> a quick fyi: in a total war everything is a valid military target
this is not true, war crimes exist and have legal definitions, even in WW2 people pushed back on some things their government decided to do, like firebombing large civilian centers
hospitals and water facilities are easy examples, which Israel is very guilty of violating in recent years
I would just like to point out that the court that prosecutes war crimes was just hit with even more sanctions from the US, with the justification that "nobody will hurt American citizens", buy the guy who indirectly ordered the bombing of the school.
Legal definitions are pretty worthless if nobody gets prosecutesd.
> this is not true, war crimes exist and have legal definitions
That is why total wars are distinguished from a normal war. The concept that "all civilian infrastructure supports the war effort" is used in a total war to justify firebombing civilians.
Dresden and Hamburg, by the UK and Americans, public outcry saw this tactic end
WW2 is arguably bad example because everyone was committing crimes against humanity, worst thing humans ever did do, and today we're doing a lot of the same things that got us there
Do you have any sources on this? Would be interesting to read that perspective. Coincidentally read an article [0] on the bombings of Hamburg 2 days ago. As far as I know it was the tactic the US and UK employed until the very end of the war. Dresden was 2-3 months before the end of the war. The bombing of Hamburg was 2 years earlier.
The "tactic" of committing war crimes? How exactly does the date make indiscriminately killing civilians more legitimate? If the bombings had targeted military installations or even civilian targets of strategic importance (which would technically still be a war crime) it would be a different story, but targeting innocent civilians in their sleep isn't really debatable.
They ran out of free information on the internet. They can't steal it just like that anymore because the providers are now aware of the value they could provide and could sue the now trillion dollars companies for stealing the data.
They didn't bother when it was a non-profit sponsored by Elon Musk.
Largely, because books are heavy, and there's limited demand for most used books. If you've ever been at a book sale on the last day, there are always lots of leftover ones that no one wants.
There's a general sense that librarians are preservationists. This is far from the truth. Most books get pulped within a few years of printing. Librarians are constantly discarding books that don't get checked out to make space for new books.
In the name of efficiency they cut the spines, rip the pages apart for easier scanning, books are literal dead wood which would cost a lot in shipping so it's easier and cheaper to just discard or burn the remnants.
The book ceases to be a book right at the beginning of the extractive process.
I have a dodgy thermometer on the wall, and I tend to enter the sauna when it shows 80, by the time I leave it's usually been showing 90 for half the time. Celcius.
Right you are. It's little a bit warm for my personal taste, but sure, for a 10 to 15 minute session, ok. It was late, and I was thinking more of the 90F as not even as hot as normal outdoors for many parts of the globe.
The problem with the wheel is not inventing it so much as finding ways to use it. Aside from capstans and pulleys, the wheel is mostly only useful in combination with good infrastructure or complicated machinery.
Of course there can be - likely with a gentleman's understanding that neither would use them, and each side careful to not back the other into a corner where they'd have nothing left to lose.
It's just going to be your typical meatgrinder and attrition warfare.
Yeah, arguably the war in Ukraine is teaching everyone who is listening that nobody is willing to be the first to use nukes and destroy the planet, which means that nuclear powers can actually fight wars--which is incredibly dangerous, of course.
Living systems actively regulate water, stabilize soils, moderate heat, absorb shocks, reduce flood peaks, buffer storm surge, sustain food systems, support biodiversity, protect public health, and preserve the ecological conditions that make human communities viable
Ecosystem resilience is based in the so called natural buffers. They are a product of the interactions between life beings. Imagine the life bar in a videogame. A natural buffer is like a 4-D life bar, where each character actualize their life bars at the same time. You lose some life and your friends will change their energy automatically to fix your health bar, Is paid with energy but also needs some "time currency".
With healthy buffers, even big impacts in an ecosystem are absorbed and the system returns to the initial situation again and again. But it has a coast in the buffer. The life bar gets shorter.
When the buffer is spent, the system is not 'elastic' anymore. At this moment the danger is extreme, but the warnings are subtle or none. Just further impacts, even tiny impacts, on the ecosystem cause a total, devastating and irrevocable collapse that may extend over several years and can't be stopped.
