mopsi
> Which is exactly what needs to happen. /---/ I don't see a problem with this.
BRUSSELS — U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau on Wednesday slammed European NATO allies for prioritizing their own defense industry over American arms suppliers, according to three NATO diplomats. /---/ Landau, a longtime NATO skeptic who spoke first at the closed-door meeting, told ministers not to “bully” his country’s defense firms out of participating in Europe’s rearmament.
The expectations seems to have been that elevated military spending would flow to US arms manufacturers. Instead, it is flowing to European manufacturers, making them more competitive and reducing the influence that the US government had through export controls, which essentially gave the US veto power over the foreign and defence policies of other countries. That influence is now rapidly waning.
> That sounds like performative politics.
This was the moment when trust was broken beyond repair. No amount of flowers or apologies will restore the trust that was before. It is perhaps one of the most important events of the past decade in US-EU relations and a fundamental shift in the understanding that had stood since 1949 when NATO was established.
> We don't need the US industrial base ramping up for the Ukraine war. We need it ramping up for the war with China.
> The point of a diplomat is not to go and insult the people you're communicating with, it's to achieve results through diplomatic means.
There's a reason why the US government has not achieved any meaningful concessions from Russia since the 2021 ultimatum. The endless talks with Witkoff serve only as a humiliation ritual. Putin even got to walk down a red carpet on US soil while US officers saluted him, all without giving anything in return. Allegedly, that embarrassing Alaska summit happened because Witkoff misunderstood what Russians meant by "withdrawal from Zaporizhzhia and Kherson". He mistook Russian demand for Ukraine to withdraw from Zaporizhzhia and Kherson for an offer by Russia to withdraw its own forces. This led Trump to immediately annouce the summit in Alaska that produced flashy photos for Russian newspapers, but nothing else. My God, what a bunch of retards. They don't even understand what's being told to them, and you're trying to condescendingly convince me that they're playing clever reverse psychology on Europe. It's time to face the reality.
> Exactly, and our allies aren't going away.
Anything US-related is increasingly seen as a liability. Take the HIMARS, for example. An increasing number of countries that recently bought HIMARS are favouring South Korean Chunmoo for their next purchases. Chunmoo comes with technology transfer that allows customers to maintain the launchers and manufacture the ammunition themselves, whereas HIMARS is micromanaged from Washington, and poorly so.
> Maybe you'll notice that we haven't actually invaded Greenland or Canada.
> The reality is that the US remains the only superpower
The US is losing credibility as a security guarantor, because it has failed to impose its will even on countries such as Iran. From failing to adopt modern anti-drone warfare, and using very expensive interceptor missiles instead, and then running out of them, we can all see that the US military and industrial might is a postcard from the past.
Why does China even need to fight or even directly confront the US when it can simply bribe its government into halting military aid to Taiwan, pressuring Taiwan to surrender, and pressuring others to drop their sanctions? Putin offered Lukoil to Trump's buddies, and today's WSJ top story says that Trump is pressuring Europe to resume buying Russian gas so that his friends can use intermediaries like Lukoil to skim their share of the revenue and enrich themselves. China can offer TSMC to Trump's buddies, too. That would send decades of US wargaming down the toilet, just as Trump's actions have done regarding Iran and Russia.
After years of mocking the sovereignty of allies like Canada and Denmark, are they more or less likely to support the US in the event of a war with China? Less likely, and the same applies to most other countries, too.
A similar thing happened between him and Merkel, when Trump didn't understand that the EU was a unified trading bloc with a common market and that making separate trade agreements with Germany was not possible. Trump allegedly asked Merkel more than 10 times why he could not do that.
I don't think Americans still understand what a laughing stock their president is to the rest of the world. This goes beyond personal sympathies and antipathies; he is objectively a very unintelligent person and his exceptionally poor manners make things only worse.
A little unpolished because it was bolted on by fans and not the original game developers, but otherwise very impressive.
> AI slop isn't copyrightable, but there can be copyrightable elements in an AI-generated image. The most obvious element is the prompt. So long as your prompt contains some quantum of creativity (e.g. "Make me a beautiful flower whose loveliness is reminiscent of a newborn baby", but not "make me a beautiful flower"), that prompt is copyrightable. That means you can use copyright to challenge others' rights to present the same prompt to a chatbot. But while the prompt can be copyrighted, the image it gives rise to isn't. So you can spend a month iteratively refining your prompt, consuming all your town's water along with 200,000 gallons of diesel and that prompt will be yours for your life plus 70 years, but the image it generates is in the public domain, and anyone can copy it, sell it or give it away
There should be a difference between asking AI to "draw a funny picture of a donkey", and spending a month iteratively refining your prompt.
> Facts remains facts, whoever spins a propaganda out of it.
