heywood on 16/12/2019 at 18:12
Sorry, one more point on the Russia side topic:
Quote Posted by Gryzemuis
I was already in my twenties when the Soviet Union fell. I remember the Cold War. I remember the propaganda and the fear-mongering. I remember the madness of Mutual Assured Destruction. I remember how the constant threat of a (nuclear) war was always present. I don't want that back.
Me neither, but it's too late. Russia re-started flying their nuclear bombers on the old Cold War alert routes about 10-12 years ago. NATO doesn't publicly detail them, but there's been thousands of intercepts of Tu-95s and Tu-160s over Northern Europe, North America, and S. Korea and Japan since then. There's also been multiple instances of Russian fighters with IFF turned off crossing the border into the Baltic states. And a long campaign of pointless harassment i.e. buzzing ships, forcing planes to take evasive maneuvers, having their fire control radars light up NATO aircraft, etc. At first, we brushed it all off, saying the shows of force are just part of Putin's domestic PR strategy.
But now they've got a half dozen acknowledged new nuclear weapon development programs going. Not just new ICBMs, which is understandable since they are retiring the SS-18/R-36M, but also some pretty scary (and unnecessary) developments, including tactical nukes, first strike weapons, and autonomous nuclear powered weapons. They like to claim they are responding to US missile defense deployments, which is nonsense considering the size of their arsenal. They also like to say they are responding to China's developments, who were never part of the INF treaty. But regardless of the reasons or excuses, what should have been one for one replacement of older weapons for modernization's sake has now turned into another nuclear arms race. My country is now planning to spend at least several hundred billion USD over the next 20 years, not just to modernize but to develop new intermediate range weapons too.
I hadn't worried about nuclear weapons since the 1980s. I remember during the 1990s and early 2000s, we were having our best nuclear weapon scientists visit each other's secret facilities, stay in each other's homes, and collaborate. First on nuclear science, but later on how to maintain deterrence with a reduced and aging arsenal, so as to avoid a round of new weapons development and testing. The way the NATO nations and the former Soviet nations handled the final stages of the Cold War in the late '80s and the initial post-Cold War period in the early '90s was gave me warm feelings about the world and dreams of future visits I'd make to Russia. The closest I got was a fishing trip to Kamchatka that my Dad planned when he was living in China, which we cancelled after a friend returned from traveling in Eastern Russia with a horror story of a week long detention with no explanation. I regret missing that opportunity, because with kids now and the way relations are going, I don't think I'd dare travel anywhere besides Moscow and Saint Petersburg.
Quote:
I don't think we need to be scared of Russia. If there is something to be scared about, it's China. How China is a ran by a repressive dictatorship. How they get better and better at repression. And how their economical power is a threat to our wellfare. And how nobody in the West dares to say something about that, because someone might makes less profit if they do.
The Russians have nothing, besides oil.
I agree. With Russia, we can always break out the old Reagan playbook. You want another arms race? OK, we'll bankrupt you again. We can't do that with China.
I can't tell you how disappointed I am with how China has changed under Xi's leadership. After seeing what Jiang Zemin's party did with China in the 1990s, I finally visited there for the first time about 15 years ago and it was really eye opening. It was booming like no place I'd seen, and although there was ample evidence of government planning in housing and even brand new planned cities, it was also amazingly capitalist. The people were so welcoming, wide eyed, optimistic. But I was surprised how much freedom they seemed to have. I knew about regulations on family size, etc., but it seemed like the central government was pretty much leaving people alone and didn't have a whole lot of control over things except at the macro level.
Around that time, a lot of Americans were moving there for work. I have a couple of family members and many friends who worked and lived in China at some point during Hu's leadership. We could all see that China was going to replace the United States as the world's superpower, but some of us thought that by being closely engaged and giving them a leg up economically, we were helping to shape our successor. I don't see things that way anymore. My view now is that we were naive to believe that economic liberalization would lead to political liberalization, and they took advantage of us. We helped an authoritarian power become the biggest industrial nation.
demagogue on 28/12/2019 at 16:23
I was just reading the important news that the earth's magnetic north pole is quickly drifting from Canada towards Siberia and wondering what kind of plot is afoot. We need to do something to ensure the North Pole doesn't fall into Russian hands!
dj_ivocha on 29/12/2019 at 19:31
To be honest, I don't think you can blame them. What with Trump pulling out of this agreement and that, meddling with Nord Stream 2 and the US and China developing their own hypersonic weapons - the West can't really take the moral high ground here.
Nicker on 29/12/2019 at 21:41
I wasn't singling out Russia for criticism, just responding to some suggestions made here that Russia is not a significant threat to the west.
Gray on 1/2/2020 at 02:04
Not happy.
I wrote a much longer piece, with lots of unsavoury language, elaborating about the massive failure of the political system, the narrow-mindedness of the poor fools tricked into voting for it directly opposite to their own interest, and some general ranting about how unity is always better than isolationism, but I opted not to post it. You've heard it all before. It can all be summed up into two short words.
Not happy.
Or perhaps a slightly stronger phrase. We're fucked. All of us. We lost. I know it. I just hate it that we lost for all the wrong reasons.
SD on 1/2/2020 at 06:12
I'm still not happy about it, but I made my peace with it a while ago. I'm simply going to enjoy every mini-disaster that ensues on a comedic level, each bringing with it a gradual realisation that maybe, just maybe, we haven't entered a new era of milk and honey. Obviously bearing in mind the average Quitling is as dumb as a box of rocks, so it may take a while for the metaphorical penny to drop (as opposed to the actual penny, which has dropped quarter of its value since the referendum). Indeed, I've just been watching a few videos of Brexiters being interviewed, and not one of them was able to come up with an actual, tangible benefit of leaving the European Union, even while they were stood there looking like twats in their Union Jack clothing.
The one thing I am absolutely certain about is that the divides in this country won't be healed any time soon. The contempt I have for these people is off the scale. The one saving grace being that those who voted for this farce are going to be worst hit by its effects, being, as they are, substantially over-represented in the "old and useless" and "poor and stupid" demographics.
Nicker on 1/2/2020 at 20:33
The UK needs Europe. Not so much the other way around, as Jolly Old will shortly discover. And no, young Canadians are not going to flood in to fill the underpaid service sector jobs vacated by underpaid continentals (as one pro-Brexit pundit promised on the radio yesterday). We can hardly keep enough desperate temporary foreign workers around to serve our cheap burgers and under cooked doughnuts as it is.