Recent content by Lone Primate

I had my old Fujifilm Finepix W1 3D camera converted to shooting infrared this summer. I've been wondering around southern Ontario ever since taking opportunities to present the world in a new way, and I hope you folks here might be interested in some of the results. :) These are side-by-side...

Intriguing! How does stuff like this ever get lost? You'd think the city would have records of pretty much every thing bidded on, built, 'bandoned, and burned. It's weird we have to grope around in the dark playing Columbo with what was there in living memory. Anyway, thanks. Now I want to go...

A conventional response would be the only real hope we'd have of not triggering an ever-increasing spiral of nuclear escalation. Once that gets going, it's very unlikely either side is going to give the other the last word, and the likelihood that some field commander or submarine captain calls...

Which I've been at lengths to stress repeatedly. Seriously, have you been reading what I've actually been saying here, or just supposing I'm saying what you want to take issue with? But the point is, our willingness to enforce Article 5 starts and ends where Article 5 does: with NATO's members...

Strawman much, Keith? Seriously. I've mentioned Article 5 any number of times. If you don't know what that is, I'll tell you. It's the heart of the North Atlantic Treaty we've been party to since 1949. It's the part that declares an attack on one to be an attack on all. It's only been invoked...

Do you actually believe the Russians are going to make a distinction? That they're going to say "Oh, well, they just destroyed tens of thousands of our own soldiers and their weapons right here on Russian soil, but at least they didn't vapourize Novgorod"? They're not. No matter what we hit...

I'm not naive about it at all; quite the opposite. We're not dealing with a little country that shakes a little nuclear sword to get more pie. That's North Korea. Russia is a country whose people still imagine themselves the peer of the United States in particular and NATO in general. Outside of...

I have to disagree. Realpolitik is about the art of the possible, and if you want there to be a planet Earth to live on next week, going tit-for-tat with Russia in nuclear exchanges would not give you that result. Russia is not North Korea. North Korea is not Russia. North Korea has, at least...

Yeah, and? Ukraine is not in NATO. I'm not saying it wouldn't be a big deal, but strictly speaking, it doesn't involve NATO or trigger an Article 5 response. It would be the end of the world we've lived in since 1945 or so, but not necessarily WWIII.

Well, that sure would be something it it's true. I'm a little dubious, because it sounds like a serious climb-down for Russia, without all that much to show for the effort, but if it's enough to get us all out of this jam, then I think it's a small price to pay—everything that Ukraine's suffered...

I don't see what sending troops across a border does to address something like that. First of all, that's a different matter from engaging troops who do cross into NATO or surging across Ukraine, and then into Russian territory in either case. You're talking about something of a different order...

It's exactly the fact that he has nuclear weapons that will secure his regime. The world can hate his guts till the cows come home, but nobody's going to attempt regime change there if the likely outcome of attempting it is the end of civilization, or possibly even the entire human race. Time...

Well, that's the thing. If Russia directly strikes a NATO country, it no longer has anything to do with Ukraine, one way or the other. It's an Article 5 attack on 30 countries, and we're obliged to respond. If we don't, then the whole alliance is a farce and it crumbles like burnt paper, and the...

Well, you're right, it is absurd. You're basically arguing we can't change anything unless we change everything. And that's simply ridiculous, isn't it? Seriously, now. Creating a new flag for a new identity on the one hand and creating a new language on the other are hardly equivalencies. After...