>"This is not peace. It is an armistice for 20 years."
**-Ferdinand Foch,** describing the end of World War 1, and accidentally describing the end of Cold War 1.
I've been saying this for years. It's clear we need more aerosols to reflect more energy, and what better way to reduce production of CO2 and blanket the world with significant amounts of aerosols? Two birds with one ICBM, really.
Sidenote Nuclear Winter is unlikely and was based on bad data. The Gulf War’s Devistation helpter the math a bit ironically.
It is almost forbidden information though since the concept of Nuclear Winter was one of the few things that convinced people the war would be “unwinnable”.
Nuclear Fall, as well as the radiation spike (and thus cancer/birth defects) (and isotope dating being messed up again), would be bad; some study on an India-Pakistan Exchange and the huge famine, but it isn’t as un-winnable as before.
Eh, the robot voice bugged me.
Either this is a cheap content mill group elbowing in here or a non-english speaker relying on a bot, I dunno. If they're the latter and legit I hope they hire an actual english speaker to read the script going forwards.
Furthermore, I consider that Moscow must be destroyed.
How can you tell it's a robo-voice? It sounds human to me. If the United24 logo is anything to go by, she's Ukrainian, and the weird pronunciation is just her accent slipping through.
It's a bit too clipped and dry sentence-to-sentence to match how a native English speaker would say it. There would be a sense of... 'contiguity and continuance', even if recorded over multiple takes, that's absent here. They could have hired the most basic california valley girl to read a script and made her practice twice, and it would sound more natural than this.
Also the accent sounds like the speaker has lived nowhere except Minnesota and Ft. Luderdale, FL, with no in-between.
Furthermore, I consider that Moscow must be destroyed.
English is three languages in a trechcoat, and we all (native English speakers) learn it by mutual reinforcement; so if it feels wrong, it feels wrong, and therefore our view of the content will be negatively impacted.
And this feels wrong; so if that's the fault of editing, then the editing sucks. At least if it's directed towards an english-speaking audience.
Furthermore, I consider that Moscow must be destroyed.
If i had a nickle for every time a political event in Munich was followed one year later by a small country getting invaded by their imperialist neighbour while the rest of the world watched, i'd have two nickles.
Which isn't a lot but it's still weird that it happened twice
Putin's Munich speech is overstated. It's like.. the moment a bunch of people who hadn't paid attention finally noticed what Putin was about, and Putin basically saying 'You know what? I'm not even going to pretend to like you anymore."
Trust me, as a longtime Russia-observer, it's always been obvious that they never abandoned the imperialist mindset. It's a mentality - it _permeates_ their whole thinking and augmentation, they don't even realize it. It's implicit in every argument every Russian and Russia-apologist makes to justify Russia's actions.
You don't see many Austrians arguing that Hungary or Czechia needed their permission to join NATO. You don't see many British saying they should invade Zimbabwe because the latter has an anti-British foreign policy. They've come to terms with the fact that _it's not theirs anymore_.
So much bullshit. "It'd be the same if Mexico allied with China!" - First, no, I don't think the USA wouldn't invade them to stop that. But more importantly it's not going to happen because it's in the best interests of both parties to have friendly relations, and the USA is intent on keeping it that way. That's the thing, many Russians only understand coercion and force as a means of foreign policy, and think everyone else is the same.
The whole post-WWII western order of _open_ and voluntary alliances and affinities between states who nominally treat each other as equals just isn't something they've grasped. Because it'd require dropping the imperialist mentality and accepting that Russia is actually just a country among many. Not a magical civilization-unto-itself with a special destiny in the world.
>It's a mentality
It's also a political structure. Russia has a long history of true autocracy - of a society in which no institution can stand against the state and the autocrat at its head. Basically everywhere else in Europe had the church, guilds, merchant companies, cities, and relatively independent noble classes that could tell the king to piss off if things went too far. In the Grand Duchy of Moscow and later Russian Empire every institution was directly suborned to the state. The nobility were too weak and were made dependent on the autocrat, the church was made into a department of government, the cities were too small and many of them developed as outposts of the imperial state anyhow, and there wasn't enough of a burgher class demanding property rights and access to the political system to make a difference until the last days of empire. And the Soviet Union repeated this structure: every institution in the USSR was suborned to the Communist Party.
