I was being a little sarcastic in my first post,

Your mistake was not using the /s to indicate that.

Poe’s law is a thing.

Remember Poe’s law.

I really hope that was intended as sarcasm and that you simply omitted the /s

Europe has already been pulling their weight in Ukraine. Now they’ll also have to pick up the slack that they US is about to create.

The worst people who can afford the best skilled lawyers have been trying that kind of shenanigans since the beginning of lawyers and courts.

Seems a bit suspect.

Typical for the Russian legal system

Bordering super powers is actually fine, if you’re not a psycopath

It’s also fine if that superpower isn’t a psychopath.

How many countries that claimed they were communist ever really fit the actual definition?

I can’t think of one.

There’s more to Scandinavian food than lutefisk, y’know.

This is about land,

Wars always are.

But warring factions almost always use the religion of the people as a strong lever and excuse in order to maintain the support of those people for the war effort.

This is no different. There have been strong and influential factions (on both sides of the conflict) who have claimed that the piece of dirt they’re fighting over is holy land to both of the religions represented.

concerns over the possibility that religion might be a political opponent and trying to neutralize it by replacing figures with one’s own are not new.

It’s been a pretty common thing that dictators have done throughout recorded history.

It’s not about agreeing or disagreeing with the specifics of the church, it’s about eliminating divided loyalties.

Dictators always do that.

And, not because they’re atheists as the butthurt Christians so often claim.

It’s all about centralized control and not allowing for divided loyalties or spaces for people to gather outside the party’s control.

a reasonable amount of economic output

There’s a vast difference between "reasonable " and “max_profits nothing else matters”.

That’s as silly as Trump claiming he could stop it (or the Russian invasion of Ukraine) with a single phone call.

Israel has been fighting against its neighbors since its inception.

God: you have free will

Also God: you’d better make the choices I dictate or you’ll be punished eternally in the most unimaginable hellscape possible.

Because everything they ever needed to know was in the Bible

Most of them have no idea what’s in the Bible, other than what some preacher told them is in there.

Gorbachev said he would bury us?

I don’t subscribe to that point of view.

It would be such an ignorant thing to do, if the Russians love their children too.

Does Russia have any functional weapons that they can spare at the moment?

I’m not enough of a military man to tell you WHICH aspects have to be knocked out, but I’d believe those elements are inside

Nor am I, but I suspect that list would have to include every known Rusian military installation.

And given that all of Nato’s member countries information gathering agencies will have been working for decades to identify those, the list should be fairly complete.

Thar makes a lot more sense than the headlines claiming that the pagers were “hacked” by some remote exploit.