Am I ignorant for not being worried about nuclear armageddon?

[TroutMan]

@dolphinboy

If his entire world is crumbling around him he might be crazy enough to do something stupid preemptively, but there are people around him who would have to go along with that and most sane and rational people don’t want to destroy the world.

You are right to not get too worried because there’s not really anything you can do about it. But trusting people around Putin to keep him in check is not a good plan. For some depressing reading, see the article below about a fundamental shift in Russia and the “Putin regime” over the last 20 years.

It has become clear that what exists inside the Kremlin is no longer a “regime” at all—a system of government where multiple figures can affect and feed into decision-making, from security chiefs to billionaires—as many believed.

Instead, it has transformed into what political scientists call a personalist dictatorship, where the whims of one man, and one man only, determine policy, a fact that has terrifying implications for Russia and the world.
…

The pandemic also made it difficult for outsiders to notice Putin’s apparent descent into paranoid isolation; he has apparently cloistered himself for the past few years through ultra-strict personal lockdowns and social distancing measures that may have affected his judgment. The absurdly long tables Putin has sat at for meetings have become a symbol of his remoteness (and a pretty good meme). French President Emmanuel Macron reportedly found him a completely “different person” in early February from the man he last met in 2019.

The Terrible Truth So Many Experts Missed About Russia

[Leaper]

@TroutMan

You are right to not get too worried because there’s not really anything you can do about it.

Technically, there is something I can do, to maximize my chances of survival, but it would take drastic, life-altering, prepper-type actions that I don’t think are wise at this juncture.

[nightshadea]

so its become what the old soviet government called a “personality cult” and was considered the lowest form of government the soviet union could sink to

[Mama_Zappa]

@Machine_Elf

If your late-model cars aren’t plugged into anything, there’s a decent chance they’d be OK. EMP has its worst effects on devices with large length scales, so the electrical grid and anything connected to it would take the biggest hit. But cars aren’t so large, and the electronic parts are somewhat shielded from electromagnetic effects by the metal body of the car.

That’s somewhat reassuring, though just the car portion of the article leads me to believe that the power grid itself would be at high risk (and reading further, it’s quite clear that that is an understatement!). Which I knew already, of course, and given the interconnected power grids, a single large area affected by an EMP would cascade.

[Balthisar]

I’m GenX, so, meh.

[Sunny_Daze]

I am also GenX but not meh. For some value of meh.

[msmith537]

@Balthisar

I’m GenX, so, meh.

As a Gen-Xer growing up in the 80s, if you told me at some point in the future there would be a global pandemic, Donald Trump would be our president, and we would be on the brink of WWIII with the Russians…I would have believed you.

[nearwildheaven]

In the 1980s, we were dealing with AIDS, which was WAY scarier, at least at first, than COVID ever was.

[Senegoid]

@nearwildheaven

In the 1980s, we were dealing with AIDS, which was WAY scarier,

That was because AIDS was a tripple whammy: Deadly disease; incurable; and spread by everybody’s favorite activity.

[nearwildheaven]

And for the first few years that we knew about it, we didn’t even know what caused it in the first place.