Is unclear if we had crossed this line yet.
The life has recovered from huge collapses at a planetary level five times yet, but it needed millions of years for that.
Just because we had luck before, does not mean that we will have luck forever.
My takeaway is that Russia, China's vassal, wanted to use nukes and China told them they can't[1].
I don't believe Russia really cares about the rest of the planet. At the same time, China doesn't care if Russia gets a bloody nose on Putin's little vanity project and realizes a nuclear war is bad for their mercantile economy.
This coming from the leader of the other country in a war... I mean, I do find it credible that Xi might have told Putin to think very hard before doing something extremely stupid, but from there to stating that Russia is "China's vassal" and will do whatever they're told by a party who has long been a direct competitor (China and Russia have been solid "frenemies" for a long time, pushing very different views of what "real socialism" looks like)... It's a big jump.
The Soviet Union's relationship with China was more of a peer rivalry situation. The Russian relationship with China is nowhere near parity. Russia would fold tomorrow if China withdrew their backing and went along with the US/EU sanctions.
So Russia is only able to prosecute their war with China's permission. When your foreign policy is decided by another power, that's the textbook definition of a vassal.
It's not a binary choice between material support and sanctions, there are plenty of intermediate states. I think you are being hyperbolic again.
And I disagree that USSR and PRC were just "rival peers". Rival peers would be UK/US (at least until Suez), or UK/FR until the 90s. USSR and PRC actively fought each other and almost started a nuclear war; that's way beyond "peer rivalry", that's actual direct competition.
Regardless, Russia is far weaker today then when it was in the USSR, and China is far stronger than what it was when it was getting into shoving matches with the USSR. It's relegated to a chess piece China can move around without much thought.
I think the biggest risk of war between nuclear powers is from mistakes and accidents that might trigger nuclear escalation/MAD. Systems can malfunction. War can spiral out of control, fast.
>"gentleman's understanding that neither would use them, and each side careful to not back the other into a corner where they'd have nothing left to lose."
So we'll just grind each other into a halt? And what is the end state? What a BS.
That's what's happening in Ukraine right now, I don't understand why you think it's BS. The point is reaching a situation where one of the parties is ok with going "alright, enough". Not all wars are WWII-level fight-to-the-death conflicts, a lot of them just end with both sides agreeing a new status quo.
In case you did not notice, that is exactly what happened between China and India. Disputes at the border are frequent and they fight with sticks: https://youtu.be/T1-Gi_l-024
China imports food and has stressed or extremely stressed fresh water reserves. You take out the method they keep alive hundreds of millions of citizens, you think they won’t launch a nuke?
Although for all the strategic thinking we’ve seen out of the “department of war” (that offers gender affirming testosterone shots and then runs out of missiles), I wouldn’t be shocked if you worked at the Pentagon, hahahaha.
This interesting way of saying PRC distant fishing fleet fishing in international waters. Geopolitical drama aside, DWF is like 3% of PRC fishing catch, much of it just luxury consumption or resold globally. Reality is PRC more or less absolute caloric self sufficient on staples, chicken/fish. They import a lot of soy for animal feed but shit hits fan, people eat less pork/beef.
We have thus far been supremely lucky that irrational actors have not acquired a nuclear bomb. But the reality is that throughout history most leaders have been irrational.
My country (America) is behaving increasingly irrationally. I've been hearing fringe conservatives calling for nuking the middle east since the early 2000s, but the rot has spread and became deeply religious.
Now I hear talk of the end times from the most powerful people in the country, actively building bunkers. Groups of Republicans openly talking about the US being allowed to take whatever we want from anyone we want through war (Venezuela, Iran, Greenland, Canada).
Almost all of our leadership has been replaced in every branch of government. SCOTUS is clearly compromised and bought. The legislative may as well be dead. Almost all executive agencies have been purged, what remains have had their heads swapped with sycophants. Something like half of the military generals have been turned over. The DoD was renamed to the DoW with cheers, as an alcoholic prison guard was put in charge and has started touting hypermacho religious warrior catchphrases and openly advocating for war crimes.
The other day we testimony from judges before legislature who refused to say if Presidents can run for three terms or that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. Under oath, just simply refused.
