AFAIK Norway is the only nation bordering Russia that has never once in history been at war with it. This asstwat and other military men have been on Norwegian national media crying for more funds after the invasion of Ukraine. One has to see this in context of Norway having underfunded their military for some time and historically being subjugated by Denmark and Sweden. However, long story short, it is just fear mongering. Russia poses no credible threat to Norway with the backing of NATO.
I would still be much more worried about the Baltic states being invaded. Even so, there is a reason no major powers have been at war since the invention of nukes, and NATO would not in any way be a pushover without the US.
I do not disagree on allocating more funds to the military. I even argued that it objectively has been underfunded. That does not change that this man is an asstwat and others like him try to scare Norwegians for their own purposes. I think a scared populace is a dangerous thing, possibly allowing for dangerous ideas to be implemented in the name of security. Recently some hefty surveillance has been implemented in Norway, which I blame on people like him.
Norway is part of NATO, and has strong incentives to make sure that its neighbours aren’t at risk of being invaded. They still have reason to want to make sure Russia wouldn’t be able to invade.
Finland and Sweden getting invaded is terrible for Norway’s economy’s and plenty of individual lives, so Norway has a natural interest in making sure those countries are well defended, either through their own means or through diplomacy, regardless of their own individual risk of being attacked by Russia.
Yes, many in Norway have wanted to establish a nordic defense agreement, but this is now dead as Sweden and Finland are joining NATO. That being said, individually Finland and Sweden have much more military strength than Norway.
I am sorry but as you can tell by the number of downvotes received logic, nuance, and difference of perspective are not allowed these days on some English language forums when it comes to Russia. You must qualify all your statements with “Russia bad” and just join in the warmongering /s
I have another Idea: Provide the fucking Taurus to Ukraine. It will destroy russian infrastructure and it will kill russian soldiers, which in the end will reduce the amount of troops they have and the necessity to ramp up our own troops.
I simply don’t understand what everyone is so blind to. It’s like a blazing inferno of falsehood. Trump, Santos, DeSantis, Pelosi, Manchin, Sinema, ad nauseum.
They’re all the same. Different brands, maybe. Different ideological camouflage, but the same. Why is this so hard to see?
Google?? No, not Google. Capitalism. The same forces that drove the internet’s growth are making it so much worse than it could be. Profit motive trumps everything and drives the hellscape of engagement monetization
Yeah, this guy just seems butthurt. If anything, Google was a prime mover and “Good guy” for about a decade or so. The Internet was fundamentally broken around the mid to late 2000s when broadband became ubiquitous and social media became popular. Tons of people online and zero way to control anything. The Internet and WWW simply weren’t built for this scale.
I think it’s the centralization of services that broke what the internet was in the mid-00s, and increasingly monetized every facet of it. What was internet culture in the 00s became nerd identity in the late 00s-early 10s, which over the decade became completely appropriated and commodified by capital interests.
More of the internet now is intentionally constructed to cater to a market demand. In the 00s anyone could afford to run a publicly accessible web page fully designed by them. Now that’s just having a profile on an existing social media site. Google was incredible because it helped you find the most niche type of internet site, but when everything became so consolidated it pivoted to advertising, cloud services, and venture capital. Now it’s just a monster that seeds any technology they think would help them make profit and focuses the entire sector around that motivation.
More people are now on the internet to turn a profit as well, because it’s now the primary place for business. Things you used to do on the internet for fun in your spare time are now career options.
Because if Google didn’t exists, another company would have done the exact same. So yes, I think its pretty accurate to blame the system that make this business plan to only one to succeed.
So the people who made those decisions just get a free pass then?
Come on, let’s hold people accountable. The system sucks, I agree, but the issues are massively exacerbated by the rich and powerful not being held accountable. So don’t let them hide behind economic ideologies or legal entities; point your finger at them.
