despite what i just said, i have made several update posts since this started acknowledging that my understanding of the situation did evolve. i initially couldn't understand why they wouldn't blow the bridges up and cut off the supply lines. it seemed so obvious to me. over time, i began to understand that the russians were trying to hold the conflict in place - they didn't want to win, and they didn't want to lose, they just wanted to shift the fighting. they were carrying out a byzantine barbarian management strategy. yes, they were being arrogant, and yes they wanted to take the country whole, but not yet. right now, they just wanted to fight the war in ukraine instead of in russia, and ending it, winning it, would be untactical.

there was a certain amount of logic to it. but constantinople fell in the end. it's a strategy to prolong an eventual loss that the byzantines failed to transcend. it's a strategy that would end in an eventual russian defeat.

two things have changed that have forced them to adjust, and it's not too late, and they can still recover.

1. the ukrainians started to shoot missiles and drones into russia. the point is that you bog them down in ukraine. you fight a trench war against the barbarians on their own territory to keep the war out of russia. it's what the byzantines did to stop the barbarians from plundering greece. but if the barbarians have projectiles (and that is what happened. they brought giant catapults to greece from china, and made the forgotten archimedes howl from the depths of the ether.) that doesn't work - the war comes to russia, and the parminedean stasis must break. the russians must stop preventing themselves from winning, and deal with the consequences of triumph.

2. basic math says that if you play the same game over and over again, you eventually lose. the probability of losing may be 3, 5, 7%; if you run the simulation 1000 times, you will lose a few times. you have to eventually decide to win. you can't just aimlessly fight without winning forever; an eventual loss is certain, if you do. that was the downfall of the byzantines, in the end.

the decision by the ukrainians to break the "stalemate" (which wasn't a true stalemate, it was what the russians wanted to maintain) with drones and missiles may have given the ukrainians a boost of adrenaline, but will ultimately be their own demise, as the russians shift directions and rapidly advance to the first river.

nato should back off and pull back to poland.

let the borderland return to it's previous state of overgrown weeds and uninhabited wastelands.

how long will ukrainian defences hold when you cut them off from polish supplies?

not very long.

they should have done this on day one (i have made periodic arguments in favour of blowing out the bridges as a russian strategy to divide the country) but they thought they could take the whole country and they were clearly being arrogant and delusional about it. i don't want to pretend i can figure out what's going through the mind of putin and his cronies, but it's suggestive of a move towards a partition of ukraine across the river that divides it, which was always the most tactical thing for the russians to do, at least for now. the lack of a defined endpoint was a clear failure of russian strategy.

blowing up the bridges will cut the ukrainians east of the river off from their supply lines and allow the russians to relatively rapidly reach the dnieper, which is where they should stop, at least for now.

it will be up to nato to prove that they are not a continuing threat to russia. if they can do that, an uneasy peace is possible. if nato continues to pose a threat to russia, russia will remain justified in moving to the next river and the next mountain chain.

the natural defence of the carpathians, which is the source of the vistula, are the maximal boundary points for this russian defensive advance but it never made sense for them to think they could do it all at once. it was always crazy.

stopping at the dnieper for now will give them time to rebuild and give them time to talk it out. 

ukraine is not a real country. the russians are on relatively strong historical and cultural grounds in annexing any region to the east of the dnieper, but the historical boundaries of austria and poland start to pop up when you get into the area between the dnieper and the mountains and the issues become more live and more real.

the government in kiev made this choice. it walked down this path. it will need to sleep in the bed it made for itself. 

a divided kiev may be real life for the next several decades until the next generation decides how to sort this out.

https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20261003-russia-strikes-another-major-bridge-in-kyiv

why is this important? why not shrug it off?

because maintaining a firewall of separation between any and all religious ideology and the functioning of government is essential to maintaining a secular society. it's a slippery slope issue -  giving way to any concessions at all opens up space for further erosion. religion cannot be given a foot into the door of the state, it must be locked outside and left looking in from the outside at all times.

so, canada now has muslim prayer rooms in it's federal offices.

how do canadians feel about that? do canadians support that idea?

