Canada Guy

Again, I will not take the bait and aggravate Steve by rekindling this discussion. I have a PhD in physics, so when I tell you to challenge your preconceptions and actually check facts, it isn't for any ideological reasons but because I feel qualified to say what is nonsense in that regard and what isn't. 'nough said, let's move on.

The (not just German) Greens have hurt Europe immensly with their anti-nuclear nonsense. They have been such a great boon to both fossil fuel industry and various evil regimes like Russia and the Saudis that it is fair to wonder whether they are paid by any of those.
Honestly, I wonder which reality is more scary, whether the Greens being corrupt or them doing everything because they really think it helps.

I get the sentiment but I think the danger is in another direction to be honest.  Putin cannot convince his people to do full mobilization, hence this “soft-opening” approach.  I am not sure they are willing to follow him into a certain inferno.  
The Russians also have to be worried about US ABM technology development, it spooked the crap out of them back in the late 80s and that was over 30 years ago.  They have to be wondering just how strong that hand is, or is not.  
So the old Capt has been going on about decisions and this is a Strange one - creating/making a decision from imagined conditions/stimuli.  Built on perception this space sees the Boogie man and drives off the road.  It is the land of Darwin awards and it has many champions in the pursuit of war.  So I am not saying that Russia cannot find itself down this dark road but it is more likely that someone bullets Putin before they do, if he ever did order it.
Far more dangerous is a fallen Russian without a safety net.  Fractured and possibly in a state of civil war, with about 6000 nuclear weapons rolling around the dance floor.  So I agree, we definitely are lovers in a dangerous time here, gas prices might be a quaint memory if this goes totally pear shaped.  Russia has ran into a house and set it on fire while nailing shut all the doors…and it is all our fault!  Which would be hilarious if they did not have nukes in the basement.
And even if Russia learns how to lose this thing, we still have the rise of China as it aims to re-wire global order, we will see if it can.  Oh and we can throw in a US which is frankly scaring the hell outta everyone and has been since about Jan 6th…I honestly hope it was just an anomaly and/or growing pain. Toss in climate change pressure etc…only thing missing are zombies, which at this point might be a stabilizing force.
Remember when we only had the pandemic to worry about?

My favorite sci fi author - CJ Cherryh Just a few of her pile of novels
The Chanur novels - Wikipedia

There is literally NO reason except laziness and stupidity not to get off fossil fuels as quickly as humanly possible. It would cause all of our enemies except China to go broke. It would keep the planet from cooking itself. And as not insignificant bonus you get a large improvement in public health due to less air pollution. The anti nuclear folks just need to be canceled and governments just need to get behind this thing and PUSH!

Well you definitely shouldn’t be passing up capable soldiers who are willing to fight, male or female.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt6TEsdXd1U
Short but interesting interview by Operator Starsky with female Ukrainian squad commander. There are some snippets about how Russian fought at Rubizhne. And good deal of laugh at TikTok Commando ('We heard some shooting and explosions behind their lines...we knew the Chechens started recording new movies").
Interesting is that this girl seem to be serve as common infantry sergeant on frontlines, not medic/staff officer as many women in uniforms do. It's curious how common it is in Ukrainian army.

That exactly - that's why I'm a big fan of EU. It has it's problems, but in essence it is a framework that facilitates cooperation, to everybody's benefit.
Regarding the "shift to the east" in Europe. Well, it is happening a bit, cause in general CEE countries are growing faster economically than "Old Europe", mostly cause we started from much lower levels. Mathematically this moves the center of gravity a tad east, but it will be decades before we catch up.
Politically though, if Ukraine and Moldova (and perhaps Belarus?) are admitted to UE, together with some Balkan countries that are in the process of negotiations, this shift will be much more pronounced and sudden. I personally have mixed feelings regarding this, as we for sure don't need more Orbans (or Kaczynski's ) in UE. I guess a reform that will make more use of majority voting vs need for unanimity on certain decisions would be in order before the expansion. It's long overdue anyway.
I assume @LongLeftFlank meant the classical purpose of militia, as to defend again external threats. I'm quite skeptical about increasing access to firearms for the broader population in general (in Poland, not gonna touch the US discussion on that with a 10-ft stick). If it was limited to military weapons held by reservists, I don't see a problem with it though. It would be quite a cultural change to go through, that's for sure.

