War Starts | Hacker News Reader

War Starts

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119 pointslimbicsystem43 comments

If you're further interested in a look inside Yemen, here's a cursory look from a traveler a month ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl8FPYOnJ4M

This channel is amazing, found it the other day and was instantly hooked.

Low intensity conflict. It's always like that.

Someone shoots at someone somewhere else. It just a background noise. Why bother? You won't hear your bullet. Even if you could, it won't change anything anyway.

"Someone shoots at someone somewhere else. It just a background noise. Why bother? You won't hear your bullet."

Sounds dramatic, but I heard that staying away from shootouts, or taking cover when you are too close can somehow magically increase your odds of not getting shot.

In a war situation, the way to prevent the enemy from overrunning your position, is to shoot back.

Sure, that is one way. But this scenario was about other people fighting themself and how about to not get in the way.

This was very readable.

> When Yemen united its mountainous Islamic tribal north with its mountainous Islamic tribal south, many observers were adamant that the experiment was doomed to fail. The differences between the two sides were too great.

Clever.

Funny, but super-reductive.

It's like describing every country fighting in WW2 as a 'Christian urban state' - with the exception of the officially atheist USSR. Obviously the war was between USSR and everyone else. Oh, that's the Red Alert timeline, not the real one.

Well, except that as the situation developed, it turned into exactly what you describe, a conflict between the USSR and everybody else. That tends to suggest that the analysis has value.

No love for Japan?

No. Why? The cultural analysis would tell you that Japan is the natural enemy of every European country including the USSR. In a conflict between several European countries, what does that suggest?

We see them in history attacking every nearby European country (in which category I'm including the US) as well as their actual enemy, China. Where's the surprise?

And the Turks!

Since the suggestion it was two sided, when really it was more hexagonal.

Actually it turned into the U.S./established capital powers against any inkling of communism and any poor nation that USSR decided to aid.

Why downvote when you can just google? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_interventions_by_the_U...

The aftermath of the Second World War resulted in a foreign policy in which the U.S. sought to oppose world communism. The ensuing Cold War resulted in the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Carter, and Reagan Doctrines, all of which saw the U.S. embrace espionage, regime change, proxy conflicts, and other clandestine activity internationally against the Soviet Union.

And here's an analysis on soviet foreign aid to third world countries

https://www.jstor.org/stable/151493

Except Japan, and China, and the USSR, and also Ethiopia and Libya and Algeria and Egypt and India and the Phillipines ......

Ethiopia and Philippines are very Christian, though maybe not as urban.

Meanwhile the russians are actually gearing up to invade Ukraine with force as we speak (write), and the worst deterrent the west seems willing to use is blocking Russia from the SWIFT international banking system, and that's a maybe.

This means a possibility for me to die in this war (fighting against Russians).

Is this how inevitability of the war was felt in Europe hundred of years ago?

Strange to see war starting to surface the mainstream zeigeist, as it's been happening predictably in slow motion as the consequence of obvious incentives for about 18 months, and then it goes up all at once. From everything I can tell from reading about previous ones, war is a kind of triumph of the absurd, where meaning is extinguished and all that is left is the violence until the attrition establishes some coherence again.

My bets are Russia re-establishes some of its soviet era borders between the Black and the Baltic seas, including Ukraine, then possibly Latvia or Estonia. Israel is almost out of alternatives on Iran, and China will consolidate Hong Kong and Taiwan in Xi's lifetime. The only thing standing in any of their way is the alliance of Biden, Bojo, Macron, and Trudeau getting enough democratic traction for a draft and total war. So nothing, basically.

Anyway, remember to act surprised.

Please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents and especially not nationalistic ones. That's not what this site is for.

(Edit: and we've had to ask you about this numerous times in the past. That's not cool.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Hmm. The guidelines say to avoid unrelated controversy, but possible military conflict in Eastern Europe does seem to be of some relevance to the topic at hand.

After all, the name of the article is "War Starts," and it begins by clearly hinting at the tensions between the US and China. The build-up of military assets on the border of Russia with Ukraine may merely be posturing [1], or it may be preparation for an invasion (which doesn't seem impossible a priori, given that Russia has invaded Ukraine in the past decade). In either case, it seems to me that this sort of international posturing/brinksmanship is very relevant to the article's discussion. A key question the article seemingly poses is whether war will die out, or whether it remains an essential part of society.

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/3/how-real-is-the-thr...

That's a classic example of a tangent (single point of contact, leading in a completely different direction), and flamewar tangents are most of all what we want to avoid here.

Hot generic topics are like black holes that suck in any unsuspecting spaceships that fly nearby. Our goal is to steer clear of those, because they lead to the most repetitive and inflamed sorts of discussion, drowning out anything that is quieter or more obscure, and ultimately, anything interesting.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I see. That makes sense.

Appreciated!

Okay. Sorry about that. I thought it was relevant enough, but I defer to your judgement and expertise on this issue.

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