Most of 4chan has nothing to do with politics or propaganda. The ones that are reposted mostly all come from two boards. /b/ and /pol/. Also your reddit comment is weird cause reddit is just full of bots now.
9Gag is pretty bad with them as well. They used to push anti-vax and anti-mask disinformation with obvious bad faith arguments there during the COVID period. Then when the “special military operation” started in Ukraine they immediately switched to posting pro-Russia bullshit.
Until then I was only thinking this sort of nonsense was there as a result of the website being more open to diverse political views, for better or worse. But that sudden switch made me realize that it was actually a team of people trying to sow the seeds of disarray in any way they could for the Western world by pushing disinformation like this on websites mostly frequented by young adult males, who can be vulnerable to radicalization. To think back to it, it was obvious that they were using a bot farm to upvote their content as well. I haven’t set foot on that echo chamber or propaganda and conspiracy nonsense since then. I can only assume this sort of thing is still going on there.
There was a time recently when Internet connection to Russia got severed for a few hours and a lot of people wrote posts about how friendly and polite people on the Internet were during that time.
It’s always been agitprop for one thing or another. Hell, I was an edgy teen over a decade ago and there was always a BBC thread and a WHITES ONLY thread running at all times, and both were interspersed about how jews wanted blacks to cuck all the white guys. Truly unhinged shit.
It’s the year 2031. NATO troops surrounded the Cremlin after a weekend of mostly chill driving through the Russian countryside. Picking up defectors here and there.
Russia still threatens with war if they don’t stop.
Everybody laughs. There is no way to stop Nato, neither the bipartidism in your country. Laughing helps to release the anxiety of knowing you have no more power to choose.
It’s all Google now. G-wallet, G-keys of the house, G-irlfriend, G-health care, G-education.
Working for Youtube, Amazon and McDonalds is great. But there is no other choice.
Everything works so smooth that by 2040 the earth is not gonna be suitable for human life.
I know you’re joking, and I’m sorry to ruin the dream but to be clear nuclear fallout would be in the air and there won’t be laughing as several millions would die before that moment.
I’m going to watch this video later tonight, but I sincerely wonder what the US and NATO’s protocols are for rogue nuclear nations led by someone with nothing to lose.
Those are more hypothetical than real. Kim Jong Un has plenty to lose personally. Every dictator on Earth does. They live in mansions while their people starve, and that’s not nothing.
I don’t know if I would bet the extinction of all life on Earth save for the most resilient bacteria on that assumption.
Suppose that through the Russian government’s kleptocracy, that after they spent billions on mansions and stolen exotic cars, that they put the rest into maintaining their nuclear arsenal.
There’s a very good chance of that, but the consequences of being wrong are too high.
That said, there is an I-know-that-they-know-that-I-know game involved. We might not be able to chance Russians nukes working, but Putin has to be wondering if they work, too. If he launches one and it fizzles, the whole world will cheer NATO on while obliterate Putin’s regime in a conventional war. Therefore, he has all the more reasons to not launch them preemptively and let the question hang in the air.
Question: We’ve seen sand-filled missiles due to corruption and cronyism, and they were actually transfered to the front line expecting to be live munitions. How many Russian ICBMs do you think are truly functional between the “new” ones and the 70yo cold war hulks?
To be clear, I don’t revel in the idea of a war between the Ruskies and NATO, but Putin is certain to be wondering this, too. How effective are his strategic assets, truly? I’m sure the CIA has figured that out and is guiding US response on that intel. They know exactly how far an insecure dictator can be pushed.
Ok so I can finally reply to your question after days of appealing my permanent ban to noncredibledefense for my comment above. (Apparently it was too pro-russia and spreading false information)
Secondly you’re right, I don’t think anyone knows how many are truly functional, the US and Russia have the best ideas but both of those nations are rightfully very secretive about the true nature of the nukes.
I believe that if US truly believed the russian nuclear arsenal was a zero threat they would have already put troops in Ukraine. That’s mostly the reason why my opinion is that Russia has at least one likely operational nuclear device which could cause damage to the European continent.
Secondly risk is calculated by two factors, chance and effect.
