Kansas Crimson

if the worst you have on me is "an afterthought," then I'll gladly take that over, uh, many of the other views (or lack of views) expressed in this here thread.

how much is NATO to credit for relative peace in Europe? What NATO policies or initiatives contributed to that peace? Is it a causation/correlation thing? Are there other factors that contributed? I dunno, I'm genuinely asking, and will credit whatever positive work NATO has done.

And what to make NATO on the edges of or outside Europe? I wonder what people think of NATO in Libya, Yugoslavia, Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other places subjected to NATO activity?

also what do other non-western/non-NATO world powers think of NATO?

Humans are not peaceful animals.
Neither are lions, tigers, or bears. Oh my.

I know I shouldn't even respond.

but I also can't help but wanna run up and bite illy around the neck, and when he complains about it, just say "oh my."

careful…that’s often a mating gesture in addition to one of aggression/predation

Good luck Q.

KUTradition wrote: ↑Thu Jun 30, 2022 10:38 am careful…that’s often a mating gesture in addition to one of aggression/predation

you're gonna eat my...wut

https://energyandcleanair.org/publicati ... t-100-days


Financing Putin’s war: Fossil fuel imports from Russia in the first 100 days of the invasion

[yet another] convincing reason to divest from fossil fuels

Germany isn't surprising considering the agreements they have in place, but Italy, Netherlands and France is quite disappointing to see.

vlad threatening to take back Alaska

someone better call sarah palin

Vlad desperately aches for a war with western powers. It may be his only way out, a reason for justification (in his mind).

TDub wrote: ↑Wed Jul 06, 2022 5:55 pm Vlad desperately aches for a war with western powers. It may be his only way out, a reason for justification (in his mind).

heard an interview on npr earlier, can’t remember who with (which is important, i know), where the woman was theorizing that putin won’t stop until someone stops him

he won’t stop with the donbas, but rather it will only serve to embolden him, and he’ll claim it as a major victory back home

KUTradition wrote: ↑Wed Jul 06, 2022 7:11 pm

TDub wrote: ↑Wed Jul 06, 2022 5:55 pm Vlad desperately aches for a war with western powers. It may be his only way out, a reason for justification (in his mind).

heard an interview on npr earlier, can’t remember who with (which is important, i know), where the woman was theorizing that putin won’t stop until someone stops him

he won’t stop with the donbas, but rather it will only serve to embolden him, and he’ll claim it as a major victory back home

I wonder if the rumors of terminal illness have any merit. It smells of a desperate king eager to cement his name in the chronicles before he dies. (or Ive been watching too much "The Last Kingdom"....where's Uhtred?)

The fear of humanity in the last 70 or so years is the fuckitall capability.

There have been many many crazy rulers in different sects of different regions with different levels of power.

The issue now is that those crazy rulers can, once they realize their mortality* as a power or a human, in theory, decide to take everyone else out with em.

This is a pretty new thing if you compare the length of civilization.

mortality...but yes.

there’s a reason the doomsday clock was recently updated

But Sonntag’s young disciples didn’t know his darkest secret. While outwardly he was a neo-Nazi, he was also a spy for East Germany’s feared secret police, the Stasi. Not only that, he had ties to the KGB. In fact, right up until the Iron Curtain fell, one of his handlers was a young, ambitious Russian officer stationed in Dresden. The handler’s name was Vladimir Putin.

The story that follows is based on dozens of interviews with neo-Nazis, eyewitnesses, and former spies, and hundreds of pages of Stasi files and court records. It is the story of how, more than thirty years before Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine, under the disingenuous banner of “de-Nazifying” the country, he and some of his closest intelligence associates helped nourish a neo-Nazi movement across Germany. Their preferred tool for sowing hate and discord was Rainer Sonntag...

https://longreads.com/2022/07/06/follow ... -magazine/

wait, did we just go from "but there is no nazi problem that's just Russian propaganda" to "the Russians are the ones who created the nazi problem"

I dunno. I guess the common theme is, the west hates the Russians even more than nazis. or something.

That's a long ass article, and I admit I started skimming toward the end, but it didn't seem to discuss much about Ukraine specifically.

one line struck out to Qusdahl though:

"Some prisoners viewed Nazism as the purest form of opposition to communism"

that's interesting, cuz there's a lot of lefty rhetoric like "opposition to communism is effectively an endorsement of fascism."

Pick your poison, I guess

nobody has said nazis arent a problem, the discussion has revolved around the legitimacy of that as a reason to invade. This article indicates that, not only was it not the driving force behind invasion, but that Putin cultivated that problem as a potential origin story for his desires.

and i wouldn’t be surprised one bit if it turns out that putin has been fomenting such things across europe for decades, wherever he can get a foothold

So today NYC emergency management put out a video for what to do if there is nuclear radiation.
Good luck with that, NYC