ＲＥＶＯＬＵＴＩＯＮ ＩＳ ＯＶＥＲＲＡＴＥＤ
Crypto-Centrist Transhumanist Nationalist.
Type-19 Paramilitary Cyborg. Wanted time criminal. Class A-3 citizen of the North American Union. Opposed to the Chinese Hyper Mind-Union, the Ultra-Caliphate, Google Defense Network, and the People's Republic of Cascadia. National Separatist, enemy of the World Federation government and its unificationist allies.
Blogs Topics: Cyberpunk Nationalism. Futurist Shtposting. Timeline Vandalism. Harassing owls over the Internet.
Use whichever typical gender pronouns you like.
Not all content will have sufficient warning tags.
Well, how does one get people to become willing to literally fight to the death to support wishy-washy liberal multiculturalism and large-scale migration?
After all, under such conditions, one does not really own one’s country, or any country, and everywhere is just a multicultural blend, so the logical thing to is just leave whenever threatened until your back is against the wall and it’s reduced to one nation again.
Who will fight in the nation’s army if there is no national pride as all developed nations are in the debt of infinite sin?
Say what you will about Philippe Pétain, but at least he fought for the Third Republic.
In this world, only the willingness and ability to use force can ensure that an ideology is instantiated, even if it is in ways that are bound up in rules and procedures and called law.
Is that dangerous?
Yes. But it applies to every ideology, from the cruelest of the Second World War, to Human Rights.
If an ideology cannot even generate enough power to defend itself, then it will be replaced by one that can. That is why it is essential to construct ideologies that can create that power but which are still worth living under.
A fact about NATO that to me seems to go strangely elided in the discussion: the alliance has plenty more countries in it than just the US and the Baltics. US clearly has strongest single military, but even if assuming maximal US waffling and vagueness, any threats againt NATO members are still held in check also by, for starters, pretty much the entirety of Western Europe.
That’s fair, but I believe the United States has advantages in procurement, development, and air support, larger reserves of manpower and materiel, and more military experience than the Europeans.
In a non-nuclear confrontation with Russia, I believe only the Americans have the combined arms forces with the military superiority to roll back Russian positions in Poland and the Baltic states.
The United States has about 14,000 military aircraft, while Russia has 3,800. But the principal allies together have fewer aircraft than that: France has 1,300, Britain has 850, and Germany has 700.
Even if qualitative and personnel superiority allow the smaller allied forces to fight Russia to a draw – and the Russians will have combat experience that allies lack – I’m skeptical that Europeans will have the air superiority they need to advance on the ground.
On the ground, the United States has about 5,900 tanks and 41,000 armored fighting vehicles. Russia has about 20,000 tanks and 31,000 AFVs. The Europeans have fewer than that: France has about 400 tanks and 6,900 AFVs, Britain has about 250 tanks and 6,000 AFVs, and Germany has about 550 tanks and 5,900 AFVs.
I don’t have the technical expertise to evaluate those military numbers, but the Europeans are not prepared to fight and win a ground war against Russia without air superiority, and I don’t know how long it would take the Europeans to procure the materiel and manpower to reverse Russian gains.
They would need that, because Russia will have an enormous military advantage at the beginning of the war. NATO runs war games, and the outcome isn’t happy, even with US and European allies working together:
Across
multiple plays of the game, Russian forces eliminated or
bypassed all resistance and were at the gates of or actually
entering Riga, Tallinn, or both, between 36 and 60 hours after the start of hostilities. Four factors appeared to contribute most
substantially to this result.
First and obviously, the overall correlation of forces was
dramatically in Russia’s favor. Although the two sides’ raw
numbers of maneuver battalions—22 for Russia and 12 for
NATO—are not badly disproportionate, seven of NATO’s are
those of Estonia and Latvia, which are extremely light, lack
tactical mobility, and are poorly equipped for fighting against
an armored opponent. Indeed, the only armor in the NATO
force is the light armor in a single Stryker battalion, which is
credited with having deployed from Germany during the crisis
buildup prior to the conflict. NATO has no main battle tanks
in the field.
