Cunigulus [they/them]

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: April 27th, 2022

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  • Now that the original line in the Southwest part of Donetsk has fallen, the Russians have a straight shot right to the Zaporizhia Oblast border, all flat fields with 0 obstacles until Ivanivka, basically everything south of that green line is super vulnerable, putting the Russians in position to threaten to roll up the lines either to the West or the North. Logistics for a major offensive might be tough due to limited good roads, but we might be looking at the return of big arrows soon and maybe a precipitous collapse of Ukrainian lines, especially if the Russians are actually already in Kostyantynopil. We’ll see if they’re prepared to exploit their successes further. It’s hard to be optimistic watching this war, but this is the kind of action that might bring it to a more rapid close.




  • Meanwhile China has reached the cutting edge of microprocessor fabrication science and is planning a superfab utilizing a particle accelerator to try to get down to 2nm. Was this maybe coming eventually anyway? Sure, but I think these sanctions have made the Chinese double-down. They might have temporarily lost some market share by not being able to scale as fast at the cutting edge for the last few years, but these sanctions forced them to move up the supply chain to the kind of fabrication technology ASML had been supplying before sanctions and now they will outcompete the western monopolists. They wanted a quick fix to keep the Chinese behind in semiconductors for another decade, but no one thought to ask, “Well what happens after that? How will the Chinese respond?”










  • These things go slowly, slowly then all at once. There’s been a lot more movement on the front these last few months, and the Ukrainian army is pretty depleted. At some point Russia is going to wind up for a big kick at an open door and we’ll see things starting to look more like Afghanistan in 2021 or the final months of the Third Reich. A negotiated peace is the only thing that can prevent this kind of outcome, and Ukraine might be smart enough to go in for it before things really start to deteriorate. Even so it’s hard to imagine the Russians crossing back over the Dnieper and even harder imagining them taking a defended Odessa. If they get Odessa it will be in a peace treaty, not by military force.


  • The crazy thing about the prison abuse stories coming out now, on the eve of the planned Hezbollah operation, is that it suggests a rift in Israeli and American politics and it looks like the American side is using this to heavily lean on the Israeli side to not escalate. I think the US election angle is significant here as well. Bidenworld has been trying to keep some kind of a lid on this thing so it doesn’t blow up, while Netanyahu - maybe in coalition with Trump just wants to escalate to keep his grip on power. Now that Harris is taking the reigns, suddenly we get some more muscular moves - in the form of a nod to the propaganda media to touch this abuse scandal - necessarily coordinated with some sector of Israeli politics that’s trying to avert a war with Hezbollah. If Netanyahu gets his war Israel goes into survival mode and the gloves are off - historical genocide, mass missile and drone attacks from the resistance axis, large scale resistance military formations moving to Lebanon and the Golan, political instability across the Middle East - Iraq will be a mess. It’s a disaster that probably ends in Israeli conventional defeat and a high chance of nuclear weapons use.