As a European myself, the effect of russian nukes on Europe terrifies me because I live in a major city that would be a target if Russia ever went scorched earth. Although the chance is low the effect is high which puts the overall risk above zero which is too much especially with the majority of NATO residing in that continent.
“I know you’re joking, and I’m sorry to ruin the dream but to be clear nuclear fallout would be in the air and there won’t be laughing as several millions would die before that moment.”
“European families, is our life ruined now?”
“As a European myself, the effect of russian nukes on Europe terrifies me”
Sorry, we don’t allow Russian fear mongering in NCD.
ono russia has nukes, that’s scary, russia has nukes and they might even work, we have to stop all military aid because that would be eScAlaTiOn. have you seen these “new” “secret” documents, they say that sending 32 abrams is nuclear threshold, we are so lucky
i don’t care if you are true believer or an useful idiot, if you’re repeating hottest vatnik twitter talking points you are in a wrong place
honestly perun should be mandatory watching in this sub. this one in this case. maybe you have noticed that some western weapons sent earlier had a restriction that they couldn’t be used in russian 1991 borders. well as it happens F16 and any weapons mounted on them don’t have this restriction, which means that countries that sent them don’t think any of russian “red lines” around military aid are credible. putin doesn’t even want to escalate conventionally as it stands now because it would be unpopular domestically
having some vague nuclear threshold doesn’t make your position credible and makes diplomacy harder. nuclear strike in response to a nuclear strike on an ally, that’s a clear one. nuclear strike in response to disabling nuclear second strike capability, like C2, in nuclear way or not, this is also a clear one. “existence of a state is threatened” you’d expect this in some kind of total war, and we’re nowhere close to it. military aid is not it, screeching at top of your lungs that you’ll nuke london after atacms is delivered then doing nothing does not make your position credible. nukes are first of all tools of diplomacy and the right way to use them is in deterrence, this does not make a lot of sense if you want to be taken seriously
Yeah and what would that do. Sure a lot of people would die but it won’t help Russia win the war. If they shoot their load and they destroyed say two cities, then everyone else will know that’s it. Launching the missiles would be literally the last thing that they ever do. Mutually assured destruction not required.
The best way to survive is to constantly threaten but never actually act. Eventually someone will do something about putting oil just die of old age. There isn’t really a way there’s ends with him being victorious.
I suspect the reason that is because the sanctions haven’t really bitten home yet and no one really wants to inherit this nebulous mess where Russia’s position with NATO is not well understood, much better to wait and let him to out and out fail, then when they take power the only possible way is up.
The swastika predates Nazi Germany, but is forever tarnished by it. In Asia, the flag of Imperial Japan is often seen as a symbol of fascism, Imperialism, and war crimes.
More power to them for trying to reclaim it! It was stolen anyways.
The difference with Imperial Japan is that the flag is still being used by the same group that committed war crimes. The Rising Sun can’t simply be reclaimed, unlike the Swastika.
Point being is that there’s a reasonable reason for the Japanese Naval flag to be in a Japanese Naval meme. If you want at reason to think the meme wasn’t made in good faith, I’d be more worried about how the Japanese guy is holding a machete to the other guy’s throat. That actually does conjure up ideas about WWII war crimes.
Yeah a lot of people might not be aware just how heinous Japans actions were in The Second Sino-Japanese War (the Chinese War of Resistance) in the lead-up to Asias involvement in WWII.
The funny thing about John Rabe is that he was probably the only Nazi in any sort of power after The Night of the Long Knives to think they were still a socialist party, because he was off chilling in China and everyone forgot about him.
I think that’s probably true - Japan has such a sanitized reputation now (which, frankly, isn’t entirely deserved), and most people probably don’t ever take a history class after high school, so a lot of people probably genuinely don’t know how bad it was. I did a little over 3 years of an undergrad history major and never heard a word about it. The only reason I know anything about it is because my AP US History teacher in high school told a few of us about it after a class on WWII. I had nightmares about some of the pictures for a few nights. I see why they don’t generally teach it to kids.
That’s what I find insane. It’s like people have lost the ability to say, “what Israel is/was doing was fucked, but also fuck Hamas for mass murder and rape”. People get upset when you say, “I feel bad for the Israelis and Palestinians”. You’re either pro-hamas, anti-israel or pro-israel, anti-hamas. You’re either pro-palestine and anti-israel, or anti-palestine and pro-israel.
