They love it when you point out that the term “tankie” was coined by other card carrying communists to shit on tankies. Make sure to mark the “no true Scotsman” space on your bingo card when they respond.
Accelerationists are socialists who think it’s fine if a ton of gay people are killed right now, as long as it means there’s a chance they won’t be later
I used to be an accelerationist when I was 14 cause I hated everyone and everything and wanted all the people around me to be as depressed as I was. Then I went to therapy.
It’s not a very good label for this. There’s a certain subsection of the left that sees anti-Americanism as an ideology, and therefore any state that opposes America is categorically good.
They’re not common, and they tend to overlap with the sort who’s mom found their weed stash and made them throw it away. Lacking weed, they turn to making a lot of loud noises on Lemmy.
Hexbear is more sane than it seems but their loudest voices are… Quite loud. Generally because of the tools they had that other instances don’t and just come off as annoying to anyone outside of the community.
The problem with judging where the Chapo diaspora ended up is that while Hexbear started from the sub ban it has become a fairly different community and there’s also quite a lot of shared users between Lemmy.ml, Lemmygrad, and Hexbear, and then there’s the fact that the exit of the radical left from Reddit was about more than Chapo alone.
Hi, western communist here. Russia is a christo-fascist state but some fellow commies have accepted the position that any faction against US global dominance is one worth supporting regardless of their actual policies and humanity. The idea being that the #1 goal should be the distruction of the hegemony that has oppressed many of the worlds nations in the hopes that communism can rise out of them now that they would be free to make that choice.
Most communists in the West are not like this. This is a specific subsection of communists who want to knowingly support christo-fascists. Most western communists fucking hate Russia.
You hearing this Xi? Yladivostok is up for the taking in a “3 day special military operation.” You can go protect the large minority of Han (Chinese, but the type they actually care about) citizens, score an easy military and political victory, regain territory that China lost in like 1900, and pull attention away from Taiwan, all at the same time.
Deng Xiaoping missed his chance in 1989, the last time we bankrupted The USSR/Russia. Don’t miss your chance to regain glorious Chinese territory!
The NATO-beating AI targeting systems are literally a potato, though their development did pay for a number of superyachts off Monaco and stately homes in Surrey.
Like literally literally or literally figuratively? Because the thought of someone popping out the hatch with a sack of potatoes and just wildly chunking them at a drone is kind of hilarious.
To be fair, the B1 bomber (which we never actually used in action) was also built to fuel economics and enrich plutocrats.
Then there was the Sea Wolf attack sub, created not because we really needed a replacement for the Los Angeles class, but our small society of submersible-savvy engineers needed to stay in practice making submarines, so the US gave them a project to do.
So I was entirely ignorant about the project to refit B1s for conventional weapons starting in the George H. W. Bush administration. So, the last thirty odd years. I had thought we’d gone from B52s to B2s regarding conventional strategic bombing.
Makes sense that a relatively small economy like Russia can’t afford expensive pieces of hardware like that. Especially when at war. They probably already knew it. Just announcing it now.
Quantity is a quality of its own if you have unlimited manpower, i.e. if you are a low-tech agrarian society with naturally high birth rates and an effectively limitless pool of expendable serfs the Czar can press into canon-fodder service whenever he needs to wage war. Unfortunately for the current Czar, these things no longer hold, and no amount of pontificating about “traditional values” will turn this around by itself.
To be careful: I am not a supporter of Russia. Let’s be clear on that.
Agreed he can’t do this forever, but he only needs to hold out long enough for funding to run out, and is happy to spend lives and low tech equipment in the meantime. Look at the losses in avdiivka.
So for all interested porpoises, he did have unlimited lives and gear
All we can do is hope trump doesn’t win and whatever Congress is next doesn’t hold funding hostage
If I had a dime for every time autocorrect swapped to the incorrect form of “its,” I’d have enough to fly to California and drown Tim Apple and Richard Google with dimes.
