Many reasons. Sometimes the water table is too high. Sometimes the ground isn’t actually colder because it is a material that retains a lot of heat. Digging is expensive. And of course, most people don’t want to live underground.

NATO is not one unified entity, as much as it pretends or wants to be. Even if the US did decide to actually go to war with Russia, a lot of NATO could decide to sit it out out of self-preservation.

I literally said this in my post. I get that it’s long, but you wrote quite a long response. So I’d appreciate it if you read it before criticizing.

That strategy for Kaliningrad is interesting. My one question is I think it must be possible to block trains at the border without violence. I have actually crossed the border between the Baltic countries and Russia many times and I believe we had to stop for passport checks although it was a long time ago. Either way, I think it is possible for Lithuania to block Russian trains on their own rails physically without committing an act of war. Now, Russia may just go to war with Lithuania anyways, a Russian general just said this on TV.

I don’t think this will happen, Russia has better options, but if it did, would NATO really stand by and let it happen? Any nations that do so will be in violation of NATO article 5. NATO is really not an organization but a treaty. Refusing to come to Lithuania’s aid would be a violation of said treaty, and if you are saying only Poland and the UK will help, then all other NATO countries violate the treaty so NATO no longer formally exists. Also, the UK has nukes. So western countries will risk the nuking of the UK and the dissolution of NATO but will refuse to go to war as a bloc? I think this is unlikely.

About your forecast on the economic situation and Ukraine, I disagree. But it will be interesting to look back as these events unfold. I have an experience that comes from observing hours and hours of news about this, and trying to condense all of that into an argument when I will be proven correct or incorrect in a few months is a waste of time I think.

The first image breaks it down into deaths, injuries, and captures. The second image is only about military equipment. And tanks and planes don’t die per se, so I think it’s all pretty unambiguous.

No, it’s just an adjective for gender. But if instead of saying something like “my best friend is a woman” you said “my best friend is a female” it sounds like you are an alien talking about some kind of specimen.

They are isomorphic

Intelligence organizations have an agenda. Look into operation northwoods, in which the DOD planned for the CIA to stage false flag terrorist attacks on their own people and blame it on Cuba

So German CIA. That’s even worse

Such is life. And research in general.

These tweets include pictures, documents, links to other sources, etc. How can a tweet not be a source when it contains first hand evidence? It has to be posted somewhere…

What does a hashtag have to do with what people believe in?

It’s an example of the expression some are giving to the current situation. Of course it reflects what people believe. Sure, there can be dishonest framing from the elites. But your average liberal is going to take things at face value.

lol

For Americans, this conflict is very far away. America is involved with every country, it’s hard to see a conflict of this scale not having an impact on America.

But the conflicts that America is involved in Somalia and Yemen do matter for Americans. Saudi Arabia payed us $100 billion for weapons to kill people in Yemen. But no one has a Yemeni flag on their social media.

It’s like in your car example. But somehow you were running people over with your car and you didn’t care. But when someone else does it you care. Even when it’s ruining your car. It’s plain hypocrisy.

But on twitter it is #StandWithUkraine not #StandWithAmericanGas. Leftists and Democrats who are against fracking and the interests of natural gas companies are the most vocal in condemning Russia. I don’t see the economic explanation panning out.

It’s reasonable that people would care about issues that economically affect them. However, the initial reaction is unlike anything we’ve ever seen. This was before the economic shockwaves had time to percolate.

Ostensibly, much of it has to do with people’s moral concerns. People claim to care about Ukraine, not because it directly affects them, but because of the humanitarian aspect. This is apparent from the focus of the conversation on various claimed atrocities, the “stand with Ukraine” rhettoric. The issue is, all human life is valuable. So if it’s about moral outrage, which it is, then you would expect to see proportionate response to other people’s lives that matter.

If there was the same degree of attention to Ukraine, but the moral aspect wasn’t as strong, it would be hard to argue a pattern of racism. But that’s not what we see.

Can you explain why Americans care so much about it given that most Americans are not even aware of what our own military is doing in Somalia, and all over the world?

The idea that they have a tailor on the ISS who can make new suits on a whim is just hilarious

Fortunately, we have pictures from 2015 that show these suits were worn before. https://sputniknews.com/20151221/space-earth-photos-oleg-artemyev-1032047026.html

How does anyone still trust the media?

Where is the evidence that every one of these parties has links to Russia? The closest you get in this article comes from an unsourced claim from British intelligence (sus) which doesn’t even claim any collusion on behalf of the party itself.

From what I’ve seen the developers don’t condone using the software for hateful purposes. That’s why Lemmy used to have a slur filter built in to the software. That said there’s nothing they can do to prevent anyone from running an instance the way they see fit, and that’s a good thing, because it makes it decentralized. The code is open source under the GPL license, which means anyone could take the code and copy it to make their own version as long as that version is open source.

There are free speech Lemmy instances that exist. Most other instances block them though because most people on here don’t want to see casual racism in their feed. I think most people are fine with a little moderation and don’t want to give a platform to hateful communities.

I don’t want lemmy to be a second reddit.

It is impossible for this to happen because Lemmy is open source and federated, and Reddit isn’t. Anyone can fork the source code and start a new instance if they are unhappy with the moderation of existing instances.

