Although disappointing, not entirely unexpected. Assaulting and defending are two different things and without air or artillery superiority, the assault phase is even more difficult. So these lads are pressing in on well prepared defensive lines without a ton of battle space preparation. Hopefully, they can perform well enough, and violently enough to overcome the typical 3:1 requirement for beaching and destroying fortified positions.
Interesting. With how poorly Russia has done so far, I think the expectation was for the counter offense to be fast and severe. I wonder if their training is better suited to holding land, if they were holding back their more competent troops from the front line, or if the soldiers are more invested in their defense than the offense.
Russia did a shit tonne of work putting in mines, trenches, and structures everywhere. They might not fight for shit, but they can dig holes and place dragon teeth. Doesn’t really require much advanced thought or tech.
Well, the quality of some of that work leaves much to be desired, in some cases. But even if it's all crap there still is an awful lot of it so it'll take time to clear a path.
Also, while the morale of russian front-line soldiers is shit, their artillery in combination with minefields are responsible for most Ukrainian losses.
That may have been the case in meme-circles, but anyone looking at the war objectively knew it was going to be slower. The Kharkiv counteroffensive only was so brutally effective, because the russian defensive lines were so weak and they didn't have any secodary defensive lines to fall back on. Meaning that once the defense was breached, Ukrainian Humvees could just keep driving and pursiung fleeing russians.
Kherson had a better defense setup, but with the bridges over the Dnipro cut, russia couldn't supply them.
Now, russia had time to create layered defensives and their logistics are harder to cut. The push towards the south is the most difficult offensive Ukraine has undertaken so far, so it's only logical for it to take the longest.
There is also a difference in tactics: While russia employs zerg rushes of convicts and mobilized into fortified Ukrainian positions, Ukraine tries to achieve local supperiorities of firepower and taking russian positions into pockets. That lowers your own casualties, but makes offensive operations more difficult.
It's also a factor of Russia not competently executing the initial invasion and got themselves bogged down. Similar to the Germans in WW1 on the western front, they got bogged down before they could take their key objectives, but the eastern front remained mostly mobile during the war because of the vast size of the front, and they eventually won on that front. Because you either win by our maneuvering your enemy an encircling them, or attriting the hell out of them till they have nothing left, and I think the pendulum has swung again towards a defensive advantage, especially with UAVs and remote mine laying systems, and precision artillery munitions.
It's a big part of why US doctrine is so focused on quick fast and overwhelming assaults and a strike first mentality. Even in Desert Storm they were severely worried about being bogged down by the Iraqi Army and starting a prolonged conflict with massive American losses. So it was imperative to flank the Iraqi Army from the western desert by the French Armored Corps.
We now know that Russia and Ukraine signed an agreement back in March, and Russia pulled back as a show of good faith. Then the west told Ukraine that the agreement was unacceptable and that’s how we got where we are today.
Ya well tragic shit happens all the time. We’re desensitized to it. This submarine is interesting and the circumstances are kind of like a movie. Of course media will cover it more. It’s what people are interested in.
Yeah, the titanic situation involved submarines, suspense, radar, underwater drones, etc.
The suspense was key, too. A race against the clock of oxygen running out. What happens if the drone finds them, but can't free them? Stuff like that made it a very unique story.
So of course people are more interested in that one.
More to your point, the reason we are so interested is in the uniqueness of the situation. For the North Americans this the Titanic is culturally significant. For Europe, the migrant issue is local news. The problem is that our news is blended.
The article describes Dina Boluarte as Peru's "unelected president" — but a different description would be that she was vice-president at the time that president Pedro Castillo attempted a self-coup to elevate himself from president to dictator, failed, and was then impeached & removed by Congress.
As a US citizen, I have to wonder if there's an analogy there with Mike Pence, who was VP to president Donald Trump but did not cooperate in Trump's attempted self-coup on January 6 2021. Pence's non-cooperation arguably saved the US from a Trump dictatorship.
Peruvians, or other folks who know more about Peruvian politics — is that an entirely terrible analogy?
The situation is pretty complex. I don’t have my finger on it entirely, but I get the feeling he was going to be forced out whether he self-couped or not. They seemed to be looking to remove him from the get go and were obstructionist
A month ago, Colombia’s first left-wing President Gustavo Petro dismayed many of his supporters by committing to strengthen Colombia’s cooperation with NATO in areas such as climate change, human rights, integrity building and cyber defence
What would it even mean to co-operate with NATO on
climate change, human rights, integrity building and cyber defence[?]
NATO is only concerned with one of these things. Co-operation in this respect can only mean exacerbating climate change, ignoring human rights, and I don't even know what it might mean for one of the most violent military alliances in history to build integrity.
I stand corrected. I still don't think they plan to do anything about climate change. Not unless they're forced by public pressure. The plan is more to protect the capitalist class from the destruction of climate change.
Edit: the linked report is informative but it's very idealist. It says that NATO has been aware of climate risks since 1969 and had done this or that through the years to take environmental degradation, such as cleaning up after wars. This may all be true. But if we used a weighing scales and measured these positive actions against the environmental degradation it has caused, the scales would tip over.