it would strike me as rather blatantly in opposition to how s 2(a) of the constitution has been interpreted in common law, which is primarily as the right to state secularism (in the french revolutionary context rather than the american revolutionary context). the right to freedom of conscience in canada has been repeatedly interpreted by the court to mean that atheists have the right to be free from religion. prayer rooms in federal workplaces would be inconsistent with that constitutional right and should be abolished for that reason.

upon googling the issue, i'm realizing that a lot of documents are referring to a "duty to accommodate" that does not actually exist in law. i am not aware of any legislation anywhere in canada that upholds the idea of a "duty to accommodate". i am aware of some case law that indicates that employers are expected to be reasonable in dealing with religious requests. in the context of religious muslim employees, i don't think the case law says anything more than that employers are required to allow for a 15 minute break every 2 hours, which is established in labour law as the "smoke break". asking for more than that would generate unnecessary costs for the business, which would be correctly seen as undue hardship. employers should be reasonably expected to not hire employees that would force them to endure extra costs and the courts should uphold their rights to do that and i think they actually have. expecting employers to incur costs to hire religious people is patently unreasonable and i don't think the courts in canada have ever done that. court cases to my knowledge have been about more aggressive forms of interference. 

i should point out that i'm also in support of banning all forms of public prayer. 

but the legal requirements here should be that employers are forbidden from doing anything that prevents muslims from praying on their 15 minute breaks, rather than they're required to incur costs and actively make spaces for them to do so, which is the legal definition of undue hardship.

it does not appear as though the federal government was forced to do this by court order. that was what i was looking for and it doesn't seem to exist. this would rather appear to be a choice made by the government to infringe on s. 2a atheist rights (as established in common law), and a government choosing to behave in ways that the courts would consider to be "undue hardship", in terms of what the rights of religious people are, if challenged in a court process. the courts would not order this. for that reason, secularists should seek a court order to shut the prayer rooms in federal offices down under existing common law precedent upholding a separation of church and state and under the s. 2a right of atheists to be free from religion at work.

https://www.ourcommons.ca/written-questions/45-1/Q-1307?response=14224163

i'm trying to figure out what's going on with this:

https://torontosun.com/news/national/nearly-1000-prayer-quiet-rooms-added-federal-buildings

it does appear to be real, and it's a massive infringement on canadian values of state secularism, and the common law principle of the separation of church and state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouvement_la%C3%AFque_qu%C3%A9b%C3%A9cois_v_Saguenay_(City)

there should be immediate legal action taken to shut these rooms down at once.

the unfortunate realty is that the only country that wants canada's dirty old technology era energy is the united states and if we're insistent on selling this trash, we're tying ourselves to their inevitable collapse. 

tragically poor leadership is going to sink us.

donald trump apparently wants to compete with canada. why a country of 400 million people with a gdp of the next five countries combined wants to compete with a country of 40 million people that isn't even in the top 10 in global gdp isn't clear, other than that it has some kind of inferiority complex. 

donald trump in truth doesn't want to compete with anybody because he's a loser. what he wants is to bully somebody. so he's identified somebody vulnerable and smaller to pick on that he is sure he can win a fight with and then called it "competing". then, he'll claim he won, probably to make his father proud, like the dumbass fucking man-ape that he is. ooga booga. me win, you lose.

so, when canada announces an ill-perceived project to transport gas to asia that is unlikely to happen (and probably won't happen), trump responds by announcing a pipeline from alaska, because he wants to compete with canada. oddly, he also seems to want to reduce prices, which would make the economics of the project infeasible and which nobody competing in the business would support. 

and who will pay for this stupid dick-waving exercise in manly competition? the asians will pay for it.

in fact, the response from the koreans and japanese around the issue is important to take note of as it's very similar to what the europeans are telling canada, and it opens up some insight into what the market for this gas in asia actually is, which is low and dwindling.