All right guys, this is a post where I spill my guts in quite an emotional manner, please move along if your're not up for it.
I'll start with stating that I'm really fond of this community that I accidentally found thanks to @Der Zeitgeist. While we differ in perception of some minutiae of the events unraveling in front of us, we all seem to share the same view on whats right and moral in this context. And that is really a lot, more that I could expect from most of my average 'real', 'physical' acquaintances.
For my whole life, since I was an 8 years old kid listening to my grandpa's war tales, I was deeply interested in all things military related. It is easy to get a young boy interested  in this kind of stuff - the power, the agency, the feeling of purpose this provides is unmatched by anything else in the world. Of course  when you're still an adolescent, your understanding of what war/ armed conflict means cannot be deep enough. As I was entering my adulthood, even studying military history academically, I grew to hate the very notion of armed conflict and violence. I guess getting the real grasp of what war means to a regular person was too much to me at this point. I retained my interest, but didn't really pursue it apart from theoretical knowledge. Especially, I dodged the last years of draft i Poland - neither me, nor Polish civil society in general was really ready for it in early 2000's. I was living my life happily since then, like if "The End of History" was and undisputed fact of life.
And it really changed with the start of war in Ukraine. I could easily picture myself in the position of average Kyiv or Kharkiv citizen, a guy in his late 30s, with a reasonable career in IT, concentrated on making a living for his wife and young kids, who is suddenly confronted with the need to physically fight for all that is important for him. 
Of course, in this great community we mostly  concentrate of relatively coldly analysing what is going on, trying to get a grasp of events the way a historian narrates the Battle of Kursk - it is of course THE WAY to practically understand the events and be able to draw conclusions. That's how a commander should look at it, putting his feeling aside. This however isn't the only way to talk about war, especially it isn't the only "right" way to do so. 
On a personal or local society level, what this war is is the fight between right and wrong, between liberty and slavery, between good and evil. Of course, if you are a mature individual, you understand that the good and bad are very relative terms, and it's best to avoid such violent situations at all. Yet, it if comes to the conflict like this, for me the only true way to talk about the people on the very front line, in the trenches facing The Enemy, is poetry and epic prose. The cold analysis is of course important to practical understanding of the situation, yet it doesn't do justice to a person giving his or her life for a greater cause. Having said that, I run at a few videos kept very much in the spirit I outlined here:
A music video to Sabaton's 40:1 song, really fitting the evens of the first few weeks of war. We might've forget it already, but the first days were about the grassroots citizen resistance that in many cases stopped the orcs. Videos from February and March are really reminding of what it is all about:
Here's an Azov oath from 2015, it's as powerful as it gets:
And a subtitled Ukrainian anthem:
There's a conclusion to this rant - today I sent a letter to my local Territorial Defense brigade. They are overflowing with volunteers at the moment, but I'll should be able to join in the winter, early next year at the latest.
It's OK, I'll have the time to get used to morning jogs I guess.

And one reason Tsingtao is such good beer is because the brewery was founded by Germans. 

Trying to reply to peoples posts on mobile is cancer. 
Anyway, I havent heard anything about Belarus being gone after. They launched 20 missiles from their territory? I'm about to phone my local politician. 

Thanks for the information! 

Sure, it's a good-ish idea (although I'm not sure how thrilled UKR will be to receive a random consignment of random weapons of random age and wear, with no ammunition or spares). But DeSantis is ... not exactly favourable to the concept of reducing private firearms ownership.

This is a lie. You know the level of knowledge about Ukraine present here.  Can’t believe you would try and trot this out in front of this crowd. Since everything else is just Fox News talking points also, I doubt there is any reason to address this in detail, but broadly:
-Biden worked to end corruption in Ukraine, carrying out the policy of the US and our European partners, including putting pressure on Ukraine to fire the prosecutor who WAS NOT actively pursuing an investigation of Burisma (which concerned issues predating Hunter Biden’s term on the Burisma, and so COULD NOT have been an investigation of H. Biden).
-Trump tried to extort a fake investigation of H. Biden by Ukraine for purely domestic US political purposes by threatening to withhold military aid, in direct contravention of US foreign policy.
If you don’t think the latter display of complete contempt for Ukraine on the part of the US didn’t play into Russia’s plans in Ukraine (which did not start out of the blue in Nov 2020), then I don’t know what to say.

Welcome aboard Letter from Prague!
Don't know if you are from Prague but I visited that city a few years back. Truly beautiful city. 😀

1. Well pretty much all hedge fund strategies eventually seem to boil down to 'find a greater fool.'  An easy (profitable) out for them, maybe, but someone still holds the bag at the end. Often taxpayers. Kind of subverting your point lol, but I have small love for financial engineers of all stripes.... 
2. Tooze actually ends his essay on a similar note: 
... it is a fatal trap to align different notions of individuality and freedom. It may well be true that success in intense modern combat requires not just courage but a certain sort of initiative, a certain kind of freedom.
But let us not confuse those expressions of agency, and initiative, with other broader notions of freedom that we employ in political or cultural thought. The battlefield is a zone of absolute and violent constraint. As Clausewitz says the enemy gives me the law. To prevail may require a sense of super human strength or extreme self-sacrifice. Furthermore it requires one to regard the enemy as a counterpart not to be reasoned or bargained with, but to be outwitted, crushed and if necessary incapacitated or killed. 
@Beleg85, I used 'Western Way of War' deliberately and you picked up on the Hanson reference nicely, full marks.
I found his thesis interesting, if underdocumented as you say (fine, him and Gladwell and a bunch of other popularisers too -- he doesn't write for academics or wonks). Sadly, I have found Hanson himself (like Paul Krugman on the other team) a disappointingly dull reciter of partisan talking points.

