NeuronautML

Top quality comment. Developing Russia into a strong nation would be a century long effort and would require a complete change in way of thinking.

If anything, they only expanded their cannon fodder doctrine to their economy as well. Russia will never be a great nation by itself. They will only be one by taking great nations next to it. Putin knows this and it is what i suspect the reason for these senseless wars. Even the atomic bomb is useless to them if nobody attempts to go into Russia. Brickwalling them economically and militarily will lead them to degenerate and die, owing to their self destructive policies, which is why Putin is so against a defensive organization forming around them. It's why he's so invested in Donald Trump to turn around the already forming brickwall.

It was never about the range of the nukes, intentions of the US or the alleged offensive intentions of NATO that never existed. It's purely and simply because if Russia doesn't take land to exploit from people who actually can carry out meaningful progress and development, they degenerate as a country. Their doctrine is self destructive and they have never known any better.

Wonderful, a separation from the US by the EU within my lifetime. I hate Trump but this is such a blessing.

No more supporting genocides, no more sensless peer wars, no more helping create high volume refugee crises, no more 20 year long wars on weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist, no more "heroically" deposing dictators to put extremist terrorist groups in their place and giving them tons of ready to use military equipment. No more random terrorist attacks from disgruntled extremist groups as revenge for random meddling going on since the 80s for cheaper oil prices. No more association with the country that detains people and tortures them without charges in illegally occupied land. No more threats of invasion by a military ally.

No more US influence. That's how I'd prefer it.

Yet no developed country with high taxation on high income earners and women in the workforce has ever managed to even come close to the success the US had back then. Something you see, for instance, in several wealthy European countries. No, that's not why. They had an entire continent of developed but destroyed countries paying off humongous loans under the Marshall's plan and similar investments thereafter.

Yeah it's true but they also always kinda sucked militarily. Today, they're struggling against Ukraine. Their peak was during cold war soviet era and even then, they got their ass handed to them by the Mujahideen, which is seen as the event that broke them up. In ww2 they struggled against Finland and just barely made it out of their fight with Germany still a country. Only because the nazis were too confident and got into a two front war. In ww1 the eastern front was basically Russia stacking up defeats. Before that they got their ass kicked by Japan. In Napoleonic times, France handed Russia several defeats, even with other countries helping it. In pre Napoleonic times, again, just Russian defeat after Russian defeat.

It's just a matter of fact that for as long as Russia has existed, they have always been a big unmaterialized threat. Even far back in the congress of Vienna in 1814 everyone was already assuming Russia was going to industrialize and how powerful Russia will become and in the end.... nothing.

I seriously don't think Europe needs even half of what the US has, even to face Russia. Nobody does, US military expenditure is ridiculous. I also think Russia is only still a country because no country in history ever wanted to occupy undeveloped tundra. Even the mongols only sorta occupied it by asking them for tribute and leaving them mostly alone.

Should Europe become complacent ? No, but seriously all Europe needs is a half decent unified army and a cooperating industral military complex for domestic use to go with it and i don't really think Russia will ever be that big of a threat.

Hard disagree that we're better off with relations restored. Even if Trump was not in the white house, the current internal political situation in the US is a powder keg ripe for abuse.

The US helped Europe in post war but it made enormous amounts of money with it. Why do you think in the 50s and onward Americans had a massive a massive golden age of prosperity where you could support a full household on a highschool diploma which led to a massive baby boom ? It was all piggybacking on the massive loans Europe took to rebuild itself.

Did they have to do it ? No, but if you know anything about Americans is that they love money. They didn't do it out of the kindness of their hearts or because they feel Europe is such an important ally, they did it purely and exclusively for money. They wanted money and Europe could give it. When matters of money align, and we both stand to profit, no issues there - we should cooperate with Americans. But make no mistake, everything the US does is for its own benefit and nobody else's and if they don't stand to gain anything from cooperating, they will throw their allies under the bus first chance. Americans must be kept at arms length at all times.

They are not European allies, they have never been European allies, we just stood to gain together in the past. It was profit, pure and simple.

In Houston? Only in the center and even then, have you ever seen Texans drive ? They have a total disregard for any speed limits, despise cyclists and will pull a gun on you if they feel slighly uncomfortable with the road situation. I barely felt safe walking on the sidewalks.

I drive but i wasn't going to stay working in Texas long enough to justify the costs of buying my own car and transferring my license there, but same situation.

I was in Houston which has some buses and decided to use them. To do a 10-15 ish km ride, it took over 2 hours because there was just one bus that way and it stopped in every street corner. An uber took the same route in about 20 minutes.

I really disliked the way Texas looked, too much sprawl, cheap falling apart houses and whole blocks of abandoned houses and businesses. Definitely not enough trees. Also how it's organized, but the people were fairly nice. Like 60% of the time.

There's a lot of racism but i already was expecting that. I thought the racism would be whites vs everyone else, but honestly I've witnessed and experienced racism there from every race, towards everyone else. People also treat you better when they think you're their own race, so being Mediterranean i had random acts of kindness from Arabs, Latinos and white people who thought i was from their respective race. I also met some Brazilian people who hated Europeans for some reason and were not shy to show it.

Yeah so is the option to inform you, you are bothering people. Blocking is an eventuality of course, but i usually only block right away comments whose content i dislike and except your cc license i have nothing against the content of your comments.

Theres a reason why the 90s web forum design was never widely adopted and it's dead now. Nobody cares about witty quotes or how many posts an account has, or badges, or a little picture or footers.

Anyway, i won't even comment on the law part because that's a can of worms and i don't want to write a huge wall of text. Like i previously said, for the purpose you think the footers have, they are pointless. Nevertheless, i appreciate at least the small font.

Anyway i think i said what i had to say about this.

Holy fucking smokes. This was without a doubt the cringiest, most uncomfortable display of lack of professionalism and pure second-hand embarassment I've ever seen from a president and a vice president.

I have so much respect for Zelensky for putting up with that. What an absolute circus. Americans were made to look so feeble and insecure.

Plenty of communitites inside .ml are also filled with people who don't participate in that, as .ml was a major reddit refugee hub. I can tell you of using .ml daily and obviously not being of the opinion China/Russia are great, the average user of .ml is not what you think it is. You just don't see them cause they're not out here commenting on politics.

Criticizing admins, moderators and instances or specific user behavior is also perfectly reasonable.

While you may find it cringe, I meant it as a courtesy to you. I'd rather not engage with you at all beyond informing you of what i just did, if it's all the same to you. The less iterations of 100% legally pointless comment "footers" i can see spamming this comment section the better. I am grateful nobody else is doing this though. It would make it unbearable to read any comments.

This right here is what i hate the most about Lemmy. The federated nature of Lemmy makes it evident that instances are varied in opinions, regardless of what opinions instance admins or the larger groups in the instances have.

You wanna shit on the Russia bots or China bots, I'm right there with you. You wanna call out tankie rethoric, I'm all for it. But this generalized instance tribalism that's cropping up on Lemmy is just the worst. Just indiscriminate broad stroke criticizing people of a specific instance because you hate the political opinions of a subsection of that instance. Can't go a single day reading the news without someone going like "but yeah fuck .ml users cause they're all super communist tankies, amirite everyone?"

You're making Lemmy less enjoyable you know. It's exhausting.