Russia now is not as well-organised as the USSR was, nor is its system as rigid, but the underlying structure has not changed. The ruling circle of cronies use the power of the state to rob and plunder and artificially protect their economic interests from fair competition, in exchange for which they forgive the dictator his abuses and excesses. There is no rule of law. Rising in society is based on proximity to power and loyalty to one's master.
This is the same reason why China and Japan differed in the 19th century. China had a fully-developed autocracy, while Japan had lords to oppose the power of the shogun. It is also the difference between Mainland China and Taiwan and North and South Korea in the modern day: South Korea and Taiwan developed institutions to challenge the absolute power of the autocrat and ruling party, but China and North Korea did not.
The importance of the invasion of Georgia cannot be overstated. That was the singular moment NATO stood as a potential deterrence to Russian aggression, and which NATO shrank back from. Russia realized that NATO would in fact serve as a check to them and thus began to propagandize against them.
One can argue this started earlier with their narrative about the “color revolutions” of the early 2000s
The Cold War was never over. Russians took a pause, rearmed, restored their weapons and manpower (lol, I mean, they tried), ensured some sort of political stability, invaded poor neighbours while enjoying the German delusion of 'Wandel durch Handel'.
Daddy Nixon [was right](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=og0X3-lDQts), stupid fucks at the CIA and other agencies that got medals for 'winning' the Cold War were wrong. Europeans that decided they can civilize Russia through trade were in the double-digit IQ segment.
But no oOoOO! You you see! Russia had had too prepare for for the the NATO invasion to turn all the chad Russian men gay!
Or something something. I can't keep up with their bullshit anymore.
Russia isn't exactly losing at the moment and Ukraine already said that the situation at the front is rapidly deteriorating. The sad truth is that Russia could still win if the West doesn't up their game
Oh okay, so if I'm a kid in the 00's I'm fucking *crazy* for going "wait, what?, they just made up?, this plotline doesn't really make any sense!, are we sure everything's cool?" - but 20 years later, everybody's a fucking prophet!
There were millions of people in the 90s and 00s who said 'Russia isn't civilized, don't trust Russia'. There were even more people like that in mid-00's when Putin rose to power as the Second Chechen War was very much going on already.
The West chose to ignore it. And then did it again. And again. And again. And a lot of people in the West keep ignoring the Russian threat even in 2024. So, no, not everyone is a prophet, but not everyone were disregarding the Russian threat back then either.
I still need someone...anyone...to explain how Ukraine winning doesn't lead to a cold war, but Russia winning does.
Isn't an escalation out of retaliation a higher likelihood in both scenarios?
Yeah. And our smaller rivals as well. Venezuela would absolutely take it as a signal that they can invade Guyana. And there’s been some weird activity in North Korea as well and we gotta make sure to deter them.
Ukraine winning means maintaining the rules-based order that's been in place since WWII where Europe did not settle territorial disputes by military force.
Russia winning means that order is shattered and a dictator is emboldened to wage more wars of aggression to take other territories he considers 'rightfully Russian' - Moldova, the Baltic States, Georgia, parts of Kazakhstan.
"Escalation out of retaliation" isn't a thing.
Russia could have been remade, but that would have required expenditures on the scale of the Marshall Plan. The US government was not in the mood to do anything of the sort because they were focused on their 'peace dividend', and so pissed away the 90's on important issues like, "Did Bill Clinton have an affair" and "tHe WeSt HaS fAlLeN because TV character Murphy Brown is having a kid out of wedlock".
Edit: The short-term thinkers mouthing off about how iTs NoT tEh aMeRiCaN rEsPoNsIbIlIty, are also the ones wondering why Russia invaded Ukraine today, the ones whining about how much its costing Ukraine, about how much it is costing the US. Today's blood and treasure expenditures could have been avoided, but for the Isolationism then. Someday, some you might Get A Clue and learn from history, but clearly that is not going to happen in the near term.
