freagle

I agree with your main points. I just don't think saving lives at the expense of national security makes sense. I think national security was the main driver and saving lives was part of the process and part of the calculations.

As for the timing, I think the timing was very interesting from an intelligence perspective. The US was warning about an imminent attack and Ukraine was saying there was no intelligence to support it and then Russia invaded the next day. To me, that says the Russians were testing the West's intelligence capabilities and launched when they thought they had the element of surprise. I think they were correct and the ensuing first day of battle gave the Russians good intelligence on what was and wasn't known by the West. It is very useful to know what your opponents know (and what they don't know), so I think timing was partially urgency and partially opportunity.

I really don't think that the potential massacre tipped the scales here. Realpolitik requires that you let people die if the consequences of intervening threaten national security.

From what I read, Russian intelligence could no longer assure that the activities of NATO were not preparations of nuclear kill chain capabilities. This, I believe, is far more likely to be the cause of the SMO launching when it did and the genocide of ethnic Russians was the legal and moral pretext that aligned with Russia's national security profile.

NATO began military exercises in Ukraine at the end of 2013. In the years leading up to the SMO, NATO flew B-52 nuclear bombers up to border of Russian airspace, they ran a simulated invasion of Kaliningrad with a full force, and Putin explicitly stated that the reason the SMO launched was because there was NATO activity on the border that was indistinguishable from preparations of nuclear capabilities.

Since the SMO, none of these things have been possible. This is the reason for the SMO. It was not mindless adventurism. It was calculated and reluctant.

Don't forget the India-Pakistan flare up. There's mounting evidence that the USA has a contingent that is focused on getting closer to a war with China.

This would result in foreign products maintaining their price competitiveness against domestic products, preventing the supposed domestic investment in production that the tarrifs are aimed at.

Keeping the costs low means the tarrifs will have no effect. The point of tarrifs is to increase the cost and make domestic products more attractive to consumers. Having Walmart eat the cost of tarrifs means that foreign products will retain their price competitiveness with domestic products and result in absolutely no domestic investment in production.

This is delusional. It's not a personal vendetta against the USA. Nuclear Europe fielding military in Ukraine is a red line for Russian national security. Until people understand the reality of security, you're all going to be blathering idiots.

There are two positions on security - it's either I am secure while you are not or it's we're both secure. Mutual security is the only way that peers can engage sustainably. Assymetrical security cannot be sustained by peers.

Ukraine being a non-militarizer buffer between Europe and Russia is critical to Russian national security. Any arrangement where Ukraine is militarily aligned with the rest of Europe is an assymetrical security situation where Europe has security at the expense of Russia losing security.

It will never be sustainable.

Russia will either establish Ukraine as fully demilitarized with its constant oversight for the next several decades, as a result of the violation of trust that the US and EU committed, or Russia will occupy Ukraine. These are the only two options that establish mutual security and thus are the only sustainable options. Anything else is an escalation by Europe.

There's only so many organizing hours in the day. When we spend them on reform, the opportunity cost is that we are not spending them building revolution.

There are precious few ways to have a revolution. But there are many ways to have reform.

That's the first problem - reform spreads the finite resources of organizing time over a much wider target area, which dissipates the energy.

The second problem is that reform doesn't actually work. All the energy being funneled into reform doesn't actually determine the reform - the power structure determines it. Revolution seeks to change the power structure. This would strip power from the people who currently have it. If you use reform to do that, it necessarily passes through the power structure and gets deformed.

Take for example universal healthcare in America. It is hugely popular. A super majority of the country supports it. There was enough organizing energy to elect a black president, but somehow, we got the ACA instead. Why? Because the people who have the power right now benefit from the current state of US healthcare and enacting universal healthcare would strip them of their power vis-a-vis healthcare. They hold the mechanisms of reform in their hands, so all the organizing time that went into universal healthcare reform got deformed into the ACA which further entrenched the existing power holders.

It's been almost 20 years and we're still trying to get that popular reform to happen.

Reform has never worked, because it explicitly relies on the power structure it is trying to change. The revolutionary analysis is that popular needs are not met and that reform will not meet them and historically this has always been true. Revolutionary analysis shows that it's not about popularity but about power and history has shown this to be true. Focusing our efforts on the root cause is how the change occurs. Spreading out our focus to all of the various symptoms is how change is thwarted.

Wait till you learn about Hiroshima and Nagasaki

I am so tired of these sorts of shallow analyses from people that think their screw-ups are actually caused by EDAs or micro services or whatever. They're even totally transparent about the fact that they did because they heard cool things but never say "so we sat down to learn about best practices, what the current state of the art is, and considered how our use cases matched the architecture"

They just say "we thought it would be cool so we just started doing it and it sucked - here's why that's an inherent problem of the architecture and not in any way related to our behavior".

Yes. If you take a team of people who build n-tier and hexagonal MVC monolithic apps, and then tell them to build micro services, they're going to build a bunch of n-tier or hexagonal MVC monolith candidates and eventually end up with a single service that does too much and ultimately becomes the monolith.

Yes. If you take a team that does 100% synchronous HTTP interfaces, SOAP or ReST, and then tell them to build microservices, they're going to daisy chain those microservices via synchronous HTTP interfaces, and if you tell them to build an EDA they are going to build an EDA that attempt to replicate all of the aspects of their synchronous HTTP interfaces with busy polling loops.

So stop doing that and actually do the hard thing of learning fundamentally different architecture, techniques, technologies, trade offs, best practices, operational patterns, design patterns, and heuristics and principles for managing software. Learning is difficult and humbling. But it sure beats writing ignorant articles like this.

There is going to be a war launched against China that the USA will lead and it is currently trying to figure out which countries will support the war effort and which will resist. NATO may end up being an occupying force in Europe to discipline any country that doesn't support the USA's belligerence, and NATO will certainly provide sufficient cover for collaborative war activities like recruiting soldiers from Europe, deploying them to hot spots, and occupying resistance nations for "peacekeeper" missions.

I am genuinely concerned that we are running towards the big one.

You think it was a gross imbalance between your simply being wrong and my uncalled for insult? You literally called thousands of people, who are fighting for their lives against a fascist military, baby killers and human shield users and mass rapists.

Asking you to put some fucking effort into your analysis before labeling people like that is, relatively, extremely gentle. The fact that you take offense to it is 100% about you and the difficulty you have with the consequences of changing a small set of your beliefs.