That’s not bad, but might ignore the factors of madness and despair and plain arrogance. Sort of like WWII shouldn’t have started, and shouldn’t have prolonged once it started, and then there were plenty of points where it made sense to stop for all involved.

There already is, it seems. Just people bombing them are not the west.

But yes, in the end result what Putin’s propaganda voices were saying turns out to be correct. Not in case of Ukraine during the war (that’s war propaganda, it’s always crazy), but before it.

I have a pet conspiracy theory, if you wish:

Either they are this inept or they don’t need Ukraine as an equal ally, and see it being weakened as a good outcome. I don’t think a group of nations still making up the world’s economic and technological leadership can be this inept. So Ukraine is seen as an enemy best weakened.

They can’t expect Ukraine to attack them, that would be crazy. Or to ally with their adversaries, it doesn’t have many options. Meaning there’s something brewing with the western nations preparing to piss off a loosely defined group of nations, including Ukraine. Piss off so significantly that weakening it is a good idea.

So the conspiracy theory would be that the west intends to start “WW3: Nuclear drone boogaloo” soon enough. Because their dictatorial, aggressive and in general very bad enemies are not hurrying with this, and are doing just fine winning economically. And the war must start and result in the victory of those most deserving, that is, those with the best global military logistics and the biggest nuclear arsenals.

The war has gone on for 3+ years, and it still has two participant nations, with “Ukraine’s allies and friends standing with it” nowhere in sight. No western soldiers dying, but Ukrainian soldiers dying, - it’s a demonstration of values too.

Other than that any real war treats fit men as a resource. Such a flight will happen in any country at war with conscription, when its population knows what war is.

A functional military doesn’t do superman shit, it doesn’t have irreplaceable heroes and it doesn’t use smarts. It’s a pipeline. Nobody wants to be fed to it if they can avoid that.

Most of all - those Europeans cheering how they “stand with Ukraine”. But they haven’t been taught to keep their fucking mouth shut about standing with anyone if they are writing comments and that someone is under bombs.

So I thought before 2020 that western values are “if we have the same idea of good, we die for you, you die for us”, even if I wasn’t sure if anyone really shares that, I thought the western public kinda remembers something of that.

Then war in Artsakh happened, and I understood all about western values, western ability to keep their word they chose to give, western honor and what will happen with all that. Just all thieves and cowards, who seem civilized by inertia from robbing half the world. The economic and demographic dynamics show that this won’t happen again.

Well, not only western, but in general, it turned out that for most Russians alliances matter nothing if the other side is some people who “disrespect them” - how nice, yes, so if I don’t like how a Russian talks, I have the right to not pay them for work or deny them, say, a floating jacket when they are drowning … ah, oops, it’s different, “too much honor for some kebab makers” - that was said by a person for all supposedly good in Russia, against Putin and such, about alliance obligations. These people don’t even understand that fulfilling obligations and being decent people is all about their own honor, and if something is “too much honor” for someone, you shouldn’t give your word.

So - for Ukrainians it was naturally easier to believe in some “western values” because the west was seemingly helping them, and saying many nice things.

But I think now they are done with that.

We’ll have a world where all the politics will function after Conrad von Wallenstein’s army, because to restore understanding of honor you should first impress with all the weight upon humanity, in practice and thoroughly, what role honor fulfills.

No model is absolutely precise, and no pyramid of modelling to avoid full cost will rid you of need for real feedback. That works for everything in history.

(Warning - yes, I know they won’t understand fully anything of the following, but they will understand some and will remember it’s not magic.)

First, show them how to make a paper animation (quickly changing pictures, lots of paper and two pencils are enough, don’t even need two pencils, but eh).

Second, show them how to make a paper computer (look it up, there are even ready books for children ; that is a bit more complex, you’ll need to cut some for registers and the “windows” to indicate current values and you’ll do the operations manually, and you’ll need more turning pencils).

Third, find some book about microprocessor design - I’m serious, you just have to show them in it the pictures about what is a decoder and what is a datapath and ALU, and what are interrupts, and what are registers (program counter and two-three other ones, suppose), and explain how this relates to the paper computer. Not much more.

Then you tell them that a computer is just many microprocessors running their programs, some run small simple programs to control dedicated devices, and some run big long complex programs. After that you show them some of the devices - like hard drive, RAM, video, audio, network card, thingies on the board. And tell that they work with other devices, like keyboards and displays connected electrically. And tell that this looks like a city.

For 6 years old this is not so good (but just like people normally do with airplanes and trains, you still should try, just this shouldn’t be your only try by far), but when I was 8-9 years old and wanted to learn, someone explaining step 3 to me would have helped.

Step 1 my dad had done, step 2 I think he did too, and it was in some book for preschool education I read, I didn’t know it was sky cool back then. Step 3 is more of an encouragement when you can’t quite mentally make the leap, from small elements which you know can be combined into complex things, to complex things themselves.

This is not an advice to teach a toddler computer design. Just like people don’t teach toddlers railway design or civilian engineering or automotive or airplane design. They still tell them various things of how those work, and build models, so they don’t have ideas from medieval bestiaries about these being magical monsters.

There’s no such single theory. Rather they are using the mechanism that worked in western nations’ favor for much of history. The western progress looked like “now we can produce more and better and faster and with less”, and the step to “now we are doing intellectual work than nobody else can do, while others produce stuff for us” is not linear.

And the point of global logistics is to help those who produce the most. Like China.

I mean, OK, the point is to control the flow, but the quote basically complains that using that control is expensive. Oops.