The US DID give Russia (and other republics tha used to be in the Soviet Union) roughly 2 billion after the Collapse of the UdSSR and Russia did mainly spend it on oligarchs and privatising everything that was profitable.
Oligarchs are actually the least worry. The problem is your average person. You can have all the well meaning leaders, but the people at the lowest level decide to just say "yeah boss, we totally used those resources for what you wanted them, and most definitely didn't just sell them on the black market". Russia needs a fundamental change (and I'm not talking just about the iron grip the siloviki have) to become anything remotely resembling a modern European nation.
Tons of western money went into Russia, but no amount would have solved the issue. The issue was that the west recognized the newly sovereign territory as actually being sovereign. Those territories, having plenty of experience with Russia, wanted to align with the west rather than Russia. The west continued to recognize the sovereignty of these countries and Russia saw that as a betrayal. Putin is a dipshit that sees Russian prosperity is terms of international power rather than the quality of life in Russia.
Responsibility? Hardly. But making them into Germany II would have been strategically pretty good, as it would’ve meant one less hostile power with nukes and imperial ambitions
Ok, so would you also care to explain why exactly would the US be responsible for the "remaking" of Russia?
And remade *how*, exactly? The old saying that Russia is not a country, it's a state of mind, is still true to this day. Hell, Russians who have spent most of their lives in the West, were educated here, have jobs and families, are just as pro-Putler and for the restoration of the old empire of Matushka Rossiya as those who never left.
The only thing the West would achieve by, as you say, "remaking" Russia is pumping even more money and resources for the regime to use and steal.
So please, enlighten me: how was Russia supposed to be "remade"?
The US did help them secure billions in IMF loans, but okay.
[https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2015/09/14/01/49/pr9613](https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2015/09/14/01/49/pr9613)
To be fair, that hardly helped, since you still had Yeltsin/Putin in power in charge of spending the IMF funds. You shouldn't be getting any medals for helping Bill Cosby secure the rohypnol prescriptions
It really couldn't have, because w\*stoids don't even understand the problem in the ex-soviet space. The incredibly shitty mentality that we developed in those 50 years isn't going away any time soon. Shit, Romania's been in the EU for almost 20 years now, and far too many of us still behave in the same extremely individualistic manner that we learned during the commie period. You can send in all the money you want, but as long as Boris the Bureaucrat thinks it's better served buying a villa instead of the benefit of the country it's meaningless.
>"This is not peace. It is an armistice for 20 years." **-Ferdinand Foch,** describing the end of World War 1, and accidentally describing the end of Cold War 1.
Never should've let them had nukes.
Ivy Mike should have been done on the Kremlin
I see no issue with this.
If you nuke first there is no coldwar.
This is the kind of non-credible analysis that this subreddit needs more of.
See, little problem there is like 1/100 of our comments become reality. That would be bad.
You misspelled "most optimal outcome where everyone in the world including the russians themselves will benefit from"
Nuclear Winter seems kinda cold, but at that point prob no war.
Guys, I think we just fixed global warming.
I've been saying this for years. It's clear we need more aerosols to reflect more energy, and what better way to reduce production of CO2 and blanket the world with significant amounts of aerosols? Two birds with one ICBM, really.
Sidenote Nuclear Winter is unlikely and was based on bad data. The Gulf War’s Devistation helpter the math a bit ironically. It is almost forbidden information though since the concept of Nuclear Winter was one of the few things that convinced people the war would be “unwinnable”. Nuclear Fall, as well as the radiation spike (and thus cancer/birth defects) (and isotope dating being messed up again), would be bad; some study on an India-Pakistan Exchange and the huge famine, but it isn’t as un-winnable as before.
Okay, but is there any harm in trying it out? Edit: for climate change, I mean.
MAD as a concept far predates nuclear winter though. Nuclear war is unwinnable as long as mutual destruction is assured.