> Yeah, when facts don't suit you, it is ofcourse fake or "misinterpretation" or even irrelevant because of the "source" along with snide subtle remarks that imply how you alone are superior in intellect, and everyone else who doesn't agree with you is automatically dumb.
This can come as a surprise only if you've read prepackaged narratives from Russian propagandists instead of following the news and forming your own opinion.
> Again with the pedantic gaslighting. It is public knowledge that is even cited in a book. If you had any real interest to verify it, you can easily do so online.
> You aren't dumb. I have even cited the exact line from it. Read it again.
Here is the English translation of the document: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Act_of_Declaration_of_Indepen...
It makes no mention of neutrality.
> I guess even Henry Kissinger was brainwashed by the Russians
> If it were not for the political wisdom of the Americans and the Russians, warmongering Europeans would gladly start WW3.
> Any political action under violence, and then the threat of violence (whether it be by so called "revolutionaries" or an army) resulting in the opposition capturing power undemocratically is exactly that - a coup ...
> Again deliberately avoiding the context with selective facts that are irrelevant. /---/ remember the tape leak about the US planning who to install in Ukraine?
Next week, the US is holding midterm elections. At any given moment, there are probably hundreds of phone calls taking place between all sorts of people discussing whom they'd like to see in the House and Senate. A bunch of Ukrainians are probably discussing among themselves who would be the best for them too. You'd be a fool to characterize that as "planning who to install" in the US. Of all the Ukraine-related talking points, this one is easily one of the laziest.
> Benett has also said that all the negotiations were very carefully coordinated with the US, Germany, France and UK. And once Putin and Zelensky compromised and agreed to a deal and a ceasefire, the West then blocked it because they wanted to "keep striking Russia".
Russian propagandists took this lengthy interview out of context and clipped different parts together to show Bennett saying that "the US, Germany and France BLOCKED Ukraine from signing peace with Russia and FORCED Ukraine to continue fighting". That's an obvious distortion.
Despite all the huffing and puffing about other people falling for propaganda, you're the one who's fallen for a cheap trick here.
> It's all in the public domain, even if you wish to ignore it:
> Sure, if you wish to resort to technicalities and legalspeak, that is partly true. But the delaration of independence, and subsequently the constitution of Ukraine proclaimed that it would not join any military alliance.
Neutrality was mentioned only once in the earliest declaration of sovereignity (July 1990) as an aspirational goal. It was not included in subsequent legislation like the 1993 law on the main directions of Ukraine's foreign policy or the 1996 constitution, because it was considered an obstacle to cooperation with European regional security frameworks. So contrary to your claim, Ukraine did not make a commitment of neutrality to anyone.
> You had to carefully choose your words to write that sentence, didn't you? Otherwise NATO invasions post 1975 shows how little the Western superpowers have cared about international law or sovereignty ...
> Ofcourse, those who support the "revolution" obviously don't like when it is labelled a coup
> The medals, the manufactured controversy over the dates are all irrelevant
> Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has publicly stated in an interview that he took a message from Putin to Zelensky that Russia would not invade Ukraine if he publicly committed to not join NATO.
> Zelensky was willing. But all subsequent negotiations (before and during the war) failed because the western superpowers always dissuaded him from signing and committing to "permanent neutrality" - the original condition on which the USSR had granted independence to the Ukrainians
> Nearly 2+ decades back, Putin had publicly said that if Ukraine joins NATO, Ukraine would do so without Crimea and the Eastern regions.
> And ofcourse, this is again something to be seen in isolation, and we should all ignore the development of the cold war, right? Selective picking of a political event without the underlying context is easy to twist to fit some narrative. Post WW2, as Russia supported the independence of western colonies, and communist revolutions everywhere, the western superpowers again turned hostile towards USSR.
The Cold War was triggered by the same Russian suppression of independence of other European nations during the final phase of WWII and in its immediate aftermath.
> In other words, Russia as a superpower is not doing anything different to what western superpowers do (or have done).
> The west was more successful here as the western backed coup managed to overthrow the democratically elected Russian friendly
> Russia recognized the coup for what it was - a foreign backed coup - and so immediately annexed Crimea (to protect its own military interests).
> Zelensky was elected on a platform to unite the people /---/ He in fact exacerbated the issue by using violence against East Ukrainians, triggering a civil war.
> All that said, a major reason for Russians dropping the advance towards Kiev, and later tactically withdrawing,, was because of request for urgent negotiations by the west and Ukraine.
> As is any media outlet, funded by the government, like the BBC, NPR, DW or PressTV.
> Stalin's main concern was always Hitler and Germany, for historical reasons.
> No one can confidently say that if Poland had acquiesced to Russian terms to provide right of way to the Russian military, and for a stage hold territory, backed by British and the French guarantees of sovereignty, Soviet Russia would not have withdrawn after defeating the Germans.
