mopsi

  > Things were accelerating rapidly on the Ukraine-NATO front.

We saw with Finland and Sweden how quickly entry into the organization can progress if there's a will in the alliance to accept new members. We have not seen such will regarding Ukraine.

The whole "blame NATO" narrative is just a waste of everyone's time and completely ignores the internal developments in Russia and the ambitions of Putin and his clan. The main goal of the ex-Soviet security apparatus is to restore their lost empire and the special privileged position of the security services within it. To Europeans, the Cold War and the Iron Curtain were abnormalities that have been rectified; to the current generation of Russian decision-makers, the Cold War was a normalcy that they strive to return to. Russian dissidents have been warning for decades that the destruction of Russian democracy would sooner or later lead to resurgence of Soviet imperial thinking, and that's exactly what we're seeing.

NATO itself bears little importance in this. Russia is against all forms of European cooperation and would prefer to see countries alone and isolated, because it would permit attacking them one by one, instead of facing a joint front that they can't beat.

No, that's just an impotent power fantasy. Even among the hardcore nationalist crowd (the so-called "Z-society"), support for the use of nuclear weapons remains a fringe position, because nuclear weapons are not known to spawn conscripts and gasoline, lower the price of potatoes and carrots and other essentials, or attract Chinese foreign investments.

1. Wanted in 2008, did not get an invitation, and that was the end of it. Russia invaded in 2014 because of deepening Ukraine-EU trade ties.

2. Most of Eastern Europe has been in NATO for over 20 years and has not seen any permanent stationing of "NATO troops", whatever that means. And the forces that were in Western Europe have seen dramatic decrease since the 1980s, around 5-10x across all key categories (personnel, weapons, etc). The US military is currently undergoing a review with the goal of making further reductions of their presence in Europe.

  > Why do you see that institute as the authority on the secession of Donetsk and Lugansk? 

Nothing described there is meaningfully contested by anyone other than talking heads on the Russian state TV and the cheap whores who parrot their talking points in the west. The commander of the 2014 invasion force is a public figure and used to hold multi-hour livestreams where he talked about the same things; namely, that his forces were directly responsible for the war, and that there was no groundroots support for them among the locals in Ukraine. He often complained that the 2014 invasion stalled because Moscow did not allocate him enough soldiers, tanks and artillery to work with.

  > So, going back to the cold war is insufficient, you want to make analogies to Stalin's USSR in the 1940s? That's almost all the way to Godwin's law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abkhazia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transnistria

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Ossetia

Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are just some of the oldest examples of this. At this point, you have to be intentionally trolling to take these "people's republics" propped up by Russian military with any credibility. Russians have been abusing the concept of peoples' right to self-determination for about as long as the concept has existed, to justify territorial expansion.

  > Still, you are making my point, in that the war in Ukraine is perceived as NATO's war, or the US-and-EU's war, to fend off the evil Russians like in the old days.

  > With Donetsk and Lugansk, Russia did not annex; those areas seceded from Ukraine, declared independence and fought a protracted war against the Ukrainian Army for some years.

The verdict: https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/?i=001-244292

Key part:

  The reality of the relationship between the separatists on the one hand and the respondent State [Russia] on the other was such that, whatever their legal status, the separatists were completely dependent on military, political and economic support from the respondent State to carry out their activities and were, ultimately, a mere instrument of that State. It is for these reasons that the Court was persuaded that, from 11 May 2014, the relationship of the separatists to the Russian Federation was so much one of dependence on the one side and control on the other that it would be right to equate the separatists in the “DPR” and the “LPR” with de facto organs of the Russian Federation, within the meaning of Article 4 ARSIWA. Any other solution would allow States to avoid their Convention obligations by choosing to act through entities whose supposed independence is purely fictitious.

At this point, it's such a common Russian strategy that in several European countries children learn about in the middle school, from the times when it was used against their own countries.

  > Russia shouldn’t tolerate NATO troops stationed on one of its longest land borders.

  > NATO is certainly participating:
  > * It supplies most ammunition and arms and much of the equipment.

Instead, the most important decision-making platform has been the so-called Ukraine Defense Contact Group, which consists of 57 countries, of which only 32 are members of NATO.

  > * A negotiations process in Istanbul, having reached a draft agreement which would have concluded the war, in early 2022, was vetoed by NATO, or at least the US and the UK.

  > And this is in the context of NATO's long-standing strategy of expanding eastwards towards Russia

Rechargeable batteries have become very good and very cheap. IKEA sells 4xAA batteries for 8€, made in Japan, last 500-1000 cycles. Many "non-user-serviceable" devices actually have them inside; they're just not accessible without breaking the plastic clips that hold everything together: https://www.pololu.com/category/54/batteries

"The Great Patriotic War" is a propagandistic term that selectively frames the war as something that happened between 1941 and 1945, to obscure USSR's role in the first few years of the war. It diverts attention from the joint partition of Poland with Nazi Germany (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), the Winter War against Finland, the invasions Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and parts of Romania, and USSR's extensive economic cooperation with Germany in 1939-1941, which helped sustain the German war effort during the Fall of France and the Battle of Britain.

