If that was the case, you’d have mandatory voting like Australia.

We already started during this year. No sane leader trusted in a coin flip to guarantee our security. A possible Trump presidency was planned for.

The optimistic alternative is EU countries scale up their military production and cover the gap. We were already seeing a ramp up, but it’ll have to accelerate.

Downside for the US is later down the line, exports will go down as the EU will have more domestic manufacturing.

This is more about ramping up domestic arms production to fill the gap that is going to come from US production no longer going to Ukraine.

Totally unrelated historical fact: Hitler’s attempted coup failed, and he was appointed as chancellor later on in a completely legal manner.

I think Brexit has also been a significant factor in making UK way more xenophobic.

Personally, I don’t think it’s made the UK more xenophobic. A decent percentage of people supported Brexit due to xenophobia, and the success of the referendum made them more outspoken. Basically, Brexit is a symptom of xenophobia rather than the other way around.

If you got a powerful tablet and installed Kali on it, isn’t that effectively a cyberdeck?

It’s a confirmed fact they ordered troops in fallback lines to shoot any fleeing Russian troops trying to pull back on some of the fronts.

Playing on the highest difficulty level

FYI, I’m not Ukrainian. I’m Romanian. We have more skin in the game than Germany or France though. If Ukraine falls, Moldova falls 24 hours later, and allowing our brother country to go back under Russian domination is pretty unthinkable.

Even without that existential issue, allowing democratically minded Europeans trying to walk the same path we walked 25 years ago get invaded by Russia without as much help as we can give them seems horrific to me.

Need a dispenser here!

This period of war in Eastern Europe is pretty shit and I would like Western Europe to take it more seriously, thx

Technically yes, but I don’t mean technology as phones/laptops/tablets/etc. Imho, the biggest factor in social isolation is atomization due to bad urban planning. When everything and anything is only accessible by car, you lose any connection with your local neighbourhood and local stores/cafes/etc.

In environments where people walk around the neighbourhood, doing small daily shops, going to local businesses and taking mass transit to work/school/restaurants/bars, then you’re much more likely to interact with people rather than driving around in your social isolation-mobile.

Urban planning can be considered a form of technology, which is why I said technically yes.

EDIT: Oh, another big factor here is the loss of the third place. It still exists in some places (local pubs in British towns, local coffee shop in Portugal, etc), but in places without a socially normal “hangout spot” that is separated from both home and work/school, it’s much harder to meet acquaintances which may in time become friends.

Those look like 3 random people to me. I’m not seeing the caricature. For them to not be caricatures, what would you expect them to look like?

They tried protesting at oil infrastructure, they stopped multiple oil terminals in the UK being used for weeks and caused shortages in various parts of the UK. Hundreds went to prison and everyone forgot about it after a week.

They throw soup at glass, 2 people go to a police station for a few days and people are still talking about it months later.

Unfortunately, they have to exist within the constraints of modern news media, outrage cycles and social media, and that influences their decisions.

Except when they did protests targeted at oil infrastructure, that was still apparently wrong and got far less coverage than much safer stunts like these.

Military stuff is out of the picture since they established their trade with CCP and NK for rockets

Not all rockets are made equally. The NK rockets, artillery barrels and artillery shells are much worse than they could manufacture with western components. A degradation in quality leading to less accuracy which lessens the battlefield impact is still a positive step.

It also means that China can take advantage of Russia to get much more than it could usually get for their gear. China is not helping Russia out of the goodness of it’s heart or some ideological reason. They’re taking advantage.

I wonder if sanctions targeting non-consumer products critical to producing them can lead to long pauses

Interesting question. I have no idea. I’m pretty confident all sanctions so far are for gas, oil, and military/dual-use technology.

Maybe. The point of the sanctions isn’t to cause unrest though, as I said, it’s to apply pressure to the state. If it happens to cause some unrest, that’s an unlikely side-benefit.

To piggyback on @[email protected], the point of sanctions is to create an extreme economic cost to a state as a bargaining chip. Stop doing the thing we don’t like and you get your trade back. Unfortunately, states control the national currency (most of the time), which means anyone who uses that currency also gets hit. There is no way around that.

Politically speaking, a majority of Russians have been utterly disenfranchised from politics, repeating the refrain “I’m not political” like it’s a magic spell that will ward off the consequences of their government. Consequently I’m not that sad about them experiencing a bit of economic hardship. Maybe it’ll help them realize that politics isn’t just for politicians.

Commentators I’ve seen blame the lack of defence on incompetent commanders that aren’t reporting losses, lack of construction equipment for preparing fallback lines and lack of communication between units. There are apparently many cases of electronic warfare units jamming Ukrainian drones because they don’t know what the drone unit is doing. In short: doesn’t sound like a problem that can be solved by just adding more bodies.

Disclaimer: fog of war, I’m reporting on what people have said about what people have said, this may not be accurate (but what source is perfectly accurate in the middle of a war?).