> And ofcourse, you guys have always upheld that, have you? (cough NATO invasions cough). Look up every western action against another country that was done without UN approval - it's all illegal to the rest of the world. Like I said, you guys have no moral standing to preach to the rest ...
It is such a blatant violation of established norms that even some of Russia's closest allies like Belarus have not recognized it.
I've found it very liberating that I can handle some of the tedious parts of a project to AI. In the end, I spend perhaps the same amount of time on a project, but more of it goes to important work and less gets wasted on plumbing.
I cannot imagine a typical suburban American consumer tolerating a chatbot as blunt and direct as Linus.
> NATO members were already preparing for the proxy war with Russia by sabotaging diplomatic negotiations
> As for Russia's initial battle loses ... Russia had surrounded Kiev, and the only reason it stopped was because Zelensky and the EU superpowers offered to negotiate with them.
> Cambodia rejects the use or threats of force and does not side with any of the parties in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Prime Minister Hun Sen has declared. The premier stated that support for any party in what he believed had evolved into a proxy battle between the former USSR and US-led NATO countries would violate the Kingdom’s own policy of non-alignment with military blocs.
Prime Minister Hun Sen has reiterated that Cambodia does not support the forceful occupation of one country by another, in comments that apparently referred to the Russian-Ukraine conflict as an “invasion”. “We don’t support the invasion of one country by another. This is our absolutely firm position,” he said while presiding over the inauguration of National Road 21 connecting Kandal province to the Cambodia-Vietnam border. “This is not a small issue because it creates a bad habit for the world: the stronger nation attacking the weaker one. So, if the stronger nation attacks the weaker one, will they attack us [Cambodia]? Then who will help us? This must be clear-cut. This is why we must have a clear position,” he explained.
Cambodia was one of 141 countries to co-sponsor the draft resolution of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) on March 2 condemning Russia’s military offensive in Ukraine. Hun Sen revealed recently that there were countries that allegedly lobbied for Cambodia to abstain on the Russia-Ukraine vote, but did not state which ones.
> This is what the Russian media recently claimed - https://rt-english.com
> And when you mention that it is only prudent to also mention that Soviet Russia made that pact only because the French and British refused to make a pact with USSR, against Hitler, in the first place.
Stalin was simply shopping around for a way to exploit the looming German-Polish war and gain an opportunity to invade Poland. The French and the British did not agree to pressure the Polish government, so Stalin struck a deal with Hitler who had no such inhibitions.
> It did pre-emptively use the military against many of them when their governments refused to cooperate with it
> USSR never desired to conquer Finland
> Only a moron would believe that Russia has no right to be considered about its "security", or sphere of influence, and thus it is ok to ignore it.
It's really strange to see that for so many people "tech" means just a handful of US megacorporations, none of which produce critical products like medical equipment or marine engines or industrial robots or railway signaling systems.
> And without NATO support, it is apparent that Russia would have achieved all its military objectives in Ukraine a long time ago.
The invasion plan crumbled before Ukraine got any foreign aid worth mentioning. The airborne attack of Hostomel airport was successfully repelled, leading to failure to capture Kyiv, leading to failure to decapitate the military command structure, leading to successful coordinated counterattacks on the overstretched invasion force.
Five years and 1.5 million casualties later, Russia has still not managed to recover where it was a few weeks into the war, because it had no realistic plan B after the surprise attack failed.
> That's just normal wartime propaganda - both sides have claimed that civilians are being deliberately "targeted".
> And how many of those from the Global South has offered anything more substantial than words in this war?
> I obviously have no idea where you plucked those numbers from as I have never read anything similar
Russian war correspondents openly ridicule such statements, as well as comments like yours, according to which everything in Ukraine has already been blown up five times over. Yet the situation on the ground continues to deteriorate. Russian official recruitment target is 34k soldiers per month, of which about 29k gets filled. Losses have been 37k this month, expected to reach 50k by the end. Territorial gains since the start of the summer, the most advantageous time of the year, have been 180 sq km in total, which is a rounding error in a country of 603 000 sq km. The numbers speak for themselves.
> The only reason Finland retains its independence, government and armed forces is because the pragmatic Finnish leaders capitulated to Russian security concerns, agreeing to all their terms.
All four got ultimatums demanding military bases on their soil to satisfy Russian "security concerns". Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania accepted the demands. Those bases were then used as staging areas for overthrowing national governments and installing puppet regimes loyal to Moscow that unleashed widespread terror against the local population to keep them under control. These oppressive puppet governments survived for half a century, until the end of the USSR. Latvia suffered the most. By the end of the 1980s, Latvians were on the verge of becoming a minority in their own country due to resettlement policies of Russians into Latvia.