It's widely known that Germany had chronic shortage of oil products through the war (which led to them developing coal-based synthetic fuels, etc), but few know that - for example - USSR supplied crude oil and various petroleum products to Germany during the Battle of Britain, which were processed into fuels and lubricants for Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine, which helped them bomb London and sink allied ships in the Atlantic. "The Great Patriotic War" framing helps to hide all of this and uphold the national myth that Russians were merely a victims in the war and liberators of Europe, not chief collaborators with Hitler in the destruction of pre-war Europe.

Under Putin, this winners-liberators narrative has been dialed up to 11 and turned into a state-promoted MAGA-like "victory cult": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pobedobesie

Perhaps the best examples of this are "victory parades" with preschoolers, dressed up by their teachers: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/05/10/russian-preschoole...

What a load of nonsense.

When the USSR collapsed in 1991, the citizens of the USSR had to choose their future. If they were in countries that declared independence from the USSR as it was falling apart, they could become citizens of those countries. They could also apply for the citizenship of Russian Federation, because RF had declared itself a successor state to the USSR. By default, those who did nothing, became aliens, which is a funny legal term for people without citizenship.

A shitload of Russians outside of Russia did nothing out of misplaced belief that the Soviet Union would return any day now, and they remain without any citizenship.

The irony is that all sorts of human rights organizations see stateless people as horrible tragedy, but the stateless Russians prefer it, because being an alien grants certain privileges on both sides (like visa-free travel in both Europe and Russia) while simultaneously exempting from certain duties like mandatory conscription (again, on both sides). In some regards, both countries treat you as a citizen; in others, both treat you as a foreigner. If you have regular business on both sides of the border, then the alien passport is the best travel document to have.

And if you don't want it anymore, all you have to do is demonstrate B1 level language proficiency and knowledge of the constitution to get a citizenship.

  > And Estonian patriots enthusiastically helped[0] German Nazis make Estonia the first judenfrei (free of Jews) country if you don't count Luxembourg.[1]

Judenfrei Estonia is a shared credit between the USSR and Germany. USSR occupied Estonia 1940-1941 and disproportionally targeted Jews because of their social class (doctors, lawyers, etc). Germans finished the job when the German army arrived in 1941 and stayed until 1944. Of the 4500 pre-war Jews, about 1000 remained by German arrival. Their tragedy was that they had an opportunity to flee with retreating Russians, but did not use it, believing that Germans couldn't possibly treat them worse than Russians.

  > These patriots had to flee to the forests when the time came to answer for their part in Holocaust and other crimes.

The second major wave was in 1949, about 70% of the targeted were women and children under 16: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Priboi

Russians didn't care about the Holocaust one bit. Anti-semitism was rampant in the USSR and remained so until the very end in the early 1990s. The purpose of these actions was to destroy the professional classes who could run a country and organize resistance to Russians (1941), and to punish rural farmers who resisted giving up their land, animals and tools to collective farms (1949). It's notable that these actions targeted entire families. The mother of Kaja Kallas, the current EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs, was a six-month-old baby when their family was deported to Siberia. I wonder what her role in the Holocaust was.

In the early 1960s, the USSR authorities held a war crimes trial of Estonians as Cold War propaganda to reinforce the Soviet narrative of "liberation", legitimize their occupation, discredit émigré movements and accuse Western governments of harboring fascists, but they could not find more than a literal handful of defendants.

It is not about the longevity of the medium, but control and preservation. If something is on a disk and can be played or viewed without requiring a revokable permission, then you can preserve it and access it any time you want. If you need someone's permission, then it can be taken away from you at any time.

Steam is an exception. It's privately-owned and reasonably well-managed. In another 20 years, private equity might very well take it over and give it a customary milking. You have no way of preventing the loss of access to everything you've collected over the years. The deeper you are into Steam's ecosystem, the more value can be milked from you.

Thank you! That was not available the last time I checked.

Does Immich support read-only source folders yet? I'd like to keep the original files intact, but allow Immich to index them.

That's also a good argument for completely removing rainbow flags from everything, in more countries than one. Will we see that happening?

To add to this, sneakers with a barely visible fuzzy fabric bottom are one of the best examples of tariff engineering: https://www.gazetc.com/blog/2010/08/sneaking-through-us-cust...

There was nothing "American-led" about the fact that societies that had been forced by Russia into submission for the entirety of the Cold War rushed toward whatever alliances they could to prevent the same thing from ever happening again. Poland even threatened to mobilize the Polish-Americans to tank Clinton's re-election if he tried to block Poland's entry into NATO, that's how "American-led" it was.

Not to mention how ridiculous the narrative of "provocation" is, I can almost hear "provokatsiya, provokatsiya" in Putin's weak and whiny old-man voice. Entry into NATO meant that NATO spent billions upon billions introducing proper civilian oversight of militaries in the new members, and other key features of first world countries. Former RU foreign minister Kozyrev hits the nail when he calls it free security for Russia.

