#westernbloc — Public Fediverse posts

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It isn't. These weapons and interceptors are not something that can be hidden in pant pockets. That kind of deception only happens in James Bond movies or in the Marvel Comics Universe. Real life doesn't resemble them at all.

The mainstream media doesn't mention it, but the almost fatal weaknesses of the U.S. military have been known for at least several years now. Even their internal audits have flagged them for years. And it has been repeatedly mentioned in the alternate media.

Here, for example, are three blog posts by Indrajit Samarajiva on the topic:

1. From April 24, 2024
2. From April 25, 2024
3. From June 5, 2025

Or you can check out Bappa Sinha's article from January 22 of this year.

If you are truly interested in the decades-long historical arc of how the U.S. and its allies reached this stage, you can check out this (somewhat meandering) July 2023 essay by Aurelien, a veteran diplomat/bureaucrat.

@Abhartach

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I agree that the Western bloc would rather burn the whole place down than accept losing its hegemony. My point is that literally any option it pursues creates unexpected problems for it in unexpected places. It is not sovereign in terms of energy, in contrast to what Medhurst claims. It is critically short on military hardware. It has deindustrialised, so cannot produce weapons at the rate required to fight wars of attrition. In general, it has become incapable of prosecuting wars at the (time and geographic) scale it wants. It cannot establish new rare earth supply chains at the desired speed, it cannot control the existing rare earth supply chain. It cannot establish new AI datacentres if there ain't sufficient energy and new chips. It does not control copper supply chains, and it cannot supply electricity to those datacentres without using a lot of copper. It cannot just wish new LNG refineries into existence, neither can it wish into existence the billion-dollar specialized ships required to transport additional LNG (the shipyards are in China and Korea, and they have backlogs running into years). It cannot magically transform the light crude it produces into medium or heavy crude. It needs at least a decade, and billions in investment, to truly start exploiting Venezuelan oil resources. It cannot force the Gulf states to invest their dollars back into the American economy, if they have no dollars to begin with, if their economies crash due to the Hormuz blockade. And so on and so forth. These are material constraints, they cannot get round them by manipulating the world's financial architecture.

Basically, the Western bloc is no longer powerful enough to shape the world to its liking. But it is still powerful enough to disrupt any plans countries in the global south make. It is powerful enough to cause a lot of harm. It is doing that to the full extent of that power. That's what we are seeing everywhere.

Hopefully, nukes remain out of the picture until the Western bloc is rendered incapable of causing widespread harm.

@Dragonholley
It not just Putin, the society appears to be more #sociallyConservative, maybe because there are three religions vying to balance each other out in the country.

Over 300 lawmakers in the country voted unanimously and without debate to enact painful fines for LGBTQ in #legacyMedia (not #videogames, interestingly).

Ukraine is apparently very #conservative too, although they do seem to be signalling to the #westernBloc that they are not.