Finland was the only one that refused the demands and took up arms and gained a victory by remaining independent instead of following the tragedy of its southern neighbors.
This is why Russian "security concerns" is not a phrase anyone can take seriously in North-Eastern Europe. Everyone's already seen what it means. Talking about Russian "security concerns" in a serious tone is like walking around with a giant "IDIOT" painted on your forehead.
> As for Putin's comment on Poland and Hitler, the context was that Poland had helped Hitler and Germany in the division of Czechoslovakia, but when the Poles refused to give up the Danzig corridor, Hitler, who looked down at the Poles, decided to make an example of them and attack them.
Hitler was ideologically motivated to conquer Europe using North American westward expansion as a model (mixed with German agrarian romanticism), and what Poland did or didn't do had ultimately little importance. Putin, too, has an ideological worldview that was drilled into him at the KGB: the security apparatus mentality of a totalitarian dictatorship, layered on top of a much broader Russian imperialism, which is rooted in centuries of territorial expansion and the subjugation of other peoples. Russia didn't come to span 11 timezones through acts of kindness, you know.
> Ukrainian estimates put their potential there at 20 million soldiers
That is pratical only in the event of total societal breakdown like Nazi Germany in its final months when there was no economy left and institutions like schools, hospitals, factories and utilities had ceased to work. Everything was thrown to the front while the people in cities were malnourished, had no power nor running water, and died of minor diseases due to lack of medical supplies.
Putin is too afraid to even announce a regular mobilization and resorts to dirty tactics coercion of poor rural ethnic minorities to fill the ranks, because the backlash that would follow a general mobilization would be a major threat to Putin's grip on power. Look up the effect of soldiers' mothers movement during the Chechen wars, or how the forced conscription into the Soviet-Afghan war (620k people over a decade) contributed to the disintegration of the USSR. Educated middle-class people accustomed to European lifestyle won't go to the front to get slaughtered like IQ 80 villagers who are up to their necks in payday loans; they will resist and cause major disruption among the productive urban population that keeps the country running.
These millions of soldiers exist only on paper. The actual situation on the ground is pretty dire. Ukraine hit another all-time record yesterday, killing or disabling 2250 Russians in a single day. The entire month of October is trending to hit a record too, 50k casualties in a single month. Russian recruitment target is 34k per month.
You are using some very poor sources if they have given you the idea that Russia has 20 million soldiers to mobilize. Russia is facing a severe shortage of manpower too, made worse by the fact that they rely on constant costly attacks by small groups of infantry that have very short lifespans, whereas Ukraine is increasingly automating the war and relying on unmanned weapons more and more. For example, Ukraine reached parity in drone strikes in early 2026 and is now carrying out more drone strikes than Russia. It's increasingly rare for Russian soldiers to meet any Ukrainians before they die; about 80% Russians die by drones as drones have become significantly more lethal. In 2024, drones killed about 1/3 of soldiers on impact. Now they kill about 2/3 of them.
Also, the "slow but steady advances" are a complete Pyrrhic victory if you look at the numbers. Russia has gained less than 1000 sq km this year at a cost of at least 100 000 lives. Ukraine is over 600 000 sq km in size. The daily number of casualties hit a new record a few days ago, exceeding 2000, about half of which are deaths. Russia has no hope reaching the territorial control it had 30 days into the war, let alone anything beyond that. It is by all objective measures one of the worst military disasters in the entire Russian history.
> That means that once a peace deal is signed, Ukraine will need to be permanently armed to the teeth, much like South Korea. That would ensure they can defend themselves without NATO membership. If Putin doesn't like that outcome, well he shouldn't have invaded in the first place.
For example:
> The parliament vote to oust Yanukovych for “abandoning [the] presidency” was unconstitutional. It did not follow the impeachment procedures specified in the Ukrainian Constitution, and the tally lacked the required constitutional majority of 338 votes.
Likewise:
> Further, the vote was done under duress, and many of the 328 “yes” votes that were recorded were fabricated. According to the official parliament record, 248 deputies out of 450 were registered at the opening (Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine 2014).
Katchanovski is a well-known conspiracy theorist, and it shows. And like most of them, he is lazy and assumes the same of his readers.
It's like those arcane verification checks used by US-based services that ask for utility bills, as if they had any way of verifying an invoice issued by a small utility provider in rural Finland.
> Because "the world", in an act of collective dementia praecox, pretends that history started on February 24, 2022. "The world" even forgot about the "most blatant coup in history", the Maidan massacre and coup d'etat of February 2014, organized by Uncle Sam, to bring to power extremist divisive forces to implement US planning.
Russians tried to circulate the narrative for a few months in 2014, then gave up and recognized the newly elected government out of pratical needs. So this talking point expired 12 years ago.