Military equipment is not cheap, nor is flying jets into Taiwanese airspace. Also if you keep telling the population that you’re going to invade Taiwan, then they do kind of expect it to some extent, even if the PRC is not a democracy.
Finlandization does have some benefits for the PRC, but I would not rule out a stupid land invasion of Taiwan.
If that was true, why are they still saber rattling? Stupid dictators and bloodthirsty supporters lead to stupid wars, so I wouldn’t count it out.
Look at Ukraine. Russia had already de facto annexed most of the land that they hold today. Ukraine wasn’t willing to fight them to get it back. All of Russia’s neighbors were too scared to join EU or NATO. Europe was dependent on Russian gas and vulnerable to Russian coercion.
Putin started the war anyways.
Four years later and hundreds of thousands of soldiers dead, and the economy is crashing. Ukraine is bombing the shit out of Russia and occupied Ukraine and trying to take it all back. Oligarchs are going poor/dying. NATO now has a much larger budget than the Russian military, arguably stronger than it ever was during the Cold War. Putin has no way out of this war, if he withdraws he probably ends up in the Hague.
If he had stopped after 2014, Putin could have kept everything, but he kept breaking the ceasefires and escalating.
Putin wanted Finland to stay out of NATO, look how well that worked out for him. Stupid leaders make stupid choices.
But I think NATO would probably have a coalition to protect Taiwan anyways.
EV batteries are rated for 100K miles without any maintenance, and can often exceed that many times over.
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/02/nx-s1-5706658/electric-vehicle-battery-lifespan
You cannot run a Toyota more than 15k miles without maintenance. Usually it’s just an oil change, but there are so many moving parts that need regular maintenance, and many engines will just up and die before a battery will.
EV cars also have rhe benefit of needing less brake maintenance, though that is offset by the tire wear and weight of long range EV cars.
Something like a Citroën Ami will probably wear out the interior before any mechanical component dies. Maybe some rare maintenance like a tire change.
Lithium batteries are far, far, far more reliable than a Toyota. It’s not even a comparison.
I’m trying to keep the same vehicle for as long as possible.
The oil companies are trying to make sure you stay in a metal cage as long as possible
Gee, I hope there isn’t a major spike in energy prices next month…
If your life/job/city sucks, it’s obviously {every human between the age of 16 and 25}'s fault, the only thing you can do to fix it is to spend the rest of your afternoon doomscrolling!
Why would you ever leave your couch?? That will never fix it!
CONSUME MORE SLOP
Please go touch grass.
I am not saying Ukrainian civilians are “Russian-backed forces”. I’m saying that Ukraine has been fighting a war against Russia and Russian-aided military forces in the Donbas, which is why the Ukrainians have been shooting in the Donbas. It is not an insurgency or ethnic cleansing. It makes no sense to say that civilians have died while ignoring the whole fact that there is a war in the Donbas.
You are also minimizing the rights of civilians by slandering the opposing side. Calling the government that was democratically elected in the May 2014 and October 2014 elections, a “Banderite regime”, is minimizing the fact that Russia is fighting a war of conquest against the people of Ukraine, and committing genocide in the process.
Yanukovich wasn’t overthrown by anyone, he fled to Russia after his security forces thought he was going to backstab them during the revolution.
The Ukrainian people are suing for peace. The problem is that every peace agreement proposed by Russia demands that Ukraine disarms, and that NATO countries are not allowed to give security guarantees. That opens the door for Russia to immediately violate the peace agreement like they have done dozens of times already since 2014.
What gives Russia the right to own the 5 oblasts, on what grounds should Ukraine cede them?
The first step to peace is an immediate ceasefire for both Russia and Ukraine. If Russia would agree to one of the countless ceasefire agreements that has been presented to them, then the war would end then and there. The US doesn’t want to spend money fighting the war any longer. Ukraine cares more about NATO security guarantees than trying to reconquer Crimea. I agree with you there that the war is not popular. The goal should be de-escalation, not bombing Kyiv with drones, or nuclear saber-rattling with IRBMs like Oreshnik.
This is a leftist, anti-imperialist perspective. Any party in the European Left Alliance would agree with my assessment.
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You’re so right, Brussels and Kyiv are complete sieg heil fests every day.
You’ve honestly got me there, believing Russian conspiracy theories would honestly be a lot more exciting than the boring real world.
What am I denying? I really have never heard of whatever you’re talking about.
Are you saying that Russian and DPR/LPR forces were not the target of Ukrainian artillery in the Donbas War?
the LPR and DPR requested Russian assistance against Kiev, who had been shelling them for a decade.
This is disingenuous. Russian FSB and Russian soldiers have also been shelling Ukrainian civilians since April 2014.
I wasn’t aware of Ukrainian forces using artillery close to populated areas in July 2014, that is sad. Ukraine signed a ceasefire with Russia in September 2014, which lasted until January 2015 when Wagner mercenaries invaded Debaltseve. Any shelling that happened in July-September 2014 is not relevant to the current situation in Ukraine.
With regards to the OSCE report, there was no ceasefire in the Donbas in 2022. Ukraine was at war with Russian-backed forces in the Donbas in 2022 before the Russian full-scale invasion in Kyiv and Eastern Ukraine.
Saying that Kyiv was shelling the Donbas for 8 years and Russia only assisted the LPR and DPR in 2022 is really nonensensical, when the Russian government has been fighting in the Donbas since 2014, consistently breaking any ceasefire agreement that Ukraine has signed. Russia simply escalated the fighting that they had already been doing, in a 2022 attempt to simulate the Iraq War in Ukraine.
Also, any implication that Russia is helping civilians in Ukraine in 2026 is inhuman and ghoulish. Russia is perpetuating a winter genocide in Kyiv right now.
There needs to be a ceasefire immediately, and making excuses for Russian genociders who break ceasefires, instead of demanding that they stay east of the Surovikin Line and lay down their arms, is not affirming anyone’s right to self-determination, and only encouraging further suffering.
Nobody here is claiming that a US intervention would make things better, I think the point here that lying about the situation in Iran and Eastern Ukraine only helps the violent fascists in power in those places.
The nuance is that workers are being slaughtered by Putin and Khamenei and defending them just because the US doesn’t like them is only helping the fascists.
Free thinking is when your opinions about other countries always coincentally and conviently line up with what NaZi Ruzzia wants.
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I mean even from a purely transactional perspective, they did the best thing they could have done in that moment.
If they let him die, a brownshirt might have taken out their frustration on them.
If they shot an ICE agent and ran, they wouldn’t have gotten that far and would have gotten the attention of the top Trump ghouls.
Whereas, by saving his life, they got better treatment, convinced a few brownshirts of the value of humanity, and a PR win for the anti-ICE coalition.
How is this hacking? You have access to someones phone, and then you can see their photos? It would probably be better for the app to delete the local photos but that’s not a GDPR violation, and it’s clearly an early-stage prototype.