I’m saying this is a proxy war - a game of tug of war between two larger powers. Neither care in the slightest about what actually happens to the Ukrainians.

They will not recover from this war for a hundred years. But Lockheed Martin stock will perform nicely

edit: and remember this comment in 15 years. people will be talking as if what I’m saying is obvious. but right now the propaganda is strong- just like in 2003 with invasion of Iraq

At the time when we launched the aggressive and illegal invasion of a sovereign county, we were doing it for Democracy™ and Human Rights™

At the time, you would have been called a traitor, shill, or insane to suggest otherwise.

After some years, it becomes absolutely clear none of it was true. It was all for imperialist motives. It seems that the propaganda is strong, but it has a short half life. Today you’ll have trouble finding someone defending the US invasion of Iraq.

I think we are seeing the same thing with Ukraine war. In 10, 15 years people will see the war for what it is- a progressive destabilization of Eastern Europe and intentional proxy war.

But right now- it’s Sovereignty™, International Law™, and Democracy™

We destroyed Iraq. We doomed millions of people for generations. And we are participating right now in the destruction of another country.

It’s just that we do. We destroy.

i’d like to think life exists on every single rocky planet. i remember reading about the discovery of single celled organisms deep in the earth’s crust. they exist in a very low-energy environment and therefore have slow metabolisms. some of these are theorized to be able to live for over a million years. they literally extract energy from inorganic compounds in metabolic pathways we don’t understand.

the question is: did life originate on the surface (deep sea hydrothermal vents are still surface in this context) or deep in the earth?

if life originated in the earth, then I think there’s a very high probability every single rocky planet is essentially a seed. inside of it’s core it has life and whenever the surface environment grants some long term stability, the life slowly emerges and evolves into different forms.

so how would extra terrestrial beings and humans interact in the next 10 years?

basically, I think there’s a chance (although low on such a short time scale as 10 years) that we will discover life on another planet. or at least some very significant signs of life. either on Mars or Venus or some Galilean moon, etc.

Life just isn’t good at cooperation.

Our only data point for life is carbon based life on Earth. And from that we have

• a variety of insects that live in colonies that cooperate in a profound way, putting themselves in harm’s way for the sake of the colony. Ie ants, bees, termites

• a variety of insects (and fish and birds) that have swarming behaviors, which involves individuals coordinating movements to confuse predators, conserve energy, or find food. ie locusts, sardines, starlings

• a variety of animals that work as herd animals, which intuitively agree to use the power of numbers to increase the safety of the herd. Ie gazelles, sheep, cattle

• a variety of predatory animals that cooperate in order to bring down animals they would have a much harder time getting alone. Ie wolves, lions, and arguably humans

• a variety of primates that live in tribes ie chimps, baboons, and again humans

• a variety of trees that share resources through vast underground fungal networks, known as mycorrhizal networks. so not only are trees cooperating with other trees, the fungus is enabling that cooperation in exchange for a piece of the pie

and that’s just complex life, there’s many more examples in cellular life. animals have been known to show altruism, social animals take care of each other, like feeding and caring for the wounded.

cooperation has evolved in virtually every branch of the tree of life and oftentimes independently. it wouldn’t happen if life wasn’t conducive to cooperation and cooperation wasn’t a positive selective pressure of evolution

and i mean, just look at modern human society. do you really think our globalized society would work without a profound amount of cooperation? we even have a word for this idea, the social contract.

I really don’t get this viewpoint of yours. I see the opposite. Yes, humans run into problems at large scales but life absolutely is good at cooperation and in fact the most successful species tend to be the most cooperative

primary thing $$$

it’s what will ultimately make or break the strike. people start getting desperate when they are behind on their rent

i feel like only people with too much free time get bored

most people are caught up in their own day to day lives. it’s just the nature of things.

you have to go to work to pay your bills. your girlfriend wants to go out to dinner every once in a while. you have to go have dinner at your parents. you have to walk your dog. you have to brush your teeth, do your laundry. you have to figure out what you’re gonna eat for dinner. should probably schedule that dentist appointment soon. need to do my taxes.

etc

really doesn’t leave you that much time or energy to worry about the big problems of the world.

look at the chaos that Y2K was. one doesn’t simply adopt a new calendar.

it’s too ingrained. it’s like ripping out the foundations of a house to build a new one. it would have to be one hell of a calendar

Israel & the US are more or less one and the same. if i remember correctly, 98% of representatives in congress last election cycle was endorsed by the AIPAC

there’s a reason we can only vote for pro-Israeli politicians. Israel projects US power in the mideast

not saying they don’t do all of that. read the reuters article i linked before. or this one: https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/03/why-russia-has-been-so-resilient-to-western-export-controls?lang=en

russia does not need israel. they have complex and sophisticated systems that these days use China a lot but they don’t even need China. it’s sometimes impossible to tell whether you’re selling your microwaves to a russian company or not. it’ll look like a legit company, and then it gets somehow routed to russia and they use the microchips or whatever.

