Advertisements around where I live are gradually all becoming about joining the military. My country is sending troops to territories as if they are tripwires.
No. If I had this level of anxiety, I would disconnect from news and online media for a little while to take a walk in the forest to clear my mind and calm down.
I'm seeing these messages in the real world. Adverts on the side of buses are telling me to enlist in greater frequency, and job sites have positions in the Royal Army pinned above everything else.
The only difference is scale, and with the increasing flood of bot users and throwaway alt accounts, that's starting to matter less and less.
Whist there is often plenty of crossover (think car enthusiast forums), I'd hardly call a technical discussion site 'social media'.
To call the headline "US threatens to invade Greenland" unprecedented would be an understatement. You only need to see it once to be justifiably anxious.
Mind you, the logic of MAD was a lot more .. logical? The canonical example of a cold game theoretic perspective leading combined with enough irrational paranoia to make an unstable situation.
We're more likely to have a war over a dumb tweet.
In short, everyone had treaties signed with everyone else which effectively guaranteed a WW if any nation attacked another nation. The thinking being "nobody would ever start a war because of what it'd lead to".
MAD suffers the same problem, one demented leader can end all life by being irrational.
What do you mean? Only one country is threatening Greenland/Denmark/EU with military actions directed against the sovereignty of Greenland.
Not that high, but I know what you mean. I think there's a reasonable chance that the US system successfully redirects Trump away from actually ordering an attack on Greenland, and a reasonable chance the US military has an actual coup if that order comes through.
But if he gets to take it… the consequences need to be extraordinary, and misjudgement will have already been a precondition and therefore more misjudgement is likely, therefore escalation can be almost arbitrary.
But definitely higher than any time since 1990. With a possible exception for the days immediately after 9/11, when it seemed like there might be follow-ups.
A fun thought experiment, but only that.
I wonder how to survive? Nomad lifestyle?
- WW1 was a competition of troops: how many soldiers each country was willing to sacrifice for victory. Something like 50M soldiers participated.
- WW2 was a competition of hardware, less troops - how much industrial output could each country pour into the battle. Aprox. 300 000 tanks, 200 000 airplanes , 9000 warships (according to chatgpt), 2750 Liberty cargo ships (wikipedia).
- WW3 can't be a competition of troops (where would they get 50 million people, how would they train them, how would they feed them?), and it can't be a competition of hardware (who could make 300 000 tanks, 200 000 airplanes and 9 000 ships today?, where would they even get that much steel?).
World war today could be 1) nuclear and we're doomed, or 2) kids playing with toy drones breaking windows at each other's factories - you're mostly safe, unless you work there.
Cyber war, especially insufficiently defended industrial equipment control systems.
And about those drones: the category scales up and down, all the way from toys to things that rip apart apartment blocks.
And about quantity, Ukraine is estimated to be at the scale of millions of units last year, expended like munitions rather than like vehicles.