And that's before getting into how the President of the United States started a war to distract from his involvement in the highest profile sex trafficking ring in human history, and has continued to use his position to perform insider trading on oil prices repeatedly for weeks.
If you said any of this would be happening in 2005, I would have laughed at how "that would never happen in the US". And now it's just... reality. Like Russia. And it seems to have no end in sight. So what actually happens if Trump gets so deranged he hits the red button? And if not him, who will the loonies pick tomorrow - someone who actually believes in "the cause", who doesn't understand it's a grift?
And what are the external long term consequences of Trump's actions in countries like Iran and Venezuela and Ukraine? The US is not to be trusted anymore, every country has a clear signal to build their own nuclear arsenal ASAP. We have a river of blood behind us, so are we just expecting to get lucky that no one in Iran, for instance, who gets to a position of power leverages an irrational hate for the US and just... Does it in a religious or hate-driven Armageddon?
Incompetence is one thing, but the aspect of the current leadership that I (as a non-American) find most shocking is the corruption. That is, the use of state power to enrich an individual and his family members and to bend state institutions into tools for conducting petty personal vendettas. Pardons are sold for “investments” into private business owned by the president. Legal “settlements” agreed with organs of state under the direct control of the executive. Granting themselves perpetual immunity for tax evasion. The use of federal regulatory bodies to force private media companies to cancel comedians who hurt the president’s feelings.
The fact that these actions barely seem to register with the US public at large truly blows my mind. That over 35% of the population are completely fine with this stuff is frightening. The fact that none of the constitutional checks and balances are effective in preventing this abuse of office is alarming.
> That over 35% of the population are completely fine with this stuff is frightening
Most literally don't even know, because what little information filters down to them, is all radical right-wing propaganda from Fox or worse. The country has been drowning in it for decades.
The US is still fixable if young people will just fucking vote. Irreparable damage has been done, which means the old structures are gone, but they can be replaced with new ones -- a hypothetical Democratic president would need to clean house top to bottom. Obama's greatest flaw was that he didn't see the need to do that after Shrub.
I don't fall in the ring category, but I will be voting Democrat for the first time. That's how bad this is getting for me. I have real reasons to hate the Democrats as a party, but I'm scared of them less than the modern Republicans .
In several states we have moved well beyond "fixable". For instance, in Texas, where they are outright saying that they are redrawing districts with the explicit goal of preventing Democrats from being represented. Not only that, they're saying they campaigned on the promise and are therefore obligated by their constituents to institute a single party state through the denial of representation of their political opponents.
I genuinely don't believe the US can be fixed anymore. We're on a slip-and-slide and far too much damage has been done to stop it. There aren't even adults left at the table to try.
Fair. And I agree with nearly everything in your comment.
One thing about tRump, is that he is more blatantly obvious about the "bully" side of America. He is not the first bully; just the first un-subtle American bully.
What I find disturbing is the others who enable him. I've long despised the Repugnant Party for their anti-worker ideology but under tRump 2.0 they've gone to a new low that I never thought possible. As much as I despise tRump, the other Repugnant members of congress (the odd rare exception) are absolutely disgraceful.
What I still struggle with is the huge percentage of people that support the behavior. Seeing what the Tate brothers did and seeing the sheer number of people who cheered on the crimes and exploitation they did was shocking. The fact that Epstein is just a minor talking point now. Did I miss when we became so evil? I actually know a kid who went down the red pill path following Tate -- he seemed like a good kid, but to do the things he has done is something that I can't imagine any person with any heart doing.
I fear I've lost so much faith in the goodwill of many people. At the same time, I know that so many people are good. But there numbers of truly bad people are much larger than I thought.
I remember looking around at the people in my friend and family circles who supported and defended the imprisonment of migrants at CECOT, often repeating the propaganda that they were terrorists and criminals, etc - and realizing chances are they'd do the same if it happened to me. Quite a surreal, scary feeling.
> effect is that you are "serf of whomever pays your insurance"
That's why in normal countries public healthcare is a thing and it competes with the private healthcare sector, forcing it to offer relatively affordable premium services.
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