these asian countries were very successful in the 80s and trump, like much of the american capitalist right, is time capsuled in the 80s, so he is looking at asia in 2026 like it's still 1985. that was 40 years ago. 40 years before 1985 was 1945. it makes no more sense to look at japan today through the prism of 1985 than it did to look at it through the prism of 1945 in 1985, although that's less obvious, because the truth is that american cultural development began to slow down with reagan and came to a halt in the early 21st century. progress has been much slower over the last 40 years than it was in the 40 years before it. we're stuck in time, so it's become difficult for us to understand just how long ago that the bad old days of stupid 80s bourgeois excess really was. it was not a quarter century ago. it was almost a half century ago. does that language help?

the japanese and koreans are today mired in debt and facing a superpower staring them down that may very well swallow them whole. i don't expect that the chinese are actually that concerned about taiwan. in terms of industrial capacity, and revenge in an area with a longer memory than the atlantic world, i would imagine the immediate target is largely helpless japan. the most important military targets would be malaysia and the philippines. korea would just get occupied as collateral, like denmark in world war two - but usefully. they aren't these economic powerhouses that they were in the 80s anymore and it's been a long time since they were. the era of nintendo and toyota is long over.

regardless, trump wants them to pay for the gas pipelines.

and the koreans are saying they want to build nuclear plants and invest in renewables instead, because they don't even want the gas at all, they're trying to get off the gas. the europeans are telling us that, too, but we're just trying to sell them more and more gas. we're not listening.

if canada wants to embrace state capitalism, i'd suggest that's ill advised, but it should take note that reaganomics is wrong - demand is not created by supply. you don't create demand for a product by increasing the supply of it. companies that try to create demand rather than respond to it will fail. if canada wants to be a state capitalist dictatorship that makes it's money in the energy industry, like some backwards arab country, it needs to produce the kind of energy that is in demand, not just maximize it's ability to supply.

and trump will lose this competition, too - the one he set up against a weak competitor so he could win, all to make daddy proud.

this is a taliban-style attack on a woman that isn't wearing a face mask who is getting uppity with a male muslim religious extremist. it's comparable to the attack on malala yousafsai. 

these kinds of attacks are not that far out of the norm in muslim culture. they may be condemned by a technical numerical majority of muslims, or at least something close to approaching it, but they're not that unusual. that's why it's easy to understand what it is with little context around it - it happens all of the time in many majority muslim societies and it would and will generate a large minority of support for what it is, which is a muslim man smacking a bitch down for talking back to him and, ultimately, for being immodest. he acts that way because that's what he was taught to do by the men in his culture.

there's nothing left-wing about this and it has little to do with the school system in france. this is political violence by an increasingly organized far right youth movement of religious extremists that are angry about muslims losing wars in the middle east and are taking it out on the french society they live in.

https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/international/europe/artc-riots-spread-across-france-from-paris-suburbs-with-large-immigrant-populations

these kids should be rounded up en masse and sent directly to jail. the police should sort them out from incarceration. illegals should be deported on the spot. criminals, including those displaying hateful signs and engaging in clear hate propaganda, should be charged and prosecuted as adults. the rest should be fined, and the funds (paid by their families) should be used to clean up the mess.

can somebody explain to me why the kids burning dumpsters and assaulting teachers in france today are "left-wing"?

they seem like the far right, to me - and i'm a socialist, a syndicalist, an anarchist. it seems to me like if you're trying to find fascism somewhere in france, under that rock or hiding in that party, that you're missing the reality that the new hitler youth movement is marching right past you holding the placards of an anti working class fake left that openly calls for slaughtering and expelling the jews.

is it because a lot of them are brown? is that it? 

are you that stupid that you think they can't be fascists because they aren't white? really? then you are demonstrating the ultimate triumph of goebbels, who is cackling at you from his grave. the ultimate alliance between hitler and islam, the grand master plan, is unfolding before you in the streets of paris and you're too brainwashed by anti-white nonsense to see it.

political islam is always fascist, everywhere. it's inherent. you can't take the fascism out of islam, there would be nothing left of it. that's why the nazis loved it so much and saw it as a superior religion to christianity.

france would appear to need to vote for le pen in order to stop fascism and both france and the world had better pull their heads out of their asses and see the obvious truth burning in a dumpster fire right before their blind ass eyes before it's too late, and the so-called far left is rounding up jews in paris for execution or expulsion.