Comments by "Heads Full Of Eyeballs" (@HeadsFullOfEyeballs) on "Anders Puck Nielsen" channel.

  1. I mean, NATO is a defensive alliance.
    82
  2.  @unduloid  They're supposed to defend NATO members, none of which have been attacked. I'm all in favour of helping Ukraine defeat Russia, but NATO as an organisation is really the wrong address for that.
    48
  3.  @theo3030  The reason Russia's neighbours keep joining NATO should be pretty obvious, no? Russia is not a nice neighbour. It's taken chunks out of Ukraine and Georgia, while little Latvia with its huge Russian minority is still intact thanks to NATO membership. I wouldn't call seeking safety from an aggressor a "provocation".
    41
  4.  @stevenobrien557  What do suits have to do with anything? There's no dress code, they let Musk in there without a suit. Zelenskyy hasn't worn a suit since the beginning of the war. The idea that Trump ought to get to tell him how to dress is just another attempt at petty bullying.
    28
  5.  @NativeAuslander  "If it wasn't for X, you'd be speaking German/Russian right now" is also a common phrase in the US, who are the single largest NATO country. It's hardly a uniquely Dutch quip.
    23
  6.  @qltcn  So what? He said the equivalent of "oh, for fuck's sake" because the person he was talking to was being a moron. That shows he was frustrated, but I don't see "impressed" or "intimidated".
    21
  7.  @Princip666  Only Ukraine used to have to do this. Now the Russians have to do it too. Russia used to have an advantage in this regard, being able to concentrate their forces wherever they wanted. Now it's even. That's the point.
    18
  8.  @ДанилПоздняков-в8т  Autocracies are good at mobilizing resources at their rulers' whims. That's kind of what autocracies are for, after all: to let the ruler do whatever he wants whenever he wants it. Democracy has a lot of advantages, but rapid decision-making isn't one of them.
    15
  9. Dictators are much worse than hungry crocodiles, if anything. If you keep feeding a crocodile, it will in fact leave you alone. Well-fed crocodiles are pretty chill. But dictators tend to have have infinite appetites -- if you give them what they demand, they just take it as a sign that they can grab even more.
    11
  10.  @robderich8533  Having two different leaders named Chamenei and Chomeini isn't quite as bad as electing two guys called "George W. Bush", but it's still pretty inconsiderate.
    10
  11. Moldova isn't in NATO, so that wouldn't work if the goal is to challenge Article 5.
    9
  12.  @BarrySlisk  Because then it wouldn't serve to weaken NATO solidarity. Did you watch the video?
    9
  13.  @u2beuser714  I'm not arguing that NATO is nice or peace-loving or whatever. Just that it isn't designed to fight the conflicts of non-NATO states. NATO has never fought a "real" war, just short-lived interventions, peacekeeping operations, no-fly zones etc., precisely because no NATO member has been attacked.
    9
  14.  @svenT16  Russia is only "the biggest country in the world" in terms of land mass. It's mostly an empty wasteland. Russia has a smaller economy than Italy and fewer inhabitants than Bangladesh. It's perfectly sensible for the Russian government to be concerned about its country's geopolitical position, in principle. Putin just happens to be irrationally paranoid about NATO, because he mistakes it for a territorial empire when in reality it's a defensive military alliance.
    7
  15. It depends on how many people they're prepared to mobilize. Russia has so far avoided a big draft campaign because that would cause a lot of discontent, and Ukraine is still preferentially drafting older men to avoid pulling young people out of education and training, and is keeping existing troops at the front instead of rotating in fresh conscripts. If either country switches to World War-style mass conscription, they'll have bodies for many years at the current casualty rates.
    6
  16. I'm actually glad that I was too edgy and antisocial to engage with social media when it first became mainstream. Means I never got addicted to it, so I haven't had to wean myself off it as it's gone to shit.
    6
  17. Why do people keep saying this whenever Germany delays the supply of some particular weapon to Ukraine? This has happened a dozen times now, with everything from RPGs to tanks to missiles, and no information harmful to Scholz ever surfaced after Germany got around to supplying those weapons after all.