  >  I've had enough. Time for a Swiss foreign policy. George Washington was right: No foreign entanglements or peacetime alliances. We'll handle our continent, and you handle yours.

The whole huffing and puffing about alliances and isolationism is just the US refusing to keep their side of the deal while demanding that partners continue serving the US interests. It's strange to observe how shell-shocked US representatives are when that performative isolationism is treated seriously by partners, and they actually start taking independent steps like investing in their weapons programmes (instead of buying American).[3] It's as if they were seeking emotional satisfaction from the performance and weren't ready for American influence to wane.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8r1mzd8vygo

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/16/world/middleeast/trump-st...

[3] https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/05/27/canada-chooses...

  > This is 101-level UN stuff. If Ukrainian diplomats were unaware that Russia can veto Security Council resolutions, that means they were totally incompetent.

It is safe to say that the present lack of leadership from the US was not foreseen at the time. It was unimaginable that Russia would launch a major ground war in Europe and that the American president would blame the victim of the aggression and try to coerce them into surrender while sucking up to the aggressor. This is not how things were conducted back then. It was the era of Schwarzkopfs showing strength and resolve by giving presentations on how coalition tanks had pummeled the enemy in the past few weeks, not of Sullivans showing weakness and indecisiveness by endlessly yapping about "escalation".

The core problem is that the US has spent almost a century embedding itself in all kinds of relationships (cultural, political, economic, military), but has lost the ability to carry out that central role. Biden did not save Ukraine. The limited but valuable military support fostered an unhealthy relationship that gave the US a veto over Ukraine's (and other allies') actions, but the US leaders do not have the statemanship to use that power responsibly. Biden's legacy is the shortsighted micromanagement that turned the fast and effective Ukrainian counteroffensives of 2022 into slow and costly trench warfare of 2026, all while emboldening enemies like Iran to launch assaults like October 7th.

"UN Security Council action" is a broad term that can include deployment of international UN-led military forces, as in the Korean War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Command

A few years prior to the Budapest Memorandum, the UN Security Council had authorized military action to liberate Kuwait. 42 countries participated in the coalition that drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_the_Gulf_War

The expectation at the time was clearly more than just "we'll bring it up at the UN for dicussion". The current weaseling over the exact wording looks weak and pathetic, and has a certain flavor of propaganda that tries to convince everyone of something that's not quite true. The fact remains that the US strong-armed Ukraine out of nuclear weapons, and when Ukraine was eventually invaded, tried to strong-arm Ukraine into surrender. This reflects very poorly on the US.

The brainrotting effects of social media are increasingly being recognized. The effects of porn are not as noticeable in schools and workplaces.

Indeed. The 2004 chat snippet is notable because it displayed attitude that was uncommon at the time. Zuck made it mainstream.

"Amazing" is a little generous for script kiddie stuff from the early 2000s.

The author has yet to learn the extent to which civilization depends on people not being cunts to one another for no good reason.

I prefer not to have views of my home permanently archived and made available to anyone in the world, unless they can present a reasonable need for it. City planners? Go ahead. Local people for navigation purposes? Go ahead. But some random bloke from another continent? That's clearly too far.

Services like Street View should have distance-based friction to preserve privacy. The further you are, the less (or at lower quality) should be available, to keep it proportional with the effort required to inspect the place in the real world.

  > Heck, I hate street views disfigured by huge privacy blobs.

Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, and by 2021, Ukraine and Russia were in the 8th year of the war.

The Russian "multiple and continuous warnings" (aka demands and ultimatums) were taken seriously in 2008 and Ukraine was not offered a path to NATO membership. Didn't save them from the invasion. The 2008 decision is now widely considered a mistake. The "Russia is afraid of NATO encirclement" argument has been conclusively falsified for a while now.

Timeline from the article you linked does not support your argument:

  During the 2010 presidential election campaign, Party of Regions leader and candidate Viktor Yanukovych stated that the current level of Ukraine's cooperation with NATO was sufficient and that the question of the country's accession to the alliance was therefore not urgent. On 14 February 2010, Yanukovych said that Ukraine's relations with NATO were currently "well-defined", and that there was "no question of Ukraine joining NATO". 

  In February 2014, during Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity, president Yanukovych fled the capital despite signing an agreement with the opposition. Parliament voted to remove Yanukovych from his post and schedule new elections, while an interim government was set up. 

  Ukraine's interim Yatsenyuk government took office on 26 February. The new government said that it did not intend to make Ukraine a member of NATO.

  In late February and early March 2014, Russian soldiers without insignia occupied Crimea.

Because they thought that everything would be over in three days and business would continue as usual, as it did after 2014.

Millions of Leave voters have died in the decade since the referendum.

Graph: https://www.thenewworld.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/202...

Article: https://www.thenewworld.co.uk/peter-kellner-an-anti-brexit-m...