Meanwhile, all Russia’s forces are motorized, mechanized,
or tank units. Even their eight airborne battalions are equipped
with light armored vehicles, unlike their U.S. counterparts.
Second, Russia also enjoys an overwhelming advantage
in tactical and operational fires. The Russian order of battle
includes ten artillery battalions (three equipped with tube artillery and seven with multiple-rocket launchers), in addition to
the artillery that is organic to the maneuver units themselves.
NATO has no independent fires units at all, and the light units
involved in the fight are poorly endowed with organic artillery.
Third, NATO’s light forces were not only outgunned by
the much heavier Russian units, but their lack of maneuver ability meant that they could be pinned and bypassed if the
Russian players so desired. By and large, NATO’s infantry
found themselves unable even to retreat successfully and were
destroyed in place.
Finally, while NATO airpower was generally able to take a
substantial toll on advancing Russian troops, without adequate
NATO ground forces to slow the attack’s momentum, there
is simply not enough time to inflict sufficient attrition to halt
the assault. Airpower is rate limited, and against a moderately
competent adversary—which is how we portrayed the Russian
Air Force—NATO’s air forces had multiple jobs to do,
including suppressing Russia’s arsenal of modern surface-to-air
defenses and defending against possible air attacks on NATO
forces and rear areas. This further limited NATO air’s ability
to affect the outcome of the war on the ground. Without heavy
NATO ground forces to force the attackers to slow their rate of
advance and assume postures that increased their vulnerability
to air strikes, Russian players could meter their losses to air by
choosing how to array and move their forces.
Russia’s tactical advantages make victory in the Baltics a fait accompli. That means that Europeans can only make victory in a protracted campaign, and I am deeply skeptical that the Europeans are willing to go it alone. I’m not even sure they’d be willing to do it with American help.
European electorates outside the Russian borderlands are also deeply skeptical of military action, even in defense. Only 18 percent of Germans, 27 percent of Britons, and 29 percent of the French are willing to fight for their country. The French and British establishments believe in the alliance, but I’m skeptical that the deeply pacifist German electorate is prepared for conflict.
If there were a political solution available – supposing the Russians install an amenable client government in the Baltic states, and offer a compromise peace with the Western Europeans – I am not certain that the Germans would hold out for something more.
Without Germany, without the United States, and with the Baltic states already under Russian occupation, I don’t think the Atlantic alliance has a leg to stand on, even if the Balts and Poles put up a heroic resistance. Even with the Americans and the Germans, the Russian fait accompli in the Baltics presents the allies with hard choices, as RAND points out:
A rapid Russian occupation of all or much of one or two
NATO member states would present the Alliance with three
options, all unappetizing.
First, NATO could mobilize forces for a counteroffensive to
eject Russian forces from Latvia and Estonia and restore the territorial integrity of the two countries. Under the best of circumstances,
this would require a fairly prolonged buildup that could
stress the cohesion of the alliance and allow Russia opportunities
to seek a political resolution that left it in possession of its conquests.
Even a successful counteroffensive would almost certainly
be bloody and costly and would have political consequences that
are unforeseeable in advance but could prove dramatic.
Any counteroffensive would also be fraught with severe
escalatory risks. If the Crimea experience can be taken as a
precedent, Moscow could move rapidly to formally annex the
occupied territories to Russia. NATO clearly would not recognize
the legitimacy of such a gambit, but from Russia’s perspective
it would at least nominally bring them under Moscow’s
nuclear umbrella. By turning a NATO counterattack aimed at
liberating the Baltic republics into an “invasion” of “Russia,”
Moscow could generate unpredictable but clearly dangerous
escalatory dynamics.