    5
  18. What's your best example of NATO threatening Russia prior to the war in Ukraine? Please note that I mean an actual threat of military action. Not simply doing stuff that Russia finds inconvenient to its imperialist project, like allowing Russia's neighbours to join NATO. Keep in mind that Russian state media are currently threatening to nuke NATO capital cities on a weekly basis. Just to set a standard for threatening the other side in this discussion.
    5
  19. Hitler got quite lucky, to be fair. He narrowly survived or avoided a number of assassination attempts (mostly by military officers during the later years of the war, but Georg Elser's bomb could have got him in 1939 already).
    4
  20. "The people" in the sense of "the populace, the nation" can be used with singular agreement. It's just a little unusual nowadays because modern English shows the opposite trend, always using plural agreement for words that describe groups even when the word is grammatically singular. Like in "the staff (sg) here are (pl) very polite".
    4
  21. He's an officer in the Danish military and a professional military analyst.
    4
  22. Did you quit the US military because of its constant violations of the rule of national sovereignty?
    4
  23.  @bigglesharrumpher4139  If they're supported by the US Air Force, NATO's European ground forces shouldn't have much trouble driving back any Russian attack. They wouldn't need to sustain the war effort for very long.
    4
  24. That sentence doesn't make sense. Zelenskiy is the president, so of course it's "illegal" for other Ukrainians to negotiate with Putin over his head. He doesn't have to "make" it illegal, that's just how the chain of command works. In any case, Putin has told us his conditions for "peace", and it's "pretend we won the war and give us everything we wanted out of it", which is obviously unacceptable. So what is there to talk about?
    4
  25. "but Russia made the case for the demilitarization of Ukraine as their reason for the operation" Why on earth would you believe them, though?
    4
  26.  @seancidy6008  I don't follow. Military supplies for Ukraine are social spending?
    4
  27.  @Shoelessjoe78  Except the US didn't do any of that out of the goodness of their hearts, or to do any European country a favour. They did it to maintain their empire. And the Cold War got within inches of turning Europe into a nuclear battlefield multiple times, so it's purely dumb luck that we're even around to "thank" the US for their role in it.
    4
  28. "No matter how you look at it, NATO's eastward enlargement poses a threat to the Russians." Nope, sorry. Russia's neighbours joining NATO only poses a threat to Russia if Russia is planning to start a war with them. You are confusing Russia's imperialist interests (maintaining a "sphere of influence" of weak neighbours they can push around) with Russia's actual material security. Also note that your best example of NATO "threatening Russia" involves no actual threats of any kind being made, whereas Russian state media are currently threatening to nuke NATO capital cities on a weekly basis. "Deploying nuclear weapons in Ukraine, as Zelensky proposed, would have meant that Moscow could be reached within 5 minutes. Turning the situation around, how would the US react if Russia were to deploy nuclear weapons within 5 minutes flying time of Washington?" Has anybody in NATO shown the slightest inclination to take Zelensky up on this idea? Not as far as I'm aware. Certainly nobody even considered the idea before Russia invaded. So again your "threat" is a 100% hypothetical future issue (NATO could choose to do something to threaten Russia), and again it's only a threat if Russia intends to start a war with a NATO country, because otherwise why would NATO nuke them?
    4
  29.  @Princip666  Which of his arguments' premises do you take issue with? You do understand the difference between making an argument, as Nielsen did, and making a bald claim, as this commenter did, right?
    3
  30. But a total absence of "censorship" will lead to a platform becoming unusuable for actual communication due to bots, spam, scams, trolls, shock images, etc. etc. It's much quicker and easier to automatically churn out bad content than to create good, thoughtful content, so without "censorship" the bad content will drown out the good.
    3
  31. It favours Ukraine if Ukraine continues to receive Western support, because the West has the industrial and economic capacity to keep it up longer than Russia. Russia's economy is the size of Italy's. They can ramp up production, sure, but they can't possibly replace the Soviet stockpiles they're burning though. Russia doesn't have the industrial capacity of the Soviet Union. So they'll have a very hard time maintaining pressure on the front and building up for a big offensive as the war continues.
