It has nothing to do with wanting to actually fight NATO. The idea is to manufacture a carefully crafted situation where Article 5 is triggered, but due to internal disagreement and individual risk, it is not fully honored.

Needless to say, any such move would be very risky.

Agreed. Great voice acting is one thing. Quality voicing a cast that gigantic is another. I first noticed with that frog in the hag’s area. You don’t even get it if you don’t cast speak with animals and talk to this random frog hopping around, but if you bother to, you get this short, amazingly acted dialogue.

The attention to detail is just off the charts.

or maybe “national security adviser,”

lol

If an edible variety has any lookalikes that similar that can be found in your climate zone, you need to steer clear from it. This isn’t the case for all varieties and all areas though. General mushroom foraging may be dangerous, but certain species can be safely selected, due to not having lookalikes you need to be worried about.

Which these are requires learning specific to your local area though. The skills do not transfer to other regions, and everything you know would need to be reconfirmed if you moved anywhere new.

One aspect that doesn’t get discussed enough is how effective their grassroots in predominantly young, male hobby spaces has become.

20 years ago, if you weren’t that interested in politics, you wouldn’t get much of it. Currently though, it has thoroughly infiltrated spaces like athletics and gaming. This was not an accident. They have a strong ground game, it just operates in spaces we’re unaccustomed to thinking about in reference to politics.

Yeah, I’m not entirely sure what’s so surprising about a bunch of professional diplomats being diplomatic with their statements. It’s not a group I expect a lot of outright, direct statements of their positions from.

I don’t know where you get your info, but China and Russia have a frenemy relationship, a friendly rivalry, basically. This goes back to Stalin’s limited support for the CCP in their early days, or even before when the Russian Tsar conquered huge swaths of land from the Qing Dynasty during their Century of Humiliation, about the time when we Americans were busy having our Civil War. We see it to this day, where China could have a huge and decisive effect on the Russo-Ukrainian War if they wished and fully threw in with Russia, but instead are happy to sit back and war profiteer while Russia takes heavy loses and the West spends money instead of making it.

Then Iran and Saudi Arabia are archenemies. Iran is a Shia-majority theocracy, SA is a Sunni-majority secular monarchy with a history of persecuting Shias, and even warming up to Israel before Oct 7th. They have a long history of conflict.

Not sure how Turkey gets on the list either, Turkey has consistently played both sides, always being in it for Turkey. I don’t see the benefit for them to actually pick a side, thus losing their benefits from the other. We see this clearly, again, in how they’ve approached the Russo-Ukrainian War. Like cozying up to Putin, but hey, have some free Bayraktars, Ukraine!

I know a lot of people put a lot of effort into trying to make it seem like a real WW3 with fairly even sides is plausible in the near future, but it always requires a lot of cherry picking and ignoring realities for them to spin their stories together.

Digital feudalism… I suppose that does make it easier to call up large armies of peasant levies when you need to wage an information war.

Also just fear of going out of business by alienating any potential customers. When your revenues have been steadily dropping for decades now and it’s starting to look like you’re going the way of Kodak, it becomes more tempting to pander to the middle and try to avoid pissing as many people off as possible. This in turn means you can’t speak the truth anymore.

It’s the “I know you are, but what am I?” defense. A real elementary school classic.

I think he’s going to go down in history as one of the most successful civilian wartime leaders, ever. I truly cannot even begin to imagine how much he has had to learn on the job, and it has certainly taken years off his lifespan. Pictures of him now vs pictures of him pre-war could almost be a father and his son. But his sheer effectiveness at rallying his people and the world has been nothing short of legendary.

“I need ammo, not a ride” is fully equivalent to “We will fight on the beaches”. So far I consider him in that same tier as the titans of history. This, I think, is what historical figures look like when you’re living alongside them, certainly mired in propaganda and debate, but with a certain shine that is hard to deny.

Just call it the Russo-Ukrainian War. It’s the formal English language name we seem to have settled on, and is unbiased and objective, just listing the two main participants.

That’s a region. It’s also not what you said, you said rust bowl. You know bowls and belts are different things, right? Belts hold your pants up, bowls are dishes you eat food out of.

You read too much bullshit. The US is the second-largest manufacturer on the planet, after China. We have quite a lot of industry still. Nor was “rust bowl” ever a term, which you’d know if you were an American.

If Russian production is so plentiful, where are all the T-90s? Seems to me a major producer of materiel wouldn’t be needing to field its T-64’s in a modern conflict.

… remember the Rust Bowl? lol You should do your homework a little better.

Now I will agree that it takes years, absolutely. Not decades though, which is what you said earlier. Also, fortunately, the process of scaling up armaments production was already started, about two years ago.

Scratch? No, not even close. A reduction and an elimination are not the same thing.

Decade? Probably not, unless you’re trying to spin up domestic production from nothing.

Few years maybe. Depends who you buy them from and how developed their industry is. S Korea does a lot of artillery production. US has its fair share if you want jets. Everyone’s got small arms, trucks, stuff like that.

You see, weapons do not grow on trees. Instead, you need to allocate resources, to either construct them yourself, or purchase them from other people who do. This is usually done with money.

Don’t forget what eventually becomes necessary to retain domestic control.

They’re not liberals, they don’t stomach the idea that the populace could choose something else if they prove themselves unable to deliver on their promises. Liberals get around this by embracing change, giving people the option to change the status quo if they wish. Even to the point of discarding liberalism itself.

Authoritarians don’t believe in that option though.

Not quite as shitty as it looks, for him. Not sure if anybody told Trump yet, but the richest Ukrainian mineral resource deposits are all in the east, under the territory occupied by the Russians.