Consider two countries at war with the other. Now imagine that both are part of the same territory but the planes still fly and the bombs still fall on the same places. It is clear that this is economic and political madness. So as a combined system, the two warring countries are better off not engaging in war. But if one country can make money from war then it is beneficial for it to be at war.

The answer is for those who govern to think in terms of the whole system, i.e. both countries. That is unpopular with patriotic voters who accuse such leaders of being traitors.

It seems to me more and more that people are living in some kind of lala land today.

They seem to believe that military action against some group of people will not result in some kind of recoil. Especially when part of the group they are engaging military action against is living among them or has free access to enter the country.

I think that this is pretty disconnected thinking.

Asking intelligence agency to do better job feels is kind of ridiculous. They just have to follow too many people to be 100% effective.

The problem with calling this a war is that the right-wing press are calling this a war. This is not an existential threat to us in the way, say, WW2 was to the Soviet Union or to the UK once we had engaged militarily. We could withdraw from bombing campaigns in the middle east tomorrow and see almost no immediate detrimental domestic repercussions. That is probably a sign that this is not so much a war but something else. If it was domestic we would call it a massacre.

The more we go down the road of annihilation, the more costly that peace process will be and the more people will die purely for war. That includes our own.

WW2 was an existential threat to the Soviet Union. It was so existential that this became the largest part of the identity of Russians.

But WW2 was not an existential threat to UK. UK could have exited from the war at any time. No battle took place on the soil of UK mainland.

I am not saying the people in UK did not suffer - they just did not suffer comparably to the people in the middle of the conflict. In a way the war was rather distant to the people living in UK.

Well, that's because the battle eventually took place in (mostly) France. But it's not as if that battle would not have eventually happened in the UK if the Germans had managed to gain air supremacy over the UK or if they had managed to pull a reverse Normandy. The UK could not have exited from the war at any time at all, their shipping would have been sunk and they would have been under siege from the moment they did so.

The larger cities were receiving a good number of aerial bombardments and V2's (ok, also a form of aerial bombardment). And then there was the shipping tonnage sunk with all hands.

War very much came to the UK, even if the eventual battle took place in France, Belgium, NL and eventually Germany (where whole cities had been obliterated).

Not so for the USSR, since it had been designated as "Lebensraum".

This kind of verbal white-washing causes all kinds of problems when the inevitable adjustment happens which shows that we can play word games all we want but it won't make an actual difference.

A draft would change this. But the military is a product like anything else. It's not civil service. It's not something that every family suffers from. The U.S. professional military is overwhelmingly middle and lower class. There's no meaningful representation of aristocratic families in the military. They have nothing to lose by supporting politicians who in turn support interventionist policies abroad.

When discussing foreign policy on an internatioal medium it would be helpful to formulate your responses by specifying the hypothetical combatants and coalitions explicitly rather than implicitly (i.e 'we' is an ambiguous definition in this context).

For example, China/Taiwan, North Korea/South Korea, which no longer fight.

We saw similar pushes for strengthening Canada's Surveillance State when they had two terrorist acts. Canada's PM didn't even hesitate.

When an attack or an event happens that puts people in a state of shock and fear, politicians know their nefarious ideas have a higher probability of slipping through the public's filter. UK's PM is doing what has now become an automatic response to any kind of act. Expand government's power at all cost.

...falling on deaf ears. I have been saying for years that hacker culture needs to develop greater emotional intelligence and meet people where they are instead of lecturing them with arguments that make their eyes glaze over. Politics is not a function of logic.

Your best option, if you live in the UK, is to roll your eyes eyes and vote for the beardy communist despite his obvious faults. Logical arguments are not compelling to people in the grip of an emotional rush. The inability to assess and adjust to peoples' emotional states is a kind of social stupidity.

You say it like it's a major indictment - people just don't understand probability and low probability events occur all the damn time. On the flip-side people also play the lottery.

A lot of factors contribute to poll errors: sample group is never perfectly representative of actual voters, people lying on their voting intention if they feel it's not socially accepted, &tc. That does not make polls worthless.