personal view: the thing with japan is that after ww2 they got heavily disarmed ,they focused only on defensive military . Now ,after the Ukraine war and the problems they face with China(and north Korea) they decide to increase the military budget ,just like everybody else “if my neighbor is buying a gun ,shouldn’t I also have one ?” Everybody says that we are at the start of the second cold war ,I tend to belive it .
You sure about that? Wasn’t Russia like in a much worser shape after WW1 and got raided by line 15 countries at once (“to strangle the bolshevik baby in its crib” according to Churchill)? And they still prevailed?
It’s freaking hilarious how untrustworthy China is, yet the US still trips over themselves to buy Chinese crap. The capitalist race to the bottom in full effect, from the economy to the gov’t.
archive.is/j7NqS if you don’t want to be assaulted by cookie notices and paywalls and more.
Edit to add: I find it absurd how this logic is used so often:
He insisted that Russia was justified in starting the war because Ukraine was run by “Nazis”, even though its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is Jewish.
It’s logical nonsense to think the two are mutually exclusive. Moreover, it ignores the very real issue of Nazis in Ukraine. We even see this “don’t believe your eyes” nonsense, trying to convince people open and proud Nazis aren’t in fact Nazis.
Nobody honestly believes Putin started the war to fight Nazis, he just used it as an excuse because he thought the West would stay out of his way for this flimsy lie. Instead he was quickly called out for using resources such as his own Wagner Group in the war which directly recruit modern Nazis, and thus lost all credibility.
Russia also said demilitarisation and pointed fingers at NATO. If it’s this and denazification, it would suggest that Russia was hoping for NATO/the West to get involved in exactly the way that it got involved.
Further, the Russian perspective is that NATO was already involved by running a coup then supporting about a decade of shelling in Donbass. If that’s the case – and the important detail here is not what westerners think NATO reps were doing in Ukraine all those years, but what Russia thought – there is no logical scenario in which Western involvement comes as a surprise. It was known to be there before the invasion.
And if NATO really wasn’t in Ukraine before that invasion, the point still stands: Russia expected NATO involvement even if it’s initial intelligence was faulty.
That doesn’t mean denazification is the main reason for the invasion. Although there are people who accept that reasoning as it was more than just a Nazi presence. It was an organised Nazi terror campaign against ethnic Russians living in Ukraine, killing thousands.
No matter how you look at it, Putin was just swinging his dick around thinking he was a big boy that could tell everyone else where to stick it. I really do believe he thought Russia was a dominant world power, but he’s living in the dark ages and didn’t have a clue that social media can change governments. Zelenskyy knew how to play the game and got people to care about his country again, and that immediately made a difference in how much aid they could ask for.
One could say that with every election. It’s always a gamble but when you start from such a low point it really doesn’t matter. Putin is a violent dictator using a scorched earth policy against Ukraine. He is ruthlessly suppressing LGBTQ people to the point where their existence cannot be spoke of. He kills his opponents and is engaged in an ongoing Cold War with the USA. He needs to go.
Also, given the lack of a clear successor, Putin's death would likely lead to a power vacuum and infighting-- which means they'll be too busy fighting each other to focus on attacking us.
Are you surprised? After SA continued doing business with Russia after much of the west had imposed sanctions this type of inconvenience is expected. It’s petty and exactly the type of thing delegates are used to
Yeah the fact that SA doesn’t agree with the west politically totally justifies holding their delegation hostage. Thank you for your insightful comment.
edit: presumably downvoters think it’s normal behavior for countries to do this sort of thing, if this is the way the west is going to keep acting on the world stage then life is going to get very hard for westerners
Words should matter though. The guy you responded too is correct. There is a very big difference in responses to pandemics vs drought. Both can cause upheaval, but that’s about where the similarities end.
even used figuratively, it’s bad writing for the reason i explained. this isn’t some high school essay; it’s a headline in a well-regarded, internationally-recognized newspaper. this should never have passed editorial muster. it’s sloppy.
I think better management and recharge of groundwater is the only way to weather the unpredictability climate change brings to precipitation. During winter floods it will be necessary to divert flows to areas where it can soak in to recharge aquifers and make it through the dry times. There simply isn’t enough space for surface storage to fill the gaps.
I think it’s important to note how much hardscape and channelling has been done to prevent widespread and sheet style flooding, and how they contribute to this problem of ground water recharge.
Most places that are flat enough to build are flat enough to build because of thousands of millenia of flooding, especially sheet flooding, laying down sediment and making them flat. Then humans get annoyed because the flat low places floos, so they build flood control.
There is a post further down about how Muni water really isn’t an issue and I agree with this. I’ve put up a couple posts explaining this on Reddit and hacker news. I could rehash it if some one was interested.
I don’t think this is actually as bad as people say.
It’s not that we won’t have drinking water. Municipal water use is tiny! And provided with enough incentives (higher costs) people will use less water. And this can be done in very reasonable ways by issuing water tiered rates.
Agricultural water use, is a whole different topic. However, until we can incentives better water management on our massive agricultural lands, it’s only going to get worse.
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