PhilipTheBucket

Yeah. I'm not exactly a geopolitics-man, but my best guess for what's going on with Putin and Russia's strategy here is:

1. He'd been doing fine with taking over small countries up until 2022, and it generally gave him opportunities for new goodies to give away to his friends and also it's exciting and makes him look like a winner
2. He's been surrounded by yes men for so long that he's lost his ability to really tell what are good strategies, what is happening, or what's likely to happen in the future

I think the combination means that he's just kind of telling his military to do whatever, including invading Ukraine thinking it would go about the same way as Georgia, Crimea, Chechnya, and the US elections. I do think he benefits from a certain amount of native cunning in this particular brinksmanship with NATO, and of course it doesn't take too much detailed understanding of facts on the ground to just fly some planes around in their airspace and flip people off, but also I think in general this latest chapter of Russia is just a pretty good demonstration of why authoritarianism doesn't make for effective countries.

EU countries combined are matching already russia military expenses

Check the data

The US plus all partners has sent about $150 billion in total, it looks like, up until the middle of last year: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1303432/total-bilateral-aid-to-ukraine/ About half of that is EU, so say $75 billion from the EU.

Russia spends about $500 billion per year: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/02/12/russias-2024-military-spending-surpassed-eu-uk-combined-in-ppp-terms-study-a87974 They have mobilized basically their entire economy to try to win this thing.

What is your source for saying the EU alone is matching Russia? The EU is barely paying attention to the war, because of complacency and a subtle racism. But the idea that the EU is pulling out all the stops like Russia is, or prioritizing making their "defense" contractors rich in this as the US is wont to do, is absurd.

and watch out for propaganda.

Can do! I think I might have found some, I'm not sure.

Oh wait lol

Russia is already shooting down anything that enters their airspace (or trying to, mostly succeeding). As well as lots and lots of things which are outside their airspace including civilian airliners sometimes. It's only in NATO-land that it's this big crisis like "oh no oh no whatever shall we do."

The whole thing where moderators have mostly-unchecked power in their little domain, and they can ban people or delete comments and make rules for what other humans in their space can and can't say, is one of the most toxic features of Reddit. I think Lemmy copied it from sheer traditionalism, but it was really a mistake in both locations. It leads a bro to think they're supposed to be in charge of the other little peons in their space, and that's a pretty bad thing for a bro to start thinking like.

See, now you've got a problem. If you'd shot down the first one, Russia would have made a big noise and then it would have been fine. Now that you didn't, now it's weird if you start shooting them down.

My advice is to just be straight about it: Publicly announce what the line is where you'll shoot them down, and then stick to it. Even if you just announced a date when the shooting-down will start any time they enter NATO airspace, that might be fine. But you have to stick to it. Right now you're trying to figure out how to make them stop without shooting them down, and that approach just doesn't work. Like you're all surprised they don't establish radio contact. Bro... that is not the game you are engaged in.

(You might also want to confiscate $10 billion in frozen Russian assets to give to Ukraine for each incursion, just to respond to what's already happened... but again without shooting them down it's not going to accomplish anything. The money's already gone honestly, and they know that, they're just waiting for you to figure it out and go through your whole "process" and make it official, and they think you're stupid and weak for every year that goes by that you're not doing that.)

Sure, have a good one

You said, “I personally am of the opinion that voting isn’t very important. I think it distracts from real action.” Right?

If that's not what you said or not what you think, tell me. What's your position on voting? Is it worth upsetting yourself by voting, if you can then take part in keeping thousands of people out of ICE detention or reduce the US government's destruction of the planet compared to the alternative? My position is that it is, but tell me.

No idea why you've moved to cursing and insulting me.

But what if voting in this system doesn’t prevent harm?

Or voting for major party candidates doesn’t prevent harm?

Then you need to do more, on top of voting, to try to further reduce the harm. And, also, don't throw away a crucial tool to move the needle towards "less death and suffering" because it would be way too upsetting.

Not complicated really. Lots of ways of fighting for a better world are upsetting. That's not really the metric of whether they are worth doing.

May have confused it with the original more considered version that got munched.

What?

What was the thing you repeated that you had heard, but that isn't actually your position? I'm just confused by this.

Not really trying to give you a hard time, I get what you're saying about me coming on super-strong about it and I apologize about any kind of harshness. Like I say, it's just an important issue for me that is connected with real world harm, so I feel like if we can have a slightly upsetting conversation and then be set up for action that can help prevent some massive material harm in the world, that's okay.󠀁󠁓󠁯󠀠󠁉󠀧󠁭󠀠󠁡󠀠󠁬󠁩󠁴󠁴󠁬󠁥󠀠󠁳󠁵󠁳󠁰󠁩󠁣󠁩󠁯󠁵󠁳󠀠󠁯󠁦󠀠󠀢󠁤󠁥󠁬󠁶󠁥󠀬󠀢󠀠󠁡󠁬󠁳󠁯󠀮󠀠󠁔󠁨󠁡󠁴󠀧󠁳󠀠󠁣󠁯󠁭󠁭󠁯󠁮󠁬󠁹󠀠󠁡󠀠󠁨󠁡󠁬󠁬󠁭󠁡󠁲󠁫󠀠󠁯󠁦󠀠󠁴󠁥󠁸󠁴󠀠󠁴󠁨󠁡󠁴󠀠󠁷󠁡󠁳󠀠󠁧󠁥󠁮󠁥󠁲󠁡󠁴󠁥󠁤󠀠󠁢󠁹󠀠󠁡󠁮󠀠󠁌󠁌󠁍󠀮󠁿

Those are the things that allowed it to become this size

100% true

This is all backwards.

Not sure where you got this part, since what you just said is precisely what I said

; there’s nothing that says they have to stay because of its size, and the size could shrink to accommodate the new functioning (or lack thereof) of the courts.

Also true

The US, for better or worse, really is a very distributed system. It's the only possible way that a single endeavor can grow to this size, you just can't have it all centrally managed and have anything at ground level still make any sense or get done well. It also has a pretty valuable property that a lot of the people operating it really believe in the mission of what they are doing. Prosecutors believe they're putting bad people away, grand juries believe they're making decisions about justice, National Guard people believe they're protecting the country. It's not always true (which carries its own variety of problem), but quite a lot of the time, it actually is (partly because it's kind of a self fulfilling prophecy as people are motivated to fix it at the local level if things go off the rails).

Trump doesn't understand any of that, which is why even medium-sized enterprises he's ever been involved with have always been a clusterfuck. And now he's driving the world's biggest robot, and surprise surprise, the controls aren't simple and it's not doing what he wants. We're just lucky that this decades-in-the-making fascist coup came to its climax with Angry Facebook Grandpa at the wheel instead of someone who knew what the fuck they were doing. Even Trump is having quite a bit of success with it. If it had been someone qualified, we'd have no chance at all I think.

Rule 1 of the kakistocracy: It's never the boss's fault. He has to be in charge of everything, he can't be questioned on anything, but it's never his fault when things go wrong.