Russia is weak compared to the West, so this threat is toothless, but shows how frustrated it is that the West won't concede anything of value, above all, a formal treaty promise that NATO will no longer expand.
The reality is that nobody in the US cares if the US has diplomatic relations with the Russians or not.
Russia's leverage is quite small.
That's the situation, as someone who is sympathetic to Russia's genuinely legitimate desire for an end to NATO expansion.
The reality is that Russia has virtually no leverage over the US or the West.
This may be painful to admit, but simply understanding the vast power disparity between the US/West vs Russia in turn helps us understand why the US is so comfortable with conceding nothing to the Russians, except some worthless proposals for dialogue over "arms control".
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South Korea has the worst gender relations of any major economy.
The extreme sexism and hierarchy of Korean society and Korean men has produced an equal and opposite fanatical, ultra-feminism, that is unmatched anywhere else in the world.
The net result is to make Korean men hate Korean women even more, which is why you have these rancorous culture war controversies over "feminism" in Korean society.
Ironically enough, Korean feminists, while totally justified in their outrages, are so fanatical as to turn off even possible male allies, and as a result, have had virtually zero impact on actually improving Korean society for women.
Linkedin posts extolling the virtue of "grinding" and working all the time is a manifestation of the ethics of capitalist Stakhanovite-ism, which I totally detest.
It just promotes de facto wage theft, aka uncompensated or forced overtime.
I'm not anti-work. But it's not the early Industrial Revolution anymore.
The interests of Labor and Capital need to be balanced against each other, rather than be tilted to an absurd degree towards Capital.
There's no such thing as a "dream job".
At the flight school where I learned to fly, plenty of people and stories of people with every little boy's "dream job", aka being a US military pilot, being totally, utterly burned out with flying, and just wanting to rest.
I'm increasingly of the belief that the US will likely never engage in a great power war ever again (so no intervention against China over Taiwan), unless its territory is directly threatened.
Instead, it'll just try and sanction/economically coerce its opponents.
The chance of direct US-Russia war is almost zero.
If Russia moves even on a NATO country like Estonia or Lithuania, it'll likely be a punitive strike lasting only a few hours/days before they pull back, not giving the US enough time to respond, and throwing NATO off balance.
The US response will, predictably, be to sanction and totally embargo Russia rather than a symmetrical punitive military response.
Lol at all these nevertrump and resistance lib types talking about impending violence and civil war apocalypse in the US.
If you actually, genuinely believed what you were writing, you would be buying some AR lower receivers and preparing your spouse and children on survival skills, and fortifying your house.
But no. Instead, you just write some weak op-eds and spend all day crowing about how illiberal Trumpers are. But hey, at least you dunked on them on Twitter. Good job!
NYC Mayor Eric Adams deserves to be criticized for supporting back-to-the-office schemes.
But criticism against him for saying that certain workers have higher ability than others, and that not everyone is suited to an intellectually demanding job, is totally misplaced.
Yes it's true: Ability is not distributed evenly, but rather according to the normal curve.
Serving food doesn't require the intense mental effort of being a physician or some complex engineering task.
By definition, half the population is below average.
The idea that coal miners can just be retrained and become coders totally misunderstands the fact that intellect is just not evenly distributed. That's why these schemes go nowhere.
Blame God. Or Evolution. But Adams was just making an honest assessment of reality.
How will we see the US' attempts to maintain economic and technology hegemony via sanctions in 20 years time (2040?...)?
About as far away from today as 9/11.
PRC is relatively well positioned to withstand US aggression, as it has a large internal market with high levels of human capital, and full sovereignty.
Compare that to say, Japan in the 1980s, or the USSR/post-Soviet Russia, which were dependent on outsiders for markets and hi-tech/aid (ie USSR constantly sought Western/Japanese tech b/c it was so backwards domestically), respectively.