This goes along with the picture I had already observed during this crisis. The Azov Battalion in Mariupol want as many civilians to die as possible for propaganda purposes. And mainly because of their racist beliefs that ethnic Russians are asiatic and inferior and should be “cleansed”. This is only the latest opportunity for these genocidal pigs to commit massive acts of atrocity.

yes, i’m aware there are nazi’s in ukraine. i’m also aware that nazi’s have snuck themselves into almost every crevasse of society. it’s fucking gross, but it’s certainly not what provoked this invasion.

Again, the issue is not that Nazis exist in Ukraine. It is that the US has been promoting Nazis and Nazism. And it is how influential these Nazis are. Only in a Ukraine could you have, in your capital city, a street named after a Nazi collaborator and holocaust abettor Stephan Bandera, who is also officially recognized as a national hero. And on this same street, you have a shopping mall where a swastika was boldly displayed in lights on the main staircase.

They are not sneaking in crevasses. They are out in the open. Characterizing it that way is minimization of Fascism. Kinda sus how they always choose this line of argument that the Nazis aren’t a big deal, as if there aren’t other arguments you could make against Russia. Very sus indeed.

It’s like that Albert Einstein quote. “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones”

Except now we know that WW3 will be fought with coke and pepsi.

I’m curious who this Julianus person is. Makes their account three days ago. Only posts propaganda about Russia-Ukraine. Maybe they are someone’s alt who are too scared to show their true thoughts on their main account. Or maybe they are a glowie looking to sow division in one of the few networks that is immune from state department censorship.

I wrote something with the same conclusion here:
https://lemmy.ml/post/181612

Xi Jinping is a good man

Now it does, I agree. According to the Kremlin, the military operation was paused as it looked like Zelensky was willing to negotiate neutrality. Now that has fallen through, they have resumed the operation today, so it seems like tonight we will see a big escalation in military action now.

Demilitarization is just the reduction of armed forces. So yes you can demilitarize a country without a full scale invasion.

No it’s not. There’s not just peace and war. There’s in between. For example, in Syria, the US has never been in all at war with the Syrian government. They’ve used hybrid warfare and other methods. There was that one time as well where Trump ordered a tomahawk to destroy a Syrian air field. Still no all out war. And also when Trump ordered the assassination of Soleimani without engaging in warfare with Iran. Countries can engage in military attacks without invading or waging war.

I don’t remember denying there were Russian troops on the border. You might be confused

There was no full-scale invasion two days ago. I stand by what I said.

Fair enough, I’ll correct it

See for yourself
https://theconversation.com/putins-public-approval-is-soaring-during-the-russia-ukraine-crisis-but-its-unlikely-to-last-177302

It is scary. Almost like the neocons, western ultra leftists like Vaush et al, and neo-nazis are starting to join hands.

It is worth me clarifying though, while this Jacobin article is trying to argue the Russian people aren’t with Putin on this, and that’s wrong, it is true that the Russian people don’t want this war. The ones who wanted and started this war since 2014 are the imperialists in NATO. Russia has only intervened in countries that were promised NATO membership, Ukraine and Georgia. People who think Russia is rebuilding an empire through force and would have attacked regardless don’t appreciate the timing of these interventions either. The Russians want to live in peace without jeopardizing security.

When Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, Putin’s approval shot up to 80%. They are trying to paint this narrative that the dictator madman Putin is unilaterally attacking Ukraine against the popular will of his people. Putin’s approval rose to 69% (nice) after this latest operation. It was 8 points lower in August. Even by Jacobin’s own single source, when they’ve only had a short period to poll these issues and things are dynamic, half of ordinary Russians do support the recognition of LPR and DPR. So that contradicts the title of the article.

Of course that doesn’t make ordinary Russians the bad guys. It’s just that your average westerner who can’t find Ukraine on a map thinks they know better about complex geopolitics than people who actually live in the region. Unsurprising.

I variety of sources such as Ukrainian officials, your cousin on twitter, some random farmer in Kharkov. Many of the more extreme claims are being fact checked now.

If I was living in a Russia dominated media and social media environment, and people were making false claims about the scale of USA’s actions for the purpose of warmongering, I absolutely would want people to be cautious

A lot of these videos have been fact checked as false and out of context
I mean, even twitter had this thing to debunk false claims
https://twitter.com/i/events/1496815373936574469
Not saying that Russians aren’t in Ukraine right now, they could very well be, but I object strongly to people jumping to conclusions about a full scale invasion, when it looks like the real narrative is Russia has done a one off attack for political leverage.
You are from lemmygrad, so I assume you trust China at least somewhat. This was China’s stance.
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-calls-restraint-ukraine-rejects-term-invasion-2022-02-24/
I wanted to post it, but lemmy wouldn’t do it for some reason

BBC 💀

If I accused you of murder or sexual assault, you would full well expect me to provide some proof before making that kind of situation. In a time when world tensions were high, you jumped to conclusions and made them higher by exaggerating what happened. I don’t care if you don’t want to write an essay, that’s fine. But you chose to engage in these false claims in the first place, then dipped.

But you are not responding to a general thread are you? You are responding to a specific comment in a specific thread of discussion.

I said Kiev. In the very post you’re responding to!

I’m still waiting for evidence of boots on the ground in Kiev

I’ve never denied the first two things when they actually happened. You imply that I’m moving the goalposts but you can go through my history if you want. I’ve stayed consistent.