On a tactical level, a counteroffensive campaign into the
Baltics would likely entail the desire, and perhaps even the necessity,
of striking targets, such as long-range surface-to-air defenses
and surface-to-surface fires systems, in territory that even NATO
would agree constitutes “Russia.” Under Russian doctrine, it is
unclear what kinds or magnitudes of conventional attacks into
Russian territory might trigger a response in kind (or worse),
but there would certainly be concern in Washington and other
NATO capitals about possible escalatory implications.
Finally, it is also unclear how Russia would react to a successful
NATO counteroffensive that threatened to decimate
the bulk of its armed forces along its western frontier; at what
point would tactical defeat in the theater begin to appear like a
strategic threat to Russia herself?
The second option would be for NATO to turn the escalatory
tables, taking a page from its Cold War doctrine of “massive
retaliation,” and threaten Moscow with a nuclear response
if it did not withdraw from the territory it had occupied. This
option was a core element of the Alliance’s strategy against the
Warsaw Pact for the duration of the latter’s existence and could
certainly be called on once again in these circumstances.
The deterrent impact of such a threat draws power from the
implicit risk of igniting an escalatory spiral that swiftly reaches
the level of nuclear exchanges between the Russian and U.S.
homelands. Unfortunately, once deterrence has failed—which
would clearly be the case once Russia had crossed the Rubicon
of attacking NATO member states—that same risk would tend
to greatly undermine its credibility, since it may seem highly
unlikely to Moscow that the United States would be willing to
exchange New York for Riga. Coupled with the general direction
of U.S. defense policy, which has been to de-emphasize
the value of nuclear weapons, and the likely unwillingness of
NATO’s European members, especially the Baltic states themselves,
to see their continent or countries turned into a nuclear
battlefield, this lack of believability makes this alternative both
unlikely and unpalatable.
The third possibility would be to concede, at least for the
near to medium term, Russian control of the territory they had
occupied. Under this scenario, the best outcome would likely
be a new cold war, with the 21st century’s version of the old
“inner German border” drawn somewhere across Lithuania or
Latvia. The worst be would be the collapse of NATO itself and
the crumbling of the cornerstone of Western security for almost
70 years.
If the Americans believe they must “trade New York for Tallinn,” or Rostock for Riga, or Calais for Kaunas, or Hampstead for Helsinki, I’m not sure they’d be willing to make the trade. So I’m a bit concerned. Yes, I’m a bit concerned about this, that, and the other thing, about events that might precipitate this eventuality, or perhaps something worse.
Americans and Europeans both might decide to “respect Russia’s interests in its traditional sphere of influence,” whatever that might mean for their six million Baltic allies.
Well, how does one get people to become willing to literally fight to the death to support wishy-washy liberal multiculturalism and large-scale migration?
After all, under such conditions, one does not really own one’s country, or any country, and everywhere is just a multicultural blend, so the logical thing to is just leave whenever threatened until your back is against the wall and it’s reduced to one nation again.
Who will fight in the nation’s army if there is no national pride as all developed nations are in the debt of infinite sin? And who will fund a regional army if having a military is something only for oppressive colonialists? Much less that the issues the regional army might deal with are someone else’s problem.
This is another of these weird American idiosyncrasies that is just not a thing elsewhere in the developed world. (Or at least not on a comparable scale)
I’d guess it’s a product of police departments in the USA being very localised, with even small towns sometimes having directly elected sheriffs or the mayor controlling the local police. In the UK and other European countries police forces tend to have much more national oversight and organisation. Probably also something to do with how police forces are funded in the US gives them more incentive to acquire money directly. This is the only thing I could find that talks about the difference. https://www.quora.com/What-other-countries-have-laws-similar-to-the-Civil-Asset-Forfeiture-laws-in-the-US (Seems like the main difference is in other places you can only take assets after a conviction, )
I’m increasingly convinced that the much greater popularity of libertarianism in the US compared to other countries is not due to the cultural things people normally talk about, but because the American government is just weirdly and uniquely bad.
