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Really difficult to concentrate on the day job as the world flirts with nuclear war
Hotblack Desiato 28 Sep 22 11:08
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Or is it just me?

Perhaps the rest of you are more able to compartmentalise things, and read headlines such as (and I am paraphrasing, of course):

"White House has to telephone Kremlin to explain in detail precisely what would happen if they used battlefield nukes"

"100,000s of Russian men flee Russia to avoid being conscripted into a war Russia started"

"Russia declares 98% referenda results in favour of unification, says it will absorb captured territories into Russia and treat any attack on them as an attack on Russia itself"

"Russia blows up its own gas pipeline in international waters"

"10,000s of forced Russian conscripts being sent to frontlines with no equipment and training"

 

Whilst calmly getting on with your to do list?

Eeyore - Yes I saw that and was encouraged by it - the Russian propaganda regime appears to be crumbling. That clown has been a major, if not the major Kremlin propaganda spokesman, but has been changing his tune recently given the obvious bedsh1tting that mobilisation represents - he even referred to it on TV as "meat for the grinder" But this is next level stuff - a public meltdown on primetime TV.

I am very torn between "The economy is tanking so I need to be prudent with my finances" and "The world is ending so I should enjoy it while it lasts".

Why worry? You cannot control it and most of it will not come to pass anyway. Stop focusing on the day to day clickbait headlines and op-ed nonsense.

I agree that this is sage advice. But just like a car accident on the opposite carriageway, you know you shouldn't look, but you do, and then regret the fact that you did.

I am very torn between "The economy is tanking so I need to be prudent with my finances" and "The world is ending so I should enjoy it while it lasts".

 

This is me, exactly - should I buckle down, beaver away at work, eat more beans, etc. to save money and build for the future or should I party like the last days of Rome before everything turns into either:

(at best) The Road to Wigan Pier

(at worst) The Road

nuclear war terrified me as a kid, now not so much.   My only worry is surviving.    I want me and all my loved ones in the centre of the blast such that we know very little of it.

HD if you are genuinely so worried about global destruction, presumably that fear eminates from the belief that Putin will use them if he doesn't get his own way.   Should you in that case advocate being quite so bullish towards Russia?    However loathsome appeasing Putin is, surely letting him have a bit of the Ukraine (even with the risk that he will in the future try to annex more territory if he lives long enough) is better than global destruction?

I resent having to do my job anyway tbh. But I do get on with stuff like cuddling my children, being a good husband and watching football despite the heightened threat of nuclear engagement, yes. What else am I supposed to do? The chances may have increased tenfold, but only from 0.01% to 0.1%.

@Guy the problem with that approach is that you make it more likely to happen in the future.

For example, pulling numbers out of a hat, I might think there's a 10% chance of it if we push back hard this time, which is enough to be very worrying. However, I think if Putin succeeds with nuclear blackmail this time it makes it much more likely that we'll end up with a full scale nuclear war in the future because:

(a) Putin and others will take the lesson that nuclear blackmail works and the West will back down so it'll happen again and eventually they'll cross a red line and a miscalculation is much more likely because of past back downs. 

(b) Any country that has a potentially hostile neighbour and has the capability is going to look to get its own nuclear deterrent and the chances of things going badly wrong increase with more countries having nuclear weapons. 

yes it's just you

there have already been attacks on land russia considers russian, that land is called Crimea 

Nato caught Putin by surprise in its responsiveness to this and is stronger than ever today

russia's gas blackmail seems to have failed and has turned its biggest customer away from it probably for good 

the pipelines, were they blown up or has the dicking around with pressure in them imploded them? Even for the big brains in russia it's a stupid thing to do 

 

 

I am not necessarily advocating that approach James, I am just saying if as Hotblack seems to think there is a very real risk Putin will press the button then the downsides of letting him have a bit of Ukraine (and I agree with you what you say) would seem to pale compared to global armageddon.

I'm reasonably comfortable that Putin will die in some manner before he can do anything particularly mental.

In the meantime too busy worrying about whether the old man has fallen over when I'm not at home to get him off the floor.

I am not necessarily advocating that approach James, I am just saying if as Hotblack seems to think there is a very real risk Putin will press the button then the downsides of letting him have a bit of Ukraine (and I agree with you what you say) would seem to pale compared to global armageddon.

Quelle surprise from ROF's biggest coward. 

Appeasement didn't work in 1938 or 1939 when the threat was "terror bombing" - it just made the problem worse. 10,000s of British civilians died as a direct result of German terror bombing in response to our decision to fight Hitler instead of appeasing him, but these deaths were a price worth paying.

Appeasement didn't work in 2014 when we allowed Russia to keep the Crimea because of concerns over nuclear escalation.

The same is true now. If you allow nuclear blackmail to succeed, then Putin will not stop with the concessions granted to him, just like Hitler didn't stop in 1938 or 1939, and Putin didn't stop in 2014. This is to say nothing of the inspiration that it will give to other nuke possessing/aspiring d1ckheads out there (North Korea, Iran etc.)