all i’m saying is

a) it doesn’t need Israel’s help for this.

b) israel doesn’t have the industrial capacity (small country, gdp only $500B) the geopolitical position for it (they are a tool of US interests and would not meaningfully harm US interests) and the domestic will for it (again, russia is friends with Iran, Israel’s mortal enemy)

there absolutely are parts of the government that will support Russia. Almost half of Israelis speak Russian and have connections to that area. So yeah, of course. But from a top-down directive it’s doubtful

notice i’m not denying Israel does not supply extremists. i’m specifically referring to this russia-israel dynamic

yes, israel supports extremists. they have a very advanced intelligence system and do all sorts of crazy shit. they’re wild. i agree

if you look at my history it isn’t particularly pro-israeli

it’s just that in this specific context, I don’t think it’s as significant as it may seem on first reading. Israel has had a long relationship of cooperation with Russia. Although lately things have gotten more tense between the two, with Iran and Russia becoming closer. Iran is Israel’s mortal enemy and Russia supplying money and tech transfer over in exchange for Shaheeds is a big no-no for them

so while yes, there probably are pro-Russian elements in the Israeli state that have probably helped Russia circumvent sanctions and export controls… the brunt of their materials probably comes from China, from European sources, and maybe even American companies themselves.

russia doesn’t need Israeli help to get access to American parts

All the way back in the Cold War the Soviets had a governmental department specifically to source parts from the West that was blocked off to sanctions. They have decades of experience creating shell companies, intermediaries, etc.

if someone wants to do more research the parent organization was “First Main Directorate of the Committee for State Security under the USSR council of ministers” and the department was called “Directorate T: Scientific and Technical Intelligence” sometimes referred to as just “Line X”

so basically the Russians have had many decades of experience circumventing sanctions and export controls. The Russians, while a shell of the former USSR, still have a lot of the human capital and base of experience in this regard.

I remember reading an article on Reuters or Washington Post or something where apparently even after sanctions, the Russians are getting roughly 90% of the high-tech components they were getting before the war. So the sanctions have hurt, but by a marginal amount. I think it’s this article: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/western-industrial-components-rebuilding-russias-military-2024-08-16/ but Reuters is now paywalled for me

i’m not ready to say we’ll kill them yet. for example we stuck Japanese in camps but didn’t kill them. sure, we took all their property and whatnot.

but you’re right that it’s concerning because remember the Nazis originally did not mean to kill the Jews. Initially they meant to deport them out of the country.

They created the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in the early 1930s which was meant to facilitate the process of Jews leaving the country voluntarily (at least at first) and also by force. Sort of like our modern ICE

One big idea before the decision to exterminate was to send them all to Madagascar. They seriously explored this idea in the late 1930s but realized it was logistically impractical to transport such a large number of people.

Some enterprising Jews managed to float the idea of returning Jews to British Palestine - and they collaborated with the Nazis to get 60k Jews out of Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haavara_Agreement

But eventually they realized, around 1941, that the easiest way to deal with the Jewish Question would just be to industrially exterminate the Jews

this entire process lasted about a decade give or take a couple years.

my main concern is this: let’s say they start this process. they make the camps, they put hundreds of thousands in said camps. but then they realize they don’t have the money, will, or logistical capacity to actually continue through with it

what happens then? that’s the key question. in the beginning, exterminating is out of the question. it sounds absurd.

but over time, as the situation gets normalized, the overton window shifts. then you mix in economic crisis and war… the idea of extermination starts to look less and less absurd

https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/cbsnews_20240609_1.pdf

That’s a link to a CBS / YouGov poll taken in June of this year.

If you scroll down to question number 62, you’ll see this

62. Would you favor or oppose the U.S. government starting a new national program to deport all undocumented immigrants currently living in the U.S. illegally

Favor . . . . . . . . 62% Oppose . . . . . . . . 38%

That’s a national poll taken of all registered voters, so not just Republicans.

Majority of the people in this country support mass deportation of all illegal immigrants. Majority of the people in this country support a policy that would

• require dozens of camps near all urban areas to house tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people
• require the federal government to dramatically increase the size of ICE, having to hire tens of thousands of additional officers
• that beefed up federal agency would have to search through all urban areas and stop individuals to inspect their paperwork
• those individuals who are caught will have to spend many months if not years in a concentration camp detention center

Consider this. There are anywhere between 10~15 million illegals in this country. Let’s call it 12,500,000. How many seats does an Airbus A321 hold? (fairly standard and common passenger aircraft) About ~200 give or take 30 or so.

So, how many back and forth flights would you need to send 12.5M people back to their country of origin at 200 people per flight?

That’s 62,500 flights. The largest passenger airline in the US, American Airlines, has a fleet size of 970. Let’s call it 1,000 (you can find this on their wiki page)

It would then take all of American Airlines roughly 60 days to move all illegals out of this country, assuming 100% capacity on each and every single flight.