Not to mention that one of the functions of NATO is to maintain the conditions of the existing balance of international trade, which allows the global north to contribute disproportionately more to global emissions than the global south. So NATO-as-a-military-alliance cannot be analysed in isolation from the political economy that NATO exists to protect.
we use environmental input-output data and footprint analysis to quantify the physical scale of net appropriation from the South in terms of embodied resources and labour over the period 1990 to 2015.
This analysis proposes a novel method for quantifying national responsibility for damages related to climate change by looking at national contributions to cumulative CO2 emissions in excess of the planetary boundary of 350 ppm atmospheric CO2 concentration. This approach is rooted in the principle of equal per capita access to atmospheric commons.
Methods
For this analysis, national fair shares of a safe global carbon budget consistent with the planetary boundary of 350 ppm were derived. These fair shares were then subtracted from countries' actual historical emissions (territorial emissions from 1850 to 1969, and consumption-based emissions from 1970 to 2015) to determine the extent to which each country has overshot or undershot its fair share. Through this approach, each country's share of responsibility for global emissions in excess of the planetary boundary was calculated.
Findings
As of 2015, the USA was responsible for 40% of excess global CO2 emissions. The European Union (EU-28) was responsible for 29%. The G8 nations (the USA, EU-28, Russia, Japan, and Canada) were together responsible for 85%. Countries classified by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change as Annex I nations (ie, most industrialised countries) were responsible for 90% of excess emissions. The Global North was responsible for 92%. By contrast, most countries in the Global South were within their boundary fair shares, including India and China (although China will overshoot soon).
Can‘t believe all the waste of resources to look at some trash on the ocean floor, die, search the whole place, then find some more trash on the ocean floor. Climate is doomed.
Only good headline I read today is the orcas now attack boats, at least they try to fight before going extinct, admirable effort.
Well, it's a tragic example on how capitalism really ruins things for everyone. The OceanGate drama should have been the wake up call. But it wasn't and these people are dead. And they get infinietly more media coverage than hundreds of souls lost in Pylos.
Must we do the comparisons? The sub story was simply more interesting. It's not some media conspiracy, unless the media is already controlling the upvotes on kbin lol
Yeah, this comparison is getting really strained. As the Joker once said:
Nobody panics when things go “according to plan.” Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all “part of the plan.” But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!
A sunken ship filled with hundreds of migrants in the Mediterranean is, horrifyingly, a routine thing. It's "part of the plan." But a billionaire in a minisub possibly stranded on the Titanic? That's newsworthy. Yes, it sucks, but it's human nature and some battles are just impossible to win under the current circumstances.
How is the story of five idiots choosing to do something incredibly dangerous – and predictably dying – more interesting than hundreds of desperate souls perishing at sea because of racist policies? That latter should be absorbing almost as much interest and attention as climate change, considering how closely they're connected.
And it is a media conspiracy. The news doesn't happen by accident, it happens by several people coming together and deciding what to report on.
Conspiracy, from the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th edition (emphasis added):
A joining or acting together, as if by sinister design.
A combination of persons for an evil purpose; an agreement between two or more persons to commit in concert something reprehensible, injurious, or illegal; particularly, a combination to commit treason, or excite sedition or insurrection; a plot; concerted treason.
In this instance the media decided to report overwhelmingly on the bunch of idiots rather than the plight of and the conditions leading to the death of hundreds of tragic deaths. This comes as no surprise because to media barons and many media consumers, apparently, the life of refugees is seldom as interesting even as a politician caught with their pants down. The result is that nothing will improve for refugees but the safety rules for keeping other billionaire idiots alive might be reformed. If that's not sinister, reprehensible, or injurious, I don't know what is.
Of course not. India used to be secular. the far right Hindu extremism is taking over. Also it’s so good to be able to post this and not be trolled by pro Modi trolls. The amount of concentration of power due to lack of alternatives is so scary.
a form of government in which the people have the authority to deliberate and decide legislation (“direct democracy”), or to choose governing officials to do so (“representative democracy”).
Going by wikipedia, India fits in as a representative democracy. None of the elections are contested despite widespread corruptions. Its pretty much assumed all major parties do so and thus in a level field.
Where most have issue is:
Features of democracy often include freedom of assembly, association, property rights, freedom of religion and speech, citizenship, consent of the governed, voting rights, freedom from unwarranted governmental deprivation of the right to life and liberty, and minority rights.
India has some level of trouble with almost all of those. Both in past as well as some ongoing.
A large part of the reason is all available government choices are shitty in some sense or other. Modi is bad but so was their opposition. India didn’t start having these issues magically the day modi came to power. In that sense many blaming him ignore how deep rooted these problamatic views are in general soceity (at least in some areas and communities).
My point is that the many issues pointed here stems from a deeper problem and exists despite India being a democracy not because it isn’t. Infact if it was nearly as authoritarian as many claim, it would have plunged into greater chaos.
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