181–190 of 339 posts
"We investigate the theses of “long peace” and drop in violence and find that these are statistically invalid and resulting from flawed and naive methodologies, ..."
https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf
Our technology is smarter than our politics. We will be lucky if we don't blow up everything.
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You posted a lecture in which Mearsheimer says Russia will never try to conquer Ukraine, because "Putin is much too smart for that" -- and ask us to accept him as an expert?
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> defensive alliance I almost spit out my coffee I laughed so hard. That's how the alliance markets itself, but that's not how everyone in the world, especially their potential adversaries, perceives it. And its potential adversaries have been saying so, publicly, for decades. As I'm sure you understand, all military alliances, even if they start out defensive in nature, can easily become offensive in nature. > if th…
The only ones pretending that it isn't a defensive alliance are the ones who have some territorial claim they're hoping to take military action against. For whom it is very inconvenient that there's this group of countries who would very much rather they didn't. Everyone else sees very clearly that an alliance which only invokes when attacked and requires the resolution of territorial disputes prior to gaining member…
The cynic in me sometimes thinks that part of it, and the American response as well, is perhaps as much that it's a European country being bullied and not somewhere far away (read: brown), but that it's happening at all is any port in the storm.
The first time I heard Eric Weinstein call for periodic above ground nuclear weapons demonstrations[1], I thought it was nuts. That's because I grew up with the threat of the H-Bomb[2] and the impending nightmares that I've had ever since (though thankfully they are infrequent these days). Seeing how casually people dismiss the possible effects of a war involving 10,000 of these weapons has caused me to re-evaluate t…
Why not just play videos of previous demos as if it's news.
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This is the point that Robert Kennedy Jr has been making, very eloquently. Regardless of how heinous Putin may be, how nasty the Russian invasion has been, it was not unprovoked. The USA put missiles in Turkey in 1961, and the Soviets responded by puting missiles in Cuba. The Soviets felt threatened by missiles that could hit Moscow in 30 minutes, and they responded in kind. What did the USA do? They blockaded Cuba,…
> Who benefits from this conflict?
Minority populations in a variety of countries (Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus) who nostalgically yearn for Russian confederation again.
Ultimately, US military dominance is good for US+LIO interests / serenity, but hard to extrapolate anything more. IMO multipolarity will increase the chance of "smaller" conflicts as poles assert their own interests for sure, but it's going to be around the baseline of conflicts that's consistently been simmering throughout history. The fear is increasing large-scale conflict between poles/blocks - ending the cyclic gap between major wars among major powers - but that's what happens when declining hegemon pushes their interests to the exclusion of others too intensely for too long.
> What is – quietly, because they haven’t tried to launch a major invasion recently – most militaries are probably similarly incapable of the basic tasks of industrial warfare? I once read an article that argued in the absence of war, it's impossible to tell if a doctrine or commander is good or not . Maybe you've got five officers up for promotion. One officer wants to give soldiers high-tech equipment, a heads-up d…
The US Navy did extensive wargaming at the Naval War College in the inter-war years, from after WW1 to about 1933. The results were extraordinarily valuable in the Pacific when WW2 came about. The strategic issues the Japanese had can be seen as the consequence of not gaming full campaigns (as opposed to putative "decisive battles").
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This is the point that Robert Kennedy Jr has been making, very eloquently. Regardless of how heinous Putin may be, how nasty the Russian invasion has been, it was not unprovoked. The USA put missiles in Turkey in 1961, and the Soviets responded by puting missiles in Cuba. The Soviets felt threatened by missiles that could hit Moscow in 30 minutes, and they responded in kind. What did the USA do? They blockaded Cuba,…
And now it's placing further nuclear missiles in Belarus.
And yet, when countries directly threatened by these weapons seek mutual defense pacts and cooperation with other countries in Europe and North America, you call this a provocation. Russia can place nukes in Europe and that's fine, but Poland can't even hold joint military exercises with France. Can you tell me why?
This blog post has some curious blind spots that, if taken into account, negate most of its primary thesis about 'the long peace'. The focus of the post is two-fold: the recent outbreak of war in eastern Ukraine, in truncated form (the war has been going on at a low level since 2014, with militia forces supplied by Russia and Ukraine fighting one another in eastern Ukraine throughout that period), and a recommendatio…
That is not the focus of the post. It's a "Fireside Friday;" an abbreviated [1] discussion of some topic, combined with a generally unrelated list of recommendations. You're misreading a lot into the author to assume that there's some hidden agenda to avoid talking about America's modern wars. There's no discussion of the US here because the entire theory is essentially a pondering (not structured enough to be a full thesis) of "does long peace make countries into paper tigers?" where the US not having been at peace means it fails the precondition.
And as other commenters have noted, the author does have include criticism of America's foreign policy misadventures in this blog post, not to mention that there's been more forceful denunciations in other blog posts.
[1] Abbreviated here is relative; the author's in-depth discussions will be multiple blog posts on a single topic.