You know you can be sympathetic to the civilians on both sides and hate the extremists right?
Yeah, it's one of those polarizing issues, where people on both sides decide that any opinion is binary and you either are all in for Israel or all in for Palestina and you can't have any empathy or understanding for both sides.
These past days people yelled at me in the fediverse that I chill for Israel's illegal occuption and also that I chill for Hamas and blame their atrocities on Israel. It's insane. You can hardly have any other opinion than either Israel all bad or Palestine all bad.
It's disgusting how many people on both sides support slaughtering civilians of the other side while at the same time saying that the other side are monsters for slaughtering civilians.
Welcome to modern politics, where the range of opinions that a person accepts is so small that it doesn’t overlap with the range that a person on the other side accepts.
If you have an opinion in the middle, everyone will just hate you and having a discussion is impossible.
I blame Western media’s fairness bias. Decades of pushing the idea that every issue has exactly two sides, no more and no less, and those sides are exactly opposite each other and fully equal.
Israel, represented by their hardline zionist governments, on one side. Palestine, represented by the hardline islamists of Hamas, on the other. Nothing exists off that axis, nothing exists between those poles but Enlightened Centrist fence sitters. Fairness.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has taken on symbolic importance to many people. In one sense whatever is going on there is not really important for most of the world. It’s some kind of internal conflict/civil war with essentially neighbors beating each other up. But it doesn’t really affect anyone else significantly. And yet everyone has a take on who is right and who is wrong and the thinking is very black and white and absolutist, even if you really don’t know what’s going on or the history behind it or the stakes.
Contrast this with other similar conflicts that most people have no opinion on. Like Ethiopia-Tigray or the ongoing civil war in Myanmar. Most people probably haven’t even heard of this stuff and have no clue as to who is fighting who. Hell, how many people had the barest inkling of who Hamas was a week ago. And now they feel they can take some absolute morally superior position on the issue.
It’s because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become symbolic of who you are. The other conflicts I mentioned have no symbolic meaning or importance to people outside those regions. The Ukraine war is another highly symbolic conflict and that’s why it’s often mentioned in the same breath, but the myriad of other ethnic conflicts going on throughout the world are ignored.
The power of symbolic positions is that they strongly ensure group cohesion. You wear these symbols on your chest like a medal or a placard. They superficially resemble personal opinions, but actually they’re badges of membership. Most people don’t actually think hard about these issues or try to understand deeply what’s going on. Instead they are told what to believe and what to say by people that they trust and identify with. Once it’s clear what the “correct” position is, people will wear it with pride.
Deeply thinking about a complex issue is extremely resource intensive and most people just don’t care that much. We also want to clearly delineate things into categories of good/bad. It’s a natural heuristic that feels good. Once you know a thing is “good” you cheer it on. If a thing is “bad” you loudly denounce it with your peers. If a big thing happens, but you don’t know if it’s good or bad then you feel uncomfortable mental dissonance. Big things can’t just be left in a state of psychological limbo. You need to decide if it’s good or bad. And so we do, collectively.
This is why I mostly stay out of that conversation. I don’t know enough about the history or politics or general demographics of the region to have an informed and nuanced perspective. I just know it’s not good
And when you take that stance, you get called an enlightened centrist. I lack the words to express my frustration. Why is life so cheap to these people? Do they even fathom what’s being lost?
No, they don’t have any clue what’s being lost because they haven’t seen anything other than the flickering blue light of their computer monitor for the past 4 years.
The people least well adjusted (terminally online) are the ones online all the time upvoting and posting things and only generally interacting with others that are terminally online. This lack of interaction with other ideas leads to this radicalization and lack of care for others.
There’s no use in trying to convince the guy that hasn’t left mom’s basement in 6 years. What’s he gonna do? Get cheeto dust on me?
That, or they’re college pseudointellectuals who have become so isolated from the world outside their campus and the surrounding neighborhood and are lied to so constantly about how the world works (as it’s an institution where ideas don’t have to be factual or practical in order to keep being taught) that they’ve been brainwashed into thinking those ideas are applicable to every current problem in existence and into always being contrarian and automatically disagreeing with everything the mainstream says.