BTW, it’s not exactly about control, but funding. Tiny Town just doesn’t have much of a tax base, and the tax base gets to directly vote on the budget in a lot of small towns, so it’s hard to increase the taxes for education and police budgets. Filling budget shortfalls by essentially robbing passing travelers and the least popular citizens can be a popular method of keeping the lights on at the station, especially when it means more money in every property owners’ pocket.
I think probably a lot of it is, the United States is less of a country than most (all?) other developed/First World countries, in that there’s a LOT more regional and local control, and deep seated resistance to changing that for multiple reasons, including full out religious paranoia, and lack of faith in the federal government to be competent.
Here in Canada, asset forfeiture has been a pretty serious problem in BC and Ontario, for basically the same reason: it’s a way to increase revenues without being perceived as raising taxes. BC and Ontario also have recently had the most corrupt provincial governments in the country, which may have something to do with it. BC’s just had a change of government, and I’ll be interested to see if they deal with this or if it simply doesn’t affect enough of the voting base to bother them. I don”t have much hope of Ontario dealing with it, since if they go out it’ll be the Tories replacing them, and the Tories as a rule are much more committed to looking pro-police and anti-criminal than they are to small government.
In some US states civil asset forfeiture is prohibited, and so are speeding ticket quotas for cops. I haven’t been able to figure out how this might be reproduced in other states.
As for the origins, I can’t help but wonder if it’s related to density WRT infrastructure. Not only do we have exodus from cities depriving them of revenue, but the suburbs are pretty sparse, requiring more concrete/pipe/powerlines per resident.
Honestly, most of the people on the other side of the net neutrality debate are probably living in a completely different world from me. They have over a half dozen different options for ISPs, all of whom actually have to compete with one another to keep the customer happy.
Meanwhile I’m over here my little corner of Iowa, which in a duopoly in part because it’s LITERALLY ILLEGAL TO HAVE SATELLITE INTERNET.
@oliwhail said “Wait why in the world is it illegal”
I mean I’m pretty sure it’s because Mediacom and Centurylink want it to be. I have no idea what the justification is though.
Probably building out the lines (and then not spending money on upgrading them).
In some countries, the government builds the lines and then rents them out. Those countries have cheaper internet access.
What really gets me is that they won’t even let local power cooperatives compete on this, when they’re demonstrably better. (In fact, local utility cooperatives seem pretty good generally.)
Never forget that the Market actively pays people to sabotage itself.
“the word nazi has lost all its meaning now, thanks, liberals” is a cold take because people called each other nazis for no reason for over 50 years. what concerns me is the devaluing of the word “violent”.
Well, there was a time when the word “Neo-Nazis” meant something at least. Not so much anymore.
But yes, this equivocation over the meaning of violence is quite deliberate. Definitely trying to exploit the taboo sane people have against punching people who aren’t literally punching other people.
Also, all political ideologies can claim that their enemies being in power is “violent,” because states have number of cops greater than one (or anarchist villages use locals instead of dedicated cops). Really don’t want to normalize this.
life hack if you live in a flood zone and are worried put a sign up that says ‘welcome to california’ and then it floods the water will see the sign, realize it’s in the wrong place, and leave
Speaking of independent prosecution agencies for police misconduct, we should have those. Can’t have the prosecutors that depend on the cops for all their other prosecutions, bad cops could retaliate to cover for their buddy by refusing to cooperate with later prosecutions. Otherwise at least try it in another jurisdiction.
this awaken the horse ppl thing sounds like the hippie swpl progressive version of white identarians with a heaping spoonful of noble savage stereotypes abt native americans mixed in
I mean, I don’t really want to hop on the “YAY WHITENESS” train, but like,
From a strategic standpoint, positioning white people as “an enemy to all life,” seems like a really bad plan, like when that one vegan started calling people “bloodmouth carnist” which does, indeed, sound like a metal band.
If you present only two options, and present them as “be evil or be destroyed,” people are gonna pick the former.
You want whities lobbying for independent police misconduct prosecution boards, you don’t want them shopping for jet black uniforms with silver trim.
