Yes and emergent behavior goes both ways. Organizations have many properties that the individuals they’re made up of don’t have and they lack many properties that individuals have. Organizations don’t have feelings. Even in the rare cases when the feelings of the people in those organizations are homogeneous, the organizations almost never manifest those feelings without significant alterations.

Are you seriously comparing Joe Rogan with NATO strategists?

There’s a bit more to it than that.

NATO is a strategic alliance lead by the US. NATO doesn’t have any feelings and isn’t pleased or displeased about anything. Instead it generally does whatever is the US believes is most strategically advantageous.

Those strategist are typically smart people who listen to all kinds of things. They’re definitely careful about what they say though and won’t go around promoting information they don’t want suppressed.

There’s nothing false about all the dead civilians.

This is a horrible ad hominem attack and actively fuels racism.

Wanting Israel to stop its genocide is a good thing. Antisemitism is a bad thing.

If you insist on equating the two, antisemitism will stop being a bad thing. That would be bad.

This is just insane. No normal person would doubt that arms shipments are a military subsidy.

Reply or not. I’m blocking you.

A rational person would take the information in context. The shooter was not acting in isolation. The shooter was part of an organized military that is heavily subsidized by the US government.

What’s hyperbolic about the last sentence? It’s an easily demonstrated fact that the US sends billions of dollars in military aid to Israel. It’s an easily verified fact that this is a large portion of Israel’s military budget.

If you look hard enough you can always find a nit to pick.

When there are billions of dollars of heavy weapons pounding the entire area to dust, it’s completely disingenuous to talk about who paid for a particular bullet or gun.

The entire operation is heavily subsidized by US military donations.

Weapons. That’s the connection.

The US sends vast arsenals to Israel and Israel uses those weapons for genocide and other war crimes.

That’s outrageous. We should immediately stop funding Hamas.

No more weapons packages.
No more military funding.
The Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group should stop supporting them now.

China knows that the US has a lot of economic leverage. They’ve been working very hard to change that and a lot of those efforts have flown under the radar.

BRI is pretty obvious and it’s seen as one of the major reason the ASEAN countries are pivoting towards China. But consider the whole South China Sea issue. Everyone frames it as a contest over sea resources and few people consider the strait of Malacca. It’s a potential choke point for all trade west of Southeast Asia. While China is working to be able to defend that they’re also working with Thailand to build a canal that would bypass the straight of Malacca all together. All of that is primarily to reduce US leverage and those initiatives tend to work more often than they fail.

US is by far it’s largest customer

That’s true and there’s also more to it.

The US is China’s largest single trading partner but China has many many trading partners.

May nations now trade or at least negotiate in blocks. Both ASEAN and the UE, as blocks, do more trade with China than the US does. When it comes to individual nations the US isn’t as far ahead as it might seem. Russia, Vietnam and Taiwan together trade more with China than the US does, despite having a combined GDP that’s a tiny fraction of the US.

The key issue is that China has been working really hard to make itself less dependent on the US. They still have a way to go but they’re much less vulnerable than they were a few years ago.

The current president of the USA is a Democrat.

Democrats used to say, “The buck stops here.”

I have no idea why you keep bringing up that particular deal. It’s not like it’s the only or even last deal the US has signed.

The US hasn’t stopped. The US went out of its way to ensureassure Israel that there wouldn’t even be any delays in shipments.

The US is blatantly enabling genocide and it’s currently headed by the Biden administration.

The rest of the world combined isn’t funneling billions of dollars worth of weapons into the conflict.

You might not be the target audience. I’m not currently the target audience either.

My wife and I are really into cooking. We have a whole bookshelf of cookbooks, a metrowire rack full of “kitchen stuff” and we use it daily.

There was definitely a time when this book would have been perfect. This book seems to cover a lot of stuff that’s obvious to me now but wasn’t always.

If you’re food plan is a bulk package of Ramen, any help on how to make it not the same as every other day is culinary gold.

Just started playing Shapez 2. https://shapez2.com/
Hot damn, is that addictive.

I think that still boils down to attrition and relative size.

From what I’ve seen. Russia has only pulled small numbers of troops out of other theaters to reinforce Kursk. They’ve had an ongoing assault on Avdiivka and they don’t seem to have pulled enough troops out of there to slow down the assault.

The impact, both the severity of the impact and the duration of the impact is likely to hinge on how deep Russias reserves are and their overall production capacity. As near as I can tell, they have both in spades.

From what I’ve seen on Russian industrial production they don’t really care too much if all of Kursk were destroyed. It’s not a strategic location (I think) and all the human and material resources can be easily and quickly replaced.

That obviously involves a lot of guesswork on my part. That’s why I’m wondering if someone with expertise just knows the answers to these kinds of questions (and would hopefully also provide sources).

If that’s the case then Ukraine would need to repeat the Kursk invasion a lot before it made a difference.

Trying to out attrit an opponent with many times the population and GDP is a pretty tall order.

I’m trying to differentiate between things we might like and things that are actually likely.

That makes sense. I’d have questions about all of those too

a) be intended to divide Russian attention and spread their forces out Do we know if that’s happening? Russia has a lot of people and equipment and it’s not obvious to me that they need to pull many resources from other fronts to reinforce Kursk.

b) be used in negotiation and applying domestic pressure to Putin That would make sense too. As long as Ukraine is still holding that territory when those negotiations are going on. Are there any estimates on when those negotiations could happen and if Ukraine will still be in control of Kursk by then?

c) provide a greater buffer for air-defense to counter inbound artillery and missiles
That true but only in the areas directly near Kursk. Is it likely that this can be repeated along the rest of the battle lines?

Your intuition on what Ukraine is hoping to achieve seems reasonable but I don’t know if it’s likely to work out that way.

The whole thing makes me think back to the “Ukrainian counteroffensive” from last year. At the time, US advisors were telling them to do a fast combined arms assault on some place like Mariupol, instead of dithering around, letting the Russians build a ton of defenses and then smashing all the fancy US equipment against said defenses. This assault seems almost like what that counteroffensive should have been. I say “almost” because I’m puzzled about the target. Controlling Mariupol would have cut off the entire western half of the Russian assault. They’d have no supplies and nowhere to run to besides going for a swim. Kursk? The benefits are less obvious.

defcon warning system forums

I’ll check them out. I’m curious why you wouldn’t want to link to them. Do they do something bad?