    3
  32. Russia's economy is the size of Italy's. The only reason they have any chance at all in this confrontation is because NATO would prefer not to spend too much money or get directly involved.
    3
  33. That doesn't make sense to me. The conditions you describe are exactly what Russia had before they started the war. There were no NATO missile in Ukraine and NATO had repeatedly made it clear to Ukraine that they wouldn't be accepted as a member because it wasn't worth a confrontation with Russia. Russia's objective in starting the war wasn't to achieve what they already had. So why would they accept that offer?
    3
  34. If you'd read as far as the video thumbnail, you would have seen that Anders agrees with you that Trump has no plan.
    3
  35. He does work for the Danish government (as a military officer and analyst), so I imagine that saying very...undiplomatic... things in these videos could land him in hot water even if he's technically speaking as a private citizen.
    3
  36.  @StPiter111  None of those wars were NATO operations, so you're 0 out of 8 so far. And Cuba was never even attacked outside of some silly American commando operations, so I don't know what that's about.
    3
  37. Of course they'll have elections. Putin will probably even get the majority of the vote, because no credible opposition candidate has been allowed to run. And to make extra sure, they're going to fake ballots and intimidate voters.
    3
  38. Because the first offensive, which was intended to overrun the entire country, managed to cling on to about 20% of it after it failed and got pushed back.
    3
  39. The Lapland scenario isn't about acquiring territory in Lapland, it's about making Finland invoke Article 5. The Russian hope would be that other NATO countries will decide that a bit of Lapland isn't worth starting a war with Russia over. Leaving Finland in the lurch and destroying NATO solidarity.
    3
  40.  @antred11  But responding to a war in Ukraine or Moldova isn't NATO's job (beyond shoring up its defensive capabilities in case the aggressor decides to attack NATO later). NATO's job is to co-ordinate the mutual defense of NATO member states. if Romania declared war on Russia over an attack on Moldova, other NATO states would be under no obligation to join in.
    3
  41.  @ruznaupozorneni  You're a bit slow, aren't you.
    3
  42. He's a military analyst for the Danish government, it's his job to understand this stuff. He's also an officer in the Navy.
    3
  43. He's a military analyst in the Danish navy. Surely it would be Danish propaganda, if anything.
    3
  44. At the current intensity it can go on pretty much indefinitely, it's just a matter of mobilising the political will. If that happens -- if both sides keep investing resources into the war -- then it'll end for social reasons, not material ones. Because one side loses political control, or because too many soldiers mutiny/desert, not because they've run out of weapons or bodies.
    2
  45. I think the saying goes "it's a large, modern army, but the large part isn't modern and the modern part isn't large".
    2
  46.  @Princip666  I'm sorry, in what universe do you see Ukrainians voting to join the Russian Federation? They hate Russia's guts. That suggestion would be received about as warmly as the idea that Poland should become part of Russia. The majority of Ukrainians aren't even on board with a peace deal where Russia gets to keep its currently occupied territories, and that's after years of fighting and suffering. Why on earth would they voluntarily hand over the entire country?
    2
  47. I would argue that in terms of being a revolution, i.e. a rapid and dramatic overthrow of an established order, drone warfare is actually more revolutionary than gunpowder. It took a long time for gunpowder weaponry to become reliable and widespread enough to make a big difference in how battles and sieges were fought. There must be centuries between the introduction of firearms and the point where two thirds of battlefield casualties were from gunpowder weapons. With drones in Ukraine, this happened within a few years.
    2
  48. NATO isn't fighting in Ukraine. There are no NATO troops there. NATO countries are just giving some military supplies to the Ukrainian forces.
    2
  49. A nitpick, but: I know the prototypical European pogrom is an attack against Jews, and so that's a word that comes to mind. But a pogrom is specifically when the majority gangs up on a minority group living among them, with the tacit support of the authorities. This wasn't the case with the Hamas massacres. Those were regular old terrorist attacks. For pogroms in Israel, you have to look at radical settlers in the West Bank attacking Palestinians.
    2
  50. Do enlighten us.
    2