So in a best case scenario, assuming the US federal government was somehow able to emulate the total logistical capacity of the largest passenger airline, it would take 2 months to move all of these people.

Now consider this is the federal government that could not even properly create a floating pier in Gaza: https://www.npr.org/2024/07/30/nx-s1-5050708/what-went-wrong-with-the-u-s-built-floating-pier-designed-to-get-aid-into-gaza

Just some numbers as food for thought. Majority of Americans support placing and keeping millions of people in camps for years.

Living through this, it doesn’t surprise me at all how most Germans did not care about what happened to the Jews

i guess the implication is that he puts more blame on the voters, as that is what his comments are mainly focused on.

me personally I don’t blame the voters at all. just like I don’t blame the German public for voting in the Nazis.

humans are stupid herd animals who will elect strongmen when they feel weak and scared.

i believe you can only put blame on people that have autonomy. and the only people with any real autonomy in this country are the elites, which have stuck their fingers in their ears and their heads in the sand for far too long.

the pressure pot is cooking and I think it’s too late to stop it. maybe if we were a little less greedy over the last few decades and a little less focused on the short term, we could have skipped this resurgence of fascism that we’re about to live through

but politicians only care about the next election and corporations only care about the next quarter. we are a short term society and have sacrificed the long term health of our country

You’re still supporting evil, even if it’s the lesser evil.

this is rather why i like the quote from ZIzek i heard in an interview recently

“if i were an American, I would obviously vote for Kamala. No question. But before I go into the booth, I would make the Christian Catholic cross with my hands and beg God for forgiveness”

i voted for Kamala but I did it with an awful taste in my mouth. Of course, just like all humans are guilty of Eden’s original sin… I think all of us Americans are guilty of benefiting from imperialism, capitalist exploitation, and the spoils of genocide.

games like EU4 simulate it pretty well

when you first take a territory, it requires infamy. other countries look at you with sideways. you can’t extract the full value out of the land yet. but after a long period of time (upwards of 50 years) it slowly starts to become legitimized. especially as you import settlers and built population centers. after a long enough time, it’s both de facto and de jure yours and if you hold it long enough people will recognize it as yours.

so look what happened with West Bank. when Israel took control of WB in 1967, it was majority Palestinian.

what did they do? first, you import settlers. you give incentives for people to come and populate the area with Jews. you also tacitly endorse the ideology of the settlers, so they do it even without you actively supporting it (so you have some semblance plausible deniability when people call you out)

then, you take the native peoples and you herd them into smaller and smaller pieces of land. you restrict movement (like through their “jewish only roads” and the many checkpoints through the WB) (edit: sound similar to what Americans did to another native peoples by chance? almost like it was a blueprint)

fast forward to today, and now 63% of the land area of West Bank is majority Jewish. The Palestinian population is still higher, but they are forced into smaller and smaller pieces of low-value land. In about 50 years or so they’ve managed to turn a majority Arab area into a majority Jewish.

this gives them legitimacy. there’s no way some future government, even if they wanted to be more generous, would ever give up majority Jewish land.

I’d say the entire process is gonna take ~75 years or so. we’re almost to its conclusion. they’re gonna replicate their WB strategy in Gaza, but since Gaza is much smaller and they’re being much more brutal about it, it’ll go much faster

I think the best way to become more resistant to propaganda is to read and understand history. If you only pay attention to this conflict since Oct 7th and you are getting your entire media diet from certain dubious sources, you don’t stand a chance.

but if you deep dive and actually look at the history. look at the beginning of the state of Israel, look at the early leaders, what they were saying, what they believed. look at the process of occupation, what the policies have been (ethnic cleansings population transfers, restriction of movement, blockade of gaza, destruction of airports, killing of journalists, etc)

then you will have a more cynical eye when certain people try to twist and bend the truth. and you will be more accurate in predicting where the ball will land.

the last 80 years has been the slow elimination and annexation of palestine

it really doesn’t matter which pro-Israeli US presidential candidate serves for the next 4

they’ve been self-defensing their way towards the total elimination and annexation of Palestine from the 1940s to now.

this whole thing really should not surprise anyone that knows even a simplified history of god’s special country. they have been slowly and steadily inching towards their goal. they’re not really shy about it.

hear it from Israel’s first prime minister

“You are no doubt aware of the JNF’s activity in this respect. Now a transfer of a completely different scope will have to be carried out. In many parts of the country new settlement will not be possible without transferring the Arab fellahin.” He added: “Jewish power [in Palestine], which grows steadily, will also increase our possibilities to carry out this transfer on a large scale.”

“With compulsory transfer we have a vast area… I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it.”

Here’s another guy, a director of the JNF, Joseph Weitz

“There is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, and to transfer all of them, save perhaps for [the Arabs of] Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem. Not one village must be left, not one [Bedouin] tribe. And only after this transfer will the country be able to absorb millions of our brothers and the Jewish problem will cease to exist. There is no other solution.”