Not defending Google but the truth is legally, the directors at Google have to drive shareholder value and thus every legal opportunity must be explored. Not just a Google issue as many nations have similar laws that drive this sort of behaviour. Money wants to make money and the laws are structured in their favour.
Capitalism isn’t the problem. It’s corruption. So rather than fix the problem and hold the corrupt individuals accountable, you’d rather stop the symptom. But then the source of the problem is still there and manifests itself elsewhere. But it’s easy just putting bandaids on things, so I can see why that would be the crux of your efforts.
Corruption is the natural end result of Capitalism.
Do you really expect that in a society were “Greed is good” Lawmakers and Law-enforcers would magically not be seeking to maximize personal upsides like everybody else and positions of power within the State that could be used for such personal upside maximization wouldn’t attract smooth talkers seeking to become filthy rich???!
You need to be pretty naive to expect that an environment where the greatest measure of success and discriminator for receiving superior treatment is having lots of money, the people who can get power from salesmanship (which is what politicians are: selers of themselves and of ideas) and being mates with said salesman (i.e. those who get nominated to positions by the politicians) would not be driven by maximizing their personal wealth and the prestige and superior treatment that is given to the monyed.
Given human nature, Capitalism without widespread corruption is about as realistic Communism (the whole utopia of everybody having the same, not the bullshit that the PRC and Soviet Union deem “communism”) and, funnilly enough. they both fail for exactly the same reason: Greed.
I’d have to agree. Morals and ethics (and the lack thereof) are what drives this perversion and the same can be seen in other economic models tried in the past like communism.
One might argue that companies are forced to do this “because of the shareholders” but in the past companies weren’t always solely focused on short-term gain with long-term term consequences (enshittification) and they made their shareholders plenty of money for longer. It seems the focus now is to burn bright and die out fast, but that path isn’t inherent to capitalism itself.
Sure. But also the tech bro culture of “I’m not responsible for the consequences of my choices, so long as there is a computational layer between those consequences and me”.
Silicon Valley, and it’s legion of brown nosers, all love to believe that “I didn’t think…” is a valid excuse, not a self-indictment.
So I guess Russia is going to end up getting what it wants by bleeding all of the opposing countries out economically.
I’m just trying to figure out how Russia isn’t running out of equipment. Everyone keeps saying they are yet they keep pushing and pushing, and they’re clearly not stopping. 🤔
See, I am 100% on Ukraine’s side on this to the point where I think the U.S. should use nuclear weapons to defend it when we inevitably run out of shit. I think we should have put U.S. troops on the ground as soon as the trouble started and prevented all of this from happening in the first place.
That being said, evil actually does win most of the time in life. It’s why most people are evil – because it works.
So when I see this pattern of Ukrainian cities getting leveled and Russia seemingly never running out of troops or equipment, but now at least one Ukraine ally has, the writing on the wall looks pretty clear.
I am not advocating we pull out and let Ukraine get ass-plundered. I’m saying we should fight to the last but that Russia will probably win in the end. And that is sad.
They’re pulling older and older pieces of equipment out of storage, fixing it up, and sending it out.
They’ve given up trying to bombard Ukraine with naval assets, and surrendered the offshore oil platforms they were using as observation platforms.
They’re flying fewer and fewer sorties, the ones they do fly typically lob missiles from beyond the border, and they’re seeing mechanical failures because the few aircraft they do have are not being properly maintained.
The lack of equipment is definitely hurting them, make no mistake about that.
Unfortunately, they have no shortage of young men to send to their deaths.
Gestures at Germany in May 2022 when they started to ramp up industry and allocating billions of funds for Ukraine to shop there because supplies from army stocks simply aren't sustainable.
So what's the actual problem? Did the UK do nothing in 1½ years but run on what they had lying around? Or are they just trying to prepare the narrative of how they can't afford anything anymore for the next round of conservative™ destruction and decay in the name of saving money?
As this is from the Torygraph I assume the latter...
telegraph.co.uk
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