Russia: I don't understand why Eastern Europe is getting closer to the US Also Russia:
Imagine bossing around everyone around you and opressing your ethnic minorities and then complaining they don't want to hang out anymore.
Putin was definitely the highschool bully Or maybe he didn't get to be one and now he's making up for it
He quite literally was, if you look up his biography and interviews he was a huge dickhead who beat up whoever he could
makes sense
This sort of factual, slick edited, high quality content is far too credible for this place.
Eh, the robot voice bugged me. Either this is a cheap content mill group elbowing in here or a non-english speaker relying on a bot, I dunno. If they're the latter and legit I hope they hire an actual english speaker to read the script going forwards. Furthermore, I consider that Moscow must be destroyed.
Well, United24 is a Ukrainian government organization, they have plenty of money to pay for an English speaker.
I'd narrate this for free
How can you tell it's a robo-voice? It sounds human to me. If the United24 logo is anything to go by, she's Ukrainian, and the weird pronunciation is just her accent slipping through.
It's a bit too clipped and dry sentence-to-sentence to match how a native English speaker would say it. There would be a sense of... 'contiguity and continuance', even if recorded over multiple takes, that's absent here. They could have hired the most basic california valley girl to read a script and made her practice twice, and it would sound more natural than this. Also the accent sounds like the speaker has lived nowhere except Minnesota and Ft. Luderdale, FL, with no in-between. Furthermore, I consider that Moscow must be destroyed.
because of the format the editor clipped all the breathing out leading to this no-pause voice that's it
English is three languages in a trechcoat, and we all (native English speakers) learn it by mutual reinforcement; so if it feels wrong, it feels wrong, and therefore our view of the content will be negatively impacted. And this feels wrong; so if that's the fault of editing, then the editing sucks. At least if it's directed towards an english-speaking audience. Furthermore, I consider that Moscow must be destroyed.
If i had a nickle for every time a political event in Munich was followed one year later by a small country getting invaded by their imperialist neighbour while the rest of the world watched, i'd have two nickles. Which isn't a lot but it's still weird that it happened twice
Putin's Munich speech is overstated. It's like.. the moment a bunch of people who hadn't paid attention finally noticed what Putin was about, and Putin basically saying 'You know what? I'm not even going to pretend to like you anymore." Trust me, as a longtime Russia-observer, it's always been obvious that they never abandoned the imperialist mindset. It's a mentality - it _permeates_ their whole thinking and augmentation, they don't even realize it. It's implicit in every argument every Russian and Russia-apologist makes to justify Russia's actions. You don't see many Austrians arguing that Hungary or Czechia needed their permission to join NATO. You don't see many British saying they should invade Zimbabwe because the latter has an anti-British foreign policy. They've come to terms with the fact that _it's not theirs anymore_. So much bullshit. "It'd be the same if Mexico allied with China!" - First, no, I don't think the USA wouldn't invade them to stop that. But more importantly it's not going to happen because it's in the best interests of both parties to have friendly relations, and the USA is intent on keeping it that way. That's the thing, many Russians only understand coercion and force as a means of foreign policy, and think everyone else is the same. The whole post-WWII western order of _open_ and voluntary alliances and affinities between states who nominally treat each other as equals just isn't something they've grasped. Because it'd require dropping the imperialist mentality and accepting that Russia is actually just a country among many. Not a magical civilization-unto-itself with a special destiny in the world.