Unhappily I think Hotblack is right on this - feels like sooner or later we are going to find out whether Putin is prepared to push the button, even if that means Armageddon (and then find out whether such an order would be followed). Probably when Crimea is about to fall to Ukraine.

Unlike Guy, I don't think there is any way of wresting that decision out of Putin's hands, for the reasons HB identifies in his 12:17 post. We cannot give in to nuclear blackmail. Any use of nuclear weapons by Putin must lead to the wholesale obliteration of Russian forces in Ukraine, and then the cards can lie where they fall. Ironically, of course, the more people in the West espouse leaving Ukrainians to their fate, as advocated by Guy, the more likely it is that we all get vaporised. 

The fear of armageddon has indeed influenced me.   Yesterday I bought a 1k Miele dishwasher, when a 700 quid Bosch one would have been just fine.  If we face a nuclear winter, then I will face it with spotless glassware.  

I think if Putin even tries to the give the order he'll have a mysterious stroke or heart attack as there are people within his inner circle who know it will be a disaster.

oh and using words like "cowardice" in the context of the best way to avoid global armageddon combined with the evident thrills you have taken from the ukranian war mark you out as somebody whose views have the sophistication of a games of thrones character which are best ignored completely.

I can’t see that I have Guy. You think we should try to compel Ukraine to accept annexation and genocide because Putin otherwise threatens nuclear war. I think that is both morally unacceptable as well as demonstrably self-defeating and pointless. 

No, as I very clearly said several times -  if one thought, as HBD believes is the case Putin is very likely to press the button if pushed then clearly letting Putin have part of Ukraine is preferable to nuclear armageddon. Personally I don' think that and unlike HBD do not have difficult concentrating for fear of nuclear war.

Nonsense, Geoff. The Ukrainians are going to hand him his arse on a plate whatever happens now, and regardless of whether the Guys of this world want to try and buy him off (temporarily and unsuccessfully) with other people’s lives. The only question is whether he wants to take everyone else with him, and whether those around him will let him. 

Putin will get the Dombas and after one cold winter, the gas will be flowing - thats the only way this is going 
 

I would have agreed until a few weeks ago, now I think the Ukrainians may actually be able to drive the Russians out of Ukraine.

the translation picks up some words and twists the meaning

it is really talking about the conditions of the mobilisation debacle and not that fat phuck solovyov specifically being called up

Jesus Christ on the Solovyov clip.

'Don't send us, send perverts and paedophiles.'

'Don't send us, there must be plenty of ethnic minorities who can go.'

So Mother Russia isn't worth defending yourselves, then, all the people you don't like can go. 

The complete lack of logic could make your ears bleed. You want to put Russian national objectives in the hands of perverts, paedophiles and people you hate? If it's a glorious war why would you not want the brightest and best to go to give you the best chance of prevailing? Could it be that you secretly know the war is a pile of manure?

 

Putin will get the Dombas and after one cold winter, the gas will be flowing - thats the only way this is going.

Does Vladimir Putin pay you to spout defeatist crap like this, or do you think it makes you "edgy" or alternatively a "world weary realist who can see things as they are"?

Because no-one in their right mind would post such obvious bullsh1t otherwise -

Right now Ukraine is completing the encirclement of the Russian garrison in Lyman (which is in the Donbas, by the way) and gas prices are lower than they were before Russia invaded Ukraine.

And Russian mobilisation will make zero difference - 

This is a modern artillery war, where Ukraine has got the quality advantage and Russia had a quantity advantage, although given the huge amounts of artillery and ammo that was captured in the Kharkiv offensive, and the pipeline of artillery supplies to Ukraine, it is questionable whether Russia even has a quantity advantage in artillery anymore.

In any event, in such a war, all other things being equal, adding more badly trained badly equipped Russian troops into the war just means more dead and wounded Russian soldiers.

Eeyore - Yes I saw that and was encouraged by it - the Russian propaganda regime appears to be crumbling. That clown has been a major, if not the major Kremlin propaganda spokesman, but has been changing his tune recently given the obvious bedsh1tting that mobilisation represents - he even referred to it on TV as "meat for the grinder" But this is next level stuff - a public meltdown on primetime TV.

Jesus Christ hd you don’t help yourself. It’s as fake as a Downfall meme video. It’s supposed to be obvious ffs. 

Just so we’re clear about just one of the many consequences of appeasing Russia, Moscow Times reports:

Russia's children's rights commissioner on Wednesday said that Ukrainian children taken to Russia from Mariupol initially showed negative attitudes toward Russia, but now don't wish to return home. Kyiv has called the forced relocations of Ukrainian children a war crime.

"When we brought them to the Moscow region so that they could get their strength back, at first they were negative about the president and said nasty things. They sang the Ukrainian anthem and that sort of thing... but later, that negative
attitude turned into love for Russia."
 

Maria Lvova-Belova, Russian commissioner for children's rights. 
 

Plenty of video footage of bewildered looking children arriving on Aeroflot planes, holding each others’ hands. 
 

This is what appeasing Putin’s bestial gang of savages means, Guy. Just one example. Still in favour of giving him “a bit of Ukraine” (like it is even your or ours to give). 

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