It did create some alarm in the US that Orange Putin was alienating our allies though.

Now that is just nonsense. Even with the military expenditures, the US would have the ressources for that, easily. The political will / ideology is just not there.

Incredible.
Haiduk's in for a hell of a surprise when he gets back on his pc...
FUNDED!

$1500 to get him a new laptop. Amazing. Thank you, everyone who donated.
 

That depends.
 
 

The way we split year into parts is also not the smartest, French Revolutionary Calendar FTW

Really? I know the US public has stuck with imperial, but I thought the military had at least switched to metric (I always knew the caliber of my M16 in millimeters, not hundredths of an inch, and I qualified on a 300 meter range not a 300 yard range). If it's causing these sort of interoperability issues we need to switch to metric yesterday! I don't really believe that one system is truly better than the other, but standardization matters, and most of the world has already chosen to standardize on metric.

Would it be valuable to break the mold a little and go back, before World War II, and show earlier conflicts? All games should be designed with a point or intention in mind, maybe something like the Spanish American War could be an interesting look at Single Shot vs repeating Bolt Action rifles. An easy title would be Korea, almost all the assets exist already. Would be a lot less work than an entirely new setting.

I am trying very hard to catch up on this thread, but for now I'm still responding to points that were raised several days ago (I'm sure I'll catch up eventually).
My own 2 cents on the "how willing are countries to sustain casualties" issue is that, as far as I know, it is pretty normal to be shocked by the high casualty rates at the start of a major war. The recurring narrative I keep hearing about the opening stages of WW1 always includes a certain degree of shock by the public at the immense casualty lists, ditto with the American Civil War. But shock can only last so long. If the casualty rate remains constant, people become used to it. Shock can be sustained if each battle is exponentially bloodier than the last. But once it levels out, people become used to it again.
What is unthinkable now can become very thinkable later (one of the tragedies of human psychology). We are used to <10 casualties per day now because that was the casualty rate of the low intensity conflicts of the last 20 years. But if it came down to a major war with China, I think we would find ourselves more willing to endure hundreds of casualties per day than we might think right now. I do not want to discount the importance of context/stakes of course. The willingness to endure high casualties is clearly much greater when the stakes are higher than when the stakes are lower (if the stakes are existential we may be willing to endure any casualty rate, even thousands a day, to avoid annihilation, whereas any casualties at all may be too much if there is no tangible benefit to our interests). And duration seems to matter as well, though perhaps only because the stakes themselves change over time (what seemed important five years ago may no longer be important, so while the casualty rate may no longer be as shocking, it may nevertheless be less worth enduring), and/or because other costs to the society increase over time (being on a full war footing for several years is not great for an economy, so the standard of living of a population may visibly decrease over the course of a war, decreasing their willingness to tolerate the war).
The Dictator's Handbook (fantastic book if you are interested in politics) even argues that democratic countries are actually far more willing to endure long wars than autocratic countries, due to the differences in the incentive structures of democratic regimes as opposed to autocratic regimes (which is another point in favor of Ukraine winning a long war, on top of the economic considerations, and difference in stakes (existential for Ukraine, non-existential for Russia)). They are more casualty averse in the sense that they put a greater amount of effort into keeping casualties down, but not in the sense that high casualties are more likely to make them quit the fight. Both democratic and autocratic leaders are primarily interested in holding on to power. The difference is that autocratic leaders need money to maintain power (to pay off their key supporters), and wars cost a lot of money. Whereas democratic leaders need popularity to maintain power (to win elections), and conceding defeat in a war is usually very unpopular.

Just about the stupidest thing I have heard in decades.  I've been an engineer for over 3 decades and every time I get something in pints of pig blood or whatever imperial units are made of I immediately convert to metric.  It's a completely idiotic system and US should've converted back when we were planning to in late 70s (Reagan canceled US conversion to metric). 
5280 feet in a mile.  Using fractions instead of decimals (1/8, 3/16, 5/32" etc).  Degrees in some arbitrary nonsense farenheit scale that ties in w nothing physical.  pounds-mass, pounds-force.  And that's without even getting into energy & fluidics, which are a nightmare in imperial system.  And cooking?  everything is stupid for cooking  - ounces, pints, cups, teaspoons, tablespoons. 
So snuck off right after work for early showing of Top Gun w my 21 yr old.  The enemy is not explicitly named, could be china/NK/RU, so I just decided they were Russians and this greatly increased my enjoyment of the dogfight scenes.  Heckuva fun movie, saw it in a 'theatre', which is a large room w chairs and a big screen -- weeeeeird.
But back on topic, the official UKR press release guy said to be prepared for a very hard week ahead for UKR forces.  Said they just don't have enough heavy weapons in the izyum/popasne/sloviansk areas and UKR will probably be losing some ground.  I saw this in the Denys Davydov youtube video for today.