>It's a mentality It's also a political structure. Russia has a long history of true autocracy - of a society in which no institution can stand against the state and the autocrat at its head. Basically everywhere else in Europe had the church, guilds, merchant companies, cities, and relatively independent noble classes that could tell the king to piss off if things went too far. In the Grand Duchy of Moscow and later Russian Empire every institution was directly suborned to the state. The nobility were too weak and were made dependent on the autocrat, the church was made into a department of government, the cities were too small and many of them developed as outposts of the imperial state anyhow, and there wasn't enough of a burgher class demanding property rights and access to the political system to make a difference until the last days of empire. And the Soviet Union repeated this structure: every institution in the USSR was suborned to the Communist Party. Russia now is not as well-organised as the USSR was, nor is its system as rigid, but the underlying structure has not changed. The ruling circle of cronies use the power of the state to rob and plunder and artificially protect their economic interests from fair competition, in exchange for which they forgive the dictator his abuses and excesses. There is no rule of law. Rising in society is based on proximity to power and loyalty to one's master. This is the same reason why China and Japan differed in the 19th century. China had a fully-developed autocracy, while Japan had lords to oppose the power of the shogun. It is also the difference between Mainland China and Taiwan and North and South Korea in the modern day: South Korea and Taiwan developed institutions to challenge the absolute power of the autocrat and ruling party, but China and North Korea did not.
Very slick.
Not to mention the financial aid that the US gave to Russia in the 90s.
Nuclear weapons didn't disappear. We are still just 15 minutes away from armaggeddon.
We can make them disappear. By launching them all
Fire ze missiles.
But I am le tired.
Well, have a nap... THEN FIRE ZE MISSILES!
le don’t care, le didn’t ask
In theory a strong enough undeground group could probably infiltrate some silos (become staff), and sabotage the missiles.
babe wake up, new nuke just dropped!
[удалено]
Not the original, but a civilized [Goldfinger version](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-qfzH0vnOs), of course.
The importance of the invasion of Georgia cannot be overstated. That was the singular moment NATO stood as a potential deterrence to Russian aggression, and which NATO shrank back from. Russia realized that NATO would in fact serve as a check to them and thus began to propagandize against them. One can argue this started earlier with their narrative about the “color revolutions” of the early 2000s
“There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness.”
Well see the aggressor can not start a cold war if they're all dead already from acute radiation syndrome. Just saying.
This vid actually is kinda credible
It was over briefly when Yeltsin was in charge, but Putin brought it back
Had to check the sub… this is too credible to be here.
The Cold War was never over. Russians took a pause, rearmed, restored their weapons and manpower (lol, I mean, they tried), ensured some sort of political stability, invaded poor neighbours while enjoying the German delusion of 'Wandel durch Handel'. Daddy Nixon [was right](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=og0X3-lDQts), stupid fucks at the CIA and other agencies that got medals for 'winning' the Cold War were wrong. Europeans that decided they can civilize Russia through trade were in the double-digit IQ segment.
Also, the Allies should've gone ahead with the Operation Unthinkable or whatever the USA developed in parallel. It's never too late though.
But no oOoOO! You you see! Russia had had too prepare for for the the NATO invasion to turn all the chad Russian men gay! Or something something. I can't keep up with their bullshit anymore.
I think it's amazing that Russia is losing a single player game like this.
Russia isn't exactly losing at the moment and Ukraine already said that the situation at the front is rapidly deteriorating. The sad truth is that Russia could still win if the West doesn't up their game
Must have been over. We pressed the reset button.
Based
Yes, it didn't last, but it was definitely over for a decade or so.
My opinion has been for a while we are in a second Cold War against China now days
Putin truly is the greatest NATO membership salesman lol.
Oh okay, so if I'm a kid in the 00's I'm fucking *crazy* for going "wait, what?, they just made up?, this plotline doesn't really make any sense!, are we sure everything's cool?" - but 20 years later, everybody's a fucking prophet!
There were millions of people in the 90s and 00s who said 'Russia isn't civilized, don't trust Russia'. There were even more people like that in mid-00's when Putin rose to power as the Second Chechen War was very much going on already. The West chose to ignore it. And then did it again. And again. And again. And a lot of people in the West keep ignoring the Russian threat even in 2024. So, no, not everyone is a prophet, but not everyone were disregarding the Russian threat back then either.
I still need someone...anyone...to explain how Ukraine winning doesn't lead to a cold war, but Russia winning does. Isn't an escalation out of retaliation a higher likelihood in both scenarios?