A laser that is powerful enough to hurt a human target (especially a human target with body armor) is going to be powerful enough that it'll be ionizing the air to some degree. It'll be like a lightning bolt, there'll be flashes of light and sharp cracking sounds. That's also ignoring the fact that the random bits of terrain that the laser is hitting will also be exploding. Someone under "suppressing fire" from a laser weapon would be quite aware of the fact.
All that said, the successful laser weapons right now seem to all be anti drone/aircraft and they are typically using tracked CW (not pulsed) lasers with heating over time to avoid atmospheric lensing. Lots of challenges to overcome in getting pulsed energy a long way through air.
I was wondering if we’d see pulsed lasers in anti-drone warfare… the power supply advantages aside, focusing on just the right point in time with the pulse seems hard.
It might be hard, but with the processing power we can fit into microchips these days I’d say we fixed harder problems already. I mean, the controller needs at least two cameras or another methode of locating the target and estimating the distance, but I’d guess we could completely get rid of time of flight calculations as the light pulse would be instant for that matter.
The hard part is predicting atmospheric effects to get the focus right. It’s basically impossible without some form of just in time compensation. One idea I’ve seen is that you fire a physical projectile and use that to calibrate the focal point at arbitrary distance, almost like a laser tracer.
It’s not easy but you can correct the atmosphere. This is done with guide stars and adaptive optics.
The bigger challenge is that for intense pulsed lasers, the standard laser profile causes them to self focus in air through nonlinear effects. To overcome this you need to make weird profiles like top hats that are much hard to get just right.
This is a fundamentally physical limitation that is pretty tricky to overcome.
Genocidal/Politicidal history doesn’t predict political opposition though (e.g. Kazakhstan being struck by starvation campaigns as well, but juggling neutrality now)
Remember that elderly women that offered seeds to russian soldiers “so that at least some sunflowers will grow where they are going to die”. I think that kind of counts as greeting with flowers?
Oh my god how did I forget about sunflower grandma.
Imagine being a fresh-faced recruit to what you still believe to be a noble mission to liberate your own oppressed people. An easy mission at that - go in, march on Kyiv, overthrow the “nazi regime,” go home heroes. You show up, head held high, waiting for the cheers and thank-yous from those you think you’re here to protect. A sweet old lady walks up to you offering a gift! Sunflower seeds - peaceful, bright, lovely sunflower seeds. Then she says it. “At least some sunflowers will grow where you die.”
Because Putin is bankrolling two or three minor political parties and the front runner of a major political party. That fucking anti-war protest in DC was the dumbest shit. Yeah let’s have two political parties that agree on absolutely fucking nothing except for hating Ukraine co-host an event where Ron Paul’s bitch ass makes up stories about how congresspeople told him that they needed to start a war to fix the economy while some limpdick tankie waves the Soviet flag around in the background
Most people posting as tankies today aren’t tankies.
As someone who has done extensive reading in modern Marxism, Rawlsian doctrine, anarchism both historical and modern, and so on and so on (and yes that was a Žižek reference), many of those posting as far leftists are coming from wholly self-constructed positions. They’re either deliberately playing the role of an agent provocateur or they’re people who have unwittingly become broadcast nodes with the same effect.
One of them on chapotraphouse said “I’m gonna vote for Trump just so see the US finally burn to the ground” and I replied “horseshoe theory: confirmed” and the mods removed my comment lmao
Crazy how tankies support Russia (despite them not even being communist, domestic abuse, treatment of gay people, and ties with conservatives). And are just okay with Russia killing entire villages of Ukraines because their supposed Nazi government (didn’t let a Russian puppet in government).
I opened accounts on multiple instances due to the instability (and information propagation dynamics) of individual ones. I figured “why not?” I had several Reddit accounts, after all, and it just seemed to make sense.
I thought lemmy.ml was for machine learning. The UI I was using didn’t include self-descriptions.
They’re either deliberately playing the role of an agent provocateur or they’re people who have unwittingly become broadcast nodes with the same effect.
That’s… a tankie, at least functionally. If they’re spouting the propaganda, I don’t care where it came from or whether it’s officially certified as doctrine.
noncredibledefense
Top
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.