881–890 of 894 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
See https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/04/17/chernob...
Are you saying that 180 (old) people who refuse to leave out of 50000 who were displaced are a representative sample that should show us that living in a fallout zone isn't a problem?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If the same thing happens to a nuclear power plant the area can't be lived in for millions of years. Some people have been squatting in the Chernobyl exclusion zone for decades now, and are still alive. See eg https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/04/17/chernob... I wouldn't want to live there myself, and cancer levels might be slightly higher than normal.
Living secluded in a big exclusion zone with ~180 other people, no stores or infrastructure and higher levels of cancer is definitely something we should strive for.
I'm not sure if there is a higher level of cancer. But I grant you that we can assume that.
It's not pretty, but it's also not something that prevents people from living. Remember when everyone used to voluntarily increase their risk of lung cancer by crazy amounts? Back when everyone smoked? Civilization still persisted.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
First, yes, Putin's Russia has started a war of conquest. Second, no, it is definitely _not_ a total war. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_war for background. Third, the theoretical threat of NATO is not so much to Russia: I agree that NATO is not a threat to Russia. However I do also see that NATO and EU are a threat to Putin's long term vision for a renewed Russian Empire. To be clear, I agree that this visi…
This is total war. RF targets infrastructure and kills civilians on purpose. More than 2000 civilians are killed by RF in one week on territory controlled by Ukraine. RF uses weapons of mass(1) destruction freely, to force humanitarian crisis, then ask for tactical pause, to let civilians escape, while using reinforces to fortify captured land. They are shutting at hospitals, gas pipes, power lines, humanitarian conv…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is total war. RF targets infrastructure and kills civilians on purpose. More than 2000 civilians are killed by RF in one week on territory controlled by Ukraine. RF uses weapons of mass(1) destruction freely, to force humanitarian crisis, then ask for tactical pause, to let civilians escape, while using reinforces to fortify captured land. They are shutting at hospitals, gas pipes, power lines, humanitarian conv…
You realize that Russia would kill way more than 2,000 civilians in a week in a total war?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That didn’t happen with Bush, who conjured up a premise with multiple lies in order to justify going to war. And then 3 years later, he got re-elected.
So it took 7 more years with Bush. Again, not comparable to Putin - not even close.
However the significant bit here is the fact that Bush was re-elected despite lying about the reasons going to war.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve been wondering if that convoy outside of Kyiv is really stopped because serious thought is being given to the idea of a nuclear attack to save a long bloody insurgency. I don’t know if NATO would respond to a nuclear attack on Kyiv. Would NATO attack knowing the destruction of London/Paris/NYC/etc would be almost guaranteed?
No offense but this is pretty far fetched. First of all, if Putin wanted to level Kiev he could do it with conventional bombs and artillery. Nuclear weapons are not needed. But second of all, *why* would he want to flatten Kiev? Why don’t you read his goals in his own words? https://web.archive.org/web/20220224024154/http://en.kremlin... He says he sees Russians and Ukrainians as one people and wants to unify them. N…
And besides taking pieces from your neighboring country, waging long shadow war in Donbas, telling everyone how Ukraine is not really a country anyway and then invading doesn't really seem such a great plan for unifying nations.
As far as I understand relations before Russians and Ukrainians were pretty OK before 2014 events. With his own actions Putin has made a country that has roughly 1/3 of the population of Russia mostly against him. Healing these wounds and relationships will take decades even once the war ends.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This touches on why I think humanity will not survive for much longer. Global warming continues to be a civilization-ending level threat, and yet it continues to be more or less ignored. Vast swathes of the population believe that their egos can determine reality, no matter the actual physical reality they so hubristically ignore. > we’re not capable of I don’t think so, either. This sentiment tends to be met by the…
> Global warming continues to be a civilization-ending level threat, Global warming is a threat that will have tons of negative impact. But is it really "civilization-ending"?
Plenty of cases of lost civilizations in America, Asia and Africa linked with desertification and climate going unstable
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unironically, it is exactly that crisis that is key to understanding Russias actions right now, as there are many similar parallels. That, plus the 2.5T barrels worth of shale that Chevron and Exxon prospected underneath the Crimean peninsula. If Russia really did go to war over securing some natural resources and a geopolitical strategic location, over a false pretense of something like liberation, it would sound so…
Russia may or may not care for it's own wealth in the shale prospects, but it can't allow for Ukraine to have them. They've shown interest in being a western aligned democracy, and having such resource exports would make Ukraine much more wealthy. A wealthy, friendly Ukraine as an energy provider is much more attractive to Europe than Russia. They would have a much easier time being admitted to the EU and NATO, and i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is bad, but nuclear isn't uniquely dangerous here: just imagine the same kind of shelling around a large dam.
I hope you realize how bad of a comparison that is. If a dam would break and flood some area it would kill people but after a year the chaos will be cleaned up and things will be back to normal. If the same thing happens to a nuclear power plant the area can't be lived in for millions of years.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Exclusion_z...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You realize that Russia would kill way more than 2,000 civilians in a week in a total war?
The same sentiment was said about US wars since 2000 and we can’t even agree on how to count the number dead, and more or less stopped trying.