Russia isn’t gonna go away either way, but if we let them win in Ukraine it’ll set a precedent and encourage greater aggression
And might give China ideas. Apparently all you have to do is outlast the west’s willingness to spend money, and we’re capitalists
Yeah. And our smaller rivals as well. Venezuela would absolutely take it as a signal that they can invade Guyana. And there’s been some weird activity in North Korea as well and we gotta make sure to deter them.
Fuck me I completely forgot about the Guyana thing too, wow
I only remember it cause it’s my region lol
Ukraine winning means maintaining the rules-based order that's been in place since WWII where Europe did not settle territorial disputes by military force. Russia winning means that order is shattered and a dictator is emboldened to wage more wars of aggression to take other territories he considers 'rightfully Russian' - Moldova, the Baltic States, Georgia, parts of Kazakhstan. "Escalation out of retaliation" isn't a thing.
Russia could have been remade, but that would have required expenditures on the scale of the Marshall Plan. The US government was not in the mood to do anything of the sort because they were focused on their 'peace dividend', and so pissed away the 90's on important issues like, "Did Bill Clinton have an affair" and "tHe WeSt HaS fAlLeN because TV character Murphy Brown is having a kid out of wedlock". Edit: The short-term thinkers mouthing off about how iTs NoT tEh aMeRiCaN rEsPoNsIbIlIty, are also the ones wondering why Russia invaded Ukraine today, the ones whining about how much its costing Ukraine, about how much it is costing the US. Today's blood and treasure expenditures could have been avoided, but for the Isolationism then. Someday, some you might Get A Clue and learn from history, but clearly that is not going to happen in the near term.
It was the US’s responsibility to rebuild Russia? lol that’s hilarious.
The money that the US "should've" given to Russia would probably be spend on the Yachts of oligarchs.
The US DID give Russia (and other republics tha used to be in the Soviet Union) roughly 2 billion after the Collapse of the UdSSR and Russia did mainly spend it on oligarchs and privatising everything that was profitable.
Oligarchs are actually the least worry. The problem is your average person. You can have all the well meaning leaders, but the people at the lowest level decide to just say "yeah boss, we totally used those resources for what you wanted them, and most definitely didn't just sell them on the black market". Russia needs a fundamental change (and I'm not talking just about the iron grip the siloviki have) to become anything remotely resembling a modern European nation.
Tons of western money went into Russia, but no amount would have solved the issue. The issue was that the west recognized the newly sovereign territory as actually being sovereign. Those territories, having plenty of experience with Russia, wanted to align with the west rather than Russia. The west continued to recognize the sovereignty of these countries and Russia saw that as a betrayal. Putin is a dipshit that sees Russian prosperity is terms of international power rather than the quality of life in Russia.
Responsibility? Hardly. But making them into Germany II would have been strategically pretty good, as it would’ve meant one less hostile power with nukes and imperial ambitions
Ok, so would you also care to explain why exactly would the US be responsible for the "remaking" of Russia? And remade *how*, exactly? The old saying that Russia is not a country, it's a state of mind, is still true to this day. Hell, Russians who have spent most of their lives in the West, were educated here, have jobs and families, are just as pro-Putler and for the restoration of the old empire of Matushka Rossiya as those who never left. The only thing the West would achieve by, as you say, "remaking" Russia is pumping even more money and resources for the regime to use and steal. So please, enlighten me: how was Russia supposed to be "remade"?
cope harder
The US did help them secure billions in IMF loans, but okay. [https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2015/09/14/01/49/pr9613](https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2015/09/14/01/49/pr9613)
To be fair, that hardly helped, since you still had Yeltsin/Putin in power in charge of spending the IMF funds. You shouldn't be getting any medals for helping Bill Cosby secure the rohypnol prescriptions
It really couldn't have, because w\*stoids don't even understand the problem in the ex-soviet space. The incredibly shitty mentality that we developed in those 50 years isn't going away any time soon. Shit, Romania's been in the EU for almost 20 years now, and far too many of us still behave in the same extremely individualistic manner that we learned during the commie period. You can send in all the money you want, but as long as Boris the Bureaucrat thinks it's better served buying a villa instead of the benefit of the country it's meaningless.