If you accidentally change your keyboard layout to italian it will autocorrect all kinds of stuff that makes no sense. Was kinda funny at first and then grew to be annoying
Which fighter is a better match than an F-35 if you want stealth? (If you don’t want stealth, you aren’t looking at a F-35) The A model is damn nice for most, and the B model wipes the floor with the VTOL competition. There is damn good reason over 1,000 of these have been produced already and orders keep coming in.
I don’t doubt that F-35 has some good stats, I am looking at this from a more general perspective, what I have seen is that because F-35 costs substantially more than other fighters this limits countries that does not have a US level defense budget on how many planes they can afford, for example instead of 50 F-16 they end up with 10-20 F-35.
And by looking at those numbers it seems like they get less defense for the same amount even if F-35 is better than the alternatives.
Yeah, if a country doesn’t need stealth, they really shouldn’t be purchasing stealth. Most countries will probably want a mix of both. Stealth for air dominance and heavily-contested, high-value strikes, and fourth generation air frames to provide bulk ordnance delivery.
With the exception of VTOL, in which the F-35B is the only reasonable option, even if you don’t need stealth.
Honestly, if you already have air superiority and you just need a bomb truck, you can’t go better than strapping a ton of hard points onto a crop duster and raining hell
I hear you have also heard of the US’ newest aircraft, the armed crop duster! (Not a joke, this is a real thing, and it works for exactly the reasons you said)
From what I’ve seen, the F-35 defeats enemy F-16s because of its advanced sensors. Mostly it’s firing missiles at things beyond visual range. Plus it has stealth capabilities that avoid detection and retaliation.
It’s worth the cost because you lose fewer experienced pilots, which are the real bottleneck for an air force.
The only cost I can find that is anywhere near that order of magnitude for the F-35 is the total lifetime cost out to 2070 (!!!), which includes operations and maintenance in the figure for the approx seven decades of its total expected life.
Which kept the manufacturers working, kept the supply chains moving, and aligned nearly all of the west onto a shared, network-able platform? These things literally get more deadly when more are in use. All in a jet that is better than most (not all) of the near peer opponents.
Man it certainly ran over budget but now it’s a steal of a deal for all that allied interop.
Plus keeping the aerospace contractors moving means you keep potential wartime production avenues open and lubed.
Edit also I’d assume defense planners saw all that value beyond the sticker price, so when the public hears “budget overrun” the defense planners said “nah, we good”
Over budget just means it costs more than originally projected. It does not necessarily mean it’s too expensive or overpriced, just it’s more than anticipated.
I guess if it won’t fix your whataboutism…then “mmm yes you’re abso-liootly right!”
But I say this in the voice of that tuxedo wearing Simpsons Yes-guy. If you’d prefer to be taken seriously, perhaps a post that is not completely irrelevant to the subject at hand is in order.
Yeah, it’s just like the people hating on the Osprey- the read the media about all the crashes and don’t realize that the overall crashes per mission hour is on par or lower than other military helicopters. The military just takes more chances. Even though they do try to minimize the unnecessary risks being in the military is still inherently risky.
The F-35 might have gone wildly overbudget, but it was never going to be out of reach of the US economy. There are over 2,500 orders of it from foreign governments, which run around $80M each. That’s $200B on a development cost of $416B (the >$1,000B figures cited are for total lifetime costs). Given that this was never meant to be profitable on foreign sales, that’s pretty good.
Russia cannot afford a next gen tank and next gen aircraft program (and they’re doing two next gen aircraft, Su-57 and Su-75). Countries in its economic peer group buy their military hardware from bigger countries. They’re trying to pretend they still have the resources they did under the Soviet Union, and they just don’t.
Edit: for another way to look at this, the $416B development cost of the F-35 represents less than 2% of US GDP for a single year and the cost was spread over 20 years. If Russia was able to do it for half as much, it would be about 12% of their single year GDP. They would need to spread the cost over 80 years to get close to GDP percentage parity with the US on this project.
This economic reality is why Putin is so hard for conquering Ukraine, btw. Losing Ukraine was like Texas seceeding.
Yeah, you don’t really need them, and they can be more trouble than they’re worth, but it’s still a very sizable chunk of your resources, population, and technical capability. A chunk that let you play with big boys.
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